Apologies for the extended delay: I had some projects I'd set aside while I was working on this story, and decided to finally catch up on them. I can't promise a delay won't happen again, but hopefully the next one won't be half a year!
Forty-Three || Phantom
Rue had approached Old Carona on foot, taking the long way around the lake ruins and keeping to the forest for as long as he could. He didn't want to attract any attention and didn't want to wander too close to either the ruins in the lake or the shattered tower that now stood above the town. Either of those locations were where Doll Master and his associates were most likely to be gathered, and he was in no state for a real confrontation.
Fortunately, there were only three of them, and Old Carona covered a fair bit of area. He skirted the forest and emerged on the far end of the town. The tower was visible, a twisted mass of broken stone and torn-up earth spiraling at impossible angles, and from high enough up easily commanded a broad view of the town. But Rue was a small target among the buildings, he moved quick, and the dying daylight would have made him difficult to see even from a lower angle, let alone from the height and distance of the tower.
He wound through the broken streets and buildings, on alert for any indication of movement, but the old town was still as death and his path to the cathedral unhindered. When he arrived he searched for an indication of a perimeter ward, sealed magic or some kind of trap, but everything seemed empty.
That only made him more alert.
He stepped into the empty courtyard, followed the path to the door, stopped. He moved around to the nearby windows and tried to peer inside, but even if the lighting had been better the stained glass was too thick to get more than a blurred, rushed look inside, and in these conditions it was utterly impossible. With no other recourse, Rue approached the door and pressed his hand against it. It was slightly ajar, and under the pressure of his touch swung inward.
He opened it just enough to get his head and shoulders through, and looked inside.
He expected to see puppets; to see the interior in a state of disarray, to be greeted by an army of warped souls in broken bodies. He expected some indication of infraction, of movement, but all he saw instead was a quiet church interior, illuminated by the dull glow of ancient lanterns and the spangled, dusty light filtering thin through the glass. The door behind the altar was still jammed open.
Exactly how he had left it.
He eased his way into the building, shoving the door as far open as he could before entering, and once he stood inside he looked quickly for something he could use to keep it propped open. It would be an obvious mark of his presence, but after the last time he'd been there he didn't want to take the chance of being locked inside again. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could use; the pews were the only option he could see, and they were too heavy to be moved.
He'd have to risk it, then.
He moved toward the pulpit.
Nothing had changed there, either. He clambered up to the raised platform and turned, assessing the room from an elevated position, his eyes flicking through the pews and trailing up toward the ceiling. He searched for something waiting above, crouched in the thick shadows of the steepled roof, but still he saw nothing. Felt nothing.
Maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe they'd all been moved elsewhere already.
He turned toward the open door, the room beyond still burning faintly red, and sucked in air between his teeth. Of course he knew better than to expect something significant in the chapel itself; of course, if anything was happening, it would be down there.
He turned away from the door and leapt off the raised platform, taking a few tentative steps down the central aisle, looking up at the chandelier. His heart was throbbing somewhere in the lower part of his throat, choking some of his breath, and he couldn't understand why. Of course he'd had an unpleasant experience in here; of course he was nervous about plunging back down into the catacombs; of course he was terrified of running into another contingent of puppets, of course, of course...
But that wasn't it.
It was the silence.
Silence oppressive; silence absolute. Old Carona was abandoned by man and animal alike, leaving the only sounds the tumble of shattered mortar, the whisper of wind, the too-loud echo of his own footsteps invading the place. Here, in this cathedral, with its carpeting and its all-engulfing hugeness, the silence became palpable.
And then broken.
He heard the whine of an opening door, the soft thunk of wood butting against stone, and he wheeled, his hand whipping immediately to the handle of the Arc Edge, his gaze burning on the door, and now his heart had stopped throbbing and taken a solid residence in his throat because there in the door, framed by the ruddy light, was a human silhouette.
He didn't even blink and suddenly it was gone, its presence a ghostly shadow behind his eyelids. He stood rigid, his eyes darting across the room, but whatever it was hadn't come out; it had gone down.
