text
stringlengths 5
145k
|
|---|
Bonus Story 3: Misunderstanding (Claire François)
“Huh? Why? Are you already tired of this look?”
“Not at all, but that look is purely for aesthetic purposes. If you’re going to actually cook, then you need to wear real clothes. I’d hate for cooking oil to mar your perfect porcelain skin.”
“I, er, I see.”
I didn’t quite get it, but I obeyed, as Rae was the expert on the matter. That is, if one could even be an expert on whatever this was. Genuinely, what was all this? At any rate, I was glad I’d caught her making such an absurd face.
From there on, whenever the two of us fought or I had a request to make of her, I would pull out my new trump card, the “naked apron.” It continued to have a dramatic effect, bringing an end to even our worst quarrels. The embarrassment I had to endure was always great, but seeing Rae so happy made my wariness fade. Unfortunately, there came a point where my wariness faded too far…
“I’m home, Miss Claire.”
“Welcome back, dear. Would you like to cook dinner? Would you like to prepare a bath? Or…”
I welcomed Rae home like I often did…but that day, she was not alone.
“…Claire. What is the meaning of this?”
“F-Father?!”
My father, Dole, was with her. They had run into one another on their way home, so he decided to drop by and say hello. I screamed out of sheer embarrassment, ran to the bedroom, and changed.
From that day onward I never brought out the “naked apron” again.
Incidentally, Rae was so shocked that I stopped doing the “naked apron” that she tried doing it for me instead, one day. By coincidence, I happened to have brought Misha home as a guest that day.
“…Disgusting.” Misha looked at Rae with a gaze as cold as ice. I had a feeling this memory would keep Rae up at night for a very, very long time.
“Um, Mama Claire?”
“Mother Claire, there’s something we want to know.”
“Yes, May, Aleah?”
Sometime later, after Rae and I adopted May and Aleah, I told the two of them about my fight with Rae. Of course, I omitted the “naked apron” part.
“What was it you two were fighting over after all? Was it a misunderstanding?”
“Did Mother Rae not keep her chastity?”
“W-wait, do you two even know what that word means?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“How old do you think we are?”
“Uhhh…”
With them being orphaned, I did not know their exact age. But they should have been around four or five. “Chastity” was certainly not a word that should be in their vocabulary.
“Mama Claire, tell us what happened.”
“Hurry up and tell us!”
“W-well…” I felt cold sweat form on my brow. “O-okay, it was a misunderstanding. Just a small one, though.”
“What was the misunderstanding?”
“Tell us!”
“O-oh, I don’t see why we need to talk about it. It’s really not that interesting…”
“Tellll ussss!” they nagged.
“…It’s really nothing, though.” Reluctantly, I began to recount the story.
“I-I’ll be going then, Rae, Miss Claire. Please take good care of the children.”
“Of course.”
“We will wish you safe travels.”
A few days after we took May and Aleah under our wing, Lilly embarked on her pilgrimage of atonement. Rae and I went to the checkpoint to see her off. My father was watching May and Aleah in our absence, though I’m sure they wanted to see Lilly off as well.
“Oh, right. Before you go, there’s this misunderstanding I want us to clear up,” Rae said.
“Wh-what misunderstanding?” Lilly asked.
“You said something about me giving you my first. Miss Claire and I got into a big fight as a result—although something good did eventually come out of it.” |
Bonus Story 3: Misunderstanding (Claire François)
“You don’t need to go into that much detail,” I chided Rae, covering her mouth. “And you needn’t make excuses for me, Lilly. Even if Rae did give you her chastity, I understand that the one she loves is me, and I will never doubt that again.”
“Wh-what? R-Rae’s chastity? What are you talking about?!”
“Huh?”
“Huh?”
“Huh?”
The three of us all gave one another looks.
“Is that not what happened?” I asked. “You said you received Rae’s first.”
“Whaaat?! I-I said no such thing!” Lilly exclaimed.
“Huh?” Sensing this didn’t bode well for me, I said, “Please try to remember. It was a few days after the revolution took place. To celebrate you being released from custody, we went together to a café with sweets.”
“I-I remember that, yes. You bought me strawberry daifuku, didn’t you?”
“I did. It was then you told me that Rae gave you her first. You even asked if I was okay with it.”
“…Oh, ohhhh!” Lilly exclaimed with horror.
“I-Is something the matter?” I asked.
“M-Miss Claire, I am so sorry. It seems there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”
“…Pardon?” Oh no…
“The first I was referring to was not Rae’s chastity but her first handmade strawberry daifuku.”
“Her…first handmade strawberry daifuku?” I repeated the words in a half daze.
“Ohhhhhh!” Rae exclaimed, as though just remembering something. “That was around the time we rounded up those corrupt nobles, wasn’t it? I’d been wanting to make strawberry daifuku ever since our holiday, so I made some while Miss Claire was out and had Miss Lilly taste-test them for me.”
“I-I’m quite particular about my strawberry daifuku, you see,” Lilly said.
I wanted so very much to crawl into a hole at that moment. “S-so, I misunderstood what Lilly meant?”
“It would appear so,” Rae said.
“I-I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! This is all my fault for not articulating myself well!” Lilly said.
Wait, then I had worn that shameless outfit for nothing? “…Ack.”
“Miss Claire?!” Rae exclaimed.
“Eeek?! Her eyes are rolling back in her head! Rae, quick, use your healing magic!” Lilly shouted. “…W-wait, could this actually be my chance to do something with Rae behind Miss Claire’s back?! Rae, let’s—”
“No chance,” Rae said.
“A-aww… H-how about a farewell kiss, at least?”
“Nope.”
Lilly clicked her tongue. “Prude. Would it kill you to at least toss me a bone?”
“M-Miss Lilly?”
“Ah! N-no, that wasn’t intentional! I didn’t mean to say that!”
The two of them shouted this and that, but I was too far gone to pay any mind. In my daze, I swore to myself that I would always ask for clarification before leaping to conclusions from here on out.
Incidentally, when I told May and Aleah about all this…
“Oh, Mama Claire…”
“You can be a bit silly sometimes, Mother Claire.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that! |
Torture Princess
1
Innocent Victims
Thanks to the efforts of the Torture Princess and her servant, the fourteen demons were successfully defeated and slain.
Humanity’s desperate fight had finally reached its conclusion. But the battle left the world acutely wounded, like a chessboard with cracks running down its surface.
The Capital, in particular, had been scarred and defiled. And that had brought forth a new problem.
The upper echelons of the Church, a number of their fanatics, and some of those who wished to escape the burden of having to restore the Capital sought to awaken the first demon, expand the destruction, and in doing so urge God to rebuild the world.
They believed that when the world was mended, the pious faithful would remain. But that line of thinking was naive in the extreme and shallower than the dreams of a child.
God created the world, and Diablo destroyed it. That was the extent of their existences.
Rebuilding was nothing more than the act of blotting out the current portrait, then painting a new one on top of it.
Other than the one holding the paintbrush, everyone would die. That was the answer awaiting them.
Also, in the underbelly of the world, there existed those who had worked to bring those events about, and there existed those who had worked to prevent it. The Butcher was the former, and he had sold Vlad demon flesh in order to bring calamity down on the world. The fourteen demons were destroyed, but the damage they left was more than sufficient to push people into desiring the world’s restructuring.
The flower of malice was blooming proud and vibrant.
The latter, those who worked to prevent it, were a group of alchemists, and they sacrificed their entire clan to bring forth a new Torture Princess. She was a maiden of salvation, a self-proclaimed oppressor of slaves, savior of the world, saint, and whore.
Jeanne de Rais.
On her guidance, Kaito and the others were currently deep in the sealed-away bowels of the Capital’s underground tomb.
The room they were in was modeled after a nursery. At first glance, it looked to be cutely adorned. But the decorations’ true nature was that of grotesque agony. Living human heads were embedded in the walls in place of a floral wallpaper, and intestines dangled from torn stomachs on the ceiling in place of ribbons.
And in the room’s center sat a cradle. It seemed almost cruel how pure a shade of white it was.
The cradle was rocking, as though to soothe the first demon slumbering within.
As she stood before that overwhelmingly powerful, wicked entity, Jeanne made her haughty proclamation.
“Now, dear Lovers, you understand the truth, and the gravity of the situation. Kaito Sena. Elisabeth Le Fanu. I know that the two of you are destined to fight each other to the death. But now you must throw that all away and serve me as faithful slaves.”
She turned her rosy gaze directly on the two of them.
And when she did, Jeanne de Rais, the artificial Torture Princess, went on as though it were only natural.
“At this rate, our world will be destroyed, and not so much as a trace will remain.”
Her words rang out through the chamber like a final verdict.
“…Hmph.”
“…Hmm.”
Upon hearing what Jeanne had to say, both Kaito and Elisabeth abruptly crossed their arms. Then they closed their eyes, as if to scrutinize her order-like request. Elisabeth’s beautiful face hardened, her expression serious, and Kaito’s youthful face did the same. A few seconds passed. Then the two of them opened their eyes in unison.
Neither of them had consulted the other. Without exchanging so much as a glance, they gave their replies.
Not even a breath separated their overlapping refusals.
Jeanne blinked repeatedly. Her head slumped as it tilted to the side.
“You made your decisions rather promptly, didn’t you, Lovers? Moreover, your answers themselves were outside my expectations. And ‘surprising’ hardly begins to describe the speed with which you responded. Please state your reasons.” |
Torture Princess
“First, ’tis wholly unclear what actions you intend to take hereon in search of this salvation of yours or what have you.”
Elisabeth raised her forefinger.
The black varnish on her nail glittered as she spun it aimlessly around in the air.
“Even if you tell me to become your servant, I have no intention of agreeing while unable to verify the validity of your plans and directions. And even prior to that, another problem arises. Do I look to you to be a laudable enough woman to labor like a slave under the direction of another?”
“Yeah, nope, not seeing it.”
Elisabeth pointed at herself, her face fiendish and cruel. Behind her, Kaito nodded earnestly.
The two of them then traded an inane exchange. “I have no desire to hear that from you. I shall kill you for that later.” “Wait, why?!” Seeing them on their normal behavior despite the time and place, Jeanne tilted her head to the other side.
“I see. That seems logical enough. Even the last section felt oddly persuasive. And your other reasons?”
“Second, you clearly have intentions of dragging us into some battle for the sake of salvation, do you not? And with no regard for our thoughts on the matter, at that. Why, then, should we content ourselves with being your servants? I see little benefit. We have little proof that your true motives are worthy of such faith.”
“I see, I see. And what else?”
“Third, Kaito, you tell her.”
Elisabeth turned to Kaito and gave a sharp gesture with her chin. The two of them still hadn’t consulted with each other. But in spite of that, he took over her speech with utmost ease.
“Thing is, we just don’t like you that much. That’s all.”
“I see. Illogical in the extreme.”
Jeanne bobbed her head up and down. But that was the extent of her reaction. She didn’t seem satisfied, but she didn’t seem dejected, either. She simply began spinning around on the spot, her left foot acting as her axle.
The chains dangling from her thin wrists like a prisoner’s jingled.
“Then I can assume that you have no intention of becoming my servants, but you plan on maintaining our collaborative relationship? After tellin’ you chucklefucks so many of the world’s secrets, having to be enemies with you meatheads sounds like a bad time! As you can see, I’m just a sweet little girl, after all!”
“The way you manage to offend is nothing short of superb, and your manner of speech is as disjointed as always. But I have no complaints with your conclusion. My servant’s foolishness and goody-goody nature know no limits, so I’m all but certain he’d have gotten himself involved regardless, of course. But I am not he. Normally, I’d have lost interest altogether the moment you mentioned salvation.”
“Oh, do you intend on seceding, then? I’d like to see you try, bitch!”
“Nay, I shall lend you my strength. And rejoice, for I intend to give it my utmost.”
A cruel smile accompanied Elisabeth’s declaration. Kaito nodded, his expression devoid of surprise. Even though she’d been the one to ask for help, though, Jeanne plopped her head to the other side again in puzzlement.
“For what reason?”
“I slew the fourteen demons. I put them down, each and every one. I destroyed them.”
Suddenly, Elisabeth’s tone grew cold and levelheaded. Her crimson eyes narrowed.
Sharp bloodlust danced atop her tongue as the words slipped from her mouth.
“But for that to be the mere opening act to the world being rebuilt? What an insipid farce. The ones who would laugh at the corpses I’ve left in my wake and accuse them of having died in vain shall perish by my hand. I shall kill them all. And in a manner befitting the name of Torture Princess, no less.”
Elisabeth gave a grand laugh. Her smile was beautiful, twisted, and evil.
Seeming half-likely to lick her lips, she gave voice to her blasphemous proclamation.
“Even if they are the Saint, even if they are Diablo, and even if they are God.”
“Bravo. I would expect no less from you. I would expect no less from the first Torture Princess, the woman who willingly gave herself to sin.”
Jeanne loudly clapped, the chains on her wrists jingling like a tambourine. Then, placing an open palm over her chest, she gave an elegant bow. With a great display of pride, Jeanne endorsed Elisabeth’s statement.
“Indeed, precisely. It would not do for us to be anything but haughty and proud. For without our human deeds surpassing those of God and Diablo, how could we possibly hope to bring about salvation?”
“Hmm,” pondered Kaito. On a basic level, Jeanne displayed the same arrogant disposition no matter who she was dealing with. But with Elisabeth, her reactions seemed to be of a slightly more positive bent.
The plan to create a Torture Princess must have started way long ago. But back then, they probably hadn’t arrived at the name “Torture Princess” yet. And it’s probably not just her speech—she likely used Elisabeth as a point of reference for her actions, too.
Perhaps Jeanne held a degree of respect toward the woman she’d used as a template. Elisabeth, though, seemed like she couldn’t care less about Jeanne’s admiration. She gave a small shrug.
As she did, Izabella interrupted their conversation.
“I apologize for the intrusion, but isn’t it rather dangerous to be making such an uproar down here? If you’ll forgive me, you’ve all been rather loud the last few minutes… What do you intend to do if that thing wakes up?”
At the moment, Izabella was being carried by Deus Ex Machina, the living, four-in-one weapon Jeanne had summoned as a servant. Sitting in its metal arms, she was looking at the cradle with a pallid expression on her face. Her eyes were filled with primal terror.
Kaito and Elisabeth turned their gazes toward the first demon as well. It was still deep in slumber.
But if it’s asleep, that means it’s eventually gonna wake up.
As a matter of fact, the group scheming to have the world rebuilt was actively hoping for that thing to awaken. But just as unease began welling up within Kaito, a voice suddenly called out from beside him to refute it.
“Put your mind at ease. You needn’t worry about that, I daresay.”
Kaito turned to look at the voice’s owner. A man wearing an aristocratic coat with a cravat was floating beside him, his legs crossed elegantly in the air. The man was Vlad Le Fanu, the Kaiser’s previous contractor and Elisabeth’s foster father—or, to be more precise, a replica of his soul. The smile that spread across his face bordered on beautiful.
“After all, its contract with its master yet stands.”
Vlad was a mere phantasm, and as such, the forces of gravity held no sway over him. He floated gently through the air on his way to his destination, which was, of all places, directly above Diablo’s cradle. Izabella quietly called out, trying to get him to stop.
“Wait, stop, stop, that’s dangerous. You shouldn’t get any closer than that.”
“Good heavens, to think that the Holy Knights’ commander would be such a coward. Timidity and virginity go hand in hand, I suppose, which lends your reaction a certain charm to it.”
“I’m gonna need you to dial it way back, man. That was a pretty blatant HR violation there.”
“What exactly might an ‘ay-char’ be, my dear successor? I’m afraid that we of this world aren’t familiar with that word.”
Vlad calmly threw Kaito’s cold rebuke aside. Then he turned back to the entity before himself and peered at it, an act that would have been enough to drive any normal human mad. As he placed his hand on the side of the cradle, he let out a seductive whisper.
“Upon manifestation, higher-ranked demons use their summoners as references and obtain from them language and ego. And upon gaining ego, many, like our friendly Kaiser here, go against the wishes of their inexperienced masters. This thing’s summoner, though, was first-rate. The Church built it this devious little room, but even with the pacification from the room’s pain, it wouldn’t awaken. The order it received was so effective, it borders on a curse, you see.”
Kaito responded to Vlad’s words with shock. Then, still dumbfounded, he turned to survey the room.
The people embedded in the walls were screaming in agony. But their vocal cords had been taken from them, and their howls were silent. The only things coming from their faces were tears and saliva. And the people hanging from the ceiling with rent stomachs were the same. The entire room was perpetually filled with the pain of the living, designed to pacify the demon within.
But according to Vlad, all of it was meaningless.
“Wait, the Church went out of their way to build this torture chamber…and it turns out they didn’t even need to?”
“That they didn’t, my dear. Since time immemorial, it has been an occasional habit of the weak to fearfully give offerings to the strong despite neither party wishing it. It’s a tragic tale, truly, and I’m sure the unfortunate victims around us find it more appalling than any.”
Vlad chuckled, and Kaito clenched his fists. As they did, Diablo continued peacefully breathing. It looked like a satisfied child, one who had never so much as experienced sorrow.
Vlad drew his face close to the child’s, which was repulsive in a difficult-to-quantify way. This time, his laugh was tinged with irony.
“Heh, no matter how proficient its master’s order, seeing an entity with power enough to destroy the world merely sleeping like this after manifesting is wholly unprecedented. And I say that as someone who lives in that very world.”
“Nay, you were burned through and through till you were well and truly dead. I made quite certain of that.”
“Ah, right you are. Burned to death by my own beloved daughter, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Wait, no, I suppose that isn’t anything to laugh about. But, well, I exist in some capacity, in any case. And because of that, it would be rather bothersome if the world went and got itself destroyed. But at the same time, as a mage, leaving Diablo to its rest seems altogether a waste. At any rate, though, it won’t wake unless it receives a new order from its contractor.”
As she heard Vlad’s declaration, Hina narrowed her emerald eyes just a hair. As she stood beside Kaito, she laid her hands over the breast of her maid uniform and clasped them together tightly.
“Its contractor…”
Seeing her unease, Kaito drew himself closer to her. After exchanging a glance, the two of them nodded.
Jeanne had already told them who the contractor was.
The Suffering Saint revered by the Church.
She’s the one contracted to the first demon.
The long-sung legend of the world’s restructuring at the hand of the Saint had another, hidden side to it.
Before becoming known as the Saint, she’d formed a contract with the most powerful demon. While it’s unclear what her objective was, she was unable to maintain control and ended up destroying the world. In her regret, she summoned God, formed a contract with Him, and rebuilt the world. But she was unable to endure her two contracts, nor was she able to die, so instead, she fell into a deep slumber—and ever since, the truth had been perverted, leaving the focus solely on the fact that she’d carried God within her body as the savior who rebuilt the world. And because of that, she’d become worshipped as the “Suffering Saint.”
Part of the reason that the order she gave to the First Demon was so effective was probably because she used God’s power for it as well.
As that thought crossed his mind, a small question arose with it. The Saint was supposed to be the only one capable of waking up the first demon. That meant that the people plotting to set the world’s rebuilding in motion couldn’t wake it up, either. But if that was the case, then where was the woman who possessed that power resting?
An eternal slumber, huh?
Death and sleep were very different. And unlike Diablo, it was conceivable that any human would be able to wake up the Saint. If the Church got their hands on her, they’d be able to implore her to bring about the miracle of restructuring. That was something he and the others definitely needed to prevent.
But where in the world could she be?
“Hey, do we have any idea where the Saint might be? She isn’t dead, right? Because if she isn’t, then we gotta find her before the Church does.”
“You’ve asked an uncharacteristically pertinent question, mister. Allow me to answer it. We the Church, and for that matter all of humanity, have no idea where the Saint currently rests. And the Church has spared no effort in trying to locate her. But after all their investigations and expeditions, the only things they were able to locate were relics. And they were hunks of trash, the lot of ’em! And the other mages and believers looking for her found no more success than they.”
“Well…I guess that’s good news. That means that there’s no way to bring about the world’s restructuring. I mean, without the Saint, Diablo won’t wake up. And they can’t pray to God to start the rebuilding, either, right?”
Kaito felt a deep sense of relief. When he did, though, Jeanne’s eyes flashed as though she was looking at an incorrigible dunce. It was impressive, given that the rest of her face was as expressionless as always. Elisabeth heaved a heavy sigh.
Kaito tilted his head to the side, unsure of what had been so stupid about what he’d said. Even after running it all back through his mind, he couldn’t find any contradictions. Jeanne shrugged her bare shoulders derisively.
“You really are The Fool, aren’t you, mister? The Church desires the world’s restructuring due to their blind faith in the Saint. Despite knowing of the first demon’s existence, the reconstruction sect still believes the Saint to possess boundless mercy. Because of that, they believe that no matter how they go about destroying the world, the Saint will naturally appear amid the rubble and carry out the rebuilding. Diablo is but one method at their disposal. Of course, they would doubtless prefer to find her themselves and witness the miracle firsthand.”
“Wait, b-but are people even capable of such wide-scale destruction on their own?”
“With ease. And especially now that the Church can produce as much of the Monarch’s meat as they desire.”
Elisabeth responded matter-of-factly to Kaito’s doubts. Without a shred of hesitation, she put forth a cruel supposition.
“Let us say, as an example… All they’d have to do is cart a small army of transformed sinners to the border leading to the beastfolk and demi-human lands. War would break out, the forests would burn, and the earth would be shattered. And there’s no shortage of other methods one could conceive of. Just think back to your past life. You should be well acquainted with mankind’s capacity for tyranny, and the means of destruction at their disposal are legion.”
“The Church…the Church would never resort to such inhumane methods!”
Suddenly, Izabella cried out. Kaito and the others all looked at her. Kaito’s gaze was unconsciously tinged with pity. Her silver armor, what had once been proof of her status as a paladin, still shone. But she’d just defeated a monster created by a high priest called the Grave Keeper, and her armor now sported dark stains from its blood.
Ironically, her own body served as a rebuttal to her outcry. Even so, she continued her emotional appeal.
“I’ll concede that ever since the demon subjugation, a group within the Church has been acting suspiciously. Within the paladins, as well. And I’m well aware of how unusual this place is, along with the fact that they worked to conceal it. But the vast majority of the high priests are good, respectable people. Why are you all so unable to trust in their dignity and virtue? My paladins wouldn’t stand for the sorts of atrocities you speak of!”
The more she spoke, the more she affirmed the perversion lurking within the Church. Her voice was full of desperation, as though she was clinging to something. But Jeanne merely looked at her the way one would at a willful child.
“Would you mind being quiet, miss? It takes a thief to catch a thief, they say! Even if you and your friends get pissed off, it ain’t gonna change shit! Organizations are like centipedes. The body follows the head, even if it doesn’t quite know what it’s doing. And people would sooner discard their dignity and virtue than be left behind. To put it kindly, it’s proof of their loyalty. To put it less kindly, well, sometimes abandoning one’s judgment ends up working toward the greater good. This time, however, the head is beyond salvation. Shit’s rotten to the core.”
“B-but…”
“Godd Deos’s death was the turning point, no doubt. With nobody near the head to stop it from running wild, the situation can quickly turn for the worse, with little regard for the opinions of those involved.”
Izabella choked back her rebuttal. She was probably well aware of examples where organizations had undergone transformations without their members noticing. Still silent, she bit down on her lip.
Jeanne, on the other hand, went on. Her tone was that of an instructor.
“There exist shepherds who would gladly cast themselves into the fire just to catch a glimpse of a miracle. And most of their sheep will blindly follow after them. Only when the situation becomes irreparable will the people first cry out. How did things get to this point? they will say, one and all.”
Izabella offered no reply, instead choosing to remain completely silent. But she hadn’t given up—she was clearly thinking in earnest about something. Concerned about how deeply she seemed to be brooding, Kaito called out to her.
“Hey, Izabella—”
“Therefore, before the situation reaches the point of no return, we must locate and obtain the Saint.”
Jeanne, though, continued talking, paying no heed to Izabella’s mental anguish. Kaito went quiet for the time being.
At the moment, figuring out their next course of action was of utmost importance.
“If the situation degraded into a race war, reverting it would be nigh impossible, after all. It’d be like charging straight into Hell! Ain’t shit a group of our size could do about that!”
“But you have no information on the Saint’s whereabouts, either, aye? What do you intend to do about that?”
“True. But that’s not to say the information doesn’t exist.”
Jeanne offered an unexpected answer to Elisabeth’s question. Kaito frowned.
Who could possibly have information regarding the location of a woman who’d been missing since the very creation of the world?
“Her location may well be known to a single…or rather, perhaps it’s best not to try to count, but they do exist. I’ve spent some time investigating him. But upon learning the secrets of this underground tomb, I find my suspicions have finally turned to confidence.”
The chain on Jeanne’s wrist rattled as she raised an arm. Then she pointed at the wall they had broken the barrier on and passed through. It was currently functioning as a door and was resting ajar, and on its surface was an intricate carving of an apostle wearing tattered rags and standing alongside the Saint.
As he gazed at the apostle’s familiar figure, Kaito muttered meaningfully.
“…The Butcher, huh.”
“This, too, is a reason I sought the assistance of you two Lovers. He is the merchant of legend, one of the founders of the original Five Great Guilds, and known by all with even a passing involvement in trade. And he is also the Saint’s apostle, the Butcher. After working to build the foundations for the circulation of goods within society, he went into hiding for countless ages. But there have been sightings of him in recent years, all of which have been located around the two of you.”
Kaito instinctively cast his eyes downward. He still hadn’t gotten his emotions in order over this whole ordeal. Hina, standing beside him, was much the same. The Butcher had saved them a number of times, so it was difficult to think of him as an enemy. But according to Elisabeth, he’d declared himself the enemy of no one individually but of every person living in the world.
And he’d supposedly said something else as well.
“They are of little consequence to the result. I’d never thought someone would rise to oppose the dreadful end of the story that the fourteen tragedies mark the beginning of. And Mr. Dim-Witted Servant is the same. Though your two tales may be small in the scope of things, the results they bear may be monumental indeed… Who knows, after all, how the world may turn from here on?”
That doesn’t sound like something the “enemy of the world” would say, does it?
That thought stole through Kaito’s mind unbidden. The Butcher’s words didn’t sound like they’d come from someone who wanted the world to end. But he swallowed down the doubts welling up inside and asked a different question instead.
“Where is the Butcher right now?”
Elisabeth responded to his inquiry by crossing her arms. When she spoke, her voice had a mysteriously quiet ring to it.
“He’s inside a Gibbet within my castle.”
“You, uh, you did mention on the way down here that you’d captured him. But you didn’t just leave him like that, did you?”
“I did. What of it? I can hardly release a man who proclaims himself my enemy. ’Twould be folly.”
“I mean, I guess…”
Surely there are options other than just leaving him chained up, thought Kaito to himself. But the Butcher was notably elusive. Any lesser restraints would probably have ended with him just slipping out.
Finally satisfied, Kaito turned his gaze away from Elisabeth. It landed on the first demon.
It doesn’t matter if it wakes up or keeps sleeping, huh. But we can’t let them destroy the world, no matter what method they try to use… Wait, hold on a second.
If that was the case, then just finding the Saint wouldn’t be enough to stop the Church from running rampant, would it? Was Jeanne perhaps hoping to get the Saint to persuade the fanatics to stop? That plan seemed altogether dubious, so Kaito posed Jeanne a question.
“Hey, what’s your plan for after we find the Saint?”
“Duh, we’re gonna kill her ass.”
Kaito found himself at a loss for words, and his eyes went wide with shock. He hadn’t thought that their plan involved killing the Saint. Jeanne’s lips curled upward a smidgen. Then, in order to completely crush his naïveté, she elaborated.
“Why do you seem so surprised? If we kill its contractor, Diablo will be unable to stay manifested and vanish. And God, who yet dwells within her body, is no different. When that happens, the two of them will return to a state where mankind’s desires cannot possibly reach them. Furthermore, if we deliver her head to our foes, they, too, will understand. ‘The miracle is lost to us.’ ‘Even if we destroy the world, it won’t be rebuilt.’”
“But we don’t have to kill anyone… If we just get her to make the fanatics see reason—”
“Oh my, you would have us rely on the woman who once destroyed the world? Please don’t tell me you only just now realized, Hanged Man. The praiseless road we walk down is paved with thorns, and at its end, we shall become true enemies of this world.”
Jeanne shook her head in exasperation, her thick honey-blond hair gently scattering across her shoulders.
She still bore no expression, but her rose-colored eyes opened alarmingly wide as she made her declaration.
“Our salvation lies in murdering Diablo, murdering God, and, yes, murdering a human.”
A heavy silence spread throughout the dimness of the underground tomb.
Kaito still offered no reply. Hina gently placed her hand atop his arm. The Kaiser let out a deep, humanlike laugh. As she scratched gently at her own black hair, Elisabeth spoke in an annoyed tone.
“Hmm… The Saint bears God within her body, so I have concerns about our ability to actually kill her. I suppose we’ll know once we try. Steady your resolve, if naught else.”
“Yeah, no, I’m okay. I’d be fine even without you telling me that.”
“Very well, then.”
“I do appreciate it, though.”
“Ha. Appreciate what exactly?”
Elisabeth scoffed at Kaito’s words of thanks. Even so, he nodded back at her. Jeanne’s declaration had come as a blow to him, but he was already over it. He’d seen grisly mountains of corpses before, and starting with Marianne, he’d killed his fair share of people.
There was no reason for him to be fixated on the Saint’s survival.
And besides, once we meet her in the flesh, everything might change on the spot. Right now, we should just worry about getting the Butcher to talk.
“It seems there are no objections to our current course of action, then, so I think we’d best be off. Going back the way we came ain’t too glamorous or anything, but them’s the breaks. All the barriers are destroyed, but the building itself is designed to block teleportation. To go to the Torture Princess’s castle, we need to first make our way outside.”
And with that, Jeanne practically danced her way out of the nursery. The Kaiser scoffed in displeasure, but he, Vlad, Elisabeth, and Izabella, who was still being carried by Deus Ex Machina, followed after her.
Accompanied by Hina, Kaito started walking out of the nursery as well. But as he approached the doorway, he stopped in his tracks. His leather soles screeched against the ground. Then he turned back, the hem of his military-style long coat rustling as he did so.
As he stared fixatedly at the horrific nursery, he called out to one of the people behind him.
“Hey, Vlad. You said that even without this room’s messed-up setup…even without the pacification from the pain, the First Demon won’t wake up, right?”
“Verily, my dear successor. This room was crafted out of an overabundance of fear. It’s meaningless, and dare I say even comical…so I have my suspicions as to your intentions.”
“You’re not going to stop me, even though you’re onto me?”
“Perish the thought! True, your actions are hypocritical, grounded in a trivial sense of mercy! Yet, at the same time, they will lead you one step closer toward becoming a worthy vessel to inherit my will—after all, what you’re thinking of doing is a privilege extended only to the strong! Hypocrisy leads to arrogance, and from them flower the origins of all sadism and tyranny! Please defile them all you wish!”
“Huh… Well, if that’s the way you see it, at least you won’t get in my way.”
Kaito nodded as he gave his blunt reply. Then he cast a fleeting glance outside the room.
Vlad was spreading his arms exaggeratedly wide. At some point, Jeanne and the others had stopped as well. Elisabeth was shrugging at the very edge of his vision, as though calling him a fool. But Kaito knew.
If I hadn’t stopped, you’d have come up with some excuse to do this yourself, wouldn’t you?
The only bewildered member of the group was Hina. She looked back and forth between Kaito and the nursery. Before long, though, her expression stiffened with resolve. Gripping her halberd tightly, she stepped in front of Kaito.
“My dear Master Kaito, I, too, have grasped your intentions. You are far gentler than any other and far more merciful…and that is precisely why it will hurt you so. Please let me do—”
“No. This isn’t something I should be foisting off on my wife. I’m gonna do it. I have to.”
Her offer was kind, but Kaito turned it down. With Hina looking to be on the verge of tears, he patted her head, then gestured for her to leave. After waiting until Hina was a safe distance away, Kaito took a deep breath and raised an arm above his head.
Then he snapped his fingers.
Six blades appeared out of the empty air, deploying in a circle with the cradle at their center like the middle of a flower. They glittered sharply as they turned toward the walls and ceiling. After coming to eerily precise stops, they waited for their master’s cue.
Kaito murmured quietly, as though trying to persuade himself.
“It’s a job befitting the enemy of mankind.”
Then he snapped his fingers again.
“La (kill them all).”
The blades shot out with the speed of a guillotine dropping, the six of them carving up the walls and ceiling in unison. That is to say, they sliced up the victims installed therein.
They’d all been cursed so as to avoid letting them die. But the curse wasn’t nearly effective enough to protect against Kaito’s magically empowered attack. Their lives, which had been held perpetually just shy of death’s grasp, instantly came to an end.
One after another, the soundless screams faded.
But the slaughter went on.
Blood sprayed in all directions, drenching the room in a ghastly shade of red. It looked almost as though six beasts had leaped from Diablo’s cradle and savagely sliced their way through the room. And the noise of the walls and ceiling sounded like an orchestra. Kaito, in his black uniform, played the role of the conductor, waving his arm both violently and delicately. The blades were his instrumentalists, and they wove their shearing melody in accordance with his directions.
The time it took felt like it lasted an eternity. But every performance must eventually come to an end.
Ten or twenty seconds later, Kaito swung his arm wide, then brought it to a sudden stop.
All at once, the blade disappeared. Silence descended upon the room. The only sound left was the faint trickling of blood.
The nursery-like chamber had been completely ruined. Chunks of flesh and viscera littered the floor, and everything in sight was red. A thick, rusty smell began filling the air.
Amid the tragic spectacle, the first demon slumbered gently, as though nothing had changed. Kaito averted his gaze from it, instead looking at the blood gathering at his feet. As he faced the vast pool of red, he let out a gentle whisper.
“Good night, everyone. Sweet dreams.”
In a sense, his words were tinged with madness. But they came from the heart.
After all, he’d heard a continuous scream from the moment he’d first set foot in the room. It was a striking, sorrowful plea, one that only someone who’d experienced extreme pain could perceive.
Please kill us, they’d been saying.
Please make it all end.
The people being used to pacify Diablo had long since gone mad from the pain. But in spite of that, they’d never stopped their desperate supplication. And now Kaito could hear their pitiful cries no more.
He cast his gaze around the room, his expression full of affection and sadness. He looked to make sure they were all dead, that there were no sacrifices left in the room. After determining that to be the case, he let his face turn serious again.
Having coldly wiped away his expression, the Kaiser’s contractor turned on his heel. Then, alone, he began walking.
Hurriedly, Hina rushed back into the nursery. Clutching the hem of her skirt, she faced the grisly spectacle and offered a deep bow. After closing her eyes for a moment as though in prayer, she ran back over to her companion’s side. Nestling close to Kaito, Hina squeezed his hand in hers.
He stayed facing forward, as though nothing had happened. But he returned his wife’s grasp and intertwined his fingers with hers.
Ever so faintly, his hand was trembling. |
Torture Princess
2
The Little Lady’s Choice
Officially, the underground tomb’s sixth floor didn’t exist.
Everything past it was blockaded off by a colorful barrier, and the architecture took a turn for the bizarre. But once Kaito and the others ascended the seemingly endless staircase and returned to the fifth floor, the rest of the tomb was as calm and sanctified as ever.
They walked down the long passageway. Individually crafted mausoleums of the kings of old lined them on either side. Even with the tomb’s innermost secrets laid bare, the resting kings on the upper floors were unperturbed.
As he cast a sidelong glance at the extravagantly decorated mausoleums, Kaito posed a question to Jeanne.
“Did any of the kings know about the First Demon?”
“Who can say? I imagine it depends on how close to the Church and how devout they each were. For example, I think the odds that the third king, hailed as the ‘Faithful King,’ was informed are quite high. He gave his generation’s Grave Keeper special rights, after all, and their relationship was rather cordial. They’re all crazy!”
“Makes sense. Still, though, for some of the kings to find out about it and still give it their endorsement… Fanaticism’s a hell of a drug, I guess.”
Kaito turned his gaze toward what appeared to be the third king’s mausoleum. Compared to the other kings’ mausoleums, its design was rather plain. It didn’t even sport flowers, although the uncouth suits of armor surrounding the sarcophagus within hinted that the third king had specialized in battle. The only piece of ornamentation that could be described as beautiful was the statue of the Saint hanging upside down from the ceiling.
Perhaps the cause of his faith had been a desire for divine protection in his countless wars. Now the Saint was always watching over him. Red gemstones were embedded in the sarcophagus’s lid, even replicating the Saint’s tearstains.
That’s one messed-up charade they’re pulling.
Kaito leveled a blunt rejection of the king’s beliefs that he was clearly adhering to even in death. But he chose not to voice that impression of his. Instead, he asked a different question.
“What about the current king, then?”
“His predecessor died early, so he is still a whelp. I’d wager they haven’t told him a thing. Ha, he’d likely faint on the spot.”
This time, it was Elisabeth who answered. Jeanne then offered a follow-up.
“He also entrusted the battle against the demons wholly to the Church and has done little in the way of mobilizing troops on his own. As a result, the Royal Knights generally just obey the Holy Knights’ orders. The Church no doubt saw that as an opportunity to seize greater power, but Godd Deos refused to use their strength as a pretext to meddle in domestic affairs. That geezer was a pain in the ass, but I gotta give him credit for being a decent guy. At some point, though, the king’s advisers began tithing more and more, and their ranks grew flush with the pious. That being the case, it’s anyone’s guess as to what would happen if the king found out about the first demon.”
The two Torture Princesses exchanged a glance, then shrugged. Their billowing blond and straight black heads of hair shook.
Kaito sighed. He knew almost nothing about the current king. But unlike the third imperial beastfolk princess, Vyade Ula Forstlast, he didn’t seem like he’d be particularly reliable if things got down to the wire.
It’s gonna be rough, not having any influential humans who are sympathetic to our cause.
Kaito sank into thought. Once he stopped talking, his surroundings grew quiet as well.
Eventually, the group approached the stairwell to the entrance. As they did, Kaito looked up, thinking he’d heard something. Noise from the surface was finally starting to reach them, running down the stairs and echoing off the thick walls.
Someone’s shouting orders. And that’s a lot of armor, swords, and footsteps I hear.
Kaito cautiously strained his ears to make out the intermingling sounds. As a consequence, he found himself inadvertently frowning.
“Sounds like they’ve got quite the crowd up there, huh.”
“I should certainly think so. Izabella and I originally came on orders from the Church to kill you, after all. And I did happen to destroy Yah Llodl’s communication device before we entered the tomb, not to mention the fact that we left the paladins behind. ’Twould have been stranger if they hadn’t called in reinforcements.”
“…Oh, right. That makes sense.”
As he bore the brunt of Elisabeth’s exasperation, Kaito thought back to their battle from a few hours ago. He and Elisabeth had traded blows directly in front of the underground tomb. However, he’d been so engrossed in the fight that he hadn’t spared much thought as to what would come afterward. And afterward, their entire worldview had been turned on its head.
Everything just changed so quickly.
Kaito’s gaze grew distant. As she stood in front of him, Elisabeth went on.
“The only reason we weren’t attacked while we investigated this place was the strict orders the paladins received not to enter it. The fewer people who know the truth, the better for them, so the reconstruction sect no doubt plans to destroy us the moment we pop our heads out. However, therein lies a problem.”
“A problem?”
“Indeed. Our foe is the Church.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You forget so quickly, fool. The Church has me bound with shackles.”
Kaito’s mouth hung agape in realization. Now that she mentioned it, he remembered.
Elisabeth had been ordered to slay the fourteen demons as a chance to atone for her sins. But because she was a sinner without peer, the Church had placed shackles on her body so that she couldn’t betray them. If one of their priests recited scripture, the shackles would activate.
That meant that Elisabeth’s ability to oppose the Church was diminished. But Jeanne merely shook her head.
“I don’t think we’ll find that to be much of a problem. This is the Capital. The reconstruction sect won’t be able to deploy their transformed paladins. And even if they wanted to use a saint, it would take them too long to get a permit issued. In other words, the force at their disposal is currently quite low. No matter how much cannon fodder they call out, cannon fodder is still cannon fodder. After Deus Ex Machina tosses them aside in one fell swoop, I can activate my teleportation circle. Hunting mice is a specialty of mine, y’see. I don’t mind taking the lead this time.”
“I see, how reliable of you. I’ve no objections.”
Elisabeth readily nodded to Jeanne’s suggestion. Kaito, too, was relieved.
Jeanne’s Deus Ex Machina was even more robust and powerful than him, the Kaiser’s contractor, and Hina, an automaton. Buying enough time to activate a teleportation circle would be a piece of cake for it. But although he gave the plan his approval, he made sure to add a warning, as well.
“Just make sure you don’t kill any of the paladins. They’re only following their beliefs, after all.”
“Given the current situation, that alone is foolhardy in the extreme. Abandoning critical thought is a crime. Ignorance is sin. Sheep end up as mutton, as they say. But if we consider what’s to come, it’s true that unnecessary bloodshed will likely prove disadvantageous. And my little lady would object, as well. Agreed. We should avoid letting things get too complicated here.”
Surprisingly, Jeanne obediently nodded. Behind her, Izabella went slack as she breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed that she’d been on the verge of shouting out. If things had gone poorly, it might have even ended in a fight.
Kaito was glad it had gotten resolved peacefully. All in agreement, they headed toward the entrance. Light from outside streamed down onto the stone stairs. Kaito then stopped, calling out to Jeanne as he did.
“Hold up a minute. Before you send out Deus Ex Machina, we should have one of us get a visual on the situation up there. I’ll go—if they fire off some kind of long-range attack, I can block it with my blades.”
“…Well, I suppose that’s true. Your doll has a rather anxious expression on her face, mister, but you are in fact qualified. Guess you finally get to be useful for once, huh? After you, then.”
Despite the verbal abuse he was receiving, Kaito climbed up the stairs.
Because they’d been made from a different material, the steps near the top had been melted when the demon attacked the Capital. Making sure not to fall, Kaito carefully jumped over the pit. Then he popped his head out through the entrance.
“Let’s see, here… Man, that’s quite the crowd.”
The silver troops were lined up atop the gray earth at regular intervals like chess pieces. There was also a group Kaito wasn’t familiar with beside them, covered from head to toe in scarlet cloth. Due to the way their faces were covered, they looked almost like executioners.
Man, I’m not getting a good vibe from those guys… Hmm?
At that moment, a sense of incongruity washed over Kaito. While it was true that the underground tomb was completely surrounded, their enemies were all standing strangely far away. Kaito frowned as he tried to find the reason.
Then he noticed the bizarre-looking man standing in front of the assembled troops.
Say…what?
The man had a sturdy frame, enough that Kaito could make out his gender despite the distance between them. He had broad shoulders, and his height was on the taller side. In spite of that, though, the hem of his white robes reached all the way to the ground, as did his thick, bristly black hair. That alone would have been enough to qualify his appearance as strange, but his most conspicuous feature was the thick chains binding his arms around himself in an embrace.
Kaito couldn’t help compare him to the other bound saint he was familiar with.
H-huh? He…looks kinda like La Mules, doesn’t he?
As that thought crossed through Kaito’s mind, the chains binding the man’s top half came loose without warning. He slowly spread his arms wide. When Kaito saw what was between them, a shiver of terror ran through his body.
“…!”
The man’s chest had been excavated, clothes and all. The red flesh within had been shaved down, and his white rib cage lay bare. For some reason, though, there was no blood pouring out. The heart, lungs, and other organs a rib cage was normally designed to protect were missing as well. In their place were a large number of white feathered creatures.
A second later, realization hit Kaito. The man was using his rib cage as a birdcage.
“La (fly)!”
Spurred on by instinctual fear, Kaito snapped his fingers. A blade went soaring toward the man. At the same time, white light flared up in the man’s chest, then burst out. The two collided head-on. While the blade was successfully blocking the light, it melted like candy in the process before evaporating. Kaito shot out his second attack. But to his disbelief, the man was faster. He shot out more light, this time even brighter than the first. The white entity swallowed up the blade, but this time, it didn’t stop.
Kaito’s eyes widened in shock. The light bore down on him.
An unpleasant blasting noise rang out.
As it did, the light burned away the tomb’s entrance.
“Master Kaito, no!”
“Wh—?”
It all happened in a single moment.
Right before the light made impact, something grabbed Kaito by the scruff and yanked him backward. His back toppled into Hina’s chest. After embracing him, she leaped back over the melted pit in the stairwell, then crouched down.
White light burst over their heads, accompanied by the sound of an explosion.
Kaito looked up. When he did, he saw that the metal decorations at the tomb’s entrance that had miraculously survived were glowing red and dripping. If Hina had been even a hair slower, he would have died on the spot.
“Th-thanks, Hina… Geez, I seriously misjudged that guy’s power.”
“Oh, Master Kaito… Thank goodness, thank goodness you’re safe… I was so worried for you.”
Still sitting firmly on the ground, Hina squeezed Kaito tightly.
As one might expect from the fact it had survived the demon invasion, everything from halfway up the stairs down was unmarred. The building material itself must have had a powerful anti-magic effect to it. But the bombardment showed no signs of letting up.
They’d lost the ability to carelessly go outside. Jeanne blinked, her rosy eyes flashing.
“…Well now. This falls outside my expectations.”
“Aye, it boggles the mind. What exactly is the meaning of this? Forgoing all the proper procedures to deploy a saint, then a summoned beast bombardment without so much as passing a verdict on us? Have they gone mad? No, wait… Ah!”
Elisabeth clicked her tongue, looking as though she’d just realized something. When she spoke, her tone was filled with vexation.
“The completed request, the one they submitted as part of the plan to defend the Capital immediately after La Mules’s death! Blast, we overlooked it!”
“I suspect your hypothesis is correct. We should assume they used the permit we obtained back then. Under the pretext of killing the Kaiser’s contractor and putting an end to the battle against the demons, fast-tracking its transfer would certainly be possible. And as for that light…”
The one who replied to Elisabeth was Izabella. Still cradled in Deus Ex Machina’s arms, she thoughtfully observed the exploding white light. Kaito followed her lead.
Now that he looked closely, he could see that the light was made up of tiny skylark-like creatures. Saints’ power came from sacred beasts. The man’s birds were clearly far weaker than the one La Mules had been able to deploy, but in exchange, he was able to shoot them out repeatedly.
Jeanne shook her head in annoyance.
“As far as the reconstruction sect is concerned, the end is nigh, after all. They’re starting to move more brazenly. ‘The sky is falling; the sky is falling! Let’s all dance, guys, memento fuckin’ mori!’”
“Ugh, I feel like destroying that communication device didn’t do us any favors.”
Kaito prefaced his comment with a groan as he thought back to the device Yah Llodl had been using to communicate.
The orb that Elisabeth had mercilessly skewered had been needlessly extravagant and flashy. He didn’t know where Yah Llodl ranked in the Church, but the man’s pride was all too evident.
Kaito had no doubt that Yah Llodl’s anger was only worsening his animosity toward himself and the others. That said, figuring out what their foes were thinking wasn’t going to help them much at this point.
This is a problem… If we can’t get outside, we can’t activate the teleportation circle.
Kaito furrowed his brow. The bombardment showed no signs of letting up. Elisabeth clicked her tongue in frustration.
“Tch, the intervals are too short. What to do. Send out Deus Ex Machina, perhaps? ’Tis fast and sturdy. Even so, it would doubtless be whittled away in short order. And you have to temporarily disassemble to activate the teleportation circle, eh… On the off chance they have a second saint in reserve, that would prove troublesome indeed. I wouldn’t mind activating the circle myself, but if they set off the shackles midway through, maintaining it would be no mean feat.”
“I concur. We seem to have quite the problem on our hands. If the Kaiser offered his help, it would make things a deal easier, but… The bad doggy’s got a lot of pride, if nothing else!”
“Hmm? Did the puny human say something? Seems to me like you fancy getting yourself bitten in two.”
“Quit fighting, all of you. I will go.”
A dignified voice rang out, remonstrating them. Everyone turned to look at the speaker: Izabella. Still sitting in Deus Ex Machina’s grasp, her arm was raised and her face was earnest.
Jeanne blinked her eyes rapidly a few times. A few seconds later, her head slumped sharply to the side.
“Have you lost your mind, miss?”
“I suppose I probably have. But I suspect my odds of success are better than you think. Now, let! Me! Down!”
Izabella contorted her body, her cynical remarks accompanied by a smile. Somehow, she was able to slip out from Deus Ex Machina’s arms. After gracefully hopping down onto the floor, she gave a long exhale.
Then she turned her blue and purple eyes toward the incessant explosions of light going off above them. She narrowed her gaze.
“I know the man who summons those beasts—La Christoph, the Modest Birdkeeper. I’ve had the honor of visiting with him a number of times. He possesses a firm spirit. Even after formally becoming a saint, he still recognized me and offered me kind words of advice.”
“That’s…impressive.”
Izabella’s words filled Kaito with earnest admiration. After all, La Mules, a similar saint, had lost her reason and humanity and become little more than an animal. Maybe it had just been the case that La Christoph’s connection to God was weaker than hers had been, but odds were that his force of will was astounding.
At the same time, being reminded of how brazenly the Church retained their saints caused Kaito to realize just how perverse of an organization it was.
The cracks were always there—the current situation just tore them wide open.
The time had finally come. The Church’s shell had cracked, and the terrible monstrosity within was now free.
That was really all there was to it. While the twisted imagery was floating through Kaito’s mind, Izabella continued laying out her plan.
“Even after being recognized as a saint, La Christoph persisted in his deep love for the people. I strongly doubt he knows anything about the plan to reconstruct the world. I’ll need someone to block two or three of his attacks for me, but if I call out to him, I believe there’s a good chance he’ll stop.”
Izabella was totally serious. But Elisabeth crossed her arms and shook her head.
“You expect a saint to see sense while firing off a bombardment? The odds are lower than low.”
“If I die, then all it will mean is that my work up until now was unworthy of being remembered. In that event, I will accept my fate. And I apologize, but you’ll need to come up with a new plan.”
Izabella’s voice was calm, and the evenness of her tone served to illustrate just how composed she was. Kaito reflexively shuddered. The degree of certainty in her voice was alarming.
“Izabella, no!”
“Oh, Master Kaito—”
Kaito hurriedly stood up, wrenching himself free from Hina’s arms. Then he turned to face Izabella.
He stared straight into her mismatched, gemstone-like eyes.
“Izabella, you can’t! Whether or not that saint guy will remember you isn’t the problem! It’s what’ll happen to you afterward. If your plan works, you won’t be able to go back to the Church. Hell, even trying to will be off the table. I’m not gonna let you go through with some plan that’ll get you killed, whether it works or not!”
Kaito’s voice rose to a shout. When Izabella replied with silence, Kaito clenched his fists.
The odds were low that Izabella’s callout would stop the bombardment, but they weren’t zero. But if they wanted to use that opportunity to activate a teleportation circle, it would mean leaving her behind. The moment Izabella showed signs of fleeing, the saint would no doubt recommence his attack on the spot.
She was, of course, a member of the Church, and the commander of the Holy Knights to boot. But given the Church’s current state, even someone of her standing wouldn’t be able to return safely. The situation over there was anything but upstanding.
That was just how deep the roots of evil had sunk into it. The entire organization had gone completely mad.
“Even if it was just because Jeanne kidnapped you, you still ended up going into the underground tomb. You can pretend not to have seen anything, but there’s no way they’ll believe you. And I bet the Grave Keeper will be especially pissed.”
Kaito’s thoughts turned to the perverse nursery down in the depths of the tomb. There had been a monster with a snowy owl’s head and a huge mass of tentacles stationed in front of it as a guard. It had been made by taking a holy summoned beast, feeding it demon meat, and mixing in human parts.
That torture room, its guardian… It takes more than run-of-the-mill fanaticism to make messed-up shit like that.
The Grave Keeper must not have had a moral bone in their body.
And back in Jeanne’s hometown, Kaito had seen those hideously transfigured paladins, too. It was unclear whether they’d done so willingly, but all of them had eaten demon meat.
Either way, even if they’d left them alive, there was no way to save people who’d undergone transformations like that.
“If you go back, they’re just gonna dispose of you. If you’re lucky, all they’ll do is kill you. You can’t go back; it’s over!”
“I refuse to believe that! Or rather, I want to…but even I can see the truth.”
Izabella answered frankly. Her voice was calm. So calm, in fact, that it filled Kaito with ominous premonitions. Izabella wasn’t even trying to deny the evil lurking within the Church anymore. But even so, her smile remained.
“There would normally be no shortage of people who would defend me and ensure my sentence was just. But at this rate, I’m likely to be judged behind closed doors, without my allies knowing about it. Even so, there are things I still must do. You see, I want to go back to the Church.”
“That’s crazy talk…”
“I have to make sure as many of the Holy Knights know the truth as possible. If things continue as they are, they’re liable to be taken advantage of.”
“But you can’t seriously think you’re gonna get a chance to—”
“Even if I don’t. I can’t just sit back and watch my subordinates die.”
Izabella’s words were matter-of-fact. She’d clearly had her mind made up for some time now.
It was at that moment that Kaito realized something. He and Elisabeth didn’t have that many people they needed to protect. At the end of the day, both of them were criminals. But Izabella was different. Many people had placed their trust and loyalty in her.
“The Holy Knights’ main force has to receive any untoward orders. But it’s only a matter of time. It’s as Ms. Jeanne says: Organizations are, for better or for worse, like long centipedes. I refuse to let my people unknowingly destroy the very people, the very world they’re trying to protect.”
“Even so, you still—”
“I understand how you feel. Or rather, allow me to pretend to sympathize despite being wholly incapable of understanding. Still, though, foolish little lady, I must ask that you stop.”
An unexpected voice called out to restrain Izabella. Jeanne stepped forward and stood beside Kaito. She, too, didn’t hesitate to give her warning. Deus Ex Machina stooped over, as though trying to scoop Izabella back up.
Falling away a step, Izabella took on a defensive pose.
Jeanne pointed a pale finger at her. It hung in the air as Jeanne tried to elucidate the situation.
“I didn’t bring you along just to let the Church pass judgment on you, miss. I needed someone besides the Torture Princess and her servant who knew the truth of the world and was able to help convey it. Someone who was affiliated with the Church yet could accept the truth without breaking. That was what I chose you from among the stray sheep for.”
“So I supposed. I had the sense that your expectations for me were something along those lines.”
“It wasn’t so you could die a dog’s death. Don’t forget. Death is absolute. If you die, that’s it. Game over.”
“…Forgive me. I understand the importance of the task you’ve given me. But would you be able to find someone else to carry it out? I have my own task I need to finish, you see.”
Izabella flatly refused to heed Jeanne’s warning. Narrowing her rosy eyes, Jeanne made to set Deus Ex Machina into motion. As things were, Izabella had no means to resist. But with a gentle expression, she repeated back the words Jeanne had once thrust at her.
“I am a commander, though perhaps only in name.”
“…”
For once in her life, a look of surprise crossed Jeanne’s face.
Izabella began walking. It was easy to make out the unwavering pride in her gait, as was the fact that stopping her would accomplish nothing. She walked past Jeanne, practically daring her to act. Her silver hair nearly grazed Jeanne’s honey-blond locks.
Standing straight up, Jeanne let out a quiet whisper.
“…What a fool you are.”
Taking her cue, Deus Ex Machina sprang into motion. But instead of trying to capture Izabella this time, it strode directly forward. It seemed that the steel giant intended to serve as Izabella’s shield, just as she’d requested.
“You can’t…”
Still refusing to give up, Kaito raised his voice. But the timing with which Izabella turned around indicated that she’d seen that coming. As light continued to explode at her back, her voice was the image of composure.
“Farewell, ladies and gentlemen. Dreadful as it was, I’m glad I was able to learn the truth. Even now, I still hold that the Church’s teachings are wonderful. Using faith as a way to support a life lived nobly and properly is an honorable thing. People are weak. They need something to believe in. So as a member of the Church, I will fight to my last to right its wrongs.”
Kaito sucked in his breath. Even after learning so many ugly truths, Izabella retained her piety and pride as the commander of the Holy Knights. Her next words were stern, and her voice rang with conviction.
“That is why, Kaito Sena, Elisabeth Le Fanu, Jeanne de Rais, even if history ends up validating your actions, I cannot become like you.”
With quiet yet unfaltering words, Izabella issued a complete rejection of Kaito and the others.
The ebony and gold Torture Princesses said nothing. Kaito, too, gazed silently at lacerations running across Izabella’s skin and her tranquil eyes. His thoughts turned to the metaphor he’d just heard.
There exist shepherds who would gladly cast themselves into the fire just to catch a glimpse of a miracle.
And their sheep would follow after them, blind to the foolishness of their own actions.
Even though she was just a lone sheep, Izabella was trying to shout out warnings to the rest. She was likely to find herself cut down in the blink of an eye. But even so, she refused to abandon her flock.
Izabella Vicker is a noble person through and through.
Authority and cajolery would utterly fail to make her falter. And she had the rare power to not only believe in her own sense of justice but to put it into action, too.
Which means that there’s no way she’d ever become an enemy of the world.
Kaito now felt that fact keenly. In other words, it was pointless trying to get her to stay by their side any longer.
Kaito and the others were enemies of the world, and the road before them was paved with thorns.
At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is kill God and the Saint.
Trying to coerce someone who was living their life nobly and properly wasn’t possible. Satisfied with that fact, Kaito threw in the towel.
Elisabeth quietly clicked her tongue. Her sleek black hair rustled as she shook her head.
“Ha, do as you please. If one persists in their foolery, that, too, is a form of conviction. If you have no regrets, then go forth and die unburdened. Your brand of idiocy may differ from mine, but we are both idiots nonetheless.”
“That we are, I suppose. Idiots, one and all.”
Izabella’s smile was tinged with a hint of embarrassment. The lacerations running across her face twisted unattractively.
Yet, even so, Izabella Vicker was beautiful.
The next moment, she dashed up the stairs. Her silver hair fluttered as she broke into a run.
Explosions of white light rocked the entrance she was heading for.
With surprisingly fluid motions, Deus Ex Machina took the lead from Izabella.
The steel giant was the first to rush outside. Izabella followed unflinchingly after. The bombardment exploded across Deus Ex Machina. Protected by its massive body, Izabella shouted out.
“Please stop, La Christoph! It’s me, Izabella Vicker! I have something I wish to report! Everyone, please, you have to listen to me!”
Tragically, her voice was drowned out. It looked as though the attacks would continue. But she didn’t give up.
“Rgh!”
Seizing the tiniest of gaps between explosions, Izabella made her move, leaping out from behind Deus Ex Machina. Having abandoned her shield, Izabella laid herself exposed before La Christoph.
“It’s time for us to move.”
“Indeed.”
If they didn’t leave then, they wouldn’t make it in time. With no room to doubt whether or not Izabella would succeed, Jeanne and Elisabeth dashed forward. Kaito and Hina followed after them. With a singularly nonchalant air, the Kaiser shook his head in exasperation and did the same. Vlad floated along behind, a wide grin plastered across his face.
Together, they passed through the entrance.
Unbelievably, the bombardment had stopped. It was almost miraculous how quiet their surroundings were.
They could see a priest wearing a lavish vestment shouting something at La Christoph. He was undoubtedly trying to get him to resume the bombardment. But as he gazed at Izabella in bewilderment, La Christoph obstinately refused to open his arms. The priest shouted again, even louder.
“What the hell are you doing? Why show mercy to someone who’s been won over by the demons?”
As he did, Izabella’s subordinates started moving at once. They all rushed over to the priest. The group that looked like executioners tried to get them to fall back, but the paladins gave determined shouts.
“Please, that’s not it! Our commander was taken against her will!”
“Bah! Back, you lot, back! What are you thinking?!”
“You’re the one trying to dispose of our kidnapped commander all on your own! What are you thinking?!”
“She’s fallen into the demons’ clutches!”
“We told you, she was abducted! We’re not going to just let you blow away our commander!”
Disorder swelled through their ranks. Taking full advantage of the opportunity, Deus Ex Machina collapsed into pieces. The steel giant’s body separated into a number of chunks. From them, four machines landed atop the ashen earth.
One of them was a beast made of nothing but fangs. Another was an automaton, shaped like a human except for its fatally warped frame. One of the other monsters was a lizard with limbs made from pipes and wings of glass. And the final one was a bipedal suit of armor with no visible seams anywhere on its body.
The chains on Jeanne’s wrists jingled. Taking their cue, the machines began spinning.
White light started glittering in a circle around them, and golden flower petals danced up through the air. The teleportation circle began activating, leaving Izabella behind. The priest went slack-jawed. La Christoph continued looking solely at Izabella. She made no motions to flee, so La Christoph chose not to resume his attack.
“Get ahold of yourselves! Don’t let them get away, dammit—stop them!”
As he shouted orders at the fighting paladins, the priest began chanting to activate Elisabeth’s shackles. As she stood beside Kaito, her skin started burning, and she let out a small cry of pain.
“Urk—”
“Elisabeth…”
“Lady Elisabeth.”
Kaito and Hina supported her shoulders. However, Elisabeth wasn’t the one giving the chant for the summoning circle—Jeanne was. The light gradually grew in strength. The paladins and the executioner-like group frantically rushed toward them.
As they did, Jeanne gently extended her hand. Making sure she wasn’t seen by the people closing in on them, she lifted a tuft of Izabella’s hair. Then she kissed her, like a knight kissing a princess’s hand.
Izabella’s shoulders twitched. But she didn’t turn around.
Finally, Jeanne offered a surreptitious murmur to her dignified back.
“I don’t hate seeing a mere human trying to oppose them. After all, such actions are the ones that are supposed to change the world. You may be an idiot, a dunce, and a fool, miss, but I choose to believe that your actions helped delay the clock hands in their march toward the end. You did catch my eye, and the eyes never lie.”
With slight vestiges of sorrow, Jeanne let go of the silver hair. As she did, she offered a quiet farewell.
“Good-bye, my stupid, gallant little lady.” |
Torture Princess
3
Something Left Behind
The gold petals and white light dissolved together to form a solid, cylindrical wall. Then, immediately afterward, it crumbled. The fragments gently melted, transformed into droplets, and crashed against the stone floor. When each one landed, it sent a small crimson splash into the air.
“…Crimson?”
Kaito tilted his head to the side in confusion. Then he noticed the second magic circle at their feet.
The blood it was comprised of was recoiling at Jeanne’s mana, causing it to bounce up off the ground. As a result, their surroundings were like a rain of light pouring atop a sea of blood.
After looking at the room he was in, Kaito furrowed his brow.
“Huh? Wait, don’t tell me this is…”
“Jeanne, you little… I must say, I was expecting we would arrive in the forest nearby. Why is it that you’re able to leap directly to my castle? When was it you interfered with my teleportation circle?”
Her skin still covered in burn marks from the Church’s shackles, Elisabeth crossed her arms.
They had all successfully arrived in the wide chamber beneath Elisabeth’s castle that sported her permanent teleportation circle. But teleporting directly to it wasn’t supposed to be possible for anyone who hadn’t themselves activated it previously.
Everyone turned to look at Jeanne. Her abundant golden locks shook as she tilted her head to the side.
“What are you talking about, miss? Why, you daringly left your castle exposed so as to invite attacks by the fourteen demons, did you not? Shit, you had openings everywhere! In other words, sending in a familiar to invade your castle and tamper with your teleportation circle was no grand undertaking. But hey, don’t sweat the small stuff!”
Her unabashed response earned her a murderous glare from Elisabeth. But it was true that, thanks to the fact that they’d traveled directly to the castle, their arrival had been quicker than they’d anticipated. Letting out a short sigh, Elisabeth started walking. Her heels clicked loudly as she went.
“Very well. I’m hardly pleased, but I shall overlook it this once. This once. Now then, let’s be off.”
“Um, Lady Elisabeth, we should treat your injuries first…”
Hina timidly called out to her. As she stopped in her tracks, Elisabeth’s harsh expression softened. But despite Hina’s frantic pleas, she just gently shook her head.
“How kind you are to the woman you once betrayed… No, no, stop looking at me with those teary eyes! It feels as though I’m kicking a puppy. I had no intention of being snide to you, Hina. What I was trying to say was that you needn’t worry, that I would cast healing magic myself later, when we have time to spare. Aye.”
“Wait…doesn’t that mean that if you were talking to me, you would mean it snidely?”
“How astute he is! I should surely think so. ’Tis your own fault for being so wholly unlovable. You’re a man; deal with it.”
“Well then, I’ll just have to praise Master Kaito so sweetly that it all balances out!”
“Uh… I dunno if ‘balances out’ is really the way you’re supposed to look at it…”
Despite the crisis situation they were in, the banter the three of them exchanged was light. Kaito took care to speak in the same glib manner as always.
By doing so, he managed to slowly but surely regain his lost composure. Eventually, he succeeded in shaking away the scene that had burned itself into his eyes.
My grieving isn’t gonna make things any better. We’ve gotta hurry, for Izabella’s sake, too.
“…Hmph, ’Tis time to cut the idle chatter. Let us be off in earnest. There’s no shortage of information we need to drag out of the Butcher, whether he gives it freely or not. And time is of the essence.”
Her words hinted at the possibility of torture. Elisabeth licked her scarlet lips, and Kaito quietly dashed after her.
They all ran out of the chamber. Groan-like noises echoed throughout the labyrinthine basement as they hurriedly made their way through it and on up the stairs to the first floor.
It was at that point that the Kaiser, who’d been dutifully accompanying them, paused. He raised his head high and sniffed at the air. Then, after shaking his head a few times, he let out a bored scoff.
“…Hmph, I thought as much. Already, eh?”
“What’s the matter, Kaiser?”
“You can’t tell, boy? I should think it’s a smell that you, too, would be familiar with.”
“Familiar…?!”
Then Kaito finally realized what was different. The rusty aroma of blood was wafting down the first-floor corridor. After sniffing at their surroundings some more, the Kaiser approached something hidden in one of the walls’ shadows.
When he realized what it was, a shock ran through Kaito. The Kaiser’s nose was right up against a large pool of blood. The supreme hound then poked at something dark sitting in the middle of the sea of red.
“This in particular. Its odor is like that of a demi-human, yet more mixed. What do you think, O unworthy master of mine? Surely you recognize it.”
The Kaiser let out a satisfied laugh, his expression hinting at ominous things to come. Kaito silently knelt down beside him. When he saw what his hound was pawing at, his face went white.
Resting half-submerged in the pool of blood was a scrap of tattered black cloth.
“…The Butcher.”
“Kaito, Hina, to my bedroom! Investigate the status of the Gibbet! Jeanne and Deus Ex Machina, go search elsewhere! You two are better at covering ground!”
“I have no objections, miss. We are at least twice as fast as you punks, after all.”
“Oh my, precious daughter of mine. Ignoring me?”
“You and the Kaiser, go search as well! And before that, the both of you need to muster up some determination! Especially you, Vlad, you deadbeat! You seem quite content to just sit there and do nothing!”
Vlad peevishly pouted upon receiving his orders and insults in the same breath. Like always, his expression was creepily innocent. He stroked his chin and crossed his long legs in the air.
“Hmm, given that you all are the ones who killed me, I’d say I’m contributing more than my share. Also, given that I’m quite literally dead, perhaps ‘deadbeat’ isn’t the kindest insult you could have chosen… Oh, I see—you’re choosing to turn a deaf ear to my complaints. Ah well, I suppose I can help you out with your investigation.”
Nobody present was paying any heed to his grievances; they’d all set off. Protest written across his face, Vlad floated on after Jeanne. The Kaiser, on the other hand, seemed to think it was none of his concern. He snorted, then vanished. Separating from the others, Kaito’s group made for the stairs to the second floor.
Kaito, Hina, and Elisabeth hurried through the oppressive cliff-top castle. Their footsteps echoed through the hall. Right before reaching the stairs, though, the three of them stopped in their tracks.
“…’Tis his handiwork, no doubt.”
“Yeah…”
Before them stood a blood-soaked suit of armor. It resembled the moving suits of armor installed throughout the castle, but just barely peering out from beneath the rusty bloodstains on its chest was a white lily coat of arms.
Elisabeth let out a murmur, her voice tinged with pity.
“Hello, transfigured paladin.”
“Uorrrgh, uorrr… Gah, graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… Blagh, blegh, blargh—”
Kaito and the others hadn’t done anything yet. But in spite of that fact, the blood spurted forcefully from the openings in the paladin’s helmet. It would appear that all the blood staining his silver armor had come from his own mouth.
Upon catching a glimpse of the man’s eyes through his helmet’s eyeholes, Kaito gasped. The man’s left eye had ruptured, and a number of pink sacs were dangling from his neck and pulsating. It looked like some sort of strange, parasitic plant was growing off him. But the truth was even more revolting. The sacs were made up of the man’s own engorged flesh.
“Uorrr… Ah, ah, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
With a shout, the paladin hoisted up his weapon. They normally used swords, but his had been replaced with a crude battle-ax. It looked far too heavy for a normal paladin to wield properly.
Before charging at them, the paladin held his battle-ax directly at Kaito and the other two. Even in his current state, he was still making sure to pay respect to his foes.
“…!”
Kaito involuntarily bit down on his lip. Normally, that was a gesture one would perform with a sword. Perhaps due to haziness stemming from his hunger for pain, the paladin firmly believed himself to be holding a sword. It was, in a word, pitiful.
“Master Kaito…”
“Yeah, he’s beyond help.”
Even if they left him alive, there was no way to save people who’d undergone transformations like that. Kaito raised his arm, and Hina readied her halberd. But a cold voice spoke first, scoffing at the fact that they’d faltered even for a second.
“Gavel.”
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!
A solemn, bell-like noise rang out. A mass of crimson flower petals scattered magnificently through the air.
A massive iron hammer swung down from empty space, the very air trembling as it fell. The transformed paladin was crushed, armor and all. The hammer’s head was covered in brutal-looking thorns, causing it to resemble a meat tenderizer as it flattened the man from the head down.
An invisible hand lifted up the Gavel’s short handle. An unsettling sticky noise accompanied it.
Crimson lines gently stretched up, then snapped. Beneath the hammer, iron plates and human flesh were all flattened into one. It made for a spectacle so far removed from the man’s original form that the action seemed retroactively less cruel.
“Hmph.”
Elisabeth snapped her fingers. The iron hammer transformed into a cloud of petals, then vanished. All that remained was a horrid, incomprehensible pile. It made a squelching sound as Elisabeth trampled it underfoot.
Ascending the stairs, she let out a low murmur.
“Hurry.”
“…Got it.”
She spoke but a single word, and Kaito’s response was similarly concise. After stepping over the pitiful corpse spread out before the staircase, the three of them resumed running. On their way, they encountered two more transfigured paladins and dispatched them just as quickly.
Having disposed of everyone in their path, the three of them then dashed through the corridor where high windows cast ominous designs on the floor.
Eventually, Elisabeth’s bedroom came into view. Kaito felt a shiver go across his body as he ran. A terrible scene surely awaited them there, as the door was wide open and the floor around it was covered in blood.
“Butcher!”
“Mr. Butcher!”
As Kaito and Hina shouted, Elisabeth stepped wordlessly into the room.
What greeted them was an overwhelming silence.
It was quiet in the room. Quiet and still.
Ever since a demon had broken in, the window’s slatted shutter had been left broken. A faint light streamed down onto the vacant floor. The spots where the plain yet refined bed and dresser had once been were now devoid of furniture. They’d gotten caught in Elisabeth’s battle with the Butcher and destroyed.
The only thing left was the knife-ridden map on the wall. That and the tall, narrow metal cage hanging from the ceiling—the Gibbet, one of Elisabeth’s summoned torture devices.
Kaito looked up at the iron cage in silence. It was empty. The Butcher was nowhere to be seen.
“Elisabeth…”
“…Hmm.”
Elisabeth snapped her fingers. Its chain rattled, and the cage landed on the floor.
The first thing she did was deliberately inspect the cage door. Kaito watched her work from the side. After running her finger across the scratch marks left on the lock and confirming their direction and shape, she nodded.
“These marks came from within. It would seem the Butcher opened the cage on his own, then fled.”
“You’re saying that he wasn’t removed by force? Could Mr. Butcher be all right, then?”
“No, there’s no way… Something definitely went down after he broke out.”
Kaito turned to look back toward the bedroom’s entrance. Drops of blood were scattered about by the doorway. And not only were there grotesque paladins prowling the castle grounds, there had been a scrap of black cloth floating in the pool of blood back on the first floor.
There was no way the Butcher was unharmed. Elisabeth sighed, as though agreeing with Kaito’s fears.
“I can probably surmise what happened. After breaking out of the cage, he had the poor fortune of running into those paladins. They probably brought a fair number of men here with the intention of capturing me on my return from the underground tomb. There were doubtless priests among them to activate my shackles, to boot. After capturing the Butcher, though, they returned to their headquarters. That gives us our reason why none of the ones we faced were in any state to fight.”
Upon hearing Elisabeth’s hypothesis, Kaito nodded. It was true that all the paladins they’d encountered had already been half-dead. The assembled manpower had been too half-assed to conduct any sort of proper purge. It seemed likely that the only ones left behind were those who’d had a poor affinity for demon meat and were on the verge of death.
Even though they weren’t as sure of it as Jeanne, the Church was probably looking for the Apostle, too… So it makes sense that they took the Butcher back to their headquarters with them.
“You mean to say that Mr. Butcher has been captured? The Church is… Oh?”
“What’s wrong, Hina?”
“My beloved Master Kaito, my dear Lady Elisabeth, what might that be?”
Forgetting how worried she was, Hina sounded flabbergasted. Kaito and Elisabeth turned toward the direction she was pointing. Something had been placed in the room’s blind spot, arranged so that the Gibbet would draw one’s attention in its place.
Upon seeing it, the two of them squinted in unison.
“That’s…”
It had a preeminent presence to it, which made the fact that it had evaded their attention for so long even odder. Once they saw it the first time, though, it was thereafter impossible to ignore.
Sitting on the floor was a massive slab of bone-in meat. It was so impressive, it practically deserved fanfare.
“’Tis meat.”
“Yup, that’s meat.”
“It’s meat, isn’t it?”
Despite themselves, all three of them said the obvious. The paladins had sunken into madness, so it made sense that they’d overlooked it. But its very presence was such that Kaito and the others couldn’t help commenting on it.
The three of them cautiously approached the meat. The closer they looked, the odder its countenance seemed to be. Kaito and Elisabeth exchanged a glance, then started elbowing each other in the side.
“Go on, then, Kaito. You’re the one with the wife, so why don’t you show her how manly you are, eh?”
“Oh, no, no, I wouldn’t dream of denying the opportunity to check it out to my world-famous master in action.”
“Allow me, then. As your intrepid maid, I shall go forth and investigate the meat! I’m off!”
““No, no, no, no, no, no, no.””
Kaito and Elisabeth both reached out, determined not to foist the task off on Hina. By sheer coincidence, Elisabeth’s fingers reached it quicker. She tutted at Kaito as she hoisted up the meat.
Then something about the sensation of grabbing the bone gave her pause.
“Hmm? ’Tis…loose? Perhaps… Rrrrrrrrrrr, rah!”
“Yikes!”
With a loud pop, Elisabeth yanked the bone free from the meat. When she did, something fell out from within and clinked against the ground. She picked it up and held it in front of her eyes. It was a slab of metal, twisted into an intricate shape. Even though it was covered in grease, it still sparkled. After pondering its design, Elisabeth tilted her head to the side.
“Some kind of key, perhaps?”
“Yeah, and there’s something on the side, right? Look—there.”
Elisabeth turned the key over as Kaito had instructed. One of her eyebrows shot violently up.
The words beloved dragon no. 2 were etched on its soiled metal surface.
“That’s…”
“Familiar words, indeed.”
Kaito and the others began whispering among themselves. Whatever it was, it probably had something to do with the dragons the Butcher kept. And keys were, by nature, designed to open things. As he considered those facts, Kaito remembered something else as well.
Oh yeah, Elisabeth knows where the Butcher lives.
Elisabeth had sent Hina on an errand there once, and on another occasion had brought golems and ice spirits there as a gift. The Butcher had many clients, albeit most of whom he’d probably picked for their lack of knowledge regarding the Apostle. Of them, though, the number who knew where he lived was likely quite small.
In fact, Elisabeth might well be the only one.
Elisabeth tossed the key in the air. Before it could fall, she snatched it back up.
“After we reconvene with Jeanne and the others, we’re heading for the teleportation circle. We make for the Butcher’s residence.”
“Got it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Kaito and Hina nodded. Without another word, Kaito began pondering.
The Butcher had definitely left the key there on purpose. It was impossible to know whether his intentions had been benevolent or malicious. Even so, though, Kaito wanted to believe.
Maybe this will let us change something.
Kaito couldn’t help but wish for it as he thought back on the Butcher and the pleased way in which he would tell his tall tales.
The Butcher’s residence was home to no small share of danger. Specifically, it was in the deep heart of a vast, dark, remote forest. Nobody dared harvest its rare herbs and ores, and the closest human settlement was on the other side of a mountain. Thanks to that, the forest had been able to avoid human exploitation. As a consequence, monsters and man-eating plants thrived within its confines. It had long since become a place where no human dared tread.
However, everyone in their group had, in some sense, transcended humanity.
Kreeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Kree—
A strange noise erupted as a tangle of ivy made to take a bite out of Elisabeth’s head, but she ripped it in two with her bare hands. Its death wail was a sound no plant should ever make. As she tossed the ivy aside, Elisabeth sighed.
“Hmm, none of them poses much threat, but they do make it unpleasant to walk. ’Twould have been far more convenient if we could have but leaped there directly.”
“It’s set up so that you can only teleport as far as the forest entrance. It was like that when I came here, as well.”
“Huh. I wonder if the Butcher set it up that way in preparation for when we all found out his secret.”
Kaito’s voice was soft. “Nay, I suspect he merely wasn’t thinking at all,” groaned Elisabeth in reply. Beside them, Hina shouted, “Don’t you dare get near them, you insolent lout!” at a poisonous moth as she bisected it down the middle.
Leading the group was Deus Ex Machina, which had returned to being a steel titan and was currently trampling some howling plants underfoot. The chains on Jeanne’s wrists jingled as she gracefully followed after it. Vlad gently drifted along behind.
They all marched in silence, the only noises the gyaaahs and arrrghs of their would-be hunters. Eventually, though, they reached a clearing and stopped.
A fancy hut towered before them. It was so impressive, it practically deserved fanfare.
“……………………………It’s a mushroom.”
“It would appear to be a mushroom, yes.”
“Aye, and a toadstool, at that.”
“Hmm? Why, where is the meat? I must say, abandoning the sense of cohesion strikes me as a crime against aesthetics.”
Kaito was aghast, Hina merely nodded, Elisabeth was exasperated, and Vlad leveled a characteristically obtuse complaint.
Erected before them was a completely round house. Its red roof was the very image of a mushroom’s cap, and it was even mottled white. It was abundantly clear that the building was modeled after a mushroom—more specifically, a toadstool.
And at the bottom of the stalk was an adorable little round door.
Kaito grabbed its handle and pulled. However, the door refused to budge. It must have been locked. Elisabeth prompted him to move aside, then raised one of her shapely legs into the air and let out a casual shout.
“Hi-yah!”
“Welp, there she goes!”
Elisabeth had let loose a magnificently bold roundhouse kick. The door shattered. Inside, though, nothing seemed particularly amiss. While it was true that the massive chopping block, assorted knives, hand-operated saw, and miscellaneous hooks made the house seem a good deal more dangerous than the average merchant’s, given the vast array of meats the Butcher dealt in, it all fell within reasonable expectations. Suspecting that the room had more to hide, Kaito and the others got to work searching it.
Vlad alone stood motionless, still floating in the air. Kaito turned back to lodge a complaint.
“Vlad, c’mon. I know you can’t touch stuff, but you could at least try to help out.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, my dear successor. I’m rather preoccupied, you see, trying to figure out why the area around these shelves is the only place free of dust.”
“…Huh.”
“I see. I guess the dead guy ain’t a deadbeat after all.”
Vlad smiled, and Jeanne called Deus Ex Machina over. It moved the shelves aside with great ease. A secret door was installed beneath them. When they opened it, they discovered a staircase leading underground.
Nerves on edge, the group descended. At the bottom, they discovered what had once been an underground lake now being used as a storehouse.
A vast number of stone sheds were lined up atop the parched earth. Despite their master’s absence, golems and ice spirits were diligently managing the meat within.
There was nothing strange about that, either. And there certainly didn’t appear to be anything related to the Saint in there.
It feels like the nasty stuff we learned was all just a bad dream or something.
As doubts started creeping through Kaito’s mind, though, Hina started waving her hand about and shouting.
“Master Kaitooo! There’s another set of stairs leading up over here!”
Apparently, she’d found a different set of stairs than the ones they’d come down on. But given that they hadn’t found anything so far, the group’s expectations as they ascended were low. Upon opening the wooden door at the top, they saw dim light flooding forth.
Kaito popped his head out through the doorway. They were surrounded by trees. It was probably a backyard of some sort.
“Hey, over there!”
Then amid the dazzling light and vivid shades of green, Kaito spotted it.
“Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! I’m gonna faaall!”
“Don’t worry, Master Kaito! I have your hand firmly in my grasp! Even if every gear in my body should stop, I will never let you go! Or would it be better if we simply traded places?”
“Nope, that’s a no-go! If we think about it rationally, I’m just as likely to fall from up there, so it works out better for both of us for you to keep supporting me like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s scary as shiiiiiiiiit!”
“Seeing you so scared is so heartrendingly cuuuuuuuuuuute!”
A strange shout erupted from Hina. They’d been in so many nerve-racking situations recently, she must have finally snapped. As she swayed and squirmed, Kaito’s legs were left practically floating in midair.
Furthermore, the two thin black wings beside him were flapping fiercely through the air. Each time they did, Kaito had to expend mana to maintain his stamina and avoid getting sent flying.
Below him, the forest spread out in every direction. The trees behind him vanished in a sea of green as they receded into the distance.
Currently, Kaito and the others were riding atop a majestic red dragon.
Upon leaving the Butcher’s house behind them, they’d taken to the skies.
It had all started a few hours prior. When they’d entered the Butcher’s backyard, they’d been met by three dragons. The first was the steel dragon that had previously brought Hina to the Capital. The second had been a female with four wings and a long, slender crimson body. According to Jeanne, it was called a “red dragon.”
The moment they’d used their key to unlock her collar, she’d begun violently flapping her wings.
They hadn’t been afforded a moment of hesitation. Jeanne, who seemed to have expected this development, had elegantly mounted the dragon’s saddle. Elisabeth followed after and reclined atop the dragon’s back. And bringing up the rear had been Hina, who’d grabbed the startled Kaito by the arm and jumped on board last.
Naturally, a red dragon’s body was tapered at the rear. In other words, there was basically nowhere viable to sit near her backside. As a result, Kaito had been wailing the entire time since.
An exasperated shout came from Elisabeth, near the front.
“Enough of your whining, Kaito! You’re immortal! Even if you do fall, you’re sure to survive!”
“Hell no, I’m not falling for that! I know full well that enough blood loss will make my soul fade away! I’m freaking out over here, and the bumpiness isn’t helping!” |
Torture Princess
“Your grumbling really is getting irritating, mister. Why don’t you make like a corpse and shut the hell up.”
“You’re sitting in the saddle; you’re in no position to talk!”
Kaito put forth no shortage of effort in making his objections known. Jeanne’s honey-blond locks fluttered in the air as she feigned ignorance.
Deus Ex Machina was no longer by her side. It was ill-equipped for long flights, so she’d temporarily dismissed it. Vlad, who was floating beside Kaito, gave a light chuckle.
“Well, well, well, my dear successor, it seems that you’re growing accustomed to the skies. And isn’t that what’s really important here?”
“Shut up! …But I, uh, I guess it’s not as bad anymore…”
Still trembling, Kaito caught a glimpse of the ground below.
The forest looked like a vast, vibrant green swath. Beastfolk, demi-human, human—it was impossible to tell whose territory they were above. Looking down on it from the sky, he felt land-ownership rights seemed almost petty and irrelevant.
The red dragon’s body weaved back and forth as she continued her flight. It was unclear where their destination was, but she clearly seemed to have one in mind. Her speed was steady, and she showed no signs of being lost.
Then the landscape below them started to change. The forest came to an end and was replaced by a series of houses and buildings that looked as small as toys. Then they, too, were replaced with a sandy yellow desert. As he gazed off into the distance, Kaito felt his breath catch in his throat.
Far away, he could make out a vast body of water, sparkling as radiantly as though it had fragments of glass sprinkled atop it.
“You’ve gotta be kidding. We’re gonna cross the ocean?”
“At this rate, it seems she intends to leave the very continent.”
Elisabeth sat up. Her voice carried an understandable hint of tension to it.
At some point, the air had taken on a different quality. It had previously been dry and parched but was now rife with moisture and the smell of the sea.
The ocean was approaching faster than they could blink. Then the red dragon soared over the glittering sea.
A gust of conspicuously fishy wind lapped at their cheeks. A flock of seabirds let out alarmed cries, then flew off. A line of white sailboats ran atop the waves.
At that point, the sun started sinking beneath the horizon line. The waters burned a vivid red.
The light was the shade of ripe fruit, and it scorched its way into Kaito’s retinas. The majesty and splendor of it all took hold of his eyes and soul. It was a landscape he’d never gotten the chance to see in the closed-off life he’d lived before.
Anxious as he was as to the nature of the red dragon’s destination, an uncharacteristic surge of excitement ran through him.
Riding a dragon through the skies, huh… Man, just look at how far I’ve come!
“Hmm. I’ll admit to not knowing why I know, my dear successor, but I think I have an inkling of where this dragon is heading.”
“W-wait, for real, Vlad? Then where—? Ahhhh!”
Upon hearing Vlad’s assertion, Kaito had turned his head to one side in earnest.
The moment he had, though, the red dragon had charged headfirst into a cloud. His sight stolen away from him, Kaito let out another yelp, at which an emotional voice called out, “Master Kaito, you’re so cuuuuuute!” Beyond the pale white of the cloud, Vlad quietly murmured his response.
“The World’s End, in all likelihood.”
At that moment, Kaito recalled something he’d once heard.
It’s a nonsensical little fairy tale, and one that’s gone on for a very, very long time.
Having first gotten atop a red dragon’s back, it would appear that they were now heading to a land straight out of a story. |
Torture Princess
4
The World’s End
Someone once said that the world has no end. The world is round, they proclaimed, and as such it has no terminus.
Someone once said that the world has an end. It’s like a waterfall, they proclaimed, one that swallows up anything and everything.
Someone once said that the world has an end. For God created that place, they proclaimed, and designated it “the World’s End.”
Was the world, in fact, round? Were the seas all connected? Or was there nothing but a waterfall at the edge and an abyss that swallowed up anything and everything? To this very day, the truth is yet unknown.
After all, nobody ever actually undertook the voyage to find out for themselves. Even so, though, one of the three proclamations can currently be held up as definitely true. For in this world, there is a location that God designated as its End. It’s said to be a pure place, one crafted from snow and water, wind and mana.
And it’s a place that only those granted knowledge of its location were able to reach.
“‘Even if one were to walk the whole earth over,’ it’s said. Being a mage, I’d of course heard of it, but to think that while I live and breathe… Well, no, I suppose I’m dead now. Either way, I never dreamed I’d actually be able to reach it! Yet, now I stand with my own two feet…or to be more precise, I should say I float! But in any case, it’s quite moving.”
“That’s a lot of corrections you’re making there. Are you quite all right?”
“Ha-ha-ha, as satisfied as satisfied can be!”
Leisurely shrugging off his beloved daughter’s cold stare, Vlad gave a hearty laugh.
With grace befitting his noble bearing, Vlad cast a sweeping gaze over the snowscape before them. The ground was frozen and hard, and no amount of digging would turn up soil. The entire region was made of mana-rich ice. Because of that, everything as far as the eye could see was blue and faintly glowing. The snowflakes were big enough to make out their individual shapes, and they piled up everywhere like little handicrafts. Above them, the sky was milky and white. Strangely, it was also covered in an oil-like rainbow sheen, although that didn’t appear to belong to clouds, the sun, or the stars.
The sky was simply empty. It was like a giant lid was sitting over their heads. Consequently, it was difficult to tell whether it was night or day. In a sense, it resembled the demons’ world. However, the sky wasn’t sullied like it had been back there. The wind was frighteningly clean and pure, and the atmosphere was sparkling.
It was beautiful, almost miraculously so. But at the same time, there was nothing there.
There was just absolute emptiness.
It was like a hollow vessel, with all the desolate solitude of everything having ended and the faint hope that something new would begin.
It was a place truly deserving of the name “the World’s End.”
And in that legendary land, Kaito Sena was currently freezing to death.
“I’m s-so c-cold! Cold, cold, cold, cold, c-c-c-c-cold!”
“Please, Master Kaito, pull yourself together! Oh, if only my surface area were a hundred times larger!”
“Hmm, I feel as though I just saw a vision of Kaito being fatally crushed.”
Despite being wrapped in Hina’s tight embrace, Kaito was shivering.
For the last little while, Hina had been laudably trying to warm him up with her own body. Just as she’d said, though, she lacked the surface area to cover him completely. Other than his face, which was buried in her opulent chest, Kaito was suffering an utter defeat at the hands of the cold. As she gazed at his frozen visage, Elisabeth nodded.
“’Tis true, though. The temperature is such that no human would withstand it unprepared.”
“The World’s End is a place of purity. In other words, this ain’t no place for respectable creatures to try survivin’.”
“H-h-how the hell are you two not cold in those r-r-ridiculous getups?!”
Kaito couldn’t stop himself from crying out. Elisabeth and Jeanne, in stark defiance of what they’d just said, seemed to be perfectly fine.
Vlad was a phantasm, and Hina was an automaton. It made sense for the two of them not to feel the cold. But the fact that Elisabeth and Jeanne seemed unaffected as well made no sense.
After all, the amount of fabric comprising the Torture Princess’s bondage dresses barely even rose to the level of “sparse.”
Jeanne appeared dumbfounded by Kaito’s exclamation. She shrugged her exposed shoulders.
“Allow me to pose you a question, mister. Why should any mage complain about the cold in a land as rich in mana as this? What, you think you classify as ‘respectable’?! You’re like some sorta masochist perv who owns clothes but walks around naked anyway!”
“’Tis just as Jeanne says. Using your mana better would serve you well. Are you ready? Hold the sensation of a lit fire within the pit of your stomach. Then form a layer of warmth in the air around… Wait, no. Stop. You were just on the verge of immolation, no?”
“Y-y-yeah, that’s right, I a-a-almost caught on fire! I’m bad at that f-f-fiddly magic stuff, okay, and I’m cold!”
As smoke sputtered from the top of his head, Kaito continued shivering.
Then Vlad returned, seemingly having grown bored of observing the scenery. He shook his head in exasperation.
“I take it you intend to secede, then, my dear successor? It’s a pitiful way to die, to be certain, but it is what it is. Partings are always sudden and always sorrowful. As comical of a farewell as it is, perhaps that, too, lends it deeper significance.”
“Listen here, you. When I die, I’m smashing your stupid jewel on my way out if it’s the last thing I do.”
Kaito leveled a glare at Vlad through his shivers. It was unclear what he found so funny, but Vlad responded with a chipper laugh.
Exasperated as she was, Elisabeth gave Kaito a firm clap on the shoulder.
“Calm down, now. I daresay you’re at no risk of actually freezing to death.”
“I—I—I mean, you’re r-r-right, but I feel like it’d still be a problem if I s-s-stopped being able to move.”
Elisabeth did have a point. Kaito’s soul was currently housed inside a homunculus.
As long as he didn’t unintentionally undergo severe blood loss, his body was immortal. In fact, if he were a normal human, he would have already succumbed to hypothermia and died. But if Elisabeth’s blood running through his veins was to freeze, so would his motor functions. And given their current situation, he wasn’t particularly keen on asking someone to lug him around as a paperweight.
Hina clenched her fists in determination. Her face full of resolve, she grabbed at her maid uniform.
“Now I understand! Now that it’s come to this, we only have one option left! As his bride, I will take extreme, extreme pleasure in removing my clothes and pressing myself against my precious husband to better warm him up!”
“Settle yourself down, Hina. ’Tis true that you replicate a human’s body heat despite being an automaton. But stripping and clinging to him will change little. Also, do try to hide your ulterior motives a bit more thoroughly. Promise me that, if nothing else… In any case, the red dragon seems to have stopped moving. We have nothing to use as a guide, and Kaito is on the verge of freezing.”
“I d-d-don’t like where this is g-g-going.”
“The matter now becomes, ‘what to do?’”
Elisabeth crossed her arms and hmmed. Then she snapped her gaze to the side.
The red dragon was lying on its belly there, seemingly unaffected by the cold. Ever since they’d arrived at the World’s End, she’d suddenly stopped moving. She was instead dozing off, as though she’d come home for the first time in a long while.
Upon hearing what Elisabeth had to say, Jeanne shrugged again.
“A good question. Leaving the pathetic mister to freeze to death won’t exactly do us any good. Nevertheless, walking about randomly would be foolish. We need to avoid wasting our stamina. Our best option is to await good news from my children. If things go well, it will give us a direction for our next course of action, as well. And if they don’t, well, we can just give up and let him die.”
“D-d-damn, that’s harsh.”
Kaito lamented, his face pale. However, he didn’t have any specific objections to Jeanne’s proposal.
After Deus Ex Machina had rematerialized, it had split up and begun scouting. In accordance with Jeanne’s orders, its four parts had gone out to search the vast untrodden land. Waiting for the four to return was the best option they had available to them.
After all, there’s basically nothing to use as a landmark here. If we started walking, odds are we’d just end up going in circles. Given that the Butcher invited us here, there should be something we can reach before we freeze to death, but…
Despite his racing thoughts, Kaito chose to put his trust in the four machines. In other words, the only thing there was to do was wait.
They spent the next little while in silence.
Sandwiched between the luminescent sky and earth, even Kaito’s sense of the passage of time evaporated. Given the fact that he was able to successfully put up with it, the time he spent waiting couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but to him it felt like an eternity.
Then, with a start, he looked up. He could hear the crunching sound of something scraping at the frozen earth.
A distorted mass of silver approached from the distance, chipping lightly away at the ice as it moved. Bandersnatch, the beast made from nothing but fangs, had returned. It bored holes in the ice as it came to a quick stop.
Sitting in front of its master with its feet all lined up together, Bandersnatch let its mouth click open and shut. Apparently, it was using the rattling of its fangs to somehow give its report. Jeanne responded with a theatrical little gesture and covered her mouth with her hand.
“My, my, this falls outside my expectations.”
“Wh-wh-wh-what is it, Jeanne? D-d-d-did something happen?”
“I’ll praise you for having the grit to ask your question despite your teeth shivering to their roots, mister, if nothing else. Listen and be awed. Bandersnatch found a soldier encampment down the way. Who’da thunk that someone’d beat us to the World’s End? Barely even feels real.”
“What? The Church’s goons, then? They must have dragged something out of the Butcher.”
“That isn’t it. The flag they’re flying isn’t the Church’s. I recognize the design, but…describing it would be difficult. Draw it, if you would.”
Bandersnatch nodded obediently at Jeanne’s order. With unhesitating motions, it set its bladed legs to work. It looked something akin to a machine outputting image data. Silver whooshed through the air, carving a delicate, flowing pattern in the ground.
The first things it drew were animals. Then flowers. Eventually, the drawing of a white deer, an ancient wolf, and a colossal hawk all wreathed in an extravagant ring of flowers was complete. Kaito’s eyes went wide. Momentarily forgetting about the cold, he let out a dumbfounded whisper.
“The Forest King and the other two… And wait, the flowers in the crest vary by member of the royal family, and that one is specific to…”
“Yes, Master Kaito, I remember it, too.”
Still nestled beside him, Hina gave an obedient nod. Elisabeth narrowed her eyes in confusion.
His tone serious, Kaito stated the flag’s owner.
“It belongs to the private army of Vyade Ula Forstlast, the Forest King’s third imperial princess.”
With that, a new mystery arose. After all, Kaito and the others were currently at the World’s End.
Without being told exactly where it was, it was impossible to even reach.
So why are the beastfolk here? And what’s their goal?
No matter how hard he racked his brain, though, Kaito couldn’t come up with answers. He didn’t even have enough information to come up with a reasonable guess.
He scrunched up his face. Elisabeth responded by crossing her arms and puffing out her chest.
“When thinking fails, all that’s left is to act. And one way or another, we need to figure out the beastfolk’s reason and objective in coming to the World’s End.”
“Indeed. We can hardly chalk it up to happenstance. Which leaves us no choice but to find out why.”
“Yeah…you two are right. Guess we should get moving, then.”
Jeanne interjected in the affirmative, and Kaito nodded as well. Odds were that the beastfolk weren’t their enemies. Kaito didn’t think of them as enemies, at any rate, and he chose to believe that they’d feel the same way.
And with that, their course of action was set.
They were going to head to the beastfolk campsite and make contact with them.
Without further delay, they followed Bandersnatch and set off.
As they walked, they trampled snowflakes underfoot. But just after they got going, a serious problem reared its head.
“E-E-Elisabeth, this isn’t g-g-good.”
“What isn’t? Ah. I think I have the gist of it, but go on and say it anyway.”
“A-a-at this rate, I’m gonna die. Or r-r-rather, freeze stiff.”
“Hmm. I’m afraid I don’t really see the issue. We can merely simmer you in hot water later, I should think.”
“Wh-wh-whaddaya think I am, f-f-frozen peas? I don’t wanna be a s-s-statue.”
As they were talking, Kaito’s body heat was mercilessly fading away. For a moment, the insane thought of burrowing into the Kaiser’s fur passed through his mind. After all, the one part of his body that wasn’t cold was his left arm, which had been transformed into that of a beast. If he clung to the Kaiser’s canine pelt, he was sure it would warm him up. But the Kaiser was a proud demon. Rubbing his soft fur would no doubt incite his rage. And for that matter, Kaito wasn’t sure if demons even had body heat.
All right, brain, back it up. Let’s try to avoid getting ourselves bitten in half.
Narrowly coming back to his senses, Kaito began trying to think of a more realistic solution.
The plan he ended up going with was trying to get magical tutelage from Elisabeth again.
No matter how many times he tried, though, success eluded him.
“…N-n-no dice, huh?”
“Hmm. How else to go about teaching you, I wonder?”
Having already tried out a number of different explanations, Elisabeth tapped a finger against her forehead. Thin beads of smoke were coming up from Kaito’s head. Elisabeth frowned as she gazed at his sorry demeanor.
“The problem seems to lie in the fact that thermoregulation magic doesn’t use pain as its fulcrum. To you, that makes the sensation comparatively hard to grasp. Even so, though, I’m at something of a loss as to how else to explain it.”
“D-d-don’t give up now; you’ve g-g-got my life in your hands.”
“Worry not. I’ve all but dropped it already.”
“H-h-how the hell’s that s-s-supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s okay, Master Kaito! Even if you can’t move anymore, I will make sure to dutifully carry you!”
“Hmm, transporting cargo under our present circumstances seems rather hazardous. Blast it, though! How can it be that a man who birthed a sword on his own strength has so impoverished an imagination?! One. More. Time. First, you—”
“May I, my precious daughter?”
“I’m sorry, does the charcoal briquette with delusions of grandeur have something to say?”
“Ha-ha-ha, as rebellious as always. Worry not, though; I’m a forgiving man.”
Vlad’s interruption was met with Elisabeth’s unconcealed scorn. However, he just laughed off her snide comment. He found his face riddled with stakes in reply, but he carried on undiscouraged.
“The reason your teachings are so ineffective is because they’re designed with a sane pupil in mind. If you want to teach him, then you’d best rethink your methods from the ground up… Now then, my dear successor, I want you to release fire and ice within your body at the same time. Don’t try to grasp the sensations. Actually release them. And put enough strength into both of them to kill yourself.”
“Wait, Vlad, are you mad? I mean, I’m well aware that you’re mad, but that’s—”
“Each one will offset the other. But of the two, your talent with fire is greater, and the difference should be precisely enough to warm your body.”
Kaito followed Vlad’s instructions and closed his eyes. He focused his mind, then tried burning up and freezing his innards. His mana immediately started flowing freely, as though all the lack of response up until then was but a distant memory.
Oh man, this is way nicer.
The two contradictory energies were clashing within Kaito’s body. It wasn’t without a degree of pain, but neither was able to fully take form without being quashed by the other. At the end, the only lasting effect was his body temperature successfully rising.
Kaito slowly opened his eyes. He then turned to Vlad, who was beaming triumphantly, and nodded.
“Yeah, the cold’s manageable now. Thanks, Vlad.”
“Y-you little… Do something about that irreconcilably twisted nature of yoooooours!”
Elisabeth evoked the image of a cat with its hairs standing on end as she screamed. As she did, she leveled a splendid roundhouse kick at Kaito’s back.
The attack itself was, by all means, no different than his usual treatment. Their location, on the other hand, was anything but usual.
As a result, the impact of the kick caused Kaito to lose his footing and slip.
“Wh—?”
“Oh?”
The frozen ground was all but devoid of friction. And to compound on Kaito’s misfortune, the ground had begun gently sloping up at some point. Without realizing it, they’d climbed up a little white hill.
One can imagine, then, what happened to Kaito when he slipped.
His black long coat acting as a sled, he began sliding down the hill at an alarming rate.
“Ahhhhhhhh, Elisabeeeeeeeeeeeeeth!”
“Kaitoooooooooooooooooo!”
“My beloved Master Kaitoooooooooooooooo!”
“Hmm. I seem to have lost my precious successor.”
“I don’t know if he was really all that precious.”
While the remaining members clamored among themselves, Kaito continued accelerating with no signs of stopping. He frantically thrust his beastly arm into the ground. However, he was unsuccessful in driving his claws into the ice.
So, uh, what exactly am I supposed to do now?
Although he wasn’t exactly being driven by negative emotions, the absurdity of the situation served to calm him just as effectively. Kaito narrowed his eyes and cast a glance over his surroundings. When he did, he realized something.
There were strange furrows in the ground right next to where he was sliding. The snowflakes had been carved up, and the ice had been shaved away. In all likelihood, this was where Bandersnatch had slid down the hill.
“Well, it looks like I’m headed in the right direction, so…I guess this is fine?”
After all, Kaito’s pace had been the slowest among the group. Deciding that continuing to slide was just fine by him, he stopped resisting. Of course, that said, it wasn’t like he had any way to stop. Growing slightly desperate, Kaito crossed his arms.
Maintaining that posture, he continued sliding away.
Eventually, the ground became flat again. Despite that, though, Kaito’s speed showed no signs of abating. He merely continued rushing along the ground beneath the milky-white sky. Then, suddenly, he got caught on something and came to a stop.
“Hmm? What’s that?”
Kaito squinted. It felt as though he’d been caught by countless pairs of transparent hands.
He then reached out and checked to see what it was that had actually stopped him. It turned out to be a fat bundle of wire-thin plants. Each one of the snow-white vines was covered in fuzzy, bur-shaped blossoms.
Narrowing his eyes once more, Kaito surveyed his surroundings. The ivy stretched out around the entire environs.
He tried giving the vine a tug. The more he pulled it back, though, the more it stretched. It didn’t look like it was going to snap, nor was there any end to it in sight. It was far longer and sturdier than he’d expected.
What’s a plant doing here, though? I thought stuff wasn’t supposed to be able to live here. What’s going on, then? And did Bandersnatch manage to avoid this stuff?
Faced with the plant’s contradictory existence, he cocked his head to the side and double-checked the shaving in the ice. Bandersnatch’s tracks stopped just before the ivy, then reappeared on the other side with deep holes at the very beginning. It must have noticed the ivy just before running into it, then jumped to avoid it. Kaito, on the other hand, hadn’t had such luck. Crossing his arms again, he tilted his head back to the side.
“What’s up with this ivy, then? I mean, there are definitely things that come to mind when I think plants, but…”
“I came to see who was caught, but this? To think that a human would make it to the World’s End. It would appear we were not the only ones invited… Who are you? State your name!”
“Huh?”
Suddenly, he heard a deep voice addressing him. Kaito’s eyes went wide. But the animosity present in the other party’s voice wasn’t what he was reacting to. The expression flooding his face wasn’t one of tension and alertness but one of shocked familiarity.
“…No way.”
He knew that voice. Flustered, he cast a glance at his surroundings.
It was then that he realized there was a group behind him leveling swords at his back. The approaching soldiers were all clad in vermilion armor. Its scale-and-leather aesthetic gave the same unique impression as always. In addition to their breastplates, though, they were also wearing thick winter coats. The coats had likely been made from the fur of their comrades, as that was their people’s custom. Just as Kaito had expected, masculine, inhuman faces peeked out from within their heavy hoods.
At the front of the group was a beastman with copper fur and a wolf’s head. And the subordinates standing behind him looked familiar as well.
Kaito somehow managed to avoid slipping as he stood up. Then, making no efforts to defend himself, he called out to the wolf-headed beastman.
“Lute!”
“Hmm? Why do you know my…? Wait, you’re—!”
Lute, the commanding officer of the first squad of Vyade Ula Forstlast’s private army, stopped dead in his tracks.
At that point, Kaito finally came to a realization. The reason the plants hadn’t withered away in this frozen world was because the beastfolk had brought them there. They must have been using them in place of a fence to keep out intruders. What beastfolk lacked in magical prowess they made up for in their peculiar brand of engineering. Armor and magical tools made from the corpses of their comrades and plants that could grow inside buildings without any soil were just a few examples. It made total sense for them to have developed breeds of plants that were resilient to the cold.
At any rate, Kaito found it a great relief that the beastfolk he’d run into had been people he knew. He opened his mouth, about to casually ask them how they were doing. At the last moment, though, he swallowed his words.
No, no, no, no, no… This isn’t some situation where I can just stroll up and say, long time no see.
This was the first time Lute had seen him after Jeanne had forcibly taken him away. And ever since then, the situation had gone completely pear-shaped. The relationship diagram of the people Kaito was involved with had grown more tangled by the minute.
And above all else, they were currently standing at the World’s End.
Under normal circumstances, people couldn’t even reach it without being told its precise location.
And I don’t have any idea what Lute and his men are doing here.
Depending on what their objective was, they could very well perceive Kaito as an enemy. And even if they didn’t, the way he’d just suddenly appeared was suspicious in the extreme. Having their reunion take place due to him getting caught in their guard netting could hardly be regarded as desirable.
Kaito clutched his head. He could feel a headache coming on.
Man, why couldn’t we have reunited under some easier-to-explain circumstances? —Wait, hwah!
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Sir Kaito, you’re alive!”
All Kaito’s concerns were blown away in an instant. A hearty smile spread across Lute’s face as he unhesitatingly wrapped Kaito up in an embrace, his thick, burly arms holding Kaito firmly in place. Perhaps getting slightly carried away, Lute swung Kaito from side to side as he spoke in a tone full of heartfelt delight.
“You’re alive, you’re alive, thank goodness you’re alive! Oh, could there even be a more joyous reunion?! How wonderful it is that you survived! Look, everyone, it’s Sir Kaito! He’s alive!”
Lute set Kaito down and gave him an affectionate thump on the back. Feeling woozy, Kaito pitched forward, nearly toppling to the ground. As he did, Lute’s subordinates surged toward him.
One after another, they thrust their oafish, gloved hands into his and shook.
“We missed you! Captain Lute is right; it’s wonderful to see you alive.”
“You look well. That’s good to see.”
“We were all so worried about you.”
“Oh, uh, thanks, you too, nice to see you all.”
Thoroughly flummoxed, Kaito did his best to respond to his overly enthusiastic welcome. While he did, though, another part of his brain coldly analyzed each beastperson’s reaction. However, much to his surprise, not a single one of them cast so much as a doubtful glance his way.
Wait, seriously? Should they really be welcoming me so openly?
Kaito was taken somewhat aback. At the same time, however, he felt a strong feeling wash over him.
Lute had once told him that beastfolk took much more pride in repaying debts than humans did.
It would seem that he hadn’t been lying.
The words of celebration eventually died down, and all the hands were successfully shaken. The mood was amiable and calm. “Very good, very good.” Lute nodded in satisfaction. At long last, though, he cocked his head in puzzlement.
“Hmm? But, Sir Kaito, whatever are you doing at the World’s End?”
“Wait, don’t tell me you only just started wondering that.”
“And for that matter, whatever became of you after you were taken away by that eerie golden girl?”
Lute’s questions were starting to come out in force. Kaito nodded. In the midst of the storm of greetings and handshakes, he’d been hard at work trying to straighten out all the information in his head. He opened his mouth, prepared to begin explaining the particulars.
“Okay, Lute. You gotta promise not to get too freaked out. Right after that, I—”
It was at that moment that the crunching sound of ice being shaved away began growing audible from afar.
The timing was atrocious. Oh, shit, thought Kaito as he spun to look behind himself. But he was already too late.
New colors were visible atop the snow-white hill. The silver, black, and gold were especially eye-catching.
Leading the group was a twisted silver machine. Right behind it was a young woman wearing a risqué bondage dress running alongside a maid, and floating a ways behind them was a man dressed like an aristocrat. And dashing along calmly directly beside him was a young lady wearing a white bondage dress comprised of little more than just belts.
When you see them from a distance, they look kinda weird, don’t they?
“Kaitoooooo! Are you okaaaaaaaaaay? I was a bit careless back there—I’ll admit to that! Having you die on me like this would haunt not just my dreams but my waking hours as well!”
“Master Kaitooooooooooooo, are you all riiiiiiiiiight? You’re okay, riiiiiiight?! If you aren’t, I’ll be sure to follow right afterrrrrrrrrrrrr!”
“Good heavens, what a troublesome man he is. Sheesh, it’s a miracle he managed to get himself a wife.”
“I find myself agreeing, but hold on a minute… A wife? Now that I think about it, did my dear successor swear an eternal oath with that automaton I made? Boasting of loving a doll is an absurdity among absurdities, but I suppose the same could be said of a human partner as well. Love is pleasant enough as a temporary indulgence, but it’s far too insubstantial a delusion to spend one’s whole life bound to. Human or doll, that fact remains unchanged. But that’s not the important part. That doll is a creation of mine, which means…that in a sense, he’s become my son-in-law both in name and in substance?”
The group’s ramblings were just as self-indulgent as always. There was no background noise to interrupt them, so their voices traveled well. Kaito especially wanted to declare his staunch objection to Vlad’s assertion. But now wasn’t the time for that.
Oh, shit.
The beastman’s eyes had come to a stop on the girl in the questionable white bondage dress—the golden Torture Princess with honey-blond locks and sparkling gold adornments, Jeanne de Rais. Their tails were jutting out from their coats, and they all puffed up in unison. The beastfolk grabbed for their weapons and went on high alert.
Elisabeth noticed their change in demeanor and came to an abrupt stop. Her expression turned grave, and she reached out and snagged Hina by the collar. Hina responded by kicking and squirming, wanting nothing more than to dash over to Kaito’s side.
“What are you doing, Lady Elisabeth? Master Kaito is right there in front of us, Lady Elisabeth. All I have to do to be with my beloved husband is walk straight forward, Lady Elisabeth!”
“Calm yourself. Look around him. He’s surrounded by beastfolk, but… I see. He must have gotten himself caught on the guard netting they’re wont to place around their campsites. Little matter, that, though… Although it seems we arrived a tad too early to join up with them and a tad too late.”
With only a glance, Elisabeth had read the situation like a book.
Back in the underground tomb, Kaito had told Elisabeth all about what had happened when he was on the run. In other words, she knew about the grave injuries the golden Torture Princess had inflicted on Lute and his men when she’d whisked Kaito away from the beastfolk lands. Jeanne herself, on the other hand, seemed utterly nonchalant about the whole situation.
Jeanne de Rais is the oppressor of slaves, the saint, the whore…and the self-proclaimed maiden of salvation.
According to Jeanne, salvation could be obtained only by human deeds. And she was haughtier than both God and Diablo. She probably didn’t even harbor a shred of guilt toward those she’d sacrificed with noble intentions.
As though to provide proof of that, Jeanne turned to the beastfolk and began casually tossing cruelties their way.
“Oh, why, it’s been some time. You seem to be in better health than I expected. How nice. Y’all are a bunch of sturdy old pups.”
“Positions!”
Lute shouted, his voice tinged with rage. The sounds of swords being drawn could be heard, one after another in succession. Bows stretched to their limits.
Dammit, they’re practically at each other’s throats already. If a fight breaks out, all this will have been for nothing!
Kaito immediately realized that he was going to have to be the one to stop them. Leaping out in front of the beastfolk, he spread his arms wide.
“Wait, hold up! Jeanne might not make any sense, and she might be a total asshole, but she’s not your enemy!”
“I feel as though I’m being mocked. Not that I’m disputing the charges, mind you!”
“Have you gone mad, Sir Kaito?! Why would you protect the monster who mercilessly wounded and cruelly slaughtered our people…? Curses, she must have brainwashed you! Or perhaps you were accomplices from the start… I truly don’t want to believe that, but…”
Lute ignored Jeanne’s comical interjection as he ground his fangs. Kaito gave a silent thanks for Lute’s rationality. If he hadn’t hesitated just then, arrows would already be flying.
Now, how should he go about breaking the deadlock? Kaito frantically racked his brain.
In the end, he decided to hit the beastfolk with the most appropriate card he had.
“The golden girl…Jeanne de Rais didn’t slaughter the people in those villages!”
“What did you just say?”
Lute was visibly shocked, just like Kaito had expected. He breathed a sigh of relief. The beastfolk were proper soldiers; they cared more about their people who had fallen victim than about the wounds they themselves had suffered.
He could take that to mean he’d been successful in buying them another chance to discuss things over and explain themselves.
In order to give both himself and the beastfolk a chance to calm down, he took his time laying out his next few points.
“Would you mind hearing me out? Right now, she and I are working together. And it’s to prevent the killer you guys are looking for from achieving their ultimate goal. If it’s okay with you, Lute, I wanna give you a proper explanation of everything that’s happened. Do you have somewhere we could sit down and talk?”
Kaito already knew that the beastfolk had set up camp, but he decided to feign ignorance. However, the response he got was lethargic. Lute’s subordinates seemed unsure as well.
Looks like they need another push. C’mon, think. How much information can I safely give out?
The terrible truths he’d come to learn floated through his mind one after another. Each and every one of them was like a bomb with the power to shake human society to its foundations. If he let them slip carelessly, he could very well end up bringing about an international incident. Despite the fact that he was short on time, he considered his options as carefully as he could.
I really want to be able to see eye to eye with Lute and his men here.
They had no idea what was waiting at the World’s End. Given that the Butcher had brought them there, it had to be something important, but they were critically short on preparation and manpower. They didn’t even have a home base to speak of.
We need to get the beastfolk to work with us. Because most importantly, if we lose Lute, we lose our connection to Vyade Ula Forstlast.
Kaito and the others were trying to face off against the Church, a massive, influential organization. It was vital that they get someone powerful to back them up, and there was no guarantee that they’d have another chance to negotiate with the beastfolk. At worst, the world might even be destroyed before then.
I don’t want to start a war between them and the humans. But right now, I need to maintain my relationship with the beastfolk.
Kaito clenched his fists. Steeling his resolve, he opened his mouth.
Then he threw down one of the most crucial cards available to him.
As far as humanity was concerned, it was a perilous card indeed.
“There’s something I want to tell you, something the Church has been working to conceal.”
That one sentence was more than sufficient to insinuate the Church’s involvement with the beastfolk murders.
Lute’s ears twitched beneath his hood. As they did, he stared straight at Kaito and studied his expression.
Kaito responded to Lute’s piercing gold gaze with silence. The shoe was on the other foot now. This time, Kaito was the one concealing information and asking for help. And he was well aware of how self-serving he was being.
But what we’re trying to do ends up being in Lute’s best interest, too.
Kaito’s conviction stemmed from his desire to stop the world from ending. Thanks to that, he was able to avoid looking away.
The two of them stared at each other, the way they had when they’d first met.
Eventually, Lute closed his eyes for a moment before reopening them. Having made some sort of decision, he raised his arm straight out to the side.
Kaito’s shoulders twitched. However, he made no motions to flee, nor did he ready himself to defend or counterattack. Staring fixedly at him as he did, Lute abruptly turned his palm down.
All at once, his subordinates lowered their swords and bows. They relaxed their postures.
Kaito let out a sigh of relief. The tension in his body had faded away so rapidly, in fact, that his knees began to awkwardly give way. As he looked at Kaito, Lute narrowed his eyes. Then he placed his palm atop his vermilion breastplate.
As he did, he spoke in a respectful tone.
“I suppose this marks the second time, then, that we extend an invitation to the enemy of mankind.”
Bright red flames crackled up within the stone-enclosed hearth.
In a sense, seeing light and heat in that closed-off world of ice and snow was practically moving.
On top of the fire was a pot filled with scooped-up snow. After slowly melting, the clumps had transformed into shockingly pure water. Hina was hard at work shredding flower petals and pouring them in. The water boiled, and as it changed to a vibrant shade of orange, she scooped the petals back up before they could go tart. Then she replaced them with some diced-up dried fruit. Beside her, a gray wolf beastman was setting out bowls.
As the preparation of the tea steadily advanced, Lute, Kaito, and Elisabeth sat down in a circle.
They were currently resting, having made their way to one of the portable dwellings of the beastfolk’s campsite.
The inside of the ceiling above their heads was supported by an umbrellalike frame. Comprised of wood and beastfolk hides, the hut had been prepared in advance so that it could be set up by anyone. After the planks that made up its round floor had been laid out, they’d been covered twice over with rugs woven from various types of fur. According to Elisabeth, they’d been made from the pelts of powerful mages, and the patterns woven within served to ward off the cold.
Given all the measures they’d taken, the inside of the hut was surprisingly warm.
With no need to worry about the cold, Kaito and the others sat cross-legged as they talked.
“After that, we went back to Elisabeth’s castle for a bit. But the Butcher had already been…”
As he relayed his story to Lute, Kaito cast a number of furtive glances to the side.
Jeanne was sitting in the corner hugging her knees under the watchful eyes of several guards. Her hip adornments interfered with her ability to sit, so she’d done away with them, but as a result, she was practically naked from the waist down. If they hadn’t been beastfolk, her guards would have likely been at a loss for where to look. Originally, the plan had been for her to be confined to a different room altogether. But with just a few words, Jeanne herself had gotten that plan amended.
“If confining me in name alone will satisfy you, then do as you wish. But if a couple of nobodies guarding me will put your minds at ease, then you’re all a bunch of dumb shits. Looks like living till old age just ain’t in the cards for ya.”
Her words had evoked no small amount of displeasure from the beastfolk. On the other hand, she did have a point.
Locking her up would accomplish little. It took a thief to catch a thief, and it took a Torture Princess to stand up to a Torture Princess. Even so, they didn’t want to upset the beastfolk any more than they already had.
Having been given strict instructions by everyone to say nothing, Jeanne was currently sitting in silence. Next, Kaito had dispelled Vlad’s phantasm and thought back to the complaint Vlad had lodged.
“Hold on now, my dear successor. Lumping me in with her and getting rid of me as well is rather unjust, no? Respect might not be either of our strong suits, but we are different people, I’ll have you know. Hmm? ‘Did you forget all that you said back in the beastfolk village?’ Good heavens, is a man forbidden from enjoying a smart remark now and again? But very well. I am a dead man, after all; being forgotten about seems appropriate enough.”
Now that I think about it, was he being sarcastic back then? Eh, whatever.
Kaito then turned his focus back to the exposition he was giving to Lute.
At long last, the story reached the point where they’d arrived at the World’s End.
“…And so basically, we ended up flying here.”
“I…see. I must admit, it all seems rather implausible.”
Apparently at a loss for words, Lute stroked his chin. He had just gotten a huge amount of information dumped in his lap.
Kaito could certainly appreciate his bewilderment. After all, the entire story felt almost surreal.
If I hadn’t lived through it myself, I probably wouldn’t believe it right away, either.
After receiving Elisabeth’s approval, he’d gone ahead and told Lute almost everything.
Even while he was talking, he felt like he’d been spinning some sort of tall tale. Despite that, though, he unfalteringly laid out the truth. The one thing he did make sure to do, though, was stress the fact that the culprits behind the beastfolk killings were only a group of fanatics within the Church who’d taken advantage of the chaos of Godd Deos’s death to run wild, and that their wishes ran contrary to those of humanity as a whole. Furthermore, he added, he felt that they should be treated like demons and their contractors and viewed as enemies of the entire world.
If the beastfolk see that as an “act committed by humanity” and decide to retaliate, then even avoiding the world’s restructuring won’t be enough to stop the world from falling into an age of darkness. Both sides would suffer tremendous casualties.
Lute had avoided giving Kaito a firm answer to his request. Given his position, doing so made perfect sense. Even if he knew who the killers were, the choice of how to retaliate wasn’t Lute’s to make. Everything lay on the shoulders of Vyade and whichever other members of the imperial family to whom she chose to disclose the information.
Vyade’s the Wise Wolf. She holds harmony in high regard, and she desires peace for her people.
Kaito chose to believe that she wouldn’t start a war in retaliation. Before him, he could see Lute’s face growing more sullen by the minute. He looked as though he’d just bitten into a piece of meat that not even his beastfolk fangs could tear.
“The first demon slumbering in the royal underground tomb, the truth about the Saint, the Apostle yet living… It’s like something out of a myth or a fairy tale.”
“Man, tell me about it.”
“If not for the land on which I heard it, I’d have written it off as idle fancy.”
“If not for where you heard it, huh…? So you believe me?”
“It would seem I have little choice. You see, Sir Kaito, the way we arrived here, at the World’s End, was given to us abruptly and by a mysterious individual.”
Suddenly, Kaito recalled what Lute had said back when he’d been caught on the ivy that had served as guard netting. Even though he’d been astonished at the unexpected reunion, he’d heard Lute’s words loud and clear.
Back then, Lute said…
“To think that a human would make it to the World’s End. It would appear we were not the only ones invited…”
“You said you guys were ‘invited,’ right?”
“Precisely. It would probably be faster to show you the object itself. Have a look.”
Lute withdrew a piece of paper from the sack on his back. Kaito took it, then stared at it intently. Elisabeth, who was right next to him, peered at it as well. They scrunched up their brows in unison.
“This is…”
“…Aye.”
Complex magical runes were piled up along the left side of the paper. Together, they made up a formula designed to interfere with a teleportation circle. Even Kaito, who was generally ignorant when it came to magical matters, could tell how abnormally chaotic they were.
It reminded Kaito of the letter the Governor had once given them.
Back then, the formula dissolved, paper and all, after a single use.
This paper, on the other hand, had survived even after Lute and his men had teleported. Frightened by its incomprehensible construction as he was, he turned his gaze to the paper’s right side. A few words were written on it in a round scrawl.
The beginning, the middle, and the end all lie in the palm of His hand.
If you wish to reject those words, make for the World’s End.
The right shall be granted to all races impartially.
The invitation was almost reminiscent of a poem. The artwork at the end, though, stood out like a sore thumb.
A massive piece of bone-in meat was drawn on the paper. It was so impressive, it practically deserved fanfare.
“…Aye, the Butcher wrote this.”
“Yup, definitely the Butcher.”
“You can tell from so little information? Consider me impressed.”
Lute’s words rang with frank admiration. In truth, Kaito had come to that conclusion off the bone-in-meat drawing alone, but some things were better left unsaid. His expression turned meek as he handed the paper back to Lute.
After glancing over its contents again, Lute frowned.
“The first time I saw it, it seemed like some manner of practical joke. But it was impossible to write off as such, as the circumstances under which it was delivered were far too peculiar.”
Apparently, the letter had been delivered to Vyade’s third villa.
Ever since Jeanne’s invasion, Vyade had changed residences and fortified her defenses. But someone managed to not only find where she’d moved but also slip past the guard netting and invade her bedchambers.
The culprit had been a small dragon. After leaving the letter on Vyade’s pillow, he’d flapped his way out.
Afterward, one of the few beastfolk mages had immediately gotten to work analyzing the formula written on the letter. What they’d discovered was that there was an unknown set of coordinates recorded within it.
However, there were still many members of Vyade’s private army who had yet to recover from the wounds Jeanne had dealt to them.
Because of that, she’d chosen Lute, who was naturally resilient and deeply loyal, and put him and his subordinates through a round of intensive healing. While that was going on, she’d also sent out scouts to the designated location and had them bring back reports.
Then, armed with their newfound information, the squad had prepared themselves for the environment and set off.
Upon reaching the site themselves, Lute and his men had come to realize just where it was that they’d come to. Beastfolk held little piety toward God and the Saint, but even they were versed in their legends.
In this world, there exists a place that God designated as its End. A pure place, crafted from snow and water, wind and mana. A place that only those granted knowledge of its location are able to reach.
“Given everything you just told me, Sir Kaito, it follows that the first half of the letter—‘The beginning, the middle, and the end all lie in the palm of His hand. If you wish to reject those words, make for the World’s End’—refers to preventing the world from being restructured. But what is this ‘right’ it says will be granted? Why, it’s not even clear what the letter’s writer would have us do in order to attain it.”
“Yeah, it really isn’t… What does the Butcher want with all the races anyway?”
“In truth, we were at a loss for what to do after we finished setting up camp and laying out the netting. With only the letter at our disposal, we couldn’t make heads or tails of things.”
Lute scratched his head. Apparently, the arrival of Kaito’s group had been a great help to him as well. For a moment, the conversation came to a lull. Kaito and Lute crossed their arms, and Elisabeth immersed herself in thought. Silence filled the room. Then a bright voice piped up.
“Thank you all for waiting—it’s ready! Go on and drink it while it’s still hot!”
Hina was nearly prancing as she began passing out tea. Her smile was, to borrow an idiom from Kaito’s old world, like a breath of fresh air. Kaito and Lute thanked her as they received their bowls.
Kaito took a sip from his. It was as sweet as honey, and it had a fruity tanginess mixed in as well. Elisabeth, on the other hand, sat unmoving, her bowl remaining perched in her hand. Eventually, she let out a quiet murmur.
“‘The beginning, the middle, and the end all lie in the palm of His hand. If you wish to reject those words, make for the World’s End. The right shall be granted to all races impartially.’ Given that he used the phrase ‘all races,’ we can assume that, while their coordinates are unknown to us, the demi-humans must have received his invitation as well. And rejecting the notion that everything from the beginning to the end lies in God’s hand, eh?”
“What do you think it means?”
“In all likelihood, something exists here that would serve to hinder God’s restructuring of the world.”
It sounded like Elisabeth already knew what that was. Kaito’s eyes widened. The surprise of that realization almost caused him to drop his bowl. The moment before its contents spilled, though, Hina grabbed it from beside him.
“Are you all right? Not a single drop spilled on your leg, my dearest Master Kaito, did it?”
“Huh? Oh yeah, no, I’m fine. Thanks. Sorry about that.”
Kaito’s thanks was decidedly absentminded. Reflexively, he cast a glance toward Jeanne. The golden girl was as expressionless as always, but the corners of her mouth were ever so slightly curled up. She nodded, affirming his suspicions. Elisabeth went on, her voice low.
“’Tis but one thing I could imagine it to be.”
“Yeah, same.”
Kaito offered a brief agreement. But he left the role of saying it aloud to Elisabeth.
Lute leaned forward in anticipation. Elisabeth reverently opened her mouth to speak.
“Here lies—”
“Why, indeed, our revered Saint is here.”
A sweet, bell-like voice rang out.
Who the soft interjection belonged to, nobody there knew.
At some point, a petite individual clad in scarlet cloth from head to toe had taken a seat beside Kaito.
The long garment reached all the way to the floor, spreading out wide like a carpet of rose petals. Half-hidden within its folds, she was also wearing a gold-hemmed vestment of the same color. She looked to be affiliated with the Church.
The most surprising bit, though, was what lay beneath the clothes.
Their sudden intruder was a young girl. She looked to be less than ten.
She had simple flaxen hair and marvelously clear eyes the color of amber. Her short, evenly cut hair paired well with her attractively proportionate facial features. Her appearance was more than sufficient to classify her as cute. But there was just something about her.
There’s something…catastrophically broken about her.
No matter how you looked at her, she was nothing more than a sweet, simple little girl. But Kaito couldn’t dispel the strange impression he was getting from her. And the fact that she’d appeared out of nowhere without catching anyone’s attention served as proof that she wasn’t just anyone.
Due to the intrusion of a single young girl, the air in the room was stretched thin and tense.
Lute and his men reached for their swords. However, their opponent was simply too young to cut down or cross-examine. Hesitation welled up in their eyes. Hina alone assumed a battle-ready stance as she swiftly moved to protect Kaito. Jeanne merely blinked.
Still cross-legged, Elisabeth planted her chin atop her hands. Then she spoke, making no effort to hide her displeasure.
“As I suspect. And that’s why you’re here, I suppose.”
“Yes, exactly. Lovely to see you again, Elisabeth Le Fanu. I remember the last time we met, you know. You may have known my name, but you didn’t have the faintest clue as to the gravity of the role I play. You’ve matured quite splendidly, O ignorant sheep. I can hardly make light of you after you’ve come this far.”
The girl chuckled, clearly amused. Elisabeth’s brow furrowed even further. Kaito cocked his head to the side. It would appear that the two knew each other, although their relationship seemed anything but cordial.
Who is this girl? What is she?
Kaito opened his mouth, about to give voice to those questions.
Before he could, though, Elisabeth continued, spitting out her words with a look of utmost resentment plastered across her face.
“Is it really fine for you to be out of the Capital like this, Grave Keeper?” |
Torture Princess
5
The Grave Keeper’s Zealotry
“Oh, no, it isn’t fine at all. It’s super not-fine. But we all have to do what we have to do. I serve at the pleasure of God and the Holy Mother. The tomb’s seal is broken, and the end is nigh. Soon, the living and the dead will both return to ash. We’ll be just fine leaving a handful of men to protect those worthless old kingly corpses, thank you very much. Besides, I had another part I needed to play.”
The girl’s voice was as smooth as silk. Abruptly, she stood up.
Her long scarlet cloak fluttered, and she continued her speech in an operatic tone.
“I may be the Grave Keeper, but I am also the Messenger. I am the one who blows the horn at the end of days, loudly hailing the sheep—‘behold, for she is awakened, and rejoice, for the devout have been granted a miracle.’”
Kaito squinted. Her speech was strangely verbose. Considering that she was a member of the Church and a fanatic, to boot, the actual contents of her speech themselves were fairly normal. But the fact that they were coming from someone who looked to be a ten-year-old girl was anything but. The most pressing issue, though, was how she’d addressed herself.
“…The Grave Keeper?”
Kaito thought back to the horrors he’d seen in the underground tomb.
Living people had had their pain harvested for pacification down in the cruel nursery. And the room’s gatekeeper had been a monster created by taking a divine creature, feeding it demon meat, and mixing in human parts.
The Grave Keeper had been the one responsible for all that.
As a result, Kaito had come to believe that the Grave Keeper lacked anything resembling morals or basic rationality. But the girl standing before him seemed entirely sane. That fact sent a shiver down Kaito’s spine.
You mean that the person who created that stuff, who was able to create all that stuff, knew full well what she was doing?
Kaito had assumed they had been the deeds of someone consumed by madness, but this notion was dozens of times more horrifying.
Then a sharp noise sliced through the air.
Kaito frantically looked up. When he did, he saw the tip of Lute’s sword resting on the Grave Keeper’s forehead from where he’d swung it. It looked capable of splitting her head open at any moment. However, the only response the Grave Keeper gave was a few blinks. When he spoke, Lute’s voice was full of loathing.
“Just what business does the rotting flesh of the Church have with us?”
“I’m rather disappointed. You seemed so magnanimous, yet your actions are most deplorable. Have you perhaps forgotten about the third peace treaty? Normally, we would not be so lenient toward pagans such as yourselves. But the beastfolk are not our people, nor are they even human. So the Church overlooks your sins and strives constantly to be good neighbors to you. Ah, but alas! Alas, you repay me with violence!”
“Don’t take me for a fool, girl!”
Lute howled. The pelts that made up the portable dwelling’s walls shook from the vibrations.
Kaito swallowed and looked back at Lute’s sword. Fortunately, it hadn’t broken the Grave Keeper’s skin yet. In an impressive display of rationality, Lute had carefully maintained the sword’s position.
“We know all about what you did to our people, how you slaughtered them! Our people place much higher pride in repaying debts than humans do! That, and because a friend of mine put in a good word for you, I have no desire to decry humanity as evil! But betrayal must be repaid with fangs! If you are the Grave Keeper, then you will not leave this place alive!”
“…Wherefore?”
“Wh—?”
“What right hath the likes of the third imperial princess’s private army to bellow at me?”
Her voice had a terrifyingly calm ring to it. She focused her clear, hollow gaze on Lute.
Upon seeing her apparent transformation, Kaito let a breath catch in his throat. Elisabeth gave a light scoff. Lute, like Kaito, had shock spread across his face.
The Grave Keeper continued her diatribe dispassionately in a strangely old-fashioned tone.
“Thou hast no right to take such a tone with me. What evidence doth thou hast of such killings? Didst thou misconstrue the testimony of a demon’s contractor and the Torture Princess as valid, perchance? Thou showest thy naïveté, knave.”
“You would treat me as a child?!”
“As such befits an immature mutt as thyself. A lesson, perhaps, for thee. If thou wishest to turn thy sword on the Grave Keeper, do come up with a better excuse. Vyade would surely do as such.”
“What do you know of Lady Vyade Ula Forstlast?!”
“Will it require an order ere thou understand? What an insufferable simpleton. Now, stand down.”
“Grrr—”
“Stand down, I did say!”
When Lute heard the Grave Keeper’s arrogant tone, his face contorted. His hands trembled in humiliation. A scratch appeared on the Grave Keeper’s forehead, and blood began to drip forth. Wholly unperturbed by that fact, she began speaking in another tone altogether.
“Well, if you really wanna take my head…then go on—go for it! Seeing one of the three kings have to take responsibility? Now, that sounds like a good time! And hey, don’t worry! The restructuring will be a grand repentance, a rite of absolute destruction where all sins get forgiven! Watching our races carve each other up in the meantime sounds like a blast! Everyone’s gonna die anyway, so hey, memento mori!”
This time, she spoke like a young punk, and an energetic smile spread across her face. Kaito was astounded all over again.
What the hell is wrong with her?
The Grave Keeper’s speech patterns were abnormal, and in a different way than Jeanne’s. Hers were incongruous, as though several different people were all mixed together.
The tip of Lute’s sword shook a little. The trail of blood had dripped all the way down to the Grave Keeper’s lips. In spite of that, though, her smile remained the same. Grinding his teeth, Lute raised his sword overhead.
“Hrgh!”
“Lute, no!”
Kaito called out to stop him. Killing the Grave Keeper could easily have drastic consequences. Instead of stopping, though, Lute returned his sword to its sheath. Then he collapsed cross-legged onto the pelt floor.
Kaito breathed a sigh of relief. The Grave Keeper sloppily licked at her blood. After cleaning the area around her mouth in the same manner a cat would, she spoke.
“Ah, how lovely. And the Church is quite magnanimous toward its neighbors. We will overlook your discourtesy this time.”
Man, there’s gotta be a limit to how shameless you can be.
Kaito frowned. Lute grimaced as well, but he looked around the room, seemingly having returned to his senses. His subordinates had been directing murderous rage toward the Grave Keeper as well. Even now, they still seemed poised to spring forward and go for her throat. Lute took a deep breath.
Then, having stiffened his resolve, he bowed to the Grave Keeper.
“I thank you for your generosity.”
His subordinates ground their teeth in unison. Their commanding officer had apologized, and they couldn’t let that apology go to waste. They forcibly choked back their rage. But Lute then continued, his voice practically a growl.
“But make certain you do not forget. This is the World’s End, a land that belongs to no race. If we all seek the same thing, then conflict is inevitable. And the battlefield is a place of many surprises. You may be influential, but I can make no guarantees for your safety. So take care. Remember, any old blackguard might fire the arrow that takes your head.”
“Oh yes, I’ve been aware of that for quite a long while. Why, I’ve seen it myself. That’s simply the kind of place that a battlefield is. Anyone and everyone might find themselves among the ranks of the fallen. The dead will form circles and dance among the skulls, waiting patiently atop God’s palm for the day when all returns to nothing. Such tranquility, such delight! But we are not yet on a battlefield, and I am but a simple messenger.”
The Grave Keeper gently laid her hand atop her chest.
Then, at long last, she displayed an innocent, age-appropriate smile.
“Now, let’s have a chat! Let’s talk peacefully and pastorally so that all God’s creatures can come to an understanding.”
“Have a…chat?”
Kaito let out a dumbfounded murmur. The Grave Keeper’s proposal seemed completely reasonable. But that was what made it seem so completely and utterly surreal. After all, their two camps were working under diametrically opposed goals and beliefs.
Jeanne, Kaito, and the others were trying to protect and preserve the world as it was. That was the salvation they were trying to attain.
The Grave Keeper and the rest of the fanatics, on the other hand, were trying to bring about the world’s restructuring. That was the salvation they were trying to attain.
Most conflicts had some sort of common ground the two sides could agree on. But here, no such thing existed.
There was no way for them to meet halfway. The chasm that lay between them was vast and deep.
Given the situation, then, what could there be to talk about?
“’Twould be meaningless. And surely you know that, Grave Keeper. Exchanging words would amount to naught but a waste of time.”
“Oh my, you state that so assertively. It saddens my heart, it does.”
“You lot endorse the restructuring, and we seek survival. The world will either perish or not perish. The two options leave no room for compromise, which presents us with a rare instance of pure, unadulterated opposition.”
Elisabeth gave voice to the same thoughts that had been going through Kaito’s head.
Still languidly resting her chin atop her palms and crossed legs, she bluntly continued.
“Mutual understanding is impossible for us. One or the other shall have to die.”
“Oh my, I should hope not. We at least have room to talk things over. Elisabeth Le Fanu, you especially should have little reason to want the world to continue.”
The Grave Keeper smiled. Elisabeth sullenly arched an eyebrow.
Kaito immediately picked up on what the Grave Keeper was trying to say.
Elisabeth’s going to be burned at the stake. So it shouldn’t really matter to her whether or not the world goes on… But wait. If we manage to prevent the world from being restructured and show everyone how corrupt the Church is, could we maybe get her sentence reduced?
It was the first time that Kaito had considered that possibility. But the Grave Keeper wasn’t finished yet.
“Let us assume for a moment that the restructuring fails to occur and that you are all successful in borrowing Vyade Ula Forstlast’s wisdom and denounce the Church. A purge would take place within it, to be certain. And Godd Deos’s equilibrium sect would rise to power once more. Even so, the first demon’s existence would still be hidden from the public, and the truth would be concealed once more. Why, I would bet on it. You all would choose to remain silent, and Vyade would, as well.”
Elisabeth offered no response to the Grave Keeper’s bold declaration. Although he was about to vehemently object, Kaito ultimately held his tongue.
The Grave Keeper was right.
She’s right… I won’t say anything. And Elisabeth’s probably the same.
After all, what would happen if he talked?
If he publicly announced the existence of the first demon, the world would descend into chaos. Destroying the very foundation of one of the world’s most prominent religions tended to have that effect. The Church, its followers, some of the aristocrats, and even the royal family would become the subjects of intense hate and distrust. History would be marked by an age of executions and torture.
The will of the masses could transform into a ruthless killing machine. Who knows just how many would hang?
Furthermore, the war against the demons had dealt a grave blow to the world’s economy. If society lost their leaders as well, it would plunge into an unprecedented state of disorder. And if a famine or plague hit, the disaster would be inconceivable.
It was all too easy to imagine. Which left them with but a single choice.
They couldn’t say anything.
“In short, even if your actions allow the world to persist, no grand accolades await you. For you yourselves will be the ones covering it up. Which all comes to mean that Torture Princess’s fate will be unchanged.”
If we made some sort of backroom deal with the Church… No, that wouldn’t work. Elisabeth herself doesn’t want amnesty, and the masses would call relentlessly for the Torture Princess’s head.
The sheep would come to a stop right before plunging into the flames. But then, unknowingly, they would burn their own savior to death.
Kaito clenched his fists. If that was the case, then the issue became which end was more honorable: the world’s restructuring or burning at the stake.
“As I said but moments ago, the restructuring will be a grand repentance. When the end arrives, all your sins will be forgiven. The time has come to ‘pray that God will be your salvation.’ Doesn’t that sound pleasant? It’s a more beautiful end than burning to death, at any rate. The Lord will finally reward you for your efforts.”
The Grave Keeper smiled, as though giving Elisabeth her blessings. As she did, Kaito was assailed by a particular doubt.
True, the Torture Princess is a grand sinner. But…
The masses had no clue how much good she’d done, nor did they even try to learn. That was simply the kind of creatures they were. They listened only to what they wanted to hear and saw only what they wanted to see.
Flocks of sheep were, fundamentally, stupid. And that was the way things ought to be.
…But isn’t that a sin in and of itself?
The ignorant had no right to cast blame, did they? Their entire way of life was fundamentally wrong, wasn’t it? Then didn’t that make the restructuring just a way to rectify that?
“Is that what you think? Then you’re an imbecile.”
A razor-sharp voice forcefully smashed through Kaito’s reverie. With a start, he came back to his senses.
Before him, Elisabeth still sat with her chin in her hands.
“Your premise is flawed, to start. The masses were not the ones who decided to cast judgment on me. ’Twas I. And grand accolades are the furthest thing from my mind. Your restructuring may well be more pleasant for me, but I care naught. In fact, ’tis quite the opposite.”
Elisabeth’s gaze bored down on the Grave Keeper. Her black nails glinted as she whispered.
“Any who say my sins can be forgiven shall die by my hands. ’Tis all there is to it.”
Elisabeth ran her tongue over her red lips. Then, with a sweet smile, the peerless sinner continued.
“Your cajolery has backfired on you, Grave Keeper. Your death shall come swiftly.”
That’s right. Elisabeth is strong.
Kaito had just been forcibly reminded of that fact. Her resolve came completely from within. He had yet to come to terms with that, nor did he fully accept it. But the way she refused to fear death was definitely admirable. Now that he thought about it rationally, Kaito, too, was opposed to the restructuring.
He certainly didn’t want Elisabeth to burn at the stake. But he saw no reason to endorse a plan that involved everyone in the world dying, either. Calling death “salvation” was nothing but base sophistry.
At the same time, Kaito realized something odd. The Grave Keeper’s description was mad from its very premise.
Most of the people who want the restructuring to happen believe that the pious faithful will remain in the new world.
At least, that was what he’d thought. But the Grave Keeper was different.
The whole time, she’d clearly been working under the assumption that all humanity would perish.
“What…the hell?”
Words of doubt spilled forth from Kaito’s lips. The Grave Keeper cocked her head to the side, curious as to what he was trying to say.
As he looked back at the young girl, the words practically leaped from Kaito’s mouth.
“You…you know that the restructuring is gonna kill everyone?”
“Oh no, not everyone. Our revered Saint will surely remain.”
“Still—you know? But then…how the hell could you endorse that?”
Kaito gave voice to his genuine doubts. Believing that their piety would ultimately be rewarded with a miracle and would grant them survival was at least something he could comprehend. And as twisted as it was, looking for validation of one’s devoutness and righteousness made logical sense as a desire.
But if they knew full well that they, too, would be reduced to nothing…
That kind of devotion is just too empty.
That would mean that all their wishes and prayers had been for nothing. Not a single thing they asked of God would end up meaning a thing. Not a single person would be saved.
“Wouldn’t that just make everything meaningless?”
“Why should we seek results from prayer?”
Her voice had a strange, dry ring to it.
Kaito’s eyes went wide. Ignoring his shock, the young girl made a firm declaration.
“That would be blasphemy.”
Kaito had nothing to follow up with. He had no idea what to say. But then, suddenly, a smile spread across the Grave Keeper’s face. To his surprise, her voice took on a gentler tone.
“Ah, I see. It rather makes sense that a man from another world would have difficulty understanding. We know full well of the truth behind our world, you see. That is why we believe. God and the Saint have been seeking this restructuring for many ages. With that being the case, then our annihilation, too, is a thing of joy.”
“What the hell do you—?”
“If God deems our existence a mistake, then that is what is just and proper.”
The Grave Keeper’s voice was solemn. She spoke calmly, as though proselytizing to an ignorant sheep.
“The next world will be God’s kingdom, a perfect, ideal land. And oh, what a marvelous thing that will be. Now is the time for us to repay the Saint for the love she so freely gave us. ‘All glory to God.’ ‘The miracle is upon us.’ ‘There is no need for us here.’ That is what it means to have faith.”
Kaito shuddered. The hair on Lute’s tail stood up.
Now Kaito finally realized.
So she’s one of the “shepherds who would gladly cast themselves into the fire just to catch a glimpse of a miracle” Jeanne was talking about.
At the same time, he ruminated on what Izabella had said: that the Church’s doctrine was necessary.
“Even now, I still hold that the Church’s teachings are wonderful. Using faith as a way to support a life lived nobly and properly is an honorable thing. People are weak. They need something to believe in.”
This girl wasn’t using faith to support herself. She was using herself to support faith. She didn’t even believe that her prayers would reach anyone. She sought nothing from God.
And if she was told to die, she would simply die. That was the nature of her love.
Kaito parted his trembling lips. Still shaking, he asked his question.
“How can you even think like that? You’re so young, but you’re—”
“Enough from you, Kaito. Asking such a thing of the Grave Keeper is nigh comical. Now you’re the one with the flawed premise.”
Sounding annoyed, Elisabeth interjected. She gestured rudely toward the Grave Keeper with her chin.
When she spoke of the adorable young girl she was pointing at, her voice was tinged with loathing.
“The Grave Keeper inherits the memories and personality of every Grave Keeper before them. However, the rite of succession is too great a burden for a baby’s mind to bear. As a result, the personalities blend together, and a kind of natural selection occurs. In the end, all that remains is a single common denominator: fervent piety toward God and the Saint. To put it in a few words, she’s akin to zealotry personified.”
She looks sane, but I guess she really, really isn’t.
Kaito could see that clearly. At the same time, he was reminded once more of the Church’s deep-rooted perversion. Preserving the Grave Keeper’s memories and personality was no doubt a necessary step for them to take in continuing to conceal the deadly secret that was the first demon’s existence. People who could maintain their faith after seeing that thing were probably rarer than rare. But that had resulted in her.
You know, that stuff Izabella said is probably closer to how the Church is normally supposed to be.
But instead, they’d gotten the whole world involved and had sunk deeper and deeper into their mistakes.
What had gone wrong? How had things gotten to this point? No matter how hard he thought about it, no satisfying answer was forthcoming. Ever since the world had been created, or perhaps even before then, thin layers of madness had slowly been trying to engulf everything. But even with the situation as tumultuous as it was, the trigger that had initiated the collapse was abundantly clear. Everything had started when the Butcher had sold Vlad that demon meat.
They really did need to talk to the Butcher directly. With that thought in mind, Kaito asked a new question.
“Where are you guys keeping the Butcher?”
The Grave Keeper completely ignored him, instead tilting her head to the side.
Still surrounded by Lute’s subordinates, Jeanne was sitting coolly on the floor. The Grave Keeper’s gaze shifted to Jeanne’s defenseless profile. Then, in a gentle voice, she called out to the golden Torture Princess.
“I’ve heard reports on you, you know. The other Torture Princess. The girl who proclaims herself the maiden of salvation, who rejects God’s will, who would pour poisoned wine upon the Saint’s lips. You’re a fool of a wholly different sort than we… Although I also hear that despite that mechanical impression you give, you took quite a liking to our Izabella Vicker.”
“So I did. She was my first love, you see.”
Jeanne’s response was instant.
The next moment, the eyes of everyone present save the Grave Keeper went wide.
“Huh?”
“What?”
“Excuse me?”
“I beg your pardon?”
The brief comment she’d given may as well have been a bomb.
Upon hearing the words first love, Kaito, Elisabeth, Hina, and even Lute reeled. Embarrassed by their reactions, they all then shut up, and an indescribable silence descended upon the room.
Other than the Grave Keeper, whose smile was unchanged, they all wore truly peculiar expressions.
Then Jeanne gave her continuation in the same emotionless voice as always.
“I’m sorry. That was a joke.”
“A joke?! I thought you were being serious! Now is hardly the time to be saying such things!”
Elisabeth slammed her fist onto the ground, and it sank gently into the bear pelt. Kaito rapidly nodded his assent. Jeanne’s so-called “joke” was tone-deaf in the extreme. However, she wasn’t done talking yet.
“However, I do feel that it was something similar. But hey, beats me! I was chosen by the alchemists to save the world and raised solely for that purpose. I was a princess and a sacrifice. I was created by them, and I destroyed them. For that was my contract with them. Neither of us resented the other. However, I had little direct contact with humans, so I was concerned as how best to interact with the stray sheep until I obtained a servant. So I went to some bandits in a neighboring mountain, snatched ’em up, and learned from their example.”
“Wait, so that’s why your speech gets vulgar at random intervals?!”
One mystery had been solved, at least. Now they knew the context behind the fact that Jeanne’s word choice would regularly take a turn for the incredibly coarse. But what they didn’t know was why she’d chosen then to share that seemingly irrelevant piece of information with them. Ignoring Kaito’s expression of bewilderment, Jeanne kept speaking.
“So that was my first time.”
“Your first time…what?”
“My first time meeting an ‘ordinary human’ like that.”
This time, Jeanne answered Kaito’s question. For a moment, her rose eyes went vacant.
Then she whispered in an uncharacteristically hazy voice.
“My li’l miss was foolish…but she was gallant, and she had honor.”
That simple sentence hit Kaito like a train. He gazed at her profile and ruminated.
Her interactions with people had been severely limited. That was what had made Jeanne the way she was today, into the maiden of salvation. She never looked back at those she’d trampled over, nor did she spare a thought for her victims. But if a single person she perceived differently existed, then…
If that’s the case, then…that basically is a first love, isn’t it?
Kaito almost said it aloud, but he held his tongue. Pointing it out now wouldn’t do them any good.
Izabella was currently far away from them. She’d carried out her will and returned to the Church. And it was anyone’s guess as to what had happened to her after being captured by the group of executioner-like people.
No, wait. There is one person.
There was a chance that the Grave Keeper knew whether or not Izabella was safe.
Kaito instinctively turned to look at her. As he did, a sleazy smile spread across her youthful face.
Upon seeing it, a chill ran down his spine. Frantically, he tried to ask about Izabella’s well-being. But Jeanne spoke first, as though to stop him. Her voice was coolheaded to the last.
“Even so, trying to use my li’l miss as bait to negotiate with me is a waste of your time, fanatic. I’m too late, ain’t I?! Jackasses like you always go by the same damn playbook!”
“Wait, hold on, ‘too late’? You mean Izabella is…?”
Kaito’s face went pale. The next moment, Izabella’s smiling face flashed vividly across his mind. White light had been exploding at her back, and she’d been smiling. Even with the cruel scars etched across her face, she’d still been beautiful.
Izabella is…
A chuckle slipped unbidden from the Grave Keeper’s mouth.
Kaito reflexively made to grab at her vestment’s collar.
Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Before he could, though, a shrill noise filled the room. As it did, the leather flap at the camp’s entrance violently flapped inward.
Everyone turned to look. Heaving a stately sigh, the Grave Keeper rose to her feet.
Her crimson cloak trailed behind her as she silently walked to the entranceway and unfastened its leather knot. When she rolled it up, an orb flew inside, along with a mysterious, cutting wind.
The orb was one of the Church’s communication devices. The wings on its sides softly fell out as it alighted on the Grave Keeper’s palm. Runes ran across its surface, ones far more intricate than those Kaito was familiar with.
It looked like the message the Grave Keeper had just received had been encrypted. After she read it, her eyes narrowed.
“Good work out there. Now convey this to the lookout: ‘It’s Yah Llodl all over again.’”
The Grave Keeper gently tossed up the communication device. A fresh pair of wings sprouted from its sides.
Then they flapped, and the orb took off. After watching it get swallowed up by the snowscape, the Grave Keeper returned the entrance to the way she’d found it. Turning back around, she placed a hand atop her chest.
Her scarlet cloak fluttered as she gave a deep bow to those assembled.
“I’m afraid I must take my leave. It’s quite unfortunate, but there are some rather troubling matters I find myself needing to attend to. While it was perhaps too short to glean much importance from, I believe that our little rendezvous was a meaningful one. Pagan hunts and inquisitions are so ineffective, and they leave such poor legacies, after all. Not even I wish to turn all the world’s creatures against me. Instead, I simply pray that you all will find it in yourselves to have a change of heart, even if it’s but a small one.”
The Grave Keeper’s words were chosen carefully. The scariest thing, though, was the fact that the sheer compassion dripping from her voice seemed entirely heartfelt. She placed her small palms together and closed her eyes, as though she was praying.
“‘You are free to act as you will. But pray that God shall be your salvation. For the beginning, the middle, and the end all lie in the palm of His hand.’ The blessings of God and the Saint on you all.”
Then the Grave Keeper raised her head and offered them a sweet smile. Not a single person returned it. Seemingly unhurt by that fact, though, she began walking. The beastfolk stared daggers at her as she rolled up the leather door once more. However, she stopped for a moment before heading out into the snowscape.
“But worry not. We’ll be enemies from here on out, just as you wish.”
With that quiet murmur, she began walking again. The entrance flapped back to a rest.
And with that, she was gone.
It feels like a typhoon just passed through.
Kaito surveyed the room in a daze. It looked no different than it had before, but it felt as though it had been draped in a thick film. That was just how badly the entity known as the Grave Keeper had thrown the mood into disarray. As he tried to shake off a numbing sense of fatigue, Kaito turned his thoughts to Izabella’s well-being.
So…what happened to her?
The Grave Keeper’s twisted smile flashed through his mind. He recognized that sadistic smile; he’d seen it time and time again back when he was alive.
He opened his mouth to speak. But before he could put his tenacious sense of unease into words, Elisabeth stood up.
“We’re leaving, Kaito. A clear target has presented itself to us.”
“A target? You mean we’re gonna tail the Grave Keeper or something?”
If they did that, they’d probably be able to find out where the Church had made their camp. But they also ran the risk of running into the Church’s main force. Kaito chose to leave those concerns implicit. However, Elisabeth shook her head as she replied.
“She knows me not, and as such, she was negligent. Ever since Godd Deos’s time, I’ve been carefully stealing secret records from the Church and breaking their cipher. As such, I was able to read that last message.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“Heh, seeing a code would make any mage wish to crack it. And I had my suspicions that the day such knowledge would become useful would arrive. And now it has. Rather impressive of me, if I do say so myself.”
As she sang her own praises, Elisabeth chugged down the rest of the tea that she’d been continuing to hold the whole time. Once she was finished, Hina, who was waiting on standby, took the empty bowl.
“Good work, Hina. ’Twas splendid as always. Your talents never disappoint.”
“You’re too kind, Lady Elisabeth. Your words fill me with such joy. But, um, if I may ask, what were the contents of the transmission?”
Hina asked this question in a nervous tone. Their next actions as a group hinged on the answer. Everyone swallowed as they waited for Elisabeth’s reply. Its contents, however, were unexpected.
“‘The cage in headquarters was opened. The lookouts were unconscious, struck in the back of the head.’ In other words…”
The scene he’d seen back at Elisabeth’s castle spontaneously flashed before Kaito’s eyes.
The Butcher had been able to unlock even the Torture Princess’s own Gibbet. There was no way any man-made cage could contain him. And what would he do after he escaped the cage?
Elisabeth went on, her voice echoing Kaito’s thoughts exactly.
“At present, the Butcher’s whereabouts are unknown. It would seem that he’s fled somewhere.” |
Torture Princess
6
Searching for Answers
Now that they knew that the Butcher had escaped, they had to act fast.
Leaving the warm, comfortable campsite behind them, Kaito and the others plunged once more into the world of ice and snow.
The air shimmered and sparkled as it had before. The snowflakes were unchanged, too, still piled high atop the vast plain of ice. The scenery before them was radiant and beautiful, as though they’d stepped inside a snow globe.
The vast, endless snowscape seemed just the same as ever.
Kaito’s group, on the other hand, had expanded. At the end of their procession stood Lute, clad in thick winter gear due to his inability to use magic. As the copper wolf stared straight ahead, Kaito called out to him.
“Are you sure you wanna come with us? There’s no telling what’s gonna happen after we catch up with the Butcher, you know.”
“Whatever are you talking about? Sitting idly by after being insulted so would be a disgrace to my name as a warrior. And you say that this escapee of yours is not only the Apostle who summoned us to the World’s End but may even know the Saint’s whereabouts?! Why, how could I not pursue him?!”
Lute’s ears perked up as he gave his determined reply. However, he had ordered his subordinates to wait on standby at the camp. He’d claimed that too large a group would be too conspicuous, but that was likely just a pretense. He probably intended to personally take full responsibility if things went south with the Church. Kaito had been concerned about the extent of Lute’s resolve, but he hadn’t stopped him.
Everyone’s got pride, something they refuse to back down from. Right now, it’s probably for the best if I just don’t say anything.
With Lute having joined their ranks, Kaito had decided to leave Vlad sealed in his jewel. The jewel in question was shaking at regular intervals as though trying to express its displeasure. Kaito, however, staunchly ignored it.
With Lute added and Vlad subtracted, the five of them advanced, spearheaded by Gargantua.
In the end, they’d decided to head for the Church’s encampment.
They were aware of the risk that they’d run into the Church’s main force, but the amount of information they had on the Butcher’s whereabouts was fundamentally deficient. In order to get a sense of which way he’d fled, they’d decided to covertly track the Church’s movements.
In order to avoid getting into a fight, all Deus Ex Machinas besides Gargantua were hard at work searching for their foes.
It appeared that the Grave Keeper had left on foot. Her footprints were so faint, they hardly seemed to be there at all, but Gargantua followed them unhesitatingly. At present, it was equipped with extra parts specifically for that purpose. After borrowing Jabberwocky’s warped glass, it had fashioned what appeared to be a pair of eyes. They were enlarged, as though they were looking through glasses, and they swiveled and turned as Gargantua made its pointy way across the icy ground.
The plan had been for Gargantua to switch off with Pantagruel once the Grave Keeper’s footprints faded so it could track her by her mana. However, it didn’t look like that would be necessary. Kaito and the others continued following Gargantua in silence.
No matter how far they went, the scenery never changed. That, in and of itself, was unsettling.
If all of it is beautiful, then it kinda feels like everything in it is dead.
A chill ran down Kaito’s spine, one completely unrelated to the cold. The notion that they were merely going around in circles began captivating him. Right as it did, though, Gargantua came to a sudden stop.
Thrusting one leg into the ice to use as a fulcrum, the automaton spun around. It turned to face Jeanne and rattled its head up and down. It was clearly conveying something to her, as Jeanne quietly nodded back.
“Ah, I understand now. C’mon, ya lumps! Keep up!”
Jeanne and Gargantua changed course. Turning to the side, they set out perpendicularly from where they had stopped. Kaito found it rather difficult to believe that the Grave Keeper had traveled in such a bizarre manner.
It would appear that the two of them had stopped following the Grave Keeper’s tracks altogether.
But then where are they going?
Right as doubts started crossing through Kaito’s mind, though, Gargantua stopped and began walking parallel to their original route.
Kaito and the others followed after it. As they did, the scenery around them began gradually changing. The ground began sloping up at a much more noticeable angle than the hill they’d visited earlier. Kaito found himself on the verge of slipping a number of times. Each time, though, Hina successfully managed to support him. Constantly thanking her, Kaito laboriously made his way up the silvery hill.
Especially large snowflakes began crunching under his feet, and he called ahead to Jeanne.
“So why’d we stop following the footprints and come this way instead?”
“The number of sets of prints increased. Do you know why that is, mister?”
“…The Grave Keeper must have met up with her subordinates. We must be near their camp.”
“Precisely. A keen hypothesis, coming from The Fool. Furthermore, the Deus Ex Machinas share information among themselves. According to Pantagruel, this cliff is the optimal location from which to observe their camp. Also, do make sure you avoid walking in front of Gargantua. Falling to your death before we meet our first foe would be a hell of a bad joke!”
Kaito cocked his head, confused by Jeanne’s warning. It sounded like there was a cliff in front of them, sure, but not even he was dumb enough to just fall over its edge. A moment later, he took it all back.
Gargantua had come to an abrupt stop. Before it lay nothingness.
The ground in front of its silver legs had cleanly vanished. It was like someone had carved it off with a knife, then stuck a fork in it and carried it away. No normal cliff declined so sharply.
Oh man, I would totally have fallen off there.
Narrowly stopping as well, Kaito broke out in an internal cold sweat. He timidly peeked over the edge.
He could make out the Church’s camp way down below. A number of tents were lined up in orderly, systematic intervals. Each one bore at least two flags emblazoned with white lilies and images of the Saint. Fires were lit throughout the camp, illuminating it amid the snow. They were clearly having to put much more work into maintaining their heat than the beastfolk had.
They’d probably even put their camp’s back to a cliff in order to stave off some of the wind chill.
The speck-like people in the camp were hustling and bustling, no doubt due to the Butcher’s disappearance. After he mentally recovered from the sudden appearance of the cliff’s edge, though, Kaito’s eyes came to rest on something else entirely.
“Hey, what’s…? Oh, geez.”
There was something above the cliff.
The figure had been frozen stiff with its arms spread out wide. It looked like a statue of some sort of pagan god or perhaps an inane scarecrow. It was a man dangling in the air. His body was supported by a thick stake, which pierced through his buttocks and exited his mouth. Frozen blood and feces dripped down between his legs.
His eyes were open in an expression of intense agony. It looked like the stake had been driven in while he was still alive.
With a second glance, Kaito confirmed the cruel truth: the man, clad in a luxurious vestment, had been impaled.
Then his body had been put on public display atop the cliff.
“Who is that?”
“…Yah Llodl.”
“What?!”
Upon hearing Elisabeth’s answer, Kaito let out a surprised yelp.
After Godd Deos’s death, Yah Llodl had taken advantage of the Church’s changing power dynamics to join its upper echelon. And even with just the small conversation he’d had with Yah Llodl over a communication device, the man’s pride had been abundantly clear. Yet, now, this was the state he was in. His failure back at the underground tomb had probably been the cause.
And as far as people who could have gotten away with purging him went, only one came to Kaito’s mind.
After all, when she’d heard about the Butcher’s escape, this was what she’d said:
“Good work out there. Now convey this to the lookout: ‘It’s Yah Llodl all over again.’”
“…The Grave Keeper.”
There was no doubt in his mind that she was the one behind the grim spectacle before him.
Kaito had long since gotten used to seeing torture. And loath as he was to admit it, looking at someone who’d been impaled almost had a sort of familiarity to it. Even so, seeing the corpse of someone whose arrogant laugh he’d just heard came as a blow. Elisabeth and Jeanne, on the other hand, seemed to regard Yah Llodl’s death with complete disinterest. Taking their eyes off the body, they looked back toward the camp.
“Hmph, I see.”
“Indeed. It’s rather unambiguous.”
There was no reason for Lute to know who Yah Llodl was, but he still seemed to find the Torture Princesses’ composure unsettling. However, he, too, realized that retreating would accomplish nothing.
Because of that, he cautiously followed their lead. Kaito and Hina lined up beside them and did the same.
Before long, Kaito found himself frowning. The Church’s camp was even more chaotic than he’d expected.
Cautious inspection made it clear that they were split into two large factions.
One group of people was wearing silver armor with pelts draped over themselves to keep out the cold, and the other group was clad in scarlet, executioner-like outfits. Each one was gathered together and acting as a unit, like two herds of different beasts.
“It falls well within my expectations, but it seems they aren’t a monolith, are they?”
“Indeed, that they are not. And it’s a big ol’ laugh, coming from chumps who’re goin’ on about reconstructing the world! You’re all pilin’ into the same damn grave, ain’tcha?! Shepherds and sheep refusing to get along—what a riot!”
Elisabeth narrowed her crimson eyes, and Jeanne raised her voice in scorn.
Kaito immediately deduced what the two of them were talking about.
The paladins and executioner-looking guys aren’t exactly enemies, but could it be that they’re on bad terms?
The paladins looked to be forming a search party all on their own. They headed south, but their spirits seemed low, and they could hardly be described as unified. Instead of rebuking them for their sloth, though, the executioner-like group merely headed north. Neither group seemed to have any intention of working with the other.
In fact, the executioners seemed to be avoiding the paladins.
“What’s going on? They came all the way to the World’s End, and now they aren’t even gonna work together?”
“The paladins have lost their commander. Though she was young, they put a great deal of trust and responsibility in Izabella. Trying to keep their morale up despite having her unjustly snatched away from them would be a fool’s errand. And this is the World’s End. Unlike the Capital, the Church can deploy their transfigured paladins freely. That scarlet bunch would likely have preferred to come here with themselves and their grotesque pawns alone.”
“However, while the reconstruction sect holds the reins of power within the Church, their control is not absolute.”
Jeanne took the explanation over from Elisabeth and dispassionately laid out the current state of affairs within the Church.
“Refusing to take the normal paladins along would have earned the distrust of the royals and some of the notable aristocrats. Even with the attractive proposition of escaping the grand burden of having to rebuild the Capital, the reconstruction sect will fail to sway many of the less devout. And the powerful have a tendency to value gold higher than God, y’see. They both have a way of slippin’ away when you really need ’em, though!”
Taking Jeanne’s mocking words into account, Kaito took another look at what the people down below were doing.
The streams of silver and crimson had completely split apart, serving well to illustrate the discord present among their camp.
“As a result, the normal paladins were taken along, but in name alone. The grotesque pawns are likely off searching, and the scarlet lot is no doubt going to join them and try to capture the Butcher. The paladins, on the other hand, seem to have been sent off in the opposite direction. With that in mind, it would appear that the north is far more promising. The Butcher fled quickly, though. I have my doubts as to whether they’ll truly be able to catch him…”
“Excuse me, Lady Elisabeth?”
“Hmm? What is it, Hina? …Oh-ho?”
As Hina repeatedly tapped on her shoulder, Elisabeth turned around. After looking in the direction Hina was indicating, she blinked repeatedly. A silly expression crossed Kaito’s face, as well.
At some point, something had taken a seat atop Yah Llodl’s corpse’s shoulder.
It was a small emerald-green mass, and it was gnawing on his frozen ear.
Startled, Lute reeled backward. As he pointed at the mass, a cry slipped out of his mouth.
“Y-you! You’re the irreverent whelp who invaded Lady Vyade Ula Forstlast’s bedchambers!”
“Kyau!”
The response he received sounded entirely innocent. The dragon whelp began turning lively somersaults in the air. Its splendid tail, which seemed a bit too large for its body, swayed behind it. It didn’t look repentant in the slightest.
How long had it been there? Just as that question crossed Kaito’s mind, though, a more pressing concern weighed on him.
The body was put on display up here.
In other words, the Church was fully aware of how well the cliff overlooked their base. It was odd, then, that they hadn’t stationed any guards there. As he carefully surveyed their surroundings, Kaito gasped.
“Hey, wait, Elisabeth! Look where you’re stepping!”
“Hmm? Ah, I see. Little wonder, then, that standing here was so comfortable!”
Elisabeth nodded. Beneath her high heels was a man buried in the snow. His scarlet hood peeked out from amid the white. He appeared to be unconscious.
Worried that the man might freeze to death, Kaito frantically reached out his hand. When he touched the man’s skin, though, it was strangely warm. Apparently, he’d stored magic stones on his extremities to preserve his body heat. A jewel designed for communications was installed on his chest as well. In all likelihood, he was the one who’d been in charge of guarding the cliff top.
But why, then, was he unconscious?
Kaito cast a sidelong glance at the whelp. Its emerald scales glittered as it spun around in the air. Each time it twirled, it lashed out with its tail. A blow from that looked to be about as powerful as one from a blackjack from Kaito’s old world. “Kyoon!” the whelp cried as it puffed out its chest.
Upon seeing the vigor with which the whelp was making its claim, Kaito nodded in conviction.
“Looks like this guy’s our culprit.”
“Aye, no doubt. Excellent work, you!”
“Dunno if that’s really something you should be complimenting it for.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Whelp, but why did you knock out the lookout and then stay here?”
“Kyoon!”
By means of answering Hina’s question, the whelp let out a loud cry. Then, with a chomp, it tore off Yah Llodl’s ear. After tossing it up in the air and catching it in its mouth, it gobbled the dead flesh down.
Kaito and Lute openly grimaced. Apparently done trying to cheer them up, the whelp shot into the air like a bullet. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, it began flying off into the silvery atmosphere.
For a second, it turned back toward Kaito and the others. It seemed to want them to follow it.
Kaito was reminded of the chunk of bone-in meat that had been left behind at the castle. It looked as though, just like back then, the Butcher had predicted their movements once more and had sent the whelp to guide them. He was clearly trying to send them somewhere.
Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing was still anyone’s guess.
Either way, our only real option is to follow it.
Knowing that, Kaito steeled his resolve. Leaving the corpse and unconscious lookout behind them, they all took off at a run.
Then, following the distant whelp, they began making their way down the pearly hill.
The whelp looked like it was flying aimlessly.
Its wings were comprised of thin bone and membrane, and it flapped them to fly high up into the milky-white, rainbow-tinged sky. Then it would glide for a while. It seemed to be rather enjoying its travels. However, for those trying to follow it, the wasteful movements in its flight path were the source of a great deal of stress. Kaito’s displeasure was painted all across his face.
“Hey, does that thing even really know where it’s going?”
“Hmm… It does belong to the Butcher, after all.”
“And Mr. Butcher is awfully fond of playing around. I suppose we can only hope.”
Elisabeth’s shoulders slumped, and Hina smiled to try to placate her.
Continuing forward through the unchanging snowscape was hard on the legs, but it was harder on the spirit. However, it quickly became clear that, despite the whelp’s playful flight, their efforts hadn’t been wasted.
A living creature’s corpse had appeared before them in the empty world.
When Kaito first saw it, his immediate reaction was shock.
Whatever the something was, it was made up of fragments of ice and snow. Its body was unsettlingly linear, and if he had to compare it to something, it looked somewhat like a fish. But even upon getting a closer look, it was difficult for a human to truly understand its appearance. After all, their brains refused to parse some of the optical information on it. In fact, it was hard to say definitively if living creature was really the right descriptor for it. The only thing sure about it was that it possessed a concept of “death.”
All in total, there were four of the somethings. They were lying horizontally, their pyramid-shaped heads all caved in.
“…Hmm. This land seems free of foreign invaders, yet they appear to have been killed by something.”
Elisabeth stooped down and began inspecting the damaged sections. Kaito did the same. Once they did, a commonality emerged. All four of them seemed to have been struck by something soft. Also, there was blubber stuck to their wounds.
“With my cunning intellect, I’ve unraveled all the mysteries. The weapon…was a slab of meat!”
“I’d be surprised if it was anything else. In other words, that means the Butcher definitely passed this way.”
The two of them nodded to each other. This time, the whelp’s somersaults seemed to be saying, See?
Now trusting its guidance, the group resumed their pursuit of the Butcher. They carefully walked among the somethings’ corpses. As Kaito stood atop an unsullied patch of ice, though, a snapping sound rang out from around his feet.
“Huh?”
“Is something the matter, Sir Kaito? Hmm?”
Lute turned around as well, and his ears perked up. The two of them started inspecting the ground at their feet for presences. The moment they did, a square chunk of ice directly below Kaito cracked and burst up into the air. Slipping along its now-slanted surface, Kaito narrowly managed to land on his feet.
“…!”
“Ah!”
A massive slab of ice had pierced through the ground. Innumerable cracks were running along its surface.
The slab then split into fine vertical segments. Its cylindrical fragments danced through the air, then recombined into a three-dimensional shape. The transformation it underwent was impressive, like a single sheet of paper being spliced into a meaningful form.
Chilly air blew off its body as the completed something bent into a fishlike shape. However, it had no scales and no mouth. It swung its smooth, clear, pyramid-shaped head down onto Kaito.
Drawing his sword, Lute stepped forward, intending to meet the hammer-like blow.
“Fall back, Sir Kaito! I shall repay the debt I once—”
“How dare you try to strike my dear husband, you hoodluuuuuuuuuuum!”
However, Lute’s noble declaration was drowned out by indignation and fury. His ears went slack, and he stopped in his tracks.
Hina dashed across the ice like a cannonball. Accompanied by her vaunted halberd, she twirled freely through the air.
“Hyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
Her maid uniform fluttering, she raised her weapon aloft behind her back. Then, as she flew forward, she swung it down hard. Its blade crashed solidly into the something’s side.
There was the sound of glass cracking. The something’s body flushed with white, then shattered.
Its needle-thin fragments scattered all about. Upon mixing in with the snowflakes, they ceased to even be visible.
Hina then landed with an elegant thump. After courteously straightening her maid outfit, she gave a sweet bow.
“Phew. With that, the cleaning is successfully finished. How was that, Master Kaito?”
“Perfect as always, my dearest Hina.”
“Eek! Oh, Master Kaito! Not in public! Why, how embarrassing!”
As she let out quiet shrieks, Hina covered her reddening face. Watching over her with affection, Kaito nodded. Lute stepped back as he commented, “Very…very well, then,” and a bemused expression overtook Elisabeth’s face.
The sole member to ignore the commotion and continue walking was Jeanne. Everyone else then hurried after her.
And with that, Kaito and the others left the somethings’ corpses behind and continued pursuing the Butcher as though nothing had changed.
Eventually, their surroundings started to transform with increasing speed. Snow began falling from the empty sky.
The massive flakes resembling delicate lacework fluttered gently through the air. Upon closer inspection, each one of them had a unique shape. In all likelihood, no two of them were alike.
The strange rainbow membrane covering the milky-white sky was beginning to get thicker as well. Snowflakes tumbled lazily down from within it. It looked like silvery flower petals being spat out from inside an oil slick.
Anywhere else, such a blizzard of petals would have been unimaginable.
The area around Kaito’s group had long since taken on an otherworldly quality to it. If someone had told them it was the afterlife, they practically would have believed it. Kaito’s eyes were captivated by the landscape’s untarnished, lifeless beauty.
The world was hollow and empty, and it was terrifying. But at the same time, it was also endlessly fascinating.
As Kaito was preoccupied by all that, the whelp abruptly stopped advancing.
“Kyau!”
With a loud cry, it gave its wings a powerful downward flap. After making a sharp nosedive, it suddenly vanished without a trace.
“Wait, where’d he go?”
Kaito looked down in a panic. The scenery, which had had a bare minimum of regularity to it, had come to a complete and total stop. At some point, a narrow, deep fissure had appeared before them. In contrast with its transparent icy walls, the ravine was filled with a pervasive darkness. The whelp must have flown down into it.
It was almost like it was trying to say that its task was complete.
Now convinced that something awaited them beyond the crevice, Kaito turned to look up.
The fissure extended farther and farther. Little by little, it grew wider and deeper. Beside it, a new fissure stretched out its distant arm as well. They continued on like a pair of wide rivers.
Eventually, they met up and converged on a colossal hole.
The pit resembled a volcano’s crater with its gaping maw.
Suddenly, a strange conviction assailed Kaito.
Let’s say hypothetically that all the ice in the World’s End melted. What would happen?
The water probably wouldn’t reach the sea. Regardless of whatever differences in height there may be, every drop of it would flow into that hole. Yet, even so, the void would remain. Even if it swallowed up everything else, nothing could ever fill that abyss.
And at the same time, Kaito remembered something he’d once heard.
Someone once said that the world has no end. The world is round, they proclaimed, and as such it has no terminus.
Someone once said that the world has an end. It’s like a waterfall, they proclaimed, one that swallows up anything and everything.
Someone once said that the world has an end. For God created that place, they proclaimed, and designated it “the World’s End.”
“…The World’s End.”
Kaito mumbled that phrase once more. Unlike the world he’d come from, in this one, there was a real chance that all three stories about the World’s End were true. The world was round, and it had no terminus. But it did have an End, one that God had designated. And therein lay a waterfall that swallowed up anything and everything.
As those thoughts rattled around in his head, Kaito’s vision wandered.
Given that the whelp had disappeared, this was no doubt the “answer” they’d been searching for.
“Master Kaito, over there.”
“Ah, there, huh?”
After looking to where Hina was pointing, Kaito nodded. A narrow path just barely lay between the two crevices. And someone was standing at its end. The figure was black, and it was standing alone before the pit.
In a way, it looked lonely.
As though it had been waiting a long, long time for someone who had never come.
“…The Butcher.”
A brief murmur escaped Elisabeth’s lips. Kaito was about to break out in a run, but then he heard something.
“Ah, what an excellent job you all did finding him! Now, at long last, I’ve finally reached a complete understanding!”
A loud voice called out from behind him. Lodged within it was an unfathomable amount of joy.
Goose bumps rose all across Kaito’s flesh. Horrified from the bottom of his heart, he felt his face stiffen as he turned around to look.
“Blessings on you, and blessings on me! Everything is just as you will it!”
Standing behind him was exactly who he’d expected to find.
Her snowflake-covered crimson cloak fluttered, and she was flanked on all sides by grotesque, transfigured paladins.
The image of the giant men protecting an adorable little girl was almost picturesque, like a painting of a maiden surrounded by monsters. But in reality, it was the girl who was the monster, not the transformed men.
It was the living symbol of zealotry, the Grave Keeper.
As she looked down upon Kaito and the others, a smile dripping with affection spread across her face. |
Torture Princess
7
Her First Love
“You all were perfectly able to pursue me. Thus, the converse should be true as well, no? I find it truly, truly sorrowful, you know, that we should meet again in such a way.”
The Grave Keeper launched into a sudden monologue. Words came pouring from her mouth with no preamble or introduction. Her face was dark beneath her scarlet hood, yet her white cheeks were tinged red like those of a maiden in love.
“It was said that the rights would be granted impartially. Equally, to all races, to all peoples. Yet, that was never anything more than a sweet little white lie. The Apostle made his choice back at the very beginning, he did.”
Kaito’s brows involuntarily furrowed. The Grave Keeper was clearly agitated about something, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was that had set her off.
Impartial rights… Is she talking about the letter the Butcher sent out? But this thing about the Apostle making his choice back at the start…what’s that about?
“It was simple once I put my mind to it. The fact that the whelp served as a guide was proof. The fact that he sought ‘two’ was proof. And if that is the case, then it’s hardly my place to raise objections. It’s only right that the number of people who receive blessings be limited. Only a few shall bear witness to her sacred awakening. For that, verily, is providence, is it not?”
The Grave Keeper’s tone began gradually shifting. It started to sound like she herself was the one she was trying to convince. An indescribable sense of unease washed over Kaito. Lute’s reaction seemed no different.
Elisabeth and Jeanne, on the other hand, appeared wholly unfazed. It seemed that the two Torture Princesses had anticipated a showdown with the Grave Keeper. Even so, though, Elisabeth raised an eyebrow.
“…Just what exactly are you going on about?”
Kaito was taken aback. Apparently, not even Elisabeth knew the reason behind the Grave Keeper’s confusion. Jeanne’s expression was as blank as always, and her rose-colored gaze was steely.
Instinctively, Kaito grabbed on to the jewel within his pocket. Heat emanated from the stone by means of a response.
Letting Vlad out here might be a good idea.
As the Kaiser would have it, Vlad was “He Who Rears Hell Within His Mind.” His disposition was fundamentally calm, but his nature was twisted and mad. There was a good chance that he’d be able to interpret the Grave Keeper’s ramblings for them. But calling Vlad out here would raise problems of its own.
Standing around the Grave Keeper was a group of gigantic, transfigured paladins. Their stiff armor was spread out over their engorged muscles like caramel. Their limbs were elongated as well, knees, elbows, and all. However, their transformations were just slight enough that they still counted as “human.”
They were no doubt the cream of the crop, those who’d either been relatively compatible or those who’d successfully been able to take in pain.
They were currently standing in a line, stock-still and with their swords pointed toward the ground like a row of statues. However, there was no telling how they’d react if he added Vlad to the mix. Odds were good that a battle would break out before Kaito even had a chance to ask Vlad to interpret.
Hina was standing in front of him, protecting him with her halberd at the ready. Lute also had a firm grip on his sword’s handle.
Everyone present was prepared for fighting to break out at any moment.
And no wonder… Now that we’ve come head-to-head like this, it’s not like we have room to worry about power struggles or politics anymore.
After all, the Apostle, which was to say, the Butcher, was within their line of sight. It was only a matter of time before they started trying to kill each other in earnest. And only the survivors would end up finding out where the Saint was resting. However, the Grave Keeper seemed to have only just caught on to the bloodlust emanating from Kaito’s company.
She shook her head vigorously from side to side, as though to suggest that the entire thing was preposterous. Snowflakes fluttered loosely off her scarlet cloak. She then clutched tightly at her chest as she wrung her pained words out.
“No, no, heavens, no. I, and those who share my beliefs, no longer have any intention of turning our swords on you. Now it’s faith that’s required of us.”
“…Wait, you’re not here to fight us?”
“I believe in you all, you see. Even if you don’t afford me the same sentiments! However, you require an ordeal. Indeed, one from another besides myself. However, that is all. That, truly, is all.”
“…Someone other than you?”
Kaito felt an unpleasant premonition, and a chill ran down his spine. Even now, the Grave Keeper’s voice was tinged with madness. Her pupils were dilated, her arms were spread wide, and spittle flew from her mouth as she talked.
“For the sake of the world, for the sake of the people, our revered Saint fell into slumber and shed tears of blood! That is what flows through the roots of the Church—her unrewarded love, her noble self-sacrifice! In the name of faith, in the name of the world, she cast herself aside! And what could that be but the most desirable trait possible for those chosen to possess! I have sacrificed everything, discarded even my ego! Can you, the chosen ones, say the same?”
As she forcefully posed her question, the Grave Keeper held her right arm aloft. An unpleasant metallic noise followed.
Upon looking at her hand, Kaito finally noticed something. Clenched within her small fist was the end of a silver chain.
The noise acted as a signal, and the paladins set into motion. Relinquishing their posts at the Grave Keeper’s side, they parted to the left and right like waves. Then, in unison, the transfigured paladins knelt.
Then, pulled by the chain, something with four legs advanced between them.
The thing was a beast draped in fine scarlet cloth. Beneath the cloth, its flesh and bones burbled as they constantly swelled and contracted back to their original shape. Each time they did, blood gushed forth, and a cry of pain rose from beneath the folds.
The moment he heard it, Kaito shuddered. He recognized that voice.
Th-that’s not…
“And here it is! Here it is, O unworthy contractor of mine!”
The Kaiser’s laughs echoed within Kaito’s eardrums. At the same time, he felt someone firmly staring at him. The boy who’d once saved him was looking straight at him, his unflinching gaze boring into Kaito’s skin.
The dead boy, Neue, was asking Kaito a question with his eyes.
Can you? he was asking.
Can I what? replied Kaito silently. But even as he did, his thoughts naturally rushed to a certain fact.
I’ve slain a lot of people.
He’d drenched himself in blood, lost his left arm, and lost his status as a normal human. He’d killed foes, he’d killed demons, and he’d killed underlings. That was how he’d gotten by. But up until then, he’d never once killed someone he himself held dear. He’d gotten this far without ever needing to.
But Neue’s gaze was asking him a question.
Can you? he was asking.
The Kaiser, on the other hand, was merely laughing his almost-human laugh.
“It seems a proper trial is upon you!”
There was no way Kaito could successfully feign ignorance as to what he was being told. He was well aware. There was no doubt in his mind as to what question he was being asked.
“Please show me tragic devotion befitting the favor you’ve received! Show it to me, if you’d be so kind!”
As she made her loud entreaty, the Grave Keeper yanked off the scarlet cloth. The curtain to the freak show had been drawn, and the creature’s full body was revealed. Kaito reflexively looked down at his feet. Then he let out a violent whisper.
“........................................................................ You fucking monster.”
The thing beneath the cloth had once been human.
Its silver hair was longer than it had been before. It crept like vines, winding its tangled tips around the creature’s legs. All its flesh had metamorphosized and had either swelled up like tumors or was sagging. Because of that, the scars that had once run across its skin were exaggerated, causing them to look like stitches. Its armor had been taken from it, and its spine was crooked and warped like an animal’s. Its breasts rocked as they scratched against the surface of the ice.
Then she slowly looked up. When she did, her gemlike, mismatched blue and purple eyes came to rest on Kaito and the others.
Even now, her eyes were still beautiful.
“Ah… Ah, ah, ah, ahhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The creature let out a roar of agony. Can you? asked Neue’s gaze once more.
Can you kill Izabella Vicker? he was asking.
Can you kill her, like all those transformed paladins you unhesitatingly decided there was no way to save?
Kaito parted his trembling lips. Then he gave his confession to the phantasm whom only he could see.
“I…can’t.”
Then the thing that had once been Izabella leaped.
Its sharp claws and fangs loudly bore down on Kaito. |
Torture Princess
There existed something that Kaito Sena had never thought about.
It was something he’s stubbornly ignored time and time again.
For instance, there were all the people who’d been forcibly turned into underlings. For instance, there were the people whose pain had been used to pacify a demon. For instance, there were the paladins who had eaten demon flesh, either by force or by stupidity.
In other words, innocent victims.
Kaito had killed them, hoisting a flag of mercy all the while. Because he’d known that there was no other way to save them, he hadn’t so much as hesitated. Despite its hypocrisy, the act itself had been compassionate. However, therein lay room for a question to arise. It was a question related to an instance that had yet to occur, one that Kaito had purposefully avoided thinking about.
What if, hypothetically, one of the victims was someone Kaito knew well?
Would it still be so easy for me to kill them, claiming that there weren’t any other options?
Could he, Kaito Sena, do that? Or was the reason he’d been able to avoid hesitating merely because the victims hadn’t meant anything to him?
…It’s the latter.
Now Kaito could be sure of that. That was the plain truth of the matter. Even so, he still didn’t believe that he’d been in the wrong. Someone you knew would invariably be more important to you than someone you didn’t. That was just how the world worked.
And at the same time, killing someone, even someone who meant nothing to you, was hard on a person. It wasn’t as though Kaito was a homicidal maniac or something. In order to save someone who was constantly suffering, though, someone else necessarily had to get their hands dirty.
Suffering an eternity of pain was a cruel thing indeed. Because he believed that, Kaito had drenched his hands in blood.
Doesn’t it make it blasphemous if I can’t do the same now, then?
“I did it to you all, but I can’t do the same to someone I know.”
Was he really going to face the mountain of corpses he’d piled up and say that? It would be complete and utter bullshit.
And it would be deeply, deeply unforgivable.
But of course, Kaito Sena already knew all that.
Back in the real world, that entire train of thought had gone through his mind in the space of a blink.
As he returned to his senses, Kaito channeled mana into the soles of his feet, propelling himself back on his own strength. Not a second later, Izabella’s forearm shattered the icy ground before him. He landed a hairbreadth beside Hina, who had almost taken off at a run. As she breathed a sigh of relief, a heartbroken light passed through Hina’s eyes.
“Master Kaito… I understand how you feel, but…”
“Huh? …Oh.”
It was then that Kaito first realized that his hand was outstretched and had been for some time. Grabbing his right arm with its beastly left counterpart, he forcibly wrenched it back down. Then, with trembling fingers, he stroked his cheek.
I knew it was gonna end like this. Or, at least, I should have known.
Kaito had left Izabella behind, knowing full well what would become of her. Even so, the scene before his eyes smashed his heart to pieces like a hammer.
That was simply how cruel Izabella’s transformation had been.
Elisabeth said nothing. Surprisingly, Jeanne’s expressionless face showed no changes.
Lute, however, let out a low growl, sword in hand. He narrowed his eyes, as though digging through his memories.
“Sir Kaito, is perchance that monster someone you…? No, I, too, know her name. Izabella. Izabella the paladin… That silver hair, the color of those eyes… Could that truly be Izabella Vicker? Why, that’s their commander! Why has she become such a thing?”
“Lute, you and Izabella knew each other?”
“She paid us a few courtesy calls regarding the assistance Lady Vyade Ula Forstlast was providing in rebuilding the Capital. Her manners were rare for a human, and she valued repaying her debts. Why, from her second visit on, she even brought souvenirs for my wife! Well, I suppose that hardly qualifies as knowing her. Yet, still…”
Then Lute stiffened his jaw, his teeth audibly grinding together. As he looked at Izabella’s grotesque form, his lupine eyes flashed. Dumbfounded, he repeated himself.
“Still…”
“It’s okay, Lute. It’s more than enough in my book.”
If it was someone he hadn’t known, he could likely have put her down out of pity. But knowing her character, how warm her heart had once been, would have dulled anyone’s blade. That was just the way things were. Sentiment had the power to radically change the weight of a murder.
Even so, though, there were times when battle was inevitable.
Now was one of those times.
“Ah-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah, ehhhhh, eh, aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
Izabella let out a maddened scream. Several of her bones had pointlessly expanded. In particular, her knees and elbows pierced through her skin. Each time she moved, blood flowed freely from her body. In spite of that, though, she leaped around with clear purpose.
Her silver hair grew violently disheveled. Chunks wrapped around her limbs tore free, taking bits of scalp with them as they went.
“Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha-ha, hyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
Even so, she continued laughing at the top of her voice. Recollections started flashing through Kaito’s mind.
Then, despite knowing that it was the most meaninglessly sentimental thing he could possibly do, he began filtering through his memories.
First, he thought back to what had happened in the Capital, back when the demonic mass of flesh had invaded.
Izabella’s straight silver hair had glistened in the moonlight. Back then, not a single scar had marred her skin. After unhesitatingly taking the Kaiser’s contractor’s hand in hers, she’d spoken.
“Let’s take out that demon together.”
Next, he thought about the events back in the demon’s world, the space where everything died.
Paying no heed to the fact that the force of her mana was tearing apart her skin from inside, Izabella had shouted at him through a communication device.
“Don’t give me that nonsense, Kaito Sena! Enough is enough! You should be looking for any help you can get, even if it comes from a monster! Don’t you want to save the suffering people as soon as possible?”
Then there had been the events down in the underground tomb.
She had been the one to deal the final blow to the gatekeeper within, a monster that the Grave Keeper had created by fusing a demon with a divine creature. Despite her trembling hands, Izabella had laid her arm horizontally over her chest. Despite her flowing tears, she’d given it a bow.
“No longer must you be bound by the chains of your tortured existence. Your efforts guarding the tomb did not go unnoticed.”
Finally, Kaito arrived at the memory of what had happened only just a little bit ago.
Izabella had stood with her back to the exploding light. Even while she rejected Kaito and the others, she’d still smiled.
“That we are, I suppose. Idiots, one and all.”
The lacerations running across her pale skin had twisted unattractively.
Yet, even so, Izabella Vicker was beautiful.
She had truly been beautiful.
I… I can…
As he tried to finish thinking through his answer, though, Kaito found himself interrupted.
Crimson flower petals had begun gently fluttering around him.
Startled, Kaito felt his eyes go wide. At some point, crimson had become interspersed with the silver snowflakes dancing through the air. A violent wind broke out, and petals and feathers flew through the air as though trying to blot out the milky sky.
Astonished as he was, Kaito was reminded once more of a certain truth.
Sentiment had the power to radically change the weight of a murder. That was only natural.
But there’s someone I know who’s fully willing to trample their own thoughts and feelings underfoot.
She was someone who paid no heed to the wails of others, no matter how grief-stricken or forlorn they might be. And she had the power to utterly destroy her own feelings and sentimentality. The hefty sins she bore on her back did nothing to dull the resonance of her loud laughter.
Now she was standing proud and tall amid the whirlpool of crimson petals and black feathers.
She was the proud wolf. She was the lowly sow. She was the Torture Princess, Elisabeth Le Fanu.
And she was holding Executioner’s Sword of Frankenthal aloft.
“How pitiful you are, Izabella. Yet, this, too, is the fruit of your resolve and dedication. Thus, I lend you no compassion or scorn. I shall simply kill you. And I shan’t ask for your gratitude. Death is a fate we all wish to avoid. Even if it is the sole avenue to respite, that sentiment is one that every living creature shares.”
Elisabeth’s voice was cold and firm. She was arrogant, and at the same time, she knew full well what it meant to take a life. Her black hair fluttered as she began advancing, passing by Kaito in silence.
When she did, she didn’t spare him so much as a glance.
She said nothing to anyone else, either. When she spoke, it was to Izabella alone.
“Resent me to your heart’s content. ’Tis your right to do so.”
Unhesitatingly, she looked into those blue and purple eyes. Her gaze didn’t waver for a moment. Just like she’d done for Marianne and the children who’d been fused to the mass of flesh, she gazed at the one she intended to kill. At the same time, Kaito felt as though he’d been struck by lightning.
What am…what the hell am I doing?
“Go now to your rest.”
“Elisabeth, wait!”
The shout escaped Kaito’s lips half-unbidden. Elisabeth whirled to face him, clearly annoyed. Izabella stooped over, then let out a growl. Keeping a careful eye on her movements, Elisabeth heaved a sigh.
“What, are you going to insist that we can save her or some such nonsense? Idiocy taken to extremes can border on sin, you know.”
“No, that’s not it! I just need you to hold on for a minute.”
Kaito tried to take a step forward. When he did, though, he realized something. Even though his thoughts were clear and level, his knees were on the verge of unceremoniously giving way.
Hina quickly rushed over to his side. She gently took his hand in hers to comfort him.
“Master Kaito, your hand… I understand what it is you’re thinking. What a truly kind man you are. If you wish to do this, even though your legs tremble so, then I shall accompany you.”
“Thanks, Hina. Every step I take forward is thanks to your help.”
Kaito returned Hina’s soft squeeze. Then, with her by his side, he stepped before Elisabeth. Awkward as his demeanor was, the Torture Princess didn’t laugh at him. She simply waited for him to speak.
As he gazed at her, he ruminated on something.
Back at the entrance to the underground tomb, when he and Elisabeth had been crossing blades, what was it he’d been thinking about?
Why had he fought so hard to avoid being killed by the Torture Princess? It wasn’t fear of death. It was mindless obsession.
That’s right. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to die. It was something way more important than that.
Like hell I’m gonna let Elisabeth kill me.
Like hell I’m gonna let her kill anyone else she cares about.
That was what had been going through his mind.
Isn’t that right, Kaito Sena?!
The number of people whom one could choose to save at all costs was highly limited. Kaito was well aware of that fact.
Back before he was reincarnated, he hadn’t had a single person who was precious to him. That was precisely why he’d decided to fight to the bitter end to protect the ones he’d found in this life. But this demon-ridden world was harsh and cruel. His experiences in his past life had helped him learn one thing quickly: Due to his powerlessness, his arms could reach only a handful of people.
Because of that, he’d chosen to put Elisabeth Le Fanu ahead of the whole world.
He’d decided to put his entire existence on the line to save that dreadful, horrible, peerless sinner.
What, then, could he possibly have to tremble about?
“Indeed—one who forgets their greatest wish is naught but a fool masquerading as a saint.”
The Kaiser had told him to trample over everyone who stood in his path. Kaito ground his teeth.
Even if Izabella’s smile had been beautiful.
Even if she’d been radiant as she foolishly strode straight forward.
That was something he couldn’t allow the Torture Princess to bear.
“I’ll be the one to kill Izabella Vicker.”
And with that, Kaito made his declaration. He squeezed Hina’s hand in gratitude. Then, after tapping the back of her hand to set her mind at ease, he let go of it and strode alone toward Izabella.
The Torture Princess narrowed her crimson eyes. Hina closed her eyes, then opened them. Lute hung his head downward.
Kaito Sena raised his hand high and made to snap his fingers.
Then, right before he could, a massive silver fist came crashing into him.
“Hmm?”
“Wh—?”
“Master Kaitoooooooooooo!”
Elisabeth arched an eyebrow, Lute was dumbstruck, and Hina let out a cry.
As for Kaito himself, it took a couple of violent revolutions of his body before the fact that he’d been punched set in. He then descended in a cartoonish tailspin. A moment before he crashed to the ground, though, Hina successfully slid into position to catch him.
“A-a-a-a-are you all right, Master Kaito? I had no idea you would go popping and whizzing through the air like that, my beloved. Oh heavens, what would I have done if I hadn’t caught you?”
“H-Hina… Ow, ow, what happened to me?”
“Why, it was her.”
Confused as she was, Hina’s tone when she answered Kaito’s question was filled with unmistakable reproach.
At the other end of her pointed gaze, a single individual was walking forward. Her honey-blond hair danced luxuriously.
It was the golden girl, her outfit as risqué as ever. Behind her was a steel giant. Deus Ex Machina had merged back together, and it was the one who’d punched Kaito.
Her rose eyes flickered as Jeanne de Rais looked down on Kaito Sena. When she spoke, her voice was cold.
“As the one who chose Izabella Vicker as my evangelist, getting to the bottom of her transfiguration is my duty. Sorry for butting in just when you worked up your resolve, but I’m gonna need you to back down now. This one’s mine.”
Then Jeanne turned to face Izabella and looked down on her transformed, monstrous form.
After slightly narrowing her eyes, Jeanne raised an arm. The steel giant squared off in response.
Spiderweb cracks splintered in the ice beneath its feet. Her voice dispassionate, Jeanne went on.
“Granting her death will be my responsibility. Arrogantly, selfishly, and self-righteously shall I lower the curtain on her life… No, my apologies. Allow me to correct myself, that I may speak the untarnished truth. Granting her death will be my privilege.”
Jeanne spoke with imposing dignity. Izabella offered no reply. Blood and drool dribbled from her lips, and she receded backward, as though on high guard. Jeanne watched over her calmly.
Then, eventually, the corners of her lips curled up into something resembling a smile.
“It seems the stories were true… First loves just ain’t meant to be.”
The next moment, Izabella dashed forward like a lion.
When she did, a steel fist crashed hard into her side.
Kaito watched over the state of the battle, still swaddled in Hina’s arms. Lute opened his mouth in bewilderment, and Elisabeth crossed her arms. However, the affair before them could barely even be described as a battle.
To be more precise, it was a beatdown.
That was just how powerful Deus Ex Machina was after returning to one body.
“I suspected as much. You didn’t need to consume something like that to attain power, li’l miss.”
Jeanne began talking to Izabella. While she did, the steel giant continued mercilessly swinging its fists.
Even if they tore or were sliced, Izabella’s limbs and torso would quickly regenerate. Because of that fact, the steel giant narrowed down its attack to blunt strikes. Its fist carved a straight arc through the air. Its offensive options may have been limited, but its movements surpassed the perception of man and beast alike. Unable to avoid the strike, Izabella was dashed hard against the cold ground.
The subsequent blow crushed her body. Her bones writhed, trying to return to their original positions. As they did, her flesh loudly burst. The regeneration had been too much for her, and her ribs had popped out through her back like springs.
Lute’s lupine snout scrunched up. Unable to take it anymore, he averted his eyes.
Kaito, Hina, and Elisabeth were silent as they watched the one-sided beatdown.
“Gah… Ahhh… Argh… Geh…”
Izabella violently retched. Blood and countless chunks of flesh spilled out onto the ice. For the first time, Izabella looked afraid. She dragged her broken legs along as she tried to put distance between herself and Jeanne. Jeanne gracefully approached the fleeing Izabella, steel giant in tow.
Then, with an almost terrifying calmness, she continued talking.
“Divided as they were from the titan, miss, you once managed to reach me through Bandersnatch and Gargantua. And as you were before, you would have remained composed even in the face of Deus Ex Machina’s parts combined. So what’s this sorry shit? I told you not to go, didn’t I?”
“Graaaaaaaaaah, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Jeanne received a low, terrified roar in reply. Her words didn’t seem to have reached Izabella.
Jeanne’s rose eyes narrowed just a hair.
Izabella’s entire body undulated. Her flesh was rapidly expanding.
Muscle fibers began wrapping around her still-exposed ribs. When they were finished, they’d formed sets of winglike, fleshy protrusions. Her body’s damage was forcibly being compensated for, but it was impossible to completely negate the wounds from the blows she’d received.
Izabella drew back even farther. Even while she was retreating, her movements took on a frailer quality to them.
Jeanne gazed expressionlessly at the veritable wounded animal before her. When she whispered next, her voice sounded truly young.
“…I told you.”
“Gah, ah, ahhh, grahhhhhhhhhhhhh, gyah!”
Izabella recklessly leaped at the giant only to be brushed away like a flea for her troubles. The arc she painted through the air on her way to the icy ground was almost comical. Bones and flesh writhed beneath her skin once more. However, her regeneration was growing more and more chaotic. Strange convulsions ran all across her body.
Izabella managed to lift herself off the ground, enduring no small amount of pain as she did. She looked ready to leap again.
Jeanne spoke coolly, directing her words at Izabella’s trembling back.
“I think that’s enough, little lady. Just submit to your pitiful, tragic rest.”
“Gah, ah… Gaaaaaaaah!”
Izabella let out a meaningless moan. Jeanne opened her mouth. Before she could say anything, though, she showed a rare moment of hesitation. After closing her mouth and opening it again, the whisper seemed to practically spill unbidden from her lips.
“You are a leader, though perhaps only in name, no?”
When it did, Izabella stopped in her tracks. Her silver hair violently shook as she suddenly turned to look over her shoulder.
When she did, she focused her blue and purple eyes on Jeanne, just as she had once before.
“Ms.…Izabella?”
“Izabella…”
Kaito and Hina both reflexively called out her name. She gave no reply. However, the light of reason had faintly made its way back into her eyes. It was fleeting, though, and ephemeral. She was on the verge of being ruled by nothing more than her base animalistic instincts of pain and starvation and the fear of death. Her face morphed unattractively back and forth.
From senseless beast to human, from human to beast.
Once her internal battle had finished, Izabella’s trembling legs set into motion. She sat down in place.
Her silver hair gently sagged as she bowed her head and went motionless.
It was as though she was asking that they cut off her head and be done with it.
“Impossible… How can this be? How can she retain her sanity even after being transfigured so?”
Elisabeth’s voice was filled with disbelief. Her words echoed Kaito’s sentiments as well.
Jeanne remained silent. Her rose eyes, though, opened wide in what could only be described as bafflement. She seldom showed anywhere close to that much emotion. The next moment, her eyes rapidly set into motion.
She cast her gaze away from Izabella, focusing it on the Grave Keeper with such intensity that sparks seemed likely to start flying out.
The scarlet-clad girl, for her part, replied to the hostile stare with a warm smile.
Seemingly having come to understand something by that, Jeanne nodded.
“I see. So shit was weird from the start, huh?”
That’s right… Now that I think about it, the signs were there.
As Jeanne spoke, Kaito realized something. All the transformed people they’d seen had had their eyes engorged, congested with blood and sometimes even ruptured. Yet, Izabella’s eyes had been just as beautiful as ever.
Coming from someone who knew what she’d looked like originally, Kaito felt the state of her transformation had seemed near-absolute. In truth, though, the degree to which she’d been transformed was probably comparatively lighter. In all likelihood, the paladins on the verge of death had had their skin melting off beneath their armor.
Kaito tumbled out of Hina’s arms. He unconsciously covered his mouth.
Was it because Izabella resisted? Or…did the Church do that intentionally? Either way, she must not have eaten much of the demon meat.
But in the end, what difference did that make? The fact that she was beyond saving remained unchanged.
That was what the rational part of his brain determined. At the same time, however, a wave of discomfort ran over him.
She…should be, but… There’s something off about Jeanne.
There could be little doubt that the golden Torture Princess was even more rational than Kaito was. At the moment, though, she had completely laid off the attack. She merely blinked, her rose eyes flashing.
“…This falls outside my expectations. But not yours, I suppose?”
Jeanne continued staring at the Grave Keeper as she murmured. The young girl offered no reply, instead just continuing to smile her perfectly unnatural smile. Her gaze was affectionate, so much so that it evoked the image of a saint. It was an expression one would hardly expect to come from the one who’d birthed this hellish situation.
Jeanne turned back toward Izabella once more. Her whispered voice had a rare tone of bewilderment to it.
“It seems that I do have the power to save you, little lady.”
“What?!”
Kaito couldn’t stop himself from letting out a shout. As he did, Deus Ex Machina moved. Despite its considerable mass, it gave off no noise or presence as it advanced.
And then the giant ruthlessly crushed Izabella.
“W-wait, you, you just said you could save her! You said you can save her, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I can save her. And this is a necessary step in doing so.”
After returning to his senses, Kaito shouted out yet again, to which Jeanne replied coolly. However, it certainly didn’t seem that way to him.
Deus Ex Machina slowly lifted its fist. Unsurprisingly, Izabella’s body was almost completely crushed. She was just barely breathing, but now it was even harder to imagine her ever getting back to normal.
“Allow me to reiterate myself. This is sufficient. The bits I smashed weren’t necessary, see?”
“Unnecessary?”
“Now, all I have to do is remove them.”
Kaito asked his question in an uneasy tone, but Jeanne replied with conviction. His reaction was one of blank shock.
If Jeanne did that, Izabella would definitely die. After all, she would end up losing over half her body. But Jeanne unconcernedly laid out a means by which to preserve Izabella’s life.
“Then we can do our best to supplement the places where the demon meat set its roots in with parts from Deus Ex Machina.”
“Wait, is that even possible?”
“It is. They’re weapons designed for combat, but they can alter their forms as they please. They can even act as human organs. However, in doing so, we would lose access to a powerful weapon.”
Kaito’s eyes went wide in comprehension. Unlike Elisabeth, who summoned her torture devices each time, Jeanne used Deus Ex Machina as a more conventional weapon. Whether or not someone could mold the mana drifting around in higher dimensions into a form suitable for combat depended heavily on their inherent nature, after all.
Deus Ex Machina was designed to circumvent that restriction. If we lose it, the strength at our disposal will invariably suffer. But…
Kaito looked over at Izabella’s crushed body. Then he turned his gaze to the Grave Keeper, who was looking at Jeanne like a shepherd watching over a lost lamb. Kaito suddenly recalled the inscrutable declarations she’d made.
“For the sake of the world, for the sake of the people, our revered Saint fell into slumber and shed tears of blood! That is what flows through the roots of the Church—her unrewarded love, her noble self-sacrifice! In the name of faith, in the name of the world, she cast herself aside! And what could that be but the most desirable trait possible for those chosen to possess! I have sacrificed everything, discarded even my ego! Can you, the chosen ones, say the same?
“Please, show me tragic devotion befitting the favor you’ve received! Show it to me, if you’d be so kind!”
Is this what she was talking about?
It would appear that the Grave Keeper was asking them to demonstrate their devotion by sacrificing Deus Ex Machina to save Izabella. However, there were still mysteries left to solve. For example, the Grave Keeper had said that she no longer had any intention of fighting them. In other words, she shouldn’t have had any reason to want to whittle away the Torture Princess’s strength. If that was the case, then, why was she doing it?
What was the Grave Keeper’s goal? As that question rattled around in Kaito’s head, though, he was suddenly interrupted.
“What to do; what to do?”
A distracted murmur echoed out. Kaito’s eyes went wide.
Of all the things she could be doing, Jeanne was standing before Izabella’s crushed frame with her arms casually folded. Her words and demeanor made no sense to Kaito. In his mind, there was only one logical path to take.
His voice grew rough as he pointed at Izabella’s dying body.
“What the hell are you talking about?! What is there to think about? You can save her, can’t you?!”
“Indeed. I can save her.”
“You said she was your first love, didn’t you?!”
Kaito’s scream was so forceful, he risked damaging his throat. As far as he was concerned, the things Jeanne was saying were unforgivable. She had had nothing, and now she’d finally found someone precious to her. Choosing to cast her aside was a choice he refused to get behind.
He refused to approve of it. Hell, he didn’t even want to try to understand it.
There’s no way—not that!
A beast-like growl slipped from Kaito’s mouth, to which Jeanne replied with an unfalteringly calm gaze.
When she spoke, her voice was just as calm.
“Allow me to ask you a question, then, mister. Is that deed truly more worthy than bringing about salvation?”
The moment she did, an answer burst forth from Kaito’s brain, one that ran in stark contrast to his emotions.
It wasn’t.
There was no person so valuable that saving them was more important than the entire world. That fact was the same as it had ever been. There were no exceptions. All he had to do was look over his shoulder at the corpses he’d piled up. Giving special treatment to a single person would be wrong. And right now, the world’s fate hung in the balance. Now was no time to complain or nitpick. They simply needed to do what needed to be done. That was the only correct answer.
You should know that, Kaito Sena.
Yeah, I know. I know all too well. THAT’S WHY I DON’T KNOW, GODDAMMIT!
“Screw you. Shut up.”
Kaito violently repudiated the correct answer he’d arrived at. Jeanne blinked. Kaito’s reply had hardly constituted an answer. Yet, in a way, it had conveyed everything.
His composure fracturing, Kaito racked his brain.
Jeanne, Elisabeth, they’re all the same. All they can come up with are correct answers.
Elisabeth, the raven-haired Torture Princess, showed no signs of bearing regrets, nor did she ever try to cast aside her sins. But what about Jeanne?
If she did bear regrets, what would she be left with after the world was saved?
If she won’t have anything left, then…
…then at that point, what had she really even saved?
That instant, a shout exploded from Kaito’s lungs.
“Don’t listen to me!”
“…Pardon?”
“Don’t listen to anyone! Think about it yourself! Think about it yourself, all on your own! Don’t let anyone else decide for you what is and isn’t more precious than the world! You have to choose; you have to make the decision! Dammit, you, you’re not thinking at all!”
“You’re saying rather strange things, mister. What are you suggesting it is that I’m not thinking about?”
“You can’t seriously tell me you paid a single thought to whether you’d regret it or not!”
Upon hearing Kaito’s accusation, Jeanne cocked her head to the side. It was faint, but her lack of expression started crumbling a little.
She blinked as she replied, her voice filled with utter astonishment.
“Whether I would regret it or not? That don’t matter for shit.”
“Like hell it doesn’t! And the moment you couldn’t immediately say that you wouldn’t proves it, goddammit! You’re the one who brought up first love, so don’t you dare pretend you’re some robot who doesn’t know what emotions—Oh, right, this world doesn’t have robots… Anyway, don’t talk like you’re pretending you don’t have feelings! Dammit, how can you be so…how can you be such a…?”
Kaito was even more dumbfounded than Jeanne was. Unable to find the words he was looking for, he stomped his foot on the ground. Then he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down.
The words he finally found were equal parts earnest and ill-fitting.
“How can you be such an idiot?”
“I see. How nonsensical. However, this does mark the first time anyone has ever asked me that.”
Jeanne’s whisper was quiet and subdued. She looked back over at Izabella. The convulsions running across her body were growing weaker and weaker. Yet, Jeanne refused to move, as though she were frozen solid. The heavy silence persisted.
Kaito was on the verge of wringing more words out of himself.
Before he could, though, Jeanne hesitatingly opened her mouth, then closed it again. After repeating that process a few times, she finally managed to get the words out.
“What do you think, miss, Torture Princess Elisabeth Le Fanu?”
The question had an almost desperate ring to it. Likely expecting words of rebuke, Jeanne elaborated on her inquiry to the black Torture Princess, the woman cut from the same cloth as herself.
“You consider all equally. You bear heavy sins and will someday burn at the stake for them. You refuse to betray those you’ve killed, and you obstinately continue your life as an arrogant, honest sinner. If it were you—?”
“Hell if I know. Silence. I’m tired of listening to you.”
The reply came in three curt remarks.
Furthermore, it came from a location that nobody had expected.
Everyone present turned to look. Lute, in particular, gave a heavy gasp.
Elisabeth Le Fanu was positioned in midair. Facing her target, she was holding her sword aloft.
On the other end of her sword stood the Grave Keeper, whose scarlet robe fluttered as she looked up at the Torture Princess aiming for her.
Everyone felt as though time had frozen over. The sinner and the zealot exchanged a meaningful stare.
The Grave Keeper could have easily given orders to the paladins, who were still kneeling to the side. However, she persisted in her silence. The crimson blade drew toward the pale neck, almost as if the two were destined to meet.
The moment before the sword reached its target, the Grave Keeper spoke as though in prayer.
“‘You are free to act as you will. But pray that God shall be your salvation. For the beginning, the middle, and the end all lie in the palm of His hand.’”
Her quiet, hopeful smile had never left her face.
As the Grave Keeper spoke to her killer, her expression was steeped in heartfelt affection.
“Hallelujah.”
And with that, Elisabeth’s blade sliced through her young neck. Blood surged. The Grave Keeper’s round little head went flying through the air. It then rolled along the ground, eventually coming to a stop still draped in its scarlet hood. A pool of blood quietly gathered.
The Grave Keeper had been killed before their very eyes, and she hadn’t so much as put up a fight. |
Torture Princess
The paladins didn’t move. The way they refrained from counterattacking implied that they’d been given orders not to beforehand. Instead, they stood up in unison and raised their arms horizontally over their chests.
Turning to face the Grave Keeper’s corpse, they bowed. Their postures seemed to be ones of mourning.
Suddenly, Kaito arrived at a hypothesis. The Grave Keeper’s escorts seemed to have had a relatively high compatibility with the demon meat. Maybe that was because they’d willingly chosen to consume the meat and carefully tuned their portions.
No matter what kind of person they are, anyone with a strong will will inevitably find admirers.
Even if that person harbored nothing but madness.
Just so long as their conviction was unshakable.
“Tch, how ghastly. ’Tis my first victory to ever be so irksome.”
Elisabeth landed on the ground unopposed. She clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction.
A violent wave of confusion washed over Kaito. The Grave Keeper had died, and she hadn’t even tried to defend herself. And she’d probably even told the paladins not to retaliate. But why?
He had no idea what she’d been trying to accomplish.
Should we really be playing along with the Grave Keeper’s scheme like this?
Plagued by his misgivings, Kaito turned to look back at Jeanne.
She still hadn’t made her decision. Instead, she was looking at Elisabeth in supplication.
Elisabeth dispelled her sword and began walking. It didn’t look as though she intended to give Jeanne any replies past the three she already had. The black Torture Princess passed by the golden Torture Princess.
Suddenly, though, Elisabeth came to a stop. Still facing forward, she gave a quiet murmur.
“’Twere it I, I would ask no one. And if any dared tell me what to do, I’d lend them no ear.”
“…”
“Yet, ask you did. I obtained power by killing people as they wailed and screamed. You obtained power by killing the willing. One part the same, one part different—not that I was informed, at any rate. In truth, I find it unpleasant that such a woman would declare herself Torture Princess. That is what I say to you, Jeanne de Rais, the saint, the whore, and the maiden of salvation.”
Jeanne didn’t respond. Only Elisabeth’s eyes moved as she gazed at her in profile.
When Elisabeth spoke next, her voice was cold beyond belief.
“Do as you please. ’Twere it I, I would kill her. But you are not I. And the burden of your choice shall be yours alone to shoulder. But bear no conceits—saving the world and destroying it are but mere matters of personal selfishness.”
“…It would seem both my options are cruel. But damn, this one’s a doozy.”
Jeanne’s voice was quiet and subdued. The ebony Torture Princess resumed walking, leaving her behind.
Elisabeth left Kaito and the others behind as well as she headed toward the Butcher. Kaito hurriedly grabbed Hina by the hand and followed behind. After looking around restlessly, Lute joined them, too. |
Torture Princess
As they ran, Kaito cast a fleeting glance backward.
Only Jeanne and Izabella remained atop the ice.
Alone, the golden Torture Princess gazed down upon the dying woman.
She gazed down upon the person who, by all rights, she should let die.
She gazed down upon the first woman she’d ever loved.
“I’ll…”
Jeanne’s whisper came out hoarse. Then her head flopped to the side.
For the first time, her expressionless visage shattered. With a perplexed look on her face, she let out a childlike whisper.
“…I…will?”
And then Jeanne de Rais,
the saint, the whore, and the man-made maiden of salvation,
made her choice. |
Torture Princess
8
The Butcher’s Story
Kaito and the others ran atop the narrow pathway that sat between the two fissures. Bottomless abysses lay on either side. One wrong step and they would be swallowed up by the unknowable darkness.
They dashed quickly but carefully. The dark blob in the distance slowly but surely grew closer, eventually revealing the silhouette of a familiar back. In a way, it really did look lonely.
It feels kinda like he’s waiting for someone who’ll never come.
As he quickened his pace even further, Kaito felt a strange pressure coming from ahead. It was like a wind was blowing up from the bottom of the pit. However, the air around him didn’t seem to be moving an inch.
Now that he thought about it, the snow had stopped falling as well. The atmosphere was frozen over and tense.
It felt as though the whole world were holding its breath.
I guess this really is the moment that the world was waiting for.
However, he didn’t know what it was waiting for in particular. He didn’t know what would happen, or what would become clear, once they reached the Saint’s Apostle, either. In fact, he didn’t even have proof that they’d be able to find out where the Saint really was.
Even so, he kept on running. Eventually, as he closed in on the figure’s back, he called out to it.
“Butcher!”
“Why, if it isn’t Mr. Dim-Witted Servant, Madam Elisabeth, and Ms. Lovely Maid! And the rest of you fine people, you’re all here!”
The Butcher did a little hop. His reply was no different from normal, as though he’d been out on a stroll and had just happened to bump into them. It was not a response anyone had expected.
Perplexed, Kaito came to a stop. Everyone else did the same. Hina’s expression was just as confused as his, and Lute scrunched up his snout and made no efforts to hide his wariness. Elisabeth frowned in displeasure.
Jeanne, bringing up the rear, wore a serene expression on her face.
Not looking at the Butcher, her gaze was solidly fixed on the woman she was cradling in her arms.
It was Izabella, with more than 70 percent of her body supplemented with machine parts. She was adrift in a defenseless slumber.
The way Jeanne was carrying Izabella reminded Kaito of a statue from his old world called the Pietà that he’d once caught a glimpse of on television. As the Butcher looked at her, he let out a surprised cry.
“Ah, so that’s what you chose! Goodness gracious, what a surprise! I had a hunch, somehow or other, yet it’s a surprise all the same!”
“You little…”
“Humans really are intriguing creatures, I must say. They have wisdom surpassing any beast, yet at times they find themselves driven by their emotions despite knowing full well how illogical they’re being. I can’t say I hate that contradiction, mind you!”
“You knew this was gonna happen, just like the Grave Keeper did, then?”
Kaito’s voice was full of quiet rage, indicating his revulsion and fury at having been toyed with by the two of them. However, the Butcher’s demeanor didn’t change. His response was clear and prompt.
“Oh no, I just heard bits and pieces of information from my little whelp. So I figured, this is what would happen if the golden, Deus Ex Machina–wielding Torture Princess butted heads with the Grave Keeper, that’s all. She was quite the devout believer, after all, and she had a rather solid head on her shoulders. But, me oh my, I’m just glad that that delightful woman is all right!”
“You don’t get to say that!”
“I’m being entirely sincere! Back when I was trapped in the Gibbet, she was kind enough to show me concern. Wishing death on her was the furthest thing from my mind!”
“Skip the nonsense, Butcher.”
A cold voice interrupted Kaito and the Butcher’s exchange. Slipping adroitly through the group’s ranks, Elisabeth took her place at its head. She then went on, marking the Butcher as an enemy with her gaze.
“You referred to yourself as the enemy of the world. And even had you not, this entire affair began when you sold Vlad that demon meat. Was this nonsense about restructuring your desire as well? Every creature in this world may well die thanks to you. So you can skip the nonsensical rejoicing over a single woman’s survival.”
“Hmm, I must say, calling it my ‘desire’ is really quite off the mark. But I suppose you are right.”
“Yet, at the same time, you invited us here. To what end?”
The Butcher offered no answer. Instead, he began thinking to himself and turning about idly in place. As he did, his usual cross-marked sack dangled from his shoulder. Then he began humming a strange tune.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, my meats are the finest meats around! Filled with love and bravery, they’ll never let you down! Eat them and your courage will increase one millionfold! As always, I’m your friendly neighborhood Butcher! Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!”
“…!”
Kaito shuddered in spite of himself. The Butcher was acting the same as always. Given their current situation, only madness could account for that. And at the same time, a sort of melancholy struck him as well. It was the kind of pathos one would feel toward a clown atop a stage, the kind of pity one felt toward those who had no choice but to play the part of the comic.
Could it be that none of us has ever known the Butcher for who he really is?
“To the contrary, Mr. Dim-Witted Servant!”
Kaito’s gaze had apparently been enough to convey his sentiment, as the Butcher hopped up and down in protest. When he finally landed, he thrust his finger straight toward Kaito.
“I’m overfond of tall tales, it’s true, but never once have I told a lie! Thank you very much! Okay, well, there’s a small chance that I might have exaggerated a bit from time to time, and I might have told a lie here and there, but… Ahem. But the kind, adorable, lovable Butcher you’ve all come to know and love is the real deal! It merely…wasn’t all there was to me.”
“Truth, lies, they make little difference. The point where such things mattered has long since passed.”
Elisabeth offered no reaction to the gloomier words the Butcher had ended his speech with. She stepped forward, as though to demonstrate how fed up she was. Executioner’s Sword of Frankenthal glittered in her hand.
“Now, I’ve but one question for you. Where is the Saint?”
With each step she took forward, the Butcher took one back. The heel of his foot struck a hard, frozen snowflake. It slid backward a smidgen, then was soundlessly swallowed up by the darkness. The Butcher had nowhere left to run.
Elisabeth thrust Executioner’s Sword of Frankenthal toward him, then continued pressing him for answers.
“Talk. We’ve come to kill her. All the way here to the World’s End.”
“And how well you’ve done to make it here. Ah, the efficiency of your questions…how very like you, Madam Elisabeth.”
“You’d do well to understand this, Butcher: The time for buffoonery is over.”
Elisabeth’s calm retort shut the Butcher down. His glib remarks came to a complete stop. Tilting his head a smidgen to the side, the Butcher let out a docile murmur.
“…It’s over, is it?”
“We are those who know what goes on behind the stage. Never again can we return to the audience. Not even you would keep performing to no end, I suspect. Isn’t it about time to put an end to this farce?”
Elisabeth laid out her question dispassionately. But deep in her voice was a faint hint of sympathy, a fact that caused Kaito no small amount of shock. Hearing Elisabeth show sentiment toward an enemy was a rarity among rarities.
Maybe…maybe Elisabeth appreciates where he’s coming from.
Like a faithful jester, the Butcher had continued playing out his role. But perhaps he wasn’t the only one who’d chosen to become something instead of just being someone.
As he stood before the Torture Princess, the Butcher gently scratched his chin.
“I see, I see. Time to close up shop, is it? Yes, well, I suppose it is.”
“It is, isn’t it? And in following, enough playing around. Tell us what your duty was.”
“In that case, allow me to start by sharing a serious little anecdote with you.”
“Very well. Speak.”
Still training her sword on him, Elisabeth jerked her chin. The Butcher nodded, then gave a bow.
Then, as though he were laying his heart bare, he began narrating.
“Did you know, Madam Elisabeth? Fairy tales are always born from the smallest of things.”
“More of your tall tales, even now?”
“Destiny is much the same way, you see… The very shortest of memories can come to define a man’s whole life.”
Although his story seemed to have little to do with their current situation, the Butcher persisted in telling it. Serious to the last, he spoke his truth. His voice sounded strangely old and hoarse, and his tone was firm and inflexible.
Although he should have already known it, Kaito realized something all over again.
The Butcher is the Saint’s Apostle.
In other words, he’d been alive since before the world had even finished forming. In a sense, he was literally the oldest person in existence. He’d lived for far too long for the word lifetime to even begin to cover it.
In spite of that, though, the age of the memory he was laying out hadn’t worn it away in the slightest.
“Madam Elisabeth, do you have memories of your mother?”
Elisabeth replied with silence. Kaito suddenly thought back on the facts he knew. Elisabeth’s parents had died in an “unfortunate accident.” Right before it, though, there had been sightings of a massive black dog.
The Butcher peeked around behind Elisabeth. His gaze landed on Kaito and Hina.
“Mr. Dim-Witted Servant and Ms. Lovely Maid, what about…? No, I suppose not. My apologies. Whether or not one has such memories varies from person to person. It’s neither a good thing nor a bad one. But I…I have them. Not that she could truly be called my mother, that is.”
“You mean…?”
“The moment I attained consciousness in her arms, the very first things I saw… Over the course of my long, long life, not once have I ever forgotten that memory. Not once could I forget that memory.”
The Butcher’s voice was calm and quiet. Kaito sucked in his breath.
The person who created him was the Saint.
When he spoke about her, his tone remained light, but his voice grew weighty. Contained within it were hatred; grief; a vast, untarnished amount of love; and a frightening amount of passion and emotion. The scant few decades of a human’s life could never even come close to attaining such sentiment, nor were they sufficient in understanding such a feeling.
The only thing capable of swallowing up the Butcher’s emotions was the crystal-clear air.
At long last, Kaito realized something—why the snow had stopped and why the wind wasn’t blowing.
The world is waiting for the Apostle to tell his story.
“In the end, I was but a single seed of evil. A pawn without even a name to his name. And I’ve understood that fact for a long, long time.”
The Butcher took a deep breath, then exhaled. He clutched at his tattered clothes.
Then he went on, forcing the words out of his throat.
“But I saw that smile… I saw that smile.”
Just what was he saying about that expression he’d seen?
He spoke with alarming speed as he elaborated on his answer.
“It was the smile of one who had, for the first time, obtained a companion in a desolate, lonely world. It was the desperate smile of one whose absolute solitude had been broken. In that moment, she greeted me with unmistakable love. That smile was more than enough to prove that to me. And…through her tears, she spoke…”
Then, just for a moment, the Butcher trailed off. When he spoke again, it was in a voice steeped with nostalgia for a time long gone by, or perhaps one filled with the exhaustion of countless ages.
“‘Thank you for being born unto me,’ she said. That was all. And that was enough.”
In his entire monologue, not once had he explained why he’d sold the demon meat. At the same time, though, it was more than sufficient as a confession of motive.
Because he’d heard those words, the Butcher had carried out the Saint’s mad wish.
Despite knowing that it would destroy the world, he had taken the demon meat, and he had sold it.
Kaito narrowed his eyes. The Saint’s words to the Butcher had been a blessing, one filled with joy and gratitude. At the end of the day, though, he’d spent his whole life bound by them, and they’d turned him into the entire world’s enemy.
In that sense, weren’t they more like a curse, then?
Kaito was about to say as much aloud, but he stopped himself. The Butcher didn’t need to be told that. He knew. Yet, even so, those few words of hers had given his whole life meaning. If they hadn’t, he would have stopped walking down this path long ago. He had ascended past the point where regrets were still relevant.
Suddenly, the Butcher took a small breath. Then he set down the white bag on his back.
When he did, it made a small sound. Having cast aside the goods he’d carried around for so long, he spoke in a whimsical voice.
“I had fun, Madam Elisabeth, Mr. Dim-Witted Servant, Ms. Lovely Maid, really, truly, and deeply. The living cannot live without finding enjoyment in their days. And when I watched you all fight back, my, how radiant you looked. Yet… Yet, knowing full well how mad it is, there is a request I need to fulfill.”
For that shall be the evidence of my existence, the sole proof of my love for her.
As Kaito listened to the Butcher’s cryptic declaration, a certain quote resounded within his chest.
It’s a nonsensical little fairy tale, and one that’s gone on for a very, very long time.
