Chapter 98. Short-Lived Races and Long-Lived Races (2)
Chapter 98. Short-Lived Races and Long-Lived Races (2)
After that, my father kept talking.
He told me I had been taken as a child from a people called elves. He put it this way: it was like killing a mother rabbit from a happy rabbit family, taking only the young rabbit, and raising it in your own den.
When that happens, the young rabbit, knowing nothing, slowly grows up, and by the time its sense of self awakens, it sees that person as its mother.
Just as I, knowing nothing, had called him Mother.
"......Why? Why did you do something like that?"
"Because I wanted to succeed."
"Why?"
"...There was a time when I believed that was the right answer."
"The right answer? What do you mean?"
"......."
"Father. Why......."
Even when I asked, no answer came back.
But I felt the hand I was clutching gradually tighten.
As if he were lost in a flood of thoughts, as if even answering what I said was too much to bear.
"Hunting things...... was that because you were planning to eat me?"
So I wove a question of my own and offered it to him. I didn't know what a slave was, but there had always been a reason for all the hunting I had done in the forest until then.
He had told me that all living things must kill other living things and live atop their hide and blood.
That this is the nature of the world, and that I too must become strong to avoid that fate. And that at all times, I must feel that I am living atop such sacrifice.
"......No."
And yet, this was the man who had placed such emphasis on the value of life and the cruelty of the world.
What he revealed to me in that moment wasn't fear of his own life reaching its end.
"I probably would have done something worse to you. If you had fallen into someone else's hands instead of mine."
What he feared was how I would receive his words.
As if anxious about how I would react, he kept stealing glances at me.
Would I be disappointed? Or would I resent him?
"Worse things? Why?"
But contrary to his expectations, I was merely curious at that time.
Because to live is to come to know things, and the very act of coming to know things is how we go on living.
What I needed at that moment was to learn what emotions I should feel toward him, once I heard his story.
Through the explanation that came from his own lips, no less. Just as it had always been.
"It must be because we were different."
"Because we were different?"
"Yes. When beings are different...... people believe that simple difference alone gives them permission to treat another being differently than they would one of their own kind."
Why?
Before I could even voice that word, I reflexively paused to re-examine the sensation of his hand, clenched tight in my own.
Because that alone gave me a vague, intuitive understanding.
Even though we had lived through the same span of time.
Just by holding his hand, which was wrinkled unlike mine.
"Then, why......."
Why, when I was so different, had he not killed me—or done something worse than death—but instead kept me by his side?
What was the difference between me and the beasts he had hunted and devoured all along? Was it simply that we could speak? Simply that we looked alike?
"......Cough."
But now.
I realized that even asking such questions was no longer possible.
"There is so much more I want to tell you, but I hesitated too long. Now, I don't have much time left."
Time flows.
But an ending exists.
Unlike me, who could continue to feel that flow ahead of me, an end was coming for him.
"...Take this necklace."
Even with that end approaching, he handed me something he had prepared, as though he had been thinking about what would come after he was gone.
"That necklace will hide your identity. Now, leave my side...... go out of this forest, and live among other people."
"Father."
"I have taught you everything you need to survive. You will do well, Heira, I am certain of it. You think a great deal, but you are a clever child......."
"I don't want to leave."
"Please, leave me, and go find new encounters."
"Father."
"I love you, my daughter......."
"There are still things I want to learn from you. There is so much I haven't learned yet."
"......."
"...Father."
"......."
"Father, I......."
It was an unusually cold day.
Even though the firewood in the campfire had not yet burned away, I felt a chill spreading over my body.
That must have been why his skin, which I was clutching, had turned cold.
I believed it was because of that.
"I want to hear your story a little longer."
Hoping to warm him with whatever warmth I still had, I brought his hand to my eyes, which had grown hot with tears.
Not to come to know him better through this act.
But hoping that the sorrow of being unable to come to know him further would fade away.
***
It was only after I set foot in human society that I realized knowing is not everything.
