[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 16] A Second Castle Descends from the Sky
The blue door of the Royal Chapel opened, and the first spike shot out at the height of a human heart.
With iron sliding inside the wall, its long white point split the darkness, but Alucard did not shorten his stride. The scars across the Spike Breaker ignited red the moment the spike met his chest, and the impact pressed through to his ribs. The rebounding force split the iron column down its center like dry bone. One fragment grazed his cheek and left a thread of blood beneath his jaw.
Blades in both walls, the floor, and the ceiling rose in succession. The passage in the Catacombs had hidden its movements in darkness; this one displayed every edge and declared there was nowhere to evade. Metal struck shoulder and thigh with each step. The armor remembered the shape that pierced it and returned that same shape in destruction.
Between the interlocking spikes, Maria called Richter’s name. Her voice was so close he could hear her breath, yet it came from beyond the solid wall to his right. Alucard struck the stone. Only a dull resonance returned, with no hollow space behind it.
“Answer me. Please.”
When Maria’s words ended, a low laugh continued without drawing breath. Alucard closed his eyes and released a short pulse, listening to the height of the passage and the thickness of its walls. No one stood where the voice indicated, but a black mass enclosed in a thin membrane clung near the ceiling. Each time the membrane contracted, stolen breath and laughter escaped in turn.
His sword had come halfway from its sheath when the demon spoke first.
“Adrian.”
It used Lisa’s voice. This time his wrist did not slow. The dark-drinking sword passed once, splitting the membrane and releasing at once the words of women, children, and old men imprisoned within. Pleas to be spared, confessions never delivered, and the names of the lost scattered among fragments of the spikes.
The last sound remaining was Maria saying, “It cannot be.” That voice had not been invented by the demon. It had stolen words truly spoken somewhere nearby. Alucard shook the residue from the blade, sheathed it, and quickened his pace.
The final iron column, as broad as a human torso, drove straight toward him. He drew back his left foot, lowered his shoulder, and received it upon his chest instead of evading. The impact rang to the chapel spire. Every scar in the armor joined in red light. The column split at its core and tore into two halves. Beyond it, in a narrow chamber, a silver circle held back the darkness.
When he brought the Gold Ring near, the two metals recognized one another. Gold sounded low and warm; silver answered with a cold, clear note. The words “…in Clock Tower” inside the Silver Ring joined the worn “Wear… Clock…” and became a single command.
Wear them in the clock room.
As Alucard lifted the silver ring, the stone wall parted and opened an exit to a high gallery. Maria stood at its far end with a small dagger in hand, gathering her breath. Her right sleeve and the hem of her dress were torn, but more striking than her injuries was a face in which the question had arrived before relief.
“Did you find Richter?”
Keeping his distance, Alucard told her that he had met Belmont, and that Richter had declared himself master of the castle. Maria tightened her fingers around the dagger. While a single candle went out, she looked between his face and the passage of shattered spikes, waiting for some evidence to appear and preserve her faith.
“The Richter I know would never do that.”
“The castle chooses the weakest moment in a person.”
“That does not mean it can change him completely.”
Alucard did not answer at once. Memory could protect a person, but it could also conceal what had to be seen. Even when one believed the choice between them was one’s own, the castle was already prepared to use it.
Finding no agreement in his silence, Maria put away the dagger. She took two steps, then stopped and said she would see the truth with her own eyes. She did not look back.
Alucard watched the gallery after she disappeared, then closed one hand around both rings. This time he would move before accepting the answer the castle had prepared.
Two different times flowed through the Marble Gallery’s clock room. The great hands approached midnight, while the statues on either side kept one door open and guarded another silence. Alucard stepped into the central circle and put on the Gold Ring. The short hand stopped. When he placed the Silver Ring on his other hand, the long one began to turn backward.
