To Cover Yourself in Dread - Act III Begins

The story so far*: The revolving pointers of the clock ticks forward again as we make our way to the present, one week after the events of Act I's ending:

Reizō invaded Shirakawa-go internally to scout rebellious motives against the Meiji, later planning to get rid of Tenkai—his nurse—to remove evidence of his presence in the village before leaving, however halted by Danjiki and then Jinko, he was in a pinch before the Meiji themselves arrived to escort him. Having safely returned to Edo with Shirakawa-go's subordinative representative Michinori, Tenmichi departs with two of the guns she acquired 10 years ago, unannounced.

---

The month of December in 1877 did not arrive in Kanazawa—a city near Shirakawa-go—with the grace of falling petals. It arrived as a siege. The Kambai—the winter plum wind—tore through the narrow, dark-timbered alleys of the old samurai districts, carrying the weight of the Sea of Japan. The sky was a bruised, low-hanging ceiling of slate, and the snow fell in heavy, wet clumps that silenced the city, turning the vibrant gateway to the mountains into a monochrome graveyard.

In the heart of the city, where the traditional wooden eaves of the tea houses met the jarring, arrogant brick of the new Meiji government buildings, stood the private residence and academy of Master Sakamura. Sakamura was a man of "Enlightenment." He wore wool frock coats, kept a Western pocket watch, and taught the sons of the elite that the sword was a primitive relic. He was the intellectual pulse of the city’s modernization.

Until the morning of the twenty-second, when the pulse stopped.

---

The frost on the windows of the schoolhouse was thick enough to obscure the world, but it could not hide the smell. It was a dense, metallic sweetness that seemed to seep through the very wood of the walls—a scent that didn't belong in a place of learning.

Hana, a six-year-old student who had arrived early to shovel the night’s snowfall, found the door to her Sensei's study barred from the inside. She knocked, her small wooden shovel clattering against the stone path. No answer. Only the rhythmic, haunting sound of a dripping liquid—plip, plip, plip—hitting wood.

---

When the police finally broke the door down, they found a crime scene that would haunt Kanazawa for decades.

The room was a masterpiece of clinical horror. Master Sakamura sat in the center of a pristine white tatami mat. He was dressed in a formal shini-shozoku, the white burial kimono, though it had been dyed a deep, glistening maroon. The death was staged as a seppuku, but it was a grotesque parody of the ritual.

Sakamura’s abdomen had not been sliced by a single, agonizing cut of honor. It had been surgically opened with the precision of a master watchmaker. His ribs had been pried apart—not snapped, but unhinged—and pinned back with silver surgical retractors that gleamed in the dim gaslight. His internal organs had been meticulously rearranged like the gears of a complex machine. His lungs were inflated with a bellows-like apparatus, and his heart—exposed and cold—had been placed inside a bell jar that sat in his lap.

But the "Terror Tactic" lay in the head. Someone had used a jeweler’s screwdriver to bore a small hole into Sakamura's temple. From that hole, a thin copper wire trailed down, connected to a small, brass music box sitting on the floor.

As the officers entered, the music box reached the end of its spring. It emitted a final, tinny, distorted note of a Western lullaby, and Sakamura’s jaw—wired to the mechanism—clattered shut in a final, mockery of a bite.

There were no footprints in the snow outside the window. The window latches were locked from the inside. The door had been barred with a heavy iron bolt. It was a vacuum of death, a locked-room murder performed by someone who understood anatomy better than Machaon—the Greek God of Surgery.

Young Hana, peering through the legs of the officers, didn't scream. She simply stared at her teacher’s eyes, which had been fixed wide open with drops of clear resin, forced to watch her own disassembly in a mirror placed directly in front of her. The girl's world shattered in that silence. She dropped his shovel, and the sound echoed like a gunshot.

The city of Kanazawa was not interested in mysteries; it was interested in safety. The "Clockwork Butcher" had attacked the very idea of progress. The Meiji authorities, desperate to prove that their new police force was superior to the old shogunate ways, needed a monster to display.

---

The news reached the mountain village of Shirakawa-go on a day when the snow was so thick it felt like the sky was falling. The thatched gassho-zukuri houses looked like hunched giants under their white burdens.

Jinko and Danjiki were near the gate of the village's entrance with Jinko's breath blooming in the air. He was wiry and possessed of a speed that bordered on the supernatural, furrowing his eyebrows trying to hit a target with a snow-packed stone.

