I swallowed, instinct telling me to step back. But I didn't.

  I merely stood there, arms loose at my sides, meeting Wailfiend's searching gaze. I was nearly a head taller. Though she had cleverly cheated to gain eye level, levitating just above the ground.

  "So this is your true form. Szylla once mentioned a… word… about humans. They're almost like Wanderans. How quaint. How unfortunate."

  The Wailfiend's mouth twitched. Her nails hovered inches from my collarbone, pausing as though she meant to rake them across my throat. Then she let them drift away with an exasperated little sigh.

  "I thought perhaps seeing you this way would unnerve me less. Or more. I haven't decided," she confessed primly. "I imagined humans to be more… dainty. Soft like moths. You are neither."

  "You wanted me to be afraid of you," I said, reading the tight little dance in her shoulders.

  Her lips parted, a ghost of sharp teeth behind them. Her eyes shone brighter, eerie gleams swirling in the depths. Then she leaned in, close enough that her chamomile breath ghosted across my cheek.

  "Aren't you? I could wail right now, let it pour through your bones. Make your marrow twitch with mourning. I could whisper all the secrets that live under your bed."

  "Go on then." I held her midnight gaze. "Try."

  For a breath, her poise cracked. The faintest line of confusion crept between her elegant brows. Her shoulders drooped.

  "Hmph," she sniffed finally, pulling back with a wounded little flourish. "It's terribly rude to spoil a haunting."

  I nearly laughed. Nearly. Instead, I just shook my head. "I've seen enough horrors lately that one more specter trying to make me shiver feels almost… quaint."

  The Wailfiend recoiled with exaggerated affront, clutching ghostly fingers to her chest. "Quaint! I was once the Scourge of Hollow Shoals, you know. The midnight bride who danced entire villages into their graves. Do you know how many poets tried to capture my lament? Thousands. An entire generation wept themselves blind over my song."

  At once her posture faltered. Her shadowy skirt coiled tighter around her ankles like frightened cats. Her long hair curled protectively over her shoulders, nearly hiding her face. Her eyes flickered with something raw, lost and painful.

  I stepped closer, slow so as not to spook her, and laid a tentative hand on the cool ripple of her sleeve. "Do you remember much? From… before? Before the plague, before Szylla rebuilt you?"

  She stiffened. Her breath hitched, just once. Then she turned her head away, strands of hair sweeping across my arm with a soft, sorrowful hush.

  "No," she said at last. "Only the illness. The fever dreams. Screaming. And then Szylla's hands. Her voice telling me it would be alright, even as she cut things away that I can't quite name. I remember love, I think. But it might have just been the delirium wishing for it."

  A chill swept through the hall. The chandeliers dimmed, their blue flames shivering down to thin, frightened tongues. For a heartbeat, the house itself seemed to lean closer, eavesdropping.

  I squeezed her sleeve lightly. "That must be hard. Not knowing."

  "It is infuriating," she whispered. Then her hands twitched, and her posture snapped back into a prim, high-nosed elegance, banishing her vulnerability as though she'd simply folded it into one of her shadowed pleats. "But at least Szylla keeps me. I am her masterpiece. Her favored wraith. You may be new, you may be fascinating—but she has known me for far longer."

  Her voice wavered at the edges. Not quite a threat. More a frightened insistence that she still mattered most.

  I offered her a sad, small smile. "Then I suppose you'll just have to put up with me."

  She huffed a delicate, ghostly sigh, looking every inch the offended lady at an unwanted garden party. She hovered away, and I followed, maintaining a calm smile.

  Together, we began to walk deeper into the mansion's twisting halls. Portraits watched us with sly, shifting eyes, and somewhere far above, an unseen piano began to play itself—a lilting tune that sounded suspiciously like a funeral waltz.

  And though the Wailfiend tried very hard to glide ahead with regal disdain, her trailing fingers occasionally brushed my sleeve, as if afraid I might vanish without her noticing.

  "Wait here. Allow me to change my garment. If you decide to wander, that is your problem." She phased through a wall before I could give a word.

  So I waited by turning toward one of the portraits. I lingered too close to a peculiar decadent one of a horned woman with fiery orange hair, elegant slit jewels, and ruby skulls caught on a silver collar. An Oni, perhaps?

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  The painted eyes rolled abruptly to meet mine, pupils tightening to pinpricks. In an instant, she lunged—her face inches from mine, eyes gone wide and abyssal, mouth opening far too wide as a spectral wail built in her chest. The sound curled around my skull, cold as coffin air.

  I didn't even flinch.

  She halted, expression freezing, the haunting crescendo collapsing into a small, awkward hiccup. Her mouth closed slowly, almost sheepishly.

  "You didn't shudder. Or gasp. Or even pale," she accused, voice petulant.

  "Why would I?" I reached out to Wailfiend, and before she could recoil, I flicked a single loose strand of her drifting hair. It passed through my hand with a faint chill similar to that of breath. "I've seen you as a banshee, attempting to drive me to the brink of madness. I've felt your wails on my soul. This? This is your polite face."

  With her face already transitioning back to its original form, Wailfiend's lips pursed into a delicate moue. For a moment she looked genuinely flustered.

  "You are... remarkably unfun," she sighed and almost made a pout. "It used to be so delightful, hearing your heart seize under my song."

  I shrugged. "Guess you'll have to find something else to haunt."

  Wailfiend's eyes half-lidded with a glitter of sly curiosity.

