IBTRFL Chapter 25

"Ah—I, I'm, that, ah. Ah."

The woman, her eyeballs spinning in slow circles, vanished into the darkness of the alley.

Aer stepped past the unconscious thieves and ran straight into the alley after her.

A Chaos Beast, in Thescion. That meant the Extinction Cult existed here too.

How many had died already? Ten? More?

Hostility that had gone to rust in the comfort of peace bared its edge.

Aer didn't blink as she chased the woman weaving through the alleyways.

What the woman did could no longer be called human movement—it fell closer to animal. Climbing the wall, she moved like a lizard; vaulting lightly up it, like a cat; twisting her neck to check behind her, like an owl.

Not even a guess could be made at how many things had been mixed into her.

The grind of teeth rang out, uncanny and cold. The woman flinched, her body shuddering, and craned her neck to look around.

A narrow gap between two stone buildings. She might be able to escape through there.

The woman folded her stiffened joints and forced her body into the gap.

Behind her, Aer clicked her tongue and drew up the cold.

"Ah, ah, ah?"

Frost gathered on the stone wall. Her breath, threaded with the raw stink of fish-water, scattered white in the air.

Sensing something was wrong, the woman twisted and writhed, backing away.

The frost expanded explosively, sealing the gap. As the ice advanced toward her, the woman hurriedly scrambled back out.

"Other, other, other, gap—the gap, uh, ah?"

Every other gap nearby had already been sealed shut, without exception. Filthy gray-white mucus oozed in thick drops from the nose and mouth wrapped in bandages.

The woman flailed, limbs bent, and, as if only just remembering it, tried to leap up the wall.

But ice, cold and sudden, rose from the ground and seized her ankle.

"Ah, that, I, I—I-am, I-am—am."

The woman tilted herself far back and looked at the one standing before her.

A cold blade, leveled to kill her. From eyes that trembled without focus, a dark red liquid burst forth.

The filthy, coarse bandages were soon stained an ominous color.

Watching this, Aer spoke slowly.

"You."

"Ah, ah, ah."

"Do you remember your name?"

"...Ah, ah?"

The neck, which had been bobbing anxiously, stopped moving. The woman, who had stopped crying without realizing it, blinked blankly.

A name. The first gift a person receives when they're born.

That's right. A name. She'd forgotten. Until now—that she, too, had once had one.

"Mine, mine, na-nayme, na-i,—me, name, mine. Na—me."

"..."

"Vi... ola. Viola. My name—Viola."

"I see."

The ice that had been binding Viola's movements melted away.

Viola stepped back cautiously, but kept watching Aer's expression. Her sharp, animal senses caught even the smallest change in the other.

"Why, why?"

Viola asked, tilting her head. Aer said nothing, only sheathed her sword. In eyes gone violet and hollow with grief, Viola's shape condensed, whole.

One wretched soul, no longer able to remain human, because of the Extinction Cult.

A Chaos Beast possessed no reason at all. It simply swallowed whatever stood before it, exactly as the Cult commanded.

It did not spare whoever crossed its path, nor did it remember any past from before it became what it was.

"Viola, you—"

"S'right, right, me, me, Viola. Viola."

The artless voice trembled with joy.

Viola clapped her hands and called her own name over and over, like a child who'd finally received the gift she'd been longing for. As though she meant never to forget it again.

Aer couldn't bear to watch it and wrenched her head away.

Bile rose in her throat. Gloom, despair, helplessness, rage—dark, raw-meat feelings closed a fist around her heart.

Her chest ached. Fit to burst, welling up—it felt as though it would turn to ash, just like that.

Maybe it was because the thing standing before her now was clearly different from everything she'd cut down until now—and because everything she'd cut down until now had, at its beginning, been no different from the thing standing before her.

A moment's peace had scoured away, however slightly, the madness of war.

And in the space that scouring left behind sat a cruel truth she'd forgotten in the scramble to survive—a truth she might, in fact, have deliberately looked away from.

A thing that became neither monster nor human—caught in the gap between. But something that had, beyond question, once been human.

Viola was one of them. A single soul who couldn't even resist the ruin that had come for her—trampled without mercy under someone else's selfish scheme.

Faced with a misfortune beyond all reckoning, Aer felt herself hurled down, rammed into the bottom of an endless cliff.

Aer ground her teeth into her own lip. Hard enamel tore through soft skin, and red blood seeped out, somber, through the torn wound.

Seeing this, Viola spoke haltingly.

"Blood, blood. Hurts, hurts, blood."

"..."

Aer pressed her lips shut and wiped the blood staining her chin with the back of her hand.

Then, wringing out what remained of her shattered composure, she faced Viola.

"...If it's all right, there's something I'd like to ask."

"Yes, yes, g-good. Good."

