[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 29] The Name the Rain Left Behind
It had rained like this ten years ago.
Frog sat at the table with the Masamune across his knees. Every time the rain struck harder against the roof, the fine red line in the blade caught the lamplight and came briefly alive. The Hero’s Badge lay beside it, the lion worn faint after years of handling.
He could reach both without rising.
But the first thing he picked up was neither the sword nor the badge. He drew an old leather strap from beneath the table. It had once been long enough to circle a man’s waist. Now it had been folded over several times, and one end still bore a black stain blurred by rain.
It was the strap Cyrus had used for the Masamune’s sheath.
Frog closed his eyes.
He heard the morning bell of Guardia Castle.
In 590 A.D., that bell had not yet been a call to war. Knights finishing their drills raised spears in the courtyard, and summer sunlight poured through the open gates. Cyrus stood fastening the clasp of his traveling cloak.
“You truly mean to leave today?”
King Guardia had come all the way down the steps without his crown.
Cyrus lowered himself to one knee.
“I will recover the Hero’s Badge that was taken from us. And I would see the legendary sword for myself.”
“The kingdom needs you.”
Queen Leene came to the king’s side before he could say more.
“So do we. You must come back to us, Cyrus.”
Cyrus smiled as he always did. Not because he failed to understand the danger, but because he never let another person hold fear longer than necessary.
“As long as there is breath in me, I will return.”
When he rose, the knights in the courtyard lifted their swords as one. Steel and armor blazed beneath the sun. Glenn stood behind Cyrus with the traveling packs on his back. The men called Cyrus’s name. Almost no one called the name of the young squire beside him.
Leene did.
“You be careful as well, Glenn.”
He bowed deeply.
“May you both remain in good health, Your Majesties.”
Beyond the gate, Cyrus slowed until they were walking side by side.
“Why the funeral face? That is not where we are going.”
“You made too great a promise to them.”
“The promise to return?”
“The part about having breath in you.”
Cyrus laughed aloud.
“Then you had better keep watch and make certain I continue breathing.”
Glenn could not laugh with him. Instead, he straightened the crooked fall of his friend’s cloak. At the time, he had been more troubled by Cyrus speaking too boldly than by any thought that this might be their final departure.
They recovered the Hero’s Badge in the southern woods.
The monstrous Frog King who ruled the marsh wore the lion medallion around his neck. Cyrus slipped in the mud again and again, yet still managed to stamp on the creature’s tongue, vault over its head, and strike its crown with the pommel of his sword. The Frog King flung the badge into the mire and fled, shrieking that he would remember the insult.
Glenn wiped the mud from the metal and offered it to Cyrus.
Cyrus did not take it.
“You keep it.”
“You recovered it.”
“And I have a habit of losing things.”
It was only half a joke. Glenn slipped the badge into an inner pocket over his heart.
After that, they climbed the Denadoro Mountains.
The legendary sword waited in the heights. When Cyrus first drew the Masamune, Glenn heard what sounded like two people taking the same breath inside the steel. Cyrus seemed to hear it too. He listened for a moment, then sheathed the blade.
“A fine sword.”
That was all. It was a modest judgment from the man who had just taken up a hero’s weapon.
On the evening of their descent, clouds swallowed the peaks.
Ozzie stood in the middle of the trail. His broad body was wrapped in armor, and he wore the face of someone already struggling not to laugh. On a high shelf of rock behind him stood a man in a black cloak.
Magus.
Glenn had known the name even then. The sorcerer who gathered the Mystics and broke Guardia’s borders. But the name heard at a distance was not the same as the man before him. Rain did not fall straight around Magus. It bent aside as if driven away by an unseen heat.
Cyrus drew the Masamune.
“Stay behind me.”
“You mean to fight both of them alone?”
“I am not alone.”
Cyrus never looked back.
Glenn mistook the words for faith in him. He drew his own sword, determined to repay it. The first exchange showed him how wrong he was.
A ball of fire from Ozzie burst against the rock. Glenn ducked, but the force threw him across the trail. He rolled down the wet slope and lost his sword. As he tried to stand, black light gathered at Magus’s fingertips.
Cyrus blocked it with the Masamune.
The sound was not the clash of steel. It was a scream.
