[Arc 1 | Volume 2]

[Introductory Arc]

[Volume 2 | Chapter 44: End Verse]

Cagliostro Narma has had far better nights.

Shadows danced across Ocarina's port as dusk bled into darkness. Amber streetlights cast sickly halos upon cobblestone, illuminating nothing but the city's decay. From his estate overlooking the harbor, Cagliostro Narma watched ships crawl like insects across blackwater. The evening breeze carried salt and rot, scents that had defined this city for centuries.

His study had once been his sanctuary, and now it felt like a mausoleum.

Cagliostro poured himself another finger of whiskey. The glass clinked hollowly against the oak desk. He swirled the liquor, studying its color. Like blood, like brown, like his son's hair. He downed the liquid poison from his glass in one gulp. It burned his throat, yet not enough. The sear did nothing to dull the voice echoing through his skull—that monster's voice, wielding unattainable foreknowledge and unimaginable threats.

"Was my message thorough enough?"

The glass shattered against the mansion's marble ground. Shards glinted like stars fallen to the earth. Servants would clean it tomorrow. Servants always cleaned his messes.

Not this one, however.

Not the blood that still haunted Ocarina's streets, seeping into the foundation of everything he'd built. Not the void left by Giovanni's absence, a chasm that widened with each passing day, threatening to swallow everything he'd ever cared for. As even now, Marcella wept in their chambers, inconsolable for the third consecutive week. Her once vibrant eyes had dulled, her skin pallid and paste-like, her spirit utterly broken. The doctors could do nothing for a heart shredded by grief, they explained offhandedly as if he needed their expertise to understand that his wife was dying not of disease, but of sorrow.

"Worthless… utterly worthless… all of them…" he whispered, words tasting of bile and ash.

The Narma patriarch tried everything. He acted quickly, silenced all dissenters, bribed the two most capable men in the IPA, and orchestrated the perfect execution... and for what? For that Irregular to escape with a High Inquisitor? For the Bloodhounds—notorious for never failing a contract—to abandon their mission?

"Deal is off, circumstances have evolved." Nemesis hollowly said. His tone crackled through the line, bearing static that couldn't mask his indifference.

"You gutless bastard!" Cagliostro roared, gripping the receiver until his knuckles bleached white. "I've paid you! My son deserves justice!"

"I don't have time to deal with your horseshit." The assassin growled in an attempt to mask his pain, a sound like steel scraping bone. "This was never about justice and you know it, you dumbass. Pursue your case through… legitimate channels if you actually care about your son's death next time."

The implication had been clear as crystal. A threat wrapped in velvet—a reminder that Siegfried Eisenberg had known from the start exactly why Cagliostro Narma had hired them instead of letting the Empire's justice system handle the murder, and why a father would pay assassins for his son's murder rather than demanding an official investigation.

Because he couldn't risk the truth emerging.

The real killer. The real reason.

Cagliostro moved to his desk, fingers trembling as they traced the leather-bound ledger hidden in the false-bottomed drawer. Inside lay the evidence of his damnation—shipping manifests, coded contacts, payment records. The illicit Luminance trade had kept the Narma family afloat while their legitimate businesses slowly sank into insolvency. Under the gilded veneer of commerce and finance, Ocarina was a city of drug trade. The Luminance trade was one of the biggest underground markets in the Western Hemisphere, and the Narmas controlled the lion's share of it. This had been their practice for decades, ever since their family's demotion from Sovereign House to Lesser Nobility a century prior. Criminals, businessmen, and merchants from all across the world sought out the Luminance network's services.

And so, he never once questioned why that person approached him six months ago.

"A partnership. Your routes. My protection. Mutual benefit," the figure had called it, voice neither distinctly male nor female, countenance obscured by that damnable white mask.

He'd agreed. Of course he'd agreed. The House of Pelagius was squeezing his family out of every legitimate venture in Fiora. What choice did he have? The Narmas had ruled this province centuries ago before relegation had reduced them to glorified merchants with empty titles. Giovanni would have inherited nothing but debt and faded glory, and so Cagliostro had chosen differently for his son. He would do anything to ensure that his son could properly succeed him and restore the House to its former glory.

Until the payments came due.

Three missed shipments. They were three delays that couldn't be helped: storms, Imperial Homeland Security, and the usual hazards of smuggling. Three apologies that fell on deaf ears.

"Lord Narma, I trust you understand the consequences of your actions."

Cagliostro laughed it off. What could one person with a mask-wearing fetish do to a family that had survived centuries of political machinations? He'd increased security, doubled the house guard, and installed new Mystic Gears at every entrance.

