Hours after the officers had gone, Alphard sat on the edge of his bed. His legs hung off the mattress, his left elbow propped against the soft cotton of the blankets, while his right hand held the diary open to a single page, his focus fixed entirely on it.
Hours had passed in that same quiet exercise, working carefully through the diary's earliest pages. He wasn't even halfway through yet, but what he'd found so far was fascinating.
Alphard Quinn Aurelius. Student at the University of Beauclair. Graduated in social sciences, foreign languages, and economics.
Within the pages he'd already read lay an extensive account of Alphard's life, along with a wealth of knowledge about the world itself. Saint-Rémont was the capital of Saint-Cyr, one of the great economic and military powers of the Steam Continent and the world at large — a nation locked in constant conflict with the United Kingdom of Victoria ever since the day of its independence.
There was also mention of something called the Lament Gem, though he assumed it was some kind of jewelry.
Interesting. The Dance of Heroes is a celebration honoring the nation's liberators. Does the whole city turn out for it, or do people celebrate at home?
Well. Whatever else is true, Alphard clearly had good taste when he picked his degree.
His attention drifted, and he reached into his pocket for the crumpled slip of paper the stranger at the square had pressed into his hand.
Le Caveau des Sages. A bar in the Bercy district, Rue Saint-Émilion. Open from 5 pm.
Reading it over again, part of him expected something extraordinary — but mostly it just felt absurd, probably a product of his own paranoia.
An invitation to a bar was strange enough on its own. But it was the man's manner — the silence, the odd, deliberate way their paths had crossed — that made it feel like more than coincidence. Everything pointed toward something illicit: an illegal bar, or something worse. Criminal groups recruiting the young. Or maybe, he told himself, it really was something as simple as an Independence Day gathering.
As his mind wandered further, he found himself recalling Mr. Blake's stare, comparing it, almost involuntarily, to the stranger's. They weren't the same person — that much he was sure of — but something in the color of their eyes, the angle of their gaze, felt uncomfortably alike.
He got up, pacing in short steps in front of the bed, rubbing his chin and staring at the ceiling, careful to keep quiet enough not to draw attention.
That was when the strange presence returned — the same feeling he'd sensed before, somewhere in the room with him. This time, though, it didn't frighten him. It felt more like an omen.
The crimson moonlight crept closer, flooding the room in that same deep, blood-red hue.
He was ready now — ready for the plan that had been sitting in the back of his mind since the moment he'd arrived.
Before he'd ended up in this world, Alphard — no, Kenji — had recited a short prayer, one a friend had asked of him. An unusual prayer, one that had, oddly enough, required a clown's mask resting between his knees as he knelt.
Nothing strange had happened right after. That night he'd gone to sleep as he always did. And when he woke — he was in this new body.
"I need to repeat this to get home. The moon's in position now."
The timing wasn't just for show — his original prayer had also been recited at night, since the ritual was far more effective that way, and being transmigrated deep into the night carried its own weight of importance.
He knelt on the cold, soft carpet that covered the floor, drew the small book he'd bought that afternoon from his side, and set it down in front of his joined knees.
The clown mask painted on its cover meant little to the ritual itself — the book would do.
Standing before the window, he pressed his hands together and closed his eyes slowly, feeling the temperature of his own body settle around him.
The room drowned in absolute darkness, broken only by the thin crimson trail the moon cast through the window and across the floor.
A whisper slipped from Alphard's lips.
"God of Misery, God of Divinity and Fate — wrap me in the mantle of desire, of fortune, of love. Take my misery and turn it into blind joy. Take my soul, my life, so that others may rejoice, and shield me from every imposition of the world's eternal light."
At that exact moment, the curtains shuddered, stirred into a strange, fluttering life by a gust of wind that carried a bitter chill against Alphard's skin.
A shiver ran through him, and he wanted, badly, to open his eyes. But he understood, somewhere deep down, that this mattered too much to break now — so he held his hands together tighter and endured.
Then, without warning, a disturbing image began to surface in his mind. A vast, endless shroud stretched across an infinite space, bodies clawing to break free from within it, all of them turning toward him as though he were something to be worshipped — a god.
