Solborn: The Eternal Kaiser

The door behind them groaned shut, sealing off the sounds of the main chamber, save for the occasional distant rumble that made the walls shiver. Celestine and Rosaline were tearing the air apart in there, each explosion rolling down the corridor like the growl of a storm.

Kaiser's smile was already there, but the tremors only made it sharpen. Everything was lining up, each piece falling exactly where he wanted it.

Before Celestine had ever crossed his path, he had learned much from Maximilian, too much, some might say. One truth in particular had lingered with him: Hieronymus Bosch had once possessed his most valuable treasure… and had hidden it. Kaiser had every intention of finding it. Interrogation, if the man still lived in mind enough to speak; another method, darker and far less preferable, if the first failed.

He allowed himself a low chuckle as they walked, the sound swallowed quickly by the corridor's stillness. Celestine had taken the bait so readily, and exactly as planned. The little book he'd placed in her hands was one of five. Each held the same sparse information on Rosaline's origins, but with one key difference: a single line on how she could be defeated.

In one, the margin claimed she could only be harmed by a woman. In another, only by a man. A third had no weakness listed at all. The fourth claimed she weakened when facing multiple opponents. The fifth was left empty, the silence of its pages designed to force the reader to fill it themselves with doubt.

He had written the weaknesses long before setting foot in this place, the variations prepared so he could select whichever "truth" best suited the battlefield he found himself in. Celestine had been given the first because it served his purpose now.

If Rosaline was indeed what he suspected, then knowledge of her true limits, if she had any, was too valuable to give freely. Better that everyone, friend or foe, moved according to his version of reality, until he decided otherwise.

The hall they moved through now was narrow. The air was clean in a way that felt unnatural, like a maid had been locked in here for days and told to scrub until she reached the marrow of the stone. Not a speck out of place.

The walls, however, bore a dozen crude paintings. In truth, they looked like something a bored child would smear together on cheap parchment with poor proportions and colors bleeding into each other in muddy blotches. Yet Kaiser's gaze lingered on them all the same. He knew what they were. More importantly, he knew what they would be worth when the time was right. Not now. The vizbots were always watching, and the Liberatorium would notice their absence. At the end of the Tale… that would be different.

They passed a small table, the end of the hall drawing near. Beyond, the space opened into a room with no door.

And then he saw a small figurine on a table that stood in the center of the hallway, lit by some unseen source.

It was him.

Or at least, something made to be him, mirrored perfectly in posture, in bearing, even in the set of the shoulders beneath a familiar military cloak. Every thread of the uniform was identical to the one he had worn in Nebrosa. The hair, the jaw, the coldness in the eyes, every detail exact.

Except…

It was a woman.

Just slightly narrower in the shoulders, just slightly slimmer in the frame, and with a bust that was, by all accounts, more than "slightly" larger. Aria's steps faltered. She blinked, then made a sound in her throat halfway between a scoff and a laugh. "...You never told me you had a sister, Kaiser."

He didn't look at her, but she could see the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth. Her grin sharpened. "Or is this some kind of… fantasy you forgot to mention? A little self-admiration taken too far?"

"Quiet," he murmured. But his tone wasn't sharp, but more distracted. Inside, his thoughts slid into a place Aria couldn't follow.

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'It's perfect.'

Every inch, every ratio, every difference intentional. The work of a mind not merely mimicking, but understanding him to the point of insanity. To render him in another form entirely yet keep the core so untouched...

Did Bosch make this? Did he dream this, or is it a message? A joke? A warning?

The air shifted, and with it came a voice. "Oh, visitors. How rare, how very rare."

From the far side of the hall, she stepped forward. The figure moved with an elegance that was neither slow nor hurried, every footfall placed as though rehearsed in advance. She was tall, her proportions stretched just shy of the human ideal. Pale flesh gleamed like carved bone, riddled with circular hollows that pulsed red, as if her body itself were a lantern of wounds.

