I saw a dirty wooden table in front of me and blood dripping from my face. What’s going on? Where am I?
I tried to move, but I simply couldn’t. I couldn’t even turn my head. However, my head did look downwards, even if not under my control. I took a look at myself and I immediately noticed a dirty checkered shirt, hairy arms, a horrible stench, manly shape and clothes. This isn’t me!
“It works! It’s working!” I heard a manly voice shout. It was like I said that, I felt my mouth move. I was possessing someone else’s body. “Mendivi, I put you together!” the voice continued, “I finally did it!”
Unwillingly, I left the dirty room and went into the yard of that house. The sight was familiar, yet distant. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an open yard and nature blooming around me.
After a closer inspection, it was Vorfall, the village where my family was from, but the houses were different. They all looked cheaper and older. There was also no road, even though the layout of the village was almost the same.
I was freaking out, the entire situation was confusing and frightening. I couldn’t even remember what had happened right before. Is this one of Rose’s illusions? Is she trying to show me something? No, wait, didn’t I try to kill her?
My memories came back to me. I realized that I had mendivi, not Rose. This was being shown to me directly by mendivi without anyone’s control. The further events were shown to me way more quickly, the time wasn’t accurate at all. In fact, I remembered every event in detail, but they eventually all passed in parts of a single second.
I was watching Alfred’s life, well, his life from the moment he had obtained mendivi. I did not have any recollection of anything before he inserted it into his eye socket. I could feel a deep rage inside of him, he felt that he had a proper reason to use mendivi. His plan began within the mansion, where he cleared around stuff, and where I got to see the blueprints and seemingly random tools. The blueprints were not Alfred’s, I assumed that he had somehow stumbled across them.
He spent the next year or two kidnapping every single victim of his and also preparing everything needed for them, while also testing out different illusions in front of everyone, then quickly making them forget with some clever use of mendivi.
The mansion in his time looked different from today and the differences really stood out. Firstly, the room on the third floor that led to the rooftop wasn’t there. There also wasn’t anything in place of the monitor room. Those parts were constructed later. The storage room and the playroom on the second floor, while still there, did not serve their modern function and looked nothing like what I could remember. They were mostly empty, only having a couple of shelves inside with random dusty things stacked on top of each other. The room on the right wing of the second floor looked like a living room, with furniture, a lamp and a radio inside it. In the modern time, none of that was there, only a pile of trash was dumped around the room.
When Alfred began his sick game, he pretended to be one of the victims, and with mendivi, that worked out for him, though the tricks he pulled were different from Rose’s. He simply created fake traps around the mansion, illusions that the others thought were attacks coming from a mysterious being that was always nearby, but never visible. Alfred reinforced that idea by occasionally creating fake shadows that convinced everyone that their idea of that individual was real.
The torture itself was varied, it mostly depended on Alfred’s mood. Either he’d make someone in the backyard think they were being attacked by a wild animal, force someone to vomit blood, have an illusion of a knife randomly falling from the ceiling where it wasn’t visible to anyone until it was too late to dodge, give someone the feeling of being burnt alive without any visible symptoms, there was no end to his barrage. The conditions these people were living in could only be called a form of hell, and that’s without mentioning that they only had enough food for around a single meal a day.
Because I had Alfred’s memories, I also knew the full names of these people. That meant that I knew exactly who was whose ancestor. Eugene Eller, Mary Steed, Gabriella Martel, Lillith Sharp, Friede Divinitas, Joseph Divinitas, Samuel Cleeve, Peter Voss, Omar Alrawi, Mabel Umbra and Bertha Keller.
Most of these names were completely irrelevant, in fact, all but one. Gabriella Martel. Her surname made it clear that she was related to Rose. In fact, her surname and Lucia’s lack of appearance in Alfred’s memories made me question many things. Is that the mistake Rose said I made in my essay? It has to be!
I paid closer attention to Gabriella whenever Alfred gave me the chance. That happened on many occasions, despite the fact that the memories in front of me came one after another without a second passing.
She was a skinny and pale girl with long and straight blond hair, unusually quiet considering the situation. She acted differently than everyone else, like she was making a plan. She was still suffering, but she made efforts to do things that others did not. Most importantly, she and Alfred became close, she would apologize for random inconveniences from a past that I couldn’t remember, she would call him really nice nicknames, she would even offer to comfort him, though she herself was on the verge of going insane.
