Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jesse gazes out the window of the carriage and tries not to sweat too noticeably. Outside, tall dark pine trees roll by, and the air is light and crisp. Inside, all Jesse can feel is ominous pressure.

It’s been like this for the past three hours.

Jesse sighs and turns to the oppressive force. “Have you been here before?”

Cédric stares at him flatly.

“Ah, sorry,” Jesse says. He tries not to squirm. “Of course you have. It seems very important.”

Cédric doesn’t say anything.

Jesse looks to Benjamin. Please help, he wants to say. I’ve tried to talk to him fourteen times and he hasn’t responded to any of it. But he can't say that; to do so would be impolite. Also, Cédric would probably growl or something, the bastard.

Benjamin meets Jesse’s gaze. I know. Please tolerate it, Prince Jesse, he projects through complicated yet subtle eyebrow movements. Also, maybe give up. This is a little bit painful to watch.

Jesse sighs again and stares back out the window. The awkward atmosphere is yet more stifling; and even worse, now Jesse’s a bit envious of Benjamin’s eyebrow skill.

The trees flash by. Jesse wishes he could bail—or, better yet, hadn’t been dragged into this in the first place. It’s just the royal equivalent of an errand run, he’s pretty sure, and his presence isn’t actually necessary. But the empress wanted Cédric and Christelle out of the house because they’d been destroying training fields at the unsustainable rate of two per week, and Jesse’s along as their personal ether supplier.

At least he has Demy to help keep him sane.

Demy, as if sensing Jesse’s thoughts, puts his paws up on the windowsill and tilts his head to lick Jesse’s nose. Jesse stifles a laugh.

“What's jopping, Jesse?” demands Christelle, lurching into view of the window.

Jesse yelps.

“Sorry, sorry.” Christelle doesn't seem very sorry. She beams at Jesse and pats her horse, which speeds up a bit at her behest. “How’re you liking the ride so far?”

“Jopping,” Jesse echoes.

“Jopping,” Christelle agrees. “It’s a new word I just came up with—a combination of jumping and popping.”

Jesse affixes his best How fascinating expression and beats back all thoughts of recent pop music with a stick. “How is, ah, Unicorn treating you?”

Christelle accepts the change in topic with delight. “He’s such a good horse,” she says. “Are you sure you don’t want to ride with me? This is so much more comfortable than being stuck in the carriage with a big pig.”

No thanks, Jesse thinks. “I’m not a very good rider.”

“Neither is she,” Cédric says.

“Ah, Cédric.” Jesse turns to Cédric, smiling. “Thank you for finally joining the conversation, your highness.”

Cédric doesn’t respond, and Jesse rolls his eyes in his heart.

Seriously, the silent treatment is worse than usual today, Jesse thinks. He’d managed to get Cédric to talk to him yesterday, on the first leg of their journey, but even that was like pulling teeth.

Still, this has to be better than riding Unicorn. Jesse’d like his ass to stay where it is, thank you very much.

Christelle laughs. “He’s just upset that I get to ride Unicorn and you don’t.”

“Why did you name it Unicorn?” Cédric asks her.

“He’s got hooves and is cute and has less than two horns,” Christelle says easily. “What, you think it’s a bad name?”

“Hm,” Cédric says, which means that he does think it’s a bad name. “You shouldn’t change the name of a horse once it’s grown.”

“Oh, but you would’ve let Jesse name the horse whatever he liked,” Christelle says. She’s leaning forward on her horse, towards Cédric—her words are halfway to purrs.

Wait, now she’s getting Jesse involved? And they’re fighting! “Cédric, Christelle,” Jesse scolds, before he can hold his tongue.

Cédric and Christelle both turn and look at him. “What do you think, Jesse?” Christelle asks.

Oh no. They want him to pick sides. Jesse didn't want that.

He turns to stare out the other window and forcibly thinks about food. Chicken… yes, chicken, steeped in a balsamic marinade, maybe with some lemongrass… and onions… crisp, carmelized onions, the type that crunch but are still warm in his mouth….

“I bet Jesse thinks it’s a good name,” Christelle says.

Hmm, but what to put with the onions…? Greens? Yes, greens.

Christelle jerks her head towards Jesse.

Please don’t talk to me, Jesse thinks, and then, but which greens…?

“If he has something to contribute, he’ll say it,” Cédric says.

“Do you have something to contribute, Jesse?” Christelle asks.

“No, no,” Jesse blurts. The carriage lurches beneath his feet for a moment, which Jesse thinks represents the lurching of the shambling corpse of his dignity. “I was just… saying your names.”

“Are you sure?” Christelle prompts. “You’ve gotta have a side you can take.”

“Names,” Jesse says desperately. “You both have C names. Very cute.”

“Cute?” Christelle and Cédric demand at the same time.

“Cute,” Jesse repeats. The carriage rocks again, this time with a noticeable crunching sound. Jesse threads his fingers in Demy’s fur. Jesse is wearing gloves because it’s a bit cold out, and they dull the texture of Demy’s hair on his fingers. “Don’t you think so too, Benjamin?”

Benjamin’s expression implies he does not think so. “Whatever you say, Prince Jesse,” Benjamin says.

“Ahahah,” Jesse says. He casts about for a different topic. “Why does the carriage keep rocking?”

“The carriage…?” Cédric repeats, and then his constant bitchface sharpens into a scowl as the carriage rocks again. “There’s something underfoot.”

“Something afoot,” Christelle corrects.

“Underfoot,” Cédric repeats. He peers out the carriage window. The position puts him halfway over Jesse and is surprisingly undignified, and more importantly it blocks Jesse’s view. Jesse stares hard at Benjamin in a desperate plea for sympathy. His plea goes unanswered. Instead Cédric grunts and leans away from the window. He announces, “Rocks.”

“Rocks?” Jesse repeats. Aren't there usually rocks on the road?

“Rocks,” Cédric says. “There’s a rockslide ahead.”

Jesse straightens in his seat. “Excuse me?”

“No excuses,” Cédric says. “We may have to turn around.”

Oh, that’s not great. That sounds like trouble, actually. This was just supposed to be an errand, Jesse bemoans internally. And besides, wasn’t this road supposed to be used fairly often…? Shouldn’t someone have taken care of the rocks before the prince arrived?

“Oh, huh, yeah,” Chirstelle says. She’s peering up ahead. “Rocks. Wow, there’s a lot of them.”

“If I may interrupt,” Benjamin says. Jesse casts him a smile, and Benjamin continues. “Perhaps you three should go ahead? The rockslide may block the carriage, but there are trails nearby that you could take to the manor. It should only be an hour’s ride, if that.”

Christelle shrugs, which looks a bit unnatural on a horse. “Sounds good to me,” she says. She smiles, and Jesse feels dread. “So, then, who’s Jesse riding with?”

Cédric shifts forward in his seat. His glare is killer. Jesse leans away from him automatically.

“Hold on, I just remembered!” Christelle’s smile gets wider. “Unicorn’s big enough to seat two, right? I remember you telling Jesse that.”

Cédric looks away.

“Guess you’re riding with me, Jesse!” Christelle chirps.

“How…?” Jesse starts to ask. He doesn’t get to finish his question, because Christelle leans over and yanks open the carriage door. At the same moment Cédric grabs the back of Jesse’s collar and hefts him out.

Jesse makes a horribly undignified squeak. “Got you!” Christelle says, hefting him up onto the horse in front of her. “Jeez, Cédric, did you have to push him like that?”

“No! No he did not!” Jesse wheezes. Demy scrambles to stay put on Jesse. Jesse clings one-handed to the mane of the horse as they jolt up and down.

Cédric does not answer. He’s hopping out of the carriage on the other side, and he vanishes as Christelle urges Unicorn on. Jesse spares a moment to be concerned, and then that concern is immediately lost as Unicorn picks up the pace.

“I’ve got you,” Christelle says again. She does something with the reins that hits Jesse in the face, and then her arm comes around his waist like a steel band. Demy screeches at his position being interrupted. “You can straighten up.”

Jesse does so, slowly. Unicorn’s pace is jolting, and its ears are a-swivel. The horse is wide enough that Jesse’s thighs immediately begin to ache. He’s sitting half on top of the saddle horn, which is incredibly uncomfortable. When he peers ahead, he can see the landslide—and below him, small jagged rocks litter the road.

“Please don’t throw me around like that without warning again,” Jesse requests. Demy is scrabbling up Jesse’s front and shoving himself around Jesse’s neck.

“Sorry,” says Cédric, appearing suddenly beside Unicorn. He’s atop a horse too now—a big black one that looks like it should be pulling a carriage instead of being ridden. Jesse gapes; partially at the horse, and partially at the uncharacteristic apology.

“Sorry,” Christelle agrees. “The manor’s up ahead, right?”

“Yes,” Cédric says. In a startling display of eloquence, he adds, “But the footpath is back that way. We should double back to pick it up.”

“We may go back to the village to regroup,” Benjamin calls out from the carriage. “We’ll meet you up there tomorrow afternoon. The manor staff should take good care of you, Your Highness, Prince Jesse, Christelle.”

You’re leaving me with them, Benjamin? Jesse wants to cry. He can’t, though—he’s being jolted around too severely.

Christelle must notice his plight. “Sorry, Prince Jesse,” she says. “We’re gonna have to go even faster, now.” And she clicks her tongue and wheels the horse around and taps her heels against Unicorn in a pattern that urges the horse into a lope, then a gallop. Jesse yips and holds on tight to the horse’s mane.

The ground flies away beneath them. Cédric’s horse pulls up besides them, and Christelle urges Unicorn faster. For a few minutes they’re flat-out racing; then they turn off onto the footpath, and the road grows steeper and narrower and rougher, and both Cédric and Christelle let their horses slow.

They ride through the darkening woods for a while. Jesse relaxes into the horse’s gait. Trees blur by. They pass more rocky terrain, and Unicorn stumbles a bit, but luckily doesn’t fall.

Eventually Unicorn breaks from a trot into a walk. Cédric slows his horse as well. “We’re almost here,” Cédric says.

“Wow.” Christelle is looking around the trail. “This place is gorgeous.”

Jesse heaves for breath. Why am I out of breath when the horse did all the work? he complains in his heart. He’s got cramps in his stomach and Demy’s fur in his mouth and he’s sweaty even though it’s cool out. Most importantly, he’s still halfway on top of the saddle horn—it hurts!

Christelle’s right, though. This place is pretty. The trees are tall and the ground is blanketed by pine needles. The sky is visible now through them, and it’s all silvery clouds. The world smells gently spiced.

“The manor house sits on a ravine,” Cédric says. He’s not facing either of them when he speaks. He cuts a striking figure on the big black horse. Even on horseback he’s taller than Jesse.

Christelle hums. “It’s a sentry point, right?” she asks. “So they can watch out for demonic beasts?”

Jesse jolts away from his musings. “Yes,” he says. “This is the manor of the Margrave de Ravin, which is part of the vast Duchy of Milieu. The Margrave de Ravin was appointed to destroy any demonic beasts that make it across the ravine. Around and beyond the ravine is all karst—the land is unstable and pitied with dungeons, so few people live there until you get to the Marquisate of Duhem.”

“Wow,” Christelle says. “You did a lot of studying for this!”

“Yes,” Jesse says, who mostly studied this by accident. After Her Imperial Majesty tried to trick him as to the identity of the Duke of Yvelines, Jesse had decided to study more on the Riester Empire. Learning geography was all incidental—he’d just been transcribing a book on the history of the empire, and the knowledge had stuck.

“What do you mean karst?” Christelle asks. She seems genuinely interested, though Jesse can’t see her face. “Is that, like, some magic thing?”

“No,” Jesse tells her. “It’s a word for the landscape created by the dissolution of highly soluble carbonate rocks. So limestone, and the like. It’s generally unstable terrain.”

“Limestone,” Christelle repeats. “Was there once an ocean here?”

“I guess there must’ve—” Jesse starts to say, but Cédric cuts him off.

“We’re here,” Cédric says. The horses break through the tree line, and the sky opens up. Against it, silhouetted dark, is the manor.

Christelle urges Unicorn onwards through the high gates around the manor. Jesse sits up and looks around as they pass through.

That this mansion is so set apart from the village it serves is unusual, Jesse recalls. But that’s mostly because the manor predates the Duchy. The manor is supposed to be fairly self-sustaining.

But… as they ride onwards, the manor does not seem self-sustaining. Instead it seems to be abandoned.

The grounds are messy with lumpy grass and torn-up pavers. They pass outhouses and servant’s quarters and gardens that look empty. No one joins them as they walk.

“Does it normally look like this?” Christelle asks Cédric.

“No,” Cédric says.

“Hm.” Christelle’s arm tightens around Jesse’s waist. “It looks like there’s been a really weird attack.”

“I don’t sense any demonic beasts,” Cédric says.

“Yeah.” Christelle huffs a laugh. “I don’t think those claw marks were made by people, though.”

Jesse looks where she’s pointing. Indeed, on a dirt lot is a mess of small scratch marks. Demy tries to burrow into his shoulders.

“Well, looks like it’s long gone,” Christelle decides as they pull up to the stables. “I guess we’ll have this place to ourselves!”

Cédric slides off his horse and gives Christelle a judgemental expression. For once Jesse agrees with the sentiment—this situation is just too ominous! But Jesse keeps his face as neutral as possible.

“We’ll be fine,” Christelle says to him. “Neither I nor Cédric sense any demonic beasts, and if it’s human attackers, we can easily take care of them.” She slides off the horse and holds out her hands for Jesse.

Jesse stares down at her from atop Unicorn. Sure, that was nice of her to say, but she’s setting off too many flags! “Ah,” he says, instead of Please stop talking. “Thanks.”

Christelle hefts Jesse off of Unicorn, and Demy swarms down Jesse’s legs to trot around on the ground. Jesse’s body aches. He very much does not want to go horse-riding again.

“Looks like they left some halters and hay in here,” Christelle says, peering into the stables. “And… some more horses, huh. Well, we can get our horses set up here while we look around.”

Jesse squints at the dark stables. He can indeed see some other horses inside—interesting. “Is that really all we need to do?”

“No,” Cédric says. “We have to untack and curry them.” He turns to look at Jesse. “Stay here. We’ll handle it.”

Jesse doesn’t know anything about horses, but… “I can help, if you’d like.”

“No. Stay here,” Cédric repeats.

It feels a bit weird to just stand there while Cédric and Christelle work, but maybe it can be a bonding moment for the two of them? Jesse looks to Christelle. She’s staring at Unicorn with trepidation. When she sees Jesse looking, she flashes him a grin and thumbs-up.

Jesse decides to take that as a good sign. He turns away from Cédric and Christelle to look around the grounds. As he gazes over lumpy grass and spotty dirt, his eyes catch on a bright red lump. Demy?

“Wait, Demy, your paws will get dirty!” Jesse exclaims. He swoops down to scoop Demi up and examine his paws. Demy’s paws are super muddy. “What were you digging at…?”

Demy huffs and tries to wriggle out of Jesse’s arms. Jesse cranes his head to examine the ground. Demy had been digging at a mound of dirt. It looks like one of the many churned-up spots in the ground around them.

Jesse strokes Demy’s head, then peels off his gloves to brush the dirt from Demy’s paws. Demy heaves a sigh and wriggles around to flop his head down on Jesse’s shoulder. He’s heavy.

The manor grounds are still and quiet. Distantly a bird is singing the same song over and over again.

Jesse and Demy stay like that until Cédric and Christelle are done with the horses. Both emerge covered in dirt. Jesse looks down at Demy’s paws, which he painstakingly cleaned of mud, and his own hands, which are also covered in dirt. He slides back on his gloves and looks pristine. For a moment he considers commenting on Cédric and Christelle’s appearances; but he’s not that much of a hypocrite.

“Whew!” Christelle says. “Okay, now we can take a look around!”

By now Jesse has resigned himself to whatever may come. “Shall we head to the manor house first?”

“Yeah,” Christelle says. “It looks like we’re right by some sort of servants’ entrance. Normally I’d say we should go through the main entrance, but since no-one’s here….” Christelle trails off leadingly.

Jesse’s curious as well. “The main entrance is a bit of a walk from the stables,” he agrees.

“Exactly!” Christelle sets off for the servants’ entrance. Cédric follows her without complaint, and Jesse clutches Demy closer to his chest while falling into step behind them. Together, they enter the looming manor house.

Inside the house is just as abandoned as outside of the house. The ceilings are tall and spacious; the carpet is long and dark; and the windows are pointed and thin. The atmosphere is ominous, at best!

“Where should we look first?” Christelle asks. She’s still smiling, but… her hand’s on her whip, now. She looks much more alert.

Jesse worries at the soft fur behind Demy’s ears. He appreciates Christelle’s new caution, definitely. But, as he looks around the hallways, he thinks the situation isn’t as bad as he thought? Despite the ominous atmosphere, it isn’t all that scary! There aren’t any random objects lying around the halls, or bloodstains, or bodies. In fact, it doesn’t look messy at all. There’s still a mirror and a vase full of flowers in this hallway. If this was a ransacking or an attack, it was a very odd one. And the flowers are only partially wilted.

By the vase of flowers is a doorway. “Maybe we can start there?” Jesse suggests.

“Works for me,” Christelle says. She starts off towards the doorway and pokes her head in. Cédric is right behind her. “Oh,” she says. “It’s a kitchen.”

Cédric pushes past Christelle inside the kitchen as Jesse catches up with them. “Jeez,” Christelle mutters, but she turns and grins at Jesse. “Great luck, right?”

