Interlude: A Story (1)
In this story, Najin was a supporting character.
True to that role, he watched the two of them from a step away. Relieved that their tale had not ended in tragedy, Najin let out a long breath.
To be honest…
Najin smiled bitterly.
I thought it would be a tragedy.
Four hundred years of waiting. The love between a witch and a human. Taboo. The story had been packed with every ingredient for tragedy. Even the moment they reached the top floor of the tower, Najin had expected it to end that way. Yet contrary to his expectations, the tale of the witch and the knight did not conclude in tragedy.
The witch who loved a human cast aside everything that was hers.
Her Mystery of Distrust. The part of her soul that made her a witch. In doing so, she abandoned the very identity of the Witch of Distrust—just as Anton had once abandoned his knighthood for her sake.
And that emptied space…
The part she had discarded and left hollow was filled by Anton’s star. He achieved something never heard of before: two people sharing a single constellation. Najin could not even begin to guess how such a thing was possible.
“Amazing. Truly.”
Merlin, who had watched the birth and extinction of countless stars over a thousand years, reacted much the same. She looked at Anton and Lapis with open astonishment.
“Two people sharing one constellation—and that it can ‘perfectly’ sustain a constellation that had lost its star? It’s impossible by any common sense. Nothing like this has ever happened before. This is genuinely the first case.”
Analyzing every cause and effect, probing how such a thing could even be possible—that was a mage’s virtue. But Merlin decided she had no desire to do so in this particular moment.
“Perhaps it’s simply a miracle.”
Sometimes one needed to accept a miracle as nothing more than a miracle. All the more so when stars were involved.
What’s this? You’re not launching into ‘this is because of that, so it must be this or that’ analysis?
“What do you take me for? I have enough sensibility to clap and marvel at a beautiful story, you know.”
While Merlin grumbled, Najin smiled.
Ever since coming to the Outer Land, he had spent his time marking the final moments of others or seeing them off in funeral rites. That made an ending where people could laugh and chatter like this all the more welcome.
The human who abandoned knighthood for a witch: Anton Quijano.
The human who abandoned witchhood for a knight: Lapis.
What remained at the end of the story was simply a man and a woman who had endured four hundred years for each other.
“What wouldn’t I do for my lady?”
“When a person truly falls in love, they become a fool. The biggest fool in the world—someone who can throw away everything, truly everything they have.”
Just as Anton had said, it was a story of fools.
Foolish, and because they were foolish, overflowing with romance—a tale of fools.
One story had drawn its curtain. Yet the play itself was not over, and the lights upon the stage had not gone out. Najin’s own story was still in full swing.
But every endeavor requires rest.
A brief gap between the fall of one curtain and the start of the next tale—time given to catch one’s breath, savor the afterglow, and prepare for what follows.
An interlude.
Using that interlude, Najin exchanged greetings with Anton.
“There’s a great deal to talk about, but I suppose this comes first.”
Anton Quijano bowed at the waist toward Najin—a gentleman’s greeting, proper and formal. When he rose, he extended his hand for a handshake.
“Thank you. Even ‘thank you’ falls short. You helped me far beyond what we promised. I’m grateful. I owe you a tremendous debt.”
“Did you enjoy the voyage, Captain?”
“Ah, what’s the point of saying it?”
Shaking Najin’s hand, Anton crooked the corner of his mouth upward.
“It was the greatest voyage of my life, oarsman.”
They both burst out laughing. The oarsman and captain who had shared that magnificent voyage walked for a while, talking as they went. There was a story that still needed to be told.
“The terms of our deal were that you would take me to where Lapis was, and in return I would provide you with information on Quixote and La Mancha. That was the oath.”
Anton nodded.
“Promises must be kept.”
Outside the tower, with the sea wind blowing against him, he began to speak.
“Talking about La Mancha—that is, La Mancha—carries a serious risk even for me. That’s why I never shared it lightly with anyone.”
“A serious risk?”
“Because my uncle and the Revelry Emperor would be watching me.”
Anton Quijano shrugged.
