[This work is inspired by the images, gameplay, and story of Atlus's Etrian Odyssey, as well as its sequels.]
You thought it was strange, at first, that Ardell could be caught off guard while telling one of his own treasured myths. He told the story so suddenly and without prompting, except that Circe wrote he looked at the moon first, that you assumed he must have had a purpose for telling it. But when he got to the end and began talking with Circe…it was she who sounded like Ardell, and Ardell himself sounded more like one of his former colleagues from the Ethereal Academy. It was Circe who advocated that the unknown must be chased, that darkness must be revealed, and that truth is in the journey and not the destination. It was Circe who advocated that dreams and feelings must be studied, even if such a course of study is futile.
After finishing your dinner, you took Ardell's journal from out of your satchel and flipped ahead of your bookmark, all the way through his journey to Etria, and to that night – Uroboros 6 – to find some answers. What was he thinking? You skim ahead through the chapter, through his fawning descriptions of the Labyrinth, to reach the moment when the campfire conversation began. And you find this passage:
Uroboros 6, The Yggdrasil Labyrinth, Year 1212, Circe Estrade
"No. Fear is a sign of weakness to great predators. We must be ready for anything and fear nothing. Even if we are being lured into danger, if we are always prepared then we will always prevail," she said. Ludo and I were sitting, mind you, while she stood a short distance away from the fire. She threw furtive glances our way, all of which I assume it was impossible for me to notice, and for the most part kept her eyes locked on the surrounding wilderness…a specific patch, in fact, of tall trees which stood like pillars of rising pitch in the moonlight.
"Is that what you were going to say?" she said, and looked at us. She smiled…and I could not see her face well, but I could hear in her voice that she was challenging me. Why? This is not what I was going to say at all. In fact I am absolutely terrified of being inside of the Labyrinth. If it is the source of the Reclamation, then it must have all of the powers of the other Reclaimed areas. The grass could strangle us in our sleep. The trees could uproot themselves and smash us into pulp. The shrubbery, like that terrible Reclaimed shrub Yvette, could stalk us like a murderer and leap upon us when we least expect it.
The risk is worth taking, though, and it is all very majestic. I had been toying with Ludo, because to admit to fear in front of him would be to invite disaster: he would never let me live it down. As long as he is afraid and he believes that I am not, then I hold the upper hand.
Circe puzzled me. She was challenging my false front with my own true feelings. And so, I decided to get to the bottom of her game.
"Something like that, yes," I said. I felt my face blush red with the shame of deception.
"I think you're wrong. We won't prevail if we always ignore our fear. You can't ignore fear. Do you fear being afraid? Fear is something you have to live with. Even if it seems like an enemy, it's a part of yourself," she said.
I glanced at Ludo, who was watching me with a curious and challenging intensity in his eyes. "I'm not afraid of fear. No," I said more to him than to Circe.
"If you are," she continued, now watching the trees in the distance, as if I had never spoken, "even if you're prepared…if something goes wrong, you'll begin to panic. Even if it's only a little. And that panic will grow, quickly, into a powerful fear. And then you won't know what to do because you've never felt fear before. And while you're feeling your fear for the first time…you could be injured."
Ludo piped in with some snide remark, but I ignored him.
Feeling your fear for the first time. I've always believed that our emotions, strange and unknowable, are like the myths that I study: things in which truth is obscured, but exists somewhere to be dug out and interpreted in pieces; impossible to describe and therefore impossible to study, but still worth the scraps of illumination that a futile study of them provides. This all sounds very pretentious, I'm sure – but that's part of my point. To try and describe emotions and feelings like fear and joy with any amount of precision always sounds inhuman.
Looking at the moon and feeling my fear for the first time that day, being alone with my own terror for just a moment, made me imagine the possibility of our deaths and death reminded me of an old religion that I'd once read about. I told my new companions this story:
In an old religion, there is a god of painting and of death. Supposedly, the holders of this religion wrote, this god of painting and death is responsible for painting the last image that a person ever sees in their mind before they pass away. It is believed that a well-trained priest who is present during a person's passing can sense this image – feel, taste, and smell it; resonate with it. I described to Circe and Ludo the books I'd read which described these dying dream-images – the conclusion of most of the priests was that the images were impossible to describe and impossible to know, and therefore fearful.
It has always been my opinion that it was right to study these unknowable sensations and dream-images. I can't say why, though. It simply feels right to me that they would do so. But, I wanted to test Circe.
