[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel – Episode 15] When the Spikes Become Part of the Road
Alucard rubbed the soot from the inner surface of the gold ring with his thumb, revealing worn letters.
Wear… Clock….
Standing beside the coffin, he did not linger over the incomplete command. The small circle won in the nightmare contained neither blood nor jewel, yet whenever it rested in his palm, he remembered Lisa’s eyes upon him in the flames. The face and voice made by the demon had been false. The wound into which they had entered was not.
If the words instructed him to wear it in the Marble Gallery’s clock room, one piece was missing. The castle always severed part of its commands and left those who sought the rest to wander its passages until they died. Alucard did not put the ring on his finger. He placed it in an inner pocket. The metal warmed faintly, as though somewhere far away the other half of the sentence had answered.
Among the water smells of the Underground Caverns came traces of ash and rusted iron. Behind them sounded a very slow friction—not a blade being sharpened before an attack, but countless metal points rubbing themselves against stone so they could go on waiting.
Alucard turned toward the Catacombs. Black water and moss spread along the descent through the Abandoned Mine. Human finger bones and animal teeth lay indiscriminately embedded in the mud. The odors of scorched wood and sulfur had not faded after Cerberus’s death, and smaller things were crawling out to occupy the emptied tunnels.
Purple masses of slime fell from the ceiling when he entered the Catacombs. He did not stop to cut down each one. Sweeping back his cloak, he opened only the path he needed with short strokes. The divided bodies struck the floor and stained it black after he had passed.
To the left lay the burial chamber where Granfaloon had suspended countless corpses as a single body. The castle despised human beings, yet discarded nothing of them—not blood, bone, flesh, or memory. The greed that possessed with greatest cruelty whatever it held in contempt was no contradiction. Alucard did not return to that chamber. He chose the right-hand passage, where iron scraped stone.
Old blood at the entrance showed that someone had tried to return with one hand against the wall. The print ended after three steps. In place of a corpse, three severed fingers remained on the floor. Their cuts were too smooth for an animal’s teeth or a dull edge.
Alucard picked up a pebble and threw it into the dark. Before it touched the floor, dozens of metallic sounds erupted together. Pieces cut cleanly in half flew back past the entrance. Even a vampire’s eyes could find no shape within. It was not merely that there was no light; darkness itself filled the space between wall and floor.
He drew a single silver thread from his cloak and released it to the wind. A succession of blade sounds consumed it. Nothing returned, not even severed cloth. Before his eyes could make fear out of what they could not see, Alucard folded his human body and hung upside down from the ceiling of the passage.
A piercing pulse left the bat’s throat. It skimmed floor and wall, ran along metal edges, then shattered into hundreds of returning paths. The lightless space acquired shape within his mind: spikes rising from the floor, blades descending from the ceiling, spears crossing from both walls—and pieces of flesh and cloth dried where they had been caught, each with distance and direction.
Alucard flew into the first opening. Iron closed behind him and clipped the end of one wing, scattering the small body’s blood in black droplets. The second pulse showed a hollow in the right wall, but a spike pushed out from it just before he arrived. He turned into mist to pass between the edges.
The spikes could not cut a body without form, yet the air of the passage drew the dispersed vapor into cracks in the rock. If he remained too long, he felt he might never recover the borders of himself. Alucard gathered one human arm first and seized the wall, then restored shoulder and torso in succession.
The instant he heard the floor move, he kicked away from the wall. The spikes below closed like an animal’s jaws while the second foothold in the air lifted him higher. He returned to small wings and sent out another pulse, but this time he did not fly straight toward the empty place it showed.
An instant later, three blades pierced that space together. The castle had turned the road returned by the Echo of Bat into bait. It remained open when the sound arrived, then closed only when wings touched it.
Clinging to the wall, Alucard listened past the shapes of the threats to the order in which the mechanism moved. Friction came before impact. Before every spike chose its next position, all of them waited through a very short silence. A shared rhythm existed even within motion designed to appear irregular.
He remembered the Succubus wearing Lisa’s face. Had he trusted the first impression before a creature speaking falsehood in a voice identical to truth, memory itself would have undone him. Not only the scene shown by the eye, but the first answer returned by sound had to be doubted. What mattered was not merely what he heard, but where the answer wanted to take him.
The next pulse indicated a gap high on the right. Alucard flew in the opposite direction, low to the left. While the spikes converged upon the bait, he folded his wings and fell through the path they opened. When a blade ahead began to move, he became mist an instant before striking the wall, passed between two edges, and recovered human form on the other side in a roll.
His cloak tore, and a thin wound opened across his left shoulder. The scent of blood spread. The whole passage trembled like a living animal and increased its speed. Alucard abandoned sight, released pulse after pulse, and ran among overlapping shapes of death that appeared and vanished.
