89 | fade; buried under the snow

Lucas could no longer open his eyes against the layer of frost that sealed them, framing his eyelashes and shuttered eyes, a perfect statue in the midst of snow. He heard a distant ringing, but it sounded far and numb, like a distant memory.

The woman smiled beside him, playing with his stiff strands of hair as her own charcoal locks flowed around her freely, unbothered by the snow.

Her dark gaze flicked up for a second, and she laughed lightly.

'Even in this life, you can't stop yourself from losing your companions, hm?'

Lucas struggled against the dead weight of his body, confused as he furrowed his eyebrows. It was uncomfortable, submerged in cold and unable to move or even to formulate his thoughts properly.

How long had it been?

How long would it become?

He couldn't even properly process the sights he'd seen, the memories that both felt like his and also not, the ones that involved Elias' entanglement with his own, forgotten deals and promises, an intertwined fate.

The weight of her words settled over him, causing his body to numb more, his senses dulled. He wondered if he was even alive, or was he dreaming?

'Are you curious?' laughed the Yuki Onna, the woman of snow. Her hands trailed down his body curiously, landing on a frozen finger, solid as a rock. Her expression twisted and Lucas heard a sickening,

Snap—

Smiling still, a beautiful and pure smile, she waved the severed finger before his closed eyes. 'Will they find you, or only pieces of you?'

Lucas couldn't feel the pain of his snapping finger, severed off as if it were never his. It was such a strange disconnect, floating, as his body weren't really his, as if nothing were real.

'Oh, how interesting. She chose you. She could've begged or pleaded, and perhaps they would've pitied her—forsaking you for her sake. Or perhaps they would've rejected her, and she'd know that she wasn't enough. Maybe she already knows.'

'That she's nobody's choice.'

The woman's honeyed voice continued to taunt and tease, and Lucas could do nothing in his miserable state except to listen.

He'd already realized what she meant—that likely, the next Ranking had begun. That after the three day period this time, anybody without a Title would scatter into fine figments of lost words, memories of what they once were.

And eventually, forgotten as all stories became.

His body jerked, or he thought it did, when in fact it was nothing more than a roar of emotions in his mind that could do nothing but be just that. Emotions in his head.

'Ah~ how long will you last? Did you know, dearest dreamer, that in one of the precious world lines you've forgotten, those children lived?' She laughed. 'There was a way to save them all, and you failed them. Did you really try?'

With only the low murmurings of her voice in this space of pure white emptiness, Lucas couldn't help but recall the scenes of the corpses, the torn and mutilated bodies that bloomed with wilted flowers. The chorus of terror filled screamed and wailing.

He saw it, vividly still, the wrinkled hands whose skin clung to the bone like plastic wrap, the pointed and crooked nails that tore free of the wallpaper.

The line of bodies that he'd laid out, and the feel of their dead skin when he lifted them under the freedom of the outside, the freedom they'd never have the opportunity to see again. It would be foolish to blame himself for their deaths, but Lucas had always been a fool.

Suppressed gloom flowed through his body, inking into his skin and tainting his blood with dark thoughts. Lucas thought he was going mad, and if he weren't already, he would lose it in this space.

It was as if those flowers, the crumbling and blackened petals had planted a seed in his lungs, its vines spreading and crawling up his throat until it was hard to breathe, hard to taste or feel anything but the dead flowers in his stomach.

Snap—

The woman smiled as she plopped another severed finger; the ice keeping its bent shape without blood to spill and pollute the white snow.

'You haven't any idea how interesting you were to so many Tellers. The fools that still clung to humanity, praying you'd succeed. And the ones, the smarter ones, that had long abandoned it.' Her head tilted, resting on the side of her shoulder unnaturally as the dark black pupils peered at Lucas. 'They relished in your failures.'

A sigh, and he felt delicate fingers prod and pry at his frozen lips, ripping them open. A frost formed over the new scab of his bleeding lips, and she rolled her fingers in his mouth intrusively.

Lucas urged his body to move, to jerk away. The Yuki Onna laughed, a jingle of wind chimes blowing in the cold. 'Don't be dramatic, dreamer. I'm only helping you speak—It's a rare opportunity for conversation, you see. It gets awfully lonely here. I'm sure you'll understand soon.'