"The people who did this to you. Do you know where they are?"

"Gone. Gone, gone. Th-those, peo—peeeople, left. Left. Far away. Far, far away."

Viola raised a hand and pointed somewhere. Where her sharp nail pointed—toward the harbor.

"...They boarded a ship and left, then. Completely."

"Y-yes, left. Left. City, left. Far away."

"...And the place they were staying. Where is that?"

"Yes, yes, there, there, now my house. My house. Friend there. Friend. Fwiend? Friend! Cute friend."

After a brief silence, Aer asked.

"Would it be all right if I came to your house?"

"Yes! Yes! Goo-ood. It's fine, good. Good."

Viola answered brightly, lightly clearing the wall. She turned her head round and round, urging Aer to hurry along.

Aer followed without a word.

It was not a route people could ordinarily pass through, but that made no difference to the two of them.

The further they went, the more desolate the streets became.

The signboards that had cluttered the earlier streets vanished entirely, and the elegant brick buildings gave way to wooden houses that looked ready to collapse at any moment.

A poverty that could not be hidden was smeared into every corner of the place.

"He-here, here, here it is."

"...Thank you."

The place Viola stopped was the most out-of-the-way corner even for a slum—no sunlight seemed to reach it at all, and an unpleasant dampness rose from the ground.

Moss gone soft and mushy with rot stuck in thick, clinging clumps to the soles of her shoes.

Aer wiped her shoes against the driest patch of ground she could find and stepped into a house that looked like it might come down at the first thread of wind.

"My, my, myyy friend. Fri-end. Friend."

Viola pointed with a long, sharp fingertip toward a corner of the room.

On a bundle of grimy cloth lay a small cat.

A dark chestnut-brown, teardrop-shaped mark on its forehead. This was the creature at the center of the ridiculous farce over which the Merchants' Guild chairman was so desperately searching.

The cat rose and padded over on light feet, its plump tail swaying.

It rubbed its face against Viola's bony wrist, as though welcoming her home.

"Oh, h-hello, hello, hello, sle-ep well, sle-ee-eep, sl-sleep well?"

Viola stroked her friend's small head with the back of a hand that showed every contour of bone.

Her touch was endlessly careful, as though wary that her sharp nails might so much as graze it.

As if it understood, the cat purred and preened, pleased with itself.

"My, my friend. Friend. Cute, isn't it cute?"

"...It's cute."

"A-at night, at night, in, in the city, city, I met it."

"I see."

The little cat, apparently displeased at losing attention, gave an irritated cry.

Viola turned hurriedly and soothed her small friend. That peaceful sight gouged brutally at some corner of Aer's heart.

Watching from a few steps away, Aer turned her back.

Her weary, downcast gaze swept the interior.

Mold blooming across the damp ceiling, a wooden floor caked in dried mud, old furnishings scattered in disarray, and dust like black wool clinging to everything.

However charitably one described it, there was no calling this anything but an old animal pen.

Through the humid, stale air, an unpleasant smell drifted faintly.

The foul stench of animal droppings and rotting carcasses. Her attentive gaze, sweeping carefully across the room, fixed on a wooden wardrobe against one wall.

Moving the wardrobe revealed a dark stairwell leading down.

Aer glanced once at the two friends absorbed in each other and started forward.

By the time her nose, eaten away by the stench, had gone entirely numb, her feet touched flat stone floor. A gentle flame appeared in the empty air, lighting the underground space.

A scene of raw, naked atrocity. Death and violence had seeped into everything, leaving nothing untouched.

Behind rusted iron bars—the bodies of animals, decayed past recognition of what they'd once been.

Broken claws and shattered teeth littered the ground underfoot. Fingernail-gouges soaked black-red, cracks from heavy blows—the stone floor and walls were riddled with them, chaotic, everywhere.

Some of these looked recent.

What had happened here drew itself vivid before her eyes.

Aer moved forward, holding herself in rigid silence. The flame overhead flickered, casting an eerie shadow across her face.

"..."

Aer stopped before a desk set incongruously among the iron bars.

On the desk sat a mound of burnt paper scraps and ash, and a few blank sheets rolled about in the bookshelf and drawer beside it.

The work bore signs of haste, but the crucial information had all been destroyed.

On the faint chance some small clue remained, a thick, clinging reluctance seized her by the ankles.

Then a sheet of paper, fallen inside the iron bars, caught her eye.

Aer drew her sword and cut through the rusted lock in a single stroke. The pieces of cleanly severed metal clattered noisily to the floor.

Aer sheathed her sword and stepped inside the bars. Avoiding the writhing swarm of maggots, she picked up the paper.

Dark red liquid had dried and cracked over most of it, but a few words written in black ink were still legible.

"This—"

The hand holding the paper trembled, faintly.