About a fortnight since the day we arrived in Pirberg and entered the Talios Order.
Long if you called it long and short if you called it short, that stretch of time had been the finest moment of Formel's life.
- GRRRRRK
Fragments of Formel's emotions reached me as he yawned languidly.
He did not want to leave this place that treated him so lavishly.
'......What a strange feeling.'
And yet he would spring to his feet at a single word from me.
Regardless of Formel's will, his emotions, his thoughts, on the strength of the one fact that I had ordered it.
That was what it meant to dominate something.
I dismiss every will that something holds and inject my own.
Do I truly have any right to receive that unconditional love?
'I've grown full of idle thoughts.'
Since resuming the pursuit of the Luxeon Cult, I had been feeling for myself how the emotions that had thinned in me were growing varied again.
Even a few years ago I would not have been conscious of such trivial things.
"Brother."
A voice came through the sound of rain pattering down.
It was Drik, approaching me.
"It is a shame, you leaving like this."
"Aren't partings always sudden?"
He had come running straight from swinging a sword on the drill ground.
Though I had said there was no need to inform anyone, Camilla had gone and given Drik word of it after all.
"Well, it is just like you, Brother."
Drik laughed lightly.
He wore everyday clothes bearing the emblem of the Talios Order.
In a mere fortnight, the sight of it had come to look quite natural on him.
"I won't be able to watch your trial."
"It is fine. Do not trouble yourself over such a thing."
"I've given the chapter master word. You won't be thrown out for failing the trial."
"If I were thrown out I would miss the lamb ribs here, but I have no intention of failing in the first place."
In the cold rain, Formel gave a low cry.
I stroked Formel's jaw and tightened the saddle and reins firmly.
Drik, watching, had taken on a somewhat troubled expression.
"Brother."
"What is it?"
"Thank you."
It was an expression I couldn't place, whether smiling or crying.
"You said you would let me live a different life, that you would cut my misfortune away. Thank you for saying that to me back then."
"......I thought you'd be thanking me for bringing you here."
"Of course I am grateful for that as well. Thanks to you I am living happily. But you know, once I settled in, I understood something. I was happy before that. From the moment you said those words to me, I was already living a different life."
Somehow I thought that his ambiguous expression was closer to a smiling face.
"Brother, you and Kallen gave me a second life. The back alleys were where I survived as a human, but the place that let me live as a person was at your side."
Just as I exerted influence over Formel's will, Drik had been influenced by me.
It was not a visible power like the Power of Domination, and yet he had plainly been influenced by me and was gradually becoming a different person.
"Thank you. Brother, I wanted to be sure to tell you this. Thank you for changing my life."
To change someone's life.
To shake someone's fate entirely.
It means my own fate is shaken just as much.
"Is that so?"
I had changed.
I grieved, I rejoiced, and I longed.
Can I declare that Drik had no part in that change?
"In that case, I should say thank you as well."
For entrusting your fate to mine.
For leaning on me, and for letting me lean on you.
For that, I was grateful.
Drik only stood there without a word.
I did not speak the rest aloud.
A little more time passed, and at last Kallen came running with all the baggage gathered, holding a fold of his clothes over his head.
"Sir knight! Take this."
"What's this?"
"The Order gave it so we wouldn't get rained on."
What Kallen held was a heavy robe.
The Order's emblem was not drawn on it.
"No need."
Instead of taking the robe, I pulled up the cape I was already wearing.
Being an article meant to keep off rain to begin with, it had been waterproofed.
Grumbling, Kallen tied the spare robe in among the baggage.
He himself was wearing one as well.
"So all that's left is to leave?"
"Have you finished your preparations?"
"I'm done. Are you not packing anything of your own, sir knight?"
"That's right."
I had come empty-handed, so leaving empty-handed was only natural.
I climbed into Formel's saddle, then reached down and pulled Kallen up.
"Did you say your goodbyes?"
"Briefly. Brother Drik was awfully sorry about it."
Thanks to his particular knack with people, Kallen had grown quite close with Drik.
It was mostly a matter of Kallen approaching and Drik pushing him away, but today at least they seemed to have talked a good while.
He might inwardly have been glad it was raining.
For it hid the few tears he had let slip.
"Hold on tight."
"Yes."
This time Kallen did not question it.
Instead he simply sat behind the saddle and gripped my waist hard.
'Formel.'
At my call, Formel rose from where he lay.
In the air that had settled cold, Formel's hot breath made white steam.
'Let's get out of this city.'
Formel kicked off the ground.
Along with a ponderous sound that rang through my whole body, a sharp rain-wind beat against my helm.
Clearing the outer ward's wall in a single bound, Formel landed on a rooftop and began running along it.
The whole of Pirberg, wrapped in water-mist, swept past over my shoulder like wind.
In that motionless scenery, only a giant monstrous beast cut across the gray city.
It was a sight that would have sent anyone who glimpsed it screaming toward the guard corps, but there was no chance of them pursuing us.
Reaching the wall, Formel hurled himself toward the gate.
Pirberg's gate, which had been firmly shut, now stood wide open as of today, showing off its grandeur once more.
"———!"
