Hometorius : Coming Home

chapter 39 : A Shard of the Mirror

Agis POV

I stopped by the wooden door. I knew all these corridors by heart, but this time I felt like I had reached the wrong room. Although it has never happened to me before. Since I was a child, I'd been exploring the entire building without a map, always making it to dinner. I'm still like that. When I had too much on my mind, I wandered the corridors.

This time it was like that, too. I knocked on the door and a strange sound came from inside, it was hard to define. After a while, the door opened, slamming against the wall, and an elderly skinny man in a knee-length nightgown stood there.

"What?" he hissed in the voice of a heavy-smoker and scratched his buttocks.

I didn't answer him and stepped back, choosing another corridor. "Weird, I've never made a mistake before". I stopped at another door again. "Now it must be it". I lifted the brass knocker a few times and waited.

"You cannot be here," Victuvius hissed as he opened the door slightly. "Why are you here?"

"We need to talk," I replied in a whisper.

Victuvius immediately tried to close the door, but I stopped him with my foot just in time.

"It's about Marylin. Her eyes," I added even more quietly.

It worked right away. He unbuckled the door lock and let me in. With one swipe of his hand, he threw everything off the desk and sat on a wooden chair.

"Have they changed completely?" he asked a small child, and when I nodded, he said to himself, "Excellent."

He rubbed his hands and removed the hood off his head, causing his greasy hair to fall on his face. Fortunately, most of it was kept in a ponytail, which was long to the middle of his back. Only when looking at his face could you easily say that Marylin was his daughter. Her eyes were just as big, and her eyebrows were bent in the same angle. Even the mole above her lips was after him.

"What does it mean?" I asked uncertainly, afraid that Victuvius would soon kick me out of the room if I asked something wrong.

"That means she's one of us now," he explained with a sly smile on his face. "Do you want me to explain it to you?"

"Do I hear... care in his voice? Something friendly? Man, what did you do with the old, nasty Victuvius?!" I nodded, casting suspicious glances to the man, which he didn't seem to notice.

"As you know, Marylin is my daughter to the same extent she's Katrine's. That's why she has, or I should now say 'had', irises in different colors," he explained calmly. "Red, as you can guess, was thanks to me, and brown - because of her mother. If her father was Tobias, as in other cases, then her eyes would be just brown.

"I got it," I interrupted him, noticed his furious look and looked down. "I'm sorry."

"It's impossible to overlook," he continued, slowly softening his glare, "that recently, me and Maryline had many opportunities to run into each other. In a word, I could meet her more often than her mother, which in turn affected her eyes."

"Wait a minute," I interrupted him again. "You say her mother is Katrine? And in the survey we sent to her, you wrote that she was the daughter of Marylin Freeze. What is this about?"

"Listen," he replied, slightly abashed. "As you know, one of my ancestors killed Katrine, right?" I nodded. "Well, it turned out that he didn't hit his heart directly and, well, she recovered. She was so powerful that she didn't even age, so she was still young. And incredibly beautiful. And so it happened that she gave birth to my daughter. Marylin. It couldn't get out that Katrine was still alive, so we said our Marylin was the daughter of Marylin IV Freeze. A little twisted. And to make sure there's no evidence, I had to kill Katrine. It was difficult, but I didn't miss, the arrow went straight into her heart".