The scholar furrowed his brow and kept his eyes raised, if not out of respect then to show he wouldn't be swayed. This was his plight, and he knew the worth of his work even if most of the world failed to agree. "Few hardened soldiers will buckle with fear when they see the fruits of my labor whittling down the armies commanded by your enemies. They merely have to pick off the survivors, attack what is weak and broken. Like I must ask that a king gives my field it's chance to prove, your soldiers may need that same chance."<br/><br/>Few stood in the room around them, a makeshift court granting them the privacy he knew was required for such discussion. Mendoza may have been without honor but only fools so openly frightened their court attendees. It however did not mean he wouldn't show the same flair as he would before a throne. In fact, any seat the king chose may have been such. With a hand over his chest, sharp gauntlets clacking against metal. There was a softened look on his face, honest and intimate. A man without secrets, with a face that could be read from behind a ball mask. Something he was chided for in his youth when Campona was still breathing. A noble's flaw in the old world, a detriment to one's ability to weave lies and manipulate their peers.<br/><br/>"If I may speak personally... I have no loyalty to prove and no intentions to hide. I fled a dead city without the means to craft simple golems, let alone the more lost arts of vitamancy. My desire for a proper study and an opportunity to hone this... necromancy, brought me to your kingdom. I sought a man with bodies at his disposal, someone with the power to move time forward. The era is fragile, there's little but loathing to be had for those that fight to keep it in some sort of feudal purgatory. If given such a wondrous opportunity, I would gladly spend this life of mine as your aide, that you might will away the ancient laws that you so seem to condemn. Break their rules, knight their bastards, fight mere men with enchanted beasts."<br/><br/>Even he was not above buckling under the pressure of the air between them, stiff and heavy despite the heat. Orsa lowered his head again in respect, just to give himself the time to breathe.<br/><br/>Sometimes he wondered why all the passion in the first place, over dusty old books he found in some crook's library. Drifting away from his father's work into things more forbidden, stealing cat carcasses and sick birds. The terror of initially seeing those tiny abominations writhe in confusion turned into something morbid. There was no pleasure to be had in death, but the inevitability of it became a ghost that plagued his dreams. How to manipulate it? How to avoid it. And while he was stuck in his new hobbies, the surrounding nobility crumbled around him. The vapid fights between aristocracy, like angry peacocks arguing over who was the most colorful. The rumors, the slander, all a big game of dress up. Pointless was it, when that same royal arrogance is what allowed the wars to be waged in the first place.<br/><br/>"The death around us, burnt castles and the like. Is it really a curse? The end of an era, the start of anew." Someone so hated by the world, denounced by many and slandered by the rest, was surely no stranger to cheating. If he saw them unfit to dictate the rules the whole of humanity followed, then he should have the power to deny them that opportunity.