The Faraway Paladin, volume 1: The Boy in the City of the Dead.
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Prologue.
My memories of death were indistinct and muddy. I had spent most of my days in a dim room. I had screwed up. Somewhere, I had screwed something up. It had become almost impossible for me to leave the house.
My family’s interactions with me were tepid. They did not scold, nor did they lament. They simply gave me vague smiles and troubled looks. They offered me platitudes, and treated me as if everything were normal. It may have been kindness, or perhaps that was all they knew how to do. But whatever it was, to me, it was poison.
Before long, a sense of restlessness burned me from the inside. Just when it had risen to the point that I wanted to tear myself open and rip it out… My home and my room, which provided me just slightly more comfort than discomfort; the fear and distress the outside world inspired in me; and my tolerant family, who remained forever kind—together, they made me hesitate to take that single step forward.
I might have been able to start over… the day after screwing up, or the day after that. Even a week, a month, a year, a decade after. If I had just taken that step, something might have changed. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I lacked the courage to take that single step. It was like something I needed, something that would give me a push, was missing. Or maybe that was just my excuse. Every moment of inaction gave me another reason to give up.
“It’s too late.”
“What’s gone is gone.”
“I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“They’ll just laugh at me if I start now.”
The restlessness built up within me, but everything seemed like too much effort. I wanted to take
action, but was too terrified to take it. I wanted to do something, but had no idea what to do. Life was suffering, and yet, I lacked the passion one needed to die.
I ate the food that was given to me, consumed cheap entertainment, and lived by inertia. I was like water that had gone stagnant. Afraid of failure, I averted my eyes from my approaching doom and gave myself over to folly, half-aware of the decision I had made.
The reason why my memories of death were so unclear—It was surely because my life itself had been so hopelessly muddied and indistinct. A dim room. A life where day and night are inverted. The light of a monitor. The clacking of a keyboard. Fragmentary and chaotic, the memories came and went.
And… This memory, which was slightly clearer than the others. The sound of a motor. A handcart trundled by, carrying a white coffin. A cold, mechanical sound accompanied the slow, inexorable closing of the incinerator door. It was one of the few vivid images left in my hazy memory: the deaths of my parents. I wondered, had I shed tears as I stood there, with my parents reduced to bone fragments and ash? All of it was shrouded by fog. There was one thing from that memory I could understand. That event had come far too late to be my stepping stone. The days blurred again. At some point, they had come to an end. My memories of my death were indistinct and muddy. It must have been because my life itself had been so hopelessly indistinct and muddy. Memories came and went. Pain tore at my heart from the inside. Tears spilled. I let out a groan. Soon, the pain silenced even that.
All faded to black
And at my last gasp, I thought I saw a faint flame.
◆
“Wah…”
I awoke from my indistinct and muddy memories.
I made out a gloomy ceiling… and from the shadows, a skull loomed before me. Blue will-o’-the-wisps inhabited its vacant eye sockets. Jawbone clattering, the skeleton slowly stretched a hand toward me.
I screamed involuntarily. The sound that emerged from me seemed unnaturally high-pitched.
Like a young child’s, I thought. With a start, I realized that my voice wasn’t the only thing that felt out of place. The arm I had instinctively moved before me was curiously small and short. It was pudgy, short, and small, in fact. It was an arm that belonged to an infant.
Skull! Forget the arm! Focus on the skull! And where was I? What had happened?
My panicked thoughts bounded from place to place, refusing to settle. I decided to try to calm down for the moment. I wanted to remain cool and rationally observe the situation—
“■■■■…”
And then the skeleton traced a bony fingertip across my skin.
“Waaaahhhh?!” A part of my brain began to curse at me. We’re in a situation like this, and you expect me to stay calm?! I flailed about in an attempt to escape.
It was an ambulatory skeleton. A monster. An aberration. A thing not of this world.
A sudden encounter with this thing would have terrified anyone. I was no different.
