When Aiden woke up, none of them were surprised to see he was completely healed from his wounds. The pain in his ankle had long since subsided during their journey to the witch's hut, and even the scratches on his calf had vanished without a trace.
"Right," Aiden said to the wisps as he folded his cape into his backpack. "You didn't get a chance to tell me how Riven helped with my wounds."
Riven and Lucius gazed at one another, their wispy bodies flickering a reddish gray light of dishonesty.
"Uhm..." Lucius chuckled. "Ah! Riven fell asleep on a potent hot spring for a hundred years, and so, uhm--yeah. He's a flying ambulance."
Aiden nodded his head. "That's nice. At least I get to be clean for someone who needs to get punched every single day." He laughed, and the two wisps awkwardly followed through.
How were they supposed to tell the boy he was getting beaten up every day to help them recover their true forms? So, they all decided to lie and hope he wouldn't eviscerate them himself once he got stronger.
Lucius took his time saying farewell to his loyal snakes. Although most of them couldn't come close due to what Aiden had in his hands, they all hissed back when the boy waved goodbye. Caelum, on the other hand, took a quick trip to town while waiting for Aiden to wake up and hasn't returned yet.
"Where in the world is Caelum?" Lucius hissed, it had been an hour since their agreed time of departure. "Screw that guy, where are we going next?"
Both Lucius and Aiden looked at Riven.
"We're going back to the mansion."
Riven seemed to be in deep thoughts, so the two of them saved their questions and just went with what was told.
Their trip out of the forest was a breeze, thanks to the stinky box they had with them. Right after they stepped out of the forest and began following a paved path, Caelum came flying from the forest.
"Hey!" he complained. "You didn't wait for me!"
Lucius hissed at him. "No one said they're waiting. Who asked you to wander around?"
Caelum beamed a red light to spite Lucius before hovering closer to Aiden. "Hey!" he said. "Guess what."
Aiden looked at him with a dull expression. "What?"
Caelum went about his trip to the entire town, telling stories about seeing a suspicious looking bunch of people with heavy tattoos, hearing a few gossips about a woman and her husband who was cheating on her with their neighbor, and a few more gossips.
"Come on," Riven said. "Just get to the point, man."
Caelum bobbed himself. "Oh, right?" he said. "I glanced at the town's clock and guess what!"
Aiden slumped, his back arched on Mr. Busty's back. "We've been trying to guess for a while now."
"It's supposed to be Wednesday today, right?" he turned to all of them, and they all nodded. "Nope! It's already Friday. We've been inside that forest for four days!"
"Oh, really?" Aiden said, "That's shocker."
"Right?!"
In all honesty, Aiden was not too surprised to hear Caelum's news. There were more questionable phenomena going on inside that forest than its time zone. And for someone whose days always passed aimlessly, wasting three days wasn't much of a big deal for Aiden.
"Where did you get that coin, anyway?" Caelum asked Aiden.
"That maid gave it to me," Aiden said. "It's been bugging me for sometime."
"That ugly maid?" Lucius asked him. "She must have fished that out from where she lives—trash."
Caelum laughed. "True. But at least it saved us," he hovered atop Mr. Busty's nose, "At least it saved us, and bought off Mr. Busty."
"It's suspicious," Aiden added. "Everything that had happened so far, she had at least a small part."
Riven flickered in agreement. "You're right. It took us so long to notice, but her involvements are far from coincidental."
They had a realization that it was also the maid that handed them the books for wizardry. She handed him a coin they soon used, and she was also the one who poured the milk for Aiden—as if she knew what was gonna happen. Or had been planning what was supposed to happen next.
"It all makes sense," Aiden admitted. "I wouldn't have bothered going to the academy if she didn't take Butler Mitch's death lightly. I wanted to make her apologize for what she did... and now we're here."
All of them fell silent. With a few more questions in their minds, there was one question that joined their thoughts.
"Were we..." Lucius voiced out, "Manipulated?"
"I believe so," Caelum said. "What the hell?"
Both Riven and Aiden simply shook off the issue while the two wisps went on for hours, mad about the fact that a mortal had manipulated them into doing something without them knowing.
"I guess that maid's the reason we're going back to the mansion," Lucius murmured to himself.
When they reached the mansion, Aiden gave no damn about what was going on around him. He marched inside that mansion, not minding the guards that roamed around him as he pushed the gates open. He even stumbled upon a few maids whose faces were painted with utter surprise. Well, that was understandable, everyone knew he was supposed to be grounded. They must have thought he'd still be rotting in his room by now.
"She's not here," he said after running around the mansion for hours, their target still out of sight. "I should've realized there was something odd about her."
All the maids gossip about him but he'd never seen that maid talk to someone else. He'd never seen her dusting paintings or vases in the hallways. The way she sneakily poured him a glass of milk was also questionable from the fact that she immediately blended into the crowd. He'd only seen her whenever she barged inside his room, yapping and yapping—which was in fact, odd, now that he thinks about it. No one gave a damn about him, and he'd lived his life like a lone wolf. That maid just appeared out of nowhere, on a random day, and began tormenting him like a pest.
Aiden decided to go to his room. If that's where she always pestered him, that's where he'll wait. But a stumble-block immediately greeted them upon their return.
"Oops," Aiden said, his hands on the rusty metal door handle, "Right. We locked the door from the inside. We can only break it open now."
All of them gruntled. Obviously, there was no way for them to open it from the outside given that Aiden was the only one with a physical usable body. And climbing down from the attic of a four-story mansion needed no sweat, but there was no way he'd be able to climb back up without much struggle.
"Well," Riven said. "We expected they'd barged in your room by now. But now I see they didn't."
"Those monsters!" Lucius said. "Do they really intend to lock you inside that room for a week. "With no water and no food?!"
Aiden nodded his head. "I already expected that. I can even go on for weeks with nothing," he smiled proudly, earning a few glares from the wisps.
"You know that's sad story to tell with a smile on your face, right?" Caelum said. "No one's normal in this house."
Aiden grabbed his things and opened the door of the nearest room from where he was. It was locked so he went onto the next room, and then to the next, until he arrived at the center of the hallway, and a room had a broken knob.
Aiden entered and found an empty room about ten times the size of the attic he bad lived in. There was no furniture. Not even a single bed. Only a huge balcony greeted him, and it had a good view of the entire town.
"Woah!" Caelum said. "That's a nice balcony! We can see the entire town from up here!"
Aiden took his time taking in the view and breathing the fresh air. It offered so much relief given that he'd spent a lot of time inside that witch's hut with her foul breath, and the entire dark forest was no better, smelling like moss and mud.
"We can draw a map of the town from here," Riven said.
Caelum laughed. "A map? There's no need for that. Mr. Busty knows this land like the back of his mind. He can take us everywhere if you just ask. And if he's not feeling—ya know—that."
The four of them took their time replacing the air inside their lungs. They wanted no recollection of the atrocities they went through inside that cabin.
"Oh, right," Aiden remembered the question that had slipped out of his mind a couple times. "I've been wanting to ask but keep on forgetting," he faced the three wisps. "What's a calix?"