Was the story a tragedy or a comedy? Kaito and the others had no way of knowing.
And how is the Butcher planning on bringing it to an end?
What was the mad request he was trying to fulfill?
Elisabeth shifted her sword vertically a hair. She asked her next question in a voice fully devoid of emotion.
“So? Where is this dear Saint of yours?”
“Madam Elisabeth, it brought me such joy when you saw fit to voice how delicious something was. Mr. Dim-Witted Servant… No, Mr. Kaito. The fact that you, a mere human, made it this far on conviction alone is something to be proud of. Ms. Lovely Maid…Ms. Hina. Thank you for preparing my meats so exquisitely. And congratulations on your wedding.”
The Butcher’s voice was light as he obstinately ignored Elisabeth’s question.
Her irritation was about to show on her face, but at the last moment, the corners of Elisabeth’s mouth froze. Kaito and Hina rapidly went pale as well. Lute looked around restlessly. Jeanne offered no response.
Of all the people present, those who knew the Butcher well were the only ones who realized.
Kaito and Hina took off at a dash. Elisabeth reached out with her sword-free hand.
“Butcher, no!”
“The time has come to close up shop. This marks my final task as a merchant: delivering meat.”
The Butcher didn’t, in fact, stop, instead taking off at a dash himself.
The way he ran wasn’t forward but backward. Yet, nothing lay there except darkness.
“I said so, did I not? The fairy tale must come to an end.”
Kaito’s eyes practically bulged out of their sockets.
Just as he’d thought, the last thing the Butcher had said had been his final testament.
“Tch!”
Elisabeth snapped her fingers. Having seen that her arm wouldn’t reach far enough, she summoned forth a vortex of crimson petals and darkness from the air. Her aim was unsteady, perhaps due to her agitation. However, the chains just barely managed to wrap around the Butcher’s arm.
Kaito breathed a sigh of relief. The next moment, though, blood billowed forth.
“Wh—?”
“And finally, thank you so much for your many years of patronage.”
The Butcher’s clawed left arm remained bound by the chains.
It, and it alone, dangled in the air.
The Butcher had drawn a knife from the many folds of his cloak, then severed his own arm. His body fell, as though it were being sucked in. Ribbons of blood followed him down as the abyss consumed him.
In the end, all that remained was that one arm.
Elisabeth stopped at the edge of the cliff. Hina came to an abrupt halt, too. Kaito, on the other hand, didn’t.
His momentum practically carried him over and into the abyss. Then, with his arm still outstretched, he got ready to leap into the vast darkness. Elisabeth and Hina frantically wrapped their arms around him.
They nearly ended up slipping as well, but the two of them narrowly managed to maintain their footing. They both cried out in unison.
“Get back, you dullard!”
“Master Kaito, please step back!”
“…This isn’t right.”
The words tumbled from Kaito’s mouth. As he scooted backward little by little, he tried to get his jumbled thoughts in order.
Not even he knew what he was trying to say. He didn’t know what it was he found so wrong, so abhorrent. But then, all of a sudden, he realized what it was that was filling him with such sorrow and vexation.
“Thank you for being born unto me,” she said.
No doubt it had been a happy, joyful thing. Until he met Hina, Kaito had never had anyone tell him that, either. But in the end, the Butcher had died imprisoned by his role as a seed of evil.
He’d abandoned everything he’d enjoyed, canceled out all the memories he’d collected, and swallowed up the pain of cutting away the feelings of those who’d shouted at him not to die as well as his own arm.
Could the words that had bound him really be described as love?
Hadn’t the Butcher just died after being used up without ever truly being loved by a parent?
He hadn’t even been able to live for his own sake.
And the Butcher would never get another chance at life.
“This isn’t right, goddammit!”
Kaito screamed from the depths of his soul. Tears began spilling out from the corners of his eyes.
No matter how many times he’d lost his humanity, no matter how many times he’d tasted the pain of death, Kaito hadn’t shed a single tear. But for the Butcher’s sake, he cried. He let out animalistic wails. But he received no response.
Hina gently stroked his back. Elisabeth said nothing. She merely snapped her fingers. The silver chain transformed into petals, then vanished. The Butcher’s arm descended, accompanied by crimson.
When it did, Kaito felt a faint pressure in his eardrums. He looked up with a start. Then he heard it.
“GRAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
A roar reverberated up from the depths of the pit, one that tore the heavens and cracked the earth.
The World’s End quaked at the terrible cry. Following the vibration of the atmosphere, cracks began running along the surface of the ice. Spiderweb-like white patterns began polluting the silvery ground. As they did, the darkness of the abyss inverted.
Something ominous was glowing at the bottom. Upon seeing it, Kaito was struck speechless.
A massive golden eyeball was floating amid the blackness. And it was staring straight at Kaito and the others.
They were peering into the abyss, and it was gazing back at them. Eventually, Kaito realized just what it was he was looking at.
There’s a monster down at the bottom.
It was a colossal creature, one that defied all reason and providence.
The monster then shifted its body, and its eye disappeared from sight. In its place, a giant jaw jutted up from the pit. As it did, Kaito understood what meat the Butcher had meant to deliver and to whom.
When he fell, he wasn’t carrying his bag.
In other words, the Butcher himself was the meat.
The Butcher had delivered his own flesh to the gigantic, presumably draconic creature.
“It awakened by consuming the Apostle? What in the blazes is it?”
Elisabeth murmured, her voice low. As she did, a massive pair of wings extended up from the pit to the sky. They were like massive, fleshy flower buds reaching for the heavens. Then, like a flower blooming, the wings unfurled.
Rejecting all constraints of gravity and volume, the dragon softly flapped them and took off into the sky.
When it did, its entire monstrous body came into view. Compared to its wings and body, its limbs were comparatively stubby. It also had no scales, which was unusual for a dragon. Its pale, pinkish flesh was fully exposed. Between that and its round shape, it called a human fetus to mind. The thin red membrane swimming in the air behind its neck made it look like it was on fire.
Jeanne narrowed her eyes. As she regarded the strange dragon, she said in almost a whisper:
“Why, if it isn’t the Legend Dragon, the supreme flesh drake… According to the literature, the male was hunted by a group spearheaded by the merchant of legend. That must be the female, then. Who’da thunk it’d survived by staying out here. Now, this, this is a fairy tale.”
“Man… Looks like those tall tales of yours were true after all.”
Kaito muttered in disbelief. He thought back to all the stories the Butcher had told seemingly half in jest. One of those stories had been about the battle against the Legend Dragon.
Although he’d dressed them up as tall tales, the Butcher had shared no small number of his memories with them.
At that moment, though, harsh winds began to blow and knocked Kaito out of his reverie.
The Legend Dragon had begun softly bending her crooked wings again. In open defiance of her own mass, she was floating gently in the air like a balloon. She cast a vast shadow atop the icy ground as she drifted.
The way she did made her look almost like a floating island. It made for a grand spectacle, one that surpassed the realm of human comprehension.
The way her reddish flesh pulsated also made it look as though she were the beating heart of the very world.
Kaito found himself once more in the harsh grip of bewilderment.
What reason did the Butcher have to want to wake up the Legend Dragon?
He probably was planning to have the Legend Dragon destroy the world, and in doing so spur on the restructuring. Massive as she was, though, she was as docile as a whale. She showed no signs of wanting to attack her surroundings. And considering their descriptor, the reason the merchants had hunted down the male probably hadn’t been to exterminate a threat but to harvest his flesh.
And the Legend Dragon just kept drifting along.
Then she slowly began turning her massive body over. Eventually, her chest entered Kaito’s frame of vision.
“Wh—?”
As it did, he let out a dumbfounded noise. He finally understood why the Butcher had woken her up.
A hard crystal had been forcibly embedded in her soft flesh.
And in the Legend Dragon’s chest, encased in the red crystal, something was sleeping.
A naked woman was floating within.
She looked as though she’d been buried within a coffin suspended in midair. She was horribly defenseless, frozen upside down and submerged naked in the bloodred liquid. Its red crisply offset her white skin.
Hina held down her hair, which was being blown about by the wind. She blinked and whispered in puzzlement:
“Is that…the Saint?”
“Man… I guess it makes sense why no one could find her.”
With that, Kaito nodded. The Saint had been hidden away in the belly of a sleeping dragon at the bottom of an abyss in a pit at the World’s End. There was no way any ordinary search party could have turned her up.
Kaito had no words; he merely looked up at the drifting dragon. The stone in his pocket containing Vlad squirmed, but he ignored it. He didn’t have time to worry about Vlad right now. The Saint they’d been seeking was floating right before their eyes.
However, Kaito didn’t have the first clue as to what to do.
So what are we supposed to do with her?
The being before them was simply too far removed from mankind’s sense of scale. Kaito gazed up at the shadow-casting giant and the woman lodged in its chest in bewilderment. And the Legend Dragon continued to drift.
However, it was then that the calm, peaceful atmosphere came to a violent end.
A low, merciless voice rang out.
“Reenactment of the Plain of Skewers: Impaled Victim.”
Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab!
Innumerable crimson petals scattered through the air, and countless stakes fired out from them. The silence was shattered, and blood flew through the air.
Easily over a thousand iron stakes had buried themselves in the Legend Dragon’s body.
The air violently trembled. Kaito was certain that the Legend Dragon had let out a scream, but he couldn’t hear it. It must have been at a frequency that human ears were unable to perceive.
The Legend Dragon contorted her body through the air in anguish. Stakes fell out from her trembling flesh in succession. They roared through the sky as they toppled to the ground and pierced the frozen earth. At the same time, massive amounts of blood gushed forth from the Legend Dragon’s wounds.
The fresh blood pooled wide atop the ground like a lake. However, a few of the humongous drops twitched, then halted in the air. Several orbs of blood hovered in place.
“Huh?”
“Hmph.”
The next moment, the bloody spheres shot toward Elisabeth. The path was narrow—she had nowhere to run.
At this rate, Kaito and the others would get taken down as well. But Elisabeth was the very image of composure. As she swung Executioner’s Sword of Frankenthal, darkness and crimson flower petals spread out over the chasm.
When they vanished, they left behind a web of chains that covered the hole.
Elisabeth cracked her neck in displeasure.
“I first thought of this as I watched the Butcher fall. I must say, I’m disappointed it didn’t occur to me sooner. Ho!”
Elisabeth took an acrobatic leap and landed atop the chains. Then, despite her high heels, she effortlessly dashed across their delicate iron loops. Seemingly uninterested in harming anyone except their foe, the dragon’s bloody spheres took off in pursuit. The countless crimson orbs snapped at her heels like a pack of beasts.
Elisabeth weaved a graceful, nimble dance atop the chains.
As they grazed her afterimages, the blood pellets fell down. When they came into contact with the chains, they burst into steam and then vanished into the pit.
The Legend Dragon lurched unsteadily as she let out a groan. Many of the stakes were still embedded in her flesh. In her current state, she was nothing more than a target. Kaito thought back on the story he’d just been told.
The male Legend Dragon was once hunted down by a group of merchants.
If that was the case, then there was no reason why the Torture Princess shouldn’t be able to kill the female.
Grabbing a chain, Elisabeth hoisted herself upside down. After avoiding the blood that had been aiming for her foot, she arched her back and made a soft landing. Then she mercilessly snapped her fingers once more.
“Arachnophobia.”
A new swirl of crimson and black appeared high in the sky. Two iron claws shot out of it.
Then, like the hands of a long-fingernailed woman, they each split into four and reached for the Legend Dragon.
When they did, they snatched her massive wings up by their bases, much like an innocent child would to a small animal. Their pointed tips dug into her draconic flesh as they lifted her high into the air.
Another violent tremor ran through the air, the echoes of an inaudible scream. Blood gushed forth and melted the icy ground.
The claws froze in the air, almost as though they’d heard the scream. They were finished moving. But the Legend Dragon’s weight caused her to begin sagging. Each time she did, her wings tore from their bases where the claws remained lodged. She gradually started falling faster and faster.
Then the Legend Dragon fell, her wings shredded to pieces.
When her fleshy body impacted the ground, its weight caused the earth to quake.
Tremors ran through the World’s End. This, of course, caused the skinny path Kaito and the others were standing atop to shake.
If not for the fact that they’d immediately grabbed on to the chains stretched out atop it, they very well could have toppled into the abyss. Lute collapsed onto the chains, then frantically crawled back to the path. Kaito broke out in a cold sweat and wiped it away with his fist.
“Looks…looks like we made it.”
“’Twill only get worse from here, fool! Make haste!”
Elisabeth’s angry voice rose up to meet him. Kaito blinked in astonishment.
As he did, he heard a faint popping noise. A chill ran down his spine before he even understood what it signified. The next moment, he discovered that his ominous premonition had been on the mark.
Fatal cracks had begun loudly winding across their narrow walkway.
Kaito looked up in shock. At some point, Elisabeth had finished making her way across the chains and had reached the side of the cliff opposite them. She was waving her arms atop the solid ground and shouting.
“Hurry! At this rate, you’ll be caught up when it collapses!”
“Oh, now you tell me all of a sudden!”
“It was hardly sudden, mister. That much weight comes crashin’ down, even you should be able to put two and two together.”
“Pardon me, my beloved Master Kaito! But I have no intentions of giving you up to that abyss!”
Jeanne was cradling Izabella in her arms and had already begun running. Kaito, on the other hand, had gotten a late start, so Hina scooped him up.
That moment, the ground at her feet shattered. As she carried him bridal-style, Kaito turned to look behind them. The path had started to crumble. The ice sounded like a mirror as it shattered.
The fragments glittered as they descended into the darkness.
Kaito succumbed to his primal fear and gulped. Hina shot forward, accelerating like a bullet.
Lute had originally been behind her, which meant that he was now in front as they ran for dear life. However, due to the weight of his winter gear, his footsteps were sluggish. Hina caught up with him in the blink of an eye.
After thinking for a moment, she shifted Kaito to under her arm.
“Master Kaito, this may be somewhat uncomfortable, but I ask that you bear with me! And, Mr. Lute, pardon me!”
“Oh my!”
Hina reached her free arm out and snatched Lute up by his burly back. Surprised by her strength, Lute let out a little yelp. Then he reflexively flattened his ears and tucked in his tail.
The walkway continued loudly crumbling. If they slowed down even a little, the abyss would swallow them up.
“Ha!”
Hina kicked off hard against the ground. The hem of her maid uniform flared out, and the glimmering ice beneath her feet shattered. She skidded as she landed, scattering snowflakes in her wake.
The two adult men in her arms screamed. However, their screams were drowned out by a loud clattering noise.
Kaito and Lute cautiously looked backward.
The thin path between the two crevices had vanished without a trace. Now that the obstruction was gone, the two ravines had joined together like a single vast river. Beyond it was the pit with the chains stretched over the parts of it still visible.
Lute shook his entire body, and the fur on his cheeks stood up straight.
“Th-that was a rather close shave… To think that Ms. Hina would end up having to carry me. Good gracious, how embarrassing. I do thank you, though. Never shall I forget this debt I owe you.”
“Th-thanks, Hina… Seems like you’re always saving my ass, doesn’t it? Now…”
Kaito stared hard, trying to make out what was happening on the other side of the pit.
The Legend Dragon was over there, writhing in a lake of her own blood. Eventually, the fierce convulsions running through her body stopped. The red gem in her chest continued glowing unabated.
The pale woman was still sleeping inside, like an insect trapped in amber.
In a daze, Kaito thought back to what Jeanne had once told him.
“Our salvation lies in murdering Diablo, murdering God, and, yes, murdering a human.”
“Is it…is it time?”
For now, the Saint had fallen to a place where they could kill her.
As he stood atop the World’s End, Kaito Sena thought to himself.
The end was finally upon them. All they had to do was kill the Saint, just like they’d originally planned.
Ever since he’d heard the Butcher’s lonely soliloquy, every positive thought he’d had about the Saint had vanished. The very fact that the person who’d destroyed the world and built it anew still lived was unnatural.
Now, mankind would lose the Saint, and the world would avoid destruction. And they would all live happily ever after.
The fairy tale would finally end.
Will it, though?
“Now, then, I aim to proceed! Feel free to stay there, you lot; you’d be hindrances at best!”
“Please wait. I, too, shall come… Or rather, allow me to join you, Torture Princess!”
Elisabeth called out from the opposite cliffside, and Jeanne replied. Despite her expressionless visage, though, she seemed troubled as she cast her gaze down at the woman in her arms. Izabella was sleeping like a baby.
Jeanne gently stroked her mostly metal cheek. Then she whispered quietly.
“My dear little lady.”
Then, lifting her head, Jeanne looked at Lute. He’d gotten down from Hina’s arm and was currently sitting cross-legged on the ground. Jeanne slowly approached him. He quickly stood up, his fur standing on end to illustrate his wariness. Jeanne stopped directly in front of him, then quietly held out Izabella.
Lute seemed bewildered. However, his fur settled down, and he took Izabella from her.
Jeanne softly brushed Izabella’s silver hair from her face. Then she gave Lute her quiet request.
“Of the three of you, your arms seem the thickest and most comfortable, mister. I leave her in your hands. Please do not let her go. She is very precious to me. Not that she herself knows, mind you. Hell, she’d probably find it a bother! But hey, that’s first love for ya, am I right?”
“Precious…you say. I understand. Then on my name as Lute, I shall protect her to the last! Hmm?”
Being a devoted husband himself, Lute must have been moved by Jeanne’s words. His ears and tail sprang up as he acquiesced. At the very end, though, it seemed like he remembered the fact that Jeanne had severely wounded him not long ago.
Lute hmmed to himself and scrunched up his snout. As he did, Jeanne faced him and bowed deeply.
“You have my sincere thanks.”
Kaito and Hina felt a slight shock. It was the first time they’d ever seen the golden Torture Princess act so admirably. Lute’s voice got caught in his throat for a moment before he replied with a docile nod.
“Think nothing of it. I may bear resentment toward you, but that has nothing to do with Madam Izabella. And grudge or not, I can hardly forsake another’s beloved. If you would entrust her to me, then I will see to it that she remains safe.”
“Again, you have my gratitude. Thanks a million, li’l pupper.”
“Learn when to stop talking, will you?!”
As Lute shouted angrily at her, Jeanne turned around and broke into a run. Hurrying toward Elisabeth, she dashed alongside the rim of the hole. Her radiant honey-blond splendor gradually grew distant. Kaito remained where he stood.
If he went, he’d probably just be in the way. All that was left was for the two of them to lower the curtain.
The Kaiser was silent, seemingly having lost interest in the way things were proceeding. The stone in Kaito’s pocket was flaring up as usual, but now wasn’t a great time to have a conversation with Vlad.
Kaito’s gaze was fixed firmly on the woman within the red jewel.
She was still far away, but thanks to the Legend Dragon’s collapse, she was now a good deal closer. She looked utterly defenseless. All they had to do was kill her, and the nightmarish turmoil regarding the world’s restructuring would finally come to an end.
Will it, though?
However, doubt still welled up unbidden in Kaito’s mind.
All of a sudden, he noticed that his heart was palpitating strangely. Sweat was dripping from his entire body. Discomfited, he lost track of his thoughts. Then he pressed down against his forehead.
“Master Kaito? My dear Master Kaito, whatever is the matter? Your face is ever so pale.”
“No, no… I’m fine. It’s nothing… I think it’s nothing.”
Hina worriedly stroked his brow. As he felt the soft sensation of her fingertips, Kaito replied. Deep in his mind, though, his childish self was asking his rational self an innocent question.
Will it really, really, really, though?
No, you’re right. Something’s off. But what?
Kaito couldn’t really put his finger on it. But his discomfort raged on, beating incessantly against the inside of his skull. He found himself lost in the strange sensation. It wasn’t that he wanted to stop them from killing the Saint. At the moment, it was the correct choice to make. But something was off.
Will this really, really, really bring everything to a close? Do I really believe that?
You’re a big dumb-dumb! his inner child crowed.
Think about it carefully, the rational part of his brain murmured.
And now that he considered it, there were a number of questions that he and the others had more or less ignored.
Why did the Grave Keeper bring Izabella to us like that? Why did she give Elisabeth her blessings, then offer no resistance and practically kill herself off? Why did the Butcher invite us here? Why did he specifically wait for us to arrive before waking up the Legend Dragon?
Then, upon noticing another fact he’d overlooked, Kaito went pale.
The various races had each received a letter, and in the letter had been a certain phrase.
“The beginning, the middle, and the end all lie in the palm of His hand. If you wish to reject those words, make for the World’s End.”
But we were the only ones the Butcher didn’t send it to.
Perhaps that fact signified something truly terrible.
And at the same time, a question he had failed to consider up until then crossed Kaito’s mind.
The Butcher had claimed that the whole uproar about restructuring hadn’t been his desire. The Apostle and the fanatics had simply been trying to grant the Saint’s wish. But had anyone ever said that the restructuring itself was what the Saint had been wishing for?
That fundamental problem now pierced through Kaito’s brain. He frantically dug through his memories.
That’s right—it was the Grave Keeper!
She’d said that “God and the Saint have been seeking this restructuring for many ages.” But was the restructuring itself really her true desire? Wasn’t it also a possibility that the reconstructing was simply a natural part of the process involved in granting her true wish?
If that was the case, though, then what did the Saint actually wish for?
“Ah!”
At that moment, Kaito’s thoughts were forcefully interrupted. An incredible amount of heat was coming off the stone in his pocket. He was about to click his tongue in annoyance, but then he realized something.
Vlad’s never been this insistent about wanting to come out before.
So what could it be that Vlad wanted to tell him?
Kaito hurriedly ran mana through the stone. Azure petals and black darkness fluttered up through the air. When they vanished, they left behind a man in aristocratic attire. Unlike usual, he didn’t move to strike a dramatic pose.
Vlad’s limbs dangled loose as he turned to face Kaito. Upon getting a look at Vlad’s crimson eyes, Kaito gulped. Fierce madness and burning thoughts were swirling within Vlad’s gaze.
“…Why?”
“Um…”
“Why did you so obstinately refuse to let me out until now, my dear successor?”
“M-my bad. I had no idea you actually had something you wanted to tell me.”
“Well, what’s done is done. And perhaps it’s fine. I’ve yet to get all my thoughts in order.”
Vlad ignored Kaito’s apology and began mumbling to himself. He clutched at his raven locks like a man possessed. As he ruined his normally impeccable hairdo, he started laying out his thoughts.
“If one is lost, they need but retrace their steps. Where did the malaise originate? Right, from the Grave Keeper’s words and deeds. It seems that we’ve all been dancing atop the Saint’s palm. Since when, though? The golden Torture Princess was created to stave off the restructuring. Was that part of her design? Or was it not?”
Another chill ran down Kaito’s spine. That wasn’t something he had even considered.
There were those who’d worked to bring about the restructuring and those who’d worked to prevent it. What had the Saint thought of each of the groups?
“When the alchemists created their golden Torture Princess, they were aware of the black Torture Princess and used her as a reference. However, there was no need for there to be two of them. The alchemists could just as easily have gone to the ebony Torture Princess and sought out her aid. They hadn’t expected her to exist, and they chose not to rely on her. They had their pride, after all; it was the sole end their clan had been living toward. Instead, they tried to have their golden Torture Princess take the black Torture Princess on as a follower, and in doing so make it so their creation was the primary force to prevent the restructuring. But what if, say, she anticipated their pride?”
“If the Saint predicted that another Torture Princess would be created… Then what?”
“Then there would be ‘two.’ The Grave Keeper even said it! What we need to pay attention to is the resulting number!”
Vlad shouted like a madman. Hina reacted to his menacing demeanor by positioning herself in front of Kaito.
Kaito, shocked, ruminated on what the Grave Keeper had told him.
“The fact that the whelp served as a guide was proof. The fact that he sought ‘two’ was proof.”
“In the end, those who sought to prevent the restructuring and those who sought to bring it about arrived at the same method—‘finding the Saint.’ And the Butcher said that the black Torture Princess’s resistance was unexpected. Up until she arrived, he probably was simply aiming for the world’s restructuring. But if his objective changed upon the arrival of the black Torture Princess and the creation of the golden Torture Princess that accompanied it, if it took on a form closer to that of the Saint’s true desire… Oh, oh, that’s it!”
“What is?”
“The ‘significance of the two.’”
Vlad’s eyes widened, and his words served as the trigger that set Kaito’s thoughts into overdrive. Why had the Butcher, and the Saint, needed two people? What was the meaning behind that number?
What will happen when she assembles those two unbelievably powerful women? What will she be able to do?
Kaito spun around. Elisabeth and Jeanne had just reached the crystal. The two of them smoothly raised their arms, and gold and crimson flower petals began swirling.
As he gazed at their elegant backs, Vlad spoke in a hoarse voice.
“The two Torture Princesses. God and Diablo.”
Kaito didn’t fully understand what those words signified, but their ominous nature was all too clear. Vlad’s murmur had an almost prophetic ring to it. Dull as he was, Kaito could understand that much. Something irreparably wrong was happening, here and now. And once it occurred, it could never be undone.
It was something he had to stop at all costs.
“Stop, stop, run, get away from there! Elisabeeeeeeeeth!”
Kaito screamed, driven by impulse alone. His voice tore violently through the still, quiet air.
Elisabeth’s black hair fluttered as she turned. Her beautiful crimson eyes landed on Kaito.
Her expression was annoyed, confused, and a little bit listless.
It was the same face as it had always been, yet, for some reason, it seared itself into Kaito’s eyes.
And then, suddenly, something grabbed her wrist from behind.
Kaito was sure of what he’d seen. Two white arms had extended out from the red crystal.
Fingers so pale that they seemed almost dead wrapped tightly around the ebony and golden Torture Princesses’ wrists.
Elisabeth’s and Jeanne’s eyes opened wide. At some point, the surface of the crystal had turned soft and blurry and begun vibrating. After the arms came out, they were followed by a head.
The woman slid out from within the crystal as though it were birthing her. Then she toppled awkwardly to the ground. She shook her head, spraying red droplets around her. Kaito immediately realized: They were the tears that had been running down her cheeks.
The Saint then lifted her head. The whisper that came from her lips had a strangely sweet echo to it, and it traveled like a wave, reaching all the way to Kaito.
“Ahhh…you’ve finally come.”
My new Saints. |
Torture Princess
* * *
It was a declaration pregnant with unfathomable madness and a terrifying degree of volition.
In the next instant, crimson and gold flower petals began pouring out from her palms. The two hues swallowed up the Torture Princesses.
Elisabeth tried to summon a torture device, but petals rushed at her hands and lips, sealing them off. Jeanne’s eyes began wandering. She was searching for Deus Ex Machina. Right now, though, it was serving as parts of Izabella’s body. No longer could it come to its master’s aid.
“I see. This falls outside my expectations.”
As she murmured, Jeanne gave a faint laugh.
Those proved to be her final words.
The crimson and gold petals completely engulfed the two Torture Princesses.
Even so, the naked woman refused to release their wrists. Red, capillary-vessel-like tubes tore as she wrenched even the tips of her toes free from the crystal.
Now fully free, she looked up and parted her lips.
Her rows of startlingly white, well-formed teeth came into view.
“Ha-ha… Ah-ha-ha-ha, ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The Saint began laughing uproariously. The sound of her mad laughs tore through the air.
As he shuddered, Kaito got ready to level an attack at her. However, he stopped. He couldn’t sense any power coming from the cackling woman.
She’s just…a normal woman.
She had already transferred the things that had made her into the Suffering Saint.
She’d transferred them into the two Torture Princesses.
The next moment, Kaito heard a voice deep in his eardrum. Hina pressed down on her ears, and Lute gave a small yelp.
It was being conveyed in every imaginable language, in the words of men, of demi-humans, of beastfolk, of animals, of fish, of bugs, even in languages from other worlds. It was transmitted to every living creature in a mysterious form they could all comprehend.
The voice belonged to one who’d been sleeping far, far away, deep in the bowels beneath the Capital.
“Good morning.”
Kaito understood on instinct alone. Freed from its contractor’s order, the first demon had vanished from its cradle.
And when it had, it had transferred into the body of its new contractor: Elisabeth Le Fanu. |
Torture Princess
9
In the Midst of Demise
His voice solemn, Vlad began speaking.
It was no fairy tale. The entire situation had been a farce.
“It all began when the Butcher sold me the demon meat entrusted to him by the Saint.”
With that, the man responsible for part of the world’s reconstruction had set the ball in motion.
By eating the demon meat and collecting the pain of others, Vlad had been able to summon the Kaiser. Then he’d gathered up other people who wanted to summon demons and guided them on their ways. And the demon army fourteen strong had arisen.
At that point, the Butcher’s goal had simply been to have the mighty band of demons overrun the world, then to wake up the Saint once the world was in a state where she could wield the power of restructuring. The reason he’d picked Vlad was likely because Vlad had both the power and the inclination to unify the demons. But then someone had appeared, someone who opposed his dreadful plot.
The woman who’d eaten demon meat, tortured her people, and obtained the power to fight back.
The Torture Princess, peerless sinner that she was—Elisabeth Le Fanu.
Under the orders of the Church, she had begun hunting the fourteen demons.
After hearing that Vlad had been captured, the Butcher had made his way to Elisabeth’s side, then taken stock of the situation.
At around that time, another faction had made their play as well: the alchemist clan that had hidden themselves away long ago. Knowing that the first demon would appear, they devoted many generations to working toward preventing the world from being reconstructed.
Upon seeing the fourteen demons run rampant, they realized that the time was upon them and used the ebony Torture Princess as a reference to create the golden one. However, the fact that their pride and obstinacy led them to entrust matters to their own masterpiece instead of giving the raven-haired Torture Princess their support proved to be a fatal blunder.
Once the Butcher learned of the two Torture Princesses, he changed his plan in order to take advantage of the alchemists’ goal and use it against them. After inviting the Torture Princesses to the World’s End, he sacrificed himself to bring them face-to-face with the Saint. The Grave Keeper, having sensed the Apostle’s plan, got to work as well, and the two Torture Princesses were left with no way to avoid being captured.
And then, finally, the Saint used them as exceptional vessels, transferring the contracts with God and Diablo she bored into their bodies.
“What, then, was the Saint’s true wish?”
The Butcher had originally been following the Saint’s orders and trying to bring about the world’s restructuring. At the last minute, though, his objective changed into transferring the contracts binding the Saint over to them. But those contracts were too much for the Torture Princesses to withstand. Within the next ten days or so, the world wouldn’t even be reconstructed; it would simply meet its demise.
“Given all that, we can deduce that the Saint’s objective wasn’t the restructuring itself. In all likelihood, she merely needed the world to sustain fatal damage from the demons before she could wield God’s power. Only at the time of restructuring could she awaken with the ability to use both God’s and Diablo’s powers as she pleased. And that would also be the only time she could abandon their strength.”
If she abandoned her contracts during the restructuring, when the world was still a blank canvas, everything would undoubtedly perish. But in exchange, she would attain a brief moment of freedom. But by transferring her contracts to the Torture Princesses, she would stretch that moment out into nearly two weeks.
In short, that was all there was to it.
“She cared little for her own survival, nor for the fate of the world. She merely wanted to set down her burden, even if but for a moment. There was nothing more to it, I’d wager.”
She intended to cast aside all the blame and responsibility she’d once shouldered. Back when she’d been carrying out the original restructuring atop the blank canvas of the world, loathing toward all of creation and fear of her own deathlessness must have swelled inside her and eventually turned into madness. That was why she’d set up a time bomb in the new world she’d created.
“The Butcher worked ceaselessly toward bringing about that promised day, deftly manipulating us all the while.”
While Vlad laid out his theory, Kaito didn’t offer a single interjection.
His head was nestled in Hina’s lap, and the rest of his body was lying atop the solemn stone floor.
They had already left the World’s End. Now they were back at Elisabeth’s castle.
Hina, Lute, and Izabella were resting in the castle’s owner’s empty bedroom. Lute, still cradling Izabella in his arms, didn’t stir. He seemed absentminded. The Kaiser had yet to show his form.
Vlad was floating in front of the three of them. His legs were crossed gracefully, and he was silent, his lecture now complete. Kaito remained on his side, not saying anything. Beads of cold sweat were welling up on his forehead. His teeth were clenched tight as he tried to endure the waves of pain coursing through his body. Every few minutes, he lapsed into violent coughs and spat up blood.
As Hina wiped the blood away so it wouldn’t flow back into his trachea, she stroked his brow.
“Please, Master Kaito, get ahold of yourself. Oh, whatever am I to do…?”
“Are you quite all right, my dear successor? Or did perhaps my explanation go to waste?”
“…Don’t worry…about that… I heard…it all—Gah!”
Kaito let out another pained cry. Hina helplessly mopped the sweat off his forehead.
Kaito tried to suppress the pain gushing from within him so he could think Vlad’s explanation over. As he did, another thought faintly drifted to the forefront of his mind. It was what he’d been thinking about as Jeanne wavered over her choice.
Elisabeth, the black Torture Princess, showed no signs of bearing regrets, nor did she ever try to cast aside her sins. But what about Jeanne?
If she did bear regrets, what would she be left with after the world was saved?
If she won’t have anything left, then…
…then at that point, what had she really even saved?
This was no doubt an example of someone who’d erred in their choice, just like he’d said.
The Saint had carried out restructuring while unable to cast aside her regrets. And because of that, she’d dragged the whole world in and crumbled it. No person could become the Suffering Saint out of a sense of duty and obligation alone. But…
She doesn’t deserve my sympathy. Screw sympathy, and screw her, goddammit!
Spitting up another mouthful of blood, Kaito scratched at the stone floor. His fingernails split as he roared within his head.
GIVE ME MY ELISABETH BACK.
There was, of course, no way that his scathing, soundless scream could reach her. The World’s End was distant. However, a different voice rose up as though in reply.
The cliff-top castle was surrounded by trees and far from any human settlements. Yet, in spite of that, screams and laughter filled the air around it.
However, it wasn’t humans that the voices were coming from.
The world outside had become a living hell.
Demonic underlings laughed as they soared past the window. One monkey-like underling peeked inside.
Kaito’s eyes were still closed as he snapped his fingers. His blade swung precisely, cleaving off the underling’s wings. It let out a loud scream as it began tumbling down. In the space of an instant, Kaito forgot all about it.
Elisabeth…
As he continued coughing up blood, his thoughts turned to the events that had just occurred.
The gut-wrenching spectacle played out once more before his eyes.
First, the petals engulfing Elisabeth and Jeanne all vanished. The two of them suddenly found themselves free. And at a glance, their bodies seemed the same as ever. Their faces contorted in confusion.
Then, though, without warning, the horrible transformation began.
“…Rgh!”
“What’s the matter, miss? I—Ow!”
A single strand of dark-red blood had begun running down Elisabeth’s shoulder, and the same had happened to Jeanne’s arm. It was like they’d each been stabbed with a sharp needle. But no one had attacked them. Their skin had been impaled by something hard and pointy yet, at the same time, also soft from within.
A black feather peeked out from Elisabeth’s skin, and a white feather did the same from Jeanne’s.
It was immediately clear that something was wrong. After all, feathers had just sprouted from human flesh.
“This is…”
“…Impossible.”
The two of them exchanged a glance. But they didn’t have time to leisurely discuss the phenomenon assailing them.
Accompanied by a loud popping noise, another feather protruded out from each of them.
It was as though the two of them were down pillows, and their stuffing was bursting through their cloth. Feathers began tearing out from within them, one after another. Streaks of red blood once more made their way across the Torture Princesses’ bodies.
Kaito was struck with an ominous premonition. A moment later, that premonition came to pass.
Pop! Pop! Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop!
Pop!
Just hearing it was enough to evoke the image of goose bumps rising up in succession. The patterns of erosion resembled vegetation budding. Feathers began sprouting from all over their bodies, like carelessly strewn seeds indiscriminately tearing apart the earth. They flew out from their cheeks, their backs, their eyes, their lips, and even their gums.
Elisabeth’s and Jeanne’s bodies wordlessly writhed. They were clearly in incredible pain. In the blink of an eye, the two Torture Princesses had come to resemble newborn chicks.
Elisabeth and Jeanne were being forcibly turned into something foreign.
The moment that fact hit him, Kaito recovered from his state of shock. The same seemed to be true of Hina.
Letting out loud cries, the two of them dashed forward.
“Elisabeth!”
“Lady Elisabeth!”
“Stay awaaaaaaaaaaaay!”
When they did, they were met with a bestial roar.
As she rebuked them, Elisabeth coughed up blood.
Kaito and Hina reflexively froze in place. The next moment, the countless feathers sprouting from the Torture Princesses extended with explosive force, each one of the black and white quills growing to massive proportions. Then the two sets merged together, and they formed a pair of contrasting wings. However, the wings slumped to the ground, unable to support their own weight. They writhed there grotesquely.
Eventually, they gave up on trying to fly. Instead, the two damp wings pushed off against the ground like a set of arms. At their center, Elisabeth and Jeanne rose into the air.
Then, supported by the inverted wings, they hung there, suspended.
As they did, crimson and gold flower petals began gently descending. They spread out through the air, as though they had come to replace the no-longer-falling snow. As he gazed upon the cruelly beautiful spectacle, Kaito’s eyes widened.
The petals were pouring out from within the Torture Princesses’ lips.
Several of the thin red and gold sheets wound together, taking on the shape of full flowers and decorating Elisabeth and Jeanne. Then thorny briars wound around their bodies like snakes, binding their masters’ bodies and refusing to let them go.
Finally, the thorns wrapped around their heads like crowns.
The two of them hung in the air, crucified. They looked almost noble.
And at the same time, they looked like sinners, kings who lorded over all of creation.
The Saint still hadn’t stopped laughing. With her maddened fit as a backdrop, Kaito was reminded of what the Grave Keeper had said.
“Hallelujah.”
So this transformation’s what she was alluding to?
As he watched the changes the two Torture Princesses were going through, Kaito came to understand just how outstanding of a vessel the Saint had been. The fact that she’d been able to put Diablo to sleep, shelter God within her body, and still maintain her human form was nothing short of a miracle. In truth, her ability to keep the two of them from running amok was a feat so impressive, no words could do it justice. But now, she’d given up on doing so, and the result was the scene before them.
Whether he wanted to or not, Kaito immediately understood. What he was looking at was calamity incarnate.
Those two pillars of black and crimson, white and gold, would bring about an end to everything.
There’s no way… The world can’t just be ending before my eyes…can it?
For the first time in over a decade, Kaito was struck by an urge to scream and cry at his own powerlessness. The despair of it all made him want to just topple to his knees, tremble, and start wailing. Terror that no living creature could overcome seized him and refused to let go. But Kaito gritted his teeth and forced down all those emotions. He took a step forward. When he did, Hina called out in a panic.
“Master Kaito, you mustn’t! It’s dangerous!”
“I know that. But I can’t just watch this happen.”
Wallowing in terror and despair would accomplish nothing. Even in the face of his all-encompassing demise, he refused to stand by powerlessly and grieve. After all…
…Just who is it in the middle of all that?
Kaito looked up high in the sky. A single woman was hanging there, her eyes closed.
The person who’d saved him, the girl who had laughed so innocently, was being crucified.
She wasn’t the Saint. In the beginning, she hadn’t even been the Torture Princess.
She was Elisabeth Le Fanu.
The woman Kaito Sena admired most.
“Elisabeth!”
Kaito screamed her name. Then, after shaking off the trepidation running through his body, he dashed toward the pillar.
Because Kaito knew something. Screw terror. Despair? And the end of the world? So what?
The thought of losing you is way scarier than any of that.
Kaito Sena had sworn that, until the day he died, he would stay by Elisabeth Le Fanu’s side.
And he had no intention of breaking that promise.
Kaito finally arrived at the base of Elisabeth’s pillar. He reached out to grab one of the briars winding around her wing. His skin tore, and pain shot through his body. It felt like he was clutching at barbed wire. But he didn’t let go. Lifting his feet up onto the briar, he began trying to climb the wing.
His beastly hand and his human both ran red as he tried to get closer to the captured woman.
“Elisabeth! …Rgh!”
Suddenly, the feathers and thorns proliferated, nearly swallowing Kaito up. At the last moment, though, someone yanked him backward by the nape of his neck and saved him. Kaito was about to call out Hina’s name. But he was mistaken.
When he turned around, he found someone wholly unexpected there.
“…Kaiser?”
“Your foe may be the eminent Diablo, but so long as you are my contractor, I forbid you from allowing yourself to be unceremoniously consumed, O unworthy master of mine! To think, though, that it would come to this… I’d stayed on the sidelines, thinking the situation trifling, but this, truly, is proof that I was a fool! Ah, how vexing!”
As he bayed, the Kaiser flung Kaito into the air. Then the supreme hound vanished. Hina, who’d rushed up close, barely managed to catch Kaito. Large tears were welling up in her emerald eyes.
Because she’d understood how he felt, she’d been too slow to stop him.
She squeezed him tight with all her might.
“Master Kaito, I know how you feel! I…I, too, desperately don’t want to let Elisabeth go! But please, you have to endure it. You’re so wounded…”
“Hina… I’m sorry. I just…”
As he rubbed Hina’s back, Kaito took another look at their surroundings. At some point, Vlad had moved over to where the two pillars stood. His arms were spread wide, and his eyes were glittering as he gazed at the Torture Princesses’ transformations.
“It’s magnificent… It’s the peak of beauty, the apex of ugliness… Truly, ‘magnificent’ is the only way to describe it.”
His face was as innocent as a child watching a meteor shower. However, his expression suddenly took a more serious turn.
As he began rapidly coming back to his senses, Vlad started thinking.
“…Still, though… Hmm…”
While he did, the Torture Princesses continued transforming. Their engorged wings and briars slipped down under the icy ground, eroding it away. The milky-white sky quickly grew muddied as well. The rainbow film froze over into a leaden gray.
The God and Diablo pillars spread out their arms, ever wider, ever farther.
“Is this…the end?”
Hearing a trembling voice, Kaito looked down. Lute was cowering on the ground, his tail completely curled up. However, he was holding Izabella firmly.
Humans’ sensory perception was weak, so the visceral despair Lute felt was probably many times greater than theirs.
Words tumbled weakly from Lute’s mouth as he stared at the growing horrors before them.
“At this rate… At this rate, everything will come to an end. How can we stand up to such a thing?”
Lute’s right.
Kaito agreed with him. God and Diablo were both taboo entities, beings that mankind wasn’t meant to come in contact with.
Both of them transformed the land into a place wholly uninhabitable by living creatures, as though it were only natural for them to do so. Eventually, the very world would crumble, unable to bear the strain.
The two pillars grew at a steady pace. However, they suddenly quavered, and the transformation came to a temporary halt.
The briars writhed, and a trembling arm thrust its way out from each pillar. The Torture Princesses had forced their bodies to move. Their eyes still closed, they tore at what bound them, their own skin and all.
Then they raised their arms high, and their soundless voices rang out.
Begone from this place. Make haste.
Please run, Fools.
At the same time, they also snapped their fingers. Black darkness and white light flashed, and crimson and gold flower petals started raining down.
They then formed a cylindrical wall with Kaito and the others at its center. A teleportation circle was being etched in the ice.
“…!”
On impulse, Kaito tried to dive out of it. He needed to remain by Elisabeth’s side. However, he found himself unable to move. One of Lute’s arms and both of Hina’s were holding him back.
Normally, when Kaito’s violent emotions reached a certain threshold, he would return to a sound state of mind. However, the situation was so abnormal that that function of his was broken. He raged like a wounded beast and screamed.
“Let go of me! Elisabeth is—I can’t just leave her alone like that!”
“I understand your loyalty and affection for your master, I truly do! But even if you hate me for it, I won’t let you go! What do you hope to accomplish by staying here? Think of your wife!”
“But—!”
“…Master Kaito, please listen to me.”
Suddenly, Hina whispered, her voice gentle and calm. She wasn’t crying anymore.
Her beautiful, clear emerald eyes were fixed on Kaito alone.
“If that is your answer, Master Kaito, if you say that that is your sole wish, then I will release you.”
“Ms. Hina?”
“But if you do, then I will remain here as well.”
Hina made her declaration calmly. Then she gently unbound her arms to tell Kaito that the choice was his.
Kaito gulped. Hina took a step back, then smiled at him.
“It would be my pleasure to remain with my dear Lady Elisabeth and die alongside you, my beloved.”
There was no reproach in her eyes and no anger. Only pure, unadulterated love.
If Kaito wanted to stay behind, then she would no doubt die at his side without a single word of regret.
And because of that, Kaito stopped. Because of that, he was able to stop.
Then he deliberately took a long, deep breath. The strained energy that had built up in his body dissipated. He went limp, then collapsed backward. When he did, Hina made sure to catch him.
As he lay in her arms, he let out a weak murmur.
“…I’m sorry. I’m good now. God, I’m supposed to be your husband, but I—”
“It’s no matter. Anything you hold precious is just as precious to me.”
Hina gently stroked Kaito’s head. As he clung to her warmth to maintain his sanity, Kaito’s thoughts turned.
Right now, there’s nothing we can do here. We need to get a fresh start.
At this rate, the world really would end. The leisurely time for the various races to stay on guard of one another and probe for advantages was over. Right now, they needed every person possible to pool their power together so they could come up with a countermeasure.
And that was why Kaito and the others needed to leave. The world needed people who had witnessed the horrible truth. Right now, information was of the essence. As those thoughts swirled around in his head, Kaito looked up through the interweaving light and petals.
At the far end of his vision sat Elisabeth’s tragic figure, her eyes closed.
“Wh…?”
Even so, part of him still wanted to run to her.
Hina seemed to have sensed something as she released him from her arms. Kaito tottered a few steps forward. Then he extended his bloodstained hand to the edge of the teleportation circle and let out a fitful shout.
“Don’t go… Don’t go, Elisabeth!”
The hell do I mean, “Don’t go”?! We’re the ones leaving!
As he shouted to Elisabeth, he shouted at himself internally. He was the one fleeing, not her. Even knowing that, though, he couldn’t stop the nonsensical words from pouring out of his throat.
“You’re the one who called me, Elisabeth! You’re the one who called me to this world! You ordered me to become your servant, didn’t you? And you’re gonna go anyway? You’re gonna go off all on your own anyway?!”
Blood dripped down his fist. Tears dripped down his cheek.
Weeping with all his might, he screamed again.
“Please, Elisabeth, don’t leave me! I don’t want you to go!”
Kaito reached out his hand as he pleaded with the person he could no longer reach.
“Please don’t leave me,” he implored her like a child. “Not now that I’ve finally met you,” he cried.
“I’d rather watch the world get destroyed than lose you!”
Then, at the far end of his vision, Elisabeth opened her eyes.
“…Huh?”
For a second, Kaito doubted his sight, thinking it nothing more than a fanciful delusion. But it was true. Her crimson eyes were assuredly focused on him. Her lips silently moved. What poured out from them was blood. In what no doubt caused her a great deal of pain, she contorted her lips into a smile.
And when she did, she whispered.
“…………You utter fool.”
It was a heartrending, nostalgic voice.
Elisabeth then reached out her trembling arm, as though trying to grasp Kaito’s palm in reply.
Briars wound around it, trying to stop her. But Elisabeth resisted them. She extended her hand straight forward. But Kaito’s palm was too distant. After displaying another abrupt smile, Elisabeth lowered her arm.
Instead, she now snapped her fingers once more. Her fingers broke. Their skin tore, and their bones fractured.
Yet, even so, her whispers had a strange warmth to them.
“You don’t want this; you don’t want that, eh? Well, if you despise being alone so badly, then I shall grant it to you.
’Tis my loss, O peerless fool. I give unto you my everything. Do with it as you please.”
Crimson petals flitted through the air, then coalesced into a sphere. It soared away from Diablo’s pillar and floated gently through the sky. Then, all at once, the petals rushed between Kaito’s lips. His mouth filled with the sharp stink of rust and the taste of flesh.
Understanding intuitively what it was, Kaito widened his eyes. He looked up at Elisabeth.
Her voice unimaginably kind, she went on.
“Drink them down or spit them all up, the choice is yours to make. But do try to live on, Kaito.
And when you do, save the world. Your strength is equal to the task, as is your needless determination.
You are the greatest fool this world has to offer—and you are my dim-witted servant, my pride and joy.”
Her voice sounded almost like someone trying to cheer up a dejected child.
Kaito stared straight at Elisabeth. Then, with a gulp, he swallowed the petals down.
The moment he did, he clutched at his chest, and his knees crumpled. He began violently heaving up blood.
“Master Kaito!”
“S-Sir Kaito!”
“Geh… Urgh, ugh, gah, geh, blegh!”
As he heard Hina and Lute cry out, Kaito collapsed in pain. Despite that, though, he looked up. He was weeping and coughing up blood, but he looked straight at Elisabeth. He lifted his trembling arm.
Then he stuck his thumb up to say, Don’t worry. I received it.
Both of their faces were haggard, but they exchanged a smile.
Elisabeth, having used all her strength, closed her eyes back up.
In truth, she’d probably hit her limit long ago. She quickly lost consciousness. Jeanne’s eyes were still closed as well. However, the teleportation circle activated automatically. Kaito and the others had their vision covered by compound walls of crimson and gold, darkness and light. In the final moment before the world faded away, though, Kaito witnessed something.
The pillars had begun undergoing even more radical change. A flock of black birds took off from Diablo’s.
To be more specific, they weren’t birds at all. They had a variety of shapes and forms, but every one of them was an underling.
Amid the growing tempest of pain raging within his body, a thought crossed Kaito’s mind.
Oh man… The world’s gonna become hell, isn’t it?
And the way things were going, everything was going to end. |
Torture Princess
“We need to inform Lady Vyade Ula Forstlast of what we’ve learned.”
Back in Elisabeth’s castle, Lute gave a quiet murmur. Odds were good that his subordinates had made it back safely and given their report on the chaotic situation, but Lute was the only one of them who’d seen the pillars up close.
He needed to go give an accurate report. It was now clear that he hadn’t just been in a daze—he, too, had been thinking hard.
“If things continue on like this, the world really will cease to exist. I can’t simply sit quietly and wait for it to meet its end. We’ll need to get in contact with the demi-humans…the humans, even, too, and come up with a plan together.”
Lute squeezed Izabella tight. She was still asleep, blissfully unaware of what was going on. He gazed at her mechanically supplemented face, then whispered so as not to wake her.
“And as for Ms. Izabella Vicker, I was thinking of leaving her in my wife’s care. The two of them are on good terms, and as her body is right now, Ms. Izabella might be in need of my wife’s skills as a healer. I can promise you that no harm will come to her under my wife’s watch. Does that sound reasonable?”
“Yeah, that sounds good. It would probably give Jeanne some peace of—Geh!”
While he was replying, Kaito heaved up even more blood.
Lute’s eyes went wide with alarm. The amount of red liquid spilled out atop the stone floor was far from normal.
Can humans really survive after losing that much blood?
Lute found himself bewildered. He’d been told that Kaito had a homunculus body, but even so, he still needed blood to maintain his existence. Now, though, Kaito was down on his hands and knees, and Hina was rubbing his back. Lute called out worriedly to the back of Kaito’s head.
“Sir Kaito, what’s the matter? Ever since we returned from the World’s End, you’ve been coughing up blood incessantly. Are you certain you’re all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine… I’m fine. I’m getting used to it. I’ll get better at it soon.”
“Better at what?” wondered Lute. But before he could ask, strange noises drowned him out.
Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw!
One of the noises was high-pitched, and the rest were monstrous. Upon inspection, it was a group of underlings chasing around one of the Church’s communication devices. All of them, the white orb and the winged, boar-headed underlings alike, were charging toward the castle.
Lute frantically leaped away from the window. As he did, their assailants all flew into the bedroom.
After carefully setting Izabella down on the floor, Lute drew his sword. Kaito was in no state to fight, and Hina no doubt wanted to stay by her master’s side. Lute steeled himself to face the group of foes on his own.
The time has come for me to repay the debts I’ve incurred!
As that thought raced through his mind, Kaito, who was still down on the floor, weakly raised his arm. Then he snapped his wounded fingers.
“La (become).”
And with that, ten blades appeared in midair.
Dozens of silver flashes filled the air. Each of the blades had silently traveled across the room several times.
The underlings were sliced to ribbons. Their diced-up flesh toppled to the ground, and their organs all spilled out.
Faced with that overwhelming display of power, Lute found himself at a loss for words. Still holding his sword at the ready, he stared at Kaito in astonishment. Kaito himself hadn’t even watched his foes die. He was down on his hands and knees, coughing up blood once more.
Lute was overcome with shock. Hina was at a loss for words, too. Only Vlad laughed.
That was just how abnormal Kaito’s deed had been. As he was normally, it would have been wholly beyond him.
Without power on par with the Torture Princess’s, carrying out that kind of unilateral slaughter would be impossible.
“Sir Kaito, what in the world—?”
“Over here… C’mon, over here. Good boy.”
Kaito raised his bloodstained, beastly arm, and the rescued communication device obeyed his summons and landed on his palm. Its feathers then tumbled off, revealing its glossy surface and the unencrypted runes thereon. Historically, Kaito hadn’t been able to read them. Now, though, he nodded casually and rose to his feet.
“Perfect. It was a message from the Church… Looks like Vyade Ula Forstlast is already putting stuff into motion off the reports your men gave her. And the demi-humans who were at the World’s End went home and started mobilizing, too. Underlings are sprouting up all over. And because of the initial info the returnees brought back, the Church is getting bombarded with reproach and mistrust. The message was about a summit the three races are planning on holding together. Looks like things are moving fast, which is good. Sounds like at least someone over there knows what they’re doing.”
Kaito laughed. When he did, though, blood came gushing from his mouth. His black uniform was stained a wet crimson.
As blood dripped all over his body, he righted his posture. Then he chucked the communication device to the side. The violence of that action seemed strangely reminiscent of Elisabeth.
“The funny thing is, the sender was La Christoph. Which is weird, ’cause there’s no way the Church hasn’t written off Elisabeth as a traitor. For him to send her a message, man, he must have had some pretty strong thoughts about Izabella getting locked up. Hell, he even sent us coordinates. And hey, if we’ve got an invitation, it’d be rude not to go, right?”
“Go? Where to?”
“The summit, where else? Time to crash a party. I’ll handle the teleportation circle.”
That was just one more thing he casually mentioned that he wasn’t supposed to be able to do. The soles of his shoes loudly clapped as he began walking. The long hem of his uniform flowed out behind him. At some point, its inside had been dyed scarlet.
Then, his voice the very picture of composure, Kaito made his bold statement.
“We’re going to a conference about how to keep everyone alive. Let’s walk in with our heads held high, ’kay?” |
Torture Princess
10
The Mad King’s Decree
Mankind’s royal castle had gotten caught up when the demonic mass of flesh had attacked the castle, and it was currently still destroyed.
In fact, the Capital as a whole had sustained serious damages, and the plans to rebuild it hadn’t even been fully formed yet.
Even so, if one was to compare the relative strengths of humanity, the beastfolk, and the demi-humans, humanity firmly held the edge in both land ownership and military might at their disposal. Normally, out of consideration for that fact, the Church’s headquarters would be offered up as an alternative. At the moment, though, mistrust of the Church was surging within the beastfolk and demi-human ranks. As a result, both races had vetoed humanity’s proposal.
As a compromise, the Three Kings’ palace was chosen as the meeting place.
At Kaito’s suggestion, Vlad had temporarily hidden his form, and the other three of them headed for the palace.
Using the coordinates that the communication device had left for them, they carried out their teleportation. Azure flower petals rose up, formed a cylindrical wall, then collapsed. Lute squinted as he looked up at the palace’s familiar form, and Kaito let out a cry of admiration.
“Damn, that’s impressive.”
“That it is. We strive to live in harmony with nature, and the greatest manifestation of that belief is the Three Kings’ palace—the World Tree.”
Lute puffed up with pride as he spoke. While he was too polite to say it out loud, he no doubt considered the Three Kings’ palace to be far grander than humanity’s royal castle.
It was a colossal tree, towering before their eyes.
It was ancient, and the tree in its entirety was releasing sacred energy. Because of that, the underlings would have a difficult time getting near. Its gnarled branches blotted out the sky, their cracked bark so stiff, it was hard to imagine anyone living within it. In truth, though, cavities and tunnels ran freely throughout the World Tree’s interior. It almost resembled an ant nest. Not only beastfolk but humans, too, were able to move about comfortably within its confines. The Three Kings lived in its lowest layer, beside the lake that seeped out from the World Tree’s base.
Having received word from Vyade, the gatekeeper led Lute and the others inside.
Under normal circumstances, only beastfolk who’d gone through special screening were allowed to stay within the World Tree. At the moment, though, it was crowded with people from every race. Those who hadn’t been allowed in the meeting chamber could be seen all over the place.
Several beastfolk and demi-human soldiers were enjoying their rare reunion and exchanging ardent handshakes. A group of exhausted paladins were keeled over atop chairs of mushroom. There were people wearing executioner-like outfits, too, staring forcefully at their surroundings. The demi-humans in front of them were meeting their gazes head-on.
“Yeesh, looks like everyone brought more people than they know what to do with. And they say three’s a crowd.”
Despite the tension in the air, Kaito strode forward as casually as if he was going for a stroll.
With every step he took, the unrest around him grew stronger. Even battle-hardened soldiers receded in shock as he passed by them. The wariness and animosity they felt toward him were all too clear.
Who in the world is that? What are they? they all wondered.
That spoke to just how abnormal Kaito Sena currently was. Not only was he covered in blood, but he was clad in determination so thick, it was visible. And yet, in spite of all that, he was utterly calm. Some of the people around him even recognized Kaito as the Kaiser’s contractor. But not one of them could work up the courage to cry out and stop him.
Behind him, Lute trembled in concern.
He’s clearly no ordinary human… I mean, he was always the Kaiser’s contractor, but now… Just how did he change so absolutely?
As he gazed at Kaito’s imposing stature, Lute narrowed his eyes.
He seems almost like…the Torture Princess herself.
Knowing nothing of Lute’s doubts, though, Kaito just kept casually walking.
Suddenly, some of the onlookers called to Lute.
“Captain! Thank goodness you’re all right!”
“Why, it’s you all!”
It was the subordinates he’d parted from at the World’s End. After the rejoicing over their successful reunion, Lute learned a few new things. For example, the Three Kings weren’t planning on attending the meeting. They’d said that they had no intentions of leaving their rooms upon the coast of the lake by the World Tree’s base. They seemed determined to continue their policy of not reigning or governing.
Just like always, they were leaving the meeting in the imperial family’s hands.
“I see. It’s not that I don’t understand how the Three Kings feel, but…”
“Yeah, it doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
As Lute mumbled beside him, Kaito spoke assuredly. In truth, Lute felt the same way. And the entirety of Vyade Ula Forstlast’s private army no doubt shared the same misgivings. After all, there were loud voices among the imperial family who sought to expand their borders.
The meeting had probably already taken a hairy turn.
On their way to the meeting site, Lute and the others took a small detour and dropped by the hospital ward.
After flying off from the World’s End, the underlings had laid waste to everything in their path.
The damage the humans had suffered had been especially severe, but the beastfolk imperial family’s villas had come under attack as well. Because of that, all of Vyade’s medical staff had taken refuge in the World Tree.
Lute rushed into the room his men had pointed out to him. When he did, the space he found himself in was filled with flowers whose aroma served as a disinfectant. A large number of beds were systematically lined up, and an alarming number of them were occupied.
Vyade’s personal army had been away, so her court ladies and gardeners had suffered serious injuries.
Lute ground his teeth as he lamented his absence. One after another, however, the wounded sat up and called out to him warmly.
“Sir Lute, congratulations on your safe return.”
“Quick, someone, someone call her over!”
He frantically called out for a particular healer. However, the goatwoman with her mouth covered by a sanitary cloth prioritized treating the page before her. After reaching a stopping point, she stood up, then calmly walked over to him. Her voice sounded disaffected, but anyone who knew Lute’s wife could make out the notes of affection in her tone.
“I was sure you’d be all right, but to see you so thoroughly uninjured is rather pleasant, Lute. It looks like I married a good one… I suppose your return can hardly be considered flawless, though.”
“Of course, Ain, I would never dream of worrying you by getting injured. But I…I’ve seen things. I need to go give my report to Lady Vyade Ula Forstlast. While I’m doing that, could I ask you to look after Ms. Izabella?”
“Izabella? Ms. Izabella Vicker? I am rather fond of her, true, but wouldn’t the Church’s healers be better equipped to—? Oh, goodness.”
Lute had silently held out Izabella to her. As she gazed at Izabella’s half-mechanized body, Lute’s wife, Ain, immediately sensed just how complicated the situation was.
She nodded, then turned around. Her voice was as matter-of-fact as her steps were quick.
“She looks to have burned through a great deal of her stamina. Let her rest here. There you go, gently.”
Lute followed her orders and set Izabella down on a bed in a quarantined section of the ward for the severely injured. Now they wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing her mechanized body.
Ain then quickly got to work inspecting Izabella all over. After checking her esophagus and making sure it was functioning properly, she poured a decoction down her throat. Then she started applying ointment to the places where metal and skin joined together.
After a little while, Izabella’s breathing grew steady. With a kindly look on her face, Ain stroked her mechanized cheek. Then, though, she suddenly whirled around and stared straight at Kaito.
“That should put Ms. Izabella at ease for now, but…you don’t seem quite well, either, do you?”
“Who, me? I mean, I guess I’m covered in blood, but I’m not really injured anywhere. Thanks for your concern, but I’m fine.”
“It isn’t a matter of being injured or not. You seem like yourself right now, yet, at the same time, you seem like someone else.”
Lute gasped a little. He, too, had thought the same thing, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask Kaito about it.
Ain’s gaze stayed firmly fixed on Kaito. Not flinching, she probed even deeper.
“I can’t quite put it into words, but…I find that fact rather alarming, no?”
A heavy silence descended upon them for a moment. Kaito blinked. Hina looked down but said nothing.
The tension caused Lute’s tail to puff up. A few seconds later, though, Kaito burst into laughter.
“Ha-ha-ha, you and me both. Man, Lute, you found yourself a good wife.”
“Errr, yes, I’m more than aware… Ow, Ain, don’t step on my feet!”
“Now is hardly the time for that kind of talk, dear. And as for you, you’re certain you’re all right?”
“Yeah… I mean, you’re right. But I’m fine… I’m still me, after all.”
Sir Kaito is dodging the question.
Lute could feel it. Perhaps Kaito realized it, too, as he gave an awkward smile. Upon seeing it, Lute felt a slight tinge of relief. That good-natured expression was undoubtedly Kaito Sena’s.
Suddenly, a thought crossed Lute’s mind.
Perhaps… Perhaps I ought to make sure to remember that smile.
It would be best if he made sure to remember it, no matter what happened.
He didn’t quite know why, but Lute was certain of that.
After leaving the temporary infirmary behind them, Lute and the others began making their way toward the meeting hall once more.
Eventually, after traveling down a long, wide hallway, they reached its sole set of double doors.
The doors were made from a part of the World Tree itself, and flowers associated with the Three Kings and the various members of the imperial family were delicately carved into its surface. Two muscular lionmen stood in front of its gorgeous design.
Upon seeing Lute, the doorkeepers saluted. As they did, they crossed their spears and firmly barred the door. One of them called out briskly to Lute.
“Excellent work, Captain Lute. Lady Vyade Ula Forstlast told us of your expedition. However, the conference has already begun. We cannot allow any to enter, no matter who they may be. You can give your report after the meeting is complete. Until then, you can make yourself at home in the antechamber.”
“What, it started already? Hey, perfect!”
Before Lute could reply, though, Kaito poked his head out from behind him.
When they saw his bloodstained figure, the lionfolk gatekeepers’ expressions contorted in bald suspicion.
“Wait, who is—?”
“La (take a nap).”
Kaito snapped his fingers. When he did, a pair of small blades quietly appeared behind the two gatekeepers, then slammed into the backs of their necks. Concussed, the two of them toppled wordlessly to the ground.
As he rushed over and caught one of them in his arms, Lute directed a quiet shout Kaito’s way.
“Sir Kaito, what do you think you’re doing?! There’s no need for such violence!”
“Don’t worry. I controlled it well, if I do say so myself. They’ll be up before you know it.”
His voice calm, Kaito reached toward the doors. As he did, Lute suddenly noticed the other collapsed figures throughout the corridor. Evidently, Kaito had dealt with all the patrolling guards in the same manner.
All in that one moment?
As Lute tried to come to terms with that fact, he suddenly heard the sound of meat sizzling.
Panicking, he looked back toward the doors. When he did, he discovered that smoke had billowed up from Kaito’s hand as he’d grabbed its handle. Despite the fact that his own flesh was burning, though, Kaito wore a thin smile on his face.
“Damn, that’s a decent barrier they’ve got going on. But still, for it to be able to burn me… I must be more wounded than I thought, huh?”
In the blink of an eye, Kaito’s hand had been hideously burned. Its flesh was seared and its skin was peeling off. Yet, he still held on tight. Hina made no move to stop him. Sizzling blood and bodily fluids ran down the door’s handle.
Around it, azure petals and darkness raged like a storm.
Then the sound of something splitting rang out.
When it did, the door exploded open from within.
The gazes of everyone present—human, beastfolk, demi-human royalty, aristocrats, and clergymen alike—all fell onto Kaito.
“’Scuse the interruption. Here I am, the Torture Princess’s representative.”
Kaito, for his part, replied with a savage, villainous smile.
Practically everyone present was utterly dumbfounded. Vyade Ula Forstlast and La Christoph merely nodded, though, as if they’d seen this coming.
In the next moment, a number of swords were noisily unsheathed and pointed Kaito’s way. The guards had all drawn their weapons at once.
Their response was prompt, as one would expect. At the same time, one of the Church’s high priests called out.
“Such insolence! What business could the Kaiser’s contractor possibly have with us?!”
The guards’ murderous stares bore down on Kaito. As they did, a shrill noise filled the air.
One after another, the guards’ sword blades and spearheads went spinning into the air. Hina’s halberd was magically enhanced and glowing blue, and she’d used it to lop them off. After fully swinging it, she stooped down low like an animal.
Then she calmly looked up. The guards were frozen in surprise. She turned her jeweled emerald gaze on them.
“You people have no idea. No idea what he gained. No idea what he lost. Such insolence.”
Her voice was quiet and cold. Faced with her stern demeanor, everyone else gasped in fear.
As they did, Kaito loudly clapped his hands together. After getting everyone’s attention, he spread his arms out wide.
“Now, if you would all be kind enough to settle down. La Christoph sent me a message about this meeting, and Vyade knows me as well. Furthermore, I serve the Torture Princess, the strongest weapon at the Church’s disposal. I feel like that qualifies me to be here. I’m not gonna leave, but I’m also not gonna get in your way. Feel free to carry on.”
Kaito casually rattled off the names of the authority figures he was acquainted with.
Lute’s face went pale, and just as he’d suspected, accusatory glances rained down on the parties in question. However, the third imperial princess of the forest and the astoundingly resolute saint replied nonchalantly.
“I ordered Lute to inform me of what happened at the World’s End. The events that took place there were the root of all evil, the reason we find ourselves gathered here today. If he deems Kaito Sena a necessary witness, then I stand by his decision.”
“It’s true. I did, in fact, send for the Torture Princess. After the uproar at the plaza, it became evident that she and Izabella Vicker discovered something down in the depths of the royal tomb. Afterward, the Grave Keeper mobilized the paladins and set off for the World’s End. They should be able to clear up the suspicions the demi-humans have leveled at us, and as such have an obligation to testify.”
Their responses were met with a number of angry bellows. Despite the turmoil, though, Kaito flippantly snapped his fingers. Azure petals and black darkness swirled. This time, it was the mages who stood at the ready, but all he did was create a chair. It was the exact same extravagant chair as the one Vlad had summoned in the past. Kaito took a seat.
Then he haughtily placed his arms atop the armrests and crossed his legs. When he spoke, his voice was utterly devoid of fear.
“Go ahead, carry on. The world’s gonna get destroyed if you don’t hurry, right?”
Kaito’s words had a certain truth to them. Furthermore, the sole present saint had endorsed his attendance. And in any case, it wasn’t as though they had any way to expel someone powerful enough to destroy the barrier.
The room gradually settled down. Then, reluctantly, they resumed the meeting.
And thus, the Kaiser’s contractor, the enemy of humanity, was added to the discussion that would determine the fate of the world.
“It’s true, we have no time. Those two pillars sprouted up at the World’s End, and the underlings coming from the black one are destroying everything in their path. At this rate, all our people will perish. Given the current situation, the chances that the restructuring the Church is so fixated on will actually take place seem rather low.”
“…What, that’s as far as you guys have gotten?”
Upon hearing the beastfolk official’s speech, Kaito muttered to himself. Apparently, the Church was still placing their faith in the restructuring. But when he thought about it, he realized that he and his group were the only ones to have talked with the Apostle or seen the Saint’s madness firsthand.
It was no wonder that there were those who viewed the appearances of the two pillars as a divine miracle and a sign that the restructuring was imminent.
Consequently, the meeting had reached an impasse. The discord between humanity and their Church and the other two races was only getting worse. Even now, the high priest was objecting to the official’s proclamation.
“You people don’t share our faith, so you may find it difficult to understand. But we know that the promised day spoken of in legend is at hand. The devout faithful will be welcomed into the new world. You all may lack that qualification, but I’d ask you to kindly avoid gnashing your teeth and referring to it as the end.”
“I see. Then let’s suppose that the current situation is, in fact, part of the restructuring you all are so keen on. Can we then take it that this is what you wanted, that you were the ones who brought this about?”
The next individual spoke in a thorny tone. Kaito turned to look at its source. It was a foxwoman with silken red fur and a beguiling smile spread across her face. Upon hearing her antagonistic response, Vyade called out to reprove her.
“Dear sister, shouldn’t we be less concerned with carrying out investigations and more with coordinating our strategies?”
“Be quiet, would you, Vyade? What do you think we stand to accomplish if we don’t know who’s to blame? And we have such a convenient intruder, too. Perhaps it’s high time I divulge a piece of information I’ve been keeping.”
The woman’s voice dripped with honey. She was likely the first imperial princess, the one who was focused on expanding the beastfolk territories.
The men’s clothing that she wore suited her well. She leaned back in her chair, then crossed her legs in the same manner Kaito had.
“We’ve already heard from the demi-humans about the horribly transfigured paladin corpses they discovered. As it so happens, they weren’t the only ones who did.”
“…What are you getting at?”
“Immediately after the underlings started appearing and Vyade gave her report, I dispatched several elite members of my private army to the World’s End. Over two-thirds of them died, but their results were more than satisfactory. They brought back the corpses of several transformed paladins, as well as a cackling woman. I don’t know much about the woman, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? It all reeks of the Church’s involvement.”
“…!”
The members on the Church’s side were visibly shocked. But it wasn’t because the first imperial princess had called them out. As far as they were concerned, the restructuring was already under way. Having their wrongdoings pointed out would hardly affect them at this point. But the captured woman, on the other hand, was a different story altogether.
If she really was the Saint, then it meant that the Church had had their most revered person stolen away by the enemy. But that wasn’t how the first imperial princess interpreted their distress. Her smile deepened triumphantly as she went on.
“If this situation, if the appearance of the two pillars, is the result of you people seeking restructuring…then how exactly do you intend to make reparations?”
“My sister is right. It feels like compensation is in order. You know, as a show of good faith.”
A youthful voice called out in assent. It belonged to a young man with a panther’s head. He was probably the third imperial prince. His radiant sapphire gaze turned on the members of the Church. A stuffy voice piped up from his right.
“That can wait. We can figure out where the onus for reparations lies after the situation has been settled. Right now, we need to focus on how to stop the underlings from harming our people. The Church has several saints at their disposal. Depending on how they have them act, we ought to consider lessening their punishment.”
“Oh man, aren’t we feeling generous to the people who got us into this mess.”
“The pureblooded among my people number few, and one of their crucial sectors has sustained damages. Our primary concern is quickly coming up with a defense strategy for it.”
“…So he’s just hung up on his pureblood nonsense.”
The bespectacled lizard-headed demi-human’s words drove Kaito to mutter to himself again. Lute mirrored his exasperation. None of the other demi-human representatives seemed to have complaints, but surely there were other things they should be more concerned with defending.
Amid the quarreling, the human king was merely trembling in his chair. Just as Kaito had heard, the man was decidedly young.
The king’s face was freckled and stiffened from nerves. His advisers, who all looked to have close ties to the Church, were practically glued to his sides. La Christoph, who was sitting a little way off to the side, was the next to speak.
“We’re currently conducting an investigation into the abuse of power by some of our members. And it’s impossible to say definitively whether or not the current phenomenon is an aspect of restructuring or not. I believe that a pragmatic strategy would be for us saints to act as a shield and serve as a front line to defend all three races. I would ask that you all please lend us your strength.”
“…That’s as far as you guys have gotten, too?”
Kaito heaved a heavy sigh. As he’d suspected, the Church hadn’t completely abandoned the possibility that restructuring would occur. But while they were deliberating, people were dying all over the place. The world was coming to an end, filling to the brim with pain and screams. However, it seemed like that fact had yet to sink in with anyone present.
“Lute, you were there when the two pillars arose at the World’s End. What information do you have for us?”
Vyade finally called out to Lute. He responded by giving a flustered salute.
Her decision had been a good one. Right now, what they needed more than anything was accurate information. It was essential that they understand that they were atop a collapsing cliff, that the pot they were perched in had already reached a boil.
“Allow me to first say this—there is no chance that restructuring will occur.”
Lute was firm in his statement. The room buzzed with frenzied murmurs. The Church members’ faces were blotted red with rage. But Lute ignored all the criticism being leveled his way. He calmly relayed a description of the events he and the others had witnessed.
“First, regarding what Sir Kaito and his group discovered beneath the royal tombs…”
One by one, he laid out the insane truths. The hall steadily grew quiet as a different type of tension filled the air.
“…Then the Saint transferred her contracts with God and Diablo over to the Torture Princesses. Her objective was…”
…to abandon the role she’d been burdened with.
The moment those words left his mouth, the sound of the round table being violently struck echoed through the room. The Church’s people had angrily risen to their feet.
“Hold your tongue! We will not sit here and listen to these vile insults! What merit does the testimony of a man who accompanied the Torture Princess and the Kaiser’s contractor have anyway?!”
“If you can’t show off your power, you’re just weak. If you fight without information, you’re just a fool, and if you whine pointlessly, you’re just incompetent. And hey, if your life has no value, you’re no better than a pig. So which one are you? Incompetent or a pig?”
A well-projected voice served to cut off the clergyman’s angry tirade. Kaito’s sounded almost listless. One of the high priests was about to raise his voice in objection, but at the last minute, he froze. Kaito’s eyes were cold and hard. He gave the man a quiet warning.
“Now, listen until he’s done.”
“Errr, well, I have more bad news, unfortunately. The damage from the underlings isn’t the only threat. Within ten days or so, the two pillars will collapse. God and Diablo will both be released, and the world will be destroyed.”
“Yes, and that will herald the start of recon—”
“Seven days.”
Kaito interrupted the priest once again. Every eye in the room turned toward him.
Once they had, he nimbly raised a finger and matter-of-factly made his proclamation.
“The Diablo pillar will only last seven days. That’s as long as Elisabeth’s mana will take her.”
“But, Sir Kaito, Vlad… Sir Vlad said it would last ten days or so.”
“Sure, if Elisabeth was at peak form. But not now.”
Kaito gently shook his head. His expression was calm as he shared a piece of information that only he knew.
“Because Diablo has infiltrated her body, she can’t die. But while she still had her freedom, she expelled one of her internal organs. As a result, her body can’t generate new mana anymore.”
Confused looks filled the room. Saying that Elisabeth had expelled one of her organs was a ridiculous claim. Hina alone squeezed the hem of her maid uniform. Everyone else turned toward Lute, wondering what organ Kaito was talking about.
Kaito gave his chest a quick thump.
Then he revealed the bizarre truth.
“Right now, Elisabeth’s heart is inside me.”
It took a good ten seconds for Lute to fully comprehend what Kaito had uttered.
So this is what he meant when he said he was “getting used to it” and would “get better at it soon.”
Blood carried great significance to dark mages. Their mana originated from their hearts, then traveled to the rest of their body through their blood. And due to the roots the demon meat had spread throughout Elisabeth’s organs, hers was a reactor with power beyond compare. And apparently, it was now in Kaito’s body. Lute was struck speechless. If that was the case…
In other words… Right now, Sir Kaito is…
…the Kaiser’s immortal contractor and the inheritor of the Torture Princess’s mana.
Few would be able to fully understand the overwhelming nature of that truth. However, the color drained from the faces of several of the mages present.
Caring little for whether or not his words caused shock or were even understood, Kaito went on.
“And because I inherited her heart, a new connection sprang up between Elisabeth and me. Diablo stole away her consciousness and is using her body to birth underlings—but all pain and injuries they’re causing are being delivered straight to me.”
“…What?”
Lute let out a dumbfounded yelp.
Kaito grinned. As he did, crimson blood dripped down from the corner of his lips.
“But it’s not like I can just go passing out now. I have it more or less under control, but it hurts like a bitch.”
Lute could imagine. Right now, the underlings were transforming the world into a living hell. Their acts of brutality spanned the entirety of civilization. If all the pain they were causing was being transferred to a single person…
There’s no way they could maintain their sanity! That’s madness! How can he withstand it?!
“I guess forcing me to get used to pain is the one thing I gotta thank my old man for, huh?”
A carefree smile spread across Kaito’s face. The expression hardly suited the moment, and the room’s occupants froze upon seeing it. Every second, pain was being sent to his body. And all of it was passing through the Kaiser and being converted into mana.
The silence was tinged with fear. Kaito himself shrugged, then gave his chin a light jerk.
“So? Carry on. If you don’t, the world’s gonna get destroyed. You do know that, right?”
“T-true, it will… No, it won’t! Our stance remains unchanged. Even if what you say is true, and the Saint did set down her burden, then the new Saint who bears God within her will carry out restructuring all the same! We have faith in that! We have to…we have to believe in that.”
“Very well, then. If humanity wishes to sacrifice themselves for their faith, then far be it from us to stop them.”
A husky, feral voice spoke up. The first imperial princess of the beastfolk licked her lips.
Sharp claws glittered atop her fingers as she tapped on the round table’s surface.
“Your proposal for a unified line of defense among the three races is hereby rejected. And while we’re at it, let’s annul the peace treaty, too. And while we focus our own defenses, we’ll move in on the human territories, too. We have a right to revenge, after all. And the Saint is already in our grasp. This way, we can mount a resistance against the pillars and wipe out humanity, just the way you want it.”
“Sister, you’re making a terrible decision! Declaring war at a time like this? You may excel at battle, sister, and even with the recent loss of your elite troops, your army is no doubt still strong. But do you truly believe that you can accomplish both those things without suffering crippling losses? Your ambitions will leave the forest barren. How can you not see that?”
“Be quiet, Vyade! Who do you think you’re taking that tone with?! We’ve remained silent for too long. Letting this opportunity pass us by would mar our pride as beastfolk!”
The first imperial princess’s indignation shut Vyade right up. Her approval among the people served as her sole weapon. The actual authority she wielded was comparatively slim. Now was not the time to descend into bickering.
The demi-human delegation looked at one another, then stood. The bespectacled, aged green lizard spoke solemnly.
“Very well. Humanity did bring this upon us. We will stand with our old friends and form a united front alongside them. If you all wish to resign yourselves to destruction, then your fate is in your own hands. But the disorder within your Church seems to run deep. I doubt you have the power to successfully protect your people. It appears that this is the end for you.”
The hostility of the other two races bore down upon the humans. It was true; the Church had been to blame for the current situation.
This could all be seen as a natural result of that. However, the humans lacked the resolution to admit fault and try to change the way things were going. La Christoph didn’t have that authority. Two of the advisers turned to the king and whispered.
“Your Majesty, now is the time to make your decision. Once the restructuring occurs, we will all be saved. But first, we must destroy the pagans. Perhaps we should have done so sooner. We must begin the third king’s holy war anew. You must demonstrate your faith in God, for the sake of the people.”
“Please, Your Majesty, give the order to deploy all the saints.”
“I… I…”
The king was clearly baffled. The decisions he was being asked to make were far beyond what he was mentally equipped to handle. He was young, and death and responsibility clearly scared him. The Church obviously wanted to get things under way before any of the influential aristocrats who’d missed the meeting could get a say. “All you have to do is nod,” the king’s advisers whispered enticingly.
While all of that was going on, Lute’s gaze turned to a certain someone.
Kaito was calmly watching over the proceedings. His eyes were strangely serene, and they were picking up everything that was happening.
Kaito heaved a deep, deep sigh. Then, out of the blue, he snapped his fingers.
“La (become).”
When he did, over a hundred blades manifested in midair.
Azure flower petals and darkness had danced luxuriously through the air, and executioner’s ax-shaped blades had lined up within them. Everyone present had steel pointed right at their neck. Anyone with any amount of combat experience couldn’t help but immediately realize what was happening.
It was a dangerous stunt, one that would normally be carried out with hundreds of soldiers. As he stared in wonderment, a thought passed through Lute’s head.
Normally, a coup isn’t something one carries out on their own.
That was just common sense. Right now, though, that common sense had been overturned.
A voice rang through the hall, one tinged with disappointment.
“Enough of this nonsense—clearly you guys are all useless.”
Kaito Sena slowly rose from his chair.
The hem of his black uniform flared out behind him as he began walking. The way his tunic was dyed scarlet on the inside really was reminiscent of the Torture Princess’s dress. It was at that point that Lute realized something. Almost like proof of his explosive development as a mage, Kaito’s beastly left arm had returned to that of a human. Kaito casually leaped atop the round table. Lute elected not to follow him. A beautiful automaton, on the other hand, unfalteringly took her place by Kaito’s side.
“Oh? What’s this? You’ve finally decided to seize your crown, O unworthy master of mine?”
Humanlike laughter accompanied the horrible black dog’s appearance. Seemingly thinking that he might as well, Kaito snapped his fingers. Azure petals and darkness scattered throughout the room, and Vlad Le Fanu’s phantasm made a graceful appearance from within them.
“Why, hello, hello. I see that my dear successor has assembled quite the notable audience.”
Placing a hand atop his chest, Vlad gave an elegant, courteous bow to the members of the conference.
The three of them now in tow, Kaito stopped at the center of the table. Azure petals and black darkness swirled up once more. A jet-black long sword dropped from within them. The engraving carved upon its beautiful blade flashed.
When it did, its meaning was seared into the eyes of all present.
All things are pardoned unto me. But I am ruled by none.
Then the azure glow abruptly faded. Flower petals still fluttering through the air, Kaito lorded over his surroundings.
“All I wanna do is save the woman I admire. And I don’t want to let any more innocent people become victims. That’s all. I have no desire to dominate, no lust for glory. And I certainly don’t intend on ruling or getting involved with politics at all. I don’t give a shit about who’s in charge after this. But right now? Right now, I’m taking charge of the world.”
Kaito Sena, the Torture Princess’s servant, lorded over the assembled nobles of all races.
Blood dripped from his mouth. He lifted his sword, then pointed it at his newfound hostages.
“Humanity, beastfolk, and demi-humans are all equal. Every living creature is ignorant, every living creature is like a stupid animal, and every living creature is precious. So I’ll promise you this. I’m gonna keep you all alive. I’m gonna save the world. And that’s why…” |
Torture Princess
* * *
Then the boy who had once died meaninglessly in another world made his grand declaration.
“…Just for now, I’m king. So obey me.”
In that moment, as the world crumbled, the Mad King was born.
And as he was, the desperate battle to survive in the world of the two pillars began. |
Unnamed Memory
1. The Call of the Soul
Five witches lived in these lands.
The immense power these abnormal beings possessed granted them endless life spans.
Pushing beyond the limits of any known mage, this quintet of women came with unthinkable might.
For all those who lived in this world, the witches lurking in the shadows of history came to symbolize fear and calamity.
You should never meet a witch.
You should never listen to a witch.
You should never try to understand a witch.
The old fairy tales were true.
Witches disturbed the flow of fate. They were even said to have destroyed entire countries overnight.
It is for that reason that people dubbed the era that followed the Dark Age…the Age of Witches.
“The Age of Witches, huh? People throw that phrase around a lot, but I’m not so sure about it. It’s scarier than it needs to be.”
Farsas was a kingdom situated at the center of the continent.
In its castle, a young man took a moment to look up from the work that had been laid out on his desk.
He had brown hair, nearly black, and eyes the color of a lightening night sky. His fine features exuded the nobility of his bloodline, though they were tinged with childishness at times. The crown prince, twenty years of age that year, received an appalled look in response.
“Oscar… You should be a little more wary. What do you think witches even are?” a woman with a breathtakingly beautiful face retorted coolly. She had long, inky-black hair and eyes of the same color. Her snow-white skin set off her striking features and gave her the appearance of a painted doll. She appeared to be younger than the man, but there was a certain sense of eternity in her gaze.
She was a witch, one of only five in all the land.
The Witch of the Azure Moon, Tinasha, was said to be the strongest of the five. She presented Oscar—the man who’d formed a contract with her—a cup of tea she’d brewed herself. He thanked her as he took it.
“Why is the current era known as the Age of Witches in the first place? Did you do something?” he asked.
“There are five witches. Why are you pinning all the blame on me? You’re wrong, regardless. Although I suppose I can’t say I had nothing to do with it in the beginning,” Tinasha said, waving her hand dismissively. “About three hundred years ago, a country to the northwest called Helginis locked up the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned. Helginis mages tried to weave a huge destruction spell using her as the catalyst.”
“What? I’ve never heard of that,” Oscar said. As part of his statesman’s education, he had learned the basics of regional history, but this was his first time hearing of destruction magic using a witch as a catalyst.
Tinasha made a face, still holding the tea things. “That’s because everyone involved at the time died, except the witches of course. It’s not something that was spoken of openly. And any sort of large-scale destruction magic, whether it uses humans as catalysts or not, is classified as a forbidden curse. However, the one they attempted back then was on a whole different scale. If they’d managed to pull off the spell, it would’ve no doubt irreparably altered the entire continent. Naturally, with something so dire at stake, the other four witches—myself included—refused to stand by and let the Helginis mages do as they pleased.
“So what happened?”
“We had no choice but to intervene in the situation in Helginis and release the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned. Once we did, she destroyed the entire country in a single night.”
“………”
“From then on, the term Age of Witches started cropping up…,” Tinasha concluded.
“What a mess…,” Oscar remarked. Just listening to it was enough to give him a headache. He rubbed his temples.
Compared with the gruesome era colored by war and betrayal that was the Dark Age, the Age of Witches was largely peaceful, with only a few currents of discord. Perhaps that was the natural result of people cowering in fear of the supremely powerful witches.
Oscar eyed Tinasha, a witch capable of taking on an entire army alone. “Destroyed a country in one night, huh? That’s more than just an old story?”
“The Dark Age was rife with tales like that,” Tinasha said with a smile, but her dark eyes revealed none of what she was thinking. She realized Oscar was staring at her and arched one shapely brow. “If you’ve learned your history, then you should behave more responsibly. Keep acting recklessly, and you’ll end up dead someday without understanding why.”
“You can talk about my death all you want, but I have your protective barrier on me as long as you’re alive, don’t I? Doesn’t that mean we’ll die at the same time? Shouldn’t we just get married?” Oscar grinned.
“Don’t lump us together! I’m not marrying you!” Tinasha spat.
The barrier she had cast on Oscar was an extraordinary one that could protect him from all magical and physical attacks. While it had a few limitations and blind spots, it afforded every defense that magic could provide. So long as Tinasha was alive, the barrier on Oscar would remain intact, making it practically a cheat.
The witch rolled her eyes at the prince. “You need to learn your place. Here I am trying to break your curse, but it’ll all be pointless if you get yourself killed doing something else.”
As heir to his country, Oscar had a heavy burden on his shoulders. When he was but a child, he’d been cursed to be the end of his line by the Witch of Silence. The wicked spell cloaked any unborn child of his blood in such a powerful protective charm that no mother’s body could bear it. Overcoming such a mighty enchantment was quite the high hurdle, but Oscar had to if his lineage was to survive.
In pursuit of a way to do so, Oscar had completed the trials set by another witch so that she would break the curse for him. He’d braved the tower where it was said a witch granted a wish to all who climbed to the top, and he’d come back with Tinasha as his protector.
Oscar looked up at said mouthy protector. “Even if you don’t break the curse, you’re not affected by the Witch of Silence’s power, right? Just marry me and that’ll solve everything. When should we hold the wedding?”
“We have a contract for one year! You don’t have the right to extend it! And I’m almost done analyzing the curse!” Tinasha retorted.
“Weren’t you the one who went on and on about how difficult it’ll be to undo the spell? You’re so studious…,” Oscar commented.
“Of course I am. There’s no one else around who can do it. If you understood that, you’d know not to act so rashly. Now behave or I’ll curse you to never leave your desk.”
“It’d be too funny if I was cursed by two separate witches,” Oscar remarked before giving up and returning his attention to the stack of documents before him. Talking to Tinasha was entertaining, but he’d incur her resentment if he took it too far.
Contrary to the typical idea of what a witch was, Tinasha was so overly serious that it was adorable. It was no doubt due to that demeanor of hers that she was helping to break his curse, even though that wasn’t specified in their contract.
Tinasha had lived for so many years that she viewed solitude as natural, however, and didn’t form attachments to people. She was both incredibly kind and incredibly heartless.
At times, a terrible loneliness filled her eyes…and it made Oscar wish that she’d just stay with him forever. He wanted no more shadows to cast a pall over her smiles. Over the past half a year, he had completely fallen for her.
“There’s no need to push yourself to finish the analysis so fast. After coming down from your tower for the first time in so long, you should enjoy things for a time,” Oscar urged. He wanted Tinasha to think of living peacefully with humans as something normal for her, and he wished she’d just while her days away like ordinary people did.
After tidying up the tea things, Tinasha turned back to him. “I want to do what I can while I can,” she stated, as if anticipating the end of the contract. She smiled, a faraway look in her eyes.
Farsas Castle employed close to fifty court mages. They spent their days researching and attending to magic-related task requests that came from all over the castle.
They were all generally excellent mages, even in comparison to mages from other countries, and reliably took care of most issues even if it required some time. There were the occasional requests that were beyond their capabilities, however. Ever since Tinasha had arrived at the castle, she’d been the one who handled such cases.
“So we’ve been asked to give our expert opinion on this magic implement but can’t identify exactly what it is…,” explained Kav the mage as he handed a dagger to Tinasha.
At present, there was no one else in the castle’s laboratory. A great number of reagents Kav was using for his own research had been left out on the lab table. Looking stumped, he awaited the witch’s assessment.
The old-looking dagger was encased in a copper sheath. Tinasha pulled it out and frowned. “You were told this is a magic implement?”
“Yes. Apparently, it was purchased as an antique at a secondhand shop in town, but it moves on its own and gets hot. That’s why we were asked to look into whether it’s ensorcelled… But while I do sense some sort of power from it, there’s no spell laid into the thing and it bears no carved sigils, either. I’m not sure what to make of it,” Kav said.
Tinasha turned the blade over, and sure enough, the dagger’s surface was bereft of etchings.
In order for a mage to imbue an object with a specific magical effect, the item in question must be given a carved sigil denoting a spell. Looking at that mark was the usual way of discerning what sort of power the enchanted object possessed.
This dagger had no such engraving, however, which was why Kav needed help.
Tinasha’s face was pinched as she said, “This isn’t a magic implement. It’s the result of a forbidden curse.”
“What? A forbidden curse? Wh-what part of it is?” Kav asked nervously.
“The effect itself isn’t particularly potent, but its origin is problematic. A human soul is sealed inside.”
“What?!”
Forbidden curses included things with problematic effects and tricky spell-casting processes. Anything involving a human sacrifice typically fell into the latter type.
Tinasha’s beautiful features twisted in disgust. “Souls are masses of power that naturally dissolve if they lose their frames—the body. This soul has been affixed to the dagger to prevent it from dispersing. But it wasn’t done by a very good mage. And just because a soul is sealed inside doesn’t mean the weapon is imbued with some sort of power. Most likely the soul will escape in time.”
“If that’s true, then that means this is…” Kav trailed off as he accepted the dagger back from the witch. Its time of creation was now clear.
Tinasha picked up on what Kav had left unspoken. “Not much time has passed since this object was made. We should find and catch whoever did this. Where is that secondhand shop?” she asked, her dark eyes flashing.
Her gaze was sharp and shone with a cold fury. Kav gulped.
Immediately, Tinasha frowned as she suddenly addressed someone standing behind Kav in the laboratory doorway. “Absolutely not. I’m not taking you.”
“No, I’m definitely going. I can’t just leave this alone after hearing all that,” came a deep, most definitely not childish voice. Kav whirled around and bowed to the man, who was standing in the doorway with an irritated look on his face.
When Tinasha caught sight of that expression, she merely threw her hands up in exasperation.
Kav led Tinasha and Oscar to a secondhand shop situated in a back alley of the town that encircled the castle.
Light entered through a small window and shone on various curiosities set out within the dim store. A motley assortment of goods including rusty bells, ancient horseshoes, keys and locks, kitchen utensils, and decorations were crammed onto shelves and stuffed into wooden boxes for display.
Oscar gawked with great interest at nearly everything around him, but Tinasha leaned against the wall with her arms crossed soon after entering. Seeing that the other two were loath to take the initiative, Kav had no choice but to address the shop owner. “Excuse me. We’ve come from the castle. We’re looking for the person who sold this.”
The owner was a man in the prime of life. He took one look at the questionable dagger’s scabbard and answered right away. “Oh, that? Someone traded that to pay off their loans. I’ve known the guy for about a decade, but it sounds like he’s gotten himself deep in debt this year. He borrowed money from a bunch of places and brought me this dagger to get the funds to pay it off. This isn’t anything special, but I did him a favor since I’ve known him so long.”
“What kind of man was this?” Oscar asked, a bronze key in hand. His voice carried well, and the shop owner glanced over at him but thankfully didn’t seem to suspect he was truly the crown prince.
“Just a regular guy. He’s got a wife and two little girls. Several times a year, he goes around the city selling wares. Oh, I recently found out he had a younger brother, though.”
“A brother?” Oscar inquired.
“Indeed. His brother was the one who came in to sell the daggers. Said he was holding on to the little things and an IOU.”
Tinasha, leaning against the wall, suddenly straightened up. She walked over to a box of items and pulled out two other daggers from it.
The owner’s eyes widened. “You’ve got a good eye, ma’am. He brought in those two along with a third—the one you’ve got. Apparently, it should’ve been a set of four, but…”
“…A twenty-five-year-old woman.”
“What?”
After unsheathing one of the short blades, Tinasha said something as though observing what others could not. The owner and Kav gaped at her. Pulling the other dagger from its sleeve, she said, “A thirty-one-year-old man.”
“Miss Tinasha, what are you…?”
Kav didn’t understand, but the shop owner seemed to have realized something. Stunned, he asked, “How do you know the ages of my friend and his wife? Can you tell the daggers’ former owners just from looking at them?”
“What? Former owner…?” Kav muttered as he quickly went pale.
What did her words indicate? The first of the three daggers had been discovered to house a human soul. It was easy to deduce why Tinasha looked at the daggers sold with it and stated the ages of a couple she shouldn’t have known.
Inside the first dagger was…
Kav stared at the blade in his hand.
Tinasha pointed to it with one pale finger. “A seven-year-old girl.”
Realizing that had to be one of the couple’s daughters, Kav fought down a scream with everything he had.
“Our suspect has to be the brother who sold the daggers. When he came here with the three blades, he must have already killed the mother, father, and daughter,” Oscar reasoned.
He and Tinasha were walking along an alley clustered with small houses on the outskirts of the Farsas castle city. They’d departed from the castle rather early in the day, so the sun was still high in the sky.
Oscar and Tinasha had sent Kav—still shell-shocked—back to the castle and headed to the house of the man who owed money. Consulting the map the shop owner drew for them, Oscar turned a corner.
“A set of four, huh? Which means the youngest daughter probably got involved, too,” he remarked.
Both of them were enraged at the idea of a three-year-old girl being made a sacrifice for a forbidden curse.
Tinasha tucked her long black hair behind one ear. “Experiments with forbidden curses like this one were quite common during the Dark Age. During that time, lives were treated with even less care than they are now. Unlike magical ability, which is determined at birth, all souls have a kind of power to them. It’s entirely natural that some stupid people started to think it could be harnessed and utilized.”
“Madness…,” Oscar said.
“This sort of thing happened a lot back then. The only thing that came from those horrible experiments was the conclusion that souls couldn’t really be used for anything. History has proven time and again that those who use forbidden curses will eventually fall prey to one themselves. There was nothing to gain by forcing souls into the daggers. Any amount of research would’ve made that apparent… That this man would still do something so depraved suggests he is not of sound mind.”
“Someone sane wouldn’t have sacrificed people to begin with,” said Oscar, patting Tinasha on the head.
Mages utterly despised forbidden curses, and it seemed this witch was no exception. In fact, perhaps because Tinasha was such a preeminent mage, she was even more upset than Kav about this situation.
As Oscar attempted to soothe the displeased witch at his side, he turned another corner. No sooner had he done so than he came upon the man’s home. It was a rather washed-out little place crammed tightly between its neighbors.
Oscar stared at the structure. “Those daggers were brought to the antique shop three days ago, right? Won’t that mean there’s no one here?”
“Even if their souls were sealed away, their bodies should’ve remained,” Tinasha explained.
“I was trying not to put it so bluntly…,” Oscar muttered.
“There’s no need for you to worry about upsetting me. I lived through the Dark Age, after all,” Tinasha insisted.
Judging from the exterior, the man’s house didn’t look lived in at all. They could see a simple kitchen through the glassless windows. Empty dishes sat atop a wooden table.
“Let’s start by taking a look around inside,” Oscar decided.
Just as he was about to go in, a man carrying a child popped out from the yard of a house two doors down. He must have been watching.
“Hey, the people in that house moved out three days ago,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Did you see if they had any kids with them?” Oscar asked. He didn’t bother speaking formally to a stranger, which did nothing to hide his high social status. Tinasha frowned slightly.
The man nodded, rocking the sleeping child against his shoulder. “They did. Two of them, in fact. The younger one’s close with my son, so he wanted to know where they were going so early in the morning.” The young man patted his child’s back.
Oscar and Tinasha exchanged glances. “That must mean something happened after they left the house,” deduced the former.
“In that case, we need to gather more eyewitness reports…,” Tinasha answered, snapping her fingers and pointing inside the house. “Oscar, have a look around inside the place.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll wait out here. When we get yelled at for this later, someone will have to provide an excuse for your recklessness.”
“That’s true. Lazar’s probably dying of a stomachache right about now,” Oscar remarked.
“And yet you snuck out anyway. Have you no compassion?” chided Tinasha. She frequently scolded Oscar herself and thus sympathized deeply with Lazar, Oscar’s childhood friend. Before she’d met Oscar, Lazar was the one who’d had to chase after him whenever he snuck from the safety of the castle. These days, that job fell to Tinasha. Lazar probably still got just as many stomachaches, but at least he enjoyed some reduction in hardship. If Oscar dared to point out such a thing, however, both Tinasha and Lazar would undoubtedly scold him.
“Well, I’m off, then. Don’t follow any strangers,” Oscar warned his beautiful protector.
“If you really think I’d do that, then finish up your tasks quickly…,” Tinasha replied, waving him off tiredly.
The prince turned toward the seemingly abandoned house. The man with the child appeared shocked to know that Oscar was about to intrude on someone else’s home. He beat a hasty withdrawal indoors, clearly thinking this wasn’t something he ought to get involved in.
Before the man with the child could retreat out of sight, however, a little girl poked her face out from the house across the way. She looked at the child in the man’s arms and called in an innocent voice…
“Ayla? Did you cut your hair? Who’s that?”
There was a moment of silence.
It was Oscar who responded the swiftest. He rolled to the side and grabbed the child before the man could escape. A fraction of a moment later, Tinasha seized the man by his neck with her ivory fingers.
Her nails very nearly cut into the man’s flesh. She looked up at him with dull, coal-black eyes. “It was you.”
“Don’t kill him, Tinasha,” Oscar demanded, the child in his arms limiting his movements. He’d have to put the child down to stop her, but the little girl was fast asleep. Upon closer inspection, it was obvious the child’s hair had been crudely cut to make her appear to be a boy.
The man struggled against Tinasha’s hold on his throat. With a voice like the chill hand of death, the witch asked, “What were you doing with those daggers? Were you experimenting with different spells depending on the soul?”
“N-no…”
“Then were you practicing? The daughter’s soul stuck to the weapon better than the mother’s and the mother’s more than the father’s. Did you think the next one would go even better?”
“…Ngh, ah…”
The man’s breathing grew faint, and he began thrashing around like a drowning man. The witch had silently lifted him off the ground, her jet-black hair swaying all around her.
The primal urge to kill was pouring off her in waves, dominating the surrounding atmosphere. Its ominous presence left not only the man but the girl who’d exposed him frozen in fear. The only one unaffected was Oscar, who said, “Are you listening, Tinasha? Don’t kill him yet. I want to hear what he has to say.”
“There’s no point in letting him live. This man has magic.”
“Did you decide to remain outside when you realized that?” Oscar posed. It’d struck him as strange that Tinasha had been so willing to let him out of her sight. It was hard to think she’d do that under normal circumstances. Evidently, she’d suspected the man of being the culprit from the very beginning.
Tinasha saw that the man was about to pass out and released her grip. He fell to the ground, coughing violently as he gasped for air. In a hoarse voice, he admitted, “I—I was trying to make a magic sword…for the future…”
“Save the cryptic remarks. What do you think you are, some lunatic from the Dark Age?” Tinasha’s mocking retort seemed casual enough, but her eyes betrayed something darker than the desire to kill. Peering into them was to stare into an abyss that ran deeper than Tinasha herself.
Sensing a moment of opportunity, Oscar said, “Tinasha, trade places with me. I don’t know how to hold a kid.”
“You seem to be managing. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Trade with me. I’ll take over for you,” insisted the prince, patting the witch’s head with his free hand.
The warmth from his hand slowly spread through Tinasha, and she reluctantly received the young girl from him. She cradled the child against her shoulder.
As she held the sleeping kid, the witch suddenly appeared very kind, not unlike a regular person.
Resolving the case turned out to be an exercise in frustration.
Oscar frowned as he listened to a report of the culprit’s testimony.
“A call for mages? Cuscull… Isn’t that the same new country that sent an envoy to invite Tinasha?”
“It is. It doesn’t look like they’re doing it openly, but they’ve proclaimed themselves open to all capable mages. This man resorted to murder trying to heed that call,” Kav explained, reading out the report and glancing to one side. His gaze fell to the crown prince’s protector. She was sitting on a couch with her legs crossed.
Despite having been furious and nearly killing the man, Tinasha now seemed a portrait of placid calm—on the surface anyway. Crossing her arms, she took over the report. “Though the invitation is for ‘capable mages,’ that can mean a great many things. It looks like Cuscull is trying to collect those who excel at warfare. I don’t know what they’re planning, but it doesn’t bode well that they’re inciting people to commit terrible acts.”
“A magic sword, huh? Mass production of such a weapon would not be good for us,” Oscar commented.
“Normal mages cannot produce magic swords. Almost all of them are fakes, with the exception of Akashia. A considerable amount of magic and a very complicated spell are both needed to fix a soul to an object. That’s why most cases have historically come about by accident,” Tinasha detailed.
“You’re saying it’s difficult to intentionally re-create such a process. Now that the challenge is out there, though, it’s likely to cause further trouble.”
While Oscar and Tinasha happened to uncover this one case, that didn’t mean they’d be able to bring in everyone who’d taken up the same offer.
“Idiots are out there doing things like this because they don’t know any better. Not knowing what they’re getting themselves into convinces them it’s worth pursuing… This is why, with time, people will repeat the same cycle of despair,” Tinasha snapped back coldly.
A sorrowful shadow fell over her dark eyes. Her words spoke to countless instances of lost hope witnessed over the many years of her life. Her gaze grew distant, as if she were reliving far-off memories. When she noticed Oscar and Kav’s eyes on her, she rose to her feet.
Clapping her hands to change the conversation, Tinasha said, “In any case, keep an eye out for any strange magical incidents and be sure to tell me about them. I’ll deal with any and all occurrences as best I can.”
“Yep. Kav, don’t go to her directly. Report to me first,” Oscar ordered.
“Why do you treat me like some bomb that could go off at any minute?!” Tinasha cried.
“Well, at least you’re aware of how dangerous you are,” Oscar quipped.
“You’re one to talk!” the witch protested, floating along the ceiling.
Kav was relieved to see her acting like her old self again.
He had to wonder how things would play out, however. What changes were lurking just beyond the veil of darkness?
Come what may, Kav had a feeling that true despair would be averted, so long as Oscar had Tinasha by his side. |
Unnamed Memory
2. Thinking of You
“Mages are dangerous, so don’t get close to them.”
This was a phrase mothers often said to their children. It was something kids heard from most adults.
Luly asked, “Aren’t they human, too?” only to get told, “They look human, but they’re filthy creatures who defy the gods.”
She was left to wonder what “filthy” meant… The young girl always had trouble with tough words. She knew enough to grasp that people would be angry if they found out her secret, so she visited the cabin discreetly.
Deep in the mountain was a small cottage where a wonderful magician lived. He could make flowers appear, and he healed Luly’s scrapes… When Luly first met him after getting lost one day, he gave her candy and led her back to the village where she lived.
Luly wanted to tell everyone about how nice the magician was, but she kept her mouth shut. This was her secret.
Her hands full of gathered berries, she was running off to the mountain cabin yet again.
Just before the little building came into view, Luly saw the magician himself barreling toward her on the path. As soon as he caught sight of her, he ran over and scooped the young girl up in his arms. “Thank goodness. I was so worried. I didn’t think I’d make it!”
“What’s wrong? Make what?” Luly asked, thinking that her friend was acting strange. He was very pale and completely flustered. She didn’t understand why. The magician merely offered the girl a weak smile.
“It’s nothing. Come, let’s get you inside.”
“But I have to go right back today. It’s my mom’s birthday,” Luly said.
“No! You can’t go back to the village!” he cried.
“…Why?”
The magician didn’t answer. Normally, he was always smiling. This was the first time Luly had ever seen the man so close to tears. “Hide out here for a while, then flee to another country. Run as far away as you can… All the way to Farsas if need be.”
“What…? I can’t do that. I have my mom and my dad.”
Why was he saying this to her?
Suddenly, Luly felt very worried. Shaking off the magician’s grip on her, she ran back the way she had come.
“No, Luly! You can’t go back there!” he shouted, scrambling after her. However, she kept running.
Luly ran and ran, until she arrived at a spot that overlooked the village below…
…and saw her hometown engulfed in flames.
“That really takes me back,” said a young man watching the white smoke rise from verdant hills and drift beyond the distant forest.
His snow-white hair was tied up in a long queue. The young man’s delicate, doll-like features gave him an odd countenance—as though something was missing.
He watched the smoke dissolve into the sky.
“I was born in the Dark Age, you see. Only once did my father ever take me outside the country. That’s where I saw people and towns on fire, just like this. It really was a terrible era.” Despite describing great tragedy, the man’s voice was indifferent and bereft of emotion. Even the words a terrible era were as plain and ordinary as if he’d been describing what he had for dinner last night. The mages accompanying him, however, all looked upon their lord with eyes full of admiration.
“Lord Lanak, you should return to the castle.”
“Ah, I suppose it’s about that time. Yes, I still have many things to do,” replied the white-haired man apparently named Lanak. He tore his eyes from the billowing smoke and turned his gaze to the contingent of mages before him. As calm as one could ever be, he continued, “Since we’ve gone through the trouble of setting fire to the village, we’ll need to send a proper declaration of war. Not doing so would be an insult to those who lost their lives today.”
There was no sarcasm in his words acknowledging the people he’d killed himself. He appeared to feel true pity for the dead but quickly broke into a bright smile. “This is the dawn of a new era for this land. To that end, we’ve got to reset everything for a fresh start. First up is the Four Great Nations, I believe? If they’re destroyed, all the others will fall obediently into line from there.”
Lanak held out his abnormally pale hands. A transportation array appeared, though he had said no incantation. With a final smile, he vanished. The burning village was left behind, unaware of the one responsible for its fate.
All that remained was ash and a lingering smell of burnt human flesh that drifted on the lukewarm breeze.
The sky above the castle was clear and sunny. However, thick ash-gray clouds hung low in the distance to the north.
Standing atop the castle walls, Tinasha held out a hand to her familiar who’d come from the direction of the approaching gloom. The gray, cat-shaped familiar leaped onto her shoulder and rubbed its head against her cheek.
This familiar had been making the rounds all across the continent for hundreds of years. Recently, its excursions had been limited to the newly minted nation of Cuscull.
“I see. So it’s true… Why now, after four hundred years…?” Tinasha murmured, distress crossing her lovely face as she received her familiar’s report.
Truthfully, she wanted to leave and make for Cuscull immediately.
The very thing that had driven her to become a witch had at last come to pass. It was nearly within Tinasha’s grasp, and she wanted to reach out and put an end to everything as soon as possible. It clawed at her so ceaselessly that Tinasha felt liable to go mad.
Based on what she’d learned, however, things were still too complicated and dangerous for her to act on emotion now. If she made a wrong move, countless other countries would get involved and the death toll would be astronomical. Even if one quick move could bring an end to the troubles she had endured for so long, Tinasha couldn’t ignore the potential mass loss of life.
“What should I do…?” she wondered aloud, putting a hand to her chin and falling into thought. The cat on her shoulder perked its ears up.
“…What is that? Your pet?” came a voice.
“Oscar…”
The prince was approaching along a castle rampart walkway. He gingerly picked up the cat. Its black eyes went round and wide at the sudden appearance of an unfamiliar man.
Paying no mind to the animal’s reaction, Oscar scratched under its chin as he looked at Tinasha.
If it were him in my position, what choice would he make given the situation?
After half a year of observing Oscar at work, Tinasha knew he was an exceptionally clever statesman. She knew that he cared for the safety of others and that he’d undoubtedly answer the call if asked to help.
More than anything, Tinasha knew he was fond of her.
He’d once told her that as everything around her changed, he alone would not.
If she was allowed to take his hand and make a request…
“Tinasha? What is it?” Oscar frowned, the cat now resting on top of his head. Concerned, the prince’s blue eyes were trained on the witch. Tinasha held her breath for a moment as an impulse to tell him everything swept over her…
She knew she could never tell anyone about her past transgressions, however.
Tinasha stuffed down the emotions churning inside her like warm mud and smiled at the young man.
“…It’s nothing. And that isn’t a real cat; it’s my familiar.”
“It is? Wow, it feels exactly like a real one,” Oscar remarked.
“It’s made with magic, just like Litola. And don’t put the cat on your head; you might startle someone. You’re supposed to be a prince,” Tinasha scolded, snapping her fingers lightly. In response, the cat jumped over to her shoulders, and she whispered in its ear.
“You go rest now. Thanks for all your hard work.”
Those words released the familiar from hundreds of years of service. The gray cat stared at her, then its head slowly lolled.
Abruptly, it dissolved into gray powder and blew away.
Oscar boggled at the sudden turn of events. “Was that really okay? Did it just cease to exist?”
“Yes, it did, but it’s all right. It’s done its duty for me many times over by now,” Tinasha replied. In many ways, the cat was a representation of Tinasha’s own illusions, but she didn’t need it anymore. Tinasha didn’t need to involve anyone besides herself. That’s why she chose not to draw Oscar into any of this, either.
Her relationship with him was nothing more than what the contract dictated. She was his protector and would keep him safe. The agreement said nothing of the reverse.
Tinasha closed her eyes to conceal the shadowy look in them. She took a few seconds to get her emotions in order. Once the worst of her tumultuous feelings had passed, she put a pretty smile back on her face. “Besides, I’m busy right now cracking your curse,” she said.
Her analysis of the curse was nearing a conclusion.
After that, all she had to do was compose a spell to break the curse. It was likely to be extremely complex, so she’d sent away for crystals to make magic implements infused with spells ahead of time. Upon reflection, Tinasha realized she’d kept Oscar waiting quite a while, but at last the goal was in sight. She was certain she’d end his curse and positive he’d be pleased.
Tinasha grinned up at Oscar, and he smiled back. “About that, don’t forget you also have the option of marrying me. That’s what I’d personally recommend.”
“You’re about the only one who would.” Tinasha snorted.
“Isn’t my recommendation all that matters? What other opinion do you need?”
“Mine for one! Listen to what I want here!” Tinasha cried.
The two had a way of getting off track and going on and on like this forever.
Tinasha started to leave him behind, but he grabbed her hand and turned her back around. She could feel in his grip his strong desire not to let her get away, and she looked back at him.
“…What is it? Don’t even think about sneaking out like you did before. You’ve got too much to do.”
“No, not that. The dress I ordered for you is ready for a first fitting, so I came to find you.”
“What…?”
The dress Oscar was referring to was one he’d ordered on his own when a cloth merchant had visited the castle three months ago.
The ones Tinasha ordered herself had been of a simple design, so they’d been completed much earlier. The fact that Oscar’s had taken so long gave Tinasha an uneasy sense of foreboding.
“I—I suppose refusing won’t do me any good.”
“You’ve got that right. Would you rather walk there on your own or be dragged? Up to you,” Oscar offered.
“I’ll go…”
The longer Tinasha lived in the castle, the more things she had to do seemed to naturally accumulate.
Hanging her head in resignation, Tinasha let Oscar lead her along by the hand.
“It’s sooooo gorgeous, Miss Tinasha!” Sylvia cried out, though it sounded more like a shriek of glee. She was the first person to see Tinasha come out wearing the dress.
Oscar looked Tinasha over from head to toe. Rather candidly, he complimented her. “Looks pretty damn good.”
“Thank you…,” Tinasha said.
The dress was finely crafted of smooth black silk woven with abundant silver threads. It was open at her arms and back, hugging her curves close from the high collar to down below her waist. From the knee, the hem flared out in a beautiful arc. Flowers embroidered in silver thread bloomed all over the fabric. Against the witch’s porcelain skin and jet-black hair, it looked perfect. All who beheld Tinasha were utterly entranced, unconsciously sighing in admiration.
Sylvia gazed at the witch, spellbound. “Miss Tinasha, let me do your hair and makeup on the big day.”
“The big day? What big day?”
“It’s almost His Majesty the King’s birthday celebration, of course,” Sylvia reminded her.
“I know that’s coming up, but why should I go? Isn’t it just a ball being held for diplomatic purposes?” asked Tinasha.
As the two women discussed this, Oscar circled Tinasha to inspect the dress’s craftsmanship. Once talk turned to the ball, an evil smile spread over his face. “You’re the one who’s gotta go. Jump right into the lion’s den and get some experience socializing with humans.”
“Why?!” Tinasha asked, indignant.
Rather timidly, the dressmaker spoke up for the first time, asking, “Um…how is the fit?”
Instead of Tinasha answering, Oscar piped up happily from behind her. “It’s a little loose in the waist. Did you lose weight? You should make sure you get proper sleep.”
“I am. When I feel like it,” Tinasha informed him.
“And could you make a hair ornament in the same shape as the flowers on the dress but a little bigger?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” answered the dressmaker, quickly marking the waist measurements on the fabric and retiring from the room. Oscar dropped a fond kiss on Tinasha’s shoulder. Sylvia blushed as she observed it, but Tinasha bore it calmly, a look of clear mental exhaustion on her face.
Oscar noticed her expression and lifted his head with a look of displeasure. “You’re really not affected the littlest bit.”
“I can’t react when you touch me so brazenly.”
“Is that the problem?” Oscar asked.
“Is that not what it is?” Tinasha shot back, failing to understand and staring at him with some confusion.
The prince rolled his eyes. “You don’t see me as a man at all, do you?”
“Of course I don’t. Though it’s more like I don’t see anyone in such a way,” Tinasha clarified.
Silently, Oscar balled his hands into fists and ground them against the sides of the witch’s head.
“Ow, ow, ow! What do you think you’re doing? Honestly now!” Tinasha cried.
“Sorry, I just got annoyed,” Oscar explained.
Tinasha glared at the man while rubbing her temples. He seemed entirely unaffected, however, even grinning. Once more, he inquired of his romantically apathetic protector, “Why are you like this? Is it because purity is so important to spirit sorcerers?”
“I think that’s part of it, but I also don’t want to get too close to humans. Lucrezia is much calmer nowadays, but in the past, she used to take revenge for getting dumped by magically moving all the water in a village’s lake to a different location. Observing things like that always made me feel reluctant to get involved with anyone… Oh, and I put the water back, of course.”
Sylvia was frozen stiff, and Oscar had fallen silent, too.
Getting involved with a witch certainly did risk angry outbursts on an entirely different scale. Suddenly, the most powerful witch’s aversion to love affairs seemed a very wise decision indeed.
Even then, one couldn’t deny that Tinasha was exceedingly awkward with humans. She appeared aloof as long as she kept people at a certain distance, but once anyone got to know her, they quickly realized how unaccustomed she was with socializing.
That was likely why Tinasha was so apathetic, even to herself. Shaking his head, Oscar patted Tinasha’s hair. She looked up at him, perplexed.
“Well, let’s put a pin in that. I’m an exception, so think of me as something different.”
“Really?” Tinasha asked.
“Really. We’ve got half a year left, so I’ll wait until then.”
“Hold on. I don’t think this is something that just needs a little more time…,” Tinasha protested frankly, but Oscar paid the remark no mind and merely grinned. The hand on her head slid down to caress her cheek.
“I’m pretty confident that you’ll change your mind. I suit you.”
“…I really don’t understand,” Tinasha said, shaking her head. Her dark eyes seemed to search the air for something invisible.
“So shall it be defined by me.”
At those words, crystal balls no larger than one’s fingernail began to float in the air. A dozen spheres glided slowly as if guided on wires. Each lazily came to rest in place on the red lines that delineated the spell.
Tinasha made sure they were all in their proper spots before beginning her incantation.
“I pray that these words will turn to poison. Let them sow seeds of thorns.”
Her voice sang out the words. As the infinitely complex spell took shape, her mind wandered.
If love could kill someone, then was that feeling in and of itself a contradiction?
Whether a person killed out of love or out of hate, it brought on death all the same.
Why then did humans treat them as totally different things?
Only the one who killed could know the truth of their motive, and even they couldn’t be absolutely sure.
Sweat beaded on her ivory forehead.
Cautious and precise, Tinasha wove together her power and her intention.
“Fate goes round in a loop, impossible to escape.”
Each line made the air vibrate, and the crystal balls rotated accordingly.
“No one shall touch it nor change it. Let my words turn to poison.”
People kill people.
That’s what emotions do.
That’s what power does.
If strong feelings could push Tinasha toward such vile actions, then she would avoid love and hate. She didn’t want to ever remember.
At the same time, Tinasha didn’t want to push herself to insanity. From the very start, she was already caught in the midst of an inescapable madness, after all.
“Blessings born of hatred, love born of a curse…”
Partway through a lengthy incantation, Tinasha let out a little sigh.
She tipped her head up to stare at the dark ceiling…then closed her eyes.
Failure wasn’t an option. The witch was already running low on time.
She was sure there was nothing else someone who dwelled in the past—someone like her—could leave behind.
That was why she was so determined to at least accomplish this one task.
Honing her thoughts down to a single thread, Tinasha launched back into chanting the spell.
Oscar felt like he’d been dreaming.
It was a very fuzzy sort of vision. He didn’t know whether he felt happy or sad, but he awoke with the distinct feeling that his dream had been very emotional. The room was still dark, and only the earliest hints of morning were visible through the window.
Rubbing his forehead, he moved to sit up in bed and noticed something strange. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Did I not wear one to bed…?” Oscar murmured, scrolling through his memories even though his thoughts were still muddled… Then he noticed someone next to him.
His witch was asleep, seated on the floor, with her torso slumped over his bed. Several crystal balls were scattered all around her.
Something had clearly happened, but Oscar didn’t have the foggiest idea what it was.
Sitting up, he reached out and tugged gently on the witch’s hair. “Tinasha,” he called.
No reaction. He tugged again, and she finally stirred. She gazed at him with bleary eyes. “I’m sleepy…”
“You can sleep after you’ve explained what happened,” Oscar insisted. Tinasha shook her head like a petulant child. As she gradually came back to her senses, however, the light came back to her eyes. She let out a little yawn and sat on the bed.
Looking up at Oscar with her dark eyes, Tinasha declared, “I broke your curse.”
“…What?”
Oscar stared at his protector. Dumbfounded, he found himself questioning his own ears.
Tinasha rubbed at her watery eyes. “Technically speaking, I didn’t break it so much as I set up another curse in the same location to offset it. There’s a part of the spell with a name attached to it… It’s like a password. Only the spell caster designated by that name can do anything about it, so I left it in there. But if that’s all it is, then it’s just part of the blessing and protection charm, so there shouldn’t be any ill effects.”
“…You broke the curse already?” Oscar was stunned by the sudden turn of events.
He knew that Tinasha had been nearly done with analyzing the curse, but now it was seemingly gone altogether. Oscar had borne the burden for fifteen years. That it was neutralized with so little fanfare left him at a loss for words.
Blinking her sleep-heavy eyelids, Tinasha pointed at Oscar’s chest. “You can wash that off now. Go take a bath or something.”
Now that she mentioned it, Oscar realized there were intricate sigils drawn in blood on his body. They looked magical and were still a vibrant red.
“Is that your blood?” Oscar asked.
“It is. I used it as a catalyst,” answered Tinasha.
“Why did you do it while I was asleep?”
“Because it was easier with you unconscious. You kicked up a fuss when I waited for you to fall asleep the last time,” Tinasha reminded him, floating up into the air. “Okay, I’m going to head back to my room for some sleep…”
She was about to teleport away when Oscar suddenly grabbed her hand. Frowning a little, she looked down at him. “What?”
“Ah, just… Thank you.”
At that, a bewitching smile reached Tinasha’s sleepy eyes. She squeezed his hand in return, placing a kiss on the back of it. Then she faded away like a ghost, leaving only the crystal balls scattered about the floor.
Oscar gazed down for a better look at the blood sigils painted on his body.
He was certain that for the rest of his days he’d never forget this morning.
The entire castle was abuzz with excitement.
Today was the king’s birthday, though the festivities were more of an opportunity for state diplomacy than anything else. People from neighboring countries gathered to sound out one another’s intentions. As the celebration was about to begin in earnest, a group of court ladies were getting ready in a room of the castle.
“How’s everything look?” Oscar, dressed in full court regalia himself, knocked on the open door before entering.
The witch looked up at the sound of his voice. “Oscar… I’m exhausted…”
She’d been held fast for two hours while her hair and makeup were done. She longed to get free, but Sylvia and the other court ladies were having too much fun and wouldn’t let her go. Whether Oscar actually heard the witch’s plea for help was unknown, as he was staring at her in awe.
“You look…stunning.”
“What’s that supposed to mean…?” Tinasha grumbled.
“I put my whole heart and soul into it! She was already beautiful, so it made the perfect base for makeup,” Sylvia piped up. Upon hearing that, Tinasha judged the makeup session to be over and stood at last.
Her long hair was bound up, though a few wispy locks trailed down in front. The floral hair ornament that matched the embroidery on the dress sat perched above her ear. Silk gauze around the flower trailed down over her alabaster shoulders.
Makeup in hues of blue had been applied to accentuate her already prominent nose bridge and big dark eyes. As a result, her normally cool and clear features took on the proud, intimidating air of a queen. Coupled with her youthful face, this rendered her entirely unapproachable.
“You did a great job. Completely exceeded my expectations,” Oscar said, very pleased. He reached out to brush Tinasha’s cheek.
Suddenly, Lazar’s voice came echoing down the hall. “Your Highness! Where are you?”
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Oscar asked. Lazar heard him and rushed into the room. He looked appropriately gobsmacked when he caught sight of Tinasha. Oscar didn’t turn to look at his old friend, as he was entirely preoccupied with the witch. Instead, the prince merely asked again, “What’s wrong?”
“Ah yes. Well, the prince from Tayiri won’t be able to attend, it seems. There was an attack on a town close to the border with Cuscull about a week ago. In his place, he’s sent his royal younger sister.”
“Cuscull?”
“Attack…?”
Oscar and Tinasha’s faces hardened at Lazar’s words.
With a grave tone, the man continued his explanation. “Without warning, Cuscull mages burned a village to the ground. By the time help had arrived, no survivors could be found.”
“No survivors… They killed everyone?” Oscar inquired.
Not in the past one hundred years had there been something so vile. Mass killings of innocent citizens had been commonplace during the Dark Age, but it was the Age of Witches now. Most thought such a tragedy impossible unless one of the witches was involved.
Bile rose in Oscar’s throat. “I have no idea what Cuscull is thinking. I’ve also got to wonder if Tayiri plans to publicize the attack and ask other countries for assistance.”
“They might. If Tayiri could handle this on its own, a nation of mages who oppose Tayiri’s state religion would never have declared independence in the first place. I’m sure those in charge want to do something about Cuscull, whether that means incurring debts to other nations or not,” Tinasha replied.
“True. Fighting mages when your nation shuns the practice of magic sounds difficult,” Oscar observed.
Mages have great power in war but are actually quite difficult to utilize efficiently.
The stronger the spell, the more likely it is to affect soldiers on the mage’s side, too, and the longer the incantation as well.
It was hard to control large-scale magic at all, and few mages mastered the delicate practice. What’s more, the farther away a spell was loosed, the more time an enemy mage had to counter it. Mages needed to be able to get fairly close to their opponents if they wanted to have any hope of outsmarting them by being the first to cast a spell. As a result, spell casters were placed in the rear guard behind soldiers and typically lobbed small- to midrange magic attacks. Opposing magic users would attempt to guard while hurling back spells of their own. Such a task was exceedingly difficult and was the exact reason so many mages devoted themselves entirely to defense and support magic.
Tayiri was an exception, as they had no mages and therefore no way of defending themselves against a volley of spells.
One had to wonder what Cuscull’s aim was in all this. Whether it was revenge against Tayiri for so many years of oppression or something else entirely, none could say for sure.
Oscar frowned, then noticed that something seemed off about the witch. The blood had drained from her face. Her eyes were glinting with a mixture of grief and rage.
“Tinasha? What is it?” Oscar asked, and she snapped back to herself.
Her eyes wavered as she looked up at him. “…Oh, no… It’s nothing,” she said, smiling. Then, after some hesitation, she tugged on his sleeve. “Um, do you have some time? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about…”
“Oh? This is unusual. Sure, I don’t mind,” Oscar agreed.
Knowing her, this wasn’t going to be anything romantic. Instead of making everyone clear the room, Oscar led Tinasha out onto the balcony. Beyond the railing sprawled the castle courtyard. Oscar glanced idly at the plants and flowers shadowed in the dusk. Tinasha followed him out, shutting the door behind her.
“Oscar, do you like Nark?” she asked.
“Huh? Nark… You mean that dragon of yours? I mean, I guess I don’t hate it. Why?”
“Then could I ask you to look after it? I’m its current owner, but I’d like to transfer that over to you. It’s fond of you, too…”
“Why?” Oscar pressed.
Tinasha didn’t answer. She just looked up at him with a pained expression. The dissonance between the look and Tinasha’s fanciful hair and makeup lent her an air of instability. It was unusual for the witch to appear so helpless, and Oscar scratched his head. “All right. I don’t mind.”
“Really?! I’ll transfer it over now, then,” Tinasha decided, breaking into a broad smile. Without a sound, she floated into the air and placed her palm to Oscar’s forehead and hummed an incantation. He caught her in his arms, and she settled into them.
“Now, you’re its owner. It’ll come when you call its name. You don’t have to worry about food; it’ll find some on its own.”
“Got it.” Oscar nodded.
She was radiant when she smiled. The moonlight tinted her ivory skin a pale-blue shade. Her gaze appeared to be on him, but her attention was far away—perhaps linked with the night itself. With the distinct feeling that he’d get utterly swept away if he looked at her for too long, Oscar bit back a sigh.
He stroked Tinasha’s cheek with his other hand, and her eyes narrowed. He slid his hand over to the back of her head, drawing her close.
She didn’t resist. She placed her hands on his shoulders and then kissed him quite naturally.
When her soft lips drew back, Oscar huffed out a laugh. “That was not what I was expecting.”
“You have to change things up every so often,” Tinasha replied with a smile, reaching out a finger to wipe off the lipstick that had stuck to Oscar’s lips.
When Oscar entered the ballroom accompanied by the witch, the pair looking as beautiful as a painting; all eyes turned to stare at them. Aware of the wave of murmurs sweeping across the room, Tinasha sighed to herself. Her arm looped through Oscar’s, and she whispered to him, “It’s unheard of for me to make an appearance in a place like this…”
“No one knows who you are,” Oscar assured her.
“If you refer to me as your fiancée, I will send you flying.”
“I’ll remember that,” he acknowledged dryly.
They made their way to the king and bowed. Tinasha took a step back, and Oscar offered his official well wishes. The king eyed the two of them with some amusement, and when Oscar finished his address, the king beckoned Tinasha closer. She came to the king’s side, and he lowered his voice so that only she could hear him.
“You’re going along with this well,” he said.
“It’s only because I signed a contract with someone very pushy… Is your family known for such things?”
“Since you’ve graced us with your presence, shall I introduce you to the guests?”
“Please, no. I believe the noble young ladies of the neighboring countries have been awaiting a meeting with the crown prince.”
Upon hearing that, the king swept his gaze over the ballroom and picked out the ladies in gorgeous gowns who studded the hall. Each was staring at Oscar with anticipation and at the witch with hostility.
The king chuckled. “That does look tricky. My sympathies.”
“I see writing things off as someone else’s problem runs in the family… I wish you’d do something about him.”
“At his age, he isn’t going to listen to his father. You should just go ahead and get together with him.”
“You’re really going to say that, too?” Tinasha cried out without thinking; then her hand flew to cover her mouth. She hurriedly curtsied and returned to Oscar’s side.
“What were you talking about?” he asked her, suspicious.
“The troubles of life…”
Oscar looked like he wanted to hear more, but Tinasha refused to speak further. She spent an hour with Oscar at the ball; then when the timing was right, she escaped out into the gardens.
“I’m so tired…and so glad this dress isn’t for dancing…” Tinasha sighed, savoring her freedom as she glanced back at the ball with everyone in their finery. The witch could dance, of course, but she had a feeling that doing so would invite unwanted trouble. She was about to slip away when someone called out to her from behind.
“Are you all alone, beautiful?”
“Gah…”
The disgusting catcall made Tinasha screw her face up, but she schooled her features into a smile before turning around. Standing before her was a well-groomed young man. He must have been a guest at the ball.
She replied blandly, “Just out for some night air…”
“That’s perfect. I just came out to do the same myself,” he said, striding up to her and taking her hand rather naturally. “If it’s all the same, I’d like to accompany you.”
“Mmm…” Tinasha sighed. She’d missed her chance to escape. Now she had to render this person unconscious without leaving any proof behind.
As he caressed her hand and Tinasha began to wonder if she could just bury him in the gardens, someone appeared from one of the side paths. This man noticed the two of them and gave a little snort. He said to her, “Miss Tinasha, are you about ready?”
“Ah yes. I’m coming,” she said, shaking off the man’s hand as fast as she could and scurrying away after excusing herself. The man looked reluctant to let her go, but she didn’t spare one glance back at him as she hurried to Als.
“Thanks. I was about to knock him into next week.”
“I have to admit, that was funny to see. But, well, I suppose it’s part of my guard duties to protect you from unsavory men like that,” young General Als declared, laughing loud and long.
Annoyed, Tinasha wiped off her poor abused hand. “It was really awful. I don’t want people groping at me like they have permission to do so. He was much too familiar.”
“True, although you don’t seem to mind when it’s the prince.”
“…Huh?” Tinasha paused in confusion when Als pointed that out; she’d never noticed it herself.
When Oscar touched her like it was the most natural thing in the world, she’d often thought his hands felt warm or comfortable—but never unpleasant. At most, she’d found Oscar’s caress distracting.
She wondered what the difference meant but gave up on it halfway through her thoughts. Even if she got an answer, it didn’t matter anymore.
She shook it off only to suddenly feel uneasy all over. Her skin prickled.
“Someone’s watching.”
“Huh? Miss Tinasha, did you say something?”
“…No.”
The disquieting sensation disappeared in an instant. There was no one else around but Als and Tinasha.
The witch tipped her head up. She gazed at the moon, as if searching for something she’d been longing for.
Back in his chambers, Oscar was lounging in a chair, feeling entirely fed up. What in the world do I do now? he thought.
Sitting in front of him was one very prideful princess in a brilliant gown.
“Your Highness, what’s wrong?” inquired Princess Cecelia of Tayiri, who was attending in place of her elder brother. She looked at Oscar with eyes plainly filled with hope.
Oscar had struck up a conversation with her in order to ask about the Cuscull situation, but Cecelia had said, “It’s very complicated, so I can’t discuss it here” and invited herself to his private chambers.
Now that she had gotten Oscar alone, however, Cecelia refused to discuss any matters related to Cuscull. From the look of things, she knew nothing of politics, though perhaps she was tasked with making an ally of the power behind the throne of an influential country—or just seducing Oscar.
“…Time to kick her out,” Oscar muttered under his breath and got to his feet. Just then, there was a light rap at the window. On reflex, Oscar called, “What is it, Tinasha?”
The witch opened the window and entered, then looked shocked to see Cecelia there. Oscar was prepared for Tinasha to react in a dramatic fashion, but instead she turned calmly to face the princess.
“I am so very sorry, but I need to borrow him for some important business. I hope that’s all right with you,” Tinasha said very politely but in a manner that brooked no objections.
Cecelia did not take the imposition well. “I never… How very rude to come in from a place like that! Your Highness, just who is this woman?”
“My wi—mage,” Oscar replied, correcting himself just before the word witch could escape from his mouth. When Cecelia, the princess of a country that hated magic, heard that, her eyebrows flew up. She leaped to her feet and brazenly stepped right in front of Tinasha, glaring into her deep, dark eyes.
“A mage, was it? A mere mage who doesn’t know her place… How filthy. Begone!” she haughtily decreed.
Before Oscar could reply, Tinasha coolly spat, “A mere mage? You should watch your mouth, you imbecile.”
“What did you call me?!”
“Leave. Do I have to repeat myself before you understand?”
The witch’s eyes were like two pools of bottomless black—a silent gravity that dominated the entire room.
Cecelia shrank back, cowed by the intensity of her gaze. Oscar gaped at the witch in numb shock.
He had seen Tinasha look fearsome and intimidating before, but never had he seen her with eyes that could force others to submit so completely.
Oscar himself possessed that same ability. His eyes were that of someone who stood above the rest—a ruler.
Cecelia looked at Oscar imploringly, but once she realized no help would be coming from him, she all but fled the room. Only the witch and Oscar were left.
It seemed to Oscar that Tinasha in formal wear was an entirely different person—someone he didn’t know.
Tinasha slowly turned around and approached Oscar. There was an irrepressible self-deprecating look in her eyes.
“Tinasha?”
With a smile, she placed a finger to his lips, indicating that he shouldn’t speak. She lifted off into the air and gave a light wave of her right hand. Blood started to ooze from her pointer finger.
Then she wrapped both arms around Oscar’s neck and began to write something in blood behind his left ear. As she concentrated on her work, she whispered something in the prince’s ear.
“Oscar… I am someone who should have died four hundred years ago… At present, I am only a witch. I am nothing more than the remains of a child who should be dead. You should not fall for a dead woman.”
She finished writing and cradled Oscar’s face in her hands. From very close, she gazed into his eyes the color of a clear twilight sky.
“You should do what you need to do. The future of this country is riding on your shoulders. Don’t forget that.”
The darkness within Tinasha’s gaze was akin to stepping into the abyss.
A baseless anxiety seized Oscar.
“Tinasha? What’s going on?” he pressed.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she looked at him again and parted her red lips. “Do you remember what I said…when I undid Lucrezia’s spell?”
Oscar’s eyes widened.
She didn’t wait for his reply. Her face came closer, pale and twisted in sorrow. She kissed him softly on the lips.
Then she landed soundlessly on the ground and turned her back to him. The air in front of her—where her dark gaze now focused—warped.
In the next moment, an unfamiliar man materialized from the twisted space.
The man’s long white hair was the shade of melting snow, and his skin was similarly pale.
The light blue mage’s costume that clung to his lithe body looked remarkably similar to the one Tinasha often wore. This man with an air of androgyny to him gazed at Tinasha and smiled. “Aeti, I’ve come for you. You’ve grown so much bigger…ah, lovelier.” |
Unnamed Memory
At that, Oscar wanted to shout out. But when he tried, he found that his voice had been silenced. No matter how he tried, his body refused to move, too. That kiss just now had bound him with magic.
Tinasha suddenly leaped off the floor and launched herself at the man. She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Lanak! You really are alive!”
Oscar had never heard Tinasha’s voice sound so full of pure joy.
The man she’d called Lanak stroked her hair fondly. “I knew you were looking for me. But I couldn’t do anything for so long…”
“It’s all right. It’s enough just to know you’re okay.”
Tinasha took the man’s hand and cradled it against her face. Seeing the witch act so unusually shook Oscar to the core. Tears were glistening in her eyes, and her happiness was palpable. He was well aware that this wasn’t the smile she used as a mask. Who was this man who inspired such feelings in her?
Lanak smiled at Tinasha, apparently taking no notice at all of Oscar. “You won’t have to feel lonely anymore. I’ve built you a country, too. It’s called Cuscull. It’s small, but it’s going to grow quickly. I’m certain you’ll like it. You’re going to be its queen.”
That left Oscar reeling.
Cuscull, the newly formed country of mages.
This dangerous-looking man before him was the king of that country?
Tinasha answered him with a tone of rapture, not sounding the littlest bit perturbed. “If it’s my country, I’m going to make lots of requests.”
“Request away. It’s your right,” Lanak replied, wrapping his left arm around her. Noticing Oscar for what seemed to be the first time, he asked, “Who’s he?”
“The man I signed a contract with,” Tinasha explained.
“The bearer of Akashia, hmm? Sounds dangerous,” Lanak said, facing Oscar and making a motion with his right hand.
Tinasha saw it, and for a second, her expression twisted. The spell binding Oscar broke.
Wasting no time, Oscar tried to unsheathe Akashia, but Tinasha leaped in front of Lanak and gave the man a smile. “Let him go. Even if the sword has power, it’s just a sword in the end. It means nothing if the bearer has no strength of their own.”
“Tinasha!”
Oscar felt like he was trapped in some awful dream.
His witch, the person he should’ve known better than anyone, now felt terribly far away from him.
Where had her heart gone?
Slowly, Tinasha turned around. An unmistakable belligerence blazed in her dark eyes.
“My contract with you ends tonight. The curse is broken. You don’t need anything more from me, I believe.”
“There’s still time left on it,” he said.
“Not anymore,” she said, a cruel smile flickering across her face.
Oscar finally drew Akashia. He pointed the tip of it just past Tinasha. “I’m not letting you leave with him.”
“If you intend to hurt Lanak, you’ll have to go through me.”
Tinasha spread her arms wide, and a longsword materialized between them. She grabbed hold of it.
In an instant, there was a terrible pressure about the room.
Oscar did his best to stay calm. His mind was reeling from a chaotic mess of questions.
At this distance, he was confident he could kill Tinasha.
While she was touted as the most powerful witch, that met its match against Akashia.
Tinasha was the one who’d trained Oscar so that he could kill her, after all. However, even knowing that, the prince found it difficult to take a single step forward.
He was of two minds—the desire to focus on battle and the desire to reject it.
Time froze where it was, and there was a horrible silence that seemed to go on forever. Then Lanak embraced Tinasha from behind. “It’s all right. Let’s go.”
She gave a tight-lipped smile and nodded. Magic enveloped the two of them.
“Tinasha!” Oscar shouted, but she had already winked out of sight. |
Unnamed Memory
3. When the Abyss Formed
“Aeti, you’re going to be my queen. Do you know that?”
“Yeah… I know,” the little girl said, nodding hesitantly. The boy’s face changed from stern to smiling in an instant. That sweet smile reassured Tinasha somewhat.
She hadn’t intended to do anything bad. She’d just had a fit of anger, and her magic had leaked out and shattered a flower vase in the room. Startled, the court ladies called over the boy, who had stopped by rather coincidentally.
Tinasha felt devastated that the one person she didn’t want to learn of her failure had discovered it.
He was the only one she didn’t want to hate her. She’d been alone here for as long as she could remember. In a sense, the boy was the only family she had who thought of her and helped her.
Tinasha clenched her fingers in the hem of her dress. The boy seemed to sense her grief. With a half smile on his face, he opened his arms to her.
“Come to me.”
“Lanak!” Tinasha cried, leaping into his arms, and he stroked her hair gently.
Tinasha closed her eyes, wanting to cry at how warm his hand felt.
Now was the one time she could forget all her worries and her loneliness. Once she became his queen, she was sure she’d never suffer such thoughts again.
“Lanak, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. Just promise me you won’t do it again.”
“Yeah. I’ll try hard… So please don’t hate me.”
“You needn’t worry,” Lanak assured her. The voice floated out over her head, and she hugged the boy all the tighter, wishing desperately that he’d never abandon her.
She had loved him.
She had trusted him with her heart and soul.
But why?
Tinasha’s quarters in the castle had been completely emptied. The transportation array linked to her tower was gone, too.
Rumors traveled through every corridor on hushed whispers as everyone wondered why the witch had so suddenly disappeared without notice.
While some guesses held kernels of truth, not one of them struck upon the whole story.
It had now been a day since Tinasha’s disappearance. Lazar left the study and let out a long sigh. The man waiting for him out in the hall waved to him. Lazar looked up and murmured the man’s name. “General Als… Everyone.”
Standing before him were Als, his officer Meredina, as well as the court mages Sylvia, Kav, and Doan. The entire group took a few paces down the corridor before Als dared to ask, “How’s His Highness doing?”
“Not good. At first glance, he looks the same as he ever does, but…,” Lazar answered.
“And yet he’s still able to do his job. That’s just like him,” remarked Als.
“He won’t tell me what happened,” Lazar admitted.
“I want to know, but I’m afraid I won’t like what I hear…,” confided Als.
Sylvia joined the conversation, her eyes full of tears. “Where did Miss Tinasha go? …It was right after the ball, wasn’t it? Did I do something she didn’t like?”
“I don’t think that’s it. She wasn’t that sort.”
Their discussion was getting nowhere, and everyone lapsed into silence.
Just then, Oscar emerged from the room. He surveyed the entourage with a frown, but he walked right up to Lazar and handed him some documents.
“I’m done. You handle the rest.”
“Th-that was fast…,” Lazar said, accepting the stack.
Next to him, Als inquired suspiciously, “Your Highness, where are you going with your sword on?”
“Lucrezia’s forest.”
“What?!” exclaimed the entire group in chorus.
Recalling what happened before, Lazar rushed to stop him. “Please wait. What if something dangerous happens?”
“It won’t, so I’m fine. Let me go.”
“Your Highness, I’m going with you. Please wait,” Lazar insisted
“I—I am, too,” Sylvia added.
As the scene devolved into chaos and everyone spoke over one another, there came a peal of laughter from above their heads. Oscar looked up to see a woman with chestnut-brown hair floating in midair.
“You don’t have to go anywhere. I’m right here,” the Witch of the Forbidden Forest said with a wink.
“So she really did leave after all.” Lucrezia sighed as she looked out at the group now seated by the windows inside the study. She looked unusually low-spirited.
“What do you mean ‘after all’?” Oscar asked, sitting behind his desk again. He picked up on something unsavory in what she revealed.
“I mean, I was invited to Cuscull, too,” Lucrezia said.
Kav had just taken a sip of tea, and he broke into a coughing fit when he heard that.
“What did you decide?” Doan inquired timidly.
“I said no, of course. I’m sure the other witches did, too. Witches have no interest in countries and politics. Oh, well, one of us does but rejected the offer, too. The fact that our little Tinasha has gone means there’ll be troubles among the other countries.”
Everyone except Oscar gulped, their expressions heavy.
It was true that until now, a witch had never backed a country and assisted its invasions into other nations. When Tinasha had fought on the front lines seventy years ago, that had been in opposition to an invasion, and the use of her force had been limited to fighting the demonic beast.
Every nation maintained that the witches were beings who were not to be trifled with largely because of how powerful they were. It was also due to the fact that witches didn’t intervene in international skirmishes among mortals.
That the most powerful witch had seemingly allied herself with a nation set on invading other countries was concerning to say the least. The panic this development would cause would no doubt result in serious trouble.
A dark expression on his face, Oscar swung his legs up on top of his desk and crossed them. He looked up to the witch sitting behind him. “Do you know what kind of a relationship Tinasha and that Lanak guy have?”
All the courtiers tensed upon hearing the name Lanak for the first time. They realized he must have something to do with Tinasha’s disappearance but judged it wise to say nothing, considering Oscar’s mood.
Lucrezia, on the other hand, broke into a grin. “I do. She’s been looking for him ever since she became a witch. Now that they’ve finally been reunited, isn’t that a good thing?”
“Something’s off about that guy.”
“Are you jealous?” teased Lucrezia.
“I am, but there’s still something off there, though I can’t rightly tell what.”
The man who’d taken Tinasha away appeared to have one foot in a dream. It was obvious he was a powerful mage based on how he’d transported himself and Tinasha away with no incantation, but he left a general impression of being dangerous and not entirely sane.
Lucrezia floated into the air, then flipped upside down and got a closer look at Oscar’s expression. “Does it really matter? Tinasha was okay with it, after all. How about you just let her go? No one likes a persistent man.”
“I can’t,” Oscar stated bluntly.
“Oh, how stubborn. She made her choice all on her own. Who are you to go sticking your nose in? Shouldn’t you worry about yourself more?” Lucrezia inquired, gazing at Oscar with a bit of a mocking smile.
It was the gaze of a witch who ensnared, compelled, and controlled people’s hearts. Oscar looked back into those eyes without faltering—and made a decision. “I will not give up on her no matter what anyone says. In my eyes, she’s my one and only. If I kill that man and bring her back and she still says she’d rather have someone else, then I’ll let her go.”
Oscar was positive that he knew Tinasha better than she thought he did.
What she liked, what she hated. What she loved, what made her upset. He knew her loneliness, as well as her stubborn refusal to rely on others.
It was that understanding that drove Oscar to reach out after Tinasha. There was already a boundless distance between the two of them. If he stopped here, he’d never reach her.
Oscar’s fierce determination burned in his eyes, and Lucrezia met his gaze evenly. Time stretched out between them, feeling both endless and momentary.
Someone sighed. Lucrezia wiped the scorn off her face and sat down on the study’s desk. “First, I want you all to promise me that you won’t tell her you heard anything from me. I don’t want her to kill me. I will reveal everything I know about Tinasha to you. She only ever recounted indifferent recollections of her past to me, so think for yourselves about how she may have felt back then.” Breaking off there, the witch gazed out at the entire group. “And finally…I will only tell these things to those who are prepared to fight to the death with Tinasha. If you aren’t ready, then you shouldn’t hear this.”
Oscar closed his eyes and didn’t move.
Als looked at his friend Meredina. After some hesitation, she stood up. Lazar and Kav stood up, too. They had gone back and forth in their minds, but in the end, they bowed to those who remained and left the room.
Doan and Sylvia stayed. Doan met Lucrezia’s gaze with conviction, while Sylvia clenched her hands into tight fists. Als smiled wryly at that.
His eyes still closed, Oscar spoke. “Good. Go ahead and begin.”
With a sweet smile, Lucrezia launched into a long tale that took place many years ago.
“Before I begin my story, let me tell you her true name.”
“True name? It’s more than just Tinasha?” Oscar asked.
“Yes. Her full name is Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr. Aeti is a nickname for Aeterna.”
“Tuldarr?!” exclaimed Doan and Sylvia, thoroughly startled.
Timidly, Sylvia asked for clarification. “Tuldarr as in the Magic Empire that vanished overnight four hundred years ago, correct? I never expected her to carry the name of that ancient place…”
“So she’s royalty,” Oscar concluded. He was a little surprised, but it made sense. Tinasha had occasionally shown signs of such a heritage. This explained where it all stemmed from.
Lucrezia listened to everyone’s surprised remarks and laughed. “She is royalty, indeed, but perhaps not in the way you’re imagining. Strictly speaking, she was a potential queen. Tuldarr was a monarchy, but the throne wasn’t inherited based on lineage. Instead, rulers were decided purely by power.”
“If it was decided by power, then what happened if someone dangerous was also incredibly strong?”
“That was why candidates were educated in the castle from a young age. Soon after Tinasha was born, she was taken from her parents and raised in the castle. That was how preeminent her power was.”
Als let out a deep sigh. Lucrezia smiled in a motherly way. “So both a boy and girl would be chosen as potential regents, and they would become engaged. In Tinasha’s case, the boy was the king’s only son—Lanak. In terms of status, he was about equal to her, but in terms of power, he was no match for her. Everyone thought she would be queen and he would be her consort.”
“What a world,” Oscar commented.
“That’s what royal families are like. You have Akashia, don’t you?” Lucrezia said, looking at Oscar. The prince shrugged. It was true that without the royal sword, Oscar might not have been able to brave all the dangers that led him to Tinasha in the first place.
“Even so, Lanak apparently doted on this girl five years younger than him. They’d been together ever since Tinasha was a baby and as close as a real brother and sister. But all around them, unrest was brewing.”
Lucrezia narrowed her eyes and pointed to Oscar. “At the time, Farsas and many other countries were growing stronger. Tuldarr had broken off diplomatic relations with all other nations, and internal debate raged over whether that should continue. The Reformists urged Tuldarr to engage with foreigners and exchange technology with them. The Traditionalists insisted that Tuldarr was a special country that was better not intermingling. Neither side would yield. Eventually the king fell ill, and the Reformists championed Tinasha while the Traditionalists sided with Lanak. They argued over which would be heir.”
“You say they argued, but wasn’t it basically already decided that Miss Tinasha would take the throne?” inquired Als.
“Yes, it was. Which is why the Traditionalists hatched a plan. They plotted to kill two birds with one stone by preventing Tinasha’s coronation while also fortifying Lanak’s power.”
Lucrezia took a breath, licked her red lips, and continued.
“At the time, Tinasha was thirteen. One night, she woke up and found herself being spirited away in Lanak’s arms. She wondered why, but Lanak told her, ‘Something good’s about to happen,’ and she trusted him. For someone like Tinasha, who was separated from her parents and brought up in the castle, Lanak was the one person who understood her circumstances. He carried her into the cathedral and laid her down on the altar…
“And then…very slowly, he cut open Tinasha’s belly with a dagger.
“I remember Tinasha told me that it was ‘the kind of thing that happens all the time.’ She’d been smiling, her dark eyes closed, as if she hadn’t even been the one it’d happened to.”
“…What did you just say?” Oscar asked, swinging his legs back onto the floor and sitting up.
The others were staring at the Lucrezia, varying degrees of terror on their faces.
The witch giggled, although her eyes were filled with anger. “Oh, did you not catch that? Lanak and the Traditionalist mages used the blood and guts of Tinasha—a powerful mage—to summon magic. They didn’t want her to die partway through, so they used a life-prolonging spell but did nothing for the pain. When the magical power appeared, Lanak absorbed it.”
“Didn’t he think of her as his sister?!” Als shouted, half rising out of his seat.
Lucrezia curled her lip scornfully. “He did. But he had his wounded pride to think about, too. A young girl who relied only on herself had a power that far outstripped his, guaranteeing it was she who would succeed to the throne, not him, despite him being prince.”
“Unbelievable…,” Sylvia faintly murmured as her eyes welled up with tears. Next to her, Doan was uncharacteristically biting his lower lip in fury.
Oscar recalled Tinasha’s strange reaction when he’d picked her up and placed her in bed. That incident far in the past, four hundred years ago, must’ve left an unforgettable mark on her mind.
With everyone’s hate stirred up, the witch went on with her story.
“But the magical power they summoned was much greater than they’d imagined. The plan was to split it up using five names and affix each one to a part of Lanak’s body. But ultimately, they failed to control it. One of the mages working the spell ran away; one was eaten by the magic and died. The power whipped up into a huge vortex surrounding Tinasha…and it destroyed Tuldarr. That’s why the country fell to ruin overnight.”
The two mages paled. They had learned about the ancient Magic Empire and its mysterious downfall. Lucrezia gave a limpid smile and returned to recounting Tinasha’s history.
“Tinasha was on the verge of death but still conscious. She saw Lanak and the other mages escaping and grew frantic… This next part I don’t personally think had anything to do with her talent or power. Whether it was the willpower or the tenacity of someone half-dead, Tinasha succeeded in bringing the magic under control and absorbing it. However, she couldn’t absorb it all, and the parts that she couldn’t scattered all over the world, forming the magical lakes.”
Lucrezia lifted up her ivory hands. Before their eyes, a map of the continent appeared in midair. Five locations glowed red—the remaining magical lakes.
“Though the storm of magic vanished, the country was already in ruins. All around her were heaps of rubble. She lay there in exquisite pain for three days while her stomach wound healed.”
The map disappeared. Lucrezia smiled, biting back her sorrow. “And once it was all over—she became a witch.”
That was the tale of how a thirteen-year-old girl met with a checkered fate in a time long past. It was a long-forgotten tragedy that couldn’t be altered
“After that, Tinasha built a tower in a corner of the Tuldarr territory and made it her home. Through the years, she continued to search for Lanak. I’ve never dared to ask her why. That’s the end of the story. What do you think?”
Lucrezia looked at Oscar. She appeared to be grinning, but she wasn’t.
Slowly, Oscar let out a long exhale.
When he closed his eyes, it felt like visions of a distant past sprang up in his mind’s eye.
There was a desolate landscape and a girl. One who’d lost everything and had become a witch.
How much despair had she suffered? Despite it being more than anyone could’ve rightly endured, Tinasha had still managed to smile so naturally before everyone. How long must it have taken until she could get that smile back?
Oscar thought of his witch.
He recalled her fragile body. Her proud soul. Her whims, her love, her loneliness, her cruelty.
Oscar wished he could have been there to take her hand in the beginning.
He cursed himself for not being at her side when she was suffering the most.
Those were ancient memories, however, which meant the only thing he had any hope of reaching…was Tinasha as she was now.
“Do you think she still loves the man who slit her belly open?” Oscar asked Lucrezia.
“Who knows?”
“Then how do you think she feels about me?”
“Don’t ask me things you know the answer to,” Lucrezia replied, pointing a red-painted nail at him. “She left the barrier on you, didn’t she? And she left you her dragon? There’s your answer.”
Oscar touched the back of his left ear.
The night before, Tinasha had written a sigil in her own blood to temporarily seal off his protective barrier. If Lanak had seen the barrier, it seemed unlikely he would’ve let Oscar be.
Tinasha’s silent gift to Oscar was still protecting him, even in her absence.
Oscar stood up and addressed the group. “There are no changes to the essential plan. I’m going to kill that disgusting man and bring Tinasha back. That’s all.”
Als nodded, his eyes closed, and Doan bowed. In tears, Sylvia bobbed her head over and over.
The Witch of the Forbidden Forest looked at them and smiled like a mother of children who had done well.
A memory of a past that could never be recovered.
“You can sleep,” Lanak told Tinasha, and she closed her eyes. She was in his arms as he walked along, and they were warm.
To Tinasha, he was the only family she’d ever had. That was why she found herself comfortable enough to act so defenseless.
For a while, she lingered in a hazy dream, but she blinked her eyes open once she realized that the air around was suddenly different.
The pair were in a dim, cavernous room. It felt cool, and Lanak’s echoing footsteps were the only sound.
After noticing that Lanak was carrying her up some stone steps, she murmured, “Is this the cathedral?”
“Ah, are you awake? Your magical resistance is strong, so of course you woke up.”
“Magical resistance…”
Lanak was talking as if he’d used magic to put her to sleep.
The alabaster man climbed the stone steps. At the top was a ceremonial altar, with rays of moonlight streaming in from a skylight onto the chilly platform made of pale stone. Tinasha finally noticed the figures all around them. Countless mages in robes, faces shadowed by hoods, were clustered around the altar in silence.
“…Lanak? Who are these people?”
He didn’t answer her.
Smiling limpidly…he placed her down onto the cold altar.
When she tried to get up, he pressed her shoulders back down against the carven slab.
“Stay still, Aeti,” he said and took something from a recess in the dais.
Rays of moonlight caught something white.
Tinasha saw it, but she couldn’t comprehend what it was. She just lay there on her back as if frozen, staring at the dagger Lanak was holding.
“Lanak…?”
The blade plunged down.
The tip pierced her belly.
“…Aaaaaahhhhhh!”
Her body arched up like a bow, but Lanak held her down and brazenly cut her stomach open.
Blood spurted and flew, and her guts were dragged out.
She heard the sound of multiple people chanting. No matter how she shouted and struggled, Lanak kept cutting her open.
Her high-pitched screams didn’t stop until they turned at last into bitter sobs.
Thus, in a tale as old as time, that loathsome country came to an end.
“…!”
Tinasha jerked awake.
She clutched her head with shaking hands. Inside her mind, dreams and reality and the past and the present were all jumbled up.
She looked around and found herself in an unfamiliar room. She sat up in bed, tugging on her long nightgown.
After several deep breaths, her heart finally stopped pounding. Once she got out of bed, she began to pace around. Before long, she caught sight of a full-length mirror on the wall.
For a moment, she saw a skinny little girl there and she gasped.
“Ah…”
Breathless, she looked again but now saw only her adult self reflected back at her.
Tinasha looked nothing like the child she’d once been. The years had worn her down and caked her with despair and hatred. She knew that deep in her heart, however, that same self was still there. That girl who’d been driven mad four hundred years ago was still there.
Tinasha stepped up to the mirror and placed a hand on the icy glass. “This is why I told you not to get too close to a witch, Oscar…”
Her lips curled into a self-deprecating smirk, as the dark eyes of the woman inside the mirror seemed to avert her gaze.
Tearing her eyes away from that reflection, Tinasha went through the basic steps of getting herself ready. She had many things to do now. She couldn’t stay in a dream forever.
When she arrived at the castle’s main hall, three mages were having an audience with the king. Seated atop a white throne, Lanak noticed her and called, “Good morning, Aeti. Did you sleep well?”
“I did, thank you. Who are these people?”
“Ah yes. Apparently, they’re about to head out to a city in Tayiri.” Lanak chuckled.
The way he phrased this made it sound like it had nothing to do with him, and Tinasha cocked her head innocently. “To go burn that city?”
Her question sounded like a little girl’s, and one of the three mages nodded with emphatic aggression. “Yes. A declaration of war.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Tinasha decided.
“What?! But…”
She’d made the statement rather lightly, twirling her hair, and the three mages exchanged bewildered looks.
The beautiful witch smiled fearlessly. “I’m allowed to ask for whatever I want. I will go to the city. You three go prepare for war or something.”
Tinasha fixed the mages with powerful eyes the color of darkness and the bearing of royalty. More than anything, however, the witch possessed a power that afforded no room for disagreement.
One week after Tinasha disappeared, Oscar was buried in diplomatic materials in Farsas Castle, very far from Cuscull.
Cuscull, the northwestern part of Tayiri that had broken off and declared independence, shared no borders with Farsas.
Reaching it would require first going through Old Druza in the northwest or Cezar in the northeast, then Tayiri itself.
“Or first go west, then north through the territory of Old Tuldarr, and surround Cuscull from the west,” Oscar observed.
“But supposedly the magical power fields are unpredictable in Old Tuldarr,” Lazar said.
“Some people say that land was cursed to begin with, but no matter how you look at it, the real source of the problems has got to be him,” Oscar spat. “Because the land is permeated with a large-scale forbidden curse… I never would’ve thought the magical lakes stemmed from the same source.”
Oscar stared at the unfurled map of the mainland on his desk.
Beyond the western borders of Farsas lay deserted, desolate land belonging to no country—the wasteland where Tinasha’s tower resided. The presence of the witch’s spire was certainly a part of why the area had been abandoned for over three hundred years, but there was more to it than that.
That barren strip of land ran along the western edge of the tower all the way up to western Tayiri. It had been regarded as cursed since the Dark Age because of the fall of Tuldarr.
“I never considered it much before, but was all that land under Tuldarr’s rule? It would had to have been almost as big as Farsas is now. That was unusual for the Dark Age, wasn’t it? Tuldarr must’ve been mighty indeed,” Oscar observed.
“It certainly seems to have possessed the power befitting the title of ‘Magic Empire.’ According to Miss Lucrezia, Tuldarr was originally founded as a place to shelter persecuted mages,” Lazar explained.
“So it grew more and more powerful from there, until it rose to become the most powerful country on the continent by way of magic alone. Then one day it was brought to absolute ruin leaving only forbidden, magic-soaked waste behind. I’ve never heard something so ridiculous.”
When Tinasha had told Oscar of how their current era came to be known as the Age of Witches, she’d said the spell that was supposed to use the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned as the catalyst would have irreversibly altered the mainland. Apparently, Tinasha herself had been used in the very same way, and the effects of that incident could still be felt to this day.
The mere thought of that served only to infuriate Oscar. He knew if he dwelled on that idea too long, he’d want to march into Cuscull alone and cut that man named Lanak down where he stood. The others definitely wouldn’t allow him to do that, however. Even Oscar had to admit it was far too brash.
That said, spurring the military into action because of his own personal feelings was even more out of the question.
“I guess all I can do is wait until Tayiri comes running to us in tears…”
“What if Miss Tinasha gets married in the meantime?”
“…Now there’s an interesting thought,” said Oscar, indicating that Lazar should lower his head. Then Oscar used his fists to slowly apply pressure to Lazar’s temples.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow!”
“According to Lucrezia, Lanak is a spirit sorcerer, too. If he’s going to get married, he’ll wait until the fighting’s done.”
“I—I see…,” Lazar whimpered.
Oscar let go, releasing Lazar. Instantly, he sprang out of his lord’s grasp, rubbing his sore temples with tears in his eyes. “Your Highness, did you do this to Miss Tinasha, too…?”
“I use different amounts of force on different people, obviously,” Oscar replied. Lazar was looking at him reproachfully, suspecting him of treating his protector rudely. If Oscar had put real force into the move with Tinasha, he’d have crushed her delicate skull.
Oscar folded up the map and snapped, “I don’t know who he thinks he is, sweeping in and shamelessly spiriting Tinasha away, but I won’t be satisfied until I cut him into forty-eight different pieces.”
“I don’t think it has to be that many pieces,” Lazar protested.
“Anyway, I guess I’ll make sure we’re ready to ship out at any time while we wait to see what Tayiri’s move is,” Oscar said, scratching his temple with the end of a pen.
As it happened, he didn’t have to wait very long. That evening, two letters addressed to Farsas arrived.
In a castle hall, the king looked out at the cluster of royal council members and showed them the letters in his hands. “Here they are. One is from Tayiri, asking for aid from neighboring countries against Cuscull’s violent attacks. It says that Cuscull appears to be plotting to conquer the entire mainland and that it will not be satisfied with Tayiri alone,” the king detailed in a leisurely tone.
One general, Granfort, raised his hand and stepped forward. This man was in the prime of life, and he spoke in a measured, dignified voice. “My apologies, but it is hard for me to believe that Cuscull truly does have that intention based solely on the word of their current target. Isn’t this simply some internal skirmish? I must express doubts as to the wisdom of sending our troops into the situation so recklessly.”
“Ah, you would think so normally. But there’s one more letter…from Cuscull. This has gone out to all the Four Great Nations—Tayiri, Cezar, Gandona, and Farsas. It’s a request for surrender.”
The king’s words sent a shock wave of fright through those assembled.
Just as quickly as the fear had come, the royal council started to murmur among itself, with some snickers mixed in. The Four Great Nations were all powers with extensive, storied histories and unquestionable sovereignty. For a tiny country founded less than a year ago to demand submission of these superpowers was ludicrous beyond belief. Surely, Cuscull was getting too far ahead of itself.
Oscar and Als were the only ones not laughing.
What would the reaction have been like if it weren’t Cuscull trying to annex the Four Great Nations but the former monarchy called the Magic Empire? In the war-torn Dark Age, Tuldarr was a powerful state that successfully repelled invasions from other countries without surrendering ground. What would happen if that country that had once existed to protect the rights of mages now sought to attack other countries as a means of ensuring that goal?
More and more mages were flocking to Cuscull by the day, including incredibly powerful spirit sorcerers. Fighting against them would necessitate anti-magic warfare. There hadn’t been a mage-centric war on the mainland in the past two hundred years, however. Chances were high that one wrong move could lead to getting mowed down without even knowing what was happening.
The king, famous for his mild nature, surveyed those present with a stern look. “We don’t yet know if this will end up as something we can laugh about. I would prefer not to misread a nation and do something that cannot be undone. Five major Tayiri cities were destroyed all at once the other day. Casualties are estimated to be in the thousands. These were not cities that happened to be close to Cuscull, either. The attacker appears to have simply chosen the largest settlements. One of them was not far from Cezar at all.”
A hush fell over the audience.
Ultimately, the study of magic was rather lacking in most countries. Many were content to simply learn what had already been recorded in books. At best, a kingdom kept around fifty court mages. Cuscull had many, many more. It was beyond most people to accurately predict when and where such a sizable force of mages would attack. A city in Farsas could be struck the next day.
After making sure that the hall was quiet again, the king opened the letter in his hand. His gaze dropped to it. “Finally, this is for Oscar.”
“What is it?”
“In the cities in Tayiri that were destroyed…the people vanished, but the buildings were left intact. They say it’s the work of the Witch of the Azure Moon.”
Everyone in attendance suddenly stiffened.
A witch, who’d previously been content not to involve herself, had finally started using her immense power to interfere in war. Those who understood how unprecedented this was shuddered with fear, confusion, and horror. Some of them looked reproachfully at Oscar, knowing the witch in question had been at his side until very recently.
Oscar himself was like a rock, and his expression didn’t change.
With his eyes trained on his son, the king continued. “Tayiri requests that you, as the current bearer of Akashia, slay the witch. This is separate from the request for aid made of Farsas; they want you to kill her. Can you do it?”
“I can,” Oscar answered immediately. Behind him, the color drained from Als’s face. He raised his hand, intending to say something.
Before the general could speak, however, Oscar added, “I refuse to do so, however.”
The king looked puzzled, and a faint line creased his brow. “I won’t ask you to endanger yourself by going if you can’t win.”
“I’m the only one who can kill her. But I won’t. If Tayiri wants aid, let’s go give it to them. But only if Cuscull is our enemy. Tinasha’s a separate matter.”
“Didn’t she join up with Cuscull of her own free will?” inquired the king.
“It might look that way, but I don’t think so,” Oscar replied.
The king’s face darkened in an exceedingly rare display of anger. His full intimidating aura, normally held in check, was laid bare. As the royal council members grew pallid, the king rose from his chair and looked down at Oscar. He took in a short breath and then proceeded to berate his son. “Are you a fool to get so possessed by a witch?! Have you forgotten that the lives of the people are riding on your shoulders?!”
Everyone shrunk inward at their lord’s earsplitting roar of indignation.
Oscar only offered a wry huff, however.
The witch had said the same thing to him. It wasn’t very long ago, but Oscar felt oddly nostalgic about it already. Everyone was chewing his ear off, trying to test him.
Oscar met his father’s angry gaze, his bright sky-blue eyes blazing. “Father, we don’t need to go back and forth. I’ve already made up my mind. I don’t plan to lose, and I also don’t plan on giving anything up.”
That much Oscar had decided a while ago. Perhaps everything had been leading up to this ever since Oscar had learned the truth of Tinasha’s past from Lucrezia… Or maybe it’d been from when Oscar had first reached the top of Tinasha’s tower.
Regardless, the prince’s answer was clear, calm, and wholehearted. The king eyed him silently.
After only a moment, the king’s rage seemed to quiet and he gave a heavy shrug of resignation. “It really must run in the family…”
No one in the room understood the meaning behind their ruler’s mutterings. With a pained smile, the king sat himself back down.
“All right, then. Do as you like. In exchange…”
“In exchange?” Oscar urged.
“You take the throne. I think I’ll abdicate.”
“Y-Your Majesty!” cried Minister of the Interior Nessan in a panic.
The king received the concern rather nonchalantly. “It’s a little early, but I don’t mind. He’s already handling almost all the official duties. The one who rules this country is supposed to also be the bearer of Akashia anyway. It’s the perfect opportunity for Oscar to do some important things.”
Even Oscar was taken aback by his father’s rather sudden decree. It was true that kings in Farsas took the throne unusually quickly compared with other countries, though. This was because the king of Farsas wielded Akashia, meaning he had to be a capable swordsman.
In accordance with that tradition, it would not have been strange if Oscar had been crowned as soon as he’d come to possess the mighty weapon. His father had just been occupying the throne since that day.
Oscar snapped out of his shock, and a smile broke across his graceful features. “I can’t believe you… All right, I accept the throne with the utmost gratitude.”
The king nodded, a dark smile on his lips. It very much resembled his son’s. He seized upon the opportunity to give Oscar another warning. “You must always be aware that your decisions affect the entire country.”
“I will take that to heart,” Oscar declared, silently wondering what Tinasha would think of him saying such a thing.
He tried to imagine it, but the Tinasha in his mind had her back turned to him.
“I’m a witch, and you possess Akashia; you really might have to kill me someday.”
At the time, the witch had said that in partial jest, but it was the truth.
Oscar was the owner of the only sword in the world capable of killing the Witch of the Azure Moon—his protector. Maybe Tinasha had so enjoyed her time together with Oscar because she’d known all along that it was ephemeral.
What role did she expect Oscar to play in the war that was to come? Did she instead wish him not to get involved at all?
Oscar could only grasp at an answer as the tale hastened onward, faster and faster. |
Unnamed Memory
4. The Shape of Emotion
If he closed his eyes, he could still see it so clearly—the sight of his mother in agony, engulfed in flames.
Nearly ten thousand soldiers marched through the Asdra Plains, a landscape with nothing to entice the eye but the thick forests that flanked it. The plains were not far from Cuscull at all, cut through by a highway road that led from Tayiri to Cuscull. Troops marshaled by Tayiri’s Prince Reust marched along this road on their way to Cuscull. This crown prince was Cecelia’s older brother, much sterner than their father in temperament, and he had disapproved of his royal father’s decision to send aid requests to the neighboring countries.
The Tayiri people were known for their valor in battle, and they regularly boasted that their soldiers could beat Farsas’s in hand-to-hand combat. In the eyes of the military officers of Tayiri, Reust included, Cuscull was a country of five hundred mere mages at best—no different than an irritating pest. It didn’t matter to them that such a number of magic users was ten times more than a normal country possessed.
The troops Reust commissioned, commanded by a trusted general in his place as he remained in the castle, made their way with no troubles. At their current pace, they would reach the castle in Cuscull in another two days.
“…They’ll reach the target in twenty minutes.”
The scout’s report made all in the forest tense up.
Cuscull mages were lying in wait. For the past several days, they had made meticulous preparations to ambush the Tayiri army. Riding high on prebattle excitement, one mage said, “Can’t wait to see the looks on their faces.”
“It’ll be over before that happens. They don’t have any mages on their side. They can’t use or defend against magic.”
Their hushed whispers were as much to reassure one another as anything else.
Another mage piped up loudly, “They’re just a pack of delusional fools who think they’re strong, even though they don’t even have any magic. They better realize who’s going to be controlling whom.”
Upon hearing such scornful derision, the Cuscull soldiers all around them exchanged uncomfortable looks. Not able to use magic themselves, the soldiers ended up on the receiving end of numerous openly contemptuous glances. Leaning against a tree trunk, Renart rolled his eyes.
The oppressed had flocked together to form a country, and now they looked down on anyone who wasn’t one of them. That was the current state of affairs. The few soldiers that Cuscull commanded had been brought to the fledgling nation for a number of reasons. Some were the family members of mages who had come; some agreed with Cuscull’s founding principles; some were simply in it for the promise of new money.
Whatever the purpose, they faced worse treatment than the mages because they could not cast spells. Peeling the veneer off the so-called nation of mages revealed this underneath. It was still a long way away from any sort of stability derived from a ruler with overwhelming power. It was not yet Tuldarr.
Originally from Tayiri, Renart was a youthful mage fighting for Cuscull. He loathed seeing how those around him were behaving and shut his eyes. The murmurs persisted, even in the dark.
“Anyway, the witch is getting her revenge now, isn’t she?”
The atmosphere of the forest grew even more fraught at that.
They were talking about the woman who had suddenly been made the king’s bride.
She was terribly beautiful, with black eyes and hair, and she destroyed five enemy cities as soon as she arrived in Cuscull. There was no warning and no mercy given to women and children. Her power was so tremendous that it inspired more fear and awe than joy in victory among the mages of Cuscull. Because they were mages themselves, they understood her power far outstripped that of any human.
“…So she really is a witch?”
“Most likely. I don’t know which one she is, but I pray she’s not the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned. That’s the one who destroys countries.”
“Best not to interact with her. She’s only our ally for as long as we don’t upset her.”
A while back, a member of the royal council by the name of Kagar came to invite her to Cuscull, but he incurred her wrath and got himself cut down in cold blood. The king had now set her free to do as she liked. No one wanted to be her next victim.
“A witch? Now isn’t that interesting,” cut in a very relaxed voice.
Renart opened his eyes. There was now a man standing in the middle of the group—the chief mage of Cuscull, Bardalos. He wasn’t very tall, and his looks were nothing to write home about. His eyes glinted with a sadistic gleam, however, constantly seeking out his next prey.
“The witches can change the course of history, or so they say. Don’t you think it’s actually pretty good luck that we’ve got one at our disposal?” Bardalos asked leadingly, but all fell silent. Not only were they afraid of the witch—they were also afraid of Bardalos. Originally hailing from a small eastern country, he was a criminal who had carried out numerous mass murders in the towns and villages of his homeland. After wiping out the team sent to take him down, he was banished and went into hiding. Now he had reappeared as the chief mage of Cuscull.
Seeing that no one would answer him, Bardalos snorted and pointed out at the plains just beyond the edges of the forest they were concealed in. “Well, it’s just about that time. They’re walking right into our slaughterhouse. Let’s burn them to the ground.”
At that, everyone squinted out at the rolling fields. As Renart gazed at the shadowy shapes of troops marching closer, he thought of the flames on a day long ago.
Ever since Renart could remember, he and his mother had lived in a cabin in the forest.
His dad died before he was born. His mother was an embroidery artisan who went into town once a week to sell her work and buy food with that money. Renart himself, however, was not allowed to go into town.
Unfortunately, the forbidden was all the more alluring. One day, he slipped out of the house and snuck into town, where he met a group of children his age and showed them what he always did. He used magic to retrieve a girl’s hat that had fallen into a pond. She was in tears, so he thought she’d be happy. When he presented her with the hat, however, she slapped it away with a look of abject fear. The children scattered and fled, and scary-looking guards chased after him.
Renart desperately ran all the way home.
Even now, he could clearly remember the look of despair on his mother’s face when she heard his hurried explanation. When they ran out of the house without even packing their belongings, the guards from town had just arrived. They saw Renart and his mother trying to escape and lit a bottle they’d brought with them. Then they threw the flaming container of oil toward the house, at the two of them. Renart’s mother shoved him away just in time, and he fled into the forest.
He looked back once, only to see his mother in her death throes, writhing in agony in the flames.
“…My mother wasn’t a mage,” Renart muttered to himself.
His mother had died for his mistakes, but mage haters had been the ones who’d actually killed her.
Renart didn’t think of joining up with Cuscull as fleeing to safety. It was a means to carry out something he knew he had to do.
Even now, he could recall the faces of the men who killed his mother. They were still young at the time of the fire, and over the years they went from guardsmen to officers in the army. He knew exactly where they were stationed.
Revenge.
Redemption.
Those were Renart’s only reasons to live.
Thus, when he saw the large-scale spell enacted across the plains…Renart felt a dark exhilaration. Those men would die on these grasslands. They deserve to go up in flames, roiled with agony, just like my mother did that day, he thought.
“We really stepped in it this time. We’re marching out to the middle of nowhere.” The general laughed dryly, surveying the army from horseback in the middle of the Asdra Plains. “We’ve gotta get this over with quickly so we can go home and give a good report to His Highness. We’ll make a nice clean sweep of those filthy mages. Ah, maybe we’ll bring a few of the nasty curs back as tribute. Chop them up alive.”
Flattering laughter rang out around him. The general was in good spirits and sported a grin on his face. Suddenly, a messenger dashed over from the vanguard at top speed. The general’s expression quickly soured.
“G-General, we have a problem!” cried the messenger.
“Yes, what is it?”
“There’s an invisible wall up ahead… It’s blocking our advance!”
Just as the general was about to spout That’s absurd! the ground beneath them shimmered. From horseback, the general watched as a red spell configuration materialized and expanded across the ground as far as the eye could see.
“What is this…?”
The general leaned forward to get a better look. No sooner had he done so, however, then crimson flames leaped up from the design and swallowed him whole.
“Now there’s a sight,” said Bardalos, hungrily observing the blazing plains from midair. He could see the figures of thousands of soldiers writhing and collapsing amid the flames below his feet.
The mages had laid out a far-reaching fire ignition spell on the plains in advance. They waited for the Tayiri troops to pass over it, and then they activated it.
It was all done under Bardalos’s command, and he watched the sea of flames with delight. As he was taking in the sight of the enemy soldiers’ anguish, a voice from the ground hailed him.
He looked down at his subordinate. “Yes?” he asked.
“Lord Bardalos! They’re breaking in from the south!”
“Oh, are they? Well, I’ll be. Let’s go meet them, then,” Bardalos declared, an intrigued smirk on his face as he mounted his horse.
Cuscull and Tayiri were now in open war.
The Tayiri cavalry emerged from the flames amid cries of anguish and death throes and the awful stench of burning flesh. Their faces were masks of mad rage as they charged at the mages, who poured from the forest to meet them. Waves of magic hit the Tayiri soldiers one after another, setting them ablaze.
Undaunted, the soldiers kept coming in a rushing torrent that soon reached those Cuscull mages on the front lines. They trampled over the magic users who had fallen to a stab of their spears, and the cavalry soldiers brandished their swords.
“Kill them! Kill them!”
None could tell from which side the cry had come. All anyone could do was muster their sword or spell. Renart fell back to a part of the forest the soldiers hadn’t penetrated and set up a defensive barrier. Shielded from the growing flames, he looked for the former guards who had wronged him years ago.
Inside, he hoped they’d already fallen prey to the licking tongues of fire.
If they hadn’t, Renart was ready to slay them himself. He began a new incantation.
Just then, an explosion went off right next to him.
A scorching hot wave blew through his magical defense wall. Renart whirled back, and his jaw dropped open.
The forest just behind him was gone.
This was Bardalos’s doing. From atop his horse, the chief mage laughed as he let loose more magic attacks.
“Go on and kill them already. If you don’t hurry, they’ll all be gone!” he shouted. This was the voice of a man who was clearly enjoying himself. He sent out another fire explosion. Those mages running about trying to escape found themselves reassured by Bardalos’s power and confidence. With a renewed will to fight, they began pushing back against the Tayiri soldiers.
After the front line moved past, the air filled with silence and a cloying heat.
All that was left were dead bodies burned to a crisp by Bardalos’s magic. Renart saw that among the dead lying there was a soldier who was once his ally. Secretly, Renart let out a sigh of grief.
Less than an hour later, a great number of people lay dead.
As the fires began to wane, the scene they revealed was so horrific that most of the mages turned green at the sight.
Charred corpses blanketed the earth as far as the eye could see. The nausea-inducing spectacle and foul smell hanging in the air were so intense that the mages would likely never forget what they’d witnessed. While victory clearly belonged to Cuscull, the aftertaste was brutal. The suffocating nature of war made it difficult for anyone to speak.
Renart felt suffocated, too, as he sprinted through the forest. He clicked his tongue in annoyance as he caught sight of three soldiers running around screaming like chickens with their heads cut off.
He wondered why they were so desperate to survive at the loss of their dignity. Surely, they should’ve perished in the blaze. How selfish of them to want to live after taking his mother’s life. Someone who killed another had to be ready to suffer the same fate themselves, after all.
Like a huntsman stalking his prey, Renart sent out a blade crafted of wind. It pierced the back of the man lagging the farthest behind, and he fell. When Renart stepped over his body to pass through, he looked at his face.
He’d gotten a little older, but it was definitely one of men who’d murdered his mother ten years ago. The man was already dead, with a trail of blood leaking from his mouth. His eyes were bulged in fear over his untimely death.
Renart was a little surprised to realize that this inspired no emotion in him.
He thought he’d feel satisfied, but he didn’t. All he felt was dull and numb, as if he was submerged in cold water. It was like realizing that the person he thought he was this entire time had actually been sloughed off along the way. His body kept going out of pure momentum.
The second one was within range, and Renart shot him down with magic, and he crumpled to the ground like paper. He’d likely died instantly, but Renart didn’t look at his face… He didn’t want to see.
The third one tripped on a tree root and fell to the ground.
Crawling forward, he looked back and begged in vain, “Someone save me…”
Renart muttered to himself, “Mother pleaded for the very same thing…”
No one came to help her, however. They had killed her in cold blood. So why did they want to live now?
Renart hummed an incantation, and a blade of wind appeared. The man saw it and feebly shook his head. “Please… I don’t want to die…”
Renart looked down at the man, lifting his summoned sword.
Thoughts of his mother’s last moments and of ten years of hatred came rushing back. All of that would finally end here.
As he narrowed one eye, he heard the man sobbing.
His right hand was hot from the magic he’d manifested. The time he’d waited for was finally here. He’d dreamed of this—the end of the vision seared onto his mind. There was no cause for hesitation.
That was why…
And yet—
For some reason, he just couldn’t manage to bring his summoned blade down.
Renart stared at the trembling man. And a command fell naturally from his blood-caked lips.
“…Go.”
He lowered his hand. The blade made of magic vanished.
“Go! Don’t let me see you again! Get out of here!”
At that, the man rushed to get to his feet and took off deep into the forest. Renart buried his face in both hands so he wouldn’t see this. He took a deep breath to calm his agitated breathing.
Then he heard a jarringly blasé taunt from behind him. “Oh-ho? What do you think you’re doing? Don’t tell me you let the enemy escape?”
The tone was mocking. Renart turned to see Chief Mage Bardalos, with a cynical smirk twisting his face. He eyed Renart. “I thought I said not to let a single one get away. Am I wrong?”
“…You’re not wrong.”
“Well, whatever. I’ll chase him down and kill him. You head back.”
“Wai—” Renart started to cry out, then bit his tongue.
Bardalos snickered as he tore into him. “What is it? Are you telling me not to end his pathetic life? He’s a soldier who entered a battlefield. Don’t you think he knows death is a possibility?”
“He no longer has the will to fight,” Renart argued.
“Do I look like I care? If he doesn’t want to fight, he shouldn’t have come out here in the first place. Or…what? Do you want to die in his place?”
“…Excuse me?” Renart said, utterly at a loss for words as he stared at the man before him. Bardalos’s eyes were filled with a mad, murderous glee. To him, it was all the same if he killed the enemy soldier or if he killed Renart.
Great mages had the power to kill people as easily as cutting blades of grass. That was what it meant to be a mage.
Renart let out a ragged breath. An unspeakable exhaustion weighed heavy on him.
Maybe I wouldn’t mind dying, he thought. He’d die covering for an enemy he thought he wanted to kill. He wanted to burst out laughing.
But—enough. He needed to end things here.
Just when Renart made up his mind, a woman’s thin voice cut in.
“That man is my attendant. I’ll thank you not to bully him too much.”
The voice was unfamiliar, and Renart looked over his shoulder.
There in the forest permeated with the scent of blood stood a raven-haired woman, the king’s favorite.
She was so beautiful it almost looked artificial. Bardalos gave her a dark smile. “Well, well, well, Lady Aeterna. When did you arrive?”
“Only moments ago.”
“Well then, I do apologize for not meeting you personally. You appear quite exhausted. Was it that tiring giving the declarations of war to the other countries? I would’ve happily done that for you.” Bardalos’s tone was openly mocking.
Renart took a closer look at the woman. She did look terribly pale-faced. He could even detect fluctuations in her power, as if she’d spent too much magic.
She only eyed Bardalos with a haughty stare, despite his sarcastic attitude. “This way was faster. Ignore deserters. Treat the wounded and go back to Cuscull.”
“…Very well,” Bardalos said, wiping his expression blank and bowing before teleporting away.
The woman glanced at Renart. Before he could even gasp at the darkness of her eyes, she’d already vanished, too.
“…Thank you for what you did back there,” Renart said, his head bowed. He had come to the woman’s chambers after returning to the palace of Cuscull.
She was sprawled along a couch by the window, looking indolently up at the sky. It was as if she hadn’t noticed him there at all.
Despite her seemingly paying Renart no mind, he inquired, “Why did you save me?”
While he was her attendant, he had never spoken to her. He only knew what she was.
She was the fearsome woman the king had brought back. She was the one who would be queen someday. This was a woman who did not get close to anyone and never smiled. People spoke of her as a doll made of ice whose only job was to kill.
Renart did not believe all the rumors, though he did think of her as one far removed and above himself. Bardalos probably saw through all the rumors, too.
She finally flicked her eyes over to Renart expressionlessly. Her voice was devoid of any inflection as she answered quietly, “Because you looked tired.”
The reply was so simple that Renart wasn’t sure if it was a proper reason.
Curiously, he felt himself freeze up. He was struck by the odd sensation that this woman had peered so thoroughly into him that he may as well have been transparent.
Her long eyelashes were cast down. Her eyes appeared as ebony pools.
It was a strange gaze, very reminiscent of an abyss. Meeting it gave Renart the feeling that he could see his own past reflected there.
“I—I—”
Before Renart registered what he was doing, he spilled everything about himself. It was like a dam had broken. His childhood, his mother’s death, the days he’d spent in pursuit of revenge, and what’d happened earlier that day.
The woman remained silent the entire time, evidently content to stare up at the ceiling. He couldn’t tell if she was listening, but once his story came to an end, she cocked her head at him. “How did you feel when you killed them?”
For a second, Renart was at a loss for words. Hurrying so as not to make that apparent, he fumbled to express himself. “It was like a load was taken off me…but it was also very unpleasant.”
“I see. What about when you didn’t kill one of them?”
Dark eyes pierced right through him. The woman’s question made him shiver with fear, and he answered in a trembling voice. “I felt relief…but I also felt that I should’ve killed him.”
“So honest,” the woman fired back rudely, and Renart was shocked by her tone. This didn’t sound like an emotionless ice doll; Renart was dumbfounded.
Paying her inferior no mind, the woman continued her aggressive line of questioning. “So what will you do now? I can help you escape, if that’s what you want.”
“…What?” Renart stammered, feeling like he’d misunderstood something.
She stared back at him, as even as a cat. “You did what you came here to do. There’s no need for you to stick around here, is there?”
What did it mean for the king’s favorite to be suggesting that a member of his forces flee?
It didn’t look like she was joking or teasing, however. Instinctively, Renart swallowed a held breath.
The king’s bride—a woman rumored to be a witch—was supposed to be a cruel, heartless lady.
Renart thought those rumors wrong. Up close, she was vague and elusive. She seemed set apart from humans but also completely human at the same time.
Feeling that her dark eyes were focused on something beyond the room, Renart couldn’t help but ask, “What is your purpose here?”
Witches were always said to not involve themselves in mortal affairs. Why then was this supposed witch taking such an active role in a war?
Her eyes widened. A faint grimace crossed her face.
Suddenly, her expression revealed itself. A very lonely-looking queen admitted in a whisper, “I… I am here because of my own delusions. That’s all.”
The bitter words didn’t match her beautiful figure. Just as Renart was marveling at how her inner demons were the same as his, the door swung open violently.
“Lady Aeterna! How could you invite such a person in!”
A girl burst in with her shoulders hunched up angrily. Another woman was right behind her.
The younger one in the front looked to be about sixteen years of age. Her slightly curly hair was pinned up, and her eyes blazed with conviction.
The older one in the back couldn’t have been more than twenty. She had dark blond hair and a calm disposition. One glance revealed her to be a fairly powerful mage.
The icy woman let out a sigh as she eyed the younger of the two intruders. “It’s my prerogative to speak to whoever I want.”
“Who is this girl, a lady-in-waiting?” asked Renart.
“Who’s a lady-in-waiting?! I’m a mage, too, you know! I’ll definitely get my revenge on the people who chased us out of town!” the girl snapped, red-faced with anger. She certainly sounded serious, but her childish phrasing sapped the word revenge of all its dark dignity. Renart observed all this with a pained smile.
The girl noticed his expression, and her face turned purple. “What’s your problem? Got something to say, servant?!”
“Tris, hush,” admonished the possible witch, and the girl instantly clamped her mouth shut. While Tris looked displeased, the soon-to-be queen continued, “I told you before that I won’t deny you your revenge. Carry it out as you see fit, whether that’s punishing them by the proper channels or exacting it directly. If you choose the latter, however—that act and your own intentions will only lead back to the past. You must think carefully about whether it’s truly worth it to waste who you are now on that. Is it really so important to lower yourself to nothing but a remnant of your past…? If you’re not prepared, all you’ll succeed in doing is losing yourself, even if you do get your revenge.”
What she said hit Renart hard, for it was undoubtedly true for him as well.
Ten years ago, he’d watched his mother burn to death. Every breath he’d taken since had been to remember that moment. He was just the remnants of that child gone mad with rage. Once that child’s fury dissipated, there was nothing left. That was why Renart felt utterly despondent, with no idea where he should go.
Tris scowled, her face still red, but she said nothing further and stormed out of the room. She slammed the door hard behind her, and the blond woman gave a helpless smile. “I’m very sorry.”
“I’m used to it,” answered the future queen, getting to her feet and letting out a little yawn. She looked at Renart and smiled. “So what’s your answer to my question? What will you do?”
Renart gazed back into her dark eyes.
He didn’t know what lurked there. Nothing was reflected in her gaze; it was as lifeless as a mirror.
Although her delusions had left her stranded, here she was, still standing.
His life should have ended with his revenge, but she’d scooped him up. So if he had to seek a path to go down from now on, it could only be—
Renart made up his mind and knelt before the ebony-eyed woman.
“I hereby pledge my loyalty to you.”
Her eyes widened in surprise, but she quickly recovered and smiled.
“Strange man.”
Her smile was terribly kind and human.
“Ugh! Why is Lady Aeterna so fond of lecturing?” Tris groused indignantly, sipping tea in her antechamber. Across from her, the blond woman smiled uncomfortably.
Her name was Pamyra; she and Tris were under orders to attend to the witch and look after her needs. However, the one who required the most looking after was actually Tris herself. She had an extremely high opinion of herself, and she sat in her chair with pursed lips.
“She’s not even that much older than me. I wish she’d stop her meddling,” muttered Tris.
What she said was so far off the mark that Pamyra gaped at her. “What? Tris… Do you not know who Lady Aeterna is?”
“She’s His Majesty’s bride, isn’t she? And a really strong spirit sorcerer, too.”
“More than a strong spirit sorcerer, she’s the Witch of the Azure Moon.”
When she heard that, Tris’s face was a sight to behold. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets, and her jaw dropped to the ground. She was frozen in place for a while, and then all the blood drained from her face only to come rushing back and turn her bright red. “Is that true?! The Witch of the Azure Moon?! No way, I…I’ve admired her forever!”
“It’s true. I’m surprised you didn’t know,” Pamyra replied curtly, while Tris’s eyes sparkled with interest.
And she’s the last queen of the Magic Empire of Tuldarr, Pamyra thought.
Pamyra was born and raised in an isolated village of spirit sorcerers within the territory of Old Tuldarr.
Four hundred years ago, when Tuldarr was destroyed, its realm stretched far and wide. That said, it may as well have been a city-state, as most only dwelled within the palace city. There were those mages who lived quietly in the wilds, however.
Pamyra was a descendant of those people. All her life, she’d heard the same story—the tale of a girl who was to be queen of Tuldarr and became a witch.
Over hundreds of years, various storytellers had embellished the fable and spun it into a secret legend.
In the story, the witch was beautiful, fearsome, strong…and all alone.
As a young girl, Pamyra had worried and fretted that the witch lived a lonely existence up in her tower. As she grew older, she came to understand that the witch chose that for herself.
As she grew, so, too, did her memory of the fairy tale begin to fade. That was when Lanak came to their village.
Tuldarr’s prince spoke of restoring the country. While the others disapproved of such a suspicious proposal, Pamyra alone accepted his invitation. She had long desired to live in a place as wondrous as Tuldarr—the powerful, mysterious nation whose city ran on magic, that researched advanced technology, that cut off all relations with other nations.
A land ruled by the most powerful mages of the modern age. It represented the highest achievement magic’s power could accomplish in the entire history of their land.
Legend had it that the regent of Tuldarr would take multiple high-ranking demons, known as mystical spirits, as personal familiars during the coronation ceremony. Nowadays, the idea of humans subduing high-ranking demons—called gods by ancient people in rural lands—sounded like a pipe dream.
Pamyra, however, dared to wonder if, perhaps, it was true.
She felt anticipation and hope swell up within her and left her village for the first time in her life.
But when she came to Cuscull and spoke of her origins, all the other mages sneered at her behind her back.
“I heard her parents are spirit sorcerers. Or, well, they used to be.”
“Spirit sorcerers, but they decided to have a child…”
“They gave in to the desires of the flesh, huh? Won’t she end up just like them?”
For her, the humiliation was unbearable.
She didn’t know how other spirit sorcerers had fared over the past four centuries. In her village, everyone saw it as a happy thing when two people in love got married and were blessed with children.
The idea that losing your spiritual magic would make you inferior as a mage angered and frustrated Pamyra. She did her best to tolerate the rumors, however, believing that everyone would stop talking once they saw what she could do.
The harder Pamyra worked, the worse the gossip got, though. Just when it seemed like too much and the longing to return home began to claw at her mind…she arrived.
Lanak introduced her as “my bride and a girl who was raised alongside me.” That meant she was none other than the witch who was a potential heir to the throne, just like him.
She had hair like black silk, skin like white porcelain, and true to the story, her eyes were the color of darkness. Pamyra had always thought the witch’s beauty had been exaggerated over the years, but the woman’s visage left her stunned.
Pamyra hastily volunteered to be the witch’s attendant and was certain she’d never forget their first encounter.
The witch, standing by the window, had turned to look at her and said in a tone that carried some amount of surprise, “You’re a spirit sorcerer?”
“Yes, I am from the village of Dilenne, Princess.”
“Don’t call me princess…,” the witch replied, uncomfortable. There was a pause, but the witch quickly returned to the topic at hand. “I see—so you’re from that village… Is everyone doing well?”
“Yes, thanks to you.”
When Tuldarr had been destroyed, much of the land surrounding the castle had been contaminated by a forbidden curse. Pamyra’s village was unaffected because the one survivor of the disaster had purified the land around the settlement.
The witch smiled faintly, as if she were remembering that, too. “That was a long time ago. If you’re a spirit sorcerer, does that mean there are many still born in your little town?”
“Yes. My parents were spirit sorcerers, too, and I’ve inherited all their techniques,” Pamyra replied instinctually. She quickly froze, however, afraid she might be mocked again.
Surprisingly, the witch gave a gentle smile. “You are very much loved. That’s a wonderful thing.”
Affection and longing bled out of that gaze. She was as beautiful as the legends said but much kinder than the old fairy tales would’ve had Pamyra believe.
In an instant, Pamyra made up her mind. She imagined it must’ve been quite similar to what a newborn chick felt upon seeing its mother for the first time. Pamyra was struck by a deep, abiding certainty that this witch was her master.
The blond woman knelt and bowed her head low. “As a mage, I pledge myself to thee. Order me as thee will.”
She used to worry if the witch was lonely living all alone in the tower.
Pamyra, however, would do her best to prevent the witch from feeling lonely in this castle. She felt certain that was why she’d ended up here. |
Unnamed Memory
5. The Side of Me Unknown to You
The boy stood frozen before the gates to his city. He’d returned from running an errand in the next town over. The streets looked no different. They should’ve been bustling with people, however. The boy couldn’t spy a single person out on the thoroughfare. Shops were empty, as was his own home.
Wandering the city in search of someone—anyone—the boy eventually came to the conclusion that the place was completely deserted. He was at a complete loss. The whole thing felt like some bad dream. Maybe he’d just found his way into a different city that looked identical to his?
Everything looked familiar; the graffiti on the walls that had been there for years, the old dolls decorating the storefront windows.
He went back to his house, clinging to the smallest glimmer of hope.
On the kitchen table, his mother had laid out lunch for him.
It smelled like home, and he felt tears well up. The food was still fairly warm.
He ate, tears pouring down his cheeks, and then ran to the next city over on weary legs to let them know what had happened.
The extremely gruesome battle of Asdra Plains exceeded almost all expectations.
All of the ten thousand soldiers Tayiri had were lost, save for the five hundred or so who deserted. Cuscull ended up losing just under fifty mages. Such a gruesome outcome forced those neutral countries to reevaluate the power of magic, as well as the danger that Cuscull posed.
The battle of Asdra was not the only thing to prompt such reconsiderations, however.
At almost the same time as the battle, one city in each of the Four Great Nations was attacked.
These assaults were similar to the ones the Tayiri cities suffered: The buildings were left intact, while only the people vanished. Only big cities were targeted, and the countries that had considered themselves mere spectators in the conflict now had to seriously consider the letter Cuscull had sent.
Oscar, his coronation now only four days away, received a report on the attacks and grimaced.
Normally, his being made king would be a grand affair with all the important people from each country in attendance. With the looming crisis, however, it was set to be a simple event for domestic guests only. Along with coronation plans and preparations, the royal council was busy attempting to get a handle on the political situation.
“So how bad was it?” Oscar asked.
Suzuto, standing before Oscar, nervously gave his report on the vanished city denizens. “Just like the attacks on Tayiri cities, the buildings suffered no damage. Inside them… Well, it really was as if everyone simply vanished without a trace. Some restaurants even still had steaming hot bowls of soup on the tables.”
“A very bizarre phenomenon,” commented Oscar.
“While I couldn’t find any signs of human life, I sometimes…got the feeling that something was there.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“It was like I felt a presence or a sensation. It struck me rather often, but never did I actually see anyone there.”
“…I…see…,” Oscar said, dubious. This story got stranger and stranger the more he heard. He wanted to go and take a look for himself but knew that’d only upset everyone.
Oscar dismissed Suzuto, then turned to Doan, who had been waiting in a corner of the study. “What do you think?” Oscar asked.
“To be honest, I have no idea how such a thing could be done,” Doan replied.
“Could it be her doing?”
“I’d say it has to be. Her not being responsible poses its own problem, because it means there’s another mage capable of impossible things.”
“I guess that’s true. None of the other witches are involved,” Oscar reasoned.
After half a year, he thought he’d witnessed and understood how exceptional Tinasha was, but the truth was that her power on the battlefield was beyond anything he could’ve conceived. If that much was true of Oscar, who’d gotten to know her, one could only guess how ill prepared other countries were. Doubtless they were fearing for their lives.
“Ugh. She just doesn’t know her limits, and it’s making it hard for us,” groused Oscar.
“Actually, you could say that’s just how prepared she’s been for this,” Doan pointed out calmly. He was right. That was why she disappeared from Farsas.
Oscar sighed. Als, who was also in the room, spoke up. “Cezar has decided to dispatch troops, but Gandona is still hesitating.”
“I see,” Oscar said, putting his legs up on his desk and crossing them. He wet his dry lips with his tongue.
…The answer had been there all along.
Tinasha had only been searching for the right time, and now that time had come. Oscar huffed, swinging his feet down and standing up.
“Marshal the troops. We ship out after the coronation.”
Als and Doan bowed respectfully in response.
Ever since his gorgeous protector disappeared, Oscar had been plagued by a single lingering thought day after day.
How long has Tinasha been contemplating this exact situation we’re in now?
He was sure she’d figured out who the king of Cuscull was long before Farsas did.
That was why she got rid of her cat familiar after its job was done, and it had to have been the reason she’d rushed to break Oscar’s curse.
Oscar believed there was a different reason she’d trained him, however. She probably left him with a choice, so he wouldn’t end up like her—powerless and violated.
Tinasha was an emotional, self-sacrificing, awkward witch. She was stuck in time forever, but she’d finally chosen to take action. She’d jumped headfirst into her own fate.
As for the future Tinasha was envisioning… Oscar knew she wasn’t acting to safeguard her own future.
What choice did that leave him with, though?
Oscar pondered that question as he looked down on the city from a platform along the castle ramparts.
His coronation went off without a hitch, and the people welcomed their young king with wild, enthusiastic cheers when he was presented to the public. It was a scene Oscar himself had envisioned often. He’d known such a day would come ever since he was a boy, and yet he hadn’t imagined it would be nothing more than a simple milestone.
He was probably the only person in history to get cursed by one witch and then earn the protection of another. Both of those things, however, had come about as the result of the royal burden he’d carried as long as he could remember. Much of his own life was out of his hands; the path of a prince was set before he ever saw it.
That said—choosing Tinasha now was the one thing he did of his own free will.
Oscar had never imagined a future such as this when he was a child. That made what happened from this point on all the more important.
The new king waved to the people and returned to the castle. Without a moment’s delay, courtiers and staff clustered around him. As he paced, Oscar made his way down the hallway, giving orders to Chief Mage Kumu, Als, and Doan about the following day’s march to Tayiri.
“Make sure we can teleport away at any time. Our opponents are all mages, after all. Plan a way for me alone to be able to get out in the worst-case scenario. I may be able to manage something if I do.”
“Very well. Your Majesty shipping out as well is really our last resort, but…”
“Tayiri isn’t holding back, and neither can we. Farsas must use everything at its disposal to ensure its safety.”
Akashia—the Mage Killer. So long as Oscar held that sword, he carried a powerful advantage over mages. Of course, the bearer needed to be a skilled swordsman, too, but Tinasha had ensured that with her thorough technical instruction. Ultimately, Oscar knew he could even slay a witch if he wanted to.
…He could, but whether he would was another story.
As the group made their way down the hallway, solidifying plans, a boy popped out of the door to the lounge. He leaped in front of Oscar, waving his hands wide and shouting. “You’re going to kill the witch, right? I wanna go, too!”
The startling outburst left everyone in silence. As a faint frown crossed Oscar’s face, Suzuto came running up from the other end of the hallway.
“What are you doing? You’re speaking to His Majesty!” Suzuto scolded, pinning the boy’s arms behind his back. He bowed to Oscar. “I deeply apologize, Your Majesty. That was very rude.”
“Is this your little brother?”
“No, he’s a boy from one of the cities that was attacked… He was away when the tragedy occurred. He had nowhere to go, so I brought him back here.”
“Ah, I see.”
Evidently, while Suzuto had been out on his investigation, he’d found a boy from a city whose inhabitants had all suddenly vanished and had brought him to safety in the castle. His arms still pinned behind his back, the boy piped up, “I heard all about it. The witch killed everyone, right? I wanna go, too! I’m gonna get revenge!”
“No. Children should be in school,” the newly coronated King Oscar flatly insisted.
The boy didn’t back down, however, and escaped from Suzuto’s grip to shout at the king some more. “Then let me borrow your sword! I’ll go kill the witch.”
“Listen here…,” Oscar started. He grabbed the boy’s collar and lifted him off the ground so that the two were eye level. The boy kicked his legs, and Oscar fixed him with an astounded glare. “No normal person is a match for the witch, even if you did have this sword. Got it? If you do, then behave yourself.”
“You’re just saying that ’cause you don’t wanna kill her! Take me with you!”
All those around were frowning at the child’s wild behavior. Kumu glared at the boy. “How dare you speak to His Majesty like that…”
“It’s fine. Besides, he’s saying some funny stuff. I don’t want to kill her, do I? You’re absolutely right,” Oscar admitted.
“But you’re supposed to be the king!” cried the boy.
“Listen up… If a mage or a witch wants to shoot down a city, they’ll just fire a few huge attacks from above without caring about the buildings and be done with it. Think about how complicated it must have been for her to make the people vanish but to leave everything else untouched. If you don’t use your head, you won’t be able to see them again.”
When the king pointed that out, the boy’s eyes grew wide and he fell silent. After thinking for a bit, he spoke up timidly. “My mom’s…alive?”
“Probably. I’m going to get the witch to tell me,” Oscar said, setting the boy back down on the floor.
He was wobbling with the faint hope he’d been given, but he was equally afraid of possible disappointment. Rather accusingly, the boy inquired, “But what about if they really are dead?”
It was obvious he was afraid to even ask, and Oscar’s eyes narrowed. His handsome face went blank.
He surveyed the boy with the eyes of a king seated on his throne—someone who bore a long history and a heavy responsibility.
As the irrepressible majesty of a king pressed down on him, the boy gulped.
Oscar cast his sky-blue eyes down as he spoke.
“If that truly is the case, then I’ll kill her.”
Oscar’s tone sent a chill down Als’s spine.
It wasn’t a lie. He meant every word.
At midnight as the moon glimmered like a pearl, Pamyra entered her lady’s chambers to find her drawing a long-distance transportation array.
“Lady Aeterna, where are you going?” asked Pamyra.
The woman standing in the middle of the room flinched and turned around. “Oh, Pamyra. Don’t sneak up on me. Also, don’t call me that.”
“My apologies, Lady Tinasha.”
After hearing the revised term of address, Tinasha stuck out her tongue like a child caught making mischief.
At present, only Pamyra knew of Tinasha’s true nature, which ran completely counter to the personality she assumed when acting as the king’s bride.
Several days after becoming Tinasha’s attendant, Pamyra noticed that the witch seemed to be hiding something. Once they were alone, she questioned Tinasha mercilessly while pledging her loyalty. After much pleading and reassurance, she finally seemed to win the witch’s trust.
“No matter what happens, I am on your side. If you ever find you cannot trust me, cut me down where I stand.”
When Pamyra first pleaded with her, Tinasha glowered at her in silence. She was quickly worn down by her attendant’s persistence, however.
“All right, all right… To begin with, don’t call me Aeterna when it’s just the two of us.”
Tinasha had conceded with a faint, exasperated smile, and her demeanor turned much more calm and polite than it had previously been. Pamyra supposed this was the witch’s true self, and she thrilled to see it.
Now was not the time for exultation, however. While Tinasha’s power was certainly immense, she only had herself and she was exceedingly isolated in Cuscull. Pamyra wanted someone who the two could trust a little more and had recently been wondering if Renart would be that person.
Ignoring Pamyra’s fretting, Tinasha resumed work on her array. “I’m heading out for a bit. If someone comes by, cover for me.”
“Wait, ah—” Pamyra tried to ask where she was going, but a moment later the witch vanished from the room without a trace.
“I can’t believe this woman!” Pamyra cried, but there was no one to hear this. The moon hung silent and pallid in the sky.
From the balcony, the moon looked red.
It looks like it’s dyed in blood, mused Reust, the crown prince of Tayiri, quite cynically. His hair was bound up and cast a long shadow down his back.
Nearly ten thousand soldiers had perished on the Asdra Plains, because of his own poor judgment. Something bitter was roiling in Reust’s stomach as his eyes remained fixed on the heavens.
Tayiri had a long history of persecuting mages.
Over the past one thousand years, the country had seen more than its share of blood. Not once had Tayiri’s belief that Irityrdia was the one true god ever been shaken.
World-Splitting Blade and Sleeping Paleface were among the other names for Irityrdia, who decreed that humans with magic were greedy, impure, improperly sprouted, and shouldn’t have been born. It was said that those with magic could not keep hold of their minds or bodies in front of Irityrdia and would go on mad rampages that brought harm to innocents. The ancient people of Tayiri bore witness to this truth, feared their god, and shunned mages. It was a tradition that had survived into the modern day. Many mages had attempted their own uprisings, only to be quelled time and again by the overwhelming royal army.
When Cuscull declared independence, no one thought it would last long. Everyone assumed its existence was because the king of Tayiri was too lax.
Reust had felt the same way, and yet the soldiers he had insisted on sending out were annihilated.
Regretting his underestimation for not having marshaled a larger force, Reust cursed himself for not taking command himself. It was much too late for that now, though. In a week, troops from Farsas, Cezar, and Gandona would arrive at the Tayiri capital. Having criticized his royal father for calling in reinforcements, Reust secretly still hoped to achieve something on Tayiri’s strength alone before aid could arrive.
“Tomorrow I’ll marshal the troops again and command them myself…”
Reust looked up at the sky, bitter determination in his heart. But as he looked out, the moonlit sky suddenly warped.
“…!”
Reflexively, he drew his sword.
That warping was the sign of a mage appearing after long-distance teleportation. He’d seen it many times by now, and he was always able to cut the mage down the instant they appeared. This time, however, it came from the sky, a place his blade couldn’t reach. Reust wished he’d brought his bow, but it hardly mattered now.
As he grit his teeth in frustration, the warped space widened.
In the next moment—a witch appeared.
He recognized her right away as the witch who had attacked Tayiri’s cities.
She had been so bold as to show herself before striking and announcing that she was indeed a witch. Her hair and eye color were true to the reports, but her beauty far exceeded what Reust had imagined.
She was like moonlight given form. It defied all the laws of the heavens, and he didn’t understand why she was blessed with such features. Her long eyelashes stirred slowly. From beneath them, she flashed a piercing look down below.
“Prince Reust?” she called in a voice as clear as cold water.
The darkness in her eyes was so deep it felt like Reust could fall forever. Something about them drew him in.
She was so vivid and striking that Reust thought he might stop breathing. One glance was all it took to utterly captivate him.
Reust’s voice was hoarse, and he couldn’t answer right away. After a span of some moments, he finally eked out a reply. “What do you want, witch?”
She gave a little nod, floating in midair. The way she spoke suggested she was choosing her words very carefully. “It’s pointless to keep attacking Cuscull. I’d like you to call off your march.”
“Utter shameless nonsense. What’s your aim here?”
The witch sighed a little at his outright scorn and hostility, then pointed one ivory finger at him. “This will all be over in another two weeks. If possible, I don’t want you deploying your reinforcements until then.”
“…What did you just say? What does that mean?”
The witch didn’t answer. Reust was at a loss as to how to interpret her words.
Was she just wasting his time, or did she have some other intention?
Floating in the air, the witch gazed back at Reust impassively. Her black sheer silk dress fluttered in the breeze; she seemed about to disappear any minute now.
Reust was struck by an odd feeling that the witch wasn’t even really there.
He cleared his dry throat and took a step forward. “If you’re asking for favors, come down from there, pathetic mage.”
“Pathetic mage? Don’t you people understand that attitude landed you in the current situation?” the witch asked rhetorically, one side of her mouth quirking up in a cruel smile.
The sight of it made a jolt of fear and excitement course through Reust. He had the distinct sense that her white, wholly inhuman hand could cast him down into unending darkness.
He wondered what to say in reply. Silence was as good as admitting defeat, so he pasted a sneer on his face. “Mages disrupt our god’s world with their selfish desires. Such power is a sin. Come down. If you do, I’ll listen to you.”
Reust didn’t think she’d obey his order, but to his surprise, the witch zipped down swiftly until she was floating at eye level with him, though still beyond his reach.
Now beholding her at an even height, Reust acknowledged that the witch had a startlingly petite frame for someone so strangely intimidating. A wave of light dizziness crashed over Reust as he felt that she’d fit perfectly in his arms if he were to hold her.
A slightly bitter smile twisted the witch’s features. “You’re much taller than I am. You’re probably also that much more flexible, too. But wouldn’t you find it ridiculous if I envied you and tried to cast you out just because of that? Using a god’s name to hunt down those who are different only shows how weak humans are.”
Shadows cast by the moon threw into relief a terrible sadness on her face.
The witch’s dark eyes appeared to be floating and bobbing along a sea of night. Reust wanted to know if he was reflected inside them.
“…You’re trying to use words to deceive me. The power that creatures like you possess is unnatural.”
Everyone in the world was different; that much was to be expected. Mages differed in a more significant way, however. A witch understood that better than anyone.
Snorting, the witch asked Reust, “Have you ever swung a sword down on a baby’s head?”
“…What?”
“Have you ever burned a mother and her crying baby at the stake?”
“What in the…?”
Reust’s throat grew dry. He had an idea what she was trying to say. As the blood drained from his face, the witch clarified, “Your country permitted all of that to happen. Not as madness but as routine. I’ve seen even more horrifying spectacles. That’s the reality of Tayiri.”
Reust was speechless. The witch’s tone wasn’t harsh or scornful at all, though. She spoke with detached indifference.
“As the crown prince, you surely know your nation’s history and about the governments of other countries. You must realize how unusual Tayiri is. Three hundred years have passed since the Dark Age, and no other country is still as relentlessly elitist as your homeland. You should be able to understand that what you’re doing is the same as cutting off your own foot.”
A certain ratio of children with magic were born to parents without any talent for the arcane. Tayiri ostracized those children, regardless of their circumstances. Those kids had been born in defiance of Irityrdia, after all. It wasn’t worth considering whether it was right or wrong. Put another way, it was something most were content not to think about… Reust did not have that option anymore.
The witch tossed back her long black hair. A white light glowed at her fingertips, then changed into a butterfly that flapped its lovely wings and disappeared into the dark of the gardens.
That done, the witch’s voice took on a remonstrative tone. “No matter what kind of a mage you are, there are still rules you are bound to follow. No matter how you struggle, you can’t bring people and nations back to life. That’s true of anyone—mages are no exception. You might think magic users differ from normal people, but the reality is they’re nearly identical.”
“…A witch’s nonsense.”
“No matter what I am, there still remains a man who can cut me down quite easily. Even my power has its limits,” said the witch with a smile. For a moment, she looked almost pleased to know that.
Her smile soon vanished, however, and her face became a stiff mask. Cold, dark eyes scrutinized Reust. “I’ve given you my warning. Think it over.”
Abruptly, she opened both arms wide. Reust realized she was preparing to teleport away and cried out reflexively, “If you want me to halt the reinforcements, come ask again tomorrow! Come to me! If you don’t, I won’t do as you ask!”
He received no answer.
Without an incantation, the witch created a magical array and vanished. No trace of the woman remained as the wind whistled past.
Left in the shadow of the witch who had so enthralled his soul, Reust spent a while refusing to budge from the balcony.
At long last, he returned to his room, bereft of the desire to marshal his army the next day.
When he first met her, she was just a baby sleeping in her crib.
Her skin was as white as snow and soft to the touch. He remembered thinking that her eyelashes were incredibly long.
It was the baby taken from her home to be his royal bride. It took several years before Lanak realized what all the sealing ornaments on her ears and fingers meant. By that point, she’d grown into a frighteningly beautiful young girl—and the strangeness of her talent was beginning to become apparent to all who met her.
He’d always thought of her as a girl he ought to protect, until their paths diverged.
“…The Allied Forces of the Four Great Nations? How very ostentatious,” the king of Cuscull commented lightly, as if this didn’t concern him in the slightest.
Sprawled on his throne, Lanak examined the ceiling languidly. The empty throne room had no furnishings. The Cuscull palace was splendidly crafted, but it was lacking in a certain sense of history that other countries had.
The same was true of its monarch. His face devoid of fear or anger, Lanak complained, “They struggle pointlessly. Everything will settle where it’s supposed to be in time.”
“Your Majesty. As ordered, we’ve completed all corresponding preparations,” reported a mage kneeling before the throne. Lanak pointed at the deserted hall. At once, blue lines drew up a floating map of the mainland. The other mages fell silent as they scrutinized it.
There were five glowing lights on the map. Each was connected to the others by glowing lines, which branched out into even more lines that spanned the entire continent.
It was a wondrous sight, and Lanak broke into a smile. “This shall be our new country.”
Upon hearing the king’s words, the mages gazed at the map with longing.
Most people could tell that the intricate lines overlaying the map were a magic spell. Once they did, they shuddered at the scale of it. No spell spanning the entire mainland had ever been attempted before. The proposal of such a thing would only earn the one who thought it up a chorus of laughter.
Lanak trusted himself to be the only one capable of bringing such an impossible feat into the realm of reality. Once it was done, the lives of all would change overnight. He regarded his spell map with great satisfaction. “This will erase all suffering and create a world far more suitable to live in.”
The mages gazed at their king reverently, overcome with emotion. One brought up a hesitant objection, however.
“B-but is such a spell really possible…?”
“It’s all right. We have Aeti,” the king replied.
Just then, the door to the throne room opened and the black-clad witch entered.
Her looks were so stunning, it was like she’d walked out of a painting. After realizing she’d attracted everyone’s attention, she lifted her long eyelashes and bobbed her head in a light bow. As expressionless as a doll, she asked the king, “What’s going on, Lanak?”
“I was just talking about you. Will you help me transform our land?”
“Help you? Of course,” she answered breezily, then crossed the room with perfect composure and sat down on a couch that lined the wall. It was a usual spot for her and was located only a dozen paces from the throne. Leaning against the armrest, she began to read a book.
Lanak gazed at her calmly. “No matter how complicated and large a spell is, it must still abide by the basic laws. As long as you have enough magic, all you have to do is cast each spell one by one. Isn’t that right, Aeti? I taught you that a long time ago.”
“Yes, because you were instructed on that principle long before I was,” she said with a smile, not looking up from her book.
The two had been raised in the same castle, both as potential rulers. While that had been four centuries ago, to Lanak it may as well have happened yesterday. Unlike the witch, who was very much aware of everything that’d happened in the intervening time, Lanak had spent much of the last four hundred years in a magically induced stasis. He was spelled to sleep while he enjoyed a light, all-but-eternal dream.
At times, Lanak could sense the witch’s familiar nearby but was unable to react. The powerful magic needed to fuel the stasis spell had left his body half-broken from the recoil.
Despite that, he had seemingly returned whole. The long sleep had made his memories and thoughts hazy, but he hadn’t forgotten what was most important.
Protecting her. That was his role, and it hadn’t changed since he was a child.
“You were such an obedient, good student that the tutors always praised you. During breaks, all you did was follow me around, but you learned everything I taught you right away…”
Aeti was five years younger than Lanak. In the early days, she was little more than a child clinging to him, but her talent had been undeniable even then.
It was more than just natural ability, though. She also put in fierce effort but so did Lanak.
“You were very clever. In just a few years, the tutors no longer had anything to teach you…”
By the time she was ten, she’d surpassed all her instructors. Her many tutors all withdrew voluntarily, and she was left in solitude. Lanak was the only one in the entire castle who dared to reach out to her.
“But compared with me, you were always so much more…”
The light in Lanak’s eyes dimmed. His gaze was hollow as he looked at the witch who had once been a potential ruler of the empire, just as he had been.
Tinasha was the first to notice the shift in Lanak, and she watched him intently.
As if poised to take action at any time, as if making sure of something…
The other mages stood petrified by the look in her eyes. Her voice alone was gentle as she asked, “Lanak? What’s wrong? Did you remember something?”
When he heard her voice, Lanak blinked slowly. At some point, his temples and hands had begun to sweat.
A lingering chill ran through his body, as if he’d stumbled across something deeply unpleasant, and he took deep breaths to calm himself. “It’s no good. It’s like I’m still in the dream,” he admitted.
“It wasn’t a dream,” Tinasha urged.
“I know.”
Lanak’s home country had been destroyed. Four hundred years later, he built a new one. That much was real.
From time to time, however, he had the oddest sensation that he was forgetting something. It was some sort of lingering emotion he hadn’t quite parsed.
Lanak asked the girl who was once so small, “Aeti, are you upset?”
“About what?” Tinasha said, her gaze back on her book. Long black locks swept over the floor, and she looked just like a blooming flower. This witch truly captivated all who looked upon her. She was all grown up now, and Lanak felt both pleased and somewhat lonely to see her as she was now.
Gazing at her, Lanak waved his hand lightly. Upon seeing his dismissive gesture, the other mages cleared out immediately. Once they were alone, Lanak started again. “About what happened four hundred years ago. On the last night we were together.”
It was a subject neither had broached since their reunion. Tinasha was a little surprised to hear him bring it up. With a panther’s fluid grace, she slowly sat up and looked at him. “Why now, after all this time? I thought you’d forgotten.”
“I’ll never forget.”
Even though most of his memories were a fuzzy jumble, that night was something he’d never forget. The shock and fear on her face when he’d cut into her stomach were seared into his mind. Screams, sobs, and pitiful begs echoed in his ears.
On the other hand, however, Lanak couldn’t recall how it had felt to look down on her then. It was all faint, worn away by the long sleep, and he couldn’t get that part of the memory back.
“I thought you might be upset. I’ve been wondering.”
“I’m not upset,” Tinasha answered curtly, as if to say that was the end of the conversation. She resumed her reading.
That was a clear rejection. Lanak had no choice but to change the subject. “Do you think if we suppress them with huge amounts of power, the fighting will end?”
“I think it will, but it won’t get at the root of the problem,” she replied.
“But we might be able to save the people who are unhappy now,” Lanak countered.
“Mm-hmm,” Tinasha answered.
Unable to order his thoughts very well, Lanak pressed his fingers to his temples. The man had the faintest sense that his memories and personality were snapping apart, perhaps because he’d slept for too long. Holding himself together as he felt like he was going to fly to pieces, he gazed at his bride-to-be. She was the most powerful person on the continent.
“Once you became a witch, did you not want to do something like that yourself?” Lanak inquired.
“I didn’t. That would just be self-righteous,” answered Tinasha.
“Even if that meant someone died?”
“Everyone dies eventually. If I interfered in the world and prevented something from happening, it might end up killing human thought.”
What Tinasha said smacked of a policy of everlasting total noninterference, and it sounded cruel. Such was the road she had chosen, however. Lanak, who only knew how kind and sweet she was to everything and everyone, felt a little lonely again.
“Is what I’m trying to do also self-righteous?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s cold.”
“Then you shouldn’t have asked.” Tinasha laughed, and then her face turned serious. “But because you summoned me, I was able to interfere in the conflict between Tayiri and the mages a little.”
“Aeti.”
“So thank you. I mean it,” Tinasha concluded, a smile on her face. If this was her real smile, then what wasn’t real?
Lanak broke into a smile, too. “If it made you happy, I’m glad.”
Breaking a cycle of tragedy required action. And the time for it is now, Lanak reminded himself. Heaving a huge sigh, he turned his gaze up to the ceiling.
“You don’t need to worry about a thing. I’ll protect you.”
Even if the whole world shunned and feared Tinasha for being a witch, he would be on her side. If he didn’t do that, then she would be all alone, just like when she was a little girl.
Lanak repeated his vow as though a command to himself. “I’ll protect you, Aeti.”
Perhaps that sentiment was the one thing that hadn’t faded from Lanak’s mind after four hundred years.
Tinasha was no longer a little girl, but things were still the same. Aeterna would forever be a weak and helpless person who existed for him.
“I’m going to sleep for a bit,” Lanak declared. He then retired to his chambers.
Tinasha departed from the throne room shortly afterward.
As soon as she reached the corridor, she was joined by her guard, Renart.
He looked concerned. “The king seemed a little…”
“He’s fine. I don’t think he’s awakened from his dream yet.”
“His dream?”
Among those in the castle, Renart and Pamyra were the only two mages assigned to serve Tinasha. They had won her trust and had a rough idea of what happened to her in the past. It was because of that knowledge that Renart had come to the throne room fearing the king had done something to hurt Tinasha, but the witch quickly brushed that concern aside.
“Renart, do you know why the witches of this land are all women?”
“What? Er… Is it not because they’re witches, not wizards?” he asked, anticipating that she was setting up a pun of some sort, but Tinasha laughed and shook her head.
“You’re quite a strong mage yourself, but the truth of the matter is that men’s bodies are unstable in terms of magical power. It’s difficult for them to survive for long periods of time with vast amounts of magic. A normal life span is not long enough for negative effects to manifest, but hundreds of years will take their toll on a man’s mind or body. It causes a breakdown. That’s why there are no men among witches. To come as far as we have would mean self-destruction for them.”
Tinasha said such frightening things so flippantly. Renart attempted a smile but found himself unable to muster one.
“Which means the king is…” He trailed off.
“His mental faculties have deteriorated. While he used a magical sleep, he still suffered quite a bit. His mind comes and goes, but it’s all focused around his mental state when he was fifteen. He’s very unstable. That’s why he’s being so sweet to me. To him, I will forever be the powerless child I was back then.”
A self-deprecating expression crossed Tinasha’s face. Renart frowned at the sight of it.
The witch only ever spoke of her past with a glibness to her tone.
Even that told him something, though. Namely that a long time ago, Tinasha adored Lanak as if he really was her family. Now that her big brother was back, as kind as he ever was, Renart wondered what Tinasha was thinking. While he was worried, he found himself incapable of discerning even some small part of the witch’s true intentions. Deciding on another course of action, Renart asked about something else. “Is what the king said really possible? A spell that spans our entire land…”
“It is, if we use my magic,” Tinasha replied. She answered so matter-of-factly that it left Renart stunned. With a hand, the witch flipped her long, braided hair back. “We’re talking about using magic to completely control the continent. People in the past may have conceived of this, but none saw it successfully realized. In terms of sheer ability, the first king of Tuldarr should have had the power to do it. He was the only one who had all twenty spirits at his beck and call, after all. But spell casting at that time was much more difficult than it is now. That may have been what prevented him. Spell-casting research didn’t know many advancements until the time of the fourth regent.”
“Ah, er, Lady Tinasha—” Renart cut in. If he let her continue unchecked, she’d go off on a tangent about the history of Tuldarr.
She realized what he meant and gave a little cough. “It’s possible; but if we do it, it will irreparably alter the mainland. Smaller countries might collapse, and it would mean all-out war with the Four Great Nations. Lanak would never stand for that, though. Depending on how things go, we could see a death toll that exceeds the Dark Age.”
“You mean…”
This was definitely an unprecedented state of affairs. Renart shuddered to realize he was standing at a turning point in history.
The witch remained unperturbed, however. Evidently remembering something, Tinasha suddenly changed the topic. “Oh yes, how are you coming along with what I asked you to do?”
“I’ll have the forty obsidian stones for you by today. Tomorrow at the latest.”
The witch had asked him to find stones of a deep color possessed of as few imperfections as possible.
Tinasha nodded. “Just to be safe, you should make yourself your own defensive array, too.”
Renart inclined his head in silence. While he wasn’t a suicidal man, he felt he should give priority to his lady, not himself. Despite the fact that he’d so brazenly thrust his vow of loyalty on her, she’d smiled and accepted it. Renart intended to repay Tinasha no matter what it took.
“Now what could you two be discussing?” wondered a new voice that slithered from behind the shadow of a pillar.
It was an oily, clinging sort of sound. As its owner emerged, Renart scowled without realizing it. There stood Chief Mage Bardalos. The king had forbidden people in the castle from having excessive contact with Tinasha, but Bardalos took every opportunity to engage with her.
For someone like him with such a bloody past, the fact that Tinasha had such immense magical power residing in such a slender body caught his attention and incited a sadistic interest. He made no attempt to hide his desire, and Tinasha stared him down with eyes as cold as ice.
“I’m thinking of making a necklace. I asked him to gather some stones,” she stated, inclining her head back at the foul man.
