To Flip a Switch
Content Warning: This story contains mentions of murder, suicide, and trauma recovery.
If you were offered a chance to escape, would you take it?
I don’t think it would be an easy choice. It’s something you’d have to weigh — staying or going. What ties do you have to this place you are now? What do you stand to lose if you escape? What do you stand to gain? Are you running away from your problems or toward a solution?
It’s only when I looked into the endless depths of a spatial and magical abyss that I really considered the question, reaching up to feel the pieces of my broken horn, as if they could somehow grant me luck.
I used to keep the peace. It took me a long time to realize who stood to benefit from the peace that I was keeping.
Growing up, I idolized the City Guard and the Sivyian Legion. True discipline, strength, temperance, and morality on display. There was something so compelling about seeing an entire company of soldiers displaying their coordination and ability openly before the rest of us citizens.
When I told my parents I wanted to join the Sivyian Legion, they said that oni aren’t given the same chance to belong there as other folk. That wouldn’t stop me. I refused to accept anything less than total success.
At the same time, I constantly read stories of the Sivyian Legion. Stories that put their particularly tough brand of morality and justice front and center. Stories that glorified the hard work those officers and inquisitors did for the good of the community. One of my favorites was the Inquisitor Longhorn series, starring a loose cannon of a minotaur who knew just when to break the rules and get his suspect with just the right evidence to lock them up for good.
I knew there were awful people out there. Maybe even next door to where I lived, in the crowded urban center of House Geminus, next to the Church of the Ten, where everyone seemed to be happy and get along just fine. But I knew everyone around me had something to hide. And one of them was undoubtedly a criminal waiting to be put away for life, quietly sweeping their terrible deeds under the carpet of our collective awareness.
The Grand City had a healthy command of magic and technology, each complementing the other as they both progressed. But those advances barely touched my life as a Legionnaire. I would grow to detest the stories of magic and technology being able to take us to other worlds where things like orcs and gods and sorcerers lived. It was all nonsense to me. I ignored it and put myself toward a real goal: joining the Legion.
I could sit here and tell you how hard I worked to become a member of the Sivyian Legion. I could tell you how quickly I learned the rules, how I aced each of their tests, how my main struggle was convincing them of my physical fitness despite being overweight, even for an oni.
But that’s not why I’m here. What you need to understand is why I joined. How I imagined the people around me as wolves in sheep’s clothing, waiting to pounce when one poor sucker turned around the wrong corner.
In a city rich with faith, I had none for my fellow people.
What I failed to realize at the time was that I was in love with the narrative of being a hero for the community, not the community itself. I did nothing specifically for the people around me. My career and reputation were far too important. After all, how could I protect the most people possible if I were too careful about my paperwork or if I was unwilling to make an arrest when a crime went unanswered.
When you choose not to trust the people you protect, each of them becomes more suspicious when you watch them. Pick apart a person’s life and you’ll find the unsavory details. And when you spend your days building cases and profiles out of these unsavory details, it becomes harder and harder to see the good in people.
I wasn’t a patrol guard for long. I made it clear to my superiors that I was overqualified for the role and should be promoted immediately.
My first cases as an Inquisitor were in the seedier districts of the Grand City. Not far from the Library of Yattsu and the Ouroboros Initiative.
Arson, robbery, assault, but never murder. Not quite. The Legion was careful about how they investigated murders, about who they put in charge of finding the truth. I always brought them a suspect, and that suspect almost always confessed. A few, I found out later, confessed because I had told them what would happen if they didn’t.
A few of those, it turned out, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But that’s not what my superior, Commander Windry, wanted. No civilian excuses. Only results. And I always delivered, if not the perpetrator, then someone close enough to one.
I feel compelled to mention this is the chapter of my life that I most regret. I would give my left leg just to apologize to one of those people I put away. Even the guilty. Even the unrepentant. If there is one thing you take away from reading my attempts at lurid prose here, I hope you know that I regret so much.
My first and only murder case proved to be my own undoing.
I was allowed access to investigation files only after cursing out my superiors to their faces. A portion of them were just trying to shut me up, I’m sure. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and finally, I was going to stop a true monster on our streets.
He was known as the Cherry Blossom Killer. It wasn’t a particularly subtle nickname, earned only because he killed his victims by strangling them, then left them in eerily serene poses with a single cherry blossom in their hands. His body count reached up to seven people by the time I was able to focus on the case, though we’ll never be sure how many of those deaths were from copycat killers, ever since the press intercepted and leaked a report we sent to the Legion’s headquarters in the Sivyian district.
