Chương 50: Moonlight

A purple window glowed in front of Lloyd's face. The room was still steeped in deep nighttime half-light — the desk lamp continued burning dimly in the corner, casting a warm, trembling circle of light onto the worn wallpaper, while outside, the sky, finally cleared of clouds, began revealing scattered stars against the black expanse, glimmering with a cold, distant light, like tiny pinpricks in the dark fabric of night.

The air after the rain was fresh, almost crystalline, saturated with the smell of wet earth and cooling asphalt, and a light draft from the window occasionally stirred the edge of the curtain, casting a barely visible, trembling shadow on the wall, like the slow, lazy wave of some invisible hand. Somewhere on the windowsill, right at the edge, a single raindrop still glistened, on the verge of falling.

Skill: [Hand of the Forgotten King] Level: I Description: The Forgotten King has reached out to you across the ages, and his gift has become your shadow. The spectral hand knows no barriers: stone, steel, and flesh are equally hollow to it. It can touch what the living cannot reach — the soul itself. Lloyd's eyes lit up as he read the text, the purple glow of the window dancing in his widened pupils, tinting the whites of his eyes with a faint lilac hue.

"I knew it — with a name like that, the description was bound to be epic. Well, thanks, Forgotten King. I don't know who you are, but I owe you one. This skill's gotta be insanely strong." Lloyd stretched his hand out in front of him, tensing his fingers, as if expecting something ghostly and majestic to materialize from his palm at any moment.

An awkward silence settled over the room, broken only by the quiet hum of the refrigerator somewhere in the kitchen and the occasional, lonely chirping of a cricket that had somehow made its way onto the windowsill outside and was now methodically singing its simple tune in the darkness. The seconds dragged on slowly, thickly, as if the very air in the room had frozen along with Lloyd's outstretched hand.

"So how am I even supposed to use this thing?" Lloyd spent several minutes twisting himself into the most ridiculous poses, stretching his arm up, then to the side, then sharply shaking his wrist, as if trying to flick something invisible off it, but nothing ever appeared.

The shadows cast by his silhouette darted across the walls in the lamplight, stretching and shrinking with each jerky movement, lending the whole scene an almost comic, grotesque edge — like some absurd shadow play performed for no audience at all.

Eventually he ended up standing on his head, palms pressed against the cold wooden floor, feet braced against the wall, straining so hard the veins on his neck bulged and his face flushed red from the rush of blood, his pulse pounding dully in his temples, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Suddenly the door to the room creaked open, the sound echoing through the quiet house.

Lloyd shifted his gaze — as much as his current position would allow — toward the doorway. There stood Rozi, eyebrows raised, holding a cup of coffee, a thin, barely visible wisp of steam curling up from it into the cool air of the room before dissolving somewhere near the ceiling. An awkward pause settled over the room. They stared at each other silently for a couple of seconds, though for Lloyd those seconds stretched into an eternity of humiliation.

The lamplight picked Rozi's frozen, slightly stunned expression out of the gloom, while Lloyd himself, standing on his head with a flushed face, undoubtedly looked, at the very least, bizarre — disheveled, his bandaged arm hanging helplessly in midair. Suddenly Rozi murmured quietly: — Right, I'll probably just come back later. The door clicked shut, followed by the sound of her footsteps receding down the hallway, gradually fading into the depths of the house until they disappeared entirely.

Lloyd stayed on his head for a few more seconds, as if hoping that pretending nothing had happened would somehow make it true, while the silence around him now felt especially oppressive, thick with an inexplicable, almost childish sense of shame.

"I take back everything I said." Suddenly he lost his balance and crashed to the floor with a dull thud, nearly knocking a stack of books off the shelf above the desk — it wobbled, then settled back at the very edge — while the old floorboard beneath him let out a pitiful creak, as if protesting such careless treatment.

Lloyd exhaled heavily, rubbing the back of his head and wincing in pain, while somewhere in the wall, after his fall, something gave a short, quiet crack — whether it was old plaster crumbling or just the house settling again in the night, he couldn't tell.

"Could this King not have left behind at least some kind of instructions? God, I miss Mippo..." He slowly got to his feet, still a little unsteady, and walked over to the window, leaning his good arm against the cold, damp windowsill. His gaze drifted up to the sky, where a bright white moon had begun to break through the thinning clouds, bathing the yard below in pale, ghostly light that made the wet grass and the puddles on the asphalt gleam with a dull silver sheen.

He stared at it, transfixed — the moon was so far away, and yet it remained impossibly beautiful. It seemed as though he could make out every hollow and every shadow on its snow-white surface, every crater, every wrinkle of that ancient, silent face gazing down on the sleeping city. Thin, translucent clouds drifted slowly across it, briefly dimming its glow before revealing it again in full splendor, as if some invisible hand kept drawing and pulling back a gossamer-thin veil.

The wind outside stirred the last leaves on the trees, and they rustled softly, as if whispering to one another in the moonlight, while on a neighboring rooftop, a lone bird sat motionless, a sharp dark silhouette against the starry sky, seeming to listen to the stillness of the night as well. Somewhere far off a dog barked, and the sound, bouncing off the walls of the neighboring houses, dissolved into the night almost as soon as it appeared, leaving behind only emptiness and the steady chirp of the cricket.

Lloyd, still captivated by the moon's beauty, murmured quietly without looking away, his breath forming a faint, barely visible puff of vapor in the cool night air: — I wonder what's waiting for me next.