Hungry Ghost (1)

The Boundary. In some ways, it was a land that stirred the curiosity even more than the Outlands did — for everywhere humans lived was more or less the same. The Boundary was not a place where humans lived.

No — perhaps something did live there, and the world simply didn't know it. 'Honestly, it would be more surprising if anything were alive.' Either way, it was as good as unknown.

'A path someone passed through.' So it appeared — as if the darkness itself had moved along, laying the road as it came. That reading was wrong. Something had passed this way, and the darkness was what it left behind.

'Only my height, though.' The darkness broke off at the crown of Harad's head, and side to side it ran a touch thicker than his frame. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Something Harad's own size — perhaps a magic beast in the shape of a man — had come through here. Whatever the principle, the darkness was that creature's trace.

In truth, arguing the principle meant little. In the Boundary, everything was vague by nature.

Where the darkness met the search path, an ember still glowed. It went out the moment his gaze touched it. The heat took longer to fade.

"That..."

"Not me."

Harad shook his head at Ellen's pointing finger. What sort of fool mage fails to know his own magic? That ember was no trace his fire had left.

Fire, in the Boundary. That was why Harad was surprised.

The magic beasts dwelling in the Boundary were beyond counting. The unseen made up the vast majority, and it would have been no wonder if some among them had to do with flame. He had never laid eyes on one in his past life, though. He had seen everything — fire alone had been the exception.

Fire. Harad knew better than anyone how precious that Origin was.

His gaze rose to the sky. There hung the watchtower's smoke, visible to him alone. Too distant to fix its exact position — but the smoke drew a line across his vision, right to left.

Left. Follow that end down with his eyes, and there was darkness, joined in a straight line to the trail something had left behind.

'Hoping it waits at that end would be wishful thinking.'

The watchtower's smoke — or the outer relic of the King of the Red Tower. That something tied to them might exist at the end of that darkness was a hope worth indulging.

Harad turned his head. Ellen looked thrilled. Her curiosity had always mattered most to her, and she hungered for freedom — the true nature of the human called Elain.

"We go back."

Kalinos said it then, and Ellen's mood curdled on the spot.

"Mage Harad. You have my respect. The proof is done."

Kalinos showed no intention of probing that darkness — no search path of theirs, presumably. The valor of the 3rd Knight Order that Ellen so boasted of seemed to hold only on charted ground.

"And that path? What will you do with it?"

"Once we see you and Lady Ellen off, the 3rd Knight Order will search it. On our responsibility."

"That means leaving the search path."

"Then we make sure we aren't caught."

So that was how it was. Valor, it seemed, chose its moment but not its place.

"We have a duty to confirm that darkness. It is an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠order from Serzila."

"Your orders were to guard the Great Wall, no?"

"Killing a threat is guarding."

Kalinos was combative. Worth calling valor, certainly.

'So knights like this did exist.' It was a drive rarely seen in the knight orders of Serzila. The orders yearned to conquer the Boundary yet never left the search paths — the imperial decree. Or, precisely: because if a departure were ever discovered, Serzila would suffer the Empire's pressure. They had no wish to brew trouble and burden their lord. And so, in the past life, the orders had guarded nothing but the Wall, and died for it.

Of course, in Harad's eyes Serzila bore its share of the blame. If you command men to hold the Wall, you ought to foresee that they may well die holding nothing else.

"Serzila could come to ruin over you, you know."

At that, Kalinos moved his gaze to Ellen.

"Who is worrying for whom? That is Serzila's to do."

Ellen nodded, satisfied. It was the right answer. Who worried for whom? The Serzila of the past life would have wanted exactly that reply. The knight orders should never have worried for Serzila — and they should never have swallowed her orders without doubt. Had they questioned them, they would not have died so hollowly.

The Elain of the past life had regretted it bitterly, saying Harad should have put the orders' stubborn devotion to use. So that was what he was doing now. He had brought the 1st Knight Order to heel. But there was no need to collect every order besides.

"I hear you are a friend of the Young Duke's."

"Something of the sort."

"Keep it from the Young Duke, I beg you."

True to Ellen's boasting, Kalinos was valorous. And he was not only that — valor and nothing else was the very shape of person Harad despised most. Kalinos had flexibility, which in Harad's judgment was the one thing these thick-headed northern knights needed most.

'A waste, that.' Kalinos was a knight whose dying this year felt like a squandering. That flexibility deserved to be kept alive. Had Kalinos not died, the 3rd Knight Order of the past life might at least have died differently.