I loathed them, then. They stood to break the peace with their sensationalism, printing anything that will get people reading their fishwrap. It was a peace that we worked tirelessly to preserve, under constant threat from these sneak fucks.
But I digress. It was the Cherry Blossom Killer’s eighth victim that held the breakthrough we needed to find him. His very own namesake.
You see, in the Grand City, everything is regulated by Houses. The Sivyian Legion executed and enforced the laws written by the Kuusian Senate. The Church of the Ten made sure no religion was oppressing any citizens. The Library of Yattsu controlled the vast collected knowledge of the city’s greatest thinkers and scholars. Each House had its own domain. Each imaginable domain would eventually fall under a House.
So it was with the community gardens throughout the city, each regulated by the Kolme Conclave. After a spat with local farmers, the Conclave started requiring reports on what plant species were being grown in each garden, whether it was for profit or for community access. Every florist in the city had to share their supply chains.
It was through these reports that I was able to track shipments of cherry blossoms. I suspected the killer to be a vagrant who stole cherry blossoms from vendors or suppliers. Hard to trace, but not if you know what you’re looking for. I cross-referenced every shipment of blossoms from garden to storefront, interrogated several florists, and even escorted a single shipment just to understand the process.
It was excellent police work. I was thorough. Unbending. Unwavering.
It was a receipt that ultimately brought me to my target. A special order of eight cherry blossom flowers, no other considerations. A potted tree or a bouquet wouldn’t be terribly suspect, but eight felt off.
We traced the receipt to the local florist, who quickly gave us information on the suspect’s demeanor, frequent visits, and delivery address.
“He’s a quiet fellow,” the florist told me. “Is there something wrong? Is he all right?”
I told him no, he’s not all right. But I couldn’t share any further information.
We visited his apartment, in an extravagant building, the tallest in his district. He wasn’t home. But his tools were. Gleaming instruments of torture and pain interwoven with floral patterns and arrangements. My accompanying officer found his desk, where we found his identification and learned the name he gave his florist was a decoy.
His name was Mason Winterbrook, the youngest son of Kuusian Senator Isaac Winterbrook.
Laying on his desk were a half-dozen sketchbooks, each containing a few drawings of his crime scenes. It made me sick to my stomach.
But at least he would be put away for a long, long time.
Commander Windry didn’t see things quite the same way.
Mason was a valuable member of the Kuusian Senate’s bespoke entourage. An invaluable staffer. He wouldn’t be arrested so quickly and cleanly as I’d hoped.
I was told to keep things quiet. That Isaac Winterbrook had been informed of his son’s acts and agreed to have him committed to a mental health institution, where he would be rehabilitated and eventually released. Treated for his idiosyncracies with society.
I disagreed. Mason Winterbrook had to be put away. For the sake of public safety.
But Windry had the final word. She dismissed me, and told me to stay home the next day so I could cool off.
I couldn’t let that happen. The Cherry Blossom Killer couldn’t be so easily swept under the rug. Those fuckers in the press, as I once called them, would find out eventually.
That night, before Winterbrook could be transported to the sanitorium, I paid him a visit. No badge. No blade. Just the two of us. And a flimsy little human like him would be easy to subdue if I had to do it.
Finally, I’d have my own Inquisitor Longhorn story.
I walked into his apartment unannounced.
He was sitting in his chair, pen in one hand while the other held a sketchbook open. Frail, thin, gaunt, pale. A ghost of a human if there ever was one, dressed up in a mid-level Kuusian Senate assistant uniform.
He locked eyes with me and put his pen down, marking the page in his sketchbook.
“Have you come for me, then?” he asked, his wispy voice almost ethereal in the room.
I nodded.
“How many have you found?”
“Enough.”
“My good man, if you dodge the questions that quickly, nobody’s going to believe you in court.”
I lunged at him, but he rolled out of his chair, procuring a knife from an end table and thrusting it toward me. He underestimated my speed and reflexes, and disarming him took a matter of seconds. He had no chance of escaping, I was too fast, too big, too strong. Every strike he attempted on me was blocked and countered with an even harder blow.
Gasping, he collapsed to the floor after a particularly strong impact on the side of his neck. I found myself towering over him. And so I pressed my boot down on his back, pinning him.
“They’re not going to hear this case in court,” I said. “Because you’re going to confess. Is that understood?”
“Not quite,” he said, his voice suddenly clear.
He swept his leg into mine, knocking me to the ground. Before I could orient myself, he was crawling on top of me, grabbing my horn and tugging on it.
I felt indescribable pain, watching his sinister smile grow until there was a loud CRACK.
