Not Madness, But Spirits
"Bayul, careful!"
But his body was still too weak to obey him. The moment Bayul set his foot down from the bed, he swayed and began to crumple, and it was only by catching him at the last second that Eli and Aidan kept him off the floor.
"Let go of me! I have to see Logan!"
"Bayul, your body still isn't—"
"Please, I'm begging you!"
Now that he knew Logan was here, there was no way he could lie still. The fact that he had come to this place meant that, at the very least, he was somewhat willing to see him. Bayul's heart was racing.
"Fine. Then here's what we'll do."
Eli offered a compromise.
"You two carry Bayul back to the dormitory room. I'll go fetch Logan."
"What are you talking about? You're supposed to keep getting treatment!"
"And if something else happens like it did before? You want to watch a repeat of that?"
No!
There wasn't a shred of him that wanted that. Aidan's head whipped around.
"Bayul, that work for you?"
"Thank you, Rai."
"Right, then let's get out of this creepy place, and quickly."
Shooting a wary glance at the statue's face at the center of the wall, Eli hurried them along.
Click.
Once the group had left and the door swung shut, only the priest, asleep upon his bed, remained in the room.
But a short while later, a strange change came over that stillness-drenched chamber. The statue's closed eyes snapped open. For a long moment, pupils blacker than the darkest night gave off an enigmatic light within them, wearing an expression no one could read.
"Quinn, so what exactly is a spirit? The thing you mentioned earlier?"
Aidan asked as they laid Bayul down on the bed. It stung his pride that Eli had been the one to go after Logan, but that aside, he simply wasn't the type to hold in his curiosity. He had already told Bayul everything about the scene at the temple on the way back to the dormitory, and so Bayul was currently in a complete daze.
"...No, it was nothing."
"What? What do you mean, nothing?"
"I've been thinking it over, and it's impossible. There's no way that was a spirit."
"So then what IS a spirit?!"
The poor scholarship student was even skipping class to wait on Bayul like this. Whatever spirits turned out to be, the price of playing hooky would have to be worth it.
"You saw it yourself."
"Me? I saw something?"
All Aidan had seen was a scene that defied explanation—water splashing out of thin air, wind blowing, an extinguished flame roaring back to life, and the roots of plants writhing about. It was hard to extract any definition of "spirit" from that.
"Water. Fire. Wind. Earth."
"...?"
"Each of those four great elements has its own unique power. In the old days, they called it the power of spirits."
"...The power of spirits?"
"Right. Spirit of water. Spirit of fire. Spirit of wind. Spirit of earth. Something like that."
Strand by unfamiliar strand, words he had never once heard in his life creased Aidan's forehead. He couldn't make heads or tails of any of it. Water, fire, wind, earth—wasn't manipulating those things called magic?
"You could be forgiven for mistaking it for magic. But the two are fundamentally different. Spirits are living beings in their own right... Except the Spirit Realm was destroyed."
"What does that even mean? Can you please explain things one step at a time so I can actually follow?"
What's a spirit, what's a Spirit Realm, and destroyed? His brain was so overloaded it felt like his skull might split open.
"Quinn..."
Then, whether he had finally come back to himself or not, Bayul looked at Quinn with vacant eyes.
"That thing called a spirit... if it's alive... could it be something like a person?"
"A person?"
A nod.
"Shaped like a human... but a very young child, tiny like that..."
Bayul was speaking cautiously, but he couldn't put one over on Quinn.
"You saw one, didn't you?"
"...What?"
"You saw a spirit. That's why you collapsed, isn't it?"
Only now did it make sense—Bayul mumbling to thin air all by himself right before he fainted.
"It was a spirit. That's why I could sense the aura of water coming off you!"
At last, every dot connected. The fact that he was human yet carried the aura of water, and the fact that he could catch the scent of the merfolk—everything fell into place in that single moment.
"Ah, for crying out loud, now what the hell is an aura of water? I swear I'm about to lose my mind from frustration. Can you please talk so a person can understand? Huh?"
He'd never once been called stupid anywhere in his life, yet for the past while Aidan hadn't the faintest idea what anyone was saying.
"Spirits, the Spirit Realm, destruction, aura of water. Start from the top and explain it calmly. Make me understand!"
"I already told you. What you saw back there was a spirit."
"That—the water and wind and all that?"
"Yes. To ordinary people like you and me, it just looks like water and wind. But to them, it's different."
"Them?"
"People like Bayul."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Spirit Users. That's what they were called in the past."
The answer came from the other side of the room. Eli was closing the inner door—he'd returned at some point without anyone noticing.
"Where's Logan? Why are you alone?"
The hope that had been blooming on Bayul's face gave way almost instantly to disappointment.
"I couldn't find any trace of where he went. I checked the dormitory too, but it was a bust. I'm sorry."
"...No, it's fine."
It was true that he'd been swelling with the expectation of finally meeting Logan, but he couldn't blame Eli for it. What fault was any of that his? If anything, a word of thanks would have been too little.
"So the guy ran off, did he? Making a fuss about worrying over you one minute, gone the next—truly a hilarious fellow."
"He must have his reasons. Don't take it too hard, Bayul. You'll see him again soon."
"Yeah. Thank you."
"By the way, Rai—what's a Spirit User? That's what you said just now, right? Do you know something about spirits?"