He felt his voice, foreign at the tip of his tongue, surge at the back of his throat. He swallowed back curses and instead weakly asked, "What wish did you make?"

She blinked, taken aback as she twirled her finger in her hair. '...ah, as expected of a person like you.' She curled her knees to her chest playfully, her white dress exposing her pale legs. 'I made the wish to see light one more time.'

A glaze settled over her pupils as she swayed like a thin flower that could be crumpled if held wrong. 'Nobody to save, no reason to save the world.'

Her fingers trailed down her arms, ghosting likely over her skin as she shivered in memory. 'I didn't want to save the world, or the humans that inhabited it. Do you believe it's ironic, that I was one that everybody expected to die first? I was a beautiful doll to vent frustrations on, hardly human. I was nothing.'

Lucas said nothing, only listening quietly. There was bitter resentment in her tone. A hollow recollection of the past that haunted her, every waking hour, every terror filled dream.

'Do you want to hear the details? How hands feel on your body, how it feels to be degraded and stripped bare of your soul?" She hummed, closing her eyes. "To you, perhaps you pity us Tellers, or you condemn us for what we've done. But it's a matter of perspective.'

'We are never the villains of our own story.'

"Why did you make... that wish?"

'Because the only thing I thought was worth seeing were the stars, or the sun. They're one and the same. But in the endless night, when I only knew the darkness of humanity and the skies that had cast me into darkness, only I wanted was the light.'

Lucas couldn't imagine the details of who she was, and how she claimed the Forsaken Throne. The sufferings she endured, those who may have worshipped or used her when all morals went down the drain during the apocalypse.

He couldn't imagine the details of a person who didn't have a single person she'd wish for, but instead called for the light that had long abandoned her.

A woman who was undeniably lonely. Or was she satisfied in this land of one where no harm could come? Where no darkness could reach?

'I can see it, your thoughts. Are you trying to figure me out, dreamer? When you are drowning in your own misery. Let me tell you a secret—there is no wish maker that has ever been happy. And you will be no exception.' Her hands clapped together sharply. 'That's to say, if you leave.'

He felt her presence shift as she stood up, twirling lightly on the snow.

'Open your eyes, dreamer. I'll allow you to.'

And as if obeying her commands soaked in honeyed words, Lucas' eyes fluttered open. Between the stark darkness and the pure white, he felt overwhelmed by the light. His eyes flickered painfully.

The woman twirled again, bending her head down to lift the corners of her pale lips coated in a layer of frost that shimmered like ground diamonds. Her raven hair hung down, spilling over her ears as her eyes curved into perfect crescents.

'Tell me, dreamer. Am I beautiful?'

Lucas regarded her coolly through the pain of his vision and thoughts. "No. Not at all."

Her smile grew a little wider. 'Do you mean that?'

"I'm not a liar." He temporarily forgot all the lies and tricks he played in the past with a mask of indifference. If the Yuki Onna knew anything about it, she didn't mind.

She hummed in delight, an unnatural sound from her lips that bordered between the twitter of a bird and the whistle of the chilling wind. She fell to her knees where Lucas lay, still as a statue in her garden of white. He looked at her calmly, more because he couldn't turn his head than any other reason.

"There's never been anybody who told me that before." She smiled, a flicker of gloom in recollection of those who did call her pretty, told her she was beautiful, like a doll. "Do you want to stay here?"

"There's... no way in hell." said Lucas hoarsely, still feeling his voice warm up slowly.

"Then I'll give you another gift." She sang softly, as if her acts were a kindness and not a kidnapping. Although he supposed it'd been himself that was foolish enough to follow, manipulated by her threats.

Typically, he was able to keep a relatively cool head despite his preferred method of resolving conflict to be violence. But Kane, he'd only just united with Kane in the sense of family, in the way of having the emptiness that stemmed from loneliness patch together.

Kane, who he already had a fierce protective nature to, became somebody untouchable.

Those who dared against his brother would answer to him.

The Yuki Onna casually snapped another finger, waving them in the air with delight. "You have such lovely hands, you really do. It's a pity you won't stay, but I won't force you, of course. Now, haven't I granted you a wonderful service already?"

