Black Lily (2)

Past the enormous door the underground passage was as dark as ever, and damp besides. Lilian kept peering eagerly this way and that down a corridor where there was no chance of seeing anything at all.

“…Can you see something?”

“No. I can’t see anything.”
“Then what are you trying so hard to see?”
“I’m trying to see because I can’t see.”

Maybe even beings who are genetically identical grow into different people depending on where they are raised. Whatever the cause, Lilian’s temperament was a little different from the Eladin I remembered.

A little more brusque.

“I can’t see the fields, or the sky, or the sun.”
“And do you know what any of them look like, to be saying that?”
“People brought all sorts of pictures and showed me.”

The passage ended soon enough. The fork had never been a long stretch to begin with.

We came to the junction where the two roads met, and Lilian, naturally, spotted Pindel Morein’s carcass sprawled across the floor. I moved to cover her eyes a step too late, and the gesture was wasted anyway; she walked on with an untroubled face.

“…Lilian.”

“Hm? What?”
“What did you say you did with yourself here?”

In the dark Lilian shifted her gaze from Pindel Morein’s carcass to me. The place was black enough that I could not make out her expression in any detail.

“If I waited in that room, people brought me things to eat. There were people who taught me things like speech, and people who drew my blood. Actually, almost the only ones who came were the ones who drew my blood.”

Lilian’s blood.

That was the pendant’s main ingredient, the medium that held Eladin’s holy power and made it usable.

I drew Pormel’s pendant from my breast and showed it to her.

“Ugh. You have that thing?”
“How was the holy power breathed into this?”
“I don’t really know either. They only drew my blood.”
“I see. Was there nothing else?”

Pindel Morein’s carcass, a corpse no different from a monster’s, had not made her so much as twitch an eyebrow. Lilian was long past merely being used to such sights; she had reached a place where they did not move her at all.

“People brought monsters and showed them to me. And then they gave me all sorts of orders. Try talking to it, try killing it.”

“…And? Could you talk to them?”

“Of course. To me a monster and a person are the same. If anything monsters are easier. Monsters like me an awful lot.”

Eladin held dominion over every lesser creature. Not simple control, but a flawless hierarchy both sides upheld. They followed her absolutely, and set a single word from her above every appetite they had. Hadn’t I heard that on days when Eladin’s spirits were low they would even put on tricks for her, unbidden?

She was, in the truest sense, the god of lesser creatures.

“And the killing? How did you manage that?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t?”
“Mm. If I didn’t kill the monster, the people wouldn’t give me food. The monsters worked that out, and every one of them killed itself. So I wouldn’t go hungry.”

Where the pendant forced a monster to obey my will, she, merely by existing, made a monster choose for her sake of its own accord. Eladin’s authority, which Lucseon worked through the shortcut of Lilian’s blood, was a degraded version, markedly inferior to the original.

“You know, that’s why I hated people,” Lilian said. “Do you know what it feels like to watch kids who like you so much they don’t know what to do with themselves kill themselves because of you?”
“I hated it, I hated watching children kill themselves every day, and however much I cried the people didn’t so much as blink. However angry I got, they wouldn’t even listen. If that was how it was going to be, why teach me to speak at all.”
“Roan came from outside. Is the outside full of people like that? People who won’t even look at you when you’re crying and begging.”

People like that. The ones who had kept Lilian shut in this place a very long time and treated her as no different from an animal.

We turned down the left-hand passage, the one Drick and the paladins had taken. Plate boots and bare feet rang together through the broad dark corridor.

“The world is full of that sort.”

“…I see.”

It was a world of trash. Good and evil had blurred into one another, and sin ran rampant through it. If I set out to clear away every piece of filth in it, I might well end up fighting the world itself.

And therefore.

It was also a world of compromise. Where everyone lived by turning a little from malice, and handing out a little goodwill. A world with neither judges nor judged.

“But there are just as many who aren’t. Someone out there will surely listen to you. Lilian.”

Those who had compromised with goodwill. Lilian had simply not met any of them yet.

She sank into thought for a moment at my words, and then spoke, abruptly.

“Like Roan?”

To her I was, in many ways, the only one there was. The only one who had told her a name. The only one who had asked her name. The only one who had held out a hand.

“Something of that sort, I suppose.”

The nearer we came to the end of the passage, the plainer the change grew. Countless claw marks stamped into the stone floor, for one.

They would have caged the beasts after capture and carried them in. These are the marks of something going out from the inside.

Nothing about hauling a beast inward would leave claw marks. Set against the rest of the circumstances, the empty cages in the room where Lilian had been among them, these had to be the traces of the faithful riding beasts out of the city after Oskalt was sculpted whole.

“Lilian. Have those people ridden the beasts in that room out of here lately?”
“Hm? Yeah. Not long before Roan came.”
“Could you tell where those beasts are now?”
“Mm… I don’t think so. They’re too far off, and those ones ignored me from the start.”
“The beasts in the cages did?”

Beasts kept separate, in the room where Lilian was. That they had been tamed with Eladin’s authority was not hard to guess.

