Angel's Serenade

Stories

## Illustration

## Prologue

A girl was singing.

To call her a girl… perhaps… she was still a child.

A beautiful child's voice.

Her soft, light-brown hair shone like sunlight filtering down through the leaves, as though draped in a veil of luster.

The girl sang with a gentle expression on her face.

But why did those eyes let slip the faintest thread of loneliness? Perhaps it was only his imagination.

—The eyes.

Yes, the eyes. Large, beautiful eyes. What lingered most was that the color of her left pupil and her right were not the same.

—Odd-eye…

The right eye was a crimson red, like the last glow of sunset.

The left eye was a blue-violet, like the first light of dawn.

(—Rusty is singing again.)

Kurabisu was inside his own dream.

A dream of traveling with his little songstress, the spirited Rusty.

To Kurabisu's accompaniment, Rusty sang.

They passed through village after town. The music they played always turned a street corner into a miniature concert hall.

Listening to Rusty's singing, every person wore a look of happiness that came from the heart.

Applause surged like a tide, and bouquets crowded in around her. Rusty hugged the flowers and laughed with joy.

"I'm so glad we came out traveling."

Watching the exhilarated Rusty laugh, Kurabisu answered her gently.

And yet he could not protect her… That regret—even with a smile on his face, tears were flowing in his heart.

"Hehe. Kurabisu, you're so strange."

Rusty, like a little puppy…

## August

"At this rate, how much longer do I have to walk before I reach Fordio Town?"

Over his long travels alone, Kurabisu had fallen into the habit of talking to himself. He set the pack on his back down by the roadside, stretched out in one long, lazy stretch, and settled his mood.

Over the course of the long journey his clothes had worn through, and his black hair was coated in a thick layer of dust. He looked to be about twenty, yet the manner of someone long accustomed to the road made him seem nothing like a person that young.

This was the frontier of the Land of Earth. It had taken Kurabisu nearly a full day to walk here from the remote border town of Daidaro.

Summer had already passed, but the heat was still fierce, and the sunlight poured in without mercy through the dense gaps in the trees along the road.

"—I'll rest a little first. If the rumors are true, I ought to be nearly at my destination."

Kurabisu wiped away the sweat running down his face, let out a small breath, and sat down beside a tree at the roadside. On a whim he began to play the Fudoru he carried with him (a magical instrument driven by a wind-magic stone).

The Fudoru was a small keyboard instrument resembling a piano, with a wind magic stone sealed inside. The power of the magic stone greatly lightened the instrument, though even so it still had a little weight to it. It could produce all manner of tones, and melodies more distant and haunting than ordinary instruments, which was why many musicians favored it…

## September

The cicadas cried with all their might, as if reluctant to let the departing summer go.

The murmur of water came from beside the river. At the foot of the hills below Fordio Town, at the edge of that forest, in a heat fierce enough to evaporate a person, Kurabisu creaked and twisted his way out of his sleeping bag.

By his reckoning, nearly a week had passed since he arrived in Fordio Town.

Almost every day Kurabisu went into town, laboring to gather information about the angel. But things were not promising. From the fragmentary accounts of the town he found in the library, the town had indeed once kept an angel's feather, a feather said to grant wishes and even work miracles. That was all the information he had managed to collect. The townspeople treated him as an outsider and kept a wary distance, as if every resident had agreed together to guard some secret.

There was one more thing Kurabisu did without fail each day.

It was his daily required lesson.

And that was—

He scooped up the flowing river water and splashed his face, then quickly assembled the Fudoru.

As if to break the stillness of morning, gentle music flowed out from the riverbank.

(It should be about time, shouldn't it?)

As if expecting something, Kurabisu turned his gaze toward the road that led into town.

—Just then.

Crunch, crunch.

A faint sound of footsteps on the grass.

"Hey. Good morning, Rusty."

Kurabisu turned toward the sound, and there, sure enough, was Rusty.

Seeing Kurabisu, Rusty also showed…

## October

The sky for a quilt, the earth for a bed. Sleeping in the open was not so bad. Especially when the weather was fine.

