Hello everyone. This'll be my 2nd time posting up a story :) Please feel free to leave any comments! Thanks and enjoy! (hopefully haha)
Prologue
Snow.
All around me, in every direction I turned, snow was falling. It came down with no end in sight, paving the ground with white and piling it up higher and higher, all the way up to my knees. It made it so hard to walk, and it was so cold I was sure that if I was half-conscious, I'd be convinced my bones had turned into ice.
But no. I had to keep going, even if I could hardly make out anything in front of me, even if every step I took made me feel like I was about to collapse. I had no other choice. Behind me was death- or, at the very least, capture- and there was no negotiating. Not with all the men in the midst of a battle. Not with all the cannon blasts and the clashing steel I could hear muffled beyond the cover of the blizzard.
But more than the cold, the hunger, and the fatigue, I felt emptiness. It was deeper and harsher than any cold winter night or blizzard or mountain. It was pain in the deepest pit of my heart, and just like the snow, my tears kept falling, even though my face was already frozen. I haven't cried in so long. Not since my parents and sister died. Not since my hometown and all the people were killed in a bloody massacre because the government was afraid of a disease they didn't bother to study or understand.
Now someone else was gone. The man who protected me from the shadows for nearly 3 years, a good man, was killed without mercy by his own bastard brother's hand. All I could do for him in the end was let him save me one last time while he was clinging to the last fleeting moments of his life. All that I could do to make sure his life wasn't thrown away in vain was to walk away.
And I would walk. I didn't know how long it had been since I started, or how far away I was from his dead body, but I would keep going as far as my legs could carry me. As far as….
Before I knew it, I was on the ground, my whole body shaking and frozen. My face was buried in snow and I could barely breathe. It felt like my lungs had filled with frost. My consciousness was slowly fading and my mind was swirling, just like the snow in the wind.
I managed to look at my hands. In the snow, the white patches on my skin were almost invisible. Somehow… that made me a bit hopeful. Maybe soon… I could find out how to make myself better… with that new power…? Cora-san said it… wasn't magic…. He never did… tell me how-