He vaulted the platform and ran to the opening to the catacombs, stopping himself at the door and craning his neck to see down the stairs. The red light faded to a pallor down below, and his eyes were having trouble adjusting fully, but there it was, standing at the bottom of the stairs, head tilted up toward him, arms clasped behind the back, its features drenched in red-tinted shadows.
Rue didn't move. The figure continued to watch him.
Then it disappeared again, with hardly a flutter of its clothes. Footsteps echoed down the stone hall.
Rue descended, forcing himself to move deliberately down the decline. He was aggravating himself, taking such care, but something was desperately wrong and he couldn't afford to go charging headlong after it, even as his muscles tensed and his skin felt electric.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and looked down the corridor.
The evidence of their presence was still laid out in the stonework; cuts and cracks, fresh stone dust, tattered remains of cloth. It was not, however, as they had left it; the doors to either side of the hallway stood at varying degrees of open, slivers of darkness cut against the stone.
Rue assessed the hallway, his gaze flicking from opening to opening, to the end of the hall, back, but there was no sign of the figure except the faint whorls of dust against the light; echo of movement, phantom of life, but nothing with it.
Quickly, he turned and looked back up the stairs. Nothing. He spun and looked back down the hallway. Still empty.
Carefully, he stepped forward.
Silence weighed down against him.
He approached the first of the entryways and caught the edge in his hand. Putting all of his power behind him, he shoved, and after several seconds of dedicated assault the stone finally moaned and ground away into the wall, revealing a little square room beyond. He ducked to the side, trying to allow as much light from the corridor to spill in as possible, and saw only dust, so thick on the floor he could barely make out the stone. He peered more closely and saw at the back patches of emptiness where the dust had not yet settled, spaces only recently vacated. He stepped back, not daring to try and pull the door back into place, and moved to the other side of the hallway.
He repeated the process a few times, working slowly so as not to overexert himself, and the result was the same; each room empty, only recently disturbed, choked by time. Every time he finished pulling at the door, he would check behind him, up and down the corridor, waiting for the figure to reappear. Still nothing.
About midway down the hall, something was different.
This particular door had only been knocked slightly ajar, just enough for him to get his fingers in the opening; he barely had enough leverage to start pushing, and when he did it slid back with significant protest. He had to stop only once he'd opened a space large enough for him to slip through, casting only a thin lance of light into the room. He expected it to be empty as the others, and had no problem wriggling inside, but after only a few paces into the darkness he bumped into something solid.
He jumped, heart racing, and stepped quickly to the side, his hand at the hilt of the Arc Edge. When nothing else moved and his eyes had adjusted to the poor light, however, he saw that the light from the corridor was cast over what appeared to be a wooden desk, a plain and somewhat makeshift thing that was plastered over with yellowed, fragile paper.
Slowly, he released his hold on the Arc Edge and approached the desk. He touched the edge of one of the paper fragments and it all but disintegrated in his hand. He pulled back, careful not to destroy any more of it, and took a quick glance over the contents. It became clear after only a few seconds that this was not something of Yordaf's; the writing was in more modern alphabet, the magician's cipher hadn't been used, and the papers had obviously not been reenforced against the passage of time.
It took him a moment to determine that, though. The handwriting was shaky, sometimes rattling itself entirely off the page; some of the words were composed entirely of nonsensical scribbles that had subsequently been scratched out with such force as to rip through the paper and claw straight into the wood. At times it was almost normal, words written in extremely broad, careful strokes of someone only learning the motor skills for penmanship; at other times it tried to be more compact, but whoever had written the words couldn't manage it. Their fury bled onto the paper, where a few characters would suddenly devolve into a long angry snarl of nothing, ending in blots of smeared ink. And the words...
Not words. Names.
Lines and lines of names, hundreds of names repeated hundreds of times, papers filled with repetitions of a single name in varying states of written decay. The papers filled the desk in layers, the names scribbled off the sides and onto the ground and, now that his eyes had adjusted to some of the light, up onto the wall. He moved to the side and found another desk against the back wall. The light was too dull back here to make sense of it, but the mounds were doubtless paper, the darkness on them names, the ink tendrils working their way up the wall and across the floor more of the same.
