by Kell Inkston
This one is of a fantastical suit of full armor, presumably a knight or armored soldier from the older days, Colette thinks. This one, however, is ludicrously tall, and its sword is nearly as long. The feeling exuding from the painting isn’t exactly noble like Miss Irefall’s portrait, rather, Colette feels somehow threatened by the work of art, as if the suit of armor were addressing her as an intruder and was preparing to strike. What else, there’s a small glint tucked into the right-side frame, like a piece of metal. She shrugs it off, certain that neither the glint, nor the figure have any significance, and she heads on.
The next door contains a full library of magical books, a concerning collection of humming, trembling, whispering volumes of witchcraft and wizardry. Colette scans over the funny room for just a little longer than she should, enjoying the bright, all-business atmosphere of the room contrasting against the horrific hallway she was just down. She briefly considers snatching a book or two and studying it for her fight against the overlord, but decides that the Black Eye would be more than enough to serve that purpose.
She ducks out of the room, but something strikes her peripheral vision - the painting. She swings around and inspects it again. Colette’s certain that the armor in the painting was looking a bit to the left when she first saw it, but now it’s looking directly down, straight to the door she peeked into. Another burst of adrenaline, another cold wave of sweat overcomes her. She smirks dismissively and keeps on.
Colette checks the next room, and then the next. Each new door reveals a workshop or study of some kind dedicated to furthering one’s knowledge in the occult. Whirring, buzzing, scraping alchemical-monstrosities crawl along the floor in useless confusion, and the walls speak with magical languages, each more diabolical and precious to Irefall than the last. Finally, Colette reaches for the final door, presumably leading to Irefall’s most secretive room, and it’s locked. Colette eyes the unassuming keyhole just under the knob in the hall of azure shadows, and takes a deep breath. Where’s the key? She remembered The Captain’s briefing on the matter, that on his estimates there will likely be some form of guard with the key.
Smartly, she secures her grasp on her pistol grip just as she hears the thin, delicate ping of metal being struck. She turns around to stare down the long hallway, and spots, glinting in the blue light, a key, floating in the air towards the back of the hall from whence she came. It ebbs and flows about the room enticingly, its bronze-shimmer flinging reflected light across Colette’s cautioned gaze. She stuffs her pistol back into the shoulder harness, and goes instead for the occult salt and banishing slip.
The key moves forward in the air eerily. There’s scarcely any time to prepare, she’s certain. She puts her thumb into the salt jar’s lid and pops the cap. With every second in the silent hall, the key continues forward and its possessor begins to take shape and dreary color. This being doesn’t appear all at once, but rather, its incorporeality is banished bit by bit as it closes the distance. Only partially clear now is the intimidating armored figure from the painting, floating menacingly in anticipation with the key in hand. The small glint in the picture frame was, indeed, the key to Irefall’s most treasured chamber. With the knight is the same, monstrously-long sword, held at rest with the tip of the blade hovering just a centimeter over the carpeted hall floor as it awaits mortal blood.
Colette spreads a thin line of salt along the floor from one wall to the other as she flexes for movement. “I don’t suppose you’d be cool with just giving me the key and I’ll scream for you? Pretty sure you don’t get much affirmation tucked away here.”
The phantom tosses the key to the hall behind it and enters a striking stance, poising its human-length blade with dangerous intent. “Whet thine taste,” the armor speaks in a wispy, ethereal voice, a mere phantom of the original owner’s voice.
Colette squints. “Uh, what?”
“I’m going to kill you,” it clarifies.
“Have it your way, dude.”
With a fathomless howl the knight soars forward, edge poised to split right through the smug-looking Colette. Only an inch from her face the blade crashes along with the knight, ungracefully producing a resounding, ethereal clang. It ran into the salt line. Colette reaches over the salt line to attach the slip to the stunned armor, but just as quickly the armor reaches up with its pushing hand and swipes the slip out from her grasp. She blurts out a nasty word as the armor, who in its living days must have been at least a little crass, spares a victorious moment to split the magic parchment with a ghastly guffaw.
“Wow, we can-” Colette stops in the split second that the phantasm phases through the wall to her left. She aptly spreads a line of salt across just before the ectoplasmic blade phases back through her side of the wall right for her.
It reveals itself from the wall the second its blade fails to meet its mark and thrusts again toward Colette’s backside. Again just on the breath of the moment she steps over the line of salt. In the two seconds it takes the phantom to phase around again she spreads a circle around herself. The ghost comes out once more and sees her protective 360 degree barrier. Rather than showing frustration, it just cocks its neck back confidently.
“Yeah, that’s what’s up, dumbass,” she says cockily to the equally-cocky phantasmal armor.
It crosses its arms with powerful levels of sass as it floats back near its portrait. “Fine,” it says in a way that tells Colette that nothing is really fine at all. The horror, slowly gaining transparency the more it moves away, is only barely visible as it reaches up behind its portrait frame and pulls what seems to be a small lever.
