SN Chapter 33

For any other creature, it would have been a simple fact of existence—accepted without question.

For the entity, it was a loss greater than losing hands and feet. More terrifying than a fanged death sentence.

Rosaline trembled—for the first time since becoming human. She understood it instinctively: this aberrant state was punishment of some kind, a side effect born of the taboo. Partial transformations remained available. She could borrow a tiger's musculature, a hawk's hearing, the toughened hide of a demonic beast. But she could not return to the complete form of what she had been.

Had she encountered this truth in the early days of wearing Rosaline's shell, she might have collapsed into vast panic. But now—the entity, Rosaline, was dissolving gradually into human life. She had a younger brother named Kallix. A friend named Raymond. In the world of these two-legged creatures, emotions and sensations existed that could not be felt as a shadow, as an animal—diverse, intense, crowded into the same space all at once.

Perhaps the shadow's life had been a little dull. Sleeping as though dead. Eating corpses when the time came. Waiting. Sleeping again. Hundreds of years of this, broken by human life. Perhaps she was beginning to like it.

She felt it: a kind of power beginning to faintly mix with the magical energy inside her. The black-haired human, Rosaline. The force inside her—the force all living creatures carried. The primal force that made living things breathe. Life. That life was slowly dissolving into her, merging with what she was, becoming one. Perhaps their taboo had been less a warning against living creatures themselves than against the life force within them.

Rosaline had been alarmed at first, naturally. No longer able to mimic other creatures. No longer able to run. If something wanted to kill her—if someone wanted to kill her—would she simply have to die?

Shocking.

But then a thought arrived, sudden and unbidden.

Why do I need to run?

Why had she needed to mimic anyone at all? Dying, being buried, rotting into the earth—this was the natural order. The principle of cycles. For the first time, she understood: she, and perhaps her kin living somewhere else in the world, were strange beings standing outside this law.

She would die. She had a body now, and when the power within this body was spent, she would cease to breathe. She would die as Rosaline. Natural law—as with all living things. Thinking of it this way, the loss of complete mimicry was no longer so frightening. The instinct to flee endlessly, the resistance against attacking or killing anything—both of these subsided.

After that, Rosaline occasionally dreamed. Or recalled certain memories. Not her own memories. Rosaline's.

The contents of books studied with diligence came back to her.

Being chased by someone through a dark forest.

Sometimes she looked at her young sibling and spoke with warmth: 'You're a good boy, Cal. My Kallix.'

She filed this: fragments of Rosaline's life force.

In the end, the taboo binding those who called themselves shadows had begun from the act of possessing true life. Because only through life as a starting point could death be reached. A taboo born from wariness of death. Some would call it reckless. Some would call it foolish. But Rosaline had already stepped into the crossroads of life and death—whatever the consequence.

She placed her hand over her heart. Through the skin, her heart beat with fierce insistence.

She explained it from the beginning. A dying black-haired human. A request. The necessity of consuming something living.

The woman listened with her pretty face thoroughly rearranged into something it was never designed to be.

"What are you even saying. Explained from the very beginning and I still can't follow any of it? Well... I suppose even among monkeys there are ones that can't climb trees..."

Every group has its inferior individuals, I suppose. She let the sentence drift. It seemed she wanted to avoid accepting that she and Rosaline were the same kind.

She—another entity—had once watched a kin commit the taboo. That kin had been starving for a long time. By good fortune, they had found a dead snake. They had absorbed the large snake—never imagining there might be a still-living rabbit inside. Afterward, the kin had lived in bewildered misery as a rabbit, reporting that their mimicry ability was disappearing. Partial transformations remained possible, but no matter how they borrowed a leopard's musculature, they could not escape the fundamental shape of rabbit. Eventually, the kin had been caught by hunters.

A tragedy that couldn't even be laughed at.

Without weapons, humans were a weak species. No sharp claws. No fangs. Not even strong muscles. Better than a rabbit, technically. But by the woman's reckoning, rabbit and human were roughly the same category. She could transform into a demonic beast the size of a house if she chose. Her standards for strength were set accordingly.

