[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 19] The Heart with Closed Eyes
Each time the stiffened bird's beak scraped across the stone floor, Vlad's Rib in his inner pocket gave a small tremor.
The snake dragging the bird let go of its prey at Alucard's boots and raised its head. Its body was no thicker than a finger, but its eyes were absurdly large, and in both pupils the same woman's face was reflected. When the snake opened its mouth, gray dust spilled out with a hoarse breath.
Before Alucard could lower his sword point, the snake turned to stone of its own accord. Cracks spread through the scales as it hardened in a tight coil, and from those fissures three smaller snakes slipped free and crawled toward the chapel.
He did not pursue them. Instead he bent one knee and touched the stone dust with his fingers. The moment it met his skin, it whitened and hardened around the edges of his nails. His left hand, only just freed from Akmodan II's curse, was still slow to move. If petrification spread through it in that state, breaking his fingers would become necessary before gripping a sword ever could.
Alucard rose, brushing off his hand. For a moment he considered taking out the Holy Glasses, but the frost of warped starlight still clung to the rims of the lenses. There was no reason to believe they would protect his eyes. Instead of putting them on, he lowered his gaze and entered the Anti-Chapel looking only at the cracks in the floor and the shadows cast along the walls.
The chapel's spires stretched long toward the ground below. The altar was fastened upside down above his head, its wax running toward the ceiling, and the long pews hung chained to the walls on either side. Whenever moonlight came through the shattered stained glass, fragments of saints' faces crawled over the floor, then split into many colors when they struck the pillars.
Between those colors stood people turned to stone.
A soldier in armor had frozen while raising his shield, and a monk stood with both hands covering his face. Some statues had no heads at all, and the severed necks were packed with snake eggs. Every one of them had turned their backs in the same direction. They had tried not to look at the altar in the center of the chapel, and twisted away at the last instant.
Alucard did not check their eyes. He followed only the long shadows sliding beneath his feet. The snakes watched him from atop the pillars, beneath the pews, and from within the frames of upside-down sacred paintings, keeping a fixed distance without coming nearer.
Someone was taming his gaze.
When he reached the altar, one more set of footsteps joined his own. When Alucard moved his right foot, the same sound came from behind him, and when he stopped, silence followed a beat later. Without turning his head, he sent out a brief pulse.
The echo sketched pillars, statues, and the altar fastened to the ceiling. But the shape behind him scattered sound into dozens of threads around the head.
"Whose eyes do those resemble?"
A woman's voice sounded just behind his right ear. Alucard closed his eyes and drew his sword in the same motion, slashing behind him. The blade left the feel of scales and metal scraping at once, and his opponent withdrew with a laugh.
Even through his eyelids, green light seeped in.
He lowered his body and set a hand on the floor. While the light swept over his head, the stone beneath his palm grew rough, then softened again. Even without looking at it directly, any surface touched by the beam was hardening first. Simply closing his eyes would not be enough.
To his left, the snakes all drew breath at once. Alucard read the sound as warning and rolled aside. Two thick serpents jutting from her hair smashed down where he had been and cracked the stone, and an instant later a cold blade passed low, cutting away what remained of his cloak's hem.
The strip of red cloth that fell to the floor hardened at once under the green light.
Without opening his eyes, Alucard retreated behind a pillar. Sending out one short pulse after another, he found Medusa's shape within the echoes. Beneath a woman's upper body, a colossal serpent's body was coiled where human legs should have been, and in one hand she held a curved sword. The snakes of her hair tasted the air in different directions, each swallowing sound with its flickering tongue.
His first judgment had been that all he needed to do was avoid her eyes. But the petrifying light did not come from her pupils alone. Dozens of eyes among her hair and shards of mirror set behind the altar were catching and scattering it across the whole battlefield.
Green light brushed the edge of the pillar. The stone surface whitened, and cracking fragments struck Alucard's cheek. He read the angle of the beam from the direction the shards flew and lowered himself further.
