Cassion (1)
Once.
The Boundary he had been dragged to by the 2nd Knight Order against his will—dragged, and made to crawl the whole way there—was cold and painful. Terribly noisy.
Perhaps he had even been glad of it.
His body hadn't been cold. It hadn't truly hurt, either.
The wind thundered against his eardrums, and every so often the roar of a magic beast tore straight through it and burst free. So no, it hadn't really been noisy.
—Father.
It was a snowfield, yet before his eyes spread a sea of fire. People died one after another. His father's heart was devoured.
—Mother.
His mother's heart was devoured last of all. You lay asleep upon the floor, and beneath that floor, in a small hidden space, Harad was sobbing. That was the cold.
Heh, heh.
In the snowfield, in the sea of fire, a magician laughed. Beneath those very feet, Harad clamped a hand over his mouth. That was the pain.
Iagar had been a warm land. However tightly Harad shut himself away in his room, the chatter of life always reached him. But Iagar, turned to a sea of fire, was silent. That silence was the noise—for it had been born of Harad, and because Harad alone had survived.
—Father. Mother.
This was a Boundary no knight could endure without an Aura, yet Harad was untouched. That damned Sun which had annihilated House Iagar had already been at work as magic, despite the ignorance of the magician called Harad. He had hated that.
The one thing he knew was that it would be used up. When his mana ran dry, the Sun would lose its warmth. And, laughably, he hadn't the courage to die by his own hand. Whenever thirst gnawed at him, he found himself devouring eyes. Perhaps that was the most horrifying part.
Even so, the Boundary was surely filling him with courage. His mana was draining away, plain as day. He was dying, and it would not be long now.
Harad searched for words of apology to those who had died before him. He drew his mother's face and his father's in his mind. Their expressions, he dared not draw.
—Father. Mother.
Harad crouched down and wept.
Ellen had already dreamed that dream. Which was why she was dreaming it again now—the dream she'd had upon returning from the tunnel, from her battle with the patchwork beast. Only this time, it was far more detailed.
The scene was the same, but unlike before, Harad's feelings came through.
How many days had passed? Harad didn't know. Ellen, dreaming, did. Half a month had gone by now.
Soon Grand Duke Aratus would appear. He would drag the sleeping Harad off to the Inner Castle, no doubt. It was going exactly as Ellen expected.
A figure emerged from the blizzard. Naturally, it was the Grand Duke.
—What a waste of an Origin.
Lamenting, the Grand Duke looked down at Harad. That was when Ellen's breath caught. Harad was not asleep. He looked ready to collapse, but his mind had not yet slipped away.
Only then did Ellen understand. This was a dream like the last—yet different.
—Do you know why you are here?
The Grand Duke asked. Harad could not answer. The Harad of that time, in the dream, was weak—far too weak.
—Because you're a half-wit.
…
—That is why Iagar died, too.
Ellen agreed to an extent, but dragging the whole house into it was going too far. She felt sorry for that Harad. He was innocent—nothing like the Harad of reality.
—Do you know why I do all this for you, half-wit that you are?
Why go so far. It seemed to point to the Grand Duke having come to the Boundary in person.
—Because you are going to become Serzila's.
That this was wrong, Ellen realized the moment she saw the Grand Duke's right hand. Clenched in it... was a coil of hair. Cassion's severed head dangled from it.
—That is why this magician died. For daring to look down on what is Serzila's.
Fwoosh. His footprints turned to fire.
The trail Harad had walked remained as scattered embers, refusing to die out even atop the pristine white snow.
It was a road steeped in mana. It began at the Inner Castle's entrance and ran down into the cellar of the ruined inn, through the tunnel, across the Boundary, all the way to the barren wastes.
It was the small hours of dawn, and yet that barren land was blinding. The sun hanging in the sky permitted not a single shadow.
Beneath that sun, a thread of smoke had been drawn across the heavens—the smoke of a watchtower that once ran all the way to the King's outer palace. Harad stood beneath that sun and that smoke.
The Sacred Ground of Fire. Using the watchtower's remains for a chair, he sat gazing back along the path he had walked. Embers still glowed there.
His hand never stopped toying with Ellen's sword hilt. Pater. The sword was familiar and strange at once—for unlike in his previous life, the regressed Harad's hands bore no calluses.
Harad swung Pater through the empty air. The more he swung, the more the awkwardness faded. If that was to Ellen's credit, then so be it. Pater was the sword he had received when he became her escort, only to have it snatched back before long. She had taught him the sword, too. None of it had been asked for.
Fsshh. Fsshh. A sound drifted from far away—so faint that anything short of total concentration would have missed it, and had this land not been the Sacred Ground of Fire, even Harad would not have heard. A land ruled by fire, existing in fire's service. This place nurtured not only his magic but his five senses besides.
Fsshh. Fsshh. It was the sound of fire dying. The trail he had left was going out, beginning from the farthest point. That residual mana had no business vanishing. Someone was approaching, stepping precisely where Harad had stepped.
Now the footprints and embers winking out were visible even to his eyes. It meant the one treading them had set foot in the Sacred Ground of Fire. The extinguishing crept closer and closer. The last print—the ember just before Harad's feet—went dark.
Harad, who had been watching that sight, lifted his gaze. No one was there. But he knew something was.
"You're late."
…
"And after I went to the trouble of showing you the way."
"Says the bastard who doesn't even know his place."
A reply came—a voice like iron scraping on iron, beginning from precisely the spot Harad's gaze rested on.
"I know. That's why I'm here, at our Red Tower's sacred ground."