After two revolutions, the spears of both statues struck the floor together. A narrow crack started beneath his boots, extended below the clock, and drew a circle. The central floor descended like an enormous lid. Cold air rose from the opening, revealing a spiral stairway deep into the heart of the castle. With no sconces along the walls, the alternating lights of the two rings revealed each foothold.
Maria waited in a small room at the bottom. The conviction she had shown in the gallery was gone. Her dagger lay on the floor, and she had clasped both hands over her knees.
“You were right. Richter has joined forces with the enemy.”
Alucard studied the sacred images around them, each eye painted over in black, and asked whether that had truly been Belmont’s will. Maria could not answer at once. Disbelief and the desire to believe collided within a single breath.
“Someone is controlling him. Whatever happens, you must not hurt Richter.”
“But he must be stopped.”
Maria said she understood, then removed a fine chain from her neck. The small spectacles hanging from it held clear lenses in silver frames. They were unadorned, worn only around the edges.
“With these, you can see beyond evil illusions.”
When Alucard accepted the Holy Glasses, one layer of darkness peeled away from the room. Black threads invisible before emerged over the painted-out eyes of the holy images. All rose through the ceiling toward the castle’s highest point.
Castle Keep.
“Save Richter.”
Alucard replied that he would do what he could. The words were too cold to be called a promise, but Maria knew he did not offer empty hope, and she nodded. As he climbed the stairs, a prayer began behind him, too quiet to overcome his footsteps.
Night poured through the ruined roof when he opened the doors of Castle Keep. The moon appeared and vanished among black clouds. Broken columns stood like bones that had failed to hold up the sky. At the end of a torn red carpet in the center, Richter Belmont waited with the Vampire Killer in one hand.
Every link in the chain carried the scent of old holy oil and the blood of monsters. The whip that had sought and slain Dracula’s bloodline for centuries recognized Alucard’s blood and trembled faintly.
“I have been waiting.”
As Richter smiled, Alucard put on the holy spectacles. The moonlight paled through the lenses, and black veins appeared within the shadows of the columns. A green sphere invisible to the naked eye floated above Belmont’s head. A black pupil turned inside its transparent membrane. Fine threads entered Richter’s temples, neck, and the wrist gripping the whip.
Alucard asked why Belmont sought Dracula’s return. Richter’s smile stiffened for an instant, and his eyes moved a moment later than the sphere’s.
“Dracula returns once every century. I defeated him, and my role was over. But if I can bring him back, the battle will never end.”
Alucard drew his sword and began to answer that, if those were Richter’s true wishes, he would stop him. The whip came before the sentence could be completed. Its first strike passed him, wrapped around a column, and changed direction toward his back. He sensed the holy presence and ducked, but the returning chain struck his side. The armor absorbed the impact, not the sacred flame that followed. White heat entered between the plates.
Richter closed the distance and shortened his grip, attacking face, knee, and the ground in the direction Alucard would evade. Alucard deflected the first two strokes along the back of his sword and released himself into mist for the last. The chain passed through his black shape, but the holy fire remained inside it. Smoke rose from his left hand when he became human again.
Before the pain, he saw the controlling sphere move. It withdrew whenever Richter attacked, and when Alucard raised his sword, it placed Belmont’s body between them and shifted to the opposite side. The controller was using not only Richter’s strength, but Alucard’s desire to keep him alive.
Richter threw a small vial to the floor. Blue fire ran along both sides of the carpet. Staying low meant touching flame; jumping meant entering the whip’s circle. Alucard leapt once and stepped on the air again to rise above the chain. When his gaze drew level with the sphere, he swung the heavy blade saturated in darkness.
Just before its point reached the membrane, Richter threw himself between them and struck Alucard’s wrist with the hilt of the whip. The deflected edge grazed Belmont’s shoulder, staining his clothes with red blood. Remembering Maria’s request, Alucard landed and turned the sword, facing Richter with its back rather than its edge.
The eye within the sphere narrowed. Ignoring his own wound, Richter laughed and demanded more. He spread both arms. Air rushed upward through the hall, and the holy water on the floor rose in hundreds of blue droplets. Then sacred rain poured from the roofless night.
