This is a chronicle of Twilight Helbe.
It’s the story of the land, as told by Clarice herself.
Let’s go back, three hundred years in the past, to the start of everything. Back then, there was a mage. Her name was Clarice. She lived with her mother and was deeply loved. The two of them lived a totally normal life.
Her fate changed one day when she was ten years old.
Undoubtedly, it was a day that changed the fates of many people living in Twilight Helbe.
That day, after the sun had gone down—
—the dead appeared.
The dead that appeared long ago were just like the typical dead that still appeared at night. Their skin was pale, as if all the blood had been removed from their bodies, and looking at their faces, there was nothing there that could be called consciousness.
They also wandered around town repeatedly mumbling the same words that at first thought seemed to have no meaning.
It was obvious from looking at them that they were not living humans. The citizens could tell the moment they looked at them that these were dead people who had once been their neighbors.
Although they understood what was going on, back then, most of the citizens had had a very different reaction.
“It’s a miracle! Our friends have returned in great numbers from the land of the dead!”
They threw their hands in the air and welcomed the deceased parading through town.
Someone hugged the father they had lost to illness. Another person snuggled up to the sweetheart they had lost in an accident. Others greeted siblings they had once been close with, or comrades who had fallen in war, or friends who had departed after a falling-out.
They were delighted by the reunions.
However, whenever anyone touched the dead, that person’s skin became inflamed, they lost consciousness, and in the worst cases, they even died. In her memoir, Clarice conjectured that this was the result of the dead absorbing life from the living.
As a result, the first night the dead appeared—
—many citizens lost their lives.
Clarice’s mother was one of them.
When it happened, Clarice’s mother was affectionately teaching Clarice to use magic. Then someone knocked on the door of their house, knock, knock. Who on earth could it be? they wondered. A visitor, maybe? Clarice opened the door without questioning it much.
“…Who are you?”
An unfamiliar, translucent man was standing there.
Clarice was puzzled.
“You—”
Apparently, he had been an acquaintance of Clarice’s mother.
Her mother touched Clarice’s shoulder and moved her away from the door, then embraced the man outside without hesitation.
“…? Mother?” Clarice was confused by her mother’s unusual behavior.
Her mother spoke to the bewildered girl through tears.
“This person here is your father, Clarice.”
Her father, who had died long ago, when Clarice was first born. And now, somehow, her mother was telling her that he was standing there, right before their eyes.
Naturally, Clarice was even more bewildered to hear that. How could someone who was supposed to have died be standing before them?
And actually—
“Uaaagh…you, you, you…”
—was it really okay for her to call this translucent man, who was deliriously babbling incoherent words, Father?
The sight filled Clarice with a sense of utter discomfort she couldn’t shake.
“I’m so happy… You came back to me—”
She felt uneasy as she watched her mother embrace him tightly.
She reasoned that her mother must be crying at being reunited after so long. She heard her sobbing and saw her shoulders shaking—but before long, her mother’s arms and legs started trembling like she was having convulsions, and she began coughing hard.
“—Kah-ha! Ah, aaaaaahhh…ow, ahhh…!”
Trickling down the translucent man’s back, a dark red liquid fell in drops onto the floor. A wordless gurgling sound escaped from her mother’s mouth, as if she was drowning in water, and finally her mother’s knees buckled, and she fell to the floor as if she had somehow been knocked down by the translucent man.
After that, her mother did not move.
The dark red stuff just flowed from her mouth and nose.
“…Mother?”
Clarice wrote in her memoir that she didn’t remember most of what happened next.
As they gradually began to realize the truth about the dead, the people destroyed them, one by one. The good-natured citizens then went all around town, warning others that the dead were not really people’s friends and family returned to life, hoping to keep the number of victims low.
One of those people helped Clarice, as she stood there in a daze looking down at her mother’s corpse.
Unfortunately, her mother was already dead by then.
Clarice was heartbroken.
Then she made a promise to herself.
She swore that never again would people lose their families like that—
“And then,” her mother told me, “Clarice studied magic and took the name the Crescent Moon Witch. That was when she founded the Crescent Moon Company and began patrolling the streets and subduing the dead.”
In other words, she’d been doing it for about three hundred years.
She’d been fighting against the dead that whole time.
“She did it to dispel her resentment over her mother’s death?”
“That was part of it, and apparently there were other reasons, too.”
Her mother knew her daughter well, despite hating her—actually, seeing as how she was also a citizen of this place, Clarice’s circumstances were probably basic knowledge for her.
“Her ultimate goal was to make it so that the dead would never appear anywhere else, ever again.”
However, if the dead were inhuman entities that took the forms of deceased humans, then—
—what that meant was as long as there were people living there, the dead would keep appearing at night. They would never stop.
“In order to defeat them for good, just one single lifetime was not enough. By the time Clarice reached old age, she still hadn’t accomplished her goal.”
Ultimately, leaving behind the organization known as the Crescent Moon Company, as well as many mourners, Clarice took her last breath and died of old age.
Or so people thought.
“However, five years after Clarice’s death, a young girl arrived at the Crescent Moon Company, calling herself Clarice.”
Apparently, there were many children who aspired to be like Clarice, the woman who had spent her whole life protecting her home by night, so the adults who received the girl were convinced at first that she was just a mischievous child playing a prank.
However, the little girl revealed many secrets of the members of the Crescent Moon Company, one after another. She talked about finances and the failures of the company. She even knew the combination for Clarice’s old safe. The girl revealed a large amount of information that only Clarice would have known.