Black Lily (1)

Let me trace back through my memory a moment.

I was born in a small village in the far east of the empire, and an old couple who kept a stock farm out on its edge took me in. There was no knowing who my birth parents were, and I had no particular regret about that. In this world an orphan was as common as herb butter.

The years brushed past like a light breeze. Ten years went by, and twenty, and then one day.

A sweltering day; it would have been just after a burst of rain. And then, of all things, every sheep I had turned loose on the grassland began to bleat at once. Sitting up on the hill, I turned my head.

There she was. Crouched on her heels, watching me intently.

‘How curious.’

White hair like the first snow at daybreak. Pupils cloven into a cross.

One look told you she was a woman unlikely to live long. Anyone who saw her would have branded her a witch.

‘Most people show me a rather more violent reaction than that.’

‘…Was I supposed to jump out of my skin or something?’

Eladin smiled with her eyes.

‘Ought not a human who has come face to face with a god do exactly that?’

I looked into her cross-split eyes a moment, then turned my gaze back to the flock.

‘Gods must be as short of things to do as anyone. If you’re bored, go over to the house that keeps dogs, the one by the main road. Old Raymon’s been saying his bed’s cold lately.’

Whether it was Eladin’s doing or not, the sheep would not stop bleating. At this rate I was plainly going to catch it from my foster father for dereliction of duty.

‘If you’re going, go quickly. I can’t get any shepherding done because of you.’

Eladin turned her eyes on the flock. The sheep that had been bleating so noisily shut their mouths in an instant.

‘…’

That was the moment I first witnessed her authority.

I turned my head back to her, and met a pair of grey eyes.

‘My name is Eladin.’

A strange feeling came over me. They were only eyes, and yet I felt as though I were looking up at clouds high in the sky.

‘What is your name?’

I could do nothing but answer, as though I had been charmed.

‘Roan Belgard.’

Time flowed on after that. The weather eased and turned cold again, over and over. Snow fell a number of times and melted. Flowers bloomed and faded. And Eladin went on appearing in front of me without warning, exactly as she always had.

‘Roan.’
‘Eladin, don’t say it.’
‘I am afraid.’
‘Please. Please don’t say it.’

I held her dying body with all the strength I had and wept without stopping. Because it felt as though she would scatter like dust if I let go. Because I could not shake the feeling that she would crumble apart the instant I did, I would not let her go.

For all the good my efforts did.

Eladin left. For somewhere very far off, where I could not reach.

And at the same time my body began to change. Little by little I grew to resemble her. My black hair took on an ash grey, and the pigment drained out of my eyes as they split crosswise.

Eladin urged a helm on me. If I went into the village looking like that they would only drive me out, she said, so I should cover my head.

‘All right, Eladin. I’ll wear the helm.’

So that you would be the last person to remember my face. So that no stranger should ever defile your pure death.

That day. I swore I would show my face to no one but her.

From that day the helm became my shackle and my conviction both.

A spiritual shackle carried for several hundred years becomes an ideology and a religion. And a physical shackle carried for several hundred years? What does that become?

The helm was the symbol of a conviction I had guarded like my own life for a very long time.

A room of unknown purpose at the end of the passage in the underground cathedral. The moment I pulled its handle.

I doubted my own eyes.

“…”

A room spread with rags. In its corner, a single human being, huddled, staring at me. Eyes brimming with wariness, lips pressed tight, a nose straight and high.

My heart slammed. The human before me resembled Eladin.

No. That does not begin to cover it. However closely a thing resembles another, it cannot be entirely the same. Not a value converging toward 100, but 100 itself.

She is Eladin.

No other explanation would fit that face. Only the black hair and the ordinary eyes told me she was not the same person as Eladin.

I got as far as trying to say something, but in the end nothing came out and I shut my mouth again. Both my hands were shaking. An unbearable humiliation came flooding in.

Th-this f*ing bastard…

Lucseon.

A thing I could chew alive and still come up short. Its intent in bringing me to this place. Was this cheap a mockery all it wanted to hand me? Only, only to show me this. To stand me in front of it.

“…”

I dropped to my knees in front of her, almost collapsing into it.

This is mockery, laughing at me. An insult to me, and a desecration of Eladin. The woman before me is nothing but a human Lucseon sculpted into Eladin’s likeness.

I bit down hard. Blood, salt and iron, soaked my mouth. Licking at that blood, I slowly reached out a hand. She gave a small shudder, but in eyes deep with resignation there was no particular will to resist.

The human before me is not Eladin. I knew that, and still, foolishly, I took her hand in mine. And I bent every nerve I had toward feeling even a trace of holy power.

On the remotest chance, absurd as the notion was, might she not be Eladin? Might she not laugh and tell me all of this had been a dream? Might she not pat me and say I had only had a long nightmare, and that it was time to get up? That Lucseon, Talios, all of it had been nothing but my own delusion. Might she not say that to me?

To deny reality, and at the same time to accept it, I tried to find Eladin’s holy power inside her.

