Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 10
People I met long ago keep appearing.
Rebecca Rolf is blonde—the way she looked before I went inside her, or after I went in and came back out. Her skin isn't a bloodless pallor either. It's white with a sheen.
"What a darling young lady. Who are you?"
"That's an Outer God."
Before I could answer Rebecca, Hyungkesuni—seated nearby with her back to us—answered for me.
"A journalist from another country?"
"You know perfectly well. Don't play dumb."
Hyungkesuni grumbled, and Rebecca, watching her, broke into a giggle. I remember the two of them being on quite bad terms by the end.
It was a deeply strange sight.
Rebecca came closer. Taller than me. She was on the small side, and yet by the measure of the first world she was very nearly a grown adult. She leaned in until our noses might have touched, and met my eyes. This part felt a little more real. After I left her, Rebecca had wandered with no warmth in her body—not even light.
"You aren't lost. You know your goal, and you aren't hesitating."
Was she always this good at reading people? Or was she only dragging a memory up out of my head?
Just as I'd feared—can the witch pull memories free and read them?
I don't know. So I have to go on.
At the very least, reaching that castle ought to be enough. From the square where I stood, a tall white castle rose in the far distance.
"Do you have a key?"
Rebecca looked at me and asked something that didn't belong to the moment at all. I've only gotten one key in this place. An illusion having context is the strange part. I took the key from my pocket.
"So the king who was sobbing his heart out gave it to you? A cruel, pitiless king."
"He didn't cry."
King Tisha. But I never saw him weep. Even when I stopped on my way out and looked back, there wasn't a single tear.
"A king can cry only when he has no audience. And yet this is truly peculiar. To think he would hand a key over so lightly."
Rebecca turned. Hyungkesuni still had her back to us, so all I could see was that back. Rather than do anything in particular, Rebecca seized the empty air.
Clack.
A heavy ring of keys appeared. She looked through them one by one, took one, hid the corner of her mouth behind a fingertip, and quietly held it out to me.
"If the king permitted it, I've nothing to say. Here. Go that way, and you can leave this place."
The shape was the same as the key I'd received from Tisha. But unlike the key engraved Despair, the top of this one bore only scratches. The raised letters had been scraped away. What had been written there?
Holding that question, I closed my hand around the key, and Rebecca pointed toward the place where the headquarters of the Church of Future Hope had once stood. She meant for me to go.
I said goodbye to Rebecca and looked at Hyungkesuni. She was still facing the other way. So I left her there and set off again.
I opened the door of a building at the edge of the square and stepped inside. What lay before me wasn't the interior of a building at all, but a long passage walled in earth. The moment I entered, the door shut, and a latch clicked. No going back. I walked straight down the passage and found another door.
Not wood—iron. The underground temple had never had a door like this. I took hold of it and opened it, and a barren rock desert under a midnight sky pouring with stars filled my sight.
I stepped out. In a wide clearing, a single door stood planted all by itself. Empty in front, empty behind. A door that went nowhere.
Given everything so far, someone ought to be here too. I looked around.
And I found that someone. No—it would be truer to say I found what had once been someone.
A woman's corpse lay there, her head replaced by an enormous padlock. Wondering if a key might fit, I pushed in the one inscribed Despair.
It wouldn't turn.
The key with its name scraped away did no better.
I searched the ground and saw no key that would fit this lock. I turned out my clothes and found nothing plausible. Thinking I might see something by way of my body, I stripped off my top—but there was only a blank white nakedness, with no shining memory that the body was mine. Nothing I could learn. My pockets yielded nothing either, so I gave it up and set out for my destination again. Even from this rock desert, the castle still rose white in the distance.
Following a path I used to run often, I came upon a steam locomotive.
Not a train driven by magic stones or anything of the sort—a real steam locomotive, its tender heaped with coal. It stood on the empty plain, and the rails ran on ahead of it.
I was meant to board, wasn't I? I went into the crude little station beside the train, nothing but stone laid over the ground.
No one was there. There wasn't even a chair—only a platform. From there, I got on.
Inside, I saw one person. A man dressed in the clothing of the second world stood before the steps up into the carriage.
A man I know. Also a man I have never seen with my own eyes.
Eunjae.
Even after I climbed aboard, he didn't speak to me. Instead he drew a sword and leveled it at me. Then he swung.
No—he tried to.
As if he could not cut me, the blade stopped at the distance where it would have touched my hair. He glared, sheathed the sword, and pointed not at the carriage but at the locomotive. As I understood it, the coal was at the rear, so reaching the cab would mean going back.
But this was an illusion.
I opened the door on the locomotive's side, and the cab appeared at once.
It wasn't a proper cab. Where the coal ought to have been fed, a great mass of iron was fixed fast, as if welded in place. A keyhole sat in the center of that iron. Open it, and the train could depart—wasn't that it?
