Two weeks had passed since the strange encounter in the village. Though no new incidents were reported, an unsettling pattern was beginning to emerge. In the last ten days alone, four doctors from surrounding villages had disappeared without a trace. None of them had ties to each other. No messages were left behind. No bodies were found. They simply vanished.
Rumors spread like wildfire. In taverns, whispers told of someone being seen near the homes of two of the missing doctors, but no one could describe the figure. When pressed, the witnesses only shook their heads, eyes wide, hands trembling.
Back at the castle, Lindsay sat in a tall-backed chair at the edge of the central war room, staring down at a list of the disappeared. Her brow furrowed, jaw clenched. She didn't speak her thoughts aloud, not even to Kraft, who stood nearby with his arms folded and back straight, his usual bravado dimmed by recent events.
"They're not related," he said finally, as if trying to convince himself. "There's no connection between them."
Lindsay didn't respond. She wasn't convinced.
The two were summoned shortly after to the castle archives by an officer overseeing the ongoing investigations. Within the grand, dimly lit room, thick with dust and silence, the shelves towered above them, each brimming with records—births, crimes, experiments.
They were instructed to go through the older files, searching for anything that could hint at connections to the missing doctors. The deeper they dug, the more fragments of old reports they unearthed—classified research notes, failed experiments, quiet relocations. Most were mundane or unrelated.
But then Lindsay found something peculiar.
A record—blank. A page dated nearly a decade prior. No name, no summary, no origin. A singular slot in the registry, its presence recorded but never completed. It sat amid files on other experimental subjects, all detailed with their results, locations, and fates. This one entry had none of that.
"Someone erased it?" Kraft asked, peering over her shoulder.
"No. It was never written," Lindsay replied, voice low. "They never dared."
She traced a finger over the dusty edge of the page, a chill passing over her skin.
Later that evening, under a sky cloaked in thick clouds, a coat floated down the river near the outskirts of the western forest. It drifted slowly, its weight making it list oddly to one side. Nearby, wedged between two stones, a pair of cracked glasses lay partially submerged, the lenses fogged with silt.
On the riverbank stood a lone figure. His fists clenched. Face locked in silent fury—not directed at anyone else, but himself.
He stared at the flowing water for a long time, before turning away and disappearing back into the woods.