Watching Hana scamper away with the journal pressed tightly to her chest, Karl was forced to acknowledge something he didn't really want to recognize. The quickest way to get Hana to leave him alone was to give her what she wanted.

Perhaps it was an obvious conclusion. There wouldn't be any reason for her to bother him if she'd gotten what she wanted. All the same, he didn't like it. He had no intention of walking to the beat of her drum in some misguided attempt to keep her away from him. Then again, at least he'd recognized it before he allowed himself to walk into that trap, out of some misguided habit.

Frustrated with both the memory of Hana's presence, and his own failure to extract the cube's secrets, Karl cast the book aside, allowing it to float back up to its spot on the shelf. He was done with black magic research for the day.

As the day progressed, Karl was forced to acknowledge that the 'give her what she wants' tactic might have been more effective a tactic than he'd expected. After her forcing her way into his presence three times in the past twelve hours since her arrival, Karl didn't run into Hana for the remainder of the day. At first it left him with a weird sense of anxiety, like there was some shadow stalking him through his own house. However, as time passed and the girl still didn't show up, Karl found himself relaxing.

It wasn't like he thought she was gone, or that she wouldn't eventually be showing up again. Instead, it was a sort of middle ground that left him with a faint tinge of nostalgia. This was how it had been back when people other than him had stayed in his house. If he was around, something that was far from guaranteed back then, he'd meet up with them briefly in the mornings or around lunch, share a few words or a brief conversation, and then Karl would be left alone to do his work for the day.

Of course, back then he'd been under a lot more pressure, having to constantly deal with integrating new artifacts safely into the house, and dealing with the inevitable backfire that would arise when some of them didn't get along. It had been long enough now that very few of the typically peaceful artifacts in his house raised issue with their imprisonment any longer. Without new additions to upset the balance, everything maintained a sort of timeless status quo that only inanimate objects could present.

Of course, with a very unwelcome new addition wandering around the house in the company of a young woman, Karl was certain that something was going to end up getting unbalanced again soon. He spent most of the day verifying the house's various fail safes, with special attention being paid to make sure that there was no way Hana would be able to accidentally stumble across a divine artifacts that would likely not take kindly to abyssal magic suddenly entering their personal space.

However, by the time the end of the day rolled about, Karl had finished with his work and was sitting quietly in another one of the house's gardens. The Lotus Garden was almost entirely dominated by a pond, which was covered by an ephemeral blue barrier. Inside the pond, it was easy to make out several white lotus flowers drifting across the water's surface, releasing a multi-colored smoke that curled lazily within the barriers. Only if someone stared long enough would they catch sight of strange, shadowy tendrils reaching out from dark objects within the pond. However, they would withdraw the instant they touched the cloudy mist coming from the lotus flowers.

Karl stared at the pond vaguely, his thoughts drifting back to the days when he'd first made this garden. It had been one of his more proud moments, realizing he could use the dangerous memory-erasing smoke that emerged from within the lotus flowers to control and subdue artifacts that fed on human emotion. In many regards, this house had taught him even more about the possible utilities of magic than his thousand of years of wandering. Of course, he never would have been able to put it into practice as effectively and efficiently as he had if it wasn't for the vast reserves of experience he possessed, but...

It took several long moments for the sound of Hana's voice to drag Karl out of the recesses of his memory. He blinked slowly, before eventually turning to stare in her direction as he dug the sound of her words out from his memory.

"There's six more of his journals," Karl answered flatly. "Although none beyond the third cover any basic magical knowledge. Just get them from the house if you want them. And didn't we go over that this morning? I don't..."

Karl paused abruptly, blinking slightly as the memories of their conversation from this morning rose unbidden into his mind. "No, I guess we didn't actually go over that. Verdammt. I don't know what that cube is, or what kind of magic is in it, beyond 'not of this earth' and 'bad'. Whatever is at its core, it's keeping itself carefully hidden, and it's on guard against me. There's more than one kind of binding, and unless you want to go through the tests for them one by one, along with all the potential risks that represents, there's no way for me to just suddenly know the answer."

Verdammt” - “Damn it" (German)
 
Hana considered what Karl just told her. There looked to be nowhere to set down her things, besides the floor, so she adjusted them in her arms. Even though she originally asked for a book of instruction, she’d become quite attached to H. Becker and his story, and she was anxious to see where their adventures would take them. She definitely wouldn’t mind six more journals, even if the instructional portion ended after the third book. He probably didn’t have a WiFi box anywhere in house, so she would have to find other ways of amusing herself that didn’t involve staring into a screen. At the very least, she’d would have a source of entertainment for the next week.

Hana gave equal consideration to his explanation of the nature of the cube. “Well, I’ve got time. I don’t suppose you have anything better to do?” She shifted her attention to the cube, which sat quietly atop the journal. “And, well, the risks don’t bother me much. If you don’t mind, I’d like to do the tests. All of them.” Any risks those tests pose could not possibly be worse than what the cube had in store for her. Moreover, she needed to squeeze out all the information she could. If there was some loop hole she could manipulate, maybe she could even leave the house alone and look for the missing pieces by herself.

... But at the same time, there was so much she didn’t know, and even if she did get all of the pieces by herself (and god knows where they were) she would have to find someone who could fix the darn thing and get it off of her. Karl’s days of helping strangers and going on adventures... were likely past him. Hana let out a frustrated sigh.

She folded her arms and let her gaze drift to the lotus pond, the ephemeral blue barrier and the rainbow of colors that drifted from it. Very faintly, she could see the shadowy tendrils striking the air and darting back down, and it startled her a little when she noticed them. They looked like they were interacting somehow, and it piqued her curiosity. For Hana, it was very easy to become momentarily distracted by things. She turned to Karl.

“Hey um before we go though, what are those things? Underneath the pond?” Hana inquired, stepping closer to its surface.
 
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Hana’s answer couldn’t help but cause Karl to glance over at her, his brows wrinkled into an indignant fold. In truth, his statement about going through them one by one had been far more hypothetical than serious. He also couldn’t help but wonder if Hana really understood what he meant by ‘risks’. She’d read through Hartley’s first volume, and he was certain it covered the risks of magical artifacts, and some of the catastrophes that could arise from seemingly simple interactions. But the ‘risks didn’t bother her’?

Muttering a string of swear words under his breath, Karl finally sighed, before nodding his head slightly. Fine. Even Karl had to admit that figuring out how the cube was bound to Hana would do a lot to help him understand the thing, which would also allow him to better adjust for its presence in the house. He didn’t want something magically backfiring on him because he didn’t do his due diligence.

The ways artifacts could bind to people were almost as numerous as the artifacts themselves, but they could generally be divided up into broad categories. Considering the dark and otherworldly nature of the cube, Karl began to dig through his memories, looking for any information he had on abyssal artifacts and their interactions with people.

Hana’s question washed over his ears as he thought, and he began to answer her question unconsciously, in the same distracted but efficient tone from the morning when he was studying the cube.

“They’re parasitic artifacts, which feed on human emotion. These particular ones are most adept at driving their hosts mad, until the person turns either psychotic or suicidal. The smoke from the lotus keeps them contained, because it interferes with emotional connections.”

There was no doubt that contractual binding was by far the most common form of binding when it came to demonic artifacts, which made it as good of a place to start as any. However, as Karl glanced at the lotus flowers, he shrugged slightly.

“We might as well start with that one, since we’re here. The chances of it being right are slim, but not nonexistent.”

Karl stood up, unconsciously brushing off his pants as he stood. He approached the barrier to the pond, before beckoning Hana over. “Come here, and then pick a memory you don’t mind forgetting. Think about it clearly, and then let me know when you’re ready.”
 
“O-Oh...” Hana instinctually backed away from the pond, pushing the journal and cube closer to her chest. “That doesn’t sound very... so- well, but it’s safe to be around?” Turning psychotic or suicidal were not things that she had in mind for herself during her stay, but she had to admit that the counterbalance of the smoke from the lotus and the parasitic nature of the artifacts squared together nearly perfectly. It was almost satisfying.

