Interlude: The One Who Abandoned Memories (1)
Don Quixote’s story reached its final period.
Najin—who had been actor upon that stage, its playwright, and its sole audience—watched the end in silence. The curtain that divided the seats from the boards came down.
The curtain fell upon the stage.
As it descended, Don Quixote’s stage and his body alike crumbled into starlight. The knight who had wandered three hundred years inside a nightmare smiled in his final moment. Stepping down from the stage called life, he was smiling with quiet satisfaction.
The instant he faced that smile, Najin knew it in his bones.
Perhaps… no. Certainly.
He would never forget that smile. Not because his memory was especially keen, but simply because the smile itself had been far too intense.
“……”
Before the stage whose curtain had fallen, Najin stood silent.
Then he raised his hands and began to clap.
A fine actor’s exit deserved applause. The sound of his clapping continued for a long while. Until now, Najin had never known what expression to wear in moments like this.
Regret. Bitterness.
And yet, relief as well.
A tangle of feelings that no single word could hold. Watching someone’s end was always like that. In the past he had worn a complicated face at such times; at least now he knew what face to make.
“Laugh, boy!”
“If life is a stage, there is no reason not to laugh!”
Recalling Don Quixote’s words, Najin smiled. Still unused to the act, his smile was clumsy. Clumsy—yet natural all the same.
“It was a pleasure sharing the stage with you, Don Quixote.”
With those words he turned on his heel.
The stage was over.
Now it was time to become the lead—neither supporting player nor audience. For Najin’s own story was not yet finished.
Tak.
He put strength into his step and strode forward.
Kirchhoff stopped his sword at some point.
He had been carving through the clowns that surged like a tide; now he lowered his blade and exhaled the breath that had caught in his chest. It was not that he had given up resistance, nor that he was too exhausted to swing. The tide itself had simply stopped.
The clowns, which had already been dwindling, now hung frozen in mid-air—as if they no longer had the leisure to spare him a thought, or as if something had gone wrong with the very being that propped up this stage.
And then—
Tuhwak.
The clowns burst apart. Unable to hold their shapes, they smeared into paint. Watching the sight, Kirchhoff blinked once—and then burst out laughing.
So the boy pulled it off again.
His guess was correct. Moments later light erupted from below. From the place where the paint had pooled, from the heart of the stage itself, a pillar of radiance shot upward until it pierced the sky.
And a constellation fell.
The fallen star belonged to the Star of Contempt—yet it was not the Star of Contempt everyone knew. The star that crumbled as it fell was the Star of Laughter. A fall ought never to be beautiful; still, the descent of the Star of Laughter felt beautiful.
Starlight bloomed in every direction.
Kirchhoff looked toward the place where the light had risen. A boy was walking out of it. Their eyes met; the boy gave a short, crooked smile and raised his sword.
The Dawn Star shone.
Its light, fiercer than before, flooded the entire field. The Revelry Emperor’s paint, robbed of its center, evaporated the instant the starlight touched it. Even the paint that had veiled the sky was driven back. The Dawn Star announced that the long night was over.
It was time to wake from the nightmare.
The constellations sealed inside the Graveyard of Stars, drawn by the Dawn Star’s light, began to emerge one by one. The waking constellations roused the knights; the knights in turn roused the soldiers… and so the Imperial army that had sunk into the nightmare opened its eyes.
And Najin—
lifted his head and looked at the sky.
All four Court Jesters had been purged. With nothing left to veil the Revelry Emperor’s star, her constellation was sliding down the heavens.
A grotesque constellation unlike any other.
One step forward.
Najin tightened his grip on Excalibur.
2.
Once the situation settled, the Imperial army chose to rest for a while. Wandering the Graveyard of Stars had drained both mind and body, and the backlash of having marched ten days and nights without rest under the Revelry Emperor’s scheme was catching up to them.
Not everyone possessed Najin’s monstrous recovery, and even he looked thoroughly exhausted.
Najin dropped heavily onto a seat.
“Hooo……”
Perched on a convenient boulder, he caught his breath. Every inch of him ached. The wounds had closed, yet his spirit was worn thin; the recovery he had forced had left his eyelids fluttering.
“Of course you’re tired.”
Merlin tapped his shoulder with a small fist. As if determined to give him a massage, she reached out and dug her fingers into his shoulder and the nape of his neck.
“You tore through the Graveyard of Stars where dozens of constellations were running wild, fought a whole pack of the Heavenly Stream Star’s whales, broke through Daedalus’s Great Labyrinth, and then dueled the Heavenly Stream Star itself at the end.”
That schedule alone was enough to make anyone retch, yet Merlin sighed and muttered, “And that wasn’t even all of it?”
“Your mind was being scraped raw by the Revelry Emperor’s authority; you dragged every last star you had into resisting it; and then, in that state, you fought a duel against the Star of Contempt on the Star of Contempt’s own stage?”
She let out a dry laugh. The two of them continued in the tone of ordinary conversation—“This time was especially rough,” “Yeah. Honestly I figured I’d lose an arm or a leg at least”—as if such things were routine.
“……”
Those watching from a distance could not even manage a hollow laugh. They simply fell silent.
