Black Spire (3)
Merlin's voice was trembling.
Najin could neither joke as he usually would nor answer at once. Just as the Merlin he had seen in the dream had felt unfamiliar, the Merlin before him now was every bit as strange.
"It's not that important, is it? Just bringing that kid this far means you've already done your part, right?"
Whether you're here or not, Anton will climb the tower. Bringing him this far is enough—you've fulfilled your role. This trial is too hard for me, so I can't keep the promise. Say that, get the information on La Mancha, and leave.
Merlin clutched Najin's sleeve and pleaded. She tried to act as if she were fine, as if nothing were wrong, as if she were merely offering a rational suggestion, but······
"Hm? Please, hm?"
She could not hide the tremor in her voice.
Najin looked at her in silence.
Unsteady eyes. An unsteady voice. Agitation, fear, confusion. The emotions spilling from Merlin crashed over him like waves.
"······."
There had been times when Merlin grew emotional. Clashing with him over opinions was hardly new either. But this was the first time he had ever seen her tremble with fear.
Why? What on earth was that memory?
Everyone has them, you know.
Come to think of it.
Memories you'd rather bury. Places you don't want to dig up. Memories you hate even recalling, let alone speaking of aloud.
Once, Merlin had said something like that.
Do I have one?
Of course I do.
Najin looked down at Merlin. Merlin looked up at him. They had traveled together long enough that a single meeting of eyes was enough to read each other's thoughts. The moment she saw the look in Najin's eyes, Merlin bit down hard on her lip.
"You don't, do you. No intention of turning back."
"······."
"Why? Is this really that important? Is your promise with that Anton so important? More than my request······"
"It's not because of Anton."
Najin cut her off.
"It's because of you, Merlin."
"What?"
"You know everything about me, but I don't know anything about you. I don't. What Merlin was like in the past, what kind of person she was, what happened to her."
Of course he had read the fairy tales and the heroic legends. But half the stories there were omitted or missing entirely, and a few sparse lines of summary could never let him understand Merlin's life.
"I just... want to know."
"······."
"We are companions, after all. If wanting to know more about my one and only companion is too greedy a wish, then fine. As you say—I'll go down."
Merlin fretted at her lip.
"If you put it like that, what does that make me?"
"What does it make you? You're Merlin."
Najin gave a short laugh, and Merlin swallowed hard. She released his sleeve and clenched her own instead.
"After Arthur died, I obtained the twelfth star."
She spoke with her head bowed.
"I hated the twelfth star. I don't remember it well, but I just... hated everything. Everything I saw was so filthy I couldn't stand it... I think."
There was no certainty in her voice. Once, Merlin had told him she had carved those memories out of herself. She continued, groping through the blanks.
"I don't remember what I tried to do or what I was thinking. But one thing I'm sure of."
Merlin raised her head.
Her deep blue eyes fixed on Najin.
"I was going to end it all."
End what?
"With the mystery I hate most—the one I possess."
The period. Merlin's own mystery.
"So I don't want to recall those memories. If I was willing to use the mystery I loathe and detest most, it means I was already out of my mind."
"······."
"I don't want to remember it. I don't want to show it to anyone. It's a memory I want buried forever. That's why I must have cut it out."
Why this tower had dragged up the very memories she had excised, she could not say. Merlin let out a long breath.
"You'll be disappointed. You might even despise me. Back then I was cruel, foul-tempered, my head stuffed full of terrible thoughts until I became... something. I might even try to kill you."
So I don't want to show you.
I wish you wouldn't see it.
Even if you have to see it someday, I wish it weren't now. Fear filled Merlin's voice as she said it. Watching her flounder, Najin silently rested a hand on his chin.
"······."
Several minutes passed.
When Najin still did not speak, an anxious Merlin carefully opened her mouth.
"What are you thinking?"
"I'm wondering what on earth I'd have to see to despise Merlin."
"Wh-what······?"
"I've thought about it."
Najin shrugged.
"Unless you joined hands with a witch and massacred humans or something, I don't think I'd despise you. Did you do something like that?"
"No. It shouldn't be anything like that······"
"Then there's nothing. Nothing to despise."
"I might have done something terrible."
"Well, there was a reason for it, right?"
The answer was almost breezy.
While Merlin stood flustered, Najin went on.
"People can go a little crazy when they get angry enough. Thinking about the situation at the time—it'd be weirder if you didn't snap, wouldn't it?"
Arthur was dead. The Round Table had fractured. With Arthur's vanishing beyond Camlann as the trigger, demons and witches began to run wild. Having considered the circumstances from Merlin's side, Najin answered briefly.
"Even I would have gone berserk and thrashed everything in sight, don't you think?"
I would have done the same.
"······."
Merlin was silent.
She parted her lips to speak, closed them again, and repeated the motion until at last she forced out a short question.
"Really? You won't despise me?"
"I already told you I won't."
Only then did Merlin nod. She still looked uneasy, but she no longer tried to hold him back.
2.
"How dreadful."
Some time later, those were Anton's first words upon waking from the dream. As if he had suffered a nightmare, he let out a sigh deep enough to sink the earth, his face drawn with exhaustion.
"They said they'd show the most dreadful memory, so I expected a dream of Lapis piercing my heart. It wasn't anything of the sort. Well—if Lapis appears, it can hardly be a nightmare."
"What kind of dream did you have?"
"A dream of the day the Quijano family fell."
Anton Quijano rubbed the space between his brows as he spoke.
"I told you I come from the same house as Quixote—that is, Alonso Quijano—didn't I?"
"Yes, you did."
"I was from a rather prosperous family, if I do say so myself. Naturally, several fiefs fell under our name. Troupes were always staying in the domains, so there was never a quiet day. A glamorous house in every sense. Was that why, I wonder?"
