Catharsis
It had all happened a very long time ago.
Twenty-three years was a considerable span even by elven standards.
Enough years had passed that she had thought she might finally be able to forget.
She had never imagined she would cling to it this hard.
In the end she had returned to her work as Forest Keeper of Luke Forest—where her charges were mostly monsters—and clawed her way back to some semblance of a stable life. Even so, she still could not bring herself to watch television.
Whenever she sat alone in front of a screen, she was certain those old broadcasts would come flooding back.
Yes. That was surely why.
The first time she saw Luke, Karen and Airen had risen unbidden in her mind.
Those children had been beastmen too.
At first she had simply planned to hand the child over to an institution. Before any attachment could form, she would place Luke in a facility she had carefully vetted herself—one that was honest and good—and hope the child would grow up happy in a loving home.
Even if she had managed it, she probably would have stopped by the orphanage after every shift. No—she would have done so without fail.
But every time she mentioned the beastman transformation procedure, the answer came back the same: Our facility is not prepared to take on a child like that.
And so even the handful of institutions that met Yerna's standards—close enough to visit, well-run, offering an education, operated with integrity—had to be abandoned one by one.
In the end, half by choice and half by necessity, she had taken Luke in. And as the days piled up, she came to realize just how deeply she had grown attached to the child.
Luke was cute, and brave, and easily embarrassed, and kind, and clever—a child who followed her so readily and smiled so freely.
I'll be fine looking after this one, she had told herself.
Perhaps that had been her way of finding peace.
Even a woman like me still has something useful left. I can still be of help to someone.
But it seemed that had not been the whole of it.
"That's the end of the story."
And so Karina's tale—and Yerna's—drew to a close.
What effect would this story have on the child?
Even as she spoke, she had wrestled with the question again and again: Should I really be saying this?
There were so many parts she had cut away, thinking, I won't tell this. The child doesn't need to know that much, does she?
Because of all those omissions, what she had offered might have been nothing more than a muddled, half-finished unburdening—something the child could scarcely understand.
She thought as much and smiled a bitter smile. But Luke had already pieced together every detail she had left unsaid.
"So that is how it was."
To Luke, it was as good as if she had laid bare every hidden corner of the truth.
At last, knowing the heart she had kept locked away, Luke spoke with grave sincerity.
"Yerna."
"……"
At the quiet sound of her name, Yerna's body went rigid.
Luke—who had listened to every word in complete silence—had finally opened that mouth.
She could not find the courage to look at the child's face.
She had poured the story out as if entranced, but the truth was she had never wanted to speak it.
If this conversation dragged Luke back into painful memories……
Yerna squeezed her eyes shut.
Would the child resent her? Demand to know why she had said such things?
What answer had she even been hoping to hear, rambling on at such length?
When she first began to confess, it had felt like a release. Now, looking back, all she felt was regret.
But she had already said everything. What good was regret now……
Was I so exhausted I simply lost my mind?
The hands working over her body had felt so good that she had not been able to keep her mouth shut.
Luke knelt on one knee before her, gazing down at Yerna's hands.
They were a warrior's hands, thick with calluses.
"Yerna. How have you been thinking of me?"
At Luke's solemn question, Yerna's heart lurched.
How had she thought of Luke?
Had she not simply been intoxicated with the image of herself spending money and caring for this child?
Could she truly swear that what bound them was a healthy relationship between guardian and ward?
She did not know.
Once the doubt took root, she began to wonder whether she had ever felt real affection for Luke at all.
Yerna spoke as if reciting a spell.
"Luke, I was wrong. I used you like a tool to ease my own guilt. I…… I'm sorry."
Yerna apologized.
It seemed the only thing left that she could do.
She had never even managed to apologize to Karen and Airen……
Perhaps spending money on Luke, fretting over Luke, treating Luke well—perhaps all of it had been her attempt at atonement.
A substitute for the dead. What a hideous kind of selfishness that was.
Tears slipped from beneath her tightly shut eyelids.
"If you want to leave me, that's fine. I can help with that too. You could go somewhere I've never even heard of and live under a completely different identity. Then you'd never have to see me again."
The witness protection program was already filed. Whenever Luke wished, the child could vanish and receive a new identity. Then, surely, a decent life awaited in a state facility.
Even weighing the freedom and happiness Luke might gain by leaving her, that still seemed the better path.
Luke did not belong with a sinner like her.
And then, a moment later, she felt a soft touch brush along the corner of her eye.
After wiping the tears away, those small hands closed around her own.
Luke understood this kind of heartache all too well.
Had he not lived through it himself?
War was always an endless chain of such terrible choices.
Which side to sacrifice. Which side to spare.
In the countless either-or decisions of a battlefield, the notion that no one would die was a fantasy.
And those who fell in such choices were, every one of them, the pillars and roots of some household.
A battlefield was the place where the lives of such people became the cheapest of all commodities.
So no matter which side you chose, people died.
There had been a time when those monstrous decisions had driven him into such self-loathing that he could no longer even wield magic.
"Yerna……"
Luke felt a deep pity for her.
Unlike him, she had not killed anyone with her own hands. What happened had been closer to an accident.
There was no need for her to suffer alone like this.
"It was not your fault."
How many times had she heard those words? Once? Twice? Or more times than she could count?
Or perhaps no one had ever said them to her at all.
"……"
The gentle stroke of Luke's hands felt good.
Those small, soft fingers pressed into her own hard, callused ones—kneading them as if working out a knot—and it was as though something had reached into the tightness in her chest and begun to ease it.
