200 years ago today I killed my first man. My first true man that is, I'd killed hundreds of Shadow men before this as practice. His name was Buralo, a scientist of a sort.

We'd been working on a project in a shadow of his creation for a number of months, something boring to do with the Trump I believe. It was at his insistence that we perform the experiments in a Shadow far away from Amber, he didn't want anyone to know about it until he'd acheived results. Dismal failures mounted week after week and I began to lose patience with him, my part in his work wouldn't come until the very last phase, when a mind stronger than his would be needed to complete what he called a "binding".

I confronted him after his latest and most complete failure, one which resulted in the loss of all of his work to date. I told him that I was leaving and that he could contact me when needed. He snapped some sort of reply and went back to his work. I made sure that my leave taking was dramatic, a few score of the natives were killed and I made a show of destroying the Trump he'd given me to return to his Shadow in front of Jordan and Cathryn.

I returned two months later.

I'll never forget the look of exquisite surprise on his face as I pushed the dagger through his eye. Ahhhh....I remember his experiment now, something useless involving Shadow people and Trumps. He did however have an exellent Trump deck, for which I offer thanks to his spirit.