Melody of a Detective: The Castle Keep's Conclusion

My consciousness returned as a sharp, unwelcome splinter. I opened my eyes to a world painted in cherries. I was lying in a shallow pool of warm, iron-smelling blood. The chamber had been transformed into a monstrous, living abattoir. Great, fleshy red vines of something visceral, now covered every surface, pulsing with a slow, sickening rhythm, like the veins on a great, beating heart, pumping some unseen fluid somewhere deep within the castle's bowels.

A hot throb of pain lanced through my skull, and I raised a hand to my head with an irritated groan. The pale, still forms of the fox children were scattered about the room still. Across the chamber, Ashley was slumped against a wall… but where was Xiao Ru?

As the desperate question formed in my mind, I felt a pair of warm hands close gently, almost lovingly, around my neck. I looked up. It was the witch, Melody, her form flickering in a disturbing, inconstant way, shifting between the petulant child and a taller, more severe adult woman, though the hands on my throat remained disturbingly small.

My strength was gone, remedied a fleeting memory. My limbs were hollow reeds, devoid of all power. I could not move my lower body. This, I thought with a strange and distant calm, was the end. It was over. I could only raise my fingers to her face, a final, futile gesture.

The purple miasma began to bleed into the pools of blood, and the platform itself started to tremble—like the floor of a great hall where an orchestra tunes for its final, terrible symphony—the foundations sinking to create an amphitheater for the coming tragedy, a last act of spiteful dramaturgy from Melody, whether she was the conscious composer of the piece or merely its lead, unknowing instrument.

And in that moment of final surrender, a hiss of ignited air tore through the chamber. A single, golden, flaming arrow materialized and tore directly through the witch’s shoulder.

Melody let out a sharp, ragged gasp, of pure, astonished indignation. Her hands flew from my neck as she hunched over, and then fell back, her breath coming in shallow, rapid pants, her eyes wide with disbelief.

My gaze drifted to the edge of the chamber. There stood Xiao Ru, leaning against the doorway, her bow held loosely in her hand, her own breaths coming in deep, ragged drafts. A weak smile touched my lips. Of course. Even at the end, it was her—Ruru.

But I could not revel in the rescue. I tore my attention back to Melody, who was now clutching her wounded shoulder, her teeth gritted in a snarl. A soft, airy laugh—a chilling sound, escaped her lips.

"You have already lost, detective," she whispered, the words a poisoned dart. "I need waste no more of my time on such ambitious, fleeting trash."

I blinked, and in that instant, she was gone. Where the witch had knelt, only a small cloud of dull, blue-green vapors swirled for a moment before dissipating into the foul air of the chamber.

I felt Xiao Ru approach like the slow drift of a paper boat across black water, her footsteps uneven as broken music. When her fingers found mine, they carried the fever of someone who had been holding lightning too long—warm in a way that suggested her blood was arguing with itself.

My knees had developed the consistency of wet newspaper, folding and threatening collapse with each heartbeat. The chamber around us breathed through its new skin of crimson veins, pulsing like the throat of a swallowing giant. I surveyed the scattered children—some still drawing breath in fitful sips, others already claimed by the castle's hungry anatomy, their small forms braided into the flesh-tapestry as if they were flowers pressed between the pages of a book written in meat.

Xiao Ru exhaled, and the sound was like air escaping from a punctured balloon shaped like hope.

Ashley's groan drifted from the shadows—a sound like rusty hinges protesting the opening of a door no one wanted to enter. At least she breathed, though her complaints suggested she found survival to be poor customer service.

The question that gnawed at me was mathematical in its cruelty: how does one shepherd wounded sparrows across a desert made of broken glass? The journey here had been an accordion of time and distance—stretching and compressing until memory could not quite grasp its true dimensions.

Then they appeared—the Lamia and the Widow—moving with the careful choreography of pallbearers who had learned to dance. The serpent-woman's voice had shed its earlier mouse-like qualities, now carrying the authority of someone who had just discovered she owned more courage than she remembered purchasing.

"We shall summon our sisters," she said, her words falling like coins into a wishing well. "Point us toward home, and we shall carry you on wings borrowed from better angels than ourselves."

A smile crept across my lips like sunrise through dirty curtains—small, unexpected, but genuine as a child's first lie. I turned to Xiao Ru, drawn by gravity that had nothing to do with the Earth's… the Makai’s pull, and let my forehead rest against hers.

In that contact, skin meeting skin, I discovered something that tasted remarkably like peace. Her warmth seeped into me like honey poured into cracked porcelain, filling the hairline fractures that had been singing their small, sharp songs of damage.

Here, in this place where nightmares had set up housekeeping and made their dirty bed, I found myself cradling contentment like a rescued bird—fragile, unlikely, but undeniably alive. And for all my fatigue, I could feel my descriptions churned right and strange.