The First Snow of the Northern Empire
The First Snow of the Northern Empire
Aslan confronted his own memories.
A dream, the first in a long while—and a normal one at that, untainted by the presence of any evil god.
Nothing more than the aimless residue of unconsciousness, set against a castle buried in void-gray snow.
It could almost pass for mental respite. For a brief while, he let himself believe that.
He might have held onto the feeling a little longer, savoring the scenery and its calm, if something hadn't revealed itself.
When the fat flakes settled on his shoulders and turned his black hair white with their touch, Aslan became aware of the figure standing at his side.
Black hair and pale blue eyes. A woman whose features carried a certain kinship with his own.
Astrid.
Her name was Astrid.
She had been his friend—a companion during the short span he'd spent in the Northern Empire.
The moment he saw her face, Aslan understood: this dream was built from a memory he had lived once before.
They stood side by side, gazing out toward the horizon. Far across the snowfield, something like a rippling white veil stretched before them.
The trace of an authority unfurled by the Veil of Compassion. A faraway world.
The barrier that divided the northern and southern continents, and a place where the scars of the dead ancient empire still burned vivid and white.
Astrid was a woman who harbored ambitions of turning back that faraway world.
"My friend—have you ever thought the Northern Empire ought to be a warmer land?"
She wore her ambitions openly. She was the sort who spoke of such things while adjusting the fur cloak draped over her mage's robes, as if the question of possibility or impossibility didn't concern her in the slightest.
Whenever he heard her talk like that, Aslan had encouraged her, told her it was possible, and she had always smiled in thanks, quietly proud.
She was a cheerful person.
Despite holding the post of Imperial Mage, she was a woman who genuinely enjoyed the company of others.
In his eleventh year, Aslan had drawn relief from that cheerfulness. Had found comfort in it.
He hadn't stayed long in the Northern Empire, but there had been times he'd thought—if only this Geladrion had more people like her.
He'd thought that until not very long ago.
This is... a dream, isn't it.
And that was how he knew—the scene before him now was a dream.
The moment he recognized it, knowledge and information flooded his mind, coming to him like sudden clarity.
Holding that knowledge close, Aslan drew his cloak tighter against a cold he couldn't feel.
Shivering in that unfelt cold, he thought.
Why had Astrid become a priest?
Had she been one from the very beginning?
If so, why had she befriended him?
The questions welled up without answers, and the afterimage of Astrid standing beside him brought only a quiet ache.
He let out a sigh, expression troubled, and looked at her.
He could guess why this dream had come to him now.
Because in the waking world, the priests' forces were right in front of him. Forces that had been avoiding Aslan and his party, dodging any direct confrontation.
In the process of sweeping them away, he would meet Astrid again.
He sighed at the thought.
He rejected the dream.
And with startling speed, he was free of it.
Aslan opened his eyes, face still drawn, inside a tent.
Tiyamal and Richard were sleeping beside him, and their snoring filled the canvas with noise.
He rose quietly so as not to wake them, threw the Wings of Stymphalos over his fur garments, and stepped outside.
The camp lay deep in the hour before dawn. The tilting moon had already slipped past its zenith and now hung before him, slowly brushing against the horizon.
Angled out from that horizon, shoved aside as if the tents themselves had been piled into a makeshift wall, the faraway world stretched across the landscape.
The great line dividing the northern and southern continents. A death of space-time—a cosmic death like curdled cheese, frozen solid.
He stared at it and his thoughts drifted back to the Astrid he'd seen in the dream.
It occurred to him that perhaps she had abandoned her humanity because of that thing—because of its power, so vast it defied reckoning.
He exhaled, pushing the thought away. When he turned, his eyes fell on the command tent, still lit from within.
As he approached the canvas seeping bright light, someone abruptly popped her head out.
"...Ah."
A woman with light brown hair plaited thick over her shoulder and eyes that gleamed a matching light brown.
Rumel.
A small exclamation escaped her at the sight of Aslan, and then she glanced around, scanning their surroundings. No one was watching. No one was listening, either. A situation where she didn't need to maintain her general's bearing. Without a second thought, Rumel grabbed Aslan's arm and pulled him inside.
He was inside before he could properly react, and Rumel greeted him inside the command tent with a bright laugh.
It wasn't the sort of laugh you could meet while still lost in brooding, so Aslan quickly composed his expression and forced a smile in return.
"Rumel, why are you still awake? What have you been doing?"