"That's why they killed him."
Something blotted the light. Rue froze.
"At least, that's what they say," the voice continued; quiet, low, feminine. "Yordaf did terrible things to these people, shattered them to the soul, and yet all they wanted for his crimes was to be acknowledged. To be given a name again."
He turned.
She stood in the doorway, framed by the pale light, her hair lit in an auburn halo around her head. Her face was thickly in shadow, but he didn't need to see her to know the details.
He couldn't breathe.
"Names are a powerful thing, aren't they?" she continued. "A lot of identity wrapped up in a few little words. It's terrible when somebody forgets your name. Worse when it's stolen. Why do you think he did that to them?"
Rue reached out and gripped the table to keep himself from collapsing. Paper turned to dust beneath his hands.
"Some say he was possessed. Others say he was simply obsessed. To destroy and desecrate and defile and never once stop and think that the things he created just wanted to be remembered."
He found his legs again, and slowly the rest of his body followed. He let go of the table – carefully, let he lose his strength again – and turned to face the speaker. He couldn't see her face, but he could feel the smile.
"That's what you felt, at least a little, when you looked into their soul, wasn't it? That sadness, that... oblivion. To continue living without identity, without understanding, when you're very self has been cracked... it must be frightening."
"Claire," he breathed.
Gone.
He blinked, stared at the empty space she had been standing, and suddenly his brain snapped to attention.
"C-Claire!" he shouted, and threw himself at the opening. He squeezed through, staggered back into the hallway, and glanced up and down the length of it. To the end, to the stairs, to the end again–
Suddenly she was there, at the far end of the hall. She raised her hand, then stepped to the side, disappearing around the corner.
He didn't think about it; he wasn't even aware of moving until, suddenly, he was standing at the end of the hall, too, staring at the broken remains of the door that the chimera had crashed into. The light faded beyond the other side; dust danced in the gloom.
He walked up to the door and clambered over the opening, passing into the next hallway. There was heavy silence again, made heavier in the dark. His throat felt dry, his lungs hot, his heart beating so hard against his chest it hurt. He tried to find words again, but when he'd got his throat and his mouth and his tongue all working together again the only thing he found was a name.
"Claire!"
His words were swallowed by the dark.
He moved forward, through insufficient light, through heavy gloom, out of the interim room and into the hallway. He made his way down the length of the hall, to the door at the end, and there he stopped. He turned again, checked behind him. Emptiness.
Turned to the door. Pushed it open.
The door gave way and creaked inward, and he leaned through the opening and looked into the operating theater. The table still lay in the middle; the vestiges of horrors past still spattered the ground; the light was still dim as it had been in the corridor, and it was thanks to that light that he took several seconds to see the mound of twisted darkness bundled on the floor.
It was a disarray of limbs, appendages all akimbo, and he was a long time understanding exactly what he was looking at. He pushed the door fully open and stepped inside, but slowly, gradually, walking softly toward the thing that lay in a heap behind the operating table. It was moving, breathing, the length of its body shivering, but something about it – its pathetic stance, the strange heaviness of magic around it – told him that regardless of what he remembered, regardless of what he saw, this creature was now harmless.
He stepped up to the humanoid chimera's side.
Heavy binds of magic crossed over its body, so thick they shimmered, so thick they were almost visible to the naked eye. They lashed over the thing's form, necks and torso and legs, held the arms at odd angles around its sides, wove tightly across its body and then sank back into the floor, pinning it solidly to the ground. The serpent's head was caught partially beneath the chest, tilted at an odd angle, its eyes glassy and its tongue lolling out of its head; the woman's head was obscured by her hair, brown strands fanning out across the stone; the skeletal head had been tilted unnaturally to the side, twisted more than ninety degrees from how it was supposed to sit, its empty eyes and rictus grin fixed in Rue's direction.
