We walked down the slope, still walking.
The detective held a long wooden cane; he swung it lightly, as if conducting some hidden rhythm, then tossed it into the air in a perfect arc. It sliced through the sky with a faint crackle — like bone shifting in its socket. Each time it fell, the cane struck the ground or brushed the grass by its tip, and he caught it again by the other end as it rebounded. The sound it made — soft, deliberate taps — seemed to guide our steps: thum… thum. The grass bowed before it, like a congregation before an ancient force.
To his left, I kept pace — or tried to.
Now and then my boots slipped on the wet grass; the edges soaked, mud clinging stubbornly. I stumbled, caught myself, then stumbled again. The scent of soil and freshly torn herbs rose around me, blending with the sweat sliding down my cheeks. The sun burned through my shirt like a candle melting wax, draining away the last traces of eagerness.
Behind us, the three — Lagrita, Castor, and Ancaeus — whispered among themselves, weaving conspiracies like courtiers plotting against a dead king. Their talk circled endlessly around the Towers.
I never understood why we were walking at all; the magi could have transported us in an instant. But the detective — through some persuasion I still cannot name — had convinced them otherwise. None of the four seemed tired: the detective hummed while twirling his cane, and the others glided along without strain. I was the only one whose every step felt heavier than the last.
Their murmurs drifted through the sound of the cane and the faint trickle of distant water. From fragments of their words, I pieced together enough to follow:
— "The strange towers appeared from nothing, all of a sudden, five years ago," Lagrita whispered sharply.
— "But the towers existed long before the first spatial quake," Castor replied, his tone slicing the air. "Even though they're sure the towers are distorting space and time, no one knows why."
— "The sacred magi warned us of the towers," said Ankeus calmly, "but they never spoke of Simon."
Lagrita immediately tied the towers to Simon, whispering of an order called the Saharim. Castor and Anceus neither denied nor confirmed it — their answers felt more like cautious verification than belief — and that uncertainty made their words sink deeper, buzzing in my head like the dull hum that follows a battle.
When the discussion began to loop on itself, I snapped, my voice restrained but sharp:
"Shouldn't you be meeting the rest of your unit instead of arguing here?"
Ancaeus replied without looking at me, his tone flat and cold:
"We are. My being here doesn't mean I'm not elsewhere too."
I gave a bitter smile; I had no appetite for philosophical riddles about presence.
Then the detective stopped abruptly — the cane frozen midair.
I stopped too. "What is it?" I asked.
He turned slightly, voice steady and triumphant, as though he had just solved the century's riddle:
"We've arrived, my friend."
I looked ahead. The village walls loomed before us — closer and harsher than I'd hoped.
"Finally," I exhaled, as if releasing a breath I'd been holding for hours.
We reached the outer wall — not built, but seemingly torn straight from the heart of the earth. The stones were not aligned by human order; they coiled and twisted like rigid spines. Each one bore a crack or mark — not carvings, but scars left by time itself, fine intersecting lines like clenched fingers pressed upon the parchment of eternity.
The detective studied those markings with an old, bitter gaze with his eyeless face — the kind that carries both a question and its forgotten answer. He flicked the cane again, as if testing whether the path still held purpose.
I stood before the wooden gate — more the lid of a giant seed chest than an entrance for men.
Carved upon it was a small symbol: a triangle enclosing a circle, and within the circle, a black dot
We entered the village without guards at the gate—no sentries, no barricades, no warning sigils. That alone was enough to make my skin crawl.
Usually, it's the faces that tell you before the words do; and here, every face said the same thing: "Something vast has vanished, and we have no idea how to stop it."
The streets of Marij were a concentrated chaos: overturned carts, torn sacks of flour scattered like white bombs, a bread-seller screaming at two men wrestling over a single loaf.
Children ran in half-torn clothes, clutching toys with absent minds, as if by pretending at play they could make the world appear ordinary again.
A woman sat on the stairs, crying softly, dust and blood painting her skin in slow layers. Some houses had doors flung wide open; inside, tables were overturned, glasses abandoned — as though their owners had simply risen mid-breath and never returned.
Whispers spread faster than footsteps… whispers that soon swelled into chants — a festival of fear:
"The god is angry!"
"Sanctify the Lord! Sanctify the Lord!"
The words clanged through the air like iron bells, half prayer, half accusation.
Some voices pleaded: "Have mercy…" others declared in judgmental tones: "An ancient wrath, a debt recalculated."
The entire village looked as though it had slipped back into the Middle Ages — dressing itself in ritual, unsure whether to pray or to condemn.
