11. The Shiland Hills
The bond between the Sun Elf kingdom of Orteia and the nation of mages, Macaia, had its beginning five hundred years ago.
It was an age of chaos. The once-mighty empire of the north was tottering, and dragons — creatures that had never existed on the Elda Continent until they first appeared five hundred years before — suddenly burst into the world and ran wild, laying it to waste. They called that age the War of the Four Calamity Dragons.
In those days the Inrica Peninsula, the southern reach of Orteia where Macaia now stands, had belonged to the Sun Elves.
Wait. So wicked humans drove out the innocent elves and founded a country of their own? Figures. Change the world all you like — assholes stay assholes, right?
If that is what you are thinking, then unfortunately, you are wrong.
The previous Sun Monarch, Ordein, came to a ready agreement with the leader of the mages who had fled the empire, and ceded the southern lands to them of his own accord.
Five hundred years ago, in the War of the Four Calamity Dragons, an ancient dragon — the Deep-Binding Dragon, Atsunaka — and the Sun Monarch of two generations prior perished together. Ordein, the previous Sun Monarch, rose newly to the throne.
He had to admit that his strength alone could not hold the whole vast domain of Orteia. The dragons were strong, and they were fast. He meant to surrender a portion of his territory so there would be less to defend, but that was never a matter of simply moving people and calling it done. Empty land would become a breeding ground for the monsters that had come with the dragons and for Elda's own native beasts, and that nuisance would gnaw at Orteia for generations. It was then that the mages appeared, fresh from their escape out of the empire: the faction of Macaia's first Magic Tower Lord.
To those mages, searching for a land where they might rest, the previous Sun Monarch Ordein granted the ground south of the Shiland Hills — the Inrica Peninsula, then the south of Orteia — in exchange for a fixed yearly tribute of magic tools. They swore an alliance, and agreed to fight the dragons together.
That alliance was kept with remarkable faith. The previous Sun Monarch and the first Magic Tower Lord carried their friendship through to the end, and it is said that in later days they stood together with the great Fairy King Elvern when the heroes brought down the most vicious of the Four Calamity Dragons: the Dragon Emperor, Night Shade Wing Ankil.
Whoa! So the real problem was the elves being a pack of misers? They gorged themselves on an obscene pile of magic tools until Macaia couldn't take it anymore and declared war? Those rotten cheapskates! The whole mess was your own damn fault!
Say that, and any ordinary elf would burn with the unfairness of it — and still have nothing to say in reply. So Elgaia lamented.
"It's close enough to the truth. Even if the king's will was never what we wanted, he was our king. There was nothing we could do."
As she spoke, Elgaia stirred the campfire. Her golden eyes, fixed on the wavering flame, caught its red and seemed to burn.
"For more than four hundred years after the War of the Four Calamity Dragons, the friendship between Orteia and Macaia held. But—"
The previous Sun Monarch, Ordein, departed this world. A new figure took the throne, and everything twisted out of shape.
Once, he had been called the most brilliant elf since Elvern, the great Fairy King who ended the War of the Four Calamity Dragons. Now he was a tyrant set beside the accursed princes of the ancient fairy empire, far off in the deep past. He danced upon blood boiling in flame. He drank the tears of lament as if they were sweet. He was calamity itself, come down to walk the earth.
The Black Sun, Oros.
A little more than twenty years ago, he made a sudden proclamation.
Five hundred years past, he said, the generation before him had leased the land away for a ridiculously cheap price, and that had been a mistake. Macaia would have to pay a proper price — proper, of course, only by his own measure.
In the name of setting things right, of normalization, Oros abruptly demanded an enormous quantity of magic tools from Macaia. Nor did he stop there. He demanded slaves as well, a thing that had not even existed in elf society at the time. It was an absurdity outrageous enough to stun his fellow elves.
Macaia, naturally, refused. Even so, war did not break out at once. The bond between the Sun Elves and Macaia's mages, centuries in the making, was a stubborn thing, and above all there was the difference in power.
For several years Macaia tried, somehow, to talk their way through it. Oros did not move an inch.
Had the demand come from an ordinary man — had it come from an ordinary High Elf monarch, king or not — Macaia would have ignored it. Oros was another matter. His power was real. It was said to rival the heroes of legend and the fairy kings of the old tales, and because of that power Macaia groaned under the weight of him. They searched desperately for some tolerable compromise. Ready at last to swallow nearly any demand, however excessive, Macaia sent an envoy.
And that was where the disaster broke.
"The negotiations between Oros and Macaia ended... in the worst way possible."
Elgaia shuddered, as if she had looked on something foul. She frowned the way one does when a memory is hateful even to recall, unpleasant even to hold in the mouth.
"Oros took one of the mages in the delegation and— um—"
Her lips parted and closed again. For a moment she chose her words, as if weighing how to say it without dirtying her mouth any more than she had to. A little later, she managed it.
"Um. Oros... took that mage by force. Yes."
"Took them by force?"
The took she meant, he was fairly sure, was not the kind that came out of a bottle. Greeting a delegation that had come to negotiate while already drunk would be pretty unbelievable on its own, but it would still be a great deal better than that kind of taking.
And yet. Madman or not, he had raped a member of a foreign delegation that had come to negotiate, all because of his own unreasonable demands? That was a complete piece of shit, wasn't it?