A fracture raced through the center of the blade. The next instant, the sword broke in two. Its severed point buried itself in the earth beside Glenn’s foot.
Ozzie roared with laughter.
“Without that sword, your great hero is nothing!”
Cyrus did not cast the broken hilt aside. He caught his breath and backed one step toward Glenn. Blood ran from his left shoulder, darker than the rain.
“Glenn. Go down the mountain.”
“We go together.”
“I will hold them.”
“I cannot leave you.”
Only then did Cyrus turn.
He was not smiling.
“If you stay, we both die.”
Glenn understood. It was a calculation. The kind a knight had to make: one man remained, and the other lived long enough to return to the castle.
Still, his feet would not move.
Darkness gathered in Magus’s hand once more.
“Go!”
Cyrus shoved Glenn away.
The black light drove through him.
Cyrus fell facing Magus. One knee struck the ground first, and he caught his weight on the broken sword. Glenn crawled to him and seized his shoulder.
“Cyrus.”
His friend still had breath, but only a shallow thread of it.
“Leene…”
Blood passed over his lips.
“Protect her.”
There was no breath after that.
Glenn called his name again and again. He knew no answer would come. He could not make himself stop.
Magus stepped down from the rock. His boots passed through rainwater and Cyrus’s blood.
“Are you next?”
Glenn searched for his sword. His fingers closed on mud.
Ozzie bent until his face was level with Glenn’s.
“A coward who spent his life hiding behind Cyrus deserves a more fitting shape.”
Magus raised a hand without answering.
Cold light closed around Glenn’s body.
His bones seemed to fold inward. His skin felt as though it were tearing. His throat closed first. When he tried to scream, no human voice emerged, only a burst of wet air. His fingers shortened. His feet spread. The stones and the two men before him became impossibly large.
Ozzie’s laughter rolled across the mountain.
Magus pushed Glenn’s small new body over the slope with the toe of his boot.
He tumbled with the rain.
Branches struck his back. A stone cut his head. At the bottom, freezing water swallowed him. However wildly he fought with his shortened arms, the surface remained far away.
He thought he would die.
He survived.
He woke among reeds below the mountain. The hands he placed against the mud were not human. Neither was the face that looked back from the water.
He shattered that face again and again. Each time the water settled, the same round eyes and slick skin returned. He tried to call Cyrus’s name, but what came from his throat was nearly indistinguishable from the frogs crying in the reeds. Only then did the truth become sharper than the curse itself: he had fallen from the mountain, and he would still have to go on living.
He remained in the reeds until sundown. If someone found him, he would need to ask for help. Yet whenever human footsteps came near, he hid beneath the water. The boy who had always concealed himself when he was afraid had kept the habit even after losing his human form.
Something hard pressed against his chest.
The Hero’s Badge.
When he drew it out, he found his own survival harder to bear than Cyrus’s death.
The lamp faltered.
Frog opened his eyes.
Ten years had passed.
In that time he had kept Cyrus’s final request. He had saved Leene. He had stood with Guardia’s soldiers and held Zenan Bridge. But after every battle, he returned to the woods. He hid his face and his name before anyone could call him a hero.
There had been times when he told himself it was humility.
He knew better now.
He had not been afraid of stealing a dead man’s place. He had been afraid to admit that the one who survived still had a place of his own.
Outside, damp wood cracked in the fire. Crono, Marle, and Lucca were sheltering beneath the eaves. He remembered the answer the boy had given him: what had he seen on the road to repair the sword?
People who returned.
Frog drew the Masamune.
The restored blade still carried its old scratches. The red line crossing the break had not been polished away. To be mended did not mean to return to the time before anything had happened.
He fastened the sheath at his waist.
He took the Hero’s Badge in one hand, but did not yet hang it around his neck.
Dawn entered through the narrow window.
When the rain stopped, the forest’s smallest sounds returned one by one. Frog opened the door.
Crono woke first, leaning against a post beneath the eaves. Marle and Lucca pushed aside their blankets.
Frog stood before them.
“We may fail.”
Lucca used her bandaged wrist to push her glasses higher.
“That isn’t new information.”
Marle rose and shook the water from the hem of her skirt.
“You’re still going?”
Frog placed his hand on the Masamune’s hilt.
This time, it did not tremble.
“Then let us go to Magus’s castle.”
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