In front of a mirror clouded with the dust of ages, Elijah wore an expression of unprecedented determination.
It had been a month since he’d visited the settlement. He had regained a fair amount of energy by now, and he had the coin purse he’d stolen from the con artist.
Plus, he now knew the new currency denominations. Having been burned badly once, he would be even more careful from now on. His heart still fluttered a little when he recalled that day, but Elijah steeled his resolve.
He lifted the scissors he’d been holding in his hand. The scissors, as large as Rose’s head, were rusted in spots. The blade touched his hair, which had been gathered and tied together.
Snip, snip. After a few decisive cuts, the hair that had covered Elijah’s back for so many long years was cleanly severed. It was just hair, yet his neck felt refreshingly light, as if a head had been removed.
‘Rose is going to be sad.’
Elijah thought this as he set the hair, now separated from his body, down on the table.
For Rose, who had no proper toys to speak of, Elijah’s long hair had been a good plaything. Even while sleeping, Rose would always fiddle with Elijah’s hair, and during feeding, he would grip his hair tightly like a rope.
Sometimes Rose would take Elijah’s hair and wind it around his neck like a muffler, or drape it over his shoulders as if it were his own hair, asking absurd questions like, “What would it be like if my hair got this dark? Would you still think I’m pretty?” For young Rose, it had been a toy he was quite attached to, in his own way.
“It shouldn’t matter. Hair grows back…”
Elijah muttered quietly to himself so as not to wake the sleeping Rose, then looked at the mirror again. He trimmed his bobbed hair even shorter, creating a shape similar to the hairstyles of the men he’d seen at the settlement.
There would surely be people who remembered the commotion from that day, so he needed to look as different from then as possible. Since he only had two cloaks and they were both the same gray color, changing them would be meaningless, so he had no choice but to alter his appearance this way.
“…”
Elijah turned and looked down at Rose lying on the bed. Perhaps sensing that Elijah wasn’t beside him, Rose frowned faintly and turned over.
Elijah slipped into bed beside him and patted his back. Rose, still half-asleep, stretched out his arm to pull Elijah’s neck close and buried his lips against the nape. Something soft and moist swept over the wound from that morning’s bite.
Just as gripping Elijah’s hair was natural to him, biting and licking his skin was also one of Rose’s natural habits. Opening his mouth, he gently scraped Elijah’s nape with his front teeth. It was an instinctive action, like a baby seeking milk.
Shh… Elijah’s small whisper reached Rose’s ear as he seemed about to wake from sleep. Young Rose was still in a period when he needed a lot of sleep.
“Sleep more, Rose.”
Elijah patted his back for quite a while until Rose fell back into deep sleep, then carefully slipped out of bed. Elijah, whose movements were never particularly loud to begin with, began preparing silently and swiftly.
He hoped Rose wouldn’t recklessly leave the cabin looking for him when he woke up alone. What had happened when Elijah went down to the settlement before, leaving the sleeping Rose alone? If Elijah had been even a little later that day, Rose would have gotten lost in the forest.
It was fortunate that time that his walking was still clumsy so he couldn’t go far, but the current Rose walked and ran far better than he did back then.
A cord made by cutting up a bedsheet was wrapped around Rose’s slender ankle. After checking that the ankle wasn’t too tightly constricted, Elijah tied the other end of the cord to the bed leg.
This way, even if Rose wanted to leave the cabin, he wouldn’t be able to get beyond the bed.
Elijah placed his cut hair on Rose’s pillow. The small hand that stuck out from under the blanket covering him up to his neck habitually gripped Elijah’s hair.
“I’ll be right back, Rose.”
Elijah swept back the white hair that had fallen over Rose’s forehead with his hand and pressed a kiss on top of it.
***
Elijah deliberately took a long detour to avoid running into the con artist he’d met before. He pulled his hood down as far as possible so no one would recognize his face, and had to move carefully, as if walking on thin ice.
The fortunate thing was that the con artist’s coin purse contained quite a generous amount of money. Though it was stolen money, it was far less than the value of the mushrooms taken that day, so Elijah consoled his conscience with that.
The man who’d committed fraud first was the worse one anyway. In any case, the man ended up with the mushrooms and he ended up with the coin purse, so wasn’t that settled?
He went from shop to shop as quickly as possible. He even spent the 1 marc coins he hadn’t known about before without hesitation. Having plenty of money meant his heart didn’t feel as constricted as before.