The inferior kin was discussing matters directly relevant to her own safety, and Rosaline was maintaining the attitude of you talk, I'll listen—while staring fixedly at one of the tents the humans had set up.

The worry was unavoidable. She had no idea how the world worked, and on top of that was a kin who had committed the taboo and could no longer fully mimic. In the back of the woman's mind, that other kin kept surfacing—the one who had lived as a rabbit and been taken by hunters. She exhaled slowly.

"I once ate a human, you know."

"Mm-hm."

Not listening at all. The woman was going to—

"Thanks to that, compared to other kin... how to put it. I tend to think a bit. Humans do have higher intelligence than other animals, after all."

"Mm-hm."

The woman moved a little closer. The scent of grass brushed faintly past Rosaline's nose.

"Living with humans, I learned what a community is. So I worry too. Listen, you foolish girl!"

Knights passed near Rikardis's tent. Rosaline's attention turned toward them automatically. The woman struck her forearm—thwack—and snapped at her. She bit her lower lip once, then seized Rosaline by the shoulder. Determination moved through the woman's gray eyes.

"Listen."

"Mm-hm."

"I'll watch over the end of a kin who committed the taboo."

And rescue her if she looked to be in danger, incidentally. Running away with one human was nothing to her. But Rosaline only narrowed her eyes slightly and did not respond.

The woman understood. She doesn't follow.

She revised her phrasing.

"I'm saying I'll follow you from now on."

"Oh." Rosaline nodded. "Okay."

For one of them, this had been the defining decision of an existence. She does think, right? The woman realized, once more, that her choice had been correct. She exhaled again, long and slow.

"Anyway. I'll be in your care."

"Mm-hm."

Rosaline held out her hand. A sound escaped her—small, involuntary—and she clasped it. For all that, apparently the inferior kin had learned this particular form of greeting somewhere. It was a warmth she hadn't felt in a long time.

"Squirrel?"

"That's strange. Why would anyone carry a squirrel around."

"Deer?"

"I have seen someone walk with a deer, actually. A hunter who had killed it and was carrying it over their shoulders."

"...Bear?"

"A person and a bear could certainly coexist. With the person conveniently inside the bear's stomach."

The two women were still talking in the tree. The woman had decided to follow Rosaline—but not in human form. Whether human or animal, outside presences who appeared suddenly were strongly rejected, even among the same species. Human intelligence was often higher than most animals', which only made things worse. They would quickly form doubts about an imperfect mimicry.

The woman listed the animals she had consumed over the years. Rosaline went through them one by one. But a person who keeps a squirrel. A person who walks with a deer. A person who travels with a bear or a demonic beast. Such things might exist somewhere in the world, but they were clearly rare circumstances. The woman, like Rosaline, had a strong instinct to avoid being noticed.

After that, snake, black leopard, stag beetle, and raccoon dog were each raised and rejected in turn. The woman who had been thinking for quite a while made a small sound of discovery.

"When I lived with the old woman, I once saw someone who traveled with an animal!"

She barely remembered it. An old woman who had lived in a small cabin on the mountainside. Hunters occasionally stopped there to shelter from rain. Most carried only materials for bows and traps, but occasionally there were hunters with hunting dogs or hawks. Two candidates. She had consumed neither dogs nor hawks. She smiled anyway.

"I once ate an eagle."

Rosaline made a sound of admiration. Certainly—hawk or eagle, both large birds of prey. Same category, more or less. The woman shuddered once and began to transform. Her form darkened to black. It did not take long. When it was done, she had taken the complete shape of an eagle—considerably larger than expected. Rosaline marveled at the sheer scale of it. The eagle spoke in human language with complete ease. Only the vocal cords had been changed to human ones, it seemed.

"It was the eagle they called king of this region. One that had fought demonic beasts. Unfortunately a great horned owl ambushed it at dusk and it died. A great horned owl at night is as strong as an eagle in the day."