Interlude: A Story (3)
Not every story in this world can be a comedy.
There are as many stories as there are people, and of course not every one of them can end happily. That is simply how it is.
Especially for any story that has one foot planted in reality.
No matter how hard someone tries, no matter how many trials they overcome, no matter how desperately they search for a way out… so many stories still end in tragedy. So very many. Perhaps most of them deserve that name.
"Ah…"
And so—
"Please."
—the witch pleading before Najin's eyes was nothing more than the heroine of one more ordinary tragedy.
"Let me meet Roselyn."
Lena. The witch who had loved a human.
The names the other witches called her: madwoman, a blind fool blinded by love, a witch cursed by her mother, the shame of all witches. A prisoner locked in the Black Spire for six hundred years.
Unlike Anton and Lapis, she was the protagonist of a story that had already ended in tragedy. She clung to Najin's ankle as if begging him, please, just listen to her tale.
"…"
He could have shaken her hand off at any moment, yet Najin did not. Because the red-eyed mercenary who had once done him a kindness rose unbidden in his mind.
A witch who resembled Roselyn Ascalo, and who spoke Roselyn's name.
Najin stopped walking, sat for a while, and listened to her story.
2.
The red-eyed mercenary, Roselyn Ascalo.
There was a person known by that name.
One of the white-grade adventurers of Cambria, the City of Opportunity, and a fighter ranked among the upper echelons even of the Sword Seekers. That Roselyn harbored one open secret.
Red eyes.
A witch's eyes.
The color in her irises was not ordinary red; it was the eerie crimson unique to witches. Witch blood ran through her veins.
Roselyn was a half-breed of human and witch.
Yet that was all anyone knew. Who her mother had been, who her father had been—no one could say. Not because Roselyn had never told anyone, but because she herself did not know.
A test subject created by a witch who kidnapped humans.
No— a homunculus crafted by a magic tower.
Perhaps a hybrid born of mad black mages.
Countless theories circulated, yet not one of them was certain. Still, most people assumed Roselyn was an artificially created life-form. She had the background that made such a conclusion almost inevitable.
Roselyn was forty or fifty at most.
By contrast, the most recent human known to have loved a witch was Anton Quijano, and even Anton had last faced a witch four hundred years ago.
The eras did not match. The timelines did not match.
Therefore Roselyn had to be an artificially created being. That conjecture gathered natural strength. Of course, no one alive could confirm the truth.
"Roselyn is my daughter."
Which meant Najin was almost certainly the first.
"My beloved daughter."
The first person to learn of her true origin.
"I suppose I should introduce myself properly?"
Najin looked at the witch seated before him. At first she had only muttered the name "Roselyn" over and over like someone who had lost her mind, and he had thought conversation would be impossible. But after a little time she recovered her senses.
She moistened her throat with the water he offered and spoke.
"My name is Lena. Lena, the Red-Eyed Witch."
"I am Najin. Free Knight Najin."
"Free Knight? It's been a long time since I heard that word."
The witch who called herself Lena.
Chains bound her wrists, ankles, and throat, and a stake had been driven into her spine. It was not a stake that could simply be pulled free by force.
A stake that has taken root deep inside her body.
He did not know exactly what that stake was. But just as a tree sinks its roots into the earth, the stake had torn through her back and rooted itself deep within her. Because of it, Lena could not straighten her waist; she sat hunched over.
"It's been so long since I talked with anyone that I don't know where to begin. Would you wait just a little? Let me gather my thoughts."
"Take all the time you need. I have plenty myself."
"My, how kind."
Yet she herself seemed untroubled by the discomfort. Lena smiled, planted a hand on the floor, and began to move about the cell as if searching for something.
A narrow prison. A sealed chamber that had not admitted even a sliver of light until Najin found the entrance.
Inside that chamber lay hundreds upon hundreds of scattered sheets of paper. Lena gathered them carefully, as though they were treasure, and turned the pages with the most delicate touch of her fingertips.
"Roselyn, you see? She is the fruit of my love with Albert. And she is the only treasure he left me after he was gone!"
Albert.
Najin knew that name.
Sir Albert the Foolish, hero of the Allied Kingdoms.
A man who had made his name roughly six hundred years ago. Najin had encountered the name while searching through heroic legends. The ending of that legend had been so shocking that the name had stuck with him.
A man seduced by a witch who turned his back on his homeland.
Albert had been a hero of the Allied Kingdoms, yet in the end he was also judged a man who had abandoned his duty. Only because his accomplishments outweighed his sins had he not been recorded as a criminal. And the witch he was said to have loved sat before Najin's eyes now.
"She must be a lovely child. I've never seen her face even once, but she must be lovely. No matter what anyone says, she is the child I bore—the child who takes after me."
As Lena spoke, Merlin, who had been listening, frowned.
-Strange.
Strange how? Because the timelines don't match?
-Not that.
Merlin's expression turned subtle.
-Witches can't have children with humans to begin with. No—having children is impossible for their kind in the first place.
Having killed more witches than anyone else alive, Merlin knew them better than anyone, and she spoke with absolute certainty.
-Witches only resemble humans; they are not human. They do not reproduce through birth. Like demons or dragons, they are beings born of chaos.
Because they were that sort of race, Merlin said, witches possessed none of the organs necessary for reproduction. They only looked human; at their core they were something else entirely.
-And yet she claims she had a child?
Impossible.
At Merlin's firm declaration, Najin's own expression grew complicated. Perhaps Lena had read the look on his face. She tilted her head and smiled.
"You think it's strange, don't you?"
Fair enough.
She murmured the words and let out a breath.
