[Fragment of a journal soiled with blood and spinal fluid]
It portended to be just another day as a clerk in the Ducal Treasury. Start the morning with baguette and camembert, then shuffle some parchments and head for home before dusk. Today, however, the normal order of things was disturbed – dramatically. I came across a highly interesting note in the archives. And, along with it, a key. The key is the more interesting find, because according to what I could decipher from the dust-covered scribblings on the note, it opens a chest full of gold coins! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
While doing some routine straightening of the files, I found a report outlining procedures for the reform of Bastoy Prison – orders straight from Duke Henri Gras. We are all aware how badly this experiment ended, for the ruins of that prison to this day frighten my potential "tourists" with their battered skeletons and legends about howling spirits of the murdered guards. Yet I did not know that hiding among the abandoned ruins there was a chest, and that its key was lying right under my nose! The chest supposedly contains crowns meant for the purchase of books and rations for the inmates at Bastoy. One of the clerks employed here at the time committed a sin of omission and sent the chest to the warden without the key. Yet perhaps that was for the best? The warden was impaled and the guards all skinned alive, meaning those degenerates would have also got their hands on the chest, had he received the key. As it is – might the chest still be there, unopened?
Folk say a curse has fallen on that place, a dark power brought down by the bestiality pf the murders it beheld, but folk also say an Ofieri will become emperor of Nilfgaard and herald the end of the world, so there's not much point giving any of such jabbering much credence.
