[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 4] The Vanishing Name
Marle could not properly explain how she had become a queen.
She remembered blue light, a cold wind, and the sensation of falling without end. When she regained consciousness, she was lying in a forest not far from the castle. Her clothes were wet, and her pendant was gone. She wandered among the trees without knowing where to go until she encountered soldiers on horseback.
The soldiers dismounted the instant they saw her face.
Some wept. Others fell to their knees. Marle tried to give them her name, but no one listened. Every one of them believed the missing Queen Leene had returned alive. At first, Marle attempted to correct the mistake. Next, she tried to ask where she was. Finally, she wondered whether going to the castle might help her find Crono, and she fell silent.
“I was afraid.”
Marle sat in a chair by the window.
“They surrounded me and cried and said how grateful they were. I didn’t know what would happen if I told them I wasn’t the woman they wanted. More than anything… I didn’t know whether you would come.”
Crono stood in the middle of the chamber and listened.
Wood burned in the hearth, yet the room was not warm. The thick stone walls and high ceiling seemed to drink the heat. Wind entering through the window frame bent the candle flames to one side.
Marle looked down at her hands.
“But you did.”
A little of her smile returned with the words.
When Crono offered the pendant, she took it in both hands. She studied the jewel in her palm for a long time before placing the chain around her neck. The instant it touched her skin, her shoulders lowered almost imperceptibly. She had recovered only a lost possession, yet she looked like someone who had been given back her own name.
“Do you think this is what sent us here?”
Crono shook his head to say that he did not know.
“Lucca could probably figure it out.”
Marle looked outside.
In the training yard below, soldiers formed ranks behind raised shields. Beyond the distant forest, a narrow column of black smoke rose. At the Millennial Fair, people cheered at the sound of a ceremonial cannon. In this age, smoke might mean that someone’s home or storehouse was burning.
“They say there is a war.”
Her voice fell.
“An army led by someone called the Fiendlord is coming from the south. The people in the castle were so happy to see their queen return, it was as if the war had already ended.”
Marle touched the chain of her pendant.
“But the real queen hasn’t returned.”
Crono glanced toward the door.
Marle understood his thought.
“That worries me too. I heard they stopped searching because I appeared.”
She rose.
“Now that you’re here, I have no reason to stay. We can leave the castle and find the place where we first arrived. Maybe the Gate will open there again.”
Her words were decisive, but after one step she stopped. Maids were speaking beyond the door. One worried that the queen had eaten almost nothing. Another said His Majesty would soon come to see her.
Marle approached the door but could not put her hand on the latch.
“If I disappear… will they start looking for the queen again?”
Crono did not answer.
He did not know either.
It might not be difficult to take Marle out of the castle. The guards believed she was the queen and would probably open the gates if she said she wanted fresh air. But there was no guarantee they would resume the search for Leene after Marle vanished. The court might choose to conceal the confusion. The abductors might already have moved their prisoner elsewhere.
Crono looked at a small table beside the window.
A map and several reports had been spread across it. The shape of the writing was unfamiliar to Marle, and she could not read everything, but the red lines around the castle and the movements of the search parties were clear enough.
When Crono approached the map, Marle joined him.
The forest, the river, Zenan Bridge, and a small building west of the castle had all been marked. One report described the place where the queen’s carriage was attacked and the traces found there. The wheel tracks ended inside the forest. Several escorts had not returned alive.
“Here.”
Marle pointed to the mark west of the castle.
“People lowered their voices whenever they spoke about this place. I think they called it a cathedral.”
Crono memorized the location without folding the map.
The sound of armor drew near in the corridor.
Marle hurried away from the table. The door opened, and an aging king entered. A red cape hung across his broad shoulders, but his face was exhausted. Sleeplessness had carved deep lines around his eyes.
He stopped when he saw Crono.
“Are you Crono?”
Crono bowed his head.
The king did not study him for long. His gaze went immediately to Marle. At that instant, the vigilance of a man directing a war disappeared. Only the relief of someone who had recovered a lost member of his family remained.
“Leene.”
Marle’s shoulders stiffened.
Taking it for the shock of her abduction, the king approached slowly.
“You must still rest. The physician says you have no grave wound, but of course your memories are clouded.”
Marle began to speak, then closed her mouth.
The king took her hand.
“While you were gone, I—”
His voice broke, and he turned his head away for a moment. Old scars and fresh wounds covered his hand. It was the hand of a man who had returned from the battlefield himself.
Marle stared down at it.
Perhaps she had thought revealing her identity would mean nothing more than telling the truth. Yet that truth would also take this man’s wife away from him a second time.
“I’m sorry,” Marle said.
The king heard another meaning in the words.
“You have nothing for which to apologize.”
