Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – 04 – Not Just a Sunrise

Now 28 A.H. (After Himmel), Frieren and Fern find themselves in the a town by the Grantz Channel. An old man, who was only a little boy when Frieren was last there, tells them the townsfolk can’t keep up with the debris and wrecks along the beach, so in exchange for a grimoire of the legendary mage Flamme, Frieren agrees to clean it up.

Fern is well-studied enough to know that virtually all books purported to be written by Flamme are fakes, so she wonders why Frieren took the job. She replies “to help someone in need”, and while she admits she may really only doing it for herself, who’s to say she isn’t in need?

Since taking on Fern as an apprentice, Fern has obseved that Frieren is a bit of a mess. She has to be woken up every morning, bathed, clothed, and fed. Fern is always cleaning up messes she makes in their room. There are times she feels more like a mother and a maid than an apprentice.

After three months of cleanup in the winter cold, Frieren and Fern complete the cleanup, just one day before the town’s anuual New Year’s sunrise viewing. The old man hopes Frieren can experience it “this time”; the last time she was here, she missed out on it because she slept in.

This time, Frieren is determined to be awake for it, so she stays up all night, only to fall asleep and dream of those days. While she knows Heiter was “bedridden” due to overdrinking, Himmel still would have liked to watch the sunrise with her, and believes she’ll know why when she sees it.

Despite nearly missing out again, her trusty apprentice pulls her out of bed, bundles her up, and takes her by the hand to the beach, just in time for a gorgeous sunset. And while Frieren admits to herself it’s pretty, she doesn’t think it’s any different form any other sunrise.

That is, until she sees Fern’s sunlit smile, and hearing her say how beautiful it is. It isn’t that Himmel didn’t understand Frieren, he did. This is what he wanted her to see and to know: a sunset is more beautiful when there are others beside you to see it. And if she didn’t have Fern, she wouldn’t have been able to see it at all.

During their travels, Frieren’s party found themselves at Eisen’s home, where he pays his respects to the graves of his long-departed family. He always believed the dead become nothingness, but Heiter believes there is a heaven. Even if it wasn’t so, and unlike most priests he considered that possibility, it was simply more “convenient” to believe somewhere better than nothingness awaited them.

It’s with that in mind that Frieren and Fern pay Eisen a visit at that same place in the Bredt region. His armor and cape are a littl dingier and his face and hands are a little more weathered, but unlike Heiter he’s far from his deathbed. He asks Frieren for help searching for Flamme’s notes…the real ones, not the fakes. A lovely search montage ensues.

As for the why, both Heiter and Eisen, who wrote to each other regularly, wanted to do something for her after seeing how sad she was not to have known Himmel better. Since it is storied that among Flamme’s notes there is a method of conversing with the dead, he seeks the means for Frieren to right a mistake.

It’s Fern who spots the biggest tree in the basin, one that is over a thousand years old. Frieren recognizes this tree and this spot. She was there when it was a mere sapling planet by her master, Flamme. Even though Flamme would pass away in the intervening thousand years, she also knew Frieren would still be around, and the notes the tree would grow to protect would be there too, if Frieren wanted to speak to the dead, as she does now.

While remarking how her old master, an “unpleasant” and “irresponsible” woman, had predicted this would be how things would go down with Frieren, upon opening the entrance to the ruins and reading the grimoire (a sequence elevated by crescendos in Evan Call’s sublime score), she learns that on her travels long, long ago, Flamme found heaven on earth.

The land where souls rest, called Aureole, is located on the northernmost tip of the northern continent, in a land now appropriately known as Ende. That also happens to be the current location of the Demon King’s sprawling castle. No doubt he built it there to establish his dominion over heaven and the dead.

The Demon King may be gone, but the caslte in Ende remains, and that is where Frieren will be able to speak to Himmel (and possibly Heiter too). The catch? It’s a long, long way to Ende. On her original journey with Himmel, Eisen and Heiter, it took a decade. There’s no getting around it; Fern will be pushing 30 by the time they arrive.

Eisen isn’t accompany them as he says he’ll only slow them down (a shame, as I really like Eisen), but as they’re on a wagon to take him back to his hovel and Frieren is asleep in Fern’s lap, he asks Fern if Frieren is a good master. She finds it hard to give a simple answer, for there are times it feels like she only took her on as an apprentice because she promised Heiter.

Frieren’s often single-minded search for both new spells and remnants of her past travels with her comrades makes it feel to Fern like she’s not interested in her. And yet, she also gives her birthday presents, so clearly there’s a part of her that appreciates she’s by her side.

In this, Eisen knows that Frieren, despite looking unchanging, actually has changed since Himmel’s death and gaining Fern as a companion. Now Frieren knows that while being alone was “nice and easy”, sharing her adventures with another, no matter how fleeting a time as it may seem, is its own reward. She didn’t take full advantage when Himmel was alive, but perhaps that too can change when she and Fern reach Aureole.

We’re now four episodes into Frieren’s story, and now the titular elven mage and her cute apprentice have a fixed destination. Its distance away suggests their journey will be chronicled in the weeks to come, and will likely be as important than their final goal. Needless to say, I’m incredibly eager for the next episode.