My Childhood Friend Became an Inquisitor

“What are you saying?”
“Uh, um…?”
“You’re already someone I can rely on.”
*

Being childhood friends isn’t actually that special of a relationship.

It might be different in the city, but that’s how it was in the countryside where I was born and raised. There weren’t many children to begin with, and no one left the village as they grew up or new people came in.

You end up going through life with the faces you’ve seen since birth. Not just two people, but everyone in the village.

But if we look beyond the simple category of ‘childhood friends’ to the relationship between you and me.
We were the most special people in the world to each other.

I grew up neglected with my mother passed away and my father busy with trade,
Anne knew her parents were important people but was raised by complete strangers without ever meeting them.

Amidst families that were poor but harmonious, we were like impurities, alien, and it was a natural progression for us to be drawn to each other.

But before going up to the city. When you still carried a cough, and when I was more ‘romantic’ instead of conforming to reality.

We used to say such things, jokingly yet seriously.

“Maybe all of this is fate?”

Even if it hadn’t been in a small rural village but somewhere else. Even if we had met briefly as a shabby peddler and a high-ranking member of the Church, we would have fallen in love at first sight the moment we met.

Even if it was just words that only immature adolescents would utter, ignorant of the ways of the world.

The same voice and the same content. The past and present overlap, but when I close my eyes and open them again, I see a completely different world.

“Yes, yes, definitely. It was Ailim’s guidance that allowed us to meet again like this.”

In this world of light that felt unpleasant, you, who had grown so much, were repeating the same words as before.

Everything has changed. Fate became Ailim’s guidance, the fragile girl became an Inquisitor, and I…

I don’t know. What have I become? A heretic as they arbitrarily call me? Even Anne only sees me as someone who needs to be saved from darkness.

Even though it’s for the absurd reason that I changed my heart.

“Is that so.”

Now without even the energy to argue, I could only respond weakly.

Actually.
My feelings for you had grown so much that I felt I could never hold anyone else in my heart for the rest of my life.

I don’t remember with what state of mind I accepted the engagement. Even now when you’ve become an object of hatred I can’t bring myself to hate, the days I longed for you are still vivid.

“Yes. You know it too, right Louis? Evil is judged-”

“…and good is rewarded. How could I not know.”

Faith that I believed in without much thought. Because everyone in the village, everyone in the world worshipped Ailim, I too naturally prayed to the only god in the world.

Though not devout, I never doubted its existence. But now, closer to god than ever in some sense, I was doubting god for the first time in my life.

If everything is truly according to your will, what is the meaning of the trials I’m facing now? If you are omniscient and omnipotent, why do you test your children when you already know?

But even with my ignorance of religion, I know enough that such questions are blasphemous.

“Yes, that’s it!”

And I also know that I must never say such things to the girl smiling brightly before me now.

“I’m so happy to see the light returning to you bit by bit already. Louis, I can’t say for certain right now, but once the darkness inside you is washed away.”

Surely Anne is speaking with excessive kindness, and I know that the person I knew originally wasn’t the type to devise such schemes or plans.

Yet somehow that conditional phrase sounded sinister.
If you come to love me again.

“You might be able to go back outside again. There’s no reason to keep someone who isn’t a heretic locked up.”

“Really…?”

“Of course. After all, the re-education center is a place to reform heretics who have the possibility of returning to the Lord’s embrace.”

Anne said so, and undoubtedly that’s what the name of this place indicated, but.

Why is it that the words of the man I first met here, whose name I don’t even know, seem more trustworthy? This space was too hard for such soft reasons.

Perhaps I feel this way even more because of the burn marks that were engraved on my body, though they’ve healed now as if washed away.

Not everyone in the Church could be this kind, and most would probably be hostile to me… No, no. I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought I had just conjured up.

“Ha, haha.”

“What’s wrong, Louis?”

Even Anne wasn’t kind, was she?

I remember the expressionless figure with the helmet on, hiding her face. The cold-hearted Inquisitor who wielded a mace and committed slaughter, yet not a drop of blood stained her silver armor.

‘Take him away.’

The chilling voice that shouted as my world closed still rings in my ears.

“I’m happy.”

“Huh…?”

“I thought I would never see the sunlight on earth again. Actually.”

