It was not tears that glistened in Óengus's eyes, but a venomous blend of realization and chagrin. His body froze for a moment, and his face, which resembled scorched earth, began to tremble—not from fear this time, but like a cauldron boiling from within. The detective's words were gnawing at the sanctity of his past five years, transforming them from "heroism and devotion" into "cheap exploitation."
Suddenly, Óengus straightened sharply, shaking his crimson robe with such force that motes of magic scattered from its folds. He exhaled a searing breath and fixed the detective with eyes that smoldered with suppressed, crimson embers.
"You are right, detective," he spat the words like a mouthful of tar. "Morals are a luxury for which we have no time. Your reading of the situation is most… precise, you clear-glassed stranger."
He raised his hands abruptly, and with a swift, circular motion, traced lines of blood-colored energy into the twisting air. The walls of "Juliana" suddenly contracted, beginning to move faster than before, flipping in a spectacle that blended high-tech mechanics with magic of surpassing beauty. My feet faltered, and I nearly fell, but I caught hold of Castor's robe to steady myself. He did not seem perturbed by my action, for which I thanked Providence… I felt a hand lifting me from behind; it was Agreta, smiling at me. "Take care, strong man," she said. It was an awkward moment, but I am not one to complain of a touch from a comely woman.
In the blink of an eye, there were no longer twisting staircases descending into the depths, nor ceilings exchanging places with floors.
Everyone found themselves standing upon a thick-piled, crimson-red carpet, its edges adorned with intricate golden filigree. The room was vast, suffused with the scent of sandalwood and ancient books. At its center, four red velvet sofas were arranged in a precise circular geometry around a massive table of rare, gleaming ebony—wood hewn from the heart of a Faerie forest.
Óengus moved toward the table with steps weighed down by wounded dignity. He did not look back at them but reached into the folds of his robe and drew forth a handful of pristine white sand, which seemed like the dust of ground stars.
With a theatrical gesture, he scattered the sand across the bare surface of the table.
The moment the sand touched the wood, it began to seethe and transform. In less than seconds, golden plates began to materialize from the void. From the table's surface erupted a feast of manifold variety: roasted meats dripping with succulence, strange, unseen fruits that glittered under the chandelier's light, and crystal pitchers overflowing with colorful liquors.
Óengus turned to them, his countenance now terrifyingly calm, yet his anger still coursed like a current through the room's air.
"Pray, be seated, my uninvited guests," he said, gesturing with a slightly trembling hand toward the sofas. "Since I am now reduced to a mere 'witness' in your narrative, detective, let this interrogation be conducted with the decorum befitting… your host."
Then he settled into his settee, drowning in the crimson hue, awaiting the detective's first verbal thrust.
A heavy silence reigned as everyone took their places. I, alone, dared to break the solemnity of that funereal scene. I reached toward the sumptuous dishes Óengus's sands had conjured and began to eat with a ravenousness I had not known I possessed. Hunger gnawed at my very core to such a degree it felt as though my soul, not merely my body, was devouring this food. What a strange sensation—to taste food for the first time, even though your memory holds the echo of every flavour, as if reclaiming a sense you thought was lost to the abyss of oblivion.
By contrast, the detective remained standing like a statue of polished ebony, facing Óengus, who was sunk deep into his red settee, while the three shadows leaned in the corners, observing the scene with unblinking eyes.
Óengus shattered the silence with his grating voice:
"Before you begin, detective… spare yourself the tedium of the conventional question. I know not where Simon is, nor where he was last seen before he vanished."
The detective tilted his glassy head slightly to the right, the chandelier light glancing off its smooth surface.
"I am aware of that, magician," his voice came, quiet, vibrating in the air like the hum of a bee. "I did not come to ask you of his whereabouts, for one who possesses Simon's cunning leaves no trail to follow. What concerns me is what occupied his mind… the vast projects whose threads he was weaving in the shadows before his departure. Those works which transcend the mere construction of an eccentric villa."
Óengus's features stiffened once more. He placed his palms upon the wooden table, seeming to weigh his words with a scale of gold.
"There was one thing…" whispered Óengus, his tone shifting to a sharpness edged with terror. "A project girded by ramparts of secrecy that would make Juliana seem but a child's toy, a screen to shroud the terrible darkness of Simon's deeds. He called it: The Scarlet Rose."
He fell silent, glancing about warily as Juliana's walls began to contract and expand like a living heart, as though the mere utterance of the name might summon some curse into the room.
"I am not meant to speak of this to any soul… the Lord placed a seal of magic upon my throat… should I begin to speak, it would erupt forthwith."
The detective turned his head toward Castor, who smiled a mocking smile. "Destroying evidence?"
The detective shook his head in negation. "Preserving a victim. We must distinguish between what can be saved and what must be sacrificed."
Castor offered no reply. He stepped forward toward Óengus and placed two fingers upon the latter's neck. They flared with a green radiance. Slowly, Castor drew his fingers away from Óengus's flesh, and with them stretched a slender thread of mana, resembling a glistening cord. It writhed, seeking to return to its place, but Castor's magic was stronger. Then, he sundered it.
Immediately, Óengus drew a deep, shuddering breath. Castor returned to his place.
"There. You may speak now," said the detective.
But Óengus remained hesitant. He stayed silent for a time, feeling himself trapped between the three shadows encircling him, the unyielding detective, and something else within—perhaps fear, perhaps horror, perhaps remorse. The lines of his face could be read as any one of those emotions.
