POV: Kraidir
My eyes felt heavy. It was hard to keep my gaze fixed on my son, who still held my head on his lap while tears streamed down his face—tears born of the pain I myself had caused him.
Slowly, my senses began to fade. Between gasps and broken sounds, I could hear the laments and pleas of my family begging me not to leave them. My sight clouded completely, and with my last strength, I tried to speak.
What escaped my mouth wasn't words, but a lament… the frame of my final breath.
I felt my body collapse entirely, while my soul drifted away from the physical shell that had once been my home. I left behind my dreams… and, more painfully than anything, my family.
In the darkness of death, all I could do was imagine how my loved ones sank into the suffering I had caused.
I was responsible for this, I repeated to myself.
The echo of my voice thundered in the void, bouncing again and again inside my mind, as if determined to remind me of every guilt, every mistake that had brought me here.
It was strange. Though I lacked a physical body, my consciousness still lingered. My arms and legs obeyed my commands, but moving them only brushed against an endless emptiness. I floated in nothingness, unable to see beyond the suffocating blackness.
Think… damn it, I shouted, though I didn't feel my mouth move—only my thoughts crashing violently inside my mind. This can't be the end. There must be more.
With a desperate attempt, I clenched my eyes shut, clinging to the sensation of a body that was no longer mine, aching to see it once more.
Something seemed to answer. A sharp pain pierced my head, as if the force of my will had broken some boundary. My eyes flew open, blinking rapidly.
A blinding light greeted me. I raised my arms to shield my vision, unable to withstand that brightness so stark against the darkness I had just left behind.
I blinked. I breathed. I felt the fresh air brush my skin, hearing how my own breath blended with the whisper of a soft breeze.
Before me stretched a clear sky, without sun or clouds, an ethereal canvas governed by its own rules.
It took time for all my senses to return, but when they did, I discovered where I was.
Fresh, dancing grass stretched as far as the eye could see. Slowly, I rose, pressing my hands against the living earth. A beautiful meadow expanded in every direction—boundless, welcoming.
I brought my hands to my face. They were wet. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
"I wish I could have brought them here," I sobbed, my heart weighed down by a guilt that refused to let me go. "This place is beautiful… it's the peace you always deserved, but one I could never give you."
My lips trembled. Every word was a dagger burning in my chest, quickening a heart already worn thin.
I had burdened my son with a weight I had never been able to bear myself: protecting our family, even knowing death would eventually reach them as well.
I let myself fall into the grass. A sigh escaped both my body and my soul at once.
Above the ethereal sky, three white birds soared, wings spread toward a better horizon. From above, a single feather drifted slowly down, carried by the wind, until it rested gently on my forehead.
I picked it up with care. I studied it closely, marveling as if my entire existence depended on that moment.
"I see you've finally awakened, love," a soft voice echoed in the distance. "Don't you think it's time to rise? You'll achieve nothing by blaming yourself for what was never yours to prevent."
With little strength left, I turned my head. I had nothing more to lose.
The voice belonged to a celestial figure. A radiant woman, illuminated by an invisible sun, looked down at me from the top of a hill with a playful smile on her lips.
Her golden hair swayed in the wind as she descended with calm grace. With her hands, she held the hem of her white dress, keeping it from brushing the earth.
Her bare feet stirred the ground. With each step, flowers of many colors bloomed from the grass, weaving a path around her, as though the land itself rejoiced at her arrival.
"It's a pleasure to meet you in person, Mr. Van Geast," she said, and her eyes shone with a happiness that, for some reason, brought me a strange calm.
"Where am I?" I asked in a tired voice.
A playful smirk curled her face; it broke into a soft, innocent laugh that creased her lips. Despite the guilt that wrapped around me, I couldn't stop a bitter little smile from forming.
"Sorry for asking," I murmured. "I would like to know… what is this place?"
"You are in the Void," she replied, "at the beginning and the end of everything."
"Your soul crossed interdimensional rifts to arrive here," she continued.
I never imagined the end would look like this. I had thought death meant ceasing to exist, shedding everything I had suffered.
Apparently I was wrong: this was not an end. Looking at the woman's still-smiling face, something in me understood that, more than closing my story, I was standing at the threshold of a new beginning.
Her figure began to walk away, and with a slight gesture she beckoned me to follow. Without thinking, my body moved with difficulty; I dragged my feet across the ground until, bit by bit, they relented and I reached her. Her words spilled out in soft melodies that filled the air.
