Silence was the absolute master.
Not a bird in the sky, not a creep beneath the snow.
Not even the wind dared pass.
It was as if time itself had frozen, and the end of movement had been written on the world's page.
The ground was covered with a layer of gray ice, not white like familiar ice, but gray like the ashes of the dead mixed with snow that refused to melt.
The trees here were upright bones, black, leafless trunks, cracked as if they had cried out repeatedly and were never saved.
And everything... was still.
But it wasn't a peaceful calm, but a post-catastrophe calm.
It was as if life itself had tried to escape and failed.
And in the midst of this icy devastation...
there was a small body, huddled like a fetus on its chest.
No movement, no apparent breath.
Just the remnants of fading warmth.
And then...
A gasp.
It was as if the air suddenly reminded him that he was still alive.
Dante opened his eyes.
Slowly, half-consciously, he gasped as if he'd just emerged from a nightmare with no exit.
His eyes were red from the cold, and his body was trembling, and he didn't know why.
He turned his head with difficulty.
Everything was strange, everything was dead, even the color seemed to have chosen not to be here.
He whispered in a broken voice, "Where... am I?"
But his voice found no one to answer him.
There was only the echo of his own voice... returning distorted, as if he didn't like what he'd said.
He stood up slowly, his hands shaking,
his hair frozen, his clothes covered in a layer of snow like invisible shrouds.
He looked at the gray sky, then the trees, then the ground,
and then he realized the truth:
He was alone.
With every second that passed,
his heart screamed:
"Where did they go? Yubi? Dabi? Yuno? Sara?"
But silence was his only response.
He tried to move, but his body was groaning,
not just from the cold… but from something deeper.
It was as if his very soul had been torn apart and left suspended in nothingness.
He knelt again,
his hands dug into the snow as if searching for something beneath the surface,
for warmth, for a trace…for meaning.
But he found only cold.
A cold that didn't come from nature, but from something greater.
Something that made him feel like his very existence was a sin.
He closed his eyes,
and when he opened them, a tear had frozen beneath his eyelid.
He whispered again, as if pleading with the gray sky:
"Is… this my punishment?"
But there was no answer.
He had to move… or this ice would bury him with those who had gone before him.
He looked at the horizon,
no features, no roads, no signs.
Just…
a world waiting to be understood.
Or cursed.
Dante stood with difficulty, looked around again… no one. No sound. No sign.
He whispered, in a low voice, as if speaking to an inner child:
"I need… fire. Something alive in this frost."
He gathered some dry twigs that looked like crushed bones,
piled them on top of each other, tried to light a spark with his small knife…
many times, his hands trembling, the cold eating away at his limbs.
Then—
A spark.
Followed by another.
Then… a tiny flame began to dance.
Dante leaned toward it as if cradling a child,
watching the flames struggle against nothingness,
as if to say: You are not entirely alone.
He sat down by the fire, leaning his back against a cold rock.
He was silent.
Then he began to mutter, not knowing whether to pray or to speak to an invisible person:
"If this is a dream... I wish I could wake up.
If not... I wish I could find someone to answer me."
He stared at the flames, his eyes piercing the dancing colors,
as if they held answers... he didn't understand.
Then he slowly turned to the frozen forest in front of him,
and said quietly, his voice more than it spoke:
"I am here.
And if this is my punishment... so be it."
But then he whispered to himself, barely audible:
"But... I hope I'm not the cause."
Dante remained sitting by the fire, motionless.
The fire burned, but it didn't warm the heart.
The wind howled in the distance, as if crying, or laughing... it was impossible to distinguish.
Then, suddenly, Dante placed his face in his hands, his body shaking slightly, not from the cold, but from something deeper... as if he were suppressing an internal earthquake.
There was no sound of crying, no visible tears,
but the air around him changed.
It became heavier, as if sadness itself had decided to sit beside him.
He whispered:
"If I am the cause... how ugly I am."
He rested his forehead on his knees, and folded his legs as if seeking an embrace that no longer existed.
Everything was against him: the earth, the sky, even his own inner voice.
He no longer knew what to believe, or who he was. And whenever he tried to convince himself that the villain was lying, he remembered how he hadn't been banished like the others... and he remembered the fear-filled eyes of his friends, before darkness enveloped them.
