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Interlude, A Tale (3)
Not every story in this world can be a comedy.
As many stories exist as there are people to live them, and not all of them are guaranteed a happy ending. Stories with one foot planted in reality, especially so. No matter how hard someone tries, no matter how many trials they endure, no matter how desperately they search for a way through... many end in tragedy. A great many. Most, even.
"Ah..."
And so.
"Please."
The witch begging before Najin right now was nothing more than the protagonist of one such commonplace tragedy.
"Let me see Roselin."
Rena. A witch who loved a human.
Other witches called her many things: madwoman, a fool blinded by love, a witch cursed by her own mother, the shame of witches.
A prisoner locked in the Black Spire for six hundred years.
Unlike Anton and Lapis, the protagonist of a story that could only end in tragedy. She clutched at Najin's ankle. Please, the grip said. Just listen.
He could have shaken her off easily. He didn't. The witch in front of him looked like someone he owed a debt to, someone whose name she kept murmuring over and over.
Najin stopped. He sat down and listened.
Roselin Ascalo. The red-eyed mercenary.
A person known by that name.
A White Rank adventurer in Cambria, the City of Opportunity, and a Sword Seeker ranked among the best. Roselin had one open secret.
「Red eyes.」
「A witch's eyes.」
The color her eyes held was no simple red, but the uncanny, bewitching red belonging to witches. Witch's blood ran through her veins.
Roselin was half-blood, born of a human and a witch.
But that was the extent of what anyone knew. Who her mother was, who her father was, nobody could say. Not because Roselin had never told anyone, but because she herself didn't know.
She was a test subject a witch had created by abducting a human. No, a Homunculus manufactured by the Magic Tower. Perhaps the half-blood offspring of deranged dark mages.
Countless theories existed, but not one could be confirmed. All the same, most people assumed Roselin was an artificially created life. The background she carried made that feel natural.
Roselin's age was, at most, somewhere between forty and fifty. And yet the last human known to have loved a witch was Anton Quixano, and even he had last encountered a witch some four hundred years ago.
The timelines don't match. The eras don't line up.
Therefore, Roselin must be an artificially created being. That assumption gathered weight on its own. Of course, no one could know the truth.
"Roselin is my daughter."
Najin, then. He would be the first.
"My beloved daughter."
The first to learn the truth of her birth.
"Oh, forgive me. I haven't introduced myself yet."
Najin looked at the witch sitting across from him. At first she'd been incoherent, repeating Roselin's name over and over like someone who'd lost her mind. But she'd calmed down.
She wet her throat with the water Najin offered, then spoke.
"My name is Rena. The red-eyed witch, Rena."
"I'm Najin. Free Knight Najin."
"Free Knight? That's a phrase I haven't heard in a long while."
The witch who called herself Rena.
Her wrists, ankles, and the nape of her neck were bound in chains, and a stake had been driven into her spine. Not the kind of stake one could pull free by force.
A stake that had taken root inside her body.
He didn't know exactly what it was. But like a tree sinking roots into earth, the stake had torn through her back and burrowed deep inside her. Because of it, Rena couldn't straighten her spine at all, and sat hunched forward in a crooked posture.
"It's been so long since I've spoken to anyone, I'm not sure where to begin. Would you give me a moment? I'd like to gather my thoughts."
"Take all the time you need. I have plenty of it myself."
"My, how kind."
If the discomfort bothered her, she gave no sign of it. Rena smiled and moved around the room on her hands, searching for something.
A cramped cell. A dark chamber that, before Najin found the entrance, would not have let in a single sliver of light.
Inside that chamber, hundreds of pages of paper lay scattered across the floor. Rena gathered them up one by one and then, as though they were treasure, ran careful fingers over each page.
"Roselin? She's the fruit of my love with Albert. The only treasure he left behind when he went away!"
Albert.
That name, Najin knew.
'Sir Albert the Foolish, Hero of the Alliance.'
A figure who had made a name for himself roughly six hundred years ago. Najin had come across it while reading up on heroic accounts, and it had stuck because the end of Albert's story was so striking.
'A man who turned his back on his homeland, seduced by a witch.'
Albert had been a hero of the Alliance and, in the end, a man remembered for abandoning his duty. Only the fact that his contributions outweighed his failings had kept him from being recorded as a criminal outright. And here sat the witch he had loved.
"She must be a lovely child. I've never seen her face, not once, but she's certain to be lovely. No matter what anyone says, she is the child I gave birth to, the child who resembles me."
Rena was still talking when Merlin, who had been listening, furrowed her brow.
'That's strange.'
'Strange? What do you mean? The timelines not matching?'
'Not that.'
Merlin's expression shifted.
'Fundamentally, witches can't have children with humans. Or rather, having children at all is impossible for their kind.'
Having killed more witches than anyone in the world, she knew them better than anyone, and she said it flatly.
'Witches only resemble humans. They aren't the same thing. They don't reproduce through biological means. Like demons or dragons, they're beings born of chaos.'
Because of that nature, witches lacked the organs needed for reproduction, Merlin explained. They resembled humans on the surface but were fundamentally different in essence.
'And yet she claims to have borne a child?'
Impossible.
Merlin was certain of it, and something in Najin's expression changed. Rena must have read the shift in his eyes. She tilted her head and smiled.
"You think it's strange, don't you?"
Fair enough, she murmured, and breathed out slowly.
