The Edge of the Holy Land and a Shattered Will (1)
The snow-covered plain stretched endlessly. At the far edge of my vision, a lone girl was fighting someone. Though she was too distant to see clearly, I somehow knew. The girl locked in that fierce battle was Pirel.
I lay there, helpless and gravely wounded, forced to watch it all with powerless eyes.
Was Pirel fighting to protect me? That was what I had thought. But as she advanced, gunning down and incinerating whatever stood in her way, it became obvious she was heading straight toward me. Was she coming to save me… or had I been her target all along?
When I weakly turned my head, a human head lay before me. It was the corpse of a man, half frozen solid and half buried in the snow, his face twisted in a gruesome expression.
The head opened its mouth and spoke.
“I’m sorry, Kaira.”
The voice struck me so hard my body, already paralyzed by injury and cold, began to tremble violently.
“F… Father…?”
The frozen head was speaking with my father’s voice. Or had it always been his head? I couldn’t even remember his face clearly, so I wasn’t sure.
“I should never have sent you to the magic academy. I’m truly sorry, Kaira.”
At that moment, a scorching heat and orange flames flared up behind me. The head that should have been frozen to death turned stiffly toward the fire. I struggled to move my body and looked in the same direction.
A charred black corpse was moving, its entire body wreathed in flames. Only a few scraps of flesh, burned black and clinging to bone, remained to hint at the human silhouette it had once been.
For some reason, even though everything that could burn had already burned away, leaving it looking like a blackened skeleton, the fire refused to die. The corpse walked with movements as clear and deliberate as a living person. If it were truly burning, it should have felt pain, yet there was no trace of agony in its posture.
The burning corpse approached me. The heat radiating from its body melted the snow piled on my father’s severed head—no, it melted the entire frozen head until nothing remained.
“H-hiiik…”
I gasped in terror, but my body wouldn’t move. The corpse stopped right in front of me and stared down for a long time through its empty, burned-out eye sockets.
After a long silence, the blackened skull’s mouth opened with a dry, clicking sound.
“Karin…?”
I barely managed to part my trembling lips and asked the skeleton,
“I-Iskil…?”
Even with all its flesh gone, I could tell the burning corpse was smiling. Still smiling, it wrapped its flaming arms around me.
“When will you give up?”
“W-what… are you saying…? Iskil…”
The voice echoing from the burning skull twisted grotesquely.
“Accept me, you insignificant worm.”
Iskil’s voice warped like a horrific whisper from beyond, and the gaunt, burning bones gripped me tightly.
“H-huaaah?!”
I thrashed desperately, trying to shake off the ash and the flames now spreading across my body, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to scream, yet my throat remained frozen in silence.
My mouth opened and closed uselessly until, suddenly, I bolted upright from where I lay.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!!!”
The scream I thought would never come finally tore free.
“Haa… haaaah…”
The cold night air washed over my feverishly hot face, stealing away the heat.
This was not some unknown snowfield. This place was…
I reflexively raised my left hand and cast a faint light. Wooden planks lined the walls, but there was no ceiling. It was a narrow space. No, not a room…
It looked like the cargo bed of a wagon…?
My body had been loaded onto the cart like baggage, loosely wrapped in a sleeping bag. When I felt around, I realized I was still fully dressed, even wearing the leather coat the hunter had given me on the outside.
Of course. It was just a dream…
I looked around with a dazed expression. Memories slowly returned. I had definitely collapsed on the road from exhaustion and pain. The last thing I remembered thinking was that I didn’t want to freeze to death, and then my consciousness had cut off…
Then where… exactly… was I…?
A hurried thumping sound approached, and a human silhouette suddenly blocked out the sparkling stars visible through the open sky above.
“Oh, you’re awake? Miss.”
It was the voice of an adult man. He didn’t sound hostile. Since it was nighttime and he stood with the light behind him, I couldn’t see his face. I asked in a timid, shrinking voice.
“Who… are you…?”
“Me? Just a porter and merchant. The sanctuary in Kil Madun got destroyed, so I took a job from Poscotia carrying preserved rations for the workers and some decorations for the temple…”
He was completely off-topic. Clearly not the most eloquent person. All he needed to say was that he had saved me and give his name.
“…Did you save me?”
“Ah, that. My donkey suddenly stopped while I was pulling the cart, and there you were, a girl collapsed and bleeding all over the place. I thought you’d been attacked and rushed over, but it didn’t look like it. I couldn’t just leave you to freeze, so I loaded you between the cargo and kept going. We stopped to rest once night fell.”
There was a hint of embarrassment in his voice. …He must have checked lower down. I wasn’t ashamed. If anything, I was grateful he had examined my injuries.
“Thank you for saving me.”
“Saving a person is only natural. But how did a young lady like you end up collapsed out there? Are you a pilgrim? Ah… I’m Orlim. Just call me that.”
“I’m not a pilgrim… I was trying to reach the southwestern edge of the direct jurisdiction. But I caught a fever, exhaustion piled up, and then… that came, so I must have lost consciousness for a while.”
Orlim clicked his tongue, looking extremely sorry for me.
His destination was Kil Madun… I remembered seeing it on the map. A town near the river. I wasn’t sure if it had a harbor with ferries, though.
I glanced up at Orlim. Even though I was alone with a man in the middle of the night, no lewd urges rose up that I couldn’t control.
My body still wasn’t healed. The mere brush of fabric against my skin was still painful. Having lain on the cold ground for so long, the condition had only worsened.
