The Spirit Realm
The dream spread out before him as the same bleak forest he had once encountered before.
This time, Lawrence did not panic.
This was different from the first encounter, when he had known nothing at all.
He calmly looked around.
Was there anything hostile nearby? Were his fairy friends here?
The owner of the small rustling sound beyond the brambles was one of those fluffy, rolling little bodies that bounded about like tumbling balls.
No other fairies were in sight.
That included the red eyes that had once scattered a sinister aura through the place.
Once he confirmed he was safe, his mind loosened.
From experience, he knew he could not leave this place until he woke from the dream.
Even returning to the meadow where he always stayed was impossible.
In other words, whether he liked it or not, he had to spend time here.
So should he simply sit and wait?
Or would it be better to wander around like before?
The hesitation did not last long.
He had met the red eyes because he had wandered blindly through this place.
Looking back, it had been reckless and careless.
There was no need to repeat a mistake.
Lawrence took a seat in the clearing, as if he were in an inn room.
His concentration deepened.
He had only just begun to get a feel for it anyway.
He had been practicing magic while leaning against the bed, too reluctant to waste even the time it took to close his eyes, and he no longer remembered whether he had simply drifted off or fallen asleep without noticing.
He refined the shape of the Shadow that rose from the darkness.
He still had to keep both hands extended in front of him, but the time it took to form the arrow had shortened considerably.
Now it was time to put force into the arrow itself.
He tried launching the Shadow, only for the form to scatter before it had even flown two seconds.
The force behind its flight was not especially strong either.
It vanished with a soft pop, like a candle snuffed in the wind.
At this rate, even the arrowhead he had managed to make was useless.
The next one was no different.
Nor was the arrow after that.
Every attempt ended in the same result as the first.
Lawrence rested his chin in his hand and stopped practicing for a moment.
It was different.
This was not a matter of skill.
He was certain that no amount of repetition would change the result.
Something drastic was needed.
He did not know why that thought came to him.
Still, even if it was only instinct, it was hard to ignore.
After all, Lawrence had first encountered magic through dreams.
No one had taught him. He had understood it and grasped it on his own.
That instinctive sense was whispering that this was not it.
But no matter how much he thought, the answer would not come.
Would it have been better to force his way to a big town after all?
There was no one here to point the way for him.
No book to teach him even the barest route.
Regret came too late now.
The suffocating sense of having no way out echoed inside his chest.
What could he do?
If it would not work, he would keep trying until it did.
He knew effort did not lie.
How long had passed?
Just as a constricting pain began to rise near his chest, he suddenly felt the temperature around him drop.
“……”
Lawrence was not so dull that he failed to understand what that meant.
He instinctively looked around, and the forest was moving.
As if welcoming someone who had come to this place.
At last, it appeared together with a horse wrapped in dark red cloth.
A black horse with eight hooves.
Sitting atop the saddleless mount, it stopped when it saw the boy.
Red eyes gleamed through the dark red cloth.
When his gaze met the eyes, which moved independently from one another, a faint headache stabbed at him.
He still could not understand the words.
And yet the pain was not as severe as it had been before.
Lawrence stared back at the red eyes.
The eyes were still grotesque enough to provoke a physical revulsion.
There was no throat or face like a human’s, and within the dark red cloth where its upper body ought to have been, those same pupils flashed with light.
There was no hostility.
He could not feel the ominous aura either.
Compared to their first meeting, it felt like a completely different being.
He did not understand why.
Was it because his magic had become more refined?
Or because something inside Lawrence himself had changed?
The red eyes that had been so terrifying now felt like nothing more than a being with a slightly unusual appearance.
Perhaps that was why.
His cool-headed thoughts gave the boy the courage to take a step forward.
“Um... can you understand what I’m saying?”
He tried speaking while suppressing the creeping headache.
The red eyes were a resident of the dream.
Surely, with enough effort, they could communicate.
The fairy friends he played with every time were proof enough of that.
At least, if he ignored the part where he still could not hear what they called Lawrence.
Ordinary conversation had not been difficult to carry on.
It sounded like a laugh from somewhere.
A cold, cutting sneer not unlike the one he always felt from Lenard.
The emotion the red eyes displayed might have been closer to mockery.
It raised a hand.
To Lawrence’s surprise, an empty sleeve hung there.
As though drawn by the gesture, something came out from inside Lawrence’s chest.
White stone fragments.
They were the pieces of the goddess statue he had found at Saint Charmant Monastery.
