Despite his blunt words and manner, his hands were careful and precise. It was clear, even with a dead person, that he would not treat her carelessly.

“……”

If only someone had treated me that way while I was still alive.

Eve caught herself thinking it, then startled and shook her head.

The man had finished his work without her noticing. Eve’s body lay neatly at rest, transformed beyond recognition, now dressed in a clean white gown. At a glance, one might have believed she was simply sleeping.

Eve crouched before her own body and reached out a hand.

“It’s no use. You won’t be able to touch anything.”

The man spoke.

Eve pulled back the hand she had been about to press to her own cheek. She looked up at the man as he brushed off his hands and rose to his feet.

“Then what are you, that you can touch me and my body both?”

The man tilted his head and looked down at her.

Like soft sand shifting and spilling, pale white hair threaded with gold shimmered around his face.

In stark contrast to his black hat and jacket, the man had hair of a brilliantly light color and bright blue eyes.

A slant of light happened to slip through the small window in the cramped room just then, and it mingled with him so completely that he looked almost made of sunlight.

He pressed his hat back onto his head, extended a hand toward Eve, and answered.

“Undertaker.”

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Hybris would not want the stain of his daughter’s death marking his triumphant coronation.

But he could not hide it either, so it seemed he intended to hold a quiet funeral.

The man who called himself an undertaker, however, finished tending to Eve’s body and promptly took her with him out of the palace entirely.

What is an undertaker doing if not preparing for a funeral?

Eve puzzled over it for a moment, but no answer came.

Then again, the fact that he could speak to her and touch her at all, when no one else could even perceive her existence, was strange enough on its own. He was clearly not an ordinary undertaker.

“Where are we going?”

Eve asked the man walking ahead of her.

“Where you need to go.”

He turned back to look at her and pointed forward. A forest path thick with mist was beginning to unfold before them.

Her memories of the last time she had been outside the palace were hazy, but there had been no place like this nearby.

Perhaps the surroundings had changed while she was shut away. Eve followed the man toward the forest, glancing around as she went.

It was still early dawn.

Caw.

A desolate crow’s cry began to ring out. When the flapping of wings drew close and she looked up, a few crows sat perched on bare branches, staring down at her.

“Someone is watching over you.”

The man offered an explanation she had not asked for.

“Who would be watching me?”

“Hard to say. Someone who still wants to see you, even now that you’re dead?”

He glanced at Eve sidelong.

“Anyone come to mind?”

One person rose to mind immediately, and only one.

Mom.

Eve looked back the way they had come. On a bare branch growing distant behind her, a single crow sat watching her retreating figure with calm, unreadable eyes.

The short forest path ended, and in its place appeared a river so vast its far bank could not be seen.

The old wooden bridge crossing it was just as endless, stretching out until it disappeared from sight.

It looked ready to fall apart at any moment, groaning underfoot, with water surging up and spilling over the planks. Eve thought about this as she stepped carefully across.

What would happen if the bridge broke and she fell into the river? She had already died once. Could she die again?

The man walked on without any sign of concern.

Unlike him, who left no trace behind, Eve’s footprints appeared in black wherever she stepped, then crumbled into white dust and dissolved into the current below.

She had no idea how long they had been walking.

‘Look, it’s a beautiful little princess!’

A stranger’s voice came from somewhere without warning. Eve startled and looked around.

‘Waaah!’

A baby’s cry followed.

It seemed to come from somewhere far away, and yet right beside her at the same time. Eve chased the sound as it echoed like a hallucination.

‘How precious.’

The next voice was one Eve knew well.

She sank to her knees. Directly below the bridge she was crossing, in the vivid blue water below, something rippled and moved.

‘My daughter. My darling.’

A woman cradling a baby with dark brown curls.

“……Mom?”

The pale face holding a newborn Eve, eyes not yet open, pulling her close. It was her mother. Pieta.

“How……”

A small sound escaped through Eve’s tightly pressed lips. Her trembling hand stretched out over the brilliant blue surface of the water.

“Cocytus. The river of memory.”

The man, who had been walking well ahead, turned back and crouched beside Eve.

“Every memory from the moment you were born to the moment you died is dissolved in that river.”

Water lapped and spilled over the edge, soaking the hem of Eve’s skirt where she knelt.

The image of Pieta cradling her newborn self, weeping with joy, began to blur.

No! Eve cried out and clutched at the surface, grasping at something that would not be caught.

‘I’ll name her Eve.’

Another voice from a memory drifted up from the rippling surface where Eve’s hand had touched it.

She snatched her hand back. The water stilled at once, and in its surface appeared Pieta, speaking to someone.

‘……A fine name.’

The moment Eve heard the voice that answered, her expression, desperate and searching for Pieta only a moment before, went cold.

‘To think I would speak that name again like this.’

The person standing naturally at Pieta’s side as she held her newborn child.

Hybris. Her father.

Looking at his wife and child, Hybris was smiling warmly.

“You despicable—!”

Eve drove her fist into the gently trembling surface. Splash! The image of the three of them scattered, then reformed into another scene.

The moment Eve first managed to say the word “Mama.”

The moment she took her very first step.

Pieta had been there for every one of those firsts. But at some point, Hybris was no longer beside them.

The family that had been three in the earliest memories became something that looked like only two, and alongside that change, the days Pieta spent lying in bed, her frail body slowly losing its strength, grew more and more frequent.

Then came one particular night.

Knowing Pieta was ill but unable to bear being apart from her, Eve had lingered in her mother’s room until late into the night.

‘Let your mother rest now.’

That evening, Hybris, whose face had grown rare to see, had come to find them first, for reasons Eve could not fathom.

‘Come now, it’s time to go back.’

The night Hybris sent Eve away with her nursemaid.

‘Pieta, here.’

Eve had looked back as the door was closing. Through that narrow sliver of space, she saw Hybris offering Pieta a cup of tea.

Watching that image reflected on the surface of the water, a familiar scent rose and filled the air around Eve.

“This is……”

It was the scent of Merirose tea. The same tea Eve had been made to drink until the very end.

“……She didn’t die of illness?”

Perhaps what Eve knew was not the whole of it. Perhaps something had been going wrong far longer than she had ever realized.

Creak.

The door reflected on the water’s surface began to slowly close.

The gap narrowed little by little, as though time itself were moving at a crawl.

Hybris, smiling with a warmth she had not seen in years, settling in close beside Pieta. His back filled Eve’s vision completely.

“Stop it!”

Eve reached toward that image. No matter how tightly she grasped, there was nothing to hold.

“Stop it, I said!”

“Hey. Calm down.”

The man, silent until now, caught Eve’s arm as she thrashed desperately at the water.

“These are memories that have already passed. Nothing you do here will change any of it.”

Eve paid him no mind. She wrenched her arm free and thrust her hand back toward the surface with all her strength.

“Father, please……”

Every last bit of her reaching out. And in that moment, her body tilted past the edge of the bridge.

“Hey!”

The man lunged in alarm, trying to catch Eve as she fell over the side.

But all his fingertips managed to catch was the yellow ribbon binding her hair, and it snapped apart like it had never been tied at all.

“No!”

It happened in an instant.

A splash rang out before him, and white spray burst upward.