Sailil ate eggs, bacon and bread with jam and had a glass of water. Apatt ate mutton, potatoes and rice with tea. Teerkedas ate stew, fruit tarts with ginger ale. And Jezromiah ate sage cheese, beef steak and cabbage with coffee. They each ate two slices of gooseberry pie.

"I don't like to tangle with crime on an empty stomach," Sheriff Cadimere Warselight said after they'd all eaten. "What's the crime you want to report?"

"The murder of my mother by a Death Storyteller."

"Did the Death Storyteller know your mother?"

"I don't know."

"Do you have the Death Storyteller's given name?"

"No. But I have pictures of the crime scene," Teerkedas took the photos from his pocket in an envelope and handed them to her.

She opened the envelope and took the pictures out and laid them out on her desk.

"Whoever took these has a great aesthetic and criminalist eye," Sheriff Warselight said with the curve of a smile and an impressed gleam in her eye.

Teerkedas felt like his head was wrapped in cotton. His arms seemed too large for his seemly shrunken hands to hold the sides of his head. He'd gone numb again, the weight and weightlessness of his body and emotions was like an uncomfortable nothingness beyond compare.

"Thank you. It wasn't easy," he heard himself say, his voice sounded so disconnected from his brain and vocal cords it crumpled his resolve to an irksome level. His brows furrowed as the inside of his skull blasted at the highest peak. The coolness factor roared like a thunderstorm swelling him up with its mood swings and deluge. "No freakin' out," he thought trying to get himself back to grounded. The bricks of his reality stacked painstakingly slow until it set into place becoming stable.

Cadimere's voice came into existence seemly delayed and somewhat distant to him. He sat there like a captive audience letting the dust settle completely from this episode. On the outside, he looked both engaged and disengaged making eye contact with the sheriff but with a distant and uninterested look wreaking havoc in them.

"Wow. Let me add it took great strength to do what you did," she said her eyes meeting his. "These photographs definitely tell a well-put story. How do you know it was a Death Storyteller?"

"They left their signature behind on my mother's face," Teerkedas pointed to the picture in reference.

"Then you have the culprit's given name."

"Death Storyteller?" Teerkedas said with a raised brow in confusion.

"No, the real name," Cadimere pointed at the same photo and traced her finger along the mother's left cheek in the shape of a "U." "Didn't you notice that the Death Storyteller wrote the words, "Death Storyteller" in the shape of a "U"?"

"No. I didn't."

"It's also the symbol for a horseshoe, which gives us another clue of who the murderer is. The murderer loved your mother very much."

"How dare you say that? How do you know? That can't be true."

"I know because it's literally written on your mother's face. The U-shape or horseshoe-shape of the words "Death Storyteller" is meant to bring your mother's spirit good luck and protection. That is why they wrote it that way. And to mark her so no one else would try to hijack what they came to steal."

"Which is what?" Teerkedas asked Cadimere.

"I don't know yet."