Farewell, First World — 11
The Outer God Church began a witch hunt.
They could not, however, find a witch and kill her at once, the way they had hoped. Considering that the age sat close to the early modern era, that was hardly strange. Magic existed in this world, but it lay shattered into fragments, and outside a privileged few almost no one ever saw it.
What mattered most was how slowly information traveled. Most news moved at the speed of a person walking. The one mercy was that, slow as it was, it spread wide. Wherever the Outer God Church stood, everyone knew—because the holy land was the place where every believer in the world gathered.
The ones who carried the stories were pilgrims visiting the Kingdom of Anselus. They stopped at the holy land, waited to receive a blessing, and talked with the people assembled there; that was when they heard of the witch hunt, and then they went home. Rebecca had built the whole arrangement with exactly this in mind, modeling it on the machinery of a certain religion so that her words would travel far. She had won the religious war this time, and she seized the opening to send her message out along with the glad tidings. From the beginning, the reason she had raised a holy land and made people write in a guestbook was for this.
Once, when something had entered her body and was moving it, Rebecca learned such things by watching a man's memories. In those memories there was a wondrous world, and what was most worth seeing was the history he had watched and studied—the story of how a single world had run its course.
In truth, she had never meant to dig so deeply into other worlds. But nearly all of the Outer God's memories she glimpsed were filled with a void, overwhelmingly and immeasurably empty. That place, so barren it made her want to vomit, was packed with the memories of human beings going mad without even managing a scream. And worse than any of it was a cold more agonizing than having one's chest pierced by some strange instrument and one's heart torn out. If she kept looking at that, Rebecca felt she would go mad herself, so she forced her attention onto the time when the Outer God had still been human, and in that way she gathered memories of one kind and another.
Half a year was a short time, but with every scrap of control over her body stolen from her, she had plenty of time to concentrate. No—if she failed to fix her mind on those memories even for a moment, she would have had to watch the memories of people going mad, or of people already completely mad, and so she clung to them without a single hour of rest. Then, all at once, her body was given back.
She knew what the Outer God was. Even so, she poured out words meant to make Yasle suffer. In the end Yasle collapsed, and Joanna died as well. A witch came to mind then—one person—but by that point Rebecca no longer wanted to be anywhere near a cult, and she left.
The world is a very harsh place for a girl to live through alone. But what if she had a special power? In her chest was the heart the Outer God had made. Once it began to turn in earnest it gulped down a staggering quantity of heat, yet the strength it granted was enough to crush not only a band of armed bandits, but a reasonably powerful army. Thinking it a wonder she had ever managed to play the weakling while carrying a heart like that, she lived her own life.
She realized something was wrong with her body only after she found a good person, married, and bore a child. Fortunately the child was ordinary. Rebecca, however, did not age. People reject whatever differs from themselves, and little by little the villagers came to find her uncanny, until at last she moved—as if driven out—to a place a little removed from the village. She could wipe out dangerous beasts or a pack of bandits in an instant, so they did not want her to leave the village entirely. They simply did not want to see her inside it, and so they sent her to a remote spot set apart from the rest. Even so, her child lived in the village, and Rebecca did not mind much.
Time passed. Her child grew up, and her grandchild became an adult in turn, and by then she almost never went into the village. It had grown large enough that it no longer needed her strength, and when she did go, more people called her an unpleasant monster than treated her with any warmth. Up to that point, it was fine.
But one day a famine came. The forest dried, much of the food people ate vanished, and a strange disease went around. The famine lasted one more year. And then another.
That year, on a day when Rebecca went into the village on an errand, the villagers pointed at her and attacked, spinning a mad logic: she alone was young and healthy, so if they ate her, they might live. Fleeing, demanding to know whether hunger had driven them completely insane, she saw something deeply wrong. At the butcher's, something that looked like a human torso hung on display, sold as meat that could cure every illness. Nearby, in a pot boiling and bubbling, a human arm stuck up, dangling—and the hand was terribly familiar. As if possessed, she went to it and overturned the pot.
A human corpse spilled out. It was her child. And beneath that mass of meat she saw the tiny hand of a grandchild who had, just once, gripped three of her fingers tight.
Rebecca lost her reason.
She did not think of them as monsters. She thought they had done it because they were human. Her own heart did not beat, and so she had decided she was no longer human. What stood opposite the thing that was not human was a human being. Therefore they were human, and she was the monster. Monster and human. There was no reason to hesitate. It did not take even half a day to turn the place that had once been a village into a plain of nothing but dirt and sand.
She stared blankly at the earthen ground where not even ruins remained, then moved on. She did not go home. She wandered from place to place like someone looking for a spot to die, and again and again she saw people eating people. Traveling through a world in the grip of a three-year famine, she came to believe that people truly were the problem.
