"I'm sorry."
"Sorry? You're... sorry... Arck..."
He coughed blood.
"Even you."
With dull eyes and a blank face, a young man fell to his knees. Multiple swords pierced his abdomen, his chest, his crucial organs, all at once. Every bone in his body had been shattered. His face was burned beyond recognition.
The sun felt distant, as it always did up here.
The weather was brutal.
Wind cut across the mountain face.
Snow fell in slow, indifferent curtains.
On this day, on Ember Mountain, the Snow family ceased to exist.
Blood soaked the ground. Organs, severed heads, grim wreckage of every kind lay scattered across the white. The snow had turned red. Deep, saturated red.
"Arck."
He coughed again, more blood spilling past his lips. His complexion, always pale, had gone the color of ash. The cold was setting in fast.
A mist rose from the snow.
Standing over him, sword in hand, the blade still buried through his heart, was none other than the woman he loved.
"You," he muttered, and a single tear cut down his cheek.
Why?
Anyone watching would have asked the same thing. There was no real answer, no explanation worth giving. One moment he was living the life he knew, the next, he was made to watch his home burn, everyone he had ever known cut down, and the very people he called friends drive their swords through his body.
Quiet sobbing broke the silence.
For the first time in his entire life, he didn't mind the stares.
He just cried.
A few of them trembled where they stood, swords still in hand, eyes turned away from what they had done.
Then they pulled the blades out.
Riley's body hit the snow.
His blood spread beneath him in a slow, dark pool.
"Let's go. He's dead."
The voice carried no feeling whatsoever.
"Jayden, we--"
"It's not our fault. We had no choice. If we didn't do it, the others would have."
"We didn't have to--"
Silence.
A vibration cut through it.
Jayden, blond hair, blue eyes, pulled a glowing orb from his coat. It pulsed at steady intervals, a coded signal. He read it and his expression didn't change.
"It's the captain. We're being summoned." He pocketed the orb. "It's done."
They all understood what that meant.
The name Snow would be scrubbed from the records of Ente Isla. Every person who had ever carried it was now gone.
"Let's go."
They trudged away through the snow, each of them stealing one last glance at the still body of Riley Snow.
"Friends?"
Riley lay there thinking the word, turning it over. The only warmth he felt now was on his cheek. The tears that would not stop.
"How stupid can one person be?"
They kept coming anyway.
The pain sharpened.
The anger rose behind it.
Betrayal.
It was a constant in his life. Both of them.
The people closest to him always turned their backs as though he had never mattered. Just like now, every one of them walking away without a shred of remorse, not a single tear for him.
In his first life, he had been framed by his best friend for murder and hanged for it. Unjustly. He still remembered his girlfriend on the stand, crying, calling him a monster. He had sat through every day of that trial in pure shock. He could not have imagined it, not from her.
No one visited him after. Not once, not through the entire stretch of it, not up to the morning they hanged him.
No one cared.
Then he woke up here.
A new world. A home that actually felt like one, unlike anything from his first life. A family that loved him without conditions. A life that felt meaningful, felt real, felt like somewhere he finally belonged.
Then one day, something took over his vision.
[SYSTEM ACTIVATED]
CONDITION: KILL THE CHARACTER DIANA.
NOTE: --
He had stared at that interface for ten years.
It was part of why he understood what this world actually was: a game he had played in his first life. He knew the canon. He knew who he was inside the story. He knew what was supposed to happen to Riley, and when. He knew he was walking toward a death that had already been written.
He knew what he had to do to fight it.
[SYSTEM ACTIVATED]
CONDITION: KILL THE CHARACTER DIANA.
NOTE: --
He couldn't do it.
The day he saw her, he fell in love with her completely and without defense.
Maybe it was the canon itself doing it to him. The feelings Riley Snow the character had been built to feel, hardwired into the plot. Maybe none of it had ever been his.
He couldn't tell the difference, and that was the problem.
Being near her was something else. Watching her laugh, standing close enough to feel the air shift when she moved. There was an euphoria to it that drowned out everything he knew.
Before he realized it, the story had him. The plot built around him exactly as it was always going to, and he stood inside it frozen, caged by feelings he should have killed when he had the chance.
Feelings he now regretted with everything he had left.
Lying here in his own blood, the cold moving through what remained of him, he could not produce a single clean reason for any of it. Why he had done the things he did. Why he had risked his life over and over to bend the plot, to save people who had nothing to do with him, who owed him nothing and gave back less.
"I'm not the fucking hero."
He tried to smile. His face was too destroyed to manage it.
Maybe he had forgotten, just for a while, what role he was actually playing.
Maybe there had been a point, somewhere in the middle of all of it, when he had genuinely started to believe he could be.