Chapitre 10: Interlude - The Headless Knight III
For as long as he could remember, he'd been able to hear the voices of his mother, brother, and others around him. They were voices that spoke without words and conveyed only kindness and affection. And that was why he thought to rely on someone he shouldn't have. That was the cause of everything that had happened.
His father passed away shortly after enlisting, and soon after, their mother left for the battlefield as well. Shin and his brother were given refuge in a church in a corner of the internment camp, where a priest took them in and raised them. The internment camp Shin was sent to was built on the remains of a village where the priest used to live.
Though an Adularia himself, the priest was greatly opposed to the Eighty-Six's internment. When the eighty-five Sectors' church refused to offer sanctuary to the Eighty-Six, the priest decided to stay alone behind the barbed wire fences of the internment camp.
He was shunned by the Eighty-Six for being an Alba but was a close friend of Shin's parents. So when the two were sent to the battlefield, the priest took their children in. If he hadn't, Shin and his brother might not have survived. There was great resentment in the internment camps toward Alba, as well as the descendants of the Empire that started the war. The two brothers, who had thick Imperial blood flowing through their veins, would have become outlets for that anger had it not been for the priest's protection.
It happened not long before Shin turned eight, on the night they received the notice that their mother had died on the battlefield. They were too far away to converse, but Shin could always feel his mother's and father's voices in the distance. But one night, their voices had vanished, and a few days later, the boys received a slip of paper telling them their parents had died.
Even though the note had informed him of their deaths, the words hardly conveyed any meaning to Shin. He had neither witnessed their final moments nor seen their remains, so the simple word death couldn't communicate the irreversible totality of this great loss to Shin's young, innocent mind.
He wasn't bereft or sad; he was just confused. Even if people told him his parents weren't coming back and that he'd never see them again, he couldn't understand why. The day she left, Mommy had smiled and patted him on the head, telling him to be a good boy and to listen to his brother and the priest. Why wouldn't she come back? Try as he might to answer that question, he couldn't.
That's why he decided to ask his brother. Rei, who was ten years older, could do anything and knew everything. He always kept him safe and cherished Shin more than anything. So he would know about this, too. Rei was standing still in his dark room, with only the moonlight to illuminate him. Shin called out to his brother, who had his tall back to the door.
"Brother…"
Rei turned to look at him sluggishly. His black eyes were red and swollen with tears and filled with grief and indignation. But in contrast to that storm of emotion was a hollow gaze Shin had never seen on his brother's face, an expression that scared him a little.
"Brother… Where's Mommy?"
He felt as if something within those black eyes cracked. Still gaping at his brother's grief, still listening to his anguish, Shin continued.
"Isn't she coming back? Why…? Why did she…die?"
A heavy silence fell between them, as if something had snapped. Those deep-black, frozen eyes shattered, and a violent madness surged out from that crevice. The next moment, Shin had been grabbed by the throat and hurled against the wooden floor.
"Urk…!"
His lungs were being crushed, and the air trying to escape them was stuck in his strangled windpipe. His vision was going black from the lack of oxygen. His brother had mobilized all his weight and strength at Shin's throat, the pressure threatening to crush it. Rei's black eyes looked down at him from point-blank range, glittering with rage and hatred.
"It's your fault."
His voice escaped like a growl from between clenched teeth.
"Because you were there, Mom went to the battlefield. Mom died because of you. You killed Mom!"
If only you weren't around.
Shin could hear his brother's voice piercing that thunderous cry. It was like hellfire, like a blade, a raw thought incapable of hiding anything for its purity. That thought stabbed into his mind mercilessly like a dagger.
I wish you were never here. I wish you'd never been born. Might as well fix that now. Disappear from this world.
Die.
"Sin. It's in your name. Fitting. It's all your fault. All of it—everything is your fault! Mom dying, that I'm going to die—all of it—it's all because of your sin!"
He was terrified. Of his brother's screaming. Of his brother's voice. But he couldn't move or plug his ears. So Shin escaped from that place. Beyond the depths of his heart, deeper than the furthest reaches of his soul, the innermost place where his parents had gone. His consciousness shut down silently, and everything faded into black and dissipated.
When Shin woke up, he was lying in his bed, with only the priest sitting next to him. He said everything was all right now. Rei wasn't there. It seemed he was still in the church, but he wouldn't meet Shin even once. In the meantime, Rei had finished the protocols for enlistment and left the church a few days later. The priest escorted him out, as if trying to hide his back. His brother refused to spare Shin a final look or even a word of farewell. He was probably still angry, and Shin was afraid to say anything, for fear he'd just get mad at him again.
And so Rei left, neither of them saying anything until the end. It was then that Shin stopped hearing his brother's voice, which he'd always been able to hear before, and on the rare occasions Shin mustered the courage to call out to him, no response ever came. He eventually had no choice but to accept that his brother hadn't forgiven him… That his brother never would.
It was also around the time his brother left him with this scar that Shin realized he could hear those voices, however faint, whispering from afar. He couldn't make out what they were saying, but he did understand what they were trying to convey. And at some point, human voices began blending with them. Reciting the same mantras, like broken records—the phrasing may have differed, but they all wept in search of the same thing.
He naturally understood those whispers that no one but he—not even the priest—could hear. He'd probably been killed by his brother then… He'd probably been dead ever since. And since he'd died but remained in this world, he could hear the wails of other ghosts like him. And one day, his brother joined the chorus of lamentation. He realized his brother had died and was calling for him.
On that day, Shin enlisted in the military.
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone