Cold Steel - Inazuma Gaiden

1: Wintry Songbirds [END]

...Sometimes it sounds like singing, other times sobbing.

It doesn't take an accomplished scholar to know that he was feeling absolutely tired. Perhaps the word 'tired' doesn't even do justice to the absolute and utter exhaustion he's experiencing. His muscles were unresponsive, his limbs unmoving, his eyelids heavy, and his throat silent. All the energy completely gone and drained from his body - all that's left was the cool touch and irresistible call of slumber as well as the never ending void and enveloped his vision. Still, he clung to life - clung to whatever awareness he had left, forcing himself to stay conscious as long as physically possible.

Occasionally, it felt as though he was slipping in and out of the realm of the living - with it, came incomprehensible sounds, unintelligible voices, incoherent chatters. At first it sounded like someone shouting, and people yelling. And then, as time went on the sounds started varying - at times they felt tender to his ears, like voices belonging to children. Other times the voices were somewhat rougher, older. From young or fully grown adults. Sometimes it sounds like people were playing or singing in the background - like they're celebrating something, an event perhaps. And other times it sounds like crying - akin to a group of people pouring out their anguish and frustrations towards someone.

It was... strange, despite sounding completely foreign, it's as though he's heard of these before indistinct sounds some time before, at least from somewhere.

He knew he wanted to- needed to escape from this dark space. There are still much left undone, many things left unsaid, many promises left unfulfilled. But even as he felt the changes happening around him, like days turning into nights, turning into several days, and finally into weeks and perhaps even months, as the cold passed and the chill faded from the air, as silent periods became filled with those of chirping songbirds, indicating the changing of seasons - he was still very much trapped within his own physical and very plainly mortal shell.

And that became increasingly annoying as time went on. He knew very well that his mind was sound and undisturbed - and he was at the very least, half-conscious of the happenings all around him. Yet he laid still and immobile, soundless all the while.

...Sometimes it sounds like praises, sometimes it's wailing.

As unusual as it is, he was becoming increasingly agitated at his own inability to act, despite his desire to do so. It was so unlike his old self, one that would so readily listen to this lullaby or even let go of what little life he's desperately clinging to. He used to have no qualms in distancing himself from the borrowed time he's allotted to, no problems in just throwing away what's left of his insignificant self - even thinking that it would be the best solution for his troubled life, considering the presence of others around him.

His old self would probably never forgive the state he's in now, trying to persevere, despite the odds and not letting go. Just as his current self - as well as a certain lady born into a noble life wouldn't exactly forgive his past for giving into despair. But that's ultimately irrelevant. He's made a multitude of promises to several people along the grueling journey that took him quite literally half-way across the broken nation. He'd made assurances, to the living and even the unliving about many a things. However, he'd also made several promises to himself.

Inazuma was ready to move on, with its citizens ready to become better people.

Naturally, so must he.

After everything he'd seen along the journey, after all the things he's experienced - from entering a cooperation with someone that'd tried to kill him, entering a particularly remarkable bond that transcends the rigid and unbending norms of the nation - shattering the inflexible conventions and difficult barrier that separates both nobles and commoners, witnessing the talks of former mortal enemies that quite literally almost drown themselves in a river of bad blood, created by years of conflict and animosity, and finally engaging in a discussion on how mortals should seize the future with their own hands with a literal deity.