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“You have an oath too, Edna?”
“Yeah. To prevent my brother from leaving the mountains...” Edna paused. Her expression didn’t change. “I eat peanuts every day. An amount equal to my age.”
It wasn’t until one or two minutes later that Lailah finally realized that Zaveid and Edna were pulling her leg.
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not…” Lailah said, her face hidden behind her cards.
“Hehe, look who’s talking.”
“But that’s what the oath of the seraphim is like, isn’t it?” Edna said.
“Yes,” Lailah said, with a hand placed over her chest. “We must keep the truth in our hearts. That’s the nature of the oath.”
Edna knew, in her heart of hearts, that the brother that she knew and loved was gone. Eizen was a dragon now: he looked like one, and he definitely acted like one. Yet something remained in Eizen’s reptilian brain that had brought him back to her, despite all his reasons to stay away, and that was something that Edna couldn’t bring herself to ignore.
Edna raised her head to the sky, eternally cloudy ever since Eizen’s arrival to Rayfalke Spiritcrest, and pondered about something she had recently read about.
Oaths. The bigger the restriction—or precious the sacrifice—the stronger their powers. That you could get what you desired so long as you paid the cost was an enticing promise, but you were also agreeing to be bound to something that wasn’t unlike a curse. And Edna, who had been watching for the past hours over a curled in sleep Eizen, couldn’t help but find that last thought ironic. Just like that ‘Reaper’s curse’ of yours, Eizen. Wasn’t that how you always called it?
Edna had vowed to herself that, unlike before when all she could do was watch him leave, this time she’d do whatever it took to protect her brother. And that meant that, if her brother brought nothing but misfortune to others as a seraph, this time she would stop him from fulfilling his cursed fate—from tasting human and seraphim blood alike.
Edna, however, was aware that she’d reached the limits of her power.
“Your wheel is yours alone to hold. That’s what it means to truly be alive.”
Edna’s hold on the handle of her umbrella tightened. Eizen was alive. Eizen was alive, because she would find a way to return him to the way he was. Maybe not in this book or the next, but she was going to save him.
You never found a way to calm Eizen’s cursed domain, and you think you can cure him now?
Edna ignored her insidious inner voice.
For the sake of forging an oath with herself powerful enough to control dragons, Edna had to give up something of great value. However, in order to keep fulfilling her role, the cost couldn’t incapacitate her. Not that she had much physical strength to sacrifice, for starters: her small body always brought her nothing but pain whenever she was forced to use Giant’s Strength.
‘Something of great value’, huh…
The answer finally came to Edna’s mind as if in a whisper to her ear, taking the air out of her lungs. She reached out to her pendant, steeling herself. This was something that she had to do. It was for Eizen’s sake, after all. Only for him.
Edna carefully collected the letters, read them, and then started to write down all of her memories of Eizen.
In the meanwhile, humans came to the mountain. Edna successfully warded them off sometimes, and left flowers at the shrine on the ascent of the Spiritcrest other times. The latter always filled her with guilt, but this was a necessary step: she wanted to be able to remember how Eizen used to be after she sacrificed her memories of him.
Edna fantasized about Eizen returning to the way he was, and about making new memories in the case that she couldn’t recover her old ones once the oath was no longer necessary. She liked to get lost inside her head: her imagination shielded her from the cruel reality as she kept writing.
Luckily, or maybe unfortunately, Edna’s memories weren’t gone in the way she’d expected they would. A faint mark, like the one left by the tape of a picture once hung on a wall, was left there where her memories of Eizen had once been, back when his smile wasn’t full of fangs and neither plants nor the earth withered under his oppressive malevolence.
The feelings associated with the memories stayed with Edna: Joy and happiness, from Eizen’s sweets and souvenirs, Edna read; Fear, from realizing that Eizen would separate them if he ever learned that he was the cause of her misfortune, Edna guessed from her notes; Anger, from Eizen effectively leaving her behind once he realized what was happening. The list continued, with some feelings that Edna could not quite place, conspicuously missing any explanations in her notes.
It wasn’t too late until Edna memorized whole lines that then turned to pages, but it felt like reading someone else’s diary: she never remembered anything.
Edna didn’t regret her choice, but her tears still overflowed at the gaps inside her mind, at the realization that she’d given up something irreplaceable—Tears that joined the ones left by her past self on unsent letters.
The first person to grow curious enough to ask Edna about her outfit was Alisha, and she was so innocent that Edna couldn’t help herself.
“If the sun strikes the leaf ribbon for too long, it starts to grow. It’s quite inconvenient,” Edna said, with her most serious expression. She could feel Lailah’s gaze on her nape. “That’s why I need my umbrella.”
“Alisha, this is just how Edna is. You can’t take anything she says seriously.”
But, despite Mikleo’s previous warning, Alisha believed Edna’s words. “Really?! As expected of an earth seraph…!”
Alisha asked about the hairband next, and Edna stalled. Her notes said that the hairband was a gift from Eizen too but, unlike the glove in her hand or the boots in her feet, that was all that Edna knew.
Edna had no way to tell if the hairband was also one of Eizen’s hand-me-downs. She no longer remembered how Eizen looked like, and she didn’t know if he was the type to wear such things. Reading through the journals felt like meeting a new person, and though the blue eyes and blond hair sounded familiar, everything else of Eizen remained inscrutable. Edna never could truly picture him.
Edna decided to tell Alisha that it was Eizen’s hand-me-down, regardless. If that were wrong, it wasn’t like anyone in the world could tell: even the seraphim that once lived in Rayfalke disappeared centuries ago, driven away by Eizen’s twisted blessing.
Rose was the next one to make questions to Edna, shortly after joining the party.
“Aren’t those boots a little big on you?”
Edna answered that she had adjusted them to match her shoe size, and that the glove also matched with Eizen’s. She knew it was true this time: it was written in her notes.
“They look great with your dress!” Rose said. “Though the overall look is a little strange.”
Edna stalled at the comment: Eizen had said the same thing in one of his letters.
Eventually even Sorey’s curiosity was piqued, though his question to Edna wasn’t about her looks.
“So you were at Rayfalke that whole entire time?”
“Yeah. Waiting for my brother to return.”
Or that was what Edna thought, at least. Guessed, read again and again, sometimes between the lines to learn what wasn’t actually written.
“Was your brother like Sorey?” Rose asked this time.
“Maybe. But it’s all in the past now.”
That one wasn’t a question that Edna could answer: it was all gone, forgotten.
“Don’t try and weasel your way out of this. You said there was something you had to settle with my brother.”
Edna knew that anything important should be written down somewhere in her journal, but she had read it thousands of times through the past centuries, enough to wear it down, and nothing about Eizen making a promise with Zaveid was mentioned in it.
Zaveid refused to tell Edna for a long time, until she faced no other choice but to accept that her time with Eizen as brother and sister came to its bittersweet end too many centuries before.
“Here you go, Eizen. Since you always brought me souvenirs.” Or at least, I suppose that you did. It’s mentioned so many times. I still can’t remember it, though.
Edna imagined Eizen approaching her, a bag over his shoulder with relics and all sorts of things found in ruins. She imagined him speaking about them in the same fashion Sorey and Mikleo sometimes did. She wondered what kind of expression Eizen would make, and if he also had that beaming smile Sorey wore sometimes.
Edna imagined. It was all that she had left.