The Brother He Cannot Remember
The sound of something shattering rang out across the pasture. They sprinted over to find a hole punched clean through the heart of a great tree. Yet there was no arrow to be seen. Only the trace of flowing water remained.
“Whoa, that's incredible!”
“That thing's killing power is no joke.”
“Then why on earth have you been holding back this whole time?”
“...?”
“I'm talking about Jared. If you'd shown him this, he obviously wouldn't dare so much as squeak—so why have you just been quietly taking it?”
“Because it would've been a waste.”
“A waste?”
“Because even so much as dealing with a guy like that is something I refuse to tolerate.”
“So that's your noble blood talking, huh?”
“Bayul, it's your turn now.”
As if that settled everything, Quinn beckoned Bayul over with a haughty jerk of his chin.
“Go on. Try it.”
“Y-you want me to do this?”
Still reeling from Quinn's demonstration—water drawn up and shaped into an arrow, hurled into the tree to punch it clean through—Bayul could only stammer in disbelief.
There's no way I could ever pull off something like that...
When the flustered boy did nothing but open and close his mouth, Quinn let out a sigh.
“I didn't say copy me exactly. All I did was show you one small fragment of what water can do. You have to do it your own way.”
“My way?”
“So you're telling me to move the rainwater in that barrel, just like you did?” Even as he asked, Bayul couldn't shake the doubt gnawing at him. How would I ever manage that?
“Hopeless.” Quinn's face scrunched up like a rotten apple. “You're a Spirit User, aren't you? You don't need anything as mundane as that rainwater. Use your spirit.”
“Use it? How?”
“That much I don't know either. Whether you speak the words or simply think them, delivering your will is your job. You're the Spirit User here—not me.”
“Sorry. I thought I was supposed to follow along with exactly what you did...”
“Now that you've got it, get started.”
Quinn's frosty manner sat poorly with him, but neither Aidan nor Eli could do a thing about it. When it came to spirits—water spirits above all—Quinn was the only one among them who could actually help Bayul.
“Um... Innocent? Could you give me some water?”
“How much?”
“Well, um...”
“Gah, what the—!”
“I-Innocent!”
Bayul's shrill scream tore out of him—and small wonder, for a deluge had come crashing down from the sky without a moment's warning. It rose to their ankles as though they had stepped inside a transparent bathtub.
“Argh, why is it a flood again! My shoes are soaked through!” Eli's indignation rang out into the night sky. The memory of his first encounter with Innocent, which he had tried so hard to bury, came rushing back, and fury spread across his face.
“Whoa, water out of nowhere in an instant. Spirits really are something else. It's amazing!” Soaked shoes or not, Aidan—as ever—was content to simply marvel at the spectacle.
“Huh?”
Eli, halfway through wading out of the water, stopped short when he spotted Quinn. “How come you're perfectly dry? Don't tell me you dodged the whole thing all by yourself?”
“It wasn't difficult.”
“And I suppose that 'not-difficult' trick couldn't be shared with the rest of us?”
“Was I supposed to share it?”
Eli stared at him for a long moment with an expression of pure disbelief, then shook his head. “I must be expecting far too much. Hey, runt! Aren't you going to clean up this water? Do you actually want to be punished?”
“Nope! Bleh!”
“Innocent, you promised me you wouldn't fool around recklessly! Here you go again?”
Naturally, Bayul had come through the deluge just as unscathed. His ankles had most certainly been under the water like everyone else's, yet somehow it had no effect on him whatsoever. As though he and the water simply refused to mix—like oil sitting apart from water.
“I wasn't fooling around. You pictured it, Bayul. I just brought it here exactly as you imagined.”
“What are you talking about? When did I picture anything?”
“I felt it, I tell you. And here I thought I'd be praised.” When Innocent's face folded into a sulk, Bayul could only stand there sheepish—for the truth was that the thought how much water would it take to cover our feet? really had flickered through his mind, if only for an instant.
“Bayul, now's your chance.”
“...Huh?”
