They strode ahead, into the next room. This one was dark and quiet. There were no puppets. Not even one.

Ike stepped forward, then slipped. He swung his arms and grabbed the wall. His feet slid outward, but he dragged them backward and pulled himself up against the wall.

Beside him, Wisp quietly placed her feet on the wall.

“Cheater,” he whispered.

She grinned.

A single light beamed on, illuminating a window. The floor shone underfoot, bright, polished silver. A mirror. The man in all black stepped onto the windowsill. He looked around, a lost expression on his face. His lips moved. No sound emerged, but Ike knew who he called for. His wife. His child.

A second light thrummed to life. His wife stood under its beam. She stood eerily still. Tall and silent, she waited for him. He ran to her side and took her hand, a smile on his face. She turned her face to him. A hollow smile twisted her lips.

From the darkness, a small figure rushed into the light. His daughter wrapped her arms around her father’s waist and beamed up at him. Just like with his wife, her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

The man smiled, then went to pull away. But the puppets didn’t let him go. They clung on. He frowned. Their grip tightened. Still unwilling to hurt them, he gently pried at their hands, but his gentleness couldn’t break the puppets’ grasp.

From out of the darkness, puppets rolled forward a frame. A pitch-black puppet hung from the frame, perfectly sized to match the man. The wife and daughters’ grips grew tighter. The man started to struggle in earnest, only to find that the puppets’ strength was supernaturally strong. He couldn’t break free. The black puppet rattled closer. In the mirror underfoot, their reflections overlapped.

The man gritted his teeth. He unleashed a blast of magic. The girl and woman staggered away. For a moment, their expressions turned earnest. The human part of them shone through.

“They’re not dead… or are they?” Ike muttered.

“One way or another, it’s too late now,” Wisp replied quietly.

The man closed in on the black puppet. He sent it flying, and the puppets holding it tumbled with it. Even as it flew away, he whirled on his wife and his daughter. His face twisted with rage. He leaped toward them.

Ike’s eyes widened. “He doesn’t know it’s actually them. He thinks they’ve been replaced, not inhabited.”

“They were probably dead to begin with,” Wisp said.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Ike pressed his lips together, not so certain.

As his fist closed in, the wife reached out. She held her daughter’s hand, rubbing the back of it comfortingly with her thumb. Peace passed over her face, and she shut her eyes.

The bodies fell into pieces. The man dropped to his knees. Bracing himself on the ground, he stared at himself in the reflective floor. His face trembled. His whole body shook.

Ike’s heart clenched. Rage built up in his chest. Not at the man, or his poor family. No. At Llewyn. At Lord Blackbriar. At all the people who had worked to make this moment a reality, to force an innocent mage to destroy his family with his own hands.

A final spotlight cut on. Llewyn stood in the distance, gazing at the man. Slowly, the Llewyn puppet’s lips turned upward. He reached out. Thousands of strings spread from his fingertips. The shady forms of all the other puppets from earlier appeared. He flicked his wrist, calling them to him.

Before the puppets could dart to Llewyn’s side, the man threw his sword. The blade severed all the strings connecting to Llewyn. The other puppets collapsed into the darkness. They flopped over. The man chased after Llewyn, sword bared. Llewyn frowned. He snapped his fingers and vanished.

Oh. So that’s why the puppets don’t move on their own, Ike realized. All of Llewyn’s puppets he’d encountered so far had the black goo inside them, and were capable of autonomous motion, even if they didn’t act on that ability. But the puppets in this town, despite looking as convincingly human as any of Llewyn’s puppets, didn’t have any autonomy. They repeated the same actions day after day. The Wisp puppet hadn’t spoken with Wisp’s voice, the way Rosamund could talk with hers, and all the other Rosamund puppets could as well—I still don’t understand that, but we’ll put it on hold for now. But the point was, she’d spoken with the same phrasing and attitude as the shopkeeper. And none of the puppets he’d broken had had the goo inside of them. That was all because this man had chased off Llewyn. If the puppets had ever had the goo, he must have done something to remove it, but keep the shells.

Weird thing to do, but I guess they were highly sentimental to him, Ike reasoned. His family was dead, so all that was left were his citizens—but they weren’t left. They were puppets. He could only hold on to their hollow forms.

Ike twisted his lips. A tragedy. That was all this was. A tragedy.

The man landed where Llewyn had been seconds ago. His sword slashed through thin air. He looked left and right, but there was no trace of the puppeteer. Frustrated, he slashed at the air a few more times before falling to his knees again. He spread his hands to the sky in despair.

The lights came on. All the puppets faded away, as if they were nothing but shadows. Ike and Wisp stood alone in the mirror-floored room.

“Damn. That Llewyn guy’s fucked up,” Wisp muttered.

Ike nudged her. “You think this guy’s maybe not a fan of Llewyn?”

She snorted. “Yeah, us neither.”

“We should go tell him that. Maybe he’ll let us go,” Ike suggested.

“Or we can beat him up.”

“After all his struggling you just saw?”

Wisp shrugged. “What, have you given up?”

Ike laughed. “No. I’m still gonna beat his head in for trapping us here for over a year. But I do feel kind of bad for him.”

“That’s the spirit.”

At the far end of the room, a door appeared. Ike glanced at it, then nodded at Wisp. “Shall we?”

“As you said. To the bitter end,” Wisp said, nodding.

They walked forward, sliding across the mirror-slicked floor. The door opened as they approached. Darkness cloaked the room beyond. Ike couldn’t see anything, but a powerful aura and presence radiated from the space.

Ike rested a hand on his sword. Wisp clawed her hands, feeling the same thing he did. The two of them closed in on the door.