Episode 14. She Was. (7)
More time had now passed since you left than the four years we had spent together.
I had opened my eyes in a shabby shack, knowing nothing of the world, and before I knew it, I was seven years old.
And yet I still thought only of you.
I remembered the dazed look on your face when you had been stunned by my confession, and I could still see the shy way you had looked whenever I came at you too boldly.
I still remembered the night we first made love.
Determined never to lose even a single memory of you, I spent my days thinking only of you.
I didn’t want to forget. I couldn’t forget a thing.
Whenever something threatened to fade, I bit my lips until they bled and forced myself to memorize it all over again.
New scenery, a new daily life—none of it was necessary to me.
If you weren’t by my side, everything else was nothing but a nuisance.
So instead, I draped my memories over those new things.
I searched the village scenery for traces of you.
I wanted you to rise in my mind even from the mountains that ringed the village, the blue sky, the shabby shack, and the dim glow of the lantern that lit the night.
Otherwise, I couldn’t bear it.
Even the mother who doted on me as the youngest, the eldest brother who carried the weight of responsibility, and my second brother and Sophia—all of them, even Penrin Village itself, a tiny mountain hamlet like this, were things I could never truly grow used to.
So I worked myself to the bone.
I practiced magic, then practiced it again.
And every time I sensed mana, I thought of you once more.
That feeling, too, kept swelling little by little each time I used magic and collapsed from exhaustion.
I missed you always.
Those four years, so brief to me, had finally come to an end, and even after receiving a new life, I was certain of one thing.
In this new life, in this painful and miserable existence, there was still only you for me.
And so I thought I would never let you die in this life.
That was what I believed.
And so I went on studying alone in the shack where my teacher had once stayed.
“...”
Outside, I could hear rain beating down in soft, intermittent taps.
The monsoon, announcing the arrival of summer, had found Penrin Village before I knew it and soaked the earth through.
A raindrop fell onto the book I was reading.
“Ah...”
I hurriedly wiped the water from the page and shifted my seat.
The shabby shack, naturally, offered no protection from the monsoon rain, so if the rest of me got wet, so be it—but the books had to stay dry.
They were precious things I could never get again.
A year had passed since my teacher left.
She had made me a promise.
She said she would return to the village before I came of age, and that if I studied magic diligently and learned other things in the meantime, she would take me with her.
So until Teacher—or Obriel—came back, I had to master everything she had left behind.
Of course, walking that road alone, I kept running into walls more often than not.
The difference between having someone kindly explain things beside you and having no one at all was truly enormous.
On the days when magic refused to work properly, I had to clutch my head and struggle to find the answer.
After a year of that sort of scrambling, I had barely managed to understand thirty percent of the grimoire she had given me.
It had been thick and complex from the start, so there was nothing to be done about that, but still, I was growing impatient.
And whenever that happened, I would remember the words she was always saying: My student always has the same problem—getting ahead of herself. Why don’t we just take a deep breath and try again, slowly?
I took a breath and steadied myself.
No matter how long it took, I would be able to leave the village before I came of age.
So I decided not to be in such a hurry.
All I had to do was understand these books perfectly and accept them for what they were.
And then, all at once, a thought came to me.
If I really did leave with my teacher like that, would I be saying goodbye to the villagers—and to Mother, and to my brothers and sisters—for good?
Was it right to choose separation from them simply because I didn’t want to part from you?
I think that was the thought that crossed my mind then.
In the monsoon rain falling with soft, steady taps, I curled myself around the book so no drops would land on it and read on and on.
It was on the way home after finishing my studies in the shack where my teacher had stayed.
By chance, the rain had paused for a while, and the dark clouds overhead had thinned just a little.
I was walking with my eyes lowered, hating the red sky of sunset the way I always did, when a boy’s voice came up beside me.
“A-Aria! Are you on your way home?”
“...”
It was a familiar face.
He was one of the boys who always followed me around and handed me all sorts of little things as supposed gifts.
