It felt as though I were falling into the silence of a lake.
The silver-blue liquid was devouring my five senses.
My vision sank like drifting debris, already dark, while my body went limp beneath an overwhelming lassitude.
I could not see the bottom.
Yet every time the distance between me and the surface grew greater, fragments of emotions with no discernible origin lodged themselves in my chest like shards of glass.
They were cross-sections of memory.
An army assembled in numbers so vast that the horizon itself could not be seen.
A bloodstained sword falling from the hand of someone trusted, and a face twisted into a wreck because it could neither cry nor laugh.
A miserable excuse.
A bone-deep betrayal.
Death.
The sky he looked up at then had been clear.
Just as nature always was.
Clear for no reason.
Cloudy for no reason.
Now, night had simply arrived.
At some point, another handful of blood drained away, and the body grew even more languid.
Strength slipped from the hand holding the sword as well.
What use was there in killing them?
The world had already turned its back on him.
And so he calmly accepted death.
Only, the sky he looked up at was so painfully clear.
It seemed that, at the very…