The Land of Sorrow
The Land of Sorrow
Aslan knew his body well.
He carried no illness, and his physical condition was sound. With his high Fighting Spirit, even if something had been wrong, he could have moved without difficulty.
A body always ready for battle was a quiet point of pride, and that awareness let him recognize the shift quickly.
His breathing grew ragged and thin. His heart slammed blood through his body, and his flesh answered with a strange surge of strength and a draining weakness all at once.
Aslan could read his own shock in all of it. He knew he had taken a blow and that something like a panic attack was setting in.
The source was fear.
It was the recoil of hearing something impossible and forcing himself to accept it. Swallowed by dread and terror, he tried to wrestle his breathing under control.
It came hard.
Each time he sucked in air to steady himself, more spilled out than he could hold, and his pulse only climbed.
It was obvious enough that the others noticed.
This reaction — the reaction Aslan was showing — was not normal. It was not the reaction of a man who had just learned his dead wife was alive.
Tiyamal reached the truth first. He had a past the others lacked, and that made the answer come naturally.
Tiyamal sifted through the short time he had spent with Aslan.
Aslan hated Evil Gods. He wanted to kill every last one of them. There might be other goals, but often the hatred seemed to come first.
No hatred is without a cause. Even when the cause is absurd, hatred always has a reason.
Tiyamal guessed that the reason was tied to the name Aslan had cried out: Rowena.
A lover he had been forced to kill with a breaking heart — and now she was alive. That, Tiyamal reasoned, was what had triggered the reaction.
And his reasoning was right.
Aslan sank into memory as if into a bottomless marsh.
As he clutched his chest and struggled to calm himself between gasps, the past pulled him under fast.
In that past, he saw a city.
A city now gone: Beryl.
He had lived there once.
He had lived there with his wife, Rowena.
They had shared a life, gone hunting together, taken work from the local lord to cull nearby monsters.
Aslan was a seasoned mercenary, and Rowena was a mage whose skill brushed the rank of master.
She had also been a priestess of Dusk's Flock, a faith widespread through the Kearney Barony.
A priestess, but she showed no superhuman physique or uncanny appearance. That was why Aslan had accepted her so easily. The Flock of Dusk preached compassion, the afterlife, salvation — nothing uncomfortable.
Even so, she often grew unstable, and when that happened, Aslan had to hold her, steady her, or talk her down.
But the appointed time had come anyway. The ordained ruin had descended as fire, as monsters, and swallowed the city.
Beryl burning. Aslan, living on the outskirts, had woken late to the sight of monsters hidden in darkness, not even fully visible, savaging the city.
In the end, he had used his tattoos. He burned stored Giant's Strength and Acceleration into his body, cast Hardness-Changing Magic onto his old two-handed falchion, and threw himself into the city.
With a blade now near white-iron in toughness, he cut through the creatures and made for the city's heart.
And the whole way, he was gnawed by the same dread he felt now — the premonition that everything was about to break.
Amid that dread, the softer memories rose, just as they did now.
When he and Rowena had shared a house, she had loved the fireplace — or, more exactly, loved talking with him there in front of it.
Their murmured conversations held no gain or loss, no victory or defeat. They simply traded whatever thoughts surfaced. It was a small routine, but Aslan had cherished it. Cherished it enough to give up on going back.
When the warmth of the fire finally faded, they would lie in the same bed and sleep. Sometimes they did things other than sleeping, and on those nights they drove each other until they were both spent.
The scent of skin tickling his nose, the faint brine-sour liquid of her body, the cling of damp sheets, the creak of the bed — those were the things Aslan had shared with her against the pale winter-morning cold.
When true winter came, they had bundled themselves thick and watched the snow fall together in front of the house.
The year they shared was not long, but its density was deep.
Steeped in those memories, Aslan had swung his sword.
He drove the falchion through monster skulls, split bellies, severed waists, cut legs, crushed heads.
Killing everything that blocked his path, he reached the city's center, and his grim premonition proved true.
And the moment did not unroll with the cleanness of the dream he had once described to Angie.
The blade was chipped and nicked, soaked dark-crimson and sticky with blood.
His flank was gashed. A claw across the face had torn him from left jaw to ear.
Aslan crushed down the breath building in his throat and looked ahead.
Rowena stood there, amid the corpses the monsters had stacked. She was dressed as if for an outing — a simple white dress, her usual tall boots, a deep violet shawl that matched her long black hair and purple eyes.
She was pristine — unlike Aslan, drenched in blood, dust, and mud — and unlike the burning city around them.
Pristine at the center of the slaughter.
Irrefutable proof of massacre. Aslan opened his mouth and closed it again and again.
Why. How. Please.
Wiping away every word that tried to follow, he forced the certainty into himself: a woman who was supposed to be a High Priestess of the Abyss had come to serve another god as a mere priestess. In that light, nothing was strange.
In the rising despair, Aslan looked at the dead around him with a face full of grief.
It was a moment of choosing, and Aslan — uncharacteristically — hesitated.
His gaze had dropped; when he lifted it again, Rowena was approaching.
With that enigmatic smile she always wore, the smile that never let him know what she was thinking. Slow steps.
She drew close and cupped his cheek, gentle. Her eyes rested on his wound with a tender sorrow, and she leaned in to kiss him.
Her lips looked pale. As they came closer, Aslan at last made his choice. He slid the falchion's edge between their nearing faces.
She stepped back, as though avoiding the steel.
Aslan followed her retreat with the blade extended. Rowena looked at the leveled steel with a grieving expression. Aslan wore a similar expression, drowned in despair.