At his question, Rumel scratched her cheek and tilted her head toward the table.
"Just... couldn't sleep. So I was looking over the maps. I should know tomorrow's marching route anyway."
True to her word, a map lay spread across the table. A reasonably detailed rendering of the southern reaches of the Northern Empire.
Aslan nodded in understanding, and Rumel fixed him with a faint smile.
"And what were you doing, Aslan? It's very late."
A question trailing off at the end. Thinking he couldn't exactly give a straightforward answer, Aslan forced another smile—
"Your face is full of worry. Is something troubling you? You look... terribly sad."
—and blinked in surprise at her next words.
Aslan was not a man given to vivid expressions. His face wasn't something you could read with a casual glance. The fact that she'd seen through him left him caught somewhere between surprise and embarrassment, the emotion flickering across his features before he smoothed it away.
Could you really call this simple empathy?
While Aslan wrestled briefly with the thought, Rumel stepped closer and stood right in front of him.
"If it's all right... will you tell me? I'll listen."
The words came quietly. Her brows bent with both curiosity and concern.
Looking at Rumel's face tilted up toward his, Aslan realized hiding it would serve no purpose.
What came out after a pause was not a detailed story, but it was clear enough.
A friend had become a priest. Or perhaps she had been one all along. And that friend was now somewhere in this Northern Empire. When they met, he would have to kill her.
Rumel's expression grew troubled as he finished. Aslan, looking at her face, smiled faintly.
"It's not something you need to worry about. It's just... well, something I've already steeled myself for. Geladrion is that kind of land."
Aslan knew Geladrion's darkness well. He also knew the chain it formed—how the darkness bred tragedy, tragedy bred priests, and priests bred still more darkness.
The mana of the settling dawn seemed to loosen his tongue, and he added,
"Still... I do think it sometimes. That no one else will point out what's wrong with this world if I don't. That if I don't do it, no one will. And that... makes me sad."
The sadness that had surfaced so freshly at the sight of Astrid—this was its source.
The certainty that this was something only he could do, that Geladrion could not change without him. A certainty earned through twelve years of living. Aslan sat in one of the command tent's chairs and laughed, a little embarrassed.
"So you don't need to worry. You don't have to understand, either."
He said it because Rumel's face showed she didn't understand. The thing he'd said—that the world was wrong—was something she couldn't grasp.
A face that had never once encountered a right world, and so could not even imagine one.
Seeing that expression, Aslan smiled bitterly and shook his head.
"It's just... the rambling of a man drunk on sleep."
He tried to step back from it, but Rumel looked at him steadily and said,
"It's not rambling."
Aslan himself had called it that, but to Rumel's eyes, it had been nothing less than his most honest truth.
She couldn't grasp his deeper meaning, but she could feel the sincerity behind it.
Aslan was afraid. He was grieving.
Having measured the emotion that clung to his melancholy expression, Rumel finally opened her mouth.
"For something you call rambling... you're grieving, and you're terrified."
At least, I would be, in your place.
She said it as she sat down across from him, then quietly reached out and took his hand.
The Dragon-king's hand, sheathed in black scales. The mark of a permanent loss that held no body heat at all.
Holding it in her own hand, Rumel realized that Aslan had been through this many times before. His tone, speaking as if it meant nothing, had been soaked in familiarity.
As if to prove that familiarity, Aslan answered.
"Maybe so. But it's all right."
"Why is it all right?"
"Because I won't collapse just from being sad and afraid."
A declaration that human beings do not fall to mere sorrow and fear. And a testament that the feelings themselves could never truly be shaken off.
The moment she sensed that familiarity, Rumel found she could not hold back a question.
"When you're that sad and that afraid... how do you still stand against it?"
Aslan considered the honest question. Considered it, and then laughed, a little sheepishly.
"I'm not sure."
"...Don't joke with me."
Rumel lifted her eyes at his reply, giving him a reproachful look. Aslan rubbed the back of his neck.
"I'm not joking. I genuinely don't know. Or maybe... I just can't explain it."
A baffled expression from Rumel, and an apologetic smile from Aslan aimed right back at her.
When their eyes met, Aslan took her hand in both of his. Then he pressed her hand against the left side of his chest, where his heart beat.
She felt the pulse. Rumel flinched, and Aslan spoke.
"It's just... following this."
This.
Before Rumel could parse his meaning, Aslan continued.
