Subaru ran.
He did not decide to run — his body decided for him, as if remaining standing and walking normally was an insult to something urgent burning in his lungs. He ran as if hell itself was on his heels, his legs bending under fatigue but obeying the adrenaline.
In the silence of the forest, his mind became an echo chamber where the specters of his recent failures resounded cruelly.
Each stride revived a wound.
He saw Crusch Karsten's gaze again, cold, analytical, her eyes reading through him. Rejecting him with a simple wave of her hand because she read madness in his eyes.
« I see no madness in your eyes. Only a man who has already been consumed by despair. »
Subaru's teeth clenched hard enough to make his gums bleed. She had looked through him like glass and seen something he did not want to be — and had still refused.
His soles struck the earth.
He heard Priscilla Barielle's contemptuous laugh. The kick to the jaw. Her venomous words reminding him how pathetic he was, a piece of trash no one wanted.
« Tell me, where has that man in white who serves as your master gone? Or has he finally grown tired of you, seeing how pathetic you were? »
Subaru's eyes contracted painfully. She had planted something with that question, something that had continued to grow since then in a corner of his chest where he did not often go.
He remembered Anastasia Hoshin's attitude, dismissing his pleas with the icy politeness one grants an importunate beggar, without even deigning to listen to his warning.
« Business is business. »
Not even cruelty — just cold, clean, flawless calculation. He had entered her offices as an insufficient variable and left as a crossed-out line in a register.
His fists closed so tightly that his nails bit into his skin.
Even Kurisu... That omnipotent being who observed his sufferings with an almost sadistic detachment, refusing to lift a finger as if he took malicious pleasure in watching him struggle in the mud.
He knew what was going to happen.
He had told him when leaving — you will suffer.
And yet he had not come. He was nowhere.
His breath grew short.
Subaru : « Shit… »
And above all, the most vivid, the most purulent wound: Rem.
His Rem.
The one whose loyalty had always been there, so constant and so total that he had eventually taken it as a natural law rather than a choice. She had not believed in him.
She had chosen to knock him out, deeming him nothing more than a useless burden who would only die trying to help her. And that knowledge did not make waking up in the empty room any less painful.
It did not make anything easier at all.
« Everyone abandoned me… »
The thought was not reasoned. It rose from farther back, from lower down, from the place in a human being where arguments had long since stopped having any effect.
The trees flashed past on either side.
Tears, pushed by the wind of his run, began to trace burning furrows on his pale cheeks.
Subaru : « Shit… shit — »
The voice broke somewhere between the two.
Subaru : « FUCKING SHIT! »
The cry was lost in the woods and no one answered it. Not a bird flew away. Not a branch moved. The world continued to exist with the same absolute indifference as the morning sun, and Subaru ran harder.
He felt something change before he saw anything.
The air first. Not heat, not cold — a different density, as if the atmosphere itself hesitated to circulate.
Then the smell. Something metallic, hot, too rich to be natural, rising from ahead with the insistence of something one cannot ignore.
Then the silence — that silence of places where animals no longer go, where instinct has already drawn its conclusions before the conscious brain has had time to formulate the question.
He finally emerged at the edge of the forest.
And stopped.
What lay before him had been the village of Arlam. He still recognized the general layout — the arrangement of the buildings, the central axis of the main street — but the rest was unrecognizable.
The silence hanging over it was absolute, broken only by the sinister crackling of a few frames that were finishing burning. Houses were still burning, black plumes of smoke rising toward the sky like funeral prayers.
Some houses were nothing more than piles of smoking ashes, a few were reduced to their foundations, others stood but gutted, their walls bearing dark and wide traces where something hot and liquid had flowed in mass before drying.
Still others displayed immense trails of vermilion blood projected against their whitewashed facades. The village was unrecognizable, profaned, emptied of any trace of life.
Open doors gave onto empty rooms, or onto rooms that should not have been seen. And everywhere — everywhere — the bodies.