Medusa did not close the distance. She circled the altar slowly with her serpentine tail and swept her sword from side to side, the wind of the blade shaving the floor thin as it aimed for his ankles. If he jumped, the snakes in her hair bit at the space he would rise into, and if he ducked low, petrifying light reflected from the mirrors sealed off his retreat.
From behind the pillar, Alucard laid his familiar sword flat against the floor. Green light reflected from the blade and sprang toward the ceiling, turning one of the hanging pews to stone. Reflection was possible, but if he tilted the sword wrong, it could come back into his own face.
Medusa laughed and pointed at the statues.
"They too tried not to look to the very end. Humans believe that if they close their eyes, the truth disappears."
Alucard did not answer. There was no need to say that he had not closed his eyes on the day his mother died. The fact of seeing had not always preserved the truth, and choosing not to see did not always mean cowardice.
He tapped the floor twice with his sword point. While the resonance traveled through the chapel and returned, the snakes in her hair swallowed sound at different moments. That slight delay split the position of her head from that of her body.
With his eyes still shut, Alucard stepped out from behind the pillar.
When the curved sword came in from the right, he turned it aside with the flat of his blade and drove it into the floor. As Medusa twisted her wrist, he stepped inside her reach and cut across the serpent body. Black blood sprayed beneath the hard scales, and every drop that struck the floor gave birth to a thin snake that bit at his boots.
He shook his foot and flung the snakes free, but in that instant one of the larger serpents from her hair coiled around his left arm. Its jaws sank into the wound at his shoulder, cold venom entered him, and his stiffened fingers slowed further. Hearing another snake strike for his throat, he let his body dissolve into mist, and fangs and blade passed through a black shape.
But the green light remained within the mist.
When he returned to human form, gray blotches had appeared on his right cheek and neck. The cold of stone spread beneath the skin, and each time he moved his jaw a fine scraping sound came from within. Mist could spare him physical blows, but it would not scatter the curse of petrification with them.
Medusa saw the change and blocked the exit with her tail. The snakes of her hair spread like a fan, and dozens of eyes opened at once.
Through his closed lids Alucard felt the light growing brighter. There were mirror fragments in every direction he might evade, and even the statues behind the pillars were throwing the light back from their polished surfaces. The battlefield had been prepared from the beginning to multiply her gaze.
Instead of dodging, he kicked the sword embedded in the floor.
The blade spun low and cut through the chain beneath the altar. The great altar fixed to the ceiling tilted from one side first, and candlesticks and holy figures spilled down from it. As Medusa twisted her tail to avoid them, the petrifying beam hardened the falling wreckage one piece after another.
The debris turned to stone and grew heavier. Two more chains snapped, and the entire altar dropped toward the floor, while dozens of mirror shards flipped over in the impact. Instead of scattering through the chapel, the green light drew back for an instant toward the center.
Medusa's snakes tangled over one another trying to cover their own eyes. She swept her curved sword to block the reflected light, but narrow beams bounced even from the metal surface and grazed the flesh below her throat. The woman's skin began to gray from the shoulder down.
The petrification could not truly harm her. The hardened skin cracked once, then softened again as it drank in black blood, and the snakes of her hair shed their stone shells as though sloughing off old skin. But while she was pulling the light back in, every eye was closed.
For that brief moment alone, the battlefield went dark.
Alucard opened his eyes. Matching the figure he had drawn in echo against the true distance before him, he ran across the fallen altar. Medusa swept the curved sword horizontally, but he lowered his waist and went in under the blade, cutting her wrist. The sword fell, and then her tail lashed his side.
The cracked plate of his armor threw back part of the blow, but it still drove him across broken holy figures. Stone edges sprang up beneath his back and tore open his wounds, driving the breath from him. Medusa came forward to seize his face with her now weaponless hand, and the snakes of her hair spread again.
Alucard saw her eyes opening. This time he did not avoid them.
Nor did he take out the Holy Glasses. He snatched up a shard of mirror from the floor with his right hand and held it before his face. The green light struck the glass and returned to Medusa, and instead of turning away she thrust all her snakes forward at once and shattered the mirror.
