The air in the corridor was extremely cold.
But it was a coldness that had no connection to the weather.
Rather, it emanated from the polished white marble that reflected the glow of crystal lamps as if participating in a silent mockery.
The hallway stretched long, swallowing footsteps, and each step in it betrayed buried sighs in little Leon's chest.
He was walking unsteadily, his face smeared with light dust, and his hair disheveled as if a fierce wind had tampered with it in an unforgiving forest.
His lower lip was cracked and dry, and a spot of crimson blood had frozen at the corner of his mouth.
His white shirt was no longer white anymore, and the blackness under his eyes appeared like the shadow of a monster that had settled in his heart.
His appearance would suggest to a blind person that he had been beaten.
He stopped at the corner where the corridor branches into side halls whose high windows overlook the beautiful inner garden.
Leon looked out the window for some time. It was a routine scene.
A very beautiful garden centered around that fountain that seems old-fashioned, but its luster and beauty forcefully betrays that it is alien to this era.
And flowers whose colors vary between red, pink, purple, and yellow.
Surrounding each other and taking a captivating circular shape, forming a huge ring around that gray fountain, while the servants work on watering the plants and taking care of them.
They were working with smiles on their faces.
At that moment, I kept watching them for some time and smiled with disappointment, and despite my hatred of admitting this, it was a truth that continues to reveal itself to me.
It seems I am the only miserable creature in this place.
"Why are you smiling?"
It was a cold voice like water that made me turn my neck nervously, and my eyes fell on her.
Sarah was standing like a statue carved from ice.
She was there by the nearby window. I didn't understand how I didn't notice her presence.
Leaning with her arms on the cold wooden edge of that window while looking at me.
A breeze of air made her golden hair sparkle under the sunset light that penetrates the walls of these windows.
And her green eyes blinked slowly as if she wasn't waiting for me... but she was.
...
Leon raised his eyes hesitantly like someone staring at his inevitable fate.
He didn't say anything.
Silence was his only shield in the face of what he couldn't repel. "Oh, look who's back!" Sarah said in a high tone and frowning expressions.
Devoid of any trace of compassion, then she laughed. Her laugh was sharp,
cutting,
unlike children's laughter... but like the tapping of an executioner's fingers on the scaffold wood.
Leon advanced a little, and nothing seemed more humiliating than weakness, and the slight limp in his left leg betrayed him more than his complete silence. "My sister... d-did you give the paper to Kirian?"
His voice came out hoarse and weak. It didn't seem like he was making an accusation, but rather like a spirit that had been concussed and broken in front of this situation.
Sarah bent down a little, bringing her face closer to him as if examining a strange insect, then whispered sarcastically:
"Your sister? And paper? If you call me your sister again, I will finish you off, and what paper do you mean, you monster? The one you wrote about withered flowers or about the sick moon?"
He didn't answer. He just took the paper out of his trembling pocket, spread out with difficulty from the wrinkles carved by his desperate grip, and showed it to her.
She raised her eyebrows affectedly, then extended her hand and snatched the paper from him with contempt and without permission.
She read the first two lines silently, then said as she threw it to the ground with disdain, as if she was touching something disgusting:
"Ah, this? Yes, I gave it to him. I wanted to laugh a little, but I really didn't imagine that you would crawl to retrieve these dead words of yours. I didn't know they meant so much to you."
Leon's knee trembled, and he stepped back. Her words weren't easy.
He retreated like someone who had received an invisible slap.
"But... why?"
The word came out orphaned from his lips and bleeding as if it was the last of his voice.
Sarah advanced two steps toward him until her face almost touched his.
And looked down at him like someone looking at something that had fallen in the mud and doesn't even deserve pity.
While Leon swallowed... tensed... became weaker and more broken in front of her gazes and the intensity of her closeness to him.
She said in a cold tone like an icy blade covered with a thin layer of sarcastic sugar:
"Because you're disgusting... because you're ugly... because your existence is annoying... because you're a monster, and the birthmark on your face doesn't hide that ugliness inside you. Do you need more justifications? Or do you want us to write them on the walls of your disgusting basement for you to entertain yourself by reading them in the dark?"
Here, Leon didn't feel anything. No tear, no tremor, no anger. Just a huge emptiness and a calmness resembling what comes before the final drowning in an ocean of despair.
Her words were painful in a way that makes it extremely impossible for such letters to be uttered on the tip of a child's tongue who is supposed to be a pure creature.