Just then, Colette feels a draft: a refreshing gust of cool air, except it’s not refreshing when she knows it’s going to get her killed. The artificial wind begins to blow and scatter the salt, ruining her sodium cover and providing an opening for the armor. The ghost does not charge forward, instead, it backs up. Colette watches in grim anticipation as the ghost displaces itself so far back that its entire body disappears. She bates her breath uselessly under the whirring of the fans- it could be anywhere. She weighs her options with trained speed. If she’s developed anything in these months on the Nocturna, it isn’t muscles, but a steady head for when it really counts. It only takes a tick of a clock’s hand for her to figure out her path.
She rushes for the lever with her jar held high. Halfway there and reaching for the handle a dreary blade phases through the floor at her feet, giving her only a glint of time to respond. She holds the jar at her feet and jumps simultaneously. Her reflexes serve her well as the blade impacts the salt and, while cracking the glass and spilling most of the contents, spares her life. With only a fourth of the jar’s contents left in the broken mess of glass she’s carrying she pulls the lever and turns off the fans. Foiled only for a second, the phantasm lifts through the floor and blasts forward to Colette. She scarcely dodges, the blade grazing her shoulder, and she rushes back to a certain spot.
With only a second more of time before the armor’s next strike, she tosses another, precise line of the crystals across the floor, but not in the arc of the blade. She hops over the line as the armor does as well, though on the other side, then again for the next corner. The armor, blocked from three sides leans to float out but is blocked by something else- the part of the bottle that it had smashed from Colette’s grip is lying in front of its escape route, still filled with salt it had protected from the wind blowing through the room. It howls as it reaches for freedom, just as Colette spreads the fourth line of salt, trapping the spirit in its salty prison.
“Knave! Let me out!… You don’t know what you’re doing!” the armor cries as its squeezed within the invisible barrier created by the salt.
Colette looses a long, relieved sigh as she takes up the key and starts for Irefall’s locked door.
“Trust me in this, mortal. Behind that door is something you will not be prepared for. You are opening a door to your own demise! You should thank me for attempting to give you
a swift… conceivable death!” The armor says with a voice of such honestly, Colette would think it nearly worth considering.
She stops by the salt-barricaded ghost a moment to think of a witty comeback. “Yeah, shut up,” she says.
Good job, Colette. You sure showed him.
The armor leans against the invisible barrier wall coolly. “You have been warned. Requiescat in pace, girl.”
She ignores the ghost as she places the key into the lock and turns it unceremoniously. It clicks just like any lock is supposed to. She grasps the knob and turns. This is where it sets in; the moment before she sees what’s behind the door. Her imagination runs away with her as easily as death comes for the foolish. Volumes over the armor and its ghastly though human-charactered presence, and even more than the horror of the ocean parasite that stole her form on that night upon the Nocturna only weeks ago, she feels a powerful fear.
This isn’t the fear of seeing something gruesome, or even something gruesome that desires to kill you, this is an unlabeled, uncertain fear, the very same that held Colette’s dumb undeveloped ancestors in their tiny huts deep at night. It is the fear of the unknown. It is the shapeless jaws. It is Dread: King of all Fears. Somehow, if by intuition alone, Colette knows just by gripping this knob that there really is something on the other side of this door, and she really, really has no clue what it is. She’s brave, however, and she decides an entry with gusto would be more valuable than caution. She swings open the door as if she owned the place.
Inside is a wonderfully-lavish, bronze-burgundy colored room with a king-sized bed, two dressers, a work desk and scribing utensils, mathematic and engineering drafting supplies, plenty of shelves for knick-knacks and a couple of book cases. The lighting is perfectly normal, a far cry from the mystic blue light from the hallway. Colette does not ask herself why this room, presumably seeing so little use, would have normal, bright lantern lighting, and that’s fine, because there’s nothing she can do to prepare herself for what’s coming next anyway.
Strangely, the room appears free of all inhabitants.
With a strange form of respect, as if stepping into a grand library, she calmly enters the room and closes the door. The Black Eye is near, she can feel it. She starts going through drawers, the book cases, even the pillows of the bed, but nothing. It takes her ten whole minutes to ransack the room, until she finally stands in the middle to scan the place as a whole. She starts by peering at the wallpaper, then the cheerfully-bright lanterns hung at the walls, and suddenly, she spots something move in the corner of her eye. She snaps her gaze to see the mirror of the dresser. She didn’t notice it before, but the mirror is reflecting the room perfectly, but the person in the room isn’t her- and it isn’t a person.
The very worst part is she can’t comprehend what she’s looking at in the slightest. This is scary to her, very scary, “outside of her capacity of understanding” scary.
The something in the mirror standing in her precise area of reflection sees that she has noticed, and steps out from the mirror to receive her, Colette, a trembling, half-conscious, mumbling mess by the time it passes through.
The Day of the Party, a Mysterious Disappearance, Disgusting Degeneracy and Perhaps a Skilled Diversion? (A.K.A. The Captain does something incredibly improper)
The scent of Earl Grey cascades through the chamber. The day begins, and Grancis stretches from what could be the calmest sleep she’s had in months- she chalks it up to this night being her first on the shore in so long. She flinches as she realizes on the other side of her vision is probably the Captain, doing something weird and creepy as he usually is when left alone.
