Chapter 379 |
Tomorrow (3)
When a Constellation is destroyed, its sanctuary collapses. That is simply how things work. A sanctuary is an imaginal space sustained by a Constellation's starlight, and without the being who provided that imagery or the being who supplied that starlight, there is no way a sanctuary can persist.
So when Lancelot and Guinevere were destroyed, the Sanctuary of Oblivion should have collapsed as well. And yet.
The sanctuary remained.
Even now, several days after their deaths, it had not vanished.
"Nothing here," Najin said, completing a full circuit of the sanctuary.
"The tower and the other structures are all still standing, but the people who should be inside are gone. Completely empty."
The Tower of Heroes, the Argo. Londinel. The city that resembled the Sealed City. Not a single person anywhere.
"Entry and exit are also unrestricted," Yuel added, helping Najin survey the area. "I went in and out roughly thirty-two times without any resistance. The Authority of Oblivion appears to have been fully extinguished."
So how was it still holding together?
An abnormal phenomenon by any measure. To understand it, the Empire dispatched the heads of several magic towers along with a number of high-ranking mages. Four tower masters in total arrived at the sanctuary, led by Sipria Gachevska, the Platinum Tower Master, each bringing their finest disciples.
Tower masters were renowned for their outsized egos and uncooperative natures, being the leaders and proprietors of their respective magical schools. Here, however.
"We present ourselves before the cornerstone of the Empire."
Given who stood before them, they bowed without complaint. Even a tower master's pride had its limits when faced with the Dawn Horn, who now shone with nine stars, no, ten.
One of them tilted his head with a puzzled look.
"Forgive me, but was the Dawn Horn not at nine stars? I count ten shining up there..."
"I gained one more."
"Said as casually as if you'd found it on the road. The Gray Tower people are going to scream again."
One tower master let out a helpless laugh as they got to work. Merlin directed them like assistants, an absurd situation in which the heads of great magical schools ran errands for her, yet the faces of those tower masters were lit with smiles the whole time. Attending the legendary Grand Mage was its own honor. Watching even the famously difficult Sipria laugh and tear up at Merlin's every word, the other tower masters could barely contain their shock. That woman, of all people?
A little more time passed.
Najin was standing at the Peak of the Argo, the Tower of Heroes, looking down over the city when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned.
"You're back. Finished faster than I expected."
"Who do you think I am? Something like this is nothing."
Merlin shrugged and settled beside him.
"Well, that's what I'd like to say. But I already had a rough idea of what we'd find. Just needed to confirm it, so it ended sooner than I thought."
"A rough idea about what?"
"This."
She reached inside her coat and held something up.
A platinum-colored drinking cup. The Holy Grail.
The sacred object left behind through the deaths of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the same relic Galahad had once set out to find. Merlin turned it lightly in her hands as she spoke.
"A sacred object made by humanity more than a thousand years ago, before even the era when we were active. A relic left by an ancient nation that the Witch of the Abyss swallowed up."
She added, with a bitter smile.
"The thing that became the spark for the Round Table's fracture."
"Did you find something out?"
"I did. I finally understand why Arthur said finding the Holy Grail would be meaningless."
She flicked the rim of the cup with her finger.
"This thing is essentially an artifact. It operates on the same principles. Simply put, it takes in mana, then expends that mana to produce a specific effect."
The difference, she muttered, lifting the cup.
"Is that instead of mana, it runs on starlight. More bluntly, it runs on human souls. It's a device for drawing out the starlight contained within them."
Human souls.
Najin's brow furrowed.
"Isn't that how dark mages operate?"
"It's similar, but different. Dark mages use souls in an extremely wasteful way. They torture them, corrupt them, stain them black to extract power. The souls are ruined in the process, so they can only be used once."
But, Merlin said.
"The Holy Grail is the opposite. It's efficient to an extreme. It unites every soul around a single purpose. One powerful will grasps all the others and leads them forward."
She pointed down at what lay beneath their feet. They were standing on the Argo, the Tower of Heroes.
"Like this tower."
"..."