She was standing in the moonlight, fully armored and leaning with one arm on her shield. With her other hand she was playing with the hilt of the thin sword that hung from her belt. Her head was tilted ever so slightly towards her right shoulder, so that she was revealing the whole of her neck to Ludo and I near the campfire. I could tell that she was very relaxed, as if she were floating in the air. I could see that she was concentrating in an absent-minded and dream-like way on her surroundings. Her eyes darted here and there, then lingered, then she closed them for a few moments and seemed to simply listen. When a person is being watchful, we say that they are "taking in their surroundings," as if a person could literally absorb the ground through their feet or the horizon through their skin, as if a person could take in and become the very wilderness that they are observing – as if it is possible to become so close to one's surroundings that a person reaches a oneness with them and achieves a god-like omnipotence over them. Circe was taking in her surroundings.
I said that exploring one's own emotions and feelings was a pointless exercise.
"We must live with our fear and learn to make it a part of ourselves," she said. "We must know ourselves."
"But we can't," I said. "We can't know true fear or happiness or comfort or death because all of those things are just what we believe them to be. We know our feelings, but to even give them a name is to be like those priests. There is a tension between what we actually feel and what we believe that we feel; between what is true and what is divine."
"So you think that the proper course of action is to ignore that tension?"
And this is where I lied again.
"Yes. Trying to resolve it is impossible, pointless, possibly dangerous. We should be content with what we know but do not understand. Since we cannot learn understanding, we must learn control."
I was parroting, almost word for word, something that a colleague back at the Ethereal Academy had once told me. He was an idiot. Saying his words again made me convinced, again, of how much of an idiot he was.
Circe told me a story of her own. When she was a young girl, she was given a ribbon to wear in her hair like her mother. Her mother, obviously proud to see her daughter emulating her, cried tears of joy when she saw young Circe dressed so.
"I know what happiness feels like for me, even if I can't describe it. And I can feel it in others even if I can't articulate how. I think you're missing the point of your story."
I was enraptured. She turned her eyes on me, and suddenly she was taking me in, instead of the surroundings. I could feel her absorbing something fundamental about my perception and sense of self. I felt, for just a moment (such a sharp moment!) that it was difficult to tell where I ended and she began.
"Which is?"
"That the priests continued to try and sense the dreams of the dying and that they continued to record them even if they knew they couldn't describe them completely. If, like you say, they couldn't understand what they were feeling…they continued to try it anyway. Why would they do that?"
Impossible. Impossible that she should ask the same questions that I continue to ask about the story.
"Does it matter? It was a great waste of time…"
She interrupted me and drove my own point into me – a graceful parry and a stunning riposte.
"But why would they do it? Why?"
I locked eyes with her and saw that I was wrong. We were never one. She is not me – there is not an Ardell Noir inside of her that I long to know.
Her eyelids drooped heavily over half of her eyes. Calm-faced, smirking pleasantly with the joy a person feels when they are winning an argument, I could see that what she was saying was not at all personal for her. She was simply trying to make me see something that she believed I had missed. That was it. There was no connection between us.
She is Circe Estrade. Who is she? Underneath her desire to educate me, what motivations are there? What is she thinking?
"I don't know," I said, partly to answer her question and partly in regards to her gaze.
The wilderness grows, breathes, chatters around us as we lay around the fire. Almost without any regard for our existence, life continues; this strange wilderness could consume us in our sleep – and would there be a difference between that state and the state that we exist in now? All around us, all of us, exists a world of other people who have their own thoughts, fears, ecstasies, secrets, desires…I will know that world, too, just as I will know the Labyrinth.
Crimson. I will feed this fire within me. Nothing will escape my pursuit. That will be my mantra while we explore the Labyrinth.
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Maurice guffaws from the opposite end of the bar. He is talking with a group of people who you recognize. Renee is among them. She smiles at you when you look up at her. She must have been watching you for a long time. You wonder why she didn't come over to you and say hello. Perhaps she knew that you were reading your journals, comparing notes, and she didn't want to disturb you. Perhaps she is having too much fun with Maurice and her other friends. It's impossible to know, but either way she's smiling at you now and winking at you from over a tankard of ale.
Whatever Renee is thinking right now is private to her, and whatever you are thinking right now is private to you, but what is happening between the two of you is somehow both private and public between the two of you. That same thing occurred between Ardell and Circe many years ago, you think. You wonder if Ardell will ever know what Circe was seeing in the moon shadowed trees or if Circe will ever know what occurred within Ardell when the firelight washed across his pupils.
They fooled each other. They both assumed in the end that they had reached a misunderstanding or a disconnection…but in reality, they'd been very close to one another. Together, but alone in the Labyrinth.
Now that you have two journals, perhaps you should begin to read both. But you don't think that you'll read the same days next to one another for a long time, if ever again. Your progress through the journals would slow to a standstill for one thing, and for another it is a mentally exhausting process to make comparisons. But by switching back and forth every few days, you'll gain a perspective on the legendary Guild Crimson that possibly no one alive has ever had before.
You close Ardell's journal and place it, along with Circe's, into your satchel. Pushing your empty dinner plate forward on the bar, you stand up from your stool and walk to join Renee and her friends in their merry-making.