Black Lily (3)

“A survivor who was left down in the cathedral’s underground.”

There was no explaining the tangle between Lilian and me, and Eladin was no easier. I could hardly bring her up either.

“I’d like to ask you to see to her safety for a few days.”
“A few days, meaning?”
“Only until my next destination is settled.”

It struck me that I only ever used the Talios church exactly as it suited me, but in the end I kept the thought to myself. An apology was an apology, and if they were offering help, was I not obliged to take it?

Lilian sat quietly, looking on at how things went, and Camilla, too, seemed deep in some thought of her own.

“Brother. Love at first sight, was it?”

Camilla gave the snickering Drick a look that said he was past helping.

“You must be tired, so let me first show you somewhere to wash. That is to say…”
“It’s Lilian.”
“Yes. Miss Lilian. Please come with me.”

Having shut Drick’s mouth for him, Camilla took Lilian by the hand and led her out of the tent. Drick would not let it go and opened his mouth one more time; her hand caught him too and hauled him out after them. Just before they were gone, she turned back to me all at once, with a troubled look.

“Erm… how would you like Miss Lilian’s sleeping arrangements handled? I could put her up in my tent, or I could bring her back here.”
“Where she sleeps is a thing to ask her. Why ask me about it?”
“Ah. Understood.”

Camilla and the others went out. The cloth of the tent was far too thin to shut out a conversation held right outside it.

“Somewhere to stay? Mm… can I sleep here?”
“Would that be all right?”
“Sorry? Of course it’s all right. Beside Roan is where I’m most at ease.”
“Well now. So it wasn’t only brother who was smitten.”

Straight after came the sound of Camilla hitting Drick, the price of one useless remark too many. It drew a laugh out of me.

The Middle Ages are backward. Asking a man where a woman would sleep was simply taken for granted here, and neither the women nor the men found anything strange in it.

No chance of me becoming a medieval man.

However long I lived in this world, however much I claimed to have forgotten my past life, this one part of it was something I would never in the end understand.

A week passed.

The Talios church’s paladins were specialists in battle, but against a fortress city like Oskalt the numbers ran overwhelmingly against them. The work amounted to annihilating an entire city, cleanly. And the undead who made nuisances of themselves at all hours could not be ignored either. Naturally it dragged on. As of today, though, it was over.

“Apostle. The mop-up of every monster inside Oskalt is complete.”
“So it’s entirely finished?”
“Yes. Oskalt is safe now.”

No humans lived in it, so there were no dangers left to threaten humans either. Depending on how you heard it, the report could turn as grisly as you liked, but a good thing is a good thing, is it not? Everything connected to Lucseon had been burned as well, so there was truly no reason left to stay in Oskalt.

The last day of the mop-up operation, one day before the withdrawal.

Inside the tent, I sat face to face with Lilian.

“Lilian. There’s something I have to say.”
“Hm? What is it?”

Revenge, and flight.

Lucseon, and Lilian.

Since Eladin died I had run with my eyes on one purpose and nothing else, and now I stood at a fork in the road, the choice handed to me out of nowhere. Would it not be all right to turn my face from Lucseon, just as things were? Just as things were, would it not be all right to take Lilian, whom it had tossed to me as though in mockery, and go and live somewhere nobody knew?

If its intent was to take me off the board, if Lilian was the game piece meant for that, then why not go along with its intent?

Would that not be all right too?

The card it had laid down, the one that went by the name Lilian, was too sweet to spit back out.

“The people who shut you in this place. I am hunting them.”
“…I knew that. I’ve got some wits about me too.”

The people who had shut her in and tormented her the whole of her life.

There was no way she was not curious who they were, why the outside was in this state, who I was. And even so, Lilian had held her tongue until I raised it first.

“They are a body called the Lucseon church. By another name, the Ecclesia church — they’ve put their roots down all over the place.”
“…”
“I have to strike every last one of them dead. But at the same time I have no wish to let go of you.”
“…”
“So could you wait for me in Pirberk? It’s a city these people govern, so you’ll want for nothing in the living of it. Beyond that I’ll ask them firmly to take particular care of you. It won’t take long. Ten years, perhaps… no, in twenty years I should be able to come back…”

I got that far and stopped. What use was any of this? Was I not, in the end, cutting the very same figure as them, repeating the very same act? To think I was sitting here planning to shut a person away for my own gain.

The figure I cut was so unsightly that I had to grimace.

“…Roan.”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you ask what I think?”

All I could do was sit there struck dumb. Lilian dropped her gaze, and there was reproach in her voice.

“I mean, why do you decide it all on your own without so much as hearing my opinion.”
“That’s… I’m sorry. If there’s something you want to do—”
“Be quiet a moment. I’m not finished talking yet.”
“…”

I shut my mouth. Lilian glared at me.

“There’s something I want to ask.”
“…Yes.”
“Why did Roan hold me? Back there, that time. You saw me for the first time and you cried and put your arms around me.”

Eladin, Lucseon, whatever it might be, it was all business of several hundred years ago in the end. From where Lilian stood, it was only natural that she could not understand me.

Was this a thing I could bring up at all? Would the story of Eladin not stay with Lilian as one more wound? I turned it over a long while, but there was no hiding the details from her forever either.

“It’ll be a fairly long story. Is that all right?”
“Mm. It’s all right.”

Which story should I begin with? I took a moment to choose my words.

“Do you understand the relation between a god and a follower?”
“Mm. Roughly.”
“There was a time when I too had a god.”

A lover, and a friend, and at the same time a god. Eladin was everything to me.

