[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel Episode 13] When the Gears Chew Time and Ravens Cover the Path
The sound of iron gnawing into iron continued beyond the dark.
Alucard stood at the edge of the ledge and listened. Each time the gears meshed, a faint tremor rose from deep inside the wall and scraped low across the surface of his Walk Armor. Other chambers in the castle breathed, ran with water, or groaned through the throats of the dead. This place was different. This place chewed. It sounded as though time itself were being ground into pieces and fed back between the stones.
He rested his right hand on the hilt of his sword. The grip of the Gladius lay still in his palm, as if recognizing the calluses it had made there. Deeper inside his cloak, in the darker fold, Mormegil waited. Its black blade was not yet drawn, yet it seemed to lessen the light around it. Alucard felt its weight and still did not call on it. In a place of raven cries, rusted gears, and high drops, the wrist had to answer first. The heavier sword would be for the final moment.
He looked down below the ledge.
The scent of perfume and wine from Olrox’s quarters had not followed him this far. Here there was oil, old dust, stone grit, and the stale smell of birds. The wind was cold and thin. Slits too narrow to be called windows opened in the walls, and night seeped through them. No stars were visible. Beyond the castle there should have been sky, but from this height even the sky felt like part of the wall.
A raven sat upon one of the gears.
When Alucard took one step forward, the bird tilted its head. Its beak was black, its eyes far too clear. Not an ordinary bird. The castle’s birds rarely kept a clean boundary between the living and the dead. As his wrist moved slightly, the raven took flight first. The sound of its wings was small, but other hidden sounds rose with it all at once.
Ten. Twenty.
Black wings broke loose from the darkness.
Alucard lowered his body. The first raven did not aim for his face. It sliced across his sight. The second drove in beneath it, toward his throat. He did not retreat. He slid half a step aside. Beneath his feet was a metal platform. It was not fixed in place. It moved slowly from left to right, keeping time with the gears below.
The Gladius flashed short and pale.
Feathers split. Black dust scattered. No living blood came out. The raven’s body unraveled like torn cloth and soon blended back into darkness. The others did not withdraw. They were not simply trying to strike him. They were trying to press him between the moving platform and the teeth below. Wings covered his vision. Beaks grazed his wrist. Talons tugged at the hem of his cloak.
The castle always sent its enemies together with the room.
He knew that.
Alucard jumped before the first platform reached the end of the wall. The instant his toes left the metal edge, a gear rose from below. Huge teeth locked into one another and shook loose stone dust. If touched, flesh would not be the first thing to grind. Bone would speak first. He reached a lower platform with the first leap, then used the second beat of the Leap Stone to pass over it and catch a higher ledge. His cloak streamed behind him, and one raven caught the cloth in its beak.
He did not look back.
As he pulled himself up, he folded the cloak with his left hand. The cloth slipped free from the beak, and the raven lost balance. In that brief falter, the sword tip rose. The bird split in silence.
The upper passage was narrower.
Round gears were set into the wall. Some had stopped; others turned slowly. They were not merely decorative. Alucard halted before one of them. Its metal surface was covered in old sword marks. Someone, or several someones, had struck this mechanism before. He listened. The great gears below and this smaller gear did not move to the same rhythm. The small one turned uselessly, making only a dull sound.
He struck the gear with the back of his sword.
Clang.
Low. Blunt. Not yet.
Again.
Clang.
A third time.
The sound changed.
A clear, thin metallic note entered the wall. From somewhere not nearby but far away, the sound of something locked beginning to move came back. Alucard lowered his sword. The gear continued to turn. Nothing appeared to have changed. But in this castle, paths often opened first to the ear rather than to the eye. Echo of Bat stirred faintly inside his hearing. He could trace the direction of the sound moving through the wall. No, he felt as though he could see it.
He folded into the body of a bat.
The Soul of Bat no longer shook him as it had at first. Even so, the act was never easy. Each time human shoulders and fingers changed into the small body of the night, a thin unease passed through him. He spread his wings once. The stone walls were close, and the heat of machinery rose from below. Wings did not hold hot air for long. Beat too hard and he would jerk upward; beat too softly and the gears’ wind would shove him aside.
He flew low.
