Wolf & Parchment, Volume 2

by Isuna Hasekura

  Everything he said made perfect sense. Col had to acknowledge that.

  However, Myuri was dying right by his side, and there was still time to save her.

  He wanted to convince Autumn of that with everything he had, but the words did not come out of his mouth because he knew nothing would happen. There was nothing here—only prayer.

  Autumn looked away quietly. He may have imagined the uncomfortable look in his eyes.

  “Pray. I shall pray for you as well.”

  Autumn turned his back to Col, gripping the Black-Mother as he spoke.

  Reeling once he realized the holy man had rejected his request, Col returned to Myuri’s side and crumpled to the ground. The always energetic and mischievous girl looked like a princess who would sleep for a hundred years.

  There was nothing left to cry, laugh, or get angry about. Even though he had done something so terrible to her, she still jumped into the sea after him and likely without any hesitation. He clearly remembered her smile and how warm she felt in the water.

  At this rate, he was powerless to do anything but watch as her life flickered out.

  He had read much of the scripture. He had talked to many who pursued theology. Every morning and every night, he prayed with all his might. And this was what he would end up reaping?

  It was painful to acknowledge that all he had done was a mistake.

  But it was nothing compared to losing Myuri.

  He could voice his complaints to God later. When he thought about burning something, he realized he may be able to burn his clothes. He quickly removed some, wrung out the water, and held them by the fire. In his irritation, he held them as closely to the fire as he could, but it seemed like the flames might go out instead.

  Though he knew that he might be able to light his clothes on fire if he dried them, he also could see the driftwood burning up and going out before then. And with it, Myuri’s life.

  He desperately held back the urge to yell in despair and rubbed her hands and cheeks and any other part of her body as hard as he could.

  It all felt in vain, as his hands that were doing the rubbing were also cold, but he had to try.

  He wanted her to wake up and look at him. He wanted her to say, Why are you making that face, Brother?

  It was now, of all times, that he needed God’s help. But like Myuri said, he would not suddenly appear from the scripture to help him. The Black-Mother, too—he screamed in his heart, asking why would she do such a cruel thing? They should have just drowned together. An ending like this was no miracle.

  The Black-Mother was an ancient, nonhuman spirit, and her figures were nothing but worthless material that was found with peat and coal. They were simply worshipping an imitation.

  At that moment, he recalled a certain memory.

  “…Worth…less…?”

  He rewound the events in his head back to Atiph. He recalled what Hyland had said in the tavern where the fishermen gathered. The Black-Mother was made of jet. It was similar in properties to amber, and by scraping it, one could produce sand and wool, and then? And then what?

  “There is a way.” he murmured and gulped.

  Blood began to rush throughout his body with the loud thumping of his heart, and his head grew hot.

  Of course, there were things he could burn here.

  He could burn the Black-Mother figures.

  Autumn’s uncomfortable gaze had likely been because he chose not to mention it. Jet was precious, found in the dwindling coal mines, and it was something the islanders clung to and always kept on their persons.

  The fisherman who had let them borrow his boat at the port said they would eventually buy it from other countries, but there was no way the islanders had enough money.

  But people’s lives should be more precious. Autumn, a monk, should understand.

  Col stood and breathed.

  This time, he was not dizzy.

  “Lord Autumn.”

  He called out to him, but Autumn did not turn around, nor did his hands stop.

  “May I have a figure of the Black-Mother?”

  Autumn finally turned around to look at him.

  “Will you be praying?”

  His question implied that he saw right through him.

  “The only thing here to burn is faith.”

  Autumn’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed. It was the expression of someone who did not want to accept a harsh reality.

  “No.”

  His answer was curt, and Col could see him grip the chisel even tighter in his right hand.

  “There are only so many of these figures. I cannot give one to someone it may not help. Give up.”

  He turned around.

  “I have said the same to many.”

  There was a leaden weight to Autumn’s words that overwhelmed him. Col had seen with his own eyes exactly what he carried in those words. That was how this region developed. It was the prayers to the Black-Mother that somehow preserved this precarious balance.

  It was a mistake to set fire to this Black-Mother for the sake of one person who might not even be saved. The scale did not balance out. It was the typical question of the devil, often brought forth by priests who preached philanthropy.

  To leave one person to die and save a hundred—what would you do?

  Autumn did not look away. He was prepared for hatred, but he had no intentions of bending the rules. It was a silent statement of responsibility for everything he had done in his past and that he was here now, after choosing to save a hundred people.

  Col’s instinct told him there was no chance of convincing him.

  He turned around, like he was running away.

  They had certainly died once in that moment. And Myuri had jumped into the water, prepared for that. And then, in a miracle, they had washed up at the monastery. There was no deceit in what Autumn had said. Everyone will die, and one should celebrate every moment a life is extended, giving thanks to God.

  His logic was unassailable. There was not enough room for even an ant to slip through.

  But whether Col could accept that or not was a different story.

