A month passed with Rozen submitting to the old man's discipline. He became a guard over one of the gardens known as a refuge for ghosts and madness, in a city that had revealed a name, Snow Nexus. Rozen kept to his duty from the first breath of dawn until the very end of night. He stood watch and barred the ghouls from entering with a sword famed for a substance that dissolved their skin, Grape Emerald. Every day, he repelled dozens of ghouls and killed some of them.
A week and a half into his assignment, Rozen had never cared for what happened in the garden, until the little girl stepped before him and chose to enter. He leveled the sword toward her face.
(The Little Girl): "Do you want to die again?"
The blade crept nearer to her eye.
(The Little Girl): "Stop this nonsense and let me in."
He kicked her in the stomach and sent her flying without uttering a single word. She flared, her face reddening as she straightened, brushed the dust from her robe, and said:
(The Little Girl): "Your reckoning tonight will be harsh."
She left without entering the garden.
Less than an hour passed before a pink butterfly arrived, its wings delicate, immense like peony petals. It hovered close to his ear.
(The Pink Butterfly): "Tomorrow morning, you have a reckoning session in the Recompense of Pain."
(Rozen): "I thought my reckoning was tonight."
He struck the butterfly with his sword and cut it cleanly in half.
(The Girl) playfully: "Some dogs remain dogs."
Rozen stared toward the horizon.
(Rozen): "Do not misjudge me. I will still attend the session. Your rudeness does not mean I believe I am safe from punishment. I am only speaking from what remains in me of humanity."
(The Girl): "You are an animal unfit to be human. Your feelings carry no weight. You are like the ghouls and the ghosts. All of you here are unworthy of reaching any human value. Even if you defy the order and do not attend tomorrow, your death is inevitable. In this city, there is no place you can hide. Every act, even every whisper, does not escape me. I can hunt you always, and hurt you wherever I wish."
Rozen nodded and returned to his lodging. He placed his sword beneath the bed, went to relieve himself while covering his head, and washed. This was not the beginning, he had long felt her watching him. When he finished, he lay down without eating though food sat on the table. His body hardened with muscle and wasted with ruthless speed. Not eating was his method of staying sane. Mild hunger kept him calmer, weaker to flare, less able to argue.
He slept the four hours allotted to him at home. He woke, dressed in the guard's clothes, took his sword, and stood before the garden in the heart of dawn. No ghoul, no ghost, came near him. The sky was clogged with thick clouds until the horizon drowned in a crude gray. When morning began, he left his post and went to the Recompense of Pain to be judged and punished.
He arrived and saw the old man standing at the door. Rozen looked at him with coldness, while the old man looked back with disappointment for Rozen's defiance of his instruction. The two children possessed an immunity no one could match, surpassed only by the authority of the speaking girl, known among the inhabitants of Snow Nexus as the Lady.
Rozen entered, and the little boy was the first to greet him, smiling widely.
(The Little Boy) beaming: "I forgive you, Rozen. I will always forgive you."
Rozen paused, then remembered the strangeness of the place and moved past it. He was led into a waiting room filled with dozens of ghouls, ghosts, madness, and monsters. He was the only human there, seated between a ghoul and a ghost, a Specter.
(Specter) glancing at him briefly: "…"
She looked forward again. Rozen sensed it and ignored it.
Minutes passed until saliva from a ghoul spilled onto his shoulder. Rozen looked to his right and found a ghoul's mouth like the one that had once torn his shoulder, breathing into his face. The smell of hunger had a voice of its own.
(Specter) calling it out: "This ghoul is disturbing us."
A guard arrived wearing a wild rabbit helmet. Rozen shuddered hard despite his composure, his heart beating with brutal force.
The ghoul's head flew away, severed by the wild rabbit.
Rozen was seized as the Specter fell silent, and he was dragged toward the Hall of Production. His arm nearly tore from the crushing grip of the wild rabbit. Rozen glanced at the rabbit's arm, its muscle twisted like rope, terrifying in its thickness.
They walked, and Rozen saw rooms where ghouls were tortured, and ghosts evaporated. Then he saw the little boy again, smiling at him and waving in greeting. Rozen stared, bewildered, and the wild rabbit yanked him forward with greater force.
The little girl appeared, her face cold, pointing toward the end of the corridor. There stood a door marked:
"Hall of Production"
The door opened. The wild rabbit threw Rozen inside and slammed it shut.
Rozen stood in a room of severe strangeness. Its floor was marble, elegant to the point of arrogance. Its walls were made of massive protruding faces, eyes closed, mouths lifted as if praising something they refused to see. Behind a lectern rose a woman with the head of a jar. Rozen's skin prickled at the sight, the form was a monstrous composition, and she spoke in a hoarse voice:
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "The guilty Rozen. A young man in his early twenties. Guard of Garden of Zaher. Under the old man's guardianship. He killed the social butterfly. He kicked the little girl. Evil springs from his foul gut. Misery leaks from his dull sweat. His deed is disgrace. His speech is shame. His origin is strange. He feeds on the old man's pity, despite the Lady's irritation with him."
