When the youth who called himself "Lucan" arrived at the Kuonji estate more than half a month ago under the pretense of acting on his mother's behalf, Kuonji Alice's first reaction was not outright hostility — she had been told to tolerate him by the witch Meinst, and so her attitude at first was merely passive acceptance rather than any warm welcome.
At the very beginning she even found him irritating.Whether he deliberately teased her, or watched her stumble with a faint amusement on his face, Alice — the witch inheriting Meinst's mysteries — resolved from the start not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her fall. She squared her expression stubbornly, held herself taut, and refused to let her guard drop. No matter how much she disliked him or how her inner emotions rose and fell, ten years of solitary life within the mansion had taught her to hide everything beneath a composed surface.
Yet those "few days" together were enough to unmake that habit.
Before she noticed, Alice realized she had grown used to his teasing. She grew used to the daily emotional ups and downs she had not known in the previous decade. She started to expect — just a little — different things happening each day. The change crept in quietly; in most moments even Alice herself did not realize it. Only Aozaki Aoko, who observed from the side, saw the shift and kept silent.
The transformation became obvious to Alice only when Lucan left briefly for three days to lure out the detestable woman known as the "Celestial Demon." Those three days were unnervingly quiet. The witch found the stillness intolerable — even the Kuonji mansion, the sole relic left to her from her mother, felt alien and ill-fitting in that silence. She didn't understand why at first.
Then Lucan had said one line — "a witch's dearest friend." The words snapped her back into herself, and she realized: this was maybe what "dearest friend" felt like.
She hated Sesshōin Kiara — the alluring, monk-clad woman code-named the "Celestial Demon." She had watched Kiara make repeated moves to cozy up to Lucan and found the sight intolerable. Sometimes the exchanges between Lucan and Aoko pricked her like thorns; "dearest friend" should be unique, exclusive — shouldn't it belong only to her?
…But was it really just "friendship"?
On the way home from that shopping trip, when Aoko heard Alice speak and saw the complicated, slightly relieved expression that passed over her face, Aoko could not help but guess there was more to it. The reclusive witch did not understand the exact label for her feeling, but she could tell that what she felt for Lucan was not a simple friendly possessiveness. It was something else — something unnamed.
"Aoko still has school," Lucan said when Alice sat up by his side in the small temple room. He smiled at her and continued in that easy tone of his: "You still have the Kuonji house to run, and you've got… your new pupil to teach."
Rinzaka Sakura — the child they'd rescued — had been temporarily sent back to the Tōsaka household to wait for Alice's return. Alice would fetch her when she had time.
"And I have other things I must do," Lucan added. "But this parting is only temporary, Alice. You must understand: every meeting is a reunion in waiting; every farewell is for the sake of the next meeting."
Lucan could read the witch's complicated thoughts. He was the kind of person who, with his peculiar fixed-reality magic — the "Evil-Spirit Left Manor" (the unique innate-field that reflects another's mental image) — could see emotional changes in others as plainly as weather. He would never force these natural things to stop. Life, to him, was to be experienced wholly: regrets included. He preferred letting things run their course rather than locking them away.
"So we'll meet again, right?" Alice said softly, having understood his meaning.
"Of course," Lucan smiled. "Even if you don't want to see me then — I'll still barge into your house.""Don't forget: the land title still has my name on it."
"…Mm." Alice nodded without hesitation. If there is a next time, she would no longer be the passive woman who merely did not refuse him; she would be the one to accept him actively — and then perhaps she would finally understand what this strange feeling in her chest truly meant.
—
Clang, clang — the temple bell rang.
In the temple timetable, the bell known as the "fixed-night bell" is rung to steady the mountain's spirit and to sweep away anxieties. For Lucan, however, the bell's greater function was practical: it would rouse the monks who guarded the ley line. The hour of highest geomantic activity had come.
Ryūdō Temple lay quiet and spare; only a single monk and the temple's hereditary head remained there. He was not a man of the occult — merely a caretaker in the technical sense — and the bell's effects were mostly tradition. But tonight the bell told Lucan and his companions the same thing: this was the best time to open the path that led to the Great Holy Grail.
The courtyard opened into a ring of wooden corridors and stone paving. The bell's resonance made the gravel stir as if the pulse beneath the earth was answering back. Lucan could feel that subterranean vibration as clearly as the rumble of a dragon — not a beast, but the underground flow of water and the bloodlike thrust of the planetary veins, brushing away the old, stubborn residues and stirring up the last thin streams of magic left in the world.
Midnight had arrived. Lucan raised his head and exchanged a single look with Kuonji Alice, who sat motionless near the top of the temple stairs. The air of late autumn cut through them both.
Alice's witch outfit had its margins trimmed in black fur; her short black hair framed her too-pale face like ink on snow. Even in the dark she seemed to be carved cleanly from moonlight. The fur-wrapped cloak made her silhouette merge with the night; the deeper the black, the more her whiteness shone like a moon.
They faced each other across a small distance. Aoko slept below them in the guest hut, curled up and oblivious, breathing softly. Neither Alice nor Lucan woke her; both were savoring the rare quiet they had together.
Lucan's plan for tonight did not require Aoko. It did not merely aim to reveal the modern-day Great Holy Grail. What he would do was more precise, more provocative: he would "time-fix" the ritual.
He would reproduce — not the present form of the Grail rite, but the original pattern recorded in the ley itself, the form instantiated on the day the forum was first constructed, the state before entropy swallowed it. In short: he intended to reverse the local entropy and make the planet remember that foundational day, to project that past ritual into the present.
"Next," Lucan said, voice low and steady, "let the world witness the brilliance of what 'magic' once was."