Medusa Heads drifted inside the narrow vertical shaft. Severed faces drew slow curves through the air. Their serpent hair stirred like tiny metal chimes, and their eyes were cold as stone. They were not fast. But their motion was never straight. They rose and fell in waves, delaying the judgment of any body in flight.
Alucard avoided the first. The second came too close. In bat form, he could not use his sword. He returned to human shape for an instant. There was no platform beneath his feet. As the fall began, the Gladius came free. Its blade cut through the serpent hair of the Medusa Head and split the face down the center. The next instant, he was a bat again. When his wings took the force of the fall, a hard ache pulled between his shoulder blades.
A red light flickered in a small room to the upper right.
He entered. The room was low and empty. Dust lay on the floor, and a small relic floated at the center. It looked like flame, but it did not burn. The closer he moved, the hotter the inside of his wings felt. The bat’s body tried instinctively to withdraw. Alucard returned to human form and reached out.
Fire of Bat.
The fire did not burn his palm. It seeped into his shadow. Between his shoulder blades, where wings had been only moments ago, something opened hot and closed again. A new path of fire had formed inside the body of the night. It was a strange sensation. The bat sought direction through darkness, and fire drove darkness away. Two incompatible natures struck one another for a moment inside him.
Alucard did not close his eyes.
Power opened paths, but it always demanded a price. To move through water, the body had to endure water’s malice. To become mist, one had to loosen the borders of the self. To become a bat, one had to forget the weight of a human body for a while. Now the body of night had to contain fire as well. He opened and closed his hand. There was no mark on his fingertips. Yet the candle flames in the room stretched a little longer with his breath.
When he emerged again, the Clock Tower raised its voice as if it had been waiting.
The gears felt closer than before. They turned everywhere. Inside walls, within ceilings, beneath his feet. Alucard found several more small gears. He struck them with the back of his sword until their dull sounds became clear notes. At times, Harpies descended upon him from above. Winged enemies with faces imitating women laughed in the air and spread their talons. Their laughter was not beautiful. It was too thin and fell from too high a place.
The first Harpy blocked the space above the platform.
Alucard leapt. The Harpy had been waiting for the instant he rose into the air. Its wings opened wide, and its claws curved downward. He read the attack a moment too late. The talons scraped across the shoulder of his Walk Armor. A long line remained on the metal. The wound beneath was not deep, but his posture twisted.
Below him was a gear.
He reached out and caught a small projection in the wall. His fingers slipped. Dust and oil slid between them. The Harpy descended again. Hanging against the wall, Alucard could not raise his sword. He released his hold. In the moment he fell, he folded into bat form. The Harpy’s claws seized empty air.
This time, he did not flee.
The small black body slipped beneath the Harpy. Alucard released a brief burst of fire. The new power was rough. The fireball did not fly straight; it wavered slightly. It was enough. Flame touched the edge of the Harpy’s wing. The smell of burning feathers spread. As she screamed and lost balance, Alucard returned to human form. Falling, he set the Gladius downward.
The blade cut between shoulder and chest.
The Harpy struck the platform, then vanished below as the platform slid into the wall. Her scream was consumed by the gears.
Alucard landed and lowered one knee. After using a new power, his breath always returned half a beat late. He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. There was no blood. Only the taste of ash inside his mouth.
Farther in, swords were waiting.
At first they looked like knights. Sword Lords stood in the darkness with long blades in hand. Their armor was old, but their stance had not collapsed. Some of the castle’s soldiers remembered only one motion. These remembered how to raise a sword, and even death had not made them forget. As Alucard approached, the first Sword Lord lowered the point of its blade.
A thrust came.
It was not fast. But it was long. Alucard turned aside and cut the arm joint with the Gladius. Armor split, and the empty darkness inside it trembled. His second cut aimed for the neck. The Sword Lord’s helm fell. Its body collapsed.
But the sword did not fall.
Even after the hand vanished, the blade remained in the air. A faint shadow gathered around its grip, and it stood upright like a separate foe. Vandal Sword. A blade whose will to swing remained after its master was gone. Alucard stepped back a moment too late. The sword changed direction without a wrist. Its first slash aimed for his chest. The Walk Armor forced the blade away, but the shock touched his ribs.