Though she only hummed, I felt that behind every note there was a tale. Every nuance in her voice carried a feeling I somehow understood.
"Of all the people in your world," she said, pausing and turning to meet my eyes, "it had to be you who answered my call."
She touched my chest with her index finger, giving me a gentle push. "You don't even know what you've just done."
I wanted to ask, but she seemed to read my expression. Her voice returned, clear and serene, and she calmly explained what had happened at my death. She spoke of a choice woven by fate: my soul had been chosen for an important mission.
A mission that involved my own son—that son who, after so much time at his side, I discovered I did not fully know.
"Pincelada," I whispered, remembering.
From the painting that had led me to my first memory with the goddess of fate, I emerged again into the ethereal domain.
Thousands of canvases hung and leaned against the walls; each canvas was a lived fragment, a captured instant. In the solitude of the Void, with the power the goddess had bestowed upon me, everything happened so fast I could hardly take it in.
I sat on the floor, rested my head against a frame, and watched, through another painting, my son's new life.
Although it was only a painting that supposedly should not be altered, I saw it with painful clarity: his cries, the screams, the exact moment he accepted that he had lost us pierced me like a knife.
I had disobeyed a deity to save him. His fate, according to the original weave, was to be born condemned: his life would end at birth; he would never have a future.
But I changed it. I used the same celestial powers the goddess had given me—and would later reproach me for—against her, and thus I saved my son.
By altering the threads of destiny, I condemned myself to live wrapped in hatred. I forced myself to wear a mask I could not truly keep—the gaze of an immutable god, a being who seemed only to wish to observe his own suffering.
Though their insults tore my soul mercilessly, I remained standing. I looked on with a cold, emotionless stare, while hiding a paternal love that was both my prison and my consolation.
"I love you, parents," I heard his voice in the portrait.
Seeing him embrace others, his new family, broke me inside. But I had fulfilled my duty: at least I had given him the peace he so longed for—the peace he had never known in his previous life.
Kael Lanpar. That was his new name. But he would always be my son: the only one who, in a land collapsed by war, knew how to show me pure affection—the only one who hugged me with a love that recognized no masks.
Listening only to my own sobs in the suffocating silence of the Void, I rose again, ready to carry out my final duty as a father: one that demanded total sacrifice.
"Pincelada," I said, bitterness lodged in my throat.
The painting before me transformed into a dimensional portal at my command. My mind hesitated for a moment, replaying everything that had happened over that time, but the call was stronger.
"My son needs me," I exclaimed.
With her words resonating inside me, I stepped forward. I felt every fiber of my being unravel and pierce through the fabric of reality until I reached the place where he was.
That child I once held in my arms was struggling to breathe; his eyelids drooped, and his dimmed eyes spoke volumes. The spark of life that had once shone in them was fading, and the eternal sleep of death approached with intent.
"No, my son… this cannot end like this," I whispered, as his body faltered in my arms.
Feeling that embrace I had longed for tore my heart apart. I saw the agony in every small movement of his frail body, in his fragile life, and in his shattered mind.
I had inhabited his mind for so long, had witnessed his new life through his eyes, that I had come to feel it as my own.
His memories were chains that bound him to a suffering he should never have had to bear, yet he accepted it. Every doubt, every thought of his fit together like pieces of a puzzle, which, when completed, revealed the shape of his pain.
I knew my time had come: the day I would leave him alone so he could thrive in the second chance I had given him.
With effort, I raised my arm. Everything shook. I gripped his forearm firmly and placed it against my chest, wanting to hold the innocent child he once was for one last moment.
Flesh tore; his arm passed through me. Tears sprang as my body collapsed. My jaw fell against his shoulder; I leaned on him and felt my life slip away, sliding out of this plane.
Even with my eyes open, I saw him one last time: not the face I remembered, but carrying the one thing I would never forget—my son, my first son.
Warm blood soaked my back, and the ground returned the same stillness I had felt the first time I died. But this time, everything was different: I had saved him. I had sacrificed myself so that something new could be born within him.
My eyes clouded; white began to fill them. At last, a true smile formed on my lips, the one that had always been meant to be there.
"My son… I love you," I murmured with my last strength. "I always have. I blame you for nothing. Your choices were born from pain, not from malice."
Knowing that my whisper had reached his ears, I let myself fall into death. The burning of disappearing consumed me like lava, but even then, I could not erase that smile that accompanied me to the very end.
"My son… soon we will meet again."