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Illyria had entered a rare era of peace. The Universal Will and the Valentines had all but disappeared, and Ky and Dizzy were able to make a life for themselves in the Castle, old as it was, hardly ever having to leave. Sol visited occasionally, and noted each time that the stones on the outside looked a little more worn and that moss had begun to form in the cracks of the cobbles. Every time, as well, Ky looked a little more sullen, his face somehow even whiter than it normally was. The service was getting bad, too – rumours were flying all across the country that the King would fire servants at any perceived slight against him. Ky and Dizzy both seemed to be cast with a strange affliction that drove them further and further into the maze of rooms that made up Illyria Castle.
There were rumours in the press of Ky going slowly insane within the walls of the fortress, of a strange curse that had been put on the place by a Nightwalker, and of strange experiments occurring inside its deepest sanctums. Of course, nobody really thought anything of these rumours, and the few remaining workers within the Castle did nothing to either confirm or deny the accusations. Apart from Ky’s obvious depression, there was no reason to really suspect anything out of the ordinary. Sol’s visits had remained cordial, and he looked forward, every few months, to dropping by for drinks.
On the night that Sol received the news, the sky appeared strangely darker than usual, the cloud-cover thick and grey as the storm raged. The wind almost whispered to Sol from outside of his office. He had almost fallen asleep, an empty bottle of vodka lying on its side in front of him. Suddenly, an incoming transmission had roused him. He shook his head, sighed, and accepted the call.
“Ugh, this is Sol, what’s up?”
“Sol, it’s... it’s Sin here,” came the voice, interspersed with sounds Sol could only interpret as sobbing. “It’s Mom... she’s... she’s hurt, real bad. I don’t know what’s happened, but... you need to get to the castle. If you could help get to the bottom of this, I’d be so thankful – and I’m sure Dad would be grateful to you, too...”
“Calm down, kid,” Sol replied, “I’m sure everything’s gonna be fine, you hear?” He paused for a second, and the dead air hung between them like a rope. “Why – why hasn’t Ky called me? Or the police, or an ambulance, or something?”
“He doesn’t trust them. Hell, he doesn’t trust anyone anymore,” Sin said, his voice wavering over the line. “We’re about the only people that he’d trust with this. And even then, I think he’s getting paranoid. You’ve gotta get down here, Sol, I swear--”
“Hey, hey,” Sol hushed. “I’ll get down there right away. Stay with her, kid. I swear it’ll all be okay.” He grunted as he lifted himself from his chair, ending the transmission with a careless button-press. Still a little groggy from the alcohol, he put on his coat, grabbed the Fireseal, and scrawled a note with the nearest quill. Illyria Castle. Back soon. Sol.
Sol rushed out into the rain, stumbling as he did, and hailed the nearest cab. He slipped a couple extra dollars to the driver as he got in, murmuring that he’d make it worth his while if he got them to the Castle as soon as possible. The driver smiled, took the extra cash, and sped off into the city, ignoring the occasional flash of lightning from the dark sky. The wind had picked up, and the ride was a little wobbly, but the driver soon dropped Sol in front of the stone-paved staircase leading to the mouth of the Castle. The towering spires silhouetted themselves against the sky as the downpour continued.
He hurried into the fortress, drips of water cascading down his coat as he ran up the spiral staircase in the heart of the Castle. There, in the middle of the corridor, was something almost recognisable as Dizzy, with the shivering figure of Sin kneeling next to her. Sol’s heart sank as he got closer and closer to the two. Ky was nowhere to be seen in the magic-lit hallway, conspicuous in his absence.
Sin looked up at Sol, and ran to embrace him. “Thank you... God, thank you for being here. Something unspeakable has happened.” His eyes darted around the room, and sweat dotted his forehead. “Quickly... I’m scared we don’t have much time.”
Sol gently pushed Sin aside, striding to where Dizzy lay. She was lying face-up on the wooden floor, her head propped up against the skirting-board at the end of the corridor. Her skin was incredibly pale – unnervingly pale – and Sol’s chest tightened as he realised that Dizzy was missing her wings. Her neck had been cut by something sharp, but the wound was ragged, the skin around it hanging like fabric.
