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Once upon a time, in the most wretched reaches of a terraced kingdom distinguished by its concentric gates that grew gradually more gilded toward the royal residences at the epicenter, there resided a pair of aspiring members of the chivalric orders. From the foot of the ferrous gate furthermost from the castle, they dreamed they too, like the royals, could brush the clouds from the loftiest of turrets and stroll languidly ’round lush gardens whilst trapping hemotropic butterflies within iridescent netting.
As they reached puberty, Pietro, who fancied himself the Knight Commander in their games, longed less frequently for bloodthirsty critters and more often for lovelorn consorts. He imagined storming up fortified towers to save damsels in distress from fire-breathing dragons and potion-brewing witches. As a well-earned reward for these victorious hunts, he envisioned himself at the heart of a harem of princesses, nestled within their silken petticoats and entangled in their artfully arranged tresses.
Meanwhile, Leorio, designated as the loyal Paladin whenever they played pretend, had not the slightest inkling of interest in the female sex, much less the parade of blue-blooded women Pietro liked picturing at their beck and call. Nor did Leorio wish to romance the village girls Pietro serenaded and kissed as practice for the princesses of his fantasies. However, as he would blindly follow his childhood friend on any conquest or crusade, Leorio feigned similar limerences for ladies of high nobility.
Born as they both were on the lowest rung of the ladder, nothing could stop Pietro from clambering up Leorio’s lanky frame and bracing against his broad shoulders to reach for peaches that drooped heavily on branches overhanging the gate. There were unyielding laws, of course, against picking fruits for which they had not labored, but Pietro never did bother to play by the kingdom’s rules.
The terrace just above theirs was not much closer to the castle, and yet the soil was already leagues more fertile, the juices sweeter upon teeth breaking the skin.
When the friends sometimes tumbled backward into brambles owing to the ringleader’s haste to snatch the freshest fruits, Leorio would hurriedly patch Pietro’s scratches and scrapes from plasters he already knew to prepare beforehand in his pocket, ignoring any sense of his own agony to alleviate another’s.
Everything changed, however, the day the would-be Paladin encountered a pain he could not ease for once.
* * *
That day, the two of them were kicking a ball around with other boys from the village. As was his way, Pietro proposed a private game between them both. Whoever could score the first point would win the alexandrite-adorned hand of Crown Princess Gilda, to whom Pietro referred most frequently in his soliloquies of yearning and whose penciled portrait hung above Leorio’s bed, if only because his dearest friend had drawn it.
At the opening kickoff, the Paladin swiftly dominated possession of the ball. With long legs and even longer strides, he bounded toward the goal as his fellow players lagged far behind. Not even ten seconds had passed since the whistle had screeched when he found himself walloping the ball straight between the goalkeeper’s splayed limbs.
As the impact nearly blew a hole through the makeshift net, Leorio spun around with the sunniest of smiles. He was marveling not only at his own explosive feat of athletic prowess, but also at his decisive victory over his best friend. As he had always made a point of falling a step or two behind Pietro, Leorio had certainly never prevailed in a race between them.
On the opposite end of the playground, Pietro was swaying on the spot. He had not moved an inch from where he had been standing when the game had kicked off. Just as Leorio’s fist was punching up in triumph for his goal, Pietro’s boneless body was toppling backward onto cracked concrete.
Pietro — Knight Commander of their games, designer of elaborate dreams that would have otherwise undulated in a dull roar, never to seep past gray matter into prismatic reality — would never stand or stride or sprint again.
* * *
As his best friend remained bedridden with an enigmatic ailment none of the folk healers in their village could name, let alone remedy, the Paladin embarked on a meaningless mission to reverse fate’s dictates.
When the gatekeepers of the terrace immediately above theirs turned Leorio away with mocking laughter and utter indifference to his lowly plight, he resorted to whirling wheels at the local gambling den.
With his good-for-nothing excuses for parents on either side, egging him on and cradling their customary bottles (home-brewed porter for his father and cooking sherry for his mother), Leorio rattled cups and tossed dice over rickety tables, invariably to incensing results.
