Chapter 10

Kuro—

I pressed myself flat behind the heavy curtain, barely breathing as footsteps thundered down the hallway. Two guards sprinted past, their boots hammering against marble.

“Hurry, get out of here!” one shouted, panic thick in his voice.

“Something’s tearing through the lower levels!” the other yelled back. “We need to—”

Their voices faded as they rounded the corner, still running.

I slowly peeked out from behind the curtain.

Something was happening elsewhere in the castle.

The floor trembled beneath my paws, subtle but constant, like a distant heartbeat. Chandeliers swayed overhead, glass clinking softly as the stone groaned under some unseen force. Guards were fleeing toward the exits, abandoning posts without hesitation.

Good. That made things easier.

“Is the coast clear?” a whisper came from behind me.

I turned.

The girl crouched behind a decorative potted plant, one of those ornamental things nobles stuffed into hallways just to show off their wealth. She had grabbed two of the lower branches and was holding them up in front of her face, as if that somehow made her invisible.

Her white hair stuck out on either side like snow-dusted wings, glowing faintly in the torchlight.

I stared at her.

She stared back through the leaves, completely serious.

“What,” I said slowly, “are you doing?”

“Hiding,” she whispered.

“Behind a plant?”

“Yes.”

I paused.

“Okay.” I decided not to question it.

“Let’s move while we still can.”

She nodded quickly and followed as I padded down the corridor. The castle was massive, far larger than I had imagined. Marble floors stretched endlessly beneath our feet, walls lined with gold-trimmed paintings and tapestries. Wealth layered upon wealth, enough to make my fur bristle.

Another tremor rolled through the floor.

The girl stumbled, catching herself against the wall.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Keep moving.”

But I had suspicions. Whatever it was, it was tearing through the castle with enough force to send guards running. That alone told me it wasn’t something meant to be stopped.

We moved quickly, hugging walls, checking corners before crossing. Most of the corridors were empty now. We searched rooms as we passed. Supply closets. Spare bedrooms. Storage halls stripped bare.

Eventually, we found a stairwell leading upward.

The smart ones had already fled. Only the desperate stayed behind. Or the loyal. Sometimes there wasn’t much difference.

I stopped at an intersection, glancing left, then right. Sweat dampened the fur along my spine.

“Uh… I don’t know where to go,” I admitted.

Behind me, the girl bent over with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. Her face was flushed. She looked like someone who had never run this much in her life.

I could have joked. Lightened the mood.

But this wasn’t the time.

For a moment, the thought crossed my mind to just turn and escape the castle entirely. Leave everything behind.

I crushed it.

I had waited months for this chance. I had come here knowing the risk. This was the only opportunity I would ever get.

“Mr. Kitty?” the girl said suddenly from behind me. “Why don’t you use your nose to find what you’re looking for? Like in the movies.”

I froze.

Her voice was… off.

I turned my head slightly. “Thanks for the suggestion,” I said carefully, “but I wouldn’t know what I’m looking for. And what’s a movie?”

I looked back at her.

She was staring at me in confusion.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“You mentioned my nose,” I said slowly. “And something called ‘movies.’”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied. “And what’s a movie? Is it a kind of candy?”

Her eyes lit up at the thought. She even leaned forward a little, already half-drooling.

I stared at her.

She stared back, clearly waiting for me to explain whether this mysterious “movie” was edible.

Before I could answer, something shifted at the edge of my vision.

Perched on the window trim was a mouse.

Gray, dirty fur. Small.

ordinary.

It sat there calmly, cleaning itself with its tiny paws, completely unconcerned by the chaos shaking the castle. I didn’t know why it bothered me, only that it did. My instincts stayed quiet, strangely uninterested, and that alone felt wrong.

Then my nose caught something.

I lifted my head and inhaled deeply.

The scent hit me all at once.

I turned sharply to the right. “There,” I said.

“Right,” the girl replied, scrambling after me.

As I moved, I glanced back toward the window.

The mouse was gone.

I forced the thought away and refocused.