He felt like a fly trapped in her web spun from sweet words. There was no arguing with her—she wouldn't listen. He didn't have the injury to retort either, when he'd rather close his eyes and sleep... allow his mind to drift and think of nothing and everything all at once.

He sunk deeper into the snow, or perhaps that was also an illusion of his mind. His eyes closed once again, even as the woman prodded at him to open them.

Elias. The Catalyst of Everlasting End.

The man who begun these cycles of time that neither he nor Lucas remembered.

Lucas felt a burst of irritation—was that true?

That the man remembered nothing at all, had been living as obliviously as Lucas did? Though Lucas knew, that the only reason he could keep his rationale was because he'd been acting under the guise that he were following a novel.

Acting as if it were fiction. There was no time to lose his cool, to overreact and make mistakes because it was all insignificant. Characters, that he wanted to aid, but was ultimately mere strangers to.

But even if Elias had forgotten the time that had restarted,

Didn't he still know who he was, what he was? That he was the Catalyst who would eventually betray and become the sole barrier between human and throne.

And maybe, he decided, it was the influence of the cold that numbed his brain, disorganized his thoughts, that made dread spill into his stomach. He had to wonder, abandoned in these snowy fields for what felt like an eternity, how much of it was real?

Lucas had never questioned his understanding of humans before. But he didn't know anymore.

He didn't know anything.

The toll of the apocalypse and all his failures finally came to wait before him. He felt misery in the depths of his mind, disappointment at himself for not living up to his arrogant beliefs. And in these moments of doubting, he doubted Elias' intentions.

Lucas' body was half buried with snow that clung to him like frosted flakes of pure gems, glittering in the blinding white. His eyelashes trembled, a dark bloom of red on his lips that were already beginning to frost over.

Suddenly, everything felt like a hazy dream.

All false.

Nothing real.

Had Elias betrayed him, been amused at the idea of a relationship with a dying man that was nothing but a number of failures? Had he known all along, watching Lucas go through story to story, it would all be inevitable in the end?

A rush of loneliness washed over him, sinking his body into a deeper ice, until even his thoughts refused to remain beating and alert.

The Yuki Onna's hums continued to taunt. "Oh dreamer, do you feel betrayed? Played with? There is no such thing as a caring Teller—we are all murderers, as humans and as Tellers."

Her words snapped him back to reality with a fierce irritation.

He'd watched it, as a ghost floating above the world, exactly was occurred in fragments of Elias' life through the End's Delusion, how the arrogant and collected leader had become waste, donning a façade of indifference and tease.

If everything Elias had said and done were really chalked up to boredom and amusement, then it was simple. Lucas would beat him black and blue, would take great enjoyment in it, and then move on to his goal.

Lucas' finger—of the remaining ones—twitched vaguely.

Because no matter how he convinced himself that everything was simple, his mind had been shrouded in a gloom hard to free himself of. Although, nothing matters, does it?

In this world of endless white.

The ice melted from his body as the Yuki Onna's light fingers traced along his skin, and he sprung to life with a final kick of desperation. His hair flew around his wildly, still numb an every move jerked his muscles awake, a painful strain deep inside his body.

He wouldn't die a sleeping statue, submerged into snow. Even if he knew that his actions were exactly what the Teller wanted, the very reason she melted ice.

The woman clapped in delight at the wild inhibition of his actions.

For an artist, it was a dream. A wide blank canvas only they can see in this blinding white. They could paint the entire world in their colour.

And that was exactly what Lucas did.

But no matter how he punched and rearranged the snow, the snow would cover it all. How could one save somebody in a place only they can see? By the time anyone reached the hidden wonder, the person trapped inside would have been lost in insanity.

The Story of the [Yuki-Onna]. The story in which only he and her exists, with corpses buried under his feet and the seeping blood—his own and the dead's—painting the land in a murky red.

Lucas choked, overwhelmed by hopelessness.

He kicked the snow again, futiley, childishly and crumpled to the ground with his aching body, exhausted and chilled to the bone. This time, it was not the frost that bound him to the ground, but his own lack of strength.

Blood and stray corpses speckled around his fallen body. Piles of white snow continued to build, and in the center, a single man laid with half-opened eyes. His raven hair sprawled around him, and the fire which once burned became smothered.

The corpses, the blood, and the man.

It would all fade away, Buried under the snow.