'Why did he die?' Kalinos dies this year. Less than a month remained, and the unknown happened to stand right before their eyes. If Harad and Ellen had not been here today, Kalinos would have ridden out with his knights to search. He would have found that path — and plunged straight in, valorous to the last.

'If he died by digging into that path...'

The path needed to be known. But in the past life it had remained an unknown phenomenon — which meant the settled darkness did not endure.

'If that path was what killed him, then barring it might save his life.'

Harad lifted his gaze a little. Stretch a line from the dark path to its far end, and there hung the watchtower's smoke.

He had meant to leave the search path the moment the chance offered — that much was settled from the start. Ellen hoped for it too. And Kalinos, the man in charge, felt no reluctance about leaving it.

"Come with us now, and I'll keep your secret."

What reason was there to refuse?

"But..."

"My. Someone's mouth is already itching. Ellen — and you?"

"I'm going to go back and have a smoke with the Young Duke."

"..."

The North believed in no world after death. To its people, the world to come was this one — the very world they lived and breathed in. Worship of the Sun and the Moon was spreading, it was true, but even a northerner converted to one or the other never let go of that creed.

The dead had to be buried in the earth. Buried in snow before that, a dead northerner would be reborn into the next world as snow. Only beneath the soil could they live again, human, in the life to come.

In the past life, Gulen had put it this way:

Northern knights were surprisingly sentimental.

Looking back, the 3rd Knight Order had never recovered Kalinos's corpse. The same went for the knights who had gone with him. At the time, nobody thought much of it — and in truth, it was nothing worth thinking about. Bitter, of course, for the knights: magic beasts do not eat aura, but they do eat people, and a body that cannot be found is no strange thing.

And yet — so Gulen had said in the past life — the 3rd Knight Order never found so much as a trace of Kalinos's search team.

Thought about now, it was a strange thing indeed.

'So he died on this path.' Of course, he might simply have been swallowed by the snow and never found; Harad might be draping the deed over the unknown that had just appeared before his eyes. It didn't matter. The truth, one way or another, would be spoken by the outcome.

Harad had already set foot on the darkness.

Kalinos took the lead. His back was invisible; look down, and even his own hands were gone. Only, there was no fear of losing the way. The path the darkness cut through was narrow, and to either side spread the Boundary they had always known — a hand invisible within the dark showed itself the moment it stretched out sideways. It was as if a single stroke had been drawn across the canvas of the Boundary, and they were walking that stroke. However he looked at it, this was no natural corruption.

"Can you see it?"

"Barely."

"Nor I."

Kalinos was a knight who could have gone over the Great Wall at any moment without anyone blinking, and no one knew better than Harad how formidable Ellen was. Yet even those two were straining to see through the dark. 'And I was worse off still.'

Harad snapped his fingers. A soft hiss — flame bloomed and died in the same breath. It had not died. The darkness had drunk it, and the black at that spot dulled, just faintly.

'Where it feeds, things brighten a little.'

Harad thought of the rabbit. The Moon's divine beast — its fur, too, had brightened at the touch of fire, and the fiercer the fire, the brighter still. 'Magic power shed by a beast? It seems so. And yet it feels like magic.' If the latter, the creature possessed intellect — and a beast of keen intellect carried a precision that deserved the name of magic.

"The rabbit?" Ellen asked from behind. Darkness eating fire and fur eating fire were quite different things, but she seemed to sense the kinship. Pure intuition, no doubt.

"No. It was never this big."

Harad spread a hand out to the left, gesturing at the darkness they walked. "This darkness is the trace of something that passed through. It dragged its magic power along behind it as it went."

Or perhaps it had overflowed because it could do nothing else.

"A beast with a shoulder height near mine, and a frame a shade leaner than Sir Kalinos's."

"A rabbit?" asked Kalinos at the head of the line.

"A beast we met during the 1st Knight Order's search. A very strong one, that. The Young Duke, with a single strike—"

A low hiss.

"A curious beast. It behaved as though fire were its food."

Harad gave a brief account of the rabbit. "There is no need to assume it is that one. It does not attack me."

Of course, it probably wasn't the rabbit. But the information was worth pooling — the darkness ran on into the deep.

"We ought to share whatever anomalies we carry. Has the 3rd Knight Order nothing?"

"...It does."