Hana approached Karl and the barrier with caution. “Guess I should probably put these down,” She set the journal on the floor beside the barrier, and her phone and cube atop it. Turning to Karl, she discovered that her eyes aligned to shoulder level with him, so she had to crane her neck up to speak to his face.

“A memory I wouldn’t mind forgetting?” Hana considered this for a moment, pausing. “What, are you going to like, erase it? Can you do that? Is that allowed?” Despite her apparent apprehension, she thought about what he asked of her. She probably wouldn’t mind forgetting a particularly embarrassing memory—in fact, she almost wished she could forget about all of them. The most poignant one, as she remembered it, still mortified her enough to make her physically squirm. It was when she was visiting New York City for a work client, and had to take the subway, a crowded uptown train. Presented with an absence of empty seats, she held on to one of the straps dangling from the roof of the train, and unfortunately, having never ridden on a jostling train as a strap-hanger before, fell flat on her face, flashing the entire subway train on the way down. Her knees (and ego) were bruised for a week.

Hana covered her face in shame, remembering the terrible incident. “Okay, I’m ready. I’m very ready.” She paused, blinking. “Wait, is this going to hurt? I don’t mind, I just want to be ready.”
 
"It's not safe at all," Karl replied with a snort. "That's why I keep them locked up in there. But so long as you don't go jumping in the pond, they won't be able to get you."

He didn't think she'd do something like that, but just in case he kept his eyes on her as she approached the edge of the pond, setting her stuff down by the banks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his eyes almost immediately turned towards the cube. It looked quiet and harmless from here, but he knew full well it was no such thing. These tests would likely go a long way to prove exactly how dangerous it was.

"It will, and of course I can. What? Do you think there's some universal law of magic that says what is and isn't allowed? Mortacci tua."

Karl was already prepping for the process, his fingers drawing across the barrier that surrounded the pond, and the lotus. Symbols glowed briefly within the bounds of a small circle, before fading back into invisibility. It wasn't until Hana gave the all clear that Karl tapped the circle aggressively.

"It won't hurt," he replied flatly, watching as the small circle he'd drawn earlier vanished from the barrier, creating an opening in the protective shield. The dark figures under the lake stirred restlessly, but couldn't do anything about the haze of multicolored mist that still covered the pond. That mist, on the other hand, flowed briefly, before a tendril slipped out of the hole. The barrier restored itself to wholeness as soon as the mist passed, and Karl extended his fingers, lightly cloaked in the same blue energy as the barrier. The mist briefly swirled around his fingers, before he flicked his hands in Hana's direction.

The mist immediately flew away from him, before sinking into Hana's forehead. Karl watched her, gaze intense, lip lightly pinched between his teeth. However, neither her nor the cube showed any particular reaction to the colored mist.

Karl nodded slightly to himself, but still confirmed with Hana after a quick one over of her figure. "Do you still remember what you were thinking about?"

Unless her connection with the cube had blocked the interference, the memory should be gone, hidden behind a warm, comfortable haze of multicolored mist.

Mortacci tua.” - “Your dead family" (Italian)
 
“Well, shouldn’t there be? Is there not like a magical council, or a rule book, or even a—I don’t know— bureaucracy?” Hana’s voice revealed perplexion. Of course, the young woman hadn’t given it much thought, but she felt as though there should’ve been some sort of regulation in place for something so expansive and powerful. She remembered that Becker’s journal, the first one at least, didn’t mention any sort of authority on artifacts or magic, but there must be something to keep magical things from getting out of hand.

“But then, what if a criminal got hold of a powerful artifact? Or a really bad... person...?” Hana’s voice trailed off as she realized that she was speaking to him, and had been speaking to him, as if he wasn’t the bad person. Or he was supposed to be, at least. She was promised charming and cunning and manipulative; the Karl she had been introduced to was ambivalent, at worst.

She steaded her gaze at him, and to the faint fairy blue that formed a blanket around his hands. Lowering her head, Hana felt the dampness of the mist atop her forehead. A mild tingle dissipated from where her skin made contact with it, and it traveled along her scalp, winding its way down her arms and legs until the sensation faded. She waited for Karl’s voice to pull her attention back to the matter at hand, which signaled her to open her eyes, blinking.

“What I was thinking about?” She pursed her lips to indicate her concentration, but after a moment her shoulders slumped and she let out a breath of air. It was like she lost her train of thought, except the train crashed and burned off the side of the rails. The only thing she could vaguely remember was the feeling of being flustered. “Huh. I guess I don’t. Oh my gosh, you erased my memory!” She looked excited. “Wait, so what does that mean? Did I pass or fail the test?” She recalled that he had her take the test, but never explained exactly what it measured.

“And also, can we do that again?” She didn’t know whether it was the tingle or the feeling of having a floaty consciousness, but it was an inexplicably warm feeling. Hana paused, however, shaking her head. “Wait. No, we have to do the other tests.”

Remember what you’re here for, Hana. Her purpose in talking to him in the first place was to figure out how and why the cube bound to her, and hopefully figure out what prompted it. She tried to think of a time that she might’ve had an interaction with the magical world, or any action she might’ve taken to prompt the binding force of the cube, but there was nothing significant she could recall. She didn’t even play with Rubik’s Cubes as a kid, and she certainly didn’t remember dabbling in black magic. It just showed up out of nowhere.
 
As Hana's question trailed off into awkward silence, her expression of embarrassment was met by a dark frown on Karl's face.

Her question was reasonable. Karl knew that. As a matter of fact, once upon a time that had been his job, self-appointed as it was. He knew better than just about anyone the potential dangers that could arise from magical artifacts that fell into the hands of the wrong people. The right artifact in the wrong hands could easily plunge the world into war.

But he had absolutely no intention of answering those questions, and trying to explain to Hana how the complicated, interconnected, somewhat self-regulated world of magic worked, especially not if it involved explaining how he'd handled things in the past. Instead, the frown on his face only grew larger.

"Shut up and focus on your memory, puella," he scolded.

Hana's excitement at the realization that one of her memories was gone didn't really surprise Karl. The lotus flowers were very adept at their job, and very few people realized that there was anything wrong with what the lotuses were doing to their minds. But, at the very least, her reaction definitely confirmed a few things for him, none of them a particular surprise.

"It's not a pass-fail test," Karl replied. "The fact that you can't remember means the lotus mist behaved as expected, which also means your bond with the cube didn't interfere in any way. This is far from a surprise."

Karl gestured for Hana to pick up her stuff again, before making his way towards the entrance to the garden room. "No, you can't do it again, and you won't be able to find this garden again for several days, even if you go looking. The lotus mist is addictive. Stay away from it. Follow me, do not wander off, and don't touch anything."

After he made sure Hana was close by his side, Karl walked out into the hallway, which seemed to present them with a dead-end wall. Instead, Karl approached it, sliding his hands across the bricks. Once again, runes began to appear from under his fingers, but this time they weren't in the glowing, ephemeral blue that he'd drawn on the barrier. Instead, dark, bloody red lines spread out from under the touches of his fingers.

As soon as Karl withdrew his hand, the wall began to bubble, before melting away into the floor, revealing a dimly lit hallway. Walls lined the shelves, covered with skulls, claws, daggers, and other mysterious objects. The entire corridor was obscured in a dark, sourceless haze.

Karl turned around to level a heavy glare at Hana. "Don't. Touch. Anything." he repeated. "You go first, stop at the second archway to the right."

Of course, all of the artifacts were protected behind a barrier, mostly to keep them separate from each other. It was doubtful that Hana would be able to touch anything, even if she tried. However, there was a chance that Hana's cube might be able to overcome these barriers, if it exerted a sufficient amount of strength.

