The Sword of Stars, Excalibur
The boy does not know.
How brightly the stars shine.
The boy does not know.
How warm the sun is.
What everyone else takes for granted, the boy could never possess. He had been born in a deep subterranean city where neither starlight nor sunlight ever reached. Lift your gaze and all you saw was the dark ceiling of the underground metropolis.
Born among the discarded, the boy dreamed. Staring up at that starless ceiling, he yearned.
I want a star of my own.
I want to become a being that shines by its own light, no matter where I stand. Like the knights in the fairy tales, like the heroes, I want to become a creature of radiant brilliance. Clutching a battered storybook, the boy dreamed.
Even knowing it could never come true.
Even knowing the longing was far beyond his station.
He could not let the dream go.
The first lesson the children of the underground city learn is how to give up. More precisely, it is less a lesson than a sudden realization—yet from the earliest age, the children of this place come to understand it all at once.
That they will rot here for the rest of their lives.
That they will never escape this city.
No matter what they attempt, they cannot climb higher. And so they naturally learn the arts of resignation and despair. It does not take long for the sparkling eyes of children who still dream to cloud over, murky as the fog that blankets the underground streets.
Najin was no different.
He knew his own talent. He had always claimed he never overestimated it, yet he had a fair grasp of just how vast that gift truly was.
Hard not to know.
Najin has sharp eyes. He is observant, sensitive to the slightest shift in another’s expression, and quick-witted besides. That is why he has always seen it.
Every time he swings a sword.
Every time he does anything at all.
How Oppen and Ivan marvel. How they sometimes force the wonder down and treat him as if it were nothing special. Najin was not so dense as to miss their intent.
He knew. All of it.
That his talent did not belong in this city. That even powerhouses like Ivan and Oppen found it abnormal. That Ivan, wary of that very talent, tried to throttle the speed of his growth. He knew every last bit of it.
He had simply closed his eyes and stopped his ears, pretending otherwise.
Even if I know, I’ll never make it up there anyway.
No matter how brilliant the gift.
No matter how immense the talent.
In the end he was doomed to rot in this city.
And so Najin had always resigned himself. Even when light shone right before his eyes, if it lay beyond the line he refused to reach for it. That light had never been permitted to him.
Resign. Give up. Forget. Shake it off.
Time and again the boy pared away his own confidence. He pared and pared, yet something remained that would not be pared away.
His longing for the stars.
Najin looked ahead. There lay the dream he had never released. The holy sword Excalibur, which had shared the beginning and the end of Arthur’s chronicle—the very symbol of King Arthur herself. The instant he beheld that blade shining like a star, Najin knew instinctively.
That this, too, he could not cast aside.
I don’t care how badly things go wrong.
The boy lives for today.
As is the way with children who still dream, Najin’s eyes were shining in that moment—not with the dim sunset haze of the underground city, but with a platinum-white light like the stars themselves.
Crossing the line Ivan had drawn for him, crossing the boundary the high and mighty of the surface world had drawn around every soul in this city, Najin seized the sword.
Tight.
The moment Najin grasped the Sword of Stars, the thirteen stars engraved upon Excalibur’s blade glittered. Star linked to star, forming the shape of a constellation.
And then—a deep, resonant hum.
The holy sword began to cry. A majestic sword-song, ringing out for the first time in centuries, shook the underground city. And the tale was not confined to the depths alone.
Though one could never know it here, where the stars are never seen—
The moment Najin seized the holy sword, the celestial bodies of the night sky trembled. Because the greatest constellation, motionless for hundreds of years, had risen.
On the wide plains of the Briton Empire, Gerd paused mid-swing and looked up. The once-still night sky was trembling. He felt the seven stars he had hung in that turbulent firmament shudder.
A swordsman who had never become a constellation, yet still possessed stars of his own.
The old man known as the Empire’s First Sword—the sole Sword Master of the Empire—gazed at the heavens and smiled.
At the highest peak of the Sword Church, Caron was oiling a blade when he turned toward the window. Beyond it stretched the vast night sky. Feeling the six stars he had hung there tremble, he set the sword aside and approached the glass. He opened the window. At the heart of the convulsing heavens lay the constellation the Church revered.
The Constellation: Sword of Selection.
The constellation that had kept silent for long ages was now in turmoil. At the sight of those thrashing stars, Caron gave a low hum of thought.
The master of the Sword Church, the Sword Saint Caron, instinctively understood that the chance to claim the holy sword for himself had slipped away forever.
In the execution grounds of the Holy Blood Church, Yuel let her blood-soaked blade hang and tilted a bottle to her lips when she suddenly looked skyward. She had felt the six stars she had hung there tremble. She set the emptied bottle down with a soft tap, then lifted the corner of her mouth as she stared at the sky.
Yuel Razian, Executioner of the Holy Blood Church.
Realizing that the number of people she needed to kill had just increased by one, the murderess threw her head back and laughed at the night.
Those who had once possessed the right to challenge the Star Trial of Selection all looked up at the same sky and understood: someone had completed the trial.
And elsewhere—
The astrologers who studied the stars of heaven and the astronomers who tracked their motions, gathered in the Gray Tower, were thrown into uproar by the untimely upheaval of the constellations. So many stars thrashing violently. Never before had the constellations shown such violent movement; the scholars were struck with awe—
Yet the fact that a single star was causing every last tremor forced them to doubt their own eyes. A star that had not stirred once in hundreds of years was moving.
