Episode 53: Thousand-Year Fiefdom

The shaft sunk under the Tower of Rebirth plunges to an unfathomable depth, and Casca, Guts, Judeau, Pippin, Anna, and Charlotte pick their way down its winding stair together. A prisoner startles the princess so badly that her legs give out beneath her, and rather than turn back she lets Guts hoist her onto his shoulders, a gesture that visibly irritates Casca.

When Guts asks how far the pit runs, Charlotte explains that the tower and dungeon are recent construction, roughly mirroring one another above and below ground, while the hole itself predates both by a thousand years. In that distant era, the land later called Midland was splintered among warring clans until a conqueror named Gaiseric bound them into one realm. He had already forced many nations under his heel, and with Midland absorbed his dominion reached across the whole continent, though no record explains where he came from or how he first raised his army. Told that Gaiseric favored a skull-shaped helm in battle, Guts briefly pictures the Skull Knight, then lets the thought go.

Judeau knows the story and carries it onward: Gaiseric erected a lavish capital and bled his subjects through crushing taxes, until heaven sent angels who razed the city over a single night. Judeau names five, but Casca corrects him to four. Charlotte adds that the fabled capital genuinely existed and was cast underground by that calamity, still resting at the bottom of this very shaft, with Midland's ruling house said to be all that survives of Gaiseric's line.

Casca loses her torch on the steps, and it falls for several seconds before settling amid the wreckage of a colossal ruined temple, where countless corpses lie scattered, each bearing a strange mark seared into its rotted brow. Farther up the stairway Guts senses a small, rounded figure lurking in shadow but makes nothing of it. The stair eventually stops short of the pit's true floor, at Griffith's cell. After a steadying touch from Guts, Casca unlocks the door, and as the group edges inside their faint light picks out a bare body lying face-down on the stone.

Charlotte recounts the origin of the emperor Gaiseric and his sunken capital, linking the modern royal family to his bloodline, while a discrepancy surfaces over whether four or five angels destroyed the old city. A dropped torch reveals branded corpses among the buried ruins, and the party at last reaches Griffith's cell, discovering a stripped, motionless figure on the floor.

This installment corresponds to the fifty-third chapter of the Golden Age Arc, running twenty pages after its debut in Young Animal issue five on February 24, 1995. The symbols carved into the buried dead foreshadow the Brand of Sacrifice, and the crouching shape Guts glimpses on the stairway hints at an unseen watcher trailing the group. Gaiseric appears only within Charlotte's recounted history.