It was the day after a heavy snowfall, a very unusual event in Alimo Row.
Opening up the door, I discovered that the almshouse plaza was completely covered in white. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before; the sheer brilliance of the snowy landscape was too much for these elderly eyes.
Even now, the memories of that day are still fresh in my mind.
I woke up shortly before sunrise, but by that point, there was already a single path made in the white garden. A long, continuous path into town, shoveled out of the snow.
I've seen a great many types in my time, including gigants and dwarves, but as far I as knew, there was only one person who could manage such perseverance and strength-testing, yet honest, work. The heavy piles of snow reflected the depths of his martyrdom.
I could see the gray-skinned ogre come into view, walking into town down the road he had cleared all by himself.
Uhak. The sole family I had.
"Ah, thank you, Uhak. Were you cold?" I always spoke to Uhak.
Though, even now, I wasn't sure if that was the correct thing to do.
Coming home, he carried a white wolf pup in his arms. A tiny life, eyes closed and trembling.
"I see… You found this little one, did you? Fantastic work, Uhak. I'm sure anyone afraid of wolves will be relieved with this."
I offered admiration at the justness of his deeds and took the pup from his large palms…
…so that I could dash it against the stone steps, killing it instantly.
I remember the sight of warm blood pouring from its split skull, melting the white snow behind.
To this day, I haven't been able to get the look in Uhak's eyes out of my head.
Why was Uhak mourning it? It was something I've continued to ponder.
It should have been the obvious outcome, extinguishing the life that would surely grow to threaten the lives of others one day.
I simply did what anyone else in this world would have done, without showing an ounce of mercy.
It was just…a soulless beast, totally unlike those of us blessed with Word Arts, so why…
I met Uhak during the season when the air grew dry.
Everything must have started when I responded to the Alimo Row villagers' request for counsel during service.
"…Priest. I beg you, Cunodey the Ring Seat. We ask that you grant them the blessing of Word Arts in our stead."
"Of course, anything for the neighbors you've gathered together. Can I ask you to fill me in on the details?"
"An ogre appeared in the forest on the main road—a man-eating monster twice as tall as any human. We've gathered up the brave and willing, and tomorrow morning they're heading to put the ogre down. Mother Cunodey… May I ask you to use the power of the Order's Word Arts to ensure these precious lives are not lost?"
Of course, the priests of the Order studied Word Arts intimately to learn the miracles of the Word-Maker, who brought them the language universally understood by all—and not to instead use their power for combat or protection.
However, I couldn't expound on this to followers seeking my aid. During the age of the True Demon King, no one was able to escape from war and bloodshed, and everyone used this power, bested to live a moral life, for battle. The members of the Order were no exception.
This village, the closest to The Land of The End, where the Demon King perished, had been deeply scarred by the age of darkness. Priests fell amid the war and the Demon King's induced madness, the lively voices of the almshouse children went silent, and I alone remained as the only official priest in this small hamlet's church.
For the church followers, this poor old woman was their sole means of spiritual support, while for myself, their presence was the only light I had to tether my own faith.
"I understand. I don't know if these old bones can aid everyone like you all, or even I myself, hope to. However, if it will provide even the tiniest peace of mind, then I see no reason not to go."
"Oh, thank you… Thank you so much, Mother Cunodey."
Ogres. The largest, strongest, and scariest of all the monstrous races.
When I was little, I saw one up close just once. Within the forest where we were climbing trees to play, a large monster with dark-brown skin crossed entered our field of vision. It was filled with hunger and rage, enough to clearly tell from our spot up in the tree branches. If it happened to find us, its thick arms could've easily snapped our arboreal hiding place.
There was something dangling out of the sides of the ogre's mouth, and my friend hiding next to me whispered that maybe it was the hunter Jokza who had gone missing two days prior. I…simply watched the predator disappear deeper into the forest, dyed red in the setting sun, experiencing for the first time in my life the fear of imminent death.
It wasn't an evening sky back then. The morning sun cast its rays into the forest around the main road, with wild rabbits and deer off somewhere grazing on grass.
The hunters didn't seem to fear what awaited them, and I was surprised by their quick and nimble steps as they bounded over fallen trees and small streams.
For me, simply getting solid footing in the dirt without falling over took everything I had, and matching their quick gait was all but impossible.
"Ogres are really intelligent, you see."
One of the hunters appealed to his compatriots with words of warning.
"It might be waiting to ambush us. I've heard stories of some pouncing down on people from up in the trees."
