The Detective fixed his gaze upon the oscillating cube, which contracted and expanded in an endless, eye-straining motion. He asked in his monotone voice:
"A geometric prison... Is this the mathematical explanation for this spatial disturbance, or is it merely a decorated coffin, Óengus?"
Óengus exhaled bitterly, pointing a trembling finger towards the tesseract.
"It is a multi-dimensional prison, crafted with boundaries that do not intersect with this reality of ours. Inside, there is no time or space as the Dolans perceive it... There is only 'Aurelius'. I have trapped him in a fissure between moments, because the world could no longer contain both him and his madness."
Here, Ancaues stirred from his shadowed corner. He took a single step forward, allowing the light of the chandelier to fall upon his pale visage. He inquired with a tone that carried a blend of reproach and cold curiosity:
"And why would a magician require a dimensional prison to incarcerate his partner in... extermination? Was the blood you spilled together not sufficient to baptize your fellowship?"
"Fellowship perished with the first celestial quake," answered Óengus, his eyes sunken in painful remembrance. "After that cataclysm, Aurelius began to lose his tether to reality. At first, I believed it to be mere psychological trauma from the loss of his daughter in the upheaval; he became strangely devout, terrifyingly serene, and I cared little for his spiritual choices amidst that hellscape... But he was not worshipping a god we know."
Óengus fell silent for a moment, then whispered a name that seemed to scrape his very throat:
"He would chant a single name in his isolation: AXIOM PRIME. He spoke of an entity representing absolute logic, the infallible cosmic machine."
The Detective leaned his body slightly, making way for Óengus to continue.
"It did not stop at worship. Aurelius, who had been one of the most brilliant and promising magicians of his generation, forsook mana entirely. He broke his staff, ceased all incantations. Instead, he seized vast quantities of Gúrath Nír stone and began constructing intricate mechanical works that defied the laws of physics. He crafted armor of surpassing strength with a cold, black sheen, and heavy weapons unlike anything I had seen in the arsenals of the Three Continents. When I would ask him the source of these designs, he would look at me with his hollow eyes and say: 'I do not invent… I merely execute what I dream. He dictates the blueprints to me in my sleep."
Óengus sighed and continued in a remorseful tone.
"He seemed to me as one possessed by an entity from beyond the stars. I tried to warn Lord Simon; I spoke with Master Mogan… but they mocked me. Simon said Aurelius posed no threat, and Moghn described his new arsenal as mere 'child's play' compared to his own great magic. And perhaps that was true while Mogan lived… he was powerful enough to quell any foolish action with but a glance."
Óengus straightened in his seat and looked at the Detective with eyes filled with pure dread.
"But the scales tipped last night. When the Baron and the Archmagus vanished, Aurelius and his arsenal were left alone in this gallery. And when I saw what he intended to do with those weapons in the absence of his… restraints… I found no solution but to expel him from this dimension and imprison him within this box, lest he turn this land into a hellish furnace."
Finally, the Detective raised his hand, bringing his fingers close to the surface of the oscillating cube.
"So, we do not have a witness here," he said coolly. "We have a time bomb sheathed in geometry."
He placed his notebook on the table, his gaze meeting Óengus's in a silent confrontation, then asked:
"Tell me of last night… Let not a single second fall from your memory."
Óengus closed his eyes, as if summoning a nightmare against his will.
"I was attending to my usual duties, immersed in analyzing the documents and data concerning the 'Red Rose'. Aurelius was supposed to assist me in reviewing the biometric readings, but he did not appear. I waited long, and at midnight, I went searching for him through the winding passages of Juliana… Three hours of wandering yielded nothing."
He took a deep breath and continued.
"At the stroke of three in the morning, I was standing on the western balcony overlooking the mountain range. The air was bitingly cold, and directly before me, Lord Simon's main palace loomed like a mountain of black stone. And suddenly… without any warning, a brilliant light erupted from the heart of the palace. It was no ordinary light, but an absolute whiteness that blinded me momentarily, followed by a sharp shriek that tore through the mountain silence, and a powerful odor of something burning… something I had never smelled before."
Óengus paused, his hand trembling as it held the empty goblet.
"The light lasted only seconds. And when I opened my eyes… I saw the impossible. The palace… was gone. Not reduced to rubble, nor burned, but lost from existence as if it had never been built. I rushed back inside Juliana, panic gnawing at my mind, searching for Aurelius, hoping he had an answer… and there I found him."
Óengus leaned his body towards the Detective, his voice dropping low.
