“Very well. I shall leave the key in your care, then,” the priest conceded.
He then walked over to my door.
What in the world...?
He plucked a small orb-like object from his pocket, tossed it into the room, and closed the door. A quiet chant drifted from his lips. It sounded a bit like a Resurrection spell, but not quite.
And when he was done chanting, that was that. It didn’t seem like anything had happened, but...
“Now, I shall return to my own room. Tomorrow, as we agreed, I shall begin aiding you from the shadows. Goodnight to you both,” he said, and then walked swiftly away.
“Huh. Your room looks normal to me,” Gourry said as he poked his head through the doorway. “What’d that old guy think he was doing?”
“Let me see.”
I poked my head in too, and...
Bwuh?!
I was stunned into silence. Gourry was right: the room was perfectly normal. Slightly disturbed bedclothes and cheap white curtains, all as it should be. Not a single thing was amiss. It looked exactly as it had before I threw that Fireball earlier.
I knew that I’d be getting an earful in the morning if the innkeeper found my room in cinders, so I’d been trying to figure out what to do about the damage, but this... I don’t know how he’d done it, but Rezo the Red Priest had completely un-fried my room.
“...He sure makes an impact...”
“Huh? What did he hit?”
“Forget it, Gourry. We’ll talk this over tomorrow. Let’s call it a night. Don’t wanna miss our beauty sleep...”
With that, I closed the door to my room, barged into Gourry’s, and curled up in the corner.
“Hey! Little miss!” Gourry shouted after me. “This is my room!”
“I know that.”
“...”
“If I go back to my room, I could end up getting jumped again.”
“But if you stay here—”
“Then at least we’re together, right?”
“...Fine. But sleep in the bed, at least. I’ll take the floor.”
“You know I can’t do that. I’m the one imposing.”
“Okay, fine.”
Perhaps realizing it was pointless to argue, Gourry simply plopped himself down on the floor on the other side of the room.
It was my turn to ask this time, “Why don’t you sleep in the bed?”
“Stupid. What kind of man could take the bed while a young lady is sleeping on the floor?”
“Suit yourself,” I said with a wry smile. “Goodnight, Gourry.”
“Goodnight, little miss.”
He’d really be a pretty great guy... if only he’d stop treating me like a kid.
“You’ve honestly never heard of Dark Lord Shabranigdu?” I asked Gourry as we walked side by side down the sun-dappled forest road.
We’d been walking through the exact same kinds of trees for days now, so I was getting sick of the monotony, but oh well. The main road to Atlas City cut through Cheresus Forest, so it was no surprise that the scenery was so verdant most of the way there.
“Hmm...” Gourry thought long and hard for a few minutes. “No, I honestly never have.”
The legend of Shabranigdu was rather famous, and not just among sorcerers. I thought everyone knew it, but...
I let out a sigh.
“Okay, fine. I’ll start from the beginning. Just remember: this is legend, not history.”
“Sure thing.”
I let out another sigh, hoping I wasn’t wasting my breath here.
“There are worlds out there besides the one we inhabit. Each of these worlds lies on top of a staff, which someone thrust into the Sea of Chaos ages and ages ago. Worlds are round and flat... Hmm, think of them like pies balanced atop fence posts. That’s where we stand right now,” I said, pointing to the ground for emphasis.
This was the broadly accepted theory among my fellow sorcerers, though I had my doubts about its veracity. Bringing that up would only confuse Gourry, however, so I refrained.
“Now, across the various worlds that exist, two breeds of beings have been battling it out since ancient times: gods and demons. Gods try to protect the worlds, while demons are out to destroy them in order to steal the staves that hold them up. In some instances, the gods won and brought peace to their world. In others, the demons won and destroyed their world. And in others still, this war is yet ongoing.
“Ruby-Eye Shabranigdu and Flare Dragon Ceifeed once fought for control of our world. Their battle raged on for centuries, for millennia even, until at last, Ceifeed cut the Dark Lord’s body into seven pieces and scattered them throughout the world, sealing them away.”
“So the god won?”
“Ceifeed only sealed Shabranigdu away. He didn’t destroy him,” I said, shaking my head.
“I thought he cut him into seven pieces?”
“You don’t earn the ‘Dark Lord’ moniker if you’re that easy to kill. Anyway, sealing away Shabranigdu consumed the last of the Flare Dragon’s power, and he plummeted into the Sea of Chaos.”
“That wasn’t very smart of him.”
“Don’t worry. That wasn’t all. Fearing that the Dark Lord might one day revive, the Flare Dragon created four clones of himself with the very last of his power—the Earthlord, the Airlord, the Flarelord, and the Aqualord—each of which was given dominion over a cardinal direction. They say this all happened five millennia ago, so let’s flash forward four—to a thousand years before the time we’re living in now.
“It was then that the very thing Ceifeed had feared came to fruition. One of the seven pieces of Shabranigdu revived, and then hijacked the body and soul of a human in an attempt to resurrect himself. He set a trap for the Aqualord, protector of the North. They fought, and in the end, the Aqualord was destroyed. But Shabranigdu’s body was also bound to the ground beneath his feet, effectively holding him in place.”
“So neither really won.”
“They were too evenly matched, yeah. Anyway, all of that upset the balance that kept the world at peace, which is what caused what I’ll call ‘beasts of the dark’ to begin to appear.”
“Huh...” Gourry sounded genuinely impressed.