Since I had lost the most reliable means of protecting myself, traveling alone was dangerous. Maybe… it would be all right to accompany him.
“Then… could I travel with you to Kil Madun?”
“Hm? Having a traveling companion would be nice for me too. But it’s a tough road. Will you be okay? I only loaded you onto the cart earlier because you were unconscious. The donkey’s tired, so we’ll have to walk from now on.”
“That’s fine. My backpack would be too heavy for me right now, though, so I’d appreciate it if you could carry it… Since you’re a porter, I’ll pay you.”
I spoke in a slightly coaxing tone. I hated myself a little for wagging my tail and trying to manipulate a man’s heart to get what I wanted… but my body hurt, so I had no choice but to use whatever I had.
Orlim thought for a moment before answering.
“All right. What’s your name, miss?”
I hesitated over whether to give a fake name, but since this was a remote corner of the Church’s direct territory, I decided it would be fine and gave my real one.
“K… Kaira…”
And so I began walking alongside one porter, one donkey, and a noisy cart full of cargo.
As Orlim had warned, it was not an easy road. Though I no longer carried my pack, the fever refused to leave me, so I had to rest often.
Time was money for a porter, so I had to pay him with the money I had earned selling my body in order to buy rest. It wasn’t an exorbitant price, but it still felt like an unfair expense.
Orlim benefited a little from my presence too. Thanks to Perius’s igniter, he could easily start a fire every time we camped. A warm flame that never spread no matter how close you sat.
On the second day, we arrived at a small village and stayed at a modest inn. Walking had been difficult, but after properly resting once by a real fire inside a sleeping bag, the fever had eased considerably by the time I lay down in a room that kept out the wind.
At the inn, I took a different room from Orlim.
And inside it, I bit down on a pillow to muffle my voice and masturbated furiously. The pillowcase quickly became soaked with saliva, sweat, and tears.
I felt pathetic for doing such things in the middle of a journey, but I couldn’t hold back. The illusion that a whisper was urging me to give up and let men embrace me was too much to endure.
Throughout the entire journey, Orlim never looked at me with sexual interest. He seemed to see me only as a small girl who paid him to carry her things.
On the fifth day, we stopped at another small village. I was able to sleep indoors, but—
Accept me.
The whisper came without fail.
This time it wasn’t an illusion. The moment I lay on the bed, a whisper loud enough to split my skull rang out. I clenched my teeth, barely holding back a scream, and rolled across the sheet on the hard wooden bed. An unbearable urge surged up immediately.
The desire to put on my crumpled boots, walk downstairs half-naked, strip off every piece of clothing, seduce every person there, and end this life of being treated like an ordinary girl. The craving to throw it all away.
To barely endure the rising impulse, there was no other way. …I believed there was no other way. Until my consciousness snapped, I could only spread my legs vulgarly and touch my precious slit with my own hand.
“What’s wrong? You don’t look well. Are you sick again?”
The next day, right after we set out, Orlim immediately noticed my poor condition, but I brushed it off. I told him I just hadn’t slept well because the bed was different.
On the eighth day, we stayed at an inn again. I wished I could have camped instead. Now it felt like the whispers came the moment I stepped indoors. I thought I was going insane.
Of course, that night too, I covered my mouth and touched my whole body, suppressing the desire to be gang-raped. I gently stroked my pathetically small but pleasantly soft breasts, licked frantically between my fingers when I couldn’t bear the aching need, and pitifully stimulated my shyly protruding clitoris.
But… something’s wrong.
Right before losing consciousness and falling asleep, I suddenly realized.
It’s not enough…
Every night I exhausted myself trying to satisfy the urge, yet the number of times I could reach climax was steadily decreasing. And because of that… a growing dissatisfaction, a craving for ruin, was slowly piling up inside me.
The moment I realized it, I reached down again to touch myself, but before my cold, dry fingertips could even reach the warm, moist place, I fell asleep.
On the tenth day, we finally arrived at Kil Madun.
Orlim unloaded his cargo, and I once again had to bear the weight of my backpack. As a farewell gift for carrying my things, he suggested we eat dinner together at an inn in Kil Madun after he finished delivering everything to the church.
I felt grateful for his help over the past ten days, and since we had grown somewhat close as traveling companions, I agreed.
In the noisy inn, I tasted a generous serving of Eternal Stew. Orlim poured me a fruit distillate from the wetlands across the river. Drawn by its flower-like aroma, I asked for a glass as well.
Is this like brandy?
I held the glass and agonized for a long time. Could I really drink this? If I did, it was obvious I would lose control again and end up in an orgy, seducing men like some worn-out whore.
I have to be careful with alcohol…
That thing beyond, always watching for a crack in my pleasure-soaked mind, might stretch its tentacles toward my sanity once more.
Even if it didn’t, if my body—already unable to properly handle the power of time—took in several men and got injured, I wouldn’t be able to rewind it.
But…
It smells delicious, doesn’t it?
The scent was… too fragrant. Strangely, unbearably, as if I shouldn’t hold back, as if someone inside my head was screaming at me to drink.
Almost like… a whisper… was reaching me…
Drink it.
But it was probably just an auditory hallucination… It would be fine if I drank… right?
Just one sip.
Yes, really, just one little sip… would be fine… wouldn’t it…?
That’s right. So far… even though I kept masturbating and my mind was crumbling apart… it had always… been okay… right?
Good girl.
Hehe.
Mahiiiiiit…