The Cipher in His Silence

I'm Idona Vaskova, and my greatest ambition is a well-deserved nap. Unfortunately, as the Royal Scriptorium's most promising - and laziest - semiotician, I've been exiled to the fog-shrouded estate of Lord Roric Ulbrek. My mission: to study the 'Whispering Blight' that twists him into a terrifying creature of ink and shadow, a monster whose form is said to be incomprehensible to all. To me, however, he’s just an infuriatingly silent puzzle I can't be bothered to solve. Yet, the more I study the living text of his curse, the more I see not a monster, but a man trapped in a prison of misunderstood symbols. He communicates through the very curse that shatters his form, and I am the only one who can read him. Our reluctant partnership deepens into a rivalry against the curse itself, which fights back with every secret we uncover. But the true architect of his suffering is closer than we think, and his reasons are buried in a shared history I am only just beginning to decipher. Can I unravel the language of Roric's curse before it consumes him completely, or will we both be silenced forever?