Epilogue
When they came back from the ground of the seal, the town was in an uproar. The Divine Sword search party had failed and the losses were heavy.
Dylan’s [Contract] had of course reached as far as the lord’s own family, and by good fortune the old lord had outlived it: in his younger days he had been a formidable knight, and he carried a mild [Curse Resistance].
Dylan kept his life, lost an arm, and was left carrying the disgrace of a man who had killed his own companions. How he would live from here, and how he would answer for those deaths, are another story.
Between a son who had passed himself off as a Hero and the noble children who had been dragged down with him, the lord would face a hard judgment. Word from King Leonar III would come in due course. He would be removed from his post, and depending on how it fell, he might lose the title altogether.
Princess Cordelia sent the king an account of the affair together with a letter asking for the lord’s sentence to be lightened. There was nothing further she could do; the rest had to be left to the king’s judgment.
The old lord thanked her from the bottom of his heart, and advised her to leave the territory quickly, before she was caught up in the trouble. She took the advice, and the next morning she left Belagrand with Sieg.
The princess was still not free of her exhaustion, so Sieg put her in the wagon bed to rest and took the reins himself. Liliandiris sat beside him, gazing vaguely out at the country going past.
Neither of them said anything. Both of them felt vaguely awkward about it, and vaguely embarrassed.
Lilis stole a look at Sieg’s profile, and remembered something from a long time ago. Her eyes narrowed with fondness and her mouth came loose at one corner—
There had been a time when Lilis was absorbed in the study of stone giants, and as part of it she had a stone giant build her a labyrinth. There was a practical purpose to it, whether labor could be conditioned into them, but honestly the larger part of it was that she had wanted to build a labyrinth.
The name of the one she raised out on the frontier was—the Labyrinth of Obsidian. An extremely artificial thing, made of nothing but obsidian and Sacred Silver. It was an unusual aesthetic for an Elf, and she had designed it to be the exact opposite of the forest she was born and raised in.
She had gone back after a long absence to make adjustments, and found a family being attacked in the woods.
The parents were already dead. They must have spent their lives protecting the child, because the baby was still alive, sleeping soundly in its basket. A fairly stout-hearted infant, as they went.
“Hoo~. A Human child…”
She could have left it there, but happening to be present was a connection of a sort. She killed the magical beast briskly, picked the baby up, and carried it back to the labyrinth. And so, while she made her adjustments, Lilis found herself living with a baby.
“Ahh~, so loud~.”
Sick of the howling as she was, she looked after it because there was nothing else to be done. She made passable weaning food out of whatever came to hand, and set the two magic dogs she had built out of obsidian and Sacred Silver to mind it. The dogs sniffed the baby over with great curiosity and pushed their noses against it.
Ten days, and the baby had attached itself to her.
With Lilis there it stayed quiet, and the moment she went out of sight it began screaming fit to bring the roof down. The two magic dogs would circle it and look at their mistress with something helpless in their faces.
“Ahh, honestly! I can’t get any work done!”
It was not behavior becoming to the most exalted High Elf, but Lilis strapped the baby to her back with a cord and continued working while she jogged it.
The magic dogs followed at her heels looking worried. She asked them:
“…What? You think I can’t look after a baby?”
The two of them looked at each other, then fixed her with a distinctly doubtful stare. She blew air out through her nose and went back to work, ignoring them.
“…Ahh~.”
“Hey. Don’t touch that!”
The baby had put out a hand toward a control unit. Where she could not work with it on her back she set it down on the floor, and lately it had gotten very active, crawling about and trying to touch everything.
“Shiro, Kuro. Watch it properly!”
The magic dogs looked helpless. They both knew the baby was a weak thing that hurt easily, and their own bodies were hard; if they tried to hold it back by force they would injure it.
Lilis worked that out, stroked the two of them, and let out an enormous sigh.
“All right, all right. I’ll look after it, is that it?”
She looked at the baby and folded her arms.
“Still, it’s hard to call you anything without a name… I picked you up in sector nineteen of the forest, if I remember rightly… that’s it! Right. From now your name is Juuku. Understand? Nice and short, like a Human name.”
The baby tipped its head and said:
“…Juu… ku?”
“That’s it. That’s your name.”
“Juu, kuu~!”
The baby laughed and laughed, and the magic dogs whined along with it, caught up in the noise.
After that, for a while, there was a life shared by Lilis and Juuku and the two magic dogs.
But everything comes to an end.
“Ahh~, finished!”
The adjustments were done and Lilis lay flat on the floor. Juuku came crawling over to her. The magic dogs had learned to judge their strength by then, and helped him along, nudging his backside gently and propping him up.
“Ree~, Ree~.”
Juuku had taken to calling Lilis “Ree.” Lilis, who hated having her name shortened, complained about it (“That’s one syllable!”) and allowed it anyway.
“Ree~!”
Juuku threw himself against her, laughing, and seeing it, the two magic dogs lay down as well, pressed up close.