“Have you cleaned her wounds?” Sol finally asked, after a minute of quiet shock.
“No,” Sin said, “there wasn’t any blood. None at all. I wasn’t sure what to do to help her. “God, old man, is there anything we can do?”
Sol placed a hand on the side of Dizzy’s neck, trying – and failing – to find a pulse. Her skin – hell, her entire body – was as cold as the rain outside, and her flesh seemed desiccated despite the humidity. It was almost a mummification.
“Fuck,” Sol exclaimed, murmuring panicked expletives as he desperately felt around for a pulse. “Dizzy, what son of a bitch has done this to you? Jesus...” Finally, giving in to his anxiety, he slapped her across the face in an attempt to wake her. Her eyes fluttered open, glazed over and grey, and she began taking laborious, rasping breaths. Her lips began moving, turning the breath into a whisper.
“Valentine...”
“What’s she saying? Mom!?” Sin yelled. Dizzy’s eyes tracked over to look at Sin, and her movements entirely stopped. Sin began uncontrollably weeping, loudly screaming in anguish.
“I’m... I’m so sorry, kid,” Sol let out, his senses refusing to accept this as real. “I’ll... I’ll find out who did this, I swear to you. And I’ll stop this, whatever it is.” He stood up, patted Sin on the back, and took out a portable communicator.
“Yeah, we’re gonna need an ambulance. Stat,” he grumbled, and re-entered the Castle.
The ambulance arrived about an hour later. Dizzy hadn’t moved, spoken, or opened her eyes since, and Sin was still understandably incoherent, distraught at what had happened to his mother. Sol, meanwhile, marched through the maze of hallways that made up the Castle, eventually reaching the central sanctum, where it was rumoured Ky had been hiding from the world.
The locked door was no match for Sol’s brute strength, and it swung open, hitting the wall behind it with a mighty slam. At the back of the sanctum sat Ky, propped up by pillows on his four-poster bed. He barely looked up at Sol as he approached, his boots clicking on the marble floor as he stormed up to the King.
“Ky, you have a lot of explaining to do,” Sol grunted, the contempt obvious in his voice.
Ky continued his blank staring, his blonde hair falling over his face, which was caked in dried tears and cold sweat. Yellow pills, some crushed into pieces, lay scattered around him. “Sol,” he murmured, “I... help... it’s them. They’ve done something terrible, Sol...”
“Who?” Sol asked, still directing a piercing, interrogative gaze at Ky. “Who is they? I thought we were past playing pronoun games, pal.”
“I can’t... I can’t tell you, Sol. They’d hurt me. Oh, Lord, they’d hurt me, like they hurt her...” Sol could see that Ky was shaking, his face growing even paler than normal. A fresh tear ran down his cheek, splashing onto the velvet below him. Frantically, he raised his arm up, pointing past Sol and into the darkness of the hallway. “God, she’s right there... talk to her, Sol, tell her to go away. I can’t do it, she won’t listen, she won’t listen to me, Sol...”
Sol hesitated before looking into the shaded hallway. For an instant, he swore to himself that he saw a wisp of white fabric slip out of view. He reassured himself that it was nerves, even though the sight had – for some reason – thrown a dagger of ice into his heart, filling him with unexplainable dread. “What, Ky? There’s...” He paused, before taking a deep breath and continuing, “...there’s nothing there. Shit, Ky, Dizzy’s dead. You need to tell me what’s up.”
Ky shook more intensely than before, and his speech became incoherent as he kept pointing into the blackness and shouting at nothing. Sol thought about slapping Ky, as well, but reasoned himself away from it. There’d have to be some other way of getting this information. The image of Dizzy’s crumpled body flashed into his head, and he walked out of the room, weaving himself back through the hallways and out of the Castle. Parked outside, a police car sat with its lights on, and Sol could see a cop inside the car filling out paperwork. He went up to the window, knocked on it, and motioned for the cop to wind it down.
