With a voice whose whisper tore through the remorseful bonds of stillness, a warm feminine tone spoke:
(The Lady): "Rozen… ah, Rozen…"
(Rozen) opened his tearful eyes after a long sleep upon the field of a garden set amid green plains. The sky was saturated with fragrant blue, and the sun was warm without stinging. The dew of the air carried basil and musk. Though the grass was abundant, it was soft, smooth, deeply warm, and utterly still.
(Rozen) raised himself into a sitting position, and his body throbbed with health. His grip moved in perfect accord with the will of his nerves. At last, after a long while, he finally felt alive.
He stood and walked through the garden in overwhelming calm. His eyes caught parasols and chairs without tables, feminine garments cast down in scattered patches. His mind sensed the trace of a terrible experience he had suffered, yet his eyes saw nothing but the splendor of fields and plains. A wild rabbit passed before him, gray-furred, hopping in joy and delight.
A feminine voice rang through his chest:
(The Lady): "Follow it… follow the little rabbit…"
For a reason he did not understand, (Rozen) could not bring himself to follow it, so the rabbit returned and sat at his feet.
(Rozen) looked at it in bewilderment and tried to drive it away, but it refused.
So he continued searching through that vast garden. Two hours passed in walking and sitting, and the rabbit remained pressed against his feet. Then (Rozen) felt helplessness, and the moment he did, the rabbit leapt, and the feminine voice spoke again:
(The Lady): "Follow it. You will find your resting place."
Then the young man moved after the hopping rabbit, until they both emerged from the garden. (Rozen) wanted to speak, but his jaw was tightly locked.
The moment he saw a hole in the air, blazing with a light brighter than the sun itself, no wider than the diameter of his body,
the rabbit leapt through it.
And for a reason he did not understand, he too wanted to enter it, for the garden had been strange.
The moment he drew near, all sensation left his body. He lost all control of it, and his body kept moving toward the hole without any will from him. He was only an eye that saw, not even an ear.
The garden was torn apart the moment he touched the hole and his body was drawn into it, and everything dissolved. It was his soul that had been sucked in, not his body. He had lost flesh, bone, blood, and skin. He was nothing but a beam.
He entered a dark desert plain. Though it was daytime there, the dense clouds had wrapped its sky in blackness and desolation. He felt unseen eyes upon him. He did not see them, yet some part of what the eyes had perceived was there, and those gazes were not curious.
Blunt hatred.
That was the title of those absent gazes.
So he fled in haste. Without a body, he ran. Without an existence, he escaped.
Panic was what composed his being. Terror was what drew its borders.
The gigantic, dreadful mountains drew giants without distinct bodies. They were, in themselves, wrathful beings. To look at them was to be warned of punishment. To walk toward them was to summon the sound of wrath and reproach. The sand beneath him killed him with its heaviness and cold.
He reached a valley between two mountains. He could not see where he set his footing because of the extremity of the darkness, and so he plunged into water, only to discover that it was a lake in the form of a long river cutting through the only path of escape.
(Rozen) entered it, though he did not know how to swim. He wanted only to cross and depart forever. And for a reason he could not grasp, he began to cross with ease. Yet something in it was not reasonable, for his mind began drawing certain visions, weak and painfully slow in their formation, until his two hands appeared, hanging over a table that enclosed only his immediate surroundings, and voices clamored around him.
He felt an old familiarity. He felt a stone placed with a delicious monotony into the hollow of his vessel. Then the scene changed to a girl dressed in black, standing before him with her back turned, so that nothing of her showed but her back and her long curly hair, in some place whose details he could not force himself to draw. She stood rubbing the fingers of her hands against her palms under some pressure. He was afraid of her, praying that she would not notice him. The moment she sensed his presence, and her back turned and her chin appeared, the sound of a painful explosion burst forth.
(Rozen), drowning, thrashed and sank deeper and deeper in the lake after his easy crossing.
The young man closed his eyes, bidding farewell to himself for the time whose count he had already lost.
They opened after he heard his own voice speaking from the horizon:
(Rozen): "You devil, you venomous wicked one!"
And from behind him rang the sound of a woman weeping:
(The Woman's Voice): "Why does everyone hate me? Why does everyone agree to cast me aside?"
And his imagination began to paint a watery image of buried nostalgia. He saw his hand gripping a railing overlooking a river while he wept with depth and burning grief, striking the railing until he dropped to his knees and rolled across the concrete ground. In the end he lay looking up at the sky, panic covering his face as tears covered his eyes, and he let out a muffled scream of oppression and sorrow:
(Rozen): "Why does everyone leave me? Why does everyone agree to cast me aside?!"
Then the vision dissolved, and he returned to the darkness of his drowning.
(The Lady): "Do you feel the wetness on your face and in your hair?"
(Rozen) in a weary voice: "And what is strange in that? I am drowning."
(The Lady) laughing: "At times, I truly do incline toward finding you adorable. And can a drowning man speak or hear, let alone feel wetness in one place rather than another?"
(Rozen) understood.
(The Lady) in a playful whisper: "Did you think I would grant you redemption? Open your eyes and you will see the surprise."
(Rozen) was bewildered, for his eyes had already been open, until he felt another distance, a body far away in place yet bound to his soul. Then he tried to open his eyes despite their already being open, and everything around him vanished softly into darkness.
(Rozen) opened his eyes, and found himself lying in one of the alleys of Snow Nexus, while heavy rain hammered his head.
This young man no longer possessed but a single feeling.
Confusion.