He enclosed the back of her hand, then looked at Crono.
“I was surprised when the queen asked to see you. She says she cannot remember where your paths crossed.”
Crono looked at Marle.
She gave the smallest shake of her head. Not now.
“But if your presence brings the queen peace, you may remain in the castle. Ask the chamberlain for anything you require.”
The king could not stay. A messenger from the southern front was waiting. Before leaving, he looked back at Marle once more.
“This time, I will not leave you alone.”
After the door closed, a long silence remained.
Marle raised the hand the king had held to her chest.
“He doesn’t know I’m not her.”
Crono stepped beside her.
“But if I vanish, he loses her all over again.”
He put a hand on her shoulder.
For some time, Marle could not lift her head. At the fair, she had asked a stranger to explore with her without a trace of reluctance. Now she could not move beneath the knowledge that her very presence might wound someone.
At last, she spoke the conclusion she had reached.
“Before we find a way home, we have to find the real queen.”
Crono nodded.
Marle returned to the map. She touched the location of the cathedral, then examined the search reports one page at a time. She narrowed her eyes, looking for words she could recognize among unfamiliar letters and military terms.
Then her hand stopped.
A faint light escaped from the pendant.
Marle touched her throat.
“Crono.”
The jewel did not blaze as it had at the Telepod. Its glow faded and revived like an ember on the edge of extinction. At the same time, Marle’s fingertips blurred.
At first, Crono thought the candlelight had shifted their shadows.
Then the writing on the map showed through her fingers.
Marle saw it too.
“What is… happening?”
She turned her hand over. Her flesh and bone had not disappeared. The outline of her body was becoming transparent, superimposed upon the room beyond it. The fading crept slowly from fingertips to wrist.
Crono seized her arm.
He could still feel it, but the sensation was uncertain, like placing his hand beneath water. If he tightened his grip, she seemed likely to slip between his fingers.
“No.”
Fear entered Marle’s voice for the first time.
“Am I going back there?”
Crono shook his head, not because he was certain, but because he needed to hold her.
Light spread over Marle’s shoulders and hair. Half her face overlapped with the gray sky outside. She enclosed Crono’s hand between both of hers.
“Don’t let go.”
He caught her by the wrist.
Marle clenched her teeth and planted her feet hard against the floor, as if she could fasten her body to this place. But there was no shadow beneath her.
“Crono, the real queen—”
The plea never reached its end. When the sentence broke, the feeling left Crono’s hands.
Marle did not shatter into light or disappear through a blue Gate. The place she had occupied in the room simply became empty. Even the warmth of the hands holding his was cut off in an instant.
Crono stood gripping air.
Nothing had fallen to the floor.
The pendant had vanished with Marle.
He searched the chamber. Behind the bed, beyond the curtains, even through the open door to the bathing room. His body moved though he knew she could not be hiding. When he opened the window, cold air entered. Only the wall and training yard lay below.
“Marle.”
The name received no answer.
Crono returned to the center of the room.
The black mark of the cathedral remained on the map where Marle’s finger had pointed moments before. The warmth of the hand the king had held, her command not to let go, and her unfinished plea all seemed to linger somewhere in the chamber.
He opened the door.
The maid in the corridor turned in surprise.
“Is Her Majesty resting?”
Crono did not answer. He headed for the stairs.
“Master Crono?”
Her call followed him, but he did not stop.
His descending footsteps struck the stone walls of the spiral stair and multiplied. Guards below asked what was wrong. Attendants tried to stop him, insisting that no one should enter the queen’s chamber without permission. Crono passed between them and reached the central hall.
As he turned toward the gate, someone burst from beneath the stairs.
“Crono!”
The voice was familiar.
Lucca gripped the banister and fought for breath. She wore a thick coat over her clothes from the festival and carried a pack of tools and equipment. One lens of her goggles was cracked. Dust and leaves clung to her hair, but the eyes behind her glasses were fierce and awake.
Crono went to her.
“Where’s Marle?”
Lucca’s face tightened when she saw his expression.
“Didn’t you find her? I heard the queen had returned to the castle. They described a blond girl in a red vest, so I—”
Crono shook his head and forced out a single word.
“Gone.”
Lucca could ask nothing more.
She immediately checked their surroundings. The soldiers crossing the central hall paid them little attention, but the maid from the queen’s chamber was explaining something to a guard on the upper floor.
“We need to go outside,” Lucca said quietly.
They moved behind an empty storehouse in the castle courtyard. A stack of firewood and a broken cart sheltered them from the wind. Lucca lowered her pack and brought out a small metal device. Several more wires and a round crystal had been added to the instrument she had shown at the fair.
“I made this and followed you. It catches the wave pattern of a Gate just before it closes.”