There was no other word. Some in almost ordinary positions, as if people who had simply fallen while doing something else — a woman on a doorstep, an old man next to a well. Others no longer resembled bodies in the usual sense of the term.
The bodies had not only been put to death, they had been profaned. Some villagers had been methodically mutilated, their limbs arranged at impossible angles. Others had been burned alive, their faces frozen in a charcoal scream.
Some had their viscera exposed, displayed with a precision that seemed almost deliberate. Others had been drained of their blood with a cold efficiency that left only pale envelopes on the red earth.
Subaru advanced with a slow step, the slowness of an automaton whose gears are jamming.
He did not decide to advance. He advanced because his legs continued, because stopping would have meant recognizing that what he saw was real — and his brain had decided to push back that recognition as long as possible.
His boots sank into a warm and sticky mud that had nothing aquatic about it. He was walking in blood, the soles making that slightly sticky sound with each step, his gaze straight ahead.
He walked among the bodies without saying a word, his widened eyes recording the unbearable reality.
To his left, the remains of what had been the bakery.
To his right, a facade on which something had traced large and dark shapes that descended to the ground.
Farther on, a man lay, his entrails spilled on the ground, while a woman, exsanguinated, displayed a waxen pallor.
A child — he stopped for a fraction of a second, his eyes on what was still vaguely recognizable — and resumed movement.
Subaru : « No... No... Why... Why again... »
His voice was only a broken murmur.
It was addressed to no one. It was just what came out when the lungs sought something to do with the overflow.
Yet an invisible and morbid force pushed him to continue. His steps led him in front of a veritable river of blood that snaked between the dwellings and began a few dozen meters from the central square.
Not a trickle — a surface, thick, which had had time to dry on the edges and remained viscous in the center, shining with a gleam that Subaru would have preferred not to recognize. The smell of iron and something sweeter, more nauseating, intensified with each step.
Instinctively, he followed the pool. Because that is what one does when something horrible waits at the end and one no longer has enough resistance to step aside.
As he approached the central square, the liquid became thicker, stickier, clinging to his soles with a sickening sucking sound. The smell of blood and decomposing viscera struck his nostrils, so aggressive that it tore a mechanical retch from him.
He finally emerged onto the great square. What he saw then pulverized the last vestiges of his mental health.
The place was surrounded by bodies arranged in a circle.
Not bodies fallen at random — the bodies of dozens of villagers had been dragged and meticulously arranged, at regular intervals, with the disturbing precision of a deliberate staging, their faces turned toward the center, like forced spectators of a grotesque theater play.
Their bodily fluids converged toward the middle of the area, and had mingled into a single and motionless surface that shone under the morning light with the cold gleam of something definitive, thus creating a purple lake beneath the boy's feet.
Subaru staggered, his hands going to his throat. He wanted to vomit, to extract this absolute horror from his being, but his breathing blocked net in his chest.
At the exact center of this macabre circle stood an immense crude wooden cross.
The size of a person. Planted in the ground with something heavy and decided, and on this cross — a silhouette.
Blue hair.
An uniform he would have recognized in total darkness, in any circumstance, among a thousand others.
Subaru : « Re… Rem… »
His voice came out like something torn from a place that was not meant to be opened.
He crossed the square. His knees gave way without warning, and he fell directly into the sticky pool, the liquid splashing his face, palms against the reddened ground, eyes raised toward the cross and toward what it bore.
Rem was there — motionless.
She had been crucified.
Arms extended on the wood, legs joined, her hands and feet pierced by thick rusty iron nails. Her maid dress was in tatters, saturated with purple.
It was her. That same Rem who had supported him against winds and tides, who had smiled at him in the gardens of the Karsten domain, the grass wet with dew beneath their feet.
Rem who had chosen to knock him out because she loved him too much to let him go to his death without doing anything, even if it meant betraying him to spare him this vision. Rem who had died anyway.
She was there, suspended, emptied of her life in the middle of this parterre of the dead.