  "What was it like? Before your Mark. Before your heart began echoing with another rhythm. What did it mean to be KiAera, unspoiled?"

  I sucked in a slow breath, feeling that question land deep. "I… remember family. Dusty sunlit roads. Fights in schoolyards and cafeterias that seemed important at the time. Smiles that reached eyes. But mostly? I remember having the freedom to forget myself. To be foolish. That's something I've been clawing back ever since."

  Wailfiend was silent for a long while. Then her shoulders hunched, and her hands pressed lightly to either side of her head, fingers buried in that cascading dark. A tiny, strained whimper bled out of her, small and heartbreakingly fragile.

  "I can't recall any of it! Not my family. Not the roads. I try so hard, but there's only Szylla's smile at the end of a long illness. Only the relief of being spared madness."

  "Hey…" I reached toward her, hesitated, then let my hand fall. "That doesn't mean you're unfinished. It just means your story's buried under a lot of shadow. Maybe it can still be dug up."

  She sniffed delicately. Her hair shifted aside to peek at me, her eyes glassy with some confused sorrow.

  "You say such dreadfully hopeful things. It's a bothersome habit."

  "You'll get used to it."

  Her smile returned, faint and crooked, shaped by old griefs. She drifted past me, and spoke again without looking back.

  "I will hold you to that, KiAera of sunlit roads. Until then, allow me at least to envy the shape of you… and haunt your side in the only way I still know how."

  I let out a strained laugh. "Deal."

  I turned back to the painting. The horned woman's composed look transformed into a rigid, crooked leer of scorn. I looked again at the spot where Wicktoria Wailfiend had stood. She had gone, probably for real this time.

  ??? ??? // ??? ???

  "This way is the library."

  We passed under a vaulted door tangled with tiny silver chains. Inside, thousands of books crowded shelves that towered to oblivion. Each book's spine seemed stitched from something that looked suspiciously like leather that still remembered warmth. Candles hovered freely here, drifting like lazy fireflies, their wicks singing in low whispers.

  Wailfiend twirled slowly, delighting in the echo of her own motion across the countless rows.

  "The books reorganize themselves nightly. If you leave a thought unfinished, they'll try to finish it for you. That is why I do not read the diaries left here. Too many endings I'd rather not watch them invent."

  She shot me a smug look. "Careful, little predator. This house is more alive than either of us."

  I offered a sardonic smile. "And somehow you still seem most at home here."

  She preened at that, shoulders rising in a satisfied shiver.

  Next came a series of odd galleries: a hall of mirrors with moving reflections, a tea parlor where cracked porcelain faces whispered sweet nonsense into cups half-filled with ink, a long corridor of suspended cages that swung gently despite the still air.

  My footsteps made little noise as I followed Wailfiend through the ever-shifting halls. The mirrors along the walls remained strangely silent, though some seemed to press outward ever so slightly, as if trying to peek at me from within.

  Wailfiend resumed floating an inch or two above the ground again, but in a different outfit now—one that made it nearly impossible to take her seriously.

  She wore a layered gothic ensemble of midnight blue and ink-black lace, complete with ribbons, delicate pearl buttons, and a high-collared bodice. But most notable was the enormous bonnet she wore, soft with frills and a slightly sagging brim that swayed as she hovered. She clutched a dainty bouquet of deep violet roses bound with a cobweb bow, and looked utterly pleased with herself.

  "You see," she said, voice chipper with an almost saccharine tilt, "not every haunted sovereign mansion is all doom and phantasms. We have culture."

  "Mm," I replied, my eyes scanning the corridor lined with portraits whose eyes definitely tracked our movement. "Refined culture. Like that painting of a saint gnawing on her own halo."

  "That's Saint Merveille," Wailfiend huffed, glancing back with the air of someone correcting a child who had called Mozart "that piano guy." "She ascended the ranks after swallowing all her regrets. Do try to keep up."

  She whisked me through high arched doors, each chamber more surreal than the last. One room had no floor, just shallow pools of ink, with floating stepping stones made of engraved teeth.

  Another chamber housed a spiraling staircase made of violin necks and vertebrae, and the distant sound of soft string music played from nowhere. Wailfiend narrated each space with breezy authority, bouquet always clutched tight, bonnet bobbing with each dramatic turn.

  "This is the Hall of Remembered Sighs. Don't linger…memory stains."

  "That's the Repose Gallery. Here lies Szylla's research assistants. They still blink if you knock."

  "And here, the Whisper Conservatory. The plants sing lullabies at dusk. Sometimes backwards."

  She said all this like someone bragging about a slightly quirky family estate and not a place clearly stitched together from dreams, eldritch madness, and the aesthetic preferences of a haunted doll.

  Despite myself, I was starting to enjoy it, which was exactly what Szylla would have wanted. What were her intentions in having Wailfiend show me around this place? The Ascension Rite was complete; I had evolved, or perhaps I had fallen into a trap—one where she desired to claim me.

  We stepped past a tall mirror with a gilt frame of twisting serpents. As I walked by, my reflection didn't follow; it only smiled, lips parting to whisper a few words I shouldn't have heard.

  Escape from…

  Wailfiend paused ahead, her shadow clawing along the wall.

  "Did your reflection say something?" she asked softly, without turning.

  My mouth went dry.

  "…No."

  Q&A Topic 1: Feel free to ask questions, I'm looking forward to address them all!

  Here's one.

  [Q] What can we anticipate for the future of the series?

  Two Fictions of Chaos Chimera