Only then did he take hold of Mormegil.
The black blade emerged. The light diminished. The room’s candle flames seemed suddenly shorter. The Vandal Sword did not hesitate. A weapon without life had no fear. That was the problem. Press it, and it did not retreat. Deceive it, and it did not flinch. A sword came like a sword and tried to cut like a sword.
Alucard did not meet it head-on.
Mormegil’s weight slowed the wrist. But when it touched, it bit deep. As the Vandal Sword slashed sideways, he stepped half a pace inside the stroke. The blade grazed the edge of his cloak. The next instant, Mormegil fell from above. The black sword pressed down on the center of the floating blade. Metal struck metal, yet no clear ring sounded. It was a dull rupture, like light being swallowed.
The Vandal Sword fell to the floor.
This time it did not move.
Alucard returned Mormegil to its place. This sword was a good answer, but it was not an answer to every question. It was not a sword that cut darkness. It was a sword that cut with darkness. If held too long, the shadow deepening first would not be the room’s, but his own.
At the end of the passage, pendulums swung.
Huge weights hung from the ceiling and moved left and right. A narrow path ran between them. Their swing was steady. But it slipped slightly out of rhythm with the gears behind them. Seen by eye, the passage seemed crossable. Heard by ear, one beat was missing. Alucard stood still and listened to the mismatch. Echo of Bat formed a circle inside his hearing. The returning sound drew the arc of the weights.
He ran.
The first weight passed behind him. The second came back in front. He did not stop. He lowered his body. The iron mass passed over his head, stirring a few strands of hair. The third came too late. No, it only pretended to come late. From the opposite wall, a small Medusa Head drifted up and blocked his sight. Alucard did not swing his sword. If he did, he would be late for the pendulum. He folded into bat form, passed beneath the Medusa Head, and returned to human form as he landed on the platform.
The weight struck the wall behind him.
Stone dust fell like rain.
Through that rain, he saw the door. Low and dark. Wind entered from beyond it, and the wind carried the heavy scent of ravens. It was different from the cries he had heard in the passage. The ravens here were not a scattered flock. They were silent like an army waiting for someone’s command.
Alucard stopped before the door.
He rolled his wrist. The weight of the Gladius returned. His left hand held no shield. Instead of the dented metal he had left in Granfaloon’s chamber, that hand was empty now. An empty hand was unsettling, but quick. He folded and opened his fingers once, then pushed the door.
The chamber was high.
The ceiling was lost in darkness. Along both walls, old machinery and broken ornamentation tangled together. The floor was not wide. It sank slightly toward the center, and broken railings lined either end. Beyond them lay depth. From below came the sound of turning gears. To be driven back here would not mean hitting a wall. It would mean falling into the dark where the teeth waited.
At first, there was nothing.
That silence was more ominous.
When Alucard stepped into the center, a single feather fell from the ceiling. A black feather. Before it reached the floor, it changed direction like a sharpened shard of metal. Alucard turned his body. The feather grazed his cheek and drove into the wall behind him. A thin crack appeared in the stone.
Wings opened above.
Karasuman descended from the darkness near the ceiling. To call him a raven-man was too crude; to call him a demon, too imprecise, for the habits of a bird remained too clearly in him. Gold ornament flashed between black feathers, and his long arms seemed halfway between limbs and wings. His face was a mingling of avian beak and human mockery. When he settled lower, every raven in the chamber raised its head at once.
The first attack was not his body.
It was a command.
Karasuman lifted one arm, and ravens surged from walls, ceiling, and the undersides of the railings. They did not fly in disorder. First they gathered into a circle. A black ring spun rapidly around his body. Alucard ran toward it. If he struck the center before the birds fully scattered, he could break it.
The judgment came a little too soon.
The ravens were not a shield. Before his blade reached the ring, they burst outward all at once. Feathers, beaks, and talons poured inside the range of his sword. Alucard shielded his face, but too late. One talon tore the back of his hand; another caught his cloak. His sight went black. In that opening, Karasuman’s true body rose.
Then feathers fell like blades.
