Sasha tried to hold Elise from approaching the throne. “Hold it. You’ll get us in trouble.”

“In a memory? I doubt it.”

Elise walked up to the throne, dragging a hesitant Sasha along. “It really is him. Father and our ruler?” She stood in between the king’s condescending gaze and the prostrating man. As Elise assumed, they weren’t visible to those in the memory.

King Andre looked down on him as he motioned for his attendant to scratch his beard. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Harken Allard. After all the tales of your mind for money I’ve heard, I expect great things from you as our new treasurer. Have you settled into your new estate well?”

“Of course, your highness, though it’s quite big for a man without a family. A single room would have sufficed.”

Elise raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Did mom leave him?”

The king grinned. “I gift land to all my council. Use it or don’t but it is yours.”

“Yes, Your Highness. It would be gravely disrespectful to reject such a gift.”

“It is a shame a man as successful as yourself is alone. Perhaps you’ll fill up your new manor with a great, big family.”

Harken didn’t make many expressions. His face rested dull and emotionless. “Such distractions won’t be necessary, Your Highness. I look forward to immersing myself in my work. I require nothing else.”

Andre motioned for him to rise with the hand that still had feeling. Despite his old age and failing health, he held himself with the confidence of a king who wore his power on his sleeve. “Lower your head to me no longer. Your expertise has been long overdue.”

Perplexed, Harken obeyed. With his hands behind his back, he bowed. “May I be guided to my office, Your Highness?”

“Ashley shall do so.”

The maid bowed too at the mention of her name. She backed away from Andre, careful not to turn her back on him out of dignity, before joining Harken’s side. “Please follow me, Sir Allard.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m a simple maid. You are not required to address me so.”

“I am aware. It is my personal resolution to respect service workers.”

They exited the throne room though massive double doors. A nigh endless hall with tall, arched stone ceilings laid ahead. The glass of the towering windows looking out over High Monestate were stained rainbow. What sunlight pierced through morphed to paint extraordinary colors over everything.

The girls marveled at the show as they followed the father and Ashley. Elise let out a subdued growl. “He respected some maid more than me.”

Sasha looked unsure. “Maybe he’s got a thing for her.”

Even when bearing witness to Castle Hemmer’s fascinating design, Harken showed no reaction. Ashley side-eyed him as they walked. “Is it not to your liking?”

“It’s beautiful. This must be the place to be at dusk.”

“That is correct.”

Harken halted. His attention caught on to an especially gruesome painting. Words branded into its frame spelled out The Red Room. It illustrated seven crescent moons looking down upon a single man hugging himself with a smile. Hooks hung from the heavens. Ever-reaching hooks that hung headless, limbless corpses of giants by their backs. Were these supposed to be The Gods?

He shook his head. “It’s almost like this is celebrating The Apparatus. Who the hell would romanticize such a horrible thing?”

Ashley sharpened up for a moment. “You know of it?”

“The tragedy of The Red Room has been burnt into my memory ever since the first time I read about it. Anyone with an education would say the same. Age old tale of fools playing God.”

“You should be more open-minded. There are no more gods but a large void of power where they once existed. Someone needs to step up. Would taking such responsibility be playing in such an age, Sir Allard?”

He pondered her question, but his answer would’ve been reactive and emotional. She had a point. He uttered a colorless response lacking intrigue. “Hm. Is that right?”

Ashley guided him onwards, speaking as he observed the details of the architecture. “Castle Hemmer is over two-hundred years old. Its rooms number over one-hundred-and-twenty. There are thirty-two staff working here, you and I included. We all work hard to maintain it.”

He did a double take on her. “Only thirty-two? That is a skeleton crew for such a massive place. I would have expected at least seventy.”

“My lord has no heirs and sparce subjects. He doesn’t trust easily. The less staff to watch, the less his anxiety.”

“That’s logical. I don’t hire staff because it's cheaper to cook, clean, and never leave messes myself. Laboring the enslaved or indentured is suboptimal too.”

Ashely gave him an eerie gaze, so he explained himself. “Is it so odd to meet a man who picks up after himself?”

“It is. Is that why you wear gloves?”

“I dislike it when the oils of the skin stain my work.”

The rest of their journey wasn’t far. Every piece of wooden furniture, golden overhanging chandelier, and masterpiece of art draping the walls were crafted to perfection. It reeked of dumb money. Dumb money made Harken nervous. He was a man who slept with a pillow at his desk for efficiency’s sake. A man who both had everything and nothing.

Ashley stopped and pointed to their right. “This door leads to your office.”

Rather than the room she spoke of, Harken focused on the one on the opposite side of the hall. It was rusted, reinforced by steel, and locked from the outside. A thick metal bar slid across to block any who would try to open it from within. Low wailing reverberated through, barely reaching his ears. It caused his stomach to drop.