"He was in the western sector, but he was not alone. There was something else with him… a caramelized jester. From it wafted that same scent of conflagration that had emanated from the palace. Its appearance defied all logic; reality itself seemed to melt and shrink around its presence, and I felt towards it a strange sensation… a terrifying familiarity, as if I had seen it somewhere before… The jester held in its possession a distinctive object: a stuffed pink bear."
A silence fell upon all, even I ceased my chewing, as Óengus continued:
"Aurelius turned towards me. It was not the face I knew; he wore a terrifying, mechanistic smile. His strange armor, forged from Gúrath Nír stone, began to coil around his body and fuse with his skin. I retreated three paces, began to weave my magic, tried to reason with him, shouted that he was not in his right mind… but he answered with a voice devoid of human inflection. He said he did not wish to kill me… but to 'update' me. He sought to transform me into something beyond any incantation my art could utter."
Óengus gestured toward the cube on the table.
"He raised his hand towards me and unleashed a pulse of unknown energy. I evaded it by a hairsbreadth, and we engaged in a clash the like of which I had never seen. I knew I could not fell him with a single blow, and with each passing moment, the Gúrath Nír stone grew harder, stronger, colder. The combat lasted… a span. The western sector of Juliana was utterly shattered in its course, its marble pillars reduced to dust. And in the end, with the last of my mana, I managed to bind him within this four-dimensional box before he could finish me."
The Detective looked at the cube that contained "Aurelius," then turned his gaze towards the shadowed corners where the darkness stood thick.
"A jester with the scent of conflagration… and a stuffed bear," the Detective repeated the words slowly, as if weighing their gravity.
He gave a slow nod, as if Óengus's confession were but a missing piece in a larger puzzle. He did not open the box. Instead, he rose with his customary solemnity and declared: "A solitary testimony is a point of view. Truth is the accumulation of echoes. I wish to speak with every soul who dwells within 'Juliana'… now."
One by one, the palace's attendants were summoned to the room that reeked of incense and devastation. The Detective sat behind the ebony table, silently noting his observations, while I watched the terrified faces and the testimonies that began to intertwine like the threads of a spider's web.
I. Lamos (Human – Head Chef)
He entered, wiping his hands on his flour-stained apron. He trembled as he spoke: "Sir Detective, I am but a cook. For ten years, Lord Simon ordered me daily to prepare an additional full meal, placed on a silver tray and left at the kitchen door to be collected by a servant. I never once asked for whom it was, for in this palace, curiosity is the shortest road to the grave. Ten years of lavish food, gone to a destination I know not."
II. Melizia (Elf – Head Housekeeper)
She was more composed, yet her timeless, beautiful features bore a trace of disgust. "Yes, I saw the girl. I cared for her at the Baron's request. At first, I thought she was one of his… unsavory whims, a secret mistress he hid from sight—a strange thought for the Lord, for he cared little for gossip—but what was stranger, sir, was not her confinement. It was that for ten full years, she did not age a single day. The child I saw last night was the very same child I received a decade ago."
III. Ilian (Averon – Adolescent Boy)
He entered with the tall stature of his race, though he was but a child. His mind seemed elsewhere entirely. "The Head Servant, Mr. Butler, is my uncle… but he tells me nothing. The Rose Project? I know nothing of it." Then, with insolence, he reached towards Óengus's repast, snatched a biscuit, and began chewing it while looking at the Detective with indifference, as if the disappearance of an entire palace mattered less to him than the taste of sugar. He added, "I didn't see Lord Simon much, but he was a kind person. He doesn't hurt us like the other masters do. He even lets me play with Nana." When the Detective asked who Nana was, Ilian replied she was his friend, but she wasn't at the villa now, she was in the other village.
IV.Tara (Elf – Maid)
She wept silently. "I know nothing of the project, but I know that my friend Evelyn vanished. Days after the first celestial quake, Lord Simon summoned her to an unknown place… and she never returned. They said she resigned, yet her clothes and belongings remain in her room. Simon took her… as he takes every beautiful thing."
V.Kondactor (Averon – Accountant)
He adjusted his spectacles and peered at his ledgers with concern. "There is a black hole in the Baron's finances, Sir Detective. Precisely ten years ago, an immense sum vanished from the central treasury, and Simon never accounted for its destination. This is logically impossible, for Simon was obsessed with financial detail; he would question me over the price of a single nail. Yet he remained silent about an entire fortune lost in a single night."
