Act III, Chapter 14: Aldric Breaks His Mask for Ophelia

The garden was dying in the way that late autumn kills things — not dramatically, not all at once, but by degrees, by the slow withdrawal of color from leaf and stem until what remained was the structural truth of the thing, stripped of all pretense at beauty. Aldric had come here because the great hall had begun to press upon him in some manner he could not precisely identify, a subtle accumulation of performance that had built through the morning to a weight he required briefly to set down — not to abandon, only to set down, the way a man carrying a heavy load will pause on a hillside and straighten his back without intending to stop.

He had paused too long, he suspected. The cold had worked its way through his coat while he was not attending to it.

He stood at the garden's stone center, where a sundial that had never been particularly accurate stood recording the wrong time with great conviction, and he thought about nothing in particular, which was itself unusual enough to remark upon — the thinking about nothing, the brief cessation of the machinery that had been running without interruption for months now, the endless calculating revolutions of a mind that had decided somewhere in the three weeks following his father's execution that the moment it stopped turning was the moment it became vulnerable.