Chapter 105
Beginning with imitating the movements bare-handed, I was eventually permitted to take up a wooden sword and swing it.
Once I began swinging a wooden sword, I realized why I had initially trained bare-handed: gripping a sword before properly understanding the movements could injure me because of its weight and centrifugal force.
I continued swinging the wooden sword as I deepened my understanding, and by the time several seasons had passed, I began exchanging blows with Kaeha.
In a mere three years, my skill probably wouldn't reach the level I wanted, much less the level Kaeha hoped for.
After all, this was swordsmanship that would obviously take decades to master.
But that was fine.
Even unfinished, I only needed to cross swords with Win and give it everything I had at that point.
Our lives would continue after that, too.
Yet even as time passed, loss still came.
Two years after returning to Kaeha's dojo and beginning my current sword training, I received a letter one day and came to the town of Vistcourt.
I had come to pay my respects at the graves of two adventurers, Kreias and Martena, who had once been active as members of a party called White Lake.
High Elves, who are believed to become spirits after death, have no custom for mourning the dead.
Elves bury their remains near a tree, and speak to that tree when mourning the dead.
In this world, magic sometimes acts on a corpse and turns it into a monster, but trees are also believed to prevent that from happening.
For humans, at least around here, the usual thing would probably be to pray to the god of harvest.
A prayer for the deceased to return peacefully to the earth and be reborn someday.
Especially since Martena had been a priestess serving the god of harvest, that must surely have been the right thing to do.
There were other gods associated with death, too, I think, but people generally prayed to whichever god they worshiped.
Yet I... I don't know why, but when I stood before the grave, I found myself pressing my hands together in prayer.
It wasn't a custom found in this world—at least not around here—but when wishing the dead a peaceful rest, it felt like the most heartfelt way to pray.
Of course, the grave bore no likeness of either of them.
But when I stood before it, their faces naturally came to mind—the young Kreias and Martena from just after they had met.
"Thank you, Eisa-sama."
The one who spoke to me as I raised my head was Airena, who had sent me the letter.
According to her letter, Kreias had passed away first, about two months earlier, and Martena had followed about a week later.
Humans truly are such fleeting creatures.
Even Kreias and Martena, who had reached the Seven-Star rank, the pinnacle for adventurers, had left the world in such a short time.
Many people in Vistcourt had admired them, and apparently a great many had attended the funeral, but... in a hundred years, surely no one would remember the two of them anymore.
The only exception would surely be Airena.
There was no need for her to thank me.
I was about to say that, but swallowed the words.
Because the smile on Airena's face was painfully fragile.
"When we parted, Martena told me, 'I'm sorry,' and then, 'Thank you.'"
I listened to her in silence.
I didn't exactly understand the relationship between Kreias, Martena, and Airena.
Still, it seemed that the two of them felt something like guilt toward Airena, and Airena felt the same toward them.
Calling it guilt may simply be my own assumption; perhaps it was merely lingering regret.
Or perhaps that was part of why Kreias and Martena had accepted Kaeha's offer.
Kuroha, Kaeha's mother, had said it was someone else's curse, not mine.
But that no longer mattered.
I had no desire to dig into every detail just to learn what they had felt.
Kaeha had come to Vistcourt with me, but she was staying at her daughter Mizuha's house now.
She presumably intended to pay her respects alone, separately from me.
"Eisa-sama, if you hadn't been there, if you hadn't given me a role to fulfill, ... perhaps I would have fled this country and gotten away from the two of them."
For that reason, I probably couldn't truly understand what Airena was feeling, either.
So rather than offer her some facile consolation, I simply took in the words she directed at me.
"While I was unable to return to this town for so, so long, they died, and I didn't have the courage to confirm their deaths even after a hundred years... Even when I finally found the courage to come here later, I wouldn't even have known where their graves were."
That possibility did not exist.
It would have been easy to deny it.
Airena wasn't that weak.
As far as I knew, she was the most capable and trustworthy elf there was.
Even if she had run away for a time, she would have come to see them before Kreias and Martena died; and even if she had visited the town after their deaths, she would have found their graves.
But there would have been no point in saying any of that.
Airena wasn't falling apart and voicing her fears.
"If I had run away, perhaps I could have avoided this sorrow. But then I wouldn't have been able to see Kreias and Martena off."
She was simply mourning, grieving, and taking stock of her own feelings.
Of course, it would be some time before she could sort them out.
It might take ten or twenty years, or it might take a hundred or even two hundred years.
But little by little, one memory at a time, she would look back, reaffirm each one, turn them over in her mind, and eventually put them away in a cabinet in her heart.
"So, Eisa-sama, thank you very much."
I nodded at Airena's thanks.
She had been preparing to hand over her role so that she could leave the country once Kreias and Martena were gone.
But it would be tactless to ask now what she planned to do from here on.
What she actually chose to do could change again and again depending on how she felt when the time came.
She should grieve as much as she wanted and immerse herself in her memories.
After all, we had plenty of time.
If she wanted to reminisce, I would gladly do so with her.
I couldn't treat the pain Airena was feeling as someone else's, either.
I would inevitably experience the same pain myself in the near future.