He's still coughing a little as he smiles with good-natured, watery-eyed chagrin at Barrow's laughter, which is probably why he answers unthinkingly, "Vyrantium, but only for a few years," when Barrow asks his question. (A couple of hazy summers in his teens spent in wide-eyed admiration of the sharply dressed literati and intelligentsia within the ivory towers of the Vyrantium Circle, suffusing himself with the knowledge contained within its libraries and, on occasion, making some very bad personal decisions at the Nug Queen tavern by the docks. One of these things made it into the letters he wrote back to his mother; the other absolutely did not.)

The acrid burn of the smoke can't be good for the books, and so Octavius leans over to flip the latch and nudge the nearby window open just enough to let the smoke escape out into the crisp air outside.