He lowered his gaze and seemed about to collapse in front of her. He said in a faint voice barely audible: "What about the beginning... I mean... the first line..."
Sarah looked at the paper lying on the ground for a moment, as if trying to decipher a primitive language, then stepped on it with the heel of her elegant shoe, and tore it with one violent movement.
She left the fragments scattered on the cold marble while Leon bit his lips hard, almost making them bleed, as he stared at the fragments of his poem paper before a breeze of wind took them from his eyes as if he had never written it.
And she said in a voice dripping with sarcastic contempt:
"I don't understand what you're saying. Perhaps monsters have a language similar to ours but with different vocabulary. I still don't understand how you can live until now. How in the name of the creator of this world are you not dead yet?"
Sarah continued as she turned around, her hair fluttering with her movement like a black flag:
"And you know well,
If you had been the one who read the poem... everyone would have laughed at you until they cried. But Kirian? The whole world applauded him. Do you know why?
Because you're ugly and a monster. Nothing beautiful will come from an ugly person like you... but Kirian delivered those words with the appearance of a poet, as if born a star on the stage."
Then she turned toward him again, tilting her head slightly.
And smiled...
A smile that was a stab without a single drop of blood.
A promise of more pain.
"By the way... that beginning, the first line you're crying over... I didn't write it. I didn't add anything. The paper reached me like that."
Then she blinked her eyes with deliberate slowness and said:
"Strange, isn't it? As if there are other ghosts in this castle who love to hurt you like me, and of course, it will be one of my siblings, so prepare for what is more cruel."
She turned and walked away. The sound of her elegant shoe striking the ground with a regular rhythm, unlike the devastation she left echoing in the long corridor.
And Leon remained alone. He stood still, a body without a soul. Everything was still.
As if the entire castle held its breath to listen to the sound of his heart breaking slowly... piece by piece... in complete silence.
Leon returned to his black basement, descending the wooden stairs that make that terrifying creak in this darkness.
And the door that closes well makes a terrible sound from its iron joints and rusty screws like a scary old woman's laugh.
But it seems he got used to all this darkness as he walked toward his dilapidated bed in this gloomy darkness without stumbling over anything.
But even the eye of a child fed on darkness
Couldn't see a drop of light in a sea of all this pain.
(Hours later)
The sunset was pouring thin golden threads on the high domed glass ceiling.
And casting long distorted shadows across the square hall surrounded by smooth white columns and lifeless ornamental plants. It looked like a rare, cold, and luxurious bird cage.
The four children sit around a rectangular glass table like small statues in a private museum.
Tea cups in the shape of crystal roses and small cakes lined up precisely look like jewels not to be eaten.
Yi Lian was sitting with her back straight as a sword and her legs elegantly crossed, slowly turning the tip of her silver spoon inside the tea cup without drinking. Her eyes half-closed, as if reading something in the air or listening to whispers that only she hears.
"What do you think of an interesting story that our mother doesn't tell us in the Thursday room?"
Sarah, leaning on the couch, sighed with extreme boredom and said as she protruded her lower lip, "I feel bored... please, sister, say anything interesting."
"The silver-haired nanny told me something strange today..." Yi Lian continued speaking in a calm tone but tinged with a malicious anticipation sparkle.
Arthur, who was devouring half a strawberry cake at once, asked with a full mouth and his eyes gleaming with naive childish enthusiasm:
"Is it something about magic? Please say it's magic! Can I learn it like we read in the stories our mother tells us in the Thursday room?"
"Closer to a curse, my dear." Yi Lian said and looked at him with a superior look as if enjoying his excessive ignorance.
"Real magic is not for fools." Karma, who was lightly rotating his cup between his slender fingers, tilting his head as he does when analyzing a complex chemical composition, said in a calm and logical voice:
"Let me guess... it's about our favorite subject? Leon?"
Yi Lian didn't answer him directly, she just smiled that cold smile that resembles only the shadow of a sharp blade while Karma returned her smile as he closed his eye and crossed his arm as a silent sign of understanding between these two siblings.
Arthur was staring in extreme surprise, turning his neck to each of them and saying, "Hey! This isn't fun. I want to play too!"