The warning was unnecessary, as the hunters were paying close attention to the whole area around us and guarded me, their priest escort, from being exposed to any danger.
Thus, it was not I who first laid eyes on the figure, but one of the hunters. When I followed the hunter's sights, urging everyone to take notice, I spied a gray ogre sitting beneath a large tree.
The ogre seemed to be in the middle of a meal, sitting with their back to us.
While they looked somewhat smaller than the red ogre from my youth, even when seated, they were taller than anyone of us, and casually lying beside them was a well-worn wooden club.
"We'll shoot from here and use that tree as cover. A few of you go around to the other side to stop them from running behind the tree. Mother Cunodey… Can you protect us with Word Arts when it comes dashing our way?"
"…I can. But there's something a little bit strange about that ogre." "What do you mean?"
"Is that really an ogre that terrorizes people?"
An ogre that terrorized the people. Even remembering my own words, I was clearly in a terrible state of confusion. After all, the word ogre itself was synonymous with murder.
Indeed, that was why even I couldn't explain the strange feeling I had.
I should've been just as frightened of the man-eating ogre, but at that moment, for some reason, I felt that something was off.
"Wait a moment. If I could just get a little bit closer…" "Mother Cunodey! It's too dangerous; it'll see you!"
It was surely foolish of me to approach an ogre just to try confirming this uneasy feeling I had. I realized later that my conduct might've led the courageous villagers to sacrifice their lives to help me. It was shameful.
However, if I didn't follow my hunch in that moment, I might've never noticed.
He was eating nuts and berries. I didn't know ogres ate anything other than meat.
After all was said and done, I remembered getting glimpses of wild rabbits and deer upon entering the forest. The animals' behavior was not that of prey being pursued by a predator. That realization, though subconscious at the time, might've been what guided me to my hunch.
Unlike the ogre I saw in my youth, this one wasn't enveloped by the scent of blood and death. In fact, there were even rabbits coming and going from the burrow near where he sat.
"…He's already noticed us."
He was calm and quiet, and his back was stock-still, enough to believe he might've been sleeping, but I was confident in my hunch.
"The reason he hasn't harmed us is because we haven't harmed him. Please call back the ones you send around to the other side immediately."
"But Mother Cunodey… That thing's still an ogre. The monstrous races eat minia! It's been that way since the beginning of time."
"Nevertheless, it still has a soul."
The Orders said as much. That this was the reason the Word-Maker bestowed the miracle of Word Arts to the races of the world.
Thanks to this wonderful blessing, none of us were alone anymore. All creatures with a soul were a member of one big family.
Before I knew it, I had left the villagers behind and was now within arm's length of the ogre.
His extremely pale, almost white pupils stared back at me.
Frightened and bewildered by my own actions, I mustered up the best smile I could and addressed the ogre.
"Good day to you, our new neighbor. I'm a priest in the village just up the road from here. I, Cunodey the Ring Seat, w-wish to…to save you."
I wanted to save him. Though, at that moment, which one of us was really the one who needed to be saved?
There was no answer. The ogre didn't try to harm me, nor did he ignore me… He simply sat there in silence.
Even when I continued to speak, the only answer that came to me was silence and his watchful eyes.
The ogre tried reaching out his hand but immediately lowered it.
Almost as if my thoughts were reaching him, but he was unable to find the means to return them.
"It can't be… Can you…" This was Uhak.
An ogre, all alone, born into the world shouldering an entirely inconceivable disability.
"…not hear me?"
The first thing I attempted was explaining to everyone that no villagers had gone missing in the past big month, and there hadn't been any direct accounts of someone being attacked by an ogre.
It was not an easy course of events to make everyone trust a minia-eating
ogre—especially when he couldn't understand speech or offer his own defense. Though there were examples of the monstrous races mixing in with minian society, it was almost always as either blood-drenched mercenaries or assassins. Most people couldn't possibly believe an ogre was capable of living a life totally divorced from evil and maliciousness.
Nevertheless, through the doctrine that the villagers and I followed, I patiently preached that a hand of charity should be outstretched to anyone lost and in pain, regardless of their sins, and I was able to convince them to allow him to be sheltered—or in the words of the villagers, "placed under observation"
—at the almshouse.
Mysteriously, there was nothing abnormal about his sense of hearing itself, and the only thing inaudible to him was the language of Word Arts.
"Uhak. If you've lived without language all this time, then I'm going to grant you a second name right now. You shall henceforth be Uhak the Silent."
