Tsana and Cayn felt the environment around them suddenly spin randomly, and when they realized it, they were already standing in the middle of a different situation.
The scene before them was no longer ruined buildings and a silent city, nor scattered corpses. Instead, there was chaos everywhere.
Flames raged, burning every resident's home. People ran aimlessly, trying to save themselves.
There were many armored soldiers who came from nowhere, brutally killing every resident who tried to escape. Women were raped before being killed, men and the elderly were mercilessly beheaded, and children were taken to be made slaves.
This was still the same city, just at a different time.
In Cayn and Tsana's view, they saw the same small girl as before. Only this time, there were no chains binding her hands and feet, nor an iron shackle on her neck.
Even her hair was still bright green, not brown because it's so dirty like Tsana and Cayn had seen earlier.
It was Tsana in her childhood, kneeling helplessly amidst the surrounding chaos.
Before her own eyes, she saw her house being devoured by fire, and the people she knew being cruelly murdered.
Then, she was dragged by one of the muscular soldiers and roughly thrown into an iron cage. Tsana did not scream or cry, but her eyes were vacant as she stared at the corpses of people she knew right in front of her.
She indeed did not have parents or people she cherished. However, seeing the people who talked to her every day die right in front of her in a tragic way, little Tsana could not help but lose her sanity.
Inside that iron cage, little Tsana received the slave sign on her back. When the hot iron stamp was pressed onto her back, little Tsana's scream was heart-wrenching, mixing with the screams of other children who were also captured to be made slaves.
The mark on her back was visible, depicting a bird inside a circle.
The mark of a slave.
A bird represents freedom, and when the bird is inside a circle, it means there is no word "freedom" in a slave's dictionary.
Cayn gritted his teeth seeing that sight, his face scrunched up terrifyingly, and his hands clenched tightly, so much so that his nails dug into his own palms. He desperately wanted to behead the soldiers who had tortured little Tsana, but he could not touch them.
"Argh!" Cayn screamed in frustration, clutching his head tightly.
Because this dimension was merely a fragmentation of Tsana's past memories, which they could only feel, but could not touch or change.
Tsana closed her eyes and tried to breathe regularly. Then she hummed softly, and slowly stepped closer to Cayn, and pulled his hand to look at her.
Tsana released magic energy around them, and a faint green light shimmered around them, creating a peaceful and calming harmony.
It managed to calm Cayn.
The green light was like jellyfish swimming and playing around Cayn, gently touching his face and emitting a childish laugh.
Tsana held both sides of Cayn's face and made him look at her. "I remember my past now."
Cayn widened his eyes. "Everything?"
Tsana shook her head. "Only my childhood."
Tsana pulled Cayn's hand closer to the iron cage to see little Tsana more closely, and there they saw the figure of little Tsana who looked exactly like adult Tsana.
Little Tsana sat curled up on the side of the cage, cold and starved, and now both her hands and feet were bound by chains, and her neck was shackled by an iron collar.
Just like what Tsana and Cayn saw before.
"I remember that time, I managed to escape a few times from these people, but was always caught again... Look."
The sky had suddenly turned to night, and there Cayn saw Tsana successfully getting out of the iron cage by stealing the key from a soldier who was sleeping near the cage.
Cayn felt tension as he watched little Tsana trying to open the iron cage door which occasionally made a sound, making him afraid that little Tsana would be discovered and caught.
However, Cayn breathed a sigh of relief when he saw little Tsana successfully get out without being noticed, and he was quite amazed by Tsana's ability to not make any sound at all even though her hands and feet were bound by chains.
However, when the sky turned to day, Tsana was caught again, and she was brutally beaten by the soldiers, until Tsana spat out a mouthful of blood because of it. Furthermore, the children who were made slaves besides her were not fed at all.
"The peak was the scene we saw a while ago, where, out of sheer desperation, I ran away again and ate whatever I saw in front of me. Whether it was insects or rotten food in the trash can," Tsana explained.
Cayn remembered when Tsana ate the rat carcass, and his face showed pain.
Then, after a few days, they were taken out of the city using a horse-drawn carriage, and finally, they were given a piece of hard, moldy bread, 50 cm long, that was not even fit to eat. That bread was the soldiers' leftover provisions that were no longer fit for consumption, and they decided to feed the children only because they thought if the children died of starvation, their effort in bringing the children would be in vain, they wouldn't be able to be sold as slaves if they died.
However, being extremely starved, and the other children were already very weak, they all couldn't even move just to pinch a small piece of bread.
Little Tsana, who was the thinnest and smallest among them all, tried to move. When she moved, her body joints felt like they wanted to dislocate, and her whole body trembled violently.
She managed to reach the bread, and the other children looked at her resignedly and spoke in a weak and hoarse voice, "That child will eat everything, we'll die of starvation."
"Sister, I'm so hungry."
"Be patient, my little brother."
Unexpectedly, little Tsana actually exerted all her remaining energy just to pinch a small piece of bread to feed to each of the other children.
There were about 11 children in that iron cage, including little Tsana, so each child only got 5 bites.
Even little Tsana herself only got 2 bites, and that was because the other children asked Tsana to eat too. If they hadn't asked little Tsana to eat, little Tsana probably wouldn't have eaten at all.
Seeing that, Cayn once again felt his chest being squeezed very tightly.
"Why did you give it to the other kids? When you could eat it all yourself?" -Cayn.
Tsana shook her head. "I know how painful it is to be hungry. At that time, all I could think about was that they were all hungry, so I just tried to make them full, even though they weren't as full as I thought they would be-"
Then suddenly Cayn hugged Tsana, burying his face in the woman's shoulder.
"I'm sorry."
Although Tsana didn't understand why Cayn was apologizing, she just stroked the back of this adult man, whose body was much bigger than hers.
She felt water dripping on her shoulder, and soft sobs were heard from Cayn.
Cayn was crying?
"I'm sorry," Cayn whispered again.
Seeing Cayn's unusual reaction, Tsana suddenly wondered, if Cayn also came from her past, what was the beginning of her meeting with Cayn?