Two days later, Giovanni's skull was bashed open.

There was no warning nor disturbance of those security measures. Just his boy—his only son—sprawled on some dilapidated building's rooftop, a single rose blooming where his heart should have been.

Just like those families in Wallachia.

Just like…

The Irregular had been there as the police searched for an apparent flash of light that was set off in the city gutters. That wretched, powerless boy. He was the perfect scapegoat.

And still, it hadn't been enough.

Cagliostro pulled the curtains closed, unable to bear the sight of his city any longer. His territory. His failure. The port that had once represented Narma hegemony now mocked him with its steady commerce, indifferent to his family's collapse. Most ships no longer even paid his unofficial "fees"—word of the Bloodhounds' departure had spread like wildfire through the underworld.

He was rotting away.

"Such despair. How perfectly you've portrayed it."

The utter sliced through the silence, impossibly impassive yet cutting like obsidian. Cagliostro's finger froze on the trigger as ice flooded his veins. He hadn't heard the door open. Hadn't sensed another presence. Hadn't—

"ANNEROSE!"

The name, the figure, the symbol erupted from his throat, primal and raw, as he spun before materializing a red scepter in a flash of flame.

There, in his study, a white shadow stood. That same porcelain mask adorned the figure's face. The rest of the intruder was draped in white, form-fitting garments that revealed nothing of the figure beneath save for its grace. Even gender remained indecipherable, the voice modulated to exist in that uncanny valley between male and female.

"Your hospitality leaves something to be desired, Lord Narma." The head tilted slightly as porcelain caught light from a different angle. "Though I suppose grief has its own etiquette."

The jeweled ruby scepter wavered between them, Cagliostro's aim betrayed by trembling hands.

"Get out. Get out before I—"

"Kill me? I'm afraid that's my specialty." The white-clad figure took another step forward, the movement sinuous and hypnotic.

"Or… have you forgotten your son already?"

"YOU—"

"Silence."

Prana, raw and powerful, rolled from the figure in a wave. It was a pressure that slammed Cagliostro against the far wall as it pinned him like an insect to corkboard. His scepter clattered to the ground, useless, as his breath left in a choked wheeze.

"You have failed me."

"I—" Cagliostro's voice caught in his throat, lungs straining against the oppressive force bearing down on him. He clawed at his chest, desperate for oxygen, for control, for his life.

"I was going to tell you that I have no more need for your services as you have exhausted your utility." Annerose paused, a statue carved from alabaster. "However, it appears as though... you wanted to kill me? Is that correct?"

Cagliostro strained against the invisible vise crushing him, eyes bulging as he struggled to breathe. "I'll kill you!" he managed to choke out, each word an agony. "I swear it. I'll rip off that mask and mount your head on my wall! I'll gut you like a fish and feed you to the dogs. I'll—"

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"Ah... I feel less bad about this now. After all, aren't I simply acting in self-defense?"

Cagliostro didn't realize the gravity of his words until he was sent flying to his right, about to smash into his study walls. He closed his eyes, bracing for impact, for death's cold embrace. But it never came. Instead…

He fell on the ground.

Cagliostro's temple struck something cold and yielding. Expensive carpet—yet not the one from his study. The scent was different here, floral and delicate. Familiar.

His bedroom.

The realization came as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, heart hammering against his ribs. How? He'd been in his study just moments ago, about to collide with solid wall, and now—

His hand met something wet. Something warm.

"Light reveals such fascinating truths, doesn't it?" Annerose's voice came from behind him, followed by the soft click of a lamp being turned on.

Amber illumination spilled across the room, catching on crystal perfume bottles, silk draperies, and the ornate vanity that Marcella had brought from her family home. What the light revealed next twisted commonplace objects into grotesque shapes.

Blood.

Everywhere.

Spreading outward from the four-poster bed in a perfect crimson constellation. It soaked the imported Wallachian rug, splattered the hand-painted wallpaper, and dripped from the damask curtains—droplets catching light like a wine frozen in sands of time.

And at the center of it all, Marcella.

Or what remained of her.

Her nightgown, ivory silk that he'd commissioned from Hyperion's finest tailors, bloomed red from sternum to navel. The cavity in her chest gaped obscenely, ribs splayed outward like the petals of some nightmare flower. Where her heart should have been—

A single white rose, petals already drinking in her essence, turning pink at the edges.

"No."

The word escaped Cagliostro in a whisper, then grew to a moan.

