Chapter 568: A Widespread Anomaly

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A palpable, unsettling silence filled the living room on the ground floor of the house. The eerie quiet seemed to mirror the strange stillness that had settled over the entire street outside, as if the world had collectively held its breath. Inside, the room retained its nighttime ambiance: mechanical dolls and automated tin men, usually animated by a blend of springs and magical mechanisms, now stood perfectly still. They appeared frozen in the middle of their cleaning tasks, abruptly interrupted by some mysterious event.

Guiding Alice cautiously down the staircase, Duncan was both anxious and on high alert. As they reached the bottom step, their eyes scanned the dimly lit room. Each step seemed to echo unnaturally in the silence, amplifying the room’s already eerie atmosphere.

Alice clung tightly to Duncan’s clothing, casting a sidelong glance at a wooden puppet designed to look like a maid. One of its hands gripped the stair railing as if it had been cleaning just moments before. The puppet was now frozen in a slightly hunched position, a cleaning bucket at its feet. Like all the other mechanical servants in the room, it had abruptly stopped moving. The usual ticking and grinding sounds from these automatons had also ceased.

The unnatural stillness made Alice uneasy. She couldn’t shake the fear that the puppet’s eyes might suddenly turn to look directly at her, just like in the many horror stories she had read. The thought sent a cold shiver down her spine.

“This is so unnerving,” she whispered to Duncan, who was a few steps ahead of her. “These puppets seemed so benign during the daytime, but seeing them all frozen like this is terrifying. It would be even scarier if they suddenly sprang back to life right now.”

Duncan glanced at the motionless maid puppet. Alice remained unaware that her comments might be seen as odd in this situation.

Shifting his focus, Duncan began to mentally track the magical “marks” he had placed on people like Morris and Vanna to keep tabs on them. Although these marks were still flickering within his senses, they were behaving erratically. One moment, it felt like these marks were right inside the house or close by. The next, they seemed to have teleported to a distant location, as if they had instantly been transported to the opposite side of the city. Duncan found this erratic behavior deeply unsettling; it was unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

Despite his best efforts to reach out to these distant marks to communicate with Nina and the others, he was met with failure. He couldn’t accurately pinpoint the exact locations or statuses of these magical markers. His calls either went unanswered or elicited only a weak and meaningless response for a brief instant—a situation that was entirely new to him.

However, Duncan took some solace in the fact that he was beginning to understand the unpredictable behavior of these magical marks. Although he was still unable to determine their exact locations, he felt that with some adjustments and learning, he would eventually be able to establish precise contact. Moreover, the continued activity of these marks suggested that those who bore them were not in immediate danger, offering him a sliver of comfort amid all the uncertainty.

As Duncan moved further into the room, his senses keenly alert to the fluctuating nature of the magical marks he’d placed on his friends, he was abruptly jolted out of his focus by a subtle yet distinct clicking sound. Both he and Alice stopped dead in their tracks as if they had simultaneously sensed the break in the room’s eerie stillness.

Quickly turning around, Duncan zeroed in on the source of the noise with laser-like focus. To his astonishment, the wooden puppet maid, which had been completely motionless next to the staircase railing just moments before, was now showing signs of life. Its head turned in a jerky, mechanical manner, similar to how a rusted machine might move. Its glassy, vacant eyes seemed to scan the room as though looking for something—or someone.

Alice, already on edge, nearly lost all semblance of self-control. “Oh my God, it’s actually moving!”

Exasperated, Duncan shot back, “Why are you scared? You’re a living doll yourself, aren’t you?”

A lightbulb seemed to go off in Alice’s head. “Ah, right. Why should I be afraid?”

Disregarding Alice’s momentary lapse in reasoning, Duncan refocused his complete attention on the gradually animating wooden puppet. A wave of realization washed over him as he sensed a familiar magical aura emanating from the puppet.

“Lucy? Is that you?” Duncan cautiously inquired.

The puppet’s eyes seemed to sharpen their focus on Duncan. Its wooden jaw moved awkwardly, and a slightly off-key voice emanated from it. “Ah, I suspected you were around. But my vision is terrible in this temporary ‘medium.’ I should never have compromised on the quality of my household help. So, what’s the situation on your end? I felt your magical calls, but the connection was severed each time before I could respond.”

“Things are strange here—the house is empty, and everyone else seems to have disappeared,” Duncan quickly responded, summarizing the anomalies he and Alice had witnessed inside the home and along the street. “In essence, it looks like the problem is with you folks; Alice and I are still in our reality.”

After a few seconds of silence, the puppet replied, “It would seem so. We appear to be inside the ‘heart’ of this anomaly while you’re still anchored in the real world, merely observing its effects.”

“Are others with you?” Duncan inquired urgently.

“No, it’s just me. We appear to have been separated,” Lucretia said from within the puppet.

“What does your environment look like?” Duncan asked, pressing for more details.

“I’m surrounded by a forest—trees, vines, and endless greenery,” she explained. “It’s remarkably similar to the forest we encountered in Master Taran El’s dream realm, but the atmosphere feels different, almost as if it’s been altered in some way.”

Duncan’s mind raced as he processed this new information, piecing together the strange happenings of the evening with the mysterious forest that Lucretia now described. The situation was growing more complicated by the second, but at least he now had a connection, however unstable, to someone else who was experiencing this baffling event.