At his mother’s behest, Leorio attempted sneaking a loaded die into his final roll. For all his trouble, he merited the dealer’s fist sinking into his mouth. Thrown out toward the streets, he hunched on all fours and spat out his last few baby teeth before he could swallow them inadvertently.
Of course, Leorio’s so-called parents stayed right inside the den, just as they did every blasted day and night. Already, they were huddling hypnotized before the sevens spinning in the slot machines, appearing to have forgotten that their pockets were only heavy with the jenny their solitary son and his dying friend had scrounged up from habitually smuggling and fencing forbidden fruits.
As he wiped blood from his mouth, Leorio swore he would never again repeat the mistake of trusting his parents. They were never family to him anyway, not like Pietro was. He would also never go home again — not that those lowlifes would even notice or care.
* * *
With the well-kept and stocked hospitals and hospices remaining stubbornly beyond their reach on the higher terraces, the Paladin acceded to his Commander’s last lucid entreaty to stay by his side until the very end.
In the shanty where Pietro was destined to breathe his first and last, anguished cries of grief from the adjacent room, where Pietro’s widowed mother and sisters awaited the inevitable, leaked through the thin wall.
Leorio sat numbly by the lone cot on the floor, swatting flies away from sticky sores that grew larger by the day, yellow-green craters that ravaged his friend’s once unbroken expanse of golden skin.
Delirious and drifting in and out of consciousness, Pietro babbled to Leorio as if they were somehow still in the middle of a game. Be a fearless Hunter. Slay the dragons. Keep the wild-haired ruffians and leather-jacketed bandits at bay. Protect the princesses.
Leorio promised he would. Their sovereign was paramount, after all.
* * *
In the year following his Commander’s passing, the Paladin wandered aimlessly over uncharted territory after departing from the kingdom at the first opportunity.
When he needed to eat, he stole. When chased, he hid.
Otherwise, he slept. Peppered in between night terrors were rose-tinted dreams that permitted him to escape an existence sapped entirely of direction and color. During such dreams, he roamed through the hallways of the castle he and Pietro had constructed in the clouds in the course of their shared childhood.
Princesses preened and batted bushy eyelashes at him. Leorio ignored them all. He only searched fruitlessly for Pietro.
* * *
One relentlessly rainy day, the Paladin found himself lost in woods with weirdly spiraling greenery.
After ambling for hours without a soul in sight, he stumbled across a person around his age or perhaps slightly younger in a cavernous raincoat.
Was it a boy or a girl? Their face was finely-featured and heartrendingly beautiful, but Leorio could not be certain either way of their gender. He observed from a cautious distance as the stranger bent down and laid a crimson flower over a crudely dug grave.
Upon straightening up, the stranger whipped their head suddenly in Leorio’s direction as if only just then realizing they had company. Their fingers, blistered and bleeding, flexed in apparent alarm. But rather than throwing punches, the stranger burrowed their trembling fists within their colossal coat pockets.
Leorio himself did a double take — was the stranger crying tears of blood, reminiscent of the petals’ fiery hue? But no, their eyes were only bleary brown, their shoulders slumped with a bone-deep exhaustion Leorio knew all too well from glimpses at himself through undisturbed puddles of water. It was hard to tell if the stranger was sobbing or simply soaked from the sheeting rain.
Leorio inquired if the person lying in that grave had been somebody special to the stranger. As he had not lingered in his village long enough to watch his Commander being lowered into the ground, the Paladin felt a peculiar urge to grieve alongside somebody who, unlike himself, had the strength to stick around in the aftermath.
But the hooded stranger did not answer. They simply walked away and vanished into the fog.
Alone again, Leorio sank to the soil and stared at the grave. The crimson bloom stayed oddly intact beneath the beating thrum of precipitation. For hours, he pictured Pietro sleeping underneath the red petals. He had nowhere else to be.
As the rain abated, the fog drifted away and gradually elucidated his surroundings to his blurry brown eyes. Leorio realized with a jolt that he was sitting before only one grave of dozens. There were rows upon rows. There must have been more than a hundred in all. A crimson flower lay unscathed atop every jaggedly executed grave.
How sobering it was to recognize that all the suffering in this world could never be solely confined within his own body and brain and bones. Not even close.