“It’s dangerous since it’s getting dark, so I’ll walk with you!”
The boy’s face burned bright red as he walked beside me.
“Not necessary.”
I didn’t even want to accept kindness like that, so I passed the boy and kept going.
Knowing what he felt for me, I wanted to reject him even more harshly.
But the forcefulness of an ordinary boy in the throes of puberty—or a boy who had fallen for someone—was not something that could be cut off by a simple refusal.
“A-Aria! It’s dark and dangerous, so I’ll walk you home! Come here!”
Saying that, the boy took my hand.
The way his fingers fidgeted, as if he were slyly trying to lace our hands together, made me frown before I knew it.
I didn’t want to see him seize my hand on his own and then blush over it.
I didn’t have the spare room in my heart to dismiss it as nothing more than a child’s foolish behavior, just the antics of an immature boy.
So I shoved him away after he grabbed my hand and snapped, “Don’t touch me.”
I ground my teeth.
I couldn’t very well lash out at a boy who didn’t know any better, so I forced the words out through clenched restraint and turned away.
Even if he was only a child, I hated it when another man—not you—held my hand.
It was unbearably awful.
The next day came.
In the long stretch of rain, Sophia and I were together.
It was because she had caught me the day I was going to the teacher’s shack and insisted that she wanted us to stay together today.
Beyond the door, there was only the same heavy sky and the endless stream of rain.
Was this what people called a scene full of sentiment?
I didn’t really understand it, but I supposed people in this world were no different from people in any other.
Whenever the atmosphere turned this slack and listless, Sophia always brought up the same subject.
“Aria, do you not like any of the boys in the village?”
Blushing, fingers fidgeting as always, she asked me things like that.
But I never opened up enough to feed that mood or satisfy her curiosity.
“...No.”
“Liar. All the girls in the village except you have already picked someone. So it’d be weird if you were the only one who didn’t like anyone.”
“...”
As Sophia said, most of the village girls already had their future partners chosen for them.
There were a few fewer girls in the village, and the boys seemed to understand that fact instinctively from a young age.
The boy next door they had been close with since they were tiny, or the boy who kept coming by with gifts even when they acted like they were ignoring him—those were the sorts of pairings that eventually led to marriage.
“I heard Mateo, the village chief’s grandson, likes you, Aria. And Leo, Elie’s older brother, and Lucas, who lives in the house at the edge of the village, were the same.”
I knew it.
That boy Mateo, and Leo and Lucas too—they were all part of the group of children who always trailed after me.
I remembered the gifts they had handed me over and over again.
Even if I gave everything back and ignored them, they still clung to me so stubbornly.
But I had no intention, not even the slightest, of accepting any of their feelings.
Even if it wasn’t you, I wasn’t so mentally young that I would start liking children who still smelled of milk.
So I decided to put Sophia off with something vague.
She was irritating, always trying to link me with one boy after another, but I knew she only worried about me.
“Sophia, this is a secret, so you can’t tell anyone.”
“Huh? What is? Wait, don’t tell me—you already have a boy you like?”
“Yeah, I do.”
I gave a bitter smile and went on.
“It’s a dream I have often, and in that dream, there’s always a prince on a white horse.”
“Waaah... Aria, are you really waiting for a prince?”
“Yeah, a really handsome and cool prince said he’d come take me away.”
“Wow, that’s so amazing! Is it the same prince every time in your dreams?”
“Yeah, it’s the same person every time.”
Just as I’d said, I always dreamed of you.
In those dreams, sometimes you would whisper that you loved me, and other times you would cry and tell me you were sorry.
Sometimes you smiled brightly, and other times you forced a smile through tears.
And always, in the end, you died coughing up blood.
It had lodged itself in my mind and kept waking me from sleep.
“And I’m going to marry that prince.”
When time had flown by and I finally became someone who could stand on my own.
I’ll come find you.
I would somehow find you, and keep going until the day I knelt at your feet and begged for your forgiveness.
I...
Would never be happy in any moment at all.