Of the Extraordinary Adventures in La Mancha (1)
The story had ended. The actors had left the stage.
Standing alone upon the stage after the lead had departed, Najin wordlessly lifted his gaze to the sky. The heavens, once smeared with paint, had reclaimed their true color. Stars that the paint had hidden now shone clear.
The countless stars that slept within La Mancha.
The stars buried in this tomb.
Najin fixed his eyes on the brightest among them—the star of a certain squire who had walked every tale beside Don Quixote and, at the end of their adventures, had become the lord of La Mancha. It was the star that formed the very heart of this place. And its master was looking back at him.
A wind rose.
The fields swayed. Petals scattered on the air. Water in the lake lapped gently at its banks. In La Mancha, now empty of both Don Quixote and Rocinante, no human presence remained.
No presence could be felt—
Yet the gaze of someone who had always been there was unmistakable.
“······.”
Najin turned his head without a word.
“A pleasure to meet you.”
A young man stood there.
Najin already knew who he was.
The master of La Mancha.
The lord who owned this place, the one who had assigned Najin his role. Najin spoke the name aloud.
“Sancho.”
2.
Don Quixote had kept his promise.
Just as he had first sworn, at the end of their adventures he had bestowed an estate upon Sancho. The master of La Mancha was not Don Quixote, but Sancho.
Sancho Panza.
The constellation who bore that name rummaged through the shattered hut and dragged out two chairs. He set them in the field and gestured for Najin to sit, as if to say make yourself comfortable.
“You said your name was Najin.”
“That is my name, yes.”
“Right. Najin? As you say, I’m Sancho. Sancho Panza. Master of La Mancha, and the original of the part you played.”
Sancho smiled bitterly.
“And also a coward who, unlike you, could do nothing at all.”
“······.”
“It’s fine. You don’t have to deny it for my sake.”
He let out a long breath and looked back at the hut—the one Najin had shattered when he countered Don Quixote’s thrust. In the original history, Sancho had died there, run through by the lance of a mad Don Quixote.
“As you saw, I died in that place. My star fell and was buried in La Mancha, and my flesh became a Star Relic—Don Quixote-nim’s lance. All that remains here is my soul. I should count myself lucky even that much survived.”
Rocinante had not been granted even that small mercy. Sancho muttered the thought, then looked down.
“At first I thought it was a dream. Ah, what a vicious nightmare. If I just close my eyes and open them again, everything will be over. So I closed them, opened them—and I was back at the beginning. Back to that day decades ago when I first set out on adventure with Don Quixote-nim.”
Sancho began the adventure all over again from the start. Convinced it had been nothing more than a terrible nightmare, he once more enjoyed the journey at Don Quixote’s side.
“But the moment I reached this place again, I understood. It had never been a nightmare. The nightmare was what I was living right then.”
“······.”
“The same ending was waiting for me. I tried to resist, but I couldn’t. Of course I couldn’t. A coward who never acts is never given a second chance.”
Terror. Panic. The original story in which he had done nothing held his ankles fast.
“No matter how many times I repeated it, nothing changed.”
Sancho is pierced by the mad Don Quixote’s lance. Don Quixote tears Rocinante to shreds, hurls him into the lake, and remakes him as a demonic beast. Then, crying Dulcinea’s name, Don Quixote rides out beyond La Mancha.
“It was a nightmare. And I couldn’t even end it. I may be master of this land, but a greater being holds the place in its grip.”
“······The Revelry Emperor?”
“Yes. This place is both a tomb for the parties who adventured with Don Quixote-nim and Don Quixote-nim’s own sanctuary. Even if I was named its lord… it was originally his.”
It was not Sancho who had drawn the buried stars here. Don Quixote had led them. Sancho had merely been appointed lord; the true master of La Mancha had always been Don Quixote.
“And Don Quixote-nim serves the Revelry Emperor. The real owner of La Mancha is the Revelry Emperor. That madwoman siphons the starlight of this place to strengthen herself.”
Sancho ground his teeth with open hatred.
“She defiles our adventures, ruins Don Quixote-nim, and as if denying the entire story weren’t enough, now she even uses the corpses. It’s utterly detestable.”
Having spat the words through clenched teeth, he drew a long breath, lifted his bowed head, and looked at Najin.
“But.”
But— Sancho smiled.
“Thanks to you, things have changed.”
“What things?”
“Many things. Truly, so many things.”
He spread both arms wide.
“You forged an entirely different ending. The thing I so desperately wanted to do—the thing I failed to do no matter how many hundreds or thousands of times I repeated it—you accomplished.”
Restoring Don Quixote to his right mind. Making him smile not with mockery, but with the same warm laughter as always.
“The tale of La Mancha, which was meant to remain as the origin of the Star of Contempt, has been denied by you. You denied it. This place is no longer where the Star of Contempt was born. For Don Quixote-nim told his story smiling to the very end.”
As the Star of Dalso, Don Quixote had left the stage.
“You have no idea how magnificent that is.”
Sancho cried out as though truly overjoyed.
“Of course this is a tomb of stars. It is nothing more than a dream woven by the stars buried here, and rewriting history inside it does not erase what happened in the real world. But just as Don Quixote-nim said… the adventures you lived here are not meaningless.”
Sancho stretched out his hand. His finger pointed to the banner Najin held—the one Don Quixote had pressed into his grasp in that final moment.
“Because Don Quixote-nim, and I, have no intention of letting them be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“This is a star tomb. And those who conquer a star tomb are always entitled to a reward. Aren’t they?”