But Yi Lian continued as she looked at Arthur with a mischievous smile:
"She said... that whoever is born with a black mark on his face... is not considered a complete human in the view of ancient destinies, and it's not just a birthmark, but a gateway. A gateway to the mouth of a sleeping demon that will wake up one day, and... devour its owner from the inside out."
Karma's eyebrow rose slightly as he heard her, not genuine surprise but appreciation for the dramatic plot she was saying, then said calmly as he adjusted his imaginary glasses:
"This is the best I've heard today, better even than the story I heard since I read 'The Sacred Intestines'. Can you imagine? A face that opens its mouth on its own? This might be the first honest expression to come from him."
Arthur suddenly laughed with his loud, unbalanced voice, and almost dropped another piece of cake:
"Hahaha, imagine! The birthmark moves and says in a hoarse voice: 'I'm hungry... I want to devour Leon!'"
"Rather, it says: I want to devour the entire Martinez family!" Yi Lian replied as she laughed too and turned her gaze toward the window where the shadows began to stretch, then whispered as if reading from an ancient forbidden book:
"Everyone who heard the whisper of the sleeping mouth... disappeared. The birthmark swallowed them." Then she added, saying as she whispers to Karma, pretending a scary voice and pointing to her mouth, "Psssst, hey Karma, imagine this, a mouth comes out of our monster's birthmark then says, 'Yaaaa! I will eat everyone who laughed at me!!!' I bet I'll be the first, haha."
The four began to laugh at Yi Lian's funny expressions.
Sarah, who was playing with the tip of her golden hair in boredom, said coldly as she examined her polished nails: "I think this is the first time I've found a logical explanation for his foul smell."
Karma looked at her with half a smile and said:
"You mean the smell of sulfur and stagnant water that sticks to his clothes... damn, do you remember when we killed his silly cat and entered that basement? Do you remember that humidity that day, it was so intense that even cockroaches stepped on themselves to die?"
Yi Lian and Arthur began to laugh hard until their eyes teared up, while Sarah couldn't help herself and smiled.
"Rather, the smell of something dying slowly... from the inside." Sarah answered and took a small sip of tea as if pronouncing the final judgment and sealing his fate.
Arthur in a cheerful voice, "What do you think about playing with him, tying him to a tree like a candy donkey on candy day?"
Sarah looked at him with boredom and said with a sarcastic smile, "A silly idea, but I don't blame you, you're only 8 years old."
Arthur lowered his gaze in disappointment, "Yes, you're right...." He paused for seconds, and after it seemed like his slow brain finally understood, he added with emotion, pointing his index finger at her, "Hey! You too!"
Sarah with an arrogant expression as she pinches his cheek, "I'm older than you, you ungrateful one!"
Arthur as he removes her hand from his cheek and pinches her cheek with both his hands, saying with annoyance, "By seven seconds!"
While Sarah also held his cheeks with her hand and pinched, mimicking his position and with a smiling tone that didn't suppress her laughter, "Exactly! The best seven seconds of my life."
Yi Lian was watching the interaction between them and laughing while nudging Karma's shoulder with her elbow, "They're really children, aren't they, brother?"
Karma was leaning and seemed to feel lazy, but he smiled half a smile as he watched Sarah and Arthur fighting in a funny way, "Yes, it seems like they're the real children here and... well, it's bad for one of us to stay away from such nice events."
Yi Lian sighed, and she seemed to fully understand what Karma meant, and she began to close her eyes even though her smile didn't disappear, "You mean..."
Karma: "Everything has a ceiling, and the ceiling of this family is..."
"Histori," Yi Lian completed her brother's sentence as she looked at him with a frowning side glance in a clear harmony of thoughts between them.
A moment of silence prevailed, then they said at the same time, "What do you think of him..."
They looked at each other in questioning for some time. The slight tension in the atmosphere was clear, then Karma added, saying, "You start first."
Yi Lian as she sighs and releases a heavy exhale from her mouth, "He's very smart... insanely so to the extent that I'm extremely jealous of him."
"Me too... he's 8 years old like us and has already learned 3 languages. He has an unparalleled speed of learning and memory."
Yi Lian looked at the ceiling and protruded her lower lip in a frown, "My God... that's a lot," then she was silent for some time and said, "Listen, Karma... he's our brother, and we'll continue to love him, do you understand?"
Karma said, "Yes, we're all special in the end, but... not like him."
Yi Lian as she winks at him with a smile, "No, Histori isn't perfect as you know. We're better than him in communication skills... what do you think?"
