[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 14] When the Flames Stole His Mother’s Voice
The scent of flowers was slowly rotting in the dank water-smell of the Underground Caverns.
Alucard landed upon a wet stone pillar, lowering his ankle against the slip and gathering the end of his cloak in his left hand before it touched the water. The light of life had cooled the wounds from the Clock Tower but had not closed them completely. His shoulder still burned whenever cloth crossed the cuts made by raven feathers, and his torn breastplate returned a dull vibration to his chest with every step. Pain remembered by the body was inconvenient, yet sometimes marked the road behind him more accurately than any map.
The grinding of gears above could not descend into these deep waterways. Only drops falling from the ceiling and echoes climbing through hollows beneath the surface remained. As the power of the Holy Symbol shone low within him, currents that had once caught his ankles divided and flowed around his body.
Narrow columns rose below the vertical passage, with Spear Guards patrolling between them. The nearest soldier thrust upward the instant Alucard left the ledge. He folded his falling body into a small bat, slipped down beside the shaft, and recovered human weight behind the enemy. The short point cut beneath the helmet; the spearman sank to his knees without a sound.
The second soldier turned and drew back his weapon. A spear ruled a broad distance, but in the moment of recovery it bound its master’s arm and shoulder in one direction. Alucard entered before the point could come forward again and severed the elbow joint. Metal and bone shook together. The released spear sank into the water.
The third did not approach, but waited upon a narrow pillar opposite him. Rather than contest its point with a human leap, Alucard flew low over the surface. Moist air pressed heavily on his wings. When the spear came straight toward him, he spat a small ball of fire past one side of the enemy’s helmet. The flame wavered off course, but it held the soldier’s gaze long enough. Alucard became human, planted one foot on the column, and used his second leap to clear the guard’s head. A descending stroke from behind split the helmet.
The water soon grew quiet as though nothing had happened. Alucard shook droplets and dark blood from the blade together, then looked toward a narrow opening high on the right. Human leaps had once fallen short of it, and mist had offered too little direction. More than that, the scent of dried flowers—impossible amid the water and moss below—descended from within.
In the body of a bat he crossed the vertical passage. A fish head stripped to bone broke the surface beneath him and breathed fire, but he folded his wings into a short fall, then climbed again when the flame had passed. The water sounds receded behind a layer of wall as soon as he entered the opening.
The chamber within was unnaturally dry. Neither moss nor damp marked the floor. At its center stood a single coffin with its lid open. There was no red light of sanctuary, no warmth to cover wounds. The darkness within it was not a shadow whose depth could be judged by light, but a hole that turned the viewer’s gaze inward, toward memory.
Alucard did not draw his sword. If this were a trap he could open with a blade, the castle would not have hidden it in such silence. He stepped into the coffin and laid his back against the cold bottom. His breastplate met the stone with a low note. The hilt of his sword rested within one hand’s reach.
The lid did not move, but darkness spread from behind his eyes. The stone walls withdrew, and the time required for a single drop to reach the floor stretched impossibly long. Instead of the air he had drawn, old smoke and burning timber scraped his throat.
When his eyes opened again, black smoke pressed low across the sky. Everything was red, even beyond the reach of the visible flames. The square was churned with mud and ash, countless footprints trampled in a single direction. Beyond the walls, a bell repeated a note that began as prayer and ended as judgment.
The body within the dream recognized its master slowly. Fingers moved, then knees; his cloak returned to his shoulders last. Only then did Alucard see the wooden stake at the center of the square. A woman was bound to it.
Lisa.
The name struck his chest before it reached his lips. Men, women, and children blocked the way, but none possessed a complete face. Through the smoke, only the mouths of accusation remained clear. Alucard drove through them with his shoulders, through the mouths that made righteousness from fear. Neither mist nor wings answered him. The dream allowed him only the late footsteps of a man.
Lisa held her head high amid the firelight. There was fear, but it could not lower her eyes. Alucard stopped when he met a gaze preserved in him more clearly than any darkness in the castle. It found him.
“Adrian.”
