Despite his rush of confidence, Daimyon stopped just short of the door. Faith's words were what broke his momentum—her firsts after Thomas captured her where she sat. She spoke to the poet, urging him to reconsider, and her reasoning intrigued him enough to comply. Perhaps the green-haired Infinite was bluffing, as cunning men are wont to do, and in which case the tables could be turned on him in an instant. If it was him being, for the lack of a better phrase,
forcibly embraced, he would have tried to knock the vial out of the villain's hand; Faith however was of a different make. She stabbed Thomas in the arm, drawing blood. No, those were not the correct words, either—
the woman shattered a dam and ushered forth a sea of blood. No. Too dramatic. Daimyon could not find a proper description for the scene that was unfolding before him, nor did he have the time to, for a different cry struck through the air.
Jezebel was shouting and it made the hair stand up on the back of the poet's neck. He tore his eyes away from the pooling blood with much difficulty and turned to the frenzied Infinite, instinctively taking a few steps backwards. There was plenty he did not understand from her outburst, but two things were clear: she liked Thomas to some degree and despised Faith in a much greater one. Did the two women have history prior to this killing game? It was not entirely implausible, even if Daimyon did not know anyone in the group. Of course, for the sake of practicality, he had only ever written about reasonably important individuals; minor acquaintances could have slipped through the cracks. He imagined it was much easier for others to keep track of people.
Lost in tracking down this trail of thought, Jezebel's vulgar command reached him with a second of latency, though he needed no further encouragement. Turning towards the door—and through that motion, gaining one last glance at the bloodied couple—, he hurried out of the study.
————
His room was rather close to the resort; he remembered the way from his morning lookup of the map. On the beeline there, he had not encountered anyone, nor was it his aim to. Others might have thought his goal with escaping from the escalating situation was to bring reinforcements, while in reality, he had long realised that was a futile endeavour. Stepping inside his quarters and locking the door carefully, he consulted his notebook at once. After putting it back in his spacious jacket pocket, he opened the sole drawer of his table. Resting on the hardwood surface was a stack of papers, as well as an e-handbook identical to the poet's. He picked it up gingerly in his hands and examined it, finding it in pristine condition.
Naturally, he reminded himself.
It had been in his room since the tragedy. His thumb pressed the button on its side, and the screen lit up, displaying a familiar name. Merely its sight evoked feelings in the poet, but they all felt distant and...manufactured. Why? He had loved her, after all, had he not? His feelings were supposed to be dependable...
There was no time to fight off the creeping shadows of dread. After ensuring that the device was still fully operational, Daimyon left his room in as much of a haste as he had entered it. He could only hope that the tensions in the study had abated, though it seemed more of a pipe dream with every thought. Regardless, he trotted up to the second floor and only stopped when reaching the door of Marianne's room. Hers was the second to the left when approached from the staircase, unassuming like the rest of them. Standing before it, however, the poet broke out in a cold sweat.
He was simply being unreasonable, went his inner voice.
He had already been here once, and the only things he had found were the love letter and a series of more or less innocuous notes.It took him a good minute to muster enough courage to enter. The door bleeped merrily when he raised the e-handbook towards it, allowing him to push it open. Inside was darkness, the enticing, magnetic kind, but it only veiled emptiness. The late herbalist's room was spotless at first glance, unnaturally so: the result of a thorough cleaning. Daimyon's eyes turned slowly in a fearful scan of the room, soon stumbling upon a spot the meticulous cleaner had missed.
Several crumpled-up pieces of paper were scattered on a table pressed against the wall. A trashcan stood nearby, thus there was no reason to leave them out in the open. Daimyon picked one up and unfolded it carefully: it was filled with lines of delicate, feminine handwriting.
“Marianne...” the poet muttered as he sped through line from line. He deduced quickly that these were her records of...time spent together with him. Though they were not more than a disjointed series of notes, they were enough for his mind to form them into a cohesive narrative.
Whether he wanted to see it or not.
He devoured all the information in a matter of minutes and stood aghast at what he had discovered. The predominant thought at the forefront of his mind was, strangely, not even about Marianne—but his massive mistake. How could he had missed penning down the existence of these notes when he had first been here? He understood his lack of writing from their short but intense period together: the herbalist had kept him in a loop of drug-induced bliss. His visit, however, came after her death, when he was supposed to be of sound mind and body. Then how come he had completely omitted mentioning these defining pieces of the puzzle? His mind gravitated towards the worst possibilities. If he could not trust himself to record everything in due detail, then truly, all hope was lost.
There had to be another reason, he told himself in desperation. With a sweeping motion, he tried to gather all the papers into a stack and accidentally shoved one of them off the table. While he crouched down to recover it, he pondered on how to proceed. As much as he ached to shred every single note, he knew that would open himself up to make the same mistake. He feared that, without explicit physical evidence, he would forget again.
He did not want to forget.
Trembling, he clutched the stack of papers to his chest. After a final look around the room to ensure it was as good as empty, he stepped out the door. Before that, he caught a glance at the clock on the wall—he had already spent some fifteen minutes out of the study. Who knew where the situation escalated in such a length of time? Daimyon tried his best to shut out these thoughts, and most others, as he rushed back to his quarters, laying Marianne's final series of notes in the drawer atop her other ones. His actions were frantic; only when he was standing outside his locked door did he allow himself to take a deep breath. In his hands was the late Infinite's e-handbook: the key to her supposedly empty room and the last trace of her in this world aside from her notes. Could the poet give it away to a man of such malicious conviction?
He had still not made up his mind when he arrived back in the study. He did not speak, merely holding the e-handbook at his side. His eyes jumped from Infinite to Infinite, as if looking for some sort of advice.