……

The forest was bathed in an otherworldly twilight hue, casting the whole environment in an unsettling light that seemed both mournful and chaotic. Flecks of sunlight managed to pierce through the dense canopy above, but these rays were dim and nebulous, doing little to lift the forest’s brooding atmosphere.

In the far-off distance, the sporadic sounds of birds calling or unseen animals rustling through the underbrush could be heard. Occasionally, the snap of a tree branch would break the near silence. Though outwardly nothing seemed out of place, Lucretia, who found herself at the center of this enigmatic landscape, felt a tangible tension hanging thick in the air. It was as though the very atmosphere was imbued with a sense of foreboding as if it were anticipating something yet to occur.

She clutched a short magical wand in her hand, akin to a conductor’s baton, which allowed her to maintain a magical link with a puppet she had crafted herself. Through this puppet, she was communicating with her father in the reality far removed from her current situation. “Papa, the forest here is thick with a tension that’s almost suffocating, accompanied by a sense of dread that’s almost palpable. It’s an emotional undercurrent that I can sense with my magical perception. This place is eerily similar to the dream realm we saw in Master Taran El’s vision, but without the celestial intruders we saw there. Also, I can feel something deep within the forest calling to me… I’m moving towards it now.

“As for any other landscape or buildings? There are none. All I see are towering trees and thick foliage. Although my line of sight is limited by the density of the vegetation, I’m convinced that this forested ‘otherworld’ stretches far beyond just a few city blocks. What you’re witnessing in your reality is likely just a fragment—a small portion that has somehow bled into our world.”

Lucretia paused, attentively listening to her father’s distant words. After a moment, she gave a thoughtful nod. “I’m inclined to agree, Papa. This may well still be the same ‘Dream of the Nameless One’ that the annihilation cultists talk about. But this time, the circumstances are very different. When we previously entered that dream, we used Master Taran El’s consciousness as a kind of gateway. According to the information you obtained from those cultists, an elf’s consciousness is usually required as a bridge to access this dream realm. However, what’s unfolding now is entirely unprecedented and strange.”

Breaking her contemplation, she raised her wand and gently tapped a nearby vine. Reacting as though infused with life, the vine began to writhe and stretch, forming itself into a makeshift bridge that spanned a deep ravine in front of her.

As she stepped carefully onto this newly formed vine bridge, she continued her conversation. “I haven’t yet located this dream’s ‘dreamer,’ but if the laws that govern dream realms hold true, I should be very near them now.”

Abruptly, she stopped in her tracks.

Footsteps crunched suddenly through the underbrush—so abruptly, in fact, that it felt as though one moment there was utter solitude and the next, a figure had appeared, breaking the silence by stepping on dry twigs and rustling leaves as they approached her.

Lucretia’s senses sharpened in an instant, her magical instincts automatically triggering a series of defensive spells around her before she even pivoted to face the source of the noise. Her grip on her wand tightened as she turned her gaze toward the direction of the footsteps.

To her surprise, what confronted her was neither a malevolent cultist infiltrating this dreamscape nor a nightmarish creature born of the dream’s own fabric.

Instead, a mysterious elven woman stood at a short distance from her under the dappled shade of a sprawling tree. She looked both startled and defensive.

Lucretia’s initial thought was that this newcomer might be the ‘dreamer,’ the conscious entity serving as the gateway between this dreamscape and reality. However, she quickly noticed something unsettlingly incongruent about this stranger. She was dressed in a suit of lightweight armor that didn’t correspond to any specific city-state or historical period that Lucretia was familiar with. Her pale golden hair was woven with strands that emitted a soft, bluish glow, and the weapon she clutched—a hybrid between a spear and a long axe—was unlike anything Lucretia had seen, either in the multicultural port city of Wind Harbor or anywhere else.

As Lucretia hesitated, taking in these details, the mysterious elven woman finally broke the silence, her voice laced with caution and seriousness: “Didn’t you receive the order to evacuate? Why are you still outside the Silent Wall?”

Lucretia’s eyes narrowed. The situation had just grown exponentially more complicated.

……

Back in the real world, under the interplay of daylight and the distinct, eerie glow unique to Wind Harbor, Duncan and Alice navigated the city’s streets at a brisk pace.

In Alice’s arms, a puppet head chattered incessantly.

The voice of Lucretia emanated from this talking puppet head, providing live updates from her perplexing journey ‘on the other side.’

“Currently, I’m in the company of a mysterious elf who just appeared out of nowhere. She seems unaware that I am not of her kind and has let down her guard quite easily. We are en route to a location she refers to as the ‘Silent Wall.'”

The sight was downright surreal—a living puppet dashing through the semi-darkened streets, cradling another puppet’s head that wouldn’t stop talking. Its voice was oddly distorted, a result of the limitations of the material from which it was crafted. Any sane observer stumbling upon this bizarre tableau would likely question their own grip on reality.

Alice, however, seemed unfazed.

Keeping pace with Duncan, she even wore an expression that could be described as slightly cheerful. Perhaps, after all, she had grown accustomed to the peculiarity of carrying heads—be they her own or those of others.

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