As she kept on waiting, waiting for her humanity to be raped out of her, waiting the moment she could let it go and embrace what she truly was, a toy and an object, only to be used and discarded when all of her essence was sucked out, she felt it.
Hot.
However, something strange, she expected a rotten dough like texture coming from such creature, but what she felt was…
Wet… Liquid…
She pried her eyelids apart, dread climbing with each fraction of light that entered. She expected the worst, the weight of a man smothering her fragile body—yet it wasn’t that. It was something else.
Moonlit steel—silver veiled beneath a canopy of crimson—jutted from Sieg’s chest. It was like a light at the end of a tunnel of sorrow: the end of her suffering, forged into a blade that finally gave the animal what he deserved. An agonizing death for all his sins and filth. For the first time, it felt as though God had not been idle.
“Ughh… ugh…” he choked.
Alice looked beyond and saw her. A white-haired woman, her dark eyes edged with brown yet unable to hide the vermilion rage blazing within them—like a ruby cast into fire.
Even through the silhouette, with her hair now white, its black luster drained away by the grind of selling her own body and raising her as a daughter, she recognized that face.
After all, how could a child ever forget? The sensation when her own mother came to chase away nightmares, or when she returned after the world had rejected her.
“Mom…” The word slipped out with trembling relief, her throat tight as if it had been waiting all along.
Why? Why didn’t I tell her? Why did I forget that she would always be there, that she would always love me? I should have told her. I should have been brave.
“You… bitch…” Sieg growled, clutching the blade with his bare hand.
“Southern Winds: Grüner Himmel – Veythars Klinge” (Green Sky – Veythar’s Blade).
From her mother’s fingertips burst a compressed blade of green-white energy like a judgement made form. Its violent hum carrying the breath of the southern wind god, wrathful as a tornado tearing through the lands, leaving everything in ruins and destruction. She swung it through the air, clean across her victim’s neck.
Alice watched Sieg’s face freeze in place, then slip away as his head parted from his body. Blood gushed in torrents.
Yet for Alice, it was no horror. It was rain after a thousand years of drought.
Blood flowed in tandem with her tears. She ran toward her mother, each step lighter as she saw proof that her mother still cared for her. Each step was no longer weighted by the arms of the rotting man who had always been there.
But just as she drew closer, she felt it—something hot dripping down her cheek. She turned, and there it was: her mother’s blade, grazing the skin of her left cheek as it leveled toward her.
“Mom?” she whispered, unable to understand why her mother’s blade was turned on her.
“So… him, huh? Edwin’s replacement for you?”Her mother’s voice rasped, dragging like a phantom pulling Alice back into the pit she had tried to escape.
The words cut sharper than the spell that had decapitated Sieg. It was as if she had been dragged back into the abyss she’d fought to escape. Hope turned to despair once more—like chains slithering up from the depths, tender yet unyielding, coiling around her body and pulling her down, one step at a time.
“No, Mom… please, let me explain.”
“I saw it, you know…” Her mother sighed. “The toys. The purse of money. The dress. I know we don’t have that kind of luxury anymore, Alice. But you called this animal ‘Papa’.”
“Mom, it was to protect you. Please, Mom, let me explain—”
“You didn’t even tell me what was going on. You hid it from me. Was it because you didn’t trust me? Or because you wanted this too? Alice… why?”
Alice dropped to the floor. “Mom, please… I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry, please forgive me.”
“Alice…” Her voice came out slowly almost gentle and caring. And yet Alice felt nothing—nothing in that word; not the rage from when her mother had forced her to chisel her father’s body, nor the warmth from when she’d said she loved her. It was hollow. Void. Null. A voice that didn’t feel like a voice at all, but a phantom’s breathe.
Alice lifted her head. Looking at her mother now was like staring at something else. A ghost wearing her mother’s skin. Her hair, completely white, swayed beneath the moonlight and the blood of the beast that had sprayed over her. A picture of rage and sorrow. And yet she didn’t show any hint of humanity left as if everything had ground her emotion away.
“You are no longer my daughter.”
The instant her mother’s words left her mouth, everything was plunged into an abyss where no light could reach. The cold, colder than the first winter and the kind that devours all life, spread through the chamber. It rattled the bones, frost biting them into countless shards that could no longer support the body. The flesh turned blue and necrotic, the kind of wound that felt eternal, though it had been inflicted by a single word. The deep end, the inside of a hollowed out sun where light and warmth was scooped out of it.
But worse than the cold was the scream.
