The Liar
While waiting for the village chief to wake up, the Goddess of the Rusty Shield delivered an oracle.
Elbridge. I have asked the God of the Brass Cup.
The God of the Brass Cup symbolized many things.
But the most prominent among them was the peace and well-being of a community.
In other words, it represented the exact same concept as the “God of the Eternal Voyage” that Osric had spoken of.
There was also one important characteristic of the God of the Brass Cup. He was known as one of the elder gods among the countless deities in the heavens.
It was said that when the God of the Brass Cup had ascended, people had not yet discovered how to work iron. In that era, brass and bronze were the greatest metals of all.
Since the God of the Brass Cup had ascended so early, he would surely know whether any other deity with similar authority had appeared. In many ways, he was the perfect god to uncover the truth behind this incident.
The goddess’s oracle continued.
The God of the Brass Cup said that, aside from you, no deity exists who symbolizes the well-being of a community. He has never even heard the name “God of the Eternal Voyage.”
Elbridge slowly nodded and replied,
“Understood, my Goddess. Thank you.”
*
The three of them had taken Tibo’s staff and bound him to a chair.
A mage could not use magic without his staff. Occasionally, high-ranking mages could cast spells without one, but their power would drop significantly, so it posed no real problem.
“Ugh…”
After completing all their preparations, they waited a short while. Soon, Chief Tibo let out a groan and regained consciousness.
The moment the chief realized he was tied up, he looked around in panic.
“W-what is this?”
The group watched Tibo in silence. He seemed to be trying to figure out why he had been bound.
Elbridge wondered what the man’s first words would be.
Let me go? Please spare me? Something like that, he assumed.
But Tibo’s first sentence was completely unexpected.
“…So the day has finally come.”
As he spoke, Tibo let all the strength drain from his body.
Strangely enough, this was the most relaxed Elbridge had seen him since arriving in the village.
Leaning on his sword like a cane, Elbridge asked,
“Chief. Why did you sell the name of a god that does not exist?”
Marcus and Rombel looked even more bewildered by the question.
“What? The God of the Eternal Voyage doesn’t exist?”
Revealing the conversation he had shared with the Goddess of the Rusty Shield would have been troublesome, so Elbridge gave a vague answer.
“That is what I believe.”
“I just assumed this bastard was pretending to be an archbishop…”
In a way, Rombel and Marcus’s reactions were only natural.
When religious fraudsters appeared, nine times out of ten they posed as high-ranking clergy to swindle people.
However, Chief Tibo did not deny Elbridge’s accusation. It was as if he were admitting that the guess was correct.
“…By the gods. Is it true?”
Impersonating a high-ranking priest was already a grave sin, but creating a fake god?
This was a form of blasphemy Elbridge had never encountered before, so he was unsure how to deal with Tibo.
Marcus asked,
“What the hell were you thinking, pulling something like this? You don’t strike me as someone with a screw loose.”
Tibo answered,
“This story will be a little long. Is that all right?”
Elbridge nodded.
It was not out of goodwill toward Chief Tibo. He simply needed enough information to make an accurate judgment.
Tibo spent a moment gathering his memories, then slowly began to speak.
“…Like most mages, my master wished to become a god. But because he was far more talented than most, my fellow disciples and I truly believed he would succeed.”
Tibo’s voice paused for a moment before continuing.
“However, in the end, my master failed to ascend. He could not rise to the heavens as a god and was buried in the earth as a mere human. Just like everyone else.”
Countless mages sought to reach the heavens. Yet only a tiny fraction ever succeeded. Most met the same end as Tibo’s master.
“It left me completely drained. If even my master couldn’t become a god, what chance did I have? So I left the Magic Tower. But I could never truly abandon the dream. I kept thinking about it. Why couldn’t my master become a god?”
Tibo’s voice grew somber.
