Forget-me-not

The hard hilt in my grip. The air heavy with the reek of blood. The floor sticky and slick underfoot. All of it churned together into a mire of a mood, right at that very moment…

— THOOM!

The beast lunged at me. By the time I noticed, it was already too late. I’d given up on dodging long ago; my plan was to drive my sword home the instant it bit down on me.

— SKRAAAAAK!

But no matter how long I waited, no pain came. No wonder: the beast had never meant to attack me at all.

“…What?”

The beast had stopped dead in front of my nose, red eyes glinting, close enough that I could feel its ragged breath full on my face.

— Krk.

It studied me a moment, then folded its legs beneath it, lowering its body and wagging its tail, for all the world like…

“…Like a puppy.”

By any measure, it was a gesture of submission, unmistakable. A beast with dragon’s blood in its veins, distant kin though it was, bowing its head to a human. Was such a thing even conceivable? The whole notion was a joke too poor to earn even a jeer in the market square. Except that it had happened. A joke, and yet no joke at all.

Surely… is it because of that?

Only then did I think of the pendant I’d tucked away against my chest. The holy power I could feel in the blood inside it sent a chill through one corner of my mind.

“Wh-wh-what is that thing?”

The soldier’s eyes, fixed on me, had changed again in that instant. A moment ago they’d been the eyes of a man watching a monster gone mad for slaughter; now they were the eyes of a man witnessing a miracle he couldn’t explain. From where he stood, it must have looked as if a beast from nowhere had appeared and knelt to me. And the truth of it wasn’t far off.

“It’s no pig or horse, I’d say.”

It was the sort of answer that asked why he’d bothered with something so obvious, and the soldier scratched his head, abashed.

“Of course it’s no livestock. It’s just — it doesn’t even seem like a beast, is the thing.”

In truth, it wasn’t quite so obvious as all that. And since he wasn’t wrong either, I had no choice but to explain how things stood.

“This beast won’t attack me. And it likely won’t threaten you, either.”

Do not attack the soldier.

I’d been repeating that command in my mind, over and over, since a moment before. Whether this was even how it worked, I couldn’t say; but the soldier had come to no harm so far, had he not?

…So this is how it felt.

Eladin. Do you reach across time and space itself to help me? Just as I have not yet forgotten you, have you, too, not forgotten me?

“…Is that even possible?”
“No reason it shouldn’t be.”

Long, long ago, in an age no one was left alive to remember. It was a sight dredged from a memory I’d buried somewhere deep, one I must have forgotten all this long while.

“Because this, too, is the authority of a god.”

Her miracle, met again now after so long, was a marvel still, even across the span of centuries. In the sight of the beast bowing its head, it was almost as though I could hear her voice. Not to forget her. That she was with me still.

Is this your will, Eladin?

Setting the tangle in my chest aside, I stepped toward the beast and threw down the longsword I had no more use for.

“…I misspoke. Get up. I can ride this instead of a horse.”

If only I had had the power. If I had not lost her then, would the present look any different? It was a thought worn so smooth by now that it held no meaning at all, and at the same time one that had tormented me just as often. Regret changed nothing. I had come too far now to turn and look back. Too far gone for regret, too far gone for repentance; the only road left to me was to press on, on and on, without end.

— Grrrrr.

I scratched the throat of the low-whining beast.

“From now on, your name is Pormel.”

Pormel, the forget-me-not. Its meaning in the language of flowers: forget me not.

When I turned my head, the outline of Brus had blurred to nothing somewhere behind us. A sharp wind and the cold of daybreak wound around my whole body.

“What’s your name?”

The soldier had his eyes shut and both arms clamped around my waist for dear life, and he answered with an effort.

“Huh?”

By now I ought to have been used to how exasperating he was, and yet every time one of those dim-witted ‘huh’s landed, I couldn’t help shaking my head.

“I asked what your name is.”
“Ah — Kalen Leont, sir.”
“Ahkalen Leont?”
“No — Kalen, sir. Kalen Leont.”

When it came down to it, Kalen went along with everything I said with surprising meekness, for a man in the middle of being abducted. After we gathered our gear at the manor, he’d even stopped by his own home for a blanket, a backpack, and other odds and ends, readying us for the long road ahead. He’d brought cord too, to lash our baggage tight to Pormel. All of it done of his own accord, which meant he was no more right in the head than the rest of us.

“You’re not afraid?”
“Ha ha — I’m afraid. Terrified, of course.”

Perched atop Pormel and grinning, he looked, by any reckoning, a far cry from afraid.

“But being afraid doesn’t change a thing, does it? So I figured I’d just as soon accept it. This is my fate, I told myself — I was born to go adventuring with you, sir knight — I’m just going to think of it that way.”

And indeed, he’d wiped away every last trace of the fear of Pormel he’d shown at first. Watching him calmly lash down the baggage, I half wondered, for a moment, whether he’d finally lost his mind.

“And besides — it’s not an experience you can get just anywhere, is it? When am I ever going to ride a beast like this again? The ride’s rotten, mind you.”

He wasn’t wrong. Set next to Pormel, a horse’s back might as well have been a nobleman’s fine wool-cushioned chair. If not for the spines jutting up along its back, we’d have slid off it long since.

