A Letter to Bayul
The ten minutes passed in a flash. The knights had to pry Aidan away by main force as he clung to Bayul where he lay, wailing his heart out. The others walked out on their own two feet, but every last one of them had tears brimming in both eyes.
It had been impossible to believe even looking at him with their own eyes. Bayul lay so peacefully that he seemed as though he might rise at the mere sound of his name. Gazing down at the white cloth draped over his face, one could only think he was simply sleeping soundly.
Not one of them opened his mouth during the entire walk from the temple back to the dormitory. Perhaps because they had now confirmed it with their own eyes, all four tramped along in a daze, their spirits drained clean away.
The academy, which had been bustling with life only the day before, had gone silent as the grave. No one had told them to, and yet the students all kept out of sight, shut up in their dormitories and refusing to stir. It said everything about how deep the shock of this incident ran.
"Are you boys holding up all right?"
How long had they been walking like that? Rayegar and Serarika came into view, emerging from the main building after an emergency countermeasures meeting. As the four looked up at them blankly, Eli suddenly charged, a curse on his lips.
"Why didn't you do anything?! Why didn't you do a single thing?! You could have saved him! You could have done something, anything, to keep Bayul from dying! Why didn't you?!"
"Lai, calm yourself."
"How am I supposed to calm down?! My friend is dead! You're cold-blooded, so of course you don't understand how I feel! Bayul was more precious to me than you could ever be! Do you hear me?!"
"If he was such a precious friend of yours, then why ever didn't you save him yourself?"
"...What did you just say?"
At Serarika's frost-glazed voice, Eli's gaze whipped around, flinching.
"Who knows? If you'd flown into one of your little rages like before, he might be alive and perfectly well this very moment. Since you're too dim to follow on your own, let me spell it out for you — it means you are not to take your tantrum out on the wrong person."
Serarika's deep-blue eyes glinted. It was a warning: kick up any more of a fuss, and she would not let it pass.
"Lai......"
Aidan, whose eyes had swollen into puffy slits from all his crying, belatedly seized Eli by the arm.
"Enough. Let's go."
"Aidan......!"
What Eli said wasn't wrong. But then, neither was what Professor Serarika said.
It was true that if Rayegar, a high mage, had been there yesterday, Bayul very likely would not have died. But the man's absence from that place was no fault of his.
Just as Professor Serarika had said, Eli was simply casting about for someone to blame. The Chairman had merely happened to catch his eye as the easiest target of all.
"Go on and get some rest. Every one of your faces looks simply dreadful."
At Rayegar's instruction, Aidan forcibly hauled Eli away. The boy glared at Professor Serarika with eyes brimming over with hatred, but mercifully he did not lunge at her again.
Silence settled over the friends once more. Even after they returned to the dormitory, each sat in his own place, sunk in long and heavy thought.
Five had become four. The room was by no means a spacious one, yet today it felt emptier than words could say. Bayul's vacant bed and desk filled their eyes with a dull, persistent ache.
"...The truth is, I was the one who fell into the water."
It came without warning. Out of nowhere, Logan forced the words through his lips with difficulty, as though making a solemn confession.
At first the others only stared, nonplussed; then, little by little, horror gathered on their faces.
"It was a day when the sky was perfectly clear. Bayul's condition was better than it had been in ages, so we set out together, saying we'd go fishing. While Bayil stepped away for a moment to pick fruit, I went down to the riverbank to fill my water flask. I lost my grip on the lid, and when I waded in to retrieve it, my leg cramped up on me."
Logan's tone was flat. But there was no focus at all in his hollow, desolate eyes.
"Bayul was trying to save me. To help me, he threw himself into the river — weak as his body was. But he didn't have the strength to haul out a drowning man thrashing the way I was. The two of us ended up in danger together."
"So that's when Bayul arrived."
"That's right. And Bayil could swim like a fish."
The rest needed no telling. Bayil had gone into the water to save the two of them — and he was the only one who never came back out.
"...Bayil, spent from pulling us out, couldn't make it back onto the bank. He was clinging to a rock when the current tore him loose and swept him away. Bayul fainted on the spot from the shock, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing but scream Bayil's name until my voice gave out......"
The memory of that day was still vivid. Logan doubled over as if in agony and clutched his head in both hands.
"I should have told the truth... I should have... but I couldn't. The moment Bayul said he'd lost his memories, I heard myself lying — before I even knew what I was doing. No matter how afraid I was, that was the one thing I should never have done......"
Somewhere along the way, Logan had begun to sob.
"I pinned the blame on Bayul. I said he was the one who'd fallen in first. That Bayil and I went into the river to rescue him, and that only the two of us came out alive. That is the lie I told His Grace, Duke Randert."
And so Bayul had lived the past two years hounded by the guilt of having killed his own brother. Logan, too, had not known a single day of peace since — but weighed against Bayul, who had believed he'd lost his twin because of himself, his own suffering had been nothing at all.
