Franc's Story (1)

My name is Flandre Evans. I am a common knight of Viscount House Aldion.

The house I belong to began one hundred and seventy-two years ago, when Sir Robert Meld—then one of the foremost ability users in Britain—was granted a viscountcy by Queen Arcie II of that age, in recognition of his service in defending the royal palace when the coming of the aberrants had put it in peril. Thereafter our founder led five companions, who were also his vassals, and made the name of House Aldion resound throughout Britain, and at last established the house in East Redfin, a quiet rural town in Wales.

As it stands today, House Aldion maintains three bodies of armed strength.

First is the Aldion Raid Team, which our lord himself commands—the core of the house, and its summit. The Raid Team includes our lord, a B-Class ability user, and twenty-seven C-Class ability users.

Second is the Aldion Knight Order, composed entirely of ability users, which forms the Raid Team's foundation and stands ready at its back. The Order's full knights number eighty, their classes ranging from D-Class to G Class.

And last, there are four hundred common knights, charged with clearing the Lowest-Rank Variants and Low-Rank Variants that appear near the town, with keeping the peace, and with discharging the duties the state lays upon the house.

Beyond these there is a guard, and a great many retainers who assist the Raid Team and the Knight Order, and besides them thirty-five elders who stand as the pillars of the house.

I was born in May of Year 118 of the Divine Calendar, of my mother, who was one among the countless concubines of our lord, Viscount Albert Meld Aldion.

Our lord, in those days a B-Class ability user of a rare attribute, had taken to wife a young lady of the royal blood as his lawful consort, and then begun to gather innumerable women as concubines and sow his seed among them—all in the hope of righting the house's declining standing after a string of failed raids. Of the children born in this way, those who showed outstanding aptitude of body and of combat were chosen without regard to sex and educated to become knights, while those who lacked such aptitude were released from the house together with their mothers.

The chosen children were gathered in one place. In the training halls they learned the house's swordsmanship, its martial arts, and the arts of the body, and were taught chivalry; and in a private school of the primary and secondary years, staffed by masters invited from outside, they pursued their studies. The aim of the place was simple. A child who endured a forced summoning to the Phase World and returned alive was sent as a squire to the full knights, and upon coming of age was assigned to the reserve of full knights. A child who did not become an ability user was, on reaching adulthood, assigned to the common knights and kept in service, and if they later awakened as an ability user, they were placed in that same reserve.

Fortunately, I seem to have inherited a generous measure of our lord's aptitude and of my mother's talent, for my gift as a knight flowered while I was still young. I was not released. I was permitted to live with my mother in a small house, in a village under the house's care.

For the child I was, the only place of rest, and the only moment of it, was the time I spent with my mother on the nights when the hard training was done. I would run home clutching hands blistered and split, and my mother would bring out the medicine box with a gentle smile and tend my wounds. That hour—eating a warm supper of bread she had made herself and a good soup, telling her of the day as if it were something to boast of; and then, when the time for sleep came, being held in her arms and drifting off in a bed that was small, but soft—those were, to me, the happiest moments of all.

But the happiness did not last.

The year I turned twelve. A cold winter night, and the snow coming down.

I had finished the day's grueling training, and I hurried back to the little house where my mother would be waiting, meaning to thaw my frozen hands in the warmth of her embrace. In the wreck of that room, I knew at once that my happiness had come to its end.

I remember the sight still, as if it stood before me. She must have been in the midst of folding the laundry, for our clothes—hers and mine—lay strewn in disorder. And above them, adrift in the air, rainbow-colored droplets.

My heart went numb. Eyes and ears seemed to draw away from me. I dropped the practice sword in my hand and sank down onto the icy floor. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠How long did I stare at those droplets, and at nothing else?

I came to myself at the shock of a blow upon my cheek, and found a full knight of the Order standing before me, looking down with a face full of pity. Around that knight, the full knights of the main house were trampling our little nest under muddy boots, and winding yellow tape—the mark that approach was forbidden—about the droplets.

The moment I saw ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it, I wept. I had a foreboding that my mother would not return alive.

She had a fine aptitude as a knight, and yet her heart was too tender for battle to suit her. Beautiful platinum-blonde hair, and sky-blue eyes so lovely one might fall into them, and they suited her smile so well... My mother, so gentle that if an insect so much as appeared she would come looking for me with tears standing in her eyes... On that night of falling snow, at the age of thirty-three, she was summoned to the Phase World, and she did not come back.

The footprints smeared across those white clothes became a brand upon me.

My peers, seeing me then, judged that something in me had broken. And all I had done was apply myself to training a little harder than usual. I had lost the dream of succeeding, and of making my mother happy. The only choice left to me was training.

