[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 32] The Castle with the Open Door
The doors of Magus’s castle did not need to be pushed.
A gap wide enough for three people opened onto a black hall. There was no rust on the hinges and no dust across the threshold. The doors had the polished readiness of something tended only moments before.
Frog entered first.
His boot struck the marble. The sound climbed to the high ceiling and returned as many footsteps instead of one.
The castle had no fire, yet it was not entirely dark. Violet light seeped between pillars and out of the walls. Whenever he tried to find its source, the nearest shadow deepened.
Crono and Marle followed.
The red-eyed bat skimmed above the doorway and flew into the hall. Frog reached for the Masamune, but it vanished behind an ornament high in the ceiling.
“Nothing attacked us at the door,” Marle said softly.
“That is not the same as a welcome.”
Crono glanced back at the open doors.
There was no wind. Even so, the shadows of dead trees outside shifted across the threshold.
A staircase rose at the far end of the central hall. A slab of black stone sealed the door at its top. A circle had been carved into the floor below it. Long corridors reached west and east.
Frog looked toward the western hall.
He remembered the direction Ozzie had stood ten years ago. His choice was not an accident.
“We begin there.”
People stood along the corridor.
An old man dressed as a Guardia farmer. A soldier in torn armor. A barefoot young woman. They faced the wall in a silent row, their skin as pale as wax. None turned at the sound of the travelers’ steps.
Marle started toward the woman. Frog stopped her with one arm.
“She does not breathe.”
As if she had heard, the woman tilted her head.
“End it.”
Her lips never moved. The voice seemed to come from inside the wall.
The soldier ahead whispered as well.
“Send me…home.”
Frog recognized the mark on his armor. It belonged to a southern Guardia company that had vanished ten years ago. The soldier’s face remained young, but one cheek had dried away to the bone.
“Are they dead?” Marle asked.
“They appear to be.”
“Then why aren’t they attacking?”
Frog had no answer.
The dead were not watching the intruders. Their eyes were fixed on the door at the end of the corridor. They stood like people waiting for something to begin.
The three passed without touching them.
The first room contained a long table set with empty cups. Dark red liquid had hardened inside them. Every chair was clean of dust. Torn banners taken from Guardia soldiers hung above the cold hearth.
A single high-backed chair stood in the second room. Before it, a woman in white faced away.
Frog stopped.
The arrangement of her hair was familiar. So was the fall of blue cloth over her shoulders.
“Queen Leene.”
The woman turned.
She wore Leene’s face.
Not the face of the queen as she was now, but the younger woman who had watched Cyrus and Glenn leave the castle ten years ago.
“Glenn.”
She smiled.
“You are safe.”
Frog’s hand slipped away from the Masamune.
The woman came closer.
“Come home now. Cyrus is waiting.”
Those words returned him to himself.
Leene would never have said them. No living person could tell him where Cyrus waited.
He stepped back.
“Her Majesty has almost never called me Glenn.”
The woman’s smile hardened in place.
Crono raised his short sword. Marle aimed her bow.
The false Leene did not attack. She simply turned away and resumed her place before the chair.
“Cyrus is waiting.”
The same words came through her back.
Frog left without drawing his sword.
When they returned to the central hall, the upper door remained sealed. The circle on the floor showed no light.
They took the eastern corridor.
Four children sat around a little chest in the first room. They had their backs to the door and were clapping their hands. Their palms made no sound. Only something inside the chest jingled with each clap.
“Want to play?”
One child turned its head without moving its body. Its face looked backward over its spine.
Marle raised her bow. The children laughed together.
“We’ll give you our treasure.”
“Keep it.”
She passed without lowering the arrow.
Familiar people waited in the next corridor.
Crono’s mother stood in an apron, her hair tied to one side as it had been on the morning of the Millennial Fair.
“Crono, where have you been?”
Crono stopped.
King Guardia stood beside her. He looked more tired than he had before Marle fled the castle. Even the curve of his shoulders and the hard line of his mouth had been copied.
“Nadia.”
The name made the point of Marle’s arrow shake.
“I was wrong. Come back to the castle.”
It was what she had wanted to hear.
The king accepting his fault. The father calling for his daughter rather than his princess.