The greatest star of all.
The constellation formed of thirteen stars.
The Sword of Selection was in tumult.
They were not the only ones watching the sky.
Adults and children alike lifted their heads. Some marveled at the shaking night; others trembled with fear.
The heavens themselves are trembling.
The stars are in turmoil.
The resonance that had begun in the deepest underground city climbed past the depths, past the people who walked the surface, and reached even the night sky above them all.
A convulsing firmament.
The lesser constellations caught in the wake of the greatest star screamed; those that held their places even within that vast current kept silent. The silent ones were the heroes who had become stars in a distant age—those who had crossed the continent at Arthur’s side.
They understood.
That a great hero who had once led an entire era was stirring once more.
That the flow of an age, frozen by Arthur that day, was about to move again.
And one constellation more than any other—
The constellation nearest the Sword of Selection, the one that had shared the beginning and the end of King Arthur’s journey, the one that had sealed the original Excalibur.
The Constellation: Staff of Selection.
The mage of the lake, Merlin, opened her eyes wide.
In the lake where she dwelled, the Excalibur that should have lain quiet at the bottom was scattering light. It was a change that had not appeared for hundreds of years.
Centuries earlier, at the end of the journey, Excalibur had lost its light together with its master. After the First Knight returned it to the lake, the sword had never shone again. Yet now, in this very moment, Excalibur was pouring out radiant starlight.
Merlin’s lake was dyed platinum-white.
Then—a flash.
Excalibur turned to light and scattered.
The original Excalibur sealed at the lake’s bottom, and every copy of Excalibur scattered across the cities of the surface world, all dissolved into light and flew apart.
The scattered lights gathered again.
Toward the single Excalibur that now existed.
No one could see that procession of light.
Not even Merlin. The only one permitted to witness it was the boy who had passed the Star Trial.
It happened in the blink of an eye.
A change in a single instant. Merlin knew better than anyone what that change meant. Because she knew, she bit her lip hard.
Someone had completed the Star Trial.
The holy sword that had chosen no one for hundreds of years—
Excalibur had selected its master.
In other words, he had appeared.
The one who would succeed her king. The one who would write the next chapter of the Arthurian chronicle that had been left unfinished that day.
Merlin was not the only one who felt it.
At the end of the world, the land of falling stars—Kamran, the Abyss—the place where Arthur’s journey ended, the place where Arthur sacrificed herself to freeze everything so that time itself no longer flowed—the beings who dwelled there also witnessed the trembling of the night sky.
The cursed dragon stirred.
The Witch of the Fallen smiled.
The Traitor of the Round Table rejoiced.
The stars that had fallen in the distant past raged.
In this very moment—
Every soul that had fallen into the underground city,
the countless powerhouses who walked the land above,
the transcendent beings who shone in the night sky higher still,
and the cursed things of Kamran at the world’s end—
all of them turned their attention to the change wrought by a boy in the lowest place of all. They watched the ripples he had raised, the change he would bring.
Crack!
The sword is drawn free.
By one boy.
A deep hum. A long, rolling roar…
The sword begins to sing.
Because of a boy who had possessed nothing.
The resounding sword-song. The storm of starlight.
In the city of those who had forgotten the light of the stars, starlight more brilliant than anything else flooded forth. Waves of starlight painted the underground city of Atman pure white. Within that overflowing radiance the boy set his stance.
Recalling a sentence he had read again and again in a fairy-tale book, Najin gripped the sword exactly as King Arthur once had.
Arthur had drawn the sword no one else could pull—with a single hand. She had applied no force; the blade had slid free the moment her fingers touched it, for the sword had recognized Arthur as its master.
It was the same for Najin.
The instant he seized the hilt, Excalibur slid free of the stone of its own accord. Trailing platinum starlight, the holy sword rose and selected the boy.
Shiiing.
At last Excalibur revealed its full form. A blade shining platinum-white. A body adorned with thirteen stars. The holy sword that had lost its light ages ago now blazed in the boy’s hand.
The shining sword proclaims it.
The beginning of a new history.
History that had stood still for hundreds of years began to move again. Into the pages of The Chronicle of Arthur, left unfinished for centuries and waiting only for the next chapter to be written, new sentences began to be inscribed.
The name of the boy who grasped the Sword of Stars is Najin.
In a place where no stars could be seen, the boy who had always reached toward them had at last seized a star.
Having cut his way through the tide of addicts and escaped the mine tunnel, Ivan paused mid-swing and looked up. There were still addicts left to cut down, but in this moment he could not help himself.
A star had risen over the underground city of Atman.
A majestic peal of bells rolling through Atman. Flooding, radiant starlight. It was a sight the people of this city had forgotten long ago.
“…”
Oppen, Ivan, even Horce who had been fighting the two of them—every last one of them fell silent and stared at the sky. Starlight bursting from the heart of the underground city and soaring upward painted their eyes. No one could look away from that light.
Because the dreams they had left behind on the surface were there.
With the rising of a star, the ceiling of the underground city was a ceiling no longer. The dark roof of Atman had become a vast night sky. Gazing at the single star that shone alone in that sky, Ivan let out a hollow laugh.
The knight who chased the stars—Ivan.
The man who had once been called that stood before the risen star in both rapture and despair. He thought he knew who had made that starlight. And he knew, all too well, what would come of it.
“Najin, you damned brat.”
Ivan groaned.
“What the hell have you done?”