[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 17] The Ring That Bore Wings
The instant he set his first foot on the black road, a drop of blood fell from the left arm Richter’s whip had burned.
The red drop did not descend toward the stone beside his boot. It sank slowly to the unseen boundary dividing the two castles, flattened there in a wavering smear, then brushed past Alucard’s face and rose toward the castle overhead. The lowest window of the Reverse Castle swallowed it, and only then did the wound in his left arm throb, as if tugged in the same direction.
Before moving his other foot, he pressed the tip of his scabbard against the black road. Its surface rippled as though light had been hardened into it, and the stone chips from Castle Keep crossed the boundary, quickened like arrows, and vanished among the spires of the castle above.
When Maria called his name and tried to come after him, Alucard raised a hand to stop her. Richter, drawing back his whip while leaning on her shoulder, warned that a castle might share the same walls and still obey different laws.
The vast wings that had spread in the window moments ago were nowhere in sight. Only a piece of darkness swayed a beat later than the window frame, and in the wind between the two castles was the smell of wet animal fur.
On the third step, the two weapons at his waist were pulled in opposite directions. The plates of his armor parted and locked again as if each were hung with a different weight, and the red cloth at his throat wrapped over his face before streaming long and flat between the castles.
His body forgot first which side was supposed to be down.
At the middle of the black road, sensation vanished from the soles of his feet and his entrails lifted upward. Alucard bent his knees, trying to lower his center of gravity, but the very direction of lower changed with every breath. He put out a hand where his foot had left the surface, and before his palm could touch, the road was already farther away. He tried to escape the fall by changing into a small bat.
The transformation came, but not flight. Wind from the normal castle burrowed under his left wing, while the gravity of the Reverse Castle pulled at the tip of his right. Each beat of his wings spun him half around in place instead of carrying him forward, until the black road and both castles enclosed his vision like a single curved wall.
He returned to human form and let the weight of the heavy armor settle the struggle of directions. The plates of the Spike Breaker drew his body toward the Reverse Castle, and without resisting that force he slid along the road, caught the edge just before the end to kill some of the spin, and struck the cold stone floor of the inverted castle shoulder first.
The heat of holy water still trapped between his ribs and the bruise in his side woke at once. Lying where he had fallen, Alucard watched scraps of cloth, blood, and dust move. All of them came to rest in the same direction, and when he pressed his ear to the floor, the vibration of interlocking gears reached his cheek from far away. The ceiling his eyes saw and the down his body accepted were not the same, but here gravity had chosen a single direction.
Alucard closed his eyes and rose slowly. Only after his ankles remembered the slope did he open them again.
In Reverse Keep, the roots of the pillars grew from the surface that should have been called the ceiling, and chandeliers hung toward the darkness below the floor. Beyond the windows, the spires of Castle Keep rose upward from a great distance, and in the torchlight the saints had their heads turned downward, their eyes scratched out.
He took out the Holy Glasses and put them on. Through the lenses, the outlines of pillars and walls split in blue, and hidden passages beneath the floor surfaced for an instant like veins. But whether from the clash of temperatures between the two castles, white frost spread inward from the edges. Where he wiped it away with his fingers, another layer of darkness settled instead, and the lenses that should have revealed the unseen blurred the boundaries between stairs and precipice.
In Castle Keep, illusion had lain over the truth. The darkness here was not a covering but a quality sunk into the stone and air themselves. Alucard took off the glasses, wrapped them in cloth, and tucked them inside his coat.
He read the space with skin and ears. The wind against his cheek told him where the open windows were; the gear-sound reaching one ear first told him how the corridor bent. He nudged a stone with the tip of his boot to measure depth, then sent out a short pulse of sound. Of the echoes that came back, one was far too late.
The hall was wider than it looked. Or something was swallowing sound.
Alucard drew his short sword and moved forward. Each step he took was matched by the shadows overhead, but after the third pillar the shadows began to move a little faster than his stride. The smell of wet fur thickened, and the tiny bones wedged in the cracks of the stone trembled.
The first attack came as wind before it came as a cry.
The darkness at the end of the hall split to either side and immense wings spread wide. Their tips scraped two pillars at once, and stone dust spilled sideways in a waterfall while a black body drove straight at Alucard through the gap. The ears on either side of its head were laid back like spearheads, and inside its open mouth two rows of teeth the size of human fingers were set deep.
Alucard trusted the weight of his armor. He braced both feet in the grooves at the base of the pillar, judging that the plates that had endured even the iron posts of the spiked passage would hold him fast, and just before the teeth reached him he shifted half a step aside and aimed beneath the throat.
