A new chapter of Scars is up! Check out a snippet below and click on the link for the full chapter!
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The imposter had discarded the corpse of its face’s owner so that it would not be sucked down into the swamp, but devoured by carrion-eaters and decompose in the reeking miasma of the cesspit marshes. It had almost worked. A few more days, perhaps a week or two and the heat and brackish, filthy water would have rotted the remains away. If there was one thing the imposter knew for certain, was that nothing could be considered certain.
That was why it had taken the extra time to mutilate the body beyond any possibility of recognition. No one looking at the dreadful ruin it had left could tell who or what it had once been. If it had had the chance, the imposter would have removed the head as well, but hands were much easier to dispose of. They’d gone into the pig feed. Swine would eat anything given half the chance, but the imposter knew from experience that it took them longer than one might think to consume a whole human body. They might have even left the head intact. No, the swamp had been the safest option after disfiguring the body so utterly that if the imposter had not known what it had begun as, even it wouldn’t have been able to identify those remains.
Other operatives might have considered a more traditional means of disposal good enough, dumping an intact corpse out in the marshes instead of taking the effort and risk to disfeature it, letting it be swallowed like so many others must have been. They would have all been unmasked when a band of muck-rakers, wandering farther afield than they usually did, pulled a ruin of half-decomposed flesh out of the cesspools.
The imposter’s work had paid off, both in using its position to keep abreast of the initial investigation and in stymieing detection. Holeish, who feigned mediocrity in public while directing the Kingsguard from the shadows, had been after it, but neither he nor Richtmel had been able to undo its efforts. They had scurried about like headless chickens. The death of the kitchen boy had been them looking for a scapegoat to appease the court. With that farce, the imposter had hoped their trail had gone cold.
Nonetheless, that body was still a risk to its mission and life. The investigation had been too tight for it to risk dealing with it, so it had had no choice but to bide its time. Destroying the last link to its identity had always been the plan, but the arrival of mercenary manhunters had changed the game.
Once the Kingsguard became distracted by the castle’s new arrivals, it took its moment to act, slipping through the halls and passages it knew so well. The imposter didn’t have to search hard; it knew exactly where to find the body of the person whose life it had taken, and it knew just how to make sure that any possible chain that could lead back to it was broken before it could be followed.
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Proximal Flame's Fiction 