“The conclusion I reached at the time was that my master simply lacked enough followers. Unlike the other gods, who had gathered many followers even before their ascension, my master had only a handful of disciples. The true essence of a god is not the one who leads, but the ones who are led. In other words, the followers… That was what I believed in my youth.”
Elbridge’s group remained completely silent.
There was no need for words. Even at this point, they could already picture the vision young Tibo had once held.
“I wanted to test my hypothesis. So I wandered through remote places until I found a tiny village.”
“And that was here?”
“Yes. It was an isolated settlement that not even merchants would visit. Calling it a village would be generous. There were only twenty or thirty slash-and-burn farmers living here…”
Elbridge, who had been listening quietly, said,
“You committed a terrible act, Chief.”
Tibo did not deny it.
“I was young. Reckless and thoughtless. I didn’t see it that way at the time… but perhaps I was truly wicked. I never considered how people would perceive it. With the single-minded goal of proving my hypothesis and becoming a god, I created a plausible name—the God of the Eternal Voyage—and declared myself its archbishop.”
Gods resided in the heavens, and their followers remained on the earth.
No matter how young Tibo had been, he could not have claimed to be a god himself. So he had chosen the role of archbishop instead.
“How could you gather followers without any authority…? Ah, I see. Damn it.”
Rombel had been about to ask but realized the answer himself.
“…Yes. Of course I had no authority. That was when I thought of the God of the Brass Cup. I figured I might be able to imitate something as vague as communal harmony. But if that had been all, no one would have followed me. So I told a lie.”
Tibo took a short breath, then spat out the words.
“That the end of the world was approaching. That only those who believed in me could be saved… I crafted a lie so convincing that anyone who wavered even slightly would have no choice but to believe me.”
“An unbearable lie. Foolish.”
“You’re right. One lie led to another. The fact that I was a mage only made it worse. I had never believed in any god myself, so how could I possibly imitate real priests and religious orders?”
Tibo lowered his head and stared at the shattered fragments of pottery scattered across the floor, at the patterns engraved upon them.
“The first thing I did was create a symbol representing the god. But that was only the beginning. When people asked if our order had any holy relics or symbols, I made those too. Sometimes I bought old items and simply carved the pattern into them.”
“And people actually fell for something that crude?”
“I know. It was sloppy. But these people were pure enough to be deceived by even such clumsy lies. They couldn’t even read… They believed in me with absolute conviction.”
“…”
“Still, I couldn’t feel at ease. So to win their favor and avoid suspicion, I helped them. If they had no complaints, they wouldn’t doubt me. And if they didn’t doubt me, they wouldn’t question the half-baked authority of communal harmony.”
Tibo let out a deep sigh.
“Every time I opened my eyes, new settlers would appear and take root in the village. Twenty became fifty, fifty became a hundred… At first, I thought things were going well. But the population shot past five hundred in the blink of an eye. The village grew far faster than I expected, and that was when fear finally gripped me. Was I really allowed to do this?”
“Of course you weren’t.”
“Yes. I wasn’t. Once I realized that again, I wanted to run away.”
Rombel clicked his tongue.
“But in the end, you didn’t run. Was your greed to become a god that strong?”
Chief Tibo shook his head.
“No. By that point, I no longer even wanted to become a god.”
“That doesn’t add up. If you didn’t want to become a god, you should have left. Doesn’t that mean you couldn’t let go of your greed after all?”
“…The reason I couldn’t run away was different.”
“What reason?”
“Too many people had gathered because of my lies. After deceiving so many, how could I just abandon them? They had stopped being slash-and-burn farmers and were building proper homes…”
Though he had begun the lie for selfish and wicked reasons, Tibo was not wicked enough to brazenly carry it through to the end. Yet he was neither good nor brave enough to confess his sins and beg for forgiveness.
The people Elbridge had seen in this world were all like that.
From birth to death, there were no purely good people, nor were there any purely evil ones.