“Think from the Revelry Emperor’s perspective. A demon with the vile hobby of turning stars into her jesters—who could look more delicious as a potential jester than me?”
Peerless romantic. Idiot. Fool. Lunatic blinded by love. The knight who loved a witch. Just looking at the nicknames that trailed after Anton made the point obvious.
“From my side, the less I stood out to the Revelry Emperor, the better. Just searching for Lapis was already overwhelming. Imagine a ten-star demon throwing passionate advances my way nonstop. How exhausting would that be?”
“I doubt it would stop at mere exhaustion.”
“Exactly. And once the Revelry Emperor started moving in earnest, it wouldn’t be only me in danger—Lapis would be as well. The most efficient way to turn me into a jester would be to secure Lapis’s whereabouts.”
He had not known where Lapis was. In that situation, he had wanted to avoid competing with the Revelry Emperor’s forces as well. That, Anton explained, was the reason.
“Something like that. La Mancha had become a kind of taboo. The moment you spoke of it, you would draw the eyes of both the Revelry Emperor and my uncle.”
“…”
“Ah, no need for that worried look. I promised to tell you, didn’t I? And now that I’m with Lapis, it’s fine anyway.”
Anton shrugged as if it were nothing.
“My lady is rather fierce, you see. In her prime she was a great mage with nine stars. If any woman dares to make eyes at me, she’ll gouge those eyes right out.”
“You must never, ever cheat, then.”
“I never planned to in the first place, but given Lapis’s temperament, I’ll have to be even more careful.”
After the banter, Anton snapped his fingers with a sharp click and shifted the mood.
“To talk about La Mancha, I first need to start with this.”
He began the story.
“Originally, La Mancha was a motif from a certain play popular in the Quijano domain. The original was a fairy tale. The title was something like The Knights of La Mancha, I believe. Probably.”
Anton briefly outlined the fairy tale. Najin had never heard it, yet somehow the story felt familiar.
“Isn’t that… the Arthurian cycle?”
“There are a lot of similarities. It was probably influenced by it, too.”
The main plot of The Knights of La Mancha was the tale of knights wandering in search of a place called La Mancha.
“In the fairy tale, La Mancha is a kind of holy land. Not a star-land, but a sacred ground. A place where every sin is forgiven and everyone can laugh in happiness—an ideal paradise. It’s even depicted as something like heaven. I suspect it took its inspiration from Avalon in the stories of King Arthur.”
Muttering that it was a ridiculous, foolish, utterly idiotic adventure tale, Anton smiled.
“Still, it was a good story. The kind that makes you think about what it means to be a knight.”
Anyway—he tapped his temple a few times.
“Alonso Quijano, my uncle, was an unusual man in many ways. He didn’t just fall for fairy tales—he lived his entire life as if it were one. And the story he loved most was precisely that Knights of La Mancha.”
Anton flung his arms wide.
Then he launched into a theatrical delivery.
“Laugh! No matter what tragedy befalls you, laugh until it’s ridiculous, until your belly splits! Whether it becomes tragedy or comedy is decided by none other than I, Alonso Quijano!” That was how he went about, acting like the hero of the fairy tale. Need I say more?”
Perhaps because he was that sort of man.
Anton murmured the words and smiled bitterly.
“Even standing before his burned domain, my uncle did not despair. Far from it—he gathered the remaining ashes into an urn and set out on a journey. He headed in the exact opposite direction from me, who was set on revenge against the witches.”
Where? Najin asked. Anton answered.
“La Mancha.”
In that instant a gaze settled upon them.
A sticky, clinging gaze.
Yet Anton paid it no mind, continuing the story with a sneer that seemed to ask what the hell they were staring at.
“A holy land that could not exist. A heaven that could not exist. A fictional place that lived only inside a story. My uncle began his journey declaring he would bury the people of his domain there.”
What meaning or value it held was impossible to know. But Alonso Quijano called himself the fairy-tale protagonist Don Quixote and continued the journey, Anton said.
“I didn’t travel with him, so I don’t know the details. But I heard he journeyed with a squire named Sancho and a guide named Rocinante. Then one day—while I was busy catching and killing witches—a letter arrived for me.”