A beast that has had a pendant made from it does not come under Lilian’s control, then?

Catching the ones that had fled had become a good deal more difficult. Though I would run into them naturally enough once I set about smashing every Ecclesia church I came across, so in truth there was not much need to fret over it.

We walked on and came to a stop before a door just as enormous. I shoved it hard, and a deep purple came pouring into the dark passage.

“…”

The hour when the sun has already gone down.

The passage let out on a hill west of Oskalt, not far from the city. Undergrowth screened the door so cunningly that at a glance a man would walk straight past it.

I took Lilian’s hand and drew her along. She balked a little, then came out willingly enough.

“Roan.”
“What is it.”
“The sky is purple.”
“So it is.”
“In the pictures it was blue.”

Lilian’s black eyes glittered with the purple of the sky. She gripped my hand hard.

As though that would bring the sky back to blue.

“It’s strange. Is the sky purple to begin with?”
“Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“The sky is blue, and then it turns red, and then it stains over purple. After that it goes black, and then it comes back to blue again.”

A question not one soul living under that sky ever wonders about. Paradoxically, only Lilian could ask it, having seen the sky for the first time today.

I had the instinct that there would be a great many more moments like this, moments when I would have to answer questions of that kind.

“…Why? Why does the color change?”

“Well. I don’t know that either.”

The reason the sky wears so many colors.

Talk of revolution and rotation would be written off in this world as a madman’s raving. People have no room in them yet. Life is not yet livable enough, so they fix on the life upon the ground and never turn their eyes past the sky.

But because of that.

Living with their eyes only on the ground, they come to conclusions of their own.

“If the color of the sky did not change, people would not have been able to live.”
“Why?”
“When the sky is blue they work; when it is red they come home; when it is purple they eat with their families. Isn’t the color of the sky just a signpost nature gives to people?”

“…And why would anyone need a signpost?”

A signpost.

As Lilian’s question had it, perhaps it is not essential to survival. Thought about rationally, leaning on a thing like the color of the sky is, if anything, a fool’s business.

“I don’t know that either.”

But is a human being not an irrational thing to begin with? Probably that is why they can believe a god is all-powerful, live by the color of the sky, and speak of what they do not know as though they were declaring it.

The Talios church had its camp south of Oskalt, so it had not yet come into sight. Lilian and I crossed the hill and headed back toward Oskalt, and far off I could make out a soldier standing sentry on the outer edge of the wall.

Before he could see my face, I moved to put the helm in my hand back on.

Until Lilian pulled at my arm.

“What is it?”
“Um. Could you not put that on?”
“Why is that.”
“It’s… it scares me. I can’t see your face.”
“Is it frightening when you can’t see a face?”
“Not exactly, but I just can’t tell what you’re thinking.”

“…Is it hearing the voices of beasts that makes you sharper about this sort of thing?”

Lilian always knew a beast’s inner heart, as a matter of course. A human’s was the one heart she could not read, so it seemed that being unable to see even a human’s expression left her uneasy somewhere.

For a moment I looked at the helm in my hand. A helm meant to preserve Eladin’s death a little longer. A helm for her, dead, and a helm that had been her last words.

And so, now that Eladin has come back.

Does a helm like this not lose every scrap of its meaning? And is clinging morbidly to old words not in truth a very foolish thing to do?

“All right. I won’t put it on.”

I lowered the hand holding the helm and, keeping hold of Lilian, walked toward Oskalt.

The deep purple sky after the sunset has gone.

Beneath that sky darkening in an instant, up on Oskalt’s solitary wall.

“Whoa—!”

I watched the soldier catch sight of us and go faint.

“The apostle Roan Belgard. Do you need my identity confirmed?”
“Uh… n-no, sir! I’ll take you through at once!”

Lilian and I followed the soldier toward the quarters the Talios church had taken. He kept stealing glances at me, and Lilian, taken with the leather shoes he had brought her, rubbed her feet against this and that.

The Oskalt mop-up looked to have settled into something of a lull.

“…Brother?”

So we reached my tent, and when I had sat Lilian down and waited a short while, Drick and Camilla came looking for me. The two of them arrived with faces full of things to say and forgot every word of it at a stroke. It was not hard to guess that my appearance was to blame.

“Odd, is it?”

“…I’ve no idea what to make of you now. Tell me you’re a dragon walking about pretending to be a man, brother, and I think I’d believe it.”

Camilla, too, muttered blankly.

“A good deal murkier a color than the descriptions in the legend.”
“Legends are exaggerated by nature. I don’t have white hair and white eyes.”

If white pupils really existed, how frightening would that be? It would be the look of a man walking about with nothing but the whites of his eyes rolling.

“So…”

Drick’s gaze landed on Lilian, perched on the edge of the cot. The look demanded some sort of explanation. I had said I would search the underground further on my own, and here I was back with some woman out of nowhere. What else was it to look like?

I turned my head to Lilian. Lilian was looking at me too.

Meeting those black eyes, I opened my mouth.