Chapter 376 - 377: So This Is Where the Dagger at the End of Yan’s Map Was Hiding!

Chapter 376: Chapter 377: So This Is Where the Dagger at the End of Yan’s Map Was Hiding!

Lacus opened her tablet.

She had already bought Inori’s digital album.

She had also preordered the physical edition and was waiting for it to ship.

Athrun leaned over too—or rather, Lacus simply showed it to him.

Yes. One North African folk song was missing—Nànnuflày. But Inori was not the singer of that song.

Strictly speaking, it had never been part of the concert repertoire in the first place. It was an extra track included at the end of the album.

So in the strictest sense, it really was not a concert song.

However, there was a note saying that a portion of the album’s proceeds would be shared with the singer.

"Because it isn’t a song performed by Inori-san herself?"

At that moment, the melody of the final song also began to play.

"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?"

"Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme~"

"Give my greetings to someone there~"

"She once was a love of mine~"

"Ask her to make me a fine linen shirt~"

"This is wrong too!"

Lacus had noticed another discrepancy.

"What is it this time?" Athrun asked, puzzled.

"The counter-melody is gone!"

Lacus opened the digital album on her tablet.

Under Scarborough Fair was another counter-melody titled "the_side_of_a_hill."

"At the foot of a nameless hill"

"A little boy sleeps in the earth"

"A war rages through the valley"

"No one cares about the life of a child..."

On the screen, the concert audience was quietly listening to a love song.

But Lacus and Athrun, on the other side, were listening to an antiwar song.

[This contrast is brutal.]

[This is basically torture.]

[Scarborough Fair itself is an antiwar song too. It’s just subtler.]

[+1. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme were supposedly used to ward off Death.]

[It’s just a translation issue. It isn’t actually a shirt, it should be a burial shroud. The herbs are part of European funeral customs. The man is about to die, so he asks someone to find his lover and have her collect his body. The original singer is male. It’s actually about the plague.]

[Our old traditions also had taboos about sewing with needles, like rust keeping the dead from passing on or something. A lot of lyrics are really tied to funeral customs.]

[You wouldn’t come away with that interpretation if you’d read the original lyrics... The lyrics are just a man and woman trading impossible demands. Where did all this romance come from?]

[A lot of old folk songs were connected to death.]

[Apparently in old Europe, if you were caught doing espionage, they’d just kill you without any trial.]

[So that’s why the part about not sewing the shirt never made sense to me. I thought the girl was deliberately teasing her lover.]

[All that fancy theorizing and I thought you people had something profound to say. Scarborough Fair and a bunch of other folk songs are basically variants of The Elfin Knight. You’re arguing over a mountain of irrelevant stuff.]

[You’re the one talking bullshit. The Elfin Knight is a seventeenth-century song, and the original version is a really nasty story. An elf wants to abduct a girl and make her his woman unless she can complete a bunch of impossible tasks. Later the structure gradually flips, and the girl becomes the one giving impossible tasks to the elf pursuing her.]

[Then the "trading impossible demands" interpretation really does work.]

[Watching the history expert do textual research.]

[Kneeling before the history expert.]

[Here’s another bit of trivia: the modern version of Scarborough Fair derives from Ewan MacColl, whose real name was James Henry. He collected the song from mine workers. The man was a socialist—a Red.]

[Holy shit.]

[Holy shit holy shit holy shit.]

[So that’s where the dagger was hiding!]

[Is Athrun really going to...?!]

[Damn, how long was that map of Yan before the dagger showed up?!]

Turns out the map really was that long before the dagger appeared.

The meaning of the song itself was important, but at the same time, it was not all that important.

Could singing a song actually kill someone?

Come on. This was not the set of Macross.

So what mattered was the meaning behind the song.

As for whether Athrun could understand it?

That was fine. Inori would make Athrun understand.

As the final song came to an end, the concert finally concluded.

But Lacus now opened the final MV.

It was a folk song that had been passed down since the Common Era, a ballad hundreds of years old.

"It’s a male singer. No wonder it isn’t Inori..."

Before Athrun could finish speaking, his voice caught.

Because Athrun realized that the song’s title translated as "Fulfilled." The lyrics were visible on the tablet as well.

And the very first line was, "There was a time when I lived fulfilled."

In North Africa, this was a protest song!

"Life taught me that everything changes."

In the video, an elderly man in traditional clothing returned to his desert homeland and reminisced about a childhood friend.

The old man in the MV wore sunglasses and traditional clothing, and somehow even looked a little cute.

But there was also a gigantic monster in the footage.

"Stop sleepwalking, stop tearing me apart..."

A metaphor.

No. The meaning was obvious without words.

The viewers in the GBN world did not understand the reference.

But the viewers in Audience World One did.

[1][I was wondering what would happen to Desert Dawn after Cagalli started traveling with the Archangel.]

[1][So that’s where the dagger was hiding!]

In the "original," Cagalli had not stayed with the Archangel. After Kira sent her away from Heliopolis, she later arrived in North Africa and joined Desert Dawn, the organization resisting ZAFT.

But under Director Lacia’s script, all of those plotlines had vanished completely.

The viewers in Audience World One who had watched SEED were stunned.

[1][I looked it up. No wonder Desert Dawn exists in North Africa. The area where Desert Dawn operates is the Ajjer Plateau, which is in Algeria.]

[1][Of course people there wouldn’t compromise.]

[1][What do you mean?]

[1][Their own resistance grew out of fighting the French for eight years.]

[1][Though I’m guessing the original writer probably never thought that far. They likely just wanted a resistance organization and accidentally hit the mark.]

[1][This version might be different. Looks like they’re planning something big.]

[1][That monster in the MV is probably a metaphor for war, military occupation, or something like that, right?]

Whether the audience could catch a reference made a huge difference to Popularity Points.

This song was not sung by Inori.

Instead, through certain means, she had invited an elderly Tuareg folk singer to perform it.

The Tuareg were nomadic people of North Africa, and at the time, the old man was on the Ajjer Plateau.

As for the Ajjer Plateau... that was Desert Dawn’s base.

As the song progressed, the old man and his friend gradually grew up.

At one point, the old man’s friend put on a pair of sunglasses.

Only then did the viewers realize that the sunglasses had originally belonged to the friend.

But the good times did not last. The monster in the desert grew larger and larger, while the image shifted into ominous colors dominated by red.

"Stop sleepwalking. You’ve been asleep for far too long..."

At the end of the MV, the old man remembered his friend tossing him the sunglasses before mounting a camel and charging toward the gigantic monster.

Then the old man himself put on his friend’s sunglasses and slung his instrument over his back. But with only half of the instrument visible, it looked much more like a gun.

They had both become warriors.

Athrun did not understand the exact meaning, but he vaguely felt that he understood something.

"Mm?"

At that moment, Athrun’s communicator suddenly received a message.

"Athrun?" Lacus looked at him. "Are you going to fight again?"

"Mm."

Preparations were complete.

The Le Creuset Team would head for Earth. Their first destination was Gibraltar.

"Kira..."

He was going to become Kira’s enemy again.

If only he could avoid fighting Kira...