Silent. In the days of old, among a group of brothers, arrogant due to their Word Arts' abilities gifted by the Word-Maker, one of the siblings refrained from speech and was able to prevent conflict between many of the races without saying a word. His name was Melyugre the Silent. The First Party, renowned by all, including myself, also contained an individual, Fralik the Heaven, who was said to have had his throat crushed at a young age, and so he never spoke.
We had all known the essence of the Word Arts' power. That their true nature wasn't something being said, but Word Arts were used to communicate exactly what was in our thoughts.
"I'm sure. I'm sure there'll come a day when they'll accept it. Both that you can't speak and that you can't hear."
Just as his second name suggested, he didn't use the strength he was born with for conflict, but he faithfully helped me, handling the various jobs that an elderly woman like myself couldn't manage.
Even without being able to use language, it didn't take long for me to understand he was an ogre that showed no desire for futile conflict and was able to exhibit consideration for the hearts of others.
Citing sheltering Uhak as the excuse, the number of villagers who visited the church dropped drastically, but I wondered how many of the villagers knew that whenever someone would come to offer their prayers, Uhak would make sure to hide away somewhere, to keep from frightening them.
"You need to learn how to write. If you can't speak with your mouth, you need to learn a way to express your thoughts and feelings to others."
Teaching the Order's script to him, unable to convey anything with words, was a difficult task, unlike anything else I had experienced in my long life.
I started with silver coins. The characters for silver coins themselves, the characters to show how many of them to use at the market, as well as the character of silver itself and the one to express a circular shape. From the beginning, it was a very difficult journey.
Soaking tree bark in liquid ink and spreading old children's clothes, no longer in use, over a plank, I remember trying to teach him the script every day late into the night.
Speechless though he was, Uhak was neither stupid nor lazy, and he diligently focused on learning this new knowledge. The speed of his progress was marvelous, and he had worked through all the Order script I was able to teach him within the first three small months.
Somewhere along the way, the silent ogre had turned into the valuable family member I needed in my life.
Ina. Nofelt. Rivieh. Kuze. Imos. Nerka… The children—breaking windows every time they played, making a mess of the shrubbery and plantings the day after my pruning, always causing me headaches, making me laugh—were all gone.
The other priests who devoted themselves to their work in the Order with me, benevolently helping people in times of need, were also all asleep beneath the earth.
This eccentric ogre that showed up in my lonesome daily life was like a son to me in some ways, as well as a compatriot protecting the faith together with me.
Uhak was able to subsist without ever eating meat, having plain beans and nuts for every meal.
On the first day of every big month, he would go into the forest to gather just enough food for his own nourishment—no more, no less.
First thing every morning, he would finish cleaning the almshouse and the chapel, offer a wordless prayer to the Word-Maker, and bring in firewood and sheep's milk, always performing his tasks alone.
After he learned script, he'd get absorbed in the books left behind by the other priests, and whenever I used script to quiz him, he'd be able to immediately search for and produce the answer no matter which passage of the Word-Maker's teaching was in question.
"…You understand why exactly we all study the teachings of the Word-
Maker, right?"
There was one occasion where Uhak saved a child who fell from a cliff and twisted his ankle.
However, his ogre physique terrified the child, and while he lived in this church, Uhak was ultimately never able to receive the trust and gratitude he deserved.
Whenever I'd write in script to express myself to him, I would always speak to him, too. Much like how we can speak to the wind and earth, I believed that, though he might be unable to hear me, there was a definitive power held in Word Arts spoken from the heart.
Was even that truly the right thing to do? Looking back, I wasn't sure anymore.
"Priests are people who dispel curses. Sometimes we are able to clear away the shadows that sink into a person's heart through our words…through our will. That's why language is so sacred, and Word Arts are our blessing… But, Uhak. You alone...were born without the gift of language. Despite your throat and ears working just fine."
Uhak remained bowed to the ground. I'd heard that ogres were a much more delicate race than the minia took them for. Perhaps this was true for that red ogre, too. Even on that day of my childhood, perhaps there was someone, somewhere who could've saved his soul.
If only ogres could have been recognized as priests. Why, there wasn't any follower more modest and pious than he was.
"I don't know if that was Word-Maker's will or atonement for some sin. But even without any speech, you have a desire to help others. No one can ever take that away from you."
I was happy. I was always being soothed and comforted by the warmth in your heart.
That's why there wasn't any need to consider any of what you did as sinful. "Uhak. You have a soul inside you. A soul just the same as anyone else's."
No matter what terrible things the embers of the Demon King brought about on that windy day.
Even if, from that day on, I lost the meaning of my own faith. You were my precious family.