Bridge of Delusion
A white, washed-out world.
When Lawrence came to, he found himself staring into a dense veil of fog.
Creak. Creak.
The moment he pushed himself upright, a disagreeable noise rose around him.
A rickety wooden bridge.
The bridge shook beneath him, swallowing sight beyond a single step ahead. Its old planks looked ready to splinter at the slightest provocation.
A faint scent of seawater tickled his nose.
The bridge, suspended over the sea, stretched only into the fog.
Where was this place?
Of all the Spirit World places he had reached so far, this was the most alien by far.
At least there were no hostile beings nearby.
After checking that much, Lawrence sat down and took out his bag.
It was the same bag the Watcher of Winter had searched once before.
Its contents were little changed from that time.
Only one thing was missing: the Key of the Spirit World, which always remained in the bag, was nowhere to be seen.
Almost without thinking, his hand went to his chin.
He began piecing together what had happened before he lost consciousness.
The holy site of winter.
Skarma, the divine spirit.
The three keys he had finally gathered.
And the burst of light that had spilled out from the sealing vessel.
That light had undoubtedly led Lawrence into the Spirit World.
Then was this place connected to the Key of the Spirit World?
He lifted his head.
All he could see was the bridge spread out over the dark sea.
“……”
No idea.
There were no neighbors of the Spirit World around, and nothing that looked like a clue.
Lawrence closed his bag and got to his feet.
He didn’t have many choices.
Forward or back.
Whichever way he went, he would only see fog anyway.
If he was going to move, it had to be forward.
Sorting his thoughts as best he could, he started walking.
He pushed through the fog and onto the decaying bridge.
The sound of waves drifted to him now and then.
The thick fog made it nearly impossible to tell how far anything was.
No matter how long he walked, the scenery never changed.
Still, if there was any luck in this misfortune, it was that this was the Spirit World.
He wasn’t especially hungry.
So he kept walking, taking sips of Water whenever he could to wet his throat.
He reserved only one other spell for now: Shadow Light.
The shadow turned to light, and though it didn’t do much, it at least helped drive the fog back a little.
His body had improved thanks to Veles’s wind, but that was no reason to overdo it. For the time being, it was best to focus on recovery.
Now and then, vague shapes loomed through the fog.
A tower? Or perhaps a pillar.
He couldn’t tell how far away they were at all.
The fog made distance feel strangely unreliable.
Best guess, the bridge seemed to be leading toward those pillars.
Nothing was certain.
The fog and sea weren’t saying a thing.
Still, that was fine. Once he reached the end of the bridge, this question would naturally resolve itself.
Lawrence put strength back into his legs and continued on.
* * *
How many days had passed after that?
The sound began suddenly, from behind him.
“……!”
Lawrence instinctively looked back.
Was it just his imagination?
He thought he had heard something through the fog.
“...rence!”
This time, it was clear.
Someone was calling his name.
A neighbor of the Spirit World?
No. That wasn’t it.
Spirit World neighbors called Lawrence a beloved child.
There were only a handful who knew his name.
There was no way they would be on this suspicious bridge.
More importantly, the sound had come from behind, not ahead.
There had been nothing on the bridge he had already crossed.
His wariness rose slowly, like mist.
Just in case, Lawrence lifted a hand.
He had to intercept whatever it was before it got close.
This was a fog so thick he could barely see a single step ahead.
Even worse, fighting on a bridge with so little room to move was far too dangerous.
There was nowhere to dodge.
And if he fell off the bridge, who knew what would happen.
Fall, and it was over.
He absolutely had to avoid plunging into the open sea.
It was coming closer.
Lawrence saw a shape approaching through the fog and opened his mouth.
“Sha—”
But the activation word never reached its end.
“……”
He nearly forgot to breathe.
The boy who emerged from the fog was far too familiar.
“Lawrence!”
It was a voice he had missed.
A voice he would never forget.
“What are you spacing out for? Hurry up, let’s go!”
