Game for a Memory
Chapter 3

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He couldn't seem to move away from the shore. It was like one of those pocket spaces where a small scene seemed endless and was endlessly there.

Beatrice, the Endless Witch. And yet even she had met her end because she never showed up again. Aside from the stories that immortalised her: tales of the Rokkenjima incident that were as pretentious and false as the next and the one in his mind was the closest and the furthest as well, because he could never write it.

And maybe Eva Ushiromiya's was equally close and equally far away and for the same reasons as well.

But the shore wouldn't leave, no matter how he wandered from its perimeter. The game didn't move – and so there was only one more choice: to head into the water itself.

His heart thumped noisily and painfully at that. He'd almost drowned after all and that was the first and last thing he recalled. But the two sets of memories within him clawed for action. Inaction made them quarrel louder and that festering panic in his soul only grew louder and stronger as well. He didn't want them to fight until they destroyed each other and this life of his and yet they tended towards exactly that. And so he couldn't sit still. He hadn't lasted long at all in the chapel until the smell of his own blood dragged him deeper –

And even the ocean choking him at night was more welcome than that.

He took a deep breath, and then turned around. He'd left the pier long ago but it didn't take him nearly as long to return. And he didn't bother trying to understand the physics behind that because it was what it was. The matches between Battler and Beatrice were centred on exactly that and yet one couldn't apply science and the laws of mystery to a dream or to illusions. That was another layer. The Rokkenjima tragedy was certainly no dream, but this? The temple under the sea –

He paused and stared out into the water he was adrift in. The temple under the sea… What was that? He remembered a glimpse of it and yet it fit with nothing. He hadn't gone diving in the Rokkenjima waters. There had been a shipwreck around the same time as the murders but that meant nothing either. The missing people… Rokkenjima was a closet of skeletons of the Ushiromiya family but it hadn't been an outsider that ended them. That would have been too simple, and too kind.

The internal strife was what kept the tale alive. And Eva's silence… She who could have condemned anyone but her own guilt and the others had been laid out in a row like dominoes but not her, never her and the omission spoke volumes and more of her guilt until something in his gut had twisted and turned her into a witch equitable to Beatrice the eternal witch…

And suddenly, Beatrice was there, in the boat with him, crying and smiling and holding…was that an ingot? The fabled gold of the Ushiromiyas that had been their fortune and their destruction as well? Her red dress was deeper than the sunrise that framed her, and brighter than the dark blood that stained her. And the ocean was swallowing all of that. Swallowing her whole and when had that happened? Did she jump and fall?

And then he was in the water as well and he lost her – or perhaps he'd been in the water all along and she was saving him, or he was saving her – He was all muddled again and half of him screamed to swim that way and grasp her and which way was that? Deeper? Or towards the surface?

There was a glitter of light behind her. Was that the temple that had flickered to the forefront of his mind before vanishing again – or the rising sun that signed the lease to his survival?

.

He had a strange dream. He had that, sometimes, and that dream couldn't be explained by science or mysteries because there was far too much magic in it. Ange was there sometimes and that was a thing in itself: Ange the age she was now, when she'd been only six years old during the Rokkenjima incident and he was the near but not quite adult he'd been back then.

No, that wasn't him. That was Battler Ushiromiya and that person was dead now, was dying now – Even time had been muddled up but that didn't matter. Battler Ushiromiya died in the Rokkenjima incident and he was Hachijo Tokya.

And it was Battle Ushiromiya who transcended his own mortality in this moment and became the sorcerer, who played the endless games with Beatrice the Eternal Witch, who was that form blinking in the middle of the playing room and then taking his seat and fighting…fighting for what? No matter who won and who lost, the game went on for eternity until the spectators grew bored and freed them from the bottle they'd wandered into… Or perhaps that was a cat box as well. A cat box with a bottleneck.

'And so I was born,' said the Endless Sorcerer from behind him.

Tohya was breathing again. They were under the ocean and his heart slowly calmed, and the division of his mind settled back into place once more. The Endless Sorcerer was behind him with his red hair and black minted cape, slimmer and fuller and yet also less real because he'd transcended his mortal existence and mortal plane.

And Tohya was the skeleton who somehow managed to crawl to the shore and survive, wasn't he?

'And the endless game began,' the Endless Sorcerer continued. 'But all we wanted was for it to end. But we fought on anyway. Fought because we could do nothing else, trapped in this place with the cat box that was once Rokkenjima at our feet and still locked. And I…became a cat box as well.'

'A man without memories that could be anyone and no-one,' Tohya continued. He understood that. He knew that. 'A blank slate…or Schrodinger's cat box.'

'Ironic, isn't it?' the Endless Sorcerer smiled. 'But the truth is that there's nothing endless. Beatrice couldn't keep on fighting forever so she gave up and the title of the Endless Witch was mine – or Endless Sorcerer, as it is.' He looked down at himself. 'And then I fought for a different purpose, not to deny Beatrice's existence and find the person truly responsible for my family dying in these endless cycles – ' He laughed. 'I've used that word again, haven't I?'

Tohya didn't answer. It was a rhetorical question anyway. Their eternals and their endlessness were drowning them just as the different people they'd become.

'In any case.' And the Endless Sorcerer smiled again. 'We're in the middle of our own eternal game. There's no Beatrice here.'

'The Endless Sorcerer against Hachijo Tohya,' Tohya snapped, teeth gritted in frustration. 'I know. He could not – would not – allow this faux pas to go on forever. But hadn't he already made his choice before this game had even begun? Then what was the question he was to answer. The Endless Sorcerer had asked questions but rhetorical ones. Nothing that demanded he answer – and he'd asked no question either.

Perhaps he'd been a fool in that he'd walked into a game thinking he knew the rules when he'd missed the most important one.

So what was it? Beatrice's questions was one and from it stemmed the debate of man vs. magic. She tried to prove the murders at Rokkenjima could not be explained by any mortal means while Battler Ushiromiya tried to do exactly that. But that wasn't the question: whether magic existed or not. It was a means: a stimulator of conversation, a provoker of arguments. But the true question had been something else.

But he didn't know what it was. The Endless Sorcerer no doubt knew. All the games that were echoing shadows in his memories were the true memories of that meta-person who'd transcended his own murder and the murder of his family. In there, surely some of those had reached endgames, where the question had been posed and the clock started… But by that same logic it meant he hadn't reached the answer if the next round came on…

But that was incorrect as well, because the fact that they were playing now and without Beatrice meant that something had somewhere changed. 'Did you win?' he wondered. 'Did you find the answer to Beatrice's question?'

'I did,' replied the Endless Sorcerer, 'but it is not quite a victory yet. The prize isn't quite in my grasp.'

'From that, I'll assume the prize has something to do with me.' Tohya gripped his shirt at the end of that. His heart pained suddenly. Screamed for something – and then the memories of Rokkenjima weren't at an arm's length but clouding his mind again. 'I am…my own person.'

'I know,' said the Endless Sorcerer. 'It's why we're in this game.'