My hometown was the city of the dead, not these woods. I was only a passerby, and had no obligation to do anything with regard to this area. The societal problems of an entire region weren’t going to be fixed overnight by the efforts of just one person, so I had the option of just dealing with the immediate problem in front of me and only getting as involved as my oath required.
From the look of things so far, I seemed to qualify as a pretty strong warrior even in the outside world, and I also had my powers of magic, my god’s protection, and a good amount of wealth. If I wanted to live in peace somewhere inconspicuous, I could probably accomplish that surprisingly easily. I just had to find some city that wouldn’t make too much of a fuss about my origin, blend in, and I was sure it would work out.
However...
“As you travel—”
“Prithee, bring light to the faraway darkness.”
If that was my god’s wish, then I had to lend her an ear. I owed her a debt too great to ever repay.
That said—
“What should I do...?”
The heart of the problem wasn’t the demons or beasts. It was the compounded societal issues of poverty and disorder that surrounded them. I could defeat the demons and beasts with a sword or a spear, but societal problems couldn’t be cut down with a demonblade. As I thought about what to do, I prayed, purified, lifted, and carried, over and over.
A few days later, the villagers returned to the besieged village. It was scorched all over, and many of the buildings had collapsed. When they saw the state of it with fresh eyes, they looked to be in shock.
Together, we scraped together the remaining farm tools, dug some holes, and held a simple funeral service to mourn the dead.
Everyone took turns piling a little bit of earth on top of the bodies lying in the graves. To make it feel like a legitimate funeral, I spoke some passages from scripture I had once been taught by Gus and Mary as I watched the villagers work. However, I wasn’t following any prescribed form; I was really only borrowing from what others had told me to make it “sound right.” It looked like I’d need to make contact with a priest belonging to a proper organization somewhere and learn from them.
After the funeral had started to wrap up, I decided to raise a question.
“So, umm... What are you all going to do now?”
There looked to be enough surviving houses that if the survivors all lived together it would work out; however, many of the fields had been rendered useless. If they couldn’t eat, if the only route available to them was going to be pillaging, then in the worst case, I was thinking I might be forced to give them money and have them spread out to neighboring villages...
“Hahaha! Well, you just watch.” The villagers laughed off my serious expression. They beckoned me over to a barn, where they started digging up the dirt. Straw bags and pots filled with grain came out one after the other.
“Ohh...” I said.
“You see, robberies and burnings ain’t anything special around these parts.”
“Yes,” another villager said. “If you can get back, you can get by. That’s if, mind you.”
“You’re very generous, but we ain’t planning on taking advantage of you, Father. We can cope, don’t you worry.”
Some people who had disappeared into the woods surrounding the village also started to come back with food and other supplies. God knows where they’d hidden those. It looked like these people had no intention of allowing themselves to be beaten so easily. Maybe the people here were cursed to become desperate muggers time and time again, but it was that very aspect that had also fostered the villagers’ toughness and strength of character.
“Well, this is a great relief.” At the very least, it looked like I’d been more than a bit of a busybody to think I needed to watch over the whole affair from beginning to end. It was just that the demons and the beasts together had been a little too much for just one settlement to handle on this one occasion. They could handle themselves without me, in their own way.
In which case, what I should have been thinking about wasn’t how to completely take care of them throughout the whole process, but merely how to contribute. And that was a good question...
Fires were being stoked, and I heard the lively voices of the women starting their cooking. Evidently there was going to be a bit of a feast tonight, to celebrate their homecoming and to mourn those who had died.
“Father, we owe you a debt of gratitude for giving us back our village.”
“We’d be more than happy for you to join us.”
“I’d be glad to,” I said, nodding—and then suddenly, I noticed. “Huh?”
At some point, Menel had disappeared.
I told the people preparing for the feast where I was going, and went to search for Menel. He seemed to have left his stuff here, so it was unlikely that he’d gone far.
I couldn’t see fairies, but sorcerer’s theory stated that all things in the world were made from the Words. Reading the difficult-to-interpret Words and Signs that represented the trees and soil, I walked through the woods, somehow managing to follow his trail.
I took in the smell of the dry winter forest. Some of the trees around me were bare like weather-beaten skeletons, while others were deep verdant evergreens. The sky was glowing red in the west; the sun was well on its way to setting. Cold wind was whistling through the trees. It was beginning to get pretty dark.
“Lumen.” I made Pale Moon’s blade glow softly.
It wasn’t a good idea to act carelessly. There had only just been an attack by demons and beasts. They could jump at me from anywhere. I had no intention of dropping my guard.
Remaining alert to my surroundings, I walked step by step through the woods, and as I did so, I thought about Menel.
Was he okay? I wondered. Parting with Marple must have hit him pretty hard. Putting myself in his position, I thought it was probably like if I had lost Blood or Mary in a sudden incident.
Expressing it that way gave me a new appreciation for how hard this had to be for him. I couldn’t imagine that someone like me, who Menel had only met a few days ago, would be able to do anything for him in a time like that. Perhaps what he really needed was some time alone to think things over, and what I was doing was just unwanted meddling. But even so...
— Could I ask you to take care of this silly boy?
I had certainly been asked, so I probably had a duty to at least keep an eye on him. If he said I wasn’t wanted, then I would just have to turn around and leave dejected. After all, until just a few days ago, I’d been a sheltered boy who had never seen another living human in his life. I had zero experience points in social interaction, so when I’d set out into the world, I’d been prepared from the beginning for everything to go south.
As I walked along confidently thinking that if I made a fool of myself I could simply cringe about it later, I arrived at a bit of an upwards slope. I could see what was left of perhaps a stone wall running across it.
A phosphorescent fairy danced lightly across my vision. I followed the momentary blinking with my eyes, and when I looked up I saw, almost entirely hidden by trees, the remains of a small and time-worn building that might have been an ancient watchtower.
Built on a small hill which could be used as a vantage point, the structure had since collapsed, leaving only the base behind, around which fairies were blinking like fireflies. As if they were concerned about someone, they were whispering to each other while stealing glances inside.