Chapter 3 – The Fire God Emperor’s Reminiscence
Cursed child.
Among the elf settlements, it is said that a child born without magic aptitude brings misfortune. Or, to put it exactly: without aptitude, and with a distinctive birthmark on its back besides… that is the condition. The old telling was no mere fairy-story; whatever the truth of it, real force came with it. In plain terms, when a child like that was born, the law held that it be cast away deep in the forest. And cast away, in fact, it was.
Fortunately for us, my little sister Bridget only lacked aptitude; the birthmark she did not have. On account of the aptitude our parents worried at first, but she grew up hale and hearty, and before anyone noticed, the old telling had slipped from every mind.
Born, then, with that slightly unusual trait, Bridget was—more than that—a strange child from the time she could first think for herself. Clever, you might call her. Or unnervingly grown-up for her years…
From about the age when she could move about freely on her own, she took, more and more, to doing curious things. She would whip up a mysterious condiment called mayonnaise, or propose that we soak in hot water rather than merely rinse ourselves. Or she would cook dishes no one had ever seen or heard of, each one delicious…
In the end, all that knowledge brought profit to the elf village and made its people happy. Yet though everyone had delighted at first in her novel notions, before long they took to finding her eerie. What settled it was the sugar she drew out of a radish-like root vegetable, a thing called a beet. The trade in it sent enormous profit rolling in, and the village’s fortunes turned sharply for the better. But… there is no doubt the words cursed child flitted through a corner of every mind.
Then came her twelfth birthday.
Just when we had all forgotten, there surfaced on her back, in the shape of an inverted cross that spelled ill omen—a red birthmark. From that day on she took to winding bandages over her bare skin to hide her back, and at the same time she ceased displaying her curious knowledge.
—Ephthal and Bridget: each a reincarnator out of another world, each hiding it from the other, and to the very end neither ever guessing the truth about the other. That the two of them were drawn together was surely no accident… or so it seems to me now.
Time flowed on—
It was some years after Bridget had married into Ephthal’s household. That day, in the Demon Lord’s castle where the last battle was joined, the four of us drove the killing blow into the Demon Lord with ritual magic. But when I chanced to catch sight of that birthmark on the Demon Lord’s corpse, I could not help being struck dumb.
“Cliff, why did you strike the Demon Lord with fire? Is it still alive?”
Having made certain I had seared the birthmark on its back to nothing, I answered as coolly as I could manage, mustering a smile.
“No, it’s good and dead… Isaac.”
“Well, with the head gone there’s no way it could be alive… now is there. Still, you blew that head clean off. That’s the four of us in concert for you.”
Isaac laughed his ha-ha-ha, but it wasn’t as though we had blown the head off at all. The instant I confirmed the Demon Lord’s birthmark, before any other soul could inspect the corpse, I had hurriedly cut it away and hidden it, nothing more. In other words, at that moment I had spirited the Demon Lord’s head off close by, where no one would notice.
Why would I do such a thing, you ask?
Because I had once heard that at the far end of mastered necromancy lay an art for drawing memories out of the dead. So, having preserved the Demon Lord’s head, I gave myself over to necromancy.
Then several years went by.
A study in a mountain villa so remote I had not told even my disciples where it stood. In its cellar, facing the Demon Lord’s head as it swam back to consciousness, I found myself laughing before I knew it.
“Ha. This is practically a bargain with a devil, isn’t it.”
Those were the first words I spoke, after years had passed, to the half-mummified head of the Demon Lord.
“A bargain with a devil exacts a mortal price; the comparison ill suits this case. Though the pain of knowing… that, perhaps, one might call the price you are to pay. I ask you, wielder of fire. What is it you wish to know so badly that you would break a taboo for it?”
“Among elves, a cursed child. Among dwarves, a calamity. Among humans, a Demon Lord. All of them naming the selfsame thing, I take it… The truth is, my own sister seems to be as you are. What are you, all of you?”
“—Do you know the term the Ten Sages?”
“When I mastered necromancy, I looked into all that might bear on it and arrived at the reincarnators and the Goddess. Of course I know them.”
“Sharp enough. Your eye has fallen in the right place.”
“Those who appeared from nowhere, raised up a magical civilization, and vanished off somewhere. But even I cannot fathom the reason behind what they did.”
“They developed magical civilization so swiftly for the sake of their own research.”
“Research?”
“Magic power, in the end, is a formula that gives fancy its shape in the waking world. The strength of a mind that wills let it be thus, brought to bear upon the outer world. Put another way: by wearing down the strength of the spirit—the soul—one bends the phenomena of nature to one’s hand.”
“Yes, and?”
“In an advanced magical civilization, the people wield advanced magic. Each time magic is cast, the soul-strength that seeps from a person, a little at a time, melts into the air and returns to the star. From the soul-strength brimming in the atmosphere the Ten Sages fashioned themselves an environment ideal for research. But what do you suppose becomes of it, if people go on spending soul-strength without end?”
“Supposing it to be finite… in time it runs dry.”
“Just so. The sum of soul circling this star, its strength ebbing across a great reach of time, sank at last beneath the level they required. So they gave this star up for lost and stole away to some new place.”
At that, my exasperation ran past its limit and a laugh escaped me.
“It’s slash-and-burn farming. Very nearly.”