Jesse pokes his head through the doorway. It really is a kitchen! “Woah,” he says. “I wonder if there’s any food left!”

Cédric opens a cabinet. “A bit,” he says. “Not a lot.”

Jesse peers around the room as he creeps over to Cédric. The kitchen implements are all put away, yet there’s wood in the fireplace and herbs hanging from the shelf. Jesse tears off a leaf and tastes it. Parsley? It’s good, but a little limp.

“What's that?” Christelle asks.

Jesse jumps in place and stifles a surprised eep! Demy, cradled against him, grumbles. “It’s parsley,” Jesse explains. “I think I can make us a meal later, if there’s anything left in the cellar.”

“I guess we will be stuck here for a while,” Christelle agrees. “Benjamin said that they’d meet us here tomorrow afternoon, right? And it’s still mid-day…”

Aw, man. It’s not too bad in here, but it's definitely a bit spooky. Jesse’s not looking forward to spending the night. He shivers and holds Demy tighter.

Something snaps.

Jesse looks up. Oh! It’s Cédric. He’s found the fireplace, and he’s… starting a fire? Jesse’s not sure why Cédric’s doing that, but it'll be helpful for cooking later.

“Oh,” Christelle says. “I’m gonna go find blankets.”

“Blankets?” Jesse echoes. But it’s too late. Christelle has trotted off to the other side of the room and is rummaging around in various cupboards. Oh, well. Jesse won’t stop her.

Cédric seems absorbed in his fire-making. Jesse decides to wander a bit. He's pretty sure the pantry is behind that door, so he goes to check it out.

The pantry is indeed behind the short wooden door that Jesse pulls open. It’s not entirely empty but it’s not full either. There’s a few loaves of bread inside, and a couple containers that are covered with cloth. There’s nothing fresh. Jesse retreats. He checks out a new door—this one leads into a short hallway, and on the other side of it is a larder with meat and cheese. Good.

When Jesse emerges from the larder, Christelle and Cédric have stopped poking around. “No blankets,” Christelle reports. She seems saddened by this. Cédric throws her a look over his shoulder that makes her bristle.

Jesse side-eyes Cédric. “That’s fine,” he says. “Should we explore somewhere else, then?”

Christelle stops scowling at Cédric. “Sure!” she chirps. “Let’s go back down the hallway!”

And so together they head back out into the hallway. Christelle takes the lead, and Cédric drops back to be behind Jesse. Jesse doesn’t really like walking in a line like this, but he doesn’t argue against it; they’re doing this to protect him, after all. Demy is getting heavy, so Jesse moves Demy to lounge on his shoulders.

“Big rooms,” Christelle comments, peering inside one of them—a dining room.

Jesse agrees. He peeks inside another. The one he looks into is full of covered objects. They’re all flat squares and circles—paintings? It’s a little weird. Jesse doesn’t enter the room.

“Oh, look,” Christelle continues. She doesn’t seem bothered that no one responded to her comment. “This looks like this is the main entrance.” She points to some very fancy-looking doors. “Then, this should be something cool.”

There’s a dense carpet that runs from the main doors to the fancy carved wooden doors. Christelle throws open the doors with aplomb, then grins. Jesse drifts over to check it out.

Oh, woah! It’s a library! A big library, wow! Jesse steps through the door without thinking much of it, and Christelle laughs. “You just lit up!” she says.

Jesse did? He laughs awkwardly. “It’s nice to see a big library like this,” he says.

“You have access to the palace libraries,” Cédric points out.

Jesse does, but… “I don’t have access to everything in there,” he admits. “There’s some books I’d like to read, but can’t.”

“Like what?” Cédric asks.

… Mostly they’re books about things Jesse should already know about! That’s too embarrassing, so Jesse just clears his throat. “Oh, look,” he says. “I think I see something interesting over there.”

Cédric, when Jesse glances sidelong at him, looks a bit annoyed. Jesse clears his throat again and then moves away at a normal and unhurried pace.

“Jeeze,” Christelle says to Cédric. “You scared him off!”

Cédric says something a bit too low for Jesse to hear. Christelle laughs. It’s good they’re getting along, Jesse thinks, a bit desperately. It really is good they’re getting along, even if they’re bonding over how silly he is.

Anyway, Jesse really does want to read some books. He starts to wander through the library, which is just as big as it appeared at first glance. It must be at least three storeys high—at the top, wooden beams cut across the ceiling, and windows let in light.

The room has an open, mezzanine design. The shelves go straight up through the second floor. There’s a staircase to the second level on the far end of the room; interestingly, the area beneath the second floor there is walled off. There must be some sort of room back there, but Jesse can’t see a door to access it. Perhaps it’s an outdoor patio?

Jesse peers down an aisle, then stops to listen for a moment. He can hear Cédric and Christelle—mostly Christelle—chattering behind him, but other than that the library is silent. It, like the rest of the manor so far, must be devoid of people.

The books all look to be in good condition, though. At least, their spines look good. Jesse pulls a book out at random, and is hit with the smell of old books. He cracks it open. It’s a trade record for the manor; going by the dates, it’s a century old. Crazy! Jesse puts it back very carefully.

There really are a lot of books here. Most importantly, there are books about the Venetiaan Holy Kingdom! Jesse rubs his hands together, then buckles in to get reading.

Jesse has a stack of three books he’s working through when Cédric comes up to him.

“It’s getting late,” Cédric says.

Jesse knows this. The natural light from the windows is no longer strong enough to easily read by, and Jesse has to squint to understand a single word. Still, he doesn’t want to stop reading—who knows when he’ll be able to find books on the Holy Empire again.

“You should probably stop reading,” Cédric says.

Jesse squints harder at the book. Maybe if he squints hard enough, Cédric will go away.

“You can bring the book with you,” Cédric says. “I’ll get you a lantern.”

Jesse stops squinting at the book and instead squints at Cédric. “Would you really?”

Cédric lights himself on fire.

Jesse yelps and grabs for the books. “Not in the library!”

Cédric extinguishes. “I’ll go get a lantern,” he says, and he leaves.

Jesse is left blinking spots out of his eyes. Demy, on his shoulders, yawns a whining yawn. “Right?” Jesse mutters under his breath.

That was kind of nice of Cédric, though. Logically he shouldn’t be letting Jesse read these books at all—if Jesse wasn’t allowed to read them at the royal library, he shouldn’t be allowed to read them here either. But Cédric isn’t stopping Jesse. Instead, he’s helping. That’s… really nice of Cédric, actually.

Jesse doesn’t like thinking about Cédric like that. Luckily, Christelle is coming up, so he can stop thinking at all! He smiles at her as she approaches.

“Cédric’s grabbing a lantern for you?” Christelle asks.

“Yes,” Jesse says. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“Not really,” Christelle says. “I did a little bit of exploring and found some places that may be useful, though.” She stares off into the distance. “It’ll be like some of the stories I’ve read….” She taps her finger on her chin, and stops talking.

Jesse is curious, but he won’t press if Christelle doesn’t want to say. And when he stares at her hopefully for a minute she doesn’t elaborate. “Alright,” Jesse says, defeated. Christelle continues to look reflectively at nothing in particular. Jesse wonders if he should say something else, but he can’t really think of anything.

Then Cédric arrives, saving Jesse from awkwardness. Eh, wait, did Jesse really just think that? Cédric is taking away the awkwardness? Something must be wrong in the world.

Still, Jesse accepts the lantern and the topic change gladly. “So what should we do now?” he asks, trying to gather up the books and hold the lantern and keep Demy balanced at the same time. He must do it relatively smoothly, because neither Cédric nor Christelle offer to help. Jesse is proud of himself.

“Oh,” Christelle says, shaking off her fugue. “Let’s go make dinner!”

Cédric nods. “We need to feed ourselves,” he says. He looks to Christelle. “Do you know how to cook?”

“Uh,” Christelle says. “Kind of?”

Jesse huffs a laugh. “I can cook a bit,” he says. “Let’s go back to the kitchen.”

“Sounds good!” Christelle chirps, and together they head out of the library.

As they leave Jesse chances a glance backwards. Without the light from the windows or the light from the lantern, the library is all dark and ominous. Jesse turns around and walks quickly to catch up with Cédric and Christelle.

“So, Jesse, where’d you learn to cook?” Christelle asks as they enter the kitchen.

“Around,” Jesse says vaguely. He’s not sure where a prince would learn to cook…! He puts down his books on a table and tries to look busy. “Do you see any pots?”

Christelle says, “Oh, lemme check,” and is sufficiently distracted, thank goodness. Cédric has made himself busy lighting more lanterns so they can see inside of the kitchen.

Jesse takes a deep breath in and out to relax a bit. “Alright, Demy,” he says. “Do you want to be my helper?”

Demy snores.

“Great,” says Jesse. “Let’s get cooking.”

Suitably psyched, Jesse slides off his gloves, rinses his hands, and heads back towards the cellar. He collects the mushrooms, and checks out the meat. Sausages! Jesse can work with that.

Out of the cellar, Jesse dumps the mushrooms and sausages on his chosen worktables. Christelle has found cabinets full of pots and pans and she seems to be pulling out and inspecting each one individually. Jesse decides to leave her to it.

First he goes for the pantry. Inside are those loaves of bread, a container that may be holding pasta, and finally flour and sugar and leavening and various other powders that Jesse would need to taste to identify.

Out of curiosity he pulls open the free-standing cabinet besides the pantry. To his surprise, it’s cold inside. Jesse stares at it for a few moments, baffled, then tries to open the compartment on top of the cabinet. Oh—ice! That’s interesting. In a cold place like this, Jesse guesses that ice is easy to come by.

There’s a basket of eggs and a few jugs of milk inside of the ice… cabinet? Icebox? Jesse’s not quite sure what this thing is called. Still, he’s taking the milk.

With the milk, sausages, and mushrooms on his table, an idea starts to come to mind. Jesse doubles back to the pantry and successfully locates some pasta, then grabs cheese from the larder as well. Then he prowls around the kitchen for herbs and spices. The oregano joins his table, as does some garlic and salt.

Cédric is leaning against the wall and watching; Jesse bravely ignores him.

“Which pots do you want?” Christelle asks.

Jesse looks over. The pots and pans seem to have multiplied greatly—they lie around her, like the shrapnel of an explosion. “Ah,” Jesse says, temporarily intimidated into speechlessness. “The, ah, the pan to your left will work—and that deep pot over there.”

Christelle grabs the requested pots and pans, dumps them on the table, and then gets to work putting all the pots and pans back. Jesse decides to leave her to it and pretend he didn’t see.

Alright! Pasta, milk, sausages, mushrooms, and cheese. And… yes, this container has butter. Wonderful! Jesse’s not sure what type of sausage this is, but the mushrooms are chanterelles, he thinks. How exciting! Jesse used to watch people cook with chanterelles on all of those fancy English TV shows, and the final meals looked so good. Of course, mushrooms can be dangerous to cook with, but… surely if these mushrooms were in the pantry, they’re fine to eat. Unless, of course, these mushrooms are what caused everyone to leave here….

They really seem like chanterelles, though. Jesse takes them off the metaphorical chopping block, puts them on the literal chopping block, and gets to work. The cheese and sausage get prepared too—grated and chopped finely, respectively.

Jesse takes the big pot and fills it with water from a tap in the corner. He’s not sure whether the water is potable, but it looks clear and he’ll be boiling it, so it should be fine. He scrounges up the necessary utensils from a new cabinet. Then he turns to the stove.

Cédric got the stove up and running while he was fiddling with the lanterns. There are logs next to it, presumably to be fed into the stove when the fire gets low. Despite how well-prepared it looks, it is a hulking beast of a thing. It has all these strange plates and panels on it, and inside the fire is lashing and jumping.

For a long moment Jesse just stares at the stove, stymied. The cooking shows never talked about this, and he certainly never cooked with one of these when he made food for Jung Euseo!

But it’s a stove like anything else. Jesse spends a few minutes searching for potholders, and then hauls the pot of water up onto the stove.

Christelle drifts over to watch too. The pasta pot has already started to boil, but only on one side. Jesse breaks out into a nervous sweat.

After a bit of nudging the big pot around on the top of the stove, he gets it to boil evenly. He cooks the pasta and then he takes it off the heat and puts it on the floor. It’s a tile floor, so it’ll be fine, right? Jesse hopes so.

Then it’s on to sautéing the mushrooms and sausages. Jesse does that in stages. The process is high-stress—by the time Jesse’s got the sausages browned, the stove has lost heat, so he opens the oven box. Woah, hot!

Cédric, come deal with this! This is your mess!

Jesse doesn’t even have to say anything, thank goodness. Cédric magically appears and throws a log into the fire. Which… actually, that log may’ve been too big? But Jesse can’t ask Cédric to take it out, so he shuts the oven box and moves the saucepan away from the hotspot.

Luckily after that everything is relatively smooth sailing. Jesse sniffs the milk, then dumps some into the pan. The oregano and garlic get added, and then Jesse puts back in the mushrooms and sausage to let the flavors blend for a moment. Finally he thinks it’s ready, so he puts the pasta in, tosses it a few times, throws some of the cheese over it all, and takes the pan off the heat—AKA, puts it on the floor.

“Dinner is served,” Jesse announces, coolly.

“Wow, Jesse, you’re drenched in sweat,” Christelle says. “I think that’s the most stressed I’ve seen you, like, ever.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jesse lies boldly. “I love cooking, and cooking loves me.”

Christelle takes another look at his face. “Ahaha,” she says. “Sorry. Yup. That’s the face of a man who loves cooking right there. Didn’t mean to offend. I’m sure it tastes great.”

It better taste great. Jesse and the wood cookstove do not get along, he decides.

Cédric has decided to be helpful, and is holding out bowls with forks and spoons. Jesse sits down on the floor to ladle out portions, and then digs in.

It’s… alright.

The cheese tastes like parmesan, and it’s a good cheese so it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But the sauce is a bit too thin—Jesse needed a heavy cream, not milk. He should’ve thrown some flour in. The mushrooms definitely are chanterelles, and they taste good but Jesse lost a lot of their flavor somewhere in the process. Plus it turns out the sausage was a sweeter one, and that goes kind of weirdly with the chanterelle sweetness. The pasta ended up a little overdone, too.

Disappointed, Jesse eats his portion slowly.

“Woah,” Christelle says, her face stuffed full. “This is actually really good!”

“Thanks,” Jesse says, morose. She’s just saying that to make him feel better. But Cédric is nodding too, which seems a little out of character. Maybe it isn’t that bad? Jesse tastes it again: no, it’s still mediocre.

“Even Demy thinks it looks good,” Christelle points out,

Jesse looks to Demy. Demy is eating his portion with his typical focus. Jesse isn’t convinced it means anything.

“Where did you learn to cook, anyway?” Christelle asks.

Jesse blinks and looks away from Demy. Christelle’s gaze on him is focused. “Ah,” Jesse says, gazing back down to his meal. “I… learned to cook for my younger sister.” It’s true.

“Huh,” Christelle says. “I wouldn’t think a prince would need to cook for anyone.”

“I didn’t need to,” Jesse tells her. It’s not quite true. “But I liked to.” That is true.

Christelle smiles at him. “That’s sweet.” She nudges Cédric in the side. “Right?”

Cédric nods, but doesn’t comment. His gaze to Jesse is too sharp. Jesse moves his pasta around in his bowl.

The rest of the meal passes in relative silence. Christelle is again the person who breaks it: “Whew,” she says. “That was good!” She makes a show of stretching and standing up. “I guess we should get cleaned up, and then head to bed.”

Jesse blinks. Head to bed…? Oh, right. Jesse had gotten so wrapped up in cooking that he’d almost forgotten why he had to cook dinner.

With mediocre food in his belly, Jesse finds the idea of staying the night here isn’t pleasant but isn’t unbearable. Jesse has no idea where they would sleep, though. There has to be beds around here somewhere, but he doesn’t exactly want to go wandering this manor house in the dark.

Cédric is already standing, though, so Jesse shelves those thoughts for now. He pulls Demy’s bowl over, and then picks himself up off the floor gingerly. After all that riding, his thighs ache when he flexes them. “We can wash the dishes in the sink,” he suggests.

“Looks like they’ve got some soap,” Christelle says, hefting a bar of soap. She gives it a side-eye. “I’m, uh, not sure how we’re supposed to clean dishes with this, though…”

Jesse hobbles over to the metal sink. He peers around it for a moment. “We can use these,” he says, pulling two basins out from underneath it. “Here, I think if we scrub some bar soap off into one of these, we can make do.”

Cédric looms overhead as Jesse gets started washing the dishes. The process is a bit awkward, mostly because Jesse’s only ever washed dishes like this once or twice.

Mostly, though, Jesse is glad that no-one here is able to call him out for his awkwardness! Christelle isn’t from this universe, so of course she doesn’t know what the normal way of washing dishes is. And Cédric is a prince, so he doesn’t know either! Jesse can get away with a little bit of fumbling.

Really, Jesse shouldn’t know how to do the dishes either, since he’s a prince. Is he acting unexpectedly competent right now, then…? With one hand plunged into soapy water and the remains of his mediocre pasta dish floating on the water around it, Jesse doesn’t feel very competent.

Jesse side-eyes Christelle and Cédric. Cédric is studiously cleaning a bowl with a rag. Christelle is staring at a cleaned pot with a look of utter confusion. No one looks very competent right now. Jesse feels a bit better.

