Two weeks have passed now since the strange meeting in the village. No fresh incidents have been officially recorded, but something under the surface was already in motion—an invisible thread pulling on the fringes of the kingdom's map. In ten days, four doctors from remote settlements had vanished. Not killed. Not kidnapped. Just vanished—vanished as if history had decreed they no longer lived.
All disappearances were the same: no fight, no shattered locks or splattered blood. Bare houses with half-cooked meals still warm on the stove, abandoned letters in the middle of a sentence, and one, a pair of neatly set shoes by the entrance.
The rumor spun wild, fantastical tales. Kidnappings by ancient cults. Black-bagging by the authorities. Curses. A tavern songstress in one northern village claimed to have seen a tall figure standing motionless in the rain outside one of the doctors' windows—barefoot, with no shadow—in excess of an hour. When pressed for a claim, she went white. "He had no shadow," she said, before clapping her lips shut on further talk.
Meanwhile, at the castle, anxiety grew in shocked dread.
Lindsay sat at the fringe of the main war room, fingers intertwined against her chin. Her roster of missing names lay out in front of her like an exposed wound on paper. Senior officers wove past her in hushed conversation. No one addressed her directly, not since her last report—the boy. Her descriptions were too vague. Her senses too sharp. The council wasn't certain whether to promote her or conceal the file.
Kraft hovered a few feet away from her, back stiff as a ramrod. He wasn't saying much these days. His quick clever remarks had lost their bite, worn away by something he couldn't articulate but felt constantly. A scratch beneath the skin of the world.
"They're not related," he said suddenly, as if saying it out loud was going to make it so. "Different territories, different backgrounds. No pattern."
Lindsay said nothing. Her eyes were on the page. She ran her finger around one of the names. Then another. They were not connected by work. Or location. But the dates… the timelines felt selective. Like someone was cutting away the edges to access the middle.
Minutes later, a runner was seen—gasping, pale. They were summoned to the castle records, where the investigation committee had redirecting efforts in search of background patterns. If any existed.
The records were an information tomb—cold, vast, and gloomy with the air of stale parchment and unseen things. The ceiling swooped unreasonably high above, distant chandeliers swaying with slow creaks. Shelf upon shelf of records towered like condemnation.
The archivist barely looked at them as he gave up access. "Stick with the off-limits decade," he complained. "1801 to 1810. When they shut everything down."
Kraft's eyebrow lifted. "Shut what down?"
But the man was already in motion, disappearing behind another shelf.
They separated, winnowing through the hundreds of reports: ethics trials, closed-down labs, projects marked "Dissolved" or "Reassigned." Most were bureaucratic molasses—names for nothing, cancelled grants, records long since designated irrelevant.
But Lindsay, working through one quadrant of the experimental subjects registry, found a discrepancy.
A page—carefully inserted into the log, dated almost a decade ago. But it was blank.
Not redacted. Not ripped.
Just. blank.
No title of the subject. No signature of the researcher. No date of trial, no location, no verdict.
Just the registration number: #000.
She waved the file under the flickering light of an overhead torch. No watermark. No ink bleed-through. It had been deliberately submitted. Saved. But never touched.
"Someone erased it?" Kraft asked, bending forward over her shoulder.
"No," Lindsay answered slowly. "They never finished it."
She moved to the previous entry. Subject #037—fatal reaction to Arc Serum. Next: #038—whereabouts unknown, presumed dead. She crossed back to the empty space.
"It's not a mistake," she complained. "It's a placeholder."
"For whom?"
Her eyes narrowed. "For an individual they couldn't afford to flesh out."
She couldn't say what she was thinking. Not out loud, anyway. But her stomach, honed and whipped intuition, was already drawing her mind back—to the boy. The silence. The look on his face. The serene way he watched the world as if it already was lost.
They brought the page with them. Classified it under a different name.
Just in case someone came looking for it afterwards.
That night, the western woods were covered in dense cloud. No moon. Just the rustle of wind cutting through leaves.
By the border of the forest, where the river flowed slowly and shallow, there was a lone figure on the riverbank—still. He wasn't hidden, but he shouldn't have been seen either.
On the river, a jacket bobbed downstream. Thick wool. Torn at the sleeve. The kind medical workers wear in cold weather.
A few meters lower down, spectacles were wedged between boulders. The frame twisted. Lenses broken, coated with sediment. No blood. No indication of fight.
The figure on the riverbank clenched his fists.
His jaw worked quietly, chewing on a memory that he could not swallow. No words escaped his lips. No prayers. Only the bare agony of something that he could not erase.
Then he turned.
And went disappearing into the woods, darkness swallowing him quietly.