Echoes
Awakening was both languid and intense.
My consciousness drifted far away, then suddenly snapped back into place.
All at once, sensation returned to my mouth, revealing the feel of chapped, cracked inner cheeks.
At last, when a mouthful of dry saliva moistened my tongue, a faint, bland taste followed.
My fingertips, seeking to take stock of the world, scraped against something soft, like cloth.
My left hand could still move, at least, but my right wouldn’t budge properly, as if it had been tied down by something.
As I kept twitching, sensation gradually returned.
My body felt disordered, somehow not quite my own.
The body of a woman, which I had thought I might have grown used to by now, was still awkward as anything.
A smell rose in on the tide of a slow, steady current: the weak, cool scent of dampness, the detergent soaked into cloth.
And beneath that, the sharp smell of medicine.
“…Ah.”
An unfamiliar ceiling.
Through half-open eyelids, a plain grayish-white greeted me.
The motion of opening and closing my eyes felt sluggish.
After staring blankly for a few seconds, my sense of balance returned.
My back was pressed into something soft. My newly awakened brain slowly supplied the word bed.
I couldn’t hear much of anything around me.
There was the sound of shoes dragging somewhere far away, the bubbling of a humidifier beside the bed, the occasional electronic chirp of something I couldn’t identify, and the wind outside….
Ah, I see. I let out a breath like a sigh.
“A hospital…?”
I let the strength go out of my upper body, which had been trying to force itself upright.
The warm bed embraced the backs of my shoulders and legs.
My mind still felt half-asleep, as if I were lingering in a mild fever, and that made it hard to gather my thoughts.
At the same time, I couldn’t simply close my eyes and surrender to sleep; my consciousness was too shallow for that.
Somewhere between reality and dream, I drifted, moving in a steady pendulum between waking and sleep, riding the rise and fall of drowsiness for a long while.
How much time passed?
Then, from outside, sound drew near.
Footsteps rustled busily closer. A door slid open, and a figure stepped in from beyond my line of sight.
At the edge of my vision, a pale flash of gold appeared and vanished.
When I slowly turned my head, loose blond hair swayed with the movement.
A brown long coat was hung on a corner coat rack, and for an instant I saw the back of a black sweater before it was hidden by her turning head.
Her absent movement turned toward me. Her eyes were lifeless, dull, impossible to read.
Something about her gave me a strange sense of familiarity, and I frowned.
“You’re awake.”
“Who… are you?”
She didn’t look like a doctor who had come in to check a patient’s condition as a matter of course.
There was an awkward pause in the middle of my words.
My throat was parched. Talking at length was difficult.
As though she had noticed, the golden eyes turned toward the direction where a pitcher of water must be sitting. Some glint entered that gaze as it simply watched.
A prickling sensation ran through my fingertips.
Magic.
“…You’re a mage, aren’t you?”
“So you noticed right away.”
My body tensed reflexively. Magic surged up.
Or rather, I tried to make it surge up.
But it only clicked and sputtered, scattering apart the moment I tried to gather it, leaving nothing behind.
I closed my eyes and opened them again.
Tracing the flow of magic backward, I found something strange moving near what I took to be my right arm.
Looking more closely, I saw that everything there had come to a stop. The gold magic that had been invisible until a moment ago was now coiling up and around my right arm.
My dry throat hurt. Between my words, awkward gaps kept slipping in.
“What did you… cough… do?”
“Oh, it’s not going to hurt you.”
The tips of the girl’s fingers drew something in the air.
Following that motion, a water pitcher lifted itself and moved. Water filled a cup, then it was held out toward me.
“…You want me to drink it?”
Instead of answering, she tilted her head playfully.
What?
Confusion flickered through me for a moment. I blinked, then looked from the cup trembling in front of my mouth to the golden girl.
Was she really expecting me to drink this straight from her hand? After blinking a few more times, I looked back at her. Her lifeless eyes were calm, as if to ask what I was hesitating for.
Her behavior felt more teasing than malicious.
She carried herself with so little sense of distance that, if anything, she came off as thoughtless and a little sloppy. Once that first impression settled, the tension that had filled my body drained away with the mood, like the tide going out.
It was still a little hard to stomach, but if she was offering.
“I-I’ll drink it. Thanks.”
The cool water I’d been craving at last slid down my throat.
A damp chill quickly spread through my body.
That sensation felt strange again, and I had to spend a moment sorting it out. It was a belated realization, but apparently getting used to being frail was harder than I’d thought.
The golden eyes curved with amusement. As if she had been waiting for that, her mouth opened.