The smell grew heavier with every step. Thick. Cloying. Wrong. It pressed against the inside of my head like fog.

It was the same stench I’d caught earlier on that man in the white robes, but stronger now. Concentrated. Layered.

“This way,” I said, turning down a wider corridor lined with old portraits. Painted eyes followed us as we passed.

The girl hurried to keep up, her bare feet silent on the marble. “Mr. Kitty,” she asked softly, “what are we looking for?”

I didn’t answer.

The scent was overwhelming now, familiar in a way I couldn’t place. My chest tightened as a name surfaced in my mind.

Fuko.

Why did it remind me of him?

Then we rounded the corner.

Double doors stood at the end of the hall.

The smell poured from the cracks between them like breath from a wound. No other room in the castle felt like this. No other place carried that weight.

I approached slowly, every step deliberate, my nose twitching. The stench was so thick here that I could almost taste it.

Rot. Metal. And something beneath it all made my instincts scream to turn and run.

The girl stopped beside me.

She stared at the doors, her small hands clenched at her sides. I could see her trembling now. She felt it too.

“Is this it?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” I said.

Whatever waited beyond those doors, it wasn’t human.

And it was close.

Another tremor rocked the castle, stronger than before. Dust rained from the ceiling, drifting down like gray snow. Somewhere far below us, something massive collided with something else. The impact rolled through the stone, deep and violent.

The girl stumbled and grabbed a fistful of my scruff to steady herself.

“What’s happening down there?” she asked, her voice tight.

“Nothing good,” I said.

She didn’t let go.

“Now then,” I muttered as the shaking faded, her grip still locked in my fur. “Could you stop choking me? It’s hard to breathe.”

“Oh. Sorry.” She released me immediately.

I took a sharp breath, chest rising as I steadied myself. “Alright,” I said, forcing calm into my voice. “Let’s see what’s behind this door.”

I already knew it would reveal the truth.

I pushed the doors open. While, with the help of the white hair girl. 

The stench poured out instantly, thick and overwhelming, like rot and metal left baking under a merciless sun. It was decay mixed with something emptier, colder. Void and flesh tangled together.

The girl gagged and clamped her hands over her nose.

I recoiled a step, ears flattening. I hadn’t expected it to be this strong. “Try breathing through your mouth,” I said, doing the same. “It helps. A little.”

It didn’t really.

Still, the scent told me everything I needed to know. We had found something important.

I stepped inside, eyes scanning the room, piecing together its shape and placement. The air was heavy, stagnant. Judging by the layout, by the pressure beneath my paws, we were directly beneath the throne room.

The lord’s private quarters.

The room itself looked almost ordinary.

A massive bed dominated one wall, its sheets neatly arranged and untouched. A tall bookshelf stood to the side, packed with ledgers and bound volumes. Across from it sat a wide desk cluttered with parchment and sealed letters. An office. A place where decisions were made quietly.

Too quietly.

The girl drifted toward the bookshelf, curiosity pulling her forward despite the stench. She ran her fingers along the spines, squinting at the titles.

“Wish I could read,” she whispered.

She probably did not realize I could hear her. For a brief moment, an absurd thought crossed my mind. After all this, maybe I should take her to Master. See if he would be pleased with a new helper.

I leapt onto the desk.

A candle burned low, its flame steady, as if nothing in this castle was wrong. Papers lay scattered beneath it.

Good.

If this lord kept records, journals, anything at all, they would be here.

I began sorting through the papers, careful not to knock the candle over. My eyes skimmed lines of ink, my nose still twitching despite the rot thick in the air.

The more I looked, the more I realized these were not reports.

They were drawings.

Most were rough sketches of faces. Twisted, hollow-eyed, unsettling. Others depicted massive shapes, towering forms with too many limbs and jagged outlines that barely fit on the page.

“Crazy man. There’s nothing useful here,” I muttered.

Then, as I pushed aside another stack, two sheets caught my attention.

The first had only words, written large and uneven, as if carved into the page by rage.

“KILL THE HARBINGERS,” I read aloud.

