Yuel Razian (7)
There is no right answer or wrong answer in this world.
That is simply how the world works. It never splits cleanly into black and white, nor does it divide itself neatly into good and evil. Had the Lighthouse Keeper Eurypylos not said as much long ago?
That the world was never so simple.
And so, never stop questioning it.
Najin had taken those words to heart, carving them deep into his memory.
Perhaps that was why, when Yuel had muttered in self-mockery that there could be neither right nor wrong answers in this world, Najin had answered on pure reflex: There will be a better answer.
There had to be. A better answer.
And if there wasn’t, he would make one. It was a pity for effort to go unrewarded. And at the end of this particular story, as far as Najin was concerned…
“Looks like we found a better answer, doesn’t it?”
Whether it was the right answer or the wrong one, he still couldn’t say.
But at the very least, it seemed they had found a better one.
“My instincts appear to have been correct. If I had executed Yuel the way the Tower Lord suggested, I get the feeling it would have been a complete disaster.”
—Well, yeah. Probably.
Merlin nodded.
—The way the Star of Oblivion looked at that kid, Yuel… it was pretty fond, you know? Every star has something it cherishes. And when someone goes and breaks the thing you cherish, well…
No need to spell out what happens after that.
She was right. If they had executed Yuel on the spot, the Star of Oblivion would have moved in an entirely different way. He didn’t care to imagine what that way might have looked like.
And if they had simply driven Yuel out of the Imperial Army instead?
That future didn’t look particularly bright either. If the Star of Oblivion wiped Yuel’s memories and left her a blank slate… there was someone nearby who would have poured paint into that emptiness without a second thought.
Najin had chosen neither of those paths.
After long deliberation he had produced an entirely different answer. Even by his own standards it was a satisfying one, so he nodded and let out a long breath.
Thud.
He sat himself down at the edge of the tomb.
I was thrown out, but…
The tomb had not yet vanished. The protagonist of the stage was still continuing her story. He didn’t know how long it would take, but it wouldn’t be long. The flow of time inside and outside was different, after all.
“……”
Najin waited for her in silence.
The reason was simple.
Because that was the promise they had made.
Tap.
How much time passed, he couldn’t say. Footsteps sounded from somewhere. The closer they came, the more the blood-soaked code of law grew faint.
Tap.
It meant the conquest of the Star’s Tomb was ending. Then came a crackling sound as the Star’s Tomb collapsed. Stepping free of the crumbling tomb was her.
“Ah.”
It was Yuel.
Almost nothing about her had changed from when she entered the tomb. She still wore the garments marked with the symbol of the Holy Blood Church. Her expression was still blank by default, her emotions still sparse.
Not much had changed.
But something clearly had.
The moment her blank face turned toward Najin, it began to shift. Her eyes flew wide. Her lips parted. Then those lips moved. Half-lidded eyes fixed on him, she…
“Finally.”
Smiled. She smiled.
“Finally, I met you.”
It was not a smile that belonged on the face of a woman called a murderer. It did not suit the woman so devoid of feeling she had been called a doll. Anyone who saw her now would only tilt their head at those nicknames—murderer, doll—and wonder if they had ever been right.
“……Ah?”
And Yuel herself was no exception.
She blinked.
The smile that had lingered on her lips for only a moment vanished. Returning to her usual blank expression, she raised a finger and touched the corner of her mouth, as if she could not understand why she had smiled like that, or why she had murmured finally, I met you.
“Hmm. Hmm.”
Her expression grew complicated.
It grew even more so whenever she looked at Najin.
“Najin? Do you happen to remember what occurred inside the tomb? I have no recollection of any of it.”
“Are you curious?”
“No. I am not curious. For reasons I do not understand, my past self seems to have been satisfied when she erased those memories. Whatever they were, I have no reason to wonder about them.”
An answer different from before.
“But……”
“But?”
“It is… strange.”
Yuel pressed a hand firmly against her chest.
“Something feels a little… hmm. Strange.”
She could not name what was strange. For a woman who had lived nearly two hundred years without emotion, feeling itself was unknown territory. Suddenly handed back her emotions, she looked thoroughly flustered.
How was she supposed to describe this feeling?
While she fretted over it, her tongue suddenly moved of its own accord, as if pronouncing a language that had soaked into it over long years.
Fuckin’… no, that wasn’t it.
Yuel clamped her mouth shut against the curse that had almost slipped out more naturally than usual. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a fucking awful feeling. It was the opposite. She had only reached for a swear out of sheer embarrassment at having to explain the situation.
Embarrassed?
Yuel tilted her head.
That, too, was an emotion she was feeling for the first time.
“Mmmmm.”
It seemed she was going to need a little time.
The change had only just begun.
It was hardly the most fitting moment for an epilogue, but once a story reaches its end, people need a chance to catch their breath.
