The Helmeted Jester (6)
The paint-stained sky tore open.
The ruptured heavens screamed like a living thing and bled. The sky's cry was the sound of shattering glass.
Drip.
Blood fell from above. The sky's blood was red—yet not merely red. Crimson, yellow, blue, green, violet: blood of every color poured down. The paints that had stained the heavens streamed through the rifts.
Plip. Plip-plip-plip…
The paint falling like rain gathered and took shape. The shape of stars. Ten stars wrought of paint hung lower than the sky itself, flashing in a place that seemed close enough to touch if one only reached out.
And then—
Click.
Footsteps rang across the wasteland.
Click.
The sound of a high heel striking the ground. With every click of those footsteps, the laughter swelled. It was no longer a hallucination. For with each click, shadows rose from the earth.
Click.
The shadows that surged up from the ground wore masks. They were dressed in ridiculous costumes. In each of their hands was an instrument. They were jesters.
Click.
The jesters danced in time with the footsteps. They scraped at their instruments with absurd flourishes. Roaring with laughter, they began to play however they pleased. There were dozens of them. Dozens of jesters played their instruments, yet their music never once locked into place.
Not the harmonious chords born when notes meet notes, but a dissonance in which every sound ran wild and scrambled the air. Noise that made listeners frown and clap their hands over their ears flooded the wasteland.
Click.
Yet even amid that din, the click of those footsteps was never drowned out.
"…"
Escorted by dozens of jesters, the woman walked. Her pace was slow—but speed is always relative. From the moment she appeared, Najin could not even breathe.
She walked toward the frozen Najin.
Rustle.
Black hair cascading down. Long trailing hems. The demon wore the form of a beautiful woman. At last she bent at the waist, reached out, and picked up something that had fallen to the ground.
A helmet.
She picked up the helmet Alderan had cast aside.
Holding it, she walked toward Najin. Every one of Najin's senses screamed. Ripping free of the bindings that clamped his body, he leapt backward, seized the sword he had dropped, and snapped straight into a guard.
Tremble.
The hand on his sword shook. Whether that tremor was the aftershock of his battle with Alderan or the instinctive terror of the being before him, Najin could not tell.
Overwhelming. Beyond overwhelming—something of an entirely different order.
Najin knew it at once.
The figure before him was the Revelry Emperor. A demon of ten stars. The constellation called the master of the Outer Land. The one who had defeated Alderan stood there.
—…
Merlin, standing at Najin's side, wore an atmosphere utterly unlike her usual self, eyes wide. Eleven blue stars blazed cold and bright in her hands, as if she might descend upon this place at any second.
"Ahh."
And the demon spoke. She smiled not at Najin, but at Alderan's corpse lying before him.
"In the end, you met your death as a knight, didn't you?"
As if greeting a long-lost lover.
As if welcoming her dearest friend, the woman's voice was soft. In a sweet tone that brushed the ear, she continued.
"I lost the wager. A promise must be kept, of course. How regrettable. The beast that blows the horn, the mountain goat with the golden horns, the sword that shines with sunlight… It pains me to let them go. Truly, what a pity."
A pity, she said—and smiled.
"But I have you now. That will be enough."
Najin could not grasp her meaning.
He understood soon enough.
The instant the Revelry Emperor gestured toward Alderan, a vast curtain fell across the sky. Like a stage curtain descending before a play begins, a pitch-black drape covered half the night. Cloaked in that curtain that divided stage from seats like a mantle, the Revelry Emperor raised her arm.
Rustle.
Threads spilled from her slender fingertips. The flowing threads bound Alderan's body and the star that had fallen from him. Erasing the period at the end of a story already finished, the Revelry Emperor turned the next page and began to write.
"A jester is one who lives by laughter—and so even his death must be ridiculous."
"Laugh, prattle, sing, and dance, O jester."
"Forever, forever, forever!"
Alderan's body rose. His fallen star was drawn by the threads and hung in the sky. Yet the sky that held Alderan's star was a sky and not a sky.
An artificial night the Revelry Emperor had made.
The night-sky curtain she wore.