"You must be thinking: a witch can't have a child with a human, so how? You're right. A night's pleasure is one thing, but bearing a child from it is something else entirely."
"Then..."
"Even so, I wanted a child. I wanted to leave behind proof that Albert and I had loved each other."
Rena ran her fingers over the papers she cradled in her arms.
"I spent a long time researching it. And eventually I succeeded. The price was being locked in this place, but... that's all right. That child was certainly born into this world."
She smiled.
"Still, I want to see her. What she looks like, the child who might resemble me and might resemble him. I want to know how she's been living. I want even a small taste of what it means to be her mother, but I suppose that's asking too much."
Rena raised her arms. Clank. The chains rang out loud. Looking at herself, unable even to stand with a stake rooted in her spine, Rena smiled bitterly.
"Even so. If you'd be willing..."
She looked at Najin.
"Would you hear my story? And could you carry it out to the world? So that one day my child might hear it."
Only then did Najin understand what she was holding. The papers that filled this room. Written on them was a single story, and at the same time, a letter meant for someone.
"I'll do that."
"Oh, truly, thank you!"
Najin nodded. The moment he agreed, Rena beamed. She grabbed both his hands and pumped them up and down, again and again, then cleared her throat and began to speak.
A story written over six hundred years by a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Rena spoke the first line.
"It begins like this."
To my beloved child, Roselin.
From your mother, Rena.
For a long time, Najin listened to Rena's story.
He stepped away now and then to check on Anton, but aside from those moments he spent most of his time listening.
Throughout it all, Rena laughed and smiled.
The stake rooted inside her body stabbed into her lungs every time she opened her mouth, and she coughed dryly. She never stopped talking.
"And then, and then!"
With arms spread wide, she spoke.
Her story was divided into several chapters. The first was the love between Rena and Albert. The second was how their story ended. The third was about Roselin.
Listening, Najin felt something bitter settle in his chest.
Her story could never be a comedy. It couldn't even be called a happy ending. Despite effort, despite overcoming trial after trial, despite struggling with everything they had, Rena and Albert's story ended in tragedy. Declaring, once and for all, that the only ending a love between witch and human could ever reach was tragedy.
Along with the bitterness came pity.
Not only for the witch before him, but for Anton, still climbing the tower. What Rena was telling him was also the ending Anton would face.
"For a witch to love a human, she has to give up being a witch."
"Why is that?"
"Because otherwise the curse won't lift. Our mother, the Witch of the Abyss, carved several taboos into the souls of witches. So that we could never mix with humans."
To be with a human, then.
"You have to stop being a witch. It's not easy. It's far more than that, actually. It's something close to denying your entire life and being born again. Breaking your own Mystique is exactly that kind of thing."
Rena placed a hand over her heart.
"I couldn't do it. I think I might have been able to, if I'd truly tried. But if I had..."
"You'd die."
"Yes. To deny yourself and deny your own star means dying through erosion. But I had a reason to stay alive. For as long as possible."
Her gaze drifted somewhere far away.
"If I died, that child would never be born. So I, and we, made a choice. Or maybe accepted something. We said: if it can only end in tragedy, then let us speak of what comes next. At the very least, let us leave behind proof that we loved each other."
They found their answer inside the tragedy.
So that even ending in tragedy, it wouldn't be meaningless.
"So I hope this story reaches that child someday. Has she been born yet? Or is she still not here. Is she still wandering in some dream?"
"Well, she does tend to wander in dreams. Drunk more often than not, actually."
"...What?"
Near the end of Rena's story, Najin mentioned a certain mercenary he knew.
"Do you know Roselin?"
"She's done me a kindness or two. Helped me out quite a bit, actually."
Rena's eyes trembled. Her gaze went unsteady, and Najin filled the silence with a story of his own. Everything he knew about Roselin Ascalo.
"So, as I was saying."
At the end of that long exchange.
"As for me."
Najin reached into his Free Knight's coat. The appearance matched the coats worn by knights who had followed Arthur a thousand years ago, but the interior was an entirely different matter.
A thousand years of imperial knowledge and craft had been poured into that single coat. The empire's Magic Tower had packed it with every manner of spell. Naturally, among those was expansion magic.
Items stored inside the expanded space.
Pulling out a set of clothes from within the coat, Najin smiled a little. Clothes that held memories. The outfit he used to wear back in the underground city. More precisely, the clothes he'd worn when working as the organization's executioner.
Right now, though, it was the appearance that mattered, not the old purpose.
Whenever Najin had visited someone as the organization's executioner, he'd always arrived with one of Ivan's letters in hand, dressed in a postman's outfit, introducing himself as one. The letter had to be delivered, after all.
This time was no different.
Off came the Free Knight's coat. On went the postman's cap, the postman's bag slung across one shoulder. Najin held out a hand to Rena.
"Before I became a Free Knight, I used to work as a postman. If you have letters to deliver, give them here."
Rena stared at him like he'd lost his mind. Then she burst out laughing. She gathered up the letters scattered across the room and held them out to Najin.
"Can you deliver these to that child?"
An intermission. The brief gap between one act and the next.
Actors step off the stage, catch their breath, and prepare for what comes next. In those short moments, they set aside their roles and rest.
Najin meant to use this intermission to take on a different role.
A postman delivering letters.
Perhaps the very first role Najin had ever played.
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