A City for the Forgotten (3)
Najin set foot at the city's threshold.
Ahead of him lay a city. Or perhaps "a city" was the wrong word. It would be truer to call it cities become one.
Before his eyes, countless cities were stacked one upon another—piled, tangled, knotted together until they formed a single mass. The sight was like looking at the sedimentary layers of human history itself.
A city that had vanished some two hundred years ago. Ruins that seemed to belong to a civilization five centuries old. A tower that had disappeared without a trace seven hundred years past. Countless other structures, all of them tangled and settled into one another.
That's supposed to be a city?
Guinevere had named the place the City of Deposition, but to Najin's eyes it was a nation. No one would call a land of that scale a mere city. Something on the order of an empire sat out there before him.
A grinding sound—teeth clenched hard—pulled Najin's gaze aside. Kirchhoff stood there, eyes wide, staring at the sanctuary with naked intensity.
"That one."
Kirchhoff stretched out a hand. His finger pointed to a tower that jutted free of the mass.
"The bell tower of Rondinel. Never thought I'd see it again like this."
"Those look like the remnants of the old churches," Yuel added. "The ones that existed before the Holy Blood, Holy Radiance, and Holy Body Churches took root… churches whose very names have been forgotten."
Merlin, now fully manifested, glanced over the city and muttered under her breath.
"She gathered quite a lot."
She let out a sigh.
"Structures from a hundred years ago at the short end—up to a thousand years at the long. And besides…"
It wasn't only buildings, either.
Merlin frowned as she said it. Najin, for his part, watched the city with an unreadable face. Turning over what Guinevere had told him, he started walking.
"As I said before, the name attached to this sanctuary is the Deposition Grounds. Or the Landfill, if you prefer."
Deposition or landfill—the meaning was much the same. Najin sorted what he knew of the place, along with everything he had newly learned.
"Cities, nations, people erased and forgotten by the Constellation of Oblivion… in other words, the place where the history of humanity itself has settled into layers."
Stories wiped clean and forgotten until no one could remember them lay buried here. People, cities, nations—histories, even—all of it was here.
"And the Star of Oblivion chose, by her own will, which beings would be 'forgotten.' I don't know exactly how she means to use them, but she told me… that this is a lesser evil prepared for the future in which I fail."
"Preparing for failure, is she."
Kirchhoff snorted.
"A pretty enough excuse. There's never a shortage of excuses when someone means to do evil."
"My thoughts aren't far from yours."
"So? What does the greatest knight of all intend to do about it? While she talks of lesser evils—"
Trailing off, Kirchhoff pointed at the deposition grounds.
"What answer do you mean to give a constellation that swallowed a city—no, a history—of that size? May I ask?"
"Of course."
Najin turned back.
He offered Kirchhoff a faint, crooked smile.
"The answer's simple."
"Simple, is it?"
"I'm more capable than any of you."
Najin took hold of Excalibur.
"My best doesn't need your lesser evil. All I have to do is prove it. Isn't that the whole of the story?"
As if that had been exactly the answer he wanted, Kirchhoff smiled. He nodded and took his place behind Najin. Najin glanced at Yuel.
"…"
Their eyes met, and she nodded without a word. She fell in behind him in silence, asking no questions at all. Just as Najin had once done for her, she simply showed her will: if you walk that way, I will walk with you.
"Then we're ready. Merlin?"
At Najin's call, Merlin nodded. Standing at his side, she stretched a hand toward the deposition grounds.
By nature, the paths of a sanctuary are twisted.
This is not like a star's tomb, which longs to be found. A sanctuary does not wait for visitors. It is a space for itself alone, and it has no need of proper roads.
Paths only the owner can recognize.
Spaces sorted by methods known only to them.
Finding a true road through such a place is all but impossible. All but—
"But not actually impossible."
Standing here was the most famous guide in history.
Her fingers brushed the starlight flowing through the deposition grounds. Merlin calculated the current of that light—and did more than calculate. She seized the flow and bent it into a road.
At a glance, the sanctuary seemed to have no rules.
Everything looked thrown together without any proper system of classification. Yet rules did exist here. Memories had been sorted by fixed criteria, and the sectors that held each kind of memory were cleanly divided.
Those dividing lines—the roads that separated the sectors—Merlin found them.
With a sharp motion, she clenched her fist around the current and swept her hand through the air, as if hauling in a net. Caught in that net was a road. A three-way fork appeared before Najin.
Three paths.
Pointing to them, Merlin spoke.
"If you dig deeper it splits into dozens of branches, but for convenience I made it three. There are only three of us here, after all."
First:
"One leads to the domain where the memories of ordinary people—common folk—are gathered."
Second:
"Two is for nations. Cities, organizations, and other great collectives—memories that belong to groups on the scale of a state."