Kalinos stopped walking and stepped out to the left. Free of the darkness, his figure stood out sharp against the snowbound terrain. He was pointing at his own face — a face eaten raw by burns, mottled with blade scars.

"I took this burn in the Boundary, back when I was a rank-and-file knight."

In the Boundary, a burn was a rare wound indeed.

"Astonishing."

It was information the past life had never known. With Kalinos dead, there had been no one left to tell it. It sounded like an old story, at that.

"It was a beast shaped like a crow." Kalinos described ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a crow the size of a manor, every last feather a tongue of flame.

"Did you kill it?"

"No. I was the only survivor."

As Harad had, Kalinos kept the account brief. The enormous fire crow had simply been sitting on the search path, and every member of the team but Kalinos had died.

"It never even deigned to look at us."

The fire crow had perched a while, then taken wing. The knights died to that single beat of its wings. Its eyes had never once turned their way. That Kalinos alone survived was not because he was remarkable — it was because he had been posted at the rear of the team. Farthest from it, he had lived with nothing worse than the burns across his face.

"A 5th-tier beast, then."

Not 6th tier. The fire crow's traits fell comfortably within the plausible.

"That beast, too, we should keep in mind."

Where the darkness met the search path, one small ember remained.

The path was long. Walking it, Harad learned a great deal about the darkness. Within it, Kalinos and Ellen had to shield their bodies with aura — Harad's warmth was cut off as though the dark had eaten it.

'So that is the extent of it.' Even now, without wielding magic power, Harad could tend to his own body. The darkness devoured only what was manifested; it could not reach down into his Origin.

A low whine — a beast's cry from the left. It sounded very near, near enough to touch with an outstretched hand. Yet the beast did not perceive them. The darkness was hiding them. 'Like Cassion.'

Nor was it only the beasts; the Boundary itself was the same. Stick his head out of the darkness, and in that unfamiliar terrain a rain like something boiling was falling. The darkness crossed that terrain as a road, yet not a drop of the rain entered it.

'A barrier? A concealment?' Similar, and yet clearly not the same. Were it either, the Boundary's environment would have acted upon it. This darkness existed as though it were something the world did not possess.

Then something struck the back of his hand. A drop of the boiling rain. Harad raised his head. The darkness had thinned — only now, as if the world had finally noticed this place, did it rain, part of it punching through the dark to patter down.

He looked back. The darkness they had walked was erasing itself; the far stretches were already gone. As expected. The darkness was a passerby's trace, and of course it could not last. That was why the path had gone unknown in the past life.

"What will you do?" Kalinos asked. He was this search team's commander.

"You may turn back if you like."

An irresponsible commander. Kalinos was resolved to press on alone if it came to that.

"We raise our pace. No telling what waits at the end — no sense spending strength before we must."

Beasts sprawled in every direction. Unlike the raindrops, they had not yet noticed this side; it was a matter of time. They had to move before the darkness thinned further.

"Turn ba—"

"Turn back, and I'll tattle to the Young Duke."

Kalinos quickened his pace. That Harad could feel it at all was fresh proof of how thin the darkness had grown. The raindrops ceased, and Kalinos passed beyond his senses; the darkness thickened again. Only natural — the farther they went, the fresher the trace. Harad did not slow, and never once collided with Kalinos, which meant the man was holding his pace as well.

How far had they run? Harad opened his mouth. "Let's stop a moment."

The darkness was thick. The trace fresher, was it? No — darker than its original shade. Harad poked his head out of the darkness. He had unmistakably left it, and yet it was still dark, exactly as dark as within... 'No — a shade brighter.'

The terrain had changed. And by chance, into a space of pitch darkness — one much the same shade as the trail they had followed. In the distance, a light. No — a fire.

"...So it was them."

At the words, Kalinos and Ellen stepped out of the dark path. Their astonishment at the new terrain lasted only a breath before both were looking where Harad looked. There, the only light source in this terrain.

"...The fire crow."

The 5th-tier beast that had burned a comrade of the past. Recognizing the light for what it was, Kalinos's eyes bulged — but his voice carried no rage. The fire crow was dying. The flames that roosted where its feathers had been were guttering out.

Someone was murmuring. A pitch-black beast wearing the shape of a man.

"Ah...?" Ellen's mouth fell open. The natural predator of fire — the beast she had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠seen in a dream.

"I call them Agwi. Hungry ghosts," Harad told her.

Agwi, craving flame. They were swarming over the fire crow, devouring it.

Gluttonously.