Sancho smiled. Then he snapped his fingers with a sharp click. In that instant the sky of La Mancha glittered. Najin looked up on instinct.
The stars were shining.
Every star buried in La Mancha turned its light upon Najin, each glowing with its own radiance. And the regard they sent him was of a kind he had never felt from any star before.
La Mancha shall always answer the call of you, Dawn Star.”
It was not the gaze one casts upon a stranger. Nor the gaze sent toward an unfamiliar star, nor one filled with mere curiosity.
It was the eyes of an ally.
Kindness, goodwill, reverence, respect—those emotions poured down with the starlight, aimed more precisely at the banner in Najin’s hand.
“That banner is now a Star Relic. A Star Relic that holds not only Dalso, Don Quixote, but every star of La Mancha.”
To the wide-eyed Najin, Sancho said,
“You understand what that means, don’t you? You’ll only be able to use it once… but I don’t need to tell you where.”
“Of course.”
“Good. That’s all that matters.”
“Then will La Mancha simply disappear like this?”
“I wish it would.”
Sancho shook his head.
“We still cannot rest. The true master of this land has yet to return.”
“The Star of Contempt must fall?”
“Yes. Only then will we be able to close our eyes.”
So must you dream the nightmare again? Najin’s eyes asked the question, and Sancho answered with another bitter shake of the head.
“I told you. Many things have changed.”
He looked up at the sky.
“After thousands upon tens of thousands of repetitions, the story has finally reached its ending. I will accept this as the story’s conclusion. There’s no need to begin the play again. When you have witnessed a tale that is more than excellent… sometimes you must know how to rise from your seat with applause and leave the theater.”
He stood.
“Najin.”
Then he offered Najin a bow of the deepest formal respect.
“To you who accomplished what I could not, what we could not—my infinite gratitude. To the story you showed us—the highest praise. And······.”
Sancho could not bring himself to speak the rest. To say that much would have been shameless.
“Don’t worry about Don Quixote-nim.”
But as if to spare him the struggle, Najin spoke the words Sancho had wanted to say.
“I’ll drag him back even if I have to beat him black and blue.”
At that, Sancho burst out laughing.
As the star of Dalso shone overhead, La Mancha began to dissolve into light and scatter.
3.
The curtain fell upon the stage.
The story had ended.
As everything turned to light and drifted away, Sancho, representative of the theater, bowed to Najin—exactly as an actor bids farewell to the audience.
The story titled La Mancha had ended.
For a time the theater would close its doors, and no new play bearing the name La Mancha would ever begin. Masterpieces must be left as masterpieces. Wantonly defacing one under the labels of “revised edition” or “expanded edition” was not to Sancho’s taste.
The story is over.
Sancho placed the period.
The tale of La Mancha had ended—yet he left a blank page for an epilogue. Someday the moment would come when this story received its true finale.
Applaud.
Najin clapped—so that the actor who had performed his role superbly might leave the stage. With a satisfied expression, Sancho stepped down.
La Mancha scattered into light.
It was not that the star tomb itself had vanished. But from this day forward no one would be able to enter La Mancha. One cannot lay hands upon a story that has already ended. The stage meant to repeat forever had abruptly dropped its curtain.
“······.”
All that remained where the light had faded was Najin.
La Mancha had disappeared without a trace, true to its original meaning—a place that is nowhere.
It felt as if he had dreamed. Yet Najin knew it had not been a dream. The banner in his hand, the Star Relic that had refused to dissolve into light, was proof enough. Clutching the banner, he offered a brief silent prayer.
The funeral star shone faintly.
When the moment of silence ended, Najin looked up at the sky.
With the close of La Mancha’s tale, a change had come to the heavens. Confirming it, he smiled. He thought he understood at last why the Revelry Emperor had reacted so violently to this place—why it was treated as a weak point not only for the Star of Contempt but for the Revelry Emperor herself.
That story could wait for another time.
Right now there was something else he had to do.
Najin scanned his surroundings. Time flows differently inside a star tomb and outside it. Within the tomb he had spent at least several months, yet he had no way of knowing how much time had passed in the world beyond.
Before I entered the star tomb, I was definitely······.
Fighting the endlessly regenerating jesters.
He recalled leaving those jesters to Yuel and Seongyuksin and charging toward the windmill. So what had become of Seongyuksin and Yuel? As he looked around, his eyes suddenly met another’s.
“Huh.”
It was Seongyuksin, chewing demonic-beast meat by a campfire she had lit. She blinked at him.
“Huh?”
Her eyes flew wide and she jabbed a finger toward him.
“Hey! You! There! There!”
As Seongyuksin shot to her feet and pointed, Yuel—who had been roasting sweet potatoes beside the fire—spotted him as well. Najin chuckled and walked toward them.
“Hey, kid! You suddenly vanished and scared us half to death. Just what were you doing that you······.”
“Has La Mancha been reached? Or have you found the entrance leading to it? Excellent. Then let us go. Having faced only jesters that offer no satisfaction even when cut, I find myself wanting to cut something—anything.”
Seongyuksin fussed about what had happened; Yuel Razian watched him with eyes full of expectation. Settling himself near their campfire, Najin merely shrugged.
Then, without a word, he pointed at the sky.
Yuel and Seongyuksin followed the tip of his finger. Both pairs of eyes went round at the same instant.
The sixth star—Dalso, Star of Laughter and Chatter.
That single light answered every question. Najin let the star of Dalso shine as he opened his mouth, not forgetting a faint smile. And so he began the tale for the readers—or the audience—who were curious about his adventures.
Of the marvelous adventures that had unfolded in La Mancha.