Ashley watched his lips quiver in eerie silence. She warned him with an authoritative voice. “Don’t go into that room. Entering would be dangerous. It’s blocked off for ongoing repairs.”

“What is that sound?”

“The wind.”

Sasha walked up to the door, placing her ear against it. “And the sky is red.”

Ashley left Harken waiting outside of the treasurer’s office to stare at the barred steel door. The wind? Did they think he was dumb? He sighed and ignored it to get to work. They paid him to doubt their financial decisions. Not their moral ones.

The office was the most spacious room he’d ever worked in. It was bigger than his smaller practices in their entirety. A desk sat centered in the circular space surrounded by expansive bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. Then a staircase revolved up to even more bookshelves out of reach.

Was it clean though? Not at all. It was a horrible damn mess. He filed through disorganized papers and files thrown everywhere for an hour before sitting in his office chair. Finally, he propped his feet up, putting his hands behind his head. “I feel important now.”

Sasha leaned up against a nearby bookshelf. “Well, he is the treasurer for the most important man in Ailmor.”

Elise who sat on the ground sighed. “I need to know what’s behind that door.”

Harken yawned. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. With a disturbed face, he turned to face the door to his office only for it to slam. “Hello? Who is there?”

No answer. Elise looked at Sasha. “Did you see her?”

“I did. The maid. It was just for a moment, but she was watching him.”

“Are you thinking about what I am?”

“Opening the door?”

Elise nodded and got on with it. They left to the halls where it waited, lifted the metal bar from its braces, and thrust it open. She squinted. “What?”

Nothing stood behind the doors. White void. It confused Sasha. “If we’re in your father’s memories, I guess that means we won’t know until he does.”

“You must be right.”

The sound of repeated metallic clinging rung out behind them.

They turned to find the black suit of amor leaning up against the wall, clapping with hollow gauntlets in applause. It coughed and gasped for air. The armor creeped out Sasha.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

She took a step back, questioning Major. “What is that thing?”

Major replied. “I sense spiritual energy and complex, horrible emotions, but I cannot identify what it is. I only know that its soul bears a burden of guilt, dread, and sadness unlike anything I have ever seen.”

Elise scratched her chin, pondering. “Whatever it is, it must want us to know what is beyond the door. Why else would it lead us here?”

Sasha pointed. The door to Harken’s office, like the others before, gave off the same red fog. They entered and found his space completely reorganized. Not even a speck of dust or hint of disarray was in that room. The king’s treasurer sat at his desk, quill pen in hand, scribbling in chicken scratch. His hat hung next to him.

He’d developed an unmaintained, scratchy beard. Elise watched his bleak, focused face with a solemn look about her. She turned to Sasha. “Father always made sure to keep his face cleanly shaven. He couldn’t grow a good beard. My mom found him more handsome without it.”

“So he doesn’t care anymore.”

“Looks like it. Or maybe he was pushed over the edge.”

A high-pitched scream barely reached their ears. Harken’s quill snapped in half. With trembling fingers, he opened his desk’s drawer to pull out a replacement. “One hundred and thirteen days and three hours. Sixteen disturbances. The wind, aye, maid? This one sounded like my little girl.”

He scooted back in his chair as if propelled to action only to slam his forehead against the corner of the desk. Blood dripped from a new cut. “Four months. Eleven staff of Hemmer vanished and replaced. Every prior treasurer, the same, erased from history. My records are the only truth.”

Ashley’s words often reverberated in his head. So did her eerie everyday stare. She was always watching. Watching and searching. Never cleaning. Never performing the genuine duties of a maid beyond surface-level performance.

“If she’s really just a simple maid, then I was a perfect husband and father.”

Sasha’s face tensed up. She pointed to the door now creaked open. They stared down Ashley who stood and gazed at the back of Harken’s head. In that moment, her eyes were as soulless and beady black as a killer bear’s.

The door ever-so-slowly pushed open. Like a morbid creature, the maid burst into a soundless sprint toward him. Elise closed her eyes tightly, expecting the worst, as Sasha witnessed Ashley violently pluck hair from his head.

Harken broke from his deep focus with a pained “Ouch!” and snapped to the opened door. He rubbed his scalp. “I locked that door. I’m losing my mind.”

To both the girls’ horror, he never saw Ashley stalking. She predicted every turn of his head, moving with supernatural speed and silence to keep from even his peripheral vision. The maid followed inches behind him as he walked to lock the door. When he did so with a click, she reopened it, slipped out, and left it swinging.

Harken turned, saw it, and grinned. He erupted into drawn out, exhausted laughter. He wiped his watery eyes with his sleeve. “I understand now. I’m dead. I’ve been sent to some low level of Yellen.”