(Rozen): "What are you saying, and why do you speak in short segments? Who is this Lady, and why does the old man do what he does to me?"
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "You are at the bottom of Snow Nexus. Your rights are nothing. Your presence is rejected. Yet you are here. You have no right to ask. You have no right to answer. Despite all this, the Lady has permitted the granting of your recompense."
The light vanished. The ceiling revealed itself as glass, reflecting a darkened sky. The hall's light turned faint, and its air turned viciously cold.
(Rozen) whispering: "Snow Nexus?"
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "Are you the man you have always wanted to be?"
The faces turned toward Rozen. He stared at them, mouth open in sharp disbelief, and his voice carried both astonishment and contempt.
(Rozen): "What kind of question is this? We are in a court, not a psychiatric clinic."
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "You are a lost soul. There is no self to be treated within you. This is not a court, this is a recompense. Every refusal is met with punishment."
Rozen shook his head, still not understanding what kind of cruelty pretended to be logic here.
(The Jar-Headed Woman) repeating with calm insistence: "Are you the man you have always wanted to be?"
Rozen stared for seconds, something in his face slackening.
(Rozen): "I do not know…"
(The Jar-Headed Woman) repeating with an attentive softness: "Are you the man you have always wanted to be?"
Rozen's shoulders loosened, as if the question had found the seam in him.
(Rozen) faintly: "I do not know…"
(The Faces) speaking together: "Are you the man you have always wanted to be?"
Rozen's mind erupted with a memory that arrived without permission. A yard. A child rolling on his back. An adult man passing by, stepping toward a mailbox. Rozen in that memory stared at the man as he walked, as though that walk carried the whole world.
(The Jar-Headed Woman) roaring with violent force: "Are you the man you have always wanted to be?"
Rozen collapsed onto his knees, and the answer broke out of him at last, stripped of any pride.
(Rozen) shattered: "No… I am not even an atom of that."
(The Faces) erupting in a deafening uproar.
(Rozen) screaming violently as a long rose stem was driven into the back of his neck, the thrust so brutal that its tip burst out through the front of his throat.
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "Have you achieved your desire in life?"
Rozen's chest heaved. He tried to answer, but the rose stem blocked him. He tried again. Blood burst from his mouth with each failed attempt at sound.
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "That is the Rose of Truth. You will speak only the truest answers, or you will endure this torment until your longed-for death."
Rozen screamed again and tried to rise, to lunge, to break the room with his bare bones, but the faces screamed at him with a cry that shut his nerves down for seconds. When awareness returned, he tried to speak again and again, and blood kept exploding from his mouth in a brutal ache that made language itself feel like a sin.
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "Have you achieved your desire in life?"
Rozen forced his breathing to slow. He sat, thinking in a depth that felt like drowning while still alive, then answered with heavy, broken hesitation.
(Rozen): "I… have not… achieved… anything… in my life…"
(The Jar-Headed Woman): "Do you hate yourself?"
(Rozen): "No…"
(The Jar-Headed Woman) poetically: "Do you deserve these humiliations?"
(Rozen) struggling: "No… no…"
(The Jar-Headed Woman) rising with force: "Do you fear death?"
(Rozen) audibly strained: "Yes…"
(The Jar-Headed Woman) striking the lectern with her voice like a blade: "Do you feel despair? Do you feel you will never be saved no matter how you wish? Do you feel you are a burden upon everyone who saw you and heard you?"
The faces closed their eyes, and their tears fell heavy, as if the room itself had begun to mourn. The rose in Rozen's neck dissolved, its nectar running down his back. Rozen trembled violently, as though the truth had finally found his bones.
(Rozen) shaking: "Yes… yes… yes…."
(The Jar-Headed Woman) calming into cold certainty: "You have eased yourself. The recompense has ended. Now comes your punishment. You will die by drowning."
Rozen's body surged with panic. He tried to stand, but his muscles refused him. His body conceded, with a filthy clarity, that he was the lowest among those who existed, and that in the buried vaults of himself, which betrayed him for the first time, he truly deserved death, despite loving life.
He tried to scream, hoping to wake, but the matter had already been decided.
Two guards wearing wild rabbit helmets appeared and took him toward a dark, sealed yard, where a colossal basin waited, immense in depth as much as it was in size. (Rozen) was bound in steel chains, and he could barely manage to straighten beneath them. He was shoved coldly toward the basin and sank with insane speed. The first seconds were packed with terror and raw nervous panic, but when seconds turned into minutes, (Rozen) understood that he would only make things harder on himself if he resisted, for in his state there was no salvation.
His exhausted body calmed.
He smiled a smile of acceptance, shed one final burning tear, and bid farewell to that roaring pressure by entering the stillness of absolute darkness.