Chương 61: 25-3.Gore, Flesh, and Organisms

I pulled my gaze from the head and looked up. She was still hanging there. Naturally. The most humiliating part of the evening hadn't even started yet.

"Matthews. Give me a hand." I wiped blood from my mouth and stepped forward, gauging the chain height.

"Leave her up there any longer and we won't just be carrying a head back upstairs."

"That's a terrible joke," Jessi muttered from the floor, still pale but apparently capable of criticism.

"If you can complain, you're alive. Keep it up." Matthews ignored us. He dragged his ruined shield to the stone platform and stepped up, jamming the chain mechanism with brute force. I climbed beside him, working through pain that had opinions about this plan, and reached for the shackles at Erina's wrists. Up close, I saw the damage. The iron had worn through her skin—pale flesh torn and bloody, frighteningly cold. She must have heard me approach; her lashes stirred faintly, but she didn't lift her head.

My hands paused. Last night I'd made her cry in a spire. Tonight I was collecting her from a dungeon ceiling. I was either remarkably unlucky or karma had developed very specific timing where I was concerned.

"Erina," I said quietly.

"Still with us?" She opened her eyes slowly. Unfocused from blood loss, but when they found me, something flickered there. Not relief. Not reproach. Something that had been exhausted past naming but refused to collapse.

"... You shouldn't have come." Her voice was barely audible.

"You said that already." I worked at the shackle's mechanism.

"Unfortunately, our team's greatest virtue is a comprehensive failure to take good advice."

"That's not... a virtue..."

"I'm aware." The moment the shackle released, her weight shifted. I caught her—and my chest injury immediately filed a formal protest, white flooding my vision. I came genuinely close to joining her in the blood pool. Matthews got a hand under her other shoulder fast enough to matter.

"Are you functional?" he asked quietly.

"If functional means alive, yes."

"I meant standing."

"... That's open to negotiation." When Erina's feet touched ground, she had almost no weight to them. She tried to find her footing and her knees immediately disagreed. I caught her waist on instinct. Through the blood-soaked fabric, I could feel her trembling—not small shivers but the deep, involuntary kind that comes when the body has been running on nothing too long. She was trying to stand on her own. Her legs weren't cooperating. Alvira stepped forward, assessed the situation in a glance, and raised her hand.

Her fingertip hovered at Erina's temple for a moment. Faint green light flickered—not enough to heal, just enough to pull her back from the edge.

"She won't die immediately," Alvira said.

"Your bedside manner continues to inspire."

"Because you continue to deserve exactly this level of reassurance." Good. The elf still had energy to find me contemptible. That counted as positive. As for Lucas—he was still upright, which given his current complexion represented a significant achievement. He looked like someone had scooped out half his lung capacity along with whatever he'd used for that technique. But standing. Conscious. Under the circumstances, that deserved genuine gratitude. I looked down at Conrad's head. The face had gone quiet.

That somehow made it worse. You could see traces of something recognizably human in the splitting, slowly desiccating features of a man who had wanted a throne and ended up with considerably less. He'd been talking about a throne right up until the end. Now he was just a head. Power had a way of being brutally fair about these things.

"Do we take it?" Jessi asked. I looked at it for two seconds.

"... We do." She raised an eyebrow.

"Bold of you."

"What's the alternative?" I kept my voice down.

"Go back upstairs and explain that we turned your lord into something not easily identifiable, suggest everyone use their imagination?"

"That's actually a fairly complete explanation."

"Complete doesn't guarantee we survive delivering it." Matthews pulled a strip of relatively clean cloth from somewhere and wrapped the head by the hair. I looked away, committing to not revisiting that image. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Some things shock you the first time. The second time, they just ruin your appetite. The climb back up was quieter than the descent. Not relief—exhaustion. We were all too drained to waste words.

Erina walked between Alvira and me, each taking a shoulder. Halfway up she tried a few steps on her own, nearly dropped to her knees on the stone, and put her weight back without comment. Honestly, this was when I would normally have made a joke. Something like: Your Highness, next time you decide to vanish, perhaps choose a location that doesn't require us to haul back a head as evidence. I had the line ready. Opened my mouth. And said nothing. Not from tenderness.

Just awareness that saying it now would make me a very specific and unimpressive category of person, and I had enough problems tonight without adding that to the list. When we stepped back up through the iron door into the upper corridor, there were two more torches burning in the hall than before. My stomach dropped. Wrong. Alvira caught it in the same instant. Her stride stopped, her eyes going cold. Matthews shifted the cloth-wrapped bundle behind his back.

Jessi's hand found the knife in her boot without conscious thought. A moment later, a figure stepped out of the shadows ahead.

"... I knew it." The voice wasn't loud, but it made the corridor feel like it had just developed a layer of frost. Valdorin von Eberswalde stood there. Awake. More than awake—he'd clearly dragged himself out of Alvira's spell through sheer anger and trained vigilance, then followed us here. His hair was disheveled, his coat marked with dust, and the composure he usually maintained so carefully had gone visibly thin. He looked at us first. Then at Erina.

Finally, his gaze settled on the blood-stained cloth in Matthews's hands. The corridor went quiet enough to feel unnatural. As if someone had seized time by the throat. I moved forward half a step, about to speak. Valdorin raised his hand.

"Open it." Not a question. My throat tightened.

