Rudeus's vision slowly returned, the darkness receding like a tide. His head throbbed, and his body felt heavy, disconnected. He blinked, trying to focus, and looked over at Glen.
Glen's body was flickering.
In and out. Like a candle flame caught in the wind. One moment he was solid, the next moment Rudeus could see through him see the wall behind him, see the outline of furniture that shouldn't be there. Glen's concerned expression remained frozen on his face.
"Glen, what—"
The world desolved.
The mayor's bedroom dissolved like ink in water. The walls melted away, the furniture evaporated, and suddenly Rudeus was falling no, not falling, being pulled through darkness and light and colors that didn't feel real.
Then he hit solid ground.
Rudeus gasped, his hand his only hand instinctively reaching for his sword. He pushed himself up, taking in his surroundings with growing confusion.
There were trees. Everywhere, massive trees stretching up toward the sky he was in a forest.
But why? How? They'd been in the mayor's estate just seconds ago. This made no sense.
The smell hit him then. An unmistakable smell the smell of Death.
Rudeus's jaw clenched. He knew this smell. Had smelled it a lot recently in his life. But there was something familiar about this particular scent, something that made a chill run up his spine.
He started walking, his footsteps crunching on dead leaves. The forest was quiet he didn't hear birds, insects, and there was no wind rustling the branches. Just silence and that awful smell growing stronger with every step.
Then as he was walking he seen it.
A clearing ahead. And in the clearing, two figures.
Rudeus's breath caught in his throat.
A body lay sprawled on the ground, blood pooling beneath it, soaking into the earth. And kneeling beside it, a child. A young boy with messy brown hair and tears streaming down his face, sobbing over the corpse with the kind of grief that destroys something fundamental in a person.
The boy was him. And the body was Ghislaine.
"No," Rudeus whispered. "No, no, no—"
His younger self was crying, screaming her name, begging her to wake up. The same words he'd screamed that day. The same helpless, agonizing grief that had carved itself into his soul and never truly healed.
Rage flooded through Rudeus like wildfire.
Who would do this? Why was he being forced to relive this? Who would do this to him?
His hand tightened on his sword hilt. This wasn't real. This couldn't be real. Ghislaine was already dead. This was just just some kind of illusion, some trick. And if it was a trick, he could end it by killing his old self.
Rudeus charged forward, his single arm drawing his sword in one fluid motion. His younger self didn't see him coming, too consumed by grief to notice anything else. Rudeus raised his blade, ready to drive it through that crying child's skull, ready to destroy this memory once and for all.
The world stopped.
Mid-swing, mid-step, mid-breath. Everything froze. Rudeus tried to move forward, but his body wouldn't obey. He was locked in place, suspended in the moment like an insect trapped in a trap.
"Let me go!" he screamed. "LET ME GO!"
He strained against the invisible force holding him, every muscle in his body tensing, his teeth gritted so hard his jaw ached. But nothing happened. He couldn't even turn his head.
Then something grabbed him.
He was ripped backward with tremendous force, his body flying through the air like a ragdoll. He slammed into a tree trunk so hard the air exploded from his lungs. Pain shot through his back and shoulder, and he crumpled to the ground, gasping.
For a moment he just lay there, trying to breathe, trying to understand what had just happened. Then anger overrode the pain, and he forced himself back to his feet, using the tree for support.
When he looked back toward the clearing, his younger self was gone.
"You bastard!" Rudeus shouted at the empty forest. "Stop hiding! Face me!"
His voice echoed through the trees, but no one answered.
He stumbled forward, back toward where the clearing had been, but the scene had changed. The body was gone. The blood was gone. Instead, there were three children two of them crying.
Rudeus stopped dead.
He knew these children. Knew them better than he knew anything else in this world.
Himself. Sylphiette. Eris.
They were crying in grief Eris was crying the hardest for Ghislaine while Sylphie was crying looking at the one armed rudeus. Eris looked at the sword Rudeus was carrying and started to say very hurtful things.
Rudeus's breathing became frantic.
"No," he said, taking a step backward. "No, I won't I won't relive this. I won't!"
He drew his sword again, his hand shaking. These weren't real. They were just ghosts, just memories weaponized against him. If he destroyed them, maybe this nightmare would end. Maybe he could escape whatever hell he'd been trapped in.
He rushed forward, raising his blade to cut them down all three of them, these phantoms of a past he couldn't change and a the grief and sarrow he was forced to watch he couldn't handle it.
Before his sword could fall, he was thrown backward again.