“Ugh~, you’re a nuisance. And you run hot~.”
Lilis cursed him out loud with a face that did not object in the least.
She had decided to leave this place the following night; there was a great deal she had to be doing.
Juuku fell asleep where he was, so Lilis gave up on sleeping alone and spread a blanket out on the spot.
“Nothing for it~…”
She muttered it as if it were a great nuisance, and that night the two of them and the two dogs slept there together.
The next evening—
With everything settled and the magic dogs packed away into [Infinite Storage], Lilis put Juuku in his basket and took off.
Juuku made a delighted noise. Unbothered even by flight magic; the boy might amount to something one day, Lilis thought.
There was a church in a village nearby. She came down without a sound and set the basket in front of it.
When she reached into the basket, Juuku took hold of her finger and gripped it.
“Ree~!”
“…It isn’t Ree…”
Lilis muttered it under her breath, and then looked at him and spoke.
“Juuku. Living with you was… well. Not bad. You’ve even got me a little interested in Humans.”
“Ah~?”
She poked his cheek and he laughed and laughed.
Then her face set, and she continued in a serious voice.
“If our souls draw toward one another… then you and I will meet again. Until then, keep well.”
She let go and rose into the air, looked down at the basket, and said the last of it.
“Grow up well—Juuku.”
Lilis bit her lip and fled. The crying started up behind her almost at once.
She stopped on the way, over and over, and looked back, over and over, and the crying grew fainter with the distance. When at last she could not hear it at all, she flew away from that place at her highest speed—
“Whoa! Drive it more carefully~!”
The wagon lurched and Lilis complained. Beside her, Sieg answered exactly as expected.
“…Fly, if you don’t like it.”
“Kuku, not a chance~!”
Lilis looked at Sieg’s profile once more.
Sieg had been picked up in that forest, so the story went, and raised in a church as an orphan. The moment she saw the Sacred Silver sword she knew he had been to the Labyrinth of Obsidian, because she was the one who had put that treasure there.
…And he beat the Mithril Golem, of all things.
The age fit too. There was no mistake about it.
Sieg was that baby, Juuku. The priestess had settled on his name from the words the infant spoke, most likely. Which meant Lilis had named him, too.
Looking at Sieg grown, Lilis let her face come open where he would not see it. Then she toppled sideways and laid her head on his knee.
Sieg sighed from somewhere deep, and did not go so far as to move her off.
“…What is this supposed to be?”
“What’s the harm~? It doesn’t cost you anything!”
Lilis narrowed her eyes and reached up toward his face, and said his name with everything she had in it.
“—Sieg—”
“What now?”
“Fufu… it’s a good name.”
A High Elf who lives out an age has no understanding of Human feeling—so people say, at any rate.
But what stood in Liliandiris’s eyes was, past any mistaking, a deep affection.
She had noticed it on the previous journey too. That was exactly why she had stayed with him to the end.
And this time as well, Lilis had met Sieg again and recognized the baby in him.
Their souls must be bound together very tightly. However many times time was begun again, the two of them would surely meet.
“Do you understand me, Lady Liliandiris!? Rushing off like that is simply too much! Have you any idea how worried I was!?”
Princess Cordelia had Lilis seated formally in front of her and was working steadily through a lecture.
The princess had finally got up a little while ago, taken one look at Lilis being carefree about the whole thing, and let everything she had been holding in come out at once.
Lilis started to speak.
“No, look, that was—”
“Hold your tongue!”
The princess cut her off with a face like a demon’s, and even Lilis shrank under the force of it.
Sieg had been intending to press Lilis himself, and was steadily losing the will in the face of Princess Cordelia’s intensity.
The princess continued.
“If you understand, then go and reflect on it by yourself!”
“…I did come back to help you…”
“Reflect!”
Lilis jumped where she sat and got to her feet.
“F-Fine, fine~!”
She fled into the wagon bed and burrowed out of sight.
The princess let out a breath and sat down beside Sieg. They had stopped for a short rest in the shade of the trees, off the highway. Sieg handed her a cup of herb tea, and she took it with a bow and a “Thank you very much.”
Sieg spoke to her, warily.
“She has thrown us around thoroughly this time.”
“She has! Sieg-san, please scold her too!”
The princess agreed instantly and continued at length; it had evidently been sitting badly with her for some while.
Watching her, Sieg said:
“Then shall we part from her about here? She was a passing acquaintance to begin with.”
The princess blinked at that and asked, puzzled:
“Eh? Why?”
Sieg answered, dubious.
“Why? Having her along is nothing but trouble, surely.”
The princess was quiet a while. Then she looked at his face and spoke.
“Is it possible you have not noticed? Sieg-san, when Lady Liliandiris came back, you had the most enormously relieved look on your face.”
“…What?”
Sieg put a hand to his own face before he could stop himself. The princess continued, gently.
“After Lady Liliandiris left, you were in pain the whole time, Sieg-san. But it looked to me as if you were telling yourself over and over that it was for the best.”
