Before me stretched an endless void, as though I floated suspended in the darkest ocean ever dreamed. Time had lost all meaning—my memories scattered and dissolved like dust motes caught in a shaft of dying light—yet certain fragments clung to my soul with cruel tenacity. A broken heart, if such a thing still existed within me, pulsed with the raw, uncomprehending agony of a five-year-old orphan. I could still hear it: the sickening crunch of twisted metal when my parents' car was obliterated by a roaring semi, driven by a drunk who never even slowed to witness the devastation he'd carved into the world. In the hollow aftermath, my so-called relatives descended—vultures circling not me, but our house, our savings, our things. Then they discarded me into the orphanage like unwanted baggage, their duty fulfilled, their conscience clear.
My childhood became a wasteland of isolation. I evolved into a corporate machine, punching clocks and grinding through endless overtime for paychecks that felt simultaneously generous and utterly meaningless. What scraps of freedom remained, I surrendered to glowing screens: devouring anime marathons and manga binges, chasing fleeting dopamine in the merciless money-pit of gacha rolls in Fate/Grand Order, or pursuing the brutal catharsis of Souls-like games where those damning words—YOU DIED—would leap from the shadows of my nightmares.
Hope was a bear trap I'd learned never to touch. I remembered that scene in Fate/Zero too vividly: Gilles de Rais's young victim, sobbing as the flickering promise of rescue guttered and died in his innocent eyes. I vowed never to reach for light again, never to let it slip through my trembling fingers.
And yet—against every oath I'd sworn to my scarred heart—happiness found me.
I fell in love. I tasted warmth. I stood at an altar bathed in golden afternoon light, believing with terrifying sincerity in a future of shared laughter, creaking rocking chairs on a porch somewhere, grandchildren tumbling at our feet. For the first time since childhood, I believed.
Reality's blade fell without warning.
One ordinary afternoon, my phone buzzed. A single sentence shattered everything: my husband had been stabbed during a convenience store robbery. Grief swallowed me whole before I could even process the words, dragging me under like riptide. I woke in a sterile hospital bed to the second hammer blow—my unborn child, lost to the shock that had ravaged my body.
After that, I became a ghost. I drifted through the world hollow and purposeless, each step mechanical, each breath an obligation I no longer understood. Until one night, walking home through streets I didn't really see, a blinding light seared across my vision. The screech of brakes. The flood of violent crimson. Then nothing.
Nothing but darkness.
Now I float here once more, suspended in this empty infinity, asking the silence a question that has no answer: When will this relentless suffering finally end?
Then—impossibly—a brilliant radiance blooms before me like a sunrise breaking through eternal night. A voice echoes through the void, impossibly gentle, impossibly warm:
"Do not despair, child. I am here to offer you passage to another world of your choosing… and three wishes to shape your destiny anew."