This time he hit the ground and rolled, ending up on his back, staring at a ceiling.
A ceiling?
Rudeus scrambled to his feet, immediately on guard. He wasn't in the forest anymore. He was inside. A building. An old one, from the look of it rotting wood, crumbling plaster, the smell of mold and decay.
And something else. Something worse. His pulse quickened. He knew this place. God help him, he knew this place.
"No," he whispered. "Not here. Anywhere but here."
He was in a basement. The walls were stone, water-stained and covered in moss. There was a single door at the top of a rickety staircase, and no windows. No light except for the faint glow emanating from one giant torch.
Rudeus backed up until his shoulders hit the wall. His breathing was rapid, shallow. Panic clawed at his chest.
"This isn't real," he told himself. "This isn't real. This isn't real."
Then he heard it the screaming. A girl's voice, high-pitched and terrified, coming from behind the wall beside him. Begging crying The sounds of suffering so visceral they felt like physical blows.
Rudeus clapped his hand over his ear his only hand but he could still hear it. The other ear was exposed, and the sounds poured in, filling his head with memories he'd buried so deep he'd convinced himself they might not be real.
But they were real. They'd always been real. His hand moved to his sword. Drew it slowly. He looked at the blade, at the way it caught the light, and then raised it to his own throat.
One cut. That's all it would take. One cut and this would end. The memories would stop. The pain would stop. Everything would just stop
A hand closed around his wrist. Rudeus's head snapped up. Glen stood beside him, seemingly appearing from nowhere. But his expression was different now. The nervous energy was gone, replaced by something more expressionless
"You fold so easily under pressure," Glen said, his voice calm and almost disappointed.
"Let me do it!" Rudeus screamed, trying to pull his arm free, but Glen's grip was iron. "Let me I can't I can't be here! Let me do it!"
"You see, I can't let that happen." Glen's other hand came up and carefully pried the sword from Rudeus's grasp. "We've invested too much in you to let you take the easy way out."
"Why?!" Rudeus screamed the word, his voice breaking. "WHY?! WHY?! WHY?!"
Each repetition was more desperate than the last, tears streaming down his face, his whole body shaking. The screaming behind the wall continued, relentless, and he couldn't block it out, couldn't escape it.
Glen just shook his head slowly, almost sadly. "You already know."
The words hit Rudeus's he stopped and looked over at Glen. He did know.
The realization hit himand suddenly everything clicked into place with clarity.
Rudeus stopped struggling. Stopped screaming. He turned his head slowly to look up at Glen really look at him and saw it now. Saw the wrongness he'd been ignoring, the inconsistencies he'd noticed but never questioned.
The badge. that Glen had explained away with a flask that appeared too conveniently.
The name in the ledger. The entry that had made him stop for no reason he could explain. He saw it clearly now in his mind's eye the letters rearranged, scrambled: G-L-E-N.
And Sylvia. God, Sylvia. She would never act the way she'd been acting. The petty resentment, the deliberate coldness, the way she ignored him. It wasn't like her she'd never do that.
"You knew," Glen said quietly, watching the understanding dawn in Rudeus's eyes. "You had all the clues. But you were so deep in the illusion, so caught up in the emotions and the mission, that you never stopped to question it. Not really."
Rudeus's voice came out as a hoarse whisper. "How long?"
"Since the first night in the inn." Glen smiled, and it was nothing like the nervous, friendly expression he'd worn before. This smile was sharp, predatory. "You've been mine since you went to sleep in that room."
The basement around them began to shift, the walls becoming translucent. Through them, Rudeus could see other scenes fragments of the illusion he'd been trapped in. The guild. The mayor's bedroom. The Red Lantern District. All of it artificial. All of it constructed from his own memories and his mind.
"The murder, the conspiracy, my sob story about missing people I pulled all of it from your mind. Built a narrative you couldn't resist investigating. Used your sense of justice, your need to save people you feel indebted too, your guilt about your past." Glen circled around him slowly, like a predator admiring its captured prey. "You made it almost too easy. So much trauma to work with. So many pressure points."
Rudeus tried to summon anger, tried to reach for his sword which he realized was no longer in Glen's hand, it was gone but all he now felt is that he was used.
"What do you want from me?" he asked, his voice dead.
Glen stopped circling and stood directly in front of him. When he spoke, his voice carried absolute certainty, absolute control.
"You're my slave now."
Glen with his arms behind his back smiled and bowed getting right into Rudues face. "Welcome to your new reality," he said. "We're going to do such interesting things together."