“Oh, is that braille?”
“It is! I’m surprised you know about it.”
“I know it exists, anyway. This is my first time seeing it in person. I definitely can’t read it.”
“Hee hee! You’re a little mysterious, Koh.”
“I am?”
“From what I understand, braille’s incredibly rare! My brother’s the one who learned that there’s a form of writing that lets people like me read stories on their own, but there was no hope of finding a book written in braille anywhere near here. He had to ask the local peddler to keep an eye out for them in his travels.” She ran her finger across the first page. I could imagine the book’s story flowing into her mind with that single motion.
“To me, these books are the world.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve never been able to see. Not the beautiful flowers, not the clouds that float up in the blue sky, and not people... My brother and Lyra talk about the boar you caught sometimes, but I couldn’t see that either. But books are different... Their worlds are made up of words alone. I can enjoy them, just like a normal person. So, for me...”
Rei paused and smiled sadly, her words seemingly caught up inside her. Seeing her make that expression brought about yet another feeling I couldn’t quite explain—a painful, aching sensation somewhere within my chest.
“This story’s about a perfectly ordinary girl who falls in love with a valiant knight.” Rei began to speak once more. Maybe my silence made her feel uncomfortable. The content of the book was more or less exactly what I’d imagined, judging by the illustration on the cover. But Rei, of course, couldn’t see it.
“The girl thought of the village she grew up in as a cage, and herself as a bird trapped inside it. Ever since she was born, she saw the exact same sights, day after day, year after year. One day, the knight appeared before her by pure coincidence and took her with him into the outside world. That was how the previous volume went. This one’s supposed to continue the story and tell the tale of the adventures they have in the world he opened up for her.”
“You must be really excited to read about them.”
“I am! But, it also makes me feel wistful... That’s not a feeling I’ll ever be able to experience for myself.”
“Rei...” She hardly needed to say how it made her feel. Her tone of voice and her pained, almost tearful expression as she clutched the book to her chest made it all too clear. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her.
Rei was a lovely girl. She was bright, cheerful, kind, and considerate to a fault...or at least that’s what Balrog repeatedly told me. In all honesty, I didn’t really have any standard by which to judge that sort of thing myself. That said, I also didn’t have any reason to disagree with him.
I wanted her to be happy. I’d barely spent any time with her at all, and yet I felt exactly the same as Balrog and Lyra. For all we knew, maybe a day would come when a dashing knight would arrive in the village and escort her into the outside world. Something about her made it feel possible. Surely that sort of happiness was waiting for her, someday in the future...
“Hey, Rei? Do you want to go out and explore the outside world with me one day?”
“Huh...?”
“Your world might still be pitch black, even after you leave this village, but... That’s why I’ll be there with you—I’ll see everything in your place, and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll be your eyes.”
“You’ll be...my eyes...?” Frankly, my mouth was moving faster than my mind was. I only realized what I’d said after it had already popped out, and part of me had to wonder what on earth I was thinking.
I’d always thought that all I was capable of was swinging a sword and slaying my foes, nothing more, nothing less. But I hadn’t so much as touched a sword since I arrived in the village. There was more to my life there than manual labor—I had Rei, Balrog, and Lyra there with me. I didn’t need a special reason or excuse to spend time with them. I could live for something other than killing.
And if I didn’t have to live for war, I wanted to live for the sake of the girl who taught me that I could be more. Even if I did have to take up my sword and return to the battlefield someday, the fighting couldn’t last forever. And when it was over...
“I want to stay with you, Rei. You and everyone else.” I crouched down in front of her and took her hand in mine. The book she’d been holding plopped down on her lap, but she hardly seemed to notice. Even with her eyes closed, it felt like she was looking at me in stunned silence.
“What do you mean, ‘everyone else’? I think you just made my heart skip a beat!” She sounded a bit pouty, but her smile told a different story.
“M-My bad.”
“But it’s just like you to say it like that... It really did set my heart aflutter.” Rei stood up from her wheelchair just a bit too quickly. With nothing to support her, she teetered forward, almost losing her balance, but I caught her before she could fall.
“When I said that I can’t see anything...I might’ve been lying, just a little.”
“Lying?”
“I can’t explain how, Koh, but I just...see you, somehow. Even if I don’t know what you look like, I know that you’re here for me. I can feel your warmth.” She leaned forward, resting her face upon my chest. Her voice quivered as she poured her heart out, stringing her feelings together as carefully as she could, word by word. As each word seeped into me, they grew, kindling a warmth I could feel spreading throughout my very being.
“Koh, you’re my light.”
Me? Her “light”...?
“I love you, Koh.”
“Huh?”
“Even if I’ve only known you for a month, even if we’ve barely had any time to talk...I still love you.”
I knew what she meant. The love she spoke of was the same “love” depicted in the book she’d left resting atop her wheelchair.
I didn’t understand “love.” I knew that there are all sorts of forms of love—love for your friends, romantic love, familial love...too many to count, and I couldn’t for the life of me explain what the differences between all of them were. I was born without that intuitive understanding.
That’s why I didn’t know whether I could live up to the “love” that Rei had conveyed to me. The right words just wouldn’t come to me, and the very few that did stuck in my throat. I couldn’t spit them out.
But even so, the seeds that had been sown in my heart since I arrived in the village were beginning to sprout. They were growing, slowly but surely, and I was growing right along with them. Gradually, they were teaching me what it means to be human.
Before I realized what I was doing, I’d embraced her. Whether that was a deep-seated fragment of knowledge or reflex left over from the me who’d been erased, or an impulse prompted by whatever was growing inside me, I couldn’t say. And in that moment, I didn’t need to know. I knew I’d understand someday. As long as I could be with Balrog and Lyra... As long as I could be with Rei... I knew I would come to realize what the emotions budding within me were called.
I was sure of it.