The sky was thick with dark clouds, and stars were few and far between.
Outside the fortress, the world was swallowed by darkness, illuminated only by a few faint lamps swaying in the wind. In a world without electricity or science, dim moonlight meant one could not see their hand in front of their face.
It was an environment that many city dwellers had never experienced. Most people would not be able to see at all in such conditions. But Ian was no ordinary person.
He could clearly see the shadow blending into the night and the woman within it. Her appearance seemed to have stepped straight out of a fairy tale, causing the young wizards to wonder if she was the Soul Hall's Mistress that the Big Bad Wolf had spoken of:
Cinderella.
"Are you Cinderella?" Ian called out for the first time. When she did not respond, he walked to the window, fixed his gaze on her, and asked again, loudly.
A strange cluster of shadows seemed to wrap around a woman. Her gaze met Ian's, and a trace of surprise flickered in her eyes.
However, the moment Ian spoke, the woman's expression shifted.
Hearing the name "Cinderella" from Ian's lips, she let out a faint, mocking smile. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
It was as if she were silently ridiculing something.
"Hm?" Ian hadn't expected that reaction.
'Had he mistaken her for someone else?'
She looked as though she held Cinderella in contempt.
"That doesn't make sense. If she's from the Soul Hall, then according to that stupid wolf, she should respect Cinderella greatly. After all, nearly everyone in the Soul Hall was recruited by Cinderella herself." Ian frowned, his eyes flicking between Young Morgan and the mysterious woman.
He couldn't guess whether the woman's presence had something to do with Young Morgan or himself. The startled look on her face seemed genuine, so it probably wasn't because of him.
As Ian pondered this, his guard was already up and his wand was ready to fire at a moment's notice.
"Teacher, what are you looking at?" Seeing that Ian was not responding, Young Morgan turned to look behind her, but she didn't see anything. She turned back to look at him with a puzzled expression on his face.
"Is there something behind me? Are you trying to scare me? I'm not afraid of ghosts or anything like that." Young Morgan was indeed bold. She spoke with complete confidence.
She leaned out the window, her pale little hands gripping the frame. She felt no unease and had no urge to quickly climb back inside the house out of fear of something uncanny.
"There's a wizard behind you."
Ian didn't bother to conceal it. He raised his hand to point out the exact spot to Young Morgan. Yet, when she followed his finger, she still saw nothing.
"I don't see anything. Where's the wizard?" Young Morgan rubbed her eyes hard and carefully scanned the darkness for any hidden figures.
But, she still found nothing.
Her gaze lingered on the place where the shadow hovered more than once, yet she didn't notice anything strange. In the end, she shifted her gaze to other spots, trying to locate the wizard Ian had spoken of.
"Hm? Look again." Ian was surprised. He raised his hand and lightly brushed it in front of Young Morgan's eyes, giving her the ability to see in the dark.
"Oh, heavens! This is amazing!" Young Morgan marveled at the wonders of magic as her vision shifted. She quickly turned around.
"I only see an owl's nest in that tree over there." She pointed exactly toward the spot where the woman floated, yet she saw nothing of the hovering shadow.
Only the nest in the branches behind it.
That was definitely not normal.
"What's going on?"
Ian's pupils narrowed slightly. He carefully studied Young Morgan's expression, searching her eyes for even the faintest hint of a joke. But Young Morgan's emotions were pure confusion. She hadn't found any wizard. Her eyes and demeanor made it clear that she knew nothing about the mysterious woman.
"Well, that's interesting."
Ian raised an eyebrow.
The woman outside remained motionless during their exchange, silently floating there. Her gaze shifted back and forth between Ian and Young Morgan.
"Could a wizard be using invisibility, which is why I can't see her?" Convinced that Ian wasn't teasing her, Young Morgan asked her teacher curiously.
"Perhaps."
Ian wasn't sure either.
His eyes went to the window again. The woman was still suspended there, her figure flickering faintly in the night. Something about her gave the young wizard a sudden, inexplicable sense of danger.
A woman who could make a legend feel threatened, could she be a legend, too?
Ian wasn't certain.
But he had always trusted his sixth sense. In the next moment, his wand slid silently from his sleeve into his hand.
At the same time, the bottle containing the Big Bad Wolf flew into his other hand from the floor, where it had been placed beside the Mirror of Erised.
"Stupid wolf."
Ian held the bottle up toward the outside, letting the Big Bad Wolf see where the shadow was coming from.
"Who is that?"
He asked the soul that used shadow as a shell and that had once belonged to the Soul Hall. Yet inside the bottle, the wolf's soul only jumped and thrashed a few times.
"Eternal Lord, this stupid wolf, I didn't see anything at all!" The creature echoed Ian's insult, but the confusion in its tone made the situation even eerier.
It strained to identify the spot Ian had pointed out. When its eyes proved useless, its ears shot straight up as if trying to sense everything outside.
And yet, it still detected nothing. There was no trace of Cinderella or anyone else.
"What did you see?" The Big Bad Wolf asked.
Ian gave no answer.
Couldn't even the wolf, itself a shadowy soul, see that woman?
His eyes flickered.
"Are there soul forms outside the Soul Hall that can wield such methods?" Ian's gaze shifted back toward the window. The woman was still there, a mocking smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Her mouth moved again as if she were speaking, but no sound reached Ian's ears.
It was as though her words came from another plane of time and space. Ian tried to read her lips, but the syllables were utterly unfamiliar, belonging to no language he had ever studied.
Just as his mind filled with questions, the woman suddenly shook her head. She opened and closed her mouth a few more times, and then the shadows coiling around her body began to stir violently.
Almost by instinct, Ian raised his wand and aimed it at the woman. As his magic gathered, the shadows, along with the woman within, began to fade rapidly.
In the blink of an eye, both the shadow and the woman vanished completely, as if they had never existed. The night sky returned to its earlier stillness, broken only by the cries of bats and birds.
"Whoosh, whoosh~"
Ian did not cancel the spell. Instead, he cast flames into the sky, lighting up the darkness all around. Apart from startling a few birds into flight, however, the fire revealed nothing.
(To Be Continued…)
You can read ahead up to 110 chapters on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darkshadow6395