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."

"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."

"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."

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."

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."