The sky had grown dark by the time he had made his way back to the tower. The tower—Lanternlight Keep—was a fitting place for such a thing as his task. Bright and eternally white, the tower often caught the last light of the sun as it set beyond the mountains and provided a beacon for the townsfolk below in the surrounding fields. He had caught snippets of conversation in the inn and they all regarded it warmly and fondly, considering it to be a symbol of hope and assurance in an otherwise bleak existence.

But it was not. Lanternlight Keep was a pit full of vipers, and he—the Warden—as despicable as he was, was least among the coiling snakes. One by one, he had found out the schemes and plots within the tower. He had thought it his duty to do so: to find and report the plots to the local Keepers. His task as Warden, but, more importantly, his task as a citizen. But then he had uncovered the Keepers’ own plots, and the glow of Lanternlight had dimmed somewhat for him. The Keepers were intended to be the last bastion safeguarding goodness and justice… but they had turned out to be just as corrupt as the ones they were sworn to root out.

All the plots involved the Seat in some form or another, and many of them revolved around the person who sat upon it. The plots had all grown legs and wandered and split until the Keep held a dizzying array of tangled limbs and winding webs that ensnared everyone around it. There was no real goal to many of the schemes anymore; the people simply made more schemes because they had always done so. There was no point to it all. But he intended to see the issue resolved.

The clearest way would be to wipe the slate clean, but how to go about it? He had no army, no authority, no claim. He was only one man, and not a well-liked man at that; his adherence to the law and reticence to involve himself in the plans had run a stake through the heart of nearly all his friendships. Needless to say, his own scheme would have to be much subtler. That’s how he had come to his conclusion: there was no other way around it. When the High Seat was empty next, it would be filled by the Princess. The innocent Princess whose only crime was to be raised in a spiderweb of lies. The Princess who could not help but be the centerpiece of many of the schemes. A last lie had to be told, and a last victim would have to be given to the altar in order to settle the myriad plots of the inhabitants of the tower once and for all.

The Princess must hang. There was no other way. The tower—Lanternlight Keep—was a fitting place indeed. A pure, white keep on the outside, hiding a pit of vipers within. The Warden looked down at his own white robes, grimaced, then entered the tower.