  He could not leave Myuri to die. He could not. That was the only impossibility.

  Since coming to this island, it was experience after experience that could have lost him her trust. He had seen how hollow he was inside. But there was just one thing, one thing he vowed in the past that he would never, ever compromise on.

  That was—

  “I will not leave Myuri alone.”

  The one soul who truly believed all the words of this ignorant man, who wished to one day become a holy man in the hopes of saving others, was Myuri.

  He did not know if his prayers would reach God, but Myuri’s prayers reached him. Whether they came true or not depended on his actions. He was the object of her faith.

  If he could not answer her prayers, then how could he pray in the same fashion to God?

  The light from the fire illuminated her profile, as the light of her life dwindled.

  Such a straight face did not suit her. She was supposed to be expressive, even in her sleep.

  He would not leave her. Even if she had to die in order for a hundred to survive, he would choose to stay by her side.

  He had promised that he would always be her friend.

  “I, too, do not mind if you hate me.”

  Col himself was not particularly great-looking, but Autumn was much too thin. He likely was not eating properly and only holed himself up in his monastery to work.

  But he gripped a chisel in his hand. A dull, worn-out chisel that only just managed to whittle the jet. It was something that looked like it could break skin if he put all his strength into it.

  Col thought about how if it was a sharp sword instead, the fight would be over in an instant.

  They both knew this would not end safely for either, that it would become a terrifying thing.

  But did he care?

  There was never any mercy w
ith God.

  “Myuri.”

  He murmured her name the moment Autumn was about to attack him.

  “Humans are all the same,” Autumn said.

  “They forget their debts and become possessed by self-interest.”

  The reason he couldn’t move his legs was not because the conversation dulled his determination. He froze due to something else entirely.

  As Autumn stared at him, his beard and hair that reached his stomach puffed outward, as though he had taken a deep breath. Col thought for a moment it might be an illusion, but it was not. Autumn’s body was growing larger.

  “It is not enough to demonstrate miracles. Only through punishment do humans recall their faith. The one who saved them, as well as that which must not be forgotten; I will engrave it all into this land.”

  Though he remained sitting, Col had to look up to see him. Like some sort of joke, Autumn looked down at him in his cramped position.

  Autumn was not human.

  Col then realized how shallow he had been. Myuri had commented that he did not smell like an animal.

  What had been the god of his own hometown?

  “Hate me. I will be conscious of sin, just as you think of cows and pigs.”

  His blackened hand reached out to Col to crush him.

  He could not run; even if he did, he would be leaving Myuri behind.

  Oh God!

  At that moment, something slid by him.

  A silver mass flew at Autumn, its tail streaming out behind it.

  “A beast?! Why here?!”

  Myuri had turned into a wolf and flew at Autumn.

  Autumn gave a yell and his posture crumpled, his floating backside falling to the floor. The ceiling cracked, and the figures standing by the wall scattered across the floor.

  But as he flailed his arms about, desperately trying to chase Myuri away, it was not long before he noticed.

  There was no silver wolf to be seen.

  After a moment of uneasy silence, Col felt the blood drain from his face and he turned around.

  Myuri lay there quietly.

  He thought he saw the slightest smile at the corner of her mouth.

  “Myuri! Myuri!”

  That may have been her spirit.

  He touched her cheek and her neck, but she was still terribly cold. He did not want to believe it, pulling the body so limp it seemed it would fall to pieces into his arms. He drew his ear near her mouth, finding that she was still only barely breathing.

  But she did not have long left. He knew that she had squeezed out the last of her strength to create a miracle.

  He peeled off the blanket and embraced her. He could only pray that, as he had in the sea, the last thing she would feel was his warmth. He wished he could tell her—I am here. As you were by my side in my final moments, I, too, will be your friend until the very end.

  He immediately felt a presence behind him, but he did not turn around. There was no time to do even that.

  If Autumn were to kill him, he wished he did it quickly. It no longer mattered if he lived or not.

  Rather, he wished he could curse his powerless self for still being alive.

  “Use it.”

  With a high-pitched thunk, clunk, a mass of black rolled to his side. There were stonelike pieces, unfinished pieces, and spectacular decorative pieces.

  He turned around and Autumn, still ballooned up, stared at the girl in his arms.

  His expression was pained, as though he had questions to ask.

  Perhaps it was something among nonhumans. He did not know what it was, but now was not the time for that.

  Col immediately gathered the jet, threw it against the wall, and fed the pieces to the fire.

  After a few moments, the fire shrank. It was not something that caught right away.

  He wanted to cry in frustration, but a voice hung over him.

  “You need to make sure the wood does not collapse.”

  Without a moment to think, there was the sound of a deep inhale behind him. He immediately reached out, grabbed a part of the driftwood that had not lit yet, then suppressed the embers.

  An instant later, a large gust blew through, like the kind he would feel standing on the deck of a ship.

  It fanned the fire, and a piece of jet suddenly ignited.

