Let the clock’s hands turn backward.
A soft veil of water unfurled over the imperial capital’s sky, like a vast translucent blue banner riding the wind. The earthbound crowd gazed up as if into a lake, every ripple a moving image. When the blue rings thinned and slid away, the first scene blossomed—close to home.
It was the garden outside a manor hall, where fine ornaments should gleam. Now the flowerbeds were rubble, like a storm had uprooted grace.
Someone lay amid shattered stone, breath a torn thread.
The signature crimson heavy plate flashed like a bleeding rose, and the crowd gasped. All knew her—the capital’s famed Crimson Blossom.
...
When the hands went weak and Crimson Blossom lay limply in the gravel, a gauntlet seized her throat like iron frost. As her mind dimmed, she spent her last speck of strength on a whisper.
“Save me.”
But.
No one came. It was the same as in childhood, when darkness pressed like a damp cellar and she prayed to the Hero King, the Demon King, to anyone—please, save me.
No one came.
Back then she learned a blade-cold truth—only the self saves the self.
To hope for rescue was a mirage, a soft rot.
Time drifted on like pale smoke, and Crimson Blossom, spared from despair for years, forgot that lesson. Now, as death’s chill swept in like winter tide, she remembered.
She pried her eyes open and stared at the tall knight with a red ponytail. His face hid behind a helm; only those scarlet eyes burned like coals.
Their gazes locked, and a vital thought struck like lightning. Her body convulsed like a fish flung onto dry stone. Words tore up from her throat in broken knots. “You—you—are not—”
The knight was silent, then spoke, voice flat as iron. “I’m not your father.”
“But,” he said, cool as shadow, “the one you see is.”
I’m not—But the one you see is.
The two lines clashed like crossing blades, yet Crimson Blossom understood in a snap.
He wasn’t her father. He was Dread, the Church of the Divine’s Four Horseman famed for mind sorcery.
From the first breath, he had woven silent spell-thread. He folded her into a dream, made her see the one she feared most—her father.
She should have died inside her own mirage. But she remembered a shard—her father didn’t have red eyes.
They weren’t blood kin; red had bled into him only in her warped memory.
Knowing didn’t help.
The spell was already flowing like a river in flood. No matter how she fought upstream, the face before her was still her father—the strongest, bleakest figure etched in memory—so her hands became snow, her strength a candle in wind.
From the first spark of Fear, everything she saw turned into the shape of fear.
Yes or no—it all became yes.
Clack-clack-clack—
His right hand tightened, each click like ice splintering. His voice grew solemn, as if a bell tolled, “One of the Four Horsemen—Dread—”
No—no—!
Her hands were free, but her fists, enough to crack the earth like thunder, struck him and left no ripple, no dent.
His tone drifted colder, stately as a judge’s mallet. “Risen by your Fear—”
Her breath thinned to smoke. Blood in her gut boiled up narrow pipes, flooding mouth and nose with copper heat. Her fingers scrabbled over grit like a trapped animal, hunting one last thread of life.
Then she touched something.
Cold. Small. A seed of winter in her palm.
“I grant you death—”
Shlunk—
The sound of a blade entering flesh was wet, thick, and nauseating, like mud sucking at boots.
His voice cut off. He looked down, startled as a stag at arrow-flight, at the hand buried in his chest—Crimson Blossom’s hand—gripping a tiny knife.
A fruit knife. Palm-length, dull as a kitchen moon. Yet it split his solid armor like bamboo under storm, pierced hard muscle, and drove true into his heart.
Even heart-struck, with the strength she had imagined into him, he should have clung to life like a cliffroot. But the instant the blade kissed his heart, power drained like sand through fingers, and life streamed after it, a river falling away.
He straightened, staggered back. Red poured from his helm like a spill of paint. His world shifted—first her blazing crimson eyes, then a sky rimmed in gold, then a gray ash of despair.
As he crashed and the dark swallowed him whole, he finally understood—
That knife was the one that killed “him”—Crimson Blossom’s father.
But how could such a titan die to a simple fruit knife?!
With that question nailed open in his mind, Dread—one of the Church of the Divine’s Four Horsemen—
died.
...
When the lady knight raised her greatsword, the silver edge fell like moonlight. Silver’s body on the ground was already broken, like a torn banner.
Left alone, with blood raging from her belly, she might have died fast, the sand running out.
But for some reason, the Church of the Divine’s only female Horseman saw the way Silver’s eyes chased Stardust, and a nameless fire flared up her spine like a volcano.
Her long-still heart split like a fault line, and magma bled from the crack. A hunger to destroy flooded her chest.
“Die!”
Clean and sharp, the blade crossed Silver like lightning and cut her through.
When she truly cleaved Silver in two, then flicked the blood from steel, sheathed the sword, and turned to leave—
Her pupils tightened like knotted thread.
A vast shadow gripped her heart like a fist.
Fight or flee, she should have moved. She didn’t. She stood pinned like a moth.
The shadow felt solid, tar-thick. It wrapped her in black and held her still.
“Who?! Who?!”
Cold sweat fell like rain as she roared inside. Frozen, she strained to roll her eyes, to find the face behind the dark.
She managed a twitch and saw a maw full of fangs, a blood-red cavern yawning wide.
A moment later, thick blackness flooded her sight. Pain chewed her into two living halves, and fire ripped through what remained of her mind.
Before her thoughts drowned, she heard—
“It wasn’t easy…”
She knew that voice—Silver’s. But hadn’t she cut Silver clean in two, dead as stone?
Not easy? She wanted to ask, not easy what?
She never heard the end. Her upper torso was spat from that gory mouth, slick as offal. Before light could touch it, a huge, ink-black dog’s paw came down and mashed her skull into pulp.
“It wasn’t easy to finally decide to be human…”
Silver licked blood from her claws, crimson gleam on black, and spoke.