The guards shouted something, but Formel did not stop.
In one breath we passed them, men who could not have dared to bar the way.
- KRAAAAA!
It was his first run in a fortnight.
Pleased, perhaps, by the grassland underfoot after so long, Formel howled loud enough to make the air tremble.
It was as though he were asking me where we should go.
'Northeast. Toward where it grows colder.'
Erbern. Oscalt.
To the final curtain of a long story.
***
"Sir knight, look over there."
Kallen suddenly stretched out a hand.
Where his finger pointed, a vast cloud lay across the horizon.
"Doesn't it look like a mountain?"
"That's quite a tall mountain."
"I've never in my life seen a cloud that low and that big."
The green grassland and the still bluer sky, and the white cloud draped over the horizon that divided them.
The way it stood there as though ignoring the light wind lodged itself in my sight.
"Doesn't it feel like a dream?"
"What does?"
"All of it. The vivid grassland and clouds, the smell of grass carried on the cool air, Formel with his red eyes shining."
A gentle breeze blew.
As the wind swept low, the grassland rippled like silk.
"I have never experienced anything like this in my life."
Kallen closed his eyes and opened them again, as though singing.
He looked as though he were trying to cram the surreal sight into his head.
"The west of the Empire is famous for its fine weather. Weren't you from the west?"
"I've seen scenery like this plenty of times. But this is a first."
Formel, lying down, gave a small cry.
Kallen's words came layered over Formel's cry.
"This, this soft, welling-up feeling I can't explain."
A soft, welling-up feeling.
I looked at the rippling grassland, at the cloud as high as a mountain, and at the flushed Kallen.
Somehow, I felt I understood what he meant.
"Is that so."
"I'm glad. That I came with you, sir knight."
"Let's get moving again soon."
Failing to account for a companion's stamina was a chronic ailment of the Undying.
Two straight days of running had left us stranded in the end.
Formel had gone slack and sunk down, while Kallen, who had eaten and slept in the saddle, was in comparatively better shape.
Love without recompense, which at a single order would not stop until it collapsed.
There was no helping it that my mood turned troubled.
We set off again from the field.
As Formel ran at a pace neither fast nor slow, a moderate wind burrowed in through the gaps of my helm.
We crossed the plains and forded a small river.
We went over hills and ran across a vast plateau.
The blue gradually drained from the sky until it was stained purple.
Only then did we reach the edge of a forest.
"A primeval forest?"
"The trees are ridiculously huge."
"They must be several centuries old at least."
Kallen fumbled something out from inside his robes.
It was a map of the surrounding region he had received from the Order.
"It says if we turn right here, we'll come to a road. Shall we go that way?"
Four days since leaving Pirberg; we had rested one, so we had run three straight.
Considering Formel's speed, incomparable to a horse's, that put us halfway.
"On the road, we'd likely be seen by others. Besides, the road itself goes around the primeval forest. If we cut through this forest, we should arrive within a day."
"Won't Formel's size slow us down?"
"The ancient trees of the primeval forest are all one species. That must mean only this tree can live here. Since there's no variety of species, the inside of the forest won't be that dense."
We decided to cut across the primeval forest.
With every hour pressing, we had to weigh every option available.
When I scratched the back of Formel's spines, he began slowly moving his legs.
"......It's eerie."
The purple light left after dusk met the dim primeval forest and gave rise to a grim air.
Kallen shivered and adjusted his robe.
"It's certainly a little strange. We'll camp here tonight."
The ancient trees inside the primeval forest were all of the same species, just as at its edge.
The gaps between the trees were as wide as their broad trunks, so there was no mishap of Formel being unable to move.
We settled beneath a tree thicker in width than Formel himself.
We spread out blankets and were lighting a campfire with flint and steel.
"Sir knight, by the way."
"What is it?"
Kallen set down the flint in his hand and turned his head, sweeping his eyes over the surroundings.
"Isn't it somehow dark?"
"The sun's set, hasn't it?"
"No, I mean isn't it too dark even accounting for that? For it to go this pitch-black, at least another hour or two should have to pass."
As Kallen said, the interior of the primeval forest was considerably dim.
I had thought it was because of the ancient trees' high, enormous leaves, and had not made much of it.
"The weather must have turned cold."
"No, well...... I am lighting the fire now, but."
Kallen, who had taken my words in an odd direction, struck flint and steel over a pile of fallen leaves.
Small sparks leapt with a CLICK, CLICK.
Like a black dot on white paper, it was the only light with color in the black forest.
As Kallen's hand moved in steady rhythm, more and more sparks came, and then one of them fell onto the pile of leaves.
"Wait!"
"Yes?"
———FWOOSH
At the same moment as my shout, a crimson light bloomed.
A light red enough to be ominous, and bright.
"What is it?"
"......."
It might be a needless worry.
But the present situation lined up far too well with a certain past to dismiss it as mere coincidence.
With the days when I rode Plibentorinus I.
From somewhere came the cry of a beast.
No, it was a sound closer to a monster's than a beast's.
"Kallen."
"Yes?"
"Put out the fire."
The monsters that tear apart and devour the living: ghouls.
"Right now."