"I agree with you. He barely joins us on occasions, he's not with us when we bully our dear pig. If we excel over him in this, we probably excel over him in other things."
Yi Lian smiled more widely and seemed happy, and she pinched his cheek with some force, "That's the spirit!"
Karma as he extends his hand to pinch her cheek until he pulled it strongly as if uprooting it, "This is how pinching is done correctly. You don't want me to make you a birthmark similar to that damn one's birthmark."
He said it with a sarcastic smile while Yi Lian turned red with anger.
"Shut up!" while they began to fight in a similar way to Sarah and Arthur while the latter two whisper.
Sarah: "Arthur, weren't they calling us children just a little while ago?"
Arthur as he laughs: "Behind the intelligence of both of them, they have a foolish side, Sarah."
Yi Lian and Karma at the same time as they raise their voices: "Shut up!"
At that moment, while their small laughter filled with joy and happiness rose,
Leon was behind the column.
That huge column made of ornate gold and extending to the high ceiling.
The only one in the hall that doesn't carry anything reflecting the distorted truth.
He was hiding there like a terrified rat among broken glass debris, and his eyes hadn't blinked for a full minute.
Wide with terror and understanding.
His hands trembling while one of them weakly leans on the column.
His knees knocking together weakly despite the stiffness of his stance.
"They could have said all this to my face... direct mockery is more merciful, but why the whisper now? Why this confident, calm tone? Are they... really believing that nonsense? No one is laughing now... no one is looking around to see who's listening. They're talking as if they were alone in the world. As if they've decided my fate... and it's over. The birthmark... gateway... mouth... devours..."
His heartbeats rose like war drums beating at his own private execution ceremony.
Every word he heard seemed as if it was coming directly from his birthmark, not from their mouths. When they finally left the hall,
Leaving behind the smell of their cold perfume and cake crumbs, he didn't move. The shadow had changed around him, almost swallowed him.
But Leon... remained as he was, a frozen piece of fear and despair.
Leon was walking in the long marble corridor leading to the almost neglected southern wing. It was rare for any servant to pass by here in the after-afternoon hour.
And where the old kitchen and the dusty servants' storage are located, and the walls are covered with faded mirrors framed with golden edges that have lost their luster long ago.
His reflection was repeated in them like an army of ghosts walking with him toward an unknown fate, and his bare feet touch the harsh coldness seeping from the shiny white tiles.
And the floor whispers under his footsteps with faint sounds resembling the crackling of brittle bones and the crumbling of pottery.
And at the last turn,
Where the corridor sinks into semi-darkness,
Sarah stood.
She wasn't watching him this time but was clearly waiting for him.
Her left shoulder leaning against the cold wall and her hand playing with a small thread hanging from the sleeve of her silk shirt as if waiting for an insect to crush.
When she raised her eyes to him, there was something in her look resembling a smile — not explicit mockery but a kind of quiet pleasure... the pleasure of a predator playing with its prey. "Oh, what's this? I thought you had melted and disappeared with the shadow."
She said in a voice as smooth as silk, but carrying the sting of needles. "Can you still move?"
Leon stopped without uttering a word, but his nerves were taut like violin strings about to snap. Her gaze didn't just penetrate him but stripped his skin piece by piece.
While silence prevailed for a few seconds.
"I need something."
She said in a commanding tone, "Don't be too happy, this won't happen again. Go to the family library. I want a novel... called 'Sword of Dawn'. You'll find it in the western section on the second floor."
Leon kept staring at her nervously, and his lips trembled as if he wanted to say something, but Sarah preceded him before his words came out of his mouth.
"And because you're stupid and don't know your right from your left, you'll notice that the wood color changes in each section. The wood color of the western section tends toward red — don't waste your precious time in sections that exceed your modest mental level."
Leon raised his head a little and in a faint voice trembling like the wing of a dying butterfly:
"But... I'm forbidden from entering the library... the servants will prevent me."
Sarah was silent for a moment as if thinking about the extent of his stupidity, then took out of her pocket something small and shiny even in the dim light.
A heavy silver piece... in the shape of a circle that appears to be the family seal.
The symbol of the dark wolf engraved with one eye in the middle. The color of the silver for the wolf drawing almost tends toward black, which is a very strange and unfamiliar color for silver.
Sarah said in a cold tone as she places one of her hands on her hip, "Throw this in their ugly faces, and they won't dare to prevent you from entering."