“AAA!!!!!”
It was no human sound, and yet it originated from one. Raw and endless, as if the air itself had been torn open to let something that did not belong in this world manifest. The walls quivered, and for an instant, it felt as though heaven itself recoiled. It was the cry of an abandoned girl—one that could make gods weep, unmake their hymns, and drag them down from their thrones to intervene. Yet no one came. It poured from where Vierna was strapped, but it did not seem to come from her throat at all. It was as if it rose from everywhere, from the marrow of the world itself.
Lina thrashed against the floor, holding her ears which seems to bleed from the sheer pressure of the scream. Then she started to cry to. Not because the pain that come from the scream but from the agony of seeing that her friend was abandoned to rot by her own very mother. To think that Vierna, her Vierna was abandoned in such manner was breaking her inside. All that smile, all that teasing, all that acceptance coming from someone whose so cruelly rejected by her own Sun was unimaginable. Then she heard her screams again.
“MY SUN… MY SUN… MY SUN… MOTHER!!!
FORGIVE ME FORGIVE ME FORGIVE ME—”
“Halwen, quickly!” the Arkmarschall barked as he tried to cast a spell to calm Vierna’s body.
Halwen tightened the straps on Vierna’s hands, but she thrashed violently. Lina saw blood dripping from her wrists and her eyes. Halwen tried to subdue her telekinetically, but it was useless. Both the spell and the straps began to waver.
Beside Vierna’s thrashing body, a spirit took form. It was bluish-white, like ice given shape, yet featureless, a small pure silhouette that stood in silence. Its presence felt wrong, as though it did not belong in this world at all.
From it came a sound—an untouchable, intangible voice. It was more tremor than speech, a resonance that rattled the air yet carried no meaning anyone could grasp.
Leopold removed his eyepatch. Lina saw it: a deep violet gem burning within. He leaned closer, his gaze locking with the spirit. The gem flared, flooding the chamber with violet radiance.
“COLOR OF SOUL: DAS AUGE HARMANSIANS!” (The Eye of Harmansians)
The Eye opened, and the spirit shifted under its gaze. What had been a faceless silhouette rippled, reshaped, and grew features—hair like bleached silk, eyes sunken in anguish, and a mouth that trembled as if tasting words for the first time. The formless resonance solidified into a voice. Vierna’s spirit now bore her likeness, and at last, it could speak. Her physical body had lost consciousness.
The spirit then spoke.
“If there is a God, why has He forsaken me? What have I committed? Name me the sin, name me the guilt, and I will bear it! Was I cursed in the life before? Was I born only to endure and to suffer? Oh please, do not leave me so… judge me, pronounce the sentence, condemn me, if it be Your will, yet give me a reason! If death is my redemption, then let me go. If another life awaits, then let it be gentler than this one. But do not let me be orphaned in the darkness, without knowing what I have committed!”
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As the spirit spoke, tremors tore through the research facility. Lina’s head felt as though it were going to be pulverized. She screamed, clutching her skull, hands pressed tight against her ears in a futile attempt to block out the sound. Halwen staggered, gripping his temples as if he could hold back the voice that was splitting his mind apart. Only Leopold remained unmoved—the sole figure able to withstand the spirit’s anguish.
“There is no God. There never was.” Leopold declared, “Only us, only will, only choice.”
“If naught but will and choice be in this world, why then did my mother choose to forsake me—her very flesh, her very blood? She spoke she loved me for eternity—yet is eternity but eight years of my life? If even a mother’s love endureth not, what hope is left unto us in this accursed world? Why do we strive, why do we walk still? Should we not let all things here come unto their end?”
As the spirit spoke, the memory projection continued. It showed Alice reaching for her mother, only to be driven back by a surge of wind magic as her mother vanished into the night sky.
The vision shifted. Alice left her home with no one but Wan at her side. She looked at her coin purse, now empty—spent on food while she had wandered the roads aimlessly for months.
And yet she continued, not knowing where the path would lead—her steps heavy, her stomach hollow. Hunger gnawed at her until every sound of Wan’s paws on the dirt made her think of meat, and every time he panted, she heard the crackle of fire.
At last she broke.
Her fingers sank into his fur, trembling as though the softness burned her palms. Wan licked her wrist once, trusting, patient. She pressed her forehead to him, whispering apology after apology until the words became nothing more than broken breath. Hunger clawed at her insides, louder than her grief.
The projection faltered—then returned.
