Chapter 101 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 101: Tower of Crows 09
The sky had remained overcast all day, threatening rain but never quite delivering it.
Then, just as Lucita was walking home, lost in thought, the heavens opened without warning. Rain poured down in great sheets.
Lucita stood in front of the courtyard gate, momentarily dazed, drenched from head to toe in an instant.
Blinking, she wiped the water from her face and found herself wondering why the weather was still behaving so strangely. Autumn had been here for so long already, yet the rain still arrived like summer storms, appearing out of nowhere.
A sudden crack of thunder exploded, accompanied by lightning that lit the dim, muddy street for an instant.
She came back to herself as if waking from a dream, hurried into the sitting room, snatched the cobalt-blue cloak she had had made at the end of summer from the coat rack by the door, threw it over her shoulders, grabbed a glass-shielded sturgeon-eye lantern from the shelf in the entryway to light her way, and pushed open the courtyard gate to run out.
The old tree by the roadside reflected hazy water-light. The heavy rain had beaten down a scattering of half-green, half-yellow leaves.
The rain-soaked street was exceptionally quiet. Occasionally a passerby in raincoat and rain boots hurried past. Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance, and the puddles covering the ground reflected blurred lamplight.
The east gate of the city was easy to find. She folded space twice in quick succession and slipped through the gaps. In the blink of an eye, she stood beyond the city walls.
Further south lay a forest whose direction was difficult to gauge.
It was called Detice Forest, the Distant Wood.
Old cities steeped in tradition often seemed to share certain peculiar traits. Whether by coincidence or design, there was almost always a forest somewhere along their southern outskirts, large or small, where the nobility established hunting grounds. Viktori was no exception.
And so, along the edge of the forest, a band of noble estates was scattered.
Perhaps the carriage drivers in service to these nobles could easily tell direction here, but Lucita could not.
Detice Forest was wrapped in rain and mist growing heavier by the minute, hazy vapor gathering above the treetops, branching streaks of lightning stretching in from the distance, seeming to have no end.
Lucita folded space twice in the forest's direction, and in an instant found herself standing at its edge.
From there, she would have to proceed on foot.
The clerk's explanation had been frustratingly vague. She had said only that the bodies were taken deep into the forest, offering no details about what happened afterward. Lucita had been too stunned at the time to ask for details.
Would the body be cremated to ash and carried off? Would they be buried somewhere deep among the trees? Or worse...Would they simply be abandoned, discarded like refuse in some forgotten corner of the woods?
When she had been dealing with the plague in Grandé, passing through the cities between Grandé and Phalos, she had not failed to see the corpses abandoned in those forests — their fate to fill the bellies of vultures, or even some starving wild beast.
The thought that the meticulous woman she had met might come to such an end filled Lucita with an unspeakable chill.
She pulled her hood lower and walked slowly into the forest, lantern raised, searching.
On an ordinary night illuminated by moonlight, finding her way would have been simple. She could have navigated by the moon's position.
But on a night with rain this heavy, there was no moon to be seen, not even the cry of a night owl. Everything was buried under the roar of thunder and rain, surrounding Lucita on every side, with no other sound at all — utterly, completely silent.
She walked forward for several hundred steps, head down, when she suddenly sensed something wrong.
The life force around her was growing weaker and weaker, but even looking through her life-sense, beyond the unusually thin vitality, nothing else seemed amiss.
A person cannot live without air.
Do you know the feeling of all the air around you being drained away?
The thinner the life force grew, the more a thick sense of suffocation pressed in on Lucita, until she finally felt the danger and stopped advancing.
The tendrils of life had long since extended from beneath her feet, crossing through ten miles of soil, twining together with the root systems of every plant in the forest, and the vitality within those roots was disturbing her perception.
Just as in the frozen Iris Garden of before, where the only force present had been the power of time, this stretch of ground was now utterly severed from vitality. Only Lucita's own heartbeat remained, steady and stubborn, like a solitary lantern burning in a land of eternal night.
The tendrils of life reached and probed outward, until she suddenly registered an anomaly. Can perception sense nothingness?
How could something that didn't exist be detected by her tendrils at all?
So what she was sensing — that quality which ran counter to "life," which made her own "life" feel suffocated — was not nothingness.
It was — death.
It was the place where all things fell silent. It was a mountain of bleached bones piled high. It was extinguished faces and dimmed minds. It was where flesh died, and where the soul died too.
Tendrils of black mist coiled around her sensory threads, flowing along their length all the way down to her heart.
Ever since entering the life layer of the world, she had vaguely felt a barrier somewhere beyond her reach. Now it shattered completely. The illusion of a world filled only with life, peace, and song broke apart. Its missing half surged toward her. Decay, withering, and rot came rushing in, carrying a thick, fetid smell.
Death and life intertwined, finally filling the blank half of her perception that had remained empty until now. In life there can be death; in death there can also be life. They merged with one another, transformed into one another, and at last became a complete, ever-transforming law of life, held in the palm of her hand. And then, all at once, dissolved.
Good. Now she could detect where death-energy had accumulated.
A brand-new tendril of life extended from beneath her feet outward, a hundred miles into the dense forest.
Because her newly acquired grasp on death-energy was still unpracticed, power leaked away along the extending tendrils, and a hundred miles of forest withered instantly.
Lucita was startled, and hurried to steady herself, exchanging the leaked death-energy back for vitality. New shoots burst forth at once, the forest grew lush again in an instant, soaked once more by the continuous downpour.
She probed all the way to the edge of Detice Forest, but found no place where death-energy had gathered.
Lucita's brow furrowed.
That's not right...
A thought stirred within her, and she stepped into the world layer of death.
This was her first time entering this layer. The lush forest outside became, here, nothing but bare, dead branches, as though they had been through a fire, black and stark against the night sky.
The heavy rain poured down even into this layer from reality, and the sky still held no moon, but—
Through the misty haze, ahead of her stood a black tower with a sharply peaked roof.
A flock of crows circled the tower's spire, and others perched silently on the surrounding branches.
These crows had no glossy black feathers, some were nothing but old, bare bone, and their crimson eyes stared at her silently through the night.
Behind the tower stood countless silent gravestones, like an inescapable shadow of the dead, enough to chill the heart of anyone who looked upon it.
Lucita pulled her hood lower and walked toward the tower, lantern in hand.
When she reached its front, as though a guest had already been expected, a crow began to call out raucously before the courtyard, and the tower's door opened.
There stood another woman in a hooded cloak. Her garments were entirely black, and she looked already aged, standing quietly on the stone steps.
The two regarded each other. Thunder split the long night. Rainwater dripped from Lucita's eyelashes, running steadily down her cheeks.
With every step she took forward, the vitality in the soil was drawn along by her movement; in the life layer of the world, countless rules collapsed and rebuilt themselves, and that authority gathered now in Lucita's hand—
"I apologize for the intrusion, madam."
The young woman's clear, composed voice came out distorted in the rain.
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