At first, Ian assumed it was only the wind brushing past the window and paid it no attention.
Then, not long afterward, he realized it wasn’t.
Bang!
One night, he woke to the violent rattling of the window and a sound like something being torn apart.
His mind was still thick with sleep. As he struggled to blink himself awake, that same ‘sound’ seeped through the window again.
Ian had never heard anything like it before.
Not sure whether he was still dreaming, he forced his heavy eyelids open even as they kept trying to fall shut again.
……
He couldn’t seem to wake up properly.
Shaking his head in an attempt to clear the oppressive fog weighing it down, Ian climbed out of bed and took a step toward the curtained window.
Creeak.
A warped, twisting noise came from the carefully fitted frame.
Maybe the wind was strong enough to damage it.
But what had that earlier sound been?
It seemed to have come from the forest.
He couldn’t be certain.
The mansion was surrounded by wilderness, so there was nothing strange about animals living out there.
Bears.
Foxes.
Maybe even something larger.
But the noise hadn’t sounded like an animal.
Ian slowly raised a hand and murmured,
“Something, a little more… than that…”
Even in his dreams, his name was still Ian.
At the voice that suddenly came from behind him, Ian froze just as he was about to open the window.
He turned.
Ed stood there.
He had entered without knocking and, as always, wore that gentle smile.
“The master will be returning soon.”
Again.
The same words.
Ian had already heard them several times.
His brows drew together slightly as he opened his mouth.
But with his vocal cords ruined, he couldn’t even ask what he wanted to know.
He closed his mouth again and simply stared.
Ed responded by suggesting that he return to bed and sleep.
Standing ramrod straight, the butler never took his eyes off Ian until he climbed back beneath the covers.
Shadows swayed across the walls in the flickering candlelight.
Ed’s face, however, remained perfectly still.
Still smiling.
Even after Ian closed his eyes, he could feel the man’s gaze lingering on him.
For several minutes, Ian deliberately slowed his breathing and pretended to sleep.
Only then did he hear the door close.
And so, for the next two weeks, Ian lived like a shadow.
No one treated him as though he were truly there.
So perhaps it was more accurate to say he behaved as though he weren’t.
But as the days passed, his certainty that this was all a dream gradually began to erode.
Every thought that began with what if sounded ridiculous.
And yet he had no explanation for a reality that remained unchanged no matter how many times he fell asleep and woke again.
There was no mirror in the room.
Still, the face reflected faintly in the window glass was his own.
If anything had changed—
it was his hair.
It now reached all the way to his waist.
It looked well cared for, soft and glossy.
But Ian had never grown his hair past his shoulders in his life, so to him it was nothing more than an inconvenience.
He wanted to cut it.
Unfortunately, with what little was available in the room, that was impossible.
Apparently, they thought he might hurt himself.
Every sharp object had been removed.
Of course, if he had truly wanted to die, he could have ripped down the curtains and hanged himself instead.
The thought amused him enough that, on a whim, he actually tore the curtains down.
The next day, when Ed brought his meal, he merely glanced at the fallen fabric and remarked in the same indifferent tone,
“It seems the pins came loose.”
Naturally, the window remained bare after that.
“……”
Watching Ed behave as though nothing unusual had happened, Ian felt questions slowly begin to pile up inside him.
He had never been much of a talker, so being unable to communicate did not frustrate him as much as it might have someone else.
Still, he wanted to know one thing.
How long was he expected to keep playing along with this incomprehensible game of confinement?
And on the evening he thought that—
No.
More precisely, the afternoon of the fifteenth day.
The mansion, usually so unnaturally quiet, suddenly became noisy.
Then a tremendous trumpet blast pierced through the window frame.
Ian, who had been dozing in a patch of sunlight, opened his eyes at once.
Wondering what was happening, he turned his head.
Through the curtainless window, he could just make out the massive castle gates opening in the distance.
What is it?
The last of his drowsiness vanished.
Ian rose and approached the window.
Beyond the gates, now spread wide open, a haze of dust was rising between the dense trees.
He had never seen those gates open before.
He narrowed his eyes, trying to make out what was happening from so far away.
Then dozens of horses burst through the cloud of dust and flooded into the grounds.
Ian opened the window.
The thunder of hooves crashed over him.
The earth itself seemed to tremble beneath the approaching riders.
Every one of them was clad in jet-black armor.
For the first time, the mansion—usually silent as a tomb—seemed to come alive by magic.
People poured out from inside to greet the returning group.
Voices rose in cheerful conversation.
Laughter.
Calls of welcome.
Sounds Ian had not heard even once during the past two weeks.
A short cheer went up.
Then the castle gates slammed shut again as though they had never opened in the first place.
The deafening trumpet had already fallen silent.
The whole scene looked like something from an old medieval film.
Ignoring the cold wind, Ian rested his arms against the terrace railing and watched the procession below.
