The Eternal Darkness
The darkness felt like it would drive me insane without you. Pitch-black darkness where I couldn't see even an inch ahead. How long had it been since I'd been soaked in this darkness?
Werther had been held captive by Bael for roughly a hundred days... that much I remembered clearly. But what was happening? Clearly more than a hundred days had passed, yet there was no sign this hell would ever end. The darkness continued without end.
I already knew that Morphino used techniques that created hallucinations close to reality to plunge people into confusion. The moment the supposedly dead Bael and the Werther from the past appeared before my eyes, I realized this was one of his illusions.
"How dare you use a mental attack on an elf like me? Unlike humans who arrogantly believe themselves to be independent beings, elves value resonance with nature and have internalized the self as part of nature itself. That's why mental attacks don't work on us!"
After all, someone who views their own birth, aging, illness, and death as part of nature's natural cycle wouldn't fear death. Even if I died, I would become nutrients for growing trees and exist eternally within nature. An elf's mind isn't entirely their own—it's connected to nature, with the World Tree at its center. Hypnosis that targets an individual has no effect.
"I won't be toyed with by illusions like these! There is no such thing as an eternal hallucination, right? I'll endure to the end and walk out of here perfectly fine! This kind of barrier is nothing!"
—Or so it should have been. But what was this? Why wouldn't it end?
Was it around the ninth day after the torture began? Werther's eyes were gouged out. After that, there was only darkness. Nothing but darkness. The time in which nothing could be seen stretched on endlessly.
At some point, I stopped feeling pain altogether. Perhaps my brain had broken down. Just how much longer did I have to endure before the darkness would end? Or perhaps... the very premise that it would end was nothing more than my own delusion?
What guarantee was there that it would end? And if it did end, where would I return to?
I felt as if I had been born in this very darkness and had grown up within it all this time. In that case, it was only natural that I would suddenly meet my death in the darkness. The world full of desperately longed-for light and color... wasn't that nothing more than a virtual world my brain had constructed to forget this unbearably painful reality?
My oldest memory was of the cedar leaves covering the sky. Beneath them, a cluster of elves living together. Yes... I had been the next chieftain of a tribe of about a hundred members.
My peers—though there weren't even ten of them—envied me. In our tribe, one's job and rank were decided the moment they were born. There was no climbing the ladder through effort. Once the chieftain selected me as the next leader, that was the end of it. A fate where success was guaranteed if I simply stayed still... but to me, the forest seemed far too narrow.
I couldn't understand why we had to live in hiding. The forest's resources were limited, and elves extremely disliked any action that harmed the woods, making it difficult to procure food. We were always hungry. The secret behind the elves' slim, fat-free figures was simply poverty.
If we left the forest, there was a human village very close by. If I went there, I could eat until my stomach was full. I'd heard that humans piled meat in a storage called a refrigerator and ate from it.
"Sharon, you seem far too interested in humans. They won't share their food with us."
"Why not?"
"Because humans hate us."
"What? Why?"
"That's a story steeped in very complicated history. I'll teach you in detail when you inherit the position of chieftain, but the history of conflict between humans and elves spans over a million years. Especially after the elves' defeat in the Great War a thousand years ago, humans began raising us as slaves. Tribes like ours that hid in the forest were extremely fortunate."
"So does that mean we have to keep living in this narrow forest forever?"
"That's correct. It's dangerous to go outside."
Still, I continued to yearn for the outside world, found the forest boring, and neglected my lessons to become the next leader. With no other choice, the chieftain gave me a special order: just for one day, just one single day, I could disguise myself and visit the human village.
I was so excited that I immediately rushed out wearing a disguise robe meant to hide my pointed ears. —On that day, I was the second stupidest elf in the world.
Who was the stupidest elf, you ask? My friend who spread the rumor that an elf living hidden in the forest had appeared in the human village. She must have believed that if I disappeared, she would become the next chieftain.
The moment I entered the village, I was captured by soldiers who had been waiting. Our forest burned all night long. The beautiful spring, the butterflies, beetles, water birds, and bamboo that had flourished there—all of it vanished, leaving only a desolate, pitch-black clearing.
The elves who had been my family were scattered to the winds and became someone's slaves. I heard that the chieftain, who resisted until the very end, had his Achilles tendon severed and was sold to a perverted noble who had once been imprisoned for his sadistic tastes.
I too was sold like a souvenir to the village chief's son and became a slave. At first I thought I could simply run away, but the Slave's Mark engraved on my tongue restricted my actions so I couldn't move freely.
"Sharon. Aren't you happy to become my slave? Say that you're happy."
"I-I'm happy."
"Sharon was born to become my slave, right? Say that."
"Sharon was born to become Master's slave."
"You'll remain my slave forever from now on, right? Say that."
"S-Sharon is Master's slave forever."
I couldn't defy in the slightest the commands given by that disgusting human—low self-esteem but high pride, incompetent, thirty years old with no job, living off his parents—who called himself my master.
The moment I resisted an order even a little, electric torture would begin. It wouldn't stop until I obeyed... In the end, my mind surrendered.