But the monster did not bite. It folded both wings before its body at once, then opened them in front of Alucard’s eyes.
The compressed air hit him like a wall. The grooves under his feet shattered, and the weight of the armor became not an anchor but a sail taking the blow. Alucard was driven toward a broken window, his sword-point scraping stone.
The instant he drove the blade into a crack, a soundless resonance burst and shook the inside of his skull. The pillars seemed to split into layers, and his sense of down inverted. As a crack spread across the left shoulder plate, the tip of a wing that had followed the gust slammed into it.
The red-glowing plate hurled some of the impact back, but it could not hold. The shoulder piece tore away with its clasp and flew out the window. For a moment the fragment of metal seemed to be falling toward Castle Keep, then once clear of the frame it changed direction and rolled upward along the outer wall of the Reverse Castle until it vanished.
Cold air touched the exposed shoulder. Alucard set his back against the window frame and steadied his blurred vision. Clinging to the opposite pillar, the monster showed blood vessels and old tears in the membrane of its wings, black as a map under the moonlight.
Realizing that the first charge had only shown him teeth as a feint, Alucard did not meet the wind this time. He let his body loosen into mist and be blown away without anything to seize, then regained form behind a pillar and raised the heavy blade at the height of the wings.
Darkwing Bat turned within the wind. It folded its left wing to skim over the blade and hooked Alucard’s side with the claws of its right foot. Three rents opened in the side plates of his armor and his body lifted, while the creature dragged him toward the window like a raptor lifting prey in its talons.
Alucard dropped the weight of his weapon downward. The blade drove deep into the floor, and the monster’s flight halted with it. While the claws bit farther through the gap in his side, he did not let go of the hilt but twisted his body and kicked the joint of the left wing with the heel of his boot.
There was no crack of breaking bone. Instead one taut membrane ripped, and moonlight seeped through the tear in a thin line.
The monster loosed him and surged upward. Alucard hit the floor and lay there a moment, one hand pressed to his bleeding side, breaking his breath into shallow measures. Clinging to the pillar, the creature could no longer spread its wounded wing to the full.
It could not keep itself level anymore. Instead, it beat the uninjured right wing harder than before.
The next charge traced a circle listing to the left. The whole wing struck floor and pillar by turns, changing the gusts, and when the second circle tightened, the hem of his cloak caught on the wingtip.
The red cloth tightened around his throat, and the scorched knot did not give. As the monster climbed, Alucard cut the cloth near his neck with the sword-point. Breath returned, and most of the cloak remained hanging from the wingtip, then scattered into the night.
Only one strip remained across his back, barely enough to cover the shoulder.
Darkwing Bat shook the cloth away and gathered a sharper resonance between its split ears. The little bones in the hall leaped first, but this was no sound that could be blocked with the palms.
He sent out a short wave before the monster could. The two pulses collided and beat dust from the pillars, and the echo that returned sketched the windows, the cracks, and the body flying in at a slant more clearly than sight.
But from the middle of the monster’s chest, no sound came back.
Beneath the fur was a gap no larger than a coin, and around it the pulse was being drawn inward. Alucard opened his eyes and lowered himself. As the teeth passed close enough to shear a few strands of hair, he swept the short sword upward and parted the fur on the creature’s chest.
Under the black fur, a round scar appeared. The flesh had shriveled in a ring as though cauterized long ago by heated iron, and at its center a piece of metal without luster was buried deep. It was a black ring, with no jewel and no ornament.
The monster rubbed its chest against the wall and broke a pillar with its wings. It was not moving to protect the ring. Every time its body twisted, the scarred flesh was pulled the other way, and veins stretching from the black metal went taut along the darkness in the wall.
The ring was not lodged in the monster. The monster was hanging from the ring.
When Darkwing Bat spread its wings, the entire Reverse Castle trembled as if drawing breath. The ring sank deeper into the chest and wrenched the creature upright by force, while black threads grew across the torn membrane and filled the empty place.
For an instant, a beast’s urge to flee flashed in the monster’s eyes, then was swallowed by red darkness.
Alucard lowered the heavy blade. If he drove deep into the chest, the creature might fall, but the ring would only seek another body and hide in the castle’s dark. What he needed was not the force to pierce a heart, but a short, exact distance that could split flesh from metal.
He held the short sword low and retreated to the broken window. The monster spread its sound wing wide to steady its tilted body. It was the first motion of the circle.
