(POV: Aretia Exemplar)
A relentless, grinding ascent tore at our muscles. Our breath billowed out in ragged white plumes, immediately swallowed by the biting dark as our boots sank into the deep, heavy snow with exhausting slowness.
Justitia stopped abruptly, her frail frame swaying from side to side. "Sleep... let us take a rest here."
I turned toward her, my breath catching in my throat. "What?! We haven't slept in so long, and the night is half-spent, but stopping in this open waste is suicide!"
Her eyelids were half-closed, her voice melting into a languid, hollow whisper. "I am just sleepy... There are no monsters here, let us just sleep a little... And besides, I do not feel any cold anymore."
The blood froze solid in my veins.
My eyes locked onto her pale, cyanotic lips and slackening eyelids; her body had completely ceased its shivering, and the creeping numbness of death was beginning to swallow her consciousness whole.
"What on earth are you talking about?!"
I seized her trembling shoulders and shook her limp frame violently.
"We are freezing to death out here! Falling asleep now means never waking up! There is no closing our eyes until we kindle a fire... Hold on until we reach a tree!"
Justitia whimpered weakly, like a child shaken awake from a heavy stupor. "Alright... alright."
I did not leave her to her own failing footsteps. Hooking her arm over my neck, I locked my arm around her waist, bearing half her mechanical weight against my taller frame. We trudged through the snow with agonizing effort, one step dragging another while the gale lashed our faces, until a massive ancient pine emerged before us.
It stood like a lone sentinel in this desolate glacial expanse, sheltered between two jagged rock ledges that broke the fury of the wind.
"A tree... finally," Justitia breathed faintly.
She slipped from my shoulder and collapsed back directly against the rough, gnarled bark, letting her eyes slide shut. Beside our pack in the snow, I set down the wooden vessel she had hollowed out.
I gathered dry kindling and flakes of pine bark inside the rocky hollow, set the baseboard and the drill stick, locked it into the notch, and began rolling it rapidly between my palms, pressing downward with my full weight.
Just as before, the unnatural phenomenon recurred. At the very first rotations, thick smoke billowed upward, an ember flared with sudden intensity, and a hungry orange flame burst forth, devouring the dry wood with a voracity far exceeding the freezing air around us.
I watched the flickering flame with grim caution.
We were still traversing a zone saturated with anomalous thermal energy—an indelible imprint of an overwhelming power that had passed through this expanse. Suspicion gnawed at my mind, yet without this bizarre anomaly, we would have frozen to death long before reaching this sanctuary.
I glanced over at Justitia and found her sitting upright, wide awake, staring into the dancing fire with large, unblinking eyes from which all drowsiness had vanished.
"Weren't you on the verge of falling asleep?" I asked as I seated myself opposite her across the fire, resting my back against the cold, sheltering stone wall that blocked the wind.
"I thought I would get some rest," she murmured, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms tightly around them. "Yet sleep suddenly dissipated... I do not know why."
I tilted my head back against the stone, gazing up at the crystal-clear celestial canopy. The stars glittered in the void with cruel, unyielding brilliance, like diamonds scattered across the infinite abyss.
Justitia broke the mountain stillness with a faint, hesitant murmur. "Do you know the names of these stars?"
I looked at the constellations, then returned my gaze to her face. "In the ancient era, they bore a name... but those records were purged from written history."
"Why were they erased?"
"A matter concerning the elder gods and their wars," I replied tersely.
Justitia contemplated the glittering sky for a long moment, then spoke in a lost, wandering tone. "Do you think they were good?"
"Who? The gods?"
"Yes."
I sighed, extending my open palms toward the radiant warmth of the fire. "Yes and no. They were numerous, like mortals, and among them were both the righteous and the tyrannical."
"And if we wished to discern the good from the evil?" she pressed, her voice clinging to the question as if grasping for an immutable moral anchor.
"The scale itself is shifting," I answered in a calm, neutral tone.
She knitted her brows in protest. "Isn't the good one who does not kill? The just, the merciful, the protector of the helpless... these are clear, undeniable traits. And the evil one is he who sheds blood and crushes others. The matter is simple and clear."
I looked at her pale, hollow cheeks and her naive, unblemished gaze. "The world is not that simple, Justitia."
"Yes, it is that simple!" she objected, a tremor of rising emotion fluttering across her lips. "The wicked is wicked, and the righteous is righteous!"
"Not necessarily." I adjusted my posture, looking directly into her eyes. "One who treats you with boundless nobility and mercy might commit the most unspeakable atrocities against others simply to secure your survival. Is he righteous, or is he wicked? In the eyes of his victims, he is a remorseless monster; in your eyes, he is a savior."
Her brow furrowed in deeper confusion. "If he were truly good, what would prevent him from being merciful to everyone?"
"The very nature of existence forbids it. The earth has not enough room for all to survive, and mortals are not made that way."
"Yet the gods are not mortal!" she retorted instantly. "They are higher beings!"
I studied her for a long while, then said quietly, "I do not know... I speak only of what I have observed in human nature. And I do not know if those higher entities were ever anything more than mere mortals who seized absolute power and began behaving like gods."
Justitia fell silent, her gaze sinking into the cold horizon between the crags, while the wind circled around us with a low, hollow whistle.
Then, without the slightest warning, words dropped from her lips like heavy stones cast into a bottomless well:
"You are not angry with Vanitas."
My entire body locked rigid. My gaze dropped, fixing onto the frozen crust of snow beneath my boots.
Justitia continued, her voice trembling with a sharp edge that struggled to contain a profound, wounded fracture: "You feel no rage toward him, nor toward what he did to us... You do not even believe his actions were fundamentally wrong."
A suffocating silence descended.
One heartbeat... two... three...
