Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 13 - Chapter 14

14. A Vague You and Me

Leaving the area where thickets of pink coral-like plants grew on white sandy ground, they came out into the foothills of Mt. Glass.

Mt. Glass, as per its name, was made up of hard, translucent rocks that were piled up to form a mountain. According to Alice, the glass was hard but brittle, and if you stepped on the wrong spot, it easily gave way. If it collapsed, they wouldn’t get off lightly. They could expect to end up heavily injured at least, or dead at worst.

They scraped the outside of the foothills of Mt. Glass, and it felt like they were walking over white sand for a long while. But that wasn’t certain. The flow of time was awfully vague.

Alice’s footsteps were dotted across the sand. Haruhiro tried not to step on them. If he did, his footsteps would combine with Alice’s, leaving only one set of footsteps behind. When he turned back, two sets of footprints went on for as far as he could see. Not one set, two.

He heard beast-like cries occasionally, and when he looked up at the polka dot sky, there were monsters with shapes which he couldn’t imagine were birds flying through it.

How long had it been there? There was a purple crescent floating in the sky, looking awfully big. It felt like if he reached out, he could touch it. He stared at it vacantly.

“Don’t look,” Alice told him. “If you look directly at Parano’s moon, you’ll be cursed.”

“So it’s a moon, huh? That thing.”

“What’d you think it was? It doesn’t look like anything else.”

“I thought it was alive, maybe. One of those... dream monsters, was it?”

“Dream monsters aren’t alive. That’s why they have no ego.”

Honestly, he couldn’t understand half of what Alice said. If he asked questions, sometimes he got answers and sometimes he got ignored.

Sometimes... he didn’t know anymore. Did Alice really exist? Or was he actually alone, just hallucinating that he was with someone?

No, that wasn’t it. There was proof. The footsteps. There were two sets, like there should be. Besides, if he looked in front of him, Alice was there.

But maybe he couldn’t trust his senses, or his memory.

Looking like a crown, Mt. Glass was all glass, as far as the eye could see. The foothills were gentle, and the incline eventually became steep. It was beautiful, but nothing special once you got used to seeing it. It was a mountain of glass.

At the border between Mt. Glass and the sandy ground, the white sand was intermingled with small glass rocks. The glass stones weren’t as fine as the sand, and they felt totally different underfoot.

When had it happened? He no longer saw any of the pink-colored coral-like plants. There was a milky and white smoke over the sand. Less of a mist, and more of a cloud.

Was he really walking? Could it be he was actually lying down somewhere, with his eyes closed? When he opened his eyes, would he be in a different place? In front of that door in the Leslie Camp, for instance?

Or perhaps he was nowhere at all. If that was case, then where was the “he” who was thinking he was nowhere at all?

It was all silly. The fact that he could feel things, and think things, was proof of his existence. This was no dream. It was going on way too long to be a dream. It’d be weird if he didn’t wake up soon.

Where were Kuzaku... Shihoru... Merry... Setora? Were they safe?

Why didn’t he go looking for his comrades?

It was all weird. Maybe this was a dream, after all. Was the lack of logical flow and consistency in his thoughts and actions because it was a dream? If this was a dream, none of it was strange. Anything was possible.

If he were to assume he was dreaming, then when? When had the dream started?

Hey, Manato, Haruhiro thought. Was it a dream that you died, too, maybe?

If it was, this was an awfully long dream. But no matter how long, complicated, and intricate a dream was, the moment he opened his eyes, he’d rapidly forget it. In no time, he’d hardly remember a thing. Maybe it was that sort of dream. Maybe it was that sort of dream... Maybe...

Now that you mention it, I think it is like that, maybe. This dream would become an empty shell like that, and then vanish.

“I’m hungry...” Haruhiro muttered. “My throat’s dry, too...”

Either Alice didn’t hear, or wasn’t listening. It was like Alice C was here, but not here, and continued walking without turning back.

On several occasions, he considered stopping. I should sit down and rest, he thought. If Alice got out of sight while he was resting, so be it. There was no Alice anyway. He was alone.