My heart grew colder by the day. If only I had taught her, even by force, the things I was learning on the Order's training ground... It would have been impossible all the same. My mother was a girl, through and through.

Had I not met the Second Lady, I am certain I would have broken.

There were not a few among my peers, my seniors, and those who came after, who could not endure the hard training and gave it up, or who came to understand that their birth was no ordinary one, wandered, and broke. I was no different. I did not see it at the time, but just as my peers had judged, my heart was in a broken state.

You ask whether it was our lord who made things hard for me? No. Our lord was a very good man. ...Though, as you say, Seoha, he did once make a choice a good man would not have made.

Our lord committed a deed that would have drawn denunciation, had it been known. But barbarous conduct—unnatural abuse, exploitation, and the like—he shut out utterly, and he spared no effort in the making of a mighty house bound together by blood. Above all, he understood that the foundation of a house lies in the bonds between its people, and he poured a great deal of care upon us, the children of concubines. From the clothes we wore and the food we ate, down to the small houses and residence-blocks provided for mother and daughter, mother and son, everything was neat and well-kept, and all of it fitted with the latest of things.

By my own poor judgment, was it not a last, painful resort, meant to raise up again a house in decline?

By those efforts of his, some three hundred half-siblings, myself among them, followed our lord with comparatively little discontent, and went on with our training. But one day, during a rest in the midst of sword practice, the subject arose of what had become of the children driven out without even making common knights.

Cast out with nothing to their names, they must be living hard lives. Perhaps, turned away by our lord, they were all of them dead. Talk of this kind and that came out, the mood darkened, and the conversation would not stop even after the rest had run long past its end. The instructor, learning of it only late, told us this.

"The children released for lack of aptitude, and their mothers, have returned to the arms of their families, and they now live without incident, supported by a stipend for their raising."

But whether because this news reached the council of elders, one of the elders of the house—judging that degree of explanation insufficient—came to us, and told us of the matter in fuller detail, together with footage. Over the past ten years, he said, five hundred and sixty-eight children had been born in all. Of them, two hundred and twenty-six had been judged short of qualification and, where they wished it, sent back to the arms of their families; and the children whose mothers refused to raise them were all growing up in the house's nursery, wanting for nothing in the support they received.

The footage, which could only have been taken recently, showed a peer of mine released a few days before—one who had always liked study better than training—living among the other children with a bright face.

"You are all nothing less than the future of House Aldion. It is true that our lord set this work in motion so that he might restore the house's former glory. But he loves you as his sons and daughters."

To us, who were relieved, the elder said that when we grew and came of age, two choices would be granted us.

One was to become the sword and shield that guarded the house.

The other was to go free, and leave the house behind.

The children, feeling the consideration in the elder's words, were satisfied less by any worry over a future they could not yet see than by the knowledge that the house thought of us and had regard for us, and they returned to their daily lives. But I, who had lost my mother not long before, only grew more curious as to why a woman born and raised in an ordinary home had come into our lord's household as a concubine.

Hm? No... I do not resent our lord. A forced summoning is little different from an accident that cannot be helped, and had it not been for him, I would never have been born at all.

The question I conceived that day was not answered until the year I came of age, completed my education and training, and became a common knight—and the answer came through the Knight Commander. My mother, he told me, had entered into a contract to offer her body, in exchange for the treatment of a younger sibling stricken with an incurable illness, amid the hardships of her family. It was the point she shared with the other women who had carried our lord's seed in their wombs.

For a cure.

To pay a debt.

To escape hardship and want.

In every case, the problem had been money.

The contract was completed when the child finished their education, reached adulthood, and formally entered the company of common knights. Once it was complete, one might return to the arms of one's family if one wished, or remain with the house; and the terms provided that the house would support whatever study or work one desired, or else make compensation in money.

On the day I became a knight, the Knight Commander told me that the compensation my mother ought to have received had come out in my name, and that if I wished, he would tell me of my mother's family as well. Learning of a family I had never known, I thought that merely coming to know such a thing as family existed would change nothing. In its place, as a comfort to the grandfather and grandmother who had lost their daughter, I asked that the whole of the compensation be sent to my mother's family, and that every word of me be erased.

I thought that with this I had settled the bond, and cleared it away. I resolved that the life ahead of me I would live as a knight of the house. For our lord, and the peers beside whom I had eaten and slept and lived, were family to me—more than my mother's kin, whom I had never once met.

Year 135 of the Divine Calendar.

The other peers who passed through the common knights' investiture with me were set to all manner of duties. Some spent their days in training alongside the senior common knights. Some were sent to subjugate the Lowest-Rank Variants that appeared near the domain. Some were put to the administrative work of managing the territory. My own life, by contrast, grew exceedingly plain, for not long after the completion ceremony I was set to guard and attend the Second Lady, who had come from Japan.

