Dalia said nothing. But if Morticia could see, she would certainly notice a change in Dalia's expression, which paused the conversation.
"As an ordinary worker, I couldn't ask questions freely, especially not at that place. Curiosity was not a virtue there. My job was to take care of Althea, and nothing else."
"You mentioned that the man brought three children," Jorgen said. "But you only saw Althea?"
"The other two were boys. Apart from the day they arrived, I never saw the other two children again. Maybe they were sent to a different area; the orphanage was vast, and I couldn't move around freely, so I couldn't be sure if they stayed there. As for the man, I only saw him twice. A year later, I encountered him on the path as I returned from the laundry room. He asked me how Althea was doing. I was still afraid of him, very nervous, and I didn't say anything. Just as he was about to ask again, a supervisor came to call him away—they didn't want to see him talking to a worker. It was strange... the higher-ups wouldn't let me have contact with that man, and they weren't willing to provide better beds and food for Althea, but at the same time, they demanded that I protect her with my life."
"I hate that man," Althea said. "Even though I haven't seen him much since he left me at the orphanage, I know he can't be my father. I have some vague memories... it's like I once lay in a cradle tied with a red ribbon, and a woman was singing to me. She used a candle with a spinning lampshade, and I could see many changing shadows on the walls and ceiling. There were knights, carriages, and..."
She shook her head.
"Later, I don't remember what happened. After all, I was less than two years old back then. But I could feel a man wearing a black hat taking me to a strange place. It was as if one day I suddenly woke up from sleep and found that the ceiling with murals had disappeared and turned into pitch darkness. It must have been night. The light that used to put me to sleep turned into shadows of branches. I must have cried then—I have an impression. But he acted as if he didn't hear me. He kept running. I don't know—"
Jorgen listened to Althea's account while keeping his gaze fixed on Dalia. She wasn't calm. However, her weakened physical state masked much of her emotional turmoil, giving her a somewhat pallid complexion. She was not merely listening; she was capturing every word, every change in tone, and threading them into translucent threads of color within the silence, then weaving together the image of a man in her mind. A man who had been dead for almost a decade, emerging solely from these two women's descriptions. He didn't exist beyond their words. He became a silhouette of time rewind, inexplicable and unclassifiable. Even Jorgen couldn't explain the nature of this figure. Yes, he was Dean, that was the only answer. But the "man in the black hat" described with anxiety, confusion, and a hint of panic by these two women was not the Dean Jorgen and Dalia knew. It wasn't because he showed a different personality; it was because they hadn't had the chance to know him, only to touch the surface—the presumed heir of Military Intelligence Section 7. A person with that title was supposed to be associated with words like intimidation, fear, and more. What Morticia and Althea saw was a part of Dean's psyche that had peeled away from the surface.
Althea continued to narrate her regret over her childhood's vague memories and her firm belief that she was taken away from her biological parents. She described how this mystery, which she couldn't comprehend as a child, slowly dominated her growing inner fears. She knew her life had been manipulated from the start, and as she matured, she speculated more about this, which compounded her fear and confusion. The primary way she resisted this inner anxiety was by regarding the man in the black hat who had taken her away from the cradle to the remote orphanage as the source of evil that could be touched. It made her feel better—acknowledging that there was a tangible person disrupting her life.
"How did you two meet Gondore?" Jorgen asked.
Morticia looked particularly troubled. Like rain clouds passing, casting the vast green forest on the mountainside into shades of copper, her expression was shadowed. She had been taking care of Althea for three years when the incident occurred.
"I had to leave the orphanage with Althea because it was attacked. I still don't understand how it happened... it was just that one night, I was awakened by a series of loud noises. My sleeping room didn't have any windows, but I immediately recognized the sounds of burning and screams, so I knew something was wrong. Just as I stepped out into the corridor, blood splattered onto my face. It turned out two guards had killed an intruder right in front of me. At that moment, my only thought was to find this child."
Morticia described the scene at the orphanage very restrainedly. Throughout the process, she interrupted herself many times. Her right hand remained pressed firmly on her knee, and her left thumb and pinkie seemed restless, rubbing back and forth at times but occasionally resting gently in Althea's palm. Young Althea found herself in chaos when she realized that Dean had brought her to the wilderness. Similarly, Morticia, running through the turmoil of the orphanage's ordeal, also faced an abyss of chaos. She saw blood and fire. She heard blood, smelled fire. She stepped over human femurs, living fingers, one after another discarded iron sword left by the losers that no one would ever pick up again. The thick, smoky stench of blood screamed past her, leaving ashes on her wrist.
