Epilogue:
Prologue Zero
IN THE YEAR 500 of the Armored Dragon Era, there lived a girl called the Blessed Child of Restoration. There was no life in her eyes. Ever since she was born, they had been empty save for despair. The adults around her found her uncanny and kept their distance.
The girl knew what fate had in store for her. She had known before she was born—but “before she was born” is a misleading phrase. She had not known before her first, true birth. For this girl had been reborn many times. Again and again, she had repeated the same life. Again and again, she had repeated a life with minute differences each time. Different lives, albeit only slightly…and they all ended the same way. Her life was always fixed. There were never any great upheavals, and those lives always came to the same end.
That end was death. She died. No one living creature may escape death, but her death was a particularly awful one. After being manipulated as a tool by her country, she was captured and murdered by an enemy nation. She was like a toy fought over by children. Sometimes she was brutally raped, sometimes she was eaten alive by monsters, sometimes she was bound and thrown into water…
The girl died in suffering and despair. To her, life was a road that ended in despair. Every day was nothing but another step closer to the executioner’s block. She was without hope.
The girl had a power. She could reverse time for an object by, at most, a single day. With this power, she restored broken things. She could even bring people back from the dead.
A single day. But even the power to bring the dead back to life for just a single day was enough for the Blessed Child to be pressed into service for the nation. The king kept her all to himself.
Her power to reverse a single day freed the king from injury and illness. Mysteriously, she could not stop him from aging, but this was of little importance to the king.
The girl had known three versions of the king. Though his name and appearance never changed, there were small variances in his personality and his conduct. Every time she died, and a new nightmare began, the king she served changed a little. Another, seeing these slight changes, might have praised the king for his wisdom, or condemned him as a fool. None of it mattered to the girl. There was no difference in how any of the kings treated her. To her, the kings all blended into the same monster.
The power that made her a Blessed Child brought her no happiness. She could not turn back her own time, nor could she use her power for her own purposes. All it did was shackle her to the palace that served as her prison.
And then, she died. She was kept like an animal in a corner of the palace, meeting slightly different people every time, until she finally perished. Sometimes her power was insufficient, and she incurred the wrath of the king. Sometimes another nation invaded the kingdom, and she was taken prisoner. Sometimes the kingdom was overrun by demons who slaughtered them all. Her life faded away in misery. And then, she returned to the beginning. She started again from her birth in a remote, rural corner of the kingdom. After spending her early years enduring the adults’ disgust, she was taken to the palace, where she would ultimately die yet again.
The girl tried to escape her fate in the beginning. She hid her power so that she could stay with her mother and father. It did no good. For some reason, just before her fifth birthday, soldiers came from the palace and took her away with them. She tried to run away from the village before the soldiers came, but that too was futile. She was either killed by a monster or captured by bandits or kidnappers. Who she was sold on to next varied, but she ended up at the palace without fail. Fate dragged her back to the palace like an antlion’s trap, crushed her hope, then murdered her. It was hell—an eternal, unceasing hell cycle that utterly destroyed her. She ceased to feel anything. She followed the king’s orders, her face as devoid of expression as a machine. A hundred years passed, then two hundred. Or was it a thousand? Two thousand? Perhaps ten, or twenty thousand. She no longer remembered how many times she had died, or how long she had lived. Her memory was perpetually hazy, and she couldn’t recall a single instance of joy.
The moment of her murder was always crystal clear.
Perhaps it was instinct. Some pure animal urge within her that clung to life, that recorded the memory of her murder as something to be avoided. Alas, the result was that her whole life was blotted out by her own deaths. She no longer recalled anything else. Nothing but a chain of memories of death.
Immersed in an endless stream of death, the girl made a wish. She wished with all her heart.
I can’t bear this anymore… Somebody, help me…
In that moment, the laws of the world shifted.
✦ ✦ ✦
Things in her next life had changed.
She was born in a provincial village she couldn’t even name and was taken to the palace. She obeyed the king’s every whim and used her power day in and day out. None of this had changed. But when she was ten, something different happened. Something that had never happened before. It was her tenth birthday. As though to celebrate the occasion, the girl was taken away. She was taken beneath the palace, to a space with a vast magic circle. The girl hadn’t known there was such a magic circle in the palace, for she had never been allowed to walk freely within it.
Several dozen adults stood around the magic circle. They held staffs and wore black robes. Hoods covered their faces. The knowledge she had gleaned from her eternal hell told her that these people were magicians. But what would happen to her next, she did not know. She knew little about magic and magic circles. She had never had the opportunity to learn such things in her hellish prison.
The girl was bound to the magic circle. Her eyes were empty as always. Something new had happened, but it failed to stir her heart at all. She would still die in the end. No matter what happened along the way, nothing would change. This sense of resignation crowded out everything else.
The ritual began. The magic circle relentlessly drew the mana from her body. Blessed Children held an inconceivable volume of mana within their bodies. It was a different stripe of mana to that which was used in magic and swordcraft, and in theory, it could not typically have been used for a magic circle like this one. Was it chance, then, that the magic circle was drawing out her mana? No. This magic circle had been created for a purpose. It was designed to be activated using the mana of the Blessed Child of Restoration. Who had made it? Though she was out of the girl’s sight, the architect was present at the ritual. She observed the magic circle looking only a little less bored than the girl.
The ritual was a success. The magic circle blazed with light. Light in a prism of seven colors—the light of summoning.
Then, when the light died away, there was a boy standing in the middle of the circle.
“It worked.”
“We did it!”
“The kingdom is saved!”
While the magicians celebrated, the boy looked around at his surroundings in amazement. Then, his gaze turned to the girl with empty eyes who sat on the ground in front of him.
“Um… Could you tell me where this is? I was just with Nana and Kuro…huh?”
The language he spoke was unknown to all there, and yet somehow, the girl understood. Perhaps it was because her own mana had been used, or perhaps it was because she was connected to his presence here.
“Oh, um, my name’s Shinohara Akito,” he said. “How about you?”
“I am the Blessed Child of Restoration.”
“Blessed…? Um, I wanted to know your name.”
The girl realized that in every iteration of her personal hell, and in particular after she came to the palace, no one ever asked her name.
A Blessed Child had no name. Perhaps if they were royalty, an exception might be made, but as a rule, Blessed Children had their names taken from them. From that point on, they were only ever referred to as “Blessed Child.” The girl was no exception.
But while Blessed Children usually had their names taken before they could learn them, the girl remembered her name. She remembered it precisely because she had died so many times.
It was the name her mother and father had given her.
“Lyria,” she said.
“Lyria? That’s a nice name.” The boy smiled, and the girl’s heart sang.