After all the dishes are cleaned and returned to their proper places, Jesse turns to Christelle. “Do you have an idea where we could sleep?” he asks her.

“I do!” Christelle chirps. “That’s what I found in my tiny bit of exploring, actually. Turns out they’ve got some bedrooms up the stairs.”

She found stairs and the second floor? That sounds like more than a tiny bit of exploring! But, it’ll be nice to sleep in a bed. Jesse gathers up the books he’d brought out from the library, then pauses. “Are the bedrooms…” He wrestles with the phrasing for a moment. “Have they been used recently?”

Christelle, luckily, must see that Jesse isn’t asking out of snobbishness; her face goes pensive. “Some of them,” she says. “But the one I thought we’d use looked like a guest room.”

“Alright,” Jesse accepts. “Maybe we’ll check out the other rooms in the morning.” If the rooms look like they’ve been used recently, maybe there are some hints as to what happened here.

Christelle grins. “Sounds like a plan! You ready to go, Cédric?” As always, she manages to pronounce his name like an insult.

“Of course,” says Cédric. “Are you?”

“Of course,” Christelle echoes. She stares at him with the same grin. For a moment Jesse thinks they’re going to get into another argument—er, lover’s spat—but then Christelle turns on heel and trots off with an Onwards ho!

Jesse subtly exhales in relief. With Demy on his shoulders and the books in his arms, he follows Christelle off into the manor.

Christelle leads Jesse and Cédric down the hall, to the left this time. Turns out there’s a stairwell right next to the kitchen. Jesse does some mental math; the stairs must pass over top of the hallway to the larder.

The stairwell itself a dark and mildly foreboding place; Jesse is glad Cédric is still carrying a lantern. When they emerge on the second level, Christelle leads them further down the hall for a while. She really did explore a lot. When they reach the part where the hallway turns, she beelines for a door and throws it open. “Here we are!” she announces.

“Ah,” says Jesse, peering in. “There’s… only one bed?”

“Haha,” Christelle says. “Yeah. I figured we’d do a rotating watch, so only two people have to share the bed at a time. Or we could have someone sleep on the chaise-lounge.”

Jesse considers the room, and the bed. The room is smaller than the ones he’s grown used to but infinitely bigger than anything he knew before he came to this novel. It has dark windows on the far side, a bed on the left wall, and a chaise-lounge on the right by a fireplace.

Jesse approaches the bed. It’s queen-sized, so two people could fit into it easily. And… actually, isn’t this a trope somewhere? This could be the perfect chance to match-make!

“Good idea,” he says belatedly to Christelle. “I’ll take first watch.”

“No, you should sleep first,” Cédric insists. He’s followed Jesse into the room and is eyeing the bed like it’s going to bite.

“I didn’t do much work today,” Jesse deflects. “You two both had to steer the horses all the way up here. Taking first watch is the least I could do.”

“You’re sleeping first,” Cédric repeats.

“I agree with Cédric, actually,” Christelle says. “How about I take first watch, Cédric takes the middle watch, and you take the last one?”

Cédric’s expression is, as always, unreadable. “Fine,” he says. He turns to look at Jesse pointedly.

Under the combined might of Cédric and Christelle’s pressure, Jesse has no choice to concede. “Alright! Alright,” he says. “I guess I’ll get ready for bed, then.”

“Good,” says Cédric.

With that settled, Jesse skulks off to find a bathroom. Luckily there’s one right off of the bedroom. Inside the bathroom are various robes. Changing into one feels odd, since Jesse doesn’t technically have permission to be here—it strangely feels more taboo than cooking dinner did. But Jesse has a bit of experience making himself comfortable in places he’s not supposed to be living in. He splashes water on his face, freshens up, and gets changed.

Jesse’d left his books and Demi on the bed. When he gets back, Demy is already snoozing on the pillow. Cédric is standing by the bed and Christelle has dragged a chair over to the window.

“Huh, they have robes here?” Christelle asks.

Jesse shrugs. He’d made the choice to change into one, but confronting it is awkward! “I didn’t want to dirty the bed with my dusty clothes,” he says.

“We’ve already cooked our own meal and borrowed books,” Cédric says. “We may as well make ourselves at home.”

Actually… isn’t Jesse the one who cooked the meal, and borrowed the books? The realization is a bit embarrassing. As always, Jesse is the interloper.

Jesse laughs stiltedly, for lack of a better thing to say, and slides under the covers. “Goodnight,” he says.

“Goodnight,” Christelle says.

“Goodnight,” Cédric says as well. He picks up the lantern and walks off, towards the bathroom.

Jesse puts his back to the center of the bed. He stares at the wall. How is he supposed to fall asleep like this? Cédric’s going to be sleeping right next to him!

Nerves keep Jesse awake as Cédric emerges from the bathroom. Though Jesse doesn’t look, he can hear as Cédric lifts the sheets; and he can feel the bed dip under Cédric’s weight. Cédric exhales a deep breath, and settles.

Wow! Now Jesse’s sleeping next to Cédric! Er… lying awake next to Cédric, in bed! This is a little bit scary? Jesse really isn’t sure how to feel about this. Also, Demy stole his pillow, so now Jesse doesn’t have a pillow. Really, how could Jesse sleep like this? Who came up with this plot?

But as Jesse stares at the wall his eyelids begin to feel heavier. And Cédric’s deep breaths grow slower, and softer, and Jesse feels his own breaths doing the same.

Slowly, somehow, Jesse is lulled off to sleep.

Cédric wakes Jesse up early in the morning with a gentle hand on his arm. Jesse goes uuuugh and noooo and five more minutes. Cédric goes, “Wake up.” Cédric wins.

Jesse crawls out of his warm blankets and peers around. Christelle is passed out and starfished in the bed next to him. Cédric is standing above him. He looks tired. The fireplace has a fire burning low inside of it.

“Anything happen?” Jesse whispers to him.

“No,” Cédric says. “It’s your turn.”

Jesse nods. He turns to the pillow and pulls Demy off of it. If Jesse’s going to be awake, Demy’s gonna have to be awake too! That’s what he gets for stealing Jesse’s pillow. “Sleep well,” Jesse says to Cédric, and he hobbles over to sit in the chair by the window.

Ow, ow, ow. If Jesse thought that sleep would make his thighs recover from all that horse riding, he was wrong. Jesse really doesn’t want to have to ride a horse again. With a sigh he situates himself in the chair.

Demy grumbles and curls up in Jesse’s lap. Jesse strokes his ears. Fine! Demy can keep sleeping. He’s just too cute.

Jesse stares out the window. It’s still dark outside. This window must be facing west, as a sliver of moon is slowly setting.

In front of the sky there are trees, and in front of the trees is the main courtyard. Even with the moon, the sky is more full of stars than anything Jesse has seen before. They look sort of like dust in the air. Jesse tries to find it beautiful and succeeds.

It is very still and quiet here.

Cédric and Christelle seem to be sleeping fitfully.

Jesse is wondering whether he should splash cold water on his face to stay awake when suddenly Demy wakes up. Demy’s ears twitch and his head jolts and with a scramble of dull claws he’s on his feet.

“Demy? What is it?” Jesse asks in a whisper. Demy turns his head back and forth, then presses his paws up on the window. “…What do you see?”

Demy makes an odd sound, sort of a cross between an pig’s oink and a duck’s quack. Then he does it again, and again. “Um,” says Jesse.

Then Jesse yelps. “Woah! What’s that?” Outside the window, in the courtyard down below, there is a large dark shape. It looks like some sort of animal. It’s thrashing around the courtyard like it’s fighting with itself.

Demy’s huff-snort-quacks are increasing in volume. “Okay!” Jesse says to himself. “Time to get Christelle and Cédric up!” He slips out from under Demy and scrambles over to the bed.

Waking Cédric and Christelle gives Jesse temporary pause. Sure, they don’t look like they’re sleeping peacefully—in fact both of them are scowling surprisingly identical scowls—but Jesse doesn’t want to just shake them awake! But, there’s no other way he can think of to wake them, so Jesse tentatively gets to work.

…Alright, maybe tentatively is the wrong word for it. Enthusiastically might be the better one. Jesse has to take his wins where he can get them, okay? And Cédric and Christelle look pretty undignified when he shakes them awake.

Once they’re both up. Jesse steps away from the bed and clears his throat. “Something’s disturbing Demy,” he reports.

“Uh,” says Christelle. “Okay?”

Jesse rephrases. “There’s a big animal in the front yard and Demy is alarmed.”

Cédric had been staring vacantly at the blankets on the bed, but now something clicks. “This could be important,” he says.

Christelle blinks a few times, then snaps into wakefulness as well. “You’re right,” she says. “Alright, let’s go.”

Then she and Cédric are both vaulting out of beds and rushing out the door. Jesse is left blinking after them. Wait, are they both wearing the same clothes they’d been wearing? Neither of them got changed? Jesse’s the only one in the night robe? Darn it!

Demy makes another one of his weird noises and Jesse focuses up. “C’mon, Demy!” he says, and Demy tears himself away from the window. With Demy by his side Jesse rushes out of the room, down the stairs, and out the main entrance.

When Jesse bursts out the main entrance he’s greeted with a shock of cool air. The smudge of light on the horizon has gotten bigger but the sun is still an hour or two away. The animal is a dark and moving blur in the courtyard.

Christelle is standing by the door with her sword drawn. Jesse’s not sure where she picked it up—did she sleep with it on, too?! “I think it’s a wolverine,” Christelle says.

“A wolverine?” Jesse repeats. He scoops Demy up and clutches him close to his chest. Honestly, Jesse can’t see the creature well enough to tell what it is, and he’s not quite sure what a wolverine is besides; but he’ll take Christelle’s word on it.

“It looks like a divine beast to me,” Cédric says. “It’s acting oddly.”

It is, isn’t it. It’s frothing about on the ground. Its front paws are moving enough to make Jesse’s eyes hurt when he tries to focus on them. It seems to be digging.

“Let’s keep our distance,” Jesse decides uneasily.

The creature digs and digs and digs. Never once does it stop or lift its head toward Jesse, Christelle, Cédric, or Demy. The sky begins to lighten more. Finally, though, it stops. It steps away from the hole and its head ducks down. Its mouth gapes open in a wet flash. Its teeth crunch.

Cédric and Christelle crumple soundlessly to the ground.

That’s not good! Jesse’s holy domain snaps out of him in a wash of golden light. The creature rears back, and then bolts. It’s bigger than Jesse thought it was. It disappears into the trees before Jesse can move after it.

“Cédric?” Jesse prompts. “Christelle?” Demy’s still in his arms, so he can’t check their pulses—and Demy’s out too, oh goodness. Jesse lays Demy carefully on the ground, and gets to work checking everyone’s vitals.

…Okay, no one seems horribly injured. Cédric, Christelle, and Demy all have pulses and breath and when Jesse peels open their eyes their pupils contract. But none of them respond to prompting. They seem to be asleep.

Jesse gently tries to wake them up. Then he tries to wake them up less gently.

When Cédric’s face is looking a little red from the slapping, Jesse gives up. His holy domain is still active. Jesse’s pretty sure nothing will sneak up on him with it out and blazing. Jesse can walk a few meters away from Cédric, Christelle, and Demy.

Jesse minces over to where the wolverine had been digging. He kneels down to investigate the dirt. There, where the wolverine had snapped its teeth—there are strange shards of gold-backed glass, fallen into the hole it’d been digging. Cautiously Jesse picks one up. He’s holding it gingerly, but as he lifts it, it crumbles into dust between his fingers. Huh. That’s probably not good.

Well! There’s nothing Jesse can do about it now.

“Okay,” Jesse says to himself. “Time to get everyone back inside.”

Cédric lets out a snore.

Jesse allows himself one long and meaningful, “Uuuuuuugh.” Then he gets to work.

Heaving Cédric and Christelle onto his back is no easy task, but Jesse’s done it before so he can do it again. It takes him a while, though. By the time Jesse has both of them on his back, Demy is awake! This is a great relief. Jesse is hopeful that Cédric and Christelle will wake up, too; unfortunately, they do not.

“Maybe,” Jesse puffs, “you… can… help… me… carry… them?”

Demy stares blankly at Jesse. Jesse decides to save his breath.

Jesse does not enjoy carrying Cédric and Christelle up the stairwell. He does enjoy heaving them into a heap on the bed. But then he feels bad leaving them like this, since it wasn’t their fault they passed out; and so with shaking limbs he reorganizes them so they look more comfortable.

Then, while he’s at it, Jesse puts on his dusty clothes from yesterday, too. They feel a bit nasty; there’s a grain of dirt caught in one of the fingertips of his gloves. For a moment Jesse tries to scrape it out, but it’s taking too much effort so he gives up.

“Whew!” Jesse collapses back into the chair by the window. He attempts to lift Demy up onto his lap, but his arms are too tired to do it easily. Demy gets bored of waiting and jumps up by himself. Grateful, Jesse strokes Demy’s chin. “That was a bit of excitement. What do you think it was? And what do you think that shard did?”

Demy doesn’t answer.

“I guess they’ll probably wake up soon,” Jesse hopes. “You’re already awake, after all….” He scratches up Demy’s jaw. “Once they’re awake, we can figure this all out.”

Demy butts his head into Jesse’s chest. Jesse lapses into silence.

Something outside makes a strange noise.

“Huh?” Jesse murmurs. He peers out the window once more. The sky is turning red with sunrise. He can’t see anything moving out there—if the wolverine is lurking outside, it’s hidden by the trees.

The strange noise comes again. This time it sounds sharper.

Adrenaline jolts down Jesse’s spine. He moves Demy off his lap with trembling hands. “Demy,” he says, but the sound comes again and he goes quiet.

The strange noise is the sound of a little girl shouting Hello?

“Right,” Jesse says. He stands up. “Stay here, please, Demy. Watch over Christelle and Cédric. If anything happens, please protect them.”

Demy blinks up at Jesse.

“Okay,” Jesse says. He takes a deep breath and then walks out of the room. He closes the door behind him. The doorknob is the type that opens with a simple downward push. After a moment of consideration, Jesse takes a vase off a nearby table and drags the table in front of the door. It won’t stop an adult human, but it’ll stop an animal, maybe. Or a kid.

…If Christelle or Cédric wake up, the table won’t stop them from getting out of the room. But hopefully that won’t be a concern.

Jesse turns away and hurries down the hallway. He takes the stairs two at a time and rushes out the door. The cold slams into him, familiar but no less biting, when he steps outside. The sky is mottled red and purple and blue with sunrise. As soon as he’s out, Jesse releases his holy domain.

Jesse scans the forest’s edge for only a few seconds before he finds her. She’s tiny, and dressed in beautiful laces. Her hair is blonde. She’s standing in front of the trees, and she looks close to tears.

Jesse steps closer. Her attention snaps to him, and she scrubs at her eyes. Then something changes. Her head tilts to the ground. Her hands drop to her sides and her mouth opens. In the light of his holy domain, Jesse can see that her eyes are green.

“Hello,” Jesse says lamely. “Um, excuse me, are you alright?”

She looks between the golden glow and Jesse’s face. “Um,” she says.

A leaf smacks Jesse in his face and he bats at it automatically. The girl flinches, hard. “Don’t worry,” Jesse blurts, suddenly thinking only with the part of his brain that reacted strongly to Sadie’s terrified reaction to non-consensual touch. “I won’t touch you without you saying it’s okay,” Jesse promises.

His voice reverberates oddly. Divine oracle activates; Jesse has said it, and so it will be done.

“Um,” the girl says again. “Losna?”

For a moment the name is just vaguely familiar, and then Yeseo feels the blood drain from his face.

The girl turns and bolts through the woods.

“Shit,” Yeseo says, with feeling. What sort of plot is this, author? he asks the sky. Then he takes a deep breath and chases after the girl.

She’s running downhill, towards the east. She isn’t facing much resistance in the forest, full of pine trees as it is, and she’s running fast. Jesse doesn’t chase her at full speed. He jogs after her and puffs out misty breaths in the cold air and tries not to trip on the pine-needle ground. His golden divine oracle ripples alongside him.

The trees open up to the scarlet sky. Yeseo slows to a stop.

He emerges from right by the ravine. He glances over his shoulder, and the manor is looming above the tree canopy. Back in front of him, the girl is standing on shaking legs. There’s a big briar bush on her left, a fallen tree on her left, a ravine behind her, and Yeseo in front of her. Behind her, the sky is grey and electric red.

Yeseo raises his hands up. “Hello again.” She’s cornered and scared and he wants to move back to make her more comfortable, but she’s too close to the edge. “Do you mind moving away from the cliff?”

The girl sniffs and wipes her nose. She is utterly unfamiliar. A breeze rocks by and whips at her delicate lacy dress. “You’re not my brother,” she says.

Again for a moment her words mean nothing; and then Yeseo wants to be away from here. He buries the feeling as soon as it comes. “Your brother?” he repeats.

“Jesse,” she says, wet.

With great care, Yeseo thinks, Ahaha. Oh no.

Yeseo has to consciously stop himself from balling his hands into fists. The energy, foiled, instead goes to his voice: “Why do you say that,” he says.

“He doesn’t have ether like that,” the girl tells him. She’s stopped crying, for the most part. “And you’re not him.”

“I’m…” Yeseo glances between her and the edge. He weighs his options for long enough to decide that he doesn’t have time to think. “I’m not,” he agrees. He takes a step forward. “Please back away from the edge of the cliff.”

She doesn’t move. “I knew it,” she says determinedly instead. She’s still crying but now she squares her shoulders and scowls. It looks wrong on her little face. “You're not him. You’re—you’re a fake.”