Jorgen heard her say:
"I saw the person in charge who had made me swear to protect Althea. His right hand and right leg were both broken, but he wasn't dead. Maybe he was insane; he grabbed my ankle, saying, 'The day has finally come.' I had to kick his face and step on his wrist to make him let go... because someone terrifying was approaching. He was entirely dressed in black, and at first, I thought he was the man who had brought Althea, but soon I realized it wasn't. This man wore a strange iron mask, and his body was clearly on fire, but he didn't seem to mind. He had no weapons, but his right fist was metallic, dripping with blood—his entire right side was covered in blood. I was so scared at that moment that I almost went crazy. I kicked the man in charge's face hard, stepped on his wrist until he let go. Maybe I killed him, but I didn't care at the time. Because..."
She covered her eyes, as if the mere memory of that terrifying scene in her mind made her momentarily blind; in the compulsive recollection, she could only see what pained her.
"...because he walked out of the children's dormitory covered in all that blood... I couldn't imagine what he was or what he had done. I just knew that I had to get Althea out of there. Even if the man in charge hadn't made me swear, I had already decided to protect her at all costs."
She eventually found Althea and luckily caught up with a carriage driver who had intended to leave alone. The carriage rushed out of the orphanage but plummeted off a cliff in the torrential rainstorm that night. During the fall, she clung tightly to the girl, but the impact of the landing threw them apart. The moment she let go, she passed out.
"I thought I was dead because everything was dark in front of me. I thought it was the afterlife, my punishment for killing someone just now. But then I touched my dress, felt the cushion, tasted the rain on my tongue. I lightly touched my eyelids with my fingertips, and the pain shot through my entire body. That's when I knew I was blind."
She struggled to say, "I was blind," as if each syllable was a stubborn rock sinking into the mud, impossible to extract without expending all her strength. Over the past decade, the pain she had hidden deep within herself condensed into her self-awareness of "blindness." When she admitted to becoming a blind woman that blood-soaked rainy night, all the memories associated with it began to reverse and collide with the ashes that had settled in her heart since that night.
Then, she recounted her first encounter with Gondore.
Althea also had her own memories. Still a child at the time, she experienced a more primal fear, but like her fear of the man in the black hat, these memories spread within her year after year. She firmly believed that this disaster was brought by Military Intelligence Section 7, and that man was responsible—partly inferred, partly pure conjecture. In the family established by Gondore and Morticia, under the lantern light of the Night Watchmen, she gradually found the peace that had been lacking in her childhood, albeit a peace that sometimes made her willful. At the same time, her hatred for Military Intelligence Section 7 deepened with time. When Gondore was investigated by Section 7 and subsequently committed suicide, today's anonymous letter written with malicious wording and the attacks on Dalia by Althea with a small knife and a venomous spider had already taken shape.
Dalia adjusted herself slightly, propping the upper part of her back against the pillow. The room's lighting subtly shifted between shades of gray and deep purple.
Jorgen still sat in his original position.
Since Morticia and Althea had left, no one had spoken.
There was nothing to say.
Jorgen had long understood this truth: forgetting the past was meaningless. Ten years, a long time indeed. But too many memories, too much history, possessed a power that transcended the current moment. After finishing a case, he would often think, "This is over, I can move on to the next one." But now he had a sense of displacement: I've been standing still. I've never really escaped the things I thought were over. What exactly happened ten years ago remained a vague cloud in his mind, and this might not be something they needed to deal with right now. However, there was always a vast web slowly tightening, pulling them back into a past they had hoped to forget—Altairia's presence was living proof of that.
He understood that Dalia's sense of displacement would likely be even more profound than his own. After nearly ten years since Dean's death, she had finally gained some independence, though she didn't particularly enjoy it. But what she heard today would drag her back into that world. How many times had he said that coming to Darkshire was just for a mission, that the title of Special Envoy was just a label, that they would return to Stormwind after they handed out the badges—how foolish it all sounded now.
"When Morticia mentioned what happened," she began, "we should have already left Southshore."
The attack on the orphanage had occurred right after Dean's death.
Jorgen nodded, and even to himself, the gesture felt somewhat ridiculous. "Yes."
"I still remember it. Dean took away three babies."
"Listen, Dalia," he said.
She didn't let him finish. "Althea is one of them. She was personally selected by the old man. She should have..."
Jorgen stood up and walked towards the bed.
"...she should have been with Matthias..."
In the past, Jorgen might have thought that Dalia's reaction would elicit further sympathy for Althea. But this time, he set aside his usual analysis, bent down, and embraced her by the shoulders. She turned towards him, her left hand gripping his coat, her forehead resting on his upper arm.
Jorgen could feel Dalia's left hand tightening more and more. If there weren't layers of clothing between them, her nails might have already pierced his palm. He stroked her long hair; the strands appeared like the edges of clouds bathed in the sunset, floating between his fingers.
"When can we leave?" she asked.
"Soon," Jorgen said. "Soon."