Chapter 212 - Black Spire (3)

Merlin’s voice was trembling.

Najin could neither joke as he usually did nor answer her right away. The Merlin before him was every bit as unfamiliar as the one he had seen in the dream.

"It’s not that important. Haven’t you done your part just by bringing him this far?"

Anton would climb the tower with or without him. Bringing him here was enough. Couldn’t he simply say the trial was too much for him, that he couldn’t keep his promise, then take the information about La Mancha and leave?

Merlin pleaded, clutching Najin’s sleeve. She continued as though she were fine, as though nothing were wrong and she were merely offering a reasonable suggestion, but...

"Please? Please, won’t you?"

She could not hide the tremor in her voice.

Najin looked at her in silence.

Her wavering eyes, her wavering voice. Agitation, fear, confusion. The emotions flowing into him from Merlin crashed against him like waves.

"..."

Merlin had become emotional a few times before. This wasn’t the first time they had disagreed, either. But it was the first time he had seen her trembling with fear.

Why? What was that memory?

["Everyone, you know."]

Come to think of it...

["Everyone has memories they want to bury. Things they don’t want brought to light. Memories they hate even thinking about, let alone speaking of."]

Merlin had once told him that.

["Are you asking if I have any, too?"]

["Of course I do."]

Najin looked down at Merlin, and she looked up at him. They had traveled together long enough to read each other’s thoughts roughly just by meeting each other’s eyes. And the moment she saw his gaze, Merlin bit her lip hard.

"You have no intention of turning back."

"..."

"Why? Is this really that important? Does your promise to that Anton bastard matter so much? More than what I’m asking you...?"

"It’s not because of Anton."

Najin cut her off.

"It’s because of you, Merlin."

"What?"

"You know everything about me, but I don’t know everything about you. I don’t know what you were like in the past, what kind of person you were, or what happened to you."

Of course, he had read about her in fairy tales and heroic legends. But most of her story had been left out, and it was difficult to understand her life from a few lines of prose.

"I just want to know."

"..."

"We are traveling companions, after all. If wanting to know more about my one and only companion is asking too much, then yes. I’ll go back down, as you ask."

Merlin worked her lips.

"Where does that leave me when you put it that way?"

"Where else? You’re still Merlin."

Najin chuckled, and Merlin caught her breath. Letting go of his sleeve, she tightly gripped her own.

"I gained my twelfth star after Arthur died."

She spoke with her head bowed.

"I hated that twelfth star. I don’t remember it very well, but I hated everything. Everything I saw was so shitty that I couldn’t bear it... I think."

Her voice was uncertain. Merlin had once told him that she had cut out those memories herself. Feeling her way through the gaps in her memory, she continued.

"I don’t remember what I was trying to do or what I was thinking, but I’m certain of one thing."

Merlin raised her head. Her blue eyes fixed on Najin.

"I must have been trying to end it all."

End what?

"With my Mystery. The one I hate most."

Full Stop. Merlin’s Mystery.

"That’s why I don’t want to remember that time. If I was trying to use the Mystery I hate and loathe most, it means I’d already lost my mind."

"..."

"I don’t want to remember it, and I don’t want anyone else to see it. It’s a memory I want buried forever. That must be why I cut it out."

She didn’t know how the tower had dredged up a memory she must have cut away, Merlin added with a long sigh.

"You’ll be disappointed. You might even despise me. Back then, I was cruel, foul-tempered, and so full of horrible thoughts that something had gone wrong with me. I might even try to kill you."

That was why she didn’t want to show him. She didn’t want him to see it. Even if he did see it someday, she didn’t want that day to be today.

Merlin’s voice was full of fear as she told him this. Watching her flounder helplessly, Najin silently rested a hand against his chin.

"..."

Several minutes passed.

Growing anxious when Najin still said nothing after several minutes, Merlin cautiously spoke.

"What are you thinking about?"

"What on earth you’d have to show me to make me despise you."

"Whaaat...?"