“Bodies of heaven that bear intelligent life are few. After the burning, green will sprout anew… and so, by way of aftercare, they built a certain system into this star.”
“At a guess, that would be the reincarnators?”
“Precisely so. They established a system to call in innocent souls, born in a world where magic does not exist—souls that by rights would never cycle into this dimension at all.”
“But what makes that aftercare?”
“A soul of high purity, one that has never known the working of magic… he, or she, wields skills and magic here in this land. By that alone, the gathering-ground of cycling souls—the Chamber of Guf—sets to recovering apace. On the order of centuries, of millennia, mind you.”
“…Something has always puzzled me. What of the tie to magic aptitude? Why is it that reincarnators, near enough without exception, have none?”
The moment the words left me, I caught my own slip. It is precisely because a soul has no experience of working magic across its round of rebirths that it is a reincarnator to begin with. Magic aptitude, when you come down to it, is the proof of a proficiency graven into a soul over long, long ages, and a reincarnator can hold no such thing. There are natives to this land, too, who through some flaw were left without aptitude—but such people are wildly exceptional; for a reincarnator, aptitudelessness is foreordained, a different case altogether.
“Then let us come to the heart of it. Turning Demon Lord… the reason a reincarnator loses its reason after death, becomes a living corpse, and is driven by the urge to destroy?”
“First, as a premise, it is not after death. To die the once and be brought back to life, that is the fitter phrase. When the urge to destroy takes hold, the body moves of its own accord, and yet the original mind is present through it all. And the reason for it is simple. Do you know the tale of the big basket and the small basket?”
“No. First I’ve heard of it.”
“In that tale, the one who greedily grasps for the larger basket is made to pay for the greed—and here it runs just the same. The power of the skills granted in the Reincarnation Chamber. It is a thing like magic and yet not magic… and because it and magic aptitude repel one another, only those without aptitude may lay hold of it. And since it bestows every manner of uncanny power, told to choose two, why, it is only human nature to choose the two, is it not?”
“Two skills… In the writings concerning the Goddess’s Chamber there was, indeed, mention of just such a choice.”
“To put it plainly, power beyond one’s station—an overloading with two skills that outstrip the very capacity of the soul. Because they lived as they pleased on that power while alive, in death they are left for the world to do with as it pleases. That is the reasoning of it.”
“…You mean a reincarnator comes into the world already shouldering its sins?”
“Indeed.”
“Ah, that reminds me. There is one among my acquaintance who seems to fit. The man has no magic aptitude, and yet no birthmark has shown on him. What would that mean?”
“A crank who declined to choose the two skills, or else… perhaps it may simply be that this one’s true hour has yet to come.”
Then, as I checked the time on my pocket watch, a click of the tongue escaped me. The Rite of Soul-Return can be worked but once in several centuries, and even then the span it grants is a narrow one. In all honesty there was a great deal still beyond me, but it seemed my time was already spent.
“I’ll ask you straight. What must my sister do to slip free of that fate?”
“Of a means to save her there is none. She will rise again after death, and the fifty-year cycle of the destroying urge will come to her without fail. The most that can be done is to tell her the truth this instant and have her steel herself… Like me, she will not stop until she has met her second death.”
“…Is it truly past all hope?”
“It is a matter set fast by the workings of the system. Through destruction the strength of an innocent soul is spent, and the sum of soul-strength coursing through the cycle is swelled. A sacrifice, wrung after death for all that can be wrung from it—that is the true face of what men name the Demon Lord, the calamity, and the cursed child.”
“Thank you for telling me. But this, I will not be passing to my sister. It is enough that I alone should know a thing like this.”
“…Hm? What do you mean by that?”
“Bridget… so long as she can stay happy knowing nothing, thinking nothing, living out her present at Ephthal’s side… that is all I ask.”
And time flowed on further still—.
Just as the Demon Lord had foretold, Bridget, having died the once, rose again. What startled me was that her form had grown young, into that of a girl in her early teens, and from then on she ceased to age. Concluding it must be some measure to let her carry on her destroying for a long span of years, I too turned necromancy upon my own body and made it deathless.
So, fifty years on.
The sight that met me for the first time then, of scarlet flowers of slaughter blooming in wild profusion, is with me vividly in my heart even now. And then Bridget, having come to know it all and fallen into despair, made her wish. I worked upon her brain by sorcery, wiped away her every memory, and brought her mental age to rest, fixed, at a stage terribly young, around five years old. If her sense of right and wrong were left a blur, it would lend her heart even a little steadiness… such was my reckoning.
After that—
I traveled the world together with a Bridget who no longer knew me even for her brother. Her heart and body never growing, however the years wore on, she carried on her killing at intervals, innocent as ever. More than once I set myself to lay a hand on Bridget… on my own sister.
But I could not do it.
Before I knew it, I gave up on all of it, and let my heart freeze over. And yet, however deep in ice I wrapped that heart, at its very core there burned, always, a red flame.
It was, come what may—
—my fierce resolve to protect Bridget.
In truth, her very being is an evil to the world; she stands as the world’s enemy. But if the whole of the world would wound Bridget, then a world like that, I will smash to pieces with my own hands. That conclusion, from the moment I heard the Demon Lord out, I have held unshaken in my heart all this while.
And yet, four hundred years have gone by since then. And now, in this moment… here, without a doubt, stands a self grown just a little tired.