VI. Bekniu (Dwarf – Palace Blacksmith)
He reeked of coal and sweat. "Bekniu knows not, strange man. The Baron ordered me to make tools… monstrous tools, sir. Not swords or shields, but intricate restraints, magnetic pincers, pressure chambers forged of cold steel. Bekniu asked him once, for whom are these? He looked at me with a gaze that froze my blood and said: 'Immortality has a price, and Bekniu pays his price with craft, not with questions.'"
VII. Mendak (Human – Captain of the Guard)
He was the only one who still wore his sword. "I knew of the girl, but I knew only the surface. Simon ordered me to guard the passage to her chamber, with an explicit command: 'Kill any who catches a glimpse of her shadow, or hears her voice without express permission.' We were not guards, sir. We were jailers for a secret we did not understand.
After the last witness departed, a heavy silence prevailed. The Detective looked at Óengus, then at the four-dimensional cube.
"The extra meal, the missing funds, the tools of torment, the vanished maid, and the child who does not age… All roads lead to this cube, Óengus."
The Detective turned towards Castor and pointed at the cube. "Castor, I believe the time has come to hear 'Aurelius's' perspective."
As the Detective gave his order, Castor did not wait a second longer. He reached his hand towards the tesseract, and his fingers began to weave an incantation.
"Hold fast," said Castor with a smile, before a light brighter than the sun engulfed us.
Suddenly, there was no "here" or "there." I felt Lagrita's cold hand clasp my wrist with force, and she held not only my body but, I felt, my very consciousness itself before it could fragment.
I will say it as it was, without added philosophy or literary adornment: you do not "enter" a four-dimensional box; you are shattered within it.
The first to vanish was "direction." I fell, but not downwards; I fell into all angles at once, through endless directions. A nausea tore through my guts, not because I was ill, but because my stomach had suddenly decided it wished to be outside my skin without leaving it.
I looked at my hand, and it was not a hand. It was a series of interlocking segments, as if I saw a hundred cross-sections of my hand in a single microscope, moving and disappearing. I saw my heartbeat… my chest was not open, yet I saw the red muscle contracting with perfect clarity, because this accursed place does not acknowledge "inside" and "outside." To the Box, we are but flat drawings on paper, and it looks upon us from above, seeing our viscera, our thoughts, and our skin all at once.
"Breathe, Thomas. Do not look at your legs," came Lagrita's voice, but it did not come to my ears; I felt it resonate directly within the bones of my skull. Were it not for her grip, which served as an anchor for my perception, I would now be but a mote of lost consciousness in this geometric violation.
With Lagrita's aid, I managed to keep my awareness afloat—just enough, clinging to itself and slowly stabilizing. Yes, it still teetered on the edge of dissolution and existence, but I would be whole in the end; it is Lagrita herself who holds me. The geometric chaos slowly resolves into an infinite white expanse, suffused by a placeless, gentle radiance.
That white space is crisscrossed by celestial threads of the finest kind, moving and flowing in the void like the pathways of a living energy or visible lines of longitude and time, lending the place a strange and solemn order.
At the heart of that desolate whiteness rose a being that could only be classified as a divine transgression: Aurelius, or what remained of him. His Gúrath Nír armor was no armor but a parasite that had grown over his body, fused to his bones, so that one could not tell where flesh ended and stone began. The stone's blackness was no ordinary darkness but a hungry void that absorbed light, through which pulsed a faint blue rhythm like the veins of a dead machine. His helmet was sharp and devoid of human features; from its center, a single glass lens shone with a cold, celestial light—an eye of observation, not of life. From its crown erupted branching black protrusions like the malformed wings of a raven, trembling with each thread of energy that traversed the space. His chest lay open to a revolting metallic lattice; ribs of metal contracted like bellows breathing non-existent air. His noble sash had transformed into flayed skin hanging limp, brushing the floor of the Box with a slow, meaningless motion. In his hand, a coiled spear of the same dark material vibrated with a hum that could only be heard when one's attention lapsed. He did not attack; he stood silent, watching us like a machine calculating equations, aware that the human shadows around him concealed a greater terror—thus he waits, he studies, and he prepares.
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Investigation Tools: The Detective's Notebook
A yellowed paper found by a Norwegian hunter in a glass bottle along the western coast.
Content: Heading: Information for the Public*
Date: The Thirteenth of July, 478
"From Óungus to Mendak, all confirm the same tale of hearing a strange hum, their memories suspended like the others."
Page 81 of the Simon Disappearance Case
The Detective's Note: "At least one witness is lying."
End.