The rain does not fall; it lashes the earth with whips of ice.
The sky empties its bowels in pitch darkness, and cold water drops strike the muddy floor around the cabin with deafening violence.
"How do you expect me to light a fire in such weather?" the boy shouted, trying to overcome the roar of the storm.
No response.
I looked at Mugen. He was lying flat on his back on the muddy ground, his limbs stretched out with absolute indifference. The rain washed his face and dark clothes, while his dead eyes stared into the black sky, piercing the thick clouds in search of a bottomless void.
The genius bit his lip in annoyance. I drew an alchemical card, and cut my thumb with the dagger to spill a drop of blood. "[Tulli]."
A white flash. The card ignited with concentrated alchemical heat, but before it could touch the wet firewood, the water pounced on it like the mouth of a raging beast and extinguished it in a fraction of a second. (A faint hiss... then darkness).
But at that exact moment, an anomalous scent emanated from the wet ashes... It wasn't the smell of burnt wood, but the suffocating sting of sulfur and molten iron that vanished faster than the mind could comprehend. A raindrop fell on my chest, and for a single second, it felt as heavy as mercury, burning my skin like an ember dropped from a distant hell.
The genius ignored this physical illusion.
I threw away the remnants of the burnt card, sighed bitterly, and walked a few steps in the mud. The exhausted body surrendered to the cold, and I laid down on the ground beside him. My back sinking into the cold mud, and raindrops striking my face like tiny needles.
I looked at the sky just as Mugen did.
Mugen said, his voice flowing with a strange calm that pierced the noise of the storm: "Didn't I tell you to light a fire?"
The noble replied with artificial coldness: "If you say 'sir,' I will try again."
Total silence. No response but the savage rhythm of the rain.
Mugen spoke again, his eyes still fixed on the blackness: "Why did you insist on trying... when you know for certain that the rain will swallow your fire?"
The boy replied, closing his eyes under the pouring water: "Because there is no other choice. In this world, you either act and move forward, or freeze motionless... and I chose to act."
Mugen sighed with a quiet voice like destiny: "Sometimes... the insistence on acting is just a noisy screen... to try and escape from the inevitable frost."
Something dark jolted inside me; my heart contracted with a sudden sting of rage, and the genius said sharply: "I am not running away. I am not the one who hides and waits for the sky to take pity on him."
"Oh?" Mugen muttered in an abstract tone, as if weighing my soul: "Then what are you waiting for? For someone to come and save you from this mud?"
I smiled a dead smile, stained with mud: "No one saves anyone in this world... and no one will take pity on me. Everyone who cared about me... is dead. All that is left is to burn my own fingers with my own hand."
The air stilled for a moment, then Mugen asked, a question devoid of any emotion: "How does death feel?"
I stared into the pitch darkness above me: "Like a void... the void that falls between the stars. Or perhaps... a suffocating pink space, where monsters swallow their reality."
"What about the sun?" Mugen asked.
I furrowed my brows, and felt a burning lump choking my throat for no comprehensible reason: "The sun? The sun burns you if you approach it... it chokes your breath until it strips you of the ability to escape, then leaves you a corpse in the dark."
Mugen slowly turned his head to look at the pale moon's disk hidden behind the thick clouds: "Can't you use a card that lights an eternal fire under this rain?"
I did not answer him. I closed my eyes, and let the rain fall on my face, washing the blood, the mud, and the lies I feed upon.
(Darkness)
(Rustle).
The sound of hard shells scraping against each other... millions of them. I feel them. Walking on my feet, climbing my cold legs. Cockroaches. I want to push them away, but my hands are bound by invisible shackles.
They began to bite me. Small, sharp jaws tearing microscopic pieces of my flesh, eating me very slowly. (No! No! No!).
I opened my mouth to scream, to call for help from anyone, from any god in the sky... But no sound came out. My mouth filled with the taste of mold and rust. The cockroaches were there, devouring my tongue, blocking my airway, and crawling toward the bottom of my throat.
(Stop! Please!).
The boy backed away in blind terror, crawling on a floor that had turned into a living carpet vomiting insects. My back collided with something solid... a massive basalt stone, giant as an eternal mountain. I turned to it looking for refuge to shelter me.
But the stone suddenly cracked, its color turning to charred black, and the entire mountain collapsed not as rocks... but as an endless waterfall of hungry cockroaches that rained down upon my head to bury me.
I drowned. I was being eaten alive. Being eaten from the inside and outside, choking on their feces, trying to scream into the void...
"Ahhhhhhhh!!"
I jolted from my place with a hysterical scream that tore through the stillness of the wooden cabin.
I stood on my feet swaying, striking my arms and chest with my hands madly, trying to shake the illusory insects off my skin: "Get away from me! Leave me alone!!"
I was panting violently, cold sweat drenching me despite the cabin's suffocating frost. I looked left and right with wide pupils overflowing with terror.
I looked at Mugen. He was sitting in his place, awakened by the echo of my scream.
"Kill them... kill them!" the boy screamed at him, the mask of the genius having completely fallen, tears carving their paths in my eyes: "Please... please help me!"
He didn't mock me. A smile did not draw itself upon his face, and he didn't ask me what happened. He looked at me with a deep, glacial silence, then slowly stood up.
He stood at his full towering height, picked up his wooden sword, and uttered a single, calm word: "Follow me."
I walked behind him.
My breath was still trembling, my heart beating in my ribcage like a war drum. We were walking through the dark, frozen forest, but we were taking a direction completely opposite to the usual hunting path; we were ascending upward, toward the ultimate edge of the mountain.
The genius tried to gather the scattered pieces of his spilled pride. I looked at his broad back ahead of me, and whispered with a broken voice: "I'm sorry... I lost my mind back there. It was just a trivial nightmare."
No response. He continued his silent steps that left not the slightest trace on the carpet of snow.
Then... we arrived.
We passed the dense tree line, and the borders of the forest ended abruptly. I stopped in my tracks, and forgot how to breathe.
Before us stretched a vast, endless snowy plain. An ocean of absolute, pure whiteness, undefiled by the foot of any creature before. It wasn't just ordinary snow, but it looked as if a sky of crushed crystal had descended and settled on the earth. The surface was perfectly smooth, reflecting the cold blue of dawn like a giant mirror of velvet ice.
The air here was pure to the point of searing the lungs, cleansing them of any smell of mold, or fear, or blood. The place was insolently beautiful... beautiful to the point of making a creature feel its insignificance, and the filth of everything it carries within its belly before this silent, cosmic purity.
I stood staring, the tears that had flowed from sheer panic moments ago freezing like grains of salt on the tips of my eyelashes.
Mugen stood beside me, putting his hands in his pockets, gazing at the extended horizon.
And at that exact moment... the sun rose.
It glided up with majestic slowness. A thin thread of pure gold cleaved the dead gray horizon. The first ray touched the edge of the snowy plain, and the whiteness exploded with countless spectrums of light; the ice crystals turned into millions of diamonds burning with a calm flame, a magical blend of warm orange, delicate pink, and pure gold.
The light began to creep toward us quietly, swallowing the shadows and the cold, second after second. The light was flooding my soul... wiping away the cockroaches, wiping away the black tar, and erasing the walls of the dark basement.
The sun took its entire time to rise, as if it realized how much we needed every atom of this light to breathe.
I closed my eyes, and let the heat of the first rays touch my pale, cold face.
(If only it...) the boy whispered in the bottom of his soul, clinging to a false and temporary peace, yet necessary for survival.
(If only this sunrise... took a longer time).