Bardalos’s lips curved up in a smirk. “A necklace, eh…? Yes, obsidian would look very nice against your hair and eyes. But shouldn’t a bride wear a different color? Like pearly white…or garnet red?”
“I’m not sure about red for a bride,” the witch replied, trying to pass by Bardalos. He stepped squarely in her path so as to bar her way, however. His already narrow eyes clamped down even further, giving him the countenance of a hungry reptile.
“I think red would look wonderful on you. It’ll match the color of your blood. I’m really very interested in knowing just how beautiful those organs hiding inside that lovely body of yours are.”
“Go ask Lanak,” Tinasha spat scathingly.
Even Renart didn’t quite understand what that meant. He glanced at her, but she appeared as cool and unaffected as always.
“Get out of the way,” ordered the witch. “Or if you’re a baby who can’t walk on his own, perhaps I’ll move you myself.”
A gleeful smile spreading on his face, Bardalos took a step back and cleared the way. Sensing that something was off about that, Renart shielded his lady with his body as they passed by.
After the defeat at the Asdra Plains, Tayiri ultimately decided to hold off on sending reinforcements to Cuscull. At Prince Reust’s orders, the troops were assembled but detained in the capital.
Additionally, armies from the other major powers that had heeded Tayiri’s call began to arrive.
For four days, Oscar had joined war conferences in Tayiri’s castle, and he was quickly growing fed up. He had suffered through many meetings, and not a single one had resulted in dispatch orders. Prince Reust was the biggest obstacle. Despite holding primary military authority, he merely parroted the words “We need to act carefully.” Oscar was close to the end of his rope and wanted to point out that it was Tayiri who asked for help fighting in the first place.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Reust’s younger sister, Cecelia, followed Oscar around every day, testing the limits of his self-control. Finally, he turned an exasperated look on the gorgeous princess and asked, “What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Am I not allowed to say it’s because I wanted to see you?” she replied with a sweet smile. Looking at her was enough to give Oscar a headache. His mind full of cynical thoughts, he stared back at the young woman.
The two were in his guest suite in Tayiri Castle. It was a little after sunset, and the sky had darkened to match the deep blue shade of Oscar’s eyes. Later, I am going to lecture the hell out of whoever let this woman into my room, thought Oscar as he bit back a sigh.
His obvious annoyance must have shown in his attitude, because Cecelia arched an eyebrow, got to her feet, and sauntered over to him. Leaning against the armrest, she moved her poisonous red lips to whisper in his ear, “Don’t make that face. When you act so cold to me, it gives me certain thoughts.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“That mage woman who followed you around in Farsas—that was the Witch of the Azure Moon, wasn’t it? It could be quite damaging to your position if I was to make that known,” she breathed. The look in her eyes was challenging, and Oscar pasted on a smile in return.
He’d known someone was liable to deduce that eventually, but how had Cecelia managed it? The eyewitness report Tayiri had received spoke only of a beautiful woman with dark hair and eyes. Women of Tinasha’s exact coloring were rare, but it wasn’t as if they didn’t exist. A single onlooker’s testimony wasn’t enough to go on.
“So? Feeling a bit differently now?” Cecelia purred. She peered at Oscar while gleefully enjoying her advantage. Looping her arms around his neck, Cecelia snuggled close to him. Her perfume was cloyingly sweet. Oscar tipped up her chin and drew closer. Then he pressed his lips to hers.
It was not a short kiss, and it was soul melting in its intensity. Intoxicated with her victory, Cecelia drank of it deeply. After a while, Oscar pulled back to murmur in her ear, his low voice reverberating through her body. “Why do you think that? It could have been someone who looks like her.”
“You won’t be able to weasel your way out that easily… I saw her myself. There’s no way I’m mistaken.”
Oscar trailed his fingers along Cecelia’s white neck. He could feel her blood pumping under her soft skin.
“Where? I don’t believe you,” he said.
At that, she let out a shrill laugh. “Do you truly desire that enchantress that much? She’s a witch, so I suppose she uses magic to make men into her slaves. She visits my brother every night, you know. What a trollop she is. I don’t think she even knows I’m watching.”
“…What?”
Oscar almost crushed Cecelia’s windpipe in his hands. Restraining himself just before he did, he pushed her off and got to his feet. Cecelia was left in a daze, and he grabbed her chin and forced it upward. He stared down at her, no trace of sweetness in his gaze at all.
“Tell me where Prince Reust’s room is,” Oscar demanded in a tone that was not to be disobeyed.
Reust had asked the witch to come back the next day, but in truth he hadn’t actually expected that she would.
Against all expectations, however, she did indeed return the following night and the one after. She floated beneath the moon, seemingly just out of reach.
Each time she visited, she explained to Reust how foolish it was to discriminate against others. Sometimes she used roundabout comparisons, while other times she was more direct and brought home how truly hurtful it was. Not once did she look down on Reust or plead with him. Her voice remained ever calm and plain. The witch never remained too long, either. When she was finished answering his questions, she vanished.
Reust never wanted their time to end, though. Each night he would insist, “If you don’t come tomorrow, I’ll send out the troops.”
How much better would it have been if he could have said, I want to see you again; I want to talk with you? Unfortunately, the woman he longed to see was a despicable mage of an enemy country. Saying such a thing was tantamount to betraying the history of Tayiri. Reust absolutely refused to cross that line, even if he’d been the one to set it for himself.
Despite that, even Reust himself could tell he was wavering. He didn’t know if it was because of her or because of what she told him, but as their conversations continued, he began to falter in his belief that mages needed to be killed.
Only three days remained before the two-week grace period the witch had set ended.
If he could hold off his troops until then, something would surely change.
Reust went out onto his balcony and looked up at the night sky. Just then, someone knocked on his door.
“Reust… It’s me,” came Cecelia’s voice. While he was suspicious of why she was visiting him so late, he went back inside and unlocked the door.
He tensed in shock.
Behind his pale-faced sister stood the young king of Farsas, sword in hand. A tiny red dragon was perched on his shoulder.
With effort, Reust squeaked out the words, “…What do you want…?”
“Was it not your country who asked that we slay the witch?”
There was a provocative look in Oscar’s eyes. Reust gleaned the man’s meaning, and his whole body froze. He stood there petrified, and Oscar slipped past him into the room. He went right for the balcony, and Reust chased after him in a panic. Sensing that Oscar’s attention was no longer on her, Cecelia beat a hasty retreat.
“Stop! What is the meaning of this?” Reust shouted at the intruder on his balcony.
“Play dumb, and this is only going to make you look bad,” Oscar replied indifferently, drawing Akashia. The blade caught the moonlight and glittered an argent shade. A sword that killed mages. Tayiri could not have wished to own a finer weapon.
In that moment, Reust regarded that blade as the most accursed thing he had ever seen. Everything inside him screamed not to let the witch face her natural enemy. How was he to warn her, though?
While Reust was thrown into confusion, Oscar stared up at the sky. The air beneath the moon began to twist and warp.
“Don’t come over here!” Reust yelled up at the sky.
Oscar opened his mouth to cry the witch’s name.
However, the woman with dark blond hair who appeared was one neither recognized.
“I wondered where you were going every night. Is that really what you were doing?!”
“Yes…”
Pamyra was appalled, while the witch looked disillusioned. Tinasha leaned against the back of her chair and grumbled replies to the woman hurling a litany of questions at her.
“He doesn’t seem that stupid. but he has some comprehension problems… He always says, ‘I don’t understand, so come back tomorrow.’ It’s proving entirely too difficult to change his beliefs. I give up.”
Pamyra watched Tinasha stretch as she voiced several complaints. A wave of heavy exhaustion crashed over her, and she let out a sigh. “You don’t have to listen to him, you know. You’re too easily swayed by pressure.”
“I’m sorry…,” Tinasha said, hanging her head guiltily. She picked up one of the obsidian stones laid out on the table. Next to her, Renart was polishing them as he shook his head in disbelief.
Pamyra planted both hands on her hips in a show of indignation. As soon as Tinasha told her the whole story, she knew that the crown prince of Tayiri had fallen for the witch. The only one who hadn’t realized that appeared to be the witch herself. Pamyra wanted to tell the prince off for daring to request continued meetings Tinasha. The witch was a busy woman. She didn’t have time for fools.
“But if I can soften his attitude, I’m sure it’ll help those mages of the future.” Tinasha mumbled as she turned over a piece of obsidian. “Mages can be born of non-magical parents. There will be no end to tragedy unless Tayiri changes its ways.” She lamented the situation even as she sighed.
Pamyra and Renart grasped their lady’s intent and felt heat rise to their chests.
If mages were born only to magical parents, Tayiri’s history of oppression would have ended a long time ago. All magic-using families could have left the nation, and Tayiri would be free of magic.
The trouble was, magical aptitude wasn’t determined purely by blood. About half of those children born with magic ended up hurting themselves or their surroundings if they didn’t learn how to control their powers. The seeds of tragedy could be sown anywhere in the world.
A faint smile on her face, Pamyra faced her lady with a gentle expression. “In any case, tonight you should focus on creating magic implements. We don’t have much time left, so I will go to the Tayiri prince and put an end to this. Tell me the transportation coordinates.”
“Put an end to what…?”
“………”
While baffled at just how clueless her lady could be, Pamyra succeeded in obtaining the necessary information for the teleport. Tinasha watched Pamyra with concern as she drew the array. “If something happens to you, I will come.”
“You don’t need to worry. Renart! Please keep a close eye on Lady Tinasha!”
“I would’ve done so anyway,” he answered.
With that, Pamyra transported herself to Tayiri’s royal castle. After appearing aloft in the night sky, she peered down and spied a castle, its gardens, and the crown prince’s balcony.
Two men stood on it—and one of them was holding a sword Pamyra had seen in books.
“The royal sword of Akashia…the Mage Killer…”
What strange string of events had led the wielder of such a deadly weapon here?
Pamyra didn’t have to ponder the answer.
“You plotted this!” she cried. Her head flushed with heated anger, and she threw her hands out in front of herself.
A powerful light bloomed before her palms and quickly began to spread.
The woman who’d teleported in had immediately recognized Akashia and was filled with rage. A white glow burst forth from her hands.
Clicking his tongue in irritation, Oscar swung his sword once and dispelled the magic. “Nark! Capture her!” he commanded the dragon on his shoulder.
Heeding the royal decree, the little scaly thing immediately began to grow larger. Mid-flight it expanded to the size of a small house, raking its sharp talons at the woman. Staggering in the sky, the woman threw up a short incantation to protect herself. At the same time, Oscar flung a dagger at her legs.
The hurled knife was one of Oscar’s usual maneuvers against mages who floated in the air. Its aim wasn’t to cause heavy injury. All it had to do was interrupt the woman’s concentration. Most magic users weren’t able to stay aloft after their focus was interrupted.
To Oscar’s surprise, the blond woman countered that upset with another spell. Clearly this was a fairly capable mage.
Nark seized upon its opportunity in that instant and battered her with one of its giant wings.
“Ngh, ahhh!” Although the woman shrieked in pain, she remained hovering. The dragon circled around to claw at her again. Just before its talons caught flesh, there came another rippling and twisting of air.
The next moment…a new woman appeared in the sky.
Throwing up a defensive wall to repel the dragon’s talons, she let out a cry of surprise. “Nark?!”
Her jet-black locks rippled in the evening breeze. Her slender body glowed a pearl-white shade in the moonlight.
Slowly, she turned to look at the balcony. Her eyes clearly fixed on one of the men there.
Looking thunderstruck, she spoke his name.
“Oscar…”
“Come here,” he insisted irritably, reaching out to her.
At the offer of his hand, Tinasha froze in midair.
She knew he was staying at Tayiri Castle but hadn’t expect to encounter him. Some small part of her had been anticipating that they’d run into each other like this, though.
Stupefied, she stared at the man she’d once shared a contract with.
His blue eyes had the power to arrest her. Entirely effortlessly, all her memories of when she’d smiled and laughed in his arms came rushing back. It hadn’t been that long ago, but it all felt incredibly nostalgic now.
Tinasha’s lips quivered. If nothing had happened, she might have taken his hand.
Before she ever had the chance, another voice broke her trance.
“Run! Now!”
Reust unsheathed his sword and slashed at Oscar, who parried it easily with Akashia. Tinasha remained unmoving. Pamyra hurriedly grabbed her lady’s shoulder and declared, “Lady Tinasha, we must go!”
Pamyra looked up at the sky, and a transportation array floated up. It was a gate meant to transport multiple people. Renart’s head popped out from the complex magic pattern.
“I can’t hold it for long! Please hurry!” he urged.
Pamyra seized Tinasha and ascended with her. Nark was confused by the appearance of its former owner and looked to Oscar for new orders. After knocking Reust’s sword out of his hands, Oscar shouted, “Tinasha!”
In the last moments before Pamyra and Renart pulled the witch into the array and out of sight, she threw Oscar a terribly anxious look.
Grinding his teeth in frustration, Oscar stared at the now-empty spot in the sky where the mages had vanished.
That was his one chance…and he’d missed it.
He needed to get her back. If he had her, everything else would work out. He’d talk to her, and they could come up with a compromise.
Unforeseen interference had sent Oscar back to square one, however. Tamping down the irritation burning him up from the inside, Oscar put Akashia back in its sheath.
Nark had miniaturized, and Oscar patted it on the head to thank it for a job well done. Then he glared at Reust. “Why don’t you explain what’s been going on?”
Reust licked his dry lips.
The moon was red.
A day of reckoning had come as silently as any other.
“Lady Tinasha, are you hurt?” Pamyra asked, looking Tinasha over with concern once they teleported back to the witch’s room in Cuscull.
All the blood had drained from the witch’s face, and she stared blankly at Pamyra and Renart. After a while, she answered, “I’m fine, but what about you?”
“The dragon’s wing just bumped against me a little. Please don’t worry about it.”
The witch heard that and sagged to the floor in exhaustion.
Renart rushed to kneel in front of Pamyra. “Are you really okay? You don’t feel unwell?”
“No, I’m fine… It was just a bit of a shock. That’s all,” assured Pamyra.
Frowning, Renart asked his lady, “You know the swordsman of Akashia?”
Tinasha gave a little jolt at that. Some unnamed emotion welled up in her dark eyes.
“That’s my… He’s a man I once signed a contract with. I trained him so he’d be…able to kill me.”
There was something Tinasha wanted to leave in this world, for the history that was yet to come.
Oscar had given that to her. He was the king who would build a new era.
The witch said nothing more. She closed her eyes and similarly shut out the feeling building within her.
The next day, the Allied Forces began their march to Cuscull. |
Unnamed Memory
6. The Dream Is Over
“Aeti, where are you?”
He called her name.
The spacious castle of Tuldarr was formed entirely of cold stone. The people who walked its halls were like crafted dolls. No one turned to look at him. They didn’t see him.
With one exception—her.
“Aeti?”
Lanak peeked into an alabaster hall. There was the girl who would be his bride, standing in the middle of an empty room.
Her slender arms were outstretched, and a finely woven spell burst forth like a flower blooming. Suddenly, it expanded to fill the entire chamber, and Lanak was struck breathless.
The spell was intricate and expansive, the height of craftsmanship.
No matter how Lanak stared, he couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t parse it. Her power far outstripped his.
It was all he could do to stand there in shock. Finally, she noticed he was there and turned around, giving him a sweet smile. “What is it, Lanak?”
“…Aeti.”
Lanak had come because he wanted to see her. In this cold and quiet castle, she was his only friend and ally.
His teachers had appeared unenthusiastic for a while now. After many days of feeling stifled, wondering what had changed, he learned that her tutors had all gone.
That’s why he’d wanted to see her. He’d planned to comfort her and tell her that he’d be the one to stick with her no matter how lonely she was.
But now…he knew.
Her power was the reason she was lonely. No one could teach her anything. That was why her tutors left, and it was also why everyone lost interest in him.
…She would be the one to inherit the throne of Tuldarr.
Surely everyone was thinking it. This delicate, lonely girl would be the next queen.
She’d shown up after Lanak, yet at some point she’d far outpaced him.
If that truly came to pass, he would—
“Lanak?”
She was looking at him with her dark eyes. The eyes of the powerful. The gaze of a pure person who knew nothing.
Lanak swallowed down the bile rising in his throat…and smiled. “It’s nothing, Aeti.”
Even so, he was the only one who could protect her. He had to.
She still knew nothing, after all, and she was so alone in this castle.
“…Lanak, wake up.”
Her voice was in his ears. She gently shook him awake.
Scenes of the distant past fading before him, Lanak blinked his eyes open. A woman was staring at him, and he focused on her.
“…Aeti?” he murmured by reflex, and she frowned the littlest bit. Her face was that of an adult, one he didn’t know. He always felt slightly uncomfortable looking at it. Letting out a deep breath, he straightened his posture on the throne where he’d dozed off.
“I suppose I was…dreaming,” he said.
“What kind of dream?”
“A dream of the past. When you were still a little girl…I think.”
He meant when she was still a helpless child. Lanak racked his brain trying to recall the rest of the memory that was growing hazy with each passing second.
At his words, the woman merely made a curious expression. “How odd. Anyway, it’s already a new day.”
All the preparations had been made for their move to reform the continent. Emotions ran deep in Lanak’s eyes as he looked at the woman. “It’s all thanks to you. Now the land can be at peace. Mages will live their lives without fear.”
Tuldarr had fallen long ago and would never return. There was no point in reclaiming its throne. That country had not chosen Lanak.
That was why he made a new country for himself. One that would ensure the oppressed could live peaceful lives in the future.
The witch, once a little girl, narrowed her eyes as she smiled. “If that is what you wish.”
If not for her, Lanak’s ideas wouldn’t have become reality. She had the power to change all his visions into something real. That was the one thing he hadn’t obtained, no matter how hard he’d wished—
“…Aeti.”
“Yes?”
The low timbre of his whispered call was answered quite innocently.
Her reply brought him back to himself. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking or what he was trying to say. Something bitter had been spreading inside his heart. That much he was sure of.
“I’ll protect you, Aeti,” Lanak said, as much to remind himself as the woman.
Now that she’d been reduced to a witch, he would protect her from others. He had to. She was now a wretched creature, shunned and despised by all.
Lanak nodded with satisfaction at his own answer.
However, the bitter taste in his mouth had yet to fully go away.
Nearly fifty thousand troops gathered from the Four Great Nations teleported to a fortress to the west of Tayiri.
The number might’ve seemed excessive considering they were only going up against a few hundred Cuscull mages, but when faced with an opponent of unknown strength, it felt necessary.
Oscar had successfully coerced the full story out of Reust and was livid to discover that the Tayiri prince had been so easily manipulated into wasting time. The day the witch had asked Reust to wait for was the following day. The only hope now was to move out immediately in the hope of catching Cuscull before its mages could enact whatever plan they’d concocted.
At sunset, Oscar, still fuming, met with the generals at the gates of the fortress. They discussed their marching route for the next day. During the meeting, Oscar glanced up and happened to spy Sylvia running toward him. Panting and gasping, she hurried to her king’s side and delivered a report.
“Your Majesty, the scouts recovered a civilian girl. Apparently, she was attacked by the mages on the road leading from here to Cuscull. Everyone’s gathering in the council room right now. You should come, too.”
The girl’s name was Luly.
She survived the burning of her village that sat near the Cuscull border. A kindly mage living secluded in the woods had taken her in, but the two had been separated after nearly being discovered by Cuscull forces. She was found by the enemy as she made her way to the fortress, and they gave chase. Oscar found himself deeply impressed as he listened intently to the tale on his way to the council room.
“I can’t believe she’s unhurt after all that.”
“Perhaps the Cuscull pursuers were merciful because she’s a child. In any case, you should hear it directly from her.”
When they reached the council room, Sylvia opened the door for her king. Oscar entered and joined a number of other royals and commanders from other countries.
Encircled by these powerful people was the young girl. Immediately, her eyes lit up as they fixed themselves on Oscar. “It’s the prince! You’re really here!”
“…I’m not a prince…,” Oscar muttered out of habit but then decided it wasn’t worth making a point of.
The girl had evidently heard his whispering, however. “Yes, you are! She showed me. She said you were really strong!”
“Showed you? Who showed you?”
“The lady who saved me from the bad magicians. She was really pretty. I couldn’t stop crying, so she told me all kinds of stories. She showed me lots of stuff. She put her hand on my forehead, and I could see all these scenes like they were really happening.”
It was a childish explanation, but a bell began to ring in Oscar’s mind. He sank to his knees and looked the child square in the eye. “Did she have black hair?”
“Yeah. And black eyes. With no light at all, like nighttime.”
He’d expected that answer and let out a little sigh. “Damn that elusive woman…”
Standing back up, he placed a hand on top of the thoroughly exhausted-looking little girl’s head.
She’d been chased by mages, saved by a witch, and found on a prairie an hour’s ride from the fortress.
The troops departed at dawn and paused their march almost immediately to send out mages as scouts. They couldn’t afford to walk right into a trap like what’d happened on the Asdra Plains.
Before long, the mages returned and expressed that nothing seemed peculiar or amiss.
Doan was one of the scouts, and Oscar gestured for him to come speak privately outside the tent.
“Is that true?” Oscar asked. “Nothing?”
“Actually, we could sense some faint magic in the vicinity but didn’t detect any spells. That said…if Miss Tinasha set a spell, I don’t think any of us would’ve been able to sense it anyway,” Doan replied.
“I see. I thought so,” said Oscar.
The others were wrapping up their discussion, having decided to press on straight through. If they detoured now, they wouldn’t be able to cross into Cuscull on the same day. Even if it was a trap, the best course was moving straight ahead.
As Oscar was deliberating over the situation, a young woman piped up from behind him. “I do wish you keep moving after asking me for a favor.”
“…Here’s just the person I was looking for,” Oscar said, turning around to find the Witch of the Forbidden Forest pouting.
Hands on her hips, Lucrezia glared at Oscar. “I went to look at all the towns and cities! It was a lot of trouble, you know!”
“Sorry. So what did you find?”
Passing soldiers and commanders glanced over with interest at the beautiful lady having a hushed conversation with the king of Farsas. Oscar and Lucrezia continued undaunted, though.
“A bit of this, a bit of that,” she answered. “It certainly looks like our girl has done something extraordinary. While the citizens appear to have vanished, she’s actually just delayed their time to the extreme and placed them in a pseudo time-suspended state. On top of that, she’s put up a defensive barrier around them and taken away their sense of awareness. They aren’t gone. They’re all still there, even now. Perceptive humans should be able to sense them.”
“Ah, I see…,” Oscar said, remembering how Suzuto had reported the feeling that something was there. Now that Lucrezia had explained it, Oscar understood the cities were essentially full of invisible, intangible people. Tinasha had somehow managed this incredible feat across eight cities simultaneously. He was struck all over again by how fearsome the Witch of the Azure Moon was.
Full of admiration for Tinasha, the king asked, “Can you undo it?”
“No way, that would be too much work. Besides, she’s arranged it so that it will wear off naturally with the passage of time. It’s due to expire in another hour, in fact,” Lucrezia explained.
“Seriously?!”
“Seriously. Okay, I’ll be going now.”
“Hold on a second.”
Lucrezia lifted her arms to teleport away, but Oscar grabbed one. She gave him a quizzical look.
“I’m sorry, but since you’re here, I’d like you to tell me if Tinasha has cast some sort of magic ahead.”
“Why me?”
“No one else can.”
Only a fellow witch possessed the skill necessary to detect Tinasha’s spell craft.
Lucrezia retorted coolly, “No matter what’s out there, you can’t afford any detours. So it hardly makes a difference. Rest assured, it’s not anything that will kill you.” Then she stuck out her tongue. Evidently, she already knew what sort of spell lay waiting on their path.
Oscar sighed. “So there really is something. Nothing good comes of having Tinasha for an enemy.”
“If you really understood that, you wouldn’t have asked me for help. You’ve got enough on your plate just dealing with her. If she finds out I was involved, too, things will only get worse. Do you want to wring your own neck?”
“I’m not in a position that affords choosiness. For now, I can only deal with things as they come.”
Oscar felt pretty sure he could find a way to silence the other countries. Lucrezia picked up on his implicit meaning and gazed at him in astonishment. “Stop acting so inflexible. It’ll backfire on you later. If anything, I’m giving preference to what she wants far more than you are.”
“Giving preference? She’s acting with total disregard for her own interests,” Oscar shot back.
“Even so, I can’t help you more than I have. You’ll have to figure something out on your own,” Lucrezia declared. Her words were harsh but fair. Oscar scowled.
Lucrezia gave him information but refused to get directly involved. That was her line in the sand. While it looked like she was forsaking Oscar, she was actually respecting human freedom.
Oscar understood that and nodded, accepting that he wasn’t going to get his way. “Fine. I’ll figure something out myself.”
“What a good boy you are,” teased the grinning witch. Her smile quickly melted away, however. She turned very serious, far more so than Oscar had ever seen before. In a low voice, she said, “She won’t protect herself. You must be her shield.”
“…I know.”
“I’m very glad she has you at this turning point,” Lucrezia admitted, a hazy fondness passing over her amber eyes. The emotion was gone after a single blink, and Lucrezia smiled as wide as she ever had. “Work hard and do your best.”
After issuing some rather light words of encouragement, she was gone. Oscar had the distinct feeling that two witches had him in the palms of their hands. He took a breath to recenter himself, and then he went back into the tent.
In the end, it was decided that the fifty thousand troops would proceed as planned along the original route, although they suspected a trap.
In expectation of the worst, the royals and commanders were to all ride in the very middle of the formation, however. This included Oscar, who let his other generals lead the march while he surrounded himself with Als, Meredina, Kumu, Doan, Kav, and Sylvia, among others. As long as he had them near him, he knew he’d be able to weather whatever happened. Even if it was a magical trap.
Much to the surprise of many, nothing extraordinary happened during the first hour of marching. The commanders gradually began to relax in the face of the uneventful monotony.
As the procession soldiered onward, a messenger came running from a battalion stationed at the vanguard.
“No matter how far we go, our surroundings stay the same.”
Upon hearing that, Kav murmured wonderingly, “Wow… To set up a blockade of such a huge chunk of space. We had no idea we were going in circles. Fairies use similar magic in forests a lot, but this might be the first time in history that one on such a large scale has been accomplished.”
More than half of what he said sounded more like a compliment than anything, and Oscar felt a headache coming on. It was almost as if he could hear Tinasha shouting Just go around and around in circles, then! at him.
“Her very existence should be illegal.” Oscar groaned. “How can we break the spell?”
“Locating its essence and destroying it is the quickest way out. Judging from the scope, Miss Tinasha is not actively maintaining it now. She’s set up sigils and something to use as a core to do that for her. That’s if we can find it first—it’s impossible to see this spell.”
“I can’t see it, either,” Oscar said.
They were at a complete loss. Privately, Oscar cursed Lucrezia’s heartlessness, though only just a little.
The soldiers had halted, and from Oscar’s position in the center of the march, they seemed to be in quite the disarray. He looked around and saw that the generals, royals, and aides-de-camp were trading information and ideas on how best to escape their trap. His eyes caught sight of Reust, and Oscar made a sour face.
It was all because of Reust’s time wasting that things had gotten this bad in the first place. Oscar felt a fresh wave of irritation threaten an angry outburst.
Just as Oscar bit it back…a guest arrived.
It was a man clad in black mage’s robes. He materialized in the midst of the crowd without any forewarning, and as everyone’s heads began to turn, he bent one knee and made a sweeping bow. In a full, ringing voice, he greeted the army with all due formality.
“I believe this is our first time meeting. I am the chief mage of Cuscull, Bardalos.”
“Wha—?”
Immediately, several soldiers drew their swords. In an instant, the air was crackling with tension, and Bardalos gave an exaggerated shrug. “Ah, don’t be too hasty. If you kill me, you’ll never get out of here. This is a fine work of art crafted by the bride of our very own king. I doubt you’ll be able to get out now that you’re inside it.”
“You clown… What have you come here for?” spat out a Cezar general.
Bardalos only smiled at the attempted intimidation. He answered with theatrical flourish, as if reveling in his assigned role. “On this fine day, you are all bravely gathered here to make an offer of subordination to Cuscull. I am most extremely and humbly delighted. I would be thrilled to allow you the chance to witness our king’s great act of bringing the entire mainland under his control. If I may be so bold as to escort you…”
Bardalos wheeled around to take in everyone surrounding him.
“However, I’m afraid that I am unable to invite each and every one of you. We do have limited seating. That said… Yes, I do believe we have room for those of you who are here in this vicinity.”
“Who would go along with that?!”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself!”
Angry cries rose in reply to Bardalos’s arrogant invitation. The man paid them no mind, a masklike smile painted on his face.
Akashia in hand, Oscar stepped forward. “Fine. Take me.”
“Your Majesty?!” shrieked Kumu. At once, Bardalos flashed Oscar a pleased grin. He spread his arms wide, black robes billowing. A complicated spell appeared before him.
“Of course, I can take you… But all the rest must go as well. No one has the luxury of saying no. I’m afraid I rather need you as an audience. After all, you’re—”
The transportation array activated. The gate widened to encompass around fifty people, with Bardalos at the center. Screams and shouts of fright filled the air, muffling the latter half of Bardalos’s sentence.
“—to be the bride’s hostages.”
Bardalos sneered ominously.
The transportation spell brought them to the middle of a huge, open wasteland.
Gritty, sandy air whipped past.
They were standing in the midst of decaying ruins. A round plaza thick with sand clouds was half-crumbled away, lined with a row of equally eroded white stone pillars. Much of the stone paving underfoot was cracked and peeling. Ten steps led up the center of the plaza to a raised section. Atop that sat an old stone altar and a suspiciously new-looking empty throne.
Oscar stood in the middle of the plaza, turning to observe everything.
“We’ve been ambushed, just like they planned,” he muttered.
Everything looked peaceful, appearing as some visage from the distant past. Along the outer edges of the plaza, an arena of circular stone steps towered over them imperiously. The weathered things looked just like petrified flower petals.
At present, the many rows of encircling steps were filled with several hundred Cuscull mages. Their chilling gazes were locked on their newly arrived guests. Mixed in among them were quite a few strange-looking creatures, including winged, mid-level demons. Presumably, these had been summoned and put to work.
Oscar gazed at the crowd calmly, but the others were frozen in place, whether out of astonishment or fear.
Keeping his eyes forward, Oscar called for one of his confidantes. “Als, what’s your take?”
“Not good. There’s way too many of them and way too few of us.”
With only fifty on Oscar’s side, a head-on battle seemed a poor choice. Oscar checked on how his other subjects were doing and then drew Akashia. Pitching his voice so they could hear, he ordered, “I have a defensive barrier, so don’t worry about me. Protect yourselves.”
No matter what happened, Oscar knew he would not die so long as Tinasha was alive. Oscar didn’t intend to let his team die, either, however, and he readjusted his grip on Akashia’s hilt.
At that moment, a man appeared at the top of the central stairway, flanked on either side by other mages.
His white hair caught the eye, and his robes were a magnificent finery unto themselves. He stepped forward with his retinue trailing in his wake. Next to the altar, Bardalos bowed to him and gave way.
Oscar fixed his eyes on the newly emerged man. “Lanak…”
When those around Oscar heard his growl, shock crossed their faces. Lanak was a historical figure from four centuries ago, but here he supposedly was looking not a day past twenty. With his abnormally pale hair and skin, it was like he’d walked out of a dream.
Lanak surveyed his audience and smiled. “Welcome to the ruins of Tuldarr’s cathedral.”
The involuntary guests all exchanged looks. Ruins of the famed Magic Empire, a country that prided itself on its exceptional power, had been sleeping here in silence throughout the centuries. Lanak took a seat on the new throne that rested amid the ruins of a country lost so tragically.
“I’ve brought you all here today to share a proposal. At our current place in history, people suffer cruel discrimination and strife. Tayiri, the foremost enemy of our nation, is the greatest example of this. Their god is unfair and fickle. His power does not reach you. Such is why people murder one another. Whether it be hate or love, they kill.”
Lanak’s voice was even, bereft of both sternness and compassion. The man appeared to be a doll parroting a learned phrase. His eyes even seemed to be made of glass as he cast them down. “But we can put an end to that. No more fighting. That will be the rule. Anyone who can’t abide by it will be punished immediately, no matter where they are on the mainland… I have the power to enforce this.”
“What?” Oscar cried without thinking. Many others were left speechless. Surely some of them doubted Lanak’s sanity. What he said was tantamount to declaring his own divinity.
Suspicion flickered in the eyes of some of the guests, who suspected Lanak of deception. The ruler of Cuscull laughed. “I’m sure you know of the five huge reservoirs of magic known as magical lakes. They are formed of natural life energy, magic, and the souls of countless humans. Right now, each one is divided, mindlessly drawing in the life force of its surroundings. But if we use a spell to connect the lakes into a network, it would form a giant web across the continent. Once we do that, I’ll be able to see everything that happens right from this very chair. Even the weather will bend according to my will. Magnificent, don’t you agree?”
…Surveillance of the mainland and control of the weather.
It was like some nightmarish future vision. If Tinasha were here, Oscar knew she’d object.
A vision of her doing just that popped into Oscar’s mind, and he let out a puff of laughter.
“Your Majesty…,” Als warned from his spot at Oscar’s side.
“Ah, I’m sorry. I’m fine. I’ll take this seriously.”
The magical lakes were formed upon Tuldarr’s destruction. Originally, they were the power that Lanak was supposed to inherit but had proven too much for him to control. Now he had fashioned a new method of doing so. The demonic beast incident had taught Oscar about the power of the magical lakes. Their wild and mighty energy accidentally created that terrible creature from something never actually meant to be a weapon. If Lanak could purposely bring all the magical lakes under his control, the potential he’d possess really would rival a god’s.
“He’s practically insane for even thinking to try this, though.”
No matter how noble Lanak’s ideals were, he couldn’t be allowed to spy on the entire mainland. No one knew when his self-righteousness would go off the rails.
Lanak stood from his throne and smiled. “The spell will take about an hour. Waiting might bore you, but I do want you to bear witness. This is the dawn of a new era, after all.”
The king of Cuscull made sure his audience gasped in shock before breaking into a wide grin. “Now then, allow me to introduce my bride. If not for her, we could have never performed a spell of this magnitude. I’ll be borrowing her power as the catalyst. Aeti, come here.”
Lanak waved his right hand, opening a teleportation gate next to him. A woman emerged with three mage attendants in tow.
She was a resplendently pale creature, signifying to all that she was the bride in question. Her radiance was such that it made it easy to forget the dire circumstances at hand.
Her dress was replete with a long train crafted of multiple layers of lace. Black flowers were strung into her long, ebony hair. Her fine features would have taken a sculptor a lifetime to re-create, and her dark eyes were cast downward in melancholy.
Slowly, her lashes lifted and she cast a glance at Lanak. As she did, the audience gathered at the bottom of the stairs realized who she was and a frisson of terror ran through the crowd. Two of the three mages at her side turned pale as well. The one who didn’t was a young woman who’d seen fewer years than her peers.
Bardalos smirked as he took in the bride’s expression. A smile on his face, Lanak inclined his head. “What’s wrong, Aeti?”
“Did you undo my spell?”
“I didn’t. I helped Bardalos bring them here. I wanted them all to see.”
“…Ah,” Tinasha said shortly, then turned back to give a reassuring smile to the attendants that flanked her. She moved to sit down beside Lanak’s throne. Midway through her motion, a rustic chair made of white stone popped into being to catch her.
Lanak placed a hand on her shoulder. Then he began to chant a slow and deliberate recitation.
As the sound of his incantation echoed off the ancient ruins, Oscar thought about what he should do.
There was only one hour until the spell was complete. He had to do something to stop it soon.
Simply trying to kill Lanak would incur retaliation from the surrounding Cuscull mages. The other captives would no doubt be dragged into the fighting, too. Worst of all, the enemy greatly outnumbered them, ensuring that Oscar’s side would lose.
“I just need an opportunity…”
Oscar looked to his shoulder and saw Nark let out a little yawn. He then turned back to stare at the woman who gave him the dragon. Her dark gaze had dropped to her feet; she refused to meet anyone’s eyes. Oscar wondered what her goal was in all this.
Pamyra didn’t let her inner turmoil show on her face and simply kept a close watch over her lady.
She’d never thought they’d summon an audience.
The mage couldn’t be sure whether that had been Lanak’s doing or Bardalos’s, nor did she want to think about how things were going to play out with this new change to the plan.
“Give me power… Protect us…,” Pamyra murmured to herself, praying to anyone who might be listening.
Lanak’s chanting echoed throughout the half-rotted sanctuary.
Four hundred years was a long time.
It was long enough to lose your mind, but Tinasha had overcome that.
For the first century, she hadn’t been able to stand to talk to anyone besides Lucrezia.
Her life had been an endless series of torments, from the loss of her country to the betrayal of the one she loved most. Even after she’d become a witch, there were those who still hunted her down, trying to gobble up everything she had. Tinasha despised everything about those who had let such terrible things happen to her.
Eventually, she succeeded in locking away her grief and resentment but gave up on trusting and loving other people in the process. Tinasha feared her searing hatred would return and bring the world to ruin if she ever dared to love anyone again.
After the completion of her tower, Tinasha began to grant audiences to those who overcame its trials. As time went on, she discovered she was starting to like people a little.
They were interesting.
Fiercely devoted.
She was envious of how their lives soared and dipped so beautifully.
So this is what humans are like, she thought. Why am I different?
How much more time would have to pass before she could die?
Was slowly whittling down her own soul really bringing her closer to what she wished for?
Life in the tower was peaceful and never changing. She was free and alone.
Tinasha never found what she was looking for, no matter how long she looked. Nor did she know why she was searching.
Her time was spent grasping at delusions.
Then it came. At last, she found the person she was searching for.
His humming voice was low and pleasant to listen to.
It was the voice that had often been her lullaby. His presence gave her the strength to bear her empty childhood. So long as that boy was with her, she could survive being driven into a detached wing of the castle for her studies.
It was a sweet voice, one that promised protection.
Tinasha closed her eyes and followed the magic that was being drawn out of her. She felt the enormous spell Lanak was weaving.
Once it was completed, everything would change. The spell he was chanting was the beginning of the end.
What she wanted lay just ahead.
The sight of his demolished homeland didn’t inspire any longing nostalgia in Lanak.
In the Dark Age, the Magic Empire spanned a large territory, yet was also impenetrable by other countries. The king at its head commanded multiple high-ranking demons, any one of which could decimate an army. Lanak had once believed in the future that ancient Tuldarr envisioned. He had vowed to see it done.
All those feelings for his nation had died out at some point, however. Perhaps they’d vanished when he realized he was not to be chosen as ruler, or perhaps it was when Tuldarr fell. Even Lanak couldn’t remember anymore.
A long sleep had worn his heart and mind thin. Even his very surroundings felt veiled and unreal as he sat on his throne. His one grip on reality remained the warmth he could feel coming off the witch he was clutching. He steadied his breathing and carefully wove together the words of the spell.
“Silence drifting on a sea of grief. Countless outstretched hands choose me. Neither morning nor night. Their eyes are everywhere.”
Borrowing from Tinasha’s inexhaustible wellspring of magic, Lanak crafted the spell by tying together strands of her power. As small spells threaded together, the creation turned massive.
At the same time, he reached out across the continent toward the five magical lakes, grasping and linking them. The growing spell sucked up even more magic from the lakes and urged them into harmony with one another. Quickly, Lanak’s conjuration began to extend out to every coast. Huge amounts of force pulsed and coursed, and winds began to eddy and swirl very slowly in the ruins.
Amid the growing storms, Lanak’s voice crackled like thunder.
“I command the first lake that was born. I am the one who defines. I command you under the name Compassion, which brought you into being. Your location shall be daybreak.”
…Lanak suddenly found himself wondering what he’d do once this was over.
He’d only ever thought to control the land through magic. He hadn’t considered what to do after. He glanced at Tinasha, who was still sitting next to him.
Perhaps he’d build her a mansion here. A place where she could live in peace. She used to love her birth country. Surely that hadn’t changed. Lanak wanted to grant her the relaxing days she deserved. He wanted to free her from her duties and loneliness.
“I command the second lake that was born. I am the one who defines. I command you under the name Jealousy, which brought you into being. Your location shall be morning.”
Magic of this scale had never been seen in all of recorded history. The ceremony required scrupulous care. There was meaning in taking the trouble to do so, however. Once completed, there would never again be war. People, no matter who they were, would gain the right to live their lives. When he thought about it that way, even his long years of sleep seemed worthwhile.
“I command the third lake that was born. I am the one who defines. I command you under the name Denial, which brought you into being. Your location shall be noon.”
At the moment, Lanak had no complaints about taking the throne.
If there was one regret he truly had, it was that he couldn’t quite recall the sort of person he was in the past. He didn’t know what he loved, what he hated, or why he committed such a terrible act against Tinasha. He was still the same person, but his own self felt formless and unmolded.
“I command the fourth lake that was born. I am the one who defines. I command you under the name Longing, which brought you into being. Your location shall be twilight.”
When he thought of the past, the first thing to come to mind was always her as a lovely young girl. In his memories, she was always blushing shyly. He had to protect her. She existed solely for him to protect.
“I command the final lake that was born. I am the one who defines. I command you under the name Hatred, which brought you into being. Your location shall be midnight.”
Why had he lived for four hundred years? Why hadn’t he died?
He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, putting himself into a magical sleep, but suspected it was so he could see her again.
Calm feelings surging within him, Lanak gazed down at his bride.
She was staring up at him and perhaps had been for some time.
There was a challenging glint in her dark eyes.
For some reason, that look made him flinch and recoil.
A sneaking feeling began to grow.
He stopped chanting.
A smile flickered across Tinasha’s face.
Lanak had never seen her make such an expression before.
Cuscull mages were abuzz with speculation as they watched the king’s bride suddenly stand up.
She brushed Lanak’s hand from her shoulder. He stumbled back several steps.
“Aeti, what are you…?”
The witch offered no answer. With a radiant smile, she faced him. More specifically, she turned toward the spell configuration he had created. With elegance, she extended a hand.
“Come.”
In answer to her command, the enormous configuration rushed to her.
The winds swirling around the ruins dispersed at this new interference.
Struck dumb, Lanak tried to stop the spell from going to her. He stared at the woman, thoroughly stunned.
“What are you doing?” Lanak asked. “This is—”
With a snort, the woman took in her surroundings
She gazed at the ruins of her fallen country with an overwhelming sense of wistful longing.
“It’s been so long…”
Her clear, lovely voice resounded far and wide.
She beamed at Lanak with a smile so beautiful that anyone in the world would’ve found themselves entranced by it.
“I’ve been searching for you forever… I really wanted to see you; I missed you. When we met again, I was so happy I could cry.”
In her eyes shone honest admiration for Lanak. It was a look not unlike that of love, though not quite the same.
Under her slender fingers, Lanak’s complex spell array wavered even more, jerking toward her. From her petal-shaped lips fell a whisper imbued with trembling ardor. “I really needed you… What I truly wanted…was the names of the lakes that only you, as the caster, knew.”
The woman’s smile twisted, and suddenly she was someone new.
In an instant, she changed from adorable young girl to powerful victor. Her grin was bewitching and cruel.
Lanak felt the abyss within her seize hold of him.
“I can finally set free the bound souls of the people you killed four hundred years ago—all those poor people who melted into the magical lakes.”
A proclamation from the distant past echoed. It spoke of a wish that had survived the passing centuries.
Finally, signs of dawning comprehension showed on Lanak’s face.
The witch extended her pale ivory arms wide.
“Come to me.”
The spell was drawn into her arms. Lanak desperately tried to stop it, but it was wrested from his hands and quickly fell under the woman’s sway.
With a sweet, beatific smile, she poured magic into the complex array, resetting it.
At an incredible speed, the witch transmuted the spell from one that would control the magical lakes…into one that would dismantle and divert them.
“Aeti, you…”
Lanak had lost all thought. All that remained in his mind were his few feeble memories.
She should have been the person he needed to protect.
Once she was a weak, lonely little girl, but now she was a feared and hated witch. She couldn’t survive without him. He had to ensure her safety.
Letting her overpower him…was unacceptable.
Lanak was waking from his long sleep. Fury and hatred blotted out the dreaming persona. Arising to replace it were the emotions that had been previously frozen dead within him, feelings from a time long since destroyed.
The violent, indelible passion that had led Lanak to slice open a poor girl was now surging back to life.
“Aeti… Would you betray me again?”
“Betray you? The reason I am still alive today was all for this moment,” the witch declared.
“Now, let the atonement begin!”
Her roaring declaration was a link between the past and the present.
Furious heat boiled in Lanak. Four hundred years later, this woman was still getting in his way.
“Why, you… I won’t allow it!”
Furious, Lanak prepared a spell to attack, but Tinasha effortlessly lifted a hand and diffused it. Furious at the counter maneuver, Lanak barked, “Kill this woman! …No, neutralize her! Cut off her limbs for all I care!”
Tinasha watched Lanak’s pale face contort with hideous fury as she leaped back a few paces. With a nasty sneer, she cooed, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you look like that. You’re the spitting image of the man you used to be. Does that mean you’ve finally woken up?”
“You’ve got a big mouth for a little brat!” Lanak spat acidly.
Renart and Pamyra hurried to Tinasha’s side. She glanced at them, then snapped her fingers. Pieces of obsidian appeared, floating in the air all around her. With the same motion, Tinasha pointed at the captured audience still standing at the base of the stairway. Forty of the dark, glassy stones winked out and reappeared in a pattern around the group, forming a barrier. |
Unnamed Memory
“Ahhh… I knew it!” Pamyra cried in consternation, and Renart sighed. The stones were infused with spells originally meant to form a protective barrier around Tinasha. Despite her power, she still required concentration for the incantation to divert the five magical lakes. That was why she needed a barrier that could protect Oscar and the others during the intervening time. Both Pamyra and Renart knew, however, that Tinasha was protecting the captives at the expense of guarding herself.
“Go!” the witch hissed to her two loyal attendants.
Fending off the hail of offensive spells that came barreling downward from every direction, Pamyra and Renart both turned down the command.
“No!”
“I refuse.”
Lanak’s huge spell had already activated, synchronizing the magical lakes. If Tinasha relinquished now, a storm of magical power worse than when Tuldarr was destroyed would carve its way across the land. The only hope was to reset the spell and divert the magical lakes. Tinasha was the only person capable of such a feat.
Guarding their lady, Pamyra and Renart retaliated against Lanak’s closest followers. The man himself fell back behind a row of his supporters and was still clearly enraged. Evidently, he didn’t want to expend his own magic.
Without an incantation, Renart summoned up a blade of wind. It mowed down two mages still in the middle of chanting. Pamyra was about to give pursuit when she sensed something and threw up a defensive shield at Renart’s side. Black flames battered against it.
“Ngh! Damn you…!”
The attack was more intense than she’d anticipated, forcing Pamyra to devote all her strength into fortifying the shield. She stumbled a few steps back and glared at the source of the strike.
It was the mad mage Bardalos, standing there with a look of unmitigated glee. “So you really did betray us! How hilarious!”
Bardalos loosed another wave of dark fire. This time, he aimed for the witch, who was still deep in the middle of her diversion spell. Renart hurried to block it, but a second spell came hurtling toward him and rooted his feet to the ground.
“Lady Tinasha!” Pamyra screamed, afraid that Bardalos’s attack would reach the witch.
Much to her relief and surprise, however, the shadowy tongues of fire never knew the taste of Tinasha’s flesh.
Looking slightly put out, Tinasha glared up at the man who had leaped to protect her.
“You really need to learn how to ask me for help,” he drawled.
Before Tinasha stood the one man who could kill her.
As Oscar was eyeing the situation at the base of the steps, Als came running up to him, hacking his way through Cuscull soldiers along the way. Doan and the other mages intermittently stepped outside the barrier to return fire against the enemy mages. Nark swelled in size and engaged in an aerial battle against five demons.
Of those fifty who’d been kidnapped via teleport, close to half managed to grasp the situation and spring into action. Some even dared to push past Tinasha’s shield. They charged forward to protect the witch, recognizing that she was key to their survival. Others climbed the stone steps in an attempt to reach the throne.
As things quickly devolved into a free-for-all, Bardalos hurled a spear of light toward the man who’d stood himself in front of the witch. The magic pole arm merely struck Oscar’s barrier and shattered.
“What?!” Bardalos exclaimed in shock. Oscar cast a knowing glance back at Tinasha. She returned the look while still working on Lanak’s spell.
…He’s here. He actually came.
Just knowing that was enough to fill her with a curious feeling of reassurance. The back of her throat grew hot.
“What do you want me to do?” Oscar asked, and Tinasha looked down and ran some calculations. It was going to take her thirty minutes to finish reciting the spell. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to last that long amid the current chaotic situation. Even if she did, there was still a chance of catastrophic damage.
Tinasha looked back up at Oscar. Her dark eyes glowed with a light that Oscar knew very well.
“Give me as much time as you can.”
“As you wish,” he replied immediately. Tinasha nodded.
Then she began the new incantation that would overturn everything.
Positioning himself in front of Tinasha, Oscar prepared to square off against Bardalos. The mad mage grinned with delight. “The swordsman of Akashia, eh? Heard a lot of legends. Wonder how much is true.”
“Hmm? I don’t care,” Oscar spat out and advanced on Bardalos. The other man had been expecting that, however, and aimed a sickle of flames at Oscar’s feet.
Dodging it would risk the spell hitting Tinasha behind him. Instead, Oscar brought down his sword and smashed Bardalos’s magic apart. Akashia scattered the flames, leaving only black scorch marks on the stone.
Bardalos licked his lips. “You’re pretty good with that. I thought you were just a foolish swordsman who’d let the barrier do all the work.”
“I don’t want to make any trouble for her—that’s all,” Oscar shot back.
The defensive barrier was linked to Tinasha. Oscar wasn’t sure what was going to happen as she completed her spell. As such, he wanted to make certain that he didn’t drain her power unnecessarily.
Bardalos sneered as the king again fended off the magic rushing at him with a single sweep of Akashia. “It’ll be interesting to see how long you can keep that up. You might even die without ever moving a single step from where you stand. That sure would be a shame. My first audience with the Mage Killer is certainly turning out to be rather disappointing.”
“Sorry to say, but my merciless teacher gave me one hell of a training regimen. I promise you won’t be disappointed, though I can’t promise your survival.”
“Bold words. I hope you have the strength to back them up,” Bardalos sneered. With an arcane motion, he summoned up some two dozen fireballs that floated in midair.
A swordsman who kept his distance would soon find himself battered by a volley of ranged attacks. While this upstart king possessed a legendarily dangerous weapon, Bardalos believed there was nothing to fear so long as the sword never touched him. In his mind, the battle was already over—and he had won.
“Go on—burn to cinders,” he cried with glee, commanding a flurry of fireballs down on Oscar. With one eye on his burning storm, Bardalos lifted his right hand to cast his next spell. He believed wholeheartedly in his own dominance, but then his eyes widened.
“Die.”
Unbelievable speed, unbelievable distance. A drawn sword glittered before his eyes like a polished mirror.
All of Bardalos’s thoughts ended there. In one motion, Oscar had cleaved through the foul man’s magical defenses and his neck.
Many of the Cuscull mages began to lose their will to fight after seeing their chief mage meet his end in a flashy spray of blood.
Behind them, Lanak continued to rage. “Summon more demons! Kill them!” he howled.
At this royal decree, the mages on the outermost stone steps began summoning incantations. A mage near the throne began the same sort of spell, but Als came leaping up and quickly struck that person down. With Pamyra and Renart in the fray as well, Lanak’s forces were quickly losing control of the platform with the throne.
To compensate, more and more of the mages who’d been in the outer ring teleported into the center. The occasional demon came with them, too.
“That can’t be true! There’s no way Lady Aeterna would betray us!” rose Tris’s voice above the melee.
She couldn’t bring herself to attack Tinasha, but neither could she defend her like Pamyra and Renart. Unsure and unwilling, she simply stood stock-still in disbelief. As other Cuscull mages teleported to the center of the fight, she was pushed to the back.
Tris’s childhood dreams were dying before her very eyes, and it seemed that everyone was content not to help. Only power and blood mattered on the battlefield. Finally, Tris tore her tear-filled eyes away from the spectacle and ran off. Tears trailing behind her, she vanished into the wilderness. A Cuscull mage who noticed the fleeing girl raised a hand to send a fire arrow after her.
Meredina’s sword bit into the caster and stopped the spell before it began, however. Protected by a barrier made by Doan and Kav, she slashed her way through the outer stone steps. As she pressed on through the crowd, someone threw a ball of light in her face.
“What in the—?!”
Closing one eye reflexively, Meredina slashed blindly with her blade in an attempt to hack through the spell. Before her sword made contact, the incoming magical attack simply bounced off the protections that her friends had placed on her.
“Stop acting like His Majesty. You can’t cut through magic with a normal sword,” Doan reminded her, appalled, as he hurled a small lightning bolt at some Cuscull mages.
“Wasn’t it better than doing nothing?” she snapped back.
Meredina came in from the left. With a practiced motion, she severed the arm of a mage that’d been attempting to protect himself with lightning. He collapsed to the ground with a shriek, and Meredina continued to move forward.
From behind, Doan calmly cautioned, “You’re going a little too fast. Slow down.”
Meredina shrugged and took two steps back, only to meet the sharp claws of a lizardman’s swipe. A terrible, metallic screech rang out in the arena. She exchanged three blows with the creature before plunging her sword into its scaly chest.
Another lizard tried to grab her sword, but a Cezar general cut it down from behind. Meredina pulled the blade out and nodded at the general, who gave a casual wave back.
Sword in hand in the middle of the battlefield, Reust looked at the dauntless Farsasian crew and bit back a sigh.
He had a habit of losing track of time during fights. One moment would pass in a flash, and the next seemed to lag. It was like wandering endlessly through a fog with no clear exit.
As he crossed swords with a wave of advancing demons, he looked up at the witch on the stone platform. Even at this distance, her white dress made her easy to spot.
She seemed just as beautiful as ever, even as she chanted her spell. Reust was so caught up in looking at the lovely lines of her face that a small magic spear grazed his shoulder. When he looked to see who had thrown it, he saw a very young mage—a boy, really—scowling at him with fear and hatred.
“Die! Rot in hell, you monster!”
The bitter cry was unmistakably meant for Reust alone.
Tayiri had built up this hatred over the centuries. Seeing it right before him in the flesh took his breath away.
The boy sketched a rough spell array, then hurled it at Reust. It became a fireball as it arced through the air, leaving a trail of flames in its wake. Faced with a literal burning manifestation of anger, Reust choked out, “Is this the result of Tayiri’s sin…?”
It was indeed a terrible thing to deny others the very right to live as human beings.
Both sides had been born with a twisted resentment of each other.
Had the day come for that to end? Was an end even possible?
Reust closed his eyes, ready to accept what came. Before the fireball could consume him, it was dispelled. Whirling around, Reust saw a mage of Farsas who waved him off casually.
“Save the deep thoughts for after this is over, Your Majesty. Right now, our priority is surviving.”
“…Got it,” Reust answered curtly, though not without sincerity. Tamping down the bitterness rooted in his heart, he strode up to the mage boy. As the little magic user hurried to prepare another spell, Reust drove an elbow into his stomach. He supported the buckling boy, gently laying him down on the ground. The time to think would come later; for now, Reust knew he had to keep his head up high.
He raised his sword, ready to engage his next opponent.
A winged demon swooped down upon the witch with its claws outstretched. A burst of fire rose to meet it, however. Hurling attacks as they dashed up the stone stairs, Sylvia and Kumu finally reached the top and rushed over to Tinasha. Although she was in the middle of her long incantation, she acknowledged the pair with a smile.
Overcome with joy that Tinasha was still her old self, Sylvia nearly broke down in tears. “We’ll protect you. I promise!” She then began to chant a spell. “O midday star, o nighttime flower. O thing that cannot be seen, breathe. Spiral up.”
It was a rather elementary spell that induced sleep. However, in the hands of Sylvia, a court mage, the effect was strengthened to a degree one could only describe as bizarre. Ordinarily, the spell wouldn’t have affected other magic users very much. That was why the Cuscull mages chose to ignore it. This complacency proved to be their undoing as one by one they began to stumble and fall.
Next to her, Kumu took point in front of the witch so that Oscar could enter the fray. He put up a defensive barrier and listened to the witch’s incantation more closely.
“…A double incantation?!” Kumu yelped in surprise before he could stop himself, and all the mages around him turned their heads. The shock on their faces meant that they’d realized it, too.
A double incantation was an old, high-grade magical art that had died with Tuldarr.
According to the records, by using one incantation to create two spell configurations, two types of magic could be utilized at the same time. Doing so unfortunately required more than just the power to cast each spell individually, making double incantations one of the most advanced magical arts ever devised. Tinasha’s usage of this now meant that she was preparing to cast something besides her spell to divert the power of the magical lakes.
“And not only that…”
When Kumu realized what the second spell was, he gasped and fell silent. Pamyra had come up to him, and she finished his sentence. “This is…from Tuldarr’s coronation ceremony…”
As if in response, the witch stretched out her right hand, palm facing downward.
A white glowing circle of light appeared around her. It rapidly expanded, stopping at the edge of the stone stairs. Lanak saw it from his position in the air above the fray, and he seethed with fury.
“Aeti! How much further will you go to mock me?!”
Tinasha offered no answer.
Dozens of white, glowing spell patterns rose up within the great ring. A huge light erupted from what would’ve been the one o’clock position had the spell array been a clock. Soon after, a similar luminous burst appeared at the two o’clock position, then three, and so on.
Powerful lights glowed in sequence until finally the twelve o’clock position blazed to life.
Perched from a high vantage point, Doan beheld the incredible display and muttered, “Could that be Tuldarr’s…? Wait, twelve? All of them? She can’t be serious.”
Brandishing Akashia against multiple demons, Oscar slashed apart the torso of a lizardman who leaped at him. He snapped the weapon to shake blood from its blade, then looked over his shoulder.
He caught sight of the witch and grinned. “Has enough time passed yet? What are you gonna show us?”
Combatants on both sides chanced glances at the witch. An unbelievable amount of magic had gathered around her.
This was when she showed what a witch was truly made of. Everyone could feel in their bones that this was going to be a turning point in history.
Tinasha paused in her chanting and began to issue some sort of decree. Her voice rang out sonorously across the battlefield.
“Appear, spirits bound to Tuldarr by an ancient contract! My name is Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr! I am your regent, and by this proclamation, you are defined… Come to me!”
All was lost to a blinding explosion of white.
A violent torrent of power came rolling in. Sandy winds buffeted those still standing.
The air changed. A stream of alternating hot and cold winds rushed in.
When the dust settled—Tuldarr’s twelve hereditary spirits had appeared.
The beings known as the spirits of Tuldarr were legends spoken of in magical history. They were high-ranking demons that the first king of Tuldarr had summoned and bound to the nation. At the time a new regent was crowned, one to three of them—based on the regent’s magical abilities—would be selected and put to use.
History had taught many that it was impossible for any ruler of Tuldarr to control multiple high-ranking demons at once.
Tinasha’s calling of all twelve seemed akin to lunacy, yet it was happening before every nonbeliever’s eyes.
The high-ranking demons stood above the circle. One of them, a man with vermilion hair, said in a leisurely tone, “It’s been so, so long since I last made myself known.”
“Oh? I hadn’t gotten enough sleep yet…,” another complained.
“Hey, the country’s in ruins.”
“Well, anything humans create is fragile.”
As the demons started to chat with one other, the humans all around gaped in shock. Some of the demons looked elderly, while others appeared as young men and women. One or two even resembled children. Whatever their appearance, it was clear that none were truly human. Their deep crimson hair and aloof, intimidating airs betrayed their true natures.
If left to their own devices, they seemed liable to chat among themselves forever, but a word from the witch shut them up.
“I order…”
At that, all the spirits knelt down. The old, white-haired one at the twelve o’clock position spoke for its peers with a dignified tone. “Our master. What is your order?”
“Annihilate the enemies. Leave those who do not show hostility unharmed. Avoid killing if you can.”
“We understand.”
Their directive clear, the twelve rose to their feet. A few of them had their eyes closed, yet others were openly smirking. The vermilion-haired spirit appeared to be familiar with Tinasha and teased, “You’re all grown up but still such a naive little girl.”
“Just do it,” Tinasha commanded, waving a hand at them dismissively, and they scattered.
Instantly, the nearly one hundred demons the Cuscull mages had summoned all vanished.
The appearance of the spirits was enough to sap any remaining desire to fight from Lanak’s forces. Terrified of such a supernatural power, they either surrendered or fled the scene.
Now free of opposition, the witch resumed her first incantation. All anyone could do was watch the huge, intricately woven spell as it grew to exceed all human limitations.
Just like that, the battle was over. Lanak turned tail and ran through the ruins of the country he’d destroyed, panting all the while.
Gradually, the tumult grew distant. He tried to teleport away but found concentration extremely difficult. Whether it was due to exhaustion from the spell he’d created using Tinasha as a catalyst or more deep-set damage from his long stasis was anyone’s guess. Either way, his body’s magic was in tatters.
Lanak growled, the taste of fresh blood in his mouth. “Aeti… Aeterna…”
All he did was repeat her name. It was impossible to say now whether the word was spiked with hatred or something else entirely.
Over and over, Lanak repeated the name, as if calling it was the only thing still anchoring him in this world. A cloud of sand rolled by and engulfed the pale man.
Suddenly, Lanak’s surroundings grew terribly dark. He looked up to see a red dragon circling overhead. After catching sight of Lanak, the great beast started into a descent. A man leaped off its back.
Amid the grit, Lanak spied a double-edged sword that’d been polished to a mirrorlike sheen. He knew it well; the weapon was the only one of its kind in all the land.
The man who’d leaped from the dragon was blocking Lanak’s way. Doing his best to remain calm, Lanak called, “Hello. We meet again, I see. I believe the outcome of our little skirmish is already decided, so what are you here for?”
“Oh, nothing. I just had something to ask you,” Oscar replied, readjusting his grip on Akashia’s hilt. His handsome features were emotionless, but an angry fire burned in his eyes.
“What could you possibly want from me? If there’s anything you want to know, you should ask Aeterna, not me.”
Much like what had transpired in today’s battle, Lanak was sure that Tinasha understood more than he ever had. He was the only one who’d been clueless.
“Aeti knows everything. Take pity on me. We were both potential rulers of Tuldarr, but I wasn’t powerful enough.”
Lanak wished she’d stayed as the little girl he only had to protect. She was supposed to marry him; that was her role. Unfortunately, her talent and diligence had brought about a betrayal. If she’d only been weak, none of this would have happened.
“It is because of her that Tuldarr came to ruin. She’s the reason I…”
“You abused her trust,” Oscar spat coldly. His words concealed a frightening threat, and Lanak fell silent.
While the pale man was unsure of many things, he had a powerful hunch that he was going to die here.
Lanak’s long life, a journey bereft of joy, was coming to its end.
With indifference in his tone, Oscar asked another question. “What did you feel when you cut her open?”
“…Ha.”
Lanak’s face twisted into something resembling a smile. He only remembered that it was a lurid, ghastly sight.
He could hear her voice as she screamed and begged him to save her. Her blood and entrails had gushed up from her little body. The nauseating stench tickled his nose even now.
Lanak could still feel her innards in his hands, and he glanced down at his empty palms.
Compassion, jealousy, denial, longing, and hatred.
The names he gave to the lakes were the only feelings Lanak had ever felt toward her.
She was the woman who controlled his life and whose life he should have controlled. In truth, he had loved her. She had reached out to him with such innocence, and he’d only wanted to cherish her.
He simply never had the power to make that happen.
That was why…he’d wanted his power to exceed hers.
“Lanak, stay with me. Don’t leave me alone.”
“It’s all right, Aeti. I’ll protect you.”
Someday, he’d awaken from that fleeting dream. The illusory vision of the past that had so consumed Lanak for over four hundred years was now finally giving way to reality.
…He was sure that she would never look back at him again.
Lanak had been the one who’d perished that terrible night at the altar. In the throes of his demise, he’d ripped the purest part from his beloved.
The pallid man looked up with a crooked smile on his lips. “I wasn’t thinking about anything. She was just a tool.”
Perhaps that’s why he didn’t need to say her name anymore.
Lanak closed his eyes, shutting out all feeling.
Akashia bore down on him, and in his final moments, Lanak whispered her name one last time.
A young man selling firewood in the landlocked nation of Cezar was suddenly struck by an odd sensation. Curious, he looked to the eastern sky.
Legend had it that an evil god and his worshippers had built a village hidden in the forest along the eastern border. However, if the old tales were to be believed, magic fell from the sky and destroyed the village four hundred years ago.
After that, the place where the secluded settlement once stood became known as something called a magical lake.
As the boy stared toward the horizon, he saw something shine brightly in the sky and his eyes widened.
At first, he thought it was just his imagination, but the very next moment, white lights began to fountain up from the forest. Rather leisurely, they began to make their way up toward the sky.
“…What in the world?”
The sight was a wonder, a mystery, but beautiful to behold.
Such a spectacular phenomenon was enough to inspire faith in forsaken gods.
A warm, soft breeze swept across the entire region, though there was no wind.
The luminous motes continued their climbing until they diffused into the sky, gradually diminishing in number and growing paler. The boy stood rooted to the ground, entranced by the sight of it all.
At long last, all the floating, meandering globes dissolved into the clouds and disappeared.
Nothing was left.
For a long time after, the young man gazed dumbly up at the heavens.
The titanic spell configuration, set aloft from the witch’s grasp, finished diverting the energy of the magical lakes and dissolved into the open air above.
Now that her long incantation was finally over, Tinasha stared out at the former battlefield with placid eyes.
The stench of blood and charred flesh clung heavily to the breeze. Burnt and motionless bodies lay facedown. Tinasha carefully partook of the brutal sight. Cries of agony and death still lingered in her ears, or perhaps the sound was in her mind.
…It would be very easy to cry.
Tinasha didn’t want to, though. Allowing her emotions to rise risked them overflowing and her losing control. No matter what she felt, Tinasha knew it didn’t change the fact that every death today was her fault—her burden.
Those who survived were staring at Tinasha with a strange elation. It was the deep sort of emotion shared by comrades who fought side by side for a united cause.
There were just as many—particularly those still cowering inside the barrier Tinasha had formed with the pieces of obsidian—who eyed her fearfully, however. Pamyra and Renart moved to shield their lady from those hostile gazes.
They were covered in wounds from head to toe, and Tinasha cast them a look as if to say, It’s all right now.
Her dark eyes landed on Nark, who’d come back. The man who alighted from the red dragon spotted her and wasted no time in rushing to her side. Tinasha awaited him in silence.
A general from Gandona stopped Oscar before he could reach the witch. “As the bearer of Akashia, I trust you know what needs to be done,” he said.
A nervous ripple ran through the crowd. All present knew that Oscar was tasked with slaying the witch.
Oscar nodded tightly, then strode to Tinasha. He paused before Pamyra and Renart, who were teeming with animosity. Before either could conjure up some manner of defense for their lady, the witch talked them down.
“Thank you, both of you. Let him through.”
While they were reluctant, they heeded their lady’s order and stepped aside.
Oscar passed between the two and at last came to stand before the witch.
Tinasha was about to call Oscar’s name but held the word back.
She knew he had been crowned king of Farsas. That made it all the more improper for people to know he had any connection to a witch. He was someone who would walk the path of righteousness and go down in history as a wise ruler.
Knowing this, Tinasha thought it best that she fade away and become nothing more than his stepping-stone. She prayed that he would find happiness in the future to come.
“Please…,” she said, the quiet plea unconsciously spilling from her. Realizing she’d spoken aloud, Tinasha pressed her lips shut tight.
She didn’t know what she’d planned to say. All that she’d kept so repressed had somehow slipped out a little. The lingering heat in her throat felt good. Tinasha thought it more than she deserved to die while enjoying that sensation.
The witch took a deep breath, then closed her eyes with a smile.
Diverting the magical lakes had exhausted her own power. It took everything she had just to stand upright.
If she was to meet the end today, she wanted to greet it on her feet, however—on her feet and dry-eyed.
The lakes were gone, Lanak was dead, and now she would die.
With her death, the ghosts of Tuldarr would disappear. After four hundred years, the fate they had altered would at last right its course.
Tinasha tilted her head up a little, almost as if she were expecting a kiss.
She waited for Akashia to run her through.
Oscar reached out toward her face. He brushed her smooth cheeks.
“Do you remember what I said when you broke Lucrezia’s spell?”
No answer came.
Very gently, he placed the blade of Akashia against her alabaster neck.
Tinasha’s body crumpled into Oscar’s arms.
“Aeti, come here.”
She could hear a voice coming from very far away. It called her name, and she opened her eyes.
Tinasha was peering down a stone corridor that seemed to stretch on forever.
“Come to me, I’ve missed you.”
The voice was coming from somewhere behind her. It belonged to a boy who Tinasha missed terribly. She smiled. Tinasha recalled how she used to feel accustomed to solitude but still longed to cling to the warmth of someone’s hands. Something not quite self-derision and not quite loneliness filled her heart.
“Aeti.”
…Names defined people.
The name one was called became their self.
No matter how sweetly the voice in her memories called that name, Tinasha knew she would never turn back again. Aeti was a child who died a long, long time ago.
“Good-bye, Lanak.”
Eyes focused on what was ahead, Tinasha began to walk forward.
The stone felt cool under her bare feet and told her nothing of the future that awaited her.
When she awoke, Tinasha realized she had no idea where she was.
In truth, she did know. It was more that she didn’t understand. Her brain felt heavy and slow as she shook her head. Sitting upright in bed, she blinked blearily at the blue sky that could be glimpsed through the nearby window.
As she did, the door opened without a sound. Tinasha glanced over and saw a woman there. “Pamyra…?”
“Lady Tinasha, you’re awake!” Pamyra cried, rushing over to kneel before the bed and take Tinasha’s hand. She placed it against her own forehead, testing its warmth. “You’ve been asleep for over a week… I was very worried.”
“I’m alive?”
“Of course you are!” Pamyra reproved her, but it still didn’t feel real. Tinasha found she was wearing a nightgown, and she placed her feet on the floor. She tried to stand, but her body was too weak for her to stay up. She staggered, and Pamyra supported her.
“Thank you… So why am I in Farsas?”
“A lot of trouble has happened. But right now, you can’t be up and about. Rest some more.”
They were in Tinasha’s bedroom in Farsas Castle. She had vacated these quarters, but it all looked the same as when she had left. Tinasha let Pamyra push her back down and sat on the edge of her bed.
She asked about the other mage. “Where’s Renart?”
“The laboratory. Should I call him?”
“No, I just wanted to know he was safe,” Tinasha said. She had a feeling that he was all right if Pamyra was, but it still gave her a sense of relief.
Tinasha took a breath, then looked up at Pamyra, who was checking the witch’s pulse.
“Pamyra, I have a request…”
“What is it?”
“I want to go out of this room… Help me bathe and change my clothes.”
Her lady had barely recovered, so Pamyra pulled a face at this demand but nodded reluctantly.
Bathing proved a little tiring but also felt so wonderful that it swept aside what had built up inside her. It awakened her consciousness to a degree and cleared her thoughts. Back in her bedroom, Tinasha used magic to dry her hair and slipped into the long dress Pamyra brought her.
“It feels like my legs have weakened… I can’t walk very well… It might be easier to fly or teleport to get around.”
“You need to rest properly!” Pamyra practically shrieked, and someone outside the door took that as their cue to enter. The master of the castle walked in, looking sullen.
“Don’t go out if you aren’t at your best.”
“Oscar…”
He gave her the same warning as Pamyra, who bowed as she passed him and left the room.
Tinasha used magic to float over and land in front of him. She’d lost a bit of weight, and he picked her up like he would’ve done with a child. She touched his cheek as she asked, “Why am I alive?”
“Right off the bat, huh? If you’re feeling that good, I suppose you won’t mind if I grind my fist into your head for a moment.”
“That really hurts. Please don’t.”
Oscar brought her to the bed and sat her down on its edge. Then he dragged a nearby chair over and took a seat himself. “I never had any intention of killing you. And it feels gross that you wanted to make me do so.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Anyway, I’ve got tons more things I want to lecture you about. It’s likely to take half the day, so prepare yourself.”
“…I’m sorry,” Tinasha repeated, hanging her head like a child getting reprimanded. Oscar reached out and entwined his fingers in her long, silky black hair. As it was freshly dried, it was still a little warm.
The witch gazed into his eyes. They were a deep blue, and he stared at her just as seriously as he had before. Belying his harsh words was a look full of adoration that he lavished on her.
An indescribable sense of nostalgia welled up inside Tinasha when she saw that. “Can I touch you?” she asked.
“Do what you want.”
She floated up into the air and landed on her knees between his legs on the chair. Looping her arms around his neck, she pressed in close.
She had always thought that loneliness was just a natural thing for her.
When she finally found a way out, she plunged in headfirst, but then left it behind… The month and a half she had been away had felt like forever.
Everyone assumed Tinasha was dangerous, and she’d never thought it mattered. All she’d cared about was waiting for the right moment to arrive. Once it did, she believed she’d finally be able to pay back all the people she hadn’t been able to save. To that end, she did her best not to pay any attention to what others thought, even if it wore away at her.
That was why Tinasha had held it all in—everything she wanted to cry out. No matter how the irritation and self-hatred tore at her, she never let it rise to the surface. Even when that sludge of emotion burned her up from the inside and she thought she would go mad, she still told herself she didn’t have the right to express those feelings.
It was much the same as her childhood spent living all alone in a detached wing of a castle.
No one was with her. She blamed herself for everything. That had long since become her reality.
Acceptance should have settled in, yet Tinasha had always found herself strangely…lonely.
“You brought me back.”
“Of course I did.”
Tinasha buried her face in Oscar’s shoulder. He was just as steady and warm as when she’d left.
Something began to rise up within her, tempting her to open up, but the witch didn’t know what to say. There was just a comforting heat in her chest. It was so tranquil she felt ready to fall asleep in Oscar’s arms.
Tinasha smiled, her wet eyelashes trembling. “A lot…happened. In the past and now.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But I…”
After getting that far, Tinasha found herself unable to continue. She was positive that Oscar already knew anyway.
She breathed heavily, and as Oscar stroked her hair, he muttered, “Oh right… You’re my fiancée now.”
“Why?!”
“If I didn’t say you were, I couldn’t have brought you back with me. It was bad enough that someone told me to kill you, but your huge display of power earned you a whole list of suitors.”
“You need to respect my opinion!”
“You’re already here; just do your best for the remaining half of the year,” Oscar instructed—as high-handed as ever.
Tinasha pulled back to heave a huge, exaggerated sigh, but she couldn’t stop her face from breaking into a grin. She looked up at him from under her long lashes. “As you wish, then, O contract holder.”
Oscar nodded solemnly, and she gave him an angelic smile. Then she hugged him again, whispering “Thank you” in his ear.
After the battle at the ruins, Oscar immediately sat down with all the high-ranking members of each country.
“All right, let’s jump right in and start our discussion of what to do post-battle. The plan is to cover everything we can, including how to handle that,” declared the king of Farsas, an irrepressible air of authority belying his calm demeanor. The representatives of the other countries, Reust included, picked up on the inherent threat in his words and gulped.
The conference, held at Tayiri Castle soon after the group returned, was on a timer. The witch, depleted of her power and cuffed with the Farsas sealing bracelet, was put to sleep in a separate room. If they didn’t decide how to handle her before she woke up, none could say how things would play out.
Everyone understood that going into this discussion, though things began under a veneer of calm. Focusing mainly on Reust, the group made arrangements regarding compensation for the troops Tayiri sent out and the Cuscull mages taken as prisoners of war. When talk finally turned to what to do with the witch, a general of Cezar—one of the Four Great Nations—readily volunteered as the first to speak.
“About the witch… Whatever her reasons, she sided with Cuscull and she’s incredibly guilty. There can be no better time to end the threat she poses than this very moment… There would be one less threat to our land.”
Among the five witches who were the symbols of their era, Tinasha was undoubtedly the strongest.
The battle with Lanak had laid bare the extent of her power. On top of that, she now controlled twelve high-ranking demons. She was not someone they could just ignore.
The representative of Gandona, another Great Nation, agreed. A silence of implicit consensus fell over the room.
Oscar surveyed the group, then rested his folded hands on the table. “There’s still room for discussion as to whether she’s guilty. We were able to confirm that all the people who vanished from cities and towns in Farsas were restored unharmed before the battle.”
“…What?”
“It seems likely that she used a kind of invisibility magic to merely hide them. I’d like to know if this is the same for those cities that were ‘attacked’ in other countries,” Oscar said, though he knew what the answer would be. Confusion broke out among those at the table.
The only one present who was not shocked to hear that was Reust. He lifted a feeble hand to reply, “Tayiri has also confirmed what happened in our cities. It’s true—there were no victims wherever she was involved. I can’t say the same for the very first town that burned to the ground, but…it’s possible that she learned from that incident and intervened within Cuscull to reduce future damage.”
Tinasha had volunteered for a dirty job to make sure no one else came to harm.
Those gathered in that very conference had seen with their own eyes what Tinasha’s true goal had been.
The queen of a ruined country. The witch who lived for those that had been lost.
Oscar and the others carried the weight of their respective countries on their backs. They all felt deeply moved despite themselves by the awfully clumsy, sincere beauty of that woman.
The third prince of Gandona piped up nervously. “She’s the successor to Tuldarr, isn’t she? Doesn’t that mean she has magical knowledge that’s been otherwise lost for centuries? I think it overly hasty to execute her while she’s unconscious…”
“But we won’t be able to stop her once she’s awake. She’s a witch,” snapped the general of Cezar warningly, a sour look on his face.
Oscar cut in quickly. “If she’s with me, I can stop her. She’s very reasonable as far as witches go. And I’m sure I don’t need to explain why Farsas is the most suited to take charge of her.”
“…Akashia.”
The royal sword of Farsas was the one weapon that could kill a witch.
Right now, a sealing bracelet, made of the same material as Akashia, held Tinasha in check. At present, she wasn’t a threat. The king of Farsas was the only person in the land with items that could so disarm a witch at his disposal.
Rather hesitantly, the Gandona general protested, “But wouldn’t that mean that Farsas has a monopoly on the witch’s power? If she’s as reasonable as you say, I should think many countries would want to borrow her power.”
“If all you had to do was ask her for a favor, she wouldn’t have been living in a tower. As long as we don’t do anything, she’s completely harmless—just floating around reading books all day long. But make one wrong move and she’ll reject you. The envoy from Cuscull made that mistake, and she turned down his invitation.”
“She refused an envoy from Cuscull? How do you know about that?”
“Because I was originally the one who brought her down from her tower,” Oscar admitted. Reust’s eyes widened.
The others reacted in much the same way. Everyone looked like they wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Slowly, Oscar looked at each member of the conference in turn. Sitting up perfectly straight in his chair, he said, “I’m sure she had her reasons for her part in the Cuscull incident, but ultimately the fault is with my negligence. I apologize for that and vow that nothing like this will happen again.”
His low, resonant voice sent a ripple through the council. The representatives from the other major nations exchanged glances, unsure of how to respond to what the king of Farsas said. Though he was making his own position highly precarious, Oscar went on matter-of-factly, “Bearing that in mind, I intend to answer your concerns to your complete satisfaction. Ask away.”
Oscar ceded some ground in the debate, but his unwavering intent was still clear in his attitude. Doubt plain in his tone, the Cezar general inquired, “I’m sorry, but why are you going to so much trouble for her?”
The witch was a living cataclysm, an abominable oddity. Why was he, a royal, taking steps to protect her? It was a perfectly natural question, and Oscar smirked. “That’s easy. It’s because she’s going to be my wife.”
“What…?”
Palpable waves of varying degrees of shock ran through the room as everyone’s heads swiveled to look at Oscar.
The young king of Farsas just gave the largely uncomprehending group a light smile. He finally picked up the cup of tea in front of him and took a sip.
By the end of the day, the decision was made; the witch would stay with Oscar.
“I just know he did something rash so he could take me in… Hmm, is it really all right…?” Tinasha fretted between mouthfuls of soup in bed.
“I wouldn’t worry about that part. He was kind enough to allow Renart and me to stay with you, too,” Pamyra said with a tight smile.
It certainly hadn’t been easy—Oscar had been left with no choice but to force his opinion on certain points—but he’d succeeded in convincing the other representatives to withdraw their concerns about the witch. Upon hearing that, Tinasha decided she needed to be on her best behavior whenever she left Farsas.
Pamyra went on to explain one other thing she knew her lady was wondering. “Tayiri initially held the Cuscull mages who surrendered, but later they were allowed to return home. Prince Reust has declared that Tayiri recognizes Cuscull as a self-governing, inviolate dominion for mages.”
“…Wow, that’s unexpected.”
“It appears he’s taken your sermons to heart. Inspired by recent events, a number of Tayiri people have begun speaking out about the persecution of mages. Several members of the Tayiri elite had children born with magic who were killed by the state, after all.”
“Ah… I see now. That would help things along.”
The death toll for Tayiri ultimately comprised those killed in that first village that was razed and the soldiers who fell during the battle on the Asdra Plains. Both were tragedies but may have marked the end to something even bigger. Only the passage of time would say for sure.
Tinasha felt faintly for her part in the recent changes. Returning her empty bowl to Pamyra, she broached the subject of one final person she was worried about. “Do you know what happened to Tris?”
“I don’t know where she is now, but…I’m sure she’s doing fine wherever she is. I just know it.”
“Oh…”
It seemed Tinasha hadn’t succeeded in saving everyone.
For all her power, such a feat was impossible. Just like turning back time or returning the dead to life, there were some things she could do nothing about.
Even if she had the ability, it was unfeasible to expect a single person to help everyone. That was why Tinasha had decided a long time ago that she wouldn’t get involved. Her decision to exist as a witch was a choice to live for those who had passed, not the living.
Even so, she couldn’t help but mourn. Whether that amounted to hypocrisy or self-gratification, she was still free to do it.
Tinasha gazed up at the canopy of her bed and sighed.
Everything she had been working toward was over now. There was nothing left she wanted to do. If she died the next day, she wouldn’t have found it objectionable… Her contract with Oscar still remained, however.
Tinasha decided to live for just a while longer. She would live for the man who hadn’t killed her.
When she thought about it that way…she did feel a little glad to be alive. |
Unnamed Memory
7. Teatime
“All the magical lakes really cleared away completely. It’s amazing.”
“That was my goal from the start.”
One week after Tinasha awoke, King Oscar had handled almost all the remaining post-battle cleanup, and Farsas Castle was completely back to normal. Amid that backdrop, two witches were having tea in the castle lounge.
It was a glorious afternoon, and Sylvia whispered to Kav at the next table over, “It doesn’t seem strange to me at all anymore to see Miss Tinasha and Miss Lucrezia here at the castle… I suppose my senses are dulled…”
“Mine too,” he replied.
Two of the mainland’s five witches came and went freely from the castle of one specific country. This was probably the first time such a thing had ever become commonplace during the Age of Witches. By and large, they were the personifications of power and fear. The extent of said power had recently been laid bare for all to behold. The sight of two witches calmly sipping tea was oddly humanizing, however.
Teacup in hand, Lucrezia pointed at Tinasha. “I heard you inherited the spirits, too? You were really prepared for the worst.”
“Don’t bring that up,” Tinasha said with an annoyed scowl.
Behind her, Pamyra piped up wonderingly. “Why didn’t you inherit them before this?”
It was a perfectly natural question. The witch who should have become queen of Tuldarr grimaced. “I’ve never felt a need for more might than I already have, and the spirits are the symbol of the Tuldarr throne. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to have a ruler but no country? Country and ruler are concepts that exist to protect the lives of the people, after all.”
Tinasha smiled, as if to say that, even now, she had no use for the twelve.
What she said made perfect sense, and Pamyra simply nodded. Sylvia, Doan, Kav, Renart, and the other mages all looked serious.
…Even so, she’s a queen without a throne, thought Pamyra.
The witch brushed it off as something she’d done for a personal reason, but she had chosen to exist for four hundred years in order to free the souls of Tuldarr’s dead. If anyone was fit to rule, it was her.
Lucrezia rested her chin in her hands and stared at the witch. Then her eyes narrowed fondly. Before Tinasha realized it, the other witch was wearing a bright, perfect grin. “By the way, I brought a new type of pastry for you to try.”
“Really? What kind?” Tinasha asked, her eyes sparkling, and Lucrezia conjured up a plate piled high with confections.
“Here you go. Be my taste testers, everyone.”
The pastry was cut into the shape of a flower and dusted with sugar on top, but breaking it open revealed three layers in different colors. Tinasha tasted one first, followed by Sylvia, Pamyra, and then the men. Perhaps Renart didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, because he hesitated. After a moment, he gave in and partook, however. His eyes widened. “This is good.”
Looking delighted, Sylvia took a second one. “They’re absolutely delicious! I’m in heaven!”
“Mm, thank you. Have as many as you like.”
Most of the group was enraptured, but Tinasha looked unsure after eating one. She appeared quite dubious, and Lucrezia cocked her head.
“What is it?” she asked. “Do you not like the taste?”
“No, the taste is fine. Did you put magic in these?”
“Mm-hmm. Since I made them with three types of batter, I used magic to adjust the baking time.”
“I see,” Tinasha said. With her doubts dispelled, she took another pastry. As she savored the taste of it, she sipped at the tea she’d made. Lucrezia’s baking was always exceptional. Tinasha had been enchanted by the taste of her friend’s handiwork ever since she first became a witch. Lucrezia looked on with a smile as Tinasha grinned happily to herself.
By the time Tinasha took a third one, the other mages had already eaten through most of the plate. She took a fourth and twirled it around as she asked innocently, “Is the magic you used new? You said we’re taste testing them.”
“Nope, I put an aphrodisiac in them,” Lucrezia admitted, grinning with glee.
Everyone froze. Doan put down his half-eaten pastry. Kav choked on a mouthful of tea.
This was unbelievable. A muscle in Tinasha’s face twitched. “What exactly are you playing at here…?”
“I buried it layers deep in the spell so you wouldn’t notice, but you still picked up on the magic. I suppose it was naive of me to hope you wouldn’t sniff it out.”
“I’m asking you to tell me why you did that!”
Magic began to crackle and spark in the air over the table. The mages all paled at the sight.
“Maybe we should call His Majesty…,” Kav muttered to his peers in a low voice.
“Oh, possibly.”
None liked the idea of explaining how a castle fell to indecency.
Just as Kav tried to creep out of the room unnoticed, Lucrezia blocked his path with a barrier.
The instigator of this chaos surveyed everyone with confidence in her eyes. “At least listen to what I have to say first. You’ll begin to feel the effects roughly two hours from now. It comes on pretty strong, so I’ll keep the details to myself. Also, it will last about three days, so you can’t just hole yourselves up in your rooms.”
The explanation was worse than expected, and Tinasha buried her face in one palm, utterly exasperated. Sylvia begged Tinasha in tears, “Can you break the enchantment?”
“This is Lucrezia’s handiwork, so two hours won’t be enough…”
“Oh no…What are we going to do…?”
There was no use in worrying. Dropping her hand, Tinasha crossed her arms and leaned against the chair back. Sighing, she eyed her friend. “All right, what do you want us to do?”
“Your intuition is spot-on.”
“How many hundreds of years do you think I’ve known you?”
The two had shared countless conversations similar to this. A brilliant smile on her lips, Lucrezia held out her right hand above the table. Above her palm floated an image of a ring.
It was a silver band inscribed all over with spell sigils and inlaid with a small garnet.
“I lost this a while ago. I’d like you to look for it.”
“When and where did you lose it?” Tinasha pressed.
“Five hundred years ago at home.”
“That was before I was born! Clean your house!” snapped Tinasha.
“It’s no longer in my house, of that I am certain,” Lucrezia replied.
Tinasha let out a little frustrated groan. Lucrezia loved riddles and using tricks to demand favors of people. There weren’t enough clues to go on, however. Surely, Lucrezia wasn’t so cruel as to deny them their best chance.
“Give me a bit more information. There’s no way I can find it with so little to go on,” pleaded Tinasha.
“I made it, so it’s tinged with my magic.”
“You can’t track it?”
“Nope. I can’t see it,” answered Lucrezia.
There were few scenarios where a witch couldn’t track her own magic. That would place the object either behind an extremely secure barrier or on the person of a powerful magician. The treasure vault was the only place in the castle with such a barrier. Tinasha herself had reinforced it after the incident with Miralys.
After thinking it over, Tinasha stared at her friend. “Two hours?”
“Two hours. If you make it in time, I’ll undo the enchantment.”
“And if I don’t make it?”
“Then I’ll be entertained.”
“I’ll blast you into the sky,” Tinasha grumbled, getting to her feet. She looked around at the other mages. “Well, guess I better get to work.”
Already, her voice sounded exhausted.
“So I need access to the treasure room.”
“You haven’t told me why. Explain that first,” insisted Oscar, not looking up from his papers. Tinasha had teleported into his study out of the blue.
He was king now, but he still made use of the same rooms he had prior to being crowned. Moving everything had proven too much of a hassle.
Tinasha had predicted his response, and she brought both her palms together before her face and begged, “I would really rather not go into it. There’s no time. Please.”
“No. Tell me. I’m already planning to lecture you later on your secrecy.”
“Urgh…”
The Cuscull fiasco had robbed Oscar of his trust in Tinasha. With a great deal of agony, she managed to relay the gist of her current situation. By the time she finished, Oscar was doubled over with laughter.
“I can see you have no sympathy for our plight…”
“You can’t expect me not to laugh at this. What were all you mages even thinking?”
As the one with the most magic of the entire group, Tinasha could say nothing. Instead, she hung her head dejectedly. Oscar got up from his chair and patted her head. “Well, I find it highly entertaining, so it’s fine by me if you don’t find the ring.”
“It’s not entertaining in the least! Have a little more value for your subjects!”
“You reap what you sow. Don’t eat suspicious stuff,” Oscar chided calmly as he headed for the door. He opened it and turned back to gesture that she come along. “Well, come on. You don’t have much time, right?”
Tinasha perked up and rushed after him.
As Oscar and the witch made their way down the corridor leading to the treasure vault, Oscar went over each and every detail of Tinasha’s predicament.
“So this is really going to affect you, huh? I thought normal magic drugs didn’t bother you.”
“The ones Lucrezia makes are an exception… She’s fed me all kinds of weird potions in the past.”
“And yet you ate something she made again. I don’t get it.”
“Because it tasted good.”
Shortly after passing a group of guardsmen, they came into view of the doors to the treasure vault. Oscar approached and pushed the giant things open. Once inside, Tinasha reached out with her magic to search the place.
It came as no surprise to her that she detected several unknown objects that resonated with strange power, but none of them carried Lucrezia’s magical signature.
“It’s not here… Hmm, so my guess was wrong…?”
“Too bad,” Oscar commented, not sounding like he was really all that worried. Tinasha glared resentfully at the man who looked perfectly content to just watch things play out.
“Do you have any other ideas?” Oscar asked.
“I have one I’m pretty sure about. The Tuldarr treasure vault.”
“That exists?!”
“It’s been sealed off for a long time, but now that I’ve taken the throne, I should be able to open it. I’m going to go check,” Tinasha declared. She then proceeded to draw up a transportation array.
Oscar stopped her. “Sounds intriguing. Take me with you.”
Tinasha was surprised but quickly grinned and took his hand, resetting the array to open up a gate.
The two teleported into the middle of empty wilderness. In the distance loomed the cathedral ruins—the sight of the recent battle. After wandering about for a bit, Tinasha caught sight of something and paused in her tracks. Slowly, she raised her arms above the ground.
“I am queen. Open your path.”
In response to her royal decree, a white spell sigil floated up from the earth. Seconds later it vanished, leaving a stone stairway descending underground in its place.
“Whoa, what’s this? Amazing,” commented Oscar.
“The entrance is enchanted. It’s very likely that no one has come in here since Tuldarr fell,” said Tinasha, manifesting a ball of light in her right hand and readily heading down the shadowy stairs. Oscar followed her.
After going down two flights of stairs into increasingly stagnant air, they entered a wide room of stone.
The instant they stepped on the ground, candelabra on the walls flickered to life. The glow illuminated messy piles of magical objects on shelves and stone tables. It looked just like the witch’s rooms in her tower.
“I’ve got to make sure to clean up in here from now on.”
“Wow… Look at all these magic implements,” said Oscar, picking up a nearby crystal ball. Inside of it floated an image of an unfamiliar seaside.
Her eyes focused ahead, Tinasha warned, “Some of these things could be activated by touch. They’re dangerous, so try not to touch anything.”
“Got it. I’ll watch out,” said Oscar, returning the crystal ball back to its spot. Tinasha turned away and used her magic to search all around, just as she’d done in Farsas. As nearly every object in the vault was magical, it was going to take Tinasha far longer to distinguish one thing from the next. Carefully, she sorted through every nook and cranny, taking care not to overlook any small articles.
After he’d wandered all over the treasure vault, Oscar returned to Tinasha’s side. “Is it here?” he asked.
“It’s…not!” Tinasha cried in horror. Judging by Lucrezia’s account, however, it really should have been. Tinasha checked the time and felt something in her stomach drop as she realized only an hour remained. The witch wondered if perhaps it was wiser to return to Farsas and admit defeat to her friend.
As Tinasha fell into panic, Oscar dropped a hand on her head. “Think it over one more time. There’s gotta be a clue. What’s different about today compared with other times you’ve met with Lucrezia?”
“Hmm… The most obvious is that I’ve claimed the throne of Tuldarr. Another would be that I have Pamyra and Renart, but Lucrezia didn’t know about them until she arrived at the castle today, so I don’t think that’s it. The last thing I can think of is that you’re a king now.”
“That reminds me, I did see Lucrezia once after being crowned.”
“You did?” Tinasha inquired. She was interested to know the circumstances of their meeting, but now wasn’t the time to ask about that. “I really think it has to do with Tuldarr, since she lost her ring five hundred years ago. Not much remains from that era. It was the Dark Age, after all.”
“Are there no other structures still standing?”
“In terms of underground facilities, it’s just this and the Spirits’ Hall.”
At that, Tinasha and Oscar exchanged a glance. Oscar ruffled the witch’s hair. “Looks like we know where we’re headed next. Can we get there from here?”
“No, they’re not connected. I’ll have to get the coordinates once we’re aboveground. The hall should be located directly below the remains of the cathedral.
The pair returned to the cathedral ruins, then teleported underground from there.
The Spirits’ Hall was a round, empty cavernous space paved with stone as far as the eye could see.
Normally, any of the twelve spirits that had not been claimed rested here as statues. Tinasha inherited all of them, however, leaving not even a pebble in the place.
Magic lights in hand, they each took a side of the vast hall and began to explore. Along the way, Oscar discovered a singular door in the outer wall. “Does this connect to somewhere?”
“It actually connects to the castle, but it’s probably long since caved in.”
Aside from the door, they didn’t find anything. They made a loop of the room and met back up in the center.
“Doesn’t look like it’s here,” Oscar observed.
“No, it doesn’t. I can’t sense anything. I think I’ll summon one of the twelve and ask them… King Zayurk reigned five hundred years ago, so I’ll ask one of his old spirits.”
Tinasha shrugged, then called quite casually, “Senn, come here.”
In response, a spirit materialized before them.
“My Queen. What do you need?” asked the spirit in the form of a man in his mid-twenties. His white hair was short and slightly bluish. Crimson burned in his eyes. A devious smirk was on his handsome face.
Tinasha crossed her arms and spoke plainly. “Do you know the Witch of the Forbidden Forest?”
“I know her.”
“I’m looking for a ring she made. It’s a silver garnet ring.”
Since this spirit had been active when the ring was lost, Tinasha thought he may have some knowledge on it. That was why Tinasha had summoned him, but his reply far exceeded what Tinasha had been expecting.
“I have it,” he said.
“You what?! Why?!” she shrieked wildly before she could stop herself. She’d never dreamed that the spirit had the item in question. Her head was spinning as she wondered what in the world was going on, but Oscar poked her in the back to remind her about the time limit. Recalling the urgency of her predicament, Tinasha asked, “Will you give it to me? She wants it.”
“It’s mine. But if the queen wants it, I’ll obey her orders,” he said, looking a little doubtful but still smiling.
Tinasha felt somewhat indecisive. She was resistant to the idea of confiscating someone’s property simply because she was their master. Under the circumstances, Tinasha was left with little recourse than to accept the lesser evil. Looking sour, Tinasha nodded. “Then I’ll make it an order. Give me the ring. Once I’ve given it to the Witch of the Forbidden Forest, I can try to negotiate it back for you.”
“No need for that. If she wants it, that’s all the answer I need,” Senn replied, holding out a hand. Tinasha held out her own in kind. A ring appeared out of thin air and dropped into her palm. She looked it over and confirmed that the sigils and the stone were all that Lucrezia had described.
To make sure she wouldn’t lose it, Tinasha put the ring on her own finger. It was extremely loose on her, as a man’s ring might have been. She closed her other hand around the little trinket.
“Thank you. I feel bad about this,” she admitted.
“It was an easy task. I’ll be off, then,” Senn declared and vanished as quickly as he’d arrived.
The witch turned around and showed Oscar the ring. He stared at how it was practically falling off her slender finger. “You made it in time,” he said.
“Thanks to your help…,” Tinasha replied, breathing a sigh of relief. Then she took his arm and cast a transportation spell back to the castle.
After Oscar gave his impressions of the little adventure—“That was fun”—and returned to his work, Tinasha headed back to the lounge where Lucrezia and the aphrodisiac-dosed mages were waiting.
They were still sipping tea just like when she left, and Tinasha gave them an exasperated look. “I’m glad you’re all taking this so calmly.”
Doan looked up from a spell book, exhaustion plain on his face. “I feel like we’ve had to adapt to all manner of things lately. By comparison, something like this just doesn’t seem worth a fuss…”
The others’ expressions were much the same; it appeared they agreed with him. On the other hand, the woman who was the cause of all this grinned delightedly. “Did you find it?”
“Yes,” answered Tinasha, taking the ring off and throwing it at her beaming friend. Lucrezia snatched it as it arced through the air. The mages all looked at her, nerves taut.
The Witch of the Forbidden Forest rolled the ring around on her finger, inspecting it, then broke into a smile. “Mm-hmm, thank you.”
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Tinasha massaged her temples, thoroughly exhausted from yet another day she’d spent wrapped around Lucrezia’s little finger. “Next time, just ask normally,” she insisted.
“Oh, but where would be the fun in that?”
“First things first. Go on and undo the enchantment,” Tinasha urged. Lucrezia reached her left hand out. Instantly, the spell design appeared there before popping out of sight. At the same time, those ensorcelled suddenly felt themselves free of the magic’s insidious effects. As the creator of the spell, it only took Lucrezia a moment to undo it. Anyone else would’ve needed a long incantation and that was assuming they could crack it at all.
“Unbelievable… You always waste so much magic,” Tinasha complained.
“It’s the best I can manage, okay? I’m not like you.” Lucrezia sniffed.
“This is why they call it the Age of Witches…,” grumbled Tinasha as she floated over to her friend. After all that trouble, she wanted a proper explanation.
Tinasha sat down and rested her chin in her hands, looking distinctly displeased. “So what was that all about?”
The oversized ring on her finger, Lucrezia arched an eyebrow. The smile melted off her beautiful face, and she pouted like a child. Throwing Tinasha a sidelong glance, she muttered sulkily, “…I gave it to an old lover of mine.”
“What?” Tinasha said, eyes round and wide. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Ignoring her, Lucrezia waved a hand. “Welp, gotta go!” With that, she winked out of sight.
Left in the dust, Tinasha stared blankly at where her friend had been sitting until just a moment ago. “Wh-what in the world…?”
Something had clearly happened between Lucrezia and the spirit Senn before Tinasha had even been born.
Evidently, there were still things she didn’t understand, even after living for hundreds of years.
Tinasha stared at her bare hand. She had the feeling that the silver ring contained someone’s love and affection. |
Unnamed Memory
8. Ocean Blue
It was a rather sunny day, so much so that it was uncomfortably warm, even inside. The witch had just brewed tea in the king’s study, and she repeated the words Lazar had said to her, “What? Birthday?”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s two weeks from now.”
“Whose?”
“Mine, of course,” Oscar cut in, breaking his silence as he signed another document. Still surprised, Tinasha placed a cup of tea near his free hand.
“So you have a birthday…,” she muttered wonderingly, placing the tea tray under her arm.
“What do I look like in that head of yours?” Oscar retorted. His eyes remained trained on the contract he was looking over. His fine features exuded nobility, though Tinasha was long used to seeing them.
Tinasha let her true thoughts slip out. “You’re going to be twenty-one, right? …So young.”
“Everyone must seem that way when compared with you.”
“Mentally, you’re like an old man, so it’s especially surprising.”
“I will grind my fist against your head again. Come here,” Oscar said, reaching out for the witch. She dodged and leaped back.
Tinasha took a seat in a chair to the side of the table and had a sip of her tea. In sharp contrast to his leisurely protector, Oscar worked hard at progressing through his documents. He worked efficiently from right to left.
“What does ‘surprising’ mean? Don’t you have a birthday, too?” Oscar inquired.
“Yes, I do. I was born just the same as you were. It was two months ago.”
“How old are you?”
“I’ve forgotten… I suppose I’m four hundred plus around twenty or thirty.”
“Crazy,” Oscar remarked.
Lazar stacked up the papers Oscar was done with and picked them up. The faithful attendant asked his king, “And what should we do for your birthday celebration, Your Majesty?”
“My dad just had his, so we don’t need to do one this year… Too much trouble.”
“But the coronation ceremony was a simple affair, too,” Lazar protested.
“And right after that, I saw just about everyone who’s anyone while we were in Tayiri, so it’s fine,” Oscar argued. While he carried out his duties impeccably, he had little desire to appear at fancy affairs.
Lazar hummed unhappily, but when he considered the situation with Cecelia in Tayiri, he felt some amount of sympathy. He gave up and nodded. “Then I’ll answer as such to the people who have already inquired about the matter.”
“Please do that, thanks.”
Lazar left, his sighs trailing after him. The witch set down her cup and floated up. Fluttering through the air as if she were swimming, she drifted over to a position directly above Oscar’s desk and looked down at him. A bit of her sweet floral perfume tickled Oscar’s nose, and he smiled.
“Is there anything you want?” she asked, her voice like tinkling bells.
“Where did that come from?”
“It’ll be your birthday, so just this once.”
Oscar tilted his head to look up at Tinasha, only to find her grinning in amusement. She looked so innocent—it was hard to believe she had lived for over four centuries.
Oscar paused in his work to consider the question. “You’ve put me on the spot. I can’t think of anything.”
“So you want for nothing,” Tinasha replied doubtfully.
“I’m aware of how blessed I am,” Oscar said, gesturing for her to come closer. She descended until she was sitting on his lap with her legs out to one side. Oscar brushed her hair back, revealing one pale earlobe. He took in her lovely profile and neckline, and his eyes narrowed.
“By the way, about getting married—”
“I’m not going to!” Tinasha cried in her usual way. Oscar made a face as he dropped a hand on her head.
“Then there’s nothing I want. I have you, and that’s enough.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hmm. So don’t dart around hiding here and there. You’re not a little kid, you know.”
Tinasha groaned, aware she could say nothing for herself. In the end, she just looked up at Oscar regretfully.
Little light penetrated the deep canopy of the forest. Thick bushes abounded, seemingly staring at any visitors. Silent in the shadows, they appeared eerie and almost ill intentioned to any humans who wandered through.
Despite the gloom, patches of sunlight filtered down in spots surrounding the cabin tucked snugly away in the woods. One sunbeam generously poured right onto a group of flowerpots. The planters must have been placed in just the right spot forecast to get sunlight. Wondering at it, Tinasha knocked on the door of the house.
“Oh, it’s you. Come in,” said Lucrezia, appearing at the door. She seemed mid-experiment, as she held numerous tiny bottles between her fingers. Once inside, Tinasha began to brew some tea herself, as she was very familiar with this house.
Soon enough, the two sat down. Tinasha lifted one finger that was wrapped around her teacup to point to the ceiling. “Tell me how to make the pastries from the other day. Without the aphrodisiac.”
“They won’t taste the same without it.”
“Seriously?!”
Tinasha often wound up an unwilling live test subject for one of Lucrezia’s potions, but as this only happened once every fifty years or so, she would always forget and recklessly consume a Lucrezia creation again. While Tinasha was extremely cautious in every other area of her life, she was aware that when it came to this, she had a tendency to forget in calms the vows she’d made in storms.
“So why have you come today?”
“Oh, I have something to ask you about. What’s a normal thing to give men?”
“…What in the world?” the Witch of the Forbidden Forest exclaimed, staring nonplussed at her friend after such a random question. Tinasha recounted the events of the conversation back in Oscar’s study.
To Lucrezia, the situation seemed quite trivial, and she offered a simple answer. “If he said he doesn’t need anything, then you don’t need to worry, do you?”
“I’ve been feeling like I owe him a lot lately. Since I have the chance, I’d like to pay him back.”
“Owe him, huh?” Lucrezia said. She rested her chin on her hands as she eyed Tinasha, who was carefully selecting a cookie.
Wanting to give someone a birthday present was so completely ordinary that it seemed exceedingly unordinary for a witch. Lucrezia wondered if Tinasha had realized that.
“So then why did you come to ask me for advice?”
“Because the other day with the ring, you…”
“What?!”
“Nothing,” Tinasha said, electing not to broach the subject after seeing the look her friend gave her.
With hurried bluntness, Lucrezia cut to the chase. “Anything you give him will be fine.”
“I suppose you’re right… Maybe I’ll go take a look around the Tuldarr treasure vault while tidying it up a bit. There might be some intriguing armor in there or something.”
“I am begging you, do not make that man any stronger than he already is!” cried Lucrezia. Feigning calm, Tinasha sipped at her tea.
Even so, she did wonder if getting him something he could use every day would be best. The question was what? Maybe some sort of food that wouldn’t leave leftovers? Tinasha mulled over the idea as she picked at a cookie. She realized she had almost no experience giving someone a birthday present. If she messed this up, she’d have to consult her memories from before she became a witch. Never had Tinasha considered such an innocuous concept to be so vast.
“I can’t think of anything…”
“Give him your body. He’ll love it.”
“You’re a pervert,” Tinasha said. She broke her cookie in half, sighing.
The southern tip of Farsas touched the ocean.
Numerous port cities dotted the mainland’s southern coast, and each had long bustled with fishing and trade. Merchants did business with partners in the continent far across the sea to the east, as well as with countries along the eastern coast of the mainland.
One day, an aristocratic merchant ship set off from the port city of Nisrey bound for none other than the eastern country of Mensanne. The ship was laden with pearls and silk goods to sell there, where it would load purchases of grains and spices to bring back to the southern ports.
Soon after departing Nisrey, however, the boat disappeared without a trace.
People suspected that the long-lost ship had been set upon by pirates or that it ran into some sort of accident. No information to support either claim surfaced, however. As time went on, more reports poured in of similar vanishings.
After ten such cases, people began to regard that portion of the ocean as cursed waters that no ship could cross.
“The other day, I replied to the other countries, letting them know about your birthday celebration. Prince Reust of Tayiri sent word that he’d like to make an official visit thanking you for your military aid.”
“Turn him away,” Oscar replied immediately.
Lazar pulled a face. He sighed as he chided his king. “Please don’t be difficult. Farsas can’t afford to take a hard stance against Tayiri.”
Oscar was quite aware of that, of course.
Farsas had recently sent troops in accordance with Tayiri’s request, and everything had wrapped up rather well, given the stakes. One unfortunate outcome was that every other country was now acutely aware that Farsas possessed Tinasha. Fortunately, no other nation openly opposed that, but it was still safest for Farsas to be on its best behavior for the time being.
As if that alone wasn’t enough, Oscar had also crossed swords with Reust over his keeping Tinasha’s visits a secret. If Oscar was entirely honest with himself, the last person he wanted to see was the Tayiri prince.
Lazar flipped through the papers in his hands. “Even if you refuse him now, the visit is only three days away. Your letter will pass his retinue on the road.”
“I just wanted to say it. I have a feeling I know why Reust is coming.”
“Why?”
“He wants to see her, doesn’t he?” Oscar said, jerking his chin over at Tinasha to indicate her as she entered the room with a book in hand.
As both men’s gazes converged on her, she cocked her head in bemusement. “What are you talking about?”
“You, you traitor.”
Faced with criticism she didn’t recall incurring as soon as she stepped into the room, the witch scowled.
Oscar ignored her and passed some documents to Lazar. “Here, you handle the preparations.”
“Hey, Oscar… What was that just now?” Tinasha inquired.
“Does it matter if you don’t remember?” he retorted shamelessly. It was hardly a satisfactory answer, but Tinasha sank down into a chair anyway. She started to flip through a thick spell book.
“What the—?” she heard Oscar say in a tone of surprise. She looked up to see him frowning down at a document.
As she looked on curiously, Lazar explained, “Evidently, a number of ships have gone missing in the southern sea. The cause is unknown, but the damage keeps piling up. The nobles and the merchants have banded together to request the situation be handled.”
“If they’re going missing on the ocean, it’s probably the work of pirates, right?” Tinasha theorized.
“We had some issues with pirates a while back, but General Als should’ve handled it.”
“Ohhh. Then maybe it’s a sea monster.”
“Do those really exist?” Oscar asked, setting the report down and crossing his arms. It was dangerous to face off against any type of demonic spirit or monster and even more so at sea off some faraway port.
Oscar began seriously considering the sort of team he’d bring while Tinasha gave a brief explanation. “There are many types of sea monsters. There’s huge fish as well as creatures of unknown shapes and sizes. Sea creatures can grow very big. Of course, it’s also possible that it’s just a regular demonic spirit.”
“What falls under the classification of ‘unknown shapes and sizes’?” Oscar questioned.
“Things like gigantic sea anemones… Have you never seen one?”
“I’ve never even seen the ocean,” Oscar admitted.
Next to him, Lazar raised a hand and offered, “Neither have I.”
Farsas as a country was so huge that many people who were born in the capital went their whole lives never glimpsing the sea. Surprised by the response, Tinasha let out a little cry of shock.
“If you’ve never gone to the ocean, can you not swim, either?” she asked.
“I can swim,” Oscar assured her.
“That’s no fun…,” she muttered.
The conversation had gotten off track, and Oscar reeled it back in. “Who do you think is best suited to handling this?”
“It depends on their skill, but if you bring Als, then you’d need about ten people, including mages. That should be enough to handle it. There’s no accounting for the creature’s size, though.”
“Als, huh? He’s more of a land guy, I wonder if putting him on this team is a good idea…”
As Oscar was deliberating over his decision and Tinasha floated directly overhead, she peeked at the papers. “Oh, Nisrey. That really takes me back. In Nisrey, there’s—”
She got that far before she clapped her hands together, having just remembered something. Oscar looked up at the sound. “What’s up?”
“I’m heading out,” Tinasha declared.
“Why so suddenly…?”
“Don’t mind that. I’m going to take care of it!” Tinasha answered, suddenly very excited and in a great mood. Oscar narrowed his eyes suspiciously at her. He wanted to make her tell him what she’d thought of, but he also knew that Tinasha handling the trouble at sea was the safest way to see it done.
As Oscar rested his chin on his knuckles, he remembered something else. “Fine then, go along. Pick out who you want to accompany you.”
“Thank you.”
“Make a weeklong trip of it and get some rest while you’re at it.”
“Your Majesty…,” Lazar objected, appalled. He knew what Oscar was up to. This was a ploy to make sure Tinasha wouldn’t be around when Reust arrived. For a king, he could certainly act very immature.
The witch suspected nothing, however, and replied to Oscar’s seeming generosity with a wide smile that bloomed like a flower.
“I’ll be back by your birthday,” Tinasha promised. She gave a playful toss of her hair before winking out of the study.
The witch chose Als, Suzuto, Pamyra, and Renart to accompany her.
Als had knowledge of the southern regions of Farsas, and he suggested Suzuto accompany him. That was because he was close with the witch and counted as one of the few people in the castle not afraid of her. Then Tinasha picked Pamyra and Renart. While the two had recently been made Farsasian mages in name, it was more accurate to say they served Tinasha directly. Unlike most other local mages who were terrified of the sea, Pamyra and Renart had volunteered to go on the trip.
The group of five used a transportation array to teleport to a fortress far to the south. From there, they rode on horseback to the port town of Nisrey.
Als had vanquished the southern pirates only three short months ago, and the people of Nisrey had not yet forgotten his deeds. Tinasha’s group was met with cheers and applause upon their arrival. Marquis Broguia, the most influential person in the city, welcomed the five into his mansion.
The marquis wore an ashamed expression as he bowed low before Als. “I’m deeply sorry to be troubling you again.”
“Not at all. Ships going missing is quite the significant matter. We’ll get this resolved as quickly as we can,” Als replied formally. While Tinasha was the actual leader, Als took the role of a figurehead so as to ensure her identity as a witch stayed a secret.
Marquis Broguia’s eyes widened as he beheld the beautiful woman behind Als, and then he seemed to grow concerned at how small their party was. He suggested sending some of his private officers, but Als refused. “We’re only asking for a ship and the sailors to man it.”
“I’d be happy to, of course, but… Will you really be all right?”
“We’ve brought everyone we need,” said Als. He flicked his gaze over to the witch, who was looking out the window. She grinned and waved at him.
The next day, the group of five was escorted to the port where they borrowed a medium-sized ship that normally ferried around twenty. The marquis had wanted to lend them an even larger man-of-war, but Tinasha said it would be a waste if it sank.
“Does that mean there’s a chance we could sink?” murmured Suzuto. His face looked pale as they sailed out toward where the disappearances had occurred.
“We can’t rule it out. I’ll do my best to keep us from sinking, though,” Tinasha said matter-of-factly.
Als cocked his head in puzzlement. “What exactly are we up against anyway?”
“Based on what I’ve heard, it’s either a demonic spirit or a sea monster. I’m hoping it’s the former, because that will be easier for me to handle. I don’t like how sea monsters look. They’re big and slimy.”
“That’s your reason…? I think there’s bigger problems beyond their size and sliminess…,” Als objected.
Pamyra suddenly cut in, raising her hand. “Could it be a kraken?”
The witch frowned at that. Krakens were a famous and gigantic sort of sea monster that lived deep in the ocean. They were said to resemble squids or octopuses. Tinasha’s little band was in for a hard-fought battle if their opponent was something on that scale.
After some thought, Tinasha shook her head lightly. “Krakens tend to live only in the northern waters. I don’t think one would be this far south unless it’d been specifically summoned.”
Suzuto piped up and hesitantly inquired, “Um, sorry to ask something so basic, but does magic not work on things that are underwater?”
The three mages exchanged glances. Renart was the one who answered. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s more difficult for a spell to affect something that’s in the water. If they’re completely submerged, the spells will have almost no effect. You can’t speak an incantation while submerged, so it’s best for us to fight above the waves, if at all possible.”
Tinasha and Pamyra nodded in agreement. Als let out a deep sigh. “We’ll have to lure it out, then. Before the boat sinks.”
“Even if it sinks, we can fly back to land,” the witch said brightly, and Pamyra and Renart grimaced. Tinasha often floated in the air when she was in the study or her rooms, but flight magic required a spell and dedicated concentration. Most normal mages couldn’t fly and perform other spells at the same time.
Fortunately, both Pamyra and Renart were highly skilled mages who could do battle while flying. So long as they didn’t need to defend themselves, they could carry the others away. With this crew, they could handle the situation even if the ship was lost.
Owing to the heat, Tinasha’s hair was tied up, and she was wearing a lightweight, boyish outfit. A thin sword was sheathed at her waist, and her overall lithe figure made a perfect picture against the marine backdrop.
As she gazed out at the open water, Als turned back to eye the others. He didn’t know about them, but Als sometimes felt like Tinasha was a natural part of Farsas—and he often found himself forgetting she was a witch at all. He had a hard time believing that she would someday leave the castle.
That was why her leaving for Cuscull had been such a shock to him. Now that she was back, he felt relieved. Als actually couldn’t imagine Oscar marrying anyone but her.
He was unsure how things would truly play out, however. At best, he knew he could only accept whatever came and grow used to it with time.
After about an hour, they reached the area of the ocean where the disappearances had taken place. Far in the distance was the shore, where an intimidating gray quay jutted out from the cliffs.
Als scanned the surface of the water. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. “All right, Miss Tinasha, what should we do?”
“We’ll be wasting time if we wait to get attacked, so I’m going to send out a scout,” she replied. After a short incantation, a fishlike creature appeared in her palm. Upon closer look, it wasn’t a living creature but a hazily glowing mass of clay. She threw it into the water, where it began to zip along just like a real fish.
“It’s going to loop around the area and search for magic. If something happens, it’ll alert me,” she explained.
“That’s convenient. I guess we’ll break out the booze while we wait,” Als replied.
“You’ll die when you fall in the ocean,” Tinasha cautioned.
Neither of them seemed worried at all, but everyone else on the boat looked pale and drawn. The crewmen were there on the marquis’s orders, but more than ten ships had gone down already—no exceptions. They wanted to turn around and head straight back to land.
Blessed with fine weather, their vessel bobbed in the blue ocean. A favorable tailwind carried the ship to the middle of the danger zone. Als peered back at the distant sight of land on the horizon. “I’ve come here before. We sank one of the pirate ships around here.”
“Ohhh. Then maybe it’s a ghost ship causing all this trouble,” Tinasha suggested.
“That’s ridiculous. First of all, ghosts don’t exist; you told me that yourself—”
Then Als noticed that the breeze had suddenly died down. The sea was eerily calm. The sailors in charge of adjusting the sails were glancing around uncertainly. Off to one side, waves could be seen rippling out from a point not too far away. Tinasha grinned radiantly after noticing the trembling in the water.
“Oh, sorry. I guess it really is a kraken after all,” she stated.
Screams erupted high into the air.
Ten huge tentacles, each the width of a column, rose from the briny depths.
The half-transparent limbs tried to assail the ship from all sides, but each was stopped by an invisible wall. In the nick of time, Tinasha had thrown up a barrier to protect the boat. Unfortunately, that only provided a moment’s relief before the kraken tried to drag down the ship by way of pulling the barrier itself.
The witch’s eyebrows raised. “This isn’t good. The shield’s got about ten seconds before it breaks. Drive that thing back.”
Als and Suzuto unsheathed their swords while Pamyra and Renart began to chant spells. In the middle of it all, the witch continued to bark her countdown. “…Eight! Nine! Ten!”
On that final word, the barrier shattered.
With nothing stopping the kraken’s tentacles anymore, the slimy things slunk their way over the deck. Pamyra and Renart burned them with magic. One tentacle tried to make off with a sailor, but Suzuto intercepted it with his sword while Als cut it off. The severed limb wriggled fiercely for a moment before a spell from Renart sent it tumbling back into the ocean.
As she burned the other legs, Tinasha conjured another magical shield around the ship. In the face of such an unexpected counterattack, the kraken dragged its arms back into the sea. Pamyra looked out over the slimy deck.
“This is inarguably disgusting…”
“Apparently, you can sell kraken mucus for a high price.”
“Lady Tinasha…”
Their battle with the kraken had lasted only a few dozen seconds, but it had all felt too bizarre to instill fear. Instead there was a strange sort of mania that hung about the vessel and its crew. Als realized his heart was beating out of control and took some deep breaths. |
Unnamed Memory
“If there’s a kraken, then that means there’s someone who summoned it,” Als reasoned.
“Most likely. But I don’t understand what their goal is. The attacks seem completely random,” Tinasha answered.
“Can you kill it?” Als asked.
“That might be difficult unless we can get it to stay above water for more than a few moments at a time. I wonder where its weak spot is…”
No sooner had the words left the witch’s lips than the boat began to rock. Everyone lost their balance and almost fell. Tinasha herself was about to slip, and Als grabbed her arm to support her. He looked to the ship’s bow and saw three fat tentacles coiling around it, pulling the boat up vertically—barrier and all.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
As the bow was hoisted higher and higher, everyone started to topple down toward the stern. Als grabbed hold of Tinasha, who shouted, “Pamyra! Renart! To the sky! We’re abandoning ship.”
The two loyal attendants began their chants while Tinasha took hold of Als.
Als lost his footing, but they escaped into the air a split second before the kraken’s tentacles lugged the hull to one side. All they could do was watch from above as it pulled the barrier with the ship inside down into the inky dark.
Tinasha surveyed the violently roiling waves and scratched at her temple. “I’m definitely glad we didn’t take a big ship. I guess Oscar will have to pay off our debt.”
“I think that necessitates a discussion with Marquis Broguia…,” Als remarked. He had a feeling the marquis wouldn’t mind the loss of an entire fleet of ships so long as it meant the death of the kraken.
Perhaps realizing there was no food on the boat it had sunk, its tentacles began wriggling about the surface in search of new prey before finally disappearing back under the water. Watching from above made it clear how unusually large this specimen was. The whole creature, judging by its limbs, was big enough to eclipse an entire town.
“I’m tracking it, so let’s figure out how to combat it. That should probably wait until we get the sailors back to land, though,” Tinasha said.
Pamyra heeded her lady’s order and opened up a transportation portal in midair. Then she pushed the sailors into it.
At the same time, Tinasha crossed her arms and fell into contemplation. She only spoke up once the sailors were gone. “It looks like the creature’s bound to this particular portion of the sea. That said, it doesn’t appear to be taking orders from anyone.”
“You think someone summoned it and left?” Als inquired.
“No, I think the summoner is here,” she answered.
“Here? You mean, among us?” Als said, pointing to himself.
The witch shook her head, however—a faint smile on her face—and pointed downward. “He’s probably dead. I bet it was one of the pirates you defeated, Als.”
“Huh?” Als was frozen in place as Tinasha gazed back at him with her beautiful eyes.
“Do you mean that a pirate summoned the monster but died before giving it any orders, leaving it trapped in these waters?” Renart theorized.
“That seems the most probably explanation. The summoning must have taken a long time, and this is the result. I’m glad it didn’t happen while you were subduing the pirates, Als.”
“Ugh…I can’t believe this,” Als moaned, faintly horrified as he finally understood. Had his fortune been even slightly less favorable, he would’ve wound up in the kraken’s clutches. While he wasn’t sure whether the beast was an octopus or a squid, he knew for certain that dying while battling a creature like that was not how he wanted to go.
Pamyra turned to her lady and asked, “What shall we do? Fire attacks at the monster or destroy the spell pattern the summoner left behind?”
“Either target would be deep underwater. Hmm, what to do?” wondered the witch aloud. She scanned the air. Her dark eyes came to rest on Als. Tinasha seemed to mentally debate her own idea for a moment, but eventually she pressed her palms together and requested, “Please be our bait.”
“…Oh, you really have got to be kidding me,” Als said, echoing what he’d exclaimed earlier. He turned his head skyward in futile supplication.
Still hovering in the air, the group laid out their plan while keeping careful watch on the rolling waves below.
While Als readied his sword, Pamyra and Renart drew up attack spells. Suzuto had managed to avoid being part of the bait, so he stayed aloft with Tinasha and her mages.
Pamyra and Renart cast separate spells, then combined them into one. For her part, Tinasha called up a barrier around Als.
“I’m going to lower you into the water, so draw it toward you. Once it’s hooked, we’ll reel it up.”
“I’d really prefer not to die…,” Als griped.
“I’ll be very careful,” Tinasha reassured him.
The witch checked to make sure her mages had completed their spell, then motioned with her alabaster hands to slowly drop Als down into the ocean. Only his feet sank below the water, but Tinasha’s protection kept Als’s boots dry. The general looked up at his teammates hovering overhead and wondered how long it’d been since he’d felt this helpless and alone. From far away, he could see that the witch’s hands were still moving.
“She really has the perfect personality to be His Majesty’s wife…”
They were definitely alike in how reckless they were. More importantly, Tinasha was powerful and reliable.
Waiting began to make Als anxious, so he swung his sword around as a test. Based on how the water reacted, Tinasha’s barrier seemed to be globe-shaped. Curiously, no water leaked in, even if his sword penetrated it. With his blade, Als idly stirred little pools in the sea.
After a little while, bubbles began to gather close to where the kraken had surfaced earlier.
“…There it is,” Als muttered. His back felt uncomfortably sticky with sweat. He readied his sword and slowed his breathing. No sooner had he done so than a huge sheet of water rushed up. A gigantic tentacle crept from the depths and encircled him.
The tentacle pressed in to wrap itself around him, but just before its tip could touch him, the globe-shaped barrier began to carry Als up and out of the water. The tentacle was hot on his heels, and Als slashed at it. His cuts were repelled by a nauseatingly elastic surface, however. The kraken’s limb retreated slightly but didn’t give up the chase.
“Looks like my sword isn’t gonna help…”
Als continued to soar upward. Ten huge arms stretched far up toward the sky, pawing after him.
Each limb was taller than a tower. The sight of them wriggling after Als was like something out of a nightmare. Tinasha stared at it from her position in the air, then nodded at the two mages next to her. “It’s time. Do it.”
At their lady’s command, Pamyra and Renart fired their magic down at the same time.
Fierce spears of lightning crashed down, colliding powerfully with the ten tentacles of the kraken. Electrical currents ran through them, and a piercing shriek rent the sky.
The sea monster tried to retract its unexpectedly electrocuted arms, but that wasn’t to be. The witch’s lips curled in an evil grin. “You can’t get away. Who do you think you’re up against?”
Using no incantation, Tinasha cast a spell to bind the great sea beast’s arms and hold it in the air. Electricity charred its writhing limbs, and a fragrant aroma began to waft through the air. The shocks diffused at the water’s edge, however, so they didn’t reach the kraken’s trunk and head.
“Hmm… Not enough after all,” Tinasha murmured, grabbing a cylinder that had been at her waist. She poured five crystal balls out of it and flung them carelessly into the sea. As the little spheres sank, they spread out into a neatly formed circle with the kraken in the middle.
“Renart, could you look after Als?” Tinasha requested.
“Yes, my lady,” said Renart who accepted stewardship of Als from the witch.
Now free of distraction, Tinasha began an incantation.
“Let my words sink in. A change of form shall not be a change in quality. The definition will not waver but merely flow and float… Move aside.”
In response to her chant, five white lights started fountaining up from underwater. All at once, a white magic circle linking them together appeared in the air. Once the glowing disk surrounded the kraken, the ocean water within its circumference began to slowly drain.
“…Unbelievable,” Als breathed. Never had the man dared to envision such an astonishing display of magic. Next to him, Pamyra gasped.
In three minutes, a perfect circle had been cleaved all the way to the ocean floor. The kraken’s huge body was stripped of its watery armor, revealing its ugly shape to the open air. Its black eyes, each easily three times the height of an adult human, glared at its opponents with unmistakable ire.
Tinasha scrutinized the sea monster she’d captured. “Is this a squid? Looks like it would be quite tasty.”
“Miss Tinasha, I don’t know why that’s the first thing that comes to mind when you look at that thing…,” Als muttered miserably. In contrast, the witch appeared in slightly brighter spirits as she began another incantation.
“Recognize my will as law, transformer that sleeps in the earth and flies in the sky. I control your thunder and summon you. Know my command to be every concept of your manifestation.”
When Tinasha finished her chant, ten balls of lightning appeared in her hands. They crackled and popped, sending out silvery branches of light every passing moment.
“Go.”
Tinasha glanced at her collected spheres, and they obediently sped off to assail the defenseless kraken. Each one expanded to a tremendous size and affixed itself to one of the kraken’s ten immobilized tentacles. Then, with frightening speed, they moved along the limbs as though they were pathways and made for the monster’s trunk.
An air-rending sound exploded on impact.
The kraken’s arms blackened and crumbled into fragile pieces.
As the lightning attack reached the kraken’s head, a drawn-out scream like nails on a chalkboard shook the sea.
The terrible shriek grew fainter and fainter before fading away entirely. As its last cries echoed off into silence, the kraken drooped feebly, still unable to move. One of its large, beady eyes had gone cloudy.
“Is it dead?” asked Als.
“We’ll see,” Tinasha replied, floating down to inspect. She hovered in close enough to examine the mighty creature’s head and eyes.
Suddenly, the kraken’s one dead eye regained its dark luster.
In a flash, it regenerated its disintegrated arms. One thin tentacle caught hold of Tinasha’s right foot.
“Lady Tinasha!” cried Pamyra, trying to swoop down, but the kraken entwined itself around the witch’s body before she could. It tried to draw the witch toward the rows of tiny teeth inside its beak.
Bearing the pain, the witch placed a hand on the tentacle coiled tight around her.
“Dissolve!”
The kraken’s arm exploded. Tinasha kicked away and teleported over to Pamyra. The two of them rose up to come next to Als. “Miss Tinasha, are you all right?” he asked.
“I broke my ankle,” she answered. Looking down, he saw that her right calf and foot were crisscrossed with red bruises from where it had been snared by the kraken’s tentacle. Proper healing was going to take some time.
The witch took a moment to look down at the sea. Her concentration had broken, so the parted water was thundering back to fill the open space. The kraken’s regenerated ten giant limbs were wriggling about.
“This damn squid… How should I deal with you…?” Tinasha muttered hatefully. Suddenly, the creature stopped moving. A huge distortion formed around it, creaking and groaning for a bit like the low growl of an animal. Then the distortion converged toward a central point.
That was when the kraken inexplicably vanished.
Renart finally let a breath out. “Looks like it went well.”
“It certainly looks that way,” the witch said with a shrug. Not a moment later, a young man about Suzuto’s age appeared nearby from thin air.
He nodded to her with a calm expression. “My Queen, your orders have been carried out.”
“Thanks, Nil. And stop calling me ‘My Queen.’”
“But you are the queen,” the spirit said crossly.
Next to him, Suzuto looked visibly relieved. “The magic pattern for the summoning has been destroyed. I’m sorry it took so long to find it.”
Als listened to his subordinate’s report, then sheathed his sword and grinned. “You succeeded just in the nick of time. Thanks.”
While the three magic users and Als had faced the kraken head-on, Suzuto had gone diving inside a barrier maintained by one of the witch’s spirits. He’d searched the wreckage of the dozen or so ships sunk by the kraken for the pirate vessel, then—following the spirit’s instructions—used his sword to smash the spell pattern seared into the deck by the summoner.
Once the summoning mark was gone, the kraken was released from its bindings and returned to its original home in the northern depths.
With that, Nisrey’s sailing troubles came to an end.
Mission completed, Als glanced over at the witch floating next to him. “I don’t know what we would have done without you here, Miss Tinasha.”
“Hmm. Maybe Oscar would have come,” she replied, not even joking. She broke into a face-splitting grin. A frightening amount of power was packed into her petite frame.
On the day before Oscar’s birthday, Prince Reust finally arrived in the castle city of Farsas after a long trip on horseback from Tayiri. While his country now tacitly acknowledged the existence of mages, their castle still used no magic at all, which denied him access to teleportation, something the other Great Nations used in abundance.
Oscar was there to greet Reust, welcoming him with formal remarks of gratitude.
News of Als and his party’s return came soon after the guest’s welcome banquet began. Oscar was given the news while in the grand hall.
He clicked his tongue in disapproval, wishing the journey had been delayed even slightly.
After the magistrate who delivered the missive excused himself, Reust inquired lightly, “What was that?”
“Als and his team have returned from a mission to kill a sea monster. We’ll hear the full story from him later.”
“General Als? I owe my life to him as well. Would it be all right if we sought an audience with him immediately?”
Oscar wanted to scowl but knew it strange to refuse. He ordered that the new arrivals be summoned to the banquet.
Ten minutes later, the Nisrey expedition team entered the grand hall and bowed. Renart and Pamyra lifted their heads only to catch sight of Reust and freeze. Oscar felt bad for them but noticed that their lady wasn’t present. While he wondered at that, he struck up a conversation with Als. “How did it go? I heard you ran into something big.”
“Until further notice, consider squid off the menu for me.”
“I kinda wish I could’ve seen it. I bet it’d be tasty.”
“You really are two peas in a pod…”
“Who are you talking about? Hey, where’s Tinasha?”
Pamyra answered the king. “She has some business to take care of, so she’ll return later.”
“Got it. Good job out there,” Oscar replied.
Pamyra nodded, then she, Renart, and Suzuto bowed and left the hall in haste. Left behind, General Als accepted a glass of wine and offered a formal hello to Reust. The foreign prince looked at him oddly. “Does the witch always go with you on these sorts of expeditions?”
“She does when it’s something we can’t handle ourselves or when she feels like coming along.”
“She’s a temperamental one,” added Oscar with a wry face, before taking a sip of his own drink.
Normally, Oscar’s birthday would be a grand celebration filled with invitees from many nations, but as it was the second birthday celebration that year, Reust was the only guest. That made the event easy to pull together, but a guest was still a guest and had to be attended to. As a result, two hours after the banquet started, Oscar went out to the balcony alone to sober up. He didn’t get drunk easily by any means, but he wanted to be as sober as possible on official diplomatic occasions. He also wanted a break, and he took in the night air while gazing at the scenery outside.
The sun had already set, and faint orange and dark blue streaks intermingled in the sky. The few lingering clouds were dyed golden. The sight so beautiful that Oscar wanted to show it to Tinasha.
As he gazed idly up at the sky, he felt someone behind him and turned around. Reust was standing there with a humble expression, and once their eyes met, he bowed. “I want to deeply apologize for how I behaved.”
Oscar knew exactly what the other man was referring to. He meant when they had ended up crossing swords outside Reust’s chambers.
“I’m sorry, too. If possible, I’d like us to forget all about it,” said Oscar.
“If that’s all right with you, then let’s do just that… Has she been doing well?”
This was probably what Reust had really wanted to ask all along. Oscar smiled and prepared to answer.
Before he could, however, the witch in question teleported right behind him. “Oscar, I’m back,” she said, floating up and throwing her arms around his neck with an innocent smile. She quickly caught sight of the foreign prince in front of her and paled. “P-Prince Reust…”
“It’s been a while,” he replied politely.
She was back, but her timing was supremely unlucky. Suppressing a sigh, Oscar undid her arms from around his neck and moved her to the side. She looked ill at ease as she floated back to the ground. When he looked over, he saw she was wearing a very boyish lightweight outfit.
“What is that getup? Come back after you’ve changed your clothes.”
“I’m sorry,” Tinasha said. She would’ve had her hands full dealing with just Oscar, but there was a guest of honor in their midst, too. The witch looked flustered as she inclined her head to Reust. “I apologize for greeting you like this. I’ll come back later.”
She made to teleport away, but Oscar caught a sense that something was off and grabbed her arm.
“Wh-what?” she asked.
“Is there some magic on your foot? What happened?”
Her eyes wide, she shook her head immediately. “You’re imagining things.”
“There’s no way I am. Show me,” he demanded, reaching out for her bare right calf. Twisting to keep her balance with one leg out, Tinasha floated up and straightened her posture.
“I told you, it’s nothing!” she cried. There was no injury on her slender leg. Oscar frowned at the smooth skin there, but he used his other hand to draw Akashia. She guessed what he meant to do and started to flail, but he held fast to her leg and wouldn’t let her squirm away.
Reust, who had no idea what was going on, wasn’t sure if he should try to defuse the situation. Before he could, Oscar touched the flat of Akashia’s blade to the witch’s leg. Once he did, the magic dispersed.
“I knew it…”
With the glamour dispelled, spirals of red bruises rose to the surface of her skin. The witch turned her head to the side, with Dammit clearly written on her face. She’d successfully healed the bones, muscles, and nerves, but she couldn’t erase the bruises permeating her skin.
The sight of red marks twining around her slender white leg was more titillating than painful looking. Reust turned his face away with the distinct feeling that he’d caught sight of something he shouldn’t have.
On the other hand, Oscar examined the marks with a very unhappy look on his face. “You really let down your guard. How could you be so foolish? If you’re going to get yourself hurt like this, I’m not going to send you out the next time. You have to beat it without the close call.”
“Okay…”
Oscar released Tinasha’s leg, and she clucked under her breath as she teleported away, clearly too proud to admit she was wrong. He watched her go and heaved a sigh, then winced at Reust, who looked incredibly uncomfortable.
“This is how she usually is,” Oscar explained, his voice laced with much more fondness than exasperation.
Thirty minutes later, Tinasha returned to the banquet dressed in full formal mage’s robes. Clad in white, she was wearing light makeup—meaning Sylvia must have caught her. She was so lovely that her mere presence changed the entire tone of the room.
Once again, she greeted Reust. “I’m so sorry I appeared before you looking like that.”
“Not at all. Defeating the monster must have been quite an ordeal,” he replied.
She flashed him a grateful smile. Her aura was entirely different from when they’d met at Tayiri Castle. Gone was the mysterious and forbidding sense of intimidation. In its place was the calm of sunlight filtering down through a forest. To witness such a transformation in her made Reust feel both glad and lonely.
Tinasha—a person, a witch, and a queen with no throne—changed her aspect like the waxing and waning of the moon. All people had various facets to them, but because she was a witch who had lived for such a long time, each of her qualities was truly differentiated.
She sat down next to him, and as his eyes ran over the delicate planes of her face, he broached the topic on his mind. “Thank you for everything you did back then. What you said gave me a lot to think about…and in the end, I realized I’d never thought about anything for myself. Our god Irityrdia is indeed absolute, but I may have been trying to pretend I was that god myself by throwing around my power and hiding behind his name.”
His halting delivery was awkward and full of self-admonition, but his sincerity was evident. Tinasha was serene as she responded, “Please don’t beat yourself up. We’re talking about a history that’s gone on for centuries. It would have been very difficult for you to go up alone against that. That said, I think what you’ve done is incredibly meaningful. Yes… It’s very human.”
“It’s…human?”
“Humans kill people but have the capacity to save them as well,” Tinasha said with a smile. She was as radiant as the moon.
A dull pain prickled at his heart. But on the surface, he asked her with a smile, “Incidentally, when are you planning to be married?”
“What?” Tinasha replied blankly, caught off guard. Oscar, sitting across from Reust, cleared his throat and started to laugh. Tinasha finally remembered the excuse by which she was allowed to remain in Farsas. “Oh! Um, well, that’s—”
“It’s a lie,” Oscar interjected smoothly as Tinasha fumbled for how to reply. Now it was Reust’s turn to gape. “That was a pretext to bring her back here. In reality, she’s only my protector.”
For her part, Oscar’s protector—not fiancée—looked uncomfortable. Lazar, standing on ceremony behind her, was too shocked to move. He’d never dreamed his lord would tell Reust the truth, not when he’d hated the idea of Reust and Tinasha meeting. What kind of turn of events was this? He dreaded what would come next.
Reust looked back and forth between Oscar and Tinasha, unable to parse Oscar’s meaning. After a moment, he dared to ask, “Then what are your plans for marriage?”
“I don’t have any,” Oscar answered.
“You said she’s your protector…?” Reust inquired.
The witch of the tower answered that one herself. “We have a contract. You know that I normally live in the tower, don’t you? He climbed all the way to the top, so as his reward, I signed a contract with him.”
The witch gave a soft smile. Feeling as if he would be drawn in completely by it, Reust couldn’t help but say, “Then what if I could climb the tower? Would you grant me a wish?”
All present, excepting the king and the witch, froze awkwardly. It was completely obvious that Reust was attracted to the witch. But it was also all too certain that the king of Farsas’s mood would darken if anyone pointed that out. If things really went wrong, it could mean conflict between the two countries.
While his attendants and confidantes were worrying away, Oscar merely sipped at his drink with perfect composure. The witch looked a little surprised by Reust’s question; then she put on a somewhat pained smile. “I don’t mind, but I wouldn’t recommend it. His Majesty here climbed it easily, but it normally takes a team of at least ten. It’s so difficult that I only see successful challengers once in a hundred years—if I do at all. I tamper with the memories of those who fail and transport them to random locations on the mainland, so people with royal responsibilities probably shouldn’t attempt it.”
Her warning was unshakable fact. Stories of the tower’s trials were told even in far-off Tayiri. That included the part where the majority of fearless challengers went out to try their luck and never returned.
The barrier was so high that Reust almost hung his head. He still couldn’t quite bring himself to give up, though.
Tinasha was one of a kind.
At that moment, she was within his reach.
It didn’t matter to Reust that she was a witch and he was the heir to the throne of Tayiri, a country tough on mages. Reust took her hand and faced her as her eyes widened.
“I…,” Reust began.
“Tinasha,” Oscar interjected. Tinasha tilted her head to the side, mystified. Oscar used his glass to gesture toward the balcony. Disinterest plain, he offered, “If this is going to be a complicated conversation, could you have it outside?”
“I understand,” she said, frowning as she got to her feet.
Looking abashed, Reust took her hand again. “I’ll be borrowing her for but a moment. So sorry about this.”
Once he’d let the witch out to the balcony, Als hissed in his lord’s ear, “You sure you’re all right with this?”
“Why should I have to mind the affairs of a woman who’s lived twenty times longer than me?”
No one was expecting that reply, and Oscar’s confidantes exchanged glances. Oscar, for his part, was eminently calm as he took another sip from his glass.
Reust and the witch returned quickly. Neither of their expressions betrayed any change.
Tinasha sat down next to Oscar, furrowing her elegant brows at his wineglass. “Don’t drink so much. You’ll die.”
“Where did that come from…? I don’t know what you mean.”
She didn’t bother to explain her reasoning. Oscar found it suspicious, but set down his glass and switched to water.
After that, those seated at the table enjoyed pleasant conversation for a while before Tinasha excused herself and went back to her room. With that, the party started to wind down naturally.
As Oscar changed his clothes in his bedroom, he wondered if he shouldn’t take a bath to remove the last lingering traces of tipsiness in his system.
He checked the time and saw that it was almost midnight. He took off his shirt and then heard a rapping at his window. He answered, and the witch opened it and entered. Oscar took one look at what she was wearing and was suddenly struck speechless.
“What’s with that outfit…?” he asked.
“It’s easy to move in, and that’s what’s most important to me,” Tinasha answered. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress. It hugged the lines of her torso snugly before flaring out at the waist into a very short skirt. Practically all of her smooth ivory legs were on full display. She was surely wearing underwear beneath it, but such a revealing outfit made Oscar do a double take. The bruises on her legs were all gone; she may have used magic to cover them up again.
Oscar couldn’t tear his eyes away from her creamy, slender thighs. “I don’t know whether to let my eyes drink their fill or avert them…”
“Stop talking nonsense and change into something you can move about easily in, too,” Tinasha insisted. It was only then that Oscar noticed she was carrying several folded bundles of thick cotton fabric. He wondered what their purpose was as he donned a light jacket. Then she called over, “Oh, and tell Nark to come.”
“What the hell…? Do I need Akashia, too?”
“It doesn’t matter too much either way,” Tinasha answered.
Evidently it wasn’t going to be something too dangerous. Nark was sleeping in a corner of Oscar’s room. He roused the dragon and put it on his shoulder. After some deliberation, Oscar ended up bringing Akashia, too.
The witch took his hand and opened up a transportation array right in the middle of the room. The array took them to a spacious, grassy plain. The moon was high and bright in the sky. The witch picked up Nark and bade it grow. From there, they continued their journey on the dragon’s back.
As city lights came into view far in the distance, Oscar asked the witch sitting next to him, “What city are we heading toward?”
“Nisrey,” Tinasha replied.
Oscar was surprised to hear the name of the city where Tinasha had so recently vanquished a sea monster. Looking again, he saw a dark sea spread beyond the dots of light comprising the city. Bluish-white moonlight rippled across the water, glittering silver on cresting whitecaps. The moon’s reflection shuddered ever so slightly as it sparkled luminously.
Oscar could do nothing but gaze out raptly at such overwhelming natural beauty. It was the first time he’d ever seen such a sight. The night sea looked like it could go on forever, tinged with stillness and mystery. Brushing back her black locks, Tinasha grinned. “I really should have taken you during the day, but you were busy.”
“…No, this is great,” Oscar said, still overcome with wonder, and she smiled with satisfaction. Moving up to the dragon’s head, she signaled something to it. The dragon understood and made a slow rotation over the ocean.
“Are you going to show me the kraken or something?” Oscar asked.
“What would you do if I said yes?” Tinasha responded.
“I’d take back what I said to Als.”
The witch could imagine what their conversation entailed, and she burst out laughing. The dragon changed its heading and started to fly along the coast.
Before long, they reached the top of a rocky cliff some distance away from the city and Nark let them down there. It shrank back to its original size and climbed onto Oscar’s shoulder.
They were just outside a southern city, and as such, a languid heat clung to the air despite it being nighttime. The high temperatures were probably what drove Tinasha to put on such a skimpy, almost boyish ensemble. She ran her fingers through her hair, mussed by the salty sea breeze.
“Well, shall we be off?” she said, taking his hand. Silently, they rose up into the air and descended slowly down the cliff face toward the ocean. Oscar stared eagerly down at the water; all this was so fresh and new to him. Then he realized there was a cave opening halfway down the cliff. She led him into it by the hand.
The tiny cave was a hollow that sloped down at an angle, and soon enough they entered a wide space filled with seawater. There was a small crack in the rock making up the cave ceiling, letting in moonlight that shone with a blue light on the water.
It looked like the sea had eroded the interior of the cliff over the years to form this space. It was like being inside an eggshell. The rocky enclosure kept the water still and calm.
The witch let Oscar down on a spot along the wall where there was a foothold the size of a closet.
“Let there be light—”
She opened her hands, and white balls of light flared to life. Some flew up to the ceiling and some dived into the water to illuminate the cave.
Immediately, the place took on a cerulean tint.
“What is all this…?” Oscar murmured, his breath taken away by the transformation.
The water gleamed with a brilliant azure hue. The color only intensified deeper into the water. Those conjured luminous globes that had been submerged underwater shone here and there in electrifying and gorgeous shades of cobalt.
Everything glittered like sapphires. Oscar was thoroughly entranced and found himself unable to hold back a sigh of wonder. The witch’s smile was one of total gratification. “What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“The bottom is sandy, so you can swim without worrying about rocks. There’s no fish here, either.”
“You want us to swim?!”
“You can, can’t you?”
The thick cotton cloths Tinasha had brought must have been for wiping themselves dry after swimming. She placed the towels somewhere they wouldn’t get wet, then dived into the water without delay. A spray of water sparkled in the air.
“That’s why she’s dressed like that…,” Oscar realized, nodding to himself as he doffed his shoes and jacket. He likewise removed Akashia and placed a sleepy-looking Nark next to the weapon.
The water was deliciously cold when he waded in, and it sent lighting running up his body. It was so hot outside that the chill was quite comfortable and welcome. Oscar dived down to the bottom and found it blanketed with white sand. He glimpsed an underwater cove deeper in. It probably led out to the open sea, but the jagged opening made it hard to tell.
Oscar’s body felt lighter. He hadn’t gone swimming since he was a child, but that had done little to fade his muscle memory.
He swam up to the surface to breathe and found Tinasha floating just above the surface watching him. Droplets of water fell from her long, black hair. Each one carved tiny ripples in the water as they hit the surface. Her glossy skin and ebony eyes, now backlit by azure moonlight, created a fascinating allure.
Using his fingers to comb back his own wet bangs, Oscar asked her, “Did you make this place?”
“It’s entirely natural. I came here a lot to relax back in the day. This is the first time I’ve brought someone with me, though. Oh, it was missing a foothold, however, so I carved one into the wall earlier today.”
She pointed to the little ledge their belongings were resting on. Nark was curled into a ball, snoozing away on top of Oscar’s jacket.
“So…happy birthday,” Tinasha said, pressing her palms together and offering him a pleased smile.
Finally, Oscar understood why she’d brought him here. He reached out and tugged on her hair until she slowly came down to his level. When he touched her cheek, it was oddly warm.
“Thank you,” Oscar replied.
Tinasha suddenly laughed out loud like a child.
By the time Oscar had gotten his fill of swimming and returned to the foothold, a sense of heaviness had permeated his whole body.
He turned back to see the witch still playing in the water. She really looked just like a kid.
Smiling and shaking his head, Oscar grabbed one of the thick towels and dried his hair off. After he’d toweled off his chest and arms, he looked back to ask Tinasha about a change of clothes. Tinasha didn’t answer. Instead, she sat on the water gazing straight at Oscar.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing, I was just thinking that something looked pretty…”
“What is?”
“You are.”
“What the…?”
Oscar didn’t think pretty was a compliment generally used for men. But the witch didn’t seem to be concerned about that. Her head was cocked to one side as she took in every bit of his beautiful face and well-proportioned body. Beneath the force of her unbridled gaze, Oscar gestured her over.
“What are we doing about our clothes? I didn’t bring anything to change into.”
“I’ll dry them,” Tinasha offered, walking along the water’s surface as easily as she would have done with solid earth. With one press of her hand to his clothes, warmth circulated along the fabric, drying it instantly, though his skin didn’t feel hot at all.
Impressed, Oscar examined his newly dry clothes. Then he remembered something he’d forgotten to ask about. “Oh right, what did Reust say to you?”
“Ah, that? He proposed,” Tinasha recounted.
“Again?”
“I said no.”
“You shot him down fast.”
“I just don’t like him in that way…”
“Did you tell him that when you rejected him? That’s pretty harsh,” Oscar observed, feeling a little bad for Reust.
The witch, still dripping wet, made a disapproving face. “What would you do if I’d said that and relations with Tayiri deteriorated? I turned him down tactfully.”
“I see,” Oscar replied.
Although they were both witches, he was positive that if it was Lucrezia, she would have happily toyed with poor Reust. The prince was lucky it was Tinasha he’d proposed to—everyone was fortunate for that.
Still, Oscar felt there was something slightly off about what Tinasha said. He’d heard her insist that her being a witch was her reason for not getting overly familiar with anyone.
What change of heart must she have gone through to now say that she didn’t like Reust in a romantic way? Oscar found the whole thing strange but had the sense that if he probed too deep, he’d just end up pitying Reust, so he said nothing.
The witch peered at Oscar. “Are you tired? Should we head back?”
“No, I want to keep looking around a little. You brought me all this way and everything,” he replied, and Tinasha broke into a happy grin. Her smile was so lovely he could only stare in fascination. Her gaze was soft with joy, and there were no traces of sadness or loneliness to be found.
Seeing that up close sent Oscar into a trance. He tipped up her chin, moving closer to her entirely naturally.
“Hey, wait—!” she cried, paling as she tried to push him away. He only caught hold of her with his other hand, however.
Then he pressed his lips to hers, even as she flailed beneath him. Nothing about the blue-tinted cave they were in felt real, so he made sure she was. Her long eyelashes tickled his face.
First, it was just a light brush of lips, though a lengthy one. Then Oscar changed his angle and kissed her again—and again, kissing her with yearning and the desire to make her body heat, her breath, belong to him. A slow, lazy passion suffused his body; it felt like their souls were melding.
It was all so sudden, and while Tinasha resisted and tried to pull away, Oscar wouldn’t allow it.
It was all Tinasha could do to remain standing under such a rain of breathtaking kisses. A mysterious heat welled up deep within her soaking wet body, seizing hold of her thoughts.
She felt faint.
She even forgot how to use magic.
The warmth—and the numbness that came along with it—dominated her body.
That was when the lights around them gave a mighty shudder.
Oscar sensed the lights’ flickering and pulled back. With the witch’s mindfulness disrupted, the globes had begun to blink on and off. When she realized what was happening, she used her free hand to cover her reddened cheeks. Until now, her control of such a simple spell had never wavered like this, no matter what kind of pain she was in.
“What do you think you’re doing…?” she whispered.
Oscar released Tinasha’s hand. He’d been clutching it very tightly but fortunately hadn’t left a bruise. The witch was red to the tips of her ears, and he patted her head. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” he said, ostensibly calm.
Tinasha glared at him, her eyes big and resentful.
“I’m gonna swim a little more,” Oscar stated unevenly and dived right into the water. |
Unnamed Memory
“…What?” Tinasha exclaimed, left behind with a heart that wouldn’t stop pounding. As she massaged her chest, she muttered, “But…I just dried your clothes…”
Reust left Farsas the next day. The witch offered to teleport him, but he refused firmly. As his retinue of attendants and guardsmen made their way home on horseback, a commanding officer Reust had known for a long time inquired, “Are you really all right with giving up?”
Reust gave a light chuckle, aware of what the guard was referring to. “I was refused flat out. I have no choice but to.”
“But isn’t she simply bound by her contract to Farsas?”
“No…,” Reust said with a wry grimace. Memories of last night flashed through his mind. He’d asked Tinasha the same thing, and she’d been radiant as she answered…
“He’s special. I couldn’t handle another one like him.”
The witch probably wasn’t even aware of it herself yet.
As she’d smiled ruefully, looking the tiniest bit exasperated, Reust had recognized his defeat with perfect clarity, however. |
Unnamed Memory
9. Nighttime Serenade
“How much of these stories are even real?” muttered the king at his study desk. The witch was up on the ceiling with a thick spell book open before her. She didn’t know what “these stories” referred to, and she floated down while still upside down to look over Oscar’s shoulder.
“What’s that? A book of fairy tales?” she asked. An elaborate and exquisite illustration dominated the left page; this appeared to be a collection of nursery tales for children. The picture of a princess gazing into an oval mirror looked eerie and old-fashioned.
Oscar closed the book and showed her the cover. “I’m having a quick look through a book we acquired to add to the castle reference library. There’s a lot of weird stories. It’s pretty interesting.”
“Oh, it’s a book from the Dark Age,” observed Tinasha. A request from a historical or literature scholar had most likely brought it to the castle. The tales people used to tell one another back then became fairy tales over time and had all been collected in this tome at some point. Tinasha came down and sat on the edge of the desk. Reaching out for the book Oscar had opened back up, she began to leaf through the pages.
“The story of the Mirror of Oblivion, huh? This is from before my time. I couldn’t tell you if it’s true or not.”
The art depicted a princess gazing into a looking glass. It was an illustration of a story from the early days of the Dark Age. The tale spoke of a princess who spent her days in tears and sorrow after losing her parents. One day, she looked into a mirror and forgot all her sadness. The fable itself had little meaning, but if it was based on a true story, the mirror could have been a magic implement.
Tinasha flipped through more pages as she mused on what sort of spells were responsible for each story.
“Oh, this one’s true. The story of a castle that suddenly got covered in ivy.” Tinasha pointed to the one she was describing.
“That one’s relatively new. I think it’s from the very beginning of the Age of Witches,” Oscar commented.
“Yes, it is. It’s about me.”
“………”
Ignoring the pointed look he was throwing her, Tinasha drifted back up to the ceiling. From below, she heard his heavy sigh.
“That makes me want to appear in one of these odd little stories, too…”
“What do you think you’re saying? Have some self-respect,” chided the witch. Oscar, evidently rather bored, paid this no mind. Tinasha quickly resumed her reading. As she turned a page, the thought occurred to her: What kind of king will people say he was?
Without realizing it, Tinasha began to smile.
There were seven lecture halls for the mages of Farsas Castle. All of them were in use during the day, but permission for after hours could be requested. Six mages were gathered in one such reserved auditorium, forming a circle in the center around two women.
“Pamyra, the transition to the sixth sequence is too slow,” said the witch. Pamyra rushed to erase the spell configuration and recast it from scratch. Tinasha silently inspected the intricately woven spiritual magic spell.
No one in the castle but the witch could teach spirit sorcerer magic to Pamyra. She had begged her lady to help her practice, which the witch did often.
Doan, Sylvia, Renart, and Kumu looked on with keen interest. Spiritual magic was a unique form of spell casting that utilized most of its magic in the spell configuration as opposed to spell execution.
“You can’t only look at the sequence you’re assembling now. You have to be focusing on the whole thing constantly and think ahead to what’s next,” Tinasha instructed, holding out her right hand palm up. In an instant, a delicately wrought spell formed there. “The kind of spell a mage can envision and execute is one indicator of magic aptitude, but that’s not all that matters on the battlefield. Your speed and the stability of your spells are both directly linked to how strong you are. No matter how much magic you have, it’s all meaningless if your spells are a jumble.”
Pamyra nodded meekly, and the witch smiled at her. She quickly turned serious again, clapping Pamyra on the shoulder. “The truth is, it’s most ideal not to encounter a situation where you have to fight directly. For mages, our best fighting style is one that involves preparing spells ahead of time and keeping premade sigils and arrays ready for attack. This is because face-to-face combat involves too many uncertain elements.”
“Very illuminating,” said Chief Mage Kumu with a nod. The witch found his reaction quite nostalgic. She had lectured the mages of Farsas on how to fight seventy years ago as well. The country had been at war then, so she had prioritized teaching them survival spells over killing ones.
“Now then, how about a little contest?” Tinasha proposed with a light wave of her hand. Before her, a glass ball the size of a person’s head appeared.
The glass was hollow, with a tiny ring inside. There were no cracks or seams on the glass, though there was a hole the same size as the ring at the very top. The aperture was reinforced with a silver inlay around the rim, making it too narrow for the ring to pass through, however.
Tinasha pointed one ivory finger at the glass sphere. “Cast a spell that will pull out the ring inside without damaging the glass sphere. Teleportation magic is disabled. I’ll be looking at your spell-casting speed and method. You have three minutes to devise a strategy. Feel free to touch the sphere and inspect its composition.”
After she finished, she placed the hollow globe on top of a desk. Doan picked it up and spun it upside down. The ring fell down with a tinkling noise, but the silver rim at the bottom blocked it from coming out. The silver rim must have been forged at the same time as the glass, because it was stuck fast to the inside of the sphere.
The mages, given their task, picked the sphere up one by one and pondered over what to do.
“All right, three minutes are up. Is everyone ready?” the witch asked, and the group nodded. Tinasha surveyed the nervous-looking bunch. “Then we’ll start. Five, four, three, two, one, go!”
At the signal, all the mages began their spells. Kumu, Pamyra, and Doan used no incantation, while Sylvia and Renart uttered short chants. Kumu completed his spell the fastest, then Pamyra. The other three completed theirs at nearly identical times after that.
Tinasha studied each spell design, and her eyes narrowed. “Kumu, Pamyra, and Doan are using a method to remove the silver rim. Kumu, your speed and stability are both strong. That’s to be expected… Pamyra, yours is a little too cautious but quite well-made. Doan, your decisiveness is good. You just need to shave off some excess in the third sequence.”
The three felt relieved to hear such positive criticism. Mages did not normally undergo tests, and they were all quite nervous.
“Renart’s spell will create a hole where there is none, then seal it up again once the ring is out. I guess you think you’re better at transmuting the glass than the silver rim?” Tinasha asked.
“That is what I decided, yes,” Renart answered.
“I see. I like this change in thinking. The spell is well-made, too. Carry on.”
“Thank you.”
Last, the witch carefully examined Sylvia’s spell. Unfortunately, she nearly burst into laughter almost immediately.
Shocked, Sylvia looked nervously from one side to the other. Next to her, Doan sounded stunned as he said, “Sylvia, that will break the ring.”
“What? But…”
“It’s fine. I did say not to break the glass, but I didn’t say anything about not breaking the ring. Not bad. This one is the most interesting,” the witch remarked, still giggling with delight. Within seconds, she had a spell drawn up in her right hand. She poured it into the glass ball, and the ring was sucked out right away.
It had happened so fast it looked like teleportation, but the five mages recognized that she’d shrunk the ring, removed it, then restored it to its original size. The quintet of pupils let out cries of admiration. Shrinking spells were difficult and could not be used on living things or anything larger than a human hand. Such magic was so circumstantially useful that it was often forgotten.
“Spell casting is the forging of your idea with your technique, so you should always be practicing. Okay, I’m giving this to Sylvia. I applaud your imagination,” Tinasha praised, tossing the ring casually to Sylvia. The other woman caught it with both hands.
“Th-thank you!” she cried.
“It absorbs spells to be launched at a later time. It’s a simple magic implement, but you can use it over and over. Feel free to employ it however you see fit.”
Sylvia nodded over and over, looking rapturous with gratitude. With that, the special lecture broke up.
“People are talking about a song that kills anyone who listens to it.”
“Is the song really bad or something?”
Kumu and Renart returned to their research, while the remaining four moved to the lounge. Doan had been the one to broach the subject over tea, and Tinasha was quick to shoot it down. Doan wagged a finger before his face, however.
“That’s the thing. Apparently, the song is very good. The woman singing it is famous as a singer. But everyone who hears it ends up committing suicide.”
“No, no, no,” cried Sylvia, trembling with her hands over her ears.
Tinasha made a face at her. “Is this really that scary? I very much doubt it’s real anyway.”
“Oh, but it is. Suicide is on the rise in the city. Dozens are already dead,” Doan revealed.
“What?! This is happening here?!” cried Sylvia.
“Yes. It’s the talk of the town right now. People have purposely gone and listened to it for themselves, so the numbers have skyrocketed.”
“…What in the world?” muttered Tinasha.
Human curiosity was undoubtedly the most frightening part of the rumor. If this was really happening, it was a serious problem.
After listening in silence, Pamyra turned to her lady and asked, “Can magic really cause something like that?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but I would categorize this more as a curse. Still, curses shouldn’t have the power to make people commit suicide… Maybe it is some regular sort of spell. That it’s afflicted so many is unusual, though. It would be difficult to pull the strings on something like that. Hmm, I’m having a hard time conceptualizing it. This would be hard for a normal mage to do.”
“Then what about you, Miss Tinasha?”
“Yes, I could do it. I’d pick someone out of a crowd and kill them while making it look like they committed suicide.”
“………”
Tinasha’s words painted a realistic picture, stunning the group silent. The witch sipped at her tea nonchalantly.
Looking at the clock, Tinasha saw that it was almost three o’clock in the afternoon. She set down her cup and got to her feet. “In any case, could you try and keep Oscar from hearing about this, if you can?”
“Why?”
“He’s been extremely bored lately. I wouldn’t be surprised if he said he wants to go and listen to it for himself.”
“…Understood.”
Ever since Oscar took the throne, things had largely calmed down, but this king was incredibly curious and prone to bouts of exploration. Added to that was the fact that this case was occurring right in the castle city. Such a tempting target right under his nose could prove dangerous.
The witch quietly decided she would have to handle this in secret should it continue to be an issue.
“People are talking about a song that kills anyone who listens to it,” said Oscar with great interest as soon as Tinasha entered his study. She sank to her knees in disappointment.
Oscar half rose to his feet, surprised. “What’s wrong? Low blood sugar?”
“…It’s nothing,” she muttered, collecting herself and standing back up. She started to brew some tea. “Who did you hear that from?”
“Lazar.”
“Why, that little…,” Tinasha muttered, cursing the attendant who was thankfully not present. While Lazar frequently worried that his lord would act recklessly, he still brought him all these tales of shady incidents. It was enough for her to suspect that Lazar was riling him up on purpose.
Unaware of what Tinasha was thinking, Oscar asked her if it was possible that magic was causing this, just like Pamyra had earlier.
“I won’t know details until I hear it for myself,” Tinasha stated flatly.
“Oh yeah? Then let’s go check it out.”
“I meant that I would! Alone!” cried the witch. She handed Oscar a cup of tea with a smile.
Oscar noticed that it was a very shallow sort of grin and rested his chin on his hands with a grimace. “You’re not going.”
“Why not?!”
“There’s two singers causing this. One is a tavern singer, and one…works at a brothel.”
Tinasha was dumbfounded at the revelation. Women weren’t allowed in the brothel, but Tinasha had a feeling it was more dangerous for Oscar to go. “You’re the king. Please do not go to a brothel…”
“Lots of people conceal their identities when they go.”
“So that means I could disguise myself as a prostitute and go,” she reasoned.
“Absolutely not. That’s a hard no,” Oscar said.
“Just let me do it!” Tinasha insisted. She grabbed Oscar’s shoulder and shook it back and forth. It jostled the cup in his hand, making the tea wobble. “Didn’t I tell you that the protective barrier won’t protect you from psychological spells? Have you already forgotten the pain Lucrezia caused you?!”
“I don’t recall much pain being involved.”
“I didn’t mean it literally!” Tinasha scolded, releasing Oscar. She gave him a smile with eyes so icy they would make anyone quake in their boots. Oscar beheld Tinasha, unflappable, even as the woman exuded her full witch’s might. “End of discussion. I’m going to do something about the tavern singer first, so you be good and do your work.”
“Fine, I understand,” Oscar answered, waving his hand lightly. The witch remained unconvinced, however.
Tinasha didn’t doubt her own ability to resolve the case, though, so it was fine. She decided to start looking into things immediately, so as not to give Oscar a chance to act. She left the study and headed back to the lounge, where she grabbed Doan.
With Doan recruited for her investigative mission, she had him go over the details as they made their way to the tavern.
The tavern singer’s name was Delia. She was an attractive woman with a good voice that had earned her quite a bit of popularity.
About a month ago, she began singing a new song. The tavern patrons raved about the melody, which was redolent with melancholy and nostalgia. Before long, however, some of them began committing suicide. Not everyone who heard the song was discovered dead, but as about thirty people had already fallen victim to it, the tavern owner was considering canceling the performances.
Once that rumor got out into town, more and more people came to sample the “killer song.” The owner suddenly found himself with a crowd too large to turn away, and performances continued.
The witch was left aghast after hearing the whole story. She frowned. “That’s terrible. I can’t help them if they want to die of curiosity. Are the people going to the brothel acting the same way?”
“The brothel? What are you talking about?”
“I heard there are two singers causing this.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it. I only know about Delia.”
“Huh?” Tinasha spat reflexively.
Had Oscar tried to trick her? Maybe he thought she’d give up once she heard the word brothel.
“He’s got some nerve trying to pull off a cheap trick on me…”
“I don’t really understand, but please be gentle with our king,” Doan pleaded. Consulting the map, he led the way. The route he chose was very like him: sparsely populated back streets so they could save on trouble.
Tinasha snapped her fingers. “If you like, I can go on alone, and you can head back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going, too. I’m a mage, and I don’t believe in superstitions.”
“Come along, then,” urged Tinasha. She was grateful that Doan was possessed of such a no-nonsense temperament. Soon they arrived at the tavern, where the dim lighting conveniently concealed Tinasha’s beauty. It was dinnertime, so they ordered some light food.
The sound of glasses tinkling and low murmurs filled the space. They could hear a fair number of conversations about the song in question.
Namely, people wondering what exactly was this song that killed its listeners.
Dumbfounded, the witch rested her chin on her hands. Then a light shone down on a small stage at the rear of the tavern. The patrons all turned to glance that way.
Doan looked up from his salted fish. “Almost time.”
“Have a defense spell at the ready, just in case. If it’s not magic, I’ll handle it,” Tinasha instructed.
“Understood.”
A woman with all the charm someone in the prime of adulthood could carry appeared onstage. Her features were not outstandingly beautiful, but her dark sensuality was eye-catching. She looked around the crowd, smiling in gratitude, before drawing her right leg slightly behind her.
She took a deep breath in and stood up straight. With only the strums of a zither to accompany her, she began to sing.
“Here is a forbidden place, a room with no air.
I sing a song that no one listens to.
Night falls in my hometown so far away,
where you are not—you are not anywhere.
You’ll never come home despite all my wishing.
Should night come again tomorrow, I may as well die.
Here is a forbidden place, a dream with no air.”
Her voice crooning out a heartrending melody was so lovely that it sank deep into the hearts of the audience. However, a strange unease arose within them the more they listened. Doan glanced over at the witch next to him, who was listening raptly. She must have felt his gaze, because she turned to look at him.
She inclined her head in thought for a moment before suddenly giving a light wave of her hand. Once she did, the song became inaudible.
Flustered, Doan looked all around the tavern, but the other patrons appeared lost in the song. He felt uneasy and was about to get up when the witch tugged on his sleeve. She leaned over to his seat and whispered, “You’re the only one who can’t hear it. It’s better not to listen.”
“Is it a cursed song? I don’t feel any magic.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll explain outside. Let’s go,” said the witch with an apologetic smile. With urgent haste, she rose from her seat. All except Doan were too enraptured to spare even a single glance at the disturbance.
When they emerged back onto the street, it was completely dark outside. Tinasha spoke once they had put some distance between themselves and the tavern. “So it’s just a song. A genuine song.”
“Just a song?!” he repeated.
“Yes. A normal song with no magic or curse in it. The melody, lyrics, and her voice seem to have a disquieting effect on people. I’ve lived a long while, and I’ve only encountered this a handful of times. It’s exceedingly rare, but there are some songs, paintings, and poems that are like that. Tired and sickly people are particularly weak to this sort of thing. We should pursue the proper channels to get performances of that song canceled.”
“I see…,” Doan said, shoulders slumping. It was a bit anticlimactic. He’d expected to hear some sort of fantastical backstory. Upon finding out it was just a normal song, he felt both relieved and disappointed.
The witch noticed his expression and gave a half smile. “The truly frightening incidences are ones like these, with no magic behind them. There are rules to magic, and we can use those rules to devise a solution. But this probably just stems from the incredible talent of the person who wrote the song and the woman singing it. Encountering a case like this makes you realize how mysterious the human power is.”
Tinasha smiled, her eyes cast down, and asked Doan to file the paperwork to have performances of the song prohibited before returning to the castle. There was a great deal of relief that washed over her as the witch realized that this was the end of the incident.
While the witch was having dinner at the tavern, the lights went on in an establishment in a back alley on the western side of town.
Unlike those back alleys on the eastern side, these were safer and the clientele tended to be wealthy. This brothel was no exception, and it wasn’t unusual to see nobles sneaking in and out of its doors.
A recent windfall of profit had left this particular brothel’s owner, Gaske, in a fantastic mood.
This was due entirely to Clara. An unceasing stream of clients came seeking her. Even if most of those clients never visited again, enough new ones poured in that it didn’t matter. They were all seized with curiosity and enough baseless confidence to think they’d be fine. It was impossible to correct their misapprehensions.
Gloating to himself, Gaske opened the doors and retreated to the reception booth. Soon enough, the first client arrived.
The tall man with a hood pulled down low over his eyes to hide his face was dressed well. Judging him to be a nobleman, Gaske welcomed him courteously as a guest of honor. The client took the greeting as a sign to get right to the point. “This is where I can find the woman who sings the song that kills its listeners, right?”
Gaske was surprised to hear how young his voice sounded. A series of kidnappings fifteen years ago had left the city with few young adults of noble heritage.
Prying into the identities of patrons ran contrary to the rules. “You mean Clara. Yes, she’s here. But she has a prior engagement at the moment…,” Gaske answered with a smile.
“I see. But if I don’t see her now, I’ll end up caught by someone pesky. Is there any way you can be flexible?”
“I’m really very sorry, sir, but…”
The man grimaced upon hearing Gaske’s reply. He pulled up his hood to show his face. “Do you know who I am?”
There was no way he wouldn’t have. Stunned, Gaske dropped the papers he was holding.
How wonderful it would be to manipulate people with nothing but your thoughts. It was inarguable that many had thought of such before.
Clara had that power; she was certain of it.
She could bend anyone to her will if she only wished to do so. If she wished them to die, they would. All the clients who came to her knowing that must have been dense or otherwise frivolous about their own fates. As such, she felt that it wasn’t her fault if they died.
“Clara, you have a client.”
“Ah, Simon.”
A man holding a zither knocked on the door of her room before entering.
She had known Simon for three years. Clara had found him collapsed outside the brothel with nothing to his name and brought him in. After learning of his musical talent, Clara made him her dedicated accompanist. As she had saved his life, he would do anything she asked. She didn’t want to take him as a lover, but she felt that there was no one who understood her better than he.
Seated before her vanity, Clara stood up as she fastened a clasp into her hair. “My reservation, right? I’m coming.”
“No, it’s a walk-in.”
“A walk-in?”
The brothel where Clara worked saw very high-profile clientele. It wasn’t possible to force your way in using money or pedigree; appointments were required. Who was it that had forced their way in and cut in line? Clara was wholly intrigued.
“All right. I’m coming,” she said, rushing through the rest of her routine. Leaving Simon there, she headed for the designated room.
A huge bed dominated the room. A single window was located very high up on the wall. It was designed that way to prevent peeping, but it made the room feel stuffy.
The man was standing at the entrance, sipping a drink; he turned around when he felt her presence.
He was exceedingly handsome, with eyes the color of the sky right after twilight.
She’d never met him before but recognized him instantly.
Clara froze in shock. She couldn’t take another step into the room.
“What’s wrong? Come in,” the king of Farsas invited her easily, noticing that she wasn’t moving.
Once Clara finally emerged from her cage of astonishment, she sat down gingerly next to the man and poured him a drink. “Is it all right for Your Majesty to be in a place like this?”
“It’s not, which is why I came in secret.”
“Surely you could have any beautiful maiden you desire.”
“The one I’m in love with is pretty stubborn.”
Oscar drained his glass, then set it aside. He gazed back at the woman. She was undoubtedly lovely, though her features gave an impression of instability. He reached out and caught up a lock of her hair. Upon closer analysis, her glossy, soft black hair was a shade lighter than the witch’s. “…Hers really is the color of night.”
“Your Majesty? Did you say something?”
“No, nothing. More importantly, I heard you can sing a very interesting song. I came to hear it.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t. I fear for my life if I ever got caught here.”
Clara was shocked once more into silence. She was different from the woman at the tavern. If Clara wished people to die as she sang, they would. This young king likely had no idea. “Please don’t joke around. You have no heir.”
“Just so you know, I don’t plan on dying.”
“Then please give up on listening to the song,” Clara said.
He placed her ivory white hand along his cheek. His eyes pierced into hers, laden as they were with the power to compel people to obey him. She gasped, feeling as if his blue eyes would suck her in completely.
This wouldn’t do.
She couldn’t sing. Even if she could, she couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t wish for him to die.
She couldn’t kill him.
“I’m asking you to sing.”
“…I’m unable to. In return, perhaps I can offer you something else. This is, after all, an establishment for slaking all manner of desires.”
“I don’t want a woman. I’ve got what I need.”
“Then it seems all you can do is leave. There is nothing I can provide you with, be it a song or my conversation.”
The king scowled in displeasure at that. Up until now, he had generally received whatever he wanted. He’d had the power and the self-awareness to make that possible.
Now he stood bested by a prostitute wielding bargaining as her weapon. Clara would not yield, even to a king.
Instead of speaking, she wound her arms around his neck. Very slowly, she lowered herself onto him. She pressed her lips to his with a clear passion.
It didn’t feel real. She wished this moment would go on forever.
The day after returning from the tavern, Tinasha headed for the study to report on the events of the last night.
Oscar listened to her while managing a stack of paperwork.
“And I’ve asked Doan to take care of that, so when the application comes in, please approve it,” Tinasha concluded.
“Got it. Sorry to have you go through all that trouble.”
“It’s nothing. Actually, I have a favor to ask. I’d like to borrow some mages for about a week, starting today. I’d only need them in the evenings after they’ve finished their lectures. And I’ll pay their honorarium.”
“I don’t mind. But what are you going to do?”
“I want to organize the Tuldarr treasure vault. The seal is broken, and I can’t have anyone robbing it. So I’d like to sort through everything and move it to the tower…and, if possible, to Farsas.”
“The treasure vault? You’d transport that to Farsas?”
“I won’t use anything even if it’s placed in the tower, so I’ll keep only the dangerous items there. Moving the rest here means that it’ll just end up hoarded away, but I’d still like to.”
“Huh… Okay, got it. Go ahead,” Oscar approved, letting out a little sigh.
With the treasure vault emptied and the spirits brought under the witch’s control, it seemed the entire legacy of the Magic Empire of Tuldarr would soon be entirely lost. Briefly, Oscar wondered if this was really all right. He decided that if this was Tinasha’s decision as the last queen of Tuldarr, then so be it.
The queen with no throne floated up into the air as she always did, flipping upside down and looking Oscar in the eyes. She observed her own reflection in the man’s sky-colored eyes, while Oscar saw his in her ebony ones.
Tinasha looked at him fondly, a softness in her gaze. Released from the delusions of her past, she now gave off an air of innate ease and reliability. Oscar reached out to draw her face closer. He moved to kiss her red lips, but before he could, she noticed something and cried, “Oh!”
“What is it…?” Oscar frowned, put out at the thwarting of his maneuver.
Tinasha did not heed the gripe, however. She was pointing to his collarbone. “You have a bruise there. Did you run into something?”
That damn woman, Oscar cursed in silence. He took care not to let the emotion show on his face. Things would get nasty if Tinasha discovered his little meddling excursion. She’d warned him so sternly not to get involved, after all. If she knew he’d ignored her cautioning, he would absolutely be in for the lecture to end all lectures. Thankfully, the witch hadn’t caught on.
Tinasha rested her chin on her hands, tilting her head thoughtfully. “I can’t erase your bruise. Do you want me to use a glamour to conceal it?”
“Yeah, could you? Speaking of, how are the ones on your foot?”
“You should worry more about yourself,” Tinasha muttered, looking put out. She placed a small illusory effect on Oscar’s collarbone and then kissed his forehead while she was at it.
That evening, Tinasha brought five mages—Kav, Doan, Sylvia, Renart, and Pamyra—to the Tuldarr treasure vault. The sight was so magnificent that they let out cries of wonder.
“It’s a mountain of treasure!”
“It is a treasure vault. Please pick out any items that resonate with faint magical power. We’ll bring those back to Farsas. Anything suspicious needs to be taken to my tower, so set those aside, too. If you find anything that seems like it would be dangerous to touch, let me know. Once it’s all done, I’ll gift you with something here.”
“We’ll do our best!” chorused the group. All six were wearing clothes that were easy to move around in, and they set about classifying the magical objects one by one. It was a lot like packing up for a move. Shouts of admiration rang out everywhere, which the witch found amusing.
Doan waved Tinasha over, and she approached. “I completed the paperwork to have performances of that song canceled,” he said.
“Sounds good. Let me know if there’s any trouble.”
It was enough just to have cut off a potential avenue for Oscar to get into trouble. Humming happily, Tinasha started organizing. Things proceeded without incident.
Clara hadn’t expected him to ever return.
Her heart was in a flutter at the unexpected visit. As soon as he saw her, he snapped, “Don’t mark me. I told you this was a matter of life and death, didn’t I?”
He was clearly very grumpy, but even that made her happy. She let out a laugh like tinkling bells. “Do you have someone very jealous in your life?”
“I wouldn’t say jealous, but… She’s not attached to me at all,” he admitted with a grimace. A light in his eyes told Clara that he was thinking of his beloved, and it chilled her to the core. That was an emotion a prostitute should never show on the surface, however. She gave an awkward smile. “Then there’s no need for you to be so faithful.”
“Not attached to me and unwilling to act are two different things. If she finds out I went rogue, she’ll destroy me and the country.”
Naturally, Clara took that remark as a joke. The man sat in a chair and took the liberty of leaning against her.
“I’m quite envious that you have someone that concerned about you. What is she like?” Clara asked.
This made him pause and think for a bit. His witch was truly an enigma. It was difficult to put her nature into words to explain to someone who didn’t know her. “Hmm… If I could compare her to anything, it would be purest white and darkest black. She’s like a leopard who enjoys human company.”
“Oh my. She must be a well-brought-up lady who hasn’t suffered a day in her life.”
“She has. Very much, in fact. But that’s not her at all…”
It was true that Tinasha was well brought up, but it was equally true that she’d suffered far beyond the scope of what most were capable of envisioning.
Besides, she wasn’t merely a lady; she was a queen. Oscar had witnessed that firsthand during the Cuscull conflict. That was why she understood better than anyone else the weight borne by royalty.
“Well anyway, about that song. I didn’t come here to bargain with you,” Oscar started.
“I refuse,” Clara stated.
“Don’t be so hasty. Most things can’t kill me.”
“No man has listened to my song and lived to tell of it.”
“Then I suppose that will make me the first.”
Clara was left bewildered that he wouldn’t back down.
She couldn’t sing, for she had no reason to kill him. If she refused outright, however, she feared he would stop visiting. That was no good, either. The woman needed a way to ensure his return. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to steep herself in the heat burning deep in his body, in his skin. That was why she had to barter.
Clara got to her feet and caught hold of his jaw from behind, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Hmm… If you became my regular, I’d think about it. You’d have to come at least five times.”
Oscar made a plainly sour expression upon hearing Clara’s terms. “I don’t have the time for that. Sing today.”
“I refuse. This is a place where women sell their bodies, not where songs are peddled. If you would like to hear a tune, you must pay the appropriate price.”
The demand caused Oscar to grimace. He wondered if simply giving up was the better choice.
On the other hand, more could die if he turned back now. It would also mean the past two nights of sneaking out had been a waste, something Oscar was loath to admit. He’d considered sending out one of his retainers instead, but if the retainer got killed, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. The witch had reminded him insistently that she couldn’t protect him from psychological spells, but the first sign of magical interference would expose Clara outright. At the very least, Oscar felt confident that he could handle whatever might happen better than most people.
“Five times, huh. And you promise?”
“Yes, I promise,” Clara replied, feeling as if she were walking on air after hearing his acceptance.
An hour later, Oscar left the brothel. He walked for a short while before stopping and suddenly turning around. He called out to someone in the alley. “Als, I see you.”
“Huh?” came an astonished voice from the shadows.
Oscar couldn’t help bursting out laughing. “I lied. I didn’t actually see you.”
“…Your Majesty,” said Als, emerging with an awkward bow. He wasn’t wearing his jacket, so as not to stand out in the back streets. Mystified, the general asked his king, “When did you notice me?”
“As soon as I came out. We’ve known each other forever, so I picked you out right away.”
“I saw you’d snuck out of the castle, so I couldn’t help but follow after.”
“I don’t mind. This is perfect,” Oscar said, falling into step with Als and catching him up on the song that heralded death.
Als’s eyes widened with shock. “This is different from the one Miss Tinasha went to see?”
“Yeah. This one is very hush-hush, only spoken of in whispers by noblemen and merchants. When you consider the kind of place it originates from, it makes sense that they don’t want it becoming public knowledge. This song’s also more powerful than the tavern one—just about everyone who’s heard it has perished.”
“That’s horrifying. And so odd that two singers would appear at the same time,” Als observed.
“True… That part is troubling,” Oscar agreed.
According to Tinasha’s report, the tavern woman was just a singer, but perhaps there was a deeper connection between the two than first believed. Oscar thought it a good idea for him to go listen to the other song once.
“Als, I hate to ask, but I’d like for you to dig up all the details on the people who died at the brothel. Find out their causes of death and any underlying circumstances.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. But are you sure you don’t want to ask Lazar?”
“No. He’s no good at lying to Tinasha.”
Als blanched once he heard the witch’s name. “Don’t tell me you haven’t told her about this…”
“If I had, you can bet I wouldn’t be here right now.”
Als suddenly realized he’d been drawn into a nasty secret and immediately felt a bitter sense of regret.
That witch absolutely hated it when Oscar acted rashly on his own. To make matters worse, this was a song that could herald death. If this put the king’s life on the line, Tinasha would be so incensed she might end up risking her own life, too.
Realizing this, Als cocked his head, puzzled. “I wonder if she’d feel jealous if she found out about all this.”
“I don’t think so. She told me herself that I have to start searching for a queen now that my curse was broken.”
“True.”
“Don’t just agree; you’re going to put me in a sour mood. Anyway, that’s why I think she’ll only get upset over the sneaking out and acting reckless parts,” Oscar reasoned.
“Only, huh…? That might be the most frightening thing of all… She’ll have the whole castle disappear.”
Als was filled with trepidation, but Oscar just said lightly, “Well, if I do get busted, we’ll face her together. Collective liability.”
“Spare me…”
“She doesn’t let off people who keep quiet about what they know. Lazar got the screws put to him before.”
The illicit temptation to betray his king and spill everything to Tinasha flitted through Als’s mind. Oscar must have seen right through that, though, because he clapped Als on the shoulder. “And I won’t let you off if you bust me voluntarily. I’ll be waiting on that investigation.”
“…Yes, Your Majesty,” Als complied, accepting his orders with slumped shoulders.
Clara returned to her room and started picking out her outfit for Oscar’s next visit. She couldn’t recall how long it’d been since her heart thrilled with such exhilaration; it actually surprised her that she was still capable of feeling this way. Singing a happy tune, she laid out a bunch of gathered clothes on the bed.
“Clara, what are you doing?” came a sudden voice, and she jumped.
“Oh, Simon. I’m choosing an outfit,” Clara answered brightly.
Simon slanted a look at her. “Do you really like him that much?”
“We’re talking about the king! …No, it’s not that. I like him. There’s no one but him.”
“He’s way above your station.”
“I know that! I don’t want to be his wife or anything. I’m aware of our social statuses.”
“So long as you understand,” Simon replied flippantly, sinking into a rattan chair. He sighed as Clara put together an ensemble, acting as spirited as a teenage girl.
Clara’s ear caught the dispirited sound, and she did an about-face. “What? Do you have something to say?”
“He wants you to sing, doesn’t he? You should just sing for him.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to kill him…”
“Just sing while wishing he’d fall in love with you.”
Clara’s eyes grew wide. That hadn’t occurred to her. She thought all her powers could do was kill. “Do you really think I can do that?”
“I bet you can. You’ve got the power.”
“Really?” she asked nervously, and Simon laughed.
“I know you can,” he insisted.
Simon always knew how to fill Clara with confidence.
The king didn’t come the next day. When he did visit on the following day, he brought a little red dragon with him. Clara’s eyes sparkled with childish joy upon seeing a dragon for the first time. Oscar made sure to warn her immediately, however.
“Don’t touch it. It’s not all that tame.”
“It’s lovely,” she breathed.
He gave a strained smile before tossing the dragon a fruit from the plate piled high on the table. Nimbly, the dragon snapped it from the air and swallowed it down.
“I was busy yesterday, and I’ll be busy tomorrow, too.”
“I don’t mind. Naturally your work must come first.”
“If that’s how you feel, then sing for me today.”
“No,” Clara declared, jerking her head aside. Thinking of when she’d sing a new song made her heart pound out of her chest. She fought to keep a smile off her face. Oscar paid her no attention and kept tossing fruit to the dragon. Before long, the plate was empty. Oscar’s dragon was rather small, and Clara was unsure where the tiny thing was putting it all.
“Should I have a new plate brought up?” she asked.
“Don’t bother. It actually doesn’t need to eat.”
Oscar made no attempt to hide his desire to leave. Clara hated to see it, but it also stirred her desire to change his tune.
Right now, he was hers.
That thought was especially sweet, and it seared itself into her heart. So she wound her alabaster arms around him. Atop the table, the dragon curled up and went to sleep.
After four days of organizing the treasure vault, all the magic implements had finally been cleared out. With so much empty space, the repository now looked over twice its size. While the majority of stored items had been small, there’d been a staggering number of them. Sorting through all the trinkets would’ve been a far greater task than six people could’ve handled.
Since they were handling magic implements, only mages could help with the task. What’s more, it was the Tuldarr treasure vault, so Tinasha could only allow in people she trusted. The team she’d appointed sifted through the remaining objects efficiently.
As Tinasha categorized a shelf of objects in the back, she noticed a small box made of white stone that had been all but hidden deep in the recesses of the shelf. Pushing aside some other unremarkable things, she reached out and grabbed it.
Opening the lid, she found a blue crystal sphere inside. It was slightly bigger than her palm. Magical sigils she’d never seen before were engraved on the surface. “Hmm? I feel like I’ve seen this before…”
Tinasha tilted her head to one side and then the other as she pondered but couldn’t recall where she’d seen it. The carved symbols were alien to her, and she couldn’t so much as manage a guess as to what they did.
After considering it for a while, Tinasha decided it should go to her tower. Placing it with a heap of other magic implements, she returned to the others just in time for Sylvia to run up to her excitedly.
“Miss Tinasha! We found this!”
“What is it?” asked the witch. Sylvia presented her with some lace folded into layer upon layer. Tinasha detected a trace of magic; evidently the stuff was charmed not to deteriorate. She spread it out, taking care not to dirty it, and saw that it was a long wedding veil. “What in the world…?”
“Here, look at this!” Sylvia cried, pointing to the edge of the underside of the veil. There was some tiny silver stitching there.
Suspicious, Tinasha got a closer look. In the script of Tuldarr was written, “To my beloved daughter Tinasha. May you grow up healthy.”
“Oh my…,” Tinasha said, gaping in shock at seeing her own name there.
This veil was a present sent to the palace from parents whose names and faces Tinasha had never known. They’d sent it as a gift for the child that’d been taken from them.
Tinasha didn’t know what to say. Some unknown emotion was burning hot inside her.
Frozen, Tinasha stood there staring at the silver embroidery.
On the night of his fifth visit, Oscar again brought the dragon and appeared to be in unusually high spirits. Sprawled on the bed, Clara watched his back as he dressed. “Why are you in such a good mood today?”
“Am I?”
“You’re acting like you are.”
He chuckled, buckling on his sword belt. “My girl found something interesting. She’s so cute when she’s happy. And what she found will look really good on her when she’s a bride.”
“…When she’s a bride?” Clara repeated, feeling rage boil low in her belly. While this was a brothel, it was still considered insensitive to discuss other women in the bedroom. Oscar was probably doing it on purpose. He was implying he didn’t consider her an option.
Clara understood as much. She meant to keep her feelings to herself, but hearing Oscar speak that way of someone else proved too much to bear. She dug her nails into the pillow. Her obsession with him ran too deep; it tilted dangerously toward hatred.
“I want to kill him…” The unbidden whisper startled even Clara.
“You’ll keep your promise tomorrow?” Oscar asked, his tone lighthearted.
“…Yes.”
“Don’t expect to get off easy if you break your word.”
“I am aware.”
Oscar left the room without looking back once.
As Clara watched the door close behind him, she weighed her own emotions with lifeless eyes. Should she love him or kill him?
Morning arrived quickly.
Clara had spent the entire time worrying. She didn’t sleep a wink, though she might have had flashes of dreams.
Beneath her love for Oscar was a desire to kill him. She herself didn’t know what she wanted to do. This was the first time in her life she’d agonized over anything to such an extent.
Unfortunately, the appointed final meeting arrived all too soon.
With makeup covering the dark circles under her eyes, Clara welcomed Oscar with Simon at her side. They did not go to the usual room but to a hall used for banquets.
Oscar was sitting cross-legged directly on the floor, the dragon in his lap. Calm in the face of potential death, he annoyed Clara deeply. “All right, time to let me hear it.”
“Are you prepared?” Clara asked.
“I don’t plan to die,” Oscar assured her. That was enough to settle Clara’s mind for her.
His strength was merely arrogance. Why wouldn’t he look at her? Was he trying to cast her aside? The more she yearned for him, the more she hated how unshakable he was.
A bitter smile came to her lips. She turned back to Simon and gave a signal.
He strummed the zither, the note trembling in the air and casting a gloomy pall over the room.
Clara took a breath of air and then began to sing. In song, she sobbed out the passions she could no longer hold back.
“Here is a forbidden place, a room with no air.
I sing a song that no one listens to.
A flower falls into my hand, leaving not a single petal behind.
You are not here—you are not anywhere.
My hands grab onto nothing at all.
Should night come again tomorrow, I may as well die.
Here is a forbidden place, a dream with no air.”
Clara’s hands trembled.
She didn’t know if she was standing upright. She looked at Oscar and saw that he was listening intently, no change in expression.
She wanted him so badly she thought she’d go crazy.
She was afraid of the song coming to an end. Not even she could guess what would happen when it finally did. Clara’s voice clung to the melody Simon plucked on his instrument, but then she realized he had stopped playing and whirled around.
Simon’s eyes were wide in shock. For the first time, Clara became aware that there was a second voice singing the song. It trilled the same words and hit the same notes in perfect synchronization. Careful listening revealed that the second singer had to be someone other than Clara, however.
Immediately, Clara silenced herself.
A beat later, the other voice stopped, too.
She glanced at Oscar and saw him grinning with amusement. She flew into a rage and shrieked, “Why?! What did you do?!”
“What did I do…? Come to think of it, you wanted to know about my girl. Allow me to introduce Tinasha.”
His final word was addressed to the dragon on his lap. With a glimmer of magic, the creature became an attractive woman.
Her skin was white as porcelain, and her hair was black as night. She was breathtakingly beautiful.
In her dark eyes was a glint of displeasure. From her position on Oscar’s lap, she threw Clara and Simon a cold glance. Oscar kissed the witch’s cheek, then whispered into her ear, “Which one’s the leader?”
“He is,” she replied without hesitation.
“I thought so. I completely wasted my time.”
“Wasted?!” Clara exploded. An insuppressible sense of defeat welled up inside her.
…She never thought it would be her.
Fury clouded the courtesan’s mind. She wanted to rip Oscar away from Tinasha.
While Clara seethed, Simon stood up behind her. He reached out a hand to the two guests, but the witch commanded, “Don’t move. If you do, I will judge you to be in opposition and kill you.”
Simon’s lips curled into a sneer. A spell configuration manifested in his open hand.
Then he was sent flying. He collided hard with the far wall and fell limply to the floor. Clara stared at the sight, unable to believe her eyes. She staggered over to Simon, who wasn’t moving. His wrist was bent at a sickening angle. He looked like a broken doll, and Clara saw red.
“What did you do to him?!”
“I warned him,” the witch said, swiftly rising to her feet. Her threatening aura filled and dominated the room.
It was the same pressure that had proven frightening to tens of thousands of soldiers. Clara was undaunted, however.
“How dare you! He was the only thing I had in this world! What do you know?!”
“I won’t know anything unless you tell me. Or was he so important to you that you wish to meet him in death?”
“Die! Both of you!”
Nothing mattered anymore.
After a moment of hesitation in the face of Clara’s mad frenzy, the witch drew up a spell to fire intangible power at her.
From behind, Oscar got to his feet and stayed her hand, however. “Wait—don’t kill her,” he insisted.
Tinasha threw him a sour look. “She might not have been the instigator, but dozens of people are dead.”
“Everyone’s wished they could kill someone.”
“She’s thinking of killing you. A tiny splinter could be made a sword with time. It’s best to nip it off now.”
“Don’t bother with her. Stop.”
Tinasha sighed heavily at getting told over and over to hold back. She dismissed her spell and faced Oscar. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling attached.”
“I’ll take her statement through the proper channels. It’ll teach the noblemen a lesson, too.”
“I wish there was something that would teach you a lesson.”
Tinasha waved her hand, and Clara collapsed.
With the main offender dead, his accomplice—Clara—was banished from Farsas. As Als looked between Clara’s written testimony and the investigation report, he let out a whistle of admiration. “That Simon guy made it look like suicide, but he was the one actually killing them. What a letdown.”
“That was the easiest way to do it,” replied Tinasha as she sipped her tea in the king’s study. The matter was all resolved now. “The woman had a bit of magic, too. She hadn’t undergone any training, but she could layer it on top of her song to give her a degree of control over the mood of her listener. The audience would get depressed and think they were about to commit suicide. That’s when Simon would strike.”
Oscar voiced a doubt after her succinct summary. “That woman believed herself to possess some other sort of power.”
“Everyone she wished dead went ahead and died one after another. It’s only natural she’d think something like that after a while. The man egged her on repeatedly, too,” Tinasha explained.
“What an incredible tale…” Als sighed, looking up at the ceiling. All the secrets had been revealed, but the case itself remained so peculiar that he had a hard time believing it all. “But what was his aim in the first place?”
Chin resting in her hands and a sullen look on her face, Tinasha answered, “My guess is that Simon just wanted to give Clara what she wanted. Evidently, this all started when a patron cruelly insulted her. Then he created the song for her. Their signal was that she would sing the song to someone she wanted dead. She was the one who selected their victims.”
“And the tavern singer happened to hear the song and decided to make a name for herself by singing it, too?” asked Als.
“The tavern singer was the superior performer. The tune was designed to manipulate emotions. An exceptional voice meant that no magic was needed. To sum it all up, everything stemmed from the man who composed the song. Truthfully, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen such a talent. If he’d been part of the royal court, a skill like that might’ve changed history.”
After Tinasha brought the topic to a close, she returned her empty cup to the tray. Directing a frigid look at Oscar, she asked, “So how much of a lecture do you want to hear?”
Oscar grimaced. “You’ve already blown up the study; isn’t that enough?”
“Of course it’s not,” she retorted.
Als looked around the room. They weren’t in Oscar’s normal workplace. The witch had completely destroyed that room. That had been the perfect opportunity to move Oscar to a room more suitable for a king. At present, Als, Oscar, and Tinasha were standing in the new study. Oscar grumbled as he processed paperwork. “I swore Als to secrecy and everything… I never thought Doan would uncover the composer.”
“How blessed you are to have such talented subjects. If you haven’t learned your lesson, I’ll hang you from the tower.”
After taking care of the tavern situation, Doan had conducted further investigation to prevent any more trouble. In the course of his work, he’d determined that the song originated from a brothel. As soon as Tinasha heard that, she grilled Lazar and confirmed that requests had come in from noblemen.
Then she visited the brothel herself.
On the night before, Oscar had returned from a meeting with Clara and was hard at work with Als. Suddenly, the door to the room blew apart, startling the two men.
The witch strolled in through the wreckage of the door. Her eyes came to rest on Oscar, and she smiled widely. It was the expression of a monarch—bereft of innocence. She opened both arms wide and called up a gigantic spell. Adorably tilting her head to one side, Tinasha asked, “You can die when you hear the song or die now by my hand. Which do you choose?”
“………”
Immediately, Oscar and Als realized their secret was out. Als squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of death.
Magic rolled off the witch in unrestrained waves. One by one, the vases and jars decorating the room exploded. Oscar considered how to react for a moment. He decided to start by asking, “Where did you hear about it?”
“I interrogated the brothel owner.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I didn’t hurt him, although I don’t think he’ll sleep easy for a while.”
A windowpane groaned a terrible sound before shattering. A calm night breeze blew in from outside.
As that breeze swept past her, Tinasha flashed a wickedly beautiful grin.
It was her witch’s smile, capable of entrancing all who saw it and driving them to death. Her voice sounded like clear ice breaking to pieces as she said, “No matter how many times I tell you, it seems you never quite understand. It’s getting quite irritating. Giving in to curiosity and overestimating your own abilities… Since it sounds like you want to die in a terribly boring way, I can just kill you now. Go on, stretch out your neck.”
She sounded dead serious.
A table and shelves burst to splinters. Als gasped at the frightening level of destruction. He wasn’t sure if he should get between Oscar and Tinasha or not, but he also didn’t think he could do anything to improve the situation.
Oscar stood up and met the witch’s gaze head-on. “Just wait a moment, Tinasha.”
“Shut up.”
The well-constructed desk Oscar regularly used split in two as easily as paper. The walls began to bend at a convex angle with a stomach-churning sound. Powerful winds stirred piles of documents into a vortex.
Oscar strode over the broken desk and approached the floating witch. With a hand, he reached out to her.
“Don’t touch me,” Tinasha snapped, trying to use magic to repel him. However, her own protective barrier canceled it out, and she was unable to.
Oscar pulled her into his arms, center of the storm as she was. “I’m sorry,” he admitted.
“Do you think this is something an apology can solve?”
“I don’t, but I’m apologizing anyway.”
Tinasha bit her lip. She looked down at Oscar with utter detestation.
The witch stared into the king’s eyes. They appeared calm but also slightly anxious.
Despite Tinasha being a witch, Oscar never showed any sign of being afraid of her. She liked that but also hated it.
“I want to bite you to pieces.”
“If that will make you feel better.”
“It won’t.”
“So I’d get bit for nothing.”
Tinasha raked Oscar’s hair up into disarray. She cradled his head and stared at him. “I owe you a lot, so I’m going to let this go. But if you do this again, I’m going back to my tower.”
“I understand. I’ll bear that in mind.”
For quite a while, Tinasha stayed gripping Oscar’s head. After venting all her frustration, she released him with a deep sigh. Slipping out of his grasp, she floated into the air.
His life spared, Oscar surveyed the room and blithely declared, “It’s totaled.”
When the witch heard that, she clicked her tongue in annoyance.
On the day after the old study’s destruction, Als was sipping tea in the new study as he muttered, “I really thought I was gonna die. Stop getting me involved in your schemes.”
“Lazar said the same thing to me earlier,” Oscar noted.
“It’s what you deserve,” Tinasha spat coldly, though she still refilled Oscar’s cup. That done, she sat herself down on the armrest of Oscar’s chair. “If you want to go around womanizing, just take an official consort or royal mistress or something. Are you an idiot, wandering around outside like that? Are you an idiot king?”
“It wasn’t like I meant to get up to any debauchery…”
“Shut up.”
“………”
Evidently, the witch was still angry. Like a child, she kicked Oscar in the shin with her heel. “In four hundred years, I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad, and you’re not even an enemy.”
“Well then, I’m glad.”
“You shouldn’t be!”
Using a kick to push herself forward, Tinasha slid off the armrest. Hands on her hips, she faced Oscar and stared him down. “…Well… Even if I get mad, it has no effect on you… So whatever. I feel like I’m just wasting my power by getting upset.”
Tinasha gave a little shrug, accompanied by the same sort of cute smile she usually wore. She reached out and patted Oscar’s head. The motion was so gentle that his eyes narrowed happily.
Oscar caught the witch’s hand and pressed a kiss to the top of it. “Once I have you, I won’t need anything else,” he said.
“That isn’t possible, so you need to choose someone properly,” Tinasha replied firmly. Then she let out a loud, high laugh. It was like the sound of a flower bursting into bloom. |
Unnamed Memory
10. Moon Fragments
A vast, pale-blue sky stretched out overhead.
Clouds streamed past and filtered the heat of the sun, shielding those below.
Amid this gentle afternoon, the clang of metal clashing against metal echoed throughout the castle courtyard. The clear sound rang brightly. At times, it would come in quick staccato, while at others, it would be a slow legato.
“Don’t fall back right away, Tinasha.”
“Urgh.”
Practice sword in hand, the witch parried blows from a similar weapon. She advanced toward her opponent’s left. Leaning forward lightly, she attempted to knock him off his feet.
Her blade was repelled with a soft clink, however. It went flying out of her hand, rotated several times in midair, and landed some distance away.
“Oh, that was close,” she said, clutching her numb wrist as she eyed the fallen sword.
Oscar rested the flat of his sword on Tinasha’s shoulder as he drawled, “Put up a barrier to repel anyone who might get close. I don’t want stray swords impaling people.”
“All right,” Tinasha agreed, and she jogged over to retrieve the weapon. After checking her wrist, she took hold of the hilt and assumed a fighting stance again.
“Is His Majesty here?” asked Als as he popped into the lounge. He’d looked everywhere for his king, and this was the last place on the list. He cocked his head to the side when he failed to find Oscar there, either.
Kav looked up from the essay he was writing and answered, “He’s outside.”
“Outside?” Als repeated, glancing toward the windows in the back. The mages who frequented the lounge were standing there, watching the courtyard below.
Als joined them and peered down, too. There he found his lord and the witch having a sword fight. “What’s going on here?” he inquired.
Pamyra answered him with a wince. “His Majesty said his reflexes were slowing and dragged Lady Tinasha out there.”
“I see.”
The witch was quite capable with a sword, but Oscar’s superior skill was quite apparent, even at a distance. Als, who fell somewhere between the two when it came to swordsmanship, studied their practice with rapt interest.
“Those two really do get along well,” commented Sylvia.
“I suppose they do,” replied Doan from his spot next to her. Then he remembered something, and an evil smirk crossed his face. “There’s only four months left in their contract. How about we bet on whether they’ll get married before it expires?”
“What?” cried Sylvia. Her brows knitted disapprovingly.
From behind them, Kav declared, “I’ll wager on it never happening,” without even looking up from his writing.
Doan laughed out loud after hearing his challenge so readily accepted.
“I bet that they will get married!” Sylvia shot back with a huff. Her cheeks were puffed out.
With sides drawn, the instigator of the wager joined in and said, “I’m with Kav. It won’t happen.”
Als shook his head in exasperation as he listened to the three mages. When the trio looked at him expectantly, however, he admitted, “I think they will. That’s my hope anyway.”
The votes were split half-and-half, and everyone looked pensive. Pamyra, who hadn’t placed a bet yet, offered, “I think the most important issue facing them isn’t their own feelings but the political situation surrounding them.”
“True enough,” Doan agreed with a nod.
Als cut in. “But in terms of someone who’ll be an immediate asset, there’s no better queen than Miss Tinasha. She’s strong, and she’s the heir to Tuldarr. She has knowledge and techniques that any other country would love to have.”
“She brought almost all the artifacts from the Tuldarr treasure vault to Farsas,” Pamyra revealed.
“You don’t say,” Als replied. He looked down at the witch in the courtyard with a good degree of shock. She was parrying and thrusting her sword in silence, her lithe form supple and flexible.
Pamyra watched her lady calmly. “I bet they will get married. I’d like her to find happiness sometime soon.”
Unaware she was the subject of much speculation, Tinasha lunged again and once more found her sword knocked away.
Oscar returned to his study, feeling satisfied now that he’d loosened up his muscles. Tinasha, however, flopped onto the couch by the wall as soon as she got through the door. She crumpled into her seat like a boneless cat.
“You all right?” Oscar asked with a frown.
“I’ll be fine once I’ve had an hour to rest. I don’t have a lot of stamina…”
“You should put on a bit more weight.”
“I don’t think I can build any more muscle than this,” she answered, staring at her thin arms and legs. To all appearances, mage’s bodies were low in fat and muscle.
It was stranger still that she could even wield a sword with that physique, but perhaps her many years of experience had afforded her technique enough to compensate. In reality, no one could’ve held something as heavy as a sword without first strengthening their physical form in some way.
“You’re not tired?” Tinasha asked.
“That was just a warm-up for me. Lately I feel like I’m going to rot away behind a desk.”
As she thought about it, Tinasha realized that she’d seen Oscar doing nothing but clerical work for the past three weeks. The last time the king had enjoyed some fresh air and exercise had been during the death song incident.
To Tinasha, Oscar seemed the type who belonged out in the thick of battle. The truth, however, was that he spent almost all his time dealing with documents. He never even took time off. Tinasha felt a bit sorry for him. Oscar was still a young man, after all.
“What do you think about visiting the brothel?” the witch suddenly suggested.
“Are you teasing me?” Oscar asked, incredulous.
“I’m not trying to…,” Tinasha said, floating up into the air and zooming over to his side. She was so tired that it was easier to use magic than walk.
With his free hand, Oscar tugged on a lock of her hair. “I’d rather you take me to the sea again.”
“That’s easy enough,” replied the witch, sinking down onto the edge of the desk and picking up the papers that were left. She felt like there weren’t as many as usual. Checking the clock, she saw that it was only noon. “Then how about I help you with these, and we go somewhere in the evening? We can go to the sea or wherever else you’d like.”
Oscar’s eyes widened a fraction at her suggestion. “We can go anywhere?”
“As long as it’s on the mainland. The city, the mountains, the lake, anywhere.”
“The lake, then,” Oscar decided.
“The lake it is,” Tinasha repeated with a soft smile.
Oscar felt his heart dance with joy like when he was a child.
After all his hard work, he’d earned a bit of fun. So long as he was with his witch, he couldn’t ask for anything more.
With Tinasha’s help, Oscar’s remaining paperwork was resolved in under half an hour. She went back to her rooms to get ready and changed into a light, flowy dress.
“Normally the two of you are busy when you go out together, so relax and enjoy yourselves,” Pamyra said cheerily as she helped her lady change.
Tinasha nodded but picked up on something odd she couldn’t overlook. “Something about what you said makes it sound like we’re a pair of lovers…”
“That’s precisely what it looks like.”
“Wait…,” Tinasha objected, feeling as if something was wrong.
Pamyra gave the witch a placid smile in return. “Judging by appearances, the two of you are very intimate.”
This was a clear wake-up call. When Tinasha reflected on how she and Oscar normally interacted, she could certainly see why things would seem that way. Tinasha acknowledged the facts and let out a sigh. “I guess it’s because I’ve gotten used to him touching me all the time…and I end up touching him, too. If this keeps up for another hundred years, I might end up marrying him by mistake. Scary!”
“Will it really take another hundred years…? And even then, ‘by mistake’…?” Pamyra murmured, feeling incredibly disappointed. She was hoping to see her lady happily wed.
Oscar and Tinasha left the castle before sunset. First, they used Tinasha’s transportation array to jump to her tower; then they flew farther west on Nark’s back. Oscar was in holiday mode, carrying a normal longsword instead of Akashia.
“Which lake are we headed to?” he inquired.
“Lake Soknas in the south of Old Tuldarr. Now it’s part of Magdalsia, I believe. We’re almost there.”
Magdalsia was a small nation in the southwest. Cattle farming thrived there, and mountains and forest dominated the majority of the country.
As they flew through the evening sky on Nark’s back, red slowly began to tinge the sky. The setting sun dipped over the mountaintops. Tinasha pointed to the overlapping peaks.
“There it is, look.”
Tucked between the mountains was a flat stretch of land. Its edges were ringed with trees, and the lake in the center glittered with a reflection of the evening sun. Nark gradually dropped altitude.
“I came here many, many times when I was little. A long time ago, you used to be able to collect bluish crystals called moonstones by the waterside, but I heard that you almost never find them now. I miss them,” Tinasha explained.
“…I see,” Oscar answered.
It was rare for the witch to talk about her past, and Oscar studied her face intently. He saw only nostalgia there, no gloom, and that reassured him.
Nark descended lower and lower. By the time the dragon was about three stories above the ground, it was flying directly over the lake. The witch leaned to one side off the dragon’s back and gazed down below. The water was clear but fairly deep, as the bottom wasn’t visible.
“Where should we land?” Tinasha wondered aloud.
“Okay, let’s go!” Oscar declared.
“What?”
He scooped her up in his arms and leaped off the dragon.
Her long scream echoed across the lake, followed by a gigantic splash.
Several seconds later, Oscar floated to the surface with Tinasha in his arms. He burst out laughing at the shock on her face.
“Y-you gave me a scare… What do you think you’re doing?”
“I thought that would be nice and invigorating.”
“It was more like terrifying!” Tinasha cried. She felt all over his body to check for injuries. He’d shielded her from the impact, so she was fine. Most likely owing to the protective barrier, even his sword was still in its sheath. All was well.
Looking up, Oscar saw Nark circling the lake while shrinking smaller; it had noticed its master was gone. Still laughing, Oscar readjusted his hold on Tinasha. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you scream.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve heard it myself…,” she grumbled, placing a hand on Oscar’s shoulder and pushing off up into the air. She wrung out water from the hem of her dress. She hadn’t planned to swim today, so the cloth was sopping and heavy. Looking down, Tinasha saw that Oscar had started swimming. Fortunately, the water temperature was perfect. He was having so much fun that he actually looked his age for once, and Tinasha grinned. “It looks like this will be a good break for you. I’m glad.”
“All thanks to you. Does anything live in this lake?”
“In the past, it was just ordinary sea creatures, but now no one knows. Try to be careful.”
“Got it.”
After flying around the area, Nark landed on the witch’s shoulder. She lowered herself to the surface of the water and sat down there.
The eastern edge of the lake glittered a crimson shade, while in the west it was dark from the shade of the trees. A pale moon began to claw its way up. The sky was still a few shades lighter than the color of Oscar’s eyes.
Tinasha raked back her wet hair. She could use magic to dry it, but it wasn’t especially necessary, since it could very easily get wet again. Oscar swam up to her and rested his chin on her knees. “You look like a water spirit doing that.”
“Do I? Maybe I shouldn’t be sitting on the water.”
“Eh, I think it’s fine,” Oscar said. He tugged on her hair to bring her face close and planted a kiss on her cheek.
Tinasha’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s, and she gazed back at him with a complicated look on her face. “You know, Pamyra said we seem like a pair of lovers.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Oscar’s counter came so quickly that the witch had to take a moment to consider the question. Even if they seemed that way to others, that didn’t mean anything had actually changed.
“…Not really.”
“I suppose we would, though,” Oscar commented, smiling at Tinasha as he pushed back stray locks of his hair. Most of his smiles were more on the intimidating side—wry smirks or amused grins—so when he showed a simple grin like this, it was utterly captivating.
Tinasha reached out to touch his face. His blue eyes reflected the darkling sky. Upon gazing into them, she thought she could see the moon there, too, and leaned closer for a better look.
That was when Oscar yanked Tinasha down into the water, cradling her in his arms and pulling her to him. Not a moment later, something whizzed through the air. Something flew in from the shore and collided with Oscar’s barrier.
“What was that?!” Tinasha cried.
“An arrow…,” Oscar replied.
Tinasha rushed to catch Nark in her arms as the creature hit the water. Narrowly avoiding sinking, it thrashed in her arms. Oscar stood in front of them protectively, glaring at the shore.
“Did you hit it?”
“I don’t know. It went into the water.”
Five men stared out at the lake surface from the forest at the water’s edge.
It’d looked like someone was sitting on top of the water, but that must have been an optical illusion. One man gave up and shrugged, lowering his bow.
“Would’ve been great to get a water spirit’s treasure, though.”
“If that really was a water spirit, you don’t want to provoke it. And even if you killed it, it would just sink into the lake and you’d never get it.”
“Whatever it was looked human, but it was probably a fish or something.”
The men exchanged disappointed and relieved remarks as they turned back to leave.
Just then, a loud splash came from behind them.
There was a woman standing on the shore that they could see through the trees. Her feet were submerged, and the hem of her black dress trailed in the water. Long jet-black hair and glistening white skin painted a portrait of ethereal beauty.
The men froze, but one of the younger ones pulled out an arrow. Taking that as a signal, the rest of the group did the same.
“Wait. We’re human,” the woman insisted. The men squinted suspiciously at her.
“Human? Really?”
“Yes, really. We came from Farsas.”
“I knew you’d look like a water spirit,” came a new voice. Startled, the group of hapless hunters scanned the woods. They saw a young man leaning against a tree with a sword fastened at his hip. He was dripping wet from head to toe, as if he’d been swimming. “That’s my companion. She’s a mage.”
“Ah…,” the men murmured, finally accepting the explanation. Mages were a rare sight in rural lands, though there were many in Farsas who were ignorant of magic users as well.
A man who looked to be the oldest of the group stepped forward. “We’re very sorry. We were convinced she was a water spirit and acted terribly. Are you hurt at all?”
“I’m fine,” the woman said with a bright smile, coming to stand next to her companion. The men bowed their heads, abashed.
“Normally, we’d be too scared of a water spirit to lay a finger on one, but we panicked…”
“Has there been some sort of problem recently?” inquired the witch.
“No, there’s a festival in our town today,” one hunter explained.
“A festival? For water spirit elimination?” Tinasha repeated, finding it curious. Quickly, she dried her clothes and Oscar’s. The men were thoroughly impressed by the trick.
One man in the middle of the group laughed as he explained, “It’s a marriage festival. Nowadays, the celebration almost never accompanies a real marriage, but the whole town still gets into it. People come from neighboring towns and villages to take part, too. Would you two like to join in?”
“What would that entail?” Tinasha pressed.
“Women just wait in town. Men make the rounds of the lake and rustle up gifts—from nature, that is. They bring them back to the woman they want to propose to.”
“I see.”
Rural areas had curious festivals. Mountain hamlets without much in the way of entertainment might toil all year preparing for festivals like this one. While Tinasha was impressed, she had no intention of participating. No sooner had she opened her mouth to refuse the invitation than Oscar tapped her lightly on the head.
“Sounds interesting. Let’s do it.”
“What?! Wh-what’s gotten into you?” she protested.
“We’re here and everything, so why not? You go head on into town.”
“You can’t be serious… You don’t even have Aka—”
Tinasha was about to say Akashia when Oscar ground his knuckles against her temples.
“I’ll be fine. Go on now,” Oscar insisted.
“I didn’t miss you doing this to me! Ow!”
Oscar patted his worrywart protector’s head. Leaning slightly, he whispered in her ear, “We’re somewhere safe. There’s no danger, so relax and wait for me. Things like this can be fun once in a while.”
“…All right. We did come here for you in the first place…”
Oscar still had Tinasha’s protective barrier, but above all else, he was a strong fighter in his own right. The townsmen saw that they’d wrapped up their discussion and showed Tinasha the way back to the town. Apparently, while there were only five of them now, many more would soon arrive to scour the woods.
Oscar gave the witch a jaunty wave. “Don’t follow any men you don’t know.”
“I’m not some lost child!” Tinasha retorted. While she still felt a bit uneasy, she had no choice but to leave and head for the town.
It only took a few minutes of walking before she arrived at the settlement. The place was in full festival mode. People were crowded onto the narrow streets, with alcohol and food on offer everywhere. It was completely dark, but soft lights gleamed from every direction, giving the whole place a warm glow. The sound of children singing drifted from somewhere nearby.
As Tinasha stood and paused at the entrance taking everything in, an unfamiliar middle-aged woman tapped her on the shoulder. “You’re here for the festival, aren’t you? Where have you come from?”
“Farsas.”
“Another faraway place… Well, you’re welcome here. Are you here alone?”
“I came with someone, but he’s out gathering things in the forest.”
“Ah, so you’ve got a boyfriend. Then you’ll need to change.”
“What?”
Before Tinasha could even ask why she needed to change, she was led away.
The middle-aged woman brought Tinasha to the town gathering hall, where she guided the confused witch into a room jammed full of women changing. A chorus of admiring cries rose up from the women near the entrance.
“Wow, so gorgeous.”
“Heard she came from Farsas. So sophisticated.”
The excited women ushered Tinasha into a chair before she could get a word in edgewise and set about applying makeup to her.
“Um…”
“Don’t talk! I’m putting on your lipstick now.”
All the ladies surrounding poor Tinasha appeared to be married. They gleefully painted her face. The younger women, on the other hand, were busy getting themselves ready. Tinasha wondered why she’d bothered coming to such a distant place when she could’ve been subjected to the same treatment back in the castle. She wanted to run away but knew that it’d upset the people attending to her.
Partway through a little sigh, Tinasha’s eyes suddenly widened. Something had made contact with Oscar’s protective barrier. A slight fluctuation in magic reverberated within her.
“What’s wrong?” asked the woman powdering Tinasha’s face after noticing her darkened expression.
“Nothing… I’m just worried about my companion.”
“He’s fine. You should trust your boyfriend more!” the lady assured her with a grin, clapping Tinasha on the back cheerfully. Worry had already sunk in, however, and Tinasha couldn’t shake it.
Finally, the women finished getting ready and trooped out to the town plaza. Tinasha followed, clad in the outfit she’d been forcibly loaned.
The center of the village was now full to the brim with women in gorgeous costumes, filling the place with the bright din of youth. As the women waited for their suitors, men returned from the woods one after another, found their mates, and presented them with gifts. Each presentation earned a chorus of sighing admiration, which in turn only elevated the overall excitement.
Tinasha took in the spectacle, standing at one edge of the plaza with a veil covering her face.
She did have some awareness of how her features made her stand out in a crowd. All she had to do now was meet up with Oscar and go home, but no matter how long she waited, he failed to show. Tinasha detected no further disturbances to the barrier, but that did little to reassure her.
The witch looked up at the sky from the gap in the veil. The moon glimmered translucently in the heavens.
She wondered if she should go after him or not.
It wasn’t that Tinasha didn’t trust Oscar, but knowing that he was alone made it difficult for her to relax. She was staring at the ground, plagued with indecision, when her veil was suddenly lifted up. Startled, Tinasha looked up.
“Did I keep you waiting?” asked a familiar voice.
Tinasha recognized Oscar and sighed deeply in relief. When they parted, his clothes were dry, but for some reason, he’d gotten all wet again. As she reached out to dry his clothes, she smiled and admitted, “I was worried.”
“No trust in me at all, huh? Hold out your hand.”
Puzzled, Tinasha held out both hands. Oscar dropped something he’d been holding into them. The five rounded crystals were tinged with faintest blue.
“These are…”
“I bet you haven’t seen them in a while, right?”
The townspeople surrounding the pair gasped at the sight of the rare moonstones.
For a while, Tinasha merely stared at the collected stones that rested in her open palms. She recalled the ones she’d once collected herself. They were long gone now.
Warmth bubbled up inside the witch’s chest. Blinking rapidly, she felt on the verge of tears. When she looked up at Oscar, he offered her an abashed smile.
“Thank you. I’m really…very happy,” Tinasha said, beaming at him. While her childhood was long past, the grin on her face still appeared innocent. She was positive she wasn’t doing a very good job of smiling, but she really was very happy.
Oscar leaned in close to her. She closed her eyes and accepted his kiss.
It didn’t matter that they looked like a pair of lovers even though they weren’t. She couldn’t put it into words.
It was enough that he was next to her, touching her.
All of it felt entirely natural, and that’s what made it real.
After Tinasha changed back, she and Oscar left the town. From Nark’s back, they watched the lake grow smaller and smaller in the distance.
Tinasha was clutching the moonstones protectively. “Where were these?”
“The lake bottom. I grabbed a water spirit and made it show me.”
The witch’s jaw dropped; she was speechless. This man had the rare talent of finding trouble wherever he went.
Tinasha didn’t feel like lecturing him at the moment, however. The moonstones were warm from her body heat.
“When we get back to the castle, will you change their shape and mold them into a necklace or something?” Oscar inquired.
“No… I’ll keep them like this.”
“Okay then,” he accepted, patting her on the head. She closed her eyes, happy.
Oscar’s touch was warm and fond, and Tinasha abandoned herself to the memories that washed over her. |
Unnamed Memory
11. Green Vines
The wide underground cave was stuffy and damp.
Revered as sacred ground, the hollow had long been kept a secret. A young man clad in blue gazed at murals that illustrated major moments in history. His sword was already wet with blood, red droplets dripping off the tip.
For a time, all was quiet and no one spoke.
A man who’d fallen before the youth looked like he was still breathing, though only faintly. Another man knelt next to him and looked up at the youth in blue.
“Who are you? Why do you have that sword? Only our leader should be able to inherit th—” In the middle of speaking, he caught sight of his elder brother, facedown on the ground. The man’s older sibling was the current leader of their clan. Sure enough, his hand was curled around the hilt of a sword identical to the one the mysterious young man was carrying.
There should’ve only been one of that blade in all the world. What did this mean? Why did this young man have the weapon’s twin and know of their holy place? Why had he tried to kill his elder brother?
The man’s mind swirled with doubts, and the one garbed in blue looked down at him. “You were just and fair. You treated me sincerely, which is more than I can say for my overly fickle father. It was you who taught me how to fight. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
“…What did you say?”
He was certain he’d never taught this boy anything. This was their first time meeting. The man’s clan was nomadic. They were a band of robbers that drifted from one country to the next. This strange blue assailant had appeared in one of the safe houses the clan maintained.
The man’s older brother, the leader, leveled a furious look at the youth. Evidently, the mysterious boy had appeared while they were raiding a town, and they’d chased him off. The leader went after the fleeing boy and entered this sacred place. By the time the leader realized he’d been lured into a deserted area, the one in blue cut him down easily.
The boy ignored his questions and continued blithely, “I actually wish I could’ve saved my mother. But even if I’d prevented that raid, I wouldn’t have disappeared. I know that if I let him live, he’ll make my mother unhappy someday. He’ll burn her village down and take her away, treating her like his plaything. He won’t give her enough food, and he’ll make her sleep on straw. He’ll whip her harder when she gets sick and weak. He’ll try to be a good father to me, but…no father of mine would treat my mother like an old rag.”
The youth’s words were directed at the clan leader’s younger brother, who could only guess at the meaning of the speech. Dazed, he looked at the boy and asked, “What are you saying…? You and he aren’t even that far apart in age. He can’t be your—”
“Exactly. This all happens later for you. But that future isn’t going to exist. I’ve altered it for the sake of my mother.” The boy scowled, and his face steeled against pain. “My mother was a kind and beautiful person. She should never have been forced to live that kind of life…”
The youth in blue let out a deep sigh. Quietly, he spoke into the dark cave.
“After her death…I learned of a way to change the past. Then I came here.”
His voice echoed off the rock walls and faded away. The clan leader’s younger brother ruminated on what the boy had said over and over. Finally, he said, “…So that means you’re…”
What the boy said pointed to only one thing.
He’d come from the near future to change the past. The one in blue was the spawn of the clan leader and some woman he’d abducted. The young man had somehow gone back in time to save his mother from her fate.
It sounded ridiculous, unbelievable even. That the boy carried a copy of the clan leader’s sword was powerful evidence, however. The weapon was only to be bequeathed to the next head of the faction of bandits, after all.
“Tell me your name,” the younger brother of the clan leader insisted, hardly understanding why he’d said it himself. He simply felt like if he didn’t ask now, he’d never know. Nothing would be left of the boy. It would be as if he were never there. Perhaps the man asked for a name because he believed that. For the first time, the boy’s face relaxed.
“You were the only one who was sympathetic to my mother. You helped me when I was little and buried her in her home village. That’s why I’ll tell you everything. My name—and how I came to be here.”
The boy glanced down at his father on the ground. A flowing pool of blood made it clear that he had little time left. That much was clear to all three who were present. The boy returned the sword to its sheath and presented it to his young uncle. “If possible, give this sword to my mother someday. Tell her it’s a gift from someone who wishes her happiness.”
As soon as the boy’s father died, he would wink out of existence with him.
With that moment fast approaching, the uncle accepted the sword…and nodded.
The eastern side of the mainland was home to the major nation of Gandona and an equally large country called Mensanne. There were many far smaller states that dotted the area as well. This created a land of many crisscrossing international borders. Unfortunately, this often gave rise to conflicts. Many of the smaller domains repeatedly invaded their neighbors.
Yarda’s invasion of Farsas ten years ago was one such case. Despite Yarda’s sudden attack, Farsas easily repelled the incursion. At the time, Yarda was well on its way to major nation status, but defeat saw it relinquishing half of its land.
One hundred years ago, Farsas built the fortress of Minnedart to keep an eye on its tumultuous eastern border. It was the largest garrison in the country, with thirty thousand troops stationed there at all times to secure the edge of Farsas territory.
“Inspecting the fortress? I’ll go, too. If I take my eyes off you, you’re bound to wind up in trouble,” said Tinasha.
“You’re the only one who would say that,” returned Oscar.
“Everyone thinks it; they just don’t tell you.”
Oscar eyed the witch from his desk. She was standing before him, riffling through his stack of paperwork. In three days, Oscar was heading to Minnedart with several military officers to conduct a regular inspection.
As the witch read up on the eastern border, she hummed admiringly. “I see there was a skirmish ten years ago.”
“A small one, yeah. You’re not really up on this stuff, are you?”
“I normally keep to myself… Ten years ago means you were alive to see it, right?”
Oscar thought that Tinasha’s long life often made her phrase things somewhat strangely, but he kept that idea to himself. Instead, he cast back to his memories of the conflict. “Yep. I remember it because during the cease-fire negotiations, Yarda said they wanted me to marry their princess.”
“What happened with that?” Tinasha pressed.
“I didn’t agree. It only would’ve made things worse,” Oscar explained.
“Oh right,” Tinasha said.
At the time, Oscar still had his curse. If the princess from Yarda had gotten pregnant and died, the two nations’ tenuous peace would’ve broken down in a heartbeat.
The curse breaker herself muttered, “Indeed, indeed,” evidently having banished all memory of the curse now that it was gone.
It seemed that Yarda bitterly regretted the entire affair, as they interpreted Farsas’s inexplicable rejection of the offer to mean that a Yardan princess wasn’t good enough to be queen of Farsas. Yarda had been in too weak of a position to back out of peace talks at the time, however, and ten years had done little to close the power gap between the two neighboring states.
While Oscar attended to other matters, he added, “It’ll take about three days, so pack for that.”