Since he planned not to come down for quite a while after today’s outing, he bought several outfits and shoes in various sizes, considering Rose’s growth rate. When Elijah bought multiple sizes of clothing at once, the junk dealer watching him apparently thought he had many younger siblings to support, and threw in a few old picture books for free.
Unlike his previous outing, everything was going smoothly, so his mood kept improving. Now that he was feeling confident, he planned to buy the red cloak he hadn’t been able to purchase before, secretly leave a token of gratitude for the kind merchant who’d taught him about currency denominations, and then return home.
Having shopped so thoroughly that his bag was bulging, Elijah finally moved to buy the red cloak. Since the cloak merchant’s location wasn’t far from the herbalist’s shop, he didn’t lose his caution even in his excitement.
It was when he entered the entrance to the now-familiar alley.
“You there, person in the gray cloak!”
He was startled, thinking someone was calling him. However, the voice came from far down the alley, quite distant from Elijah.
There, a man was stopping a passerby dressed similarly to Elijah and checking his belongings.
“What are you doing all of a sudden? Did something happen?”
“Ah, one of the merchants in the alley on the other side was victimized by a crazy mage. So we have no choice but to search everyone with a similar appearance. They say the mage stole the merchant’s coin purse.”
“The world is truly harsh. How could such an atrocious thing happen in broad daylight in the middle of the market…”
The passerby obediently showed his bag and all his inner pockets.
“What a pointless effort. Would that thief still have that coin purse? He probably ditched the purse and just kept the money long ago.”
“Still, it’s a necessary procedure.”
This time, the man checked the facial features drawn on the wanted poster and compared them to the passerby. He soon smiled and apologized.
“Yes, confirmed. Sorry to delay you when you’re in a hurry.”
“It’s fine. I hope you catch that crazy mage.”
Elijah quickly turned and walked rapidly in the opposite direction. His heart, which had calmed down a bit while shopping, began pounding again. Since they seemed to check clothing first, he should take off his cloak.
But if he took off his cloak, how would he hide his face? He needed to make sure as few people as possible recognized him…
“Ah!”
At that moment, Elijah’s body toppled sideways. It felt like he’d collided with a massive wall.
“Hng…”
He heard a startled gasp from in front of him. A hand wearing black leather gloves entered his field of vision beneath the hood.
“Are you all right?”
Elijah, who’d dropped the bag he was carrying when he fell, ignored the hand and scrambled to gather his cloak as he stood up. The man, who was about a hand’s span taller than Elijah, bent at the waist to pick up his luggage and apologized.
“I’m sorry. I should have watched where I was going…”
Strictly speaking, it was Elijah who hadn’t watched where he was going. His view was already poor because of the hood pulled down so far, and he’d been so focused on the search happening behind him that he hadn’t noticed the man.
Elijah didn’t even look at the man’s face and just bowed his head deeply.
“Ah, you dropped this too. Just a moment.”
The man picked up the coin purse that had fallen to the ground and brushed off the dust.
“…”
That time felt unbearably long to Elijah. The man looked down at the coin purse in his hand for a few seconds, then handed it to him.
“Th-thank you.”
Just as Elijah, having received the coin purse, was about to quickly pass by the man—
“Excuse me.”
The man called Elijah to a stop again.
***
Picking up the coin purse, Kalian doubted his eyes.
Estimated early twenties. A coin purse with the same pattern as Adam-ssi’s tattoo. Gray cloak. Pale face. The hair wasn’t long, but well, he could have cut it in the meantime, so this gets a pass.
This is him. Kalian immediately felt it. This is the person I’ve been looking for…
“Genius mage…”
At the words that slipped out of his mouth without thinking, the man’s shoulders visibly flinched.
“I’m in a hurry right now…”
The man, hugging his luggage tighter to his chest, bowed his head and backed away from Kalian. In his haste, Kalian grabbed the man’s arm and tilted his head to check his face.
“Wh-what do you want?”
The man startled so visibly that even Kalian was surprised. A neat, kind face looked at Kalian, full of wariness. Kalian, finally making eye contact with him, shuddered at the sight of his green eyes.
“By any chance, is that coin purse yours?”
“…”
The man’s quivering lips trembled. From that suspicious behavior, Kalian finally gained complete certainty.
‘This is him. No doubt about it!’