"My enemies are vast and powerful. I'm sure of that. Meanwhile, I'm feeble and weak. And my will is just as frail."
"That's not—"
Aslan shook his head before she could finish.
He had spent twelve years watching humans who were nothing in the face of evil gods. Even in the land he'd come from, he knew that not everyone got to see their will and purpose fulfilled.
And so, humans were always weak and feeble. Aslan was no exception. That was something he believed without doubt.
But.
Being weak and feeble did not excuse anything. It had never been a reason to surrender to fear.
So he told her.
"Even so... when I don't stand against it with that feeble, weak life and will, it feels like I'll lose something more precious than my own life. That's why I stand against it."
To Rumel, who was staring at him blankly, he spoke with a deliberately gentle expression.
"Because if I don't, I'll regret it even in death."
At least, that was how Aslan felt.
"So even when I don't really know how... I stand against it. Even when I'm sad and afraid, I pick up the sword."
Rumel listened with that same blank expression, then stared at Aslan for a long moment before she finally managed a nod.
"I'll... remember that."
"Thank you." At the words that followed, Aslan's face showed a wash of relief.
"No—thank you."
Even with the cold wind blowing outside, the atmosphere warmed between them. Rumel held Aslan's gaze and smiled with her eyes.
Along with the thought that she now knew him a little better. Along with the fleeting daydream that maybe she could move things a little further forward.
At least, until Aslan's expression hardened.
"...Aslan?"
His face went rigid without warning, his eyes fixed on something unseen, and Rumel asked with a note of puzzlement. Without a word, Aslan shifted his gaze and read the text that had surfaced before him.
The words read as follows:
[Active Sub-Quests]
[ ! Subjugate Astrid the Wailing, Priest of the Self-Birthing Mother ]
[ ! Subjugate the Monster of Kravrig, Priest of the Self-Birthing Mother ]
[ ! Subjugate the Knight of Lelanda, Priest of the Self-Birthing Mother ]
*
The capital of the Northern Empire. Habrisg.
In a city steeped in the remnants of the ancient empire, a woman opened her eyes.
She rose slowly, black hair spilling loose, and turned a complicated expression toward the space beside her.
Her disciple was there.
The disciple she had sent out days ago to investigate the deaths of the monsterized beasts. The disciple who had not been seen since.
She had meant to ask where the girl had been all this time, but the disciple spoke first.
"What troubles you, Master? Your color is poor."
The question came out so smoothly, so precisely aimed at the woman's unsettled spirit, that she forgot even what she'd been about to ask and opened her mouth.
"...A dream. I had a dream."
She spoke on instinct, not even knowing why the words were coming out.
"Aslan... my old friend, killing me and slaughtering our people. I dreamed it."
She trembled, unable to grasp the meaning of the symbolism layered over the dream—symbols that felt too deliberate to be natural.
"And... it didn't feel like a mere nightmare. It felt like a revelation. I heard the Mother's wailing. I saw divinity."
The Mother—the name by which she called the Self-Birthing Mother.
The disciple bowed her head deeply, and the woman passed her pale white hand over her face, wiping away the cold sweat.
The sense of wrongness melted away like snow before she could even notice it, and in its place, suspicion welled up.
What drove the wedge deeper was none other than her own disciple.
Still bowing deeply, the disciple spoke.
"...Master, I regret that I must bring you disgraceful news. The Watcher you brought here, Greenskin, has run amok and escaped."
The woman turned her head to look at her disciple, who kept her waist deeply bent as she continued.
"The last survivor at the scene spoke the name of the General-slayer Aslan before he died."
At this carefully chosen piece of information, the woman sank into deeper confusion, wiping her face again.
Her disciple spoke in a mournful tone.
"Perhaps this is something Aslan himself orchestrated. He may be planning to rescue the Watcher, extract information, and then attack..."
With just that slight nudge, suspicion hardened into certainty. A certainty that pushed the woman into terror.
The words that escaped the frightened woman were a lament.
"Must it truly... be this way, Aslan?"
Words that would never reach him. She closed her eyes with that final utterance and spoke.
"Prepare the army. If the Watcher has escaped, an attack will come before long."
At the command paired with a sigh, her disciple straightened from her bow and withdrew.
And the woman sank once more into deep anguish.
Because of that anguish, she shut her eyes—and therefore did not see her withdrawing disciple's shadow writhe.
That was her mistake.
She never noticed a thing.