"I’ve given it some thought."

Najin shrugged.

"Unless you joined forces with witches to massacre humans or something, I don’t think I’d despise you. Did you do anything like that?"

"No. I don’t think it was anything like that..."

"Then there’s nothing for me to despise you for."

"Even though I might have done something horrible?"

"Well, you must have had your reasons, right?"

His answer was downright refreshing in its frankness.

As Merlin stood bewildered, Najin continued.

"People can lose their minds when they get angry. I thought about the situation back then, and wouldn’t it have been stranger if you hadn’t gone mad?"

Arthur was dead. The Round Table had split apart. And amid all that, Arthur’s disappearance beyond Camlann had prompted the devils and witches to run rampant. Considering the situation from Merlin’s perspective, Najin gave a short answer.

"I think I’d have snapped and gone around beating the shit out of everything in sight, too."

He would have done the same.

"..."

Merlin was silent.

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again, over and over. In the end, all she managed to squeeze out was a short question.

"You really won’t despise me?"

"I told you, that won’t happen."

Only then did Merlin nod. She still looked anxious, but she no longer tried to hold Najin back.

2.

"Horrible."

Those were Anton’s first words when he awoke from his dream a little later. Looking exhausted, as though he had suffered a nightmare, he heaved a tremendous sigh.

"When I heard it showed your most horrible memory, I thought I’d dream of Lapis piercing my heart or something. Not even close. Though I suppose any dream with Lapis in it couldn’t be a nightmare."

"What exactly did you dream about?"

"The day House Quijano fell."

Anton Quijano pressed a hand between his eyebrows as he spoke.

"I told you I came from the same house as Quixote—Alonso Quijano, that is—didn’t I?"

"Yes, you did."

"Believe it or not, my family was quite prosperous. Naturally, we held several estates. There were so many theatrical troupes staying on our lands that we never had a quiet day. A splendid house in all sorts of ways. Perhaps that was why."

Anton smiled bitterly.

"It was spectacularly splendid when it burned, too. Oarsman, have you ever eaten ‘perpetual stew’? Or seen it?"

"The stuff they keep in taverns? That they keep boiling for decades?"

"Yes, that. Stew that’s simmered for so long all the ingredients have turned to mush, until you can’t even recognize them. That’s exactly what became of our lands."

One day, a witch appeared, and the estates went up in flames.

As befitted witches who devoted their lives to inflicting suffering upon humans, the flames they raised neither went out easily nor burned quickly.

Slowly, languidly, over several days.

Anton told him that the damned witch had burned their lands for days with heat just low enough not to kill them.

"She left their vocal cords unburned until the very end, so the screams never stopped. The Quijano domain became a mushy stew, and all my family and retainers melted away, screaming. Only my uncle and I survived."

Three days of unbearable agony.

Anton murmured about his memories of those three days.

"I hear the screams. There’s nothing I can do. I was a Sword Seeker then, but the martial strength I’d spent my entire life building was utterly useless. My younger siblings died. One of my brothers had no talent for combat, but he was just as gifted when it came to brains. He was always advising me, saying, ‘What would you do without me, brother?’..."

At the end, though, he hadn’t offered Anton advice.

"He murmured, ‘Brother, save me. Please, at least save my daughters.’ He had little girls, you see. So I crawled down the corridor, dragging myself along with my fingers, trying to save at least them. I crawled and crawled."

Stupid, Anton sneered.

"Even I, a Sword Seeker, felt as though I’d burn to death. How could little children still be alive? After crawling all that way, all I found were corpses melted beyond recognition."

"..."

"Well, those are the sorts of dreams I had. Ugh. I feel sick."

"A witch burned your lands, Captain?"

"That’s right. Who was it again? The Witch of Blazing Heat? I think it was something like that."

As he murmured, Anton looked at Najin and grinned, saying he thought he knew what Najin wanted to ask.

"You lost everything to a witch, so why do you love one? That’s the look on your face."