It made a noise, a rattling exhalation that rose in pitch until it became an animal whine, and tried to move. It twitched, shivered, and then lay still again, its voice returning to a ragged pant.
"Do you pity him?"
Rue turned, and this time did not hesitate to grab the Arc Edge.
Psycho Master stood behind him, casually leaning forward on the slab of the operating table, his arms folded, his whole countenance frustratingly serene. He cracked open one eye, just enough for Rue to see the gleam of it in the pale light, and tilted his head to the side, assessing both of them.
"You shouldn't," he said, and pushed himself fully upright. He took a few steps around the table, generally away from Rue. "The man was a monster. You see what he did to those puppets. What he did to himself– and to his beloved." He nodded faintly toward the chimera. The creature's serpentine head twitched and hissed, but it did not make another attempt to move. "Abominable acts, all in the name of love. What a wretched legacy."
"Where are they?" Rue asked.
"The puppets? You and your friend already found them, I should think. Unless something else cut down their numbers. I shudder at the thought."
Rue was quiet, tense. Psycho Master turned his head toward the chimera again.
"I would like to kill him," Psycho Master said. "Such misery is unbearable to me– the thought of living so long, knowing your intentions and knowing as well you'll never be able to carry them out. Wandering for decades – centuries – with only the understanding that no matter what you do, you will never realize your purpose. Such tragedy. Some, of course, find ways around cruel fate, but our dear Father Yordaf has no such recourse. Alas, his demons keep him alive– animate, rather, this is hardly living– and all I can do is hold him here while we go about our work."
"And what work is that?"
"Gathering forces. You and yours have proven intensely uncooperative and our master is growing impatient."
His grip on the axe tightened. "Where's Claire?"
"Claire? Your... old friend, yes? I was led to believe she is precisely where you left her, back in that village, several feet underground."
Rue stiffened and forced himself to remain quiet. Psycho Master turned away and stepped toward the door.
"Why do you ask such questions?"
Rue hesitated, the words caught for a moment on his tongue. He swallowed them down and tried a new string, one that tasted a little less rancid.
"I saw something in here," he said.
"Something," Psycho Master repeated. "A curious choice of word." He looked over his shoulder, his eyes open to barely slits, watching Rue intensely and narrowly. "A memory? This is a dark and haunted place. Perhaps it draws out our phantoms."
He looked away and stepped through the door, and suddenly Rue moved, snapping the Arc Edge off his back. He shouted after Psycho Master – "Hold on!" – and made it all of three steps before he came to a stop, staring at the doorframe.
Psycho Master had vanished, the vestiges of his magic lingering in the air. In his place stood Claire.
She smiled at him.
"What's wrong, Rue?" she asked quietly. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"A ghost," he breathed. "You're..."
She tilted her head and stepped back, rounding the corner and fading into shadow. He lunged and skidded through the door opening, wheeling to face down the hall. He was greeted by emptiness and silence, and waited with bated breath for something to break.
It did.
A distant scream rent the air, echoing hollow down the halls, and without thought Rue broke into a run, tore back the way he came, down the halls and through the doors until he came back to the stairway, and as he reached the bottom he heard the scream again, coming from near and above and rebounding into the darkness behind him. He scrambled up the stairs, propelled by the noise and the echo and the voice and now words–
"Let go of me! Rue! Help!"
–and another scream that ended with chilling abruptness–
–and he practically leapt past the open door and onto the cathedral staging, and standing at the pulpit, his posture impeccable, his hands clasped casually behind his back, was Psycho Master. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back, and Rue spun, following the direction Psycho Master was pointed in, his gaze flying up the wall until he saw her hanging suspended in the air, her arms held out to her sides, her head lolling limp against her chest.
Psycho Master peeled one eye open, just enough to look at Rue, and said; "I believe I have found your phantom."
Rue's axe was buried in the pulpit before he even had a chance to think. He tore down harshly, taking with him a chunk of wood in the action, and spun around to see Psycho Master standing several feet off, flush in the tangled magics of teleportation.