A commotion out in the halls caught his attention. The voice of the junior maid, Mae, shrieked out. “It’s His Highness! He’s suffered another stroke!”

Harken stumbled out into the halls. “What?!” He called back. Then he saw her to the right. Ashley. With a stone-cold expression, she sprinted with pumping arms towards Mae’s voice. He’d never even seen a beast so fast.

What psyched him out more than anything else was her lack of sound. Ashley’s footsteps were completely silent. With goosebumps, he watched her as she disappeared down the halls like an owl in flight.

Harken faced the barred off door as the whimpering of a young girl from under its cracks met his ears. Such a panic overtaking Castle Hemmer never happened. If he were to find the truth, it’d have to be then while Ashley was distracted. Why did it even matter now anyway? He was dead.

Tunnel vision narrowed his line of sight as he threw the binding metal bar aside and thrust the door open to enter. Sasha and Elise slipped in with him. It slammed behind them. They descended downstairs consumed by darkness as the whimpering neared. So did new, terrifying sights and scents though.

The combined low moans and cries of dozens created a twisted choir of suffering. A miasma of blood, shit, and body odor induced all three to gag nearly to the point of sickness. He groaned. “I was wrong. Now I’m in the depths. Such a place isn’t meant for someone’s daughter.”

Harken entered a wide chamber with flickering ceiling lights. It appeared to be some kind of operating room. Countless tools from serrated saws to surgical blades and mouth muzzles meant for animals scattered on tables and hung from pegs on walls. He stood in the center of it, met by many directions to take.

That barred door must’ve led down to labyrinthian underworks. Sasha took Elise’s hand again, overwhelmed by dread. Major spoke up from its sheath. “I sense an extremely high concentration of souls within this facility. They’re suffering in ways unimaginable. The density shifts by the minute as well.”

Sasha looked at her dagger, her body shaking in its entirety. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“People are brought down here to die. They are replaced as quickly as they are killed.”

“Why would someone do such a thing?”

“I do not know.”

Before choosing a direction, Harken noticed rows of racks showcasing white cloaks. Though hesitant, he put one on to disguise himself. Rescuing the little girl took precedence before anything else, so Harken approached the door straight ahead. They pushed onwards into a smaller operating chamber where loud yelps rang from.

A jester with a face painted gold and a doctor’s coat stood behind a girl strapped to a surgical table. She’d been strapped down at the wrists so tightly that her hands were purple. As she drooled and hummed with flickering eyes, the jester hammed a sharp rod into her exposed brain.

Sasha grew faint and stumbled onto Elise’s shoulder as Harken gazed with frozen, wide eyes. “By The Gods... Wha—What have you done?”

The jester addressed him nonchalantly. “She just wouldn’t stop begging for her daddy to save her. I found it odd that she couldn’t understand that her daddy was already dead, so I deduced that she suffered from mental illness. It called for a lobotomy. Now she’s stopped being such a bitch. We can harvest her soul in peace in now.”

“Harvest her soul? What are talking about, clown?”

Confusion overcame the jester. He glared at Harken, tilting his head erratically to the side. “That isn’t the proper way to address your senior.”

Harken’s face twitched. This was the point of no return. “I apologize, Sir. I’m one of the newer ones down here. I’ve forgotten your name.”

“It is Mercutio. Honorifics aren’t necessary. While you’re down here, lend me a hand.”

“With what?”

“I need to put her back on her hooks. Follow me to The Apparatus.”

Harken’s face fell deadpan under his cloak. “Excuse me? I believe I misheard you.”

“Obey, acolyte. My patience is running thin.”

Mercutio unstrapped the girl, ushering her up to her feet. She shimmied by inches in her permanent daze, led by the jester and hesitant assistant. A stream of silent tears and snot flowed all the way down to Sasha’s chin. She hicked every now and then.

Seeing her cry then made Elise start too. They’d gone through so much that night already and it wasn’t even close to being over. What awaited them at Castle Hemmer branded terror into their hearts.

Sasha begged her. “Tell the black armor to let us leave now. Please. We don’t need to see anymore. We get it.”

Elise shook her head despite her own psyche being pushed over the edge. “I don’t think it would listen to us. It’s almost over. I can feel it.”

They followed Mercutio and Harken onwards into a massive chamber akin to a cathedral. Ever-long chains hung from a contraption on the ceiling that cranked, cycling them closer to their destination at the back. Countless crying, suffering people from children to the elderly hung from them, hooks lodged deep into their backs and toes hovering above the ground.

The Apparatus stood massive at the end of the room. It was a machine the size of a building, riddled with incomprehensible pumping liquids, spinning gears, and steaming pipes. A nude adult man lowered down into The Apparatus.