Yeseo spares a brief moment to imagine throttling the author. Then the girl wipes away a fat tear with the back of her hand and Yeseo has to take deep breaths. “I am a fake,” he agrees, after a moment, and it comes out calm. “But—I know your brother would want you to back away from the cliff. Please.”

“How did you do it?” she asks all of a sudden. She sounds like she’s trying to be serious. The wind yanks at her loose hair. “How did you replace him? And—get ether?” She scowls harder. “If you hurt him, I’ll—I’ll hurt you.”

“I don’t know,” Yeseo says. “I didn’t consent to being here.” He bites his lip. “Please back away from the cliff.” The wind whips up again, and she sways. She looks like she’ll be knocked over any second. The clouds in the sky behind her are moving fast. One more step and Yeseo will be in grabbing distance of her. He takes a risk and steps forward.

She steps back, and overbalances. She starts to fall.

Yeseo lunges forward and grabs at her hand. He’s right next to her; it should be an easy catch. And it is, except for the fact that when Yeseo’s hand gets close enough to touch her it seizes and he can only feel air.

He locks eyes with her for a moment. She’s terrified. “Wh—” Yeseo says, and then she plummets, silent, over the edge. Her body hits the ground with a thump.

Yeseo stares blankly into the sunrise. He looks down. She lies at wrong angles on grey-turned-red-and-pink stone. Yeseo looks back to the sky.

Comprehension dawns: Yeseo told her that he wouldn't touch her, and under the dominion of his own vow he could not touch her.

Author, Yeseo thinks, is such a plot really okay?

Yeseo looks back down. The little girl is still at the bottom of the ravine. She is tiny and dead.

Yeseo has pine needles in his hair. He pulls one out. He checks the ravine a third time; the little girl dissolves, slowly, into a familiar golden dust.

Yeseo withdraws his divine oracle. He walks back to the house.

He climbs up the stairs to the second level and pushes aside the table and opens the door and steps inside the room. Demy, standing in front of Cédric’ and Christelle’s useless empty bodies, looks at him as he approaches.

“Demy,” Yeseo says. “Did anything happen?”

Demy makes a low sound and stands on his hind legs for a few moments before dropping back down. He wanders over to Yeseo with his tail held high.

“It looks like Christelle and Cédric are alright,” Yeseo says. He reaches down and scrapes his hand over Demy’s fur. Then he keeps going down until he’s sitting on the floor. He is shaking again.

Yeseo opens his mouth to say something else, but he doesn’t know what to say. His voice sounds wrong. He is thinking in a different voice than he is speaking in. “Sorry, Demy,” Yeseo says, because he has to say something. “I didn't intend to sit down.”

Demy climbs onto Yeseo and stares up at him, closed-mouth.

Yeseo blinks, and Demy is curled in his lap. Yeseo isn’t sure when Demy moved. “Don’t be worried,” Yeseo says.

Demy looks up.

“It’s… fine,” Yeseo says. “It was just… some… weird thing… that my sister must’ve forgotten to tell me about.” He falls quiet for a moment. Demy puts his head back down. Yeseo strokes him. “Or maybe she didn't see it in the first place?” Yeseo says. Demy lifts his head back up. The sky outside is blue. “It’s fine,” Yeseo says again. “Did I tell you about that time, in my old company, when I had to pull three all-nighters in a row to finish up a project? It wasn't a very big project, but my co-workers were swamped and I was the youngest so they dumped it on me.”

I don’t have to sleep, Yeseo meant to say. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for a while. But he abruptly doesn’t want to say anything else.

Demy’s tail whisks over the floor. Underneath it, a miniature meadow of spindly flowers have sprouted. Demy squirms around and then picks one up in his mouth and drops it lightly on Yeseo’s lap.

“Thanks,” Yeseo says. Beneath his hand the flower is fragile. If he twitches one finger wrong its stem will snap.

He stares at the flower for a while.

Yeseo knows he did not kill his own sister. He knows that he probably did not kill Jesse’s sister either, because Jesse's sister would not be in the middle of the Riester Empire and she would not dissolve into gold dust upon her death.

Yeseo is used to being overwhelmed. He rolls the little flower in his hands and its head flips quickly and lamely.

Whatever just happened must be caused by that strange shard of glass and gold that Yeseo had picked up. There must be a link there. Yeseo stares at the frail flower and can’t find the connection.

He sits there in silence as the sun comes up.

Chapter Text

Christelle wakes up first. She yawns and roles over and hits Cédric in the stomach. “Oh, shit,” she slurs, and then she’s flailing up into a seated position. “Jesse? What happened?”

Yeseo lifts his fingers off of the flower. He’s long since stopped rolling it; instead he’s been sitting with his fingertips pressed against its stem. He clears his throat, and hopes the gesture is subtle. “You passed out after the divine beast broke a shard of glass,” Yeseo says. He smiles at her, reassuring. “I’m glad you’re up now.”

Christelle seems flustered. “Yeah, me too,” she agrees. She combs a hand through her hair and shifts away from Cédric. “Is that what the wolverine broke? Do we know what the glass shard did? And how long was I out?”

“You’ve been unconscious since before dawn,” Yeseo says. “I don’t know what time it is now. I’m not quite sure what the glass shard did, but that’s definitely what the divine beast broke.”

Christelle has finished making herself look more presentable. Now she rolls out of bed and swaggers over to Yeseo. She plops herself down beside him and plucks one of the flowers from the ground. “I think we were knocked out because of ether overload,” she says, now ponderous. “I don’t know what sort of object would have been able to do that, though.”

“Me neither,” Yeseo admits. “As far as I know, divine objects are the only things that can store or transfer ether.”

“So maybe it’s some long-lost divine object?” Christelle squints into the distance, probably for emphasis. “Wouldn’t that be crazy?”

Yeseo shrugs.

For a moment Christelle side-eyes him, and then she sighs. “Well,” she says, “guess we won’t know ‘till we know.”

Yeseo shrugs again.

Christelle eyes him. “Do you have any theories?”

Yeseo doesn’t want to shrug a third time. “Not really,” he says.

“None?” Christelle pushes.

Yeseo wishes she wasn’t pushing. “No,” he says, harsher than he means to.

“Alright.” Christelle leans back. She looks confused.

Jesse feels bad, abruptly. “Sorry,” he says. “I guess… the shard had been plated with gold leaf. Maybe… maybe there’s something important there.”

“Maybe,” Christelle says. “Huh. Maybe we can check the library for something relating to shards or glass or divine items, once Cédric’s awake.”

Jesse jolts. He’d forgotten to ask Christelle how she was feeling after passing out—and he knows firsthand how terrible ether-related injuries can be. Jesse feels worse. “How are you doing?” he asks. “Do you have any leftover aches?”

“Oh,” Christelle says, and she huffs a laugh. “Nah, I’m doing fine, thanks! The ether just, like, blasted us. It was wild.”

Jesse nods, wide-eyed.

“It’s funny to be the one passing out, for once,” Christelle says. “I guess this time you didn’t pass out because of your low sensitivity. Seems sort of backwards, but okay.”

“I think it’s backwards that I pass out normally,” Jesse tells her. “Shouldn’t I be able to withstand more ether, if I have a low sensitivity…?”

“I dunno,” Christelle says. She laughs again. “I’m an amnesiac, remember? I’m still learning all this stuff!”

I’m still learning all this stuff too, Jesse thinks but does not say. Aloud he says, “Oh. Right.”

Christelle raises her eyebrow at Jesse’s sudden unenthusiasm. She opens her mouth, but if she’s going to say anything, she’s cut off—because at that moment, Cédric jackknives up in bed. 

“Where—” Cédric starts to ask, half a word and half a strained breath, and then he looks around. His brow furrows. His eyes land on Jesse and Christelle and he relaxes.

“Welcome back, sleeping beauty!” Christelle chirps. If she was put off by Jesse’s behavior, it's hidden now. She laughs at the weird face Cédric makes at her. “Jesse said we passed out after the demonic beast broke a shard of glass,” she explains to Cédric. “He said we’ve been out since then.”

Cédric nods, slowly, then looks at the window. He checks his watch. He asks, “Are you alright?”

“Are you asking your watch or Jesse?” Christelle asks.

Cédric looks up. “Are you alright?” he repeats, staring at Jesse.

What a question. It takes Jesse a while to rearrange his face into a smile. “Of course,” he says. “Thank you.”

Cédric’s eyebrows go up. He looks to Christelle. Christelle looks back at him. Cédric blinks; Christelle twitches her shoulder; Cédric sighs. He looks back to Jesse. “Where is the divine beast now?”

“It left,” Jesse says. “It left the shards behind, though.”

“Our first clue!” Christelle stands. “Shall we investigate them, then?” She offers her hand to Jesse, on the ground.

Jesse doesn’t take it. He stands up, and brushes himself down. There’s another pine needle on his shirt. He picks it off.

“Jesse…?” Christelle prompts.

Jesse drops the pine needle. “What?”

Christelle and Cédric are by the door now, somehow. Demy is standing between them and Jesse. Christelle looks worried. She asks, “Are you… ready to go?” 

Jesse hasn’t stopped smiling. “Of course,” he says. Is he repeating himself too much? “Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Christelle says, but she doesn’t move until Jesse has walked out the door; then Christelle, Cédric, and Demy all trail behind him.

They go down the stairs, through the hallway, and out the main entrance. The sun is halfway up the sky. The manor bathes them in its long shadow. Jesse walks over to the shards of glass.

Where the wolverine had been digging is a large hole in the ground. Jesse hadn’t examined it, before, but now he can see that it’s less big than he thought it was. Inside it is another small shard of glass—outside it, there are four scattered on the ground.

“These are the shards left behind when the… when the divine beast snapped its teeth,” Jesse explains. Cédric bends down to examine one. “Be careful not to—”

“Woah,” Christelle says. “Hey, it did something weird!” She holds up a hand dusted with golden powder.

“...touch them,” Jesse finishes.

Cédric's hand is golden too. “It melted,” he observes.

Christelle bends down to pick up another shard. It vanishes beneath her hand like sand in the wind. “This one melted too!”

“It doesn’t seem to be stuck to us,” Cédric says. He’s rubbing the powder on his palm. “Nor are there any obvious changes in our ether. I agree that it seems like part of a divine object, though.”

“Yeah,” says Christelle. “The ether is super pure and strong. I don’t know why it’s melting, though.”

“Stories of lost divine objects aren’t uncommon,” Cedric admits. “But I’ve yet to hear one of a melting divine object.”

“Maybe we're moving them, somehow?” Christelle suggests. She leans down to pick up the last two shards. “Like, we’re prompting some sort of teleportation by touching them? Because they don’t seem to be doing anything but melting.”

Jesse jolts. He snatches up the shards before Christelle can grab them. Their dust filters between his fingertips. “They may still be dangerous,” he says.

“Then why’d you touch them?” Christelle demands immediately. She reaches out to examine Jesse’s hands.

Jesse blinks. “But you were touching them?”

Cédric strides over to Jesse, too. “Your ether feels fine,” he says, grabbing Jesse’s arm. 

“If there is an effect, it may be slow-acting,” Christelle speculates.

The contact is stifling. Behind Cédric and Christelle, the woods are dark. Jesse tugs himself out of Christelle’s and Cédric's holds. “Regardless, there’s no point in hanging around here,” he says. “Let’s head back to the library while we wait for Benjamin and the carriages to arrive.”

“...Did something weird happen while we were asleep, Jesse?” Christelle asks.

Jesse’s stomach lurches up to displace his heart, and his heart pushes into his throat. “Why do you ask?”

“Just a guess,” Christelle says.

“Nothing odd happened,” Jesse says.

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

Christelle stares at Jesse for a moment longer, then releases Jesse’s hands. “Okay,” she says, stepping away. “If something odd does happen, please let us know.”

Cédric drops Jesse’s arm. “Don’t get too far out of our sight,” Cédric says.

Jesse bends down to pick Demy up. “I’ll try not to,” he says, when he can think past the humming in his ears. “To the library, then? To search for more information on this object?”

“Yes.” And Cédric gestures for Jesse to take the lead.

Jesse does so. He keeps his fingers buried in Demy’s fur; if his hands are shaking, only Demy can tell.

The library lets Jesse calm down a little bit. It’s just as empty and still as it was when he first stepped into it, and though Christelle and Cédric keep a sharp eye on Jesse for the first fifteen minutes, eventually they both get distracted browsing the shelves.

As soon as their eyes are off of him, Jesse ducks into a thin space between two shelves. For a few minutes he stands there and breathes. Demy’s nose presses into the hollow between his shoulder and his throat. Soon Jesse stops trembling, and he steps back out for the shelves.

The library isn’t organized in a fashion Jesse is familiar with. Of course the Riester Empire doesn’t use the Korean Decimal System. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be using the same system that the library at the capital used—the books aren’t labeled by category. Really, they’re not labeled at all. Jesse had found a small section on the Venetian Holy Kingdom earlier, and that’s where he’d taken the books he’d been reading from. Now, though, he’s not sure where to look… or what he’s looking for.

Jesse pulls out the nearest book on a whim. It’s a civil registry. Hm. Jesse pulls out another book. It’s another civil registry. Most of the books in this section seem to be civil registries. The first book predated the second one; Jesse follows the line of records, checking them occasionally, until he comes to the most recent one.

Hmmm. The book is completed, and dated about fifty years ago. It seems to be functioning as an employment record as well—it’s recorded both vital events for the village, and among those events ‘residence at the manor of Margrave Du Ravin’ listed. There’s a column for whether a vital event occurred on manor grounds; paging through the book, Jesse can only find one instance of that column being ticked.

…Does the disappearance of the manor inhabitants have something to do with the divine object shards? Jesse hopes not.

Staring at this registry, though, makes Jesse think there may be a different book somewhere else that has more recent or specific data on the manor’s inhabitants. If Jesse’s lucky, that book is somewhere in this house. Maybe that’ll have some clues as to what happened.

Jesse resolves to check out any books he finds outside of the library. He puts back the registry he’s holding and wanders further down the aisle. Demy moves around to lounge on his shoulders.

Cédric is still looking at books when Jesse peers around a shelf. He’s picking a book up and delicately flipping through it. Christelle has disappeared; but as Jesse watches she comes out of one of the side-doors, back into the library.

Jesse will leave them to it. He’d wanted to find the staircases up to the next floor, right? There’s a door over there that looks like it’ll lead out into the hallway. Jesse trots towards it, looks out, and nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Uhhhhhh,” says the Korean woman standing in the hallway. “Heeeeeey.”

She’s wearing an ill-fitted suit. She has thick bags under her eyes. Her hair looks like it just had a close encounter with hurricane-force gales. Despite it all, she looks pretty. This is immediately a bad sign.

“Cute red panda you got there,” the woman says. She shifts her feet and glances around. She looks freaked out. “I, uh, didn’t know that was legal, but it’s pretty cool.”

Jesse stares at her for a long moment, then sighs. “His name’s Demy,” he says. He steps out of the doorway to stand in the hallway with her. “You’re probably confused about why you’re here, right?”

The woman does a double-take. “Yes,” she says. “Do you—did you bring me here?”

“No,” Jesse says. “But you should follow me.”

“Right,” says the woman. She hesitates for a second—barely long enough for Jesse to notice. Then, with a friendly smile, she trots over to Jesse. “What’s your name, anyways?”

“Jesse,” Yeseo says. “And you?”

“I’m Ham Ga-in,” says Ham Ga-in.

“Ahahah,” Jesse says. Damnit, he thinks. “Right.”

Jesse steps into the library and walks down the aisle to the main room. Christelle is standing up, next to Cédric. Both of them lock onto him as soon as he steps into view. And then Ham Ga-in steps in, too, and Christelle’s face goes white.

“Everyone,” Jesse says, staring at a spot a few meters above Christelle’s head. “This is Ham Ga-in. Ham Ga-in, this is Christelle, and that’s Cédric.”

Christelle’s mouth opens and closes like a fish. “What the fuck ,” she says.

Cédric takes a threatening step forward. “Where did you come from?” he demands.

“Woah, hey.” Ham Ga-in holds up her hands and sidles closer to Jesse. “Uh, listen, I don’t know what's going on here, but I didn't mean to break in, I swear.”

“It's alright,” Jesse tells her. He half-turns towards her and manages a reassuring smile. “We believe you. We’re just… also confused by this situation.”

Ham Ga-in searches his face for a moment, then relaxes. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

Christelle takes a step forward and then runs into the table. Undeterred, she plants her palms on it and leans forward. “Where did you come from?”

Ham Ga-in crosses her arms. “Woah,” she says. “I don’t know, okay? One second I was at my cubicle, next I’m in this bigass hallway. I’m guessing this is some sort of isekai thing, but I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here.”

Christelle stares her down for a moment. If he wasn’t looking for it Jesse isn’t sure he would see it—the fear in her eyes. She looks like a hunted animal. 

And then she tosses her hair. “Right,” she says. “Sorry, this is just—excuse me, one second.” She maneuvers around the table to come up to Jesse and Ham Ga-in. To Jesse, she says, “Do you think this is because of those shards? Like, maybe they make random people appear?”

‘Random’. Haha. No. Jesse nods. “That could be it,” he says, which is technically true.

“But why her?” Cédric points out, coming up behind Christelle. His expression is stormy. “Who's this?”