  “Here comes the smoke,” Autumn said and put his absurdly large hand to the window.

  He altered the stone wall like it was clay and widened the window, and all the black smoke rushed out of the opening at once.

  He retreated to the other room for a moment and returned shortly. His hand extended over Col’s head, and after crushing the jet in his hands over the fire, he sighed again.

  The small fire instantly burst into flames. It was so hot it felt like it would burn his skin.

  “I…”

  He heard Autumn’s voice and the soft thud as he sat down.

  “I did not know what to do.”

  Col turned around, and though the size of Autumn’s body had not changed, he looked withered.

  He was hunched over, at a loss, staring at the figures of the Holy Mother scattered on the floor.

  “Humans multiply. They proliferate without thinking. They spread, knowing it will ruin them. I never knew why this threw away its life for the sake of such humans.”

  He touched the Black-Mother figure with his fingertip, as though stroking it.

  “…You’re…”

  Col gulped.

  “You’re not human. Just like the Mother.”

  Autumn’s eyes slowly turned toward him, and they looked somewhat resigned. His oddly blackened eyes were clearly not human, but the way they expressed his wish to tell someone the truth was very human.

  “…Long ago, I was worshipped as the dragon of the seas.”

  He hunched over further, like a fallen king.

  “Humans called it a whale.”

  A giant body big enough to stop the flow of lava, the miracle on the boat that Yosef told them about. The story of a wave putting out the fire on a burning boat. And then, the puzzlingly prosperous fishing harvest.

  Everything came together neatly with a single thread.

  It was understandable that Myuri could not sniff out his true form. It was her first time at sea after all.

  “I can no longer remember if this was a blood relative or a companion. It must have had a name, but I cannot recall. It was so long ago that it left to travel. I did not mind at first, but I suddenly yearned for it and went to search. When I finally found it, it had already become cinders.”

  The fishing became prosperous after the Mother volunteered her body and saved the town because a whale, who naturally had to eat quite a bit, was suddenly gone. What the fishermen had said was true. A dragon did once live at the bottom of the sea.

  “I could not understand. Humans are foolish creatures. Leave them alone and they destroy themselves in an instant. But I knew there must have been a reason why it gave its life to save them.”

  “So you decided to maintain the islands for that?”

  Autumn was about to nod, but he stopped.

  “No. Without inhabitants on the islands, people would forget. So I decided to raise the humans here, so that the memory passes down from one to the next. So they do not forget.”

  Raise humans.

  That was a difficult phrase to swallow, but Autumn continued.

  “The sea is vast and deep. I could have drifted in the waters for eternity, because I thought this was somewhere out there. I thought I would have been able to see it anytime.”

  Autumn’s solitude was here.

  “Were I the only one to remember, then one day, I might mistake it for a dream. I could think that I truly had been alone from the beginning. How terrifying the thought is. The oceans are bottomless. It is truly silent.”

  Col could not say he understood the pain of those who lived for time eternal, but he had watched them as they suffered through it.

  “It seems, however
, that what I truly wished for was something else. Now I realize that.”

  Autumn looked at Col’s arms.

  “Even on the brink of death, that wolf showed herself to save you. Then…Then why, at the time of its death, did this not appear before me?”

  The lone monk held the figure of the Black-Mother in his hand, on the brink of tears.

  “I knew that, in order to sustain this island, I had to prolong the people’s suffering. But it was not so that they would hand down its name. Had that been all, there must have been a different way. In the end, I continued to watch the people suffer because…”

  Autumn took an extended sigh.

  “It was nothing more than a fit of jealousy. I was jealous because I knew that when this died, it had not been thinking about me but the people of the island…”

  That was not something Col could laugh about, nor could he blame him for.

  Autumn may not have found another companion besides the Black-Mother in the endlessly vast, deep sea. Col could not say he completely understood the extent of his loneliness.

  But he did know Myuri, who had stared powerlessly at the world map. He had borne witness to the helplessness of those who knew they had no place in the world, despite how vast it was.

  Autumn’s wish of praying to his only friend was a rather modest one.

  And Col was learning that there were many ways to look at things.

  “…Even if it was jealousy, it is fact that you have supported these islands. There are those you have saved, and there are many who thank you.”

  For the first time, Autumn smiled.

  “I was not expecting words of comfort. A true fool.”

  He seemed astonished.

  “But before anything else, I must say this.”

  Still holding Myuri, Col looked at Autumn.

  “Thank you so much for saving us.”

  It was not a coincidence that they had washed up here. Autumn had saved them. Every time in the past people threw their Black-Mother figures into the sea when they encountered trouble on the waters, he followed the scent and rushed to save them.

  Col could not imagine it was all simply out of jealousy, as he claimed.

  In his own mind, he thought that Autumn was doing all he could to protect the land his friend once saved.

  “It was only a whim.” Autumn spoke quietly, a bitter smile on his face as though holding back a cough.