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With one last look at the awaiting Blackburns, Hector put the notion out of his mind and began pulling the tarps down from the room’s far corner.

What was revealed was a gargantuan cabinet with a few small statues and plaques dotting its shelves.

“I know it’s still a bit empty-looking,” said Hector preemptively, “but I thought I should leave plenty of space for you and the other Houses to add in whatever you like.”

The statues were made of polished stone. He’d had them commissioned from a sculptor on the other side of the city.

Every single person who’d lost their life at Dunehall was either named here on a plaque or given a statue.

And Ismael Blackburn was there in the center.

Hector hadn’t known him long, but it only felt appropriate to honor him like this.

He’d thought about just materializing all the statues out of his iron, and indeed, he’d even gone ahead and done so as a form of practice, but it ended up proving rather laborious, trying to capture the perfect likenesses of actual people, especially in a miniaturized form. While he was sure that he could’ve gotten it right eventually, he came to the conclusion that they probably shouldn’t be composed of iron, anyway.

In the admittedly quite likely event that he someday got himself into another dire life-and-death situation here at Warrenhold, he figured that he didn’t want to have anything delicate here taking up space within his volume limit. He could very easily imagine a situation in which he needed to start annihilating iron indiscriminately in order to free up volume quickly, and he didn’t want the extra concern of trying not to accidentally annihilate what was supposed to be a precious fixture of historical importance.

Plus, he supposed it just felt a bit more impactful, this way. Even if there was still a degree of skill involved in the process, using materialization was kinda cheating, wasn’t it? There was something meaningful about having this kind of thing done properly by a professional.

Eh, but then again, maybe if he’d had more free time on his hands to get it perfect, he would’ve gone for it, anyway. Because there was definitely something meaningful in doing it all himself, too.

If only.

The reaction from the Blackburns was definitely something, though. The smiles on their faces. The tears in their eyes. The solemn nods--of approval, hopefully--as they approached and looked more closely.

Yeah. That alone made this more than worth the effort.