The Diary of a Young Girl
By Ymir Fritz
My name is Ymir Fritz.
It is a pleasure to be let loose of my former duty.
It is a pleasure to roam the world.
I have been used to seeing things burned, blackened, and smoked since my village received that same treatment when I was a child. Torture became the blood in my veins as my words were stripped from me by the edge of a blade that had already stolen enough. Even though my tongue had healed after acquiring the power of the titan, I had forgotten what it was like to whistle, what it was like to speak, and what it was like to taste.
The world now bleeds similar torture, for I have enabled the genocide of millions. Each individual, young or old, has erred to differing degrees, but it does not matter since their fate is to be trampled.
The Colossals formed a wall of doom that produces steam and replaces the sun as the bringer of heat. With this volatile mist, footsteps that rattle animal bones, and the bones of houses, some humans are being burned, blackened, and smoked. Others have their consciouses splurge out with the contents of their bodies as the feet pile over them— one could not see these consciouses pool up as the blood tended to do.
They now know my pain, the pain I endured and inflicted on others thousands of years before.
This doom began when a man holding my former power gave me a choice. He embraced me in my domain and my birdcage: the paths that connect all Eldians.
"Lend me your power! You're not a slave, nor are you a god! You're just a person. You don't have to obey anyone! You can decide!"
I cried.
For once, I was given the freedom to make a decision.
I lent him my power, thereby choosing to eradicate this world.
I now walk upon the earth among the splattered bodies, but I am still connected to the paths. I have become a ghost, unable to touch or taste, but I can see and hear. I am over thousands of years old, yet I appear before others in a manifestation of a young age.
It is ironic how even when I was set free, I could not be granted all the basic sensory abilities required for life. Am I truly a person when I cannot have those things again, Eren?
A wellspring of curiosities arose after being set free. So many questions poured into me with no developed thinking capabilities to define them: How did these people live? Were they slaves too? Did they live in fear like I did?
The paths store memories of each Eldian that perishes, but it was difficult to tap into them when I was relegated to my duties as the shaper of titans. But since that duty no longer chains me, I made another decision for myself…
I want to see the lives of each Eldian I enabled the murder of. Was everyone just as miserable as me, or was it better?
I have seen the memories of every Eldian killed by the armageddon in a portion of the so-called "Marleyan Empire" and the island of Paradis. I watched each person live out their personal events by their side but completely hidden from sight.
I have learned so much.
I can think now with greater understanding than I ever could during the original twenty-three years of my life, with the wisdom that comes with the infinite mistakes made by thousands of people and with the knowledge capacity a single person could not imagine having. I learned the mannerisms of the modern-day and the colloquial terms that have changed with time despite my natural ability to understand every language that an Eldian utters.
In the unfathomable amount of time that I have observed people's lives, the concept of freedom has been processed through different mouths attached to different lips, cheeks, eyes, and brains.
Dogma flows deep within these people's lives. They have lived underneath what other people tell them to do.
In the case of Eren, he didn't succumb to this dogma that has throttled so many individuals. He instead relishes imagining freedom like a shimmering fruit on an apple tree that he could never seem tall enough to reach.
Even then, there is still one thing I am not yet free from. Eren is not the person I have been waiting two-thousand years for. It is someone else— they were not one of the many casualties of the Colossals' destruction…
Moments ago, I passed through the majority of the so-called "Eldian Internment zone" in a port city titled "Liberio." The wall quartering off this section seems to be more of a pig pen than a way to constrain a portion of humanity. So many slaughtered "pigs" lined the stoned ground becoming the consistency of the slop they would typically ingest.
I want to speak about one of these many "pigs."
While the Eldians of this town tried to flee through its gates, one Eldian decided to stay on the bottom level of an abandoned establishment and decided that his own life was not worth preserving. He cut himself with a glass bottle, which caused him to bleed— it did not matter that he was wasting his blood since he would lose it all soon anyway.
This man, a product of disadvantages, a bundle of shame, a living cacophony, was someone whom I was already familiar with. Herein lies the contradiction of my ability to perceive. I saw this man for the first time while walking near him, but I knew everything about him already. Time felt so short but so long.
This Eldian was an emaciated stick whose health had dwindled through malnourishment. He was a rotten and vile skunk whose body formed a thin "C" shape when he hunched over; alcohol seemed clean next to him, and a shade of black would be pure next to him. He could not afford a building to call home or even a set of pages to write inside.
This Eldian was a forager on the street, a man who belonged to the roads and pathways of this flawed pigpen. He was a man without a home.
This man's story was titled misleadingly, "An Eldian's Journal."