“All right,” Tinasha replied. She returned the papers she’d taken to the desk and vanished from the room. Snorting at how abruptly she’d left, Oscar picked up the documents.
On the day of the observation, Oscar, Tinasha, General Granfort, and three officers used a transportation array to reach the fortress of Minnedart.
Farsas had over forty generals, and Granfort was the oldest among them. His initial misgivings about the witch had softened quite a bit with time. This probably had something to do with Oscar’s father, the former king, recounting the events of seventy years ago to the members of the royal council.
This served to clear up the misconception that Tinasha was a witch scheming to possess the country and revealed that she had claimed the throne of Tuldarr. Someone like that had to be acknowledged as highly valuable to society. Granfort and the others came to welcome her as a counterbalance to Oscar, considering how she often scolded him and kept him in line.
Two generals stationed at Minnedart welcomed the inspection party. General Edgard, who commanded the fortress, was Granfort’s peer. The other, Galen, was a rather young officer of only twenty-seven years. They both appeared surprised to see the witch but concealed that feeling immediately and knelt to bow to their king. Once the ritual greetings were complete, Tinasha tugged on Oscar’s sleeve. “I really think I should have come in disguise…”
“That would be no fun for me. It’s fine,” Oscar replied in clipped tones. Tinasha scowled. As she followed him down a corridor in the fortress, she looked out the window and saw kids playing in a courtyard below. “Children live here?”
“Residents of a nearby village have been living here since last year. The men of the town died in a battle, so Minnedart took in their elderly, women, and children.”
“A battle…” Tinasha sighed. The children’s cheerful shrieks of joy echoed throughout the courtyard.
Carel, a soldier stationed at Minnedart, saw that it was his break time and headed for the courtyard. Once the kids saw him, they dropped the stones they were playing with and ran up to him gleefully.
“Carel! Tell us a story! We want a story!”
“A story, huh? What do you want to hear?”
“The story of the blue knight!”
“Again?” Carel asked. He removed his sword and placed it on the ground before sitting down cross-legged. He was only eighteen. Having joined the army two years ago, Carel was still at the recruit training stage. The kids surrounded him, their eyes shining with anticipation.
“Once upon a time, when our settlement was a vast prairie, there lived a beautiful girl in a village. A never-ending stream of suitors longed for her hand in marriage. But she turned them all away.”
“I guess none of them were very handsome.”
“Hush and listen. But one day, bad men on horses attacked the village. The bad men set fire to houses, burned the village, and tried to kill people. But then a knight dressed all in blue appeared. He drove out the bad men and saved the girl they were about to carry off. She was deeply moved and said she would be glad to marry him, but he declined and disappeared. The end.”
“Carel, that was over too fast!”
“Tell us a better story!”
The children protested one after another. Carel answered seriously, “It’s all true. That’s your story, and don’t ask for more.”
The kids continued to pout, and Carel was reaching to poke at their cheeks when he heard a young woman giggling from behind him. Whirling around, he saw a lovely and unfamiliar woman standing there. She met his eyes and bobbed her head to him.
“I’m sorry. I was curious about what kind of story you were telling,” said the king’s witch as she grinned.
“If that was over too fast, does that mean the real story is much longer?”
Carel was thrown into a fluster upon learning of her identity, but when Tinasha asked for details about the tale, he sat back down. The children had lost interest and gone off to draw pictures on the ground some distance away.
“The story I told is actually a real thing that happened in our village two hundred years ago. The blue knight was apparently the son of the girl he saved.”
“Er… So you’re saying he came from the future?” Tinasha asked.
“That’s right. He was the son she had after she was kidnapped by the riders. It’s said he came to the past to change his mother’s ill fate. Changing the past in such a way meant he’d never be born, though. Even knowing that, he still saved her… And legend has it that this is the sword the blue knight left behind.”
Carel held up the sword he’d set aside. The hilt was engraved with a horse motif. The blade appeared well used but carefully maintained. That it had been handed down for two centuries suggested there could be some magic housed within it.
The witch examined the weapon, then voiced an objection. “I see… I think this story is far from the kind meant for children.”
As folktales go, it was well made, but it was public knowledge that there was no way to go back in time, even with magic. The part about the knight coming from the future wasn’t true, but it was still an intricately formed story. Tinasha looked back at the kids playing.
“Do they come from the same village as you?” she asked.
“Yes… Actually, our home was attacked by a tribe of riders a year ago… We sent out troops to defend ourselves, but almost all the men were killed. Survivors were graciously allowed to stay here. Sometimes I curse myself for not having been there. I’m sure I could’ve done something…” Carel bit his lip.
Tinasha’s face darkened. According to Oscar, a band of horse riders belonging to no country—a group known as the Ito—had long plagued these lands. They were nomadic and roved from nation to nation. Their raids were sudden, and they disappeared just as quickly as they came. Many attempts had been made to stamp them out, but as they would immediately cross into another country and go into hiding, they’d evaded justice for a long time.
“The village chief’s wife hasn’t smiled for a whole year because her husband died protecting her. They just crush people’s lives underfoot without a care… I can’t let them get away with what they do,” Carel spat, his hands curling into fists. Anger filled his eyes, as if his hated foes were right there before him.
Revenge begat revenge. Tinasha knew that all too well.
That was why she couldn’t allow any threats to Oscar, not even the tiniest seed. She would intervene and nip them in the bud before they could take the form of revenge. She knew they were all laughable tricks. She also knew that she would accept it if she got herself killed someday as a result.
Regardless, she’d lived for far too long to cling to ideals… Her hands were already covered in blood.
After dinner following the first day of inspection, Galen asked Oscar about his sleeping arrangements and Oscar burst out laughing. The rest of the party gaped as their king howled uproariously.
“E-er, did I say something I shouldn’t have?” inquired Galen.
“Unbelievable. Did someone put you up to that?” snickered Oscar.
Galen had asked Oscar if the witch would be staying with him. It had seemed to be an innocent enough question, but it just as easily could’ve been the work of council members who’d pestered Oscar about marriage and heirs. After Oscar declared that he didn’t intend to choose anyone but Tinasha, quite a few people were now trying to push him in that direction.
Oscar prepared to tell Galen he was wrong, but Tinasha spoke up first from her place beside the king. With a hint of exasperation, she said, “If Oscar doesn’t mind, I don’t, either.”
“…Do you have a fever or something?” Oscar asked, placing his hand against her forehead in true confusion.
She didn’t feel hot, though she did frown at him. “I’m the one who insisted on coming along. It’s fine, I’ll just change my shape.”
“Oh right.”
Oscar remembered how she’d recently morphed herself into a dragon like Nark. The witch had the ability to change her outward appearance and age at will. With Tinasha as a wholly different creature, it was true that there would be nothing improper about them sleeping together.
“In that case, I’ve got no complaints,” Oscar declared.
Galen breathed a sigh of relief and departed. Oscar and Tinasha were left alone, and the witch said feelingly, “It’s actually perfect. This way I’ll know if you sneak out at night.”
“There really is no trust in this relationship…” Oscar groaned.
“I’d think it strange if there were,” Tinasha retorted coolly, then let out a little yawn.
The after-dinner conference lasted long into the night. The main topic of discussion was Yarda’s renewed suspicious activity. Oscar gave instructions to investigate, then retired to his bedchamber. There he found the witch dozing on the couch. It looked like she’d bathed and changed into loungewear.
“Tinasha, don’t sleep there,” Oscar said, tapping her lightly on the cheek, but she didn’t stir.
She’d never know if I snuck out now, thought Oscar ruefully. Unfortunately, even if he did, there was nothing to do right now.
Deciding to let Tinasha have a proper night’s rest, Oscar picked up her light frame and carried her to the bed—then he paused. He remembered how she shot up from the bed the last time he laid her down like this.
Trauma from four hundred years ago was the cause of that, but Tinasha might still be plagued by that same nightmare. Even if things with Lanak had been resolved, Oscar couldn’t be sure. After a few seconds’ consideration, he sat down on the bed with Tinasha in his arms. He lay her down in his lap and poked her cheek again.
“Wake up, wake up.”
With a little groan, the witch’s eyes fluttered open. Dark spheres heavy with sleep blinked up at Oscar.
“If you’re gonna go to sleep, do it in the bed,” Oscar chided.
“Okay…,” Tinasha murmured, crawling over to a corner of the huge bed with his help. Then she curled up like a cat and fell back to sleep.
While Oscar was relieved to see she wasn’t having a nightmare, he realized something else with chagrin.
“You didn’t change your shape at all…,” he muttered, grabbing a lock of her hair. This time, however, she showed no signs of waking.
Sighing, Oscar covered Tinasha with the blankets and then left to go take his own bath.
There were images she could never forget.
Blood and the body of her fallen husband. The young man she could see just past his body. His arm on the ground.
For whatever reason, these gruesome memories of the past played back in black and white.
The only color was the chilling eyes of the man glaring at her.
They were a deep green, the color of a forest that knew no sun.
She didn’t want to see him ever again. She didn’t want to look.
But that green continued to torment her.
After leaving the witch where she was and going to sleep, Oscar awoke in the dead of night with a strange suffocating sensation. He blinked his eyes open but had trouble seeing anything. His body felt heavy. Something warm was touching him.
As that went on, he realized something had slipped between his lips and was licking into his mouth. He woke up instantly.
Oscar was shivering and dizzy all over. The woman’s tongue intertwined with his. His hands were held down, and he moved one to touch her cheek.
She noticed it and slowly pulled back. She sat up and lay a hand along his face; he was staring at her. With the empty eyes of a dreamer, she gazed into his blue eyes…and spoke.
“Wrong…,” Tinasha murmured, then suddenly shouted, “No!” With that cry, she leaped up.
Oscar gaped at her. “What do you think you were doing…?”
“I got synced up…,” Tinasha replied, sounding mortified. She clutched the sides of her head as she leaned over the bed.
As she moaned in distress like a child, Oscar came back to himself and patted her head. “That’s enough—just explain. I don’t understand what’s happening. Did you suddenly feel like marrying me?”
“Not at all…”
“You don’t have to answer so fast.”
“I was in a deep sleep, so I dreamed on someone else’s frequency…”
“What the hell?” Oscar asked, rubbing his temples. The manner in which he’d been roused from bed had left his head spinning. Checking the clock, he saw it was still hours before dawn.
The witch pulled her knees under herself, sitting up straight on the bed. She appeared somewhat more collected now. “Most likely, someone in this fortress is asleep and dreaming of something passionate. They’re unconsciously broadcasting those thoughts. The person in question probably has magic, but likely doesn’t know how to control it. Something like this wouldn’t affect normal people, but I have magic, and I was tired… I guess I picked up on it. I’m sorry!”
“That was bad for my heart.”
“Please forget all about it…,” the witch begged, groveling. Just looking at her like that filled Oscar with fatigue. He didn’t even consider taking advantage of the situation; he was just exhausted. This brief, strange incident had left him feeling as though heavy stones were weighing down his nerves.
“You said it was wrong. What was wrong?” Oscar inquired.
“Your eye color, I think. It wasn’t green…,” Tinasha admitted.
“I’m glad you woke up,” Oscar said coldly. The witch refused to meet his eyes. Even if his response hadn’t been so frigid, she was still too ashamed of her own conduct. “Anyway, I’m going back to sleep. You better change your shape like you said you would.”
“Okay…”
Oscar lay back down, rolling so that he was facing away from Tinasha. The witch finally lifted her head and changed into a black kitten. Feebly, she wrapped her tail around herself. Unfortunately, sleep proved elusive for her after the shameful mistake she’d made.
When he woke up the next morning, Oscar picked up the curled-up cat by his pillow. The little animal gave a big yawn and jumped onto his shoulder, where it stretched. Oscar stroked its neck and said, his voice low, “If you want to stay a spirit sorcerer, you better remain in that form all day.”
The warning sent a shiver through the cat, and the creature shrank in on itself, ears drooping.
During the morning of the second day of inspection, Oscar made the rounds through the fortress. He listened to discussions of repairs for the deteriorating bastion walls. After that, he retired to a makeshift study and reviewed other reports. A few representatives of the refugee villagers requested an audience. Oscar granted it, and in came an elder—the former chief of the village—and a lovely young woman in her late twenties. Her pale golden hair was bound up, revealing the lines of her fine features. Ordinarily she would have been a peerless beauty, but at the moment, pronounced shadows cast a pall over her looks.
Sensing the presence of visitors, the black cat curled up on the corner of the desk lifted its head. It sat up slowly and stared at the young woman. Oscar took notice and glanced at her.
“I see. So it’s you.”
“Excuse me?” the woman asked.
“No, it’s nothing.”
The woman introduced herself as Elze, the widow of the chief who was murdered. Even when she smiled to be polite, sorrow could be felt in every line of her face. With the greetings concluded, she turned to leave, but Oscar called out to stop her. “Did your late husband have green eyes?”
His casual question caused her to stiffen. Her grief-stricken expression froze in shock, which Oscar found suspicious.
“No, they were brown.” The elderly former chief was the one to answer.
“Huh. Ah, sorry for asking about something trivial. You can go,” Oscar declared. Once they’d left the room, he rested his chin on a hand thoughtfully. Bored, he sent the ornamental crystal ball on the desk rolling toward the cat. Its ears perked up, and it pounced on it.
Oscar petted the cat as it toyed with the sphere, and he whispered into its black ears, “Whose dream do you think she was seeing?”
The cat ducked its head in a shrug and batted at the ball again with one black paw, sending it spinning.
Come noon, Oscar rode out of the fortress on horseback with Granfort and the other officers and soldiers.
Minnedart’s inspection was also something of an excuse to check on things in the adjoining country of Yarda. With a black cat riding on his shoulder, Oscar gazed curiously at a reddish-brown, craggy expanse from his perch on a cliff. “The landscape changes as if there really was some sort of boundary. It looks completely different from the fortress’s surroundings.”
“People say this area was formed from some kind of upheaval of bedrock during the Dark Age. There’s even steeper canyons closer to the border and tiny fissures hidden in the ground, so please be careful,” Tinasha warned.
“Will do,” Oscar said.
Rocky hills and jagged peaks of many different sizes clustered together to form a natural wall. The formation had long safeguarded Farsas’s eastern front until Minnedart was built. An incursive force that was marching west into Farsas would have to veer farther south to avoid the difficult terrain. That would put such an army’s path close to the border with Gandona.
Ten years ago, however, Yarda had crossed these precipitous canyons to invade. The eastern half of the rocky ravine had belonged to Yarda at the time, allowing them to lay their preparations without Farsas’s knowledge.
Oscar stroked the cat on his shoulder. “Time to head back. I still have to tour the village.”
Today marked one year since the refugees’ village had been attacked. Plans were underway to help them relocate. Many wanted to look around the ruins of their old home before they did so, however. They had left the fort together and were waiting with a guard escort at the base of the canyon region.
Oscar grabbed the reins and turned his horse around. Avoiding the protruding rock pillars that dotted the landscape, he guided his steed as it snaked its way down. As Oscar was jolted along in the saddle, he took in the sharp features of his surroundings. “When I’m with Tinasha, we teleport places a lot. It’s nice to travel normally for once.”
When the black cat heard that, it whapped Oscar’s head with a front paw. The king didn’t look like he minded the cat’s slaps, however. The rest of the party, following behind, didn’t know quite how to respond and stayed silent.
Once they were halfway through their descent, Oscar’s horse suddenly stopped. The black cat on his shoulder raised its head.
“Your Majesty? What’s wrong?” called Granfort. Before Oscar could respond, a shadow loomed overhead.
Looking up, they saw a full lineup of men stood on the rocky hills towering on either side. Each man had an arrow readied.
The king had close to fifty of the projectiles pointed at him. With startling calmness, he mused, “Ito, huh? I thought you were a horse tribe. Where are the horses?”
“Y-Your Majesty… You shouldn’t provoke them…,” Granfort insisted.
“Tinasha, don’t make a move. Stay down,” Oscar instructed, giving his protector a concise order. Hearing her name calmed the men’s nerves a fraction. But the cat, half on its feet already, threw him a look of protest before reluctantly settling back down on his shoulder.
One of the Ito archers stepped forward. He was tall and appeared to be in his early thirties. He looked down on the Farsasian party with eyes the same deep green shade as a sunless forest.
“I’m the leader of the Ito. I want to talk to the most powerful one among you.”
“I guess that’d be me,” Oscar drawled. Then, with all the majesty of a king infusing his tone, he went on to command, “Give us your name.”
The people of Farsas all sat up straight at that, and the archers recoiled slightly as well. Only the man who’d declared himself the Ito leader met Oscar’s gaze without flinching, though he did seem surprised. He threw out his chest and declared arrogantly, “My name is Javi. We want something and came to negotiate.”
“You’re awfully shameless for a thief. We wouldn’t mind cutting all of you down right here, right now,” Oscar needled.
“That’s some big talk considering the situation you’re in. Don’t you have eyes?” Javi retorted. He probably reasoned that with all his archers’ arrows trained on the Farsasian party from the high ground, they could kill the whole lot of them in a second. The instant a single shaft was loosed, however, it would be the Ito who fell. Oscar had only traveled to the border with a small party precisely because it was fewer people to protect if a fight broke out.
The king of Farsas responded with a shrug.
“You all can think what you want. Looting’s been our clan’s way of life for a long, long time. We take pride in it. How is that different from taking an army and attacking another country? I’m following a much more honest way of life than a man who doesn’t fight and just gives orders,” Javi snapped.
A cynical smile played about Oscar’s lips as the fur of the black cat on his shoulder bristled. It opened its mouth to growl threateningly, but Oscar picked it up by the scruff of its neck. He ignored the little animal’s struggling.
“You do love to talk, don’t you? What do you want?” asked Oscar.
“A woman,” Javi answered.
At that, Oscar and the cat exchanged a glance.
A dry breeze blew in from the deserted village. From horseback, Elze gazed out into the distance.
This had been a peaceful place once. At the time, Elze had thought things would continue that way forever.
She hadn’t been unhappy with her husband or her life in the village. Elze had married the man she’d been ordered to and built a home with him. He cherished her, and their life was idyllic. She was very happy—up until the day the village was attacked.
The man who killed her husband. His eyes had seared into her.
Elze didn’t want to see him ever again. She found herself unable to forget those deep green eyes, however.
How often had she wished to forget them? She’d spent many nights desperately wishing to return to how things used to be.
The more she thought, the more those eyes plagued her dreams. She had no idea how long it would be until she could escape them.
“What’s wrong, my lady?” asked Carel. The question brought Elze back to herself. The young man assigned to guard her was from her village. The concern in his voice was plain.
Elze shook her head minutely. “It’s nothing. I apologize.”
Each time she was called “my lady”—the term of address for a chief’s wife—it brought reality rushing back. She felt suffocated, like there was nowhere for her to go.
That hollow sensation was absolutely because she’d lost her husband. Elze could no longer see a place to move on to or a path to tread.
Ever since that day, she’d remained frozen.
“Elze,” came the voice of the former chief who’d accompanied her. She turned around, only to seize up in astonishment.
“Why…?”
The king’s expedition party was coming down from the rocky hills, but its members had clearly changed since they’d set out. General Granfort was at the head of the group, instead of the king. What’s more, men who appeared to be Ito riders were mixed in among them.
Guards around Elze began buzzing with concern over what’d happened. Carel’s face darkened at the sight of his hated enemies. Granfort, however, galloped over to Elze and said, “I apologize, but the situation has changed. We need you to come with us before we go to the village.”
“Come with…? To—to where…? Why are they…?”
“It’s a summons from His Majesty. You, at the very least, are to come with us,” Granfort declared with a grave look. Then he turned his horse around. Numb with shock and incomprehension, Elze followed, only to be reunited with those green eyes she had desperately wished never to see again.
The rocky protrusions jutted up together onto a hilltop composed of reddish-brown rock. Upon that was a natural, open clearing.
It was circular, situated atop huge, natural columns. The site was so high that a fall almost certainly meant death. There were large pieces of stone that rose higher surrounding it, however.
Oscar dismounted from his horse and brought only the cat with him to the unusually formed plateau. He looked around with admiration. “It’s like a giant cage. Interesting. Didn’t know this place existed.”
“This is a holy place for the Ito. It is said that a long time ago, a god once visited this place.”
“A god? Was it Aetea? A child of Aetea?”
“Neither. The god’s name has been lost. It was some other deity.”
Javi’s strange way of speaking made Oscar glance at the witch in cat form, but the cat only twitched its tail disinterestedly. Tuldarr had been an atheistic magic nation, after all.
More than thirty Ito riders arrayed themselves around the holy clearing, making no effort to hide their hostility. Oscar paid their attitude no mind, inspecting the cracks and fissures in the ground. He looked up to ask Javi, “So you want a duel?”
“I do. If you want to call over men from the fortress to fight, I’ll send a messenger.”
“No need. I’ll make do with the men I have here.”
The guards who accompanied their king didn’t appear intimidated, despite being outnumbered nearly five to one. They glared right back at the row of Ito men around the edge, who were emanating cold animosity.
Just then, Granfort appeared at the top of the narrow hill road leading to the clearing. Elze followed behind him, and she turned white as a sheet when she caught sight of Javi.
He stared at her evenly. “It’s been a while.”
“Ah…” was all she managed to get out before going motionless.
Oscar cocked his head to look at her. “Did Granfort tell you the situation?”
“Ah yes…,” Elze replied.
She was what Javi wanted.
One year ago, he’d failed to carry her off. This time for sure, he vowed to use force to take her away.
Currently, Elze had no one to protect her. Her husband as well as the men of the village were all dead. So Javi insisted on having someone from the fortress that had taken her in act as her defender. Not wanting to engage in open war with the Farsasian troops and waste the lives of his clan, the Ito man had proposed a duel.
The demand was the last straw for the Farsasian side. Many lost their tempers and called the Ito audacious, greedy thieves. To them, the Ito were criminals and in no position to request a fair match. They wanted troops summoned to crush the raiders head-on.
The people of the Ito were not without their own complaints.
When they looted towns, they didn’t kill women or children, and they had their own families to provide for. To them, pillaging was a duty they had to carry out to maintain their clan’s way of life.
However, no matter the Ito’s circumstances, looting and pillaging were acts that Farsas could not allow. There was no way that Farsas would simply nod understandingly and acknowledge the Ito clan’s assertions. That was where the negotiations broke down. It was Oscar who’d quickly put an end to things.
“Before us stands an enemy that has long eluded us. If we can win the duel and get them to do what we say, that’ll speed things up. That means that you are going to be the witness.”
“I—I…,” stammered Elze, so dumbfounded that she was like a hollow doll that couldn’t move. She stood there at a loss for words as uncontrollable emotions crashed over her. Behind her, Carel scowled at Javi with eyes burning with hatred.
Javi looked away from them and pointed to Oscar. “You choose three of your strongest. I’ll do the same. Sound good?”
“No problem here. It’ll be over faster with fewer people. Truthfully, I don’t mind if it’s just you and me.”
“What a stupid brat you are. All you do is mouth off. The people around you must suffer so much.” Javi snorted. The black cat tried to swoop down on him from Oscar’s shoulder, but the king wrapped a hand around its belly to hold it in place. The cat fought him desperately but couldn’t escape his grip.
“If we win, you’re forbidden from any looting and pillaging in Farsas from now on…and you know what will happen if you break your word,” Oscar stated, his voice turning low and threatening all of a sudden. Javi flinched at the decree but concealed the unconscious motion and nodded.
When Javi turned around and gave a signal, two men from the line along the edge stepped forward to fight in the duel. After approving them, he stared at Elze, who was still trembling next to Granfort.
She stared back at him, her beautiful face fraught with fear. It was no different than a year ago. She looked so forlorn and helpless that a gust of wind could blow her away.
That, however, was precisely what instilled such attraction in Javi.
He had met her during a looting where the smell of blood roamed heavy about the air. Shielded by her husband’s back, she’d struggled to hold him up. She was beautiful. Javi was done in at first sight. The fierce glint in her eyes as she’d looked at her husband had completely taken hold of him. He wanted to make her eyes glow that way for him.
Among Javi’s faded memories, only the image of her remained vivid and bright.
He could never forget the look of shock in her eyes as she stared at him over her fallen husband.
He had never felt this much attachment toward another person. But he wanted her badly. He couldn’t give up.
That was why he was here now.
Without taking his eyes off Elze, Javi rubbed his left arm. It had been magically reattached. Getting the limb back in proper working order had required a considerable amount of pain and hard work.
Elze’s eyes widened slightly. Her thin lips trembled.
Scratching his head in annoyance, Oscar walked over to where his team was. “So I’m definitely one of the three. What should we do about the other two…?”
He grabbed the cat by the back of its neck and lifted it up to eye level. “Going by order of strength, this one should be first, but right now she’s just a cat.”
Just then, the cat’s outline rippled. The tiny black kitten turned back into the witch’s original shape in a flash. Oscar’s face darkened as he scolded, “I told you not to change back. Are you asking to get punished?”
“Just because I was a cat, you can’t grab me by the back of the neck. I’ll suffocate!” Tinasha spat.
The others were speechless at the witch’s sudden appearance. No one thought that the king’s short-tempered little kitten was his protector in disguise. Rubbing the back of her neck, Tinasha said offhand, “I’ll go.”
“No,” Oscar refused.
“Let me finish… Of those two he’s going with, the shorter one is probably a mage.”
Oscar eyed the two men standing in the clearing. Both the muscular giant and the short-statured man were carrying swords and didn’t look like mages. If Tinasha said it was so, however, then Oscar believed her.
“Got it. I’ll leave him to you.”
“Understood,” Tinasha replied, already starting to tie up her long hair. Drawing closer to Oscar, she whispered, “Also… Isn’t there something strange about this place? I feel an odd presence.”
“An odd presence… They said it’s a holy place. Could that be it?”
“Mmm… Something about the story of ‘a visit from another god’ is fishy. If it wasn’t some member of Aetea’s lineage, then what did they take for a god?”
“A high-ranking demon maybe? That sort of thing happens a lot.”
“It does, but I think it’s something more…” Tinasha trailed off. The witch racked her brain, trying to figure out what it was that nagged at her. She shot a glance at Oscar with her dark eyes. “Maybe I should transport everyone to a different location? Like the castle training grounds or something.”
“That would certainly be interesting, but I don’t think they’d go for it. We just have to make our win quick,” Oscar said, patting her head.
That was when a young man ran up to him. “Your Majesty! Please choose me!”
The appeal came from a rather desperate-looking Carel. Oscar gazed into his eyes, which swirled with resentment. “Why?” asked the king.
“They’re the ones who attacked my village. They killed my father.”
Tinasha frowned. Oscar took that in, then returned his gaze to the soldier.
“What’s your name?”
“Carel, Your Majesty.”
“Got it. You’re in,” Oscar decided, and joy bloomed on Carel’s face.
Now I can defeat my enemies, the young man thought. He looked over at Elze, but she was still deathly pale and staring at Javi.
The first fight of the duel was between Carel and Joaquin, the enormous Ito man. The spectators held their breath as the two men drew their swords and faced off. Carel had the slenderer physique by a long shot. Against a person as large as Joaquin, it looked like a child was battling an adult.
Joaquin looked down on his opponent and sneered. “You’re a survivor from your village? You should have stayed hidden.”
“Shut up, you savage!” cried Carel, readying his sword. It was obvious to all that he exuded inexperience.
The match seemed decided before it had even started. Javi, however, frowned at Carel. “That sword… Why does he have it?”
Carel’s weapon was the spitting image of a blade passed down from leader to leader in the Ito clan since ancient times. Javi was certain the real sword had been shattered in a battle during the previous clan leader’s time.
Javi found it suspicious. Then he recalled something from his childhood.
Deep in a sacred place, there was a story carved into the wall next to a mural—
“And start!” called out a voice, signaling the beginning of the match.
Carel swung his sword in a huge arc before running straight at Joaquin. He brought a blow down on his opponent with all his might. Joaquin deflected it with a smile, however. Carel slashed over and over at the giant man, but none of the swings ever made contact. Even so, Carel kept attacking head-on.
After a while of batting slashes away, Joaquin’s lips curved up and he struck down powerfully from above.
Unable to withstand the force of the strike, Carel was sent sprawling. The Ito guffawed as if they were watching an entertaining spectacle.
“Dammit…,” Carel muttered, face flushing with shame. He wasn’t even allowed a chance to get back on his feet, however. Joaquin brought his sword down to crush the young man. Still seated, Carel scrambled back. The desperate maneuver had afforded him safety, but it didn’t look like he’d be able to avoid a third attack.
Carel’s eyes shut in anticipation of death. No impact came, though, no matter how long he waited. He opened his eyes a fraction. “What…?”
There was a slender sword standing right before his eyes. Joaquin’s sword had been deflected by one much thinner and was now embedded in the ground. A small pair of feet crunched on the sand next to Carel, who was still in shock.
“The match goes on. I’m up next,” said the witch in a voice as cold as ice. Her long ebony hair was bound up tight.
“You’re sending out a woman? Farsas must be running out of capable people,” sneered Javi.
“She’s actually too capable, if you can believe it,” Oscar retorted flippantly.
All eyes were on Tinasha, who casually readied her sword. Her formfitting mage’s costume threw her slim and elegant figure into sharp relief. The second man to fight, Inigo, grinned at her lasciviously as he gave her body a long, slow once-over. He pulled out a curved sword and faced her. “You’re a fine woman, though a bit too skinny. Maybe I’ll skin you.”
“You’re certainly welcome to try,” Tinasha invited, flashing him a cruel smile. When the start signal came, she leaped off the ground. Her strike wasn’t powerful, but it came down with fearsome speed. Reflexively, Inigo held up his sword to block it. The witch’s weapon worked so fast that the Ito man’s head was liable to go flying off his shoulders if he lost focus for even a moment. He reassessed his initial contempt of the woman.
In a cold sweat, Inigo blocked three more attacks, then poured his strength into launching one big blow. Tinasha dodged it and jumped back. After waiting for the right timing, Inigo aimed his sword point right for her. He cast a spell, pouring magic into it.
He brought forth an invisible rope and sent the tip flying toward Tinasha’s thin frame. Conjured cord twined around her, binding her instantaneously.
Her arms were lifted up, and with her wrists bound, she dropped her sword. The Farsasian side broke into a commotion when they saw that.
On the other side, crude grins spread across the faces of the Ito clansmen, who were well aware of Inigo’s power.
Not many mages used swords. Few would’ve guessed that Inigo could use magic, especially after taking his rustic dress into account. Inigo had used that misconception to take advantage of scores of people in the past, toying with them before killing them. Inigo had savored every petrified look when his victims realized they’d been immobilized.
Inigo approached Tinasha and placed the point of his sword right between her collarbones. She met his gaze evenly, not appearing frightened at all.
“No one said we couldn’t use magic, did they?” he snickered, sure of his victory. He moved to slit her costume open with his blade.
Before he could, his sword shattered apart with a ringing noise.
Inigo’s jaw dropped as he stared at the sparkling fragments lying on the ground. It didn’t feel real, and he didn’t quite register the evident danger he was in. He looked up to find his opponent floating in the air with a merciless smile on her lips. In a lilting voice, she said, “You’re right. No one said we couldn’t use magic.”
Her ivory hands closed around his neck. Then the clearing echoed with the sounds of his screams.
“So that puts us at a draw,” Oscar said matter-of-factly, eyeing Tinasha after she came back from her fight.
Javi looked stunned. “What did you do to Inigo…? What is that woman?”
“A mage got done in by magic. I don’t think I did anything unusual,” Tinasha answered. She returned to Oscar’s side and undid her hair. “Okay, now let’s go home. Right away. As soon as possible.”
“What’s got you so spooked…? Well, go on, then, Tinasha,” he said. She caught his meaning and floated up to dab her blood behind his ears. That would allow a sword to get past his barrier, though not magic. Javi couldn’t cast spells, though, so that was enough.
As she was checking the spell, Oscar caught sight of her white earlobe and suddenly drew close and nibbled on it.
“Hyaugh!” she cried in a strange voice, blushing and jumping back. If she were still in cat form, the fur on her back would’ve been standing on end.
She pressed her hands to her ears, while Oscar tossed her an evil grin. “That’s for not doing what you’re told. Stupid cat.”
“Ugh! Why…?” Tinasha muttered reproachfully. Leaving her there, Oscar walked into the clearing, Javi following after him.
The air around them was tense. A dry breeze blew between the rock pillars.
Once he reached the center of the clearing, Oscar turned to look at Elze. He stared at her, something significant in his gaze. “What do you want me to do? Shall I kill him?”
Faced with this sudden question, Elze’s eyes widened and she gaped back at him.
She couldn’t think. No answer rose from her heart. Her breath came in faint gasps as she stammered, “Th-that man killed my husband…”
“I know. But that’s not what you want, is it?”
“Wh-what I want…”
All Elze had to go on were the facts of what had happened. She was born and raised in a completely normal environment. She’d gotten married as her parents had wished. What she wanted had never mattered. Elze had never been aware of a want or a desire of her own. She avoided what one should and never did anything improper. She had lived a very ordinary, stagnant life.
It was unthinkable for her to feel attracted to a man who was an enemy.
Standing next to the king, Javi’s deep green eyes bored right into Elze. She stiffened beneath the weight of his gaze.
She couldn’t answer, and Oscar eventually looked away to focus on his duel against Javi. He threw a sidelong look at the spectators and saw that Tinasha—perhaps doing what she’d been told—had changed back into a cat and was perched on top of a small rock pillar with her paws and tail tucked under her body. She looked extremely serious, which made Oscar snort as he pulled out Akashia.
“Hurry and come at me already. If I don’t get back soon, I’ll have a mountain of work,” Oscar taunted.
“Little brat… You better be ready,” Javi spat. He drew out a long broadsword. It was crafted to prioritize weight over sharpness and had the ability to smash apart an opponent along with their sword when he struck at full strength. Anyone who’d ever faced Javi knew to fear that weapon, but Oscar didn’t appear bothered in the slightest. Javi licked his lips and settled himself into position.
The start signal came.
As it did, Javi charged straight ahead. Immediately, he swung at Oscar.
His sword’s powerful slash was surely lethal for anyone on the receiving end, whether they parried it or not. Oscar leaped back to avoid it.
Javi struck back swiftly with his heavy weapon, closing the distance between them with a sideways swipe. Oscar dodged the second attack. When Javi’s next blow came, Oscar fended it off with the edge of Akashia. He then used his left hand to catch hold of Javi’s right arm.
“What?!”
Oscar ignored Javi’s cry. With incredible speed, Oscar drew back his own blade.
Formidable strength brought Akashia whistling forward, and the sword severed Javi’s arm just above the elbow.
The limb hit the ground with a dull thump. Soon after, a bestial scream ripped through the clearing.
Javi fell to his knees in pain, but he still reached out with his left hand for his fallen sword.
Before his fingers could touch the blade, however, Akashia was at his throat. A calm voice called to the Ito leader. “Looks like it’s my victory. I’ll make sure you honor our agreement.”
A cheer rose up from the Farsasian side. The Ito were breathless with astonishment.
Biting his lip, Javi glared at his right hand and his sword.
Elze nearly fainted as the match came to a close, but Granfort supported her.
Amid all the wild enthusiasm, her body felt strangely cold. Color faded from the world.
The only parts of the scene that seemed alive were the man groveling on the ground without his arm and the red of his blood.
She couldn’t hear anything.
She couldn’t say anything.
His green eyes took hold of her. His mouth formed the shape of her name.
The world lurched. Elze slumped over.
The next thing she knew, she was on her knees in the pool of blood, reaching out for his face.
“D… Don’t die…”
That was all she was finally able to say.
Javi’s emerald eyes were so much more brilliant than they’d been in her dreams.
Oscar exhaled and sheathed Akashia. He then went over to the black cat and placed it on his shoulder.
He turned back to gaze at the man and woman in the center of the clearing. The dazed woman was trying desperately to stanch the bleeding from the man’s arm.
Both sides watched in silence as the bizarre scene played out.
Oscar snorted in disgust and spoke to the cat on his shoulder. “Tinasha, can you reattach his arm?”
“I refuse.”
“I suppose you would, but stop the bleeding, at least.”
The witch wanted to tut at him in annoyance. Oscar had never intended to have her reattach the man’s arm in the first place. He’d just made an unacceptable request first, so that she’d agree to something less drastic afterward.
Tinasha wanted to protest, but in the end, she bit her tongue and cast a spell to stop Javi’s bleeding.
“What do you want to do about her? If you want to retrieve her, I will,” Tinasha said.
“She can decide for herself. If she’s been dreaming about him, let her face him herself,” the king replied, and the cat stared up at him.
That was when her dark eyes grew huge.
The wind died down flat and the atmosphere suddenly changed.
Sensing something abnormal, Oscar shouted, “Get away from there!” to the two people in the middle of the plateau.
“What?” Javi asked. He was the only one to react to Oscar’s warning. Elze wasn’t moving; her hands seemed affixed to the puddle of blood. She was looking down and away. Concerned, Javi put his left hand on her.
“Hey, what’s wr—?”
Something invisible repelled his hand.
The wind whipped back up again, swirling into a vortex with Elze at the eye. The maelstrom quickly grew faster and faster, throwing the people in the clearing into chaos. Oscar shouted at everyone, “Get down from here! You’ll get drawn into it!”
“Your order doesn’t decide anyth—!” shouted back an Ito member, whose words were cut off as the high winds pulled him off his feet. With a scream, he was swept out between a gap in the outcroppings and fell to the ground below. This shocked the other Ito clansmen into action.
“R-run!” someone cried, and panic rippled out among them. People crashed into one another as they hurried to escape. Cries of those being trampled could be heard.
Oscar kept a hand on the cat. The poor thing looked like it was going to be sucked up in the vortex.
“Tinasha, are you all right? What’s going on?”
“I’ll…teleport them…,” croaked a hoarse feline voice as a transportation array engulfed all of the Farsasian citizens in the clearing. Granfort and Carel disappeared with surprised looks on their faces, but Elze remained at the center of the whirling winds. She was stock-still in the pool of blood. Suddenly, from a corner of the clearing, Inigo shrieked and squirmed away.
Cracks opened up in the earth of the clearing. Immediately, they widened and the red bedrock inside fizzled into sand and started to crumble away, joining the windstorm.
“Not good… Tinasha, you okay?” Oscar asked again.
At this rate, the entire clearing was going to cave in. Oscar looked up at the cat on his shoulder.
Now the cat was breathing raggedly. Its tiny body was shivering, and its black gaze couldn’t stay steady. The witch was in a bad way, and a scowl crossed Oscar’s handsome face. He heard Tinasha’s feeble voice plead, “Oscar… You must…stop it…”
The king of Farsas saw that a white mist was seeping up from the fissure closest to the center. It was heading toward him, and he used Akashia to clear it away. The mist vanished when it touched the sword, but fresh vapor streamed up in an endless supply. The huge chasm in the middle was widening little by little, and some sort of particularly thick mass was crawling up from it. It looked distinctively human as it tried to stand up from within the deep crevice.
“What the hell is that…?”
The white mass reached its handlike appendages up to the sky. As it pulled itself free, it began to float into the air.
Something like that couldn’t be allowed to run free.
Oscar recognized that much intuitively, but there was little he could do in the face of such mighty wind. As a stream of sand reached his feet, Oscar brandished Akashia before the white creature.
Then he threw the royal sword into the air. It soared through the eddying gale and pierced the white thing. The strange creature’s body immediately dispersed.
Unfortunately, an even larger fissure cracked open the clearing. With a violent lurch, the cat fell from Oscar’s shoulder into the gigantic aperture.
“Tinasha!” Oscar shouted, reaching for her. He missed but dived in after her without a moment’s hesitation.
The king and the witch were swallowed up by the holy ground.
They tumbled into a pitch-black opening in the rock.
Before Oscar could worry about where they would land, the crevice opened up into a wide space filled with dim white light. He and Tinasha were falling toward a body of water. Oscar finally managed to catch hold of the black cat in midair, taking it into his arms.
Immediately after, the pair plunged into the water with an enormous splash.
Oscar broke the surface right away, boosting the cat up onto his shoulder. The cat had stiffened, its black eyes huge.
“Are you unharmed?” Oscar asked with urgency.
“Yu—”
“Yu?”
“Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck! I hate water! I hate being wet!”
“Whoa, what’s wrong? Calm down,” Oscar insisted, but even as he spoke, the sopping wet cat was in chaos, attempting to clamber up from the water to his head. It dug its claws into his back in its panic, and Oscar patted the little animal. “I understand. You can change back into a human, so calm down. We’ve got to swim for a bit—don’t fall in.”
The pair were in a faintly lit, gigantic cave with walls of rock. It was much bigger than the underground cave Tinasha had taken him to on his birthday, though not as deep. It was more of a spring than a lake. Oscar was uninjured due in large part to his protective barrier. The considerable impact against the water would have undoubtedly broken something otherwise. It may have just been a spring that formed when underground water pooled, but to the wet cat, it was a full-scale calamity.
What Oscar said must have brought Tinasha back to her senses and calmed her a little, because she transformed back into her original shape. The shift hadn’t freed her of a cat’s fear of water, however, and she clung tearfully to Oscar’s neck while he swam.
“I—I got soaked… My fur got so wet…”
“You can swim. What’s gotten into you? I can’t see where I’m going; move your arm out of the way.”
“Cats hate getting wet! What is this awful place?” |
Unnamed Memory
“I’d like to know that myself,” Oscar said, pulling the witch into his arms as he swam the rest of the way across the cold spring. When they reached the shore, he hoisted her up first before getting out of the water himself.
Muttering complaints all the while, Tinasha dried their clothes. As she did, she froze. “Oscar… Where’s Akashia?”
“I threw it. I saw it fall into a different fissure.”
“I—I see…,” she said, most likely well aware that scolding him for something that reckless wasn’t going to help their current situation.
Tinasha sighed as she finished magically drying her and Oscar’s clothes.
“What happened back there? You were acting odd. So were Elze and that Ito mage,” Oscar pressed.
“Right… It’s strange that you were the only one unaffected by what happened,” Tinasha replied as she took in their surroundings. A lichen on the walls was emitting a faint glow that illuminated the place. The witch pointed to a singular rift in the wall. “Let’s walk and talk. I want to get Akashia back.”
“Got it. Sorry about this,” Oscar apologized, ruffling her hair, and her eyes narrowed happily. They set out along the path the rift had carved for them.
“Some sort of external magical interference was making me feel sick. A strange power from underground was coming up toward our internal magic. For people like me and the Ito mage who’ve undergone magic control training, it felt like something shut up inside us was forcibly churning us up. I felt so bad I couldn’t cast any spells. I don’t know what it was like for Elze, but I can only imagine…”
“Mine is uncontrolled, but I was fine,” Oscar interjected.
“You’re a bit of a special case… You also had Akashia. That Javi guy might’ve managed to avoid the feeling, too.”
“Javi, huh? You didn’t like that place from the start, and I guess with good reason.”
Regardless of what’d happened, Tinasha and Oscar were now underground. Oscar looked down at the witch next to him. “If you want, you can wait back at the fortress. I’ll look for Akashia.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m your protector. I’m actually very glad I came with you. I shudder to think of you off getting yourself drawn into trouble without my knowledge,” Tinasha stated pertly. She then grabbed hold of Oscar’s sleeve. The witch may have meant her words to be a sign of her dedication, but it betrayed her compassion more than anything else. Oscar smiled and continued the march forward.
Beyond the rift in the rock lay a narrow, crooked path. Oscar ran his fingers along the surface of the wall. “This is man-made. Is this part of the Ito holy ground, too?”
“Most likely. I think the aboveground part is just a lid. The battle on that seal is what broke it,” Tinasha hypothesized.
“A seal… What of that white mist that was inside? Do you know what that was?” Oscar inquired.
“I don’t. There’s not enough evidence for me to hazard a guess. All I can sense is that it’s something bad for mages,” Tinasha replied.
An end to their path was nearing now, and they could see that it led into an open space. Tinasha was about to advance into it, but Oscar held her back. “Someone’s there,” he hissed, pulling out his dagger. Tinasha obediently followed behind him.
Concealing his footsteps as best he could, Oscar crept out into the round, empty chamber of rock. A man was crouched in the middle of it, and Oscar gaped at the sight of him.
“Did you fall down, too? Are you okay?”
It was Javi. He looked up at them with empty eyes. “You… How did you get here?”
“We fell. If you’ve got any fatal wounds, she can heal them,” Oscar replied.
“Hey, don’t speak for me. I plan to kill all of them as soon as I can,” the witch retorted, sounding truly enraged. Oscar grimaced.
He’d learned over the course of their time together that she was indifferent toward people who were hostile to her but merciless to those who treated him that way. She was much crueler than him, particularly to people who struck back even after their defeat was clear.
Both of them were confident in their own abilities. Oscar was content to let his enemies escape, but Tinasha beat them down thoroughly to nip any future revenge plots in the bud. It was not easy at all to rein her in when she was full of wrath.
“Leave it. You don’t have to handle everything. Besides, right now I have something to ask him.” Oscar turned to Javi. “What is this place?”
Murals and written characters were carved into the faintly glowing walls. Javi glared at Oscar and Tinasha as if they were something unpleasant. “This is the Ito’s sacred place. Only the leader and his closest associates know about it. Carved into the walls is the history of our clan… I’ve only been here once before as a kid.”
“Your history, huh? Interesting,” Oscar remarked. He walked up to the right edge of one wall, where the carvings looked the newest. Inscribed there was small, tightly packed text detailing the events of two years prior, with no pictures. In some places, it was too smudged to read, but here and there, Oscar could pick out words like two of the same sword, the past, magic crystal ball, and memories of a clan.
When he brought his face closer to get a better look, Tinasha called to him. “Don’t wander around. This is more annoying than I thought.”
“Hmm? What’s up?”
Tinasha was looking at an even older carving on the opposite wall. It was composed almost entirely of pictures, and she pointed to a drawing of a white human-shaped being. It had no face or clothing, and little balls were depicted at its feet. The other humans around it were reverently bowing down to it. “This is probably their visiting god. It’s the thing that just attacked us.”
“Oh, because it’s white? Is it okay to decide that’s what it is just based on color?”
“There’s more written here that makes it obvious. ‘The god who came from another place found the devil fiends mixed in among the humans and killed them. Everyone gave thanks to the god and feared it. They made a resting place for their deity.’ In the early Dark Age, devil fiend was an insult for mages. Mages weren’t treated as people back then. This ‘god’ can provoke reactions in people with magic, revealing them to be mages. That’s why the Ito revered it.”
“I see. So they turned their sacred land into its resting place. But what is it really? It looked like mist. Is it a demon?”
“No. A demon would have its own magic. This thing was different…”
Tinasha traced a part of the wall. Oscar squinted and saw that it was what must have been the god’s name, judging by context. But it had been scraped off at a later date, and only some of it was legible.
“…ity…di…? I can’t make it out,” Oscar finally admitted, brooding over it.
Tinasha whirled around to look at Javi, a grim look on her face. “The god that came from another place. Have you heard where that place is?”
Javi’s face was pale, but he glared at Tinasha and refused to answer. She let out a huge sigh. “The fact that you’re here but largely uninjured must mean that you followed the path down here yourself. You didn’t fall like us. You came in search of Elze, right? You better start talking before it’s too late. She had magic.”
“Wha—? That can’t be…” Javi gasped. He struggled to get to his feet, but he fell to his knees in agony. After a brief moment of indecision, he finally decided to give Tinasha the answer that she wanted. “Th-they said it came from the north.”
“I knew it…,” the witch whispered to herself.
“Tinasha, what do you know?” Oscar inquired.
“I can’t be certain, but there’s another country with similar stories of an entity that can badly affect the mind and body of those with magic. Its mere presence was said to be enough to cause their magic to run wild and hurt those around them…”
“It can’t be…” Oscar had heard the same story. Just two months ago, he’d needed to review an account of it.
Before sending out Farsasian troops to aid in a foreign country’s religious war, he’d thought to study up on that nation’s cultural history. It was in that research that he’d learned of the entity known as the World-Splitting Blade or Sleeping Paleface.
A huge country in the north worshipped that fearsome creature as a god.
“…Tayiri’s one true god, Irityrdia,” Oscar muttered, completely stunned.
“Most likely, yes… That giant thing was what they deified,” Tinasha affirmed.
Tayiri, which had long expelled and oppressed mages, was where Irityrdia had come from.
It was what led mages to run amok and hurt people. That in turn had caused those without magic to demonize spell casters.
This Irityrdia had drifted in from the north and come to rest here.
Tinasha uncrossed her arms and asked Javi, “So what does this room connect to? You must have an idea of where Elze is.”
“…I couldn’t get in. It connects to a chamber just below the center of the holy place. But there’s an invisible wall, and I can’t get past.”
“I’ll do something about that. Elze and Akashia probably ended up close to each other,” the witch declared, looking around the chamber. She spied a door across from the passage Javi must have come in through.
“Oscar, will you wait here?” Tinasha requested.
“I will not,” he stated flatly.
“I thought so! I expected this! I want to forcibly teleport you home!” Tinasha shouted at him, just the same as she always did.
Oscar didn’t answer, instead offering a thought. “Won’t a mage be at a disadvantage against that creature? Won’t it just be a repeat of what happened earlier?”
“I’ll put up a defensive wall. Besides, I’m not a cat anymore. If it tries to send out more magical interference, I just have to push back against it. I’m actually the most worried about you without Akashia.”
“Hmm. Perfect timing—I’ll just borrow this,” Oscar said, picking up Javi’s broadsword. He handled it as if it weighed no more than a feather, and Tinasha felt some of the tension leave her shoulders. With no fanfare, the duo headed for the far side of the chamber.
Oscar pushed past the door that barred the way to a piece of mythological history.
Beyond it, a winding narrow path extended outward. The surrounding stone made the trail just wide enough for Oscar and Tinasha to pass through.
The witch walked two steps behind the king so as not to get in the way of any sword attacks. Along with a long incantation, Oscar could see a finely wrought defensive wall taking shape around them.
The air changed degree by degree. As he made his way forward, Oscar asked, “If Irityrdia is up ahead, do you think you can kill it?”
“I’m not sure… As we saw earlier, an attack with Akashia appears to be effective, but we’re up against mist.”
“A mist creature, huh? Guess we’d have to burn it.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it a creature… Judging by the interference I suffered, it was probably closer to a phenomenon. One that reacts to magic and rejects it.”
“Rejects magic? So it’s something like Akashia?”
“No, not quite that. Akashia dismantles and scatters magic here within the hierarchy where we live, but this phenomenon seems to try to push magic back to the plane in the hierarchy where magic primarily exists. The name World-Splitting Blade refers to how Irityrdia tries to cut through the gaps between planes in the hierarchy. Originally, we mages are born with power that’s on the magic plane. It feels like someone trying to make off with our very organs.”
“It definitely doesn’t sound pleasant.”
“It’s not. But that’s only true for someone who’s undergone control training and can store magic in their body.”
“And for someone like Elze?”
“…Their magic wouldn’t be so easily cut out. It could mean they’d be blotted out, soul and all.”
“We’ll need to hurry, then,” Oscar declared, quickening his pace. Finally, the path began to widen and led into a chamber that looked like the carved-out inside of a mountain.
Instead of glowing moss, darkness and white mist clung to the place. Oscar scowled as he peered at the way forward. “Isn’t there some sort of invisible shell up ahead?”
“There is. That was probably what blocked that Ito man back there from entering. Someone cast a spell to prevent Irityrdia from escaping. Magic wouldn’t have been enough, of course—that’s why I believe they transmuted their soul into a spell. The seal must be very old, though; it shouldn’t have held for this long,” Tinasha mused. She sidled up next to Oscar and stroked the empty air.
Then they heard a soft shattering noise. The mist was stirring. The white shroud blanketing the room surged forward toward them. But a few steps before it could reach Oscar, Tinasha’s barrier blocked it. Glaring at the strange anomaly, the witch waved a hand.
“…Move aside.”
The witch’s power pushed back the pale fog that threatened to swallow the two. Sweat gathered on Tinasha’s brow as she forced the vapor aside.
Once Oscar realized that Tinasha probably couldn’t endure this for long, he patted her shoulder. “I’ll be back. Don’t overexert yourself.”
“Be careful,” she whispered and nodded to him. Oscar took off at a run. He meant to look for Elze and Akashia, but he couldn’t see anything with the mist pressing in on him. Tinasha expanded her defense to encompass Oscar for a time, but once he got too far for it to follow, he dived into the mist alone.
That was when everything shook and warped.
It felt just like up and down were all out of order, yet Oscar’s feet remained firm on the ground. The persistent mist was trying to interfere with his magic—attempting to overwhelm him and the barrier Tinasha had placed on him.
It wanted to crush his body to a pulp, but Oscar marched onward, undaunted. “Elze! Can you hear me?!”
Judging by how the woman had been acting aboveground, Oscar had to concede that it was possible she’d been pushed off this plane of existence. Even so, he called out in search of her. An instinct suddenly commanded that he draw his sword.
Something came whooshing down at Oscar from overhead, making a high-pitched sound when it clashed against his blade. Oscar tried to push away the other weapon, but his sword was suddenly confronted with nothing but empty air.
Tinasha’s efforts forced the mist back farther, compressing it tightly.
From within the alabaster vapors, Oscar saw a person emerge. The sight of her caused his handsome features to twist. “You…”
It was Elze. Her blank eyes were darting all over, and she held something white and swordlike in her hand. It looked like she’d lost her mind, as if she was a marionette controlled by strings.
She lifted one slender arm—and threw the pale sword at Oscar.
“Ngh!” he grunted. While he repelled the attack easily enough, the hurled weapon dissolved and turned to white mist.
“It’s possessed her. Not good.”
A corporeal opponent was a far easier target, but there was no way Oscar could attack Elze. As he hesitated, she swooped down upon him again. He parried another slash of a fog-formed blade, but he was at a loss for how to proceed. Elze was innocent in all this. Oscar found himself trapped in a stalemate. Seeing that her attacks weren’t landing, Elze leaped far back.
Then she opened both arms and threw out her chest.
Oscar didn’t know what she planned to do, but then he saw mist start to move toward her open mouth. A steady stream of it flowed into her petite frame.
“Oh, come on… That’s where this is going?”
There was little to do but watch the strange sight. Oscar had to wonder how such a slender body could house such a vast quantity of the strange miasma. He was granted precious little time to think, as Elze began to emanate a gentle light.
Oscar deliberated for a moment, and then he kicked off the ground and closed in on her. He slashed down from overhead to put an end to the mist influx.
An ivory hand stopped his sword, however.
“What?”
Clutched in Elze’s hand was the blade of a broadsword powerful enough to cleave bone. While Oscar was surprised, his body moved reflexively. He let go of the sword and leaped back.
Swinging from the blade, Elze brought the weapon to bear down at the exact spot where Oscar had been standing just a moment before. The huge sword she’d appropriated twisted like flimsy wire. As Oscar watched the weapon shatter to slivers in her grip, he wanted to burst out laughing.
“If this is what a god is, Aetea’s downright docile.”
“Come on now. You’re the king. Watch what you say,” came Tinasha’s exhausted voice. Oscar whirled around. The witch had stopped trying to push back the mist, as there was no need now that it was contained inside Elze.
Tinasha wiped the sweat from her forehead as she came over to Oscar. “That was pretty heavy labor… Any mages who faced that thing in the past definitely fell into endless despair.”
“You okay? You’re really pale.”
“I just feel extremely seasick. It’s like something’s churning up my insides… I can’t walk straight.”
“I don’t feel it that bad,” Oscar admitted in reply. His surroundings grew hazy in the mist, but it was nothing like what Tinasha was describing.
The witch shook her head feebly. “Half of my magic came to me later in life, so it’s easier for me to feel the effects, I think… As for you, it’s because your magic is sealed.”
“Sealed? This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Oscar said.
Tinasha’s eyes grew wide for a moment, but she immediately smiled as if nothing was wrong. “Oh, really? Then it must be my imagination. Let’s focus on what we’re going to do here.”
“I want to hear more about that later. Anyway, is there anything we can do about Irityrdia without killing Elze?”
“It’ll be very hard… Magic has almost no effect on it, so I can’t draw it out in the usual way. Having said that, it’s impossible to destroy whatever’s inside her without harming her body. The humanlike figure depicted in that mural may have also been a human who was possessed,” Tinasha explained without taking her eyes off Elze. “A physical form to attack makes things easier for us.”
The vapor that had once filled the room was now nowhere to be found. All that was left was a glowing woman in a dark chamber.
When she opened her eyes, they were completely white. From her slightly parted lips came a trail of fine mist. She appeared human but was something else.
The witch frowned. “For now, we need to get Akashia. It seemed to be capable of dispersing Irityrdia.”
Oscar scanned the gloom. Now that the fog had cleared, he could see something glinting in the distance. Its occasional shine had been calling to him for a while now.
“But if I cut Elze down with Akashia, she’ll die,” Oscar protested.
“She will. But if that thing gets out in the open, something far worse will happen. So as a last resort—” Tinasha cut herself off. Oscar sensed someone approaching and spun around.
A man had emerged from the passage into the chamber.
“I won’t let you kill her,” he swore. He glanced at what remained of his right arm and declared with even greater determination, “I will not let you kill her.”
He was so weak he looked like he could collapse any minute. Still, Oscar and Tinasha knew his words were no bluff.
Oscar started to say something, but the witch held up a hand to stop him. She turned to Javi and said, “I understand how you feel, but something bigger is at stake here. Irityrdia has possessed her. If she’s turned loose on the world, it will be nothing short of catastrophic. Once anyone with magic gets near her, they’ll either self-destruct or go mad. A berserk mage is a threat to everyone. Things like that are the reason Tayiri has spent over a thousand years ostracizing mages.”
Tinasha’s dark eyes mirrored a dark abyss. Her gaze was the sort one could only acquire after watching bloody conflicts repeat themselves throughout history.
One look from those dim orbs was enough to paralyze someone. It was unmistakably the glare of a witch. How bottomless her eyes could be was something she didn’t regularly reveal; Oscar squinted at her. Javi stiffened, and the witch went on in a voice as cold as ice. “What she is now is nothing but a vessel that will propagate more innocent deaths. Do you want the same mistakes of the past to repeat themselves? If you fail to understand, then I’ll start by killing you.”
Tinasha’s tone was enough to snuff the life from those who heard it.
Normal people would’ve cowered and begged forgiveness after one look into those ebony eyes.
The witch was only speaking the truth, however.
Javi cleared his dry throat. He looked at the stump of his arm…but then glared back defiantly at the witch. “I don’t care who she kills or how many.”
“That’s enough nonsense. You’ve got guts, laying down your own life.”
“Even so…I won’t let you kill her. She’s the one I want,” Javi insisted, stubborn to the last.
Tinasha stared at the Ito man. Her eyes told him nothing, and Javi shrank back a little under the weight of her gaze. He held his breath and cleared his throat.
“…Please save her,” he begged.
Tinasha frowned, appalled. She rubbed her temple with a finger. “I suppose I have to. But you’re going to help.”
She looked over at Elze. The woman was in a state of total possession, standing stock-still in the open space as if waiting for her next moment of opportunity. Tinasha gave Oscar and Javi brief instructions. Javi looked unsure but obeyed and took his position.
“Do you think we have a chance now?” Oscar asked.
“Mmm… I wish I had some sort of medium to ensure it’ll work. But I was a cat, so I didn’t bring any equipment.”
“What kind of medium?”
“Normally, I’d use crystals. You know, like the ones we saw at the foot of the humanlike thing in that mural?”
Evidently, those ancient carvings were what Tinasha was basing her plan off. Without a conduit like the ones that had been depicted, all she could do was take over the job herself.
Oscar suddenly straightened up in surprise and responded, “Oh, I’ve got something that might work. Here.”
He pulled a small bag containing a crystal ball from his breast pocket, and Tinasha’s eyes grew wide. “Why do you have something like this? You’re not a mage.”
“Because it’s your favorite toy. I brought the one from my desk.”
“I’m human! I only made myself look like a cat!” Tinasha squawked, her cheeks puffing up. Despite her protestations, she received the palm-sized sphere and inspected it. “Urgh… It’s a little too big… Won’t fit in my mouth…”
“What are you talking about? It’s a cat toy.”
“It’s not a toy!” Tinasha insisted loudly. She squeezed the ball, and it shrank to the size of a small pearl.
“What was that? How’d you do that?” Oscar inquired.
“Shrinking magic is a real thing, you know. Now watch—the crucial part is what comes next,” Tinasha instructed, popping the reduced crystal ball into her mouth. Oscar’s eyes bugged out. Suddenly, Tinasha asked, “If I became a threat to the entire world, would you kill me?”
It was reminiscent of something she asked before.
Was that the same situation Javi was facing at that very moment, or was it different somehow?
The witch’s question sounded like that of a little girl trying to probe into something she didn’t quite understand. Without any hesitation, Oscar responded, “Only if it were beyond a shadow of a doubt that you couldn’t be saved.”
No matter the situation, no matter the circumstances, if there was even a sliver of a possibility, he would reach out to help her.
He’d set her forward and get her on her feet. They’d move on, even if she were smeared in blood and mud—even if she’d garnered hatred from every side.
If she’d truly closed off every option and it was all over already, however…
In such a situation, Oscar knew he would be the one to bring Tinasha to her end. When he took the throne, he accepted the position knowing he needed to be prepared for that.
His words may have sounded callous, but they’d showed that he was more devoted to the witch than anyone.
Tinasha was left breathless at Oscar’s reply.
And then…she gave a heartfelt, blissful smile.
Her eyes were soft with feelings she couldn’t hold back as she gazed at him. “That’s why I can fight. Because I know you’d do that.”
She floated a few centimeters into the air and took Oscar’s face in her hands.
Tinasha’s dark eyes bore right into his. Then she closed hers, eyelashes fluttering, and pressed a kiss to Oscar’s forehead. After pulling back, she whispered in his ear, “Let’s go.”
The witch gave a solid pat to Oscar’s chest. At the same time, he saw the crystal ball go down her throat as she swallowed it.
Before he could think about what that meant, he broke into a run.
There was no more mist. Oscar was heading for Akashia, not Elze. The possessed woman reacted to his magic, taking no notice at all of Javi. Her eyes followed Oscar as he ran. A dozen arrows of that white fog formed around Elze before speeding after Oscar.
“Guess you’re so predictable because you’re not really alive,” commented Oscar. Keeping an eye on the arrows closing in, he made a huge leap. The vaporous projectiles all missed, crashing harmlessly into the ground. With no change in expression, Elze motioned to summon up new arrows to chase him.
That was when Tinasha called out, “Hey, Irityrdia. Shouldn’t I be the one you’re aiming for?”
Her voice cut through the dark, and Elze’s eyes swiveled to Tinasha. Clad all in black, the witch appeared not unlike a moon hanging in the night sky. “You were laid to rest here in this sacred place. I wonder how many sacrifices were needed to seal you away.”
The question carried across the cavern. It filled Oscar’s ears as he charged through the black. The closer he got, the more certain he was that it was Akashia sticking out of the ground. He picked up his beloved sword and was about to turn back when he noticed something scattered on the ground a short distance away.
“Are those…human bones?”
Scattered skeletons lay faded on the dark earth. Piles of dust had accumulated on them, and in their midst glittered freshly shattered crystal shards.
The witch’s voice boomed. “You were held by an ancient seal but awakened in response to my magic. That is why you surfaced and reached for me…but I rejected you. So you took that woman instead.”
Tinasha reached out a hand. Her eyes curved beautifully with her smile and then flashed with irrepressible rage. “So come to me, O god who has killed many and driven more to madness, who has left its claw marks on history. As a mage of this land, I—the Witch of the Azure Moon—shall face you.”
Blue flames sparked from her hands. A colossal magic bonfire powerful enough to burn anything to a crisp at a single touch sprouted to life.
The flame was so different from anything found on this plane of the hierarchy that Irityrdia froze for a moment.
Then it let out a terrifying roar. “Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!”
The taut scream emerging from the woman’s mouth rang double and triple in everyone’s ears.
Elze kicked off the ground and attempted to spring an attack on Tinasha. Javi had gotten behind her, however, and held her back. As he restrained her with only his left arm, his face twisted at her inhuman might.
“Stay here… Do not go!”
Elze struggled in his arms like a broken doll. Javi gritted his teeth and dug in his heels firmly.
She fought and writhed, striking out at him with supernatural strength. There came the dull sound of bones breaking, and Javi doubled over, anguish writ clear on his face. He refused to let her go, however, and she let out a beastly howl.
They were entangled like that for a while, until Elze gave a jolt. “Ah…aaahhh…”
From her immobile body, a stream of white mist began to flow out, drawn toward the witch’s flame. The sentient white mist pressed in. As it came nearer, Tinasha flashed it a dauntless grin. “Come.”
The witch closed her eyes…and let out a little sigh.
Then…something winked out of sight.
“Tinasha!”
What she erased was the solid wall that was otherwise always in place around her magic. The first thing mages were taught was how to establish one’s individuality in the world, but she was a witch. Her distinctiveness wasn’t ordinary and neither was how she held her magic in check.
She had undone it entirely.
An almighty bundle of magical power was utterly defenseless.
The god turned into mist and surged toward it.
Tinasha extinguished her blue flame as the stream of vapor closed in but did nothing else.
The mist flowed right in between her red lips, entwining around her arms and legs and her waist. The phenomenon descended on her, trying to remove her magic from every pore of her body.
The sight was bizarrely beautiful and yet completely sickening.
Javi stared in shock, assaulted by nausea. In his arms, Elze fell limp.
“Dammit!” cried Oscar, running toward the witch. He realized what the piles of bones were. The mural had depicted smashed crystal balls and human remains.
Long ago, someone must have used the same method to seal away Irityrdia.
The process entailed using oneself as a vessel for a god—but humans were short-lived. So in order to prevent a god lacking a conscious will from going free after its human vessel died, a crystal ball swallowed internally acted as a medium to store the god. Double vessels kept Irityrdia tied to this holy ground. The old crystal balls—the god’s resting place—had shattered into pieces under the pull of the witch’s power.
Tinasha had noticed the mist was sealed using two vessels…and resolved to do the same thing others had in the past.
“Tinasha! Stop it!” Oscar insisted.
If she became a phenomenon that only existed to kill…
Oscar would be the one to bring an end to it. He didn’t plan on burdening anyone else with that responsibility.
Undoubtedly, that’s the sort of role the witch wanted him to take. Oscar had always chosen paths that prevented the possibility from becoming an inevitability, however.
A beautiful witch. The symbol of the strongest, most abominable power in the entire land.
A queen with no throne from an empire that fell long ago. Oscar knew if he let go of her even once, he’d never get her back. She’d glide away as easily as water. Ordinarily, the two should never have met. The slip in time that had allowed it would carry her off.
That’s precisely why Oscar knew he couldn’t give up.
“Tinasha!”
Oscar grabbed her shoulders. By now, there was no mist remaining. A wisp of white breath escaped her slightly parted lips.
She looked up at him with empty, dark eyes. In a thin, weak voice, she said, “Not…yet…”
“What’s not yet?” he demanded, but he was relieved to see she was still conscious. She wasn’t lost. He could still get her back. Glancing down at her stomach, Oscar said, “I’m going to make you throw up that crystal. It’ll be painful but bear with it.”
If he separated it from her, they should be able to take another tack. He also wouldn’t mind just going back to square one. The two of them could battle the likes of a god. He was convinced of that.
Eyes still vacant, Tinasha immediately responded, “But then it might get away…”
Her face was pallid as she looked down at herself. Slowly, she pressed a few fingers down on a spot in the center of her body, just under her rib cage. Then she slid her fingers lower. The black fabric of her formfitting costume opened up smoothly like a knife through butter. Skin as soft as virgin snow peeked out from under the gap.
Then her fingers stopped right over her navel. “It’s here. You can do it, right?”
“Listen…,” Oscar said in exasperation, having gleaned her meaning.
Irityrdia was inside the crystal ball she’d swallowed. There was only one way to keep it from ever truly escaping.
“Are you planning to make me disembowel you?”
Tinasha’s plan was to have Oscar cleave her through and smash the crystal with Akashia. By using her own body as a decoy, the god could be slain. That was the only way.
The graceful lines of Oscar’s face were all twisted in bitterness, which made the witch laugh. “Disembowel? You’re the one most capable of finishing the job with minimal injuries. I’ll heal right away, so I’ll be fine. Besides, I’m used to getting holes cut in my belly.”
“Can you be a little less ridiculous…?” Oscar muttered through gritted teeth.
It was true that Tinasha had experience with atrocious injuries, but that didn’t make the decision any easier for Oscar.
Yet here the witch was, asking him to do just that, entirely naturally. “Take up your sword and win.”
Tinasha gazed at Oscar’s sullen face and tilted her head. “Do you not think you can do it?”
“Don’t try to get me riled up, idiot. I’m just in shock at how shameless you are. Are you a cat?”
“I’m not a cat,” the witch insisted. Complete trust shone in her eyes.
No—it wasn’t even trust. Her gaze was saying, You can do it. To her, it was just a fact, not a matter of trust.
She was handing her body, her life, over to Oscar without a single doubt.
This woman was nothing but trouble, and that was precisely what he loved about her.
“Fine, I’ll do it. You do your best to dull the pain.”
Oscar wiped Akashia with a cloth.
This was the royal sword. It was meant for war. Its blade was not slender at all. But where he would be cutting bled out copiously even under the best of circumstances. He didn’t want to nick any other organs. Taking off his left glove, he touched her skin to make sure of his aim. He traced upward on her soft belly, and she shuddered. “Th-that tickles… Don’t touch it too much.”
“Don’t move around. Just try and bear it. If you don’t stay perfectly still, I’ll touch you more later,” he warned her, and she screwed her eyes shut.
Tinasha used magic to anesthetize the area, and while she could stanch bleeding and heal herself, it wouldn’t be possible to do so as long as Akashia was touching her. He needed to be as swift and sure as possible. There was little time left to wait.
Oscar looked down at the witch. Her breathing had grown very shallow. While Irityrdia was sealed in the crystal ball inside her, it was taking a heavy toll.
Oscar collected himself and grabbed Tinasha around the waist using his left hand.
“You’re my one and only,” he said, voicing a simple truth, the same way she’d done. “Concentrate. We’ll beat this without any close calls.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, grinning up at him just like a challenger in her tower. “Oscar, I’ve always, always wanted to beat a so-called god to a pulp.”
Her desire to fight was clear and honest.
The witch lifted her chin and closed her eyes. “Go on. Do it.”
Oscar nodded in acquiescence. Then he focused his strength into his grip on Akashia’s hilt—
And crushed the thing once called a god. |
Unnamed Memory
12. The Same Dream for a Time
After doing much more than he had planned, the first thing Oscar saw when he returned to the fortress was his old playmate on the verge of tears.
Lazar was at the front gate to welcome his king back, and his knees almost gave out under him when he saw Oscar.
“Y-Your Majesty… I’m so glad you’re safe…”
“What are you doing here?” Oscar inquired very matter-of-factly.
“What am I doing here?! I came running once I heard you’d gone missing! I was told there was some commotion over a duel with the Ito, but everyone was teleported to safety except you and Miss Tinasha!”
“Oh yeah…”
Oscar and Tinasha had managed to sort things out and teleported back. Apparently, Minnedart had been thrown into chaos during their absence. Cries of “His Majesty’s back!” echoed throughout the fort. Granfort and the others hurried over, then looked down at the witch lying in Oscar’s arms. She was half-asleep but opened her eyes blearily at him. “Is it time to explain…?” she asked.
“I’ll do the explaining. You just get some sleep. I’m taking you back to the room.”
“Sorry… I’ll go back myself…,” she murmured, vanishing away with a silent transportation spell.
Lazar had gotten an eyeful of her all covered in blood and ventured fearfully, “What happened…? Did the Ito do that…?”
“No, I did. I stabbed her.”
“Excuse me, Your Majesty?!”
“I’ll explain while we clean things up. Give me a hand.”
He was exhausted and desperately wanted sleep, but there was currently no one else around who understood the entire situation. Oscar gave orders to the people who had gathered around him and retreated to the makeshift study in the fortress.
He gave Lazar a brief rundown of everything. By the end of it, his attendant was left in shock. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you right…”
“No, you did. You just don’t want to believe it. Accept the facts.”
“Why did you end up killing another country’s god when you just went out on a short observation mission?!” Lazar cried. The story about the battle with Irityrdia had left Lazar looking like he could fall to his hands and knees at any moment.
No work would get done if he wasted time doing that, though. The most pressing matter at the moment was the banning of future Ito raids. Oscar rested his elbows on the desk and placed his chin in his hands. “Well, all that stuff about Irityrdia is just between us. Maybe it was something else with a similar name.”
“No matter what it was, I’m just so very glad you’re safe… Oh, that’s right, there was a woman who didn’t come back, either. What happened to her?”
“Yes, Elze. After healing her, we dropped her off at the former site of her village. If she wants to, she’ll come back on her own,” Oscar explained.
He didn’t know exactly what answer Elze would decide on or how she’d face herself. If she chose to go back to her old life, the man who’d followed after her would surely escort her to the fortress.
Javi had begged the witch to spare Elze’s life, even in exchange for his own. Oscar trusted that Javi and Elze would work things out with each other.
After drafting the agreement that Javi had agreed to, Oscar passed the document to Lazar. Lazar read it over twice and asked, “This says that there will be a formal signing of an accord at a later date, but will the Ito really respect something like this?”
“Good question. If they don’t, we’ll just have to deal with them in a different way when that time comes.”
If the Ito didn’t accept, Tinasha would fly into a rage and possibly annihilate their entire clan. For their sake, Oscar truly hoped this matter had come to an end. He looked out the window; it was completely dark outside. “There’s still a lot to sort out, but can I go back to my chamber? I’m worried about Tinasha.”
“Go right ahead. I’ll take care of the rest,” Lazar replied.
“Thanks,” Oscar said, gathering up the bare minimum of paperwork and heading back to the room he and Tinasha were sharing.
He thought she’d immediately pass out after teleporting, but she’d had the strength to take a bath and wash off the blood. She was laying on the bed in a nightgown and looked up at the sound of the door opening. “Welcome back…,” she managed weakly.
“Are you doing okay? There’s no more fragments inside you, right?”
“If there were, I’d definitely know. I’m fine. I don’t have a scar, either,” she informed him. After giving a little yawn, the witch turned to lie facedown.
Oscar sat down next to her, tugging on a strand of damp black hair. “You’ve really gotta take better care of your belly. That’s gonna bite you when you’re giving birth to our child.”
“I won’t… I’m definitely not doing that… Anyway, you should get to sleep. It’ll be rough when the recoil from your magic getting shaken up kicks in later.”
“I still don’t feel anything, though.”
Oscar did have to admit that he was feeling exhausted, however. He stood to head for the bathroom, but then something occurred to him. Tinasha was already dozing, but he asked anyway.
“Are you going to sleep in human form? Did you forget you’re sharing a room with me?”
“I trust that you have a firm grasp on your self-control…”
“You’re gonna get yourself in trouble one of these days.”
“When I’m a cat, I curl up in a ball… But I want to stretch my legs… Just let me sleep like this for an hour.”
“…Go to sleep, then.”
Evidently relieved by that, Tinasha closed her eyes immediately. Her breathing turned deep.
Oscar couldn’t help but frown in exasperation as he looked at her. The witch was so defenseless in sleep. She’d cozied up to him considerably compared with when they’d first met, but he didn’t think it was in quite the right way. He stroked her hair and covered her with the blankets. “So typical… You’ve gotta stop trusting me so much.”
The weight of Tinasha’s trust in him felt like a comfortable load to Oscar, though.
He wished that he would always be the one she asked for help and that he would always be able to pull her out of distress.
“No matter what happens, I’ll protect you.”
The next day, he would take her hand again and they’d start their march forward. They’d journey to prevent themselves from reaching an end they couldn’t come back from. Even if that took a lifetime, nothing would make Oscar happier. He gazed down at his rare and precious guardian.
They carried the legacy of the Magic Empire of Tuldarr into a new era and destroyed the mindless god.
The story of the king and the witch still had many more pages to go.
“I want to kill them…,” growled a voice in a dark room.
The speaker was a slender woman, and the fury in her voice seethed like lava sleeping underground.
Her red-hot hatred scorched her spirit as she awaited the time to unleash her boiling rage upon the world.
“I want to kill those two…”
“…You can’t. Not only is she the most powerful witch but the bearer of Akashia is her guardian. Make no mistake, those two are the strongest duo in all the land,” the owner of the room said in reply to the first speaker’s litany of curses. She sounded bored, but lying below the surface of that was a placidity tainted with poison.
Her matter-of-fact statement caused the incensed woman to bite her lip. “Even so, I want to kill them,” she insisted.
“Weren’t you in the wrong? You’re the one who toyed with people’s lives.”
“I want to kill them…”
Her resentment ran deep. Her anger had deafened her to what the other woman was saying.
The owner of the room listened to the other whisper for a while before she suddenly gave a little snort. In an amused tone, the witch said…
“Then let me teach you how.” |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
1. The Song That Is No Lullaby
It is waiting.
Waiting for that one last straw to undo all the rewrites. Waiting for a sign to begin the revolution.
The world anticipated its opportunity, at the mercy of all the pins stuck into it.
The blood painted the white walls of the corridor red. The slain lay tragically on the ground where they fell, wearing uniform expressions of indignation and disdain. Their deaths had clearly come too swiftly and suddenly for their emotions to shift.
A girl stood amid the blood, gazing around at the dozen bodies. Although she was no older than fifteen, she was fearless, with dark hair and eyes of deepest night. Her face was as lovely as a work of art, yet it was entirely blank.
This young queen, swarmed by assassins only a moment before, smeared away the flecks of blood on her cheeks.
“I’m sure you wish that the lofty ideals of your mission had prevailed.”
The assassins were the ones who had branded her the Usurper Queen and sought to eliminate her. In a sense, their methods weren’t wrong. After all, this nation of mages was historically governed by the strongest of their ranks.
But they were woefully lacking in the power to see their plan succeed.
They had attacked the girl en masse, trusting strength in numbers, but were unable to touch a hair on her head before she dispatched them.
Recently, it had become a common occurrence. In the year since the queen’s coronation, there had been no end of those who feared her, spurned her, and sought to dethrone her. Crowned because her fellow candidate for ruler, Prince Lanak, had gone insane and died, she was a rarity even as she sat at the pinnacle of the nation.
This girl was the only ruler since the founding of the country to have full command of all twelve mystical spirits. She frowned at the piteous scene before her.
Her dark gaze fell upon the one remaining man, an older gentleman and magistrate who had served the court since the era of the previous ruler. Even after the new queen’s enthronement under unprecedented circumstances, he had remained loyal, backing her up and offering thoughtful advice.
The young queen smiled at her subject. “Did you think you could kill me if you caught me by surprise and overwhelmed me?”
“I…”
“You spent so long pretending to be obedient and submissive, and now you’ve gone and ruined it with your shortsightedness. You should know that I never let down my guard around anyone, no matter how many years pass,” she said.
“Y-you monster!” he shouted, his cry becoming an attack spell. But before he could finish weaving the magic’s configuration, his head split open like a ripe fruit.
Her smile didn’t falter. His body slumped backward onto the ground. Now that everyone in the vicinity was dead, some of the tension drained from Tinasha’s shoulders as she sighed. “No one ever learns, do they? Honestly.”
As she was about to walk away, a lady-in-waiting appeared around the next corner. “Your Majesty… Ahhhhhh!”
The lady-in-waiting shrieked at the gruesome spectacle. Tinasha cocked her head at the woman. “Yes, what is it?”
“Er, well, you have a guest. A royal of Farsas.”
“I’ll be right there,” the queen replied.
Not long ago, a letter from Farsas had arrived stating that the king’s brother wished to come study in Tuldarr.
No Oscar existed in Farsas at present; Tinasha had looked into that a while back. Still, it was the country of his future birth. Curious, Tinasha had granted permission to this one of royal lineage a few days earlier and wished to speak directly with her guest.
Tinasha was about to rush off before she stopped and turned. “Senn, could you clean this up?”
“Sure, but aren’t you gonna track down their coconspirators? There’s bound to be some sort of group behind all this,” replied the spirit in the form of a young man, appearing in response to her summons.
The queen gave a brisk shake of her head. “That would be a never-ending task. They’ll keep coming anyway.”
“Got it,” he replied, vanishing the pile of corpses along with the blood spatters.
Tinasha didn’t stop to watch as she made for a room in which to receive guests. Waiting for her was a mild-mannered man old enough to be her father. Out of respect for his meeting with a queen, he was not wearing a sword, but his muscular build indicated well-honed swordsmanship. The older brother of the king of Farsas, born of a different mother, had expressed a desire to study in Tuldarr so that he might bring magical culture back to his own country.
“Your Majesty, I thank you deeply for agreeing to my humble request,” he stated formally.
“There’s no need to stand on ceremony. We will have much to learn from you as well,” Tinasha replied. Despite the hard line she took with the domestic factions who opposed her, she could not be like that with outsiders.
When she smiled at him, the man’s polite demeanor cracked a little as he returned the expression. “My, what a young queen you are. My brother is young for a king, too, but he must be at least ten years your elder.”
“Yes, we do have some customs that tend to surprise those not of Tuldarr. However, Farsas has Akashia, does it not?” she countered.
Just as the ruler of Tuldarr needed to be the strongest mage, the ruler of Farsas had to wield the royal sword. Historically, teenaged regents were not a rare sight; Oscar had been around twenty.
Tinasha’s guest gave her a placid smile. “Are you interested in Akashia, Your Majesty? Most mages are.”
“I’ll admit to some curiosity. It is a national treasure,” she answered, keeping her response vague.
A sword that could neutralize all magic certainly was a mystery. Oscar had let Tinasha touch it once, but she was unable to glean what it was made of or what enchanted it.
The man nodded. “For Tuldarr, Akashia may certainly be an object of vexation. No matter how sturdy of a barrier or defensive charm you cast, it can nullify it entirely.”
Tinasha said nothing, keeping a smile on her face.
Was this a mere show of force or an open provocation?
If Farsas decided to utilize Akashia to mount aggression against Tuldarr, it would crush the Magic Empire to bits. Farsas was the one country Tuldarr needed to remain vigilant around. This was the Dark Age, and Farsas was a land of preeminent warriors. Time evidently did little to dull that prowess, as Farsas was still mighty during the era of his birth.
If Tinasha let herself grow blinded by personal feelings, her country would fall to pieces. She had to use whatever means were available to her, no matter what they were. A ruler had to march onward for the people, even if it meant getting dragged through the mud.
For just a moment, all sorts of thoughts rushed through Tinasha’s mind.
Whether he noticed that or not, a mischievous look came over the man’s face. “To commemorate your agreeing to receive me, I would like to gift Your Majesty with a tale from my travels. No one knows whether it’s true or not.”
“A story from your journey?”
“Yes. About three hundred years ago, the man who would go on to become the founding king of Farsas received Akashia from his future queen. At the time, Farsas was nothing more than a ragtag bunch of cast-offs and runaways from other countries. The leader of that group had a wife. The story goes that one day, she traded her own power for a sword that would not decay, and presented her husband with Akashia.”
“Traded her own power? So she was a mage?” Tinasha questioned.
If the tale were true, that would make Akashia a mage’s creation.
Noticing the queen’s interest, the man gave a wan grin. “Who can say? This is merely a fable from long ago, and no history speaks of it. It was simply used to put the children of the royal family to sleep. But according to this fairy tale, the loss of the queen’s power meant she could no longer return to where she was from. Perhaps she was a water spirit.”
“Surely not,” said Tinasha with a cynical smile upon hearing the ludicrous myth. There were many legends of blighted love between water spirits and humans, but that didn’t mean a water spirit was capable of producing Akashia.
“She was very mysterious, even compared to other accounts from that time. Oh, and the legend does give her a name, although there are no historical testimonies to support it.”
“It was never recorded?”
“There was no time for record-keeping when the country was founded. Such a young, upstart nation only wrote down the name of the first king,” the man explained.
“That sounds very much like the founding of any other nation in the Dark Age,” Tinasha commented.
She spoke the truth. Tuldarr’s own formation was a mad scramble of people with similar aspirations coming together, and many things had been left undone.
“I appreciate that acknowledgment, Your Majesty. According to legend, the lady who met our first king at the lake was named Deirdre.”
“Deirdre…?”
Tinasha spent time mulling over this fairy tale told only to the children of the royal family, a story that seemed to slip through her fingers like sand.
Yet with the upheaval and strife that soon followed, she forgot all about it.
Such was the Dark Age in the distant past.
“Shall we shorten your reign a little?”
“Huh?!” yelped Tinasha from a desk in her study, her voice a squeak.
She had long black hair that fell to her waist and eyes of darkest night. Her skin was white as snow. Adulthood had only perfected her rare beauty, which would undoubtedly go down in history.
She was still the queen at the zenith of the Magic Empire of Tuldarr. The Dark Age, an era of ceaseless war within and without the country, had long since passed. Tinasha had used a magic sleep to survive four hundred years into the future, where Oscar was.
With no memory of meeting her centuries ago, he had remained suspicious of the girl and treated her as a liability for a very long time. Eventually, he either grew accustomed to her or gave up and seemed to accept her. However, they were only that distant for a short time, because Tinasha’s announcement at her coronation that she would only reign for a year before stepping down spurred Oscar to propose to her. She could never understand the way his mind worked, though she was very glad of his actions.
And so, as happily as any other young woman, Tinasha agreed to marry Oscar. Upon her abdication, she would leave and be wed. The thought of it made her giddy and embarrassed all at once.
Regardless, she planned to carry out her queenly duties to the end. She threw a searching look at the man sitting across the desk from her. “Shorten my reign? Have I done something careless again?”
Legis, son of Tuldarr’s former king, smiled at Tinasha. From his light-blond hair to his fine features, he exuded both nobility and calm. His appearance alone gave him the aura of a prince who had stepped from the pages of a fairy tale. But at his core, he was a pragmatic and highly capable statesman. It was only because he and Tinasha helmed Tuldarr that the nation was taking the leap of total reform.
The two of them had devised a bold revolution plan that entailed switching to a two-pillar system of ruler and parliament. Tinasha and her might would dissuade any foreign powers from taking advantage of this vulnerable moment, while Legis—deeply trusted by the people—handled the negotiations with the biggest names in Tuldarr and the citizens’ representatives. Tinasha, someone who’d abruptly popped up after four centuries, had almost no connections or reputation. Her only asset was her enormously powerful magic.
During her reign during the Dark Age, she had been constantly beset by assailants. While things today were much calmer, Tinasha was still very conscious of her status as a temporary queen. The political landscape and the time period were all new to her, so she didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.
Legis, who would be the next king of Tuldarr, smiled faintly. “It isn’t a question of anything you’ve done, Your Majesty. However, you’ve had no lack of troublesome situations ever since you took the throne.”
“Y-you may have a point,” Tinasha admitted. In the four months since her coronation, she had battled mysterious ruins, a forbidden curse, a child kidnapper, and then, on top of all that, a witch and a high-ranking demoness. She couldn’t deny it had been quite chaotic.
With head hung, Tinasha heard Legis’s gentle tones wash over her. “And as there’s no one in Tuldarr stronger than you, things may be a bit safer if you go ahead and marry into Farsas now.”
“Hmm…”
Yes, no mage in Tuldarr could surpass her, but it was a different story in Farsas. Farsas had Oscar, the strongest swordsman of his generation and the bearer of the royal sword. Loath as Tinasha was to admit it, Oscar had been instrumental in resolving many of the recent troubles.
“To be completely honest,” Legis began, “the king of Farsas has also reached out to me about this. He’s asked if it would be possible to move up your abdication date. I believe he’s worried about letting you out of his sight.”
“I see.” Tinasha sighed, resting her elbows on the desk, taking care not to bump her cup of tea, and burying her head in her hands. While the queen wanted to protest that Oscar had no reason to be concerned, she understood she was in no position to be making that claim. Tinasha was a spirit sorcerer whose magic would wane upon losing her chastity, which was the reason why they hadn’t yet been fully intimate despite being engaged. Oscar had judged it too dangerous to leave her in a weakened state when she was separated from him.
Tinasha raised her head, raking a hand through her hair. “I really don’t know what to say… Why do all these things keep happening to me?”
“Anyone else would’ve died immediately, and we’d have never gotten to the root of any of the crises,” Legis remarked.
“That’s terrifying in and of itself…”
The queen was a special breed, able to narrowly beat all the formidable enemies who had come rushing at her.
Legis smiled and nodded. “Should you wish it, we can certainly move up your abdication. You’ve been a great help to Tuldarr, and you’re free to make any selfish demand you’d like.”
The meetings and proposals to draw up the new parliamentary system were proceeding apace. She was currently shouldering a third of that work as well as her regular duties. It was an awful lot to hand off to Legis.
Still, the young man was steadfast. “Don’t worry about the workload. While I’ve been very fortunate to have your help all this time, it’s no hardship at all if you hurry your abdication along. I wish for nothing more than for you to be safe and to forge a bond with Farsas.”
Despite Legis’s somewhat droll tone, Tinasha crossed her arms and frowned. What he was saying was entirely correct. He was capable of handling things going forward as king.
And while Tinasha’s power gave Tuldarr an advantage, it also put the nation at risk. “You may be right. And since completely unpredictable enemies may keep showing up as long as I’m here…I suppose I’ll prepare to abdicate once my wedding attire is ready. Is that all right?”
“Of course it is,” Legis replied.
A fleet of artisans had begun crafting Tinasha’s bridal attire a month ago; it was set to be completed in three more. Should everything go smoothly, she would vacate the throne half a year after her coronation. Her reign would be exceedingly short, but not without precedent. About five hundred years before, there was a king who ruled for a scant two months before stepping down.
Legis and Tinasha went on to review several other things. While most were resolved by immediate agreement, Legis raised an eyebrow as he made one last inquiry. “What will you do about that magic orb? Will you transport it to Farsas?”
He was referring to the magical item that could send the user backward through time, an enigmatic artifact that had the power to remake the world.
Certainly, Tinasha couldn’t leave the matter as it was, yet she had no idea how best to handle it. At the very least, there was Valt to contend with, a mage who knew much more about the orb than she did. The sphere had a twin, and the pair were collectively known as Eleterria. It was Valt’s mission to obtain both.
“Yes, that’s a good question. Valt knows that Tuldarr and Farsas each have one. I’ve sealed off ours, but I also need to do the same for the Farsas orb. Or maybe I should keep it near me at all times? I’m really not sure.” Tinasha sighed again.
While separated, both halves of Eleterria were kept in royal treasure holds. Valt couldn’t access them directly.
Unfortunately, as long as he was targeting Tinasha and she knew where they were, he would eventually catch up to her, no matter where she hid the powerful orbs. Eleterria were too powerful to attempt to destroy, and Tinasha couldn’t think of anywhere but the treasure vaults to keep them.
As her brow was deeply furrowed in thought, she happened to remember the Lake of Silence underneath Farsas Castle. “A being who was not human pulled Akashia from that lake…”
She recalled that four hundred years ago, a member of the Farsas royal family told her about Akashia’s origins. She couldn’t recall the details anymore, only remembering that it had something to do with the wife of the first king. The details were written in her diary, however, and she needed only to search for it. Tinasha made a mental note to do so during a spare moment. Apart from that, she continued to ponder that mysterious subterranean lake.
Investigating was an interesting notion, but she would need sheer determination to carry it out.
Unable to settle on a solution, Tinasha left the question unanswered. Legis picked up the paperwork he’d completed and stood to leave.
Tuldarr’s neighboring country of Farsas was a well-known Great Nation that boasted martial prowess.
The king’s attendant, Lazar, entered the royal study with a disgruntled expression. When Oscar glanced over at his friend and caught sight of it, he frowned. “What? What’s happened?”
“Some very suspicious business has come to light, and frankly, I don’t want you learning about it. But I’ve been tasked with informing you…”
“What’s going on, then? Who wants me to know?” Oscar pressed.
Lazar looked unhappier by the second. Ultimately, he had no choice, though. He’d been instructed to apprise the king of a strictly confidential matter that had arisen. Refusing to tell Oscar simply because he didn’t want to was out of the question.
“This is coming from the nobles and wealthy merchants. There is a certain brothel where a song is being sung that will kill anyone who listens to it. Almost a dozen nobles and merchants have fallen victim to it, but no one wants that made public, the location being what it is… They have made a confidential request to have it investigated,” Lazar explained reluctantly.
“A song that kills anyone who hears it? Is the singer that bad?”
“No, it’s not that. Rather, the nobles suspect it’s a curse song. Also, there is apparently someone in a tavern singing a song that drives those who hear it to suicide. These are two different singers, and while almost all who heard the song at the brothel went on to die, only a few who heard the tavern one have committed suicide.”
“A curse song…”
Oscar frowned. A while ago, he heard Tinasha sing such a tune. He was well acquainted with the power such a thing possessed to warp one’s perception.
It sounds like a pain, but people have died. I can’t very well do nothing.
The king couldn’t deny that it also sounded interesting. He grinned as he caught a whiff of a mystery. “Guess I’m going to go hear it for myself, then.”
“Are you insane?!” Lazar yelped.
“I won’t know anything until I listen to it with my own ears. And it’s happening right in town, so it’s close by and everything.”
“Now hold on just a moment! You should send someone else with you,” Lazar protested.
“But what if they die? I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I’ll be fine going alone. I suppose I’ll hit the brothel first,” Oscar said.
“Would you please learn that baseless confidence is not a good thing?! And don’t you think it’s unwise to go and visit a brothel with your wedding just around the corner?”
“It won’t be an issue if I don’t get caught,” Oscar stated dismissively.
Just as Lazar opened his mouth to object, the door to the study gave an ominous crack and collapsed inward. Both men turned to look.
With a terrible grating noise, the thick wooden door disintegrated into a heap and fell to the floor like a wadded-up ball of paper. A matter of seconds had reduced it to a pile of debris that was no longer reminiscent of its original shape at all. It was too strange to be believed. In the doorway stood General Als, rubbing at his temples, and a sunnily grinning Tinasha.
“Pardon the intrusion. I certainly didn’t intend to eavesdrop, but I happened to overhear quite the fascinating story,” she greeted sweetly, even as the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees.
Lazar and Als fixed their gazes on the floor, clearly wishing to make a swift escape.
Oscar pinched the bridge of his nose, at a loss for how to react. Subconsciously, he checked to make sure he had Akashia near.
“May I offer to help you? Would you like me to vaporize that brothel you were just discussing? All I have to do is boil it up. It’ll be easier than making tea. Just say the word,” Tinasha said.
“Hold on now, Tinasha,” Oscar placated.
“Or maybe I should vaporize you, hmm?” The queen narrowed her eyes at him. Cold fury blazed within them. The windows behind Oscar started to crack.
He got up and held both hands out to Tinasha in apology. “I’m sorry. I was only joking.”
“It didn’t sound that way to me!” she cried.
“Calm down, please. Don’t blow anything up,” Oscar pleaded, opening a desk drawer and taking out a silver bracelet. Snapping it open, he tossed it to Tinasha. With a sour look on her face, she took it and put it on. In a flash, the torrent of magic that was swirling around the room vanished into thin air. Such was the power of this sealing ornament made of the same material as Akashia.
The other two men sighed with deep relief, shaking in their boots.
Anger was still distorting Tinasha’s beautiful features as she floated into the air. She fumed like a petulant child. “I wouldn’t even be here if Legis hadn’t asked me to come on business! Ugh!”
“Don’t get upset. I messed up,” Oscar said, beckoning her to come back down. As she descended sulkily to a spot behind the desk, Oscar pulled her onto his lap. He took the papers she had brought with her and flipped through them. “You’re advancing your abdication?”
“And I’m already regretting that decision,” she spat tartly.
“Don’t be like that. I’m really happy to hear it,” Oscar replied, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
However, she still turned away from him, pouty and huffy. “If our positions were reversed, you’d be pinching me so hard my cheeks would swell up.”
“Of course I would. And I’d go kill whoever the guy was.”
“All right, then I’m going to go vaporize her.”
“I didn’t do anything, though. Don’t blow things out of proportion. All I want to know is if curse songs can kill,” he admitted in a blatant attempt to change the subject.
Tinasha’s eyebrows raised in shock, but then she sighed with resignation. From her position on Oscar’s lap, she crossed her legs. “It’s not possible. Even I can’t do that. At most, a curse song could make a person depressed, but only if they were already prone to despair. So I very much doubt the veracity of these stories, both the one about the tavern and certainly the one about the brothel.”
“So you think there’s something else at play here?” Oscar asked.
“Someone’s just killing these people, aren’t they? Plain and simple. That’s what I would do,” Tinasha explained.
“Gotcha…”
“If you’re going to go listen to the songs, I’m coming with you. I’ve already told Legis that I’m taking today off. Oh, but in exchange, sign this.” Tinasha handed Oscar a separate set of forms from the ones pertaining to her abdication. Oscar leafed through the sheets, which described security at the Farsas and Tuldarr border.
There were no fortresses or walls on the boundary between the two countries, only a high road passing through a stretch of meadow. Watchtowers and guard stations studded the route, which had regular patrols. The gist of the documents was that Tuldarr wanted to adjust the scope of the magical barrier placed on the road for investigative purposes. This would be done to utilize fewer personnel in a more effective guard network.
Oscar checked everything over and nodded. With Tinasha still on his lap, he signed it.
Tinasha glared at her fiancé and stuck her tongue out. “You’re welcome to let me know if you’d like to take any mistresses. That happens all the time, doesn’t it?”
“You won’t vaporize them?”
“I’ll curse them so they can’t sleep unless they’re cuddling a rabbit.”
“…”
Just the idea of it was terrifying. Repressing a shiver, Oscar said, “All right, let’s go and listen together. I have a feeling you might disintegrate the entire castle if I go without you.”
“Oh, don’t worry on that account. I would only disintegrate you,” the beautiful queen stated serenely, a gracious smile on her lips.
After removing the sealing bracelet, Tinasha informed Oscar she would be leaving the paperwork with him before teleporting herself back to Tuldarr temporarily.
All three men in the study let out deep, relieved exhales. Lazar glanced over at Als, who was still frozen in the doorway. “General Als, you should have told us that Queen Tinasha was there.”
“I had only just run into her here in the hall… We weren’t trying to be sneaky. When I went to open the door, we heard your conversation,” Als explained.
The nature of said conversation was what was really to blame. Lazar and Als turned cold, reproachful eyes on their king, who only played dumb.
“Jealousy is pretty entertaining, huh?” Oscar remarked.
“How? Did you miss the part where she said she would vaporize you?!” Lazar exclaimed.
“It wasn’t entertaining at all. I thought I might die,” added Als.
Ignoring his advisers, who were both at their wit’s end, the king remarked, “We’ll have to get the door and windows repaired.”
Just about all of the king’s royal council was well aware that his bride-to-be was a jealous woman. However, as she had not displayed those tendencies since Oscar proposed, everyone had let their guard down. While Als swept up the splintered remains of the door, Lazar bemoaned the state of the windows. “I’m afraid you’ll never be able to take a mistress.”
“I don’t need one. As long as I have her, I have everything I could want,” said the king.
“If that’s how you feel, be more considerate of your actions! And words! And behavior! Sooner or later, you’re going to exhaust her affection for you!”
Oscar grinned. “No way.”
Als and Lazar could only shake their heads in disbelief, bite their tongues, and silently get back to work.
The sky was a soft lavender hue. As twilight fell around the alleys and lanes, the man who owned the brothel went outside to open the shop. While this brothel in a western back street was far from large, it was famous for its sizable clientele. Aristocrats and wealthy merchants would disguise their identities to visit. And thanks to the rumor buzzing around town, it had five times as many guests as normal.
Glancing around, the man noticed that the establishments all around were lighting their lamps as well. For a moment, he was entranced by the almost wondrous scene before his eyes. When he looked back at his own building, he discovered a woman standing before it.
The long black hair that fell to her waist was more lustrous than silk. She had fine features, like a work of art crafted to perfection. Most captivating was her aura of mystique.
Noticing him, she turned around, and the man could not help but gasp at her beauty. She stared at him hard enough to bore holes through his skull. “Are you the owner of this place?”
“I—I am… What business brings you here?”
She was clearly not a prostitute. One glance was enough to tell that the woman was a high-class lady of some sort. Perhaps she was here to cause a scene after learning of a lover’s infidelity or something of that nature.
If that was the case, things could get hairy. Her red lips parted to tell him her business, but then a man called from behind, “Tinasha, don’t run ahead of me! Are you really going to vaporize it?”
“No, I’m not!” she protested.
The man’s clear, refreshing voice prompted the brothel owner to turn around, only to be struck dumb. The one who approached the woman and stroked her hair was none other than the king of Farsas.
Clara and Simon, ushered onto the stage in a rush, stared in horror at the pair waiting for them. Both knew who the man was—the young ruler of Farsas. He pointed to the somewhat sullen-looking woman next to him and stated, “This is my fiancée,” which meant she was the queen of the Magic Empire of Tuldarr. Apart from political might, this duo possessed unmatched power between the two of them.
Clara had at least one guess as to why they were here—the song that invited death.
But even if word of the song had made its way to the royal castle, there was no definitive proof. All she did was sing. The people who listened to her tune may have perished, but no one could prove she carried any culpability.
While Clara reassured herself of that, she was unaware that Simon, who stood behind her, was watching Tinasha with the gaze of a man resigned to his fate.
The queen peered right back at him.
Oscar and the brothel owner discussed something, seemingly arriving at an agreement. Their business concluded, Oscar turned back to the performers and his fiancée. “Well, let’s hear the song, then.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Tinasha interjected, pointing one slender finger at Simon. “He’s the one with the magic. If you’ve got anything to say, we’d be glad to listen.”
At her impolite gesture, Oscar and Clara both turned to look at Simon, who bowed his head without a word.
“What? Simon, that can’t be right. Tell them!” Clara said.
“Is that true, Tinasha?” asked Oscar.
“It is. Her magic is very weak, so he’s the only one who could do something… Shall I summon a spirit? High-ranking demons can tell when a human has killed someone, you know,” said Tinasha, a finger pressed to her temple while her eyes remained fixed on Simon.
With his head still bowed, the man stated, “No, Your Majesty, there’s no need. It is as you say—I did all of it.”
“Simon?!”
“Clara, I’m sorry. Go back to your room.” Simon wore a gentle smile, the sort he always did. However, there was no light in his eyes. He wasn’t looking at anyone, not even her.
In the three years Clara had known him, she’d never seen him like this. She realized she had no idea who he really was.
“That was over fast,” commented Oscar.
“Why do you sound disappointed?! Go and play to your heart’s content if that’s what you want,” snapped Tinasha.
“No, I’m good,” Oscar said, wrapping his arms around his angry fiancée from behind. He leaned in close to her dewy cheek. “Ooh, you’ve gotten soft. Once we get back, I’m going to run you through some training.”
“It’s been so long. I can feel the bruises already!” she moaned.
Voice dry, the king retorted, “What are you whining about when you wind up covered in blood practically every day?”
The brothel owner was bewildered as he watched them bicker. He heaved a sigh and then glanced behind at Simon, who was smiling wordlessly after soothing and sending away an utterly perplexed Clara. His placid gaze was on Tinasha, who noticed it and raised her eyebrows at him.
Simon said blandly, “I have heard that Your Majesty the Queen of Tuldarr is an exceptional and incomparable mage. Would you do me the honor of answering one question?”
“What is it?”
“Is it possible to use a curse song to kill a mass of people?”
Tinasha frowned; Oscar had asked her a similar question earlier. “It depends on the method, but it’s not possible to accomplish that directly. A curse song can incite people with latent hostility in their hearts to make war, but it would be exceedingly difficult for an ordinary singer to escalate that to mass murder.”
“I see,” was all Simon said in response.
His arms still around Tinasha from behind, Oscar put in, “Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, I’ve just always been curious… Here I have Her Majesty right in front of me, and I’ll likely be put to death soon anyway, so I thought I’d satisfy my curiosity before it’s too late.”
“Why were you interested in something like that?” Oscar pressed.
“My village was destroyed by a curse song,” Simon replied, prompting the king and queen to stare at him.
Oscar said sharply, “What do you mean?”
Simon gave a wan smile. “I’m afraid this isn’t a very pleasant story, but since you asked…”
He then launched into a tale of his village’s demise from three years prior.
Simon’s village rested in a corner of Mensanne, a Great Nation east of Gandona, Farsas’s direct neighbor in that direction. The town had a long history of crafting musical instruments, and many living there were musically talented.
Simon himself specialized in the zither and in writing tunes, while his younger sister was the finest singer in the village. She had no training, but her sheer charm and clear singing voice had suitors lining up around the block.
One day, she met a man in the woods. His sister never discussed him in detail, only claiming that he taught her a song that could kill. From then on, she began to hole herself up at home.
Concerned over her growing lack of appetite, Simon barged into his sister’s room one day only to find her an emaciated husk of herself. Her eyes looked possessed, with a strange light in them.
The next day, he headed into the forest to find the man responsible for transforming his sister into someone he hardly recognized. Yet after traipsing aimlessly through the woods for half a day, he turned up nothing. Come nightfall, when he was dragging his weary legs home, he spied a terrifying sight.
His hometown was a red sea of flames. Even from a distance, he saw masses of people collapsed in the streets. No one was moving.
Over this nightmarish sight floated the faint strains of a song sung by a woman.
“And once I realized who was singing, I ran from the village. Everything about it was terrifying. I knew that no one would survive, not even my sister, who was reciting a tune I had never heard before.” His story concluded, Simon closed his eyes.
Tinasha shook her head, brows knit in consternation. “But…was it really all due to your sister’s curse song? I find that a little hard to imagine. Why didn’t you go and make absolutely sure?”
“I’m aware I’m a coward. Even if I could revisit that day, I still wouldn’t set foot in my village. What I saw was too horrific. I learned that day that nightmares could turn into reality,” Simon muttered, a faint smile on his lips. Indelible terror flickered in his eyes. “After speaking with you, Your Majesty, I feel some modicum of closure. Until now, I couldn’t tell anyone else about this. Thank you.”
“Does that have some connection to you killing others?” asked Oscar, a cynical grin on his face. Tinasha, however, still looked baffled.
Simon’s weak expression grew into a sunny smile. “No, it isn’t related at all. I simply wanted to repay a bit of gratitude to Clara for saving me.”
“Killing people is repaying gratitude?” Tinasha questioned.
“Yes. As word spread of a singer who could bring death, customers flocked to her with the express goal of hearing her sing. Curiosity is a strange beast. Once I got involved, her customers doubled,” Simon explained, making no attempt to disguise his disdain for the victims. That made Tinasha openly uncomfortable, even as she elbowed Oscar in the stomach warningly. Oscar maintained his composure, however.
Abruptly, Simon’s face twisted. “Besides, none of her clients ever saw her as a person. Swanning about all arrogantly, they treated her like an insect. Someone like you wouldn’t know what that’s like, would you?”
After a pause, Tinasha responded. “You’re right. I wouldn’t.”
She knew there were limits to one’s imagination. No matter how she sympathized or envisioned what it must be like, it would only come off as trite and clichéd.
“But from Clara’s view, wouldn’t it make her much happier to have you with her forever as opposed to the deaths of those she hated at the cost of losing you to execution?”
Tinasha wished to say as much, but she held back. Instead, she looked up at Oscar. “Well, it’s up to you now.”
“Thanks for the help. I’ll have the soldiers take him in,” he replied.
Tinasha glanced at Simon, whose expression had relaxed, looking placid again.
The sight of it made some manner of indescribable bile rise in her throat, and she bit her lip.
It was growing dark outside. Night would soon fall completely.
Als was making his way down a corridor in Farsas Castle when he caught sight of Doan, Sylvia, and some other mages huddled by a courtyard-facing window. They were staring down at a patch of ground that was lit up bright as day for some reason.
“What are you doing?” Als asked.
“Oh, His Majesty is playing with Queen Tinasha,” a mage answered.
“Playing?” Als repeated skeptically. When he looked closer, he found that the king of Farsas and his fiancée were sparring underneath a magic light. While Tinasha was sweaty as she thrust her sword at Oscar, the king handled her easily.
“I told you, that’s too high! Lower it!” Tinasha cried.
“Nope. You’ve gotta compromise,” responded Oscar.
The metallic sound of swords clashing filled the air. As they kept shouting about “high” and “normal,” Als grew increasingly unable to make sense of their conversation. “What are they talking about?”
“They’re negotiating grain taxes.”
“Wow…”
From an outsider’s perspective, Oscar was taking a very underhanded route. The discrepancy in their physiques and skill was clearly taking its toll on Tinasha, and Oscar buffeted her with questions.
Still, she was not one to back down. “If you don’t lower it, I’m going to wreak some havoc around here!”
“That’s a threat, you know.”
“Grrrr!” Tinasha lunged forward and swept her sword up sharply.
But Oscar parried it away easily and brought his practice sword down on her neck, stopping it just before it made contact. “I suppose we can set it at seventy percent. In exchange, I want you to lower taxes on our textiles.”
“Fine,” Tinasha agreed after some quick mental calculations. Neither proposal would put Tuldarr at a disadvantage. Good weather had blessed her country with a bountiful grain harvest this year, so this was perfect.
Crouching, she inhaled deeply to steady her breathing. “Did you do that on purpose? Bringing up your little proposal once I was exhausted?”
“Of course I did. Waiting until your opponent’s sense of judgment is dulled is lesson one in negotiations,” Oscar stated smugly.
“I will throttle you…”
Tinasha stood, keeping her hands on her knees. She had taken hits on both arms and her back, which were likely to bloom into bruises; she healed them before they could.
Oscar took her sword from her. “Your moves have gotten better. Maybe it’s all the combat experience?”
“What? Do you really think so? I’m actually pretty thrilled to hear that.” Tinasha knew that all the battling had honed her magical instincts to a fine point, but she had no clear assessment of her swordsmanship.
Praise from her very first combat instructor made her break into a happy grin. Oscar ruffled her hair like she was a little kid. “We should get back. I’ll get a change of clothes ready for you, so go and wash off all that sweat.”
“Okay,” Tinasha sang, trotting off.
Oscar glanced up and met Als’s gaze through the window. A devilish smirk was visible on his face.
“What happened to Simon after his arrest?” asked Tinasha while combing out her wet hair after using the bath in Oscar’s chambers. She was freshly changed into a white dress of light silk.
Oscar was sitting on the bed, his knee propped up and his chin resting on it as he gazed at her. The fine silk clung to the lines of her soft curves, sending a frisson of arousal through him.
Tinasha looked back from drying her hair. “Oscar? Are you listening?”
“Huh? Oh, he was executed after thorough interrogation. The girl got a stern reprimand.”
“I see,” she said, carding her fingers through her hair. Any remaining damp strands dried instantly at her touch. Once her hair was completely dry, she picked up her comb again and came to sit next to Oscar as she brushed her long tresses. “It was just such an odd story he told… I really am suspicious of the man his sister met in the woods.”
“Is that still on your mind? What if he was lying?”
“It didn’t seem that way,” she replied. Oscar didn’t say anything, but he felt the same.
Simon’s story was likely true, and that incident had changed the course of his life.
Tinasha went on. “Witnessing the destruction of his village and abandoning his sister must have left deep psychological scars. As a result, he became fascinated with the idea of a curse song. I heard the one he made, and it was well done. Creating a melody that can be used as the base for a curse song might be within the realm of genius.”
“It was a nasty story, and he was a strange little man,” Oscar remarked.
There was no way of knowing just how significantly Simon’s past had traumatized him. It hardly justified his murders, however. Tinasha vanished her comb and stroked her jaw. “It’s too disturbing to ignore. An entire village was destroyed. Did that ever happen in Farsas? Villages left in ruins, cause unknown?”
Briefly, Oscar cast through his memory of the past decade. “I guess there’s one case like that. I think it was two years ago… Everyone in a settlement near the border perished.”
“What did they die of?” Tinasha asked.
“All kinds of causes. Two or three days had passed by the time anyone realized it. According to reports, some had burned to death, while there were also signs of people fighting with one another. There were no survivors, no one to give testimony. It was left unsolved.”
“Two years ago… Simon said his village was destroyed three years ago. I’d like to check up on records across the mainland.”
“Oh? Do you have some clue what it might be?” Oscar inquired, winding his fingers through Tinasha’s still-warm hair and caressing her nape.
Tinasha jolted a little out of ticklishness, but the pensive look on her face remained. “Nothing specific, but something about this is jogging my memory. After all, a curse song is capable of subliminal provocation.”
“Which could make friends fight one another or drive people to arson?”
“Hmm. In theory that is possible, but only a mage of my caliber could incite such widespread effects across an entire village all at once.”
Oscar frowned. Tinasha’s words suggested she was likely the only person capable of doing something like that. And in that case, the source of these incidents couldn’t be a curse song.
Tinasha hugged her knees to her chest. “But if it were an ordinary hex instead of a curse song, that would dramatically expand the list of possible culprits. Still, only a very powerful mage could pull it off. And unless we’re talking about an eccentric who specializes only in hexes, a mage that good would find it easier to simply attack a village using regular means.”
“Do you think a mage destroyed those towns?” Oscar asked.
“I strongly suspect so. I believe it’s all linked to the man Simon’s sister encountered in the forest, though I don’t know how direct of a hand he had.” Tinasha sighed. Tilting her head to one side, she peered up at Oscar. “So that’s what we know. I’d like to do some research into this.”
“You really do love poking your nose in some weird places,” Oscar commented dryly.
“Hmph. It’s who I am.”
“I suppose one of the ruined settlements was in Farsas. If the same person’s responsible for both tragedies, that needs to be dealt with. Ask me for any help you want.”
Tinasha grinned, dimpling like a child. “Thank you.”
She was a slippery woman, mercurial and unpredictable. She could be the perfect coolheaded queen and then morph into a pure, innocent girl.
Oscar smiled fondly as his fiancée’s more childish side came out. “I really can’t take my eyes off you for one second.”
“Hmph. So you asked Legis to talk to me about speeding up my abdication?”
“I did indeed. I told him things are so dangerous that I’d like to have you with me now. I think it was pretty effective, since I also told him about you fighting a witch and an all-powerful demon.”
“And after I did my best to hide that part from him!” she cried.
“Don’t do things like that!” he retorted, even as he pulled her close to him and pressed a kiss to her glossy black hair. “Come to me now.”
Once you do, I’ll protect you with everything I have. I’ll drive back any enemy that comes knocking at our door.
Tinasha had traveled from four hundred years in the past, all to meet him. But because she was queen, she refused to abandon her country. She was trying to have it all.
However, it was long past the age when one supreme ruler alone would sustain a nation.
She was soft in his arms, burning like a warm lamp. The atmosphere grew hazy and heavy, inexpressible emotions hanging thick in the air.
There was no sound at all to be heard. The only thing that told them this moment was real was the warmth of their bodies.
Tinasha blew out a hot breath. “About what we were discussing this afternoon…”
“Which was?” Oscar asked.
Tinasha looked guilty. “The whole mistress thing… I mean, you’re not cursed anymore, so you can do what you want. It’s your right and all.”
When he heard that, Oscar restrained himself from bursting into laughter. Tinasha sounded very serious. She was probably feeling guilty about losing her temper earlier.
However, there was no need for her to worry about that. She was the only person Oscar had ever wanted to be with, even if it meant dealing with the problems that came along with her.
She was the type of person who loved strongly and did not expect to receive that same love back. He could show her the tiniest bit of affection, and she would swoon like a maiden and feel that was enough for her.
Oscar’s feelings for her ran deeper than that, though. She was his one and only; he had decided to spend his life by her side. Not once had he considered taking other consorts.
“I don’t need mistresses. Don’t worry about it,” Oscar assured her.
“Are you sure?”
“Have some more confidence in yourself. It just sounds like you hate other women.”
“Well… Confidence is easier said than done.”
“Personally, I find who you are as a person to be much more interesting than your looks or your magic. Although both are a bit too conspicuous already, more than capable of inspiring envy on their own.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean… Most people don’t get to know me as a person, and for a good reason. I have enough power to rival a witch, after all. It would be ludicrous of me to expect anyone to look past that.”
“I’m not looking past it. You’re you because of it,” Oscar said.
The overly immense power she had always lived with was a large portion of what made Tinasha. Yet it was still only one part. So to her, she didn’t see the need to worry about it.
Oscar caught hold of Tinasha’s downturned face, tilting her chin up. He gazed searchingly into her dark eyes. “Anyway, I have a little favor to ask.”
“What is it?”
“I want you to put a transportation array in here connecting my rooms to yours.”
“What? I can, of course, but why?”
“So I can come pick on you every day.”
“Absolutely not!” she shouted, tumbling off his lap and onto the bed. Her limbs splayed out from the center of the wide bed.
Oscar scooted over to sit next to Tinasha and pinched her puffed-up cheeks. “Please?”
“Ouch! Is that the sort of attitude you have when asking someone a favor?!” Tinasha flailed wildly for a bit before laying her head in his lap. “I mean, all you have to do is call for me, and I’ll be there. Stop trying to bully me whenever you want.”
“But there might come a time when I can’t just call for you. If something happens to me, you’ll know because of the protective charm you have on me, but I don’t have anything like that to tell me when you’re in trouble,” Oscar pointed out.
Tinasha had placed a barrier on Oscar that warded off all magic attacks. If any spells made contact with it, she would know immediately. On the other hand, a non-mage like Oscar had no way of knowing if anything had happened to Tinasha. He’d only learned of her recent battle against a demoness after the fact.
“It’s all well and good if nothing happens, but you have a lot of enemies. It’s perfectly natural for me to fear you’re tangled up in something. Let me at least just check in on you once a day.”
“Oscar…”
Tinasha looked remorseful. She was aware that she’d been worrying Oscar. While the king understood the mindset of feeling strong enough to take care of things alone, his fiancée tended to take herself to the brink of death, confident she would win in the end and make it worth it. Such were the differences in their personalities and the eras they had grown up in, but that was no reason to let her continue that way. They were going to be married.
Curling in on herself, Tinasha said, “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t really know how to rely on people.”
“Well, I don’t mind if you think of it as indulging me. I’ll be very mad at you if you die.”
“I understand,” the queen replied, rising and glancing around until she found an out-of-the-way spot in a corner of his bedroom.
“Should I make it one-way? Two-way?” she asked.
“Two-way. I need to be able to get back,” Oscar answered after deciding.
“Okay, and are you the only one in the castle who needs to give permission for this?”
“Of course,” he said.
Tinasha smiled, nodded, and held up her hand. In a clear tone, she spoke an incantation. As it ended, a transportation array appeared on the floor. She stood on tiptoe to inspect it and then turned back to Oscar. “It’s done. It will activate once you step inside.”
“Oh yeah? Thanks.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you,” she corrected with a tight smile.
Flopping back onto the bed, Tinasha rolled to her stomach and kicked her feet back and forth in the air.
Looking at her in such an obviously good mood, Oscar remembered something. “Don’t you need to be getting back?”
“Oh! I don’t have anything on my schedule tomorrow morning, so I thought I’d stay here.”
“Got it. You really are a defenseless little kid…”
Even prior to their engagement, Tinasha had never displayed much shame around Oscar, but that was because she thought he didn’t have any interest in her as a woman. He’d assumed that his proposal would show her that wasn’t the case, and she would change her behavior. Although Tinasha did reveal a cuter side now, blushing and growing flustered around Oscar, she still left herself quite vulnerable. At night, she would turn up and fall asleep next to him, then refuse to get out of bed in the morning.
While it occasionally felt as though he were being demanded to exhibit superhuman restraint, Oscar himself had chosen to remain on the safe side. He knew that the loss of Tinasha’s chastity would weaken her powers, which was why they lived apart. Seeing as Tinasha said she was fine with that, he had to just resign himself to it. It was more important to give her time to relax, away from her duties.
“Well, having our rooms connected affords us a bit more flexibility, so maybe I’ll rethink that.”
“Rethink what?” Tinasha inquired.
“Just how far I can test the limits of my patience,” Oscar grumbled.
“Hmm? Good luck with that,” she replied, not understanding what he meant, and Oscar burst out laughing.
He lay down next to her and cuddled her slender frame. She burrowed her head in close to him like a cat, then abruptly peered up. “Oh right. Oscar, do you know the story of the first queen of Farsas?”
“What? Where’d that come from? No, I don’t know it.”
“Really? You didn’t hear about it as a fairy tale that only the royal family gets to listen to?”
“I…don’t remember that. I have no memory of a story like that,” Oscar replied. What had brought this on?
Tinasha’s face turned pensive. “Maybe it’s been lost in the past four centuries, then. I heard about that story a long time ago and just happened to remember it the other day. The first queen was the one to give Akashia to the founding king.”
“First I’m hearing of it. All I know about Akashia is that someone who wasn’t human fished it up from the Lake of Silence.”
“Exactly, which I didn’t know until you told me. What I originally heard was that the first queen may have been a water spirit.”
“Who told you all this?” Oscar questioned. If it was a story told only to the royal family, then she had to have heard it from a Farsasian royal. Farsas and Tuldarr were neighbors, providing plenty of opportunities for such chats, but he wanted to know who would bring up such a casual topic of conversation.
Tinasha’s long eyelashes fluttered with sleepiness. “Someone who came to study in Tuldarr. After that, the war with Tayiri happened and I forgot all about it. I think I had to send that person home early.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man. Why is that important?”
“Because we have a lot of weirdos in our family tree.”
“It’s been like that since the Dark Age, huh?” Tinasha remarked dryly.
Tinasha buried her face in Oscar’s chest and let out a little yawn. He would be really pushing her if he kept the conversation going. Stroking her hair, he said, “Go to sleep. If you don’t wake up tomorrow morning, I’m dumping you over to your own room.”
“I’ll wake up…”
With a little sigh, Tinasha shut her eyes. Closed, they looked like two seashells; her long eyelashes cast shadows on her porcelain cheeks, painting an enchanting picture.
Her beauty was like a miracle. But the real marvel was that she had appeared in this era.
Their destiny was one born of coincidence and fierce dedication all knotted together. It was extremely precarious, which was why Oscar wouldn’t trade it for the world. He had once given up on such feelings only to choose them of his own volition. Relinquishing them again would be unthinkable.
He leaned close and pressed a kiss to her eyelid. She giggled. “Oscar.”
“What is it?”
“I love you.”
Her love was like a ray of sunlight headed straight for him. Her single-minded nature kept him upright. He was blessed to have her in his life.
He dropped a kiss onto the petals of her lips. “I know.”
On his life and on his sword, the king swore he would keep anyone from bringing her harm and would always be there to grab her hand when she was struggling. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
2. Monochromatic Flowers
Of the twelve mystical spirits Tinasha commanded, she always had three summoned. All twelve took turns as these watch guards, stationed on the northeastern border with Tayiri, in the capital, and on the southern border, respectively. Usually, any spirit not serving as a watch guard would only appear when summoned by the queen. There were some exceptions like Mira and Lilia, who remained near Tinasha unless called away by duty, as well as Karr, who came as an adviser, but that was far from the norm.
As a rule, high-ranking demons carried no interest in humans, so the spirits would not manifest without an order from their master. It was an unspoken boundary line between them and mortals.
Ever since Tinasha first heard of the strange case of villages falling into ruin for no discernible reason, she had taken to researching it whenever she had a spare moment between royal duties.
That said, her research did not consist of consulting other countries’ records; she couldn’t gain unfettered access to those accounts simply because she was curious. Instead, it was more along the lines of dispatching her spirits and diplomatic advisers to ask around for information in cities and towns.
Many nations besides Farsas owed a debt of gratitude to Tinasha for saving them, including Yarda, Cezar, and Former Druza. All graciously acquiesced to her somewhat personal request.
Once all the information she collected was assembled, a hazy picture emerged.
“So the earliest case happened seven years ago. If it really is all the work of the same person, they’re pretty clever. Moving from country to country, destroying entire villages without leaving a shred of evidence… We’re looking at nine sites altogether. Had those all happened in the same country, it would’ve been too conspicuous, but they were all in different nations in locations and dates that were too disparate to be noticed,” Tinasha said to Pamyra, who had answered the queen’s summons for help sorting her royal paperwork.
As Pamyra looked over the investigative report, she blanched. “Did the same person really do all of this? There are so many victims…”
“Hmm. My instinct tells me it’s not the same person, but there’s really not enough evidence to say for sure.”
Across the nine villages, a little over two thousand people had died. If Tinasha’s information was correct, this was a major historic incident. Curiously, not one of the victim villages belonged to Tuldarr.
Pamyra was puzzled. “Why didn’t they come to Tuldarr? Despite how big the country is, we don’t have that many settlements. If something happened to one, it would take a while before news reached the neighboring communities. At a glance, it seems like an easy target.”
“I think it’s because the person doing this is a mage. No matter how remote the village, a place in Tuldarr is likely to have a dozen or so mages. Whoever’s behind this wouldn’t want to face them,” Tinasha surmised.
“Ooh, I see…”
Cursing another mage required much more effort than doing it to an ordinary person. A mage would also be able to escape easily using teleportation. Escapees who could give testimony defeated the purpose of destroying an entire village. Someone carefully evading detection wouldn’t risk targeting Tuldarr.
Tinasha signed some documents Pamyra brought to her and stated, “The real problem we have to deal with now is how to catch them.”
With her chin in her hands as she pondered the quandary, the queen glanced over and noticed the time. She called back the spirit placed at the northeastern border. “Itz, thank you. Let Sylpha relieve you.”
Her magic-infused words reached the ears of the distant spirit. In reply, an entity in the form of an old man appeared. Itz bowed deeply. “There have been no changes at the border.”
“Good,” Tinasha responded. The northeastern border faced Tayiri, the country that abhorred magic. To the east were Farsas and Former Druza, while the south road led to the breadbasket nation of Magdalsia. Only Tayiri harbored antipathy toward Tuldarr.
And while Tuldarr did maintain constant vigilance against Tayiri, it didn’t seem like Tayiri had any desire to go picking fights with Tuldarr. The report that there was nothing out of the ordinary relieved Tinasha.
While she had Itz there, she asked him, “By the way, have you ever seen any destroyed villages?”
“Ah yes, that mystery. Fortunately, I have never seen any, so I cannot offer you any clues,” he answered.
“I thought so.”
“However, I did catch sight of an unusual personage in a town near the border. Perhaps this individual may provide some help in solving your case,” Itz suggested.
“An unusual personage?” Tinasha frowned, having no idea who that might be.
In a gentle tone, Itz continued. “Yes, indeed. An unerring fortune-teller.”
Itz opened a teleportation portal for Tinasha that led to a town on the edge of Tuldarr that was home to a grand waterfall. In any other country, it would’ve been inconveniently located, as far as it was from the main high road. However, Tuldarr’s network of teleportation arrays helped this location flourish as a tourism site.
As Tinasha made her way down the main avenue, her curious gaze roved all over the bustling stalls and stands lining the street. “Reading about this place and coming here in person are two totally different experiences. There are many more people than I imagined.”
“People say that all born in Tuldarr must come and see this waterfall at least once in their lives,” Pamyra remarked with a smile, here to accompany her queen.
Both during her life in the Dark Age and her life now, Tinasha spent almost all her time in castles or on battlefields. She had never toured any of her own nation’s sightseeing locales. Even this break was wedged into her tight schedule. She didn’t have time to go view the waterfall, but she would know that freedom once she was married. Itz had given her the transportation coordinates so that she could return with Oscar someday.
Facing the spirit, the queen inquired, “So what’s this unerring fortune-telling?”
Almost every form of fortune-telling was unreliable. A long time ago, some mages moonlighted as clairvoyants, but no magic spell could divine the future. It would be pure conjecture, nothing more.
Naturally, Itz knew that as well. He answered his master’s question with a smile. “It’s most likely a supernatural ability, like precognition or fate-seeing.”
“Ah, I see,” said Tinasha. It was exceedingly rare, but some people in the world possessed extraordinary powers that had nothing to do with magic. Aurelia, a girl Tinasha had met recently, had the ability to see into people’s pasts. This fortune-teller must have carried the exact opposite talent.
Itz pointed farther down the road. “That’s her.”
Tinasha’s eyes narrowed a fraction. A girl sat behind a small table set up at the opening of an alleyway. Her face was covered with a veil, but wavy silver hair spilled from the edges of it. A garland of white flowers sat atop the table, glowing under the sun.
Tinasha’s face screwed up in a grimace. “What is that magic…?”
“Your Majesty?”
“She’s suppressing her power, but it’s not an ordinary amount. It might be as much as I have.”
“What?!” yelped Pamyra despite herself, then hurriedly clapped a hand over her mouth. Fortunately, the crowd around them didn’t seem bothered. Likely, Itz had cast an awareness-blocking spell over the throng, not wanting anyone to recognize the queen and cause a fuss.
Itz chose his words carefully. “This is an acquaintance of mine from a very long time ago, though I don’t believe she remembers me. As you can see, she is a powerful mage, but she is not someone who would bring harm to others. She does not get deeply involved in anything; she simply passes the time with amusements like this.”
There were layers of hidden meanings implicit in the spirit’s remark, but none of it was strictly a lie. Tinasha and Itz had a master and servant relationship. He could not speak falsely in a way that might put his master at a disadvantage, nor was he an incredibly kind sort by nature.
“If she has that much magic and you’ve known her for a long time, she must be someone who once held great sway in Tuldarr. I’m curious to know why someone like that doesn’t appear in any historical records and is still alive today, but I will take your word for it,” said Tinasha.
“You are very perceptive and generous, my lady,” Itz replied.
While the origins of Farsas’s royal sword were a mystery, the Magic Empire of Tuldarr predated Farsas by two hundred years. One or two strange stories were bound to be hiding in its history. Tinasha herself was an unusual character who had slept for four centuries. She had no right to judge others.
Tinasha approached the fortune-teller’s table and examined the girl on the other side. All she could see under the veil was a pair of blue eyes peering up at her and a young-looking face.
“Would you like to have your fortune told?” the girl inquired.
“Please,” Tinasha answered, pulling out a stool and sitting down.
Now that she viewed the girl from head-on, Tinasha noticed she had a face as pretty as a porcelain doll’s. Her skin was as white as fresh, untrodden mountain snow. Her straight nose and tiny lips were as if painted on by the most delicate brush, crafting a picture of beauty.
However, her eyes, like two crystal balls, weren’t looking at Tinasha. They were focused on something else, much farther away.
It felt like those eyes would suck Tinasha in if she peered into them for too long. Thus, the queen got straight to the point. “I’m looking into something. Several villages have been destroyed by a mage. However, I don’t know where to start looking. Do you have any clues?”
Tinasha didn’t expect any sort of immediate answer. Supernatural abilities often did not work on command.
Yet the fortune-teller girl replied instantly. “It won’t be long before they come to you.”
“What? Really?”
If someone who could see the future claimed as much, then Tinasha could probably begin preparing. She cocked her head inquiringly, but the girl only nodded.
From his position standing next to Tinasha, Itz commented, “Her fortunes are absolute, although it’s possible to change your fate once you’ve heard the prediction.”
“Hmm, I guess that means I should continue my investigation,” Tinasha mused. She hadn’t gained any direct clues, but perhaps that was fine.
Still feeling confused, Tinasha placed a large stack of coins on the table. “Thank you. That was helpful.”
At the very least, she’d learned that this strange case wouldn’t remain unsolved. It was also past time to return to the castle. Itz and Pamyra bowed to the girl.
As Tinasha was about to draw up a teleportation portal, the girl muttered, “So many shards are sticking into you.”
“What?”
Was this also part of her ability to see the future?
Eyes the color of a frozen lake watched Tinasha, her own bemused reflection shining within them.
“The world is waiting for a revolution.”
Her remark had the ring of something heard in a sea of chaos, a sound that wouldn’t remain in the memory.
“I feel like I’ve received a vaguely ominous premonition about my future,” Tinasha grumbled, once back in her royal study as she picked up a sheaf of papers.
Pamyra had already moved on to other work, and Itz had been dismissed to rest.
The mysterious divination from the fortune-teller weighed on her mind. When pressed for an explanation, the girl had replied, “I can only see it. I can’t comprehend it.”
Tinasha couldn’t seem to relax. What made her most uneasy was the feeling that she’d heard a similar claim before.
“Wasn’t…that…?”
It wasn’t four hundred years ago. It had been much more recently.
Everything was touching her. She understood everything. About the world, about herself.
Just like trying to recall a dream, it was beyond Tinasha’s grasp, although she felt it tickling the tips of her fingers. She had felt something identical, and she later told Sylvia about it. “I was in a strange place where I understood everything.”
“Oh. That was when Simila consumed me.”
It was no wonder Tinasha couldn’t remember what she’d glimpsed within Simila, the snake that appeared from the lowest plane of existence. Human senses didn’t work on other planes. No matter what she learned there, she couldn’t take the memory out with her.
“The mystery deepens…”
With no hope of an answer, Tinasha had no choice but to let it go. The nature of war meant that it was not uncommon for broken shards to be stuck into her. And if that happened, all she had to do was heal herself.
As Tinasha concluded her thoughts there, Legis entered the study. “You’re back, Your Majesty. How was the waterfall?”
“I didn’t see it. I certainly couldn’t shirk my duties to go sightseeing.”
“It’s a beautiful place. I went once when I was a boy. I believe that town didn’t exist at the time of your reign four hundred years ago.”
“No, it didn’t. I hadn’t heard of any waterfall until waking in this era,” she replied.
A lot could happen in several centuries. So much was new to her. If this was what it was like to cross through time, how vast was everything that fortune-teller girl witnessed?
Musing on that notion, Tinasha accepted a stack of documents from Legis. She flipped through all of them, from most urgent to least, until finally she paused on one page. “Tris is going back to visit her hometown. She’s from Tayiri, huh?”
Tris, the girl who assisted in resolving the kidnappings at the Academy of Magic, had since become a court mage. She was requesting approval for her visit home, as all those who served the court of Tuldarr needed to file for advance permission before entering Tayiri. Tinasha and many others had assumed Tris hailed from the town that was home to the Academy of Magic, but it turned out she was from Tayiri.
Legis peered over at the national departure register and gave a wan smile. “Her family lives in Tayiri, while she’s living with a relative in Tuldarr. I heard that on her visit last year, Tayiri soldiers discovered her and chased her around.”
“Oh… And she became a court mage this year. If she’s ever caught, we’ll be in for a diplomatic incident,” said Tinasha.
Tayiri ostracized mages. In some cases, unfortunate children born with magic were killed. Most of those children ended up coming to Tuldarr, but each one’s individual circumstances determined whether they would move alone or with their families.
It would be quite the sticky situation if a Tuldarr court mage were to get arrested in Tayiri. Tris was still young, so Tinasha felt obligated to do what she could to help.
“I think I’ll arrange for an escort for her trip. We’ve only just begun the crystal excavations in Cezar, and I don’t want to provoke Tayiri. Another war may wipe Tayiri off the map.”
The Tuldarr army, as commanded by Tinasha, had forced Tayiri to yield four hundred years before, after it had attacked first, but that was no mean feat. She wanted to avoid war at any cost.
Although Tinasha’s remark had been a joke, Legis’s expression turned grave, and he bowed. “I apologize for the trouble. Thank you for doing this.”
“Sure,” Tinasha replied, regretting how she’d thought Legis would laugh off her comment. That was a little unscrupulous of her. While reflecting upon that, she summoned one of her spirits.
“I’ve been a spirit of Tuldarr for a long time now, but I gotta tell ya, this is the first menial task I’ve been assigned.”
“Don’t say that name here! And don’t talk about being a spirit, either!” chided the girl.
The black-haired, black-eyed man simply shrugged. The girl was Tris, a court mage, while the spirit was Eir, one of the twelve who served the Queen of Tuldarr. Eir knew Tris from the Academy of Magic incident, which was why Tinasha assigned him to accompany the girl on her trip.
After leaving Tuldarr together, the two of them were presently floating in the skies above western Tayiri, where Tris’s hometown was.
“I’ve only been dragged into this because you had to go and get caught by Tayiri soldiers last year,” Eir pointed out.
“Y-you be quiet… There was just a bit of a holdup at the border, that’s all,” Tris muttered.
It was impossible for Tinasha to send them directly into Tris’s hometown, as the girl didn’t know the coordinates because she couldn’t teleport. Eir had no choice but to teleport them nearby. The rest of the journey would have to be made via flight through the twilit sky.
At last, the lights of a town came into view far below. When Eir threw the girl a sidelong glance, she gave a relieved-looking nod. They descended from the air and landed in a nearby forest.
“I have an errand to run for Lady Tinasha in Gandona, so I’m headed there now. When are you going back to Tuldarr?” Eir questioned.
“I don’t need you to escort me back! I can get back on my own!” Tris protested.
“What? But I was ordered to come and collect you for the return trip. Well, I guess if you run into any trouble, you can contact Tuldarr and have Lady Tinasha call for me. You can use magical telepathy, can’t you?”
“I—I can…”
“Okay, then see you.” After an uninterested farewell, Ein drew up a teleportation spell.
Tris hurried to give him a wave. “Um… Thank you.”
“It’s fine. Be careful,” he replied. That was all he had to say before he vanished. Free of her inscrutable companion, Tris sighed out all her pent-up frustration before setting off at a run toward her family home.
The night air in Tuldarr was cool.
Tinasha had the windows in her bedroom open as she scanned some papers, and she found herself shivering. Winter was a while off yet, but she was freezing in her light nightgown. Setting the documents down, she went to close the window.
As she was leaning out the window, a sudden and mysterious sense of unease struck her.
“Hmm…?”
There was a faint thrumming of magic in the air. Tinasha had felt this sensation of drifting magic once before—when she was reading the invitation from Farsas to the banquet. It was daytime then, and she hadn’t been concerned, reasoning that someone in the castle was casting. What could anyone be doing this late?
It was very, very weak. Tinasha couldn’t sense any sort of spell configuration, either. The magic was so faint that it was impossible to tell where it was coming from, but it still left Tinasha wary.
She frowned. “Am I overthinking it…?”
This was the Magic Empire, after all. In the town at the foot of the castle, people were surely using magic.
She was shaking her head to dispel her worries when someone wrapped their arms around her from behind, nearly causing her to fall out the window.
“Oscar! Don’t sneak up on me!” she cried.
“I wasn’t trying to. Were you thinking hard about something? You’ll catch a chill out there,” he warned, reaching past her to close the window. He had arrived via the transportation array. Noticing how cold his fiancée had gotten, he placed his coat around her shoulders.
A faint blush on her cheeks, Tinasha said, “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing. Have you been a good girl? It doesn’t look like anything’s changed,” Oscar commented. Ever since Tinasha had formed the array, he’d used it every night to come over and check to make sure everything was all right.
Tinasha wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Having someone look after her so carefully made her feel like she was living in the Dark Age again. Her powers were on par with a witch’s, which meant no one treated her the way her fiancé did, like she was a child to be cared for.
As Tinasha went to fetch the liqueur she kept for Oscar, she shrugged. “No, no changes. Oh, but about my investigation, this wild-goose chase has finally led us to one person I’m very suspicious of.”
“Oh yeah?”
Between dispatching spirits to investigate and her visit to the fortune-teller, Tinasha had been busy gathering information from all over. The key to the puzzle ended up coming from Aurelia, a member of the royal family of Gandona, one of Farsas’s neighbors. Confidentially, Tinasha had asked Aurelia to relay anything she knew about mysterious cases of entire villages being destroyed. Aurelia, with her natural perceptiveness, intuited what Tinasha was after. In addition to details on cases in Gandona, Aurelia passed along a description of an incident from eight years earlier in a small country to the east.
“It’s a nation called Cathlys. Eight years ago, every single person in a small settlement abruptly died,” Tinasha explained.
“Eight years ago? That’s the oldest one yet,” Oscar remarked.
Every night, he had a drink with Tinasha, listening to how her investigation was proceeding. He was slowly drinking his way through the bottles of liqueur she kept on a shelf in her room as decoration. No matter how much Oscar consumed, his behavior didn’t change at all; Tinasha wondered if he might not actually have been human.
Her own glass of chilled water in hand, Tinasha passed Oscar the documents she’d been reading. “They know who attacked the place in Cathlys, however. A mage named Bardalos used magic and hexes to raze a village of nearly one hundred to the ground overnight.”
Oscar nodded. “Sounds almost exactly like all the others. What was his motive?”
“A town-wide attack experiment. A long time ago, Tuldarr also had mages who devised large-scale forbidden curses that would target cities. In reality, it’s completely impractical for one person’s curse to destroy an entire city. But this mage supplemented his hex with regular attack magic and psychological spells, thereby making it possible to lay waste to a town. He brought his proposal to the Cathlys royal castle.”
“That’s…one weird court mage,” Oscar commented.
“No, he wasn’t a court mage. While he possessed plenty of talent, he was refused because of issues with his personality. In response, he presented his town-wide attack idea, but naturally, his designs were ignored.”
“Of course. He was only making it worse for himself at that point,” Oscar remarked, shaking his head in dismay.
Tinasha agreed with him. Bardalos fell into disgrace because he didn’t understand the social implications of his proposition. Or perhaps he did and brought it before the court for the hell of it.
Cathlys ignored his proposal, so Bardalos set out to prove just how viable his theory was.
Tinasha perched on the armrest of Oscar’s chair. “He had numerous other offenses, too, and likely more that haven’t yet come to light. It’s no wonder he was barred from becoming a court mage. Apparently, he ran about, completely uncontrolled in the smaller countries on the border.”
“And they couldn’t stop him after all that?” Oscar asked.
“When he wiped out that village, they were going to execute him. But Bardalos annihilated the squadron sent to capture him. Only one man survived. Based on his testimony, those in charge verified that Bardalos was indeed responsible. Because the casualties had piled so high, Cathlys gave up on capturing him and banished him instead. No one knows where he went after that…”
“What the hell? Why’d they just let him go? He’s a threat to society.”
“Cathlys is a small country, and they didn’t have enough mages who could fight back against him. I wish they had consulted with Tuldarr before things got so bad.” Tinasha sighed, refilling Oscar’s empty glass. She set the liqueur bottle on the shelf and resettled on Oscar’s lap.
“We’ve made some major progress now that we can identify our suspect, but catching him will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Still, I’ve uncovered what he looks like, and I know I’m going to catch him one of these days,” she stated firmly.
“You know you’re going to?”
“Oh, that’s right, I didn’t tell you. Oscar, do you believe in the concept of a fortune-teller with completely accurate readings?”
“I do not,” he replied immediately, which Tinasha had half expected. She was a little disappointed, but she knew that explaining the mysteries of precognitive abilities would derail their conversation.
She crossed her legs from her position on his lap. “For the time being, all I can do is continue my research while alerting the rulers of each country that’s involved.”
As Bardalos continued his attacks, it had occurred to Tinasha to place barriers on every village, but there were simply too many.
While Tinasha was still unsure of what action to take next, Oscar said decisively, “When you’re up against someone like that, you just have to beat them to the next spot they’re going to hit.”
“I considered that, but there are far too many potential targets. I wish we could at least narrow down the country,” she responded.
“We can,” Oscar said flatly, which made Tinasha gape at him.
She turned in his lap to look him in the face. “What? Really?”
“With about fifty-fifty odds. Did you notice that there are one or two cases a year and that the number of casualties has been steadily rising each time?”
“I did recognize that. At first, it was rural farm villages, but the latest one was a pretty bustling community,” Tinasha said.
“Whether he’s doing it to test his limits or to shake things up, he keeps attacking larger places. If this keeps up, they won’t exactly be villages anymore, will they? More like towns. But there’s probably going to be some professional mages in a town.”
Tinasha nodded. “Well… Yes, that’s true. At least one or two.”
Simon was a magic user who had lived in a village, but he wasn’t a mage—he was a musician by trade.
However, he was an outlier. There were a few dedicated mages in just about any town, whether for defense or healing purposes. That much Tinasha could follow, but she didn’t understand where Oscar was going with this and gave him a puzzled look.
His blue eyes regarded her evenly. “Bardalos is definitely giving Tuldarr a wide berth. If Simon’s story is to be believed, there’s some time between when he decides on a target and when he goes through with destroying it. That means he carefully avoids any potentially dangerous elements. A person like that wouldn’t consider widening their scope or risking battle against mages.”
“Mm-hmm. That’s right.”
“But there’s one country that doesn’t have any mages at all—that won’t permit mages, no matter how big the city is,” Oscar pointed out.
“Oh…”
Oscar’s smile was tight as he stared into her dark eyes. Realization dawned on Tinasha, and she cried, “You think their next target is Tayiri?!”
“That’s what I’d do, anyway. Low risk,” Oscar confirmed immediately. Tinasha didn’t miss the displeasure that flashed across his fine features. Leaning into his chest, she let out a low groan.
He was exactly right. Two of the incidents had already occurred in Tayiri, but all other countries had only seen one attack each. That didn’t exempt Tayiri from being the next target. In fact, it probably spoke more to how much easier it was to operate there.
Tinasha floated up into the air and wound her arms around Oscar’s neck. “We could send them a straightforward warning… No, we couldn’t. I don’t think Tayiri would listen to anything I have to say. Maybe I’ll send out some spirits.”
“If you’ve got something you want me to do, you better tell me. You’re not allowed to get up to anything dangerous,” Oscar warned. He set down his glass and stood to embrace Tinasha. She cuddled into him innocently, and he grinned as he pulled her close.
“I’ll be careful. You’ve told me enough times already,” she said.
“If you were truly being cautious, I wouldn’t need to hold myself back so much,” Oscar replied dryly, conscious of her body heat through the thin fabric of her nightgown. While Tinasha’s true age was over four hundred, she still behaved like a young girl and was oblivious to her seductive charm. When she cocked her head at him like a bemused kitten, Oscar grimaced and set her down on the bed.
He tousled her hair. “I’ll be heading back now. See you tomorrow.”
“You’re not going to sleep over?”
“I’m not up for the chore of hauling you into the bath in the morning. It’ll make me late and I’ll end up soaking wet, too.”
Tinasha regularly dropped off to sleep like a rock but could hardly be roused in the mornings. Because of this, Oscar had taken to hurling her into the bathtub, clothes and all. She whined of course, but it did get her to open her eyes.
Reminded of that fact, Tinasha looked abashed. “I-I’m so sorry. But I don’t think I can fix it in three months…”
“Then you need to work harder! But I suppose once you come to Farsas, you can sleep as much as you want. You’ll be our sleepyhead queen.”
“Urgh, no, I’ll work on it…”
While Tinasha was busy with her everyday royal duties, her wedding was fast approaching, as was her abdication. Once she became queen consort of Farsas, Tinasha would have much less work to do, but that didn’t mean she could sleep in all day.
As Tinasha curled up remorsefully, Oscar pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Go to sleep. Good night.”
“Good night,” she whispered back. Then Oscar returned to his own bed.
But there would only be a little while longer of that. Before long, they would blend their lives into one. Together, their days would be relaxed and happy. Such was the worth each of them placed on the other.
He hadn’t told anyone that his big sister was coming home for a visit.
She was a mage, after all, and she served the court of Tuldarr. Everyone in town had believed she’d died of illness when she was little. That definitely meant he couldn’t tell anyone.
The boy ran along the main avenue with arms full of the fruit he had bought for his sister. When he approached a crossroads, he noticed a crowd of people gathered. They were all clustered around a notice board with a poster stuck to it, buzzing among themselves. The boy stood on his tiptoes, struggling to see between the gaps in the throng.
“What does it say?” the boy asked a man next to him.
“It says a serial killer’s escaped. Farsas and Cezar are both looking for him. You better watch out, kid.”
The boy’s eyes grew wide. People from other countries had never conducted a search like this before. There was no way of knowing just how dangerous this criminal was.
Ultimately, the boy gave up on fretting over some piece of paper he couldn’t see and headed home.
And because of that, he didn’t know what the man on the poster looked like, and neither did his sister.
Thus, Tris ended up meeting this very, very dangerous man without knowing a thing about who he was.
The man was just as surprised to meet her. While he was scoping out the town he had targeted, he ran into a girl in the woods on the outskirts.
Had she been an ordinary sort, and had they not been in Tayiri, he could have concocted some excuse and escaped. Unfortunately, her eyes widened the instant she saw him.
“Wait, you’re a mage?”
Tris could tell at a glance that the man had magic. He recognized how out of the ordinary it was for two mages to meet in a country that wasn’t supposed to have any at all, but she didn’t.
Snapping out of her shock, she gave him a relieved smile. “Are you back home for a visit, too? I’m so glad it’s a fellow mage who caught me! I thought I was going to worry Queen Tinasha again.”
“Queen Tinasha?” the man repeated, his eyes narrowed. But the girl didn’t notice, lost in her own thoughts.
“Do you mean the Queen of Tuldarr?” he asked.
“Yes. She’s very beautiful and strong! Where are you from?”
“I’m… I live in Farsas now. But wow, I’m jealous. I’d love to serve Tuldarr,” he said.
“Oh really?”
“You’re a court mage? That sounds great. Hey, would you mind putting in a good word for me? I really want to study in Tuldarr. I have a younger brother who has an incurable disease,” the man explained.
If Tris were a more experienced court mage, she would have known to be suspicious of this man’s assertion. She was too young for that, however. A cloud passed over her childlike features. “Your little brother…?”
She recalled her own brother, who was just twelve years old. Tris had fled to Tuldarr when she was five, so they had barely played together. Still, she loved him dearly, and her brother worshipped her every time she came home for a visit. Tris wanted to bring her whole family over to Tuldarr and give them a life free of hardship.
Sympathy welling within her breast, Tris made up her mind and looked at the man. “Okay, sure, I’ll do that for you. Oh, can you make teleportation portals?”
“As well as anyone, yes.”
“Then could you take me to the town outside Tuldarr Castle? I’m not very good at long-distance teleportation.”
“Sure. It’s the least I can do in exchange for an introduction to people in Tuldarr.”
“Thanks! Let’s meet again here tonight, then. Sound good?”
“Yep. I’ll see you then,” Bardalos agreed, an amused smile on his lips as he watched the girl grin and run off with a wave.
Upon discovery, Bardalos had feared he’d screwed up, but that hadn’t been the case at all. Coincidence had dropped an unforeseen opportunity in his lap.
Tris hadn’t seen that wicked smile on the posters around town, so she remained ignorant of the fact that her carelessness had just saved her hometown.
Even court mages couldn’t teleport directly into the city while accompanying outsiders. Therefore, Tris had Bardalos teleport them first to the capital’s immigration checkpoint, which was connected to major foreign cities via transportation arrays and handled inspections of visitors from other countries.
Bardalos produced forged identification papers and stated his purpose of entry as study. He had learned that doing so made it easy to wander between nations. Unlike those countries, however, Tuldarr measured visitors’ magic and had them officially register it.
After Bardalos received permission to enter, Tris showed him around the castle city. Impressed, Bardalos praised Tuldarr. “Just as I’d expect—the Magic Empire has special defenses built into its main city. I suppose that’s also why they limit the amount of magic that temporary visitors can use.”
“They do? I had no idea.”
“You’re a court mage, so you have no limits on your magic. But all other citizens of Tuldarr and temporary residents are divided into grades, and each grade dictates the amount of magic you can use. Of course, no one will be punished right away for going over that limit, but you need to apply in advance. If you fail to do so, you must undergo a royal inspection afterward. In short, the castle will sense any outsider’s unauthorized use of large-scale magic and come to question them. That’s also why there are wards strung up all over the city. They’re quite meticulous.”
The magical defenses in Tuldarr’s capital could be described as the best in all the mainland. While he was certainly impressed, Bardalos muttered, “But there’s no such thing as a perfect defense. You have only to use magic so weak the wards won’t detect it. That’s a very complicated spell and one that takes a long time, but…”
“Um, is something wrong?” asked Tris, looking up with some confusion at the man’s whisperings.
He smiled at her. “How about I treat you to some tea as thanks for bringing me into the country? Of course, I have many things I want to ask you about as well, so it’s not entirely a selfless offer.”
“I’ve only just become a court mage, so I probably can’t answer most of your questions, though,” she pointed out.
“Oh? But I know how important you are. You know the queen, don’t you?”
“Yes, but…”
“Then that’s perfect. I want to know what the queen is like,” he said.
Bardalos was interested in the mage at the head of the Magic Empire because she had noticed his experiments.
No proof should have survived his tests, which had begun in his homeland of Cathlys. And yet someone had detected what he was up to and sent out warnings to every nation.
The warnings had come from Tuldarr, meaning she was behind them—this fiancée to the king of Farsas and a figure who also held sway in Cezar because of the crystal mines.
This preeminent mage of the era, the sovereign Queen of Tuldarr, had exposed him.
According to rumor, she had popped up one day out of the blue ten months before and jumped right to the head of the succession line.
But more important than the mystery of her origins was the fact that she was an exceptional mage and a willing combatant on the battlefield. The idea of an individual with such immense power reminded Bardalos most of a witch, yet the whereabouts of all the witches were unknown. The Queen of Tuldarr, on the other hand, was a different story.
She would be abdicating in two months, which meant that, as far as Tuldarr was concerned, she was only filling in as ruler. How did she intend to live after relinquishing the throne? For Bardalos, that seemed like an opportunity he couldn’t ignore.
He led Tris down an alley off the main road and into a tea shop, where he invited her to sit at a table facing the street. She seemed hesitant, but broke into a smile when a cup of fragrant tea arrived. “Her Majesty is…beautiful. You wouldn’t even think she’s human like the rest of us. Also, she’s very nice. She even had a spirit accompany me on my visit.”
“A royal spirit, huh? Does she always keep them around?” Bardalos inquired.
“I don’t think so. Eir—one of the spirits—said he doesn’t come unless she calls for him. Most of the court mages have never met one of the twelve.”
“She employs them sparingly, then. I suppose she only has them keep the surrounding countries at bay.”
“The queen often goes out to handle tricky situations herself. She lets Prince Legis, our next king, take care of the more day-to-day stuff.”
“Yes, I’ve heard. People say she was at the head of the army when Tuldarr intervened in the war between Farsas and Yarda,” Bardalos commented.
“And when I first met her, she was disguised as a young girl and blended right in. I guess having that much magic means you have just as much freedom, too,” Tris reasoned.
Her innocent words revealed how little she knew, and Bardalos smiled. It had been fun to secretly wipe out those villages without anyone catching on. Adjusting and changing his spells and curses bit by bit had allowed him to test his powers.
However, it was lonely to be a powerful mage, which was why they—who stood apart from the crowd—flocked to Tuldarr. Gathered together, they would stand among equals.
Bardalos believed that to be tantamount to lapsing into obscurity, though. Mages after companionship were only after the sense of reassurance that came from getting absorbed into a sea of identical others.
That wasn’t what a mage should be. It was their duty to push their limits.
Surely, the Queen of Tuldarr felt the same.
How did it feel to know the future?
It seemed convenient, but it was more likely a constant restraint on one’s thoughts and actions.
That was how it was for Tinasha, who had only received a hazy glimpse of what was to come. She began to understand a little of why that fortune-teller lived her life without anything fettering her.
Tinasha waited, progressing her investigation however she could during breaks in her royal schedule.
And though she had anticipated the event, she also found it the tiniest bit unexpected.
That evening, with her duties completed, Tinasha returned to her chambers carrying a stack of papers she hadn’t dealt with yet.
Her abdication had been moved up abruptly, leaving her with only two months. After she had a bath and changed into comfortable loungewear, Tinasha lay on her stomach on the bed and read through the documents.
A frown formed on her face when she arrived at the last one. “A request for an audience?”
It was from Tris, who had returned from Tayiri the day before. Apparently, a mage friend of hers who was in the country temporarily had a younger brother who was very ill. This acquaintance wished to know if the queen would cure his sibling.
After a bit of consideration, Tinasha went out of her bedroom and called for a lady-in-waiting. Tris arrived about a half hour later in response to the summons. The girl bowed low in Tinasha’s bedroom doorway, abashed. “I’m so very sorry to bother you while you’re at rest. Thank you for sending the spirit with me. As I wrote in my request, I know someone with a brother who’s taken a sudden turn for the worse…”
“It’s perfectly all right, although I don’t really specialize in healing. Where do you need me to go?”
“Oh, the mage is waiting outside now. May I invite him in?” Tris inquired.
“Go ahead. Time is of the essence, isn’t it?” the queen said, tossing only a cloak over her loungewear. Returning to her room, she chose to sit in the frontmost of the chairs for receiving visitors.
Tris and the other mage arrived after a moment and sat opposite Tinasha, who regarded them evenly with a placid smile.
“Tris, is this him?” the queen questioned.
A bashful Tris replied, “Y-yes. I’m so sorry for the audacity.”
“May I ask your name?” Tinasha inquired.
“I am Bardalos, Your Majesty.”
Silence fell. Beneath the man’s amicable expression was a calculating gaze trained on Tinasha.
“Tris, you may leave. I’d like to discuss things with him personally,” the queen stated.
“What? But—”
“Tris,” the queen interrupted firmly, and the girl half rose from her chair.
Yet the man placed a hand on his acquaintance’s shoulder. “I’d like her to stay. Best not to go anywhere.”
“Huh?” Tris’s confusion deepened.
Bardalos was oblivious to this, however, for he saw nothing save Tinasha anymore. With absolute poise, he remarked, “You seem very calm. I thought you’d been searching for me.”
“I have been, and I’m certainly surprised. If it doesn’t look like I am, it’s because I’ve known this would happen for a while. Have you heard of unerring fortune-telling?”
“What’s that?” asked the man suspiciously.
Tinasha gave a thin smile. “Tris went to Tayiri, and I gather you met her there while scoping out your next victims.”
“You’ve figured me out, huh? Well, I’m glad I didn’t overestimate you. It would’ve been such a letdown if it hadn’t turned out to be you after all that preparation,” Bardalos said, his tone growing enraptured.
Tinasha listened to him, elbow on the armrest of her chair and her chin sitting in her palm.
When Tris mentioned she’d brought an acquaintance with an ailing brother, Tinasha wondered if that might be the culprit she’d been seeking. She hadn’t sent Tris back immediately only because she’d required time to determine whether the culprit had enchanted the girl in some way. Tris appeared normal at the moment, but a close inspection was still in order.
Folding her arms, Tinasha cocked her head to one side. “And? I’ll hear out why you’ve come, although I’ll be smashing you to a pulp once you’re finished.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. You can’t cast a spell or summon one of your spirits. And do you know why?” Bardalos drew out a hollow triangular pyramid, letting it rest on his open hand. Tiny silver arrowheads dangled from a thin chain inside it.
Tinasha’s lip curled. “That thing’s still around? Isn’t it a relic from before Tuldarr was founded?”
“Indeed. It’s an enchanted implement that can sense magical ability from back when mages were still persecuted and labeled as fiends. I’ve enhanced it so that it will react when any magic besides mine comes within range. Cast so much as a thread of power my way, and the curse tied to this object will trigger inside the girl’s body. It’s already taken root inside her; a painful death, to be sure.”
“What…? Queen Tinasha…?”
“It’s all right, Tris. Stay calm,” Tinasha assured as she raised her hands to show Bardalos she would comply. He’d taken great precaution for this meeting. The man must have slipped the core of some hex into Tris’s food or drink and made sure she’d consumed it. Still, a simple hex shouldn’t have been lethal. Bardalos had to be bluffing, if only partially. Yet if he did have something nasty prepared, Tris would suffer dearly if Tinasha was careless.
Proactive aggression was no longer an option for the queen, and Bardalos grinned broadly with clear satisfaction. “Isn’t it difficult protecting everything all by yourself? No matter how vigilant you are, there will always be gaps. And for all that, you keep bending your ear to whatever request some utter weakling brings to you. You may be revered as a queen, but you’re no different from a slave who serves these fools.”
“You certainly have a lot to say. What does any of that have to do with what you’ve done? You’ve been so careful up until now. Did you really come just to insult me?”
“No. I came to invite you.”
“To what?” Tinasha questioned, frowning. She didn’t miss the way Bardalos’s eyes shone with a sadistic gleam, and she made no attempt to hide her disgust.
He grinned, amused. “I can see you have a lot of opinions about my experiments, but we’re not so different. You’re just as capable as I am of cutting people down like frail blades of grass.”
“Yes, I’ve killed people, but I’m not the same as you.”
“Yes, you are. There’s no whitewashing or justifying murder. You and I both devour others to survive,” Bardalos said, pausing there to regard Tinasha. While her beauty was enough to steal a heart with one look, it offered no warmth now. She exuded only animosity. “So I’ve come to tell you that you’re freer than that.”
“Freer?”
“Yes. I can tell just looking into your eyes. You think all other humans are weak and fragile, don’t you? To you, they’re weeds you can manipulate with a wave of your finger.”
“So what?”
Tinasha didn’t refute the assertion. It was the truth. She was aware that she was an entirely different breed from other humans, though she felt no sense of superiority about it. Because she had been chosen to rule, she would fulfill her duty as a matter of course.
The edges of Bardalos’s lips twitched upward. “Won’t you join me? I want your magic.”
“Excuse me? How about you save the gibberish for the grave,” Tinasha fired back coldly. Tris jumped at that.
“It’s not gibberish. Don’t you have fun when you’re fighting using magic? Doesn’t it give you a rush of pleasure to draw up the perfect spell configuration? That means you love exercising your power. But how much of it do you employ in your daily life? It can’t be more than ten percent at best. With me, you can let loose to your heart’s content. Nothing is taboo. You’ll be able to indulge in whatever comes to mind—all that you could desire. Neither magic nor your intelligence will constrain you.”
For any powerful mage, this was the sweetest of temptations.
Not all mages could flex their strength freely, even if they had the ability to do so. There were limitations. Restraints. The more powerful the mage, the greater they were bound.
Bardalos had thrown off those shackles…and was inviting Tinasha to join him.
“You get it, don’t you? Do you know how bored you’ll be spending the rest of your life cowed as the queen consort of Farsas?”
Tinasha sighed in disgust. In one fluid movement, she crossed her legs. “I refuse. Don’t make me say it again. It’s too annoying.”
“You’re a stubborn one. I guess you don’t care if this girl dies, huh?” Bardalos reached out and closed a hand around Tris’s neck. The frightened girl’s eyes bulged.
Face twisting with displeasure, Tinasha was almost on her feet when a blade of wind sliced toward her, opening a gash from her right cheek to her knees.
A spray of blood went everywhere, and Tris screamed. “Queen Tinasha!”
“Don’t shout,” Bardalos commanded. Then he turned to Tinasha with a smile. “I don’t wish to repeat myself. You understand the loneliness of a powerful mage. I can be the one who gets that about you.”
“You’re a very confident man, aren’t you? Did it not occur to you that I could kill you if we went off together?” Tinasha pointed out.
“You do have a point. That’s why I’ll be taking this one with us for the time being. That’ll help keep you in line.”
Bardalos leaned in to whisper something in Tris’s ear. She shuddered, and the life faded from her eyes.
Tinasha watched it with revulsion. “Is that a hex, too? How tedious.”
“The good thing about hexes is that others can’t parse them easily. People are far weaker than they believe. You only need to work on the mind, and you can warp it without much effort.”
“Is that how you got all those villages to catch on fire?”
“Yes, although it didn’t go that smoothly at first. Thanks to all my experiments, I’ve grown pretty confident in my psychological magic, though I’m no Witch of Silence.”
Wiping the blood from her cheek with her thumb, Tinasha glanced at the clock. Bardalos followed her gaze and noted the time as well.
She was more of a fool than he thought.
He hadn’t thought she would agree right after speaking to him.
But she was more stubborn than anticipated. He’d believed that she, of all people, would see the reason in his invitation.
In any case, she must not have been listening properly. All the power in the world was insignificant without the mind to control it.
But such a colossal amount of magic would still prove useful.
Bardalos looked at the clock again.
It was nearly time. The man had laid everything out very carefully in town before coming to the palace, establishing a complicated spell utilizing a low, undetectable level of magic. He couldn’t take too long with it, so he’d ended up linking it to a small ignition spell set nearby. That would suffice for starting a fire. The spark would trigger a chain reaction with other magic in the vicinity and grow into an inferno Bardalos imagined the flames of which would rise high enough to be visible from the castle windows.
And with that moment of distraction, Bardalos would plant a hex in her mind. Even this all-powerful queen couldn’t break another’s curse instantaneously. Once he was in, victory would be his. The queen was a fool, but she understood the loneliness and constraints of life as a mage. Exploiting that would allow him to manipulate her any way he desired. Ultimately, she was only a little girl with nowhere to go. Surely that explained why she’d accepted a political marriage with Farsas.
Tinasha sat there silently, legs crossed primly, paying no mind to the blood oozing from the gash. She truly had nerves of steel.
Her dark eyes seemed to reflect and absorb everything. Before he knew it, Bardalos was holding his breath.
But the fire was about to start. He couldn’t miss this moment.
“Were you born with that magic? I’d love to see how much of it has seeped into your guts,” he said.
“Why are mages like you always so eager to rip my belly open?”
“I’m just curious. Your entire body is like a very, very valuable catalyst,” Bardalos explained, lifting a hand.
There was a soft noise, and acute pain lanced through Tinasha, causing her to double over. Glancing down, she saw a slender stake crafted of magic piercing her stomach. The black spike faded away to reveal fresh blood gushing from the finger-width wound it had left.
Tinasha gave a shaky breath and sat back up, eyeing with a cold gaze the blood streaming into her lap.
“Tell me you’ll be mine. I can understand you,” Bardalos commanded.
“I have never once wished for someone to understand me,” Tinasha answered, smiling and shrugging.
Her grin made Bardalos uncomfortable, and he glanced at the clock. “What’s going on?” he muttered.
No fire had started.
It was past time, but that couldn’t be. He had checked the spell repeatedly while casting it.
Although he attempted to conceal his agitation, Bardalos heard the queen giggle—an exceedingly unpleasant sound to him. Flicking his gaze to her, he saw blood running from her stomach, pooling on the floor of the dark room.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Then why are you laughing?”
“Sorry… I was just considering the best way to kill you, and it slipped out.”
“You think I’m going to die?” Bardalos snarled, his expression tight as he threw out a hand to claw at her throat.
He would cast a spell to forcibly show her who was in charge in this situation.
Before he could, however, a man called from behind:
“What do you think you’re doing?”
The impact came as he spoke. Bardalos couldn’t get a word out; his world had suddenly gone dark. He couldn’t see a thing. By the time he finally realized his chair had been yanked from under him and he was pressed with his face to the floor, a sharp pain was cut through his right leg.
Bardalos’s mind went blank and he screamed. “AAAAAHHHH!”
“I asked you what you think you’re doing. You’d better answer quick, if you want to keep your leg,” instructed a masculine voice seething with fury.
Bearing the pain as best he could, Bardalos attempted to cast, but his magic refused to take shape. It wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate—the power was dispersing as he called it.
With his heel firmly planted on Bardalos and the royal sword stabbed into the mage’s leg, Oscar looked at his fiancée, tutted irritably, and snapped, “What are you waiting for? Heal your wounds.”
It was over too soon. Tinasha made a face as she approached Tris, who was unconscious. Pressing her forehead against the girl’s, she focused on the magic inside her. “Hmm, I think it’s a type of curse that makes you feel phantom pain. I can break it once I apply a pain-killing spell.”
Tinasha thought up a spell, one that would be the most optimal in the shortest amount of time. She placed a hand on Tris’s chest.
“Recede.”
The incantation was but one word. Tris shuddered, but that was the only change. She sank into her chair. Tinasha sighed now that the treatment had been successfully administered. With a hand on her stomach, she intoned another spell and mended the little hole. All the while, Bardalos’s screams echoed around the room.
His foot still pinning the other man, Oscar fixed him with a glare and barked, “Whose woman do you think she is? You’re going to pay for that.”
Bardalos wailed, having lost all desire to fight. He thrashed about on the floor in an attempt to escape Akashia, which was stuck into the floor after slicing his ear off.
Pressing his hands to his own ears to muffle the mage’s shrieks, Oscar said to Tinasha, “What a racket. Who the hell is this guy?”
“He’s the one who set all those villages on fire. He came here of his own accord,” she answered.
“Really? What a complete idiot. And why did you let him do as he pleased to you?” Oscar demanded.
“He limited my magic. But also I knew you’d come if I waited,” Tinasha replied. That was why she had picked a chair close to the front of the room. She knew that her guests would sit opposite her, putting their backs to Oscar when he arrived via the array in her bedroom.
The explanation did little to ease Oscar’s anger, however, and his face twisted with irritation. “You get yourself into way too many scrapes.”
Someone pounded at the door. Guards had heard Bardalos’s screams and had come running.
On this no longer quiet night, the series of incidents that had claimed the lives of more than two thousand over the past eight years finally came to a surreptitious end.
Bardalos was given a quick painkiller so he could talk, but he knew that did not mean he would be spared. While he was bound on the floor, a pair of men carried on a terrifying conversation about what to do with him.
“Give him to me. He destroyed a village in Farsas, so I’ll execute him there,” Oscar demanded.
“But he was captured here in Tuldarr, and he’s harmed our queen… Let’s each take half of his body.”
“Lengthwise, then. Do you want the left or the right?”
“Oh, but while we’re on the subject, we should consider the other countries he’s wronged, too. I think there were a total of nine.”
“No, two attacks were in Tayiri, so that makes eight.”
“So then nine equal pieces including Tuldarr’s two shares,” stated Legis.
As the king of Farsas contemplated how best to carve up Bardalos with the sword in his grip, Tinasha stopped him. “Don’t do it in my rooms. The smell will be impossible to air out.”
“But there’s already blood everywhere,” Oscar pointed out.
“Yes, removing the stains will be awful. We’ll probably have to replace the carpets.” Tinasha stood. She’d healed all her wounds, changed into fresh clothes, and restored Tris. Tinasha had expected that breaking the curse would require much more time than it had. However, the caster was her prisoner now. Oscar’s rough interrogation method—torture—had pushed Bardalos to reveal what she needed to visualize the basic spell he’d cast, allowing her to neutralize it effectively.
The queen approached Bardalos and knelt next to his head. “I have one last question for you. Do you know a man named Valt?”
A shadow crossed Oscar’s and Legis’s faces when they heard that name. Bardalos only swallowed a mouthful of bloody saliva and shook his head. After a pause, he gritted his teeth and said, “I don’t.”
“Really? Well, I suppose that’s for the best. I puzzled over the most effective way to capture you for a while, yet you delivered yourself to me. Thank you,” Tinasha said with a bright smile.
Bardalos’s lip curled in a sneer. “Someday you’ll be lonely and regret rejecting me.”
“No, I won’t,” she replied decisively, placing a hand on his forehead. All the darkness of the abyss in her eyes pierced his own. “I’ve never once feared loneliness.”
It was the gloom she always dragged behind her. She had never thought it frightening or tried to avoid it.
As far as Tinasha could remember, she had always been lonely. The only one to fill that void was the man she met when she was thirteen. Regardless of what the future held, and no matter what regrets awaited, she would never be dissatisfied for choosing him. She had reached her goal.
“And there’s one more thing. I would never pick a weak man,” she added with a sweet, beatific smile.
Tinasha was a person capable of killing, the type who found battle fun.
And she would use her power to claim another life now. There was no doubt in her mind. Bardalos’s face grew taut and pale as the queen’s magic coalesced and took shape.
Lacking all pity, Tinasha peered down at Bardalos and whispered, “Good-bye.”
His scream tore through the night.
With her devastating power holding him down as he writhed in agony, Tinasha watched until the end, never looking away.
“What you just did—is his brain broken now?”
“If it was, we’d have no way of interrogating him for the record. I simply ruptured his magic into pieces. I’ve planted a spell in his body that will shred his power again if it heals. It’s extremely painful, so it will be difficult for him to retain sanity,” Tinasha explained with a self-deprecating smile, answering Oscar’s question as if discussing the weather.
The two of them had moved from Tuldarr to Oscar’s bedroom in Farsas Castle. Following Tinasha’s destruction of Bardalos’s magic, she’d made arrangements to have everything cleaned up and taken care of. Then Legis had sent Tinasha and Oscar to Farsas, so the queen’s rooms could be scrubbed as an added safety measure.
After an investigation, and once all of Bardalos’s crimes came to light, the other affected countries would be notified. If there were no objections, Tuldarr would handle the execution.
As Tinasha lay on her stomach on the bed, Oscar took her comb and started brushing her hair. She craned her neck to give him an odd look. “What are you doing?”
“It’s fun to watch it get shinier. It’s like grooming a cat’s coat,” he replied.
Tinasha boggled at him for a moment before covering her mouth as she yawned. So much had happened, and it was three hours past her usual bedtime. She harbored no delusions that she’d be able to wake up tomorrow morning.
Oscar, however, was a king who never slept in. Coldly, he warned her, “You’re way too careless. Don’t just let people into your bedroom.”
“I told you that I didn’t seriously suspect him at first. And since my bedroom is where you teleport to, it’s actually the safest of my chambers, in a sense,” Tinasha countered.
“Unbelievable…”
She knew what time Oscar always dropped by, so it hadn’t seemed like there was any cause for worry. It had only been a matter of waiting until he arrived.
Turning her face down, Tinasha let herself begin to drift off. A light pinch on the cheek from Oscar tugged her back into the waking world, however.
“Ow…”
“You need to fight back as soon as you face off against someone! Don’t let them do whatever they want to you!”
“Hmph. It’s not like it was a very big injury.”
“But it hurts me to see you hurt,” Oscar argued, setting the comb aside and lying on his back. His blue eyes glanced over at Tinasha.
She closed her eyes and sighed. After some deliberation, she decided to come out and say it. “Oscar.”
“What?”
“He told me that I’m the type of person who enjoys fighting—that I devour others to survive.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
“Being strong makes killing easy, but that power doesn’t remove a person’s doubt to go through with it. Knowing you, I’m sure it makes you more hesitant, right? Besides, you’re so much stronger than other people that I bet it’s rare you feel exhilarated during a battle.”
“Oscar…”
How did he understand all that about her so well?
Executing a criminal or dispatching an enemy was no cause to doubt wielding her power.
And although Tinasha believed that, she did occasionally think about how unfair it was for her to carry so much strength. That said, if she was up against someone just as mighty—or if she had a hard time killing them—it was harder to justify reluctance.
There was nothing she could do when ridiculed or despised for her incredible power. Regardless, it needed to be wholly controlled, for magic had no personality. There was only the will of the user.
Thus, while she may have harbored doubts or flinched when the time came, she would stand firm. Whether she chose not to act or got spooked by the casualties that would result, she would never cower. She had decided to be this way a long time ago.
“If you’re having doubts about it, go ahead and have them. That isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. There are times when someone has to be the one to kill. And you’re capable of living with that, aren’t you?”
Tinasha couldn’t hold back a snort at that. She had almost never seen Oscar paralyzed by uncertainty. She knew that was one of his strengths—and it allowed him to be kind.
“I…don’t think you’re telling me to just turn the negative into a positive or something optimistic like that. You only ever say things as they are… I love that about you,” she confessed.
Despair would never become hope.
Instead, he helped her move past despair, without changing it. He supported her in that and gave her strength, which made it possible for her to share those things with him.
Aware that she had been slowly changing since meeting him, Tinasha gave a little smile. She used both hands to push her sleepy self upright and gazed into his eyes, which were the color of a young night sky. He looked back at her, his gaze compelling her to follow him unconditionally.
She didn’t need him to understand her. The sense of peace and feelings of passion he gave her were only parts of the full picture.
The only thing she wanted was him.
Tinasha closed her eyes and gave him a kiss conveying all the heat she was feeling. She pulled back to gaze down at his beautiful face. “I feel…desire.”
“I swear I’m going to teach you to stop toying with a man’s heart one of these days,” Oscar grumbled, letting out the most frustrated groan, and Tinasha burst out laughing. She curled up next to him and closed her eyes. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
The girl slipped through the moonlight undetected. It took her longer than anticipated in the castle city, but three hours later, she finally finished making the rounds of all the crucial points and teleported back to the mansion.
Valt was waiting for her in her room when she returned. He set about making tea. “How did it go?”
“There was an odd spell set up in town, so I removed it. It seemed to be a timer that would set all the buildings in the vicinity on fire when triggered. That sort of thing would only inconvenience us.”
“Oh? Sounds like the work of a fairly talented mage, if it escaped Tuldarr’s notice.”
“It’s no laughing matter. Whoever it was went right ahead and linked their spell to mine,” Miralys huffed.
Valt gave her a smile. “I’m glad you undid it in time. We certainly don’t want them noticing us now. Thank you, Miralys.”
His praise caused her to turn bright red, but she ignored the color in her cheeks and pasted on a prim face as she went on. “Aside from that, my check confirmed that everything is nearly complete. It’s grown enough.”
“Good. Thank you for your hard work,” Valt replied, grinning with pleasure.
However, a shadow passed over his accomplice’s face. “Is it really going to be okay? Will it work?”
“It’s a bit late to be asking questions like that. Of course it’s going to be fine. We’ve put in so much time and planned very carefully,” he assured her.
“And…you’re not going to disappear, right?” Miralys pressed, voicing the one fear she’d carried the entire time.
Valt didn’t answer. Still smiling, he offered Miralys a steaming cup of tea, but she didn’t accept it; she kept staring straight at him. “Answer me, Valt. I can’t act until you do.”
“If you…hadn’t met me, you could have been so much happier,” he remarked.
Miralys scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you making fun of me?”
“I’m not. I really think that, Miralys. I know it. But no matter how many times I go through this, I end up meeting you. I’ll want to find you. It’s very annoying.”
“This will be the last time. Right?”
“Yes… It will,” Valt said, his grin shadowed by the moonlight streaming in from outside.
Despite feeling no more reassured than before, Miralys accepted the tea at last. She took a sip and found it a little bitter.
Valt closed his eyes. “Our preparations are made. But there’s one last thing I have to check first.”
Teacup in hand, he turned to face away from Miralys and gazed up at the azure moon. It glowed exquisitely with eternal loneliness.
“I need her to surpass the outsiders. If she can’t, then no one will. That’s why we’re having her build up all these experiences.”
“Does she really possess that much power? Maybe she’ll lose,” Miralys said, a little sourly.
Grinning, Valt proclaimed happily, “I know her very well. Much better than that king of Farsas does. Despite the overwriting of the past, she’s still the strongest witch—and the secret weapon this world has been waiting for.”
Fate did not remain stagnant. It turned continually, swinging violently on its axis. This man was doing all he could to get it to budge just a little one way as he stood amid a battle that he’d already fought time and time again. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
3. The Pride of the Past
Whispers influenced people. They heard what they wanted to believe and let the honeyed words sway their hearts.
Valt knew that this couldn’t be dismissed as a weakness. It was natural for people to cling to hope as long as they lived. Humans would always wish for joy over sadness, for bliss rather than pain. People who couldn’t see the future made their way in the world with ignorance as their salvation.
But he, lacking that escape, had no choice but to cling to a single hope. And he wouldn’t hesitate to trample others to make it real. The world would get overwritten anyway. Their agony and deaths would disappear in time.
Valt sighed as he came upon the mouth to a small cavern deep in a forest. “Here we are. There really is no path at all.”
Overgrown trees blocked the mouth entirely, and there had been no trail of any sort to follow. He’d managed to locate it by teleporting from nearby using data from his ancestors’ records.
A flash of his magic burned away the trees at the cave’s entrance. He pressed a hand to the barrier preventing anyone from entering. “As rock-solid as I expected. This might take some time.”
Valt began an incantation to nullify the barrier, which may as well have been a thick iron wall. No halfhearted efforts would break it. By the time the lengthy incantation finished and the way was cleared, sweat dappled Valt’s forehead and night had fallen. Shoulders heaving with his breaths, Valt stepped into the cave.
At the end of a narrow, winding path, he found what he was looking for.
A beautiful woman lay on a stone pedestal. She had light-brown curly hair and held an ancient oval looking glass.
He only needed the mirror. But he saw that an even more complicated barrier than the one at the entrance protected the object from theft.
Valt licked his lips nervously. “Can I make off with this without rousing her?”
He had two strategies prepared. This was the second. If his predecessor’s account was correct, she shouldn’t wake unless the mirror was broken. If that was wrong, Valt would die.
Taking a deep inhale to steady his breathing, Valt started another long incantation.
The world began to move again.
As the last month of the year approached its midpoint, the Farsas Castle city bustled with celebratory activity.
The king’s wedding was only a month into the new year. An air of revelry was already taking hold of the city, but not every denizen welcomed the impending nuptials. A woman who lived in a large estate near the castle eyed the capital’s festive mood with cynicism.
The twenty-year-old was not the legitimate heir to the estate. She was the daughter of the duke and an outside woman, a Gandonan. She had been born in Gandona and had lived there with her mother until she turned thirteen, which saved her from the child abductions that plagued Farsas. When her mother died, she was taken in by her father and moved here.
“If only I could turn back time,” she whispered, winding a strand of long golden hair around her finger.
She didn’t want to remember him, yet she did anyway. Her thoughts had turned to someone who was once very close but was now distant. During their final conversation, she’d sensed that their lives would never intersect again.
Initially, she hadn’t loved him. She’d felt two contradictory things for the man—curiosity and respect. There was no reason for her to still feel sorrow or regret over his absence.
Even so, thoughts of him surfaced at all hours. His face would flash through her mind even though she didn’t want to see it.
This had been the case for half a year. She wanted to forget all about him.
Regardless of her desperation, she also understood she would likely never forget him.
Perhaps that was why she listened to the words of a shifty man.
Suppose there was a small forest.
Animals, insects, and trees lived out their lives there. Although these woods made gradual movements, they always maintained their core essence.
However, if someone took an interest in the forest and began to watch it and experiment, then it would grow distorted, changing shape into a miniature garden. This observer transformed the world into something else.
Would the insects living within the miniature garden have the power to escape?
Tinasha stared, mesmerized by an exquisitely crafted miniature garden.
The enormous garden was a model of the entire mainland, with each side the length of three adults with arms outstretched. It covered the surface of the desk completely, and it even contained a tiny Tuldarr Castle.
“What incredible artistry,” she commented.
“It took the artisans half a year to make. Apparently, they had to redo parts of it after the fall of Druza,” Legis replied with a smile.
The miniature garden, a veritable replica of the power structure of the mainland, had been delivered to the castle today. Tinasha squinted at the national borders delineated by vibrant threads and metal fixtures.
Farsas held the largest territory—its lands stretched from the center down to the south. It shared its western border with Tuldarr. The other countries bordering Tuldarr were Tayiri, a handful of minor nations, and a small country called Magdalsia.
The queen nodded as she identified each of these regions. “In the past, hardly anyone lived outside the castle city.”
“I suppose it’s because we have more mages now,” Legis remarked.
“And because the population has grown. The rest of the mages came from Tayiri,” she replied, aware that her policies from four hundred years ago had led to this. Once she began accepting refugee mages persecuted in Tayiri, Tayiri retaliated by attacking Tuldarr.
After that war, Tuldarr had not been embroiled in conflict since, because all knew of its unique values centered around magic. In the modern era, Tuldarr stood at the forefront of magic research, always consulting with other countries on spells and mediating magic-related situations.
Legis smiled as he traced the borders of his homeland. “Once your marriage with Farsas is made, we’ll be secure for a good while. Please do your best to keep him twisted around your little finger.”
“I’ll try, but…don’t expect too much from me,” Tinasha responded. Her fiancé would oblige her personal requests, but he would never concede on official ones. There was no reason to believe that would change once they were married. All that would change, if anything, was that Tinasha would grow more likely to pop a blood vessel over Oscar’s reckless behavior.
Chatting evidently reminded Legis of something, and he glanced at the clock. “Isn’t it almost time for your wedding gown fitting? Shall I escort you?”
Tinasha shook her head lightly. “I’m teleporting over, so there’s no need. Thank you, though.”
Farsas dressmakers were sewing her wedding ensemble, which meant Tinasha had to visit regularly for measurements.
Only a month and a half remained until she abdicated and married the king of Farsas. The crossroads was almost upon her.
“Your Majesty, you aren’t going to go and observe Queen Tinasha’s dress fitting?” asked Lazar.
Oscar glanced up from his paperwork. “Seeing it now will ruin the anticipation for the big day. Besides, she’ll look beautiful in whatever she wears.”
The wedding planning was already in full swing. Naturally, the effort was a joint one with Tuldarr, but the bulk of the workload fell on Farsas, which would be welcoming the bride. There was much to do, leaving Oscar juggling these new responsibilities alongside his regular ones.
Something occurred to him, and he tipped his head to one side. “Oh yeah, should we invite Lavinia?”
“D-don’t ask me!” exclaimed Lazar.
The witch who’d cursed the Farsas royal line was Oscar’s grandmother. The idea of inviting her made Lazar squeamish. He couldn’t tell if it was brazen or reckless to extend that offer so soon after she’d nearly killed Oscar.
Eyeing his friend, who was clearly growing woozy over the idea, Oscar tapped his pen against his temple. “Well, I can just ask my dad about it later. We don’t even know where she lives, anyway.”
“Shouldn’t you consult Queen Tinasha as well?”
“I don’t think she’d be opposed. She’s more likely to ask if we should invite the witch, I bet,” said Oscar. Unlike the king, who was born in this era, Tinasha came from four centuries in the past and had no living family. Even in her own time, she’d been separated from her parents soon after her birth to be raised in the castle. Family had been an alien concept for all her life. As a result, she tended to be more concerned about Oscar’s own kin.
“A witch at the wedding, huh?” mused Oscar. Witches were beings of great power who dwelled in the shadows of the world. There were only three, and the blood of a witch ran through his veins. Their immense power was on par with that of the queen he would wed and their future children.
However, Oscar believed individual strength, no matter how great, was not sufficient to change the world. He, his wife, and their children would one day fade into the annals of history, and the power of their lineage would weaken. To Oscar, this wasn’t unfortunate; it was merely the way of things.
Someone knocked at the door, Oscar answered, and a guest entered the study. It was Tinasha, clad in a white, knee-length dress. When Oscar gaped at her, she flicked the skirts of her dress at him.
“Is that your wedding dress? I can see your legs,” he remarked.
“No, this is the same fabric, though. The dressmaker used leftover material from my fittings to make it for me. The real one is much longer,” she replied, twirling around. The skirt filled with air and flared out.
A line appeared between Oscar’s brows. “You really are still a kid…”
“What? Why? Don’t you like it?”
“Of course I do. It’s adorable,” he said, walking over to her. As she beamed at him, he lifted her into his arms and spun around with her just like he would with a small child.
She let out an almost feline yowl, not expecting that at all. Once she was set back down on the floor, she wobbled unsteadily into his chest. “What was that for?”
“You looked like you wanted some attention.”
“I mean, I do… But not like that.” She pouted, cheeks puffing out, and Oscar laughed. He scooped her up in his arms again and carried her over to his desk chair, where he settled her on the armrest and handed her some papers.
Tinasha read them over. “Arrangements for the wedding? Looks complicated.”
“Don’t talk about it like it isn’t your wedding. Still, it’s true that we’re handling most of the work over here. All you need to do is show up and get married,” Oscar replied.
Tinasha happened to be a foreign royal, yet in the past, some Farsasian kings had married commoners and made them queens. Farsas would prepare everything down to the jewelry the bride would wear.
But Tinasha was more concerned with another matter entirely. “What are you going to do about security? If all the mages from Tuldarr coming in will pose a problem, I can handle it.”
“You don’t think you’ll be a bit preoccupied being the bride?” Oscar questioned dryly.
“Of course I will, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also handle security. I’ll set a spell to ban magic inside the cathedral. I could place one around the entire castle, but that wouldn’t be good if someone suddenly needed healing,” Tinasha said matter-of-factly as she handed the papers back to Oscar.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Is that what you did at your coronation, too?”
“I didn’t ban magic. That would’ve inconvenienced the Tuldarr mages. However, I maintained a surveillance network. I would’ve known immediately if anyone used unauthorized spells, and I’d have forced them to surrender. I plan to do the same for Legis’s coronation,” she informed him.
“If you ended up forcing someone to surrender at your own wedding, it’d turn into quite the circus…”
Anyone who’d witnessed Tinasha’s coronation knew not to attempt interfering at her wedding. She had inherited the twelve spirits of Tuldarr. The atmosphere in that room had been such that all understood going against her meant death. And she would be bringing all of her spirits with her to Farsas.
Oscar glanced at the woman sharing his chair. “I can’t believe Tuldarr is really going to let you go…”
“Is that how you see it? Don’t you think it’s more dangerous for them to have a security risk like me in the country? No one in Tuldarr has so much as tried to stop me,” Tinasha remarked calmly, but for an instant, Oscar caught a flash of a bottomless abyss in her dark eyes.
He frowned. Once, that power had granted her the throne. Even now, centuries later, her power had necessitated that she rule again.
Should Tuldarr wish to eliminate Tinasha, it could never do so by force. Farsas had Akashia, however, and could potentially control her. That made Oscar a person capable of killing her.
Oscar pressed a hand to his mouth unconsciously. He glanced at Tinasha, and she eyed him quizzically in response. “What is it? You don’t look very good.”
“It’s nothing…”
He hoped that was true. The pair had previously shared minor disagreements, but they’d never led to a complete breakdown in their relationship. It would be all right. They could spend the rest of their lives together at peace.
To banish his inner worries, Oscar tugged on a lock of Tinasha’s hair. She responded by leaning in close to him, which made him press a kiss on her smooth cheek. She blushed like a maiden. “Hey! What was that for?”
“No reason.”
“Your Majesty, have you forgotten that I am still here?” Lazar sighed wearily.
“I haven’t,” replied Oscar.
Tinasha picked up a book lying on the corner of the desk. “Oh? You read fairy tales?”
“I got it for the castle reference library. I don’t have time to look through all of it, but I glance at it from time to time,” he explained.
“Oh, here’s the story on the Mirror of Oblivion. I suppose that it’s remained a mystery even after four centuries, although I have my suspicions that a mirror that can absorb sadness must be a magic implement that utilizes psychological manipulation.”
“Aren’t these stories fictional?” Oscar asked.
“Who can say? That one is from before my time,” Tinasha said innocently as she flipped through the pages. Oscar gave a wan smile as he watched.
The new year was only two weeks away, meaning the king was swamped with work. Yet when he thought about how his future with her waited for him at the end of it all, it didn’t seem so taxing. He was about to begin his life with his chosen partner. All that remained was to trust in that and keep going.
Magdalsia was a minor nation to the south of Tuldarr. A small castle and less than twenty villages dotted its forested terrain. Almost all of these were peaceful farm settlements.
Tall mountains and thick forests prevented any road out to the south or west. The only country accessible on foot was Tuldarr. Because of this, Magdalsia maintained a minimal army and had gone hundreds of years without worrying about foreign aggression. The Magic Empire, founded on land that was originally vast wilds, was indifferent to expanding its territory.
For that reason, Magdalsia was occasionally derided as “Tuldarr’s tail” by the small, war-torn nations in the east of the mainland. However, that didn’t bother anyone in Magdalsia, whose citizens largely prized a peaceful life above all else.
One day, a week before the new year, Queen Gemma of Magdalsia visited her husband’s bedchamber, concerned over how late he was sleeping. King Hubert was in his mid-fifties and had no health problems. He carried out his duties with vigor, though he occasionally indulged in fantasies. While he could not be said to be particularly bright, his good nature made him beloved by the people.
“My king? Are you feeling unwell?” Queen Gemma called. The day before, a rare visitor had come to the castle from another country, a merchant whose assortment of unusual curios had intrigued the king. The merchant had recommended many things, which Hubert gladly purchased.
And now his health had taken a sudden turn. Alarmed by the king’s lack of response, the queen stepped into the room and attempted to shake the king awake. When he wouldn’t rouse no matter how much she shook him, the blood drained from her face.
“My king… Someone! Someone, come quick!” Gemma cried, flying out of the room to summon help.
An ancient mirror lay fallen on the other side of the bed, out of sight.
Tinasha was in her study, taking care of her regular royal duties with the new year just around the corner, when urgent news came to her.
She frowned. “Whatever could be the matter at this time of year?”
“The king of Magdalsia has fallen into a mysterious coma. No reason for it can be found, but as he is entirely unconscious, magic is suspected. They request that we come and investigate immediately,” Renart reported calmly. Tinasha plucked the letter from him and scanned it for the salient points.
It explained that the Magdalsian king had fallen unconscious the day before and that the castle physicians and mages had failed to discern a reason. Desperate, Magdalsia was now asking Tuldarr for aid. Tinasha heaved a sigh. “What could it be? I suppose I won’t know unless I go take a look.”
“Shall I send an envoy to carry out the investigation?”
“No, it’s too dangerous with so much unknown. I’ll go myself today,” Tinasha said, deciding.
Renart’s expression didn’t change as he nonetheless offered his candid thoughts. “You’re going to visit personally? We don’t know what this might be. It may very well be a trap laid for you, Your Majesty.”
“That’s true… All right, then I’ll choose someone to come along. Would that suffice?” she said, though it hardly counted as a proper reply.
Renart pulled a long-suffering face.
Tinasha winced. “Legis is most important to Tuldarr right now. I’m only a temporary ruler. And besides… Even if it is a trap, I have a feeling I’ll still come back in one piece.”
Since advancing her abdication, Tinasha had been handing more and more of her duties off to Legis. At this point, he should’ve been able to govern Tuldarr without her.
Despite his queen’s assertion, Renart still wore a sour look. Tinasha’s awareness that she was a temporary ruler and her confidence in her own powerful magic made her act rashly.
Still, none were better equipped to solve a magical problem than she was. After a sigh, Renart fastened his gaze on his queen. “Very well. You should also notify the king of Farsas before departing.”
“Ugh… Do I have to?” Tinasha groaned.
The man she was to marry was a weakness, in a manner of speaking.
He wasn’t weak. She was weak to him.
Whenever something happened, he grew upset with her, scolded her, and grumbled that he needed to teach her a lesson. The thought of telling him about this made Tinasha pale instantly.
But she also realized that she couldn’t leave things to chance, and she gave a reluctant nod. “Urgh, fine… But I don’t like it.”
“It’s better than him finding out later and telling you off.”
“Both are equally bad,” Tinasha whined, while divvying up the paperwork in her in-box and arranging for some to be sent to Legis. She assigned Renart the task of selecting her companion on the journey and teleported away.
“And there you have it… I’ll be leaving for Magdalsia now.”
“What do you mean, ‘there you have it’?”
“Ow, ow, ow!” Tinasha cried as Oscar tugged on her earlobe. She had barged in on Oscar while he was in the middle of work, rattled off a suspicious explanation, and was attempting to flee. As she flailed around, close to tears because of his iron grip on her ear, she didn’t appear the ruler of a nation at all. Nor did she even look her age, although that was a complicated matter—Tinasha was over four hundred in the body of a twenty-year-old. It certainly wouldn’t do for her to look her true age.
Oscar finally released his fiancée’s ear, only to grab both her wrists and pull her close. Her dark, teary eyes gazed up at him.
“Listen to me. The new year is right around the corner and our wedding is in only a month. Why are you trying to get yourself involved in such a shady situation?”
“Well, they contacted me…”
“So? Just forget about it. Don’t go.”
“I—I can’t do that,” Tinasha protested. While Magdalsia was a minor nation, it was still Tuldarr’s neighbor. She couldn’t ignore a direct request, and she also had to hurry because the king of Magdalsia’s life hung in the balance.
She cast beseeching eyes up at Oscar. “I’m only going to take a quick peek.”
“Remind me again of how many conflicts you’ve gotten embroiled in after telling me you were only going to take a quick peek?”
“Urgh…”
While Oscar didn’t allow Tinasha’s resentful look to sway him, he let out a little sigh and released her. He lowered a hand onto Tinasha’s head. “Well, I suppose I have to commend you for coming to tell me first, at least. Take your spirits with you and be back by nightfall.”
“You mean you won’t be upset with me if I go?!”
“I reserve the right to go and remove you at any time,” Oscar said, although it was only a warning. In truth, they were equals both in their private lives and as public figures, and he couldn’t exactly interfere in another country’s domestic affairs.
Tinasha broke into a relieved grin and nodded. “I’ll be back before you know it! Thank you!”
Happily, she jumped up to throw her arms around Oscar’s neck, then teleported away and vanished.
The abrupt departure left Oscar dumbfounded. “She really is just a little kid…,” he mused. He couldn’t even imagine what kind of a wife she would make. Would she act like this her whole life?
Tinasha could cloak herself in an aura that was downright terrifying when necessary. Oscar chuckled at the stark contrast she was capable of as he returned to preparing for the new year’s festivities.
Trouble was already brewing in Magdalsia before Tinasha arrived. Accompanying her were Pamyra and two military officers. After saying hello to them, Tinasha attempted to summon a spirit. But no matter how long she waited, said spirit didn’t appear. “Senn? Where are you?”
Tinasha’s summonses had never gone unanswered—not during the Dark Age or the present one. Growing frantic, Tinasha made contact with all the other spirits and found that only Senn was unaccounted for.
Mila appeared in his place, and Tinasha fretted to her. “What do you think I should do? What if something’s happened?”
“I’m almost never with him, so I have no idea, but it’s very strange. Unthinkable. Failing to answer your call is a breach of the contract.”
The predicament had left the entire party held up just outside the castle transportation array they were to take. After some thought, Mila gave a light shake of her head. “He’s probably in a situation that’s rendered him unable to manifest. That’s the only thing I can think of. The contract is still there, so he’s not dead.”
“Itz, Karr, Saiha. Would you search for Senn?” Tinasha ordered. The three spirits heeded her command.
While anxiety still darkened her face, Tinasha forcibly suppressed it and pasted on a smile for her retinue. “I’m sorry about that. Let’s be off.”
“But Your Majesty—”
“It’s all right. We need to hurry,” Tinasha cut in, her smile not faltering for a moment. Compared to her previous loss of composure, it was like she was a different person. It was obvious she was concerned, but her responsibilities came first.
The queen drew herself up straight and stepped into the array. It was a portal installed one hundred and fifty years ago at the wishes of both Tuldarr and Magdalsia, linking directly to the latter’s capital city.
Upon the group’s arrival, guards came to escort them to the castle’s main gate. There they were greeted by Queen Gemma and a few magistrates.
Gemma bowed gratefully to the other queen, who appeared to be twenty years younger than she was. “I’m very sorry for asking you to come. We simply cannot discover what’s caused this…”
“It’s no trouble at all. Tuldarr has a duty to accept requests like this. May we make haste and see King Hubert right away?” asked Tinasha.
“Of course. Please follow me,” Gemma replied, lifting her heavy skirts and turning on her heel. The group from Tuldarr followed her into the palace.
Magdalsia’s castle was not large or luxurious, but it was crafted thoughtfully from good-quality materials. Unfortunately, the king’s unexplained coma meant the structure was filled with a distinct sense of unease.
Tinasha was musing to herself that she wouldn’t know if she could help until she inspected the king, when Gemma suddenly came to a halt in front of the entrance to the throne room. Tinasha almost tripped over the woman’s skirts, though she managed to steady herself with help from a nearby officer.
“Who are you? You’re not allowed to be in here!” Gemma barked.
The young woman standing before the throne only smirked, remaining still.
Tinasha peeked over the queen’s shoulder. The intruder was a beautiful woman with light-brown curly hair falling to her waist. Her amber eyes were striking and sparkled with provocative intent. Her arms were crossed, with a paper held between the fingers of one hand.
“Nice to meet you, Gemma. No need to worry about the king. He’s only sleeping,” the woman greeted them.
“I asked you who you are!” shrilled the queen.
“I’m Lucia. I’ll be filling in for the king while he’s asleep.”
“Filling in…?”
Lucia gave a half smile and flicked the piece of paper in her hands. It floated through the air and landed in Gemma’s grasp. She glanced down at it, and within a matter of seconds, her hands began to tremble.
“No… This can’t be…”
“It’s the king’s handwriting, isn’t it? You don’t need to worry about him,” Lucia stated.
The letter outlined that Lucia was someone the king of Magdalsia trusted and that she was to be given full authority while he was immobile. Yet this was still someone Gemma didn’t recognize, a woman of completely unknown origin.
Gemma’s gaze turned harsh, and she stood firm. “If the king is truly in no danger, I will hear it from him and no one else! Move away from there!”
“Gemma, are you really that incapable of grasping a situation?” Lucia questioned in a low tone.
The queen, who carried herself with a deep majesty no ordinary person could possess, drew back. Realizing that she was cowering instinctively, Gemma twisted her face in humiliation. Just as she was about to say something, a door across the room opened, and a man nearing his elder years entered.
Gemma beamed at the sight of him. “Gasparo! Do something about this woman, please.”
The man scanned the room.
Whispering, Tinasha asked, “Who is he?”
“The prime minister. He’s held this position for over twenty years. His Majesty and all the magistrates trust him absolutely, and he will not let some strange girl tell us what to do,” Gemma replied, gazing at the prime minister expectantly.
After letting out a sigh, the prime minister turned to face his queen. “Your Majesty, I deeply apologize, but I cannot obey. Lady Lucia is currently the acting ruler.”
“Excuse me?!”
The entire chamber was thrown into an uproar, excepting Lucia and the prime minister. Sighing again at how severely shaken Queen Gemma was, Gasparo glanced at the door he’d entered from. Two soldiers stepped into the room.
“I understand your concern, Your Majesty, but you should rest for a bit. Soldiers! Escort the queen to her chambers!”
“Wh-what?! Unhand me!”
Ignoring the queen’s protests, the soldiers each took an arm, and she was frog-marched away to her chambers.
The delegation from Tuldarr and the magistrates who had escorted them in were left behind. Pamyra and the Tuldarr officers gawked at the abrupt escalation.
Only Tinasha and Mila were eyeing Lucia pointedly, and Lucia’s amber gaze fell upon Tinasha. “So that’s how things are. I appreciate that you came all this way, but there’s no longer any need. I’ll ask you to leave now.”
“You’re a mage, aren’t you?” questioned Tinasha.
“And what if I am?” the woman replied boldly, and Tinasha arched a brow.
She hesitated for two to three seconds before she responded, “May I see the king?”
“No need.”
“Because you can’t allow us to?” Tinasha returned coldly.
Lucia gave a shallow grin. “The king is not well enough to meet with the Queen of Tuldarr. When the time comes, he will visit you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Tinasha, tilting her head to peer suspiciously at the woman on the throne. She honed her concentration to a fine point as colossal amounts of magic pulsed in her body.
That was when she noticed multiple pairs of eyes on her. Soldiers had streamed in from the door in the back, ready and watching.
Their expressions were devoid of emotion. It was clear they would draw their swords on command.
Tinasha relaxed her power. With eyes as cold as ice, she stared at Lucia. “Very well. We will take our leave for today. I do hope we’ll meet again soon.”
“So sorry I couldn’t provide better hospitality,” Lucia apologized mockingly, confident of her victory.
Concealing her emotions, Tinasha turned to depart. Her retinue gave her reassuring smiles.
The woman seated on the throne smirked as she watched the ruler of Tuldarr disappear the way she had come.
The party returned to Tuldarr almost immediately after leaving. Renart greeted them with astonishment.
Once in her study, Tinasha dismissed her guards and exhaled hard. “Things do not look good over there…”
“Who in the world was that woman?” inquired Pamyra, naturally referring to Lucia.
Tinasha sat in a chair with her knees drawn to her chest. “I don’t know if the king really gave her the right to rule, but she’s extremely bad news. She has…as much magic as I do, or as much as a witch. It’s not normal.”
“What…?”
Renart and Pamyra paled. Tinasha sighed over her knees. “I can’t believe we ran into such a dangerous person. Oscar will definitely not be happy about this.”
Mustering courage, Renart finally managed to ask, “Do people with as much magic as witches truly exist?”
“Strictly speaking, Lady Tinasha has more raw magic,” put in Mila. “But power isn’t measured by capacity alone. It’s hard to tell how much of a challenge she would pose, so I think it’s good we retreated for now.”
The spirit made her assertion in a flat yet unhappy tone before floating into the air and taking a seat on top of a bookcase.
In terms of people with abnormal amounts of magic, that fortune-teller Tinasha met the other day certainly qualified, though Lucia was far more hostile. Moreover, Itz had vouched for the fortune-teller.
This mysterious woman who’d popped up in Magdalsia’s court was like no other. Tinasha folded her hands and rested her chin on them. “She means to take the country, doesn’t she?”
“I wonder. Those soldiers looked like they were being mind-controlled. And in that case, she could have complete domination almost overnight,” Mila replied.
“She really showed us up, right at the end of the year and everything,” Tinasha muttered.
Tinasha would have preferred to evacuate Gemma, at the very least, but a chance hadn’t presented itself. Had she forced it, she could have at best sparked a battle of spells with Lucia or, at worst, started a political scandal.
Lifting her head, Tinasha glanced over at Pamyra and Renart. “I want to…get rid of her, I’m pretty sure…”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea…”
Her followers preferred Tinasha to leave the situation be, so long as it brought no harm to Tuldarr. However, no one knew what the future might bring. Unsure of what to say, all fell silent for a moment.
Tinasha stared up at the ceiling. “Because of how powerful she is, I’d like to come up with a bit of a strategy for going up against her. Phaedra got the better of me with a particularly nasty type of spell, after all.”
“But this Lucia is human, isn’t she? She wasn’t a demon or anything.”
“Hmm… I don’t think she’s a witch,” Tinasha mused.
Of the three witches in the world, Tinasha knew who one of them was—her fiancé’s own grandmother.
It couldn’t have been Lavinia, which left two others.
“The Witch of the Water or the Witch of the Forbidden Forest, huh? I’ve never met either.”
“You might be able to get some answers if you questioned all the spirits. The Witch of the Water was the one with invisible spells, right?”
“That’s what people say, yes. I really don’t want to face her,” Tinasha replied.
Skilled mages could camouflage their spells and make them invisible to other casters. If Tinasha herself felt like doing so, she could make it so an ordinary mage wouldn’t see a spell of hers. Invisibility was fairly labor-intensive, however, and it’d have no effect on someone who rivaled her strength.
According to legends passed down in Tuldarr, all of the magic the Witch of the Water used made her spells and their results completely undetectable. Her opponents would fall in defeat, having never seen the blow coming. Were that true, she’d be a fearsome opponent.
“And the Witch of the Forbidden Forest specializes in psychological magic. I wouldn’t want to fight her, either,” Tinasha remarked.
Mila gave a disgusted shudder. “Demons are weak to high levels of psychological magic, so that’s even worse than the Witch of the Water for me.”
Unlike humans, whose souls and minds were closely linked to their physical bodies, high-ranking demons were formless spirits merely clothing themselves in bodies as conceptual manifestations. This meant that demons were more susceptible to strong psychological spells than humans, and the same was true for curses. The fierce curses of the Witch of Silence had rendered them all powerless instantly.
Resting her cheek in one hand, Tinasha felt her thoughts racing.
While she had built up her magical resistance since she was young, there was no way of knowing how prepared she was to face a witch. An ordinary human who hadn’t undergone such training would be no match for a witch at all. She didn’t even know if her fiancé would come out victorious against such an opponent.
“I’m stumped…”
The queen leaned back in her chair with her arms folded behind her head and sighed deeply.
With only a week to go until the end of the year, people in every country were drowning under piles of work.
Oscar rushed to complete his duties and made his habitual visit to his fiancée an hour earlier than usual.
Half a day had passed since she’d informed him of her trip to Magdalsia. He hoped her lack of contact since meant there were no major issues, but he worried regardless.
“Is she not back yet?”
Tinasha’s bedchamber was dark and empty, with only a candle flickering on the table. Perhaps she hadn’t returned yet. As Oscar was deliberating over whether to wait or go out looking for her, he heard the door behind him opening and whirled around.
A ray of light cut across the room.
“Oscar? You’re here early,” Tinasha said, coming in from the bathroom and cocking her head to find him there. Droplets of water dripped from her black hair, which was piled into a bun. Steam wafted from her body as she padded over to him on bare feet, clad in only a white towel.
He eyed her incredulously. “You’re getting the floor all wet. Dry yourself off before you come in.”
“Oh…I’ll do that,” she said, wrapping her hair in the other towel she’d brought as she glanced behind her. All it took was one look, and the water on the floor evaporated into thin air; she hadn’t even said an incantation. Noticing that the droplets beading on her creamy, taut skin were also disappearing, Oscar was amazed. He stroked a line from the nape of her neck down her spine.
“Waugh! What do you think you’re doing?!” Tinasha yelped, letting out a strange cry as she jumped back.
Oscar looked down at his hand and marveled. “Your skin’s not hot at all. And here I thought you were drying it using heat.”
“I’d die if I did that! The spell only affects water!”
“Gotcha. That’s pretty handy,” he commented.
“Unbelievable… That tickled, you know.” Tinasha pouted, quivering with anger. Then she let down her hair and began to dry that, too. Oscar gave her a flat look before he reached out to lift her into his arms and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, settling her on his lap.
She gazed up at him innocently. “Aren’t your clothes going to get wet?”
“I don’t care,” he stated, drinking in the floral scent wafting faintly off her soft body. She had never felt shy or wary around him in intimate situations, and that hadn’t changed since their engagement.
Savoring the virtually inescapable pull of her unusually warm frame and flushed skin, Oscar let his eyes close.
Tinasha dried her hair quickly, perhaps conscious of how she was dampening Oscar’s outfit. After only a moment, she was completely dry, as was the towel wrapped around her. She teleported a comb over to her and started to brush her locks.
“You’ve been pretty well-behaved lately,” Oscar commented.
“That’s because you’re always getting upset with me!”
“Which is a result of your love for poking your nose into absolutely everything,” he shot back. Tinasha stuck out her tongue at him childishly but didn’t refute his point. She knew that Oscar’s many annoying warnings came from a place of love.
Oscar pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder. “Our wedding is only a short while after the new year. Why don’t you move to Farsas early? It won’t be so different from having our rooms connected.”
“What? But you’re the one who’s always complaining about how hard it is to get me to wake up in the mornings!”
“I’ll wake you up anyway,” he said. It was hardly a sacrifice if it meant making Tinasha his bride at once. He had held himself back this entire time, aware that taking her chastity would mean weakening her spiritual magic, but things had been peaceful for a while, and she was behaving herself. Surely, they didn’t have to wait until after the wedding.
Tinasha appeared confused at how quickly Oscar had responded. She tossed her hair over one shoulder and made to stand. “All right, I’m going to go get dressed.”
“You can stay like that,” Oscar replied, holding her down on his waist. He tipped up her chin and pressed a deep kiss to her lips.
She was so hot to the touch that he felt like he would melt. He knew that a good half of that heat had to come from her emotions. He wanted to melt her down to her core and pick out the most constant and true part of her. He would do it over and over. And he sensed that she desired to do the same to him.
Oscar whispered into her ear, “Tell me you don’t want this, and I’ll stop. You have to tell me now.”
Tinasha had consented in the past, but that was then and this was now. If she didn’t want it, he would back off. Yet he desired her so intensely that his reason was beginning to fail.
He rubbed his thumb over her bare kneecap, feeling the smoothness of her skin as he slid his hand up along her thigh, hidden under the towel. Releasing her chin, he gazed down at her, finding her lips bitten as red as a flower petal.
“I…I’m not…going to stop you…”
Her dark eyes brimmed with innocence, surrendering to everything and practically liquid with emotion. That look of hers made him dizzy, and he smiled. He kissed a line down her neck, his ardent passion ruling him entirely.
“But Oscar?” she called, her voice the tiniest bit tremulous.
“What?”
“I need to tell you something. You’ll be upset if I tell you later,” she panted, although her voice also carried an edge to it. A bad feeling took root in Oscar’s stomach. Tinasha’s long eyelashes fluttered as she closed her eyes.
“Tell me, then,” he said.
“I—I might need to fight an enemy who’s as strong as a witch,” she confessed.
“……”
Night had fallen completely in the queen’s bedchamber—a heavy, almost tangible silence blanketed its two occupants.
After letting out a very long sigh, Oscar lifted Tinasha and settled her next to him. With his eyes squeezed shut against the headache boring at his temples, he clapped her on the shoulder. “Go get dressed, then we’ll talk.”
“Umm, but it’s really all right. I have plenty of magic, so I can figure something out even without my chastity…”
“Put on some clothes! I was a fool to let down my guard!”
“Sorry,” Tinasha muttered as she headed for her closet. While she was doing that, Oscar helped himself to a glass of one of the liqueurs from her shelf. He had never touched any of the bottles without her permission first, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He wanted a distraction from his own irrational behavior; he was furious with himself for the selfish indulgence.
“What if I go my whole life never getting to touch her?” he murmured, and it didn’t seem all that implausible. If the two of them allowed her personal safety to outweigh the need for heirs, if they didn’t trust in their own power, that future could very well become a reality.
It was too early to worry about that, however. For now, Oscar had merely lost all desire to cross that line with her until after the wedding. He was taking a sip of bitter liqueur when Tinasha returned wearing a black, long-sleeved dress that trailed along the floor behind her. Sweeping the skirts up, she sat down across from him with a dejected look on her face.
Oscar got right down to business. “So, who’s this opponent that’s as strong as a witch? How have things reached this point?”
“It’s a long story, but…”
Tinasha gave a clear and concise explanation. Oscar frowned as he took everything in.
A mysterious woman with as much magic as a witch had appeared out of nowhere and taken over a country, albeit a minor one. The facts alone were highly irregular.
But for the time being, this was all another country’s problem. “As long as no harm comes to us, you should leave it alone.”
“Renart said the same thing,” Tinasha replied. “But we don’t know what her motives are. Magdalsia is Tuldarr’s neighbor, so depending on how things go, we may want to strike as soon as possible.”
Magdalsia and Farsas did not share a border, but Farsas was much closer to it than Gandona in terms of distance between the two capitals, with Tuldarr between the route connecting them.
Resisting the urge to put his feet up on the table, Oscar took another sip. “Why Magdalsia? There’s nothing there.”
“Yes, that’s true. There’s only untamed nature.”
“Have you asked the other spirits if she’s a witch?”
“Yes…”
Before Oscar’s eyes, Tinasha veritably wilted, anxiety and worry casting a pall over her face. The king of Farsas raised an eyebrow.
Tinasha brushed her bangs from her face. “Actually, I’ve met the Witch of the Water.”
“You did? So you’ve fought against her, too?” Oscar questioned, appalled that this was his first time hearing of it.
Tinasha shook her head, a mysterious look on her face. “No. Do you remember when I mentioned the unerring fortune-teller? I had her tell my fortune after Itz introduced me to her. I believe she’s the Witch of the Water.”
“What in the world…?”
“Itz told me in confidence that the Witch of the Water is apparently a blood relative to the founding king of Tuldarr. But as that came to light only after he abdicated the throne to the next generation and left the country, only three of the spirits know her. I can vouch for all of them, though. I only wish Itz had told me sooner,” she grumbled.
That left only one witch. “What about the Witch of the Forbidden Forest, then? Do none of the spirits know about her?”
“One does… But he’s missing at the moment.”
“That’s possible?”
“This has never happened before. I didn’t think it ever could,” Tinasha said, slumping over the table.
Oscar frowned. He knew the spirits were more than familiars to her—they were her friends. Of course she would be depressed with one of them missing.
“In that case, it’s pretty likely that we’re dealing with the Witch of the Forbidden Forest.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Two major incidents have occurred simultaneously. You should definitely be considering if they’re linked. If that spirit were around, he could tell you whether the woman in Magdalsia is a witch, couldn’t he?”
“That’s…true. Does that mean she could have silenced him?!”
“I’m just saying it’s possible. I don’t know for sure,” Oscar replied, forcibly cutting himself off there. There was a lot he didn’t know about witches, and even more he didn’t understand about the mystical spirits, who were high-ranking demons. “Is there anything in any records about the witches?” he inquired.
Surely Tuldarr’s vast archives held some clue, no matter how small. Tinasha put her hand to her chin and hummed. “Hmm, they’ve mostly been treated as abominations. No one was in the habit of recording their names or physical descriptions, even if those facts were known. Leonora—the witch I killed—only entered the records after her death.”
“Gotcha.”
“If anyone knows, it’ll be Travis…or Lavinia,” Tinasha said, aware that both were shrewd and crafty. She didn’t want to go near Travis, despite knowing where he lived, and Lavinia’s whereabouts were unknown.
That prompted Oscar to recall that he’d asked his father about inviting Lavinia to the wedding. “Do whatever you want,” his father had answered with a weak look. Perhaps he had some idea as to where the witch resided.
“I’ll contact Lavinia. Don’t go to Travis,” Oscar stated.
“What? Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Eh, it’ll be fine. And if you start hatching any plans, tell me about them first. Same goes if this Lucia comes to you. You need to let me know as soon as you can.”
Tinasha thought on that. “What about making the first move?”
“You’re unbelievable…”
According to her story, the witch hadn’t done anything yet. There was no reason for a preemptive strike.
However, Tinasha looked truly puzzled by Oscar’s reaction. “But why shouldn’t we? A witch is capable of waging war against an entire country.”
That reminded Oscar of one of Tinasha’s nicknames—the Witch Killer Queen.
During the war with Tayiri four hundred years ago, Tinasha had battled a witch and the Tayiri army at once.
Her words were incongruous with her sweet face, but Tinasha continued, ignorant of that. “The reason why the remaining witches and the mainland’s political powers maintain a tacit nonintervention agreement with one another is because the witches have never used their power to get involved in conflicts between countries. If they were to incite a nation to start a war, that would be the equivalent of battling two full countries at once. We can’t afford to let this go. We should take action before they have a chance to prepare themselves.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but we’d be landing ourselves in a quagmire if we crossed that line. The impact on the mainland would be…”
Oscar trailed off, struck by the look in Tinasha’s dark eyes. It was the countenance of a queen, the same one he had witnessed several times before.
This was the first time, however, he glimpsed a peculiar, overwhelming force there. It was the bottomless depths of the abyss itself, swallowing up everything with a contemptuous, domineering glare.
That look said that she would show not a shred of mercy to an enemy, that she was a mage capable of killing a witch.
Curbing her power now might be the best course after all, Oscar thought.
That flash of insight drifted through his mind. Perhaps it was not wise to leave her as a chaste spirit sorcerer able to wield boundless amounts of magic. While this thought was born from neither love nor lust, he brushed it aside immediately.
Such a notion was unbecoming of Tinasha’s husband. It had occurred to him as the ruler of Farsas.
Therefore, he thought it wrong to consider such thoughts.
Oscar did his best to maintain his usual expression and keep his voice sounding normal. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be good. You always overdo it right out of the gate. I’d be in a very difficult position if something happened, so you should rethink that. It makes me very uneasy.”
“Fine,” Tinasha said, accepting this with a huff. Still, she blushed, undoubtedly happy that he was worried about her.
That reassured Oscar. He reached out and stroked her hair. “You really have no shortage of irritating enemies.”
“That’s the sort of country Tuldarr is. We settle magical situations gone wrong,” she replied, aware that Oscar also got drawn into all manner of troublesome matters by dint of being the Akashia swordsman. Now that he was marrying Tinasha, he might find himself constantly at war, even after they were wed.
But he didn’t intend to lose, no matter who came at them.
It was not mere pride that made Oscar believe firmly that there was no predicament they couldn’t overcome.
Valt always made the first move.
The world was a tangle of the known and the unknown. Each time it repeated, the known grew larger, but the unknown never vanished. The world would undulate and smack him with another shape. For someone like him, who walked through time, the present seemed no different from a dream.
So much of it was absurd, illogical. All that he could remember were the hopes that had been betrayed.
Valt had even engaged in self-harm, sick of the growing wounds on his soul. However, he’d quickly reminded himself that it wouldn’t change anything. On occasion, he’d wished to forget everything, and on others, he sought to hasten his own demise, as his father had.
But as the world continued to repeat, and he absorbed its distortions and warping inside himself, there came to dwell within him a darkness as clear as a lake on a windless night. Sunk at its bottom were mountains of resignation, remorse, and hatred. They could not be seen from the surface, which reflected only the azure moon shining in the heavens.
Would this be the time for those emotions to function as a trump card?
“I’m really in it this time. No matter how long I try, I can’t settle these miscalculations. I didn’t expect there to be a barrier inside the mirror, too, or for all of this to happen.”
“Perhaps it’s because you were greedy,” offered Miralys, glaring coldly at him.
“I’m ashamed of myself,” Valt confessed, shrinking back in the face of her glower.
He dropped his gaze to the map of the mainland spread on the table. Sighing, he stared at the words Tuldarr, Farsas, and Magdalsia, the last of which was written smaller.
“All we needed was to have the king of Magdalsia touch the outsiders’ artifact while in a coma, but it looks like only half of the mirror activated. And one hell of a ruler has claimed the throne in his absence. I guess it’s partly because we’ve had so many first-time clashes this go-round. Who would’ve thought it’d turn into such a pain?”
“You reap what you sow,” Miralys commented mercilessly, sitting on her chair with her knees drawn up and a stormy expression on her face.
“I’m sorry.” Valt gave her a brief, terribly fond look, then glanced away. “Well, it’s all right, I have many pieces on my board. I’ll get things going here first,” he said with a wink, pointing to the picture of Farsas Castle on the map.
The Farsas new year festivities went off without a hitch. Oscar waved to the people as he paraded through the streets on his way back from the temple, protected by airtight security, then returned to his chambers. Ordinarily, that would be when he visited Tinasha, but Tuldarr’s new year festivities began at dawn, not at night like in Farsas. That was when the ruler would give a speech to the populace. Waking up was not the queen’s strong suit, so she would likely be going to bed extra early. He couldn’t bring himself to disturb her slumber.
While his schedule had been a busy one up until now, it would only grow more so with the new year. In two weeks, there was a founding day celebration in Gandona, and Tinasha’s abdication and Oscar’s wedding to her was another two weeks after that.
Even Oscar found it too hectic, but such responsibilities came with the territory of being king. And unlike the Gandona revelries, which he had no desire to attend, he was hoping to move up the wedding. He certainly wasn’t complaining about what the near future would bring.
As he shrugged off his jacket, he spoke to the air around him. “Nothing happened, so you can go back now.”
After a moment, a shocked-sounding girl’s voice responded, “You knew I was here?”
“I felt someone watching me. Did Tinasha order you to do this?”
“Yes,” replied a red-haired girl as she materialized close to the ceiling. This was the only spirit of the twelve who had been with Tinasha before her coronation, and the one Oscar knew best—Mila.
He asked her, “Did you find the spirit who went missing?”
“No. He hasn’t returned to our realm. If only he were here to confirm whether we’re dealing with a witch.”
“Did he and this witch once have a battle or something?”
“Actually, I’ve heard they were lovers, though it was a long time ago,” Mila explained.
“Oh yeah? So more than four hundred years ago, huh?”
Oscar sank into a chair, poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher, and took a sip. He glanced up at the spirit on the ceiling. “In that case, is it possible he’s betrayed Tinasha and gone back to the witch?”
“Absolutely not. High-ranking demons cannot break the contracts that cause them to manifest. If the witch used her power to force him into doing so, Lady Tinasha would be immediately aware that the agreement was broken. The same would be true if he died.”
“So he’s not dead, but he can’t do anything.”
“More than likely. I wish he hadn’t acted on his own and spared Lady Tinasha the worry,” Mila spat. Evidently, her master was more important to her than another spirit.
Oscar set his water glass on the table. “How freely can spirits act?”
“Hmm, well, we can’t appear unless summoned. That can keep us from helping our master, too, even if she’s in mortal danger.”
“That’s pretty strict.”
“Those are the terms of the contract. The first king set them when he made the pact. To put it bluntly, we avoid getting trampled by politics, and we are allowed the freedom of our own judgment. To put it nicely, it means humans handle their own affairs. Ultimately, we’re just tools at Lady Tinasha’s beck and call. The difference in power between ordinary humans and us is just too great, so doesn’t it make sense for us to have restraints?”
Oscar did not answer Mila’s question. The first person who came to mind when Mila mentioned a vast power disparity was his fiancée.
“However, we can go wherever we please when our master doesn’t need us. Of course, we can’t engage in battle or anything, but we can certainly poke around here and there. Although up until now, none of us have made it a point to do anything like that,” Mila grumbled bitterly, sounding very much like she blamed the other spirit for his situation.
Oscar crossed his legs and picked up the letter he’d set on the table. It was a reply to one of his own.
“Let’s put that aside for a moment. Here’s where our next clue about the witch is going to come from. Looks like she got my letter, even though I sent it lacking knowledge of her address. This is Lavinia’s reply.”
The missive, which was only a reply to Oscar’s inquiry and nothing more, included the name and physical appearance of the Witch of the Forbidden Forest, as well as a brief description of her personality and abilities.
Mila’s face darkened as she listened to Oscar read the letter aloud. “Oh, what in the…? So it probably is her. Lucrezia is Lucia, huh? I see.”
“From the way Lavinia describes it, the Witch of the Forbidden Forest doesn’t seem the type to have any interest in politics. I wonder what’s going on here,” Oscar said.
“Who knows? You humans are always changing—that’s probably all it is. Anyway, it’s the part about her being a psychological mage that I don’t like.”
“What? Is that something you can’t handle?”
“Nope, not from her. Anything cast by a regular mage would be fine.”
“Gotcha. I see how it is,” Oscar replied, folding the letter and placing it in his jacket pocket.
Mila must have decided the conversation was over, because she gave a nominal good-bye and vanished.
Once he was confident the spirit had left, Oscar locked the letter from his grandmother in a drawer. He didn’t want Tinasha to know its contents, even a detail that might be obvious to her.
At the end of Lavinia’s curt letter, she had written, You can’t fight psychological magic, so be a good boy and let her do it.
The first three days of the new year passed in the blink of an eye.
On the evening of the third day, the sky was clear, and its blue tone deepened each hour.
Lazar made his way down the hall, glancing outside the castle windows at a sky that had reached the exact shade of Oscar’s eyes. That was probably why he ran straight into someone who had just rounded the corner ahead of him. Flustered, he quickly moved out of the way to the right.
He adjusted his grip on his papers and was about to apologize when he froze. “L-Lady Zefiria…”
“It’s been a long time, Lazar,” she said, curtsying to him gracefully.
Lazar knew her well. She had a mind like a steel trap and eyes that were somewhat cold, perhaps owing to the time she’d spent outside of Farsas before coming to live with her noble father. While her smile was placid, her disinterest in everything was unnerving, enough so that it may have even troubled Oscar.
But she was also someone who was not permitted to be here now. Lazar stared at her searchingly. “Do you have business in the castle?”
“I’d like to wish the king a happy new year. Where is he?” Zefiria asked, twirling a strand of golden hair around her finger.
Finding something alarming in her beautiful blue eyes, Lazar held his breath for a moment before replying, “I’m very sorry, but I cannot tell you. I shall give your regards to him myself and will have to ask you to please take your leave.”
“Oh, how cold of you. It isn’t as if I’m going to eat him alive.”
“How you jest, my lady. Didn’t the king tell you himself that there was no need for you to wish him anything ever?”
“Did he? Well, if you won’t tell me, I’ll search for him myself. You don’t have the authority to send me away,” she said with a mocking smile.
Lazar drew himself up straight. “It isn’t a matter of authority. I am saying this as his friend. Please depart.”
“Is this because he and I used to be intimate?”
“Lady Zefiria!” fumed Lazar, red in the face, and Zefiria let out a tinkling laugh.
Only a few people knew about her and Oscar, including Lazar, the king’s friend since childhood. Zefiria’s father and others may have sensed what was going on, but they did not discuss it openly.
Lazar broke out in a cold sweat at the mention of this woman. Her relationship with Oscar had been over since Tinasha’s arrival in Farsas, and it should have remained a buried secret.