A long silence... only his ragged breathing could be heard.
Then, as if he could no longer bear the weight inside him, he said in a faint voice:
"I hate this... I hate all of this..."
Finally, he raised his head, his eyes sunk in the depths of silence.
Then he looked down at his trembling hands,
and said:
"I just... want to understand.
I want... not to be this thing."
**
And then he sat, frozen in place, the small fire in front of him beginning to fade.
But he didn't move.
He just... stayed there.
A human lost in a land that knew no mercy.
**
Dante remained silent, staring at the rising ashes of the fire's last breath, as if it were just like him... breathing its last breath without anyone knowing who it belonged to, or why it had been lit in the first place.
The cold was biting his extremities, but there was something harsher than the frost... the emptiness in his heart, the abyss that had opened within him.
"Do I deserve to survive?"
The question recurred in his mind, like a broken mirror that returns the same reflection over and over again without healing.
He wasn't trying to run away from himself...
He was trying to understand himself.
Slowly, he reached into his bag, shivering from the cold.
Among the remains of meager provisions and a piece of cloth, he pulled out a book Dabi had once given him with a wry smile:
"You may not learn how to become a great swordsman from this book, but you will know how to live with a sword."
Its title was engraved with ancient inscriptions:
"The Swordsman of the Three Continents - Commandments of Survival and the Weighing of the Heart."
He blew on its cover, covered in a thin layer of ice, then opened the first page.
As the wind howled around him, he began to read quietly, as if reading to his broken self, trying to find what remained of meaning:
> "Survival is not heroism, but an act of temporary betrayal of powerlessness."
He closed his eyes for a moment, then smiled a small, painful smile.
> "The sword doesn't decide the battle... but the hand that refuses to drop it, even after it's broken."
He looked up at the gray sky, and felt something in his chest trying to breathe.
> "If you don't understand why you're still alive, then death is just a false comfort."
In that moment... he no longer felt just lost, but as if every old person inside him was rising from his ashes.
**
He kept reading, page after page, text after text,
not in search of hope, but of an answer.
For an explanation of his existence, and why he remained when everyone else had vanished.
**
That night... was not the beginning of his survival.
But rather the beginning of his understanding that he existed.
And that he had to decide, not just how to live...
but why.
...Slowly, Dante closed the book, as if every word in it were imprinted in his soul, not on the paper. He carefully reattached it to the pouch slung over his shoulder, then silently looked around.
He reached for his sword, the one thing whose existence he didn't doubt.
He raised it slightly, then returned it to its scabbard with a faint thud, as if the blade understood what he felt.
---
He stood up... not with force, but with determination.
As if his legs weren't just bearing his weight, but also the memory of those who fell and never returned.
He didn't look back, because what he'd lost didn't remain there.
It remained... in him.
**
He began walking.
He didn't know where.
He wasn't waiting for anyone.
And no one was waiting for him.
With each step, his thoughts flowed like cold fire:
"Why only me? Why wasn't I exiled with them?"
"Is this a blessing? Or another form of exile?"
"Maybe... maybe salvation is just a slow postponement of punishment."
He paused for a moment. He looked up at the sky.
"Were you watching?"
Then he laughed softly:
"Or maybe... there's no one there."
---
He kept walking.
The snow sometimes reached his knees.
The cold slapped his face as if nature wanted to remind him that it was merciless and unforgiving.
Then... he saw something looming on the horizon.
A pale blue line, as if the ground had opened up through a crack.
He drew closer, until a river appeared before him.
But it wasn't flowing.
It was completely frozen.
Dante was silent before him, staring at his crystalline surface.
The snow covered his sides, and the ice in his center wasn't white... but rather a dark blue, as if buried secrets lay beneath.
He knelt by the riverbank, stretching his hand out over the ice, but didn't touch it.
He whispered, "Everything stopped... even the water... even time..."
He bowed his head.
"What else froze inside me?"
Then he closed his eyes and began to mutter,
"Dabi... Yubi... Yuno... Sara... is this the world you wanted?
Or am I the one who messed everything up?"
(Silence)
...
Dante remained kneeling there. No tears in his eyes, for tears refuse to fall when the grief is deeper than tears.
The frozen river wasn't just water that had stopped flowing...
It was a silent mirror of the state of his heart.