Ham Ga-in steps behind Jesse. She’s about the same height as him; it’s not super effective. Jesse turns around to face her. Staring beyond Jesse, to Christelle and Cédric, Ham Ga-in furrows her brow. “You guys brought me here?” she asks.

Yes, Jesse thinks. “We're not sure,” he tells her. “Do you mind coming with us for a while as we figure it out?”

Again Ham Ga-in searches his face. Whatever she finds must be enough for her. “Sure,” she says. “Can't be worse than office work.”

“Thank you,” Jesse says. He smiles, and Ham Ga-in stares harder.

Christelle reaches around Jesse to grab Ham Ga-in by the arm. “This way,” she says, and without further ado she tows her away.

Cédric stares after them, unmoving. Jesse says, “I guess we’re going that way.” He starts walking.

Cédric huffs, but follows.  “Did you find any books before you were distracted?” he asks 

“Nothing that seemed relevant,” Jesse says, which is true enough. “Did you find anything?”

“No,” Cédric grunts.

Christelle opens the main entrance and hurries Ham Ga-in outside. “Does this look familiar to you?”

Ham Ga-in blinks and looks around. “No,” she says. Her eyes are going wide and her posture is stiffening. “Is this real?”

“So you just showed up here?” Christelle checks. “What’s the last thing you remember doing?

For a moment Ham Ga-in doesn’t answer. She’s turned back to look at the manor. “I was at work,” she finally says. “I’d just had lunch.”

“What did you eat?” Christelle asks.

“Leftover bibimbap,” Ham Ga-in says. She’s stopped looking around; her focus is on Christelle. “How’s that important?”

The Korean word is jarring. It doesn’t sound right here, in this pine wood. Christelle seems jarred too—she pauses too long. Cédric cuts in. “Do you know her?” he asks Christelle.

Christelle starts, and her face twists into a scowl. “I have amnesia,” she says. “How the hell would I know if we’ve met?”

“I don’t know you,” Ham Ga-in volunteers. “I’d remember you if we’d met.”

Christelle scowls harder.

Alright, it’s time to step in. Jesse clears his throat. “Excuse me,” he says. “Ham Ga-in, you don't know anything about the shards?”

Ham Ga-in twitches to face Jesse. “What shards?”

“They’re part of a divine object, we think,” Jesse explains. “Your presence may have something to do with them.”

“What’s a divine object?”

Cédric stares at Ham Ga-in with disgust.

“Listen,” Ham Ga-in says, raising her hands. “I’m pretty sure I’m not from around here.”

This is true enough. Jesse inclines his head in acceptance.

Cédric turns to Jesse. “Assuming she’s telling the truth,” he says, “the shard must’ve brought her here.”

The logical leap seems accurate. Jesse’s glad he wasn’t the one to suggest it. “We would’ve noticed if she were here yesterday,” he agrees.

“Yeah.” Christelle eyes Ham Ga-in. “So what do we do with her?”

Ham Ga-in takes a step back. “I’d like to go home, please,” she says.

Christelle grimaces. “I don’t know how to send you back home,” she says.

Jesse fights back his own grimace. “If this is linked to the shards,” he thinks aloud, “we should continue trying to find information on whatever object it came from. Christelle, did you find anything interesting in the library?”

“Oh,” Christelle says. “Yeah, I found a locked door at the end of one of the hallways. It looked like it needed a key. It’s the only locked door in the manor that I’ve found so far.”

Interesting, Jesse thinks. “So we need to find that key. Whatever’s behind that door may be useful.”

“We should look for other locked doors,” Cédric points out. “We don’t know that this door is special.” He pauses. “Also, someone needs to check on the horses.”

Jesse nods. “Then, let’s split up. Someone can look for other locked doors, someone can look for the key, and someone should check on the horses.” He pauses. “Oh, but someone needs to stay with Ham Ga-in…”

“I’ll stay with her,” Christelle says.

Ham Ga-in makes an odd face. “I’d prefer going with—what was his name—Jesse. If my two cents count for anything.”

“No,” say Cédric and Christelle in unison.

Ham Ga-in looks surprised. “Why not?”

Cédric says, loquaciously, “Because.”

“You're coming with me,” Christelle tells her.

Ham Ga-in does not seem to like this plan. She switches her plan of attack. “It’s alright with you, right, Jesse?”

“Definitely no,” Cédric and Christelle say in unison again. This time they scowl at each other afterwards.

Jesse, torn by peer pressure and sensing his chance to flee, blurts out, “Demy and I will look for the key,” and promptly turns to walk back to the manor.

Ham Ga-in, Cédric, and Christelle all lurch into motion. Ham Ga-in, closest to Jesse, is hot on his heels. No! Jesse thinks. Go talk to Christelle, not me!

But his prayers don’t work. Cédric calls for Christelle before she can grab Ham Ga-in again, and surprisingly Christelle listens. Jesse steps back into the manor with Ham Ga-in by his side.

“They don’t seem very friendly,” Ham Ga-in says as soon as they’re inside.

Jesse starts walking down the hall, fast. I’m not very friendly either! he exclaims in his heart; but he can’t say that. “They’re stressed,” he says instead. He finds a door to a room he hasn’t gone into, tries it, and steps through it when it swings smoothly open. “We were supposed to come here in a big group,” he continues, “but we were separated, and now it’s just us. This mansion wasn’t supposed to be abandoned, either. It’s been a bit…” Jesse struggles to find the appropriate word, then gives up.

“Huh,” Ham Ga-in manages. She follows Jesse into the room. “And, uh, where is this mansion? Exactly?”

The room looks like a sitting room. “It’s in the interior of the Holy Riester Empire,” Jesse says.

“The Riester Empire,” Ham Ga-in repeats. “Ah. I see.”

Yeah, right, Jesse thinks, but he doesn’t call her bluff. Instead he begins to drift around the room. It has a couple long couches, a fireplace, and a wardrobe. Thrown over the couches are stoles. Jesse runs his fingers over one: sable. Even through gloves its fur is odd and cold compared to Demy’s, and Jesse wipes his fingers on his trousers.

“The others don’t trust me,” Ham Ga-in says. “But you do. Why?”

Jesse looks at her more out of surprise than anything else. “You think I trust you?” he asks. “No—I mean, why should we trust you? We’ve just met.”

Ham ga-in gives him a look that says she noticed his slip, she’s not stupid, thank you very much. It’s an embarrassing look to be on the receiving side of; Jesse busies himself drifting to the room’s wardrobe.

“Well, yeah,” Ham Ga-in says. “But they didn’t want me to be paired with you. Why?”

This Ham Ga-in must be younger than the one Jesse has grown to know, though she looks older. She seems less tactful. Or maybe Christelle just cares more; Jesse couldn’t say which seems more likely. Either way, Jesse doesn’t particularly like it. “Hm,” he says, stalling. He taps his fingers on the wardrobe’s dark wood, and pulls open its heavy door. There’s nothing inside.

Inspiration strikes. “You should talk to Christelle,” Jesse says.

“Why?” Ham ga-in asks. She’s examining a pale stole. “Man, this looks expensive.”

“It is,” Jesse agrees. “The pelts here belong to demonic beasts that can only be found in this Duchy. You should talk to Christelle because she’ll be the best person to answer any questions you have.”

“Why her? Why not you?” Ham Ga-in asks, rapid-fire. Despite the speed of her questions, her tone is consistently casual. “She didn’t seem to like me very much.”

Jesse takes a last look around the room. “I think you two are very similar,” he says. “You may find speaking with her to be… enlightening.”

“Enlightening,” Ham Ga-in echoes. She tosses the stole down on the couch. Jesse wonders if she thinks this is a dream. She asks, “Are you done in this room?”

The cabinet was the only thing that looked interesting in here, and it didn’t have anything useful. “Yes,” Jesse decides. “Unless you happen to know where the key is, Demy…?”

Demy flicks his ear at his name, but doesn’t move. Jesse didn’t expect much anyway. “On to the next room,” he says, and he strides out the door.

“But what if I do want to talk to you?” Ham Ga-in pesters from behind Jesse.

“I’ve no idea why someone would want that,” Jesse says. He glances down the hallway. Cédric and Christelle are standing by the main entrance; they’re deep in a hushed conversation. They both look up when Jesse speaks. Somebody come watch over Ham Ga-in instead of me! Jesse tries to project, locking eyes with Christelle and then Cédric. 

Christelle gives Jesse a thumbs up, but doesn’t move. Cédric gives Jesse a confused look, and also doesn’t move.

Great , Jesse thinks. He opens the door to a room closer to the main entrance and sulks inside.

“Are they keeping an eye on us?” Ham Ga-in murmurs, following Jesse inside.

They’re definitely keeping an eye on us, Jesse thinks. But why did they choose now to be tactful? Complaining won’t get Jesse anywhere, though; so instead he straightens his shoulders and looks around the room. It’s another sitting room, this time with a slightly different style to it—the chairs are more worn, and the stoles slung over them are messily placed. On a whim Jesse scans the far wall. There—a door. When he opens it up, he can step through to the room he and Ham Ga-in had just left. The door is cleverly disguised as wall paneling, so Jesse hadn’t noticed it before. Interesting.

Jesse steps back to the drawing room. With how informal this room looks compared to the other, this must be a true drawing room while that one was a reception room. After the rampant Rococo styling of the Romero and Juliette palaces, that reception felt underwhelming. Jesse’s becoming a snob.

“You have a very refreshing aura,” Ham Ga-in says, apropos of nothing.

Jesse stares at you blankly.

“You asked why someone would want to talk to you,” Ham Ga-in elaborates.

Flustered, Jesse struggles to follow the thread. “Oh,” he says when it clicks. “You’re talking about my holy domain?”

“Holy domain?” Ham Ga-in makes a face. “Are you holy?”

“No,” Jesse says. There’s a wardrobe in this room as well, and a desk. The desk has a few letters on top of it, so Jesse heads towards it first.

Jesse picks up the letters. One of them, in charcoal, is recording grain imports. The rest of the letters… all look to be the same letter, actually. The author appears to have been drafting a letter for a friend. Jesse checks for an envelope, but none of the envelopes inside the desk have locations for delivery marked on them. There aren’t any stamps in the desk.

The letter itself is mostly casual, and Jesse skims through it. A reference to demonic beasts catches his eye, though. The author is complaining about small beasts in the house. Apparently, the beasts were burrowing under floorboards. Jesse finds it interesting that the author has chosen to complain about these beasts—they sound like rats or mice or moles, from the description—rather than mention the wolverine.

Jesse chooses the cleanest draft, folds it, and slides it into one of his pockets.

“So, if you’re not holy, why do you have a holy domain?” Ham Ga-in is asking. “How does that work?”

“It’s complicated,” Jesse says.

“Explain it like I’m five,” Ham Ga-in says.

If only someone had done that for Jesse when he first arrived here. “My holy domain is determined by my divine power,” he explains. “Divine power is used to control ether, which is channeled into the holy domain. Some people exude ether, and other people absorb it. I exude ether. Some people can also use mana and magic—mana is elemental ether control, and magic is non-elemental ether control. By using ether in various ways in unison, a person can become a Holy Knight.”

When Jesse has finished talking, Ham Ga-in laughs. “That does seem complicated.”

“You’d probably get your head around it pretty quickly, if you wanted to,” Jesse tells her. He’s speaking from experience—Christelle has never once seemed confused about theory during her sparring matches with Cédric. But, on the other hand, she didn’t really talk about theory, either. She and Cédric had seemed very focused on… practical applications.

“Really?” Ham Ga-in says, shaking Jesse out of his explosion-filled memories. “That’s easy for you to say—you must’ve been studying this your entire life!” 

“No,” Jesse says. “I got a late start, compared to most. There was… a lot of studying.”

“As much as college entrance exams?” Ham ga-in jokes.

Jesse moves away from the desk to check the wardrobe. “Almost worse,” he agrees.

“Woah! You’ve got college entrance exams here, too?”

“Ahhh. Hm.” There were two fur coats in the wardrobe, but their pockets were empty. “No key there, either.” Jesse turns back to Ham Ga-in. “Where I’m from, we have entrance exams, yes.”

Ham Ga-in tilts her head. “Where are you from?”

So many questions, Jesse thinks. “The Venetiaan Holy Kingdom.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Ham Ga-in mutters. She side-eyes Jesse. “Are you done again? Should we move on to the next room?”

“Actually,” Jesse says, “I think this would be a great time for you to go talk to Christelle.”

“Again?” Ham Ga-in deflates.

She looks awfully young, all of a sudden. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-five. Why?”

“No reason,” Jesse says. “You should talk to Christelle.”

“Why should she talk to me?”

“Christelle,” Jesse says in greeting. He turns around. “Sorry, I didn't see you arrive.”

Christelle’s standing in the doorway. Her shoulders are tight and her chin is up. “Just got here,” she says. “What’s up?”

“Jesse thinks I should talk to you,” Ham Ga-in reports. Her tone has gone back to laconic and casual. “Because we’re similar people, or something.” Her eyes on Christelle are sharp.

“He’s right,” Christelle says. She turns a cool neutral expression on Jesse. “Why do you think that?”

“Uhm. Well, you know.” Jesse casts about for an excuse. One pops into his head, and for a few moments he resists it; but it’s the only one he can think of, and unfortunately he thinks it’ll probably be believed. “I… happened to notice…”

Christelle leans forward. “You noticed what?” 

“I think you two may be…” Jesse can't make himself say it. They won’t believe him.

“May be what?”

“May be long lost half sisters,” Jesse blurts.

Christelle stares at Jesse for an uncomfortably long time. Then she snorts.

“What?” Ham Ga-in squints. “But we look nothing alike.”

“You have very similar hair,” Jesse says, staring stoically at the wall.

“My hair is normal and hers is pink and cur—” Ham Ga-in can't finish the sentence because Christelle slaps a hand over her mouth.

“Sure,” Christelle says. “I think you may be right, Jesse. Great detective work—you’re a real Sherlock Holmes. Ham Ga-in, let’s go talk about our torrid family life, alright? And how we coped with video games.”

“Video games?” Ham Ga-in repeats.

“Video games. Jesse, Cédric’s in the library again—go find him and help him out, will you?” And without further ado she tows a suspicious Ham Ga-in away.

Jesse stares after them for a moment. “Do they think I’m stupid?” he asks Demy. Demy blows air out of his nose, which isn’t a no.

Jesse lets himself feel the offense for a moment longer before he casts it off. Jesse checked this room pretty thoroughly while he and Ham Ga-in were talking: the key isn’t here. Jesse should check out another room, then.

And he should take his moment to breathe. Talking to Ham Ga-in hadn’t been unpleasant, but it had been… odd, to talk to someone who wasn’t pretending to be anyone else. Ham Ga-in’s questions had been offputting in their frankness, and also a horrible relief.

Jesse wonders for a moment what it would be like to be transmigrated the way this Ham Ga-in had been. Would it have been better to be upfront about not knowing anything? To be honest about not being from this world? It’s not worth contemplating; Jesse doesn’t want to think about it. He keeps moving.

Outside the room Jesse pauses. Christelle is towing Ham Ga-in to the left, past the parlor they’d just left. Jesse does not want to be involved in their discussion. He goes to the right.

Jesse makes it about halfway down the hallway before he has to stop. The door to a room down the hall is drifting very suspiciously closed. Christelle and Ham Ga-in had gone in the opposite direction. Jesse is right by the main exit.

Jesse looks at the closing door, then the main exit. The door, then the main exit.

Not my problem , Jesse decides, and he turns to march out the exit.

There’s a creaking sound from inside the room.

Not my problem , Jesse thinks again. He lifts one foot to march.

Something shatters against the floor.

Ah, shit , Jesse thinks. He creeps over to the door. With one hand, he takes Demy off his shoulder and drops him. “Stay here,” he whispers. Demy twitches around to look at him but obligingly stays put.

Jesse pushes the door open and steps inside.

It was once a receiving room, probably. There’s a couch and a few chairs. Now it’s a storage room, though—there are stacks of boxes on the chairs, and open cabinets of clothes, and odd rectangles covered with cloth. But that's not what makes Jesse stop in his tracks.

A familiar blonde-haired and purple-eyed man stares back at him.

Ah, shit , Yeseo thinks with significantly more vehemence. Stiltedly he asks, “Prince Jesse Venetiaan?”

Prince Jesse Venetiaan—the real one, that's who this has to be, with his chin held up and his gaze unwavering and his princely outfit with golden gloves—narrows his eyes at Yeseo. In front of him on the floor is a broken mirror; his gloved knuckles are covered with a second layer of torn fabric. “Yes,” he says. He holds a shard of glass in one hand, and the other hand by his waist. His voice is horribly familiar. “Who are you?”

FUCKFUCKFUCK , Yeseo thinks normally. He raises his hands. “I’m you,” he says. “But I, uh, got amnesia, so—I’m not you. Yes.”

Jesse Venetiaan gives Yeseo a once-over that drips polite disbelief.

Yeseo tries to laugh, for lack of anything better to do. He is unsuccessful. He trails into silence.

“Is this a kidnapping?” Jesse Venetiaan asks.

“No,” Yeseo tries.

“Right,” Jesse Venetiaan says. “I’m leaving now.”

And he walks toward Yeseo.

“Please don’t,” Yeseo blurts and with the adrenaline running high his holy domain snaps out in a blaze of light. He flinches and condenses the light but it’s too late; Jesse Venetiaan moves like a blur.

One moment, Yeseo is wide eyed with Jesse Venetian’s tense face burned into his eyes. And then he’s doubled over on the ground, trying to breathe and failing. His throat is burning and air comes in whistling—he gasps and chokes and tears well up, reflexive.

