Prologue I: When the Snowflake's Dream Ends

―It was hell.

Corpses were littered all over the snowy ground of the Aries Villa as far as I could see. All of them were now all an unrecognisable patch of human lives, a dirty patch of blood and of heavily mutilated corpses, from heads to toes... The once proud servants and guards of the vi Britannia line were no more... Absolutely no one was spared from this horror...

It truly was a horrifying and sickening sight... My stomach ached from the mere sight of it. My throat hurt with its rising bill. I tried to steel myself, to not cry, to not vomit... But the winter was truly merciless this year, it made things even harder. It was hard to support the breeze in my light prince's outfit, hard to breathe this cold air, hard to walk, hard to even stand. It simply made the situation a living hell...

It was terribly, horribly, frighteningly difficult but I had to manage it. Even if I simply wanted to curl myself in a ball, to go home, to enjoy life in its fullest, to forget everything that happened here, to think that this was a nightmare all along. But I knew too well that this wasn't the truth, I was already living a real nightmare, an inescapable nightmare... At the very least I had to do it for their sakes... I had to find them.

Then, I stumbled on something.

I-it was my mother Marianne, my lovely mother. I couldn't bring myself to fully look at her. I was too scared, too terrified to even dare to move a centimetre. She couldn't be... No, she had to be alive! Wasn't it? She was after all the strongest! Surely, she couldn't be...

I knew the truth but I couldn't support it. So, I had to look away from her, I had to lie to myself. I wasn't strong enough and I simply was too young to truly grasp and understand this cold and cruel reality... So, I had to flee from it.

But I couldn't even do something as simple as that... I simply was too frozen to attempt to flee... I truly was a pathetic human being. Clearly, I didn't merit all the praise they were giving me, from my mother, to Nunnally, to even Schneizel...

Then, a simple movement of head, an involuntary flinch caused by all the accumulated stress happened and all hell broke loose. I saw it all, saw the true horror. I vomited once again. I tried to resist the urge to cry and the oncoming wave of despair.

She was dead, very dead... I couldn't no longer deny it, it was after all before my very eyes. From her dull and despaired eyes to her cold and pale touch, I knew that she wasn't longer among us. The very air that I breathed was sickening, disturbing... It was all bloody, that I was certain, but something far darker and eerie was mixed with It, I couldn't figure it out, but it truly fit the scent of death... It made me still and very uneasy.

And from a closer look, the state of her body... I... I couldn't find words... I couldn't even imagine to describe it... It was even worse that all the others mutilated corpses... Her once beautiful violet eyes were bulged out from their cornet. Her once so pretty face was eviscerated, so violently contorted but still recognisable. But all in all, her face was the most conserved part of her body...

The rest was beyond recognition... Bones were now visible and blood was all over the body. There was a great hole in her chest and her heart was nowhere to be seen. Her arms were cut out in small parts, separated from her body. Her right arm was even bisected in two to the elbow. But her fingers still grasped something like a sword, it was also covered in blood. Her guts were in the open, all littered on the ground. Her stomach was crushed, completely crushed. Her waist was now nothing more than a pile of flesh... Her legs were just not right... They were absolutely horrifying; they were rotated to an unhuman position... They were both inwardly and outwardly rotated...

Guilt. A surge of guilt was encroaching me. It... It hurt so much. It was agonising... I couldn't save her. I couldn't help her. I couldn't even be here in her last moments, to dull her despair. I couldn't do anything. I was powerless all along. In that moment, I wanted to die so much, to flee all of this madness...

Then came self-loathing. I despised myself for all my weakness... For all my uselessness... I could and should have done something before... I knew too well that my mother had many enemies, she was after all a commoner married to the emperor. The Imperial Court would have been involved, it was just simple and plain logic... But I just ignored it, I denied it for the pursuit of my own happiness, of my own dreams. How childish. With all my intellect, all my genius, I couldn't even protect my own mother. How pitiful, how fitting for the filthy human being that I was... After all, I was nothing, nothing special, I was even worse than trash...

I dug my nails in my palms and I bit my lips with all of my force to somewhat appease myself, blood was eventually drawn. It was strangely comforting, but the pain was all that I had.

And then finally came an all-englobing despair and sadness. I froze, realisation dawned upon me that my own mother, the mother that I loved so much was dead, very dead, indeed dead. I was shaken to the core, to my very being... It was pure and agonising despair. How couldn't it be? No seven years old should lose his own mother, no one should be subject to this horror... I couldn't take it. I cried, cried so hard. I had to release it. I couldn't no longer contain it. I was not strong enough to support the burden. The pain was incommensurable, it was too great.

It hurt. It hurt. It was painful. So, so painful. I couldn't understand this whole situation. My head couldn't no longer process it. It was a mess, a terrible mess. Why? Why? Why did this happen? My fragile mind couldn't understand all this cruelty. All my body was shaking, I couldn't no longer control it.

Then, what seemed like an anvil came upon my whole chest. The pain was even worse than before. I couldn't no longer stand, the sight of it truly was pathetic. I simply fell on the snowy ground. I couldn't even feel the snow. I had to grab my chest, my heart was accelerating, it was completely running wild. It made my head completely dizzy and the pain was... The pain on my body was even more insufferable. My body's temperature was falling quickly. It felt cold, too cold, it felt like a blizzard had enveloped me. It hurt. It hurt too much. I couldn't no longer comprehend the pain. It hurt too much.

Suddenly, I couldn't even breathe... It was frightening. It hurt. It was an agonising pain, an agonising despair. I just wanted this to end... It just was too much. Tears were falling freely from my face; everything was now a blur. My vision was slowly fading away. I... I just wanted sweat death to come. I was weak, I was a coward, and I now knew it too well...

I now remembered the sword within my mother's hand... I had to take it, it would be my last-ditch effort to end once and for all this tragedy... It hurt to move even a little bit but it would be worth it. I had to retire the sword from her hand. It was hard, it was painful but I eventually succeeded. My hands were now bloody and numbs from all this effort.

With my trembling hands, I slowly lifted it toward my neck, slowly but surely. I gulped... I closed my eyes... I prepared myself for the inevitable end... And I finally swing it do-...

Then another realisation came upon me: where was Nunnally?