When the right wing drew in air, the stone dust drifted toward the monster first, then the moment the wing opened it was driven toward the window. Only that brief pull, shorter than the gust itself, could close the distance to the chest.
The wing folded.
He kicked from the window frame and threw himself into empty air. In the instant of being drawn in, he changed into a small bat to slip past the teeth, then the colliding winds spun him and he broke the transformation. The restored weight of a human body dropped him beneath the monster’s throat.
The sword entered at the edge of the ring-shaped scar. Alucard laid the blade flat and split the hardened flesh from the metal. As the creature tried to bite his shoulder, he scattered into mist, passed between the teeth, and regained his hand in front of its chest.
His left hand closed on the black ring.
The metal trembled, not as if it meant to stay in flesh but as if it meant to return to the castle. Alucard braced a foot against the monster’s breastbone, bent the arm burned by the whip, and twisted the ring.
The wound opened again, and blood running down his wrist touched the band.
The beat stopped.
In that instant, when the ring recognized the blood, the black threads leading into the castle slackened. Alucard hooked two fingers through the band and leaned his body back. The hardened flesh tore in a circle and the metal came free, and at the same moment strength left both of Darkwing Bat’s wings.
The huge body dropped on top of him. Alucard rolled free over one shoulder, but a wing drove the remains of his cloak into a crack in the stone and the cloth tore again.
For a while, the only sound was the harsh breathing of the two of them.
Darkwing Bat did not rise. As black vapor streamed from the hole in its chest, the size of its wings and claws dwindled with it, until at last only a bat crouched beneath the broken pillar remained.
The creature lifted its head. The red had gone from its eyes, and they looked at neither Alucard nor the ring in his hand. It moved its sound wing once toward the night beyond the shattered window, and the injured wing followed a little later.
Both wings folded around its body. The next breath never came.
Alucard stood there for a moment before sheathing the short sword. The silence after the fight was unlike the silence he heard in Castle Keep. There was no sense of the castle coming to swallow a dead guardian. Instead, the walls of the hall quivered faintly, as if they had let one thing slip away.
He opened his left hand and examined the ring. It was sized for a human finger, but marks remained inside where flesh and bone had been pressed, and between the faded patterns was a smell like his father’s blood.
Vlad's Ring.
The moment the metal touched blood, scenes too brief to be called memories and too old to be called instinct passed behind his eyelids. Candles going out all at once. A pale hand laid on an unfinished wall. A heart beating more slowly than a human one. Someone knocked five times at a door, and only the first blow overlapped with the ring.
Alucard did not slip the band onto his finger. This was not an ornament that granted strength, but a remnant cut from Dracula’s power and memory and sealed away. That the ring had recognized his blood and that it meant obedience were two entirely different matters.
He wrapped the metal in cloth and put it inside his inner pocket. The Gold Ring and Silver Ring at his side gave no answer as they had in the clock room; only the black band beat slowly through cloth and flesh.
After the first beat came an answer from far away.
From where water ran came the sound of wet bandages dragging. From where countless snakes scraped over stone came a cold tremor. An answer came back as well from distant darkness where lightning was trapped in walls and little scythes brushed together. Four scattered pieces were calling to the same blood.
Between those four beats was a deeper, slower emptiness. The silence of something not yet fully returned, waiting for its missing parts.
His father had not been resurrected. But the castle was making his body, and Shaft was trying to restore blood and memory to it. Leave the relics where they were, and they would take root in monsters and walls; gather them, and he himself would carry them to the gate of resurrection.
Neither was safe.
The left shoulder plate of the Spike Breaker was gone, and fresh wounds lay over both his side and the arm burned by the whip. Only one strip of cloak hung from his back, brushing the armor like a wet wing.
Alucard tightened the straps of the remaining plates against his body and bound his side with torn cloth. He could not restore the armor whole, but a defense that knew where it was open was better than one that refused to believe it had cracked.
The door of the hall had been there from the beginning behind the broken pillar, but an inverted shadow had covered it like a wall. He followed the direction of wind being drawn inward and stepped into the dark.
At the end of the corridor, huge gears drew back the place they had already passed and meshed in reverse. Beneath them, drops of water did not reach the floor but climbed the wall and flowed past the ceiling, trembling with the second beat of the black ring.
Alucard listened by turns to the path between the gears and to the sound of water flowing overhead. One was dragging the castle’s time toward a deeper past; the other carried the smell of bandages and old spices.
He turned toward the sound of water.
Behind him, a single great gear locked into place and swallowed the first moment that could never be taken back.
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