So You Must Live
Her body was growing light, and her breath was easing with a ease so sudden it felt like a lie. At the same time, the gaunt body cradled in his arms was cooling, little by little.
He tried to pull her hands away, but her fingertips were already cold as a sheet of ice.
"Hey. Stop this. Right now."
"Stop it this instant, Odelli!"
"No."
Clinging to him, Odelli shook her head with all the strength she had left.
"If it isn't now… I'll never be able to do it again."
"Don't! I never wanted this!"
Ludville shouted, the veins standing out along his neck. The violence of it did not last. Before long the cry had broken into a desperate plea.
"Please… stop. I'm begging you…."
But it was already too late.
A faint smile touched Odelli's lips, and she folded, softly, inside his arms.
"It's all right now."
He never had the chance to answer—what, exactly, was all right, when nothing was.
"If you go straight out that way, you can escape. …So live."
Gathering the last of her strength, Odelli pointed somewhere with a fingertip that trembled uncontrollably.
"Live. That is my last request."
The faint curve at the corner of her mouth never left her.
Not until the instant her breath failed.
For all her bold insistence that she would be the one to live longer, Odelli died with a bleak, empty suddenness. It was an age far earlier than the average span of a Purifier.
Now that Odelli was dead, a new Purifier would be born before long. House Cardel would surely click its tongue and declare that a newborn specimen had to be broken in from the very start. Death had merely come a little sooner. It was the same fate that had bound every Purifier, unchanged, for hundreds of years. It had always been so, and it always would be.
That was how the story ought to have ended.
But.
One person.
There was one soul who could not accept the current of that fate.
"You said you'd live longer than me…."
Lips crusted with dried blood trembled. Ludville's fingertips drifted down the cheek of Odelli, whose eyes had closed as if she had only fallen asleep in his arms.
"…You were lying."
"Odelli."
"Answer me…."
His shoulders shook. The breath he had been crushing down until it rasped did not take long to turn into a sob. The moment the first cry tore out of him, he broke completely and wailed.
Because he had spent his life as an expendable subject, Ludville was still slight even after coming of age, so thin he seemed to be nothing but bone. Nothing like the man Odelli remembered. Only his eyes were alive—brilliant, even in the dark.
"God or devil, I don't care who. It doesn't have to be a miracle. A contract, a curse—either is fine. Please, just one more time…."
Hot tears slid over Ludville's lips and fell. He prayed as if he were wringing himself dry.
"Take all of it. My name, my memories, my soul. So please, I'm begging you—let her live…."
In that instant, the empty air rippled. As if time itself had stopped, the air warped, and a jewel spilling radiance took shape. It was a blue crystal no larger than a palm, trembling and pulsing, fine as a living heart.
"This is…."
One of the many Sacred Relics of House Cardel. For hundreds of years, while Cardel built its image as the descendants of a dragon, it had gathered Sacred Relics and stored them underground. One of them had appeared, without warning, before Ludville.
And the scene changed.
Red blood was spattered across the floor in every direction. Ludville lay collapsed there, his whole body drenched in it, the blue jewel still clenched in his hand. Knights of House Cardel in silver armor stood around him in a closing ring.
Someone shouted through gritted teeth.
"This mad expendable subject dared to steal a Sacred Relic of the house!"
The knight at the front drew his sword and drove it down toward the heart of Ludville, who lay as if already dead.
Before she knew what she was doing, Odelli started forward in shock. But in that instant the jewel blazed, and a blue flash burst from it. A fierce light swallowed Ludville's body, like a star catching fire—brilliant, and cruel.
And then everything vanished. The blood, the pain, the blade that had run him through.
In the quiet dark, time began, for the first time, to run backward. The red pool spread across the floor was drawn back into his body, and the knights who had surrounded him lowered their swords and retreated, step by step. Everything rewound, like a spring coiled back upon itself.
And when his eyes opened again, Ludville had returned to ten years before—to the very day he was sold in a slave market and dragged into the underground laboratory of House Cardel.
…The Jewel of Regression.
The ring Ludville always wore. That was the true nature of the jewel set in it.
No one could say what had stirred it. Only that, on that day, the jewel answered the voice of Ludville as he knelt and prayed before Odelli's corpse. He had been chosen, and the power to turn time back had come into his hands.
"This can't be."
The first time regression took him, Ludville denied reality.
"…I can undo all of it."
The next time, he felt hope.
"I can save you."
Ludville laughed, alight with joy.
"We can live together."
This time he took Odelli and fled. But he was nothing more than a powerless slave. He was caught before he could even leave the Cardel lands, executed where he stood, and Odelli was dragged back underground.
Time turned again. The jewel had grown subtly smaller than before.
I have to grow stronger.
Ludville chose, first, to escape House Cardel. While attending a retired knight, he took up a sword for the first time in his life. The boy who staggered and could not even hold a blade properly grew, through grinding effort, stronger than others his age. Even so, he had no hope of becoming a knight.
He decided to give this life wholly to mastering the sword, and he drove himself at his training until he was an old man. When he died, time turned again. The jewel had shrunk further than in the regression before.
In the new life, he became a knight of House Cardel. And when his chance came, he fled with Odelli. The two of them stowed away on a cargo ship, escaped to another country, built a small hut on a rural estate, and lived there together.
"Odelli."
Ludville drew a newly bought pair of silver rings from his pocket.
"I can't offer you anything expensive, or any grand promise…."
They were the costliest rings his scraped-together money could buy. With a trembling hand he slid the smaller one onto Odelli's finger, and the larger onto his own.
"This is my token that I will remain at your side forever."
Slowly, and deeply, he pressed his lips to the ring on her hand. With the face of a man in the throes of a devastating first love, he whispered.
"I love you, Odelli."
There was nothing in that bare, unadorned confession but pure devotion. As if this moment might be the last that would never come again, Ludville gave everything he had and held her, desperately, against his chest.
But long exploitation had already ruined Odelli's body past any mending. She died at the age of twenty-nine.
Ludville despaired. And yet it was all right. Many chances still remained.
…I'll have to find a way to heal her body.
Ludville traveled the length and breadth of the empire, seeking any medicine that might cure Odelli. But there was a limit to the information a knight of low birth could obtain.
I need power.
Time turned again. The jewel grew smaller.
He went to war as a boy soldier and threw himself in without a thought. Absurdly, an enemy sword ran him through, and he died at once.
Time turned again.
The reek of blood from countless battlefields. Screams burning in the flames. The names of comrades who perished on the edge of a blade.
He died more times than could be counted. He broke more times than could be counted. By merit he became a viscount, and a count, and a duke. Among the achievements he had seized thousands of times over, the title of archduke ranked among the lesser.
He saved this land. He conquered an enemy nation whose medicine was far advanced, and he learned magic in the hope of working a miracle. He even became master of the underworld and laid hands on every forbidden art.
But he could not save her.
No matter what he did.