The Singing Bone [Erchanhardt/Yugiri]

Erchanhardt liked that answer. Truly, he had chosen well this friend of his.

"Then allow me to expand upon the question. Let us say that a higher power, God or any other divine being, visited you in the night, and spoke to you thus: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.'"

It was a question which often weigjt heavily on him, in truth.

"Would you call this a blessing, Yugiri? Though you do not regret those twenty years, can you look back upon them joyfully? Can you gaze at your life as a whole, and not simply accept your failings, but be glad in them? Every mistake you have made, every pain you have faced. Do not simply gloss over them, Yugiri. Speak those griefs, and affirm that you can truly accept them."

"Well... You are just describing the Soul Cycle to a more extreme manner. A fluid closed system that denies stagnation yet is just that, the only difference between it and statis is thet the elements of the system are in motion."

She had to think about that though, could she live in the acceptance that every thought she made. Every action was predetermined, her death was already ensured---no, it had possibly happened. Under this philosophy of denying the Will the implication was that all this could've occured before and she was only inside a cycle.

"If it as you say, to defy the will and our natural instincts---desires even. Even though I am inclined to deny it and insist that my actions are my own but if one is to accept this lifestyle Erckenhart there is no reason to try, no reason to improve. Only to accept it?"

Yugiri sounded confused, if there was some greater enlightenment to achieve it made sense. Similar to buddhism if she had to recall something she studied when she was younger.

"But somehow that seems contradictory, especially when you speak of self-improvement and growth. A system that promotes stagnation goes against your ways and philosophy, because to not learn is to stagnate and cease improvment."

This was beginning to remind her of why studying philosophy when she was younger was a headache, the terminology and concepts that went into her stance and movements. Perfection in technique and spirit.

"Regardless if one were to tell me this, even if it turns out to be true. I cannot simply accept fate, so if I have to live my life knowing I'll live the first twenty years crippled, the next seventy blind and knowing every choice thereafter will be already set out then I will resist my despair and persist to repeat these actions with the exact same enthusiasm I had before the knowledge."

She was grasping at straws here but this was all she could think of. The mouse running on the wheel didn't think about how it wasn't going anywhere, it still ran with the same energy and vigour as it had before. It didn't bother to think about the pointlessness of it's effort.

"Not exactly, Yugiri. What I posit is not some universal truth. It is merely a hypothetical, intended to ask a more pertinent question. There is no such thing as destiny or fate, I do not believe. The Will is not something so black and white as that."

Erchanhardt still listened closely to her answer. He supposed that she had come to a correct answer, even if through what he would have said were not exactly the correct processes. She was intelligent, this one.

"You would live your life willingly in the same manner if you knew it was set to be the same. But let us say that you were given this very same information, and in your next life you would have no knowledge that you had already lived these very same events. Would that knowledge, in this life, cause you distress? Would you curse that, knowing you were destined to suffer that very same life without even realizing? Or can you look at the demon who has told you this fate, and tell him truthfully that there could be no greater fate than this?"

A deep breath in, a deep breath out. There were moments such as these which taxed even his own belief in himself.

"Amor fati, this belief is called. To truly love one's fate and one's life. not merely to accept it, but to look back upon everything that has ever occurred in one's life and say that you are glad for it. It is through this belief that we transform the Will into something more. No longer the Will to Live, but the Will to Power. Not a burden, but a blessing. Not something to be denied for the sake of growth, but to be nurtured as a driver of that very same development."

"Oh..."

She was starting to remember why she found philosophy a headache. So much thinking involved yet a crippled girl only had so much she could do in her spare time and stuff like this occasionally filled those gaps for better or for worse.

"Okay. But if I am aware of this knowledge wouldn't I try to live it differently than if I did not know? Hmm. I guess trying to change the end result could lead to that result... but then the journey is still different."

It was obvious Yugiri was thinking too much about the overall premise of this hypothetical situation rather than the actual meat of what he wanted her to process but she could come back to that headache that was trying to unravel his analogy.

When he just explained Amor fati to her it just made it so much easier to answer.

"Ye-... No."

She was getting ahead of herself to say that. She was not happy with her life up to now, the actions she had done and the choices she had made. It would be a lie to say she could be happy with her life of treating her family the way she did and all the ways she had acted.

Yugiri accepted everything she had done and lived but she did not love it.

"I understand.. I do not have the Will to Power, do you have it, Amor fati?"

Well maybe, then again Yugiri knew full well that many that pursued philosophies such as this might not reach their intended goal. Such was the way of many that pursued an enlightenment through belief.

"I do not."

Erchanhardt replied so simply, but what more could he say to her? He would be a liar if he claimed that he had embraced amor fati, that he did not regret his life every day. Try as he might, he did not yet have that within him.

"Do you remember what I said to you when we first met? That it is our responsibility, as those who have made mistakes, to learn from those mistakes, and to use that knowledge in the pursuit of greater things. To understand that the good we have done, the happiness we might find, have in the end still come from those mistakes. That is amor fati, impossible though it may seem in the present."