A more fitting title would be, "An Eldian's Plea for Forgiveness."
He wrote his tale in the pages given by the street-dweller before him: a journal that already carried a story.
After the man cut his chest, he spent minutes huffing air, representative of a human in panic. His crestfallen demeanor was typical of fellow Eldians before they got trampled, but his one was special because of his tattered skin and suffering flesh. It would be generous to call the strands connecting his joints "muscles."
His back straightened into a ruler, and he leaped from his sitting position. It was bewitching how the survival instinct could pull any energy out of this bug of a man. He proceeded to jump out of a secret entrance.
He had resisted evacuation for so long, but he must have wanted to watch the bringers of his demise themselves.
There was no sky, and no future, for this young man to see. The horizon was formed by red pillar-like titans driven by an ambition they had not chosen, but Eren had decided for them. They made no complaints. From a human's perspective on the ground, the view would be an endless wall when looking left and right.
The young man frantically ran away. His body siphoned energy that had not been there before, but it didn't matter. He said he did not mind dying, but his animal mind had silenced his rational mind.
The Colossals caught up to the Eldian. One of the titan's toes smothered his decayed legs, without interest, without anger, but with only an unnerving indifference. Half of his body became a fresh stain on the already stained ground of the internment zone.
The upper half of this man's body remained. Enough life was left in him for me to imprint a final memory.
I revealed myself to the Eldian. It would be the very last time he would see me. In a sense, having only one understanding of time was a luxury for him. I would be seeing him again.
The man dug his fingers into the pavement, trying to inch toward me. His knuckles were swollen, unlike the skin for the individual parts of his fingers, which hugged their bones tightly.
"Were you ever imaginary?" The Eldian asked with his long, mingled hair hanging like a patchwork of misery.
I replied, "No," speaking to him mentally for the first time and the last depending on the perspective.
The young man's face went blank as his brain stuttered, skipping its beat without relation to the heart. His expression went on pause as his thoughts attempted to catch up.
I stared at the frank, light blue of both the irises in his eyes, the only aspects of him unruined by his acts from preceding years.
The eyes swelled in the sockets of the young man's head as a different titan stepped onto the remainder of his body. The foot fell upon him like an enlarged hammer that only needed one tap to destroy its object.
I saw the Eldian's skin crumple up like a piece of paper in an unforgiving fist for a split second. Fragments of his skull underlying his face shoveled past each other to adjust to the decreasing space. It was grotesque.
The titan making the kill lifted its foot, and the man's obliterated body remained with a fraction of its original volume. The worn-down clothes masked the oozed organs and battered bones. The body was thin as a stamped butterfly but the polar opposite of the beauty and grace of one.
Heinrich Steiner, the cockroach of the internment zone, finally perished.
He was so close to turning nineteen years of age as the age of humankind nearly eclipsed.
The journal received a similar treatment to that of its second owner. Its spine broke down the middle, and a titan's foot pressed the pages so compactly that the paper acted as a sponge to absorb the displaced blood.
The words in this journal that previously nurtured ideas, settings, and morals were drowned with no story left to tell. Hours, days, and weeks of repetitive effort led to a hollow result.
Heinrich, no one ever did read your journal.
Would you be disappointed to know that?
Don't worry. I was there all along. I read your journal.
The titans moved onto the next block and devoured the houses with their steps, but I hesitated to follow them again. I could not pull away from Heinrich, the first Eldian I revealed myself to in this hysteria.
I lowered myself to the ground and tried holding Heinrich's hand. My hands passed through his crippled fingers, and I could not feel anything. My form did not grant the sense of touch.
I thought to myself, "I killed my friend."
I never thought I would call anyone "friend," notably a human in the population I decided should be annihilated.
I stood up and followed through the process of diving into an Eldian's memories. I had to make sure the events that happened to Heinrich, and the times he saw me, existed.
A light flashed and diminished as a setting unburdened by Colossals appeared. It was the Eldian internment zone in Marley. No one could mistake the landscape of armband wearers and their flat caps.
I spawned on a sidewalk, and a little girl on a bicycle rang the bell on her handlebars as a warning for arrival. I almost backed away to make space but realized it did not matter. She passed right through me and crashed into a man with a tender knee. It must have been her father since he gave her a beating without hesitance.
The brush of the wind from the bicycle was not present on my "skin." The last time I felt anything akin to that was thousands of years before when archers and their bows and arrows chased me. The wind scratching at my face was palpable. That is what a 'whoosh' of a bicycle feels like, right?