I can’t say what I wanted to say to you the most. If you were to change upon hearing those words, if you were to act just like the other Inquisitors, I might truly crumble then.

So I aimed and shot the second thing I wanted to say most like an arrow.

“I was afraid of you.”

That too was my true feeling.

When a person witnesses an overwhelming power like a calamity, it’s natural to feel intimidated even if there’s no will behind it. What more if such ‘power’ has a clear will and direction? If that power tries to harm you?

Anne might think her actions were to protect me, but to me, it was harm no different from a disaster. Even if it was someone else who tortured me.

In the end, wasn’t it you who locked me up here, the root cause of all this?

“You’re… afraid of me?”

Anne, hearing my words, asked again as if a broken doll.
As if she didn’t know that her actions that caused storms would be feared, or as if she didn’t expect that I – of all people – would say such a thing.

At the reaction more intense than I had expected, I couldn’t help but refrain from saying more. Lest her patience exceed its limit.

Anne took my silence as an affirmative answer, and she too fell silent. Emotions I could no longer discern flickered across her face, frozen solid like ice.

Soon, with a cracking sound like ice breaking, the girl’s mouth, too kind to be heartless, opens again.

“Why? Is it because I destroyed the village? Or because I kidnapped you?”

You knew, didn’t you?
Even though you knew everything…

“Louis.”

When Anne called my name next, I unconsciously flinched. Not out of fear, but for another reason.

All extraneous thoughts are cleanly erased. That tone was completely different from before. The unfamiliar aspects Anne had shown since our reunion. Neither cold, nor filled with madness, nor gentle as if trying to embrace, nor mature.

Despite the long time we hadn’t met, it was rather the Anne I ‘knew’ exactly.

“Meeting again after nearly ten years…”

A voice that sounded like whining, throwing a tantrum, acting spoiled.

That was the Anne I knew. Actually, if we counted by age, you were two years older, but when we met to play, I often acted like an older brother.

I wonder why. Was it because you were weak and developed slowly, looking younger than your peers? Because you were the owner of a delicate heart that cried easily and kept even trivial things in your heart all day long?

“It would be a lie if I said I didn’t expect a somewhat fairytale-like reunion. But Louis has forgotten someone like me, and greeted me in that way…”

With a sensation like my throat was being choked, I barely managed to refute.

“I didn’t forget.”

“I, I…! I did everything to protect Louis!”

However, Anne didn’t even pretend to hear my words. This too was rare.

Her voice gradually rises. A heart frozen by the cold wind of the harsh world, the delicate and young warmth that barely remained unextinguished inside struggles to break out.

“I stained my hands with blood, endured even the whispers of others. If just one person, just one, wouldn’t look at me that way, everything would have been fine…”

But the Anne I knew, the girl like a flower in a glass garden, was a child who didn’t even know how to get angry properly. The rising voice ultimately doesn’t ignite but spreads, fizzling out and raising only a steam-like sigh.

At times like that, I used to drop everything and run to hug Anne. Embracing her lightly, patting her shoulder until the trembling stopped.

When you shook your head, not wanting to show an unsightly face, I used to gently comfort you, saying there was no unsightly side to you. When you raised your head, convinced by those words, it was one of my old – and pleasant – secrets that I struggled to hold back my laughter.

“I tried so hard… why don’t you understand?”

However, ten years have passed.

The fourteen-year-old me and sixteen-year-old you couldn’t be the same as the twenty-five and twenty-six-year-old us meeting again.

“Ugh, sniff…”

Even though you’re crying within arm’s reach, I don’t hug you.

You crying alone have now learned to stop your tears by yourself, even without someone to comfort you.

Now you don’t hesitate to show your face after crying. Your face, raised high, is still flushed red, but the eyes that were shedding tears drop by drop just moments ago have already cooled like ice.

Anne glared at me, her eye corners twitching as if losing strength, and spat out:

“You’re really mean.”

Even though I abandoned you, in the end, you can’t be harsh to me alone.
What escaped her lips were just words that couldn’t even be called curses.

I felt a strange feeling. It’s not that I’m denying my fault, but if we were to weigh the severity, yours would obviously be much greater. You only show your childlike self to me, but you’ve become an adult who can be cruel enough to others.

For some reason, the moment I heard those words, I felt as if I had committed a great wrong against Anne.