Skinny body, hollow cheeks.
The boy with the friendly face was John.
“How….”
His throat tightened, and his voice barely came out.
It was John.
He hadn’t seen wrong.
It was John, the very friend who had left his side first after suffering through the fever.
Why was John here?
And why did he look exactly as he had back then?
“What’s wrong, Lawrence? Hurry up already. If we dawdle like this, the others will eat everything first.”
There was no need to ask where they were going.
When he came to his senses, the bridge in the fog was gone.
What appeared before Lawrence was a familiar back alley.
Hilton Village.
Instead of the sea, the reek unique to alleyways tickled his nose.
“Honestly, you’re impossible. Come on, let’s go.”
John took Lawrence by the hand.
Warmth flowed through that hand.
A force tugged at him, as if urging him to come along.
This wasn’t some kind of hallucination.
He just hadn’t realized it yet.
Before he knew it, Lawrence had become a boy like John.
His field of view had dropped.
His arms and legs were smaller.
But no matter how hard he ran, he never ran out of breath.
It was as though he had become the mischievous child who used to race through these alleys long ago.
The alley he ran through with his friend had not changed at all.
The well in the back alley that was always dry.
The abandoned house everyone swore was haunted.
And beyond the intersection, in the third red house, lived old man Berun, who had lost one leg in the war.
“You little brats!”
“Wahaha! Hurry up, the old cripple’s coming after us!”
As always, poor Berun was being tormented by the children.
Past Berun’s house, there was a rotten tree.
He would circle the stump, then wrap his arms around the dead wood and turn, and there it was.
See? Not a thing had changed.
Just like in that memory, a ramshackle house appeared, one that looked ready to collapse at any moment.
The shabby place where Lawrence and his friends had once lived together.
Skinny John, with his small frame, always slept on the outer edge.
Beside him was slow-moving Titu.
Simple-minded Baril, who snored in his sleep, stayed all the way inside.
Large-bodied Haman took the middle.
The Leader and Lawrence took turns sleeping in whatever space was left.
It had been cramped and stinky, but noisy and happy.
The house that had been full of the children’s warmth had grown larger and larger over time.
In the end, it had become the house Lawrence guarded alone….
“You really showed up early.”
Standing at the front of the house with his arms folded was Haman.
The deep furrow in his brow dripped with irritation.
“It’s John and Lawrence!”
Titu, the slowpoke.
Even his awkward tone matched his nickname.
“You two made it? Then we can eat it, right?”
The cheerful voice belonged to silly Baril.
“Sorry we’re late. Lawrence suddenly started acting strange.”
“Strange? Since when has Lawrence not been strange?”
“Bring us some meat, at least. Lawrence likes that best.”
“We’d have to have meat to bring, wouldn’t we? You really are dumb, Baril.”
He heard them bickering.
At those words, which he had thought he would never hear again, Lawrence could no longer move.
“Lawrence?”
His friends’ voices barely reached him.
The voices he had wanted to hear even in dreams were slipping away from him.
Then tears spilled out all at once.
Those friends he had thought he had lost once were all there.
Lawrence burst into tears like a child.
* * *
The meal wasn’t much.
Hard, stone-like bread that you had to keep in your mouth and let soften before you could eat it.
But not a single friend complained.
There were plenty of days when bad luck meant getting nothing at all.
They had to be grateful just for the fact that they had something to put in their mouths.
Lawrence slowly looked over his friends.
One by one.
He carefully studied each of them, unchanged from those days.
“So anyway, they say there are incredible people out there.”
“You mean the Four Knights of the Promise? Yeah, I’ve heard about them too. I heard they just swing their swords and the enemy goes flying.”
The idle chatter never stopped.
They were at an age where they could chatter all day just from hearing a bard’s song.
So of course they were easy prey for rumors brought in by traveling merchants.
“I wonder if we can get anything good today.”
“You won’t know until we go. The merchant said he was coming, so I guess we can at least hope.”
“Anything’s fine as long as it fills my stomach.”