Hoping it would fit this time, I took out a key, pushed it in, and turned.
The sound of an automobile ignition followed, and the train began, slowly, to move.
This place was an utter mess.
The train itself sat still while the world around it smeared and changed, and that was genuinely wrong. Ride anything real and inertia ought to press you back, yet I felt nothing of the kind. The scenery even streamed backward, and still the pure-white castle in the distance drew no nearer. This being a dream of a world, it wasn't strange for the background itself to be what moved.
Then the rushing scenery blackened, as if we had entered a tunnel, and rainforest and marsh appeared.
Of course.
The second world.
Soon the background stopped dead. Stage direction, I supposed, for the train having halted. I turned. There was no way out from here, so I went back to the carriage.
I opened the door. Eunjae was gone. In his place, the sword he had leveled at me was driven into the doorway, and a key hung from it.
This one was embossed with the word Rage.
I took it and stepped down, and a thoroughly familiar place met me. The road up into the village of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. Go up, and the cult was there; turn left here and keep on, and there was the house where I had lived.
I made for that house.
Or I meant to.
A building I had often seen in the second world blocked the way. Sure enough, planks and nails sealed the entrance so no one could go in. It had been an empty hill, and now a building stood there that should not have existed.
Go by the road you're given. That was the meaning.
I climbed along the city raised up the hillside. A vast building stood upon a cliff and towering crags. In the original world it is a ruin, but here it stood whole. If I went on like this, might I meet the Heavenly Demon?
Thinking so, I went inside. Open the door, and ordinarily I would have had to cross a bridge over a drop—but a room appeared at once.
I entered, and two people were within.
Between them, a single go board. A fish-man holding a black stone set it down, and a man holding a white stone set his down after. But the board was wrong. Not go played on a grid—go played on a board filled with kaleidoscopic curves. Go? They had black stones and white, so I would call it go.
The players were one young man and one fish-man. People I had never seen in person, yet knew from memory.
Yuanshi Tianzun and Daegon.
As they had looked in their youth—or while they were still human.
"A guest, I see."
The fish-man rolled only his eyes toward me.
Everyone here was counterfeit anyway. Mere resemblances appear and, without much talk, only point the way. This time would be the same.
"You ought to call her the master."
That was Yuanshi Tianzun.
"A guest. And when has that thing ever once stood of its own accord?"
At Daegon's question, Yuanshi Tianzun's eyes narrowed.
"Quite so. Unlike you."
Strange.
Too loaded to dismiss as empty talk. Daegon's face twisted.
"Ill-omened bastard. So then, guest—what did you come here to do?"
At Daegon's question, I pointed to the white castle visible in the distance.
"I'm heading there."
Neither Daegon nor Yuanshi Tianzun spared me so much as a glance. Both looked down at the board. No answer. Thinking a reply might be difficult for them, I started to move, and Daegon spoke again.
"You'd be better off not going."
"Put another way, it means she must go."
The one who took up Daegon's words was none other than Yuanshi Tianzun. Unlike Daegon, he kept his gaze fixed on the board as he went on.
"In that castle, there is no quarry the master must overcome."
"The guest need only step outside, isn't that so?"
By Yuanshi Tianzun's account, the witch was not up there.
By Daegon's, I could go outside whenever I pleased.
Daegon was right. Press reality down the way I always have, and I can leave this world with ease. Not a possibility—a certainty. Yuanshi Tianzun's words, though, were something of a problem.
"You're saying the witch isn't up there?"
At that, both of them broke into a rough laugh. They laughed a long while, as if they'd heard a fine joke, and then Daegon's gaze and Yuanshi Tianzun's turned on me.
"Save for the guest, there is no witch."
"Yonder is the master's castle."
As they spoke, their eyes shifted—not to me, but a little behind me.
"A man called Nietzsche once said it. Gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss gazes also into you. Should you follow at the guest's back, be wary."
"The master is a greedy one. She strives without end to take shining things into her hands. And yet she does not tuck the most important thing away and hide it."
This wasn't advice meant for me.
In other words, the witch was following me. They seemed to be saying opposite things, and yet the conclusion was that they meant to stand in my way.
"Where is the door?"
At my question, both of them let out a deep sigh and rose. They lifted the board and moved it aside.
A deep pit lay beneath.
I stood before it. That both of them disliked me was certain. Just as certain was my belief that they would not actually obstruct me.
And if I was deceived?
Then, once deceived, I need only do it again.
"They both disappeared, didn't they?"
Then, abruptly—because it felt wrong—I put the question to them.
"To the guest, they are fake."
Daegon answered without expression.
"Have I not been telling you to call her the master?"
Yuanshi Tianzun smiled, as if bidding me to consider the meaning.
Realizing they had no intention of giving me a proper answer, I jumped into the pit.