And on top of all that, I seemed to be a lot smaller and younger than I remembered. My memories were vague, but I thought I could remember being lanky and a bit on the tall side. However, my memories didn’t match up with my current anatomy whatsoever. Imagine yourself, as an adult, sitting on a tricycle you played with as a small child. It felt like that, but taken to an extreme.
“■■■■…”
Seemingly at a loss for anything else to do with me, the skeleton pressed me against its breast with one arm, then began to rock me rhythmically back and forth. No matter how much I struggled in its arms, it kept on rocking me, its persistence unremitting.
“Ah…” At last, I realized. The skeleton’s clumsy swaying was fundamentally kind.
It was a rough ride. The skeleton appeared to have little experience with this sort of thing, and its bony arms were far from comfortable. Still, it didn’t seem to be contemplating, say, the best way to go about eating me. Well, it probably wasn’t.
Of course, I did not possess observational skill sufficient to read whatever passed for a skull’s facial expressions. I couldn’t exactly be confident when it came to my opinions, and neither could I drop my guard. But it seemed to me that this skeleton was acting in a distinctly loving fashion. When I looked closely at the blue will-o’-the-wisps bobbing in its eye sockets, I felt as if they might have a friendly warmth to them. The thought calmed me down a little.
Wondering what exactly was going on, I diverted my attention from the skeleton for the time being and focused on my surroundings.
My head couldn’t move freely, but I could see several large, majestic pillars, and numerous arches. There was an oculus in the middle of the domed ceiling, through which a faint light streamed. I felt pretty confident that I was indoors, but the place seemed terribly old-fashioned and imposing. I was reminded of the Pantheon of ancient Rome, which I had once seen in photos.
But I couldn’t tell any more than that.
Something that should have been dead was moving for some reason, and I seemed to have become a lot smaller and younger. I organized what I knew in the back of my mind, but before I could embark on a search for further clues, my thoughts started to become fuzzy. Moving around had tired me out.
The skeleton was still trying, in its own awkward way, to lull me to sleep.
My body swayed slowly, now feeling as if it was being rocked by gentle waves.
I let the waves take me, and I slowly drifted off.
◆
When I woke up, a cranky old man with a hooked nose was staring at me. He was pale blue and semi-translucent. That is, I could halfway see through him. He was unmistakably a ghost.
I stifled a scream.
Then, I was being picked up. I looked up to see a woman who was all skin and bones, each as dry as the other. That is, she was a mummy.
I desperately held back a scream.
Something was looming in front of my face and peering into it. It was the skeleton I had encountered before falling asleep.
“Waaaaaaaaaaah?!” Finally, my scream escaped me. I bawled. I wailed, kicked, and struggled. But perhaps because of my body’s current state, I quickly became tired and hungry. The energy I needed to violently resist withered away.
“■■■■…?” The old ghost peered at my face, and made indistinct noises to the mummy. She produced from an unknown location a bowl containing some kind of white gruel. Scooping some of it up with a spoon, she brought it to my mouth. Which I kept firmly closed, without so much as a second thought.
I mean, it’s not like I could think of any good reasons to open it.
No one dreams of hearing “Open wide!” before they get a heaping helping of who-knows-what from a bone-dry old mummy.
What I was face-to-face with right now resembled nothing so much as the pictures of those mummified monks you’d always end up seeing in history books, who’d starved themselves to reach enlightenment. She was the ruined final state of the human form, dry as a dead tree.
Who wants to experience “say ah” with one of those? I couldn’t imagine even a single person who would. And if such a person actually did exist, I, for one, wouldn’t want to be friends with them.
Now, all that said, I was feeling desperately hungry. And there was no other obvious way of obtaining food in my present situation. My hunger for both food and sleep was irresistibly strong, probably as a result of my younger body. So I thought to myself, The hell with it! I then snapped up the whole spoonful.
It actually tasted pretty good. My memory informed me that baby food was bland, but I guess my tongue was as underdeveloped as the rest of me.
The skeleton stroked my head, as if to say, “There’s a good boy.”
“Wah…?”
At that time, I came to a surprising realization. It took something being put in my mouth before I noticed it. There were no teeth in there. No wonder my attempts to speak kept coming out kind of funny.