"An utterly impossible, hyper-secretive project," Óengus continued, leaning his body towards the detective. "Even I, the Archmage's right hand and the commander of his brigade, was privy only to the outermost shell—based on the tests I conducted. Simon spoke of it as though it were… his ultimate purpose, the very end for which he was created."
The detective finally sat upon the settee opposite Óengus and withdrew his notebook, crossing one leg over the other with a mechanical calm. The reflections from the platters and candles danced upon his glassy face like distant galaxies in the deep of space. He listened, interrupted only by the sound of my chewing, for I felt a chill seep into my bones despite the heat of the roasted meat before me as I heard Óengus recount details no human nature should bear.
"Simon's obsession with immortality is no secret," Óengus began, his voice growing desiccated. "The whole world knows it. His famed auctions were but a front for peddling the trinkets he collected—magical junk the buyers later discovered was worthless. But ten years ago, Simon bought something real… he bought a 'human girl' from a merchant named Billy."
He paused to take a sip of red wine, which at that moment seemed as though he were drinking blood.
"She did not speak. She did not interact. She was a body without consciousness, without identity, without thought… she was merely a physical 'presence'. But she possessed what no one else did: an absolute capacity for regeneration and immortality. And for an entire decade, I was… I was her official executioner, responsible for testing the limits of that immortality."
Óengus's voice dropped, and the veins on his forehead stood out as he confessed to the brutality he had committed:
"I burned her alive with the fires of beasts that melt stone. I fed her, while she still breathed, to the starved Servants of Magic. I submerged her in hyper-gravitational chambers where space liquefies and tears tissue between the third and second dimensions… And each time, she returned. Her regeneration was not merely physical; our tests proved her existence extended across an infinite number of axes of motion and matter, and perhaps beyond. Her outer frame appears as that of any frail child, but her bones… her bones were impossibly hard, there was no—"
A suffocating silence fell; I nearly stopped eating from sheer revulsion. But Óengus continued, his eyes vacant:
"The strange thing is not her immortality, but what began to happen within her. Though her mind's data remained 'null' in our instruments, she began to learn. She began to recognize faces and react to them. With me… she was aggressive. She would kick, strike, and bite with all her childish strength, for she had learned I was the source of her pain. But with the maidservants who fed and tended to her, she was gentler… she sought a touch of tenderness in a world of torture."
The detective leaned his body forward.
"Can you describe the form of this 'rose'?"
Óengus hesitated, trying to remember. "Not… not exactly. I cannot recall its shape literally. It is only on the fringe of my memory. Sometimes, I think its form changes… not dramatically. Perhaps a shift in hair color, an arm's length by a few millimeters. But over time, you would notice the strange alterations."
A profound silence followed the description of the "bloody petals," a silence broken only by the rustle of Óengus's robe as he drained the last of his cup. I, Thomas, stopped eating entirely. A sudden bitterness rose in my throat; every morsel I had consumed seemed steeped in the suffering of that deathless child.
Óengus resumed, his voice growing sharper and more bitter:
"Ten years… a full decade of torment and rending, yet we came no closer to understanding the secret of her immortality. Simon watched the results, and his madness blazed ever fiercer. He would scream at me and at 'Morghan,' saying time was slipping through his fingers like sand, that Death was knocking at his door while the secret remained elusive."
The detective tilted his glassy form, its blackness reflecting on the table like a dark star.
"Where is the girl now, Óengus?"
Óengus gestured towards the twisting walls surrounding us.
"Juliana… Juliana was not built to be a villa for leisure. It was designed to be the ultimate laboratory, a torture-chamber with no exit. There was a passage, an intermediary chamber linking 'Juliana' to the main Eisenhart manor. Last night, the girl was there, at the heart of that chamber… and when the main manor vanished and Simon disappeared, the chamber faded, and the girl vanished with them. All that remains here is the hollow Juliana… and I."
"Who else knew of the girl?" asked the detective, his voice carrying a cold, interrogative tone. "Secrets of this magnitude are not borne by one man alone."
The crimson-robed magician hesitated, and a shadow of ancient guilt passed over his lined face.
"In truth… I was not the sole executioner. There was another who shared this black burden. The Archmage's left hand, Morghan, and my close friend… his name was Aurelius."
"And where is this Aurelius now?"
A heavy silence fell. Óengus hesitated for a long moment, his eyes darting between the three shadows standing in the background and the featureless face of the detective. Then, he sighed a sigh that seemed to issue from the depths of a grave and extended his hand towards the empty air before him.
With a sound like shattering crystal, the space beneath the magician's fingers fractured, cracking like a shattered mirror to reveal a small, black rift, infinitely deep and dark. Óengus inserted his hand into that spatial fissure, then withdrew it slowly, clutching something that made the very air in the room shudder.
It was a small, strangely wrought box, a piece of impossible geometry: a tesseract. A four-dimensional cube, its color a pristine white interwoven with a vivid cerulean blue that moved and flowed within the cube like a cloud trapped in glass from another age. The box folded in upon itself and expanded in motions that defied visual logic, much as Juliana's walls had done moments before.
He placed it on the table before the detective, so abruptly it made me finally cease my eating.
"What is the meaning of this, Óengus?" asked the detective.
Óengus lowered his shoulders. "It is a prison of my own making… Here resides the man named Aurelius."