"You're thinking a witch can't have a child with a human. You're right. We can enjoy a single night's pleasure, but we cannot conceive a child."
"Then…"
"Even so, I wanted a child. I wanted to leave behind proof that Albert and I had loved each other."
Lena stroked the papers cradled in her arms.
"I researched for a long time, and I succeeded. The price was being locked away in this place… but it's all right. That child has surely been born into the world by now."
She smiled.
"Still, I want to see her. I want to know what she looks like—the child who takes after me, and after him. I want to know how she is living. I want to taste even a little of a mother's happiness, but I suppose that's greed."
Lena raised an arm. The chains clattered loudly. Looking at herself—unable even to stand because of the stake driven into her spine—she gave a bitter smile.
"Even so… if you don't mind…"
She looked at Najin.
"Would you listen to my story? And could you carry my story as far as the Continent? So that someday my child might hear it."
Only then did Najin understand what filled her hands. The papers that carpeted the chamber. Written upon them was a single story, and at the same time a letter addressed to someone.
"I will."
"Thank you—truly!"
Najin nodded. When he answered that he would, Lena's face lit up with a radiant smile. As if she were truly, deeply grateful, she seized his hands and shook them up and down again and again. Then she cleared her throat and began her tale.
The story a prisoner confined to a solitary cell had written over six hundred years.
Lena spoke its opening line aloud.
"The first sentence of the story begins like this."
To my beloved child, Roselyn.
From your mother, Lena.
3.
Najin listened to Lena's story for a long time.
There were moments when he stepped away to check on Anton, but apart from those intervals he spent most of his time listening to the tale she told.
While she spoke, Lena laughed with pure delight.
Every time she opened her mouth the stake rooted inside her body stabbed into her lungs, wringing dry coughs from her, yet she never stopped talking.
"And so—and so, you see!"
She flung both arms wide as she spoke.
The story she told was divided into several chapters. Chapter One was the love story of Lena and Albert; Chapter Two told how their tale had come to an end; and Chapter Three was the story of Roselyn.
As he listened, Najin felt a bitter taste rise in his mouth.
Her story could never become a comedy. It could never be called a happy ending. They had struggled, overcome trials, and thrashed with every ounce of their strength—yet Lena and Albert's story had ended in tragedy. As if to declare that the only possible conclusion for love between a witch and a human was tragedy.
Along with the bitterness he felt pity.
Not only for the witch before him, but for Anton, who was even now climbing the tower. Because the story Lena told was also the ending Anton might one day meet.
"For a witch to love a human, she must first abandon being a witch."
"Why is that?"
"Because otherwise the curse never lifts. Our mother, the Witch of the Abyss, carved several taboos into the souls of every witch—so that we could never truly mingle with humans."
Therefore, to join with a human—
"—you must give up being a witch. And that is a difficult thing. An impossibly, impossibly difficult thing. It is closer to denying your entire life and being reborn. That is what it means to shatter your own Mystery."
Lena laid a hand over her heart.
"I could not do it. To be honest, I don't know whether I would have been able to even if I had tried. But if I had done it…"
"You would have died."
"Yes. To deny yourself and deny your star is to erode away and die. But I had a reason I had to keep living. For as long as possible."
Her gaze turned toward some distant place.
"If I died, that child would never be born. So I—so we—chose. Or rather, we accepted it. If the story could only end in tragedy, then let us speak of what comes next. At the very least, let us leave behind proof that we loved."
In the midst of tragedy they found their answer.
Even if the story ended in tragedy, it would not be meaningless.
"So I hope this story reaches that child. Has she been born, I wonder? Has she not been born yet? Is she still wandering somewhere in a dream?"
"Well… she does spend a fair amount of time wandering in dreams. The woman I know is drunk more days than not."
"…What?"
As Lena's story drew toward its close, Najin began to speak of a certain mercenary he knew.
"You… know Roselyn?"
"I once owed her a great deal. She helped me many times."
Lena's eyes trembled. While her gaze wavered, Najin told her everything he knew about Roselyn Ascalo.
"And so."
At the end of that long account—
"I was thinking."
Najin rummaged inside his Free Knight's coat. Outwardly it was identical to the coats worn by the knights who had followed Arthur a thousand years ago, yet the interior was nothing like those ancient garments.
A thousand years of imperial knowledge and craftsmanship had been concentrated into the single coat he wore. The Empire's magic towers had poured their hearts into covering it with every kind of magic imaginable. And among those enchantments, of course, was expansion magic.
Clothes stored in the expanded space.
Najin pulled out a single set of clothes and gave a short snort of laughter. They were clothes heavy with memory—the clothes he had worn in the underground city. More precisely, the clothes he had worn when he worked as the organization's executioner.
But what mattered now was not the old purpose of the clothes; it was their appearance.
Whenever he had paid a visit as the organization's executioner, Najin had always carried "Ivan's letter." Because he needed to deliver a letter, he would put on a postman's uniform and introduce himself as a postman.
It was the same now.
He shrugged off the Free Knight's coat, set a postman's cap on his head, slung a postman's bag over his shoulder, and held out a hand to Lena—as if to say, if you have a letter to send, give it here.
"Before I became a Free Knight, I did a bit of postman's work. If you have a letter to send, give it to me."
Lena stared at him as though he had lost his mind—then, without meaning to, burst into laughter. She gathered the letters that filled the room and held them out to him.
"Can you deliver these to that child?"
An interlude—the brief gap between one act of a play and the next.
The short time when the actors leave the stage, catch their breath, and prepare for the next story. In that brief span they forget their roles and rest.
And Najin intended to use this interlude to take on a different role for a little while.
A postman delivering letters.
Perhaps it was the very first role he had ever played.