Anton smiled bitterly.
"Even when it burned, it burned with spectacular glamour. Boatman—have you ever eaten something called 'perpetual stew'? Ever seen it?"
"The one they keep in taverns? The pot they boil for decades?"
"That's the one. Boiled so long the ingredients inside turn to mush you can't even identify. Our family's fief became exactly that."
One day a witch appeared, and the domain went up in flames.
As befitting witches who dedicate their lives to making humans suffer, the fire they raised neither died easily nor burned quickly.
Slowly. Leisurely. Over several days.
That damned witch, Anton said, scorched the fief for days on end with heat just shy of killing.
"They left the vocal cords for last, so the screaming never stopped. That way the Quijano domain became mushy stew, and my family and retainers all melted away while they screamed. The only survivors were me and my uncle."
Three days of pure agony.
Of those three days' memories, Anton muttered,
"I can still hear the screams. There was nothing I could do. I was a Sword Seeker then, but the martial power I'd spent a lifetime building was utterly useless. My younger siblings died. Even the one who had no talent for the martial path—but was sharp enough to make up for it, the one who always advised me with, 'What will you do without me, brother?'······"
He didn't offer advice till the end.
"'Brother, please save me. At least my daughters—' he muttered. He had young daughters. So to save even those children, he crawled, marking the corridor with his fingers. Crawled and crawled."
I was a fool, Anton scoffed.
"Even I, a Sword Seeker, was about to burn to death—how were little children supposed to survive? After crawling a long way, what I found was a corpse melted beyond recognition."
"······."
"Well. Those were the dreams I had. Ugh. My stomach's turning."
"Your fief was burned by a witch, Captain?"
"It was. Who was it again? The Witch of Blazing Heat, I think. Something of the sort."
Muttering so, Anton looked at Najin and grinned, as if he already knew what the young man meant to ask.
"You lost everything to a witch, so why love a witch. That kind of look, hm?"
"Something like that, yes."
"It wasn't always so. At first I resented them. I swore I'd kill every last witch in the world. Beating witches left and right like that, I even became a transcendent."
But there was no end to it.
Anton rubbed his chest as he spoke.
"Hatred—revenge—in the end it's a flame. You need firewood to burn. After burning so long, the firewood ran out. From then on I hunted witches half out of duty. Still no end in sight. Ah, at this rate I'll die to a witch myself. That's what I thought."
Anton planted a hand on his knee and slowly rose to his feet.
"And the one I met then was Lapis. She gave a reason to live to a man who was going around slaughtering witches at random. While tapping the head of a man lying there exhausted, you know."
You live a really hard life.
Kid, I've lived that way myself—and there's no answer at the end of it. Living like that is no fun. You live like shit and you go out like shit.
Ah. Looking at those eyes, I get it.
Eyes that won't listen worth a damn. You want to keep burning? Fine, then well······
"Muttering like that, she pulled out my heart."
"······What?"
"Ah, don't look so startled. She was that skilled with her hands—she knew how to take a heart without killing the owner. Anyway, she pulled out half of mine, shook it in front of my face, and smiled."
I'll be your firewood.
You already killed the Witch of Blazing Heat, didn't you? You need new wood, right? Then take the one who took your heart as your firewood. Once you've got something to burn, life becomes somewhat livable, doesn't it?
"It was a pretty absurd first meeting."
"Pretty fiery, though."
"Right? She was a fiery woman. I could talk about her for a solid four hundred years, but I shouldn't. She'll be waiting at the top of the tower."
Anton took a step forward.
"Let's keep climbing. We can't keep a lady waiting, can we? Come on, boatman."
Though exhaustion was plain on his face, Anton pressed forward as if there were no time to spare. The two of them mounted the stairs and continued toward the top of the tower.
3.
The second stratum of the Black Spire.
When he closed his eyes and opened them again, Najin was standing on frozen ground. His breath rose white when he exhaled.
"······."
Najin looked around in silence. It was the same place as a moment before, yet several things had changed. There were places where the earth was not merely pitted but split clean open, and fallen stars lay driven into the ground at irregular intervals.
Dozens of constellations had been shattered.
Hundreds of stars had been driven into the earth.
Najin turned his head and looked toward the center of the frozen plain. There stood Merlin, arms hanging limp, breathing in ragged gasps. Covered in blood, reduced to a wreck, she was grinding her teeth.
Around her lay the corpses of constellations in abundance. Dragons with torn wings and severed heads. Demons frozen solid while still alive. Witches with hearts torn out and eyes gouged empty, sprawled across the ice.
The dead, and those about to die.
Every one of those figures lying like insects was a foe against whom Najin could not have guaranteed victory even with his life on the line.
Crunch.
Against them, Merlin had survived. Facing hundreds of constellations alone, she had not only lived—she had slaughtered the greater part of them. Looking up, one could see shattered stars endlessly falling.
Broken stars rained down.
On the frozen ground where a rain of stars poured, Merlin burst into laughter. Looking up at the sky, she laughed madly. She laughed while she wept; she wept while she raged. Crunch—the sound of grinding teeth rang out with an eerie clarity.
"It's over."
Now it's all over.
Muttering so, Merlin sank to the ground. A hollow laugh escaped her as she bowed her head. Watching her, Najin began to walk.
Thud.
At the sound of footsteps on frozen earth, Merlin turned. Seeing Najin walking toward her, she smiled.
"You still haven't left?"
Thud.
"It'd be better if you didn't come."
Thud.
"Can't you hear me?"
Ignoring her words, Najin closed the distance until he stood right before her. Merlin's emptied eyes met Najin's, shining platinum-gold.
Holding her gaze, Najin thought absently,
Come to think of it... when I first met you, it was just like this.