A hard thud into his chest—a foot. Yeseo crumbles. The holy domain around him flickers out.

“Please stay down,” Jesse Venetiaan says over the ringing in Yeseo's ears. He is a great dark shape in Yeseo’s watering eyes. With a heady flash of mirrored light, he steps over Yeseo.

Yeseo manages to reach out with one hand. His fingers catch on the cloth of Jesse Venetiaan’s pants, and harmlessly fall away. Shattered glass beneath him from the mirror squeaks and crunches.

Then there’s this terrible squeal-grunt-bark, like a squeaky chainsaw, and the floor shakes. Yeseo can’t see what it is. Something big slams into his back—falls on him, heavy—and Yeseo writhes around to throw it off. His vision clears enough for him to make out Jesse thrashing on top of him. Yeseo doesn’t understand what’s happening. He cranes his head; Demy is making the sound, and around him flail green vines.

Yeseo tries to say something, again, but all he can do is wheeze. He gropes around on the floor and splinters of glass pierce his gloves and—his hand closes around a heavy shard of broken mirror.

Jesse twists around. He shoves Yeseo’s head into the floor and holds it there. Something sharp jabs into Yeseo’s throat and he freezes, taking shallow whistling breaths. He clenches the glass in his fist. “Back off ,” Jesse hisses to Demy. “Or I’ll—I’ll make you back off.”

Yeseo can see Demy from the corner of his eye. Demy's jaw is stretched wide open, but he holds his place.

Jesse sits up slowly. He’s on top of Yeseo and pinning him down with his weight. When he moves the glass jostles and Yeseo’s throat stings. Jesse’s eyes are flitting between Demy and Yeseo’s throat—no, the shard of glass at Yeseo’s throat. Demy, the glass. Demy, the glass. Then he glances to something Yeseo can’t see.

In the distance is the clamorous sound of footsteps. Warm blood rolls down Yeseo’s neck. In the corner of his eye are vines, creeping.

“Jesse?” Christelle shouts. “Are you alright?”

Jesse barely pauses: “I’m fine,” he projects.

For a moment there’s silence, tense. Then Christelle shouts back, “I’ll be back in a few minutes. You better not be lying to me.”

Yeseo allows himself one pained blink. Of course. Of course . His fingers curl tighter around the shard of mirror that is pressed against his palm.

Jesse doesn’t answer her. Instead he lowers his voice and says to Demy, “If you let me go, I won’t hurt him any more.”

Demy hisses, then chitters. He doesn't move.

He’s clever, but he doesn’t understand what you’re saying , Yeseo tries to say, but his throat is too rough and the only sound that comes out is a gular clicking; his throat works against the glass and stings.

Jesse’s attention snaps to the wound. Yeseo watches wide-eyed as Demy crouches, then leaps. With his paws wide he pounces at Jesse. Jesse whips up his shard of glass but it’s knocked away by a vine already in motion.

In the half-second space between Demy’s pounce and impact, Jesse yanks something else up—a dagger, tiny, made to be hidden, pointed right at Demy.

There is one conscious thought that flits through Yeseo’s head: I can’t let Demy get hurt.

Yeseo bucks. He lashes out at Jesse. He tries to push him off and away from Demy. It works; Yeseo shoves at Jesse’s chest, jaw; Jesse recoils.

Demy hits Jesse in a whuff of hissing red panda. There’s red fur flying and a tail whips past Yeseo’s face and then Jesse falls over, jerking.

On his hands and knees, Yeseo scrabbles away from him for a moment, heaving for breath. He looks down at his hands. He looks at Jesse. 

Jesse is lying on the ground. Demy is frothing on top of him, with his mouth open and screeching. Jesse is not fighting Demy. His hands are on his neck. He is bleeding from the neck. There is a piece of glass embedded in the junction of his neck and throat. Jesse fumbles it out of his body with gloves that are soaking red.

Yeseo’s own hands are empty, and wet through his gloves.

Yeseo scrambles full up. “G—get off him,” Yeseo gasps. It sounds more like a gravelly gurgle than words and Demy doesn't move. “Demeter,” Yeseo says, stronger, “get off him.”

Demy still doesn’t move. Yeseo dives back down to Jesse and clutches at Jesse’s bloody hands and neck and bears down, hard. It’s warm. Yeseo’s gloves begin to saturate.  “You’re going to be okay,” Yeseo rasps. “I’m sorry. I didn't mean to. You’re going to be fine.”

Jesse's eyes roll to meet Yeseo’s. All the blood has gone out of his face; it’s eerily pale. There’s a complex emotion on his face, but Yeseo can’t read any of the parts in it beyond the terrible fear.

“You're going to be fine,” Yeseo says again. His holy domain flickers into place. “I just—need the circle to heal you. It’s—”

Jesse looks away from Yeseo. His fingers weaken beneath Yeseo’s.

Yeseo does not know how to heal complex wounds.

The blood flowing from Jesse’s neck has lost its pulse. He blinks once, fluttery, and then does not blink again.

The gold light dies.

Yeseo stares at him. Demy sits down.

Very slowly Yeseo peels his hands off of Jesse’s neck. Then he peels his gloves off too.

There's a high whining sound in Yeseo’s ears. Demy swings around his head to look at Yeseo, then pads off Jesse’s body to Yeseo’s lap. He sits himself down and leans against Yeseo, heavy.

His paws are bloody. Yeseo’s hands are bloody. Jesse’s hands are bloody. There is so much blood. Yeseo can’t breathe. Jesse can't breathe, either: he’s dead.

The whining is getting louder and cottony. Yeseo leans heavily on the ground so he doesn’t fall over. Splinters of glass from the shattered mirror prick on his slick, numb fingers.

Demy twitters.

Jesse’s body starts to melt into gold specks. His throat goes first, then his face, then the rest of him. It radiates out—Yeseo looks away when the second layer of skin starts to flake gooily off.

A rough paw presses against Yeseo’s chest. Gold is flaking off of Demy’s claws. Demy twitters a little louder.

“Sorry,” Yeseo rasps out. When he does the whining stops; then it starts up again. He’s the one making the whining. Now that he’s noticed it he stops it.

Silence, now. Cottony still. Yeseo can hear every breath he takes. His throat is still whistling.

Jesse’s blood on Yeseo’s gloves flakes off. 

Yeseo’s own blood does not flake off. I should heal us, he thinks. The circle for small wounds is a simple one and it whirls into place unerringly. Yeseo recites the incantation in a gravelly voice. Glass pushes out of his hands and then they are flawless, besides the blood.

Now Yeseo looks up. The room is a mess, even more of a mess than it was before. The mirror is splashed across the floor, there’s a torn cloth crumpled in the corner, and fur drifts fuzzy into cabinets and boxes. His gloves are in a limp bloody pile on the floor. Yeseo fumbles his gloves into his pockets. The room still looks terrible.

Yeseo should probably clean up.

The process of standing up is a delicate one. Yeseo expects his legs to crumble but they don’t. He sways when he stands, and he takes deep breaths until the ground stops dipping beneath him.

Yeseo moves the mirror frame first. It's heavy, with its metal backing, and more glass falls out of it as he lifts it. He wedges it into a corner.

Then he picks up the cloth and uses it to clean his hands. He wipes at his neck, too, and hopes that that’s good enough. With that done he folds the cloth so that none of the blood is visible. The cloth is a bedsheet and the bottom of it is ripped off—this is what Jesse had used to cover his knuckles when he broke the mirror, probably. Yeseo can’t see any place to store it, now. Probably it was used to cover the mirror.

The mirror’s glass is still broken on the ground.

There are a few larger pieces, two of them bloodier than the others. One is soaked in red; the other only has blood beaded at the tip. Yeseo very carefully unfolds part of the cloth and picks up the shards through the fabric.

Yeseo does not see the dagger that Jesse intended to use to attack Demy. It was a thin dagger, Yeseo thinks—Jesse probably had it on him to ward off assassinations. He’d taken down Yeseo efficiently, too. He’d probably learned how to deal with people who used holy domains.

Yeseo can’t do any of that.

Yeseo is very, very lucky that no one he’s met so far knows the real Jesse, he realises with a coldness in his guts. Yeseo wouldn’t hold up.

Yeseo pushes away the thought; he’s cleaning right now.

Yeseo lifts the cloth full of bloody shards up to place on top of a wooden crate. He pushes it into the shadows, then goes back to look at the rest of the glass on the floor.

The glass splinters are too small to pick up. There is blood smudged beneath them, too, from Yeseo’s neck. Yeseo picks up a larger fur pelt from on top of a chair and throws it on the ground. It covers things well enough.

Demy’s fur is still drifting around the room. Yeseo bends down to push clumps of Demy’s fur beneath the rug.

And, crouched on the ground, he sees an odd little box wedged between two crates.

Out of vacant curiosity, Yeseo shuffles over to the box. It's ornate and heavy when he lifts it up. It’s unlocked. He opens it carefully.

Inside is a ring of identical keys.

“Ah, Demy,” Yeseo rasps. “Would you look at that.”

The door swings open abruptly and Yeseo jerks out of the way of its swing. “Jesse,” exclaims Christelle, “why’re you in here?”

Ham Ga-in peers out behind her. “Were you looking?”

Yeseo blinks a few times. He clears his throat. “I think I found the keys to the door,” he says, and he holds up the key ring.

“Hey!” Christelle seizes the keys and examines them. “These definitely look like they’re old enough to be for that door. It’s weird that they’re so many of them, though.”

“Whoever made the key must’ve made multiple copies at a time,” Yeseo says.

“Some of them look corroded,” Ham Ga-in points out. “It's good you guys have a lot of them.”

“Yeah,” Christelle agrees. She lowers the keys and looks around the storage room curiously. Yeseo’s heart stops beating. But Christelle’s eyes skirt right past the rug on the floor. “What a major stroke of luck,” she says.

“He’s royal and cute and good at finding things,” Ham Ga-in mumbles.

“Corgi,” Christelle and Ham Ga-in chorus in unison. They grin at each other.

“I don’t know what that means,” Yeseo says blankly. His heart has started beating again; it’s difficult to hear Christelle and Ham Ga-in around it in his ears.

“It’s an inside—nevermind.” Christelle surveys the room a final time and then hands the keys back to Yeseo. “It’s weird Cédric hasn’t shown up yet. Usually the pig’s always snuffling around you.”

Yeseo doesn’t know what that means, either. “Maybe he got held up somewhere?”

“Yeah.” Christelle turns back to Ham Ga-in. “C’mon, we’re going to go find him.”

“Your life is so exciting,” Ham Ga-in says appreciatively.

Christelle laughs but doesn’t deny her. Instead she barges back into the hallway. Ham Ga-in grins at Yeseo, then goes off behind her.

Their footsteps rescind down the hallway.

Yeseo stands there for a few moments longer. He’s waiting for something, but it doesn’t come. Their footsteps get further away. If he stalls any longer, they will notice something is wrong.

With jerky movements, Jesse pockets the keys. He glances around the room. There’s still Demy’s fur in the shadows, and the rug is lumpy, and a few grains of glass sparkle on the floor, and the frame of the mirror is sticking out awkwardly where Yeseo had wedged it.

Demy yawns.

Yeseo starts. Demy is standing on the rug right now, and Yeseo lifts him up. Demy’s paws are clean now. Demy finds Yeseo’s throat and presses his nose against it; he licks at the place that Jesse’s knife had been. Yeseo’s eyes burn.

With halting movements Yeseo steps out into the hallway. Ham Ga-in is standing at the main entrance; when she sees him she waves him over.

“Christelle’s grabbing Cédric right now,” she says. “Oh, that’s cute.”

Yeseo blinks. “What’s… cute?”

Ham Ga-in jerks her chin towards Demy. Demy has pressed himself into Yeseo; his nose is squished so his breaths come out whistling. “He’s really cute,” she says.

Yeseo blinks. Agrees, or nods maybe.

“Are you okay?” Ham Ga-in asks.

“What?” Yeseo jolts.

“You seem kind of—weird,” Ham Ga-in says. “I mean, I don’t know you, but you seemed a bit more normal earlier. And Christelle says you’re super nice and sweet.”

“I don’t…” Yeseo says, but he’s not sure how to end the sentence. “Sorry.”

Ham Ga-in opens her mouth. Yeseo shrinks back.

The main entrance doors swing open.

Christelle stalks inside. By the time she lays eyes on Yeseo, he’s reconstructed himself. “Cédric isn’t out there,” she says.

“How odd,” Yeseo says. He tilts his head. “When did you last see him?”

“He’s probably fine,” Christelle says. She sounds annoyed. “I bet he just went to start searching for the key after he filled the horses’ hay nets.”

“Guess we’ll have to search,” Ham Ga-in says. Yeseo glances at her from the sides of his eyes; she’s looking at him. “Hey, Jesse,” she says. “You take point.”

Yeseo smiles, then drops the smile. “Why me?” he asks. He smiles again.

Ham Ga-in’s gaze is sharp. Her words are mild. “You’re good at finding things,” she says.

Christelle huffs a laugh. The irritation fades from her expression. “Yeah, that’s right! We’ll follow your lead, Jesse.”

“Alright,” Yeseo says. He doesn’t want to fight. He turns down the hallway and starts walking. He passes the door to the room that the mirror was in; he doesn’t look at it, but he follows the door in his peripheral vision as he walks by.

Ham Ga-in mutters something to Christelle. Yeseo can’t hear what she’s saying. He re-arranges Demy in his arms; Demy grumbles, and puts his paws up on Yeseo’s shoulder so he can reclaim his spot pressed against Yeseo’s throat. His fur prickles against Yeseo’s pulse.

Yeseo stops by the door to the kitchen. One-handed, he pushes the door open.

Inside the kitchen is Cédric.

“See, I told you!” Ham Ga-in chirps. She’s speaking at a normal volume again; Yeseo represses a flinch, and the nervous energy tremors down his hands.

“You were on it,” Christelle agrees. She flounces in ahead of Yeseo. “Hey, Cédric.”

Cédric is standing by the stove, and staring hard at something behind it. “What,” he says without looking away.

“What’s—oh!” Christelle pauses mid-skip. “Uh. Wait a second.”

Ham Ga-in says, “I want to see,” and scuttles over to where Christelle stands, open-mouth, and Cédric glowers. She pauses, too, then says. “Hey there, kiddo.”

Yeseo is struck with a sudden cold fear that pierces past his hot fuzz of adrenaline. He too steps over and—oh.

It’s Sadie.

Huh. Yeseo looks between Sadie and Cédric. Sadie is curled tightly into a cubby beneath the counter with skinny knees and wide eyes. Cédric stares down at him, entirely neutral. “The shard,” Yeseo says.

Christelle tears her gaze away from tiny Sadie to blink at Yeseo.

“The shard,” Yeseo repeats. “It likely brought Ham Ga-in here, right? So it likely brought Sadie here, too.”

“Huh,” Christelle says. “That’s—funky.” She looks back to Cédric. “Hey, how long have you guys been staring at each other?”

Cédric stares at Sadie harder, likely out of spite. 

Christelle sighs, then says, “Heeeeey. Answer me, pig bastard.”

Cédric looks at Yeseo. “We need to get rid of him,” he says.

Yeseo’s free hand flies up to clench Demy tighter to his chest. “But he’s not doing anything,” Yeseo says.

“He can’t be here,” Cédric insists. “He’ll slow us down, like your Ham Ga-in.”

“Excuse me,” Ham Ga-in says, insulted.

“He’s a child,” Yeseo snaps. “And Ham Ga-in didn’t intend to be here. Besides, she’s not slowing us down. More people gives us more hands to search.”

“The dangerous divine beast is still roaming around here,” Cédric argues. “Helpless people won’t be safe here.”

“So what do you want to do about it?” Yeseo demands. “How are you going to get rid of them? Are you going to kill them? Are you going to kill a child, Cédric?”

Yeseo only realizes after he stopped talking that he’d raised his voice at the end of his sentence. Cédric’s face has frozen. Christelle’s hands are up placatingly.

“I,” Yeseo says. Demy snuffles at his throat. The blood drains from his head. “Sorry,” he says. His tongue is clumsy in his mouth.

“It’s fine,” Christelle says, her hands still up. Her voice is oddly muffled.

“Right,” Yeseo says, half a wheeze. He sucks in a breath, and the world jolts back into clarity. “I—sorry,” he says again. “I know you wouldn’t do that. I don't know what I was talking about. I shouldn’t have raised my voice. My apologies.”

Cédric looks away. “As long as you know.”

Yeseo too looks away.

Christelle lowers her hands. She glances between the two of them, then exhales harshly. “Argh, I can’t believe I’m including Cédric in this, but—you both raised good points. We need to get these people back to where they belong, and we need to figure out what’s up with the divine beast and whatever happened here.” Christelle pauses to make sure everyone's following. “Luckily, Jesse found a set of very suspicious keys.”

“Good work,” Cédric says to Yeseo. He very slowly reaches out to Yeseo’s shoulder. He comes within a few centimeters, then Demy jerks in Yeseo’s hands.

Yeseo yelps as Demy wriggles around. Demy whips his head to face Cédric. His jaw drops back open again, and he makes a long and whistling squeak. One of his paws drops away from Yeseo’s shoulder to hang threateningly in the air.

Cédric withdraws his hand.

“Uh,” Christelle says, as Yeseo stares blankly at Demy. “Is… is he okay?”

