Ishura - Volume 1 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Regnejee the Wings of Sunset

Around the time the lamplighter was beginning to snuff out the night lamps along the main streets, a ray of light began reclaiming the bottomless darkness covering the pure canal waters surrounding Lithia.

At this hour, there was a group touching down in a plaza on the outskirts of the city. It was the flock of wyverns under Regnejee’s command. A fantastic and non-minia army, both feared and relied on by the citizens of the city.

“Attention, all troops. Eyes on me!”

Having landed on the tallest lantern in the area, Regnejee craned his neck from side to side restlessly, more to ensure no minia could hear his voice than to confirm that his entire force was present.

“Now then. We’re here to expunge the filth.”

Even among others of his race, he was a high-strung and delicate wyvern. With wyvern flocks generally revering strength and boldness above all, this sort of wyvern would normally never hold sway over his kin.

“There was a missing person in Lithia today. A minia child. A nine-year-old girl. That ring a bell to any of you?”

“I have something to report!” a shrill voice replied from a corner of the flock.

“Vice Captain of the Southern Column Lukwel…a-ate and killed the child, raak! I—I witnessed it myself, I report!”

“……”

In the silence, Regnejee looked at a large wyvern in the corner of the plaza. The eyes of the troops gathered on the same location.

“…We are provided sufficient provisions for our work as guardians of Lithia. As compensation! I’ll say it so that even the fools among you will understand! Eating Lithia citizens! Damaging Taren the Punished’s trust! High treason! These are the things that will lead to this whole swarm’s starvation! Vice Captain of the Southern Column Lukwel, if you have anything to say for yourself, you’d better say it now!”

“Krrrnnn…”

The vice captain crooned indistinctly while slowly blinking. Peculiarly, some number of the wyverns had the same suspicious look about them. Although intelligence level varied from wyvern to wyvern, there was a bizarre atmosphere among Regnejee’s troops.

“Krrrnnn…… Mrrr…”

“Kekxy ko khart. Kent kakor. Kokett korp.” (From Regnejee to Lithia winds. Return mirror plate. Encumbered sun.)

Without a single word of warning, Regnejee began incanting Word Arts. An unseen fear circulated through the wyverns. Their leader’s spell signaled an execution.

“Kokaitok!” (Shine!)

“Krwaaaah!”

A conical red light appeared in the empty air and burned the wyvern from three directions at once.

The one scalded was not Vice Captain Lukwel, however, but instead the wyvern informant who’d first accused the vice captain.

“—!”

Before the informant could even spit in contempt, Regnejee grabbed them in his claws and pushed them down to the ground.

“Did you think to mislead my own investigation?! Scum! Traitorous scum!”

The moment the light from the Thermal Arts touched the wyvern, their skin was seared, cooking the inner flesh, when—

“Aah… Look! All of you look! Bear witness to the end of this fool who betrayed us!”

Regnejee’s claws mercilessly rent the informant’s stomach.

The reason this peculiar wyvern, with his unimpressive build, had gained control of the flock was not solely due to his inherent intelligence and proficiency for Word Arts to overpower others.

“Scum who eat Lithia citizens… People eaters are punished by death! No exceptions! Capital punishment! Execution!”

A chunk of bloody meat, torn out from the living wyvern’s stomach, was raised into the air. It was the half-digested arm of a child.

Regnejee’s eyes glared through his clouded nictitating membrane at the speechless flock.

Then, suddenly, there came a disquieting noise of wingbeats.

One thing was certain. These wings did not belong to any of the wyverns.

“One year…this filth was added to our swarm one year ago! Not enough treatment! All the others who joined at the same time will undergo treatment again! No more cracks in discipline! Never again!”

Within Regnejee lurked a harshness that bordered on insanity. A reign of terror that accompanied very little tolerance for insubordination. That was the real power that elevated Regnejee the Wings of Sunset to his position at the top.

This historic symbiosis between people and wyverns was also a tenuous peace, dancing on thin ice and barely supported by the existence of a prodigy like Regnejee.

It’s my duty, Regnejee thought, his claws still soaked in cooling blood.

The minia girl the executed wyvern soldier had eaten would be treated as a runaway. Two people a month. That category of sacrifice would likely be fine with Taren. However, if these sacrifices increased, Regnejee couldn’t guarantee the wyverns’ futures. It was necessary for him to maintain control.

To preserve the swarm. And for the only thing he valued in the world.

He knew it was not a crime for wyverns to eat people. Wyverns had no concept of crime to begin with. Their nature was to be free, their wings tools for them to forcefully devour and plunder anything and everything their hearts desired.