Then I got to see Alfred’s downfall. He naively put his trust into Gabriella and forgave her for whatever she may have done to him. He took her to his bedroom on the first floor, the same one that I slept in the last couple of weeks.
“Gabriella, I must admit something,” he said to her.
“Yes?”
“I am at fault for all of this. I am sorry that you were forced to take part, as I mistook you for a terrible woman.”
“How are you the one to blame? You’re suffering just as much as everyone.”
“No, I’m not,” he said before stopping the illusion that made mendivi look like a real eye. I did not see the difference when he did that, but I somehow felt it. “I knew that you would stay calm. This thing replacing my eye is called mendivi. I found its parts while exploring this abandoned mansion and since the blueprints were there too, I decided to build it. Next to all of that was a small note explaining its capabilities, but I threw it away out of paranoia. However, all you should know is that it allowed me to do everything ‘supernatural’ that occurred.”
Gabriella was not phased, it was like she expected everything.
“How interesting,” she said creepily.
“I will free you from here and I will even attempt to compensate you for everything you went through. The others will have to stay here, some more might even die. So far only Samuel and Mabel have died, but it is not enough. You are not aware of how evil these people are.”
“I’m really free to leave?” Gabriella casually asked while going through the drawers of Alfred’s bedroom.
“Yes, you are. Though, why are you going through my drawers? Do you think there’s anything of value there?”
“I’m just taking my compensation.”
When she turned around, I saw a tool in her hands, the same one Rose used to take out mendivi.
“Put that down,” Alfred said with a stern voice, “that is something private of mine.”
Gabriella did not respond. She jumped towards Alfred with rage in her eyes that was no longer disguised. Since he was caught off guard, he didn’t have time to use the mendivi or even protect himself with his hands. She successfully attached the tool to mendivi and pulled it out without much effort.
Everything was black again, darkness surrounded me for a moment in the same fashion that it did when Rose attacked me with mendivi. After that moment of darkness passed, the light that returned put me in Gabriella’s shoes, with Alfred in front of her, dead. That reminded me of one of my moments with my grandmother. She talked about how her mother had quickly lost her love for Alfred, how he didn’t care for her or his wife and how his early death had completely been his fault. Now, staring at his lifeless body from the perspective of a woman who he tortured, I knew that the truth was way worse than just a lack of love.
What a disgusting monster.
Gabriella created an illusion to hide mendivi, then left the room and freed everyone before telling them what happened. Everyone was shocked, but it didn’t take them long to believe her. With all said and done, they returned to Vorfall, expecting no more than a warm welcome and tons of questions, but their expectations weren’t met. Everyone was terrified of them, they were people who were presumed dead and they returned as a group despite going missing weeks or even months apart. After a bit of time, the mass of villagers was calm enough that they could hold a conversation, but once they heard about mendivi and what Gabriella did, they kicked her out of the village for having the guts to murder a man and then forced everyone else to live in the local church for at least a week with daily exorcism attempts, as they had thought that mendivi was the devil.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
She headed down the road to Nidengate and finished her journal while walking before putting it in her bag. Afterwards, she made the biggest decision of her life. That decision was to create a new identity using mendivi, to start a new life. That created Lucia. The rest of her life was mostly normal to my surprise, she found a handsome man that treated her well, had two children with him and one of her children had a daughter later on, Rose. For a while everything was going well, although she always presented herself as Lucia, even to her children. She even purposely aged Lucia as the years went by.
She was really close with Rose, even closer than with her own children. Most of Rose’s free time was spent with Gabriella and they talked and played for hours on end. Their endless conversations only ended with Gabriella’s death, and she was even fortunate enough to die of old age. However, before that, Gabriella decided to confess her secret to Rose. She sat in her small bedroom and called for Rose while nobody else was home.
“I’m here,” Rose said, “what’s up?”
“I have something to show you. It must be kept as a secret from everyone else though.”
“Don’t worry, you know I never share our conversation topics with anyone.”
“This is more than a topic. It’s something I’ve been shunned for and something that forced me to change my identity.”
“Oh, really? Well, you know that you can trust me with anything, nan.”