Why couldn’t he commit to that? Was he scared? Lonely? What did it matter anymore? He didn’t even know if he was alive or not.

“Um, where are you going?” Haruhiro asked. “Hey! Hey, I said! I’m asking you a question here, you know? Why aren’t you answering? Don’t ignore me. Screw you. What the hell? Put yourself in my shoes here. For a start, why... Why is this happening? Did I have this coming to me... maybe? Not really. It’s always like this. Every. Single. Time...”

Haruhiro breathed in deeply.

“Maybe I just think that, though. I feel like the same sort of thing’s happened several times now. Am I wrong? Can’t trust my memory, after all. Besides... Yeah. I don’t remember what happened before I came to Grimgar, either. It’s weird. I’m not a two or three-year-old. If this had all happened before I was old enough to really think, I’d understand. It’s not, though. It’s weird, right? It’s weird. A lot of stuff’s happened, but it’s all weird. I can’t imagine this is reality.”

Haruhiro sorted through the thoughts in his head.

“Which means... it’s a place that isn’t real, basically. It’s a dream. A dream. All of it. Manato. Moguzo. Ranta. Shihoru. Yume. Merry. Kuzaku. Setora. All of them, they don’t exist. They aren’t real. Me... in my head... in my dream, or whatever it is, I created them. They’re figments of my imagination. Everything that’s happened is. Grimgar, the Dusk Realm, Darunggar, and this world, Parano, too. Man, I’m amazing. The power of my imagination, I mean. It’s not half bad, huh? It’s pretty crazy... Huh? Then what about me, myself? This me that thinks I’m me... Is that an imagination, too? Is there someone out there somewhere... different from me, dissimilar, maybe not even human, a creature or something... dreaming about me?”

He hesitated.

“No, that’s not it. It can’t be. But how can I prove it? It’s impossible, right? Well, damn... When am I going to wake from this dream? Is it one of those things? Do I have to die? If I die, I think maybe I’ll wake up. That could be how it’s set up. Manato and Moguzo... and Choco, the ones who died, maybe that’s what’s happened to all of them. They wake from the dream when they die... and return to their original worlds. But... if so, that’s weird, too. I mean, this is my... no, not my, someone else’s dream.”

Haruhiro was beginning to feel lost.

“If it were a bunch of people’s dreams to be mashed together, that’d be weird. There’s nothing. It’s all meaningless. Because it’s all just a dream... even if I die, it may all be the same. This dream will probably go on forever. Until the dreamer wakes... and when they wake, they’ll forget. It’ll all return to nothing. To zero... Ahh, I’m hungry. My throat’s dry, too. So dry it hurts... This is suffering.”

He tore off his mask and threw it away. He wanted to strip off his cloak and his clothes, too, cast everything off.

The wind was blowing. Sweet. The air was sweet. He sucked in all he could, and choked on it. It reminded him of something.

Oh. Vanilla. It was like the scent of vanilla.

He inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. Inhaled, inhaled, inhaled as deeply as he could.

It was incredibly sweet. He could feel the sweetness up to his eyeballs. The more he inhaled, the more he suffered. Still, he didn’t stop.

“Hey!” Suddenly, he was grabbed by the collar and shaken.

It was Alice. Right in front of his eyes. Alice.

To hell with Alice C.

“Don’t breathe the wind! Do you want to fall asleep and give birth to another dream monster?!”

“I don’t care.”

“Your ego’s gotten pretty weak,” Alice snapped. “At this rate, you’ll go mad. You won’t get off with just falling asleep and creating a dream monster. Do you want to fall to darkness, and become a trickster?”

“I have. No clue. What you’re talking about.”

“One of my friends fell to darkness. Once that happens, there’s no coming back. I can’t turn you back, at least. Nui is...”

“...Nui?”

“Just listen!”

Alice pushed Haruhiro down. When he landed on his backside, it cleared the haze from his mind, and the sweetness clinging to the inside of his lungs made him feel sick.

Alice picked up the mask, throwing it at Haruhiro’s face. “Put it on. I didn’t save you so you could fall to darkness.”

