[POV Mizuk

  The room assigned to me in the guest wing of the Royal Academy of Whirikal was comfortable—luxurious, even, compared to what we had endured under Orestia’s austere vigince. The sheets carried that clean scent of wild vender that seemed to be this kingdom’s signature, and the silence of the night was broken only by the distant chirping of a nocturnal cricket. My companions were already asleep; I could hear Yvonne’s slow, steady breathing in the neighboring bed, but for me, sleep was an unreachable border.

  I stared at the ceiling, where the shadows of tree branches from outside danced with the moonlight filtering through the rge window. I closed my eyes, trying to quiet the noise in my head, but the moment I did, the present dissolved. The pressure of dark mana, the looming war, and the white armor all vanished, repced by a painful crity that only memory can grant. Suddenly, I was no longer in Lyre. I was back home, in an autumn that felt eternal.

  The air was cool, saturated with that scent of dry leaves, cinnamon, and burning wood that only exists when seasonal fairs arrive in the city. I could hear the distant echo of folk music coming from the pza’s speakers and the murmur of the crowd—sounds that once felt mundane and that I would now give my soul to hear again.

  “Mizuki, wait! You’re going too fast—you’ll trip in those boots!”

  That voice.

  I stopped and turned around with a mischievous smile, adjusting my wool scarf. Edward was a few meters behind me, carrying both my backpack and his, his brown hair slightly tousled by the breeze and those gsses that always seemed one step away from slipping down the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t a warrior. He had no aura of power, no golden sword. He was simply Edward, in an oversized winter jacket and with that constant look of concern he only ever had when it came to me.

  “You’re so slow, Ed!” I called out, ughing as I waited for him in front of a small ice cream shop with a bright sign in the dispy window. “Look, it says the buy-one-get-one-free deal ends in ten minutes. If you don’t hurry, I’ll have to eat both by myself and then I won’t be able to have dinner.”

  He reached my side, slightly out of breath, but he didn’t let go of my backpack. He stood next to me, looking at the sign with a resigned smile.

  “You know I don’t like running, but… I suppose for a two-for-one deal, I can make an exceptional physical sacrifice,” he said, adjusting his gsses and gncing at me with that warmth I took for granted back then.

  We bought the ice creams—vanil for him, chocote for me—and continued walking toward the center of the festival. It was the kind of fair Edward loved most: wooden stalls, strings of lights hanging between the trees, and the smell of warm pretzels floating through the air. I remember us sitting on a wooden bench near where a band was pying acoustic guitars.

  “I like this part,” Edward whispered, closing his eyes as he leaned back against the bench. “It sounds like… like the world stops for a moment, just to let us breathe between all the studying and exams.”

  I watched him. I remember thinking how peaceful he looked under the yellowish fair lights. Edward had that ability—when school life became noisy or when my parents’ expectations weighed me down, being with him felt like stepping into a zone of absolute calm. We went to fairs, spent hours at amusement parks—where he always let me choose what to ride, even though I knew heights made him a little dizzy—and walked home along the cobblestone streets downtown, counting how many red leaves fell before we reached the corner.

  I remember once, months before everything broke apart, when we went to a big autumn festival on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t anything extravagant—just a field full of food stalls, shooting games, and a giant Ferris wheel. I wore a new dress that made me feel pretty, and he spent the entire night making sure I didn’t get cold, offering me his jacket every time the wind blew a little harder.

  “Mizuki, look at that,” he said, pointing to a carnival game stall where they gave out plush toys for knocking down cans.

  He tried ten times. He missed almost all of them, drawing ughter from the kids passing by. On the st attempt, his face red with sheer determination and his teeth clenched, he finally knocked the metal tower down. He handed me a small blue cat plush with an expression of triumph that made me ugh for ten straight minutes.

  “It’s so it can watch over you when I’m not around,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, a little embarrassed by how hard it had been.

  At the time, I simply took it and thanked him, thinking he would always be there. It never crossed my mind that there would come a day when the memory of that blue cat would be all I had left of him before the Church took everything from us.

  Walking beside him felt like the most natural thing in the world. Sometimes our hands brushed accidentally as we walked along the park path, and I felt a small spark—a tingling sensation my teenage mind refused to process as anything deeper. I was afraid. Edward was my refuge, my best friend, the person who knew my deepest fears and never judged me. I thought that if I allowed the retionship to change, if we became a couple, I would lose that safety. I believed romance was fragile, something that ended in breakups and awkward silences, and I didn’t want that with him.

  What I didn’t know was that by trying to “protect” our friendship, I was sowing the seeds of our destruction.

  I remember his ugh. It wasn’t loud—it was a soft, honest sound that came from deep in his chest. I remember how he worried about the small things: whether I’d eaten breakfast, whether I was cold, whether I was ready for the history exam. Edward took care of me with a quiet devotion that I, in my immaturity, mistook for something that would always be there, like the air I breathed.

  During the fifty years of training in Gaia’s void—where time stretches and the mind fractures—Edward was the only thing that kept me sane. Remembering our walks under light rain, sharing a slightly old umbrel that always ended up soaking his right shoulder so I wouldn’t get wet at all, was my anchor. Remembering how we went to the municipal library only to end up whispering jokes and getting kicked out by the librarian.

  “Mizuki, someday… I’d like to travel to a pce where the sky is as blue as it is today, but without so much noise,” he told me once, sitting on the school rooftop watching the sunset. “A pce where we can just walk without rushing.”

  I ughed at him back then. “You’re so boring, Ed! I want to go to cities that never sleep, to huge stadiums.”

  He just smiled—that smile full of infinite patience that now tears my soul apart.

  “Then I’ll go with you to those noisy cities,” he said, “to make sure you don’t get lost among all those people.”

  That promise. That unconditional loyalty I shattered when I rejected him in the coldest way possible, just to protect myself from fear.

  I opened my eyes in the darkness of the room in Whirikal. My cheeks were damp and cold. I sat up in bed, hugging my knees, feeling the weight of decades on my shoulders and regret burning in my chest.

  Here, in this world, the sky was blue and there were no tall buildings—just as he wanted. But the Edward I knew, the boy with the gsses and the heavy backpack, was gone. In his pce stood an ice warrior named Liselotte, who loved a princess and looked at me with a compassion that hurt more than any hatred.

  Liselotte had that same calm. That same way of observing the world as if she knew something the rest of us didn’t. Every time I saw her, I felt a pull in my chest—a dissonance screaming that the Edward I was searching for was standing right in front of me, transformed into someone who no longer needed me.

  “I’m so sorry, Edward,” I whispered into the silence of the room, clutching the sheets tightly. “I was a coward. I wasn’t afraid of the retionship changing… I was afraid of how much I loved you and didn’t know how to handle it. And now that I have the courage to say it, you’re no longer here.”

  I y back down, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to return to that festival on Terra—to that moment in front of the ice cream shop where the two-for-one deal was our biggest worry and he was still smiling beside me, carrying my backpack and my world without ever being asked. I cherish every one of those days now. Every walk, every shared silence. I cherish them with the desperation of someone who knows they lost a treasure they never realized they possessed.

  And as exhaustion finally began to cim me, one single determination burned itself into my mind: I would survive. I would survive this war and find a way to tell whoever remained of him that the world was far more beautiful when he helped me walk through it.