I see. So infants didn’t have any teeth. Well, that was news to me. If I’d had any experience with raising children, I might have been able to use that to figure out what stage of development I’d reached. Aha! No teeth, but not breast-feeding, that makes me a few months old! Something like that. But that sort of warm familial experience was nowhere to be found in my memories. I didn’t know the kind of things you’d otherwise expect of any reasonably mature adult.
There’s not much to me, I found myself thinking.
I had died having accumulated nothing more than superficial knowledge and calendar years. “Ah—”
—Of course.
I had died.
I had definitely died back then.
Despite all my muddy, hazy memories, the agony of death was still deeply imprinted upon me.
Was this confusing place, where I was surrounded by the living dead, the afterlife?
If God existed, was this His punishment?
◆
About half a year passed.
I said “about” because constantly falling asleep and waking up again makes the passage of days a little hazy. It turns out that babies really do spend a lot of time sleeping, then waking up because they got hungry. It felt like I was in a long, strange dream or vision, and so my mind was able to survive the boredom of being constantly horizontal.
About the only information I was able to gain in the meantime was that my situation was neither dream nor vision. It felt far too vivid and far too realistic. And I couldn’t imagine what would have to go wrong for a person to start having visions of having their diaper changed by a reanimated corpse.
I was forced to accept that I was an infant incapable of anything more advanced than a crawl, spending my days in the care of three undead creatures.
After some time, I began to understand their speech.
It was some linguist’s theory—their name escaped me—that a baby’s brain was not a completely blank slate, but instead possessed from birth the ability to steadily construct and learn a language from surrounding sounds. Though my memories were still vague, it seemed like I could still recall a certain amount of my old knowledge.
“Ba… Ba…” I attempted to use my tongue and throat to produce a word, but I had yet to master these organs, so it wasn’t going very well.
I couldn’t shake the way I had controlled my old body before I died. The two were clashing inside my head. The power of speech, something I had taken for granted before, was now something I struggled with. Likewise, I still couldn’t walk properly.
What if I was going to be like this forever, unable to walk or talk to my satisfaction? That fear haunted me.
“There, there. Want a hug?” Possibly sensing my anxiety, the mummy smiled, as if to reassure me.
She wore an old, threadbare robe similar to those worn by ancient priests, and the two around her called her Mary.
While I was a little hesitant to judge the beauty of a woman, not to mention a mummy, I felt that she had probably been a beautiful lady in life. She had a slender body and graceful bearing, with her eyes always averted downward. Her skin was like the bark of a dead tree, but it was unscarred. From it, I felt I could infer the flawless facial features she must have possessed as a living woman. Her wavy blonde hair had, admittedly, grown dull with the passage of time, but it was thick and gorgeous.
“Why don’t we take a little walk outside today?”
You’ll take me outside?!
“Heheh, that put a smile on your face.” She could tell. I had been curious about what existed outside of this… temple?
Yet, with this body, I could hardly just go and take a look. I had been waiting for an opportunity to be taken outside.
“Up we go!” She picked me up. I detected some kind of light, floaty fragrance. It wasn’t an unpleasant odor. Kind of woody? It reminded me of the incense-like scent you might expect from a kind old lady.
Slightly soothed, I allowed myself to enjoy the smell.
Mary carried me in her arms as she stepped slowly through the dimly lit temple.
Its floor was a checkerboard of square stones. Soft light streamed in from the ocular skylight at the top of the temple’s vast, awfully high, domed ceiling. There were alcoves in the walls, which gave the impression of a Japanese shrine, and within them were sculptures of what were presumably this temple’s gods.
One by one, they flowed past my eyes as we walked.
One depicted an imposing man with an air of gravitas, in the prime of life, bearing a sword shaped like a lightning bolt in his right hand and a set of scales in the other.
Another was a portly woman, her smile affectionate, with a baby and a bundle of ears of rice held securely in her arms.
There was a moustachioed man of short, beefy stature, with roaring flames at his back, hands gripping a hammer and tongs.