Logically, that was strange. However emotionally she had seen it, she had watched human beings do anything at all in order to survive an extreme situation, and then defined that as what a human was. But she had not been thinking logically. She wanted to vent her hatred. She resolved to call the worst monster she knew—a monster that, having once been human, knew humans far too well. Drawing on the Outer God's memories, she laid a plan for the Outer God to swallow every person alive.
All of that was before Rebecca entered the Outer God Church.
And her search for Hyungkeshuni was not pure resentment. It was the opposite. She predicted that Hyungkeshuni would interfere with the plan. She knew Yasle and Hyungkeshuni had been connected, and she remembered that Yasle had driven the Outer God out of her body. She judged it highly likely that Hyungkeshuni possessed a way to send the Outer God back, and so she made up her mind to eliminate her. It helped that Hyungkeshuni was also the enemy of Dakota, who moved like Rebecca's own hands and feet. Two birds with one stone.
But when had anything in the world ever gone the way a person intended?
The witch hunt changed into something other than what she had wanted. Most people felt nothing much toward Hyungkeshuni. Every time they prayed, the name of the one who had brought hardship upon the Outer God came up, so they could hate without hating. The phrasing is odd, but emotionally they felt nothing in particular; it was closer to hating out of habit, because the name was one that ought to be hated. To begin with, the Kingdom of Anselus lay far from the region where Hyungkeshuni was active, so stories of the witch amounted, at most, to the tale that a wicked witch lived deep in the forest. In short, it was someone else's business.
And the story of the Outer God Church defeating the Holy God Church mattered more. What mattered more still was that the Holy God had personally erased even those who believed in the Outer God Church, if only a little. The people who had preached morality right beside them had turned out, in truth, to be villains—and here was a chance to beat those villains legally. The witch hunt degenerated into a hunt for the Holy God Church. They burned its belongings, seized those who had been priests, and killed them. Hatred spread as fast as fire catching on a dry field, riding the witch-hunt festival. In an instant the traces of the Holy God Church vanished from the streets, and the Outer God Church filled the empty space. This happened everywhere east of the Skard Desert.
That did not mean Rebecca's intent was buried completely. Hatred is not easily erased. People killed believers of the Holy God under the pretext of punishing Hyungkeshuni, and the phrase spread so widely that not only members of the Outer God Church, but even people who did not particularly believe in any god, came to use it out of habit. Years passed, and it reached the witch's hermitage at the deep heart of the forest—west of the Kingdom of Cogni, in the Adu Jungle, where the Yeongrang Theocracy had once stood.
Hyungkeshuni was in an extremely foul mood, because people were holding festivals in the name of punishing her. But by the time word of it reached her, the witch-hunt festival was no longer necessarily an occasion for burning things tied to the Holy God Church. It had become a single festival tangled up with folk belief: they set old things, or things that ought to be thrown away, in the middle of the village, made a rough straw doll, called it Hyungkeshuni, beat it, and burned it together with the goods. If they had been burning Holy God believers, she might have been afraid. Folk belief of that sort, to her eyes, was simply disgusting. People who did not even know her hung her name on a doll, cursed it and beat it, then set it alight, and around the fire they ate and drank and held a festival, declaring that they had struck the witch down. A festival to ward off evil. Given time, the witch hunt had changed into that kind of event. It had become a simple festival.
To say it again: Hyungkeshuni was in an extremely foul mood.
So she cursed the first village where she found it and killed them all, and over several years she repeated the thing again and again. She simply cursed them, killed them, and forgot, to relieve whatever had put her in a bad mood at the time. She had always lived that way, so there was nothing special about it.
But Dakota's hatred reached her.
Barely, the Outer God Church caught Hyungkeshuni's trail. To catch her and kill her, it sent an official notice to the churches in the region, and headquarters dispatched a legion of specialists in hunting such people. At their head was a tall beauty with blue skin and purple hair. Dakota. She was the saint of the Outer God Church, and a war hero who had survived the war against the Holy God Church. They called her by titles like guardian saint, of course, but the essence was the same: she was not merely someone who had been present, but someone who had fought in earnest. The woman who had lived her whole life for the sole purpose of taking revenge on Hyungkeshuni was on the move.
Now, in the Kingdom of Cogni and the lands around it, more and more people set out to exterminate the witch. Wherever Hyungkeshuni went, word of her circulated through the villages she visited, and capable hunters began to garrison the Outer God churches in order to catch her and kill her. Even when she tried to run rampant as usual, people appeared to put her down. Her curses were gradually analyzed and stopped at the root, and more and more searchers prowled the country around her hermitage.
At the corner of Hyungkeshuni's mouth, ever so slightly, a smile caught.