"No, no, no no nonononono—"

He crawled toward the bed, hands slipping in his wife's lifeblood, staining his imported suit, his skin, his soul, the mother of his scion, the love of his life. Her eyes stared upward, frozen in an expression of surprised recognition. She'd known her killer, perhaps even welcomed them into the room. She knew she would die, but living a life where her son was dead and his killer alive was nothing more than torture.

"She asked about you, at the end." Annerose moved around the perimeter of the room in a robotic sort of gait. "Wanted to know if you would join her soon."

Reality split around Cagliostro as he reached the bedside. His fingers trembled as they brushed Marcella's cheek, still warm, still soft, as if death hadn't yet realized it possessed her.

"...What did I tell her again? I said that depends entirely on Lord Narma's choices. That some fates are worse than death."

A sound built in Cagliostro's chest—something primal and agonized that had no name in any human language. It burst from him, a howl that scraped his throat raw, that emptied his lungs in one sustained note of pure anguish. He clung to Marcella's body, oblivious to the blood that now covered him head to toe, oblivious to the intruder's presence, oblivious to anything but the absence—the yawning, irreparable chasm—left by his family's extinguished flame. He buried his face in her neck, inhaling her scent one last time—jasmine and copper, perfume and death.

"Please. Please, Marcella, please—"

"She cannot hear you." The ghost watched before stepping closer. "Though I suspect she would appreciate your distress. In my experience, the death of a spouse always cuts deepest. There is something uniquely devastating about losing the person who chose to share your path, don't you think?"

The casual observation, delivered in that same impassive tone, drove something in Cagliostro to splinter. He clutched Marcella tighter, rocking her like a child, smearing crimson across his face as he pressed his forehead to hers.

"Wake up," he whispered, voice cracking. "Please wake up. I'll do anything. I'll give anything. Just open your eyes."

"Is this not preferable to slow decay?" Annerose tilted that masked head. "She was dying already—withering from grief. I merely hastened the inevitable. Some would call it mercy."

Mercy.

The word resonated within Cagliostro like a bell's toll, each echo shaking him to his core. Mercy. This was mercy?

This... travesty of justice, this obliteration of everything he had ever loved or lived for? This was mercy?

"....You dare speak of mercy?" His eyes were venomous.

"I speak of necessity. Your family has exhausted its utility. The shipments are no longer required. The diversion is complete. Your role in this production has concluded."

Cagliostro's mind reeled as he tried to process the words through the fog of his grief. "Diversion? What diversion?"

"The Irregular, of course. His journey to Windsor was imperative. The circumstances of his arrival, equally so." Annerose waved a hand dismissively. "Your son provided a useful catalyst. His death sent you in quite the frenzy."

"No," he breathed, the realization sinking in. "No. No. You... you used my son. His murder, the Irregular, all of it, to... to what, manipulate me? To send an innocent boy to the executioner's block? You killed my son... orchestrated all of this... for that powerless nothing?"

"Innocence is a relative concept at the end of the day." Annerose's tone shifted, a hint of amusement coloring their voice. "But yes, in a sense."

Cagliostro wanted to understand, wanted to unravel the insanity that had destroyed his family. Yet all he could see was Marcella's face, peaceful in death as it had never been in those final weeks of life. All he could feel was the cooling stickiness of her blood on his hands, his clothing, his soul.

He didn't care anymore.

He just wanted to rip off the mask and tear out the eyes of the monster that wore it.

"I'll...KILL YOU!"

Cagliostro's hand found his family's sword, mounted on the wall beside their bed—an heirloom from when the Narmas had been more than merchants and smugglers. His fingers closed around the hilt with grim purpose.

Murder.

It was the only thought remaining in his shattered consciousness. The only purpose left to a man who had lost everything else. He would kill this monster before him, this aberration that wore a human shape but lacked all humanity. He would carve off that mask and reveal the demon beneath. Cagliostro lunged, the heirloom describing a perfect arc through the blood-scented air. It should have cleaved Annerose from shoulder to hip and split that white-clad form in twain.

It passed through nothing other than empty space.

His momentum carried him forward, stumbling, as Annerose appeared behind him, solid as stone where there had been only air moments before.

Cagliostro whirled, blade flashing again, driven by grief rather than skill. Again it met no resistance, Annerose having stepped sideways—not in the sense that humans could describe three-dimensionally, but in some other higher dimension that Cagliostro couldn't perceive.

"Pathetic," Annerose observed.

Rage ignited in Cagliostro's veins like liquid fire. The prana within him—long dormant, rarely used except for parlor tricks to impress business associates—surged forward in response to his fury. His Elemental Thaumaturgy, unremarkable among nobles but adequate for a desperate man's final stand, manifested in the ancestral blade.