In truth, there was some risk to bringing Hana through this corridor, with the cube in her possession. Karl had seen more than a few demonic artifacts that were capable of consuming similar brethren to strengthen themselves, and a space like this, filled with demonic energy, would likely prove a great temptation to it if Karl had correctly understood its nature.

Which, ultimately, was the reason he chose to bring her in here. It was a test, to make sure he hadn't misunderstood anything. He was expecting the cube to react somehow, but ultimately pull back before it took action. Whatever the artifact was, it seemed to be desperately trying to hide itself and its capabilities from Karl's eyes. Considering he'd been able to take it by surprise earlier this morning, there was a chance it wouldn't react at all to the space. However, if it did react, Karl would be able to get more information.

And, of course, if he had misjudged its level of intelligence, and the cube did go after one of the artifacts that lined the hallway, he had safety devices in place that would capture it. In some ways, that would be the best possible ending, because Karl would get a raw, pure sample of its energy to study.

The hallway was long, straight, and relatively narrow. Thin shelves lined both sides of the hallway, looking almost more like cubicles than bookshelves. Within each little cubby, an object rested. Some glowed with strange light. Others shivered when they felt a gaze pass over them. Still others lay still, looking like nothing more than harmless objects. About every ten to fifteen paces, the shelves were suddenly interrupted by an arched doorway, which provided access to small rooms. Each room was empty except for a single pedestal, where larger, more powerful artifacts rested. One doorway contained something that looked like a plant made out of metal. Its vines had long since overgrown the pedestal, and spread out across the floor. Another looked like a giant statue of a fox's head, wearing a mask of leaves. Its mouth opened as Hana and Karl walked past.

In the second archway to the right, a small, black book rested on the pillar. Unlike the other artifacts they had passed, this one looked completely still, almost harmless, except for the dark glow that surrounded it. Three of the four walls that surrounded the book had large, graceful symbols carved into the wall.
 
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As Hana listened to Karl’s explanation of the test, she nodded. So, essentially, she failed it, if failing meant the connection between her and the cube was not an emotional one. Her shoulders slumped as she took in the underwhelming conclusion; she had originally thought that the fact that her memory was successfully erased meant something more significant for her and the cube, but thinking about it logically, that wasn’t the case. It just meant they would have to do more tests.

“Okay, okay, gosh, don’t get your panties in a twist,” Hana held up her hands in innocence and let out a light laugh. “I won’t go near the darn flowers,” she bent down to pick up her belongings, letting out a puff of air as she stood, “...not that I can anyway.” The last words came out a mumble. She was surprised to hear that the lotus flowers were addictive, and if she was being entirely honest, that bit of information only further piqued her curiosity. Shaking her head, she realized that Karl was leaving the room, and jogged to catch up to him. Hopefully, the next test would give her the answers she was looking for.

She listened to Karl’s cautionary warnings with slight unease, but ultimately thought he was severely overdoing it. “I won’t touch anything! Promise. Geez.” Rolling her eyes, she followed behind him and straightened her arms so that the spine of the book bumped against her legs as she walked, the cube and her cell phone resting atop the flat surface. She frowned as they approached the end of the corridor vacant of any visible doorway, and peeked over Karl’s shoulder as he played his fingertips along the surface of the wall.

“Uh,” The young woman slowly pressed her belongings to her chest, a transparent gesture of alarm at the bloody runes which appeared from his hands. “Is that supposed to happen?” Hana watched in terribly concealed horror as the wall melted before her, and a dimly lit room opened up behind it.

Chills ran down her spine in a similar way the lotus mist has caused her whole body to tingle, but way worse. Suddenly, his stern tone seemed to make a lot more sense. It only added to her panic once she stepped into the room herself. His forbidding “Don’t touch anything” rang in her ears. “I don’t think I’d really want to touch anything, even if you didn’t tell me.” She said slowly, walking apprehensively down the hallway. The sheer number of things that lined the shelves made her head spin, and it felt like any and every unsettling object she could possibly conjure in her mind was in that room on any one of the shelves.

For a moment, she considered turning around and high tailing it to anywhere that wasn’t that room. But ultimately, she was there to learn about the cube, as nauseating as it may be. Her gaze was tense, her knees were stiff, and her brows were furrowed as they passed the decapitated fox head. For a moment she thought to question it, but decided it was better if she didn’t know.

From underneath the book, the cube that was pressed to her chest began to rattle. The sudden movement caused an already unnerved Hana to gasp, throwing her arms open. The cube, the journal and her phone clattered to the floor. “It m-moved!” She looked at the source of her discomposition, pointing. It stared back at the two of them, unmoving. Hana looked at Karl. “I swear it did! I felt it, on my boob.” She tried to explain herself. It couldn’t have been her phone, because she never sets it to vibrate, and it certainly wasn’t the journal, so the only other explanation was that the cube had moved, reacting to the new room somehow. Perhaps it was scared. She was too!

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I’ll do the test now. Just, can we make this one quick? This corridor gives me the creeps.” Hana gathered her things again, this time putting her phone in one of the pockets of her sweats. She stepped closer to where Karl had directed her to go, and found a pocket-sized book sitting atop the stone pillar. It looked like it could’ve been a travel size bible, were it not for the devilish hue surrounding it. There were runes on the wall that glowed a brighter color, but she couldn’t hope to decipher them.
 
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Karl stepped into the hallway only a second behind Hana, allowing the wall behind them to slide closed once again. The light from the hallway was sealed off, leaving nothing but a dim, slightly orange glow that filled the entire hallway from no apparent source. For several long seconds, Karl kept his gaze carefully trained on Hana, waiting for any indication that her cube was going to react. However, for several long paces as they walked down the hallway, nothing happened.

Instead, Karl found his gaze drawn to an artifact further down the hallway, a long, thin chain that had been surrounded by golden string. From within it's prison, Karl watched the chain tremble, and a faint smile spread over his face. Demonic artifacts were all arrogant, selfish, greedy, and demanding. Especially for the ones that had less intelligence. As Karl studied the way the chain was reacting to the presence of the three, Karl, Hana, and the cube, he heard a sudden clatter from in front of him. Karl's head snapped around, his eyes narrowing as Hana trembled in front of him.

He didn't scold her, but he certainly had no intention of comforting her. Instead, he sighed slightly. "Pick up your shit and keep walking, puella," he instructed, before turning his gaze back towards the chain. Within its confines, the chain had gone completely limp, as though it was truly nothing more than a decorative piece of metal. His smile grew slightly wider.

It didn't mean much, and it didn't tell him anything new about the cube. However, it did confirm that it was intelligent. It was trying to hide from him. And it was arrogant. Even at the risk of exposing itself, it still couldn't stand being looked down upon or taunted by a lesser artifact, and put it in its place.

When he was done here, he'd have to come back and run a few tests on the chain, and the rest of the nearby artifacts. Both to make sure that none of them had been damaged or compromised, and to check if there was any additional information he could gain from their reactions and behavior. But that was for later.

"Just walk into the room and stand there with the cube. Everything else will happen automatically."

For several long seconds after Hana walked through the archway, nothing happened. However, abruptly, the book in front of her began to tremble and then lifted several inches into the air over the pedestal. A red aura began to glow around it, before the aura collected into several blood-colored tendrils. They waved through the air, before beginning to stretch towards Hana.

As soon as the book began to move, a golden barrier had appeared in the archway, blocking the space off from the rest of the corridor and trapping Hana inside. Even if she tried to run at this point, it wouldn't ruin the experiment. However, Karl still took a step towards the archway, stopping just on the other side of the barrier. "Stay put," he warned her. "Let it touch you. It won't get the chance to hurt you or do anything bad."