He ducked under the blade above his head and planted a foot upon the left wall to avoid the spikes in the floor. As he kicked the air again, an iron spear descending from the ceiling pierced his cloak and dragged him backward. He did not resist to save the cloth. He released the clasp. The black cloak with its red lining remained upon the spike while his outstretched fingertips found cold metal ahead.
A blue seal shone faintly in the dark. He raised the Jewel of Open. Its light flowed into the door, and the instant a gap appeared, he forced his body through. Every spike behind him closed together and shook the door.
Dozens of blue candles illuminated a suit of black plate armor upon a stone pedestal. Its chest and shoulders carried more marks from thrusting, scraping, and crushing blows than could be counted. Some looked newly made; others held the rust of centuries.
Before the pedestal lay a skeleton that had very nearly reached it. The front of the body remained whole, but the spine had been cut into dozens of pieces. Less than a hand’s breadth separated the outstretched fingers from the armor. Such a distance was enough to kill a man.
Alucard removed a rusted metal plate caught between the skeleton’s fingers.
Let those who fear the spikes turn back. Those who fight the spikes shall die here. Only those who accept the spikes as part of the road may break them.
He read the words twice, then laid a hand on the armor. The metal was not cold. It trembled so faintly he could barely feel it, as though listening to every spike moving beyond the door. This was not iron that endured through hardness alone, but matter that remembered the shapes of the things that had wounded it.
Alucard released the clasps of the Walk Armor, whose strength had grown with the ground he had traveled. When the long-familiar metal left his body, the chill of the deep earth penetrated the thin clothing beneath. He lifted the new armor over his shoulders. Breastplate and rings locked of their own accord. Red light flowed along its innumerable scars and formed the image of a shattered spike.
A pulse unlike his heart sounded once inside the armor. A moment later, his heart answered. The two did not beat at the same speed, but they resembled one another in the way each awaited the next response.
“Spike Breaker.”
Alucard spoke the name left within the metal once and opened the door. The black passage opened its mouth again and drove its first spike toward the center of his chest. He did not evade it.
When the point struck the armor, the impact pressed through to his ribs and one scar on the surface burned red. Then the spike split from its root like a dry bone. He stepped on the second blade as it rose from the floor; the iron screamed and bent. The third and fourth attacks came from either wall, and each shattered the moment it struck his shoulders.
Alucard did not shorten his stride. Metal broke with every step, but neither impact nor pain disappeared. His chest rang, and blood flowed from wounds already opened. The new armor did not make his body invulnerable. It prevented pain from blocking the road. The difference seemed small, but it was enough to separate those who returned alive from those who left their names here.
His cloak remained impaled midway through the passage. When Alucard pulled the cloth free, the blade holding it struck his breastplate and broke. Its clasp was gone, so he tied it around his neck with a strip of red cloth. The torn end trailed behind him as he walked the remaining distance.
When the final spike broke, the sconces on both walls ignited and complete darkness withdrew. Names of those who had died along this road crowded the stone. Alucard ran a finger along the empty line at the bottom and understood whom the castle had awaited there.
“Not yet.”
Whether the words were meant for the castle, for his father, or for the face of his mother in the nightmare was unclear. After Alucard left the passage, the candles went out one by one. Beneath the last flame, the name ADRIAN FAHRENHEIT ȚEPEȘ inscribed itself upon the empty line. No year of death appeared beside it. Not even the castle knew his ending yet.
The Gold Ring grew hot when he left the Catacombs. As he lifted it near his ear, a tiny bell sounded twice. Before the third note, a woman’s breath intervened.
“Richter….”
Maria’s voice had drifted from the direction of the Royal Chapel. It held more fear than faith. This was not the breath of someone searching for a man, but of someone unable to accept what she had already found. In that direction lay a passage filled with white spikes beyond a blue door. The new armor vibrated low, as if remembering those distant edges.
At the same time the Gold Ring’s heat intensified, and somewhere far away a cold, clear metal note answered. Silver against gold—the sound of a second ring that would complete the severed command. Maria was near it.
Alucard climbed the stairs. The scars across his breastplate glowed faintly with every step. Walls and spikes could no longer hide within silence. When he sent a question into the dark, it returned a shape, and whatever revealed its form could be broken.
At the head of the stairs, the Royal Chapel bell sounded twelve times. As the final note faded, the command inside the ring seemed to lengthen.
Wear… in Clock….
It was not yet complete, but he knew where the remainder lay. Far above, Maria called Richter’s name again. Behind her voice, something that did not breathe imitated a human laugh.
Alucard did not draw his sword. He rested one hand upon the hilt and continued upward. In the next room, he would need neither the name nor the splendor of a renowned weapon, but the judgment to separate Maria’s voice from the laughter clinging behind it.
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