With no other choice, Harper led them to his hut.
Aisling followed him in silence while Harper ignored him, focusing his attention squarely on Sunny.
It was the first chance he’d had to be close to Sunny, and he didn’t want to waste it.
He didn’t want to look desperate like Harper; besides, that only fed other people’s suspicions.
Besides Sunny, there was one more person who’d been questioning and pestering him.
That racist Caster.
Or is it classist?
He wasn’t sure, and he had no proof, but he was certain the man looked at his hair before looking at him with that proud Legacy stare.
He’d meddled with something he shouldn’t have, without even knowing it.
They reached Harper’s small hut; it was a pitiful piece of work, though it earned extra points for actually having a door.
Aisling could almost smell Harper’s deep longing to return to the Bright Castle.
Once inside, they sat on the floor around a low wooden table.
Harper hesitated a moment, glancing at Aisling, and not wanting to waste time or the opportunity, he resigned himself to pulling out a glass jar; he also took out only a single clay cup, with the sole intention of showing hospitality to Sunny.
Aisling saw right through him and said:
“Harper, don’t worry about me; I don’t want to take advantage of your kind hospitality.”
A deep vein showed on Harper’s forehead as he gripped the glass jar tighter.
Sunny gave Aisling a curious look, then glanced at Harper.
He seemed to have worked out something about their relationship from that brief exchange, which drew a sigh out of him.
Aisling spoke to him:
“Something wrong, Sunny?”
Sunny waved a hand, signaling it was nothing important.
“I’ve figured out that you’re just weird.”
“Oh…
thanks.”
Sunny shook his head, letting out a small laugh.
Harper didn’t want to be left behind, seeing that their rapport, after just a few sentences, was already better than his own after several weeks.
“Here!”
He poured Sunny a cup.
Sunny took it and smelled the strange liquor.
He brought the cup to his lips and drank it in one gulp.
Harper filled the cup again quickly.
“I heard about the last hunt.
By the gods, you survived a run-in with a Messenger of the Spire!
It must have been horrible…”
Sunny stayed still, staring at the cup, and shrugged.
“I just stood in the back the whole time.”
“Even so, you’re amazing!
I heard you’ve been with Lady Changing Star from the very start, surviving more than two months in the labyrinth.
Is that true?”
Flushed from the liquor, Sunny smiled slowly:
“Ah, yeah!
In fact, if it weren’t for me, she’d have died a long time ago.
Do you know how many times I saved her life?”
Gritting his teeth, he suddenly went pale and whispered:
“…and for what?
Huh?
For…
for this?
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
How did this happen?!”
Sunny clutched his head and let out a dark laugh.
The atmosphere felt heavier; or so Harper must have felt, since he grew a little bolder:
“You must have fought shoulder to shoulder with Lady Nephis many times!”
Sunny lowered his head and then shrugged.
“Yeah.”
The gaunt young man hesitated for a moment, then asked cautiously:
“Then…
you must have seen her Aspect Ability, right?”
Sunny thought hard about something and answered:
“Sure.
It can be used to heal.”
Harper’s eyes lit up.
Of course.
That ability suits Lady Changing Star wonderfully.
Everyone knows she’s an angel…”
What are you doing, Sunny?
Aisling didn’t know what was going on, but something wasn’t going to end well.
And watching Sunny closely, he was being…
emotional?
He couldn’t stay any longer; he’d already bothered Harper enough, and the atmosphere kept growing stranger, even if Harper didn’t see it that way.
“I think that’s enough for me.”
He set his own cup down on the table and stood up.
Harper couldn’t hide his smile, trying to appear modest.
“What a shame.
I guess this is goodbye, then.”
Sunny just watched him go.
Stepping out of Harper’s makeshift hut, he ran into someone unexpected.
“You must be Caster, one of the great Dreamers who fight alongside Changing Star.”
“Oh…
it’s you?” Caster said with a friendly smile.
“Spending time with your friends?”
Aisling knew none of it was sincere.
He’d already talked to Caster a couple of times, and the man kept rehearsing the same garbage, obviously suspicious of him and interrogating him.
He was also completely certain that Caster didn’t even know his name.
How much do you have to look down on the lowly?
And that’s without even mentioning that you’re standing next to Silvery.
You’d fit in better with that tyrant Gunlaug.
“As a matter of fact, I was.
If you’ll excuse me, I hope this isn’t rude, but I’ll be heading off.”
Caster looked at him without hiding much of his true, irritated feelings about his presence, but he was interrupted by an unexpected sound.
A thud rang out, followed by a crash, as if something had been smashed to pieces.
Aisling and Caster hurried to the open doorway, catching a barely audible but unmistakable voice:
“Lost from Light!
I am Lost…
Lost from Light.”
That hoarse voice belonged to Sunny.
The scene before their eyes was disturbing: Sunny was on top of Harper, who lay there with a knife in his chest, bleeding profusely.
Sunny wasn’t in the best state either; despite having no wounds and his hands stained with blood, he was visibly shaken by what had happened, seeming to whisper to himself:
“I killed him because I wanted to survive.
I killed him…
because it was easy.”
He let out a sinister laugh and doubled over, vomiting miserably.
The scene was awful: the broken table, the smell of alcohol in the air, the bloodied body with a knife in its chest, and Sunny kneeling with blood on his hands and face.
