Chapter 15

Isaac forced his fading, hazy vision to focus on those cold, depthless blue eyes. To swear by the River of the Moon was to sign a contract no soul could ever break. Did I choose a life of misery, existing merely as a vessel for this creature to drain every new moon? Or do I accept a clean, final death? This was the prince’s singular mercy, his only gamble. If I hesitate, Kaiyan won’t ask again. The hand around his throat tightened, the prince’s resolve turning the air to ice.

Faced with the shadow of oblivion, Isaac did not linger in indecision.

“I swear… by the River of the Moon. Every new-moon night… I will come to you.”

CLANK

In that instant, something mechanical and cold shuddered into place within the depths of his heart. Isaac recognized the sensation; he had felt it years ago, when he had sworn the same oath to his mother. It was the weight of a binding vow, a spectral shackle impossible to discard by one’s own volition. It could only be severed if both parties mutually agreed that the necessity for the oath had evaporated.

“Good,” the prince muttered, his interest in the room and its occupant vanishing instantly. He turned his back to Isaac and gestured toward the hulking beasts. “My business is concluded. Take me back to my palace.”

「But dawn has not broken yet. His wish was for a night with a beauty.」

The prince’s gaze snapped back to Isaac, dripping with palpable derision. He scanned Isaac from head to toe, the expression on his face articulating a silent, cruel verdict: You truly believe you are worthy of such a thing?

“With that face, you could never dare hope for such a prize,” the prince drawled, his voice tinged with a predatory amusement. “However, I find myself in a remarkably generous mood. If you desire it, I could make a special exception and fuck you once—”

“No! I have no business left! Return before the dawn takes you—what are you waiting for? Escort him out, now!” Isaac roared at the beasts, his panic cutting through the prince’s taunt.

With an indignant snort, the prince turned, and the beast with teacup-sized eyes lowered its back to receive him. It grumbled incessantly about the absurdity of being summoned only to be dismissed, but it paced toward the window regardless. As it neared the frame, the curtains parted to reveal not the room’s familiar view, but a yawning, pitch-black void. The beast and its rider stepped into the darkness and dissolved as if they were nothing more than smoke.

The silence that followed was suffocating.

Isaac stared at the empty, blackened window until his legs gave out, and he collapsed to his knees. He remained there, his mind hollow, suspended in a state of catatonic shock.

Whether hours passed or merely seconds, he could not tell. His consciousness felt bleached and frayed until the faint, discordant murmurs of the beasts dragged him back to the surface.

「I think he is sleeping with his eyes open. He has been frozen like that for ages.」

「Humans are prone to dozing when they are warm and full, are they not? The room is cozy, and he ate well. It is only natural.」

「Ah, that explains why he chased the beauty away so quickly. The poor thing was sleepy.」

“…”

Isaac, still rigid, flickered his eyes toward the creatures hovering inches from his face. They shrieked—「Kyaa! You terrified us!」—and scrambled backward, a flurry of limbs and fur.

“You damned, ungrateful, rotten…” Isaac choked on the words, unable to settle on a curse sufficient to convey his rage. Overcome by a toxic mix of resentment and sheer injustice, he crumbled. He threw himself onto the floor, his frame racking with heavy sobs.

The beasts simply watched, their massive, vacant eyes blinking in confusion as they pondered his agony. The ringleader of the group, the very creature that had orchestrated the night’s nightmare, crept forward.

「Why are you weeping? Are you injured?」 it asked, and before Isaac could recoil, its sandpaper tongue rasped across his skin. The abrasive texture scraped against his raw flesh, sending a jolt of agony through him.

“Ahhh! That burns! Get away, you damned cat!”

「It burns? But why? It is completely healed.」

“What do you mean, healed—”

Isaac’s protests died in his throat. As he flailed, he suddenly realized the truth: the gore and agony were gone. His broken arm was whole, and the puncture wounds on his neck had sealed entirely. The only remains of the night were a few superficial scratches where the beast’s tongue had not reached.

“…”

He stared down at his own skin in profound disbelief, his sanity unraveling for a second time. Reality had become a labyrinth, and he no longer possessed the tools to tell where the nightmare ended and the world began.

As Isaac remained trapped in a stupor, the three beasts continued their incessant chattering beside him, their voices laced with sharp, predatory amusement.

「Did you hear him just now? He called us damned cats, didn’t he?」

「He did. We granted his every wish and mended his broken body, yet he curses us in return. What a shameless wretch. We really should chew him up, starting from the head…」

「Let us be the bigger souls and forgive him. Our hearts are as broad as the sea, after all. Besides, he is merely a child who will soon be cast into a prison to have his blood slowly drained.」

「That is true. If he proceeds to his work at the palace and wanders those halls until he inevitably runs into the prince, the prince will surely toss him into the dungeon beneath the palace at once, oath or no oath.」

「Of course. No matter how expansive the royal palace may be, if he keeps moving through its corridors, they are bound to cross paths eventually.」

Isaac, who had been staring into the void while silent tears streamed down his cheeks, suddenly flinched. Within his field of vision, he spotted the flint lying neatly on the edge of the table. Still anchored to his spot by exhaustion, Isaac began inching his backside across the floor until his fingers could finally seize the cold stone.

“You absolute, cursed cats…” Isaac hissed, his voice raw with a mix of fury and despair.

With the steel clutched in one hand and the flint in the other, Isaac glared at the beasts. They all pricked up their ears, watching him with an unsettling, synchronized intensity.

