Cilia's eyes had grown drowsy. The right wing wasn't doing justice to her carefree and ever joyous nature. From the moment she started opening the doors, more and more visceral images of dead bodies entered her head. It was like the pungent smell that assaulted her nose at every door she opened told a story. It started as a story of confusion and dread then it became fear and wish for freedom and in the previous last two rooms, regret and betrayal. The right-wing of the mansions was still holding back details of the entire story and in front of her was the door to the closing act.
Her silky silver hair was riddled with webs and dust. She didn't dare smell it because if she did, she would have cut it then and there. In her mind she blamed one person for her horrors. Mr Kisharu. There master and teacher. He must have set all this up to scare the living hell out of them. Cilia had never been more disappointed in her life before.
"Tsk!" she clicked as she reached for the door knob of the master bedroom.
"Let's get this over and down with."
The door opened. Her sensitive nose had grown used to the disgusting air that was bound to hit her face. She braced for impact.
The air in the room came with a hint of old wood and growing moss. None like the previous rooms it didn't stink of dead lives or past regrets. In fact, of all the rooms she had seen this was the cleanest. It looked as though it went through a weekly regular cleaning and maintenance. The window curtains were ironed and opened letting in a stream of moonlight into the room, the bed tidy and nicely made, the leather couch a little farther from the bed seemed good as new with no wrinkles or tears from old age. There was a wooden table next to the couch and on it a bunch of papers lay with a paper weight on top of them.
Cilia squinted her eyes and moved towards the paper… something was suspicious. She reached for the fluttering paper that was on top of the bunch and read it.
"Congratulations, you found the Master bedroom and the story piece you were looking for. As you have seen by now this mansion hides a secret… a dark secret. You have crossed twenty-nine rooms each a horror in itself. In this room sleeps the final piece. The final horror and a consequence of an awakening. You have two options, one read the sheets of paper on the table or two, look around and find out the story for yourself. But be careful of all the pieces this room holds more than what meets the eye." The note said.
Cilia's eyes dulled. Which is a wonder given the things she had seen in the previous rooms. But Mr Kisharu never disappointed in setting a new low, in the name of training or a test. Cilia placed the piece of paper down due to the sudden flaring pain that pinched her. She looked around completely ignoring the fact that she had set the piece of paper, which was slowly catching fire, on the fine leather couch.
As the paper burnt away a thought spawned in Cilia's mind.
There was something different with the room, something ominous and extremely powerful. Something even her years of study in the fief had never seen nor felt.
And with that Cilia made up her mind. She turned to the sheets of paper on the wooden table, which were considerably few that what she had first seen, and sighed. She picked them up and walked towards large windows of the room. The windows flung open and even before the passing wind could barge into the room, Cilia threw the paper into the night.
Reading was more of Kento's thing.
Her silver hair flowed in the breeze as she turned to the neatly kept furniture of the master bedroom. She felt a familiar tingle as her breath began… back home she had been stressed to learn this and was always glad for it. The sensation grew with each time like opening one page after another in your favorite novel.
By the final page the master bedroom's story was more than clear. Humans are despicable beings.
***
Down below Kento had stormed through all the rooms of the right side of the lower floor in search of the library. His joy had overwhelmed his senses to even notice that the library was just at the end first left corner from where the Loom was. Joy glimmered from his eyes refracting of his dark frame glasses. His thoughts were automatically paraded to finding where the vast knowledge was, not even noticing how quiet Cilia had grown.
After a while the energy in his steps faded. He had searched all labels pasted on top of the doors of each room of the lower left yet none of them spelt library. He grew tied and lazily walked back to the Loom. His disappointment knew no counter as he rested his hand onto the wall of the final corner to the loom. He rested his head onto the wall too before slowly dropping down to the floor. His orange hair rubbed against the wall as he dropped leaving some scratched on the wallpaper that cover it and some minor dentures on the wood behind it.
He looked up to cry for his failure.
"I'm sorry guys," his voice sounded disappointed," I failed…" he stopped after reading the label at the top of the door beside him.
He got up, mended his tilted glasses and opened the door into the library.
Kento's love for books was quite obvious. Of the three he was confident to have read more books than Karin and Cilia in one week than they had in the previous year. To him knowledge was priceless. It was mandatory for him if he hoped to be able achieve his goal and shut Karin and Cilia up. But in as much as he read, he never seemed to achieve it and only made the criticism from the two worse.
Thus, as he opened the door into the library, he'd hoped to find some knowledge there that could help him. Actually, he was sure to find some. It was an old mansion hidden in the woods after all. There was bound to be some forbidden knowledge there.
Today, disappointment seemed to have been prepared in surplus. Kento couldn't believe the atrocity before him. One of his few favorite words, defiled right in front of him.
The library was empty. Shelf after shelf the library stacked nothing but dead air, dust and the occasional spider webs. Kento didn't want to believe it. His eyes ran from the first row, with four columns, to the second to the third to the fourth and by the tenth the idea was clear. A place that held the name library should at least have one book, he thought. Even a children's book. Even a…
"Even at least one paper." He cried.
And as though magical, the library answered.
There were a bunch of seats and tables before the first shelf row, possibly where the former residents used to sit and read. On top of one table a piece of paper, hid under a relatively large candle holder. Thanks to the darkness of the night, it would have been hard to catch for the normal eye. Luckily Kento's body wasn't that of a normal mans.
There is a first time for everything. Everyone knows that and has lived it. As for Kento he was currently having a first time. This was the first time for him to walk into a library depressed and walking like sloth on a hot day.
Just like all the other papers this one held a message. His eyes schemed through the lines of text trying not to cry from the disappointment. Kento's quest was a treasure hunt and was supposed to be the easiest. But something about the note made him think otherwise.