That was how she recognized the lie.
Marle kept her bow raised. The arrow steadied over the king’s heart. Frog heard her teeth come together.
“My real father cannot apologize that easily.”
The illusion lowered his brows. It even imitated a father wounded by his daughter’s answer.
“If one kind sentence could erase everything between us, I never would have left the castle.”
Marle stepped forward. The apparition seemed to have expected retreat; it gave ground instead.
“How would you know where I want to go back to?”
The king’s face smiled.
The corners of his mouth stretched farther than a human face allowed.
“You have nowhere to return to.”
Crono’s mother wore the same smile.
Crono moved in front of Marle. No lightning gathered around his short sword. He would not give the waiting figures an attack until he understood what they meant to do with it.
“Come on.”
Marle backed away at his quiet instruction.
The false figures did not follow. They called the travelers’ names until the last turn of the corridor hid them.
The final room was empty.
There was only a chair draped in red cloth and three closed chests. Frog touched none of them. He examined the floor and walls. Fresh scratches marked the back of the door, while tiny claw marks crossed the ceiling.
The bat had passed through this room more than once.
Marle looked upward.
“It wanted us to walk both sides.”
“What was it looking for?”
“Where we would stop,” Frog said.
Crono turned toward the door.
Every figure in the corridor was gone.
They hurried back to the central hall.
The castle doors had closed.
The opening to the night was now a wall of black stone without a seam. Blue light rose from the circular mark before the stairs. It resembled the light of the pillars at the End of Time, but the air within it smelled of decay instead of cold.
“That isn’t a Gate,” Marle said. “Don’t go near it.”
Laughter fell from the ceiling.
“Still a coward, Glenn!”
Frog knew the voice.
Ozzie emerged through the black slab at the top of the stairs. The broad armor, the round body, the grin of a man certain he had won before anyone else had fallen—ten years had changed none of it.
Frog drew the Masamune.
“Ozzie.”
“What a warm greeting. Sir Frog has learned his manners.”
Ozzie’s gaze descended to the sword. When he saw the red seam, his laughter stopped for a fraction of a second.
“So you glued the broken toy together. And you found some new friends to replace Cyrus.”
Frog tightened his grip.
Marle stepped beside him.
“We are not replacements.”
Crono took the other side.
Ozzie looked between them and began to laugh again.
“It makes no difference. Lord Magus is preparing something far too important to waste his time on you.”
He raised both arms. The doors to the eastern and western halls opened at once.
“If you hope to see even his shadow, you will have to pass me, Slash the swordsman, and Flea the magician. Of course, the hundred beasts filling this castle will eat you first!”
The blue circle flared.
Frog started to cut through the light. Marle caught his shoulder and pulled him aside. Black hands thrust out of the center. Skulls and rotting armor followed, forcing their way up through the floor.
The people in the western corridor screamed together.
This time the sound did not come through the walls. Dozens of feet were approaching.
Ozzie withdrew into the black slab.
“Take your time, Glenn! And don’t run away like last time!”
Frog did not chase him.
Three skeletal soldiers rushed into the central hall. Black fire burned along their swords and spearheads. Behind them, the shapes that had worn the faces of farmers, soldiers, and children lengthened into bone and claw.
“Put the stairs at our backs!”
At Frog’s command, the three formed a crescent around the circle of light.
Crono turned the first spear with the back of his blade. Without twisting his injured side, he stepped in and cut the skeleton’s wrist. Marle froze the knee of the second with an arrow.
The third brought its sword down toward her.
Frog’s blade met it between them.
When the Masamune struck the black flame, its red seam shone. A high note and a low note rang through the hall. The flame divided. Water driven by Frog spread through the spaces between the creature’s bones.
Marle froze the water.
Crono’s lightning struck the ice.
All three skeletons came apart.
The footsteps in the corridors did not lessen.
Frog looked from west to east. The presence of a drawn sword waited at the end of the western hall. To the east, the red-eyed bat flew up and vanished into the dark.
Slash and Flea.
Both roads stood between them and Magus.
Frog shook the blood from the Masamune. The Hero’s Badge still trembled against his chest, but his feet did not lock as they had ten years ago.
“West first.”
For the first time, he walked forward where Cyrus was not.
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