The empty air writhed. At least, that was how it looked to Harad—proof that his choice had been the right one. The Sacred Ground of Fire. For Harad, there could be no better preparation than this.
"And you can stop scratching at that throat of yours. It's only you and me here."
Harad blinked. Those eyelids were fire. Over the place he had been watching, flame descended like a falling eyelid, lighting up the hidden shadow: a loyal knight draped in a coat of magic-beast leather, a sword at his hip, the white lion that symbolized Serzila engraved on each piece of his gear.
"A pleasure, Cassion of the Moon Tower. No—the magician."
It had been a guess. The magic of the Gu ran close to the shadow attribute.
So I was right. Judging by Cassion's expression, the man really did belong to the Moon Tower. Shadow was one of the Origins that tower prided itself on.
The Moon Tower, then. Of all the towers, the least was known about that one. Which would make it the second-least-known now. He hadn't so much as heard of the Red Tower before his regression, after all.
In any case, little about the Moon Tower had ever come to light. The prevailing theory blamed the stealthiness of their Origins, but the conclusion Harad reached was far simpler.
Because the Moon Tower is the weakest of the magic towers. That was why so little was known. A tower took its name from the Origin that had shone most brilliantly in its history—which meant the Moon Tower had once housed a magician whose Origin was the Moon itself.
And no moon, nor anything resembling one, had ever risen over a battlefield. And so the continent had written the Moon Tower off as the weakest of them all.
They must be wrong. Harad did not overtrust his regression—hadn't Ios of the Ivory Tower taught him that? Information from a previous life was never exact. Of the Outlands, what he didn't know far outnumbered what he did.
As if the weakest tower could have planted a magician inside Serzila. And in the seat of 2nd Knight Commander, no less. Impossible without room to spare.
"How fares the Moon Tower these days? I hear its circumstances run much like our Red Tower's."
"Nonsense." Cassion drew the line at once. As expected, the Moon Tower's standing was nothing to scoff at.
"That stings, between fellow magic towers. Even if our Red Tower is, for the moment, set against the Outlands' Long-Cherished Wish."
At that, Cassion gave a hollow laugh. "Your hearsay is half-baked. The Moon Tower and the Red Tower sustain each other."
"Didn't know that." He hadn't in his previous life, so it was valuable information, if nothing else. The Outlands' Long-Cherished Wish. Which meant the Moon Tower, too, opposed the conquest of the continent.
"You've taught me something. And what is the Moon Tower's reason for opposing it?"
For the Red Tower, it was their King's absence. They opposed the Outlands' advance because their King wished to conquer the continent himself.
"Not going to answer?"
There was so much Harad wanted to ask, and Cassion looked the same. When he had killed Ios of the Ivory Tower—the Cassion he met then had been utterly self-assured, despising Harad in the certainty that his identity would never come to light.
"How did you know?"
The Cassion before him was not that man. The self-assured 2nd Knight Commander was gone; an anxious magician stood in Harad's path.
"I can tell a magician when I see one."
"Nonsense!" Cassion barked. How very magician-like of him. It was precisely the sort of remark a magician could not hear without convulsing.
"If not, how do you imagine you got caught?"
"...There is a traitor in the Outlands." At last, after a long silence, Cassion gave his answer. It was the wrong one—but for Cassion, it was the best he had.
"Wrong."
"Understood. I won't ask who." Harad's eyes widened a fraction. The reaction was unexpected. He had anticipated disbelief—not this easy surrender.
"You're sure you can let it go that easily?"
"You are the only one who knows what I am." It wasn't untrue. Ellen had refused to believe it to the very end. That was why this meeting had come to be.
"You never told the magician called Kubel, either. Good. Had you breathed a word, I'd have killed him."
"That's why I didn't."
Night belonged to the shadows. As expected, Cassion had been watching him all along—which was why Harad had left no note for Ellen. Even if he had, Cassion would have destroyed it, and it would only have bred needless suspicion.
More docile than I expected. Harad watched with interest as Cassion concealed his unease behind long, measured breaths. It was the exact opposite of what he'd anticipated. I thought he'd lunge the moment he arrived.
Harad had backed Cassion into a corner. If this dawn passed quietly, he intended to tell Grand Duke Aratus the truth. Which meant this night was Cassion's last chance.
"Were you the one who set fire to the Watchtower of Fire?"
And yet Cassion was merely indulging his own curiosity. Magician-like, if anything—but the tone was slightly off. He wasn't asking because he didn't know; he wanted a definite answer.
"It burns beautifully."
"I see." Cassion nodded slowly. Then he spoke again.
"Go."
Harad tilted his head. Cassion was pointing firmly toward the far side of Serzila. Toward the Outlands.
"You're sure about that?"
Harad played dumb. Cassion's face twisted.
"I'm telling you to go to the Outlands."
"Why let me go? If I were you, I'd have killed me." Harad was genuinely curious.
A symbiotic relationship, was it? The Moon Tower and the Red Tower sustain each other. Harad's defection would make a fine gift for the Red Tower—that tower loved nothing so much as fire. And Harad was a blaze big enough to have burned down the Watchtower of Fire.
"No reason I can share. Go, and live as quietly as a dead rat." Harad could not understand it. Trusting in what, exactly? This was leaving a loose end behind—not the act of a man whose weakness had been seized.
"Did you not come here seeking asylum yourself?" The meeting had been Cassion's choice, but the place had been Harad's. Cassion had followed his footprints here.
"Ah—there's been a misunderstanding."
He didn't know why Cassion was urging defection on him, but Harad corrected him all the same. "I didn't come here to defect."
Fwoosh. The flames licked higher.
"I came to kill you."