The Land of Sorrow
The Land of Sorrow
Gobil.
A name that belonged to the man who had fought Aslan to the death in Kuramunz, city of the Honor Tribe.
Weak, certainly, and his scheme had thrown its lot with the evil gods—but he had faced Aslan openly and died for it.
He believed in the rightness of his convictions right up to the end, and Aslan had looked on him with something close to pity.
A man who had chosen a path that Aslan himself might have walked, marching toward a foreordained ruin.
Aslan had felt a kinship in that, and had steered events to safeguard the man's honor. And yet...
"How...?"
That same Gobil was standing before him now.
Aslan's mouth fell open in shock. Fay was the first to react to his shift in mood.
She shut her mouth without a word and glared at Gobil, her eyes thick with suspicion. The killing intent in her gaze was sharp enough that even Gobil himself—had he not been a spirit—would have been forced to take notice.
Unlike Fay, who silently adjusted her grip on her sword hilt, Aslan was busy trying to make sense of the figure before him.
A translucent form, something about it letting the space behind it show through.
It was unmistakably the shape of a pure human soul, one that had never been seized by any god.
Considering that most priests and faithful had their souls taken when they died and never reached the underworld, the sight of Gobil here was deeply unexpected.
Not every evil god collected souls. Exceptions existed, but they were rare.
The only ones who fit were the Veil of Compassion, which obliterated the souls of its dead faithful on the spot out of sheer disinterest in human souls, and the Twilight Flock, whose followers openly boasted that their god left souls untouched.
Of course, that could have been a lie. The Twilight Flock might well have taken Rowena's soul at the last.
And so Aslan had braced himself for the refusal he might receive: A soul like that is not in this underworld.
But against all expectation, Rowena was alive.
Because of that, Aslan had suffered a panic attack—brief, but nearly dragging him unanchored into the quagmire of the past.
He had even begun to suspect that Rowena herself might not have escaped the grasp of a god after all.
'And yet Gobil is here? His soul was never taken?'
True, when they had fought, the man had shown no signs of priesthood—but even without those marks, there were many ways to mortgage one's soul to an evil god.
Aslan had guessed that the scale-ward shield Gobil carried might have been the price of his soul. It seemed he had been wrong.
He stared wordlessly at the apparition drifting before him.
Moreover, merely escaping an evil god's grasp was not enough to make a soul summonable.
The soul had to possess a high enough status to avoid being swept away by the countless spirits of the underworld, and to endure the measureless span until it was called, it needed formidable willpower.
Even setting willpower aside, Aslan had never expected Gobil's status to be that high.
Faced with this sudden apparition, Aslan could only gaze up at Gobil, who looked down at him with arms folded.
He started to voice the question rising in his mind, then stopped.
'Familiarity...? With me? I killed him.'
Summoning a soul was, in essence, drawing near a spirit that felt a bond with the summoner.
That Gobil was here meant, at the very least, that Gobil regarded Aslan with some kind of closeness.
Part of him wanted to ask about it, but there was no point.
Souls had no vocal cords. Conversation was impossible.
He could ask yes-or-no questions and receive answers, but those would never reveal the true nature of whatever familiarity Gobil felt.
So Aslan simply looked at the spirit regarding him in silence and spoke.
"Thank you. I was in a difficult spot."
A crooked smirk crossed Gobil's sullen face, and he shrugged.
The meaning was not entirely clear, but Aslan had the distinct impression it was a wry retort along the lines of, "You? Surely not."
"No, truly—this was a tight corner. I consider myself fortunate that you answered."
Gobil's eyes widened as if in surprise, and Aslan met the spirit's seeming gaze in silence before bowing his head.
"I don't know why you came forward to help me. But now that you're here, I'd like to ask for your help."
That had to be why the spirit had appeared in the first place, but Aslan bowed and asked regardless.
Gobil blinked, plainly taken aback by the gesture, and the rest of the party reacted much the same way.
"Uh, what? You're actually talking to him?" Angie asked, staring at Aslan—her surprise evidently stemming from the very fact that he was communicating with a spirit.
"Not really. Not much back-and-forth. I'm just... reading him as best I can."
Disappointment showed on both Angie's and Gobil's faces. Seeing the spirit's open chagrin, Aslan allowed himself a crooked, bitter-edged smile.
His head still swam with the memories he had dredged up, and his heart had not yet settled—but his willpower was high enough to drive him into motion regardless.
He drew a breath and spoke, and Gobil nodded, watching him.
"I want to go to the City of Mages. Will you guide us?"
Gobil scratched his chin, then with a nod began to drift away in a particular direction.