Frankly, she doesn’t see him alone often, but she’s been getting so many “feelings” about him recently, and she doesn’t much like it. They’re not all scary feelings, of course, some are pleasant, and even eerily warm.
She turns and sees him not in the bed, but over by the now-unlit fireplace, reading a book and enjoying a cup of tea. As she expected, he’s already perfectly attired and looking ready to command any discerning crew— she didn’t even hear him get dressed. He’s invested in the reading, looking to be one of those fresh new books with the clean white pages that aren’t quite made out of paper, and it isn’t until she sits up that he looks to her.
“Ahh, Miss Vereyrty. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Captain.”
He raises his cup. “Might I interest you in some tea?”
She hums. “Will we be served breakfast? I know she’s going to try to kill us and all…”
The Captain chuckles. “Why of course, my dear! You can expect perfect peace until just before dinner- that’s when all the guests will be there and thus when she’ll make her move. All she wants is to keep tabs on us until then.” He laughs again for some reason. “So by all means, you could go right down to breakfast in only a few minutes. I’m sure that bell will be wrung any moment… Pardon, that is, if you were going to breakfast in the first place.”
Weirdly, Grancis feels the same way. Somehow, she knows the breakfast bell is about to ring. “Oh, alright then… What are you reading?”
The Captain sighs and flips the cover ‘round for her to see. A male’s abdominals take center-stage on the cover along with some mystical beast and a pretty young lady. “Popular fiction is what they call it,” he explains. “Pertalaine’s library is stocked to the brim with it, it seems.”
Grancis raises a brow as she puts on yesterday’s garments. “Well… is it good?”
“It’s not terrible. I can understand why the young, firey crowd would like it, but it seems to be relentless emotional turmoil and romantic struggle. Any semblance of danger or violence is foregone by the seemingly omnipresent male figure that appears right when the female protagonist is in physical danger, thus rendering meaningful development in any manner other than their relationship to be quite impossible… I suppose you’d find that idea rather appealing, wouldn’t you?”
She tacks on her chefs coat. “What?”
“Having the officer swoop down to save you from the dark any time you’re in trouble.”
Grancis thinks on it as The Captain peers over in a way she can only feel is sinister toward her admiration to Martaine. “I…” She minces words. “Wouldn’t you?”
The Captain raises a brow under his bandages. “I do believe I asked you first, Cook-Hand Vereyrty.”
She knows to be careful when he uses the full title. “I would like that, sir. It would make me feel safe.”
He draws back as if in disgust. “So, you’d have someone else defend you, then? Someone to watch your every step and have every decision made for you?”
“Um, no, sir. I’d like them to be with me, and it would be convenient and nice to have them defend me when such a time would come, but for the most part I’d like to defend them just as much if I could. Egalitarianism and meritocracy and all that, sir.”
The Captain hums, as if suddenly appeased. “And defend them you will… I agree.”
She has no idea what this means, but this is too awkward for her to say that. “T-thank you, sir.”
He waves the now-closed book about in his hand. “Anyway, the book isn’t really in my taste. I expect you would like it more. I would offer it to you, but I have something more important to talk about before the bell rings.” He stands up and sets the book on the side table.
“What is it?”
“Remember your part of the plan?”
“Yes?”
“There’s going to be a slight adjustment.”
She addresses him with her oak-brown eyes.
“You’re going to be down in the kitchen all day.”
She nods, but her hip unconsciously sways just half an inch to the side to project sass. “Alright.”
“With no breaks for meals, you understand?”
Grancis pauses, and suddenly blinks in surprise. “So no breakfast either.”
“You’ll have to whip something up while you’re in the k
itchen then, won’t you?”
“I suppose I will, sir.”
The Captain steps up to her just as the breakfast bell rings. “Above all, ensure that you are not seen by Miss Irefall. Not once is she to spot you, understand?”
“Uh… Alright, yes sir.”
“Don’t ask what happened to Colette, don’t question anything weird, just cook and have a good time, yes? Everything will be fine so long as you cooperate, understand?”
Grancis nods.
"Good, now I'll go first, wait five minutes, and then you are free to go straight down to the kitchen until everyone else has gone."
She looks out the window. "But, won't that be after dinner?"
"Yes."
"So... I won't be present for the dance?"
"No, you won't."
Grancis is silent a moment as she watches the cawing sea birds circle around the smokey rooftops of the port's many homes. "As you say it, sir."
The Captain reaches over and places his bandaged hands upon her shoulders. "Now is not the time for petty sensitivities like romance, Grancis, you must keep your eyes on what's important- the mission. Can you do that for me?"
Grancis sighs, and nods."Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir," anything resembling contempt in her voice is gone, making way for the tones of disappointment.
The Captain stares at her a moment more, and then draws away. "Very good- I'll see you tonight." He turns the knob to the door. "And remember, Pertalaine can't see you, not even once. Consider yourself lucky that I trust you so much, or else I wouldn't even allow you out of this room."
She nods again. "Thank you, sir."