"You crazy bastard! Bayul isn't even here anymore — why are you telling us this?! What difference is it supposed to make, spouting it off now?! You think Bayul's going to come walking back alive?!"
Aidan raged, spitting out the curses.
"You should have said it from the very start! Then he wouldn't have suffered like that all this time! And you call yourself human after that?! You call yourself a person, you piece of trash?! You worthless garbage!"
"The first day I came looking for this place, that was what I had actually come to say. In the end, I couldn't even open my mouth......"
"You pulled all of that, and you could still laugh when you looked Bayul in the face? That's what people mean when they call a guy like you a hypocrite!"
"...You're right about all of it. I'm trash. I'm a hypocrite. I'm a man who doesn't even deserve to be alive and breathing like this."
Aidan's accusations flew straight and true, burying themselves in Logan's chest like a dagger. Yet he felt no hatred, no resentment — none at all. If anything, he was grateful.
Perhaps some part of him had been longing to be cursed like this. With the terrible secret he had carried alone finally poured out, he felt a little lighter inside. The guilt had not vanished — but it seemed he might at last have found the courage to confess to Duke Randert as well.
It was far too late, but he wanted to accept whatever punishment came, gladly, and to clear away the injustice done to Bayul. That was all Logan could do now for the one who had gone on ahead.
"So what, you're planning to die the way Bayul did? Confess every last bit of the truth to Duke Randert, and then?"
Eli, silent until now, cut in.
"But......"
"You were selfish then, and you're selfish now. Everything has its moment. Yours has already come and gone — and right now is even less the time. Can't you see that?"
Logan's golden eyes wavered. He had not thought that far. To lay the truth bare now would be to drive another nail into the ailing Duke's heart.
"For now, keep still. Let the guilt grow back inside your chest, where it belongs. If you truly care about Bayul and His Grace, it won't be too late to tell him after Bayul's funeral."
Bayul's funeral.
It was another moment that made his death real.
"If only it had been me staying with him last night......"
If it had been, perhaps he could have saved Bayul and died in his place. He should have paid for the past in at least that much — and Logan could not stop regretting that he had failed to keep the vigil to its end.
"Lokha was right."
Aidan, who had been glowering at Logan with distaste, blurted it out.
"Everyone remembers, right? What that guy said about Bayul's lifeline being severed. He said an accident would strike him before long."
Come to think of it, they had forgotten all about it. They had seized Lokha by the collar and told him to quit spouting nonsense — and yet, absurdly, Bayul really had died exactly as he'd said.
"Lokha's reading really did come true, just the way he saw it in Bayul's palm. What do you think?"
"What do you mean, what do I think?"
"I'm the one who dragged Lokha outside, remember? And he said it, clear as day — that the fate line and the success line, or whatever they're called, definitely held a future, and that he couldn't help wondering whether Bayul might die and then come back to life."
"That's right! We jumped all over him back then, demanding what kind of bullshit that was! Wait — so does that mean Bayul really is going to come back to life? Is he?!"
Eli shot to his feet, trembling with excitement. It had sounded like nonsense then, and it sounded like nonsense now — but Lokha's words had come true, and like a drowning man clutching at straws, he wanted to believe every last word.
"But how would he even come back? Could it be... that the spirits have something to do with it?"
For now, that was the only reasonable guess they could make.
"Should we go ask the spirits?"
"How, without Bayul? We can't even see where they are."
Even in ordinary times, no eyes but Bayul's could see the spirits. Without him now, all they could do was worry over where the spirits might be, and what they might be doing.
"How about we go see Lokha?"
"Go there and do what, exactly?"
"I don't know. Just ask him. He remembers Bayul's palm reading, doesn't he?"
He felt he would go mad if he didn't do something — anything. At Eli's suggestion, Aidan and Logan voiced their agreement and rose to their feet.
"Quinn, you're not coming?"
Since returning from the mortuary, Quinn had not uttered a single word. Slumped at his desk, staring at nothing but the wall, his wilted figure was almost too pitiful to look at.
He had once been cold through and through. It was Bayul who had thawed Quinn — the boy who kept his heart sealed fast against all humankind — the first person Quinn had ever called my person.
He was also the one who had rejoiced more than anyone at the birth of the Spirit User, dreaming of the Mermaid Kingdom's revival.
"Let's just go, the three of us."
He would need some time to himself.
"We'll be back."
Leaving Quinn behind, the three friends set out for Lokha's room.
Tick. Tock.
With the friends gone, only the tick of the clock's second hand echoed, indifferent, through the quieted room. Quinn, who had not stirred for the longest while, suddenly drew paper and a pen from the drawer.
And there, he began to write a letter.
To Bayul.
The recipient was Bayul. He knew perfectly well that the boy was gone — that a letter to him could never be read — and still, Quinn wrote on without a moment's hesitation.