“Are you saying this is what I was searching for…?!”
Facing the priest and seeing what he carried, Adonis let out a groan.
With trembling fingers, he picked up the mask.
“Impossible…”
Even holding it in his bare hands, it didn’t rust away.
“This can’t be…!”
The mask crashed against the floor with a shrill noise, shattering into pieces. Adonis noticed some of the fragments showed faint signs of darkening and decay, and a desperate smile spread on his face.
“I’ll be the one to decide what I’m looking for! No one else decides for me!”
He called for Bamboo in a howl, drawing a sword out of thin air and attacking the priest before his eyes with a slash too fast to follow with the naked eye. He cut the priest’s head with the sword, then drove it down into his chest, at which point the weapon couldn’t withstand the decay and shattered at the base.
The priest collapsed to the ground face up, blood pooling around his body. Adonis flung the sword’s remains, then kicked the priest’s split mask, sending it flying. The two halves fell off the stage with a hollow sound.
But Adonis didn’t hear it. The blood had drained from his face, and all the fur on his body stood on end. The face of the priest lying at his feet, glaring up at him with eyes long dead, was Adonis’s own.
“What kind of magic—?! What kind of a trick is this?!” Adonis screamed at the king, his entire body trembling.
Even he couldn’t tell if it was out of anger, terror, or a hopeless premonition of what was to come.
“No magic, much less a trick. It is a métier created by God’s Thema.”
“Huh…? What do you…?”
Adonis trailed off, because there was no longer anything in the direction he was pointing, save for the remains of a decayed sword.
“What you just saw was your own form as a tone,” the king’s upper face said.
“What you just touched was your own form as a machine,” the king’s lower face said.
“One’s toned form is the aspect they take after they offer themselves to the God Tree as an objective symbol of God’s people.”
“One’s mechanical form is the presence on the scales capable of being weighed, having discarded all attributes and become an abstraction.”
“A result of your agreement to become a tone…”
“A result of your agreement to become a machine…”
The king’s two faces looked up to the heavens, then back down at Adonis before solemnly saying in unison, “Under the God Tree, you will become a record in God’s history.”
“A record…?”
“God’s history discards all memories, turning everything into a record. And all records have their death continue to die for all eternity, serving as the blue priests of the chronicles, existing alongside God as the roots of the God Tree.”
It was then that Adonis suddenly felt an intense presence form behind him. It didn’t feel alive at all, but like something inorganic had been built up into a mound, exuding intense pressure on its surroundings. Adonis stumbled forward, his back pushed by that pressure. His expression became pained. He didn’t want to turn and look at the spectator seats any longer, but he had to. Even though he knew it would defeat him and leave him in despair.
“Help me…”
Adonis seemed to hide in the shadow of the throne as his gaze was dragged toward the spectator area. Lining the countless seats was a startling number of blue priests. Blue figures, wherever he looked. Hundreds upon thousands of them—a sea of blue mantles and masks.
And then—
“…!”
That sea of masks turned to face Adonis as one. They stared at him, clanking mechanically, mantles rustling, eerily inorganic in every way.
“Help me…,” Adonis cried out as if in agony. “Belle, help me…!”
But the king’s voice thundered over him mercilessly.
“Behold, the forms of those who have been copied after offering themselves up to God’s history by your own hand.”
A number of the priests rose from their seats and stepped onto the stage. It was at this point Adonis realized all the priests were the same height and build. They were slightly taller than Adonis and had broad shoulders. But the reason he had realized this was because the ones who had stepped forward had undergone radical changes in their appearance. Before Adonis’s eyes, their bodies under the blue garb began changing, taking differing forms. One of them slowly took off their mask in the process of that change.
“No…”
A red-haired Centaurus. It was Kir. He had masculine features and looked at Adonis expressionlessly, but then it changed again. The priest’s body warped and twisted with the sound of bones cracking, taking on the form of Kir when he had been afflicted by the cancerous sword and, without a weapon, had sprouted a flashing, steel branch of something that looked like the God Tree.
Beside Kir, Tiziano took off their mask next to him. Under their blue mantle, their slender limbs contorted hideously.
“Stop it…”
All Adonis felt at this point was horror. As he watched on, all the color drained from his face. The nightmare continued to unfold. The third figure took off their mask, revealing the face of the black-haired Cateyes Adonis had slaughtered in the garden looking straight at him. Then a fourth: the Minotaurus whose head and right arm he’d severed.
