Whooooosh!!
A fierce wind, accompanied by the now quite familiar scenery of the open sky, swept past and struck my earlobes.
Leaving behind our eventful encounter with the devil, we set off for the Holy Capital on the celestial horse as dawn began to break.
Looking down from the vast sky at the narrow forest path that would have taken days on foot, I said,
“…The people in the caravan looked strangely relieved when we left.”
I opened the conversation like that to the mage sitting in front of me, lost in thought, while shading my eyes with one hand from the hot sunlight spread over the earth.
All the while feeling the presence of the grimoire tucked inside my clothes.
“Even though we solved the problem for them, it felt like they couldn’t quite hide the fact that they wanted us gone as quickly as possible. As if they were frightened of us, you could say.”
“I’m used to being treated that way. A mage is someone who resolves matters related to mystery, but at the same time, we are also beings who draw mystery toward us.”
As if the things we had gone through were utterly familiar to her, the mage looked back at me with an expression devoid of much emotion and spoke.
“Even so, the caravan we met this time was made up of rather amicable people. In most cases, the moment ordinary people hear that a devil appeared, they recoil in horror and try to shut us out.”
“…I see.”
“Well, I can understand their position, too. The devils they’ve heard of all their lives are beings that only appear in the absurd tales told by the Church, and now one has appeared in reality. How frightening must that be?”
Frightening, huh.
Certainly, in my past life, if someone said a devil had appeared, people would probably shove their phones at it first to post it on SNS. But in this fantasy world, everyone was cautious, and they weren’t suffering from a chronic lack of dopamine like modern people were.
Even our fief’s people, when they encountered something strange or bizarre, usually pretended not to see it or quickly left the place.
“In a way, it feels like we caused harm to that caravan. If we hadn’t been there, the people in the caravan wouldn’t have needed to tremble in fear because a devil appeared, right?”
“Who knows. Whether we’re there or not, if you’re human, you’re bound to encounter mystical creatures or mystical disasters. For example, in the case of those mystical creatures I caught, the clone rats, if they hadn’t met me, the grain that caravan had contracted to deliver would have been reduced to less than half. Everything has possibilities on both sides.”
“…For something like that, I don’t think I ever saw any mystical disasters or creatures in my fief.”
When I spoke cautiously while searching through my memories, the mage looked down at me with an incredulous gaze and said one word.
“Fairies.”
“Ah.”
“Do you even know why you were conscripted into Academia in the first place? It was because you were born with fairy blood, wasn’t it? On the other side of the Haidin Mountains, where your fief is located, there exists the Great Forest, a mass of mystery that does not permit human footsteps. And you say you’ve never experienced anything?”
“That’s right, wasn’t it? Right.”
I had heard about fairies so familiarly since the beginning of my second life that, for a moment, I had mistakenly thought fairies weren’t mystical creatures.
Indeed, fairies couldn’t be found anywhere else but our fief, could they?
Come to think of it, that enormous bear Father beat to death long ago must have been a mystical creature too.
“Since we’re on the subject, have you ever seen a fairy?”
“Pardon? All of a sudden?”
“To be honest… I was curious from the moment we first met. The reason your fief has farmland whose fertility never declines is also because it borders the fairies’ Great Forest, isn’t it? And your ancestor was a person called the Child of Fairies.”
“Ah… well, that’s true.”
The name of our family, Prah, was derived from something like the Gate of Fairies, so it wasn’t strange for outsiders to misunderstand things that way.
The standard misconception of asking whether I had perhaps seen a fairy since we lived near the Great Forest.
“I’ve only heard stories myself, and I don’t remember ever seeing a fairy in person. To begin with, I wonder if anyone in our fief besides Father has even seen the tip of a fairy’s foot.”
“By your father, you mean the head of the Prah family?”
“Yes. It’s a fairly famous story.”
As we entered the shadow cast by a massive cloud and the sunlight was blocked, I felt our surroundings darken slightly. Then I slowly began to speak.
“When Father was young, there was a time when he was wounded and isolated all alone.”
This was a story I had heard from our family’s old butler when I was young.
On a quiet night when only tranquil moonlight poured in through the window.
Back when my younger sister was still an infant who could not yet speak, and I was trying to sleep alone and lonely in the old castle, the butler came to me and told me this story.