First.
“How…?”
Cypria Gachevska, Lord of the Platinum Tower, blinked up at the sky. Roughly a day had passed since Najin had grabbed Yuel and leapt straight into the Star’s Tomb. High above, the thousands of rolling eyes that had been churning across the heavens slowly closed.
Then they melted away into empty air and vanished.
The last thing those eyes had seen was Yuel stepping free of the tomb, smiling brightly as she looked at Najin. The moment the Star of Oblivion confirmed that she no longer longed for her past, that she was smiling at the present, it disappeared without a trace.
While Cypria was still blinking, Gerd—who had been preparing to cut the sky from the cliff top—quietly slid his sword back into its scabbard. Steel met steel with a sharp click.
“……”
He descended the cliff without a word and met Najin walking toward the tents. No long conversation was required. Gerd clapped Najin on the shoulder twice and spoke briefly.
“Well done.”
The incident was resolved. Tension drained from the Imperial Army as they finally drew full breaths; even a few of the transcendents had to wipe cold sweat from their brows. Confronting a fragment of the Star of Oblivion for the first time, they could not help but share a single question.
Was that thing truly a transcendent like them?
Just as ordinary humans looked at a Sword Seeker and wondered whether that was truly the same species of human, they looked upon a fragment of the Star of Oblivion and felt the same doubt.
The rank was different.
It was the kind of overwhelming presence one might expect only from the Stars of the Round Table hanging at the far edge of the Outer Land.
“The Revelry Emperor, the Star of Oblivion… are those things really transcendents like us?”
“Well, the Revelry Emperor and us are different from the number of stars up. That devil’s supposed to have eleven, right?”
“Even allowing for that… haah.”
Just as ordinary people felt a wall before transcendents, some of the transcendents felt emptiness before a vast star that reduced them to mere humans. Not all of them, of course.
One star laughed that it looked like it would be fun to cut.
Another marveled that a higher realm still existed.
There was no need to ask which type Najin belonged to. His goal had always been higher than the Star of Oblivion to begin with, and the Star of Oblivion had long since been added to Najin’s “list” under the name of the Revelry Emperor as well.
The list. In other words, a kill list.
Najin had seen more than a few people broken by the Star of Oblivion. Even if the Revelry Emperor had borrowed its authority, the Star of Oblivion itself had done no small amount of the damage.
So it was a being that would have to be brought down someday.
That was how Najin regarded the Star of Oblivion.
But……
Najin let out a long breath.
“Merlin.”
—……
“Merlin?”
—I’m listening.
Ever since the Star’s Tomb—especially after that final kiss of Yuel’s—Merlin had been oddly sulky. Najin watched her carefully as he asked his question.
“About the Star of Oblivion.”
He recalled the end of the Star’s Tomb. He had averted his eyes from the Star of Oblivion’s true form, but he had roughly grasped the conversation between Yuel and the Star.
That conversation had left him unsettled.
Just as he opened his mouth to speak of it, Merlin pressed a finger to her lips and shook her head.
—Don’t recall it. Don’t think about it too deeply either.
“……”
—It’s still too early. Your target right now is the Revelry Emperor. You can think about the Star of Oblivion after that. Right?
Even recalling it would let the Star of Oblivion sense him. At Merlin’s warning, Najin nodded.
“Ah, but Merlin.”
—Hm?
“You seemed to have looked. Is that all right?”
When Najin had turned his eyes away from the Star of Oblivion’s true form, Merlin had been looking at it. Judging by her earlier remark about the Star gazing fondly at Yuel, she had watched everything.
—Oh, that?
Merlin answered as if it were nothing.
—I already know. What the Star of Oblivion looks like.
“……What?”
—How many stars she has, her true name—those are a bit fuzzy. But I at least know what she looks like.
Because she had run into her a few times.
Merlin said nothing more on the subject. She only left him with the remark that he would come to know it naturally with time.
That was the second matter.
And lastly, the third: the protagonist of this story, the one who would have the most to say. Perhaps calling what she was about to do an “epilogue” was not quite right.
A prologue. An overture.
Those words might fit better. Only now could she begin her life again.
“Hmm.”
Unlike her usual self she hesitated, faltered, fretted…
Tap.
Then she set her feet in motion.
“……”
Her steps turned naturally toward him. Just as they had for a very long time—a hundred years, a hundred and fifty years. She walked toward the someone she had searched for across ages.
The walk was not long, yet it felt long.
A low cliff.
On a cliff where tough weeds that had survived even the Outer Land grew in sparse patches, he sat. She approached without a word and settled beside him.
The wind blew.
Through hair stirred by the breeze, she smiled faintly. For some reason, she could smile easily at his side.
In front of others she could still act as usual—blank-faced, emotionless. But in front of this man, she simply could not manage it.
