The Sixth City

On a rainy night in Crecy in 1346, the long archer Nader took a silver pendant from the corpse of a young man from the Golden Bird Kingdom. The boy's name is Eric - but there is another Eric, his older brother, who is going to war with his father without knowing it. It rained heavily that night, so Nader stuck the pendant to his chest for sixty-nine years. Since then, the two pendants have caused him to age extremely slowly and have constant nightmares. In the dream, there were burning cities, flags with pupil eyes, and "the first city, the second city". On the other side, his brother Eric took "Moon Grass" in a prisoner of war camp and began to have the same dream. A hand that draws a bow and a hand that holds a sword, across the strait, share the same piece of dream fragments. The mysterious mercenary Pino wanders around the two armies, immortal and immortal, guiding them like an invisible hand. Until the city of Orleans, Joan of Arc said to Nader: "It's time to return the fragments of the five cities." Nader finally understood - the silver pendant is a container, holding the forgotten eyes on the battlefield. He is not a murderer, he is a corpse collector: what he collects is not the bones, but the last obsession of the soul. Sixty-nine years later, two white-haired old men met in the Wilderness Tavern. One has a right hand with two fingers bent like a tree root, the other has a scar on the left eye and a straight back. They said at the same time: "You are -" and stopped at the same time, laughing. Eric took out his mother's red silk hair and the pendant Nader put down. The weight of sixty-nine years settled gently on the edge of the wine bowl. Body collector meets body collector. The war had long ended outside the ceasefire line, but it really ended at this moment - two strangers, who had spent half their lives memorizing the stories of the same group of dead people, could finally let go of themselves. The evening wind outside the window pushed the grass waves, and the night was quiet.