Haruhiro tried to put the mask on. His fingers trembled, and it wasn’t working.

While he was fumbling around, Alice stabbed the shovel into the ground, knelt down, and snatched the mask from Haruhiro’s hands. “Listen, Haruhiro. You know how people sometimes tell you to keep a hold of yourself? In Parano, that’s really important.”

Alice put the mask on for him. Haruhiro didn’t move a muscle. Or rather, he was tense, and he couldn’t move.

“No matter what anyone may say or think about me, I know who I am, and no matter what happens, I will not be anything that isn’t me. That’s ego. It can’t be expressed in numbers, but in Parano, you can sense whether someone’s ego is weak or strong. You can’t see it. It’s like a smell, or a taste. If you want to remain yourself, you have to be yourself. If you don’t, you’ll become something other than yourself. I don’t mean that metaphorically. You will actually turn into something else. Into what’s called a trickster.”

“That what I... started to turn into?”

Alice stood up, pulling the shovel out of the ground. “If I’d left you alone, I think you would have, yeah.”

Haruhiro looked around the area. To his right, Mt. Glass rose up to the sky, the glass foothills and white sand mixed together, and at the end of it all was smoke.

Like always, the more he looked at it, the more his sense of reality seemed to weaken. It was a rather vague scene.

“Where are you heading... if you don’t mind me asking?” he hesitated.

“To where I live.”

“A house?”

“You’ll understand if you come. If you can get there intact, that is,” Alice said brusquely, then shouldered the shovel and started walking.

“I have to be myself...” Haruhiro murmured to himself as he followed Alice.

I... Myself... Does that mean acting in a way that’s like me? What does that mean?

What am I?

If I had a mirror, I could look at my face in it. That’s me. But sadly, I don’t have a mirror. Well, it’s not like I’d want to see my own face. I’m not in the habit of looking closely at it, anyway. So...

If you were to ask if I remember in detail what I look like, it’s doubtful. Even if the face in the mirror changed slightly, I might not notice.

Still, the one stepping on the white sand mixed with small bits of glass, footsteps crunching, that’s unquestionably me, myself. I feel the weight of my body. The hunger, and the thirst, too. Those feelings undoubtedly belong to me.

That means I’m here. If it weren’t me here, I wouldn’t feel anything, after all.

Well, hey, wasn’t that simple?

The one looking at, listening to, smelling, feeling, thinking, pondering about me and things that are not me, that’s me. Even if I were to turn into something else, something not quite human maybe, so long as I could look, listen, smell, feel, think, that’s still me.

Alice was walking with the shovel shouldered. A gap had opened between them. Alice was about ten meters ahead.

While walking, Haruhiro looked down to his right palm. “...Huh?”

Were my hands always like this? Furry, oversized, with long, sharp claws?

No.

“That’s not my hand.”

Before he could think, What do I do? his left hand was already drawing the flame dagger from the dwarf hole.

Right, I have to cut it off. I mean, this right hand isn’t mine. I have to cut it off with this flame dagger. The hand holding the dagger, it’s weird, it’s all furry, isn’t it?

“Dammit! Oboaba! Bugegagobuda! Udebagazo! Nndebanba! Doga!”

Someone’s shouting something. Not me. That’s not my voice, after all. It shouldn’t be. The words, they fiil rong gigazuzu. Badagu dota obada godoga ganbaze gotoga? Onto furebure tobagonda guzoda bugo, oada?

“Haruhiro!” Alice shouted.

“Nnaka?!”

“Look! Look at me!”

“Lu... uk...”

Luuk.

Look.

He looked.

Alice was there.

The one holding his hands, it was Alice.

The color of Alice’s eyes, it was pale. He’d thought they seemed bright, but they went past light brown, to almost being the color of blood running through someone’s arteries. The hood was pulled back, then finally pulled off, showing Alice’s hair.

The color of Alice’s hair wasn’t so much bright, as pale. Looking closely, the eyebrows and eyelashes were the same color. Alice’s skin, too... the word “white” didn’t quite adequately describe it. It seemed translucent, like you could see through to the other side of it.

“Get ahold of yourself,” Alice said.

