The Hero Who Could Not Steal the Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, there was the act of stealing a storybook, and the act of failing to steal one. Back then, the world split cleanly into two without any fancy justifications like duty or cause. Preferring hard bread over soft bread. Liking summer more than winter. Feeling more secure sleeping on a cold floor than in a cozy bed. All of these were remnants of those crude days, habits deeply rooted inside her like ingrained instincts. Even now, with her entire body wrapped tightly in a thick veil, she could not completely wash away the crude thoughts of that time clinging to the inside of her eyelids.
If you cannot steal, you will be stolen from. That was the truth she realized while watching a cat crunching on a field mouse that had nothing left but its head, her own mind hazy from starvation. For a time, it had been her life’s compass, her orbit, her standard.
Abigail. A name meaning “one who brings joy to God.” The first day she learned her name carried such a meaning, the very first words her cracked lips ever produced were these:
Triana Abigail. At the time, she was twelve years old. Not many people know that the girl who would later be praised as the Hero of the world was once the greatest troublemaker to ever rule a small village.
“I am truly, deeply sorry for causing you all such worry!”
It was only natural that every eye in the room turned toward the noble voice that possessed both the clear purity of a songbird seeking its mate and the fierce spirit of a wild beast. Yet none of those present could bring themselves to respond to that energetic declaration. After all, they were simply too stunned by the fact that the door they had believed would remain firmly shut until the end of the world had been thrown open so refreshingly wide.
Everyone except the owner of that voice had to cover their mouths with their hands to hide the undignified way their jaws kept trying to drop.
“Hero! You’ve been shut away in your room for an entire day! Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been?!”
Dawna spoke in a tone heavy with concern. Though she always looked as if a single tap would knock her over, her already pale face had grown noticeably more haggard compared to just yesterday.
The Hero had identified the monastery—deemed the most likely hiding place for the missing priest—as the location where his scent could be detected. She had been certain he resided there. The sight of her completely falling apart the moment she realized her intuition had been wrong was so shocking that even Dawna, owner of a highly logical mind, had felt her brain momentarily freeze.
Had Apis not stopped her, Dawna would have undoubtedly torn the door off its hinges just to confirm with her own eyes that the Hero was all right.
“Hey… You okay…?”
Apis sounded calmer than Dawna, yet her words were equally soaked with worry. The Hero had proven beyond doubt that she possessed the greatest strength and ability in the entire party—no, in the whole capital. Yet her inner self was still immature. The fact that her mental growth was still very much in progress was common knowledge within the party.
Both Dawna and Apis were somewhat aware that, on occasion, they treated the Hero like a precious youngest sister.
“Thank you for your concern! Apis! Dawna! But truly! I am perfectly fine! On the contrary, I feel guilty and ashamed for showing you a side of me unworthy of the name Hero!”
Back straight, stance firm. A booming voice. A bright smile. She looked exactly as she always did. So perfectly in line with the ideal image of the Hero stored in their memories that she seemed like a completed puzzle with not a single piece missing.
Yet to the two women who had witnessed that perfection shatter into pieces only yesterday, the Hero’s tidy appearance only heightened their anxiety. They knew. They could not not know. For the past month, how desperately the Hero had searched for the priest. How much she had worried. How deeply she had missed him.
When the priest first left the party, the Hero had tried to calmly accept reality, telling herself that if he had chosen to depart of his own will, they had neither the justification nor the right to hold him back. But once the suspicion arose that something terrible might have happened to him, she had transformed as if her entire personality had been flipped inside out.
The sight of the Hero pointing her sword at a non-combatant—even if that person might have kidnapped the priest—had been so ferocious that, had they not seen it with their own eyes, they would have dismissed it as an absurd lie. To them, who were accustomed to the Hero’s spotless conduct, it had felt no different from a particularly nasty daydream.
That was why even the two heroes of the reversed tide had failed to fully prepare for battle until Victim grabbed the Hero’s blade with his bare hand and stopped her killing intent right before their eyes.
“Though my heart wishes to go to the nun I have wronged and offer her my most sincere apology in person! Even if my intentions are good, since I am the perpetrator and she is the victim, any action taken while facing her directly could become violence toward her! That would be unacceptable!”