But the most unbearable thing, the detail that finished breaking Subaru's heart, was her face. Her face that Subaru knew in each of its expressions, in each of its nuances, bore something he had never seen on her outside of his dreams.
A smile.
Rem was smiling. A smile of absolute serenity, almost angelic. As if, in her last moments of agony, she had found comfort in the idea that she had succeeded in her mission. She had died thinking she had put him to safety.
She had died happy to have suffered in his place.
Subaru : « Rem… »
Subaru could not cry. The shock was too violent, the flood of emotions so destructive that it short-circuited his tear ducts.
He remained there, hands scratching the ground without reason, fingers sinking into the bloody mud by reflex, seeking a grip on something solid while his brain stopped producing complete thoughts — just fragments, images, bits of voices.
Subaru : « Rem... Rem... Forgive me... Forgive me for being so weak... »
His fingers, now scraped and reddened, sank into the mud.
Subaru : « Forgive me for always arriving too late... Always... Forgive me... »
A single tear finally escaped from his empty eyes, sliding along his cheek before getting lost in the purple ocean at his feet.
One, for now — the rest was still seeking an exit that his body had not yet opened.
He remained prostrated like that, motionless in the middle of the dead, for long minutes. Then, as if moved by a mechanical spring, he straightened up. Not because he was ready. Because there was still something to do, and staying there would change nothing of what had happened.
His eyes no longer had anything human; they were two wells of nothingness.
He approached the cross, wrapped Rem in his arms with the care of someone touching something irreplaceable, and pressed her against him. He no longer felt the blood that soaked his clothes. He no longer felt anything physical, to tell the truth.
Subaru : « Your hero will save you… Rem. » His voice was of a terrifying monotony, devoid of any inflection.
He said it mechanically. Not only for her — for himself, like a promise he forced himself to formulate out loud because formulating it in silence no longer sufficed for his brain to believe it.
He gently laid her back against the cross, turned around and resumed his walk, his gaze fixed toward the hill. Toward the manor.
...…
As he progressed on the forest path connecting the village to the Mathers domain, a leaden weight seemed to fall on the environment. The air began to change a few steps after the square.
A slight drop in temperature first — almost pleasant after the sticky heat of the village — then more marked, then frank, the cold settling with the determination of something that had no intention of leaving.
A milky and supernatural fog began to creep between the trees on either side of the path, first light then thicker, reducing visibility to a few meters at most.
Each of Subaru's breaths burned his throat with increasingly glacial air, but he continued to walk, indifferent to the frost that numbed his limbs, his thoughts reduced to a single simple instruction:
Continue.
Something made him stop.
Not a thought. An instinct. There was something on the road ahead — a long shadow outlined through the mist, a vertical form, planted in the ground, with something at the top.
He approached slowly, step by step. The veil of fog dissipated, revealing the nature of the obstacle in the last meters.
The young man instantly became deathly pale.
Subaru : « … »
No sound came out.
A human arm, severed at the shoulder, had been driven into the earth, vertically. The fingers of the hand were rigidly spread toward the sky.
And in that open hand — placed there with a precision that had nothing accidental, like a displayed trophy or an offering — the head of a child. The juvenile features were frozen in an unspeakable expression of terror.
Petra.
Subaru : « Uhahauahaah...! »
A cry of a wounded beast escaped his lips as he toppled backward.
He stepped back one step, then another, his legs operating the movement without conscious order, collapsing onto the frozen ground to retreat backward, his hands plowing the ground.
Subaru : « Petra... »
Something animal took the decision in his place — to move away, to put distance — but his eyes did not move, they remained fixed on what lay before him with that particular stupefaction of things the brain receives without yet knowing in which box to put them.
Subaru : « No… no… Petra… how… how could this… ?! »
His stomach contracted violently. He turned to the side and vomited a flow of acrid bile, his body shaken by uncontrollable spasms. Kneeling on the path, hands in the cold mud, until there was nothing left to give.
