I Miss You
A single snowflake touched everyone equally, melting on every brow alike — but the cold that came flooding in its wake was never fair.
There were men wrapped tight in their clothes, scarves wound to the chin, while on this wind-scoured winter day children lay in the streets with nothing but a single thin cloth for a blanket, too ragged to even be called thick.
The merciless snow buried the entire street.
"Hhh... fuck... bastards..."
...It's cold.
And the snow buried more than the street. It buried everything in it, relentlessly, without mercy.
Flakes like white powder lingered beside a certain child, their warmth held at bay by the single thin cloth he had draped over himself.
"..Fucking... hell, it's cold..."
....
Even when coarse curses spilled from the boy's mouth, the snow gave no answer. It simply kept its silent vigil at his side, melting away.
The cold wrapped around my body. A thin cold that refused to scatter.
Cold. Freezing. My bones ached and my thoughts dulled, and it felt as though my body existed crumpled inside a narrow box called chill.
The boy's fingers moved. So I tried moving mine.
His fingers would not move — but mine moved just fine. Yet I could say with certainty: the cold we felt was the same. That chill still lingered in my memory.
"That... fucking pig of a woman..."
....
The boy murmured someone's name. Someone who existed in my memory too. A young lady who had never once treated the old me as a person — who worked me like a dog, like a pig, and used me up.
The boy curled in on himself even tighter, like a hedgehog.
"..It's okay... I'll survive. Again..."
....
The cold bored deeper and deeper into his body. White breath drifted from his lips and drifted away, and his fingers and toes had passed beyond sensation entirely. His skin had turned a livid blue, and his eyes no longer granted anything a glance.
At some point snow had piled high on the boy's shoulders, and he no longer had the strength to care. The snow kept accumulating, thicker and thicker — like a snowman.
Weight settled on his shoulders and hair now. A cold, heavy weight. His fingers and toes had all swollen red, and several of them looked as if they would never work again.
The boy let his head fall, burying his face in his knees.
More time passed. Enough time to freeze him solid and then some.
"Hah... hah..."
....
The boy still sat in that spot, and I still lay where I was. My whole body was frozen stiff; I couldn't move. Before it became any harder to move at all, I had barely managed to stretch out where I lay.
My limbs were numb, my entire body blanketed in snow, and even breathing was growing difficult. Every breath drawn through my nose drove a maddening cold into my throat, and every breath out, I could watch in real time as it turned to frost.
My eyes stayed shut, refusing to open — because the tears shed from instinctive fear of death had frozen solid on my lashes.
The boy's helplessness, the sense that there was nothing he could do, reached me as well. Perhaps that was only natural. That, too, was me.
With the pain of necrosis spreading through my body, the scenery around me shifted once more — toward the final moment of my third life.
Clatter-clatter, rustle-rustle. Something was moving busily about.
Ash-grey hair brushed past crystals of every different color, and stark white hands and feet stood out against the black backdrop — utterly mismatched with it.
She was a woman whose name matched neither that snow-white skin nor those bright yellow pupils. The Lord of Ashes, Ivedia.
Her slender hands were methodically sorting and classifying a towering crystal spire, her slit pupils fixed on crystals each of a different hue. And so the sorting of every crystal was finished — at a staggering speed.
"..Who the hell is this guy, anyway?"
She clicked her tongue again as she surveyed the crystals she had gathered. However young she might look on the outside, Ivedia was one of the ancient dragons who had lived for thousands of years. She had endured — existed — through ages beyond counting.
And yet even she had never experienced death more than once or twice. Transcending death was precisely that difficult, that dangerous a thing. For a created being, it was all the more impossible.
"..He clearly received a god's power... so then why is this happening?"
She murmured as she lifted a crystal — not black, but dark enough. The deeper the pain of one's experiences and memories, the darker the crystals of the mindscape grew. And before her now lay what looked to be well over a hundred crystals. All of them dark.
"..Even having received a god's power, can a person really be this unhappy?"
By her common sense, it was impossible. Even power granted by an evil god shouldn't run this deep. No matter how wicked a god, it cherished its faithful. There would be no reason to bestow power that did nothing but harm them.
"..Then what happened to him? Did he become a ghoul, or an undead?"
But she soon dismissed the thought. He looked nothing of the sort. He could scream properly, his nerves were far from intact but still functioned, and there was color in his skin.
