Alicia's room lay in shadows, barely pierced by the soft light filtering through the curtains. Sitting at the edge of the bed, she stared at the typewriter on her desk. She hadn't touched those keys since the fire consumed everything. Since Verso screamed at her to leave. Since he pushed her out of the Canvas… and stayed inside to erase it.
She didn't know whether to cry or remain in silence. Everything was vague, everything hurt. The Canvas had vanished, but its memories still shone with the clarity of an unburned painting: the adventures, the living strokes, the creatures. Verso, her soul-brother. Verso, who in the end had turned his back on her.
The faint click of the door interrupted her thoughts. Clea entered, closing it quickly, precisely, but without sound. Her brow was furrowed, like someone carrying news already chewed over and swallowed with difficulty.
"I gave you time," she said softly but firmly. "Because I thought you needed it. And maybe you did. But time doesn't stop, and neither do the writers. They're still on our heels. Everything seems calm… but the status quo is a lie."
Alicia looked at her. She leaned toward her notebook, opened it quickly, and wrote with a trembling hand:
"What do you mean?"
"Artists have gone missing," Clea whispered even lower. "A writer, a painter, and two chamber musicians. One by one, as if erased from the margins of the world."
Alicia paled. Her hand scribbled furiously as Clea waited. She no longer grew impatient. She was terrified Alicia, now voiceless, would lean more toward writing than painting—despite the pain Verso's death at the hands of the writers had left behind, clearly.
"What can we do? I don't remember anything. Before the fire… I saw no one suspicious. No one came near me. Nothing."
Clea pressed her lips together. She walked to the window. Then turned around, something more than suspicion etched on her face.
"Did you see that boy… did you see Antoine in the weeks before the disaster?"
Alicia hesitated. Then shook her head, though not with certainty. She returned to the notebook. Clea, as always, waited.
"No. That was months before. Maybe six. I saw him in the park. We walked. We talked. That's all. What does he have to do with this?"
Clea stared at her. "Everything, idiot; absolutely everything," she thought with a surge of searing fury. But Alicia didn't deserve that level of rage. She wasn't weak, but she didn't need to feel punished either.
"Did you touch him?"
Alicia blinked. Her face showed confusion, but also the beginning of something else. She shook her head slightly, but not convincingly. Clea didn't look away. Nothing was clear. Her mind was still fogged. Above all, there was a lingering confusion between reality and fantasy—or rather, between the realities inside and outside the Canvas. Too much time inside had consequences.
Clea read her again. Closed her eyes. Took a breath.
"This uncertainty is gnawing at my bones. So, following more my gut than my reason, I decided to spy on him. I broke into his house. I thought I could confront him, interrogate him… something."
She paused. Alicia watched closely, her fingers gripping the notebook. Clea was usually quick-witted, fast with words. But they weren't coming. Her usual sharpness was paused too. But eventually, Clea spoke again.
"As I got closer, I began to tremble," Clea continued. "It wasn't adrenaline, Alicia. It was terror. I physically couldn't keep going. He was right there, thirty meters away or less. Writing by hand, hunched over, fragile… pitiful. And yet…"
Clea looked down, her fingers clenched into fists. Alicia could feel the same chill beginning to creep over her. It was contagious.
"There was a dark presence around him. He seemed absent, and yet that presence crushed me. I felt like an ant standing before an elephant. Instinctively, I left the garden before he saw me. Because I feared… that if our eyes met even once, something inside me would cease to exist."
Alicia tilted her head. Clea's words couldn't be an exaggeration. She was meticulous, calculating, precise in thought, sharp-tongued, but always truthful. And even so, now her voice carried a level of turmoil Alicia had never heard before.
"Why are you telling me this? Why are you spying on him?" Alicia wrote, her handwriting becoming increasingly illegible.
"Why?" Clea repeated, as if the question insulted her. "Because Antoine Durand is a monster, Alicia. He isn't a writer. He's a force—something we may never be able to explain, even if we tried. Not yet, anyway."
Alicia swallowed hard. Her expression changed. Her eyes widened. A spark—faint, but alive—lit in her gaze. She looked down at her notebook, and with a trembling hand, wrote slowly, striving for clarity:
"I said goodbye to him… and touched his shoulder."
Clea read it. The silence that followed said more than any scream. A single touch? One mere contact of skin was enough to crumble the walls of the Dessendre mansion? To unleash the writers' wrath and destroy everything? To erase Verso's life and the family's future from that moment on?
For each question that surged in Clea's mind, the answer was the same. So much so that she couldn't keep it locked inside. She had to say it. She meant to sound resolved in front of Alicia. But it was too late. There was no point in hiding it anymore.
"Then Antoine Durand is not a monster, Alicia," she whispered, almost as if answering herself. "He's a horror."