The second was a symbol.

I stared at it, and the longer I stared, the more it felt like it was staring back.

A single black line ran straight down its center, uneven and rough, as if dragged into the surface by something that did not care about precision. At the top, the line opened into a thin crescent, like a broken moon, its hooked ends forming a silent, watching grin.

It did not feel welcoming.

Just beneath it, two sharp strokes split outward, angled like blades pushing away from the spine. Lower still, the lines bent again, forming a wide, jagged shape that reminded me of limbs frozen mid-step, a body caught in descent.

The black ink bled at the edges.

As I dug deeper, I found the same mark again.

And again.

“Why do I feel like I’ve seen this symbol before?” I murmured.

I folded one of the papers small enough to fit into my pocket. Whatever this was, it mattered.

I glanced back. The white haired girl was still studying the bookshelf, lost in thought.

There had to be more to this room than parchment and ink.

Dreading the answer, I lowered myself from the desk and pressed my nose to the wall. I inhaled.

The smell was stronger here. Seeping through cracks in the stone. Rising from somewhere below.

“Um,” a voice said behind me.

“What?”

“Can you smell me?”

I froze mid sniff. “What?”

“You keep smelling everything. The air. The floor. The walls.” She stepped closer, tilting her head. “Can you smell me too?”

My tail went rigid. “That’s not relevant right now.”

“But you can, right?” She crouched to my level, blue eyes studying me. “Cats have good noses. You probably smell everyone.”

“I’m tracking scent,” I said quickly, turning back to the wall. “Ancient dark magic. Very serious business. Not people.”

“So you can.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say you couldn’t.”

My ears flattened. “Look, we have more important things.”

“Do I smell bad?” she asked quietly. “I haven’t had a bath in days. The guards didn’t let us wash.”

I sighed. Long and heavy. “You smell fine. Perfectly normal.”

“What do I smell like?”

Why was she pressing this? “Will it matter?”

“I want to know.”

“You smell like a human,” I said, doing my best to steer away from the subject.

“And?”

“Strawberry. A little.”

Her expression softened. A faint blush crept across her cheeks as she smiled.

“Okay.”

“You probably worked in a bakery. Or near one.” My tail swished before I could stop it. I did not know why, but seeing her smile calmed me.

She was just a child. Caught in all of this.

She nodded, the smile lingering, small but real.

For a moment, I found myself staring at her.

She reminded me of someone.

Then I noticed it.

The stench.

It clung to the air around her, thick and wrong. Not her scent, but where she stood. Surrounding her.

I leapt down from the desk and moved toward her without a word. She immediately scooped me up, holding me like I belonged there, rubbing her face against my fur.

I did not like it. I did not dislike it either.

“Do you notice anything strange about the bookshelf?” I asked.

She stopped and followed my gaze.

“I’ve never seen this many books before,” she said softly.

That was expected. Paper was expensive. Ink even more so. The shelf alone could have fed a village for years.

Then her brow furrowed.

“But one of these books isn’t moving.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She set me down.

“Here. Look.”

She placed both hands on a book and pulled.

It did not budge.

I had expected it to slide free like the others, but her hands began to shake as she strained. The book refused to move, as if it were part of the shelf itself.

The smell grew stronger.

Whatever was hidden here did not want to be found.

“Wait,” I said. “Don’t pull anything yet.”

She froze.

I reached up and shoved a nearby book aside with my paw.

It slid free easily.

“Just as I thought,” I muttered, knocking another loose. Then another.

Books hit the marble floor with dull thuds, covers cracking, pages fluttering like wounded birds. With every space we cleared, the stench thickened, seeping from behind the shelf in thin, choking threads.

“Mr. Kitty,” she hissed.

“Help me,” I said. “Take them all off.”

She did not argue.

She grabbed books and tossed them aside, some nearly flying over her head. We worked quickly, clearing the shelf until only three books remained.

They were evenly spaced.

Nothing about them looked special, yet they felt wrong.

“Those,” I murmured.

She reached toward one, hesitating.