After waving through the air for several seconds, the tendrils seemed to lock onto Hana. With slow but unerring accuracy, they moved through the air towards her. As they grew closer to her, one tendril surged forward greedily, wrapping around her arm. Karl's gaze was hyper trained on the cube, waiting for it to react. However, a sudden glow from the wall caught his attention. The three runes that had been carved into the wall were now glowing with the same brilliant, golden light as the barrier that blocked the doorway. The tendrils, clearly sensing the presence of the light, lunged towards Hana faster, trying to wrap her up.

Before they had the chance, the light surged brighter, and a strange, keening shriek came from the book. The tendrils flew backwards so quickly that it seemed they disappeared, before the book dropped limply back to the pedestal. The runes on the wall dimmed, and the barrier separating the small room from the hallway faded away.

Karl's smile was completely gone, replaced by a harsh frown. It was clear at a glance that he result of this particular test had not satisfied him in the least. "Din lille lort," came a muttered swear from under his breath, before he turned towards Hana.

"Come," he ordered. "We're leaving."

Without explaining further, he turned and walked back towards the wall that led out of the corridor.

Din lille lort” - “You little piece of shit" (Danish)
 
Oh god, he wants her to step in there? She closed her eyes, sucking in a shaky breath before letting it out again. Why did it have to be this room, out of all the rooms in this maze of a house? The one with the bloody runes and the terrifying, snout-agape fox head? She rubbed the nape of her neck, clicking her tongue softly. This was the only way to get answers to the questions she needed answered, so she supposed she could bear through seven minutes of hell in that demonic walk-in closet.

Once she worked up the courage, Hana did as the man instructed and took tentative steps into the room. For a few moments, she watched the book with furrowed brows, and when nothing happened, her shoulders seemed to relax a bit. But, once the book rose from its pedestal and those villainous blood red tendrils slipped out from its pages, she clutched the journal closer to her chest, as if it were a protective barrier. It proved to do no protecting, however, as those dripping tendrils which she could only describe as tentacle-like inched closer to her. And as they did, she took shaky steps backwards, only to find that her back suddenly hit a barrier.

Oh, that’s just great. Karl’s reassuring words practically flew in one ear and out the other.

One slimy tendril darted to wrap around her arm, and suddenly she felt like the starring character in a japanese animated porno. Unsurprisingly, she shrieked and dropped both the journal and the cube. Her back pressed into the barrier in a vain attempt to get away from the demonic thing assaulting her arm. When the rest of them assumed a threatening stance, she didn’t even notice the golden light that began to emit from the back wall. They all darted towards her, and she reflexively shut her eyes as tight as she could, turning away.

Yep. This is it. This is what she gets for trusting an evil overlord. She should’ve just asked for the second Becker journal and kept to herself in that quiet living room. Is this how it ends? Is—

She only caught a glimpse of the bright light that followed, and the only thing she saw next were the tendrils retracting just as quickly as they came out, and the book slamming back down on the pedestal. Before she could heave a sigh of relief, the barrier opened behind her and she stumbled out of it. Her rear hit the floor of the hallway with a soft thump.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph...” Hana muttered in disbelief. Her body loosened as she slowly did away with the fear that flooded her only minutes ago. “Good lord, Karl, warn me before you do something like that.” She composed herself as quickly as she could and grabbed the things she dropped earlier.

“So?” Hana asked expectantly. She shuffled quickly behind him, sticking close to him as they exited the room. “What does this test tell you? Did we do all of that for nothing or is there something conclusive?” Hana knew that she was probably never in any real danger, though two minutes ago she might have thought otherwise. But gosh, she really hoped this test yielded something promising. “And what’s next?”
 
Karl ignored Hana’s complaint about his lack of warning, instead turning and striding back out of the dark corridor. He barely even glanced back to make sure Hana was keeping up, seeming as though he might just leave her behind if she didn’t follow along.

Of course, despite his frustration, Karl made absolutely certain that the stone “door” wasn’t sealed back into a smooth wall until Hana was out of the corridor. The frown still hadn’t left his face when Hana’s incessant chattering began.

He snorted at her words. “What that test told me,” Karl replied somewhat sharply. “Is that your cube isn’t contractually bound to you. If it had been, that book would have considered you polluted, and would never have tried to establish a contract with you. It would have just thrown a fit instead. And that’s bad, puella. Of abyssal artifacts, well over 80% of them have contractual bonds. And as nasty as those contracts can be at times, at least they’re fair. You give something, and you get something.”

That chain her cube had shocked into submission was a perfect example of a contractual bond, although Hana had no way of knowing that. It would wind around a host, and upon the correct stimulus, it would begin to absorb its host’s blood drop by drop. The more blood it absorbed at one time, the more strength and invulnerability it would provide back to its host. Of course, it was more than possible for the chain to absorb more blood than the host could survive giving, but, according to the terms of the contract, it was fair. The host gave blood, and they got something back for exactly what they gave. There was rarely guesswork in contractual bonds, especially ones that lacked true intelligence. At that point, it was up to the host to be clever.

“The remaining 20%?” Karl continued, a bit of a sneer crossing his face. “They’re the really dangerous ones. The ones that take and take and take, often without ever giving anything back in exchange. The ones that often leave nothing but death and destruction in their wake. Congratulations, puella. You’ve got a Grade A dangerous artifact with you. No wonder the house won’t let you out with that thing in tow.

“Come on.” Without waiting for Hana’s reaction to his proclamation, Karl set off down the corridor, rapping on one wall as he walked passed in an almost casual manner. Rather than working his way through the other tests, Karl decided to simply skip to the most dangerous and deadly of the abyssal binding methods. Soul binding. It seemed just like Hana’s luck.

Unlike just about any other kind of bond, soul binding put the life of the bonded directly in the artifact’s hands. However, not only could the artifact often kill their host almost whenever they pleased, it also had the strongest potential to pollute the soul of the bonded with abyssal energy, because there was a direct connection between the artifact and the bonded’s soul. Many other artifacts had the potential to corrupt a soul, of course, but those were indirect methods. Use temptation, greed, power, to drive a person over the edge. Only a soul bonding allowed the artifact access to the nature of a soul.

At best, the changes to their soul might drive a person mad. At worst, it would turn the bonded into nothing but a pawn for the artifact, a meat puppet for them to control. If that was really the case, Karl would have to consider locking both Hana and the cube up somewhere in the house until she died. He couldn’t let a demon-pawn wander free in this house.

Best case scenario, Karl was overreacting. There were other bonding methods, worse than contracts but far better than a soul bond. He’d find out soon enough.

They took a few turns through the hallways, before Karl came to a halt in front of another doorway. As was the case for just about everything in this house, this door was unique compared to any other Hana would be able to walk past. However, even among all the doors in this house, this one seemed special. The door itself was made of solid silver, shaped like a perfect arch. Intricate patterns were carved into the face of the door, like the winding sprawl of a Celtic knot. Two statues stood on either side of the slightly sunken archway, one winged angels with their single wing raised up, flanking the door like guardians. They stood with their heads bowed, faces completely hidden by the darkness of their hoods, hands clasped carefully in front of them. Multicolored lights seemed to dance across the surface of the statue, as though they were reflecting fragments of light that fell through a stained glass window.

At the very center of the door, a raised symbol stood over the knots. It was a series of interwoven circles, seeming as though it was drawing something into the center. Something almost resembling the hilts of two swords, if it wasn’t far too intricate and complicated to ever be practical for use, rose above and below the circle. The entire image was perfectly symmetrical.

Karl paused in front of the doorway, before gently clasping his hands in front of his face. There was a strange sort of solemnity about him, a stillness that almost resembled reverence. It was at odds with his usual gruff, loose, almost sloppy behavior. He bowed politely to the door, before turning to stare pointedly at Hana.

“Bow,” he told her, shortly. “And you should know the rules by now. Don’t touch anything once we’re inside.”
 
Hana recoiled at Karl's callous tone, but still she considered his words, as cold as they were. She supposed that it made some sort of sense—she didn’t exactly remember entering any sort of shady contract with anyone or anything in the past few weeks, so having the cube be bound to her by contract wouldn’t make much sense.

