"That's oddly unfitting..."
"Right?!"
They both got a laugh out of the dark, strolling as sturdily as ever.
"Have you ever questioned why the world threw stones at you?"
"For a long time, I did. But I couldn't find an answer. Eventually I settled with the conclusion that it's simply how the world is. They pick someone to blame all of their troubles on, so they can feel unburdened."
"But provided Lucian did have a reason, a reason that doesn't stem from malice or hatred, do you think you could ever forgive him?"
To that question Elwin looked away, his face shrouding in the dark, footsteps echoing through the lost city.
"I don't know, and that's why I am afraid. From what I've done to him, how I lunged at him back then and hurt Robert and Daphne... I know I am perfectly capable of falling to the same low, to that abyssal trench. That was when I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was. Perhaps deep down, I could do things as wicked as Lucian could."
Mirai's eyebrows furled into commensurate sadness.
"Though Professor Aionia pulled me out of that tunnel, I'm afraid that I can't stay my Quan if given the chance for revenge. It will leave me with blood upon my hands, no matter how sweet the vengeance for my childhood lost, my happiness lost, of my mother having to see me come home beaten and bruised every week...!"
He stopped, mustering moisture to soothe his parched throat.
He began his pace once more.
"But at the same time, I can't help but think that the rhetoric around bullying is crassly unjust – I mean, unfair." Professor Aionia's warm yet stern expression materialized in his imagination.
"What rhetoric is that?" asked Mirai, fully aware of the answer she would receive.
"That teachers and schools always tell you to forgive without cause, to be the greater human, to be magnanimous... I understand it, because every man seeking revenge for every wrong done will create nothing but misery. Yet it is so easy, so easy for them to say 'to forgive without cause,' without having been at the terrible end of the stick... if they were, they wouldn't be able to say such a thing."
Mirai looked forward, continuing on. She had faced it too.
"Instead of tackling Lucian, or telling him to stop, all my teachers turned a blind eye. When I asked them why, they told me it's just what we as kids do, and when I complained to the principal, he gave me a talk-down on why it was my responsibility to forgive. And the FOUNDERS forbid if I ever fought back against Lucian to defend my father... they would let him off easy, while I had to write more than just lines."
Elwin was gripping his robe so tight that his fist had gone white. Mirai rested her hand on his; he gradually began to relax it until warmth returned.
"Who is right? Who is wrong? What is right? What is wrong? Who are the people that decide those things? What am I to do without any knowledge?"
"I think I have a clue," suggested Mirai.
"Hmm?"
"I think I know the reason why Lucian despises you so much."
"Let me listen," replied Elwin, wanting to hear a share of wisdom from his friend who knew he was good.
"I think Lucian is envious of you. Lucian is envious because you, Elwin, are a goal he can never reach, the image of what he could have been and who he could become."
Elwin trudged on, his ears intent. Mirai continued.
"Do you remember back in the mid-year exam, when you managed to perform the Dance of the Sparks, and blew everyone's expectations out of the water?"
"Yeah."
"Didn't everything go downhill from there, especially with Lucian?"
A knowing expression came over his face. Yes, that was true. After his disastrous first duel with Lucian, Lucian didn't bother him in the slightest, having thought him defeated. But right after that fateful class, when he finally manifested the powers he'd practiced with Professor Aionia, Lucian was...
"Ever since you got better at the Mahamastra, Lucian was eager to prove you wrong to everyone. All of his lies became so much more venomous, didn't it? I know it because rumors of you went throughout the school, things which weren't even remotely correct. The gossips that the boys and girls would chatter over the Dining Hall enraged all three of us, but when we tried to prove them wrong, they simply pointed to the fact that you threw the first swing at Lucian in the Dining Hall and had your Quan taken away, even though it was him that goaded you."
Elwin held up his hand. "But Lucian was and still is, in many ways, superior to me in all Four Mahamastra. What more of a thing can he want from me?"
"Perhaps who you are, Elwin, and not only the skills you have."
Professor Aionia had told him something of a similar melody once. But a memory of Robert and Daphne's bandaged bodies interrupted his mind.
Elwin lowered his head.
"Do I deserve such a praise?"
"Of course! You carved a path of your own like water does across the canyons... you stood in the face of Ursus when none of us could," Mirai assured, stopping him. "More than that, you made Ursus your friend, which is not something the Mahamastra alone could do. Isaac and I could only lie there on the sand, half-conscious, afraid that you would be pummeled to death, or you would find a way to kill him, both of which would have robbed you of yourself."
Mirai's assessment was like a melody he'd never heard.
"So Elwin, wouldn't Lucian be envious of you? Knowing that no matter what he does, he couldn't possibly follow you now in that regard? Isn't that why he is so angry to prove you wrong, to goad you into your base state so that he can show to the world that you are just as low and callous as himself?"
Elwin could not bring himself to speak. Mirai's eyes were true; it pierced his soul, and Lucian's.
"But I wasn't good before."
"You always were, Elwin," Mirai declared, pulling out the sleeve of Elwin's jacket from the sack. "You reached out to me when no one would on that skycraft, and offered your friendship. You fought to defend the writings in my poem-book when others made a mockery of it. What does it spell other than goodness of heart?"