Alucard was not behind it.
The instant he raised the mirror he had changed into a small bat, and now he flew up above the snakes' line of sight. He returned to human form behind her head, gripped his short sword in both hands, and drove the blade down with the weight of his fall into the root where dozens of snakes gathered.
Medusa's body writhed, and the snakes bit into his shoulders and arms. He did not pull the sword free, but shoved the hilt sideways and split the bone beneath her skull. Black blood burst up like a fountain and covered his eyes and lenses, but now her eyes could no longer see him either.
The great tail swept the floor one last time. Alucard was flung aside, and his sword tore free from Medusa's head as it came, severing several snakes with it.
She raised her upper body amid the altar's wreckage. Snakes torn from her head carpeted the floor, and some tried to crawl back into their mistress's body and mend the wound. When Medusa covered her face with both hands, green light began gathering again between her fingers.
Alucard tore off the clouded glasses and moved a step by instinct alone. While the snakes on the floor bit at his right boot, he dropped to his left knee to lower himself and closed his hand around the hilt of the fallen curved sword.
It was her weapon. Thin layers of the final faces of countless statues overlapped one another across the blade's surface.
The moment Medusa lowered her hands, Alucard sent the curved sword skidding over the floor. It slipped in a curve between serpent flesh and broken altar stones and lodged beneath her tail. Her balance broke and her upper body pitched forward, and the beam she had gathered turned not toward Alucard but toward the pile of mirrors on the floor.
The light split into dozens of branching reflections and struck Medusa's face and body all at once.
This time she had no chance to close her eyes. Her skin hardened, stone filled the gaps between her scales, and the snakes of her hair writhed, struggling to tear themselves free of her body. Alucard raised his own sword and did not thrust it into the center of her chest. Instead he cut beneath the left breast, at the single dark place the petrification had not reached, where the pulse of the relic was gathering.
Within the split stone shell, a single dark crimson heart came into view.
Vlad's Heart was not connected to Medusa's own heart. Snake-like blood vessels had wrapped around it, sending petrifying power through the whole body. Alucard severed the vessels one by one with his sword point, and when the last strand tried to cling, he seized it with his left hand and tore it away.
The moment the heart came into his hand, Medusa's statue collapsed.
The snakes loosed from her head flew in all directions. Some hid beneath the altar's debris, and the rest bit at their mistress's stone fragments before hardening one by one themselves. The curved sword crumbled into rusty powder across the floor.
The human statues left in the chapel did not return.
Alucard set Vlad's Heart on his palm. It did not beat, yet black heat pulsed between his fingers. When Vlad's Ring and Vlad's Rib answered from within his coat, the heart contracted once at last, and that force pushed the lingering stiffness of the curse out of his left hand.
At the same time, an unfamiliar sensation entered his mind. The arrogance of not bowing his head even beneath the gaze of hundreds of eyes; the blood of his father, who did not accept curses but sent them back. It was protection, and command as well. Not merely the will never to kneel before any curse, but the violence of deciding for himself who was even worthy of being cursed.
Alucard wrapped the heart in black cloth. He did not place it near his living heart, but put it into a small pouch at the back of his waist, then wiped the blood from the Holy Glasses and tucked them away again. One of the lenses now bore a fine crack.
When the pulses of the three relics overlapped, the west wall of the chapel trembled. Pieces of stained glass broke away and revealed a narrow path leading outside, beyond which the outer wall stretched long, rising upside down toward the sky.
Lightning flashed far away. But there were no clouds.
Blue current ran along the metal railing of the wall and broke off at one point. For an instant, iron spikes and stitched seams showed across the back of a gigantic crouching man in the dark, and even after the lightning faded, that shape went on breathing heavily.
As Alucard stepped out of the chapel, only the eyelids of one statue behind him split open by a hair. Inside, instead of an eyeball, a little snake lay coiled.
댓글
댓글 쓰기