
Dawn comes, I’m ready to begin on my new mission to cut Belphegor’s plot short and return Neptanie to health. Leaving Celine and Juna to continue their sleep, I meet Mercy outside and give it even more of my best with our exercise together.
“Damn, Khiron! Where did all of that come from? Usually you’d be on the floor after a run like that!” She gives me a look of astonishment as I stretch myself a bit more.
“I have a new mission and I need to be in my best shape. There’s no time to be slack.”
“That scar may suck, but it really makes you tough when you choose to be. Which is pretty much always. But more so right now.”
“The pain has tempered me to push through plenty. I’m grateful for at least that much. I would wonder if there’s a blessing for each curse, but…”
My mind flits back to the task at hand; Neptanie’s sickness. The grim outlook that comes to me first is that while my sickness has had a roundabout way of improving my vitality, hers has only stolen hers away.
“So, a new mission. Is something going on with Sloth? Finally time?”
“More or less. Signs are that it’s coming and it’s shaping up to look like it’s going to be the most difficult of all to put down. Fitting since it’s the last of them.”
“You can count on me to shape you up if you need me to.” She smirks a Cheshire smile at me as she stretches her sides.
I motion to thank her, but the sound of a special, cute ringtone I’d handpicked chimes and snags my attention. Brandishing my phone from my pocket, I read a name that brightens my day.
“Good morning, sweetie. How have things been?”
“Good morning, dad. I’m doing good.” Her most adorable voice is music to my ears. “I’d thought that I’d check by and see how things have been. It’s been longer than I’d like it to be.”
“I’m proud of you. It’s impressive that the kingdom entrusted you with such an important task. One so far away as well. I’ve been missing you. Your mother is just fine. She’s still up in those high spirits of hers.”
“I haven’t heard anything about Sloth. It sure is taking a while, isn’t it?”
Hearing her thought, I give Mercy a small side glance and think it over to myself.
“It’s been taking some time, that’s for sure. Focus on your mission and we’ll see what comes when you’re finished with it.”
A silence reaches across the line and I can already tell what she’s up to with how quiet she’s become.
“…I have to go. I wish that I could talk with you a little while longer, but it’s been busy. When I get back… I want to hug you and mom. I love you.” As she is, shy to be so cutely affectionate in front of others. She gives me a gentle whisper to save herself from embarrassment.
“I love you too, Rose. Take care of your brothers and sisters for me, okay?”
I hear the sound of her kiss over the phone and the line cuts shortly after.
“Hope she’s having fun with our boy. Hahaha.” Mercy snickers after giving me a solid swat on the back.
“I wonder when they’ll be back. It feels like it’s been forever.”
“What bundles of joy, huh? But besides that…”
Reaching around me and pulling me in, she brings me to lightly hunch given our difference in stature so that she can kiss me on the lips. And after that peck, she claps her hands on my cheeks and sends me a big old smile.
“You know, you’re kind of hot when you’re all fired up like this. Keep it up.”
And just as easily as she comes, she goes.
✩ ✩ ✩
Breakfast is another bright moment and despite the news that had been delivered, the lot of us who are in the know had kept our hopes high.
It had been decided between the four of us that met in that room that those who didn’t know would be spared the worries and fear. If we were going to rescue Neptanie, we had to go in with nary a doubt to fight to the end.
But Celine’s ignorance for the real heart of the matter didn’t stop her from being restless. She’d taken Juna along with her to spend the night together, the three of us. Her sleeplessness had lasted a little while longer for a more favorable reason before she could find her rest.
With breakfast’s conclusion, I’d let the maidens know that I’d be busy with a matter and excused myself. While Celine went to spend time with Neptanie before her day’s classes at her university, Juna had prepared to be off to work. Thus we’d walked along together until our place of parting.
But of course that’s not to forget to mention that Venna had smothered me before I could step out the door.
As Juna is off on her own business, I brandish my phone and dial up the number of a most reliable confidant.
“I’m on the way. Thanks again for making the time on such short notice.”
“It was easy enough. We were already going to do this so moving the date wasn’t much of a hassle. I’m coming up soon enough, so get to the place and hang tight.”
“Got it.”
✩ ✩ ✩
Top down, wind rushing as we’d cruised the streets together, Vestil wore that suave smile on her face she has reserved for whenever she’s behind the wheel of her beloved sports car. Her hair, having grown longer over the year, whips and flicks even more that it had ever before when it was left in such a short, boyish cut.
She gets us to our destination in a flash. Taking off her sunshades and storing them, she puts her fist out for me to bump it with my own and the two of us enter into the cold, imposing building before us.
Thus reads the sign at its front: Empyrean National Correctional Facility.
✩ ✩ ✩
It’s a thankful thing that Vestil has the connections and pull she does. Not only had she been an active player in the original events of the given case at hand, but her friends in high places makes it a simpler matter to gain such privileged entry.
This rough and dismal place has never been a pleasant location for me, but I’d imagine anyone who would have interest in visiting a prison, of all places, would have a screw loose in their head.