It wasn't only my master who tormented me. Every person living in the village was my enemy. Whenever I passed by, they would glare at me with contemptuous eyes, hide their children, or throw stones at me.
"They say you'll catch an incurable disease if you touch an elf!"
"Elves are all vicious by nature. They pretend to be gentle on the outside but are always looking for a chance to get revenge."
"It's truly disgusting. I heard she tried to infiltrate our village to attack it but failed."
Before I knew it, I had become an ordinary slave who kept my head down out of fear of hostile gazes and watched humans' expressions carefully just to get a scrap of bread.
By the time the village chief's son died, his son became my new master, that person died too, and his grandson rode me like a horse, I had accepted my fate—that I would live like this forever and die of old age hundreds of years later—and had fallen into resignation.
—Until I met Werther.
"H-Hiiing! Hiiing!! I'm sorry for being so noisy! I'll pass by! Hiiing! Hiiing!!"
"? What are you doing?"
I had received an order from my master to "Since you're a horse, make horse sounds while running errands" and was carrying it out when I ran into a man carrying a huge load.
Everyone in this village knew I was a slave, so they didn't care what I did. That's how I immediately realized that Werther, who was looking at me strangely, was an outsider.
Even if he was an outsider, a human sir was still a human sir. Far greater than an elf like me—a human sir.
I was scared that Werther might play a cruel prank on me, so I quickly tried to run away.
"H-Hiiing! P-Please don't mind me! I'm just an ordinary slave~~!!"
"Ah, wait."
But Werther chased after me as I tried to flee. Tears welled up as I thought I was going to be horribly teased again. Humans always laughed at me as if I were a circus clown when I carried out my master's bizarre orders.
A slave who never resisted no matter how much she was tormented... I was exactly like a soccer ball abandoned on the side of the road that people would kick once for no reason before passing by.
Werther was clearly tall and muscular, the very picture of a manly man. Guys like him tended to be macho and play even nastier pranks...
"You've got a wound on your collarbone. Looks like you were whipped or something. I'll put some ointment on it."
"H-Hiiiiing!!"
"Stop making weird noises."
"H-Human sir! I'm just a slave, so please ignore me!"
"How can I ignore an injured person? I take care of my sick little sister, so I'm pretty knowledgeable about medicine. If you don't put ointment on something like this, it'll get infected and hurt even more later."
"B-But I'm an elf!"
Everyone said there was no need to treat an elf even if she caught a fatal disease. After hearing it so many times, I had come to believe it myself. But Werther flicked my forehead and scolded me in the tone one would use with a child.
"Whether you're an elf or whatever, if it hurts, you can say it hurts."
".........Yes?"
Suddenly, tears flowed down. Not because it hurt. Not because I was scared. It was the first time in decades that tears had fallen for a reason other than those two.
"Eh...? You said if it hurts, I can say it hurts? But if I say I'm in pain, Master burns me with fire! He burns me with electricity too! Then it hurts even more! So it's better to endure it! That's... that's what I was taught!"
"What the hell is that? He's a total bastard. Should we rescue you?"
"What? R-Rescue... you mean rescue me?"
"We're the hero party, you see."
"H-Hero...?"
"Yeah. You've heard of us, right?"
"Of course I've heard...! The heroes are handsome! Tall! Smart! Kind! Incredibly strong! I heard everyone looks up to them!"
"Hmm... Is that so? Well, fantasies are free, I guess. Anyway, I'll go tell my companions to help you out, so wait here."
"W-Wait, Hero sir! I want to know your name!"
"Huh? I'm not the hero? I'm just the porter."
"P-Porter...?"
—The image of Werther from that time, carrying a heavy load and smiling brightly, is still vivid in my memory.
Yes, Werther... Now, when the boundary between illusion and reality had grown hazy, only Werther was the sole light illuminating the darkness so I wouldn't go mad.
Jet-black darkness. Eternal darkness. Infinite darkness. Even when the loneliness made me shudder with the delusion that I was the only living creature in this universe, Werther's emotions would seep into my heart and tell me I wasn't alone.
"Those fucking bastards abandoned me?"
Werther. You were there after all.
"After everything I did for you guys. How much I helped you."
Resentment, betrayal, desire for revenge... anything was fine. Keep feeling those intense emotions. Because those feelings were being transmitted directly to me.
"Especially you, Sharon. If it weren't for me, you'd still be living like a pathetic slave, yet you sided with the hero like a rat and stabbed me in the back?"
You're hating me, aren't you. But that's okay. Just the fact that you're there, just the fact that you're breathing, is enough for me to be grateful.
"Those sons of bitches. If I ever call you my comrades again, I'm not a person—I'm a dog. A dog."
"What are you muttering about? The torture is still far from over."
"UAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!"
Even your pain was proof that you were there. Proof that you and I were connected. Proof that I wasn't alone.
In this darkness, you're the only one staying by my side, right?
Werther. WertherWertherWertherWerther... Don't go anywhere. Without you, I... I...
I really think I'll go completely insane.