Chapter 34: The Shadow Beneath the Saint (2)
The rooms we’d given her opened onto one of Ygdracia’s high boughs, set apart from the rest, where the trunk of the great tree lost itself in the dark of the leaves. I climbed the walkway of living wood without haste, already turning over the words I would use to approach her.
It was a few steps from her door that I felt it.
A magic laid across the threshold, fine and discreet. It took me a moment to recognize its weave. Sound Barrier.
And there, the first doubt took me.
Sound Barrier derived from the magic of air. And yet the child had no command of air. Not once, in two weeks of lessons, had I seen her call upon it.
Did she raise it herself? Is someone with her? And if she set it alone... what is she guarding herself against, that she would have no one hear?
Elsa’s words came back to me. Curiosity won out over propriety.
I unfolded a domain of anti-magic finer than a grain of sand, and with it pierced a minute portion of the barrier — a point so small the one who had raised it could never detect it. Then, through that breach, I let my consciousness slip inside, by that art of my people which parts the senses and the soul from the body for a time.
And I saw.
The room was a field of ruin.
Not the disorder of a careless young woman, but that of a mind coming apart. The cushions lay torn open, their stuffing strewn across the living floor. Marks streaked the walls where some ill-held magic had bitten into the wood. This was what two weeks away from him had left behind.
One thing alone, in all that chaos, looked new — and cared for above all the rest.
A long bolster, propped upright on the unmade bed, made in the likeness of a young man. I knew those features: the second hero, the one Elsa kept at her side. Kuro.
The floor around it vanished beneath sheets of paper. Dozens of them. Theories, diagrams, tangled circles that I passed my eyes over one by one — and that, for the most part, I did not recognize.
I — who, for ages now, had met nothing in the magical arts that I did not already know.
In the midst of them, traced directly onto the floorboards, an immense circle.
The child woke it with a breath of mana, and within its lines, the floor turned to an image.
A forest without end. And at its heart, a young man seated cross-legged, slowly circulating his mana through his body. Training, no doubt.
I stood speechless.
That circle was among the most complex magics it had ever been given me to see in a whole existence. A work many masters of my own people would never bring to completion. And it served only this: to gaze, from afar, upon the one her heart had chosen.
How many nights had it cost her? Had she so much as closed her eyes, these two weeks?
She stretched out on her stomach before the image, her chin in her hands, her feet beating the air to a lover’s rhythm.
And she was smiling. A true smile, this time — one I had never seen on her.
"Aaaaah... you’re so beautiful, Kuro. So beautiful~"
She went on, her voice dragging with happiness.
"Look at you... you’re growing so fast. No one climbs the way you do, no one~" A little laugh in her throat. "And you were so beautiful against the goblin king. I watched you, you know. I always watch you. Every second, without missing a single one."
She drew the bolster against her, buried her face in it for a moment, breathed in long and deep against the cloth.
"Kyaaah~~~ you were so sexy when you landed on his sword... your hand, the way you turned your blade, your eyes right before you struck — I kept all of it. All of it. I play it back again, and again, and again~"
She rolled onto her back, the cushion clutched to her chest, her legs kicking at the air.
"I could watch you for all eternity. Only you." Her voice dropped a register, lower, softer, a purr. "You’re mine, Kuro. All of it is mine. Your smile, your hands, your voice, that little crease you get between your brows when you’re thinking... no one else has any right to see them. No one. Only me. Forever~"
It was not her words that froze me.
It was understanding what she was doing as she spoke them.
She was still feeding the circle. That magic of dreadful complexity, she held without so much as a thought, her mind turned wholly toward him. Her body stirred, never still. And her mana, all the while, went on drawing in that of the world through Pillar of the World.
All three at once. Without granting any of it the least attention.
This was it — exactly this — the very thing I wore myself out trying to teach her on the terrace. The third threshold. The one I still believed her incapable of reaching: the body in motion, the spells unleashed, Pillar of the World never once let go, all of it held together. Under my darts, at practice, she still crumpled, folded in two.
Here, sighing a boy’s name, she held it effortlessly.
