TFM 236

My dear Thalia :'''''

He glared at the guard’s face as the man struggled to speak, and pressed him sharply.

“I asked what happened.”

“O-Older brother…”

Just then, a rough voice, mixed with a metallic rasp, struck his ears.

Varkas whipped his head around and, upon finding Raina sitting collapsed on the ground covered in dirt and dust, his expression hardened.

“Why are you in a place like this?”

“T-that is…”

His younger sister, sobbing with a bloodless face, lowered her head as though she could not bring herself to continue.

He gripped her shoulder with one hand and was about to question her fiercely when the woman who had been kneeling before the pile of stones, wailing, abruptly lifted her head and ran toward him.

“Y-Your Grace!”

Varkas looked down with frozen eyes at the face of the woman he had grown sick of seeing since boyhood.

The woman, her blunt features distinctive of dwarf blood twisted miserably, tore at the hem of his blood-soaked clothes and cried out loudly.

“Please help! Our young lady is trapped inside there!”

In that instant, a sharp ringing pierced through his mind.

He felt his vision narrow sharply as he stared at the wreckage of the building piled up like a mountain.

Through his muffled eardrums, as though submerged underwater, the woman’s grief-stricken sobs rang out.

“Your Grace, please, please save our young lady! I-I beg you!”

He roughly pushed the woman aside and walked toward the mountain of stone rubble.

As though the outer wall of the building had been torn away whole, layers of interlocked masonry blocked the lower part of the structure, and beneath it lay the remains of a staircase that seemed to have fallen from the top of the tower.

He immediately bent down and lifted the massive block of stone obstructing the building’s entrance.

He could feel spasms running from his shoulder down through his arm and into the muscles of his fingers, but he paid them no mind. After shoving the wreckage of the building aside, he cleared away the collapsed pillars and piles of stone indiscriminately.

The guards who came up beside him helped with the work, clearing the smaller fragments. But Varkas could hardly recognize their presence.

It was as though all his senses had gone numb.

Light, sound, even the flow of time seemed to have frozen solid. He could feel nothing at all.

How long had he gone on repeating the motion of clearing away stones, again and again, half out of his mind?

Someone grabbed his shoulder.

“Your Grace… your shoulder is still bleeding. You should treat your injury first…”

He roughly shook off the hand getting in his way and bent over the tower’s remains again.

Then, gripping the lower end of a large stone pillar lying across the floor, he lifted it up in one motion—only for something pale and whitish to catch in his vision.

Varkas froze completely, staring down at the woman’s pale face, half-buried beneath the rubble.

Suddenly, it was as though the machinery of thought in his mind had been severed clean through, and everything went dark.

Soldiers pushed past him, hurrying into the wreckage while he stood there stiff and vacant, unable to move. They hastily cleared away the stones covering her body, then carefully pulled her limp form outside.

Only then did Varkas let the stone pillar fall from his hands as if throwing it away, and stagger toward her.

A soldier kneeling on both knees beside her to examine her condition muttered in a grief-stricken voice,

“...She is not breathing.”

A sorrowful murmur spread among the people who had gathered around the tower.

The man added in a trembling voice,

“She is already... gone.”

The woman who had been collapsed on the ground, wailing, threw herself over her body and began to cry out even louder.

Raina, who had been standing there dazed and hollow-faced, also began to cry.

It all felt like watching some strange and eerie play.

Varkas did not move at all. He only stood there, gazing silently down at her pale face.

As he did, his vision slowly began to warp in a strange way, as though the entire world had shattered into pieces.

Then, in an instant, a darkness black as pitch descended over the world, now faded into gray.

As though the light of the sun itself had gone out, he thought within that fathomless abyss:

Morning would never come again.

The day light would return to his world would never, ever come.