Don't Cry. Don't Cry. - 9
A little farther through the dark cave, a light shows in the distance.
Splash.
I am walking on when the sound of water comes out of nowhere. The cave is too dark to see by, but water has pooled across the floor. It is not so deep that I cannot go on, and so I wade in as I am. It climbs to the inside of my thighs.
The water is bitterly cold.
An ordinary person would have gone blue in moments. I am fine. I put my strength into crossing, and something catches my foot.
Thump.
Some lump of a thing.
Curious, I feel for it: something soft, something hard, and something like cloth. It is not dangerous. There is nothing alive around here to begin with. If there were, there would be light. This place has nothing of the sort.
Slosh.
Before long I come out at the mouth. Trees lie heaped thick around the entrance, so it is gloomier than it looked from inside the dark, but once I step clear of the cave I can at least make out what surrounds me.
The light falls, and I see what had been drifting deeper into the cave. A corpse floats past at my side, swollen taut with water and half melted away. Boys and girls in the clothes I so often saw at the Royal Academy. Not a face I know.
And that is not all. Kanna's memory says the clothes are a wreck. The eras are all askew, fashions from wholly different times layered one over another.
So they are not real corpses. Someone set this out to be looked at. The only one who would do such a thing is the witch. If you are going to bother, you might at least keep the period right. It feels like an amusement park that spent not a single coin on the scenery.
Is the theme horror?
Thinking so, I follow the path that all but tells me to go that way. Along one bank, the tree trunks closing in the surroundings are gone, as if to say come up out of the river. I step out, and the ground ahead is strewn with the corpses of birds whose heads have been cut off. Every bird has a body and a head that do not belong together. As if someone had pieced them together at random, the cut and the neck refuse to meet.
The flesh is done convincingly, and they even minded the smell of blood, but none of it was made from anything that had lived. The memories of specialists—hunters, butchers—say this is not meat.
I mean to ignore it and pass. There is nowhere left to go. A dead end. Heads hacked apart however they pleased. A puzzle.
I take up a head lying on the ground.
Squawk! Cheep! Chirp!
Every time my hand closes on a head, a bird's voice sounds. The effects are amusing. Memories keep sparking—that a sound needs lungs to come out of, that blood running this thick is far too fresh, and therefore wrong.
And so, once I have matched every bird's head, a child crawls out from between the thornbushes ringing the place: a child become a jam jar with the lid off. The child comes toward me, tears the clothes being worn, spoons jam over the top, and holds it out. I take it, and the child points at the hole they crawled in through.
A fairy tale I saw somewhere comes back to me. I think what they had there was medicine.
I put it in my mouth.
Marmalade. The cloth chews like bread.
Well, no food has actually entered my body. The sense of my organs is an empty hollow. Instead, as if I have done the proper thing, my body grows small. The hole the little one crawled out of becomes far larger than I am tall. I walk on into the place that has turned into a cave.
I come out through an opening like a rabbit hole, and a vast palace stands far off. Is that the destination? They have composed an interesting story. I cannot tell what the purpose is, but it feels like walking through a fairy tale.
There are, subtly, a great many corpses—but isn't the shape of the tale the same? The birds meant for the Caucus Race are all dead, and the mouse had already withered dry where it first fell. So next comes the potion that makes you grow, and the house that makes you shrink?
"Who are you?"
I am walking with the fairy tale turning in my head when someone speaks to me without warning.
I blink. A girl of small frame, with long white hair. But she matches someone in my memory far too exactly. A face I know. From a very long time ago. A witch who has never existed in this world.
Hyungkesuni.
With this, the notion that it is an illusion belonging to the witch alone is dismissed. At the least, she has done something to my mind. Every living thing of the third world, Victoria among them, is stopped. Of course, things that are very fast—or that ought to be very fast—can be seen to move, just a little. Time is only passing extremely slowly.
I thought the world had stopped. She has merely done something to my mind. The scale of it is smaller than I expected. Above all, Hyungkesuni cannot be standing in front of me. She fell to the ground, melted, and was gone.
"I've been changed so many times that it's hard to explain."
"And who doesn't change? That's why there's something that defines you. A name. A name."
She is asking for a name. I have never taken the memories, so I cannot tell whether this is the woman herself or a mere illusion. Shall I try one, and see?
"Belle. Choseol. Rebecca. Take your pick."