As the riders drew closer to the mansion, a foul metallic smell drifted toward him on the wind.
Ian had always had a sensitive nose.
If the scent was strong enough to reach him from what was nearly the fourth floor, then there was little mystery as to what they had been doing before they returned.
Swords and spears hung from their waists and backs.
Ian watched blankly as polished metal flashed in the sunlight.
At last, the riders reached the space before the mansion and pulled on their reins almost as one.
The horses cried out as they came to a halt.
The people who hurried forward to meet them looked strangely relieved.
Ian watched the unfamiliar scene in silence.
Then a booming voice suddenly rang out from nearby.
“He’s alive!”
That single remark turned every head toward him.
The cheerful atmosphere vanished instantly.
For a brief moment, silence fell.
It was almost eerie.
Dozens of faces turned in his direction at once, every one of them staring.
Ian, now the center of attention, didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow.
He merely shifted his gaze toward the source of the voice.
“……”
What are you looking at?
That was what he wanted to ask.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t speak.
Feeling like some random pedestrian who had been singled out for no reason on the street, Ian lowered the arm resting against the railing.
Only then did the chatter abruptly resume.
The guards stationed below, as usual, looked up and shouted something at him.
Ian ignored them.
The distance was too great for him to make out anyone’s expression clearly.
Even so, the mood was unmistakably unfriendly.
No matter how hard he strained his ears, there was no chance of hearing the words they were openly whispering among themselves.
Every so often, however, one word carried clearly enough.
‘Rox.’
Again and again.
Ian didn’t know what it meant.
Still, the word sounded strangely familiar.
Which meant he had probably heard it around the mansion before.
Beyond that, there was nothing else he could learn.
Seeing no reason to keep watching, Ian was just about to turn back inside when—
someone dismounted from the black horse at the very front.
The man leaped down with effortless grace.
He landed lightly.
Took a single step.
And the entire courtyard fell silent.
As though no one had been speaking at all.
Unlike the armored riders around him, the man wore a cloth uniform.
Even from this distance, he was noticeably tall.
Ian couldn’t see his face from this angle.
But one thing was obvious.
Without anyone needing to say a word, every person present had focused their attention on him.
Only then did Ian understand.
The master Ed kept speaking about—
had finally returned.
“The master’s journey was quite arduous, so you will most likely be able to meet him tomorrow.”
Not long afterward, Ed entered the room, set a meal on the table, and delivered the news.
He was a man who always smiled and revealed almost nothing of what he was thinking.
Today, however, even Ian could tell.
Ed was in an unusually good mood.
Is he really that happy?
Perhaps sensing Ian’s blatant stare, the butler raised his head.
Over the two weeks Ian had been confined here, Ed was the closest thing he had had to a conversation partner.
No—
calling it conversation was probably generous.
Still, the old butler was the person Ian had seen most often.
Ian wanted to know what was going on.
But he couldn’t speak.
And Ed never volunteered a single word beyond what was strictly necessary.
As a result, Ian knew almost nothing.
Until now, he had dismissed the entire situation as a dream and hadn’t bothered taking it seriously.
But the moment he saw that man in the courtyard, an uneasy premonition crawled slowly up from his ankles.
Ian almost never had feelings like that.
So for the first time since waking here, he made a deliberate attempt to communicate with someone.
More precisely, he traced a writing motion against his palm with one finger.
It was vague enough to resemble some absurd guessing game.
Yet Ed, with his unsettling perceptiveness, understood immediately.
“Please wait a moment.”
He left the room.
When he returned shortly afterward, he carried a tray.
On it sat a pen, an inkwell, and several sheets of paper.
“You may write here.”
A notepad and ballpoint pen would have been more than enough.
This felt unnecessarily ceremonial.
Ian couldn’t exactly complain aloud, however, so he accepted the items without protest.
After figuring out how to open the inkwell, he dipped the pen nib into the ink.
What should I ask first?
There were too many things he wanted to know.
He settled on the most important.
“Hmm…”
Ed’s expression became strangely peculiar when Ian handed him the sheet bearing a single question.
Where am I?
The butler examined the writing several times.
Carefully.
Then he looked at Ian and spoke.
“Pardon me, but could you please write it in Shettian?”
What is he talking about?
Ian tilted his head at the unfamiliar word.
Ed explained that he did not know the language of Rox very well.
He seemed completely incapable of reading the English cursive written across the top of the white page.
Acting on a hunch, Ian tried Spanish.
Ed couldn’t read that either.
Ian had needed foreign languages for his commissions, so he could manage basic conversation in several of them.
He tried writing in a few more.
Not a single character was recognizable to Ed.
Finally, just in case, Ian wrote something in Korean.
The only response he received was a troubled groan.
I can understand everything they’re saying just fine.
So what the hell is this?