At the touch of her voice, the crowd, the bell, and the smoke receded. Only small embers had caught among the wood below her, though greater flames would soon rise. With a gentleness that made a lie of all the cruelty in the square, Lisa spoke for him to hear.
“Do not hate the people.”
Alucard ceased to breathe. Do not curse them all for what human beings had done. It was a plea left behind before his father’s fury could consume the world, a final door that had survived inviolate in his memory amid blood and fire.
Then the light wavered, and the resonance of the voice twisted with it. The Echo of Bat trembled faintly within him. Her words seemed to strike the walls of a narrow room and return, though they had been spoken in an open square. The flames were still low, yet the heat came from behind his back. The dream could imitate scene and face, but it did not remember the depth of the place.
Lisa spoke again.
“They are not worth living. Hurt them. Return the pain they gave you.”
The wood skipped every stage of burning and erupted red at once. The crowd that had demanded the woman’s death went silent like a congregation awaiting his answer. Alucard stepped backward. It was a small movement, yet every face in the square turned toward him together.
“My mother would never say that.”
The moment his hand touched the hilt, the sounds lost their throats. The bell swung but gave no note; the fire moved without crackling. Warmth slowly drained from Lisa’s face, revealing the mockery of another creature at the corners of her mouth.
“Are you still bound by that woman’s words?”
The first syllable remained Lisa’s. At the end came a rasp like a nail crawling over silk. Alucard drew his sword, and the square collapsed. The crowd became ash, the stake stretched into an immense pillar, and the ropes loosened into black serpents that floated upward. The woman’s dress tore apart. Bat wings, claws, and a long curving tail emerged beneath it.
The Succubus did not abandon Lisa’s face entirely. She kept the line of the eyes, the curve of the lips, the opening notes of the voice. She had stolen only what was required to turn a beloved memory into a weapon.
The battlefield unfolded from the coffin’s darkness but did not grow wide. The pillar’s shadow remained at the center, while low walls of fire enclosed both sides. Hovering above the floor, the Succubus peeled heart-shaped red lights from her palms. They were not fast, but each changed direction after he evaded it and followed the course of his escape.
Alucard let the first pass to one side and cut the second too late. The divided light did not disappear. It burst against the back of his hand, and whispers entered his mind before the burning pain: Hate. Remember. Repay. The attacks of this dream did not cut the flesh. They tried to change the direction in which old wounds pointed.
Laughing, the Succubus descended and raked at his face. Blade and claw met with the sound of glass being scratched, not metal. She did not press with strength. Hooking one arm around his, she brought her body close. Lisa’s scent came for an instant. Alucard’s wrist slowed by half a beat, and the waiting tail struck the armor at his side. The impact passed through metal into the flesh of the dream.
Driven near the flames, he turned before the end of his cloak caught and opened the distance. At close range the stolen face delayed his hand; far away, the red lights entered through gaps in memory. Holding the height above the narrow floor, the Succubus descended only when his heart wavered.
She opened one hand, and her body divided into three. Figures with the same face, wings, and smile floated at different heights. While the center called him “Adrian” again, the left swept low with its claws. Alucard blocked, but the shape passed through the blade, and red light from the right grazed his shoulder. You were late, it whispered through the wound. You failed to protect her. You stood silent.
He did not retreat. He watched the center. The two phantoms continued to smile after their attacks landed; the true creature had stopped moving her lips to prepare the next spell. When Alucard charged directly, her eyes narrowed for the first time.
He joined two leaps to pursue her ascent, but the dream returned the second foothold in the air a little late. Red lights poured over him at close range. He dissolved into mist. The whispers could not catch the scattered shape, yet it was dangerous to abandon his boundaries within a place designed to unmake him. When the body returned, terror flashed through him as though the ground had ceased to exist. Human weight dropped.
The Succubus came down from above with talons extended. Alucard drew the heavy sword that swallowed light and angled it before his chest. When claw met steel, the fire in the room shortened, and the edges of the face she wore blurred with it. Darkness could not cut her deeply, but it bought a moment in which Lisa’s afterimage receded.
Upon landing, Alucard used the sword’s weight in a broad rising stroke. Thigh and wingtip split, releasing violet mist. Within it, the faces the crowd had lost emerged for an instant and vanished. The Succubus bared her teeth. She did not use Lisa’s voice again.