Then without approaching and without looking at him directly, she threw the seal with her thumb toward him with an indifferent movement while that ring spins in the air.
Not like someone giving a gift,
But like someone throwing a bone to a hungry dog. The seal hit his bare foot and made a faint ringing sound, then rolled on the cold marble floor until it settled between his nervous, trembling feet.
He bent down and picked up the seal cautiously,
As if touching something that shouldn't be touched.
As if the silver was hot from the intensity of the shame it carries.
Sarah smiled for a second as she watches him go down on his knees to pick it up before her facial expressions return to their original coldness when he got up from his place and coughed, saying,
"And don't try to touch anything else there," she added in a sharp voice. "You know how easy it is to leave your dirty fingerprints on precious things that don't belong to you."
Then she approached, just one step, a precisely calculated step, and bent slightly to speak in a whispered voice, but it was cutting like the edge of a knife in the silence of the corridor:
"Think of it this way, Leon... you don't even deserve to have a bedtime story read to you, but you, and luckily for me, are perfectly suitable for fetching books."
Then she turned gracefully and left the place behind her darker and colder. Leon remained alone.
His palm embracing the silver seal, which he began to feel its strange warmth seeping into his skin.
This was the first time Leon touched a seal... his family's seal, which is supposed to be one of his most basic rights.
He began to touch it... his thumb drawing a circular movement on this seal that resembles a coin.
And his eyes staring toward nowhere when he directed his gaze to Sarah's back, who had moved away from him a distance of meters, and he stares toward the darkness at the end of the corridor, which swallowed Sarah.
The library... had always been a closed world and a silent door knocked only by adults.
For the smart ones... like my siblings, each of them distinguished by a special intelligence relative to an arrogant and almost aristocratic family like the Martinez.
And now they want me to enter it?
Why?... For a trivial novel?
Or is there something else waiting for me between the shelves?"
"I know the answer... because they want something to happen. They want to see my reaction. They want to test my limits. Or maybe... they want to get rid of me indirectly."
He began to walk, his steps as silent as a ghost's.
But he feels as if the entire ground is screaming beneath him in a muffled voice:
"Return to the basement."
"Stay in the dark."
"There you belong, monster."
But he no longer knew where he belonged and no longer knew what he was, and with each step toward the imposing library door,
the feeling of danger... of inevitable fate...
became more tangible than the cold marble under his bare feet.
The night in Martinez Castle was unlike any other night.
It had a velvety and majestic silence.
As if time itself lowers its voice in reverence to the darkness that fills the corridors like black ink spilled in pure water.
The lights weren't lit on the upper floors, just some faint ivory lamps here and there.
Sending a dim yellow flicker that isn't enough to cast reassurance in little Leon's heart but just enough to reveal his shadow trembling behind him.
Leon was walking alone. Barefoot. His faded white shirt almost reaches his knees, and its slightly torn edges shake with each step.
Not from the breeze, but from the tremor of his body that doesn't stop.
In his right palm, he was gripping the family silver seal tightly.
As if holding a cold ember in the palm of his hand. And the more his fingers tightened around the engraved metal, the more he felt that he didn't own this thing... but this thing was owning him.
Leading him toward the unknown.
When he reached the giant wooden door made of dark ebony and decorated with brass handles in the shape of sleeping dragon heads,
The servant was standing there. He was called Anselm. A bald, tall man with a protruding neck like that of a vulture.
And his eyes are gray, extinguished, and never shine.
And even when he sees a family member, his stern features don't soften.
He remained silent as he stares at Leon from above without lowering his head, as if evaluating him not as a child,
But as a strange creature.
An insect that sneaked into the masters' house.
Leon swallowed and felt afraid of the sharpness of his gazes.
Leon extended the seal to him, and his hand was visibly trembling.
Anselm didn't take it. He didn't even touch it. He just looked at it carefully for a moment.
Then raised his chin slightly with an expression resembling silent acceptance, then opened the heavy door slowly without uttering a single word.
In one movement, he bent slightly backward to make room for him, as if letting an unwelcome visitor into a sacred shrine entered only by adults and the chosen ones.
Leon advanced, and his eyes didn't rise from the decorated floor.
And when he crossed the threshold, and the servant closed the door firmly behind him with a low and deep sound,
It was the first time Leon entered this library in his life.
And when he entered it...