It was then Leorio resolved to rouse himself from his sedated state and start marching forward. In any case, his Commander would not have wished for him to sleepwalk through a penitent, pathetic existence. This Paladin needed to resume living, not simply existing.
* * *
True to his designation as the Paladin in their games, Leorio must further his leader’s cause not only through prowess in combat, but also through the power to harness remedies from botanic and geologic and aquatic sources.
Above all else, he must ensure history would never repeat itself. The fate that had befallen his beloved Commander, deprived of even the sparsest resources trickling down from the castle’s bountiful reserves, must not recur in others similarly situated and limited.
Upon returning to the kingdom and locating a library, Leorio eschewed the shelves of fantasy to pore through tomes of science. For a start, he learned how to craft basic herbal balms and soothing medicinal creams from rudimentary ingredients.
However, he discovered soon enough that the sophisticated chemical solutions of the sort that might have coaxed Pietro away from the cruel clutches of death were restricted to the higher terraces.
* * *
Before daring to venture upward, the Paladin took a detour toward the gravesite hidden in the forest with all the spirals. Amidst the whorls of vegetation, he hoped to find the hooded stranger who had driven him unwittingly to drastically upend his life.
Leorio had a hunch he and that unknown person who had been mourning over a hundred and twenty graves would understand each other deeply, perhaps even become intimate friends someday. This was certainly the first time Leorio had longed to call somebody a friend ever since he had lost Pietro.
Yet Leorio could not find the graveyard once more, no matter where and how long he looked. At some point, he began to wonder if he had only dreamed those rows upon rows of graves, tended to by a beautiful stranger with a cavernous raincoat bursting at the seams with crimson flowers.
That night, as Leorio leaned against a tree (with veiny leaves far too angular for his liking) and allowed his head to droop, the castle in the clouds again parted its doors for his benefit. As was his custom, he propelled past the preening princesses in search of Pietro.
As before, Pietro was nowhere to be found. That part no longer surprised Leorio.
What did take him off guard, however, was a royal reception hall he certainly had never entered before. Around an elaborately carved, empty throne were crimson petals strewn all over the gilded floor.
* * *
As the Paladin prepared to ascend from terrace to terrace to secure the medical substances and supplies he needed to open a pro bono practice for impoverished villages like his, he alternated his time between studies and strength-training at night and engaging in odd jobs of manual labor to earn jenny in the day.
Maintaining an honest trade for the first time meant he had to toil much longer to replenish the funds he had saved from his past dealings in the black market, then lost within the sinkhole pockets of his estranged parents.
To survive in this ruthless world, he built himself a hard, outer shell to protect the softer, sweeter sides of himself, which he tried his best to shove down. He called this his Pietro persona — brighter and braver and brasher, as his best friend had once been.
At various points of the day, the Paladin asked himself, what would his Commander do? Spike up his hair with gloopy gel. Don a pair of teashades even in indoor settings to confound everybody. Punch people back rather than retreating. Buy naughty magazines and leer at the scantily clad women adorning their pages. Bed actual women in whatever village he visited, then creep cat-like out their windows as soon as they succumbed to slumber and started to snore.
Leorio far preferred dreaming alone. That way, when he would occasionally bolt upright in the dead of the night, soaked in sweat or tears or both as the imagery of festering sores and waxen eyes inundated him, nobody around would demand an explanation.
* * *
After obtaining the necessary certification to officially commence premedical then medical studies, the Paladin decided the time had finally arrived. He was as ready as he would ever be to attempt to scale the kingdom’s terraced landscape.
He managed to mount a few levels, always with a hefty pouch of coins to ingratiate himself with the gatekeepers. However, when the jenny eventually ran dry, he once again found himself immobilized, unable to cross the latest barrier or climb any higher.
Just as Leorio had elected to recalibrate and thus turned away from the firmly bolted gate — papered all over with gold leaf halfway peeling — one of the gatekeepers asked if he had ever considered taking the Hunter Exam.
Even as his companions smiled indulgently at what they evidently deemed a preposterous suggestion, the gatekeeper insisted it was a viable possibility, even for somebody of Leorio’s obviously humble origins.
According to the gatekeeper, an aspiring Hunter who bested every trial would receive a special license to merit an audience in the royal residences at the kingdom’s apex, let alone gain passage at any of the bejeweled gates beneath.
