The Knight didn't sleep throughout the night.
He couldn't. He couldn't possibly sleep with the fear of being killed.
Not in that room. Not in that mansion. The mansion was perfect. Way too perfect.
So, sometime past midnight, he stood up from his bed. He put on his armour. Strapped his gauntlets and covered his head under his helm. And then he started walking.
The mansion felt even more hollow at night. No candlelight. No footsteps. Just the creak of the floor under his boots and the soft clinking of his armor. He wandered for a while without direction, until he found himself at the library doors. They were quite large,just like all the other doors in the mansion.
It has the same thorn-like handle as the door to the study.
He pushed them open.
Inside, it was as silent as a tomb. No,more silent.
Tall bookshelves stretched high above him, packed with old tomes. The Knight moved slowly between the rows, dragging his hand across the spines. Some titles were written in languages he didn't recognize. Others had no titles at all. Their contents were not much better. Nothing special or anything.
Then one book caught his eye.
It was red, plain, and dusty. The wood on the shelf beneath it was worn—scratched and sunken, like it had been pulled out or pushed in more than the others. He pressed it.
Nothing happened.
"That was disappointing."
He sighed, stepped back—but then spotted another book across the room. Same shape. Same wear. Same dull color.
Another. And another.
By the time he found the seventh one, he'd circled most of the room.
He pushed it in—and heard a soft click.
One of the shelves slid backward with a low groan. Behind it was a narrow stone passage, dimly lit by flickering blue flames in iron sconces. The Knight hesitated for a moment, then stepped inside.
The stairs spiraled downward, carved from rough stone and damp with moisture. The air smelled strange—like metal, chemicals, and rot. At the bottom, he found a wide, cold room. The make of the room could only mean one thing:
It was a laboratory. Adraval's laboratory.
Long shelves lined the walls, filled with jars and containers. Inside them were preserved organs, glassy eyeballs, and tiny malformed bodies floating in yellow-green liquid. Some had feathers. Some had extra limbs. One jar held a twitching, half-formed fetus with too many fingers.
"My god..."
The knight was repulsed as he looked at the jars filled with the beastly humanoid things.
The Knight walked deeper in. Everything looked old, but well-kept. There were worktables, scribbled papers, empty beakers, and a few open bloodstained journals. Inside there was the name of the owner:
[Adraval Lalaurie]
He picked one up and began to read after some deliberation.
[Experiment 124] – Subject: Ariana
Age: 6 years.
Sprouted extra along her spine.
Stopped speaking.
Tried to jump from a third-floor window, thinking she could survive.
Died of brain damage.
Conclusion: Failed.
[Experiment 76] – Subject: "Mother"
Age:45 years.
Injected with Bone-Eater Compound.
Skin hardened. Organs started to turn to bone.
Grew a second jaw.
Spoke in the voices of her dead children.
Bit through her own neck and died.
Conclusion: Failed.
[Experiment 16] – Subject: Rita
Age:19 years.
Calm at first.
Started drawing floorplans of rooms she'd never seen.
Spoke backwards.
Then she vanished.
Body found three days later.
Conclusion: Failed.
The Knight flipped through more pages. Each one listed another failed subject. Some were children. Some were servants. Some were family.
He was about to close the book when he heard something.
Footsteps.
Slow. Deliberate. Echoing off the stone.
The Knight turned.
Adraval stood at the bottom of the stairs, a sword in one hand. The blade wasn't old—it was polished, sharp, and ceremonial. Silver etched with patterns the Knight didn't recognize.
Adraval's face was calm, but his eyes said otherwise.
He smiled slightly.
"What are you doing… Knight?"
The Knight closed the journal with a dull thud.
He didn't speak right away. He stood by the table, armored fingers still resting on the bloodstained cover, head tilted slightly behind the helm. He could feel Adraval's presence—his voice was calm, but the weight of it was anything but.
The blue flame sconces on the wall flickered harder, as if responding to the tension.
"I couldn't sleep," the Knight finally said. His voice echoed slightly from within the helm. "So I wandered. This… wasn't where I intended to end up. Seems as though you have some skeletons in your closet."
Adraval stepped down the final stair, slow and graceful, like a man descending to a wine cellar—though the sword in his hand ruined the image. He didn't raise it. Not yet.
"This part of the house isn't meant for guests," Adraval said. "It isn't… decorated. Or tidy. And I do like things tidy."
The Knight didn't move.
"I figured that out," he said, nodding once toward the rows of jars. "Hard to miss."
Adraval walked past a shelf slowly, his fingers tracing a jar that held something like a bird… but with a child's jaw jutting from its chest.
"You shouldn't judge a man by his methods, Knight Allen. Not in a world like ours," Adraval said. "We live in a world that let it all fall. The cities. The gods. The lines between man and monster. My family didn't survive the Hollow War by holding hands and praying."
He stopped just a few paces from the Knight, the ceremonial sword now glinting under the blue light.
"These weren't just… experiments," the Knight said. "These were people. Children."
Adraval's smile faded. Slowly.
"No. They were failures," he said quietly. "Like everything else in this world. They were failures on the path to the perfect human!"
A silence passed between them.
The Knight charged.