This is unexpected.
An event I truly didn’t see coming.
Poor Sunny…
but magnificent.
He was about to speak when Caster summoned his sword.
Aisling held himself back completely.
He controlled every involuntary reaction in his body and focused on looking stunned as he watched Sunny.
My fault…
I let myself get carried away.
He should have seen it coming, but he couldn’t help giving Sunny his full attention; the situation was just too absurd.
Caster made a wide swing, which gave him the chance to glance out of the corner of his eye, catching the motion and seeing, unable to stop himself from noticing, the sword arc through the air aimed at his neck.
Aisling’s head went flying as it parted from his body.
* * *
Caster went out to find something for Sunny to clean the blood off with and to deal with Harper’s and Aisling’s bodies.
Sunny had been startled to see Aisling’s head hit the floor; unfortunately, it made a grim kind of sense.
He couldn’t help feeling bad about it, unlike with Harper, since he’d barely gotten to know him, and on top of that, the man was a friend of Effie’s, so he tried not to think too poorly of him for it; but to Caster, Aisling must have looked like a variable that could put everything at risk, which was why he’d killed him as soon as possible.
After losing himself indefinitely in his thoughts and Memories, Caster brought back water, strips of cloth, and a rough tunic.
While Sunny washed the blood off his body, the proud Legacy carefully moved Harper’s corpse to a corner, buried it under the pile of seaweed, and cleaned the blood off the floor as best he could.
This way, a passing glance inside the hut wouldn’t reveal much.
Of course, with even the slightest scrutiny, the signs of what had happened there would become obvious.
As he did all this, Caster kept talking:
“The easiest way to get rid of a corpse is to just throw it off the platform.
With luck, it won’t land on the road. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
But even if it does, no one will pay it much mind.
People die constantly here in the Dark City, especially those living in the outer settlement.”
He paused, then continued:
“However, we can’t do that here, because Harper isn’t just some nobody — he worked for the Lord of the Bright Castle.
The guards will take an interest in his sudden death and use it to cause trouble for you and Lady Nephis.
As for the other one, he’s far too suspicious to just let go.
So we have to make them both disappear completely.
It won’t be easy.”
Sunny was a genuine amateur when it came to murder, and he really couldn’t compete with the Legacies.
After talking it over, and with Caster handling the planning, they left the wretched hut behind.
Unnoticed by anyone, Sunny made his way back to his room.
He thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, tormented both by his knowledge of what Nephis was planning and by the memories of Harper dying at his hands, and of unfortunate Aisling, who’d gotten caught in the crossfire.
But in the end, his exhausted mind slipped into oblivion the moment his head touched the pillow.
* * *
The next night, two bodies were dumped in the ruins without a second thought, left to rot or be eaten by Nightmare Creatures, like anyone else within the Forgotten Shore.
With no one else around, a beautiful woman with exotic grey skin approached one of the bodies.
“Is this him?”
The woman seemed to be asking the air itself; however, a doll with eyes full of darkness sat on her shoulder, pointing at one of the corpses.
They approached the headless corpse.
Seishan asked again:
“Where’s the head?”
Cian pointed further into the ruins.
Dragging the headless corpse along, they walked several paces before finding an ugly Nightmare Creature licking Aisling’s head with its long, serpentine tongue.
The moment Aisling’s lifeless eyes reflected Seishan’s figure, his features contorted and he looked delighted.
“Sei!
I’m right here.
Look at me, take a good look.
I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve got a certain charm with mindless creatures.”
Seishan brought a hand to her head and let out a weary sigh.
Right after, she summoned a war hammer.
The monster wasn’t very strong; Seishan dispatched it quickly and pressed the head back onto the neck.
Slowly, the tissue could be seen knitting back together, and Aisling became whole once more.
“Not bad, considering last time some spiders mistook my head for an egg.”
Aisling laughed, lost in the memory.
Seishan grew more serious as she asked:
“How did you end up like this?”
“That…
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It wasn’t that serious, but it looks like I’ll need to step it up a little if we want to keep going.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Yes and no.
I was hoping not to, but life is magnificent.”
Taking Cian off her shoulder, Seishan nodded and set her on top of Aisling’s head.
“We’ll move straight on to the next step.
Meet with Changing Star.”
* * *
Aisling decided to spend the night inside the castle and went over his diary entries with Cian.
They were called entries in the Observation Diary, but he had no notebook or paper to write anything down in; they were purely mental notes where he organized what he picked up on.
“There aren’t any interesting entries left to add to the diary…
Gathering up the changes of these past few weeks: besides getting decapitated, Nephis is quite the sight to watch — she genuinely wants to make the world tremble.”
Cian nodded her little head, sitting beside him.
“What drives her is something more than just going home.
The Immortal Flame Clan doesn’t exist anymore.
Why want to go back so badly, then?
That’s the one thing that doesn’t fit within the picture.”
Cian shook her arm forcefully.
“Revenge?
Could be.
If that’s the case, it would be a sick kind of revenge.
We can rule out love; she’s young and naive about that sort of thing, and she has no family left…”
Aisling pulled out a small brush, taking Cian into his hands.
Inside his dark room, he brushed the doll’s hair until she was satisfied.