Chapter 34 Gaetano
Gaetano
I never once doubted I would complete Madeline’s curse. From the very beginning, the ending was only a matter of time…and souls. She shaped it in a way that guaranteed my victory—if I allowed the darker parts of myself to win. Parts that existed long before I met her.
Madeline always acted with a purpose. Not because she wanted to see me succeed.
She loved watching me fall under the weight of my own power, wrestle with my inner shadows, crumble and then rise again in the same damned body.
My struggle has perpetually been with myself.
Witcher’s blood versus human nature. Black magic versus white magic. Good versus evil.
She haunts my thoughts as I wander through the castle—her monstrous creation.
How did a witch like Madeline forge such a majestic entity?
I am the one who creates; she’s the destroyer.
But here, everything is built to perfection.
Stone and witchcraft intertwine in every intricate detail, forming a trap the Devil himself might envy.
And yet, Madeline miscalculated. By turning me into the Black Joker, she ensured I became a person who never loses. Not even against my creator. That thought takes me five centuries back, to the first time I found myself inside the Black Joker’s castle.
It took days before I accepted that the castle’s boundaries were impenetrable. And longer until I started calling it my castle.
When the haze of Madeline’s spell wore off after the last ball, I was curled beneath a massive stone wall.
My eyes searched its surface for any sign of history—scratches, cracks, cobwebs, the bite of moisture.
It looked sterile, frozen in perfect stillness.
As if time didn’t exist here. The worst part? It wasn’t an illusion.
Cut into the wall, a window opened onto a vast field, its greenery spilling all the way to the horizon.
That gave me hope—that fragile thread a condemned person clings to in the darkness.
My heart surged at the sight of freedom.
But the field morphed into a graveyard. The greenery beyond became the boundaries of my prison.
The thrum in my chest fell silent for five hundred years.
Until recently…
I push the last thought away and return to the memory of my first days in the castle.
I wandered for hours, searching for Madeline’s game.
She said I would harvest souls, yet I didn’t see a single soul around.
I ran into empty walls, explored vacant hallways, and opened doors to lifeless rooms. There was so much space, yet with every passing second, my lungs tightened.
The emptiness consumed me, spreading through me like a biting cold.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t create a portal to escape.
However, I could easily shape a couch to sit on and materialize some food without substance, just enough to give the illusion of satiety.
As an immortal, I wouldn’t starve. But the feeling of imprisonment…
My legs still weaken as I revisit those moments, even if only in my mind.
That day, I thought of my father and the tears in his eyes when I told him I wouldn’t follow in his craft. I wouldn’t waste my magic on frescoes and mosaics. I was made for greater art—to shape spectacle out of life itself and lead the world.
It took imprisonment for me to understand the true reason behind my father’s sorrow. He wasn’t grieving because I rejected his art. He was grieving for me. As if he had sensed the disaster my bold, na?ve mind would bring upon me.
Whether it was fate’s whim or sheer chance, in that instant of clarity, the castle awakened.
At first, it was a shift in the air. Then the vibration intensified, rolled down the walls, and crawled across the floor.
An icy wave flooded down my spine, and my hands went numb, as if an invisible cord was wrapping around my bones.
Something wet slid down my cheek. I was crying!
The warm, sticky tear seared its way across my skin.
I caught it on my fingertip and stared, everything in me sinking at the dark red, bloodied smear.
In the world of magic, blood means only one thing: a promise, a contract.
This one had been torn from me by force.
At that exact moment, the air thickened with the scent of caramelized sugar.
I had dealt enough with the Higher Powers to recognize one of the most common conductors of black magic.
The aroma was gentle, almost tempting, but carried a weight impossible to ignore.
Sweetness, as a symbol of temptation, was Madeline’s favorite method to enhance her spells.
A faint, unintelligible whisper stirred my mind. I blamed it on the castle’s strangeness, later, I realized it was my connection to the harvest.
The invisible cord around my wrists pulled me.
Magic surged through me with a power I hadn’t felt since arriving at the castle.
I used that energy for another attempt at a portal.
This time, the space before me shimmered with the threads of my magic.
However, unlike before, I couldn’t control where it would take me.
It didn’t matter. I would go anywhere to escape spending even a second longer within those cursed walls.
And when I did… The portal opened beneath the vaulted ceiling of Madeline’s bedroom. The manuscript of September Spells lay on the table beside the bed, right where I had left it. A slow fire crackled in the hearth, its heat seeping into my muscles and easing the tension.