Yet he refused to give up. He got up, wiped his mouth with a bloodied sleeve and resumed his forced march.
He would not stop. Whatever he saw, he would not stop.
The horror was only beginning.
A few meters farther, the second form.
A human foot this time, severed at the ankle — planted in the same cold earth, with the same deliberate precision. Just above, posed in unstable balance, the head of another child, a face he vaguely recognized, someone from the village.
Subaru felt his heart miss a beat, a veil of denial darkening his thoughts.
Subaru : « This is not my fault… this is not my fault!... This is not me! »
He screamed these words at the dead trees, as if to convince himself, while retreating, when a glacial breeze rushed between the trunks, jostling the child's head which fell and rolled in the earth.
Its fall revealed what served as support for the skull:
a piece of familiar fabric. A delicate white lace trim, a thick black cotton cloth… a cut he would have recognized in total darkness.
The wind lifted the scrap of clothing and sent it directly onto his face, and Subaru caught the fabric in his hands before understanding what he was holding — a maid uniform, stained with blood but incontestably recognizable.
Subaru : « What… »
He looked at the fabric in his hands. His eyes fixed on the fine embroidery he knew by heart. His fingers trembled slightly.
Subaru : « No... No, it's nothing... It's nothing at all... »
He threw the piece of cloth away in horror and moved away stumbling, pressing his pace, sinking deeper and deeper into hysteria, as if distance could make the fabric less real.
« There are thousands of outfits like that… This is not what I think. This is not… »
A few more steps, the staging repeated with geometric regularity.
A third limb.
An arm anchored in the ground, with the same disturbing logic — the head of a child in the closed fist like a bad-taste trophy.
But it was not that that froze Subaru's gaze.
His eyes focused on the severed hand holding the skull — caught under the broken and bloodied nails of the thin fingers, there was a tuft of pink hair. A vivid pink, a pink so particular that he refused to identify it.
A pink that belonged to only one person in the entire world.
The wind blew the lock toward him, scattering a few fine hairs in front of his eyes. Subaru caught a few in flight, his fingers closing on the pink silk. His heart stopped beating for an entire second.
Subaru : « No... This is not possible... It's a joke... »
He clutched his head with both hands, the locks between his fingers, his nails sinking into his scalp.
A mad laugh, high-pitched and perfectly manic, stretched on his cracked lips which stretched without him deciding it — that smile that was not one, the shape the facial muscles take when reality becomes too big to be treated normally.
Subaru : « It's the blood… yes, it's the blood that changes the color! It can only be that! It's the blood! ... »
He was delirious out loud, desperately trying to plug the breaches of his ruined mind, as if stating it out loud could make the thing true.
He did not believe what he was saying himself.
He advanced again.
Farther on the path, the fourth limb was erected:
A foot, driven into the compact snow. Above, the head of the last child of the village. But this time, the head was not simply placed.
Piercing this head from top to bottom, planted with surgical precision, sinking deeply into the lower limb to solidify the whole — a long smooth and worked wooden stake, thin, slightly pearly at the end.
Subaru approached, the spark of life leaving his pupils definitively as he detailed the object. It was not a stake. It was a magic wand. A wand of precious wood, with familiar runic engravings, which he had seen in a certain hand dozens of times with haughty assurance.
Made for one person. For no one else.
Subaru : « R… Ram… »
The name escaped his lips in a breath of agony.
It was Ram's wand.
Subaru : « No... This is impossible... Please... Not her... Not again... Mercy... »
His head began to spin violently, the decor oscillating around him as if he were seized with dizzy spells. His feet continued despite him, one step, two, his legs functioning by inertia while his brain spun in a spiral around a conclusion he categorically refused to reach.
But his balance was broken, his legs giving way under him, he took an erratic sideways step, stumbled heavily on a dark mass hidden.
He fell. His hands found the ground first.
Subaru : « Ouch... »
He groaned, slowly straightening up on his elbows.