In his doubt he had been blinded as to who he had been all along; perhaps he'd never been as despicable as Lucian. He would never go out of his way to hurt anyone, even if they inconvenienced him; he wanted to help everyone if possible. Toto would agree with Mirai. And therein all of Lucian's schemes seemed to surface to his understanding. Or at least, it was an understanding that was comfortable to him, because if Lucian hated him not for the reason that Mirai had surmised, then Elwin wasn't sure how he could defend himself from the truth. But for now, Elwin chose to believe, and the thought made tears pool in his eyes.
He surreptitiously wiped them away.
Mirai continued.
"The world can't demand that you forgive Lucian, because forgiveness is a thing that only you possess the right to make. But provided you have the chance for revenge against forgiveness..."
She turned to him, her eyes glistening with scars of time, "I ask you to make the right choice as to who you want to become."
Elwin hugged Mirai, and for a long time. When they finally parted, dried tears were upon his face, too obvious to hide. He made no effort to wipe it away.
"Thank you."
He continued gently, "when I saw you on the skycraft, when I saw your eyes, I saw the same scars of time etched into them. They were as deep as my mother's. Do you see the same in mine?"
"...Yes. For you to have suffered like that, but to carry a heart of gold... that's when I knew I didn't have to face Aeternitas alone."
"Yeah, getting to the fact... uhm, ever since your poem-book, I've had dreams where I was a young girl with hair like yours, and I was dressed in black. I saw a lone man in the middle of a courtroom rotunda, and each time I would awake with a scream; a plea that I and the man in it were innocent."
Mirai continued forward, listening intently.
Elwin stopped his pace, letting Mirai trail in front of him.
"Only a person who'd gone through similar things as I did would understand what and how I feel. Was I you, Mirai? Are you also afraid? Have you also been exhausted?"
Shadows undulated about their beings as Elwin awaited.
Then Mirai gave her answer.
"Yes, that girl in the dream was me." She turned to face him, surprise evident. "How did you know?"
"Did a terrible fate befall your family to have them brand you as traitors?"
She replied, her expression wistful. "Do you wish to know?"
Elwin nodded. "I'll always be on your side, no matter what. You can tell me anything."
"Alright."
And so Mirai finally revealed to Elwin her past, of her family's legacy as Quanmasters, how the Quan for the Chancellor was sabotaged, and upon his death they were deemed traitors to Heian, soon to die.
"They drove your family to the death penalty?! After all the Hinozawa line had done for Heian?" Elwin exclaimed in his whisper, so as not to disturb the spirits nearby.
Mirai affirmed wordlessly. "That's when I saw something that horrified me."
"What was it?"
"On the day before the sentencing, my brothers and I were huddling in the waiting room, afraid. Then out of nowhere and everywhere, a beautiful hand emerged and called out my name, inquiring as to why I wept."
"At first I thought it was one of the FOUNDERS, perhaps TERA, or MANASURA, because I prayed to them since I was little, and his voice sounded eternal and divine like one of the Five, or at least, one of the MAHANIR. But the words which came into my head promised me that by pledging myself to him, I could – I could exact whatever revenge I wanted on the people who drove us to death."
Sweat was glistening on Mirai's hair. Elwin craned his ears without a word.
"I nearly considered taking it. I asked him about the cost to this power, but he could give no answer. And that's when I realized he wasn't speaking the truth. I realized he would make me do things that I didn't want. And as soon as I rejected him –"
A sharp noise tumbled from the great darkness ahead of them, reverberating off the walls and pillars. They both jumped and held each other in fright.
And out emerged a rat in the light, having knocked over a ruined column by accident. It ruffled its whiskers and scurried on its merry way. They both let out sighs of relief.
"As soon as I said no, his hands turned fuligin and skeletal, and they wrung my neck. His words echoed like truth in my head, that the FOUNDERS were false and he was the true divinity, the MAHA of all MAHANIR; I held and held onto my being, and in the end, I escaped from his grip. But not without cost."
"What cost?"
"He told me that when the time comes, I will look for him once again. And from that day since, I've promised never to call for his power."
Elwin rested his hand upon her shoulder. It was a burden no one should have had to bear.
Mirai continued.
"It's a strange thing, to know you're going to die... in the face of death, reason and morality sound like such little squeaks. But I didn't want to lose who I was, even if it meant I would die... so I refused his will, and I refuse him still. I will never fall to that accursed divinity as long as I live."
"What happened to your family at the sentencing?"
"Professor Aionia saved us. I do not know how, but it looked like she mustered the best defense the Republics had to offer on that day. And so we were spared from capital punishment. In her face I saw hope, hope in my darkest moments – and that's why I chose her as my Tanaar. She is who I want to become, someone who lights the way forward through the dark tunnel as does a shining torch," Mirai confided, brightening the flame upon her hand to light up the chamber.
"Although I've not gone through your harrowing trials," Elwin added, "Professor Aionia helped me along, too."
"Do you want to be like her?"
Elwin nodded. "Yeah. The very same."
They exchanged smiles, knowing each other's hearts properly for the first time.
They continued to stroll through that darkly lit maze of corridors and halls, the compass needle facing south.