Everyone he loved... had vanished.
Everyone he trusted... had been taken from him.
And he, the sole survivor, didn't know if his survival was salvation or damnation.
---
And suddenly...
It was as if the ice breathed.
The surface of the frozen river shook with a slight tremor.
Small cracks formed, then vanished.
It was as if something... beneath the ice was moving.
Dante didn't shiver; he just stared.
"Are you... another creature?
Or... another thought trying to swallow me?"
He stood up, his right hand clutching his sword, his left ready to open the pouch.
The air grew colder.
But he didn't feel it.
A voice... faint, not in his ear but in his mind, whispered to him:
"You're still alive, Dante... and this is the worst punishment."
---
He stood there, not fighting, not running away, not calling out.
Just existing.
The cracks in the ice disappeared.
Everything was quiet.
Dante, in a whisper:
"Even shadows are afraid to follow me..."
Then he slid his sword into its sheath and looked into the distant horizon.
He began to walk along the river, without looking back, as if his steps weren't for survival, but for a search for meaning... even if it didn't exist.
**
(In silence, interrupted by the creaking of snow beneath his feet...)
Dante was walking along the frozen river, his footsteps echoing intermittently in the white void, as if the entire world were paying attention to his movements.
And suddenly...
The silence was broken.
A crackling sound.
Not from beneath him... but from far away, across the other bank.
He stopped, staring in the opposite direction.
And there, through the fog thickening over the surface of the ice... a figure was moving.
A human shadow.
But he didn't move like humans do.
His steps were jerky, unsteady, as if his body were breaking with each step.
His clothes were torn, his head was tilted back, his eyes... white, pale, unconscious.
Dante, sharply:
"You... who are you?!"
No answer.
The shadow drew closer.
But something wasn't normal about him...
It was as if the ice beneath him wasn't affected by his footsteps, as if he... weighed nothing.
And suddenly...
A second shadow appeared, then a third, then a fourth.
From among the trees, from behind the rocks, from above the small rises...
There were ten, fifteen, twenty...
All walking with the same crushing sway, with the same dead white eyes.
Dante took a step back, then whispered:
"What are these...? No... they're not human."
He realized the truth when he smelled the air...
There was no smell of flesh. Only the smell of cold ash... and elixir.
He whispered to himself, overcome with tension:
"These are neither living... nor dead..."
Then he gasped, under his breath:
"Golems... but different."
The golems he'd read about, or even fought one before, weren't like this.
They made noises... and they had a shape.
But these, like the remnants of souls embedded in corrupted stone bodies, were like the remains of souls.
One of them stopped suddenly, then let out a loud, cracking scream, as if stabbed through the air.
The attack began.
Dante had no choice but to fight.
He drew his sword, assumed a defensive stance, and then said in a low voice, as if addressing death:
"If you're going to take me... fight me first."
The sword intersected with the first golem.
The sound of iron meeting stone, of anger meeting cold.
**
Dante sat on the rock, sword at his side, his head tilted slightly back as if trying to catch his breath... no, as if trying to grasp the meaning of survival.
The snow around him was still falling slowly, as if the sky had decided to calm down as well.
And strangely... one of the golems, the one that had been hit first and fallen without being destroyed,
was still there... staring at him.
The golem knelt on its knees, unmoving, just its silent stare.
Dante noticed it and stared back.
He didn't see malice in its gleaming green eyes... but rather a question.
"You're still here after you've defeated us?"
A question that didn't sound, but it hung in the air between them.
Dante, covered in snow and sweat, muttered:
"Shouldn't you hate me?"
But the golem didn't move.
At that moment, Dante felt something strange...
It was as if the golem, despite its cold constitution, understood.
As if they, he and these creatures, shared something... emptiness.
Desolation.
Purposelessness.
And the constant question: Why?
Dante, in a low voice as he rose again:
"You are not my enemy... you are merely a product of an unforgiving land. Like me."
The golem gave him one last look,
then slowly lowered his head, still kneeling, swaying, without attacking.
Dante remained standing. "Well... I will spare you your torment," he whispered, a little desperately. Gripping his sword tightly, Dante struck the golem across the neck, decapitating it until it disappeared into the rock and mist.
Inside him...
Something quieted.
Not the pain, but the noise.