Chapter 16. She Was. (8)
My life—my life without you—was a sewer compared to my past life.
Just as the happiness of my former life had been the last happiness I would ever know, the path before me had become a road of thorns.
Born as the youngest child in a mountain village, I had never known abundance of any kind. The only thing I wanted was you, but even the you I had never truly been able to hold in my last life drifted farther and farther away now.
Even the one desperate wish I had left felt like a sin to want. I was pitied by many; I had no father, and I had many siblings.
The empty place beside me, the one you had left behind, kept growing until it pressed down on my heart and crushed it whole. Mother always looked at me with a bitter smile that seemed to apologize for everything, and before dawn she went out to work the fields, as if sheer hard work could keep death from taking us.
My eldest brother, Luca, gradually drifted away from our family as he grew old enough to think of marriage to the girl who had become his sweetheart. My second brother, Noah, often helped Mother with her work, and when he came home, he would collapse into bed with a face full of exhaustion.
Sophia only grew more and more like a young lady, and our fourth sibling had died long ago, fading beyond the reach of memory. More than two years had passed since we parted, and I had taught myself magic from my teacher’s grimoires.
Though I had been born with no special gifts, I was flowering little by little, like a dragon rising from a humble stream. Magic was the only thing I possessed in the present.
I had no one I could really call a friend. I no longer had the courage to take anything else into my heart, because the experience of having filled my hands with something precious only to lose it forever had already been too heavy for me—especially when that thing had been you.
I was alone. I had always been alone, and whenever I felt a little lonely, I would climb to the slope of the mountain and sing.
In my past life, I had never paid much attention to the lyrics. It was a song of aching, desperate love.
No one in this world knew it, but whenever I sang it, the loneliness inside me would settle and quiet down. I had spent a childhood so miserable it was almost shameful to compare it to the life I had once lived.
Like this. Thinking only of you until my mind was overflowing with you. With no one around me at all, I simply stood alone and stared at the hollow that kept growing larger inside me.
So I buried myself in the past, trapped forever in an old love, and slowly withered as a person.
Still, if there was one good thing about learning magic and steadily improving at it, it was that I no longer had to go hungry.
I never hid my magic from the villagers. By then, after the year my teacher had spent staying in the village, everyone who needed to know already did.
And the magic I had learned was the kind that could chase something down and kill it.
According to my teacher, magic itself didn’t seem especially versatile to begin with. Since the magic I had heard about from you had sounded so extraordinary, I had once asked her about it in exactly that way—only to see her smile with clear amusement, as though I were adorable.
“My disciple, magic is magnificent, and yet not so magnificent. In the end, it is power made to hurt someone. It can’t be used everywhere for everything.”
After hearing that, I had felt a little ashamed of how absurd my question had been.
So, in the end, I used the magic I had learned to hunt wild beasts. Just like now.
Paang—
There was a sound like the air itself bursting, and the cry of a wild beast followed.
Like the silence after a gunshot, I watched quietly until the beast’s cry finally died away.
...
Even if it was just an animal, killing something didn’t feel especially good. The look in its eyes as the spark of life went out and its pupils emptied into nothing was painfully familiar.
It was your death, and it was mine as well. But now, I no longer cried. I no longer shook when I saw blood. I simply looked at the dying beast with indifference.
To keep myself from falling apart every time I thought of you, I had slowly drained the emotions from my heart.
This wasn’t a life where I could afford to cry just because I was lonely and sad. And when the beast finally fell silent, I heard Sophia’s voice beside me, where she had been keeping quiet all this time.
“Ah, Aria. Did you catch it?”
“...Yeah.”
“W-wow... Amazing! That’s a deer!”
As she said, there it was—the deer, at last breathing no more. Sophia ran toward it with cute little scampering steps, and soon enough I heard her gasp again.
“This is incredible, Aria! We could eat meat for days with this much, couldn’t we?!”
“...Yeah, I guess so.”