A sensation like congealed blood thawing, then pumping fresh through her veins.
For a while she simply let herself sink into that feeling.
Strangely, the more the pressure lifted, the more the tears came.
Like water running off melting ice.
What spilled from Yerna's eyes was the water of the ice that had frozen around her heart.
Luke released her hands, rose, and wrapped both arms around Yerna's head.
Held in the embrace of that small child's body, Yerna wept like a child herself.
When the storm of tears had passed, Yerna sniffled and tried to gather herself.
"This is…… a little embarrassing."
It had been a long time since she last laid her heart bare—and realizing she had been genuinely comforted by a child made the shame catch up with her all at once.
And as she sat with that feeling, she found herself wondering again: how could Luke be so composed?
The small smile the child wore as those eyes looked up at her was utterly pure, without a single shadow.
So pure she almost doubted whether Luke had truly understood the story at all.
"Hahaha! So that is how you have been looking at me all this time!"
When Luke laughed with such hearty abandon, Yerna was left utterly speechless.
Luke stroked Yerna's hair as she lay on the bed, and spoke.
"From this day on, trouble yourself no more on my account. Even if you worry over me and scourge yourself with blame, all you will earn is the weariness that settles around your eyes. That is hardly a productive endeavor, is it?"
"Luke……"
Yerna found herself at a loss for how to answer.
Luke asked to be treated ordinarily—but this child was unlike any other she had ever known.
Talent, temperament, conduct, manner of speech……
Not a single point of contact with other children of the same age. How was she supposed to think of Luke as just a child?
"How am I supposed to do that? You're nothing like ordinary kids."
It was not only the unhappy past.
Luke made no effort to blend in with other children.
Even now, that archaic way of speaking had not been abandoned.
Wearing the shell of Luke Irushi, still performing the role of the great archmage.
"Is that so. Different from ordinary children……"
Luke nodded in understanding.
Of course he was different from ordinary children.
It would have been stranger if he were the same—he had never once corrected his own bearing, after all.
All this time, Luke had believed that if he changed, the Luke Irushi within him would vanish.
That was why he had refused any shift in his identity. But that very refusal had become a source of worry and distress for Yerna.
Luke made a decision, and opened his mouth.
"Yerna."
"Yeah, Luke."
Luke clasped both hands before his chest and spoke with a bright, lively lilt—
not the usual solemn register, but the light, cheerful cadence of a child speaking to a peer.
"Don't worry about me anymore, okay? Look—I'm living happily right now, see?"
"……Huh?"
Yerna's eyes went round as she stared at Luke.
Did those words just come out of Luke's mouth?
Luke kept smiling bashfully and went on.
"So you don't need to feel guilty about me at all. I'm always grateful. Thank you, unni."
Good heavens.
Yerna felt something like sparks crackling through her skull.
Did she just call me unni?
Unni. What a resonance that word carried……!
Not because someone had forced it—this was the first time Luke had called her unni of her own free will!
The voice of the child who had shed the shell of Luke Irushi suited her so perfectly, so completely, that……
In the end, Yerna simply lost her hold on herself before that angelic sound.
Exhaustion and happiness and relief tangled together, and she could no longer withstand it with a clear mind.
Imitating a child. If he put his mind to it, there was nothing he could not do.
If his failure to act like a child his age had been causing her worry……
Then it was only right that he correct it. The fact that Yerna was his benefactor had not changed.
He had always been grateful to her, and always a little sorry.
So he had decided to try it once.
"Unni."
Spoken directly, of his own will.
……The reaction had been catastrophic.
"Hweeeung……"
Making some bizarre little noise, Yerna had slumped into sleep as if she had simply fainted.
Luke scratched his head, a touch embarrassed.
"It seems I have little talent for this sort of thing after all."
To think Yerna had passed out from listening to his performance.
Had it truly been that dreadful?
Well, no matter. Yerna was asleep, so Luke left the room.
He had a few things of his own to think through.
Still—hearing it all laid out, it is rather amusing. Listening to her story, it does sound entirely plausible.
If one insisted on viewing everything through a colored lens of misunderstanding, one would naturally arrive at such conclusions.
Had he been in Yerna's position, he might well have fallen into the same misapprehension.
Perhaps the truth is not so far from what she imagines…… but there is no need to reveal it now.
Human experimentation may well have taken place.
Though it would have been something he performed upon himself.
Speaking of it now would only do harm.
This body was surely the product of research into immortality.
Haha. Then whom, exactly, am I supposed to blame?
This transformed form was the fruit of his own labors—reaping what he had sown.
And thinking of it that way, he found himself oddly at ease.
Had he not failed after all?
I leapt a full five thousand years, after all.
Was this body the immortal flesh he had once sought to create?
If so, how on earth had he made it?
He still did not understand the principle—but he knew full well that he himself was deeply bound up in the changes this body had undergone.
And when he cast his mind back to the memories that belonged not to a cat, but to Luke Irushi……
The place in that dream had clearly been a forest of the Demon Realm.
"The Demon Realm, is it."
Luke nodded.
A cat that lived in the Demon Realm could hardly be an ordinary cat.
And recalling the sensations from the dream—the forest itself had felt so peaceful, so welcoming, that it seemed almost well-disposed toward him—only reinforced the possibility.
To ordinary wild animals, the wilderness was a battlefield for survival, not some leisurely playground.
At least I have a lead now—the Demon Realm. I ought to look into the records on that side.
And how, he wondered, was the Demon Realm recorded in this age?
His curiosity stirred.