Chapter 13: Liberation Festival

The chapter begins inside one of Frieren's dreams, where the Hero Party is paid for a subjugation job with a counterfeit grimoire credited to Flamme. Frieren observes that no authentic works by the old mage survive and that this fake is the finest she has ever encountered, while Heiter wonders whether genuine grimoires survive at all, and Eisen quips that Flamme herself sounds plucked from a fairy tale. Frieren muses that she alone still remembers the mage's face before waking.

In the present, twenty-eight years after Himmel's death, the trio helps a merchant clear a landslide blocking the Eng Road in the Northern Lands. Grateful, he guides them toward town and admits he has never seen an elf, prompting Frieren to note how scarce her kind has grown; elves live long, but their weak pull toward attachment and reproduction is quietly driving them to extinction. Wagons crowd the town gate for that night's Liberation Festival, which commemorates when the Hero Party brought down the demon that had long oppressed the area.

The merchant's remark that people still honor Himmel each festival, even eighty years after the demon fell, sends Frieren into a memory of the living hero. Studying a likeness of himself that had been recarved five times, Himmel explained that statues let short-lived humans keep the party in mind, but his true aim was to spare Frieren a lonely future: unlike Flamme, the Hero Party would leave undeniable proof they had existed rather than fade into legend. Back in the plaza among the flower-draped statues, Frieren asks whether the festival will endure another century, and the merchant vows the festival will endure as long as the town itself survives. Come the following morning, the trio sets off again toward the distant north.

Flamme is named here as the originator of human magic. Fern is so startled to see Frieren rise early that she rewards her with food and has Stark rub her shoulders. During the roadwork Stark asks Fern to drop her formal address since they are close in age, but her blunt new tone pleases him even less, so she keeps calling him Master Stark while privately judging him a nuisance. Heiter also remarks that Himmel's five-times-redone statue had taken less time than such work usually required.