Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [371]
The wall twisted and the image blurred. Now he was looking at the Isle of Dragon. A steady stream of dragons were flying up from volcanoes. They looked prepared for battle, and they breathed flames that scorched the skies. Heroically, they blasted their way through the legions of demonkin, and sent them careening into the ocean screeching in pain and anger.
At the port of Sono, boats filled with refugees slowly raised their sails. Demonkin swarmed like ugly ants over the town broken by Mitsuru’s magic. Every boat was crammed from bow to stern with people.
All the towns and villages Wataru had seen on his journey through Vision were under attack by the demonkin. Now, at this very moment, the places he had been and the people he had met were fighting a hopeless battle. The walls of the tower burned the reality of it into his eyes.
I have to hurry. The images of battle still tugging at him, Wataru ran up the spiral staircase. Then, quite suddenly, the stairs came to an abrupt end. Is this it? Am I at the top?
He was in a hall, the floor of which was decorated with the same pattern he had seen so many times before, the one connecting Vision to the real world. Each point of the star was shining a different color. Wataru walked to the center of the room.
The top part of the pattern was pointing toward a tall, elegant arch. Upon closer examination, it proved to be in the same shape as the top of the tower—two hands clasped in prayer. Perhaps this was the passageway that led to the Goddess.
He took a step toward the arch, when he heard a voice from behind him.
“Wataru.”
That sweet voice. Wataru tensed and turned around. A girl was standing at the edge of the pattern.
Where did she come from?
“You finally get to meet me.”
How many times had she talked to him? In the real world, and even here, in Vision. Wataru had thought she was a fairy—but he had never forgotten what she told him to do on the shore near Sakawa. “Kill the Goddess.” She had been with him all this time, and he still couldn’t tell whether she was a friend or foe. And he had never seen what she looked like.
Wataru stared at her, too surprised to even blink. She was the spitting image of Kaori Daimatsu.
Those slender wrists. That graceful neck. Those large, black eyes. A smile graced her exquisite face.
“I’m glad I waited,” she was saying. “So glad! I knew you would make it. I believed in you.” Speaking gently, she walked toward him. Wataru stepped back, maintaining their distance.
The girl stopped. Her eyebrows lifted, each a delicately curved brushstroke. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you glad to see me?”
Several questions rose in Wataru’s mind at once. He picked one. “Who are you?”
“Me?” she asked, spreading her hands as though in dismay. “Does my appearance not please you?” She grabbed the edge of her skirt and then bent one knee, curtsying like a girl meeting her partner for the first time at a formal ball. But this was no ballroom. And she wasn’t wearing a gown. Wataru’s memory wasn’t clear on this point, but the skirt she was wearing looked like what Kaori had been wearing when he saw her outside the Daimatsu building. The plain, simple attire of a girl in middle school. The real Kaori would have been wearing it as she sat in her wheelchair. Her unfocused eyes hadn’t even registered his presence.
Of course not. After all, her soul had been captured in the crystal city—until Wataru had freed it.
But the Kaori Daimatsu in front of him now stepped lightly across the floor and spun. Her skirt lifted up, her legs flashing beneath it. Wataru had never seen her like this.
Just like Kaori…and yet totally unlike her. Who is she, really?
“You…talked to me many times.”
The girl smiled, blushing. “You remembered?”
“How could I forget?” He had been happy at first. Back when he thought she was a fairy. Now he felt differently. “What do you want here? Why have you been following me? What do you want me to do?”
“So serious! You sure know how to ruin a girl’s mood.”
“Of course,” Wataru said, clenching