Argonaut (3)
Galahad waits at the tower's summit — the thirteenth stratum.
Then who dwells on the twelfth, the floor nearest that summit? Now that he knew the answer, Najin could only laugh.
From the moment he entered the Sanctuary of Oblivion, where forgotten memories gathered, and from the moment he set foot in the tower where forgotten heroes had come together, Najin had thought, Maybe.
Maybe he would find a reunion here.
The intuition that had hardened into half a certainty the day he met the Blue Lance was now simply the truth. Najin climbed. He passed the tenth stratum and stepped into the eleventh. From then on, one by one, people began to recognize him.
"That swordsmanship — are you by any chance…?"
They spoke a name from the blade in his hand.
"That technique just now — was that Ramming? I've met someone in this tower who used the exact same art…"
They pointed at the Cross-Star Lance he held and named the technique. Najin answered with a smile.
"Yes. That's right."
He walked on.
"This lance is called the Cross-Star Lance, and the banner slung across my shoulder is the war standard of the Golden Horn Knights."
He climbed higher.
"The swordsmanship I wield is the Triumphant Sword, and its founder is Alderan Basaglia — Imperial First Horn of a hundred and fifty years past."
He left the eleventh stratum behind and made for the twelfth.
"And I…"
The one hundred twenty-ninth floor.
"…"
Najin's steps stopped. Knights stood where he halted. Each bore a lance across his back, and every head was crowned with a horned helm.
An order of thirteen.
At their center sat the man whose horned helm shone brightest of all. He was perched on a boulder, a single sword at his hip. He lifted his head, and thirteen knights looked at Najin.
"I am."
Before them, Najin struck his pauldron with his fist. Iron rang — clack — and he smiled.
"Commander of the Golden Horn Knights, and a pillar of the Empire."
Before the assembled order, he gave his name.
"Pillar of Dawn. Najin."
The instant Najin spoke his name, silence settled over the one hundred twenty-ninth floor. What broke it was the snap of a knight's head turning, the clatter of his helm, and then the sharp clack! of him flipping up his visor.
"Commander — I win the bet, don't I? I told you! If what you said was true, that friend of yours was bound to make it all the way up here!"
One by one, starting with him, the knights began to raise their visors or pull their helms free.
"Never thought I'd live to see Calven win a wager. Though I'll grant you — the odds were decent this time."
"What kind of knight leaves a place like this alone? Commander, you've raised one hell of a disciple. Look at him — the bearing's already there."
"Whose disciple, you say? The same foul-tempered commander who swore up and down he'd never take a student — that one's disciple."
They talked over one another, looking from face to face, and then they started toward Najin. Eleven of them came forward — everyone except the Helmet Knight still seated on the rock and the knight standing guard at his side.
"Hah! Look at that coat. Isn't that a Free Knight's coat? By the gods — wearing one of those has been my life's wish…!"
"Would you like to try it on?"
"What? Is that all right?"
The knight who immediately began stripping off his armor was Calven. His comrades tried to stop him; he ignored them, cast the plate aside, and pulled on the coat Najin held out.
"Hahhh."
The moment it settled on his shoulders, he sucked in a breath.
"The fabric is incredible. And the finish — how is it this perfect? Walk the capital streets in this and the ladies would absolutely lose their minds. Damn it. If I'd had this coat, I could have proposed to that young lady…"
As Calven lamented the great regret of his life, the knight beside him snorted.
"One correction: the coat wouldn't have helped. There's an old saying — ornament is finished by the face. Look at yours, then look at his."
Calven checked his own reflection in a well-polished breastplate, then glanced at Najin's face. Between them lay something like the gulf between a Sword Seeker and a Sword Master.
"…Damn."
"Good. You've learned."
The knight who stepped past Calven introduced himself as Paragon. He offered Najin a formal salute.
"My name is Paragon. It is an honor to meet the next commander of the Golden Horn Knights. Calven here may be a little short on manners — I hope you'll forgive him."
"I don't mind at all."
"We're grateful for that. First, allow me to introduce the order…"
He pointed to each of the others in turn and gave their names. When the eleven introductions were done, he hesitated a moment, then put a question to Najin.
"Sir Najin? One thing, if I may. The last word we had from the commander was that you were attempting to subjugate the Revelry Emperor. Might we hear how that campaign ended?"
"Of course."
Eleven knights fell silent. They waited, silent, for what he would say next. In their eyes Najin saw tension, hope, fear.
Of course they're afraid.
To the Golden Horn Knights, the Revelry Emperor had been a nightmare. A demon who had swallowed twelve of them whole and nearly taken their commander as well. "Nemesis" was too small a word.
Knowing that —
"Well, naturally."
Najin answered with a smile.
"I won. I broke her in single combat."
He snapped his fingers. With Merlin's help he showed them a single scene from his mindscape: the finishing art of the Dawn Sword shearing through the Revelry Emperor's neck.
"Her head still hangs from the Empire's first pillar. I cut it rather cleanly, if I do say so — a shame I can't show you the real thing."
As he spoke, one knight let out a long breath of relief. Another clenched a fist. Someone else dragged a hand down his face and bit hard into his lip.
"At last. At last…"
Paragon muttered the words and pressed his fingers to his brow. Then he dropped to one knee before Najin — one knee, the deepest respect he could offer — and lowered his head.
