Traces of You
Months had already passed since the war ended.
All that time, I had searched for Riven's traces, starting from the orphanage where we grew up together and making my way through the villages and cities around it, one by one — but finding him was not as easy as I'd imagined.
Because the clues I had were far too few.
That he had left the orphanage around the age of fourteen.
And that he carried a necklace identical to the one I had worn as a child.
Those two things were the entirety of what I could say I knew for certain.
At first, I'd genuinely believed I would find him quickly. I knew exactly when Riven had left the orphanage, and I figured that if I simply traced his path from that point onward, step by careful step, I was bound to turn up some trace of him eventually.
But reality refused to cooperate.
No one could even tell me which direction he had gone after leaving the orphanage, and whenever I followed up on a rumor about a boy of fourteen seen around that time, it almost always turned out to be a completely different person — or someone whose memory of it had long since blurred.
In one place, I'd heard about a boy who passed through the village alone around the right time, and I spent days traveling to follow the lead — only to discover he had already left for another province years ago, a total stranger to me.
In another, I heard that a young mercenary had passed through the area long ago, and in a flicker of hope I made inquiries, but no one could even remember whether the man had worn a necklace.
All I had in my memory was the face of fourteen-year-old Riven, the habits he'd had since childhood, the foods he loved and hated, and the necklace we had bought together.
Eleven years had passed, and I knew nothing — not how tall he had grown, not whether his hair was long or short, not what work he did or where he had lived.
In the end, the Riven I knew was still frozen on that day we parted, at fourteen years old.
Even so, I had no intention of giving up. Even if it took years rather than months, I was going to find him — and if I were the kind of person who could quit over something like this, I never would have set out on this desperate search the moment the war ended.
"...Haa."
Not that it didn't wear me down. I'd spent the entire day wandering the city and was growing tired, and today had yielded nothing — not a single scrap of information. So I decided to call it a day, and after wandering in search of an inn, I ducked into a tavern that caught my eye.
Creak.
The moment I opened the door, a wave of noise and the familiar smell of alcohol I'd breathed countless times on the battlefield washed over me.
Glancing around the interior, I saw the place was packed almost entirely with what looked like mercenaries — some still in the process of shedding their armor and drinking, others already collapsed face-down on their tables.
I found an empty seat tucked into a corner and sat down.
"What can I get you?"
"Whatever's edible. Anything."
"Anything to drink?"
I considered it for a moment, but I wasn't really in the mood to drink, so I shook my head. "I'm fine."
Once the owner turned away, I leaned back in my chair and mentally retraced each of the places I'd visited that day, but as expected, nothing stood out. Should I head a bit further north tomorrow, or would it be better to circle back to the capital and start gathering information from scratch? I was still debating it when an unusually loud voice rang out from one side of the tavern.
"How many times do I have to say it! I'm the one who taught that brat to hold a sword from the very beginning!"
"Yeah, yeah. There he goes again."
"That's the fifth time today he's told that story."
"You punks doubt me, huh?"
When I turned my head, I saw a group of mercenaries clustered in a corner of the tavern, and at their center a grizzled old mercenary, his sparse white hair catching the lamplight, his face flushed deep red with drink as he waved his cup around.
"I'm telling you, it's true! You know the famous Guide. The Guide of the Vanguard!"
At the word Guide, my gaze drifted toward them before I could stop it.
It was a name I'd heard often enough here and there even after the war ended. He had been the captain of the Vanguard, always pushing into enemy lines ahead of us to carve out a path whenever we advanced against the Demon King, so I had seen his face any number of times myself.
But that was all it was. I decided it had nothing to do with the person I was looking for, and I was just turning my head back when the old mercenary's next words reached my ears.
"Must've been fourteen, maybe fifteen, when that kid first came to the frontline."
My body, mid-motion, froze in place.
Fourteen or fifteen.
If that were true, wouldn't that mean the Guide had spent roughly eleven years on the frontline?
Which would put the time he first arrived at the war almost exactly overlapping with the moment I left the orphanage — and Riven, too, had left the orphanage the very day after I did.
Of course, that alone proved nothing. It wasn't as if Riven were the only person in the world to have entered a battlefield at fourteen or fifteen.
But just as I was thinking that, a voice from long ago flashed through my mind.
On the battlefield, the Saintess had called for the Guide — and she had said the name Riven.