“Ah, aah…”

Everything in my head went white. I could no longer know anything at all. Very slowly, I pulled her into my arms, and with shaking hands I buried her head against my chest.

Tears ran down. Their wetness, felt for the first time in decades, was skin-crawlingly unfamiliar, and vivid besides.

A holy power that should have been impossible to feel. A holy power identical to the one held in the blood inside the pendant.

I felt it, inside her body.

How — why…

Dozens of questions rose up and then all of them vanished at once.

Some two hundred years since Eladin died. In my arms was a human who had her holy power and her face. If she is not Eladin, then what on earth is she?

Eladin, who had gone away to somewhere very far off, had at this very moment leapt two hundred years and come back to me.

Slowly, I took off my helm. My face, smeared all over with tears, burned where the cold air touched it. She flinched at the sight of my unearthly face. Every small movement she made was a dagger going into my chest.

She did not remember me. Looking at how stiffly her face was set, I had guessed as much, but in the moment she startled at mine the fact became plain. A pain that seeped in without a word stabbed deep in my chest.

Had Eladin been this young? Halfway through her twenties, perhaps. Set beside me, who had lived out more than two hundred years, she suddenly looked boundlessly young.

“My name is Roan Belgard.”

Eyes shining black as a night sky. Much had changed, and at the same time nothing had. Across a leap of two hundred years she still had the same unchanging, beautiful eyes.

“What is your name?”

She kept her eyes wide and round and her mouth shut. At first she had looked wary of me, but since I took off the helm even that seemed much eased.

About the time I began to worry she might not be able to speak at all.

“Don’t know.”

She opened her mouth. Yes. This was the voice. The Eladin in my blurred memory had whispered to me in that same voice.

“…Can you tell me what you do know?”

Conscious of my eyes on her, she lowered her head. The hesitation did not last long.

“I— I don’t know anything.”
“It’s all right. Anything at all.”

“…”

She looked confused. I made up my mind to wait, however many days it took.

There is no need to hurry in any case. We will not be parted again.

I looked the room over.

This place is too small. So small it was hard to believe a person had lived here.

“Do you want to leave here?”

“…”

“I seem to have asked that badly. Have you ever been outside this place?”

“…No.”

She has never once left the underground of Oskalt. It meant that, at least as far as she remembered, she had been born and raised here. Though I could not rule out the possibility that Lucseon had played tricks with her memory.

“I can take you out of this place. Do you want to see outside?”

She said nothing for a while. I waited quietly in front of her. Then she spoke, low.

“Mm.”

A clear will toward change. She wanted out of this place; she wanted to know a new world.

I took her hand and we came out of the narrow room. Thankfully there was no particular injury to be seen on her. We walked through the big space filled with animal cages and stopped before the enormous door. Before I could push it, she gave my arm a weak tug.

“Roan.”
“What is it.”

“…Did Roan come from outside?”

She was trembling faintly. One step further and she would be facing what lay beyond the only space that could be called her whole life. She looked afraid, and she looked as though she were hoping for something.

“I did.”
“What is it like outside? Past this door?”

“…There is sky, and cloud, and open field, and a soft breeze.”

Eladin loved flowers. It seems the world of the gods has something like a language of flowers too; one day she kept hold of me for hours on end, teaching me what all sorts of flowers meant.

“And the dandelions were out, and the forsythia ran riot, and the azaleas had put their faces up on the hillsides. The cherry blossom was already falling, and white lilies had come quietly into bloom, and the cosmos was still too early, and the sunflowers were getting ready to lift their heads.”

Eladin was especially fond of lilies. The sight of her was still vivid to me: arms full of the white lilies blooming thick across a broad grassland, smiling for me.

She was like a lily. A lily without a blemish on it, pure white, noble and beautiful.

All at once, as though waking out of that quiet memory, I turned to look at her.

“You said you don’t know your name.”

“…Mm.”

“Guess we’ll have to settle on something to call you, then.”

She thought about it a moment, then spoke. The hand gripping my arm seemed to tighten a little.

“Roan. Roan should be the one to decide.”

“…You’re content with that?”

She gave me a smile so beautiful it ached in my chest.

“It was a first for me. Hearing someone’s name. So Roan should make one for me too.”

“…Right this moment?”

“Mm. Right now.”

A weighty mission had been handed to me out of nowhere. The pressure was greater than when I had fought Pindel Morein.

“For now let’s just settle on something simple to call you. I’ll think properly on the actual name later.”
“All right.”

I looked at her steadily. One memory surfaced unbidden.

‘Roan. Do you recognize this flower?’
‘It’s a lily, obviously.’
‘How admirable. You managed not to forget.’
‘You ask me every single day. How would I forget?’
‘That is true enough. Well then, Roan.’

A flower as white as her smile.

‘Do you remember what this flower means?’

And the meaning of that flower—

“Lilian. Lilian, then.”

Lilian, the lily.

—purity, and unchanging love.