In three hours, Tinasha would arrive for a briefing session on the wedding. Lazar wanted Zefiria gone before then at any cost, and if possible, he did not wish for Oscar to see her, either.
Without taking his eyes off Zefiria for a moment, Lazar asked a probing question to try and glean her true motives. “What are you after?”
“Oh, nothing, I’m simply having fun. If you’re so eager to know, why not play along?”
Provocative words. A bewitching smile. Lazar scowled as he sensed something ominous there. And as he did, someone approached from behind and abruptly struck him on the back. The surprise almost made his heart stop.
Before Lazar could turn to see the culprit, he collapsed in the hallway.
Oscar, who was in his study and had just finished the last of his paperwork, frowned when he realized Lazar hadn’t returned. It had already been half an hour since he’d left to drop off some documents with Nessan, the minister of the interior. That errand shouldn’t have taken this long.
When Oscar opened the door to the hallway, eyes narrowed suspiciously, he found a lady-in-waiting about to knock. She apologized for her rudeness and informed Oscar that Lazar was waiting for him in the king’s private chambers.
“In my chambers? That doesn’t make sense,” Oscar said. Even Lazar, his longtime friend, could not enter those rooms without permission. Tinasha was authorized to do so, but she wouldn’t enter when Oscar was absent.
Puzzling over that incomprehensible message, Oscar hastened to his chambers and flung the door open once he had arrived.
Lazar wasn’t there.
Instead, he found a woman standing by the window, the waxing moon at her back. When she noticed Oscar’s arrival, she looked to him slowly. With a graceful smile on her lips, she dipped into a curtsy.
“I apologize for the long silence,” she greeted him.
“Why are you here? Where is Lazar?”
“Lazar? I don’t know. Perhaps the lady-in-waiting got her message mixed up?” she replied with faux innocence, and Oscar swore under his breath.
Zefiria couldn’t call him here herself, so she’d used Lazar’s name. The king’s mood plummeted upon realizing he’d fallen for such a foolish trick.
“What are you doing here? Are you in trouble?” he demanded, concerned for Zefiria despite his anger.
A look of terrible sadness came over the woman’s face for just a moment before it vanished. She walked over to the table and picked up a small bottle resting on it.
“My mother’s winery has produced a fruit wine this year that is the best vintage yet. I’ve come to invite you to taste it,” she explained, pouring the red liquid into a glass and stepping over to Oscar to hand it to him.
He received it and stared at the liquid. “Is that really why you’re here? Don’t hold back. Just come out and say it.”
“That’s really all it is. Please, enjoy the wine,” Zefiria said with a beautiful, clear voice.
Oscar lifted the glass up to the moonlight and put his lips to its rim. Ultimately, he set it back down on the table without taking a sip. “Sorry. I’ll have some later.”
“Oh? What’s wrong?”
“It isn’t that I don’t trust you, but I can’t be too careful lately. Forgive me.”
“I don’t mind,” Zefiria assured him, smiling and taking a step closer and reaching out for Oscar. “Very soon, you’ll be married. Congratulations.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Farsas will flourish with this tie to Tuldarr. You are the very image of a king, Your Majesty.” Invisible thorns barbed Zefiria’s words, and Oscar scowled.
He caught hold of her wrist as she extended her arm toward him. “Like I told you before, I didn’t choose her for her status. I like her for who she is. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but keep the gossip to yourself.”
The woman only laughed in response. She gazed up at Oscar, eyes filled with chaotic, whirling emotions.
Oscar’s voice grew more chilling. “Zefiria, what have you done with Lazar?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“Then why hasn’t he returned, and why did you use his name to bring me here?”
“I merely borrowed his name. I don’t know where he is,” she asserted. Her face claimed ignorance, yet her voice felt barbed. Oscar made a face at how vague she was being.
Zefiria had never been one to reveal her emotions. She had long maintained a coldness about her, as if she were using her keen mind to keep a calculated view of everything. Perhaps it was that aspect of her—so similar to Oscar’s—that had garnered his interest. However, she had remained the same all while they’d seen each other and even upon their separation. Now, for the first time, he began to see the sharp edges lurking in that smile.
Zefiria laughed, her eyes inscrutable. “I actually have one request.”
“What?”
“I want you, Your Majesty.”
“You can’t have me. Give up,” Oscar replied immediately, rejecting that request that reeked like a poison flower. They’d been lovers in the past, but the relationship had never been romantic. Neither Oscar nor Zefiria took advantage of their statuses to claim the other. They’d simply approved of each other and met on occasion.
Her perceptiveness, which Oscar had once appreciated, now possessed a strange hue. Zefiria clearly enjoyed Oscar’s suspicion of her. She wriggled her hand out of his grasp. “I’ll abandon hope, then. But in exchange…”
Sharp pain lanced through Oscar’s right hand, the one that had been gripping Zefiria’s wrist, and he yanked it back. Glancing down, he saw that it was oozing blood, as if pierced by a thin blade.
Reflexively, the king wrenched Zefiria’s hand up. Pain twisted her expression, yet her smile remained gleeful. “In exchange, I shall betray you.”
Upon those words, Oscar’s vision went dark.
Everything grew very distant.
His consciousness slipped into darkness.
As he crumpled to the floor, Zefiria gazed down at him fondly.
Tinasha arrived in Farsas about twenty minutes sooner than scheduled, carrying a spell book that her friend Sylvia had asked for.
Now that Tinasha was about to become her queen, Sylvia had regretfully decided to stop asking her questions about magic. Tinasha wished for their friendship to remain as it always had and insisted Sylvia make as many requests as she liked.
Tinasha asked a mage she passed in the hallway where Sylvia was and was told she waited in the outer gardens. Dusk was falling, and once Tinasha located Sylvia, she discovered that fellow court mages Doan and Kav were also there, drawing a magic circle by the light of magical lamps.
“What are you doing?” asked Tinasha.
“Oh, Queen Tinasha! We’re trying to create a transportation array with a variable destination that can be changed each time you want to use it. I thought it might be useful in times when there isn’t a lot of space to set up multiple arrays,” explained Sylvia.
Tinasha stood next to the three and examined their work. “Hmm, sounds interesting.” The configuration was fairly well crafted, owing to the efforts of the trio. “Excellent job. But the destination can only be changed by those who can work magic. You’d need to output it to a magic implement or something.”
“I know… I’d like to make it simpler, though.” Sylvia sighed.
“You could create a crystal for every destination, give each a unique name, and define them in the spell configuration. That would allow the destination to shift, depending on the crystal fitted into the array. It would require some adjusting of the spell, however.”
“Ooh, I see!” said Sylvia, accepting the book Tinasha brought her with gratitude.
The large transportation arrays permanently installed in the castle could not be combined into one, as it was sometimes necessary to depart for multiple locations simultaneously. Still, this invention could be used for simple configurations installed in people’s rooms. Once implemented, getting around the castle might become a lot easier.
As the three mages fell into serious thought, Tinasha giggled and waved her hand at them. “Oh, but then you’d have to put chains or something on the crystal to prevent removal. And you’d be in trouble if you ever lost one.”
“Ooh, that could definitely happen… I can see people walking away with them by mistake,” Sylvia agreed.
Tinasha stared at the magic circle. “This really is well crafted. You’ve designed it to utilize minimal magic for maintenance, and when it’s activated, it will absorb magic in the area and amplify it. While that means it wouldn’t work without enough latent energy nearby, you’d just need to place it carefully, and it would work as a hidden array.”
Sylvia nodded. “We arranged it so that it could be used even in places without any mages.”
“Now that you’ve pointed that out, this really is an extraordinary idea,” Tinasha remarked.
For Tinasha and Tuldarr, the concept of “not enough magic or mages” was somewhat foreign. No Tuldarr mage would have considered a way to keep a magic circle going on minimal magic. However, a concept like this would be useful in places where mages were scarce. Likewise, there was the fact that when mages battled one another, hidden magic and spells were often used, meaning that it was worth researching to see whether this could be adapted into a magic circle for long-term use. Tinasha crossed her arms, falling deep into thought.
Aware that if he let her go on, she would ponder it all night, Doan said, “Queen Tinasha, aren’t you here for the meeting about your wedding ceremony?”
“Oh, yes, I’d completely forgotten. I suppose Oscar’s in his study?”
“If you’re looking for the king, I know where he is,” purred an unfamiliar voice from behind her, and Tinasha whirled around. So did the other three mages.
It was not a lady-in-waiting who spoke but an upper-class woman in an elegant dress.
Tinasha bobbed her head to her and asked, “Could you tell me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be any fun if I revealed it right away, would it?” drawled the woman, making no secret of how much she was enjoying this.
Tinasha frowned. When she glanced at Doan, she found him pale. He hissed. “That’s Zefiria, daughter of Duke Jost.”
“I see… It’s nice to meet you. My name is Tinasha of Tuldarr.”
“I am Zefiria. It is an honor to make your acquaintance. This is my first time seeing you from up close. You really are lovely. I can certainly see why the king is so captivated,” said Zefiria, her tone dripping with derisive scorn rather than prickly barbs.
Unsure of how to respond, Tinasha scratched her temple. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Doan’s expression looked just as grim as it had once in the past. She racked her memory and soon recalled when that last time was.
He’d made this same face the last time Tinasha faced off against an unknown woman in Farsas Castle. It had been the king’s mistress on the previous occasion.
Tinasha clapped her hands together in recognition. “Are you Oscar’s lover?”
Her question was so indifferent that it made the three mages tense. Kav’s and Sylvia’s jaws dropped in shock, while Doan went truly white. Their reactions confirmed Tinasha’s hunch.
Zefiria narrowed her eyes and smiled patronizingly. As if Tinasha were some underperforming student, she replied, “My… I had heard you were quite an aloof young lady, but you are surprisingly astute.”
“Yes, although I won’t deny that I can be dense at times,” Tinasha answered, giving Zefiria a sardonic grin.
Tinasha lacked Oscar’s keen intuition. In fact, she was rather thickheaded for a lady of royalty. But that was when it came to emotional matters in her private life; as a public figure, Tinasha was extremely shrewd.
Presently, Tinasha was carefully ascertaining whether this sudden visitor expected to interact with her on a private or a public level. She could certainly denounce Zefiria for her rudeness; perhaps that was what she should do. But too much was unknown about the situation for her to do that.
Doan whispered softly to Tinasha, “It’s ancient history now. The king hasn’t seen her since proposing to you.”
“I surmised that much. I can’t go getting upset over every past dalliance. There would be no end of it,” she muttered back with a bitter smile on her lips, which visibly reassured the mage trio. Naturally, Tinasha was a little irritated, but her wedding to Oscar was just around the corner. She couldn’t involve Oscar’s subjects in her feelings, nor did she want him to scold her for causing a fuss.
After composing herself, Tinasha projected an air of calm on the surface as she faced Zefiria head-on and met her gaze.
With four pairs of eyes upon her, Zefiria tapped a finger to her chin. “Unfortunately, I know the king much better than you do.”
“Is that so? I don’t know a thing about that man.”
“I’m surprised that you’re marrying him, then.”
“I love him.”
Zefiria sneered. “Really? What makes you believe you haven’t just imprinted on him?” It was a direct provocation. Tinasha knew Zefiria had come to start a fight.
Her face darkened, but ultimately, her lips curled in a faint smile. “I suppose when we first met, I only adored him the way a child might. But the man I longed for when I was younger was not the one for me. The love of my life is the Oscar with me now, the one who’s vexing and mean to me.”
The Oscar she’d met in the past had lavished her with affection.
Her fiancé was not like that. He teased and scolded her; he stood by her while never holding back. That was proof that they held equal positions and that he saw her for who she was.
Tinasha’s eyes drifted shut in her reverie; then, with a sudden inhale, she opened them. All of the daunting power of the abyss filled her dark gaze. A cruel smile played about her lips. “So tell me, who has bribed you to come? I would so love to know.”
A different sort of tension shot through the air. The court mages held their breaths.
No mere jealous ex-lover would turn up before Tinasha and label her love for Oscar as false. Zefiria must have been informed of the queen’s past.
Eyes flashing, Tinasha fixed a stare as cold as ice on the other woman. However, Zefiria only looked a little astonished by the sudden change that had come over the queen, before her facade returned. She clasped her hands before her heart, smiling. “I do so apologize if I’ve offended you. I heard about it all directly from His Majesty.”
“From Oscar?”
“Yes. If you like, you can ask him yourself? His Majesty is in his bedroom. Oh, but he just fell asleep,” Zefiria said with elegance and scorn. That managed to needle at Tinasha’s emotions.
Logically, she knew that Oscar wouldn’t allow any woman besides his fiancée into his bedchamber. He wouldn’t. Still, her eyes flashed dangerously, and she couldn’t stop the low growl in her voice as she spat out, “What do you mean?”
“Precisely what I said, Your Majesty. You claimed you wouldn’t get upset about past affairs, but…what about current ones?”
Tinasha heard someone gulp, yet she couldn’t be sure who it was.
Her thoughts overheated, and her vision warped as her face screwed up into a grimace, as if that would hold the pain at bay.
Zefiria broke into a delighted grin as she observed each and every little fluctuation in Tinasha’s composure. Her laughter rang out across the twilight, echoing unpleasantly. It was the laugh of someone who stirred up other people’s emotions for her own amusement.
Clutching her forehead, Tinasha took a step forward. “Enough. I’m going to go and ask Oscar myself.”
“Ask him? You’re not going to kill him?” the woman mocked with glee, causing the queen’s face to darken further.
Tinasha trusted him. That hadn’t changed.
But…she was still unnerved. Her heart was no longer her own.
It was all so uncomfortable and frustrating that she wanted to burn everything to the ground, an impulse unbecoming of a mage. She had never felt anything when others betrayed her in the past, but when it came to him, she was reduced to an ignorant little girl.
It made her feel truly foolish—but that was all it was.
Tinasha suppressed the warm sludge threatening to swallow her mind. A smile like a flower under the moonlight bloomed across her face. “I…don’t know him as well as you do, it’s true. But I love him much, much more than you think,” she said. Tinasha intended to keep moving forward despite the doubts in her heart. Zefiria did not look furious or unhappy to hear this; she only grinned with eyes narrowed.
Tinasha sidestepped the irksome woman and walked past her, not looking back once as she left.
“Oscar? Can you hear me? Are you alive?” Tinasha called, knocking on his door, but there was no reply. As she deliberated over whether she should teleport inside, she remembered something and called, “Nark, can you hear me?”
The dragon served Oscar, though Tinasha had been its master for a time. After a short wait, a little red dragon came flying in response to Tinasha’s summons. “Go inside and open the door if Oscar’s in there. If he isn’t, come and tell me.”
Oscar’s private rooms should have had a window left open during the day so that Nark could come and go as he liked. The dragon let out a chirp of acknowledgment and flew out a nearby window.
Tinasha waited for a bit before she heard the click of the lock turning as the door opened from the inside. Nark glided over to her, and she patted the creature’s head. “Thank you. Stand guard here. Tell me if someone comes.”
As ordered, Nark remained by the door while Tinasha ventured deeper into the room. Oscar wasn’t there. Only when she entered his bedchamber did she find him, asleep on the mattress. She gasped and ran to check his pulse and breathing.
“He’s alive… Good.” Tinasha let out a held breath.
He was fast asleep. Even Tinasha, who occasionally slept in his bed, rarely caught a glimpse of Oscar resting, as he lay down later and rose earlier than she did. She patted his cheek lightly as she gazed down at his gorgeous face, no emotion in her eyes.
Oscar showed no signs of waking.
“Ugh… I really might kill you for this,” Tinasha muttered, getting onto the bed and mounting him. Reaching out, she wiped away the smudge of red lipstick on his lips. He was shirtless, revealing numerous red marks and scratches littering his skin. Tinasha eyed them expressionlessly.
It was a very transparent attempt to provoke her. She would be a fool if she let it anger her.
The emotions she couldn’t rein in turned to roiling magic. She wanted to gouge out each and every one of those marks, to tear him apart and put him back together.
Considering that Oscar was unconscious, Tinasha could do with him as she desired. She could kill him lovingly. The little girl inside her screamed out that she wanted to.
Tinasha stroked a finger along his neck. Magic seeped out and shattered a glass on the table. Broken shards and wine spilled to the ground, but she paid them no mind at all. She traced a nail along his carotid artery and scratched the mark already on it.
“To let someone do this to you… If you’re going to hand yourself over to someone, I will take control.”
The cold flame in Tinasha’s eyes died as she lowered her gaze and drew near his face. Opening his lips, she kissed him deeply and slipped some of her magic into his body.
Instantly, Tinasha understood that Oscar had fallen into a trap.
He was a light sleeper, so he would have woken up at a knock on his door. In any case, she had come here for an appointment; Oscar wasn’t so careless as to forget he had plans and dabble in an affair.
Using her magic to probe throughout his body, Tinasha soon found a spell, just as she’d expected to. With her mouth still pressed to his, Tinasha scowled as she sensed the hex entwined with a complicated spell, likely caused by a potion. Then she recalled that she had seen a very similar hex before, although its caster had been executed.
Why, then, did an almost identical configuration still exist? Tinasha’s mind raced to form conclusions.
Then she felt a flicker of magic in the distance. It was a tiny wave rippling out to notify her that something had made contact with one of her barriers, and, of course, it wasn’t coming from the protective barrier cast on Oscar.
Tinasha scanned the room. The royal sword, which Oscar always kept with him, was nowhere to be seen.
“Was I deceived? Itz!”
“I am here.”
“Keep watch over this man!” Tinasha ordered, and the white-haired old man swept into a bow. “I’ll be right back!”
As her fury colored her fine features, Tinasha teleported away.
Zefiria was a shrewd, dauntless woman.
Valt attempted to cajole her into letting herself be manipulated, but when she saw through his lies, he decided it best to tell her the truth.
He hadn’t told her everything, but none of it was false.
She set two conditions: one, that he would not take Akashia away, and two, that Oscar would not be put into any mortal danger. Valt agreed readily. As a mage, he had no need for Akashia, and he certainly didn’t want Tinasha holding a grudge against him for killing Oscar.
After Zefiria handed Akashia to Valt, he asked her, partly as a joke, “What would you change if you could go back in time?”
“Hmm… I would find my mother when she was young and tell her to have better taste in men,” she replied facetiously, but the remark possibly contained a grain of truth. While Zefiria was proud of who she was, she also detested herself.
Valt chuckled at the complexity of emotions and watched the woman as she left, knowing he would likely never see this person again.
“Ow! If that had taken any longer, it would have melted me to the bone.” Valt sighed as he glanced at his hideously burned hand and the royal sword on the ground.
Akashia, the artifact passed down through the Farsas royal family, had the ability to nullify any magic it touched. Valt did not know the exact reason why only the direct descendants of Farsasian royals could wield it. He hadn’t expected the hilt and blade to heat up when he took the sword and touched it to a spell configuration.
He healed his hand as he carried a small box out of the Farsas treasure vault. Ordinarily, breaking the wards on the box would alert the queen, but she probably couldn’t spare the concern for that at the moment. Even so, he needed to hurry, or someone would notice the fallen guards.
When Valt exited the no-teleportation zone around the treasure vault, he said an incantation and cast a transportation spell. Zefiria had led him inside the castle; to leave, he would cross the wards. He also needed to cast a complicated spell to prevent anyone from tracking him.
Suddenly, Valt detected someone with a very murderous intent behind him. In a voice like the clearest flute, she called, “It’s been a while. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Well, well… I never thought you’d notice,” Valt said, tensing up and turning around. There before him, he found the very embodiment of an abyss of darkness in the form of a beautiful woman, vivid and real. Blue lightning crackled around her right hand, its light flickering against her exquisite features.
Thunder rent the air, though Tinasha didn’t appear to be bothered by it at all. She pointed to the box in Valt’s hands. “I shall have to ask you to leave that here. Along with yourself.”
“Mmm. While that is an enticing proposition, I’m afraid I already have a girl waiting for me,” Valt said with a smile, drawing back his left leg as a small crystal tumbled from the hem of his pants.
Her gazed fixed squarely on him, Tinasha narrowed her eyes, so black that no emotion could be discerned. “Then die.”
Lightning erupted, but as it did, Valt kicked the crystal up before him. The bolt intertwined with it, snared before it could reach him.
As Tinasha drew up a new spell, Valt smiled. “We’ll meet again soon, Witch of the Azure Moon.”
What he said left Tinasha unguarded for one crucial moment, which Valt seized. He activated his teleportation spell and disappeared.
Tinasha was left to stare around in a trance. “Witch…of the Azure Moon?”
Then she shook her head violently to snap herself out of it. Striding down the hallway, she arrived at the treasure vault. The lock was broken. By searching the messily arranged space, she found that there was no white box on the pedestal. It was empty, and below the stand on the floor lay Akashia.
“You’re lucky it was a hex I remembered dealing with. You almost landed yourself in a coma like Legis,” Tinasha remarked, colder than Oscar had ever heard her. Her tone was so chilly he could practically hear the ice floes cracking in it.
He clutched at his head, sitting up in bed. Glancing down at the marks littering his body, he knew he needed to think about what to say first. The wrong thing might mean losing his head.
But before he could open his mouth to speak, Tinasha asked, “Did that woman bring you this wine? It’s dosed with a potion.”
“No, I didn’t drink it. She cut me with a razor of some kind.”
“You really will let a woman be the death of you one of these days.”
“……”
Oscar wanted to defend himself, but he knew that this wasn’t the time. He obediently bit his tongue and kept quiet.
Tinasha was sitting on the edge of the bed with Akashia across her lap. If not for that, the mood in the room would be even more miserable.
Tinasha gave him a bright smile, though only for show. “Lazar was found asleep in an empty chamber. He was only knocked out with magic, and Doan is examining him. There is a team in pursuit of Lady Zefiria, but she hasn’t returned to her home. Since the hex used on you resembles the one that was placed on Legis, we can assume Valt is responsible on both counts. He’s managed to steal Eleterria right out from under us. Sorry.”
Despite the apology, it was clear Tinasha felt only rage.
Oscar cut in with one of the eleven ways of appeasing her he had thought of. “Hey, Tinasha.”
“What?” she responded, her ear-to-ear smile frightening.
But he couldn’t falter now. “First of all, thank you for saving me. And I’m sorry. I let my guard down.”
Those few words were all he had to say. Tinasha narrowed her eyes at him. While her lips were curved into an approximation of a smile, she looked more like a statue than a person.
Tinasha set Akashia aside and got onto the bed, crawling slowly over to Oscar on hands and knees, resembling nothing so much as a lithe jungle cat. She assessed him with the eyes of a predator. Then she leaned down and pressed a light kiss to his neck.
In a titillating voice, she whispered, “Is there anything else you want to say?”
“I’m sorry,” he grumbled reluctantly, sulking, and Tinasha burst out laughing.
A childlike gleam came into her dark eyes. “It’s a bit fun having our positions reversed for once.”
“Oh yeah? Well, it makes it a little better to know you’re enjoying yourself.”
“I may be feeling pleased, but I am fifty times more absolutely livid with you.”
“Don’t call off our engagement.”
“I wouldn’t!” Tinasha shouted crossly. When she touched Oscar’s shoulder, the marks on his body that were placed there to infuriate her all disappeared at once.
Looking deeply unamused, Tinasha sat back onto Oscar’s lap. “I’m glad nothing worse happened to you. I didn’t want to have to kill someone for personal reasons.”
“So you were thinking of killing me?” Oscar muttered, something cold running through him.
Tinasha threw him an appalled look. “Of course I wasn’t. I was talking about her. I placed a tracker on her, which I undid once I learned you had simply been careless. If I’d known she was working with Valt, I would have kept it on her. That’s my mistake. I should have knocked her out when I met her in the gardens,” Tinasha said lightly, as if she wasn’t discussing life and death. Her confidence in her magic remained apparent, however. This was her true self, the Tinasha who wasn’t a child or a queen.
Oscar couldn’t help but grin at her.
The sight prompted Tinasha to frown. “Do you understand what you did?”
“I do. I understand.”
“Did it sink in?”
“Absolutely.”
“You are prone to making women obsessed with you, so you need to be careful,” she chided seriously.
Oscar gave a wan tired smile. “What about you?”
“Unfortunately, the only men who are interested in me are after what’s inside my body.”
“What the…?”
A grin flashed across Tinasha’s face before she turned serious again. “Valt wants both orbs of Eleterria, so he shouldn’t be able to use just the one right away. I need to fortify the security around the remaining orb…”
“Why don’t you just destroy it? That seems like the path of least harm,” Oscar suggested.
“We don’t know what might happen if I try,” Tinasha said, nose scrunching up.
She had no idea how a magical artifact that could send people back in time might react to harm. The potential backlash was far too risky.
Just to be certain, Oscar asked, “Is the Tuldarr treasure vault secure?”
“I’d like to say it is, but the recent irregularities have me worried,” Tinasha admitted. After a beat, she looked at him. “Valt is extremely good at reading people. He seems to know a lot about you and me, and not just general facts.”
“Owing to when he infiltrated Farsas Castle as Nephelli’s mage, I’m sure. You talked to him then, too, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but his understanding runs deeper than the superficial. I mean in a more familiar sense.”
“Familiar?”
“He probably knows my current self. I can’t let this continue…”
Tinasha cut herself off, her gaze turning distant as her thoughts sank to a deep, dark place. All the emotion faded from her eyes, leaving behind only a cold and calculating mind.
Her train of thought took her deeper and further away. She grew so distant that it was like she was rewinding time.
She was becoming someone Oscar didn’t recognize.
“Tinasha?”
Her name fell from his lips involuntarily, surprising even Oscar himself. Immediately, the emotion came back into her gaze, and she smiled. “What is it? Are you going to beg to keep your life?”
“So you really do plan to kill me…?”
“Of course not. We’re not even married yet.”
“I know… If you’re gonna kill me, at least wait until our kids are grown.”
“I’ll consider it,” Tinasha joked, giggling. She turned to burrow into Oscar’s chest. Yet as her long eyelashes fluttered closed, her thoughts sank once more to the coldest depths. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
4. At the End of a Memory
Tinasha was not a child for very long. Her position and the tumultuousness of the era did not permit it.
She couldn’t rely on anyone or trust them. All around the young queen enthroned under extraordinary circumstances were people who either feared her or wanted her removed.
Her only supporters were the twelve mystical spirits she had inherited. They were the only ones she could trust, and they became like friends and family to her.
“I’m exhausted.” The girl sighed, lying facedown on her huge bed.
Only a few months had passed since her coronation, and fourteen-year-old Tinasha buried her face in her pillow and sucked in a deep breath. The spirit Senn, there as her bodyguard, said to her, “You should sleep. You can’t keep going like this.”
“I’m fine. I won’t stay up much longer. Kill any assassins that come while I’m sleeping, okay?”
“No matter who it is?”
“No matter who,” she replied flatly. When Senn didn’t answer, tears welled in her dark eyes. She mumbled into her pillow, “I mean…if I’m ever indulgent with anyone… Well, that’s exactly the type of person that they’ll try to use to kill me. I have to treat them all the same. That way, only those willing to fight me will come.”
She was undoubtedly thinking of how, just the other day, a lady-in-waiting around the queen’s age had attempted regicide. If she showed any weakness, her political opponents would take advantage of it. Blood did not determine who inherited the throne of Tuldarr. Eliminating Tinasha meant someone else could take her place.
Senn opened his mouth, but mostly repeated what he’d said earlier. “You should sleep. You’ll sit on the throne until you’re an old woman. That’s probably going to feel like a long time to you.”
“Not that long, I bet,” she muttered. She would probably die before that. No matter how idealistic or powerful anyone was, they would not last long in times like these. People were always tricking and stabbing one another in the back. All wished for it to end, but none could find a way out. That was true for the entire mainland.
Thus, even if Tinasha triumphed and survived, she wanted to relinquish her status before turning gray. Decades of using her extraordinary power to intimidate everyone into submission might very well drive her insane. Even if she retained her wits, her subjects would suffer if her ways of thinking grew old-fashioned and she began to pursue peace and quiet for herself. So, at most, she had another twenty years of this left.
Ruminating on how that was a very long time indeed, Tinasha glanced up. “If you want me to fall asleep, talk to me.”
“Talk to you? Shall I report on something?”
“No, just talk. Tell me about you. What was it like when you manifested before? When you made the contract with the first king?”
Her request came out of nowhere, and Senn looked bewildered. However, when he saw the hopeful curiosity in Tinasha’s eyes, he gave a rueful smile. The spirit leaned against the wall to indulge his master’s very age-appropriate curiosity. “When I manifested back then, I had quite a bit of freedom.”
“You have freedom now, too, Senn.”
“Maybe,” the man with bluish-white hair said with a dry laugh. His voice was tinged with the slightest hint of yearning. “Just as you can never forget the man who saved you…I met a very strange woman once, too, a long time ago.”
The girl rested her elbows on the bed, staring at Senn. It was rare for him to talk about himself. Out of all the twelve spirits, he was the most unemotional.
“She was free-spirited, capricious, and affectionate. She would wander off only to come back, repeating the process each time I appeared in this realm.”
“Was she…a demon?”
It would be impossible for someone with the life span of an ordinary human to come and see him each time he, a royal spirit, manifested upon the coronation of a new ruler.
Senn only smiled and did not answer. Pushing himself off the wall, he came over to the bed and placed a blanket over his master’s lithe frame. Tinasha noticed for the first time that he wore a ring.
Senn’s ruby eyes went half-lidded in a very human gesture of sympathy. “If you ever grow tired of it all, you should visit her. She’s a troublemaker, but…I know she’d make a good friend for you.”
He stroked Tinasha’s hair and, for the third time, said, “Sleep.”
The girl nodded and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, her heart feeling somewhat lighter.
They were the only family she would trust. But they also belonged to…the ruler.
A ruler was a symbol of strength and the greatest cog in the machine that kept the citizens alive and the country running.
Regents did not need emotions or individuality.
Relying on another was a weakness. Trust meant a gap in her defenses. That was why she didn’t mind being alone, as long as she had enough strength to do so.
For the next five years of Tinasha’s rule she maintained that ideology—treading on thin ice all the while.
She never wavered, and displayed no weakness.
As ruler, she would use her devastating power to secure victory with all the pride of a queen.
That was, after all, the last promise she made to him.
A flicker of emotion showed in Tinasha’s dark eyes as she gazed down at the miniature garden. Next to her, Legis noticed it and glanced at her. Without making the slightest movement, Tinasha said to the two spirits on her other side, “I’ve gotten sloppy lately.”
“Yes, especially since your engagement, but you’ve been like this ever since you arrived in this time period, you know. I thought you were just exhausted,” Mila remarked.
“Thank you for that tart answer. It’s quite refreshing,” said Tinasha, though a smile didn’t bloom on her face like it normally did. Feeling as though something were slightly off, Legis stared at her.
Karr, the other spirit, piped up. “But you never used to be super vigilant when you were younger anyway, little girl. You were so obedient and sweet that I was actually a little worried.”
“What? You were? That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” the queen replied.
“Well, it’s the first time I’m telling you. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing, either. You’re only human. After becoming queen, you did everything so perfectly and carefully that it had me a bit concerned.”
“A queen can’t very well act like she’s still a child,” Tinasha remarked, nodding as if the conversation wasn’t about her. “In any case, dealing with this person I’m up against feels like he’s able to read my thoughts. As if that isn’t impolite enough, he even seems to know my private personal details. I don’t want him poking his nose in there.”
Valt was clearly one step ahead of Tinasha. Since their first meeting, she had gotten the strangest sense that he could read her like a book. How was he able to look past the facade of Queen Tinasha of Tuldarr? Valt understood Tinasha’s love for Oscar and what she would do to be useful to the king, using that information to trap her.
It was how he’d kidnapped her—he’d seized a chance after the battle with Simila. Likewise, he’d taken advantage of that same understanding of Tinasha to steal the Eleterria orb. Zefiria’s feelings for Oscar kept him from harm, but things could have easily escalated and resulted in his death.
Tinasha would not let Valt get away with it anymore.
Before she was a private citizen, she was a queen.
She could discard her emotions any way she pleased. She could forget them.
Only those capable of that could sit on the throne.
A ruler required a mind. Not a heart.
“I’m going to switch to another mentality.”
Now she wore another face, one she had never shown in this era. Surely Valt wouldn’t recognize it.
She turned a cold gaze upon the miniature garden. The light faded from her eyes. This all-powerful mage made soft a declaration of war.
“I hereby accept his challenge and will show him a side of me he does not know.”
There came a change like drawing the curtains on a window. Something had altered, something small yet fundamentally different.
The air in the room shifted.
With heads lowered, the two spirits flanking Tinasha spoke together. “We are yours to command, my queen.”
Tinasha gave a haughty nod. Threatening waves emanated from her, making all in the room frightened to so much as breathe. Legis had gone rigid all over. Tinasha pointed to a series of settlements in Tuldarr. “These three villages first, and these two places. Make arrangements.”
“Yes…Your Majesty,” he replied.
“Also, bring me all the materials you have pertaining to Magdalsia. I’ll read them by tonight.”
“I shall,” Legis said with a bow. He paid careful attention to her many orders, never lifting his head. The intimidating air Tinasha emanated made him hesitant to do so. He merely listened as she gave instructions in a dispassionate tone of voice.
Tinasha had behaved coolly before, but she always retained a sense of amiable self-deprecation.
Not this time. None of that was present now. This was likely her true persona.
History spoke of her as a fierce queen who did not hesitate to execute anyone, and who never feared dirtying her own hands. A shiver ran through Legis as he beheld the truth of it.
Lying on her bed, she closed her eyes. Alone in the dark, Tinasha began to sort through all the knowledge she had accumulated. She also considered the wards and surveillance spells she had set up all over, drawing new information from them.
Before entering her magic sleep four hundred years ago, she would end each day reviewing her plan and what she needed to do. She also wrote down part of that in a diary. What to prioritize, what to discard. What verdict to give, what to rescue.
Those on the throne faced these choices constantly. There could be no personal feelings involved, nor sense of self.
Tinasha expanded her consciousness. Her mind emptied. She tidied up and categorized all the disparate fragments. While multiple thoughts ran concurrently, she took a step back and observed the mental jumble with the benefit of perspective.
I still don’t know where Senn is.
Her heart ached to acknowledge it. Each of her twelve spirits was irreplaceable.
She had confidants and supporters during the Dark Age, but none who could be counted as close friends. And for every supporter, there had been an opponent.
In this era with Oscar, Tinasha knew neither allies nor enemies. Perhaps it was only natural that she’d grown a bit soft. It didn’t offend her to be told that; it was true.
Perhaps the time since waking in the modern day had merely been an extended vacation—a nice bit of fun for one who had been running her whole life.
And now it was coming to an end. Tinasha would set aside her own personal happiness and stride forward.
No one needed a rusted, inoperative cog.
“Ah!”
All of a sudden, Tinasha sensed someone nearby and instinctively cast a spell, leaping to her feet on the bed. Before she could launch the magic from her right hand, she caught a glimpse of a very surprised-looking man just ahead.
“Hey, you scared me,” he said.
“Oscar! I was lost in thought and didn’t realize it was you. Sorry,” Tinasha replied, dismissing her spell.
Oscar was mid-lunge to evade the attack; it would have been a good fight. He sat on the edge of the bed and threw Tinasha a baffled glance once he got a closer look at her. “Your forehead’s all scrunched up. What were you thinking so hard about?”
“All sorts of things,” she answered with a tight smile. Standing, she went to grab a bottle of liqueur, and a book on the table caught her eye. “Oscar, do you know the story of the Mirror of Oblivion?”
“The Mirror of Oblivion? Sure. The fairy tale, right? The one in the book I got for the castle library.”
Once upon a time, there lived a princess in a small country. She grew up happy and beloved by all, but one day the king and queen were attacked by bandits while outside the castle and perished. The princess fell into despair and refused to leave her room for a year, no matter how her royal attendants cajoled her.
But then a traveling mage heard of her plight and sent her an old looking glass, a mirror said to absorb all sadness. When she peered into it, she stopped crying and left her room to be among her people again.
Such was the ancient fable recounted since the dawn of the Dark Age.
“The story of the Mirror of Oblivion is told all over our land,” said Tinasha, “but it changes a little in each region. In some versions, it isn’t sadness the mirror takes, but memories. Others have it that the mirror steals the minds of those who refuse to believe in its power, and sends them into comas.”
“Huh. That’s interesting.”
“About a hundred years ago, a researcher in Tuldarr looked into it and published a paper. According to the report, every nation has the odd account of someone who encountered the mirror. Following that trail leads us to the last place it was sighted…Magdalsia.” Tinasha handed Oscar a glass.
He looked faintly shocked. “Do you think the fairy tale has some connection to the witch in Magdalsia?”
“It’s one possibility of many. However, if the Witch of the Forbidden Forest wanted to steal a country, why would she appear after the king fell into a coma? It would be easier for someone with her power to use psychological manipulation, rather than incapacitate a ruler. The incapacitated king is why Tuldarr learned of the situation, after all.”
“So you believe the witch appeared because the king fell unconscious?”
“That’s what I suspect. I’m going through any fishy-sounding stories with a fine-tooth comb to try and discover what brought on the king’s mystery coma and why it summoned a witch. The Mirror of Oblivion is one compelling candidate,” Tinasha explained, climbing onto the bed, sprawling out on her back, and throwing an arm over her eyes.
It looked like she wanted the conversation to end there. Sensing something different about her in that moment, Oscar set down his glass. “Tinasha?”
Five days had passed since one orb of Eleterria was stolen from Farsas. Ever since, Oscar had noticed a slight change in Tinasha’s behavior. It was as though her mind were constantly working while her emotions had been set aside. There was a noticeable sharpness to her as well, like all her edges were honed.
Called back to herself, Tinasha asked, “Hmm? What is it?”
“Nothing. Are you upset?”
“I’m not upset,” she chirped, smiling at Oscar. But her arm remained thrown across her eyes. She wouldn’t look at him—as if she had no need to. It was certainly different from anger. Oscar could sense how terribly far away her heart was, and he found himself at a loss for words.
This was the woman he was supposed to marry in three weeks, yet it was the first time he’d seen this side of her.
They still met every day as usual, but recently, Oscar had noticed that something felt slightly off, accompanied by a mysterious sense of déjà vu. Thus, he made sure to ask Tinasha about it to check on her, and sure enough, something really had changed.
What was to blame for this shift? Oscar reached out and touched Tinasha’s face. “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s going on,” she replied, dropping her arm and revealing her dark, cold eyes. Tinasha sat up and looped her arms around her knees. “I think I’m going to visit Magdalsia to investigate after all.”
“You’re what?”
“I’ll go undercover, gather what info I can, and then take out the witch, if necessary,” she stated. Her matter-of-fact demeanor stunned Oscar.
He recovered swiftly, however. “Absolutely not. Do you realize that your abdication and our wedding are just around the corner? Why go stirring up trouble?”
“I am the only person who can battle the Witch of the Forbidden Forest,” Tinasha answered. To Oscar, that felt more scathing than the words alone should have been. He remembered Lavinia’s letter, which rendered him incapable of replying, before Tinasha could continue. “If I let her do as she pleases, things might grow out of control. I will take her down now, before that can happen.”
“But…she still has royal authority in Magdalsia. Considering your position, one wrong move could start a war,” Oscar pointed out.
“So I should just wait for her to attack? If we delay, we’ll only end up suffering greater damage, and there’s no telling how she’ll outsmart us.”
“But that’s—”
In a sense, Tinasha was correct. Responding now was the right move to secure peace in Tuldarr. However, it was also a clear act of war. Such a preemptive strike from a powerful mage had not been seen in hundreds of years. Should the truth of it come to light, the ramifications would shake the mainland to its core. It was akin to…
“You’re going against the times,” Oscar observed. A while back, Druza had attacked Farsas with a forbidden curse, and Tinasha had aided in repelling it. In the aftermath, the major powers signed a treaty banning the use of forbidden curses in war. Should Tinasha go rogue here, that treaty might turn into mere lip service.
In reply, Tinasha gave a beautiful smile and a confident answer. “That will get sorted out one way or another.”
Implicit in what she said was enough power to make anyone who heard her tremble.
This woman sat on the throne four centuries ago; that was who she was. At her center, she was a Dark Age queen.
Oscar hadn’t forgotten it, but ultimately, he hadn’t known what that truly meant. During that period, everyone had to fight and backstab one another—life itself was not guaranteed. To protect her country, Tinasha had vanquished a witch. And now, she was attempting to do it again.
Yet while she’d survived then, she could easily lose this fight.
Oscar grabbed her arm. “Don’t go.”
“You don’t have the authority to stop me,” she replied, echoing something Oscar had said to her once. But it felt different coming from her.
For a moment, Oscar wavered between warning her as one ruler to another or stopping the woman as her fiancé. No matter which he chose, the answer was the same. “I am going to be your husband.”
“You are. And I will become Farsas’s queen consort. I have that position to keep in mind,” Tinasha said, giving the answer of a sovereign queen. Her black eyes glanced down at Oscar’s grip on her arm. “But we aren’t married yet, and you are a member of a foreign nation.”
“Tinasha…”
Having her point it out made all the blood rush to his head, but it was unquestionably true. Oscar knew very well that they ruled different countries, although they had come far by supporting each other. So then why was she rejecting him now?
“Do you not want to live in this era?” he muttered. Hadn’t Tinasha traveled forward four hundred years in time to be with him?
Her black eyes widened a fraction. There was a tranquil glow to them. “This time period is the reason we’re not enemies.”
Was that a form of hope in her eyes?
Oscar recalled how Tinasha had abdicated during the Dark Age. After defeating a witch and triumphing over Tayiri, rumors began circulating in Tuldarr that someone who could kill a witch might be a witch herself. Amid that tumult, Tinasha was forced to relinquish her position.
And she was even stronger now than she was then.
Oscar stared at her, this person he once thought he knew extremely well. Perhaps the best solution would be for her to lose her chastity and a fraction of her power with it. Tinasha carried too much individual might and too strong a desire to head into battle. It was dangerous to leave her unattended. One misstep could spell catastrophe for the mainland.
However, that was not an option the man who loved Tinasha could suggest.
As Oscar fell silent, still clinging to her arm, Tinasha gave him an innocent smile. “What’s wrong? If you’re thinking of reducing my magic, go ahead. I’ll win, even if I lose some of my ability to use spiritual magic. Or are you thinking of restraining me in a more direct manner?”
Beneath that grin lay a hostility that made it plain she wouldn’t balk at making an enemy of him.
She was so far away, distant enough to be unreachable.
How could she have changed this much?
Oscar was stunned, and he released Tinasha’s arm without realizing it. “I don’t…know what you’re thinking.”
“The same as ever. This is who I’ve always been,” she stated as she reached up and looped her arms around Oscar’s neck, snuggling in and holding him tight.
Her warmth was no different, but her mind couldn’t have been further away.
Closing his eyes against a significant rush of sentimentality, Oscar realized where that odd sense of familiarity had come from.
This was the same person he caught a glimpse of in Tinasha’s diaries from four hundred years ago.
Piled haphazardly on the floor of the study were stacks of papers penned by the past sixty-seven generations of so-called heirs to the family. All of them had written so much—no, some refused and fled. One such example was his own father, who hanged himself.
“Valt, did you scribe any of these?” Miralys asked.
“Plenty. Whenever I had something I wanted recorded for the next time.”
Miralys frowned, holding a broom in her hand. As her eyes turned anxious, Valt immediately gave her a reassuring smile. “There’s no need for you to make that face. The people who wrote these did so because they wanted to. What they recorded would disappear with a rewinding of time. But while all of them could remember every life they experienced, they didn’t know anything beyond that. If they wanted to inform future heirs about what had happened up until that point and what changed when time restarted, writing it down was the only way.”
Some of the past successors had memories from multiple lifetimes, while others didn’t. There had been many types of heirs before Valt. Only a small portion of their number were recorded here.
“Of course, not everyone documented things each time. Some were too worn down by multiple rewritings of history to leave records. To fill in those blanks, others penned what they recalled of records they had read in earlier lives. It really varied,” Valt explained. The sizable archives seemed a representation of a great many people and all the lifetimes they’d experienced.
However, the only thing that mattered was what each one had inside. Valt glanced at the girl next to him. The first time he met her was at the end of a distant memory, one so remote it was aggravating.
In a part of some forest only a few steps from a main road, he saved an injured girl. The Miralys of the present didn’t remember it, but Valt would never truly forget. It was a terribly precious…and very regrettable memory.
Miralys walked over to the stack of papers. “There’s some material on the Witch of the Azure Moon in here, isn’t there?”
“Yes, although she rarely came down from her tower. I know more of her than the records do. Because I knew her when she was his queen—”
Just then, the ceiling of the study shook violently. Miralys screamed, “What’s going on?!”
“Oh no, did she abandon Magdalsia to come here?” Valt moaned.
From the way the mansion was creaking and groaning, it was obvious who had arrived.
“Miralys, over here!” Valt shouted, dashing to a corner of the study and lifting the trapdoor concealed on the floor there. It led to a passage underground, and he stuffed Miralys into it. Despite her shock, she obeyed without a word. Valt had one foot down in the passage when he wove a fire spell and launched it at the archives.
“Valt?!”
“It’s fine. We can’t leave them there.”
Tearing his gaze away from the burning sheaves, Valt hurried down the stairs. As he dashed along the underground passageway that led off the property, he muttered, “Why is she doing this when she should be incredibly busy? In a sense, she’s more trouble than when she was his queen.”
Across countless lifetimes, Tinasha had been a witch and queen consort at once. Valt knew. Having lived for eons, she held herself apart from the world. She was a fiercely compassionate, kindhearted loner who liked people but kept her distance.
The current Tinasha was similar to all of that, yet atypical. The king of Farsas drew out her girlish side remarkably, though in the past several days, she’d been acting more merciless than when she was a witch. Perhaps because her mind was still young, she was highly aggressive and decisive. That was how she had conducted herself as a sovereign during the Dark Age—a side of her Valt was ignorant of.
“This was in the records from four hundred years ago, but I certainly never expected the change to be this drastic,” Valt said quietly. Cold sweat formed on his nape as he hurried down the passageway that stretched into the dark.
That was when he heard the roar of a cave-in behind him.
Focusing on what needs to be done could avert sadness.
Tinasha had learned that form of mental control when she was queen many years ago.
Therefore, she was not sad. She’d never had anything to be sad about.
“If they thought I’d focus all my attention on Magdalsia and take no action, they’re sorely mistaken,” the queen stated coldly, her face an emotionless mask.
Next to her, Mila asked, “Are you sure about this, Lady Tinasha?”
“Sure about what?”
“You’re fighting with the Akashia swordsman,” the spirit remarked while floating next to Tinasha in the sky.
For a moment, Tinasha gaped at Mila. Then she burst out laughing. “We’re not fighting. We just had a disagreement.”
“But you’re about to get married. What if he’s tired of you now?”
“Hmm. Well, I can’t do anything about that if it happens,” Tinasha replied indifferently.
Mila’s eyes grew wide. “You’re really okay with it?”
“I can’t change how he feels, and I have something I need to do. Even if I don’t become his queen, I can still be by his side in other ways. Farsas would approve of something like that more readily anyhow.”
“Something like what?”
Tinasha only grimaced. Then an intricate spell configuration formed between her hands. From the air, the queen peered down at the mansion below. Located on the outskirts of a rural town in Tayiri, the holiday villa had belonged to some noble or other for five years. That was the cover story, anyway. However, several days of monitoring a magical surveillance network that spanned the mainland had revealed the truth.
Tinasha snapped her fingers. “I finally got a bite on one of my lines, but it took up a good chunk of time. Still, now I have some hope of winning.” She signaled Mila with a look, and the spirit nodded. “Let’s go. After this, I have to appear at the Gandona ball.”
The queen snapped again. With that cue, her spell became a gigantic cage and sank onto the mansion below. It would prevent teleportation and crush anything within.
Unfortunately, it was repelled, if only just, by defensive wards laid upon the estate. Mila whistled. “Wow! That’s a pretty ironclad barrier.”
“Looks like we’ll have to force our way in,” Tinasha said dismissively, lifting her right hand. Then she swung it straight down. A huge hammer made of magic smashed a hole in the villa’s roof with a loud bang. With the core of the wards destroyed, the barrier dispersed.
Tinasha and Mila descended into the hole. Immediately, Mila frowned. “It’s all smoky. Did something catch on fire?”
“Or someone set one, perhaps as a smoke screen,” Tinasha replied, erecting a defensive barrier around herself and the spirit as she landed inside the mansion. They appeared to be in the living room, although it was difficult to be certain, given all the floating white ash.
As she redirected the airflow in the room, Tinasha glanced around. Smoke was pouring from a spot just beyond a toppled wooden chair. Mila went in first, followed by Tinasha. There she found the source of the blaze.
“Documents?”
Stacks of papers were alight. There were enough sheets for close to one hundred bound volumes. Tinasha picked up a sheaf that was farthest from the conflagration, which had so far been spared the flames. She strained to make out what it said.
“What in the—?”
“I’m sorry, Lady Tinasha. They got away,” Mila reported, popping her head out from a hole in one corner of the room. The underground passage must have taken them outside the ban on teleportation. Tinasha’s attack was meant to catch them off guard, but they’d still proved to be quicker.
However, Tinasha was more concerned with the papers in her hands. As she read, her face screwed up in a dark scowl.
Once a year, the Great Nation of Gandona held a ceremony to commemorate its founding, an event the most influential and powerful individuals of every country attended.
Naturally, Oscar was in attendance at the castle in Gandona. He suppressed a sigh as he donned formal attire in his guest room. He never liked going to state functions, but that was the least of his worries.
His first concern was that Aurelia’s guardian, a revolting demon man, would also be there. The other was that he would see his fiancée.
While Tinasha refused to let him stop her, she ultimately didn’t go to Magdalsia. When he asked if she was holding herself back, she smiled but said nothing. Oscar was puzzled by the distance that had somehow opened up between them, even though they saw each other daily.
He’d even inquired whether she’d had a change of heart about their relationship. With a strained grin, she’d denied it, claiming she didn’t suddenly hate him. However, she did request a hold on wedding planning for the moment, because the near future was too uncertain. From Oscar’s perspective, it was clear that things had shifted around in her list of priorities.
“Why is she so impossible to get a read on?” he muttered, staring at himself in the mirror as he fastened his jacket cuffs. His foul mood was written all over his face, but aside from that, he looked fine. Upon leaving his guest chamber and joining Als, who had been waiting outside, they entered the hall.
First, Oscar greeted the king of Gandona, the man of the hour. After that, he looked around but did not see Tinasha. However, he caught sight of Aurelia and her chaperone on the other side of the hall. The man noticed Oscar’s gaze and gave him a nasty smirk, one entirely unlike the pleasant smiles he’d shown all the young ladies in attendance.
Oscar’s eye twitched. Under his breath, he muttered, “I hate that guy.”
Als evidently caught the remark, for he winced. “It does not appear that Queen Tinasha has arrived.”
“Yeah, she’s been running around like crazy lately,” Oscar replied curtly.
That was when the woman in question made her appearance.
Although her hair was only in a loose updo, and she was dressed in a black gown sporting little ornamentation, she was still beautiful enough to turn heads. Oscar watched from a distance as she greeted the king of Gandona with a diplomatic smile. Behind her trailed a red-haired girl clad in formal attire, marking perhaps the first time a mystical spirit had accompanied Tinasha to an official function. Oscar was surprised.
After Tinasha completed her formal greetings, she let her gaze wander the hall. After marking out where Oscar and Travis were, she wove her way through the crowd and approached the former. He glanced down, partially dismayed. “You’re dressed so plainly. And you’re late, too.”
“I made it just on time. I haven’t eaten anything yet… It hasn’t been my lucky day,” she replied, sighing dispiritedly.
Now she looked like the Tinasha he knew. Oscar laughed and grabbed a plate from a nearby table. “Here, get some sugar.”
“You want me to start with sweets?!” Tinasha cried, but she received the tray obediently enough and partook of the cream-covered pastries. As she devoured them with impeccable manners, she took a step closer to Oscar and whispered, “I found out something kind of dicey. I want to ask Travis about it.”
After a sullen pause, Oscar bit out, “Fine.”
While he certainly wanted to object, he knew that would do no good. It risked worsening his relationship with Tinasha, throwing the situation into chaos. Of course, that might happen after she spoke with Travis anyway, but they could worry about that when it happened.
Once Oscar nodded, Mila brought Travis and Aurelia over. Travis bowed and gave a courteous greeting, which morphed into his usual rough manner of speaking immediately after Tinasha put up a barrier to prevent anyone from hearing their conversation.
“What did you call us over for? What do you need?” he questioned brusquely.
Tinasha finished her second pastry and set her plate down. “I’ll get right to it. Do you have any memories of time repeating?”
Oscar frowned. He knew what she was trying to ask. Tinasha wanted to know if this demon king recalled the world before Eleterria rewrote it.
Aurelia looked confused. Patting her head, Travis scoffed. “Oh, so that’s what this is about. I don’t have any memories, because those orbs are outsiders’ artifacts.”
Tinasha cocked an eyebrow. “Outsiders’ artifacts? What does that mean?”
“What? You mean you don’t know?” Travis said. He glanced at Oscar, who shook his head. Reluctantly, Travis went on. “To put it simply, it’s a general term for items with powers that shouldn’t be possible under the laws of magic. That means they affect me as much as anyone else. There are no exceptions.”
“Really? Sometimes you truly make me wonder. Occasionally, you act like you know the future or you’re aware of what it was before things changed.”
“I don’t know anything. Get off my back,” Travis huffed, waving Tinasha off crossly.
That made Oscar recall something. “Wait. The first time we met, you called me her husband.”
At the time, Oscar and Tinasha hadn’t been engaged—they hadn’t even been romantically involved. Surely that meant Travis knew their prior history, the one where they were married.
The demon king could not mask his annoyance at Oscar’s comment. “You didn’t need to remember that…”
“It was kind of hard to forget.”
“Shall I erase that memory for you?”
Before the two men could engage in pointless bickering, Tinasha intervened. “Travis, answer me honestly. I saw records of a history that doesn’t exist.”
Tinasha’s face had gone pale, and Travis replied irritably, “You saw that? Which part?”
“The part about Cezar. Before history changed, there was no Simila in Cezar. It was a prosperous Great Nation that never attacked Farsas.”
No one said a word.
After thinking it over for a few seconds, Travis patted Aurelia on the shoulder. “You go over there for a while.”
“Oh, but—”
“Go on. And don’t follow any strangers,” he insisted in a tone brooking no refusal. The girl nodded and left the hall, looking over her shoulder repeatedly as she walked away.
Once Aurelia was gone, Travis turned back to Oscar and Tinasha. “First off, I really don’t recall anything. High-ranking demons are not exactly compatible with outsiders’ artifacts, because they operate on all planes of existence. That said, I’ve seen the same records you did—many times. There’s this family of Time-Readers, and they do retain their memories. They have mass archives of various repeated histories that they pass down through generations. The current heir is… You know him, don’t you? A guy named Valt.”
Oscar and Tinasha both inhaled sharply.
The plot against them, the meticulousness of it. Everything traced back to the frightening records and memories their enemy had access to. It was difficult to believe right away, but it was also a truth they had both somehow suspected. They were left stunned.
“Did you only see the records about Cezar?” Travis drawled, sounding bored.
“Yes. All the others were destroyed in a fire,” Tinasha answered.
“Well, I’d call that lucky. It’s best for humans not to see too much of that stuff,” the demon king said.
In a sense, he was probably right. The records spoke of something Tinasha had no memory of—a self that was not herself. Accounts of a vanished world could only be for sentimental purposes. It didn’t seem to Oscar that any good could come from reading them.
Oscar glanced at Tinasha. “Were the papers that escaped the fire Valt’s?”
“Yes. I’ve been tracking his magic for a while and traced him to a mansion in a corner of Tayiri. I attacked it just before coming here. The coward got away by escaping through an underground passage.”
“Bet that shaved a dozen years off his life span.”
While Oscar did believe Tinasha hadn’t gone to Magdalsia, he hadn’t expected her to go after Valt instead. The man did have one half of Eleterria, though, which put him at the top of Tinasha’s priority list.
“Tell me more about these outsiders’ artifacts. What does ‘powers that shouldn’t be possible under the laws of magic’ mean?” Tinasha pressed.
“Why do I have to tell you? Figure it out on your own,” Travis grumbled.
“Valt wants Eleterria!” she cried, and Travis scowled for the first time during their conversation.
He stared searchingly at Oscar, then at Tinasha. With an annoyed click of his tongue, he responded, “Outsiders’ artifacts enable what is impossible according to the laws of magic. That doesn’t mean they operate using undiscovered principles—they defy them. And there’s a few of them around. Most of them are objects with legendary characteristics, like Eleterria.”
“They defy the laws of magic, huh?” Oscar repeated quietly. Tinasha had told him multiple times that it was beyond magic to rewind time. He also knew of something else she had spoken of in the same way. “Does that mean those old ruins full of cocoons were an outsiders’ artifact, too?”
“Huh? Oh, that place that abducts humans and makes copies of them. That’s an interesting one. A long time ago, I saw it swallow up entire villages all at once,” Travis commented.
“If you saw it happen, you should have done something about it!” Tinasha exclaimed, naturally.
“As if I’d care,” Travis sniffed, naturally.
She let out a long, resigned sigh. “Why are they called outsiders’ artifacts, anyway? This is the first time I’ve heard that name.”
“Well, because the existence of such things is a problem in and of itself. Any humans who know about them would have a hard time going public with that knowledge. They were all brought in from beyond our world,” Travis said blandly.
His explanation didn’t surprise Oscar, because he’d suspected the same thing himself and had asked Tinasha about it once. Undoubtedly, she remembered that conversation, too, because she only seemed a little rattled as she asked, “So there really is something outside of our world?”
“Why did you think there wouldn’t be? You mortals can barely even recognize that there are different planes of existence, but you acknowledge that they’re real because we demons and other negative manifestations exist. So why didn’t an outsiders’ artifact lead you to consider the existence of something foreign to this world?”
“It seemed like a leap too far. We have far more evidence of the different realms and planes of existence,” Tinasha pointed out.
“So rigid in your thinking. Well, you’re free to believe what you like. Go ahead and think that what you know is all that exists, without even considering that there may be those who enjoy watching you from the outside.” Travis smirked, looking as if none of this had anything to do with him.
Perhaps he truly believed himself uninvolved. After all, he had also spent centuries delighted with spectating humans.
Tinasha huffed out a laugh. “So it’s like how characters in a book remain unaware that a person is observing from outside the story? But if all they want to do is watch us, then isn’t rewriting the past overly intrusive?”
“It’s you mortals who make the choice to alter history. Regardless, it’s futile to understand what the outsiders are thinking. I met one of them a long time ago—a completely incomprehensible woman.”
Tinasha hopped forward. “You’ve met one?! That’s not fair! It’s like you know the correct answer already!”
“Oh, hush. It’s you mortals’ own fault for being so out of the loop. Besides, while she was an outsider, she also wasn’t. She chose to be an ally to humans and lived and died among them. This happened long before you were born. That was just one person, and she has nothing to do with the artifacts.”
Oscar frowned. Over the course of simply listening to Travis and Tinasha talk, something had gotten stuck in his mind. Earlier, when Travis had said, “You mean you don’t know?” he’d looked at Oscar, not at Tinasha.
“Wait, was she—?”
Before Oscar could finish his thought, however, a man approached, having slipped briskly through the crowd. He bowed silently before Tinasha, though anxiety was clear on his face. Oscar recognized him as a magistrate of Tuldarr.
“Your Majesty, I have an urgent message,” he said, then glanced at the other two men, unsure if he should go on with them present.
“They are of no concern. Speak,” ordered the queen.
“Yes, Your Majesty. A short while ago, Magdalsia breached the national border and began an invasion. They have about thirty thousand troops and will reach southern Tuldarr in a half hour.”
“What?” Oscar blurted out in his surprise.
But Tinasha only let out a small sigh. Her dark eyes shone with a cold gleam. Rapidly, her entire aura sharpened to a point. “They’ve come a bit earlier than I anticipated. Understood. Give the order to mobilize our troops. I will be there immediately.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” answered the magistrate, who hurried off into the throng the way he’d come.
Tinasha watched him depart and then turned to Oscar. For a second, he saw loneliness in her eyes. Yet all too soon, it was painted over by the falling of a cold night.
The corners of her lips turned up as she smiled. “I will take my leave now. Thank you, Travis.”
“Sure. See you,” he replied.
The black-clad queen made to leave, and, before Oscar could stop her, she disappeared.
Oscar brought a hand to his mouth. Tuldarr was under attack by another country. While Magdalsia was no Great Nation, it had a witch at its helm who was very likely to utilize a forbidden curse in the war or introduce some manner of weapon that was even worse. Given Tinasha’s reaction, she had been aware that Magdalsia was readying itself for battle. Tuldarr’s own army was prepared to march as well. Tinasha hadn’t gone to Magdalsia personally, because she had chosen war with them over conquering the witch.
“Finally, she’s back to her old self. I didn’t know how long she was going to keep acting like some spineless wimp.” Travis sounded deeply amused. Oscar eyed this inhuman creature.
Noticing the gaze, the demon king stared back at Oscar. “What’s with that face? She’s always been like that. She just got soft after coming to this time period. Oh, here’s a fun story. I’ll tell you about the war with Tayiri.”
Travis grinned mockingly. “At the time, the Tayiri army had about…fifty thousand troops, I think. And Tuldarr had less than seven hundred.”
“What? They couldn’t have possibly stood a chance, then.”
“That’s what you’d think, right? But it’s true. Tuldarr was an isolated country, ignorant of the ways of the world. They didn’t have a proper military back then, although once she became queen, things changed. She started training up soldiers little by little and organized the mages for combat, too. Still, she had no end of enemies within the castle. So when Tayiri attacked, she was stuck inside.”
“She couldn’t act?”
“Yep. The Traditionalists opposed war with Tayiri and wanted her to surrender without a fight. They believed Tuldarr couldn’t win.”
“So she couldn’t get to the battlefield…”
In the Dark Age, having many enemies in the castle was a given. Tinasha had also been an extremely young queen. If she left to battle Tayiri, the Traditionalists might have seized their chance to take over the country and declare a surrender. Thus, she stayed put to prevent that, choosing not to yield for the future of mages and Tuldarr.
She was fierce by nature, but that did not mean she preferred eccentric strategies. If at all possible, she would have surely raised an army the size of Tayiri’s and engaged the enemy.
Instead, she cooked up an outlandish plan. Of the two thousand troops in Tuldarr, one thousand were sent to the border to warn Druza and Farsas, while three hundred remained in the castle. She took the remaining seven hundred to confront Tayiri.
It was on a stormy day that Tayiri discovered Tuldarr’s army numbered only a few hundred and set out to slaughter them. However, Tuldarr’s military fled without a fight once they spotted the Tayiri soldiers. Following in pursuit, the Tayiri army’s formation got disrupted, and they landed smack in the middle of a fog that had crept up around them while they were unaware. Such a thick mist was highly unusual for a grassland. Heedless, they wandered into the dense fog like children lost in a nightmare, unable to see the people and horses ahead of them. Amid the vapor, they began killing one another by mistake with unprecedented ferocity.
It all went as the Tuldarr army had cleverly orchestrated. As the Tayiri soldiers realized they were fighting one another, they found themselves blocked by a huge wall of flames. From the other side of the burning walls, relentless volleys of magic buffeted them. The surviving Tayiri soldiers later said, “That was a sight no one should ever have to see.”
Unable to fight back, the army was routed by fire and spells. After a narrow escape, the Tayiri army discovered it had suffered thirty thousand casualties on the first day.
Most horrifying of all was that the one who had instructed Tuldarr’s forces was the queen in the castle.
She observed through the eyes of the mystical spirits she dispatched for surveillance while also communicating magically with her closest advisers. That was how she gave direction to the mages in the army and, even from so far away in the palace, reversed the overwhelming disadvantage.
The next day, a witch appeared before her.
Oscar held back a sigh of grief for young Tinasha.
He trusted that she was an excellent ruler. From what little he’d seen of her diary, he knew she’d stood firm in a maelstrom of war both within the country and without.
However, he’d never imagined her orchestrating such a cutthroat strategy. The way she smiled at him so innocently made it difficult to believe.
This meant that Tinasha was now back to her true self, the queen who fought to the bitter end despite her own loneliness.
So that’s her other side… It’s truly a world apart.
All royals had two faces—a public one and a private one. While Oscar largely operated with his public demeanor while keeping his private feelings in check, Tinasha’s two sides formed a clear duality. Both portions were opposed.
That was only becoming evident now that Tuldarr was at war, despite remaining hidden during her coronation and her fight with the demoness.
The appearance of a witch meant that Tinasha was about to become the Witch Killer Queen once more.
“I told you it was a fun story, didn’t I? Anyway, she was fighting a battle while working on eliminating her enemies in Tuldarr at the same time. She didn’t have any spirits to spare—they were all filling in as castle guards for the soldiers who’d gone off to fight. The Traditionalists who meant to capitalize on a chance to assassinate her wound up arrested instead. She left herself open on purpose, and they fell for it. One after another, they were all executed or banished.”
“All of them? But wasn’t it the Traditionalists who pressured her to step down after the war?”
“So the records claim, but it’s not actually true. There wasn’t a single Traditionalist left by then. She made the decision herself to appear like she’d been forced to abdicate to satisfy Tayiri.”
“But…”
If Tinasha had stepped down from the throne by choice, then that changed the story drastically. It made clear that she believed her extraordinary might put her at the same level as a witch. She’d expelled herself for having too much strength.
“There is no need for a ruler to possess mighty power.”
She’d said that many times since coming to this time period. From the beginning, she’d seen herself as an anachronism. Yet she had chosen the path of abomination once again.
And once the dust settled, what would she relinquish this time?
Wait a minute… Is she not planning to become my queen?
If a person dangerous enough to kill witches single-handedly became the queen consort of the Great Nation of Farsas, other countries would undoubtedly grow exceedingly worried. That meant Tinasha had already abandoned a future where she became Oscar’s queen. It explained her request for the wedding plans to be postponed.
Even if she still came to him after everything was over, it would only be as someone under the watchful eye of Akashia’s wielder. At best, Tinasha would be his mistress; at worst, a prisoner. Either way, she would never show herself in public. She was going to force him to accept that.
“She’s crazy,” Oscar muttered.
He knew that if such a future came to be, Tinasha would only smile and insist, “I’m perfectly happy this way.”
Whether that was true or not, Oscar would find it unbearable.
Oscar turned to Als, who stood behind him. “Change of plans. I’m going back to Farsas.”
If he acted now, there was still a chance that the situation could be resolved privately, without other countries finding out. Legis, the next king of Tuldarr, wouldn’t want the image of the queen who preceded him to be tainted with needless prejudice. Oscar could work with Legis and appeal to the other nations. While Tinasha confronted the witch, they would handle the diplomatic side of things and control the narrative.
Fortunately, Magdalsia was the aggressor, and it was headed by a witch, a creature fearsome to all. Oscar felt confident that if he got the major nations’ understanding, he could do something from within Farsas. All that remained was coordinating with Tinasha.
As Oscar bid a hasty good-bye, Travis suddenly went from smirking to grave. “About what we discussed tonight… Do not hand over Eleterria. I don’t want any do-overs of history, even if I remain unaware of them. I don’t want to forget Aurelia, and there’s no guarantee that things will happen the same way. Don’t use it, and don’t allow it to get stolen. I refuse to let this timeline go.” Without waiting for a reply, the demon king walked away, melting into the crowd.
Now that this inhuman being had gone back to his girl, where should Oscar go next? What should he do? He still didn’t have a clear idea, but inaction was not an option. Thus, Oscar left the ornate, gorgeously decorated hall behind, his heart heavy.
Although his aim was to get out of Gandona swiftly, Oscar had to make a detour to his guest room first. And it was there that he detected something was off.
Nothing had been amiss when he left the room, but now there was very clearly something wrong. Oscar scanned the room, gripped by a vague sensation that he wasn’t alone. Drawing Akashia, he demanded, “Who is it?”
He hadn’t expected an answer, but a young man replied, “I have a few things to discuss with you, so I let myself in.”
No person emerged—there was only a voice. Oscar recognized it, however. “Valt? Show yourself.”
“You can’t be serious. I’m quite afraid of you, you know. Anyway, would you like to hear something nice? It’s about the Witch of the Forbidden Forest.”
Oscar’s intuition told him that what he could sense of Valt was too faint for the man to be hidden in the room. While Oscar had deliberated over how to respond to the mysterious voice at first, that made him fire back, “Tell me.”
“Always so quick to decide. The woman who controls Magdalsia now…is not the Witch of the Forbidden Forest,” Valt revealed, and Oscar had to bite his tongue to stop from making a noise of surprise.
Tinasha had all but decided that the one stirring up trouble was a witch. If she was wrong, the consequences could be astronomical.
Valt went on calmly. “However, physically, she is the same as the Witch of the Forbidden Forest. It is only the soul inside that differs. The soul inside her now is that of King Hubert of Magdalsia.”
Oscar frowned. Things were escalating beyond expectation to a scale that felt absurd. “Is that even possible?”
“Not with magic. But unfortunately, there is an artifact that enables it. I believe you call it the Mirror of Oblivion?”
“Is that an outsiders’ artifact?”
“Oh, did you hear that from that demon king? That does save me the trouble of explaining. Yes, it is an outsiders’ artifact. The witch’s soul is sealed within the looking glass, along with your queen’s missing spirit.”
“Within the mirror? According to the fairy tale, it’s only supposed to absorb sadness.”
“Yes, in the most widely circulated version. But absorbing sadness is merely one side effect. What the Mirror of Oblivion actually does is capture human souls and memories, recording them. It’s triggered when you lock eyes with your reflection.”
Valt was revealing incredibly detailed information about an item from beyond the known world. Perhaps Valt knew so much about it because of his intimacy with another outsiders’ artifact, Eleterria.
“The Mirror of Oblivion has been sealed away along with the Witch of the Forbidden Forest in a cave deep in Magdalsia for a very long time. But it would appear the seal has been broken, and the mirror was taken and sold to the king as an antique. King Hubert gazed into his new looking glass, but the seal within the artifact must still be intact. His extracted soul couldn’t enter it. From there, I imagine it wandered around until it found the body of the witch and possessed it.”
Oscar picked up on a vague sense of bitterness from Valt, though it vanished in an instant, so perhaps it was only his imagination.
“If the mirror is broken, the witch’s true spirit will return, and the king’s will be driven from her body. But outsiders’ artifacts are sturdily crafted, so your queen is the only one who can manage it.”
“What a ridiculous story,” Oscar scoffed. He was having a hard time believing all of this coming from out of nowhere. According to mages, separating a person’s soul from their body was impossible. But outsiders’ artifacts enabled what was magically impossible.
In a voice kept even so as not to give away his doubt over which was the truth, Oscar replied, “If that’s true, why are you telling me this? It sounds like a trap.”
“It is true. I’ve offended Tinasha quite terribly in the past, so I wanted to do something to try and mend her impression of me a little.”
“That’s not going to happen. Aren’t you the one who gave the Mirror of Oblivion to the king of Magdalsia in the first place?”
“Why…would you think that?” Valt questioned stiffly.
Oscar retorted matter-of-factly, “You’re much too knowledgeable about all of this to be merely a messenger. What’s your angle? If you’re trying to lure her out, you’re on a suicide mission.”
“I’m not that reckless. She is quite formidable at present.”
Several hours earlier, Tinasha had attacked Valt’s estate. He shouldn’t want to see her at all, so then how did he stand to benefit? Why had he given the king of Magdalsia the Mirror of Oblivion only to turn around and feed Oscar information and urge him to undo everything?
Belatedly, Valt responded to Oscar’s question. His voice sounded strained. “It’s simple. It was a mistake to use the witch’s body to declare war on Tuldarr. In truth, I only intended for the Mirror of Oblivion to put King Hubert into a coma for a diversion.”
“Yeah, you’ve really botched this one. And now you want her to clean up your mess?”
“I don’t care if Tuldarr and the witch end up clashing. But…I don’t wish for her to remain in that state. You understand what I mean, don’t you?”
“………”
Ever since the Eleterria orb had been stolen, Tinasha had been changing by the day.
She decided everything on her own and implemented her decisions immediately. That had to be difficult for Valt to contend with. Tinasha had to be somewhat aware of this herself, since she fretted that Valt could predict her thoughts.
“Left to her own devices, she’ll take unpredictable actions like destroying my mansion. I’d like to ask you to take the reins, so to speak. And, admittedly, I don’t wish for her to die. You can tell that I bear her no ill will, can’t you?”
“You would have killed us long ago if you wanted to.”
“I’m glad you understand. So consider this a mere confluence of mutual interest. All you have to do is tell her that she needs to break the mirror. No one has to fight a witch. I would hate for Tuldarr Castle and its half of Eleterria to be destroyed in a battle.”
“By witch, you mean Hubert, right?”
“Yes, but magic is in the soul, while half of knowledge resides within the body, and the two are linked. A different soul can still use quite a bit of the body’s magical power. At most, the spells will be clumsy and crude. Now that he has the strength of a witch, he will not hesitate to wield it even more brazenly than she would have. That’s obvious from how Magdalsia mobilized for battle.”
Under normal circumstances, a country as small as Magdalsia would never have attacked Tuldarr. It wouldn’t stand a chance at winning. However, King Hubert must have decided that victory was assured with the witch’s power.
Too much strength could easily lead a person astray, a fact that history had borne out. Generals had brandished devastating military might to carry out massacres, while kings had ordered execution after execution for no reason at all. Forbidden curses were proof enough that a not insignificant number of mages had also fallen prey to such temptations.
And then there were the witches.
Far too mighty, their deeds—feats that should not be humanly possible—became the stuff of legends.
With the capabilities of a witch, the king of Magdalsia wished to trample over the Magic Empire that had been his neighbor for so many years.
“He’s got ambition; I’ll give him that. He’s certainly creating trouble for us,” remarked Oscar.
“Having power makes you want to use it. However, we know its limit. The Mirror of Oblivion is in the castle of Magdalsia. Destroy it, and this will be over,” Valt said, repeating his instructions as if to indicate that the conversation was over.
Oscar still had questions, though. “I heard you have memories of before the timeline changed.”
“That demon king told you that, too? He’s really ruining things for me with how much he meddles.”
“Why do you want Eleterria?” Oscar pressed.
“To change the past, of course.”
“Then wouldn’t just one orb be enough?”
“It will be meaningless without both. Shouldn’t you be hastening to your lady’s side?”
“She…doesn’t want my help,” Oscar admitted, unable to hide his bitterness.
Tinasha’s first war in four centuries and the desire to prevent Valt from predicting her actions had changed her.
But in all likelihood, she hadn’t told Oscar a thing because she didn’t want to drag him and Farsas into the conflict. Oscar had done the same to her once. On that occasion, Tinasha had provided aid secretly to help him break a forbidden curse, even though Tuldarr would have wanted to receive public credit for intervening.
Oscar wondered if his private wish to attempt something similar would be a violation of Tinasha’s choice. He thought of the distance that had formed between them. It was the proper space two rulers ought to maintain. Up until recently, Tinasha was the one bridging it, moving closer to him with an innocent smile and unguarded affection. Those qualities had made Oscar choose her to stand beside him.
And now, she would no longer lean on him, becoming again the sovereign queen who acted for her homeland. It was clear from their previous conversations that she did not require his help.
Valt sounded dismayed. “Isn’t it a little late for this? Don’t slack off just because you earned her heart so easily this time. In every other instance, you only managed to win her over after considerable effort. That she loved you from the start is unique. You need to act prudently.”
“What the hell are you talking about…?”
Valt had to be referring to previous timelines. Oscar had no recollection of doing anything worth such censure, but it also felt like the blame really did lie with him somehow. He pursed his lips.
Valt went on, his voice brimming with conviction. “This is who she really is. But she’s also her true self when she’s with you. She is not your one and only partner, but you are hers. You will always be the one who saves her. And you’re going to let her go?”
“You…certainly sound confident. It’s like you’ve witnessed it all personally.”
“Because I have. Why do you think I can predict both of your actions? I worked for you both once, in the past.”
“What?” Oscar blurted out.
Valt had infiltrated Farsas as a court mage from Yarda, a neighboring country. It wasn’t beyond conception to learn he’d worked directly for Farsas in another timeline. Tinasha was right when she’d said Valt was familiar with them. Apparently, he’d even been close with the two.
“So you’re a spy. I can’t believe I have no memory of you ever existing.”
“Think that if you like, but it isn’t as if I manipulate time at will. Back then, a farmer who lived far away from Farsas had Eleterria. The orbs changed hands many times, and I wasn’t able to follow their trail.”
“But you still remember all the previous timelines?” Oscar demanded.
Valt fell silent. After a few moments, that aura of bitterness seeped out again. “For me, the events happened a very long time ago. To you two, they never existed. However, I am well aware of how often you rescued her in many of those erased histories, and of how deeply she loves you.”
A purehearted, lonely, earnest, and ruthless woman.
What kind of person was Tinasha in another timeline? And was Oscar really her salvation?
Had she loved him regardless?
It was all ludicrous. Without meaning to, Oscar let out a heavy sigh. He hadn’t the slightest notion what parts were true. He was genuinely bewildered. Was this how a person with knowledge of lost histories spoke?
Valt continued placidly. “If you understand, then you need to get going. Now Tuldarr is… She is fulfilling the role, but ordinarily, you would be the one facing a witch, yes?”
“Because…of Akashia,” Oscar muttered. Possessing the royal sword made Oscar the prime candidate for vanquishing a witch.
“Go carry out your mission. Save her,” Valt instructed candidly. Too candidly.
But for some strange reason, it didn’t feel wrong. In fact, the truth of it sank through Oscar like a stone. He clenched one hand into a fist, then released it. Tinasha’s sad smile when they had bid good-bye to each other surfaced in his memory.
Oscar made up his mind, selecting the path that had always been right there for him—the road to a life with her. That decision had long since been made.
He had to be brutally honest with her to bridge the distance between them. It was no longer the Dark Age when she was a lonely queen. She had crossed four hundred years to find him.
“How dare you say she isn’t my one and only. You’ve got some nerve,” Oscar spat.
“It’s true.”
“I don’t care about something I don’t recall existing. She’s the only one for me, and I’ll prove it,” Oscar proclaimed, sheathing Akashia and heading for the door. Before exiting, he turned back to the empty room. “And someday, I’m going to pay you back in full for what you did.”
Valt offered no reply. He only chuckled, sounding both amused and perturbed. Then his faint aura faded from the room entirely.
After watching Oscar leave the room from a distant vantage point, Valt let out a long sigh. Undoing his spell, he sank into a chair.
The fifth witch was not the king of Farsas’s only partner. In many timelines, he never met her and married other women instead.
Still, Valt knew better than anyone that Oscar was the most attached to Tinasha out of all of them. Because of that, he had been given the opportunity to go after her once more.
The army marched on through the night as if possessed, and when the lights of a village came into view, the procession halted. The settlement sat in southwestern Tuldarr, close to the Magdalsian border. The general in command of the vanguard battalion hissed to his troops. “Kill the villagers. Watch out for any mages mixed in. Don’t let a single person escape. Stack up the food in the center of town.”
The soldiers nodded. Despite the vast power difference, none showed any fear over challenging a Great Nation. They were like expressionless dolls.
“Let’s go,” the general ordered, and the soldiers kicked their horses into a gallop.
A woman floating in the sky observed all this with delight. She had curly light-brown hair and amber eyes. Her brilliant beauty contrasted with the cruel smile on her lips. While she called herself Lucia, the soul controlling her body was not hers.
Unable to suppress his glee, the king whispered in her voice, “So this is how Tuldarr falls…”
Magdalsia’s glorious and prosperous neighbor had flourished for many years with its power and expertise, inciting jealousy all the while. The king envied how Tuldarr could thrive so much compared to his own land, where nothing ever changed. So when power fell in his lap, his first desire was to stomp out that irksome thorn to the north. He had whipped all of this together in a short time, because Tuldarr would notice if he delayed. Having the country’s ruler operate under the delusion that the king of Magdalsia was comatose and that a mystery woman had usurped the nation was best.
There was no time like the present. Starting today, he would remake the history of the entire mainland.
As the king surveyed the terrain below through Lucia’s eyes, he realized that he hadn’t heard any screams or weapons clashing.
Immediately after, a mage in the ground battalion contacted him telepathically.
“The village is empty! No one is here!”
“What…?”
Lucia’s beautiful face twisted into a scowl. Then a white light flooded the entire village; the king lifted his arms to cover his face. The light persisted for half a minute, turning the landscape as bright as day. But when it vanished, the king found that his connection to the mage on the ground had been cut and that the troops there had vanished as well.
“How many did we catch?” asked Tinasha. The queen was in her command center.
“A little over a thousand with all three villages combined,” reported Renart, and Tinasha nodded.
When she learned that Magdalsia’s army was on the march, the first thing she did was lay a trap close to the border. Once her sensors notified her that the Magdalsian troops had crossed the border, she evacuated the villagers and set up a spell in their place that would trigger once the enemy troops broke in. The spell was one of Tinasha’s devising and had two primary effects—it would put all living beings in the vicinity to sleep, and then it would forcibly teleport them away after a few seconds. The Magdalsian soldiers had attempted to slaughter defenseless villagers, only to fall into Tuldarr’s ploy.
“What should we do with the soldiers we teleported?” inquired Renart. “At the moment, they are being held within a barrier.”
“Their mind control should wear off by the time they wake up. If they fight back, kill them. I’m hoping to defeat the witch before that happens, though.” Tinasha leaned back in her chair as she observed the map hung in her war tent.
Most of the soldiers in this war were victims, except the instigator of all of it, the witch. Tinasha preferred to release the troops unharmed, but she would kill them if necessary.
Her top priority was the people of Tuldarr, and she couldn’t afford to forget it.
The queen, clad in black mage’s garb as her battle attire, issued her orders with a dispassionate face.
Tuldarr’s last war was the great one fought against Tayiri four centuries ago. Magdalsia had no more experience in battle than Tuldarr. Farsas and other countries situated in the center of the mainland were constantly fighting off enemies, so their forces were battle-hardened and well-trained, but Tuldarr and Magdalsia had enjoyed peace since the end of the Dark Age.
And while that had made them very fortunate and blessed indeed, it also meant they were unreliable in a crisis.
However, Tuldarr had Tinasha.
Even a witch would come to learn what it was like to square off against a country focused on magic. This was what Tinasha had been preparing for this whole time.
Initially, she had intended to go alone and wipe out the witch. But when she thought about the future of her country, she decided to take a different approach.
Oscar’s objections hadn’t swayed Tinasha’s decision. This was her best chance while she was still queen to let the world know what it meant to war with Tuldarr. She would etch Tuldarr’s singular power onto the pages of history so that none would think of challenging it for at least another few hundred years. She also wanted the soldiers and mages of Tuldarr that she would be leaving behind to gain combat experience.
Tinasha chose to sacrifice a minor nation manipulated by a witch for the benefit of her homeland.
“Now that they’ll think twice before setting foot in another village, I suppose it’s time for the next stage of the plan. Please make ready,” Tinasha ordered, getting to her feet. Her advisers stared at her with fear and awe as she strode out of the tent with a sheathed sword.
Once she was outside, she drew the thin rapier. The enchanted blade glimmered a faint purple. It had originally belonged to the Farsas treasure vault, but Oscar told her no one was using it and gave it to her. She would wield it as a weapon that could function both as a blade and as a spell catalyst.
With her naked blade in one hand, Tinasha surveyed her troops. They had made camp on a grassy plain sloping gently south at the exact halfway point between Tuldarr’s capital and the southwestern border.
As commanded by Tinasha, the Tuldarr army in its arc formation numbered close to forty thousand in order to match Magdalsia’s thirty thousand.
It would’ve been dangerous to have fewer troops than the enemy, while too many would lead to others writing the victory off as one achieved by numbers alone. Therefore, this was the safest course. This force was still sizable enough to engage without needing to resort to deceptive tactics anyhow.
“All that’s left is to see how she teleports in.”
There were three main types of magical teleportation: individual teleportation, teleportation portals, and transportation arrays.
When a mage wished to warp away, they would use individual teleportation magic to disappear and then reappear at a destination.
Teleporting other people required opening a portal. The spell to create a portal was a grade of difficulty higher than that for individual teleportation, but it could be used in many ways. However, the farther the distance to the destination, the more magic and spell configuration power it took, and multiple coordinates for the target location were required to make a larger portal.
The final type was a transportation array, a spell seared into the ground as a permanent installation. It allowed non-mages to warp away at any time without the mage who wove the magic. However, such arrays needed regular maintenance and had to be continuously charged with magical power. This meant that locations connected by the spell had to authorize its installation or it would be almost impossible to set up.
In wartime, transportation arrays were employed regularly, as they allowed armies to warp from a fortress or castle to the national border and deploy for battle without consuming a mage’s power.
However, once out on the battlefield, there were no transportation arrays. Mages who possessed other countries’ large-scale teleportation coordinates were scarce, and such information was necessary to make an array. Similarly, almost no one had the required magic to open a massive portal, making it impractical on all fronts.
After considering all this, Tinasha decided that a witch would probably deploy her army using teleportation. The longer the march, the greater the physical toll. It also increased the risk of being waylaid en route.
Teleporting solved those issues and allowed the enemy to sneak into Tuldarr. Tinasha had set her trap assuming the witch would think the same way.
Tinasha expanded the defensive wards of cities that were both close to the capital and near locations that could accommodate an army of thirty thousand. She did this with every settlement except for two. Then she laid out a network of lightly cloaked patrol spells and sprinkled tiny pebbles all around that would deter any mage from wanting to teleport into the terrain.
This ensured that there were only two places an army could appear—the plains to the east or the ruins of the old castle city to the south.
Tinasha believed that there was a 60 percent chance that Magdalsia’s army would teleport in via a portal and an 80 percent chance that said portal would lead to one of those two places.
“If they march in normally, we can use that time to change our formation. But if they teleport—”
Before Tinasha could finish her sentence, the air in the middle of the grassy plains warped.
The source of the disturbance was just beyond where her army was stationed. A buzz and a frisson of tension ran through the troops.
Sweeping her sword to one side, Tinasha teleported to the center of the vanguard.
Cast in the moonlight, the queen floated up into the air and drew all eyes to her.
Before the distorting space, Tinasha turned back to face her forces.
“Soldiers of Tuldarr, do not be afraid. I promise you victory. No matter who our enemy is, we will not allow them to invade our lands. Now show me your strength!”
Her orders were as clear as crystal, seeping into every fighter present. An exuberant roar erupted from the Tuldarr army. Here and there, soldiers offered morale-boosting cheers and praise for the queen.
Tinasha gave a little smile and turned to face the warping in the air. It spread rapidly, tearing a hole in the atmosphere with a high-pitched ringing.
After a moment, a large force appeared on the grassy field.
With the Tuldarr army deployed in a crescent shape, the Magdalsian troops were surrounded on three sides. The invaders surveyed the situation and then froze. Undoubtedly, they had expected to appear from the witch’s portal on the eastern plains. However, it was there that another portal had brought them here.
Immediately, Magdalsia’s soldiers found themselves fenced in. Moreover, the grassland was a gentle slope, and the Tuldarr side was positioned on the higher ground. Clearly, Magdalsia’s forces had warped into a trap. An ordinary army might have fallen into a panic.
The Magdalsian troops were still partially under the witch’s control, so the soldiers overcame their moment of stupefaction quickly and drew their swords.
Innumerable white blades caught the moonlight and sparkled like an ocean.
Tinasha frowned. “So they really are just puppets under her control. I had heard she specialized in psychological magic, but controlling an entire army is certainly no easy feat.”
“What do we do, Your Majesty?”
“We follow the plan,” Tinasha replied coolly.
The enemy soldiers attempted to gallop up the grassy field on horseback. Eyeing them placidly, the queen lifted her sword. On that cue, all the Tuldarr mages fed magic into a spell.
A net of lightning flashed across the meadow, scattering sparks into the night.
Screams mingled with electrical crackles as soldiers and horses toppled onto the ground in succession. The queen beheld the display with a blank expression.
The spell was a large-scale one designed to knock out the troops who had fallen into the trap. Tinasha had chosen this method partly because killing mind-controlled warriors would affect her army’s morale, and also because it was safer to take on stunned opponents. Battles between mages largely entailed setting lots of ploys in advance. If a mage had to have a battle, it was preferable that it proceeded according to a plan. The war with Tayiri four hundred years ago had been much the same—except for the part where a witch showed up.
Rendered immobile, the capable number of Magdalsian troops dwindled swiftly. Relief spread throughout the Tuldarr army as its soldiers watched it happen.
And that was when a powerful rush of magic burst open overhead.
“Wha—?!”
Mages who had been concentrating on the large-scale spell yelped and stood aghast, doubting their eyes.
“What in the world is that?!” someone exclaimed.
Out of the darkness emerged a gigantic red hand, large enough to grab hold of a castle spire. It slammed down toward the Tuldarr troops as if crushing a bug.
Soldiers screamed as the front lines fell apart.
The army was ready to flee the terrifying scene when their queen strode forward and called out in a ringing, far-reaching voice, “It’s an illusion. Do not falter.”
To verify her claim, Tinasha swung her sword, and the red hand vanished without a trace. The night returned to normal.
However, the huge mass of magic in the air only emanated more bloodlust.
Tinasha turned her head to look behind her. “All right, it looks like the star of our show has finally arrived. Renart, please handle the rest.”
“I wish you the utmost luck in battle, Your Majesty,” Renart replied, bowing deeply.
Scornful laughter rained down from the sky. “Will you ever tire of these petty tricks? Do you really think a so-called Queen of Tuldarr can win against a witch?”
“Of course I do. I’ll make sure history remembers this,” Tinasha replied, launching up into the inky sky. Another woman floated there in waiting, barely visible against the ebon darkness.
Moonlight glinted off the woman’s light-brown hair, turning it silver. She wore a belligerent smile. “If you’d only sit there and look pretty, you’d make a lovely doll. I’ll train that insolence out of you, make you my slave, and keep you as a beloved pet.”
“Which of us needs training, I wonder? If you want me, pay with your life,” Tinasha shot back. She wasted no time casting a spell with her left hand. Once launched overhead, the straightforward yet powerful magic manifested.
A fierce wave of power shook the atmosphere, so strong that Tris ducked. While she was still young enough that other mages objected to her taking part in the battle, she refused to back down. Ultimately, she had been permitted to fight under the condition that she keep away from the front lines.
The Tuldarr army’s vanguard was beating a swift retreat. The majority of the Magdalsian soldiers had been neutralized already. Tinasha’s plan called for everyone to fall back once the witch showed herself.
Tris stood at the very rear of Tuldarr’s forces, closest to the castle city. Wind whipped past, howling in her ears, and she peered into the sky. The unmistakable hum of beating wings was growing louder. When she scanned for the source, she spied a great black shadow approaching.
“What is that…?” Hastily, Tris began drawing a spell, but the spirit next to her stopped her.
“Wait. That’s Nark.”
“What? Do you know that thing?” Tris asked, frowning at the unfamiliar name. Still, she dismissed her magic, allowing the dragon to glide in close and land in front of her. A man jumped off its gigantic back.
Pamyra came running from her position in the army, drawn by this latest arrival. When the man caught sight of her, he asked, “Is Tinasha here?”
“Yes, but she’s battling the witch…”
“Battling already, huh? Where?”
“In the sky above the front line.”
“Why do they always love to go flying? I guess I can’t talk to her, then,” said Oscar.
“You can,” corrected Eir, who was nearby.
Oscar threw him a look of surprise. “I see. Using a spirit…? I’d appreciate that, but it might distract her from the fight.”
“It’s probably fine. She issued orders to the army while fighting a witch four hundred years ago,” Eir informed him.
After a sigh, Oscar responded, “She really doesn’t know how to be ordinary, does she? All right then, let me talk to her.” Eir nodded and opened up a spell around Oscar. The girl next to him was so nervous that her knees were knocking together.
Overhead, a ray of red light shot through the heavens.
What made witches so terrifying wasn’t their great power—it was the spells and experience they had honed over their long lives. At least that was how Tinasha saw it. The most frightening thing of all was the unknown.
However, the woman before her was different. She poured tremendous magic into the simplest constructs.
Of course, the illusions and psychological contamination magic she employed between regular attack spells were very high level, but they were nothing that Tinasha couldn’t fend off, prepared as she was to take on a witch.
If this is all she’s got, I can kill her.
This one was nowhere near the caliber of either the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned, Leonora, or the Witch of Silence, Lavinia.
Dodging a torrent of light that came racing her way, Tinasha taunted, “Is that all you’ve got? Once you’re out of steam, I’ll kill you.”
“Damn you,” snarled the witch, an ugly look twisting her fine features.
Tinasha was very well acquainted with that look—the hatred and loathing in a would-be assassin’s eyes upon realizing they couldn’t defeat the queen. She had walked a long road paved with the blood of such people.
She felt no anguish about it, then or now. The weak perished on the battlefield. That was how it was.
However, Tinasha did have something she wanted to know. Fixing her dark eyes right on the other woman, she asked, “Do you know where Senn went?”
She recalled what he’d said to her when she was a young girl.
“If you ever get tired of it all, you should go visit her. She’s a troublemaker, but…I know she’d make a good friend for you.”
Senn’s lover, the one he said was free-spirited, capricious, and affectionate.
It was hard to link that description with the person Tinasha was battling. However, this woman had come to see Senn every time he manifested, which meant she had to be a long-lived witch.
And that suggested she could be responsible for Senn’s disappearance.
Tinasha kept herself alert as she awaited a reply, on guard all the while.
Yet the woman only gave her a suspicious frown. “Senn? What’s that?”
“My spirit. You are the Witch of the Forbidden Forest, aren’t you?”
That question prompted an unnatural pause. Before Tinasha could repeat her inquiry, Lucia’s red lips curled. “Yes. I’m a witch.”
She didn’t offer her true name or her witch title. Lavinia had been that way as well.
Tinasha pressed on. “Senn knew you, so you captured him to prevent him from telling me who you really are, didn’t you? What have you done with Senn?”
The woman gave an overly affected shrug. “Who knows?” Her disdainful response caused Tinasha to pause.
It was obvious that Lucia didn’t intend to give an honest reply, and hounding her anyway would only put Tinasha at a disadvantage. She was in the middle of a battle, and her opponent commanded an enemy army. It was better to prioritize her country, not her personal feelings.
Thus Tinasha declared, “Then I need nothing more from you. You will die here.”
In all honesty, it would have been infinitely better had things never reached this point. Senn was like family to Tinasha, and the witch was undoubtedly an important person in his life, just like how the younger Tinasha had valued the Oscar who rescued her.
It broke Tinasha’s heart to eliminate someone like that while Senn was unaware. Perhaps if she and Lucrezia had met centuries ago, things wouldn’t have turned out like this.
There was little point in waxing sentimental about preferring not to kill the witch, however.
Tinasha sucked in a sharp breath. Her vision grew crisp and clear.
The other woman attempted to cast a spell in the dark sky, but it was only a simple attack spell. She would be crushed by a greater power, and this would be the end.
“Wane, o ring. Let your circulation break off, and your fingertips corrode away. Your remaining thoughts shall be eternal and bring you awareness from beyond.”
Suppressing her emotions, the queen cast a spell with her right hand, intoning the words with a dispassionate tone.
“Tinasha.”
“Eek!” she yelped, her half-formed magic dispersing. “Wh-what do you want, Oscar?!”
Why had he interrupted her out of the blue, and why did she hear his voice when he wasn’t here?
Fortunately, Tinasha snapped out of her shock quickly and scrambled to dispatch the spheres of light flying her way.
Infusing her voice with magic, Tinasha went on, “Why are you…? Why are you using Eir to speak to me? Why are you here?”
“Just listen to me. That witch isn’t who you think. It’s the king of Magdalsia.”
“What?”
“The real witch’s soul is locked inside the Mirror of Oblivion, and so is that mystical spirit of yours. You need to go to Magdalsia, find the mirror, and destroy it. That will return the witch to normal.”
“What…? Where is all this coming from?” Tinasha responded. This was so abrupt that she found it hard to believe. However, Oscar had proved before that he bore a keen intuition for falsehoods. He would never offer unverified information at such a critical juncture.
Once more, Tinasha sized up the enemy floating across from her in the sky.
Why were the spells the witch used so simple? Why had she appeared after the king fell into a coma? Why was her note written in the king’s handwriting? Why was she so desperate to seize authority over the country? It all made sense if the king of Magdalsia was in control of the witch’s body.
Instead of the spell she’d been preparing when Oscar contacted her, Tinasha cast a simple one with no incantation. As she released it as a feint, she asked coldly, “Who told you all of this?”
“Valt.”
“Whaaaaaaat?!”
“I know what you’re thinking. Just go to Magdalsia and find that mirror. If the spirit really is inside it, you can hear everything from him and decide whether or not to break the mirror then. If it doesn’t look like you can find it, just teleport out of there immediately.”
“………”
Find Senn and learn the truth—she did want to do that if possible. Unfortunately, the situation didn’t allow for it.
“I’m in the middle of a battle… I can’t just leave,” Tinasha pointed out.
“I’ll take over.”
“Excuse me? This is Tuldarr’s war. You can’t just join in; this has nothing to do with you! It’s out of the question. I appreciate the information, but you need to return to Farsas.”
“No.”
“I’m going to get very mad, you know,” Tinasha warned. If Oscar was speaking through Eir, that meant he was here on the battlefield. Had he even considered his position before rushing in? Oscar could be as stubborn as he liked in their private lives as Tinasha’s husband, but being a king meant drawing some firm lines. Quelling her desire to yell at him, Tinasha snapped, “I am not your wife. I am the Queen of Tuldarr, and I won’t permit you to interfere.”
“The battle is mostly won already, isn’t it? All that’s left is fighting the witch and cleaning everything up. I’m only proposing that I help bring things to an end in a way you’ll agree with.”
“I can’t twist the situation and prioritize what I ‘agree with.’”
That would be tantamount to letting her personal desire to find Senn and learn the truth take over. Tinasha would only indulge in that after settling things here. As the ruler of Tuldarr, she controlled this conflict and refused to relinquish that.
No one could replace Tinasha. Four centuries ago, she had operated alone. While her spirits were like family, they did not offer opinions to their queen and master. They were demons in human territory, after all. Likewise, Tinasha’s mortal supporters obeyed their queen’s orders to the letter. Tuldarr leaned on its ruler as a pillar, and Tinasha had lived nineteen years in that system, never straying from it.
“A ruler is the cog in the machine that keeps the country running smoothly. That machine must not be weakened by any personal feelings.”
Oscar had once called Tinasha spoiled for not understanding how to rely on other people, and that may have been true. Yes, she trusted him. She knew that he would always be there to help if he was able.
However, Tinasha rejected that assistance. This was her duty, and she couldn’t share it with anyone else. She was the only one left who knew just how stifling the Dark Age had been.
While shooting down the witch’s attacks, Tinasha closed her eyes. The young queen in her memory was telling her to refuse.
Doubt led to weakness. There could be no faltering here. Tinasha had to harden herself and be ruthless.
“Even what’s most important—can be forgotten.”
Tinasha crossed her arms, and red blades shot out from them, arcing through the air toward the witch. Lucia released luminous bolts to intercept them, but the red blades wove around the counterattack deftly and closed in.
“You little brat!” the witch spat, and she teleported away. She wasn’t swift enough to escape completely, though. One of Tinasha’s blades cut deep into her arm, reaching down to the bone. The sight of the deep gash caused Tinasha’s face to scrunch up.
If the soul inside her isn’t really the witch…
Who was trying to kill her now? Who was the enemy and who wasn’t?
Doubts snuck in, but Tinasha exhaled them, turning her mind away from those ideas.
“I understand what you’re saying. But we’re in a different time period now. You don’t have to bear every burden all alone. Better to lean on me than regret it later.”
She had to shut down her mind.
“And I’ll share those burdens with you for the rest of our lives.”
Tinasha bit her lip.
She had never spurned solitude. It was her cradle, there with her from her earliest memories—a membrane that covered her always. It was natural to her, and she felt nothing about it.
But the only time she had cried from loneliness and let out all the feelings she couldn’t hold in any longer, there had been a man who promised her it would all get better.
And so, she had traveled four centuries to reach him.
So why did she want to cry again now?
“The mirror is an outsiders’ artifact. You are the only one who can break it. You have to go.”
Tinasha didn’t answer, instead casting spell after spell dispiritedly.
“Trust me. I’ll figure this out for you.”
Four hundred years ago wasn’t such a long time for Tinasha. She had been asleep for it all, so it felt no longer than a year.
Every day since waking had been fun. She wasn’t alone, and she got to be happy. He really had kept his promise.
“But I…”
Tinasha’s eyes grew hot, and she closed them. No matter how happy her days were, she was the one outlier from another era who didn’t belong.
She couldn’t forget that, nor could she change it. When called, she had to rise from her warm place and do what was necessary. She had to choose a lifestyle befitting her position.
It should have been simple. It was all she knew.
Tears spilled from between Tinasha’s long black eyelashes. She didn’t know why she was crying, but it seemed to her that everything she’d carried with her this whole time was melting away bit by bit and turning into sobs.
Tinasha sucked in a hot breath. “No matter how crude her spells are, normal people have no way of resisting psychological magic.”
“I’m only going to be buying time, so I’ll manage somehow. I just need you to agree to it.”
With a leap, Tinasha soared through the air. Razors came speeding for her, and she deployed an array of glowing spheres to block each one.
What is the real witch like?
She knew that these objects of the world’s fear and abhorrence were, in fact, just human beings.
Yet could Tinasha allow herself to waver and to rely on him? Would it not be equivalent to weighing her country and a single man against everything else? The gamble was far too unbalanced. It was much safer to kill the witch here and search for the mirror afterward.
Tinasha used her sword to hurl a spell and watched the woman offset it with one of her own, a look of loathing on her face.
Pale moonlight flooded the grassy plains. With one eye on the beautiful vista, Tinasha thought about her missing spirit.
Why was he sealed in the mirror with the witch? What did the witch mean to him?
Tinasha had no answer at present.
Still, anyone could be someone else’s salvation, just as one man had saved her.
As long as they honored that relationship.
“Lean on me. I want to repay you for what you did during the Druza situation.”
His voice sank deep into her. She looked out over the rolling landscape that stretched far into the distance. Out here, there was no division between one time period and the next.
“What if…you hold out until I break the mirror and the real witch returns to her body and tries to kill you? What would you do then?”
“I would kill her with Akashia. That’s its purpose.”
“……”
Just as Tuldarr was strong enough to handle forbidden curses, the Akashia swordsman was a match for mages. And witches were no exception to that. They were Oscar’s natural enemies.
Similarly, Tinasha believed him the only one capable of defeating her.
There could be no finer substitute for her.
Tinasha wiped her tears.
He had given her an option she would not have normally had, and with it, she would make a new decision.
Words infused with power held the night spellbound.
“I command all spirits who hear my voice. I give you two orders. One is to avoid death. The other is to treat the Akashia swordsman as your temporary master and aid him. Reply to me that you understand.”
After a beat, eleven spirits voiced their acceptance of her orders.
Nodding, Tinasha sheathed her sword and eyed the ground below. The Tuldarr army had withdrawn, leaving only the spirits and a man gazing up at her.
He had eyes bluer than the evening sky.
Her one and only.
Oscar’s hand was outstretched to Tinasha with that same warmth that always gave her strength.
The witch hurled a magic attack aimed for Tinasha, who negated it with a simple wave of her hand. Then she took a breath and teleported away.
When she reappeared, she was standing next to another ruler.
Oscar glanced down at Tinasha and smiled. With his off hand, he wiped away the tears on her cheeks. “Crybaby.”
“Shut up.”
“Are you running from me, little girl?” the witch called from above. Both Tinasha and Oscar looked up at her.
Evidently recognizing the man next to Tinasha, the witch blanched. “The king of Farsas… The bearer of Akashia! Did you call him here because you knew you couldn’t defeat me?”
“No, but you’re close,” replied Tinasha.
The witch snorted and descended toward the ground. She eyed Oscar judgmentally as she reached a level no higher than his head. “Stripling, are you so besotted with this woman that you’re willing to interfere in others’ business? She’s too scrawny to whet my appetite, but I’ll train her until that body’s got more worth showing.”
The lascivious leer on the witch’s beautiful features made Oscar and Tinasha exchange a glance. The latter whispered, “How crass…”
“That’s how men’s minds work. And he’s a pervert,” replied the former.
“What are you mumbling about? Would you like to learn just how powerful a witch is?”
Hubert, king of Magdalsia, lifted the witch’s arms high. Acquiring this body had also given him access to all the ways it could use its power. He could make whatever he wanted into reality. And once he realized the extent of his new strength…humans seemed so very weak and insignificant.
Nothing was beyond him. He could mold the world to be as he wished. People often dubbed the current era the Age of Witches. Were that true, then why didn’t the witches take center stage if they possessed this much power? They should’ve done whatever they pleased. If they had the capability, why not dominate?
“Watch, because I’m going to gobble you up,” Hubert declared with a laugh.
Then the earsplitting din of thousands of wings flapping descended over the plain. A swarm of insects whirled into a vortex with Oscar and Tinasha at the eye.
While Oscar boggled at the sight, Tinasha took hold of his left hand. “Listen to me. Psychological magic takes root by manipulating the senses. It uses sight, sound, smell, and touch to hijack your sense of reality and burrow into your psyche.”
Her hand was small and warm. Despite the buzzing cacophony, her voice was clear.
“Don’t let your senses drift too far away. They will be your lifeline and your weapon. Trust your intuition so you can identify the truth. You are stronger than a witch.”
“Got it,” Oscar said, and as he did, the raging horde of insects vanished soundlessly. It had all been a hallucination.
While Oscar blinked in mild surprise, Tinasha gave him a fond smile. “I won’t be liable if you get yourself killed.”
“We’re not even married yet. I can’t die now. I’d have too many regrets.”
“Well, it sounds like you’re feeling ready. I’m glad. In that case, get going. Please help me.”
“Of course. Your wish is my command.”
Tinasha gave his hand one last squeeze. Then she released him and leaped into the sky. Swift as a teleport, she shot up to Hubert and passed right by him. “He’ll be your opponent now. I’ll see you again later.”
“You little…”
Hubert whirled to fling a spell at her, but the queen was already gone. Hubert faced Oscar, grinding his teeth in frustration over his lovely prey having escaped. “It’s no fun playing with a man. Well, no matter. I’ll make sure to leave your head intact so I can show that woman how insolent you are.”
“Big talk from someone on borrowed power. Your facade has already cracked wide open.”
“………”
“Good thing you invaded her country. If it were mine, I would have slaughtered all your toy soldiers without any mercy at all.”
Hubert’s face twisted; his false witch persona had crumbled. The witch’s creamy pale skin turned an ugly dark red. Her lips, which should’ve been curved in an alluring smile, spasmed.
“Insolent little wretch… Let’s see if you can still say that when you’re ripped into a thousand pieces.”
Beneath the azure moon, a dragon circled the sky. As its huge black shadow skimmed over the plains below, the two kings faced each other.
Magdalsia was an agricultural nation, and most of its citizens were farmers. Almost none of the houses had their lights on this late.
The only light came from windows in the castle walls. As Tinasha surveyed Magdalsia Castle from high in the air, she began a slow descent.
The magical probes she had sent out didn’t detect anything. The mirror was probably cloaked. If it were in the castle, it would be in the treasure vault or the king’s personal chambers. Catching someone and making them show her the way was likely better than searching blindly.
Tinasha selected a window in the farthest back room she could find and opened it with magic. The furnishings in the dark chamber were all lavish but lacked any evidence of use. She exited into a hallway lit by a flickering candelabra and broke into a run. A guard happened to be patrolling at the opposite end of the corridor.
Naturally, the watchman was stunned to see Tinasha, but she teleported to him before he could cry out. His body went rigid as the flat of her sword pressed against his throat. “Show me to the king’s rooms. I’ve muted your voice, so you won’t be able to call for help. You know what will happen if you resist, don’t you?”
The man could only gasp for air like a fish as this unbelievably beautiful woman threatened him with truly unsettling words. He was powerless to reply, only panting and exhaling.
Tinasha gave him a beatific smile. “Now that you understand, run. I’m in a hurry.”
She waved a hand, and a life-size statue in the hallway broke into pieces.
The soldier rushed to nod and repeatedly bow before setting off at a trot for the king’s rooms. Tinasha effortlessly knocked out any guards and ladies-in-waiting they passed along the way. When they finally reached the king’s chambers, she knocked out that guard as well. Drawing her sword, she entered the chamber.
At first glance, it was utterly ordinary. The space was more furnished than Oscar’s chambers, but that was due to the difference in personalities, not wealth. Tinasha swept her gaze around the area before venturing in deeper.
In the center of the bedroom sat a bed with a silk canopy. She walked right up to it and tore through the curtains with her sword. On the bed lay King Hubert’s soulless body, sustained by magic. Close inspection revealed that his chest was rising and falling.
“Ugh. What a conceited old fool,” Tinasha muttered. While she felt like lashing out, she didn’t have time for that. She began the search for the mirror; the only sound in the chamber the incapacitated man’s breathing.
The door opened, and Tinasha quickly looked over her shoulder to find Queen Gemma. Gasping, Tinasha began a spell instinctively but soon stopped herself. The queen was rooted to the floor, staring at the intruder with astonishment, and the light of reason in her eyes indicated that she was herself and not a controlled puppet.
As Gemma stood frozen, Tinasha faced her properly. “Do you know why I’m here?”
“I-I’m so sorry… The king…won’t listen to me…”
“I understand. I’m going to bring him back, but I need you to tell me where the mirror is. Do you know?”
Judging by the queen’s behavior, Hubert had probably informed her of everything after he’d chased Tinasha out under the guise of Lucia. Gemma was undoubtedly feeling extremely confused over everything. Her husband had taken over a witch’s body and mobilized the troops to attack the Great Nation next door. No wonder Queen Gemma looked like an exhausted shell of herself. Tinasha hadn’t known King Hubert prior to all of this, but Legis had described him as a normal sort of ruler. He would go down in history as a prime example of how too much power could change someone all too easily.
Gemma hesitated to answer, but she could likely sense Tinasha’s cutthroat determination. As her eyes quivered with fear, she pointed to the back of the chamber. “I-in that room…”
There was indeed a small door there, which Tinasha had dismissed as an entrance to a closet or the like. Nodding to the queen, Tinasha headed for it and broke the lock with magic. Sending some magic lights into the dark room, Tinasha stepped in and immediately discovered a stone pedestal draped with scarlet cashmere.
Atop the stand rested an ancient oval mirror that showed a dull reflection of the magic lights in the air. Tinasha gazed at it with trepidation.
An outsiders’ artifact, a thing that runs counter to all laws.
Knowing what she did now about these items, this looking glass seemed dreadfully unfathomable and terrifying.
Still, she couldn’t falter now. She drew a deep breath.
“Ah…”
Gemma breathed from behind Tinasha, voice trembling. Tinasha was about to warn the other queen to stand back for fear of danger when a burning heat seared her left flank. Tinasha was confused for a second before a sharp pain kicked in.
“Aaaahh!”
Reflexively, she doubled over. Pressing a hand to her side, she discovered a slender dagger, the sort concealed for self-defense, embedded deep in her torso. Gemma had stabbed Tinasha from behind, and she stared at the Queen of Tuldarr with eyes full of terror. Trembling, she managed to say, “If you release the witch…the king will…”
But that was all she got out before fleeing.
Tinasha couldn’t do a thing to stop Gemma. Her body was swiftly growing cold, and she collapsed to her knees in a puddle of blood.
The Tuldarr mages, stationed some distance away, stared in horror at the tornado that had abruptly formed on the grassy plain. Only a few knew that the king of Farsas stood before it.
The wielder of the royal sword, who was battling the witch in place of his fiancée, didn’t seem fazed at all as he watched the oncoming tornado.
“That one’s not a hallucination,” Oscar remarked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” agreed Eir, who was next to him. The spirit sounded just as emotionless and nonchalant as Oscar. Their conversation made it hard to believe they were up against a witch.
Giving Akashia a light swing, Oscar asked, “Can you get rid of it?”
“Hmm. Three or four of us should be able to. Give the order.”
“I don’t know everyone’s names, though. All right then, Mila, how about you pick the team for me?”
Mila wasn’t physically present, but her voice sounded in the air as she gave compliance. A few seconds later, the tornado dispersed.
Nark flew back over. The dragon had been keeping a safe distance from the tornado.
Across the field, now utterly still without so much as a breeze, Hubert’s eyes glinted with rage. “Queen’s spirits! How dare you insolent little monsters intervene! Show yourselves!”
“He seems pretty mad. You guys should retreat for now,” Oscar said in a blasé tone, and the spirits obeyed. Only Eir remained. Because Oscar was protected by an anti-magic barrier, almost all direct spells bounced off him. But he was still susceptible to psychological magic and the aftereffects of anything conjured. By this point, he had endured several illusions, all of which had been defeated by his unusually acute intuition.
“The hardest part is staying alive without killing him,” Oscar muttered as he held Akashia at the ready. When he glanced down at his beloved sword, he frowned to find that its hilt had become a white snake. The serpent raised its head to strike, but Oscar just gave it a careless shake. When he looked back at Hubert, he found three burning spheres heading for him.
Oscar leaped forward to evade the flames that singed the air as they sped past and blocked his escape. He thrust out with the sword, its hilt still a snake.
“Don’t you realize how many years I’ve had this?”
The sword destroyed the first fire sphere. Oscar took a step back and broke the other coming from the left as well. For the third, Oscar stabbed the length of Akashia into the flames to pierce and shatter the spell’s core.
Even if the entire sword looked like a snake, Oscar still knew the length, width, and weight of it.
But after dispatching the attacks with almost disappointing swiftness, Oscar felt his vision go dark, and he stopped where he was. The moonlight and the distant lights all died, leaving the plain in total darkness. Oscar cursed himself for having fallen into his enemy’s trap.
Then he reasoned, “Well, it’s kind of a fun challenge now that it’s dark.”
Closing his eyes for a moment, he recalled what Tinasha had told him—to not let his senses get too distant. They were his lifeline and his weapon.
Mocking laughter filled the darkness. “Do you enjoy the little world I’ve created?”
After heaving a disgusted sigh, Oscar readied Akashia—now back to normal—and took a step forward. “It’s pitch-black. But maybe it actually isn’t? Eir, are you there?”
Although the spirit had been beside Oscar moments earlier, there was no reply.
Oscar gave a light tap to the ground in front of him. It seemed solid. Then he sensed something and dodged a step to the left. Something sharp whizzed by.
He scratched his head with his off hand. “I just need to focus on not dying. That’ll be easy enough.”
“Easy? Have you lost your mind and deluded yourself into believing you can win?”
“I haven’t, so don’t worry about it,” Oscar retorted.
Taking it to be a bluff, Hubert let out a delighted laugh. “Allow me to show you the most traumatic memory of your youth.”
At the edge of the darkness, a light flared to life as though someone had lit a lantern. Oscar frowned, squinting at the sight. Then he slowly moved toward it.
In the light, a woman lay facedown in a pool of blood that oozed out from her onto the floor. Oscar approached his mother’s corpse and stared down at it. He didn’t know what expression his mother had worn when she’d died; he hadn’t seen it.
If he turned her over, he would learn. Oscar snorted at the deluded notion. This hallucination came from his own memories. It couldn’t include something he didn’t remember.
There was nothing to think about.
Oscar sharpened his vision to a fine point, then honed it even further. Amid the darkness, the faintest outlines of interlocking spells revealed themselves.
He took another step in, past his mother’s body, and swept Akashia through an empty spot in the air.
“Preposterous!” came an astonished shout. With a tinkling of shattering glass, the darkness ruptured.
The plains returned. Oscar found that Hubert was right in front of him, but high enough above to be out of Akashia’s reach.
“You may have called up a traumatic memory, but it’s part of the past now. Showing it to me means nothing, although I guess I do feel a bit disgusted. Once you’re back in your original body, I’m going to kill you.”
Hubert glanced down at the witch’s belly, where the tip of Akashia had grazed the skin. The moment Oscar had readied his blade, Hubert had fled instinctively, yet the cut had been too quick to evade completely.
Hubert’s arms were trembling. “Why, you little…horrid brat…”
“Go on, go on,” Oscar teased as he checked his off hand to ensure the ring Tinasha had given him was there.
Killing the witch wouldn’t be too difficult. However, that wasn’t Oscar’s intention, so he mulled over other possible actions as he looked to the sky.
The smell of her own blood filled her nostrils.
“Ugh…”
Tinasha held her breath and yanked the dagger from her side. Suppressing a groan, she cast anesthetic and healing spells on herself.
While Gemma had probably done it without realizing, she’d twisted the dagger as she thrust, causing an unexpected amount of hemorrhaging. Tinasha’s magic couldn’t do anything about the blood loss, but she had to carry on regardless.
Keeping a hand pressed to the freshly closed wound, Tinasha stood and approached the Mirror of Oblivion. She picked it up, careful not to peer into the artifact.
“Judging by how that queen reacted, this must be the real thing…”
All that remained was to take it or destroy it right here. Tinasha hoped to verify something first, though.
While channeling some of her magic through the looking glass, she asked, “Senn, can you hear me?”
The inside of the mirror felt like a bottomless pit. Tinasha’s magic kept sinking deeper and deeper with no end. That highly unusual sensation proved that the mirror was certainly no ordinary tool.
Valt had said to destroy it, but was that the right thing to do? Even if he wasn’t lying to Oscar, Valt could be wrong.
It wouldn’t do for Tinasha to delay; she had left the witch to Oscar and had to decide quickly.
Then her sunken magic reacted to something.
“Senn!” she cried, joy coloring her voice.
He really was inside it. The reaction was very weak, suggesting he was quite distant.
The mirror was a cage holding her spirit captive. Tinasha tried to apply pressure to the mirror’s exterior to see if it could be destroyed. But it didn’t yield, even when she increased the force. The artifact was abnormally sturdy. She had no choice but to withdraw her magic.
“This is going to be tough…”
Tinasha wavered for only one moment over what to do next.
She cast a barrier around the vicinity before pouring her power and consciousness into the mirror.
After closing her eyes, Tinasha expanded her magic to connect her own darkness to the looking glass’s depths. If this artifact was capable of capturing parts of the human psyche, then it had to be possible to enter it.
Careful not to detach her mind from her body, she spread her consciousness out further as she lowered a thread into the bottomless gloom—a thread that was her very soul.
No sooner did she make the attempt than her magic bumped up against a ward inside the mirror. The spell configuration, different from the one placed on the looking glass itself, forbade outside entry. The spell was so exquisitely crafted that Tinasha almost began to admire it.
“Can I break it? I suppose I have to.”
Tinasha explored the configuration, which resembled a fine mesh net. Conceptual entities like high-ranking demons could probably slip through it easily, explaining how Senn had gotten by.
All that Tinasha, a human, could do was hurriedly search for the spell’s cores.
There were twelve of them arranged in a circle. After identifying the cores, she focused her energy on them and exhaled all the breath in her body.
Then she took a deep breath and held it.
“Disperse.”
A short word was all it took to break the foundation of the spell configuration to pieces.
Then Tinasha’s consciousness descended into the darkness alone, a darkness that was very long and seemingly unending.
But it was only a few moments before she reached the bottom, landing in a place that was utter darkness. A familiar voice called out, “My queen!”
“Senn! Oh, I’m so glad.” Tinasha let out a sigh of sheer relief, but she couldn’t lose focus here. Tersely, she demanded, “Tell me what’s going on. Outside, Magdalsia is attacking Tuldarr, and the Witch of the Forbidden Forest seems to be behind it. She’s battling Oscar now.”
“The Witch of the Forbidden Forest? But she’s right here.”
“Ah, so the real one really is in the mirror. King Hubert of Magdalsia is in control of her body at the moment,” Tinasha informed him.
Although Senn was only a presence she could sense, she could feel him scowling. “He’s the one who used the mirror. It must have separated his soul from his body, but then his soul bounced off the barrier and went into Lucrezia’s instead.”
“Lucrezia?”
“The Witch of the Forbidden Forest.”
That must have been her real name. Tinasha peered into the darkness. “Is she here now? How did she end up here?”
“She’s asleep. Judging from the barrier’s spell configuration, she likely put it up herself. She locked the mirror away with herself inside it. I sensed her when the seal came undone and went to check on her. When I did, I slipped through the barrier and got myself trapped inside the looking glass. Sorry for disappearing,” Senn explained.
“Travis did say that these artifacts don’t get along too well with high-ranking demons,” Tinasha remarked.
Senn fell silent at his lady’s mention of the demon king. Undoubtedly, he wore a look of disgust.
Now the problem lay with the witch Lucrezia. Was it right for Tinasha to destroy the mirror with the witch sleeping inside it?
While Tinasha waffled over what to do, Senn said, “She’s right over there. If you can’t see her, I’ll let you look through my eyes.”
At that statement, the darkness lifted. While Tinasha’s surroundings didn’t grow brighter, she could see around her. Senn was standing nearby, and the many other entities she detected had to be souls absorbed by the mirror, already partially destroyed. Farther beyond was a gigantic pillar that caught Tinasha’s attention.
It was about as thick around as a dozen adults holding hands in a ring. It stretched so high that the top of it wasn’t visible, while its base plunged through a hole in the darkness down into the depths.
The pillar itself emitted a faint white glow. Inside it floated a girl hugging her knees to her chest with her eyes closed.
“Is that…the witch?”
Her light-brown curly hair and beautiful face were reminiscent of Lucia’s, but their ages were disparate. The sleeping girl in a pale-green dress couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen.
As she was locked inside a translucent pillar, she clearly wasn’t an ordinary human. Tinasha felt a twinge of uneasiness to behold her.
Senn nodded. “When her soul separated from her body, it returned to the shape closest to her true essence. That pillar isn’t native to the artifact. It’s here to protect her.”
“To protect her?” Tinasha repeated quietly, approaching the column cautiously. She craned her head up and tilted it down to observe how it stretched endlessly in both directions. A hole surrounded the edges of the pillar. She couldn’t tell how far she would drop if she fell into it. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
Tinasha peered into the abyss and was assailed by an abrupt sense of familiarity. “Is that…? Does that lead to the root of all negativity?”
During Cezar’s attack on Farsas, a giant snake had emerged from a sea of negativity located outside their plane of existence. The hole that the snake’s tail had been connected to and the opening around the pillar were very similar. Tinasha craned her neck upward, staring at where the end of the pillar faded out of sight.
“Is the top on a different plane of existence? Does the pillar go through multiple realms?”
Inspecting the surroundings did seem to reveal that once the mirror absorbed a human’s soul, that soul gradually lost its shape. Remnants of such eroded souls had accumulated all over. It was the natural result when one considered how closely bound the human soul and physical body were.
The witch had endured because of her strong column that passed through several planes.
“It’s like she drove a wedge into the world and fastened herself to it. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tinasha marveled. While it had been done for self-preservation, creating such a thing within an outsiders’ artifact was an extraordinary feat. Coupled with the Witch of the Water and her unerring fortunes, it was no wonder these long-lived women were considered frightful witches. Their power went far beyond the realm of standard mages.
Tinasha stepped to the very edge of the abyss and gazed up at Lucrezia. “But since this pillar is here…”
After discovering that the mirror was too sturdy to break, Tinasha had given up hope of resolving things that way. However, this pillar existed within a hole that extended beyond the mirror’s boundaries. When she considered that, Tinasha felt that destroying the artifact was possible.
“I’ll go back outside and try to break the mirror. She should be fine because of this pillar, but can you protect yourself, Senn?” Tinasha asked.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll also protect the remnants of the other human souls as best I can,” he replied.
“Thank you.” Tinasha smiled faintly, aware that he’d volunteered for that task because he knew his master very well.
Even if he did manage to protect the trapped souls from the aftermath of the mirror’s destruction and released them, their bodies were long gone. Like any other souls, the freed ones would dissolve slowly into the world.
Tinasha thought that better than being trapped in the looking glass like a specimen, however. Senn must have discerned that his master would feel that way.
The queen smiled at him. “She’s the one you said would understand me, right?”
“Yes…although she really is a troublemaker.”
“Once we’ve all made it out of here, introduce her to me,” Tinasha replied. She turned to set about her task but caught sight of something. Above, the girl within the pillar had opened her eyes.
Her face bore no expression, yet she stared at Tinasha with eyes of glittering gold.
“Ah…”
Instinctively, Tinasha took a step back. The girl reached out both arms to her. Her face emerged from the pillar as if she were rising from water. Red lips parted as a voice made all of the darkness tremble.
“I wish for the rejection of any outsiders watching. I wish for the refutation of any interference. I shall bestow a fitting transformation upon the one who can accomplish that.”
The pressure was crushing.
Tinasha’s very soul shook, like she was rupturing into pieces.
The voice seemed to come from the holes above and below the column. It could not have been a human sound.
If this girl was a witch, she was far too different from anyone else. This went beyond strength—she was simply unfathomable.
While Tinasha was still too stunned to speak, the girl lowered her eyelids. When she opened her eyes again, they were still locked on Tinasha.
There was emotion in that gaze now, where there hadn’t been before. It seemed closest to curiosity. The girl tilted her head inquisitively. “Why are you here? Did you break the barrier to come?”
“Yes…I did. I wanted Senn to tell me what was going on,” Tinasha replied.
At that, the girl looked to the spirit. Her amber eyes narrowed skeptically before she returned her gaze to Tinasha without saying anything to him. “Which means you’re the Queen of Tuldarr. You have so much magic that it really surprised me. I thought you were a new witch.”
“I’m just as surprised. What is that pillar that’s passing through planes of existence?”
“This? It’s connected to the world itself, making it ironclad as far as conceptual things go. All it can do is protect me, and I can’t use my own will to activate it. It’s strong, but not that easy to use.”
“How is such a thing even possible? I can’t figure it out at all. And what did you mean by what you said before? About wishing to reject outsiders watching.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?” The girl blinked, her tone so unconcerned that it was hard to believe she was lying.
Thinking back on it, Tinasha did sense that the booming call sounded more like something rising from the holes than like any sound this girl could have produced. If anything, she was probably just a mouthpiece.
Tinasha muttered, “So that means it came from another realm, and if I mess up, then the fabric of the world itself…”
“So? What do you think you’re doing breaking that barrier I worked so hard to put up?” demanded Lucrezia, bringing Tinasha back to herself.
Her train of thought had derailed, and she got herself back on track. “I want to destroy this mirror. You’re the Witch of the Forbidden Forest, aren’t you?”
“I am. My name’s Lucrezia, but I suppose you wouldn’t call me that anyway.”
“I will,” replied Tinasha, and the girl in the pillar widened her eyes.
A strained smile quickly spread across her face. “Well, if you think you can break the mirror, then be my guest. I’ve tried myself, and it was just too sturdy. I couldn’t do it, so I thought maybe it would be possible if I did it from the inside. And here we are.”
“So that’s how you got yourself sealed in here?” Senn piped up sourly.
“Hey, you’re trapped, too, so you have no room to talk,” Lucrezia shot back coldly.
Their exchange told Tinasha almost all she needed to know about their relationship, although this was hardly the time to consider such things. She pointed at the pillar that could break through realms. “Because this pillar is running through it, that means there are already cracks in the mirror, conceptually speaking. That means if we can make another hole from the outside, we may be able to break it.”
“Hmm. Normally, I’d say that’s not possible, but you might just pull it off,” mused Lucrezia.
“If the queen doesn’t break the mirror, the guy using your body is going to invade Tuldarr,” Senn informed her.
“The what? What in the world is going on?! How did this happen?” cried Lucrezia.
“A lot is happening… My fiancé is holding him at bay for now. When the mirror’s destroyed, can you regain control of your body?”
“Of course I can. It’s mine,” she replied without any hesitation. It was exactly what anyone would expect from a witch.
Tinasha nodded to Senn. “All right, I’m heading outside, then. Take care of things in here.”
Leaving things to these two would be fine, she thought.
Led by the thread of her consciousness, Tinasha moved up and out. Once she was free of the mirror, she began to pour all of her power into the artifact.
“Power must be defined. An ocean of life. A past melding of wills. A water spray will spiral down from the sky and plunge into the earth.”
She concentrated her magic while speaking a lengthy incantation. Every strand of every intricately woven spell configuration wound around the mirror and applied pressure to it. It was supposed to target the hole Lucrezia’s pillar had opened up. The mirror was already broken from the inside, giving Tinasha a means to destroy it now that she knew about that weakness.
“Six locked doors. A voice of premonition. My order shall come at the end of twilight.”
It was enough pressure to flatten a castle with ease. An ordinary magic implement would have shattered in an instant.
Yet the stubbornly resilient artifact displayed no signs of budging, while sweat beaded on Tinasha’s forehead. It reminded her of the pressure that bore down on her in those mysterious ruins. That place, too, must have been an outsiders’ artifact.
I’m in the opposite position than I was in then.
Her opponent was just as irregular, though. Tinasha gritted her teeth against the sensation of her power being drained. Her fingers touching the mirror turned discolored. Blood vessels burst, unable to endure the struggle between the looking glass and the magical power Tinasha was forcing into it.
Still, Tinasha did not retreat.
She had entrusted the battlefield to Oscar. He had believed she could do this, and she wouldn’t fail to live up to that confidence. His life and many others all rode on her actions at this moment.
Tinasha absolutely would not lose. More power flowed from her, and she planted her trembling legs firmly to keep steady.
The incantation had long since stopped as she focused all of her vast, pure magic onto one single point.
It wasn’t enough yet.
More. I want more power.
Suppressing the storm raging inside her, Tinasha pulled every bit of strength from it.
“I will…overcome! I believe…I will!”
One faint crack appeared on the mirror’s frame, which gradually widened.
Unfortunately, that was when Tinasha’s vision turned dark. She had lost too much blood to wield such immense might.
She couldn’t tell if she was standing anymore.
For a moment, her whole being and soul melted away.
Forcing all her remaining strength into her fingers, Tinasha struggled to stay conscious as she collapsed.
Oscar was deftly fending off Hubert’s erratic barrages, albeit with some difficulty. Akashia could nullify any magic attacks, and any that slipped past wouldn’t pierce Tinasha’s barrier. While Hubert was desperately throwing all possible means of psychological magic at the other king, none of it was proving lethal. Still, it meant Oscar had lost all sense of time.
“I’m starting to get pretty annoyed.”
Oscar’s mounting sense of irritation was considerable, yet Hubert had to be even more irritated. The man inside the witch’s body hurled random spells down from the sky.
“You’re just a brat who’s nothing without his sword! Are you scared of a witch?” Hubert taunted.
“Like you’ve got any room to talk. And besides, witches are worth being scared of—you’re not,” Oscar said blandly, despite the provocation in what he was saying.
“Just try and say that again!” Hubert roared, losing his temper and preparing a gigantic spell. Before he could complete it, however, he paused. The expression froze on his face. “No… No, it can’t be…”
Oscar frowned up at the half-formed spell that fizzled out. Hubert was writhing in midair, scrabbling and tearing at the witch’s scalp with both hands.
A maelstrom of magic swirled around the witch, creating powerful gusts.
“No… No, no, no…”
Hubert’s pleas floated down on gales from above, but there was no one who could grant his request.
Instead, a devastating force emerged—a formidable wave of magical power that swept across the entire plain.
The wind died, and in the moonlight stood a woman—a witch wearing a beautiful smile.
“Oh, it’s been so very long since I was last outside.” She stretched her arms above her head. When she glanced down to the ground and caught sight of Oscar, she gave a little smirk and slowly descended to him.
“Good evening. Are you her fiancé? I suppose I owe you my gratitude. I haven’t been in my body for such a long time. Thank you,” she said to him, though Oscar remained on guard. The feel of the magic entwined around her body was entirely different from how it had been moments earlier. She inspired in people the same uneasy sensation as that of standing at the edge of an endlessly deep forest.
Tightening his grip on Akashia, Oscar asked, “Are you Lucrezia?”
“I am. Oh, are you the Akashia swordsman? And yet you have so much magic… But I don’t suppose you’re a mage.”
“Yes, I’m the Akashia swordsman. I have magic because I’m Lavinia’s grandson,” Oscar explained.
“What?! Lavinia’s a grandma?! And to the king of Farsas? That’s crazy!”
“Unfortunately, it’s true,” Oscar assured her, feeling like he was speaking with any ordinary woman, save for the fact that she knew Lavinia, so she had to be a witch. She exuded no hostility, and though Oscar remained cautious, he allowed himself a small degree of relief.
Lucrezia inspected the wounds all over her body and pursed her lips. “Ugh, he couldn’t even heal? How careless…”
As she spoke, her wounds disappeared, and a satisfied smile spread across her face. Unable to hold back any longer, Oscar finally voiced his true concern. “How’s Tinasha?”
“Oh, that girl? Senn was watching her. She’ll likely be back before long.”
“I see…”
That probably meant she was safe.
Lucrezia grinned in amusement at how visibly relieved he looked. “You two are so funny. You’re engaged, right? When’s the wedding?”
“Next week.”
“Next week?! Is Lavinia coming? Can I come, too?”
“Lavinia isn’t coming. I don’t mind if you attend, but you can’t cause any trouble.”
“Oh, what? I wouldn’t do that! I’d be glad just to watch,” she insisted with a friendly smile, though her eyes were dancing in clear delight.
A real witch truly was inscrutable. Oscar had the feeling he’d made a troublesome acquaintance.
Lucrezia’s amber eyes caught the moonlight, glittering gold as she narrowed them at him. “So you two are to be married. With that much power between you, you could probably change the world.”
“I’m not trying to change the world. You witches don’t get publicly involved in anything, do you?”
“That stuff’s no fun anyway. I’m more concerned about my long-neglected herb garden at home. How do you think it’s doing?”
“Probably all withered away? How many centuries ago are we talking?” Oscar questioned, accustomed to speaking with people out of time, thanks to Tinasha.
At that, Lucrezia let out a huge sigh and slumped over.
Somewhat less enthusiastically than before, she said, “I suppose that’s to be expected. Times have really changed while I was away. Well, I have business to take care of, so I’ll be off. We’ll meet again if fate wills it.”
She gave a little wave, her amber eyes glinting. In a flash, she had faded into the night and was gone.
Lucrezia’s abrupt departure marked the end of the one-night war.
After making sure that the witch had truly left, Oscar used a spirit to contact Legis. From his position in the castle, Legis immediately ordered the troops to return and began the process of sending back the Magdalsian soldiers. There were a host of other little tasks to handle as well, which he would surely carry out smoothly.
Soon after, Mila came to Oscar and whispered to him that Tinasha was back at the castle. With his role complete, Oscar sheathed Akashia and peered into the night. A bright azure moon glowed in the utterly cloudless, starry sky. Its cool and clear brilliance reminded him of his beloved fiancée somehow.
Overnight, word of Magdalsia’s invasion of Tuldarr spread across the mainland. While some criticized Tuldarr for being too naive, as it had only neutralized the enemy soldiers without wounding many of them, more people were simply frightened by the strange and devastating power behind such a feat. As Tinasha had planned, the Magic Empire’s name now inspired even greater reverence and fear.
While the public story was that King Hubert of Magdalsia had died in battle, the truth was that he was murdered in his bedchamber. Both Magdalsia and Tuldarr kept silent about the fact that a witch and her power had sealed the king’s fate, however.
Magdalsia imposed a gag order on any talk of the inexplicable and sudden troop deployment, as well as its ruler’s demise.
Two days later, the childless King Hubert’s very young nephew took the throne, as if nothing of consequence had occurred.
“So Lucrezia really did kill Hubert?”
“Probably… I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
Two rulers were having tea in a salon in Tuldarr Castle. One was the master of the castle—the sovereign queen—and the other was the man who would be her husband.
Tinasha blew on her steaming tea and sighed. “Sixty years ago, Lucrezia went inside that mirror to destroy it. And upon realizing she couldn’t, she sealed it away instead… Her body was maintained by a spell, like a magic sleep. She cast a barrier over a cave close to Magdalsia Castle and laid herself and the mirror to rest there. Checking against what you were told, we can extrapolate that Valt broke that barrier and gave the mirror to Hubert.”
“Yet another annoying mess. Still, I’m sure it’s better for that witch to be free than to stay asleep in a cave,” Oscar commented. It was hard to call this a win, as it had brought calamity upon Hubert and Magdalsia, but it had freed Lucrezia from an otherwise endless sleep. Hubert’s tale marked yet another case in history of a king’s corruption bringing ruin to his country.
Tinasha set down her cup. “Hubert’s soul must have been drawn to the witch’s body because of its power. Lucrezia was so upset about her body being taken.”
“Naturally. So how did that spirit of yours end up trapped with her?”
“When the seal was broken, a wave of her magic leaked out. He found that strange and went to inspect it, only to slip through the barrier she had cast and end up stuck in the mirror along with her. She was really upset about that.”
“Gotcha. Well, it turned out all right for you,” Oscar said, which made Tinasha give him a quizzical look.
He smiled calmly at her. “She’s someone important to one of your spirits, so you hesitated a little over whether to kill her, didn’t you?”
“Mrr…” Tinasha only mumbled. Oscar had guessed it in one try, and she didn’t know how to respond.
But in truth, anyone would feel that way.
Tinasha didn’t want to kill anyone unless it was necessary, a desire that was strong in her because she had taken so many lives. She had remained in the castle during the war with Tayiri four hundred years ago not only to keep the Traditionalists in check but also because she’d been conflicted over wielding her devastating power to force people to yield.
Did using cunning and wit to kill have any place in a battle between armies?
It shouldn’t have, in theory, but Tinasha wondered if perhaps it did. In fact, she hoped that was the case. She had reviewed what seemed right on numerous occasions, though had been careful to conceal her doubts during the Dark Age.
She kept eliminating any who sought to replace her by force so that they would never catch a shred of weakness in her. And she ruled for five years on a throne washed in blood.
“I’m a little tired,” Tinasha admitted.
“That’s because you’re too stubborn about acting on your own. Rely on others more. Things have changed in the past four centuries,” Oscar chided bluntly.”
“Thank… Thank you.”
“And don’t you dare call off our wedding. Do you hate me or something?”
“I—I never said anything about that!”
“You didn’t have to. I could tell you were thinking it! I can’t believe how little you trusted me!”
“I just didn’t want to make trouble for you,” Tinasha mumbled, jerking her head aside abashedly.
That left her cheek wide open for Oscar to reach out and pinch it. She cried, “Ow, ow, ow!” and flailed around.
“Even if marrying me proves to be an obstacle, you can just use your power as the Akashia swordsman to subdue me… Confine me to some wing of the castle, and we can still be married that way, and it’ll be the same…”
“How will it be the same?! Reexamine the way your mind works,” he retorted.
“It happened somewhat often in the Dark Age. Any given castle would have one to two members of a foreign royal family locked up.”
“How many times do I have to say that things have changed before you get it through your head? Your sensibilities need to be rebuilt from the ground up.”
“You mean you want to call off our engagement?”
“No!”
Oscar’s involvement in the recent battle was kept under wraps, even within Farsas Castle. There was no way to publicize that fact if no one was even supposed to know that a witch had led the Magdalsian troops. His inner circle of advisers had looked like they wanted to say something, but in the end, only Lazar dressed Oscar down.
“It was an emergency, but…you must not act so rashly in the future.”
That said, there were very few people capable of battling a witch.
Tinasha cast her eyes up to the ceiling. “Anyway, what was Valt thinking? The king of Magdalsia going into a coma wouldn’t inconvenience me that much, so it couldn’t have been a diversion.”
“Maybe he wanted you to touch an outsiders’ artifact.”
“What? So it could absorb my soul? But unlike regular humans, I can resist its influence. I wouldn’t have been sealed inside unless I chose to enter, like Lucrezia did.”
“I don’t know the details. It just feels like he’s feeding us little bits of info and seeing what we’ll do.”
“Feeding us info? What else did he say?”
“Noth… Nothing,” Oscar replied, unusually evasive.
Tinasha frowned at him. “What is it? Did he tell you something?”
“Nope, nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“If you say so, then all right. Oh, can I ask you something?”
“Sure. What?”
“Did you know Lucrezia before?”
The Oscar that saved Tinasha four hundred years ago had said, “If I mess up and go too far back in time, I’ll go and see Lucrezia instead, I guess.”
Only a witch could survive over centuries. Therefore, the previous Oscar had known Lucrezia.
The current Oscar only stared at Tinasha, however. “Use your head, silly. That doesn’t add up. She got herself sealed away before I was born.”
“Oh… You’re right. Never mind,” Tinasha replied, dismissing the topic with a wave of her hand.
Vast swaths of history were changing little by little. That discrepancy may or may not have been part of those changes. All Tinasha had was the present, though. She smiled, savoring her happiness.
Oscar gazed intently at this young queen who would soon abdicate. He suddenly recalled the look of sheer relief on her face the very first time they met; there had been tears in her eyes.
Nearly a year had passed since then. Curiously, the time had passed quickly, while it also felt like they had come a very long way. Oscar closed his eyes, reflecting upon their journey. “I’ve suffered some real trials and tribulations, in my own way.”
“Where’s that coming from? I don’t disagree, but…”
“There’s no one else for me.”
“I certainly hope there isn’t, considering our wedding is around the corner… Why are you talking about this now? If you’re having doubts, should we just start over from the beginning?”
“Seriously, stop with that.”
Even if Oscar did have other wives in different timelines, he’d chosen Tinasha in this one. He wanted to spend his life with her and make her smile until the day they both passed into the annals of history. He was here because he wanted to give her that; there was no other option for him.
Oscar beckoned her closer like he was calling a cat over. “C’mere.”
In a catlike reply, Tinasha cocked her head to one side before floating up into the air and settling back down on his lap. Oscar caught up a lock of her glossy hair. “Don’t get too much in your own head and overthink everything. I can handle your baggage. That’s why I’m marrying you.”
“But I’m clingy and don’t know how to act in this time period.”
“I know. It’s what makes you who you are,” he replied, pressing a kiss to her long black hair. Tinasha blushed and threw her arms around Oscar’s neck.
He patted her on the back. “I’m the one who summoned you here, and I promise I’ll make you happy.”
“Oscar…”
He thought he heard traces of shock in her voice.
Tinasha let him go and pulled back to gaze at his face. Tears had filled her dark eyes. “I’m already so happy. You really did keep the promise you made to me when I was a girl.”
When she was thirteen years old, he had come to her rescue. That memory had helped her through becoming queen and sitting upon a throne of ice.
Living his life with her meant knowing and accepting the kind of queen she was.
Oscar gave his beautiful fiancée a kiss. “If you ever consider doing anything reckless again, tell me first. Depending on what it is, I’ll knock some sense into you.”
“I look forward to that,” Tinasha answered with a delighted, satisfied grin.
The smile belonged to the girl she was and the queen she had become. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
5. Once upon a Time, with You
He had a dream of a very long time ago.
Screams echoed from the hallway.
That was highly abnormal, considering this was Farsas Castle, capital of one of the Great Nations.
He blinked his eyes open from his nap in the lounge during a break in his hectic schedule.
Intermittent screams filtered in from the hallway. He leaped up and ran out to discover something with wings chasing around a host of ladies-in-waiting.
He zeroed in on the flying thing. “Nark?”
It was certainly shaped like the king’s dragon, though the coloring was entirely different. Its body, large as a hawk’s, was gray as stone. While he had no idea what it was, he cast a spell to bring down the creature as it flew overhead.
However, it sensed the magic, quivering in midair before reversing course and flying away.
“Hey! Stop!”
Whatever it was, he couldn’t let it escape. He swiftly cast another spell and released it. This magic would paralyze the flying thing for just a second and slow its movements. The bird stiffened when the spell hit, but it did not fall. It zoomed away on unsteady wings.
Then a white light from out of nowhere engulfed the gray bird. The radiance formed a cocoon, holding it frozen in midair. Realizing who had sent out the capturing spell, he said, “Queen Tinasha.”
“I finally caught it… That thing was flying all over the place,” Tinasha grumbled. She made sure none of the ladies-in-waiting were injured, then reached for the luminous cocoon. It dropped harmlessly into her arms.
Curious about the mysterious flying object, he asked, “What is that?”
“Something Oscar brought back from some spirit sorcerer ruins he explored. He said it was a stone egg, but at some point, it must have hatched.”
Tinasha cradled it in her arms. “Oh, and thank you for your quick thinking back there.”
“I didn’t…”
“I saw you. I’m very impressed but not at all surprised that you switched to the optimal spell to use right away.”
“I…thank you, Your Majesty.”
She was undoubtedly referring to how he’d pivoted immediately from an attack spell to a stun spell.
Tinasha flashed him a mischievous grin. “I suppose it’s all in a day’s work for you, Valt. Or should I call you the new royal chief mage?”
“Your Majesty…”
The young man, who had only become royal chief mage the month before, threw his queen a mildly dismayed look.
Tinasha, witch and queen, giggled in response.
In the court of Farsas, mages valued talent over all else. That did not mean a person’s character had no bearing; it meant an individual’s bloodline and family were irrelevant. That was why Valt, who had become a court mage three years earlier, was chosen as the new royal chief mage after his predecessor stepped down.
Of course, he also had the support of Tinasha, the queen. She held the cleverness of Valt’s magic and his keen powers of judgment in high regard. In a sense, he was certified by a witch.
And said witch was currently furious with her husband. “Unbelievable! Not only did you sneak out to explore some old wreck, but you also brought back something fishy! Don’t you know that spirit sorcerer ruins are full of hazardous objects?!”
“I know, I know,” Oscar replied from behind his study desk.
“No, you don’t, or you’d have a better answer!” she snapped, making the king grin. Valt, who was there for tea with them, was careful not to say a word. On the table in front of him sat a small white cocoon.
“Ridiculous… And this stone bird hasn’t been identified at all, though it seems to be a moving statue of some kind.”
“Oh, so like the ones in your tower? Those are fun. Should we place it here in the castle?” Oscar suggested.
“You’d just fight it and destroy it. Absolutely not.”
“Do they repair themselves? Every time I go, I find them intact again.”
“I’m the one who repairs them!” Tinasha exclaimed.
He was clearly riling up his wife on purpose. It was probably best to let this play out, although that meant none of them would ever get back to work.
Valt was left with no choice but to cut in, keeping his voice as calm as possible. “Based on the shape and the fact that it flies, I’d say it might have been used for patrolling.”
Thinking the stone bird’s egg to be a “funny-shaped rock,” Oscar had brought it back and then hidden it in the magic potions storehouse. At some point, it had hatched and started flying around the castle. By the time Valt noticed the fuss, the entire palace was in an uproar.
Tinasha floated up into the air and crossed her legs. “While that does seem very likely, the spell it’s enchanted with has a strange feel. I’m going to analyze it.”
“A strange spell? Then while you’re doing that, Queen Tinasha, I shall research these ruins,” Valt put in.
“Sorry to trouble you. Please do,” Oscar added.
The fifth king of Farsas had apparently mentioned these ruins in his journal. Valt read through the notes, but he found that the writings only described the general location of the site and did not reveal any information of significance about the ruins. Tinasha hadn’t known about them at all. The only thing she could tell from the stone bird’s spell was that it was likely the work of a spirit sorcerer.
The only thing left to do was to find out what the ruins were by cross-referencing history books. Hopefully, that might reveal the stone bird’s intended use.
Valt got to his feet, documents in hand. As he was about to leave, Oscar called, “Valt, do you know how things are going with the eastern towns?”
“Ah…that situation.”
Recently, there had been a rash of unexpected deaths and suicides in various towns and villages in eastern Farsas. While Valt wasn’t in charge of the investigation, as the royal chief mage, he was aware of its progress.
“To be perfectly honest, it’s not going well. So many people have died, yet we can’t find any commonalities between their deaths… Some perish out of nowhere, screaming and vomiting blood, while others are discovered with their heads stuck in water jars. A few use magic to attack those around them before dying. Nothing is consistent, and the victims expire quickly. Some manage to survive, but most of those have gone insane, and the rest are in comas.”
“So bizarre. Tinasha, what do you think?”
“Mmm, it’s a mystery to me,” Tinasha replied. “The people in comas are on life-support treatment, but their souls are unstable.”
Valt’s eyebrows twitched upward at that, but Tinasha did not notice and went on. “I suspected demons were involved, but no witnesses mentioned anything to that effect, and there have been no signs of them, either. There’s also the fact that a significant percentage of the dead were mages. Sometimes it was a case of magic going haywire, but postmortem examinations can’t tell us exactly why or how that happened. Some of those people didn’t have enough power to actually draw upon and had only received training in how to control it.”
“I guess we’ll just have to keep looking into it. I’d like to get to the bottom of this quickly,” said Oscar.
“I will do everything in my power,” Valt said with a bow before he left the study.
As he walked down the corridor, he fell into thought.
There’s so much I don’t know… What’s influencing this?
He couldn’t have said which lifetime he was on.
However, this was his first time serving the court of Farsas, home to the Witch of the Azure Moon, the most powerful mage in all the land. He did not yet know where the red orb of Eleterria was, but the blue one was in the Tuldarr treasure vault. Valt wanted to gain her trust, but failing that, he hoped to learn about her adopted home of Farsas and the…temperament of the king.
Valt had freely used what he knew to get himself to the position he held. After coming to the court, he had used his existing knowledge to help him resolve numerous situations, including the resurrection of a demonic beast by a Former Druza faction, the rise of Lanak—a survivor of Tuldarr—and the battle with the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned in the neighboring country of Yarda. Tinasha, in particular, had a tendency to rush off on her own if left unattended. It was quite a challenge to hold her in check and take the actions she wanted to take herself.
However, Valt had learned that there were multiple events he was entirely unaware of. He thought he had a grasp on the principal sequence, but Oscar bringing back a mysterious egg from the ruins and the rash of suspicious deaths in Farsas were entirely unfamiliar. He’d wondered if it was all a ripple effect from his becoming a court mage, but the changes were far too substantial for that. The month prior, the horse-rider tribe known as the Ito went on a widespread pillaging and looting spree. They took the fortress of Minnedart as their base, only to be defeated there. This was another thing Valt had no memory of ever experiencing before. He needed to record it for the records.
“The records, huh?” he muttered self-deprecatingly.
What good would that do? He was the only one who could read them.
Ultimately, would there be any point to writing down what he knew for her?
“I really can’t take my eyes off you for one second,” the witch grumbled as she brewed tea. Oscar burst out laughing.
Lazar walked in with a stack of documents and let out a heavy sigh. “If you want to go exploring in the ruins, Your Majesty, please tell Queen Tinasha… It will really save me some stress, as I get mixed up in it every time.”
“But if I tell her, she’ll stop me,” Oscar responded shamelessly, right in front of her.
The witch arched one eyebrow. “Of course I will. This time you even got Doan to go with you…”
“Yeah, because I needed a mage for some of it, and the other ones would’ve gone tattling to you right away.”
“You seem to have a very good command of your subjects’ personalities! But I still grilled Doan to near death!”
Tinasha was the greatest mage in the castle. Her judgment on magic-related matters was generally more accurate than the king’s, which the court mages all knew. Whenever something happened, most of them would go to her to report it.
However, there were those mages who tended to be more flexible. One of these was Doan, who often found himself at the mercy of the king’s whims.
Oscar picked up his teacup. “And because you chewed him out, Doan’s begging me to let him transfer to a research-only position.”
“Yes, and that’s your fault! Yours, not mine!”
“But I can’t give him up. Renart reports directly to you, while Valt can be too unreadable.”
Tinasha flashed a strained smile, floating up into the air and settling on the arm of Oscar’s chair. Leaning back against him, she rubbed her head along his cheek. Hugging her knees to her chest, she said, “That’s because Valt doesn’t like to let his emotions show. He wants to get along just by being friendly on the outside. Doan is much cleverer in that regard. He knows that we’re less likely to suspect him of anything if he’s shown us some of his genuine self. However, that also means he winds up as your accomplice far too often.”
Tinasha grinned, her eyes lighting up. “But when it comes to that girl he lives with, Valt shows a much more human side, and it’s very interesting. I met her once when she came to the castle to bring him lunch. I can tell he cares for her a lot.”
“I know the fact that he’s unreadable doesn’t mean he carries bad intentions. He’s like you—he thinks everything through on his own and then handles it alone. You both conduct yourselves well, but you’re too careful when it counts, because you never give anything away, and that’s your downfall.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about your solo missions and how they need to stop. Admittedly, I’ll still be entrusting anything magic related to you. Just tell me if you run into trouble.”
“Okay,” Tinasha sang, sliding off the armrest and onto her feet.
Oscar picked up the cocoon on the table. Before his wife could leave to go work on her analysis, he called, “Wait, Tinasha. Demons can’t get past the castle city wards, right?”
“Right. The wards are designed that way. We’d definitely have a hard time fighting off a high-ranking demon.”
“Can you cast similar ones around the other eastern towns and villages, then?”
“I could…but I couldn’t get to all of them right away.”
The castle city’s defensive wards represented the highest level of security possible for continuously running ground-level wards. Tinasha would need to get things in order to establish them around multiple communities, and the process would take considerable time. If Tinasha set aside all her other duties, she would still only be able to cover three a day.
Oscar nodded. That answer seemed to line up with what he had expected. “Just do what you can. It’s only to be safe, but I’d appreciate it. Start with the towns closest to the ones where the unnatural deaths occurred and then go west from there.”
“But Oscar, that means—”
Tinasha cut herself off, gasping as she realized what Oscar was implying. She thought back over the details of the previous cases.
The unexplained deaths had broken out in multiple towns in eastern Farsas. The easternmost settlements had been beset by this issue the earliest.
Thus, the king suspected that whatever was responsible was approaching the castle city from the east.
Oscar caught Lazar’s eye, then Tinasha’s, and he scratched at his temple. “Five days before the first of these deaths, a mage fell from Minnedart’s ramparts and died. No one witnessed it, so everyone assumed it was an accident, but there were reports of strange-sounding screams. If it’s related to all the other deaths, it means something’s coming toward us from beyond the eastern border. I’d rather read too much into things and be safe instead of sorry.”
“I’ll…have it done immediately,” Tinasha said before leaving the study.
After Lazar watched the queen go, he asked the king in a tremulous tone, “Do you think it’s a demon?”
“Who knows? If so, it’s an awfully slow-moving demon. It’s going to take another two weeks to reach the city,” Oscar replied, resting his chin on his hands and letting his gaze wander.
As he watched his king sink deep into thought, Lazar felt a jolt of inexplicable fear.
The castle archives held no record of the ruins in question.
“I thought that might be the case,” Valt muttered as he left the castle to head home one evening.
Because there was no record of the site, people had always thought the formation north of Farsas to be merely a natural cavern. However, there was an ancient structure concealed deep within the hollow. The past king of Farsas, who’d written of it in his journal, only noted he’d heard of the location from a spirit sorcerer who became his adviser. He had reigned centuries ago, a short time before Tinasha’s birth. Many records from that era had been lost to time, especially those pertaining to the secretive spirit sorcerers.
“All I can do now is consult my ancestors’ accounts…”
The archives Valt had inherited as the Time-Reader heir were vast. When he first gained access, he skimmed through all of them, but he had yet to read them carefully. The other heirs were probably much the same.
Therefore, there was a very good chance that some record or another Valt wasn’t familiar with did describe the ruins.
With those thoughts on his mind, he reached his home, which was tucked into a corner of the castle city. The delicious aroma of soup wafted from the house.
“I’m back,” he called as he opened the door.
“Valt!” cried a girl as she leaped at him head-on.
“Oof!” Valt staggered back from her unexpected crash landing. “What’s the matter, Miralys?”
“Open this,” the silver-haired girl instructed, handing him a new spice jar. She must have bought it and then discovered she wasn’t strong enough to wrest the lid off. While she could have gone back to the store or asked a neighbor for help, Miralys wasn’t very interested in interacting with anyone besides Valt.
That was probably because she was an orphan who’d endured a rough childhood, betrayal by her fellow bandits, and being left to die in the woods…
No, that’s not right.
That was who Miralys was when he met her for the very first time, the girl who later became his wife.
That wasn’t who this was. Valt had spared no effort searching for Miralys and had managed to grab her before she joined the bandits. She wasn’t the person he’d found bleeding in a forest.
But even so…
“Valt? Can’t you open it?”
“No, I can. I was just lost in thought.”
“Lost in thought about opening a jar? Were you thinking of a spell to get the lid off it, since you can’t do it on your own?”
“I told you, I can,” Valt said, doing just that and passing the jar back to Miralys.
“Thanks.” Miralys accepted the container and scurried off for the kitchen. While she hadn’t shown much emotion, he could tell she was in a good mood. As he listened to her start humming, he smiled and went to his room to change clothes.
Valt didn’t have a detailed plan when it came to working in Farsas Castle. He was simply there to observe the palace and those inside.
It came as no surprise to discover that Farsas was incredibly stable. It placed great emphasis on magic research, and the court mages were well treated. He could easily live on his own with Miralys. After working for another three years or so as royal chief mage, he could even retire and go live a reclusive life with her in some rural town.
But, no, he couldn’t. He didn’t have what he truly needed.
No matter how content Valt was with his present life, he couldn’t grow too complacent.
“Valt, dinner’s ready.”
“Coming,” he replied, dropping the journal he was about to read back onto the pile of them in his room. When he reached the dinner table, Miralys looked up from setting dishes out and gave him the littlest smile.
It was infectious, and he returned the expression. They sat at the little dining table facing each other.
Miralys spread homemade jam on some soft bread. “You worked a little late today.”
“There’s something I need to look into. I’m going to be doing some reading after dinner, too, but call for me if you need anything.”
“I’ll bring you some tea, then. Did anything interesting happen today?”
“I was working, not having fun, but in fact, something interesting did happen. But it was nothing too unusual. The king brought back an egg, which hatched into a stone bird that started flying all around the castle.”
“I never know what you’re talking about. How could something made of stone fly?”
“In the Dark Age, they researched this sort of thing—artificial creatures. Actually, creating them proved difficult, so the research was abandoned. This is the first time I’ve seen one made with spiritual magic. Queen Tinasha is going to analyze it, and let me look at a diagram of the spell configuration once it’s done.”
He knew that his spell-casting abilities were several grades higher than an ordinary person’s, which was only natural because he’d spent more years living in the world and had his ancestors’ journals.
Valt’s genuine curiosity must have been evident, because Miralys narrowed her eyes. “You really love magic.”
“Well…I’m a mage.”
“I wish I’d been born with magic, too.”
“I’ve lent you some of mine, haven’t I?”
“That’s just a mark. It’s not enough to use magic.”
Miralys had no magical power of her own. This left her unable to protect herself, so Valt had loaned her a portion of his energy. It was tied to her soul and would guard her.
Valt found the sight of Miralys puffing out her cheeks in displeasure very precious, but her impractical wish made his heart ache nonetheless. He’d wished the same thing himself once.
Valt hadn’t been able to cast spells until the death of his father. There was no need yet to tell Miralys about that or any of the other secrets of his life. In her mind, she had simply met Valt by chance and was living with him.
Someday, he would reveal the truth to this Miralys. He would explain about himself, about her, about their past that had once existed, and about what was to come.
That day was a ways off yet, though. They were enjoying shockingly peaceful days, because Valt wasn’t on the hunt for Eleterria this time.
Valt suddenly recalled something. “Lately, people have been dying in strange ways over in the east. Queen Tinasha said that because we’re affected, the culprit could be a demon. The wards around the city prevent demons from entering, but still…be very careful.”
“Okay. But I don’t go outside the city anyway. I have no reason to.”
“I’m only saying it just in case,” Valt said, narrowing his eyes at Miralys. When he concentrated, he could sense the faintest pulse of her soul—a living being’s core. It was the primordial power that all possessed, born of nature and returned to nature.
Each time he saw that light inside her, he felt spurred to keep going.
The next day, when Valt arrived at work, he found a palm-sized stone bird flying around the castle courtyard.
His fellow court mages were gazing up at it in wonderment. Doan noticed him and waved. “There you are. Look, it’s so funny.”
“It’s gotten smaller.”
“Queen Tinasha analyzed it and made a duplicate. It sounds like it really was used for patrolling, although we don’t know what it was watching for. It doesn’t seem like it was only for people and demons, however.”
“Not people and demons? Then what?”
That left only low-ranking demons and fairies. Valt wanted to ask the duplicate maker herself, but Tinasha wasn’t around. “Where’s the queen?”
“She went with Renart to set wards around the eastern towns, as the king requested.”
Which meant the king suspected demonic involvement in the rash of mysterious deaths.
Having served Oscar for the past three years, Valt judged him capable of jumping from the tiniest clue to the right answer. He would say things like, “I just had a hunch.” Tinasha claimed that her husband had very good intuition, but it was probably due to a calculation that the man wasn’t consciously aware of. Oscar was also quick to make decisions and often worked several steps ahead of regular people. Warding the settlements must have meant he’d detected something.
Doan shrugged. “The idea of it gives me the creeps, but she’s doing it to be safe. Anyway, that means you can bring the report you’ve been working on to the king.”
“How do you know I have a report?” Valt questioned
“Because you’re late today. You were up late, weren’t you?”
Doan had hit the nail on the head. Valt gazed up at the sky beseechingly. Sylvia and Pamyra snickered. Valt outranked all of them in the mage hierarchy, but they were all around the same age and had come to the court at roughly the same time. After working together for years, they’d all grown close.
Valt held both his hands up in surrender. “All right, all right. I’m going to go see His Majesty, then. Let me know if anything happens.”
“You got it.”
As Valt left, Doan idly remarked, “Oh, and this bird has a function to scatter something, but the first bird was empty inside.”
“Scatter…what?”
His first thought was poison. The original had only been empty because it was newly hatched. However, that didn’t match what Valt had uncovered. While thinking it over, he blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Didn’t that make Queen Tinasha even unhappier with the king?”
“That’s right. So before she gets back, please try and convince the king to be less reckless.”
“I’ll try,” Valt agreed, but between the king and queen, he had a much harder time with the former. In the past, Tinasha had killed him many more times than Oscar had, but he could still predict her thoughts and actions. The king of Farsas was far younger than the witch and often behaved erratically. Valt had taken a court position to better understand him, but even after three years in the castle, he still found the king difficult to deal with.
Valt knocked on the door to the study. Oscar called for him to enter, and when he did, the king flashed him a somewhat childlike grin. “You’re back. So what were the ruins made for?”
“They were once a hidden refuge for spirit sorcerers who fled from mage hunters,” Valt replied. That was what he had managed to dig out from the vast records kept by his ancestors.
He passed a copy he had made of the journal to the king. “They were built by people who were driven out by a country that predated Tayiri, but according to records made by someone who knew that era well, they were only used for about thirty years. After that, the residents started to die out, and those who were left scattered all over.”
“Ah yeah, since the ruins are in the north, it would make sense for them to be related to Tayiri,” remarked the king.
“With so many spirit sorcerers, they could have fought, but they elected to go into hiding. That may be because spirit sorcerers lose their power once their chastity is gone.”
“A while back, Tinasha took me to some seaside ruins. That place had a real mysterious feel. I can’t speak for Tinasha, but to me, it was like it had accepted this sense of very gradual demise. I also didn’t pick up on any sort of hostility from the site where I retrieved the egg.”
Spirit sorcerers were proficient in controlling nature, and some preferred to live in the wild and pass away there. Oscar never mentioned as much to his wife, since she was a spirit sorcerer who had chosen to keep a long life. Valt didn’t think she would mind, but perhaps the king was trying to be considerate.
“Why did you take that egg?” Valt inquired.
Oscar had gone to the ruins as a sort of test of skill. But as there were few traps and obstructions, he must have felt disappointed. Why bother returning with a relic, then? He wasn’t the sort to dig up precious weapons or magic implements and haul them home.
In reply, Oscar flashed a strained smile. “The egg was placed on a small altar in the center of the ruins. The moment I saw it, I could tell it had been held in high regard. I hated the idea of it rotting away in there, forgotten.”
“Next time, I recommend you tell the queen about this sort of thing right away without trying to hide it from her.”
“I’ll do that.”
“If she gets back and she’s still testy with you, tell her Valt has a report for her. I’ll mediate things.”
“Thanks. Sorry about this.”
For now, the matter of the egg was closed.
Valt bowed and made ready to leave. When he lifted his head, he found the king staring straight at him. “Is…something the matter?”
“It’s nothing. But if you ever run into trouble, tell me before deciding things on your own. I’ll do what I can to help.”
For a moment, it seemed that Oscar could see right through Valt’s situation. Hearing a statement like that from the king was a surprise. Fortunately, he narrowly managed to keep his discomfiture from showing on his face, pasting on a pained grin. “Where could this be coming from? I don’t have any complaints about my tenure here.”
“Ah, it’s just that I get this sense that you’re the type who doesn’t rely too much on others. But if you ever reach a fork in the road and you’re not sure whether you’re going to betray me or not, tell me first.”
“I…don’t know why such a thing would ever come to pass.”
Cold sweat trickled down Valt’s back.
Oscar couldn’t have suspected anything, because Valt had no plots at the moment. At present, he only intended to serve Farsas.
However, this was Oscar looking at Valt, jumping a step ahead, and arriving at the correct answer. Valt bowed his head again. “I’m grateful to you for saying so. I dearly hope something like that never happens, but…should the worst occur, I will do as you ask.”
“Mm-hmm. Talk to me anytime. That’s what I’m here for,” Oscar replied nonchalantly, despite being the ruler of an entire nation. While Oscar’s behavior as king might have appeared unprecedented to those outside Farsas, he actually took the job extremely seriously and handled his responsibilities almost entirely on his own. Working for him drove that fact home. His occasional escapes outside the castle and the attention he paid to his queen were, in his eyes, his allotted private time. In all other respects, he was a devoted servant of the people.
For a moment, Valt thought that Oscar’s lifestyle was entirely unsustainable. Ultimately, he said nothing more and departed the study.
The days that followed appeared to be very peaceful from an outside perspective.
Those were happy days, Valt thought. At the very least, he was able to live a calm, worry-free life with Miralys. He was struck with how big of a difference the choice of how to live made in his everyday life. The fact that he could even think that was proof he had wallowed in that time like pleasantly warm water.
They never found out what exactly the stone bird from the ruins scattered originally, but it didn’t do any harm, so the matter was considered resolved. Tinasha placed a seal on the original bird Oscar brought back, but the small copy she had constructed became oddly popular among the court, and she ended up making five to fly around the castle.
Once Tinasha set up the wards around the towns, the mysterious deaths stopped. However, the protective spells around one small town vanished for reasons unknown.
Taking this very seriously, Tinasha went to investigate. Valt also spoke with the village’s denizens, who all offered the same story. They’d seen several unfamiliar men with a sick-looking girl in tow. Nothing else unusual had transpired, however, and repairing the wards brought an end to the issue. Things continued without incident afterward.
On a very sunny day, Valt stepped from a covered outdoor walkway and headed for the training grounds. There he found the king and queen sparring.
The sound of metal clashing was inescapable. Tinasha slashed at Oscar with her sword, sweat dappling her lithe physique. Oscar parried it away effortlessly.
“Don’t slow down just because you’re tired. You have to keep your pace,” the king instructed.
“I’m trying,” she panted back, jabbing at her husband. He batted the attack away easily, causing her to stumble.
“Watch out!” he cried, grabbing her arm as she almost fell. Drawing her close, he patted her back. “Let’s call it a day here. You look like you’re going to keel over if we continue.”
“I really lack endurance… Thank you,” said the queen, perspiring all over. Her shoulders were heaving as she leaned against her husband’s chest.
It was Oscar who noticed Valt first. “What is it? Which one of us do you need?”
“Queen Tinasha. A merchant party accompanied by a demonic beast familiar has arrived at the city gates and wishes to enter.”
Unauthorized demons and demonic spirits were not permitted in the castle city. Extenuating circumstances required permission from Tinasha or those sanctioned by her. It was a necessary measure to keep the city safe.
Tinasha brushed her sweaty bangs up and out of her face. “I didn’t receive an application mentioning anything like that.”
“Evidently, there was something wrong with their papers, and they were delayed in reaching the castle.”
Entry procedure called for applying to a mage authorized by Tinasha in advance of the desired day. However, the forms hadn’t made it in time on this occasion. Such groups could be kept waiting outside the city gates, but Tinasha was such a conscientious person that she frequently saw to these matters herself.
“Ooh, I see. It sounds like you’ve been very busy today, Valt. Just give me a moment,” Tinasha said.
“There’s no need. If you’ll authorize me, I can go,” Valt offered. His schedule was packed, but there was enough flexibility in it for him to go and do that.
Oscar patted Tinasha on the head. “Let Valt do it. You’re so worn out that it’ll take a while for you to look presentable.”
“Fine… Please see to it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Tinasha pointed at Valt, and a tiny dot of white light appeared at her fingertip and floated over to him, where it was absorbed into his forehead. Now he was fully authorized. A little stone bird popped out of nowhere and settled itself on Valt’s shoulder.
It looked just like Nark, who was resting on the king’s shoulder, and Tinasha burst out laughing. “It looks like it wants to come along.”
“Is it…all right to bring one outside the city gates?”
“It’s perfectly fine. I’m sure the local children will be delighted.”
“I’ll be careful to bring it back safe and sound,” said Valt, bowing to the king and queen again before leaving the training grounds.
While the queen often teleported around like it was nothing, Valt’s position made it difficult for him to do the same. Oscar might have freakishly keen powers of observation, so Valt couldn’t afford to overplay his hand.
Thus, he used a transportation array in the castle to teleport to the closest guard station. As he was walking from there to the castle gates, a familiar voice called out to him. “Valt? What is it? Are you finished with work already?”
“Oh, Miralys.”
She was carrying so many flowers she had bought at the market that he couldn’t see her face. Had he not heard her voice, he might have thought she was nothing but a gigantic bouquet. “What are you doing with all those?”
“I’m going to decorate the house with them.”
“Isn’t that a few too many?”
Miralys wasn’t the type of girl who adored flowers, so Valt knew there had to be some reason. After a brief awkward pause, she finally admitted, “Someone put in a large order at the florist I go to but never showed to pick it up. The shopkeeper looked so upset that I bought them all.”
Valt’s eyes grew wide listening to her tale. Miralys had always been extremely wary of other people. But as she settled into a more comfortable life in the city and got to know others while Valt was away serving the crown, she must have begun to change little by little.
Her warmhearted gesture made him smile. “You’re a sweet girl, Miralys.”
“No, I’m not,” she mumbled.
Because he couldn’t see her face, he walked up and took half of the blossoms sticking out of her basket. White petals parted to reveal Miralys, her face the faintest shade of pink.
“It’ll be too dangerous for you to go home alone like that. I have to head to the castle gates to take care of something, but after that, I’ll be free to walk with you.”
“But you’re at work. They’ll get mad.”
“They’d be more upset if they knew I let you go home like that. I’ll be sure to contact the castle. It’ll be fine,” Valt assured her, and he set off.
Still looking reluctant, Miralys followed. Then she noticed the little bird perched on Valt’s shoulder. “Hey, what’s this bird?”
“This is a magical creature made by Queen Tinasha.”
“Oh wow. Can I pet it later?”
“Of course. But it’s castle property, so I have to bring it back with me.”
The gates were just up ahead. The street was packed with bustling crowds, and there was not a cloud in the sky. A pleasant breeze rustled the white flowers in their arms.
The guard stationed at the gates smiled when he saw Valt and the blossoms he was holding. “Taken up flower peddling, chief mage?”
“Not quite. We’re just coming from a large purchase. I’ve been authorized to grant access to the city. Could you show me to the merchants awaiting entry?”
“Yes, right this way,” said the guard, turning around to unlock the door behind him.
All of a sudden, an earsplitting noise sounded from the side—an awful grating screech like stones rubbing together. It was coming from the bird on Valt’s shoulder.
Miralys frowned. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but…”
The bird was a magic implement created for patrolling purposes by ancient spirit sorcerers.
Before Valt had time to reason out an explanation, the door the guard was about to open split in half, revealing a girl. She was scrawny and wearing rough clothing. Her eyes were bulging, and her neck was tilted at such an angle that it looked broken.
She was clearly not in her right mind, more resembling a corpse than a living being. Valt recognized her, however.
He hadn’t met her in this life, but in other ones, she was sometimes an acquaintance of Tinasha. She was born in Tayiri and fiercely resented how it persecuted mages.
“Tris…?” he blurted.
“Is she okay?” Miralys asked dubiously.
The sight of her so completely transformed made Valt gasp.
A young man appeared from behind Tris, his eyes flashing with dark resentment.
Valt recognized him as well. This was Savas, the prince of Yarda. After the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned fell in battle, he was banished for being her devoted follower.
“What are you doing here…?” Valt asked. He had a bad feeling.
Savas surveyed the streets around him with empty eyes before commanding Tris. “Go.”
The battered girl staggered forward.
That was how it began.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”
Miralys crumpled to the ground while letting out a terrible scream. Unfortunately, Valt couldn’t even reach for her, as he was struck on the temple so hard it sent him stumbling. His vision spun.
He didn’t understand what was happening. His head was a mess, and his guts were churning.
Through blurry vision, he attempted to locate the girl he adored.
Miralys was collapsed amid heaps of white flowers, blood pouring from her mouth.
“Mira…lys…?”
While Valt crawled to her, Tris passed right by. Screams soon erupted from somewhere close by.
“AAAAHHH!”
“NOOOOOO!”
Shrieks sounded from everywhere, the stone bird crying in warning through it all.
Valt could sense magic going haywire in the vicinity. Savas let out a twisted, mad laugh. “Ha-ha! So this is the power of a god. Fall to your knees! Suffer your ruin, foolish foes of Leonora!”
The world was dimming as Valt’s consciousness slipped. He reached out a trembling hand and caught hold of Miralys’s.
No matter how he squinted, he could no longer see the light of her soul. It was already very far away.
The flower petals, dripping with blood, caught the light of the sun and sparkled.
“You’re awake.”
When Valt woke next, Doan’s voice was the first thing he heard. It was a struggle to get his sluggish body to obey, but he looked around. “Where am I…?”
“The castle, in a temporary hospice room. We brought everyone who didn’t die here. A lot are still unconscious.”
They were in one of the castle reception chambers, now home to over twenty evenly spaced beds that held ashen-faced patients. A huge magic circle was drawn on the floor; a life-preservation spell. Only one person in the castle could afford to expend magic like that on such a large scale.
“Where’s the queen?” Valt asked, but Doan didn’t answer. He was sitting next to the bed opposite Valt’s. Judging by the blond hair, it had to be Sylvia lying there.
Doan’s face was gaunt, and his voice was purposely unemotional when he spoke. “Let me tell you this first. A week has passed since we encountered…that. We’ve managed to take care of it, mostly. We’re in the cleanup phase now.”
“The…cleanup phase?”
Something had attacked unexpectedly. Reflecting upon it, Valt did have a guess as to what it may have been. All the omens lined up, after all.
The mysterious, unexplained deaths one after another in the east.
Oscar suspected that the very first casualty was the mage who fell to his death at Minnedart. However, something had occurred before that in the vicinity of the fortress—the Ito riders’ extensive raiding and subsequent capture.
It probably got released in the aftermath of all that.
Something dwelled in a place sacred to the Ito. Valt had read about it in one of his ancestors’ journals. It had to be the exact same thing that the ancient spirit sorcerers fled Tayiri to escape. The stone birds were created to patrol for it.
“So it was…Irityrdia.”
The thing that made mages lose their minds, sent their magic running haywire, and wrecked their spirits and life force.
A force of nature also known by the names World-Splitting Blade and Sleeping Paleface.
Irityrdia—Tayiri’s one god—was the true form of what was sealed away inside Tris. Long ago, a mage’s body was used to seal it off when it caused havoc. Someone who knew of this must have placed Irityrdia within Tris.
“You know what this is? We finally managed to pinpoint it just yesterday after investigating the Ito ruins,” said Doan.
“I read about it a long time ago, although I’d forgotten. I guess that means everyone who died in the east had magic.”
“Yeah. Some of them hadn’t ever undergone training to control their power, so they didn’t register as having any when we investigated. Everyone who died either had magic or was otherwise affected by magic going haywire.”
According to the legends, the presence of Irityrdia rendered mages insane in both mind and body, a danger to themselves and others. Irityrdia must have awakened in the aftermath of the battle with the Ito, slowly made its way toward the castle city, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake…and gotten captured along the way.
Doan let out a heavy sigh. “It looks like it was Savas’s intention to bring Irityrdia into the city. Disguising himself and his group as a merchant caravan and making sure his faulty papers meant the castle didn’t have advance notice of his visit—all of it was a trick to lure the queen out.”
“I don’t…think Savas was the one behind this. Ordinary people wouldn’t know about Irityrdia or be able to seal it inside a mage’s body. He must have been used as a puppet, since mages can’t get close to Irityrdia. One of Leonora’s underlings or someone else must be responsible.”
Fortunately, even a plot like this hadn’t destroyed Farsas. The situation had been resolved in only a week.
Unlike in rural towns and villages, the city contained so many mages that releasing Irityrdia inside it might have razed it to the ground.
Valt finally asked the one thing he’d wanted to know this whole time but hadn’t dared to ask. “What happened to Miralys? The girl who was with me when Irityrdia came.”
He knew the answer. That was one more reason why Irityrdia had come to the castle city.
Doan stood. “I’ll show you. Can you walk?”
“Yes…”
Even after dragging his battered body out of the bed, Valt had to lean on Doan to keep from falling over. When he finally got a look at all the beds in the room, he groaned. “Half the court mages are here.”
“And these are the lucky ones. That stone bird the king brought back? What it scattered was an Irityrdia-resistant psychological safeguard created by spirit sorcerers. Those of us who work in the castle were much better equipped to handle it than the mages out in town. It’s why you’re still sane after coming so close to Irityrdia.”
“I see. It spread it all over the castle, and that’s why it was empty. The king really has incredible luck…”
At a time of crisis, Valt had received the bare minimum of protection, allowing him to survive a force of nature some called a god. Despite explaining as much to him, Doan only offered a tight smile.
The two left the makeshift hospital, and Doan led Valt to a small parlor. In it was a white bed with flowers decorating the head of it.
Miralys was asleep, breathing faintly. A magic circle for life support was drawn on the floor beneath her.
Valt approached her and gazed down at her pallid face.
“I’ll be in the hospice room if you need me,” said Doan.
“Sure…”
Once the door clicked shut, Valt dug his nails into his palms hard enough to draw blood.
Miralys would never wake again.
Her soul was gone, along with the magic he’d lent her for self-protection.
Valt took her hand. It was so small. “I should have kept you locked up.”
Then she would still be alive. They could have lived alone, just the two of them, without anyone else.
He had always yearned to give her a normal, happy life.
But this was what happened when he believed he’d done that. The world was waiting for that one last straw to say, “Your time is up. You can’t live any longer.”
“It’s my fault…”
Miralys would never squeeze his hand back. She would never call him names in that adorable way that she did.
This lifetime ended here.
It had to.
Valt returned to the hospice room and said to Doan, “I have something I need to discuss with the queen. Do you know where she is?”
“She’s dead.”
The words echoed around the sparsely furnished room.
After a few moments of complete stupefaction, Valt asked, “She’s what? How?”
“There wasn’t much time to deliberate over what to do, and the damage had spread too far. Irityrdia’s power was only growing stronger. No one knew it was inside Tris. When she died, it was released, and the situation went completely out of control. Queen Tinasha had no choice but to use her own body as a vessel and hold Irityrdia in check so that Akashia could destroy it.”
There was not a trace of emotion in Doan’s words.
“So if you need to discuss something, go to the king. He should be in the chapel underground now.”
A chapel was built in a grove of trees behind the castle. Its subterranean level served as the royal mausoleum. The witch’s corpse, dressed in her wedding clothes, lay enshrined on the altar of a small sanctuary.
The king was standing next to it, staring at his wife’s lifeless body. One hand gently carded away the hair from her forehead, and he caressed her smooth cheeks. Valt noticed that the king’s fingers were trembling.
Without taking his eyes off Tinasha’s lifeless face, the king said, “I thought I was prepared for this, but it turns out I wasn’t.”
For three days, Irityrdia had laid waste to the city. In that time, nearly three hundred died. The storm that swept through all planes of existence in search of magical power rapidly became more powerful and untouchable…until the queen’s death brought the tragedy to a close.
“I knew she wouldn’t hesitate to give her life for her country. But for whatever reason, I always thought that only extended to Tuldarr.”
Tinasha had died to protect the country she’d married into.
As Akashia had plunged into her, she’d grabbed hold of it and wouldn’t allow Oscar to pull it out. That was how fierce her spirit was.
“No one was more careless with their life than she was. I’m going to do everything I can to honor her in return.”
“I’m sure…Queen Tinasha was fully aware of that.”
She had always been that sort of person.
No matter how many times history repeated, she always chose her king.
Oscar was the only one who knew what her life was worth, which was why she could relax and let herself love him.
The king turned his head to look at Valt, standing in the doorway. His twilight sky–blue eyes held naked remorse. “To be honest, I wanted to pull Akashia out. Even if by force.”
If the royal sword had shattered the core inside her, she might have been saved, and Irityrdia would still have been destroyed.
However, the entity had grown too large. Oscar and Tinasha had realized that when the core was shattered—and they made a decision.
The queen’s death meant the end for the part of Oscar that was just an ordinary man. He would live the rest of his life out of duty alone.
The young king looked down at his right hand. “This is the first time I’ve ever hated Akashia’s existence… And that stays between us.”
“Of course.”
For Oscar to bring that up must have meant he’d guessed why Valt was here.
Valt bowed low before his king. “It has not been very long, but I will be retiring from my post. I’m very sorry to leave at such a time.”
“That’s fine. I’m to blame for not preventing this, and I’ve done badly by you. I can’t apologize enough,” Oscar replied. Surely, he knew that Miralys was the first casualty. Valt was the one who let her soul slip away, however. Because he knew this whole time that a fate like this might have awaited her.
“I pray that you keep in good health. May we meet again in another era and in another way.”
“Yes,” Oscar said. “Indeed.”
Their reunion would be in another life. This would be the last occasion they were king and vassal.
Valt bowed low to Oscar with utter sincerity.
Before he left, Valt asked one thing that was on his mind. “If you could go back in time and do it over, what would you change?”
The king’s eyes widened a little. “I’m not sure. But…”
For the first time that day, Oscar gave a tight smile. “If it was only to save or help myself, I know I wouldn’t be able to go through with anything.”
Thus spoke a young man who was born and raised to be king.
Tinasha was dead.
That meant the Tuldarr treasure vault could no longer be opened, rendering the blue orb of Eleterria inaccessible.
He was seeking the red one, which had been missing for a long time. However, he could hazard a guess based on what he recalled of where it had been used in previous instances. Wandering through the depths of despair, he scoured the mainland for the artifact, following it from person to person.
Years passed in the blink of an eye.
“Somewhere in my mind, I knew that who you were in this lifetime is different from who you were before,” Valt muttered wryly, standing before the small grave where Miralys’s remains were interred. “But you are still you. The world will not diverge. No matter how many lifetimes repeat, you will be yourself, with the same soul.”
It was an unmarked gravestone in the woods. A great many white flowers he had planted bloomed around it. The unpretentious petals brought to mind a memory of Miralys, embarrassed with her arms full of blossoms.
Valt presented the gravestone with a little box. Inside it lay the red orb of Eleterria.
All of the myriad lifetimes he had experienced were the result of this little gem.
It was an artifact that offered unlimited attempts, overwriting the world that should be.
“I will find you again.”
Twenty-five years had passed since her death. Using the red half of Eleterria meant Valt would lose it. Still, he had to go back.
To start fresh and save her.
Valt opened the box and retrieved the item inside.
For the time it took for the world to be demolished and rebuilt anew, he thought only of his beloved wife. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
6. Born as Irreplaceable Copies
“Valt, did you fell asleep?” someone asked, shaking his shoulder and jostling him awake from his position slumped over the table. The girl who roused him was gazing down with concern in her green eyes.
Her gaze finally brought him back to reality, and he reached out to stroke her soft cheek. “Morning.”
When Miralys heard that, she pursed her lips. “You dozed off, which must mean you’re exhausted. We should postpone things.”
“I’m perfectly fine. I was just having a little dream of a time long in the past,” he said before rising to his feet. He had only meant to contemplate a few things, but he must have drifted off, wasting precious time.
Still, what he’d dreamed of, that memory of the far distant past, was noteworthy. Those events no longer existed; no memory of them lingered anywhere.
Seeing them now must have carried some significance.
Valt observed the girl before him—her lustrous silver hair, her pale green eyes. In a few years, she would be a glamorous beauty. For the time being, she seemed the sort who counted on him.
He reached out and took this girl who was once his wife into his arms. “Miralys, thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Where is this coming from? You are exhausted, aren’t you?”
“Never mind that, just let me say this. We’re at an important juncture.”
“Don’t make it sound like we’re going to be torn apart forever. Come on. Dinner is waiting,” she replied exasperatedly.
Valt’s eyes fell shut, and he smiled.
This did need to be said now. He hugged her tighter. “I love you. No matter the life or timeline, I’m always so happy with you.”
None of that was fabricated. It was a truth that wouldn’t change, regardless of how many traumas he suffered.
She had kept him going this entire time.
But this Miralys, who had no memory of any timeline but the present, only frowned. “Are you sure you phrased that right? Anyway, I don’t intend to leave you. What about dinner?”
“Right. Sorry.”
“You’re going to be here at the dining table with me, tomorrow and every day after that. Always.”
“Yes,” Valt responded, keeping his voice cheerful as he buried his face in her hair.
He wished that could be so.
One of their lives had been like that.
It had only happened once, but they’d enjoyed a peaceful existence growing old together until death had them part ways.
Once was enough. The love he’d known then was plenty.
He’d sat down at the dining table with her countless times. He’d been so happy, and at the same time, just as sad.
Amid all the lifetimes, so many it made his head spin, Valt could never return the love she constantly lavished on him. It was far too great.
So in exchange, he gave her something else—undeniable proof of his feelings, though that, too, would fade from her memory eventually.
Now he would take to the stage to bring this interminable comedy to a close.
The day dawned bright and sunny.
Oscar had come to Tuldarr via his personal transportation array. He gazed up at the sky from the passage leading to the cathedral. Clear water fell from a colonnade he spied in the distance, flowing into the gardens.
Farther back past that was the tower where the ruler dwelled…though Tinasha no longer lived there. She’d abdicated yesterday.
Today was Legis’s coronation.
In just half a year, the reins of the kingdom had traded hands. Two days after stepping down from the throne, the sovereign queen would become Oscar’s wife.
As Oscar reflected on the year that had passed so quickly, he mused that his younger self from before Tinasha would be stunned to see what had transpired. That version of himself believed that, curse or no curse, he would choose the safest possible option for his bride. That or he would marry no one at all and adopt an heir instead.
As he’d grown to understand her, he’d fallen in love.
She was reckless and unmanageable, and he knew freedom when he was with her.
That was something he would have never felt in his life had things progressed normally. Her somewhat clingy and entirely peerless love for him had opened a new door. It brought such tremendous joy that it felt like a miracle.
For that reason, he wanted to give her just as much freedom. Perhaps even more. Even if it took his whole life, he wouldn’t regret it.
“I thought that with so many ceremonies taking place day after day, some of the guests would go home, but the crowd hasn’t diminished,” Oscar remarked.
“Don’t tell me that’s why you put your wedding on the last day.” Doan hissed.
“That was just a coincidence,” Oscar replied. Naturally, he’d checked with Tuldarr’s schedule in advance, but he hadn’t selected a date hoping for a lower attendance. His only request was to make it as soon as possible after Tinasha’s abdication.
In return, both Tuldarr and Farsas were receiving and hosting guests who would be present at all the events. Once Legis’s coronation concluded, Tinasha planned to go to Farsas.
“You know, I haven’t seen her wedding gown yet. I’m really looking forward to it,” Oscar said to Doan.
“Really? That’s a surprise.”
“But I did have her dresses for all the other events made to my tastes.”
“There it is,” Doan quipped dryly, as he so often did. Oscar burst out laughing.
Until the day of Tinasha’s coronation, when she announced she would be abdicating, Oscar had never dreamed of such a future for himself. He’d decided to gift her a new gown every year, since he couldn’t spend his life with her. It made him starkly happy that they had wound up together after so many twists and turns.
That was why he had to carry out the duty he had assigned himself.
Pausing before the entrance to the cathedral, Oscar glanced at the royal sword belted at his waist. “I’m praying we keep making it out alive…”
He hoped they would eliminate all plots against them and never give enemies an opening. They would live together, and he would protect his country.
Clouds occasionally streamed past the blue sky out the window. It had to be windy higher up. Tinasha felt a curious longing for the past as she watched.
A door in the back of the room opened, and a young man in formal attire entered. She bowed to him. “All is secure, Your Majesty.”
“I’m not king yet,” answered the man she had called “Your Majesty” with an exasperated smile. At present, Tuldarr had no ruler.
The queen, who had abdicated the day before, flashed a mischievous grin and waved a hand dismissively at the soon-to-be-crowned ruler. “You may as well be. I believe the guests have all arrived.”
“I appreciate them for coming, but it does make me nervous to undergo a coronation ceremony before all the other nations,” Legis admitted.
“You’re lying to me. You’re not nervous at all, are you?”
“You can tell?” Legis said with a laugh, passing some papers to Tinasha.
Legis’s impending royal inauguration didn’t involve inheriting the mystical spirits, instead emphasizing integrity over formality. For the following six months, Tuldarr would remain a monarchy. After that came the shift to the two-pillar system of monarch and parliament.
Legis followed Tinasha’s gaze up to the sky. “I’m glad we have fine weather today. Everyone’s worked so hard to make this come together.”
“Had it been stormy, I would have changed the weather.”
Chuckling, Legis replied, “Spoken like a true spirit sorcerer.”
His placid gaze turned remote as he regarded the city streets in the distance. “I love this country. I am prepared to devote my entire life to it.”
His tone was full of conviction. Once Legis was king, he’d give all of himself to Tuldarr for as long as he reigned. Such was the path he’d chosen.
However, it would make his life a lonely one. Legis was prepared for that, though. As he had always done, he intended to listen to the opinions of those around him, entertain discussions, and pave the way for a new reign. That was how a king ought to live his life in this era.
Tinasha smiled at the young man who had inherited her country, four hundred years later. “I am sure you will be a much better ruler than I was.”
The praise came in a clear, ringing tone. Legis’s cheeks were pink as he grinned at her, but a serious look stole back over his face. “I am very glad that I was able to meet you. You’ve saved the country more times than I can count.”
“I feel like I’ve caused nothing but trouble for you over the past several months, though,” she answered, sighing.
Legis had helped Tinasha just as much. It was because of him that her reign was half as long as she’d originally planned. His assistance with royal duties had also permitted her to indulge in selfish things on occasion. None of that would have been possible in the Dark Age.
Safety for mages and peace for all citizens were not mutually exclusive, yet were rarely found together.
Moved almost to tears, Tinasha bowed to Legis. “I should be the one offering you my gratitude. You’ve taught me so much.”
“Not at all. I’ve learned from you. Come back and visit whenever you feel like it.”
“Now that you’ve offered, I definitely will. I know Oscar’s going to waste no time teasing me once we’re married.”
“Please do. I’ll keep your rooms open. You can confide in me anytime,” Legis assured her.
“I’ll admit to feeling hesitant about the prospect of wasting a king’s time with my personal gripes and grievances…”
After four centuries, Tinasha no longer had a home to go back to. Once she married into Farsas, she would have a new place as its queen consort. It meant the world to her that Legis and Tuldarr would still be a home for whenever she had trouble. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
“I’m so glad I could come to this time period,” she stated, meaning every word.
Legis smiled. “I’m delighted that I could be of service. I wish you all the happiness in the world.”
He bowed deeply to her before leaving for the coronation. Sunlight streamed in from the windows, shining off the back of his official dress. Tinasha watched him go with a myriad of emotions in her throat.
What was despair?
It wasn’t the same thing as death.
Death was something he had experienced many times already. He had repeatedly witnessed his own passing and the passing of others.
Tragedy had numbed his emotions.
He stood frozen at the beginning of the beginning, screaming and insane. Ultimately, he had come to believe that no matter when or how a person dies, death itself had no meaning.
The coronation began on schedule.
Tinasha was not seated with the guests, for she was in charge of security. That stationed her right to the side of the entryway, where she could monitor the network of spells she had laid out.
She stood to the back of the central altar, and it obscured her view, creating a blind spot of the front. Still, she knew Oscar was seated there. They had both been so busy in the past few days that they hadn’t been able to meet, which was in line with the Farsas tradition for the betrothed anyway. As often happened whenever Tinasha was incredibly swamped, the whole thing felt like some nostalgic dream of bygone days.
“Although he’d probably be annoyed with me if I told him that,” she murmured.
As her wedding was not for another two days, she was between titles at present. While Tuldarr treated her like a royal, she was no longer a queen, nor a princess.
She had taken advantage of that to position herself behind the scenes of the coronation.
Tinasha’s dark eyes were closed so she could focus her awareness on the defensive spells, but she still heard Legis delivering his opening remarks up on the dais. His pointed yet tolerant message expressed his personality very well; Tinasha smiled.
For the time being, she didn’t detect anything suspicious. The coronation was scheduled to finish in another five minutes. Tinasha sensed Pamyra’s magic as the woman approached on patrol, and she waved to her without opening her eyes.
And that was when Tinasha furrowed her brow.
There was something—a voice only she could hear was calling.
The magic was faint, though that did not reflect on the strength of the speaker’s power. Instead, it meant the magic had been engineered only to reach her, cleverly weaving through the castle wards. Had such an adroit mage in possession of such spectacular magic served the court, their name might have gone down in history.
Instead, this person operated in the shadows, plotting and scheming. Tinasha couldn’t imagine what this certain individual, endowed with vast archives and memories of lost lifetimes, was thinking, or what they might attempt.
The message that came to her consisted of congratulations on the new king’s coronation and well wishes on her upcoming nuptials. But there was no way she could accept that at face value, nor did she trust the sender to be genuine.
Legis’s speech finished.
Raucous applause burst forth at this birth of a new king. The fervor and excitement in the cathedral reached a fever pitch.
With this, a new chapter of history would dawn on Tuldarr. Tinasha wished the people living in this country eternal happiness. Hopefully, they would know the protection of a well-founded government.
That was one more reason why she couldn’t let any schemers do as they pleased.
The network of security spells Tinasha had set for the coronation had fifteen parts, each monitored by several mages. She was only within the spells’ coverage to keep an eye on them. Her absence would not alter the magic.
The decision took only a moment. Tinasha honed her consciousness to a point and followed the voice, locating it at the edge of a very small, very fine hidden spell.
He wasn’t going to get away again. She wouldn’t let him.
This time, she would capture him, control him, and make him surrender. There could be no mercy.
At last, she located him. He was within Tuldarr but was a considerable distance away.
Such a gap didn’t matter to Tinasha, though. She forced a link to the place, tracing his magic and pulling the coordinates from his spell.
As her lips curled in a defiant grin, she vanished with no incantation, leaving the cathedral brimming with enthusiasm.
Tinasha’s surroundings rearranged around her. She had landed in the middle of a wide field. Wind streamed across the grass, making it undulate like waves.
Standing in the center of the field was Valt, who smiled delightedly at her arrival. “Ah, so you came. You’re the only one who could trace my location, despite all my camouflaging.”
Without answering, Tinasha lifted her right hand, placing a teleportation ban on the area.
Valt looked surprised, but it was unclear whether this was because of the speed of her action, her decision, or the complexity of the spell. His tone was glowing as he praised her. “Wonderful work as always. But there’s no need to rush. I have no intention of running.”
“How admirable. Does that mean you’re ready to die?”
“Of course. I am ready to die anywhere and at any time. I’ve been ready for a long time. However…this moment will never come again. Do you truly understand the significance of that?”
Valt gazed up. Clouds drifted rapidly across the sky.
Loneliness he failed to suppress shone in his eyes—an emotion he couldn’t share with others.
He pointed to a spot on the empty field. “Once upon a time, an azure tower stood there. The tower was equipped with a series of trials, be it traps or monsters. Those who beat them all and reached the top level would be granted a wish from the witch who lived there. But now that tower doesn’t exist—it never did.”
“And was that witch me?”
“It was. The Witch of the Azure Moon—the fifth witch and hailed as the strongest. That is a version of you that no longer exists. Are you surprised?”
“A little, although I had some vague idea,” Tinasha replied, tucking her black hair behind her ears to keep the wind from whipping it up.
How had she been married to Oscar before the world was changed, despite their differing eras?
Why hadn’t he ever explained it?
There was only one sort of being who possessed mighty power and lived for centuries.
Tinasha had remained unconvinced by that alone, however. That was why she’d frozen up when Valt said that name so abruptly the last time they spoke.
Valt’s gaze dropped to the barren plain at their feet. “You built a tower in this wasteland and lived there alone. You were much stronger and colder than you are now. That’s why I rejoiced when I discovered that you hadn’t become a witch this time and that you had put yourself in a magic sleep. Come, let’s go and retrieve the other half of Eleterria. It’s time to bring all of this to an end.”
Valt drew out a small white box. Both of them knew what was inside. While on guard against him, for she had no idea what he was thinking, Tinasha licked her lips. “I’m not going. Give that back.”
“You’ll go, and willingly. I know how effective hostages are at swaying you,” Valt said lightly, and he snapped his fingers. The world shuddered a bit.
A hint of magic drifted through the air. Tinasha frowned. “What are you…?”
“I’ve put just a bit of power into a spell. You can tell what it is, can’t you?” Valt replied, closing his eyes and looking confident.
Tinasha glared daggers at that calm, composed face and followed the faint traces of magic to their source. It went on and on, stretching far into the distance on a path that branched and forked, but finally, she grasped the complete picture.
Once Tinasha understood, she was struck dumb. “That’s insane.”
“Do you see? The best hostage I could take to move you would be Tuldarr itself.”
Valt’s spell was an enormous magic circle linking five cities and towns in a ring, with the castle city in the center. Rigged up out of sight, it would erupt into a conflagration once triggered. The flames would then consume the lives of all inside, using them as catalysts to summon up more magic until they swirled into a firestorm that would destroy the entire country. The spell was designed to massacre on a terrifyingly large scale.
A twisted expression formed on Valt’s face. “If you refuse to cooperate, I will ruin Tuldarr.”
Tinasha shuddered to imagine such an unprecedented forbidden curse.
There was, at least, magic in place within the capital city that prevented any unauthorized widespread spells. Yet this had slipped past that defense.
“No… Did you shrink down the magic for the spell itself to the smallest it could go? You made it so weak it would never have any effect, ordinarily. To compensate, you made the configuration as intricate and complex as possible…”
“Ultimately, it’s much more difficult to defend than to attack. All the deciding power lies with the aggressor: where to attack, how to do it, and when. Admittedly, it would’ve been difficult for any ordinary person to lay the groundwork on such a massive scale. We drew up dozens and dozens of spells so small you wouldn’t notice until the very last minute, and then we connected them. Oh, but it did make us uneasy when someone discovered a half-finished spell once and tried to use it,” Valt explained blithely, though the level of spellwork here was anything but normal.
To have come so far with such a massive, forbidden work required vast reserves of magic, exceptional spell-casting ability, and fierce tenacity.
And not only that…
“Where did you learn of this spell?” Tinasha demanded. “There are many forbidden curses that use souls as catalysts to summon magic, but this is one that was used four hundred years ago, and no records remain of it.”
It was the very spell that Lanak, Tinasha’s fellow candidate for the throne, sought to use on her when she was young. Here it was again, targeting her anew, but knowledge of this magic should have perished.
Valt gave her a wan smile. “We acquire knowledge and pass it down. Some of us, in lifetimes past, were close to your fiancé.”
“This isn’t funny. Are you saying that your people have acted in the shadows of history this entire time?”
“Surely not. The Time-Reader clan is not as all-encompassing as you may believe. Our founder was only one person. The next heir can’t awaken to their powers until their predecessor dies. The only thing we know about the other heirs, past and future, is their names. Everything else we must relay via journals and memoirs. It’s an inconvenient, lonely existence,” Valt said bitterly, his face conveying only sadness and gloom.
But then his enigmatic smile returned. “It has taken more than three months, from the time we began laying the groundwork for the spell up until the finishing touches. We had to be exceedingly careful not to trip Tuldarr’s surveillance network and alert you. Ironically, you would have noticed if we’d prepared this in Farsas. Considering the scope of this spell, it is constantly emitting low-grade magic. However, Tuldarr is a nation of mages. The faintest trace of odd magic wouldn’t give you pause, would it?”
Tinasha gritted her teeth at the enormity of her blunder. Yes, she had sensed stray bits of magical power, and she’d found them strange—many times now. But as Valt said, she had never investigated.
And now, her carelessness had brought her here, to the worst possible outcome.
Caught in the full force of Tinasha’s murderous stare, Valt shrugged. “Allow me to say that I am not the one who cast this spell. If you kill me, the caster will trigger it. Ah, and don’t think of telling anyone. No one can do a thing to stop this. Within the spell are five definition names.”
Such was the thoroughness of Valt’s plan, and how cautiously he had arranged everything.
Tinasha’s irrepressible emotions made her magic start to roil and seethe. “You would go this far to get Eleterria…? What do you mean to do by changing the past?”
“I have a mere personal wish,” he answered, which was the exact opposite of what Tinasha, one who would do anything for her country, had expected.
She understood that some people weren’t like her. For most people, in fact, what was worth doing and what they wanted to do didn’t equal out. Valt was a prime example.
“I feel no guilt at all, no matter how many I must sacrifice. Regardless of how I die, it is only for a moment. It’s all overwritten before long. That’s how we’ve always done things.”
Tinasha sensed a quietly flickering flame deep within the man’s eyes and voice.
A cynical grin twisted Valt’s lips. “Shall I let you in on a little something? Do you want to know why I picked Tuldarr for my target?”
“Isn’t it because it’s my homeland?”
“Yes, that’s certainly part of it. I know the nation is your weak point. You’d never abandon Tuldarr. But there’s more to it than that. Ordinarily, that country shouldn’t exist.”
“Excuse me?”
What was he on about? Tuldarr had been founded five hundred years before Tinasha’s birth. It was one of the most long-lived nations in all the land.
What did Valt mean by claiming it shouldn’t exist? How had things gotten overwritten to make that…?
Gasping, Tinasha clapped a trembling hand over her mouth. “No…!”
That couldn’t be. He was referring to her.
On that night four centuries ago, she would have been the only casualty if he hadn’t stepped in.
After suffering a betrayal by her only family in the world, she fled Tuldarr and became a witch. That was the original sequence of events. Yet because she’d met Oscar back then and he told her that he knew she could control the colossal magic coursing and raging through her, none of it had ever transpired. Because of Tinasha…
“Tuldarr actually fell the night they ripped you open,” Valt stated, the words sounding heartless to Tinasha’s ears.
She pressed an unconscious hand to her unmarred stomach. “But how? I controlled that magic…”
“Yes. You triumphed even on the brink of death. But the catalyst for the forbidden curse was not the same. Magic summoned using Lanak as the sacrifice would be quite different from that summoned by offering you. You were unable to take it all in, and the wild power destroyed Tuldarr and sent shock waves through the rest of the mainland. In the true course of events, almost all of what was once Tuldarr is now a barren wasteland razed by a forbidden curse.”
“But… No…”
Her vision was going dark.
The energy was sapped from her body.
Tinasha struggled to breathe. Without her will to guide it, her body broke into a shivering fit.
Tuldarr had been her life.
Spilling blood had never been something Tinasha had questioned. She’d killed her emotions, too. Even when she couldn’t live up to a single one of her ideals, she had made the best choice possible. That was how it had been since she was born. Growing up all alone in a huge, empty wing of the castle, the betrayal of the man she saw as her brother, and the sacrifice of the only person to love and rescue her—she had borne all of it to keep Tuldarr safe.
It went beyond duty. Tinasha had endured out of love for Tuldarr, despite its taking everything she had to give.
And now, she was being told that it was never meant to exist. In the true course of events, Tuldarr would have perished with her.
“It can’t be…”
Her throat was dry as a bone, and she could barely force the words out.
Valt eyed Tinasha with a modicum of sadness. “When Eleterria alters the world, it remakes itself by keeping a bare minimum of things the same. However, the survival of a nation that should have perished is too much. It doesn’t pain me at all to take Tuldarr as my hostage, because it should never have existed anyway. And what about you? Does it not pain you at all to look at Cezar, which lost so many of its people because Tuldarr survived? If Tuldarr had collapsed, as it should have, that would have never happened to Cezar.”
Tinasha had nothing to say in the face of such a brutal provocation.
Cezar’s downfall came after it murdered its own people to give rise to an army of the dead. Could that have been averted in a world without a prosperous Tuldarr?
If all of this were true, that meant that Tinasha—and Oscar—were at fault for altering history.
“I…”
Tinasha felt as though she’d plummeted after losing her footing.
Alarm bells went off inside her head, pleading that she denounce her enemy’s claims as lies.
However, Tinasha did not heed that warning.
She closed her weary eyes. The discord felt like it lasted for an eternity.
Yes, it might all be a lie to throw her off. Yet it could just as easily be true. There was no way she could know.
What was she to do, then?
She lifted her head. Her dark eyes blazed with the bitterness of her decision and with her sheer force of will.
“Even if you’re right, I won’t allow you to claim your actions are guiltless. You are the one who summoned up an evil god in Cezar, and you are the one attempting to destroy Tuldarr.”
When Valt heard that declaration, he couldn’t hide the bitterness in his smile. “That’s true. We’re both at fault. We keep betraying the world.”
How could one choose what to keep and what to abandon?
Humans had made their selections repeatedly, over and over. And this was the end result.
“I will protect my country. Tuldarr is alive and well. That may be the result of altering the past, but I will never choose to abandon a country that is here now.”
This was Tinasha’s conclusion. She would protect the people in front of her.
Although she stood upon the back of an old crime, her only option was to move forward from where she stood.
Valt’s gaze turned distant once he heard that. “I suspected that would be your answer. You’ve never turned your back on your people, even dead ones. You’ve chosen to live alone for four hundred years, all for them.”
“I don’t like it when you talk about things I have no memory of.”
“It’s true. You were very fierce. Once, you even gave your life to save the people of Farsas,” Valt said. His voice choked up for only a moment before he regained composure. “You will accede to my demands to save your country. Is the remaining half of Eleterria in the Tuldarr treasure vault?”
Tinasha hesitated over how to answer.
Could she hope to trick him? She wanted to discover what Valt was after.
“What will you do with both of the orbs? You only need one to change the past.”
“I know. I’ve used one myself. But I want to change the future.”
“You want to travel forward in time?”
Whether going to the past or future, both were about knowing what would happen down the line and dealing with it before it happened. When traveling to the past, however, the user ceased to exist once events were sufficiently altered, and they were erased from the new future.
Jumping to the future meant that the person who returned with knowledge of eventualities would not disappear. As long as the present was the true timeline, they could keep making moves forever. That was certainly an advantage.
“What exactly do you intend to accomplish?”
“I’ll tell you soon enough, once I have both. Now, let’s hear your answer.”
Tinasha couldn’t delay things any longer. Her very country was on the line.
With her voice dry and hoarse, Tinasha told Valt the truth. “The other Eleterria…is in the Farsas treasure vault.”
She bit her lip. There was no knowing the right decision. It was all she could manage to follow the course that kept things from falling to pieces before her.
When the attendees filtered into the great hall after Legis’s coronation concluded, Oscar—one of the guests of honor—noticed that his fiancée was not there. “What? Is she planning to lurk behind the scenes the entire time?”
And here he thought he’d get to see her in full regalia for the first time in a while. While it was Farsas custom for the bride and groom not to see each other before the ceremony, that didn’t mean he was a fan of it. Just thinking about how long it had been since he’d last glimpsed her adorable smile sent his mood plummeting.
All that said, he hadn’t come for her. He was there to congratulate Legis, the new king. Farsas and Tuldarr would have a long and fruitful relationship going forward.
With that on Oscar’s mind as he made his way over to his new fellow king, he was surprised to find Legis approaching him as well. After the briefest of greetings, he leaned in to Oscar and whispered, “Do you know where she is?”
“Tinasha? I haven’t seen her… Did she do something again?”
“She’s gone. Evidently, she vanished toward the end of the coronation and hasn’t come back since.”
“Oh.”
The two kings exchanged glances, unsure of what to make of this inexplicable and unpredicted turn of events.
In a tight voice, Oscar said, “I think Valt believes the other half of Eleterria is in Tuldarr.”
“I’ll launch a search for him immediately, including around the treasure vault. He might have set a trap there.”
“To be on the safe side, I’ll return to Farsas and notify you if I learn anything.”
“Please do,” said Legis.
The pair had no idea that, at that very moment, Tuldarr itself was balancing on the scales of destiny.
Oscar stalked out of the great hall with a foreboding look on his face.
Valt’s recollection of his very first life was already hazy.
His father hadn’t known what he was until Valt was around five. That year, when his grandfather passed away in some distant city, his father inherited the title of Time-Reader. Valt couldn’t imagine his father’s surprise, nor how much it shook him to experience his first rewinding of time. His father was a gentle, kind man, though Valt did recall him occasionally muttering, “That can’t be. Impossible.”
In his first life, Valt was twenty-one when his father died in a carriage accident. Upon his demise, Valt realized everything about the magic orbs that could alter the past and the clan of Time-Readers who kept records of lost histories.
It took him a while to believe it all, though, because he hadn’t yet seen these archives he was meant to safeguard.
He continued his life, much the same as his father had, thinking, That can’t be. Impossible. Until one day, time rewound.
Valt’s father had been astonished the first time he experienced it. He thought he’d died, but he discovered he was living his life over from an earlier point—back when his son was only an infant. Things continued, and he remained perplexed until he died when Valt was twenty-one.
That repeated twenty-seven times.
Valt had never spoken to his father about a Time-Reader heir’s duty, because Valt had no memory of the heirs while his father was alive. His father left no arrangements of any kind for after his death. There were heaps of their ancestors’ journals and records stacked in his room, though. Valt’s father had taken them after his own father’s passing.
The number of times an heir experienced a rewinding of time varied. Valt’s own far eclipsed his father’s, but even his had been on the high side, owing to the many times the red orb of Eleterria changed hands during that period.
But despite the alterations, history still progressed in fits and starts. Time regressed by decades, but not centuries. Those heirs unfortunate enough to be living through an era of repeated misuse of Eleterria had to bear it in silence and wait for their age to pass.
That had been too much for Valt’s father.
Valt remembered the one and only time his father had lectured him on the subject.
“Once I’m dead, you’ll know for the first time what I was and what you are.”
He was talking about the artifact. Perhaps those were his parting words to his son.
“The world is waiting for one last straw. That which will undo all the interventions and restore it to its original shape.”
What he said was undoubtedly true.
That was why the world kept chasing Miralys down.
“Valt, are you okay?” the girl called to him telepathically, her voice anxious.
“Yeah,” he replied, still facing forward. He couldn’t tell her the truth. He had to keep it hidden until the end. If she knew, she would place him above her own future. That had happened on countless occasions, so he would prevent it this time. At last, she would know a happy existence.
The hallways of Farsas Castle looked as peaceful as ever. A woman with long black hair walked a few paces ahead of Valt, her beauty catching the eyes of passing guards and mages who bowed to her. It was a sight he hadn’t seen in a very long time. There was a clear dollop of fear mixed into the gazes, however.
The Witch of the Azure Moon was the strongest in all the land, possessed of the mightiest magic in history.
The invisibility spell she had placed on Valt held fast; no one noticed his presence. Even the court mages were fooled. Such was her power.
The two of them strode along quickly toward the Farsas treasure vault. Once they were out of view, Valt whispered to Tinasha, “Is teleporting directly into the treasure vault beyond even your capabilities?”
“Of course not, but we’d be detected immediately. Would you like the castle to discover that something is amiss?”
“No. We’ll keep going like this,” he said. Valt knew this palace inside and out. He followed after Tinasha but was sure of his way, had he been alone. After a sigh, he remarked, “I never expected you to acquire one of them only to transfer it to Farsas.”
“I knew you wouldn’t expect it, which is exactly why I did so.”
“You certainly trust the Akashia swordsman a great deal.”
“Of course I do,” Tinasha spat.
Valt focused on that reaction. When last had he seen her like this? He was now the only one to remember her as the queen consort of this nation.
“Destiny…has always had some twists in store for you. I do truly wish for you to be happy, but you’re just too powerful for that. I’m sorry.” It was an honest apology. Valt really did wish that Tinasha could live out her days pleasantly.
It wasn’t to be, though. The world was like that all too often.
Tinasha glanced at Valt. He couldn’t decipher what emotion flickered across those dark eyes. Decisively and vehemently, she hissed. “My life is entirely what I have chosen.”
She sounded exactly like the queen of Farsas she had been in another life.
Tinasha turned left down a different corridor and faced two treasure vault guards.
While surprised to see Tinasha, they bowed to her. Sheepishly, she explained, “My apologies, but Oscar has asked me to retrieve something. Could you let me pass?”
Only the authorized were allowed entry to the treasure vault. That was how things normally worked, but everyone knew that Tinasha would be queen in two days and how much the king doted on her.
She was powerful enough to force her way in if she desired. There was no need for her to request permission, which lent credence to her story.
That line of thinking informed the guards’ decision. “Yes, my lady. Please be careful.”
“Thank you,” Tinasha replied as the guards willingly stepped aside to let her through. Once out of their sight, she breathed a little sigh. After turning two more corners, she saw the treasure vault come into view. She approached its heavy doors and pushed them open with magic.
Within was a pedestal that had held one part of Eleterria until Valt stole it from this very spot. Now it held another box. Recognizing it, Valt exhaled with relief.
As she dismantled the barrier around the pedestal, Tinasha snapped, “There. Is that what you need? Will you undo the spell in Tuldarr?”
“Not just yet. We’re only getting started,” Valt said, drawing an identical box from his pocket and offering it to Tinasha. She frowned at him suspiciously.
In resounding tones, he said, “Now you will destroy Eleterria for me and fulfill my mission.”
Tinasha stood aghast. “Excuse me?”
The severity in Valt’s voice did not falter as he explained, “Both must be destroyed at the same time. Breaking one will trigger the other to overwrite its twin’s demise. This is why there are two.”
The two orbs protected each other. Although only one was needed to go back in time, there were two to ensure that both remained.
“In the past, I’ve destroyed one of the orbs numerous times, only for time to rewind. Eventually, I learned that both had to be shattered simultaneously, and you are the only one powerful enough to accomplish the feat. You broke an outsiders’ artifact just the other day, did you not?”
Valt was referring to the Mirror of Oblivion.
Shamelessly, he continued, “Yes, you’re the strongest in all of history, but because you didn’t become a witch, you’re an inferior version of who you were meant to be. That’s why I tested your power. How fortunate for me that you absorbed Simila’s incarnation.”
“You…”
Every action, this entire time, had played right into Valt’s hands on a chessboard he had set.
From the shadows, he’d puppeteered events, sending formidable enemies after Tinasha in a bid to hone her power.
While awaiting his chance to steal Eleterria back, Valt had prepared Tinasha for her role as the architect of the orbs’ destruction. The Simila incident had enhanced Tinasha’s magic tremendously.
But why did he want the artifact destroyed?
Without making any effort to hide her confusion, Tinasha questioned, “Didn’t you want to change the future?”
“I do. I want to rip down this mess of a canvas that’s been painted over too many times and restore the true future.”
For a moment, fury burned in Valt’s eyes, but he swiftly quashed it, replacing the fire with his usual placid smile. He placed the box holding the stolen Eleterria on the pedestal.
“The records say it all began with the death of a child. The cause of death isn’t mentioned, and it’s irrelevant anyway. As the child’s mother sobbed over the corpse, she sensed someone nearby. A voice told her that it offered the salvation she desired. She then received the two Eleterria orbs, used them to go back in time, saved her child, and died.”
“And it was an…outsider who gave them to her?”
“Yes. An interloper from beyond our world. You don’t seem to find that terribly difficult to believe.”
“Well, according to Travis, I should have no reason to doubt the existence of these outsiders, considering we know that their artifacts exist. Evidently…he once met someone who came from outside our world.”
“Really? It’s the first I’ve heard of that. I thought the outsiders only sent in objects, never entering personally. There are a total of twelve such artifacts. You’ve destroyed the ruins and the mirror, leaving ten.”
Both the ruins, which captured and stored information on humans, and the mirror, which absorbed and entrapped souls, were unusually powerful and endowed with abilities that defied the laws of magic.
“So outsiders really do exist, then,” Tinasha said.
“They do. I don’t know what they are, but they’re certainly not deities. Following the Age of Gods and prior to the start of the Dark Age, there is a blank period of time. That was when they zeroed in on our world, introduced these experimental items, and recorded what we do like we were toys in a miniature garden.”
Valt studied Tinasha’s reaction.
Before, in many other lives, he had told her this truth. In response, the witch always asked, “What exactly is this family of Time-Readers?”
This time was no different, as Tinasha repeated the inquiry verbatim. She never changed. Valt chuckled before giving the same answer.
“We are the descendants of that first child saved by time travel. Ever since Eleterria was first given to humans, one member of my lineage per generation has been trapped as part of the artifact’s power. Our souls are used as record sheets.”
“What…? Your souls?”
“Outsiders’ artifacts defy the laws of magic because the artifacts are each powered by fundamentals from beyond this world. Didn’t it strike you as odd that a tiny little orb could be so powerful as to overwrite the world by turning back time?”
“Well…yes. It didn’t map to the scale of it at all.”
“Exactly. That’s because Eleterria incorporates the soul of the current Time-Reader heir when it activates. Once it’s triggered, it calls up a specified point in time from the pool of memories the world has stored and reproduces it. The soul of the heir serves as the anchor that stabilizes that specified point and then acts as the record board where a log of usage is inscribed. The names of all the heirs, past and future, are also written upon that board. Our ability to retain memories of the lifetimes we’ve repeated is only a by-product of all of that.”
Whoever the outsider that came up with such a mechanism was, they must have been ignorant of the acute suffering of the humans whose souls would be used for this. Because Valt’s family was only alive thanks to Eleterria, the system would abuse them for centuries to come.
Valt tapped his forehead, his smile not reaching his eyes. “I have a complete log of everyone who’s ever used Eleterria and why stored in here. At present, the last time it was used was sixteen years ago so that the late Queen Rosalia of Farsas could save her son’s life. And Eleterria’s most massive overwrite happened four hundred years ago, when the twenty-first king of Farsas, Oscar Lyeth Increatos Loz Farsas, changed the past for his wife, a witch. It all adds up, doesn’t it?”
Tinasha’s jaw had dropped, which Valt observed with a tight grin.
Lives, rewound abruptly because someone else wished it so. Memories, accruing and overlapping. That would be enough torture to crush the average person. The worst part of it all was that it was only a side effect.
Irritation welling up within him, Valt let his gaze wander. Slowly, his head turned as his gaze went beyond the castle walls and onto the wider world. Finally, he fixed his eyes on Tinasha again. “You probably don’t understand, being the current version of yourself. But as a witch, you comprehended me a little, as you were also someone who had lived for a long time under the crushing weight of your memory.”
An image of that all-powerful witch superimposed itself over the present Tinasha’s face.
They were the same and yet very different. The Tinasha who was familiar with the eons of time always had a vaguely sad, self-deprecating aura.
“I’m not talking about four centuries here,” Valt went on. “I’ve endured through millennia. There is only ever one heir who is unable to share the experience of repeating lifetimes with anyone else. Go on, visualize the horror of it. No matter what, my father always committed suicide. When I was seventeen, when I was thirteen, when I was ten… Everything you thought you’d already lived through comes back, and you must experience it again. It becomes unbearable.”
At first, Valt decided his ancestors should have never had children, that someone somewhere should have cut off the line. It wasn’t until much later that he learned why that wouldn’t have solved anything.
“Sometimes, I’ve gone back only a day in time. Sometimes I’ve returned many years. I’ve seen things rewound to before my birth and relived that time. We don’t know when or where time will repeat, but it will, mercilessly. Only at the very beginning was I happy to learn what the future held. I grew sick of it fast. It needled at me, made me feel like I would burst. I’ve died more times than I can count, but then I’m back again. How many more times must I repeat this?”
A tragedy taken too far became a comedy.
On this stage, all the players of the world were dancing against their will. It was time to bring the curtain down.
“I’ve attempted to destroy Eleterria, but ordinary power levels cannot break an outsiders’ artifact, let alone two of them. Along the way, I realized you were the only person capable of doing it, but either I wasn’t able to get in touch with you, or I died before I could. Everything that could go wrong did, and I had my share of frustrating experiences. But then something happened that wasn’t supposed to. Someone went back four hundred years in time and changed history. You were no longer a witch.”
“Me not becoming a witch is something that wasn’t supposed to happen?” Tinasha muttered.
Valt gave her a pained smile. “Do you know what must transpire in order for Eleterria to activate? Have you wondered how it gets the coordinates for the targeted point in time? The soul of the current heir acts as the anchor, but that’s not what makes things rewind to the desired time in specific.”
It was a crafty artifact. Valt knew because he’d used it himself.
“Those orbs react to human attachment—love, hate, whatever. Any strong emotion will set one off. That means that a jump of hundreds of years shouldn’t be possible, ordinarily speaking. No one could feel such a powerful attachment to someone that far in the past, right? But there was a lone exception—a man who loved a witch and made her his wife. Your husband.”
Tinasha’s eyes widened.
The artifact was designed so anyone sufficiently determined could change the past.
But that was only half of it. Resolve alone with no feeling behind it wouldn’t trigger the artifact.
Only the desire to use Eleterria, even at the cost of one’s own life, would remake the world anew.
“The heir four hundred years ago must have been pretty surprised. Just when he thought the cycle was over and he could enjoy his final rest, his own era started up again.”
It was all too easy for Valt to imagine his ancestor’s shock. He must have felt astonishment that bordered on despair—enough to make him scrawl a curse upon future generations in the records.
“But on the contrary, it gave me hope. I dared to think…if you weren’t a witch, and if you came to this time period in search of him, then this may be the timeline where everything goes as planned.”
And now, that hope was paying off.
All of Valt’s meticulous preparations had successfully tripped Tinasha up.
Tinasha, with all of her fantastic power, had rarely showed herself in previous timelines. Even once she met and married Oscar, she would refuse to listen to any request that sounded remotely fishy.
But she was different now. While she could be cruel, she was also lost.
The fact that Tuldarr had not fallen to ruin also worked to Valt’s benefit. He knew that when she’d been a witch, she chose to continue living for the Tuldarr citizens who perished and turned to souls without any sense of who they were. He was well aware that Tinasha would never, under any circumstances, abandon her country.
This chance would never come again.
If Valt let it slip by, salvation would elude him and his beloved for all time.
He had to detach them from the world before it caught up.
“There is no such thing as a world where everyone is happy. Saving one person means that someone else will be sacrificed. And Eleterria will always get used as long as there is misery in the world. But I’m done with all of that. Our worldviews are all so limited. The exact same sand dune collapses only to be rebuilt, over and over. How much longer must I go along with it? It’s foolish and selfish to believe that saving those important to you means nothing else matters. It’s infuriating.”
It really was foolish. And Valt was one of those fools.
He eyed the woman who would become the world’s trump card.
“That’s why I want us to end this. You’re going to destroy it. You’re the only one who can.”
At last, this farce would draw to a close.
Tinasha stared back at Valt. Then she glanced over at the two orbs on the pedestal—the artifact given to a mother who lost her child a long, long time ago.
That was how everything started. And ever since, Eleterria had inflicted pain on human souls and caused indissoluble anguish, even as it reflected people’s strongest emotions and desires. It had altered reality, something that should have been unimaginable.
All because of one simple wish to save someone else.
That was certainly absurd and self-centered. And yet…
“I once tried to use it myself to save a child who was killed,” Tinasha admitted softly, her eyes on the Eleterria orb. “But it didn’t activate. Probably because, as you said, I had no true attachment to that boy.”
If she were the mother of that fallen child, she would have been able to use it to rewind time, without question. But it wasn’t to be. That bereaved mother did not have an otherworldly artifact—only the cold, dead body of her son. Tinasha could still vividly remember the sight of her sobbing, hunched over his corpse.
“Yes, it may be true that not being able to go back in time to save another is natural and right. All of you have suffered so much from Eleterria’s use. I can’t ignore that,” Tinasha said, tipping her head up to gaze at Valt. Her face was puckered, as if she were on the verge of tears. “But I can’t deny the wishes of those who use it. That’s the human…heart we’re talking about.”
She couldn’t refute Valt’s despair and suffering, yet she also acknowledged the desires of those who sought to alter history.
Tinasha’s eyes grew hot with tears, and she looked away. Her heart ached because that little girl who’d been rescued once still lived within her. She understood the mentality of those who used the orbs. Changing the past and history would revise people’s relationships, too. While it was foolish to desire that someone else live, even at the cost of another’s existence, she also found it to be a very sacred thing.
Valt’s voice cracked as he replied, “You only feel that way because you were rescued by someone who used Eleterria…”
“No. I’m positive it was only a coincidence that allowed him to save me. When we first met, he said that he didn’t know why he’d traveled back in time, and he wanted to return.”
Oscar had unwittingly activated Eleterria. That proved how great his love for his wife was.
Thus, Tinasha’s own experiences weren’t informing her opinion. “A desire to save the people we love, even if it goes against all logic, is an extremely common, extremely human emotion. Denying that would be tantamount to refuting our humanity.”
“Even if…the end result is the reshaping of your fate and that of all those around you? You never know if someone’s tampering with history would render you unhappy.”
“Even so, a person’s strength of emotion is what activates Eleterria. That means it is a tool for human salvation.”
Tinasha touched a corner of the pedestal, finding the stone to be colder than her tears. “The true object of your resentment is not the people who used the orbs. There’s a real reason why you feel you must destroy Eleterria rather than simply seal them from use. What is it?”
The wounds Eleterria had inflicted on Valt were surely unspeakable.
But why was he so dead set on destroying the artifact completely, which would be far more difficult than only rendering it permanently unusable? She had yet to press him on that.
Tinasha tore her gaze away from the red and blue orbs and stared at Valt. As he looked back, his eyes blazed with a soul ground down by many, many long years—a flame that would never be extinguished.
“The world is waiting for a revolution.”
“What?”
“That’s what my father said. He used to say that each time our world is altered, another pin gets stuck into it. So it’s waiting for one last straw that will uproot the changes and restore things to their original form.”
“‘The world is waiting for a revolution’…”
It was the exact same phrase uttered by the Witch of the Water when she gave Tinasha’s fortune.
Did that mean that the way she and Valt were facing off was also part of the world’s wishes?
In a bland, emotionless tone, Valt said, “Sooner or later, it will reach its limit. Someone has to do this. Our world has already reached a standstill. The furthest date in history is only another thirty-one years from now. No matter how often time is rewound, things never progress beyond that point. One Eleterria or the other will be used. Don’t you think that’s abnormal, even considering that this era has seen record levels of time travel? Eleterria’s survival means everything will stagnate.”