What is this? Where am I?
Blind panic seized his features, hollowing out his gaze. His jaw locked tight as he watched the bodies twist and thrash in movements too vast, too inhuman, and yet unmistakably alive.
He forced his eyes shut against the sight, and somehow tore himself free of that dreadful space, surfacing back into the darkness of his own room.
His breath came in ragged bursts, his heart slamming against his ribs with every beat, and for a long, agonizing stretch he simply waited, every sense stretched raw and sharp.
Only once his body settled did feeling return to his limbs, and he straightened slowly, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
What was that? Have I actually lost my mind?
He shot to his feet — too fast. The crimson light blurred into a dark smear as the floor seemed to lurch away beneath him.
Stumbling in short, unsteady steps back to his bed, he decided there was nothing left to do but rest.
His vision steadied, and he found himself staring at the ceiling, just as he had that very morning.
Weighed down by everything that had happened, his thoughts kept circling back to the images he'd seen, wondering how such a massacre could exist — and whether it had been real, or nothing more than a byproduct of the prayer itself.
Feeling blindly through the dark, his fingers brushed against the wallpaper behind the headboard until they found the small wall valve, turning it with a metallic click.
He heard the muffled hiss of gas traveling through the silk-wrapped hose resting on the nightstand, right beside his pillow. Reaching for the matchbox on the same table, he struck one against the strip, and the sudden sulfur-bright flare lit his tired eyes, blinding him for an instant.
He touched the match to the lamp's burner and opened its valve.
Puff.
The flame surged, licking almost to the edge of the glass shade. Alphard quickly eased the gas flow down before soot could darken the table beneath it. The hiss settled into a steady, low murmur, humming right at the edge of his hearing.
The lamplight spread warmth across the room, easing him for a moment and finally washing away the crimson afterimage that had clung to his vision.
"I think I've calmed down. I hope I wake up back home tomorrow," he murmured to himself.
For a while, the memory of what he'd seen faded to the back of his mind, and he found himself thinking of his old life instead, still half-convinced this whole thing was something his own mind had conjured. He'd heard of dreams vivid enough, deep enough, to stretch on far longer than they should. But that fragile hope dissolved like sand in the wind the instant the horrific image from moments ago surfaced again.
Beyond that, the terror he'd felt, everything he'd lived through in that cathedral, the sheer strangeness of the people around him — none of it was something even the most imaginative mind could have conjured in such precise, unbearable detail.
Pulling the sheets over himself, he let the comforting warmth settle in, and before long, sleep claimed him.
Not far from his room, Helena lay in her own bed. Her gas lamp still burned bright enough for her to read a chapter or two before sleep, as had become her habit — she could never quite drift off without it.
Absorbed as she was in her book, her heart still beat with a restless energy that seemed to hum through her whole body.
Eventually she set the book aside, tucking it into the drawer of her nightstand, and frowned as a thought of her brother crossed her mind.
Is he asleep already?
She rose to check.
Taking up her lamp, she made her way down the long second-floor hallway, careful with every step to avoid making noise.
The carpet muffled her footsteps well enough on its own — it was the lamp she worried about, its aging hinges prone to the faintest creak with every movement.
As she approached his door, she noticed it was left slightly ajar, a glow much like her own spilling faintly from within.
Frowning again, she found it hard to believe her brother was still awake — or worse, that he'd fallen asleep without saying goodnight to her.
Pushing the door open, she found him deep in sleep, soft snores drifting toward her the closer she came.
"Why are you like this, brother?"
Turning the small metal valve on the wall, she watched the flame of his lamp dim slowly, extinguishing with a nearly silent sigh, leaving behind a thin curl of smoke that vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.
Sealing the lamp's small brass valve shut, a thread of cold, sulfurous gas lingered in the air, drifting slowly through the room.
Helena was ready to leave. But she paused, looking down at her brother with a tenderness that outweighed her earlier irritation, and leaning in, pressed a kiss to his forehead, murmuring softly:
"I love you, brother. Rest well."
And with that, she returned to her own room, where she, too, fell asleep with a wide smile on her face.