My gaze swept over the unfamiliar woman sitting in bed (her presence didn’t surprise me; Madeline would often call for company when bored) and landed on Madeline. She assessed me from the corner, regal as ever, leaning back in her high-backed chair.
Any notion that she’d reconsidered the curse vanished the moment she said, “Did you feel the pull, il mio giullare?”
“The pull?”
“You were summoned.”
Summoned. That icy wave washed over me again and pierced my skull along with the word. Summoned, summoned…
Something compelled me to turn back toward the woman in bed, and this time I didn’t overlook the details. A small jar of honey on a wooden coaster, a tiny ritual dagger with a blade as black as obsidian. The blood-soaked wood. The woman’s eyes, shining with a strange excitement.
Madeline’s voice drifted behind me. “I told her the legend of the Black Joker. She believes she can handle the trials and win your grand prize… Of course, I left it to you to show her the contract.”
I remembered the bloody tear on my cheek. “What contract are you talking about, Madeline?”
“You know, my love. Or is this just another lesson you’ve failed to learn?”
With a frown, I concentrated on the unseen energy field surrounding me—the vault. The great masters of magic, like me, can store their most valuable items within it. It’s always with you, invisible to others—unless they possess Madeline’s skill. She’d emptied mine when she cursed me.
She had likely sensed the new item there before I did. With a swift flick of my fingers, I materialized its threads into physical form. A rolled parchment. As the sheet unrolled, the contract appeared. I read every word with the same dread that hundreds of harvests would come to know after me.
“Three trials, one for each harvest, il mio giullare. And the good news? You don’t have to wait for she’s already twenty-one. Consider it a gift. A faster path into your new craft.”
Twenty-one? What the fuck?
My attention jumped from Madeline to the unknown woman, whose confusion matched my own. She, too, now seemed to have grasped that she had unwittingly stepped into something far bigger than herself.
“And don’t forget,”—Madeline smiled—“ it’s either you…or her.”
My heart pounded, each beat counting down the seconds to the start.
My vision narrowed into a tunnel. The magic inside me surged, eager to face the challenge.
Dark energy poured into me, slipping under my skin, curling like venomous tendrils around my bones, and sinking into my heart.
The fusion felt natural, as if the Black Joker had always been part of me, waiting to awaken.
“Give her a trial, Gaetano!”
I resisted the curse. Resisted myself. But I never fooled myself into believing I’d prioritize a stranger’s well-being over my own.
I gave her a riddle she couldn’t answer.
After that, the harvest occurred with ease. I stretched out my hand, and shadows rippled around it. The air thickened. Time stalled. And I took her soul. Like an action I’d performed a thousand times. An instinct, etched into my consciousness.
A moment before incineration, the harvest gripped the dagger’s hilt. The same blade she had used to cut herself and summon me. Her fingers tightened around the cold metal, and her eyes drifted, as if revisiting a memory.
When she released her hold on it with her last breath, I reached for it, without knowing why. Did I truly need a weapon in that desolate prison?
“See you in three hundred harvests, Gaetano,” Madeline purred with a thin smile.
Just like that, the spell pulled me back into the castle, along with the harvested soul, the dead body, and the dagger in my hand—the first trophy I would later place on the library shelf.
But not before I spent hours spinning it between my fingers, while the silhouette of my first harvest hovered around me.
The dagger contained a small amount of magic inside it.
Alas, it couldn’t do anything to help me.
In the years that followed, I wept with bloody tears more than once.
I wandered the dark halls, which gradually filled with shadows.
I stared for hours at the wall with the crossed-out numbers and the ones still waiting.
I dug graves and buried corpses in the soil.
The days passed painfully slow, and with each soul taken, my resolve grew stronger.
For I had figured out how to beat Madeline at her own game.
Now, once more standing in front of the wall of crossed-out numbers, I focus on a single one.
I could stop listening to the connection between us, respecting Nicole’s wish not to be disturbed until the end of the week.
But how am I supposed to endure that long when every second feels like a blade stabbing beneath my ribs?
The unthinkable keeps trying to take root in my mind.
I pray Nicole is safe, maybe with a friend. She’d never go back to her father. Even so, I keep hoping she’ll use the dagger I secured around her thigh when I last hugged her—the same one I collected from my first harvest.
For years, I’ve cursed it for its weak spell. It couldn’t do anything greater than my own magic. It never occurred to me that I could amplify its energy to create a small portal. My curse wouldn’t let me use it, but Nicole could. I hope she does.
Harvest 290.
All this time, I believed I’d figured out how to outsmart Madeline. Yet, she’s beaten me again.