“A grade A dangerous artifact, huh?” She looked down at the cube in her left hand, turning it over like a stone to peer at it from all sides. Well, she knew that much. From the very moment she picked it up, she was told it would kill her. The damned thing was her own miniature time bomb, what else could it be besides dangerous?

Still, frustration and bitterness bubbled in the pit of her stomach. She knew this thing, however it was bound to her, was bad. But she couldn’t help but feel bitter that it hadn’t been bound to her contractually, because as far as she knew, she wasn’t receiving anything in return from the bond besides, well, a premature visit from death. Why couldn’t it have been something else? Anything else? Twenty percent isn’t exactly slim odds, but for heaven’s sake, why her? What did she ever do?

Hana’s eyes fell downcast at her feet. Thinking too heavily about her own mortality was never particularly uplifting.

As they turned the corner into what looked like their destination, Hana blinked. Every room she entered since that morning seemed get increasingly more extravagant and bizarre. The raised symbol at the center of the door spiraled outward into a chaotic structure of sculpted knots, and the sculpted protrusions coming out from above and below the symbol arranged themselves in an equally ornate manner. Artistically inclined herself, she could’ve stared at just that door for hours—the only reason she refrained from touching each and every sculpted ridge was because she was certain that Karl would strangle her if she went anywhere near it.

The two holy sculptures, with their heads bowed and hands clasped in prayer, looked almost antithetical to the man standing beside her. She was almost shocked to see his egotistical head lowered and hands mimicking the two sculptures. At his command, she shoved the cube haphazardly into an empty pocket and wedged the journal between her legs, clasping her hands the way Karl did. She lowered her head slowly, eyes trained to the ground.

She was familiar with bowing whenever she entered a shrine or a temple, as rare as that was, or greeting her extended family members with a respectful nod of the head, but in that moment, Hana was not entirely certain who or what she was bowing to.

“Why are we...” Her words dissipated as the doors to the room swept open in a grand, almost ceremonial motion. As the they opened, a golden, radiant orb as large as a sunflower head emerged from the protruding symbol on the door. It hovered above the ground in front of them, and it shone so brilliantly that Hana almost couldn't bear to look at it.

The orb led them into the room slowly, and Hana followed closely behind Karl as they walked inside, her jaw practically dropping at the sight. She almost forgot to grab the journal from between her legs as they walked in, and it was as though they had stepped into the interior of a cathedral. Looking around the room, she found stained glass windows surrounding the pair on all sides, stretching all the way from the floor to the top of the pointed arches. Ribbed vaulting extended elegantly across the room's high ceilings, forming down into long piers as they met the wall. It was as holy and beautiful and intricate as she imagined the Florence Cathedral to be.

When she looked down at her feet, there was an entire galaxy of stars swirling towards the center of the room, sinking into a well where another grand, golden orb was fixed into place at its deepest point. She stepped towards it cautiously, moving her foot slowly towards the center to see whether or not she would sink into it, but to her surprise, she found that there was a layer of glass set over the stars to form a walkable floor.

What was even more confounding were the other orbs floating freely about the room like wisps, wandering aimlessly. The majority of them were a milky blue and about the size of a human heart and they danced about the room carelessly. Some were compact, like the large golden orb, but others were light and feathery with tails trailing behind them as they moved around. None of them came near Hana nor Karl, and they all seemed to stay away from the larger golden one. When she looked closer, she found that the stained glass windows had small divots in them, arranged in pairs trailing down the length of the window. They looked like they held even more orbs, though these were colored all sorts of different hues. Reds and pinks and greens all resting inside their equally colorful dwellings. All of it was enough for her to forget why they were even there in the first place.

"What are these things?" Hana asked slowly, turning to Karl. "And what is that?" She gestured to the sunflower-sized orb, and then to the one in the center of the room beneath where they were standing. "And that?" She bit her lip in anticipation. "And are you sure I can't touch anything? It's all so intricate and beautiful."
 
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Head bowed politely, Karl’s eyes momentarily fluttered closed, and he felt a familiar stirring in his chest. It was as though a piece of himself, some invisible phenomenon, had slipped from the center of his body, and it slowly twisted through the air towards the symbol at the center of the door.

A warm, golden light almost immediately began to glow in response. It burned in the center of the door, causing a brilliant split to run right through the middle of the symbol. The door swung open towards both sides, and a near blinding golden orb waited for them to enter.

Tempus fugit,” Karl mouthed silently to himself, unaware he’d switched to Latin. It’s been a while. The golden orb did not react, it only floated backwards into the room, allowing Karl and Hana to enter behind it.

The room was as beautiful as he remembered it. Colorful, delicate, graceful, the whole thing looked like a scene right from a storybook. Add the little lights that floated from point to point, and anyone would say that it was like a palace for fairies. It was a beautiful cathedral. A magnificent tomb.

This room housed souls. The souls of countless living things, which had been prepared for the use of numerous dark rituals. When Karl had interrupted the process he’d taken the souls with them, unwilling and unable to leave them to roam listlessly around the world forever, or get taken for another dark purpose.

This room hadn’t looked like this when Karl had first created the space. This was the effect of the souls, the result of so much raw power collected in one place, a natural ripple on the environment created by a massive collection of incredibly powerful souls.

Of course, souls weren’t conscious. They didn’t know where they were, or what was going on. They might be the last record that remarkable people had once existed on earth, but that didn’t mean they had created this space for themselves on purpose. But there was a reason that souls were one of the most valuable commodities for dangerous rituals. The changes they could bring about, especially in large quantities, was staggering.

Even the divine soul, the golden orb that had guided them into the room and even now illuminated the space, was no different. Of course, it was different from a human soul, which was dependent upon a corporeal body. It had some measure of instinct. That was why Karl had stationed it as the door guard, using its natural suppression, which created reverence in the other souls, to keep them all in line. But even it couldn’t understand the beauty of the room it was in.

That didn’t make the room any less beautiful, or any less awe inspiring.

“This is the Room of Souls,” Karl replied, his voice somewhat tempered, and somewhat sorrowful. “These are the remnants of a person’s life force, which have been forcibly trapped on earth, eternally separated from their afterlife. Becker probably mentioned this somewhere in his journal, but souls are one of the best sources of power for rituals, if you don’t have any moral objection to using them. Since I can’t do anything to help them, all I can do is keep them here. Safe.

“That,” Karl said, gesturing towards the golden orb. “Is a divine soul. Specifically, an angel’s soul. The only one I’ve ever found on earth. It was used in a dark ritual, and is partially corrupted. If it wasn’t so, you wouldn’t be able to look at it without getting injured. Since it is no longer pure, the schlemiel angel I managed to contact didn’t want it back, so it is also stuck. So, like the other souls, I keep it safe, and it helps me keep the other souls in line.”

Karl walked forward again, heading towards the center of the room where the second golden orb Hana had gestured to was located. Unlike the angelic soul, it was clearly corporeal, a beautiful stone that seemed to mirror all the lights in the room. As he walked closer to it, it seemed to rise up out of the floor towards them, or maybe they were unknowingly walking down towards it.

“This is what we’re going to be using to run the next test,” Karl continued. “This you may, and must, touch. It will mirror and project your soul in a way we can observe. However, no, you may not touch anything else. Souls may look peaceful, but they are far from harmless. Best case scenario if you touch a soul, your souls are compatible and it merges with you, turning you into a different person. Worst case scenario, it swallows your soul and kills you on the spot.”

On that dour note, Karl gestured towards the metallic orb. “Go ahead. Touch it, and have the cube held in your other hand.”

Tempus fugit” – “Time flies, lit. time flees” (Latin)
Schlemiel” – “irredeemably useless, inept, or incompetent” (Yiddish)
 
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Souls.