Everything was the same.
Only one strange thing stood out.
No matter how he looked around, there was no sign of the pink-haired boy.
“By the way, when is the Leader coming?”
“The Leader?”
“Who’s that?”
At Lawrence’s question, Haman frowned back at him.
“You don’t know the Leader?”
The others tilted their heads.
“The one who gathered us and found this house.”
“What are you talking about? Are you sleep-talking again? You’re the one who gathered us.”
“That’s right. And you were the one who found this house when Baril wouldn’t stop whining about wanting a home, Lawrence.”
Lawrence couldn’t make sense of it.
That wasn’t him. It had been the Leader who gathered everyone.
“You really are weird today.”
“There’s no such person to begin with. What do you mean, the Leader?”
“Maybe this is because you played around too much yesterday? Who was it that took charge of the imperial leader again?”
“……”
The Leader didn’t exist.
The answer never changed.
For now, he decided to bury that question deep in his chest.
That night, when Lawrence lay down to sleep, he stared at the corner of the house.
Moonlight cast shadows there.
“Shadow.”
The shadow did not answer the boy’s call.
“Shadow.”
He tried again, but nothing changed.
Had I been dreaming all this time?
Were my friends’ deaths nothing but a nightmare?
And all those adventures, searching for holy sites across the land—were they nothing more than a back-alley boy’s dream?
“Can’t sleep, Lawrence?”
It was John.
He must have woken at the sound of the activation word.
“If you’re cold, come a little farther in. It’s at least better when everyone’s huddled together.”
“I don’t want to get close to Haman. He stinks.”
“I heard that, Lawrence. What, you think I want to be next to you?”
Haman grumbled as if to say the feeling was mutual.
“Listen to yourself. You’re still weird.”
“Just bear with it a little. Tomorrow I’ll definitely steal us some meat.”
At their voices, a laugh escaped him without thinking.
“I had a dream.”
Lawrence lifted a hand.
Through the gaps in the broken roof, the night sky was visible.
The moon shone bright.
Countless stars glittered beyond anything he could possibly count.
That sky of stars, forever beyond his reach no matter how far he stretched, had always felt impossibly distant.
“A very long dream. Maybe one I even knew was a dream, but didn’t want to wake from.”
“Was it that good of a dream?”
“Don’t worry about it. It was probably just a dream about eating meat anyway.”
“Yeah. If that’s all it was, then I guess that’s good.”
A dream was just a dream.
He didn’t want to remember it anymore.
Because everyone was here.
For now, that was enough.
Yes. For now, that was enough.
Giving up on thinking it through, Lawrence closed his eyes.
That night, the Spirit World dream did not come.
* * *
The back alley’s everyday life repeated itself.
If they succeeded at begging, they could at least fill their stomachs.
If they failed, they aimed for the traveling merchant’s pockets.
Naturally, they failed far more often than they succeeded.
Still, that was fine.
Even if they came home empty-handed, their friends would be there.
It was hard alone, but fine when they all had each other.
Like stray dogs, they licked each other’s wounds and survived day after day.
“Then I’ll go first?”
“O-okay! I’ll follow right after!”
“No. Wait a second.”
The Leader, who used to give the orders, was not here.
Lawrence stopped his friends as they rushed into things with nothing but grit and guesswork.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Then do you have a better idea?”
“Yeah. Titu. You draw the merchant’s attention first.”
He called on cautious Titu first.
“What do you mean, draw his attention? You want me to steal something first?”
“If that’s what you mean, I should just do it myself. I’m kind of tough, so even if I get hit it’s fine. You know that, Lawrence.”
“That’s not it. Why are you assuming you’ll get hit? If that happens….”
Lawrence swallowed the rest of the sentence.
Something had suddenly flashed through his mind.
Haman, covered in blood.
Haman being beaten to death by someone.
No.
That was a dream.
A nasty nightmare.
Don’t remember it.
Haman was right there in front of him, as alive as ever.