“I’m begging you, stop…”
The fifth: a man stabbed through the back of his head, his skull shattered. One after the next, they all did the same, until he was surrounded by ten men he’d killed. The dead no longer wanted for anything or begrudged anyone. Their gaze was a void. And it was inviting Adonis, telling him to come to that side. Telling him this would be the easiest and best choice. Adonis shook his head and stumbled back.
“You cannot escape…,” said the king’s top face.
“You have no means to…,” said the king’s lower face.
Adonis’s back stumbled into something. An instrument—the Keyboard Vessel to unlock the Door of Journey. Adonis’s own frightened visage was reflected in its sleek surface. He let out a cry, then sat urgently in front of it.
He roughly opened the lid, and a groan escaped him. It was incredibly heavy, as if it was made of lead. The black surface behind the lid reflected his face, and he could see nothing else. No words, no salvation to be found; everything was cast back at him by that black. That was how he felt, and he knew he wasn’t imagining it. He could feel cold sweat on his forehead. All around him, the ten dead wordlessly surrounded him with a flap of their blue cloaks.
Adonis’s hands hectically wandered over the Keyboard. After floating back and forth over the black-and-white keys, he finally decided to press one.
Clack.
All it did was let out a hollow sound, as if mocking Adonis’s frantic actions. He tried another white key, but that one just made the same noise, somehow even more damning than the last. He tried a black key; nothing. He ran his fingers along the keys from one side to the other, but none of them worked.
Adonis screamed.
He hammered at the Keyboard in a rage, eventually slamming his fist down on it. He smacked the lid and hit the instrument all over, eventually letting out a shriek before he slumped in place, exhausted.
“I don’t have one…,” he said emotionlessly. “I could never have a reason to go on a journey…”
His dry voice echoed loudly through the room. The ten dead moved slowly, closing the ring around him, raising their hands, inviting him somewhere. In their other hands they cradled their masks, as if they were the reason for their existence.
“…Once, there was a man in the same position as yourself who spectacularly opened the Key. His name was Sian Lablac. A man you know. You must either take after him or choose to remain in the country and someday reside in this castle. The decision is your own.”
The king made it sound like it was a choice. But in the end, he was just providing Adonis with a platform so he could stand on the brink and leap off into the abyss of despair.
“And when the time comes that you realize that you will never play the Key, you may swear to become the foundation of this country, Skeptic. This is where your eternal peace shall…”
The king’s voice suddenly trailed off. The flickering branches that formed an inexplicable appendage of the king stirred like they were being shaken by the wind.
Hmm…?
The king’s two faces contorted in alarm, and the dead blue priests stopped in their tracks. It was like an invisible wall had formed in front of them, and they slowly retreated, expanding their circle.
Still facing the Keyboard, Adonis hadn’t noticed what had happened. And then something appeared, emerging from the shadows coalescing at Adonis’s feet.
It’s not possible…
It lacked a physical mass of its own and couldn’t affect the physical world. Like a shadow, it was only cast there by something much greater, and it raised its nonexistent voice in a cry.
NNNNN…
OOOOOOWWWWW…
HHHHHHEEEEEE…
It was a rueful, phantasmagoric wail that seemed to seep deep inside a person through their ears and erode the very core of their soul.
Adonis kept his head low, mumbling to himself. Clearly, the king and the ten dead standing like wraiths were the only ones who had realized something was wrong. The dead priests were gradually being forced back by the cry, eventually reaching the point where the circle around Adonis broke and they scattered from the stage as if something was chasing them.
I see…, murmured the king, but much like the voice rising from Adonis’s shadow, it wasn’t a real voice woven from sound. So even you have found your way back here… Raising the banner of recklessness, you have come to pass judgment on Divine Tonality…
The king’s body flickered countless times. The branches stirred and wavered, and as if in response to that, the blue priests moved silently at once. Oddly enough, they were being battered back and vanishing from the stage. Some hid at the edges, while others silently stepped down and faded away, as if they were melting into the boundary between reality and illusion, or perhaps as if they weren’t real to begin with.
All the blue shadows disappeared before Adonis knew it, and silence returned. None of the priests were left sitting in the spectator seats, either. They had dispersed as if it had all been a dream.
“I don’t have a reason left… Not a one.”
As Adonis continued muttering, the king looked at him for one long moment. He eventually lost interest, though, and his body suddenly shrank, flickering as he slowly returned to the God Tree.
When he was left alone with the silent instrument, Adonis’s half-crazed, haggard form was finally granted stillness once more.