Hana’s heart sunk as Karl continued. Heaviness permeated through her as she realized the weight that each of the wisps scattered throughout the room carried. Each one was once proudly anchored to a human, alive and beating and breathing. Each one a grave to a person that has long, long moved on from this earth. How many were in this room? How many were confined here, unable to properly pass on peacefully?

It no longer felt like the Florence Cathedral, much less a place of worship. She had the same feeling as one would have standing in the middle of a graveyard, and she imagined her own tombstone hovering over her head.

“Okay.” She started, attempting to get the thoughts of the dead out of her head. From what she could put together, this would probably test if it was bound to her soul or not, considering they were indeed in The Soul Room.

Hana gulped. She took the cube from her pocket, wiping the perspiration forming on her hands off the sides of her sweats, and held it in her left palm. She took precarious steps towards the golden orb fixed in the divot at the center of the room, Karl’s warnings still ringing loudly in her ears. It almost reminded her of the bright red bollards that lined the entrance of Target stores, although it felt like a sin to even compare the two.

She rested her free hand on the metallic orb, as Karl instructed. The instant her fingertips touched it, it released a dazzling, almost blinding light that was unmistakably divine. At the same time, something inside her shifted. It wasn’t a painful sensation, but it felt dreadfully... wrong. The discomfort you feel looking at a contortionist twist her body into impossible knots. Something had been rotated, twisted in a direction that she wasn’t familiar with, and the result was disorienting.

She looked back at Karl, and then the cube, when she noticed a fragment of a wisp that clung onto its surface like a vine. Her eyes followed it as it stretched back to its source—a soft, bluebell blue orb, if you could even call it that. It looked like it had been torn apart and unraveled. Strands were flying off it like a cobweb, and when she looked closer, some parts of it were tinted yellow. The part that connected to her cube had been blotched a dark obsidian. She pulled at it, as if to separate the tainted parts portion from the rest of it, but the stands only stretched out longer.

Her eyes instinctively darted to all the other souls in the room. To the gentle whites and blues floating dancing about, to the rainbow of colors wedged into the stained glass. And none of them, not a single one, looked as unraveled as hers. It looked like it had been though a damn shredder.

“Wh-what does that mean?” Hana looked at the man standing behind her. Her eyes were wide and the worry was tangible in her voice. “Why is this part black? And blue and yellow too? And why does it...” she pulled the cube away from the wisp, stretching it even more, “Why does it look like that? Karl?”

She couldn’t have had any idea what it meant, but even she could tell it wasn’t anything good.
 
Karl couldn’t help but tap his fingers on his legs as he watched Hana approach the orb. However, for once, the gesture was not a symbol of impatience, but rather contained a trace of anxiousness. Unconsciously, his eyes strayed to the divine soul that was still slowly orbiting around them, nudging the little loose souls that floated around the room if they started drifting too close to the center of the room. It didn’t so much as tremble when the cube was pulled from Hana’s pocket, which, if anything, made Karl even more anxious. If even a genuine divine soul, albeit a partially corrupted one, couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with the cube when it was inert, that proved exactly how deep whatever was in it was hiding. That was made even more disturbing by the fact that he’d managed to sense dark magic from it in the past, and even trick it into releasing some of its energy on a couple occasions. Yet, now it had grown even more cautious. Why?

Once again, he was tempted by the idea of simply locking it up in some dark corner of the house, and Hana along with it. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’d have to leave the house to get the materials he needed to construct a room sufficiently protective to deal with whatever that thing was, perhaps he would have seriously considered it.

Instead, he was here, trying to figure out how this thing was bound to some girl.

Karl’s fingers stopped their incessant drumming as Hana reached her hand out towards the orb, his eyes unconsciously narrowing in concentration. Clearly he was preparing to observe the representation of her soul closely as soon as it appeared in front of him. But it was an unnecessary effort. As a multicolored orb began to swirl in front of Hana, Karl’s eyes went wide in uncontrollable shock.

Her soul resembled nothing so much as a frayed ball of yarn, tugged apart by incautious fingers. Strands of it floated wildly around the room, drifting away until they fell out of the radius of the golden orb’s effect. One particularly large strand ran to the cube in Hana’s hand, which had started turning faintly black right as it touched the edge of the little broken, wooden toy.

Khange khodah.” For a moment, Karl actually sounded more shocked than angry, although it didn’t last for long. “Madar kharbeh. That kak oudelic shoon of a cube has all but ripped your soul into ribbons. These?” His finger reached out, plucking the air just in front of one of the tendrils of Hana’s soul that floated into the distance. Perhaps it was an unconscious habit, but even he didn’t touch the strand. “These are why it’s impossible to unbind the cube from you. It’s dragged off pieces of your soul to all the scattered… bits.”

He shook his head, rubbing the space between his brows with one finger. “Well, you wanted to know how you were bound. Jebem te u oko. There you go. The black bits are already corrupted, polluted with raw abyssal energy. If it wasn’t for the fact that the cube is unnaturally cautions and, for reasons I cannot fathom, you have traces of saintly energy in your soul, that cube could probably have already forcefully corrupted your soul and possessed your body.”

Karl shook his head. "You can stop touching the orb now. There's nothing more it can tell us."

"Khange khodah" - "god’s fuck up" (Persian)
"Madar kharbeh" - "mother fucker" (Persian)
"Kak oudelic shoon" - "shit eating dog" (Armenian)
"Jebem te u oko" - "Fuck you in the eye" (Serbian) used when someone’s seen something they shouldn’t have.
 
Hana flinched back as Karl's tone changed from disbelief to indignance. She looked at all of the spindles that stretched off far beyond the bounds of the room, her eyes glazing over. There were so many. There were just so many. All of them, she would have to find. If she missed even one--dead. If she didn't make it in six months, close to five now, closer to zero every second she spends cooped up in this house--dead. If she can't get anyone to attach all the broken pieces, to fix it, to perform whatever ritual or ceremony was needed to unbind the godforsaken thing--dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

She picked up the hand from the orb and brought it over her eyes, shielding her view. Her grip around the cube tightened as the image of her soul shrank and dissipated, and then was gone. Her soul? Really? Did it really have to be her soul? Out of apparently all the different ways it could've possibly been attached, it had to be the Worst One Literally in the History of Ever.

"Okay." She tried to hold it in, but she let out an absurdly incredulous chuckle, unsure of how to react or what to feel. She had one and a half feet in the grave and she didn't even know how she was going to leave the stupid house and everything was wrong and nothing was right and she had no idea how to even begin fixing anything.

Her head reeled. It was a few moments until she stopped laughing and regained her composure. "Okay, it's bound to my soul." She sighed. "And saintly energy, you said? That was the bits of yellow?" She brought her hand away from her face. "Why on earth would I have saintly energy in my soul? I mean, sure, I'm not complaining if its keeping this abysmal cube from corrupting it completely, but I don't resemble anything remotely saintly. We're not even Christian."

Almost begrudgingly, like she was frustrated about having to think, her eyes did a dance around the room, before landing on Karl again, squinting.

"So it's bound to my soul, but that still doesn't explain," She laughed again, throwing her free hand in the air, "how the cube was bound to me in the first place." Slowly, she stepped away from the large metallic orb and toward where Karl was standing. "Does this test tell you anything about what could’ve prompted the binding?”
 
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"Sainthood has nothing to do with Christianity," Karl spat out, the words seeming almost ripped reluctantly from his mouth. Almost all religions had some measure of truth to them, but that didn't make him fond of them. In fact, it was generally quite the opposite. "All it means is you've been somehow touched by divine energy."

Shaking his head, Karl's eyes drifted back to the space that Hana's tattered soul had filled only moments ago. It was almost as though he could still see it, as his vault-like memory caused the soul to be reproduced with flawless accuracy in his mind's eye. The more he thought about it, the less he liked it.

