Jeanne raised her eyes and glared at him, her sword pressed tightly to his throat. Those pale gold pupils were like two burning embers, searing with a heat that could turn flesh to ash. She didn't speak—there was no need. That fearsome gaze said everything for her.
"Alright, alright, I was just joking," muttered the black sorcerer, raising both hands in mock surrender.
Jeanne let out a short huff, then sheathed her sword.
"If you die here, I'll remember you by your true name," she said calmly.
That made it sound like I was definitely going to die. So much for a long-standing relationship between knight and commander. Sasser rolled his eyes. "Would it kill you to say something hopeful for once, Lady Jeanne?"
"There are no blessings, black sorcerer." Jeanne's gaze stayed fixed on him, her breath condensed in cold wisps over her pale lips. "Before every mission, I prepare to offer my life—even if that means my soul is burned to ash."
"Burned to ash, huh…" Sasser blinked. He wasn't used to dealing with Church folk—especially not inquisitors, who were rare enough to be legends outside battlefields.
"Don't you expect some sort of divine salvation after death?" he asked, genuinely curious.
Jeanne's expression cooled even further.
"If your faith needs miracles and salvation to stay firm, then it's just the loyalty of a dog waiting for its master to feed it." Her eyes were steady, devoid of any ripple.
"That doesn't sound like something someone your age and experience would say." He saw right through her.
"…You're not wrong."
She looked away, visibly displeased, but she didn't deny it.
Sasser stared at her for a moment in silence, then turned his attention back to Viola.
The black cat stepped into the shadow connecting the banquet hall. It was like diving into a vertical pool. The moment the cat's body passed through, the surface of the shadow trembled gently, faint ripples spreading across it. Sasser crouched down and studied it closely.
Behind them, more and more people began spinning in dance.
They all raised their voices in that sharp, rasping chorus—and began spinning even more violently. At the center of the spiraling dance, the master of the house occasionally waved. Every time he waved, the dancers spun faster, their cries growing less human with each turn.
"Dance, spin,
Fly from the castle, fly from the cell,
Fly out of the prison that holds us all!"
"Once we've dealt with the master of this place, I'm going to burn everything in this hall," Jeanne growled.
Having settled the earlier disagreement, the judge's expression once again soured as the singing continued. She tapped her sword hilt impatiently, glaring at the dancers with undisguised revulsion. "There should be a limit to filth. I may not be able to purge it all, but under my watch, things this repulsive deserve to be cleansed—completely."
Sasser ignored her complaints. He stayed crouched, eyes narrowing as he watched the black mist ripple. Viola had vanished. To the naked eye, the space beyond the mist was just more hallway. Even probing spells sent to detect air disturbances passed through cleanly—again, just registering a corridor.
Shaking his head, Sasser stepped into the dark edge separating hall and hallucinatory veil. The shadow slid over him like a curtain, swallowing him whole.
And then the world changed.
All color was wiped away. Only thin lines remained—everything now drawn onto a canvas of swirling black mist. It was like a sketch left unfinished, the outlines faint and smudged, waiting to be painted. The sounds of the banquet hall slowed and stretched, warped into distant echoes—as though someone had hurled a screaming man off a cliff and his cries trailed into nothing.
Silence fell.
Only faint echoes remained—laughter, shouting, singing—distant and fragile, like waves crashing against a cliff from far out at sea.
Amid this black canvas, Jeanne stood once more—her figure drawn only in white outline.
Aside from the narrow, hunched portal they had crawled through, the fog behind her stretched infinitely. There was nothing. Just black.
Maybe... this place was drifting closer to the realm of dreams.
"There are strange things in the mist," Viola stopped in front of him, her eyes—outlined in white against her shadowy form—fixed on the black sorcerer. Her voice was a simple, factual recital of memory. "Some might be hostile. Some might not. Most of them just wander without purpose, like they're sleepwalking. But if any one of them ever ends up under the master's control, it will start moving toward somewhere—some place I've never seen—and eventually enter the house."
"This place makes less and less sense by the minute," Jeanne muttered, eyeing Sasser's white-lined silhouette up and down. She frowned and lowered her gaze to the cat. "So those things we saw before… they came from here?"
"No…" the cat answered. "They're outsiders who fell in—because my father is inside. The transparent ones, and the toys... they're the ones that came out from here."
"…Sorry."
"You're capable of saying 'sorry'?" Sasser raised a brow and shook his head, his voice laced with amusement. "I thought you had only one facial expression for everyone."
"Hmph. Just following the Lord's teachings," Jeanne replied with a cold smirk, glancing at him sideways. "I know who deserves kindness—and who deserves death."
They kept walking behind Viola.
What lay ahead was a wetland—drawn in thick and thin white lines over a damp, black surface. Pools of varying size dotted the ground like nooses thrown across a stagnant mire. Some puddles were shallow, barely covering their soles; others reached past the knees. Occasionally, a few lily pads floated atop the dark water, each bearing a motionless, flat human face, their thin stems ending in still silence. All was deathly quiet—even the rough-sketched faces had their eyes shut, as if peacefully dreaming.
"You ever read Alice in Wonderland?" Sasser asked, clearly bored. He'd expected to meet the master of the house quickly, but the journey was turning out to be much longer than he'd thought.
"Black sorcerer, I told you—I barely learned to read." Jeanne scoffed. "Are you trying to pick a fight?"
"Didn't your parents read it to you as a kid?" he asked offhandedly.
"Are you kidding?" she glared at him with a look full of resentment. "The year I was supposed to learn to read was the same year they joined a cult and almost got me burned with them. What do you think?"
"…Oh. Sorry." Sasser shrugged. Yeah, maybe it was best to end that topic there.
Jeanne clicked her tongue but didn't say more.
They pressed forward toward a horizon that refused to come into focus. The sky was a flat, charcoal black—indistinguishable from the earth beneath their feet. It all merged into one seamless canvas, making direction difficult to discern.
From a shallow puddle nearby came cries—moaning, swearing, wailing. The pool was one they had just passed, barely deep enough to wet their soles. A few white-lined splashes disturbed the water as a figure emerged—thin as a scarecrow. It was a woman. Her face was hollow—eye sockets like voids, empty and black—and beneath them, white lines marked the trails of what might have been blood or tears. They had seen this woman before—the pregnant one in the ballroom.
She crawled out of the water slowly. Below the knees, her legs had been severed, and only two raw stumps dragged behind her on the soaked earth. Her ten fingers clawed desperately at the muck, digging through wet mud until her nails were caked with grime. But she didn't move. Couldn't move.
Sasser flicked a weak spell beam toward her.
The beam passed right through the woman's body and disappeared into the pool behind her, like light cutting through a pane of glass.
"…She has no soul," he said flatly. "Probably just another mirage of the dreamscape."