“I—” Yeseo cuts himself off and Demy relaxes again. Demy curls back to stick his nose in Yeseo’s neck. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Yeseo says.

“Did something happen?” Christelle asks.

Yeseo stops himself from clutching at Demy. “No,” he says.

“Nothing happened?” Cédric asks. He is looking at Demy, and at his own hand.

Yeseo feels a bit bad. This isn’t Cédric’s fault. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why he did that.”

“I wonder…” Ham Ga-in doesn’t finish her sentence. She reaches out to Yeseo, and again Demy whips around to squeal at her. This time, he bats his paw fully at her, and she has to lurch back to avoid getting hit.

“Demy,” Yeseo hisses at him. He backs away from Ham Ga-in and Cédric and Christelle, and Demy’s squeal goes up in volume. “ Demy ,” Yeseo says again, a reprimand. Demy cuts off and side-eyes Yeseo. Looking at Yeseo, his ears swivel back and he licks his nose, but then his ears again turn forward and he goes back to staring down Ham Ga-in.

“Nothing happened?” Cédric asks again. He is looking at Yeseo instead of Demy, this time.

“I don’t know why he’s doing this,” Yeseo repeats. His story and tone have gone dull. “Let’s just go.”

“Okay,” Christelle says. And she changes the topic: “Now that we have the keys, we can check out the vault. Hopefully inside the vault there'll be some clues as to what happened here.”

Cédric breaks eye contact. “Hm,” he says. He considers Christelle for a moment. “Adequate plan,” he says finally.

“It was an amazing plan,” Christelle says. “But before that, we should eat something. We didn’t have any breakfast. Jesse, do you want to keep an eye on baby Cédric while we whip something up?”

Yeseo twitches back, hard.

“Or Ham Ga-in,” Christelle says. “How about you do it, Ham Ga-in. You’re trustworthy, I vouch for you. Jesse’s probably tired of babysitting.”

“Uh, yeah.” Ham Ga-in nods. “Hey, c’mere, kiddo. We’re going to hang out while these guys make breakfast.”

Yeseo had, horribly, forgotten that Sadie is still here.

Sadie had been watching these procedures with wide eyes. Slowly, he eases out from behind the woodstove.

“Hi,” says Ham Ga-in. “I’m Ham Ga-in. That’s Cédric, that’s Christelle, that’s Jesse, and that’s Demy in Jesse’s arms.”

Sadie nods. “Hi,” he says, half a whisper.

“Demy’s really cute when he’s not being grumpy,” Ham Ga-in tells him. “He’s a divine beast, did you know that?”

As Ham Ga-in talks to Sadie, Yeseo backs away. “I’m going to go look for bread,” he says, and before Christelle or Cédric can do anything more than nod, Yeseo bolts for the pantry.

As soon as he’s in the pantry, Yeseo reconfigures Demy in his arms. “Please don’t do that,” he whispers into Demy’s ear. “Please, please, please.”

Demy presses his forehead against Yeseo’s chest.

God. Okay. Fuck.

Yeseo is alone in the pantry. He can spare a moment to think.

Jesus fuck. Okay. So—Yeseo just killed someone.

Technically Yeseo didn’t actually kill anyone. Yeseo knows this. Technically, that Jesse was just a creation of the shards. Technically, the real Jesse is….

…Hm.

Yeseo has thought about the fate of the real Jesse before. How could he not have? He has thought about the fate of the real Jesse, and he has made some assumptions. Yeseo has been assuming that one day, Yeseo will leave, and the real Jesse will take his place.

But. But, Yeseo is standing in this pantry, and it’s dark in here, and in his head the sense-memory of Jesse’s pulse between his hands is lurching on loop; and Yeseo has no proof that the real Jesse will come back. Yeseo has no proof that the real Jesse is not dead by his hands.

This thought is utterly horrible. The dark room spins before Yeseo’s eyes; he lowers himself, slowly, to his knees. If the real Jesse is dead—if Yeseo killed him—then no one knows.

Yeseo is nothing like the real Jesse. Yeseo is walking around in his body and pretending to be him. Is this desecration of a corpse? Is this desecration of a memory? But no one knows that his soul is gone; no one knows that he needs to be remembered.

How terrible. How horribly terrible. Jesse is gone, and Yeseo can tell no one. No-one can know that they need to mourn.

Worse: if Jesse is gone, Yeseo is stuck here. That hurts more. Yeseo just killed Jesse and all he can worry about is himself. How bad is he?

The feeling that fills Yeseo is an awful mix of dread and guilt and relief; Yeseo hates himself. He’s not supposed to be relieved. He’s not relieved. He’s going to throw up.

Demy licks Yeseo’s face. “Sorry,” Yeseo says to him. “I’m sorry.”

Demy snorts in Yeseo’s face. Yeseo screws his eyes shut, and tries to compose himself.

Start from the beginning. Yeseo has no proof that Jesse is dead. As far as he knows, Jesse will come back one day. He could come back when Yeseo finally finds a way out; he could come back before that. Yeseo does not know what will happen. He doesn’t know what has happened, either; he doesn’t know why he’s in the body of a fictional character in a fictional world, or why that world is so utterly nonfictional.

Yeseo cannot think about all of this. Yeseo just has to get out of here. He just has to get out of here. He just.

Jesse just needs to find some bread.

Jesse wipes Demy’s spit off his face. He remembers seeing bread on a higher shelf, so he stands up and fumbles around until he can find a loaf. He cradles Demy in one arm. He opens the pantry door.

“Find any bread?” Christelle asks. She’s sitting on a counter. She holds up two bottles. “I found some jam and cheese.”

Jesse smiles at her. “Great work,” he says. “I found some bread. We can make toast, if Cédric’s willing to help us out.”

Cédric’s hand lights on fire.

“Great,” Christelle says. She’s eyeing Jesse oddly. Jesse channels as much benign energy into his smile as he can. Demy grumbles.

Abruptly Christelle looks away. “Well, let’s get started on that, then. Hey, Ham Ga-in, Sadie, what do you guys want on your bread?”

Ham Ga-in waves her hand. “Whatever you’ve got,” she says. She’s on the floor besides Sadie.

Sadie is sitting on his knees with his hands folded in his lap. “Um,” he says. “Jam.”

Even young-Cédric doesn’t know how to say please and thank you . Jesse huffs a laugh. “Sure,” he says. He heads over to a counter. “Cédric, will you provide the fire?”

Cédric lights up the wood-stove. Sadie watches raptly. The sight makes Jesse thoughtful—does this Sadie know how to use fire magic? He looks about the same age as the Sadie that Jesse got to know, in that time before he learned that Cédric and Sadie were the same person.

“How old are you?” Jesse blurts out.

Sadie looks to him. “I’m nine,” he says.

Jesse nods. “Nine,” he repeats, for lack of anything else to say. There’s a knife block here. Jesse pulls out a breadknife, one-handed, and puts Demy down. Demy curls at Jesse’s feet as he begins to saw at the bread. He has to use extra force, because the bread has gone a bit stale.

“Nine’s a good age,” Ham Ga-in says. “Very, uh, auspicious.”

“If you say so,” Sadie says. He sounds disbelieving.

“It’s not,” Cédric says.

Jesse, bearing down on the bread, hitches in his movements. Going off of Cédric’s tone, this Sadie must’ve come from right before all those awful things happened. That means he’s from before Cédric fell into his coma—from right before his father died.

…How unfortunate. Jesse goes back to sawing the bread. It isn’t his place to say anything; and there isn’t much to say, either.

Christelle must sense the awkwardness, too. “Hey, Jesse,” she says. “Sadie wants to know why you named Demy ‘Demy’.”

Jesse has finished cutting the bread. “Ah,” he says. He heads towards the wood-stove. As he lays the bread down on the stove, he explains, “Demy is named that because his fur reminds me of demi-glace.” He glances at Sadie out of the corner of his eye; Sadie looks uncomprehending. “It’s a very rich sauce that looks dark brown, like Demy’s stripes, in a pot. But when you pour it, it’s a lovely orange color, like the rest of Demy.”

“So is Demy actually spelled with an ‘i’?” Christelle exclaims. “Have I been doing it wrong this whole time?”

Jesse pauses and considers it. “No,” he says. “You’re doing it right. The ‘y’ is cuter.”

“Ah, I see,” Christelle says. “Whew, that’s a big relief.”

Jesse nods solemnly. “I would never give Demy a name that was less cute than it could be.”

“He is so very cute,” Christelle agrees.

Jesse flips the toast and bustles about to prepare plates for them. Luckily, Cédric or Christelle had pulled some out while Jesse searched for bread in the pantry. Jesse pulls the toast off the stove and slathers the bread with jam and cheese. Demy twines around his feet while he works. Once he’s done, he presents the plates to everyone. He hands Ham Ga-in both her plate and Sadie’s plate, so she can pass Sadie’s plate to him.

Jesse eats his own toast mechanically. He tears it into small pieces, and feeds half of the pieces to Demy. The toast that he ends up eating sits heavily in his stomach.

When everyone is done eating, Christelle collects their plates and dumps them in the sink. “Let’s leave dish-washing for later,” she says. “It’s time to investigate that locked door!”

Jesse, personally, would rather wash dishes than investigate the locked door. But he picks himself up and gathers Demy in his arms. “Alright,” he agrees.

“I’ll keep an eye on Sadie,” Ham Ga-in volunteers.

Jesse hesitates. Maybe Ham Ga-in and Sadie should stay here? But Christelle is swooping in before he can say anything: “Great!” she says, and, “Let’s go!”

Without further ado, Christelle sets off. Jesse follows her with his fingers in Demy’s fur. Ham Ga-in and Sadie tromp behind him, and Cédric brings up the rear.

Christelle leads them down the left side of the hallway. “Here we go,” she says with satisfaction, and she stops by a door that looks like it should go into the library. When she sees Jesse’s confused look, she laughs. “I’ve already checked to see whether I could find this door from the other side,” she explains. “But I can’t. There’s no door into here from the library.”

Oh! This is the space Jesse had wondered about yesterday. This must be the closed room beneath the mezzanine on the far wall of the library. He nods his understanding, and takes a closer look at the door.

The door is made out of a different material from the other doors here. It looks old. It matches the keys on the keyring well.

“Keys, please!” Christelle requests, and Yeseo hands the keyring over. She walks straight up to the door, looks it up and down, and then starts to fiddle with the lock.

“If you guys have all these cool magical powers, why didn’t you just knock the door down?” Ham Ga-in wonders.

“This isn’t our property,” Cédric says. “We have no right to destroy it.”

Christelle makes a wavey hand motion. “You’re the prince,” she says. “You can do what you want. I didn’t suggest knocking it down because I didn’t want to damage any of the books nearby.”

“But the books are in the other room?” Ham Ga-in points out.

“Cédric’s fire powers and Christelle’s water powers are both—very destructive,” Jesse says, as delicately as he can. “Especially in close proximity.”

“Huh,” Ham Ga-in says. She looks impressed, and she turns to Sadie. “Isn’t it cool to see how strong you’ll grow up to be?”

Sadie doesn’t say anything to that.

Christelle grabs the keys before Sadie’s silence can grow awkward—thank you, Christelle! She jams them into the lock and, with much jiggling and pushing and pulling, coaxes the door half-way open.

“Aha!” Christelle announces. From what Jesse can see of the room, it’s dark, and cool. “Did it!”

“It’s not all the way open,” Cédric points out.

“You didn't help at all, so you can shut up,” Christelle tells him.

“Hm.” Cédric bulls past her and slides through the half-opened doorway into the dark room. Christelle aims a kick at the back of his knee as he passes, but misses. Jesse coughs and Christelle aborts her second kick. Cédric’s body quickly recedes into the darkness.

“Uh,” Ham Ga-in says. “Should me and Sadie just stay out here?”

Jesse doesn’t wait to consult with Christelle. “Stay here,” he says. “Demy will protect you.”

Christelle casts Jesse a sideways glance that Jesse ignores. “Yeah,” she says. “This room can’t be very big. We’d just be cramped in there.”

“Alright,” Ham Ga-in agrees.

With that decided, Jesse lifts Demy away from him. Demy’s paws hit the floor and he looks up with a betrayed expression. His ears swivel back.

Jesse kneels down to be level with him. “Demy,” he says, “please protect Ham Ga-in and Sadie.”

Demy blinks and then puts his paws up on Yeseo’s pants.

“Stay here. Be nice,” Jesse tells him. He runs his hand over Demy’s back. “We’ll be back soon.”

With that, Jesse turns and slips through the doorway. Behind him, Demy twitters. “Hey, no, stay here,” Christelle is saying. “C’mon, he’ll be fine. Seriously, Demy—oh, thank you.”

“I got him,” Ham Ga-in says. Demy squeals. 

Jesse winces, but he doesn’t want to leave Ham Ga-in and Sadie alone out there. Neither of them can defend themselves properly. He hardens his heart and peers around the room.

Cédric is standing in the middle of the room. Fire is burning from his fingertips, and it casts the room in a flickering warm light. “Down here,” he says.

For a moment Jesse doesn’t understand what he means; then he looks down. On the wooden floor beside Cédric’s feet is a trapdoor. It’s made of a different wood from the rest of the floor; it looks older. “Is it locked?”

Cédric picks up the trapdoor. It opens silently; he lays it down with a thunk. Inside is dark. “No,” he says.

Christelle slides into the room as well. “Ah,” she says, upon seeing the trapdoor. “Ominous.”

A cool draft wafts from the trapdoor’s gaping darkness. When Jesse cranes his head, he can see rough stone stairs descending steeply down from the trapdoor. “Very,” Jesse mutters.

Cédric looks to Jesse and Christelle. His firelight flickers. “I’ll go down first,” he says.

“Wait,” Jesse starts to say, but Cédric is already descending the stairs.

With Cédric gone, the light source is gone. “Well,” Christelle says into the relative darkness. “Now we have to follow him. After you?”

Jesse sighs and agrees. He fumbles his way to the trapdoor’s entrance. The stairs are even steeper than they look, and slick, and hard to descend without light. Jesse gets down three stairs, then tries to duck to avoid ramming his head on the ledge of the wooden floor. He misses; with great confidence, he slams his forehead into the ledge.

Halfway descended into the trapdoor, Yeseo stands still. The pain pulses and rings through his head.

“Oh, shit,” Christelle says. “That sounded like it hurt. Jesse? Are you good?”

Yeseo is not confident he can answer without his voice breaking.

“Jesse?” Christelle repeats.

“I’m,” Yeseo manages. “I’m fine.”

“Um.” Christelle’s figure has become more visible as Yeseo’s eyes have adjusted. Now she is crouched by the lip of the trapdoor; she looms over Yeseo. “Are—are you sure?”

Yeseo blinks rapidly. The pain is receding. His eyes feel wet. “Yeah,” he says. Embarrassment starts to flood him; it laps up his throat and sloshes into his mouth. “Yes. Yes, let’s just—let’s just go.”

“Okay,” Christelle says. If she says anything else, Yeseo doesn’t hear her; he’s doubled over, and feeling his way carefully down the rest of the stairs.

The stairs go down fairly deep, and soon the darkness is too deep for Jesse to see. They twist in on themselves once, twice, then a third time. Jesse feels his way down with his fingers splayed and his arms braced. 

Jesse can tell when he’s almost at the end because Cédric’s firelight becomes visible. After a few more steps, he emerges into a hallway. Cédric stands in the middle of it. The ceiling above him is low; he cranes his neck to look at Jesse.

“Christelle’s on her way down,” Jesse says.

Cédric is frowning at him. “Did you run into something?” he asks.

“What?” Jesse reaches up to his head. Sure enough, there’s a small lump where he’d banged it against the ledge. “Oh. Yes. I couldn’t see.”

Cédric’s frown turns confused. Jesse is getting skilled at reading him. Cédric asks, “Why didn’t you use your holy domain to see?”

The idea had not occurred to Yeseo. He feels stupid. “Because,” he says. “I didn’t think of it.”

Cédric’s frown deepens. He’s slow on responding, though, and in that time, Christelle emerges from the staircase as well.

“Whew!” Christelle says. “We’ve gotta go back up those, too?”

Yeseo seizes on to the conversation topic. “Maybe it’ll be easier going up,” he suggests.

“Or maybe there’s an elevator hidden here somewhere,” Christelle mutters.

Wouldn’t that be nice. Jesse feigns incomprehension. “Maybe,” he says, in his best baffled-but-too-polite-to-show-it tone. “Shall we, then?”

Cédric huffs a frustrated breath. “Yes,” he says. “Jesse, follow close behind me.”

“Ah,” Jesse says. “It’s alright. I think I’ll just use my ether, like you suggested.” And he lets his circle expand in a flash of golden light. It stretches far down the hallway, and flashes a paler gold when it meets the walls close around them. Like this, it looks less like a circle and more like a line. “It’s probably better that we don’t have an open flame down here anyway,” Jesse adds.

“Oh, right,” Christelle agrees. “Because of the gases.”

“Sure,” Jesse says. “Or because if we start a fire down here, we won’t be able to escape.”

Cédric’s face is lit up from beneath. His eyes catch the light and burn orange. “I’ll still walk in front of you,” he says.

Jesse smiles as best as he can. “Thanks.”

Cédric stays looking at him for one moment longer. Lit like this, he looks different; the planes of his face are harsher. When he turns around and stalks away in a whirl of fabric, Jesse is relieved.

“I’ll be behind you, then,” Christelle says. “Both of you, don’t slip!”

Jesse makes a sound that could approximate a laugh, if the right equation was used. He starts walking behind Cédric with his fingertips touching the wall.