In the deep autumn of October, the blue sky stretched cloudless for miles.

By the river where he camped, Kurabisu was grilling a river trout he had just caught, for lunch.

Fat dripped, drop by drop, onto the roaring fire, crackling and popping. The aroma came rushing in, and the hunger in his belly let out an enormous growl.

"Hurry up and cook~. Hurry~."

Kurabisu murmured it softly, as if chanting a spell, turning the fish now and then and minding the heat so both sides cooked just right.

"It's done! I'm eating~~~~…!"

Just as he opened his mouth wide for a great bite, he heard a rustling from the weeds beside him.

"Is that you, Rusty?"

He set down the salt-and-pepper grilled fish he had been about to eat and looked toward the thick grass.

But what came crawling out was an adorable little kitten.

"You came running because you smelled it, didn't you?"

It had a beautiful, glossy coat; it looked like a house cat. Kurabisu tore a bit of fish from the skewer in his hand, set it on his palm, and held it out.

"Here, eat. You're hungry, aren't you?"

He bobbed the hand holding the fish up and down.

"What's wrong? You don't want it?"

The white cat seemed very wary of strangers and would not come closer.

"You're not going to eat?"

Then, whether it had lost to its own appetite, or its caution toward humans was thinner than Kurabisu had imagined, the cat came closer, swaying its long tail. Kurabisu once more…

## November

The season had already turned to winter. A full three months had passed since Kurabisu came to this town.

(…I keep feeling dizzy in waves… and my body feels so tired.)

Lately a severe influenza had been spreading through the town.

Walking through town, one could see a great many people in poor shape. Kurabisu had not been spared. He had never imagined his body would end up in a state like this.

If it had been the him of before, something like a cold would never have touched him at all.

(This is as far as it goes. Do not get involved with that person—with Rusty—any further. This is a matter of your life.)

The words he had heard in a dream rang in his ears, like thorns against his back.

The money from a single concert a week was nowhere near enough to live on, so lately Kurabisu had been busy working odd jobs to earn his keep.

Today he had finished his work at the Angulord Inn and was on his way home.

"Uwah—it's freezing!"

A biting wind off the mountains raced through the lonely town at night.

(Lately… my body's been up and down. I should crawl into bed and rest early.)

Because of the cold, Kurabisu quickened his pace. He crossed the main street, meaning to take a shortcut home, and had just reached a corner near the edge of town.

"Uwah!"

"—!!"

Suddenly a small figure came flying out from around the corner.

"That hurts… Rusty?"

The small figure was Rusty. Her eyes were wide and round with terror, and her body would not stop trembling.

"Ah… awu…"

No…

## December

"Awu!"

Bright morning sunlight poured into the room, and with it came Rusty's energetic voice.

"Sleepy… sleepy… just… just ten more minutes…"

Faced with Kurabisu lingering in bed, Rusty mercilessly yanked off his blanket.

She looked as if she were thoroughly enjoying herself.

"Uuu… I'm so sleepy…"

"Awu!"

"Let me sleep a little longer. I didn't sleep properly last night because I was composing a new piece."

Jii— Rusty stared hard at Kurabisu's face.

"A~wu!"

"Eh? Today's…? Ah! The concert!!"

—At Rusty's urging, Kurabisu sprang out of bed.

*

Kurabisu had already been lodging at Rusty's house for more than half a month.

He stayed in an empty room—a room that had probably once been her father's. Because of that, Kurabisu often felt uneasy.

Simply living in someone else's home left him unable to rest easy, so lately he had been helping with the housework.

The first thing each morning was drawing water.

The work was to draw from the well enough clean water for the day, load it into buckets, and carry it back.

The chore was genuinely hard.

It was what Kurabisu could manage, to share the burden of Aeolia, whose health was poor.

During the day he also went out to work and bring back a little money for food.

When Kurabisu said as much, Rusty flushed crimson and ran outside.

According to the doctor, her symptoms were the same as the cold going around town.

With disease running rampant lately, the great…

## Epilogue

The brilliant sun radiated light in every direction, and the blue sky was clear without end. It was a sunlit day in early summer.