For all his years, all his experience and exposure, he'd seen almost nothing like this. This? It was deliberate mutilation to the highest scale. Even the soul-bound artifacts Karl had seen in the past hadn't been so vicious in their actions. Sure, they might connect themselves to the soul, winding around it like an overgrowth of vines. Some might even use the soul as sustenance, siphoning off bits of it at a time. But to fray it until it looked closer to a grid than it did an orb? That was a kind of extremity beyond any ordinary means.

Hana's words seemed to snap Karl back into focus, but as she spoke to him, a trace of emotion was seen in his eyes. But rather than the faint trace of distaste or apathy that normally filled his eyes when he looked at her, this time there were traces of a much darker emotion. Distrust.

"You know what it tells me, puella?" he asked, his voice almost unnaturally calm, filled with a biting layer of frost. "It tells me you're hiding something from me. A binding like that? It's vicious. And there's absolutely no way it could have happened by accident."
 
Hana’s brows furrowed as Karl’s tone went from incredulous to icy. She flinched back as he started. When he finished, she simply blinked at him plainly for a few moments, attempting to decipher what exactly the meant by that.

“You—oh, that’s rich.” She said, the tips of her ears turning red in almost pure resentment. She wasn’t even sure if it was aimed at Karl or the cube or the world.

“What exactly are you trying to say, Karl? That I must have purposefully bound this awful thing to myself? What am I, a masochist? Or— oh, that I must have made so many mortal fucking enemies at age 25 that one of them decided to attach this artifact of death and destruction to me? Maybe I was playing around with magic and jokingly bound it to my own soul? Maybe I did it just to mess with you?” Hana forced out a laugh, nothing but bitterness coming out.

“My soul,” Hana started, pointing to the space where her soul was pictured, “is in tatters. It looks like a cobweb.” Her voice broke. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

She grabbed Becker’s journal along with the cube and stormed out of the room, the door swinging open for her as she approached it. Oh, what she would give to be able to storm out of that entire house. Much to her despair, she felt large drops of water spill down her cheeks as she walked. She couldn’t stop them, no matter how much she scrunched up her face or tensed her jaw. These were big, wet, angry tears.

Sure, yeah. Hana was hiding something from him. But what did the Oldpikes have to do with the cube, anyway? Without them, she probably would never have even known about the stupid thing. They had nothing to do with this.

Once she got to her room, after a winding power walk, she closed the door behind and practically threw herself onto the bed. For a moment, she begrudgingly considered his words without malice.

What if it really wasn’t an accident?

If he was telling the truth, and if he was right, then what the hell happened? Who the hell bound it to her? Maybe it was possible that it was supposed to bind to somebody else’s soul, but instead it got caught onto hers?

If it wasn’t an accident, then that made figuring out what happened infinitely more complicated. Her head hurt just thinking about it. She didn’t want to think about it. God, her soul? Who could possibly hold that much malice in their heart? Did it even matter? Wasn’t it more important that now she knew that it was bound to her soul?

She looked at the cube, sitting complacently next to her pillow, and suddenly she was overcome with the urge to throw it against the wall. Or into the fireplace. Or drop off the Empire State Building. She had never been to the Empire State, and the thought dawned upon her that she probably never would.
 
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Karl didn't even bother to respond to Hana's irate words, his arms crossed and his expression grim. There she went, trying to feed him some sob story about how bad he should feel for her, and then racing off before he could get any actual answers out of her. All she'd done since the moment she'd gotten here was whine for his help and pester him with questions.

"Poshol v zhopu," he cursed, slightly late, as the door to the Room of Souls had already closed behind Hana. Why was it his responsibility to help her?

It wasn't. She'd barged her way into his life, and demanded he solve all her problems for her? But it wasn't him who'd fucked up bad enough to get his soul bound to an abyssal artifact. It wasn't him who had forced his way into another person's life expecting them to fix everything. Hana couldn't even be bothered to explain how she'd found him. What right did she possibly have to expect his help? So what if her soul had turned into a fragmented mess? Karl had long ago consigned humanity to whatever fucked up fate they threw themselves into, and that included stupid, crybaby little girls.

Letting out a noise sitting somewhere between a groan and a sigh, Karl turned and bowed slightly to the divine soul. "Thank you for your help," he said, voice little more than a whisper. "I'll be leaving."

For a moment, as he turned, Karl's fingers reached out, brushing gently against the orb in the middle of the room. As his fingers touched the golden sphere, a brilliantly green light began to fill the room. It flooded through the air, expanding ever outwards like a silent explosion, until it touched the very edges of the room. The light was so brilliant, so blinding, that it swallowed up every other trace in the room. Even the brilliant yellow light of the angelic soul was enveloped by the ocean of green.

And then Karl's fingers parted from the orb, the green light vanished as quickly as it had come, returning the room to its natural splendor.

"Goddammit," Karl cursed once more, appearing unaware that he'd even spoken. And then he was gone, the door closing behind him, leaving behind nothing but the faintly trembling divine soul and its numerous charges.



Perhaps the universe had heard Karl's curse towards Hana, because he saw no trace of the girl for the next several days. It was a relief for him the first day, but considering how persistent she'd been on stumbling across him at every opportunity before that point, it got so that Karl almost started to wonder if she'd found a way outside. Either that, or the house had taken his concerns about her getting possessed far more seriously than he'd expected, and locked her away somewhere.

But, no. When Karl finally went to check the scryer that tracked the living presences in the house, it was most of the way through the third day after Hana began her vanishing act. But, contrary to his assumption that she'd somehow managed to get herself trapped somewhere she wasn't supposed to be, a possibility that seemed all too likely despite the fact that the house should have kept her out of any of the more dangerous areas, he instead saw her sprawled on her bed in one of the house's rooms, reading what looked to be another of Becker's journals.

If she had been reading this whole time, it was almost certain she was well beyond the third journal now, which meant she was reading because she enjoyed the story, rather than because she wished to learn more about magic. In truth, this didn't really surprise him. Hartley was a surprisingly fine writer, even Karl acknowledged that. At the very least, the last three volumes cut down Karl's presence to a merely theoretical ghost, as he and Becker had split ways for the rest of Becker's life at that point, although Karl hadn't known it at the time.

It hadn't been until seven years later that Karl had finally managed to track down Becker's corpse, lost and abandoned in a ruined fort near Dresden, Germany, which also held his last journal, and a bloodstained note to Karl that he would have rather not have had to read.

At the very least, the later journals wouldn't do as much to give Hana a misguided notion of Karl's behavior. But, in the end, it didn't really matter.
It was all history, and long dead history at that.

At the very least, Hana's newly found reclusive habits were more than welcome for Karl. It gave him the ability to pretend, at least for a little while, that he was alone in his house again. Unfortunately, there was no telling how long it would last.

Indeed, case in point, a clear white stone appeared before Karl the next day at noon, its clean white light a strange contrast to the blood red room he was currently in. When the orb came to a halt in front of him, an image began to swirl in the middle of its depths. A black haired girl was currently standing at the front door, tugging desperately at the swords that had secured themselves to the wall.

Karl groaned. "What exactly does she think she's doing now?"

"Poshol v zhopu" - Literally "Go into an asshole", meaning "Fuck off" (romanized Russian)
 
For the next few days, Hana shut herself in her room. At first, she would simply lay curled up under a pile of blankets, sulking and brooding. She didn’t eat, shower, or so much as get out of bed for an entire day. Instead, she slept. And when she couldn’t sleep, she stared at the ceiling.

She saw the image of her soul, all torn up and stretched apart. Karl’s cold and distrustful expression towards her. Her head drummed with all of the possibilities she concocted, for better or for worse, of every which way the cube could’ve accidentally become bound to her. No way it couldn’t have been an accident. There was no way anyone could’ve done something like that on purpose.

To entertain the thought would plunge her down an even deeper rabbit hole of a stupid game of whodunit with no clues and no lead. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to understand.

