The Five-Hundred-Year Performance
At last, the Hydro Goddess smiled and bade everyone farewell.
"Neuvillette... and my new friends... goodbye..."
With those words, she turned away from them, and facing the execution that awaited her, she began to dance—her final dance, one that belonged to her alone.
Neuvillette closed his eyes, steadied his emotions, and opened them again. He said nothing more.
The others—especially the children—though grief pressed heavily on them as well, saw what this moment meant and were mature enough not to make a sound. In silence, they watched the Hydro Goddess's last dance unfold.
As the music slowly faded, just as the goddess was about to take her final bow, the familiar blue light once again washed over them all.
Mouri Ran and Haibara and the others were blinded by the glare. When the light dimmed, they found they had left the place where they'd stood and arrived in a different space entirely.
Besides themselves, there were three others: Conan, Moroboshi, and Xia Yu, who had vanished earlier.
Ran and the children rushed over to them, exchanging accounts of what had happened—and only then learned that while they had been speaking with the true Hydro Goddess, Conan's group had entered another space altogether...
***
A short while earlier, on the other side—in the inner world of Focalors.
After a stretch of darkness, Conan realized they had arrived somewhere new.
There was hardly any light around them; all he could make out were the vague shapes of rows of seats. And yet Conan couldn't shake the feeling that this place was somehow familiar.
"We're still inside the Opera Epiclese." Xia Yu's eyesight had always been far sharper than that of Conan and Moroboshi, two kids, and she identified their surroundings with ease. "But we're not in the real world—the environment's different from before. There's no hole in the ceiling like the one we just saw, and it's too quiet. Even I can't hear a single sound from the opera house besides us."
Connan trusted Xia Yu's judgment completely. If this was the opera house in yet another space, then what could have caused the three of them to suddenly appear here?
Conan thought back: they had come to this place right when they'd rushed to Focalors's side, trying to stop the Oratrice from carrying out her death sentence. So was the cause the Oratrice itself? Or Focalors?
And the three of them were alone here. What was happening outside with Ran and the others? Were they in danger?
Suddenly, with a sharp click, three spotlights flared to life above the opera house stage, all of them trained on its center.
Conan and the others turned toward the light.
There, at the very center of the stage, sat Focalors herself—the woman they had seen only moments before. She rested her cheek against one hand as if lost in thought, showing none of the hollow, broken look that had gripped her after the trial ended.
"Focalors?" Moroboshi said. "She's here too. Doesn't that mean she's the reason we ended up in this weird place?"
"Maybe," Xia Yu said. "Let's go up and ask her. Even a scrap of information would be better than nothing."
Conan had no objections.
Once the three of them agreed, they headed for the stage.
It was only when they drew near that they realized just how tall the stage was—it stood higher even than the sole adult among them.
Never in their wildest dreams had they imagined the first obstacle standing between them and Focalors would be the stage itself.
Conan and Moroboshi stood at its edge, staring blankly upward at the lip of the stage, still a good distance above their heads.
Conan asked, dazed, "Xia Yu, can you climb up something this high?"
"I could, sure—but why would I climb up the front when there are stairs right here? We can just take the stairs, can't we?" Xia Yu's voice drifted back from far away.
Huh???
Conan glanced to the side and discovered that the figure who had been standing beside him and Moroboshi was long gone. She had already made her way around to the side of the stage and was preparing to go up.
Conan hurried after her with Moroboshi in tow, grumbling inwardly the whole way. Couldn't Xia Yu maybe put a little more weight into her footsteps? If you weren't paying attention, you couldn't hear her coming at all. If the two of them had been the timid sort, they honestly would have been frightened out of their wits.
Hearing the footsteps of Conan and Moroboshi catching up, Xia Yu turned and asked with concern, "What were you two doing just now? Why did you suddenly want to climb up onto the stage?"
Conan waved his hands quickly. "Nothing, nothing! We were just curious—just asking, that's all."
Heh. It wasn't as if he could admit he'd completely forgotten the stairs existed.
Moroboshi nodded along vigorously. "Yeah, yeah! Haha."
When they reached Focalors's side, they found she remained exactly where she was, motionless, as though she hadn't seen them at all.
Xia Yu and the others exchanged puzzled looks, and in the end it was Xia Yu who stepped forward and called out, "Focalors?"
At the sound of her own name, Focalors seemed finally to notice the presence of others. She shifted her posture and spoke, her expression tinged with a trace of haughtiness. "Who gave you permission to come onto this stage uninvited? As the goddess Focalors, I understand your admiration for me—but I must ask you not to break with protocol."
At that reply, all three of them wore expressions of unease and doubt.
Xia Yu tried again. "Focalors... do you remember who we are?"
Focalors did not look at Xia Yu. Her gaze seemed fixed on empty air, and she answered without a flicker of change in her expression. "I don't know who you are, and there's no need for you to tell me. Now then, if there's nothing else, leave at once. Don't disturb my performance."
Conan watched the exchange between Xia Yu and Focalors, a frown of confusion on his face.
Strange. Focalors's manner had reverted to exactly how she'd been when they first met her—as if she remembered nothing of what had happened in the opera house.
And he had noticed something: Focalors had used a particular word—performance.
It was true. He had always felt there was something exaggerated about her manner of speaking and acting. Now, connected to the fact that she had spent all this time masquerading as the Hydro Goddess... could it be that she had treated the whole thing as one grand performance?
And every performance needed an audience. Who was the audience? There could only be one answer: every soul in Fontaine. At every moment, countless eyes had been fixed upon Focalors's performance.
Only now did the realization strike Conan like a thunderbolt—just how crushing a weight Focalors had carried as she played the role of a god. She had needed to maintain the grace and nobility of a goddess every waking second, never once daring to disappoint the people of Fontaine.
Focalors had lived for five hundred years. Which meant she had kept up this performance, without pause, for five hundred years—and in all that time, not a single person had ever doubted who she was. Not even Neuvillette had realized that Focalors was not the Hydro Goddess.
Conan's heart was a tangle of emotions in that moment, and for a long while, he didn't know how to speak.