Wan was gone. Only Alice remained, hunched and shaking, her teeth grinding as though each chew tore her apart. Blood streaked from the corner of her mouth, dark against her pale skin. She continued walking, tears and blood dripping nonstop from her face. It felt like her own blood, not the blood of the innocent pet she had just eaten.
“Your mother never loved you,” Leopold thundered. “Love endures and eternal! The fact that she stopped loving you means it was never love at all.”
The room convulsed as the spirit flared crimson, its form writhing in refusal. It lifted its hands to its head, clawing at the sides as if it could block out the words, as if deafness could undo truth. Its mouth opened in a chant, sharp and unrelenting, the sound no longer a moan but a storm of denial that seemed capable of tearing truth itself apart.
“MY MOTHER LOVED ME!!!”
Its bluish-white body began to fracture, destabilizing under the weight of its own words. From the cracks, gaping wounds conjured themselves, tearing open where no flesh should be. Thick red liquid welled up and spilled, dripping down in rivulets that streaked across its pale form until it seemed drenched in blood. Each drop hit the floor with a hiss, as if even reality recoiled from the weight of its suffering.
The words crashed again and again, a storm of denial flooding the chamber. It was not memory, not reason, but a soul clawing at the one belief it refused to surrender. The force of it manifested as a tremor so violent that alarms rang out.
Leopold raised both his arms into the air. Deep purple runes instantly filled the space around him as he began his incantation.
“All guilt shall bleed upon the iron stake. All shame shall burn beneath the black sun. The soul shall rise unshackled, and the world shall drown in Judgment’s realm!
EIDRECHT 666: Der Letzte Berg der Bu?e!” (The Last Mountain of Penance.)
The world tore open, and in an instant everyone there including Vierna’s unconscious body were carried with Leopold into another place. As they were transported, both Lina and Halwen felt their pain lessen yet it was not entirely gone.
This was Leopold’s Other Place—a spell that dragged everything into his psyche, granting him control over all that existed within.
They stood upon a mountain of bones. Skulls littered the ground like broken stones, scattered in heaps and ridges that stretched into the horizon. The air reeked of dust and silence, the chill of countless dead.
Above them hung a sky the color of ash, heavy and unmoving. It was not night, yet no light remained—only a dim gray, as if God Himself loomed beyond the veil, watching, waiting to reclaim his daughter from a world that had rejected her.
From the ashen sky, four great crosses came hurtling down, each one striking the mountain with a sound like thunder. They drove deep into the rock, their iron roots splitting stone as they settled into place.
Chains uncoiled from their arms, glowing with a light of judgment. They lashed out and wrapped around Vierna’s spirit, binding the small, pale silhouette in their grip. The mountain itself seemed to groan as the chains tightened. As the spirit was bound, the trembling ceased, and Lina and Halwen’s pain drained away—the cross had taken it in.
It lifted its head, voice trembling with rage and sorrow and once. “Is this the place where thou wilt do it? Is this the place where thou wilt at last release me from this torment of being?”
The words felt like an acceptance that suffering was all it had ever known, and all it ever wanted was to be freed from it.
Guided by the vision his eye saw, Leopold raised his hand as if to seize the firmament. With a flick of his fingers, the ashen sky tore open. Darkness unfurled, vast and endless, and in an instant the heavens came alive.
Stars spilled across the void in uncountable thousands, glittering like a sea of jewels cast upon black velvet. They burned bright and innumerable, as though no boundary could ever hold them. The vast canopy seemed to breathe, stretching beyond sight, a boundless firmament that swallowed all despair in its majesty. And at its heart, suspended with solemn grace, hung a crescent moon—pale silver, magnificent, serene. It was not just a sky, but a vision of what love ought to be: endless, vast, eternal, glittering beyond the reach of time.
As the spirit looked at it in grief, a projection started again.
It was a moonless night, the sky looked like an abyss and beneath that darkness, Alice walked. Her steps aimless, her eyes hollow from hunger and despair. She followed a dirt road, drawn to a dim light like a moth to flame.
At last she reached a door. She tried to knock, but her strength failed her. The door opened anyway, and someone stepped out. Alice knew her. Elra.
Elra lifted her palm as she looked towards Alice. From it bloomed a small, fragile echo of the heavens Leopold had just unveiled. A miniature cosmos shimmered above her hand.
She pointed to the moon in the middle of her spell, “It looks like your hair,” She said with a smile, trying to distract the orphan girl who had just stumbled upon her door.