Sieg was startled by how closely she had been watching. He had in fact been forcing himself to accept it.
She drank a mouthful of the tea, and after a while she said:
“Lady Liliandiris is a great deal of trouble in all sorts of ways, but she always seems to me to be moving with Sieg-san in mind. She is a High Elf—interfering in a war among Humans, and coming back to help us, must both have taken a very great deal of resolve.”
She looked toward the wagon bed where Lilis was, and continued.
“I think she settled something in herself… I think she made up her mind, and—chose you, Sieg-san.”
Sieg closed his eyes at that.
All sorts of questions came up in him.
Why had Lilis stayed with him to the very end, the last time around?
And why—why did you die shielding me?
She is a High Elf. Sacrificing herself to save a Human is not a thing that happens. She is an Archmage besides; she would have had any number of ways out.
He still remembered her face at that moment, very clearly.
…Why did you shield me?
Why did you die with such a satisfied look on your face?
Thinking did not answer it. Turning it over produced nothing.
Princess Cordelia asked, quietly:
“She chose you, Sieg-san… What will Sieg-san do?”
Sieg let out a long breath.
Fate had come round, Lilis had appeared in front of him again, and she had saved him exactly as she had before. Perhaps you cannot defy fate, even going back through time, even starting the world over.
But rather than put it down to fate, he wanted to choose the future with his own hand, at the least. That was what Sieg thought.
After a while, he answered her.
“She is a creature of whims, she pleases herself, and what she actually wants is completely opaque. But whims and all… I want to understand her. I want to know what she is. So if she wants it—”
He said the rest of it with his mind made up.
“—I am prepared to take her hand.”
“…Sieg-san.”
And there Lilis came flying out of the wagon, with triumph all over her face.
“Well now! So you actually wanted me for a companion all along!? Kukuku! Well, if you are going to go that far—”
Lilis’s face broke into a grin.
“I’ll keep you company for a little while, to pass the time! This sort of thing doesn’t happen often, you know? Be grateful to generous me! Gyahahaha—owww!”
The princess had brought her fist down on Lilis’s head without a pause.
“You! Do not get carried away! Reflect!”
Lilis rubbed her head and bolted from the princess.
“You violent girl~! Nobody will marry you at this rate!”
“What did you say!?”
The two of them started a chase. Watching them run in circles, Sieg sighed.
“Stop right there, Lady Liliandiris!”
At the princess’s shout, she turned around and said:
“—It’s Lilis. Call me Lilis.”
“…Eh…?”
Princess Cordelia stopped where she stood, and her breath caught.
Elves do not like their names shortened. But even an Elf will sometimes permit a nickname—to a companion.
An Elf permits the use of a nickname as the highest possible mark of affection toward a companion. Wide as the world is, the princess was surely the first Human ever permitted to use one to a High Elf.
“…Lady Lilian… diris…”
The princess’s eyes filled and she put a hand over her mouth. Lilis said, entertained:
“I said, it’s Lilis!”
“Lady Lilia—Lady Liliiiiis!”
The princess threw herself at Lilis in tears and locked her arms around her. Lilis shrugged, glanced sideways at Sieg, and spoke with her cheeks slightly colored.
“If you want to call me that as well… I suppose I could allow it.”
Sieg let out a breath and answered.
“…I am honored.”
At which the princess wiped her eyes and spoke up.
“Oh! In that case, please use my nickname as well! Sieg-san, you already have, haven’t you…? You heard it from Emma, my guard, didn’t you?”
“Ah,” Sieg said, before he could help it. Now that she mentioned it, he had used her nickname in the middle of the fight with the demon god. He scratched his head, uncomfortable about it.
Princess Cordelia looked from Lilis to Sieg and back, and said:
“Both of you—please call me Cordy!”
Lilis tipped her head.
“Huh? You’re Juliet, aren’t you? Why Cordy?”
“It is quite all right! Cordy is the name of my soul!”
“What on earth does that mean~!”
The two of them laughed and took each other’s hands, on the best of terms, as if the chase had never happened.
Sieg let out a breath at the sight of it and looked up at the sky. There was something hanging there, a figure that seemed to be a woman with wings.
A spirit, visible only to Heroes. It smiled, delighted, and delivered its message as if singing.
“A COM_PAN_ION HAS_ JOI_NED. FRO_M THIS_ TIME_ LIL_IAN_DIR_IS BEC_OMES THE OBJ_ECT OF THE CUR_SED FEA_ST.”
Sieg bit his lip and nodded to himself.
I know. I know it.
He settled it again in his own mind.
This is what I chose. I won’t let anyone die again. I will protect Cordy and Lilis both, whatever it takes.
And for that I have to become the strongest Hero alive…!
A Hero with his identity hidden, a princess traveling under a false name, and a High Elf keeping what she felt to herself—
The most unlikely party there ever was set out for the next place, and continued with the journey.