Even if it went against divine natural providence and no matter what hideous methods he needed to employ, it was his duty to make sure his flock lived on and survived.

…I will guide the rabble. I will never desert the swarm. The truly powerful are the ones to lead. The ones to bear responsibility for the most lives.

There were times Regnejee would remember the scenery of the sea bluffs, when the sun was at its zenith.

The memory was from shortly before the True Demon King came and took everything away from him.

To Regnejee, his fellow wyverns were nothing more than foolish riffraff.

However, there was one other wyvern like him, possessing intelligence and the capacity to lead.

He recalled that wyvern’s shadow, flying far off beyond the clouds. Regnejee must have had the same choice available to him, too.

One abandoned the peace and order of the swarm, wishing to be free.

One earned authority and shouldered responsibility for the lives of the swarm.

Born equipped with an intelligence unlike the others, Regnejee was the one who hadn’t been able to abandon those wyverns who had remained behind, comrades destined to one day be subjugated by the minia. Even though these wyvern fools were hard to save, even if the entire world was to be brought to ruin by the Demon King’s terror…and even if it meant abandoning their natural wyvern freedoms in service to the minia, Regnejee had no intentions of abandoning his swarm.

He believed it was the correct choice.

No matter how strong a wyvern was, attempting to survive without the solidarity of one’s flock was the height of foolishness.

Nevertheless, that lone wyvern had flapped his wings and left them all behind.

Compared with other cityscapes, what greatly distinguished the scenery of the New Principality of Lithia were the white spires that rose up like a forest. Each one served as a large residence for the wyverns who protected the city and as eyes that continuously looked down from the skies on the citizens and outside threats against the city.

However, within the spire directly connected to the central stronghold, there was a room prepared solely for a single minia.

The room was always kept tidy, filled with expensive furniture, and subdued sunlight shone over the white walls. Living there on her own was a young girl of nineteen years old.

“Today was sunny. Regnejee left early in the morning…”

She muttered into the book that lay open on her desk. Her lightly colored hair stretched down to her feet, suggesting she didn’t spend much time outside her room.

“What are you mumbling about?”

The voice came from the window. She shifted in its direction.

“…Regnejee?” she asked, turning her face to the window. Even with her eyelids open, the girl saw nothing. Her irises were clouded over with gray.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Did you sortie today, too?”

“Just finished driving off a group of raider scum. I’m not playing all day every day, unlike you.”

“I was writing in a journal. Nobles who can write apparently jot down records in these books every day… If I do the same thing, then I’ll be able to remember my conversations with you forever.”

“Hmph. Don’t be so foolish. You can’t even see; how exactly are you supposed to write?”

“Hee-hee-hee. I’ve been having fun with this recently.”

Her name was Curte of the Fair Skies. Her relationship with the king of the skies and protector of Lithia, Regnejee the Wings of Sunset, extended back to before the New Principality had declared independence.

“It’s still light outside, right?”

As Curte approached the window, her long hair flowed in the wind blowing into the room. She casually stretched out a hand to try and touch Regnejee beside her.

He immediately pulled back his wing, and Curte’s fingers grasped at the air.

“Aw.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Tee-hee. I guess even a surprise attack won’t do the trick, huh?”

“Weakling. Small fry like you won’t ever come close, even if you spend your whole life trying.”

“You may be right. I have to think up some other method, then.”

The open window looked down on the beautiful cityscape of Lithia.

A colossal blue belfry rose up among the rows of spires. Radiating out in all directions were the low, gray city streets. The blue of the sky and canal, a faint and gentle border, brought moisture to the air.

“…Do you like Lithia, Regnejee?”

“How about you? Not that you can see anything anyway.”

“I like it. It’s very pretty.”

“Damn fool. If only I had it so easy.”

Curte smiled. Regnejee’s words were always vitriolic and spiteful.

However, the spectacle he had given the girl was not the cruel scenes of the wyvern fighting on the battlefield but instead the glorious and beautiful world visible only to the creatures that soared through the sky.

“…Aren’t you going to sing today, Curte?”

“If a song is what you want, you’ll find many singers far better than myself.”

“I don’t care about the song…really…,” Regnejee replied, quietly squatting down on the floor. “……I want to hear your song.”

To Regnejee and his fierce temperament, fierce even among the minia-eating wyverns, this was the only time he felt at peace.

“—. —, —”

Looking down on the city she couldn’t see, Curte began singing with her delicate yet resonant voice.

The song was without lyrics, weaving only a melody.

—The girl, her vision lost, would still sometimes see waking nightmares of darkness.

The day the True Demon King arrived and her birthplace along the sea was devoured in terror and madness.