In Penrin Village, meat was a precious ingredient. Since most people were farmers, very few knew how to hunt properly; only one or two people in the whole village could manage it, including the old man who was the village chief’s brother-in-law.
And even they usually relied on traps to catch small rodents or rabbits, not something like this.
“...Before the meat spoils, let’s butcher it quickly and take it back.”
“Okay! But I don’t know how to do that...”
“I’ll handle it. Just put the pieces in the basket.”
With that, I grabbed hold of the deer’s hide and pulled.
If you asked how I could do something like that, the answer was simple: the books my teacher had left behind included instructions on preparing and storing meat.
I had no idea how a noble, much less a count, had known such things, but the knowledge she had passed on was incredibly useful.
I sliced through the deer’s body with mana. The flesh separating with a soft scrrrk was a little gruesome.
Blood sprayed out and splattered lightly against my cheek, but I ignored it and removed the organs, which would rot quickly.
I tossed the head and entrails far away, then cut the body into portions and packed them into the basket.
“Wooooow...!”
Sophia’s cries of admiration didn’t end even after I had finished butchering every last bit of the meat and we had returned to the village.
I shared all of the meat with the villagers, not because I was fond of them, but simply because I remembered, in a vague and distant way, the things I had received from them as I grew up.
Still, it seemed the villagers didn’t see it that way.
For the first time since I was born, the village held an impromptu festival.
If it could even be called a festival, it was a humble one at best—just people gathering at the edge of the fields, where the air smelled of earth and grain, building a bonfire and roasting meat over it.
And yet, for all that, they looked happier than they ever had before.
They said I was a blessing to the village, that thanks to me Penrin Village would grow richer still. I had only ever thought of leaving this place, but they said it was a relief to have me with them.
“Aria, my dear child. When did you grow so big...? Your mother is truly happy.”
Even Mother, whose face had always looked troubled, now wore a bloom of laughter.
“Our youngest is really something, haha. Thanks to you, we got to eat meat this good.”
My eldest brother, Luca, patted my head with one hand while he stood arm in arm with the girl who seemed to be his lover.
“Yeah... I guess so. Thanks to the youngest, we got to eat all this meat...”
Noah praised me too, though he looked a little troubled. Perhaps he felt a sting of self-reproach at the thought that I, so much younger than him, was more useful than he was.
That night, Penrin Village shone more brightly than usual.
We sat around the blazing bonfire, every face lit with smiles as people talked and laughed. For the first time in my eight years, I saw a light brighter than moonlight in this village.
After all, this had always been a place where even firewood had to be conserved, a village that had lived in darkness like that.
I sat a little apart from them and looked up at the sky. Countless stars filled the heavens, shining with dazzling brilliance.
...
My hands still smelled of blood. It was the deer’s blood, the one that had stained me while I butchered and shared out the meat.
I had washed it away again and again, but the scent remained.
That fishy smell was so much like the smell of your blood that, as always, I began to hear hallucinations.
“Do... run...”
I heard your voice telling me not to cry, to run away.
“Love...”
Your voice rang out, saying you loved me until the very end.
If loving someone enough to die in their place was possible, what kind of heart did it take? To turn the blade flying toward you back onto yourself, and even in that agony, still think of me...
To swallow the blood bubbling up in your throat and keep speaking the words I love you even as death closed in...
Just how deeply would you have to love someone for that to be possible?
I couldn’t know. I was the one who had received that love, and you were the one who had poured it all into me and then left.
I wouldn’t understand it until I met you again and asked you myself.
So we had to meet again.
And staring up at the sky, I answered.
“...Me too.”
My voice cracked, and I forced the words out through the lump in my throat.
“I love you too...”
The feelings I had pressed down so tightly inside me began to seep out, until at last they spilled over as tears.
“I really love you... I love you.”
Drop by drop, tears soaked the dirt beneath me.
“Only you... I love...”
Not far away, I could hear happy laughter.
So I wept in silence.
And I murmured it to myself.
It had already been nearly ten years since we parted, but I still loved you.
Even now, I still love you.
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