And last, three:
"And three… heroes. The place where the memories of extraordinary individuals have gathered. Beings so complete in themselves that no other category can hold them. In other words, the memories of constellations and their like."
Having explained each path, Merlin stepped back. A guide's role was to show the roads; choosing which one to walk belonged to each person alone.
"I'll take this one."
Yuel spoke first.
She pointed to the path of ordinary people.
"The… ah, well. The lord of the Closed City says this is the right road for us. Heroes and nations are beyond imagining, and she can't feel any kinship with them either…"
No one objected. She took her place before the first path. Kirchhoff spoke next.
"Lady Merlin, may I ask one question?"
"Ask away."
"You said the second path is for nations. Then the center of that domain would be…"
"You're right. It's Rondinel. Of all the collectives buried here, it's the largest, so the whole sector is built around it."
"I see."
Kirchhoff nodded.
"Then this is the only road for me."
He stood before the second path.
"And that leaves this one for me."
Najin took his place before the third path as a matter of course. The place where the memories of heroes gathered—that was the road he had meant to choose from the start.
"Well then."
Standing each before their own road, the three of them looked at one another.
Luck. Strength. A reunion at the end of the path.
Each left the others a word, then stepped forward. If they failed to break through their domains, they would become part of those domains and be imprisoned in the Sanctuary of Oblivion… but none of them acted as if failure were something they were prepared to accept.
What they aimed for was the best possible outcome.
Toward that best, they set their feet upon the road.
2.
The moment his foot came down, the landscape warped. The chaotic, jumbled scenery began to realign. Najin looked to the side, but neither Yuel nor Kirchhoff was there.
Each had gone their own way.
Najin walked the path he had chosen, turning Merlin's words over in his mind. She had said this road led to the place where the memories of heroes were gathered.
The memories of heroes.
He mulled the phrase.
There were many who had been forgotten by the Revelry Emperor and the Star of Oblivion—or who had forgotten themselves. A great many. Did that mean the memories they had lost were here? That they existed here in some form or other?
With those thoughts for company, he kept walking.
How long he walked, he could not say. At last the reordering of the scenery seemed to finish, and the chaos settled. The road of starlight came to an end. The next step Najin took met solid ground.
Feet planted on earth, he looked ahead.
A vast hillside. Golden ears of grain swayed in the wind across the slopes. Weapons of every kind were driven into the hill, and a road wound on between the graves those weapons made.
Following that road with his eyes, he lifted his head…
A colossal structure rose before him.
Whether to call it a tower, a belfry, or a citadel, Najin could not say. It was all of them at once—as if whole cities had been stacked into a tower climbing toward the sky.
"…"
One thing was clear: the peak of that structure touched the sky itself. And there, someone's constellation hung.
A constellation of ten stars.
"That's Galahad's star."
Merlin said it deliberately—Galahad's, not Lancelot's.
"The shapes of Lancelot's and Galahad's constellations are different. And that one is Galahad's. Why it's hanging here, I don't know."
"That's what we're here to find out."
Najin nodded and started walking. Climbing that tower, at least, seemed unavoidable. When he reached its base, he tipped his head back and looked up.
A tower so vast its summit was lost from sight.
It was not merely tall. Its breadth was no less extraordinary; by eye, it covered as much ground as a fair-sized city.
…Why such a tower stood in a place of heroes' memories, he could not say. But he was certain that climbing it would give him the answer.
Thud.
Najin pushed open the great iron doors set in the tower's main gate. With a grinding rumble they swung wide, and he stepped inside…
And stopped dead on the first step.
He had no choice.
On the first floor of the tower—on the foundation layer beneath everything else—someone was sitting. At the sound of the doors, the man rose. He had been writing something until a moment ago; a pen and a journal still rested in his hands.
"A new guest? I don't know how you came to a place like this, but welcome. I am…"
His clothes hung as if scoured for years by desert wind. A cloth was wrapped about his head, and he held a single journal against his chest. The breeze that rose around him carried the smell of sand—a wind that called up barren dunes.
Najin knew a man who traveled with a wind like that, who looked like that.
"Blue Spear."
The knight who had fought oblivion in the desert. The knight who, even as he forgot each day, still spoke of tomorrow—stood there before him.
"Ah. You know me?"
At Blue Spear's question, Najin caught his breath for a moment. Of course he wouldn't remember me. Najin smiled bitterly and opened his mouth.
"Yes. I know you."
You may have forgotten me—but I could never forget you.
"You wouldn't know me, but I—"
"Why wouldn't I know you?"
The answer that came back was nothing like what he had expected.
While Najin blinked, Blue Spear smiled. He tapped the journal in his hand with the back of his knuckles.
"I was only teasing you a little. It's been a while, Najin."