The rapid pulses hammered against my ribs, yet I did not lift my eyes from the glowing embers. I possessed not a single lie to counter her words, for what she had spoken was the naked, unvarnished truth.
I was not moved by that boiling emotional fury that consumed Justitia's chest.
Every creature in this existence gazes upon the world through the solitary lens that secures its dominance and survival. To the wolf, tearing the lamb apart is the natural law by which it sustains life and affirms its existence; to the lamb, the wolf is a beast devoid of mercy. The cosmos does not orbit around a fixed moral axis; it is governed by perspective and power balances, where supremacy alone dictates what is just and what is false.
Vanitas moved from this exact, stripped-down perspective. He saw through the sanctimonious nobility beneath which the aristocracy of Stasis hid, grasped the rotting rules of the kingdom early on, and applied the law of predation with absolute cruelty: the weak are crushed, and the strong carve their dominion in blood.
I do not judge him by the standards of naive sentiment, nor do I look upon him through eyes awaiting an absent divine justice. I simply perceive the cold reality through which he operated.
The crushing silence broke as Justitia spoke again, her voice choked by tears pooling in her reddened eyes.
"I always wondered... during our days at the Academy... how you could bear living in his proximity. From the moment his boots crossed those iron gates, the earth beneath my feet became a raging inferno—an unyielding fire that never subsided. That was what the Academy was to me."
She looked at me, her pupils burning with raw, tearful grief.
"I thought you were suffering just as I was. But one day, I observed what was happening with meticulous care, and I saw that he never came near you. Not a single student who dared speak to you ever vanished! Yet anyone who tried to approach me was ruthlessly crushed and erased from my life."
She swallowed hard, a bitter lump catching in her throat.
"I could not understand why it was me. Did he fear your intellect? Or was he preying on me because I was weak and helpless? I lied to myself and thought: This is merely my wretched fortune, and Aretia bears no blame."
Justitia leaned her torso forward over her knees, drawing closer across the fire, her eyes charged and her features trembling under an accumulated weight of agony.
"Yet afterward... I discovered that you knew everything. You were fully aware of what he was doing to me behind closed doors."
I held my breath, feeling the biting chill of the air seep deep into my throat.
"Otos knew nothing," she continued, her voice fracturing into jagged sobs. "Nor Mother, nor Father. No... you alone knew. And even so... you ignored me."
She shook her head slowly, tears carving tracks down her pale cheeks.
"You were awake... I know with absolute certainty that you were. You heard my screams and my pleading while he was striking me in my chamber."
I closed my eyes, and the echo of that dreadful night resounded through my mind in all its unsparing cruelty.
"That night," Justitia whispered in complete breakdown, "when he broke into my room in the dead of the hour, screaming at me, striking my face, ordering me never to utter a single word to any living soul in the Academy... you were awake! I know you always wake in the depth of the night to study, and the hour had long passed midnight. The walls between our rooms were thin; whenever a book fell from your desk, I could hear its thud against the floorboards... How could it be possible that you did not hear the blows of his hands and my screams as I begged him to stop?!"
She bit her lower lip so hard it nearly broke the skin, muttering with a bitterness as dark as venom:
"Yet you... you remained frozen in your chair, let him beat me without mercy, and turned a blind eye to my existence."
I opened my eyes slowly, gazing at her without uttering a single syllable.
I had heard every sound.
I had heard the sharp slap of palms against flesh, her muffled weeping, and the heavy impact of her body hitting the floorboards. And I had not moved.
I had not moved because confronting Vanitas in the dead of night, far from the watchful eyes of Otos, would have meant turning that black madness directly upon myself. I had calculated the odds with clinical detachment, choosing my own survival and safety at the expense of my sister's agony. That was the naked, selfish pragmatism upon which I had built my existence.
"I care nothing for that past now," Justitia wiped her tears roughly with the back of her hand, a sharp gasp tearing through her chest. "I forgive you for that cowardice, and I forgive you for that abandonment... But what I have no strength to ever forgive you for is that you are not angry with him now!"
Her frail frame shuddered as she pointed a trembling hand into the bleak, freezing darkness.
"After what he did to Mother and to Otos... after he burned our house, scattered our bloodline, and cast us into this living hell... do you harbor no hatred toward him?! Do you not wish to tear his throat out with your bare hands?! I simply... cannot forgive you for this dead, callous indifference."
Justitia turned away from me, laying her head down upon the snow banked against the tree trunk. She turned her back to me, seeking refuge in sleep to escape my very presence.
I remained in my place, leaning back against the cold, unyielding rock.
I gazed up at the brilliant stars suspended in the dark sky, while the fingers of silence tightened their grip around the clearing.
I had lied to her about the stars.
There was an ancient name for those constellations, recorded in the historical manuscripts of the Institute—a single title uniting all those distant fires under one banner: [Ignis Caelestis]... Celestial Fire.
It was the very same name... the name of the ancient alchemy card Mother had activated to ignite her own soul beside the shattered wreckage of the carriage, buying our escape so that we might endure beneath this starry dome.
I turned quietly toward Justitia.
Her breathing had slowed into a steady, rhythmic cadence, and the violent trembling of her shoulders had ceased. She had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep, cradling her bitter sorrow and her disillusionment in me.
Rising without a sound, I slipped off my heavy outer coat in absolute silence. Bending low, I draped it gently over her shivering frame, then rearranged the burning logs to keep the radiant warmth close to her extremities.
Drawing my knees tightly to my chest, I let the freezing mountain wind bite into my bare skin, a sharp chill locking the muscles of my neck and shoulders. Staring out into the black abyss of the mountain slopes stretching into the unknown, I whispered to myself in a voice swallowed by the eternal quiet:
"I am not angry with him, Justitia... Because anger is an emotion, and emotion blinds the sight. And I need the whole of my sight... to repay him for what he did to us."