“Listen,” Sol said, summoning as reasonable a tone as he could, “I don’t know what’s going on in there, but someth—”
“It’s nothing,” the cop replied dismissively. “Probably just an accident, honestly. There are plenty of things that could’ve caused something like this, and, honestly, Ky’s made it pretty clear that we’re not exactly supposed to look into it like a homicide. Gears are... complicated, and I don’t want to get into their business, either.”
“She was entirely drained of blood. Her wings had been cut off and taken. What part of this screams ‘accident’ to you?”
“Look, pal, I’m just here to fill out the forms--”
“You’re one hell of a useless son of a bitch,” Sol muttered, hitting the police car with his fist before storming back into the Castle. He pulled out his communicator as he trod up the central staircase, and tried desperately to remember where Ky had put the servants’ offices when he designed this Godforsaken place. He ran through the corridors, opening every door. Every room looked exactly the same – bare, wood-lined, and completely useless – and Sol began to question what Ky had been screaming about.
After what seemed like an hour of searching, Sol stumbled upon a nondescript door in the left wing of the Castle. Upon throwing it open, he found a desk with papers scattered across its surface, lit only by the gloom of the night outside. He lit one of the lamps in the room, and began shuffling through all of the papers, attempting to find anything that could point him toward what had happened that night. He threw away piles upon piles of legal paperwork, deeds to various properties around Europe, a half-finished autobiography, and a century’s worth of employment records, tossing them off the desk in increasing amounts of frustration. Finally, he came across a small, staple-bound paper booklet. The faded inscription on the front read Illyria Castle Employee Directory, 2190. Sol shrugged to himself, and began searching through the directory for anyone who could provide any input.
He flicked through the pamphlet until he came across a few names that looked familiar under the heading Science Team. One name above all of them stood out, reigniting old memories in Sol’s mind. Dr. Paradigm; Chief Researcher, Illyria Science Team. Contact:...
He entered the details into his communicator and waited for an answer. The coverage in this part of the Castle was patchy, and the device seemed to be acting up a little. The display visibly flickered and glitched as the machine ran the details and tried its hardest to make contact. As the indicators beeped, Sol caught another glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned around abruptly, and saw another flash of glowing white, seeming to exit the room as he swivelled to look, but he was soon distracted again by Paradigm’s voice cutting through the white noise of the rain outside.
“Ahoy, this is Dr. Paradigm... to whom do I owe this very late-night displeasure?”
“It’s Sol. I need to talk to you.”
“Sol... Sol Badguy? Goodness, it’s been years... I haven’t spoken with you since...”
“Yeah, since Ariels. Listen, I need you to cut the shit. Do you know anything about what’s going on with Dizzy and Ky?”
“Oh,” Paradigm replied. The dread in his voice was tenable, even through the tinny speaker of Sol’s communicator. “I don’t believe I am privileged to tell you that information. Why, has Ky said something?”
“He’s completely incoherent. Keeps pointing at things that aren’t there. And Dizzy... Paradigm, Dizzy’s dead, I’m pretty sure. So you need to stop fucking around and tell me what’s going on, doc. This is serious shit.”
There was a long pause in the communication. The air seemed to grow thick and cold around Sol as the silence dragged on, sending a frisson down his spine. Just as he was about to yell out, Paradigm’s voice streamed through the speaker.
“I... I know what’s going on. Meet me there... in His Majesty’s chamber, I mean... as soon as you can. I’ll be there tout de suite, I assure you. Do not speak to... them...” he mumbled, and the call dropped. Sol stood up, picking up the directory and the communicator, and started trying to re-trace his steps to find the room Ky had holed himself up in. Every corner he walked around filled him with less and less confidence that the rumours were false, and the coldness in the air made him shiver more intensely with every single corridor. He kept seeing those ghostly white tendrils of fabric, now much clearer than they were before, seemingly just in front of him as he increased his pace. They seemed to be connected to a long dress, like the train of a torn wedding gown, but there was no way of knowing exactly what it was – it kept escaping from his view, tantalising him, never fully satisfying his curiosity. Perhaps it was just the adrenaline. Perhaps it was something else entirely.
