ES Chapter 1

This work draws on certain settings from Marius Petipa's ballet 〈 Talisman 〉 as source inspiration.

All subject matter appearing in this work is fictional, produced by the author's imagination.

0. Prologue

The man came back covered in blood.

Witnesses reported he had fallen from his horse mid-gallop. How a man of his riding ability had managed it, no one could say.

The path where he fell was sheer cliff-face and jagged rock, and the injuries he sustained at the bottom of it were severe. Doctors came and went, and he lay insensible through all of it; everyone who knew him spent those days tight-chested with worry and shaking with fear.

They could not have done otherwise.

He was the sole heir of House Etheldore. He had lost both parents young, had no siblings, was not yet married. Everything depended on his survival—the house itself, and with it the livelihoods of every servant who had given their years to it.

"Miss, the master has regained consciousness."

The news came approximately two weeks after the accident. But his condition remained too serious for broad visiting; access was restricted to doctors and nurses and a very small number of household staff.

Ayesha was not granted permission to see him until two full weeks after he had regained consciousness.

She straightened her clothes and made her way to his bedroom. Knock, knock. She waited. An answer came.

"Come in."

The voice was noticeably lower than she remembered, worn with long illness.

Ayesha opened the door carefully and stepped inside.

The smell of medicine hit her at once—sharp, acrid. Beneath it, faintly, blood.

The strangeness of it: this sick-room smell so wrong for him, specifically. He smelled of cedar, ordinarily. Quiet and settled. His study desk and chair were cedar wood; the scent had made itself at home in him over the years.

She had never been inside his bedroom before, but there was no room to take in the unfamiliarity—not when everything was still so precarious. She went straight to the bed.

He was lying down, eyes half-closed.

Bandaging wrapped around his temple; old bloodstains had turned brown through the cloth. This, at least, was an improvement. On the first day they had brought him in, servants had moved constantly between his room and the laundry with baskets of blood-soaked cloth and bandaging. The blood had been alarming enough that she had not been certain, watching it, that he would survive it.

Ayesha studied the cuts that remained across his face. She remembered precisely how beautiful his face had been before this—and how gracious he had been with her, always—and the memory made the current state of him worse rather than better.

She spoke carefully.

"……I heard you were seriously injured. How are you feeling?"

Anyone could see he had been ill for a long time and was still ill. She could not bring herself to ask whether he was all right.

He opened his eyes slowly. His brow furrowed as though the light was too much; he blinked three or four times to find his focus.

At last, light returned to his eyes.

The gaze was like a length of deep night, cut and placed there. Dark at the centre, something cold flickering through it.

Cold ran down her spine.

His eyes were entirely wrong. The warmth was gone—not muted, not diminished. Gone. What remained was cold and very sharp.

'What was this.'

Her feet had already carried her one step back before any decision to move had arrived. Those unfathomable eyes followed her. Nothing but a gaze—no physical force possible—and yet she felt bound, as though something had secured her hands and feet and she had only just noticed.

He surveyed her from face to feet—features, expression, clothing, how she was standing—with a gaze that felt almost tactile. She stood there blankly, still, pressing each breath carefully into place until his gaze finally moved away.

Only then did the corner of his mouth turn—dismissive, barely a smile.

"Ah, we meet at last?"

The words landed cold.

'Could he be hurt that she had come so late? Today was the earliest she had been permitted to come.'

She answered—urgently, the words already out before she had decided to speak.

"I've been submitting visiting requests—since you regained consciousness—but they kept refusing permission until——"

"Should I say I’m glad to see you. Hm?"

Her words cut off. Ayesha faltered.

'Had he always spoken like that.'

He had not. The man she knew was the most faultlessly mannered person she had encountered.

"Talk about a firm set of tastes. How'd he ever dig her up, I wonder?"

Strange words. Ayesha stared at him, unable to find any of her own. She couldn't hold her gaze on him for long—the skin of her arms kept raising.

"Golden hair. Violet-blue eyes." A pause. "Yes—I was rather surprised myself, just now. This is interesting."

'Why was he speaking as if from outside himself. As if examining someone else's acquisition.'

'As if she were someone he had never met. And finding this, mildly, diverting.'

'Wait. Someone he had never met——'

An idle thought pulled up a memory.

'Ayesha. It circles me. It holds its position—ever watchful—and waits for the precise moment it requires.'

He had said it with a different quality than this: softer, his eyes warm and composed. He had been confiding something, carefully.

'I call it the evil spirit.'

She had thought it an extravagant fantasy at the time. But the man had believed in the evil spirit's existence with absolute conviction—and he feared it.

'It will seize my body in the end. When I am careless, or when I am at my weakest—when I have lost control of myself—it will not miss that moment. It will come in.'

A fragment of conversation she had filed away without weight surfaced now, suddenly significant.

'It may manufacture the opportunity itself. Given the fixity of its obsession—it may well decide to do exactly that.'

Could it be.

A possibility she had not held in mind rose to the surface. Her heart dropped to somewhere near her feet.

'Was this possible. Does this make sense?'

She was still somewhere between belief and disbelief—and yet the man before her, so completely changed from before the accident to after it, made the doubt impossible to set aside.

However she turned it, it was wrong. A man who appeared to have spent his entire life at some remove from error had suddenly made an error of the kind that risked his own life. If there had been some cause for it——

'Was it really that.'

'Could the fall itself have been the evil spirit's work.'

And then the memory arrived:

'That is why I am in need of your help, Ayesha. I am relieved that you arrived at this estate when you did. You are a medium—you will know how to handle a thing of this kind.'

At the time she had not known how to respond to the subject—had simply smiled awkwardly and let it pass.

But now, facing the man who had spent a month lying gravely ill, her instinct was speaking.

The thing before her was not Cyrix Etheldore.

The wrongness she had felt from the moment she stepped through the door—that was instinct. The body's alarm, ringing. In the eyes watching her. In the pitch of his voice. In the manner stripped of all courtesy. In every detail of how it treated her. Each one had produced a separate cold.

"……Who are you?"

Ayesha let her guard show.

"Me? Who do you think I am?"

The corner of his mouth pulled to one side as he returned the question. To someone who didn't know better, it might have been an attractive smile. To Ayesha, who was already doubting what occupied that bed, it was sinister to the point of horror.

"You. Your name."

"Why? Don't I seem like the one you know?"

She almost screamed.

Ayesha held her composure. Barely. She kept her expression controlled; her mind was not.

That answer made it clear. He had caught her suspicion and had not denied it. The thing she had been unable to fully believe had in fact happened.

The thing in the man's body was the evil spirit.

In the end, it had truly devoured him.

"What did you do to him?"

Her heart was pounding. So hard she could feel it in her ears.

"Oh, you miss him, do you?"

The thing replied, quite at ease. But where the mouth was smiling, the eyes held nothing—cold, level, watching her—and it added one more thing.

"So sad~ You'll never see him again."