Goodbye, First World — 1
The royal castle of the Kingdom of Anselus, a realm with a long history — and within it, the largest hall of all. Its floor was a mosaic of many-colored stones fitted into geometric patterns. Ivory pillars rose to an arched ceiling, and from that ceiling hung chandeliers of glass. The space was ordinarily left shut, opened only when the king meant to parade his majesty. Today it was full of people.
The relationship between the Kingdom of Anselus and the seat of the Holy God Church was not unlike that between a medieval European kingdom and the Vatican. Every land east of the Skard Rock Desert kept the faith of the Holy God, so one could lay the map over Europe and find little changed. There were differences enough — mana, and therefore mages; swordsmen who drew sword-aura from the blade — but one difference stood utterly alone.
Here, the gods reached down and acted on the world themselves.
Warriors and priests a god had acknowledged walked the earth, and miracles fell out of the sky. In a world like that, the power of the Holy God Church was so great that not even the king of a nation could handle it lightly. So when the Church denounced the Kingdom of Anselus for harboring an evil god, the kingdom had no choice but to bring that evil god out at once.
How much more so, then, if a god had spoken. That was no different from the rules of the world speaking in their own voice. No living thing can live outside the rules of the world.
And if it steps outside them?
Then it is no longer a living thing.
And that which was not a living thing appeared, led in by soldiers.
To the eye she was simply a short girl with purple hair. Her face put her closer to a child than to a grown woman, and yet the swell of her chest made one doubt whether she was truly a child at all. Set that aside, and she looked like nothing more than a girl with unusually white skin. No majesty about her. No breath of ill omen.
Just a small girl.
Anyone seeing her for the first time thought exactly that, and this hall was full of people who had never seen her. No — more than eight in ten were looking at her for the first time. Most of those present were nobles, or people who had come out of the priesthood. The only exceptions were the servants moving among them, and even they held rank close to lesser nobility.
Nor was the hall filled with Anselus alone. There were people from the kingdoms around it — foreign nobles and royals, and a great many of them, and there was a reason so many had come. Only yesterday the funeral of Tisha, that legendary great figure, had been held. It had been a state affair, and the foreigners were here to offer condolences. They had meant to pass the night at the banquet that followed the funeral, sleep once, and go home. And then, of all things, a great incident touching the Holy God Church had broken out here?
Not one of them stayed away. The lords who had come up from the provinces for the funeral were all present as well. It was a gathering so complete that one might say everyone who could be assembled had been assembled.
Into it walked the Outer God.
"Ah. So you've come to make your excuses. Go ahead."
For the brief instant after she stepped inside and every gaze converged, a silence like a blank had settled over the hall. The first to open her mouth was none other than the Outer God.
"Excuses? What excuses, you wicked thing! How dare the likes of you open your mouth before the Holy God!"
At once the holy knight who had spoken up drew the sword at his breast and shouted, and in the next breath he was quoting the scriptures of the Holy God Church, heaping denunciation upon her. To those who had the Holy God Church as the faith they were born into, the mere claim that a thing was written in the Holy God's canon carried a powerful persuasion of its own. Which meant that most of the people in that hall, without ever doubting that the small girl before their eyes was an evil god, began to take her for pure evil.
And in fact, she was pure evil.
Take a person's warmth, and that person breaks. They cease to be a person and turn into a monster — a monster that goes looking for warmth and kills whatever life stands in front of it. How was that any different from murder? Nor was it simply hunting like a beast and stripping the warmth away. She could plant herself inside another, and through that other steal the warmth of still more people. That alone made her a revolting monster, and this monster closed her hand around the descendants of those she had planted herself in. Give a piece of herself away, and when she died she took everything they had.
The Outer God labored under the illusion that her contracts were passed down through blood. In truth, the cause was the contracts she herself had sealed. Read a certain way, they were cruel enough to hide the possibility of tearing the Kingdom of Anselus apart wholesale. But she did not know that much yet. Without specialized study and a store of knowledge, it is no different from failing to understand, in any real detail, how food is digested once a person has swallowed it.
She had never meant to do such a thing in the first place. Not because the Outer God was good, but because holding back earned her the greater profit. So, for the sake of that greater profit, she put on a mask of hypocrisy. She took nothing beyond what was necessary, and she kept her contracts clean.
In the case of Yasle, the first to contract with her, she had even — depending on the angle — carried a revenge all the way through. The royal house of Anselus, which Yasle had wanted destroyed, had in effect already fallen once. It was not a contract made anew with every blessing. It was a contract to grant a wish. Looking at things now, who would believe the Kingdom of Anselus still remained? Those the Outer God had blessed were the ones ruling the royal house.
Knowing this, she stood all the more unabashed before that man, and spoke.
"If that is what you mean to say — if you would say that every contract is worthless before a god — then you are welcome to declare it as boldly as you please. Before all of humanity, even, and no one would be able to deny you. If you truly can."
It was a provocation. A claim that if they were truly in the right, then all people would accept it.
At those words the holy knight swept the room in a glance. His manner was rough and he might have looked thoughtless, but he was a holy knight — and not just any, but one who specialized in the politics called the inquisition of heresy. Wordplay did not work on a man like that.
He did, however, fall into one misunderstanding. He believed the Outer God was thrashing for her life.