The wall is slick and smooth stone. It’s almost soft, which is an odd juxtaposition to how unyielding it is when Jesse presses his fingers harder to it. It’s pale. Jesse’s circle illuminates it a white-gold color.

“Looks like a cave,” Christelle comments. “You said this place had a lot of caves, right? Prince Jesse?”

Jesse hums in agreement. His circle is moving slowly with him as he walks. His throat hurts, and he reaches up to massage it.

“This seems old,” Christelle continues. “I wonder if this is older than the manor house?”

Cédric, a dark shape in front of Jesse, shrugs. The black of Cédric’s cloak is sending odd shadows onto the ceiling of the corridor as it shifts above Jesse’s circle.

“Maybe they built the manor house here because of this,” Christelle muses. “Wouldn’t that be something? Do you know if that’s possible?”

The shadows on the ceiling of the corridor are entrancing. Jesse can’t look away from them. His eyes are still wet from when he hit his head. No: his eyes are watering. Why? The light isn’t that bright. Is it? Maybe Jesse’s eyes had adjusted too well to the darkness of the stairwell. These eyes aren’t used to looking at a computer screen. Maybe they’re more sensitive.

“Jesse?” Christelle says.

That must be it. Yeseo blinks rapidly. Or it’s just a delayed reaction to hitting his head. Yes, that must be it.

“Jesse,” Christelle says, “are you okay?”

Yeseo presses his hands into his eyes. “Cédric,” he says, “are we almost at the end of this tunnel?”

Cédric doesn’t respond. His footsteps have stopped. Jesse lowers his hands. Cédric is standing still and looking at him. “Are you okay?” Cédric asks.

“I don’t like this place,” Jesse says, which is true. “That’s all,” Jesse continues, which isn’t true. “Shall we continue on?”

Cédric looks at something over Jesse’s shoulder. Christelle. Jesse’s eyes sting anew. His circle must’ve brightened. “Okay,” Cédric says. He turns to face forward again. “It looks like this corridor opens up here.”

Jesse follows Cédric out of the corridor. Cédric is right; it opens up into a large, uneven room. It looks like a cave. It feels like a cave, too, and it sounds like a cave—it’s cool, and saturated with the distant drip of water.

The cave is all the same pale, striated stone as the hallway. Along its walls are free-standing wooden cabinets. In the middle, on semi-even ground, a series of stalagmites jut out of the stone. Their tips are broken off. Together, they make a podium of sorts; a plank of wood rests on top of them.

Jesse inhales deeply through his nose. The cave smells like water, and stone, and… “Blood?”

“Yes,” Cédric says. He kneels down by the podium and lifts an ornately-woven, thick blanket. In its corners the blanket is stained with blood.

Jesse kneels besides him. Closer to the floor, Jesse can see past his circle to the dried blood that stains the white stone red. Ominous.

”Check this out,” Christelle says. She’s gone to the other side of the podium. When Jesse rises and joins her, she’s pointing to the ground.

On the ground is a mess of fur, a dark frame, a pile of glittering shards. The shards are huge—much bigger than the shards that the wolverine had been burying. “Don’t touch them,” Jesse says sharply.

”I wasn’t going to,” Christelle says. “You guys think these are from the same thing?”

“Yes,” Cédric says, when Jesse doesn’t answer.  

The mirror frame, because that must be what this was, is delicate but oxidized. Jesse crouches and squints against the light of his circle to see detail. Beneath the frame is a pile of fine dark dust.

“It feels like a divine object,” Christelle says. “But… not all the way.”

“It feels corrupted,” Cédric says.

Jesse swallows. “How so?”

“The ether is impure,” Cédric explains. “That may be why we weren’t able to identify the shards as belonging definitively to a divine object before.”

“Can divine objects get corrupted?” Christelle wonders.

Cédric tilts his head—a concession. “I don’t know,” he says. “But it feels wrong. Compare how it feels to how Jesse feels.”

Christelle pauses at that. Then she nods. “Fine,” she says. “Say you’re right. What can we do about it?”

“Collect it,” Cedric says. 

Christelle makes a discontent sound. “Okay,” she says. “So we’ve got a corrupted divine object, signs of an attack, a divine beast, and an empty manor. How’s this all fit together?”

There’s a moment of silence as Cédric thinks.

“Perhaps a demonic beast touched the mirror,” he suggests finally. “The inhabitants of this manor were clearly charged with protecting this mirror. If it corrupted the mirror with its touch, then the inhabitants may have fled from shame or fear of punishment.”

Interesting, but… “That doesn’t make sense,” Jesse interrupts. “Wouldn’t the manor’s inhabitants take more of their items before they went? This location is remote enough that news of their failure wouldn’t spread quickly. They would have enough time to gather their things before they left.”

“Not if they knew that representatives of the crown were coming,” Cédric counters. “We were in contact with them recently and they welcomed us. If this happened in the last week or so, they may have felt they didn’t have time to pack.”

That’s a good point. Still, something doesn’t seem right to Jesse. It seems unlikely that the whole staff of the manor would mobilize and leave this quickly over something that could be covered up; and the time frame is unclear. Jesse stands. “Those cabinets may have something relevant,” he says. “I’m going to go check them out.”

Cédric gives Jesse an unreadable look, but nods. He turns to Christelle. “If we cover our hands in cloth, we may be able to handle the shards.”

Jesse stalls. “Wait.”

Cédric is pulling the bloodstained blanket from the pedestal. He pauses and raises an eyebrow at Jesse.

“We don’t have to move it,” Jesse says. “We’re the only ones here.”

“It’s a hazard,” Cédric says. “Besides, I believe we can handle it through the cloth.”

Jesse shifts his feet. “Just in case, let me check the cabinets first. They may have more information on the divine object.”

“Why don’t we check out the cabinets with you?” Christelle suggests. 

Jesse will accept that if it means Cédric and Christelle stay away from the shards; he assents. Cédric turns and heads towards one bookshelf, while Christelle heads for another.

The cabinets Jesse ends up with is old. The wood is heavily lacquered, but it has a stale quality to it, and its lacquer is chipped in yellowing layers. Jesse rolls a door open. Inside, the shelves are crusted in places with a white crystal; in other places, they’re smudged black with a dark residue. On the shelves are linen-wrapped rectangles.

Jesse picks up one of the rectangles as carefully as he can. It’s heavy in his hands. He picks off the linen wrapping—it’s loose, so he doesn’t struggle too much—and reveals a book.

Surprisingly, despite the dampness of the cave, the book is in good condition. Jesse flips through it. It’s… another civil registry?

Yes, Jesse realizes as he pages delicately through the book. It’s formatted like the records for the village were, but it’s for the manor only. The book is about halfway filled, and it records births, deaths, marriages, and (rare) annulments from the last hundred years or so. 

As Jesse stares down at the book, a few things occur to him. First: when he’d been reading the registry in the library, there’d only been one civil event recorded at the manor—a death, about fifty-some years back. Second: only one parent is listed for most births. Third: two years ago, the same person died five times in a row.

“Hey, I found some reports on the divine item,” Christelle says.

Jesse wraps up the book in his hands, places it back on the shelf, and drifts over to her. She’s holding a book, and when Jesse gets close enough she hands it over to him.

It’s open to writing that’s formatted like a pair of diary entries. Jesse flips to the next page: blank. He flips to the previous page: more writing. He skims the writing for a moment. The tone is clinical. They’re not diary entries, he realizes. They’re reports. 

“The author of the reports changes, but the subject is all the same,” Christelle says. “They’re all written once a month. They go back hundreds of years.”

Cédric drifts over as well.

“They’re all about the divine item of magic,” Christelle continues. “The Mirror of Ideal Diffusion.” 

It seems clear that the Mirror of Ideal Diffusion is now broken on the ground behind Jesse.

“This is the most recent report,” Christelle tells Jesse, and Cédric by extension. She taps on the page. It’s dated to about a month ago. It’s brief: No disturbances to report.

“Descriptive,” Cédric mutters.

“Yeah,” Christelle says. She half-smirks. “Check out the one before it, though.”

The preceding report is from two months ago. Due to recent erosion in the gorge, it reads, the left corridor has changed. Access is still largely blocked because of the boulder. However, the boulder has shifted slightly. As the passage is still too small for a man or child to pass, we have not investigated whether this shift has created a contiguous passageway between the resting place and the eastern caverns.

With the rise of demonic beast activity, we feel the need to be cautious. We have sealed the left corridor with bricks. It should prove an effective deterrent to any errant demonic beasts.

When Jesse looks up from the book, Christelle is making eye contact with Cédric. “The bricks are in the corner over there,” she says. “They’re crumbling—there’s a passage behind them. So you were right. It was a divine object, but a demonic beast got to it and broke it.” Her half-smirk flashes into a grimaces. “Congrats on getting it correct, I guess.”

Cédric doesn’t look pleased to be right. “Had they stayed, the guards could have argued that nothing could have been done to protect the divine object,” he says. “By fleeing they have lost their honor twice over.”

This still sounds wrong to Jesse. The civil registry isn’t lining up. And… something about the bricks doesn’t seem right. Plus, that doesn’t mention the divine beast at all; surely it’d be worth a sentence or two. “Do we know what the divine object did?” he asks.

Christelle shrugs. “Make reflections of people we knew?”

“But what type of reflections?” Jesse persists. “We’ve only seen it in its broken and corrupted form. What if it did something different when it was whole?”

Cédric tilts his head. “There was a book over there,” he says abruptly, “that discussed various divine items from around the world. Perhaps we can find the mirror now that we know its name.”

Jesse nods and follows Cédric to the shelf he’d been looking at. The book Cédric retrieves is large, larger than an average book, and when he unwraps it and opens it, some of the pages are taken up by ornate illustrations.

Cédric plucks his way over to the index. “There,” Christelle says, peering over Jesse’s shoulder.

Indeed, right under M it sits: Mirror - Ideal Diffusion.

“So there’re other divine items that are mirrors?” Christelle wonders. “Cool.”

“A large portion of these may be fictional or lost,” Cédric warns her. “The book is very old, and few divine objects exist in the world today.”

“Good thing it’s got this mirror, at least,” Christelle says.

Cédric inclines his head, which may be a nod. He flips to the indicated page.

The page for the Mirror of Ideal Diffusion is illustrated with a man and a couple of mirrors, but Jesse can see why Cédric wasn’t able to instantly identify this mirror as the one they want: the frame isn’t shown, so the divine item… items?… look utterly featureless. The text accompanying the illustration is small: The Mirrors of Ideal Diffusion, it reads. This series of divine objects is said to create a perfect duplicate of a person when a person touches the mirror surface. All aspects of a person, including memories and possessions on their person, are duplicated. A duplicate will persist until it is killed, the source mirror is cracked, or until it is touched by the person who created it; it cannot die naturally. 

  “That’s it?” Christelle says. “All we have to do to get rid of the reflections is touch them?”

All we have to do is fucking touch them? Yeseo thinks, calmly.

“Not necessarily,” Cédric says. When Yeseo tears his eyes towards him, he looks thoughtful. “This is describing a perfect reflection. Neither of the reflections created by the mirror have been perfect—one was a friend of yours, and one was a past version of myself.”

“Oh, yeah,” Christelle agrees. “Plus, haven’t I already touched Ham Ga-in?”

That’s right. That’s right, hasn’t Christelle already touched Ham Ga-in? Didn’t Yeseo touch Jesse, when they were trying to kill each other?

“You have,” Cédric says.

“Oh, but I guess I haven’t touched her directly,” Christelle realizes. “I’ve only grabbed her sleeve so far.”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. The whole time—Yeseo had his gloves on. And Jesse had his gloves on too. Fuck. “Let’s test it,” someone says, from very far away.

“I guess there’s no harm in trying,” Christelle says. She’s looking at Yeseo. Did Yeseo suggest testing this? Why? Why would he do that?

Cédric nods in agreement. “We’ve looked through everything here,” he says. “After you.”

Yeseo nods also, and doesn’t move.

Christelle tilts her head. “Lead the way, Jesse.”

Oh. Yeseo starts walking. He unleashes his holy domain on autopilot. The light is warm and sickening.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Christelle asks.

Yeseo puts one foot in front of the over. There’s a roaring in his ears. His holy domain light makes his eyes sting again. It’s hard for Yeseo to see.

“Jesse?” Christelle says.

Yeseo doesn’t stop walking. “What?” he asks.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Christelle repeats.

Yeseo has reached the foot of the stairs. “We shouldn’t get distracted while walking up these stairs,” he says. “I don’t want to bang my head against anything again.” He tries to laugh but it sounds flat; he gives up.

“...Right,” Christelle says.

Yeseo starts walking up the stairs. If Christelle or Cédric say anything else, he doesn’t hear them.

At the top of the staircase, Yeseo pauses. Two bright orangish eyes peer at him from the ledge. Yeseo tries, “Sadie?”

“Hi,” says Sadie. He scrambles back from the ledge when Yeseo pulls himself up.

“Sorry,” Ham Ga-in says. She’s standing to the side, and shielding her eyes a bit from Yeseo’s holy domain. “He wanted to wait over here. Demy didn’t seem to mind.”

At his name, Demy bumps into Yeseo’s legs. Yeseo bends down to pick him up, and he huffs and buries his nose in Yeseo’s neck. “Ah,” Yeseo says. “I hope waiting in a dark room wasn’t too boring.”

Ham Ga-in shrugs. “We kept the door to to hall open, so we could see a bit. We’ve been playing hand games.” She reaches over and ruffles Sadie’s hair. “He’s good at gawi-bawi-bo, but doesn’t like cham cham cham.”

“It’s just rock-paper-scissors,” Sadie tells Jesse. “I don’t know why she’s calling it something weird.”

“You’re calling it something weird to me,” Ham Ga-in says. “I’m calling it the right name. The Korean name. Although—am I even speaking Korean right now?”

Christelle pokes her head out of the trapdoor. “What are you talking about?” she asks as she climbs out to stand next to Jesse.

“Am I speaking Korean right now?” Ham Ga-in asks.

“You can’t be,” Christelle says. “No one here knows what Korean is. See, look.” She turns to Cédric, who’s climbing out of the trapdoor as well. “Do you know what Korean is?”

Cédric’s expression suggests he does not care. “No,” he says.

“Exactly.” Christelle turns to Ham Ga-in. “We’re speaking English right now, as far as I can tell.”

“Isn’t his name French?” Ham Ga-in points to Cédric. “Shouldn’t we be speaking—”

Yeseo sincerely and horribly does not want to be having this conversation right now. He burrows his bare fingers in Demy’s fur. “Christelle,” he says.

Christelle balks. “Right, sorry. Ham Ga-in.” She makes a face.

“Christelle,” Ham Ga-in mimics.

“We, uh. We think we may have found a way to make you go back.”

“Oh?” Ham Ga-in straightens up. “Wait, really?”

Christelle turns to Yeseo, for some reason. “Yes,” she says when Yeseo doesn’t say anything. “We talked about how we think the divine object brought you over, right?” Christelle waits for Ham Ga-in’s nod before she continues. “Well, we, uh.” Again Christelle looks as Yeseo.

“You’re not real,” Yeseo says.

Ham Ga-in’s face does something odd. “Excuse me?”

“You’re a reflection made by the shard,” Yeseo says. “If the person who made you—Christelle, in this case—touches you, you’ll go away.”

Ham Ga-in’s face does not change. “I feel pretty real,” she says.

“That’s what a fake person would says,” Christelle contributes, without enthusiasm.

“So—what, you’re just gonna vanish me?” Ham Ga-in asks. Her voice shifts up in pitch. “You touch me and I get Thanos-snapped?”

Haha. Surprisingly accurate. “Yes,” Yeseo says.

“What if I don’t want to get Thanos-snapped?” Ham Ga-in takes a step away. “I’d rather be alive than a pile of dust.”

“You’re not alive right now,” Yeseo says. “It won’t change anything.”

“ Jesse ,” Christelle says, sharp. 

Yeseo flinches back hard. “Sorry,” he says. He shuffles back a few steps. He runs his fingers down Demy’s back and Demy sighs. “Sorry,” he says again, quieter.

Ham Ga-in’s jaw is tense. Her eyes flick between Yeseo and Christelle once, twice, before settling on Christelle. “You’re just going to get rid of me?” she asks Christelle. “Like I was never here, huh?”

“It’s—no.” Christelle grimaces. “It… it doesn’t work like that.”

“No Ham Ga-in,” Ham Ga-in says. “Only Christelle.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Christelle says, stronger. “Even if this version of you is gone, you’ll still live on in this world. I’ll always remember you.” Her voice goes quiet again. “You’ll stay with me for as long as I’m able to carry you.”

Ham Ga-in’s jaw works for a long moment. She is poised on a knife’s-edge; she sways back and forth. Then she sighs, and deflates. “Fine,” she says. “Fine. It was nice visiting, I guess. How do you want to do this?”

Christelle smiles. The expression looks painful. “Can we hug?”

“Yeah,” Ham Ga-in smiles back. Her expression looks painful, too; their smiles match. “Yeah, we can hug.” And she holds out her arms, and Christelle steps into her embrace—they weren’t standing that far apart after all.

For half a breath Yeseo thinks nothing will happen. Then, subtle at first, Ham Ga-in begins flaking away. Christelle stiffens and gasps. Ham Ga-in’s eyes widen. “Woah,” she says. “Cool.”

And then she melts into gold dust and is gone.

Fuck , Yeseo thinks. It worked.