She turned a handle. The needle trembled.
“The destination appears to be the same. At least the difference in time.”
“Time?” Crono asked.
As if confirming the year he had already heard, Lucca looked around at the castle walls.
“This is 600 A.D.—exactly four hundred years before our time.”
Even as she said it, she did not seem to have fully accepted the scale of her own conclusion.
“The Telepod didn’t create a passage through space. The pendant resonated with some other force and opened a Gate through time. I still don’t know why it leads here, or who made such a passage.”
Crono looked up at the high tower where Marle had vanished.
“Then where did she go?”
Lucca bit her lip.
“There’s no trace of her moving to another era.”
She tapped the crystal panel with one fingernail.
“If her body faded before she vanished, as you said… it may not have been movement. Her existence itself may have been affected.”
Crono’s gaze sharpened.
Lucca hurried on.
“I’m not saying she’s simply ceased to exist. If we correct the cause, there may be a way to bring her back.”
She drew a folded sheet from her pack. It was the notice offering a reward for the queen, perhaps taken from the inn at Truce.
“I heard the story on the way. Queen Leene was abducted in this era, then suddenly returned today. But the person who came back was Marle.”
Crono nodded.
“Marle must look very much like the queen. The search parties saw her and stopped looking.”
Lucca pressed a finger to the royal crest on the paper.
“Marle’s real name is Nadia.”
Crono looked at her.
“She is the princess of Guardia—the only daughter of the king in our time.”
He remembered Marle’s brief hesitation before giving her name in the square. He remembered the natural way she spoke of the people inside the castle and how she had tried to behave like an ordinary traveler despite the quality of her clothes and boots.
Lucca studied his reaction.
“She didn’t tell you.”
Crono said nothing.
“She must have slipped out of the castle this morning. They’ll be in an uproar by now.”
Lucca caught her breath, then spoke the most important part.
“Princess Nadia is Queen Leene’s descendant. If the queen dies in this era, the bloodline after her will never continue. History changes into one in which Nadia can never be born.”
Crono braced one hand against the stack of wood.
“Marle’s appearance stopped the search while the real queen remained a prisoner. The more likely the queen is to die, the more Marle is pushed out of this history.”
Lucca’s explanation was calm, but her hands trembled. There was no excitement in proving a theory about time. Only the responsibility of knowing that her invention had made a person disappear.
“We save the queen,” she said.
“If we restore the abduction to the outcome history was supposed to have, Marle should return.”
“Are you sure?” Crono asked.
Lucca could not nod easily.
“I can’t say that I’m sure.”
She removed her glasses and wiped dust from the lenses. Deep fatigue lay beneath her eyes, though she had not yet missed a night’s sleep.
“But there is no other way.”
Crono remembered the black mark on the map.
“Cathedral.”
He pointed toward the western forest.
“There’s a cathedral to the west?” Lucca asked.
He nodded. With brief words and gestures, he explained the search reports and the place people mentioned only in lowered voices.
Lucca immediately returned the device to her pack.
“Then let’s go.”
As they prepared to leave the courtyard, bells began ringing inside the castle.
Someone had discovered that the queen was gone.
Soldiers ran toward the tower, and shouted commands spread between the walls. One man ordered the main gate closed. Lucca caught Crono’s arm and pulled him behind the woodpile.
“If they catch us, explaining will take half the day.”
She searched the area and noticed a small opening beside the broken cart. It was a drainage passage connecting the kitchens to the outer well, barely large enough for a person to crawl through.
“I never thought the Millennial Fair would end with me crawling through a castle drain.”
Lucca loosened the screws holding the iron grate.
Crono moved the cart to conceal the entrance. Lucca removed the final screw and lifted the grate away.
Cold, damp air came from within.
By the time they crawled through and emerged in the grass outside, the gates had already closed. Guards carrying torches searched from the walls above.
Lucca brushed mud from her knees and looked up at the castle.
“When Marle comes back, this is the first story I’m telling her.”
Crono looked at her.
“She escaped because she didn’t want to be a princess, and four hundred years earlier her friends ended up covered in mud because of a castle drain.”
The joke was brief and produced no laughter. It did, however, loosen some of the suffocating tension between them.
Crono turned toward the western forest.
A low spire showed between the trees. It was smaller than the castle towers and flew no banner of war. As the evening light declined, the tip of the spire turned black.
Lucca checked the small weapon at her belt and tightened the straps of her pack.
“If we save the queen, Marle returns.”
She said it as if making herself believe the words.
Crono rested his hand on the hilt of his sword.
Marle’s final request had been the same.
Together they left the shadow of the castle walls and began walking west.
Behind them, the bells rang again for the missing queen.
This time, they did not ring for the wrong person.
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