“One night, so bright it seemed the moonlight itself was shattering, Father collapsed in a corner of the forest, covered in blood.”
At the time, Father was young, and they say he had an excess of the vigor unique to youth.
Unlike his current image as a seasoned lord, back then he was full of passion and always threw himself energetically into everything.
That day as well, while searching for a missing resident of the fief in the forest, he lost his footing in the deep woods far from any path, tumbled down a cliff, and was left wandering on the brink of death.
“As you know, Miss Bell, it is a noble’s duty to take responsibility for the safety of the people of their fief. Father is the kind of person who takes such duties and responsibilities extremely seriously, so he tried to find the missing person until the very end, and in the end he overdid it.”
When Father suddenly disappeared, the retainers around him quickly searched the place where he had vanished, but they said it was extremely difficult to find him in a dark forest where moonlight was the only illumination.
In particular, searching for a missing lord by leaving the usual patrol route and combing through untrimmed, dense undergrowth was nearly impossible.
The butler said that, in their hearts, they wanted to set fire to the brush and clear the area, but they kept the thought bottled up inside for fear of offending the fairies.
“And as Father lay there isolated, unable to receive help from anyone, slowly dying, they say a fairy appeared beside him.”
Beside Father, who was biting his tongue in an effort not to lose consciousness as he bled, a beautiful woman who seemed not of this world looked down at him with curious eyes.
She wore clothes made of leaves and a flower crown made of petals upon her head, and her skin reflected the moonlight, shining pure white.
She was barefoot, but her smooth feet bore not a single scratch despite the rough forest, and her white hands, adorned with bracelets carved from jewels, were delicate and free of even the slightest callus, like slender jade.
“…Judging from your description, you remember it in great detail?”
“Well, I told you it’s a famous story. Father brought up the story of meeting the fairy to his retainers every year, saying he had never seen such a beautiful woman in his entire life.”
“Hmmm. Somehow that annoys me. Humans put in so much effort to cultivate their appearance, but fairies get to live their whole lives with looks like that simply because they were born fairies?”
“Well, they’re not human.”
“…That’s true. Sorry for interrupting. Go on.”
Ahem!
I swallowed, cleared my throat, and continued the story.
The fairy carefully approached Father, who was covered in blood, and Father, in his dazed state from blood loss, uttered just one sentence.
Please marry me.
“No, wait! Isn’t that where he should have asked her to save him first?!”
“She was a stunning beauty unlike any he had ever seen in his life. He said he wanted to confess before he died.”
“Well, really! Men. A pretty woman comes before death, is that it?”
“Ha ha.”
“…Why are you giving me an old man’s smile instead of denying what I said?”
In any case, upon hearing Father’s words, the fairy laughed at his abrupt remark and reached out toward him.
Then she placed her hand on Father’s chest as his consciousness was fading and recited a spell.
At that moment, a gentle light wrapped around Father like a cocoon and healed his wounds.
According to Father, when the fairy’s touch reached his chest, it felt as though the moonlight pouring down from the moon hanging in the sky descended like a spiderweb, binding his wounds and healing them.
And his hazy mind also cleared in an instant, as though someone had poured cold water over his head. Immediately after, the cocoon made of moonlight shattered into pieces and vanished.
“When he opened his eyes, the fairy who had healed him was gone, and the resident he had entered the forest to find was sleeping nearby, leaning against a tree.”
Father hoisted the sleeping resident onto his shoulder, gently touched the pure white flower that had bloomed where the fairy had stood, and then immediately returned to the retainers who were searching for him.
They say the moment he met the fairy was very brief, but even now that he has grown older, it remains a memory he remembers vividly.
“Because of that story, our fief came to believe even more strongly in the existence of fairies, and we became careful about clearing the forest or expanding farmland. Even the butler, who is sincere about the development of the fief, refused when I suggested bringing in automatons, saying the fairies probably wouldn’t like it. Well, that’s the only story I know about fairies.”
After hearing the story about fairies from the butler, I wondered if I too might have such a fateful encounter like Father did, and I went into the deep forest a couple of times. But naturally, I never met one.
It was truly a shame.
I wanted to see a breathtaking beauty, one whose beauty could make a dying man’s eyes fly open.
I’m a man too, after all.