Because there are secrets in this world that must not be exposed, and things that must not be forcibly uncovered.
I came to understand all too well, in the encounters I had after leaving his side, that silence is also a virtue necessary for being together with someone.
"He isn't coming back."
But by the time such encounters finally came to me, over half a century had passed.
Even after he left my side, I remained where the traces of his existence lingered, and spent close to half a century there.
Staying in that place, retracing the traces of him, ruminating on them over and over.
"Father isn't coming back."
But no matter how many times I repeated it, no clear answer would surface.
What kind of life he had led.
With what state of heart he had taken me in, and raised me all this time.
Why, having taken me in for his own success and profit, he had made such preparations for when I would be left alone.
And why, at the very end, he urged me to leave this place.
"He isn't coming back."
The one person who could explain all of that had abruptly departed from my side.
So very abruptly...... no, so very slowly, and naturally.
"......Fade away."
Just how much time flowed as I tried to soothe the emptiness that came from that loss?
By the time his corpse, buried in the earth, had weathered, and even its bone fragments had crumbled away to nothing.
Still, I looked back on my memories with him through the grave that stood in that place, and I felt that the sense of loss in one corner of my chest was gradually fading.
Even though I had found no clear answer on my own, I felt the pain fading.
Because as time went on, memories stockpiled, experiences grew, and with them, the emptiness only grew larger.
Yes, so this was one way of digesting pain.
Burying it in time rather than in understanding.
I had thought the time I spent with him was the entirety of my life, but I realized that if the time after that went on, it would ultimately only amount to half of my life.
"Must I leave?"
At the end of the long process of ruminating on my life with him.......
It was the moment I recalled the last words he had left behind.
"Must I truly leave your side?"
Because there was nothing more to learn in that place. All I could do, having already come to know everything that existed there, was to ruminate on it.
And now that even that had come to an end, there were only two paths left for me.
"No one will teach me."
Perhaps.
Perhaps I might simply bury myself here by his side?
"That's why I have to go out, right? Even if just to learn......."
I thought maybe, if I did that, a corner of my heart might find peace. But when I starved myself for several days and felt my breath stopping, the memories I had made with him only grew sharper.
A paradoxical moment where, within a consciousness growing faint, only my memories of him grew vivid.
Feeling a sense of wrongness even as those memories, too, began to fade, I once clutched my starving stomach and ravenously devoured the smoked meat stored in the shed.
"Yes, I will go. As you told me......."
Because I did not want to forget the person who had been the entirety of my life.
Because I believed I must not forget.
"I will not forget your final lesson, Father."
Because if I were buried at his side, I would no longer be able even to remember him.
And so, I made preparations to leave that place, so that I might follow the words he had given at the cost of his life's end.
"......Goodbye, Father."
The moment of revisiting a farewell that should have been eternal came to an end.
Treasuring only those memories, beginning to extend a continuation to that farewell.
It was only after a hundred years had passed that I was at last ready to leave my homeland.
Burying the sense of loss that still remained with emptiness.
And hoping to find something with which I could bury that emptiness, in order to learn about the new world I did not fear as I ought to have.
"Who are you?"
Yes, I met him.
"I'm someone who is going to give you a pleasant dream, starting now."
In a new encounter I stumbled upon by chance.
A man who, in a way different from my father, expressed love toward me.
***
The first time I learned how to shoot a bow.
Nearly a full day passed from the moment I nocked the arrow until I let it fly.
The time it took to shoot just a single arrow.
The arrow I shot like that struck the center of the target, but when he returned from the hunt, he looked down at me with eyes full of dissatisfaction.
'......Your accuracy is remarkable.'
'Did I do well?'
'You're still far from it. Your accuracy is high but your speed is absurdly slow. If you dawdle that long in the wild, a predator will eat you.'
A hand roughly ruffled my hair.
Along with that gesture, his sharp voice carried clear dissatisfaction toward me.
'Still...... your accuracy alone is better than mine. If we polish that a bit more, I could use you as a decent hunter.'