Aslan watched him move, then turned back to the others.
"Let's go."
*
The landscape of the underworld was, in a word, an endlessly stretching desert.
Its beginning and end were so ambiguous that no matter how long one walked, it seemed impossible to reach either.
The party followed a single spirit like a lantern, walking in silence. The violet night sky, studded with drifting fog and streamers of haze, remained quietly oppressive even in the stillness.
This, Aslan reflected, was why fast travel in this realm took the form of summoning a spirit to guide you—and why you needed a guide who was both close to you and strong-willed.
To human eyes and human measures, distinguishing up from down in the endless expanse of the underworld was nearly impossible.
There was no moon, no sun. Not even a star glimmered in that sky.
No terrain to serve as a landmark, and no way to apply every scrap of survival knowledge he possessed.
Hence the need for an underworld inhabitant as a guide.
A soul who could see paths invisible to mortal perception and lead the way using the knowledge it had retained from life.
Aslan followed behind Gobil blindly, without any certainty whether the man was doing a good job of it.
Tiyamal and Fay still wore grimaces, their discomfort undiminished. Ereta and Angie had grown too weary even to take in the surroundings, and followed Aslan without comment or gesture.
"Aslan."
Angie drew close, tapping his armored shoulder with her knuckles.
Aslan turned his head to look at her. Angie gazed back at him, faltering slightly.
"Are you all right? Earlier... I didn't really understand what was wrong, so I just let it be, but now that I think about it, I'm a little worried."
Her eyes were uncertain, thick with hesitation.
Aslan glanced past her and, with a flick of his eyes, noted Ereta just behind, very pointedly pretending not to pay attention.
It was not only Angie's curiosity, he was sure. Ereta preferred to grasp a situation before she acted, and she had likely whispered to Angie to prompt this question.
So Aslan took a moment to think through the situation.
Objectively, it seemed difficult for anyone to parse what was happening from the way he had behaved—both in general and in that immediate moment.
It was hard to tell whether that panic had been an agony of joy or an outpouring of grief.
That guess proved correct, judging by the uncertain worry still lingering on Angie's face.
She had heard him speak of his wife, but her own experience was too thin to let her deduce the full complexity of the matter.
Even Ereta did not seem to have pieced it together, and Aslan had been about to let the whole thing pass. Then he realized he could not keep evading it forever.
If Rowena was alive, he would have to face her someday.
In the end, a man had no choice but to confront his wounds. No matter how much it hurt, he had to fight.
The man who hated fighting but had never once fled it gave a sad smile.
"I'm not all right. And I probably... won't be, going forward."
Perhaps even after the problem was resolved, he would not be much better.
He was aware it was a matter of the mind, so he made no deliberate effort to correct it.
If it had been a problem he could solve, he would have solved it long ago.
Time was unlikely to heal it either. After twelve years, what had not rusted or worn away in him was not about to start overcoming its wounds now.
All that remained was to endure, and to fight.
Whatever face Rowena wore when she appeared and tore his heart open, Aslan would have no choice but to fight.
That was the only recourse left to him.
Angie looked at Aslan's face—calm despite his admission that he was far from all right—and closed her mouth. Even when Ereta nudged her, she kept her silence.
Once the party had quieted, Aslan led the procession without a word, and Gobil glanced back at them before coming to a halt.
The spirit, even more taciturn than Aslan, drifted in place and then gestured with his chin toward the ground.
A gesture that said, unmistakably: This is the destination. Aslan looked at it and smiled, a gentleness slipping through.
"Thank you."
Gobil bobbed his head as if in reply, and his form began to dissolve slowly into the air.
As the spirit faded and disappeared, intricate symbols bloomed across the ground.
Aslan recognized the configuration at once—the same pattern that had opened the gate to the underworld. He turned and beckoned to the others.
When they had all gathered over the design, Aslan drew Seobsaeng from his belt and held it in a reverse grip.
"Purity."
White flames licked along the blade, drenching the Sword God, and in its place appeared the god-forged sword.
Aslan hesitated for only a heartbeat, lifting his eyes to gaze across the underworld, then drove the blade straight into the ground.
A deep, resonant boom—as though air were rushing into a vacuum—shuddered through the space, and the ground beneath their feet began to sink.
Whether it was stretching downward or simply subsiding, the stone beneath them gradually gave way to the surrounding landscape, until at last the ground vanished entirely.
"...Huh?"
The problem was that what appeared in its place was a harbor, hemmed in by deep blue sea.
Before any of them could so much as shout at the sight of the water several meters below, five plumes of spray shot into the air.