“That god came to me suddenly one day, and before I knew it she had become my everything.”

I carried the memories of a past life, and Eladin was the only thing I could pour every private thought out to. Thanks to her I managed to adapt to a world where everything was strange and hard. She was my salvation, and I naturally became her follower.

“Had she not been there, I would have closed my eyes alone somewhere nobody knew, a very long time ago, far enough back that even the memory of it would be hazy. That I was able to meet you here, Lilian, and that I am alive at all up to now — none of it would have been possible if not for that god.”

Two centuries had gone by already. And yet the moment I first met her, at least, came back to me as though it were yesterday. The moment I let her go, I remembered more vividly still.

“And that woman died in my arms. Bleeding.”
“…”
“And you resemble the woman who died.”

Why, and how. There were plenty of questions, but a question with nobody to answer it was meaningless.

“It isn’t simple resemblance. It is at the level of a perfect replication. Not the outward form alone, but the quality of your holy power, and the force of your authority besides. All of it, to the point that it would be strange if you were not Eladin.”
“…I’ve got no memories except of living here.”
“Which is why it’s a strange business. She died in my arms, plainly enough, and yet there you were in the Ecclesia church’s cathedral, as if for me to see.”

Lilian was looking at me fixedly. Even the look in her eyes resembled Eladin’s.

“Why did Eladin die?”
“The one who killed her was Lucseon. These days it seems to go by the name Ecclesia.”

If Eladin was my everything.

Then Lucseon took my everything away.

“So that’s why Roan told me to wait.”

Having heard the whole of it, Lilian sat silent, as though ordering her thoughts. It was a good while before she opened her mouth.

“But look — what about where I stand, then?”
“Where you stand?”
“I understand how bad a thing this Lucseon is to Roan. The one that killed that god Eladin, and made me. From where Roan stands, getting angry is only normal. But then what about me, made as Eladin’s substitute and living my whole life without even knowing who Eladin was? What about where I stand?”

What Lucseon was, to Lilian. Was it really a thing she could be expected to look on at quietly while I hunted its church?

“Roan. To me too, Lucseon is the worst thing in the world.”

The revenge I was working on Lucseon was the blood price for Eladin. Then what revenge, exactly, was Lilian to take, brought into the world by Lucseon’s doing as a doll in Eladin’s likeness and robbed of her whole life? Now that she knew the whole of it, the one emotion fitting for Lilian to show before any other was hatred, and that hatred belonged on Lucseon.

“I want to go with Roan too. Wanting to land one on Lucseon isn’t for Roan, and it isn’t for Eladin either. I’ll travel with Roan purely of my own will, for my own sake.”

Lilian’s voice was firm. Her eyes were resolute, in a way I knew very well myself.

The eyes of one who had resolved to collect a blood price.

The eyes of a person who, in a world where nobody passes judgment, had sworn in the end to become the judge.

“…As you know, I have lived a very long time.”
“Mm.”
“And most of it I lived with my neck strung up on revenge. Enough that nobody in this world could stand before me and hold forth on guilt, or on tears of blood.”

I have lived gripped by more guilt and more hunger for revenge than any human alive in this world, and I have shed tears of blood to match. If a thing like an incarnation of revenge existed, it could be nobody but me.

“Lilian. What stands before you is your own end.”

And so I was the result, the proof of what the end looks like for a man who lived with vengefulness as the driving force of his life. Like a madman crazed over something. A thing chasing, mechanically, a revenge whose meaning had faded by now even to itself.

“I don’t want you living the way I do. A life that plainly began running for a purpose, and where now the running itself has become the purpose.”

If my revenge was for Eladin, I ought to have stopped it the moment Lilian appeared in front of me. I had considered that too, very briefly, but I still wanted revenge.

The feeling Kalen had woken in me.

Anger.

I hate Lucseon now. The motive for the revenge was no longer longing alone.

“Roan. Listen, I don’t mind that.”
“Were you listening to me at all? If you don’t want to end up like me—”
“Why is that a bad thing? Roan, it isn’t bad for me to become like Roan. I don’t mean becoming a thing that lives only for revenge. I mean becoming like Roan.”

Begin a revenge and you become like me. Why is that a bad thing?

“What sort of person does Roan think Roan is? A blood-crazed killer? An incarnation of revenge? Roan isn’t that kind of thing.”

Who am I?

A person who lives for revenge and nothing else, and—

“Roan held me. Roan sheds tears, and sometimes Roan makes jokes. They aren’t funny, but still. That’s the sort of person Roan is. A person who cries when he’s sad, laughs when he’s glad, and knows how to put his arms around someone else.”

—at the same time a contradictory person who says he has forgotten feeling and is bound by feeling more than anyone.

To live for revenge alone is to say that one is always, consciously, shutting out everything that is not revenge. Which is no different from saying that one is always conscious of the things that are not revenge. And so I am the person furthest removed from revenge in all this world.

Lilian was saying that if a contradiction like that lay at the end of this road, then that too was not entirely a bad thing.

A human being is a complicated thing.

Never to be defined by any single one—

“Lilian. A day will come when you regret refusing my offer today down to your bones. At some point you won’t even be able to think what you were running for, and you’ll simply run with your eyes ahead. A racehorse doesn’t look back.”

—and if I affirm that Lilian too is one human being—

“So you’ll need someone who will run alongside you. I turned out like this because I had no such person. Perhaps it’s wrong to say that you, as you are now, will end up like me.”

—then it is only right that I should accept every layer she has.