Erchanhardt took another deep breath to center himself, closing his eyes in part so he simply did not need to look Yugiri in the eye for a moment. What a coward he was.

"Tell me your mistakes, Yugiri. All of them that prevent you from loving fate. To speak them aloud makes them more present, more mutable."

Hmm. Yugiri listened hard at that, to listen to him admit that he had not found it and draw her attention back to the past words of their first meeting. With a small nod that she understood what he meant she didn't know how to respond to the next question. All of them, did she even remember them all?

"Well the main ones are my choice to undergo treatment to stop my disease and... be able to walk, after that day people didn't seem to forgive me for it since I became part-hollow... Then I spent decades bitter and distant from everyone, I never tried to be close to them. I became arrogant, I let it blind my choices, I killed someone when I couldn't control my hollow part. Then I obviously brought shame to my family by destroying any trust they had and I chose to run away."

Wow. She really hated that part, having to say everything out like that. It really just made it stand out more for her and she hated that.

"So... Would you tell me why you can't find amor fati?"

She did in fact just poke to see if she could get a 'I showed you mine now show me your's' kind of deal.

Erchanhardt did not mind her prodding, if he was being honest. There was something almost comforting about the fact that she asked at all. That said, for now he had to remain focused on her, else he would simply get sidetracked.

"I will admit my own mistakes when we have finished with yours."

Looking into Yugiri's eyes once more, his gaze remained stony, unfeeling. It was actually rather hard to keep such a demeanor, given he did not especially relish the feeling of causing her any distress.

"You list stopping your disease as a mistake, and yet at much the same time you tell me that you would face death before you faced that world again. Do you think you would be happier, had you chosen not to walk? Do you believe that all of your other mistakes would not have occurred? Even if your mistakes trace back to that decision, there are two things for you to consider."

Raising a single finger as if to bullet his point, the Duke continued.

"The first is that, by the very nature of life, we will never know what might have been had we made other decisions. Even had you not accepted that treatment, had you not become part Hollow, would that have suddenly made your relationship with your family better? You have said yourself that you felt pitied, alone. Would that not have led to much the same discontent, the same feelings of distance? In time, you may well have wished nothing more but to run away, and yet found yourself unable to do so. Unable to do so, you might well have simply withered into nothing. You may well have never had the means to better yourself, as you have sought to do now. Life is a state of suffering, Yugiri. Remind yourself that, just as easily as you might have lived better, you might well have lived far worse."

Cruel truths were sometimes the simple nature of this philosophy. That life was suffering, that life was unfair, that life could not be predicted, this was all fundamental truth in this worldview. It was by accepting this, facing it and embracing one's life regardless that they gained unfathomable potential. Erchanhardt then raised a second finger.

"The second is far simpler. Tell me, Yugiri, have you felt happiness in these years since then? Have there been moments in which you felt only earnest joy? These moments of joy are what one strives for in life. They are what make it worth living, that negate the totality of suffering even in those briefest of moments. For all of your mistakes, they have nevertheless brought you to those moments. 'If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.' Find even a single memory of happiness, now, and speak it aloud. Affirm it, before the world, before the Will, and before yourself."

That was a pretty hard, in fact she didn't even think about that when she said it. So she sat there trying to hypothesise about it while listening to him but thinking about the what-ifs really only accomplished nothing. At the best they were all just fantasies of hypothetical scenarios that had no validity to them.

The next part was indeed easier, Yugiri just had to think about all the good in her life.

"Well... my cat made me happy.. when I made Shikko and became as strong as I did I was very happy. I've been... really happy since I left home. I'm not looking over my shoulder as much, it feels nicer to be out here."

Was it worth? Having all of that to get this experience out here? It kinda was, in the sense of what she had up to this point. She was still too new to all this to really know how she felt about this.

The simplicity of Yugiri's answers not only gave Erchanhardt a faint bit of pause, but made him smile just a bit. They were good answers, and he had to admit that it did warm his heart to know she had been happy here.

"Then hold to those memories. Ask yourself if you would ever be willing to trade them away, and remind yourself of the depths of joy they have wrought. To accept this happiness as the greatest good of all, to know that it has made your life worth all that has happened, that is amor fati. It is not so easy, I know, to truly accept grief and suffering. But nothing worthwhile has ever come easily."

Taking a deep breath, Erchanhardt looked up to the sky briefly, thinking about what he had said to her, and about the mistakes he had made when teaching Adelheid. He would not make them again.

"That is enough, I think, for today. These lessons are not ones meant to be taken all at once. As I promised, I will share my own mistakes with you, and that which keeps me from achieving the Will to Power, if you still wish to hear it."

"Hmm. I see."

Yugiri stated it matter of factly while she listened to him ask her if she wanted to hear his own story. The girl tilted her head to formulate her answer before giving a slow breath out.

"I did ask, but if you don't want to tell me you don't have to force yourself to tell me it. You can tell me whenever you want, if you ever want."