I hadn't thought anything of it at the time. The name Riven was common enough, and more than anything, the Guide I had seen on the battlefield had changed so much that he was hard to reconcile with the Riven I remembered.
The Riven of my childhood had a face without a single scar, a height close to my own, and no matter how hard he scowled or threw a tantrum, he was the kind of child who made you laugh before he ever made you afraid.
But the Guide I'd seen at war was covered head to toe in old scars, and even the way his eyes looked at people was nothing like the Riven I had known.
Above all, I had stood directly in front of that man any number of times without once thinking of Riven. So maybe it was only natural that the thought of them being the same person never even crossed my mind.
And yet, inexplicably, my heart had begun to pound.
A boy of fourteen or fifteen who had arrived at the frontline eleven years ago.
And the man who came to be called the Guide bore the name Riven.
The impossible thought refused to leave my head.
I rose from my seat at last, my chair screeching against the floor, but I had no presence of mind to care. As I pushed back my deep-drawn hood and approached the old mercenary's table, one of the men there noticed me, his eyes going wide, and grabbed the arm of the person beside him.
"Uh...?"
"What?"
"Wait. That person..."
The table that had been laughing and shouting only moments ago fell quickly silent, and before long one of the mercenaries who had recognized me shot up from his seat.
"H-Hero?"
At those words, the old mercenary turned his head too, his bleary, drink-loosened eyes snapping wide open in an instant.
"What?"
"That's the Hero!"
"Huh?"
The old man scrambled to his feet in a fluster, but that wasn't what mattered to me right now, so I spoke straight away.
"The man you were just talking about."
"Yes?"
"The Guide."
"Ah... yes."
All the bluster that had been loud enough to shake the tavern was gone somewhere, and the old man's voice had shrunk noticeably — but I couldn't even take that in properly.
"That man's name..."
I was only asking a single name, and yet my mouth had gone impossibly dry. I was terrified of hearing the answer I was thinking of, and terrified just as much of hearing a different one.
"Was it Riven?"
"...Yes."
The old man blinked once, then nodded. "That's right. He was called Riven."
The moment I heard it, it felt as though my breath caught in my throat — but still, I couldn't be certain yet. Riven was a common name, and the age could have coincided. There was one last thing left for me to confirm.
The thing that, I had once believed, only Riven and I in all the world understood the meaning of...
"Then... was he not wearing a necklace, by any chance?"
"A necklace?"
"Yes."
The old man furrowed his brow and rolled his eyes upward, dredging through his memory, and those few short seconds stretched out impossibly long. I couldn't even tell what I was hoping for anymore. The wish that he was Riven and the wish that he wasn't churned through my mind at the same time, and either way, I had the feeling there was no going back to how things had been before.
Then something seemed to come back to him, and the old man gave a small grunt of realization. "Ah."
That single syllable made my heart plummet.
"Yes. He was wearing one."
"......"
"It didn't look like anything expensive, but he treasured it like nothing else. On the battlefield you can lose a thing like that without even noticing, so no matter how many times people told him to take it off and put it away, he never once did."
I think the old man kept talking after that, but nothing more reached my ears.
The moment the two names — Riven and the Guide — overlapped in my mind, the countless scenes from the war began to resurface one by one, wearing entirely different meanings now.
I had brushed past him without knowing who he was.
We had crossed paths on the battlefield again and again, fought on the same fields again and again, and not once did I recognize that he was Riven.
The man who, every time we advanced on the Demon King, pushed into enemy lines ahead of us and carved a path at the very front of the Vanguard, where people died in endless numbers — he was Riven.
And the man who, in the moment we were surrounded by the Demon King's army, when no one could easily send a rescue force, came to us at the risk of his own life — that too was Riven.
The person I had spent months wandering the continent searching for like a madwoman had already stood before my eyes on the battlefield, time after time.
"...Then do you happen to know where the Guide is now?"
When I finally managed to force out the question, the old man hesitated for a moment, then shook his head apologetically.
"I couldn't say."
"...You don't know?"
"No. He vanished right after the war ended. Without a word to anyone about where he was going."
"He didn't tell anyone at all?"
"Not one person I know of ever heard a thing."
Upon hearing that, I thought that the Riven I knew wasn't someone who would have disappeared without a word — then immediately realized what a foolish thought that was.
