It radiated a localized field of pure killing intent.
To the pitiful ghosts of the Rodhe estate, trying to touch that cape was like a moth trying to touch the surface of the sun.
Seraphina didn't think twice.
With a burst of adrenaline that completely overrode her exhaustion, she launched herself forward. It wasn't a graceful movement.
It was a frantic, clumsy, uncoordinated somersault, a literal combat roll of a desperate six-year-old.
She tumbled over the pillows, tangled briefly in the silk sheets, and face-planted near the foot of the bed.
She didn't care about the bruised nose. Her small hands instantly shot out, grabbing the thick, heavy wool of the cape.
She hauled it backward, dragging it across the mattress until she was pressed against the headboard again.
Without a second's hesitation, she threw the massive garment over her head, burying herself completely underneath it.
It was heavy. It smelled overwhelmingly of cold iron, ozone, pine needles, and the faint, coppery tang of old blood. It smelled like the monster who had claimed her.
And it felt like absolute heaven.
Under the cape, the temperature instantly normalized. The biting, spiritual frost was banished.
The whispers of the dead were muffled, turned into nothing more than the sound of distant, harmless wind.
Seraphina pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her shins, and tucked the edges of the cape under her feet, creating a perfectly sealed, dark cocoon.
In the pitch blackness of her makeshift tent, her frantic breathing began to slow. The adrenaline spike crashed, leaving behind a profound, aching melancholy.
She rested her forehead against her knees.
'I am such a coward,' her adult mind whispered, the cynical twenty-something artist rising to the surface of her thoughts. 'Look at you. Hiding under a murderer's coat because you're scared of a few sad ghosts.'
She knew the spirits in this room weren't evil; they were tragic.
The maid ghost just wanted justice, and the merchant ghost just wanted his family to know the truth. The children... the children just wanted someone to acknowledge their suffering.
If this were a fairytale, or one of those webnovels she used to read in her past life, she would be the "Saintess."
She would use her special ability to listen to their woes, uncover the Count's crimes, put their souls to rest, and earn the undying loyalty of the spirits. She would be brave, compassionate, and fearless.
But Seraphina wasn't a Saintess. She was a survivor who had died once in a cold apartment and woke up in a colder world.
She couldn't afford to be fearless.
Fear was the only thing keeping her alive. It was a biological, psychological alarm system that she refused to turn off.
She remembered, vividly, the first time she had tried to help a ghost in the orphanage. She had been three years old.
She had seen the spirit of a little boy crying in the courtyard, pointing to the old well. Thinking she could help, she had waddled over, trying to talk to him.
She hadn't realized that the boy wasn't a ghost of an orphan. He was a Kelpie, a low-level demonic mimic that fed on the life force of the sympathetic.
The moment she reached out to him, the boy's face had melted into a maw of jagged teeth, and it had tried to drag her soul straight out of her physical body.
If the Head Matron hadn't accidentally walked outside and dropped a silver tray, breaking the mimic's concentration, Seraphina would have died an empty husk before she even reached her fourth birthday.
That day, she learned a brutal truth about this world: Empathy is a luxury of the strong. For the weak, empathy is bait.
If she numbed herself to the fear of these "pitiful" ghosts, she would eventually let her guard down around a malicious one.
If she played the hero, she would attract the attention of things lurking in the dark that even the Duke's cape couldn't protect her from.
'I'm not going to fix the world,' Seraphina thought fiercely, gripping the wool of the cape until her tiny knuckles ached. 'I'm just going to survive it.'
But as her heart rate settled into a steady rhythm, her thoughts shifted from the ghosts outside her cocoon to the man who owned it.
Duke Kaelus von Nacht.
Why had he left the cape?
Was it an oversight? A man as meticulous and terrifying as the Archduke didn't strike her as the type to carelessly forget his outerwear.
Did he know it would act as a ward?
And more importantly... why had he listened to her earlier?
When they had arrived, when the fog of the estate had overwhelmed her, she had babbled about a "shadow monster" on the Count's back. She had acted like a hysterical, hallucinating child.
In her experience, adults in this world fell into two categories when faced with a child claiming to see the unseen.
The first category dismissed it as childish nonsense, told them to stop lying, and sent them to bed without supper.
The second, far more dangerous category, consisted of the Church's zealots.
If a priest heard a child talking about shadow monsters, they wouldn't comfort her; they would strap her to a chair, brand her with holy iron, and perform an exorcism to purge the "heresy" from her blood.
Kaelus had done neither.
He hadn't patronized her. He hadn't called her crazy. He had simply asked, with chilling calmness: "What kind of monster?"
And then, he had believed her. Or at the very least, he had used her words to confirm his own suspicions about the Count's corruption.
He had taken her childish observation and treated it as actionable intelligence.
'He didn't dismiss me,' Seraphina realized, her eyes wide in the darkness.
The thought should have been comforting. It meant she had value to him. It meant he wouldn't throw her away as long as her "weirdness" proved useful.
But instead of comfort, a cold, heavy lump formed in the pit of her stomach.