She was my benefactor, the one who gave me a life worthy of the name, and she was my second mother.

"That platinum-haired girl as well... is she a knight?"

The Second Lady, come from the East with the pallor of illness plain upon her, looked at me on the day of the ceremony and could not take her eyes away, and at last she showed an interest in me. The elders, then choosing a child to wait upon her, promptly settled on me as the one assigned to her. Escort duty was among a common knight's tasks, and so I followed the order without reluctance and stood before the Second Lady, and she, with a look full of old feeling, took my hand and spoke.

"Flandre puts me in mind of the younger sibling I left alone in my homeland."

"Is your ladyship's younger sister British as well?"

"No. That child is Japanese. And he is a boy."

"A... a man..."

I was often called a tomboy in those days, but to be told I had the air of a man was, in truth, something of a shock.

"I did not mean that Dame Evans is mannish. Only that the air about you resembles that child's... If I gave offense, I am sorry."

"I take no offense. Please think no more of it."

The Second Lady was thirteen years my elder, a special ability user dispatched—sold, in all but name—in reparation for wrongs Japan had committed. She was handled like a thing, and entered into the registers of House Aldion in the standing of a woman meant to bear children; and yet, through all that suffering, her heart did not warp. With her own soft air she was a gentle person, who took the measure of the hearts around her. She was truly as graceful, and as beautiful, as a water lily.

Possessed of a short-range sense for the flow of spirit, she was adept at perceiving the weariness in a person's heart, and so—special though her station was—she comforted our lord, worn thin by the weight of his duties, and in a short time became his favorite. Her circumstances rose until she lived only a little below the First Lady, the lawful wife, and wanted for nothing. Yet behind the face that was always bright and kind, a longing had secretly taken up its residence. Now and then, on nights when the moon and the stars bloomed without number, she would stand at the window, look up into the sky, and weep.

The pitiable Second Lady, by the time her person was delivered into Britain's keeping, had been rendered unable to bear a child. I did not understand it well, in those days. I could only dimly guess that it had been some matter between nations. Perhaps because she was one who had carved the pain of parting into her breast, she doted on me beyond all others—I, who had lost my mother in childhood. And she sorrowed for me.

I, in those days, was a bleak creature, who neither laughed nor wept nor adorned herself, and carried herself as a man. To such a one as I was, the Second Lady taught the bearing a woman ought to have, which I had never learned from my mother, and she held me with a tenderness in which I could feel a mother's love. Steeped in that gentleness, I came to realize that I had been broken, somewhere. On the day I understood it, I came to regard the Second Lady as another mother.

Because I drank in her teachings as a sponge drinks water, the looks I had inherited from my mother and from our lord came to shine all the brighter. I had my mother's dazzling platinum-blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, and the features of our lord, famed in society as a handsome man, and so I came to possess a beauty counted among the foremost even in the country round about. It was not, by any means, an unmixed good.

At first I received offers of courtship, and proposals of marriage, from men of station like my own within the house. But the Second Lady had taught me that a maiden must be prudent even in courtship, and I refused them all. Whereupon invitations began to fly to me from the full knights of the house, and from the vassals of the Raid Team. Between her teaching and my fear that, should I enter into a courtship, difficulties would bloom in my attendance upon her, I refused every one of them, and declared that I would live all my life as a knight, and attend the Second Lady.

Thanks to that firm insistence, the bouquets and letters directed at me within the house disappeared. But as the years passed, my looks ripened, enough that the Second Lady would now and then praise me.

"Franc is like a fresh flower opening in the morning sun."

And for that reason, those who hungered after my love only multiplied. Among them were even the sons of noble houses. I could not have failed to know it.

At first I dismissed that noble for an eccentric, but the more time I spent on outings with the Second Lady, the more the letters of courtship flew to me from the nobility, increasing in proportion. By then, even the senior members of the house could not conceal their dismay. Though my station was only that of an ordinary common knight, it was plain fact that our lord's blood ran in my body, and so they could not laugh the matter away. If a noble—no commoner—were to marry me, he would obtain a legitimate right of succession over the house.

Jests began to go about that the letters, the bouquets, and the gifts flying to me every day would paralyze the work of the Knight Order, and bets were even being laid on who would be chosen as my companion. That confused state of things reached its height when a matchmaker arrived from the ducal house of Wales.

The seniors and the elders, seeing in it a chance for House Aldion to be taken into the royal house, were in a ferment of excitement when our lord summoned me. For the first time in my life, I was given the chance to stand face to face with him.

"So this is the first time we have faced one another, Flandre."

"Yes, my lord."