Alice was speaking to him.

Haruhiro nodded, looking at his own hands.

Not furry, not big, not with long claws. His own hands.

“It felt... like I wasn’t me...”

“The work of a dazzler, huh?”

Alice pushed Haruhiro away, pulling the nearby shovel from the ground, and swiveling around quickly. There was apparently something behind Haruhiro and to the left.

Alice jumped, swinging the shovel.

The shovel’s blade slammed down into the sandy earth.

Just before it did, he felt like he saw a large fish-like thing poking its head out, or maybe he didn’t. Either way, by the time Alice buried their shovel in the sand, that thing wasn’t there anymore. Had it dived into the sand, just in time?

“You’re not getting away!” Alice gripped the shovel with both hands.

What? Huh? What the? It was a shovel... wasn’t it? It seemed, at the very least, it wasn’t just your ordinary rusty shovel.

The dark, rust-like stuff was its skin, and it had started peeling on its own. The insides were peeking out through cracks in that skin. This might not be the right way to describe it, but it was like a stick made of meat. The skin hadn’t fallen off completely, with the ends of it still attached to the meat stick, split into tens of thin belts... no, more than that... and they were all wriggling.

They were as thick as human fingers, and might have looked a bit like black, or dark brown, snakes.

That part was wrapped around Alice. There were some wrapping around the shovel itself, while Alice dove deeper and deeper into the sand.

Was that shovel alive? It wasn’t even a shovel to begin with, for sure. No way could there be a shovel like that. If it wasn’t a shovel, what was it? No other appropriate name came to mind, so it would have to be called a shovel for now.

When Alice suddenly pulled up the shovel, it had hooked it.

Had their target been caught by the black snakey things, which had pulled it from the sand, forcing it out?

It had hands and feet, more or less being humanoid, and sort of resembled a sahuagin. Those eyes and that mouth were especially fish-like. But its light peach skin was strangely smooth. It had been in the sand all this time, but for some reason it wasn’t covered in sand.

“The work of a dazzler,” Alice had said.

A dazzler. Was that what this thing was called?

“Looks kind of like an axolotl, huh,” Alice muttered, and then the black snakes holding the dazzler shrunk away.

The freed dazzler immediately jumped up.

It turned its back on Alice, likely trying to get away.

But unfortunately—no, not unfortunately at all—Alice cut off any hope of that. By cutting the dazzler.

Alice stepped forward, thrusting out with the shovel. The shovel’s blade pierced the dazzler through its back.

Alice pulled the shovel upward in that state. The shovel easily sliced the dazzler from its breast to the top of its head.

There was no splatter of blood. What seeped out of the dazzler’s wound instead was a thick mucus that was like old oil.

The dazzler fell forward.

“Finally got it.”

Chop, chop, chop. Alice used the shovel, to stab, slice, cut up, and dismember the dazzler, then snorted. Alice was probably happy about having killed the dazzler, but also looked to be enjoying this brutal work.

“That one wasn’t a dream monster. It was a half-monster. When humans are taken in by dream monsters, they turn into half-monsters like this dazzler.”

“Taken... in...”

“Most dream monsters just attack and eat people, though. Still, there are some weird ones. I wonder about that dream monster you made. By the way, unlike dream monsters that have nothing but id, half-monsters have ego, too. Not much, though. If you kill them, you can take it all. Half-monsters are rare, so they’re valuable.”

Alice’s shoulders heaved with laughter.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to Haruhiro. Alice looked human, but was Alice really?

Just because Alice looked human didn’t mean that was true. He didn’t know what these dream monsters and half-monsters were, but maybe they were something different like that.

Haruhiro backed away. It was dangerous to trust Alice. But Alice had saved him. Alice was going out of their way to bring Haruhiro back to where Alice lived. What for? Out of simple kindness? Did Alice have some reason, some ulterior motive?

It might be a trap.

Alice’s hands stopped. For a moment, he worried Alice was about to spring at him.

Those fears were unfounded. Though it was a little late, Alice seemed to realize the hood had come off.

Alice put it back on, and resumed work.