She was not feigning, at training. She was truly incapable of it — save when it was her obsession, and no longer her will, that held the reins.
Then, all at once, her arms fell.
The smile slid from her face. And into her red eyes settled a bottomless dark.
"Aaaah...," she sighed.
She tipped onto her side, reached a hand toward the image, never taking her eyes from him.
"If only they hadn’t torn you away from me."
A red aura, malignant, welled up around her little by little. Nothing left in it of the clear saint’s mana she gave off ordinarily. Its exact opposite — as though, beneath the saint, something had just lifted its head.
"If only Elsa didn’t exist."
Around her, the mana tore. Lightning leapt from it, lacerating the room.
"Elsa." The name fell flat, without the least apparent anger — and that was the worst of it. "She took you. She decided, just like that, that we would be separated. She carried you off, far from me." A brief laugh, cut clean off. "She imagines I’ll accept it."
Her nails raked the floor, tearing long splinters from the living wood.
"I’m going to kill you, Elsa. Kill you. Kill you." The voice rose, fell, rose again, past all rhythm. "I’m going to cut you open slowly. I’ll watch your eyes while I do it, so I can be sure you understand. You’ll never see him again. No one will take him back. No one will take him from me, never again, never—"
"Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill."
She was repeating it now with her forehead against the floor, her body wracked with long shudders, each syllable lashing a fresh bolt against the walls. It was no longer a threat. It had become a litany, something she murmured to herself and fed upon.
She would not stop. She was sinking, there, before my eyes.
A shiver ran through me.
A monster. This child, this so-called saint, is a monster without a heart.
Then a bolt, escaped from all control, struck the bolster made in Kuro’s likeness.
She spun around without even having seen it — feeling it, all the same, in that instant, by I know not what other spell of her own devising.
"No. No, no—"
She threw herself on the cushion, clutched it against her, and all the fury, at a stroke, turned to terror.
"I’m sorry, Kuro, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I wasn’t angry with you, never with you, forgive me, forgive me—"
She rocked it against her chest, faster and faster, as if the image could feel her trembling.
"Don’t leave, I beg you. Don’t leave me alone. Everything I do, it’s for you, you know that? Everything."
Her voice broke, rushing, as though she had waited years to be able to say it at last.
"I smile at these people for you. I play the saint for you — I let them kneel, call me their light, their blessing, when I care nothing for them, for their war, for their whole world. I let myself be taken away. I let myself be parted from you. I do everything I’m told, everything, without flinching — to grow stronger. To protect you. To never slow you down."
She buried her face in the bolster, and what came next came out all in one breath, lower.
"If this world must be saved for you to stay beside me, then I’ll save it. If it must be burned to ash, I’ll burn it to ash. You need only say the word. I’ll do anything. There is only you. There has only ever been you. I belong to you, Kuro, since the very first day."
Then she let the saint’s robe Elsa had given her before leaving slip from her shoulders.
"I’ll give you my body, if you want it. Take me, even as—"
I drew my consciousness back from the room, and closed behind me the minute breach I had opened in the barrier.
It was too much. Far too much.
I remained a long moment motionless on the walkway, catching my breath.
In the space of a few minutes, she had shown me all her faces. Tenderness, hatred, terror, entreaty. Masks, perhaps. Or so many truths within a single soul — which was worse still.
She is far more than a genius. She is a genius among geniuses. But she is as mad as she is gifted.
Power of such a kind — and to govern it, a heart that beat for one being alone.
"This child could be, for our world, a calamity as much as a blessing."
I said it under my breath, to the night. And in that instant, I knew what remained for me to do.
Elsa’s doubts were well founded. I had to write all of it to her.
I went to my study, took up a sheet of paper, and set down what I had witnessed — the powers she hid from all, that nameless circle, and above all the abyss she harbored in the place of a heart. The young noblewoman dead at the palace, too, of whom Elsa had held only a suspicion: I wrote to her that it now had a face.
Then, my pen suspended above the paper, the child’s last words came back to me. And I closed my report on this single line.
Alice is a blessing for humanity. She could become the one to surpass the Demon King himself. But everything will depend on Kuro — for, to the very end, she will only ever do what pleases him.