Through the unforgiving cement hallways, past the large glass and metal dividers along the way, we reach the operations room of a particularly imposing lock up in the maximum security wing of the facility.
From the second story, the control center of its central office we can peer out the windows through the shade dividers which keep the establishment’s customers from prying a curious eye. And how dim it is where the glow of the computer screen is our main source of light.
A friend of Vestil’s prepares the footage for us, going through the onslaught of log in and verification screens to pony it up. While we wait, we both exchange some idle conversation.
“Yeah, man. You wouldn’t expect just how much those dang boats cost. I was hoping I could score one for less, but that’s how it is on this cruel earth. Guess I’d might just have to bite the bullet and get it how it is.”
“Well, it’s a nice cruiser. I’m already expecting that you’re thinking of taking all the…” I look towards our small time friend and choose to dance a bit more with my words. “ladies to go with us.”
“Ladies? Sounds like my kind of time!” Our help bounces into our chat with an eagerness at the direction the talk has taken.
“Maybe sometime we’ll pull you along. Summer’s on the horizon and that water is getting primed for a hot time.”
The topic doesn’t last much longer as the computer at last enters the heavily secured file folder of its most important video recordings. He gives it a few clicks here and there and begins the footage.
It begins as a prisoner is seated before the desk of their barren, brutish cell. Hard concrete is under foot, the walls are every bit as harsh and all the rest of the fixtures are solid metal that won’t be going anywhere.
He writes in a journal and his pen continues to work at its page, inking it with his own personal entries.
“I’m sure you remember this creep.” Vestil’s irony isn’t mistaken at all. “The freakiest thing about him is that ever since we’d locked him up, he’s always asking about you. Heard plenty from the staff even after our interrogations back when that he’d keep badgering officers to pass his letters and requests for visitation to you. Of course they’d just put them up in a file just in case something came up and they could prove useful.”
“Didn’t think he’d even think of me. It’s been so long since that sting with Saturnus. Has he coughed anything up after all this time?”
“Well… You’ll see.” She shrugs towards the display and I refocus.
The man in question writes and writes until his writing suddenly stops cold. Raising his head up, he stares at the wall for a moment before he turns his neck and looks up to the camera which had records him from the corner of his cell.
Watching the camera, a strange smile begins to creep over his face before he stands up and presses a button near the metal shutter that is his door. The voice of the attending security knight picks up over an intercom and the assassin gestures towards us like a showman.
“I have a story to tell. A confession of guilt.” He begins with an eccentric, sing-song tone. “I admit – I say it for the record – I let it all out of the bag: I’m a member of a most prodigious organization!”
In the tiny space he’s afforded in his solitary confinement, he dances around for a handful of seconds before he returns to addressing us through the camera’s lens.
“A young lad, delivered from his family who had only seen him as a salable item, it was at my most tender years that I’d come to realize how mad this world truly is. With all the cruelty I’d known, I couldn’t resist that wonderful organization’s offer that I could be their child, to do as they willed me to. It was a simple, sensible exchange and my what a man it made me!”
Ripping out a single page of the journal on his desk, he raises it high and shows what has been written on it so clearly with such large and bold lettering.
RETRO!
“My task was at first so simple: to learn their ways. And when I did, the time came when I was blessed beyond measure! A simple drug most would think is only for a rush, a fixing of the senses! Yet they don’t know the real Retro that I was given! And how much greater it is! There’s no comparison!
“I’d cut my arm and put that dark crimson powder into the wound! I’d let it run into my bloodstream! At once it fired through me like a divine touch! My eyes were opened! I saw it all! I understood it all and praise be!”
Throwing his hands high, he casts the paper to fly and it descends to the ground in a twist and a sweep. Leaving his hands outstretched as if for an embrace, he pushes on with a full smile.
“This world… it’s not the only world there is! I saw another with my own eyes! And it… was… excellent! Glass! Glass everywhere! Glass unlike the glass that holds my body captive in this prison! Glass glowing with light!”
I lean close quickly, unconscious of my own actions as I hear his statement. Disbelief strikes me like a hammer and sticks me where I stand. Eyes wide open, ears perked up to listen closer.
“Where all miracles begin! The place where all the glory of this world is born and brought to life! Our god! Our god in a prison! Our god seeking birth! I… am of the happy, privileged few to have seen their majesty and grace. I was saved.”
Closing his outstretched hands to wrap his body, he closes his eyes and his smile brings to my mind the image of a child being comforted. The sight fills me with an odd concoction of emotions. My skin crawls as I watch him writhe about in his own arms.
“Soon… Soon I’d realized the infinite number of worlds there are. Yes. All born from our god, the countless universes. I’ve visited a delicious picking of them and have been reborn. If only we all could see them, but so many are… unworthy. Unprepared. Unclean.”
Shuffling towards his desk, he picks up his journal and shows its closed face to us to emphasize his next bout of prattling.