That spark, that fleeting miracle, rooted itself deep within Alice. After what felt like a lifetime of torment, she recognized a strange yet familiar sensation—warmth, fragile but undeniable, pressing through the cracks of her suffering.
As she stared at the little cosmos glowing in Elra’s hand, her heart stilled. The gnawing hunger, the sting of bruises, the weight of abandonment—all of it loosened, just for an instant. She forgot pain. She forgot fear. For the first time in her short life, she simply wondered. The tiny stars, the silver crescent moon, the soft shimmer of light—they pulled her gaze upward into a world that felt infinite.
It was the first in what felt like an eternity, she tasted something beyond misery. From that moment on, every time Alice saw magic, she chased that same feeling—the one that let her believe, if only for a heartbeat, that life could be more than suffering.
When her mother turned on her, it was magic that had saved her. Magic proved that effort meant something—that sacrifice and training could draw her closer, step by step, to the one thing that never betrayed her. Her mother had spurned her love, even when Vierna shielded her at the cost of her own body, she didn’t want to listen to her.
“Tell me, Vierna,” Leopold said, his voice steady. He raised his hand toward her; runes and glyphs floated in the air, filling the scene with deep violet script. “Did you not love magic?”
The air vibrated with the runes’ hum, a strange, eerie pressure closing around the spirit’s body. The glyphs flared brighter, their light almost beckoning—whispering for her to agree with the man.
“I do…” She said.
“Tell me—are you going to abandon magic, as your mother abandoned you?”
“No…”
The spirit faltered, her mind stumbling over his words. She knew they were wrong—yet something in the air beckoned to her, whispering that they were true.
“Isn’t that how love should be? Your magic was weak, always was, and yet you still stubbornly tried to catch it, enduring procedure and training, spent your nights studying instead of sleeping. That’s love, Vierna, that’s how your mother should be! Love is eternal. Anything less is not love.”
The spirit continued to cry. To think that everything she saw—her mother dancing for her, preparing her dinner, greeting her as she came home—was something that wasn’t love was heart wrenching, and so with fragile resolve, she spoke.
“No… I know she loved me,” the spirit whispered, desperation fraying her voice. “She called me… called me her moon.” She paused, “She was my sun… I loved her!”
“But she didn’t love you back,” Leopold said. The words were firm, but to the trembling spirit they sounded like Edwin whether it was magic or just her delusion, she didn’t know for sure.
“SHE LOVED ME! STOP TWISTING THE TRUTH!” The spirit voice come defiantly, a last resistance against Leopold’s magic.”She just stopped! Because I failed her!”
“No mother who truly loves her child would abandon them just because they failed.”
“aaa…. AAAA!! AAAAA!!!!!”
The spirit thrashed. Her hands flew to her ears, clawing at them as if she could tear them off and never hear those words again. Her wails burned through the air—raw, molten, desperate—as if she were swallowing lava. Then her fingers turned toward her own eyes, trying to gouge them out so she wouldn’t have to see, wouldn’t have to remember. She tried to choke herself too, clawing at her own throat as if silencing her breath could keep her from cursing the world any further.
But she couldn’t. She was a spirit—grief without flesh. Her hands passed through her body, her pain circling endlessly with nowhere to land.
Leopold continued to cast sigils, one after another, the air glowing faintly with his runes. The incantations he spoke were ancient—not in Reichtongue or Common Tongue—something neither Halwen nor Lina could understand.
It continued for a while. The spirit tried its best to fight against the influence, against the promise of a solution to its pain, but it wasn’t strong enough. It was only a girl’s spirit, struggling against someone who was clearly far more experienced in both life and magic.
She had always believed her mother’s love was the strongest love there was, the one love that could never falter. And if even that love could not endure, then what hope was there for any other? All lesser loves would be doomed, and one day, those loves would die. That was the thought that caused all her wounds—the realization that the world was damned, a place where no enduring love could ever be found.
But if her mother had never loved her at all, then it was different. Then love itself had not failed her. It simply had not yet been found. Believing her mother’s love had never existed was easier—because it left one sliver of hope: that somewhere in the world, someone else might one day give her the love her mother never did.
At last, the spirit’s bleeding slowed. Crimson lines hardened into dry marks, though the wounds still gaped for all to see—a map of pain that belief could not erase.
Leopold’s gaze burned into the trembling silhouette. “Your mother never loved you.”
The spirit shuddered. Its voice cracked, the cry echoing in the chamber, old and broken, dragged from the marrow of its being: “My mother never loved me.”
What do you think? Never loved at the first place? or Loved but it ended?