Because I knew nothing of what had happened to Riven in those eleven years, what he had lived through, or how much he had changed along the way.
"Hero?"
At the old man's voice, I came back to myself just enough to pull out my coin purse and set it on the table as it was.
"Use that for the drinks."
"What? No, Hero, this is far too much—"
"It's payment for telling me about him."
I no longer had the strength to sit there and listen to anything more, so without waiting to hear the old man out, I turned and walked out of the tavern.
The moment I stepped through the door, the night air hit my face — air I would certainly have called cold only a short while ago — but I felt nothing at all. And with no sense of where I was even going, I walked forward, one step at a time.
Memories of the war were surfacing in my mind unbidden.
The scars that had covered every inch of him and that expressionless face. The way he had always fought at the very front, like a man who no longer cared whether he lived or died. And even that day, when he had come for us.
How many steps had I taken? Suddenly the strength drained from my legs, and unable to walk any further, I sank down at the edge of the road.
My palms scraped against the rough ground, but I couldn't even register the pain.
"Riven..."
I barely managed to call his name, but the sound wouldn't come out properly.
"Riven, why... why couldn't you even say a word to me...?"
When a single tear fell to the ground, everything I had been holding back came crashing down all at once.
If the man who led the rescue force into a place no one else could reach on the day we were surrounded by the Demon King's army had been Riven — then the reason he came looked different now, too.
"Back then too... he came because of me, didn't he...?"
The image surfaced with painful clarity: him carving a path through to us with an army at his back, watching us to the very end even with his body torn apart.
"Even joining the rescue force... was that because of me too...?"
With trembling hands, I clutched my necklace tighter.
The first thought that came to me was that maybe he had lost the matching necklace somewhere on the battlefield, and couldn't bear to face me because of it.
But the old mercenary had just told me that Riven treasured his necklace more than anyone and had refused, absolutely, to take it off even in the middle of the war.
Which left only one answer.
During the war, I had kept my necklace locked away in a box, terrified of losing it or having it destroyed. It was something I had treasured more than anything, wanting to show it to him whole and unbroken whenever I saw Riven again — but in Riven's eyes, all he ever saw was me walking around without it.
"Because I... because I wasn't wearing it...?"
Even trying to draw breath felt like choking.
"He thought I'd forgotten our promise...? That's why he couldn't even pretend to know me...?"
Maybe that was exactly how it was. After enduring ten years, when we finally met again, I hadn't even recognized him — and I wasn't wearing the necklace we'd promised each other we would never, ever throw away. To Riven, that might well have been proof enough that I had completely forgotten him.
But however hard I searched for reasons, the thought I found hardest to bear lay somewhere else entirely.
Not why Riven had said nothing — but why I had failed to recognize him.
"Why couldn't I recognize you...?"
It was natural for him to have changed after ten years. The boy I remembered had become a man, and after ten years spent on the frontline, it was no wonder his face and body bore so many scars.
And yet I should have known him. No matter how much time passed, no matter how his face changed — if he was someone I had longed for that desperately, I should have been the one to recognize him first.
"I loved him so much... I missed him so much..."
Through all those sleepless nights on the battlefield, I had only ever wished for Riven to be alive, wherever he was. I had sworn to myself, time and time again, that when the war ended and the Demon King fell, I would go find him. And yet when he actually appeared right in front of me, I recognized nothing.
"Back then, I was the one who spoke first..."
In our childhood, it was I who first confessed to Riven. Too shy to even look him properly in the face, I still told him that day that I loved him.
"I said I liked him first... so this time too, I should have been the one to recognize him first..."
I shouldn't have waited for Riven to speak to me. I should have run to him first and called his name. Even if his face had changed, even if he was covered in scars — I should have known him first, and approached him first, just as I had given him my love first on that day long ago.
But I didn't.
Only after months of wandering the continent in search of Riven — only after listening to a drunken old mercenary in a random tavern — did I learn that the person I'd been looking for had been right beside me all along.
I don't know how long I cried.
I could feel passersby glancing at me out of the corners of their eyes, but I had no strength left to care about their stares. Only after a long while, when even my tears had all but run dry, was I finally able to lift my head.
Still, one thing was certain.
Riven was alive.