“Use your imagination. Are you planning to leave all this water sitting here like this?”
No—I can't leave it be. The staff would be here come morning, and if they found this, an uproar was all but guaranteed. I have to clear away every last drop!
The moment he made up his mind, the water that had clasped their ankles like shackles vanished, as though it had evaporated on the spot. Just as with the tree pierced by the arrow, only the damp ground remained to prove that the water had ever existed.
“Whoa, no way!”
“Where did the water go?”
“Even watching it happen, I can hardly believe my eyes. So this is why they call Spirit Users the harmonizers of the natural world.”
All they had seen was water appear and then disappear, yet it was more than enough. That sheer will alone could bring such a thing into being was simply staggering. Only after witnessing it with his own eyes did Eli truly grasp how fundamentally different this was from magic.
“...Shall I try it again?”
Say what anyone would, the person most dumbfounded of all was Bayul himself. Perhaps that was why he wanted to see it one more time, just to be sure.
“Innocent, I'm thirsty.”
The words had scarcely left his mouth before a cup-shaped mass of water took form in the empty air. He closed his hand around it and raised it to his lips, and cool water slid down his throat. Its crisp freshness lifted even his mood.
“So it can do that too. Then me next—water, please!”
At Bayul's nod, a cup floated up before Aidan.
“All right!”
Beaming, Aidan gulped it down in great swallows. “Ahh, that's refreshing! And it tastes amazing, too!”
“Water tastes like water. What do you mean, 'amazing'?”
“Bayul, since you've gotten started, why not try making a water arrow or something like Quinn did? I think you could manage it.”
“...Me?”
“Yeah, I bet you totally cou— Whoa!”
Aidan's cup abruptly lost its shape, collapsing into a splash that pattered to the ground. And in its place, right before his eyes, a long arrow—no, a spear was the proper word for it—materialized out of thin air. A colossal spear, as tall as Aidan himself, hung drifting in midair.
“Wh-what is that thing?”
“Bayul, so this is what you're into?”
For gentle-faced Bayul to suddenly conjure such a monstrous weapon startled everyone. Only Quinn studied him with enigmatic eyes.
“Where I come from, we serve the God of War. That spear is part of the temple's crest. Looking at it always used to put my heart at ease.”
“You mean back when you were getting the divine-power treatment?”
“Yeah. There's a carving of it on the temple, far larger than anything you can see here. What Bail and I used to play with was only a little bigger than this pendant.”
The sight of Quinn's water arrow had brought Agos's spear to mind without warning. To anyone else it might have looked like a fearsome weapon, but to Bayul it was something achingly familiar.
Brother...
“Bail! Bail!”
“Innocent...?”
Was it because Bayul had spoken Bail's name, or simply because he had been thinking of him? All at once Innocent went wheeling around them, calling Bail's name over and over—and from her eyes, big graceless tears came plopping down one after another.
“...!”
Innocent's feelings crashed into him, raw and unbridled. The spirit had known. She had known all along that Bail was no longer at his side.
Innocent had been with Bayul since her earliest remembered moment; every memory she possessed was a memory of him. Even those, for the most part, were broken fragments.
And yet, just now—if only for a heartbeat—she had remembered his brother. And she was resonating with his grief.
If only I had known you back then—how wonderful would that have been?
Then my brother wouldn't have died.
Because I would never have allowed it.
The guilt over Bail that he had kept pressed down came surging back up out of its depths. More than anything, it was the knowledge that he had failed to protect his brother that kept Bayul from being able to rejoice, wholly and without reservation, in becoming a Spirit User.
He wanted to ask what else Innocent remembered—but fear sealed the question behind his teeth. He despised himself for it: the boy who had lost his brother through his own mistake and could not even hold on to the memory of losing him.
“Bayul...”
A hand came to rest on his shoulder, carrying a warmth like quiet comfort. And before he knew what he was doing, Bayul had begun to talk about Bail.