She did not know why.
And that change, Yuel Razian thought, was not so bad at all.
“It is a strange feeling.”
“Strange? What is?”
“Najin, I have traveled with you a few times, but to put it another way, it has only been a few times. In a life that has stretched more than a hundred and fifty years at minimum, the portion you occupy amounts to a few weeks, or perhaps a few months.”
And yet…
Yuel murmured as she looked at him.
“It feels as though I have spent far longer than that at your side. Why do you suppose that is?”
Najin shrugged. Yuel was not speaking in expectation of an answer. She simply talked while the wind washed over her.
“And one more thing.”
She rested a hand on her chest.
“Originally, I could only feel that I was alive when I killed people. When I killed someone, heard their screams, soaked myself in blood—only then, through the pounding of my heart, could I feel that I lived.”
That was why she had enjoyed murder.
“But now……”
She glanced at Najin.
“Simply being beside you makes my heart race. I can feel that I am alive. This is the first time I have felt this way.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. And it is not bad. Not bad at all.”
It was far from calm.
A racing pulse, a ticklish sensation, a beating heart, a touch of tension, and a smile that kept slipping free. These were emotions Yuel had never possessed until now.
“Should I call it… good?”
She tilted her head.
“Yes. I think it is good.”
Watching her, Najin could feel it. She was finding the self she had lost. It was nothing like the Yuel he had known disappearing.
She was simply becoming a little more human—Yuel, changing by degrees.
Nothing would change drastically. But she would keep changing. Because she herself felt the change was “good.”
“My past self……”
She lifted her hand.
“Felt a sense of relief and thought, this is enough. Because she believed that even if she forgot, someone else would remember for her.”
It was fine to forget.
Fine if everything was erased.
“Because someone would remember me, and would recognize me when we met again. That was enough. That is what my past self seems to have thought. And……”
Yuel stretched out the hand she had raised. Without thinking she took Najin’s hand. She did not know why. She had simply wanted to hold it.
She was honest with her desires now.
There was no longer any need to restrain herself.
Sliding her fingers between his until their hands were laced together, she smiled shyly.
“Ah. So it was you after all.”
It was a smile that was brand-new to the present Yuel.
And thoroughly familiar to Najin. His gaze drifted, unbidden, to her wrist. A bracelet there chimed softly as it swayed.
“What is this, Yuel?”
“What do you mean, what? Are you blind? Anyone can see it’s a bracelet.”
It was a bracelet familiar to Najin.
Because the Yuel of the past had worn it.
“So why a bracelet?”
She had been a woman as far from luxury as one could get. Even seated as a lord she never adorned herself, limiting herself to the barest self-care. Yet one day she had begun wearing a single bracelet.
It would have been around the time Najin started living with her.
Whenever he asked about it she would spit out a curse for no reason and trail off. There seemed to be letters engraved on the inside, but she would sooner die than show him the inner face of the bracelet.
“What, did you write some kind of curse on it? What does it say?”
“Fuck off, you don’t need to know!”
He could have forced a look if he wanted, but that would have meant listening to Yuel’s swearing for days. So Najin had never particularly checked the inside of the bracelet.
“Hmm.”
“What are you staring at? You wanna die for real?”
Besides, with an ordinary person’s dynamic vision it was hard to read the letters that flashed by each time the bracelet chimed.
“……”
But in this moment—
with a body that had returned nearly to the level of a transcendent—Najin’s dynamic vision, against his will, suddenly read the words written in the gap of the swaying bracelet.
And.
“Ah.”
Najin couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
When Yuel asked why he was laughing, he shook his head. There was definitely a reason she had been embarrassed. This was something he should never have read first. It was something she would have wanted to say herself, someday.
Najin erased the inscription from his memory.
Learning it in advance would have been rude to her.
Whatever letters were written inside, that bracelet was a Star Relic. Even if Najin had helped, the one who conquered the Star’s Tomb in the end was Yuel herself, and she had been granted a single Star Relic.
Really now.
He felt he already knew what function that Star Relic possessed.
What a ridiculous obsession.
The habit of flipping off a transcendent at the very end of one’s life didn’t just vanish. Looking at the bracelet that had carved a loophole into the contract, Najin couldn’t help smiling.
When the contract with the Star of Oblivion ended—
on some day when the Star of Omniscience set—
if she wished it, she would regain her memories. The memories that should have vanished from this world were stored whole inside the Star Relic.
And when that day came…
Najin would hear the words engraved on the inside of that bracelet from her own lips.
“Hey, fuck! Eyes off, damn it! You really want me to stab you? I’ll fucking stab you!”
“I didn’t look. I wasn’t even trying to look.”
Probably—no, certainly—
together with the swearing she used to hide her embarrassment.