The Forgotten One (2)
A diary: a record of the events of a single day.
He had been writing for some time when he closed the journal with a soft tap. Setting it upon his knee, he drew a long breath, as if steeling himself for something.
“Well then, Najin?”
He looked at Najin and forced a smile. Fear sat in that expression, and so did regret.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The moment the words left his mouth, the last grain of sand in the hourglass slipped free with a soft rustle. The upper chamber emptied, and his body went slack. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, he did not so much as stir.
He was not dead. Faint breathing still reached the ear. He seemed only to sleep—yet even when Najin seized his shoulder and shook him, there was no sign he would wake.
Something’s off.
-Isn’t it?
Transcendents had no fundamental need for sleep.
In the Outer Land that was truer still, and Najin was no exception. Having lived nearly twenty years that way, he slept only out of habit; a month without rest would have left his body untouched.
Even when he does sleep, an hour or two is enough…
That much was sufficient to shake off fatigue. In the Outer Land, thick with every manner of danger, sleeping for hours on end was near suicide, so the hours spent asleep had dwindled of their own accord.
Yet the man before him slept as though he were dead.
Najin wandered the desert for a while as he waited. The man woke near sunrise. In the thin light of early dawn he opened his eyes slowly.
“······.”
Eyes not merely clouded, but empty.
The instant they opened, he looked down at the cover of the diary still held in his hand. Two lines were written there.
Turn the hourglass.
Read pages 1 through 10 of the diary.
He turned the hourglass. As the grains began their slow descent, he turned the pages one by one. When he finished the tenth page, he lifted his head and looked at Najin.
“Do you know me?”
“We spoke briefly last night.”
“I see. Did yesterday’s self leave any words for me?”
“He told me to open page 781.”
Seven hundred eighty-one… seven hundred eighty-one… murmuring the number, the man found the page, read it, and nodded.
“Najin. Is that your name?”
“Yes.”
“Page one says I am to introduce the contents written there. It seems I meant to speak with you.”
He held the diary out. Najin took it. Unable to read the old tongue himself, he let Merlin translate.
I lose my memories every day.
The time allotted to me runs from sunrise to sunset. Turn the hourglass. When the sand runs out, I fall asleep.
When I wake, you will remember nothing. Though I keep a diary left for myself, you feel to me like a stranger.
Still, if I may wish one thing—
Please spend a day that is worth something.
Najin’s eyes narrowed.
“You lose your memory every single day?”
“Yes. The only memories left to me are how to read and write, and that I must address everyone with respect.”
“Respect?”
“Because there is nothing in this world that deserves to be spoken down to—or so I appear to believe. That is the sole memory I possess.”
His face remained blank as he spoke.
Presently he asked Najin’s leave and began reading swiftly through the diary. As the pages turned, faint changes touched his expression.
“I see.”
A little more time passed. He closed the journal and let out a long breath.
“It says I was a knight of Rondinel. My epithet was Blue Hydrangea. In the past I was called Blue Spear.”
Though the story was his own, he spoke of it as if recounting another man’s life.
“A pleasure to meet you, Najin.”
Sand whispered as it fell inside the hourglass. Blue Spear checked the glass and smiled.
“As I said, I lose every memory with each new day. I do not know who I am, nor what I spoke of with you yesterday. Even so—”
He extended his hand. Offering a handshake, he said:
“I am Blue Spear, knight of Rondinel. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Najin. Free knight Najin.”
For Najin it was the second introduction. For Blue Spear, the first.
“There are daily rites I must keep without fail—things my past self left behind and underlined again and again. Would you wait a moment?”
What Blue Spear called rites proved simple enough.
He stood in the heart of the desert and swung his spear. He might have forgotten everything else, yet while the spear moved he never looked like a man who had lost his memory.
The angle of each cut, the footwork, the breath, the stance—every piece approached perfection. Even Najin could not easily mimic those motions.
“You said you lose your memory.”
“Yes. Every day.”
“But to my eyes your movement… does not look like the movement of a man who has forgotten. It is clean. Perfect. At the very least you do not look like someone who first took up a spear this morning.”
“Haha. Kind of you to say so.”
Blue Spear gave an embarrassed smile.
“It is not the same as knowing and remembering. It feels closer to instinct. The moment I grip the spear, I dimly understand how it should be swung.”
The mind forgot, yet the body did not. Motions repeated across long years. Just as a man does not forget how to breathe or how to set one foot before the other, he had not forgotten how to wield the spear.
Actions worn into habit by endless repetition.
As he worked through that sequence, Blue Spear seemed to be groping for memories that no longer existed. Reaching for what was not there, he said:
“The diary records it. I was a knight of Rondinel, and the only man left who still knows the spear arts that carry that kingdom’s long history. Those arts must not be forgotten—so it is written.”