Her hair spilled wild and red, alive as flame, framing a face turned skyward in rapture or madness. Crimson eyes shimmered wet, heavy with tears that never fell.

A ragged skirt of flesh and fabric clung to her hips, unraveling in jagged petals. Her legs tapered into sharp points.

She curtsied, her skirt pooling unnaturally, the fabric dripping down her ankles like a spill of ink.

"Masamia," she said, rising again. Her voice was the same soft bell, but there was a texture to it, an echo that made the syllables feel painted onto the air. "Maid of this gallery. Its caretaker, its heartbeat. And you, my guests, are most… timely."

Kaiser's lips twitched into a polite half-smile, though his eyes never left hers. "I imagine you say that to everyone who walks in."

"I have never said it before," Masamia replied without missing a beat, her mouth curling into the faintest smile. "Please, come. The gallery must greet you properly."

She turned, her long fingers brushing the edge of the doorframe as she led them onward.

Aria's gaze flicked to him as they walked, noting the faint, almost indulgent smile playing at his lips.

"What has you smiling so much?" she asked at last, keeping her tone light, though her voice betrayed a trace of unease.

Kaiser didn't even glance her way. His eyes roamed the hall, drinking in every odd detail with the ease of a man entirely comfortable in foreign territory. "Can a man not properly enjoy good art?" he said, as if the question itself were absurd to raise. "You rush through life without savoring these things, and before you know it, someone else has taken the pleasure from you."

He spoke like they were in no danger at all, as though the creeping scent of ink and the oppressive Sol bleeding from the walls were just part of the atmosphere.

Aria tried to mimic that ease, telling herself to match his pace, his composure, his almost aristocratic calm. But every step was an act of will. Her instincts, every single one, were screaming at her to turn, to run, to get as far away from this place as possible. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled; her fingers kept drifting toward the bow at her back, even though she knew drawing it now would be meaningless.

Still, she kept her chin up, walking beside him. If Kaiser could be at peace here, she would at least look the part.

They stepped through the threshold, and the world changed. From the outside, the space had looked black, like stepping into the absence of light. But the moment they crossed, it was as though someone had flung open the sun.

White.

Not a white born of paint, nor stone, nor fabric, but something even purer. The floor, the walls, the high ceiling, all made of the same flawless surface, unbroken by grain or seam. It reflected nothing, and yet the light here was so absolute it erased every shadow.

The source was a single, towering window on the far wall. It led to nowhere, no cityscape, no horizon, only an infinite field of pure light, stretching forever in every direction.

Around the room, spaced like reverent offerings, were canvases. Each one was pure white, unpainted, yet framed in gold, silver, or black. They leaned against walls, stood on ornate easels, or hung from chains descending from the ceiling. The longer Aria looked, the more she had the unsettling feeling that they weren't blank at all, that something was moving faintly on their surfaces, visible only at the very edge of sight.

Kaiser's gaze moved not to the canvases, but to the objects scattered across the room. Painting equipment, yes, but none he had ever seen before.

An easel carved from the blackened rib of some giant beast, its joints bound with red wax that pulsed faintly, like a slow heartbeat. A set of brushes whose bristles were impossibly fine strands of moonlight, each tip caged in a glass vial of water that never spilled. A palette made from a single, thin shard of translucent crystal, and when Kaiser tilted his head, he saw shapes—faces, perhaps—moving inside the glass, mouths open as if whispering.

On a side table lay jars of pigment that defied color. One shimmered with the blue-black of a storm seen from the bottom of the sea. Another was a red so deep it seemed to absorb light.

Masamia walked among these objects with the care of someone moving through a chapel. "Here," she said softly, "We do not display what is finished. We display what waits to be born. The moment before the last stroke."

Her words seemed to settle on Aria's shoulders like a weight. The girl found herself whispering back, "Why show something that isn't there yet?"

Masamia glanced over her shoulder, her red eyes catching the white light in a way that made them seem almost pink. "Because it is the only time a thing is perfect. Once it is made, it can only decay."