“...That's how it happened. My brother died because of me. He pulled me out when I fell into the river, and then his strength gave out, and the rapids swept him away.”
“Bayul... don't tell me that's why you never learned to swim...”
“I haven't set foot in water since that day. I was scared.”
“I'm sorry. We didn't even know about any of that...”
“Don't be. There was no way you could have known. And I'm all right now.”
He had not entirely conquered his fear of water, but with Innocent at his side, its weight had grown lighter. Even on the day he lost consciousness, hadn't the spirit's help brought him back? Someday, perhaps, he might even learn to swim.
“But you know what's really ridiculous?” As Bayul laughed at his own expense, a desolate sorrow welled up in his face. “It's that I can't remember any of it. Nothing at all. I don't even have the memory of drowning.”
“...Is that even possible?”
“They say the shock gave me partial amnesia.”
“Partial amnesia?”
“It's a phenomenon where the unconscious suppresses the retrieval of memories. In other words, I'm the one blocking out the things I don't want to remember. Call it self-defense.”
“Oh.”
“Pathetic, isn't it? My brother died because of me, and I—his own twin—can't even remember him. Some days I feel I don't deserve to breathe.”
“What are you saying? It was just an accident. You have to live twice as hard, for your brother's sake too! I'm sure that's what he'd want?”
“...You think so? Lately I keep catching myself wondering. What if I had never received the divine treatment? Then I would have met Innocent that much sooner—and then maybe my brother would still be alive.”
“Because Innocent could have saved him?” Quinn's voice had turned razor-sharp. “If that's your logic, then 'what if you had never fallen into the river in the first place' makes for an even better one.”
“Quinn!”
“Then he never would have leapt into that river to save you—and the one standing here now might be your brother instead of you.”
“That's true. My brother was clever, unlike me...”
“No—before that, it would have been better still if you had never been born at all. If the two of you had never been twins to begin with, he could have lived his whole life in peace, on his own and unburdened.”
Quinn fixed Bayul with a stare as cold as frost. And yet, somehow, there was anger in it.
“If only this hadn't happened! If only that hadn't! Why on earth do you humans torment yourselves with such idiotic hypotheticals? The past is simply the past. There aren't enough hours in the day to fret over the present as it is—why waste them chasing empty delusions? I genuinely cannot understand it. Are your brains truly that bad?”
“And what makes you so much better than us, huh?”
Eli, who had listened to Quinn's tirade in silence until now, erupted without warning. “Do you have any idea what it means to lose family? You know perfectly well how crushing and unfair that grief feels—and you still stand there spewing that garbage?”
“E-El...?”
Clumsy as his methods were, Quinn had been comforting Bayul in his own way. Bayul himself knew it, and so did Aidan, watching from the side. Which was precisely why it left them so wrong-footed when Eli—usually so quick to read a room—went suddenly, utterly serious.
“I have been alone my entire life. From the moment I was born, there was no one at my side.”
It was a shocking confession. This was Eli, whose sunny temperament had never shown so much as a shadow—who could have guessed he carried such a heartrending past? Bayul found himself wanting to apologize, as though he had pried open a door he had no right to touch.
“That's why I understand. The gnawing loneliness. That desolation of having no one in the world on your side. Being twins, it must have cut you twice as deep. I can't even imagine what it is to lose half of yourself.”
“El...”
“Still—hang in there, Bayul. Running away—no, from what I've seen since coming out into the world, it seems like a place worth living in after all.”
It had been Eli, after all, who had flung his unhappy history into the open without a word of warning. If anyone in that clearing deserved comforting, it was not Bayul but him. And yet there he stood, patting Bayul's shoulder, handing over the solace himself.
“...Well, that's absurd.”
Whatever will Quinn had to argue back was gone. He swept Eli up and down with a look of sheer speechlessness, then simply turned and walked away.
“Hey! Where are you going all of a sudden?”
The shout chased after his retreating back, but no answer came. Only Quinn's blue hair flashed in and out of view, glinting faintly in the moonlight as he vanished into the dark.