"It's a great ship. A ship that sails wherever the captain points. Every sailor rows with all their strength for one shared purpose. The Holy Grail works the same way."
Najin looked at the Holy Grail in Merlin's hands.
"And what is that one purpose?"
"The salvation of humanity."
Salvation, she said.
"The initial purpose programmed into the Holy Grail is the salvation of humanity. It's not hard to guess how it was used. You have a rough idea of what the world looked like a thousand years ago, don't you?"
"I've heard that the Witch of the Abyss swallowed nine-tenths of the world and turned the sky black."
"Right. Destruction was right on the doorstep. But think about it, doesn't that seem strange? The Witch of the Abyss had lived for tens of thousands of years. She must have been active for at minimum several thousand years before that point, and yet..."
Merlin looked up at the sky.
"There's no way a being like that, given thousands of years, would have failed to destroy the world. Thousands of years, really? I alone could have destroyed it several times over in that span."
Even granting that heroes before Arthur had existed, and that their being devoured by the Witch of the Abyss had bought time, the rate was far too slow. Merlin had long suspected some other factor was at work.
"And that suspicion was right."
She pointed at the Holy Grail.
"I don't know how many human souls were originally held inside. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions, probably. Countless nations fell and poured their souls into the Holy Grail as they were destroyed."
"..."
"And the Holy Grail burned through those souls to delay humanity's destruction."
Slowing the rate at which the Witch of the Abyss expanded her territory. Restraining Camlann. That was what the Holy Grail had been built for, and how it had been used.
"Until, at the end, it ran dry."
Thud.
"When Galahad found the Holy Grail, only a small residue remained at the bottom. It was already empty."
An empty Holy Grail. But when Merlin shook it, a faint sloshing came from within.
"Then what about now?"
"It's been refilled."
A platinum-colored liquid filled the cup.
"With the souls of the people Lancelot and Guinevere killed."
2.
Over the past thousand years, Lancelot and Guinevere had collected an enormous number of people. They stripped away memories, erased names from history, and preserved those lives inside this city.
Those preserved lives had been poured into the Holy Grail.
That was what Merlin was saying. She let out a long breath and shook the cup, watching the rippling liquid with heavy eyes.
"They modified it, it seems. This thing is about half a sacred object now. The shell of the Holy Grail appears to be made from the souls of Lancelot and Guinevere themselves."
Now the Holy Grail could be held by someone who was not a perfect human being. The fact that it sat in Merlin's hand was proof enough.
"With those two forming the outer shell, the souls held inside can maintain their original forms intact. They aren't absorbed into the Grail, they're contained within it."
"What's the difference?"
"The moment the Holy Grail activates, they can reappear here. You remember that flag you got in La Mancha? The one you used when taking down the Star of Scorn?"
He remembered it well. The flag that had gathered all the Knights of La Mancha in one place. Najin nodded, and Merlin went on.
"It's something like that. The moment the Holy Grail activates, they'd all come pouring out."
The moment the Holy Grail activated, the city holding the forgotten ones would manifest before the world, together with all its inhabitants. Understanding what that meant, Najin spoke.
"All of them moving with one shared will?"
"That's right. Every last one of them, moving as a single body toward whatever goal the Holy Grail has been set to. With the starlight of millions behind them."
Najin tried to picture it. One nation, one city, heroes, all moving as one, racing toward a single purpose. What that would form was a vast army of millions.
"That's also why this sanctuary is still standing even with Lancelot and Guinevere gone. This place is no longer Guinevere's sanctuary. It's a storage space now, a repository to hold the Holy Grail and preserve the power within it."
That was what Merlin had uncovered after days of studying the Holy Grail. Having explained it all, she turned the cup over in her fingers and her expression darkened.
"Insane, the both of them."
Merlin pressed her lips together.
"Every taboo there is, and they broke all of them? Do you have any idea how deranged it is to forge souls into an object? And they chose to do it willingly? They were out of their minds. Truly."
A soul is by nature designed to fit the shape of a body. Forcing it into the form of an object means the soul will twist, will break, and will suffer in agony for as long as it holds that shape, forever.
