I don’t know how long I was in the darkness. I existed without sensation. I saw nothing and heard nothing, not even my own breath; my voice escaped only in silence. I tried to move my limbs, but there was no contact or resistance to tell me about my surroundings. The lack of feedback was so complete, if I stretched my limbs out, I would wonder if I’d actually moved myself at all.

But I could touch my own face and clothes. And I could feel Cynara’s hand gripping onto mine.

She needed to loosen up so I wouldn’t lose feeling, actually, or I’d have no way of knowing she was there at all.

Then I saw shapes emerging in darkness. Was it a hallucination from lack of sensory input? These vague shapes, rippling with impossible colors, twisted around me. Goosebumps rose on my skin as I was struck with the strong conviction that they were alive. And they were watching me.

The chorus of whispers came next, slithering into my mind like a cold silver thread.

— Who is looking at us?

— Who came to reveal what has been lost?

— We don’t want light here.

— Stop looking.

— It’s disgusting.

— Get rid of it.

— Extinguish it!

— Extinguish them!

I gasped as soft, alien touches brushed against my skin, and hastily squeezed my eyes shut.

The voices quieted.

— Huh?

— One of the lights went out.

— No, someone is still looking.

— There’s still one there.

Cynara’s hand was trembling.

“Acacius?” she asked in a small voice.

— Get rid of it quickly!

— Extinguish it!

“What are you waiting for?” I snapped. “Close your eyes!”

I heard a faint whoosh, like a blade swinging in empty air. Her voice was high. “I, I can’t see anything—”

“What, does that mean you can’t hear anything either?” I snarled. A strong sense of danger was converging on Cynara. I wanted to pull my hand away. “Close your eyes right now or I’m letting go!”

Cynara took a shaky breath.

She must have listened to me, because the voices changed again.

— It went out on its own.

— It disappeared.

— Where did it go?

— Is it hiding?

“Acacius,” Cynara repeated. Her voice was trembling now, too. “Something is touching me.”

“Just hold still and wait. Don’t provoke them.”

Her hand squeezed mine more tightly, if such a thing was possible.

— It’s gone?

— It’s gone…

— We can rest again.

At last, the crawling sensation of being watched disappeared.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

“They’re gone,” I said. And then I added, in case it wasn’t obvious, “Don’t open your eyes. I don’t want them coming back.”

“What was that?”

“What do you mean? Isn’t this clearly related to the moon paths?”

“I know that!” Cynara snapped back. “I meant what you were listening to!”

I paused at that phrasing. “You didn’t hear anything?”

“No, this place is silent as a tomb.”

Was this some Acacius weirdness again? I suddenly recalled the description of [Executor of the Sacrifice’s Last Will].

Passive Effect: You have an affinity for certain voices of the dead.

Fuck. Don’t tell me this place was full of ghosts. Wait, I probably counted as a ghost, too. Then, couldn’t they show some solidarity and cut me some slack?

“Did you pick up something weird from the ritual?” Cynara said, half-accusing.

“If I did, it probably saved your life just now. What are you complaining for?”

“I just think it’s amazing you didn’t start boasting about your new skills as soon as you came back, that’s all.”

I gave into the temptation to make a joke. “Is that how you think of me? It’s as if you don’t know me at all.”

“Hah, true. You probably were just waiting for Father to be around before showing off.”

If nothing else, she was in better spirits now. “Let’s focus on essential matters first. Do you have a blindfold on you?”

“Why would I bring one with me when I’m going out casually? It’s incriminating evidence. And… Hah. Yours was stolen tonight, right? What a great job you’re doing, taking care of things at home.”

Ugh, did one of the servants tell her? Now I had to come up with an excuse to magic up a blindfold out of nowhere. “Just double-check your pockets. Actually, with how much you didn’t notice just now, it would be better to let me do it.”

“What? No, don’t put your hands in my pockets — ew! Stop touching me!”

“Says the one who won’t let go of me. Hold still.”

“Hey! That was my nose!”

“Don’t move around so much… Ow! What’d you bite me for?”

“I will kill you.”

“You… can you stop biting me first?!”

In my scuffle with Cynara, where we were stupidly still holding onto each other, I finally managed to slip my free hand into one of Cynara’s coat pockets.