"How woefully predictable," he said.
"Let her down," Rue snarled.
Psycho Master shook his head. "Such a thing would hardly be of much benefit to me, would it?" he asked genially. "No, dear boy. I'm afraid I've stumbled upon something you want, and simply giving her back would be of–"
Rue sprang, the Arc Edge slicing through air, trailing behind it a blaze of azure. Still it bit into nothing, and Rue found himself standing in emptiness, staring at nothing, his breathing hard and his heart hammering. From behind came a noise, and he turned again to see Psycho Master gently clapping.
"–little use to me," he finished, and lowered his hands. "You are, of course, familiar with the concept of blackmail. I would like–"
Rue threw himself forward again, Arc Edge held double-handed over his head, and brought the blade down on Psycho Master. He was expecting the man to move again– the exercise was futile, but Rue was at least making a point. This time, however, Psycho Master did no such thing; instead, the air in front of him condensed into something almost visible, and Rue's blow came to a screeching halt several inches away from Psycho Master's face. So, too, did Rue.
He hung suspended over Psycho Master, paralyzed. He tried to force himself to calm down, forced himself not to make any sudden movements lest he hurt himself, but before he could even try to formulate a plan Psycho Master raised his hand and opened his palm. There was a flare of light and force, a sense of abrupt motion, and Rue crashed back onto the platform several feet away. The Arc Edge was thrown from his grip and landed with a heavy clatter somewhere off to his right; he tried to force himself upright to grab at it, but the impact left him shaky and his muscles were twitching uncontrollably from the magic hold. He could barely move.
Psycho Master strolled forward, but stopped well short of where Rue was.
"You're going to have to do much better than that," he said quietly.
Rue grunted and managed, with no small effort, to raise his head.
Psycho Master held out his hand and lowered it, drawing Claire's unconscious form down with it. Rue watched, tried to rise, failed and hit the ground again, and Psycho Master took another step forward.
"I don't think you'll be accomplishing much tonight, though," he said. "I would recommend, Master Artema, that you rest here for a bit. Even if you return to town now you've already missed the main event."
Rue found his voice. "You've attacked them."
"No such thing," Psycho Master said. "The town is naught but bystanders who have found themselves caught in something far beyond their ken and monstrously out of their control. We have no intention of attacking them. Not without fair warning."
The shaking in his arms was growing tolerable. Rue forced them beneath his torso and pushed, managing to raise himself slightly off the ground, although his lower body yet refused to respond to him.
"But since you've arrived here in time to meet me, and you'll be missing the proper announcement, I will give you some forewarning," he said. "Master Ruecian has no desire to wait longer than necessary to fulfill his duty, and we will be assisting him to that end until he has succeeded. Success is incumbent on opening the lake ruins; opening the lake ruins is incumbent on bringing the Prima Doll there to do so. If you and yours are not willing to bring us the doll, we will do whatever is necessary to bring it to us. If we must destroy the town to find him, then so be it.
"Before you attempt to hurl indignation at me, however, let me add something to the deal that I believe you will be most interested in."
He closed his hand, and Claire, the toes of her boots now scraping the floor, suddenly fell limp out of the air and landed with a solid thud against the platform. Rue flinched.
"Go back to town," he said. "Retrieve the Prima Doll. Bring it to the lake ruins. Your brother wishes to speak to you under more... relaxed circumstances, to say the very least, and if you prove willing to listen to him..."
He waved to Claire's unconscious form.
Rue gritted his teeth. "I don't– I don't think we have anything left to discuss."
"Then I wish you all the best in seeing your friend again."
There was no flash, no movement, no warning; Claire was there, and then she was gone, the only evidence of her vanishing a flicker of magic in the air. Rue stared at the empty space, perplexed and terrified, and Psycho Master stepped back, the edges of his own body starting to ripple.
"You have until sundown to reconsider," Psycho Master said. "Master Ruecian looks forward to seeing you again."
Rue moved to speak, but the first noise out of his throat came too late; Psycho Master disappeared, and the cathedral was left empty again.