“Did you truly believe you could orchestrate this misery and escape unscathed? I possess one final wish, do I not? You swore an oath to grant any wish I desired, didn’t you…?”

「W-what… what is it that you truly desire?」

The last beast—the one that had yet to fulfill a request—rolled its eyes with palpable unease, clearly rattled by the dark, simmering malice radiating from Isaac’s gaze.

“My desire is… for you wretched bastards to be confined upside down within a pepper shaker for three entire days and nights, left to sneeze yourselves into absolute, blinding agony—”

CLANG

“—is precisely what I intended to wish for, you monsters.”

Isaac ground his teeth, watching as all three beasts shuddered violently, every strand of their fur and all three tails standing bolt upright in terror. The creatures stared fixatedly at Isaac’s mouth, their faces pulsing with frantic anxiety.

“Wait… could I perhaps utilize this final wish to invalidate the binding oath I swore by the River of the Moon…?”

「No.」

To Isaac’s desperate inquiry, the response arrived far too firm and utterly merciless. Isaac slumped, his spirit fracturing as he muttered, “I suppose I expected that much.”

“Then… could you at least erase the memory of me from the prince’s mind? Everything he witnessed tonight?”

「That is possible, but even then, you are still bound to present yourself to the prince every new moon. What will you say when you suddenly materialize by magic in front of a prince who has lost all memory of your existence?」

He would be incredibly fortunate if he managed to survive the encounter long enough to even offer a coherent explanation.

When the beast, which had seemed nothing but dim-witted and useless until this moment, sharply dissected the fatal flaw in his logic, Isaac felt a fresh wave of despair and clutched his head. The fragile hope he had entertained evaporated. Unless everything that transpired tonight was merely a fever dream, Isaac’s life had become an endless, agonizing sentence. In that realization, he recognized he had one last wish remaining. He had to use it to secure whatever meager scraps of peace he could salvage.

“Then my final wish is this…”

He lacked the luxury of time. He had to decide before the sun crested the horizon. He needed to think with absolute precision.

Somehow, even in this decimated state and these impossible circumstances, Isaac still had to earn a living. Once the sun rose and the world flooded with daylight, he was expected to return to his labor. He had to return to the very palace where that man lurked—where they might collide at any given moment.

“Ensure that the prince remains entirely oblivious to my appearance tonight. Let him not remember a single physical details of who I am.”

At the very least, until the next new moon arrived, he could exist in peace during the daylight hours. Whatever the circumstances, Isaac was determined to live as peacefully and happily as his shattered reality would permit.

The beast nodded with unsettling readiness.

And then… nothing seemed to change.

There was no visible alteration in the room, but for a brief, flickering moment, the beast’s oversized eyes seemed to glow with an inner light. Then, it narrowed them, signaling the completion of the pact.

「Your wish has been granted.」

Strength drained from Isaac’s shoulders, leaving him hollowed out. The flint rolled weakly from his slack hand, skittered across the floor, and came to a final, silent stop. Staring at the stone blankly, he muttered as if speaking to the shadows.

“Is this flint strictly tethered to the new moon…?”

「Yes.」

“What kind of pathetic, miserable treasure is this…? It even forces a cruel time limit upon its master…”

At Isaac’s disdainful murmur, all three beasts erupted into a sudden, collective rage, yowling at him in chorus.

「Do you have any concept of what an exceptionally rare, legendary treasure this is? It cannot even channel a quarter of its true potency because it is currently missing the tinderbox!」

“The tinderbox…”

「Yes. Retrieve the tinderbox for us. Once you do, this magical steel will be restored to its full glory.」

「Once the magical steel is fully restored, it becomes a peerless treasure, unequaled in this world. It possesses the power to… transform a half-witch into a pure-blood witch.」

The beast whispered that final revelation like a dark, forbidden secret. The instant the words registered, Isaac’s body recoiled in a faint tremor. He stared at the creature in utter disbelief, and the beast continued in a low, resonant voice.

「Yes. You, too, can ascend to become a pure-blood witch. Once you reach that exalted state, you will be capable of boarding the moon-shard boat and sailing away to the distant Land of the New Moon.」

How is this even possible? Isaac wondered, his mind reeling as he stared at the beast, trying to bore holes through its very soul. His eyes widened, darting from one beast to the next, and each of them nodded in somber affirmation.

「Half a year remains. The moon-shard boat, which arrives only once every seven years, will reach this place again in six months. If you manage to board it, you can finally reunite with Kali—your mother.」

「And if you cross into a realm that lies beyond human lands, the River of the Moon cannot follow you there. The oath you swore here will effectively become null and void once you have successfully crossed over.」

「You can finally achieve true, absolute freedom.」

The beasts whispered their promises into the stillness. Isaac remained frozen, staring at them, standing dazed as if he had been struck by a powerful enchantment.

Dawn crept over the horizon, and the first light of day began to break.

Morning sunlight pierced the window that had been pitch-black mere moments ago, spilling into the room with an unforgiving clarity. The feast, the opulent furniture, and all the artifacts of his midnight terror vanished, leaving Isaac alone in his original, shabby living space. Sitting before him were three small, ordinary black cats.

They looked at Isaac with their enormous, bottomless eyes and let out thin, plaintive meows.

—”Bring us the tinderbox.”

—”Bring us our treasure.”

Isaac simply stared at them for a long, agonizingly long time.

***