The orderly logic and calm tone coming from the mouth of a person who had lost her mind, swung a sword, and eventually cried herself to sleep only yesterday were almost impossible to believe.
Dawna and Apis’s gazes met for a brief instant. It was painfully obvious that damp anxiety and a murky sense of unease lurked within both pairs of eyes.
“Therefore! I have decided to convey my apology through a letter! Fortunately, I have previous experience writing a heartfelt apology on paper! This is the perfect opportunity to unveil my new ultimate technique, perfected using the experience from that day as its foundation—the ‘Hero’s Handwriting’! That is what I have concluded!”
The Hero proudly raised a luxurious envelope she had been keeping inside her coat. Her majestic gesture made the fluttering paper look, for a single moment, as brilliant as the legendary Holy Sword. Yet the light seemed somewhat duller than usual, not quite enough to fool the two women who had grown accustomed to the Hero’s dramatic behavior.
“So that’s what you were doing all night locked in your room…”
Dawna let out a hollow sigh. Now that she looked closely, the Hero’s pale face and hands were stained here and there with the thick black of ink. Beyond the wide-open door, the room where the Hero had shut herself in was so covered in crumpled balls of paper that the floor was nowhere to be seen.
Since the Hero was notoriously bad at anything unrelated to combat, it was easy to imagine her staying up all night wracking her brain over unexpected paperwork, worrying and worrying again. The adorable image that came to mind caused Dawna’s tension to ease just a little.
However, the ever-cautious Apis continued to watch the Hero’s series of actions with a deeply suspicious gaze.
“So, Dawna! If it would not be too much trouble, could you deliver this letter to the monastery in my stead? Regrettably, my current physical condition seems to be steeped in mental fatigue and requires an appropriate amount of sleep!”
“You always add three extra sentences when you could just say you’re sleepy… Fine. I’ll take responsibility for delivering this letter to the monastery. You go get some rest.”
“Thank you!”
As Dawna reluctantly accepted the letter from the Hero and tucked it into her bosom before heading outside, Apis quietly murmured toward the Hero, who was stretching languidly and loosening her creaking joints with light exercises.
“Hey. Hero.”
“Yes! What is it, Apis!”
“You. You’re really okay, right?”
“Yes! I am perfectly fine!”
The Hero answered as cheerfully as ever. However, perhaps due to the fatigue of staying up all night, she did not immediately turn her head toward the direction of the voice as she normally would, meeting the speaker’s eyes. For some reason, at that moment, she kept her back turned to the one calling her and simply tossed out the words in a quiet tone whose underlying emotion was impossible to define.
“Because I am the Hero, after all.”
It was bleak. It was devastating. Even when she had been driven out of her home village for the ridiculous reason that her red hair invited fire and misfortune, Apis recalled that she had not felt this hopeless.
One month. Back in her home village, it would have been a span so short it was awkward to even call it an instant—just a single grain of time. Yet now, having wasted most of that single grain, Apis felt with painful clarity why humans bothered dividing time into such short, trifling units.
It was the grace period the Hero herself had declared she would devote entirely to finding the priest. It was also the explosive oath that, during that time, she would set aside the duties she was supposed to carry out as the Hero.
With only a few days left in that period, every single moment left Apis restless and anxious. The entire party had been certain the priest would be in this monastery where the Saintess was enshrined, based on prior circumstances and all the evidence and testimony gathered so far.
Now that those expectations had collapsed so spectacularly, the wave of emptiness crashing into her thoughts was beyond words.
“Slow as a damn snail, but his talent for hiding is still top-notch…”
Just wait until I catch you. Suppressing her resentful thoughts, Apis headed toward the small bookstore located near their lodgings.
It was not for gathering information. Collecting rare fairy tale books from the various large and small bookstores scattered throughout the capital had become a kind of routine for Apis to calm her restless heart.
The very thing that first sparked her longing for the world beyond her village had been a fragment of a fairy tale book that had floated down the river by chance. The reason she had joined the Hero’s party was that she had glimpsed, in the current Hero, the qualities of the heroes she had once read about in those books.
Therefore, to Apis, the humans’ fairy tale books were the flame of life, the guide of the soul. It would not be an exaggeration to call them the compass of her existence.
“Huh? Apis?”
“Huh?”
Yes. It was most certainly not an exaggeration.