But the gentleness that came at the end of it did not feel bad.
That touch, which hid his own feelings while revealing his consideration for me.......
Though now that he was gone it was nothing more than an idle wish, I used to think time and again that it would be nice if he could express those feelings honestly.
It must have been more precious to me precisely because I felt that regret.
Because when that stranger embraced my body, what he bestowed was touched with that very honesty.
So very warm, and pleasant.......
For I felt the first pleasure I had ever known in my life filling my emptiness and sinking its roots deep within me.
"Heira. Why are you standing there like that?"
A new encounter I came upon at the end of chasing after those traces.
When I came to my senses, I realized that someone else was standing next to me.
"Serika."
"Yes, it's Serika."
Serika.
A person who was younger than me in years, yet, unlike me, was exceedingly vivacious.
Though there was much she did not know, the way she learned by throwing herself bodily into things was what people in the world called 'courage.'
Bravely pushing through, and somehow overcoming things in the end, growing ever stronger.......
She was the person who taught me that such a way of living existed.
"Hey, you two. Stop dawdling and get over here."
And beside her, looking down at me alongside her, was Ymir.
Though, unlike Serika, I could not call her sister, she was far more mature than me, and I relied on her in many ways.
Unlike me, who had judged the world by merely watching, she had accumulated the knowledge that humanity had built up across generations.
And the consideration one could sense beneath her blunt and rough nature was similar to my father's.
"I get it, so say it a little more nicely. What if you startle Heira?"
"No, the one who gets startled is you, not her. Every time I see you eyeing her like a hawk every single day, I'm the one who gets a fright."
"E-eying her, who's eyeing her......."
"Life must be real fun lately, now that you've got a flower in both hands? Seeing as things turned out this way, should I join in on it too? Here, look. Boobies~ boobies~"
"Put those lumps of fat, monstrously large and nothing else, away!"
At first, watching the two of them bicker like that seemed precarious, but I could vaguely notice that the process itself was a way of expressing closeness.
Because even when it looked like they were fighting, I could feel the distance between them shrinking the more actively they interacted with each other.
"The three of you."
Of course, it was a method I couldn't even imagine at present.
I was still not used to it.
I still needed to learn more.
"You won't leave, will you?"
So a little more.
I had to keep staying by their side, learning more, going forward.
"You'll keep staying with me, won't you?"
To the three people walking the same path as me.
I quietly asked, letting that sense of expectation show.
Believing that they, of all people, would give me the answer I wanted.
That they could fill what was needed in my empty life, the life of one who set aside her sense of loss and left that person's side—I believed it.
"Ahaha, our dear Heira......."
"......Asking such an obvious thing, little one."
To that question of mine, Serika and Ymir looked at each other, smiled, and spoke.
As if it were nothing of consequence.
Giving voice to an utterly obvious fact as if it were nothing.
Yes.
An utterly, truly obvious fact, given voice as if it were nothing.
"......Huh?"
A distorted voice reached my ears.
Following that, my vision warped, and soon darkness began to fall over the place where I stood.
It was only for a brief moment.
The instant that darkness lifted like a clearing fog, rain began pouring fiercely from the sky, and with it, a chill seeped through my entire body.
It was something that came all too suddenly.
Yes, all too suddenly.......
But surely there had been signs.
"......Serika."
Tombstones now stood before me.
I read the names engraved in them aloud, one by one.
"Ymir."
Staring directly at the destination preordained at the end of the path I walked, the one I had been denying all along.
"Da......ve."
Shaaaa. I felt my body turning cold under the pelting rain.
An unusually cold day.......
But it felt colder than that day.
Because unlike back then, when I knew nothing, unlike when I had simply sent someone away,
the me of now knew what was waiting in the future that lay ahead.
'Heira.'
The moment I realized that, someone's voice echoed out without mercy.
'It's time to wake up from this happy dream.'
-Crackle.
As if in answer to my heart.
The sound of the place where I stood beginning to crumble echoed out next.