"Something along those lines."

"It wasn’t like that from the beginning. At first, I resented them. I swore to kill every last witch in the world. Hunting down and slaughtering every witch I came across was how I became a transcendent being, too."

But there was no end to it.

Anton rubbed the spot over his heart as he spoke.

"Hatred, revenge—they’re fire, in the end. They need fuel to burn. But after burning for so long, I ran out of fuel. From then on, I went around killing witches half out of duty. And still, there was no end in sight. Ah, at this rate, a witch will kill me in the end, I thought."

Anton braced his hands on his knees and slowly stood.

"And that was when I met Lapis. She gave me a reason to live when all I did was go around killing witches indiscriminately. She tapped my head as I lay there, collapsed from exhaustion."

["You really make life hard for yourself."]

["Child, I’ve lived like that, and it gets you nowhere, you know? Living that way is no fun. You live like shit, and you die like shit."]

["Ah, I can tell from your eyes."]

["Those are the eyes of someone who won’t listen to a goddamn word. You want to keep burning, don’t you? All right, then..."]

"Then, muttering that, she ripped out my heart."

"... What?"

"Oh, don’t be alarmed. She was remarkably skilled with her hands and knew how to take out a heart without killing its owner. Anyway, she pulled out half my heart and smiled, dangling it in front of my eyes."

["I’ll be your fuel."]

["You said you killed the Witch of Blazing Heat long ago, didn’t you? You need new fuel, right? Then make me your fuel—the one who took your heart. Once you have something to burn, won’t life become bearable enough?"]

"An utterly absurd first meeting."

"A fiery one, though."

"Wasn’t it? She was a fiery woman, I tell you. I could easily spend four hundred years talking about her alone, but I mustn’t. She’ll be waiting at the top of the tower."

Anton took a step forward.

"Let’s keep climbing. We can’t keep a lady waiting, can we? Come on, Oarsman."

Though his exhaustion was plain, Anton hurried along as if there were no time to waste. The two climbed the stairs toward the tower’s summit.

3.

The second level of the Black Spire.

When Najin closed his eyes and opened them again, he was standing on frozen ground. His breath rose in white clouds as he exhaled.

"..."

Najin silently surveyed his surroundings. It was the same place as before, but a few things had changed. In places, the ground had gone beyond being gouged into pits and split open entirely. Fallen stars lay embedded haphazardly all around.

Dozens of constellations had shattered.

Hundreds of stars had crashed into the earth.

Najin turned to look at the center of the frozen ground. Merlin stood there, arms hanging limp, breathing raggedly. Bloodied and battered, she ground her teeth.

The corpses of Constellations filled the ground around her. Dragons with torn wings and severed heads, devils frozen alive, and witches with their hearts ripped out and their eyes gouged out lay scattered about.

Dead, or soon to die.

Every one of those beings strewn about like insects was a formidable enemy Najin could not be certain of defeating even with his life on the line.

GRRRK.

Merlin had survived them. She had faced hundreds of Constellations alone, and not only survived but slaughtered most of them. Above, shattered stars fell endlessly from the sky.

Broken stars came down like rain.

On the frozen ground beneath that downpour of stars, Merlin burst into laughter. Looking up at the sky, she laughed madly. She wept as she laughed, and raged as she wept. The grinding of her teeth rang out with a chilling rasp.

"It’s over."

Now it was all over.

Muttering those words, Merlin sank to the ground. She bowed her head, letting out a hollow laugh. Watching her, Najin began to walk.

TAP.

At the sound of a footstep ringing across the frozen ground, Merlin turned around. She smiled at Najin as he walked toward her.

"You haven’t left yet?"

TAP.

"I’d rather you didn’t come any closer."

TAP.

"Can’t you hear me?"

Ignoring her words, Najin walked all the way up to her. Merlin’s hollow eyes met his platinum-bright gaze.

Meeting her eyes, Najin found himself thinking:

Come to think of it, I think it was like this when we first met, too.