No. You Already Have It.
"Nnngh..."
Nona rubbed at her dull, aching head and pushed herself upright in the bed. The pitch-black room seeped in past her still-closed lids.
"Have they gone...?"
She had poured out what remained of the prophecy and then fainted, so it was hardly strange that they had left. She only regretted how little time they had been given.
Lady Nona. Did you cough?
A physician on duty was asking after her through the speaker. Nona looked straight at wherever the doctor was watching from and nodded.
"Yes. I'm all right. What about my mother and the others?"
Madam was informed the moment you woke. She is already on her way here. Tough Guy has departed with your guests.
"I see..."
A shame. She had wanted to talk a great deal more.
Is there anything causing you discomfort? We will do everything in our power to attend to you.
"I'm fine. I'd like to be alone until Mother arrives."
Understood. Then.
The speaker's static cut out. Nona worked the bed's controls and raised the section at her waist to a forty-five-degree angle.
"Haa..."
Settling into the soft support along her back, she let out a long, tangled sigh and turned her thoughts upon her own situation.
With this, my role is finished.
It was a truth she would have had to reveal someday, but by delivering the prophecy to him, Nona had completed the mission laid upon her. What remained was a mysterious, ailing beauty with no power at all.
There's nothing I can do now but wait for the end of the world.
A deep exhaustion settled over her. She had been of use to the world since before she was old enough to understand it, and the fact that she was now good for nothing was almost impossible to accept.
Mother seems to want me to live an ordinary life, but...
It felt far too late for that. Most of her years had been spent not as Nona, but as TERA's Prophet, and its hope. The pillars of her self were built from duty and a sense of justice, so the very word everyday was foreign to her. Prophecy had never been the sort of convenient gift that looked after a person's private life.
Even so, until everything is over, I cannot rest easy for a single day.
Nona recalled the ending she had seen in the world of dreams. The road toward that ending was a sight that could never come to be unless even one missing piece of the puzzle was set in place. She wanted to lend her hand to that piece. She wanted to show that the desperate struggle of a powerless ordinary person could still add something to the world.
"Hoo..."
Nona made up her mind. She would gamble with her life. They had said her mother was coming, so by the time this ended there ought to be room enough to leave her a few words.
Her closed lids slowly opened. The gift of prophecy was gone, and yet the starlight of her eyes still worked; through them she looked into the dream-world kept in memory. Black dyed the space around her. The ceiling lamp became starlight and stitched itself across every direction, while up and down, left and right, expanded without end.
All at once she was standing square on both feet, and she understood that she had entered the dream-world. There was ground beneath her, and yet no sense of standing. Her other senses were the same. The only thing permitted to Nona was to see.
For a replay of memory, this is far too real...
During the half year she had slept, Nona had drifted through this world in a haze, and along the way she had glimpsed a great many futures no human was meant to receive.
I think the truths of the universe were in there, too.
She was personally very curious, but those memories were already forgotten, so she folded the regret away cleanly.
Now. Let's see.
Nona wandered the dream-world inside her memory. Between stars jumbled together without order, her eyes read the starlight. Scenes that could not be defined in any human language flickered past, and noise began to crawl across her vision.
Ugh!
She shut her eyes before the noise could fill her sight. The scenes that had crowded her mind could go no further.
Haa. Haa.
Nona bit down on her lip. So many prophecies sat squarely in a corner of her head, and still she could not draw a single one out to use. She resented herself for it.
This is the limit.
The realization struck with painful clarity. From the moment her prophetic power had vanished, these prophecies had become nothing but burdens.
It has to be now...
This landscape was only a memory her eyes had reproduced. Human beings are animals of forgetting. Little by little, the weathering of years would sweep this memory away.
At least that one...!
At the end of the world, Nona saw a starlight shining aloof and alone. A future seated at the last beyond the last. The only light she had never managed to read.
She rose, weightless, and went toward that light like a moth. Each time she drew nearer to the light at the end, the stars that had adorned the universe were pushed back behind her. The dark only widened, until a single source of light remained.
......
Her eyes stung. It was not an especially clear light, and yet its presence was unmatched. What was this thing, that it should stand so far above even the future of the decisive battle on which the world's fate depended?