He was not alone.
All eleven knights paid their respects, each in his own way. Paragon spoke for them.
"We have heard what you did for our commander, and for us. For fulfilling our dearest wish, and for carrying on the Golden Horn Knights, we offer you our highest honor."
Armor clattered as they stepped aside. Through the gap they made, Najin looked ahead. The Helmet Knight still sat on the boulder, watching him, and beside him stood the Silent Knight.
"Go on."
You can take your time talking with us later.
Between the knights who cleared the way, Najin walked toward the Helmet Knight. Only then did the Helmet Knight move — and even then, barely. He shifted his head just enough to look at the man standing before him, and nothing more.
No joy at the reunion. No sign he even recognized Najin. Confusion pricked at him. He had imagined a dozen ways the Helmet Knight might react when they met again; this was not among them.
"Najin? A moment, over here."
It was not the Helmet Knight who broke the silence. It was Kruenbel.
"First — it's good to see you, Najin."
A little apart from the Helmet Knight, Kruenbel spoke with him alone. His appearance and his voice both felt strangely unfamiliar. As if he had noticed the look, Kruenbel gave a short laugh.
"This is the first time you've seen me with a head attached, isn't it?"
"…You remember?"
"Not precisely. No head, and worn down by long years of erosion — I only remember that you and I clashed with everything we had."
He removed his helm. Beneath it was the clean-featured face of a young man. It felt almost rude to think it, but Najin found the sight of Kruenbel with a head strangely awkward.
"This is a little embarrassing."
Kruenbel scratched the back of his neck, abashed.
"I don't know how you remember me, but I doubt it matched the name Silent Knight. A dead man howling and tearing through everything in sight, after all."
He touched the horn-pipe at his hip — the signal horn, the object that had been almost his emblem.
"I forgot myself, and history forgot me. Thanks to you I met a knight's end at the last, but… I never recovered myself. Not even then."
It was true. In the final moment he had shown a knight's pride, yet Kruenbel had still died as one of the eroded dead.
"So the man standing here is whole. I hold both my own memories and the knowledge of how the outside world remembered me."
But, Kruenbel said.
"Not the commander."
He pointed to the Helmet Knight seated on the stone.
"We have watched him here for a long time. In this place the commander lost his memories and regained them, over and over — as if he were playing tug-of-war with the commander outside."
Tug-of-war. That was the word he used.
"Put another way: the commander outside was also losing and reclaiming his memories again and again. Proof that he was thrashing against oblivion, fighting it."
"Which is why everyone here knows your story," Kruenbel added with a bitter smile. "Every time a scrap of the commander's memory washed in, he talked about you with pure delight."
"My story?"
"Yes. You have no idea how happy he sounded. Said he'd taken on a disciple who was an absolute monster. Said teach him one thing and the unlucky bastard learned ten. He praised you until his tongue went dry."
"Is that actually praise? It doesn't sound like it…"
"Haha. You know how he is — stingy with compliments. Still… when he talked like that, he looked happy. And we were happy with him."
Because —
"In a place built from a past already failed, the commander was looking at the present."
Kruenbel met Najin's eyes.
"Listening to your story, we laughed. We gripped our hands until the sweat came. And when we heard you'd finally beaten me and mastered Ramming — I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I stood up and cheered myself."
And that was only the beginning.
"When you broke the commander's stubbornness and forced him to draw his sword. When he decided to teach you. When he took off his helm and began to think of himself as a knight again…"
Kruenbel recited the tales he had heard from the Helmet Knight, and he looked glad as he did it. Smiling, he nodded.
"The feeling — the sheer joy — we felt the moment he finally reclaimed himself… there are no words for it."
"…"
"I've gone on too long. What I wanted to say is this. Unlike me, unlike the rest of us, the commander recovered himself at the end. He died as Alderan Basaglia, with every memory restored."
Kruenbel tapped his temple.
"Because of that, the commander here has no 'memories of Alderan Basaglia.' He did — but the commander outside took them with him."
Alderan Basaglia had met a complete death.
In his final moment he had remembered everything, reclaimed himself, and died not as the Revelry Emperor's jester or as one of the eroded, but as Imperial First Horn. So in this realm of oblivion, Alderan's memories do not exist.
The Alderan outside had carried them away.
"'The me outside is calling me,' the commander said — those were his last words as he closed his eyes. And at the end, he was smiling."
"Then the one sitting over there is…"
Najin turned his gaze.
Looking at Alderan perched on the boulder, he recalled what the heroes had told him. The heroes of this place were made of two things — because Guinevere had taken two things from them.
One: a hero's own memories. Two: the age's record of that hero — the way the world itself had remembered him. Together those two things composed the existence of every hero here.
And Alderan, fighting oblivion to the end, had reclaimed his own memories. He had taken back one of the two.
Then —
Najin looked at Kruenbel, and Kruenbel nodded as if to confirm the guess.
"Yes. The commander here is not made of his own memories. He is made only of the world's recognition of the man called Alderan Basaglia."
The Empire's first pillar.
The central figure of the Dawn War.
The great hero who ended countless conflicts and finally closed the age of war itself — the man who had steered his era. A hundred and fifty years ago, the world had called him this:
"War Hero, Alderan Basaglia."
The sum of every recognition of that hero — history itself.
That was the identity of the man sitting there.