[Honest Man’s Deception] let me imitate the appearance of anyone whose name I knew. That meant it also let me imitate my own past appearances, both from my world and after becoming Acacius. After testing it, I’d quickly learned that included the things I’d worn before: clothes, jewelry, accessories… blindfolds.

Taking my appearance from two days ago, I felt the weight of the blindfold settle over my eyes.

I turned Cynara’s pocket lining inside out as I withdrew my hand, imitating the force of pulling something out, and said, “What do you know? There’s a blindfold here after all.”

“What? No, I definitely wouldn’t have put something like that in my pocket…”

“Really.” I pretended to bring my free hand up to my head and shifted it around a bit so she could hear my clothes rustling and feel my movement. “Then what am I wearing now?”

Cynara nearly poked my eyes as she felt around my face. “How the hell… What are you pulling now?”

“Shouldn’t I ask that of you? Why would you keep such a good thing to yourself?”

She punched me with her free hand. “If it’s my artifact, give it to me to wear!”

“I don’t think so. How useful were you just now? It should stay with me.”

“You know that I still have my sword here, right?”

I clicked my tongue. “You’d fight your own brother for this after he saved you twice over? What an ungrateful little scoundrel.”

Cynara squeezed my hand hard enough to grind the bones together. I clenched my teeth to keep from making any noise.

“You of all people don’t have the right to say that,” she hissed.

Another sensitive topic. Should I try probing more? Being under stress and in danger was the best excuse and opportunity for acting out of character, after all. “How long will you hold a grudge about the past?” I said softly. “Or do you intend to keep crying about what’s already happened?”

“Who’s the one crying? You’re the one always slinking off to lick his wounds.”

Lacking contextual knowledge, I opted for a neutral response that she could project her perceptions onto. “Is that so?”

She flared up. “Oh, so now you want to act unbothered? Your jealousy is so transparent. Who’s the one who tried to stop me from getting into the Academy early?”

If Acacius wanted to protect his sister in his last will… “Why would I do that?” I said lightly.

Cynara scoffed. “When Linden comes around again, I hope he comes for you first.”

That was not the information I’d been hoping for. Who the hell was Linden? “And what can he do?”

“Take a guess.”

Saying that, Cynara subsided into a hostile and furious silence, so no more information was forthcoming. I let the conversation drop and carefully cracked open my eyes behind the blindfold.

No voices, no gazes, no hostility. That was good. I could still faintly make out movement in the darkness, but remembering how Graves had warned me, I was quick to avert my eyes and focus my attention away from them.

Through the blindfold, the moon’s pale disc had appeared in the void again, glowing in the distance. Thin, pale lines were scattered through the darkness like torn spiderwebs or shards of broken glass. Those must have been the moon paths, but they were far above and away from where Cynara and I were floating in the seemingly endless dark.

“I have good news and bad news,” I said. Although she kept her eyes tightly closed, Cynara turned her face towards the sound of my voice anyways. “The good news is I can see the moon paths.”

“And the bad news?”

“They’re far away. Have you ever stepped off the moon paths before? Do you know how to move around?”

“Why would I do something so stupid?” she muttered. “If there’s nothing under our feet… Maybe we have to swim?”

I kicked my legs experimentally and waved my free arm, and ended up drifting in an arc around Cynara. Pulled by my movement, she began kicking in order to balance it out, but we ended up spinning around in place even more.

“What are you doing? You need to synchronize with me,” I said.

“You’re the only one who can see right now. You match with me.”

“Fine. Kick a little faster, I’m trying to turn… No, not that way. Why don’t you just hold onto my waist and act as a propeller?”

Cynara screwed up her face. “I’m not going to hold onto you like that.”

“Why, are you embarrassed?” She remained silent a bit too long. “Really? Who is here to care about how undignified you might look? Those ghosts?”

“Ghosts?”

“Fine, so ‘ghost’ might not be the most accurate term.”

“What are they, then?!”

“I don’t know. Aren’t you smarter than me? Why don’t you regurgitate everything you remember about the moon path realm? It’ll be more useful than whatever you’re doing now.”

Cynara scowled. “Can’t you use your foresight to figure something out?”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t deny it. You knew a disaster was coming, didn’t you?”