Her wings opened wide. The flames rose on both sides, and ash from the square replaced the patterns of stone, filling the floor to his ankles. She divided into three once more: claws attacked from the right, red light from the center, and a tail struck the floor on the left. Shape and pain could no longer distinguish the true body.
Alucard opened his ears rather than his eyes. An illusion could make a form, but could not reproduce the weight that pressed the air. The claws on the right scratched his armor, yet no foot pushed ash. The light in the center burst, but no fingertips cut the air. Behind the tail on the left, the ash moved too late.
The true creature was none of the three. While the phantoms bound his gaze, the Succubus descended from the darkness overhead, claws ready. Alucard did not spend time looking up. He leapt forward. Her talons tore through the place where his throat had been, while he changed to the quicker blade and turned. Its point entered the demon’s side.
A scream without a borrowed note broke free. Rather than drive the blade so deeply that it trapped him, he pulled it out at once and cut the wing joint. The Succubus thrust herself away from the ash. Mockery had left her face; only fury remained.
Dozens of red lights appeared throughout the room, pulsing at different heights. The first wave compressed the air. The second reopened the wound in his shoulder. Before the third arrived, Alucard became a bat and entered the narrow current between them. What looked to human eyes like a wall of attacks became, to small wings, air with openings and direction.
The lights grazed his wingtips, murmuring that he should hate humanity and repay blood with blood. He passed through the whispers and spat a small flame at the Succubus. She spread a hand to divide it. Human shape and weight returned behind the fire.
Falling, Alucard took the hilt in both hands. The Succubus recognized the danger too late and tried once more to shape Lisa’s eyes and trembling lips. Before one syllable of the name his mother had used could be completed, he drove the sword beneath her chest.
Every red light went out, and the ash of the square settled. The Succubus closed both hands around the blade through her body. Her fingers imitated those of a beautiful woman until every joint cracked black.
“How…?”
Only then did her own voice emerge in full. Alucard did not drive the weapon any deeper.
“Do not speak that name.”
When the blade came free, her wings became ash first. Her tail unraveled like smoke. The face that remained to the end was neither Lisa’s nor a demon’s, but a collapsing mask. As it scattered before touching the ground, the flower scent thickened once, then vanished completely.
In the silence of the dream, Alucard did not hide the trembling of his hand. No enemy remained to witness it, and the voice that had been stolen did not return. Even after the fire, stake, and crowd disappeared, it seemed Lisa’s last words might sound once more. Nothing did.
That was as it should be. Her words had ended long ago. No demon in a dream had the power to make new ones.
When Alucard opened his eyes, a drop in the Underground Caverns struck the floor at its ordinary speed. He rose inside the coffin and examined the scorch along the end of his cloak. Whether it had been made in the dream or left by an earlier battle, he could not tell, and he did not try.
A small golden ring floated in the darkness beside the coffin. Fine markings encircled the inner surface of the Gold Ring. Neither candlelight nor the sound of water made it waver. It settled into his palm with the coldness not of a reward, but of a key placed temporarily in his keeping by a mechanism he did not yet understand.
When he left the chamber, only wet stone and old water remained where the flowers had been. The dream had borrowed the room and returned it to the cavern in defeat. Yet the castle never entirely discarded a place—or a moment of weakness—it had once learned to use.
A Fish Head broke the surface and breathed fire. Alucard turned aside, passed the flames scattering against the wall, and became a bat to fly low over the water. The body newly returned from a dream felt too light. He deliberately slowed before he could be tempted by that lightness.
Landing on the first stone pillar, he opened his left hand and felt the ring’s coldness. The Gold Ring alone could not open the device held within the Marble Gallery’s clock room. The castle had divided its answer between two circles. The other still waited beyond a darkness where spikes scraped against one another.
Alucard cleared the next flame over the water with two leaps and caught the wet wall with one hand. No flower scent came from the upper passage now. In its place, he heard far away the thin sound of countless metal points brushing one another.
He touched the cold ring within his coat once, then climbed toward the spike-lined passage that remained unopened.
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