"Hyeon-u."
She called his name. Aslan clamped his mouth shut on the reply that wanted to come and said, "Stop. Please."
At that, Rowena arched her brows in what looked like regret and whispered, "I'm sorry."
Aslan gripped the sword in both hands at almost the same moment she cast her magic.
After that, it went as it always did. He fought a priest, pushed himself to the edge of death, and won.
When it was all over, Aslan had lost his left arm. Rowena had lost a leg.
She lay collapsed, her white dress dyed red, blood spilling from her mouth. Aslan was gasping, drained by the backlash of Giant's Strength and Acceleration.
Amid the scattering of their ragged breaths, Aslan tightened his grip on the falchion — on the blood-drenched blade that was near breaking.
His teal eyes met her purple ones. As always.
Holding that gaze, Rowena clutched his leg. She held on, vomited blood, and looked up at him with dying eyes.
Watching all of it, Aslan was finally able to understand.
That all this pain was something he had brought on himself.
That in the end, after all the losing and severing, he would collapse.
That this was what came of letting someone in deeply.
That he knew what path he had to walk.
And that taking a chapter boss as a wife could never have been a good choice.
The time had not been long, but he should have seen it coming.
Through all the traveling together, the talking, the journey, the settling — she had been, steadily, an evil person. An unstable, twisted evil person.
To love such a woman, to give and receive affection with her — that had been ordained ruin from the start.
But the heart never obeyed the will. So as his last act of will, Aslan raised the falchion.
Rowena watched. Aslan watched his lover's final moment.
Her eyes, sharp as a cat's, yet softened and languid when she fought off morning drowsiness, and faintly luminous even at night — that purple light making him feel hazy when their gazes tangled.
Skin so pale it bruised at the lightest grip. A body so thin it felt as if she might crumble inside his arms.
Facing all of it, Aslan hesitated — and the woman spoke with lips stained red. He knew what words would follow.
A curse he would never forget.
"I love you."
Smiling softly, she lowered her head, baring her neck. His face twisted. He screamed with everything he had and brought the sword down.
Even forced, even dragged downward, his technique severed the unresisting neck clean.
Long black hair scattered. The headless body crumpled. Across the city, the sounds of monsters fell silent.
Rowena's head rolled away, and in the space left behind, only the laments and wails of the grieving drifted amid the thick darkness and rain.
At the center of it, Aslan held his broken falchion. He stood blankly in the falling rain.
The sight of Rowena's head tumbling across the ground was unreal. A head that just yesterday had laughed, chattered, whispered love, and pressed kisses — tumbling with a blank expression. Something that would never leave him.
Staring at the sight he would never forget, Aslan found, naturally, the woman who had stopped right in front of the fallen head.
Through his half-closed eyes, a figure emerged — a woman with horns that were not human. She wore white garments on white feet, untouched by the rain. She cradled Rowena's severed head in both hands.
She looked down at the head. A face that seemed at a glance innocent. Beyond that innocence, a squirming malice bloomed into a smile — and turned toward Aslan.
"—Hey. Hey! Aslan!"
The grip shaking him hard wrenched him from the past.
Coming back to himself, Aslan realized his whole body was sticky with cold sweat and that Tiyamal had hold of his shoulders.
Tiyamal studied him — the heaving breath, the sweat-plastered hair clinging to his forehead — and his expression turned pitying. He could not offer comfort, encouragement, or rebuke. He didn't know Aslan well, but he knew well that this reaction was far from ordinary.
So Tiyamal let his mouth work silently for a moment before sighing. "I don't know what's happened, but let's discuss it once we're out of here. Understood?"
He patted Aslan's shoulders — whether from worry, it was hard to tell. The warmth of the touch helped Aslan steady himself. Tiyamal exhaled and glanced past Aslan's shoulder.
Two girls and a woman stood there. None of them seemed in any state to comfort Aslan; each was struggling with her own feelings.
Fay looked thrown — Aslan had had a wife, and that wife was alive. Angie looked stunned that he could react so violently to news of his wife's survival. Ereta looked jealous. Envious, probably, of the raw emotion he poured out for a wife.
It was plain to see, and Tiyamal sighed, patting Aslan's shoulder again. Regretting that he was the only one in any position to offer comfort, he nodded.
Aslan, face damp with cold sweat, looked at Tiyamal and muttered while wiping his forehead, "Yeah. Yeah, you're right." The words were reflexive rather than heartfelt.
Holding his muddled consciousness together, he finally looked back at the Caretaker.
The Caretaker was a kind of Ancient God — child and ego of a lesser god of the netherworld who served the God of Sorrow and Death. The Caretaker watched over the dead and gathered their souls. That meant the Caretaker's oblique remark — that Rowena was alive — could not be a mistake or a lie. Aslan had no idea how or why she might be alive, but it was clearly the truth.
Still, Tiyamal's right. This isn't the moment to press.
It wasn't urgent. If the reason she was alive matched what Aslan suspected, she would act sooner or later, and he could think about it then.
He steadied his breathing. The Caretaker gazed at him for a long, direct moment before speaking — the voice still seeming to ring inside his head.
"A guide has answered your summons."
Shall I bring him? At the following words, Aslan stopped mid-breath and frowned. Before he could assess the situation or reply, the space in front of the Caretaker warped. The distortion slowly resolved into a shape, and the shape grew into a human figure. When it finally sharpened into clarity, Aslan heard himself speak the name without thinking.
"Gobil...?"