He flicked a glance back at the priest.
In truth, priest and holy knight divided the work between them. The knight, sword in hand and armor on his body, took the radical part, while the priest held him back and negotiated with a softer face: the old good-cop, bad-cop routine. Frighten them with violence, then play at being friendly until they mistake you for one of their own, and so draw out information, or push them into false testimony. People lived here too, and so of course the same art had grown up. In any case, the priest also thought from the place of an ordinary person. Evil stock, as a rule, thrashes in order to stay alive. If that was what she was doing, then this was the moment to spread far and wide the sight of the Holy God striking an evil god down. So he judged.
It was a fatal judgment.
When the priest gave his leave, the holy knight raised his voice and shouted.
"If that is how you would have it, then I shall judge your sins before all people! Under the protection of the Holy God, every last one of your sins shall be laid bare, and upon this wicked being a fitting punishment shall be brought down!"
"Now, now. Compose yourself. Rush on like that and we won't be able to do a thing within the Kingdom of Anselus, will we? They ought to be given a chance to pay for the sins their ancestors committed."
Read plainly, the priest had said this: you prepare the stage. Do that, and we will not bring punishment down on your kingdom.
In an instant, a hero blessed by a god had been made a criminal.
Some within the Holy God Church held that Tisha was indeed a believer in the Holy God, but not a man of the Church — and they did not like that such a person had been the one a god chose. So they meant to use this chance to shave that divinity down and set the Holy God Church higher still. It was not an evil act. It was, however, an unpleasant one. At words that slighted the pride of Anselus, the great figure who had made the kingdom what it was, a very faint resentment rose among the people of Anselus.
The Outer God could read human faces, and watching that scene she howled with laughter on the inside. More precisely, it was the memory she called the faded man, rolling on the ground and laughing — because what the priest had just said was, to a Korean, the same as being told, "King Sejong the Great? Great? He's just a king." But the authority of the Holy God Church was too strong to refute it openly. And so the indignation sank the other way, down into the deep of the heart, waiting for the hour it would burst.
Meanwhile the king came toward the Outer God with a rigid face.
"So it has come to this."
And he ordered his soldiers to raise an execution platform in the square. Hearing it, the holy knight and the priest nodded, pleased, while the people of Anselus, though the taste of it was foul, watched all the same — an evil god would die, after all.
"Yes. People are free to choose their own god. I don't get angry over something like that."
A poisoned blade moved.
In that moment, a god became the one who oppressed the freedom of humankind. But no one thought very deeply about what it meant. It was not so shocking a thing to say. Heard one way, it was only this: the Holy God has cornered me, but I bear you no grudge, so please let me live.
And Hyungkesuni, watching from far off, snickered when that fearsome Outer God spoke as if she were begging.
Nearly eighty years ago.
The monster who had sat silent as a doll for half a year, her mind on eating people, was terrified all over again.
A moment ago she said she was going to die, and now she's scared and playing sweet with them?
Hyungkesuni thought it while laying his own self over her. People always think outward from what they themselves have lived, so it could not be helped. To someone who had spent his life running, crushed beneath the fear of death, a sight like that came easily to the eye. A monster greater than he was, trembling before a god and begging for its life — and the very monster that had tormented him.
With a clammy satisfaction, Hyungkesuni decided to watch the show through to the end.
In the moment of death, what face would that Outer God show?
And sunk deep in the question was a way of seeing peculiar to the people of this world. One fact lay so deep that even Hyungkesuni took it as a matter of course.
Punished by a god, the Outer God dies.
Yes.
That.
A god was a being that great. The Outer God he had watched through the time they shared, brief as it was, had been — contrary to the way she spoke of herself — an immature little brat, and above all she herself had said that she used to be human. A human, who could never dare to reach a god.
And so he let his guard down.
While Hyungkesuni waited, grinning, picturing the wretched figure she would make as she died, a great execution platform began to rise in the square before the royal castle.
In the meantime, someone with purple hair came looking for the Outer God, and asked.
"If you pass on like this, what becomes of my blessing?"
The reason was viciously selfish. Youth and health, freshly in their hands — they were afraid it might vanish in a moment. But the Outer God did not rebuke them. She answered instead.
"Even if I disappear, the blessing won't. It isn't collateral. I gave it simply because I wanted to. Blessings are a bad thing, to begin with."
At her words the hearts of the purple-haired lurched, and those eavesdropping in secret sneered at the ones who had been blessed. The blessed one, startled, asked again.
"Bad? What do you mean, bad?"
But the Outer God did not give the answer so many of them were probably hoping for. Instead she strung her words together for the sake of cutting a god thoroughly down.
"Just as a child steps out of a parent's arms — for a humanity that will one day leave a god's embrace and stand in a place of its own, a blessing is far too extravagant a gift. But I wanted to give it."
She did not deny the gods. She said that someday they might rise to a station as high as a god's own. It sounded like speech that hated no one, with no bad intention stirred in.
The Outer God had no thought of replacing the Holy God. What she had decided to plant was a single idea, and that idea was the groundwork of an enlightenment — humanity stepping out from under a god's shadow.
As yet, there was no one who understood the whole of it.
Not yet.
But she left something in the people who had been listening.
Scattering seeds, hoping they would someday sprout, the Outer God went on toward the place where she would die.