At the red eyes’ gesture, the fragments took on a black sheen.
For an instant, it was a dark radiance that seemed as though it might erode his very eyes.
Lawrence blinked, and when he opened them again, the fragments had returned to being ordinary pieces of stone as if nothing had happened.
Suddenly, the cold that had been binding his body disappeared.
Before he could even register the change, a low voice rang out.
The voice that reverberated inside his head was not human.
It was the red eyes.
The red eyes answered Lawrence’s question.
He could understand it now. He did not know what had been done, but the fragments’ brief flash of light had apparently been preparation for conversation.
“Um... well... it’s nice to, to meet you, first of all.”
“This is not the first time. Is this not our second meeting?”
Hearing that amused voice made the headache throb harder.
His face twisted before he could stop it. He worried he might have given the wrong impression, but the red eyes went on without a care.
“You do not have much time to speak with this body. I happened to have a stone from the Spirit World, so I borrowed its power, but for one without a hearing ear, it will be quite a burden.”
“A... hearing ear?”
He echoed the phrase, not understanding it.
“Do I have to explain from there?”
“Please do.”
He asked for instruction.
The moment he heard the hesitant tone, his mouth moved on its own.
“If it is the request of a beloved child, there is no helping it. To contact the neighbors of the Spirit World, you must first come into contact with the five cognitive concepts.”
“The cognitive concepts...”
“Connected Head. Seeing Eye. Hearing Ear. Smelling Nose. Speaking Mouth. Beloved child, to be blunt, what you possess right now is only the Seeing Eye.”
Spirit World. Neighbor. Five cognitive concepts.
Beloved child was probably what it was calling Lawrence.
That meant the fairy friends and the queen might have been calling him that too.
“Then the reason I can talk to you like this is... you’ve temporarily given me the hearing ear you mentioned?”
“Quick to understand. Yes. But this is only a makeshift solution using a stone from the Spirit World. A borrowed concept is not your own. The price for enjoying an excessive miracle always returns to the one who used it in the end.”
He would have to thank Abeline...
He had only kept the goddess statue fragment because he had essentially forgotten about it. He had no idea it would help him in a dream, or, to borrow the red eyes’ expression, in the Spirit World.
“So then, what business brought you here? Shadow Forest is no place for one without the proper cognitive concepts. If you have lost your way, I could send you back to the real world as before, but...”
Lawrence felt his mind jolt awake.
Apparently, the red eyes had not called him to this place.
Then why had he come to a place with so many unpleasant memories?
Had he been yearning for it inside himself without even realizing?
The tightness in his chest.
The unquenchable thirst.
There was no need to think hard about the reason.
“C-could you perhaps... teach me magic?”
His voice carried a desperate light.
He had long since abandoned whatever pride he might have needed to preserve.
For Lawrence, who owned so little, magic was the one and only treasure he possessed.
To move across a vast and endless sea, he needed a signpost.
And if, in addition, there were a prophet ahead of him to show the way...
Then surely he could achieve more than he ever could now.
“You are a greedy child. I told you, did I not, that excessive miracles always demand a price... And yet, if this is the request of a beloved child, it is difficult to refuse.”
There should not have been a face there at all.
And yet Lawrence thought the red eyes were smiling.
“Beloved children are said to be born with a connected head from ancient times. Since you are linked to the Spirit World, borrowing it once should not be too great a burden. At the very least, you already have the Seeing Eye, so you can understand it. Do not rush, child. The world will answer your earnest will, and the answer to that miracle is already in your hands.”
The red eyes lightly tapped the horse’s back.
As if to signal that it should relax, the horse turned forward.
“Still, the fact that the beloved child has talent for the void is a little troublesome.”
The words, spoken to no one, were little more than a sigh.
They were not said in expectation of an answer.
Lawrence watched every movement the red eyes made.
“Look.”
The change began small.
A chill crawled up his spine.
It was the cold he had felt when he first met the red eyes.
Hazy shadows began to rise like heat mirages.
The shadows swaying with the wind among the plants moved as though they were alive.
The red eyes drew in the black brilliance that linked from shadow to shadow.
The process happened in an instant.
Those shadows, transformed into black radiance, were then shaped into droplets.
Not rain from the sky.
Shadow rain pouring upward from the ground toward the heavens.
No one shadow came first.
The droplets that poured upside down came to a halt, as though time itself had stopped, against the pale sky.
Something inside his head snapped.
The clock turned red.
There was no pain as if his skull were about to split open.
Instead, a strange, cool sensation replaced it.