“Glad to hear it.”

Pormel, three times the bulk of a horse, was naturally more than three times as fast. We’d not long left Brus behind, and already we’d come far enough that its walls had dropped out of sight.

“You said you had no family.”
“Yes, sir. I had a younger brother once — got hauled off to the Darbar territorial war, came back short one leg, and then it festered and killed him.”
“Bad luck.”
“If anything, he was on the lucky side. He died, sure — but he made it back alive from the Darbar territorial war, didn’t he?”

It wasn’t as though I knew everything that happened, myself. All I’d heard was that not long ago the Slonhar domain, the one Brus belonged to, had clashed hard with the Darbar domain.

“Word is the lord of Darbar hired mages. The Graden Plain, where the war was fought, ran red with blood, and few soldiers came out of it alive.”
“Tell me more.”
“According to my brother, giant knights appeared and butchered the soldiers…”
“And what has that to do with mages?”
“They tore men apart with their bare hands — if that’s not magic, what is it? That’s why everyone calls those knights the mages of Darbar.”

It struck me all at once that Kalen knew nothing of my undeath. Had he known, he’d surely have raised a subject far nearer to magic than any mere brute strength. And having no confidence I could explain that one well, I chose instead to keep the conversation going.

“So in the end Slonhar handed over a city?”
“That’s right. It’s Darbar’s domain now, that place.”

After Slonhar and Darbar came to blows, the lord of Slonhar had had no choice but to give up a city to save his own skin and flee to another. And after that, well. He was lying a corpse somewhere back in that manor, as you already know. Having lost both a city and its lord, Slonhar would be swallowed up by Darbar in the end. Brus still stood, for now, but it wouldn’t hold out long.

“So where are we headed, then?”
“Pirberk.”

It was that very city, once part of the Slonhar domain, now a piece of Darbar’s.

“The mood there’s bound to be unsettled… is there a reason?”
“There is.”

First, there was a good chance no trace of Lucseon would turn up there. You might think that made Pirberk pointless; in fact, the opposite was true. Pindel Morein would surely have reasoned the very same way. A man on the run would try to strike where his pursuers least expected him, so the odds were he’d made for the one Pirberk we’d be counted on to avoid.

And then there was the second reason, the biggest of all. Pirberk was the city nearest to Brus. Whether he was there or not, wasn’t it only sense to search the nearest place first?

Kalen took in my explanation and nodded.

“I see. There’s one thing I’m curious about.”
“What?”
“What is the Lucseon church?”

I hadn’t told Kalen the tale of the church that was tangled up with me. It wouldn’t be a long road we shared, and in many ways it was better for him, too, not to know the whole of it.

“The church Pindel Morein belongs to. It probably isn’t in Pirberk.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because there’s a different church there.”

The monstrous strength to tear a man apart with bare hands.

That was the signature trait of the faithful who had received the holy power of Talios. The knights Kalen’s brother had taken for mages were most likely paladins of that church. It wasn’t impossible the Lucseon lot had slipped into Pirberk, but weighing the temper of the Talios church, it seemed unlikely. A church that all but ruled the cities it held would have left no gap for Lucseon to worm into.

“Sir knight — ahead!”

In that instant, Kalen cried out. At once I commanded Pormel to halt, and the beast drove all four feet into the ground. Dust flew up as the earth was shoved back in a great furrow.

“…This—”

The moment we crested the hill, a spectacle that lodged itself full in my sight.

Below a horizon where thunderheads vaster than any mountain range drifted low.

A river glittering silver and a dizzying canyon spread wide before us. It was the Silbern River, which fed and sustained the Slonhar domain¹, and the Eilwin Canyon that ringed it.

“We nearly went over the edge.”
“The Eilwin Canyon’s famous for its sheer size.”

A fierce updraft came blowing up out of the fathomless canyon. The wind had drunk in a vast measure of the sun’s heat to match its fearsome size, muggy enough to burn off the dawn’s damp in a single gust.

Kalen, overwhelmed by the grand vista nature had carved, gazed blankly out at the scenery.

“Do you really think Pindel Morein is down in Pirberk, at the lower reaches of the Silbern River?”

Nearest was, after all, a relative thing. Following the river to Pirberk would take a fortnight on foot, or ten days perhaps on Pormel. To expect Pindel, who’d set out a single day ahead at most, to cover so great a distance and arrive before us was patent nonsense.

“He may not be there. Or perhaps we’ll run into him on the way.”
“You don’t seem to mind much.”
“No. I don’t.”

If Pindel wasn’t at the Eilwin Canyon, it would mean a fair bit of wasted effort. But that was all right in its own way. The Talios church was in my debt, and if it came to it, I might call on them to help track Pindel down.

“Best hold on tight.”
“Sorry? I already am, sir.”
“I mean — grip me twice as hard as you are now.”

Kalen groaned, but shifted himself into a firmer seat all the same. I could feel him throwing every ounce of strength into the arms clamped around my waist.

Even so, in the middle of it all, Kalen asked me:

“Why, though?”

Rather than answer, I quietly called it up in my mind.

Jump.

Pormel flung itself down into the depths of the Eilwin Canyon, and Kalen’s scream tore loose in the very same instant.