“In one world I’d visited, I’d come across such a marvelous little book. Its name: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland! I couldn’t put it down! It was so fascinating. Did you know that by this date and time, this book would be 165 years old?! Quite an aged story, finely so. Well, that is only partially the truth. You see, despite that it is the month that it is now, it rather feels so dreadfully like November in my heart. But this book, my the knowledge it contains!”
Flipping his journal open, he begins to read from it openly.
“I do hope you don’t mind a little classical literature for your ears. And yours too, Celestial Knight Khiron. I’ve written what I’d committed as I’d read the book in that world, you see.”
It begins. The story of a sleeping king.
“A little aside from two men who were both so alike! Two riddle speakers who are as fools to the uninitiated but wise as serpents to the enlightened. The king sleeps but what would happen if he would wake? Well, Alice would be no more! Whatever could that mean?”
He begins to rifle through the pages, searching for his next read. When he finds it, he pokes it repeatedly with his index finger though we can’t see what he points out.
“Yes… The answer is here! It’s here in this prison!”
Clearing his throat and making a show of it as he has everything else, he quotes the passage proudly and confidently.
“Quoth first Alice towards the Cheshire Cat of whom she so sought and was in mystery of:
“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
“‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
“‘How do you know I’m mad?’ Said Alice.
“‘You must be,’ said the cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”
The final phrase uttered, a twisted smile corrupts his already disturbed features and he stares up to the camera as he lets his arm and the journal drop to his side. He discards his showman’s act as a cold, hollow tone sharpens his words.
“Why are you here… Celestial Knight? Just doing your duties? Or is there something more? Maybe you’re here for a faint hope or has your true calling finally come? Perhaps you’re beginning to realize that you belong here with us.”
A cutting pain begins to rough up my chest and I clutch my fist hearing his words. A sickening feeling comes forward in my mind. A sensation disquiets me as it feels as if he’s grasping and pulling on something that had been hidden there just out of my view.
The man drops the smile and all that is left is a hollow expression as if he were a corpse made useful in a ventriloquist’s show.
“Everything… has a meaning, after all. Most people are just too dumb, too lowly to see it. They’re blind. But you’re… willfully blind, aren’t you?”
His gaze doesn’t budge from the camera. His entire body has been still ever since he’d betrayed his own inhuman nature. Those dark eyes pierce through the lens as if he looks into the future, into my own eyes.
“But I relent… and I speak of another issue. Would Alice vanish if that sleeping king stopped dreaming? If he would wake, would she have never existed at all? If you were crying in a cemetery, I suppose your little lover would exist, wouldn’t she? And all the bitterness her passing could cause would seem so very real, wouldn’t it?”
With that sadistic smile returning, he states it all clearly.
“Come and find out. Come and find me, I dare you. Think it’ll be bad if the king wakes up? Imagine how much worse it’d be if the king were to die. Alice… wouldn’t even be a memory of a little, whimsical, pointless dream.”
All at once the light returns to his eyes and that giddy smile and attitude swing back in full energy.
“Oh my, that was an amazing moment, wasn’t it? Bet you were on the edge of your seat! Oh, but who am I kidding, you’re standing, aren’t you?
“Ease up! Ease up! No use getting your muscles all knotted like that! Tension only drains us all! Relax your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath, unclench that fist you have on that table!”
My surprise is overruled by my disgust and I continue feeling every ounce of my tension, if not more from his little act.
“Oh, boy! Time is running out! So quickly too! Now I have a personal riddle I’ve concocted to share with you before I go! ‘If a mirror looks at itself, what will it see?’ I may not hear the answer, but I’ll be dying to know what you think!
“I’d so wanted to see you again, to pick your brain, but sometimes things just don’t work out. But I’ll make sure to catch you later anyways!
He gives me a gay little wave before he speaks his parting.
“…They’re here now… Bye-bye!”
It’s only then that I take notice of the silhouette that has been standing behind him. A red figure wearing what I can only discern to be a cape. As the man faces that phantom, a glitter shines from his hand before the camera begins to jitter and fail.
I continue watching through the snow and can barely make out that the prisoner’s back slowly touches the wall and his body begins to slide down its surface, leaving a trail of crimson in its wake. Without a fight, without a single showing of care, his smiling face slowly falls slack as his last breath is given.
He sleeps hunched over in a heap.
Asleep to this world forever.
The phantom remains. The glittering light they hold in their hand now sparkles with a sanguine color as they slowly look up to the camera and stare directly at me with their invisible eyes, their unseen face.
The static continues. It rages harder and harder until everything is covered in the snow of a blizzard. But among the noise and crashing sounds, I hear a voice. The voice of a young woman.
“My name is Justice. I was born and raised to fight beside the Celestial Knight.
“I can’t tell you anymore than that, but that’s the reason why I’m here. At any cost, whatever I can do…”
It’s as quick as the blink of an eye, the image that flashes on that screen. But I see a head of red hair and green eyes.