“Have you heard of Vorfall? It’s that village just up the hill.”
“I know, it doesn’t seem like anything special.”
“Well, I used to live there when I was young. I had a completely different identity, my name used to be Gabriella.”
“Wait, if that was your name then, why did you change it to Lucia?” Rose asked with confusion. She seemed prepared for any confession, but just didn’t expect one like this.
“I’ll get to that. What happened was, a man named Alfred lived there as well, he was an unhinged maniac, convinced that everyone was out to get him. He set his eye on me and ten other people, he kidnapped us and trapped us in an abandoned mansion around a kilometer away. There, two people died and everyone else was tortured and almost starved to death. It was horrific, and that torture that we all endured, it was not normal.”
Rose held her hand and tried to comfort her, but Gabriella shed a couple of tears.
“It’s fine if you don’t wish to continue, nan.”
“No, this is important. What happened next was, I managed to make Alfred like me, I had the idea of him being responsible ever since we entered the mansion. And I was right, after we became close, Alfred admitted to it and he showed me how he did everything. He used a tool called mendivi, a metallic eye. Its use is to create illusions that everyone can see. They’re extremely powerful, you can feel everything. With such a tool, I knew he had to have something nearby in case he needed to get it out of his eye socket, so I quickly searched and I managed to do what was necessary. However, due to the tension, I didn't think right and I ended up stabbing my eye with mendivi and taking it. At that moment, another ability was revealed. ‘Inheriting memories’.”
“Wait,” Rose interrupted her, “where’s mendivi now?”
“I said that it can create illusions.” Gabriella stopped the illusion of her right eye and showed Rose mendivi, making her jump back. “I’m so sorry for scaring you.”
“No, no, it’s fine.”
They continued talking about what had happened, and eventually they got to one decision. Due to the ability of mendivi to store memories, Rose was to take it before Gabriella died and continue her legacy. Gabriella didn’t want to do it at first, since it would mean that Rose would inherit Alfred’s memories too along with her grandmother’s trauma, but Rose encouraged the decision and also stayed quiet about it, nobody knew what was happening between them.
I saw darkness for a moment between their exchange of mendivi and then got to see the world and the rest of the century long tale from Rose’s perspective.
When Gabriella died, Rose simply made the body look like Lucia and then ended the illusion right after the funeral.
Rose looked through Gabriella’s memories multiple times and she was angry at the inhabitants of Vorfall for abandoning her dearest grandmother without any hint of remorse. She visited the village and the mansion often after that, even staying over to sleep in the mansion for a couple of weeks once.
The memories completely altered her personality, it turned her a different person, or better said, into a mix of three people stuck inside one body. It slowly turned her into a psycho, a much different outcome than what Gabriella had gone through.
Eventually, she made a plan. As a tribute and as a weird form of revenge, she was going to recreate Alfred’s horror. She started working on it way before she had even an image of what she was going to do. She turned some rooms into hidden ones, built two or three more, repurposed some to her liking, she was aiming for a place where one could live a decent life, but where nothing made sense. She hired professionals to do that work, but only created a false memory of them receiving money as she did not have any stable income that could pay for any renovation. All that led to the version of the mansion that I ended up witnessing with my own two eyes.
She didn’t go along with her plan for years. I hadn’t even been born at the time that she first wanted to begin, but she thought that our parents were too old. She wanted to see younger people suffer. It was very obvious that her original idea was nothing more than a cover up for her sadistic desires that mendivi had given her. She spent years doing other things that she considered irrelevant, all to pass the time. To everyone, she was a normal member of society, but that murder and torture spree was still lingering in her mind.
She started executing her plan in the spring of two thousand and twenty-one when she began kidnapping everyone one by one at any convenient moment she found, just like Alfred had done, while also turning herself into Lucia. Her idea was to make me the “traitor” because Alfred was one, but since I refused to cooperate, she scrapped the plan. Then she made multiple scenarios with everyone else and used us like we were toys until she decided that Alex was the option.
Her idea of a traitor was someone that would at the same time be within everyone and considered a victim of her crimes, but also act as her assistant and be forced to assist in the torture without anyone else knowing. Alex was very hesitant, though he accepted simply because he was afraid of her.