"Valdorin—""I said, open it." Lower this time. More dangerous. Matthews didn't move. Alvira didn't move. I reached out and pulled the cloth back. The fabric fell away, and Conrad's grotesquely distorted head was exposed to the torchlight. In that moment, I watched Valdorin's face crack. Not dramatically. No staggering backward, no cry. Just a brief fracture—brief enough that if you weren't watching carefully, you might have blamed it on the torchlight shifting. But it happened.

The armor of officer, noble, Valdorin—all the roles he wore like a second skin—fractured from the inside. That had been his kinsman. Blood. House. The lord of this castle. The husband his aunt had chosen. A pillar of the Northern Reaches' respectable world. And now that respectability was lying in front of him in the most grotesque form imaginable. Valdorin didn't speak immediately. He stared at the head, and his expression cooled inch by inch.

Then, slowly, he moved his gaze from Conrad's no-longer-human face—to the wounds on Erina's wrists, to the blood still drying on my chest, to Alvira's excessive pallor, to Lucas, who looked like he was reconsidering the structural integrity of his own stomach. He understood everything. That was the most complicated part. Two more beats of silence. Then Valdorin spoke.

"Matthews." The old soldier looked at him.

"Seal this corridor," he said.

"From this moment, no one approaches the dungeon entrance without my direct order." Matthews blinked once, then nodded.

"Yes, sir."

"Jessi." Jessi clearly hadn't expected to be called first. She went rigid.

"... What?"

"Go to the kitchens. Find two servants—alive, discreet, and capable of following instructions without panicking. Don't alert anyone else. If anyone asks, tell them Miss Erina fainted during the night and requires hot water and clean cloth." Jessi took a moment to process this, then nodded sharply.

"Got it."

"Lucas." Lucas straightened by reflex.

"You go with her." Valdorin fixed him with a look.

"If she decides to casually appropriate anything along the way, stop her."

"Hey," Jessi protested.

"Y-yes, sir!" Lucas answered faster than anyone. Excellent. Apparently surviving a dungeon had a short-term positive effect on one's willingness to follow orders from authority figures. After they left, Valdorin turned back to the rest of us. His gaze returned to the head for a moment, then pulled away as though it had touched something hot.

"Erina goes to the infirmary first," he said.

"Alvira, stay with her." Alvira's brow drew together.

"And you?" Valdorin was quiet for half a breath.

"I stay." He said it like he was assigning himself a routine task. But I understood what it meant. Staying meant he had to face everything down there that belonged both to Conrad and to the name Eberswalde. The corpses. The scattered remains. The blood pool. The carcass that no longer resembled anything human. And the head, lying quietly on its cloth. This wasn't staying to manage the aftermath. This was personally conducting a funeral that should never have been necessary—for his own house.

Erina seemed to want to say something. Her lips moved, but she was too weak to produce more than a breath. Valdorin looked at her—a look more complicated than anything he'd shown all evening—and said nothing. Then he turned to me.

"Cedric."

"Yeah?"

"You stay too." I blinked. Alvira's frown sharpened immediately.

"He's in no condition to—""I know exactly what condition he's in," Valdorin cut her off. Not harshly, but without any space for negotiation.

"That's why I need him here." I looked at him, and something became clear. Not suspicion. Not settling scores. Right now there were only two kinds of people in this corridor—those who would speak for the family, and those who had already seen the worst and could never pretend otherwise. I was firmly in the second category. Alvira had worked it out too. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. Finally she said, coldly:"Don't die."

"That's the second time you've said that tonight."

"Because tonight you look especially likely to." This woman had a genuine talent for making concern sound like a curse. When she guided Erina away, Erina looked back at me. It was brief. So fragile it felt like a draft might blow it away. But I saw it. Not dependence. Not reproach. Something unresolved—exhaustion and something harder to name pressed together, not yet sorted into anything communicable. Honestly, I wasn't in any state to interpret it properly. So I did what I do best.

Pretended I hadn't understood a thing. I've always been good at that. After they were gone, the corridor held only me, Valdorin, Matthews, and the head lying quietly on its cloth. The torches swayed. Valdorin crouched down and covered it again himself. His hands were steady. Steady to the point of cruelty. When the cloth was back in place, he didn't rise immediately. He stayed in that half-crouch and said quietly:"... At least don't let anyone else see him like this." Not an order.

For the first time tonight, it sounded like something from a person who was younger than the weight he was carrying. I stood beside him and said nothing. Because at this point, anything I could have said would have been noise. After a long moment, Valdorin rose slowly, gathered the fractures in his expression, and sealed them without a single loose thread. By the time he lifted his eyes again, there was nothing on his face but the composure of a Northern officer.

"Tonight stays contained," he said.

"Conrad died suddenly. The dungeon is sealed. I'll write the report. Anything involving aberration, monsters, or Miss Erina's identity does not leave this corridor." He looked directly at me.

"That includes you." I tugged at the corner of my mouth.

"Do I really look like I'm about to go on a speaking tour?" Valdorin didn't take the bait.

"You never look like it," he replied flatly.

"You do it anyway."... Hard to argue with that assessment. I looked down at the blood on my clothes, then at the shrouded head, and let out a slow, quiet breath.

"So," I asked, "what now?" Valdorin looked toward the dungeon's open iron door, his eyes the color of steel left out in a hard frost.

"First," he said, "we close that door."

"Then we remove everything inside that could still prove he was ever human."