Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 159

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 159.
The Call of the Sealed Land (5)
I passed by the Town Hall every day, yet I had never examined each relief carving with particular care. I remembered that there were many depictions of a woman personifying the moon.
But then something else came to mind. There was not just one Town Hall on The Island.
The crumbled Town Hall I had seen in the ruined Upper Village bore reliefs entirely different from those here. They contained nothing but praises of mages and magic.
“The two Town Halls… I remember they were completely different.”
“Yes, I knew you had gone to the Abandoned Village. And they didn’t have the Moon Queen carved there, did they? And the background was somewhat different too, wasn’t it? The landscape depicted there was Ganapoli itself. Generations later, when this Town Hall was built, only the image of this Island came to be carved upon its walls. Isn’t that so?”
Zero continued his explanation. It seemed the Commander, ancestor of the Regent, had been tasked with leading people to a new land, but he was no exceptional mage.
Considering Ganapoli’s custom of scrutinizing magical ability even for minor appointments, there was something suspicious about such an unprecedented personnel decision.
Perhaps when sailing began instead of flight and magical power gradually weakened, different abilities came to be valued more highly, and the positions were reversed—that was what Zero suggested. Perhaps he had even killed and usurped the original Commander.
To avoid losing the position he had thus obtained, the Regent, being no mage, needed to create new customs that distanced themselves from magic.
The concept of Pilgrims ruled by the Moon Queen, the transformation of what was originally the Council of Seven Mages into six Priests (the circles drawn on the Town Hall floor still numbered seven), the cruelty of once even offering living sacrifices, the atmosphere of revering the sword over learning and magic, the abandonment of books and records and the suppression of magical traditions including chants—all of it had been manipulated and condoned to align with the Regent’s political necessity.
He understood well that showing clumsy magic to those accustomed to the rule of great mages would only breed distrust.
Rather, providing a new object of worship in the Moon Queen and making her will ambiguous was the very heart of such a scheme.
Ganapoli’s name became “the Old Kingdom,” and the magical kingdom became the Holy Kingdom.
For that reason, most of the magic on The Island does not manifest its true power on the Continent, it was said.
What does not weaken even on the Continent are only the mysterious innate abilities that some Islanders possess as descendants of Ganapoli, and traditions that came from Ganapoli, like Isolet’s chants.
Daphnen grew frustrated and asked in return.
“Since when have you known these facts? Why haven’t you revealed them to others? If what you say is true, then all the people of The Island have been deceived by the Regents generation after generation, haven’t they? Don’t the Priests know of such things?”
Zero slowly drew the soiled cushion toward himself and spoke in a halting voice.
“The Priests. Yes, the Priests. It was not I who first grasped all of this. It was a Priest. The Priest of the Sword, who read through more records than anyone else with remarkable speed and feared nothing—now dead and gone.”
Daphnen understood at once. Who else could he be thinking of?
“You mean the Ilios Priest?”
“Yes, Ilios… He was my friend. We were inseparable companions from childhood, yet in the end we parted ways, and before we could even reconcile, that wretched friend went to the other world. He was the first to tell me this story.”
I had heard from Nauplion that Zero and Ilios had been friends. But this story of them becoming estranged and parting ways was entirely new to me.
Daphnen found it difficult to believe that even someone like Zero could quarrel with another.
No—perhaps if it were a matter like the one being discussed now, he would have remained unyielding in his convictions.
“And he died because of it.”
“What did you say?”
Daphnen, startled, looked at Zero’s face and read the truth there, flinching.
Until now, I had believed Ilios had been slain by that monster, the mysterious entity written as “Golmohdap” on the Obelisk of the Dead.
“Of course, it was a cursed monster that killed Ilios. But the reason he was forced to throw away his life to deal with that monster was because the Regent grew jealous of Ilios, and at the same time, feared him. The Regent had noticed that Ilios had learned far too much of Ganapoli’s ancient history.”
The shadow cast upon Zero’s face wavered.
“Yes, Ilios was clever, but beyond that, he was arrogant. He did not even try to hide that he had uncovered secrets. Moreover, once he himself had escaped from false knowledge, whether others awakened to or remained ignorant of such shackles held little meaning for him.”
Perhaps, being excessively brilliant, he simply held no expectations of ordinary people.
“Had he quietly and methodically spread the truth based on people’s trust in the Priest of the Sword, the outcome would have been different. Instead, he made himself a tool for sneering at the Regent whenever he pleased.”
As Daphnen’s expression grew bewildered, Zero laughed bitterly.
“Did Ilios not know that if he acted that way, the Regent would come to hate him? As one possessed of the finest swordsmanship and learning of the time, there was perhaps an arrogant confidence that no one would dare oppose him. But more than that, having witnessed the Regent’s shallow schemes countless times since childhood, he despised them so intensely that he could not bear to refrain from openly mocking them.”