When the morning of the second day of self-confinement rolled around, she was still burrowed under a heap of self pity blankets. She had asked the house for the next of Becker’s journals; it was probably the closest thing she’d get to understanding everything left of directly talking to Karl himself—something that she did not want to subject herself to possibly ever again.

She practically flew through the second and third books. Not surprisingly, there was nothing in there that revealed anything about her current situation, how to explain it or how to get out of it. She did learn more about the ‘science’ of magical artifacts in a similar way that she did with the first journal. The frequency of the drawn diagrams and lengthy, textbook-like explanations began to taper off as she neared the end of the third journal. As she shut the book, she stared at the fourth journal sitting atop the nightstand.

Should she? Should she not?

It wouldn’t teach her anymore more about magic, but what else was she supposed to do anyway? If she pretended that it wasn’t the Karl The Goblin Man that she knew, and instead Becker was writing about some other immortal jerk named Karl, maybe she could get through it easier.

So she did. When she picked up the journal, she noticed that it felt lighter and thinner than the previous ones, and thumbing through it, she noticed empty spaces where chunks of pages had been ripped out. From what she could understand from the sparse entries, they were somewhere in Sweden chasing down an artifact of the more powerful variety.

Much to her dismay, she could tell Becker’s admiration for Karl still held steady through their journey—and it made sense, she supposed. He was a resolute, steadfast and decisive leader, not to mention the centuries worth of encyclopedic knowledge he had contained in his brain. She had to give him that much, at least. He got the job done and he did it well.

So when they arrived at a fork in the road, where their paths became separate, she could see the fallout clear as day. Having to work alone with no help from a magical encyclopedia 24/7 really put a strain on Becker, and she saw it in the haphazard way he talked about strategy and planning. It was far better than anything she would ever be able to come up with, but without Karl there alongside him, even she could tell that he was running on fumes.

At some points, she had to put down the journal because it made her physically sick to her stomach. Becker described with painstaking detail the gruesome combat, and perhaps even more frightening, the French soldiers who were nothing more than mindless lumps of flesh and artillery—zombified by the artifact he was desperately trying to track down.

It was in the evening of the third day when she arrived at the last journal. Deep red stains penetrated the cover in smears and splatters. She wanted to believe it was wine.

The entries in journal seven became increasingly more sporadic and haphazardly spaced. He’d go weeks or months without writing an entry, and there weren’t any pages torn out as far as she could tell. Each time he wrote, he seemed to have fallen into worse trouble than before.

And then: August 17, 1813. The last dated entry. She fidgeted with the edges of the paper as he went on about what had to be done, which seemed to involve storming a military base without help. In and out, he wrote. The rest of the pages were blank. As she thumbed through them, one by one, she found a scrappy spot on the inside back cover where something seemed to have been peeled off. She ran her fingers over the unevenly torn paper, wondering what it could be.

As she went to sleep that night, she thought about what happened to him after his last entry. Did he fall victim to the French army, and become an empty husk of a soldier like the ones he’d been fighting so valiantly to save? Did he ever get to see Karl again, his mentor and role model and friend? Did he die in combat that day? Did he get the artifact? Did he even get close?

Hana paused. She looked at her cube, which had been sitting beside her pillow. Would she even get close? Certainly not if she spent the rest of her days locked up in that room.


When the morning of day four rolled around, she woke up earlier than usual. Kicking the blankets off herself, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. A shower was likely in order.

Post shower, Hana donned a pair of loose jeans and a bluebell blue sweatshirt. She went back in her room to grab her tote bag and cube.

“Hey, house?” She cleared her throat. “Would you happen to have anything like map of the whole house? One that has all the entry and exit points? And could you also grab me any of the artifacts that deal with transportation? Portal artifact, teleportation artifact, whatever it is. Just something that lets me jump from one place to another.” She bit her lip anxiously. Sitting on her ass clearly wasn’t going to get her anywhere, and the last thing she wanted was to ask Karl for more help, but would she really be able to do this?

From the left wall, about three or four artifacts drifted in and hovered in front of her. She waited patiently for something like an ancient scroll or even blueprints to come in through the wall, but alas, nothing came.

“I guess that makes sense, the rooms move around so much sometimes I don’t even know where my bedroom is.” She pursed her lips, turning her attention to the artifacts.
She studied them each, turning them over in her palms. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was expecting, but an instruction manual might have been nice. One by one, she stared at them all in concentration, shook them vigorously, announced to them all sorts of different locations, declaring “Take me to Portland! Back to San Fran? Outside, at least? Pretty please?” before she finally told the house to take them away.

“Okay. So that was a bust. It’s fine, though. We’ll just have to use the doors, like normal people.” She sighed. How would she even know which doors led outside? She had no map, and Stupid Goblin Man didn’t put up any exit signs, that she was aware of, at least. There must have been hundreds of rooms in that house, most of which she hadn’t stepped foot into.

“I guess I’ll have to go through... all of them?” She rubbed the back of her head. There was no systematic way to do it besides to physically try to open each and every door and see what was behind it.

The first door she tried swung open easily. It revealed a cluttered office with a desk perched on one side of the room, with shelves lining the other walls. Books with funny looking spines adorned them, and some papers were scattered on top of the desk. But no exit. No exit. No exit.

Fourth door down, she tried for the knob. It didn’t give way. She jiggled it, pushed and pulled and slammed her foot into it, but it didn’t budge. The handle didn’t so much as turn. Finally, she stopped, doubled down and panting.

“That’s okay,” She started. “Plenty of more doors.”

And so, slowly but surely, she made her way to all of the doors she could find. Most of them did swing open, but none of them revealed any kind of secondary opening. No stairs, no elevators, no ladders, no trap doors or openings in the ceiling.

For all the doors that didn’t open, she stopped trying the handles once she realized it wouldn’t budge for her that easily. She went in for some of the locks with bobby pins, and then she resorted to trying to kick them open. She’d wedge her fingertips into the gaps between the door and the doorframe to try and pull that way, and by the seventh door, she began taking running starts at them. Loud thuds and sounds of pounding feet scattered throughout the house. If she slammed into one hard enough, maybe it would collapse. She’d seen it in movies, so it could be done, right?

“Shit!” She yelled. She felt like any longer in there and she would lose her mind. She wasn’t even sure if the doors she was trying so hard to open would be exits or not, and she had no way of knowing besides trying to peer into the small gap between the bottom of the door and the floor—which she tried a few times without success. Even still, Hana was not going to ride out her last days without knowing she did everything she possibly could to get out.

Her breathing grew more labored as she turned the corner into the entrance of the house, the first real “room” she saw when she first entered. Frantically, she shoved her body weight into the wide mahogany doors, her shoulder taking the brunt of the force. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the weapons that lined the top of the wall, remembering how she’d tried to grab one when she first came in.

Hastily, she snatched the same chair she used earlier and climbed on top, this time not steadying herself for balance. She reached up at the nearest weapon, a short sword with what she decided was a thick enough blade. She grabbed hold of the hilt and pulled, but it didn’t give way. Taking to more drastic measures, she wrapped her hand around the base of the blade and pulled. It sunk easily into her palm, and she winced slightly, but by god she would get that damned thing off the wall.

It came off the wall with a pop before the blade could sink any deeper. She stumbled back from the force she’d been using to pry, and toppled out of the chair. Quickly scrambling to her feet, she swung at the door with full force. The blade didn’t so much as dent it. Still, she pulled back and hacked away at it, hoping that if she persisted long enough, she’d be able to carve out a hole.

Slowly, after several minutes, her clobbering waned into something more like battering the door with sore, desperate, small fists. She leaned forward, letting her forehead rest on the cool wood, and closed her eyes.

“I just want to leave. I can find the pieces. I can do it. Just let me leave.” She let the sword drop a little ways away from her feet. “Please.”
 
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