"Man, ever since that whole ordeal, we have yet to hear of Tenkai waking up." Danjiki starts a conversation.

"Yeah, but the fella's strong so I'm puttin' my full faith in him recoverin' soon." Jinko responds.

"How about the princess of Kōdōkai? Where's she?" Danjiki asks.

"Y-You mean Aika? She's-- She's at my home, I guess." Jinko flustered oddly.

"Heeehh? What's with all that stuttering?!" Danjiki teases.

"It's nothing ye fool! Mind yer own damn business." Jinko pouts in response.

"Just say you fell in love with her at first sight and you've been tryna deny it ever since Pinco!" 

"I TOLD YOU MIND YOUR OWN DAMN BUSINESS GROSSY-FACE!" 

"AHAHA AND YOU STILL DON'T DENY IT!!" 

"GRRRR!!!"

As the banter went about, a messenger on a horse arrived on the village's Torii gate where the two were standing.

"Good afternoon, I've come with a message from the city of Kanazawa." The messenger spoke.

"Good afternoon," Danjiki greets the messenger, "I'll address your arrival to the village's head immediately then—"

"No, please hand this over to him instead." The messenger hands over a scroll, "I unfortunately cannot make time to grace his presence for I have to finish reporting it around Takayama and other cities." He added.

"Roger, be on your way safely then."

"Right, thank you."

After the messenger's depart, Danjiki unrolled the parchment, his eyes scanning the official Kanazawa seal.

As he read, the color drained from his face, leaving it the shade of old parchment.

"What is it, Danjiki?" Jinko asked, his smile fading. "Is it the trade taxes again?"

Danjiki, instead of answering, asked a question in return,

"Oi, Pinco.."

"Huh?"

"Didn't Tenmichi's mom say Tenmichi left unannounced leaving a letter that she's departing to Kanazawa shortly after Reizō and Michinori left after the whole ordeal with Tenkai..?"

"Ye? What 'bout it?" Jinko asked.

Danjiki didn't answer, he simply handed the scroll to Jinko.

"To whom it may concern.

A legislation to apprehend anybody guilty for the ritualistic murder of Master Sakamura of the Kanazawa Academy has been passed. Evidence of the crime has been confiscated and search has thoroughly begun. Under the Decree of Public Safety, a trial will be waived for anybody suspicious until found guilty. Execution by hanging is scheduled for the morning of December 28th,

We will find the culprit by that date, we assure you."

Jinko’s eyebrows furrowed, he whispered, "So as soon as that dumbass crawls to another city for some unannounced reason, homicide starts occurring?"

"The city is a beast, Pinco," Danjiki said, his voice a low rumble. "It’s hungry, and it doesn't care whose bones it crunches as long as the gears keep turning."

"Ye're right 'bout that alright." Jinko responded.

"You think we should go to Kanazawa and see if we can find things out ourselves?" Danjiki asks eagerly.

"Only a maniac would try that, we'll be swarmed by those Meiji for being samurai underlings, at least in the village we been safe cause it's enclosed."

"Hm."

"But then again.." Jinko turns his analysis over.

"Hm?"

"I can't really stand the idea that more murders might go about and she might be found and thought to be the culprit.. 

...Especially because.."

"She's Kisakago Keisakai's daughter." Danjiki completes Jinko's sentence.

"...Yeah."

Danjiki looked towards the mountain pass, which was currently a wall of white death. "It’s a three-day trek in this weather. If we leave now, we might make it with a day to spare. But Kanazawa isn't the mountains, Pinco."

"Yeah.. They oughta fight us with law and lead rather than mere steel" Jinko spat, already turning toward his cabin to grab his gear. "But.."

"I’ll run the whole way if I have to, and I guess that infact makes me the maniac."

---

The Kanazawa sky was the color of a bruised plum, heavy with the coming snow. The air tasted of coal smoke and frozen salt, a biting reminder that the Sea of Japan was never far. A familiar silhouette moved through the shadows of the Nagamachi district, her silhouette cutting a sharp, obsidian line against the white-washed walls.

She wore a heavy, indigo-dyed winter cloak, the hood pulled low and a silk tenugui wrapped around the lower half of her face. Only her eyes were visible—amber-flecked and restless, darting between the flickering gas lamps that lined the new brick thoroughfares.