And the Eijiro I was, until that moment, died.
I woke in the Healer’s Clinic, wrapped in bandages, a Healer by my bedside, and my superior, Commander Windry, sitting in the single chair by the window.
As I slowly regained consciousness, Windry spoke to the Healer about what happened to me. Winterbrook had studied magic rather closely, more than I had anticipated, and used it to augment his own strength while appearing to be a frail, weak human. Which is how he overpowered me so quickly.
After I woke fully, the Healer sat by my bed and explained the consequences of a broken horn, which I had never known until that day.
When an oni’s horn breaks, for whatever reason, there is an unstoppable change in their personality. A loss of strength, of conviction both physical and mental. Where humans, orcs, elves, whatever you imagine, use the physical to overcome the mental and vice versa, the two are tied together for oni. An oni’s horn is an important focus for natural magic flowing through our bodies. Interrupting that focus, distorting or breaking it, has disastrous results.
As she continued laying out the facts for me, I felt the reality of my situation sink in. The fire in my heart had been snuffed out. The bouncing energy in my mind that connects ideas to each other had fallen still. There was a creeping dread of something worse than death inside me: a growing emptiness without emotional explanation.
The Healer told me that it would take me weeks, maybe months to recover from the trauma. That I would not be coming back to work until the Healers believed that I was ready. They wouldn’t even allow me to leave the Clinic until I was able to pass certain physical and mental evaluations.
Then, she handed me a small box. I opened it without thinking.
What remained of my horn, in two pieces, atop carefully folded tissue paper. Instinctually I reached up to my forehead and fell the jagged, sharp fracture just above the base of my horn.
I felt sick, turned to the nearest wastebin by my bed and vomited the meager contents of my stomach into it. The Healer touched my hand, but I pulled it away by reflex. A reflex I didn’t know I had.
After she had finished her explanation, the Healer left my room to give me privacy with my commanding officer.
“Winterbrook escaped,” she said. “Because you went after him.”
“I know.”
“I want to scream, Eiji,” she said, using the diminutive shortened version of my name she’d first come up with during my patrolman training. “But I won’t. Perhaps if you were in complete health and standing in my office. Here? Now? Not the time nor the place. I know you feel like shit.”
I nodded.
“But your actions carry weight and must have consequences. The Sivyian Legion will support your full recovery, but you have been removed from the Delict Crimes Bureau. The Clinic has given us the badge they found amongst your personal belongings when you were brought in.” She held her hands together. “Due to the necessity of secrecy involving the Kuusian Senate, the accused, his family, and the Legion, we will not be charging you for your actions. Officially, we have noted you were conducting research and were overpowered by Winterbrook while on duty.”
A day before, I would have been outraged. I would have demanded that we negotiate my return to the Legion.
That day, I simply nodded and agreed.
“I wish you a quick recovery, Eiji,” she said, this time with an ounce of warmth I’ve never felt from her. “If you have any official business with the Legion, you know how to contact me.”
“I do,” I said.
And she left.
As her footsteps echoed down the sterile hallway, I opened the box with the remains of my horn again.
I ran my thumb over the break, feeling each individual fracture as my eyes welled with tears, but never let one fall down my cheek.
It took months to recover. Not just rest, but therapy and rehabilitation of all sorts. I foolishly believed, like a child, that I would at least have the chance to lie in bed all day and read a few books.
I was so, so wrong.
Nobody warned me that recovery was going to painful. That I would have to embrace the pain from simply moving my body the way I used to. The way I had always done.
The old me, the one that died that night, would have used his rage at Winterbrook to push himself through. But I struggled just to walk, even with no physical injury aside from my horn. One of the Healers told me that it’d been years since an oni had been admitted. That the way our minds and bodies seemed so much more in tune with each other was shocking. But it meant nothing to me. This is how I’d always been.
On the day that I was allowed to leave the Healer’s Clinic, I still had half my weight on a cane and a box with my horn tucked under my arm.
After that, I tried to piece together my old life. I took practice tests for the Sivyian Legion and failed each and every one of them. I wanted to believe that if I could just prove myself, my commanding officer would see her mistake and let me back on the force, but there was never a chance of that.
Beyond the initial disappointment, I soon discovered that I would never rejoin the Sivyian Legion. Not because of my physical fitness or my reprimand, but because I could no longer muster the passion they wanted from me. Not for them. Not for myself.
A part of me felt that I should be out looking for revenge on Winterbrook. But I had far more important things to take care of first. So I smothered that part until it finally stopped fighting.