It was a frightening truth. Tinasha’s eyes grew wide again.
But while that was an answer to her question, it was not his answer.
“Then what will happen to the world when the orbs are destroyed?” Tinasha pressed.
Would things go on turning without Eleterria? Or…?
No answer came.
Tinasha stared at Valt.
His eyes were filled with both all-knowing insight and silent resolve. She had seen that look on the battlefield before, and she understood what it meant.
The scales were perennially out of balance, with only the most cherished things in all the world weighed against one another.
It was certainly arrogant to believe one person could save everything.
But would choosing the things on one side of the scale over the other lead to strength? Was it possible to change without sacrifice?
Tinasha gazed evenly at the man before her. His eyes shone with the bright light of one who no longer had a choice.
Valt watched her with bated breath.
He didn’t think Tinasha should know this. But he did want to tell her. Perhaps she would understand him then. If this version of Tinasha were the queen he had served, he might have revealed everything.
But if he did, Miralys would learn the truth, too, as their senses were linked at the moment. And she could never know. It would shake her terribly. She would tear down the spell, which would mean defeat.
Valt and Miralys had first met a long, long time ago. Back then, Valt had already relived his own life many times. He was the latest in a long, unbroken line of heirs. While wandering, tired of enduring his own distorted existence, he rescued a grievously wounded girl in a forest. He shared some of his blood with her, using magic.
After that, the girl, who had no family and no ties, joined him. She was a bit of an odd one, only showing fondness for him. When had he started loving her?
They’d lived together, and, when she came of age, they had a simple wedding. It was a happy life.
She remained ignorant about how events occasionally rewound. Their shared life shone so brightly that it was enough to make up for the repeats.
However, Valt had no intention of ever having children. He couldn’t bear the thought of creating any more tools for the artifact to consume.
Valt did not despair when he died in an accident five years after they were married, nor when he was returned to her side because someone changed the past with the orb. He only wept when he learned, from the list of heirs etched onto his mind, that Miralys inherited the title of Time-Reader after his demise. He grilled her once he knew, but as Miralys was not heir while he yet lived, she had no memory of previous timelines.
Valt regretted his carelessness. For the first time in all his lives, he wanted to redo the past.
When, by sheer coincidence, he was returned to a time before he met her, he was even grateful to whoever had made that happen. He was careful when he rescued her again not to give her his blood or let her come along with him. Thinking he’d spared her his fate, he continued on, relieved.
But then he learned that despair was not so easily cured.
No matter how many times Valt repeated it—giving her blood or not, running into her or avoiding her—the end result was the same.
Her name was already engraved onto the records as an heir, and the curse passed to her.
Surely it had occurred to Valt’s ancestors to end the suffering by not having children. He realized that the reason the line had gone on unbroken nonetheless had to be because of some fearsome compelling force that would not allow for such things.
And his hopelessness did not end there.
Miralys had become the one last straw the world was waiting for.
“There are no heirs after me,” Valt stated.
In reality, the heir after him was Miralys. That was already set in stone and could not be changed.
Tinasha arched an eyebrow. “How can that be? According to you, there are still thirty-one more years until the world comes to a standstill. Won’t the next heir just inherit this fate after you die?”
“There isn’t one. I know the names of all heirs, past and future. My soul will be dismantled before it picks out the next one.”
Unbearable pain lanced through Valt as he made that statement. He thought of all the losses he’d endured repeatedly.
Tinasha’s eyes narrowed like she was analyzing magic. “Your soul will be dismantled? Does Eleterria do that, too?”
“No. In my first life, I didn’t have enough magic, and I resorted to a forbidden curse. I traded my soul for power.”
That was just a hypothesis. Valt could only guess what would befall Miralys when she inherited the Time-Reader position and its magic. However, her soul had indeed been splintered for some mysterious reason.
And that had drawn the world’s attention.
“The heir’s soul is treated as a part of Eleterria. When my soul was dismantled, it created a gap in the succession line. Then someone used Eleterria to go back in time, and the world decided that this gap could be used to get rid of the troublesome artifact. No matter how drastic the changes to history, it would all get added to that one fixed point of repair. With every rewinding of time, my soul fractured and was dismantled again.”
“What…? You mean you used more forbidden curses?”
“No, it happened for a different reason with every instance. Once I was attacked by a demonic spirit; once I got dragged into someone else’s spell. The worst time was when a force of nature that sucks up mages’ souls came to the city where I was living and killed hundreds.”
Irityrdia’s attack left the most devastation in its wake. Valt covered one hand with another to stop them both from trembling. “Initially, it only occurred every five lifetimes. But each rewinding of time increased the frequency. No matter how I tried to avoid it, something would inevitably happen to dismantle my soul, because that would create a gap in the succession line. That may be related to how the timeline can’t continue forward past a certain point.”
It sounded like Eleterria and the world were engaged in a tug-of-war.
One was rewriting the world over and over, while the other was attempting a revolution.
“I have nowhere to go from here. My soul won’t blend back into the world, either. It will only keep getting damaged by Eleterria and dismantled by the world.”
From the world’s point of view, the death of a single human was a microscopic moment that was easy to set as a fixed point.
Her body, which lacked a soul, was always warm.
He remembered every bit of that heat, never forgetting. He had believed that this would be the time he would save her, and the only difference would be whether he lost her first or died first.
“Sealing Eleterria won’t save my soul. And eventually, it will select some nonhereditary new heir instead. That’s why it’s much better if this ends here, with me.”
Miralys stood at the edge of waters teeming with the fusion of rewriting and repairs. Valt had to get her out of there. He didn’t care what it would cost. If not even going back in time would change it, then his only option was to destroy the orbs.
For the moment, Miralys didn’t know she was to be the next heir. She thought Valt was the last.
She believed him and had come this far to save him. Which was why…
“There was a girl living in that house with you, wasn’t there?” said Tinasha, her voice clear and ringing. Her dark gaze appeared to see right through him. “Is she the one you truly wish to save?”
Tinasha studied Valt’s reaction carefully. He looked more shocked than she had ever seen him. Never had the man’s desires been laid so bare. Tinasha was careful not to let him pick up on her own anguish.
If Valt truly was the final Time-Reader, he would not be able to proclaim with such conviction that while he would know if there were any heirs to come after him, none existed.
He knew that there was one after him. The last heir was that girl.
Her soul, too, had been dismantled. She, too, stood at a deadlock in history…
Thus, Valt’s mind was decided.
All the blood drained from his face, but he remained silent. Evidently, he didn’t want to answer.
Tinasha took some deep breaths. She kept her voice calm and steady. “I understand what it is you wish for, as well as the state of our world and what Eleterria has done to it.”
“Well…good. Then you’ll break it for me. You know I’m not going to back down. You’re the only one who can save Tuldarr,” Valt said, eyes shining as coldly and emotionlessly as they had before.
The many hostages denied Tinasha the luxury of choice.
However, she had sensed from her conversation with Valt that the present was at a crossroads, with no options left.
Should Eleterria be destroyed and the world restored to its original form…
Wouldn’t history start over from that blank space in time thousands of years in the past when the two orbs were introduced?
“And that would mean…?”
How close was the present world to its natural state? Wouldn’t negating all of the changes mean that Tuldarr would fall to ruin anyway?
And not only that, without Eleterria’s changes, Oscar’s fate would differ as well, since his mother saved his life. All of those rescued because of another’s wish while holding one of the orbs would be erased.
Tinasha stood frozen. As if he could read her thoughts, Valt remarked, “Take a chance on it. Maybe your country and your husband will remain, and history will go on as it has, even after Eleterria is no more. But if you fail to make a choice here, Tuldarr will fall.”
“I know…that.”
She couldn’t abandon her citizens, the ones alive right now, to die. Not without putting up a fight.
Tuldarr was her beloved motherland. That was as true four centuries ago as it was today. It was a country like any other, where people worked from dawn to dusk, laughed with their families, made merry at the occasional festival, and grew old in peace.
Gazing out at the city’s lights from the castle was lovely. She saw human life as a beautiful thing.
Tinasha had believed she would happily spend her whole life protecting theirs.
And yet every choice facing her seemed to lead to a dead end.
They were all so heavy.
If the weight of them meant allowing others to live, she would bear that burden without question. However, that wasn’t what was at stake now. Tinasha was so beset with doubts that she wanted to take a knee from the weight of them.
Two little boxes lay open on the pedestal, one containing a red orb, and the other, a blue one.
Eleterria, an instrument of hope and despair, absorbed human emotions.
How much would people’s fates change if she destroyed it?
With trembling fingers, Tinasha reached out.
No sooner had she done so than a man roared from outside, “TINASHA!”
Relief and remorse swept over her.
That voice belonged to her one and only beloved.
With Tinasha about to crumple, Valt tutted in irritation and acted swiftly. He shoved one Eleterria orb into his pocket and seized the remaining one. With his free hand, he grabbed Tinasha and cried, “Let’s go!”
They couldn’t exit the treasure vault. Even Tinasha would need an incantation to teleport out of it, allowing Oscar enough time to capture Valt.
Valt set off at a run, dragging Tinasha deeper into the vault and kicking open a door. He burst into a dark stone passageway. A moment later, candelabra on the walls lit up.
“Run. Do as I say.”
Tinasha nodded. They hurried down the dimly lit passage, casting defensive barriers to guard against traps. Tinasha bit her lip as she heard the sound of footsteps pounding after them.
She’d wanted him to come but also wished he hadn’t.
Her country had been taken hostage, and she was in the midst of making an impossible decision, and now he’d gotten involved. Her delaying had dragged him into this mess.
“Oscar…”
The two mages weren’t especially quick. They couldn’t keep tripping over their feet while running for much longer.
For one thing, there was no way out. Tinasha didn’t know about the secret path back into the castle. Only the Lake of Silence awaited them.
“Oh!” she gasped, recalling the lake’s connection to Farsas legend. The idea had crossed her mind when she was trying to decide where to put Eleterria.
It would be difficult to pull off now, but not impossible.
She concentrated on the person behind her.
Trusting in the man who would undoubtedly catch up before long, she kept running.
After tumbling down the passageway, Valt was struck dumb upon arriving at a large body of water. Discovering an underground lake beneath the castle was quite unexpected. He hadn’t thought their escape would be easy, but he’d counted on the flight buying some time.
A short distance away, there was a path that crossed the water, but Valt hesitated to take it. It would leave them extremely visible.
Instead, he threw a glance at his prisoner. “Cast a teleportation spell. Now!”
“That’s enough,” said a commanding voice before Tinasha could answer. Oscar stepped out of the passageway, Akashia in hand.
The king smiled as he looked at his fiancée and the intruder clutching her wrist. He had all the majesty of a monarch who could bring all who beheld him under his sway. “You’re going to pay for dragging her around. Come here, Tinasha.”
“She won’t. She can’t disobey me,” Valt responded, forcing a smile onto his face despite the cold sweat pouring down his back.
Valt had served Oscar once, but only for three years. Yet in that short time, Oscar had imprinted himself as king into the man’s subconscious. This made it difficult for Valt to manipulate Oscar as he did other people. Instinctively, he shrank back.
He wasn’t very good at dealing with Oscar and never wanted to face him. There could be no admitting as much, however.
Wrapping an arm around Tinasha, he dragged her a step back with him. One more step, and they’d land in the lake.
The smile dropped off Oscar’s face, and he took a step forward. A royal sense of pressure, enough to change the atmosphere around them, rolled off Oscar in waves and crashed into Valt. “Hand her over. Eleterria, too. I won’t let you change things.”
“You’re the one who overwrote the past! It’s your fault that we’ve had to suffer all over again!”
“Well, I’m sorry about that. But it’s all over now. We’re going to seal away those orbs and not let anyone touch them again.”
“No. You don’t know anything.”
“You haven’t explained anything. Of course I don’t.”
“You are capable of putting your country ahead of the people you hold dear! That’s why I have no choice but to keep betraying you!” Valt shouted.
Once upon a time, the king requested that Valt talk with him before indulging in treachery, but there was no way he could. Valt knew what the answer would be. Even Oscar, who prized his wife above himself, would still choose his citizens. Oscar might understand Valt’s feelings, but he would never endorse them. Valt couldn’t ask a man like that to cooperate. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
As long as Eleterria existed, Miralys’s soul would fracture. There could be no yielding here.
“Valt,” called an anxious voice in his head. It was the girl he wanted to shelter from everything. His one and only. If he could free her, it didn’t matter if he ceased to exist and she forgot all about his love as if it never was.
“Valt…! Run…!”
“It’s all right. I can still do it.”
He couldn’t back down. Dying with his mission incomplete was unacceptable. Fighting was the only recourse. He could rise above despair.
“Please, come back.”
She was seeking confirmation. Pleading.
Never had Valt doubted her love for him.
Still, he trusted she could love another if he didn’t exist, if they had never met.
And that would be fine.
It was better that way.
Valt tightened his grip on Eleterria as he stared Oscar down.
He would handle this battle alone, atop a sense of disquiet no one else would comprehend.
The girl continued to call to him.
“Are you listening to me? It’s pointless saving me if you just end up disappearing. I would choose unhappiness and knowing you over happiness and never knowing you. Even if our time together is limited. That’s what it is to be human. So please, come back to me.”
“Miralys…”
Valt was breathless.
She must have caught on during his conversation with Tinasha. Miralys knew that she was the last heir…and that Valt would disappear along with Eleterria if it were destroyed.
Knowing everything, aware of what she would suffer, she still chose him. That was the type of person Miralys was. Her strength was so familiar to him.
Valt wanted to cry, to seek refuge in that power of hers. A desire to let her tranquil love compensate for all his repeated lifetimes rose within him.
Yet Valt held his ground. He couldn’t see the future, which meant he couldn’t give up.
He listened with growing frustration as Oscar and Tinasha spoke to each other. Just as he was about to urge his captive to teleport them away, something knocked into him and sent him reeling.
“Don’t kill him!”
A gigantic splash echoed in the cavern of the dark, subterranean lake.
Held behind Valt, Tinasha gazed past her captor to Oscar. Fury was plain on his face.
No mage could take him on at this range. If either of them cast a teleportation spell, he would be on them instantly.
While Valt held Tinasha hostage, there was no avenue for his escape.
Tinasha glanced up at Valt’s tense, tight face. The imprint of a round orb shone through one of his pockets.
She looked back to Oscar. Valt had to know that Tuldarr was no compelling hostage to Oscar, which meant that he was stuck, just as Tinasha was.
But Oscar wasn’t. He would fight Valt with no hesitation at all, despite Tuldarr’s fate being on the line. That was the sort of person he was. Tuldarr wasn’t his country. He would make the choice he had to, even if Tinasha resented him for it. His fortitude was entirely unbreakable.
That made him the only one she could rely on, the only one who could shake them out of this stalemate.
Tinasha sucked in a deep breath.
She could trust him. There was no one else but him. His eyes, the color of a bright twilight sky, were fixed right on her.
“Why does something like this happen the second I take my eyes off you?” Oscar sighed.
“I’m sorry,” Tinasha responded.
“It’s fine. We’ll figure this out,” he said. The steady response was characteristic of her husband.
The two of them were to be husband and wife; that was a milestone they were meant to reach on their long and winding journey.
No matter who they were up against or what sort of situation it was, they would overcome it, just as they had so far.
Oscar adjusted his grip on Akashia. “I know you’re in the midst of a situation, but don’t get reckless. Or do anything you don’t have to.”
“Despite how things look, I’m always considering what would be the quickest way out.”
“Yeah, and I’m telling you that’s unnecessary.”
“I can do it because I have you,” Tinasha replied. Her deep trust in him was more than she had even in herself.
The two of them had each other. Surely it was a stroke of fortune, enabling them to take on this intersection of their many layered destinies.
Tinasha gave Oscar a smile like moonlight.
“So Oscar, come and save me.”
A hand shot forward and plucked the Eleterria orb from Valt’s pocket, quick as can be. Then Tinasha rammed herself into her captor and used the recoil to leap backward. From the corner of her eye, she could make out a look of astonishment on Oscar’s face.
“Don’t kill him!” she shouted to Oscar before diving into the lake, the blue orb still in her hand.
A loud splash rose with white foam. The cold of the water hit her like a shock.
I know Oscar can stop Valt.
A little smile materialized on Tinasha’s lips as she peered at the water’s surface growing farther away.
What a task to leave to someone else. Was it all right to dump it in his lap?
Regardless, he’d allow it. This one time, Tinasha would sit back and let him take the lead.
If anyone should shoulder the blame, it ought to be her, not Oscar.
Tinasha wouldn’t let that happen, though. No one would be lost today. She’d return to Tuldarr and undo that spell at any cost.
Then she would face Valt again and attempt to extricate the souls from Eleterria.
Oscar would almost certainly call her naive for such an attempt, but that was his standpoint talking. If Valt and Miralys were trapped, wedged in the middle of the war between the world and the alterations, Tinasha would see to their safety first. Then she would talk to him again and consider what to do about Eleterria and the world.
For now, she need only survive to reach that point.
Tinasha focused her mind. The lake water dispersed her magic. However, its ability to do so was weaker than Akashia’s. She hadn’t imbibed any of the water, enabling her to push past its effects by enhancing the pressure of her power. That was how she averted danger the last time.
As quickly as able, Tinasha cast an incredibly dense spell.
Once the teleportation spell was complete…she suddenly realized that the blue orb felt warm. Despite the chill of the cold water, the half of Eleterria in her grip was giving off heat. And it felt like all the water in the lake was quietly urging her to clench it tighter.
Something’s wrong.
Her movements slowed. Her spell dissipated.
Tinasha was sinking, caught in a trap and dissolving as she held this little burning sphere.
Losing track of her very place in the world, she no longer knew what was happening.
A crack appeared on the orb’s surface. Tinasha stared at it numbly. Before her eyes, it widened, and lake water flowed into the fissure. The sigils carved onto it glowed white, almost defiantly.
It began to activate.
Frantically, Tinasha poured magic into her hands to stop the orb from triggering, but the light intensified.
I want to go back to him.
That wish flashed through her mind. She could tell she was about to lose everything.
She was so close. She was about to be his bride. The promise he made her when she was a girl would come true.
With each new component of her wedding ensemble, Tinasha had savored the pure excitement. It didn’t seem real that the time had really come for her to wear the veil her parents gave her; she’d thought it something that had long passed her by.
Even the wait for her days with him to start was joyful.
Oscar had given her something that transcended four hundred years. Once she wed him, she could die happy that very night.
And yet now…
A blinding light engulfed Tinasha, blotting out her vision. The hand holding the orb disappeared.
Her body, mind, and magic were all dismantled.
As was her heart.
I want to…go back—
With that final thought, her memory cut off and vanished. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
7. Fate’s Compensation
“Awaken.”
That whisper made the girl look up. She couldn’t see a thing around her. There was only cold, watery darkness, and she was crouched in the middle of it. Her dark eyes scanned the surroundings.
There was no indication of what she’d been doing.
She didn’t know who she was.
She was all alone.
A formless voice spoke to her.
“Where is it you want to go back to?”
She wanted to return to a distant place. But where?
“The moment you choose, the world will form anew.”
The voice’s words were lost on her, for she was only a thirteen-year-old lost in the dark.
She’d been detained here to choose another path.
“Out of all your infinite memories of your lives, choose the safest time for you.”
The safest?
“Or the happiest.”
The happiest?
“Go on, choose.”
Choose. She only had one option. To go to him, to where he was.
To whatever the closest place to him was, to a time when she had fallen asleep at ease.
There was no cause for wavering or hesitation.
Standing up straight, she picked up the orbs at her feet.
“Run. Go.”
She sprinted away. A light glowed where she had chosen. There, the world was being formed.
She didn’t look back at the darkness. Her young body became an adult’s.
For the world that was taking shape, she ran.
“This time, it is your soul that will have new records etched onto it.”
She was no longer listening to the voice. Entranced, she dashed for the place and time where she wished to be.
“Give it as many tries as you like. You humans will keep trying, over and over.”
She ran. The darkness of the lake water faded.
With every bound, the world reformed and recreated itself.
“Try. Keep trying until you get to the ending you want.”
Then she leaped into the blinding white radiance. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
Intermission A Lost Fragment
Clasping the young child’s body to her, the woman wept.
The child was cold and lifeless.
Dead. Lost, irrevocably.
She sobbed for this life that could never be recovered. No price seemed too steep if it could mean the little one’s return. Her baby was irreplaceable to her.
But it wouldn’t work. She knew that. Time couldn’t rewind.
That knowledge was of little comfort and did not give her reason to wish otherwise.
“Someone, please… Save my baby…”
Her wails echoed through the world.
No one answered her plea. No one was there.
Her quavering, interminable sobs only filled up her little corner of the world. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
8. The Gray Room
“I wish I could have watched you all a little longer,” someone said, and Oscar came to.
Evidently, he’d lost consciousness for a moment. It felt like he’d been sitting in this little gray room talking to an unfamiliar young man forever.
He didn’t recognize the other occupant, who was sitting at the empty table with him. Oscar sank back into a soft chair. His wife’s head lay in his lap; she was asleep and breathing peacefully, legs curled under her on the ground. Locks of her long hair swept gracefully across the floor of the chamber.
Calmly, though with obvious regret, the man admitted, “I wanted to save you humans. Isn’t it sad when a mother loses her child? I wanted to let her do things over. That’s all. I hoped to give all of you a chance to overwrite whatever mournful or cruel thing occurred, if that was what you wished to do.”
“Even if it drove our world to the brink of destruction? Sometimes you save one thing only to give rise to another tragedy entirely.”
“I thought that you humans would do something about it, should that come to pass. I only meant to expand your options and permit you to make repeated attempts, however many times you needed.”
“We didn’t need that. We’ll handle things on our own.”
Their back-and-forth had gone on for ages now. It felt like the same conversation had repeated for a very long time, but also like it had only just begun. All in the small windowless room was gray, like an endlessly rainy day.
Tinasha’s rhythmic breathing was the only sound.
The man cracked a sliver of a pained smile. “You don’t need it? I thought you might say that. But our power already permeates the two of you. Now you can remember all of the lifetimes you’ve lived before, too, can’t you? There’s the proof. You’re just like the humans linked to that tool, but much more powerful. When you die, your souls will not dissolve back into the world as other humans’ souls do. You will keep drifting as foreign objects, divorced from your humanity.”
“Foreign objects?”
When he destroyed Eleterria, two forces—the artifact’s power and Akashia’s—poured into Oscar and Tinasha. A transformation capable of changing the world had filled the pair.
No ordinary ending was possible for them. It was Oscar’s responsibility that such an unprecedented end had come and that Tinasha had gotten wrapped up in this.
However, he knew that Tinasha would smile and say, “I’m glad we’re in it together.” That brought him both comfort and pain.
“If it all gets too unbearable, we’ll figure something out. I know she will, at the very least,” Oscar replied. As long as he had Akashia, he could at least free her.
But the man tilted his head at Oscar quizzically. “Are you truly all right with that? You might wind up alone for eternity.”
“I’m fine. I’ve already received so much.”
Tinasha had showered him with love over the course of many, many lifetimes. It was plenty.
“Why have you interfered in our world?” Oscar questioned.
“Because it’s our role to make contact with you and accumulate knowledge. Although, all of us have different reasons. I do it because I’m interested in you. I would have liked to watch you for as long as possible… But the woman who made your sword told me I was being arrogant.”
“Rightly so.”
“Meddling in others’ affairs is an arrogant act, no matter how you go about it,” the man stated, his voice dripping with undisguised self-loathing.
He was one of the observers from outside the world, the creator of Eleterria. The man in the room was a fragment of consciousness contained within the artifact. No—left here, purposely. It appeared he’d been awaiting a visit.
“Don’t you care that your tool’s been destroyed?” Oscar asked.
“It’s merely the result of you humans trying things out. And besides, nothing’s settled yet.”
“Because there are still other artifacts?” Oscar sighed, getting to his feet. He picked up Tinasha, still asleep, cradling her to his chest.
A little door appeared on a gray wall. As Oscar headed for it, the man’s voice stopped him. “Going back already? The world is waiting for you two. You’ve finally appeared—beings who can battle against our devices. It won’t let you go until all of them are gone.”
“I don’t care.”
Had he feared that, Oscar wouldn’t have destroyed Eleterria. If he’d desired to spend eternity dozing in a little room, he would have picked a peaceful life with her from the start.
So even if this was only the beginning, he had to accept it. This place was the waypoint that allowed them to reunite, after all.
Oscar heard the man offer, “Then go on and give it a try. Keep trying.”
He opened the door and stepped out into nothing.
“The world and I will give you the transformation you need to keep fighting.”
The original world would rise anew from a blank space where nothing had even begun.
And then…? |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
9. Where the Story Goes
Somewhere in a city not far from a forest near the national border, a boy sat with his chin in his hands and a bored look on his face in the dining room of a little inn. Sulking, he muttered, “Ugh, I wanted to go to the castle city. I wanted to see the Festival of Aetea.”
“Is it the three hundred and forty-second Festival of Aetea this year? Yes, that’s too bad,” a woman sitting at the same table as the innkeeper’s son responded with a smile. She’d been a guest of the tavern for two days now. The black-haired woman sipped at her water as she listened to him.
The boy went on. “They took me last year and everything, too. Have you ever been, miss?”
“I have. I’ve even lived in the castle city.”
“Aww, I’m so jealous… I wanna live there when I’m older,” said the boy.
His mother in the kitchen overheard him and shouted back, “Don’t be ridiculous!”
Automatically, the boy flinched.
The woman broke into peals of laughter. Once she was done, she grinned. “Instead of the festival, how about I tell you a very old, very fascinating story?”
“What kind of old story?”
“It’s an ancient legend passed down in Farsas about a king and a witch.”
The boy stared at the woman’s red lips, which were stretched in a beautiful smile. Though he gaped at her for a moment, he took the bait right away. “Do witches really exist? I thought they were a myth.”
“They did, a long time ago, though no one knows where they are now.”
“What? No way that’s true. How does the story go?”
The woman’s expression turned bewitching. And with a melodious tone, she recited the tale.
“Once upon a time, in the land to the west of Farsas, there stood an azure tower just beyond the border. The spire was filled with traps and monsters, and a witch lived on the top floor. Those who made it past all her trials and climbed to the top would be granted a wish. However, none had succeeded at the challenge in dozens of years.”
“Wow. Is the tower still there?”
“Not anymore. It was old and dangerous. Anyway, a prince of Farsas became interested in the tower and climbed it alone, though it was very foolish of him. But he was powerful and made it to the top floor, where he met the witch…”
Such fairy tales were commonplace, yet the boy’s eyes sparkled as he pressed the woman to continue.
She closed her eyes and smiled as she launched into the next part.
“First, he asked to duel the witch to test his strength.”
“Wow! Who won?”
“The witch beat him handily, of course. She flattened him into a pancake.”
“Yikes…”
That was an unexpected twist. The boy had been expecting a traditional tale of valor, and he hung his head in disappointment.
The woman giggled and waved a hand comfortingly as she went on. “The prince was strong nonetheless, so for his wish, he requested that the witch train him. Reluctantly, the witch accepted. Before long, he became as strong as the witch. By the time the prince was king…the witch had fallen in love with him.”
“What?! Are you joking?!”
“I’m very serious. Then the witch moved out of the tower and married him. The Farsas royal family carries their blood to this day.”
“I—I don’t believe that. I mean, she’s a witch! Wasn’t she all wrinkly?” the boy objected, which made the woman burst out laughing.
“You should ask your history teacher,” she advised. “This story is fairly well-known.”
“It is? Okay, then I’ll ask tomorrow.”
The woman nodded and took a sip from her glass. Her unique eyes, the color of darkness, caught the light of the candles and sparkled.
Then a voice boomed from the doorway to the dining room, “Tinasha! What are you doing playing around? It’s time to go.”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” answered the woman, tying her long black hair back in a ponytail as she stood and headed to join her companion at the door.
While she looked to be around twenty, her male companion appeared sixteen or seventeen. He was a handsome young man with deep brown hair and eyes the color of bright twilight. Tall and dressed in traveler’s garb, he carried a longsword at his waist, and a little red dragon was perched on his shoulder.
His features were fine indeed, though they lacked the slightest hint of adolescence. For someone so young, he spoke with an oddly grown-up tone of voice and possessed a dignity beyond his years. Despite resembling a teenager, he already seemed a mature young man. His behavior and attitude betrayed that he was quite a capable fighter and that he was of high lineage.
The people of the inn had believed at first that he and the beautiful black-haired woman were brother and sister, but they didn’t look alike at all, and there was a strange magnetism between them.
The young man set down an amount of money that covered their lodging fees and then some. “Thanks for the hospitality.”
The inn proprietress came out from the kitchen and bowed to her departing guests.
Her son did the same. “See you, miss. Thanks for the story.” He waved as he watched the woman follow her companion and depart.
The proprietress narrowed her eyes, puzzling. “That sword… Never mind, it couldn’t be. I saw the king carrying it just last year.”
“What? I wanna see the king, too!” her son whined.
“Next year, dear. Next year,” she placated before returning to the kitchen.
Dusk had arrived, and the sun was sinking into the horizon. As the clear blue sky transformed into night, a pale azure moon rose in the sky. Gazing up at it, the boy huffed out a sulky sigh.
The pair left the inn and made their way outside the town. Lights began to shine from the windows of village homes, and the woman admired the view. The man grinned at her. “That was quite the tale you told back there.”
“You heard that?! It isn’t nice to eavesdrop, you know!”
“Lots of stuff happened after we got married, too. Don’t cut the story off so soon.”
“All of that is recorded for posterity in the castle archives. Old fairy tales don’t need to be completely accurate,” she responded with a giggle.
He gave her a fond look before he remembered something else. “Who did you say flattened who into a pancake again?”
“Ow, ow, ow!”
“I’ll flatten you right now!” he growled, pressing fists against her temples.
“I went too far! I’m sorry!” she cried, begging for mercy. Once he released her, she rubbed at her head, teary-eyed.
He stuck his tongue out at her. “Well, I suppose it’s the truth. But I wouldn’t lose now.”
“I look forward to finding out,” she replied with a grin.
“I’m ready whenever you are,” he returned, nodding in satisfaction. But as he glanced down at himself, an annoyed look stole across his handsome features. “It’s just hard to use a body that’s not fully grown yet. Yeah, it’s nice that we can be reborn when the world commands it or whatever, but it’s a hassle right now.”
Their souls could not dissolve back into the world, even upon death. Such was the gift bequeathed to them by the world, to use them after their transformation into foreign entities. After they perished, it would only take a few decades before they obtained new bodies. They would search for babies that had lost their souls before birth, and they would take their forms to be reborn.
Ahead of them was a war with no end in sight.
To erase all outside interference in the world, they tracked down outsiders’ artifacts and destroyed them. These two were the weapons of that fight.
Such a long journey would likely take them beyond the mainland. They would cross the sea, move into new time periods, and keep trying.
No one could say how long it would take to end. But that was the task the world had assigned them. The pair were artifacts in the shape of people, crafted from transformed souls.
Someday, their truly eternal destiny might become unbearable.
Each time one witnessed the death of the other, the grief and loss might wear away at their psyche a little more.
But they were perfectly happy for the moment, because neither was alone.
The woman explained matter-of-factly, “Our physical bodies appear to be designed to stop growing naturally at the age when we are most fit for battle. Essentially, we’re young forever. Although if it bothers you, I can use magic to age you up a little.”
“It’s fine. I’ll only have to bear with it for a few more years.”
At that, the woman happily latched on to his arm. “I like seeing you at this age. It’s fresh and new, which makes it fun.”
“If you enjoy it, then I suppose it’s worthwhile.”
“I’d like to see you even littler, too. I’m sure you were adorable. Oh, but don’t die on me anymore. I was so lonely waiting for you…”
A shadow abruptly passed over her dark eyes. She tightened her hold on his arm, seeming anxious.
To reassure her, the man smiled. “Understood. I’ll be careful. In exchange, you’re not allowed to go out on solo missions. You always get some mortal injury or another right away.”
“What’s a bit of an injury if I still win?”
“I don’t know if I would consider ‘riddled with holes all over your body to be a bit of an injury,” he responded dryly, sounding entirely unamused.
She gazed up at him raptly. In a voice as clear as a bell, she said, “No matter if it takes decades or centuries for you to come back, I will find you. I’ll track you down even if you don’t have your memories. We’ll fall in love all over again.”
She spoke of pure and everlasting love.
An affection that would surpass eternity, as it had once already.
That feeling was enough to carry them through the ever-changing times.
It sounded like a wedding vow. The man broke into a broad grin. “I’m very glad to hear that. Oh, but I should tell you that you’re extremely bad at winning a man’s heart. You come on way too strong. If I don’t remember you and you’re all over me, it’s going to be a bit of a turnoff.”
“Hey! Don’t you think that’s a little rude?! I could say the same thing about you!”
“I watch and wait before making my move, adjusting my approach as I go.”
“I don’t see the difference!” she whined.
Then her mouth pursed into a decided pout. “I think it’s fine either way. We have all the time in the world, after all. I can wait for you to come around, even if it takes a hundred years.”
“That’s exactly the sort of creepy behavior I’m talking about.” The man sighed. Despite his admonishments, the two of them would never see eye to eye on this. It was pointless to hope she would use a more roundabout approach, but that was also proof of how deep her feelings for him ran.
Despite his grimace, he finally cut to the chase. “I heard a rumor that something that could be an outsiders’ artifact is in some lord’s domain in the north.”
“I hope it’s true. That would make our fifth one, if so.”
“Let’s take it easy as we investigate. Once we’re done, we can go see the ocean or something. It’s been a while.”
“As you wish,” she replied, and the pair departed from town.
Night fell swiftly around them while the man commanded the dragon to change its size. The pair boarded the dragon’s back and soared into the air.
Down below, the lights of the city after dark were a sea of glittering gems.
The woman smiled at the twinkling ocean, the flickers of human life. The man wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
Then this entirely uncommon pair vanished into the night on a dragon’s back.
The story of the king and the fifth witch faded into the annals of history as an ancient fairy tale.
Eventually, no one remained who could recall their names.
All the stories in the world gave rise to others, stacked in libraries to be read over and over.
But they would never be overwritten again.
So it went, a fragment of an unnamed memory. |
Unnamed Memory, Vol. 6: Death of the Nameless Story
If I didn’t exist, you’d find someone else to love. No one is irreplaceable; birth or death is insignificant.
It’s simply that a person loves another person. They love everything about them, feel grateful that they could meet them, and feel like that person saved them. That moment in time is like a miracle, a flash of emotion like lightning in the sky.
I will discover the meaning of that moment.
Tinasha sat up with a gasp. She was in a dark, unfamiliar room. The window showed it was night outside; no lamp or candle lit the room. There was only the pale bluish light of the moon.
As she attempted to calm her panting, gasping breaths, she gazed down at herself—and froze. She wasn’t wearing anything. Instinctively, she hugged her knees and head to her chest, curling into a ball.
“Why…?”
“What is it?” asked a man beside her. She nearly jumped out of her skin at his question. Lying on his stomach, he lifted his head to look at her. His eyes were as blue as the sky right after dusk.
She knew him, yet his name wasn’t coming to her right away. Why couldn’t she recall it? They were clearly close enough to share a bed. That made Tinasha realize she didn’t even know her own name.
While that left her aghast and stupefied, she had to get it together. Pulling up the blankets to cover herself, she inquired, “Who are you, and who am I, and where are we…?”
The inquiry prompted the man to give her the strangest look. He sat up, leaned back against the pillows, and then answered, “I wondered why you woke up so randomly. Are you still half-asleep? I’m your husband, the king of Farsas. You’re my queen, a witch, and the heir to Old Tuldarr. We’re in the royal bedchamber of the castle. Do you need me to tell you our names, too?”
“Oh!”
That was enough to jog her mind and fill in the blanks.
She was born four centuries before and became a witch on the eve of her country’s destruction. Her name was Tinasha.
After many twists and forks in the road, she became his wife. Tinasha had no idea how she could have forgotten such a thing, even if she had trouble with waking up.
“Sorry… I guess I was half-asleep.”
“Sure seemed like it. It’s the middle of the night,” Oscar said with a little grin. That smile filled Tinasha with such fond familiarity that she felt instantly at ease. All the tension drained from her body. He reached out to ruffle her hair, and she blushed.
“It was like…I had a dream of a time that wasn’t this one…and it felt like it took a really, really long time to get here,” she muttered.
“A dream of the past, maybe? You have lived twenty times longer than I have,” Oscar remarked with a smirk.
Then his eyes softened. “You’ve worked hard.” The warmth of his sympathy for the centuries his wife had lived was her reward for those long years of loneliness. He wanted to spend the rest of his life giving her warmth and love.
Tinasha savored a feeling of happiness before she joked, “I certainly don’t feel twenty times more mature than you.”
“Yeah, you peaked a long time ago, considering how short-tempered and socially awkward you are. I don’t mind, though.”
“Stop treating me like a little kid!” she protested, although she was grinning.
After living for eons and choosing to separate herself from other humans, she had concluded that she was an anomaly.
Such was the nature of a witch, and she was the strongest, though still shackled by deep feelings for her homeland.
Yet despite how warped she was, he never denied her identity as a witch, nor did he give up any part of himself to do it. He simply invited her to stand next to him.
Ever since she met him, she had enjoyed the most fulfilling time of her whole life. That was why she’d elected to live the rest of her days as his loving wife and as a force he kept in check.
“I’m very happy right now. I’m glad I finally found you,” she said. This was the most joyful and safest place. She had no worries or anxieties. All she needed was for this to go on forever.
Tinasha gave him a bright smile. But Oscar frowned at the sight of it. “What’s wrong?”
“What? Nothing,” Tinasha replied, but then she realized her vision was blurring. “Huh?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. Maybe she’d awoken from that dream so suddenly that her emotions were still out of whack.
I have the strangest sense that I’m a young girl in love, somewhere in time. I’m thinking about wanting to wear a wedding dress.
What would be making her feel that way? Tinasha had already married Oscar. She met him not as a naive little girl, not as an ice queen, but as a witch with four hundred years of ennui behind her.
Curiously, she still felt a twinge of incongruity. It was as though her longing for the dream lingered within her like the traces of a fragrance.
Over the blankets, Tinasha pressed a hand to her chest. “I don’t know. I feel as if…I didn’t get to marry you. That’s the sense I’m getting.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Oscar questioned, not with exasperation but with genuine concern. And it was no wonder. There were too many discrepancies in this reality. Tinasha’s memories were getting all muddled.
Something that should be there had vanished…
Tinasha swallowed whatever was swirling within her. “I’m…fine.”
“I hope so. Don’t stay up any longer. Just go back to sleep. You’ll make it even harder for yourself come morning,” he said softly, reaching out to wrap both arms around her waist and draw her in.
“He-hey!” Tinasha yelped reflexively, but she couldn’t do anything to stop it. As the confused woman was pulled back into place next to him, the sensation of her skin sliding directly against Oscar’s made her feel distinctly uncomfortable. Automatically, Tinasha tried to crawl out of his arms. “This is too—”
Her behavior made Oscar frown. “What is it? Why are you moving away?”
“I—I mean, that felt really weird, okay?! I’ve never done that before!”
“You’re funny…”
Oscar sighed, rubbing at his temples. She flailed in an attempt to break free, but she was no match for the king’s toned arms, which held her fast.
“Looks like you’re still asleep. Guess I should do something to wake you up,” Oscar whispered, dipping his head to place a kiss along her nape.
She screeched like a cat. “Wait! I said wait! Something’s not right!”
“You’re acting weird. What’s up with you?”
“Let’s just talk! Let me go!”
“Not yet,” Oscar refused, pinning Tinasha down as she squirmed beneath him. Even she wasn’t certain why it felt wrong. There was simply a definite feeling of abnormality.
As Tinasha thrashed around, one of her feet knocked against a cold, hard object of some kind that had no place in a bed. She frowned. “Wait, there’s something here.”
“Something as in what, exactly?” Oscar asked, lifting his head. She scrambled out from under him and fumbled around under the sheets for it. Then her hand closed around it. “Here it is.”
The pair of them gazed down at a blue jewel etched with sigils along its surface.
Something deep in her memory whispered, I know what this is.
“Ah!” she cried as waves and waves of memories abruptly flooded her mind. The sheer volume of so many chronicles and lifetimes lived repeatedly was enough to send her reeling.
In some, she never became a witch and perished along with her country. While in others, she died as a young child. There were a few where she perished after becoming a witch.
A few lifetimes came and went without her ever meeting Oscar. A couple she spent alone.
In so many, she died before ever having the chance for atonement. Others had her perishing from a sudden danger that arose once everything was over.
That she could wind up in his arms at all after her fate had changed so many times was nothing short of a miracle, the end point of an indescribable series of events.
This memory was like a dream, which was why she felt so happy and loved here. So much so that she would choose to return to this point from any other in time and space.
Tinasha buried her face in her hands and abruptly broke into muffled sobs, leaving Oscar flummoxed. He wrapped his arms around her soft form. Using a finger to tip her chin up, he gazed into her dark eyes. “What is it? What happened?”
“Oscar…”
Slowly, Tinasha blinked. Her eyes were wet with pearly tears. She took a shuddery breath and then gave him a melancholy smile. “I’ve traveled such a very long way… Will you listen to me?”
The beseeching expression she turned on him was beautiful. It had been a long time since he’d seen her with that look, and it had been equally as long since he’d watched her cry.
Oscar dropped a soft kiss onto her lips. “Yes. Tell me.”
So Tinasha launched into the full story of Eleterria and the history that no longer existed.
After hearing everything, Oscar let out a long, hard sigh. “That’s quite a tale. I don’t believe a word of it.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t,” Tinasha said with a pained look as she glanced over at the Eleterria orb on the bedside table.
It was the blue one, which should have been locked tight within the Tuldarr treasure vault in the normal flow of events.
“Tuldarr, huh? I would’ve liked to see it,” Oscar remarked nonchalantly, making Tinasha’s heart ache. The people who loved and protected her motherland were all gone. In this world, that country had fallen to ruin four centuries before.
In lifetime after countless lifetime, there was only one in which Tuldarr survived. But that instance was already lost to the sands of time; nothing of it remained. A half-cracked Eleterria had deemed it a dead end and initiated a rewind.
“In the end, I couldn’t…save Tuldarr,” Tinasha murmured, pressing her palms against her closed eyelids. Her regret turned to tears; Legis’s last smile surfaced in her memory.
Tuldarr was like some illusory phantom, a country she had possibly dreamed up at some point. But it was no fantasy. Despite the fact that it didn’t exist now and that the alterations in time had erased it, that nation and the people who’d lived in it were there. She would be the only one to recall the beauty of the city lights and the days she’d experienced.
Had the people of Tuldarr been truly happy? It was useless to answer that; it would make for a poor consolation.
“There is no world where everyone is happy.”
So Valt had said. Had he been correct?
The world kept spinning as tragedy and salvation intertwined like a pair of lovers. It was impossible to rescue everything. Someone would always be screaming with grief at any given moment. Tinasha had survived with her country once, and now she was left alone again.
Her eyelashes stirred. With his thumb, Oscar gently wiped away the tears from her cheeks. “Was it a good country?”
“Yes… Very much so.”
Tinasha would need a little more time to process the blow of losing her country a second time.
Through Tinasha’s story, Oscar had learned about Eleterria. After a bit of hesitation, she also revealed the full truth of his mother’s death, which he listened to with astonishment. Then he let out a little sigh, not seeming mixed-up over it in the slightest. “To be honest, sometimes I would see this silhouette flash through my mind, one I’d never glimpsed before. I guess that was…a remnant of the memories that got sealed away. Did you know all along that I was related to a witch?”
“More or less, yes. I recognized her magic in you… I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner.”
“It’s fine. You were being considerate,” he said, mussing Tinasha’s hair. As she watched him, she cast back through her memories.
This feels strange.
She wasn’t her current self, the one who was a witch. Some other, weaker—and yet very determined—self was alive within her mind. Since the day Oscar’s actions had changed history and the timeline diverged, she had lived a total of seven years. While that was a drop in the bucket for a witch, it was agony for Tinasha, the Queen of Tuldarr.
And at the end of it, here she was, her current self.
Oscar gazed into his wife’s teary eyes. “So you have these recollections that should have been erased, which means…”
“Yes. I’m the new Time-Reader heir.”
At this point, there was no Valt or Miralys. In the normal flow of time, the role of heir went unfilled. Yet instead of them, she had become the Time-Reader after touching Eleterria.
“So you remember every life you’ve ever experienced? That must make it feel like you’ve existed forever,” Oscar remarked.
“Yes, I need to keep some degree of control over it, or things will get rough,” she replied.
Mental fatigue had occasionally overwhelmed Tinasha after living for only four hundred years. Now she had the memories of the infinite existences she’d led before. Staring at her own memories would grow unbearable.
There was also something else to consider. The Time-Reader was generally a hereditary title. Any child she birthed would eventually become the next heir.
“I was selected as heir under quite unusual circumstances. Eleterria was partially broken in the lake water when it took apart the world and reformed it to escape. I was the closest, so it made me the heir, took my memories and existence as the anchoring point, and reformed the world.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that this world was created the moment I woke up,” Tinasha stated. Oscar gaped at her, which was understandable, as he possessed no awareness of having awoken only a short while before. This timeline was one Eleterria had selected out of innumerable overwritten pasts, then had reconstructed from scratch. None of that appeared immediately plausible, but as the Time-Reader, Tinasha knew it was true.
As Oscar mulled over her story, a pensive look came over his face, and he stroked his chin. “Gotcha. So it was almost broken and pulled an emergency evacuation. Did you try to destroy it in the water?”
“I couldn’t. That lake water has the same properties as Akashia. I can just barely use my magic if I pressurize it, but only for simple spells. A powerful, high-output attack would be out of the question.”
“The Lake of Silence, huh? Who knew there was something like that underneath the castle.”
“That timeline was the only one where it was excavated. Travis seemed to know about it, but maybe that was because he heard about the excavation. I can probably teleport us there if you want to see it.”
“Hmm… No, I’m good. I feel like I’ve got a general idea already,” Oscar replied, sounding like he’d accepted the crazy story. He patted Tinasha’s head.
“What idea?” Tinasha questioned, cocking her head to the side. Reclined on the bed with her cheek resting on one hand, she resembled nothing so much as a curious cat.
Oscar kissed her forehead. “Those outsiders’ artifacts or whatever have powers that defy the laws of magic, right? But even before you knew about them, you’d already encountered something else that works in mysterious ways.”
“I had?”
Tinasha had no idea what Oscar could be referring to. She had lived a very long time and had seen many things, but only a few of those were things Oscar could be aware of.
As Tinasha fell into deep, serious consideration, Oscar flashed her a chagrined look. “Come on. You don’t need to think so hard. I’m talking about Akashia.”
“Oh!”
He’d meant the royal sword, the only blade in all the land capable of nullifying magic. It was prodigiously effective, but no one knew how it functioned. The sword had been passed down since the founding days of Farsas without ever getting lost to the ages.
“The legend says an inhuman creature pulled Akashia out of the Lake of Silence. So wouldn’t it make sense if whoever that was came from outside our world? Didn’t Travis call the Lake of Silence the insiders’ lake?”
“O-Oh yes, he did…”
Travis had said, “While she was an outsider, she also wasn’t. She chose to be an ally to humans and lived and died among them.”
What if the person he met was the very one who’d pulled Akashia from the water?
“The first queen of Farsas…Deirdre?” Tinasha wondered.
“The name of the first queen was never recorded.”
“I heard it directly from a member of the Farsas royal family four hundred years ago, though not until after I became queen. She traded her own power for the sword and gave it to the first king. But in exchange, she could no longer return to her birthplace. So the story goes.”
If the inhuman creature who pulled the sword from the lake was the same person as the first queen, it explained why Travis was surprised that Oscar didn’t know about the existence of outsiders’ artifacts. Travis believed the Farsas royal family would have passed on the truth about the first queen and the royal sword.
“Then does that mean I have outsider blood in my veins?” Oscar posited.
“It happened twenty generations ago. It would be very diluted by now,” Tinasha replied. Examining Oscar magically also revealed that he had no inhuman qualities. Farsas was founded seven centuries in the past.
Tinasha gazed up at Oscar, impressed with his deduction skills. “But wow, so that’s what it was! I’m so accustomed to how unusual Akashia is that it didn’t occur to me at all.”
“Yeah, you’re pretty used to the sword because of how much trouble it gives you. But that does seem to explain why the Eleterria orb cracked inside the lake.”
“Yes, it does…”
The outside observers and the one outsider who’d mingled with humans and married one.
Deirdre, who chose the human world, left just enough power to eliminate the artifacts her kin introduced. Now Tinasha knew she hadn’t imagined the water rushing for the orb.
“So Eleterria escaped from the Lake of Silence,” she mused.
That timeline was scrapped because the Lake of Silence had been excavated.
To capture a Tinasha who wasn’t a witch, a Time-Reader heir broke into the treasure vault, which resulted in the creation of an underground labyrinth. A series of new events had driven Eleterria to desperation.
“When…I first considered where to hide Eleterria, I thought of submerging it in the Lake of Silence because almost no one would go near it,” Tinasha recalled.
“If you’d done that, this would’ve all happened sooner,” Oscar pointed out.
Tinasha let out her umpteenth sigh of the night.
Had Valt known this would transpire, he might have chosen another method. Or perhaps he would’ve reached out to Tinasha anyway?
Valt Hogniss Gaz Kronos.
He was a second-generation Time-Reader and Tinasha’s former subject. Tinasha knew his full name because it was inscribed on the records she had access to as the latest heir. His thoughts and desires during his many lives would forever go unknown, however. For he’d never revealed the full truth to Tinasha.
Huddled in the bedsheets, the witch exhaled. “This is all so bizarre. I can understand why Valt was trying to destroy the orbs. There have been far too many rewindings of time in this era.”
“So the orbs have passed from person to person over the years, huh? Is our current timeline one step ahead of the one that disappeared?”
“To be more accurate, it’s exceedingly close to it.”
This instance—the one that would have gone on had Oscar not traveled back four hundred years—had been recreated with Tinasha as the anchor. However, as it was a thing remade, there were likely to be some discrepancies.
“I chose this timeline,” she told him.
“You did?”
“Yes. A person’s wish is required for Eleterria to activate. When it asked me where it should rebuild the world, I chose this moment… Because in all of my memories, I am the happiest right here and now.”
She had wished to return to him. She was most content with him, so she’d woken up here.
Oscar broke into a grin when he heard that. “I’m honored.”
“When you met me when I was a young girl, you promised that if I could meet you four hundred years from then, you’d make me happy. And you were right.”
“Yeah?” Oscar asked as his hand brushed over her cheek. Tinasha stared at the reflection of herself in his eyes.
Oscar carried no recollections of his previous lifetimes. But now, something had settled between them—eternity. The weight of all the time accumulated within her and the breadth of the love he poured into her made this place where both intertwined eternally.
Yet she could not stay here forever. Tinasha could not allow the Farsas royal family to become Time-Reader heirs. She would attempt to detach the heir’s soul from Eleterria; if that failed, Oscar would have to take another consort.
Tinasha had no choice but to stop her physical body’s growth again, which would allow her to live as long as possible as the sole Time-Reader. That way, the artifact wouldn’t take a new prisoner.
Oscar might object to her stepping down as the queen consort, but she intended to stay in the castle until he died.
And with as many memories as she had, she could live off them forever.
Lost in thought, Tinasha cast her eyes down. However, she looked up again after noticing Oscar’s gaze. A bittersweet smile decorated his face as he stared at her. “Tinasha.”
“Yes?” she replied, waiting for him to go on.
He leaned in and pressed a kiss to her eyelid. Then he stood from the bed and began to dress. “Let’s go. Put some clothes on.”
“What? Go where?”
“There’s another one, isn’t there? In the treasure vault. Bring that one, too, but be careful,” Oscar instructed, pointing at the blue Eleterria orb as he grabbed Akashia.
From behind, he looked masculine and powerful. The way he never hesitated was beautiful. Reflecting on how his actions spoke to his unshakable will, Tinasha nodded, despite her doubts.
While the guards outside the treasure vault were bewildered to find the king and queen visiting it in the middle of the night, they bowed and made way.
After refusing an escort, the pair entered the vault. Tinasha found the little box right away. “This is it.”
“Hmm.”
After Tinasha cleared away the other jumble of objects on the pedestal, she placed the two Eleterria orbs side by side on it.
Red and blue.
The same patterns on both made a complementary pair.
Oscar cocked his head to one side as he eyed them. “You have to destroy them both at the same time?”
“Yes… But wait, you want to destroy them?!”
“Of course,” he responded matter-of-factly.
“What?!” she cried, her jaw dropping.
Her flabbergasted look made Oscar give her a look of chagrin. “I understand your point. The point made by the version of you who argued with Valt. I don’t know what you’re thinking now, but if you still want to save people, even if it means altering the past…and if you’re prepared to have that affect your life…then I want to honor that and destroy it.”
“Oscar…”
Eleterria had reshaped events over and over. Those were all, undoubtedly, challenges to destiny. In the shadows of history, people had challenged fate ceaselessly.
This would be the final confrontation—destroying Eleterria and restoring all of the altered destinies to what they should truly be.
If that counted as yet another change, it would be the biggest yet.
The mother who was first given Eleterria would not be able to save her child, and the Time-Reader family would vanish.
Valt wouldn’t be born, and he wouldn’t meet Miralys.
Not only that, the lives and destinies of many people alive now would be modified, such as how Oscar’s was when his mother rescued him from a demon attack.
“You…,” Tinasha began, but couldn’t go on.
Does he understand that he might die? The witch gazed into Oscar’s blue eyes searchingly, and he flashed her a little grin.
“I can say that because Eleterria saved me, and I’ve used it to save another. Even so, changing the past is honestly a backward-looking way of doing things. No matter how much you regret something, you have to live with it. We shouldn’t…be able to do anything for what’s behind us.” He stroked her hair. “Besides, wouldn’t it make us more careless in the present moment if we knew we could go back to fix things?”
It sounded like he was chastising a small child, and Tinasha smiled sorrowfully.
Oscar was right, but it was only because he was so strong that he could make such a declaration.
How many human emotions and revisions had gone into this world? The littlest feeling distorted history, and that deformity spread until it became the next foundation.
It was wrong. Tinasha knew that. However, she wasn’t sure if she could dismiss it, for it was so very human.
Oscar was different, though. “If you’re ready, we can end it here. I don’t know who these outsiders are, but it gives me the creeps to think of them taking advantage of human regrets and amusing themselves. I’ve had enough of getting watched and documented.”
If Oscar had been given the option to travel to the past, he would’ve refused. He’d only saved Tinasha because he was already there—because he was strong. Oscar was the kind of person who could get on his feet and start moving, regardless of where he was.
“Whatever kind of tragedy this is, we should rise above it. I believe that all humans have the power to do that,” he declared.
After a long silence, Tinasha nodded. Oscar’s dignity was the sanctity of human life.
This world wasn’t a miniature garden, and its people weren’t toys.
Tinasha would reject any observers and their aims. She would not allow fate to be manipulated. She recalled the pride given to her when she was born alone in the world and when she achieved independence as a separate individual.
Oscar watched his wife. Abruptly, tears filled her dark eyes. His heart ached to see it, but he didn’t let his emotions show, as that would only wound her further.
She gave him a lonely smile. “It always surprises me how decisive you can be.”
“Yeah? I think this is the only natural conclusion.”
“For you, yes.”
Tinasha wrapped her arms around him, and he hugged her back tightly.
If outside laws induced the alternation and reformation of the world, then it would reach its limit someday, given that each instance carried a significant burden. History had come to an impasse. What would happen beyond that? Everything might collapse. That meant someone had to ease the weight before the implosion. Akashia must have been passed through generations for just such a purpose.
Oscar stroked Tinasha’s hair gently. “Besides, if we don’t destroy it, then I know you’ll go back to saying you won’t have my baby. And I don’t want that.”
“I never mentioned anything like that,” Tinasha protested, grinning through tears.
Forget a baby—it was improbable that Oscar and Tinasha would ever meet at all.
Eleterria had been introduced into the world in a blank space in time more than a thousand years before this moment. Everything would be redone from scratch, starting from that distant point. The two of them may not even be born. Even if they were, they could die before reaching adulthood. Oscar was only alive because his mother had used Eleterria to rescue him. In the true flow of history, he’d perished.
Allowing any of that to show through his expression would rob Tinasha of the will to go through with this. All Oscar could do was smile at her like it meant nothing. The bit of deception helped ensure she carried no regrets.
Oscar whispered to her, “It’s all right. You don’t need to bear it all alone.”
If they didn’t get rid of Eleterria, she would remain the heir, seal it away, and try to live a long life.
But that wouldn’t fix the problem. She would be bound to Eleterria as Valt was.
So they would end it here, staking everything on a timeline whose fate was unknown. That’s what humans did.
Oscar heard Tinasha heave a deep sigh. “You really do see through my every thought.”
She looked up at him as a smile like a moonlit flower bloomed on her face. He held her tighter.
“Oscar… If history changes and everything goes back to how it was, even if no one remembers and I’m never born, I’ll still love you. You are my first. My last. My only.”
She swore that to him emphatically, her words filled with conviction. The depth of her feelings for him bled into her voice.
She was a rare find. He was lucky to have known her.
Loving her and receiving that same love in kind had been a miracle. It was worth trading his life for.
“That’s more than I deserve to hear. I feel the same way—I love you.”
Oscar was touched that Tinasha had chosen to come to him from myriad memories. Now that he knew what a mess the world’s history was, he was overjoyed that she still loved him.
Even if their world had only just been created, Tinasha carried memories of a life with him. Those were worth something, even if it all disappeared.
Those recollections were sure to support the decision she was about to make.
Oscar caressed his beloved wife’s cheek. A tear rolled past her long eyelashes and fell over his thumb.
If at all possible, I want her to have another happy life.
It didn’t matter if they never met, as long as a life free of the torment of loneliness and hardship awaited her.
But if by some chance he did get the opportunity to gaze upon that azure tower again, he would go forth without the slightest hesitation to meet her. Then he would be near her again, even if he bothered her initially, and they could eventually share a life together…
It was a silly dream that would never come to pass.
But for right now, Oscar wanted to believe in that happy idea.
Tinasha was trembling minutely, and he whispered to her, “Don’t worry. I have no intention of letting you go. This is just a waypoint for us. Don’t hesitate. Whether you’re queen of another nation or a witch doesn’t matter to me. Just come to me. And if you don’t, I’ll barge in on you again.”
“I can picture it,” she replied with a grin, one that was beautiful through the tears.
Oscar hugged Tinasha close. He could hear her sniffling into his chest. But soon enough, she bit her lip, and her tears stopped. Stretching up on her tiptoes, she wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself to him.
“You are my king. I have loved you for an eternity. Everything in me—my power and my mind—exists to protect you.”
The blessing Tinasha gave Oscar was utterly steadfast. That was how strongly she felt about him. He knew that the strength of her love had saved him in return.
The witch loved fiercely, intensely, and awkwardly.
He could never doubt her devotion to her people and husband. It was because she was with him that he could go forward.
As Oscar savored the feel of Tinasha’s body heat seeping into him, he listened to her make an unwavering vow.
“Please wait for me. I promise I will come to you. I will cross time. And then we will love each other again.”
“I…look forward to it,” he replied with a broad smile. The world was about to change as they dreamed of such a modest little vision.
After Oscar patted her on the back, Tinasha released him. They gazed into each other’s eyes, pressing their foreheads together.
Dark eyes and twilight eyes reflected one another’s forms.
As their noses, cheeks, and, finally, lips brushed against each other’s, they shared a last kiss.
Their destinies had undoubtedly intertwined when they were not originally supposed to. That was why things had to end here.
To attempt to change things, as humans did.
Tinasha took hold of Oscar’s left hand. With a nod, he unsheathed Akashia.
He turned to face the pair of artifacts that glittered with all of the human emotions they had absorbed.
“Was it fun toying with us? Don’t you dare look down on humans. Your days of amusement are over.”
The double-edged sword glittered like a mirror as Oscar lifted it aloft and gave his decree with a ringing tone.
“We reject your interference. You shall turn to dust and leave us be!”
Akashia came down. The blade touched both of the orbs at once.
A white light consumed everything.
Immediately after the clear tinkling of the orbs’ rupture, terrible pain stabbed through her body.
“TINASHA!”
Oscar instantly gathered his wife into his arms.
The power to dismantle the world swirled in the air, whipping into a mad vortex.
It was impossible to see anything, and she didn’t know what was happening.
The shards of Eleterria, attempting to absorb what they could, and the power of Akashia, following them in hot pursuit, were transforming her soul.
A force brought in from outside this world was pouring into her, enough to change her into something inhuman.
“AAAAAAAAAHHHH!” she screamed.
Oscar held her tight as everything turned white and burned away.
Then they were thrown into an unknown place.
END OF UNNAMED MEMORY ACT TWO |
Unnamed Memory
1. Shellwork Memory
“Once I’m dead, you’ll know for the first time what I was and what you are.”
“What, Father?” the young man asked, stunned by his father’s sudden declaration at the dinner table. He paused while bringing a spoonful of soup to his mouth. “What’s this all about? Why are you talking about dying?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” his father answered dismissively. “This world has a way of balancing the books to make up for how things were altered. One person’s salvation means another’s downfall, and one country’s glory ensures another’s decline. Ultimately, it will all converge on a future that’s not so different from how it should have been.”
The words seemed like nonsense. The son opened his mouth to inquire further, but the father held up a hand to stop him. “Stay quiet and just listen to me. Anyway, won’t shooting for that convergence mean we wind up with a future that’s totally immutable? This present that we’re in now, the one that was so far in the future for the people of the ancient past, is still being altered. Humans will keep challenging themselves for all eternity—so long as those orbs exist.”
“Orbs?”
“They possess a terrible power and keep sticking pins in the world. With every new prick, the world is dismantled and forced to reconstruct itself based on washed-up memories. It must be profoundly agonizing for the world. And we are the only ones who know of that pain.”
The young man didn’t interrupt his father’s story. He stayed silent, as an odd feeling settled over the room.
“The world cannot tolerate its memory being overwritten forever. But what it will truly become unable to suffer is us. In the end, we are mere mortals. Our minds are fragile. Our lot is to be used as tools and cast aside… No, we are eternal slaves who are never allowed to be thrown away.”
His voice took on a resentful tone. He wasn’t shouting, but his words shook with a deep fury.
The father was swift to rein in that anger before his son. And as he stared at his child, he went on. “The world is waiting for one last straw. That which will undo all the interventions and restore it to its original shape.”
There was an emptiness in his eyes as he whispered the words. Then he dropped his gaze to his knees. “But that won’t happen in my lifetime.”
Heavy despair showed through in that pronouncement. By the time his son finally understood the meaning of his words…
By the next day, his father had hanged himself on a tree in the garden.
Farsas Castle was a massive structure. Inhabitants frequently couldn’t see the ends of the hallways they traveled along. Unlike the castle in Tuldarr, which had been expanded and added onto many times since the nation’s founding, Farsas’s had been designed to be huge from the start.
“Must be because it was built over an underground lake,” said a stunningly beautiful woman with black eyes and hair as she made her way down a hall.
Passing magistrates and ladies-in-waiting turned their heads to look at her, despite knowing it was rude. In her eyes, as dark and mysterious as a moonless night, they found only the pronounced innocence of a girl.
Clad in a white mage’s robe, she sauntered down the long hallway with arms crossed, when a bright feminine voice called out from behind her.
“Princess Tinasha!”
She turned at the sound of nearing footsteps and spied two familiar mages. “Sylvia and Doan,” she greeted them.
The blond woman who had called out grinned and curtsied, while the calm young man next to her gave a bow. Both were mages who served the court of Farsas and were relatively close with Tinasha, even though she was a visitor from a bordering country.
Sylvia glanced down at Tinasha’s feet. “What happened to your shoes?”
“Shoes?” Tinasha asked, following Sylvia’s gaze. Her ivory feet were bare, floating a little above the ground. Her eyes widened in surprise as she raked a hand through her black hair. “I didn’t even notice. I was too deep in thought.”
“Your research?” Sylvia questioned.
The most likely target of a mage’s focused concentration would be their own magic research.
The future queen of Farsas’s neighbor, the Magic Empire of Tuldarr, nodded. “I’m a little stuck on something… but I think I’ll figure it out soon.”
“Ah, I know what that must be,” said Doan, alluding to the most highly classified secret in all of Farsas.
When the young king of Farsas was a young boy, a witch cursed him. Any woman carrying his child would die before the child could be born. The curse was so strong that even the royal chief mage and the king of Tuldarr were incapable of undoing it. Tinasha was presently analyzing the magic herself in an attempt to break it.
There were only three witches in all the land, and there were two reasons why Tinasha was qualified to unravel their spells.
The first was that she herself was a former queen of Tuldarr who bore the title of Witch Killer Queen. The other was that she had personally examined a nullified version of that exact curse when she was younger.
A man from four hundred years in the future had come to rescue Tinasha from danger, and he had possessed the impotent version of the curse.
Though he claimed he would be Tinasha’s husband one day, in the end, he vanished after saving her. In exchange for sacrificing everything, he rewrote history and Tinasha’s fate.
He was also the owner of a royal sword that could nullify magic. His name was Oscar.
In the present age, he was king of Farsas, and now that the past had been altered, he possessed no memory of Tinasha. But she didn’t mind.
Tinasha and Oscar were different from the versions who had married each other. They were totally separate people who had met afresh.
That was precisely why she had to be the one to break his curse.
“I need to undo it, but I’ve hit a snag… I’m looking for one last flash of inspiration,” Tinasha explained.
“Ah, right. That last stretch can be tricky,” Doan said with a wry grimace. Court mages like him held just about the highest position a mage could reach; there were fewer than five hundred throughout every country combined. The best of them spent much of their time sequestered in research, so Doan sympathized with what it was like to hit a mental wall.
Tinasha floated along barefoot, stretching both her arms up overhead. “I’m really struggling with it… but I know there has to be a way within the laws of magic…”
Curses and blessings were constructed from the spell caster’s own unique language, but as long as they utilized magic, they were still bound by its rules and limits. No matter how inspired the idea or technology used for the spell was, it shouldn’t have been beyond understanding and deconstructing.
Thus, the real challenge came from whatever was working against those laws, rather than from the witch’s curse.
The magic orb that had once sent a different Oscar backward in time now lay in the Tuldarr treasure vault, while one of another color was stored in Farsas’s treasure vault.
Once someone used the sphere, history would be erased and rewritten with a new timeline that started from the point in time at which the user arrived. What was the original purpose in creating such a devastating thing that went against all laws of magic?
As Tinasha considered it, doubts flooded her mind until it was all she could think about.
“A new law… no, that’s not it. They don’t contradict one another.”
A primary tenet of the laws of magic was that time could not be rewound. It continued to flow. There was leeway to dam its streaming for a bit, but there was no turning it back. That was the letter of the law and the hard-and-fast way the world operated. Past eras existed in memories.
“Then what about overwriting a law with a different one? Or does the orb contain its own unique rules? But where would a different law come from in the first place? Since going back in time is tantamount to reconstructing the entire world…”
“Princess Tinasha, your thoughts are getting a little worrisome,” Doan remarked with concern as he walked a step behind her. He would have liked to pretend he hadn’t heard anything, and his harsh but honest remark made Tinasha silence her whispering.
Instead, Sylvia piped up in a cheerful voice. Apparently, she hadn’t heard anything. “Oh yes, did you know rumors are flying in the city about today’s garden party?”
“Garden party? Rumors?” Tinasha repeated.
“Hey, Sylvia…,” Doan chided.
Tinasha hadn’t been informed of the event. During the two days following her involvement in a conflict with Yarda, one of Farsas’s neighbors, Tinasha had been shut up in her room, focusing on analyzing the curse.
While Doan’s expression was strained, Sylvia flashed him a grin. “Aww, but it’s the talk of the town. The word on the street is that the garden party today might be a way for His Majesty to choose a bride!”
“…”
A long, unpleasant silence fell over the trio. Doan let out a heavy sigh before pasting a professional smile on his face and bowing. “I seem to have recalled something I need to do. I will be taking my leave.”
“Hold it,” Tinasha called, her voice imbued with power, and Doan was rendered unable to move. The young mage cursed himself for missing his chance to escape earlier.
Tinasha cast him a brilliant grin. “Now that I’ve heard such interesting news, I insist you tell me all about it.”
“The garden party tradition started three generations ago with King Regius. He would invite the city’s merchants and artisans to display their pieces and sell their wares,” Sylvia explained.
“Oh, so it was a way for him to gather everyone he was keeping an eye on,” Tinasha surmised.
“Exactly. It’s a potentially life-changing opportunity for dealers, and they promote themselves with everything they have. Very often, a merchant’s business explodes after becoming an official provider for the crown,” Sylvia went on.
After the trio headed to the lounge to continue their conversation, Sylvia launched into the details of the garden party. Her eyes were dancing, and there wasn’t a shred of ill intention in her as she sipped her tea.
“So then it became a chance for the merchants’ daughters, who came along to assist their parents, to catch the eyes of noblemen. And remember, our last queen was a commoner herself.”
“All of this is just the townsfolk getting themselves all worked up,” added Doan, looking resigned. Ordinarily, he didn’t like to get himself involved in any sticky disagreements, and he could sense that this was going to put Tinasha in a bad mood. Based on her behavior, it was a reasonable fear. Still, Tinasha was about to take the Tuldarr throne and possessed good judgment.
As Tinasha savored the aroma wafting from her teacup, she asked, “The king first fell in love with Oscar’s mother at one of these parties?”
“No, I believe he brought her back to the castle with him one day. He met her after sneaking out for some fun,” Doan replied.
“Sneaking out… Like father, like son…”
“As I recall, her family was opposed to the union, so her origins remained a secret. No one from the late queen’s family attended her funeral,” Sylvia said.
“Hmm…”
Tinasha had a feeling that even Oscar didn’t know the whole story.
His mother had been the one to bring the very orb that took him back in time into Farsas. What’s more, Oscar had enough magic in him to surpass the average mage, although it was sealed away. The previous king didn’t possess a drop of magic, so it was very likely that his mother had been a mage.
Yet while all of that was intriguing, Oscar’s mother was dead, and this was all another nation’s business. Tinasha knew it wasn’t something to concern herself with. It would be a matter for Oscar’s future queen to ponder.
Elbows on her knees, Tinasha rested her chin in her hands. “I wonder who he’ll marry.”
“Princess Tinasha, may I excuse myself? I believe I have a stomachache,” Doan said.
“I’m not going to do anything!” she shot back. It was her own fault that the man didn’t trust her, but she was displeased that he was so obviously wary.
As Tinasha puffed up her cheeks with indignation, Sylvia clapped her hands together. “I know! Why don’t you attend the garden party?”
“What? But I’m a foreign visitor. I think Oscar would get mad if he found me there.”
The young king had often urged her not to sneak out on her own, as she was a precious resource. He would undoubtedly be vexed if she made an appearance during a gathering of merchants and artisans.
Tinasha tried to change the subject, but Sylvia waved a hand dismissively. “You just have to not get caught. Oh, I know! You can use a curse song to disguise yourself!”
“Curse songs aren’t powerful enough for that… and Oscar will be on guard from the moment I sing,” Tinasha objected.
“Then we’ll use some other method! Don’t old spell books have transformation spells?”
“Transformation spells? I did learn some when I was younger,” Tinasha admitted.
The magic altered the physical body itself instead of creating illusions, as curse songs and other techniques did. It was an ancient advanced magic that Tinasha had indeed been instructed in four hundred years ago. However, she only knew the theory behind it, and had never put it into practice.
Tinasha cast back through her memories. “I don’t feel capable of changing myself to anything nonhuman… but I could likely manage something simple like changing my age.”
“Let’s try it, then! I’ll get your costume ready! You should pretend to be a town girl and set your sights on marrying the king!” Sylvia chirped.
“But I’m not after that!” Tinasha protested.
“I believe it’s time for me to be taking my leave… I don’t want to quit my job as court mage just yet,” Doan said faintly. In sharp contrast to his discreet worry, Sylvia was in high spirits and bursting with excitement.
Tinasha folded her arms, gazing at the pair. “Only for a little while. I’ll leave if it looks like I’m about to get scolded.”
“It’ll be fine if you don’t get caught! Leave it to me!” Sylvia reassured her with totally baseless confidence as she tugged Tinasha out of her seat.
Doan watched them depart the lounge and let out a long sigh as he rubbed at his aching stomach.
Later that afternoon, tables and quilts were spread on the grass in the castle courtyard as townspeople who had brought their finest wares bustled about. Rows of crystals glittered on a black cloth next to a stand with a display of elaborately wrought clockwork boxes. All sorts of treasures were on exhibit as the merchants hustled to and fro.
Everyone’s greatest hope was to catch the king’s fancy, but this event still promised to be a significant business opportunity for them, even if they failed at that. One could still be made a royal purveyor if their goods enticed a castle official. And if they managed to forge a connection with a famous merchant, that could be their ticket to international trade. What kind of opportunity awaited them depended on effort and luck.
For those reasons, all attendees had been highly motivated to make the most scrupulous preparations—including the merchants’ daughters, who aspired to something a bit different. Ostensibly, they were there to assist their families. But they also harbored dreams of a fairy-tale ending, despite knowing it was unlikely.
These girls were visibly excited and restless upon sighting the king in the courtyard. While they didn’t squeal or shriek, they shot him looks heavy with longing.
The king’s attendant and childhood friend, Lazar, wore a faint smile. “They were at it last year, too, but it seems like there are even more girls this time.”
“It’ll get out of hand if their numbers continue to increase. I don’t have time to search for a bride,” Oscar replied while inspecting a nearby table of delicate handmade items. Impressed by the artisan’s thorough craftsmanship, he picked up an accessory case. “This is well made. Very interesting. I’ll take it.”
“Th-thank you very much!” answered the merchant, whose prestige would rise after having sold to the king. Joy was writ large on his face as Lazar handled the purchase. Meanwhile, Oscar slipped the shellwork case into his jacket pocket. That done, his eye turned to other goods.
As he made his way around the courtyard, the palpable sense of anticipation in the air reached a fever pitch. Much of it was coming from the young girls, and Oscar made sure to keep his expression free of the cynical smile that threatened to tug at his lips.
When he’d made his way around half of the sellers, a girl came running up to him from the crowd. Her cheeks were flushed with nervous tension as she curtsied before him. “Would you mind terribly if I accompanied you, Your Majesty?”
The young woman’s brazen offer made all the other young women stare at her with shock and envy.
Oscar’s eyes widened for a moment, caught off guard as he was, but then he grinned lightly. “I appreciate that, but I’m all right.”
“Oh, but…,” the girl protested.
“In that case, allow me to accompany you,” offered another young lady.
“No, let me—”
The girls began to close in. While the anxious anticipation in the air dissolved, it was now filled with the din of their entreaties, which clearly made the king’s guards uneasy.
At a complete loss about what to do, Lazar looked up at Oscar. “Your Majesty…”
He seemed to be suggesting that Oscar take his leave for the moment. For a second, Oscar couldn’t decide how to answer him.
Despite the garden party’s humble origins, it was an official affair nowadays. The merchants and artisans who attended submitted samples of their wares to the castle ahead of time. The king and royal experts on each type of craft reviewed the application, so there was very little need for Oscar to attend in person and cause a stir.
The dealers were all aware of that. Many of them pursed their lips at the disturbance and turned disapproving looks on the hopeful young women.
As Oscar scanned the crowd, his gaze suddenly landed on a girl standing some distance away in the shade of a tree. Her red hair was tied up in a ponytail, and she wore a white apron. With her freckled face and slightly scuffed wooden clogs, she was the picture of an ordinary town maiden.
But… there was something different in her eyes.
Blazing as they were with some potent, very fierce emotion, those eyes seemed to carry the power to captivate anyone with a single look. She was entirely unlike her peers.
Oscar’s gaze narrowed as if against the sunlight. Once he recognized how he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from her, he sighed quietly.
Turning his attention back to everyone else, he proclaimed, “All right, then. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to show someone around the castle. That said, I can’t take everyone.”
He looked around at the crowd thoughtfully. Then he beckoned to the girl under the tree. “Yes, you’ll do. Come along.”
“Um…,” the girl said, her expression seizing up. Her eyes darted about, as though hoping to spot an escape. Upon realizing that everyone was staring her way, she pursed her lips.
She looked down and away as her cheeks turned pink. “Thank… you very much. I accept.”
The girl made her way through the crowd as others lobbed envious looks at her all the while. She followed half a step behind Oscar, and as they departed this section of the garden, the feverish atmosphere vanished like a wave pulling out to sea. Deflated, those remaining returned to their work. The bustle of activity in the courtyard settled back down to more relaxed levels.
Meanwhile, the king and the young lady were silent as they ventured deeper into the castle gardens.
Once they were out of sight of prying eyes, the girl eked out in a small voice, “Um, Your Majesty… why me?”
“Do I need a reason?”
“No… you do not,” she replied, cowering at his retort. Her last bit of hope had vanished, and her pink cheeks turned pale.
Oscar wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have said anything. But he knew what he had glimpsed. Once the two reached an open patch of lawn, he sat down on the grass. The girl hurried to take a seat beside him.
The king glanced at that freckled face and then abruptly reached out to pinch one soft cheek. “What’s going on here? How did you do this?”
“Ow, ow, ow! Stop it! I just transformed myself with magic!” she confessed, ducking her head to get away from his hand and rubbing at her reddened cheek. “How did you know it was me?”
Altered though it was, Tinasha’s face looked as it always did to Oscar. Her innocent eyes were just as spirited. There was no mistaking them.
Oscar met that gaze evenly with a blank look of his own. All sorts of retorts came to mind, but he gave a safe answer in the end. “No amount of magic can hide power as strong as yours. You’re giving off the faintest glow.”
“Oh… I suppose your intuition was always pretty strong,” Tinasha replied, burying her face in her hands. Immediately, her red locks reverted to their original inky black. Her suntanned skin became alabaster, and she dropped her hands. Her face, in all its unparalleled beauty, peered up at Oscar.
The queen who had come from four hundred years ago to save Oscar gave him an abashed, guilty smile. “I’m sorry. I simply wanted a little break.”
“You should’ve just told me, then.”
“I also heard you’d be looking for a wife.”
“Listen… Don’t try to marry me disguised as someone else,” he stated gravely. “It’ll turn into a diplomatic crisis.”
“I wasn’t! I just didn’t want to get in your way!” Tinasha objected, but her actions spoke differently.
Despite her status as the future queen of Tuldarr, she had taken reckless action time and again to break Oscar’s curse while staying in Farsas. She had even used herself as bait in a fight. Naturally, Oscar was always wary of what she might pull next, but he’d assumed she would behave herself with her coronation nearing. Tinasha was the type of person to ultimately prioritize her responsibilities above her own wishes, which was why she would soon be leaving Farsas.
She made a guilty face. “I did get in the way of your work. I’m very sorry.”
“It’s fine. I was just about to leave anyway,” replied Oscar. The garden party was an event his eccentric great-grandfather had started. It held no actual use. Tinasha’s presence actually provided Oscar with a chance to leave early.
From his pocket, Oscar drew out the shellwork object he’d purchased earlier and dropped it in Tinasha’s lap. “Here.”
“What? Is this for me?”
“You’ve never been to the seashore, right?”
Upon her imminent ascension to the throne, Tinasha would lose a lot of her freedom. While Oscar was a king as well, the court of Farsas was far more open. In contrast, Tuldarr would constantly be policing its queen from a shadowy background.
So he wanted her to feel a sense of freedom in her heart, at least when she looked at that shellwork case. She could remember the brief span of days she’d spent in Farsas while imagining the vast ocean.
Tinasha held the box in her palms and looked it over. The finely wrought ornamentation depicted a girl sitting on a rocky shore playing the lyre while fish listened, enraptured. Luminescent stones embedded within the piece cast faintly wavering shadows.
Carefully, she wrapped her hands around it. “Thank you so much. I love it.”
Next to her, Oscar softened his expression as he watched her with the gift.
Amid this tranquil moment, he sprawled out in the grass and stretched his arms above his head. “Now’s a great time for a break. Also, take off those shoes. You can go back barefoot if you teleport to the castle, can’t you?”
“Um, I guess… Are you going to take a nap here?”
“Wake me up when you head back,” Oscar instructed, but before his eyes could fully close, Tinasha nudged him. Moving his arm away from his eyes to look at her, he saw she was patting her lap.
“You can sleep here. I’ve got some things to think over for a while anyway.”
“Wow,” he remarked dryly, giving her a disapproving look for acting so defenseless. They were completely alone, however. He could let it slide.
Oscar moved over and lay his head down in Tinasha’s lap. When he glanced up, he saw that her face was lit with a strange childlike glee. “What’s with that look? Are you going to chop off my head while I’m asleep or something?”
“Of course not. Should that ever be necessary, I’ll come at you from head-on.”
“Big talk. I’m going to sleep,” the king responded, closing his eyes. Tinasha’s ivory hands carded through his hair softly. Oscar knew that the faint floral scent she gave off was her own. He breathed it in comfortably.
When he did pass into slumber, there came a brief, wonderful, and laughable dream in which he married an ordinary girl from town.
Oscar nodded off rather quickly, and his breathing evened.
Tinasha gazed down at him. “He didn’t get too mad at me…”
The most foolish of hopes had blossomed inside her when his eyes had fallen upon her at the party, but it was only because he’d seen through her disguise. It was a shame that her magic gave her away. Sylvia had been so excited to pick out her clothes.
Careful not to wake the man in her lap, Tinasha slipped off her wooden clogs. She’d never worn their likes before, so her toes and heels were red. Oscar must have guessed that, which was why he told her to remove them. Feeling all mixed up inside, she massaged her heels.
When they were feeling better, Tinasha held the seashell case up and examined it. “So pretty…”
Sunlight and the luminescent stones illuminated the engraved decorations that depicted part of a fairy tale. A girl whose love had gone missing in an accident at sea walked the coast during the day, hoping to find him. Come nightfall, she sang to the fish, asking for any news of him.
Despite her efforts, her sweetheart was never found. When she was nearing the last of her hope, he appeared at last, but his memories were gone. The story went that she found joy in getting to know him again, though she mourned the loss of his recollections to the ocean.
“Starting over…”
It reminded Tinasha of her and Oscar. Unlike in the fairy tale, she and the king of Farsas weren’t in love. All that awaited them was a final good-bye.
Because the other Oscar had rescued Tinasha four hundred years ago, they had met again in this era. However, their paths would diverge before long. She could only leave him with the fruits of her labor, the breaking of the curse. It was the materialization of her feelings for him, in a way. Most curses and blessings were laid with an underlying emotion. |
Unnamed Memory
“Oh!”
Inspiration abruptly struck Tinasha, and her head snapped up.
Surely this feeling is the final piece to undoing the curse.
The desire to leave something behind. That was what the curse placed on Oscar had desired all along. Inside the spell woven by the Witch of Silence’s own distinct language, there was a further coded portion, the definition name. Even if the curse were broken, that portion would remain. In the curse Tinasha had examined four centuries ago, that bit hadn’t been negated.
The final piece of the spell had to exist to ensure the definition name remained.
“Which means…”
Tinasha looked at Oscar, still asleep with his head in her lap. She wanted to test out her theory right away, but he was resting. If possible, she would prefer to let him relax to make up for his hectic daily schedule.
After thinking for a moment, Tinasha spread her arms wide. A fluffy white blanket appeared between them, and she placed it over the king. Then she closed her eyes and began to contemplate the curse.
How long had he been asleep? Judging by the sun’s position, not even an hour had passed.
Oscar craned his neck to look at the girl whose lap he’d been napping on, only to discover that she had nodded off, too. Tinasha’s head was lolling to one side. He’d anticipated that she’d rouse him, yet the young woman had abandoned her post.
Oscar noticed the white blanket laid over him and huffed. “We’re in the castle, but it’s still dangerous if neither of us keeps watch.”
Anything could’ve happened while they were both unawares. However, one of them would have probably awoken had there been trouble.
Oscar spent some time watching Tinasha’s face as she slept, but he couldn’t do that forever. He sat up, placed the blanket over her, and took the girl in his arms. Even that didn’t wake her. Gently, he hugged her more closely.
“Go on and sleep. You are free as long as you’re in Farsas.”
If Tinasha wished it, she could live like a commoner in town. But Oscar knew she’d never do that.
The pair had both been raised for something more. That was why the rare moments of freedom like this one were so precious.
With Tinasha in his arms, Oscar returned to his day.
He didn’t want to count how many days like this she had left. |
Unnamed Memory
2. Moon Crystals
It revolved slowly in the air with a solid artistic beauty.
Strands and lines were woven together so minutely. It was the height of intricacy, and Tinasha reached a finger toward it.
Two spells intertwined, canceling each other out, just like what I saw back then.
The opposed forces brought together natures that were averse yet strongly attracted to each other.
Both of them were love, and both of them were hate.
That which devoured from the inside even as it protected, and that which supported even as it caused harm.
Within, Tinasha saw powerful emotions, and she sighed. Fear struck her at the thought that she would soon have to manifest one-half of this pair.
“It’s all right.”
She wouldn’t go back on her promise. Tinasha had slept for four hundred years for this. At the very least, she owed it to him to get it done.
She summoned an array of assorted crystal balls into her hands. Then she began the long recitation to create the magic implements she would need.
When Tinasha visited Oscar in his study, he noticed dark circles under her eyes and frowned. Her face had been lined with exhaustion the day before during their practice, too. Censure bled into the king’s voice as he inquired, “Are you getting enough sleep?”
“I don’t think I’ve slept in two days.”
“Go to bed! Now!” he barked, and she gave a wan smile. Lazar glanced over, concerned.
Tinasha leaned against the wall by the door and held up a hand. “I came to tell you that I’ve finished the analysis. I’m going to break the curse tonight. Until then, I’m going to take a little nap… so I won’t be able to make our training today. Sorry about that.”
The news she dropped so casually struck both men dumb. Neither could manage a single word for a moment.
Noticing their reactions, Tinasha grinned and looked away. Neither could be confident if she did so from exhaustion, shyness, or something else entirely. However, it was curiously alluring, and it caught Oscar’s gaze.
After sufficient time, he let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t think you’d make it before the deadline.”
“Of course I did. Anything less would’ve inconvenienced you, after all.”
“You said it would require half a year, but I thought three years for sure.”
“Don’t just add on time based on a groundless assumption!” Tinasha snapped, pushing off from the wall. She looked unsteady on her feet, which made Oscar regret teasing her.
Biting his tongue to keep himself from prodding her further, he steered the conversation back on course. “So, do you need anything to break the curse?”
“No. I’ll do it while you’re sleeping, so go to bed early.”
“Why do I need to be unconscious?” he asked.
“It’s dangerous if you’re awake during the spell,” Tinasha explained while massaging her temples. It looked like she could pass out at any moment.
Noticing that, Oscar nodded. “All right. Just go get some sleep.”
“I’ll come to you tonight,” she said before teleporting away.
Lazar exhaled, amazed. “It feels like time has passed in a flash. It doesn’t seem real yet that Princess Tinasha will be returning to Tuldarr.”
“Those were the terms she came here with,” Oscar reminded him, his inflection free of sentiment. There was less than a week left until Tinasha’s coronation. It was strange for her to still be here so close to the deadline. She had done so to break his curse, but that excuse would be gone after tonight. A profoundly mysterious emotion coursed through Oscar’s body.
Impatience, hope, loneliness, worry—no, none of that.
He was unwilling to acknowledge that unnamed sensation, but he did let his thoughts turn to how hard Tinasha had worked to reach this point.
Tinasha came to Oscar’s chamber an hour after he retired for the night. The color had returned to her face, if only somewhat, likely thanks to her nap during the day. Oscar looked her up and down from his spot next to her on the bed. “Those dark circles aren’t going to go away in time for your crowning. Legis might be upset with me.”
The future queen dismissed the concern with a smile. “I can use magic to conceal them if they don’t.” She poked at Oscar’s forehead and chest. “Take off your shirt and lie down. Once the spell begins, I don’t think you’ll wake up until it’s over. But I want you to fall asleep naturally. If I put you to sleep with magic, there will be too many spells going.”
“It’s not easy to pass out on command,” Oscar complained, but he stripped off his shirt obediently and lay faceup on the bed.
“Should I wait until you’re unconscious and then come back?” Tinasha asked.
“It’d all be the same. I’d be on edge, subconsciously wondering when you would return.”
“That’s true. It would be like knowing someone was going to creep into your room… I should have just done the spell without giving you any warning.”
“That would have been very suspicious, so forget that notion. I’ll do my best to fall asleep.”
“Thanks.”
Both of them closed their eyes, and silence blanketed the room.
Knowing that Tinasha was nearby didn’t make Oscar anxious. For as long as he could remember, he’d always been sensitive to the presence of others. This girl was probably the only person who wouldn’t keep him up. Perhaps it was because she held her own without growing overly close to him.
Tinasha was the type of ruler who kept her head high and never relied on anyone else. That was who she was, yet in Farsas, she was free to act as she pleased. Maybe that was the reason it felt so natural for her to be at Oscar’s side, and why it gave him a sense of relief.
He opened his eyes to see that Tinasha had about twenty small crystal balls spread out in her lap. She picked them up one by one to inspect them carefully.
It looked so much like she was playing a children’s game that Oscar had to speak up. “What are those?”
“Hey! You’re not asleep!”
“Who passes out that quickly?!”
Tinasha twisted around to show him a crystal ball in her palm. “It’s a magic implement. Each one contains a spell. I’m preparing these to draw up the larger spell.”
“You need that many?”
“A witch cursed you. This isn’t your everyday magic,” she replied, lips forming a smile that seemed to be both self-deprecating and relieved.
Her long eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks. The half of her porcelain face bathed in the moonlight from the window glowed pale, transforming her beauty into something ethereal. Before Oscar knew it, he was staring at her.
“It’s already been half a year,” he blurted out.
While he was no Lazar, it really did feel like the time had gone quickly.
She grinned at that. “Right on schedule, just like I said.”
“And you’ve managed to cause no end of trouble in such a short while, too.”
“Because you let me be free.”
That was the truth, and she knew he was no different.
Each day they spent together was nothing like the one before. Tinasha’s utterly carefree demeanor, her immense power she wielded like it was child’s play… It was so novel and new that it left Oscar amazed and filled with a wondrous sense of liberty.
“You do the most unexpected things. Like sleeping underneath a castle for four centuries,” he commented dryly.
“I was the one who built that underground chamber. I was only making good use of it.”
Oscar recalled the sight of that verdant subterranean garden, removed from the flow of time.
The young woman sleeping on the white bed had spoken his name when she arose.
“When I first saw you—I thought you were made for me,” Oscar confessed.
Because he discovered her while seeking a way to break his curse, his first thought was that this must be his bride. The curse that had always mystified him—even that made sense once he met her. He felt like maybe it had all been leading to that moment.
Calmly, she spoke into the silence of the room. “Yes. I did come for you.”
It echoed what he had said, but it was not the same. Still, both encapsulated emotions that were too large to hold.
Whatever sounds there were beyond the room didn’t reach Oscar. The chamber was cut off from the outside world. The flow of time was different, as if this place were submerged. Amid the quiet, everything floated to the surface.
To Oscar, it felt like he might see every corner of the room if he squinted. He closed his eyes again, however.
“Tinasha.”
“What?”
“Nothing…”
He didn’t know what to say, or how. There was a desire to express something, but hesitation as well.
In the end, he asked something that was almost what he wanted to ask, yet not quite. “Can you really break the curse?”
“I’ve come this far. Just trust me,” she responded confidently. There was no trace of uncertainty in her voice. The girl who had cried in front of Oscar was gone. While that was a relief to him, he also felt loneliness in equal measure. Whether or not that was oversentimentality, he couldn’t be sure.
If it was… then maybe, he ought to just say it.
This time he asked what he really wished to. “Are you really going to break it?”
There was a long silence heavy with something that hadn’t been there before.
Tinasha answered in a clear voice. “I am.”
It sounded like she was reading a line prepared ahead of time. Like the young woman had already convinced herself.
Oscar snorted at that resolute beauty.
She’s struggled with it that much, huh? I suppose that only makes sense.
From here, she would go on to become queen. Another thing that made sense.
Oscar had posed a foolish question. He made a face, regretting his inquiry. Now that they were here, he realized for the first time that this was what he had been wavering on all along. He’d been even more shaken up over it than she was.
However, Oscar refused to falter anymore. This would put an end to it all.
“Go ahead,” he urged before sinking deep into slumber. He let it carry him away.
As the king of Farsas fell into a soft dream, he had the faintest sensation of someone taking gentle hold of his hand.
Tinasha paused before the transportation array located deep in Farsas Castle and looked back.
No small number of people had taken breaks from their duties to see her off. She gave them all a bashful grin. Before the expression had faded, she bowed to the man who was approaching her. “I owe you a great deal.”
“And I you. Sorry I never let you take it easy,” he replied.
“I had fun. If there are ever any conflicts in the future, please call on me,” Tinasha said. She carried nothing with her, for her effects had already been cleared from her room.
She lowered her head to the others present. Sylvia bowed in return, looking like she was about to cry. Tinasha smiled to see that, knowing that she would miss her friend, too.
Oscar gazed down at Tinasha. “I’ll see you next at your coronation. It’s fast approaching.”
“Oh, you don’t have to come if it’ll inconvenience you.”
“Just how heartless do you think I am?” he groused, lightly pinching her cheek.
Tinasha fought him off. Punctuating each of her words with a slap against his chest, she retorted, “I thought you hated diplomatic events like that!”
Chastened, Oscar released the young woman. “I’m going anyway. Try not to mess up.”
“I’ve done it all once before!” she snarled, her petite shoulders squared in anger. But soon enough, her expression relaxed. One blink and her eyes glowed with affection. She scanned the assembled group, her gaze not landing on anyone in particular, until she looked up at Oscar. For a moment, her beautiful face appeared more adult, and she beamed lovingly at him.
In her gaze was clear, selfless love. The emotion was profound and boundless. Oscar felt his chest tighten.
It was fleeting, however, melting away to reveal Tinasha’s usual childlike nature. “I’ll be off, then. Thank you so much for everything.”
With that, she turned to walk away from him. Her black locks swayed like silk. Even now, her petite frame exuded nobility and solitude.
She stepped onto the transportation array.
The teleportation magic activated, and the beautiful mage disappeared from Farsas.
Oscar closed his eyes, grinning bitterly.
Her image was burned into the inside of his eyelids, vivid and striking. It would be a long while before he could forget her. |
Unnamed Memory
3. Returning the Promise
Last-minute appeals came rushing in one after another, and by the time Oscar could reach a stopping point, it was late in the afternoon.
He glanced at the clock and frowned. “Damn. Practice with Tinasha—”
Then he stopped, remembering that she had left Farsas. Not missing how his king’s face had screwed up in a scowl, Lazar gave a wan smile. “I’m sure she’s incredibly busy. Her coronation is in two days.”
“She really was here until the absolute last minute…”
While she could travel back instantly via teleportation, a ruler on the cusp of coronation normally wouldn’t remain abroad. She had done so out of a strong sense of duty and the goodness of her heart.
Tinasha had spent merely half a year living at the castle, but lingering traces of her scent popped up everywhere.
Oscar sighed, recalling how she’d smiled at him while clad in a short-sleeved outfit like something a child would wear. “She’s an odd one, all right. Make sure everything she did and said in Farsas is noted down. I want it recorded for posterity.”
“I believe Tuldarr may object to that,” Lazar said, implying that her behavior had been just that bizarre and surely her homeland would prefer that the queen’s eccentricities were kept quiet. In fact, nothing of note had been recorded about the queen who had reigned four centuries ago besides her status as the Witch Killer Queen and other meritorious deeds she had done.
“If she were a princess instead of a future queen, they might find her antics amusing,” Oscar asserted.
“Are you sure? Let’s not forget how many times she’s wound up covered in blood,” Lazar pointed out with a shudder. Ignoring him, Oscar rested his chin in his hands.
It really would have been better if she were just a princess.
If she were born as Prince Legis of Tuldarr’s younger sister and second in line for the throne, she could have led a very different life. Then she might have married into another country. Oscar didn’t know her as a princess, but he did know of her free-spirited nature.
And for that reason, he wished that she had more options, especially after she’d managed to escape from the Dark Age. He wanted her to have other paths she could choose besides a life of solitude spent under tremendous pressure.
Oscar realized he’d sunk deep into contemplation and snapped back to himself with a grimace. “Ugh, ridiculous.”
How long was he going to spend thinking about someone who was gone? There was no shortage of other things to consider. From the corner of his eye, Oscar noticed that Lazar was watching him discreetly. The king waved a hand at his attendant. “I’m fine. Get back to work.”
“Um, about that, Your Majesty. Several Farsas nobles have put in requests for an audience with you, and they would like to bring along their daughters… Er…”
“And they’re hoping I’ll pick one to be queen? That sounds annoying. Schedule them all for the same day.”
“Are you sure?” Lazar asked.
Oscar detected the layered meaning in the question but kept his face blank as he responded. “The curse is broken, so I need to evaluate some prospects for queen soon. It’s good timing, since I want to pick the most harmless one possible.”
Now that the curse was undone, there was no need to seek out the most suitable partner possible. Things would be the same no matter who she was.
Forcing himself to switch gears, Oscar returned to his work.
Three hours later, he remembered that he had never eaten lunch.
Tuldarr had not had a queen in six generations, and no ruler had inherited so much as a single mystical spirit in eleven generations.
On the day of the coronation, guests were led into Tuldarr’s cathedral, where they whispered about their fears regarding the unusual ceremony.
“A mystical spirit inheritance ceremony after Tuldarr’s spells were only just restricted under the treaty? Can you believe it?”
“It’s a part of the coronation tradition. They’re not going to suddenly stop doing it.”
“But no one’s used the spirits in hundreds of years. Could there be some ulterior motive for making a show of them now, after so long?”
Tiered rows of seats ran the circumference of the oval cathedral, with the altar at the center.
Dressed in their finest, the seated guests gossiped freely.
“Is she even capable of receiving the spirits in the first place?”
The mystical spirits that would serve the ruler of Tuldarr upon coronation were actually high-ranking demons.
Such creatures were native to another plane of existence, and consequentially almost never appeared in the human realm. On the rare occasions they did, they were frequently taken for gods, overwhelmingly powerful as they were. Some still had believers among more rural parts of the continent.
Tuldarr was already feared by other nations for being home to so many mages of preeminent magical power. For its ruler to command the mystical spirits after so many had failed to do so would make the country a concerning threat.
“It’s nothing to worry about. Even if she does succeed in the ceremony, I can’t imagine she’ll be able to handle more than one, at most.”
A wry smile came to Oscar’s lips as he listened to a fellow attendee’s optimistic opinion.
Of the twelve spirits, one, which took the form of a girl, was already under the command of the soon-to-be queen. No matter how things played out, she certainly wouldn’t walk away with just one. Oscar’s grin broadened as he envisioned how all of these guests would react once they witnessed that part of the coronation.
Yet at the same time, Oscar also understood that there was merit to the guests’ concerns. Other nations would be wary if Tuldarr suddenly grew stronger. While the Magic Empire had never launched an invasion in its history, Druza had set a precedent several months before by attacking Farsas with a forbidden curse. That immense power wielded by a comparatively small group had easily disrupted an entire country. Those aware of that would harbor doubts about Tuldarr as well.
It was the wish of former king Calste, who had abdicated the previous day, that Tinasha be coronated and inherit the spirits. However, she would be the one to pay the price for it. Tinasha had a tendency to make rash decisions, and Oscar was afraid and curious to see how she would direct her country.
All of a sudden, a hush fell over the audience, and Oscar peered down toward the center of the cathedral hall. A plain altar sat atop a raised platform with ten steps. True to the atheistic beliefs of Tuldarr, there were no adorning statues or idols.
Legis had appeared, standing upon the dais and wearing ceremonial robes. The prince of Tuldarr surveyed the faces of the attendees before bowing to them. “Thank you all very much for taking the time to be here today. On behalf of the queen, I offer my warmest gratitude.”
The simple address called Tinasha to mind.
A gentle smile on his lips, Legis continued. “The mystical spirit ceremony will constitute the coronation today. I am aware that there may be many unconventional elements, but I implore you to accept them as the will of our queen.”
None said a word.
Strictly speaking, the kings and queens of Tuldarr did not inherit a throne.
The previous ruler had abdicated, and the new one was crowned the following day. A new ruler acquired the mystical spirits and nothing more. This long-standing tradition of ascension via magical power made Tuldarr’s ancient ways plain for all to see.
The now former king Calste stood at the base of the steps alongside other mages. Only his son Legis stood at the top of the platform.
Legis bowed once more, then held out his hands. In apparent response, a transportation array appeared before the altar.
The first thing to come through the portal was the small ivory hand of a woman.
That hand, mystery incarnate, came to rest atop Legis’s palm.
Next, the bottom edges of blue robes materialized. The shade, symbolic of the Tuldarr royal family, looked made of dye crafted from ground gemstones. It was a blue deeper than the sky and clearer than the sea, calling to mind the history that had fostered this Magic Empire.
Basking in the silence from the audience, the queen stepped slowly from the magic circle.
Her long hair flowed freely as waves of black, and over it she wore a silver-threaded veil embroidered with lines of pearls.
Her mage’s robe was trimmed in deep blue and pure white; it outlined the slim and elegant curves of her body and flared out into a full ball gown. She lifted her skirt to stride forward, and the hem formed an arc with her movements.
Her eyelids were slightly downcast, but her eyes contained the depths of darkness as she gazed straight ahead. There was gravity to her beauty, lending her a magnificence that tugged at the soul.
“So that’s the queen of Tuldarr.”
Awestruck whispers ran through the crowd. Again, Oscar grinned wryly.
He should have been intimately familiar with her rare and exquisite beauty, as well as with her dignity as a queen. Seeing it on display exceeded all imagination, however. He, too, had been completely enthralled by her from the moment she appeared. This was her other side—the queen who would take the throne through force of magic.
Tinasha stood in front of the altar and drew a deep breath. As she did, Legis took two steps down the stairway and knelt.
The queen’s long sleeves billowed as she spread her arms wide. Bells on her bracelets sang tinkling notes.
“The words of this contract are assembled from the will of the unvoiced.”
Her voice rang out in sonorous incantation.
The atmosphere in the cathedral shifted. Magic began to swirl with Tinasha at the center.
“Hope is born from the depths of despair—the flow of time is irreversible, and all possible meanings give rise to awareness. A concept kept hidden makes the individual so, and it crawls to the cusp of the lineage it is bound to.”
Dense power knit itself into an intricate spell. Like rings on water, it rose up and rippled out but did not disappear, interweaving to form a gigantic structure.
“I call upon the ancient contract, the chains that bind human to inhuman.”
As the array rose higher around the altar, its complexity grew.
The gathered magic condensed toward the center, responding to Tinasha’s own immense power. Her lilting incantation made the magic in the air even denser and thicker.
“Listen to me, o sleeping ones, our unfamiliar neighbors. Long ago was the day of the beginning, but you are eternal.”
The magic converged. It was so thick that the faces of the mages, who were gathered at the base of the steps, had gone white.
Suddenly, a ray of pale light appeared at the center of the altar. The layered spell formed an intricate circle on the stone as if shaped by an invisible hand.
On the edges of the array, a tremendous light erupted from the one o’clock position. Then luminous bursts flared from the two o’clock and three o’clock positions as well. The same happened with each spot in order, except for the five o’clock point. On a shallow exhale, Tinasha spoke.
“Appear!”
Her voice was low, but it reached everyone present. It was as if it were coming from terribly far away but whispered directly in one’s ear at the same time. The power in the word made the audience stiffen.
Tinasha’s dark eyes flashed as she presided over the glowing circle.
“O spirits sleeping in Tuldarr by an ancient contract! My name is Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr!”
Gasps erupted from different onlookers.
This power could forcibly alter the immovable. Her peerless magic could rewrite anything at all.
At last, the queen made her decree.
“I am your regent, and by this proclamation you are defined… Come to me!”
Light burst forth.
A white light blanketed every corner of the cathedral, but it was soon swept away by the wind.
Having shut their eyes against that blinding radiance, the attendees cautiously opened them to glance fearfully at the altar. The sight caused their jaws to drop.
“Those are…”
Where there was nothing only moments before, there were now beings standing in a circle at the center of the platform. These were Tuldarr’s mystical spirits.
All twelve were present.
Each had taken a humanlike shape and was standing with complete indifference.
“Ludicrous. All twelve of them,” guests muttered in utter shock.
In all of Tuldarr’s long and storied history, only two rulers had wielded all twelve of the spirits alone.
One was King Otis, who had first summoned them and tied them to the founding of the nation. The other was the Witch Killer Queen.
Only a select few knew that Tinasha and that queen who had bested a witch four hundred years ago were the same person. Thus, the audience’s astonishment quickly gave way to fear. Tuldarr had just gained immeasurable power. This would undoubtedly be a turning point in history.
Much like the audience, all of the spirits eyed the queen with surprise. Tinasha noticed, and her face broke into a smile for the first time since she’d appeared. In a voice only they could hear, she said, “It’s been a very long time. Just wait a moment, all right?”
Taking that request as an order, all twelve stayed silent.
Tinasha subdued her grin and regarded the guests with a queen’s countenance. “I am Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr, and I have been enthroned as the forty-third ruler of this nation. I offer all of you my deepest gratitude for gathering here with us today.”
None dared to so much as move. Courteous words though they were, they had come from a woman with strength enough to control the lives of everyone in the cathedral. Quite a few in the crowd wore white-faced expressions of terror.
Tinasha smiled, though it was a shallow one this time. Her eyes burned with the fierce glow of a monarch. She looked out over her spirits and said, “I order the spirits of Tuldarr.”
The twelve knelt in response.
With unwavering confidence she said, “As your master, I call an end to our ancient contract. Henceforth, you are released from that which binds you to Tuldarr. You are now set free. You may do as you wish.”
She said it lightly and liltingly.
Her proclamation petrified the entire hall. All were speechless.
The only ones unsurprised were Tinasha herself, Legis, and Renart, who stood with the other mages at the foot of the dais. Even the spirits couldn’t hide their astonishment, save Mila.
The former king Calste, the first to snap from the shock, grew red in the face and cried, “Wh-what do you think you’re doing?!”
He dashed up the steps, and Tinasha met him with a gentle expression.
Heedless of the international audience, Calste yelled, “Are you aware of what you’ve just done?!”
“Yes, of course I am. The Dark Age is long past. We are no longer in an era in which rulers must possess mighty power. As you can see in many of the faces around you, power that exceeds reasonable limits only begets fear. And most importantly, Tuldarr is a capable enough nation without the spirits. You should know that best of all.”
Tinasha glanced at Legis. The prince evidently understood Tinasha’s intention from the look alone and came to stand next to her, ignoring the daggers his father was glaring at him.
Calste’s balled-up fists trembled. “Legis! You knew about this?! How could you allow such a—”
“It only made sense, Father. Even if she inherits the spirits now, a day will certainly come when no king or queen wields them. So instead of relying on fleeting strength, we should prove that the people and technology of Tuldarr are what make this country strong.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Calste said after a pause, but he issued no further protests.
After moving his father to one side, Legis nodded at Tinasha.
She faced the audience with a smile. “I hereby ascend the throne for one year, as the final queen of an era in which the rulers symbolized the power of their nations. After that, Prince Legis will become king and govern the country alongside a newly established parliament. This year will be the last for Tuldarr’s ancient traditions, and you may also think of it as the time we need to prepare for a new departure.”
The guests let out held breaths at her graceful speech. Little by little, the crowd began to buzz.
The Magic Empire, which had ever valued tradition, had proclaimed that it would move on from the ancient ways. Those who had shuddered fearfully only moments before now stared at the queen who had just taken the throne under such unbelievable circumstances.
Tinasha shrugged at the spirits. With a sardonic expression, she told them, “There you have it. We’ve only just been reunited, but I’d like to thank you for your service.”
A spirit in the form of a young man stood up. “Little girl! Can we really do what we want?”
“Of course,” Tinasha replied.
“Then I’m going to stay a spirit until you die. Our contract with Tuldarr may be over, but that doesn’t mean you’re not still my queen.”
“Oh, really? I don’t mind either way,” Tinasha replied.
“Lady Tinasha, I’m going to stay, too!” added a female spirit.
“What? Then I guess I will as well. It’s never boring with our queen, after all,” drawled a male spirit.
“Nil, you get out of here! You’re annoying!”
As the spirits began to bicker and banter, Tinasha massaged her temples with a grimace.
Legis’s eyes widened as he watched. “They’re very fond of you…”
“I think it’s more that they enjoy pestering me…”
Recognizing that things would not calm down so long as the spirits kept chattering, Tinasha shot a beseeching glance at the one situated at the twelve o’clock position.
This was the oldest-looking spirit, sporting white hair. They gave the queen a dignified bow. “I am very grateful that you have ordered the end of our contract. However, as Karr said, our contract with Tuldarr and the fact that you are our master are separate things. Please allow us to accompany you to the end of your short human life span. We do so of our own free will.”
“Well, I did tell you to act as you pleased. All right, then,” she agreed.
“We shall take you at your word,” responded the spirit. With that, the twelve fell silent. They bowed to her, each with different expressions on their faces, and then vanished from the cathedral.
Without the bickering, the spacious chamber fell deathly silent. Tinasha gave a self-possessed smile. Even beneath the weight of every eye in the room, she did not falter. There was no doubting she was the queen.
Just as many had predicted, but not at all in the way they had expected, her coronation heralded a turning point in history. Her utterly unique beauty and power would leave a vivid and eternal mark on the memories of the people.
Foreign and domestic attendees alike remained still as surely as if a binding spell had been placed on them. It was like time had stopped.
In the midst of them all, Oscar gazed at the young, beautiful ruler of Tuldarr in amazement.
“She really did do something unconventional,” Doan said as he and Oscar made their way to the great hall. Doan was attending the coronation as Oscar’s guard. General Als, a few steps ahead of the other two, nodded deeply.
The other attendees had evidently not recovered from the surprising corononation yet, either. All were offering their impressions and thoughts. Some approved of Tuldarr for rejecting such preeminent power and even endorsed this revolutionary system overhaul, but others quietly criticized Tinasha’s eccentricity and abrupt reforms.
Most nations were governed by monarchies. An attempt at utilizing a two-pillar system of a parliament and a royal monarch would certainly attract people’s attention. Four hundred years after instating too many reforms during her first rule, the queen was still trying to blaze a new trail.
Oscar snorted at the circulating opinions. “There’s no telling how her decision will be viewed in the years to come. But so long as the spirits continue to serve her, that will be enough to deter other countries. Tuldarr can establish its new system during that time.”
Tinasha had always held Legis’s aptitude for ruling in high regard. More than likely, she had been planning to enact this revolution for a while now, and approving of his temperament had only emboldened her. She took the throne, even though it would be only for a year, in order to dissolve the contract with the spirits.
“At best, a ruler of Tuldarr inherits one or two spirits. Even if she has a child who claims the throne, there’s no telling if they will be a greater mage than she is. Besides, it’s clear from the state of the royal family that magic wanes over generations. She must have known that this was the last chance to inherit all the spirits and release them,” Oscar remarked.
Doan sighed. “Because Tuldarr originally let power determine succession, it’s always been a very logical country, in a way. A royal family that inherits the crown via its bloodline deviates from the true tradition.”
“Surely that’s a result of external influence from the moment Tuldarr opened itself to diplomatic relations. They must have had outside pressure,” replied Oscar.
“The monarchy being absolute is a holdover from the age of the spirits. Tuldarr was actually founded in the hope that oppressed mages would cooperate with one another, and the members of the royal family were meant only to be the strongest representatives of the people. Queen Tinasha made her decision because things are different now. In a sense, she may have restored Tuldarr to its roots.” Doan’s tone was indifferent, but he asserted his opinion in an uncharacteristically firm way, perhaps because he was a mage himself.
Als listened to the conversation with interest but remained quiet.
When the three from Farsas reached the great hall, Legis was there receiving the guests. Attendees from every nation were clustered around him, pelting the poor man with questions.
The queen was conspicuously absent. Oscar found a mage who served her standing near the entrance and approached him. Upon catching sight of the king of Farsas, Renart bowed.
“Where’s Tinasha?” asked Oscar.
Renart answered calmly, but in a low tone of voice. “She is arguing with King Calste, though I expect it to end soon… She should arrive once she’s changed her clothes.”
Calste had flown into such a rage in front of their audience. He had to be seething.
Oscar nodded, falling into thought. It was growing dark outside. The eastern windows revealed that the night sky was still bright, matching the color of Oscar’s eyes. A faintly glowing crescent moon hung above all else. He gave it a little smile, then turned back to the other two. “I’m heading out for a bit. I’ll be back once I’ve finished what I need to do. Do whatever you want while I’m gone.”
“E-excuse me, Your Majesty?!” Als cried out in shock.
Doan looked like he was holding back a vexed exhale. Normally, he never wanted to get involved in any disputes, but this time he wore a knowing look as he asked the king, “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m not the only one. The other countries will be making their moves soon, too. Best to be quick about it.”
“Your Majesty?” Als said again. He was the only one who didn’t understand. Oscar clapped him on the shoulder, then moved against the flow of guests to leave.
Having escaped the crowded hall, Oscar gazed out a window at the castle’s other buildings. True to a Tuldarr structure, magical protective barriers were positioned here and there around the blue and white edifices; Oscar could sense them. A thin sheen of water cascaded from an azure stone shelf jutting out into midair and splashed down into the moat of the hanging gardens.
Not many soldiers stood guard. Sentinels were patrolling around, but magic formed the crux of the palace’s defense. Oscar glanced down at the sword belted at his waist and grinned. “Glad they didn’t confiscate this.”
The royal sword of Akashia could neutralize any magic, making it the natural enemy of mages and Tuldarr’s greatest nuisance. But as it was a national treasure of Farsas and a part of the king’s formal dress, it could not be confiscated without reason.
And in a nation of spells and enchantments, it was as good as a master key for Oscar. He slipped into a random deserted passageway, opened the window, and went out into the courtyard. As he made his way across the carefully manicured grass, he glanced up at a particularly tall building in the center.
“There it is.”
The spray of water falling from the stone shelf glittered in the setting sun.
The blossoms in the gardens were all varieties not found in Farsas. Azure flowers shaped like round lanterns glowed faintly from the inside, and the way they swayed brought to mind the first page of a picture book.
It was like the palace of a magical kingdom from a fairy tale. And the one who would govern this castle was a woman from four hundred years ago.
A queen for only a single year.
Tinasha must have discussed it with Legis and other advisers on countless occasions. While Tuldarr’s parliamentary system was not without historical precedent, no other nation utilized that system. Establishing one now was sure to be an uphill battle.
Still, she had chosen this fight. This method of governance—monarch and citizens supporting one another, with no room for self-righteousness—was likely an ideal she’d held on to since the Dark Age, when power was crucial to survival.
The gardens that streamed between the buildings sloped upward so gradually that the incline was almost unnoticeable. Oscar came to the base of a spire that adjoined the tall building, and he gazed up at the white stone walls. “All right, let’s go.”
“Where are you headed?” inquired an amused-sounding feminine voice from overhead. Oscar looked up to see a red-haired girl floating down, hugging her knees. It was Mila, one of the spirits who served Tinasha.
Oscar replied, “I need to talk to her. Are the regent’s chambers just above here?”
“Yes, but you’ll see her later in the great hall if you just wait.”
“That’ll be too late, and I don’t want anyone else to overhear us. Can you stop her?”
In all likelihood, Mila had appeared to protect her master. Conscious of Akashia, Oscar met Mila’s gaze and waited to see if she would chase him away.
The redhead grinned. “You can do what you want, but I’m not going to help you.”
“That’s fine, provided that you don’t obstruct me, either,” Oscar answered, placing a hand on the wall.
Mila’s eyes grew wide. “You’re going to climb?”
“The guards will stop me if I go inside.”
“Seriously? Do you have a death wish? Look, I’ll do you a favor and put an illusion on you, so the snipers don’t shoot you and send you plummeting to your demise.”
“That would actually help a ton, thanks,” Oscar said.
Mila shook her head and sighed in disbelief. She disappeared with a snap of her fingers, and Oscar placed his hand on the wall once more. He began to climb up, his eyes on a tiny transom window.
He wouldn’t think about how he wished Tinasha had only told him she planned to be queen for just a year. He knew it was a matter of national politics. She couldn’t reveal her plan to someone from another country. If their positions were reversed, he wouldn’t consider telling her, either.
So it wasn’t too late. Now was the soonest he could do this.
Oscar came out onto a small corridor and grabbed hold of the wall of another adjoining building.
He passed several magical barriers on his climb to the highest floor, but Akashia nullified all of them.
The window of her room was not locked and was protected only by a barrier. Oscar took out the royal sword and looked around the dark room that was occupied by only a few pieces of furniture
“Did we pass right by each other?”
Night had fallen entirely by now. Oscar had climbed via the shortest path, but could Tinasha have already changed clothes and headed for the great hall? Unsure whether he should trespass further after already breaking in, Oscar sank into a chair by the windowsill. Then he remembered his dragon.
“Nark.”
In answer to his summons, a red dragon the size of a hawk appeared and perched on his shoulder. Oscar was about to order it to see if Tinasha was in the great hall when a door in the back of the room opened.
Light spilled into the dark chamber. Heedless of the other occupant, the girl who entered headed for a door opposite the one she’d come through.
Then, out of the blue, her left hand sliced through the air. Instantaneously, orbs of magic launched in Oscar’s direction.
Before he could say a word, he had Akashia up and its blade out against the attack.
The magic orbs struck the sword and were dispelled. The girl turned to look, and her eyes widened with realization. “A-again?!”
“What do you mean ‘again’?”
“Never mind.” Tinasha sighed, deflated. Clad in the same outfit from her coronation, she must have just come from her debate with Calste. It was very like her to attack with magic before checking to see who was there, and Oscar had been expecting it. That was why he had waited with Akashia drawn.
Tinasha stared at him. “How did you get in?”
“The window. I must be growing comfortable with your barriers because I entered pretty easily. You’re so careless.”
“Not many people are capable of breaking my barrier,” Tinasha said, obviously cross. This was the same person who’d been in the cathedral, but her aura was different. Things were the same between them as they had always been—a mood of closeness and openness. It comforted Oscar.
Resting an elbow on the chair and his chin in one hand, he gazed at Tinasha. “You really went for it back there, huh?”
“Well… my mind was made up for a while.”
“Calste looked livid.”
“He was about to pop several blood vessels,” Tinasha admitted with a laugh, heading for the far door again. There was a closet there, and she emerged soon enough wearing a simple version of a queen’s formal dress.
“Anyway, I’d like to get changed…”
“Ah, sorry. I need to talk to you, and it will only take a minute.”
This was why he had come. He was visiting her room to speak to her not as royals, but as individuals.
Still clutching the new outfit to her chest, Tinasha cocked her head. “Talk to me about what?”
“What are you going to do once you abdicate?”
“I—I’m not quite sure… I suppose marrying Legis would be the right thing to do? That should satisfy Calste a little as well,” she replied in a way that almost suggested she wasn’t connected to the matter. Oscar had expected an answer like that. She would exit the center stage, make a marriage of convenience, and ensure that her blood remained in Tuldarr. That was indeed the safest choice. But there had to be other options available.
Oscar had begun to scowl unconsciously. Upon realizing it, he straightened out his face and said lightly, “Why not come with me?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why don’t you marry me?”
This was why he’d climbed the tower.
While it was indeed blunt as proposals went, Tinasha couldn’t immediately comprehend it. She stayed frozen for a bit; something Oscar had anticipated. After deliberating over how to make this easier to swallow, he elected to begin with the part Tinasha was probably most anxious about.
“It’s not a bad idea at all. If you’re going to change the system, an alliance with another country will give greater security, and it will relax other nations more than if you marry Legis. Some people are going to see you as a threat no matter what you do, but no one will want to challenge both Tuldarr and Farsas at once.”
“What? I—I mean, that’s true, but something seems… Um, give me a moment,” Tinasha trailed off, shaking her head at the neatly wrapped facts he had presented her with.
Undoubtedly, other nations were thinking the very same thing.
If Tinasha planned to abdicate, then they could lure them and forge a bond with Tuldarr. Not only that, but Tinasha had demonstrated her own strength at the coronation. She would be an immediate asset to any power on the continent. While a threat in Tuldarr, she could also make a powerful ally.
However, Farsas was the only country that would be able to safeguard Tinasha’s homeland in return.
After Oscar’s declaration, Tinasha’s expression changed from confused to serious and pensive. It was the face of a queen evaluating the political merits of what she had been offered.
She was well within her rights to do so, but it clashed with Oscar’s intentions. He flashed a strained smile at this deeply earnest queen. “Sorry. The way I phrased that was a little unfair. Let me say it again.”
He recalled the day they met.
She had been asleep under the palace for four hundred years, all to meet him.
Oscar had thought of her as childlike. A ridiculous person who couldn’t fit a mold if she tried. In his wildest dreams, he could never have anticipated any of the stunts she pulled.
However, he could envision a future with her.
Walking hand in hand and growing old together—he could see that life with her.
His offer was born of personal feelings.
Oscar gazed right into her dark eyes. “I want you. So I’m asking you to marry me. That’s all it is.”
He had no other reason, and he didn’t care to think of one.
His feelings were so simple; Oscar could almost laugh at himself.
Tinasha’s eyes grew round as saucers. “… Excuse me?”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that response,” he said, a little offended by her shock but also enjoying needling her about it.
Oscar headed for the window to leave the same way he came. Tinasha was still rooted to the ground, and he turned back to look at her. “Well, you have a year, so think it over.”
“H-hold on just a minute. Why are you going out the window…? Wait, that’s not the point!” she cried, burying her face in her hands.
Then she managed to find the words and popped her face back out. “I thought you weren’t interested in me?” She sounded like a little girl who knew nothing at all.
One hand already set to climb down, Oscar paused and replied, “I couldn’t disrupt my country because I had personal feelings for someone. I did my best not to get attached. But if you’re going to abdicate, that changes everything.”
The moment Tinasha had announced she would relinquish the throne in a year, something like shock had run through Oscar.
Once she wasn’t a queen, he could pursue her without issue. Marrying her would be a boon. However, more than any sort of diplomatic calculation, he simply wanted to be close to her.
Tinasha’s childlike happiness and anger, the defenseless way she carried herself, the way she was farsighted, coolheaded, and bold. She was a hard worker, stubborn, and never ashamed of herself. Everything about her was inconsistent and odd. How could Oscar not have felt captivated?
And when he learned of the deep loneliness she carried, he wanted to rid her of it.
Oscar wanted to make a place for her at his side, yet he’d never been able to.
Tinasha was a rare find.
Irreplaceable.
If only he could take her hand in his, if only he didn’t have to let her go…
“I want to be with you. I don’t want to let anyone else have you. If you desire me, I’m yours,” he said fervently, roguishly. Tinasha shivered violently. Evidently, she hadn’t fully processed such a sudden change. Oscar shrugged. “That’s all I came to say. You’re in a hurry, aren’t you? Sorry about that. I’ll go say good-bye to Legis and head home. See you.”
With that, he leaped out the window. As the garden below rushed up to meet him, he called, “Nark!”
In response to its master’s order, the scarlet dragon rapidly grew to the size of a small house and caught its master on its back. Nark made a leisurely turn in the air, and Oscar laughed out loud.
After sheathing the royal sword, he asked the dragon, “How did things turn out in that future you’ve seen? Did she marry me?”
Nark let out a shrill cry and dived for the gardens. In the night sky, the moon shone with an azure glow.
Als and Doan breathed great sighs of relief when their king returned an hour after he’d left.
While Oscar hadn’t done anything too bold lately, this was a king with a natural propensity for recklessness. Both men were filled with trepidation whenever he was left to himself.
When he showed up again, he was in a strangely good mood. They wanted to ask where he had been, but they had a pretty good idea. All Oscar said was, “I’m going to go say good-bye, and then we’ll go,” so they held their tongues and gave up on questioning him.
The reception went on without the queen. Legis, still inundated by guests, caught sight of the king of Farsas heading for him, and his eyes widened slightly. He’d been wondering the entire time where one of Tuldarr’s guests of honor had been.
Legis strode up to Oscar and bowed to him. Formal words of greeting were exchanged.
Once the social niceties were complete, Legis kept his pleasant smile as he made a pointed remark. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen you in the hall for quite some time.”
“Mm-hmm… I had something to discuss with Tinasha. I left to go see her,” Oscar answered.
Legis gasped. Once the surprise faded from his face, he seemed a little bitter.
After Tinasha’s announcement that she would abdicate in a year, he had wondered if something like this might occur. Even if she had remained queen, it might still have happened anyway.
What had they discussed? And how had she answered? Legis could hazard a fair guess. He understood the situation as well as they did—better, perhaps, as an outside observer. For a moment, a flash of loneliness passed through his eyes, and he closed them.
When he looked up at Oscar again, his gaze was direct. “She is the treasure of our Tuldarr. Will you give what she’s worth?”
“Of course, if that’s what she wants.”
Legis’s judgment stemmed from the coolheadedness of someone who would rule over the country. He didn’t allow so much as an ounce of his personal feelings to factor into it. He could already see marriage with Farsas as a way to uphold a peaceful reign.
Oscar respected the other man’s sensibility. He thought of the woman at the center of it all.
All that’s left now is to wait for her answer.
The six months since he’d met her had passed quickly. So, too, would the year to come, surely.
Oscar wasn’t in any hurry.
Compared to four hundred years, this would be but the blink of an eye. |
Unnamed Memory
4. The Crystal Orb’s Enchanted Sleep
With a clear tinkle, the teacups shattered.
“Oh no… I broke them,” Tinasha groaned.
The mystical spirit seated across the table from her made a disappointed face as she regarded the broken pieces. By appearances alone, she was a beautiful woman in her midtwenties with long green hair pulled into a ponytail.
Casting an appalled look at her master, she said, “You should train yourself in detaching your magic from your emotions, Lady Tinasha.”
“I did, a long time ago… I know how to do it,” Tinasha replied, sighing.
“It doesn’t seem that way.”
“I know…”
Regardless of any excuse, Tinasha had broken the teacups.
Before she could clean everything up, the shattered cups and the spilled tea vanished. The spirit must have disposed of them.
Tinasha thanked her before donning some sealing ornaments. “I shouldn’t have carried breakable items. Next time, I’ll use metal cups.”
“Will that really solve the problem? Why not deal with the source? Maybe you can get rid of him.”
“I won’t do that!”
Tinasha had been acting like this whenever she was free since her coronation the week before. Naturally, the trigger had been Oscar’s proposal, a total bolt from the blue that had thrown her emotions into complete turmoil.
With a very human mannerism, the spirit threw her master a sidelong glance. “I don’t know why you’re so indecisive. You came here to see him in the first place, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but… But things haven’t been like that this whole time! He’s always been so mean to me! All he does is scold me!”
“I wasn’t around, so I wouldn’t know,” the spirit replied crisply.
Tinasha flopped onto the table. Excluding Mila, the lone spirit who had served Tinasha, the twelve mystical spirits had been inactive for the past four centuries. Raking a hand through her hair, Tinasha gazed up at the spirit. “How would you answer him, Lilia?”
“I would say no. It sounds like a lot of trouble.”
“…”
Consulting one of the spirits had been a mistake. Face still planted on the table, Tinasha let out a groan. “Me, marry him? No way… no way at all.”
She remembered what he’d said to her when she was much younger.
“You will reach me, and you’ll be happy.”
The Oscar who’d disappeared had promised her that. The present Oscar was the same man, but still very different.
For the past six months, she hadn’t so much as dreamed of a future with him.
Still, the current Oscar knew why she’d come from four hundred years in the past. There was no way he hadn’t picked up on it. And yet he’d told her, “Don’t let it weigh you down anymore.”
And that was enough. Tinasha had been so happy that she could have died right then; she’d truly felt that it was worth it to come to this era.
“But marrying him…”
Tinasha bit back a sigh. She had never put words to her feelings for Oscar. For the longest time, she’d avoided thinking about that.
There was one thing on which Tinasha was certain. She’d discovered it after awakening in this era and spending time with him. Even if their paths diverged, he was someone very dear to her.
It was clear that he was important, but beyond that… she didn’t know.
It had never required much thought until now. How was she supposed to respond now that it was at the forefront of decisions she had to make? Oscar had apparently mentioned the proposal to Legis and some others, who had wished her well with Farsas. Meanwhile, her attendant Renart and the spirits couldn’t understand her hesitation.
Had Oscar proposed for purely political reasons, Tinasha would have given an answer sooner. But that didn’t seem to be the case. Just pondering it made her feel dizzy, so much so that she was grateful for the times when she was buried in work.
Lilia eyed her agonized master and remarked coolly, “Just marry him if he wants you.”
“I don’t know why he’s proposed to me, though. Even supposing that on some wild chance he really does like me and it’s not some trick of my imagination, we’re in a different time now… He doesn’t know what people were like in the Dark Age.”
When she first awoke in this time, Tinasha had harbored a faint hope that he might fall in love with her, buoyed up by the fact that they’d been married in their previous history together. But once she’d snapped out of that daydream, she realized that she was only a queen with a bloodstained past.
People only saw one side of Tinasha—a person who’d escaped her own time period and abandoned the throne to live freely for a short while. If Oscar knew how she’d subjugated those around her in the past, he definitely wouldn’t feel the same way about her.
Lilia, one of Tinasha’s servants since the Dark Age, sipped from her teacup. “That’s true. In those days, you were the type to betray someone in order to stand on your own two feet.”
“Do you really think I was that bad?! I mean, that is how it was, but still!”
“That’s why I suspect the Akashia swordsman might also be planning to betray you.”
“And get a Tuldarr hostage! That would make his motives easier to understand, but—”
“So should we get rid of him after all?” Lilia asked.
“No!” Tinasha shouted, leaping to her feet.
As Lilia watched her master go brew a new pot of tea, she giggled. “You know, I’m very glad to find you enjoying yourself. When you told us you wanted to put yourself in a magic sleep, I thought you’d finally gone crazy.”
“I can’t believe how much you didn’t trust me!” the queen exclaimed, pouting.
Shortly after abdicating, Tinasha had informed the twelve spirits that she planned to enter a magic sleep. They were unanimously opposed to that idea and told her it was ridiculous because they knew it was for Oscar, and they doubted his claim about traveling backward through time. However, a closer examination had revealed that the orb responsible was a very real power that existed outside all laws.
Tinasha decided to ask Lilia about something she’d been contemplating earlier. “Do you know how time travel is possible? It goes against the laws of magic.”
“I don’t know. It may be that it looks like time travel, but it’s actually something else,” the green-haired spirit responded.
“Like dismantling the world and reconstructing it based on records? I hadn’t thought of that, but I can’t get past the immense scale. A tiny orb couldn’t contain all that.”
“Then perhaps it’s simply that another law that makes such a thing possible has been brought in,” Lilia said.
“Brought in? From where?”
They were meant to be just chatting and tossing around ideas. But Lilia’s suggestion sent an involuntary jolt through Tinasha, and her hands stilled.
The spirit went on. “It’s human foolishness to assume that you understand everything. We demons live on a different plane of existence, and even we can’t perceive that many other realms. So wouldn’t it make sense that from time to time, someone with unusual powers would be born somewhere or a mysterious phenomenon would occur?”
“I suppose… that’s true,” Tinasha replied slowly.
It was extremely rare for someone to be born with strange powers that were not magic. Those abilities generally entailed postcognition and precognition, but where such skills originated from was unknown. Ancient myths would call powers of this nature blessings from the gods. The research of many mages confirmed that these abilities were distinct from magic.
As Tinasha poured tea, she sighed. “Now that you mention it, strange things like that did happen in my past reign… Remember the Harvesting?”
“At those odd old ruins? We never did find out what sort of mechanism was behind that.”
“When it happened, I was more concerned with ending it than with uncovering the cause, but now that I’m thinking about it again, it really was weird.”
The queen recalled an inexplicable incident that had claimed the lives of hundreds. A culprit had never been found, nor could anyone hazard a guess as to why they’d done it. Compared to that, going back in time almost felt easier to comprehend. She didn’t know how the magic orb operated, but it was clear that whoever used it wanted to alter the past.
Feeling stupefied, Tinasha sipped at her tea. Just then, there was a knock on the door and Legis entered. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but I have a number of reports to make.”
“Confidential ones, I assume. What are they?” said Tinasha, correctly guessing why Legis had come to her chamber, while she was at rest, and not to the queen’s study.
Legis gave a weak smile at how perceptive his queen was. “First of all, several private requests for marriage talks have come in.”
“Again?”
“You are an object of mass destruction, and many hope that will pass to your progeny,” Lilia offered. “Anyone who can draw you over to their country will kill two birds with one stone.”
“Thank you for that brutally honest reminder,” Tinasha replied tartly.
For a moment, Legis looked with dread at this spirit who spoke in such an unreserved manner to her master. However, Tinasha didn’t mind it at all, instead pouring a cup of tea for Legis. “And the rest of the report?”
“A rebellion against the parliamentary system is mounting. We don’t have solid leads, but some nasty individuals are plotting the use of force.”
“To assassinate me, you mean? They’re welcome to try anytime they like,” the queen responded calmly. She had overwhelming power and confidence on her side. In her eyes was the strength of someone well accustomed to fighting for her life, and she didn’t seem perturbed in the least.
While Tinasha partook of her tea, Lilia frowned. “Four hundred years have passed, and you’re still surrounded by enemies?”
“Such is the fate of someone who tries to do something different. It makes perfect sense.”
“Then why don’t you sentence them all to death?” Lilia suggested blithely.
Legis, who was in the process of sitting down at the table, boggled at that. He shot a questioning glance at Tinasha, who only smiled with her hands wrapped around her teacup.
“I told you, Lilia, times are different now. First, we should talk to them and try winning them over. Then we can resort to force, if necessary. If all they’re doing is calling me a little girl with nothing but magic to her name, they’ll be easily dealt with… and we can get rid of them anytime.” The queen gave a brilliant smile. For a moment, however, something as icy as a river in the night flashed in her eyes, and Legis didn’t miss it.
Noticing that he was still frozen in place and hadn’t sat down yet, Tinasha faced him. “What’s wrong?”
“Ah… I’m sorry,” he answered, planting himself on the chair. Tinasha put a teacup in front of him. That she brewed and served on her own, actions quite unlike a queen’s, spoke to both her friendliness and her vigilance against poisoning. Over the past two to three months of talks about changing the system in Tuldarr, Legis had caught glimpses of such shrewdness from her. He had to imagine it was typical of one from the Dark Age.
Legis felt like he might pass out if the conversation continued in this vein, so he switched topics. “Ah yes, what are you going to do about the proposal from Farsas? If you’re going to accept, then we can reject all the other ones.”
“Aaaahhhh… just when I’d managed to forget…”
“If you can forget about him so easily, perhaps you should say no?” Lilia suggested.
“N-not so fast,” Tinasha protested.
“Why don’t you just go and see him? That should give you your answer much faster than dawdling around here,” Lilia countered.
“Dawdling…”
Tinasha deflated at having it put so succinctly. But soon enough, she stopped massaging her temples in frustration and looked up. “Ah, shall we get back to work?”
“As you wish.”
“Very well.”
The queen clapped her hands, and the three of them vanished from the room. It was just a few moments past noon.
While it was afternoon, it was dim inside the room, owing to the thick cloths pinned up over the windows.
A girl was sitting on a chair in one corner of the chamber, away from the sliver of a sunbeam that managed to poke through. Her eyes were shut, but she wasn’t asleep. She simply liked things this way.
Her awareness reached to every corner of this enclosed space, and when she sensed someone approaching from the hallway, she looked up. Stretching out a hand, she drew up a spell. Magic requiring no incantation made the door silently swing inward.
The young man on the other side peered into the room and chuckled. “All closed off again… Your body needs a little sunlight every so often.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You’re hopeless,” Valt said as he strode into the room and walked up to her. He stroked Miralys’s glossy silver hair, and she smiled.
“The witch took the throne. Is that all right?”
“Yes. I needed her to.”
“How’s Farsas?”
“That’s also fine for the time being. Akashia remains a bit of a wild card, though,” Valt answered as he pulled over a chair and sat across from Miralys. He crossed his legs and rested his chin in an arm he set on his knee. In his light brown eyes was a hint of a shadow.
“It doesn’t matter that the king of Farsas fell for her. We only have to split them up and get her alone. She’s the weaker one.”
“Really?” asked Miralys.
“Psychologically, and that’s what matters.”
Force of will was paramount. They knew that there were times when it could outsmart even the most powerful and change history.
The girl sighed, eyeing the five rings on her right hand. “I’m still praying that I don’t have to face off against her directly. I may be borrowing your magic, but I’m still no match for a witch.”
“I’m working to ensure that doesn’t happen. Even though history was overwritten on a vast scale, plenty of people are still the same as they were. I have lots of pawns I can move around.”
Seeing the future. Orchestrating fate. Those were their weapons.
Valt smiled reassuringly at Miralys… but the expression faded swiftly.
“The world is waiting for one last straw.”
“What?”
“It’s something my father said. The world is trying to converge on the future that’s closest to how things should have been. Humans continue to alter it because of their desires. It’s a cycle. And so the world is waiting for one last straw—a final move to restore things to their original form.”
“That sounds like something from a dream.”
“The next day, my father hanged himself for the first time, and I understood everything,” Valt said as lightly as if he were discussing what he’d eaten for dinner yesterday, but his words painted a sorrowful picture. They cast a shadow as dark as the ones the fierce midday sun peeking through the curtain left on the floor.
Miralys frowned. “Valt?”
“I understood. And yet I—”
Silence.
It was like that dark room rejected and blocked off every fate in the world. Amid a sense of ennui almost inherited from the futures trying to converge, a drab melancholy shrouded the chamber.
Miralys stood, reached out for Valt, and clasped his face between her hands. She leaned close to him and whispered, “I don’t want to let you die.”
“I’ll be fine.” The man smiled, yet despite his cheerful expression, he gave off a gloomy vibe, as if he’d accepted his fate.
It was just about lunchtime, and Oscar was puzzled that Royal Chief Mage Kumu, Doan, and Als had turned up at the door to his study.
They stood in a row before his desk, docile looks on their faces. Finding that unsettling, Oscar came right out with it. “What? What happened?”
“To be frank, we have a report to make to you, sire,” said Kumu, stepping forward and passing the king three documents.
Oscar began to scan them, and once he had finished reading everything, the expression on his face was quite indescribable. “What’s going on here? Magic?”
“More than likely.”
According to the papers, ruins had been uncovered the month before in the mountains of southwest Farsas. Local villagers had happened upon a cliff eroded by recent heavy rains while foraging in the woods. Beneath the cliff resided a cave that appeared to be man-made. They had reported this to the castle.
The mages who led the investigation of the site had judged the ruins to be centuries old based on the shape of the entrance passageway. However, no Farsas records described anything like it in that location, leaving the structure unidentifiable.
Upon returning to the castle and getting equipment in order, the mages formed a survey team and returned to examine the cavern more thoroughly.
Oscar did recall granting permission for that soon after arriving home from Tinasha’s coronation. And now he was holding the results from that investigation in his hands.
When he read that none had returned, he scowled with displeasure. “This is extremely serious. It’s hard to believe five court mages have vanished.”
“Unfortunately, it’s the truth,” replied Kumu.
But the problems didn’t end there. In one night, all the residents of the village near the ruins disappeared. Kumu added, “One mage in the party arrived late. He’s the one who discovered the fate of the other five. Upon realizing the rest of the group was gone, he inquired at the village if any had seen them. However, all the locals had vanished as well, so he returned to the castle.”
“Does that mean they went into the ruins and couldn’t come out? How far did that mage search for the others?”
“He only looked around the entrance, where he was supposed to meet them. When they weren’t there, he checked at the village first. It was probably wise that he didn’t venture deeper.”
If he had, he might have vanished with the rest, and the issue would not have come to light until much later.
Oscar puzzled over this account that made less sense by the moment. “If they went missing after entering the ruins, does that mean all the villagers went inside, too?”
“That can’t be… They were forbidden from doing so, as it was a royal investigation, so I would find it hard to imagine they’d all get close,” Kumu replied. Then his face visibly darkened. “However, there was an anti-decay charm at the entrance. But its spell composition was unique.”
“Unique how?”
“Much of it was impossible to decipher, suggesting the utilization of technology outside our magical knowledge… It’s possible there’s something very strange inside there.”
Oscar leaned back in his chair. He crossed his legs over the top of his desk, rakishly. Brooding, he inquired, “Do you think we should bring Akashia?”
All three had expected him to say that, and they didn’t respond initially. After a short pause, Kumu spoke falteringly. “I don’t believe that you should be there, Your Majesty. We don’t know what we’d be walking into. It’s terrible what happened to the people who were lost, but we think we should seal off the entire site…”
“So you’re suggesting we cut our losses?”
These three members of Oscar’s inner circle had likely wanted to keep this from him. Akashia was the best tool in all of Farsas for dealing with unknown spells.
When Oscar was still crown prince, he had actually traveled on foot with Lazar to a sealed-off magical ruin.
However, bringing Akashia to this mysterious situation would mean exposing the king to danger. The person most suited for the job was also the one they absolutely couldn’t afford to lose.
Utterly stuck and possessing no good ideas, the three had decided this was not something to conceal from their liege and wound up delivering the news to him. They all held their breath as they awaited Oscar’s judgment.
After closing his eyes and thinking, Oscar abruptly swung his legs off the desk and got to his feet. “So it’s either living up to expectations or going against them? I don’t really care either way, but… I’ll go.”
Kumu, Doan, and Als restrained themselves from expressing aloud that they knew he’d say that.
They’d anticipated this from the start. Oscar’s personality was such that there was no way he’d approve of sealing off the ruins. In fact, that would actively bother him.
Oscar had an inkling about his subordinates’ feelings but ignored them as he issued orders quite naturally. “We should go quick. Be ready to explore the site tomorrow.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
The three men bowed and left the study.
In the hall, they exchanged looks and sighed.
As the report had indicated, the entrance to the ruins really did look like it had originally been buried inside a cliff.
The entryway under the cliff was supported by gigantic stones, the surfaces of which had traces of mud. Someone had probably plastered over the ruins with rocks and wet dirt. Chance had exposed it, and now many people were missing.
“If we’re going to seal it off anyway, I’d like to record why we elected to do so,” Oscar muttered as he gazed up at the entrance, washed clean by the rain.
The party had teleported there and were checking over their equipment one more time before going inside. No one except the king spoke, for they were all too nervous.
Oscar called Doan and General Granfort to his side and issued some simple instructions. On this expedition, they were in charge of the mages and the officers, respectively.
Ordinarily, Als would be present, but since Oscar had left the castle, Als had remained there instead. Too many people in the search party would limit maneuverability, so it totaled only thirteen members.
“Should something happen, retreat. Protect yourself first and foremost.”
All nodded in assent to that, though it was coming from a king who did not tend to prioritize protecting himself.
Chief Mage Kumu remained at the entrance. His role would be to communicate with Doan—who was heading inside—and relay any findings back to the castle. Oscar scanned the faces of his team, who were all ready, and nodded. “Then here we go.”
With that unceremonious start, Oscar led the way into the cave. The little dragon on his shoulders yawned.
Doan hurried after him with a glowing ball of magic light. “This is too clean for a ruin from hundreds of years ago. It may very well be true that some unknown technology is at work.”
“There’s no seams on these walls at all,” remarked Oscar. The surfaces above, below, and on their sides were smooth, obviously cut by human hands. However, the high level of magic evident in such design far exceeded the norm for the time period the structure would’ve come from.
Oscar rapped on a wall. “Time hasn’t worn at them at all, just like Tinasha.”
“I beg of you never to say that to her, Your Majesty.”
“You know, she actually studied pretty hard even after coming to Farsas.”
The queen of the Magic Empire had worked hard to make up for her four-hundred-year gap, and now enjoyed a place as the most preeminent mage of the era. Perhaps she could’ve told them what this strange place was?
The group proceeded carefully down the passage, which was reminiscent of the underground labyrinth beneath Farsas Castle.
No traps seemed to be laid, which made the straight, even route all the more monotonous. After walking for fifteen minutes, Oscar turned back to Doan with a frown and asked, “Was the mountain this big? We’ve gone pretty far back.”
“It’s quite strange… Judging by the distance, we should soon reach the other side and exit to the open air. Yet…”
They had come in via a cavern in the side of a mountain, which itself wasn’t all that large. Surely, they’d reach the opposite end before long if they continued. However, the path before them appeared as lengthy as when they’d set out, the end of it dark. Oscar and Doan both grew uneasy.
Several minutes later, a shout changed everything.
“Your Majesty!” came a sharp call from the back of the party. Oscar and Doan whirled around instantly.
“What happened?!” Oscar demanded, seized with apprehension. Granfort should have been at the very rear of the group, but he was not the one to reply.
A soldier gulped and then answered tremulously, “The general… vanished.”
“He what?”
After a beat, the whole party turned to look back. No matter how they strained their eyes, they couldn’t spot the general.
“Hardly any time, and we’ve lost another person,” Oscar whispered sourly, scratching at his temple. He couldn’t sense anything, and neither could Doan, who was alert for any magic in the air.
Granfort wasn’t the only one to vanish, either. The soldier and two mages just ahead of him had vanished as well. It was someone in front of them who’d happened to turn back and realize what was wrong.
The whole group stopped there to examine the walls and floor but could find nothing out of the ordinary. Doan contacted Kumu, then once he was done, he looked up at his king with a grave expression. “Your Majesty, let’s head back. This is too dangerous.”
“Hmm.”
“If you must conduct a search, we should request aid from Tuldarr. None of our mages have any idea what happened.”
“You do have a point,” Oscar admitted. Doan was suggesting they ask Tinasha for help. Royal sword in hand, Oscar considered his options.
He’d expected something like this to happen, but it was more bizarre than he’d imagined. If they kept going, they were liable to lose the entire party.
“I guess we’ll go back,” the king said to himself, coming to a decision after some deliberation. Just as he opened his mouth to issue the order, he detected something strange.
Oscar glanced at the ground and noticed it shimmering a hazy white. Faintly, he could make out a spell composition there.
“Fall back!” he cried, grabbing Doan and leaping farther down the path.
It was too sudden for the others to react, however, and they winked out of sight, stunned looks on their faces.
Oscar clicked his tongue in frustration. Doan tugged on his sleeve. “Y-Your Majesty!”
Oscar turned to look deeper into the passage and was struck speechless to see the path ahead glowing.
What’s more, the light was coming toward them, expanding outward bit by bit. The king glanced over his shoulder and understood that the light that had swallowed up the soldiers behind was also creeping closer.
The trap was closing in from both sides, making it impossible to escape.
In the end, the glow filled the entire passageway and caught the last two.
When he came to, Oscar was in a rock chamber he’d never seen before.
He hadn’t lost consciousness, but his memories were disconnected. At some point, he’d found himself standing in this small room. He could remember being on the path with Doan up until moments before, but now he was alone.
“What is this place?”
The rock chamber wasn’t very big. He could walk the length of one of its sides in ten paces. There was no furniture, and swords and magic implements were scattered across the floor like so much trash.
“Damn it… Did we all get separated?” Oscar whispered, checking to make sure he had Akashia in his right hand and Nark on his shoulder. Noticing its master’s gaze, the dragon cocked its head. Oscar petted it as he scanned the room.
There was a single door. Judging there to be nothing else of importance around, Oscar opened it and went out. The first priority was locating the rest of the investigation team. He prayed they were all safe.
“I suppose it’s been a while since I explored some ruins on my own,” Oscar mused with no small degree of pride, recalling the days of his youth when all he did was sneak out of the castle. The door led to the same type of passageway the party had been on before they’d disappeared, although likely a different one.
Oscar had changed locations so suddenly that he couldn’t be sure of where he was, but one thing he did know was that this structure had to be vast. The path was plainly constructed and yet plenty bright, despite no sign of a light source. Doors similar to the one Oscar had come through lined the sides, each a few dozen paces apart. His door was situated at the end of the corridor.
“I guess it saves me the trouble of choosing left or right,” Oscar remarked as he set off. He didn’t sense any sort of mechanisms, but there was no room to get careless. While making his way toward another door, he remained vigilant against any traps.
“All right—”
Before Oscar had time to wonder what was beyond the door, he detected something abnormal and leaped back. No sooner had he done so than a white blade sped past where he’d been standing.
A moment later, an expressionless assailant was standing before him. The young man clad in black wore light equipment and gripped a dagger in each hand. Everyone knew that those who wielded twin blades were descendants of an assassin clan.
Taking a deep breath, Oscar readied Akashia. “Nark, get back.”
Obeying its master’s order, the dragon flew up to the ceiling. The assailant struck without giving Oscar so much as a moment. Crouching low, he closed the distance between them with frightening speed.
Oscar used Akashia to repel the left dagger, which had been aimed at his legs. He instantly pulled Akashia back and up to parry the right, which had been lancing for his chest.
The motions all occurred within the span of a second. Assassins were known for their inhumanly honed speed.
Yet Oscar was swifter.
Without waiting for the man to stab at him again, Oscar kicked up at his torso. The assassin jumped back to minimize the blow, however. He was more talented than the average military officer, and Oscar smirked despite himself. Caustically, he inquired, “You’re tougher than I thought. Are you the guardian of this place or something?”
His opponent didn’t respond—instead readying their weapons. Oscar had wanted to gather a little information, but his opponent didn’t seem to feel like talking.
I can’t waste too much time. I still don’t know what happened to my people.
Oscar switched modes. When the assassin leaped for him, he moved right in for him, too. This threw off his assailant, delaying his reaction.
That spelled the end of the fight. With no groaning or grimacing in pain, the black-clad man disappeared once his belly was ripped open. It was like he was never anything but a phantom.
Astonished, Oscar looked all around. He’d felt the stab through his sword, but no one was there. There were no traces of blood on Akashia’s blade, either.
“What in the world was that?” Oscar said, shaking his head.
He opened the door he’d meant to before the attack.
Beyond it was a tiny rock chamber, the same as the one Oscar had appeared in, with nothing inside.
Oscar checked all around the room before heading back into the hallway and setting off again. Each time he arrived at a new room, another assassin would appear with no warning. This happened five times in succession. Sometimes, it was a pair of people, too. Occasionally, they attacked with swords or magic—it all seemed random. All the attackers had in common was that they never spoke, and they vanished without a trace upon sustaining a mortal wound.
“What is going on? Are these ruins just full of ghosts?” Oscar grumbled, unable to make sense of anything, but then he remembered Tinasha saying ghosts didn’t exist. In that case, this had to be the result of some magical contrivance.
Puzzled, Oscar continued his search. After he defeated the tenth assailant, the path veered to the right. He peered down the bend cautiously. It looked like a pretty major branching off. Constructing a map in his head, Oscar turned the corner.
The eleventh assailant appeared there, and Oscar’s eyes went wide. “Hold on…”
This was a familiar face.
But something was different.
The young woman’s long black locks were swaying, as if her hair itself had sentience.
Her eyes were dark as night, and her skin was white as porcelain. Her beauty was cool, clear, and utterly unforgettable.
However, her face was more childish than that of the woman he knew.
The mage girl looked no more than thirteen. Oscar’s voice exposed his fearful confusion as he called, “Tinasha?”
She didn’t answer, remaining expressionless. Instead, she launched balls of light from her hands. The orbs zigzagged toward him with differing speeds, closing in.
Holding his breath, Oscar took a step forward and sliced through the spells holding the two orbs together. By the time he did, a black vortex was already upon him. Even as he hesitated, Oscar plunged his sword into the center of it, shattering the vital key hidden inside the spell.
He was prepared for the vortex to injure his arms, yet he only felt a rubbery snap. After nullifying three spells, he closed in on the girl floating in the air. One slice from Akashia tore apart her protective barrier.
He reached his empty hand out to grab her throat.
But in that split second, she disappeared, materializing behind him.
Oscar sensed dense and powerful magic, and a shiver ran through him.
“Ngh!”
He leaped forward without looking back. At the same time, Nark landed on his shoulder and spewed fire behind him, offsetting the girl’s own conjured flames. Prickling heat seared Oscar’s skin, and the temperature skyrocketed.
It was fortunate nothing worse occurred. If Nark hadn’t been there, Oscar could have been killed.
“You saved me, Nark,” he said, racing forward and then turning back to face the beautiful girl. Her expression hadn’t changed.
With her gaze fixed on him all the while, she raised her right hand, and invisible blades sped forward. Of those razors that sought to encircle him, Oscar cleaved through only the ones that barred the way forward as he pressed in close to the girl. Once more, she tried to weave a spell.
Akashia was faster than her teleportation magic, however. It hit her upstretched arm, and her spell dissolved.
A grim, bitter look on his face, Oscar brought his sword down.
The girl’s dark eyes widened.
With her arm and head lopped off, the girl’s frame wavered for just a moment before vanishing.
“Disgusting,” Oscar spat, feeling a deep sense of despondence.
At the start, he’d been fairly uncertain over whether he should attack her. But Nark’s hostile attitude toward the girl convinced Oscar that it wasn’t the real Tinasha.
Once he understood that, it simplified things. As Tinasha herself had once said, she was far stronger in such a narrow space and at close range. In fact, this girl’s speed and reflexes had been much slower than those of the woman he knew.
“I’m going to have nightmares about that. Ugh, awful,” Oscar said, heaving a long sigh as if he could expel that nasty aftertaste.
Nark chirped at him comfortingly, and with a grimace, the king set back off on the path.
Assailants continued to appear relentlessly.
They varied in strength, making it impossible to pinpoint the origin of their manifestation. The girl from earlier was the only one Oscar recognized.
As he ventured on, dispatching enemies, he kept a mental map of the increasingly mazelike tunnels. He checked his progress first to avoid running into dead ends.
After Oscar departed a tiny, empty room, Nark gave a shrill cry. Before Oscar could even wonder at it, he saw a woman dressed in a white mage’s costume. Instinctively, he readied Akashia.
Recognizing him, the woman widened her eyes. Her delicate lips opened to say something, but she had to rush to grab her sword and parry away Akashia’s sharp slash.
However, the royal sword’s second thrust was faster. She narrowly fended it off while adjusting her stance.
“O-Oscar, wait!”
“You really look just like her,” he stated calmly as he lunged for her a third time.
She turned her blade diagonally to catch the blow, but Oscar twisted Akashia along the way, hooking it onto her slender sword and knocking the other weapon to the ground. Flustered, Tinasha next found herself with Oscar slamming her shoulders back against the rock wall with his left arm. He used the hand still gripping Akashia to grab her wrist, pressing his body weight against her to trap her between him and the wall.
She struggled against his hold, trying to escape. Losing her composure, she shouted at him, “I said wait! You’re too close! Way too close!”
“The more I look at you, the more you seem identical to her.”
“I’m the real Tinasha!” she protested.
Oscar swooped in close, then kissed her ear. Before his eyes, her ivory white earlobe turned a deep red.
“W-wait… seriously!” She pleaded with him in a reedy voice that sounded on the verge of tears.
For a bit, Oscar stared blankly at her. Her beauty was even more striking when her face was flushed. Just as she was about to beg him again, he suddenly burst out laughing. Oscar released her and bent down to pick up her sword. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey! Do you finally believe it’s really me?!”
“Of course I do. I was only teasing.”
“…”
Tinasha glared at him reproachfully, and Oscar smirked.
After taking three deep breaths in and out, Tinasha stopped shaking with rage and faced Oscar. Sword back in hand, she pointed at him. “A magic attack made contact with the barrier around you, so I went to Farsas to see what had happened. I heard about the situation from Als, then went to the ruins and spoke to Kumu, and now I’m here.”
“What barrier? I had a barrier?”
“You’ve had it the whole time. It’s set to be invisible.”
“Since when?”
“Your coronation.”
“That’s pretty far back,” Oscar said, rifling through his memories. Yes, he did recall having a barrier put on him. But something else had happened after that. “Didn’t you undo it?”
“I did not. I only enhanced it and camouflaged it,” Tinasha explained, and she stuck out her tongue.
So she’d lied about undoing it back during the coronation. And true enough, when he faced off against Druza’s forbidden curse, some sort of magic protection the mages had known nothing about had protected him. He barked out a dry laugh upon finally learning the truth.
Tinasha went on matter-of-factly. “It’s my barrier, so it’s connected to me. I’ll know when it repels magic. Did you battle a mage?”
Oscar recalled the fight with the girl. He’d thought his arms would get seriously burned, yet he escaped relatively unharmed. He pointed at Tinasha, grimacing. “I fought a younger version of you.”
“Oh… so I’m recorded, too, then?” she replied, pulling a face.
Confused, Oscar asked, “Recorded? What does that mean, and what attacked me?”
Tinasha winced. “In short, this place is… a repository of sorts that records people and preserves them.”
“What?”
It was rare that Oscar didn’t immediately grasp the meaning.
Tinasha frowned. “I’m not sure how it operates, but this place captures people and creates duplicates of them. Normally, these copies are merely storage vessels that contain information, but when they sense an intruder, they will materialize to eliminate them.”
“So that’s what I fought?”
“Yes. In Tuldarr, it’s known as the Harvesting. Four hundred years ago, I also came here in search of missing people. It caught me and made a duplicate of me. I thought I’d escaped before the process was finished, but it looks like I was wrong.”
“You’ve been here before?!”
“I wouldn’t have been able to find you otherwise. It’s only because I got close that I was able to rely on my sense for the barrier on you to forcibly teleport closer,” she explained in a huff, cheeks puffed out in annoyance. It looked like she’d taken his teasing seriously.
Tinasha had divulged some useful information. Tuldarr possessed records of these ruins and Tinasha was involved. Oscar looked down at her. “So were you the one who blocked off the entrance? It was buried inside a cliff.”
“You mean the entrance that you came in from? No. I destroyed all the entrances. This place isn’t inside a mountain; I don’t know where it is, exactly. Four centuries ago, I came in from a spot in Tuldarr.”
“It has multiple entrances?”
“Yes. It can transfer those within and abduct any who are close by. Other entrances may exist, too.”
It was certainly quite the account. Shaking off the last of his shock, Oscar posed another question. “Why do you call it the Harvesting? That’s a really unsettling name. What happens to the people this place abducts? Are they used to grow mushrooms or something?”
“What an unpleasant mental image… There are no mushrooms. They should be asleep in their duplicates’ chambers. I’ll show you.”
“Thanks,” Oscar responded honestly, and Tinasha smiled. It had been a long time since he’d seen her cute side, and he found himself grinning back at her.
The last time we met was when I proposed.
She hadn’t given him her reply yet, but Oscar felt no particular sense of urgency.
Tinasha was quite an awkward person. If someone told her to decide with her feelings, she would be lost in confusion for a while. He didn’t intend to rush her. She could take her time discovering an answer.
That said, judging by how she looked now, she’d forgotten all about the matter. The young queen had come running in a panic, her mind clearly occupied by the emergency.
“It’s this way, Oscar,” Tinasha called, beckoning to him. The two set off along the twisting, turning path.
While she paused here and there to waver over which way to go, they made solid progress without needing to turn back at all. Oscar was truly relieved for the rescue. While he’d been trying not to think about it, he had actually lost faith that he’d be able to save everyone.
Oscar glanced at Tinasha walking alongside him and felt the desire to stroke her hair. He asked, “So when a duplicate is defeated, does the person who was captured get freed?”
“They do not. They were all left to sleep, so they eventually die of starvation. The last time I was here, I was devastated to find a mountain of skeletons and bones. That’s why we call it the Harvesting.”
“Yeah, I can’t imagine anyone would be happy to see something like that…”
The initial search party had vanished three days ago. Oscar hoped they hadn’t perished yet.
That made Oscar remember the investigative team he’d come in with. “So was everyone else on my team sent to a random place in the ruins like I was?”
“Hmm, they’re probably all asleep. I think you were separated because you have Akashia. That made the ruins judge you to be something abnormal. The structure has a disposal chamber,” Tinasha explained dispassionately.
“Is that why?” Oscar said, glancing down at his beloved sword. True enough, that room he’d been deposited in was the only one littered with assorted objects. The others had all been empty. Perhaps that had been the area for isolating magic implements.
“That’s just a guess, though. This place seems to operate automatically. Honestly, it’s all a bunch of things that ordinary magic technology can’t detect. It gives me the creeps,” Tinasha admitted with a scowl.
Even for her, these ruins were a mystery.
“Automatic…,” Oscar repeated. “So there’s no one here pulling the strings? Not even a demonic spirit of some kind?”
“At the very least, there wasn’t anyone four hundred years ago. This place is a complete enigma.”
What was this Harvesting that had been going on for four centuries?
Before Oscar could think too deeply on it, he sensed something and popped his head up. A new assailant had appeared. He was about to ready Akashia to face off against this unknown male mage when the man abruptly exploded.
Surely, Tinasha must have been responsible, and without so much as an incantation or gesture, either. Impressed and awed, Oscar commented, “You’re really something, you know that?”
“This seems to have no end. It’s all just information, which is how it constructs duplicates.”
“Human copies, huh? If that’s not normally possible, does that mean that there was a mage capable of the feat long ago?”
“No. The laws of magic are immutable, whether past or present… This place employs something that should, by all rights, be impossible, even for me or a high-ranking demon.”
“Something outside the laws of magic… Has there never been anything like that before?”
After an awkward pause, Tinasha replied, “That magic orb.”
Oscar recalled the little sphere that had allowed the two of them to meet in the first place. The object’s very existence undeniably defied the laws of magic.
Bitterly, Tinasha elaborated. “Ultimately, my people failed to destroy the ruins the last time. We didn’t break its automatic defense mechanism.”
“So you destroyed the entrances instead?”
“As a last resort, yes. But if it can create other openings elsewhere, then there will be no end to it.”
Nodding to himself, Oscar turned the issue over in his head. While the nature of this place was unknown, it had clearly been constructed by a sentient being. And if it was made by something that defied the laws of magic, its goal really might be simply to record humans.
Record, collect, store.
Who would review all that information? An absurd mental image of a child lining up a collection of colorful glass marbles on a sunny windowsill surfaced in Oscar’s mind.
Children are often cruel. They don’t consider others’ suffering.
Oscar sighed, fed up with his silly musings.
The pair rounded one corner after the next, making progress while defeating enemies. At last, they reached a large door at the end of the passageway. Tinasha placed her hand on it, then paused and looked over her shoulder to Oscar. “How many people have been captured?”
“An entire small village… and our people from the castle. Altogether, a little over three hundred.”
“That’s so many!” she exclaimed, removing her palm from the door and crossing her arms. After scowling for some time, she glanced up at Oscar. “I’m going to open a transportation array here. You go wake the people inside. They’ll be within cocoons, but you can tear through them.”
“Oh, I don’t like the sound of that one bit…”
“They function as human storage vaults. However, once you open the cocoons, a large number of guardians should appear. I’ll take care of those.”
“By yourself?”
“I’ll be fine. But I may not be able to keep it up for very long, so hurry,” Tinasha said. She flashed Oscar a smile but didn’t meet his gaze. There was something ephemeral in her face that worried him.
Still, he intended to take the queen of Tuldarr at her word. She wouldn’t have made the declaration if she wasn’t prepared.
“If you feel you’re in danger, call for me. Don’t get yourself hurt,” Tinasha cautioned.
“I’ll do my best.”
After flashing Oscar a wry look, she began her incantation. Her dark eyes urged him to go.
Oscar nodded and pushed open the door.
On the other side lay a vast, cavernous space.
There was something of a mystical quality to the air, like one might find in a cathedral. What Oscar saw inside astonished him.
“Whoa…”
The floor was littered with pods the size of adult humans. Each of the white, translucent things was rooted to the ground. Oscar peered into the closest one and saw a man slumped over, his eyes closed. Inside the pod next to him was a skeleton.
These were the cocoons Tinasha had mentioned. Oscar grimaced to see the repugnant things for himself, his stomach turning unpleasantly
A hand tapped him on the shoulder. Tinasha had finished opening the array. “I’m ready. Go ahead now.”
She left Oscar to move deeper into the room. Seemingly in response to her intrusion, a dozen or so guardians materialized in front of the wall at the back of the room. Oscar noticed there was an intricate spell design etched into the surface.
Tinasha stopped. She did not draw her sword but instead outstretched her arms.
“My word defines a metal that shall not become blade. A rift of negation. A painless span of time.”
The queen’s voice sent shock waves through the chamber. The air changed. More than twenty crescent-shaped crimson blades appeared in midair. After a short inhale, Tinasha whispered in a lyrical voice.
“I reject you.”
The words flew for the guardians, who met them expressionlessly.
While Tinasha manipulated the blades, she cried out, “Karr! Senn!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You called?”
In response to their master’s summons, two mystical spirits teleported in on either side of Tinasha. Taking in the scene before them, they frowned.
“We’re back here? I hate this place.”
“Carry out your orders without complaint, Karr.”
Even as they spoke, the two spirits wove elaborate spells. Their intense magic attacks fell upon the guardians like rain.
The guardians, who varied in appearance and gender, vanished one after another, mowed down by magic. However, more appeared just as quickly to take the places of their defeated comrades.
Keeping an eye on the battle at the far end of the room, Oscar moved from one cocoon to the next.
Once he found the one he was looking for, he used Akashia to cut it open. The unsettling pod began to dissolve from the laceration and oozed out, losing its shape. Oscar gave a light kick to the man sleeping inside.
“Doan, wake up!”
After several seconds, the mage groaned. Oscar grabbed Doan’s arm and hauled him to his feet. When Oscar saw that Doan was blinking his eyes open, Oscar barked orders at him. “There’s a transportation array set up at the door. Cut through the cocoons and help the people inside escape. Get our people from the castle to help once they’re awake!”
Doan’s expression grew serious. He looked all around him and then shot up. “Y-yes, Your Majesty…”
He probably didn’t fully understand the situation, but he headed off to rescue the people sealed up near the door.
Oscar continued opening up the cocoons around him, which mainly contained the Farsas investigative team. The king shook them awake and issued his orders. Once all of his subjects were awake, Oscar hurried for the pods at the back of the chamber.
Karr frowned to see sweat beading on his master’s forehead. He and Senn were helping Tinasha battle back the guardians while protecting the cocoons, but she was also maintaining the transportation array simultaneously. It was taxing work to keep a teleportation spell from an unknown location to the outside world going. And while Tinasha was doing that, she was also casting attack magic.
Karr pushed his queen behind him. “Call another two or three, little girl.”
For a moment, she gaped at him, but she quickly nodded in agreement.
“Itz, Saiha, Mila, come here.”
New spirits appeared. Their faces grew tense once they beheld the situation.
Tinasha sighed and issued orders. “Hold things down here… and try not to hurt anyone.”
“Yes, my lady,” they replied reverently, which reassured Tinasha to some degree. The queen of Tuldarr took in a deep breath and began a new incantation.
Over a hundred guardians had appeared already, attacking relentlessly. No matter how many fell, new phantoms materialized instantaneously.
Tinasha and her spirits couldn’t use magic on too large a scale, so while they were far stronger than the phantoms, this war of attrition was slowly but surely pressing them to exhaustion. Even if Tinasha called more spirits, the vast size of the chamber and the cocoons posed limitations that would make it difficult for them to fight. While it wasn’t ideal, all they could do in this situation was keep at it.
“Over there! We’re opening that one!” shouted a Farsas soldier among a group.
They ran over to a cocoon behind Tinasha and the spirits, shouting to one another as they did. However, they were brought up short by the distinctive and peculiar sight of the spirits.
Tinasha turned and faced the soldiers with a smile. “Please, go ahead.”
That snapped them back to their senses, and they quickly cut into the nearest cocoons. Then the group escorted the emaciated villagers to the door.
Unfortunately, a phantom appeared by them. By the time Tinasha noticed, the guardian was about to bring his sword down upon a child. A wave of her hand was all it took to crush the thing. The soldiers helped the kid toward the safety of the door.
Tinasha breathed a sigh as she watched the child’s mother carry him off. Her relief was fleeting, however, as she nearly lost her balance from twisting herself backward to stop the guardian.
“Ah!”
Her arms flailed in the air but could find no purchase—until she fell back against a man who was there to steady her. He pulled her fully upright and gazed searchingly into her dark eyes.
“That was close.”
“Oscar!”
“Can you keep going for a little longer?” he asked fervently, unwaveringly.
Tinasha smiled. She loved hearing him urge her to fight and the feeling of his unshakable belief in her.
And she wanted to fulfill his request. She wished to stand tall, even if she was alone.
The world was neither a kind place nor a cruel one. It simply existed as it was.
Everything was both exceptional and commonplace. Only what was possible would happen.
Tinasha understood that, which was why she refused to quit.
“I’m all right. I can keep going,” she assured Oscar with a nod, straightening her posture to face her enemies.
The young woman told herself there was nothing she couldn’t overcome.
Nearly fifteen minutes after the battle began, the Farsas investigative team had rescued roughly 90 percent of the people from the cocoon chamber.
As Tinasha watched the soldiers opening the remaining dozen or so cocoons scattered around the corners of the room, her face suddenly contorted in pain. “Ngh…”
Something was applying pressure to close the transportation array, and the force of it was falling on the caster, Tinasha. That unknown power weighed down on her with brutal intensity. The attack sought to wipe the spell away. Anyone besides the queen of Tuldarr would have crumpled and perished beneath the force of the opposition.
Even Tinasha would have difficulty holding out against this until everyone could escape.
The color drained from her face, but her dark eyes remained fierce and determined. Oscar, who was fighting by her side with Akashia in hand, was the first to notice.
“Tinasha?”
He gave her a concerned look and used his thumb to wipe away the sweat gathering on her forehead. Tinasha’s eyes closed in a pained blink. “The enemy… is trying to block me… It’s trying to force my portal closed…”
Oscar watched the signs of desperate struggle cross Tinasha’s face, and then he had a thought.
Look ahead.
New guardians weren’t popping up as quickly as before, nor were there as many of them.
That alone wasn’t enough to conclude that the enemy’s power was waning. But perhaps it was diverting some amount of strength into that force working against Tinasha.
Glancing at the faintly glowing spell design carved into the back wall, Oscar made up his mind. “Tinasha, let me have your sight.”
“Hmm?”
The young woman’s eyes grew round and wide, but she nodded and touched his hand, whispering a short incantation.
“Please don’t go overboard…”
“There are times when that’s the only option. I’ll be fine,” Oscar said. Then he took a deep breath.
The world changed immediately.
It wasn’t just the magic in the air; he’d already been able to see that. Lines of even thicker magic emerged all over the place.
Tinasha’s vision allowed him to see that multiple layers were intertwined within that complex, overly elaborate design on the wall. The network of luminous threads was like ivy, entirely covering some portions of the stone facade. Oscar stared at it coldly.
He squeezed Tinasha’s hand tightly. “Stay right here.”
Leaving her with those few powerful words, Oscar took off. Slipping through the vanguard of the five spirits, he charged into the army of guardians. A stroke of Akashia repelled the blades that came rushing to meet him from all directions.
Magic hurled at the king vanished before finding its mark, probably thanks to the spirits. Still perched on Oscar’s shoulder, Nark extended its neck and breathed flame to drive away the phantoms pursuing him from the sides.
If I waste time here, I’m going to get swallowed up.
Oscar cut down a guardian blocking his way and continued his advance.
Before long, he was at the wall. With his gaze still trained on it, he swung Akashia and cleaved through a guardian trying to attack him from behind. As he stared up at the glowing surface, his gaze lingered on one point in the center.
“That’s it.”
Several paces to the right, a large, transparent crystal sphere was embedded in the wall. It was large enough to reach the floor. An intricate spell configuration rested within it, and Oscar recognized that the complex magic was revolving in place.
Oscar moved to the orb and stabbed Akashia into it without hesitation.
A clear cracking sounded through the chamber.
Akashia’s hilt grew hot. But it passed in a second, and the crystal sphere shattered to pieces. Just like the guardians, the shards that went flying vanished into thin air like phantoms.
Then the entire room lurched. A horrible, violent sound like metal grating together echoed from every direction.
“Ngh…”
The uncomfortable sensation of a rapid pressure change swept over everyone. Reflexively, Oscar put his hands on his ears as screams erupted from all over. Some were even doubled over on the ground, clutching their heads.
Yet the pandemonium ceased as quickly as it came.
Oscar looked around and found that all the guardians had vanished. The wall that had shone brightly with power was now dark.
“You destroyed… the core?” Tinasha whispered, disbelief plain in her tone. Oscar turned back to see her free from the pressure that had been weighing on her, but also astonished. When Tinasha was surprised, she looked just like a little kid. It was precious. Just looking at her made him start laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your face.”
“Is now the time?!”
Her outraged reaction only amused him further. Oscar was about to take a step when he heard a low voice full of resentment mutter in his ear, “You damn insider…”
When Oscar looked around, no one was there.
“What? Some kind of trick?” he wondered aloud. After shaking his head, he hurried to Tinasha’s side.
She was still shocked at how abruptly everything had come to an end. “How did you do that…?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’? It had one of those vital points.”
“Yes, but there were many others that looked just as genuine. How did you know that one was the true core?”
“Intuition.”
“You really are something abnormal,” Tinasha replied with a sigh. Her expression was a mix of exasperation and admiration.
The enigmatic ruins that even the Witch Killer Queen and her spirits could do nothing about four hundred years ago had now been unceremoniously silenced and their mechanism dismantled by the Akashia swordsman.
All the villagers had been safely evacuated. Tinasha was the last one to depart the ruins. She looked back at the cave passageway, checking to make sure no one was there, then lifted a hand toward the entrance. Lightning shot from her palm, sending deep tremors far back along the passage.
The rupture set off a cave-in that culminated in the collapse of the access to the ruins.
Tinasha watched until the shaking ceased, then turned back around with a shrug. “This should do. Since the mechanism is destroyed, we could have left it open and intact, but I wouldn’t feel right about that.”
“Yep. Thanks, you really saved us,” Oscar replied.
“I should be thanking you for destroying the core.”
Her dark eyes were narrowed, as if she were gazing into some distant past. That calm, self-possessed, and yet melancholic gaze was the hallmark of Tinasha’s queenly persona. It was clear she was thinking of the people of Tuldarr she had failed to rescue. The look drew Oscar in inexorably.
Rather than act upon that feeling, however, he decided to inquire about a different matter. “What do you think made those ruins in the first place?”
“Hmm… I’m curious, but I don’t have any clue at all. It’s something outside the laws of magic, which means I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“But aren’t there lots of things humans don’t know about on other planes of existence?”
Indeed, Tinasha was the one who informed Oscar that their world was like an endless stack of transparent pages all existing in the same place. Humans only comprehended a fraction of the total pages. Oscar’s remark was meant to point out that something on a different plane might exist outside the usual rules.
However, Tinasha shook her head. “I think you may have misunderstood. The laws of magic are called that because they exist on the laws of magic’s plane of existence, but they do apply to other planes as well. That’s why humans can use spells here… It’s no different from the laws of our so-called world itself. Even though our world is made up of multiple planes of existence, it is not divided into those separate planes—it’s all one world. My degree of sight may be different from yours, but that doesn’t change what exists, does it?”
With a snap of Tinasha’s fingers, a pale spray of magic flared to life. Oscar could see it because of the magical sight drills she had put him through. And as the preeminent mage of her era, Tinasha could view much, much more than he could. But that didn’t mean the world itself was different.
“Thus, it’s possible that a law outside the laws of magic exists. But one that contradicts the laws of magic cannot exist on another plane. That would be like repudiating the world itself.”
“I… think I get it?” Oscar answered doubtfully. He had a vague sense of comprehension. The clear water near the pond’s surface and the water down at the bottom were very different, but they both shared the characteristic of being from the same pond.
With that in mind, he asked, “Then what about something beyond this world?”
Tinasha’s eyes widened like a cat’s. “What?”
“You said that the different planes of this world all share the same laws. So then what if it’s coming from outside all that?”
“From beyond the world… What is that supposed to mean? Don’t bring up something so absurd from out of the blue.”
“You’re the one who said that something going against a law of magic would put it at odds with the world.”
“But that doesn’t mean jumping straight to the idea that another world might exist.”
“Has it been proved that one doesn’t?” Oscar pressed. For him, these were all perfectly natural questions to ask.
Tinasha fell silent, utterly flummoxed. She pressed a hand to her mouth. “It hasn’t been… proved, no… But even so… it’s impossible to verify the nonexistence of anything past our world.”
“Yeah, I bet it would be. There’s no telling how many different planes there are here,” Oscar reasoned. His remark about another world had been an off-the-cuff musing. Verifying it any further would be difficult. Yet the subdued look in Tinasha’s dark eyes betrayed that she was stuck on the possibility.
She was sinking deep into the ocean of her thoughts. Oscar watched her studiously.
He was well acquainted with the siren’s beauty she possessed.
Tinasha was a queen and a young girl all at once. A fearsome mage… and just a very adorable person.
Finally noticing Oscar’s eyes upon her, Tinasha looked up. For a second, her face paled as if she’d remembered something, then she immediately turned red. As Oscar watched steam virtually pour off her face, he recalled that she hadn’t given him an answer to his proposal yet.
She was clearly wavering over what she should say. With a serious expression, Oscar said, “You can give me an answer whenever you’re ready.”
The proposal must have seemed a preemptive strike with no warning. Tinasha jumped like a cat when its tail was pulled. Blushing even deeper, she looked down and away. “I’m very sorry for keeping you waiting…”
“No, I don’t mind. How many marriage proposals have you gotten since then? I know other countries must have sent some.”
A pause. “Seven.”
“Wow. Which nations?” Oscar inquired, making no effort to hide his displeasure.
“What’s with that face?! I’m not telling you! They all just want to have me as their weapon anyway!” Tinasha cried, looking ready to fight.
“Hmm, I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Undoubtedly, lots of foreign powers coveted Tinasha as an instrument of war, but Oscar didn’t think that was the only motivation. He knew that on the day of her coronation, she must have unknowingly captivated the hearts of many who witnessed her in the flesh.
But I’m the one who knows her better than any other.
Tinasha pouted at Oscar, then, in a small voice, asked, “What is it you like about me…?”
“How weird you are.”
“What sort of an answer is that?” Tinasha shot back, deflated. But she picked herself back up quickly enough and let out a long exhale to reset her mood. Brushing long strands of black hair from her face, the queen of Tuldarr looked up at Oscar with a profound quality to her gaze. “You know nothing about me.”
A gentle breeze whooshed past.
The rescued villagers received medical care and were then escorted back to their homes, starting with those who had the energy to move. More help arrived from the castle before long, and the atmosphere grew thick with activity and conversation. However, no one disturbed Oscar and Tinasha.
Peering toward Tuldarr to the northwest, Tinasha stated, “They called me the ice queen. You’ll find all sorts of things if you research my history—not everything, though. I made decisions that would be considered unthinkable in this era. That’s the sort of person I am.”
The words were soft, but her voice was tinged with pain. Slowly, Tinasha’s dark eyes closed as if that could lock up the night.
“I don’t intend to make excuses and say that I had to do what I did because it was the Dark Age and because I was the queen… After I abdicated, I went to see my parents once under the strictest secrecy. It was the first and last time I met with them. We could barely hold a conversation, and it wasn’t like I could live with them or anything… I missed my parents to death when I was little, but I had no idea what to do upon finally reuniting. In the end, I chose to put myself to sleep using magic… That’s how coldhearted I am.”
The halting way Tinasha spoke made her sound no different than a little girl.
Her eyes remained closed. Oscar could see her awkward former self in her expression, and he grinned with fondness.
“I know you’ll regret it once you realize who I am. Spending your life with me, that is…”
“Oh yeah? Tell me everything, then.”
“…”
Her silence was neither a yes nor a no.
Tinasha simply stood there, rooted in place and all alone, just as she undoubtedly had four centuries ago.
Oscar reached out to brush a thumb along her cheek. “You can tell me whatever you like. I don’t mind if you keep some things hidden. Whatever you need, I’m fine either way. Knowing everything won’t change the way I feel.”
“That’s a lot of up-front promises you may not be able to make good on.”
“Careful not to sell me too short.”
Her long lashes stirred. Tinasha gazed up at Oscar, black eyes glimmering and damp. A trackless sea of loneliness rocked within them.
The next words from Oscar’s lips sank deep into her soul.
“Your oddities are amusing, and I enjoy your strengths and your weaknesses. I like the decisions you make, how you carry yourself, how childish you are, and the queen in you as well. I think the way you live your life is beautiful, even if that’s only one part of who you are.”
Knowing everything wasn’t necessary to Oscar. Even if he did, he wouldn’t come to regret his actions.
He knew how deeply compassionate she was—the way she was as innocent as a little girl and how she could choose to be queen.
That look of longing for the way the people lived on the night he found her gazing toward the city during the festival was all he needed to understand about her. That was likely the moment he began falling in love with her. The only thing was that he couldn’t allow himself to feel that way at the time.
Tinasha winced. A red flush tinted her pale complexion. “I don’t understand your taste.”
“You don’t have to. My preferences are mine. Let me keep them.”
Tinasha puffed up her cheeks, pouting. “Just so you know, I never hoped for anything from you.”
“Is that right?”
“I came here to be useful to you.”
“I know. Like an uninvited bride.”
“That’s totally wrong!” Tinasha balled her hands into fists. But once she’d settled back down, she asked in a much calmer voice, “So you really think you won’t have any regrets?”
“Nope.”
This was his choice. He wouldn’t lament it. And should such a day come, he wouldn’t cower from the past.
Staring straight into her dark eyes still heavy with worry, Oscar said, “I want to live my life with you. Can’t I be selfish and follow my heart just once in my lifetime?”
Just like how she had once abandoned everything to go and see him.
If he had to devote his entire life to his country, he would spend it at her side.
The way he bared his heart to Tinasha left her too overwhelmed to speak. But soon enough, she lifted her head, biting her lip. “I understand. I also kept you waiting without any word from me at all. I’ve spent too long dawdling, so I will give you my answer now.”
“You were dawdling, were you?”
“Hush!”
Tinasha took a deep breath and straightened up. Her face suddenly shifted from that of a girl’s into something sincere and serious.
Clear, strangely familiar eyes fixed directly on Oscar. “If you’ll have me, then I gratefully accept your proposal.”
As hard as quartz. That was what her emotions were like. It wasn’t merely a crush, or an attachment, or puppy love—she had made up her mind to live with him.
Tinasha stumbled a little once she finished her sentence, perhaps from all the recent strain. Oscar wrapped her in an embrace. The feel of her delicate frame enclosed within his arms made him break into a smile. He was so happy, he didn’t know what to do. Oscar felt like a boy again.
When he pressed a kiss to the smooth skin of her cheek, she blushed and looked away. “You’re too close.” |
Unnamed Memory
“Get used to it,” Oscar replied, his words succinct but full of affection, as he savored the feeling of his bride in his arms.
Neither of them paid any mind to the shocked citizens all around them.
The king of Farsas had chosen this awkward woman to be his partner in life. His wish was that she would always be smiling; his hope was that her loneliness would abate. He would cherish her more than anything and walk through life at her side.
Oscar was confident that he would never meet anyone better to spend his days with.
Tinasha wriggled free and floated up into the air to keep from being crushed to death in Oscar’s embrace. She pressed her palms to her cheeks, which were still flushed pink. “I ran off to come help you, so I need to be getting back. I had one of the spirits impersonate me, but people will probably figure that out before long.”
“A queen shouldn’t be sneaking out,” Oscar scolded.
“You of all people do not get to say that! You put yourself on your own survey team!” she cried.
She was about to teleport away when Oscar grabbed her hand. “Once I get back to Farsas Castle, I’m going to send you an official messenger and letter.”
“Oh? Do you mean you want to go public with our engagement?”
“Of course. Or maybe I should go harass those seven countries,” he said arrogantly.
Frowning, Tinasha replied, “Don’t.” Lowering herself a little, she placed a hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “You better not tell me you assumed I’d definitely say yes.”
“I didn’t think that. You’re completely unpredictable, after all.”
“Hmph.” Tinasha stuck out her lower lip.
It doesn’t feel real yet.
For her, Oscar was someone who was accessible, in a sense, but also someone she could never dare to stand beside.
All this time, Tinasha had believed he had no interest in her and so left her feelings about him alone. Now that she knew she was wrong, she wanted to bury herself in a hole for how strangely embarrassing it all felt. His gaze and hands on her made it difficult to relax. Would she really get used to it someday?
Oscar reached for Tinasha’s cheek and laid a gentle hand along it. He seemed reluctant to part. “Come see me anytime.”
“I will take you up on that,” Tinasha answered with a pleased smile, and then she vanished.
Oscar smiled wryly as he mulled over the many ways she would make for an unprecedented queen of Farsas.
While they couldn’t marry for another year, there were preparations to be done now. First, Oscar needed to propose to her formally. As he drew up a list in his head of all the things he needed to do, Oscar turned around and stepped into the transportation array that took him and his attendants back home.
Something like a hunch told him that within what he believed to be luck, there were many overlapping memories. |
Unnamed Memory
5. Contagious Hopes
The little room was just as gloomy and dark inside as ever.
The young man who was the owner of the estate sank into a chair, a letter from the outside world in his hand. It was only one sheet of paper, the message brief and concise. He gave it a glance and then ignited it in his grip.
He ended up blurting out some of the doom and gloom he had intended to keep to himself. “Ugh… it is such a pain subduing the impatient.”
“Did they say something to you again?” Miralys inquired. She was seated in a chair on the opposite side of the room. While Valt was in a plush, upholstered one, hers was a simple wooden thing. Miralys was quite picky when it came to her surroundings, down to her preference for sitting in something free of ornamentation.
While keeping his voice light, Valt groused, “I understand why they want to hurry and get to the battle, but still…”
“Perhaps they’ll learn if they rush on out and mess up.”
“That does sound interesting, but we don’t have any substitutes. We have to use them at the exact right time,” he replied with a bitter, long-suffering smile.
Miralys furrowed her brow. “Why have they made Farsas their enemy anyway? Is the grass really that greener on the other side?”
“I’m sure that’s part of it. Farsas is one of the top two nations in all our land, and it has Akashia. People like them seek nothing more than to bring Farsas to its knees.”
“How pathetic.”
“That’s harsh, Miralys,” Valt remarked, resting one elbow on the armrest of the chair and his chin on his hand. He looked to be deep in thought.
“Oh, I heard that some strange ruins were uncovered in Farsas. Was that your doing?” Miralys asked.
“No, it wasn’t. That place was the work of an outsider—a perfect coincidence, you might call it. This latest rewrite has really left wide-reaching ramifications. All sorts of things that were buried in history are coming to light. It’s like digging through the sand on a beach and arriving at some wholly different place.”
“Doesn’t that mean the world is converging toward the true future?”
“It should be, yes. We may have found that one last straw we’ve been waiting for,” Valt answered blandly, but Miralys didn’t miss the flash of dark intent that passed across his eyes. He stared at a fixed point on the wall. “If the world has started to move, then we need to hurry, too. They successfully dismantled those ruins. She really is the key—the strongest mage and spirit sorcerer in history. Even weakened, she still has great potential.”
Which was why they had to act swiftly, but discreetly. There was no guaranteeing the same timeline would come around a second time.
Valt stood and glanced at the clock. “I’ve got to get going. So much to prepare. Those two aren’t the sort you can run into and fight head-on, after all.” Miralys walked over to Valt as he massaged his stiff shoulders. He looked down at her and, abruptly, his face turned serious. “Miralys, power is only power in the end. It will always be linked to the mental state of its user. What matters is not how much strength you have; it’s how well you can wield it.”
“I know that.”
In all the land, they were the only allies the other had. Everyone else was a pawn, including the most powerful woman.
Miralys and Valt exchanged glances. And then, with an incantation, vanished into thin air.
The plans proceeded apace.
Not even the two of them knew what the future would bring. But the pair believed this was the only path they could take, and that it would eventually take them to their desired end.
There was nothing to be done about the leisurely flow of time. The living beings within could only writhe desperately.
News of the queen of Tuldarr’s engagement sent shock waves through the major nations of the continent.
The announcement also rendered it impossible for any other country to impede Tuldarr’s system change.
Farsas and Tuldarr were to be united. No country wanted to make an enemy of two nations so inherently powerful despite their differences in characteristics. Those who had thought they would use Tinasha’s abdication as their chance to win her over to their nation cursed Farsas for getting there first.
Few people understood that the engagement was not a political one.
The beautiful queen at the center of the commotion entered her council room with a grimace. “Members of the council.”
At the moment, Tuldarr was discussing all manner of items concerning the adoption of a parliamentary system. Countless meetings had already been held so far. While drawing up a formal adoption plan was not a smooth process, it was progressing bit by bit each day. The assembly would hear the opinions of Legis and his magistrates, the mages and scholars, and the merchants and local representatives, then carefully fine-tune the plan.
Once the council members at the meeting table saw the queen enter, each of them looked as if they wanted to say something. This was the first time half of them had seen her since the engagement. Tinasha greeted them, suppressing the heat rising to her cheeks.
“As I’m sure all of you know, I will marry into Farsas after I abdicate. However, my engagement does not mean that there will be any changes in Tuldarr’s new government. I hope that my marriage will contribute to friendly relations between our two nations and that we will continue to work well together.”
She had tried to speak as calmly as possible, but she couldn’t keep the faintest hint of a blush off her face.
All the members were delighted to see their queen looking so youthful and offered her their congratulations.
That was the only unscheduled item on their agenda. The council members, not at all concerned with formalities, moved right along to the main topic of discussion. People could exchange opinions freely there, regardless of social status.
The chief royal mage stroked his beard as he said, “The continent has so few precedents to reference for a parliamentary system…”
“Evidently, the small nation of Tyle in the south once had a similar method in place. However, the records state that a house speaker with overwhelming support rewrote the laws and made it a dictatorship. A decade later, the people revolted, and the country fell.”
“So the conditions we set for amending laws are crucial, then.”
“We could either require the regent’s approval or not. Should the two pillars of regent and parliament be equal, or should one be superior to the other?”
Tinasha listened to each member’s opinions and offered thoughts of her own. Her expression held no traces of the bashfulness she’d had upon entering the room. She wore the face of one laboring to change her country.
The meeting lasted close to three hours. While the discussion was very lively, only a few things were settled—and it was possible they’d be revised in the future.
Some had asserted that this step-by-step progress was going at a snail’s pace because they were all being too cautious, but Tinasha thought that was fine at this stage. They were at peace, so they could take their time and avoid coming off as too high-handed. Surely, Legis felt the same way.
If fate brought me to this era, then I want to work hard to make the most of it.
That was Tinasha’s answer and her feelings for her homeland.
Upon returning to her study after the meeting concluded, Tinasha spread out the papers she had brought back on her desk and smiled wanly. “We have a lot of work to do.”
The mage Renart, who had come to give her a report on another matter, nodded. “It won’t be built in a day, after all. I hope that the result will be satisfying to all.”
“I do, too,” said Tinasha.
Lilia placed a cup of tea before her master. The spirit glanced at the documents on the desk and laughed. “The only thing that’s changed in four hundred years is how tall the stack of papers is. There’s been no progress at all.”
“That’s because there were only books and ledgers back then, not loose sheets. Things have gotten easier, at the very least.”
“How were reports like mine given without documents?” Renart inquired, curious.
Tinasha grinned at him mischievously. “All of them were given orally. If it were still like that now, you’d never be able to leave this room.”
With a hand, she motioned to the stack of papers Renart was carrying. The man’s expression stiffened. The queen brought her teacup to her mouth with a grin.
Lilia threw the tray into the air, and it disappeared. “Putting that aside, I thought you’d be more relaxed once you were engaged, Lady Tinasha. That doesn’t seem to be so.”
“Pff—”
Tinasha choked on her drink and coughed violently.
Lilia went on blithely. “Before getting engaged, you were so bothered by the question of it and fretted endlessly. Yet now you’re in such an exhilarated state that you can’t calm down. I’ve seen you smiling to yourself over nothing, pacing around, and flailing in bed.”
“Y-you’re wrong about all that!” Tinasha protested, slamming her hands on the desk and jumping to her feet. Snatching up her teacup, she held it as she began to pace around the study. “The w-wedding won’t be for another year… And it counts as a political union, too, you know.”
As she conjured excuses no one had asked for, a rosy hue colored her cheeks. She stopped in her tracks, gazing down at her reflection on the surface of the tea in her cup. “It’s true that I… l-love him, yes…”
The words were nearly inaudible, and Tinasha went scarlet. Her smile was shy, though she was overflowing with happiness.
The picture she painted, beaming with joy in the throes of her first love, made her nothing more than a girl full of anticipation for her own wedding.
Seeing his lady like this caused Renart to grin. Lilia, however, only shrugged. “You’re like this all the time in your chambers now. Why don’t you just go marry him already?”
“I have work to do, thank you!” Tinasha snapped tartly, draining her cup before marching back to her desk.
Hiding his smile, Renart placed a new set of papers on the desk. “All right, please look these over.”
He launched into an explanation of the most pressing issues for the queen to handle. Tinasha had to take care of her usual duties that were separate from setting up the new system. Legis had aided with some of these tasks in the past, but she tended to deal with almost all of them herself. However, when Tinasha settled problems, she was frequently told there was no precedent for her resolution method. Thus, she had to show some manner of restraint. Any resentment she incurred would negatively affect the switch to the new government. This wasn’t the Dark Age, where citizens submitted to absolute power.
Renart finished his explanation and then placed another three pages on the desk. “These are about an inspection of that academy in the town of Latuchet, which is scheduled for three days from now.”
“Oh, the Academy of Magic. I’ve been a little curious about that,” Tinasha replied, scanning the papers.
Four hundred years ago, Tuldarr acted as a city-state, and the majority of its people lived around the palace. But at present, towns and villages outside the main city dotted the country. These other settlements were not as large as those in Farsas because Tuldarr’s territory dwarfed its population. The place Renart had mentioned was a midsize town about half a day’s travel to the west of the capital.
“It’s very interesting to have an academy for the children of mages,” Tinasha commented. “In old Tuldarr, it was customary to have personal tutors give lessons in controlling magic, but it’s certainly just as possible to teach students in a group setting.”
“Those who come only for lessons in controlling magic graduate in about a year, but those who want to become proper mages live at the academy until the age of sixteen. Classes aren’t divided by age, but by levels of magic. Many of our royal mages are alumni,” explained Renart.
“That sounds so fun. Do you think I could change how old I look and sneak in as a student?”
“Please don’t,” the man replied immediately, and Tinasha’s head sunk in disappointment.
Tinasha’s palace tutoring had accommodated her interests, but the idea of a school was appealing to the young woman who had grown up without peers. She wanted to enroll in some classes, but considering her position, she could only go for a royal inspection. Still, she was very excited about the upcoming visit.
An unhappy expression crossed Renart’s face. “However, a few students have disappeared recently…”
“Huh? What do you mean? They’ve gone missing?”
“Well, some of them have simply dropped out and fled on their own, so we can’t quite say that. But all have vanished into thin air, along with their belongings, baffling their friends and teachers. As of this month, there have been five so far.”
“That’s a lot.”
The school must have been strict to have five runaway dropouts. That was a worrisome problem all on its own.
After thinking for a bit, Tinasha looked up. “Understood. During my inspection, I’d also like to do some investigating, so make the necessary preparations.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I have someone in mind who graduated from the academy and would be perfect for the job. I’ll have her show you around.”
“Thank you,” Tinasha said, handing Renart a document with her specifications listed. He took it and departed straightaway.
A heap of tasks still awaited Tinasha’s review, and the list of duties she had to take over was just as lengthy.
Still, the young queen took great satisfaction in her busy schedule. Tuldarr was so different from how it had been in her era, and that reminded her that she was walking in the footsteps of those who had labored hard to bring the country to this point.
There were four locations of the Academy of Magic in Tuldarr, and all were nationally run. In addition to the one in the capital, each region of the country had a school. Most of the children attendees, who came from the neighboring towns and villages, were there to learn how to control their magic. Half of those would stay to become mages, while a handful of those would reach royal mage status. The academies were a training facility for the next generation.
“This is a pretty big structure. How many are living here now?” asked Tinasha.
“There are fifty-two children here to learn how to control their magic, while we have sixty-eight students studying to become mages,” the headmaster replied.
“So there are more mage students? That’s a bit surprising, considering how long they stay,” remarked Tinasha, looking about with keen interest as she received a tour of the Latuchet Academy of Magic.
The academy, at which all the students boarded, was home to more than one hundred students and had been founded roughly one hundred and fifty years before. Magic wards shimmered around the polished wood-paneled corridor, which was a giant ring that ran the perimeter of the school building. Six octagonal classrooms were set along the inside of it. From above, the building resembled a beehive. During the school’s construction, Tuldarr’s ruler had designed it to optimize and enhance magical power.
“I’m sure it’s only natural for an academy of magic, but it does seem quite easy to get lost in here,” Tinasha mused, which made the mages in her guard retinue smile uneasily. In contrast, the academy headmaster’s expression turned complicated. The older man must have known that agreeing with her or refuting her would’ve appeared disrespectful to the queen, so he simply said nothing.
Tinasha gazed out a window on the third floor protected by a film of water. Past the circular academy, lush green gardens rolled out in all directions.
She pointed to a small wooden building in a corner of the grounds and asked, “What’s that over there?”
“That is the school for the local children. As part of the academy students’ lessons, they sometimes act as instructors there, so it was built on our grounds.”
“Oh, how fascinating. It’s true enough that teaching does often mean learning as well,” Tinasha responded.
Children were playing outside the building. Judging by their plain attire, it looked like all of them routinely helped out around their homes.
As Tinasha observed the charming sight, the headmaster broached a topic with some trepidation. “Er, actually… Once the town children heard that Your Majesty would be visiting, several of them begged to attend your lecture, too…”
“Oh? That’s quite all right by me, but the content will be difficult.”
Tinasha was scheduled to give a lesson to academy students. The younger pupils could attend as well, but the material would likely be challenging for local children who weren’t enrolled.
The headmaster bobbed his head gratefully. “They are all aware of that and simply want to catch a glimpse of Your Majesty. We will ensure they behave…”
“I don’t mind at all. Let anyone interested attend,” Tinasha said with a smile, and the headmaster looked relieved. “Now, let’s discuss the recent disappearances. Please make sure to tell me everything you can.”
In truth, it wasn’t so unusual for students to vanish from an Academy of Magic.
The younger students who were there to learn magic control ranged in age from five to thirteen. They had to live away from their parents and families to attend the academy, and several—particularly the older ones—got homesick, dropped out, and ran away. Most were found quickly, but some proved elusive for one reason or another.
However, the academy did not dispatch frantic search parties for the truants because it prized an innate desire to learn.
“But five missing students in a month? You should really go out and look for them,” grumbled Tinasha before her scheduled lecture.
A female mage with dark blond hair who was with the queen gave a strained smile and nodded. “The academy is indeed still searching. However, two of the missing students were friends. One was twelve, and another thirteen. They may have gone to another country.”
This woman was Pamyra, the person Renart had referred Tinasha to for assistance during her visit. She was a graduate of this academy and a royal mage. She and Renart were friends who trusted each other’s abilities.
Tinasha examined the documents outlining the situation. “One fifteen-year-old mage student and four younger students aged thirteen, twelve, ten, and five. The thirteen-year-old and twelve-year-old disappeared at the same time, while the others vanished separately. That five-year-old is especially worrisome…”
“Once the youngest went missing, the academy finally realized that these were unusual circumstances. The other kids were in communication with their families but never made it home, while the five-year-old was an orphan who lost his parents in an explosion of his own magic, so there was no one to contact.”
Tinasha frowned upon hearing that. Accidents like that were the reason children born with magic had to learn control. Tuldarr was home to the only Academy of Magic institutions because it had so many mages. In other countries, children would go to a city or town to learn from mages there. Tuldarr’s system greatly reduced the number of unfortunate incidents, but it was impossible to prevent all of them.
Pamyra went on, her voice tinged with sadness. “The five-year-old had just come to the school and was struggling to fit in to the environment. The other four were experiencing doubts about their studies and were very interested in other countries, so they all had reasons to run away. We’ve heard from other students that the pair who left together had worked out a plan of escape.”
“So what you’re saying is that if the disappearances weren’t all clustered together, it wouldn’t be so strange for those kids to have run away?” Tinasha inquired.
“It’s possible that once the first student made off, it emboldened the others to do the same,” Pamyra replied.
“How odd,” remarked Tinasha, flicking the papers away into the air and crossing her arms. After sinking into thought, she asked Pamyra, “What do you think? Is this all just a coincidence?”
Did the queen really need to investigate further on top of the academy’s own efforts?
Pamyra’s face turned serious, and she stated, “No. I think the students were specifically chosen because their absence wouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s very suspicious that we haven’t been able to get in touch with any of them at all.”
There was confidence in Pamyra’s eyes. Tinasha liked her spirit and smiled. “Then let’s look into it. I’d like to have you interview the pupils.”
“We happen to have one student who’s due to start as a royal mage next month. I’ll work together with her to speak to everyone.”
“Thank you. It’s about time for my lesson to start,” Tinasha said, getting to her feet. The mage standing before the door to the lecture hall bowed to her and opened it. A cloth covered the entrance, but the students had already taken their seats and were abuzz. Tinasha lifted the skirt of her long mage’s robes and stepped in. Once the queen appeared, everyone fell silent.
Tinasha’s petite frame brimmed with power, and her innate beauty was startling. She moved with the grace and bearing of a sovereign royal, drawing and commanding attention.
The audience’s eyes were glued to this beautiful creature, at once perfect and at the same time somewhat contradictory.
She ascended the lecturer’s dais and looked around the semicircular hall. Mage students were seated at the front, with the younger students behind them. The town children were packed into the corners.
After surveying her audience, she broke into a smile. “My name is Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr. Thank you very much for coming today.”
It was a crisp, simple address that didn’t match her appearance.
Tinasha gave a snap of her ivory fingers, and a pale blue flame flickered to life. It took the shape of a horse and galloped through the air. After making a circuit above the students’ heads, it vanished. The mage students were astonished by the queen’s technique, while the children let out gasps of wonder, their eyes sparkling.
“All right, let’s begin the lecture. I won’t speak for too long, so get comfortable and listen.”
The queen launched into a discussion of magic and the makeup of the planes of existence in the world.
“The queen was amazing,” Rudd said with a sigh as he flopped onto the grass. He was an eleven-year-old who attended the local school built on the academy’s premises. Once word got out that the queen would be visiting, he and a dozen others had begged to be let in the lecture hall. The rest of the kids had been unable to ask because they’d gotten sick or were busy with chores. Rudd planned to brag about it to them the next day. A girl sat down next to him, and he looked over at her. “Hmm?”
“So here’s where you were, Rudd,” she commented, while rapping him on the shoulder.
He’d been daydreaming, but that brought him back to his senses and jogged his memory of his old friend’s name. “Juliya! What are you doing here?”
Until yesterday, she’d been sick, so she hadn’t attended the lecture. Rudd had planned to describe it for her later.
The freckled girl grinned. “I just got here, so I missed the queen’s talk. How was it?”
“Incredible. We have these things called planes of existence in our world, and there are a bunch all stacked on top of one another. We can’t see them, but there’s one made up of just magic and one that’s totally dark inside, and lots more. That’s what she said.”
“And you thought that was interesting?”
“Well, yeah. It’s really cool. The world is a lot bigger than just the parts we know about. Tuldarr is trying to solve all the mysteries of the world.”
Rudd knew he couldn’t become a mage as someone with no magic. But despite that, he was proud to be a citizen of Tuldarr. Sitting up, he clenched his fists. “When I’m older, I definitely wanna work in the castle. That’ll make it easier to support my mom, too.”
His father had passed when he was young, leaving his mother to raise the boy alone. A job in the palace would earn Rudd good money, and the future of Tuldarr that the queen had spoken of sounded awfully appealing.
“Whether people have magic or not, everyone’s working together to build our country. The queen said that in the future, a bunch of representatives from a bunch of cities are gonna rule Tuldarr with the king. That sounds pretty exciting to me.”
“I don’t really get it,” Juliya replied with a very adult-looking shrug. Having not attended the lecture, it all sounded like something distant to her. She hugged her knees to her chest. “Anyway, I heard the people from the castle are looking into all the missing academy students.”
“Oh… like what happened to Teull.”
While the academy mage students and local kids were taught on the same campus, they weren’t all that close. The mages in training were usually busy with their other classes, so the town children only knew the names of those who acted as instructors. However, the younger students were close in age to the town children, so the two groups played together often.
Teull was five, and had only recently come to the school. He didn’t play with the other kids, instead sitting crouched under a garden tree. Rudd had frequently tried to speak with him.
But one day, after Teull stopped complaining if Rudd sat next to him, he vanished.
“They search, but they aren’t going to find anything. I don’t think he had anywhere else to go,” Rudd said. Despite the statement, he felt a sense of duty toward Teull. The boy made a displeased face, obviously troubled. “Do you think he could’ve gone that far even though he’s only five? He has magic, I guess. I always thought of him as just a little kid. I still do.”
Rudd hadn’t initially known that Teull had lost his parents in an accident when his magic went haywire.
“The last time I talked to him was when my mom came to pick me up. I didn’t know about his situation, so I asked him if he wanted to have dinner with us, but he said he didn’t need any… and he looked super hurt.”
By the time Rudd realized how insensitive he’d been, Teull had vanished. He’d gone in the night, and Rudd only found out about the younger boy’s circumstances afterward. Aside from realizing how stupid he’d been, Rudd didn’t know anything more.
Noticing how low the sun had gotten in the sky, Rudd got up. He had tons of chores to do back home. At first, he’d been awful at them, but he’d since grown relatively competent.
“Okay, I’ve gotta go home. Don’t stay too late, Juliya, or your family will be worried,” Rudd said.
“I’ll be fine. I just need to stop by the classroom,” she replied. The academy gates closed at dusk. Rudd had noticed the groundskeeper making rounds over on the far side of the gardens. If he caught them, he’d tell them to leave because they weren’t academy students.
Juliya grinned, and Rudd waved at her and dashed off. In that last glimpse she had of him before he left, she saw that his eyes reflected the shadow of the grand circular academy.
“Hmm, we really need more clues,” Tinasha muttered as she brewed tea. After her lecture, she spoke with a few people to gather information, left the investigation to Pamyra and the other mages, and returned to the palace. She pondered on the case during a break, but found herself stymied.
Tinasha set a cup of tea down on the study desk, and the man who accepted it cast her an appalled look. “You really do just show up whenever you want…”
“Teleportation magic exists. If something happens in Tuldarr, the spirits can notify me.”
On her break, Tinasha had popped over to Oscar’s study. The king was in the midst of his own royal duties, and while his fiancée’s visit stunned him momentarily, he was easygoing enough to welcome the interruption.
Oscar took a sip of the tea. “So there’s no lead on the missing kids?”
“Not at all, and the schools only recently started a more serious search. Plus, while some kids claim that they saw the missing ones walking through the town at night, others say they saw nothing at all. The reports we’ve gotten are all over the place.”
“Gotcha. Then you’ve got two options,” Oscar replied.
“Indeed. We either search all over with a fine-tooth comb, or—we wait for the next disappearance to happen and catch them.”
The former option was clearly the standard route. Tinasha had already ordered some subjects to the task. But if it didn’t turn up anything, she’d pursue the latter choice. When a new kid got targeted, they would set a trap and find out what was really going on.
“However, now that we’ve launched a full-scale investigation, whoever’s behind this might lie low for a while,” Tinasha pointed out.
“Or they’ll flee to someplace new.”
“I’d like to avoid that. I’ve put up a barrier to prevent those with magic from entering or leaving the town for the moment. If anyone tries to brute force their way through, I’ll know.”
“So you’ve effectively caged them in. Does that mean you’re sure it’s a mage?” Oscar inquired wisely. Tinasha had expected him to pick up on what she’d left unsaid.
Leaning against the wall, the queen grimaced. “Yes, but I don’t have any sort of definitive proof. It’s just that an ordinary person would have left a trail, but here, there’s absolutely nothing.”
There was also the fact that only children with magic had gone missing.
Tinasha didn’t voice the more unsavory possibilities. She shuddered as she imagined them, and Oscar waved a hand in front of her face. “I get how you feel, but don’t overthink it. You’re always trying to take everything on alone. Rely on your people.”
“Excuse me, were you there?! I don’t think you were!” she cried.
“You don’t have a leg to stand on here. I know you tried to interview people yourself. You’re too intimidating for that kind of work,” Oscar pointed out.
Tinasha huffed and pushed herself off the wall. “I’ve learned from my mistakes when it comes to that!”
Oscar beckoned his fiancée over, and she approached, curious. He caught her hands in his. “Don’t do anything dangerous. You’re the type to get yourself hurt right away, and I don’t want to be on edge for the entire year until our wedding.”
“I’ll… be careful,” she answered as her cheeks flushed and she looked away. Only Oscar could make her so bashful.
Most knew Tinasha as an all-powerful queen, but there was more to her than that.
After a hot exhale, Tinasha shook her head to refresh herself. “I should be getting back. People will probably be delivering their reports to me soon.”
“Whenever you need a fun distraction, come and see me.”
She grinned at Oscar and disappeared. The king picked up his teacup again. Some minutes later, Lazar entered and gaped at him. “Your Majesty, did you make tea yourself?”
“I did not. Tinasha came by.”
“I—I see…”
“How come she’s never able to calm down?” Oscar wondered.
“I consider that to be a good thing…”
After Tinasha left Farsas, Oscar thought he would only see her once a year from then on. Yet surprisingly, she dropped by as freely as if they were neighbors. While it was always her coming to him via magic, it still felt much easier than he’d imagined.
In general, Farsas’s people approved of the king’s fiancée, and no one in the castle was shocked at all to find out about their engagement. They had all personally witnessed how well Oscar and Tinasha got along, so while they were a bit surprised, it wasn’t unexpected.
Kevin, Oscar’s father and the former king, had said of the development, “Good, I’m happy for you. Rosalia would be, too.”
For Oscar, who had almost no memories of his mother, hearing her name brought about a fleeting sense of discomfort.
“Lazar, do you remember my mom?” asked Oscar.
“What?! Queen Rosalia? Where’d that come from? I only have a vague recollection of her,” Lazar answered.
“Yeah, I thought so. Never mind, it’s nothing,” Oscar said.
The former queen had fallen ill and died when Oscar was five, and he could barely remember anything from that time. Child kidnappings had been frequent in Farsas then, so he recalled being instructed never to go outside. He had absolutely hated that… Why was that the only thing he could remember?
“Should I go and ask Dad about this?” he posited out loud.
The mysterious magic orb in the treasure vault had apparently been his mother’s heirloom. When Oscar asked his father about it, Kevin told him that it was all right for Tinasha to seal it away. However, Oscar still didn’t understand how a commoner like his mother had come to possess such an extraordinary thing in the first place.
There were multiple questions to ruminate over, but the king set them aside for the time being. He had a pile of more pressing issues to deal with first.
Lazar placed the documents he’d brought in before his liege. The papers outlined the reconstruction progress of the fortress of Ynureid, destroyed during the battle against Druza’s forbidden curse.
“It’s about sixty percent complete. It sounds like the craftsmen and mages are really working hard,” Lazar commented.
“I’ll have to give out special rewards once it’s done. If we don’t restore it soon, Cezar’s going to keep acting suspiciously.”
The fortress of Ynureid, situated on Farsas’s northern border, allowed the country to keep a watchful eye on both Old Druza and Cezar. After the fallout from the forbidden curse incident, Druza split apart, but Cezar had maintained a hostile silence.
Oscar remembered something that Tinasha had mentioned once. “Oh yeah, I heard Cezar has an evil god.”
“What in the world is that?” Lazar asked, sounding revolted.
“I don’t know, either,” Oscar replied blithely.
The idea of an evil god was like a sick joke, but perhaps Oscar might face off against it someday. Before mulling over the idea for too long, Oscar set his mind back to his work.
Once Tinasha returned to her study, the first thing she heard was the indignant voice of a young girl. “Like I told you, there’s nowhere to hide inside the academy! You should look in the town!”
“Yeah, but I was instructed to follow you and look around the school,” argued a man.
“All you’ve done is stalk along behind me! You’re treating me like a kid!”
“But you are a kid.”
The voices were coming from the adjoining room. With a strained smile on her face, Tinasha opened the door. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. Please, inform me of what you’ve uncovered.”
“Y-Your Majesty!” chirped the girl, leaping to her feet. Next to her, a beautiful young man simply sighed.
Pamyra, who had kept silent while the other two squabbled, came forward. “Your Majesty, this is Tris. She’s an academy student who will begin working as a royal mage next month.”
“H-hello, I’m Tris,” the girl said, falling into an anxious curtsy.
Tinasha regarded her pleasantly before beckoning all three into her study. “Let’s hear your findings, then. Anything you happened to notice is fine.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Tinasha sat down and closed her eyes to focus her attention only on their reports.
The gist of the mages’ findings was that the missing children had all wanted to leave the school. Once she’d heard it all, Tinasha opened her eyes and said, “So children who wished to go abruptly vanished. Each was last seen in a different place, but none were spotted outside the town. Is that correct?”
“We also spoke to people in the neighboring settlements and on the nearby road, but no one had any clues to offer. None of the children were capable of teleportation, and the one who’s been missing the longest has been gone two weeks,” responded Pamyra.
Tinasha nodded. “Very suspicious indeed. Eir, how did things go with you?”
The young man with black hair and eyes, silent until now, scratched at his head. “Most of the people who’ve been killed were adults, like the headmaster, instructors, and soldiers. There were a few bigger kids, too, but I don’t think any of them are suspicious.”
“All of that was done in self-defense, or it happened as an accident before they enrolled at the academy. We’ve looked into that already,” Pamyra added calmly.
Tris, the only one who wasn’t following, paled. “What?! What do you mean killed people?”
“I can sense those who’ve slain others. That’s why I’ve been following you around,” answered Eir.
“Can an ordinary mage do something like that?!” Tris squeaked.
“He’s not an ordinary mage,” Tinasha put in. “He’s my spirit and a high-ranking demon.”
“What?” Tris said blankly, positively boggling at this. Eir rolled his eyes at her.
Ancient literature spoke of high-ranking demons’ ability to sniff out murderers, something that was impossible for any human mage. It counted as a sort of demon-specific quality. High-ranking demons, who generally lived on a different plane of existence, could use smell to discern humans who had killed others.
Whether the murder was done by magic or by sword didn’t matter. According to the demons, the moment of directly killing a person placed an indelible stain on the soul, altering it irrevocably.
Perhaps this stemmed from the same principle that made spirit sorcerers’ power so closely linked to their chastity. A spirit sorcerer who lost their magic upon forging a link to the next generation and a person who took another’s life both underwent an invisible alteration.
Seeing how blindsided Tris was, Tinasha nervously licked her lips. “I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark. Aside from his beautiful face, Eir can pass for human, so I thought he would be more convincing if you didn’t know.”
“My lady, you always give me orders I don’t understand,” remarked Eir.
“The most important thing is not to be too conspicuous. If only you’d change your face to be more ordinary.” Tinasha sighed.
“I can’t change it. This is how I’ve looked for nine hundred years,” Eir said stubbornly.
Tris, who evidently had thought of him as just some shady guy, was opening and closing her mouth like a beached fish.
Pamyra, however, who had known he was a spirit, wore a grave expression as she asked her queen, “Do you believe the children are already dead, Your Majesty?”
“I don’t want to, but it’s hard to stay optimistic considering the situation,” Tinasha answered. “Based on the fact that only children with magic disappeared, we should suspect the involvement of a forbidden curse.”
“A forbidden… curse?” repeated Pamyra.
“The physical flesh and souls of those with magic are far more powerful as catalysts in a forbidden curse than those of non-mages. And if they’re only children, they would have a much harder time fighting back. It gives me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” said Tinasha.
Oscar had likely considered the possibility that the children were already dead, too. He just hadn’t voiced it, out of consideration for his fiancée. But it wasn’t like Tinasha couldn’t handle that. She had witnessed far grimmer things in her life.
The queen straightened to her full height and narrowed her dark eyes at each of the three. In a cold voice, she said, “Tuldarr must act as a deterrent to forbidden curses. If this does turn out to be a plot, we will deliver swift punishment. I want you to carry on with the investigation. Should you run into a dead end, I will go myself.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Pamyra said with a deep bow. Following her example, Tris also clasped her sweaty hands together.
The gates of the academy came into view. The town children were streaming in for morning lessons, but something was different. A guard was posted at the entrance, sent from the castle. The academy had never had soldiers before, and the children stopped and stared.
Rudd glanced up at the woman next to him. “Here is good, Mom.”
“Really? Are you going to be all right?” she asked, fretting.
“I told you, it’ll be fine. I’m off to school now,” Rudd said, waving at her and running off. As soon as he passed the gates, he spotted his friends and waved. “Juliya! Sennett!”
Hearing their names, the two paused in their conversation to turn around. Rudd fell into step with them and lowered his voice. “There’s some sort of guard here now. Is that because kids are going missing?”
“Looks like it. Doesn’t have anything to do with us, though,” Sennett, a boy around Rudd’s age, replied. He loved reading, and the first thing he did after listening to the queen speak the day before was dash off to the library as fast as his legs could carry him.
Juliya looked from one boy to the other nervously. “What if the kids who disappeared are all being held prisoner somewhere?”
“If it’s someplace that could hold all five, I bet it’s an empty house or something. You know, like that one in the alley behind the blacksmith,” said Sennett.
“Should we… go looking for them?” Rudd offered.
He did want to uncover the truth, both out of a sense of guilt toward Teull and out of a sense of duty. His mom must be worried, since she’d insisted on walking him to school every day after the first kid had vanished. She always stood to the side and watched until Rudd went through the gates.
He didn’t want to make his mother worry anymore. Plus, from now on, Tuldarr would need the help of people like him, people who weren’t mages.
“Okay, then once school’s over—”
“What is going on here?” came a chilly voice from behind them.
The three kids stiffened, then slowly turned around.
“T-Tris…”
“That’s Madame to you. I’m your teacher,” chided the girl, one hand laid across her puffed-out chest. Tris was one of the academy students who worked as their instructor. She scolded them often but looked after them well. And yet, for a teacher, she had a tendency to be thoughtless and rash.
Rudd cocked his head. “Madame, I thought you weren’t giving lessons anymore, since you’re going to be a royal mage.”
“I’m here to investigate, so none of you have classes today! You can study on your own, though,” Tris replied.
“What? Then I’m going home,” Rudd said, turning on his heel to leave and maybe go snoop around that deserted house.
Tris caught him immediately, however. “Absolutely not. If anyone finds out that you three snuck off to go poking around somewhere, it’ll be my head. You are going to remain here and study.”
“Why do I have to?!” Rudd protested as Tris dragged him to the classroom.
Amid the flow of other kids turning to go home after getting to the schoolhouse and reading the notice that said lessons were canceled, Tris marched the three into the empty classroom and sat them down.
She sighed and then stretched her arms out. “I’m going to head out on the investigation, so you sit tight and study here until I return. I only came to tell you that lessons are canceled.”
“Aww, come on! You’re already going to look around, so what’s a few more people?” Rudd groaned.
“No, thank you. We already have one very strange person on the team who claims he can tell who might have done it at a glance. Yesterday, he examined the people in the school, and today we’re going to look around town,” Tris said primly.
“Whoa, that’s so cool. You’ll solve this superfast that way,” Rudd marveled, leaning forward with how impressed he was. Castle investigations were definitely on another level.
Tris folded her arms behind her head. “Not necessarily. If that were the case, it could be the teachers or a soldier who did it.”
“Huh. When you say a soldier, do you mean like the one at the gates today?” Rudd asked.
Tris was stunned. Typically, there were no guards at the academy. Her face turned grave. “Now that you mention it… There was no soldier here yesterday. Who did he check, then?”
She got up and gave the kids one of the sternest looks they’d ever seen. “All of you stay right here. I have something to take care of.”
“Hey! Where are you going?” Rudd called, chasing after Tris as she left the classroom.
Sennett followed after. “Could it have been the groundskeeper? I heard he used to be part of the army.”
“Oh, yeah!” Rudd exclaimed. He’d heard that rumor, too.
Tris appeared confused. Academy students seldom interacted with the groundskeeper, who handled various odd jobs outside.
“I heard the groundskeeper only worked at the army canteen, though,” Rudd added. He and his friends had followed Tris out of the school building. There weren’t any other kids around, but the groundskeeper was walking across the lawn on the far side of the garden, dragging a large burlap sack.
Tris gasped. As she strode toward the man, she looked over her shoulder and instructed, “You three, run along home! I’m going to go ask him some questions.”
She trotted over briskly but stealthily. Rudd, Sennet, and Juliya exchanged glances. Rudd whispered to the others, “We can’t let her go alone.”
At the very least, someone needed to sound the alarm if something happened. The trio nodded and hurried after their teacher. She gave them a disapproving look, but she couldn’t say anything without alerting the man.
The groundskeeper lugged the sack toward a gap in the circular academy building.
“Tris, where does that lead?”
“To… the space the school surrounds.”
The octagonal classrooms had no windows facing inward, and the spot in the center should have been empty. That was why the investigation team had only given it a cursory inspection. What could the man be doing there?
The four crept along the wall so as not to be detected. Once the groundskeeper reached the unmonitored central area, he dumped the bag’s contents.
Black terra-cotta soil came spilling out. He began spreading it around using something that looked like a fireplace poker.
Relief washed over Rudd when he saw it wasn’t a child’s body, but all the blood drained from Tris’s face. She gestured wildly for the children to leave, but before they could, the groundskeeper turned around.
Upon noticing them there, his face instantly contorted into a scowl. He was a mere ten steps away. Tris shoved Rudd behind her. “You guys get out of here.”
“What? But it’s just some dirt…”
“Dirt oozing with miasma. It’s definitely sinister. Run and let someone know,” ordered Tris in a tone that held none of her usual flippancy. Rudd was startled to hear her muttering a spell.
The man ran toward them with the poker brandished high overhead, and Rudd darted off with his friends.
“W-we’ll go let people know! Don’t die, Madame!”
Magic light burst behind him. A paralyzing metallic sound rent the air.
Rudd took Juliya’s hand while Sennett kept pace with him. The gardens had never seemed so empty.
The academy doors came into view. But because lessons were canceled, they were locked.
“Damn!”
How could they get inside? Rudd looked all around before remembering the guard at the gates. He dashed across the deserted front lawn, Sennett hot on his heels.
Juliya had disappeared at some point, though neither of them noticed.
The fireplace poker crashed into the wall with an earsplitting screech. Tris shuddered, having narrowly evaded it. She probably wouldn’t still be conscious if it had hit her. She quickly distanced herself from the groundskeeper as she restarted her interrupted spell.
“S-stones of ice, shards of white—”
The man lashed out before she could complete the magic, however. The poker came crashing down, and she instinctively shut her eyes. Her blood ran cold as death felt imminent.
But nothing hit her skull. Gingerly, she opened her eyes—and couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“Juliya?”
The girl who had hidden behind Rudd now stood before Tris, her arms crossed and a fierce glare on her face. The poker had stopped in midair—no, magic had caught it. Tris hadn’t heard any incantation, however. Juliya wasn’t even an academy student; she was just a girl from the town.
Tris still hadn’t figured out what was happening when Juliya said to her, “It’s suicide for a mage to fight at such close range.”
The coolheaded remark felt at odds with the childish register of her voice. Juliya extended her right hand toward the man. “Break apart.”
As if it knew that those two words constituted a spell, the poker crumbled to pieces.
Heedless of Tris, who was still rooted in place, Juliya waved a hand. “Eir, come here.”
In response, the strange man appeared silently beside Tris. He pushed her by the shoulder. “Go on, fall back. I took my eyes off you for a second, and you landed yourself in a heap of trouble.”
“Wh-why are you…?”
As she stumbled, Tris realized something. Only one person could command the spirits of Tuldarr. Once she understood what that meant, she was left astonished. “Wait, you’re…”
Juliya’s silhouette wavered for just a moment, and then she was no longer there. In her place stood a woman in a white mage’s outfit. It was the queen of the country and the foremost mage of the era. She was not a powerless child. Dumbfounded that she had fallen for it, Tris massaged her temples. “What? Psychological magic? But when did you…?”
“Juliya was a fabrication from the start,” Tinasha explained. Then she turned back to the man. Frozen while brandishing his poker, he was glaring at the queen with bloodshot eyes.
“Will you tell me what you were dumping here?” she questioned.
The man only let out a grunt.
Tinasha turned to her spirit. “He may be suffering from psychological contamination. Have him spit it out.”
“It’ll be hard not to overdo it. Humans are so weak,” complained Eir, which Tinasha ignored as she pushed the man aside to head deeper into the area encircled by the academy building.
The black soil scattered around emanated faintly noxious fumes. It was the putrid smell of lingering death.
Still, there were no bodies. The groundskeeper might have already disposed of those. Tinasha gazed up at the sky. “Did he only bring the remains of the catalysts he used in a forbidden curse? Was he planning to reuse this corrupted soil? He’d definitely want to bury something connected to anything that sinister, and this architecture is designed to bolster magic.”
“Your Majesty!” cried Pamyra, having appeared at the end of the passage to the central area as several people raced over. Rudd must have summoned help. Tris finally lost the strength to stand upright and sank to the ground. Soldiers marched past her.
Tinasha made no effort to hide her displeasure as she issued orders. “Go and search the town immediately. Since we didn’t find anything during yesterday’s investigation, there must be a forbidden curse constructed somewhere outside the school. And… we’re also looking for the mage who’s behind this.”
“What?!” Tris piped up in shock. Pamyra’s expression indicated that she felt much the same.
The only one left unperturbed was the spirit. Eir had a tight grip on the groundskeeper’s neck as he added, “They used a forbidden curse, but this man isn’t a mage. So someone else must be involved.”
“Involved? But… do you mean the teachers?” asked Tris.
Was one of the instructors the culprit? Many of them were talented mages with battle experience, which is why it wasn’t surprising when Eir discovered that the headmaster and several teachers had killed people. But did that mean they had slain students?
The queen shook her head. “No. We looked into all of them. I suppose they could’ve had others do the dirty work for them, though. We’re up against a very cunning opponent.”
“No way,” Tris whispered, stiffening in horror.
Suddenly, there came the muffled sound of an explosion in the distance. Tremors shook the earth and a creaking sound reverberated in the air.
Tinasha frowned. “I see they’ve come out on their own.”
After giving terse orders to the people around her, the queen vanished. Tris looked down at her own hands.
They were trembling uncontrollably.
“Come quick! Our teacher is in danger!” Rudd shouted toward the gates. Mages from the castle were already there. They listened to him hastily explain before rushing off toward the academy. Rudd and Sennett tried to follow, but the guard stopped them. He pushed them outside the gate and instructed them to go home.
“What in the world did we just see?” asked Sennett.
“Beats me. When I watched him pour that dirt out, I could feel how scared Madame got. But it did smell really weird,” said Rudd.
The more they talked about it, the less sense it made and the scarier it seemed. Just as Rudd decided he needed to make sure Tris was all right, a woman ran over from the end of the road.
“Rudd! What happened to you?!”
“Mom!” Rudd was at a loss for how to explain things to his distraught parent.
Before he could start, she pulled him into a hug. “I heard investigators from the castle are here. What’s happened at the school?”
