Chapter 23: The Face Beneath the Skin
At that moment, everything happened so fast.
Avin had agreed to a date — not from desire, not from excitement, but out of pity, guilt, and the sheer heaviness of Miranda’s pleading eyes. Yet even as he walked beside her, the decision sat in his chest like a strange stone. It wasn’t the date itself that unsettled him — it was her. The fact that Miranda had chosen this moment, after the blood, after the tears, to ask for something so normal, so human.
He already suspected she harbored feelings for him. There had been hints, small signs threaded between conversations they had shared before. But this? This felt different. It was eerie. Not wrong, not monstrous — but uncanny, as though some hidden rhythm in her mind had been broken, and now she beat a drum only she could hear.
There was no way to explain it clearly. It was more than unease — it was like a whisper lodged deep in his skull, muffled, insistent. A warning in a voice he couldn’t quite place.
As his thoughts tangled, a sudden squeeze yanked him back into the present. A sharp pressure on his arm.
He looked down.
Miranda stared up at him, lips pursed, her brow furrowed into a mock scowl. It wasn’t true anger — more the playful chastisement of a girl demanding his attention. Her cheeks puffed slightly, her eyes narrowed, yet her expression lacked the venom of real fury.
Avin forced a smile, awkward and a little too tight. "What?"
"You’re fazed out again," she said, scowling harder for emphasis. "Just like in the room."
"Oh... sorry. I was just thinking, about—"
"Nothing," she cut him off, her lips curling into a small smile. "Think about nothing but me."
He hesitated. Something in her tone struck oddly, an edge of fragility dressed as jest. But he smiled back anyway, weakly. "...Okay."
The moment hung between them before being swallowed by the sight ahead.
The mansion’s gate loomed — enormous, as big as a fortress wall, its iron surface carved with ancient runes. Layers of steel and wood reinforced it, and at its base stood lines of guards armored to the teeth. Their halberds glinted under the torchlight, their boots rigidly planted, discipline heavy in the air.
Then a voice, deep and commanding, cut across the courtyard.
"Young Master."
Avin’s gaze shot upward. The guards had bowed their heads, shifting in unison, parting to reveal a single figure at their center.
The man’s attire set him apart. While the guards wore plates of heavy steel, this one was draped in a black robe, a hood drawn low. When he lifted his head, the torchlight fell across a face marked by a jagged scar that tore down the length of his right eye. His eyes glowed faint crimson — not the glow of warmth, but of something cold, almost inhuman. And his face — it looked incapable of forming a smile, sculpted into permanent severity.
"You are going out of the mansion, Young Master?" His voice carried no inflection, heavy as stone.
"Yes," Avin answered flatly.
The man extended a hand. Towering above Avin, he barely needed to lift it. His palm hovered above Avin’s head like a dark cloud. His eyelids closed, and his lips parted to chant:
"Auxilium, Loki, faciem muta."
The words were whispered, yet they seemed to reverberate inside Avin’s skull.
As the final syllable left the man’s lips, a strange weight pressed down. It felt like an invisible hand laid itself on his skull, fingers sliding cold against his skin.
Then the world stuttered.
His vision went blank.
For the briefest moment, he stood nowhere. A white void swallowed everything.
And there — in the midst of the empty canvas — stood himself
.Not Avin.
Clive.
Brown hair, plain brown eyes, average height. His unremarkable, human, unroyal self. The body he had lived in for all his life on Earth. The body he remembered dying in.
Clive raised a hand to wave, the gesture slow, almost tender. But as the hand lifted, his head suddenly cracked violently to the side with the sound of splintering bone. His face twisted, the skin tearing at unnatural angles.
And then it began.
As though Clive’s body were only a suit to be shed, something clawed its way out.
A creature — impossibly slim, grotesquely elongated. Its skin hung loose and wet, pale as rotted parchment, stretched so thin its bones pierced through in jagged protrusions. The ribs jutted like broken fence posts, the spine arched unnaturally. Its legs bent backward, joints twisted the wrong way, forcing it to crawl with two legs and one arm pressed to the floor for support. Even hunched low, it towered longer, larger than Avin.
Its surface glistened, slime coating the sharp edges of its frame, as if it had no organs, no true body — just bones straining against a thin membrane of flesh.
Its face was hollow. Eye sockets sunk deep, black pits ringed in raw red flesh. And from those hollows came a gaze — empty yet piercing.
Then it burst fully free of Clive’s body.
Blood sprayed outward, soaking the void in a crimson rain. The chest split, ribs snapping wide with wet cracks, organs tearing as though shredded by claws. Flesh peeled back, spraying a torrent of gore across the white canvas. The sound was nauseating — like fabric being ripped apart, but wetter, thicker.
The creature stood in the ruin of Clive’s body. Its head tilted unnaturally, vertebrae snapping with every motion. And then — it grinned. Its mouth spread impossibly wide, tearing further than skin should allow, jagged teeth slick with blood.
Avin stumbled back, breath strangled in his throat. His chest heaved, but no air came. His ears rang with a thin, piercing shriek that grew louder and louder.
Then — like glass shattering — the vision dissipated.
The white void, the gore, the grin — gone.
His eyes snapped back open. The scarred man still loomed, his hand drawing away.
"It is done, Young Master."
Avin blinked rapidly, gasping silently, his body stiff. "...Huh?"
The man’s crimson eyes bored down into him. "Ah yes... what?" Avin stammered, his words disjointed.
The man slowly raised a small mirror and pointed it toward Avin. "The disguise is finished."
Avin’s mind stuttered back into motion. He looked down at his hands, then back into the glass.
A thrill ran down his spine.
Looking back at him was not Avin. Not the young noble boy with pale hair and strange eyes.
It was Clive.
His old body. The face he had lived with his entire life. The very image he had just seen ripped apart in his vision.
"What the fuck is happening?" he muttered under his breath.
His hands rose to his face, trembling. He touched his nose, his eyelids, his ears. The mirror-Clive did the same. Every movement matched.
He looked up at the scarred man, his words tumbling out half-panicked. "I look like this?"
The man’s brows furrowed faintly. "Yes. Do you not like the look? I can try to change it for you."
Avin flinched back, hand still pressed to his face. "No, no... I like this."
The man’s expression did not change. "Well then."
He stepped aside. The massive gate rumbled. First the steel doors groaned as they slid upward, gears grinding. Then, behind them, a thick wooden barrier shifted and opened, revealing the world beyond the mansion.
Avin stood frozen for a moment, staring into the open air as though it might swallow him. The cold wind brushed his skin again, tugging him forward.
Then a tug on his arm.
Miranda.
She smiled faintly, pulling him with her. And so, still haunted by blood and hollow grins, Avin followed her out of the mansion gates, and into the town.