In between checkups with the Healers and my psychiatry appointments with House Geminus, I found myself drifting back to the stories and novels I read as a child. Inquisitor Longhorn, The Bladear Mysteries, Chronicles of Kerrick. I started falling into those worlds all over again, falling in love once more.
But this time, I knew better.
These stories, they come from a world where crime is simple. Where there are clear lines between good and evil, and all mysteries will be solved by the final page.
My mistake when I was so much younger was assuming that the world I lived in was entirely the same. That there were no messy situations, no unsolved riddles of death and disgust, no painful choices.
I had failed to recognize that I was part of the very problem I attempted to solve. The Sivyian Legion was a fundamentally unstable institution, unable to address the issues in each of its districts because it had no presence in the communities other than as law enforcement.
The Legion did not listen. The Legion did not mediate. It arrived, assumed, and arrested.
The night I went to Winterbrook’s apartment, I was at my worst. Winterbrook needed to be stopped, that will never change. But it was not my charge to stop him.
In many ways, I owe Winterbrook a debt. He killed the man that I should never have become, before I had the chance to make a truly horrible mistake.
And while my old self is surely dead, there was one element of him that remained within me: A search for truth.
For the first time in months, I finally understood what drove me. What kept me going. And how I could move forward.
The first thing I did as this new self was return to the Healer’s Clinic. I asked them if there was any way to reattach my horn, if not functionally, at least aesthetically. The nurse told me no. The Healer told me no.
A taxidermist told me no.
A therapist told me no.
A woodworker told me no.
A smith, a furrier, and a ranger all told me no.
But as I walked home after being told “no” for the tenth time, I saw a potter’s display window with a beautiful vase that had clearly been broken into at least a dozen pieces, but it was reassembled and the cracks were lined with gold.
I went inside and spoke with the owner of the store, keeping my questions calm and measured, gradually building to the idea of doing the same to my horn.
“It will not work,” he said in a slight accent, emphasizing every syllable equally. “Your horn cannot be used like that again.”
I made it clear it was purely for looks. Symbolic.
He nodded, and for the first time in weeks, told me “Yes.”
I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.
Even with my horn repaired, the gaps filled in with gold, I still didn’t have a fulfilling occupation.
I asked my closest acquaintances if they knew of any civilian jobs that would be a good fit for a former Inquisitor. It took months of following up, but one Legionnaire finally forwarded some correspondence to me.
The Library of Yattsu, owner of half the Grand City’s newspapers, was looking for a Legion Liason. A reporter who would be willing to speak with members of the Sivyian Legion and follow up with leads on cold or chilling cases.
They needed someone yesterday, and I was just qualified enough. I was hired immediately.
The next day, I found a small package on my doorstep, addressed to me as if I still had my old title of Inquisitor, with a note from the sender. My old commanding officer.
“Eiji,” it read. “Heard through the grapevine you’re going into journalism. I’d suggest not going out with your old drinking buddies, they won’t take kindly to your new venture. Never had a problem with the press myself, my brother is a reporter in another district. He once told me this thing is the most valuable tool a reporter could have. I figure your job title might be different, but you’ll like it too.
“Don’t call me for stories. Take care.”
I unwrapped the package and unfurled a heavy tome that looked like a spellbook. Something a scrawny adventurer would hold or one of Yattsu’s finest tomes. But I opened the cover and found an inscription:
“This tome will transcribe the spoken words of any sentient being within three meters. For best results, disguise as spellcasting focus and place at your side.”
My eyebrows floated upward. This would be very useful indeed.
Over the course of the next two years, I chased down every cold case the Library of Yattsu put on my desk. Some of them remain unsolved, but most of them at least got more traction in the Sivyian Legion after I was done chasing the story.
I didn’t feel the need to bring in a suspect every time. And as a reporter, someone who didn’t have the power to arrest suspects, I felt free to go where the facts sent me.
But I never expected the file for the Cherry Blossom Killer to end up in my inbox.
At first, I panicked. I couldn’t take this case. I couldn’t handle it. I was too close, it was a conflict of interests.
But there was no second choice. There was no other Legion Liason who could handle this. It took me a full day to talk myself into following this case again. I told myself that I was a new man, one without a badge, willing to listen and make the right choice.
I took a piece of loose leaf and uncapped my pen.
“Dear Commander Windry,
I’ve done what I could to avoid asking this favor of you for as long as possible, as you’ve so kindly requested. But I’m afraid I must darken your doorstep for some information, and you’re not going to like it. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.
Sincerely,
Eiji”
It was the best detective work I’d done in my life. I followed every lead. I removed myself from the scenario as much as I possibly could. I nicknamed my younger self as someone entirely different in my notes, just so I could keep the right distance.