"People who can see spirits and borrow their power to wield as their own. Those people are called Spirit Users."
"So the things darting back and forth all over the temple earlier were spirits, and Bayul, who moved them, is a Spirit User. That about sum it up?"
"Exactly. One more thing—every spirit possesses a 'self.' In other words, they talk and think just like we do. Of course, the only one who can hear and see that is Bayul, the Spirit User among us."
"That's what you meant by a living being?"
Aidan simply couldn't wrap his head around it. Water, fire, wind, earth—those four made up all the matter in the world. That meant they existed everywhere you went. And that meant spirits existed in every corner of the world.
Why did I never know any of this? No—more than that, if you can see and hear these things and wield their power as your own, that's incredible, isn't it? Wouldn't mages and swordsmen not even come close?
"Bayul, since when? Since when have you been able to see spirits?"
Behind the astonished Aidan, Eli asked his question.
"...It's the first time."
"Today?"
"I thought I was seeing hallucinations. I've been tormented by voices for as long as I can remember."
At the memory of it, Bayul's expression darkened.
"A little child who wasn't human but looked exactly like one. I only thought my illness had grown worse. That shock is what made me faint—and now you're telling me that child was a spirit, and I'm a Spirit User..."
"You were never tormented by hallucinations. You were hearing the voices of spirits."
The voices of spirits?
Bayul had suffered from what everyone called hallucinations since his earliest remembered childhood. The first to notice his strange behavior had been his older twin, Bail. Frightened by the sight of his little brother holding conversations with empty air, Bail had reported it to the Duke at once, and the Duke, confirming Bayul's condition with his own eyes, had been so alarmed that he immediately arranged for treatment with holy power.
The early stages of the treatment had been rocky, but Bayul's condition gradually improved, and from then on he received treatments at regular intervals, slowly pulling away from the voices. And so Bayul had lived sixteen years as an invalid.
Only to be told now that it was all wrong.
That he had heard neither hallucinations nor seen phantom visions.
That he had simply heard the voices of spirits, and seen spirits themselves.
He still didn't really understand what a spirit was, but he'd been told that those who could see them were called Spirit Users.
A Spirit User... so does that mean I was normal all along?
If so, it should have been a joyous thing. But perhaps because he had spent so many years living under a misunderstanding, it all felt merely unreal.
"Pretty well-informed, for a human."
With the bewildered Bayul between them, Quinn looked over at Eli with visible surprise.
"Is it strange that I know something you know?"
"No. I only wondered—if you know that much, whether you also understand why this situation makes no sense."
"Makes no sense? How?"
Aidan was currently exerting his full capacity for comprehension. He'd barely calmed down and gotten the concepts to settle into place—what was nonsense now?
"The Spirit Realm was destroyed ages ago."
"Destroyed?"
Come to think of it, he'd brought that up earlier too.
"Yes. Destroyed. You know what that word means, don't you?"
Of course he did. Everything collapses and vanishes. Wasn't that what it meant?
"When the Spirit Realm fell, the spirits perished, and Spirit Users ceased to exist. Naturally, they faded from human memory as well. That was thousands of years ago, so in a way it's only natural you know nothing about Spirit Users."
Then how do you two know about it?
That thought had come first, but an odder one followed on its heels, and Aidan tilted his head.
"Hold on, then—how did they come back? You said they all died!"
Not only Aidan's, but Quinn's and Eli's gazes swung toward Bayul all at once. Their eyes seemed to say: you're the one involved here, so explain.
But the most stunned person in the room was Bayul himself. He'd only just learned that he himself was a Spirit User—what more could he possibly say? If anything, he wanted to summon that child, that spirit, and ask it directly. Though he had no idea whether it would give him an answer.
"Resurrection, then?"
"...What?"
"What else could it be? Thousands upon thousands of years have passed, and the spirits have appeared again. That makes it a resurrection, doesn't it?"
"That's impossible. Every last one of them died. The world turning into a wasteland like this is all because of that!"
There was fury and bitterness lying beneath Quinn's words.
"Did you see it?"
"...?"
"All of them dying. Did you lay eyes on it and confirm it yourself? No, you didn't. You weren't even born yet back then. Extinct animals and monsters show up again from time to time, don't they? What law says spirits can't do the same?"
Ignorant as he was, Aidan simply took things at face value, while Quinn and Eli kept up their air of disbelief. Even facing the evidence firsthand, they seemed unable to accept it.
"There's another strange thing."
As if refusing to concede, Quinn raised a different point.
"To become a Spirit User, you need the aptitude. You have to be born with the innate ability to commune with spirits. You know that too, don't you, Rai?"
"Of course."
"Usually that affinity is confined to a single element. Someone carrying the aura of water can command water spirits—that sort of thing. Spirit Users born with two affinities do exist on rare occasions, but even then, their affinity is generally specialized in just one or two."
Eli nodded along, as if in agreement with Quinn's explanation.
"But you two saw it just now, didn't you? All four great elements appearing at once."
That was true.
Water. Fire. Wind. Earth.
Not simultaneously, but each of them had appeared in turn, circling around Bayul.
"Don't tell me... you're saying Bayul possesses all four affinities?"
"That's impossible."
"It can't happen."
"And yet, if none of us saw a mirage..."
Quinn's trailing eyes glimmered with an unreadable light. Though he'd done nothing wrong, Bayul instinctively shrank back.