Dark light ran through him.
The thinning droplets transformed into sharp spearheads and shafts.
What rose into the sky was a shadow spear darker than pitch.
The color of shadow indistinguishable from darkness.
A shadow’s light that seemed to burn like fire.
He understood at a glance.
The magic Lawrence had been handling until now had been nothing more than a toy.
The Shadow arrows he had worked so hard to form could not even be compared to the shadow spear created by the red eyes.
“And understand this.”
At the red eyes’ will, the shadow spear shot into the sky.
Dozens, then hundreds of shadows adorned the dark heavens.
It was no longer magic, but something closer to a natural phenomenon.
Like rain falling from the sky.
Or snow descending from the sky.
No one could stand against such great nature.
It was an overwhelming sight, one that could only be described in such a way.
The magic manifested by the red eyes was close to a disaster no human being could hope to oppose.
Lawrence could not close his mouth.
This was the second time he had watched another person use magic.
The first had been the fairy queen’s flames.
Back then, the pain in his head had been so terrible that he had only managed to spy on it.
In other words, this was the first time he had properly witnessed the beginning and end of magic.
Beautiful.
That was the only word that came to him.
He had only just realized, today, that magic could be this beautiful, that it could be this fantastical.
Wind stirred somewhere.
As Lawrence stood there, stunned out of his wits, the wind wrapped gently around him.
He knew what this was.
The wind that sent him back outside the dream.
But before that, there was something he had to ask.
“W-wait! Your name. What is your name?”
He had not even managed to offer his thanks yet.
At the boy’s urgent voice, the red eyes answered with a hint of amusement.
“I have no such thing. I am merely a neighbor of the Spirit World. Call me whatever you like, beloved child.”
The sound receded.
A floating sensation lifted through his whole body.
When the wind finally stilled, the familiar sight of the inn room awaited Lawrence.
“……”
He sprang up, only to feel pain flare in his back.
He had not been sleeping in the bed.
Before his memory broke off, he had clearly been leaning against the bed and practicing Shadow, but it seemed he had fallen asleep in that exact position.
The pain in his back was no obstacle.
The clock that had vanished into red.
The headache now ticking inside his mind, oddly cool moments ago.
His chest trembled with excitement and expectation.
Even now, if he closed his eyes, that scenery stood clear before him.
The sight of countless shadow spears rising into the heavens.
It had been beautiful, no, more than beautiful. It had been wondrous.
The magic the red eyes had performed was at a level too great to express in words.
How much time would it take to reach that level?
No. Was it even a level human beings could reach at all?
Lenard had once said that the great mage Leano used magic that caused sparks to fall from the sky. He could not remember the exact name, but it had something to do with a desert, or so he had said.
The magic the red eyes had used was on at least that level, if not greater. Lawrence could not imagine it being any lower.
In other words, unless one reached the level of a great mage, such magic was impossible.
He closed his eyes.
His heart still had not settled.
Calm down. He took slow, steady breaths, as if soothing a tremor.
He did not even aspire to the level of the great mage Leano.
He simply wanted to be able to use magic of that caliber.
He truly thought so.
The foglike frustration that had once clouded his vision was no longer there.
Until now, everything had been vague.
Learn magic.
Practice magic.
He wanted to become a proper mage and earn money so he could live comfortably.
That was what he had wanted back when he had wandered the back alleys, because cold and hunger had been the things he hated most.
But that was not something he could call a dream.
The butler Blackwell had asked him about his dream.
Was there not something he wanted to achieve?
Back then, Lawrence had thought he wanted to become a mage.
But that was not the sort of thing one could say lightly.
Even among mages, not all mages were the same.
What he had said was no different from a foolish child saying he wanted to become a mercenary because he admired the city.
But now it was different.
He wanted to become a mage.
A mage who could use magic worthy of heartfelt, genuine admiration.
That was what he wanted to be.
Lawrence extended both hands in front of him.
What came to mind was the magic the red eyes had shown him.
Look. And understand.
Like those words, the boy understood that magic.
“Shadow Spear.”
Just as he had made arrows from Shadow, the shadow rising from the desk’s darkness quickly transformed into the shape of a spear.
It was the very same Shadow Spear that had shot into the sky.
Toward the open window, Lawrence hurled the Shadow Spear.
Toward the sky just beginning to brighten with dawn, the Shadow Spear flew higher and higher.
Like a bird breaking from its egg and taking flight.
Like a bird in a cage at last spreading its wings and throwing itself into the world.