Alucard rolled across the floor. He avoided the first line. The second struck the thigh of his Walk Armor. Black feathers embedded in the metal and dissolved into smoke. The wound was shallow, but his movement broke. He braced one hand on the floor and rose at once. Karasuman floated high to the right side of the room, beating his wings slowly as he called the next flock.
The pattern was clear.
Gather ravens. Scatter them. Drop feather blades in the interval. If approached, rise higher; if left at range, send the flock. His body was large, but he remained in the air. The battlefield below was narrow, while the space above belonged to him.
Alucard lowered his breath.
He had to take the air.
He became a bat. But he did not soar high. Karasuman was a winged enemy. If Alucard simply followed him upward, he would be fighting where the enemy was most at home. Instead, he flew low across the center of the room. The flock descended. He passed through them with his small body. The ends of his wings were scratched several times. The pain came from a place different from a human arm.
Karasuman lowered himself.
He had been waiting for the instant Alucard approached in bat form. One long arm swept sideways. Feathers stood up like spears. Alucard did not return to human shape at once. In bat form, he darted sharply upward and cleared the arc of the arm. Then he breathed fire.
The newly gained Fire of Bat burst in the dark.
The fireball did not strike Karasuman squarely in the chest. He folded one wing and twisted aside. But the flame split the flock. Several ravens burned and fell. In that moment, Karasuman’s left side opened. Alucard returned to human form and stepped into his first leap. The second beat of the Leap Stone opened in midair. He used it to reach beneath Karasuman.
The Gladius cut under the wing.
Black feathers poured down. Karasuman did not cry out. Instead, every raven in the chamber screamed. The sound struck the walls and returned, stabbing the ear. Alucard tried to land, but the sound blurred his direction. The floor appeared half a beat late. His landing point shifted toward the railing.
He stepped back the instant his foot touched down.
One more step would have been the fall.
Karasuman’s pattern changed.
He no longer lingered in one place. He descended briefly, scattered feather spears, and rose again. The ravens no longer formed a circle. They gathered on one side of the room and drove forward like a black wave. Alucard leapt over the first wave. The second came low. As soon as he landed, he ducked. Beaks passed over his head. The third wave closed from above and below at once.
This time he could not evade it.
He used Form of Mist.
His body blurred. The ravens passed through where he had stood. Talons and beaks tore empty air, unable to seize mist. But after that brief dissolution, when his body returned, his knees bent slightly. Strength drained away. Karasuman saw it. His eyes narrowed. The next feather blades fell directly toward that point.
Alucard did not roll away.
Rolling would take him to the railing. He ignored the pain in his wrist and raised his sword. The first feather slid along the sword’s face. The second grazed his shoulder. The third he did not try to catch with his left hand; he turned and let it pass. When the feather blade struck the floor, the stone around it cracked. They were not mere feathers. This enemy used his flock as weapons, his feathers as swords, his cries as direction.
The opening came after the command.
When Karasuman summoned ravens, his wings spread wide. At that instant, his chest and the base of his throat opened. But if Alucard closed in at that moment, he would be struck by the flock’s explosion. Then not the moment of summoning, but just after. After the birds scattered and before the body rose to its next height, there was the brief instant when the wings began to fold.
Alucard stood in the center of the chamber.
Karasuman raised his arm again. Ravens gathered from ceiling and wall. A black circle formed. Alucard did not move. It looked as though he were repeating his first mistake. The ring grew large enough. Karasuman’s feathers trembled.
They scattered.
At that instant, Alucard did not run forward.
He jumped upward.
Passing over the lower burst of ravens, he used the second beat of the Leap Stone to clear the ring from above. Wings tore through the air beneath his feet. Several birds tried to change direction, but they were late. Karasuman’s wings had not yet fully folded. In midair, Alucard drew Mormegil.
The black blade descended.
The first cut struck the shoulder. The second, the wing bone. The third, below the neck. Mormegil swallowed feather and flesh alike. Karasuman twisted his body. What scattered was not black blood, but dark dust and fragments of gold ornament. He beat his wings wide to throw Alucard away. Wind swept the center of the chamber. Alucard’s body was driven backward.
Below was the railing.
He became a bat in midair. Rather than resisting the wind head-on, he slipped along its side. The small body was pushed close to the wall, then returned to human shape there. His foot found a narrow projection in the stone. It was not a place he could hold for long. Karasuman dragged his wounded wing up and called the last flock.
