Chapter 107: The Monument of the Goddess

Three decades on from Himmel's passing, Frieren's group reaches the Kino Pass on the Northern Plateau and runs into a three-week backlog at the Empire's border. A guard explains the cause. With Macht defeated and Weise functioning again, the plateau has grown safe enough that traders and adventurers now cross it overland rather than by sea, swamping the understaffed immigration office. Rather than waste the delay, Frieren announces she has somewhere to be.

Her destination is the Monument of the Goddess. Fern knows the name, having been read tales of the Goddess of Creation from scripture by Heiter, and Frieren elaborates that the deity is said to have enchanted ten such stones across the continent. She wants to unravel the spell worked into the nearby one, even though no record exists of anyone ever managing it. She also frames the trip as making amends: on her last visit with the Hero Party she wasted three days simply locating it, drew the group's irritation, and walked away missing a week of memory.

Brushing aside the unease this stirs in Fern and Stark, the party spends several days crossing forests and ridgelines to reach the site. They find the monument reduced to rubble, though Frieren still senses mana within it. Carved at its base is a word she does not recognize, Vialathor, absent on her earlier visit. Fern judges the inscription old rather than new, and recalls that the same name turns up in the scriptural passage about a time-traveling bird, a connection that means nothing to Frieren.

Frieren lays her hand on the ruins, which flare with light. When the glow recedes, the monument stands whole again, restored to how it appeared eighty years before. Himmel's voice sounds behind her, asking whether she learned anything. She turns to find the entire Hero Party exactly as they were during the old journey. Disoriented, she touches Himmel to confirm he is real and asks his age. He answers twenty-three, placing the moment fifty-three years before his death and seven years into the heroes' quest. Frieren has been thrown into the past.

The chapter opens the time-travel turn that reshapes the Goddess's Monument arc. The political shift it describes, Weise's recovery making the Northern Plateau a busier overland route, is the mundane reason Frieren has the idle weeks to chase the relic at all.

The inscription Vialathor and its tie to a scriptural time-traveling bird quietly foreshadow what the monument does. Frieren's earlier lost week of memory, mentioned almost in passing, takes on new meaning once the stone hurls her bodily into the past and back among the living Hero Party.

The relic at the heart of the chapter is one of ten enchanted monuments attributed to the Goddess of Creation, none of which any mage in recorded history has deciphered. The installment runs eighteen pages, belongs to the eleventh volume, and was released in early 2023, its original printing accompanied by several color pages.