The father and daughter moved away without looking back at me. But I kept looking at them, for I picked up on an uncanniness in appearance to corpses I saw before. Their faces would be caved in from the feet of the Colossals. Ample people on that street would share the same fate, but others would die before it arrived. Frailty, accidents, greed, or old age would grip this second group of people first. It is this bunch I did not search the memories of.
My general surroundings were not strangers to me. I had seen them enough in Eldians' memories. The setting of this memory was Section B.
I was near the "houses in dire need of hugs" and "dust attempting to ride bicycles." Those were Heinrich's words from his journal, and I detest those two lines. They applied fantasy to a world feeding on tragedy— you cannot coat this reality with that nonsense.
I will paint the truth.
Those buildings were bricks piled together by men slaving away with a leader shouting over them, and when they reached stability, people started occupying the spaces. But when people occupy anything, they take their insanity with them, and windows become the victims. The glass inevitably shatters, and they become knives for throats below.
These houses did not need hugs. They needed renovation. That is all, nothing more, nothing less. They were the least of the issue.
The real issue was that ignorance was suspended on a leash in front of every man and child since not knowing the absolute truth, but instead agreeing to the one falsely thrust upon them, granted a respite from uncertainties, providing an inkling of safety from the dark corners of the world that were even darker than the ones in the internment zone teeming with Marleyan security that yearned to lash out at minor inconveniences.
It still looked to be a more remarkable life than I ever had. These complaints are futile.
The windows of the house across the street were intact, and they provided a looking glass to view a young family and visitors.
Crossing the street to get there carried no issues for me. No one knew I was there, as was the truth in my days as a slave.
I went on the tips of my toes to look into the house.
Surrounding a damaged sofa with a hole in the back were three people with one thing grabbing their collective gazes. They were all killed before the rumbling, so I could not put a name to each face, but Heinrich did mention some relatives in his journal.
First was an aunt, Karin Hauser, a woman whom Heinrich proclaimed was a "Social Justice Warrior." The second was grandfather Frederick Steiner, whom Heinrich said was a comedian, which must have meant unemployed. The third was a grandma, Erika Hauser, whom Heinrich had written that she believed I had contacted her through the paths, and she accidentally walked off a roof.
Their faces were adorned with joy.
On the sofa was a married couple. The young man was Frederick Steiner Jr. His hairline was still packed with springy, blonde hair, which had not receded yet. His stomach had not exceeded the strength of his belt yet. The young woman next to him must have been Rosa Steiner. Her slim figure and tight skin would not persist much longer. Her eyes were yet to turn into the warm silver that her maternal instincts would give her later.
A wellspring of love showered from their faces despite the straightforward expression. They gleamed at their son. I was a mother, and that feeling is presentable without any words.
The child cradled in Rosa's arms was Heinrich Steiner. His eyes were just as blue as the day I saw him die. He would pick up that guitar sitting in the corner of the room one day, meet a homeless man one day, meet me one day, shoot a man one day, save dozens of men one day, and become a homeless man one day.
I was walking through the first memory he could ever recall.
It was time to stroll through the memories of the 50,268th human killed by the rumbling. Or is it the 70,169th? I have lost count.
The Real Author's Note
Allow me to clarify some things:
"An Eldian's Journal" is a physical story written by Heinrich at the age of 18 during the month AFTER the initial Liberio attack. Since he was killed by the rumbling, he couldn't finish it, and the journal itself is ruined.
As for Ymir, I am using her for a "what-if" story. "What-if" she could see the lives of every Eldian she kills, and what does she learn from that?
I think Isayama (Attack on Titan's author) was biting off more than he could chew with the introduction of the paths time traveling and Ymir. While the paths made for some fantastic moments between Eren/Zeke/Grisha, the rules seem quite vague, and that may have been on purpose. However, it makes my job a little harder. Not to mention, Ymir's character is not fleshed out enough.
THESE ARE THE RULES OF THE PATHS AND YMIR'S ABILITIES IN MY STORY:
-Ymir didn't bother to access memories while directly in the paths since she was too busy shaping titans, but when she got down from there she accessed the ones from people dying in front of her. She was no longer burdened by the titan-creating duty.
-The walk-through of thousands of memories has informed Ymir of technological innovations and what it is like to live in an industrialized world. That's why she knows things like bikes, cars, and modern concepts. Also, she can understand any language an Eldian speaks (that can be seen in the manga/anime.)
-Like Eren and Zeke were able to float through Grisha's memories and converse with him, so Ymir will do the same since she created the titan powers in the first place. She just won't talk with her mouth since her "celestial" ghost form is her tongueless-slave form.
-No, even though this story is called "a diary," Ymir herself isn't writing anything.