With a lit torch in hand and several layers of rancid animal hide stripped from my body and left on the cave floor, I descended further into the cave.

My mind wandered to that year I spent trying desperately to re-educate Ulroke and mold him into the leader I thought the Hands deserved. It was unintentional that information about the First Sanctum escaped from his lips, but I listened intently as he babbled on, each word stained with blood and hate and fury and fear. How all of his plans were formed there, of the records he kept there of various pawns in his game. I had always thought that the Seventh Sanctum was his headquarters, but absolutely nobody else was privy to the knowledge of the First. Not even his Left or Right hands. Red--sorry, Amari probably wasn't aware of it herself, and she was being groomed as either his heir or the weapon he used to reshape the world.

It was also the first I heard of Isabelle, his ex-wife.

It intrigued me to hear the stories about this poor thing, of her history as princess and a guardian of a tree that had some spiritual importance to her people on the other side of the world. Of her escape to the Skavian Wilds, and of his accidental discovery of her hiding place.

Of how he was once a man capable of love and compassion, of how he was once a father. He was a man once, and not the monster that I had come to known. It was that day that affirmed my belief that I could rehabilitate him, that I truly could fix that poor bastard and shape him into the strong but understanding leader that I felt the Crimson Hands deserved.

We all make mistakes though, yeah?