It took me a moment to process her line of thinking. “You think I saw the future? Are you kidding me? If I could predict the future, why would I even be in this mess?”

“So prophecy isn’t perfect. You still sensed something.”

“Haven’t you heard of instinct?”

“Sure, your ‘instinct.’ Go use your instincts to sense the situation.”

“The situation is that I’ve got half a mind to ditch you if you don’t pull some weight.”

In the end, Cynara vehemently objected to my waist-propeller idea, so after a few minutes of flailing about, we finally started “swimming” hand-in-hand towards the moon paths under my direction. Occasionally, we would feel mysterious sensations brushing against us. Cynara listened to me when I told her to keep calm and hold still, though, so the entities passed us by without paying us any attention.

I also managed to persuade Cynara to tell me what she knew about the moon paths, since we had nothing else to talk about and maybe it would manage to jog my instinct somehow. Privately, I also thought it would be good to give her something to focus on, since she couldn’t see our progress towards the destination like I could.

Cynara told me that the moon paths originated from a Fantasm World that the Duke had seized control over and somehow moved to his domain. As far as I could tell, Fantasm Worlds were something like pocket dimensions or quantum territories that occasionally popped up full of treasures and mysteries. The moon path network that existed in Kosmonymia now had been formed from artifacts brought out from the Fantasm World. Each artifact had initially anchored a “node” in the moon path network, such as a door or a crossroad. The artifacts also served as anchors for the frame that allowed moon paths to work in Kosmonymia at all.

“So, was it a deliberate choice to populate the moon paths with monsters?”

“No!… I think.”

I pondered this information for a while.

There were entities in the darkness that didn’t want to be seen, at least not by outsiders like us. It was easy to extrapolate that the blindfolds helped filter my vision so I wouldn’t provoke those entities just by opening my eyes. The blindfolds were also artifacts, presumably brought out from the Fantasm World. So it probably wouldn’t work to have just anything over your eyes.

“The moon paths spilled out of the frame where one of the entrances was,” I said thoughtfully. “Then, do you think something similar has happened at other entrances and nodes in the network, too?”

“Hopefully not, or we’ve got a lot of covering up to do,” Cynara muttered. She didn’t sound very optimistic. “And it didn’t spill out of the frame, it spilled out of the realm. It wouldn’t exist at all if the frame wasn’t there. You should be accurate with your words.”

Right. I organized my thoughts. A frame was just a “framework” that allowed a “system” to run, so the moon path realm was able to exist because of the frame it was based on, but they weren’t the same thing. I felt embarrassed that I’d said something untrue, even if I hadn’t lied.

Since the artifacts anchored both the frame and the moon path realm… “If we can find a node and destroy the artifact anchoring it there, perhaps we can escape,” I speculated. Cynara didn’t voice any objections, so I could only assume I was on the right track. “By the way, what do you think happened to the house and the servants?”

“The house will be fine, it can’t look at anything,” Cynara said. “But the servants… I hope they’ll be alright.”

We were both silent for a while.

When we finally made it to a moon path and our feet touched down relatively solid ground, Cynara breathed a sigh of relief.

“If we jumped, do you think we’d be able to swim up into the sky?” I said.

“You can go find out on your own.”

I held in a laugh. From his journals, Acacius seemed too serious to be the laughing type, which was a shame.

Although the moon paths could be seen glowing faintly in the dark, it was harder to tell where they might lead to a node. I looked around and picked out a path that seemed like it was going out to nowhere and pulled Cynara along.

“Nothing terrible will happen if we destroy an artifact, will it?” I said lightly.

“I think the frame will just lose its foothold in the region, so the moon paths should stop existing there…”

Whoa. “But we’re on the moon paths right now. Will we be erased too?”

Cynara stopped speaking, looked alarmed.

It would be a real pain if she started freaking out again, so I said, “Let’s hope we can find a working exit.”

“…Yeah.”

As we drew closer to the end of the path, I felt a vibration in the air, like a silent, subsonic wave. The hair on my neck began to stand on end again.

“Did you feel that?” I said.

“Feel what?”

I turned my head to look back.