In the center of the Musashigatsuji market, a crowd had gathered. A town crier, dressed in a stiff, high-collared police uniform, rang a brass bell that sounded like a funeral knell against the brittle air.

"To whom it may concern!" the man bellowed, his breath blooming in a thick white cloud. "A legislation to apprehend anybody guilty for the ritualistic murder of Master Sakamura of the Kanazawa Academy has been passed. Evidence of the crime has been confiscated and search has thoroughly begun!"

She stopped in the shadow of a closed rice granary, her heart slowing to a cold, steady thud.

"Under the Decree of Public Safety," the crier continued, his voice echoing off the frozen eaves, "a trial will be waived for anybody suspicious until found guilty. Execution by hanging is scheduled for the morning of December 28th. We will find the culprit by then! The state assures you!"

The bell rang again, final and jagged. As the crier moved on, the crowd erupted into a low, anxious hum.

"A waived trial?" a merchant whispered, pulling his collar up. "These people don't announce stuff like that without ever having convicted someone with surety. Looks like they have someone in mind already."

"They might frame someone, you know," an old woman muttered, clutching her prayer beads. "Why are they so sure? Sakamura was killed in a locked room. No man can do that. They just want a body to hang so the Westerners don't think we're savages."

The girl pulled her hood deeper. Framing. The word tasted like iron in her mouth. She knew how the gears of authority turned—they didn't care about the truth; they cared about the machine.

She turned away, weaving through the narrow alleys. As she crossed a slick wooden bridge, a small child, no older than five, slipped on a patch of black ice. He tumbled into a snowbank, his small bundle of firewood scattering across the path. He began to wail, a thin, helpless sound.

Without thinking, she knelt. Her gloved hands were gentle as she lifted the boy and brushed the slush from his tiny kimono. She gathered the wood, binding it back together with a spare piece of twine from her pocket.

"There," she murmured, her voice muffled by the cloth. "Go home quickly. The air is turning to ice."

The boy stopped crying, looking up at the mysterious figure. "Thank you, lady," he chirped, then tilted his head. "Why's ur face covered, lady? Are you a ghost?"

She froze. "Just a traveler with a cold," she lied softly, pushing him toward the street corner.

She continued her trek toward the outskirts, passing an old man struggling to pull a heavy handcart filled with charcoal. The wheels were stuck in a frozen rut. She stepped into the slush, putting her shoulder against the wood. With a sharp grunt, she heaved, the cart popping free.

The old man wheezed, leaning on the handle. "Bless you, child. My back isn't what it was in the Shogunate days." He peered at her, his milky eyes trying to find a feature. "Why's your face covered young lady? A youngling's face shouldn't be hidden from the warm bliss of the sun, even a winter one's."

"The sun has no business with me, grandpa," she said, her voice turning brittle. "Keep moving. The police are restless tonight."

She left him before he could thank her again, her pace quickening until she reached the deserted ruins of an old shrine on the city's edge. She leaned against a crumbling stone fox, her breath coming in ragged hitches.

She reached up and pulled the silk from her face, letting the freezing wind hit her skin. 

Tenmichi's expression was not one of kindness, but of a weary, jagged resolve.

"I am a liar", she thought, her inner monologue a dark, swirling current. "I help the boy. I help the old man. I play the saint while I hunt for a demon. It’s a sickness. I’m selfish—everything I do is just to satisfy the dread inside me. I’ll run away from responsibility the second it doesn't serve my purpose. I’m not kind. I’m hollow."

"But I need this. I need this hollowness to carry this out. There's just no other way, no other alternative, no substitute, no goddamn nothing."

She gripped the hilt of the concealed pistol under her cloak, her knuckles white. She wasn't here to save the city. She was here to kill the thing that shouldn't exist.

"C'mon..." she whispered into the freezing dark, her eyes searching the cloud for a hint,

"Where are you, Jinko's big brother?!"

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Author's Note*: Dream Seclusion is now being cross-uploaded with RoyalRoad! I've dissected the Acts into Volumes and they have their own Volume cover too!

Volume 1 - Ensanguined Homecoming 

Volume 2 - Zeal was Sealed 

Volume 3 - Depravity in Fidelity.

I hope you keep reading Dream Seclusion and enjoy it!