So I say it. But Hyungkesuni shakes her head. She does not react in any particular way to the name Rebecca. She only shakes her head.
"No. Those aren't your name, are they? What I'm asking for is your real name."
I cannot tell whether this is talk of the person held in the only memory whose light has faded, or whether the witch means to learn my name.
"I don't have a name. If you need a designation for my vessel, give it one yourself."
At that, Hyungkesuni laughs, a small stifled giggle.
"All right. Then how about this name?"
She hops down from the rock where she was sitting and points at me as she speaks.
I have used the words Outer God in this world. But she is the first person to call me one.
Which is it?
"Call me that. I want to get out of here. What should I do?"
First, I ask the figure in front of me. At that, Hyungkesuni—or the woman made in her image—strokes her chin. It is, at least, a thing Hyungkesuni has never done. So far as I know. And she points a finger at the castle visible far away.
"Go that way."
Mm. Of course. An easy NPC to read. There is no light in this one's chest. That means she is not a person. I nod and start that way, then stop for a moment.
"Excuse me."
"What is it?"
She looks at me with an expression that says, if I have a question, to ask it and be quick. So I ask her.
"What do you think of a person who smiles when they're afraid?"
At my question, the expression vanishes. She goes perfectly still and says nothing, as if she has broken down. She even stops the show of breathing.
I must have said something she did not expect, and caused a logic error.
I let my interest go and make for the destination.
The castle shows far off, and between here and there I can see several places I will have to pass. If I am to meet figures from the past, whom will I meet?
"Hmm? A child I've never seen. What business brings you to an old man's house?"
A one-way road. A door appears as I go, and when I open it a place from memory is there—very fine, and yet frugal in its own way. An old man before me, and dozens of busts around him, every head gone.
I know who it is at a glance.
Tisha. But we are hardly close. The times we have actually met can be counted on one hand. Even if he were real, there would be nothing to say. So I simply state my purpose.
"I'm heading for the castle you can see outside."
I point at the castle. Old Tisha looks at me without a word. Then he rises, goes to one side of the room, takes something up, and comes to stand before me.
"Hold out your hand."
I hold it out, and he lets something fall. A key. A word is raised along it in relief.
"The key to the back door. I hope it helps you on the way."
"Thank you."
Then Tisha goes to the windows and opens one. Strangely, what lies beyond it is not the space that ought to lie beyond a window, but a corridor. A very old, worn passage.
I climb up through the window and stand in the corridor. On the inner side, Tisha holds a cloth and wipes a bust. I leave him there and go on along the passage.
To a suspicious degree, they tell me the way I must go with no flow of talk and no context at all. What was the witch thinking, to make a thing like this?
A passage of earthen wall, without a single ornament. The place where I lived in the first world. But it is not a place in my memory. It only resembles it so far; the traces that were here do not match the map in my head.
When I have passed the whole of the earthen wall, a small room appears. Two people are in it. One is a man as large in the body as a bear, though his face is pale and gaunt. The other—
"A child like you, in a place like this. Have you lost your way?"
Joanna.
"I'm going to the castle."
"The castle? Do you know what place you mean?"
The man answers Joanna's question.
"I know. You are bound for a dangerous place."
Yasle. The Yasle in my memory is quiet, and Joanna is quiet too. Which is to say these are fakes, alike in nothing but the face.
"But to enter the castle, you must receive an invitation from there. Otherwise, you would have to take a key from a dangerous person."
Without a word, I bring out the key Tisha gave me a moment ago. Yasle looks at it, startlement crossing his face, and opens a door where the first world had nothing but earthen wall.
"Then you may go this way."
There are no questions.
I nod, take my leave of Joanna, who waves, and of Yasle, who watches the key with a sharp look, and walk on.
By all rights I ought to be in the middle of the underground. When I open that door and step out, a city buried in trees is there. Trees have grown up where a city once stood, and no trace of the city remains. A thin stream runs along the line of what was once a wide road.
I walk straight on. Little by little the living green around me begins to dry, and soon a place appears like a city raised not long ago. Buildings stand in a ring about a round plaza, and beneath the statue of a woman at its center the white-haired girl I parted from only a little while ago stands with her back turned.
Behind her stands someone else I know. A girl the very image of the statue, slight in height, and striking for how large her chest is against that small frame.
Rebecca Rolf.
She lifts a hand and waves to me.