Zero shook his head and released a low sigh.
“What good is the ability to know truth before others if you cannot endure even for a moment what displeases you, if you know full well you are ruining things yet cannot stop yourself from rushing toward catastrophe? Even that brilliant man was not, in the end, a sage.”
Each time a layer of misunderstanding about the Ilios Priest peeled away, I encountered something I had never anticipated.
At first, I had simply thought of him as a genius who sacrificed himself for The Island.
But soon he became a romantic father strolling along the beach with his young daughter and gifting her pinecones, then a man of fierce pride who burned with anger at Nauplion for not following his will, then the wondrous boy who brought Silverskull and left an indelible mark upon Duke Fontina’s mind, and now….
He was a man who could not hide his emotions, who was never truly a sage—a figure of stubborn pride and bitter cynicism.
Before being a genius, a great scholar, or an exceptional swordsman, he was simply a human who could not master himself, and why did his entire life feel so poignant and melancholic?
Had I known him before as the perfect being I once believed him to be, I would have felt nothing at all, as if gazing upon some dusty old portrait.
“Why did he not refuse? The Regent did not have absolute power over life and death. If the monster truly had to be slain, why did The Regent not step forward himself? The books of the Continent say that a true king must be willing to cast himself into danger to protect his people from peril.”
“There lies one crucial difference. He was no king. He was merely The Regent. A Regent rules, but bears no obligation to die for the kingdom. Heh, heheheh….”
After a moment, Zero answered Daphnen’s question with a composed expression.
“Can you not see how The Regent, skilled in shallow stratagems, deliberately provoked Ilios’s pride? Ilios saw through the scheme plainly, yet in the end, with his characteristic defiant attitude, he chose death. I still remember vividly the cold gleam in his eyes as he looked upon The Regent and said, ‘Very well then, shall I die for you?’
A shimmer seemed to pass through Zero’s eyes, and a brief sigh escaped into the darkness.
“The sun—the sun could not endure in the land of the moon. Perhaps from the moment he was given that name, Ilios was fated never to reconcile with the Moon Queen, even unto death. The moon swallowed the sun. The Old Kingdom of Ganapoli was a land of gold and sunlight; had he been born there, he would have truly become a sun-like existence. Yet it seems even a genius is not needed in so small a land….”
Daphnen gazed quietly at the lamp. With every window sealed shut, the flame burned straight and unwavering.
Suddenly, he imagined waving his hand to extinguish that fire.
Such a small flame could not withstand it. If there existed some vast being—truly like the Moon Queen herself—with the power to snuff out human life, even the most extraordinary person would be extinguished in an instant.
Does the Moon Queen truly exist? The moon certainly burns round each night, dominating this Island and the waters around it.
She despises the indecisive and rules her people sometimes with directness, sometimes with subtle methods—is she a hidden deity like the gods scattered across the Continent’s many religions, never revealing her true form?
“You can imagine what came after, I suppose? Once Ilios died, The Regent claimed he wished to preserve the records and forcibly seized his father’s belongings from young Isolet’s hands. Then he rummaged through them all, locking away anything that might prove disadvantageous to his rule, and cast the rest haphazardly into this Library.”
Zero slowly traced his fingers across the cover of the book Daphnen had brought.
“The torn pages at the back of the first book that came into your hands—that surely means it originally belonged to Ilios’s study. The new copy I gave you, I transcribed myself before parting ways with Ilios. It was certainly important material.”
Daphnen turned his gaze from the lamp to Zero.
“Then why not do what the Ilios Priest could not do? You could slowly spread the truth to people and correct the wrongs one by one. You are not the sort of person who believes ‘as long as I alone know the truth, that is enough’—not like him.”
Daphnen suddenly glanced at the book Zero held.
“Or are you already doing so? Even what you’ve told me….”
“No, that is not the case. I have told this story to you alone.”
“Why? How can that be? Why only me?”
“That I tell you at all is because I am not Ilios, and that I tell only you is likewise because I am not Ilios.”
“What do you mean?”
Zero brought his hands to the lamp and cupped them as if shielding a small flame.
“For one born and raised on The Island, hearing this tale and feeling the world split in two would be no strange thing. Even Ilios, who let young Isolet read nearly anything, entrusted only a few books containing secrets to me and asked that I not give them to her. I too, at first, could neither sleep nor eat for days upon witnessing the lies that were revealed and the truths beneath them. The shock was that profound.”
Zero fixed his gaze upon Daphnen once more.
“But you are different, being of the Continent. As far as I know, you are the only Pilgrim who was not born and raised on The Island. You alone can accept the truth as it is when you encounter it. Unlike most Pilgrims, who would cover their ears before ever reaching the truth, blocked by psychological resistance. And furthermore…”
Daphnen heard Zero speak of the very subject he had most wished to avoid of late.
“You will become the Priest of The Island—the Priest of the Sword.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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