The constellations who had never seen Najin in person understood, of course, that he was extraordinary. Still, somewhere inside they had also thought, Isn’t he just gathering stars so quickly because he drew Excalibur?
Excalibur was that special a Star Relic, after all.
They had assumed the holy sword had played a large part in the boy’s abnormal growth. After witnessing his life directly, they could no longer entertain the idea.
What living being lived like that?
If that was what it took to hang eight stars by the age of twenty, they would rather stay content as they were. With that thought the Transcendents shook their heads. Only now could they accept the boy’s ridiculous speed of growth.
“Merlin.”
“Mm.”
“About this time.”
“Go on.”
Najin started to speak, then closed his mouth.
“……”
The image of Merlin that the Revelry Emperor had impersonated had risen in his mind. The same landscape formed inside Merlin’s head as well; she gave a bitter smile.
“It was dangerous, yeah.”
She nodded.
“I never expected it to be this tricky either. I can’t even guess when or from where she started extending her claws.”
Even though it had only been a spiritual body rather than her true form, the Revelry Emperor had succeeded in deceiving Merlin herself. That fact struck Najin as genuinely shocking.
To him Merlin was an unshakable presence—the one who always taught him the right answer, no matter when or under what circumstances. The moment that presence had wavered, he had felt a considerable jolt. Sensing his gaze, Merlin sighed and hooked an arm around his neck.
“Still, you did pretty well. You caught on right away.”
“We’re connected, after all.”
“Mm. But one thing.”
With a faint smile she jabbed him lightly in the side with her elbow.
“The version of me the Revelry Emperor put on—annoying as it was—probably wasn’t that far off.”
“……Pardon?”
“You said that if you ever choked me, I’d just smack you into next week. That I wouldn’t hesitate.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you think I’m talking about?”
As if to say she shouldn’t have to spell it out, Merlin narrowed her eyes and glared at him. Najin tilted his head; Merlin sighed as though the whole conversation was pointless.
Then—
Pak!
She smacked him across the back and rose to her feet.
“Anyway, whatever.”
She held out a hand to him.
“Brace yourself.”
Things were going to get a little harder from here.
Najin nodded at her words. Exactly as she said, if they were to challenge the Revelry Emperor, one great trial still remained.
The Imperial First Horn—Alderan Basaglia.
The Revelry Emperor still held a trump card in her hand.
3.
Transcendents had no real need to sleep.
They needed neither food nor drink; simply bathing in starlight supplied the power required for activity.
Only those who had recently become Transcendents still ate, drank, and sought sleep out of habit.
Najin had not been a Transcendent for long, yet the long years spent active in the Outer Land had made him accustomed to going without sleep. Even so—why? Lying in the tent to rest, he felt his eyelids grow heavy.
Mental exhaustion? Physical weariness?
He could not name the reason, but the tide of drowsiness simply washed over him and he closed his eyes for a moment. Just as he meant to rest them briefly—
Tuk.
Someone touched his body. Not content with that, they shook him awake. Had a visitor come? Najin blinked and tried to sit up.
Or rather, he tried.
“……”
He blinked. He had no choice. Right beside his reclining form sat someone looking down at him.
Crimson eyes glinted between long lashes. White hair, spilled forward because she had bowed her head, brushed against his face.
It was Yuel Razian, Executioner of the Holy Blood Church.
“I can’t get up while you’re sitting there.”
“Ah. Forgive me.”
Yuel lifted her head. Najin slowly raised himself to a sitting position. When his eyes asked the reason for her visit, her lips moved for a moment without sound.
Najin’s gaze narrowed.
He could not claim to know Yuel Razian well, yet he had spent enough time with her. The Yuel Razian he knew never hesitated. She was a direct person who simply spoke whatever rose to her tongue.
Yet now she was choosing her words.
After chewing her lip and fretting for a long while, Yuel Razian finally opened her mouth.
“Najin.”
“Yes. I’m listening.”
“Would it be all right if we spoke for a moment? No one else comes to mind with whom I might share this.”
Najin nodded slowly. He rose, drank a cup of water, then gave a small nod that invited her to continue. After another stretch of silence, Yuel spoke.
“I dreamed.”
She said it quietly.
“I dreamed. The others say they wandered the Graveyard of Stars, yet for some reason I wandered inside my own dream.”
A dream, she called it.
“It was a dream from a very long time ago. That is… it seemed connected to a past even I myself had forgotten.”
Yuel’s eyes sank low.
“In the dream I chose something. I gave something up, I let something go, I forgot something, and I longed for something else.”
Her voice trembled—only a little, yet it trembled. To Najin it was disconcerting. The Yuel who had always seemed stripped of human emotion was showing a human face.
“I do not know what I discarded, what I abandoned, or what I released. Yet one thing I could be certain of.”
Her lips moved again.
“A question about my past—something I had never once wondered about—suddenly arose. And the me of the past……”
Yuel’s head tilted at a slight angle. Pure-white hair spilled down. As though even she could not understand it, she laid a hand over her own heart.
“She looked at me and said this.”
She spoke.
“‘Have you obtained the Star of Oblivion?’”