Let's Live Here for a Month
The moment the leaves of the World Tree began to shine, the crowd was swept up in excitement. The branches hung so high that people had to crane their necks at a right angle just to see them, and yet the sight repaid every ache—the beauty on display was more than worth the strain.
It was like a black night sky strewn with countless rivers of stars. No—each time the wind passed, the panorama of swaying white lights held a beauty that words could not quite reach. Anyone with a camera had already pulled it out and started filming.
"Uncle Loop! Do you think something's happened to the World Tree?"
The little child put the question to the elf who had kept a street stall here for five hundred years. But Loop had no answer either. Leaves glowing on the World Tree were something he had never once seen in all his life.
Had such a thing ever occurred before, it would surely have come down through the records as a sight of the highest importance. That no such document existed could only mean this was the first time the phenomenon had ever appeared. Even setting that aside, the radiance unfolding now was a spectacle too vast for speech.
"It's so pretty!"
"Maybe this is why the elves come to the holy ground?"
The other races, watching the World Tree glow, spoke of it lightly enough. The elves did not. Mouths hanging open, they simply stared, and their reaction was nothing like the rest.
Then, after the radiance had gone on for the better part of an hour, it snapped out with a click. It felt like having watched some tremendous fireworks display. No one understood what had just happened, and yet the festival air only burned hotter. Unless the grounds were closed for inspection, this holy place stayed open around the clock, no different from a park.
"Eh...?"
I had no choice but to cry out, the shining duster still in my hands. Light was pouring from it, blinding beyond belief—a light I had never seen in my life. Rinea hesitated as well, as if she were seeing it for the first time. A moment later she came back to herself and rushed toward me.
"My God, are you all right?"
The instant Rinea took the duster, the light flicked out. It felt as though I had been looking at an illusion. All that remained was the same soft glow that had lit the chamber when we first came in. Rinea herself seemed not to know what had happened—and then she gasped, startled all at once.
"Ah!"
Like a child caught hiding some enormous secret, she fussed and flailed as she spoke.
"We have to—we have to run, World Tree!"
"Run? What do you mean, run?"
I had no idea what was going on when her hand closed around mine. She meant to get us out of here, and fast. But just then a voice caught her.
"And where do you think you're going, Rinea?"
A woman with bright blonde hair was suddenly standing beside us. There had been two of us a moment ago—Rinea and me—and now a third person had simply appeared. I jumped as if I'd seen a ghost.
My reaction was nothing next to Rinea's. She creaked and squeaked, turning her neck with all the grace of a broken robot. An awkward smile twitched onto her face as she stammered at the ageless woman who had materialized out of nowhere.
"M-Master...!"
"Master...?"
I stared at the blonde woman in surprise. I couldn't feel any real difference in age between them. If anything, they looked like an older sister and a younger one—a perfectly reasonable gap, and nothing more.
"You cause a disaster on this scale, and then you try to run?"
"Eek!"
Rinea made a break for it and promptly had her cheeks seized. I could only watch, dazed, as she was dragged off bleating. Some scolding followed, and before long she was down on her knees in a posture of pure repentance. Anyone who could seize a headstrong girl like that and still live under the same roof was clearly no ordinary master. Then my eyes met hers. She seemed to decide this was no time to keep dressing Rinea down.
"Eh..."
The moment our eyes met, she began to come toward me, slow and unhurried. Remembering the humiliation Rinea had just suffered, I took a step back, half certain I was about to receive the same treatment. Nothing of the sort happened. The elf they called Master sank to her knees in front of me and spoke.
"Huh?"
Rinea, and now this elf as well—both of them seemed utterly certain that I was the World Tree. Did elves have some hidden detector I didn't know about?
"I am called Amelia, World Tree. I am the former shrine maiden who served you for five hundred years."
"Five hundred years...?"
"Yes."
A span of time I could not even imagine left me stunned. People spoke of a hundred-year age, and yet those who actually lived to a hundred were vanishingly few. Most lives ended before eighty. And this woman called Amelia claimed she had attended the World Tree for five hundred years—six times an ordinary human lifetime, given over to nothing but serving the Tree.
I was dumbstruck. Ever since I had come to this world, my sense of time had gone strange. A hundred years was starting to feel like the baseline. I had no chance to sit with the feeling before Amelia bowed her head.
"I have no words for the fact that my disciple brought you to this place. I will return you to your original world as quickly as I am able."
"No, it's all right..."
Spending a month enjoying the culture here sounded like a rather delightful prospect. It wasn't as if I could never go home, and if I was certain I could return, then living for a while in a place with scenery that belonged in a film was something special. Stones floating in the air, rock mountains that climbed without end—it was a fine place to feel the grandeur of nature for myself.
Whether she heard me or not, Amelia only dipped her head, lifted both arms, and went to Rinea, who was still in the middle of being scolded.
I wanted to follow, but eavesdropping on a master and disciple while they talked seemed unlikely to end well. I settled on the thought that they would sort it out between them, and turned my attention to the surroundings instead. There were still plenty of curious things here—more than enough to satisfy me.
"Rinea... you...!"
At the sight of her master approaching with a fearsome look, Rinea's shoulders drew in. There was nothing else for it. Amelia was gentle enough in ordinary times, but when her anger rose, nothing in the world was more frightening.
"What happened?"
Amelia demanded an account of everything that had occurred up to now. She had scolded first without listening to a word, but she needed the details before she could decide exactly how the scolding ought to go.
Rinea explained the matter of bringing Hana, from the first detail to the last. Amelia listened with her arms folded, and only unfolded them once she had heard it all. The scolding had already been delivered. There was still something that had to be said.
"You were fortunate, Rinea. A little more, and you would have been lost between dimensions!"
Amelia set a hand on Rinea's shoulder as she spoke. Looking at her master like that, Rinea thought she had been forgiven. She was wrong.
"That is one matter. Discovering the World Tree was a fortune sent from heaven—but who taught you to bring her here?"
The smile on her master's face was bright, and Rinea felt at once that something was wrong. This was the signal that her master was about to explode.
That Rinea could draw on great power near the World Tree was a fact Amelia already knew, and so she said little about the discovery itself. Bringing the World Tree here in person, however, was more than enough to take issue with. And had there been no luminescence today, Rinea would have gone on hiding the fact that the World Tree was here at all.
Amelia herself had only caught on after seeing the glow, and come running. Even so, to behold the World Tree's incarnate body with her own two eyes was an honor beyond measure. Had Amelia been as young and inexperienced as Rinea, she might very well have done the same.
Rinea did not miss that opening. A shrine maiden, after all, was an elf so blindly devoted she would sell her very soul to the World Tree—in the terms of modern society, a believer more fanatical than any cultist.
"M-Master!"
Sensing a flick to the forehead in the air, Rinea looked at Amelia and spoke as if her life depended on it.
"What?"
She had already decided that keeping the World Tree to herself was a lost cause. The time had come to make an accomplice—and the collateral for that accomplice would be her own master.
"The World Tree said she wishes to stay with us for just one month...!"
"For a month...?"
"Yes... It isn't a threat, or any demand made by force. It is the World Tree's own will!"
Watching Amelia hesitate, Rinea smiled the smile of a girl who had just turned the board.