After overpowering me and breaking my horn, Winterbrook fled his home and went into hiding. Not even his father knew what happened to him, and eventually lost his position in the Kuusian Senate for failing to provide useful information.
To my younger self’s credit, the Cherry Blossom Killer never struck again after that day. The Sivyian Legion, no longer under pressure to conceal the facts or find a killer who continued to strike, simply closed the investigation as unsolved.
Winterbrook, in the midst of my recovery and the political chaos around his father, sought a new kind of escape from his life. Something entirely absurd, beyond rational thought and only spoken in hushed tones.
Interplanar travel.
The more I followed Winterbrook’s trail, the more information I discovered on this concept. Not just the other planes of existence themselves, but how to travel between them. The other planes had systems of magic and technology that seemed oddly disparate from each other, but functional enough to allow travel between them and our own. The stories of orcs, demons, spirits, and an entire pantheon of gods no longer seemed quite so farfetched to me.
Winterbrook himself, from what I had gathered through interviews and documents, was searching for a place where he could kill without fear of repercussion or putting his own life in danger. That meant war-stricken planes were out, the conflict was much too balanced. He needed to find somewhere he could be discreet and still be able to feed his compulsion.
My travels led me to a man named Theodore, who specialized in crafting weapons and artifacts imbued with magic. When I asked him if he’d seen Winterbrook, he told me that Winterbrook assumed a false identity and commissioned him to build an interplanar portal of Winterbrook’s own design. When Theodore showed me the plans, I saw every step of my own journey laid out. Every interview with every person of interest through the materials and construction of this portal.
I asked Theodore if he could build another portal that I could use.
“My good man,” he said. “I still have the first one in my workshop.”
During my recovery, as I sat with my therapist, he asked me a question that unsettled me to my core.
“Eijiro, if I gave you this — “ He said, handing me a toy switch. Like a miniature version of a mad scientist’s lever. “And if I said that if you flipped that switch, you would just cease to exist. No pain, no suffering, not for you, not for anyone in your life. What would you do with it?”
I considered it for a moment.
“I’d flip it,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know if I can describe it,” I said. “I feel like I’ve done nothing but bring pain and suffering to people by simply existing. The world would be better off without me.”
“I disagree with that assessment,” he said. “But regardless, a life cannot be ended quite so easily. As it should be.
“Now, if I told you that the switch erased all these negative ideas about yourself — that you only bring pain and suffering — and it replaced those with a genuine desire to care and help those around you? What would you do?”
I answered immediately. “I’d flip it, of course.”
He set the switch aside. “You don’t need any hardware for that, though. All of these thoughts about your self worth, everything negative you think about yourself, it comes from within. And in that same vein, you have the power to change that about yourself. If you think you deserve to be erased for who you are, you can change that into a reason to celebrate yourself.”
“It can’t be that easy,” I said.
“It won’t be. It will be difficult. Rough. There will be days you will hate it, where you hate yourself. You may need medication or to take days off from work. But you have that power. And no one can take that from you.”
I picked up the switch and ran my thumb over the metal plating. I focused on what it could do for me. The person that I could be, the man that I wanted to be. Someone who sought truth over results. Someone who made a difference.
And I flipped it.
If you were offered an opportunity to escape, would you take it?
As I stood before the functioning interplanar portal, I realized the decision was easy for Winterbrook. There was nothing left for him in the Grand City. But the story was different for me.
The innermost point of the portal, an oval in design, was pure inky black. It was an abyss that dared you to step inside, surrounded by blue and purple fluctuations of energy in the air, promising that it would spit you out…somewhere.
Theodore looked at me expectantly, having just flipped the switch to turn on the portal.
“Do you have a copy of the plans for this device?” I asked him.
“Of course, I always keep backups.”
“Could I borrow one?” I asked. “Indefinitely.”
His eyes lit up with shock as he understood what I meant.
“Right now?” He asked.
I nodded.
With a copy of the blueprint safely folded and tucked between the pages of my transcribing journal, he grabbed my shoulder and looked me in the eyes. “Wherever you’re going…they may not have the materials to construct this there.”
“I know,” I said.
But the truth was beyond my reach here. And thankful as I was for the Library of Yattsu for giving me my second chance, I knew they would understand this decision of mine.
Because this was not an escape. This was chasing the truth. If not the truth about Winterbrook, the truth about something entirely new. And I couldn’t turn that down.
“One last thing,” I said to Theodore. “Give my regards to Commander Windry, if you would.”
And I stepped through.
