"Hope...?"
Iver murmured.
Could the power of Sacred Number Eleven... be related to this?
Hope was the power of "possibility"—the power that surpassed perfection, the day of the end, fate, and established conclusions.
The Mad King's Skull inside the Void Box said so.
So that really was the power of Sacred Number Eleven—
"So that's how it is. The fusion of beauty and twilight..."
Combining this with what the Lord of Scales and Feathers had said earlier, Iver finally understood.
The ritual of beauty and transcendence had perfectly achieved the number of nothingness, so the power of nothingness had sealed it within. The Swan King had not been devoured by the power of nothingness even after all this time precisely because, through that state of being frozen between death and life, he had achieved eternity. Through the fusion of beauty and twilight, he had thus reached the realm of hope within the Void Box! It was only through the suppression of the Sacred Number Eleven's level that the power of nothingness had never been able to completely devour his will! Hope...
It was the power to turn the future toward other possibilities.
The power to break fate.
The Tenth Path that should have been born must have been "hope," because the Lord of Scales and Feathers had said... Candleholder and Iver had reached this world through the Tenth Path. Nothingness clearly could not accomplish that.
Therefore, they had most likely entered this world through the Path of Hope!
That was why the Ring Angel had said those things—
He had come neither from the East nor from the West. He had come from none of the dwelling places known to you.
My Sacred Number is 11. That is the number belonging to our people. To the Fool, I am 9;