Emperor and Devil

The out-of-season rain shifted between light and dark. A crimson rainbow became a thin arc beneath stars dimming toward dawn. Torrential rain fell in the eastern city, drizzle in the west.

Crossing the broken bridge from west to east, both sides of the long street lit up: streetlamps, windows, and rows of lights before the shopping malls, their flowing colors stretching all the way to the subway entrance at Apple Orchard Station.

Beyond that lay another space, hidden beneath clouds and rosy dawns, joys and sorrows, and the daily grind of life. It was a place where beings beyond humanity moved about—the realm of the dead, Nibelungen.

Nibelungen was an independent space constructed through alchemy. Its rules of time and space differed wildly from reality; the common sense of the human world became distorted and useless here. It was more fitting to call it a rift in time and space.

The midnight bells chimed for the last time, and soon the clock stopped.

Everything in Nibelungen was marked with a pause.

Within Nibelungen's boundaries—even at the edge of the subway station where the breath of death spilled out—everything stood still.

Red-hot molten slag, arcs of electricity and storms that tore through all things, the murderous young man and monstrous girl embracing within the fire tornado.

The half-decayed train packed with passengers, the ghostly Kamaitachi cars swarming from their nest like a tide, the splashes kicked up by the boy sprinting with a Nokia N73 in hand...

All of it fell silent. The world was quiet enough to hear a pin drop, and every story of late summer and the coming autumn was granted a moment of rest.

Apocalypse and memories, abandoned clans and conflict, revenge and return—those heavy symbols were given a chance to catch their breath, whether they were beautiful or not, whatever the future might hold.

Footsteps sounded amid time slowed to infinity.

Two ghosts of the mortal world met here.

Earlier, they had wandered through the city's drizzle, stopping and starting, brushing past traffic, happiness, and the world. They briefly parted where parting was necessary, then reunited at the end of Nibelungen's railway.

After a brief exchange of glances, one of them said:

"It is a fitting day for a reunion. Has this century reached its end?"

The subway was somewhat hot at the moment, so they each shed their black formalwear and changed into even warmer ancient robes with curved hems and crossed collars. They spun atop the steel ruins, clearly celebrating as they raised their cups and drank together.

The ghosts were obviously not in their right minds. There seemed to be no psychiatric hospital in this world capable of containing them.

There was still a long time before the play began. The banquet was plain, and hardly qualified as a lavish feast.

Two bottles of Bulmer cider with less than half remaining, an emptied bag of crab roe-flavored chips, fries and chicken wings bought from KFC with Heinz ketchup, two nearly drained cases of Nutritional Express, and an untouched cream cake.

The masks at hand were astonishingly thick. Their contours had been crudely polished, clearly revealing ordinary craftsmanship, while the people they depicted were not particularly famous either. They were cheap black-market masks of Emperor Henry V and Pope Callixtus II.

Once the gluttons had eaten their fill, they sat back against broken steel reinforcement bars for a brief rest—Nutritional Express had been the main course, and two cases had truly been too much. From time to time, they tipped their heads back to look at the top of the tunnel, waiting for the entertainment to begin.

The rails stretched toward the end of the underground subway. In the gloom rose ruins of steel with strange luster, twisted long rebars like prehistoric snake bones, broken iron frames interwoven into hills. At the railway's end lay a heap of steel ruins, as sharp as the thorny wilderness in the Book of Judges.

This subway line did not exist in reality. Naturally, it was a road from which none returned alive.

Judging from the masks, the ghostly play was about the Concordat of Worms: Emperor Henry V compromising and yielding to Pope Callixtus II. From that day onward, "Render unto God what is God's, and unto Caesar what is Caesar's" was declared over. In the Western Middle Ages, it symbolized the decline of royal authority and the rise of church authority.

"God will claim the King's Authority from the four corners of the earth." Beneath grandiose banners, the faithful swung their axes, while warhorses advanced through rivers of blood deep enough to reach their bits.

In the end, the papal side agreed that secular emperors and monarchs could intervene to a limited extent in appointing church officials and supervising elections. Yet they had to uphold the fundamental principle that church law was the sole standard governing elections, and they could never bestow upon newly appointed bishops sacred objects symbolizing religious authority, such as rings and scepters.

The era of great monarchs standing side by side declined. Earthly authority was seized by a larger iron hand.

All old powers would be swallowed by new ones.

The ghosts did not care about some agreement between powerful forces from nearly a thousand years ago, nor did they have the slightest intention of mourning or respecting Henry V and Callixtus II. The old dynasties that had once flowed like quicksand had long since gone to lie dead in their graves.

The masks had been bought to sit on. They made the seats more comfortable and refined; the exposed, sharp steel thorns were truly hard on the backside.

The ghost sitting on the emperor's mask fiddled with a light-blue portable music player that had clearly been used for years. He opened its old casing to inspect the DSP, then connected the silver headphone cable, moving as slowly as a lonely old man in need of care.

The ghost sitting on the pope's mask held a black box that constantly emitted enormous heartbeats. A bouquet of snow-white roses lay across his legs. He hummed a bloody hymn, and from certain ornaments on his body, he was undoubtedly a devil—or perhaps even calling him a devil was selling him short.

The devil and the emperor sat side by side.

They waited for the moment of sunrise.

It was past midnight. Today's sunrise for this area should have passed some time ago, while tomorrow's sunrise was still far too early.

But this was Nibelungen, a place beyond conventional explanation. Time here had originally remained unchanged or moved slowly forward.

Though the space appeared twisted and chaotic from the outside, it was not entirely disordered from within. In truth, it had its own operating rules, and every point where it connected with reality was like the orderly collision of multiple gears.

The two worlds were both independent of and interfering with each other. With the real world remaining still, they moved the time of Nibelungen and its surroundings, allowing that gear to turn through midnight, the small hours, and dawn.

Dreamlike light suddenly descended over the heap of iron thorns, falling like Christmas blossoms, like flourishing cherry blossoms. The morning sun reached through cracks in the subway station's iron dome, like a yellow tree blooming with white pear flowers. For an instant, heaven and earth became brilliantly clear, and the darkness vanished without a trace.

Tomorrow's light was too dazzling, too magnificent. Together with the clouds clearing and rain ending in full splendor, it seemed to purify and elevate even the ghosts until human expressions appeared on their faces.

One of them said:

"We should have bought a bucket meal."

The other said:

"In this world, only you and I are accomplices."

After wishing each other good morning, they spoke softly.

"Every word you say sounds like a blessing, but I want to eat an egg tart."

"Brother, if someone loves you, he will find every possible excuse to bless you, again and again until you grow tired of it."

"Today is a grand day of reunion and farewell. Fortunately, the eternity we do not keep for each other lasts only seven days."

Watching the brilliant morning light fade into the distance, the emperor said nothing more. He reached out and passed over the other end of the wired earphones connected to the light-blue music player.

The gears turned back, and frozen time began to flow.

The portable player had previously been playing the StarCraft theme, "Terran Two." The track before that had been the tune "Red Rose, White Rose." Now it switched to a blank piece without even a single instrumental note.

They could hear each other's heartbeats, beating in opposite directions.

"Happy birthday. Another one we have spent together across ten thousand years."