Before most of the people fighting now even knew there was a war to fight.
Before he had even come over from Japan, when he was finishing high school. If he’d guessed right, the names on this scroll were of people no older than he’d been—teenagers, who should have had full, happy lives, and whose lives and potential had been stolen from them. That a few survived was a miracle. That one had carried those names for so many years was even more of one.
He would have to bring Encke here, once they were marked properly. And once he’d done a little cleanup in the memorial garden; although when he stepped through the gate, he could see it was blooming again, and butterflies had settled all over the stones, there were still weeds in among the flowers.
That would be a project for another time. For now, he was here with a purpose.
He wove through the stones, though he paused at each one, running his fingers over the name.s They were engraved in hands and in tongues he could not read, even if some seemed strangely to echo one Earth writing system or another—they were always just off, and he could never quite grasp exactly what he was looking at. Except that they were names. People who had died and who were mourned, even if only by the Knight and the priests, over the centuries that Aokigahara had existed and fulfilled its purpose.
He would have to bring candles, on his next visit. One for each memorial stone. He could light them, and some incense, when he visited; a gift to this set of dead, like the lanterns he kept lit for the greater graveyard.
That was a comforting thought.
There was no memory to guide him, there; simply his own notion of what was right to honor the souls remembered here. But he thought that Rin might approve. Or,. at least, he hoped so.
Finally, he came to the empty stone, the one that must have been finished not long before everything went to hell. He took a deep breath, and pulled the scroll case from subspace, extracting the scroll from within, and closed his eyes, to remember what Rin had been shown.
He touched the scroll to the stone, and felt a tug. And when he opened his eyes, there they were.
Thirty-five names. Thirty-five lives, forever remembered, in this place far from where they had lived and died. It was not, perhaps, perfect, but it was something.
And there was a new, heavy, but comforting weight around his shoulders.
Aokigahara smiled. A Knight, finally—with all the power and responsibility thereof.
“I’ll do my best to live up to it,” he said, and he wasn’t sure who he was saying it to—perhaps simply to his Wonder as a whole.
His lantern was on a staff, now, much easier to handle, and he drove it into the soft earth, letting it cast its purple glow over the garden.
Now, it was time to start weeding.