“······.”
“At the tip of my spear, Rondinel lives and breathes. The history of a nation rests on this point. If I do not remember it, it vanishes. Therefore I must remember.”
The words sounded familiar.
“Therefore I must repeat them. So they are not lost. I must carve the memory into this body.”
Najin had heard something similar from Kirchhoff, the Sword Master of a fallen kingdom.
Kirchhoff had spoken those words while swinging his blade, determined to prove with steel that Rondinel had been real. Recalling them, Najin spoke carefully.
“Do you know a name—Kirchhoff?”
“Yes. It is written in the diary. The false knight Kirchhoff. Yet a knight more true than any other. The records of him are few, but it seems that when my memory was whole I held him in high regard.”
“Then Rondinel—”
“I know it fell. I know it was erased from history. It is written here.”
Blue Spear let out a long breath.
“My past self—the self that still possessed intact memory and intact mind—appears to have decided something.”
Decided what? Blue Spear answered the unspoken question.
“To give everything for Rondinel. That if he could leave even a single line concerning the nation of his birth and upbringing, he would gladly spend his life. And the result, it seems, is the man standing before you.”
He smiled as he spoke.
“And seeing that you remember Rondinel, and that you know of Kirchhoff, a knight born of that land—my past choice appears to have held some worth. That is a relief.”
“…Do you regret that choice?”
“Regret? I cannot know. I cannot share the thoughts of the man I once was.”
“Then do you resent him?”
“That too I cannot know. Yet looking at the entries from pages one hundred to six hundred—written while the memories were still slipping away—it seems I did resent myself.”
He opened the diary.
The pages were filled with writing set down so violently it looked ready to tear the paper. The characters were so twisted that even Merlin could not make them out.
“That self may have regretted and resented.”
Blue Spear gave a bitter smile.
“But the self I am now feels nothing. Having lost every memory, I can neither resent nor regret. I simply do not know. Still, a question remains.”
“A question?”
“Was what I preserved worth the price? And was my own life so worthless that I could throw it away so freely? That is the question.”
He could not know what he had discarded.
“I must have had a life of my own.”
Blue Spear swung the spear.
“Things I held dear. People I cherished. Objects I treasured. Memories I never wished to forget. Surely those existed.”
The spear split the air and raised a wind. Sand-laced gusts scattered. In the middle of a desert under a blazing sun he swung without end.
“Yet I cast them all aside. And the self I am now finds those discarded things a pity.”
Of course, he added with a short laugh,
“Even though I no longer know what they were.”
Najin watched Blue Spear swing the spear and thought.
If a man lost every memory each day, could he still be called the same person as yesterday?
I have seen many who lost only certain memories.
The Outer Land held no shortage of such people. The lost. Those who no longer knew what they had been. Yet even they had not lost everything—only fragments, only particular pieces.
The Helmeted Knight had been one of them.
Slowly turning into one of the lost, he had shed memories one by one: his name, his order, his sword, until at the last he nearly forgot himself. Najin had prevented that end, but—
What stood before Najin now might well have been one of the endings the Helmeted Knight could have met.
A man who has forgotten everything. A being who forgets everything anew each day.
To Najin’s mind it was closer to dying every day and being born again every day.
Blue Spear died each day and was reborn each day.
All that was given him was the span until the hourglass emptied—the hours from sunrise to sunset. The greater part of that span he spent swinging the spear.
“······.”
Looking on, Najin thought:
This is a keepsake. A last will.
The keepsake and testament Blue Spear left behind.
A man facing death seeks to leave something—proof that he lived—and by leaving it tries to give his life value.
“Hah… hahh… hah!”
Breath tearing, thick sweat pouring, Blue Spear swung the spear beneath the desert sun. Each time a handful of sand fell in the hourglass at his side, his eyes trembled. As if he felt fear.
Fear of death.
He swung as if thrashing free of that fear.
Blue Spear carved the traces of each swing into the sand. Traces that would vanish overnight beneath the wind, yet he carved them with desperate care.
A man who loses his memory every day.
A man who dies and is reborn every day.
Blue Spear was a mayfly.
There is a saying that a warrior speaks with his weapon in place of words. If so, then for Blue Spear the act of swinging the spear was nothing less than a last will—the proof that he had lived the day.
To swing the spear was to leave a testament.
To write the diary was to write a will.
In that way he lived a day, and in that way he died again.
Najin thought he understood at last why the Funeral Star had pointed to Blue Spear—and where he must escort him.
The sun sank. The last grains of sand ran out.
“Well then, Blue Spear?”
After they had spoken, Najin said to him:
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Holding the Funeral Star, Najin rose to his feet.