It didn’t take too long for Rose to lose interest in that idea. It didn’t flow naturally enough for her, she found the traitor’s function clunky. She felt like she needed to flesh out Alex’s role in everything and that made her come up with a new idea.
Unlike Alfred’s plan and her previous one, there would be no regular torture, just murder that the traitor would need to get away with without getting caught, but the tension would definitely remain high. She got the idea to give everyone the motive of the “secret of the mansion”.
Subsequently, she made more renovations, like getting rid of most windows and instead creating a quiet yet effective ventilation system and only letting the Sun in while everyone was asleep during some nights. While the unpaid workers did that, Rose kept us all inside our rooms as prisoners, though she did regularly give us food. Her plan was practically flawless, and around September of two thousand and twenty-three, the misery began.
I clearly remembered all the events that occurred without the need of mendivi, but now I was witnessing them from Rose’s perspective. She spent most time watching the cameras in case something bad happened, but she also often took walks through and around the mansion. She was constantly focused on us and always awaited something new. She was like a cruel Goddess laughing at the suffering of her underlings.
All that led to our final battle, where I learnt from mendivi that she did really plan to let us all go until Leon messed everything up. Everything went the same as I had remembered until I temporarily parted ways with Rose when I dove into the ball pit. I could feel her anger at Leon at that moment, any idea of mercy was completely gone.
While I was hiding inside the ball pit with Evelyn, she ran around the mansion looking for everyone. That was the time when I left my hiding position and made my way to the main hall where I waited for my time to strike. As I rewatched those moments, I realized something unusual. The thing that pushed me into the main hall was the sound of footsteps, but Rose wasn’t nearby when that happened. Somebody else walked by.
Eventually though, Rose did return to the storage room, though much later than I had previously thought. It all happened while I unknowingly stared at one of her illusions.
When she opened the door to the storage room, Leon was there, though in a very horrifying state. He weirdly and slowly walked toward Rose with a bag on his head that had an eerie smile drawn on it. His arms and hands were completely hidden by his sleeves, and his pants also looked way too big for him. Rose jumped back out of sheer surprise, but then immediately, without hesitation, she used mendivi to give him the illusion of a heart attack.
“Fucking freak,” she mumbled to herself.
Then, she walked away like nothing had happened and went downstairs and into the main hall. We met, I shot her and the decades of new memories that had been ingrained in my mind within a couple of seconds finally connected with the present.
The moment Rose attacked me with mendivi, everything turned black for the last time. Darkness shrouded me for slightly longer than before, and then, Rose appeared in front of me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I felt like I regained control of my body again, at least in this nothingness that I was now in.
“What do you want?” I wasn’t sure what to say.
I was still overwhelmed by the entire situation and I didn’t know if I was even really talking to Rose.
“To apologize. I had no control over this situation.”
“I saw everything, don’t lie to me!”
“That wasn’t me, that was mendivi. It’s formed its own identity. I could only watch myself turn into a monster.”
“What? I don’t understand.” I was even more confused than before.
“I was still conscious, but all those decisions, the recreation of Alfred’s crime, becoming Lucia, that wasn’t my decision. I’m afraid that mendivi has used our memories to form its own personality. I’m apologizing to you because I feel like mendivi has somewhat killed you.”
“You can’t be serious–”
“Maybe you’ll be fine, I don’t know, don’t take my word for it. Maybe I was just insane, but a person that feels the way I do now can’t commit all those atrocities that you saw. I’m so sorry, Petra!”
“Were you really not able to stop anything?”
“I exist alone only in this nothingness, and it’s not common that I get to be here. Everywhere else, I feel its influence and I feel no remorse for its decisions. I have become one with mendivi.”
I rushed toward Rose and hugged her tightly.
“Hide mendivi, try to live a normal life,” Rose said.
After that, I could no longer hear her words and her body slowly faded into the abyss.
I opened my eyes to the main hall from my view with Rose’s body lying motionless in front of me with a pool of blood around us. So, that is the secret. The full capability of mendivi, and so many horrific uses for it. I am its new owner…
Will I get to live my life as Petra Wolf or will I become a new person, a mix of four people possessing a body that once only belonged to me? Gabriella seemed normal, Rose wasn’t, and Alfred didn’t have anyone else’s memories. I’m scared…