Don't tell me that merely reading this would leak the secrets of Heaven.
A taboo not permitted even to a prophet who saw the future: a future changed by the mere act of being read.
Is it right to touch it?
If she were wise, turning back to interpret the burdens she already carried would be the profitable course. But if she laid a hand on this, she would never wake again.
Should I go back and write a will?
Or at least tell Mother, even once, that she loved her...
No. I have to settle it here.
No parent in their right mind could send a child off after hearing that the child meant to go and die. If Nona first had to watch her mother burst into tears over a last testament, she knew she would never find the will to come back. And for all her talk, Nona did not want to die either. She had bluffed about staking her life, but faced with the moment itself, she had never been so afraid.
Hup!
Before fear could swallow her, she forced her eyes wide. White light flooded her pupils.
Gyaaaaaaaah!!!
Nona screamed without a sound. Noise did not merely film her eyes; they were collapsing in agony. It felt as if her eyeballs were being carved out while she still lived, and then torn free entirely. Her optic nerves burned from the root, and her irises seemed to be scraped by a razor.
Ah—ghk! Aaaaaaaah!!!
Regret came rushing in. She resented a past for which she had not prepared. A sense of mission? Courage? Responsibility? None of those things lessened the pain. She wanted to pluck her own eyes out. Would that make it even a little easier?
They won't—they won't come up...!
Cruelly, her hands would not rise, as if something were pressing them down.
Aaaaaaaagh!!!
Nona thrashed. She twisted her head this way and that, bent at the waist, tried every frantic thing she could think of, and still she could not escape the light.
———! ———!
The pain had grown so severe that now she was hearing things as well. A sobbing voice, shouts and urgency, the beep of machines—all of it echoed around her.
Hang—! —on!
Mother...
Her collapsing consciousness was caught, all of it, by those phantom voices. Nona seized the awareness that had sharpened and refused to let it go.
Thank you. Mother, all I ever do is receive your help.
Nona did not run. She fought the white light. Even if it was a wait with no promised end, she set her sights on whatever came after.
......!
How much time passed before she could make out the scene beyond the white light?
Gyaaaah!
She poured every last scrap of strength in that direction. Perhaps the effort itself was deemed worthy. The scene drew gradually nearer...
And then Nona's vision went black.
The curtain at the window stirred in a wind from outside. Sunlight, a grace poured down by the sun hung in the sky, settled over the living room.
Click.
Person, seated on the sofa, switched the television off with the remote. Nona stared blankly at his turned back.
"Watching a half-formed future is worse than not watching one at all. Prophecy is just a roundabout way of avoiding that."
"Prophecy is a matter of forcing the pieces together. A convenient little power. Mumble something vague, interpret it to fit the situation, and you're done."
"Plenty of people can't accept that and insist on crossing the line, just like you. More than you could count. Most of them lose their lives doing it."
What are you saying...
"Let it pass."
Person turned his head. The sunlight hid his face with uncanny precision.
"Did you get what you wanted?"
...I don't understand any of this.
"No. You already have it."
"You realized it, didn't you? That the number of futures has converged to one."
......!!!
"Nothing to be shocked about. From the moment you met me, that was already decided."
"Don't blame yourself. It's a result fixed by a will higher than fate."
Person came closer and set a hand against Nona's forehead.
"A being has been chosen to bear not one role, but two. The one who was already finished will be given a second chance."
Tok.
A finger pushed her. Nona's consciousness rose toward the surface.
"Don't worry too much. Your opponent has grown stronger, and I'll be sure to give your side something to match it."
Wh-who are you, exactly...!
"You don't need to know. We won't be meeting again."
"Go tell your mom you're sorry."
With those words, it ended.
Nona opened her eyes on the bed.
Queen Knight, tears streaming, pulled the waking Nona into her arms. Nona apologized over and over. Once the tears had steadied enough for words, Queen Knight asked, her face tight with anger.
"What did you go and do out there...?"
Nona broke into a cold sweat and laughed, helpless and sheepish.
"I-I'm sorry. I can't remember..."
"I swear, you—!!!"
Before the full, heartfelt weight of Queen Knight's anger, Nona bowed and scraped until her hands might as well have worn themselves into feet. The round lamp flickered, lighting mother and daughter.