“…I’ll kill you someday,” Adonis groaned as he got to his feet.
A table appeared out of nowhere, already covered in food. Dragging his legs to the seat, Adonis sat there, covered in wounds, and began ravenously devouring the meal. Even the inside of his mouth was cut, it seemed, which tainted whatever he ate with the taste of blood.
This kind of a life is good, Adonis thought. Living like an animal. I don’t need to worry about anything, just swing my blade. I like it.
When he finished eating, he made to call out to Bamboo but stopped himself. Oddly enough, Adonis didn’t feel much displeasure at having been forbidden from doing so.
Just as he was wondering if he’d need to sleep on the cold floor, he felt something behind him.
Hearing a creak, Adonis turned around and saw an open door had appeared there. Adonis gulped down the remainder of his soda water and went through the doorway.
Inside, he found a simple bed. The rest of the room was fogged over by a veil of indigo darkness. He couldn’t tell how big the room was, but from the airflow, it didn’t seem that spacious.
The door behind him slammed shut, followed by another door manifesting in the darkness. The new door opened, revealing a bathroom behind it. It seemed they had a bath prepared for him, but Adonis instead chose to fall onto the bed still wearing his bloodstained clothes and clutching his sword. That sword was the one thing he felt he couldn’t let go of no matter what.
The weapon let out a soft wail, as if it sensed his emotions. Adonis smiled and, just like that, fell asleep.
He awoke overcome with a feeling he couldn’t explain, then realized his head was resting on something very soft. The sweet fragrance of cinnamon tickled his nostrils, along with another sweet scent mixed into it. He was resting on someone’s lap.
He looked up, eyes wide, and met the gaze of Dranvi, who greeted him with a cold yet lascivious smile.
“You should take a bath before you go to bed.”
The bath had special medicine in it, which healed wounds and recovered his stamina. But rather than respond to Dranvi’s advice, Adonis kept his head on her lap and asked suspiciously, “Just how much…do you know about me? About my hands…?”
“I knew everything when you appeared here. That you were the one I had fashioned my steel for…,” Dranvi replied in a voice that seemed to draw him in.
What made his doubts deepen wasn’t her answer but her tone. She was speaking to him like a mother talking to a child.
Above all else, he loathed the way his mind was thinking rationally. He wanted to never have to think of anything again, to just swing his sword like an animal. But there was no restraining his heart. The way she seemed to know Adonis would come here, the reason behind why she gave him this sword and so many other things. The question of what it was that was trying, ever so often, to touch his heart other than his sword.
He could clearly feel the collective will of the Dearth March trying to consume him, and he wasn’t rejecting that outcome. But even so, it didn’t fully consume him.
“At first it felt like the Dearth March was swallowing me, but now it doesn’t…,” Adonis whispered, his head still on Dranvi’s lap.
The question of why he was doing this was perhaps his biggest doubt. Why was he letting this woman see him this vulnerable?
“The reason you cannot become a part of us is because you’ve only been drawn by your sword’s voice and lack something that could answer the Dearth March’s call,” Dranvi explained softly. “But you have already swallowed the Seed of Calamity… Worry not. The time will come.”
“Why did you give me my sword if you didn’t know who I was?”
“All I do is express the shape of the future through steel.”
“The future…?”
Dranvi nodded. “Steel becomes the conduit for the blade known as the future. The sword calls to its wielder, seeking to become a form suitable to be used. Seeking out one suitable to give it that form… Dranvi, the Worthy.”
“I…don’t quite understand. Is her… Is Belle’s Runding also like that? Did you know someone like Belle would come to be in this world?”
Dranvi smiled faintly and silently shook her head. It was a gesture that made it hard to tell if she was actually saying no. Her Mermaid face, graced with the beauty of both masculinity and femininity, looked almost grief-stricken. Adonis could imagine that Dranvi was trying to express something he couldn’t grasp. And just as he was starting to doubt she would ever explain things properly, she said:
“…For now, take a bath and sleep. If you wish for a lullaby, I shall tell you one tomorrow.”
She patted Adonis on the shoulder, urging him to go.
“I want to ask you one thing first. Why doesn’t this sword have a spell?”
“It does have a spell… You just haven’t discovered it yet.”
With the sword in his grasp, Adonis sluggishly rose to his feet and walked over to the door to the bathroom. He turned to look at the room enveloped in indigo-blue darkness.
