Bozmaroff read the work of two men’s lives. Every tale he’d written and every war Roman had waged had brought them here, to these last few paragraphs. Only a few sentences in, the bard’s throat was already dry, so he took another couple of sips from the bottle to continue.

In a way, he didn’t want it to end. These last few weeks took out the best of him and as he was reading his writing out loud, a part of him wanted to go back and continue writing. Make up an excuse, say you’ve missed something and go back to the muse for a few more days. Just to feel her work through him one last time.

He doubted he’d get another visit from her after this.

But like men get born to die, so do stories get started to be finished - and he couldn’t stay in the way of that. Bozmaroff, so engulfed by his work, paid no attention to the queen’s stone face as he told her Roman’s tragedy. He took another sip from the bottle for the words came out like gravel. Saying them out lout after he had edited them three times over set his throat on fire. He drowned them in another gulp, but Roman’s demons persisted.

“The feasting halls were full, the bards’ strings were as busy as the forks, yet I felt no happiness. Тhe fires reminded me of the camps, cutlery rang like swords against shields, and the flesh in my plate sent me back to the piles of bodies after a battle. I cleaned my mouth and escaped to the terrace seeking solace in solitude.” - Bozmaroff read.

“My wife found me shortly after, expressing concerns for my distant behavior. I see she’s really suffering, and I hold back the urge to tell her that I buried ten thousand men this year. Her innocence is the only victory I’m proud of. But if I wanted a happy ending, I shouldn’t have put this crown on my head. As she returns inside with our son, a bolt of pain hit me, knowing his destined path to bear the golden shackles, to face the same horrors I have. I have only them now. The only other people I could talk to were gone - one I sent in the mud, the other I sent away.”

He struggled to cough out the words that weighed heavy in his chest, sending a spray of salliva over his pages. Unnoticing of its red color, Bozmaroff pressed on. The bottle almost empty, the last sentences in the memoir sliced his throat open on the inside.

“In the end, I was a prisoner, a man without a choice, a man who could have anything but not everything. My life was not an epic, but a tragedy. My wife’s tragedy. A wife I couldn’t love even after I conquered more land that I could walk on in a lifetime. My son’s tragedy. A son I couldn’t give anything but a demon of ambition to torture him. My people’s tragedy. A people who suffered and died for things they never understood”

“One thing I regret in this life is having tasted true love. Had I not, everything would’ve been simpler. I couldn’t lust for land, when everything I wanted was a pair of eyes. I didn’t want to wage wars, when I could’ve been with her by the fireplace. So I had to send her away. And after all these years I want one thing, nothing more - a heart to match my own. A little bit of warmth in this cold world. But the only person I want this from, I chased away years ago. But maybe that too was an act of love, maybe she’s truly better off without me.”

Winded, gasping for air, Bozmaroff leaned on the table, then the weight of his body gradually dragged him to the ground. His lips cracked of dryness, his eyes unseeing, his lungs filling with the warm rush of his own blood.

He didn’t see the queen emptying the rest of the bottle onto the cold stone floor, nor her look as she watched him struggle with his last breaths. Yet, in his last moments, there were no pleas for mercy, no begging for help. His face, a grimace of pain, bore a strange kind of peace, a hint of contentment in the midst of agony.

Bozmaroff was going to meet the lady in white with many regrets, but none of them about his craft. He’d tell her all his stories on the way to the far west, where the sun took its final bow each day.

There was little fight left in him to struggle against the coming end. He had thrown it all against the czar’s journals. Call it irony, call it fate that both the writer and his subject met their ends the same way. This was the second poisoned man Morana came for in this chamber, but the bard’s death was not as painless.

To the rest of the keep, Bozmaroff had chosen to leave life on his own terms. Unable to finish the memoir and unwilling to give the opportunity to anyone else, the bard had burned all of Roman’s journals, together with his notes. A maid was brutally whipped for allegedly giving him the poison. Her denials fell on deaf ears after a guard claimed to have overheard her talking to Bozmaroff despite the queen’s orders.

In the end, the queen had the only copy of Roman’s memoir, with all the little unknown fragments of his soul. Everyone else could have his statue.