"Speaking of which, shouldn't he be coming out by now?"
With that, she glanced toward where the black-haired man had been. Honestly, from the very start she hadn't expected Jenison to finish her trial quickly. It was only natural. Her trial could never be passed easily.
The Lord of Ashes — the worst of the Demon Dragons, born of a wasteland without a single blade of grass or a single tree. Ivedia's trial was death itself.
Death — the thing every life must pass through, the formless presence that closes out existence, engraved deep into the instinct of every living creature and shunned by all. Even those who had lived their lives in relative comfort could not endure their own death.
And this one had done it a full seven times. For him, this trial could never be easy. So she had thought he would come out soon — having lost consciousness to the pain.
Thirty minutes passed. Honestly, she thought he had held out quite a while.
An hour passed. Around then, she might have felt a flicker of admiration. She hadn't known even a human who had lived such a hard life could endure it for an hour.
Three hours passed. Here she began to sense something was off. Did he pass out from being tortured, or what? she wondered.
More time passed. By the time she was fully convinced something had gone wrong, she was preparing to intervene in him directly — toward the first and last life that might become her contracted servant.
But her attempt proved useless. Only when half a day and four more hours had passed did his figure finally begin to show.
He walked out perfectly fine, murder still smoldering in his eyes. Total elapsed time: ten hours and twelve minutes. An utterly staggering span.
He had passed the trial — enduring ten long hours of agony.
She couldn't believe it. She refused to. In her long life she had occasionally laid eyes on those called heroes — and even they would not have held out that long inside the pain.
"..Impressive."
"...."
"Truly... impressive. How is this even possible...?"
It was pure admiration. A pure admiration for a single life — something she had never once felt in all her existence. For a dragon of the arrogant, haughty dragonkin, and one with a temperament as twisted as hers, this was the highest praise she was capable of giving.
"...."
"..What are you doing?"
But he apparently didn't feel the same. The murderous light in his eyes had not faded. Saying nothing, never once breaking stride, Jenison kept walking toward her — until at last he stood directly before her, and his hand moved. Toward the top of her head.
Thwack—
Smack—
"Kyaaak?!"
"..You crazy lizard bastard."
Not a particularly profound thing to say, for a man who had just walked out of death.
"Here, bring me some bandages, please!!"
"Ah, yes, right away!"
In a field barracks of the Great Forest, where countless wounded still lay suffering, a woman who was not an elf could be seen changing the elves' bandages all the same.
"I... I thank you, human. Might I ask your name?"
"My name is Ella. I have no family name — as you can see, I'm a servant."
"..I see. Thank you."
A bucket full of water in one hand, medicine and towels for the patients in the other — it was Ella.
Having survived by the sheer chance of help from someone nearby, she finished her day's work and set off once more to see her master — toward Jenison, who had lain collapsed and unmoving for days now.
"Young Master, it's me..."
"...."
"When are you going to wake up...? You've slept more than enough by now... hehe."
No answer came, of course. An unconscious man could hardly answer. But that was all right. He was breathing, after all. It was blessing enough that he had survived that battle.
"..Still, I do wish you'd wake up soon."
"Might I come in?"
"Ah, yes!! Of course!"
An unfamiliar voice asked permission from outside the barracks. An older-sounding voice — one she had never heard in this place.
"Ah — good day to you, miss."
"Ah... good day to you... but... who might you be...?"
"My name is Azakh, the Empire's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Might I step inside for a moment?"
"Ah — yes... yes!! By all means..."
"Haha, thank you."
The moment Azakh entered the room, he took in Jenison's appearance and studied him slowly, while Ella remained in a daze.
The... the Minister of Foreign Affairs? That's someone incredibly high-ranking...!
"Haha, the more I look, the more surprising he is?"
"...?"
"His appearance shows not the slightest change — and yet this man slew such a monster all on his own?"
"...."
"The stain upon the ducal house, the delinquent young master they used to call him... my, how intriguing. I begin to understand why you said what you did just now."
"Um..."
"Ah, forgive me. I've been chattering for quite some time. If I disturbed you, I apologize."
"N-no, not at all! But... how could you, to a servant like me..."
"Haha, then I thank you. Ah, that's right. If he wakes, could you deliver this to him?"
"Yes? Wh... what is..."
"Tell him the Sun wishes to see him."