"This member of the delegation — they weren't, you know, some low-ranking servant or anything like that?"
Artia asked just in case. It was an attempt, however thin, to make some kind of sense of the madness of this man called Oros. In a society of ranks, a man on the level of a king laying hands on a lowborn commoner was common enough, if one could call such things common.
"No. It was one of the three highest-ranking members of the delegation."
"No, he actually went and—"
"Yes. It was sheer madness. A delegation from another country — and an elf, doing that to a human..."
Oros had not stopped at forcing himself on the delegation's most important figure. When the others protested, he burned them alive. Before the eyes of her colleagues as they burned, the woman he had violated begged his forgiveness instead, apologizing to him with desperate sincerity, and by that alone a handful of them barely kept their lives and made it back to Macaia. It was an incident that could not possibly have failed to start a war.
Well. Ain't that just amazing.
Artia clicked his tongue. But something about it was strange.
Setting aside, for the moment, just what a miserable bastard this Oros was — the war had started about twenty years ago? And it was still going? Sure, back on modern Earth there had been wars that traded blows for a hundred years, and countries stuck in an armistice for more than fifty, but those were special cases. Here, in a place that looked roughly medieval, with one side overwhelmingly stronger than the other, a war dragging on for twenty years... did that even make sense?
Elgaia answered his doubt.
"Fifteen years, to be precise. The last negotiation collapsed around then. And let me correct you. Orteia and Macaia are not at war. Not officially."
"Huh? What's that supposed to mean?"
"That's exactly what makes this war so hideous, haha... It never officially began, so it has no end either. Even though, in reality, it is very much happening."
She said it with a bitter face.
At the time, Macaia's upper ranks had resolved on war. Even so, Oros's power frightened them. However they looked at it, a direct confrontation offered them no angle of victory. But the mages' grudge had to be answered, in one form or another. So how?
After long deliberation, the upper ranks of Macaia thought of a way. They would keep up small, localized battles, without ever protesting to Oros directly. From where they stood, he was a tyrant who would not spare a thought for trivial disputes along the border, and that was what made the notion possible. So Macaia never issued a formal declaration of war. Whatever happened at the border would be treated as the private deviance of individuals who happened to belong to the state.
Even then, if Oros had still wanted his normalization, no one could have said how things might have gone. For whatever reason, though, he afterward lost all interest in Macaia. Thanks to that, Macaia's tactic of a localized war did its work beautifully: it soothed the anger inside Macaia, and at the same time it opened the finest situation they could have hoped for — the freedom to do as they pleased with elves they had never before been able to touch.
They fielded mercenary companies and eagerly raised elf hunters. The mercenaries and hunters trained that way attacked elves strictly in a personal capacity. And so war never broke out, but the fighting never stopped.
For the first five years it was still small enough to be called small. Then restraints appeared in the world that could seal an elf's magic, and the whole shape of things changed. Countless elves were dragged off as slaves, and the elves taken became living sacrifices to cool Macaia's rage.
Tears fell without number. Tears became a river, and lamentation stabbed the sky. And still the king — still Oros — did not move. The trivial tragedies of ordinary people never climbed as far as the throne in the majestic golden palace where he sat. Fifteen years passed. Still the king did not move.
And yet, even so, fear never left one corner of Macaia's mind. Who can know the heart of a madman? Quiet today, and tomorrow some trifle might become the trigger that set Oros in motion. That flame of calamity might roll over Macaia. For well over a decade it had been a guillotine blade hanging above their necks. If all one can do is stare vaguely up at a blade, never knowing when it will fall, who could keep their sanity? Anyone trapped in that would do anything to knock the blade away from their throat. Even if it meant breaking a taboo of the world.
"If the war had only broken out properly, and if it had reached an end, it would never have come to this. If there had only been an end, in any form at all—"
Thick resignation lay in her words, and a certain loathing with it. The very man who had caused the war treated the hideous tragedies he himself had raised as nothing but a joke — an appetizer to draw out the fragrance of his wine. Or perhaps he was not thinking of them at all. It was unforgivable.
"Uh— um."
Artia looked at Elgaia's golden eyes, flickering beyond the campfire. Honestly, he had no idea what he was supposed to say. He was an outsider who had dropped into Elda all of two days ago. A question begun in idle curiosity, after he had seen a peculiar lightning-aspected spell, had come back to him as an answer far too heavy to hold. Even so, he could feel, unmistakably, the weight of the feeling carried in her words. The campfire was blazing, plainly throwing off a comfortable heat, and yet a chill like settling frost pressed down over the space between them.
"Um— the mood got too heavy. I don't really like this sort of thing. I'm sorry, Artia."
Elgaia slapped her own cheeks, smack, smack, and let the stiffness go out of her face.
"Well, how could one mere elf like me ever bring down the great Sun King? We just... live through this shitty reality as best we can, one day at a time. And if we've got a little to spare, we help each other."
She smiled as she said it. She only smiled.
Artia hesitated, looking at her. Then he gathered himself and moved. He didn't really know whether it would help at all. He sat down beside her and, with a quiet shift, set his shoulder against hers.
"A-Artia?"
"Nothing. Night wind's a little cold."
"It is, isn't it. A little... ahaha."
A small warmth seeped in between the shoulders pressed together. No further words were needed.