At the very least, he had been alive up until the moment the war ended — and now I knew something more: that the person I needed to find was not the fourteen-year-old boy who had vanished eleven years ago, but the man who had lived on the frontline under the name of the Guide.
This time was different. The Guide had countless soldiers who knew his face and countless mercenaries who had fought beside him, so finding him would surely be easier than searching for someone who left no trace at all.
"I have to find him..."
I roughly wiped the remaining tears from the back of my hand.
"This time... I'm the one who finds him first."
Wherever he was, however long it took — this time, I was going to be the one to find Riven first and call his name.
And the moment I resolved on that, someone came to mind.
"...The Saintess."
The Saintess had been close to Riven. She had treated him on the battlefield any number of times, and Riven, who barely exchanged a proper word with anyone else, had spoken with her quite comfortably.
Above all, she had been calling him Riven since long before I ever bothered to learn the Guide's name.
So even if no one knew where he had gone after the war, she might know at least where he had last been seen — or whether he had ever mentioned where he intended to go.
I'd heard that the Saintess was staying at the chapel in the Academy these days, so that was where I should go first.
I had just settled on my next destination and was rising to my feet when a memory — one so trivial I had never once given it a thought until now — suddenly flashed through my mind.
It was right after the war ended.
I had taken the necklace out of the box where it had been stored all those years and put it back around my neck, and when the Saintess saw it, I told her that this necklace was something I had worn with the person I treasured most in the world.
I told her that the name of the first person I ever loved was Riven, and that although I didn't know where he was or what he was doing now, the war was over, so I would certainly find him.
And the Saintess, upon hearing that...
"......"
She had abruptly left her seat.
I hadn't thought it strange at the time. I assumed something had come to mind, or that she had some errand to run — and more than anything, I was so overwhelmed by the simple fact that the long war had finally ended that I had no reason to take note of such a small thing.
But now, it was different. The Saintess had already known the Guide.
She had known his name was Riven. She had called him by name and stood close beside him.
And I had shown her my necklace and told her that the name of the person I was searching for was Riven.
"......"
The more I thought about it, the stranger it became.
She couldn't have been certain from the name alone. But couldn't she have asked at least once? Whether the Riven I was searching for was the same person as the Guide she knew. What he had looked like. When we had parted.
But the Saintess had asked nothing. She had said nothing at all. Instead, the moment she heard my story, she had abruptly left.
"...Could it be."
Only now did a possibility — one I had been doing my best not to think about — surface in my mind with unbearable clarity.
Had the Saintess already known, back then? That the Riven I was searching for and the Guide she knew were the same person?
Had she known, and said nothing to me anyway?
"......"
My hand tightened around the necklace without my willing it.
If... if the Saintess had truly known and hidden it from me. If she had known full well I would wander the world searching for Riven, and never once told me that the man right beside her was him...
I didn't think I could ever forgive that, not even from her.
It wasn't just because I had spent months wandering the continent, knowing nothing. If I had learned the truth even a little earlier, I might have caught Riven before he disappeared. I might at least have had the chance to ask him why he said nothing, or to see his face one more time and call his name.
If that chance had existed — if the Saintess had known everything and said nothing—
"...No."
I shook my head almost reflexively.
"There's no way... she couldn't have."
The Saintess had spent years fighting through the war beside me. She was a friend who had entrusted me her life and saved mine, again and again. She had heard with her own ears how desperately I wanted to find Riven.
Someone like that would never have deliberately hidden the truth.
No. She couldn't have. Because if she had, I truly didn't know how I would ever be able to look at her again.
"I'm just on edge right now, that's all..."
I had learned too much, too suddenly, and now I was stitching together memories I'd never once cared about, drawing conclusions on my own. I hadn't even asked the Saintess directly yet. I didn't know whether she had really known at all. So I couldn't go around suspecting her and deciding the answer by myself.
Even as I told myself that, the hand gripping the necklace refused to loosen.
I shook my head once more and forced the thought out of my mind.
That wasn't what mattered right now. What mattered was seeing the Saintess first. She might know stories about Riven that I didn't, and even if she knew nothing, her closeness to the Guide meant she could at least give me a clue I hadn't managed to find on my own.
I drew the necklace from my neck into my palm and squeezed it tight.
The Academy.
For months I had wandered and found nothing — but this time, I could feel it: I was truly getting closer to Riven.