Curte hadn’t even directly seen who the True Demon King was or what they had done to her hometown. Even now that everything was over, there was no one anywhere who knew the actual form of the True Demon King.

A passing visit from the True Demon King had plunged her home village into irrevocable annihilation.

It might have actually been her destiny that day for Curte, as well, losing the light in her eyes from the indescribable act of violence, to linger eternally on the border of madness.

“…Ahhh. A lovely song,” Regnejee quietly murmured.

That day, she was the only person—with Regnejee as the only wyvern—who didn’t stay lost to the madness.

She remembered being able to hear a song from somewhere, amid the eternally sealed darkness. Even if it was a mere auditory hallucination moments before death, she still had heard it. The angels’ songs spoken of in the old teachings surely must have sounded similar. She remembered it was without lyrics, only a melody.

Regnejee believed that song, unsure whether it really existed or not, had brought Curte’s consciousness back to this world.

“Hey, Regnejee…what is going to happen to Lithia?”

The wyvern’s sorties were growing more frequent. Even with no knowledge of politics or government, Curte could feel a vague foreboding seeping into Lithia.

The lord of the seaside nest, Curte’s homeland, Regnejee was a wyvern who had also been wrapped up in the True Demon King calamity. At the time, save for Regnejee himself and some other wyverns who happened to be away, his first flock, which he had spent his long life cultivating, had been completely devastated by the True Demon King, as if they were nothing but a swarm of insects.

Even if they differed physically, both Regnejee and Curte shared signs in their pasts of the worlds they had lived in beginning to collapse.

They still did not know if the current daily decay would continue in waves of triumph and upheaval or if they were on the path to ruin. Nevertheless, they knew the current tranquil days would inevitably change completely.

“What about you, Curte? Planning on living on here in Lithia?”

“Hee-hee. My mom’s the ruler, after all.”

“…People die. War will start soon. I’m serious. I can tell.”

Curte knew Regnejee’s words of warning were true. He had much deeper knowledge than she did regarding military tactics and strategy, and she believed his premotions to be even more reliable than those of a general for the minia races.

Regnejee didn’t lie to Curte.

The fighting was sure to break out at any minute. And their enemy would be Aureatia, the world’s largest nation.

“Even if it does, I’m not leaving you behind, Regnejee.”

“Hmph. If war does break out, scum like you will be the first to die.”

Thin fingers tried to touch Regnejee’s wing. Regnejee avoided them without even a glance in the girl’s direction.

“Awww.”

“Try all you like, it’ll always end the same way, you dunce.”

“C’mon, just let me have a little touch.”

Curte’s fingers once again cut through the air.

“Kn-knock it off, stupid! You’re going to fall!”

“Tee-hee, hee-hee-hee.”

“It’s dangerous, even for a dunce like you!”

His shrill voice made it clear he was not a minia.

Nevertheless, being blind, Curte had never seen Regnejee’s true form before.

Thus, she was unaware that he was a genius who commanded a wyvern swarm; who erected this world’s air-defense network, utilizing air reconnaissance and radzio communication; and who eliminated and devoured anyone who stood as an enemy to Curte.

Her family and her friends were all dead. Right now, her sole parent was Taren the Punished, who had taken in the orphan girl together with Regnejee.

“Is it okay if I sing again?”

“…I don’t care. Do as you please.”

In the corner of the room, Regnejee silently curled up into a ball.

Until Curte finished singing again…quietly and in peace.

He was ever at the side of Curte of the Fair Skies. Together with his wyvern wings, allowing him to sail on the winds as far as he pleased, and with his outstanding intellect, surpassing any other member of his race.

“Hey, Regnejee, did you know? At the beginning of this world…there were angels, and together with the Word-Maker, they created everything…”

She believed this legend. Even if she couldn’t see his face and even though he wasn’t a minia, he was still a friend she could believe in from the bottom of her heart.

“Angels like songs…because the Word Arts began with a song.”

Curte smiled. She truly felt that way about Regnejee, who continued to look after her without expecting anything in return, sitting by the blind girl’s side.

“If only you were an angel, Regnejee.”

The Word Arts of this world made it possible for all races to communicate effortlessly.

He held the world’s sole flying army to do with as he pleased and controlled the wide-open skies.

He led a completely obedient colony of wyverns willing even to die if he bade them do so. It lived as if it were one singular organism.

He had the intellect to fully control the tide of battle and spread his roots deep into the core of a nation-state.

A fierce attacker as well as a guardian of order. Above all, a unique calamity among the clouds.

A wyvern commander unlike any before him.

Regnejee the Wings of Sunset.