Lemn continued his explanation, which just sounded like difficult philosophy. “It’s neither day nor night. The sun has set, but it’s bright. That’s why it’s the Kingdom of Twilight.”
“That I can understand...but what you said before makes no sense,” I said.
“If I had some paper, I could explain it better...”
“Are you just saying that so you can escape?” I asked.
“I won’t run. Now that I think about it, you can pull me out of the shadows, miss. I won’t waste my time.” After being freed from Patrick’s grasp, Lemn said, “I’m just grabbing something,” before he pulled out a sheet of paper from the shadow.
Weird that he already has a paper ready to explain this, I thought as I looked at it. I thought there would be some words or a drawing on it, but the piece of paper was quite simple. It was split down the middle, half of it white and half of it black.
What is he going to explain using this black-and-white paper? I listened intently as he began to speak.
“This white side is the world of the living. You can call it this world or the mortal world if you’d like. The black side is the afterlife.”
“Is that black part the Kingdom of Twilight?” I asked.
“Nope. That’s the afterlife. Even I don’t know what’s there. Relative to this paper, the Kingdom of Twilight is neither the white nor the black side.”
It’s neither the white nor black part of the two-toned sheet of paper? There was no gray gradation, and there were only two options on the paper: bright white or dark black—in other words, there was only life or death.
Patrick and I looked at each other again, still not understanding.
“You guys are so thickheaded,” Lemn said with a snicker. “Maybe this will make it easier.” He then traced the border where the white met the black and a red line appeared. The black-and-white paper now had a red line running through the middle, separating the black and white sides. A red sunset that was neither day nor night had appeared.
“So it’s this red part,” I said.
“Yup. This is the Kingdom of Twilight. It’s on the border between this world and the afterlife.” Huh. I didn’t know there was a place that was like being in the water of the River Styx.
So this red line is the Kingdom of Twilight, I mused as I reached out and traced the border between this world and the afterlife. As I did that, just the parts of the red line that my finger traced disappeared. It didn’t seem like I’d wiped away the ink with my finger.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Lemn proudly said as I stared at my clean fingertip. “I made this paper. Try tracing the parts that disappeared again.”
I did as he said and traced the lineless part of the border once more, and the red line appeared. Cool, this is fun. I touched the mysterious paper over and over again, playing with it.
“Is there a point to this gimmick?” Patrick asked. “Couldn’t you just leave the red line on it?”
That’s true. I was too busy playing with the paper to figure out why Lemn had made the paper this way, but he explained it right away.
“The concept is easier to understand with the red line, but the red line doesn’t actually exist. I’ll say it again—the part that is neither black nor white is the Kingdom of Twilight. You understand now, right?”
I recalled Lemn’s words from earlier.
“It doesn’t actually exist, but it definitely exists between this world and the afterlife...”
There weren’t any parts of the paper that weren’t black or white, but we could clearly see the line dividing the two sides. A line that was neither black nor white—a colorless line—with a width of zero did indeed exist.
“It looks like you got it,” Lemn said. “It’s on the border of this world and the afterlife, and its existence itself is unstable—that’s the Kingdom of Twilight.”
I wonder what kind of place it is. Though the equator was depicted as a red line on most maps, it wasn’t actually red—in the same vein, the Kingdom of Twilight probably wasn’t actually red. Since the name of the kingdom was probably referencing the border of life and death, it probably wasn’t always sunset like it suggested.
As I imagined what this place I’d never been to looked like, Patrick spoke up. “Am I correct to think that people go to the Kingdom of Twilight after dying?”
“Not everyone goes,” Lemn explained. “Only the people with strong regrets hang on and stay there. The world itself is unstable, so the residents’ human qualities also change shape.”
I can understand why people with strong regrets can’t fully die, but what does he mean that their qualities change? I decided to ask.
“Specifically what happens when the residents change shape?”
“This is just an example, but imagine there’s someone who lived a life of constant hard work and died from overworking themselves. If they regret not spending their last moments relaxing like a cat, those feelings could be reflected on them in the Kingdom of Twilight.”
“So they could relax like a cat? That sounds like heaven.”
“Nope. This guy’s a serious person at his core, so he’d become a middle-aged man sprouting cat ears who has no time to rest because he’s busy taking care of everyone around him.”
That sounds like hell, not heaven. I guess the main part is that he wanted to relax, but only the cat part of his wish was granted. Though his example was horrid, I understood. It seemed that their regrets in this world would change their bodies.
I don’t think that was an example you give while grinning like that... It was an example, right? There’s no sad middle-aged catboy who wouldn’t make anyone happy, right? I considered checking with him, but if it was true, I would only be sadder, so I kept my question to myself.
“What happens to the changed residents there?”
Lemn tapped on the black side of the paper. “Once they’re satisfied, they go here.”
“Aren’t there some people who can’t resolve their regrets?”
“They will disappear on their own after some time. I think it usually takes a hundred years. I only know of one person who’s stayed for longer than that.”
There were surely plenty of regrets that wouldn’t go away, even if you could transform in the Kingdom of Twilight. The way Lemn described such regrets as disappearing on their own displayed his lack of interest in individual humans.
Though it was a vague explanation, we now understood what the Kingdom of Twilight was. Still, this was only a preamble to the main topic. There was this world that was neither heaven nor hell, and the fact that the left side of my body wasn’t working. At first glance, these two things seemed completely unrelated, but the fact that one had something to do with the other brought only one answer to mind.
When Lemn touched my left side, he’d clearly said that I was dead.
“So half of me is...”
“That’s right. Just your left half died and went to the Kingdom of Twilight.”