There, the constellation of Alderan Basaglia was mounted and preserved. At the same time his body began to move with a crack, crack-crack… Not by his own will—caught on the threads the Revelry Emperor had cast, Alderan moved like a puppet.
Najin watched it all in a daze.
His pupils shook. What am I looking at right now? He could not understand the sight before his own two eyes. No—he did not want to understand. His mind refused.
But the Revelry Emperor would not leave him to it. She gestured. Lifting the helmet bound in thread, she cradled it gently in both hands, as if handling a precious treasure.
And then—clack.
The Revelry Emperor set the helmet upon Alderan's head.
The Helmet Knight had become a knight by removing his helm. Only after casting it aside could he declare himself Alderan Basaglia.
Then what was he now, with the helmet on once more?
Alderan Basaglia became the Helmet Knight again. No—he could not even be that anymore. He was nothing but a jester in a helmet. A clown who danced absurdly to amuse his master. An instrument with no will of its own.
A smirk.
Stroking the helmeted jester, the Revelry Emperor smiled. The corners of her mouth split. Her paint-smeared eyes half-lidded. What filled those crescent-curved pupils was mockery and scorn.
The Revelry Emperor mocked the end of Alderan Basaglia.
She sneered at the death he had met as a knight, ridiculed it, and insulted it. So he met a noble end? And what of it? Who said nobility could not be made a laughingstock? Everything depends on the staging, on the telling.
She had directed this stage as a comedy.
Cackling laughter.
The master of the stage made a knight's death into a joke. Laughter rolled from the seats. On the stage and in the audience, the dancing jesters howled at Alderan's death until they doubled over. They clapped and roared.
—————From the beginning.
From the very beginning, the bargain had never included Alderan Basaglia himself.
What the Revelry Emperor had staked as the price was only ever Alderan's comrades. She had never intended to release the hero who had pierced her heart and brought down her star. Whatever end he met was a matter of no concern to her.
Struggle. Writhe. Agonize, and agonize again.
I will make all of it into a thing to be laughed at.
Your hundred and fifty years were nothing but a ridiculous farce danced upon the stage I built.
"…Ah."
And Najin—
Najin, who had watched it all, felt his mind go blank white. It was an emotion he had truly never felt before.
Only moments earlier his head had been packed with judgments and calculations: how to escape the Revelry Emperor, how to survive this place, whether to call Merlin, whether to draw Excalibur.
Not anymore.
A vast blaze swallowed every thought, every judgment, every scrap of reason. What took their place was rage. Rage he had never known. Rage that bleached his mind white and paralyzed his reason swallowed Najin whole.
Grit.
Najin ground his teeth.
Bloodshot veins stood out in his eyes.
"…Don't."
The voice he spat out was cracked and torn. Najin let go of the sword in his hand. But not because he had abandoned the will to fight. Quite the opposite.
His hand clenched on empty air.
He seized the space where Excalibur was stored as if he meant to crush it. The space tangled around his fingers warped. Merlin's eyes flew wide; she grabbed his wrist. She shouted into his ear, but the sound never reached him.
With bloodshot eyes, Najin looked.
At Alderan, helmeted, creaking at the Revelry Emperor's side. At his master, who after enduring a hundred and fifty years had met the end he longed for—only for even that end to be desecrated. At the jesters who mocked his master, ridiculed him, and laughed until the world seemed ready to wash away.
The place where Alderan had gloriously won.
This sanctuary where he had closed his eyes as a knight.
The end Alderan Basaglia had wished for.
All of it the Revelry Emperor was trying to twist into a ridiculous skit. Najin could not bear it. He could not endure a situation that insulted a knight and mocked even his final moment.
Then Alderan's body moved, drawn by the threads.
Creak. Clatter. Grind…
The helmeted jester danced absurdly. He rattled his helm and cackled. From the mouth that had spoken of knighthood spilled ridiculous laughter, and the single sword that had been the symbol of the empire's hero, and the helmet that was the emblem of the Golden Horn Knights, were stained with paint until they lost their original colors.
The Imperial First Horn had become a jester.
Cackle, cackle, cackle!
Led by the Revelry Emperor's hand, Alderan moved. He flailed his sword ridiculously through the air and burst into laughter.