“Right now, a teacher and the groundskeeper are—”
He got that far before a strange malaise came over him. He wriggled out of his mother’s arms and looked over at Sennett. “Hey… Wasn’t someone else with us?”
“Oh, yeah…”
Rudd had the oddest sense that he’d grabbed someone’s hand and had run with them. But that person had disappeared somewhere along the way. Now that he was aware, it felt wrong.
Rudd turned pale. “Why…?”
A kid who vanished into thin air… Was that what had happened to Teull?
As she watched her son go completely pale, Rudd’s mother gave a pained smile. “Let’s go home first. We need to think about what we’re going to do next.”
Stunned, Rudd let her pull him along. Who had disappeared? A series of memories floated from the back of his mind.
“I… But why…?”
There was a gap in his recollection. It gave him this itchy, unpleasant sensation, and it was only growing—like the gap was constantly widening. Rudd pressed a hand to his head. He looked over to his friend for help, but Sennett wasn’t next to him. “Huh?”
He whirled around to find Sennett standing motionless a few steps behind him. Rudd was relieved to see he hadn’t disappeared, but then noticed Sennett’s dire expression.
“What’s wrong?”
Sennett lifted a trembling hand and pointed a finger at Rudd. “Who are you?”
“Huh? What’s gotten into you? It’s me,” Rudd answered.
“No.” What was Sennett saying? Had he forgotten Rudd just like how they had forgotten the other person who’d been with them? “Who is that?”
Rudd had a feeling someone had said those words recently. It was when he last saw Teull.
It was twilight, the time of day when people’s faces got a little hazy. Teull had looked up at Rudd and asked him that same question.
“Wait, huh?”
No. Teull hadn’t been looking at him. His eyes had been trained on the woman behind Rudd.
And now Sennett was also pointing at…
“Didn’t you say that your mom went to your aunt’s house two weeks ago?” Sennett asked. The woman placed a palm on Rudd’s shoulder. “So who is that?”
From the corner of his eye, Rudd saw a hand that was white and bloodless.
The explosion came from the town, outside the academy grounds.
While everyone else was still baffled by the situation, the queen lifted off the ground. “Eir, make sure no one gets in. Pamyra and Tris, protect the students!”
“Okay,” answered the spirit, the only calm one there, though Tinasha had already disappeared.
Teleporting in quick succession, Tinasha hurried toward the source of the blast, a deserted back alley. Magic hung thick in the air, dim as the little street was in the shadow of other buildings.
The smell of blood hung about the place. Tinasha spotted two boys collapsed on the ground, and she paled. A woman was standing beside them. She was young and plainly dressed, like any lady in the town might’ve been. But blood dripped from her hands.
When she noticed Tinasha, she smiled and giggled like a child who’d been discovered pulling a prank. “Oops, did you catch me?”
Tinasha didn’t reply. She walked up to one of the boys and examined his injuries.
Sennett’s chest was pierced through. He was dead.
Fear was frozen on his face—the despair he had tasted moments before dying. Tinasha bit her lip hard enough for it to bleed.
Next to her, a voice croaked, “Your… Your Majesty?”
“Rudd!”
Crimson was flowing from Rudd’s belly. Tinasha gasped when she saw how much blood soaked the ground below them, but she immediately set about healing him. She added a pain numbing spell, too.
Once freed from the agony, the boy relaxed his brows. “I’m sorry… I… I didn’t realize… that wasn’t… my mom…”
“You don’t need to speak. It’s all right.”
“Teull… he was with me, that’s why… she found him… because she came to get me…”
Sensing his end was near, Rudd was intent on explaining everything. By the time Tinasha found him, he’d lost too much blood. Mending his organs wouldn’t suffice.
Even so, she healed him. Rudd clutched the edge of her robes. His eyes were unfocused and darted about as he sought out the queen. “Your Majesty… save Sennett…”
“I will.”
“And my mom…”
His words cut off there. Tinasha watched as the light faded from his eyes in a single second.
From above, a curious-sounding voice spoke. “Who are you, anyway? A teacher? A castle investigator?”
Tinasha didn’t bother with a reply, remaining kneeling on the ground.
The woman huffed at being ignored, then turned on her heel. “Fine. I’m going. There’s nothing left for me in this town.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Tinasha stated. No sooner did she finish than the woman who had posed as Rudd’s mother was flung into the air. She slammed against the far wall as if punched by a giant invisible fist.
“Ghh… Hah…”
She groaned in pain, but was still alive, perhaps because she’d quickly put up a defense.
While the woman peeled herself from the wall, Tinasha closed the two boys’ eyelids. Summoning two white cloths into her hands, she lay them over their faces.
Upon seeing this act of reverence for the departed, the woman spat a mixture of blood and saliva on the ground. “What a worthless courtesy. They’re already dead. Their souls are gone.”
“That may be true. But it matters to their families,” Tinasha replied, brushing her long black hair back as she got to her feet. She stared straight at the woman, with murder blazing in her gaze.
“So you took the place of adults who were out of town. And without entering the academy grounds, you sent in your pawn and had children abducted. Why?” Tinasha’s voice was low and commanding.
The woman seemed confused. “Why? To get more power, of course. Don’t you know that if you use a mage’s flesh as a catalyst, you can get more magic?”
“I’m aware. Many experimented with that during the Dark Age.”
“Exactly. I’ve always wanted to be a witch, and once I am one, I can live freely forever, right? So I collected some mage corpses, but it looks like I overdid it a little. There’s a barrier up, and I can’t leave town.”
“That’s because I believed it very likely that a mage was behind this,” Tinasha said.
“But it’s not like I’m the one who killed those kids.”
“You may as well have. And you’ve murdered these two,” Tinasha pointed out.
The woman gave a deep, exaggerated sigh. “I only wanted to take them hostage. But they figured out who I am and resisted. Honestly, ordinary people die so easily, don’t they?”
She spread both bloodstained hands wide and gave a carefree laugh. The cruelty in her eyes made them glitter as brightly as an ornament, transforming her from a mother to an ignorant little girl. She had only been able to hide herself this whole time because Rudd had no magic.
Despite that, the boy must have felt something was suspicious. And so he had died with regrets.
Tinasha let out a deep exhale. She fixed her gaze on this red-stained woman. A bone-chilling smile appeared on her lovely face, and a blade formed in her right hand.
“Perhaps you will find more sport in me, then. May your future be one of endless remorse.”
With that proclamation, the queen dashed forward. When the woman saw the fearsome magic gathering in Tinasha’s left hand, she licked her lips nervously.
Enormous waves of magic erupted within the town.
There was no spell configuration to be seen. Such was the massive difference in the two mages’ power levels. Lashed by Tinasha’s invisible whip, the woman flew through the air.
“Guh…”
For a while now, she had been unable to weave spells to counterattack. Although her powers far surpassed those of an ordinary mage, she was helpless to do anything against this opponent.
As the woman’s body soared upward, magical chains immobilized it. Her limbs were pulled far apart, keeping her from moving a millimeter. She stared at Tinasha in disbelief.
“Witches are nothing like this,” Tinasha spat. “Aren’t you glad you won’t sully their reputation?”
“W-wait a minute…”
“I can’t possibly have such a sham of a witch in Tuldarr.”
“The boy called you ‘Your Majesty’… Are you… the queen?”
Tinasha didn’t reply, electing to only hum and smile.
The queen pointed the tip of her slender sword at the woman. The weapon was enchanted with an entangling spell.
“You are not qualified to question me.”
With a clear ringing, the blade shattered to pieces. Those little shards glittered in the sun. Each one was imbued with magic and floated aloft.
The corners of Tinasha’s mouth turned up. Powerful words fell from her red lips.
“Sip it up.”
The tiny metal pieces fell onto the woman’s body like a meteor shower. They tore into her white skin and sent her blood running out.
It must have felt like being stabbed by thousands of nails. The woman’s mouth opened as though to scream, but all the holes in her neck stifled whatever noise would have come. She could only wheeze ragged breaths.
Her death lasted several slow, agonizing minutes. She was not even permitted to lose consciousness. Although she writhed desperately at first, she eventually began to weaken, and she breathed her last as a broken doll. Tinasha watched coldly until the end.
The conclusion was hardly satisfying.
A later search uncovered traces of the missing children that led to an old storehouse in town. There was also clear evidence of a forbidden curse. The poor corpses of the kids no longer resembled human bodies. The dirt the groundskeeper had brought into the academy was stained with their blood, and it was seemingly meant to draw suspicion to the faculty. It could also have been meant to create a forbidden curse site. The exact purpose died with the woman responsible, and knowing wouldn’t have provided any relief.
While extra staff from the castle ran about handling the aftermath, Tinasha attended the deliveries of the two boys’ bodies to their families. Sennett’s parents flew into a rage, raining abuse down on the headmaster and the castle staff, who could only endure it with their heads lowered.
But what tormented Tinasha more was the sight of Rudd’s mother, who had recently returned from her visit to another town.
“What…? This can’t be… There’s no way…”
Her face was white, but she didn’t cry or scream. She only stood there stunned before her son’s body, smiling weakly. When she tore off the white cloth, her lips trembled violently. “Is it really you…?”
The corpse had been purified and cleaned, so Rudd only appeared to be sleeping.
His mother reached out for her son. She brushed her cheek against his cold one and carefully took him into her arms. Her feeble voice staggered in the night air. “You weren’t supposed to leave me behind… You should have taken me with you!”
No one knew what to say in the face of such bitter anguish.
Tinasha pressed her hands to her temples to keep herself from crying.
The mother who had lost her only child began to wail and sob. “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry, Rudd… You must have been in so much pain…”
He would never move again. His soul, mind, and very existence were all gone, and it wasn’t fair. The boy was kind, the type to be considerate of the sickly little girl who had been his friend since childhood. He was so brave, he refused to ignore the kidnappings. Tinasha bit her lip hard and bowed her head.
“I wasn’t strong enough to save your sons. I’m so very sorry.”
When Sennett’s parents heard that apology, it took away any outlet for their anger and left them speechless. Tinasha’s attendants glanced at her, unsure of how to proceed.
All told, seven children had been sacrified.
Of all the forbidden curses that had tormented the country, this one would leave deep scars.
Rudd’s mother beheld the queen’s lowered head and replied, “It isn’t your fault, Your Majesty… I am deeply grateful to you… for caring for him.”
Rudd’s smile flashed through Tinasha’s mind. Bursting with pride, he’d wanted to make his mother happy and be of use to his country. Yet his hopes and future were lost forever. Parent and child had cared so deeply for one another, but the mother was on her own now.
Tinasha kept her head down. Renart gave her a gentle nudge. “Your Majesty, we still have much to take care of…”
“Yes, of course…”
The queen still desperately wished to do more, but she gave one final bow and turned to leave. From behind, she heard Rudd’s mother whisper, “If only I could turn back time and go in his place…”
The queen shivered. Finding it odd, Renart looked over at her only to see her dark eyes wider than they’d ever been and her red lips trembling. “Your Majesty?”
Tinasha didn’t respond, however. When he tried again, she met his gaze.
What Renart saw in the queen’s eyes struck him dumb.
Whether it was determination or fear was hard to judge. Nevertheless, it was something powerful.
“Could I have you take care of the rest? I’m going back to the palace,” she said.
Despite feeling puzzled by her behavior, Renart let none of his hesitations show as he bowed his head. “Yes, Your Majesty. Be careful.”
“Thank you.”
And then she was gone.
Renart surveyed the panicked town and the bereaved family members before letting out a deep sigh.
Once back at the palace, Tinasha stumbled her way to the treasure vault. Ordering the confused-looking guards to stay at their posts, she descended the stairs alone.
With each step she took down the magically lit stone stairway, the weight on her heart grew stronger. Memories of when she was a young girl sprang to mind unbidden.
Soon enough, however, Tinasha reached the bottom of the stairs. Entering the treasure vault for the first time in four centuries, she wandered in deeper, like a woman possessed. Upon reaching a giant stone ledge, she touched the wall next to it. A spell configuration emerged from beneath her fingertips. It was intricate sealing magic she had placed during the Dark Age. She glanced at it, then began an incantation in an even voice. The complex spell reacted to the power entering it and began to unwind.
Her voice was grave, with all emotions stifled.
Once her long incantation finished at last, a small hollow opened in the center of the wall. Set inside it was a box.
Tinasha reached out, picked it up, and gently opened the lid. Inside lay a tiny blue jewel with markings inscribed upon it.
“Here it is,” she said, her heart pounding and her hands trembling. She stared at it.
This orb had changed her fate, and not hers alone. It had transformed another man’s fate and many other things, too.
She had thought she’d never look upon it again, that the day would never come when she needed it.
But now it lay here, in her hands.
“If I go back one month, I can save everyone… Or if that’s impossible, then I can go a few hours back…”
Altering the past was wrong. It flew in the face of the laws of nature. The ramifications were unfathomable.
Yet that very power had rescued her. It was the reason she was here now.
Tinasha thought of Rudd’s grin as he spoke of his hopes for the future—as well as his mother’s crying.
A parent’s wish was to save her son’s life, even at the cost of her own. Tinasha felt powerless to deny the woman that.
“I wonder what Oscar would say…”
She couldn’t imagine it. He might furiously scold her, but he also might shake his head and forgive her.
And… what would he say?
The man who went back four hundred years and changed history.
How determined was he to do what he did? Did he take her hand?
Tinasha’s eyes burned hot as she thought of what he had given her and what he had sacrificed. She bit her lip fiercely to stem the tide of emotions surging within her.
Compared to four hundred years, it was only a little bit of time travel.
It was hypocritical, Tinasha knew that much. She was doing this out of a self-serving sense of complacency. Countless people had died at her hands, and they’d all had families. She was well aware that she reeked of murder more than anyone else did.
But even so.
Tinasha squeezed her eyes shut.
Fear and hesitation rushed through her mind. Whether it lasted for seconds or hours was unclear.
And though she was still undecided, she slowly stretched out a finger.
She would not cast off her fear, or her shivering, or her trepidation, or her hope.
Those were all hers. She carried them inside her and stood upon them.
“It’s all right.”
From deep within the hesitation in her mind, she let out a heavy sigh.
And then she finally reached for the orb, thinking of the man who had been all alone.
Moonlight filtered weakly into the dark room.
Oscar, who had just finished changing for bed, noticed the fading light and looked up. Pale clouds now blanketed the sky, limned at the edges with a hazy glimmer. He then returned his attention to the inside of the room.
The king’s expansive bedchamber was utterly silent. As Oscar sat on his bed with a little yawn, he heard a rap at the window and grinned. At his call, he’d gotten the reply he’d expected.
The woman stole silently into the room. She cocked her head at him and then smiled. “Good evening.”
“Something wrong? You’re here awfully late.”
“I just wanted to see you…”
His beautiful fiancée picked her way over to him, each step careful. As he watched her, he began to frown. “Did something happen?”
“No, nothing.”
“That’s not a face that says nothing happened.”
He took her hand and pulled her onto his lap. The woman seemed a bit surprised, but merely lowered her long eyelashes with an abashed little grin on her lips. After a brief silence, she asked, “Oscar… what happened to that orb?”
It was obvious what she was referring to, and he gave a concise response. “I found it when I was sorting through the treasure vault. It’s stored deep inside so no one can touch it.”
“I see…”
“What happened? Does this have to do with the kidnappings?”
Tinasha only gave a small smile, but she didn’t answer.
Seeing that she was acting stubborn, Oscar wound a tuft of glossy black hair between his fingers and gave a hard tug. “You’re being awfully secretive. I’m going to be your husband, aren’t I? Don’t hold back and just tell me.”
At that, Tinasha’s eyes shone with something like nostalgia. She pinched the bridge of her nose with a deep sigh.
Thinking that she was holding back tears, Oscar settled Tinasha’s head against his chest, and she closed her eyes.
With the queen nestled in her fiancé’s arms, the story gradually began to come out.
As her tale neared its end, Oscar threw his betrothed an unvarnished look of disapproval. “You gave me such an earful about that orb and then you went and used it yourself?”
“I’m sorry…”
“And even though I told you not to get involved, you turned into a kid and went undercover. What were you thinking?”
“I thought it would be the fastest way…”
This woman really was intractable. Oscar had known that since meeting her, but this was still an unbelievable development.
It all stemmed from how deep her emotions ran. Oscar gave Tinasha’s head a light rap. “I understand that you wanted to save those kids, but if you do that every time, there’ll be no end to it. You’ll never get anywhere.”
Tinasha hung her head. She’d known the things Oscar was saying from the start.
Oscar gave a little sigh, seeing her so full of regret and some other emotion that was about more than remorse. “Although… I can’t say I dislike that side of you or anything.”
This delicate young woman was so weak and yet so strong. Looking at her, Oscar got the sense that it was only a matter of perspective whether Tinasha’s traits were flaws or assets; the essence within was practically the same.
By nature, she was someone who wanted to honor people’s wishes and feelings. Yet as a queen, she needed to maintain a considerable degree of coolheadedness. Tinasha was always warring with the contradictions within herself. And those in the midst of battle did feel momentary twinges of guilt over their actions.
The sorrowful look on his betrothed’s face sent Oscar into a reverie. What if she had been born into an ordinary family and had grown up without such an overabundance of magic? Maybe she would have lived a happy and fulfilled life as a good wife and mother. However, from her earliest moments, she never had such an option, and so she had chosen to go to war with herself.
Oscar brushed Tinasha’s hair behind her ear and pressed a kiss to her cheek, which reddened. “So? Could you save them?”
The way he asked was like he never doubted that Tinasha would succeed, and her heart ached. She slumped in visible dejection. “The orb didn’t activate. I couldn’t go back in time.”
“It didn’t activate? Is it broken?”
“No… It didn’t seem that way… It seems like there are conditions of some sort that must be met before it can be used.”
Her story was over. Tinasha closed her eyes.
Oscar clutched her slender, grief-racked frame close to him.
Her own experience of getting rescued because of time travel must have been affecting her. The one who saved her had vanished. Left alone, all she could do was live her life with her gratitude and everything else she felt for him locked inside herself. No matter how deep those scars ran, someone like Oscar, who hadn’t shared her past with her, couldn’t remove them.
It was all he could do to support her. He had long ago decided to stay with her and never let her go.
So if that path had led her to his own, perhaps that counted as something blessed.
Suddenly, Oscar noticed that the supple body in his arms had grown heavy, though not truly. He was simply feeling Tinasha’s full body weight that normally she lightened with magic.
Curious, Oscar peered over at Tinasha’s downturned face. She had passed out, a little crease of sadness above her nose.
“Y-you’re asleep?” he whispered, feeling more worn out than exasperated. He managed to maneuver her limp frame onto the bed and lay her flat.
Whether she’d exhausted herself after being so constantly on edge, or whether she was simply a naturally deep sleeper, Tinasha displayed no signs of waking. Oscar sighed, eyeing her in that vulnerable state. He reached out to smooth the wrinkle in her brow. Now her face carried a modicum of tranquility. Gazing at it, Oscar muttered, “I really don’t know what to do with you.”
He very much wanted to tug at Tinasha’s cheeks for how defenselessly she slept, but he restrained himself.
Oscar lay down to rest next to her, carding his fingers through black strands. The glossy, smooth sensation was a truly alluring thing. He wanted to touch her soft skin but satisfied himself with petting her hair. When he was done, he pulled the covers over her.
The soft, even sounds of Tinasha’s breathing filled the room, relaxing Oscar as he closed his own eyes. He hoped that she could find peaceful dreams in his bed. Hopefully, peace would come to feel like something natural for her. Oscar vowed to keep Tinasha safe, so that it would be possible.
He caught hold of her tiny hand, and the feel of it sent him drifting off into a dream. |
Unnamed Memory
6. Bloodless Scars
Morning light prickled at her eyes. The breeze coming in from the open window stirred her long black hair.
Such brightness was wholly unwelcome. Instinctively, she curled up and pulled the pillow over her face. She tried to fall back to sleep, but someone tapped lightly at the back of her head.
“Wake up, Tinasha.”
She heard him speak but couldn’t comprehend the words. Resisting, she shook her head underneath the pillow.
Heartlessly, he kept going. “Wake up, wake up. You’re terrible at getting out of bed in the morning.”
He grabbed her arms and pulled her upright, but she quickly flopped back down before he could keep her in place.
He eyed her prostrate form with dismay. Sighing, he hoisted her up into his arms. “I’m going to toss you into the bathtub.”
“Ugh…” Her dark eyes blinked open.
“You better not go back to sleep, got it? I’ll pinch you if you do.”
“Mm-kay… Morning, Oscar.”
“Every day you test my patience, I swear.” The words were harsh, but inside them was a deep and abiding affection.
She gave an absentminded smile. With her arms wrapped around his neck, she slowly slid down until she was standing. After a pause, she yawned. Blue sky could be seen through the window.
“Nice weather today,” she commented.
“Do you want me to take you out somewhere? I’ve got Nark, so it wouldn’t require much time.”
Her eyes grew wide. Hope blossomed inside her heart.
She was quick to squelch it, however. “There’ll be trouble if anyone finds out I’m gone. But thank you.”
“You’re still a kid. You should get to take a break,” he argued, stroking her hair. Her eyes went half-lidded like a cat’s as she grinned.
When she opened her eyes, the room was already light. Tinasha pulled away the arm she’d flung over her face.
Didn’t she already get up? For some reason, she was in bed again. Though her body was sluggish to respond, she managed to drag herself upright. Someone asked calmly, “You up?”
Tinasha looked over to see a man getting changed, facing away from the bed. She recognized the broad stretch of his back.
Sleepily, she replied, “Mm-hmm. Good morning. I’ll go make breakfast…”
“What?” he questioned sharply, turning back to look at her.
She blinked at him in confusion, her head tilted to one side. “What’s wrong, Oscar?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Huh?” Tinasha shook her sleep-addled head. Looking around, she saw that she wasn’t in her room.
Glancing down at herself, she noticed that her body wasn’t the skinny frame of a teenage girl. She had soft, womanly curves.
She looked back over at the man who had paused mid-dressing, his arms through his shirt. Abruptly, her memories returned. “Oh… I—I think I was just half asleep. Sorry.”
“Wake all the way up. You’re so bad with mornings.”
Tinasha gave her flushed cheeks a light slap. She had confused a dream from her younger days with reality. The rooms she lived in then no longer existed. She was in the king of Farsas’s bedchamber.
Looking down at herself again, she realized she was wearing the same clothes as she had the day before. “Did I fall asleep here?”
“You went out like a light. You’re a champion sleeper and yet so very, very bad at getting up. How long did you plan on staying in bed?” Oscar chided.
“Urgh… I’m sorry…”
Tinasha swung her legs over the side of the bed to sit on the edge of the matress. She glanced at the clock and paled. “I—I’m going to be late… I have a meeting…”
“I thought you might. That’s why I tried to wake you, but you completely refused,” Oscar replied. He was now fully dressed, and he tossed her a teasing smirk.
Tinasha shrunk in on herself like a scolded child.
Even home in Tuldarr, she was a poor riser. Often, she only just barely managed to drag herself to the bath in the morning. While her ladies-in-waiting all knew she was like this, almost no one else did.
If Tinasha hurried, there was still a chance she wouldn’t be late.
“Sorry, I need to get back now,” she said with an apologetic nod.
“Mm-hmm,” answered Oscar, flapping a hand at her. She flashed him a soft smile and summarily vanished from the room.
Oscar shook his head at his fiancée, gone so abruptly.
Had that been a good distraction for her? At the very least, she had seemed her usual self when she’d grinned.
Eyeing the clock, Oscar realized that he was an hour late, because he’d been dealing with Tinasha.
Although he should’ve been in a rush, too, he couldn’t help but focus on what Tinasha had said when she was still half awake.
“What kind of food could she even make? Terrifying,” he muttered with a smirk as he headed out to begin his work for the day.
The stone chamber was so enormous it could house a mansion. The walls and ceiling were bare excavated rock, while the interior was cold as ice.
It wasn’t naturally frigid, however. Strange waves of bitter air kept rolling in from a gigantic hole in the center of the room.
Valt stood on the edge of it, peering down. It was boundlessly deep, the bottom impossible to make out. But if he strained his eyes, he could see something slithering in the darkness.
Whatever it was emanated pure evil.
“Valt, isn’t it time yet? If we leave it there much longer, it’s going to eat all,” someone said, and Valt turned to see a dozen men standing along the wall, clearly unwilling to get as close to the aperture as he was. It had been one of them who complained.
Valt gave a shrug. “True enough. I suppose we can begin.”
The men stirred. Every time one of them had suggested something like that to him previously, he’d shot the suggestion down. Sensing their morale surging like a wave, Valt gave a strained smile. “I will handle it until it’s set outside. No one else can, after all. Aside from that, do as you like. I won’t attempt to control it.”
“That’s fine. We’ll handle it,” one man stated confidently.
Internally, Valt sneered. The men were far too dazzled by the sheer power to judge whether they were actually capable of wielding it.
But very soon, they would all learn firsthand what it was like to hold too much strength.
Valt could have warned them but saw no reason to. His desires lay elsewhere.
It had taken meticulous planning and execution of work laid by generations before him to reach this turning point.
After Tinasha’s meeting, which she barely arrived to on time, she had lunch with Legis. The conversation naturally turned to the events of the day before.
“Using the bodies of mages to summon magic is a dreadful thing,” Legis spat in a rare display of undisguised irritation.
Tinasha’s face darkened. “That type of forbidden curse was attempted often in the past, but I don’t think the effects are worth the high number of sacrifices. At best, the caster only becomes a slightly stronger mage.”
In the end, seven people had perished for a mediocre power increase.
Someone with true knowledge and strength would’ve been able to call a fantastic amount of magic from the flesh of just one powerful individual used as the catalyst. Tinasha was once the recipient of such colossal magic from a forbidden curse, though she herself had not asked for it. The memory of that event was bittersweet.
Sighing, Legis said, “I suppose in the end, we can’t completely stop the use of forbidden curses.”
“Unfortunately, that would be very difficult to achieve. People believe that great risks mean great rewards. In reality, there is no case that I know of in which a forbidden curse successfully led someone to their goal.”
In all Tuldarr’s records, nearly every forbidden curse ended with the caster dead and the curse either disintegrating or causing wild, unplanned mayhem. There weren’t many who knew that, though.
If that knowledge was made public in an attempt to deter future incidents, it would only end up revealing more information about forbidden curses. That was a danger that could not be overlooked. No matter how loudly they might preach about the futility of forbidden curses, those who sought power wouldn’t listen.
As a result, a force capable of stamping out those threats was vital, and the queen had already taken steps toward creating one.
Ever since Tinasha first began considering dissolving the contract with the mystical spirits, she had also started plans for how the mages of Tuldarr might fight back against a forbidden curse. In the days leading to her coronation, she’d selected qualified candidates and had begun running them through battle-oriented drills.
When Legis inquired how that program was going, Tinasha smiled. “It’s going well. Everyone is very talented, and they’re quick learners.”
“I see… Do you think that, in a real-world scenario, they could defend against a forbidden curse?” he asked.
“I do. In magical warfare, firepower alone isn’t what decides things. It’s about how it’s utilized… In other words, it’s more important to devise a winning strategy. In that sense, it’s no different from regular combat, and carefully laying preparations can actually be more effective than anything else. That’s especially the case when spells are set in advance.”
A team of multiple spell casters with finely honed magic would absolutely be enough to defy a forbidden curse if they used their power in the right places and at the right times. When Farsas had defended against Druza’s forbidden curse, Oscar had noted that a head-on battle was pointless. Tinasha felt the same way, which was why she was instructing mages on technique and knowledge. As an elite unit that could tacitly communicate and understand each other, they would be more flexible and dynamic than a single powerful mage fighting alone.
“It’s usually a group of mages who are behind a large-scale forbidden curse, and they’re all reliant on the spell. I don’t think it should be so very difficult to rein them in,” the queen stated confidently, and Legis nodded.
However, another possibility occurred to him, and so he asked, “What would you do against a witch?”
Though he had voiced the question off the cuff, it was a weighty one. Tinasha’s face turned pensive, and then she smiled slightly. “To be honest, I don’t know. I think it would be a pretty tough battle, because a witch would have so much more experience. Perhaps we could set up a very carefully laid trap… It would be best to avoid a direct confrontation.”
Legis was silent for a moment, for he had anticipated that reply.
A witch would certainly be much more formidable than even a large-scale forbidden curse.
The Witch Killer Queen knew better than anyone how terrifying it was to face off against someone with powerful magic, experience, and a will of their own. Only four such women had come to be called witches.
Sunlight streamed into the room—a rare occurrence. When Valt returned, he stared at the shafts of light with some surprise.
Miralys was sitting in her chair, hugging her knees to her chest. The bright afternoon sun made her snowy white skin shine. Her light green eyes caught his. “You’re back. Are you tired?”
“Yes, it was pretty exhausting calling it up alone. But what’s going on? You have the curtains open.”
“I’ll have to go into the outside world soon… so I’m acclimating myself,” Miralys answered.
“Ah, I see,” said Valt, a smile tugging at his lips at what a good, faithful girl Miralys was. He could feel his exhaustion melting away. Still, he made sure to ask her what he needed to ask. “Is the spell ready?”
“Yes, it’s done. It took a while, but everything is fine.”
“Thanks.”
Miralys was quite good at spell crafting. There was no need to worry over that part.
However, what did warrant concern was how their opponents’ forces would be deployed. Valt couldn’t help voicing his uneasiness. “I’m the most anxious about where the spirits will be placed. Keeping track of twelve really is tough.”
“I’ll be fine, since I have enough magic to confuse them… but you be careful,” Miralys replied.
“I will. I’ll be sure to put them to work pulling that off, too,” Valt said with a little yawn as he glanced out the window. On the other side of the glass, he could sense a peculiar magic drifting in the air. The country would probably change overnight.
That was only the beginning, though. A self-deprecating expression formed on his face. “I’m going to sleep. I have to replenish my magic.”
“Okay. Good night,” Miralys said with a little wave of her fingers. Poison lurked somewhere in that innocent smile of hers.
Everything hinged on tomorrow. The curtain would finally rise on their story.
The noontime sun blazed, bathing the earth in light.
The fortress of Ynureid stood at Farsas’s northernmost point and was built on terrain that was comparatively cooler because of its high elevation. The sun still bore down on it fiercely, though.
The first one to notice was a mage on the rampart.
About 60 percent of the main fort’s exterior had been rebuilt by a team of mages specializing in architecture, while artisans worked on the interior simultaneously. Mages were now setting up defensive spells along the outer walls. One of them looked up, sensing a flow of unusual magic. Something had gotten caught by the numerous surveillance wards placed at the national border.
He narrowed his eyes. A dark shape was slithering on the horizon.
It was impossible at this distance to distinguish exactly what it was, but it was clearly abnormal. The man raced along the ramparts to the general.
The hasty report reached the king in Farsas Castle five minutes later. Upon hearing the news, Oscar lifted his eyebrows. “Cezar made their move already?”
Cezar’s hostility toward Farsas was nothing new. It was most likely misguided resentment stemming from the fact that Farsas was a powerful country blessed with natural resources. But in hundreds of years, Cezar had never once attacked its enemy directly. This sudden action had to be the result of their evil god or some other entity spurring them to it, just as Druza had been pushed to strike with the forbidden curse.
Nonetheless, Oscar had been expecting this since he’d learned what Tinasha’s investigation uncovered. Swiftly, he issued orders to his attendants and left the room to prepare for battle.
One hour later, he and his army teleported to Ynureid.
“What’s the situation?” the king demanded.
The general bowed. “Most of the enemy army is infantry, so their pace is slow. It should take them another hour to arrive. Their numbers are close to forty thousand. However, er…”
“Yes?”
“The mages claim they sense some manner of abnormal magic.”
Oscar’s attendants gasped. Undoubtedly, they were all thinking of Druza’s forbidden curse.
Aware that this thought had just put them all on edge, Oscar grinned wickedly. “Now everyone thinks they can just whip out whatever weird thing, since they know they can’t beat us in a head-on fight…”
After what Druza did, a treaty was freshly signed banning the use of forbidden curses in cross-national wars. What had Cezar brought out now? Surely not a real evil god? Oscar’s brain whirred. “This’ll be a gamble.”
It was painful not knowing what their enemy had up their sleeve. But that just meant Farsas had to crush them before they could let loose whatever odd thing they had. Oscar gave orders to that effect, a grave expression on his face.
The half-finished fortress of Ynureid loomed before them. General Tarvo, leading the vanguard of Cezar’s army, restrained a laugh as he eyed it. He thought of Druza, which had only recently relied on a forbidden curse and suffered defeat.
“Of course Druza lost going about it that way. Even if they had destroyed the stronghold and army with their curse, what were they going to do once they’d used it all up?”
Any way you looked at it, overpowering Farsas was impossible without enough strength to last through a long struggle.
Cezar wouldn’t make such a foolish mistake.
Over long years, it had raised troops for just this purpose. What’s more, the nation had that. Victory was in sight.
However, there was one uncertain element, and that was the queen of Tuldarr, the king’s fiancée. Things could get dicey if she led her country to intervene in the conflict. The general wanted to weaken Farsas before that could happen.
“Have they not noticed us yet?”
The fortress still looked the same.
From horseback, Tarvo surveyed his infantry. He opened his mouth to give the order to speed up their march. But before he could speak, a fog suddenly rolled out. It was thick enough to block out the soldiers’ field of vision, even on the sunny plains.
“What is this?! What is happening?!” Tarvo shouted, jerking around to check behind him, but the soldiers showed no reaction and kept on advancing. He was glad to see that the march wasn’t impeded, but he was worried, nonetheless. Was it wise to continue in this fog when they had no idea which direction they were headed?
It didn’t look like any ordinary mist, meaning it had to be magic. Tarvo wasn’t a mage, though, so that was as best as he could comprehend it. He turned back to ask his officers for guidance, but the fog was so thick that he couldn’t see them.
After about five minutes of moving through the vapor, debating the entire time if they should stop, Tarvo and the rest of the army finally emerged from the fog. All of a sudden, he could see again, as if what had happened was just an illusion, and the fortress was much closer than it had been.
“So we were on the right path…”
He had been fretting that the magic was meant to throw off their course, but everything seemed fine. Feeling reassured, Tarvo took hold of his reins.
And that was when something came whistling through the air. Tarvo stiffened, then tumbled from his mount. An arrow was lodged in his helmetless head, piercing one ear and going out the other. His horse slowed and shook its head, seeking its rider that had disappeared from the saddle. A soldier who was walking behind ran into the steed.
Despite the obvious attack, the Cezar army couldn’t stop immediately upon losing a commanding officer.
In the next moment, the Farsas army attacked from their right flank.
“This magic is pretty powerful,” muttered Kav, who was casting spells from the fortress.
In the distance, Farsas’s and Cezar’s armies were clashing on the plains. Sylvia, who was watching the battle from beside Kav, nodded.
Producing fog on even ground was a potent type of spiritual magic that, ordinarily speaking, no regular mage could wield.
However, Tinasha had reworked the spell so that a team of ten mages could handle it and had taught it to those she was close with in Farsas. Tinasha had used this very tactic herself during the incident with the princess of Yarda; it was highly effective in combat.
While the fog robbed the enemy of sight, the Farsas troops had split up and teleported in groups to places along the Cezar army’s flank.
Once the fog dissipated, they launched an attack from the enemy’s blind spot.
Kav noticed that the Cezar army’s formation was collapsing under the force of Farsas’s charge and whispered, “I hope this ends quickly…”
An ominous chill ran up his spine.
The majority of Cezar’s forty thousand troops were foot soldiers. The Farsas cavalry rode into the middle of the infantry but were surprised to find no real resistance. The enemy moved sluggishly and were cut down as easily as grass.
It quickly became apparrant what was wrong. Enemy soldiers who should’ve been fatally wounded were still fighting back, swinging their swords as if nothing had befallen them.
Slowly but steadily, those blades pierced the horses’ bellies. With loud whinnies, the steeds collapsed, and their riders tumbled off their backs. They cried out upon finding themselves hemmed in by Cezar forces. “Th-these demons!”
Their eyes were cloudy, and the flesh of their cheeks was rotting. The gray pallor of their faces was unmistakable—these were dead men walking.
“Your Majesty!” shouted Doan.
“I know,” Oscar replied sullenly from the front lines.
This was the abnormal magic. While ordinary humans were mixed into Cezar’s army, the majority of the fighters were animated corpses.
“Those who are taken to Cezar’s castle never come out again, huh?”
Tinasha had said something like that to Oscar once. He hadn’t wanted to learn the fates of those unfortunate souls, and yet here they were. Oscar clicked his tongue in annoyance.
The Farsas troops had stopped in their tracks, overwhelmed with fear. Their enemy was already dead and so couldn’t be killed. That said, the corpses couldn’t heal themselves. If their limbs were lopped off, the remaining corpse would only writhe disturbingly on the ground. While this could hardly be considered ideal, it was better than nothing.
“I guess we’ll make magic our main offense… It’s not really my style, but go ahead,” Oscar ordered, and the Farsas army formation shifted. As the cavalry soldiers held their positions, the mages behind them began to set the cadavers on fire. Puppeteered by some sort of spell as they were, they ceased moving once they were burned with magic. Similarly, Akashia could also render them motionless.
A full-size Nark spewed fire onto the dead army from the sky.
Oscar groaned as he beheld the scene. “There’s no end to them.”
Right now, things were fine. But Oscar wasn’t sure if this method would hold up against the entirety of Cezar’s soldiers.
Unlike Tuldarr, Farsas did not have vast reserves of mages. Most of them were at the fortress or castle. Only around twenty were on the battlefield.
A scowl on his face, Oscar exhaled hard. As he cut through the shambling cadavers, the king said to the mage mumbling incantations behind him, “Doan, hit me with a little magic.”
“What?!” Doan yelped, going wide-eyed at his king’s extreme request.
With a serious look on his face, Oscar urged, “Do it quick. It’ll alert Tinasha. It’s our best chance.”
Tinasha had cast an anti-magic barrier on Oscar that alerted her when he was struck by a spell. It was what had brought her to those strange ruins.
Grasping Oscar’s intention, Doan drew up a simple attack spell. Before it took shape, though, a voice called down from midair.
“Could you not summon me that way?” The woman was very obviously annoyed.
Just as Oscar and Doan looked up, a dreadful and thunderous roar rocked the entire area. Glaring light flooded the front lines and the Farsas soldiers instinctively shut their eyes against the sudden flash.
When they cautiously opened their lids again, they were all astonished to find the corpses they had been battling collapsed on the ground like marionettes with their strings cut.
“Wh-what on earth just happened…?”
Soldiers gasped when they saw huge swaths of open space where thousands of corpses blanketed the earth. The remaining Cezar cadaver soldiers appeared to notice the abrupt vacancies and began to shuffle toward the Farsas troops.
Frowning, Oscar said to the woman in the sky, “You sure do know how to make a spectacle.”
“I wanted to buy us a little time to talk,” Tinasha explained as she descended. She was wearing mage’s robes, though not formal ones. The form-fitting white attire hugged the shape of her body and was emblazoned with magical sigils. The outfit had seemingly been designed for ease of movement, as deep slits ran up along both sides of the skirt, providing glimpses of Tinasha’s milky-white legs.
She was equipped with multiple magic implements strapped to her slender arms and legs, and what had to be an ensorcelled dagger was belted at her waist. She was obviously ready for battle. A young man and woman stood behind her, awating orders; Oscar recognized them as two of the twelve mystical spirits.
Oscar’s eyes grew wide as he took in his very first glimpse of Tinasha’s battle uniform. “That’s some getup.”
Tinasha beamed, her eyes narrowing. When the expression faded, her eyes became as dark as the abyss and filled with unmistakable majesty.
“The queen of Tuldarr, Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr, has arrived. I have detected the use of a forbidden art, hence Tuldarr’s decision to intervene at this juncture. We will dispose of this entity that should not exist, and no harm will come to either country,” she proclaimed in a full, sonorous tone.
Oscar grinned. He kept his response outwardly serious as he replied, “Understood. Thanks for acting so fast.”
Tinasha replied with a broad smile of her own and launched into a detailed explanation. “I will leave four of my spirits here. Also, that group over there is in training at the moment, so use them any way you wish.”
She indicated a spot close to the rear left flank of the Farsas army. About twenty mages stood next to horses some distance away. Upon catching Oscar’s gaze, they bowed.
“Mages from Tuldarr, huh? That’ll be a big help,” Oscar remarked.
“My intention was to create an anti-forbidden-curse unit, but I didn’t think it would see real combat this soon, so they’re all still learning. Rest assured, however, that they are excellent mages,” Tinasha clarified.
Oscar cocked an eyebrow. “How am I supposed to interpret that? Don’t give such a misleading explanation. And when you say you’re leaving them here, do you mean you have something else to do?”
“I’m going to go strike the heart of the corpse army.”
“Is it an evil god?”
“Yes,” Tinasha responded flatly, and though the words evil god still sounded too ridiculous to be believed, Oscar frowned. Tinasha was floating in the sky, so Oscar beckoned her to come closer. Once she did, he grabbed her arm and pulled her onto his lap, making her black eyes go wide with surprise.
With a light flush on her cheeks, the queen admonished him, “Oscar, we’re in the middle of battle…”
“Forget that. What’s this evil god? Do those really exist?”
Oscar had never once thought such things were real.
Tinasha made a face. “I don’t think it’s a mythological deity like Aetea, no. But it does exist in the sense that it’s a mass of accumulated magic and energy. I think it’s going to be pretty difficult to take it apart, which is why I’m the most qualified to go after it.”
“If you think you’ll have a tough time, wait just a little and I can go with you to help,” Oscar suggested.
“I’ll be fine,” Tinasha assured him. The smile on her face felt so ephemeral that a jolt of concern lanced through Oscar.
He held her tighter in his arms. “You’ll win, right?”
“Of course,” she said immediately. Oscar gazed searchingly into her dark eyes, seeing his own face reflected in the depths of night there. He could feel confidence thrumming through her lithe frame. As this wielder of both strong magic and fierce determination grinned up at him, Oscar couldn’t help matching her expression.
Then he glanced over her head and noticed soldiers coming closer. “Guess we’re out of time.”
There was no longer any time to chat. Sensing the enemy approaching, Tinasha attempted to float up into the air, but Oscar kept his sword arm tight around her side. With his empty hand, he tilted up her chin. “Come back to me, all right?”
“Leave it to me. I’ll beat you to the fortress and be waiting for you,” she replied with a graceful smile. Every time he saw that look on her face, it drew him in and charmed him so irrevocably.
Oscar drew close and pressed a kiss on Tinasha’s soft lips. It was just a light brush, but the warmth of it reached her heart.
When he pulled back, a bright red had spread across her ivory complexion. Covering her face with one hand, she turned away. “What do you think you’re doing? Didn’t I tell you we’re in the middle of battle?”
“Mm-hmm. Do your best out there,” he said, releasing her so she could float away.
Cheeks still pink, Tinasha turned to the two spirits. “Senn, Lilia, I’ll be counting on you.”
“Understood.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“You too, Kunai and Saiha,” Tinasha added, naming two more spirits who had not yet appeared. But then the queen giggled; evidently, they had given a reply only she could hear.
After that, her eyes focused on Oscar again. With a look like cool, clear water, she called to him. “Good luck in battle.”
“You too,” he answered.
Tinasha turned in midair to head in the other direction. Then, while Oscar was still watching, she vanished.
Oscar allowed himself one smile before his expression turned serious and he adjusted his grip on Akashia. The corpse troops were almost upon him now.
The Tuldarr mages mounted their horses and joined the ranks. The two spirits drifted to their own spots.
After confirming everyone’s position, Oscar gave a short, sharp exhale and drew himself up straight. “Let’s go.”
His clear voice signaled the continuation of battle.
A half hour’s ride toward Cezar from the battlefield, it lay enshrined in a flattened patch of grass and brush.
Tinasha, who had tracked its magic to the source, frowned sourly down on it from the sky. “That’s… quite something. What a grotesque shape.”
The spirits Karr and Mila stood on either side of her. The red-haired girl grinned at the queen of Tuldarr. “Lady Tinasha, do creatures like that disgust you?”
“I mean, it doesn’t have any legs, and it’s enormous,” Tinasha replied.
“Should I make it some legs?”
“That’s not the issue.”
Far below their lighthearted banter, a dozen mages were working to control the evil god, Simila. It was in the form of a gigantic black snake, but that was only clear to those hovering above. Up close, it was so large that it must have been impossible to determine its shape. It was long enough to wrap around ten houses and as thick around as two full-grown adults placed end to end. Such a colossal serpent did not exist in the natural world. With its eyes closed, it coiled around itself in a leisurely manner.
The snake’s tail was attached to a dark hole that opened in the ground. Upon closer observation, the snake had emerged from this magically created aperture.
Tinasha glared into the depths of the hole. “Do you think that connects to something?”
Karr, the seemingly male spirit, answered, “Perhaps it’s a conceptual entity? If it’s stemming from some manner of root, then I’d wager that’s the connection.”
“A root, hmm? I believe the evil god itself is made up of magic and human souls. Then it’s solidified with human flesh… and manifested according to a set definition. There must be a very capable mage behind this.”
“One with some nasty tastes, though,” quipped a spirit, and Tinasha nodded her agreement.
That serpent was the evil god that, once manifested, acted as the source of the magic controlling the corpse army. It was more akin to a crystal containing a forbidden curse than to a demon that came into being organically. Its huge body seethed with resentment toward humans, and its mere existence polluted the surrounding air. |
Unnamed Memory
Tinasha looked at the spirits on either side of her and snapped her fingers. “All right then… let’s do a little trial.”
In response, the two spirits teleported to other points around Simila, so that they formed a triangle with Tinasha.
Tinasha stretched out her right hand, palm facing up.
“Despair that refuses sleep soars through the night. The moon shines on the far side of the sky, a prayer that can never cross over.
“So shall it be defined, so shall it manifest. Power as power shall seek that line. Upon disappearing it will turn to nothing in the air.
“I command the procession to never end. Hidden words confront form.”
As the queen recited her incantation, the two spirits also began their own.
An enormous array stitched together in the sky, Tinasha’s spell intermingling with those constructed by Karr and Mila to make an intricate configuration. The mages controlling the snake noticed the unique magic and looked up to the sky.
At first, Tinasha and her spirits had remained invisible in order to observe the group. Now they appeared proudly as embodiments of devastating power. As the mages below realized the spell was like a net entrapping them, they trembled with fear.
“Hey! Put up a barrier…”
“We can’t, there’s no time!”
They were right, for not a moment later, the spell was complete, and its magic triggered. Silver chains manifested, glittering as they fell onto Simila.
An argent web now hung on the snake’s gigantic form. Power began to burst as it blanketed the evil god.
A flash of light seared the world. Moments later, a delayed boom from the explosion rent the air.
A Cezar mage crouched to the ground, ducking and covering his head. Hot wind whipped up pebbles that buffeted his body. There came the horrible sound of bits of flesh whistling through the air.
Seconds later, all was silent again, and the mage gingerly looked around. Beyond a cloud of dust lay the ebon form of Simila. The mage stood up to assess the situation—but that was when a strange sensation made his hair stand on end.
He looked down.
Scattered black residue was tangled around his feet. Very slowly, it crawled up his legs.
“Ahhhh!” he shrieked in fear, but there was no need for that.
The vestiges of Simila leaped up farther on his body from that momentum, wrapped around his throat, and tore into him.
“Oh no… That’s revolting,” remarked Tinasha, her face twisted with disgust as she watched this all play out from above.
Her attack had blown up half of the snake, but the residue was devouring nearby mages to reconstitute itself. In a matter of seconds, the evil god had created a dozen moving corpses and had returned to its original shape. Tinasha could also tell that it was drawing up more power from its tail, which was connected to the hole.
Slowly, Simila lifted its head to face its enemy in the sky. Eyes as red as blood fixed right on Tinasha. Its scarlet tongue flicked out as if it were locking onto its prey.
There was no doubting this unsightly creature was an evil god. An ordinary person would have already collapsed from fear, but Tinasha regarded it evenly, meeting its crimson gaze.
As she watched, the serpent slowly drew its head back. Then it launched itself at Tinasha, swift as the wind.
It whizzed through the air at such a speed that it was invisible. But she had expected this.
As Tinasha expanded her defensive barrier, she dodged to the left of Simila’s maw. The snake noticed this, however, and twisted itself in midair, turning to grab her.
With a frown, the queen began to cast a new spell while maintaining her defensive one.
“Take that!” she cried, sending herself and her barrier flying through the air to kick both feet at the snake’s head. The recoil bounced her away.
Then she brought both hands together and released more magic. An intangible pressure twisted Simila’s neck, and an ear-piercing shriek escaped its throat.
“Ugh, it’s so loud…”
Tinasha teleported over to Karr to escape the writhing serpent. Despite the force tightening around the evil god’s body, it showed no signs of weakening.
“We’re in quite the predicament. We can use these makeshift measures to keep it restrained, but that won’t solve anything for good,” grumbled Tinasha.
If she didn’t completely eliminate this thing, the corpses out on the plains would keep moving. But she was up against something very powerful, not an opponent that would go down easily.
Karr gazed down at his master. “What do you wanna do, little girl?”
“Hmm… mmm… can we cut off the power coming from that hole?”
Karr glanced over at the pit the snake had crawled from, and then over at Mila, who was floating a distance away from it. The evil god was still wriggling about, trying to break free of the pressure on its neck.
“Not with two of us,” Karr answered. “But I think five could do it.”
“Then that’s what we’ll go with,” the queen decided.
“What’ll you do once the supply is cut off?” Karr inquired curiously.
Tinasha smiled. Her dark eyes narrowed like she was looking at something far in the distance. “Do you remember when I was made the way I am now?”
Karr let out a little gasp. Of all the spirits, he was the one who knew exactly what she was referring to—that incident four hundred years ago when she absorbed huge amounts of magic. Karr had been the ruling king’s spirit at the time, and while he hadn’t been in the room, he’d pieced together what happened based on the flow of magic.
“Hey… are you really thinking of absorbing that thing?”
“Not much of it is made of magic. I will divert away the souls and flesh and take in only the raw power. Once it no longer has the strength to stay manifested, it should fall apart on its own,” Tinasha explained, her light tone belying the severity of what she was proposing.
Karr gave her a warning. “That does sound logical, but it’s really dangerous. What if you take in too much magic and you explode?”
“If it starts to feel like I can’t handle it, I’ll drain some of it away,” she stated, flashing the spirit a reassuring smile.
It was hard to tell who was the master and who was the servant. Tinasha ever placed herself in the most dangerous positions.
Once the spirits answered their queen’s call and appeared, they were free to carry out her orders as they saw fit. But that, in turn, meant that they could not render aid unless called upon.
Tinasha was the type to avoid relying on others, to a reckless degree. She would first try to solve the problem herself. Karr, who had known the young woman since her childhood, grew occasionally frustrated with how stubborn she could be.
As he looked between his master, still so small, and the gigantic coils of Simila, he snorted. “I guess this is the only way…”
None of them knew if there was a limit on the power feeding into the serpent from that hole. That made a prolonged head-on battle disadvantageous. The surest way to eliminate it would be with its power supply cut off.
Karr acknowledged Tinasha’s plan, and she nodded. “Go ahead, then.”
As she spoke, Tinasha summoned up three more spirits and positioned herself before Simila’s vermilion eyes once more. It had finally shaken off the constraints she’d placed on it.
Farsas held the front line and gradually began to push the Cezar troops back. Magical explosions detonated constantly, blasting apart the Cezar forces. Witnessing that power from the very front of the vanguard, Oscar gave a wan smile. He said to the spirit woman floating next to him, “Wow, was the war with Tayiri four hundred years ago like this?”
“No,” answered Lilia. “The corpses are moving much slower and burning easier this time, so things are going far more smoothly. We also didn’t have as many mages from Tuldarr… It was particularly hard fighting against the cavalry.”
“I see,” Oscar responded.
Lilia flicked out a hand and a lightning bolt blew away some cadavers. Without stopping to check that it had worked, she moved on.
The four spirits the queen had left were flitting about the front lines, providing support all over. They were immensely strong, which came as powerful reassurance to the Farsas troops.
“The hard part is not being able to see the end of all this,” Oscar muttered to himself, clearing away a swarm of rotting warriors as he steadily pushed the front line forward.
Just then, he detected something sharp and bloodthirsty heading for him from the side. Glancing over, he saw a cavalry battalion amid the corpses. At its forefront, a man clad in armor and armed with a longsword glared at Oscar with blazing eyes. Oscar regarded him with bemusement. The cavalry soldiers, so determined to fight, stood out among the lethargic dead. With a roar, they suddenly charged for the front line. The man in the lead was headed right for the king.
With a shrill cry, he lifted his sword high overhead. Oscar yanked his horse’s neck aside and met the blade with his own.
The man’s voice was a growl as he gave his name. “I am Tauma, a Cezar general. I know you to be the king of Farsas. You will battle me.”
“Sure, but… are you even alive?” Oscar jabbed.
Tauma gave an unpleasant grin. “Why don’t you find out for yourself?!”
The man’s sword came whistling down for Oscar’s life, but he parried it handily and counterattacked.
All around the two, mounted fighters on both sides clashed. Those mages mixed in were handling the corpses. The stench of blood and steel commingled over the plain.
Deep down, Oscar was shocked by how skilled Tauma was with a blade. His technique blended strength with accuracy. Even in a regular battle, he would be worthy of commanding a unit. However, that was as far as it went.
The exchange continued almost methodically until Oscar abruptly sped up his next thrust. Tauma narrowly evaded it, but he couldn’t dodge the one after. Akashia sank into the joint between the armor plates at his shoulder, and then Oscar poured strength and speed into cutting Tauma down from his horse.
The serpent’s head lanced forward like an arrow, closing in on Tinasha. She barely dodged to the right; it missed her by a hair. Black thorns formed on the evil god’s skin and homed in on her.
Tinasha whipped out the dagger at her waist and sliced at the sharp barbs. As she leaped farther back, she lopped off the tips.
“Ngh…”
There was a stab wound on her left thigh. Blood dripped and scattered on the breeze, but she ignored it and cast a new spell.
“Rise forth, o spray—”
Tinasha fired off five orbs of light with exact precision. As each struck Simila, black filth burst forth with a muffled whump. The substance wriggled slowly through the air before returning to the snake’s body. The serpent lifted its head in Tinasha’s direction; evidently the attack had accomplished nothing.
“It’s like one endless, muddy mess. Oh, are we ready?” muttered the queen as she raced through the air. She glanced down at the hole after receiving word from one of her spirits. The five of them were floating in a circle above the pit the snake’s tail connected to. An intricate spell configuration had already appeared.
“Then let’s get started…”
On the queen’s command, magic suffused the array. A spell pattern written in crimson emerged over the hole and cut through the tail. A burning, crackling noise sounded as interlocking rings slowly revolved.
Sensing something abnormal had struck its body, Simila turned back toward the pit. Its red eyes blazed as it focused on the five spirits.
It never had a chance to strike, for a cool voice commanded, “Over here.”
Tinasha held out her arms. Simila craned its neck until she was within its sights.
With an arresting smile, she intoned her spell.
“The very first and very last despair you meet shall be me. Now let us dance.”
The snake’s murderous fury and the woman’s compassion locked together in the air between them. Tinasha flung her arms open wide and a gigantic spell appeared. As the serpent lunged to rip her soft body apart, Tinasha sent the magic hurtling toward it. Silver threads billowed out into a veil of sorts that settled over the evil god.
Immediately, a plume of oily smoke rose from the serpent, and an acrid stench of rotten flesh wafted on the breeze. With a flick of her slender fingers, Tinasha sank her spell deeper into the gigantic serpent.
There was a sound like the tinkling of the finest chains being drawn. The silver threads were dismantling the flesh, human souls, and magic that made up Simila’s body.
Dark, discolored flesh dripped to the ground, while the human souls turned to pale light. Tinasha diverted both away while pulling in the magic that remained.
Recognizing that its very existence was gradually waning, Simila seethed with more resentment than ever as it glared at Tinasha.
Its black head lowered a fraction. Then it lunged for her, its jaw open as wide as it could go in an attempt to swallow the young woman whole. It rammed into her protective barrier at a terrifying speed, but the magic shield held firm.
Tinasha had no words to describe what was happening
The magic she had taken in circulated through her body. She could feel her blood growing hot. Some sort of exquisite pain racked her frame.
At times, attacks grazed the queen’s skin and sent blood flying, but she was indeed steadily dismantling the snake. The spirits observed the process, all with different expressions. The spell they had cast did a masterful job of keeping back the sinister power that was attempting to creep out of the hole.
One spirit peered into the dark pit. “Will this disappear once that snake does?”
“Probably. It looks like the terms of manifestation are centered within the serpent. We’ll need to clean up the hole, but it shouldn’t be too difficult once that thing is gone.”
“Will our queen be all right?” another spirit asked with obvious concern, but Karr only gave a wan smile. Their master had a fragile body, but the power within it far surpassed theirs.
She was very much like a witch in that way, although it was a mystery how a human became one of them. Perhaps it was because human lives were so unstable that occasionally one shone with fearsome radiance.
The snake glided through the air.
The silver threads eating into it pulsed with the glow of magic. Pure red blood trailed in Tinasha’s wake.
Tinasha flew up to dodge another lunge of Simila’s head. Then she placed both hands on its body and slid herself around its circumference. She poured magic into every spot she touched, disassembling the creature. Only about half of Simila’s corporeal form remained.
“Dissolve…”
With all ten fingers, Tinasha manipulated the spell. Bit by bit, the gigantic head lost shape, leaving only those wicked eyes.
As Simila’s power diminished, Tinasha’s grew immensely. When it seemed that victory was inevitable, Simila abruptly ruptured, scattering in all directions. Its enormous form turned to black filth and dispersed.
The spirits looked up at the dark remnants floating in the sky.
“Is it over?”
“No…”
Karr gasped. Bits of black gunk were swooping down on Tinasha one after another.
With an annoyed click of her tongue, Tinasha attempted to flee, but the filth entwined around her legs before she could. Shaking it off was useless, as it hardened instantly, giving the remaining bits plenty of time to gobble up her delicate frame.
“No…”
The queen was no longer visible. There was only a pulsating, bulbous black blob floating in the air.
Snapping out of her stupefied state, Mila made to shoot off into the air.
“Mila! Don’t get close to it!” Karr shouted to stop her.
The red-haired girl whirled to face him, fury clear in her glare. “We need to get it off her now! It’s going to use the magic she sucked in to possess her!”
“If you abandon the spell, she’ll never win completely. Have a bit more faith!”
Karr’s words rang true, and Mila fell silent. They were the ones keeping Simila from its power. If they stopped, and the gunk grew stronger, it would consume Tinasha. Gnawing on her lip in frustration, Mila returned to her post.
The spirits all gazed upward.
A weakly pulsating sac hung in the air beneath the blue sky like something ripped from a nightmare.
“Lady Aeterna, the world is not only what we can see with our eyes. So many invisible layers are stacked together, and we call these planes of existence. From heavenly virtues to the depths of the sea, one world encapsulates all of that.”
She had heard that somewhere before, although she couldn’t recall where or when.
It was very dark.
Why was she in such a place? An unnamed consciousness drifted in a space without time.
Wordless whispers surrounded her. Resentment, resignation, and grief swirled about her like stagnant water.
The place opened by human flesh and souls. The interior of a bottomless hole.
It was so very bleak. There was nowhere to go.
“You should just go to sleep,” whispered Resignation.
“All things end in tragedy,” whispered Grief.
She was puzzled. Is that really so?
“There is no way you’ve never held a grudge against someone,” whispered Resentment.
She gave a bittersweet smile. Yes, she had held grudges. But she could not remember them now.
She sank deeper into the darkness.
No, she wasn’t falling. Planes of existence were slowly passing through her.
At the bottom of the hole was a murky sea.
The human world was actually flimsy and treacherous. This was the place below its bottommost layer. The human realm was like a tiny boat drifting through a stormy ocean at night. Once anyone learned of the endlessness beneath, fear would overtake them and rob them of happiness.
She observed herself sinking through the depths as if it were happening to someone else.
Exhaustion permeated her, and a faint grin came to her lips. Then she became aware of the expression, and it turned sharp and wry.
She could smile.
No matter how bad it was or how sad she felt, she could smile if she wanted to.
“You’re so scared you can’t help it,” something whispered.
“I’m not scared,” she answered, and she stretched out one ivory hand. “What do you want?”
“I want,” came the reply. “I want to become one. Then there will be true stability. An incomparable peace of mind. The undermost layer the human soul can reach will catch every drop.”
“I don’t mind. But you are the same as me.”
“The same.”
The words echoed around.
She continued. “When you acquire me, I also acquire you. From the beginning, we have always been connected. It’s only our names that are different.”
The darkness was silent. Confusion developed. After a while, an answer came back from the drifting sediment.
“Then we are still different.”
The darkness asked for her name.
She thought for a bit. As she scanned the lightless expanse, her lips formed the words, “My name is undefined.”
She still lacked a title to represent her being. She had not yet hit on one, nor had she transformed into anything else.
However, she did know one thing.
“My element is—innovation.”
Each person was born with an element they were unaware of.
However, she now understood hers.
Her words evoked its true essence. A change began to ripple through the gloom.
At first, she thought she had begun to float upward, but realized she wasn’t moving. Innumerable planes of existence were passing through her. All of them were part of the world. She knew each and every layer. Her soul knew them.
So she touched the world and discovered the foreign objects placed inside it and the gazes trained on it.
She turned to look back at the planes passing by her.
“Are you waiting?”
They were quickly moving very far away. Even the things she had understood were vanishing.
She had never been a special piece of the puzzle.
Yet the destiny she’d been given and the fate she’d chosen made her something different.
Under Mila’s watchful glare, the black mass gradually shrank in size.
At first, she thought she was imagining it, but she wasn’t. The sac contracted as though being sucked into its center. Then it ruptured open with a muffled sound.
Magic, souls, and remnants of flesh went flying, and in the middle of it all was a floating woman.
The backlash from the magic sent her glossy black hair whirling up behind her. Her wet, dark eyes burdened with sorrow were downcast.
Power erupted from her right hand, clearing the air.
At the same time, the hole from which Simila had manifested shrank as well. The dull, stagnant feel in the air faded, and Mila cried out, “Lady Tinasha!”
She glanced at the spirits, smiled, and attempted to wave at them, but flinched. “Oo-ow… I haven’t felt pain like this in… four hundred years…”
“Of course you haven’t. You’re saturated with magic,” Karr replied, shaking his head as he teleported to his master’s side and gathered her up. “We’ll handle the cleanup. You should go rest.”
“Urgh… sorry about this…”
What power Tinasha hadn’t absorbed was floating on the breeze. Although the hole had shrunk, it wasn’t closed yet. If they didn’t work more spells to get things sorted, all of it would end up rooted here.
“Should I send you to Tuldarr?” Karr asked.
“Oh… no, please bring me to the fortress of Ynureid.”
“All right.”
Tinasha looked to all five of the spirits present. “Thank you,” she said to them. They bowed silently in response.
A smile bloomed on the beautiful queen’s face, and she and Karr vanished.
The wind ran across the battlefield.
There may not have actually been a breeze, but to Oscar, it felt like there was.
The body before him lay collapsed and motionless. And it wasn’t just that one. One by one, the corpses toppled to the ground in a wave that left the Farsas army speechless. Cezar’s forces, which had already been reduced to half their original number, instantly dwindled to almost nothing.
The Cezar cavalry paled to see their fighting cadavers rendered motionless. Until now, they had been at a disadvantage, but the wall of moving dead had kept them safe from the Farsas troops. Suddenly, that buffer was gone, and discomfort was clear on their faces.
Oscar eyed the Cezar soldiers, smirking. “I guess that means… she won.” No one was there to confirm it, but the dramatic change spoke for itself. To his attendants, Oscar said, “Let’s mop this up quick and head back. I’m sick of looking at those dead things.”
Sunlight poured down from the cloudless sky. On almost all the bodies blanketing the plain, there were no scars and no spilled blood.
The nightmarish landscape was sure to make stories of this battle the stuff of legends.
Sylvia was there at the rampart to receive Karr and Tinasha when they teleported over. The young blond mage hurriedly showed them to a guest chamber so Tinasha could rest.
The room was sparsely decorated, but Karr breathed a sigh of relief as he lay his master on the wide bed. As he scrutinized Tinasha’s pale, bloodless face, he asked, “How do you feel? You okay?”
“I’ll be back to normal after a little sleep. Thank you.”
“Good,” Karr replied, his face solemn as he gave the queen of Tuldarr a brisk pat on the head. It did occur to him that this wasn’t the sort of thing to do to one’s master, but to him, Tinasha was still the kid who’d lived in the detached wing of the palace.
“All right, Mila’s still shaken, so I’m going to go and help get things wrapped up. You take care of our little girl, pretty lady,” Karr said to Sylvia.
“I will!” Sylvia chirped, both fists clenched with determination. She brought over a clean cloth right away and wiped the sweat from Tinasha’s forehead. “What happened out there?”
“I’m not too clear on that myself. My memories are hazy… I was in this weird place, and I feel like it made sense at the time, but… for some reason, I can’t remember now,” Tinasha answered.
“Ah, that sounds like a dream. Although with dreams, you can still remember everything when you wake up.”
“Yes, exactly. But in any case, I believe Cezar’s forces should be severely crippled. The corpses are all dead for good.”
“Then that means the king will be coming back soon, too!” Sylvia exclaimed with a grin, which made Tinasha smile, as well.
When Oscar saw her, he’d probably chastise her for doing something reckless. Absorbing the magic that made up an evil god was not a feat for a normal person. When Tinasha took in all that magic four hundred years ago, the pain had been so awful that she’d been bedridden for a week.
Even so, Tinasha wanted to see him. Feeling supremely sleepy, she closed her eyes.
That was when a man’s voice sounded in the room.
“We’ve got to hurry. I don’t want to run into that Akashia swordsman.”
Both women’s eyes snapped wide open at the unexpected intrusion. Reflexively, Tinasha cast a spell. But just before she could complete it, something cold touched her wrist, and the spell dissolved.
“Huh?”
Sylvia was sent flying. She hit the wall and slumped to the floor.
“Sylvia!”
Forgetting her own agony, Tinasha tried to vault from the bed and run to her friend. Someone grabbed hold of her arm before she could, however.
A man’s soft voice whispered in her ear, “You can have a nice long rest once we arrive. There’ll be plenty of time.”
Everything went black. As Tinasha fell into darkness once again, she reached out. However, there was nothing to catch hold of. She lost consciousness.
Most of the remaining Cezar troops had been subdued. Some had fled toward their homeland when Simila vanished.
A cursory interrogation of the prisoners of war revealed that Cezar had long been controlled by Simila and the cult centered on worshipping it. The current king, in particular, did whatever the cult founder said, leaving royal family members and magistrates powerless. Speaking out against decisions was tantamount to asking for death. All the while, the founder amassed sacrifices from all over the country to make a corpse army. Among those bodies given were living people who forfeited their lives to Simila for the sake of the long-awaited war against Farsas.
The cruelty and tragedy sounded like a terrible joke. Oscar made a face. “Should I kill that cult leader?”
He hadn’t seen any such person during the fighting. Perhaps they were safe back in their own land.
Still, now that Tinasha had destroyed the object of their worship, the cult and its leader would lose power. Things inside Cezar would probably fall to pieces, but that lay outside Oscar’s area of responsibility.
While arranging for post-battle cleanup, Oscar headed back to the fortress to go and see the woman who had won the day.
Naturally, he was aghast to discover something had happened that no one could have foreseen.
“What’s going on here?”
Kav shrank back in the face of the king’s indignation. Face pallid, he explained what had happened.
Someone had abducted Tinasha from the room where she was resting.
Sylvia had also been present and had been seriously wounded during the attack. Kav had learned of the events while healing her.
Fury blazing in his blue eyes, Oscar asked, “Did he have silver hair?”
The first possible culprit Oscar thought of was that demon king. He wouldn’t put a stunt like this past someone like him. However, the answer he got indicated otherwise.
“No. It sounds like she didn’t get a very good look at his face, but he was wearing black mage robes,” Kav replied.
Oscar mulled that over, and then another possibility occurred to him. “Could it be… Valt?”
Reports had identified a male mage as being responsible for an attempt to poison Tinasha before she took the throne and for planting Delilah in the castle. Word had it that he bore a close resemblance to a Yardan court mage by the name of Valt who had visited Farsas before disappearing overnight.
And the Simila cult sent Delilah to Farsas Castle.
Everything was coming together. Valt’s aim was Tinasha all along. He had tried to extricate the young queen from Farsas and take her for himself. Oscar cursed himself for taking so long to realize this.
Mila, evidently unable to stand it any longer, shouted, “Karr! This is all your fault! Why weren’t you with Lady Tinasha?!”
“I’m sorry…,” Karr replied, hanging his head and making no attempt to defend himself.
Mila looked like she wanted to start in on him, but Oscar interrupted. “Tinasha and I are the ones responsible. Can you track where she’s gone?”
“Unfortunately… I can’t sense Lady Tinasha’s magic at all,” Mila confessed. “I think she’s either closed it off herself or something powerful has sealed it.”
That left them with no trail to pursue. Irritation washed over Oscar, enough so that it showed on his face, a rarity when he was in the presence of others. “I’ll contact Legis first. Whoever abducted Tinasha may have sent a demand to Tuldarr.”
The last time Tinasha was taken, Oscar had managed to retrieve her right away. He wanted to hope that this time would be no different.
An unshakable dread settled deep within the king of Farsas, however.
Oscar closed his eyes and remembered Tinasha’s clear smile from the last time he saw her.
Legis was shocked to hear the news Farsas delivered.
The queen had left the country with the mages she was training and her spirits a few hours prior. No matter her opponent, he hadn’t doubted that she would prevail. It had certainly never crossed his mind that she might vanish.
Oscar went straight from the battlefield to Legis, where he was received in a salon reserved for confidential discussions. As soon as the king of Farsas caught sight of Legis, he bowed his head and apologized. “What happened is entirely my fault. I am deeply sorry.”
“You don’t need to bow to me. She must have been negligent to some degree,” Legis replied.
Tinasha herself had asserted that the single most crucial thing for a mage was meticulous preparation. And now she had fallen for a meticulously laid trap. Her enemy had bested her.
As Legis sat down, unpleasant scenarios ran through his mind. “It’s possible we’ll receive a ransom demand… but if we don’t, it only spells greater danger.”
Tinasha was a queen, after all. Her kidnappers might’ve only been after the woman herself. If that were the case, it would be very difficult to catch those responsible.
Before Legis lost himself in speculation, Oscar said, “Farsas is also considering invading Cezar. Evidently, it is under the control of a religious cult at the moment, and it’s extremely likely that the man who abducted Tinasha is connected to that organization.”
“Ah… isn’t it possible that her captors have already fled Cezar? If so, then rushing in after them might put Farsas at a disadvantage.”
“I’m aware of that,” Oscar replied flatly. He had no interest in invading other countries, a fact made clear by how he hadn’t pursued Druza during their incursion. Plus, if he invaded Cezar now, other countries would naturally turn vigilant.
Of course, it was obvious that Cezar was the one in the wrong, as it had mounted an army and brought in a forbidden curse, to boot. Yet it was Farsas that stood as a leading member of the Great Nations, and that was soon to be linked by marriage to Tuldarr. The country was perpetually in the spotlight, and thus subject to greater scrutiny and suspicion.
All this was at the source of Legis’s concern. And Oscar was grateful for his candid thoughts. Legis’s advised prudence wouldn’t change Tinasha’s situation, though, and Oscar wanted to strike fast.
Legis seemed to sense that determination in the other man and got to his feet, a pensive look on his face. “While she is… the queen of our country, I will leave this matter to you. To Tuldarr, she is like an unexpected stroke of luck. And that good fortune has always been directed at you. For that reason, Tuldarr will not criticize anything Farsas does in regard to her. We will work with you however we can, so please do everything to help her.”
Oscar bit back a sigh. Legis must have known why Tinasha had come to this era. Tinasha likely hadn’t confessed as much directly, but the answer had been there if Legis had searched.
A woman with such immense magic and authority had traveled four centuries to meet Oscar. Quite a few men would’ve found such a thing off-putting.
While Oscar understood that Tinasha could be a handful, it came as a package deal with her intrepid spirit and her childlike innocence, making her a rare woman in his eyes.
He wanted to make her his and never let her go. He certainly didn’t plan on relinquishing her to someone who’d taken her by force.
“Thank you for your kindness. I promise I will bring her back,” Oscar declared with a bow. He then bid farewell to Legis and departed Tuldarr.
There was no telling what the future held, but the king of Farsas stood on the front lines with firm resolve to forge his own tomorrow.
“There aren’t very many enemy forces left. We could overrun them,” reported Mila, once Oscar returned to Ynureid, and he nodded. Most, but not all, of the spirits had expressed a desire to work with their master’s fiancé in her absence. First, they had gone to Cezar’s capital—the obvious starting place—for reconnaissance.
Once the red-haired girl finished her report, she wrinkled her nose and tilted her head to one side. “If you used the army, wouldn’t it turn into a whole big thing and strand you there until everything resolves?”
“Yep, which is why it’s a sort of last resort. We need to finish this as quickly as possible,” Oscar said. They didn’t know how many people they were up against, nor what their nature was.
Based on how cleverly Tinasha’s abduction was carried out, it was clear that even if her captors were in Cezar, they would escape swiftly upon learning Farsas was invading. They might even have time to silence anyone who knew what was going on.
“I wish there was a more surefire way to do this,” Oscar muttered. Karr and Mila said nothing.
The king looked from the two spirits to his advisers and attendants. When his gaze landed on Doan, he suddenly recalled something. “Oh yeah… she put a protective barrier on me. Could we use that to track her?”
“What? Oh, so she did. I would have never noticed without you pointing it out,” Mila commented.
“She really did… It must be connected to her,” said Karr.
“Could it work?” asked Oscar.
Mila and Karr exchanged glances. Karr crossed his arms, making a face. “Not right now. We can’t see where the magic leads to. But if she were close by, it might lead to her.”
“So I could be the key to tracking her down?” the king asked before falling into thought. No one missed the dangerous gleam in his eyes.
The darkness said nothing.
When Tinasha was little, she had read somewhere that it was only the living who attached meaning to death. Was it salvation or repentance that they sought from it? Regardless, it didn’t concern the departed. They no longer existed.
Tinasha believed that human thought was sacred.
However, when she learned that fact, it suddenly seemed like humans were not capable of genuinely mourning the deaths of others. It all felt so… tragic.
When she awoke, she was lying on her back in an unfamiliar room.
Her head was fuzzy, and her memories were a jumble. Tinasha slowly stretched both arms upward—and discovered something odd.
A silver bracelet was touching her left wrist. It was thick and ancient-looking. Its appearance was not what made it unusual, however. Her wrist was not inside the bracelet. Instead, layers and layers of fine chains kept her wrist and the bracelet bound tightly together.
“What in the world…?”
She touched the bracelet with her other hand; nothing felt off about its hard exterior.
Letting her arms fall, Tinasha yawned. Her body was heavy, and she wanted to sleep for just a bit longer. Just as she closed her eyes to pass out—a memory flashed through her mind.
“Nnn!”
With a wordless cry, she came back to her full awareness. She leaped to her feet, on top of the bed.
There was no one else in the plain and yet spacious room. Rubbing at her aching head, Tinasha climbed to her feet.
“Mila?” she called, which made her notice what was wrong. There had been no magic in the word. She couldn’t summon her spirits.
That wasn’t all. When she tried to cast a spell, her magic scattered. Only two times in the past had her power been so completely blocked. The first was when she’d touched Akashia, and the second was when she’d been in the Lake of Silence.
Dully, she stared at the bracelet attached to her. “I’ve been kidnapped…”
She hoped that Sylvia was all right.
Wondering where she was, Tinasha went over to the door that led to a balcony. Her room appeared to be on the second floor, overlooking lush greenery. The expansive gardens were not well maintained by any stretch of the imagination, and she inspected them with interest.
Tinasha could make out a faint reflection of herself in the glass. She was still wearing her battle mage attire. Her own blood dotted the fabric in places. The dagger she’d carried and all her other magic implements had been taken.
Scratching at her temple, Tinasha went back to the middle of the room and picked up a wooden chair. She hurled it at the door, and it flew through the air.
But as she had feared, no cracks formed in the glass from the impact. There was only the sound of the impact. The chair toppled to the floor, one leg now twisted.
“Hmm… this is a pretty sturdy barrier,” she commented.
“So violent,” a man remarked dryly from the one doorway in the room. He had light brown hair and eyes of the same color. His appearance exuded intelligence, and he wore a calm smile.
Tinasha spoke his name. “Valt?”
“It’s been a while. I’m glad you were able to take the throne with no trouble,” replied the mage who’d used psychological magic to sneak into the court of Yarda. Here was the man who had apparently been involved in numerous plots against her.
Cautiously, Tinasha turned to face him. “What do you hope to achieve? Who are you really?”
Valt only laughed, but Tinasha didn’t miss the bizarre glint that flashed deep in his eyes for just a moment.
She couldn’t use magic. No one could search for her. Truly isolated and helpless, Tinasha still drew herself up to her full height and fixed her gaze on him.
That made Valt grin. “I’m not going to hurt you. I only want to talk. Come, I’ll make tea.”
With that, he turned and left, leaving the door open. Tinasha wasn’t sure what to do, but in the end, she followed him. Once they reached a large dining table, Valt began to brew tea.
“Go on and have a seat. It’ll be ready soon,” he said.
Despite the vast size of the mansion, the layout was not an aristocratic one. The kitchen and the dining rooms were connected, like in a commoner’s home. Tinasha sat at the table while continuing to inspect her surroundings, and before long, cups of tea were brought out.
When she took a sip, Valt smiled from his seat across from hers. “How does it taste?”
“I make better tea.”
“That’s a shame,” Valt answered with a laugh.
Tinasha stared at him coldly. “So? What did you want to talk about?”
“Must you rush? How are you feeling? You’ve been asleep for almost a full day.”
“I wanted to rest for a little longer, but you’ve gone and done something ridiculous.”
“I certainly didn’t expect you to absorb components of Simila’s physical form, but I should have known better. I did wish you’d waited a little longer, considering all the hard work I put into it, but it all went swimmingly.”
Picking up on all the hints he had dropped, Tinasha couldn’t help leaping to her feet. “You were the one who manifested Simila?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? That was—”
“Oh yes, I’m aware. And while I know how this sounds, I was only a tool in all of that. I merely did what I was instructed to do. It was the people of this country who decided to sacrifice their fellow citizens,” Valt said.
Seething with rage, Tinasha spat, “That’s not a very good excuse.”
“It’s not one at all. They did everything of their own volition. Honestly, if you look at it, you and your fiancé are partially responsible.”
“What does… that mean?” she questioned, knitting her brows as she kept her eyes fixed on the grinning Valt.
Their gazes met. Had her magic not been blocked, the power might have crackled in the air around her. Such was the intensity in her glare.
It was Valt who looked away first. He gave an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. “You should sit. Doubtless, you’re tired. Ah… if you’d like to change clothes, I’ll get you something to wear.”
Backing down, Tinasha pursed her lips. After a moment of indecision, she eventually sat back down.
“Even if you do, I can’t put it on with this in the way,” she replied, lifting her wrist to indicate the bracelet. She couldn’t put her arm through a sleeve with that thing attached to her wrist. “Why is it on this way?”
“Ah, sorry. Only a member of the Farsas royal family can open or close that,” he answered.
“What?!”
“It’s called Sekta. It’s a sealing ornament with the same properties as Akashia, and it’s been passed down for centuries as a royal heirloom. Although I suppose no one there actually remembers it exists. My grandfather borrowed it from the Farsas treasure vault about forty years ago, as we suspected you would wind up in this era.”
“Excuse me?” Tinasha said, unable to suppress the shiver that ran up her spine with that last bit.
If Valt was speaking the truth, then just how far back had this been planned? Were they really after her, someone from the distant past who may or may not arrive in this time period?
Glancing at how pale she had gone, Valt gave an uncomfortable smile. “Well, now that you’ve received some warning, let’s dive right in. This is the truth that I wasn’t able to tell you earlier. I… no, we are after Eleterria. You know what that is, don’t you? The red and blue magic orbs that can take you into the past. We’d like you to get both of them for us.”
The darkness in Tinasha’s eyes froze over.
It was then that she understood what the wheel of fate revolved around.
“Why do you…?”
“Why do I know about them? Or why do I want to use them? I know because I am aware of many things. More than even you,” Valt replied, his lips quirking up into a sneer that veiled something unreadable. “One is in Tuldarr, and the other is in Farsas. You’re the best person to retrieve them. We actually wanted Delilah to get the one in Farsas, but she was no match for you. And now that you’re the queen, it should be a simple matter.”
Suddenly, everything fell into place.
The treasure vault in Farsas and the one in Tuldarr. Breaking into either was extremely difficult. Perhaps because of the Farsas royal family’s cavalier style, that country took a perfunctory view of its treasure vault. But Tuldarr’s was filled with priceless magic treasures. Only those authorized could enter. If Tinasha had married Oscar without becoming queen, even she would not be granted entry.
Which was why Valt had separated Tinasha from Farsas and forced her into negotiating with him.
“What… are you going to try and change if you have both?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you that just yet. But I will if you work with us and get both of them.”
“You think I’m going to cooperate with you?”
“I certainly hope so.”
Tinasha felt dizzy.
Despite not knowing why Valt sought the orbs, it was plain that letting him have them was unacceptable.
There was no telling how those little spheres could alter the world. They held tremendous power in the hands of someone with wicked intentions.
Tinasha had to stop Valt at any cost, regardless of whatever harm it brought upon her.
Inhaling deeply, Tinasha calmed herself and cleared her face of emotion. Just as her refusal was on the tip of her tongue, a loud male voice roared angrily from the corridor outside. “Valt! I know you’re here!” |
Unnamed Memory
Valt scowled. Before he could do anything more, however, the door flew open with a bang.
“Simila is gone! What are you going to do about it?!” boomed a man in extravagant robes. Rage colored his face.
“As I told you, that’s not my responsibility,” Valt replied.
The man was about to hurl more abuse at Valt when he caught sight of the woman sitting with her back to him. He circled around the table to get a look at her face. “You… you’re the queen of Tuldarr! Valt, have you been conspiring with her this whole time?!”
“Absolutely not. That’s very rude,” Tinasha put in, offended. She shook her left wrist and the attached bracelet at him.
Once the furious man took that in, glee came over his face. “Great job, Valt! Now we still have a chance.”
He reached for Tinasha, roughly grabbed her arm, and hauled her out of her seat. While she turned her face aside, he pulled her close for a better look. In her ear, he whispered, “You really are a pretty one, looking at you up close. No wonder you snared the king of Farsas.”
“Disgusting. Please let me go,” she demanded.
“Hmph. Stubborn. Whatever, you’ll make a perfect hostage to threaten Farsas,” the man said as he flashed her a sinister leer and licked his lips.
Feeling his breath on her face, Tinasha clicked her tongue in disgust.
This man had to be from Cezar. If Valt was to be believed, this was a person who’d decided to sacrifice his own countrymen. She drew back her leg to give him a nice kick in the shin.
Valt spoke up before she did, however. “Could you let her go? She’s a very important guest of mine.”
“A guest? Isn’t it her fault that Simila’s gone?” the man asked in disbelief.
“Even so, her role is over,” replied Valt, lifting a hand. The man seemed to sense the presence of a spell forming, and he yanked Tinasha in front of him as a shield.
Tinasha’s lip curled with revulsion at being treated like an object. “Excuse me…”
“Let her go. She’s mine,” snarled a wholly unexpected person. All three in the room went still. When Valt turned in his seat to look at the door, all the blood drained from his face. He changed the spell he was preparing and teleported away from there instantly.
Now alone, the Cezar man turned around slowly. With Tinasha held firmly in his grip, he locked eyes with the intruder in the doorway.
There stood the king of Farsas, with Akashia in hand.
On Oscar’s left and right were Mila and Karr, with Doan and Als behind him.
Tinasha’s dark eyes grew round and wide. “Oscar!”
“Wait just a damn minute,” said the Cezar man who’d walked into a surprising situation. He looked down at the woman he was holding on to. She was now his lifeline, in a different way than he had originally anticipated.
Whipping out the dagger belted at his waist, the man pressed it to her neck. “Come any closer and she dies.”
“Hmph. So we just have to keep our distance?” remarked one of the spirits disdainfully, and the man’s dagger shattered to pieces. Shocked, he released Tinasha.
Without missing a beat, she ducked and slipped out of his range. At the same time, Oscar stepped right up and punched the man in the face, sending him flying like a rag doll.
Crouched on the floor, Tinasha craned her head to look back. “Do you really think we should let him live?”
“If I killed him here, you’d end up a bloody mess,” Oscar responded, sheathing Akashia and helping Tinasha to her feet. He hugged her tight to him, making sure she was safe. “I really can’t take my eyes off you for one second.”
Irrepressible relief tinged his affectionate teasing.
Als and Doan searched the mansion but found nothing of note. All they could glean from the rooms and possessions was that a man and a young woman had been living there alone.
While they were conducting their search, Oscar settled Tinasha on his lap as he interrogated the Cezar man. It turned out that he was the founder of the cult that worshipped Simila and the mastermind behind the recent skirmish.
Oscar eyed him with open scorn. “We’ll be taking you back to Farsas. You can tell us the full story there.”
“Take him away, Mila,” said Tinasha.
“Got it!” chirped the red-haired spirit, and she disappeared with the cult leader.
Tinasha heaved a sigh, then glanced up at Oscar. “Um, I’d like to get down now…”
“No.”
“…”
Whether he was upset with Tinasha or not, he kept his left arm firmly wrapped around her. The abduction must have hit him pretty hard.
Tinasha turned her flushed face aside, feeling guilty. She held up her left wrist. “Then please take this off.”
“What is it? I thought you were wearing it for a change of pace.”
“It’s a sealing ornament that belongs to your country!” she retorted.
At Oscar’s dubious look, Tinasha relayed what Valt had told her. The king traced a finger along the bracelet, and it popped right open. He drew it free from the chains and lifted it up to examine it. “Hmm, so this was stolen forty years ago?”
“Apparently. Why is security so lax in Farsas?” Tinasha chided.
“How about you just organize things after we’re married? Is this thing really that strong?” Oscar responded, and he touched the bracelet to her wrist. It clicked onto it as easily as it had opened.
Frowning, Tinasha cried, “Don’t put it on me!”
“Oh, this is fun. Wonder how it works?”
“It is not fun!” she fumed. Oscar removed the sealing item and stowed it in his jacket pocket.
To test her magic, Tinasha cast a spell in her palm and then extinguished it. She glanced at Oscar and asked, “How did you find me?”
“I wandered around Cezar using that barrier you put on me to locate you. This house is in a town close to the royal castle,” he explained.
“You wandered around? Right after the battle?”
“I wouldn’t have found you otherwise. Two of your spirits were with me the whole time. It was fine.”
“Oh… thank you,” Tinasha said, feeling ashamed of how easily she had been kidnapped. More than that, however, she was grateful to those around her. For all her strength, there were many things she couldn’t handle alone.
Oscar smiled. “I’m just glad we found you.”
“Um, how’s Sylvia?” Tinasha inquired.
“Good. Her injuries were healed. Two or three days and she’ll be back to normal,” Oscar assurred her, and Tinasha exhaled with relief. She’d been fretting about her friend this whole time.
Als and Doan returned to report that they hadn’t found anything of interest.
Oscar stood up with Tinasha in his arms. “Let’s head back, then. Everyone waiting back at the fort is probably worried.”
Tinasha caught his eye and smiled. Despite the delays, the war with Cezar was over, and it was the start of a new stage in the game. |
Unnamed Memory
7. A Happy Kind of Sadness
“Marry me,” the man said, and the woman hearing these words opened her eyes wide. Reflexively, she glanced behind her, but the pair were alone in the tiny forest clearing. He was talking to her and no one else.
Unfortunately, he was a nobleman. She threw him a pained look. “Have you really thought this through?”
The words sounded like those of a nagging mother, and he grimaced. “I have, yes. I’ve my situation, yours, and everyone else’s. I’ve especially acknowledged how your mother may kill me. Despite all of that, I want to wed you. I can’t think about anything else.”
He spoke honestly and from the heart. The woman’s red lips opened on a sigh.
As she stared at him, his blue eyes gazed back at her, as expansive and patient as the sky.
Upon returning to Farsas, Oscar settled Tinasha in his own chambers to rest. Her own chambers in the castle had been vacated prior to her coronation, and from a security standpoint, this was the safest place for her to be.
Tinasha had intended to return to Tuldarr, but she was so obviously worn out that it would damage her dignified reputation if she returned in her present condition. For that reason, Oscar had arranged with Legis for her to stay in Farsas for the time being, under the pretense of discussing Cezar’s recent invasion attempt.
Oscar posted a platoon of security guards outside the door and then set about the massive undertaking of processing the paperwork for the recent skirmish. His father, the former king, had taken on the lion’s share of his kingly duties while he was away fighting. Upon his son’s return, Kevin said simply, “Glad it went well.”
After an hour of finishing up some routine tasks, Oscar returned to his quarters to find Tinasha fast asleep, breathing evenly on his bed. She seemed to have bathed and changed clothes, as she was dressed in a comfy white nightgown.
Oscar sat on the bed and carded his fingers through her hair. For the past two days, he had been too busy dealing with the post-battle aftermath and his search for her to get much sleep, but for some strange reason, he didn’t feel tired at all. Unlike Tinasha, he could operate on four to five hours of sleep. At the moment, he felt more sheer relief at safely recovering her than he felt any sort of exhaustion.
Catching up one of her hands, Oscar pressed a kiss to it. Tinasha must have felt it, as she blinked her eyes open. “Oh… I fell asleep… I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Rest if you need to,” Oscar said.
“I’m fine,” she insisted, sitting up in bed. Oscar wrapped his arms around her and settled her in his lap.
“All right, so can I finally ask what that guy was after?” Oscar said. He had inquired about it at the mansion, but Tinasha hadn’t given a clear reply because of the other people around.
Now that they were alone, Tinasha’s bafflement was obvious as she revealed Valt’s request, explaining that the two magic spheres were called Eleterria, and he wanted both.
“So it did have to do with those orbs,” Oscar mused.
While it was a mystery how Valt knew of their existence, he undoubtedly hoped to alter the past in some way. If he knew that Tuldarr and Farsas each had one, he must have been very well-informed. Not only that—he and others before him had spent years plotting to steal the time-altering objects.
Upon realizing that, Oscar scowled unhappily. “No way of knowing what’s the truth and what he’s just bluffing about.”
“But if just one orb can take you back into the past, why does he need both?” Tinasha wondered out loud.
“Great question. Maybe there’s another way to use them if you have two?” Oscar guessed.
“Like going to the future? If that happened, we’d have no hope of beating him,” Tinasha replied.
“It’d depend on what he uses them for,” Oscar reasoned. Speculating wouldn’t get them anywhere. The important thing was not to allow the orbs to get stolen. However, there was one thing that needed to be done.
“I’m going to ask my dad about the orb. The one in Tuldarr was sealed away four hundred years ago, right? So that means Valt could only have info on the Farsas one.”
Tinasha cocked her head to one side. “You think he knows something?”
“He understands enough to realize the orb’s important, since he put it in the treasure vault while his other mementos of my mom are displayed in his rooms. No matter how busy he may have been at the time, he wouldn’t have mixed that u—”
Oscar cut himself off mid-sentence, having suddenly realized something. He stared at Tinasha intently; she squirmed under his gaze. “Wh-what is it?”
“Well, you were gonna use that orb when those kids died recently, weren’t you?”
“But I didn’t. Are you going to lecture me?” Tinasha replied warily.
“No. Fifteen years ago, Farsas had its own rash of missing children,” Oscar replied. A series of kidnappings had occurred in the capital city. When the dust settled, over thirty kids were gone. One day, the abductions just abruptly ended.
Tinasha’s black eyes grew wide. “Are you saying that someone did what I wanted to?”
“It’s possible. No one has ever found the kids who went missing, so they must have failed,” Oscar told her. And if that were the case, it might have had something to do with his mother getting sick and dying right around the same time.
Oscar urgently wished to ask his father about this, but formulating a strategy to counter the larger situation was equally pressing.
“I’ll look into things on my side, so you just be extra careful for the time being. They’ve got an eye on you,” Oscar cautioned.
Tinasha shrank in on herself. “Sorry.”
Oscar burst out laughing and ruffled her hair. Tinasha glanced up, and he caught her eye. “Also, thanks for taking care of that evil god. You really saved us.”
She gave him a bemused look that soon morphed into an enchanting smile. Oscar found himself breathless as he beheld it.
Selfless affection shone in her gaze. Her grin was mesmerizing—it captured his soul.
Tinasha was flawed, though she closely resembled perfection. Wanting to draw such a rare, distant creature close to him, Oscar caught her chin and brought her near, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For a moment, Tinasha’s eyes widened, but then her long black eyelashes fluttered as she closed her lids and accepted his kiss.
When he pulled back, she was blushing and averted her gaze. “You’re too close…”
“I told you to get used to it. Besides, you’ve acted so comfortable with me for the entire time I’ve known you,” he said snarkily.
“Because I thought I had no effect on you,” she pointed out.
“You always did.”
He’d always seen her as an alluring woman, although he didn’t confess as much aloud. Instead, he dropped a kiss on her earlobe and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed a line down from her ear to her décolletage. When he buried his face between her soft breasts, he could feel her tremble, and how hot she’d grown.
Just how much determination and doubt made up this fragile little body of hers?
He wanted to touch every single part of Tinasha—her smooth skin and the blood beneath it.
Yet the more he felt, the closer he got, the more he knew he could never reach her. No matter how much he longed to, he would never have her soul. Her boundaries wouldn’t permit it. All he could do was make love to Tinasha and be near her.
Aware of the insurmountable gap between them, he still found her very precious as he reached for her again.
He knew that the two of them shared that despair.
Her eyes were so hot.
I’m going to cry, Tinasha thought.
She wasn’t sad, though. Adrift on a sea of sensation and losing track of where she was, she felt content knowing that she was accepted for who she was.
The young woman blinked the moisture from her eyes. Gazing down at his face, a wave of affection overwhelmed her. An irresistible desire to hug him tightly filled her.
Instead of acting upon it, though, she used both hands to hold him at bay. “Wait, wait…”
“Why?” Oscar asked, truly confused as he stared at his fiancée.
Tinasha looked away, refusing to meet his eyes. “We’re not married!”
“But we’re going to be, aren’t we?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Then there’s no problem,” he decided, brooking no objections as he took Tinasha in his arms and lay her down in the middle of the bed. While she was still dazed, he interlaced his fingers with hers, pressing their hands into the mattress and gazing down at the beautiful woman.
“I’m not going to want to let you return to Tuldarr after this,” Oscar whispered after a pause.
Magic gathered in Tinasha’s body. “I’m asking you to wait. I will use force if I need to.”
With a little smile, Oscar drew something from his jacket pocket and snapped it on to Tinasha’s wrist. “I have tricks of my own, too.”
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?!” she cried. He had placed the sealing bracelet on her, the one stolen from Farsas forty years ago. Tinasha shuddered, remembering how the dangerous magic implement had fallen into the hands of a terrible person.
Looking down at her, Oscar asked, “What are you unhappy about?”
He was serious. And the power in his gaze made Tinasha feel compelled to obey unconditionally.
“I—”
Suddenly, Lazar’s panicked voice sounded from outside the room. “Your Majesty! Is now a good time?!”
“Of course it’s not,” the king grumbled, but he kept that quiet enough that Lazar wouldn’t hear.
Oscar let go of Tinasha and reluctantly got up. While she sighed in relief, the king had a strained look on his face as he undid the bracelet. “I’ll be stepping out for a bit, I guess. I already told Legis that you’ll be here today, so sit tight.”
“Th-thanks for that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Oscar said with a smile, and he patted Tinasha’s head. His affection for her was unchanged, which she felt a little guilty about.
Once he was gone, Tinasha frowned and let out a big sigh.
“So, what’s so important?” Oscar demanded.
“Ouch, ouch! Don’t pinch me!” squealed Lazar.
“I’ll pinch you as much as I want.”
“Ow, ow, ow, ow!” Lazar cried as Oscar practically tugged him down the hallway by the cheek. When he was finally released, he rubbed his reddened face and blinked away the tears in his eyes. “A lady has arrived to see you, Your Majesty.”
“Who?”
“Ah—”
Lazar cut himself off, but not out of hesitation. It was as if there was a gap in his memory and he no longer knew what came next. His lips opened and closed like a fish several times before he finally hung his head, dumbfounded. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t know…”
Understandably, Oscar made a concerned face. “What’s the meaning of this? Why did you rush over to get me, then?”
“I’m not sure… I just felt that I had to retrieve you immediately…”
“This makes no sense, but fine. Where is she?” Oscar inquired.
“In the audience chamber,” Lazar answered.
Still unsettled by his friend’s odd behavior and this unknown guest, Oscar headed for the room in question, where he found a woman with deep chestnut hair in a ponytail. Her clothing was ordinary and plain, not at all the garb of someone visiting the castle. Stranger still, she was alone in the room.
Finding it suspicious that his guards were absent when they should not have been, Oscar eyed this woman with apprehension. She looked to be in her midthirties, with features that were a bit sharp but still quite beautiful.
At Oscar’s entrance, she looked him right in the eyes without wasting any time on formalities. Oscar was about to criticize her insolent, hard gaze when some strange malaise overtook him.
Something was off. He had the sense that he had met this woman before.
Irritably, she spat, “I wondered what you were doing when you got engaged, and now I see that all my hard work has been undone. Did that Witch Killer Queen do this?”
“I know your voice…”
Dull pain shot through Oscar’s head. Memories he should have lost flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning.
White nails
Moon
Depth of night
Blood
Ripped apart
Oscar stumbled a step back.
It felt for a moment like he’d lost his balance, but he steadied himself instantly. Mustering his strength, he drew Akashia and faced the woman with his sword at the ready.
He knew her voice and her figure. She had been a silhouette against the moonlight streaming in his window. Amid those memories he could not dispel, Oscar stood firm. “You’re… the Witch of Silence!”
“Yes, I am. It’s been a while. You’ve grown quite a bit,” she remarked with a sneer.
“What are you here for?” Oscar demanded, his voice infused with power.
Lazar, who was standing behind the king, turned pale.
The witch merely stood there calmly, her lips curling upward. “I thought a single curse would take care of it. This is quite irritating. But now that it’s been broken, I suppose there’s no use crying about it.”
She lifted her right hand in Oscar’s direction and jabbed her pointer finger at his face. “I will end your destiny here.”
Magic gathered at her fingertip, then poured forth.
Oscar inhaled sharply, then used Akashia to parry away an invisible spear. With its spell cut apart, the spear dissolved.
“Lazar, run!” Oscar shouted, without looking back. Then he lunged for the witch.
Without using incantations, the woman conjured more spears made of air. The relentless attacks left Oscar with no time to catch his breath, reminding him of Tinasha’s drills. Lances flew toward him from all sides, but he cut down every one.
Then Oscar closed in on her. Just when Akashia was within range of attack, the witch teleported away. She appeared in the right corner of the large room.
“What an intriguing protective charm you wear… Is that the work of your little bride? Still, I do have another way,” she said and snapped her fingers.
Cold danger ran along Oscar’s nape. He ducked down, and something went whizzing over his head. Jumping back up, he saw that it was an entirely ordinary sword floating in the air.
“Ah. You’re going to use a physical object since my barrier can repel magic,” Oscar muttered. As if in answer, the hovering blade changed direction in midair, and then the sharp tip came rushing at him again. He parried it away with Akashia.
Immediately, another sword appeared right to his left. Somehow, he managed to twist himself and dodge away so it couldn’t run him through.
The witch said in a clear, ringing voice, “Your reflexes are quite good. I wonder how many you can dodge?”
She smiled as she manipulated the array of weapons—regular ones that were not made of magic. For a second, her smile appeared more self-deprecating than anything, but that could have just been Oscar’s imagination. A third blade dived for his legs, and Akashia smashed it apart.
Oscar leaped forward, evading more swords that came racing toward him from either side. As soon as he landed, he dashed for the witch. Another blade swooped in before him, however.
Without slowing down, Oscar smacked it away with the flat of Akashia.
He was closing in on the witch, whose cool expression remained unbothered. As he neared the final stretch, a sword jabbed at his left flank from a spot too close to avoid.
Thus, Oscar grabbed the weapon by the blade. Pain cut through his fingers, but he tossed the sword aside.
No sooner had he done so than sharp agony tore into his right calf. A blade had stabbed into it from behind.
Seizing upon Oscar’s slowed pace, his opponent threw a second sword, which bit into his left shoulder.
The pain nearly claimed his consciousness, but he kept going and made it to the witch. Oscar whipped Akashia up with frightening speed.
“It’s over.”
Time seemed to slow to a crawl.
The witch wore a wan smile. Was it resignation in her eyes? Oscar couldn’t say.
As Akashia traced an arc toward the woman’s neck, an angry roar from the entrance to the room shook the chamber.
“Don’t kill her, Oscar! That’s your grandmother!”
Everything stopped.
He lost the will to fight.
His grip on Akashia weakening, the king opened his blue eyes wide.
The world was quiet, and only the witch dared to move as she fixed Oscar with expressionless eyes.
“You should dream of your childhood,” she said, but he didn’t hear it.
Oscar had almost no memories of his mother.
She’d died when he was five. Surely, that was old enough to recall a few things, and yet he couldn’t.
He was told she’d passed because of an illness, but he never felt sad about it because he was cursed so soon after. To break the spell and reclaim his future, he’d dedicated his youth to studying and swordsmanship. There’d been no time to mourn.
Everything related to her was just a blank.
When Oscar came to, he was in a long hallway. He glanced all around him—no one else was there. He was alone.
Recognizing where he was, he gazed absently at the walls. This was a corridor within Farsas Castle, a place he knew inside and out.
A row of windows lined the walls to his right, with doors on the opposite side. The windows were full of a lavender sky.
He couldn’t see the end of the hall. It simply went on deeper and deeper. A glance backward told him things were the same in that direction. He stared at the row of doors.
Have there always been so many rooms here?
Puzzled, he pushed open the closest door and went inside.
It led to the castle courtyard.
A boy of seven or eight stood there, his back to Oscar. When he walked over, the boy turned around. “Is this where you’ve been, Your Highness? His Majesty has been searching all over for you.”
Oscar recognized this child, for he’d known him all his life. The reply came to his lips naturally. “I only went out for a bit, Lazar. I’ll head right over to him.”
It was only now that Oscar realized he was a boy himself, only a little bit taller than Lazar.
It didn’t seem particularly odd, though. They were close in age, so of course he was.
“Anyway, stop calling me ‘Your Highness.’ It feels weird.”
“But that’s who you are, Your Highness,” Lazar protested, looking serious beyond his years. Up until recently, Lazar had called Oscar by his name, but for whatever reason, he had started acting more distant. Annoyed, Oscar sulked.
The practice sword at his waist had been crafted shorter to match his height. Unsure of whether he should leave it there, he decided to keep it on as he left the courtyard.
Oscar exited through the door and found himself in the long hallway again.
He didn’t know why he was here or where he was going. Confused, he pushed open the next door. It led to one of the castle’s lecture halls. When he approached the lectern, a man reading a book looked up. “Oh, Your Highness… what is it?”
“Have you found any clues about the curse?” Oscar asked.
“I’m very sorry, but not yet…”
Royal Chief Mage Kumu’s face turned grave as he rubbed at his shiny bald head.
Oscar smiled at him. To conceal his fears, he said cheerily, “No need to worry. Something will turn up.”
The mage bowed.
It had already been more than five years since Oscar was cursed and there were still no clues. As the matter concerned the future of the royal family, no one outside the nation could be consulted. All the mages could do was search for clues day in and day out under utmost secrecy.
Oscar tapped his fingers against his chin. “I know. What if we use Akashia to cut me? And then heal me immediately.”
“Y-Your Highness, that would be much too…”
“I’ll go ask if I can borrow it.”
“Wait!” the man protested, but Oscar turned and raced from the room.
He came out onto the hallway and looked left and right. Glancing back, he didn’t sense Kumu chasing after him.
The world was silent.
There were no changes. Nothing new.
Oscar went up to the next door and opened it without waiting. Inside, he found the training grounds on the castle periphery. A gray-haired general spotted him and bowed. Checking to be sure he had the practice sword belted at his waist, Oscar walked over to the man. The sword was already adult sized.
“Ettard, I want you to run me through some more drills today,” Oscar said.
“I’m afraid there’s no longer anything I can teach you,” replied the old man.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Spar with me.”
“Very well, Your Highness,” the general agreed, giving a deep bow. He stepped to one side and readied his sword. With a smile at Oscar, he said, “Next year or the year after, a new apprentice will come to train under me. His name is Als and he’s four years younger than you… He’s quite proficient.”
“I look forward to meeting him,” Oscar responded. Lazar was lousy with a blade, so he welcomed anyone capable and close to his age.
But for the moment, he preferred to focus on his practice. Readying his blade, he let out a long breath and concentrated.
It was growing difficult to keep track of all the rooms. Inside each, Oscar was always a child.
Once he entered a chamber, he forgot everything and thought that was where he was meant to be.
Yet when he left the room, a strange, impatient feeling washed over him.
There was no end to it.
No matter how many doors Oscar tried, he was never older than fifteen. He couldn’t view any of his adult memories.
I want to get out, something deep inside him cried. There were things like alarm bells ringing within him, but they weren’t loud enough for him to be conscious of their noise. He was only capable of opening doors and going into rooms.
Oscar continued into a new chamber. What he saw there petrified him for a moment.
It looked like a room in the castle. Blood stained the walls and floor, dirtying every surface. The furniture was thrown all over like a storm had swept through.
But what drew his eye the most was a woman on the ground near the center of the chamber. She was lying facedown in a pool of red.
Oscar couldn’t make out her face, but her chestnut brown hair was fanned out, soaking into the blood.
Looking down at her, he was seized with an indescribable fright.
I have to make sure.
He took a step closer, but for whatever reason, he was back in the hallway.
Oscar puzzled over the development. After a moment, however, he could no longer recall the crimson-soaked room or the woman.
He touched the next door. The faintest shock ran through his hand, but he pushed it open anyway. Inside was an unfamiliar chamber, one he couldn’t place at all.
It was empty, save for a wide bed, a desk, a sizable bookcase, a sofa, and a table. A stack of thick books rested atop the desk. When he walked over to them, he saw they were all volumes on magic.
Suddenly, the clear voice of a young girl came from behind him. “Oscar? What is it?”
He turned around to see a lovely girl with long black hair standing there. She was thin and had a sweet face. He stared warily at her fine, achingly perfect features.
Curiously, he didn’t know her name or how to respond to her. She came right up to him and met his gaze. “Is it time for our practice already? Am I late?”
When she said practice, he glanced down at his waist and found that, sure enough, he was wearing his training sword. When he looked back over at her, she was on her tiptoes and about to touch him. Her snow-white hand didn’t make contact with his face, though. Softly, she floated up into the air. From a little above him, she inspected his expression, her deep, dark eyes staring into his. She brought her lips to his ear and whispered, “Oscar… open the door to the next room…”
A jolt ran up his spine.
The words held a seductive lilt to them. They’d clearly been spoken by a woman, not a girl. Shocked, Oscar took a step back.
Evidently oblivious, the girl regarded him curiously, as if she had said nothing at all. “I’m going on ahead,” she stated with a smile and a wave, disappearing.
Oscar exited the unfamiliar chamber and realized he was standing before the door to the next room. He had a sense that something inexplicable had happened moments ago, but he couldn’t quite recall what.
He opened the door, getting déjà vu from the zap that ran through his hand. Inside was a large hall built of stone.
It was dark, not unlike a nightmare. People were sitting in tiered rows of seats that lined the walls of the oval-shaped space. In the center of it rose a staircase, reaching a full story above the ground. Because of the angle, he couldn’t see what was at the top of it, but he could hear muffled voices talking.
He decided to head for the staircase, but the woman spoke again in his ear. “Oscar… get out Akashia…”
There was no one there when he whirled to check. He fumbled at his waist for the sword and touched a hilt he was well acquainted with. This was his beloved weapon, the only one like it in the world.
I feel like I haven’t held it in years.
He went to unsheathe the royal sword, but while he still had his hand wrapped around the handle, a girl’s shriek came from the platform. It was so bloodcurdling that Oscar raced for the stairs.
Once again, a voice called in his ear, “Wait… Draw Akashia…”
“But…”
“It’s all right. Draw Akashia, Oscar.”
The words were faint, but insistent, and Oscar stopped in his tracks. In his moment of hesitation, he could hear the girl screaming and sobbing from the altar. Multiple voices spoke incantations over her heartbroken cries.
The woman’s voice held him strong, however, drowning out all else. “It’s all right. Trust me.”
Her words were sure and firm, thrumming with a distinct force. Instinctively, he gasped.
Believing in her, he drew out his blade.
When he opened his eyes, a woman was staring at him from very nearby.
He couldn’t immediately recall her name. But her face was very familiar, and she relaxed in relief upon seeing him wake.
Drops of blood dotted her cheeks. He reached out to wipe them away with his thumb. Her name fell naturally from his mouth. “Tinasha…”
“He woke up?” another woman spat. “Ludicrous. No one should have been able to overwrite my spell.”
Her disgusted voice made Oscar’s head pound. Slowly, he sat up from Tinasha’s lap. Looking around, he saw he was in the audience chamber where he’d battled the witch. At some point, a magical barrier had been erected around the whole room. Beyond it were Kevin, Lazar, Als, and his other advisers, gazing at him sorrowfully.
In the center of the chamber stood another, semicircular barrier enclosing Oscar and Tinasha. He was shocked to find two spirits collapsed nearby. A closer look revealed that Tinasha’s own blood colored her white clothing.
Despite her injuries, she flashed him a bewitching smile, as though she felt no pain at all. To the witch, she replied, “I can’t overwrite it, but I can use it. I introduced a dream of my own.”
“But it only shows dreams from childhood.”
“Which is why it was a dream from my childhood.”
The witch eyed Tinasha with suspicion, but the queen declined to elaborate. She maintained the barrier and her silence.
Oscar massaged his temples. He had a fierce headache. Fragments were still rattling around.
Tinasha’s eyes narrowed as she smiled at him. “Can you fight?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll need you to, as I don’t think I can move. I’ve closed up your wounds.”
“Okay,” he replied, and he got to his feet while checking to make sure he was holding Akashia. Oscar faced the witch and looked her over.
He saw another woman’s face in her sharp beauty.
The same green eyes, a regal nose, and a soft smile on her rosebud mouth. It was the face of his mother, the one he hadn’t been able to recall until that moment.
“So you’re my grandmother, huh? You do look like her,” he remarked.
The witch said nothing, and Oscar snorted.
Feeling the weight of his sword in his hands, he stepped outside the barrier.
The room was an ocean of blood. Crimson had been splattered all across the walls, gleaming as it dripped.
A huge pool of blood had formed on the floor, and a woman was lying facedown in the middle of it.
Her face wasn’t visible.
But he knew who she was.
When Oscar exited the barrier, the witch tossed him a scornful look. A spell coalesced in her right hand. “If only you’d just kept sleeping. You’d be so much happier.”
“It would be pointless for me to be the only happy one,” Oscar countered.
“Aggravating child.”
“Lavinia! Wait!” shouted Kevin. A never-before-seen look of desperation on his face, the former king appealed to the witch. “My son has done nothing wrong! If you have to kill someone, take me—”
“It’s not a matter of wrongs. If it were, then my fool of a daughter would be most to blame,” Lavinia retorted, then returned her gaze to Oscar. She extended her bespelled hand toward him, and the finely wrought magic followed. “You must die and balance out the fate that was altered.”
With that, she let the spell fly. A high wall of flames hemmed Oscar in. The temperature in the room soared, and Oscar’s lungs struggled to breathe in the scorching air.
From behind him, a woman said anxiously, “Oscar…”
“I’ll be fine.”
Oscar focused his mind. Taking a deep breath in and releasing it slowly, he visualized the spell within the flames. When the core became clear, he took a step toward it. Defying the waves of heat that every instinct told him to retreat from, he thrust Akashia into the heart of the fire.
The threads snapped.
Oscar pulled Akashia back, then did a lengthwise sweep to unbind the spell.
Searing winds blew his hair back.
The walls of flame disintegrated. Fire scattered across the room, struck Tinasha’s barrier, and vanished, leaving only scorching gusts.
The night was cloudy. Lights made of magic glowed at the corners of the room.
Unable to sleep for whatever reason, the child got out of bed. From the corner of his eye, he saw something flash past his windowpane outside.
Wondering what it was, he approached the balcony door. Then he recalled his mother’s warning.
“Do not open the windows or go outside.”
However, the boy spied a blue bird alighting on the balcony railing outside. The shade of its feathers was a deeper than the sky, vivid and striking, despite the clouds that covered the moon.
Is this what color the ocean is?
Excited over the idea of a vista he had never seen before, the boy rushed to undo the lock and push the door open. He came out onto the balcony and reached for the bird.
The little animal cocked its head. Its beady black eyes reflected nothing at all.
It didn’t look like it was going to fly away. He could almost touch it.
“Oscar!” someone shrieked at his back.
The boy jumped. Turning, he saw his mother in the doorway. The light behind her cast shadows across her face.
Gazing at the little boy, the blue bird let out a loud cackle.
Oscar swung Akashia at the swords bearing down on him from all directions, shattering them to pieces.
He couldn’t dodge every blade, though, and some grazed his flesh. Still, he made sure to smash any that would have fatally wounded him. Despite her exhaustion, his fiancée was doing what she could to help. Oscar spared a thought of gratitude for her while he closed in on the witch.
Sneering, Oscar asked Lavinia, “So I have to die? Is that why you cursed me?”
“It is. If you’re going to hate anyone, hate your mother,” she replied coldly. There was no emotion in her tone.
Several invisible vines snaked toward the young king, weaving between the swords. A strike from Akashia ended their encroachment. Oscar evaded the floating blades by leaping to the right, lopping off a vine curling around his ankle as he did. Next, he used his free hand to grab the hilt of a dagger before it could run through his left flank, then used that to parry away a sword speeding for him. Dodging the vines, he hurried toward their spell core.
As Akashia pierced and dispersed the magic, Lavinia declared, “The harder you fight, the more you’ll suffer.”
Immediately afterward, huge white claws appeared before Oscar—too close to evade.
Just as they had on that night, the white nails glimmered as they dived for his shoulder.
“No,” Oscar whispered as he caught hold of them before they could sink into his flesh.
These aren’t claws or nails. It’s just a dagger.
He hurled it away.
Ultimately, the claws had never reached him.
Instead, they’d ripped into his mother, who had thrown herself before him.
The nails tore into her shoulder and rent her body apart.
Although her face was racked with terrible pain, she wove a spell. Wrenching herself free of the claws, she flung them at the bird demon.
It flicked the red-tipped things away. Fresh blood stained the walls.
The moon peeked out from the clouds. Pallid, tranquil light shone into the room.
Numbly, Oscar stared down at his mother, prostrate on the floor, and timidly reached for her blood-soaked back. “Mother?”
Before he could touch her, the woman’s body vanished.
So did all the stains on the walls. All that remained was a shredded blue bird lying on the balcony.
Oscar flew out of the room, screaming, and made straight for his mother’s chamber.
It had to be a nightmare. It had to be.
When he burst in… his mother was there, reading, and regarded him with surprise. “What is it, Oscar?”
Her smile was gentle. She looked just the same as ever.
Relieved, Oscar flew into her arms. Between his sobs, he told her about the dream.
I knew it. It couldn’t be real.
That night, he slept in his mother’s bed. That should have been the end of it.
But the next night, he was faced with the sight of his mother’s death, exactly as it had been in his nightmare.
Akashia raised, Oscar approached the witch cautiously. Lavinia merely teleported away and reappeared near the door to the audience chamber, however.
Dodging the remaining swords, Oscar turned and gave her a strained look. “I’m not going to hate my mother. She protected me.”
At that, Kevin and Lavinia both made shocked expressions. As she healed her spirits, Tinasha looked between them in confusion.
“You recall it now?” Kevin asked.
“Thanks to those dreams just now, yeah. Are you the one who sealed my memories?” Oscar turned to Lavinia, who didn’t offer any denial. She gazed evenly at the young king of Farsas.
What ghastly memories. At such a young age, Oscar had watched his mother die twice. Fearing that he would be psychologically scarred if he had to carry that around with him forever, the witch had sealed his recollection of the experience when she’d cursed him.
As Oscar wrestled with the bitter memories that had been lost for fifteen years, he stared his grandmother—the witch—dead in the eye.
His dead mother, a rash of missing child cases, and an heirloom that could reverse the flow of time.
Once he fit together all the pieces, an answer emerged.
“My mother… went back in time to save me?”
Tinasha gasped.
Oscar’s memory of his mother getting ripped apart by a demon had been shut away. When he thought on it, he realized that the mother in that memory was another Rosalia who’d come rushing in from a day in the future. No one ever knew at the time that there’d been two queens in the castle.
Fifteen years ago, Oscar’s mother had burst into his room after traveling from the future, knowing that he was going to be attacked.
And in her attempt to save her son, she and the demon perished at the other’s hand. She’d bled out and collapsed, only for her blood and corpse to disappear instantly—because she belonged to another time.
Oscar had burst into tears when she’d vanished and had run to his mother’s room to find her as she’d ever been, ready to welcome him. Her reaction was understandable, since that was the woman from the present.
Relieved, Oscar believed the gruesome death to be a nightmare, but that was wrong. Only a day later, his mother perished in a puddle of her own blood.
Lavinia took a deep breath. Her green eyes moved back and forth rapidly, as if she were recalling something from long ago. “Do you remember when you told me that your dream turned into reality?”
“I do,” Oscar answered.
“You were the one who was supposed to die. You became the latest target of the demon that had been taking children. But Rosalia… she couldn’t bear it. She committed the sin of distorting the past.”
The queen had used the magic orb and gone back in time to save her son.
And she had certainly succeeded, but her dying in the process complicated matters.
“One may succeed in altering the past, but this cannot erase the doom of a person who uses the orb, because it is no longer part of the past. The end of my daughter’s life was determined when she and the demon killed each other. Her time had come, and she met it unaware. As a result, my daughter saved your life… and killed your heart.”
Rosalia’s end was sudden, something she couldn’t have known until seconds before it happened.
But that simply meant her days were over. Eleterria was not capable of altering the fate of its user. When a person reached their appointed time of death, the same end would come to them, no matter what.
The child disappearances that had left Farsas terrorized came to a sudden end. Lavinia flew to the castle upon hearing of her daughter’s suspicious demise. Once she learned of her traumatized grandson’s story and that children were no longer vanishing, she deduced what had occurred.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, and I do not hate you. However, you are someone who should not be alive. And so you should not beget any descendants.”
From a modicum of mercy, Lavinia had utilized a curse instead of killing him. She had wanted to honor her daughter’s wishes, but also… she had felt sorry for Oscar.
However, he was no longer a child. He possessed his own will and he stood before her, armed with a sword.
He could move past his mother’s death.
Thus, Lavinia believed it was time to correct things.
Oscar stared the witch down.
There was no doubting that his mother and grandmother had saved him. If his memories hadn’t been sealed away, he wouldn’t have grown into the man he was. For that fact, he was truly grateful.
He thought of his mother. His emotions there ran deeper than mere gratitude. He wondered if this was how Tinasha had felt when she’d gone into magical hibernation.
Oscar held Akashia steady. He could see the witch was casting a massive spell. One corner of his lips curled in a smirk. “You might be here seeking retribution for my mother’s actions, but I’m still your enemy. I’m guilty of the same crime she committed, after all.”
While he didn’t remember that, Tinasha did.
He was standing here at the intersection of their intertwined destinies.
Lavinia frowned, puzzled. Her green eyes flicked over to Tinasha, seated on the floor. After a few seconds, those eyes grew wide with horror.
“The Witch Killer… No, it can’t be… What you put in his dream was…”
No one in all the land surpassed Lavinia when it came to curses.
That was why she had believed nothing could break through hers. Nothing except for the sword capable of killing witches, anyway.
To prevent Akashia from interfering, as it may have had power even in a dream, Lavinia had purposely only shown Oscar dreams of his childhood, from before he took possession of Akashia.
But ultimately, he had undone the spell himself and stood before her—through the help of the queen who’d overlaid Oscar’s dreams with her own.
“So that’s… how you did it.”
Lavinia had heard that the queen who once slew a witch had used magic to put herself to sleep—and that she was the recently crowned ruler of Tuldarr in the present day.
What had woken her up? Why had she gotten engaged to him?
The answers to questions Lavinia had never thought to ask now became abundantly obvious.
“You utter, utter fools!”
She shook all over with rage. A devastating spell materialized before her. Glittering a brilliant green, it swelled with innumerable swords that formed a gigantic net rushing at Oscar.
Tinasha cried in warning, “Oscar!”
“I remember,” he said. With a diagonal lunge, he swept Akashia out at the spell.
During training, Tinasha had cast a similar spell at him. She told him that if he didn’t break all of its multiple cores at once, it would repair itself.
He could see seven such spots. As he shattered blade after blade that shot from the magic, Oscar swung Akashia aloft and aimed right for the cores.
He exhaled slowly, but his mind raced.
Two, three, four… In his head, he counted the cores he’d destroyed.
When he broke the fifth one, pain shot through his right arm.
One of the witch’s swords had made contact. Blood dripped onto the floor.
Akashia’s tip narrowly managed to pierce the sixth core. Oscar stretched as far as he could go, and yet he couldn’t reach the seventh.
The shattered cores began to regenerate. Swords rushed at him from all directions.
Just as defeat seemed inevitable, the seventh core broke.
Tinasha had done it.
The net dissolved in midair and vanished. With a loud clattering, all the ensorcelled blades fell to the ground.
The witch stared at her daughter’s son. Hatred burned in her eys, but there was a recognizable hollowness there. “Why are you adding to your crimes? Has it not occurred to you that your actions may have shifted things beyond your intention?”
“The person I am now can’t answer that. But…” Oscar could sense the woman behind him. His fondness for her brought a smile to his lips. “If she’s in pain and I can reach her, I’m going to go to her no matter what transpires. I will never abandon her… Too much has happened already.”
A girl’s anguished scream—from the dream he’d witnessed—flashed through the back of his mind.
Oscar had no way of knowing whether that had really happened or if it was something that had been prevented.
Yet when he recalled that shriek, it raked at his soul. If she were ever in that situation again, he wouldn’t be able to sit idly by, even if Tinasha had told him to.
Oscar approached the witch, who did nothing to stop him. She only stared with those green eyes.
He adjusted his grip on his sword, gazing into the face of the woman who so resembled his mother. Step by step, he closed the gap between them. “Whether I altered the past or it was changed some other way, we are in the present, and that’s why I have to fight you. I have no desire to lose all I’ve gained.”
“Even if it means warping the very fabric of our world?”
“Should it come to that, I’ll still keep moving forward from where I am. I have no other place,” Oscar said with a grin. After all, there would be no end to the corrections once one or two were made.
Lavinia looked her grandchild up and down. Her clear eyes were a bit reminiscent of Tinasha’s. Oscar stood before the witch now with the strength of will he had accrued over his life. He lifted Akashia high and leveled the tip at the witch’s slender throat.
“I know how this looks… but I don’t want you to die. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, though. I do tend to try having it all.”
The witch sneered. “It certainly seems that way… How frightfully greedy you are. It wasn’t enough to have the curse broken? You needed the mage who did it, too?”
“It was your magic that brought her to me. Perhaps I should be thanking you,” Oscar shot back.
The witch lifted one eyebrow. She glanced over Oscar’s shoulder at Tinasha. “She’s not much different from a witch herself. Should the two of you have a daughter, she would more than likely become a witch. Is it worth marrying her in spite of that?”
“It is,” Oscar replied immediately. Then he broke into a pleased smile. “A witch kid, huh? Bring it on. I’d love to raise one.”
Lavinia’s cold mask dissolved into a completely aghast expression. She turned over her shoulder to throw Kevin, beyond the barrier, a look of horror. “Did you raise him to be like this?”
“For better or worse, this is my son…”
Kevin’s apologetic response made the witch heave a deep sigh. She gazed at Kevin, then Tinasha, and then finally Oscar. Her lips quirked up in a sardonic smile. “Someday you might regret not killing me today. Have you thought of that?”
“I can always do it later,” Oscar shot back flippantly.
For the first time, the witch burst out laughing. Abruptly, she teleported to a spot in the air. “Do as you like, then. However…”
Her green eyes narrowed to slits. An all-encompassing, intimidating aura dominated the room. “You are not to engage in any more foolishness. The time of reckoning may draw near.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Oscar replied.
A terribly heartrending look came over Lavinia’s face as she stared down at him.
Perhaps that was Oscar’s eyes playing tricks on him, though, as the witch vanished in the blink of an eye.
When Tinasha woke, it was the middle of the night.
Blinking over and over in the darkness from her position lying on her stomach in bed, she sifted through her memories. Yet no matter how she tried, she couldn’t recall what happened after the witch vanished. Perhaps her body hadn’t been able to endure the stress of back-to-back fights. She still felt somewhat nauseated.
In the lightless room, she slowly pushed herself up. Next to her, Oscar appeared to notice and blinked his eyes open. “Tinasha?”
“Uh… good morning…”
“It is not morning. That much should be obvious,” he muttered, rising to sit beside the young queen. He scanned her face. “How do you feel?”
“I’m fine. Just a little tired…,” she answered, trailing off as she looked down at what she was wearing. Puzzled, she asked, “Did I change clothes? Mine had blood all over them. I do remember healing my injuries, though.”
“I gave you a bath and changed your clothes. It was fun.”
“…”
“Just kidding. The lady-in-waiting did it.”
“You are not funny,” Tinasha pouted, cheeks puffing out. It was strange enough for her to find herself asleep in bed next to him like it was the most natural thing in the world. Oscar must not have wanted to let her out of his sight, considering the wave of recent incidents, but she still wasn’t thrilled about that, engaged or not.
After a deeply amused Oscar was done laughing, he carded a hand through his fiancée’s hair, stroking it. “Sorry for dragging you into a bitter fight.”
She smiled. Lazar had escaped from the audience chamber, found Kevin along the way and explained that Lavinia was there, then had run to get Tinasha. By the time he did, Oscar was already caught in the witch’s binding spell. Tinasha had gotten between Oscar, bleeding and collapsed on the floor, and had found the witch staring down at him silently. After erecting a barrier, she slipped her consciousness into the spell on Oscar while battling Lavinia.
Tinasha said, “She was stronger than the witch I fought a long time ago. To be quite honest, I probably would have lost even if my focus hadn’t been split.”
“She’s really that powerful?” Oscar asked.
And yet even so, it had looked like the witch was going easy on him during their battle. Oscar was struck with new awe over the fearsome power some mages possessed.
Tinasha gave an unhappy shrug. “Also, remind me never to fight you. I couldn’t bear to have you break all my spells like it’s nothing. It would be a waste of magic just to cast them.”
“Oh yeah? It wasn’t a walk in the park for me, either. I’d be dead if not for your help,” he pointed out.
“Only because you were up against a witch. We were lucky to break you out of the binding spell,” she said dryly.
That made Oscar recall the girl from the dream. He wound a hand through Tinasha’s locks and gave her hair a tug. “So that was your memory? You were pretty cute.”
“That’s very embarrassing. Please don’t say that,” she replied, most likely flushing, although Oscar couldn’t make out Tinasha’s face in the darkness. She had definitely turned her head aside, and Oscar grinned.
While none of it was new information, he now knew with certainty that he was the one who had rescued her four hundred years ago. He wouldn’t have been present in one of her adolescent memories otherwise.
Thinking of the sobbing he’d heard, Oscar wanted to ask Tinasha precisely what had transpired, but he held his tongue. It was in the past. He didn’t need to force an explanation. If he ever needed to know someday, she would tell him.
“Tinasha, I’m sorry.”
“What? What for?”
“For what happened four centuries ago.”
“Huh?!” she yelped. Dark, wide eyes stared at him. “Why would you apologize for that? Did you do something?”
“No… It’s just that, don’t you feel something besides gratitude to him? Or to me, or to whomever? You must be angry, too. Maybe you want to know why I rewrote the past or why I disappeared afterward.”
Those were things Oscar desired answers to himself.
He was grateful beyond words that his mother had saved him. However, it also made him sick to his stomach that she committed a taboo to do so, and that it had cost her own life. If only she hadn’t gone to such lengths, she would still be alive. Perhaps she should have thought of herself, too. He loved her, and he wanted her to honor that tenderness.
Regretfully, Oscar could never tell that to the woman who saved him.
It was different for Tinasha, though. She had him.
“I don’t have my memories, but I’m still me. It’s been bothering you this whole time, right? I’m sorry for that.”
“You don’t have to be…”
Tinasha gazed back at Oscar, a pained look on her face. Fierce pain and emotion ran deep in her eyes.
After a long, slow blink, Tinasha flushed a little. “I lived a very sheltered life until I was thirteen years old. I was brought to the palace soon after I was born, and raised to be queen one day… The only family I had to speak of was another person raised as a potential king. But even though he was like a brother to me, he chose to side against me.”
The words came calmly and evenly from Tinasha’s lips. This was the first time Oscar had heard any of this.
She glanced out the window, and her expression grew visibly nostalgic. “And then he came and taught me so many things. The days I spent with him were so happy. He didn’t just save my life… He gave me the love I needed to live alone from that point on.”
Tinasha’s deep, abiding affection for him bled through in her voice. When Oscar heard it, he could tell how much love the man who’d saved her had given her. In exchange for everything he had, he’d rewritten history to rescue her. That emotion was far too all-encompassing. The mere memory of it had brought Tinasha four hundred years into the future.
“But when I arrived here to repay my debt, you were so mean to me. I did this all for you, but you treated me rudely, kept your distance because I was from a different country, acted like you were so innocent all while harping on me about everything—”
“Hey. Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” Oscar huffed.
“Yet I love how you never waver in who you are. You’re the one I want to be with now,” Tinasha confessed, glancing at him with a shy smile. It was entrancing.
A match between a tolerant king and a queen consort who swore eternal love and loyalty wasn’t unheard of, but that wasn’t who these two were. They faced each other as rulers of their own countries in equal right; at times they set boundaries and at others they butted heads. Still, they had chosen each other.
Some might have felt constrained by not having the freedom to choose anything but a life like that. Oscar and Tinasha, however, had long since accepted that it was impossible to separate their personalities from their royal identities.
Which was exactly why simply being together, laughing with each other, was so precious to them. They would be able to spend the days to come at each other’s sides.
Tinasha took Oscar’s hand in hers. She intertwined her much smaller, paler fingers within his, brought their joined hands to her cheek, and beamed brilliantly. “I am very happy now. Thank you.”
Such was her warm and utterly unguarded affection for him. Oscar found himself breathless in the face of her smile that enchanted his soul.
Without moving their joined hands, Oscar leaned in to press a gentle kiss to her soft lips.
If only they could communicate wordlessly.
He wanted her to know the feelings he was helpless to define.
It was difficult to tell if it was his body or soul that felt so hot.
Oscar pulled away and gazed into her dark eyes. “You have saved me.”
His reverent words made her dimple with happiness. It was exactly that look on her face that captivated him so thoroughly. He slid their joined hands down slowly, from her cheekbones to her mouth. As her eyes went half-lidded, he drew her close and kissed her again. Holding her upright as she went limp in his arms, he brought his lips to her ear.
“Are you hesitating because you want to preserve your magic?” he asked, somewhat wryly.
She knew what he meant right away. Contritely, she replied, “Could you tell?”
“You are a spirit sorcerer and all. Of course you’d be worried about that,” Oscar said a little bitterly as he drew back. Tinasha sighed; he was right about why she refused to go further with him.
Spirit sorcerers weakened upon losing their chastity.
Tinasha had access to more than just her spiritual magic, of course, but she did also tend to rely upon such singular and powerful magic. Should she lose her chastity now, it would require much more power to cast many of her spells.
That said, Tinasha knew that she could not remain in this state forever. In a year, she would marry into Farsas and become its queen.
However, considering the mistakes and defeats she had suffered in the half a year since she’d awakened, she was very reluctant to do anything that would diminish her strength. The thought of not having enough during an emergency was sobering. Still, she did think herself weak for feeling that way, considering she had power enough to stand far above ordinary mages.
Despite knowing all that, she still felt hesitant.
To distract Tinasha from her gloomy thoughts, Oscar cupped her face in his hands and tipped it up. “I know how it sounds to ask that of you after you’ve rescued me time and time again. No matter how weak you get, even if you can no longer use magic, I’ll keep you safe. I will give you back everything that you’ll be losing.”
“Oscar…”
Her hot breath tickled his skin.
Every single time she was with him, she felt heat within her rise—everything from a mind-searing fever to warmth that made her want to cry. He was the one who gave her more power than she needed, and he was also the one who made her believe in herself.
Before any tears could slip out, Oscar kissed Tinasha’s eyelids and grinned. “Well, you don’t need to worry about it now. We’ve got less than a year to go and it’s not like I can’t wait that long. Plus, knowing our luck, we may need your strength again in the months before the wedding. So I’ll honor your wishes. I’m fine with whatever you want to do.”
He sounded so easygoing that Tinasha couldn’t help breaking into a grin of her own.
Just as she had done when they first met underneath the palace of Tuldarr, she wound her arms around his neck and leaned against him. “I’m going to be the one to protect you.”
Tinasha had chosen her fate, no matter what was in store for them.
Never again would she lose anything to anyone. She would not expose such weakness to him.
Believing that thought to hold a power of its own, she closed her eyes. |
Unnamed Memory
8. Finding a Seed
She awakened.
Not inside a physical body, but as a conceptual entity.
Still, she was awake.
She took a breath, came to life, and sifted through the records.
She wanted one person alone.
And so she began to create a consciousness in accordance with her own specifications that would reveal her beautiful form to the world.
Through the window, morning light filtered into the spacious chamber.
Oscar lifted his head, feeling as if he could hear birds chirping, though he shouldn’t have been able to. Glancing at the clock, he saw it was his usual waking hour. He felt a little malaise, owing to the battle the day before, but he thought he would be fine if that was the extent of it.
Sitting up, he looked over to see Tinasha curled in a ball, hugging her knees to her chest.
“What’s with the fetal position?” he muttered in disbelief, then gave her black hair a tug. As he’d expected, gentle tugs weren’t enough for her to even stir. He was left with no choice but to place a hand on her shoulder and shake her awake.
She blinked her dark eyes open blearily, swiveling her head to look up at him. “Sleepy…?”
“So… once we’re married, I’m going to have to wake you up every morning for the rest of my life?” Oscar asked, sounding partially resigned to that fate already. In that interim, Tinasha had already closed her eyes again.
Oscar had half a mind to wake her up one more time, but then he realized something and placed a hand against her forehead. His eyes widened a little, and he clicked his tongue under his breath. Leaving her in bed, he got up to start his day.
The royal magistrates who had been in the audience chamber during the witch’s attack were now privy to the truth about the king’s mother, but they’d struggled to make sense of it all.
Fortunately, Kumu and Als had cleared most people out ahead of time, so the only ones who learned the truth were those who’d already known about the curse. Even so, none of them had ever expected to discover that the previous king had married a witch’s daughter.
Oscar had given a cursory explanation of Eleterria to all who’d witnessed the incident once it had resolved, and also had informed them that there were people after the orbs. Kevin, Oscar’s father, had heard about Eleterria from his wife, so he was only mildly surprised to learn there was a second orb in Tuldarr. As Oscar had privately suspected, his father didn’t know much about the orbs.
Entirely of her own accord, his mother had taken Eleterria out from Lavinia’s personal collection. He thought about tracking Lavinia down to hear more details, but that seemed like it might be pouring oil on a fire they had only barely managed to extinguish. He also didn’t know where the witch lived.
Thus, it seemed that the trail had gone cold. Oscar had learned about his past, which left him feeling like some weight had been lifted from his shoulders, but that was all.
Now that a day had passed since Lavinia’s visit, things seemed to have settled down, and Oscar’s usual routine resumed. He made for his study to begin his regular duties.
As he brewed tea, Lazar let out a sigh. “It’s just been one surprise after another around here…”
“Yeah, it was a real shocker,” Oscar remarked sarcastically.
Lazar made a face at the king’s insincere reply.
All the magistrates knew that the previous king had married his queen in spite of considerable opposition from her family, but no one had imagined she was the child of a witch.
Resting his chin on one hand, Oscar took up a pen with the other. “It makes sense that Lavinia disliked it. I kinda doubt she was thrilled to see her own daughter marry into the line that wields the Mage Killer.”
“Were Queen Tinasha’s parents alive and well today, they might object to your wedding her, too,” mused Lazar.
After that, Lazar brought up a number of topics, but he did not ask about Oscar using Eleterria to make contact with Tinasha in the past. A perceptive person could probably have figured it out, but anyone who didn’t look too closely wouldn’t suspect much. Oscar thought Lazar was more of the latter type.
A handful of papers in his arms, Lazar cocked his head. “By the way, has Queen Tinasha returned home?”
“No, she caught a bit of a fever, so I put her on bed rest. A lady-in-waiting is watching her.”
“Your Majesty… you’re unbelievable,” commented Lazar, shock plain in his expression.
“I didn’t do anything. Don’t look at me like that,” Oscar said with a frown. “She woke up for a bit in the middle of the night but went right back to sleep. I think that fight really wore her out.”
“Ah… that’s understandable. She did look like she was struggling yesterday,” Lazar responded.
After battling forbidden curses, kidnappers, and witches, it was no wonder Tinasha was fast approaching her physical limits. The king of Farsas was in the same boat himself and yet able to carry out his duties just fine, which spoke to the vast disparity between her delicate body and his sturdier one.
“If her fever still hasn’t gone down by this afternoon, I’ll contact Tuldarr,” Oscar stated.
“Very well, Your Majesty. Oh yes! Here is the attendance list for international guests for this year’s birthday celebration,” said Lazar, presenting Oscar with another paper.
Upon receiving it and looking it over, Oscar grimaced. “What a pain…”
“And you may not cancel it! Give up on that right now, as this will double as your engagement party!”
“…”
Beaten to the punch by his oldest friend, Oscar stared up at the ceiling and sighed.
Tinasha woke up in the afternoon. Her sickness was born from exhaustion, which was in turn linked to her magic. Rest cured her fever, and while she wasn’t fully recovered, she felt well enough to get up.
First, she took a bath and changed her clothes, aided by a lady-in-waiting. Then she ordered everyone to leave the room and sat on the bed, closing her eyes as she explored the state of the magic in her body.
Her vast reserves of power were currently still, like a calm sea. After ensuring she could control the entirety of it, she frowned. “I’m glad I didn’t explode.”
When taking in Simila’s energy, Tinasha had feared a worst-case scenario from magic oversaturation. Fortunately, the new power she’d absorbed was assimilated without issue. The raw magic she had at her disposal surely rivaled Travis’s or Lavinia’s now.
That notion provided little comfort when she recalled the battle from yesterday. It was a good thing that Oscar had been there. She wasn’t certain who would’ve won had she clashed with the witch alone. Tinasha’s access to spiritual magic hadn’t prevented the witch, whose full command of curses and hexes was second to none, from rendering her and Oscar powerless instantly.
But in a way, she was also grateful for the opportunity to assess the difference in strength.
Tinasha was always keen to battle against someone superior and learn from the experience. Her fight with Travis had sharpened all of her senses. There was still raw potential within her that she wanted to mold.
A spell formed between Tinasha’s outstretched arms. As she examined the intricate design, she detected a presence nearby and looked up.
A woman was standing on the balcony. Tinasha had only met her yesterday but would never forget her face.
After some hesitation, Tinasha got up and opened the balcony door, inviting the uninvited guest inside.
Tilting her head to one side to fix Tinasha with a blank look, the woman said, “You’re awfully careless, letting me in after what happened yesterday.”
“Yes, but you seem like you have something to say,” Tinasha replied, eyeing the Witch of Silence right back.
“I’m sure this goes without saying, but that orb should be sealed away,” the witch stated.
“You’re right… and I’ll propose as much. While I have you, why didn’t you take the orb back from Farsas when you cast the curse on Oscar?” Tinasha inquired.
“Because I didn’t know where it was, and I didn’t feel like searching for it. But since that fool of a man used it, I take it that means you know where it is?”
Tinasha almost lost her temper over Lavinia’s rude term of address for Oscar, but she managed to keep herself composed. “I’ve heard it’s in the treasure vault. However, he used the Tuldarr one. Apparently, it’s a different color from the Farsas one, so they’re definitely separate.”
“The… one in Tuldarr? There’s another one?”
The two women exchanged glances. Tinasha was adequately surprised, but Lavinia looked utterly taken aback.
This might be a good opportunity to learn more.
Tinasha got straight to the point. “How much do you know about that orb?”
“I could ask you the same thing. I got it from a traveling fortune-teller somewhere around two hundred years ago. I was told it was a magic implement that could change the past, if the wielder was determined to do so.”
“Determined to do so…,” Tinasha repeated.
That described it perfectly. The orb truly did test the user’s determination. The present was wiped clean for the sake of the past, and there was no guarantee of success. It was a gamble that risked the user’s very existence.
Wondering if there was more Lavinia would share, Tinasha voiced a doubt she had been harboring for a while. “We know that using the orb puts the user in considerable danger. But what about other ramifications? Does the backlash and distortion from altering time manifest in obvious ways? Are the laws of nature and the existence of the world affected?”
“From the perspective of someone watching before time is altered, using the orb would seem to distort every outcome. Those of us who exist after the change remain ignorant, however. Whether it infringes on the laws of nature and threatens the world’s existence can only be determined after the dust settles. At the very least, we cannot be aware of anything in the present moment,” Lavinia answered.
“I suppose that’s… true,” Tinasha replied softly.
There was no way to verify the specific consequences that might spring from rewriting history, which ultimately meant that those consequences didn’t matter. Even witches were powerless to know what had changed.
“According to the fortune-teller, using the orb was the equivalent of sticking a pin into the world itself,” explained Lavinia. “You could pull in a future that wouldn’t exist otherwise and stick a pin in to keep it there. The fortune-teller said to think of it like the world was a dead insect with thousands of pins stuck into its legs and wings to hold it open. Even as the world tries to return to its original state, the orb responds with more pins. That’s the cycle.”
“A pin…”
The orb threw pins at the world as it attempted to restore itself. There was no telling how many times that cycle had repeated. And if that was the case…
Tinasha realized something, and an involuntary shiver suddenly ran through her whole body.
Would this back-and-forth go on forever? Could it go on forever?
How much longer could the world endure being speared through?
Tinasha had no answer, for indeed, none would come until the final outcome revealed itself. Perhaps one day, everything would abruptly disappear, and they would never know. At the very least, each use of Eleterria unceremoniously erased the world.
Before Tinasha could get too lost in such frightening thoughts, she felt Lavinia’s gaze on her and looked up. It was only fair that she reveal to the witch what she knew in return.
First, there was the name itself, Eleterria. Then there was the matter of there being two orbs, and the fact that the other was kept in Tuldarr’s treasure vault. Finally, after a great deal of hesitation, Tinasha also confessed that a man was seeking the powerful little spheres.
After listening with a scowl on her face the entire time, Lavinia snorted. “That’s probably the man who informed me about you two. The description matches.”
“What? Valt was the one who told you?”
“I’d guess it probably happened right after he let you go. His story sounded full of holes, but I did some digging and it seemed to check out, so I came to Farsas. If only I’d had the sense to kill him back then,” Lavinia said bitterly.
Tinasha blanched. Immediately after kidnapping and releasing her, Valt had set the next step of his scheme in motion. It felt as though no matter where Tinasha went, she was caught in his web. What else was Valt plotting?
After staring expressionlessly at Tinasha this whole time, Lavinia suddenly let out a sigh. Strangely enough, the action reminded Tinasha of something a mother would do.
“You’ll need to be extremely careful. He’s the type to use everything at his disposal,” Lavinia warned.
“Thank you… for the advice.”
“All right, I’m leaving,” the witch announced abruptly, turning around and casting a teleportation spell.
Tinasha reached for her. “Wait!”
Irritably, Lavinia replied, “What is it?”
Tinasha looked embarrassed. “You only came to talk about the orb?”
“I did. I can’t trust that idiot to take proper care of it unless I stress its importance. You need to hold the reins.”
There was no emotion in Lavinia’s voice, but Tinasha could still feel something prickling at her when the witch spoke—like a thorn that had been stuck in her heart. A question she had never been able to ask anyone else tumbled off her lips. Her mouth was dry as she asked, “Do you think it’s a crime to change the past and sacrifice yourself to save someone else?”
After a pause, Lavinia turned around. Her emerald eyes glowed in the light. A few silent moments passed before she spoke. “No matter how much you love someone, you should not change things from how they are meant to be. You must accept the past as it was. And sacrificing yourself on top of that is even more foolhardy. You were rescued once yourself, so you should know that it is no mercy for the physical body alone to survive.”
Her message was harsh, but true. Those who were saved at the expense of another’s life had to live with the trauma for the rest of their lives. Haunted by regrets over losing that person, some might even seek to return to the past.
While the witch likely grieved for her daughter, she was furious with her, too.
Though it saved her son’s life, Rosalia’s death shattered his heart. Had Lavinia not stepped in, it could have led to even further tragedy.
Tinasha said nothing more, only giving Lavinia a bow. She had her own lifelong burdens to bear, too.
The one bit of fortune was that Tinasha didn’t have to endure it alone.
After merely raising her eyebrow in response to Tinasha’s silence, Lavinia said, “You broke the curse magnificently. Don’t worry about the definition name. It was just a way to seal off that idiot’s memories while protecting him at the same time. And those spells you cast during the fight… During your waking years, you’ve grown into something more formidable than I.”
“Um… thank you,” Tinasha replied, feeling conflicted about such convoluted praise. She bowed again as she sensed Lavinia’s teleportation spell coming together.
Tinasha blinked, and the witch was gone without so much as a good-bye.
Upon returning to Tuldarr later that afternoon, the queen went around apologizing to everyone who had been worried about her. She was especially humbled upon discovering that Legis and the other royal advisers had shouldered her work for the three days she’d been absent.
Legis gave a faint smile. “It’s perfectly all right. How are you feeling?”
“Wonderful. I’m going to get to work,” she replied.
“Absolutely not. You will take today off,” he insisted, and Tinasha looked chastened.
She ordered everyone else out except for Legis and Renart and then revealed what had really happened with the kidnappings. Both were stunned to learn of a magic implement that could turn back time and the entire chain of events connected to it.
“I can’t believe such a thing really exists…”
“I’ve sealed it away, but I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she said.
“No, that was a prudent decision,” Legis assured her.
Tinasha had revealed to Legis that Oscar had traveled back in time. However, she’d initially withheld the method. The magic orb belonged to Tuldarr, but learning about its power right away could’ve provoked recklessness.
Tinasha also explained that there were people plotting to take the orb. Both she and Legis wore tense expressions as she outlined the situation to him. “Valt’s proved elusive, and he seems to have everything curiously well planned out. And he’s like a phantom, popping in and out of nowhere. We don’t know what sort of move he’ll make next, so I want you to be very careful.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Renart replied seriously and bowed to her. Then he crossed his arms as he added, “A magic orb that can leap through time to the past… That’s very alarming. What would it be used for?”
“Strictly speaking, whenever someone uses it, our ‘present’ ceases to exist,” Tinasha responded. At that, the temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Even if the user only sought a minor correction, the effects could be expansive and unpredictable. There was no predicting how the flow of time would change. While Tinasha didn’t know why Eleterria hadn’t activated at her touch, she regretted attempting to use it. That kind of power was not to be used lightly.
After nodding along to Tinasha’s explanation, Legis suddenly caught her eye and gave her a wan smile. “I wonder what Tuldarr would be like now if things had gone differently four hundred years ago.”
The question sent Tinasha’s mind racing.
What if Oscar had never saved me?
Recognizing that she was losing herself to the idea, she shook her head.
Steps descended through a narrow rock crevice, going deep underground. A man picked his way down them quickly and carefully. He kept one hand on the wall, while the other clutched something wrapped in white cloth. The lights spaced along the wall at regular intervals cast a long, black shadow behind him.
After an eternity, at last the stairway ended. Only cold air greeted the man.
A few days earlier, this had been the gathering place for all the filth in the world. Hundreds, perhaps more, had been sacrificed here to summon an evil that would swallow everything.
Yet now there was nothing. It had emerged on the surface… and succumbed to defeat.
All that remained were the dregs.
The man stood at the entrance to the enormous cavern. As his eyes darted all around with a fervor that made him seem possessed, he hugged the warm bundle tightly to his chest.
The court of Cezar was shrouded in gloom.
Most of those who held power in the castle had perished during the country’s recent defeat. The cult founder came scurrying back only to go missing, and some speculated he had been arrested in Farsas.
For those who hadn’t fallen under the sway of the cult, the light at the end of the tunnel seemed to be nearing at last. The evil god’s worshippers were gone. Unfortunately, there was little to celebrate, for they had lost so many of their kin.
The only ones with any power were the king, who had taken to his bed, his only son, Lomca, and a handful of magistrates. The cult had put anyone else with the drive and ambition to govern the country in the ground.
An air of resignation about Cezar’s slow demise hung about the castle. Amid that backdrop, two men made their way briskly along a hallway.
One was a magistrate, while the other was the prince. These two were the youngest left in the castle, and they had waited patiently for the Samila worshippers’ influence to wane.
“At any rate, we need to rebuild quickly, Your Highness,” said the magistrate.
“I have no explanation I can offer the people. Most of our citizens were lost,” replied the prince.
“The country has practically come to a standstill. Merchants are avoiding us. If things don’t change…”
International traders had been giving the rapidly collapsing nation a wide berth. Cult members had, until recently, maintained an authoritarian regime that managed to keep the country looking respectable from the outside. That facade had since vanished, however.
Now there was no structure at all, and everything was quickly falling to pieces.
These two men walking down a hallway were the ones who strongly wished to preserve Cezar.
The prince, Lomca, rifled through the papers he was carrying. “We really don’t have enough money… They used almost all of it. But it’s not like we can raise taxes, considering the circumstances—we should probably lower them, if anything. Or better yet, send money to everyone.”
Mothers and children who had lost a father conscripted into the war, elderly parents now sonless—Cezar had no end of such families, and it had no future if it couldn’t save them. Lomca pursed his lips, feeling a keen sense of duty.
While his intentions were virtuous, he was at a loss when it came to concrete solutions.
The magistrate gave a defeated look. “Perhaps we should request aid somewhere.”
“If need be, we can sell what’s left in the treasure vault. We’ll figure it out.”
As they hurried along, their path was suddenly cut off by three men. Lomca gasped when he caught sight of their faces. These were the last survivors of the cult.
“That’s a very interesting idea you were discussing, Your Highness. If you’re clearing out treasure, by all means, let us help,” one man said with a snicker.
“Get out of here! Who do you think left this country in such a mess?!” Lomca snapped.
“That isn’t very convincing coming from a man who kept quiet the whole time,” another one of the ruffians countered, sneering. His cohorts burst out laughing, causing Lomca to flush in anger. Yet he felt cold sweat trickle down his back at the same time. The cult members were mages, and he was powerless against them. He glanced over at the magistrate, who had gone pale. They exchanged a look.
Just when it looked like they might be able to edge past the men, they found their path blocked again. Lomca felt despair settling over him and was therefore surprised when a new voice sounded in the corridor. His words were so strong and clear that they stuck out in the gloomy castle.
“I’m here to have a chat with the people running Cezar. Is it all right with you if I clear these guys out, Prince Lomca?”
Looking over, he saw that there was a man standing behind the three mages from the cult. While Lomca had no idea who he was, he shouted to his unexpected savior, “Yes! They drove our country into the ground, and I want them gone!”
“I won’t hold back, then,” the unfamiliar man replied, and he struck immediately.
Just as the three men were turning around indignantly, a spell shot out from the man’s hands, entangling them. Faintly glowing magic ropes offset the spells the men were about to cast and wrapped around their necks.
After a sickening crunch, the trio of lifeless bodies dropped to the floor.
Lomca had looked away instinctively. Then a cool, refreshing voice, wholly unlike the one he had just heard, said, “There. Now we can talk properly. I’ll leave the corpses to you.”
“Er, yes… thank you so much,” Lomca answered, and he looked to the one who had rescued him.
When the man caught Lomca’s eyes on him, he flashed the crest of Tuldarr emblazoned on his upper arm.
After the group moved to a room where they could talk, the man called Renart explained why he had come. Apparently, Tuldarr was interested in purchasing the mining rights to the vast crystal caves in northern Cezar.
Lomca was aware of the high-quality deposits Renart was referring to. However, the veins were close to the border with Tayiri, and the area had a history of cave-ins, so it was practically abandoned nowadays. Naturally, the Magic Empire of Tuldarr wanted the crystals for use as magic implements, but Lomca had to wonder why they were coming to Cezar now of all times.
The prince’s doubt only intensified when he learned of the offered price. There on the paper Renart passed to him was a figure that rivaled the annual national budget.
Lomca blurted out, “We’re very grateful, but isn’t this far too much?”
“We will actually be purchasing the rights for a quarter of this amount,” Renart explained. “The rest of the money will serve as collateral for the duration of the crystal mining, as the site is so close to the Tayiri border. After the excavation is complete, we’d like you to pay it back. Of course, we don’t mind if that takes years.”
Tuldarr and Tayiri were not on cordial terms, considering one was the Magic Empire and the other was a nation that spurned magic. During the mining process, Tuldarr citizens would be frequenting a location close to the edge of Tayiri, and so Cezar would be expected to smooth things over.
But even for all that, the figure was very high. Stranger still was that Tuldarr did not stipulate a schedule for repayment.
Lomca stared at Renart, who could surmise what that gaze meant and offered a wan smile in return.
This was all being done as a kindness on Tuldarr’s part. It was a way to facilitate Cezar’s reconstruction, though not openly. Upon the queen’s return to Tuldarr, she had broached the subject with Legis apprehensively, showing him her plan for providing aid. Legis had smiled and agreed with it. After all, this wasn’t pure altruism. If Tayiri ever grew hostile, being able to collect on Cezar’s debt would come in handy. In Legis’s opinion, no price was too high to pay for that security.
“If we are in agreement, then I will bring you an official contract on a later date,” said Renart.
Lomca, having read between the lines of Tuldarr’s offer, stood up and bowed. “We gladly accept. And please tell the queen that we’re speechless with gratitude.”
Renart nodded. “I certainly will.” After clarifying some points and hammering down a few details here and there, the mage narrowed his eyes. What he inquired about next was likely the true purpose of his visit. “So… could you tell us where that evil god was based? We’d like to conduct an investigation so we can all avoid any future anxiety.”
Lomca and his magistrate gasped.
Upon his return, Renart went straight to the queen’s study. Instead of being in her usual place at her desk, the queen was dozing on a sofa in the corner of the room while Legis handled royal paperwork for her.
Catching Renart’s confused expression, Legis smiled. “She seems tired. I did want to take her back to her own rooms to sleep…”
The queen had only gotten back the day before, and while she claimed to be feeling fine, she had a low-grade fever, and her health was not at all stable. Legis had encouraged her to rest, but she had insisted on working. The current situation reflected the compromise they had reached.
Legis inclined his head with curiosity. “How did it go in Cezar?”
“They agreed readily enough. Unsurprisingly, things over there are very rough,” Renart reported.
“I see. I’m glad they accepted,” Legis replied. After hearing a detailed account from Renart, he began to draft an official contract to send to Cezar. Eyes still glued to his work, he inquired, “And the other thing?”
“I’ve gone to look at it. An enormous underground cave has been dug in a forest close to the border. A great hole sits in the center. The human sacrifices were probably thrown into it.”
“What was left?”
“Nothing. It was entirely spotless. I only sensed some traces of miasma… I had a mystical spirit inspect it, too. It really seems like there’s nothing left.”
“Hmm…”
Another forbidden curse had been destroyed, and the news of that had doubtless spread across the continent already. If Tuldarr could establish itself as a power capable of resisting forbidden curses, perhaps that wicked magic would become a thing of the past.
Legis broke into a smile as that momentary fantasy flitted through his mind.
“That said, it felt… almost too spotless. It’s very abnormal for there to be no residue after bringing a magical creature into existence. I believe someone may have scrubbed away the traces,” added Renart.
“But for what purpose?” Legis wondered.
Renart retrieved a white cloth from his pouch. When he spread it out, it was about the size of a cloak. “I found this on the stairs down there. I think it’s still fresh.”
Legis frowned. “What could that possibly be? Go ahead and have it processed for potion remains.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Renart replied. After a bow, he left the study.
The prince fell into deep thought for a while, mulling over this very mysterious report.
Of the four Great Nations, Farsas and Gandona each had an annual affair to which international guests were invited as a way to foster diplomacy. For Farsas, it was a celebration for the king’s birthday, while in Gandona, the festivities were to commemorate the nation’s founding.
Implicit in these parties was the opportunity for those from other countries to gather, feel each other out, and build relations.
More than a week had passed since the battle with the Witch of Silence, and Tinasha was wholly recovered. She skimmed through letters from Farsas regarding the celebration to be held in two weeks’ time.
She made a clear face of disgust. “This isn’t an invitation; it’s a set of instructions. I feel more like a member of the Farsas side than a guest.”
“Isn’t he going to introduce you to everyone as his fiancée?” Mila reminded her, sipping tea at the table.
The documents delivered to Tinasha from Farsas contained a schedule of events for the day of the party, and she could tell based on the contents that it was also partially a request that she greet and entertain guests as Oscar’s companion. Everyone knew that she would marry him upon abdicating the Tuldarr throne, so while she was still queen, she also half belonged to Farsas.
Tinasha felt at her wit’s end over the complicated position she’d put herself in. “It’s not like I mind talking with guests… It’s part of my job, after all. I just can’t help but feel like there’s a bed of thorns waiting for me.”
“That man is certainly very popular with the ladies. You’re sure to get your share of dirty looks from jealous girls,” Mila pointed out.
Tinasha groaned. “Ugh! No thank you!”
She returned her attention to the papers. At the end, Oscar had scrawled I’ll have a dress ready for you, so come as you are.
She giggled at his messy handwriting. Without meaning to, she whispered, “I’m so happy…”
Jumping up with the documents in hand, Tinasha skipped over to the open window and hopped up onto the ledge.
Her black locks fluttered in the gentle breeze. She peered outside, her eyes half-lidded in her joy.
It’s been more than seven months since I woke up in this era. But it feels like it’s gone by so quickly.
Each day was fulfilling; Tinasha felt just as happy as she had the month she spent with Oscar when she was a girl. Perhaps even more so.
Yet from time to time, guilt over her own elation would hit her. So much sacrifice and good faith had brought who she was now into being. That was something she’d never forget.
Still, that was no reason for her to grow pessimistic. If living creatures didn’t live freely and proudly, how could the world go on turning? It was the duty of the survivors to keep moving forward—that was what she believed now.
While Tinasha was rereading the papers, she smelled a strange odor and glanced outside.
Mila noticed her frowning and asked, “What is it, Lady Tinasha?”
“Well, it’s just… I’ve caught a whiff of a bit of odd magic.”
“Have you? I don’t sense anything,” Mila replied.
“I suppose it’s just my imagination. Maybe someone’s practicing their spells.”
Tinasha jumped off the windowsill onto the floor. Spirits had been posted in the palace during her three-day absence, but they had reported nothing out of the ordinary. The castle was teeming with mages who often used magic in their research and training. Tinasha decided it was nothing to worry about.
She pulled out her chair and sat back down at her desk, pasted her queen’s smile on her face, and reached for the stack of pending documents.
“You are not to cause any trouble. Got it?” the young girl warned.
“I know,” the man replied as they departed a mansion together. In the face of her stubbornness, he flashed her a smile that masked his true motives. The brilliant grin only appeared to make her more unsure, however.
“Can I trust that you do?” she questioned skeptically.
“You have no faith in me.”
“Of course I don’t. Look at how you’ve acted,” she spat, but he had nothing to say for himself.
He pushed her forward. “Come on, let’s go.”
“All right, all right,” accepted the girl dressed in her finest, turning her back on the man and marching off.
As he watched her go, a dangerous glint suddenly came into the man’s eyes. His good looks took on an openly sinister tinge, and his smile vanished. There was bloodlust sufficient to rip the world to shreds coming from him.
No one was around to see it, though. For now, it remained an unknown element.
“What’s taking you? Hurry up, Travis,” urged the girl.
“I’m coming. You know, the bow at your back is crooked.”
“It is?!” she yelped, reaching around to try to fix it on her own.
Travis grinned and took it upon himself to retie the oversized bow more neatly than she could have. “There, it’s fixed now. You’ll be the most beautiful one there, Aurelia.”
“I don’t need your flattery, and I don’t want you doing anything stupid,” she retorted. Left speechless, the king of the demons snorted and set off.
Indelible traces of bloodlust still lurked beneath the surface of his smile.
On the day of the king’s birthday celebration, the sky was clear and gorgeous. It was warm, but not hot. Tinasha arrived in Farsas while those inside the castle were still running around to get everything ready. She was directed to a room where she found an eager Sylvia and some ladies-in-waiting. Tinasha’s friend and fellow mage seemed to take a particular interest in dressing her, so she put in more effort than was necessary at every opportunity to do so.
“We’ve been expecting you, Queen Tinasha!” Sylvia trilled. “How I’ve waited for this day since we very first met!”
“Oof, that’s a long time,” muttered Tinasha, already exhausted by Sylvia’s intense enthusiasm. But she couldn’t run away, and she didn’t have time to put up a fight. As instructed by Sylvia, Tinasha let herself be bathed by the ladies-in-waiting. She was still a little sleepy, so she didn’t mind letting them take care of her. As she breathed in the perfumed oils in the bathwater, she stretched out her limbs.
“Sylvia, are your injuries all healed?” Tinasha asked.
“Yes, completely! Thank you for worrying about me.” Sylvia grinned as she ran a comb through Tinasha’s long black hair. She was so excited for Tinasha’s debut that she could hardly stand it. Her fervor was exemplified by the diverse array of cosmetic bottles all lined up. There were far more than usual.
“The king told me to tell you that the dress you’ll be wearing today is his present for your birthday,” Sylvia explained.
“It is?!” Tinasha cried; she hadn’t expected that at all. Her legs slid from the edges of the tub back into the bath, splashing water onto her face.
She recalled that Oscar had asked when her birthday was around a month ago, when they’d been discussing the annual Farsas party. For whatever reason, he had pinched her cheek when she’d told him the date had passed already.
Her fiancé’s sneak attack made Tinasha flush with joy. “I’m no longer at an age where I celebrate my birthday, so it had totally slipped my mind.”
“How old are you now?”
“Umm… four hundred and thirty-two? Or maybe four hundred and thirty-three…?”
Sylvia gave a confused look. “That’s… quite unbelievable.”
While Tinasha’s physical body put her at twenty, she had actually been alive for centuries. In fact, her total number of years was easily twenty times Oscar’s. However, since she had spent most of that time asleep, she possessed less life experience than he did.
“Despite all those years, I’m still inexperienced. I have much more to learn,” Tinasha said with a slight grimace as she rested her legs on the tub’s edge again, crossing them.
The warmth of the water filled her, making her feel entirely protected and safe.
It took another two and a half hours after the bath before Tinasha was completely ready. In that time, she endured a long procession of hairstyle and makeup tests. At first, Sylvia and the ladies-in-waiting asked Tinasha her opinion on each one, but she only gave halfhearted, reluctant answers. So they eventually took it upon themselves to decide everything on their own.
The king’s gift was an extravagant gown constructed of unbleached, handwoven lace. Bright-green climbing roses were embroidered along the edges of the short puffed sleeves. The neckline was open, with a row of buttons running down the bodice. The skirts were made of layer upon layer of lace. In the front, the dress flared out in a gentle arc; while in the back, it cascaded into a train.
Sylvia smiled after tying the waist sash into a large bow at the back. “His Majesty understands very well how to best set off your charms.”
“Mmm. I have no idea what you’re saying,” Tinasha responded dully. Sylvia looked rather defeated at that.
Tinasha’s hair was half swept back, with an abundance of fresh flowers arranged in the hair at the back of her head. Together with her neat, trim gown, she made for the very picture of loveliness. Nearly gone was the intimidating, daunting aura she normally gave off at formal events. Her soft, charming appearance would fit in perfectly at Oscar’s side as his fiancée.
Sylvia took a step back and looked Tinasha over from head to toe, then she made a minute adjustment to the flowers in her hair. “There, it’s perfect!”
“Thank you so much,” said Tinasha with a smile and a curtsy, then inspected herself in the full-length mirror. In it, she saw a blushing young bride about to head out for her wedding. It was a side of herself she was so unaccustomed to seeing that embarrassment rolled over her.
When she glanced at the clock, she saw it was only a half hour until the event began. Sylvia had begun to tidy everything up to pack it away, and Tinasha asked her, “Can I step out for a bit?”
“Of course you can. Just tell me if anything gets messed up, and I’ll fix it,” Sylvia answered readily. With that, Tinasha left the room. Picking up her skirts, she made her way down the hallway.
With the party commencing soon, magistrates and ladies-in-waiting were flying back and forth frantically. One by one, they noticed Tinasha and turned their heads to watch her go. Feeling guilty about distracting them, Tinasha headed for a slightly less populated route. She was meandering through the halls when she glanced outside and stopped. In the courtyard below was a girl. Based on her formal garb, she must have been a guest. Her silver hair glittering in the sunlight set off her sky-blue gown. Because Tinasha was up so high, she couldn’t see her face clearly, but the girl was looking all around her as if searching for something.
Puzzled, Tinasha lay a hand on the window. She cast a short-range teleportation spell.
The girl was naturally surprised that Tinasha appeared before her so suddenly, but she quickly recognized what the woman had done. Realizing that they were both dressed formally, the girl bowed her head. “Ah, I’m sorry…”
“Is there something you’re looking for? Can I help you?” asked Tinasha. If this girl needed help, then two heads were better than one. That seemed to be in the spirit of the festivities.
Seeming frightened, the girl glanced all around her nervously. “Oh, um, I thought I heard a baby crying…”
“A baby?” Tinasha repeated with uncertainty.
Farsas Castle was not home to any infants, unless a guest had traveled with theirs. It was difficult to imagine a guest bringing their newborn to a foreign country, though.
Tinasha listened, but she couldn’t hear any crying. The girl must not have been able to hear anything, either, because she blushed and bowed her head. “I’m very sorry for troubling you.”
“It’s all right. I’ll keep an eye out myself,” replied Tinasha, and the girl flashed her a charming smile. Her grayish-blue eyes sparkled with a pure glow that drew Tinasha in.
She’s very pretty, but that’s not all. There’s something mysterious about her.
The girl was a mage, or she had the makings of one. Tinasha detected strong magic within her and was impressed.
As the girl glanced shyly over at Tinasha, her eyes momentarily darkened, like someone in pain. Tinasha wanted to ask what was wrong, but the girl bowed her head again before she could. When she lifted her head back up, there were no longer any traces of shadow in her eyes.
She broke into a shy smile. “My companion is waiting for me, so I must take my leave now. Thank you very much for taking the time to help.”
“Oh, then I suppose I’ll see you around,” the queen responded.
The girl gave an eager nod, curtsied, and left. It wasn’t until she was out of sight that Tinasha realized she and the girl hadn’t introduced themselves. “I should have asked her name.”
She was a strangely entrancing person, and it was likely that they’d meet again soon. With that thought in mind, Tinasha returned to the castle.
Once the courtyard was deserted, there came the faint sound of a crying baby.
There was no longer anyone to hear it, however.
After changing into formalwear of his own while completing the final checks for the event, Oscar appraised Tinasha with narrowed eyes as she entered the ballroom antechamber. Waving her closer, he picked her up and settled her on his knees. “You look stunning in that.”
“Thank you for the dress,” she replied.
“Mm-hmm. I’m very satisfied with it,” he replied quietly, giving a gentle tug to one lock of her hair, careful not to ruin her updo in the back. “Tonight’s going to be a pain, but power through it.”
“I came here prepared to do so,” she assured him with a mischievous grin, holding out her right hand to him, palm up. A silver ring appeared in it. A small obsidian stone reminiscent of her eyes was set into the thin band, and magical sigils were delicately engraved on its surface.
“Give me your hand,” she ordered.
“Which one?”
“Either. Oh, but your left one would be best, as it won’t get in the way.”
Oscar offered his left hand to Tinasha, as she had requested. She picked up the ring and held it against his large, masculine fingers. “Maybe I should make it a little bigger?”
After she gave a short incantation that made the ring grow one size larger, she slipped it onto Oscar’s middle finger. With another spell, the ring shrank a little to fit perfectly. Its elastic nature made it seem like it wasn’t made of metal at all, and Oscar watched in rapt fascination.
“What’s this made of?” he asked.
“Silver. It simply had magic applied to it when it was cast,” Tinasha explained, checking the ring’s fit. Then she murmured another incantation, but there were no visible changes when this one was done.
Catching Oscar frowning at it in confusion, she smiled. “That made the ring invisible to everyone except you.”
“I see. So it’s mine now?”
“Of course it is. This is a magic implement with a spell inside. Slide the stone, and it will activate. It will only work once, but it will disable any teleportation magic within a fixed radius with you at the center. Going out, coming in, and moving objects around will be impossible.”
Oscar’s eyes grew wide as he listened to his fiancée’s explanation. He stared down at the ring. “That’s amazing. Is this because of the battle we had earlier?”
“More or less. I’m sure fighting a mage who can teleport and fly around must be inconvenient for you. You can fly with Nark’s help, of course, but it’ll be easier if no one can teleport around. The effect lasts for about ten minutes. After it’s used, I’ll need to enchant it again.”
“This should really help me out a lot. Thank you,” Oscar said, and Tinasha gave a shy smile. But soon enough, her face took on a serious cast as she emphasized one point. “Once this seals off teleportation, it will prevent both enemies and allies from coming in or out, so be very careful about when you choose to use it.”
“So you won’t be able to teleport, either?”
“No, I won’t,” Tinasha confirmed. “If I’d crafted it so that I alone wouldn’t be affected, it would weaken the effect, defeating the purpose. I wanted it powerful enough to trap a witch.”
Oscar nodded. “Got it. I’ll be careful.” Then he checked the ring’s fit.
Lavinia’s attacks with summoned swords were difficult to parry. Should he face another enemy just as formidable again, he would now have a way to tip things back in his favor. Oscar was very grateful that Tinasha observed and learned from his past battles.
She glanced up at him and gave him an utterly enchanting smile. “Happy birthday.”
The words felt a little childish. Evidently, this ring was her present to him. Oscar burst out laughing when he realized that her gift was entirely practical and his wasn’t.
Tinasha’s eyes went as wide as a cat’s as she stared at him. “What? What’s wrong? Did I do something weird?”
“No, not at all. You’re just really fascinating. Thank you,” Oscar said, cupping her cheek and drawing close to press a kiss onto her scarlet-painted lips.
When he pulled away, Tinasha was red to the tips of her ears. She left the room still feeling confused over why he had told her she was fascinating.
The event began on time.
Tinasha stood at Oscar’s side as his fiancée and as the queen of Tuldarr. She offered pleasant smiles to the guests from a litany of countries who kept coming up to greet them. As she did so, she also asked probing questions about several things she needed to research further.
Tuldarr was in the midst of upheaval, and it had recently provided forbidden curse counterattack forces to Farsas during Cezar’s attack. She needed to determine how people from each nation regarded Tuldarr.
Nearly everyone offered excessive praise for the celebration or congratulations on her engagement to Oscar. Only the prince of Tayiri greeted them formally and stiffly.
Once the wave of people subsided, Tinasha leaned over and whispered to Oscar. “No one had any criticism. I was sure there would be.”
“See? Aren’t you glad we got engaged?”
“I don’t think that’s it… but yes, sure,” she answered. Tinasha was entirely unaware that her appearance was playing a large role. Had she been dressed more like a queen, it might have put the visiting dignitaries on guard. Today, however, she looked like any other beautiful young woman.
The people who came to judge how Tinasha would present herself at her first public appearance as Oscar’s fiancée were taken aback upon catching their first glimpse of her smiling so gracefully next to him. In all likelihood, some of them had to be wondering if this was the same queen they’d seen inherit the mystical spirits.
Oscar was deeply amused because he’d anticipated as much when he’d designed Tinasha’s dress, though the responses exceeded even his expectations. He smirked as he basked in a faint sense of superiority.
Tinasha didn’t seem to enjoy women casting her dirty, jealous looks, but Oscar thought he got his share of those, too. Many people envied him for managing to lay claim to a queen who united incomparable power and beauty.
“Although you’re quite the wild child on the inside,” he muttered.
“Hey! Where’s that coming from? I haven’t broken any windows today,” Tinashsa protested.
“Today? Don’t break any at all. I was just wondering if I’m the only one who can manage you.”
Tinasha narrowed her eyes, peering up at Oscar with a puzzled expression. “What are you getting at?”
Before he could answer, a young lady approached the two. Once Tinasha caught sight of her face, she let out a little cry. It was the girl she had met in the courtyard.
With a smile, the silver-haired girl curtsied before them. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Your Majesties. My name is Aurelia Canao Naysha Faurecia. I have come on behalf of the king of Gandona, and I offer you my most sincere congratulations.”
“Thank you for that very courteous greeting. Please give the king my best regards,” Oscar replied.
“Of course,” Aurelia replied with another curtsy.
Tinasha gave her a dazzling smile. “My name is Tinasha As Meyer Ur Aeterna Tuldarr. I’m sorry for startling you earlier.”
“I apologize as well, and I should have introduced myself to you then.”
Oscar looked confused, so Tinasha explained that she and Aurelia had met earlier in the courtyard. As she recounted the story, she remembered something. “Oh, didn’t you say you were here with someone?”
“Yes, I’m here with my guardian… Travis?” Aurelia called, turning around to summon him over.
Tinasha’s jaw dropped. Had she been drinking something, she would have spit it out. Next to her, Oscar was just as stupefied.
A silver-haired man sauntered over to the stunned pair and swept into an elegant bow.
When he rose, he had a teasing smirk on his face. Oscar recovered faster than Tinasha did, placing a hand on Akashia’s hilt. He glared at Travis, prepared to draw the weapon at any time.
“You’ve got some nerve showing yourself before me again,” said Oscar in a low, threatening voice.
“Come now, don’t you realize where we are? There’s a time and a place, Your Majesty,” Travis chided.
Things had gotten very tense very quickly, and Tinasha hurried to step between her fiancé and the demon. She held up her hands between them. “L-let’s just calm down. Okay, Oscar?”
“Get out of the way, Tinasha,” Oscar growled.
“No. You need to stop,” she said. A few nearby guests had noticed something was off and glanced in their direction with curiosity.
Tinasha glanced at Travis, still smirking, and Aurelia, whose eyes had gone very wide. Aurelia must have understood Tinasha’s distress and tugged on Travis’s arm. “Travis! Didn’t I tell you not to cause any trouble?!”
“And so I haven’t today.”
“Then what do you call this?!” she cried, grabbing hold of his ear and tugging on it so hard he bowed his head.
Aurelia lowered her head, too. “I don’t know what he’s done, but I feel equally responsible. I’m really very sorry.”
The king of all demons was being forced to bow by a girl of only fifteen or sixteen. Oscar and Tinasha exchanged a look at the unexpected scene.
Travis was grumbling, “Ow, let me go,” but it only made Aurelia pinch him harder.
At a loss for how to reply to that, the king of Farsas let his fiancée pull him back a step. Pressing both hands together in supplication before him, Tinasha pleaded, “I understand how you feel, but calm down. Please.”
Upon seeing how truly distressed she looked, Oscar finally regained his composure. Once he’d reined in and concealed his emotions, he turned to Aurelia and said, “I apologize as well. There is no issue, so please lift your head.”
“Thank you so much for your forgiveness,” she answered, rising. Her silvery-blue eyes darted from the king to Tinasha, but both of their expressions betrayed no trouble.
The king gave Travis a regal look, then bowed formally and took his leave. For a moment, Tinasha seemed like she wanted to say something to Aurelia, but in the end, she merely flashed her a strained smile and followed after Oscar.
As she watched the king and his bride-to-be depart, Aurelia covertly elbowed Travis in the side. “What do you think you were doing?!”
“She’s an old acquaintance of mine. I have a history of riling her up a little.”
“You are the worst,” Aurelia said with a sigh. This guardian of hers was constantly getting himself into trouble with ladies because of his good looks and bad personality. It wasn’t impossible to think he might have a history with the beautiful queen of Tuldarr.
Aurelia threw him a look full of worry, anger, and a tiny bit of jealousy. “An old flame?”
“Of course not. I don’t go for that independent type at all,” Travis replied flippantly, though he raised one eyebrow like he’d realized something. He stared at Aurelia.
She fidgeted, uncomfortable under Travis’s gaze. “What?” she asked.
“Hmm… actually, I suppose there are a few self-sufficient girls that are all right,” he said.
“Is that so?” Aurelia said in a chilly, unamused tone.
It wasn’t too strange. Of course he would be fond of someone beautiful. Aurelia recalled when she and the queen first met in the courtyard. Tinasha had come down because she saw that a stranger was searching for something.
She was warm, kind, and beautiful in a mature way. Anyone would adore her.
Aurelia closed her eyes. Those silly thoughts were making her heart hurt. It didn’t matter, because the queen was already engaged. Before she could hang her head too low, Travis stroked her hair. “Be a good girl.”
“Don’t treat me like a child.”
“But you are a child. Behave, and I’ll protect you. I promise,” he reminded her. Aurelia couldn’t bring herself to glance up and see what kind of expression Travis was making.
She nodded anyway, though, choosing to believe him.
By the time the event was winding down and guests were starting to leave, a man and a woman were floating high in the skies above Farsas Castle. The woman’s manicured brows were gathered in a scowl as she spat, “That was a horrible trick you pulled back there…”
“What an accusation. I simply attended as the guardian of the heir to a throne,” he replied innocently.
“Wow. Nice excuse… exactly what I’d expect from someone who isn’t human.” The woman sighed, massaging her aching temples. “I got chewed out for your antics. Please don’t do that to me again.”
“How wonderful for you that you’re marrying such a narrow-minded man. Anyway, I have something to discuss with you.”
“What is it?” she asked carelessly.
An evil smile materialized on Travis’s face. He pointed straight at her. “I want to collect on the debt you owe me for saving your life.”
Before her mind even had time to comprehend the meaning of his words, a chill ran up Tinasha’s spine. Twice now, Travis had let her go free when she was on the verge of death. Now he wanted to cash in that favor. Tinasha quickly summoned a spell.
However, Travis waved a hand to stop her. “Don’t be so hasty. I’m not here to kill you. I have a request to make.”
Tinasha frowned. Dismissing her half-formed magic, she tilted her head to one side. “What is it?”
“I want you to stand in for my girl,” Travis stated.
“Excuse me?!” Tinasha exclaimed. She didn’t immediately understand, but assumed that his “girl” was Aurelia, the pretty young thing Tinasha had met earlier. While she was still very young, she did possess a mysterious charm. Her will was strong, and she was clearly intelligent.
But why did Travis want Tinasha to act as a proxy for her? The insane request was difficult to make sense of.
“What do you mean, ‘stand in’?”
“Apparently, a pest of a woman has just woken up, and I think she’s going to try killing Aurelia. I’m planning to go end the threat myself before that can happen, but I don’t want one of her underlings sneaking in while I’m away. I’ll post guards, but that’s not enough to reassure me. So I want you to take Aurelia’s place.”
“Seriously?”
What an exceedingly inconvenient, selfish request. Tinasha felt sorry for Aurelia, who had gotten dragged into this. Feeling a headache coming on, Tinasha pressed her fingers against her temples again. “When you say ‘a pest of a woman,’ what do you mean?”
“Someone just like me.”
“So she has a twisted personality?”
“No,” Travis snapped. “I mean she has the same rank as me.”
“Which means… she’s a demon queen?!”
“More or less. She’s pretty clingy. It’s been a real pain.”
“What kind of love life do you have?” Tinasha muttered. The witch Tinasha killed had also been one of Travis’s old paramours. He must have dumped her in the most despicable way because she’d positively loathed him. Supposedly, he couldn’t kill the witch because of a contract he’d signed with her when she’d first summoned him. It was quite fortunate for him that Tinasha ended up killing her.
While Tinasha struggled to accept the situation, Travis continued matter-of-factly. “Given what you owe me, you have no right to refuse.”
“Hold on, just a minute here,” Tinasha insisted, holding up both hands in the air. Travis was instructing her to become a target for another supremely powerful demon. There was no world in which she would instantly agree to that.
Travis wasn’t about to let Tinasha refuse, however. Glaring at her in disgust, he said, “Are you stupid? This will make us even. I’d call this a good deal for you.”
“Yes, but…”
“You know, your marrying into Farsas certainly makes things interesting. Tuldarr or Farsas, which is your country, I wonder?” he taunted. Tinasha paled as she realized what he was referring to. A long time ago, as thanks for killing the witch, Travis had promised not to do anything to her country. The implication was that after she wed Oscar, she would have to choose one over the other. Travis was threatening harm against the one she didn’t pick.
Gandona and Farsas shared a border. Tinasha certainly wanted to keep Travis from hurting Farsas, but she didn’t want him damaging Tuldarr, either.
“Accept, and I’ll steer clear of both nations, so long as your bloodline continues. One or two doesn’t make much difference to me.”
“Urgh…”
Travis was offering a lot, which meant that his request had to be incredibly dangerous.
Tinasha crossed her arms. When she shot a glance at Travis, he flashed her one of his usual easy, indolent grins. She could tell it was a facade, however.
“What is Aurelia to you?” Tinasha questioned.
“Where’d that come from?” he countered.
“I’d just like to know.”
Travis’s face screwed up in annoyance at the inquiry. He looked like he wanted to brush it off but gave up on that once he caught sight of the serious look in Tinasha’s eyes. He tutted in irritation. “She’s just some girl. I like her, so I stick around. That’s all it is. I don’t want her to die when she’s still so young.”
“Hmmm.”
“Are you going to do it or aren’t you?” Travis demanded.
“I’ll do it,” Tinasha agreed with a shrug. While it was going to be a bother, the terms were the most favorable Travis would ever give. Travis would handle the demon queen herself, and Tinasha had her spirits if she ran into trouble. It wasn’t a bad deal.
Besides, it would certainly be a shame for Aurelia to die. Tinasha had been rescued when she was close to Aurelia’s age, and she wanted to protect someone in return. Plus, Travis’s attachment to the heir to Gandona was intriguing. Maybe his time with Aurelia was changing him.
Once Tinasha agreed, the briefest glint of relief crossed Travis’s black eyes. It quickly vanished, though, replaced by his typical cockiness. “All right. Unbutton your bodice a little.”
Tinasha looked offended. “Why should I?”
“I have to put it somewhere that your clothing will conceal it. Keep blathering, and I’m just going to tear your dress open.”
“N-no thank you,” Tinasha said. Oscar had given her this gown. Despite some reluctance, she undid three buttons in the front to expose more of her chest. Travis pointed to the patch of creamy white skin.
“Blossom.”
With just one word, a crest the size of a child’s palm appeared on Tinasha’s skin. The vermilion mark in the shape of a rose stood out against her porcelain flesh. The bright red hue made it look almost poisonous.
“That should do it. That mark says that you’re mine. Any demon will recognize it right away.”
“Whoa. You’re going to erase this later, right?” Tinasha asked.
Travis nodded. “Once everything is over, I will. Try not to get yourself killed.”
“I know, I know. Does Aurelia have one of these, too?”
“Of course not,” Travis replied curtly, then he vanished.
Tinasha stared at the spot where he’d been floating, her eyes wide. “Well, that was… unexpected.”
This was a demon who, up until now, had cast people aside like disposable playthings. Yet now he was treating a girl like his most precious treasure. Twice now, Tinasha had escaped death only on Travis’s whim. She gazed up at the sky and burst out laughing, unsure whether she should feel more amused or terrified.
The party had concluded twenty minutes before, and all the guests who were not staying at the castle had gone home. Lazar finished clearing things away in the ballroom and was about to leave when Oscar called out, “Have you seen Tinasha?”
“No, I haven’t,” Lazar replied, suddenly realizing she’d been absent for a while. “Shall I go search for her?”
“Please. Try her dressing room and my rooms.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Lazar replied, aware that Oscar’s stormy countenance stemmed from the tiff he had gotten into with the guests from Gandona. Lazar had already verified that Aurelia and her companion were back in Gandona, but the king still appeared troubled.
As ordered, Lazar checked the room assigned to Tinasha for use as her dressing room, but no one was there. He then headed for the king’s rooms.
“Surely she didn’t return to Tuldarr without saying anything,” Lazar muttered.
He made his way down the corridor until he heard a strange noise and stopped. It sounded like a cat meowing. Lazar followed the sound around a corner and arrived at a pillar just past where a guard was posted. A large basket was set behind the column.
Did someone abandon a cat?
Lazar inspected the basket. A white cloth covered the top, but the noises were undoubtedly coming from underneath. Lazar lifted the fabric and then had to stifle a cry of surprise.
A human baby of no more than four months was lying in the basket. The infant had stopped crying, likely from the surprise of being met by another person. Blue eyes flew open and scanned the surroundings.
Lazar met the child’s gaze, and he gasped. “Did… someone lose a baby? That can’t be…”
Flustered, Lazar looked all around the hallway. No one was there. Deciding he should take the baby somewhere safe, he picked up the basket, only to notice a letter tucked inside. Upon close inspection, it was only a folded note and not even formally sealed.
The message was addressed to the king of Farsas. Lazar quickly scanned the few written lines.
Lazar nearly shrieked again at how unbelievable the letter was. The baby started crying once more before he could, however. He tried to pick up the infant, but the note was in the way.
“I’ll take that,” said someone from behind, plucking the letter from Lazar’s hands.
“Oh, thank you,” Lazar replied as he bent to grab the child. But just as he was breathing a sigh of relief, he froze. Who was behind him?
Fearfully, Lazar turned around—and this time he really did scream. The king’s fiancée was standing only a few paces away. “AAAAHHHH!”
“Whoa!” Tinasha cried, putting her hands over her head. When she dropped them, she scowled at Lazar. “You’re going to startle the baby. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Th-the letter… the letter…”
“What about it? Should I read it?”
“N-no…”
Lazar blubbered, incapable of thinking up a way to cleverly stop her.
Tinasha opened up the note, and her dark eyes scanned the contents. “What in the world…?”
“W-wait, Queen Tinasha—”
“What’s all this fuss about? Oh, there you are, Tinasha.” Oscar strolled up from the opposite end of the hallway. He must have heard Lazar’s shriek.
Lazar didn’t know if Oscar’s arrival meant salvation or damnation.
The king glanced from his grimacing fiancée to his attendant, who looked about to burst into tears. Then his gaze landed on the baby Lazar was holding, and his expression turned to one of shock. “Whose child is that? Where did it come from?”
Instead of answering, Tinasha held out the piece of paper to him. Oscar received it and read it quickly. In a lady’s handwriting, the letter claimed that the infant was the king’s, and requested that he raise it.
“What is this?” Oscar asked.
The woman who’d penned the note did not name herself. Oscar was so stunned he almost let the piece of paper fall to the floor. To Tinasha, who looked extremely unamused, he managed, “It’s not mine.”
“Y-yes, that must be true! His Majesty wouldn’t make such a foolish mistake!” Lazar frantically added, his support only digging a deeper hole for his king. Oscar gave him a light slap upside the head.
Tinasha coldly eyed the two men who were losing their heads over this unanticipated turn of events. “Do both of you think I’m stupid? The math doesn’t add up here any way you look at it.”
Oscar and Lazar looked at each other. When they thought about it, they realized Tinasha was right. The king’s curse had only been broken two months ago. No child of his would’ve been born yet. What’s more, Oscar got engaged to Tinasha shortly after the curse was lifted.
Despite this, Lazar didn’t appear relieved in the slightest. “Then that can only mean…,” he muttered, trailing off.
“Someone abandoned this baby?” Oscar finished.
All three fell silent. The baby in Lazar’s arms stared up at them curiously.
For the time being, Oscar had Lazar drop off the infant with some ladies-in-waiting while he and Tinasha returned to his chambers.
Glaring at the letter, Oscar let out an annoyed sigh. “Who the hell did this?”
“You don’t have any idea?” she asked.
“None. I don’t recognize the handwriting, and there’s no name.”
Ordinarily, someone in the castle would notice a stranger hanging around, but because of the party, there’d been tons of international visitors coming and going all night. Oscar issued an inquiry, but it turned up no useful information.
Floating up into the air, Tinasha gave a thoughtful hum. “Nowadays, both parties have to give consent before having a baby, right?”
“Essentially, yeah. Men and women can drink a potion that prevents pregnancies. Were things not like that four hundred years ago?” Oscar asked.
“No, we didn’t have any concoctions like that. I read that it was invented three centuries back.”
According to records from the era in which it was invented, the contraceptive potion came about as an accidental by-product during research into a cure for infertility in the eastern country of Mensanne. In modern times, it was inexpensive and readily available, meaning that far fewer unwanted children were born now than in the Dark Age.
So then, how had this baby come to be abandoned?
“Oh… actually, Aurelia heard crying and was searching for the source in the courtyard,” Tinasha recalled.
“She heard it? When was this?”
“Just before the party started. But there’s no record of anyone bringing an infant to the castle, is there?”
“No… I guess someone hid in the crowd and snuck it in,” Oscar replied.
Who would abandon a baby, and why?
Tinasha slowly revolved once in midair, pondering over that. Then she landed in front of Oscar, sweeping the long train of her dress back. “Should I hold on to the child?”
“Why you? We have caretakers in the castle.”
“It could be part of some scheme. The sudden appearance and the letter seem odd,” she pointed out.
“Did you sense anything suspicious?”
“Not particularly, but we should still be cautious,” Tinasha admitted with a shrug. Perhaps she was being overly wary, but Oscar understood there was no reason to accept this at face value and suspect nothing.
“In that case, that Valt guy’s probably not the one behind this,” he suggested with a tight grimace.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because he knows about my curse, doesn’t he?”
“Oh! That’s right…”
For whatever bizarre reason, Valt knew all sorts of secret information. He’d sent Delilah into the castle with full awareness of Oscar’s curse. If Valt was the mastermind behind the abandoned child, too, it didn’t make sense that he’d attach a letter so quickly exposed as a fake.
“So that means it’s someone else,” Tinasha mused with a frown, floating up into the air again. However, Oscar grabbed hold of the train of her gown and pulled her down. Careful of the delicate fabric, she landed in his arms. Perhaps it was time to change clothes.
Hoisting her up in his arms, Oscar lay a hand along her cheek. “Well, let’s see how things play out in Farsas for a bit. The mother may have a change of heart and come to get the baby.”
“Yes… she may,” Tinasha replied, thinking to herself that Oscar was so sweet. He wasn’t just soft on others; he was kind and strong in equal measure. That was a quality she lacked.
Tinasha gazed into his dark blue eyes, the color of twilight after the sun had just set. His strength, his force of will, and his straightforward attitude all held her fast. While he could be sarcastic and mean, and he occasionally treated her like a child, that only made him all the more irresistible, much to her dismay.
He gave her the power to fight and the serenity to relax. So long as he was there, she could be strong—even if she ended up all alone. Love was the only word appropriate for such a fuzzy and indefinable feeling.
Sensing herself passing into a daze while staring at Oscar, Tinasha closed her eyes, placing a soft kiss on his lips instead. Her face felt hot with the urge to cry.
When she pulled back, Oscar regarded her with a wry look. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You look like you’re about to burst into tears, crybaby.”
Oscar was right, and Tinasha made an upset face. But with a little tilt of her head, a smile returned to her lips—one as cool and clear as the moon. Many long years had informed that quiet expression of hers, which soon morphed into a timid blush.
“I’m just happy,” she whispered into his ear.
Red was starting to streak the sky. Tinasha slid to the floor and checked the time. As Oscar headed to change, he asked, “What, do you have somewhere to be?”
“No, not particularly.”
“Then you should stay with me tonight.”
“I suppose I should,” Tinasha replied, heading for the door to go back to her rooms and change out of her dress first.
But he caught her hand. “Where are you going?”
“To change. I’d hate to get your gift dirty.”
“I’ll have it brought away later. Just stay here,” Oscar said, hugging Tinasha from behind and pressing a kiss to her exposed nape.
The sensation and the dizziness it brought with it left Tinasha weak in the knees, but she snapped back to her senses when she felt Oscar’s hand brush along her neck. She remembered the thing she needed to keep in mind.
Flustered, Tinasha twisted to escape Oscar’s arms. Then she backed away from her confused fiancé. “Sorry, I remembered something I need to do. I’ll be heading back now.”
“What could be that urgent?” Oscar pressed.
“Well, just… an old illness flaring up…”
“Wow. I would’ve thought a queen could come up with a better excuse.”
Her face frozen stiff, Tinasha had one arm pressed across her breast. She was currently sporting a very indelible mark there, one burned on so strongly that no camouflage magic would work on it. It signified that she belonged to another man. There was no telling how furious Oscar would be if he saw it.
He seemed to be interpreting Tinasha’s evasive behavior differently. With a frown, he let out a sigh. “What? Are you mad about earlier?”
“Huh? About what?”
“That nonsense Lazar was spouting.”
“Oh, that…”
The two men really had dug a spectacular hole for themselves. Because it had no bearing on the issue at hand, Tinasha had let it slide at the time. Upon further rumination, it was not exactly a pleasant thought, but it was also not something worth getting upset over. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Oscar had slept with other women. In fact, Tinasha assumed as much.
Yet she gave a little clap of her hands and nodded, pasting a bright smile on her face. “Yes, exactly. I’m very mad about that, so I will be leaving now!”
“Hey, listen… Wait just a minute,” Oscar protested.
“No, thank you. I’ll see you later,” she stated briskly, then escaped while she had the chance.
Her sudden departure left Oscar stunned. Unaware that his fiancée had just pulled one over on him, he decided to go to bed with the issue unresolved.
When Tinasha teleported back into her chambers in Tuldarr, she found Mila, Karr, and Lilia having tea there. While the spirits did not usually appear unless summoned, she always posted a few to remain on standby to handle any emergencies while she was out of the country.
“Oh? You’re back, Lady Tinasha? I thought you’d be spending the night,” said Mila, turning around in her chair.
Once all three spirits got a good look at their master, a chill of fright ran through them. Lilia’s teacup fell from her hands and shattered into two on the floor. “L-Lady Tinasha! What is that?! What happened?! Oh, you’re still chaste? That’s some relief!”
“Ah, I suppose there’s no hiding this from any of you,” Tinasha remarked with a sigh, smiling bitterly at the spirits’ reaction. Evidently, the mark was visible to them even over clothing, and they recognized who had made it.
With great concern, Karr asked, “You okay? Did something happen?”
“A lot has happened,” replied Tinasha, going over to her bed and sinking down on the edge of it. She gave the three spirits a summary of events.
Once they heard about the demon king’s offer, they all made faces of disgust.
“She’s awake? Eugh,” Lilia spat as she magically repaired the broken teacup.
Tinasha gave a long exhale. “Do you know the spirit Travis was talking about? What’s she like?”
“Mmm, if I had to describe her in one word…”
The spirits exchanged a glance, and then all spoke at once.
“Spiteful.”
“Arrogant.”
“Sadistic.”
“Yeesh,” Tinasha responded. What an assortment of characteristics. Perhaps such qualities were just part of being one of the highest-ranking demons, for many of those same words applied to Travis.
Karr rested his chin in one hand, looking utterly fatigued. “Since you have wards up here, it should be all right to say her name. We call her… Lady Phaedra. She’s always stuck to Travis like glue. She’s popped up in the human realm multiple times and killed everyone close to him.”
“A-ha-ha, she’s just like Lady Tinasha then. Super clingy!” teased Mila.
“I have never killed any of my love rivals!” Tinasha snapped, offended by the mere comparison.
But Mila just smiled at her master’s outburst. “Oh, no, humans are no contest for Lady Phaedra. Think about it this way: You’d be upset if you had to watch the one you loved gazing at an ants’ nest and toying with it all day, right?”
“That would drive me crazy,” Tinasha admitted.
She felt a headache coming on.
So to demons, humans really were no better than insects, which was why they had no interest in them and didn’t involve themselves with them. For the king of all demons to be interested in humans and live alongside them was truly out of the ordinary. No wonder a fellow demon of Travis’s rank was upset by it.
While Tinasha could sympathize with this unfamiliar demon woman on some level, she still couldn’t understand her actions. She shook her head. “No matter how strange I found my partner’s interests, I would never try to destroy something he cared for.”
“And that’s where your personalities differ. If only Lady Phaedra could just leave it alone,” Lilia responded, sighing.
“Well, I guess if Lord Travis is going to kill her, then you don’t really need to worry. He’s stronger than she is and all. You should be able to handle one of her underlings,” Karr remarked.
“Absolutely. Call on us anytime you need to,” Mila added flippantly.
Watching all of them dismiss the situation, Tinasha let out a heavy sigh. She looked at each of them in turn. After a little hesitation, she managed to blurt out, “So are we humans just insects to all of you?”
The three spirits exchanged glances, and a moment of silence passed. As Tinasha regarded them anxiously, all three burst out laughing.
“Wh-what is it?” she asked.
“Ah, it’s just that we’ve been living over here for so long. I’ve gotten more and more used to things. Humans are interesting, and I like you,” said Karr.
“As demons go, we’re a bit unusual for signing a contract in the first place, you know,” Lilia pointed out.
“Exactly. If we were unhappy, we would’ve gone back when the contract with Tuldarr was dissolved,” Mila stated.
Each of them felt somewhat differently, but their underlying affection was the same.
Feeling her initial astonishment turn to warm relief, Tinasha closed her eyes. “Thank you…”
Her spirits had been with her four hundred years ago, and they were with her now, too. She reflected with fondness on her cherished friends. |
Unnamed Memory
9. The Present According to the Future
The pale azure light of the moon shone down onto the earth. Amid the all-immersive dark of night, a town to the northwest of Tuldarr’s capital city slept deeply.
Apart from the occasional distant howling of a dog, all was still. Silence reigned.
However, something crawled very slowly through the grass on the edge of town.
It moved so sluggishly that a casual glance in its direction would reveal nothing at all. The sprouting seed absorbed the moonlight and glowed with magic as it gradually grew ever larger.
Lying on her back, she gazed up to see an unfamiliar man leaning over her. He was standing right next to her, something warping his considerate smile as he gazed down at her.
Whispering something, he lifted the object in his grip. The sharp edge of a dagger flashed in the argent light streaming from the window. He plunged it down toward her belly without hesitation, and she let out a shriek.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!”
Aurelia jerked awake with a scream. She was in her room in the estate, alone. There was no one else there, and she was uninjured.
The dream had felt so real. She was shaking all over as she hugged herself. Sweat coated her body
“I am so… glad… I woke up…”
Just then, there was a knock at the door. Aurelia’s racing heart practically stopped.
“What’s wrong, Aurelia?” Travis asked as he walked in. Once she saw his face, she finally trusted that she was back in reality and felt relief wash over her.
“I had a dream… Someone was trying to stab me… They…”
“You had a vision about her past, huh?” Travis said with an irritated click of his tongue.
Aurelia had an unusual ability to see into the history of others. Normally, Travis kept that power suppressed, but it did slip through the seal when Aurelia encountered someone with a particularly intense past. Powerful mages typically had old traumas, and there was no better example of that than Tinasha. It was truly an unfortunate accident that Aurelia had met her when Travis hadn’t been there.
“I’ll take that memory out. Her past is wholly unpleasant,” the demon stated. He approached the edge of the bed and laid a hand on Aurelia’s forehead. After some hesitation, the girl closed her eyes. He gazed down at her.
Her face is so small and pale.
She was so fragile. Should he wish to, he could snap his fingers and make her disappear. Not even dust would remain.
If he killed her now… she would linger in his memories forever, and the loss would torment him. Aurelia had the power to do that to him. Her strong will glowed from within her tender, vulnerable frame.
Why was he so attached to her? Even Travis couldn’t say. At some point, he’d found himself fascinated by the way she was intent on standing on her own two feet, even though they were shaky and trembling. She never gave up on herself. Despite being a weak creature, she was stronger than anything.
For that reason, Travis was willing to pay any price to keep her safe. Each time Aurelia spoke his name, he could feel something inside him changing.
He whispered the girl’s name, and she looked up at him.
“What?”
“I’m going to have to step out for a bit. I’ll post some guards, so behave while I’m away,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere good. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Aurelia cast a suspicious look at Travis. “What does that mean? You’re not going off to cause trouble, are you?”
“I’m not. Have a little faith.”
“Impossible,” she fired back. Travis made an exasperated face.
The expression turned unusually grave after a moment, though. “If someone you don’t know comes by asking about me while I’m gone, tell them I’m head over heels for that woman.”
“What woman? The queen of Tuldarr?”
“Yep. Also, do not leave this house under any circumstances.”
“O-okay,” Aurelia replied, feeling compelled to nod.
Noticing the worry in her eyes, Travis gave her a smile and stroked her hair to assuage her doubts. “Now that you understand, go back to sleep. Don’t want any dark circles under your eyes tomorrow.”
“No, I don’t,” Aurelia agreed, lying back down. She glanced up at Travis, watching how the moonlight threw his features into dark relief. “So you’re coming back?”
“Of course I am. I’ll return before you know it,” he answered.
He hadn’t told a single lie where it counted, so Aurelia felt she could believe him.
She closed her eyes and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
When she woke up the following day, he was gone.
In the morning, a half-asleep Tinasha dragged herself into a bath. An hour later, the blood in her body was finally circulating, and she felt more awake. She stood naked before her full-length mirror, examining her pale and slender form. Her lips curled downward as she observed the bright red crest blooming across her chest.
“I suppose I’m glad it’s somewhere I can hide, but it’s quite the garish symbol,” she commented.
“Of course it is. That’s the sort of thing that’s meant to be shown off. It’s like he wrote his name on you,” Lilia pointed out from behind her, handing her master a fresh set of clothes. “You shouldn’t wear any light fabrics. It’ll stand out like a beacon.”
“It’s too dangerous for me to go to Farsas until it’s gone.”
“That Akashia swordsman might rip it clean off your skin if he found out,” Lilia agreed.
“Stop it, that isn’t even funny…”
He wouldn’t really, but he might be so angry that he’d want to. Oscar would definitely hate Travis even more than he already did. Keeping it a secret from him was absolutely critical.
Tinasha donned a mage’s robe that buttoned up to her neck. “I wonder how long it’ll take until the situation is resolved.”
Lilia shrugged. “Who knows? That all depends on Travis.”
“Meaning it’s completely unpredictable,” Tinasha concluded, gazing beseechingly up at the ceiling.
It was that very afternoon when the first attack came.
The queen was doing paperwork in her study when she abruptly looked up. Something was approaching from the air, tripping the castle wards. Tinasha looked to Mila, who was sitting in a corner of the room.
“They’re here,” the spirit said.
“Looks like it,” Tinasha concurred, getting to her feet. As she did, a man teleported into the center of the room. The high-handed way of warping in without even setting any coordinates was something only the highest-ranking demons could do.
The slim man with bright lavender hair gazed right at Tinasha, or rather, at the mark on her chest. He sneered, as if he were looking upon something too trifling to even bother with. “Are you his little doll of the moment?”
“Well… I suppose he does often toy with me. Why are you here?” she replied.
“My master says that mark of yours is hideous. Your life’s a short one anyway, so it won’t matter much when it ends, will it?”
“I agree with half of what you said. However—”
Tinasha grinned and spread her arms wide. In response, an enormous spell configuration hidden within the room flared to life. A magic circle made of silver threads materialized on the floor, with the man at its center.
It was then that the demon realized he had walked right into a very carefully planned ambush.
With a beatific smile on her lips, Tinasha stretched a hand out toward him. “Today will not be the day I perish.”
She snapped her fingers, and power surged forth.
There wasn’t even time to scream. With a horror-struck expression, he exploded into pieces. Bits of murky blood and guts and black fog spattered all over the room. The gruesome spray hit a barrier Mila had set up and dripped onto the floor.
“That was over too soon,” Mila giggled. With a wave of her hand, the barrier and the man’s remains vanished.
The queen resettled back into her chair, a tight smile on her face. “If they’re all that weak, I welcome however many more she sends.”
“It does feel like a waste of time.”
It was Tinasha’s belief that the success or failure of magical warfare hinged on strategy, whether the target was a human or a demon. As long as she knew her enemy was coming, it wasn’t too difficult to engage them, high-ranking demon or not.
Still, Tinasha felt uneasy as she reset the spell in the room.
There’s no way something Travis asked me to do would be this easy…
“Danan’s been wiped out,” a woman muttered dispassionately, her tone belying a lack of any real grief. But to those who knew her well, that was shocking in and of itself. The demons stationed around her all froze.
The woman seated on the throne was as beautiful as a painting—so much so that she didn’t seem real. Her long silver hair flowed to the ground in gentle waves. The shimmer of the clearest ocean waters shone in her eyes.
While she appeared to be around twenty years old, her true age far exceeded one thousand. She was one of those at the pinnacle of the demon race.
Resting her chin in one hand, she said to the man kneeling closest to her, “I wonder what his new toy is like.”
“It would seem she is a powerful mage, for a mortal. However… she is served by twelve of our own,” a man answered timidly.
The woman frowned. Her lips curled in a sneer. “Twelve? They can’t be much better than trash to serve such a lowly worm. What a disgrace to our people. I’ll put all of them out of their misery while I’m at it.”
“Oh, but I think I’ll be putting you out of your misery first,” someone called. All present let out cries of shock as their gazes converged on a silver-haired man with a gorgeous face and a derisive smirk on his lips.
The woman rose, a mixture of surprise and joy in her expression. “Travis! You’ve come?”
“Only because you’ve forced me to,” he said. The woman stepped forward joyously, but Travis snorted and kept her away. “I want you to stop clinging to me already. This is the last time I’m going to bother with you, Phaedra… You can break into a million pieces for all I care.”
It was a brutal statement.
Phaedra’s smile froze on her face.
Then a huge wave of power tore the hall apart.
Oscar caught a baby’s cry, and a strained grin came to his lips.
The abandoned infant was a boy, and for convenience’s sake, he had been given the name Ian.
It was two days after the celebration, and there was still no information on the child, and no parent had come forth. The ladies-in-waiting in the castle were still taking care of the child in shifts.
After tidying up some papers, Lazar caught sight of the king’s expression and pricked up his ears. “What will we do if we never find the baby’s parents?”
“Raise him in town, I guess. We’ll find him a foster family,” Oscar replied, and Lazar nodded in relief.
Oscar narrowed his eyes at him. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten how you screwed things up with Tinasha and got her upset with me. I’m still working out how you’re going to pay that one off.”
“B-but I was only speaking the truth,” Lazar countered.
“Maybe, but you still didn’t need to say it. I wonder how long you can stand being hung upside down.”
“N-not even an hour!” Lazar squeaked, violently shaking his head back and forth. Oscar eyed his panicked friend, who looked utterly defeated. “Anyway… I never thought she would truly take offense to it.”
“You know she’s the jealous type. We’re just lucky all the windows stayed intact. Although maybe breaking a few would’ve helped her feel better? I might set aside some panes for her to smash if she needs to.”
“She’d be even angrier with you if you did that, Your Majesty. But at the time, she really didn’t seem too bothered by what I let slip…”
“So you agree that you let something slip,” Oscar said.
Lazar was right, though. Tinasha really hadn’t looked that upset. Or maybe she just hadn’t let it show.
She’d given her flimsy excuse about a sickness before Oscar had brought that up, however. Something didn’t add up. It was nagging at him.
Oscar frowned. “I guess I’ll just ask her about it the next time we meet.”
He reached for his next set of documents. Privately, Lazar breathed a sigh of relief.
Now the baby’s crying sounded much louder than before. A lady-in-waiting had to be walking around with the infant, trying to soothe him.
Oscar found that odd, but he returned to his work instead of checking on it.
The day she first met him, Aurelia was covered in mud.
Occasionally, she had dreams about that rainy day.
She’d lost her parents when she was only ten, but she had to go much further back in her memories than that to recall a time when they’d showed her affection.
When Aurelia was around five, she had asked her mother, “Did Grandfather hit you yesterday, Mother?”
She would never forget her mother’s reaction. It shifted gradually from astonishment to fear. Young as Aurelia was, she couldn’t understand why her mother reacted like that.
After many more conversations like that one, Aurelia finally learned that she should not speak of everything she saw in her mind. But by that time, her parents no longer wished to see her.
They would leave her at home and rarely return. Even when she did see them, they would treat her as if she didn’t exist.
But when they passed away, Aurelia cried, nonetheless. Of course she was sad. They had hardly shown any kindness to her, but she still loved them.
It rained during the funeral the following day.
Aurelia was hiding out under a tree in a corner of the expansive gardens, sobbing. She couldn’t take the servants’ pitying looks.
After she’d cried herself out and her whole body had grown cold, Aurelia got up to go back inside… only to slip in the mud and fall over. With both hands planted in the muck, she felt fresh tears begin to roll down her cheeks.
All of a sudden, a man’s voice came from overhead. “Are you crying? Oh, you’re all muddy, too. Can’t you get up on your own?”
He sounded amused, whoever he was. Aurelia didn’t recognize the voice.
Glancing up, she saw a beautiful man she had never seen before. His bright silver hair wasn’t wet from the rain at all. He was floating a little above the ground; perhaps he didn’t want to get his shoes dirty.
Aurelia slowly climbed to her feet and brushed the mud off her hands. Throwing out her chest, she stared at him head-on. “I was crying, but I can stand on my own. A little grime doesn’t bother me.”
He was taken aback by the strength of will blazing in her eyes.
That was how the story of Travis and Aurelia began.
After waking, she walked around the mansion, looking for Travis. That had been her habit for over a week now.
He still hadn’t returned. A blond man was standing at attention in the great hall. He was a guard Travis had left behind.
“Hey, do you know where Travis went? He told me he’d be right back, but he’s not,” Aurelia said.
“There is no need to worry. He will return. I’m sure he’s simply taken a detour on his way back,” the man answered.
“I hope that’s all it is…”
She had known ever since they met that her guardian wasn’t human. Travis had never made an attempt to conceal that from her. Just when she’d thought the man she met at her parents’ funeral was gone for good, he’d reappeared as a duke claiming to be her legal guardian. Her jaw had dropped.
When she asked him if he was strong for a demon, he made a face and gave her a roundabout answer. “Listen, the higher rank you are as a demon, the more you need to present as a human, or you’ll lose yourself.”
He consumed food; he bled. That made him a very high-ranking demon.
When she asked him why he consorted with humans, he replied, “Because it’s fun.”
He had a nasty personality and a bad philandering habit. When they were together, she felt like the guardian.
Worst of all, he was utterly incorrigible. Was that just his demon nature?
Yet, all the while, he supported her. That was more evident now that he was gone.
Aurelia was the black sheep of the Gandona royal family, but Travis never abandoned her. His attitude was to never look back and never give up. There were struggles along the way, but he was always by Aurelia’s side as she worked to move forward.
Where could he be? Why wasn’t he coming back? With so little information, she could only worry.
She bit her lip. “Travis…”
What if he’s gone to that beautiful queen?
The queen Aurelia had met in Farsas was unlike the rest of his usual entourage. When she pondered why she felt so uneasy about her, Aurelia realized something. Based on Tinasha’s attitude when she saw Travis in the ballroom, she probably knew what Travis was.
Aurelia didn’t know if it was because she was such an exceptional mage or because they had some shared history. Regardless, the queen knew Travis was a demon, and she was still close with him.
Perhaps she knows where he is.
Aurelia closed her eyes. She was just too anxious. Little by little, that fretting was turning to a leaden feeling in her gut.
How long would he be with her? Would he leave someday?
Maybe he already had.
Aurelia fought back her hesitation, opened her eyes, and marched out of the great hall. Determination burned deep within her heart.
All had been calm in Tuldarr since the attack one week before. Tinasha stopped in the middle of her daily paperwork to stretch her arms overhead. She even let out a silly squeak, which attracted the attention of Karr and Mila, who were playing cards.
“Things sure are peaceful,” commented Mila.
“It’s not over yet, though,” Karr pointed out.
No more assassins had come, but that didn’t mean the situation was resolved. The mark on Tinasha’s chest hadn’t disappeared, and Travis hadn’t dropped by.
Tinasha pulled down her shirt a little to check on the brand. “How long is this going to take?”
“Time passes differently over there, so it’s likely only been a few hours for them at most,” Mila replied.
“What? Really? I had no idea,” Tinasha replied.
“Demons in the demon realm only exist as conceptual entities, so they don’t pay much attention to how long or slow time is.”
“I see…”
High-ranking demons existed on a separate plane of existence. Only a few chose to appear in the human realm.
Unable to fathom such a world, Tinasha sighed. “Travis will definitely win, right?”
“Undoubtedly. There are twelve demons in the uppermost echelons, but he is the strongest of them all. Lady Phaedra is at the top of the midrange,” Mila explained.
“Wow. There’s a whole other ten of them.”
“Personally, I think you’re much more impressive. It’s hard to believe you have as much magic as a higher-ranking demon in that fragile little body of yours,” Karr remarked.
“Hmm. We must seem very strange to one another, demons and humans,” Tinasha mused as she gazed out the window. Clouds covered the sky; it was not fair weather that day.
Wondering if it was going to rain, Tinasha got up from her desk and walked over to the windows. Just then, she got a flash of instinct and took a step back.
Travis dashed through the darkness in pursuit of his enemy.
Time and space existed and limited the demon realm, though not in the same ways as in the human realm. Demons, whose forms were more like conceptual entities, simply had a different awareness of those things.
Phaedra had fled the instant she’d sensed Travis’s hostility. While they were two of the most powerful demons in existence, she was no match for him in a head-on fight. Unfortunately, catching her when she ran was very difficult.
The end of his long pursuit was nearing, however.
“I’ve blocked off all your exits. Come out, Phaedra.”
His cold, irritated voice rang out in the darkness.
The concept of love was foreign to demons. The closest things they experienced were curiosity and attachment. Travis couldn’t abide anyone who wanted to legitimize those as genuine affection.
The woman he was pursuing was no different. Phaedra didn’t love him—she only wanted to possess and monopolize him. Travis would never agree to such a boring game. He had found something much more important.
Travis grew irritated at Phaedra’s refusal to face him. He let his power rise in preparation for the kill.
“Then you can die,” he spat, words sharp like a blade.
Just as the words left his mouth, a blast of searing white light sped toward him.
Tinasha took a step back only to behold a pillar of golden radiance right before her eyes. The light struck the barrier on the floor and exploded.
“Whoa!” she yelped, leaping away.
Her two spirits conjured a shield to protect her from the blast. As Tinasha cast a defensive spell, Mila and Karr stepped out in front of her.
The surprise attack had penetrated multiple barriers. Tinasha licked her lips nervously.
Karr said tightly, “Run, little girl. We’ll buy you some time.”
She’d only heard him talk like that once before. Of the twelve mystical spirits, Karr was the second most powerful. Tinasha’s eyes grew wide in shock as Mila added, “Please run, Lady Tinasha. I think she’s here.”
As she spoke, a fearsome and intimidating presence filled the room. Tinasha took in the sight of a woman clad in a blinding, brilliant light and finally realized what was happening. “Oh no…”
The last time Karr had addressed her that way was when Travis had appeared. That meant this woman was of the same rank.
She had gently undulating, long silvery hair and pale blue eyes. There was no doubting her beauty.
Like Tinasha, there was something strange and ephemeral in her features. But hers were twisted with malicious intent.
Her clear eyes glittered ominously as her gaze pierced straight through Tinasha. “Are you that little insect I’ve heard so much about? Rejoice, for you get to die by my hand.”
Tinasha smiled tightly in the face of her death verdict. While trying not to leave herself open in any way, she spared a glance up at the ceiling.
Faced with one of her greatest dilemmas yet, this all-powerful mage and queen’s first reaction was a sigh. “Stupid Travis.”
Her tone held a pronounced tinge of resignation.
As he used both hands to divert the light that came suddenly rushing at him, Travis frowned suspiciously. That attack was far too powerful to have come from Phaedra.
However, he did know who was powerful enough to manage it—a man who was also one of the highest-ranking demons.
As he suppressed his annoyance, Travis let a cruel smirk curl his lips. “What do you think you’re doing, Taviti? Where did Phaedra go?”
“She’s manifested in the human realm,” something replied. The other demon had taken no physical shape. Only words alone, infused with his will, filled the space.
Travis clicked his tongue irritably. At some point, his quarry had changed places with someone else. Fury boiled within him for getting so roundly deceived.
The voice continued mockingly, “Perhaps you didn’t notice because you’ve grown so accustomed to wearing that filthy meatsack of a body? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”
“Can it. Why are you here?” snapped Travis.
“I’m simply trying to help cure you of your pathetic addiction to those insects. The dignity of the greatest demons is in jeopardy, and that concerns us all,” the voice explained.
Travis smirked. He held his left hand out invitingly, scarlet lightning crackling at his fingertips. “So we agree, then. I’m equally fed up with sharing my position with the likes of you.”
As Travis poured his emotions into his magic, he thought of two mortals.
One was the girl he had sworn to protect.
The other was a woman who possessed enough power to match his own.
Taviti wouldn’t let Travis go easily, and Travis didn’t intend to run anyway. He meant to give Taviti everything he deserved for standing in his way.
In the meantime, Phaedra must have arrived with great fanfare and devastating might to kill his old friend. In one part of his mind, Travis wondered if he would make it in time or not. Ultimately, he gave up midway through. “Eh, she can probably fend for herself.”
Then he unleashed a scarlet bolt of light.
The room surged with searing bolts of lightning. Karr and Mila worked together to warp the attacks far away.
Phaedra’s lips curled in a bitter grin as she beheld their swift teamwork. “You’re pretty good for trash who takes orders from a nasty bug.”
“Believe it or not, we’ve been around for a long time,” replied Karr with a friendly smirk, though he couldn’t hide how tense he was. Unpleasant memories from four hundred years ago, when every mystical spirit had been soundly defeated by one high-ranking demon, flashed through his mind. While Phaedra ranked below that man, she was still one of the strongest of their kind.
Behind Karr, Mila signaled with her eyes to her master. But before Tinasha could respond, a golden shaft of lightning formed in Phaedra’s hand. The blood drained from all three of their faces as they beheld that blinding glow.
This one was much more powerful than the one before. One wrong move and half of the entire castle would be rubble.
“Lady Tinasha!” cried Mila, leaping in front of her master to shield her.
Several spells were cast all at once.
Everything went white.
“Ngh!”
Tinasha reached out, suppressing the magic that was gushing up.
The next thing she knew, she was hurling through sudden darkness.
Mila was flabbergasted when her beautiful master first announced she was going to put herself in a magic sleep.
Going back in time was impossible. That man had to have lied about coming from the future. So then why was her master putting such stock in it? Why was she so in thrall to this desire that she was attempting to go through time? Mila couldn’t understand any part of it.
Many of the other spirits chided Tinasha for it, too. Mila felt confident that they could dissuade her. That changed when Tinasha explained things to her.
A tiny bit of loneliness swam in the darkness of her eyes, and yet they blazed with determination.
It was the first time Mila had ever seen her master with a wish so strong she was intent on having her way.
When Tinasha’s pleading gaze, more like a little girl’s than a queen’s, fell on her, Mila felt herself crumble. With a grimace, she said, “I’ll be your guard, then. Trust me to handle everything.”
Her master was stunned, as were all the other spirits.
But that didn’t bother Mila. A strange sense of duty had come over her, filling her with satisfaction.
That was probably the moment she stopped being a spirit of Tuldarr. So long as her beautiful and entirely unique master existed in this world, she would fight to protect her.
“Mila! Mila! Wake up!”
Someone shook her shoulder, and Mila’s eyes opened. Close to nine hundred years had passed since she had taken corporeal form and manifested in this realm; she had adapted completely. She opened and closed her hands over and over, getting a feel for all her senses.
Glancing up, she saw Tinasha and Karr peering down at her with concern. She waved a hand at them and sat up.
They weren’t in the palace; they were behind a half-crumbled wall built of stone. Looking around, she realized this was a part of some sprawling ruins.
“Are we in… the old capital?”
“Yes,” Tinasha answered. A presence-muffling barrier surrounded them.
Mila recalled what had just happened. “Lady Tinasha, is Phaedra…?”
“I believe she’s searching for us,” replied the queen with an upward jerk of her chin. No figure was visible in the dark sky, but Mila could sense something out of the ordinary.
During the attack in the study, Tinasha had put up a barrier to enhance the spirits’ defenses and had simultaneously teleported everyone out via an array. Their present location was an entirely uninhabited wasteland found south of the main city of Tuldarr.
The stone megaliths that made up the cityscape were all that remained of an era when this had been the center of Tuldarr. Close to five centuries ago, a forbidden curse ran amok and left the city partially destroyed. The survivors relocated to the north. Weathered ruins were all that remained.
A wave of Phaedra’s magic wriggled through the skies above like a homing beacon. They wouldn’t remain hidden forever.
Mila staggered to her feet. “Sorry, but I’m going to go buy us some time.”
“Absolutely not,” Tinasha said, rejecting that at once.
Mila gaped at her. “But Lady Tinasha…”
A tender smile appeared on her master’s lovely face. “I will go. You two keep the barrier up around this whole area.”
Her tone brooked no objections. Fierce determination blazed in her dark eyes.
Mila knew that look well. Since Tinasha was just a girl, she had ruled over them as their queen. In the face of such inviolable majesty, the two spirits bowed their heads.
An amused-sounding peal of laughter rang out from above. “So this is where you are? How sneaky. I found it dreadfully dull.”
Tinasha gave a tight smile in response to her enemy’s scorn. She spread her arms out wide. “Itz, Senn, Saiha, Lilia, Kunai, Eir, Sylpha!”
The Tuldarr mystical spirits who had served the Magic Empire for nine hundred years answered her summons. All of them materialized around Tinasha, save for the three who always guarded Tuldarr.
Phaedra snorted. “You lot came all this way just to be brought down by my hand?”
The spirits ignored the demon queen’s open scorn and looked only at their master, awaiting her orders.
Tinasha flashed them a relaxed smile as a spell formed between her hands. “All of you hold your positions.”
Every spirit understood what that meant. Their master had decided to fight alone, and she would permit no dissent. They bowed and vanished.
Immediately after, a barrier sprang up with Tinasha at the center, encapsulating the little city. This barrier, maintained by nine powerful demons, would demarcate the battlefield and prevent any magic from escaping and damaging some other place.
Tinasha took a deep breath of air into her lungs. She held her breath and teleported into the sky, her long black hair fluttering. “I certainly didn’t think I would get this opportunity again…”
The spirits weren’t the only ones reminded of the battle with Travis. Tinasha still tasted the bitterness of that defeat. She and all of her spirits had only survived at his whim.
But things were different now. Phaedra clearly sought to kill her.
If Tinasha died, the contract with the spirits would end.
She thought back to four hundred years ago, and a smile cracked her lips. If she perished, the spirits might be able to flee. They weren’t mere servants to her—they were her friends that she cared for deeply.
Tinasha pulled her mind away from morbid speculation. She was not expecting to lose this fight. Why had Travis come to her with this? If this was just a matter of a capable demon assassin, his underlings probably could have handled it. In all likelihood, he had asked for her help because he’d anticipated a direct confrontation with Phaedra.
“I wish he’d just told me that from the start,” she muttered under her breath. Focusing her mind, she eyed the powerful demon queen before her.
I’m one of only a handful of mortals who can defy them.
Tinasha lifted her right hand, and a sword appeared in it. Her eyes traced the length of the blade, which glinted purple.
So quiet only she could hear it, Tinasha whispered, “No matter who I’m up against, I am done losing.”
Phaedra smiled pityingly—and yet cruelly—at the mortal woman leveling a sword at her. Her lilting, melodic voice rent the air. “Are you ready for your death? Come and let me kill you quickly, filthy pest. I can’t stand this tepid sack of flesh. I want to be home now.”
Even the words she spat in disgust carried an alluring charm.
“Yes, I’m ready for your death. Please come whenever you’re ready,” Tinasha replied, undaunted
“Why you little…”
Silvery white and obsidian black clashed. Two women, such opposites in every way, filled the sky with vast and powerful spells.
The two magical forces collided in a flurry of sparks, like a streak of lightning.
A drop of rain hit the windowpane.
Popping his head up at the sound, Oscar glanced over his shoulder at the window. It was still afternoon, but the sky was dark and gray with heavy clouds. A light rain began to fall, dripping down onto the trees in the gardens.
The king sighed as he picked up a pen to sign a few documents. “Should I have gone to Ynureid in the morning?”
“The weather’s been ghastly all day,” Lazar pointed out.
The new fortress at Ynureid was mostly complete, and Oscar had plans to head there for an inspection. The structure was entirely protected from the rain, so that wouldn’t hamper anything, but a lack of sunlight would make things fairly annoying.
Still, that was no reason for him to change his plans. Oscar got to his feet. “Guess I’ll go get ready.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” responded Lazar, opening the study door to go and help his liege make his preparations. But once he looked out into the corridor, he froze. “Aaah!”
Oscar frowned when he heard Lazar’s shriek of terror. “What is it?”
“Th-the baby…”
Oscar peered over Lazar’s shoulder to see the baby, wrapped in swaddling cloth, lying on the floor right outside the door. His blue marble eyes stared straight at Oscar.
“What’s he doing here? Who’s the lady-in-waiting in charge of watching him?” asked Oscar.
“I—I’m not sure… That really scared me. He’s not even crying, so we have no way of knowing how long he’s been there,” said Lazar.
“This is ridiculous. Take him away, and I’ll get ready on my own,” Oscar said.
Heeding his king’s orders, Lazar picked up the baby and headed for the drawing room where the ladies-in-waiting could be found.
Oscar turned to go the other way, unaware that the infant was watching him the entire time.
Ynureid’s walls were wet with the drizzle.
Because Oscar had completed the majority of the inspection earlier, after the battle with Cezar, he only needed to inspect the storehouses, the armory, and the overall defense of the fortress.
Oscar was in a council room with General Granfort and other military personnel and magistrates when an officer entered wearing a bewildered look. “Your Majesty, a visitor has arrived for you…”
“A visitor? Here? Who is it?” Oscar asked.
“She says her name is Lady Aurelia of Gandona, sire.”
He recognized the name. It was difficult to forget the girl who had accompanied that demon bastard.
What did she want, though? With a scowl, Oscar asked, “Is her companion with her?”
“No, she is here alone. It appears she’s come on urgent business.”
“Very well, then. I’ll go see her,” said Oscar.
Normally, he would have no obligation to meet with someone from another country, especially one who arrived without an appointment. But if Aurelia claimed it was pressing, then he had to listen. After clearing out all but a handful of magistrates from the chamber, Oscar gave orders to have her brought in.