"[Gran Flammonis]!"

The sword erupted in crimson flame, edges burning white-hot as ancient metal fused with living fire. The heat was so intense it scorched the ceiling, leaving black trails as Cagliostro brought the weapon overhead. His face, illuminated by hellfire, contorted with an animalistic ire.

"Burn in hell!" he roared, bringing down the blazing heirloom in an executioner's arc.

Annerose didn't evade this time. Instead, one gloved hand rose to meet the descending inferno—casual, almost bored.

The collision never came.

The blade stopped midair, caught between Annerose's thumb and forefinger like a falling feather. For one suspended moment, Cagliostro stared in disbelief as his family's legacy—forged in the age before the Great Corruption, tempered with ancient techniques lost to modern smiths—hung impotent in the grasp of this thing that wore human shape.

Then the sword shattered.

It shattered into a thousand glittering fragments, each one catching the light of its own dying flame before extinguishing. The pieces fell around them like metallic snow, tinkling against the blood-soaked floor in a perverse melody. Annerose's free hand rose, violet light limning the gloved fingers like a living shadow.

"The Narmas truly are a shadow of their former selves."

Before Cagliostro could retreat, before he could even process the destruction of his treasure, that violet-wreathed hand swept diagonally across his chest.

There was no resistance nor pain, only a strange weightlessness as a perfect diagonal slice—from right shoulder to left hip—simply ceased to exist. Cagliostro looked down in bewilderment. Where his chest should have been was... nothing. Not a wound, not torn flesh, but absence. As if that portion of reality had been erased from existence itself, leaving only void in its wake. No blood flowed from the edges of this impossible non-injury. The jagged borders of his remaining self weren't raw or bleeding—they ended, terminated with the precise finality of a redacted document. His legs gave way, and he collapsed to his knees, still staring at the nothingness that had replaced his vital core. His lungs, what remained of them, struggled to draw breath through a trachea that now opened into emptiness.

"A clean cut." Annerose studied the diagonal void with what could have been fascination. Only then did Cagliostro notice what the masked figure held: a still-pulsing heart, extracted so perfectly that its major vessels remained intact, quivering with the last desperate beats of a doomed organ.

His heart.

It was removed so precisely that it continued its futile rhythm, unaware that it no longer resided within a living chest. Cagliostro tried to speak, but his remaining lung could only produce a whistling gasp. His vision darkened at the edges as his brain, starved of oxygen, began to shut down.

Promptly, the ghost crushed the still-beating organ in a clenched fist before Cagliostro's eyes, devoid of emotion.

"Goodnight, Cagliostro."

Then, oblivion for the man who lived a life of sins.

"[Incendio]."

With a swipe of his hand, as if it were a lighter, he ignited the ground, setting fire to tapestries, furniture, walls—everything they touched. The flames rushed through doorways, climbing stairs, seeking new fuel. The Narma estate, built over generations, cultivated as a testament to a noble lineage now fallen, burned incessantly.

Cagliostro could no longer see clearly. His remaining eye—the other lost to the diagonal void—fixed on the porcelain mask, the last image his fading consciousness would record. He thought he saw something then—a crack, hairline and subtle, running across the pristine surface like a promise.

Perhaps it was merely the distortion of death's harrowing approach.

Around them, the estate groaned as old timbers surrendered to the unnatural flames. Walls buckled, ceilings collapsed, and generations of history and wealth transformed to ash in minutes rather than hours. The fire spread impossibly fast, consuming the mansion from within, yet leaving a perfect corridor for Annerose's unhurried exit. The ghost stepped through a fold in reality that wasn't there a moment before, disappearing elsewhere as Cagliostro Narma drew his final, strangled breath.

The flames climbed higher, reaching toward Ocarina's night sky like beseeching fingers. Ships in the harbor turned their lights toward the conflagration, captains barking orders as crew scrambled to witness the spectacle. Citizens emerged from homes and taverns, pointing upward at the hill where the Narma estate burned with otherworldly flames.

None would reach it in time. None would understand what truly happened within those walls.

By dawn, nothing remained but smoldering ruins as the charred skeleton of a once-great house reduced to memory. Investigators would find two bodies among the debris, one female, one male, both burned beyond recognition yet identifiable through records and assumption.

The official report would cite arson as the cause of the Narma family's destruction. Once again, someone else was framed for a crime they never committed in Ocarina.

None would note the absence of Cagliostro's heart from the recovered remains.

None would connect this isolated incident to the massacres in Wallachia.

None would understand its significance in the grand design slowly unfolding across the Tachyon Empire.

Except.

The First Paradox.

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