"The physician tells me her health has improved, thanks to your service to Shinomiya in matters of the body and of the heart alike. You have my gratitude."

"I served only because she was a person worthy of respect."

"Ha ha. Truly, Shinomiya has cause to be proud. Even I cannot restrain my wonder at your beauty. Your looks are as a single marigold blooming in a field of green waves, and so it is only natural that Lord Rovance, son of the Duke of Wales, should fall in love at first sight and take to his bed with lovesickness."

"I... I do not know where to put myself. I am only a common knight, and he is the son of the Duke of Wales."

At my modesty, our lord showed me a gentle look, like a father's, and shook his head.

"This is hardly the Dark Ages. If a man falls in love at a glance, it is only natural that a difference in station should fail even to enter his eye. For that reason the elders wish you to take your place in the ducal house of Wales as Lord Rovance's companion. Yet though your surname differs, you are my child. I have not a grain of intention to press this matter while setting your will aside."

I could not find an answer.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Flandre."

"Yes."

"I have no wish to see you made unhappy by a marriage you do not want. So the choice is yours."

The seniors and the elders, seated with him, seemed discontent with his decision, but our lord did not yield an inch. He said he would entrust the whole of the marriage to my judgment. I did not think long. I begged to be allowed to remain a knight of the house, and to live attending the Second Lady, and he accepted the request at once.

With that, the matter of the proposal was settled. But the procession of proposals and suits did not end. Lord Rovance did not give up, and the rumor spread further still, until nobles from every quarter came even to East Redfin for the sake of looking upon me. It was around the time the elders, behind our lord's back, grew ever more frequent in their attempts to persuade me into a political marriage that would add to the house's power.

It came for me as well.

The forced summoning to the Phase World.

For the children under the house's knightly education, and for the common knights, to be summoned to the Phase World was a more ordinary thing than one would think. By the time I turned seventeen, the boys and girls swallowed into the Phase World numbered more than twenty, and by the time I turned twenty-seven that number had passed seventy. Seventy-seven out of four hundred and forty-two. More than seventeen percent of those children had been dragged into the Phase World. And the boys, the girls, and the knights who came back alive at the end of fifteen days of desperate struggle numbered a mere twenty-five.

In preparation for a forced summoning, the house had bent every effort toward the return of the summoned—so much so that survival training and combat training made up two-thirds of the course of education. Even so, the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠rate of return did not reach so much as forty percent.

And in the autumn of Year 145, when I turned twenty-seven, the door to the Phase World opened for me as well.

I remember that moment still, vividly. The world before my eyes whipped itself into a vortex, and a hole of darkness swallowed everything.

At the edge of my sight I could see the Second Lady, startled and full of grief. And yet, in my heart, I was glad. It was a chance to show the fruits of all my training, and if I returned alive and became an ability user, I might be granted the surname of Aldion. Then—so ran one thin thread of hope—I might be permitted to call Mother the Second Lady, who had cherished me as her own daughter. And so, watching tears well in those eyes of hers, black as black pearls, I vowed that I would return. I would return alive.

The landscape revealed before me, the moment the summoning was done, was not much different from what I had always known. The manor of House Aldion stands in East Redfin, in Llandrindod Wells. Walk a little, and one comes into hill country where the trees grow thick, and the place to which I had been forcibly summoned was a region much the same. In one respect, I even felt a measure of relief.

The light ceremonial armor and the longsword I had been wearing fell away from me in the crossing. But I had largely mastered the ways of surviving in the Phase World, and the ways of fighting Lowest-Rank Variants, and I knew unarmed combat besides. I thought survival would offer no particular difficulty.

I was soon to learn that this had been a misjudgment.

Yes. As you have seen for yourself, Seoha, that place was a Phase World twisted into something grotesque.

I broke a stout branch into a spear, peeled bark and twisted silver-grass into cord, fashioned makeshift guards to protect my arms and legs, and put them on. Keeping watch on every side, I set out in search of a place I might use as shelter. Four hours later, I felt that something was wrong. By what I had learned in the hours of phase studies, enough time had passed that I ought to have met an aberrant at least once. And yet I had seen no aberrant—and no beast of the field, either.

The cause was that downpour beyond all imagining, which you too have endured, Seoha. Yes. In that it returns every year to that region alone, one might as well call it a rainy season. I met it half a day after I arrived.

When the rain began, I did as the house's methods of survival recorded: I climbed a tree and wove the branches into a place to keep the wet off. But I felt that the force of the rainfall was nothing ordinary, and I set out toward higher ground. Then I found the cliff you climbed, Seoha, and I climbed it as well, and took refuge in the highest tree. From up among its branches I looked out, and there was no higher ground to be found.

And then the tidal wave you endured, Seoha, came surging in.