A Letter Concerning the Infiltration of Wiete’s Judiciary by the Assassins’ Guild

To be delivered to the Chief Magistrate of Nordturm, the Heptarchal Council, and any soul of integrity who still draws breath beneath our decaying banners.

Esteemed Lords and Learned Magistrates,

If this letter has reached your desk intact, then I dare hope, for a fleeting moment, that all is not yet lost. Forgive the manner of address—I can no longer rely on protocol, nor dare I trust the channels through which such words are customarily passed. I write not from my office in Nordturm, but from an undisclosed cellar beyond the reach of polite society. I write as a fugitive. I write, I fear, as a man already marked.

I offer this not as conjecture, but as conclusion: the judiciary of Wiete, particularly within the territories of Nordturm and the coastal satrapies, has been infiltrated—systematically, deliberately—by the Assassins’ Guild.

For the past eighteen months, I have conducted what began as an internal corruption probe. An unremarkable case. A Magistrate’s aide found to possess an income disproportionate to his station. Suspicion of favours, bribes, routine misuse of authority. A bureaucratic audit, nothing more. But the more I pulled, the more threads unravelled. And what I uncovered is not an anomaly. It is a design.

I document here, as plainly as the ink allows, the shape of that design.

Magistrate Ellin Vehrin ruled her district with a reputation for precision and piety. I was called to Braelthorn after two witnesses under her protection—critical to a treason case—were found dead within a secure compound.

I was shown what passed for an internal report: a weather anomaly, a collapsed beam, and the unfortunate coincidence of both parties sleeping in adjacent rooms. I requested autopsy records. I was told they had been lost in transit. I requested testimony from the guards. None had been seen since.

My access to Vehrin’s files was revoked. My reassignment order arrived the following day. I ignored it.

That evening, a page from Vehrin’s calendar was slipped under the door of my inn. On the back, drawn in red ink, a glyph I now know to be one of the Guild’s marks: the eye within the flame.

Three days later, Vehrin resigned and vanished. Her chambers were emptied overnight. No record of her resignation exists in the High Court archives.

In the span of ten months, eight magistrates across Wiete resigned, retired, or disappeared. In each case:

• Successors were appointed within twenty-four hours.
• Witnesses linked to open investigations either retracted statements or suffered fatal accidents.
• Financial records of the accused magistrates were sealed or redacted.

My requests to review their personnel files were denied—five times in succession. On the sixth attempt, I received a forged file. The watermark was inverted. The signatures had been copied from an unrelated case I’d handled two years prior.

The forgery was deliberate. Sloppy. Almost taunting.

In Hafendorf, I encountered a man calling himself Berrand, a former clerk who’d worked under Magistrate Hallivar.

He had the look of a man forever watching shadows.

He claimed Hallivar received sealed missives delivered by the same hooded courier every seventh day. The courier never spoke. When Hallivar died of what was ruled a cardiac seizure, Berrand stole one of the messages before it could be burned.

I have seen it. Or rather, what remains of it. It was encoded using a cipher I later confirmed as matching that used by the Guardians’ Shadows during the late Ravenglass era.

One phrase repeated beneath the ciphered lines: Name Confirmed. Terms Agreed.

The last line, uncoded, bore a name: Maelen Vor—a trade unionist found dead four days later in an alley behind the Glassmarket.

The cause? Heart failure.

At thirty-two years of age.

I made the mistake of confiding in Rence Valdir, a junior magistrate in Nordturm. Earnest. Devout. I thought him incorruptible.

I showed him the Ledger fragment. His hands trembled. He said nothing.

Two days later, my office was ransacked. My personal notes burned. My access to the city archives revoked. Valdir’s father, Magistrate Orren Valdir, publicly denounced me for treasonous speculation and abuse of state resources.

I was to be arrested.

I escaped through a sewer grate beneath the archives. My assistant, Marella, was not so fortunate. Her body was found with her tongue removed and her eyes open to the sky. A coin had been placed on her chest.

The coin bore the flame.

What I have learned in the weeks since has only confirmed my fears. The Guild does not merely bribe. It supplants. It eliminates. It occupies.

There exists—according to a source I will not name—a protocol followed by corrupted magistrates known as “The Silence.”

It entails:

1. Identification of non-compliant elements.
2. Extraction or termination of threats.
3. Rewriting of records to cover all traces.
4. Coordination with higher Guild operatives through intermediaries placed in the Ministry of Review.

I have tracked six uses of this protocol in the last calendar year.

The affected cases have vanished. As though they never existed.

I send this letter not in hope of action, but in the dimming possibility that it might survive me.

I have no allies left within the Office of Inquiry. No court will hear me. No guard will protect me.

I do not know how far the Guild’s reach extends, but I believe it now encompasses:

• Three Heptarchal Councillors
• At least eleven sitting magistrates
• Two senior officials in the Treasury
• And a dozen members of the city guard, sworn to uphold the very law they now defile

This letter will be delivered by a trusted contact. If he does not return within three days, assume he has been intercepted.

To those who would dismiss my words: I pray you wake soon.

To those who still believe in law: act now.

To those in the Guild who read this: I was never your servant. I will die as I lived—speaking truth.

My name is Eland Moreau. I was once a loyal servant of Wiete.

I write now as a hunted man.

This world is rotting from within. If justice lives, it must now crawl through ash to breathe.

You will know me by what I leave behind: questions that cannot be silenced, a trail of burnt files, and the echo of a voice that refuses to die.

May this letter reach the hands of someone who still listens.

And may Creation protect us all.

—Eland Moreau

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Editor’s Note: Moreau’s body was never found. His disappearance remains an unresolved entry in the archives of Nordturm. The copy of this letter was smuggled from the archives by an unknown whistleblower and published under restricted circulation. It remains banned in several satrapies.