The moment Najin saw it—
Snap.
Something broke inside his head.
———.
Najin screamed. He did not understand what he had shouted. He knew only what he had to do.
Boom.
Najin kicked off the ground and charged the Revelry Emperor. Odds, rational judgment, calculation—all of it was meaningless now. He could not endure another second without lunging.
In the instant Excalibur was about to be drawn from empty air, in the instant Merlin's stars were about to blaze in the sky above—none of it had happened yet, and yet one step forward would turn all of it from future into present—
Flash.
At the very brink of a point of no return, another star lit before Najin's or Merlin's.
The Martyr of Thorns.
A constellation of eight stars, one that had long since ascended to the heavens, burned crimson.
2.
Descent—an authority known by that name.
A power held only by constellations of high standing, and one that means exactly what it says.
By concentrating starlight, it moves one's true body to a chosen place—an authority close to instantaneous teleportation. It is limited to places one's starlight can reach, yet even with that constraint it is an overwhelming advantage.
Even so, few constellations ever use it.
The reason is simple.
Descent consumes a colossal amount of starlight and, in the moment of arrival, weakens the constellation's true body. For a constellation to reveal its true form is to bare its weakness, and it draws the eyes of other constellations.
A weakened constellation. A vast star. A delicious prize.
Exposed to the countless stars that would hunt it, Descent is, for a constellation, something close to suicide.
Yet the Revelry Emperor had attempted Descent.
And she had done it in the place of her defeat by Alderan Basaglia—a Forbidden Territory to her. Seizing the fleeting instant when Alderan's death blurred the boundary of that Forbidden Territory, she had brought her true body down into it.
The place of her defeat. A place where she could not be certain of herself. A place where merely standing eroded soul and flesh—and she had willingly descended there.
A near-suicidal extravagance.
The Revelry Emperor, who for hundreds of years had never left an opening, had in this moment bared her weakness.
Flash.
And there was a star that did not miss it.
A star that hated demons, that had devoted its entire life to killing them and still found it insufficient… that even after ascending to the heavens had founded an order and continued the hunt.
That star had been watching the Revelry Emperor's star, and it did not miss the moment that star moved in force.
A constellation of eight stars.
The Martyr of Thorns.
A fire that had burned for a thousand years.
And a fire that would keep burning still.
A blaze of hatred that would not die until every last demon in this world had been burned away.
Whoosh!
The star wreathed in flame called its apostle. Not only its apostle—it brought down to this place the stars bound to it by contract. Even if it meant spending every last drop of its starlight, she would not let this moment slip.
Kiiiiiieeeeeeeeek—!
As the sky tore, a colossal sword-stroke split the space between the Revelry Emperor and Najin. The threads the Revelry Emperor had stretched toward the charging Najin, and her jesters with them, were caught in the blade-force and finely deconstructed.
Upon the wasteland lit only by the Revelry Emperor's star, six stars appeared all at once.
The Heavenly Slaughter Star, Yuel Razian.
"Duck."
Falling from the rent in the sky toward the earth, she swung her sword. Blade-force hundreds of meters across bisected the battlefield. A sword-cry like a human scream buried the jesters' laughter.
The stroke did not end with one. Blade after blade fell like a guillotine, aiming for the Revelry Emperor's head.
While blade-force carved the field to pieces, one more new star appeared in the sky.
A single star alone.
Unlike Yuel, it did not hold many—yet it shone with a brilliance that yielded nothing to hers, blazing a cold, clear blue.
Thud.
A man who appeared suddenly before Najin seized him by the scruff and hurled him backward. As if to say this was not a battlefield for him. Then, with a single sweep of his sword, he cut down the onrushing swarm of jesters and spoke.
"Revelry Emperor."
Najin had heard that voice before. But unlike then, a deep fury ran through it now.
"Do you remember me?"
The Sword Master of a forgotten kingdom, Kirchhoff.
Toward the Revelry Emperor—one of the three constellations who had taken part in Rondinel's fall—Kirchhoff leveled his blade.
Two Sword Masters had entered the field.
And the Revelry Emperor—
burst into laughter and covered her face with five fingers. By the time those fingers fell away, a jester's mask sat upon her face.