There was a specific scream only those slowly ground into slush from toe to head made. That scream etched itself into everyone except Mercutio.

The jester found it to be meaningless noise. “Soul compression as an idea looks good on paper, but the results change drastically with the smallest changes in stimuli. The outcome is unpredictable. I toil every single day over how our precursors created a perfect homunculus. One day you’ll see demigods on par with The Wyrm born here. I just need time. Until then, there will only be disappointments and monsters.”

Major let out a frustrated growl. “We’ll put all these acolytes in the ground, and all these victims out of their misery. What depravity to sacrifice so much for an ugly mimicry of godhood.”

Sasha sniffled. She tried to voice her suspicions, but the sudden shock of witnessing such mass trauma hushed her into becoming nonverbal. “They’re… augh… um.”

Major knew what she meant and answered. “That’s right. They’re trying to make a god. Like machina, all humans come from gods. They possess residual soul power divine in nature but normally unreachable. These fools wish to artificially create machina of flesh by channeling the souls of countless into a single vessel.”

“Ab…dul?”

Major closed his eye in resignation. “That’s right. He went through something similar, but a horrible machine like this will never create anything but abominations. Human souls are too corrupt. This jester doesn’t know his futility. He is shooting into the dark cluelessly.”

Her tears worsened to bawling. “This isn’t right. I can’t forgive it. I—I—I can’t! I won’t!”

Harken looked down at his hands and fell into silence. He left The Apparatus. Mercutio called out to him, annoyed, but didn’t follow. As soon as Harken made it into the first operating room, he threw the acolyte’s cloak aside, fell to his knees, and vomited all over the floor.

Elise jolted her attention away, blocking Sasha's view to avoid causing a chain of sickness. “Father...”

Clenching his stomach, Harken made his way up the steps to the barred door. When he exited, the door closed on Sasha and Elise. Wheezing came from further down the stairs. The dark silhouette of the black armor looked up at them. It pointed to their final door, a red glowing haze blowing from beneath. They entered. What waited was none other than Harken’s manor before its ruin.

He sat in front of and stared into a fireplace while curled up in his lounge chair. Harken sunk into a depressive state of numbness caused by the brain fog that worked to save his mind from itself. He’d sipped bitter, hard liquor that entire evening now.

A rope tied into a noose hung from the railings of the staircase above. A voice spoke to him within his head. Run. An intruder is rushing towards us from the western wing. Her resolve is too strong to contain.

“Run? Don’t bother, Silent Hill. I have an idea of who our visitor is,” he said with slurring words.

Harken looked over to his right where Ashley stood, coldly watching. He waved at her. “Knew it couldn’t have been my wife.”

“Hilarious.”

Ashley wore that lavender maid dress everywhere. It was uncanny. With a stern voice, she spoke down to him. “I told you it was just the wind. You should’ve left it there, but you just had to go in.”

“How’d you know? I’ve covered my tracks and busted my ass to fix all your messes. I only fall apart after I get home from work.”

Ashley walked over, stopping in front of him. “I didn’t know. His Highness did. I’m here on his behalf. Our Lord can know anything about a person if I collect a piece of them. I take. He reads. That is our relationship.”

Harken felt his scalp. It all made sense now. The disappearances, the odd way she acted, everything. This was the power of King Andre’s machina. That book that never left his side. “Was it my hair then? I knew you weren’t just some maid. Scary. Scary and impressive.”

She let a condescending grin show. “It is not often that my efforts are praised. I’ll think about your words every night.”

“Gonna arrest me? Put me in some hole? Might as well kill me then.”

Ashley grabbed hold of Harken’s throat with both her hands. He never would've been able to overpower her. The muscles of Ashley’s forearms felt like steel.

Her tone grew more malicious the longer she spoke. “Just know that I’m not granting your final wish. Couldn’t care less about what trash wants. His Highness demanded your death the moment he sensed your intentions to poison him.”

With raspy wheezing and gurgling, Harken struggled to peel her fingers from his neck. “I won’t rest— I can’t till I know justice is coming… for everyone!”

Harken’s eyes bulged from his skull. Her grip only tightened. “Do you remember what I said the day we first met?” she asked. “The Age of Gods is over. Soon, we will replace them. It’s a shame. If you had just shut up, you could’ve been on the right side of history when we rewrote it.”

“Fuck! You!”

His vision faded with his final breath. Harken was too shitfaced to feel the snap of his own neck.

Elise’s face twisted in extreme turmoil as Sasha spaced out. Sometimes, a part of being family is loving those you haven’t forgiven. Sometimes, we love when we wish we couldn’t or didn’t. It often doesn’t make sense.