The path leading to death wouldn't allow living souls to enter. Lys had to make her soul fragment maintain the form of a soul while already being 'dead.'
She had to seize that moment to drag Noah out.
The dazzling symbols before her made Lys dizzy. The curtains by the window moved without wind, revealing Friedm's worried and frightened eyes outside.
Young Friedm saw his Lys's gradually greying left arm, saw the ugly scars upon it, the faint patterns and the two rings of strange, dense red symbols floating in the air.
Blood dripped onto the floor.
He saw his mother try to push open the door to stop her, then withdraw her trembling hand as she collapsed to the ground, covering her face.
Tears fell to the earth.
He saw his Lys inside the window begin to tremble, saw some black figure embrace his Lys.
He ran to try standing on tiptoe to open the door, but it was locked. He patted the part of the door panel he could reach.
"Lys! Open the door!"
But it was too late. Lys inside drew a breath:
"Goodbye."
'She' gave Lys a ghostly embrace.
"Well, goodbye then."
Lys pulled the floating curtains tight, blocking little Friedm's teary gaze as he ran back to the window. She hesitated for a moment, then poured a bottle of soul stabilizer onto that dark shadow.
"I'm sorry."
"Maybe this is what I wanted."
Until the moment of choice arrives, who truly knows themselves?
The grey figure deprived of 'life' grasped Noah's hand. Under Lys's harsh, convoluted incantation, it quietly turned pearl-white, then gradually faded into nothingness.
Something seemed to overflow from where 'she' had vanished, covering Lys's mouth and nose, flowing stickily over her entire body, enveloping and dragging her forward in a dizzying pull.
Something else sneered at her repeatedly in her ear, mocking her wild fantasies and reckless audacity...
And... arrogance...
The arrogance of actively rushing toward death, attempting to tamper with death itself.
Something began overlapping with reality's existence, confusing Lys, dragging Lys forward until she grasped that man's coat hem.
Lys's eyes gradually grew dull. Her open eyes held no pain, no hope, no struggle—even the last spark of light in the ashes seemed about to be extinguished and carried to another world.
Death, ultimately, could not be fooled...
Would this man whose clothes she grasped still choose to abandon her in this world?
This was Lys's final thought.
Until—
"You shouldn't be here. It's not your time yet, is it?"
A woman appeared, her face overlaid with wounds, blood tears still unshed in her eyes. She held the torn little "Lys" by the hand, sitting in a burned and collapsed house.
"Are my two children well?"
Lys couldn't break free from the sticky oppression weighing upon her and didn't have time to respond, but she heard the woman say:
"That's good then. Actually, I've been hesitating—whether to turn back or keep walking forward. I rarely have moments like this, so..."
"Though I'm very reluctant to say this... thank you, Death Eater miss."
"So I can righteously hate you, I'll continue walking forward with 'her.' And you—it's time to go back."
Though the woman's tone was mocking, the hand she pushed toward Lys was gentle and strong.
The thing oppressing Lys was sticky and viscous, preventing her from doing anything except desperately clutching Noah's coat hem.
Before her eyes, real existence and illusory existence began repeatedly mixing and alternating.
As the room before her became clear, the memory of everything she'd just witnessed also dissipated and blurred.
Lys, feeling as if she'd merely lost focus for a moment, carefully experienced her arm gradually collapsing under the effect of those runes, then slowly getting stuck at a critical threshold.
At this moment, Noah's eyes regained clarity as he covered his face.
"Little Star! I saw it—what have you done! You shouldn't have!" He questioned weakly, but his insufficient strength made his tone heavy with pleading and anguish.
"This family shouldn't begin with abandonment. Compared to the consequences that losing you might bring to this family, I can bear these sacrifices." Lys quietly withdrew the floating symbols, turning around to answer with deliberate coldness.
Noah, still unable to rise behind her, was weeping. He'd thought his protection of his family would be his final ending, never expecting it to be the beginning of owing even more.
Lys opened the door, glanced at Senna kneeling behind it and Friedm still pressed against the window, pouting as he looked back at her, then returned to her small building to deal with the corpse.
Pouring out the Dittany that Flitwick had sent in by climbing on Cocoa's shoulders through the window, perfunctorily smearing it on her arm, Lys thought:
Perhaps the blood thorns outside the fence would fancy fresh flesh and blood.
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