A massive shape was moving, a darkness to swallow all darkness. The moon above us was dimming. I thought I saw claws starting to dig into its pale shape.

The moon paths strung in the distance like a gossamer web began to snap, one by one.

That didn’t look promising. I turned my gaze forward and pulled Cynara along faster. “Hurry. We need to find a way out as fast as we can.”

“What did you see?”

“A colossal monster aiming for the moon… Do you know the significance of that?”

Cynara didn’t answer, but she did begin running, which seemed like a really good idea.

As the end of the path came into sight, I saw a silver doorway there, just like the one I’d used before. But it had been shattered. The pieces of its frame floated silently in place. Behind the splintered door was nothing but darkness.

“The door is here,” I said, bringing Cynara’s hands forward to feel the broken frame. “Can we fix it?”

Cynara bit her lips. “Is there anything besides this door here? A statue, a carved stone, jewelry…”

“I don’t see any.”

“Are you sure? Look again. Double check it like you did for the blindfold.”

I stepped off the path and “swam” around. “It’s all broken door.”

The massive shadow was shifting, blotting out all other shapes in the dark. This time, when the silent pressure came in waves, Cynara shivered too.

“Acacius,” she said. “I think… the artifact anchoring this node is outside the moon path realm.”

Okay, so we were fucked.

I didn’t want to give up just like that, though. I roughly pushed some of the door’s pieces together, and when I pulled my hand away, they stayed in place.

“If we put the door together enough to look like a door, do you think it’ll be usable again?”

“Are you serious? How many pieces do you think there are?”

“So it will work, right?”

“Forget it! We’d better run somewhere else…”

The feeling of pressure from the distant monster grew stronger, and with it came the sound of a wolf-like howl. It cut into my mind and tangled my thoughts together like a word I needed but couldn’t remember.

A distant white light flashed like a star.

“Run where?” I said.

Cynara ground her teeth together. Then she reached out, fumbling, and felt for pieces to put together too.

We worked silently. Honestly, this was like trying to piece together a shredded paper before a fire could reach us, but I still wanted to take the chance.

The howling came again, and my consciousness briefly blurred. I gasped.

“Acacius?”

I took a moment to fix my tone into something normal, but still ended up sounding a bit strained. “I swear, if that monster doesn’t shut up…”

“You heard something? Is it saying anything?”

Another howl, wild and dangerous in the way only a cornered animal could be. I felt dizzy, like any moment I would slip away. My whole body was drenched in sweat.

Slowly propelling myself back to the path, next to Cynara, I said, “I think it’s calling me.”

“You sound awful.”

My head was spinning. I closed my eyes. It took everything I had to rip the blindfold off and press it into Cynara’s hands.

“This…”

“I think I’m about to pass out.” With each reverberation of that howling voice, my senses wavered. My fingers felt numb. “You better look after my body after everything I did for you.”

Cynara grabbed me by the coat. “Are you joking? How am I supposed to put this door together myself? If you die here, I’ll spit on your grave.”

Wouldn’t she do that anyway?

Ah, focus, Eunseok. Cynara panicked too easily in strange circumstances. I had to tell her everything she needed before it was too late.

I’d already tested to make sure [Honest Man’s Deception] wouldn’t wear off while I was asleep, so the blindfold should last even if I lost consciousness. But what if I died?

“Be prepared for the artifact to fail you,” I said. “The entities in the dark hate to be perceived. You should be able to increase your chances of survival as long as you keep your eyes closed.”

“Hey, third best!” Cynara’s voice rose. She might have been shaking me. “What are you talking so calmly for? Do you think this is a joke?”

“Just be quiet and listen. If I don’t make it back, check the journals in my room. Pay attention to the notes about the ritual. And don’t be so obvious about practicing the sword in the backyard if you don’t want to be caught.”

“You…!”

What else was there?

Just the one warning.

“Remember, don’t look at them,” I muttered. “Otherwise…”

“Acacius? Hey, Acacius!”

The howling that only I could hear pierced my mind, and for the first time, I clearly felt its demand.

— Help me.

Who are you? I wanted to ask. Why are you so loud? Can’t you see I’m busy?

A force latched onto my soul like a drowning man and pulled.

All my senses went out like a light.

Chapter 3 Chapter 5