A long while later, Sol found the door to Ky’s bedroom, letting himself in with a flourish. Paradigm sat on a small, wooden stool, holding a handkerchief to the King’s head. He was still incoherent, muttering almost endlessly about nothing in particular that Sol could make out, and he had collapsed into the pile of pillows he had been using to hold himself up. Paradigm looked at Sol, and motioned for him to come over.
“I need you to tell me, Sol... how many of the pills did you give him?” He motioned toward the pills on the bedclothes, still scattered at random around Ky’s shivering body.
“None – I swear, I have no idea what they’re for...”
“I need to administer the medicine. Too much could kill him... too little, and... the problems will continue.”
“None, I said,” Sol shouted. “What the hell is happening, Paradigm? There are... things, in the Castle, that weren’t here when I got here.”
Paradigm sighed. “I suppose I can tell you... you must understand that this is privileged, top secret information. You must not breathe a word of this to a single soul. Having Ky remain in the Castle was risky enough.”
“I promise,” Sol said hurriedly. “Tell me, doc.”
Paradigm grabbed a small handful of the pills and forced them down Ky’s throat, rubbing his neck to get him to swallow each one of them. “Do you remember the Assassins? What they did here?”
Sol looked puzzled. “I remember there was an attempt, a while ago, but nothing more happened --”
“It was Slayer,” Paradigm interrupted. “A Nightwalker... he came here, years ago, into this very room, and tried to assassinate His Majesty, much like many before had. He was swiftly apprehended, and Ky did an astounding job of fighting him off, but... he wounded him. Through this wound, Ky gained marvellous, but uncontrollable powers...”
“Oh, you dramatic fuck,” Sol groaned. “What happened to Dizzy? What happened to Ky?”
“Have you ever had a hallucination, Sol? I have no doubt that someone with as much... trauma as you, I hazard to guess, has seen things that weren’t real, has heard voices...”
“Yeah, what’s it to you?”
“Ky has the same condition, mostly. And it’s manageable with anti-psychotic medications, but... Nightwalker-induced trauma hits a person a little differently than normal trauma. That is to say, its implications cross the wall between mental and... physical...”
“You mean hallucinations did this?”
“Essentially, yes, though... I need to do more research, obviously. The most extreme it’s ever gotten was the creation of Elphelt and Ramlethal, as well as the original Valentine and its offspring... the Universal Will, the Backyard, they were the result of an extremely traumatised, unmedicated, unmanaged mind, especially one with such power over the world around it. The mind of a King is not to be trifled with.”
“So how does this explain what happened to Dizzy?”
“According to my research, these physical manifestations can gain power by somehow acquiring the Ki of another being. Being that Dizzy was probably somewhere nearby, it is unfortunately likely that they immediately attempted to extract her blood, and her wings, the source of her magic... and, even less fortunately, they seem to have succeeded.”
He was interrupted by Ky coughing up his pills, spitting them onto the bedsheets with a small pool of bright red blood surrounding them. They had not dissolved at all.
“His throat is too dry – I need to get him water...” Paradigm stopped speaking, and looked, open-mouthed, at the door to the bedchamber. Sol turned, and saw a familiar, yet almost spectral figure standing in the door. Elphelt, appearing slightly transparent against the dim flicker of the magic-lit lamps of the hallway, stood silently in the shadow of the door-frame.
“So, you’ve come to hurt us?” she whimpered as she walked into the room, her wedding dress, in tatters, trailing behind her. “You promised, Ky, you promised to keep me safe! I wanted to see the world, to go to Paris with someone I really liked, to have a honeymoon, to do all sorts of things that normal people do! I won’t let you take it from me again, Ky... and your friends, too...”
“Elphelt, I...” Sol gasped. “I’m sorry. I never realised...”
“You know what I have to do now,” Elphelt replied, “but neither of us are going to like it. For the record,” she said, posing for a non-existent camera, “I always thought you were cute. Although you were way cuter a few years ago.” She pulled out two guns, and, without hesitation, fired them both at Sol. Sol dived out the way, leaving the bullets to ricochet off the marble column behind him.