“I warned them not to speak of the coming apocalypse and salvation to outsiders, fearing the village would grow even larger. I told them that if our village grew too big, some might not be allowed into our village in the heavens…”
The adults would have obeyed Tibo’s words. But the children could not. The innocent remark Osric had made out of pure kindness had shattered the mountain of lies Tibo had built.
It had been such a precarious deception. Fragile enough that a single child’s words could bring everything crashing down.
Tibo smiled bitterly.
“Even though I had already sinned, I hated the thought of being pointed at. At some point, my only goal became not getting caught. I knew I couldn’t avoid it after death, but I thought I could avoid it until then. Nearly thirty years passed like that.”
How foolish. If you commit an act beyond your station, the moment when you must bear the consequences will surely come…
The only difference between Tibo and ordinary people was one thing.
Thanks to his exceptional abilities, he had simply been able to hide his lies a little longer.
Tibo continued.
“But half a year ago, problems began to arise. Even though I had spoken of the world’s destruction, I never truly believed it would happen. Yet signs of real catastrophe started to appear.”
“You mean the demonic beasts?”
Though this was a conversation between Tibo and Marcus, Elbridge subtly avoided Tibo’s gaze.
The appearance of demonic beasts was not Elbridge’s fault. If he bore any responsibility, it was that the seal had only lasted two hundred years.
No, even that was likely not Elbridge’s fault but a flaw in the seal itself.
Still, every time he heard talk of demonic beasts or demons, Elbridge felt a faint sense of guilt.
Because there was no one to tell him it wasn’t his responsibility. No one to shoulder that burden in his place.
“I can handle most demonic beasts. But eventually, one appeared that I could not defeat. That was when I faced a new dilemma. Every day I wondered—should I ask for help from outside?”
“If it were me, I wouldn’t call anyone. I’d just move the village.”
When Marcus interjected with his opinion, Rombel countered,
“And if another problem appears after you move?”
“It’s not like there are other options. What if we call outsiders and everything gets exposed?”
“Yes. That’s why I couldn’t easily ask for help. I knew better than anyone how flimsy my lies were. Only simple, pure-hearted people who knew nothing would be fooled. There was no way knights or paladins, who knew so much about faith and the heavens, would fall for it. And it wasn’t as if I could explain the situation to the villagers afterward and tell them to keep quiet…”
Lies gave birth to more lies, and bigger lies demanded even more lies.
No matter how skilled a mage Tibo was, he could not bear the weight of those lies forever.
“I couldn’t move forward or backward. While I was agonizing over it, the three of you arrived. When I first saw you, my heart sank, but at the same time, I thought it might be for the best.”
“…”
“I even hoped that maybe I wouldn’t get caught. But… in the end, I was found out. That’s all there is to it.”
Tibo gave an awkward smile, then quietly closed his eyes.
His expression looked somewhat relieved.
On the other hand, Elbridge, Rombel, and Marcus now wore complicated expressions.
How should they punish this liar?
After a long silence, Marcus asked Elbridge,
“Sir Elbridge. I have a question.”
“Speak.”
“How did the Rusty Shield Order punish those who impersonated high-ranking priests?”
“Such an incident never occurred in our order. But all orders punished them the same way.”
“And what way was that?”
Elbridge answered,
“…They were stoned to death in front of the temple.”
There was only one reason every order used stoning to punish such sinners.
If someone had deceived people with lies, the most just conclusion was to let the anger of those deceived fall upon them directly.
Yet Elbridge still felt confused.
Was it truly right to punish every similar lie in exactly the same manner?
Was it not overly arrogant and presumptuous for mere travelers like them to pass judgment on Tibo, who was the chief of this village?
No matter how much he pondered, he could not find a clear answer. So Elbridge quietly offered a prayer to his goddess.
“My Goddess. What should I do?”
—Crackle. Static—
Perhaps the Goddess of the Rusty Shield was absent at that very moment, for no oracle came. Only faint static could be heard.
‘Of all times…’
Elbridge sank even deeper into thought.