An androgynous youth smiled amiably, holding a glass of wine and a number of gold coins, and surrounded by what seemed to be pictographs representing the blowing wind.
A fine young woman clad in thin cloth was submerged up to her waist in a clear stream, holding a bow in one hand, and reaching out with her other to what might have been a fairy.
A one-eyed old man who radiated intelligence stood in front of some kind of inscription, holding a cane and an open book in his hands.
Probably the representatives of a polytheistic religious pantheon, I thought. I somehow felt that I could tell what kind of beliefs lay behind each of these gods just by looking at their statues.
But I had no idea about the next one.
There was no background. Perhaps that was meant to represent darkness? The figure wore a robe with a hood that covered its eyes. A gray and cheerless mood hung about it.
Its sole notable feature was the long stick it held, on the end of which hung a lantern. Frankly, this statue gave me the immediate impression of a god of death.
I felt strangely drawn to its lantern.
Of course, having no way of knowing the thoughts of the child in her arms, Mary carried on walking. My eyes followed the sculpture until it left my sight.
There will be other chances to see it up close, I figured. I did my best to shake off my strange obsession.
We continued onward, further and further from the eye in the ceiling, my surroundings becoming darker and darker, until I could hardly see anything. Her footsteps echoed in the darkness.
After some time, Mary stopped under an arch engraved with vines, and rested a hand against a heavy-looking iron door. As the door emitted a noisy screech, a ray of light poured through the gap, then slowly expanded. When the opening had become wide enough, Mary stepped out.
“Ah…” My field of vision opened up all at once.
A refreshing wind blew past.
It was dawn, and a thin morning mist hung in the air at the foot of the hill. A city of stone was spread out below us, built up to the edge of a vast lake. It felt medieval, or even older. I could see tall towers and an aqueduct built with a series of beautiful arches.
All of it was aged and in ruins.
Many of the buildings’ roofs had collapsed, and the plaster on the walls had fallen off, leaving the buildings in a state of pitiful disrepair. Grass grew through gaps in the streets’ stone paving, and green vines and moss clung to the buildings. The city was decaying away among the greenery, as though it were enjoying a quiet doze after all of the activity that must once have taken place here.
The morning sun shone softly over it all.
My eyes opened wide. It was a view of such magnificence, it shook the soul.
I felt like the wind had rushed right through me, from my feet to my head. The inside of my head felt amazingly clear. My whole body, every last cell of it, felt the world. I felt like I had remembered something very precious, something I had forgotten along the way.
For some reason, I felt tears welling up. I closed my lips tightly, trying to hold them back, but it made no difference. They trickled from my eyes.
I had lived a hopelessly blurred and muddied life, and I had died within that haze, never escaping it. So when I woke up in this world, I suspected it might be a punishment from God.
But this was no punishment.
I didn’t know where this was. I didn’t know what was going on.
But I was sure: this was grace. Stunning, wonderful grace. Out of the kindness of their hearts, someone had given me back what I had meaninglessly cast away. Without any evidence, I believed beyond any doubt that this was a warm and blissful gift.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it, Will? My darling little boy…” The voice was Mary’s.
William. Will for short. That was my name.
It was the name the three had given me.
My name before dying had been swallowed by the mud. Now, this was my name. This tiny body was my body. The body and name that had felt like they belonged to someone else seemed suddenly to fit, as if this was how I’d always been.
“Ah… Ah…” I tried to speak, and my voice filled with tears. I didn’t care. I forced my immature vocal cords to make noise.
I told myself… This time, I was going to do it right.
As Mary cradled me in her arms, I burned with determination. Nothing made any sense at all to me yet. I didn’t know what kind of world this was, or why I had been born here. But I had time enough to understand those things.
My knowledge was sparse and I had no skills, but I had all the time I needed to learn. I’d had enough of stagnating, of giving in and hugging my own knees. I didn’t care if I failed. I didn’t care if I bumbled. I didn’t care how much muck I’d have to wade through.
This time… This time, I was going to live. I was going to live in this world! I cried out my resolve with the wail of a newborn child.
Diamond. diamond. diamond.