A license that would grant entry into the castle itself sounded exactly like an impossible relic from Leorio’s childhood fantasies. Had Pietro not advised him at his deathbed to be a fearless Hunter? When had his Commander’s counsel, whether in life or in death, ever steered the Paladin wrong? This had to be a sign. This must be the singular route to achieve his grandest ambitions.
Upon inquiring with the earnest gatekeeper while ignoring his snickering companions, Leorio jotted down the directions for a port with a merchant’s boat that would bring him to the testing site alongside fellow examinees.
Since it seemed as though only a handful of those who took the exam passed every year, with the rest shamed or maimed or taken permanently out of the game, Leorio planned to put his Pietro persona at full blast. He intended to treat every single person in his path as an enemy ready to steal a slot he direly needed, a slot he had already decided he deserved.
* * *
On the boat, the Paladin met a boy named Kurapika. This Kurapika had fluffy hair the color of wheat, fine facial features twisted into eternal fury, and a pompous way about him that got a rise out of Leorio right away. By appearance and attitude alone, Kurapika looked like he should be lounging in the royal residences rather than slumming with the rest of them on a ramshackle vessel stranded over storm-stricken sea.
Just once, Leorio would love to dunk that golden hair and sparkling visage into the weather-beaten waves, anything to erase that smug expression from his face.
As Leorio provoked the boy into battle, Kurapika’s sepia eyes flashed a startling scarlet. While it only happened for a split-second, the incandescent hue was unmistakable.
Rather than running from whatever ancient demonic entity appeared to have possessed this deceptively delicate teenage body, Leorio found himself frozen, captivated by the stranger’s tenor and story. Something about the boy was suddenly achingly familiar to Leorio, but he could not place how or when or where they might have crossed paths in the past.
When a common companion of theirs on the boat nearly hurtled overboard, where the stewing sea would have almost certainly swallowed anybody into its depths, Leorio and Kurapika lunged in unison to save their new acquaintance.
Leorio understood then that, despite the blond boy’s supernaturally shifting eye color and arrogant tirades, something softer and sweeter resided within him. Kurapika had somewhat of a reckless savior complex, with all the tragedy and trauma that necessarily came with that. Leorio recognized such building blocks of character all too well — he had contemplated them extensively enough in the looking glass into his own past.
Perhaps the boy would respond more positively to the Paladin if he only dared drop his facade and act simply like himself. Just Leorio. As yet, though, it was far too premature for the Paladin to shed his mask and permit himself to breathe deeply as he had not in many years.
Once they had both ascertained their new friend in the green suit and boots would be quite all right, Kurapika smiled at Leorio and apologized for his earlier rudeness. Freed from the very last vestiges of rage, a beautiful beaming expression illuminated the boy’s entire face.
Leorio must have said something in response, must have dismissed any apologies with a careless wave of his hand. But he could barely hear anything above the rushing in his ears and the hammering of his heart within his rib cage. Something white-hot and strange was searing into Leorio’s chest, spearing straight through his still tender heart.
This was something new. A nameless something that had somehow eluded Leorio’s full spectrum of emotions in all his life prior, both before and after Pietro.
* * *
That night, in the castle in the clouds, the Paladin wandered through the wings as usual. The sound of his footsteps left a steadier ring this time. His sense of purpose was more solidified than it had ever been.
The Paladin already knew he would not find his Commander in the castle. He never would. Pietro was lost to Leorio forever. In the living realm, at least, they would never be reunited happily ever after.
But perhaps Leorio could find something else — or someone else — worthwhile in these highest reaches.
Eventually, Leorio arrived at the throne room with the crimson petals scattered all around. A royal he had never met before whilst traipsing through the castle’s halls was sitting on the throne and gazing down the steps, at the foot of which Leorio stood dumbfounded.
Prince Kurapika stared down with a scarlet force. His eyes were red like burnished rubies, like freshly fountaining blood, like the petals of rare and indestructible flowers laid on laboriously hand-hewn gravestones.
Before Leorio knew what he was doing, he was falling on one knee, ready to swear his fealty to this sovereign, and this sovereign alone.