This time, there were not many ravens.
Instead, those that remained overlapped one another. They gathered into something like a single great black spear and flew straight toward Alucard. It was a new attack. As Karasuman weakened, the flock became simpler and more violent. What had once pressured the whole room now tried to pierce a single point.
Alucard watched the spear.
To dodge, he would need to go right. But right was wall, and it was too late to turn into a bat and slip away. Mist might let it pass through him, but if Karasuman descended immediately after, his returning body would be struck.
He sheathed Mormegil and drew the Gladius.
A short sword. A quick sword.
The raven spear came on. Black beaks, feathers, and talons gathered into one point. Alucard waited until the final moment. If he cut too early, the flock would split and bite from both sides. If too late, his chest would be pierced. One breath. Half a breath. The smell of wings reached his face.
He raised the sword from below, not above.
The blade split the center of the raven spear. The flock broke in two. Black currents streamed past him left and right. A few talons scratched his arm and shoulder, but the center had opened. Beyond that gap, Karasuman was descending. The body itself was moving to finish the fight. Because of the wounded wing, it was slightly slow.
That slowness was everything.
Alucard kicked off the wall. First leap. Then the second beat in the air. He met Karasuman’s descending path head-on. The feather spear drove toward his side. Alucard twisted to lessen its depth. The tip lodged in his Walk Armor. Metal tore.
But the Gladius touched first.
The sword point entered below Karasuman’s chest, through the split in the golden ornament. Alucard did not turn his wrist. He drove with his whole body. Karasuman’s descent and his own leap collided at a single point. The blade sank deeper.
Karasuman’s cry broke off.
The ravens fell silent at the same time.
The two bodies fell almost together. Alucard landed, pulled the blade free, and rolled aside. Karasuman struck the center of the room on one knee. His wings spread once, large and dark, then lost their strength and sank to the floor. Black feathers drifted down slowly. This time they were not sharp as blades. They were only feathers. Light things falling from the body of a dead bird.
Karasuman lifted his head one last time.
The mockery that had remained inside his eyes was gone, leaving only a brief emptiness. He opened his beak-like mouth, but no sound came. His body collapsed inward. Feathers became dust first, and gold ornaments dropped to the floor with small sounds. After that, the outlines of flesh and bone dissolved into the dark.
The room widened.
Not because the enemy had vanished. Because the command that had filled the room was gone. The ravens no longer moved. A few remained near the ceiling, but even they did not fly. A flock whose master has died becomes birds for a moment. Then, soon enough, it returns to the castle’s darkness.
A light of life rose at the center.
Alucard accepted it. His lungs deepened, and the heat in his wounds eased. But the fatigue did not disappear. The scratches on his hand, the long wound on his shoulder, and the torn surface of the Walk Armor remained. A reward does not make a battle vanish. It only grants enough breath to walk to the next chamber.
The left door opened low.
Beyond it, the sound of gears was much smaller. Instead, wind entered from far away. The high air leading toward the Castle Keep. Yet within that wind, another scent was faintly mixed. Not blood. Not perfume. Flowers. The scent of flowers once cut and pressed between pages long ago. Not a living garden, but a room remaining inside memory.
Before crossing the threshold, Alucard looked back.
The Clock Tower was returning to its own sound. Gears meshed. Pendulums swung. Devices hidden in the walls pushed against one another. The raven lord who had just died had already grown quiet, as though he were one more part of the place. The castle does not mourn the defeated for long. It leaves their traces as stains on walls or scars in the floor.
He cleaned his sword and sheathed it.
Mormegil again swallowed light inside his cloak, and the Gladius slowly lost the tremor of ravens from his hand. Soul of Bat settled low between his shoulder blades, while Echo of Bat still searched the hollow spaces inside the walls. Beneath them, Fire of Bat remained like a small ember.
Alucard walked through the open door.
Behind him, one raven feather fell late. It made no sound when it touched the floor. But somewhere ahead, in a part of the castle he had not yet reached, something like a very soft voice brushed past him. He could not tell whether it was calling him, or whether a dream had begun to leak out first.
He did not stop.
The scent of flowers grew clearer.
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