Whatever torment religion describes as hellfire would feel lukewarm by comparison. For those who had carried out such slaughter, perhaps it was a fitting punishment.
"..."
Najin and Merlin said nothing for a time, looking out over the emptied City of Forgetting.
"Merlin."
At some point, Najin spoke.
"You said the initial purpose of the Holy Grail was the salvation of humanity."
"I did."
"If that was the initial purpose, it sounds like the purpose has since changed."
"...It has."
Najin could guess what the new purpose was.
He already knew the answer, but asked anyway.
"What is it?"
Merlin answered.
"Tomorrow."
For a better tomorrow.
3.
Whatever the final moments had looked like, whatever became of the Holy Grail, Lancelot and Guinevere had been defeated. Lancelot's eleven stars and Guinevere's ten fell in tandem, and the Gray Tower officially announced the deaths of both Constellations.
The death of Lancelot, a knight who had once belonged to the Round Table, sent shockwaves through the world. But the greater shock came from Guinevere's death.
When the Star of Oblivion fell, her Authority was extinguished, and every record she had erased from history was restored in full. Something like the chaos that had swept the continent when the Carnival King's distortions were undone struck again, perhaps even worse.
"First Pillar of the Empire, Tomorrow Pillar Abraham."
"Half-demon knight, Armerle."
"Champion of the Allied Nations, Trex."
"Founder of the academic city Arcana, Parcel."
Day after day, forgotten heroes and scholars were announced to the world. Information about cities and nations erased from human history was updated constantly. Several historians who had been writing odes to despair submitted their resignations, but the Emperor declined to accept them.
Twenty-one stars had fallen in total.
Najin gained his tenth star. The form of Yuel's constellation changed. The Grand Culmination, Kirchhoff's star, blazed several times brighter than before. And a red-eyed mercenary gained a star of their own, a minor event by the world's reckoning.
From the Gray Tower's perspective, it was anything but minor. The world at large, however, had other things on its mind.
"..."
Stopping briefly in the Empire, Najin looked in silence at his own tower and Gerd's tower. From both hung banners honoring Aldaran Vasaglia, the previous First Horn of the Empire, and the Golden Horn Knights, rippling in the wind.
Their records too had been restored.
Few people remembered heroes from more than 150 years ago. Most who might have would long since have died of old age. But a handful of Transcendents had thought of them, and a certain old man who had watched over the Empire for 150 years was able to reclaim his memories as well.
The expression Gerd wore the moment those memories returned was beyond words. He expressed his joy immediately by hanging a banner from the top of the First Horn tower.
Now the Golden Horn Knights would be written into the Empire's history and passed down to future generations.
After his brief stop in the Empire, Najin moved on.
He arrived at a ruin. Collapsed walls, rubble left exactly as it had fallen. In a place where the only remaining evidence was that a nation had once stood there, Najin found the person he had come to see.
"I thought you might be here."
"Well, look who it is. My dear friend, Sir Najin. Were you looking for me?"
The forgotten nation... no, it was no longer a forgotten nation. Only after 300 years had passed could it finally shed that word. Kirchhoff, the Last Knight of Londinel, was sitting astride a crumbled section of wall.
"Yes. We had a promise to keep, didn't we?"
"A promise?"
Najin reached into his coat and produced a bottle.
A fine wine, the finest Dieta had prepared for the occasion. The kind of vintage even someone from 300 years ago might recognize. Remembering how Dieta had said it was genuinely difficult to track down, Najin smiled.
"Once your vengeance was done, we'd share a drink. That was what you said. So, will you have one?"
"Ha, that's right. I did say that."
Kirchhoff slapped his knee and laughed.
"Gladly. I was just looking for someone to drink with. I've been saving something I wanted to open, but drinking alone felt like a waste."
"Good timing, then. I brought something to go with it as well. Do you like dried meat?"
"There is no better thing to drink with."
The two knights sat on the crumbled wall and raised their cups. When Najin asked what they should drink to, Kirchhoff thought it over for a moment, then grinned.
"To Londinel. And to my dear friend Sir Najin. And..."
Kirchhoff said.
"To a tomorrow better than today."
Clink. Their cups met.