When Aurelia entered, she apologized for rudely arriving unannounced. Then, with a steely look in her eye, she got right down to business. “Your Majesty, do you know where Travis is?”
“Excuse me?” was all Oscar could say, utterly flabbergasted by that question. “I have no idea. I haven’t seen him since the party.”
“It’s been more than a week since he left me. He said he’d be right back, but I don’t know where he’s gone… Nothing like this has ever happened before,” she explained, gazing earnestly at Oscar.
The king of Farsas frowned. If it had been a week, then that meant Travis had departed shortly after the celebration in Farsas. It wasn’t surprising to learn Aurelia was fretting, but he couldn’t see what it had to do with him. Besides, that man was one of the highest-ranking demons. Oscar couldn’t think of much that would be a threat to him. Travis had likely flitted back to the demon realm on a whim.
Oscar was about to say as much to Aurelia when the next part of her explanation stunned him silent. “I thought Queen Tinasha might know where he’d gone, so I went to Tuldarr. But she’s not there, either… No one knows where she’s gone, so I thought she might be with you.”
“No… she’s not. I haven’t seen her since the day of the party, either. So she’s gone missing?” he asked.
“I was told she was in her study until the afternoon but has since vanished. There are burn marks in the room, so some manner of magic may have been used…”
Unconsciously, Oscar began to grind his teeth.
Something didn’t add up. And this feeling was oddly familiar.
Tinasha had been acting suspiciously after the party, too. And Travis had disappeared on the same night. Something had been off about Tinasha, and now she’d vanished as well.
Maybe he was worrying too much, but Oscar began to have a bad feeling that something had happened.
He needed to look into things immediately and act before it was too late.
Rising to his feet, he glanced at his magistrates. With a sour look on his face, he said, “I’m sorry, but I have to go to Tuldarr. I’ll finish the inspection another day.”
“Yes, Your Majesty!” the magistrates responded right away.
In sharp contrast, Aurelia leaped up in surprise. To her, Oscar said, “You’ve got me worried now, so I’m going to have a look. Once I’ve arrived in Tuldarr, I’ll have my dragon track Tinasha down. I’ll contact you when I know something.”
“I—I’m going, too!” Aurelia insisted.
Now it was Oscar’s turn to look flabbergasted. His eyebrows shot up as he replied, “We don’t know what’s at the root of this. I can’t be responsible for your safety.”
“I’m a mage. Take me with you, please,” she pleaded.
“But you may become the enemy,” he said.
“What enemy?”
Aurelia was confused; she didn’t quite understand what Oscar meant. Was he implying that the two of them might wind up as foes? Or that she and Tinasha would be? It was difficult to imagine, and Aurelia wasn’t sure how to answer.
While she was sorting her thoughts out, the king cut in coolly. “The man you’re searching for is the most suspicious one in all of this. Two times now, he’s almost killed Tinasha simply because he felt like it.”
“He has?”
“And if he’s trying to do the same thing again, you should know that I will end him. And if you come along, what will you end up doing then?”
“Travis really did that…?” Aurelia asked with disbelief. Were Oscar’s words true? Had Travis almost killed Tinasha?
Her eyes darted here and there frantically. She wasn’t catching glimpses of another’s past, but rather, she was rifling through her own memories.
Yes, Travis was bad-natured and enjoyed upsetting others. But over the last six years they had spent together, he had never once caused her physical harm. When he’d admitted to “riling” Tinasha up before, Aurelia never imagined the truth of that statement was so dark.
Aurelia knew what Travis really was, though, and she understood that he had a tendency to regard mortals with very little care.
Still, that couldn’t be all there was to it.
When Aurelia glanced up, Oscar was staring her down with a fierce, commanding gaze. She looked down and away, her face turning sorrowful. “What he did was inexcusable. I know it’s not something that an apology can solve, but do allow me to say I’m very sorry…”
“There’s nothing you need to apologize for,” Oscar pointed out, suppressing a sigh. This was a tricky situation. Aurelia was a member of the Gandonan royal family, so he couldn’t ignore or offend her, but her sudden visit had brought a significant upset.
Oscar puzzled over how to deal with her, and the girl showed no signs of backing down. “If he is about to fight Tinasha, I will stop him. I promise I won’t get in your way. Please take me with you.”
Desperation was written all over her face. Her delicate, fragile frame emanated pure determination.
Seeing her like this gave Oscar the strangest sense of déjà vu. He realized he was thinking of his fiancée and the way she would set her jaw and step forward, vowing not to lose. Despite the inherent awkwardness in that posturing, it was difficult for Oscar to ignore it.
Feeling himself break into a faint smile, Oscar sidestepped the girl to get to the door. “If you’re a mage, then you should be able to look after yourself.”
“Th-that’s right!” she cried, running after the king as he opened the door.
Then Oscar froze.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked, peeking over his shoulder.
There, in the hallway, lay the baby, wrapped in swaddling cloth.
At her core, Tinasha hated battles.
Since before her original coronation, she had constantly found herself entangled in a maelstrom of conflicts almost daily. Despite having the power to destroy an entire country overnight if she wanted to, she seldom wielded her full capabilities in battle. Even in the war with Tayiri, she was undecided to the last over whether she should mobilize all her strength and decimate the opposing army.
For that reason, Tinasha was actually almost grateful when the Witch Who Cannot Be Summoned came to kill her. Fighting a witch eliminated the indecision on whether to marshal all her power. For the first time, she brought out the whole might of her magic to slay her enemy.
The clash lasted for an entire day. The fierce showdown was on a scale that had never been seen before, with the mystical spirits and witch’s demon servants in the fray as well.
And when Tinasha killed the witch at last, she stood stock-still on the ravaged earth, devastated by the ruin of it all. The first stirrings of doubt flickered through her heart. Was Tinasha not a witch herself, to be capable of wielding such immense power?
While Tinasha’s right hand loosed a spell, her left swept through the air, setting off a wave of magic that neutralized the golden thorns flying at her from all directions. Phaedra growled in irritation that Tinasha had used the smallest bit of power to stop all her attacks. The demon queen scowled and was halfway through casting a new spell when she was suddenly yanked down by her ankles.
“What in the—?”
Innumerable silver threads were coiled around Phaedra’s legs, pulling her down through the air and throwing her off balance. After struggling to free herself from the restraints, she made a split-second decision and applied the spell she was casting to herself.
No sooner had Phaedra done so than Tinasha sent forth black flames that engulfed the demon.
The fire should have been enough to incinerate Phaedra down to her bones, but it fizzled before it had the chance. Free of the flames and silver threads, Phaedra glowered at Tinasha with fury burning in her eyes.
“You impertinent little…”
She had thought this insect beneath her. And her wounded pride only fueled her bloodlust.
“Tch,” Tinasha tutted. “I suppose it was never going to be that easy. Let’s try this, then.”
Another spell took shape. It turned into nine spears that zoomed for Phaedra at staggering speeds. The demon shattered the first furiously, but the other eight evaded her attacks and arranged themselves in midair.
“Miserable little worm!” Phaedra howled.
“Call me whatever you like while you still can,” Tinasha said, carefully controlling the trajectories of the remaining spears. Then her focus happened to shift to Phaedra’s right leg. Rivulets of blood were running down the white flesh, the result of the silver threads previously wrapped tightly around it. The wound must have been deep, because the crimson streams thickened, dripping down before scattering on the breeze.
“Hmm?” Tinasha mused. As Phaedra smashed the last spear, Tinasha teleported away. A second later, a bolt of lightning struck the spot where she’d been.
Time slowed to a crawl, and Tinasha’s world narrowed until there was only the battle—anticipating and acting. She felt her own mind gradually grow sharper and sharper. Her next spell came with no recitation, then she crafted a double incantation on top of it.
“All right, here I go,” she whispered before releasing three spells at once. As a feint, arrows rained down on Phaedra. When she blocked them with a magical barrier, a silver ball of light whizzed through it at breakneck speed and closed in on her.
“Ugh!” the demon growled. Although she raised her hand, she was unable to muster a complete defense. She leaped to one side to try and elude the attack but found that she couldn’t move. Her eyes grew wide with shock and panic. Myriad vines held her firmly from behind. She wouldn’t make it.
The ball of light struck Phaedra and swallowed her. As Tinasha put up a hand to shield herself from the blinding white glow, she giggled. “You’ve still got more in you, don’t you? Go on and show me what else you’re capable of.”
She was high on the exhilaration of battle. The spells ricocheting around the space were more beautiful than anything.
Tinasha read her enemy’s next move. Her thoughts were clear.
A natural grin spread across the queen of Tuldarr’s face; her mind now honed to a razor-sharp edge. That beatific, gracious expression carried with it the power to enchant all who beheld it.
The light that had consumed Phaedra exploded. The woman who emerged from it wore a bone-chilling smile as she faced her opponent. “Of course… I will take great pleasure in breaking down every meaning in this world for you.”
The demon cast her eyes downward. Hundreds of sickles materialized in the air without an incantation. Tinasha beamed at such a sublime sight.
Immediately, the golden crescent-shaped blades arced through the air, racing toward Tinasha.
While channeling magic into her sword in one hand, the queen created beads of light in the other. She leaped backward and used her blade to dispatch the sickles rushing at her. As she did, the orb of light formed argent streaks in the sky as they shot down the remaining crescents.
Despite not being consciously aware of it, Tinasha knew the paths all of Phaedra’s projectiles were taking. She could fully perceive each and every bit of magic in the space the two women were in. If things continued as they were, she might just manage to overpower the demon.
But then, something made the faintest of impacts with Tinasha’s magic. “What was that?”
Her moment of discomposure allowed an attack to connect with her.
“Ow!” she cried as pain lanced through her right arm. From the corner of her eye, Tinasha saw her sword fall from her grip and tumble to the ground. Sickles seized upon the gap in her concentration, grazing her chest and left leg.
Wasting no time, Tinasha cast a spell, and hundreds of luminous beads appeared in front of her heart.
“Go!”
The globules scattered, flying at the crescent blades and crashing into them explosively. In the chaos, Tinasha teleported away and used magic to stop her bleeding. Upon inspecting her deepest wound, she found that her arm was torn to shreds from the elbow up. Her tendons might’ve been snapped because she couldn’t move her fingers very well.
“Oh? Whatever is the matter?” Phaedra asked with great amusement.
“Nothing at all. I’m only feeling a little sleepy,” Tinasha replied, purposely smiling back.
Inwardly, however, she was far from calm. Something had touched the defensive barrier placed on Oscar, which had distracted her and created that opening.
His barrier vibrating meant that something had attacked him with magic. What in the world was going on?
“Oscar…”
I want to go to him right now. I want to make sure he’s okay.
Tinasha had to dismiss that idea, though.
If she warped away now, Phaedra would follow. And to fight outside the space she had enclosed, which the spirits were keeping warded, would mean extraordinary damage. She couldn’t allow that.
Tinasha took a deep breath. Then a brilliant grin split her face. She used magic to make her immobilized arm stretch out toward Phaedra.
I believe in him.
From birth to death, humans were all alone in the world. Only thoughts and feelings, as fine and fragile as spider silk, linked them together.
Right now, winning this fight was Tinasha’s goal.
She would believe in him, and she would defeat her enemy.
“At the moment, you have my full attention. So how about a smile for me?” Tinasha purred.
Power amassed in the young woman’s right hand. A dark crevice rent the air between them.
Phaedra’s lips curled up. Her gaze was locked onto the mark on Tinasha’s flesh, exposed when a sickle had grazed her chest earlier. “That hateful mark. What does he see in you?”
“Oh, who knows, really?”
The crevice grew wide enough that the tip of it reached Phaedra, who forcibly compressed it with a spray of magical sparks.
The demon queen licked her lips with a bloodred tongue. “Then what is it about him that entices you?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” Tinasha responded tartly. She was simply a stand-in for Aurelia. She wouldn’t have the faintest clue what was attractive about Travis. She found herself drawn to a different sort of bright light altogether. “I doubt any answer I gave would be satisfying.”
Tinasha flung out her right hand, sending the blood on her arm flying. As she did, a dark bolt surged out of the half-closed crevice and made for Phaedra, forking off many times over into a network of jagged lines. The sparking cage closed around the demon queen. Phaedra scowled in distaste at this attack from the most powerful mortal mage. Spreading her arms wide, she produced a luminous golden sphere.
Branches of black lightning licked Phaedra’s skin and left shallow cuts on it as the ball of light pulled them inside, absorbing them. “Repugnant child of the spirits… That nasty, lukewarm body of yours will not fall under his control. I’ll slaughter you first, until not a single drop of blood remains.”
After swallowing the lightning, the golden orb turned a murky black.
Tinasha kept an eye on the situation while her right hand moved in the air. A sword the color of night formed in her grip. She calmed her mind while readying her weapon made of pure magic.
The world of the senses that is revealed to me is so very clear.
Nothing was warped or distorted, nor marred or stained.
She was alive, now and at this moment. She was in good spirits. Her senses were sharp, her magic was polished to a sheen, and her spells were developing beautifully. All of it gave her great joy.
Eyes dancing, Tinasha faced Phaedra. “My body is my own. Only I and one other may lay a hand on it.”
“Shut up, filthy worm!” Phaedra cried, hurling her conjured sphere.
With a full, throaty laugh, Tinasha leaped out in front of the demon.
After a blank moment, Oscar finally came to his senses and looked around the hallway.
There was no one there but the baby. Lazar was still back at Farsas Castle.
“Then who brought him here?” Oscar muttered.
The infant stared silently at Oscar. Anxiety surged through the man as he caught a glimpse of some bottomless darkness in the child’s blue eyes.
“What’s that? A baby?” Aurelia asked, slipping around Oscar and reaching out for the infant on the floor. However, Oscar grabbed her arm to stop her.
“Your Majesty?”
“There’s something off about that child. Don’t touch it,” Oscar cautioned, his judgment informed by his intuition alone. Tinasha had said there was nothing particularly dubious about the baby, but she only meant in a magical sense. She was just as suspicious as he was of why a baby addressed to him was abandoned now of all times.
This is no abandoned newborn. It’s after me.
Tapping a finger against his jaw as he puzzled over how to handle the situation, Oscar watched something bizarre happen. A black mist rose from the baby, climbing slowly toward the king. Instinctively, he reached for Akashia.
Aurelia screamed, “Your Majesty, don’t touch it!”
Oscar’s eyebrows shot up at her shrill cry. He pulled her back and shut the door on the baby. As he kept a wary eye on the door, he asked her, “What was that?”
“It’s a very strong miasma,” she replied. “If you touch it, you may be poisoned. What is that… baby…?”
Aurelia trailed off, her ashy blue eyes going wide as saucers. Oscar followed her gaze to the door and was just as stunned.
The massive door was slowly being dissolved from the other side, as if by a spray of acid. A small hole was developing in the wood. Groaning at the sight of black vapor seeping in, Oscar took a half step back and checked all around him.
The magistrates were staring back at the king with a mixture of fear and distress in their eyes. Faced with an unexpected emergency, Oscar made a split-second decision. “Everyone, get to the wall.”
As he spoke, he edged closer to the window. Opening it, he peered down. They were on the second floor, not too far from the ground.
“Pardon, Your Majesty?!”
“It’s probably after me. I’m going to draw it away, so you do as I say,” the king ordered, pointing to a door set in the wall opposite the windows. It connected to another council room, and if the magistrates exited that way, they should be able to avoid the baby and escape into the hallway.
Oscar already had one foot on the windowsill when Aurelia touched him and said a short incantation.
The next thing he knew, they were both teleported to a grassy field south of the fortress of Ynureid.
Oscar frowned as he stared at the fortress far in the distance. “Thanks for saving me, but what about everyone in that room?”
“I apologize for acting so rashly. However, I don’t think we need to worry about them,” Aurelia said with a tight smile, pointing in the opposite direction from the fort.
The baby was floating there, a black mist coiling around it. It had warped over in pursuit of them.
“If Lazar were here, he’d faint immediately,” Oscar whispered, tilting his head and frowning at the infant. Fortunately, they were surrounded by open grassland. Deciding to fight, the king pulled out Akashia.
“Can you teleport out of here? Go back to the fortress or Gandona,” Oscar said to Aurelia, without taking his eyes off the baby.
The girl shook her head, however. “I’ll help you. I’m not as good a mage as Tinasha, but I can still be of use.”
Oscar wanted to order her to go anyway but gave it up when he saw the look in her eyes. He adjusted his grip on the royal sword. “I guess I’ll take you up on the offer, then. Thanks.”
“I am at your service,” she replied.
The baby regarded them silently. Oscar’s lip curled when he noticed that the black gas seeping out from the infant was withering the plants around it. “It sure looks like a human baby.”
“It does to me, too, but that miasma… It’s definitely coming from the child,” Aurelia replied.
There was no spell visible in the vapor. It simply billowed from the baby, slowly covering more and more.
Oscar glanced between the baby and the blade of the royal sword. “Never killed a kid before.”
The child wasn’t a demon in disguise. Whatever he was doing, he was still human.
At the bitterness in Oscar’s tone, Aurelia bit her lip. “Your Majesty, could you try stalling to give me some time?”
“Do you have a plan?”
“I’d like to search the baby’s memories. They may hint at some way of banishing the miasma,” she replied.
Oscar’s surprise lasted only a moment. He took a step forward to cover Aurelia. “Got it. I’ll buy you some time.”
He didn’t need to ask for details. Aurelia wouldn’t have proposed the feat if she weren’t capable of it.
Oscar dashed in and used Akashia to dispel the surrounding gas. The black mist dissipated at the touch of his blade. Some weakly drifting remnants made contact with his arm, but Tinasha’s defensive barrier repelled them.
“Let the past come to my sight.”
Aurelia closed her eyes. Travis had locked away the abnormal ability that had ruined her life.
And now, of her own volition, she was setting it free.
No matter what kind of power it was, it was her own. Aurelia wanted to find meaning in it. She wanted to believe she was making progress, even with this smallest of steps. Oscar was covering her without questioning a thing, which Aurelia was very grateful for. And she had to honor that trust by giving this everything she could.
Aurelia fixed her gray-blue eyes on the baby. While maintaining control of herself, she sent her consciousness into the time contained within that small creature.
At first, the miasma had no clear shape and merely undulated slowly, but once it seemingly realized that it could not catch Oscar that way, it began to shift its form.
A cone-tipped spear lunged forth out of the mist. Oscar lopped it off with his sword and leaped to one side. While preserving a reasonable distance, he kept its attention focused on him. He couldn’t let it grab Aurelia, who was standing some distance away.
The girl’s eyes were blank as she stared at the baby within the miasma. Oscar turned away, deliberately not watching. While he didn’t know what she was looking at, he had the distinct sense that she would peer into something even he didn’t know about himself. Eye contact felt like a bad idea.
After deftly handling a series of attacks that came at unstable speeds, Oscar heard the girl calling for him and fell back.
Aurelia walked up to him. As she put up a barrier, she asked, “Do you know what Simila is?”
“Sure,” Oscar replied. “That’s the forbidden curse Cezar tried to use just recently. I believe Tinasha said it uses people’s negative emotions as a core and draws out power from another plane of existence.”
“It’s a forbidden curse?!” Aurelia yelped in shock. Evidently, she hadn’t known about Simila at all. But her question informed Oscar that their current situation was related to a forbidden curse.
Nervously, she relayed her findings. “That baby has some leftover remnants that weren’t molded into Simila sealed inside him. He’s been made into an instrument to assassinate you. The remains are a formless mass of evil… or maybe negative emotions? Anyway, because of that, they’ve evaded magical detection. They’re attached to the baby through a mark drawn on his back. If you can destroy that…”
“Oh, so the power can be separated from him? Got it. Thanks.” The king responded easily, then he strode from the safety of Aurelia’s barrier. The girl’s jaw dropped.
Though Oscar knew what he had to do, the baby was surrounded by a massive cloud of deadly fog, and the mark was on his back. Achieving the best scenario without dying or killing the child wasn’t going to be easy.
Yet Oscar wasn’t worried about any of that as he approached the baby. In contrast, Aurelia fretted over what she should do. But soon enough, she widened the barrier to prevent the miasma from coming closer to him.
Oscar chuckled when he noticed her assistance. “You’re a mage, all right. That’s a big help.”
As he moved forward, Oscar dispelled any harmful vapor Aurelia’s barrier couldn’t push away. By this point, the miasma had come into contact with Tinasha’s protective spell numerous times, yet the woman herself hadn’t come running. That must’ve meant she was also tied up somewhere.
“She’s probably gotten herself injured again. I’ve gotta hurry,” Oscar muttered, steadying out his breathing. He touched a hand to his chest, wondering for a moment if he should use what was in his breast pocket.
“No, I bet I can make do without it,” he decided, only needing a second to make up his mind.
Brandishing Akashia before him, Oscar breached the center of the miasma. The black mist formed spears and cudgels to attack him relentlessly. Oscar sliced them all away handily, however, and continued his advance.
But little by little, the vast miasma was seeping in from beyond Aurelia’s barrier. Black droplets clung to Oscar. They weakened upon contact with Tinasha’s enchantment, but as they were made of negative human emotions and not magic, they slowly permeated that layer of protection and burned him like acid.
Pain spread from Oscar’s left shoulder down his arm, but he didn’t let it stop him. Instead, he only quickened his pace.
He was now a few steps away from the baby. Oscar’s twilight blue eyes met the baby’s brighter aqua ones.
A void with no thoughts or feelings.
The birthplace of darkness.
The next thing Oscar knew, he was getting sucked into that dark world.
He could sense the flow of power like a frequency. Splitting his consciousness apart, Travis managed to manipulate it.
Unlike in the human realm, where the structure of a spell was required to exercise magic, the energy spilled forth from every corner here. In this place, force of will was the only thing required.
An invisible snake pursued Taviti, who kept disappearing and reappearing.
“Don’t think you can shake me off, you worthless nobody,” grumbled Travis as he flicked a hand. The serpent divided into five. While he was back in his original incorporeal form, he still felt like blood was rushing up within him.
It was at that moment that an army of murky red hands crawled up toward him from underfoot. As fast as a winged beast, they twined around his legs. The crimson hands immediately began to corrode him from the inside out, and the changes triggered a wave of nausea.
From seemingly nowhere, Taviti spoke in a blasé tone. “You’ve always been all talk, with nothing to back it up. It’s the act of a fool to bluff that you’re more than you are.”
Despite Taviti’s mocking words, Travis wore a dauntless smile. “Enough yapping. You’ll find out whether it’s bluster or not when you’re dead.”
Travis used the strength of his mind to reshape his body. He cut out the corroded parts and regenerated new ones. All the hands clinging to him were blown off.
Taviti’s astonishment filtered into the area.
Travis manipulated his power to deal the finishing blow. “Gloat too much, and you’re just asking to have your throat torn out,” he stated, his voice dripping with evident scorn.
When Taviti turned around, two snakes lunged for him with their jaws open wide.
“How can this be happening?” Valt wondered with a sigh. He adjusted the barriers strung up all over. Instead of raking his nails through his hair in a panic, he was leaning against the armrest of his chair, resting his chin on one hand. “This has gotten a little out of hand. I didn’t think any top-ranking demons would show up.”
“Is one fighting? With the witch?”
“Seems so. It looks like they’re in the old Tuldarr capital ruins.”
“No! Will the spell be all right?” asked the girl.
Valt knocked on the wood of the armrest. “Just barely… I think. She’s got the area warded off and all.”
He grimaced as he withdrew magic from the barriers. Valt, Oscar and Tinasha’s prime suspect, was presently living with Miralys in a new mansion.
Miralys blew on her sweetened tea to cool it down. She was sitting in her favorite wooden chair, brought from Cezar. “So what’s the Farsas king doing?”
“He’s engaged in a conflict of his own. Some sort of revenge plot by the remaining cultists. Those two have no shortage of enemies, do they?” remarked Valt.
“Aren’t you responsible for at least half of them?” Miralys pointed out.
“Well, that is true…”
Valt folded his arms. The situation had taken a strange turn while he’d been off getting his plans in order. He turned his thoughts to the surprise appearance of the high-ranking demons.
Naturally, he knew that Tinasha and Travis were acquaintances. But unlike Tinasha, who was relatively easy to predict, Travis was prone to attracting unforeseen developments. That had caused trouble for Valt numerous times in the past. It had even gotten him killed on a few occasions.
Schemes that involved Travis were far too risky, and Valt had long since given up on using him. Fortunately, things were better now, because a girl named Aurelia had come along to weigh Travis down and balance things out.
Miralys snapped her fingers, and Valt popped his head up.
“What do you want to do? Should we help? You don’t want the witch to die, right?” she asked.
“No… but actually, I think we can stay out of this. This is a good opportunity, so I’ll just watch things play out,” he answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Mm-hmm. If she dies here, it means she’s not strong enough. And if that’s the case, it’s all pointless anyway,” Valt stated, drawing a coolheaded conclusion. Suppressing his emotions, he closed his eyes.
The world was constantly moving in new and unexpected ways.
And though it was far from comfortable, they stood in the midst of the tremors from those battering waves.
Tinasha sliced through Phaedra’s magic attacks.
Naturally, there was no ground to stand upon in midair. It was magic that kept her upright. With concentration, Tinasha adjusted her footing so that it was the same as when she was on land.
Reining in all the emotions that felt like they were about to spill forth, she brought her sword down on Phaedra. The demon woman raised her hands, seething with resentment. When the dark sword and Phaedra’s magic connected, the atmosphere exploded with a loud, unpleasant crackling.
Tinasha took a step closer and thrust her sword toward Phaedra’s left flank. The blade hit her defensive barrier and stopped.
“Corrode.”
Tinasha quietly intoned a spell and infused her weapon with even more power. The black blade started to eat through the barrier, and Phaedra paled. Her hand hurriedly wove a spell to drive it back.
“Vanish!”
Light flooded out. As magic surged up to attack her from head to toe, Tinasha released her sword. Shielding her head and heart with her arms, she teleported away.
A light euphoria had overtaken her. The heat of it was what propelled her forward.
Impatience and anticipation were the same—the wish to move forward immediately. She wanted to see how everything played out, and it was impossible to stop now.
Phaedra watched Tinasha retreat with satisfaction, but she froze upon catching sight of something in those dark eyes staring back at her.
“You…”
It was the gaze of a bloodthirsty beast. A pure urge to kill glittered there. Tinasha had gone straight into a mad, murderous trance.
How could someone look at one of the most powerful demons in such a way? Phaedra couldn’t comprehend it.
I’m scared.
Those dark eyes cast a shadow on Phaedra’s mind. And while she was briefly preoccupied, a flurry of black daggers ripped through her skin. Tinasha had turned the sword she’d dropped into tiny little shards.
In the blink of an eye, Phaedra was as battered as Tinasha, shaking all over with the humiliation of it. She detested the warm, red beads that soaked into her clothing. “How dare you… I will tear you into a thousand pieces and drown you in a pool of your own blood!”
Tinasha gave a gracious smile. “Too much anger can kill you.”
Phaedra had only minor lacerations. Truthfully, Tinasha’s injury was more serious. She was in greater pain than the demon, and she could only move her deadened right hand with magic. Other parts of her ached terribly, too.
But even so, she was not worried.
Every drop of her power was at her command, and she loosed it with impunity.
This was different from the silent irritation she’d felt when battling Travis. She was in the midst of effortlessly challenging someone who outranked her. Something about that got her fired up.
Tinasha turned a heated, hungry gaze on Phaedra. Pale blue eyes blazing with fury glared back as the young queen held out a hand.
“I command you to come forth, o curse-adorned illusions. Render definitions meaningless and revert matter.”
Three white rings appeared as the result of that incantation. They were composed of what looked like rows of letters, all intertwined around the same center.
The sky was dark, threatening to rain at any moment.
The rings sparkled brightly in that monochromatic world.
“What is that?” Tinasha wondered. It was clearly powerful magic, but she couldn’t say what it might do. She uttered an incantation of her own, erecting a barrier to protect herself.
The rings activated before she could complete her spell, however. Revolving as they expanded, they suddenly warped to her position, hemming her in.
“Ah!”
The atmosphere within the rings grew twisted, and Tinasha felt a wave of nausea, as if the air pressure was changing. The instant Tinasha realized what was going on, a chill ran down her spine.
This technique was one that could distort any magic. Every spell cast within the space encircled by the rings would be transmuted or rendered ineffective. Tinasha had never heard of anything capable of twisting the laws of magic and the workings of spells like this. It was hard not to marvel at such unbelievable power and artistry.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have the luxury of doing so. Her half-deployed barrier disappeared. That wasn’t all. The spells she had cast to stop her bleeding and to hold herself aloft in midair contorted, assailing her with a wave of intense dizziness and nausea.
“Oh no…”
Tinasha stumbled; she couldn’t keep herself floating. As she lurched to one side and began to plummet to the ground, Phaedra watched with a smug smile. The demon queen summoned a whirling mass of wind directly above Tinasha to deal the final blow.
“I suppose you did provide me with a modicum of entertainment,” she spat.
Tinasha tried to cast a teleportation spell, but the magic wouldn’t hold within the rings. The winds pressed down on the rings, accelerating her descent.
A moment later, Tinasha slammed into the center of the ruins with a sickening crunch. The impact sent a cloud of sand into the air. Phaedra teleported down, alighting onto the top of a pile of rubble and gazing upon Tinasha scornfully. “You really made me go to quite some lengths.”
As the dust settled, a mass of long black hair sticking out of a pile of broken stone became visible.
Phaedra snorted, raking fingers through her own mussed locks to smooth them out. She positively abhorred the sensation of warmth from the blood coating her skin. “What brittle little bodies. So very loathsome.”
As the demon wrapped her arms around the human body she had taken, something suddenly rammed into her and set her trembling.
Very slowly, she looked down at herself and saw a purple blade sticking out of her chest, stabbed into her from behind. She watched in disbelief as blood dripped down the length of it.
Behind her, someone said placidly, “Thank you for showing me how fun a fight can be.”
“But you… How did you…?” Phaedra sputtered, her gaze still fixed on that long black hair below.
It should’ve been impossible, but someone was indeed standing behind her. Phaedra craned her neck around for a better look.
Tinasha yanked out the sword and fell back. Her glossy black hair had been chopped off just above her shoulders; her eyes glowed like a predator’s.
“I’m grateful to have witnessed such an incredibly rare spell. However, only one person has the right to kill me. I’m sorry,” stated the queen of Tuldarr as she used one hand to flip back her short hair.
When she was slammed against the ground, Tinasha had released raw magic to protect herself. Even so, she’d broken one leg, and several of her ribs felt funny. Only her tremendous power had kept her body together.
Phaedra slowly turned around. When she attempted to cast an attack spell, her vision went dark. She scowled.
Tinasha smiled as she watched the demon woman’s face blanch. “You can’t move very well, can you? I don’t think you’re used to how human bodies work. Too much blood loss makes them very cumbersome.”
Tinasha had first noticed it when the vines cut Phaedra’s leg. The demon must have numbed her sense of pain, so she didn’t notice the blood flowing freely from her wounds or do anything to stop it.
The first thing a mage did when wounded in battle was to stop the bleeding and dull the pain. Failing to do both risked disrupting their concentration. Phaedra had only done the latter, so Tinasha made her opponent bleed out with shallow cuts all over. In particular, she had targeted Phaedra’s back, as the demon wouldn’t notice any lacerations there. Bright red liquid coated everything from her shoulder blades down.
Even more blood gushed out onto Phaedra’s back from the stab wound.
The demon queen glared hatefully at Tinasha. “This substance is so… filthy…”
“Really? A warm body’s not that bad, is it? I like this temperature. Not to worry, though. You’ll go cold soon enough,” replied Tinasha.
“You’re the one who’s going to die!” Phaedra screamed as a silver light flashed in midair. But with a short incantation, Tinasha negated it. A stroke of her sword tore the demon apart.
Crimson stained Phaedra’s lovely silver hair. Drops got into her eyes as well, turning her vision red. Her lips trembled. She was so heavy and chilly.
Was she really going to perish here? Of all places?
There was no answer.
Her vision went black, and Phaedra shivered with fear like a child and closed her eyes.
Tinasha sighed as she watched her opponent collapse onto a pile of rubble. Phaedra’s body lay twisted like a broken doll’s. Black mist emanated from her corpse and melted into the air. Such was the death of a high-ranking demon.
“I will go on while you sleep in this city,” Tinasha said, her eyes watching the sky.
Rain had begun to fall.
Taviti fled into a space sealed off by darkness. Travis’s snakes snapped at his heels, chasing him from behind and from the sides.
He hadn’t anticipated that Travis would be so much stronger than he was. He’d dismissed his fellow demon as someone too used to living in human skin. At the very least, he’d assumed they would be evenly matched.
However, that had quickly been revealed to be delusional thinking. All he could do now was shake Travis off and hide.
After teleporting away so many times, Taviti despaired when he emerged from his latest attempt only to find Travis’s serpents already there waiting for him. “Dammit!”
He manipulated his power, sending out invisible vines to crush the snakes. But the tendrils struck at nothing.
“Convert.”
There was nothing there. At a cruel man’s instruction, the twelve serpents reappeared and changed form. A glowing white cage took shape, trapping Taviti inside.
The demon, caught inside its tremendous power, was aghast. “What the hell is this?”
“Fun, isn’t it? A mortal woman invented it. It divides into multiple hexes and makes a single cage,” Travis explained after appearing outside the cage. He wore a caustic grin as he regarded his old acquaintance. There was no mercy to be found in his eyes. He proclaimed, “This is the end. You can die screaming.”
He snapped his fingers, and the cage glowed brilliantly as it began to collapse.
Contrary to Travis’s hopes, Taviti didn’t scream. He disappeared into the white light until not a speck of him was left.
With a bored look on his face, Travis took his leave.
There was only darkness for as far as he could see. Oscar scanned the space, unaware of how long he had been there or how he had gotten there.
The royal sword was in his hand, but he had nothing else.
Within the boundless gloom, he could sense many wriggling things.
“What’s that?” he called, the words serving to reinforce his identity. They separated him from the squirming entities. He was a drop that had fallen into an inky sea.
“All the same,” the wriggling things whispered.
Resentment, resignation, and grief—they were all connected. They were all the same. So was this ocean of negativity, as well as whatever fell into it.
Their whispers gave Oscar the answer. “I see… So these are people’s darker emotions.”
The instant he realized that, his memories came flooding back. He recalled what he was.
Readjusting his grip on the sword, he slowly turned to face the endless waves of negativity pressing on him.
“Just go to sleep,” they whispered.
“Sadness never ends,” they whispered.
“We are all the same, so join us,” they whispered, reaching out for him with immaterial hands.
Oscar’s only reply was, “Don’t feed me your lies. I’m different from you.”
Even if all this wickedness had originated from humans like him, he couldn’t stay here. He would keep going.
Resentment, resignation, and grief were not worth giving in to and relinquishing oneself to. He would not surrender to anyone.
As the scraps of darkness attempted to latch on to Oscar, he declared, “You’ll never have me. Return to your homes, you ugly things!”
He slashed with Akashia, creating a rip in the endless darkness. Air rushed in.
Many teeming invisible membranes passed through him, and the world changed color rapidly. He was riding a rushing torrent.
No—it only felt that way.
It emboldened him to step forward, regardless. With another slash of Akashia, his vision cleared.
Oscar was back in the grassy field. Amid the vapor that was so thick he could barely make out his out hands, he found the baby and reached for him.
“Your Majesty!” Aurelia cried.
“It’s all right,” Oscar assured her. Miasma seeped in from everywhere through the gaps in Aurelia’s barrier. It melted through his clothes and burned his skin when it touched his arms and chest. But Oscar didn’t falter once.
He held the baby to his chest and glanced down at the infant’s back. When he undid the buttons on the child’s clothing, it revealed a black mark right in the center of his spine.
“Be a good boy now… Bear with it for a little,” Oscar whispered. With a little sigh, he dragged Akashia’s blade gingerly along the forbidden curse sigil.
The mark’s outline shifted. Oscar heard a loud ringing in his ears, and the baby’s eyes flew open.
The change was instantaneous and dramatic.
The cloud of black mist burst open from the center outward. Aurelia let out a cry of wonder.
Now that the vapor was dispersed, it gradually faded until it was gone entirely.
In the midst of it all, Oscar looked back at Aurelia and smiled with the baby, which had started crying, in his arms. “Looks like we did it.”
Aurelia bowed her head, utterly astonished. “That was incredible! Let me see your injuries.”
“Heal him first,” Oscar replied, hurrying over with the baby, whose back was bleeding a little.
Aurelia quickly took the infant into her arms and intoned a healing spell. Oscar breathed a sigh of relief as he watched.
“There, that’s sorted now… but we’re not done yet,” he muttered. While Oscar had gotten tangled up in a creepy forbidden curse, he still needed to find Tinasha.
Oscar glanced toward the distant fortress. The magistrates were probably worried, so it was best that he return to them first. Fortunately, the baby looked to be all right. Just as he was going to tell Aurelia his plan, he sensed someone new appear behind him.
“Oscar!” shouted a familiar voice frantically.
The word filled the king of Farsas with profound relief. He’d only just thought to search for Tinasha, and now here she was. He turned around, prepared to give her an earful of some kind, but froze when he saw the state she was in. “What… what the hell happened to you?!”
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” Tinasha said, flapping a hand dismissively.
No matter how you looked at it, she was a mess. Her dress was ripped to shreds in places and practically dyed red with blood. There was some sort of inexplicable sigil emblazoned on her chest. What concerned Oscar the most, however, was that the long hair he was so fond of had been hacked into a bob.
He stared at the choppy, uneven ends. “What happened?”
“Oh, uh, nothing? Anyway, what went on here?” she asked.
“Do you really think that will work?” he responded dryly, walking up to Tinasha and pinching her cheek.
“Aaahh, that hurts!” she squealed, even as she reached out to heal the burns on his skin. Aurelia watched the pair of them, wholly slack-jawed.
Once Tinasha was released, she finally noticed Aurelia and the baby in her arms. With her head tilted curiously, she inquired, “What’s going on?”
“That baby had some leftover remnants of Simila sealed inside him,” answered Oscar.
“He did?! O-oh, I see… I’m sorry I didn’t catch that,” Tinasha replied, sounding crestfallen.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault, and it wasn’t too hard to fix,” Oscar assured her, patting her head comfortingly. Then he turned back to Aurelia. “Thanks. You were a huge help.”
“Oh, not at all. It was my pleasure,” Aurelia said politely, curtsying to him. Then she turned anxious eyes on Tinasha.
“Aurelia’s looking for the bastard. Who were you fighting with?” Oscar asked Tinasha.
“Oh, so Travis isn’t back yet? Hmm… What if he lost?” Tinasha mused.
“Do you really think I’d lose? Think before you speak,” chided a grumpy voice as the demon in question appeared behind Aurelia.
She whirled around. “Travis! Where have you been?!”
“I told you to be a good girl and wait for me. What could’ve possibly brought you all the way out here?” he questioned. The gentleness in his eyes belied his stern tone.
Aurelia rubbed her thumbs over the edges of his eyes. She hadn’t seen him in so long. “I—I was worried about you, of course! Stupid!”
“I was completely fine. Unlike her.” Travis smirked.
“You know, if you had such an easy time, you could’ve helped,” remarked Tinasha, crossing her arms and giving Travis a look. Her exhaustion bled into her tone.
From that exchange, Oscar gleaned that Tinasha’s opponent had not been Travis but some common enemy of theirs instead. He decided not to kill Travis today.
That said, he didn’t intend to stop prying. Tinasha’s face grew tight as she sensed the silent pressure emanating from the man next to her. Nervously, she glanced up at him and gave an excuse. “Umm, so basically, I owed Travis, and he asked me to help him.”
“Not getting killed because your enemy changed their mind is hardly what I would call owing them,” Oscar said sourly.
“Well, there were a lot of other things, too, you know…”
“And I’ll hear all about them later,” Oscar stated coolly. Tinasha looked abashed.
She recovered soon enough, however, and looked to Travis. “So does that mean it’s all over now?”
The demon nodded. “Yeah, and I’ll keep my promise. But wow, you got beaten to a pulp. She went pretty hard on you, huh?”
“She was really strong! Ugh, I want my hair back,” Tinasha huffed, waving her arms in a fit of pique. She had already healed all her wounds, but she couldn’t restore her locks.
As she watched Tinasha struggle—and fail—to pull back the hair tickling her face into some sort of ponytail, Aurelia bowed to her. “Um, I’m sorry Travis pulled you into this.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Travis cut in. “You should be thanking her, not apologizing. She stood in for you during that fight.”
“She what?”
“Why did you have to say that?” Tinasha hissed, grimacing uncomfortably.
Oscar patted her head. “You just had to get involved.”
“Urgh…”
Aurelia’s eyes grew wide. It had never occurred to her that she was the one in danger, and she would never have guessed that this beautiful queen had agreed to take her place.
Noticing her discomfiture, Tinasha smiled and waved to indicate it was nothing. “You don’t need to feel bad about it. Travis was the one at fault.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the demon king countered.
“You need to fix your whole lifestyle,” Tinasha shot back.
“I already am,” he grumbled. With a little wave of his hand, he made the mark on Tinasha’s chest disappear. At the same time, her hair grew back to its original length. The three humans present were left stunned.
“Wow,” Tinasha said.
“I’m pretty good at that stuff, you know. Let’s just call it a little recompense for battling Phaedra. Aurelia, we’re leaving now,” Travis stated arrogantly. The girl looked up at him and nodded obediently.
At last, she would return home with him. Relief pulled her lips into a smile.
Travis pressed a gentle kiss to Aurelia’s forehead, and the warmth of it filled her with deep comfort. It had always been like that, ever since she was young. And she wanted things to stay that way forever, if possible.
Aurelia offered the demon a bittersweet smile. Feelings she was helpless to express in words were building inside her. Perhaps that was happiness.
But right at that moment, a woman’s voice muttered something.
“You… tricked me? It wasn’t that woman? It was this little brat here?”
“Tinasha?!”
Tinasha clapped both hands over her mouth. Oscar stared down at her with concern.
A voice that wasn’t her own had come out of her mouth. She twisted her body, trying to shake off the curse-like presence.
Her head throbbed terribly. It felt like it was going to crack open. An uncomfortably warm, muddy nausea surged within her.
“You little… You planned an aftershock?!” Travis shouted with clear panic.
Dizziness came over Tinasha. Something was crawling around inside her body.
Suppressing her malaise, Tinasha leaped into the air and teleported away. She reappeared in the sky far above the other three. Clutching her throat, she rasped out, “Get out of me… You have no place here!”
On Tinasha’s final word, she made the magic in her body explode. After an impact that almost tore the young woman apart, a violent torrent of raw power struck her.
Travis gazed up at the tiny speck in the sky that was Tinasha and cursed under his breath. “Dammit…”
“What just happened? Has she been possessed?” demanded Oscar, an ominous look on his face.
The demon king flung an answer back at him. “Not possessed. Phaedra can’t do anything to her. It’s just the very last bits of her. Nothing that little could seize Tinasha completely. The equilibrium of the demon realm must have been thrown off after the loss of two of its mightiest inhabitants. There’ll be some aftershocks until things settle back to normal. That’s why some of Phaedra’s consciousness is lingering.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” Oscar pressed.
“Nothing. The dead can’t come back to life. What Tinasha just did probably blew away the last of Phaedra, and as for the demon realm, those of us who remain are enough to maintain a new balance, so long as we don’t touch anything. If we’d lost any more of us, then things would be different, but the death of two just means a temporary fluctuation in the current of power.”
Oscar frowned at that unsatisfactory explanation. “Then what are you worried about?”
“No one can stop the disruption, even if they’re short-lived. Aftershocks will keep rolling through to try and fill the empty spots until a new equilibrium is reached. Power is pouring into Tinasha—the one who killed the demon. And unfortunately, no matter how high her magic tolerance is…”
An explosion sounded overhead. An incredible mass of magic emerged. In the center of it stood a beautiful woman.
Her long flowing black locks danced in the wind. In a voice as clear as a bell, she laughed loudly. “Ahhhhh… ha-ha-haa! A-ha-ha-ha!”
Tinasha’s shrieking howls reached the ears of the three people below. The noise was downright unhinged and didn’t resemble her usual demeanor at all. Oscar’s eyes shot wide open.
Behind him, Travis shrugged. In a blasé tone, he remarked, “Ah, she’s gone out of control.”
Oscar and Aurelia had no words.
A light drizzle was falling, dampening her thin frame. Tinasha cast an annoyed glance at the raindrops on her shoulders. It was like she was burning on the inside. Her emotions were all muddled and chaotic; she didn’t know whether to find it funny or infuriating. Her soul threatened to split into pieces, and she clutched at her throat.
“Ha-ha! Ha… ha-ha…”
Power was gushing forth unbidden. It poured into Tinasha ceaselessly, as though to reforge her from the inside out.
Tinasha touched her cheek; her fingers came away wet with tears. “Hmm?”
She had nothing to be sad about. She shouldn’t have, anyway.
At present, she possessed enough heat inside her to sear away everything around, and that was all that should’ve mattered.
Tinasha glared at the gloomy, overcast clouds and the incessant precipitation. They were ruining what should have been a gorgeous view.
She snapped her fingers, and a blast of wind shot upward, sending all the clouds flying and clearing up the sky in the blink of an eye. Soft sunlight filtered down to earth.
“Excellent…”
Now things were a little better. She hated the cold. It made her feel like she’d been alone in an unfamiliar place.
Roughly wiping away the tears on her cheeks, Tinasha assessed the heat building within her. She wanted something, and she wanted it very badly, but she couldn’t determine what.
That uncertainty left her wanting to destroy everything in her path.
She shook her aching head as her gaze darted around wildly. When it landed on the fortress of Ynureid, she scowled. “What an eyesore…”
Before she could cast a spell, someone suddenly roared at her from the ground below.
“TINASHA!”
His voice carried well. She cocked her head like a kitten, gazing at the man glaring at her from below.
Oscar and Aurelia were both dazed by Tinasha’s ability to change the weather without any sort of incantation.
Travis scowled. She was growing more powerful than he’d imagined. It had reached a point that she now surpassed a forbidden curse, if only by a little.
“What do we do?” Oscar asked.
“Well… she’s getting used to her magic. It should take about half an hour for her mind to gain control over the power. By then, the terrain around here might look pretty different, though,” Travis replied.
“We just rebuilt that fortress,” Oscar said sourly.
“So? Tell that to your lady,” Travis retorted.
This was all too ridiculous. Oscar massaged his temples. Behind him, Aurelia had gone pale as she clutched the baby to her.
Travis patted her shoulder. “We’d better find some shelter. Wanna head back?”
“Hold on just a minute! Can’t you do something to stop this?!” she cried.
“Not possible,” Travis answered flatly. “Normally, she’s about as strong as I am, but I could always handle her. Now, though? No way. I can’t do a thing. Besides, children of the spirits—spirit sorcerers, that is—get the best of everything in this world. Letting her be is the best course of action.”
Aurelia frowned at her guardian. “Come on. You sound like a coward.”
“I just don’t make a habit of overestimating my own abilities. I do what I can and nothing more. Killing Tinasha’s about the only way of stopping her.”
“Absolutely not!” Aurelia cried.
“Thought so,” Travis responded, throwing his hands up theatrically.
Oscar threw him a stony glance, observing how this beautiful man seemed to be enjoying this somehow. He unsheathed Akashia again. “Then I’ll do it.”
“Are you out of your mind? Sure, Akashia can beat her, but getting too full of yourself’s only gonna get you killed,” said Travis.
“There’s a way to restore her. Besides, I’d rather not rebuild that fortress for a second time. I’m going to get close to her, and you’re going to help me,” Oscar stated in a tone brooking no refusal.
Travis’s lip curled scornfully, and Aurelia poked him in the back. At that, the demon nodded. “Fine. Do you mean get close to her physically?”
“Pretty sure I don’t need any help getting close to her emotionally,” Oscar shot back, and Travis burst out laughing.
While these two men were not on good terms by any stretch of the imagination, they worked out a simple order of operations and then set out to subdue the woman lingering in the skies.
Tilting her head to one side, Tinasha observed the man down on the ground. Irritation flashed in her dark eyes. “Who are you? Stop bothering me.”
That cut Oscar deep. Keeping his eyes focused straight ahead, he asked Travis, “Has she lost her memories?”
“It’s more likely they’re all temporarily jumbled,” the demon answered. “Phaedra’s consciousness may be gone, but her emotions are probably still there. She really, really hated mortals. If you make one wrong move, you’ll wind up in the ground.”
“No way am I gonna let that go unchecked. That’s my fiancée up there,” Oscar muttered. With his off hand, he gestured to Tinasha to come toward him. “Tinasha, I need to talk to you! Come down here.”
“No. Go away.”
“…”
Oscar smiled grimly at her immediate refusal. Her loathing for him was written all over her face; the dead demon queen’s feelings truly were influencing Tinasha.
After a moment’s thought, Oscar looked back up at her. “Come down here if you hate me so much. I’ll fight you.”
Tinasha’s eyes grew wide upon being provoked so openly. She looked shocked and hurt, but only for a second. Then there was only anger. She leveled a finger at him. “Die then.”
Five orbs of light shot from her digit, snaking through the air toward Oscar. He broke into a run and slashed with Akashia, cutting the first two magic spheres apart. Without spells to hold them together, the luminous globes dispersed.
The third and fourth orbs, racing at him from behind, exploded as soon as they touched Akashia.
Behind Oscar, Travis crossed his arms and smirked. “I’m getting tired of this. Just come down.”
As Akashia cleaved through the final orb, an enormous pressure bore down on Tinasha from above.
“Hey!”
She crumpled in the face of the sudden attack, plummeting to the earth. However, before she collided with the surface, a colossal explosion boomed. A tremendous blast of air swept over the area.
Travis threw up a barrier to ward off the kicked-up dirt, and he sighed. “Come on, now. I just want to go home.”
Tinasha glowered at him crossly while floating a little off the ground. That surprise attack had garnered her wrath. Oscar had never seen her dark eyes so filled with pure hatred. “So there’s two of you… I see.”
The woman was seething with fury, her emotions on the verge of burning anyone who so much as touched her. Still, Oscar stepped in closer to her. He touched the ring finger on his left hand, just to make sure. “Strictly speaking, I’m the one responsible for all this. Come here, and I’ll get that poison out of you.”
“I hate you,” she replied, lifting a hand. A gigantic wall of compressed magic appeared in front of her. The white edifice was as thick as a real stone one and as tall as a castle rampart.
The other side of it was just transparent enough to reveal that it was knotted together with a roiling mass of dense, concentrated magical power.
“Go.”
The wall moved toward Oscar, plowing through the ground and sending dirt flying in all directions. He set off at a run, sword in hand.
As the colossal, intricate mass of magic pressed in on him, Oscar swung Akashia down at it. The mighty wall capable of toppling everything it touched developed a giant crack.
Oscar slipped through that crevice and hurried closer. Tinasha frowned and snapped her fingers. A scalding flash of light formed behind Oscar. It pressed into his back, giving off sparks.
But without even looking behind him, Oscar sliced it to shreds. Embers flew off and landed on his arms, but the barrier Tinasha herself had placed on Oscar kept him safe.
The fluctuation in magic reverberated through her body, making her jolt. “AHH!”
“Come back to yourself, Tinasha.”
“Y-you shut up!” she snapped resentfully. She cast a teleportation spell to escape up into the sky. However, Oscar had anticipated that and touched the ring on his left hand. The warp-blocking spell activated. Travis, who had finished eliminating the rest of the wall, whistled from behind.
Tinasha’s eyes grew wide with astonishment before her face darkened with animosity. A huge amount of magic formed between her hands—a radiant golden orb. Tinasha carried it up into the air and hurled it down at Oscar. Realizing it was big enough to blow a crater in the earth, he stopped where he was and readjusted his grip on Akashia.
“GO AWAY FOREVER!”
The air crackled and sizzled. Oscar held the flat of his blade up against the radiant sphere. Akashia only held it in place for a second before splitting it in two.
By that point, however, Tinasha had conjured a black sword. The blinding orb had been a decoy, and she plunged at Oscar from above. Akashia easily repelled the incoming blade and dispelled it, though. Oscar caught hold of Tinasha’s wrist and pulled her in; her face turned to a look of startled dismay.
Despite being presented with such a clear opening, Oscar hesitated for a fraction too long. Seizing her chance, Tinasha focused her gaze as she kicked him in the shoulder. She moved far back, riding the wave of a small burst of power.
Sighing as he looked down at the hand she had knocked away, Oscar heard Travis say, “You could’ve stabbed her in the stomach.”
“If I did that, her guts would burst open,” Oscar pointed out.
“So? Just do it. I’ll heal them up later.”
“But it’ll still hurt like hell.”
When Travis had blown a hole in Tinasha’s abdomen, she’d writhed in agony even after restoring herself. Oscar didn’t want to put Tinasha through that, nor did he want to jeopardize her ability to have children by forcing her to reconstitute her body tissue repeatedly.
A scream rent the air as the two men bickered.
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”
The queen was caught in a fit of rage, tearing madly at her hair. A wild cry erupted from her tiny, battered frame. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
She was like a child throwing a temper tantrum, though her screams were more heartbroken.
“I hate you! I’m sick of looking at you! Die! Die already, you liar! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” she cried, cradling her head in her hands as she burned with enmity.
Coldly eyeing the queen going insane from an over-infusion of pure magic, Travis said, “Phaedra’s emotions are really doing her in. All we can do is beat her into submission and wait for it to subside.”
“No,” Oscar said.
What Travis suggested wasn’t impossible. While Tinasha had all the power of a full-scale calamity, she wasn’t in her right mind at present. Oscar and the demon could subdue her.
That didn’t feel like the right way to go about it, however.
Oscar gazed at her tearstained face. When his eyes met her dark ones, he made up his mind. “It will be all right.”
Akashia in hand, he stepped forward.
Tinasha shivered when she saw the weapon. She held her hands out in front of her to stop him from taking another step and started to pour magic into the space between them.
“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
“Why do you hate me? Because I’m a mortal?” he asked.
“I hate you. You’re a liar. I despise you.”
“Well, I can’t deny that I’ve lied to you,” he admitted.
The muddled state of her emotions made it hard to tell where the demon ended and Tinasha began.
Bitterly, she shook her head. White light emerged from her hands, glowing brighter and brighter.
Pure, raw magic—enough power to wipe out thousands in an instant.
From behind, Travis piped up, “Watch out. You take that hit, and this whole region gets decimated.”
Oscar didn’t answer and instead kept his eyes trained on the woman before him as he moved nearer.
As destructive radiance spilled from Tinasha’s hands, she turned a nervous gaze on him and snapped, “You didn’t even want me. You’re going to leave me.”
“I’m not. I’m yours.”
“I hate you,” she said after a pause. A simple spell appeared between her palms. It possessed more than enough strength to annihilate a lowly mortal. All it would take was a thought. Scowling hatefully, Tinasha completed the spell.
A feverish, crazed look crossed Tinasha’s face.
“Love me.”
Seven rings flared into being. The pressure emanating from them was similar to Druza’s forbidden curse, but more intense.
The massive spell flew from her hands, hurtling toward Oscar. He only felt a minor flash of worry as he leaped directly into the path of the attack, however. With a sharp exhale, he dug Akashia’s blade into the interlocking spells.
Light exploded with such intensity that Oscar momentarily lost his sight.
Still, he cut away the spells on the outer edges as pressure seared into him. The hand gripping Akashia went numb. He was robbed of all sense of gravity. However, he continued undaunted, instinctually hacking away the sheer force pressing down on his body.
As he breathed out all the air in his lungs, he found himself standing before her. Gazing down at Tinasha, her face streaked with tears, Oscar smiled. “Is that what you’ve been worried about?”
Was that an emotion belonging to the dead demon woman? Or was it a wish Tinasha herself had kept hidden?
Either way, she was here with him now.
He cupped her face in both hands. “Tinasha, I adore you. You don’t need to worry about that.”
Her teary eyes widened a fraction. Gently, he lay the flat of Akashia against her ivory cheek. From that point of contact outward, magic diffused away.
As her breathing slowly calmed, Oscar pressed a kiss to the bridge of her nose and murmured, “Do you want me to feed it to you? Can you drink it yourself?”
Tinasha’s long eyelashes fluttered. Her deathly pale cheeks turned a faint pink. “I’ll drink it myself.”
She held out a hand, and Oscar smiled tightly as he pulled a vial from his pocket and passed it to her. It contained water from the underground Lake of Silence located beneath Farsas Castle. Drawn from the pool that had created the royal sword, the water could neutralize magic.
Tinasha drained it in one gulp. When she fainted, Oscar took her in his arms. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Travis waving at them in the distance. |
Unnamed Memory
10. Half of Eternity
Seated in a chair, Aurelia closed her eyes. Travis put his hand on her forehead. “You seriously can’t just undo the seal like that, you little runaway. What am I gonna do with you?”
“You’re the one who wouldn’t come home,” she said, sulking.
“I’m strong enough to take care of myself,” he retorted, infusing his hand with magic.
Aurelia grimaced as she realized her powers had been shut away once more. Then her face clouded over. She turned her ashy blue eyes on Travis and asked, “Is it really true that you almost killed Queen Tinasha?”
“Did he tell you that?” Travis responded, his tone dismissive as he waved an annoyed hand. “Don’t mind that. It’s my business, so just forget it.”
“I will not. Tell me the truth,” she insisted, her gaze just as straightforward as it had been on the day they met. True to her proud spirit, she always carried herself perfectly upright and with the utmost grace.
Travis had known Aurelia for long enough to recognize when she wouldn’t give up. He scratched at his scalp. “Well, all right, it’s true.”
“I… see,” she replied.
Travis frowned, having expected the girl to lose her temper. “That’s all? Don’t hold back.”
“I have plenty to say. I’ve always wondered why you saved me and how long you plan on staying with me. But none of that is worth fretting over,” Aurelia responded, standing up to glare at Travis. “I know exactly what you are and how cold you can be. But if you’re planning to keep sharing my life, you are no longer allowed to do anything bad like that anymore! You will learn how humans behave! If you do, I will bear half of your ridiculous sins!” she cried, her gray eyes glittering with purpose. She fixed him with that same gaze that could see into the past.
Astounded, Travis could only manage, “Do you… do you really mean that?”
“I wouldn’t have said all that if I didn’t! Don’t you realize how long we’ve been together?”
He could have never imagined that she’d come out with that; she had left him speechless. Did she have any idea just how different their life spans were? There was no way she could know him, nor could she possibly be able to carry half of his sins.
The words seemed the foolish ramblings of a child.
And yet, Travis could feel himself wanting to cling to them. He needed Aurelia’s strength. He needed her heart, even if he had to kill her for it. That was what he had thought once.
She wasn’t the true fool here, though—he was. Travis didn’t understand a thing about mortals. His touch wounded them. His interest corrupted them. Knowing that, he still elected to get involved with them for his own amusement.
Aurelia couldn’t possibly comprehend what aligning herself with someone like him meant.
Travis cleared his face of surprise and asked, “Are you insane? You’re going to end up ruined.”
Gone was his usual teasing complacency, replaced with a loneliness as boundless and eternal as the night.
Aurelia’s eyes narrowed a fraction as she recognized how hollow he had gone. Still, her own gaze didn’t waver one bit. Every word cut Travis to the core as she stated, “Neither of us can know whether I’ll end up ruined or happy. If you want me with you, I’ll follow you all the way to hell.”
Although the declaration was dramatic, she very clearly meant it.
Travis had never met anyone like her before. She was the only one.
The demon king stared at her so hard he could burn a hole right through the girl. She arched an eyebrow. “What? If you’ve got something to say, then spit it out.”
“It’s just… hmm. I’ll concede this once that you’ve grown a little,” Travis remarked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aurelia complained, but the demon only grinned in reply.
Even Travis couldn’t say how long they’d be together. One day, they might come to reject the idea.
Yet were that day to come, and they parted ways, her words just now had still saved his soul. Travis made up his mind to tell Aurelia that someday—when he looked back on this moment with deep longing. When that time finally came, he would honor this day.
The rain gradually tapered off after dark. The white glow of the moon and stars peeked out from rifts in the clouds.
After dragging her battered self back to Tuldarr, Tinasha rushed through her paperwork and returned to her chambers. By the time she finished her bath and dried her hair, the sky had gone completely black.
Slumping over her table, Tinasha heaved a deep sigh. “Ohhh, I’m so tired…”
The nausea caused by the afternoon’s events had largely receded, but she still couldn’t use magic. Unlike when she fell in the Lake of Silence, she hadn’t vomited up the water after imbibing it. She probably wouldn’t be able to cast any spells for at least another two hours—when the clock chimed midnight.
As she mentally reviewed the awful day she’d suffered, Tinasha flushed bright red and buried her face in her hands. “I—I can’t believe how embarrassing that was! Ugh!”
On top of sustaining the aftershock pouring immense power into her, she’d synchronized with Phaedra’s emotions and lost control of herself.
Tinasha had said so many ridiculous things she would never have said out loud. Even she didn’t know which parts were her feelings and which were Phaedra’s.
“Love me.”
It was such a childish jumbled-up ball of emotion, and she’d hurled it straight at him. It was so humiliating that she wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out.
However, Oscar had only shaken his head and accepted all of it.
“I’ll need to give him a proper apology later…,” Tinasha said. She held back another defeated exhale just as someone knocked on the door to her chambers. “Yes?”
“You have a guest, Lady Tinasha!” a spirit called brightly. Tinasha walked over to the door and opened it, not suspecting anything at all. Then she froze.
Standing before Mila, who was grinning mischievously, was her fiancé.
“Aaaaahhh! Why?! This is Tuldarr!” she exclaimed.
“Wow, that’s quite a reaction. I can’t believe you had the nerve to sneak out and scurry home while I was busy with work. I’m here to give you a lecture,” he said.
“Ow, ow, ow!” she griped as he swept into the room, dragging her by the cheek. Mila waggled her fingers and shut the door behind them.
Oscar’s heartless treatment left the queen with tears in her eyes. “I—I don’t like this surprise visit.”
“Did you really think you would get away with not telling me everything? I want the whole story.”
“Urgh,” Tinasha grumbled. She hadn’t intended to keep it from him indefinitely, but she had hoped to at least delay his anger for a while.
The look on Oscar’s face told her that he had reached his limit, though.
Rubbing at her sore cheek, Tinasha first apologized and then launched into an explanation of the events leading up to the day’s battles. She wanted to conceal a few details, but every time she tried to gloss over things, Oscar’s intuition led him to press her further. Ultimately, she told him just about all of it.
Pinched to within an inch of her life and breathing raggedly, Tinasha lay slumped over her table. In the seat across from her sat Oscar, wearing an utterly appalled expression. “Were you thinking clearly at all? You were under no obligation to risk your life for him.”
“He spared my life when he could’ve ended it,” Tinasha pointed out. “And then he offered to never meddle in Farsas or Tuldarr. It seemed like a very good arrangement.”
“If you want to make sure he doesn’t trouble us, I’ll just go kill him myself,” Oscar said.
“Wai… wait…”
Oscar and Travis had worked together to stop Tinasha, and she’d hoped that meant they were only on slightly better terms, but apparently, that was not the case.
Feeling at her wit’s end, Tinasha stood up. “Um, do you want something to drink? I have some liqueurs.”
“Are those here for you to drink?” Oscar asked.
“No, they’re for decoration. The colors are very pretty,” she replied, pointing to a row of bottles in a cabinet containing amber, golden, and ruby liquids.
All looked unopened, and Oscar eyed them from over Tinasha’s shoulder. “All right, I’ll have some of the amber one, second from the left.”
“Okay. Do you need anything for it, or will you drink it straight?” she asked.
“Just over ice,” he answered. Ordinarily, Tinasha would use magic to create some, but she couldn’t do that at the moment. Instead, she poked her head into the antechamber where Mila stood guard and got the ice from her. As she struggled valiantly to open the bottle, Oscar plucked it from her and uncorked it himself.
After a sigh, Tinasha remarked, “I—I suppose I really can’t do anything without my magic, can I…?”
“Now you know what it’s like. I don’t mind at all. In fact, feel free to drink that lake water every day,” Oscar said.
“I—I don’t know about that…”
While pouring a glass for himself, Oscar admonished Tinasha. “I don’t know why you always decide to take on other people’s messes in the first place. You need to learn how to say no.”
“In Travis’s case, I owed him a debt. He’s the one who told me to put myself in a magic sleep,” she explained, and Oscar’s eyes grew wide.
Tinasha gave a tight smile. “It actually hadn’t occurred to me at all to try to find you again… We belonged to different eras, and I had no proof that what you’d told me was true. But Travis told me it was better to give chase than to sit and rot. Bizarrely, he sounded like he didn’t doubt the story at all. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he knew about Eleterria…”
For a moment, Tinasha’s gaze turned very distant. It was a look she had often adopted when the two first met, one redolent of loneliness and homesickness.
But when she looked back up at Oscar, none of that was present in her expression. “But now I don’t owe him anything anymore. I’m sorry for worrying you.”
With eyes narrowed, Oscar responded, “I see.”
Luck and coincidence were highly involved in how most people met one another. Yet it seemed like the two of them meeting was a miracle above all the rest, born out of some perilous destiny they shared. How would things have turned out if Tinasha hadn’t met Oscar when she was young?
As his thoughts led him in that direction, Oscar frowned. “Why did I go back to save you?”
“What?”
“I’m just wondering what I jumped four hundred years into the past to do. Or was it just a fluke?”
Tinasha shifted uncomfortably to be asked that now, after so long. Reluctantly, she answered, “Because in this time period, I was originally your wife.”
“You were my… what?”
“Urgh… I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d react like this,” she admitted.
Oscar was floored. While he still hadn’t taken everything in, he reached across the table and caught up a lock of his sullen fiancée’s hair. “What exactly do you mean by that? Why was I married to you?”
“I don’t know! I guess your taste in women is just that bad!” she cried.
“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the whole… born in different eras thing.”
Born over four centuries apart, they were only together now because Tinasha had gone into a magic sleep to see Oscar. How had they been married in the previous timeline?
Tinasha crossed her arms and frowned. “I asked you the same thing a long time ago, but you wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think it was a lie, though, because you knew an awful lot about me.”
“Something about this doesn’t add up… Did he tell you to jump four hundred years ahead?”
“No. He told me that I’d never see him again because he’d changed history. I was about to be coronated, so he requested that I become a good queen,” Tinasha replied, a forlorn smile on her lips. Her eyes, tinged with deep affection and loss, were turned to another man from the distant past. Her memories of that man—her sole comfort in those days—had propelled her through time and brought her here.
In sharp contrast, however, Oscar scowled. “That makes no sense. If you’d focused on being queen and hadn’t abdicated, we would’ve never gotten to meet. He should’ve considered consequences more thoroughly.”
“Look who’s talking!” Tinasha exclaimed, then she flopped over onto the table.
Many coincidences had lined up so they could meet each other. Oscar was glad that he hadn’t made any missteps. He gazed at his fiancée earnestly as he mulled all that over.
Noticing his stare, Tinasha gave him a smile. She stood up from her chair and came over to him. He set down his glass and pulled her onto his lap. “Well, you’re going to be my wife anyway, so there’s no real issue in the end. Still, you should have told me that in the first place.”
“No way. You would have thought I was a complete weirdo if I told you I was your future bride when we first met. Honestly, I did think you were crazy after you told me that when I was a kid.”
“Oh, you did, did you?”
Had Tinasha tried to explain that to the present Oscar, it really would have come off as suspicious. Unlike Oscar’s earlier self, who probably knew everything about his wife’s younger days, the only connection this Tinasha had to the previous Oscar was that he had saved her life. She didn’t have enough to go on to prove that the two were married. Had she woken up and insisted they were a couple, it probably would have only succeeded in delaying their getting together.
As Oscar carded his fingers through Tinasha’s long inky hair, he buried his face in it and inhaled the faint scent of her floral perfume. That scent of hers, her slender frame, her eyes like the abyss—all of it drew him to her and held him fast.
A little tipsy, he hugged her tightly. But then something occurred to him, and he looked up. “Tinasha, do you know what an insider is?”
“An insider? You mean… someone on the inside?”
“Right… What could that be referring to?” Oscar mused.
After Tinasha had recovered her senses, Travis had asked Oscar how he had gotten her under control. When he revealed that he’d given her magic-sealing water from the lake, the demon king responded, “Ah yes, the insiders’ lake.”
At the time, Oscar didn’t think much of it, but once Travis was gone, he remembered he’d heard that word somewhere once before. Insider.
But for the life of him, he couldn’t recall where.
Tinasha must have had no idea, either, because her wide black eyes blinked at him curiously. He patted her head and dropped the subject. “Never mind. It’s not a big deal.”
“I’ll ask Travis the next chance I get,” she said.
“No, you won’t. I don’t want you seeing him again.”
“Y-you really hate him, huh?” Tinasha sighed, but there was nothing to be done. It would be much weirder if the two of them did get along.
Oscar caught a glimpse of her black eyes widening a little.
“Oh? Did the lake water just wear off?” he asked.
She opened a hand and cast a spell. After inspecting her own exquisite handiwork, she nodded. “Everything seems to be fine.”
“So you can use magic?”
“I can. It’s all back,” she confirmed.
“Okay, then. Whenever you have a free moment, could you redo the spell on this?” Oscar requested, taking off the ring on his left hand and handing it to Tinasha. With a dry laugh, she took it from him.
She certainly hadn’t imagined that she would be the first person Oscar used the ring on. Still, it had worked. The silver lining was the fact that the ring had led to her getting pacified faster.
“I’ll recast it now, since we don’t know what might happen,” Tinasha said, and she began the incantation. After five long minutes, the ring was enchanted again, and Tinasha placed it back on Oscar’s finger.
“Thanks,” he said.
“It’s no problem. It was me who made you use it, after all,” she replied with a bitter smile. Oscar pressed a kiss to her forehead. Her eyes went half-lidded like a cat’s as he stroked her hair.
Then Oscar got to his feet, helping Tinasha stand as well. “All right, I’ll be heading back now. You must be exhausted, so get some good sleep tonight.”
“What? You’re leaving?” she asked, gazing up at him with the innocent eyes of a little girl. Oscar narrowed his eyes, confident she didn’t even realize what she was saying.
A smile formed on his face, and he kissed her. “I worry if I don’t come to check on you regularly. I only came to make sure you’re okay.”
He didn’t say that he was troubled about her not being able to use magic and wanted to see how she was faring, because it was the same as stating that he was thinking of her. And Tinasha surely knew that already.
Tinasha’s eyes went a little wide and she dimpled with happiness. “I love you. I really don’t hate you at all. That wasn’t real.”
“I know,” Oscar replied.
And because of that, the two of them would walk hand in hand on their own paths toward their shared future.
They didn’t yet know about the dark intentions and magic that were slowly corrupting nations.
The seed had been planted very surreptitiously.
It was only the most fragile of creatures. As it dozed peacefully, unknown to all, it slowly grew roots. Those roots would eventually stretch far underground, while a sprout would breach the surface.
Everything was progressing slowly and hazily, like something out of a dream.
Once they saw that radiantly blooming flower, they would know for the first time that it was truly too late.
Such would be the beginning of the final revolution. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER ONE
Tatooine's twin suns hung low above the horizon. Once he had thought they looked like demonic eyes, threatening him.
Warning him.
Daring him.
Now they were almost welcoming.
"Prepare for landing," commanded the youth at the console of Slave I. He stared out at the red suns, shadows pooling like blood beneath them. Despite himself, he smiled.
It's good to be back, thought Boba Fett as he leaned into his seat. In the cockpit behind him was a pair of shriveled hands - all that remained of Boba's last mission. He had gone to the Dune Sea to hunt down the Noghri assassin Jhordvar. The lithe, lidless-eyed alien had made the mistake of betraying Boba's employer.
Bad idea, Boba thought, recalling Jhordvar's contempt when he first peered from his desert hideout to see the young bounty hunter standing before him.
"Jabba sends a lackey to do an assassin's job!" the alien hissed.
"Wrong," said Boba. His blaster was already aligned with Jhordvar's eyes. "He sent the best bounty hunter of his house." Their battle had been brief but intense. Boba offered Jhordvar the chance to accompany him back to Jabba's B'omarr citadel, but the alien refused to surrender.
Jabba the Hutt had wanted the traitor dead or alive. Well, he got one out of two, Boba thought as he guided Slave I into the docking bay of Jabba's palace. A desert sandstorm had stranded him for several days in the Noghri's lair, with the alien's body caught outside in the storm. Sand and heat had mummified what remained of Jhordvar. The hands had literally been snapped off by the fierce winds; Boba decided that Jhordvar's ring would be enough to identify him, and so he left the body but took the hands.
"You know, Jhordvar, you should've surrendered when you had the chance," said Boba as Slave I touched down. "But you fought bravely, I'll give you that." Boba commanded the ship's computer to shut down, then picked up the Noghri's withered claws. He looked at them, grimacing, then slung them into his pack and disembarked. He left his Mandalorian helmet in the cockpit - he'd get it after he reported in to Jabba.
"I'll see you again soon," he said, letting his hand slide along Slave l's hull. "Real soon."
A pair of Gamorrean guards lolled by the entrance to Jabba's castle. As Boba approached, one of them nudged the other. The two looked at each other in surprise, but quickly straightened.
One of them grunted questioningly.
"I had a slight delay," retorted Boba. He shifted his pack so the hulking boars could get a glimpse of Jhordvar's claws protruding from the top. "Nothing serious. Just a sandstorm." The Gamorrean guards' eyes widened with respect and - yes! - fear. Boba fought the urge to grin triumphantly. That was almost all the reward he needed. Almost - but not quite. He tipped his head back and stared pointedly at one of the Gamorreans. Hastily the guard turned and opened the massive door for him. Boba strode through proudly.
He would take all the respect he could get. One earns respect, his father had always told him. As for those who are foolish enough not to give it to you - well, for them, there is always fear.
Boba paused. The heavy door behind him slammed shut. He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimness inside the fortress. He waited for his skin to adjust to the touch of cool air, and for his ears to catch the distant sounds of revelry from the throne room. Fear and respect, he thought with grim satisfaction. Everything I've learned about those things can be summed up in three little words: Jabba the Hutt.
Boba turned, and began walking down the corridor. Several protocol droids hurried past him, on their way to do Jabba's bidding. Two of the Huttese crimelord's Drovion security guards swaggered up and down the halls. Boba watched as they stopped a pair of Jawas, frisking the small yellow-eyed scavengers before letting them pass. As Boba approached, he had the satisfaction of hearing one of Jabba's lackeys mutter his name.
"G'wan," the Drovion spat, waving him past. "You're expected. As a matter of fact, you're early - no one thought you'd be back this soon."
"Some hoped you wouldn't make it back at all!" his companion laughed. Boba gave him a cold look. "I'll be sure to mention that to Jabba." The lackey cringed as Boba went on. Being Jabba's favored bounty hunter definitely had its advantages.
When he reached the passage leading to the throne room, he stopped. He could see a dozen or so shadowy figures milling inside the corridor. He recognized several of them by their weapons and body armor: bounty hunters. Something's going on, thought Boba. But what?
From inside, shrill music and harsh laughter echoed - the usual sounds of depravity that surrounded Jabba the Hutt.
There was another sound, too, almost as loud. Boba's stomach was growling.
I haven't eaten since yesterday afternoon, he thought. And it's going to take a while to tell Jabba the whole story about Jhakva. Plus, this will give me a chance to hear any gossip about what's happened since I left.... He glanced back toward the throne room. Besides the bounty hunters, he saw droids and several ragged-looking space pirates, a young Twi'lek dancer twitching from nerves, and an Arkanian holding a very young and very active Arkanian dragon on a leash.
Looks like Jabba might be distracted for a few more minutes, Boba figured. Quickly he turned and hurried down a side passage.
"At last! You've come with the new worm castings!" A Selonian wearing a white chef's robe over its sleek-furred body peered out from a doorway. When it saw Boba, its face fell.
"My mistake," it said, and turned back to stirring something disgusting in a bubbling pot.
Boba kept moving. He passed several doorways, each with a sign on it in Huttese characters. KITCHEN FOUR, KITCHEN FIVE, KITCHEN SIX...
"Kitchen Seven," said Boba with relief as he came to the last door. He adjusted his pack and went inside.
Immediately, he was greeted by the warm simmering scents of baking pod-bread, yowvetch custard, scry-mint. A gnarled figure was bent over a steaming oven. Beside him, another figure was putting the finishing touches on a white worm souffl©.
"Am I too late for breakfast?" asked Boba.
"No breakfast till tomorrow," the elderly figure said without looking up.
"Not even for a starving bounty hunter?" The two cooks turned.
"Boba!" cried the younger one. She swiped the hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge of flour. "You're back! And you've gotten even taller!" Boba grinned. "Maybe you're just shrinking, Ygabba." Ygabba shook her head. She looked him up and down. "Nope. You're definitely taller. You're going to need some new body armor soon, Boba." Boba took the pack from his shoulders and set it on the floor. "Tell me about it," he said. "That'll be my first order of business with Jabba. Second, actually." He cocked a thumb at what was in the pack. Gab'borah looked down. He was Ygabba's father. As Jabba's head dessert-chef, he was accustomed to seeing all kinds of revolting things. But even he was impressed by Boba's trophy.
"Jabba will be very pleased," Gab'borah said. He poked at one of the withered hands approvingly. "I didn't even recognize your voice, Boba. And Ygabba's right - you've grown."
The old man smiled and pointed to the wall behind Boba. There, over the past two years, Gab'borah had lined up Ygabba and Boba, drawing a line where the top of their heads met the wall. Boba looked at the most recent mark, and, yes, he was many centimeters taller now.
"Bounty hunting must agree with you," said Gab'borah with a wink. He turned and took a plate of yowvetch custard, still warm and quivering from the oven. "Here, Boba - you look half-famished." Boba began eating ravenously. "Mmmm - this is great," he said.
"Don't take too long with it," Ygabba warned. "Something's happening. There's a bunch of bounty hunters who've been waiting for the last three days to see Jabba. He's been putting them off - I think he was hoping you'd return - but I don't think he's going to wait much longer."
"Mmmmff." Boba swallowed the last bit of custard, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "Thanks, Ygabba. And Gab'borah. For the food, and the news." He grabbed his pack and headed back into the hall. Ygabba grinned and waved after him.
"See you, Boba!"
"Make sure you drop by before you leave again," Gab'borah called as Boba strode back toward the throne room. "You'll need more provisions to fill that new body armor!"
This time, Jabba's hangers-on made a point of moving out of the way as soon as they saw Boba coming. He caught the sideways, suspicious looks the other bounty hunters gave him as he passed.
Yet he also saw them gazing at him with grudging admiration especially when they saw the pair of mummified hands sticking out of his pack. When he reached the entrance to the throne room, he stopped. A short distance away, he could see Jabba's huge form, rising from clouds of incense and smoke like a mountain of sand from the Dune Sea. Even now Boba could not help grimacing at the sight of his employer. Man, that is one gross Hutt, he thought. He gestured at a protocol droid standing nearby.
"You," commanded Boba. The droid swiveled, fixing him with its glowing lidless eyes. "Tell Jabba the Hutt that Boba Fett is here." The droid inclined its gleaming head slightly.
"Yes, sir," it intoned, and walked smoothly into the throne room, past the guards. The waiting bounty hunters watched as the droid approached the throne, then cried out in its clear robotic voice.
"Lord Jabba! My Lord - "
Heads turned and the music grew still as Boba strode into the room. The droid turned and bowed.
"As you can see, 0 Mighty Jabba - Boba Fett has returned!" |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER TWO
"Hoh hoh hoh!"
Boba stiffened as familiar deep laughter thundered through the vast room. On a platform in the center of the hall reclined the huge, sluglike form of Jabba the Hutt. Behind him, Jabba's Twi'lek majordomo, Bib Fortuna, stood at attention.
The notorious gangster's yellow eyes fixed themselves on Boba. As the young bounty hunter strode closer to the throne, the great Hutt raised himself to gaze down on him.
"So!" boomed Jabba in Huttese, a language that Boba now knew well. "The prodigal hunter has returned!" The crime lord's eyes narrowed as he stared fixedly at Boba. "But he has returned alone. I see no sign of Jhordvar!"
"That's because the boy has failed!" hissed a voice from the shadows. Boba glanced aside. He saw another bounty hunter, a bulbous-eyed, snout nosed Aqualish, staring at him hungrily.
"Failed?" Jabba reached for a basket of squirming white worms. He grabbed a fistful of the repellent grubs. "Is this so?" Boba shot a cold look at the gloating Aqualish. "It is not, 0 Most Heinous of Hutts," Boba said. He swung his pack from his shoulder and stepped toward the throne. "I did as you commanded, Lord Jabba. I gave the assassin Jhordvar the choice of returning with me, or - "
"Or getting away!" cried the Aqualish. Rough laughter came from the other bounty hunters. Boba ignored them.
"Or accepting his own death," Boba continued cooly. "He chose the latter. Unfortunately for him. But not, 0 Mighty Jabba, for you." With a flourish, Boba lifted his pack and turned it over. Jhordvar's remains fell to the floor. The withered hands curled upward, as though trying - too late - to escape. Gasps echoed through the throne room, followed by excited murmurs.
Jabba looked at his major-domo.
With a bow, Bib Fortuna moved quickly toward the trophies. He stooped and grasped one skeletal hand. Then he turned it so that Jabba could see the gold-green amaralite ring glittering on a mummified finger.
"It is indeed Jhordvar," said Bib Fortuna. He flashed Boba an admiring look. Then the Twi'lek yanked the ring from the assassin's bony hand, and returned to hold it up to Jabba.
"Hmmmm," mused Jabba. He had Fortuna hold the ring up to the light and inspected it. He looked at Boba. Very slowly, Jabba's lipless mouth parted in a smile. "Hoh hoh hoh! Come - "
Boba let his breath out in a silent whistle of relief. He took the steps toward Jabba at a near run, stopping before the throne.
"Your hand," commanded Jabba. Boba extended his palm, and Jabba dropped the ring into it. "You will receive your usual fee, young Fett. This is a bonus. Amaralite is worth much in some parts of the galaxy." But not on Tatooine, brooded Boba, while making sure he only looked back calmly at his employer.
"Thank you, Lord Jabba," he said. "I will take good care of it." Jabba stared at him as though he could read the young man's thoughts. The Hutt's flaccid tongue flicked at the corner of his mouth as he reached for more grubs. "You may find it useful, young Boba," he boomed. "On your next adventure..."
Boba stared at him, trying not to let his confusion show. In the hall behind him he could hear the assembled bounty hunters whispering angrily among themselves.
"My next...?" he started.
"Yes." Jabba gestured disdainfully at the other hunters. "You see them? Jackals! Arrak snakes! They are predators. They are good hunters but they are not great ones. They lack vision. They lack endurance," his voice boomed. "They lack the will to succeed." Boba allowed himself a small, grim smile. "Endurance I can understand, " he said.
"I know," said Jabba. "That is why I have waited for your return. I have an important job for you. It will take many bounty hunters - but only one will be given the most rewarding task."
"This I understand, too," said Boba.
"These bounty hunters," Jabba went on, pointing at the others, "they have been here for a week. Some did not have the patience to wait. They left. They will not return."
Boba shivered at Jabba's tone. The crime lord's voice rose as he cried out so that all in the hall could hear him. "Return in one hour! You will receive your orders then. There will be glory for all of you - and blood for all," he finished, his wide mouth curling in a smile. Throughout the cavernous room, the other bounty hunters cursed. Some laughed. The rest made threatening gestures and stalked away angrily. After a few minutes only a few remained, looking hopefully at Jabba. One of them was the Aqualish.
"What are you waiting for?" Jabba bellowed at them. He turned to Bib Fortuna. "These guests do not know their manners! Perhaps they would enjoy sharing a meal with my pit beasts?"
"By all means, master," said the Twi'lek with a nasty smile. Boba looked over. The remaining bounty hunters hurried toward the arched doorway. The last to leave was the Aqualish. He glared back at Boba, then followed the others.
"Now," thundered Jabba from his throne. He leaned forward, his tail twitching slightly, and beckoned Boba toward him. "You have done well for a young bounty hunter."
"Thank you, Lord Jabba," said Boba.
"So well, in fact, that I have no more use for you here," Jabba continued.
Boba looked at him, startled. "But you just said...?" he asked. "No more use for me?" He swallowed, trying not to let his alarm show. But all l want is to be a bounty hunter, he thought. The very best and only the very best work for Jabba!
"That is not what I said." Jabba's voice was calm, with an edge of menace. "I said I had no more use for you here, on Tatooine." Boba stared at him, hardly daring to believe his ears. Jabba nodded. "That is right. Tomorrow you begin a new job for me, Boba - off-planet!" |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER THREE
Off-planet! Yes!
Boba wanted to punch the air in excitement. "When do I leave?" he asked.
Jabba watched him approvingly. "I am glad to see you are pleased at the prospect," he boomed. He picked up a squishy, star-shaped glubex, unpeeled its head from its body, and ate it, slurping loudly. He held out the empty skin to Boba.
"Uh, no thanks," said Boba.
Jabba belched and went on. "Many would be terrified at the very thought of traveling to Xagobah in these troubled times. But I think my instincts about you are correct. You do not seem afraid." Boba hesitated. "My father taught me that fear can be overcome," he said at last. He felt a pang at the memory of his father, Jango Fett - the mighty bounty hunter, slain by that murderous Jedi, Mace Windu. "He always said that a good bounty hunter ought to know his prey as well as he knew himself.
Knowledge is power. Fear is energy. And with power and energy, one can conquer anything. One can defeat any enemy."
Jabba stared at him through slitted amber eyes. "Your father taught you well, Boba Fett."
"What he did not teach me, 0 Jabba, I have learned from you." Jabba's enormous mouth opened in a bubbling laugh. He reached for the withered stalk of Jhordvar's arm and waved it as though it were a fan. "Hoh hoh! In that case, you have learned well indeed!" Jabba tossed Jhordvar's arm into the shadows. "But you will need all your knowledge, young Fett," he said. "And luck wouldn't hurt - not where I'm sending you."
Boba waited patiently. He knew better than to interrupt Jabba. At this point, Jabba's major-domo took over. "Last week a high-ranking member of the Republic Senate contacted the great Jabba. Completely confidential, of course," the obsequious Bib Fortuna said with an evil smirk. "They want it to appear that they are working through the proper channels. They have put a bounty on the heads of many leading Separatists. Our Lord Jabba had agreed to help them hunt down these scum. Everyone knows his bounty hunters are the best," Bib Fortuna added, gloating. "Even the Republic!"
Boba smiled. His hand moved instinctively to the blaster nestled at his hip. "So you want me to hunt them down?"
"No." The Twiilek gestured dismissively at the empty hall. "Lord Jabba will let those others do that."
Boba glanced at Jabba. The crime lord was watching him closely. Boba kept his expression calm. He waited as Fortuna continued. "Jabba has something much more hazardous in mind for you." Boba nodded. "Great!"
"Have you ever heard of a Separatist named Wat Tambor?"
"No," said Boba.
"He is the Separatists' Techno Union Foreman, as well as a combat engineer. A brilliant strategist. And extremely dangerous - an expert at fighting machines, and a master of defense technologies. He is also an expert at escape. The Republic captured and detained him at a high-security facility. But several of Tambor's followers from the Techno Union freed him, with the assistance of a Clawdite shapeshifter."
"A Clawdite," repeated Boba, scowling. "I have grown to hate Clawdites."
He didn't say why - namely that a young shape-shifter had robbed him while Boba was on Aargau, trying to regain his father's fortune.
"Lord Jabba's sources inform him that Wat Tambor is now on Xagobah," said Bib Fortuna. "He has taken refuge in his fortress there. Republic troops have laid siege to his hideout, using a clone army led by a Jedi Master named Glynn-Beti."
At the word "Jedi," Boba's face grew grim. He didn't explain that he had actually met Glynn-Beti, back on the assault ship Candaserri. She had even shown kindness to him; she had never learned his real name or parentage. Glynn-Beti was a Bothan, cream-furred and small - less than a meter and a half in height. But she had great presence and command despite her diminutive size - the power and authority of a Jedi. And nothing could change Boba's mind about that. He said, "I hate the Jedi, too."
But not Ulu Ulix, Glynn-Beti's Padawan, Boba thought. Ulu was the one Padawan he genuinely liked.
Jabba nodded. Fortuna continued, "I know. And the Separatists supporting Wat Tambor have assembled a huge counterforce - hailfires, spider droids, the most technologically advanced battle droids anyone has ever seen. To reach Wat Tambor you will first have to get through Republic and Separatist lines - no member of the Republic forces on Xagobah must know you have this assignment."
"I understand," said Boba.
"Do you?" Jabba's mouth suddenly split into a cold smile. Fortuna resumed speaking. "Once you have breached the Separatists' forces - if you can - you still have to enter the Citadel. Wat Tambor designed it himself. He focused all of his technological knowledge to one end: to make that fortress invincible. No one has ever penetrated its defenses. No one - not even a Jedi. And even if they did, inside, there are traps everywhere. Hidden doors. And there's a rumor that Tambor is protected by something more terrible still!"
Jabba leaned forward. His huge girth shifted on his throne, like a mud slide in slow motion. "You saw those other bounty hunters, Boba. Every one of them wanted this job. Some of them would be willing to kill for it! Are you?" |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER FOUR
"When do I leave?" asked Boba. He tried not to look impatient.
"Almost immediately."
Jabba turned and spoke to Fortuna in a low voice. The Twi'lek listened, glancing at Boba, then gave a nod, bowed, and left.
"I have commanded that your ship be refueled and supplied," said Jabba. "The other hunters have already received their assignments from Bib Fortuna. They will be departing soon as well. But only you will be going to Xagobah."
Jabba reached into a vivarium. He plucked a single wuorl from the mass of froglike creatures squirming inside the tank, plopped it into his mouth, and chewed thoughtfully.
Ugh! thought Boba. He quickly looked down, adjusted the relay on his blaster, and waited for Jabba to finish.
"There is a small matter we still need to discuss," Jabba said. He gave another hearty belch. "Your fee."
"My fee?" Boba pretended to mull this over. He knew he must choose his words very carefully. He did not want to appear too anxious, like those other bounty hunters. He must be clever, and sly. Even more clever than Jabba himself - only Jabba must never know that.
"It is a very difficult bounty," Boba said at last. "The most perilous I have ever heard of. I have been working for you for several years now, 0 Most Humongous of Hutts. You, more than anyone, know how loyal I am to you. And how grateful I am that you have considered me for this task, knowing that I am still young."
Boba lowered his head. His voice was respectful; but not even Jabba the Hutt could see the determined look in the young bounty hunter's eyes. "Lord Jabba! I will accept whatever fee you feel is appropriate." Jabba's vast body seemed to balloon with delight. "Once again, a good answer! You alone show appreciation for my care! You alone I can always depend on. Therefore I will split the fee the Republic has promised me. I will keep seventy percent. The rest is yours, Boba." Only thirty percent! Others might laugh, or argue, but Boba knew better than that - Jabba usually kept ninety percent. Boba bowed. "Thank you, Most Generous of Gangsters. As you say, I am still young, and learning. And when I return from this mission, I will continue to work for you. By then my apprenticeship will be over. My fee will be higher. But my loyalty will remain the same." Boba's heart beat fast as he spoke these last words. He was taking a chance, and he knew it.
But being the best bounty hunter in the galaxy was all about chance. He stared unflinching at Jabba and waited for his reply. For a moment Jabba was silent. His yellow eyes blazed.
"When you return? When you return?" he said at last. His body began to shake with laughter. "Hoh hoh! Don't you mean if you return?" Jabba drew back upon his throne. "Go - now! Ready yourself for your adventure! If you return, we will discuss this further!"
"Yes, Lord Jabba," Boba replied. With a small bow he turned and very quickly left the throne room. That was a close one! he thought. Jabba's tone and the angry look in his eyes told Boba that he had gone perhaps too far this time!
Boba went to his quarters, a small set of rooms in the easternmost tower of Jabba's sprawling palace. When he got there, he hesitated and stood before the door.
It had been several months since he had been back. He was never here for more than a few days or weeks at a time, between jobs. Still, these rooms were the closest thing he had to a home.
He knew what he would find inside. His quarters were simple, almost spartan. The rooms of a warrior, with no frills besides a small stack of holobooks at his bedside. Books on strategy, navigation, Mandalorian weaponry techniques, scouting, and hunting; ancient texts on war. Most precious of all was the book left to him by his father. It contained his father's words and images. Along with his father's helmet, and the remnants of his father's armor, the book was Boba's most prized possession. He had learned more from that book than he had from any other. But he had learned even more from his own experience. Thinking about his father still made Boba sad. But he knew his father would be proud of his son. After all, he had just received a prize assignment from Jabba the Hutt!
Boba opened the door and went inside. His room was exactly as he had left it. Or was it?
"Hey..." Boba frowned.
Hadn't he left his Mandalorian helmet on board Slave I? Yet here it was, in the middle of his bed. Boba glanced around the room suspiciously.
But there was no sign of anyone. The door showed no signs of forced entry. His hand hovering above his blaster, he crossed to the bed. There was something else there, next to his father's helmet. A set of armor.
At first he thought it was the body armor that had belonged to Jango armor that Boba had longed to wear, but which was still too big for him.
"Huh," he said. He picked up the chest-piece, molded to fit Jango's muscular frame. "Wait a minute - something's different." The body armor was smaller than his father's. Boba held it up - and yes, it was sized to fit him. Perfectly.
He examined the armor carefully, still frowning. "Wow," he breathed in amazement.
There, slightly below the left side of the rib cage, a small indentation showed where long ago Jango had barely survived an assassin's blast.
Boba whooped in delight.
It was Jango's body armor!
"This is great!" he exclaimed aloud. Quickly he shut and locked his door. Then he changed from his customary uniform - a young Mandalorian soldier's pale blue tunic and trousers, the black knee-high boots that had been too small for him for almost a year. "I hope this fits!" It did - as if it had been made just for him. Blue fire-resistant pants with steel-colored armored kneepads and shinpads. An adult's tunic, much heavier and more durable than a youth's, with shoulder and chest armor, heavy weapons belt, wrist holsters, and protective gloves that felt like a second, sleeker skin. Last of all, Boba pulled on the boots - his father's boots, but with newly reinforced soles and heels that could withstand temperatures hot enough to melt iron. He had just grabbed his helmet when there was a knock at the door.
"Boba?" asked a familiar voice. "It's me, Ygabba - "
"And me, Gab'borah," chimed in a second voice. "Can we come in?"
"Sure!"
Boba yanked the door open. In the hall stood Ygabba and Gab'borah. Both of them were grinning ear to ear.
"It fits!" cried Ygabba. "I knew it would!" Boba stared at her. "You did this?"
"Yes! With his help." She cocked a thumb at her father. "Why do you think we were so careful to get your height measurement last time you were here? We knew you'd grow from that - and it looks like we were right!" Boba shook his head. He looked down at his new body armor, then at Ygabba and Gab'borah.
"This is the best thing anyone has ever given me," he said. He held up his helmet. "Except for this. And this - " He reached for his father's book, carefully slipped it into a pocket. "Ygabba. Gab'borah. How can I ever thank you?" Gab'borah shook his head. "You saved my daughter from that horrible Neimoidian, Gilramos," he said. "I will forever be in your debt."
"And don't forget - you saved all those other kids, too, Boba," said Ygabba. She looked at him, then pointed to his helmet, grinning. "I hope you didn't mind me picking that up for you from Slave I. I thought you'd want to try it on with the rest of your body armor. And you know, it wasn't the first time I've held on to that helmet for you." Boba laughed. When he first met Ygabba, she had been a street urchin, forced to steal for the evil Gilramos Libkath. And one of the things she'd tried to steal was his helmet!
"It sure wasn't," he said. "But it might be the last. Jabba is sending me on another bounty hunt." "So soon?" said Gab'borah. Boba nodded. "Yeah. But this is the great thing - it's my first job off-planet!"
"Awesome!" said Ygabba. Her voice held a touch of envy. "Where?" Boba hesitated. More than anything, he wanted to tell them of his prize assignment. After all, Gab'borah and Ygabba were the closest thing Boba had to a family.
But he could not afford the risk. He was in the first rank of Jabba's bounty hunters now.
And he wanted to stay there.
"I can't tell you," he said. "It would be too risky. Not just for me, but for you, too."
Ygabba looked disappointed, but her father nodded.
"We understand," he said. His voice sounded wistful, but his blue eyes shone. "We are very proud of you, Boba. Your father would be proud, too." Gab'borah reached into the pocket of his chef's robe and withdrew a small packet. "Here. These will last a long time. Wherever you're going, you'll need food." Boba took the packet. He peeled back a corner to see what was inside.
"Gleb rations!" He made a face, then said, "I mean, thank you, Gab'borah." Gleb rations didn't taste very good, but a single small cube provided enough energy and nutrients for a day's hard work.
"We'd better go," said Ygabba. She gave Boba a wistful smile. "I have one more thing for you. Not as exciting as gleb rations, but..." She held out a small object, about the size of Boba's hand.
"What is it?" he asked, taking the object. It was heaver than it looked, encased in a gray plasteel container.
"A surprise," said Ygabba. "Wait till you get wherever it is you're going. Then open it."
Boba nodded. "Thanks, Ygabba."
"You're welcome. I hope it helps." She grinned at Boba, pointing at his helmet. "You take care of that, too. I won't be around to watch it for you!"
Boba smiled. "Don't worry, " he said, waving good-bye as the two of them turned and walked back down the hall. "I will." |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER FIVE
Boba had been off-planet before, of course.
He had been born on rainswept Kamino, and had buried his father on Geonosis, a desert planet even more desolate than Tatooine. He had been to Aargau, where he retrieved what remained of his father's fortune and explored the planet's treacherous, mazelike Undercity. And before that he had been on a moon of Bogden, and the poisoned world of Raxus Prime. Raxus Prime was where Boba had met up with the man his father had called "The Count."
Some people knew the Count as Dooku, a leader of the Separatists. Others knew him as Tyranus. Darth Tyranus was the agent who had chosen Jango Fett as the source for the Republic's vast clone army. Now the Republic and the Separatists were at war. Count Dooku and Tyranus were on opposing sides of the conflict.
And only Boba Fett knew that Tyranus and Dooku were the same man. This knowledge had saved Boba's life on Aargau. This knowledge was a weapon.
Like a weapon, it gave Boba great power.
And like a weapon, it had the power to kill those who used it. In the cockpit of Slave Boba made a last-minute check that his firearms were stored and ready for use.
"Jet pack, blaster, jet pack generator, ion stunner, grappling missile." Boba counted off his deadly array. "Dart shooter, rocket launchers, whipcord thrower..."
Jabba might be greedy and disgusting and power-hungry. But when it came to outfitting his favorite bounty hunter, he was as generous as his Gamorrean guards were stupid.
New weapons gleamed from Slave I's storage bays: blaster, ionizers, plasma missiles. And, at Boba's request, Jabba had arranged for brand-new sensor-jammers to be installed on Slave I, as well as a state-of-the-art interstitial stealth shield. But best of all was the shining set of Westar 34 blasters on Boba's weapons belt.
"I'll never let you down, Father. Not as long as I have these," Boba murmured as he checked a blaster's power cell cartridge. Once the Westar-34s had belonged to Jango Fett. Now they were his son's. The blasters had been designed by Jango, and specially made for him. Compact enough to fit in a jet pack, the weapons were cast of a nearly priceless dallorian alloy, designed to withstand furnace heat. Boba wasn't sure what was in store for him on Xagobah. But he was pretty sure things would heat up once he got there. He settled behind the ship's console and set his course for Xagobah. He glanced out the viewscreen.
"Looks like I'm not the only bounty hunter anxious to leave," he said. In the docking bay around him, dozens of other ships were getting ready to depart Tatooine. Astromech droids and Ughnaught mechanics were everywhere, scrambling to make last-minute adjustments to starships and speeders. In the hazy, red-tinged air above him Boba could make out more starships, flashing like falling stars. He pressed Slave I's thruster igniters.
With a deafening rumble and an explosive burst of flame from its fusion reactors, Slave I shot from the landing bay.
"Yes!"
Boba's heart pounded with the thrill that accompanied every new mission. Below him, the Dune Sea spread like flame across the surface of Tatooine. And like flame the brilliant red-and-orange dunes almost immediately faded into black, as Slave I pierced the planet's atmosphere and headed into the vast realm of space.
Boba checked the coordinates for Xagobah. He glanced out the viewscreen and saw the usual flash and flare of planets and distant stars. He frowned. "What's that?"
At the bottom of the viewscreen, something glittered and darted like an asteroid. Something that shouldn't be there.
"There's no asteroids in this sector," said Boba. "No recent planetary upheavals..."
Boba quickly checked Slave I's flight plan. There was no sign of meteor activity. The glittering spark grew larger on the viewscreen. Boba leaned forward.
"That's no meteor!"
Instinctively he reached for the control unit of Slave I's missile deployer.
"That's a fighter!" he cried. "And it's tailing me!" His fingers flashed across the console. Immediately the enlarged image of a Koro-1 exodrive air-speeder filled the screen. Furiously Boba punched at the console. He needed that vehicle's registration data... Silvery letters filled the screen. Andoan registry, licensed to Urzan Krag of Krag Fanodo.
"The Aqualish," Boba breathed. "He wanted this assignment, too. Well, he's not going to get it!"
Before him on the viewscreen was a white-hot burst. Slave I shuddered as though it were starting re-entry.
"He's firing on me!"
Immediately Boba went into attack mode. The Andoan vessel blinked from sight.
"He has a cloaking device," muttered Boba. "Well, so do I." Boba deployed Slave l's sensor jammers, then activated the protose detectors. They indicated that the Andoan ship was somewhere behind him.
"You want to play hide-and-seek?" said Boba. He grasped the controls of Slave I's laser cannons and fired. "Well, hide from that!" The energy bolts streaked through the black emptiness outside the ship. They found their target and seemed to liquefy around it. The Andoan speeder's outlines appeared, cloaked in a blazing plasma skin. The Andoan vessel seemed to hover like a teardrop waiting to fall. An instant later a blinding flare of blue-white plasma engulfed the Aqualish's ship.
"Gotcha!" exclaimed Boba.
Backlash waves of energy from the blast pulsed around Slave I, then dispersed. Where the Andoan speeder had been, brilliant specks of debris floated, like a miniature asteroid field.
"What a great way to start the day!" gloated Boba. His eyes shone as he activated Slave I's navigation program. He leaned forward, his fingers automatically programming the coordinates for his destination.
"Next stop - Xagobah!" |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER SIX
Boba was not surprised that Wat Tambor had chosen Xagobah for his citadel. This entire sector was known to be a favorite of smugglers making their way between more habitable regions. Jabba had underworld contacts on various planets there.
Still, until he had received his assignment, Boba had never heard the crime lord mention Xagobah.
He had never heard anyone mention it. "But there it is," he murmured. Dead ahead of Slave I, a planet shimmered into view. Boba blinked, wondering if his eyes had gone funny.
The planet seemed out of focus. Its outlines were blurred, as though a vast hand had drawn it with colored ink, then smudged it. Yet as Slave I drew nearer, Boba saw that the problem was not with his eyes. The problem was with Xagobah.
The entire planet seethed with colors. Purple, violet, lavender, maroon, plum: every shade of purple Boba had ever seen, and many he could not have imagined. The colors shifted and moved above the world's surface like an immense, restless demonsquid. Tentacles of indigo and violet spiked thousands of kilometers upward into the atmosphere, then retracted. As Slave 1 began its descent, Boba glimpsed jagged flashes of lightning below Xagobah's violet haze.
Atmospheric storms.
"That's not good," he said to himself. He saw something else, too. It hovered hawklike, safely out of reach of the lightning storms - one of the largest vehicles he had ever seen. A Republic assault ship.
"They sure mean business," Boba said grimly. Quickly he checked to make sure Slave l's cloaking device was still activated. "Now - let's take a closer look."
He drew Slave I as close as he dared to the troopship. It was an Acclamator, one of the military transports specially built by the Republic to carry clone troops across the galaxy. Each ship held up to 16,000 clone troopers, as well as armored walkers, gunships, speeders, and ammunition supplies.
And there would be Republic command personnel on board as well - and Republic military commanders on Xagobah's surface.
"Which is where I'm headed," said Boba. "Better get there, fast!" He took a final look at the Acclamator. Then he hit the thrusters. Slave I shot toward Xagobah.
Outside, streamers of purple and lavender whipped past. Boba thought about the troopship. It certainly looked like the Republic had sent an entire clone army to lay siege to Wat Tambor.
From what Boba knew about the Separatists, they would have their own army, geared to fight back.
A droid army. Battle droids, super battle droids, spider droids, the works.
Boba's grip tightened on Slave I's controls. He had successfully fought droids back on Tatooine, when he rescued Ygabba and the other kids from the evil Neimoidian.
But he'd never had to fight an entire army of them! "Good thing I have my body armor," said Boba. "And my blasters..." The ship's nav program showed he was fast approaching the surface. He still wasn't sure what Xagobah looked like, close up. But he knew what he would find there - Trouble. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER SEVEN
Boba locked Slave I into cruising mode. Outside, shreds of dark purple mist flew by like flocks of winged mynocks. Boba watched the haze grow thicker - and darker - the closer he came to Xagobah's surface I still have no idea what kind of life-forms are native to this place, he thought. He peered through the writhing fog. It was almost impossible to see anything, which meant it would be difficult for others to see him.
"That's a good thing, too." Boba reached for his jet pack. "The Republic is after Wat Tambor. And Wat Tambor will be busy defending himself against the clone troops - and none of them will be happy to see me coming! "
He turned back to Slave I's console. Outside, the mist no longer moved. Instead, it hung like a heavy, purplish curtain over everything. As Slave I cruised a short distance above the surface, Boba got his first glimpse of Xagobah.
And what he saw there was disgusting! "Mushrooms?" exclaimed Boba. Only these weren't ordinary mushrooms. They were as tall as trees; as tall as the rock formations that surrounded Jabba's fortress. He saw orange fungi shaped like towers, with long rubbery appendages dangling from them like arms. He saw entire forests of umbrella-shaped mushrooms, yellow, crimson, poisonous green. In spots the ground was covered with a carpet of wriggling things like hair or fur. They waved and changed color as the ship passed overhead, darkening from pink to darkest violet. Some of the tallest mushrooms sported fungi like ladders crawling up their sides. Really crawling, like slugs or gigantic swollen caterpillars.
"Gross!" said Boba.
Though it was also sort of cool, in a horrible way. He stared at a huge fungi that looked like a bloated jellyfish. It pulsed and belched clouds of purple-black smoke as Boba's ship hovered above it. Only it wasn't smoke, but spores.
"That's what the fog is," Boba realized in amazement. "Not mist, or clouds - but billions and billions of mushroom spores! I wonder if it's safe to breathe?"
Quickly he logged into the ship's medical computer and read the data there.
It is recommended that you take an antidote before setting foot on Xagobah, as a precaution. Most of the fungi are harmless, but some have toxins that can be fatal if swallowed or breathed. Others can cause changes to non-native biological entities.
"Like me?" asked Boba, as he took a small inhaler out of his med kit. Boba breathed in the antidote, then tossed the empty inhaler.
"Changes," he mused. "I wonder what kind of changes? Well, I'll have plenty of time to find out - later. Right now I'm out to find Wat Tambor." Slave I was cruising well below the mushroom forest's canopy now. But in the distance, Boba could see something other than rubbery fungi and coiling tendrils. Laser fire.
He stared out as bolts of bright blue flame erupted through the haze of purple and black. For a moment the flares illuminated the scene below.
"There it is," breathed Boba.
In the center of a large clearing an immense structure loomed: Wat Tambor's fortress. It was too dim to see clearly. But Boba could make out dark slashes about 500 meters from the citadel - a series of trenches engineered by the Republic's troops. More laser fire rose from here, streaking toward the fortress walls. Boba could just make out myriad forms moving through the shadows.
"Clone troopers," he said aloud, preparing to land. "This is where the action is. Which means - that's exactly where I'm going!" Back on Tatooine, one of the first things Boba had done was arrange for his ship to be completely overhauled by Mentis Qinx. At the time, Boba had no credits to pay for the work. He'd bluffed his way into it, projecting enough confident authority that he'd fooled Qinx's administrative droid.
And the bluff had paid off. Qinx had upgraded Slave I's power cells. He had installed a series of camo covers that concealed new turbolasers and concussion missile launchers. He had upgraded the engineering console. He had even replaced the existing hardware grid with a larger one. Someday, that grid would accommodate more advanced stealth hardware. Unfortunately, Qinx hadn't installed it yet. "That'll be your next big project, Qinx," muttered Boba.
He stared up at the vast Republic assault ship hovering just beyond the planet's atmosphere. Slave l's interstitial shield had worked beautifully out there, with the Republic's eyes trained on the surface of Xagobah.
But would it work here on the planet itself?
He activated all the ship's auxiliary cloaking devices and began to land.
Below, the mushroom forest swayed and tossed as Slave I descended. Clouds of spores drifted across the viewscreens. In the near distance, flickers of blue and gold exploded through the violet haze. He had landed behind the front lines; if he'd tried to fly directly to the citadel, both Republic and Separatist forces would've been alerted to his presence. And Boba needed both stealth and surprise if he was going to capture Wat Tambor.
More laser fire.
The Republic's forces were very close.
With a shudder, Slave I touched down.
"Here we are," Boba muttered. A chill crept across him, but he ignored it. Facing down fear had become second nature to him. He glanced at his father's book, stowed safely beneath the console. Not long ago, Boba would have taken it with him for good luck, and to give him confidence. But not now. Boba had developed discipline, and with that came confidence. And he had memorized every word of Jango's advice. Now Boba carried the memory of his father inside him, along with the knowledge of his own strength.
As for luck? Boba took a deep breath. We make our own luck, Jango had told him. Caution, cunning, preparedness - that's what luck consists of. Oh - and a great set of weapons doesn't hurt, his father had added with a rare smile.
Thinking of Jango made Boba smile sadly. "Well, I've got the weapons, that's for sure," he said.
He did a brisk check of his firearms, sliding a palm shooter onto one hand. With the other he checked the array of weapons on his belt. A vibroshiv; a single CryoBan grenade that Jabba had given him as reward for an earlier success; his blasters. The Mandalorian body armor, stronger and tougher than chyrsalide hide, as supple as Boba's own skin. Man, this feels great! he thought, flexing his arms. He checked that his Westar blasters were fully charged. That should be enough.... He started for the hatch, then stopped. His gaze fell upon a small object resting alongside the flight console.
Ygabba's gift.
He picked it up, feeling again how heavy it was for something so small. Carefully, he opened it.
"Whoa!" His eyes widened in delight. "A holoshroud!" He examined it closely: compact power cell, hologram generator and projector, hologram cartridge and tuner. As he turned it, a small text doc slid out. Boba recognized Ygabba's neat handwriting. Boba Bet you didn't expect this! I used Jabba's hologram recorder to scan an image for you on the hologram cartridge. Seeing that'll be your next surprise!
The bad news is you can't check it out until you actually use it and the power cell only lasts for two minutes. So save it for when you really need it. Can't wait to hear how it all turns out! Your friend, Ygabba
Boba shook his head, marveling.
"Ygabba, you definitely have the best taste in presents," he said at last. He locked the holoshroud in place on his belt. "Guess that's it..." He was ready to go. For a moment he looked longingly at his jet pack. That would sure make it faster to get around.
But as he reached for the jet pack, he heard a burst of laser fire from outside. There was an answering volley, followed by an explosion. Boba shook his head. "Too risky."
Reluctantly he left the jet pack where it was. He adjusted his helmet so it covered his face and stepped forward, opening the airlock. For one last instant, he stopped and stared back at the interior of his ship - he hoped he'd make it back here. Then he closed the airlock and opened the outer door.
A rush of warm, marshy air surrounded him, thick with the smells of rot and stagnant water. A flare of cannon fire made the towering mushrooms shake like grass in the wind. He heard distant comm static and shouting, the scream of something that was not human.
Boba smiled. "Wat Tambor, here I come!" His hand poised above his blaster, Boba Fett took his first step onto the surface of Xagobah - and into the unknown. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER EIGHT
Slave I had landed in a small clearing in the mushroom forest. After checking that the area was safe, Boba ran quietly until he reached the edge of the clearing. He stopped and looked back.
His ship was gone.
For a moment Boba's heart stopped. "What?" Could the Republic forces have found him so soon?
Suddenly he remembered. Jabba's interstitial shield! He laughed hoarsely. "Guess that proves the cloaking device works!" Boba gazed to where his ship was hidden. I'll be back as soon as I can, he thought. With Wat Tambor - dead or alive!
He touched his helmet in farewell, turned and began to make his way through the forest. "Ugh!"
Boba swatted at a thick, slimy purple-green tendril that reached for him from an overhanging branch. The tendril recoiled like a cratsch preparing to strike. A cloud of green mist puffed out from it, and a smell like rotten meat.
Boba grimaced. "Funny, Jabba didn't mention moving, stinking mushrooms!"
He activated his helmet's filtration system. As he stepped forward his boots sank into sticky ooze. "Ugh!" Boba groaned again. From the air, Xagobah's fungus-covered surface had appeared solid. But now that he stood on it, or in it, Boba saw it was about as solid as mugruebe mucus. He pulled his foot up. There was a loud belching sound, as the ground beneath sucked at his boot hungrily.
Maybe leaving the jet pack behind hadn't been such a good idea.... Before he could take another step, a deafening sound tore the air overhead, followed by a blinding burst of flame. Instinctively Boba flung himself back toward an umbrella-shaped fungus three times his height. That was his first mistake.
"Hey!" Boba shouted.
The huge mushroom had a gash in its side, big enough to hold Boba. He thought he could hide there from whoever was firing. Instead, great slimy folds of fungus suddenly extended from the mushroom, like huge mynock wings. They covered him until he was wrapped in a slimy cocoon, with only his head free. Then they yanked him backward to the base of the fungus tree. A putrid scent filled his nostrils. Boba's hands lashed out, struggling to free himself.
That was his second mistake.
The instant his fingers touched the rippling fungus, they were stuck fast. And the more he struggled, the worse it got. Within minutes, he was entirely stuck. He could feel his blaster at his waist, but he couldn't move to retrieve it. His fingertips grazed the handle of his vibroshiv, but he couldn't free it. He could scarcely breathe.
And that, unfortunately, seemed to be the point. Because Boba could still see. And what he saw was that he was slowly, inescapably, being pulled toward the gash in the side of the great mushroom-tree.
Only it wasn't just a gash. And it wasn't a hole. It was moving, opening wider and wider the closer he drew to it.
And suddenly Boba knew what it was - A mouth. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER NINE
The fungus was like some horrible hybrid of mushroom and spider. The folds enveloping Boba were like a web.
And the mouth - well, it was exactly like a mouth! Boba could smell it, the rotting scent of whatever its last meal had been. And he could see it, row upon row of crimson, razor-sharp teeth stretching deep inside the mushroom's trunk.
Now what?
He tried kicking again.
Nothing. He was completely immobilized. The fungal tree's mouth was only meters away now. Boba glared at it through his helmet. He couldn't move them, but still his hands clenched angrily.
Wait a minute...
Just beneath one hand he could feel the tip of something hard and smooth: his Stokhli spray stick. Boba had taken it from a Stokhli nomad who'd given him a hard time in Mos Eisley one day.
He'd stuck it on his weapons belt and, truth to tell, he'd almost forgotten about it, despite the fact that spray sticks cost a lot of credits. It was small and slender, with a stun pad at the very bottom and spray mist cartridges a few millimeters above.
Blllaaaerghhh...
A sound came from the fungal tree, a disgusting moan of pleasure that Boba interpreted as "dinnertime!"
"Not yet," he grunted. He clenched his hand again, his fingertips grazing the spray stick. He had no way of taking aim at the fungus, no way of adjusting the spray mist net or the electrical charge it delivered. If it backfired, Boba would find himself entangled all over again, still unable to move
Not that it would matter!
Aaaaergghhhh!
A pale purple tongue protruded from the mushroom's slobbering mouth. Flecks of foul-smelling saliva splattered across Boba's helmet. With every ounce of strength he had, Boba focused on moving his finger toward the spray stick.
Just an iota, just the merest fraction - And
There was a muffled report. At Boba's side the spray stick shuddered as though it would explode - and then it did!
"Gotcha!" crowed Boba.
A shimmering mist erupted from the stick's tip. It surrounded Boba, but it did not adhere to him. Instead it fixed itself to the slimy membrane that wrapped him like a cocoon. It formed a second web, a net strong enough to hold a charging myntor.
A powerful electrical surge pulsed through the spray mist net. Good thing I have my helmet and body armor! Boba thought. As the pulsing charge stunned its prey, Boba flung himself forward. Around him the fungus membrane slackened then recoiled. He was free!
He heard an unhappy slurping sound, then a sort of sizzling groan. The next instant he was on the ground, rolling away from the mushroom tree. He stopped himself, then clambered to his feet. His hand felt for the stun stick, disabling it.
"Well, that came in handy," he said.
A few meters off, the mushroom tree quivered and moaned. The stun-net covered its mouth. Its pale tongue poked pathetically at the webbing, while above it the tree's umbrella crown drooped.
"Only a great bounty hunter could have pulled that off!" boasted Boba as he brushed himself off. "And - "
He stiffened. His hand hovered above his blaster as he turned, as slowly as he dared, to face the creature behind him.
"And only a fool would have approached a flimmel tree during feeding hours," it said coolly.
"Who are you?" demanded Boba.
But he might have asked, What are you?
The creature regarded him calmly. It was reptilian, a little taller than Boba and with long, muscular arms and legs clad in what looked like a carno uniform of purple and gray. Its large, almond-shaped eyes were coldly intelligent, its lipless mouth curved in a slight smile to reveal sharp teeth. Its wiry forearms were curled around a blaster rifle. And the blaster was pointed right at Boba Fett. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER TEN
"Who am I?" repeated the creature. "On Xagobah, we like to ask questions before we answer them. But - "
The roaring whine of a missile passed overhead. Boba flinched. A moment later the missile impacted a short distance away, sending him falling to his knees. He looked up to see the creature staring down at him, still eerily calm.
"But we seem to find ourselves on the same side for the moment," the creature went on, as though nothing had happened. The muzzle of its blaster remained fixed on Boba as it motioned for him to get up.
"And what side is that?" snapped Boba.
"The wrong one," retorted the creature, as another missile whizzed overhead. "Quickly!"
It jammed the blaster rifle into Boba's side, gesturing toward the mushroom forest.
"No way!" Boba shook his head. "I've already made dinner plans, and they don't include being the main course!"
The creature made a low growling sound. Boba stiffened, then realized the thing was laughing. "Dinner plans!" it repeated. "That is good! Feeding time is over - " It poked him again, harder this time. Reluctantly, Boba began moving toward the fungi forest.
"The flimmel trees share an underground root system," the creature continued. "They are thousands of years old, and when one is hurt, they all suffer. And that one was very badly hurt!"
It indicated the flimmel tree that Boba had escaped from. Its canopy had retracted completely. It looked like a closed - and very mournful umbrella.
"None of them will be hungry for a little while." The creature shot Boba an admiring glance. "That was a good jolt you gave it."
"Thanks," said Boba. He regarded the creature warily. But its own expression as it stared back at him was mostly curious. Boba positioned his hand so that it was near his blaster.
What's the best way to deal with this thing - whatever it is? he wondered.
The alien was armed, but so was Boba. He could blast it - but what if there were others nearby?
He looked at the alien from the corner as his eye. As he did, the echo of laser fire made the surrounding mushroom forest shake as though a gale tore through it.
don't even know what side of the conflict it's on, Boba brooded. A sudden staccato burst of comm static made up his mind. That was way too close, Boba thought. And he could tell from a glance at the alien that it felt the. same way. Boba decided to take matters into his own hands. He adjusted his helmet, squaring his shoulders to make himself seem as tall as possible.
"We better find shelter - fast," he said. To his surprise, the alien nodded. "This way," it said, turning to lope into the forest. Boba followed, trying not to trip over clumps of dimly glowing mushrooms like tiny, domed cities scattered underfoot. He kept his hand on his weapon, scanning the shadowy fungus-growth around him for signs of an ambush.
Thankfully, he saw nothing, save the clusters of gleaming mushrooms and the occasional flimmeltree. They ran for several minutes. A second burst of comm static sounded - much closer this time. Boba could even make out words: Tambor Angalarra, Ulu, Suspect Ambush..
Suspect ambush. Boba's grip on his blaster tightened. Scant meters ahead his reptilian guide paused in front of an enormous mushroom tree the color of demonsquid ink. Like the flimmel tree, it was topped by a parasol shaped crown. Unlike the flimmel tree, this one had wobbly limbs protruding from it. They reminded Boba of the spokes of a wheel - if the spokes had started to melt.
"This way!" hissed the alien. It made a running leap and nimbly swung its clawed forearms over the lowest branch. The entire fungus seemed about to keel over. Almost immediately the plant straightened, its limbs coiling and uncoiling like fingers.
"Hurry!" the alien called urgently. "Come here!" Boba stared up at it. Its lidless jade-green eyes stared back. Then it turned and began clambering farther up the fungus stalk. As it did it made a soft clicking sound, as though it were talking to the mushroom. The entire tree shuddered as a low rumbling sound shook the air.
"Uh, thanks, but no thanks!" Boba yelped. He started to back away. Before he could move, the tree's lowest branch snaked toward him. It looped itself around his waist, firmly but gently; then quick as lightning pulled him into the air.
Kafl000m!
Fragments of dirt and shattered fungus pelted him. Boba stared at the ground in horror. Where he had stood, there yawned a mortar hole the size of a speeder. Flickers of flame ran around its perimeter. He smelled the ozone stink of a pulse grenade.
"That was way too close!" exclaimed Boba. Beside him the alien nodded.
"Indeed," it said.
Boba blinked. For the first time he realized where he was: halfway up a huge fungus, with an armed and possibly hungry reptile next to him. He was outnumbered, at least for the moment.
Better play dumb, he thought.
"Uh, I know you don't like to answer questions - but can you tell me exactly what's going on?"
The alien regarded him with its calm, intelligent eyes. It looked him up and down, taking in his Mandalorian body armor and helmet, his weapons. One of its clawed hands absently stroked the stalk of the fungus tree. After a moment it spoke - but not in answer to Boba's question. It gave a series of clicks and growls, seemingly directed to the tree. The tree responded by extending a long slender tendril toward Boba's head. Ulp! he thought, but stood his ground. The tendril touched his helmet, then his chest. It remained there, pressed against the smooth body armor. Boba could feel his heart pounding. After a moment he realized the tree could feel it, too.
It's checking me out!
Boba felt a sneaking admiration. The alien reptile looked at Boba and nodded. Its mouth parted in a razor-toothed smile.
"The fungus has a primitive sensory system that responds to heat and motion. It detects an elevated heart rate. Your garb indicates you are a warrior and, I suspect, a mercenary one intending to attack me. I am not a warrior."
The alien leaned against the fungus stalk. Its jade eyes grew clouded. "But I have learned to bear weapons, as you see. My name is Xeran. I am a Xamster. My family has been bound to this malviltree, Malubi, for one thousand turns of Xagobah. Once hundreds of us lived here and harvested Malubi's spores. Now only I remain."
Xeran's voice grew sad. "War has come to Xagobah. Though we wanted no part of it, still war claimed us. Many of my people have been forced to serve one side or the other. Many others fled, only to be shot in flight. Our malvil-trees are dying of neglect and loneliness. And now I am caught between two armies - " It lifted one clawed hand and pointed. "There. Can you see them?"
Boba strained, but even adjusting his helmet's focus didn't help. "No, " he replied.
The alien made another series of clicks. The fungus tree - Malubi extended another tendril. This one was thicker and less rubbery. The alien hopped onto it, then motioned for Boba to do the same. He did, and the alien grasped him as the tendril bore them up, up, up, until they were at Malubi's very top.
"Wow," breathed Boba in amazement.
Up here they were above the velvety haze of purple spores. Boba could see the canopy of the mushroom forest waving gently beneath. He could see the little clearing where he had left Slave 1, though of course his ship was invisible to him behind its cloaking device.
And Boba's breath caught in his throat. He grasped tightly at Malubi's rubbery appendage. He was glad Xeran could not see his face behind his Mandalorian helmet. Because the top of the malvil-tree also gave him a clear and terrifying view of what he had come here for. From the air, the Republic's trenches had looked like slashes in the ground. Now Boba saw how carefully constructed they were. Each held a line of thirty or so clone troopers, heavily armed. Waves of fire erupted from the trenches, arching through the air toward the fortress. With each bombast, a group of clone troopers would charge from the trenches - Only to be met by an opposing charge of droids! Boba whistled. The Republic's forces were impressive - he figured there were hundreds, maybe a thousand, clone troopers arrayed on the battle field below. But the citadel was so well-defended that Boba could not suppress a gasp.
"Jabba was right about Wat Tambor," he muttered. A master of defense technologies, the gangster had said of him; and now Boba could see how true that was. Through the haze of spores and laser fire, Boba got his first glimpse of the Separatist's droid army: lines of battle droids marching relentlessly, tirelessly, toward the clone troopers to breach the Republic's lines.
That looked bad enough. But what made Boba's hand tighten on his blaster wasn't the clashing armies.
For the first time, he could clearly see Wat Tambor's citadel. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"So that's it," murmured Boba.
"Yes," said Xeran. "The Mazariyan Citadel. The cause of all my troubles."
"And the beginning of mine," Boba replied, trying not to shiver. Mazariyan rose from the planet's surface, unimaginably immense, a looming dull black. Its sides were stepped, like the sides of an ancient pyramid of Yavin. But even from this distance Boba could tell that the edifice was not just a building.
The dull black, smooth surface seemed to pulse with life. Flickers of energylike lightning ran up and down its sides. On the levels above, shining black spines protruded. The spines were twice the length of Boba's body and as sharp as javelins. He could see where dark shapes had been impaled upon them. Even as he watched, one of the spines began to slowly retract, like a machine. Boba watched in horror as a limp form slid from it, falling and bouncing down the fortress's side.
"The tyrant who is holed up there has twisted the evolution of Xagobah's lifeforms," said Xeran. His tone was steady, but Boba saw that the alien's face was strained. "He has taken fungus that were benign, feeding only on bacteria. He has taken our gentle malvil-trees. He has bio engineered them so that they are now perverted and kill things without feeding on them."
"Things like humanoids," said Boba in a low voice.
"That is correct," agreed Xeran. "And Xamsters."
"What is this tyrant's name?" asked Boba. But he already knew what the answer would be.
"Wat Tambor," said Xeran. "He is evil. And as you can see, he has brought evil to us - "
Xeran pointed to where a dark mass stretched about five hundred meters from the citadel in its long shadow. "Those are just some of the Republic's troops gathered there. They have laid siege for weeks now. No matter how many arrive, few are able to gain entrance. And when they do, we hear rumor of what they find inside. Wat Tambor's command of technology has made him ruthless. There are no prisoners inside his citadel. And no survivors." Boba looked back at Mazariyan. He found he could not take his eyes from the sight, horrible as it was. "The Republic's using clone troopers," he said, more to himself than Xeran.
"Yes. Sometimes the Republic has forced my people to fight, paying them well. Yet the Republic has lost many non-clone fighters. Fighters they could not afford to lose. So their chiefs have sent in a Jedi General named Glynn-Beti to lead their forces."
Boba's eyes grew cold and hard. "Glynn-Beti?" He didn't speak his thought: She's the Jedi who Jabba told me about.
"Yes. Glynn-Beti is a Jedi Master, and a fearless warrior. Also a shrewd one."
"She can't be that shrewd," said Boba. He smiled coldly. "Otherwise her troops would have already captured Wat Tambor and taken the citadel." To Boba's surprise, the reptilian alien once more made the growling sound that passed for Xamster laughter.
"That is very amusing!" Xeran's jade-green eyes fixed on Boba. "It is a rare gift, to be able to find amusement when faced with danger. Or death. "
He peered at Boba more closely. "You have not told me your name, stranger, or your business here. And I will not ask you. I suspect we share a common enemy. And if that is the case, it is best I do not know your intent. That way I cannot betray you."
Boba nodded. "Thank you," he said.
"Though I can, perhaps, help you." Xeran glanced at Boba's weapons belt. "You are already well-armed. Better armed than I am," he said, and patted his own blaster. "My weapon came from a trooper I was forced to slay in self-defense. He would have harmed Malubi." The Xamster stroked the malvil tree. "No, stranger. I do not think I can offer you better weapons. But I can offer you advice.
"All of this territory is disputed, with battles erupting at anytime." Xeran pointed to the battlefield below them. "Your only hope of approaching the citadel is to come down from the north - that is the far side, there." Boba's heart sank. "There are a thousand clone troopers between here and there!" He patted his blaster, then shook his head. "But I have no other choice, so - "He started to climb down.
"Wait." Xeran's cool scaly hand gently restrained him. "You may not have a choice. But you do have a means of approaching without being seen." The Xamster turned. Standing on tiptoe, he extended his claws to pluck a dark purple globe from the malvil-tree's stalk. As he did, a small puff of violet smoke emerged from the globe, then disappeared. Once more Boba felt the malvil-tree tremble, then grow still.
"This globe contains Malubi's spores," explained Xeran. "The spores are harmless in themselves. Yet they are not useless. They act as a powerful camouflage agent. Organic life-forms cannot see through the haze produced by the spores. Neither can the droids - the spores reflect light too high on the spectrum for the droids to register through their optics. Wat Tambor has exploited the spores for his own purposes, to camouflage his vessels. But when the spores are carried by the wind, they act as chemical messengers between the trees."
Xeran's lipless mouth curved in a smile to reveal white razorlike teeth. He held up a small pouch, opened it, and took a pinch of what looked like lavender powder between his claws.
"Here," he said, gesturing at Boba's hand. "Take this. Put it into your eyes, beneath your helmet. It will enable you to see through the haze. "
Boba held out his gloved hand. Xeran dropped a small amount of the lavender powder into his palm. Boba stared at it, then at the Xamster. Could Xeran be trusted?
Boba hesitated. He had learned over the last few years to trust his instincts - one of a bounty hunter's most powerful assets. And his instincts told him now that Xeran was telling the truth.
"Thanks," Boba said. He turned away, momentarily raising his helmet. He tilted his head back, and let a few grains of the powder fall into his eyes. He felt a faint prickling, but that was all. He blinked, lowered his helmet, and turned back to Xeran.
The Xamster nodded approvingly. "The effect is not permanent. But it may help you. And here - - "
He held out a small purple orb. "Take this globe with you. Malubi has already imprinted you as one who means us no harm. The other malvil-trees will recognize you. They will not harm you. But if you have need of camouflage, crush this globe. The spores will be released." Boba took the globe. "Thank you," he said. Carefully he slipped it into his utility pouch.
"Something else I will tell you," added Xeran. "There is a fungus we call Xabar. It has many small tentacles. It is a very deep purple in color, with brilliant red tips. Wat Tambor has taken this fungus as well and made it into a weapon. Its tentacles release a toxin. The toxin causes paralysis. Not permanent, fortunately. But very effective. Anyone who comes into contact with it is immobilized. Completely. Consciousness remains, but not the ability to move."
"Thank you," said Boba. "I will remember." From somewhere beneath them came a burst of laser fire.
"I have to go now," said Boba. He looked down at the battlefield that stretched between him and Wat Tambor's living citadel. Then he turned to Xeran. "I owe you one, Xeran. Thanks again." The Xamster nodded solemnly. Its jade-green eyes narrowed, and it smiled. "You do not need to thank me. When you destroy our shared enemy, do so in the memory of my malvil. That will be thanks enough for me. And for Malubi," he added.
Boba smiled. As he did, one of the malvil-tree's tentacle branches snaked around him. Very gently it lifted Boba, then slowly brought him to the ground.
"I will not forget!" Boba called back as Xeran waved at him. "For Malubi!"
"For Malubi!" Xeran echoed.
Lifting one clawed hand in farewell, the alien slipped back into the violet shadows of his malviltree. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER TWELVE
A hundred meters up in Malubi's violet canopy, Xagobah had for a little while seemed a quiet, even peaceful, place.
That peace was shattered as soon as Boba's feet touched the ground.
"Captain! Intruder in your sector!" a voice shouted from only a few meters off.
His father's voice.
For an instant Boba froze. Then brilliant blue flame exploded, close enough that he could feel its heat through his body armor.
"Whoa!"
With a muffled shout Boba dove for the underbrush. The voice shouted again. "Captain! Did we score a hit?" Boba crouched beneath an overhanging net of webbed fungi. He peered out and saw a figure stalking into the clearing.
His father's figure, cloaked in the gleaming, gray-white body armor and mask of the Republic army. A clone trooper.
"Captain, do you copy?"
Boba tried not to breathe as the trooper moved with sure, heavy steps, until he was just an arm's length from where Boba was hidden. He was close enough that Boba could clearly see the back of his helmet. Boba had seen the clones many times before, of course. He could remember them being raised by the thousands on Kamino. And he had met a young clone, 9779, on Aargau. Clones were known mainly by their numerical designation.
Could this be 9779, grown to his full size?
The thought made Boba feel slightly sick. He forced it from his mind, and stared from the shadows at the trooper. Like all the clones, the captain had his father's build. It also had Jango's strength. Boba could tell from how easily it hefted its weapon, a DC-15 rifle that would have made Boba's arm ache.
"Checking it out," the clone answered into its comlink. "I see no sign of an intruder. Hold your fire."
It gave one more look around the clearing. Then it slid its rifle back into an upright position, turned, and strode off.
"Whew." Boba let his breath out in relief. That was close! He waited until the clone trooper was just a pale fleck among the mushroom trees. Then Boba began to follow it. He kept within the shadows of the overhanging fungus, moving swiftly and stealthily as a stalking cratsch.
Now and then a slender mushroom stalk would reach out tentatively to brush against his helmet, or touch his hand. Whenever this happened Boba would pause, holding his breath.
But it seemed as though Malubi's spores must have warned the other fungus of Boba's coming. Their tendrils would only touch him. Then they would withdraw. Sometimes a small puff of purple would appear above him. Then he would see other mushroom trees ahead of him swaying gently. Thanks, Xeran, Boba thought. And Malubi.
He patted the trunk of a very young malvil-tree, then stopped. In front of him, the mushroom forest abruptly ended. Beyond it, the ground looked scorched. When he looked up he saw the hovering shadows of Republic ships, like black clouds in the purple mist. When he looked down, he saw black circles where transport vehicles had landed and departed. In other places, there were holes and small craters left by exploding weaponry. Smoking bits of vegetation were elsewhere. And other things, too. Things Boba wished he hadn't seen.
For reassurance he made sure the purple globe was still in his pocket. His hand tightened on his blaster.
He waited, trying to figure out what to do next. There was no point running out into the middle of a battle. Nine-tenths of any bounty hunter's success is proper planning, Jango had always told him.
"So all I need is a plan," Boba muttered. He squinted through the haze of smoke and spores. From here he had a clearer view of Wat Tambor's citadel.
It sure didn't look any better. It was well-guarded, for one thing. In addition to the gigantic black spines that protruded from the fortress, there were droids patrolling its perimeter.
Battle droids, Boba noted grimly. He counted thirty - not enough to fight a war, but more than enough to keep intruders at bay. There were other droids, too. Crablike defense droids swarmed around a triangular opening that seemed to be Mazariyan's entrance. He saw several hulking modified super battle droids and mounted laser towers. And, hovering above the peak of Wat Tambor's fortress, a great, dark, shapeless mass. It was like, a purplish-black thunderhead or a huge amoeba, floating over the battlefield.
"What's that?" Boba adjusted the focus on his helmet, then blinked, feeling a faint prickling behind his eyes as the form above him took on more solid outlines.
Xeran's spores were working. Suddenly he could see clearly. And what he saw was that the massive shape was not a cloud.
It was a fleet of Separatist fighters, cloaked by the spore-haze. As Boba watched, one of the droidcommanded fighters fired upon the Republic's assault lines. A spurt of flame exploded from one of the trenches. A direct hit!
Boba steadied himself as the impact shuddered through the ground like an earthquake. He looked up again, and this time could make out something else - a darker, misshapen silhouette that hung directly above the citadel's peak. Droids swarmed around it, loading it. With a shock, Boba suddenly realized what the huge shadowy object was. A ramship.
Boba shook his head in dismayed disbelief. Robot ramships were manufactured in the most notorious reaches of the Outer Rim. They were designed and outfitted by criminal techs
But wasn't that exactly what Wat Tambor was?
A ramship had no organic crew. It used the hull of an abandoned probably stolen - warship, with enough firepower to destroy a huge starship in a single explosion. The entire vessel was nothing but a massive bomb, piloted by a kamikaze robotic drone with no goal except destruction. In this case, the Republic's destruction.
Boba craned his head back. His eyes tried to pierce the violet haze of Xagobah's atmosphere.
Somewhere up there was a Republic troopship. And while Boba had no love for the Republic, at the moment, they shared a common enemy. Wat Tambor.
And that ramship was Wat Tambor's vessel.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Jango had once told his son. Boba had been too young then to understand those words. They sounded like a puzzle.
A puzzle he had just solved.
He saw clone troopers just within the borders of the mushroom forest. The Jedi General Glynn-Beti would be there somewhere, acting as commander. Presumably there were other Jedi as well, fighting as part of the Republic forces.
But he didn't see any life-forms, human or alien, defending Mazariyan. No Xamsters; no humans. Not even any mercenaries from lawless places like Carratos or Ord Mantel!.
Only droids.
He's going to have that ramship smash into the Republic troopship! Boba sucked in his breath with excitement. Wat Tambor thinks that will end the siege - and it will!
Boba looked around furtively, thinking fast.
If Wat Tambor's vast flying bomb struck the troopship, it would destroy the Republic's chances of capturing the dangerous Separatist. It would also destroy Boba's chances of capturing Wat Tambor. Which meant it would destroy Boba's future as Jabba's favorite bounty hunter!
Can't have that happen! Boba thought.
But what if the ramship could somehow be commandeered into destroying Wat Tambor's citadel - and with it, Wat Tambor?
Two can play this game, thought Boba. He crouched in the shadows at the edge of the mushroom forest. He stared up at Mazariyan. Two can play this game - but only one can win.
And that one will be - me! |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
So now he had a plan. All he needed was a way to use it. My jet pack's no good, he thought with regret. Not enough strength or speed to go up against a ramship. Gotta try to find a vehicle... a speeder would be nice... Boba scanned the area surrounding Wat Tambor's fortress. He knew that Mazariyan was well-guarded by droids.
But Wat Tambor was not a droid. And surely not all of his guards or accomplices were droids. They would have used some form of transport to get here....
"Yeah," Boba whispered. "And that's exactly what I need." He started to run along the edges of the forest. He kept a close eye on Mazariyan, but saw nothing he could steal - er, use. But as he circled closer to the area behind the fortress, things began to look more promising. The Republic seemed to have concentrated its forces near the citadel's entrance. This back area was void of siege trenches. There were crates and cartons of supplies here, along with piles of twisted metal and plasteel. He saw demo droids and wrecker droids, a load-lifter piling big boxes near an opening. A single security drone appeared to be monitoring them. But it was an older model, and seemed to be busy scanning the area closest to the citadel's main entrance.
This must be a freight entrance back here, thought Boba. He hesitated and looked for signs of hidden Republic forces, but saw none. He might be able to dodge the security drone and clear the freight entrance. I could try to get in that way. But what would I do once I actually got inside?
He hadn't worked out that part of his plan - yet. Later, he thought. Quickly he turned and continued to circle the fortress, searching.
And then he saw it - he almost stepped on it! Camouflaged with torn mushroom fronds and malvil-limbs, it was so rusty and battered that it blended right in.
A swoop bike.
Boba looked around the mushroom forest furtively. But if there were clone troopers nearby, they were being even more stealthy than he was: He saw no one. He looked up.
And yes, the ramship was still there, like a volcanic cloud hanging above Mazariyan. The droids loading it were obviously close enough to see. through the haze. Boba glanced back at the worker droids on the ground. The security drone was gone - it must have continued on its own circuit of the fortress.
And those other droids were all labor units. None of them would be programmed for surveillance or security.
"It's now or never," Boba muttered. He paused beside the swoop bike, looking over his shoulder. Then he shoved aside the dried-up mushrooms and jumped on. "And I say - now."
For one heart-stopping moment, he thought it wouldn't start. Then it sputtered and coughed. Finally, with a low buzzing sound it lurched forward.
Someone's modified it so that any sound is muffled, Boba noted approvingly. He leaned over the controls and pulled up on the throttle. The swoop shot up through the malvil-trees. Not as fast as Boba would have liked - whoever did the modifications obviously preferred stealth over speed.
Maybe they know something I don't, he thought, and looked around. The worker droids were still laboring mindlessly by the freight entrance. Boba adjusted his helmet, increasing the focus until he could just glimpse the front of the citadel. Nothing new there, either. Above the citadel's peak, the ramship hovered in place. Boba swung his swoop around, then brought it up to full throttle. Fungus fronds lashed at his helmet as he flew up, up. When he hovered just below the canopy of the forest, he turned the swoop and started to cruise in a careful circuit.
Might as well do a little recon of my own, he thought. That clone trooper came from someplace. But where?
In a minute he had his answer. Not too distant from Wat Tambor's citadel, something moved.
Something big - something really big!
A Republic All Terrain-Tactical Enforcer!
"Man, they mean business," muttered Boba. That AT-TE would be loaded with more clone troopers - dozens of them-not to mention some serious firepower.
There was no way he could commandeer an AT-TE, of course. But where there were incoming clone troopers, there would be Jedi nearby to command them. They would have vehicles of their own - gunships, starfighters, maybe even airspeeders.
If I can get my hands on an airspeeder, I might be able to decoy that ramship back toward Mazariyan. The ramship doesn't move very fast - but in a speeder, I could! Then I could reach Slave I and get out of here - back to Jabba to claim my bounty!
He angled closer to the AT-TE, being careful to stay out of sight. There were several smaller vehicles accompanying the walker and, in the distance, more AT-TEs.
That's more like it, Boba thought with grim satisfaction. Things might not be so bleak for the Republic, after all. He adjusted the long-range focus on his helmet, until he could make out even more shadowy shapes far behind the approaching AT-TEs. Gunships, each carrying a payload of still more troops and walkers.
And, sure enough, there were speeders, too - and a starfighter.
"That'll be Glynn-Beti," said Boba. He scowled, but brought the swoop down lower to get a better look. As he did, something flashed past him Another swoop!
"Huh?" For a second, Boba was too startled to do anything. Then he grabbed his blaster.
But whoever was on the swoop wasn't intent on catching Boba. He was heading for the citadel.
But not just the citadel. As Boba watched in amazement, he realized that he wasn't the only one who'd been coming up with a plan. The swoop was flying up - straight toward Wat Tambor's ramship! |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"Great minds think alike!" Ygabba used to tell Boba, joking. But right now, watching the other swoop flying at the ramship, Boba thought maybe this particular idea hadn't been such a great one. The swoop looked like a squirmite attacking a sandcrawler.
"He's doomed," Boba groaned.
He'd had only a glimpse of the person flying it. But a glimpse was all he needed to recognize him. Ulu Ulix!
Boba had met the young alien back on the Candaserri. Of course, Ulu hadn't known Boba by his real name - Boba had called himself Teff, and had said he was an orphan from Raxus Prime. He'd guessed Ulu was about the same age as he was, though Ulu had horns and three eyes. They'd been friendly well, as friendly as Boba could be to anyone back on the Candaserri. He'd never recognize me now, Boba thought with pride. Not with my Mandalorian helmet on, and my body armor.
As Boba watched Ulu's swoop approach the ramship, he remembered the other thing about the three-eyed alien.
Ulu Ulix was a Padawan, a Jedi apprentice - and his Jedi Master was Glynn-Beti!
Quickly Boba looked back to where the AT-TE was moving in the forest. A starfighter kept pace with it, high above the tops of violet malvil trees. If Glynn-Beti was in that fighter, she must suspect the ramship was headed for the Republic's assault ship. But did she know her Padawan was headed for the ramship?
Boba wondered if Glynn-Beti was crazy - or if Ulu was. He didn't get to wonder long.
KA-FL000SHH!
Meters from where Boba's swoop hovered, a malvil-tree exploded. There was a second flash of blue flame. Boba was spattered with purple gunk. He wiped fungus goo from his helmet, yanked on the throttle, and swerved away from the forest.
He needed a better view of what was happening:
What he saw wasn't good, at least not for the Padawan. The sentry droids had spotted Ulu Ulix!
Boba's swoop shuddered as another burst of flame struck a giant mushroom not far off. BLAM!
The mushroom exploded. Fiery blobs of fungus flew everywhere, setting other trees aflame. The droids were firing! Boba's swoop shot straight up, safely out of range. He was close to the citadel now - too close, probably - but the droids weren't firing on Boba.
At least, not yet. Boba frowned. What - who - were they after? He risked bringing his swoop down lower, and nearer to the fortress. From here he had a clear view of the droids below, laser fire crisscrossing the air as the Republic's troops began to counterattack.
But the droids weren't firing on the Republic troops. Their target was Ulu Ulix.
Boba swerved abruptly as a blast tore the air just meters away. When he looked back, he saw the ramship give a sudden surge upward.
"They've released the ramship!" he exclaimed, just as the other swoop suddenly shot toward the massive vessel. Boba waited for a volley of fire from the ramship to destroy the swoop.
But the ramship didn't alter its swift course one meter. Instead it sped upward, oblivious to Ulu Ulix pursuing it.
And why should that surprise Boba? The ram-ship had a drone-mind. Nothing could cause it to alter its course. Attempting to lure or attack it had obviously been a really, really bad idea.
That could have been me, Boba thought.
He watched grimly as Ulu's swoop dipped and swerved clumsily. The alien was trying to avoid the barrage of fire from below. But his swoop didn't seem to have any more thrust than Boba's.
"Still, he could fly it better," Boba said. He clung tightly to his swoop, flying it closer still to the citadel's black peak, and glanced back into the forest.
The convoy of AT-TEs had stopped at the very edge of the clearing. The speeders were gone, and the starfighter. Boba's jaw clenched. Glynn-Beti doesn't even care that her Padawan is under fire. She's too concerned that her own attempt to attack Wat Tambor's citadel will be affected!
Typical Jedi arrogance, thought Boba angrily. He looked out to where Ulu Ulix's swoop swung dizzily around the top of Mazariyan. With a sudden BOOM, the three-eyed alien's vehicle was engulfed in blacksmoke. Sparks flew from it. There was a terrified cry.
And Boba watched in horror as a small figure tumbled into the air and plummeted straight toward the waiting spines of Mazariyan! |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Boba had no time to think. He yanked back on the throttle. At the same time he opened the stop to feed it as much fuel as possible. With a garbled roar, the swoop shot forward. Laser fire and explosion's rocked the air around Boba. Below him, the spines waited.
"Master... help...!"
A cry echoed above the sound of laser fire. Boba leaned forward as far as he could, arms outstretched. His swoop raced toward the shining black pinnacle of Mazariyan. One huge, curved spine thrust upward. It positioned itself to impale the small form falling like a stone. Boba's swoop dipped as he reached out. With a groan, something heavy crashed onto the front of the swoop. Boba swerved away from Mazariyan.
"Th-thanks!" Ulu Ulix blinked. He kept a tight hold on the swoop's fuel tank. His three large eyes stared gratefully at Boba. "I thought I was dead back there!"
"Well, there's still a chance you might be!" Boba shouted over the thunder of crossfire. "Keep your head low - "
BLAM!
Laser fire ripped past them. Boba wrestled his blaster from his belt. He turned and fired in the general direction of the sentry droids. Then he glanced down. Battle droids were everywhere now. Some were still firing up at Boba. But most had bigger targets in their sights. With a deafening rumble, the first of the AT-TEs had drawn up at the edge of the clearing. Its hold opened, and a wide gangway swung down. More than a dozen clone troopers came running out, blasters firing. There was the whoosh and roar of battle droids rushing from hidden entrances in the citadel. They marched in formation toward the Republic's troops. Bolts of pure energy zoomed toward the clones. Wat Tambor's fortress glowed like the sun as laser fire rippled up and down its sides.
Ulu Ulix's three eyes widened as he stared at the carnage below.
"Wow," he breathed.
The attack on Mazariyan had begun.
"Keep your head down!" Boba commanded. He abruptly swung the swoop to the left.
A blinding burst of energy exploded behind them. Boba cut back on the throttle. The swoop dropped sickeningly before he pulled it out of the dive.
He yelled, "We've got to get out of here, fast!"
"There!" gasped Ulu. He pointed to where another AT-TE waited. It was surrounded by a squad of heavily armed clone sentries. "General Glynn-Beti! "
Boba squinted through the thick smoke. "Where?"
"She's standing by the transport - see? She should be in her speeder, keeping track of the battle. I guess she was worried about me. Boy, she looks really, really mad."
Ulu Ulix gulped. Boba looked at him. He couldn't help grinning inside his helmet. "Mad?"
"Yeah... the siege was ready to begin, anyway, but..." The three-eyed alien looked back to where his swoop lay. It was now a heap of smoldering wreckage. It was surrounded by battle droids who were busy firing on the Republic's troops.
"But maybe the siege started a little earlier than scheduled?" Boba finished Ulu's sentence for him.
The alien nodded miserably. "Yeah. Something like that." Boba steered the swoop to where Glynn-Beti stood. He glanced at Ulu Ulix. It was weird to think that the horned alien didn't recognize him in his helmet and body armor. Weird, but good.
I was more of a kid back then, Boba thought proudly. But now I'm a real bounty hunter.
The swoop approached the edge of the forest. The sentries guarding the AT-TE snapped to attention. They stared up at Boba. They raised their weapons. They were ready to fire
"Get Glynn-Beti's attention!" Boba shouted at Ulu Ulix over the roar of battle. "Otherwise we're dead!"
"Master!" yelled Ulu. "Master, here - !" On the ground, Master Glynn-Beti looked up. She was small and slender, with a vaguely feline face crowned by flowing reddish hair. Even from this distance, Boba could sense the power she held.
A Jedi's power. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Ulu Ulix!" The Jedi's voice rang out sharply over the din. She sounded angry, but also relieved, She turned to the, clone sentries. "Hold your fire!"
Boba angled the swoop down to within a few meters of the AT-TE. It landed with a bump. Ulu clambered off. He smoothed the folds of his Padawan's robe. Then he looked at Boba.
"I don't know how to thank you," said the three-horned alien. "I don't even know your name. Although there is something familiar about you...." Ulu frowned slightly, thinking. Boba said nothing. He felt light-years older than Ulu. Light-years older than he had been when they first met. Fortunately he didn't need to say anything. Because General Glynn-Beti was bustling toward them now. And she looked like she had plenty to say.
"Ulu! What were you thinking?" She glared at the young alien. Ulu Ulix stared at his feet, abashed. "You put this entire mission in jeopardy!"
"I am sincerely sorry, Master," Ulu said. "I am ashamed of my actions. But I only wanted to help."
"Help?" Glynn-Beti scowled at him. Then she looked at Boba, still on his swoop. "This stranger is the one who helped!" The Jedi bowed slightly. "I am in your debt, stranger. My profound thanks for saving the life of this most foolish of Padawans."
Boba nodded. "You're welcome." He was uncomfortably aware of Glynn-Beti's keen gaze boring into him. But an instant later her attention was elsewhere.
"Trooper!" she commanded. "You may all resume your watch! As for you " She turned to Ulu Ulix. "You will remain by my side for the rest of this maneuver. Unless you prefer to wait on board the troopship?" Ulu Ulix shook his head swiftly. "No, Master! I will obey this time."
"Good." Glynn-Beti began to walk away. But she had only taken a few steps when she stopped. She turned and stared at Boba. Uh-oh, he thought.
"What is your place in this battle, stranger?" she asked. Her voice was calm, but there was a threat hidden in it. "You are not part of my battalion. And you are obviously not working for our enemy. You have not come from there - " She tilted her head at the citadel of Mazariyan. When she turned back to Boba her gaze was piercing. "We have sent some of our most valued soldiers inside - ARC troopers. They seldom fail us. Not one has returned from that place. Have you?"
Boba hesitated. The Jedi might be able to detect a lie. If she did, she could take him prisoner, whether or not he had saved her Padawan. At worst, he might languish in a Republic cell. At best, she could send him off-planet, back to Tatooine - where he would face the rage of Jabba the Hutt.
A prison cell might be preferable to that.
Boba stared back at Glynn-Beti. He was very glad she could not see his face behind his helmet.
"No. My sympathy lies with the Xamsters," he said. The Jedi seemed to mull this over. Finally she nodded. "Very well. I will not detain you. The natives of Xagobah are in dire need of whatever help they are given." She beckoned Ulu Ulix to her side. "Come. We have much to do."
"But Master - " Ulu stopped. He gazed up at a dark blur in the violet haze of Xagobah's atmosphere. "What about the ramship?"
"We are well aware of the ramship, Ulu. Someone more experienced - and wiser - than you will deal with it."
Ouch! thought Boba. Wonder who that might be? He watched as the Jedi and her Padawan headed back toward the AT-TE.
Just before they boarded the AT-TE, Glynn-Beti turned and shouted back to Boba, "Yes. Someone else will take care of the ramship. You, stranger, might want to launch your solitary attack at that moment. Mind my words!" The Jedi Master then disappeared from view.
Boba quickly powered up his borrowed swoop. It gave a hoarse cough and sputtered into the air.
Boba circled back to where the siege was in full swing. The air blazed blue and black and silver with laser fire. Everywhere around the fortress, clone troopers were attacking Wat Tambor's droid forces. What did the Jedi mean? he wondered.
It looked like the Republic was in trouble.
The Separatists had launched a counterattack! "This isn't good," Boba muttered. "Not for me, at least!"
Boba had thought that Wat Tambor's citadel was well-guarded before. Now he realized the canny Separatist had deliberately hidden the full power of his forces. Because suddenly the gaping maw of Mazariyan yawned open. There was a horrible, thunderous clattering sound, and hundreds - maybe thousands - of droids came streaming from the fortress. Spider droids, super battle droids, even dreaded and lethal droidekas, like gigantic insects rolling out of a rotten stump.
Boba gaze down at them, transfixed. "How am I going to get through that and into the fortress? There's no way I can land without being seen and pulverized!"
He steered the swoop down for a closer look. Too close. With a grinding noise, one of the droideikas came to an abrupt halt. It swiveled and uncurled into firing position, its black, eyeless head pointed straight up - directly at Boba.
It fired.
"Aghhh!"
Too late, Boba yanked at the swoop's controls. A blast of heat struck the swoop. At the same instant, Boba dove from it. He could feel the surge of fire through his protective boots. He could hear the concussive blast roaring through the air like a seismic charge.
But all he could see was the explosion of laser fire all around him as he plummeted helplessly-right into the battle. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ummmpphi" With a grunt Boba smashed onto the ground. His body armor absorbed the blow, but it took him a moment to catch his breath. There was such a thick haze of smoke and spores he could barely see. He blinked, trying to clear his vision.
What he was able to make out was not good: a clone trooper, just millimeters from his face!,
"No way!" yelled Boba. He rolled onto his back and kicked, out, just as the clone took aim. Boba's, feet connected with the clone's knees. He wasn't strong enough to knock down the trooper. But Boba did throw him off balance.
And that was all it took. Boba was on his feet again, blaster raised. The clone towered above him, its face invisible behind its helmet. But something in the way it stood, something in the way it held its blaster, made Boba hesitate.
Because, just for a flickering moment, it wasn't a clone trooper there.
It was Jango Fett - Boba's father.
Boba recognized Jango's stance. He recognized Jango's strength. He even recognized the way Jango's head drew back slightly as he aimed his weapon. Only this wasn't Jango Fett. This was a clone trooper who had decided that Boba was an enemy.
"You're not my father!" Boba's voice was drowned in the blast from his Westar. "You're a clone!"
The trooper's aim was excellent - but Boba's was better. In a blaze of flame and vapor, the clone trooper fell.
One down! thought Boba. Only a couple thousand to go. He whirled, and found himself smack in the middle of the battle about 200 meters from the citadel walls. Above him, droid fighters shot from the citadel's peak. Battle droids swarmed around its base, blasting away. Clone troopers ran in formation. As they neared the fortress, the formation broke up. Individual troopers raced toward the battle droids. One clone got caught by a hailfire missile and vanished into a thousand pieces. Yuck! thought Boba. He looked away quickly. BARRAAAMMM! Brilliant multicolored pulses of laser fire erupted from the clones' blaster rifles. All were now aimed at the rolling, firing hailfire.
KRRRAARRROW!
A direct hit! One of the hailfire's wheels disengaged and the clone's body was dragged into the ground by the still churning second wheel. A few moments later it exploded in a fiery blast.
But the Republic's troops were still in danger. They were vastly outnumbered, for starters. And somewhere above them, the ramship was headed for their assault ship.
That was bad enough. But what was worse - the droidekas were laying waste to the clones. They rolled across the battlefield, safe within their shimmering forcefields. Laser fire bounced from them harmlessly. Harmless for the droidekas, anyway. Some of the pulses ricocheted back and mowed down the very troopers who had fired them.
With a cry Boba dodged a sudden flare of blue. A super battle droid stalked toward him, took aim and BLAAM!
Boba fired. The upper half of the droid disintegrated into shards of flaming plasteel. Boba whirled and blasted another droid. It fell. Boba staggered backward, struggling for breath.
I can't keep up with them, he thought desperately. There's too many! The droids are fighting the clone troopers. The troopers are fighting the droids
And they're all firing at me!
Around him was chaos. Black smoke mingled with clouds of purple spores from malvil-trees and giant mushrooms caught in the crossfire. Boba adjusted his helmet, striving to see through the haze. Xeran's powder is wearing off, he thought with dismay. The Republic's getting wasted. Not that he cared about the Republic. But if Wat Tambor was powerful enough to destroy them, what chance did Boba have?
Plenty, Boba thought grimly. I'm not giving up. A sudden roar made him look up. For a split second, every battle droid paused. As though they shared one mind, they all looked up, too.
"Starfighters!" cried Boba.
A phalanx of starfighters arrowed through the haze. Wat Tambor's air defenses fired at them in a blaze of blinding energy. The starfighters' leader banked sharply to the right. Boba stared up at it, admiringly.
"He sure knows what he's doing." He thought of Ulu Ulix, and smiled. Then he adjusted his helmet's focus as he took cover behind a wrecked vehicle. "Let's get a better look at this guy..." But now the battle droids had also seen the fighter. A barrage of ground fire shot up toward it. The starfighter dove. Pulses exploded in the empty air as the ship raced downward through the flak generated by the citadel's air defenses. It made a lightning pass at the heads of the droids, decapitating dozens as it flew incredibly low. It was so close to the ground that Boba could see who was piloting it.
"Skywalker!" Boba felt a spike of excitement. He had seen Anakin Skywalker from a distance in the arena of Geonosis. The young Padawan was older now, but Boba recognized Anakin's defiant gaze - and his skill. "He can really fly that thing!"
Anakin's starfighter pulled up once more. A blaze of Separatist fire sparked around it. Then, without hesitating, the ship went into another dive. It came in low, pulling up at the last moment as it lobbed an energy charge at the citadel.
KARRR000M!
The charge exploded. Flaming spikes of durasteel flew everywhere. A raw smoldering hole appeared in the citadel's side.
"Yes!" said Boba.
Wish I could do that! Boba thought as another spasm of flame arced by him. Boba jumped, then ran through a throng of clones. He was now using all the skills he'd acquired as a bounty hunter. His blaster fired without pause. Droids exploded in orange sparks - and clones fell left and right, as he fought his way toward the fortress.
This time, Boba didn't feel bad at all. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Near the foot of Wat Tambor's citadel, a homing spider droid had fallen. Its large form slumped over on two of its legs, forming a small, protected area.
Boba headed for this makeshift refuge. He had to leap over several dead clones, and the smoking wreckage of a swoop. But once in the shadow of the droid he was safe. For a few moments, anyway.
Now what?
Boba crouched, panting, and stared out at the battlefield. The clone trooper reinforcements were holding their own against the Separatists, but were unable to advance. Boba doubted they'd be able to defeat Wat Tambor's forces. The clones were organic and could be killed. And they were being killed in great numbers. The droids couldn't regenerate, but there seemed to be an endless supply of them streaming from the citadel's mouth. But could it really be endless? Surely even Wat Tambor's army had a limit?
Boba peered out from the crook of the fallen droid's elbow. Far above him, Anakin Skywalker's starfighter led the Jedi forces in the air attack. They were targeting the spider droids.
As Boba watched, he saw another hailfire come spinning out of the shadows of the malvil-trees. It rolled toward the center of the battlefield, scattering clones like leaves. It stopped. It raised its missile launcher, taking aim at one of the starfighters. With a deafening burst of energy, a barrage of plasma pulses went soaring upward - directly toward Anakin Skywalker's yellow starfighter.
He's doomed! thought Boba.
But the Padawan had other plans. Just as the plasma bursts approached it, he arrowed his starfighter to one side. The energy bolts continued onward, up, up, up through Xagobah's violet sky
And found another target - the ramship!
"Whoa!" Boba whooped.
An immense starburst of pure energy like a thunderbolt surged out from where the ramship had been. Boba tensed, waiting for fallout; but none came. The energy stored in the ramship was so dense and powerful that the explosion caused it to self-implode.
Score one for the Republic!
Quickly, Boba scrambled between the fallen spider droid's legs. He stared out at the battlefield. For a moment, everything had come to a standstill. Battle droids and clones alike gazed up at the waves of energy rippling through Xagobah's atmosphere violet, scarlet, gold.
"Very pretty," muttered Boba. He glanced at the entrance to Mazariyan. He couldn't believe it. No droids were there!
Boba looked around again. And yes, battle droids and sentry droids alike all seemed distracted. This was the moment Glynn-Beti had foretold! It's the energy surge! Boba realized. It's momentarily scrambled their command centers.
This was his chance!
Staying as low as he could, Boba darted from the shelter of the spider droid. He raced toward the fortress, breathing hard. The entry to Mazariyan gaped, faintly gleaming. Just a few more meters and he was there. None of the clone troopers would make it in time; they were still too far off. Boba paused, hand on his blaster. Behind him, the sounds of battle began once more. In front of him was a problem: The maw of Wat Tambor's citadel opened onto the Separatist's stronghold - and blades of purple fungus ringed the entrance like razor teeth. Rows of spines stuck out threateningly, ready to pierce any intruder. He recalled what Xeran had told him and suddenly Boba understood.
Wat Tambor had perverted Xagobah's fungus to his own ends - inside his citadel.
I have to get in there, Boba thought desperately. But how? Boba shoved his blaster into his belt. He drew his vibroshiv. No, he thought, and reluctantly replaced it. That will just make it worse.
Boba's hand moved from his belt. That was when he felt something in his pocket. Something round.
And suddenly Boba remembered.
Xeran's spore-globe.
What was it Xeran had said?
"If you have need of camoflage, crush this." Boba pulled the globe from his pocket. He stared at the purple sphere in the palm of his hand.
It looked harmless. And Xeran had said it was harmless - to Boba. But he had also said the spores acted as chemical messengers. Could they somehow damage the citadel?
Well, here goes nothing!
Boba glared up at the massive structure. Then he raised his hand, and, hoping this wasn't a mistake, he crushed the globe. It was like the energy surge that had destroyed the ramship. Only this surge was darkest purple and smelled faintly of spices. And it was, somehow, sentient. Boba watched in awe as a vast spore cloud enveloped the base of the fortress. The cloud moved like a gigantic paramecium. And as it did, the spines nearest to Boba drooped. As Boba stared, fascinated, he saw more metallic spines struggling to emerge. But for the moment the spore-cloud was stronger. The spines withered. New ones wriggled helplessly, then seemed to melt away. But more kept coming, needle-sharp, and Boba quickly realized that the spores were just a temporary solution. And whatever camoflage they offered would be temporary, too.
Now! he thought, and turned back to the entrance. Sure enough, the rows of spines had withered. They hung in limp black ribbons around the opening. Boba lunged forward, head down. Around him the spore-cloud was already starting to disperse.
If I can just get inside...
Tiny spines began to poke through the entryway. Tiny razor-sharp petals thrust from the edges of the opening. Boba grabbed his vibroshiv and slashed at them. Then, with one last desperate lunge, he leaped forward. Metallic strands of fungus slashed at his helmet. Writhing silvery vines slithered from the entryway
Too late!
With a gasp, Boba's feet connected with the ground. He staggered forward into a murky purplish tunnel, heedless of the spikes behind him. Beneath his boots the floor trembled like kallil-virus jelly. From the curved durasteel walls, pale silvery fronds and stems waved like dead fingers. There was a smell of scorched metal - and a faint, ceaseless thrum as if some unimaginably vast machine heart was beating somewhere out of sight.
Boba took a deep breath. Then, with every bit of courage he could command, he stepped forward
Into the citadel of Wat Tambor. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It took several minutes for Boba's eyes to adjust to the dimness. Yet it was not completely dark. An eerie greenish/haze hung over everything. Glowing orbs appeared to be set into the fortress's curved, metallic walls. When Boba drew close to one, he saw that it was not an orb, but a mushroom - a luminous mushroom. Wat Tambor had bioengineered the fungus to merge with metal and plasteel circuitry. Phosphorescent bacteria made it gleam. When Boba touched it, glowing pale green slime stuck to his glove.
"Ugh." Hastily Boba wiped it off. He didn't want to be any more noticeable than he already was!
He began walking down the hallway. The walls were smooth and metallic and curved, as was the ceiling. They were covered by a film, of squishy, violet fungus that squelched beneath his feet. But there were other things in the walls, too. Blinking chips and miniature monitors, shining crimson threads of circuitry like blood vessels.
Wat Tambor's genius had not been content with changing the malvil trees' genetic code. He had developed all kinds of nanotechnology. This had enabled him to fuse computer intelligence into the fungus citadel as well. Yet the monitors did not seem to be alert to Boba's presence. He stopped in front of one, holding his breath: nothing. The power surge from the ramship blast must have scrambled their circuits, he thought. But that won't last long... better hurry! Boba moved as quickly and stealthily as he could. He watched for droids but saw none. Now and then another curving passage would join the central tunnel. Boba peered down these.
What he saw made him content to stay in the main passage. The walls in those tunnels had strange, lumpy shapes in them. Shapes that sometimes moved or kicked or flailed. Boba wasn't certain what they were. But he had a pretty good idea - he remembered the last ARC troopers Glynn-Beti had spoken of.
And Xeran's people - the Xamsters who had struggled against the evil Separatist. Boba gritted his teeth. He thought of the gentle malvil-trees. He thought of the gentle Xeran, forced to take up arms against Wat Tambor. Boba's hatred of Wat Tambor grew. I will show no mercy, he thought fiercely. Xeran's people can no longer avenge themselves. I will take vengeance for them!
And, of course, I'll get Jabba's bounty, too.
The passage began to climb slowly upward. As it did, it curved, as though Boba were climbing some gigantic spiral staircase. He passed shimmering walls where monitors flickered yellow and green and red. He passed a room like the hollow chamber of a human heart, pulsing slowly in and out. He passed tube-shaped openings that gave him a fragmented view of the battle below.
But he passed no droids. He passed no clones. As far as Boba could tell, he was the only thing that walked inside of Mazariyan. And that made him nervous.
Could Wat Tambor have left? Could he have somehow escaped before Boba arrived here to capture him?
Boba frowned. I sure hope not.
Things had been bad enough outside, with the citadel under siege. He suspected they could get much worse if he was found inside by Wat Tambor's troops - or the Republic's.
He continued his journey, in and up. The air grew thick and heavy. Boba made sure his helmet's intake filter was working. He thought of the violet haze of spores that surrounded this planet. He could only imagine what kind of disgusting, protective spores were produced inside Mazariyan. Sometimes an unpleasant thought would work its way through Boba like a splinter.
What if I never find him? What if I can't find my way out? He was working on pure intuition now. The curved passage seemed to spiral endlessly up into the fortress. Sometimes it would branch. When that happened, Boba would choose one way or another, on instinct. He came to another place where the tunnel divided. To his left, it curved upward, its smooth walls gleaming purple. To Boba's right, the passage curved slightly downward. Here the tunnel had a deeper glow, almost indigo.
Wonder what that means? thought Boba.
For a moment he paused, thinking. Then he placed his hand on his blaster, and walked boldly into the right-hand passage. He hoped he'd made the right choice.
Up until now he had - but not anymore.
Boba didn't know it yet. But his good fortune was about to dissipate like the malvil's spores. |
Star Wars - 050 - Boba Fett 05 - A New Threat - Elizabeth Hand
CHAPTER TWENTY
The air there was warmer; As deep and dark a blue it was almost black. Boba didn't want to risk shining a light in the tunnel. He adjusted the infrared on his helmet, but that seemed to make it worse. So he moved very slowly, feeling his way. His gloved hands stuck to the slick walls. The soft, dank floor sucked at his boots. Worse, the faint thrumming sound was louder here. He could feel the floor vibrating under his feet. Ahead of him, the tunnel's walls grew uneven. As Boba drew closer, he quickly yanked his hand away.
Flabby, pale, fingerlike growths extended from the wall's surface. As Boba stared, they wriggled like the tendrils of a Bestine sea anemone. The tendrils were dark purple. Their tips were crimson.
"The Xabar fungus!" Boba exclaimed, recoiling. He remembered Xeran's warning: The tentacles released a paralyzing toxin.
"Who goessss there?"
A hissing voice slashed through the air. Boba looked up sharply.
"Stranger - identify yourself!"
Boba felt his stomach clench - but not with fear. Anger had been building inside him ever since he entered the fortress. Now it boiled over.
A shadowy figure stood before him. Tall, with greenish skin, cold deep-set eyes, a lipless mouth. Even in the indigo darkness Boba recognized him.
The Clawdite, Nuri!
It had been two years since Boba had last seen him. That was on Aargau. The shapeshifter had been smaller then. So had Boba. But Boba was definitely bigger now - bigger, and stronger, and heavily armed. And this Clawdite had betrayed Boba. Boba had trusted him. In return, the shapeshifter had stolen what remained of his father's fortune.
"Nuri," Boba said in a low, controlled voice. He saw the Clawdite's eyes narrow. "You owe me."
"Owe you?" The Clawdite did not recognize him. His gaze shifted uncertainly from Boba to the passage behind him.
"That's right," said Boba. He drew his vibroshiv. He lunged for the shapeshifter. As he did, Nuri's form seemed to melt. His neck grew longer and longer. His arms and legs shrank into nothingness. His head narrowed. Long, knife-sharp teeth filled his mouth. Feathered scales covered his body. Where the Clawdite had been, a huge arrak snake drew back to strike. Its glittering green eyes fixed on Boba. Then, hissing furiously, it wrapped its coils around him.
"Not so fast!" Boba yelled. He struggled against the thick, powerful serpentine shape. The arrak snake's coils began to tighten. Boba fought for breath. His vibroshiv fought to discover some weak spot in the snake's scaly armor
And found it! Just beneath the snake's fanged jaw there was a patch of flesh unprotected by scales. Boba plunged the vibroshiv there - when once again the shapeshifter's form changed!
In place of the arrak snake was a copper-colored dinko. It had crushing jaws, and pointed talons the length of Boba's arm. Its jaws snapped at Boba. When he kicked back at it, a foul-smelling spray squirted from the dinko.
"Ugh!" Boba staggered backward. For a moment even his Mandalorian helmet was no help - the fumes choked him. Then his secondary filters kicked in. Coughing and shaking, Boba struck back. The dinko snarled, lashing at him with one long, pointed talon. Boba's hand fumbled for his blaster. He grabbed the weapon and was just raising it to fire, when the dinko abruptly faded. Going, going... gone.
"Hey - !"
Boba blinked, trying to find whatever the shapeshifter had become. And saw a giant fefze beetle, the same color as the walls. It crawled through the toxic Xabar fungus. Then it scuttled into the shadows.
"No!" Boba shouted and lunged after the escaping insect. But he could barely see it in the darkness. Desperately he took aim with his blaster. No, wait - Boba shook his head. That's what he wants! If I fire, I'll alert everyone in the fortress - assuming there's someone here! He shoved his weapon back onto his belt. He could just make out the beetle skittering down the tunnel. Boba took a step back, then took a running leap. As he flew through the air he leaned forward, keeping the black shape in sight.
Uuumph!
With a grunt Boba fell. The slimy floor beneath him shuddered. His hand grasped at darkness for the beetle
And got it!
"You're not going anywhere!"
This time Boba kept a firm hold on the slick scales. Moments later he was grappling with the full-grown Clawdite.
"Don't forget, I have this," Boba hissed. His vibroshiv suddenly hovered inches above Nuri's neck. He felt the shapeshifter slump in defeat.
"That's better." Boba stared coldly at Nuri. The Clawdite glared back at him. "Now - I need an answer. Fast. Where is Wat Tambor?" Nuri bared his teeth. "I don't know what you're talking about." Boba drew the vibroshiv to within a hairbreadth of Nuri's flesh. "Do you want to feel how much closer this can get?" he whispered menacingly. "I know who you are, Nuri. I know you helped the Techno Union spring Wat Tambor from prison. Now I want to know - where is he?" The Clawdite hissed. Its evil eyes glittered. It stared at Boba's vibroshiv. Then it drew a long shuddering breath.
"That way - " Nuri's head twitched, indicating the passage leading down. "The central chamber. He's there."
"Is he well-guarded?"
Nuri's eyes fixed on Boba. The vibroshiv hummed above the Clawdite's neck.
"No," said the shapeshifter reluctantly. "He sent the last of his droid forces to join battle with the Republic. But Grievous is coming - and he will bring reinforcements."
"Grievous?" Boba frowned. "Who's that?"
"The General." The Clawdite stared at him with hatred. A slow, nasty smile spread across his face. "Whoever you are, I can see that you are working alone. The Republic will not come to your aid. You will meet General Grievous soon enough, stranger - and when you do, he will destroy you!"
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Boba snarled in rage. "Those were your last words, Clawdite!" He began to press the vibroshiv against, the shapeshifter's jugular vein. Then he stopped.
If Nuri's body is found, Wat Tambor will know there's an intruder inside his fortress, But if I let him go, he'll sound the alert.... Boba looked around the dim tunnel. His gaze lit on a clump of the paralyzing Xabar fungus. That's it!
He began to drag the Clawdite toward the fungus. Nuri fought furiously. But Boba was stronger.
"I've been really curious about how this stuff works," he said. He pinned the Clawdite to the ground, then grabbed the shapeshifter's arm. "Now I can find out."
Nuri struggled as Boba pushed his arm down.
Sensing prey, the Xabar's tentacles reached upward, wriggling in anticipation.
Closer... closer...
The Clawdite's hand hung above fungus. Then, like pale, grasping fingers, the tentacles grabbed him.
"Unnnhhh...!"
Abruptly the Clawdite went slack. He hung, dead weight, from Boba's hands. Boba recoiled, worried that the toxin might somehow reach him.
"Nuri?" he said in a low voice. "Nuri?" The Clawdite sprawled before him. He looked dead. He had no pulse. He was not breathing. His eyes stared upward, blank and cold as stone. When Boba gingerly touched his arm, it felt stiff.
"Well," Boba said, scrambling back to his feet. He gazed at the fallen Clawdite lying beside the Xabar fungus. If anyone found him, they would assume he had accidentally stumbled upon the paralyzing mushroom. "I hope that stuff works for a good long time. Long enough to get me to Wat Tambor, at least."
He began to run down the passage. It was noticeably warmer here. And there were more signs of Wat Tambor's technological genius. Ribbons of circuitry gleamed along the tunnel's soft, slimy walls. Phosphorescent globes hung alongside shining plasteel tubes that crackled with electricity. Computer monitors the size of Boba's thumb blinked like crimson eyes. Xabar fungus sprouted from discarded bits of droids like hair.
And always there was that steady, powerful thrumming, like the beating of a massive heart.
Boba tried not to think about that too much. He didn't like to imagine what kind of creature would have a heart that size. Ahead of him the deep-blue glow of the tunnel began to brighten. Now it was hard to see the walls of the passage behind all the layers of metal and computer circuitry. The tunnel turned, and turned again. Boba's steps slowed. He crept alongside the wall, eyes fixed on what was before him. Just a few meters away, the tunnel ended. A high, smooth archway opened into a single large chamber. Silvery violet light spilled from it, threaded with deep purple and blood red.
The light was so intense it hurt Boba's eyes. He paused and adjusted his optical sensors. Then he checked his weapons. His blasters, his vibroshiv, Ygabba's holoshroud, ion stunner, dart shooter... Which would help him capture Wat Tambor?
All of them - or none?
Boba's stomach clenched. For the first time a shiver of apprehension went through him.
Fear is energy, he told himself. Use it.
He took a deep breath. Then, keeping as low as he could, he ran the last few meters from the tunnel through the archway. And found himself face-to-face with Wat Tambor. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Boba sucked in his breath sharply.
He was in a large chamber, more like a cavern than a room. Blinking and shimmering circuits covered the slivery walls. Banks of monitors stretched everywhere. There were heaps of parts belonging to droids - arms, legs, blasters, power cells. Clumps of Xabar fungus sprang up between them, and other mushrooms as well.
None of this surprised Boba.
But what was in the center of the chamber did.
Thrusting up from the floor was a huge, shapeless, purple mass. It pulsed and shuddered like a massive slime mold. Flickers of crimson flame raced inside it. From it protruded dozens of tentacle-like tubes. Each time it pulsed, Boba could see darkly glowing violet liquid stream through the tubes, feeding outward into the walls.
There were other veins as well. These rippled from the walls and into the bioengineered nerve center, feeding it. The liquid that surged through them was deep red.
Boba stared at it, revolted. This was why none of Glynn-Beti's ARC troopers returned. He was gazing at Mazariyan's heart! That was how the enormous fungus received its power - by feeding on what it found inside! A deep voice shattered Boba's thoughts. "You are not who I was expecting."
Boba looked up. In the center of the room towered the Separatist. His own expression was momentarily as surprised as Boba's. Wat Tambor was tall and powerfully built. His body was encased in combat armor that he had designed himself. Only the top of his ridged skull was visible above it. His eyes were hidden behind round optic sensors. A heavy metal cowl covered his mouth and the lower part of his face. When Wat Tambor spoke, his inhuman voice was calm. "So. An intruder. That is no matter. I will make use of you - one way or another!" He raised his hand. A ray of scarlet light surged from it. With a cry Boba dove to one side. The ray struck the floor, pulverizing plasteel into smoking goo.
Wat Tambor cursed. Boba rolled, drawing his blaster. He fired.
BLAM!
The blast from his weapon arced straight toward Wat Tambor! Boba's joy abruptly died. Tambor was quicker than he looked, and dodged the blast, which was then seemingly absorbed by the chamber wall. Boba felt the entire room around him shudder. The huge nerve center gave a powerful surge. The shimmering circuits glowed even brighter.
"Your weapons only serve to feed it," announced Wat Tambor in that calm, mechanical voice. "As you will yourself!" Boba staggered to his feet again. "No!" he shouted. Mazariyan's tentacles were everywhere. Writhing, wriggling, crawling along the floor - dozens of them, with a single target. Boba Fett!
With a cry Boba drew his vibroshiv. He slashed at a huge vein and felt his blade cut into it with a satisfying slurp. Shimmering liquid splattered out. He ducked to one side, nearly falling on the slick floor. But the chamber floor was already at work, sucking up the liquid greedily.
"Take that!" cried Boba. A cobralike tentacle swooped toward him and he grabbed it. It lashed up, scraping the ceiling. Boba hung on with all his strength. He waited until he was just above where Wat Tambor stood beside Mazariyan's beating nerve center. Then he let go.
"Yaaah!" he shouted.
He lunged for the Techno Union Foreman, blaster firing. Too late. Wat Tambor moved too quickly.
The Separatist whirled, sending another bolt of energy flying from his hand. Boba lunged for the floor. If he could just reach that pile of broken metal...
"Agh!"
A blazing burst of pain struck his leg, so powerful it overwhelmed his body armor, which now cracked and smoked. Boba crashed against the ground. He had a glimpse of Wat Tambor's figure searching for him. Then the Separatist suddenly looked away, toward the chamber's entrance. I've got to hide, thought Boba in desperation, before he sees I'm down....
He rolled and began to drag himself to the heap of droid parts. It was darker there. He might be able to gain a minute, enough time to get Wat Tambor in his sights once more.
Boba drew himself up by the wall. The shattered droids gave him enough shadow to hide, for a moment. In the middle of the room the tentacles were still gulping eagerly at the fluid leaking from the severed vein.
"Where is he?" Boba murmured. He rubbed his leg. The pain was subsiding - it had only been a glancing blow. "Gotta find him - " Boba strained to see Wat Tambor. But the Techno Union Foreman was out of sight, hidden by the bulk of the nerve center.
Boba could hear him, though. He was talking to someone - but who? Nuri?
I should have killed the Clawdite! Boba thought angrily. Now he's betrayed me again! He began to ease himself from the shadows. One hand remained firmly on his blaster. The other was on his belt, ready to draw whatever weapon he might need.
But as Boba looked up, he realized he'd be needing all of them. Because into the room strode the most terrible, vicious figure he had ever witnessed.
Its head nearly touched the ceiling - a head composed of interlocking bands of an alloy he'd never seen before. A pale, cowled robe cloaked its body. Through its folds Boba glimpsed its true form: gleaming metallic limbs, six-fingered hands like robotic claws. When it turned its head, searching, Boba saw its eyes. Golden reptilian eyes, the pupil a black slash set within blood-colored sockets. Even Mazariyan's tentacles seemed to sense his awful threat. They retracted into the heart, like a carnivorous snail into its shell, waiting.
Boba's blood froze. Suddenly, and with horrible certainty, he knew he was looking upon the most powerful, most lethal threat he had ever faced. The terrifying general of the droid army
Grievous!
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Boba's mouth went dry. Grievous was flanked by two droid bodyguards, nearly as tall as he was. Their eyes were huge and round and crimson. They scanned the room methodically, heads sweeping back and forth. Any moment they would find Boba!
Now what? he thought. His hands moved quickly over his weapons belt. The blasters' energy would just feed Mazariyan. And his vibroshiv would be useless against a droid.
Suddenly his hand felt something else. A small compact object, fitted neatly on his belt.
Ygabba's holoshroud.
Yes! Boba moved so that he was sitting upright. He peered out. Grievous's bodyguards had started circling the room, scanning for the intruder. Grievous stood ominously in the center of the chamber by the heart, waiting. Wat Tambor was near a monitor, busily inputting information.
Grievous hasn't seen me yet, Boba thought. He doesn't know exactly what I look like, or who I am.
Boba had no idea what image Ygabba had scanned into the holoshroud. But it was this or nothing.
This is my best chance for living long enough to thank you, Ygabba, thought Boba. It better be good!
His finger hovered above the holoshroud's button. He took a deep breath. Then he pressed it, and stood.
There was a hum from where the cell hung at Boba's waist. Then he was surrounded by a glowing halo. It extended high above his head. When he moved his arm, the halo moved. When he stepped forward, it moved too. From inside the holoshroud, Boba could see only this shimmering cloud. But others, he knew, saw something completely different. They saw whatever image Ygabba had scanned into the cell.
But what image was that?
As Boba stepped forward, the droid bodyguards snapped upright. Their empty, glowing eyes burned even brighter. Boba moved to one side, heading for the arch that led out. As he did, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a monitor screen. At the same time, the bodyguards spoke.
"Durge!"
Boba almost yelped with joy.
His friend had scanned Durge's image into the holoshroud! And that was what the droids saw: not Boba Fett, but the hulking figure of one of the galaxy's most feared bounty hunters!
"Destroy him!"
An icy commanding voice thundered through the chamber. Grievous pointed at his bodyguards. As one, they lunged forward, firing. Boba leaped aside, and the blasts struck the wall behind him. It exploded in shards of plasteel and oozing fungus. One of Mazariyan's tentacles poked out from the pulsing heart of the citadel. Grievous turned and raised a hand threateningly. The tentacle shrank back.
"I said, destroy him!"
The droids stalked across the room. Boba fired back at them. His blasts bounced off their armored forms. He yanked out his ion stunner and fired. A surge of ionic plasma flared from it. One of the droids fell back, momentarily stunned.
"Yes!" crowed Boba.
He could see his own reflection mirrored in viewscreens across the chamber, tall and powerful. For an instant it seemed that the bodyguards might be taken aback as well.
"It is indeed Durge," one said in its cold robotic voice. Grievous turned his horrible eyes upon Wat Tam-bor. "You said it was a Mandalorian warrior," he said.
Wat Tambor looked at him. "He must have brought reinforcements," he replied.
"It is no matter," said Grievous.
Boba sent another bolt flying from the ion stunner at the bodyguards. Then he turned and started racing for the door.
The holoshroud's illusion would last for only two minutes. How much time was left? Enough to make the bodyguards hesitate before attacking him again?
Everything around him was a glowing blur as he ran for the arch. If he could only escape from this chamber, he could hide within the citadel. He already had a plan for utilizing those tentacles to capture Wat Tambor. If only he could Vvvvvvmmmmmm...
The hum from the holoshroud's power cell suddenly grew silent. Around Boba, the veil of Durge's image flickered into pixels of color. For a second he could see himself clearly, as the others had seen him: not Boba but Durge, his mighty arm raised to fire, Boba's weapon shrouded in the image of Durge's own blaster.
Then the holoshroud's illusion was gone. The power cell had run out. And so had Boba's luck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"That is him! The intruder!"
Wat Tambor's voice rang out like a clear bell. Boba watched as Grievous and his two bodyguards turned to stare at him.
"You are not Durge, as I suspected." Grievous's voice was cold, with no trace of human emotion. "But you will die all the same!" He lifted his arm. Before Boba could move, Grievous gave a command. A blinding flash of energy leaped from an unseen weapon held by one of his bodyguards. It struck Boba in the chest and he fell, another piece of his father's armor smoking and cracked.
"Get him," commanded Grievous.
The droid bodyguards sprang forward. But Boba's body armor had absorbed the blow's impact. He rolled to one side, struggling to his feet and backing against the wall.
"You won't take me!" he yelled.
"Maybe not alive," said Wat Tambor calmly. "But dead will suit us just as well."
The droids stalked toward Boba. He grasped a blaster in each of his hands and raised them. He waited until the droids were just meters from him. Then, ducking, he fired and darted to one side.
KABLOWWW!
The blasts bounced harmlessly from the droids. They swiveled, firing in staccato bursts. Boba fired back.
KABLAAM!
He inched along the wall, blasters flaming. If I can just reach the door, he thought desperately.
There was another blast of power from the droids. Right above Boba's head the wall fragmented. He took advantage of the cloud of splintered metal and mushroom ooze, and ran.
Beside him fresher, cooler air streamed from the dimness - the tunnel. Boba made for it, his breath coming in short, deep bursts as he ran. He could hear the clack of the droids' measured footsteps behind him. He could imagine their arms raised, and that terrible, cloaked figure watching Don't think! Move!
He dove for the entrance. Cool air embraced him, and blessed darkness. His feet touched the now-familiar, slimy surface. Before him stretched the passage. Just up ahead it divided.
If I can make that fork, I can lose them, Boba thought. His heart strained as he raced toward it. If I can just
Searing pain tore through him.
Boba cried out in agony.
He struggled a few steps more.
Another torturous stab penetrated his armor from behind. He fell.
"So," an icy voice echoed through the tunnel "Now I see you as you truly are."
On the ground, Boba writhed, trying to reach his blaster and turning to look behind him. Above him the cloaked figure of General Grievous loomed into view - and in one hand it now gripped a lightsaber glowing in the haze.
How could this be? Was the general a Jedi?!
Grievous's eyes were yellow orbs within a skeletal, silvery mask. Behind him stood Wat Tambor, flanked by the droid bodyguards.
"Not that it matters," the icy voice continued. Grievous's other hand slid from the folds of his cape and then emerged with a second lightsaber ignited. "Because you are going to die now." Boba struggled vainly to reach his weaponsbelt. Pain lanced through him, as though flames ran through his veins. He fell back.
"It looks as though he is in death convulsions already," said Wat Tambor.
And suddenly Boba had an idea. Without turning his head, he let his gaze flicker across the floor of the tunnel. There, not a millimeter away, a pale clump of the paralyzing Xabar fungus sprouted. Can't - be - seen - moving! Boba thought. His hand crept toward the fungus. Must - reach it!
Grievous drew back both lightsabers to strike. Boba tensed. He let his hand rest upon the ground. He moved his wrist, fractionally, so that his glove slipped upward.
A tiny patch of his skin was now exposed. "He's dead," Wat Tambor repeated. "Our troops await us outside, General." The young bounty hunter held his breath. From the corner of his eye, he could see fingers of faintly glowing fungus. They were so close that he could almost feel them - almost touch them
Now!
Something cool and damp licked the patch of exposed skin upon his wrist. His hand, and then his wrist, grew numb. A freezing breath seemed to exhale into his lungs.
"General," urged Wat Tambor.
The icy numbness spread through Boba's body. He tried to breathe but could not. He felt his heart pump feebly. His vision began to dim. His mission to capture Wat Tambor had failed.
What would his father have thought?
Xeran said the paralysis was only temporary, Boba recalled as he drifted off. He better be right....
Around him the chamber began to grow even more dim. A flicker of consciousness raced through Boba's brain. He recalled how Jabba would sometimes have his prisoners brought to him, frozen in carbonite. Wonder if it feels like this...
It was the last thing Boba thought.
"General, please!" said Wat Tambor. "Look at him - he's dead. No one could have survived those blows!"
Wat Tambor came up to him and nudged at Boba's senseless form. The bounty hunter's body moved, but did not respond. Grievous swept past the Techno Union Foreman, in turn. Disengaging the lightsabers, he kicked Boba.
"Dead," echoed one of the droid bodyguards. "Dead," the other repeated.
"Leave him," said Wat Tambor. "There will be plenty of time to dispose of the body when we return. And plenty of others to join him, too," he added with a malicious mechanical laugh.
"Come!" commanded Grievous. "He is no Jedi. I will not waste my skill any longer on such a lackey." He turned, then stalked down the passage, Wat Tambor at his heels. The bodyguards followed, the citadel echoing as they passed. In the tunnel, a dark form remained, motionless, senseless, upon the ground.
Outside, the siege of Mazariyan raged on. Inside, Boba Fett's battle for life was just beginning. |
Cover |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER ONE
“Hello!”
Silence.
“Hello!?”
No answer. The hallway outside his door was quiet.
Boba Fett was all alone.
That was okay. Boba was used to being alone.
Ever since he had buried his father, he had been by himself—a ten-year-old against the galaxy. He missed his father but he didn’t mind being alone. Sometimes.
Sort of.
…whrr…
Movement! Boba ran to a bend in the corridor. “Hey! Hey!”
…whrrr…
It was just a droid. A small, shoe-sized house droid, the custodial kind that dusted and cleaned continually. While other creatures bustled in other corridors of the Count’s underground
lair, only the custodial droids came into this hallway.
That explained why Boba felt so isolated. But it didn’t explain why he had been brought here, and what was going to happen to him. Only the Count could do that.
The Count, a tall, thin, powerful man with a cold smile, was known as Tyranus—or Dooku, depending on whom you were talking to. Boba’s father, Jango Fett, had left instructions that
Boba was to find the Count if something happened to him.
Something had happened to Boba’s father. He had been killed in a battle with a Jedi. Boba had buried his father on the planet Geonosis. He had gone to his home planet of Kamino
only to find that it wasn’t home anymore. With his father gone, there was no security. With his father gone, there was no safety. There was only the need for escape.
Boba’s father had left him a book. Find Tyranus, it had told him, to access Jango’s credits and find self-sufficiency.
That suited Boba. He wanted to learn how to become a great bounty hunter like his father. To start out he’d need credits—then he’d earn more. But Boba hadn’t had time to
find the Count. The Count had found him first, sending a bounty hunter named Aurra Sing to capture him on Coruscant and bring him to this underground hideout on Raxus Prime. She’d taken his
ship, Slave I, as payment. But she hadn’t explained why the Count wanted Boba.
Only the Count could answer that, and Boba couldn’t find him. The Count had welcomed him to this hideout—sort of—and had given him a room with a table, a chair, and a bed. Boba
had immediately gone to sleep, exhausted. Now that he was awake, the Count was nowhere to be found.
“Hello?”
No answer.
Walking around, Boba had seen rooms half-empty or filled with mysterious equipment, some of it still in crates. He had heard strange sounds in the distance. Voices, many languages. He passed
figures half-seen as they scuttled down dimly lit corridors, hurrying around corners.
There was something going on. But what? Clearly, the Count wanted to keep him separate from others. Boba hoped this was because the Count was going to train him, was going to employ him like he
had employed Boba’s father.
That was his hope.
The room Boba had been put into was painted white and lighted by glow panels set in the ceiling. Like everything he’d seen so far in the compound, it was thrown together, ramshackle.
Clearly the Count had just moved in. And he might not be planning on staying for long.
Boba knew the lair was underground—he had entered through a hillside, after being dropped off by Aurra Sing—but that was all he knew. He was far from the outside world, and even
farther from any place he had ever known. He was isolated. The Count controlled everything.
Boba knew he couldn’t stay in the room all day. If he’d learned anything from the terrible days following his father’s death, it was that he couldn’t hesitate to take
action. Boba kept walking down the hallway, which led to another dim hallway, the far-off voices a little closer. How will I find my way back to my own room? Boba wondered. The room where
he had slept was where he had left his flight bag. It was his only property, the legacy from his father.
He would worry about that later. First things first. That was a lesson his father had taught him. First he had to find the Count and figure out what was going on.
“Hello?” Another empty room. But wait…this room was different.
It had a window.
The window overlooked a lake, surrounded by woods. A blue sky overhead was flecked with white clouds. But how could that be?
Raxus Prime was the most toxic planet in the entire galaxy. Boba had seen the skies, thick with smoke; the hillsides piled high with wreckage and garbage; the oily waters choked with debris and
waste. Everything on Raxus Prime was foul and filthy. So what was this lake out the window? Had it all been cleaned up while he slept? Or had he been moved somewhere else?
Boba crossed the room toward the window. He was just about to try to open it when he heard a stern, forceful voice behind him.
“Not allowed.”
Boba turned. Someone—or something—was standing in the doorway to the room, making the empty space seem suddenly filled. He was huge, his bald, reptilian head crowned with a
clawlike crest. He wore a gray jumpsuit with gold braiding and buttons. His broad mouth was filled with too many big square teeth, and his tiny eyes were cold.
“Not allowed,” the giant in the doorway said again, this time with a stomp of his tall, heavy boots. The ground shook beneath his statement.
Boba felt a chill of fear, and remembered his father’s words: Welcome your fear as a friend, but never show it to others. He made his voice sound casual, almost friendly.
“What’s not allowed?” he asked.
“The unpermitted,” was the terse reply. “Now come with us, young sir.”
Us? There was just him, just the one giant. But that was enough. “Come—where?” Boba asked.
“The Count, ready to see you. Follow us, please.”
Boba knew he had no choice. The creature wasn’t going to move until Boba did as he said. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER TWO
Boba followed the giant past more closed doors, to an ornately carved door at the end of a long hall.
The giant knocked, then entered to a signal Boba hadn’t heard. Inside, the room was larger than the others. It had furniture, too. A desk with carved legs had a holoprojector on it. A
holographic comm unit was ready for transmissions in the corner of the room.
Behind the desk was a tall picture window. The window faced a different direction than the window in the other room, but overlooked the same view, surrounded by the same woods. What’s
going on? Boba wondered.
A man in a long cloak was standing at the window, looking out. He turned when Boba entered the room. A smile as thin and as sharp as a dagger creased his long, narrow face, slicing his white
beard in two. In a single glance, Boba could feel his dark presence. This was something more than strength. It was power.
“Young Boba Fett,” the Count said in a sonorous voice. “I hope you slept well. I see you found the clean clothing that was left beside your bed.”
Boba nodded, fingering the coarse tunic. “Yes, sir.”
“And the accommodations?”
Boba nodded again. The breakfast hadn’t amounted to much, only a shuura. But he wasn’t about to complain.
“Excellent,” said the Count. “And I believe you have met Cydon Prax. He assists me with all things.”
The hideous giant bowed and Boba bowed back. His father had taught him to spot a killer when he saw one. And Prax looked like he could easily be a killer, if pushed the wrong way. Boba felt a
tinge of anger, too. Prax now stood where Boba’s dad had stood before, at the Count’s side.
“Prax will look after you and take care of your needs,” the Count continued. “You must let him know if there is anything you desire. Anything at all.”
Boba nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” He wanted to seem agreeable—almost subservient. He wanted Prax to think of him as an obedient little kid. That way, neither Prax nor
the Count would know what was really going through his head.
“Since the unfortunate death of your father, I have been pleased to take on the responsibility for your care and upbringing,” said the Count. “As you no doubt know, that was
Jango Fett’s last and fondest wish.”
It was? Boba thought. The Count’s words were kind, but why was his voice so cold?
“I have many obligations that may, unfortunately, prevent me from giving you my total attention,” continued the Count. “However, I welcome you to my quarters here on Raxus
Prime. You may find them a little primitive. We are engaged in an important archaeological project here. I will expect you to respect my rules and stay out of the way.”
“Yes, sir,” said Boba. It was easy enough to please adults. All he had to do was nod and agree.
“Good.” The Count’s smile was as bright and cold as an icicle. “Cydon, leave us.”
Cydon Prax gave a nod and lumbered out of the room. The Count slowly approached Boba and asked, “Have you ever heard the name Tyranus?”
Boba nodded. It was a simple question, but the Count’s tone was ominous.
“Your father may have mentioned it to you in connection with his work on Kamino, developing the clone troopers. I believe I’ve heard you say that he and I were the same person. When
you were on Geonosis, you looked at me and said, ‘Isn’t that Tyranus?’ Do you remember that?”
“I remember,” said Boba. Where is this going? he wondered.
“You might ask, why would someone have two names, Tyranus and Dooku?” the Count suggested mildly.
“I learned from my father not to ask too many questions,” Boba said. He could see from the Count’s eyes that this was the right answer.
“Excellent,” said the Count. “Your father was very discreet. I believe you will be, too.”
“Yes,” said Boba, wanting to reassure the Count.
“A useful man, your father,” said the Count. “And I see you are your father’s son. I am sure that with the proper training, you will be as useful someday.”
“Yes, sir,” said Boba. Training! Now they were getting somewhere. “Also, my father left a message about some credits that belonged to him. He said you would give them to
me.”
“Ah, yes, Jango Fett’s savings. I suppose, if you prove worthy…but we will discuss all that later, this evening.”
“I will prove worthy!” said Boba eagerly. “I want to be a great bounty hunter like my dad.”
But the Count was no longer listening. He was studying some strange images on his holomap. He had turned all of his attention away from Boba, as if Boba had never been there.
Boba heard the door open and felt a grip on his shoulder. “Come with us,” said Cydon Prax.
As he was being led out the door, Boba heard the Count behind him, talking on his comm device. “Keep digging,” he said in his icy voice. “Expand the search. Spare no expense.
What we are looking for is more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER THREE
As Boba followed Prax down the long halls, back to his lonely room, he thought of the Count’s cold dismissal. Can I trust him? Do I have a choice? Maybe the
Count wasn’t going to turn out to be such a good friend after all. Jango Fett had always said that in a bounty hunter’s life, there was no such thing as a friend. Boba knew this was
probably true. But still he hoped…
“Stay here,” said Prax, when they arrived at the room. “No wandering. Unpermitted.”
Boba nodded his agreement and closed the door. His original clothes were back, clean, folded at the foot of the bed. He changed into them, glad to shed the rough tunic.
His flight bag sat on the floor beside the bed. It contained everything Boba owned—except his father’s ship, Slave I. Boba fully intended to get it back. Meanwhile, the bag
contained all his worldly possessions:
A helmet and a book.
When Boba had buried his father with his armor on Geonosis, he had kept his scarred and pitted battle helmet. It was Mandalorian. Boba took it out of the flight bag and looked at it longingly.
The faceplate of the helmet was as familiar, as stern, and, in its own strange way, as loving as his father’s actual features.
In fact, Boba was beginning to fear he would forget his father’s face. This would become more familiar—this harsh visage, like a T, with an eye slit at the top.
Boba put the helmet beside him and took out the book.
The black book contained Jango Fett’s final messages to his son. Sometimes they were the same, from day to day. Sometimes they changed.
The most recent message had been about the Count, credits, and self-sufficiency. Boba opened the book to see if it had changed. It had, but only a little. Today it read:
Self-sufficiency you will learn from the Count.
Sometimes the book wasn’t much help. How was he going to learn self-sufficiency from the Count, who wasn’t even interested in talking to him?
Boba had lots of questions. Why was the Count so cold and mistrustful? What was he digging for? But it was clear that if he wanted answers, he was going to have to find them himself—even
though wandering was unpermitted, according to Prax.
He closed the book and put it back into the flight bag. It was time to explore.
Boba clenched his fist and held it in front of his face, making a vow. “Self-sufficiency means do it yourself!” he muttered. He picked up his father’s helmet—it was his
only possible disguise, just in case he needed one. Carefully, as quietly as possible, he opened the door…. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER FOUR
Boba looked right.
Boba looked left.
No Cydon Prax.
Good—all clear!
He started his exploration, staying close to the wall, so he could duck out of sight if necessary. He followed the hallway to the end, then rounded a corner; then another corner—always
heading toward the noises and commotion he could hear in the distance.
The halls around his room were empty, but those farther away were filled with noise and activity. Soon Boba found himself sharing the corridors. Droids of all shapes and sizes bustled about,
carrying equipment in and out of the small storage rooms. Their whirrs and clicks sounded almost like speech.
There were other creatures, too. Boba saw a Geonosian warrior armed with a sonic blaster at a distance and a Nemoidian in colorful robes, looking angry and harassed.
The whole place had a temporary, provisional air, like a construction site. There was dirt on the floor and scars on the walls, where they had been bumped and scraped. There was a sharp smell,
either of the outside air or of the oil-like sweat glistening on the limbs of the busy droids.
The equipment in some of the rooms looked like it was for digging or drilling. Most of it was covered with muck, but some was bright and gleaming, as though it hadn’t yet been used.
And under it all was a low hum, a constant buzz of activity. Boba heard two Nemoidians talking about “the dig” and “the harvester,” but they turned a corner and were gone
before he could hear more.
Boba made his way down the halls and around the corners, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. He had learned that it was easy for a ten-year-old to be invisible, as long as he stayed
out of the way.
The droids and workers were all intent on their tasks. And none of them knew or cared who Boba was, except for Prax. All Boba had to do was avoid him.
The air in the corridor was growing colder. The toxic smell was stronger. Ahead, Boba saw a large opening to the outside. Droids and workers streamed in and out, some carrying
strange-looking tools, others riding on square all-terrain vehicles.
He was trying to get a better look when he heard a familiar voice: “Give us results!”
That harsh, booming sound was familiar. Cydon Prax? Boba wasn’t taking any chances. He ducked into a nearby room and flattened himself against the wall.
To his surprise, he was facing a window. The view was just like the ones he had seen earlier. The window overlooked a lake surrounded by woods, with a clear blue sky overhead.
Again, Boba wondered how such a view could exist on Raxus Prime. And why was the view exactly the same every time he saw it? How could three rooms in different places have the same view?
He approached the window and reached out to touch it. It was soft, like a plastic curtain. As soon as he touched it, the scene changed. Now he saw bright blue-green water lapping against silvery
sands.
He touched the window again.
Snow-covered peaks watching over an icy planet.
Now I get it! Boba thought. It was all a display, a virtual window showing a virtual scene. A series of illusions installed by the Count.
Boba touched the viewscreen one last time and saw toxic steam belching from piles of trash and slag, under a reddish, smoke-stained sky. This was the real world—Raxus Prime. The beautiful
views were just fabrications.
In the distance was a tower with huge arms, moving up and down. It looked like a giant robot. Was it real, or an illusion? Boba couldn’t tell. Here in the Count’s lair, it was
impossible to tell the truth from a lie.
Suddenly, Boba heard a distinctive set of footsteps in the hallway—the heavy tread of Prax patrolling. In the blank room, there was nowhere to hide. Boba held himself close to the wall,
next to the doorway. If Prax peered in, Boba would be fine. If Prax walked inside, he’d be caught.
The footsteps came closer. Then stopped. Right outside the room. Boba held his breath. The door opened. Prax stuck his head into the room.
The window is wrong, Boba realized. Too late. There was no way to hide the scene of Raxus Prime.
Prax was no more than a meter away from Boba. If he turned his head, it would all be over.
For a long second, everything remained still. Then Prax grunted and pulled his head out of the room.
Boba waited a few minutes, until he was sure Prax was gone again. Then he slipped back out into the hall and headed toward the other creatures near the exit.
Boba stood to one side and looked out the giant doorway. Through the swirling mists he saw the tower he had seen through the “window.” The tower was definitely real. It was the focus
of all the activity; a crude dirt road from the door to the tower’s base was crowded with vehicles, droids, and workers carrying equipment, some coming and others going out.
Boba was fascinated. This must be the Count’s “dig.”
What was he digging for? The Count had made it sound like something very powerful…which would make it something a bounty hunter should know about.
There was one way to find out the truth. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER FIVE
Whew! What a stink! The sky was dark with swirling smoke; the ground was heaped with the trash and garbage from a thousand planets. The twisted wreckage of hundreds of
crashed ships stretched into the distance. The air was almost too foul to breathe.
Luckily, Boba had brought his father’s battle helmet. He put it over his head as he started out on the road, toward the tower. The helmet was surprisingly light, and it made breathing
easier; though it had no independent air supply, its filters removed the worst of Raxus Prime’s poisons.
Self-sufficiency, thought Boba, begins with the right equipment.
The road angled up a ridge of oozing slag. Boba slogged along, his boots slipping in the soft terrain. At the top, where the road crested the ridge, he stopped to rest.
From here he could see the tower much better. It was a crane. The arms were equipped with drills and vats, which dipped deep into the muck of Raxus Prime. Lights from the top of the tower
illuminated a great pit, where droids and workers toiled in and out of the vapors and the darkness.
All around were ruined walls and arches, like the remains of a great city that had been buried and forgotten, and was being dug up again.
Boba descended the ridge until he was at the edge of the enormous pit and looked down. Remote diggers and salvage droids rattled and bumped through the muck, far below. Well-armed
“spider” droids stood watch at the perimeter of the pit, and Boba saw AAT tanks idling nearby, hovering off the ground. But none of them seemed interested in him.
A lot of firepower for a hole in the ground, especially on the galaxy’s garbage planet. Boba wondered again what could be so valuable, buried in the mire and muck of Raxus Prime?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, a gruff voice said, “Getting close to it, huh?”
Boba jumped. He hadn’t seen the Givin driver, who had stepped out of his drilling vehicle and walked up to stand beside him.
“Guess so,” Boba asked. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know what “it” was.
“About time.” The driver bit off a piece of radni root, and offered it to Boba. “Have a chaw?”
Boba realized that in his helmet, he was being taken for an adult. Another advantage of his father’s legacy.
“No, thanks, I don’t chew,” he said. Then he ventured: “So that’s it—the treasure?”
“Treasure?” The Geonosian laughed and spat into the pit. “Not unless you call death a treasure. No one’s supposed to know, but the Count is after something called a Force
Harvester.”
Boba had heard about the Force. The Jedi used it, his father had told him. But the Count wasn’t a Jedi…
“But don’t mind me,” he said, heading back to his mud-laden craft. “I just work here.”
“Security check!” said a gruff, familiar voice in the near distance. Boba ducked behind a rock just as Cydon Prax strode into view.
“All systems secure?” Prax asked. “No intruders?”
“Who’d intrude on this planet?” asked the driver, swinging up into his seat. “Not exactly a resort.”
“Keep an eye open,” growled Prax. “The Count does not want anyone nosing about his digs. Got it?”
“Got it, got it,” said the driver.
I’d better get out of here, fast! Boba thought. Prax might recognize him, even in his helmet, because of his size. He waited until Prax was out of sight, then started back down
the road.
The problem was, the road was too exposed, too narrow. Prax could come along at any moment. Boba decided to take what he hoped was a shortcut. A path veered off through the wreckage, but Boba
thought he saw it emerge back by the Count’s base.
After getting off the road and rounding a few bends, Boba realized he’d already gone far. Like most shortcuts, it turned out to be the long way. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER SIX
It was hard going. Up one stinking slag heap, and down another.
Boba tried to keep the big tower straight behind him, and the distant light of the door ahead. That would be the shortest, fastest route back to Dooku’s underground lair.
The stinking ground sucked at his boots where it was wet, and crumbled into toxic dust where it was dry.
Raxus Prime was all ruins and debris. Boba passed through forests of broken machinery and shredded wire. He climbed cliffs of soggy, discarded fabric and slid down steep mountainsides of muck.
Brown steam spewed from the steep piles, while foul-smelling liquids oozed down their sides.
The helmet helped him breathe but it couldn’t mask the smell of the noxious atmosphere. Still, Boba pushed on. He had no choice; he had to beat Prax back to the Count’s lair. Other
wise, the Count might find out he had broken his rules and gone outside. Even though Boba wasn’t sure what he had discovered. The Force Harvester? What was that?
“Ugh!” Boba slipped on a particularly foul-smelling piece of refuse and slid to a stop. He was at the edge of a wide pond of bubbling, greenish-brown liquid. It looked very
nasty. A mist rose from the surface that smelled like rotten rikknit eggs.
Unless Boba turned around, the only way through was by way of the pond. He walked straight into the liquid—first one step, then another. The nasty goop sloshed over the tops of his boots,
but what did he care? Boba was not going to let anything get in his way. A bounty hunter was not delayed by revulsion.
Boba shook the slime off his boots and trudged up another steep ridge of dripping slag. Even through his helmet, the smell was terrible. But from the top, he could see that the brightly lighted
door way of the Count’s lair was only a few hundred meters away. He was almost there!
There was only another pond to cross, and this one was long and narrow—just a few meters across. Boba slid down another slope slick with oozing slime, to the edge.
The pond was ringed with foul-smelling ferns. It was a brighter green than the last one, and it looked deeper. A lot deeper.
Boba summoned up his courage and stepped off the edge, into the ferns. His boots sank into the ground. He took another step and sank up to his boot tops. Boba tried to pull his left leg free; it
sank even deeper.
Another step, and it was up to his knees. Boba was more than halfway across, but he was stuck. The ooze felt like hands, pulling him down deeper and deeper.
Boba tried to take a step back, but he couldn’t. Instead, he slipped farther into the greenish muck. Now it was up to his waist.
He tried again to pull his legs free, but thrashing around only sank him deeper into the stinking, gluelike mud.
He quickly sank in up to his neck.
The mist was rising into his mask, and he could hardly breathe. He could feel a burning sensation in his knees and feet. It felt as if he were being dissolved by the acid gunk.
I am being digested!
Only the helmet allowed him to breathe, to survive. It seemed to have stopped the sinking and the digesting for some reason. But for how long? His chin sank into the muck. In a moment his mouth
and nose would be covered, too. The mask was clearly being rejected by the horrible mass…but how long would that last?
Boba searched frantically for a means of escape. He saw a coil of wire sticking out of a slag heap on the other side of the pond, but it was too far away. A stick lay closer, on the bank below
the wire, but still out of reach. The reeds were all around, but they were too thin and frail to hold his weight.
Then Boba remembered: self-sufficiency. It meant using whatever was available.
He managed to get one arm out of the muck and grabbed the longest reed he could find, pulling it up by the roots. It felt slimy, even through his gloves. He used it like a long flexible hook to
snag the wire, inching it across the mud until it was within the reach of his hand.
Yes! The wire felt plenty strong. Boba wrapped it around his hand and began to pull.
It was almost too late. His eyes were burning and he could hardly breathe. His arms were weak. He gathered all his strength and pulled….
The wire was coming loose from the slag pile. It dislodged a tiny clod, starting a small landslide down the slippery slope of slag and garbage. Then it jerked tight again. It had snagged on
something.
Boba pulled again, but more carefully this time. The wire was barely caught on the edge of an old piece of machinery. If it slipped off, he was a goner.
This was his last chance. Hardly daring to breathe, he pulled himself toward the shore of the pond. One leg was free…then the other…
Boba grabbed a handful of reeds and pulled himself out of the stinking liquid, onto the slimy shore. “Whew!” Plain old slime had never felt so good before.
He was free.
Boba blended in with the crowd of droids, warriors, and workers streaming in the wide, brightly lighted door way. No one noticed him, and Prax was nowhere to be seen.
Even the filth that covered him didn’t give him away. Many of the others were filthy as well, from the dig.
Boba took off his helmet and wiped it clean. It had saved his life, that was for sure. He now realized why it was so important to his father…and why it would be important to him.
Boba joined the “dig” workers in the shower that steamed the worst of the slime off his clothes and his boots, and then dried them instantly. Now all he had to do was make it back to
his room and no one would know he had been outside.
He stepped out of the shower, his clothes already dry—and grimaced in pain as a rough, strong hand gripped his shoulder.
“Come!” The voice was unmistakable. Boba opened his mouth to explain that he hadn’t meant to break the rules, that it was all a mistake. But what was the point?
Cydon Prax wasn’t listening as he dragged Boba down the corridor, toward the Count’s inner sanctuary. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Count wrinkled his finely arched nose. “We shall have to clean you up,” he said dismissively.
Boba tried to keep from shaking. He knew it was best never to show fear. He gripped his father’s helmet in his hands.
“Your father didn’t teach you very well,” said the Count. “You have been sticking your nose where it does not belong.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Boba said. He could feel the Count’s power turning steadily into wrath.
“Oh, really?” The Count was scornful. He stood behind his desk, in front of the “window” that showed a blue lake under a blue sky. Anything but the real filth of Raxus
Prime.
“Really,” said Boba. “I just stepped outside the door. I didn’t go far.”
“Perhaps I should take on your training, after all,” said the Count. Boba felt a moment’s hope. But the hope was dashed by the Count’s next words: “If I did, the
first thing I would teach you is how to lie. You are not very good at it.”
“I am sorry I broke your rules,” said Boba. And especially sorry that I got caught.
“Sorry?” said the Count with a smooth, cold grin. “You have broken my rules. And that is not all…”
Not all? Wasn’t that enough?
“I’ve decided that you know too much at a time when information is a valuable commodity.” He turned to Cydon Prax, who stood by the doorway. “Isn’t it ironic that
one small boy should be the only one who knows such a great secret?”
Prax didn’t answer, of course. Boba wasn’t sure what the “great secret” was that he was supposed to know about. But the Count’s remark gave him an idea that he
hoped just might save his life.
“What makes you think I’m the only one who knows?”
The Count raised his eyebrow—the most surprise Boba could imagine the Count betraying. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said,” said Boba. He tried to keep his voice calm, cool, Jango Fett–style. “I have already told someone else.”
He had the Count’s attention now…barely. “May I inquire who?” the older man asked.
“That’s my secret,” Boba bluffed. “And she knows who to tell if anything happens to me.”
“She?” Boba could hear a slight undertow of uncertainty. “Might you be insinuating the bounty hunter Aurra Sing?”
Boba was making it up as he went along. “I do mean Aurra Sing,” he said.
“Young fool. Are you threatening me?”
“No, sir. I simply want what is mine. My freedom—and my father’s credits.”
“Freedom? Credits?” The Count’s eyes blazed like cold fire. “I do not bargain with children. Especially those who are a nuisance.”
I went too far! Boba realized. His last chance was lost.
“Cydon Prax, you know what to do with him.”
Boba knew it was useless to resist. He closed his eyes as Cydon Prax picked him up. Boba dropped his helmet as his arms were pinned. His father’s voice came to him. If you must die, do
so with valor. That is what Jango Fett had done, fighting to the last moment.
The memory inspired Boba. He was done with pleading and pretending. Whatever was coming, he would face it with the courage of the son of Jango Fett.
Suddenly the Count raised his hand. For the first time, Boba saw genuine concern cross his face.
“What is it, sir?” Prax asked.
“The Jedi have found us,” the Count answered.
Boba strained to hear something beyond the silence of the room. How did the Count know?
“Finish him off, then join me,” the Count said tersely as his hand seemed to instinctively find the curved lightsaber handle that glistened beneath his cloak.
BAR-ROOOM! An explosion shook the floor.
Quickly picking up a holopad from his desk, the Count left the room. As if on cue, a second explosion rocked the room. This one was closer. Small rocks started to fall from the ceiling.
Cydon Prax hesitated for a moment and his grip on Boba loosened just a little as he looked after his master. Boba saw his chance. He kicked out with all his strength against the nearest wall.
Prax was propelled backward, into the desk. Boba’s elbows slammed into him as they landed.
“You little…”
Prax’s words were lost in a series of explosions outside. The floor pitched up like the deck of a ship being tossed by a giant wave. The door cracked and fell to the ground. The sound of
blaster fire and confused voices filled the air.
Boba lunged and twisted free from Prax’s grip. He scooped up his battle helmet from the floor where he had dropped it. And then he did what his father had taught him to do whenever he was
in a bad situation he didn’t expect to get any better.
He ran. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER EIGHT
The once dim corridor was filled with light, and no wonder!
The Count’s underground hideout had been blown wide open. Large parts of the roof were missing, and Boba was standing on top of a pile of smoking rubble.
He looked up. The filthy sky of Raxus Prime was even filthier than usual. It was filled with explosions, blossoming like deadly flowers.
The noise was deafening. A battle was raging. Blaster fire screamed past. The Count’s automatic defense system was firing into the air, rapid-fire lasers filling the already smoky air with
bursts and clouds of brightly colored smoke.
Through the clouds, Boba saw the approaching gunships. They bore the eight-spoked insignia of the Republic. The Count had been right—it was a Jedi-led attack! Republic assault ships were
unloading clone troopers in their gleaming white battle armor. They fanned out in impressive military order through the slag heaps, smashing the Count’s defenses.
My brothers! Boba thought scornfully. His father had helped create the clone troopers; the Kaminoans had used his dad’s genetic material to make millions of them. So why were they
fighting on the side of the hated Jedi—again?
Battle droids followed what Boba instantly recognized as GAT tanks, closing in on the clone troopers from behind—until a Jedi on a speeder-bike streaked over the horizon, mowing them down
with deadly laser fire. And here came what looked like a new kind of tank, its telltale red markings signifying it belonged to the Jedi, lurching through the same slimy ponds that Boba had
survived.
Jedi gunships were closing in on the ruins that surrounded the crane tower and the pit. One gunship dodged a missile’s streak; another was hit and spiraled down to crash unseen over the
horizon.
Yes! Boba watched, fascinated. He hated both sides—the Jedi and the Count. But he loved the action.
It was chaos, and it was just the diversion he needed to help him escape. He looked down and saw his reflection in a puddle. His face was streaked with dirt again, but he was grinning from ear
to ear.
Anything was better than being the Count’s prisoner. He was free!
Boba heard a noise behind him and turned just in time to see a huge starship rise from the other end of the Count’s hideout.
It was the Count, making his escape. Boba wondered if he had managed to rescue the dark treasure that he had come to Raxus Prime to find.
Two Jedi star fighters raced over the horizon, zeroing in on the Count’s starship. The pursued and pursuers both vanished into the thick clouds.
KABOOM!
KABOOM!
Even though the Count had fled, his defense system was still working. It would keep firing until his slave droids were dead and the lasers ran out of energy. Boba kept his head down as he
crawled through the rubble, looking for an opening that would lead back down into the hallways of the abandoned hideout where he had to go to get his father’s book.
Wearing his helmet for protection, Boba crawled through a smashed opening in a wall. The hallways were choked with smoke and rubble. The dust, the explosions, the noise, made
everything difficult to see.
As he grasped his way through the abandoned corridor, Boba found that he felt very little fear. He had escaped the worst fate imaginable, and now he felt like a new man, or at least a new boy.
What could happen to him worse than what he had escaped?
He saw a familiar-looking door. His room!
There was his bed, turned on its side by an explosion. But where was the flight bag that had been under it?
Frantically, Boba dug in the rubble with his hands until he felt the familiar curve of a handle. He pulled, harder and harder, until it came free.
Safe! He threw the helmet into the bag and sealed it. With the troopers around, it was best to keep Jango Fett’s mask out of sight. |
Star Wars Boba Fett Crossfire
CHAPTER NINE
Boba crawled toward the open air—and found himself face-to-face with a squadron of clone troopers bursting through the wreckage. As soon as they saw Boba, they leveled
their blasters at him.
“Come with us,” the trooper said, extending a white-gloved hand.
Boba wondered if the trooper knew who he was. The trooper soon answered that question with his next words:
“Are you one of the orphans?”
“Uh, sure,” Boba replied. He was an orphan, after all.
“Name of missing or deceased parents.”
“Oh, uh—Teff,” said Boba.
“Orphan Teff, age, please?”
“Ten.”
“Under guidelines,” said the clone trooper. “Follow me for food and shelter.”
Food and shelter? That didn’t sound so bad.
Boba didn’t trust the Jedi, but this clone trooper was not a Jedi, even though he was probably working for them.
“Sure thing,” said Boba, picking up his flight bag and noticing the trooper’s number—CT-4/619.
Explosions still rocked the building. Even though the Count had escaped, the battle raged on. The Count’s slave droids were continuing the fight—and Boba was now caught in the
crossfire.
The clone troopers paid little attention to the explosions as they lifted their blasters to repel the super battle droids. For a split second, Boba felt an echo of the past—the clone
troopers’ movements were almost exactly the same as Jango Fett’s. The way they held their blaster rifles. The way their heads turned to take in the full scope of the battle. The fierce
stealth of their steps. He trained them as well as he trained me.
No, better.
Boba knew he had to snap out of these thoughts. The battle droids were pushing for ward against the troopers’ ranks, relentlessly firing their blasters. They had been programmed to kill or
be destroyed. There would be no surrender, no retreat.
They aimed their fire at the troopers and at the top of the rubble’s entrance. Boba dashed out into the open just as the door way began to cave in. The troopers inside died without a
sound. The air was suddenly choked with dust. The other troopers did not look back.
An eruption of blaster fire landed at Boba’s feet. A close call. A trooper at his side was knocked off his feet, crashing into the rubble. The droids, too, were being torn apart
by the shooting. A bloodbath—without the blood.
There was nowhere for Boba to hide. No way to get out of this.
He picked up a fallen trooper’s blaster and chose a side. The clones were his only chance of getting off the planet. He had to help them win.
Boba had never fought in a battle before. Whenever he’d held a blaster, his father had been at his side. Watching. Checking. Instructing.
Boba looked again at the troopers, the echo of his father. He raised his rifle like they raised theirs. He aimed at the controls of one of the battle droids. Without hesitation, he fired. The
droid exploded into parts.
Another trooper fell—there were only four left with Boba. He could hear the sound of other battles close by. Who is winning? CT-4/619 leaped—with Jango Fett’s
dexterity—toward a fallen excavation rig. Boba understood at once—protection. As the second and third troopers ran for cover, Boba kept in their shadow. The fourth trooper
followed and was cut down by a rapid barrage of blaster fire. His mask went flying as he hit the ground. Boba knew if he looked he would see his father’s face, replicated once more in
death.
He did not look back.
Instead he positioned himself at CT-4/619’s side, aiming his blaster rifle as the troopers made their last stand. One battle droid down. Then another. Still, it wasn’t enough. There
were at least a dozen left.
CT-4/619 did not falter. He did not look at Boba. He did not say a word. He kept his focus. He kept his aim. Boba knew this concentration well.
Boba fired again. A miss. The droid returned his fire, tearing a hole into the excavation rig—the only protection left.
Two more droids down. But the remaining droids were not deterred. They turned all their fire onto the third trooper the next time he moved into blasting position. He didn’t have a
chance.
This is it, Boba thought. There’s no other way out.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see another form approaching. Not a clone. Not a droid. A female Bothan, bearded and small. Wearing the robes of a Jedi.
With one sharp, quick movement, the Jedi activated her lightsaber and began to repel the droids’ fire. As the droids turned their attack on her, Boba and the two remaining clone troopers
had an open shot.
The droids began to fall. The Jedi expertly destroyed them with their own fire. The remaining clones rallied with cold precision. And Boba did his part. He was not as experienced or as focused
as his clone brothers. But he had a desire to survive that they couldn’t match.
The firing from the droids slowed…then stopped. There were none left. Boba looked over to see the Jedi’s reaction—but she was already gone. Off to the next skirmish in
order to complete this invasion.
Eventually, the laser cannons fell silent. Some of the gunships left the perimeter, their mission complete. A few more circled, the remains of the attack force. Jedi and clone troopers combed
the ground for survivors—and prisoners. CT-4/619 led Boba forward. There was no time to stop and mourn for the dead. There were no congratulations, no expressions of relief. Just the task
at hand—getting back to the ship, finishing the mission.
They walked across the smoking rubble toward a sleek gunship idling in the swirling, stinking mists. Boba followed resolutely. Even though he was walking into the hands of the Jedi, it was worth
it to be walking out of the grasp of Raxus Prime. CT-4/619 took away Boba’s blaster rifle as he walked on board the gunship—but luckily he was allowed to keep his bag. Boba followed
the trooper into the pilot area. The trooper got into the pilot’s seat and Boba sat in another seat.
“Not for seating,” said the trooper. “For my partner, CT-5/501. Detainees sit on the floor. We’ll wait here for the others.”
Boba wasn’t about to protest. He sat on his flight bag while the trooper powered up the vehicle.
Where’s the food? Boba wondered. He suddenly realized how cold and hungry and tired he was.
The gunship seemed awfully comfortable, even on the durasteel floor. He could still hear the last gasp of explosions and commands being given over the gunship’s comm unit, but for some
strange reason, he felt safe. He knew he had survived.
“Impossible!”
Boba opened his eyes. Had he dozed off?
There was a face on the viewscreen. Angry, violet eyes peered out from under long ash-blond hair and over a cream-colored beard that had been braided into points. But it wasn’t the face
that bothered Boba, or even the harsh, demanding voice.
It was the uniform.
Even though this Jedi had just saved Boba’s life, she was still the enemy. Boba knew he had to remember that.
“Impossible!” the Jedi said again. “There are no humanoid orphans on Raxus Prime, only Jawas. The planet is nothing but a toxic dump.”
“Nevertheless, General Glynn-Beti,” said CT-4/619. “I rescued one and brought him into the gunship, as per instructions.”
“Bring him up and stick him with the others, then. We will check on him just like the rest.”
Boba tried not to show the emotion in his face. The troopers were easy enough to fool; or perhaps they didn’t care. But the Jedi would see through his deception. They were looking for him;
he had almost been apprehended on Coruscant. He was starting to think it was better to stay on Raxus Prime, foul as it was.
But wait! Boba’s new wisdom took over. The Jedi thought he was a war orphan. He would be put with other orphans, as she had said. If he kept his mouth shut, he would get food, shelter—and transportation to another planet, where he could begin the search for Aurra Sing and Slave I.
Self-sufficiency was all about using the opportunities that presented themselves. The Jedi wanted orphans—so Boba Fett would be Orphan Teff! |
Subsets and Splits