“When people speak of mothers, they must mean someone like you,” he murmured.
Dranvi narrowed her eyes kindly. Then, still smiling, her visage faded away. She seemed to melt into the darkness, eventually vanishing from sight, presumably having moved to another space.
Fully clothed and holding his sword, Adonis plunged into the bath.
“A devil,” Sian said with a smirk.
“If God’s counterpart is the Devil, one who shakes the established peace and order, then without a doubt that is her true name.”
Such was Sian’s answer when Adonis asked him who Dranvi was.
Right at that moment, Adonis was lying pitifully at Sian’s feet, his stomach wet with blood after being run through the abdomen.
Just moments ago, as he writhed on the ground coughing up blood, Sian had told him, “Your skills are superficial, lacking in pride. I pity your sword.” He’d punctuated this scathing criticism by tossing a bottle of sacred ashes at the younger Cateyes. “We’ll resume shortly. Hurry up and heal yourself.”
They certainly weren’t the sort of words you’d direct at someone with their stomach cut open. But Adonis hadn’t argued back or pleaded for more time. Instead, he’d asked about Dranvi.
“What, did you fall for her?” Sian teased, his tone making it clear that couldn’t possibly be the case.
“No, it’s just…she’s mysterious, is all.”
Much like when he was with Gaff, Adonis didn’t show any reluctance talking to Sian. And similar to Gaff and Kir, Sian didn’t seem to care much for his tone. He shrugged casually.
“Mysterious, you say…” Sian looked like he was gazing off into the distance. “She’s ahead of her time. Her greatest tragedy was that she was born into this era and not a hundred years from now. Were it not for that, she wouldn’t have been controlled by God as the country’s Queen Minor.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said: She’s a devil.”
Smirking, he kicked Adonis in his newly healed stomach, urging him to get up. Adonis got to his feet, groaning in pain.
“That’s right; don’t think you have the free time to dawdle because of wounds this shallow.”
Adonis held up his sword and frowned. “…What are you trying to do to me?”
Sian’s smoldering sword swept through the air, arcing toward Adonis. The sound of the weapons clashing boomed through the space.
“To turn you into a devil, too,” Sian said, looking amused.
Within the closed space, there was no concept of night and day.
In this scene, where time seemed to hold eternally still and the blue tourmaline floor and ash-gray ceiling stretched as far as the eye could see, stood three hundred swords. Sian had yet to pick up most of these swords, all of which had Question marks on them.
Sian’s teaching style wasn’t simply to have Adonis shatter the swords emblazoned with his own mark, but to use the young Solist’s own sword techniques against him. He avoided direct clashes with Adonis, instead choosing to strike at his most vulnerable spots. And while he didn’t treat the swords as if they were disposable, Sian gave off the air of being willing to throw them away at any time.
It was a training method akin to Adonis fighting and smashing his own mirror image. And to add insult to injury, Sian would use Adonis’s fastest, most powerful techniques with indifference and ease, then say:
“What shallow swordcraft.”
The casual criticism was relentless. He wasn’t so much teaching Adonis as he was breaking him apart and piecing him back together from scratch.
“I’ll kill you someday…” Adonis would tell the Enola, his eyes blazing, but Sian looked completely unfazed.
That day as well, Adonis had eventually managed to shatter only one sword, after which Sian left the space with an indifferent demeanor. Adonis wolfed down his food, bathed, and changed into a fresh set of clothes that appeared from out of nowhere.
Indigo-blue clothes. The color that represented the hour of midnight blue.
Since he couldn’t call for Bamboo, Adonis couldn’t access his belongings, save for his red bandanna. Even his sword was something he’d received here.
He splayed himself across the bed and tried to doze off, but he opened his eyes when, once again, he felt himself resting on someone’s lap. His heart raced with fear as he felt someone holding his hand.
“You shouldn’t touch my hands,” he said, silencing the unease gripping his heart.
“That is because you have fixed your curse into such a form.”
“What…?”
“It is for this reason that this sword’s spell is still invisible to you.”
Adonis pulled away his hand with a start. It was like something important he’d been protecting in his heart had been agitated, flooding him with anxiety.
“Weren’t you going to sing me a lullaby?” Adonis asked defensively.
He tried to move away from her lap, but it was too warm and he was too tired to muster the strength.
“Yes…,” Dranvi responded curtly, then began speaking quietly. “A long time ago…I first came to Park to find my other self. That was when it all started…”