The first drop burned through his cloak, and light entered between the plates of his armor. Alucard turned toward a broken column, then saw the drops veering away from the sphere. The holy water harmed neither Richter nor the controlling orb. Belmont’s sacred power protected even the membrane around it. Alucard’s first judgment—breaking that barrier with a sword of darkness—had been wrong from the beginning.
He put away the blade and threw himself into the downpour. Instead of evading Richter’s chain, he allowed it to wind around his left arm and caught it. Sacred fire burned his flesh. Clenching his teeth, he pulled the whip, dragging Belmont forward. Bound to him by the black threads, the sphere descended with him.
Alucard planted a foot against Richter’s chest and forced the two of them apart. Belmont stumbled backward, but the tautened threads delayed the sphere by half a beat. Alucard seized that interval. Becoming a small bat, he threaded between the falling drops. Above the sphere he recovered human form and placed the weight of his descent behind the tip of the sword—not at the membrane, but at the black threads below it.
When the first thread parted, Richter’s left hand went slack. The second split, and the whip fell to the floor. The sphere screamed like hundreds of nails scraping the inside of a glass vessel. The last thread entered the back of Richter’s neck.
As the blade approached, the sphere pulled that thread and raised Belmont’s body as a shield. For an instant his eyes cleared, and his moving lips formed the word “Now.” Whether it was a command from the sphere or the remnant of his own will, Alucard could not know.
He released the sword. With empty hands he seized Richter’s shoulders and exchanged their positions, using the last thread’s pull upon Belmont to drive his armored shoulder into the sphere. Every red scar on the breastplate shone, breaking the shape of an unseen spike.
His fist entered the crack across the orb’s surface. Green light exploded. Glasslike fragments turned to black ash before they reached the floor. When the last thread at Richter’s neck burned away, he lost all strength and fell to his knees.
From the center of the shattered sphere rose a gaunt figure in black priestly robes. Only the violet fire within its sockets and the smile upon its mouth were clear. It seemed less a body than a shadow sent by something far away.
“You controlled Belmont.”
The priest named himself Shaft, dark servant of chaos, and proclaimed that the world must be cleansed in chaos’s flame. Alucard retrieved his sword and split the figure’s chest, but the image dispersed like smoke. Its laughter climbed the walls of the hall and entered the night sky.
The entire castle seemed to tilt.
It was the clouds that moved. Their black layers divided around the moon, revealing another immense castle whose spires pointed downward and whose roofs hung in open air. It possessed the same walls and towers, but every direction had been reversed. Slowly, the second castle descended from the sky.
Fragments of stone rose from the floor and fell toward the castle above. Even Alucard’s silver hair lifted under the inverted pull. Maria ran through the doors and lowered herself beside the kneeling Richter. She seized his shoulders as if to confirm that he still lived.
“What have I done?”
Richter covered his face. Maria gave no answer, but tightened her hands. Only then did she look to Alucard and thank him.
With his clouded eyes restored, Richter studied Alucard’s face and asked whether he was the one who had fought beside his ancestor Trevor three centuries before. Alucard cut him off, saying it did not matter now, and asked whether the one who had controlled him waited in the castle above. Pale from blood loss, Richter looked up at the inverted fortress and said he believed so.
Black light gathered between the summits of the two castles, taking the shape of a path that was neither door nor bridge. Stone dust falling upward was drawn along it into the entrance of the inverted castle.
Alucard sheathed his weapon and told Maria to take Richter out of the castle.
“And you?”
“I will end this.”
Maria began to object, then met his eyes through the holy spectacles and told him to return. Alucard did not speak a promise he did not know how to keep.
He stood before the black path. The familiar castle lay beneath his feet, while the ceiling of its twin spread above him like the ground. Wind blew backward between the two worlds. In the lowest window of the castle hanging from the sky, a vast wing slowly opened, waiting for its master.
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