The sun shines on everyone, both the good and the bad, but the heat was just a reminder of time passing by.
Blood on the snow was no longer something strange.
A familiar sight that meant nothing anymore.
The three suns shone blood, rain was blood, water was blood, blood was death, and death was...
...
This wasn't something they would do, and somehow they hadn't acted yet, but why?
...
No one knew.
...
Who were they? She didn't care, they were just another popular myth, surviving for centuries, passed down by word of mouth.
The entire field around her was blood.
Dark blood, living blood, blood on the snow.
She swung her sword, tore out hearts with her bare hands, shattered them.
Everything around her was silence, even the crows dared not make a sound, flying from corpse to corpse, looking for something they never found.
The number of ravens increased every day, almost as if they themselves were preparing to fight for something. Their feathers grew darker, they became larger and more threatening.
They grew more and more restless, as if they were angry, but they never approached the living, like *#%#@!+#& watching the living, like immortals who couldn't help but be spectators in a play, where the actors killed each other, and the observers were forbidden to join the play.
So they just kept watching, growing more restless, more violent, more deadly...
...
Who were they?
...
Winter was harsh on everyone, but she kept fighting every day.
Everyone knew her name now, she was more feared than before.
She hunted and hunted, her eyes never missed a prey.
She turned fields into blood.
She tortured, killed, survived.
She ripped the tongue out of anyone who dared to speak his name.
He was too sacred to be spoken by their filthy mouths.
The elf with short black hair in armor as black as raven feathers... she always put him at the vanguard.
He was too precious to die...
He was as restless as the ravens. There was a moment when he was forced to retreat from the battlefields, but his prayers never ended. If she imagined, she could still see him kneeling at the church altar, bathed in sunlight passing through the stained glass.
...
Who was he?
…
Why...
Why was he holding her heart?
...
Akane was in the middle of the battlefield, all she saw was red, there was only fresh blood on the snow.
She felt lost; she didn't know where she was or why she was there. Around her, there was nothing but blood and the falling snow, uselessly trying to cover the sea of fresh blood.
Her gloved hand startled her; it was an unfamiliar black armor, and she felt trapped. In her hand was a sword made of the same material as the armor.
She threw the sword away.
She trembled when she saw the reflection of her stoic face in the blood that dangerously rose to her calf.
She crouched down and tried to touch her reflection. She noticed her short hair was stained with both fresh and dried blood, and her face looked frightening.
That couldn't be her.
Before she could analyze her reflection any further, she noticed something on the horizon—grotesque black figures, with distorted faces but soulless eyes, as if they knew they were lost, robbed, and empty by someone as cruel as the devil himself.
Those she couldn't see, she could feel. They crawled aimlessly, their heavy footsteps in the snow like puppets with strings about to snap. They were always lurking behind the thin layer of fog on the horizon.
The sky was dangerously empty, with only a broken star, a black hole in place of its core.
Akane felt watched.
Akane was scared.
Akane felt in danger.
Akane was in danger.
Akane was violently pulled down; was the blood rising, or was she sinking?
The flowers clung to her body, suffocating her, and the blood seemed to swallow her, leaving her desperate.
Her movements were heavy, agonizingly slow. She couldn't breathe; she couldn't move. She was terrified.
But she couldn't scream... No, she mustn't, that would only attract the monsters to her.
The blood quickly reached her head, and she couldn't breathe anymore.
...
...
...
...
...
Everything was dark.
There was a light.
And Akane saw, in front of her, a heart bound by chains. It looked like crystal.
Akane felt it was familiar; she felt the heart's yearning to break free from the chains.
Akane wanted to free it from the chains.
She wanted to be free again.
But with a muted scream inside a silent gasp, that was the sound her lungs made when one of the chains connected to her soul.
The chain ran inside her, bringing with it the imprisoned heart.
Akane felt pain, but also relief.
Now there was a familiar weight in her chest.
And when she heard the sound of the first chain breaking, she woke up.
Now, she could finally start being the real Akane Mahal.