Intermission — Scarlet for the Bonfire

Ned had told us that we’d arrive in Barcia in around two days. That should make it tomorrow, then.

Dusk had approached while Nito was doing her usual painting, so we’d decided to camp by a small brook nearby. I picked out the smallish twigs from the wood we’d gathered and used a knife to shave them down into chips. I added thin twigs on top of the pile of shavings, followed by fallen leaves and completely dry chunks of wood, before putting a lit match to it all. Getting a fire going had a trick to it, but I was more than used to the process by now. I moved the fire to a makeshift kiln made of a circle of rocks. That would be my kitchen for the night.

I laid out the groundsheet and sat down cross-legged before opening a long, thin cloth bag. Inside was a blow poke, separated into two pieces. There was a screw thread in the middle which I used to join them back together. The handle was smooth and adhered slightly to my hand—a fascinating sensation that I could have enjoyed all night. This was the blow poke Ned had given me.

“All that grinning is creeping me out, Keisuke,” Nito said, breaking the silence.

She was crouching in front of me and giving me a steady glare. Whoops, guess my feelings showed on my face. Clearing my throat with an “ahem” to distract from the awkwardness, I moved the tip into the bonfire. Blowing air through it made the flames flare up.

The veil of night was slowly drawing in over our surroundings. Pretty soon this bonfire would be finished. We needed to get some more firewood ready before that happened. I put the blow poke to the side and pulled a log of driftwood closer instead. I’d found it on the riverbank, so it had probably either rotted away from a big branch or was just a much thinner one that had broken off entirely. The wood had dried completely, making it the best thing for a bonfire.

I pulled a hatchet from my backpack. I put on leather gloves and removed the covering over the blade. Getting up on my knees, I grabbed the haft with both hands and took several practice swings. It’ll probably split right in two if I hit a crack, I thought. Nito steadily watched the tip of the axe as it moved through my swings. The utter seriousness on her face made me feel nervous.

This is weird. Why does it feel like I’m not allowed to mess up?

I carefully checked over the path the blade would take, took a deep breath, and then brought the blade down in a single motion. The blade bit into the wood right where I’d aimed and pretty much split the entire log in two; only a small portion on the front had held together.

“Whoa...”

Nito’s impressed gasp filled me with a simultaneous rush of relief and accomplishment. Well, it was only splitting some wood, but men have a habit of getting too into things when there’s a girl around. I whacked the driftwood against the ground several times until it fully split apart. Laying it back down, I hefted the hatchet up and swung it once again—hit, break. I did the same thing over and over until the log became a bundle of firewood.

As I pulled the spice case out of the wooden box, I started thinking about what to cook for dinner. The meat was probably getting toward being unusable now. It’d be best to finish it off tonight. We’d eaten nothing but meat for the past few days, and the thought of doing so yet again gave me pause. Despite how much I’d longed for it while I’d been stuck with canned food, it was wearing on me pretty quickly. My stomach is apparently fussier than I gave it credit for, I thought sarcastically.

I was pondering using the cans to pull something together when I had a sudden thought. I pulled a notebook from my bag.

“Nito, would you do me a favor?” I asked, offering it to her.

She soon understood.

“You want me to find a recipe?”

“Right. I’m stumped.”

The notebook was the handwritten recipe book Vandyke had entrusted me with. All the recipes were in this world’s writing, so obviously I couldn’t read it.

“Something with meat, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

She flipped through the book looking at recipes. Every so often, she suggested one and read out the salient points. I passed on a lot of them because we didn’t have the ingredients, or the tools, or they were too difficult for me. Eventually, she found something that would work and I set about cooking.

“I’m sorry. You’re always the one cooking,” Nito mumbled a few minutes later as I was cutting up the canned ingredients.

“What brought this on?”

“You do basically everything: cooking, driving, even lighting fires and gathering water. It feels like I’m not pulling my weight.”

I was about to laugh it off and tease her for being overly formal until I looked at her. There was a serious look in her eyes that made me stifle my laughter. I at least knew how to tell when you could or couldn’t brush something off with a joke.

“Well, it’s because you’re here that I bother to make proper meals. Plus, with you reading the recipes I can make new meals as well.”

“That doesn’t feel like something you need me for.”

“It really is. I’m not all that fussy when I’m on my own.”

With Nito here, though, I felt responsible. I couldn’t just revert to my old pathetic lifestyle, so I’d grown into a relatively upstanding person. Above all else, though, I was grateful not to be alone anymore. She probably wouldn’t understand just how much that meant to me.

“Besides, it’s thanks to you that the car even runs. You’re like an investor, and you’ve been a massive help.”

“I did pay for it,” she admitted. “But you’ll be able to find lots of money and jewels in the town, right?”

“Hmm...”

She was right; there would be banks, shops, and houses in a town. I could gather them up and pay off my debt.

“There will be cars too,” she added.

We’d met in an abandoned station on the water, and circumstance had pulled us both to Vandyke’s workshop. Then we’d agreed to carry on our journeys together for a time because our interests had been aligned. Once we arrived at the town, though, that would no longer be the case. At the very least, I would be able to get money and Nito to get a car. There would be no more reason for us to travel together.

The thought left me reeling. That hadn’t even occurred to me. At some point, I’d come to see traveling with her as a fact of life. Though we had only met a short time ago, it felt like we’d spent months together.

“Guess so,” was all I could wring out of my throat; I didn’t know what else to say.

Nito read out the recipe and I followed her instructions. There was no other conversation. We ate together in the firelight, the sound of cutlery standing in for words. After a quick cleanup, all that was left for the night was to sleep. I would be in the tent and Nito would be in the back of the Kettle. One of us would leave for bed first.

