Apparently, for her, there are two places.
One is soft and malleable, like sand.
Here, her surroundings chime at her. Sometimes she chimes back.
Here, she is free to move, stretch her limbs, blink her eyes and trace the constellations that frame the glowing tree that towers above her.
Here, she searches, sometimes, for those she thinks might reside here alongside her, a younger boy or an older one (is this really all she has?) — but never finds another living soul, always surrounded by that hypnotic chime and the tone of her own voice calling out into the dark.
The other place is different.
Here, that soft sand has been heated until it hardened like the glasswork she would, when she was a child, watch artisans in Liberio shape, poured deep into her lungs and its sharp formation keeping her strung up in place for all whom her actions hurt to gawk at.
Here, she has no voice, but others do. One is there daily. The other doesn't show up for months at a time. They want her to answer things she couldn't even if she could.
Here, others come to her. Why? What does she have to offer other than silence?
She can't tell which she prefers the most — hard or soft, silent or chiming, lonely or accompanied — but why would it matter what she thinks when all she is ever surrounded by is cold?
Here, she has no choice.
It doesn't come lightly when the shell that has protected her from the world is cracked open and she slips out like yolk from an egg. That sand, once soft, once hard, has taken on a third form: liquid; and after so many years of suffocating on the crystal within her core, her atrophied ribs are languid and she chokes on the loose goo she coughs up.
Eren wants to destroy the world, he proclaims in the soft place. Is that right? There were never other people here, but now, the whole world that he has condemned seems to have gathered here.
She slithers, miraculously strong enough to carry her weight with her own two feet and the help of a hand, but not strong enough to overpower Hitch. Down on the floor, she is still faster and gets things her way, but not without telling a story.
About a world she once believed hard, until she found that its softness was there but not for her.
About how it doesn't matter.
About how she would lean into that cold hardness again and again if it meant she got her soft epilogue.
Hitch judges, but not nearly as much as her time outside the crystal would imply. She tells her that all she will find is a corpse.
She tells her she knows.
She gets a long time to think, when both their voices have given out screaming over the deafening noise of the rumbling.
Skinless giants walk by their path, faster than the horse they ride and with fierce determination to follow exactly what they have been told to do.
Like they did, once.
Her eyes search for a sense of familiarity among each unique face, for anything she recognises and can latch onto, for anything that she may consider important, but she knows that it isn't there. It can't be. It has been made so clear that it can't be.
With nothing else to do, nothing else to stare at but the rumbling, she remembers why she may have preferred her eyes closed so that she can stay blind to the world and shut it all out. She thinks of something she would rather not think of altogether.
Of a fearsome boy she has seen before, right beside her on the battlefield.
Of a soft boy with soft eyes and a soft heart who should've been harder but wasn't.
Of a sentimental boy who should've known better than to let her in for nothing in return.
Of a naive boy who saw the world as better than it was because he couldn't stomach it the way it truly was, and whose heart hardened with the years until he was all but gone.
Of an obedient boy whose compliance made him crack.
Of a broken boy she doesn't envy, but who deserved the chance she is now given more than she ever will.
She can't talk about it. Not now, not ever. Four years of being drip-fed information about what his shattering has led to was too much. She can't be exposed like that to the world's jagged edges, not again, so she stays guarded, even when there are others who don't.
Apparently, for her, there are two paths.
Let the world be cold and hard, then. Let it taste everything it has thrown at her and more. The world is hard, her father once taught her until she understood, and he was right. Isn't that what they deserve? Isn't that what they have done to themselves?
Or try to see if the world can be sweet and soft, maybe. What point was there in the hardships those who came before her went through if there is no one to live that soft epilogue that they deserve so much more? Someone has to do it. Someone has to be grateful for it all and find the peace that they could not. Not that she will, either, but can't she try?
It's what she owes all those who have paved the way for her.
Maybe, there is something beyond herself.
Maybe, she can be more than what they have sculpted her into.
Maybe, for once, she can face those jagged edges if it helps make the world soft.