An old man stood in the middle of the road, his tongue staggering under the weight of words:
"The baron! My God, the baron!"
Fingers pointed toward the eastern hill, where the manor once stood — now replaced by a new, grey mound rising in its stead.
A group of men circled the hill, their murmurs drawn tight as knotted ropes.
Then, through the noise, one clear voice — a child's — cut through:
"The humming! Did you hear the humming?"
The crowd froze for a moment, as if that single word had unlocked something unspeakable.
The detective advanced slowly, one step at a time, his cane tapping against the ground in calm defiance of the surrounding chaos.
Lagrita scanned the villagers with eyes of quiet mercy, as if searching for a trace of fear she could grasp and dissect.
Castor observed faces for guilt, while Ancaeus remained still — absorbed in thoughts that did not seem to belong to the present moment.
There was no room for prolonged sympathy.
This wasn't mere disorder; it was pure terror.
And I couldn't help but wonder: was it truly the manor's disappearance that terrified them, or the disappearance of Simon himself?
What kind of man was Simon, to drive a village mad by vanishing?
The stares began to gather on us — perhaps drawn by the detective's strange demeanor.
But neither he nor his cane slowed.
Lagrita followed with dry eyes; Castor's gaze searched the horizon.
The detective wasted no time.
He set his cane aside and began walking through the square, reciting short questions — not chasing a grand narrative, but cornering fragments of truth, forcing them to reveal themselves piece by piece.
He asked about the last night before the disappearance — strange sounds, lights, tremors.
Some spoke quickly, as if eager to purge a thought; others stumbled; and some remained silent — silence that itself felt like a verdict.
The first story came from a baker, his hands white and cracked like a map.
"The manor?" he said, repeating the word as if testing its weight. "It was there last night. Nothing gave warning. The birds ate, the children screamed — then… then there was a hum. A deep hum, like the sky grinding stone against metal."
He raised his hand, trying to touch the sound again, but the air offered nothing tangible.
"The manor disappeared," he finished simply.
Another man — a shepherd, his face split by years of wind — spoke roughly:
"No, the manor didn't just vanish. I saw a light, a white spear piercing the night. It struck the hill, and then everything turned to mist. The hill — yes, the hill — began to move, as if the earth had traded places with itself."
He said it like someone betrayed by his own eyes.
His story came out jagged, teetering between truth and fear.
A young woman looked at us with eyes wide from some private turmoil.
"No," she whispered, almost conspiratorially. "It didn't vanish — it was ripped out, like a tree torn from its roots. Then another place appeared — a small hill — it wasn't there before. And the air around it… it was humming, buzzing, like thunder murmuring without lightning."
Then her eyes widened further. She extended her hands, murmured a charm — a flicker of blue light danced between her palms, followed by a thin electric hum that made the crowd recoil.
And so the testimonies went on — contradictory in form, united in substance.
All of them heard the same thing: that strange, vibrating hum — not from insects, nor from any storm — a sound that drilled through rock before it reached the bone.
I realized quickly: we weren't searching for a single clear cause, but for overlapping layers of memory, stacking themselves into an event that no single word could contain.
Lagrita, Castor, and Ancaeus each examined the witnesses' memories separately, only to find them tangled and inconsistent — yet every recollection shared one detail: the maddening electrical hum.
"It's impossible to know what happened by their memories alone," said Ancaeus. "Fear of the unknown is the perfect recipe for a false collective memory."
The detective jotted notes in a sharp, angular script on an old sheet of paper.
He didn't press much about the name "the Three Magi," since none of the villagers had ever seen the Order of Shadows in person — which made sense.
This village had never trembled before something it couldn't see.
But the people's eyes lingered on Lagrita, Castor, and Ankeus with quiet curiosity — not recognition, just wary interest.
No one here knew Simon or his group as we did; to them, the Order of Shadows was merely a rumor, whispered behind sleeves.
Ankeus stepped forward and questioned an old fisherman:
"Did you see anything move before the hum — smoke, light, smell?"
The man scratched his chin, thinking.
"No smoke. No smell. Just a shift — in things. Like the earth itself wanted to rearrange its parts. The looters and the innocent alike saw the same thing: something beyond reason, then silence… then a new hill."
He said it as though trimming myth down to mechanism.
Castor noticed another crucial contradiction:
Some swore the light was so strong it cracked the air itself; others claimed the manor was cut off from the world, as if a page had been sliced from a book.
The detective brought his hand to his mouth — or where a mouth would have been, had he possessed one — and paused for a long, thoughtful moment.