I sat in front of the fire and sipped at some water. Occasionally I’d tend to the fire by using the blow poke to shift the wood around. Nito sat next to me with her hands wrapped around her cup, gazing into the fire.

The nights in this world were absolute, with no artificial illumination around. The soft moonlight cast over the area and the dim glow of the firelight were all we had to rely on. If I didn’t tend the fire and keep it fed with firewood, it would soon go out, as simple as that. The difficulty lay in not letting it go out. It was much like my own feelings.

“Say, Nito,” I heard—my own voice, the words falling from my own lips—and then felt her stir next to me. “Why are you looking for the Golden Sea?”

We’d spoken about the place in her mother’s painting, the one she’d called the most beautiful place in the world, several times. I wasn’t sure whether she’d set out on a journey just to chase a memory.

No reply was forthcoming. Eventually, as a small twig in the fire burnt scarlet and fell to the ground, she spoke.

“She often talked about her journeys. She’d gone here and there, painting countless pictures. She had lots of notebooks back then and used to tell me about all of her memories from traveling, like they were stories, because I couldn’t leave my room.” She seemed to intuit the question I wanted to ask and she gave me an empty smile. “Until recently, I was an invalid.”

“You don’t seem like one. ’Specially considering the mouth you’ve got on you.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it. I’d say I was born with this personality,” she told me, glaring harshly.

It was just a joke...

“It’s called mana deficiency syndrome. Have you heard of it?”

“Nope, first time I’ve heard the phrase.”

Nito puffed up as she spoke somewhat proudly.

“There wasn’t a single doctor that could tell why, but ever since I was born, unless there was plenty of mana in the area, I couldn’t move. They filled my room with mana stones and that finally allowed me to survive. I’m essentially a steam vehicle.”

Nito laughed at her self-directed joke, but I couldn’t do the same. I could tell just from the description that it was a life-threatening condition.

“You seem fine now though,” I prompted.

“The mana collapse was essentially the world filling entirely with excess mana. I was nearly dead because of a lack of mana.”

I gasped in realization and Nito nodded to confirm my thinking.

“It’s thanks to how dense the mana is that I can walk around like this. Ironic, isn’t it? Thanks to the world’s destruction, I’m free.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, but Nito carried on regardless.

“Anyway, we’re off topic. In the past, I had to stay in my room, so all I did was read and learn painting from my mother. I loved the tales about the pictures in her notebooks more than anything. I’d ask about them each and every day because she was always so happy when she talked about them. But...”

It took a long time before she continued. Hugging her knees, she looked steadily into the flames.

“They were probably all lies,” she finished. “I never saw her paint.”

“Didn’t she teach you how, though?”

“She just coached me. She’d look at my paintings and say, ‘You need to do it more like this,’ or things like that. In retrospect, it all sounded like tips written in books, and I’ve never seen anything she’s painted outside of those notebooks.”

Several counterarguments came to mind. For example, that she used to paint but didn’t anymore. All of those arguments were things Nito would have easily thought of herself though, especially when she must have wanted a reason to believe far more than I did.

“When she died, dad got rid of all the notebooks and said he’d never seen her draw. He said she’d probably picked them up at some antique store and made up stories around them. I argued against it lots back then. But I’m not sure anymore... Maybe they were made up. So...” Here she turned her gaze on me, her eyes looking far too grown up for her age as they narrowed slightly. “I want to know if she really did make it up. I don’t mind if she did; it was all for my sake, after all. But I don’t want to die still not knowing whether to believe her or not. I want the truth to be clear.”

I’d never had words stab so sharply into my chest as when she said that she didn’t want to die not knowing. I’d never thought I’d hear those words come so easily from someone younger than me—she’d fully accepted her death. She didn’t want to have regrets when that unavoidable day eventually came. It reminded me of terminal patients writing down lists of things they wanted to do before they died. Her words brought home the current state of this world and, at the same time, the fact that I was now part of it.

“I’m sure it exists,” I said eventually. “The Golden Sea isn’t something your mother made up.”

“You think so?”

“I do,” I insisted.

I had no foundation for my insistence. I knew myself that it was just a temporary comfort, so all I could do was make sure I said it with conviction. Even if my words held no real meaning at all, they were all I could offer.

A smile appeared on Nito’s lips as she nodded in agreement. I looked for something else to say. I was sure there was more I should add, but everything I came up with felt empty. Words with no thought behind them were just sound waves, vibrating the eardrums without reaching the heart. That was all the more true if you didn’t believe them yourself when you said them.

The world was vast, and people were vanishing faster and faster as the world moved slowly but inexorably toward its destruction. What point was there in journeying in this situation? What would come of searching or hoping for something? After all, at some point you’d vanish too, dying as a pile of those white crystals.

I was traveling in search of that black-garbed man. I didn’t honestly think that I’d find him though. I just had nothing else: no reason to live, no reason to stay in this world. This journey was like a worthless voyage of self-discovery, just me averting my eyes from reality and running away. There was no point in living in this world anymore.

“Let’s head off to bed,” I said.

“Right,” she answered after a pause.

Even so, I hoped she would find what she was looking for—the Golden Sea, the most beautiful place in the world. The place that her mother might have made up.

If that place existed somewhere in this world, then I could still believe.

[Keisuke’s Notes] Crystallization

Why do things and even people turn into crystals? The ground, plants, and even buildings are all turning into white sand. The sight’s strangely surreal, and even a little beautiful. It makes me shudder to think that even though people have died, all that’s left are those mounds of crystal.