“Well then, since we both have plenty of questions, shall we talk, Student Justina Schumacher?”
Huh?
▼
Everywhere my eyes reached through the window, mountain ranges stretched wide.
The hospital I was in faced away from the sea, turned instead toward the mountains and a deep valley.
White perpetual snow lay over the ridges, layered atop the sunlight that poured down on them.
Between the mountains racing toward the hidden horizon, green forests and brightly colored city blocks clustered in little piles.
And beyond that, farther still, rose the mountain range where Yggdrasil had once thrust its branches high into the sky.
Those mountains still stood against the headwind, but now they bore a very different shape.
The perpetual snow atop them had melted away without a trace.
Not only that, but the sharp peaks had softened and sunk, reduced to blunt, low mounds.
Below them, the blackened remnants of fire and the things that had melted down were smeared together in ugly confusion.
The marks were visible even from far away, enough that anyone who didn’t know better would have no idea what had happened there.
Noticing my gaze, the girl’s eyes flicked out the window for a moment before returning to me.
“We’ve met a few times at the university, haven’t we?”
“Ah, yes….”
Professor Linne Jernenfeld.
Her unreadable golden eyes blinked beside me. The scent of some unknown shampoo drifted right up into my face.
From that brief introduction, an old memory surfaced.
She had been a professor in the history department at the university I attended.
Come to think of it, we hadn’t been that familiar with each other. The history building and the mechanical engineering building I attended were far apart, after all. At most, I’d only ever seen her from a distance during major school events.
Had we really met? I couldn’t quite remember.
“And I’m the thirteenth department head of the Golden Dawn Society.”
I’d never even imagined that a person like that was actually a mage.
Still, the Golden Dawn Society, huh.
My best guess was that it was some kind of organization made up of mages. The word mage that surfaced in my mind along with it soured my expression before I could stop it.
It dragged up unpleasant memories.
The people who had opened the first cracks leading to the end of the world for reasons so absurd I still couldn’t believe them. That deranged, warped sense of “common sense” that had overturned my parents and everyone around them simply because it was convenient, because they were in the way.
Had I been too naïve? The thought hovered like a sigh in my mind, gnawing at my brain. Something hot surged up from my stomach.
Then it happened.
A name I’d never expected to hear came to me.
“Klaus Schumacher, and Sabine Wallenstein.”
The boiling in me cooled at once. What little irritation had remained peeled away, and curiosity took its place. My eyes turned to Professor Jernenfeld.
“You know my parents?”
“I’d have to. They were both my students.”
Her lazy, detached voice carried words that were anything but.
Goosebumps rose and then flattened back down. An unidentifiable pressure thudded dully inside me.
That pressure turned my gaze aside.
The boundary between day and night.
The blue of one eye held night, while the orange of the other caught the dying sunset.
Outside the window, everything was dyed in the blue of evening.
The deep darkness of dusk gathered in the sky as the sun sank lower and lower. Everywhere, whether the land had been burned and melted by fire or preserved in its original shape, shadow settled quietly over it.
The golden eyes gazed at me in silence. Then, all of a sudden, her mouth opened again.
“Just as I thought. You resemble them.”
“…Me?”
“Those two.”
It sounded almost like a sigh.
Come to think of it, did she know my parents were dead?
At the unpleasant thought, my gaze fell by itself. My eyes lowered slightly.
Judging by her expression, Professor Jernenfeld didn’t seem to know the two of them were dead.
Then should I tell her?
I was still turning that over in my mind when the rising wind outside began to rattle the window.
The words that came from her next sounded as though they had drifted in from some faraway place, unfocused and distant.
“I don’t need you to tell me. I’ve already been there. I had to see the place where my dear disciples were buried.”
“That—”
“Now there’s no one left.”
Her voice was empty, and the edge of her laughter had thinned.
There was no one left.
That short, indifferent little line.
It cut off my words.
I didn’t know what else to say. Nothing came to mind.
Should I comfort her for losing students she treasured, or should I complain about the thing that had been slowly boiling from the bottom of my gut?
The silence between us seemed to have weight, and not a light one. From within it, something rose.
“Hey.”
Looking out into the distance, I spoke carefully, like someone addressing words that would never quite reach their mark.
My voice was still awkward, but it felt much better than before. At the sound of that thin voice, her head, which had been turned toward the distance, came back around.
I had to stop the apocalypse that would keep crashing down on us in the future.
So it probably wasn’t mere coincidence that I was the one to say this first.
“…Would you perhaps consider taking on another disciple?”