It should be somewhere around here.
He rummaged through his clothes and produced the letter.
“To my dear nephew, Anton Quijano.”
Anton unfolded the letter and showed it to Najin.
To my dear nephew, Anton Quijano.
I have arrived in La Mancha. Once your vengeance is finished, I hope you will come here as well. This is an invitation from your uncle Alonso Quijano, and from the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, Don Quixote.
— Alonso Quijano / Don Quixote
The stationery bore a drawing of a windmill.
Pointing to the letter, Anton continued.
“When this letter arrived I was in the middle of killing witches, so I paid it no mind. And after I met Lapis, it was already too late. By then my uncle was already being called Quixote of the Star of Contempt.”
Anton let out a sigh.
“My uncle had his ridiculous side, but he was never the sort of man who would become a demon’s jester and go around doing things like that. My guess is that the Revelry Emperor played some kind of trick right after he reached La Mancha.”
“Then that La Mancha is…”
“I don’t know what it was like at first.”
Anton handed the letter to Najin as he spoke.
“But now that place is a tomb of stars.”
A tomb of stars.
Najin’s brow furrowed.
“A tomb of stars… Quixote’s?”
“I don’t know for certain either. But it had become a tomb of stars, and it is the core of Quixote of the Star of Contempt. It’s also a place the Revelry Emperor wants to keep hidden.”
Anton chuckled darkly.
“Considering she went so far as to erase every scrap of information about the Knights of La Mancha, the Quijano domain, and Alonso Quijano himself just to hide it… there must be something quite important there.”
He looked at Najin.
“For someone hunting the Revelry Emperor, that should be useful. Well? Does it help? If you travel with that invitation, you’ll arrive at La Mancha naturally enough.”
Najin accepted the letter and nodded.
“It’s definitely useful information.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Muttering that, Anton glanced up at the ten glittering stars of the Revelry Emperor in the sky and began to banter again.
“Sending me such passionate looks is a problem. My heart is already mortgaged to Lapis. And even if it weren’t…”
Anton cut the words cleanly.
“A woman as faithless as you is not my type.”
As if she had been waiting for the conversation to end, Lapis approached Anton and looped her arms around his neck. Clinging to him as though she had no intention of letting go after four hundred years apart, she waved cheerfully at Najin.
“So you’re the guide? Thank you!”
She smiled as she joked about how grateful she was that he had brought the idiot Anton all this way, and that without him she would probably have had to wait several more centuries. It was a smile that looked genuinely happy.
“So… Najin?”
Cutting Lapis off before she could chatter on forever, Anton called to him.
“As I said earlier, you helped me beyond what we promised. Even if I abandoned knighthood, I haven’t forgotten the rules of a deal or what a man owes another.”
To the blinking Najin, Anton said,
“I plan to rest for a while at that place you first came to find me—the cabin on the hill. I’ve got four hundred years of conversation and romance to enjoy, after all. But.”
Anton thumped his own chest with a fist—thud.
“I swear upon my heart.”
He crooked the corner of his mouth and made the oath.
“Just as you rowed for me, if you ever have need of me, I will come row for you anytime.”
“I’ll help too. Half of that oath belongs to me as well.”
The aid of a Sword Master and a great mage—two transcendents. As Najin shook Anton’s hand after receiving that promise, he suddenly blinked.
“Come to think of it, Anton?”
“What is it? Something you want to ask?”
“How many stars did you have? I don’t think I ever asked.”
“A rather late question, true. Well, right now we’re splitting them half and half, but…”
Anton snapped his fingers with a sharp click.
“I just gained one more, so eight.”
Seeing the eight shining stars, Najin’s eyes went wide.
“Wait—you were that strong?”
“The number of stars doesn’t always guarantee strength, but I do fall on the stronger side. What, did I look so worn out in the tower that you thought I was weak?”
Anton snorted a laugh.
“Even looking like this, in my prime I was a hunter who killed dozens of constellations. Not something you can do in your right mind.”