As he got up, he could see Paradigm clutching his throat. He collapsed to the floor, with blood pooling around him. Elphelt smiled, and made a bee-line for Ky and Paradigm.
Sol tripped her before she could get near, with a well-placed blow from the Fireseal aimed at her legs. She fell, dropping her pistols onto the floor in front of her, causing them to clatter into the wall on the other side of the room. Sol rushed toward Ky, trying to force him to swallow the pills. After he thought he’d gotten one or two down, he was tripped in turn by Elphelt, who began to punch him over and over, holding him by the collar of his jacket.
“Don’t pretend you haven’t hurt beings like us before, Sol,” she grunted, pausing occasionally to hit him. “Remember your Servants? You don’t use them anymore. Why is that, Sol? Didn’t you think we were pretty enough?”
Sol managed to kick her between the legs, causing her to reel in pain. Sol looked over at Ky, who appeared to have kept the pills down, even without water. Some consciousness must have remained in there, he reasoned, and he went back to subduing Elphelt.
“Didn’t you want to get married, Sol?” she yelled as he slashed fire toward her. “You could still do it. You could keep me around, for example,” she shouted, tripping over a blast of flame that Sol had sent her way.
“I work alone! Besides, I’ve wasted enough time on you already,” he said through his teeth, unleashing a flurry of random punches, kicks, and anything else he could muster in her general direction. “Stay outta Ky’s head, you little bastard.” As he attacked her, he could see that she was gradually becoming less opaque, her skin now almost see-through.
Sol kicked Elphelt in the head, sending her flying across the room, landing next to Paradigm, her dress getting covered in the growing pool of blood. She ran her finger through the pool, licked it, and smiled. “Gear blood... so satisfying...”
She got up, running toward Sol, who stood near the doorway, his legs obviously weak from fatigue. Still, he prepared his sword, aiming it towards Elphelt’s neck. Just as both of them were about to strike at each other, Elphelt was held back by a chain around her neck. Sin had arrived, not without ceremony.
“Help me hold her, old man!” he yelped, fighting against Elphelt’s waning strength. Sol rushed over, grabbed a chain from his belt, and tightened it around Elphelt’s legs. “Get it ‘round her arms, kid!”
Elphelt eventually stopped trying to fight. Gradually, she faded into nothingness as she lay on the ground, her dress deteriorating more and more until she disappeared. After a few moments of nothing, Sol and Sin both felt compelled to let out a relieved sigh. Paradigm, clutching his throat, rose from the hard floor, and immediately started tending to Ky.
“Paradigm! How...”
“They were only hallucinations,” he retorted, rubbing the spot on his throat where the bullet had gone in. There was no wound, and the blood on the ground had somehow dissipated. “None of that was real... though it could’ve been, if you’d messed around a little more, Sol...”
“Is Dad gonna be okay?” Sin interjected. “I mean... is he okay?”
“He’ll be okay. He needs to regain his strength. In today’s climate, I would recommend some supervised care. Luckily,” he said, as he bent over and picked up a small paper booklet, “somebody brought me a list of employees that could be re-hired, including nurses. Your father – I think – will be right as rain. All we need is to keep him medicated.”
“And Mom--”
“Theoretically, she should be fine. Her life-force was drained by entities that have now been shown never to have existed. Causally, this means that that never happened. You, however,” he muttered, pointing his finger at both Sin and Sol, “should really get into some therapy before you run into the same problem. Imagine what this could have been like if this were the psychosis of a Gear...”
Sin and Sol thanked the doctor. After finding their way out of the labyrinth that was the interior of the Castle, they climbed the staircase and ran into the corridor where they had found Dizzy. Somehow, her body had ended up back there, no longer dried out and cold, her skin flushed with blood. Sol found a pulse instantly, and told Sin to keep her warm. He left the Castle, called a cab, and found his way home, stumbling from tiredness and exhaustion.
Before he fell asleep, he swallowed a couple of small pills with a shot of whiskey. As he drifted off, he dreamed of Ky and Dizzy, and made a mental note to enrol in the UN’s group therapy programme.
Just in case.