He was preparing to get up without looking at what he had fallen on when his eyes descended by themselves, by a force that had nothing to do with his will.
The cry that rose in his throat immediately stifled itself, transforming into a rattle of unspeakable horror.
A torso. Human.
A torso dressed in the remains of a black and white maid dress, solidly placed on the path, stable, as if placed there on purpose so as not to be easily overturned.
And on this torso, posed on the severed neck, delicately installed upside down like a cubist and macabre work of art, in balance, turned so that the pink hair fell on the sides — a head.
Ram's head.
Her clear eyes, wide open and glassy, stared at the white sky with an otherworldly indifference.
Subaru : « … »
Nothing came out. Absolutely nothing. His larynx had decided not to function anymore, and the stammerings that came afterward were not words — formless sounds, attempts that dissolved before really existing.
His hands fell to the ground and found it cold, really cold.
And at that precise instant, the sky darkened further and heavy snowflakes began to fall in spirals around him, light, almost gentle, settling on his shoulders and on the torso and on the head that were before him, quickly covering the tableau with an immaculate shroud.
Subaru : « Uhh… ahh… EUHEH… »
He crawled toward the profaned corpse of the young girl in the settling snow, on his knees in the cold earth, and reached out toward the head.
As soon as he had touched it, the frozen torso lost its precarious balance and collapsed on its side, the head remaining between the boy's hands. That was the trigger. The dam broke.
And Subaru understood everything all at once — all the limbs scattered along the path, all the children's heads, all the sadistic game of clues that his brain had refused to assemble out of pure psychological terror because the conclusion was too unbearable to be approached directly — everything connected in an incontestable truth with the silent brutality of an obviousness that had been waiting from the beginning.
Everything had belonged to the same person.
Ram had been dismembered alive, transformed into a sadistic game of clues by the Witch's Cult.
Subaru : « Ram… »
The snow fell harder.
Subaru : « Ram... Ram... Forgive me...! »
His voice broke somewhere between the two names.
He held Ram's head in his hands, his fingers trembling on her cheeks, and the tears came now — all that he had held back since the empty inn room, since the candidates' refusals, since the village, since Rem on the cross, all that had not been able to come out because there was still something to do.
Subaru : « It's all my fault... It's all because of me... If I hadn't been there... If I had been stronger... »
He pressed the cold head of the maid against his chest, rocking back and forth and crying all the tears of his body in the snow that progressively covered everything around him — the limbs, the heads, the blood, everything that had been there before — with a patient and indifferent white, his tears almost instantly freezing on contact with the polar air, forming painful crystals on his cheeks.
His body trembled. His fingers clenched on Ram's pink hair, his breathing became short, wheezing, on the verge of asphyxia. The storm rose, the snow gusts gradually erasing the traces of blood on the path, burying the decapitated body.
He remained there a moment that had no measurable duration, but a spark of mad despair pushed him to straighten up.
There was still one person. One last person at the manor.
He dared to hope, with all the strength of his broken soul, that his darkest suspicions would be disproven. But deep down, in the depths of his ravaged conscience, he already knew the answer.
Then he stood up.
...
The path toward the manor was covered with fresh snow, and Subaru took it slowly — very slowly — as if slowness could push back what he would find at the end. The cold had become biting.
His breath formed white clouds in the air. His tears had dried, frozen by the cold. The blood from the corpses he had pressed against him had crystallized into a dark and rigid crust on his chest in the cold, and he carried all that like an additional layer of something he could not name.
His entire being seemed to have petrified in this polar atmosphere.
He no longer knew very well how long he had been walking.
There was still someone. One last person whose fate he had not seen. He did not dare to hope. He hoped anyway, with all that remained to him.
He finally emerged from the forest and reached the gates of the domain. The Mathers manor stood before him, entirely prisoner of a snowstorm of unheard-of violence, plunged into pure, infinite and deadly white.
