Kara no Kyoukai

Volume 2, Part IV: Chapter 10

Slowly, slowly, I slip into dream. But even in dream the question remains: The man known as Shiki no longer exists, but what did he gain, and what did he hope to protect, by disappearing as he did? In dream, Shiki Ryōgi’s memories provide the answer like a parting gift.

He died to protect a shared dream, a dream of finally finding his—our— own slice of peace. And he thought we had found it. He believed in him, in that boy.

He died for me, and for that boy, and he left me with this deep, abiding, loneliness.

Warm sunshine forces open my eyelids, and I remember now that my Eyes are no longer covered, no longer blind. It feels like I’m lying down on the bed. That mage must have put me back in my room when I fell unconscious last night, set things back to right.

Completely still, I absorb as much of the morning atmosphere as I can manage, taking in the warm yet fleeting sunlight, as if to let it wash out the darkness that possessed me last night. I feel the languor of the morning, feel it melding the dreams of my twin existence to create one fleeting life. I want so much to cry for Shiki, but I’ve decided to cry only once from now on. He represents something I’ll never be able to return to, and this isn’t the time and place for tears, and so my eyes are dry.

Besides, he would have wanted to disappear without anyone crying anyway.

“Morning, Shiki.”

I hear a voice coming from beside my bed, and when I turn my head to look toward it, there sits a familiar friend, his appearance unchanged even in the face of two years. The black, unadorned hair he keeps, and the simi- larly black-rimmed glasses: both are exactly as they were, as if he stepped out of past and into present.

“Do you…still know who I am?” he asks with marked hesitation. He didn’t need to.

Yeah, I know. You’re the one that waited, the only one that cared enough to watch over me.

“Mikiya Kokutō, right?” I respond, almost in a whisper. “Last name still sounds like some French poet to my ears.” He smiles as broadly as the day we met the second time in school. I wonder, though, if he still remembers the promise we made.

“Nice day out today. Perfect weather for getting out of the hospital, don’t you think?” Faintly, I can see the tears behind his eyes that he is so desperately trying to hold back and sound as natural as he can. It’s a touching sentiment. He chose to smile rather than to cry.

Just like Shiki chose to recognize solitude instead of becoming solitary. Though I still don’t know which of the two I should side for.

“Guess there are still things I didn’t lose,” I mutter as I look at him contentedly, the sunlight streaming in through the window behind him half-obscuring his smile. I know that such gestures aren’t enough to heal my empty heart, but still…

It was still the same smile I remember, unchanged neither by time or flawed memory.

In a room that had seen no alteration in years, in days locked in stasis, a girl shivered while she lay on top of her bed. The door had not admitted a visitor in quite some time, but today it opened for one such a man. Steps echoed in the room, there one moment, and gone the next, choosing when and if they made a sound. It was him, no doubt about it.

He stood high, with a cruel body and constantly clouded eyes that bore the weight of an eternity’s reckoning. Those grim eyes only looked at her, but still she felt the dread that passes through a prisoner when she sees her warden. The room felt emptier with him in it, and even the girl, who longed for death, had to acknowledge the deathly fear that shook her.

“You are Kirie Fujō, are you not?” His voice was ice, flowing and crashing. Though blind, Kirie Fujō attempted to look towards her visitor and ask back.

“Are you that friend of my father’s?” The man did not speak, but Kirie knew the answer all the same. This was the man who had paid for her stay here in the hospital, when Kirie’s family had all died. “What brings you here? You know I can’t do anything for you.” She tried to hold back her trembling as she spoke.

The man remained motionless, but spoke. “I have come to grant your wish. Do you desire another body, free of this prison?” Kirie heard some harmony of magic in his impossible statement, and she thought that even that absurdity could be made possible.

After a beat of silence, the girl nods her assent, throat trembling, and the man lowers his head and raises his right hand in answer. And it was here he granted her a dream and a waking nightmare. But before this moment, she put to him a question.

“What—who are you?”

He answered—

She left the abandoned underground bar behind her and started on her way. Each step was heavy, and each ragged breath brought her closer to collapse. As she progressed, she had to lean on street light posts and the walls of buildings to stop herself from falling over.

Earlier, in the bar, she had been struck in the back with a bat by one among the five that violated her with regularity. She felt no pain. Only a dull heaviness from the thought of being struck. She held a pained expression, not out of anguish but by the expectation of anguish that she thought should be present. She had planned to endure the regular humiliation and go home to her dormitory in silence. But tonight, with her mind and body sluggish and unresponsive, the way home seemed to stretch on interminably.

She passes the display window of a shop in the commercial end of town and sees how pale she has become in her reflection. Without a sense of pain, she only knows that she’s been hit in the back, and that the injury is bad. She has no idea to what extent. She walks on, not knowing her back- bone has already endured a crack.

The hospital is out of the question. Even if she went to the doctor that her parents didn’t know, he’d still ask questions, and that would blow the whole thing open. She was never good at lies. Besides, the distance to his clinic was much too far.

“What should I do?” Desperation evident in her whisper. Too tired to go further, she starts to fall towards the sidewalk—

—until a man’s arm stopped her fall.

Astonished, she looked upwards, seeing a man with hard set eyes. He asked her:

“You are Fujino Asagami, are you not?” His was a voice that brooked no refusal. It was the first time that the girl, Fujino Asagami, felt such a fear as to freeze her in place. “Your spine must be healed, elsewise you cannot move freely.” His words spoke of improbabilities, and yet brought home with clarity the reality of Fujino’s situation.

She wants it. She wants to go back to her dormitory, the only place where she had ever found peace. Her eyes are clouded with meek desperation, and they meet the man’s own. He wore a long coat despite the summer heat, and its features were a solid black. His anachronistic cloak and rigid gaze somehow brought to Fujino’s mind the image of a monk.

“Do you wish me to heal you?” he finally asks, but he phrases it more like a demand than an inquiry. Fujino didn’t even notice herself nod in assent. “Then let it be so. Your body’s defect I do now scatter.”

And it was here that his face was ever still as his right hand touched Fujino’s back lightly. But before this moment, she put to him a question.

“Who are you?”

He answered—

But before this moment, he put to him a question.

“Who…who the hell are you, man?”

The man in the black cloak remained motionless as he answered. His voice seemed then to be powered by some demiurgic force, and through him that force spoke, resounding through the alleyway with the whispering of ages.

“A mage. My name is Sōren Alaya.”