Subaru pushed the great entrance doors of the manor, which creaked sinisterly on their frozen hinges. Snow had covered everything here too — the gardens, the alleys, the steps — a perfect and total white that erased details, that erased proofs, that made everything clean on the surface. He advanced inside. His steps in the fresh snow were the only sound in all that silence.
And in the distance, in the white —
A silhouette.
Long silver hair, spread on the snow around her. A posture he recognized — that way of holding her body even in immobility, even in something that resembled sleep.
Subaru : « Emi… lia… »
His voice was only a hiss, his lungs burning under the effect of the glacial air. Forgetting his fatigue, he began to run, his boots slipping on the frozen ground. He stumbled, sprawled heavily in the snow, but straightened up immediately, ignoring the pain, and continued his desperate run until he reached the silhouette.
His knees met the snow a second time a few meters from her and he let himself slide to her, trembling with his entire being, hands reaching toward that body even before he had decided to look.
He dreaded laying eyes on her, terrified at the idea of discovering new mutilations, of seeing the body of the girl he loved reduced to pieces like that of the twins.
He did not want to look. He was afraid to look.
Yet he forced himself to look.
The spectacle that offered itself to him was radically different, and of an almost more subtle cruelty.
Emilia was intact.
Too intact.
She presented no cut, no trace of physical violence, no stain on her white and violet dress. No visible wound. No blood.
Her features in their usual position, her clothes without tears. Her body was perfect, her limbs of a divine regularity, her long silver hair spread around her in the snow like a royal train, like someone who would be sleeping a deep sleep.
Yet, when Subaru threw himself on her and took her in his arms, the thermal shock made him shiver.
Emilia was glacial.
It was not the superficial cold caused by the surrounding snow. Something different, deeper, more permanent. A cold that came from inside the flesh and had settled there without intention of leaving. The slight rigidity of the limbs. The absolute absence of everything that makes a body something other than an object.
Her entire body had become a frozen marble block. A thin dark thread of blood, frozen by the cold, escaped from her slightly open mouth. Her magnificent eyes were closed forever.
Emilia was dead.
Subaru pressed the frozen body of the half-elf against his chest, vainly trying to communicate his own body heat to her.
Subaru : « Emilia... Emilia, wake up, I beg you... Answer me... »
The deathly silence was her only response.
The young girl's face remained desperately immobile, the reflections of the ice accentuating her mortal pallor.
Subaru's eyes filled with a despair so total that he seemed to lose his reason.
Subaru : « Sorry… I am so sorry… »
The words came out by themselves, at regular intervals, like something turning in a loop.
Subaru : « I am sorry for always being late... For not having been able to protect you... For being nothing more than a good-for-nothing... »
His voice frayed with each repetition toward something that was no longer quite language.
He looked at her face — that face for which he had died several times without ever saying it out loud — and that face gave him nothing back.
His tears began to flow again, instantly freezing into small ice pearls on Emilia's immobile face.
At the end of his strength, his mind pulverized by this succession of horrors, Subaru tilted his head back and screamed his distress upward.
He raised his eyes toward the white and empty sky.
Subaru : « Please... Anyone... Kill me... I beg you, kill me! »
A silence.
Then footsteps in the snow.
Voice : « Ohhhh~ »
A shrill, high-pitched and perfectly disjointed voice suddenly exclaimed behind him.
Subaru shuddered, a fierce hatred instantly replacing his despair.
He would recognize that demonic intonation among a thousand. He slowly turned his face toward the origin of the noise.
A man approached from the trees with the slowness of someone who has no reason to hurry.
His silhouette was what it had always been — disproportionate, poorly articulated, a puppet whose strings would be slightly too long, his head tilted at an inhuman angle.
His white eyes shone with a light without warmth in the pale and marbled green face. His smile was too wide for his face and he wore it with the total sincerity of someone who did not know it was strange.
His voice fell into the silence like water in oil.
Petelgeuse : « Ohh... I was waiting for you, believing in love!!! »
Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti.