“That’s right, Snow. Everything is my fault. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

Freia spoke gently. With her response, Snow became rather restless. That wasn’t what she had meant to elicit. She didn’t intend to blame anyone. She was certain that Freia was Snow’s past life, yet she suspected they weren’t entirely the same person.

But what was the use of all this now? Snow just felt a dull ache, as if her chest was constricted.

“I miss them. I want to go back. I miss them…”

Freia embraced Snow again. This time, Snow didn’t push her away.

♣ ♣ ♣

“Snow. Do you still think we are ‘God’?”

Freia asked while holding the crying Snow. Snow shook her head, sniffling.

“I don’t know. I remember, but nothing feels real. This garden and lake are clearly places I’ve been before, but they also feel like places I’m visiting for the first time. Everything feels so distant and hazy.”

“…Yes. Actually, I feel the same. I arrived here a little earlier than you, but I haven’t really felt it’s real. So without even thinking of looking around elsewhere, I came straight here and have been staring into this unreal pond.”

Snow turned her gaze back to the pond. The imperial palace was still reflected in it. No, not still. The pond’s time is inconsistent, with past, present, and future all mixed together. The scene Snow was watching was from a bit earlier than the funeral she had seen before.

“Snow. Why did you think you had to stab yourself?”

Freia asked after releasing Snow from her embrace. Snow answered without taking her eyes off the pond.

“I remembered at some point that I might be the Goddess Amir herself. I vaguely recalled what I could do before being a saint, before being Freia. So I thought perhaps I could do it. At that moment, I saw the future, and I became certain.”

“Of what?”

“That the calamity would stop. You, Freia, scattered all your emotions across Akelan as you died, creating the calamity. So I thought the opposite might be possible too—that I could gather all emotions and take them with me. It’s not always possible, but at least at the moment of abandoning a human body and returning to a divine soul, it would be possible. I felt like I could do it.”

“You, instinctively realized it. Right?”

Just as Snow kept questioning because she didn’t fully understand Freia’s words, Freia also seemed to be realizing things as she listened to Snow. The two were truly different beings.

“I’m not sure. I just guessed it might happen that way. But since I saw the future change, whether I returned to the Garden of Beginning, fell into a deep sleep, or truly died and disappeared, I could think that the calamity would end. In fact, I was almost certain I would fall asleep.”

Freia stroked Snow’s head like a mother praising her child.

“You showed great courage.”

Courage. It wasn’t something worth calling courage. Snow had something she feared more than her own death. If she hadn’t made that decision there, Elios, Arianne, and Martadia would all have frozen to death. Snow had stabbed herself essentially because she was afraid of them dying.

Still, the warmth of Freia’s caress felt good.

“God wanted to become human. Joy, sadness, pleasure, dislike, and even hatred—all were envied. So he jumped into the pond. He became Freia Nigritia.”

Freia recited as if telling someone else’s story. As she spoke, the scene in the lake changed. It was young Freia. The baby with fluffy growing blonde hair was always in her nurse’s arms. This was because her mother had died right after she was born.

Time flew by in the blink of an eye, and the baby became a girl. Ian Nigritia held her and spun around. His eyes were full of affection for his sister. Her father, the duke, didn’t even glance at her. He was simply cold.

“I came to know affection, and at the same time indifference.”

Time flew by again. Freia was often ill. She met Ikanel and coughed in his arms. Ikanel was beside himself, wishing he could be sick instead of her.

“I came to know love. Despite my weak body, Freia—I—was happy. But having erased even my memories while intending to return as God someday, I became immersed in human life, and the calamity had already begun from that moment.”

“…You intended to return as God?”

“Though I envied humans and wanted to experience human life, I ultimately considered my essence to be God. Even while abandoning divine powers and jumping into the pond, I thought I would return here someday. How foolish.”

“Why is that foolish?”

Snow had been rather timid, but after recovering Freia’s memories, their personalities had mixed and she had become quite bold. Now, having fully returned to being Snow, she somehow felt very comfortable with Freia. Snow thought this was because they ultimately shared the same origin. Freia felt closer than family and more comfortable than a friend.

“God is a being who has lived for eternity, while humans, in comparison, live but for a moment. What God has felt over eternity, humans feel all at once in their short lifetime and then die, so the intensity cannot be the same. For God, Freia’s brief life would have felt stronger than the strongest alcohol in the world.”

Snow recalled the memories. Indeed, it was so. God didn’t experience major emotional changes. Perhaps that was because of living for such a long time. Despite that, longing and envy for the human world had accumulated bit by bit like crumbs for a very long time until it became unbearably large. But humans felt such enormous emotions in bursts. It was something difficult for God to handle.

In the pond, Freia was now kneeling, captured by knights. The last image of Ian Nigritia surrounded by spears and swords appeared. Snow became urgent. Ian shouldn’t have died like that.

“Now, can’t we change that past from here? We can, can’t we? If we put our hands in the lake and create a few ripples, everything will change.”

“Snow. That era was a time when God didn’t exist. No matter what we do, we can’t change what happened in a time when God didn’t exist.”

Freia touched the pond to show Snow. The pond repelled Freia’s hand as if it had become solid. Just before Ian was stabbed in the pond, the pond reflected a different scene. Both Freia and Snow were secretly relieved, as neither wanted to see that scene anymore.

“God became intoxicated, intoxicated, and intoxicated again. God is omnipotent but also most pure. Though envious of human emotions, it wasn’t something he could endure. Having been so deeply immersed, there was no way he could simply shake it off upon returning to the Garden of Beginning.”

“So you went back.”

Freia finally showed a somewhat unfamiliar expression. It was a face ashamed of her own wrongdoing.

“I had no intention of gathering the divine power raging with sadness spread across the earth. Instead, I returned here and violently overturned the pond water. Though I returned to the Garden of Beginning, my dress gnawed by rats and my front stained with blood remained unchanged. How could I forget? From that moment, I was no longer God.”

Now it seemed Snow should comfort Freia. Snow pulled Freia’s head toward her, just as Freia had done to her earlier. Freia buried her face in Snow’s chest.

“I… couldn’t end it like this. I had envied not only joy and sadness but also hatred, dislike, and pain, but now these negative things became uncontrollably frightening, so this time I decided to go down with better preparation. I wanted to live a perfect life, a painless human life again.”

Freia’s tears fell onto the edge of the pond. Then a cold drizzle began to fall in the Empire. Arianne, with hollow eyes, opened the window and stretched out her hand to wet it with rainwater.

‘Snow. Are you crying?’

Arianne said. She wasn’t wearing priest’s robes, and the place she stood wasn’t the temple. It was some mansion.

It seemed like she could touch Arianne immediately if she just reached her hand a little into the pond. Snow, however, gave up. As Freia had said earlier, the pond might freeze solid if her hand touched it.

“I finally realized that I could no longer live as God. The moment I was stained with human emotions, regardless of my physical form, I had truly become human. God no longer exists. So I issued revelations to God’s servants. A life created by humans. A life doubting God. A life without God. That was their life, I told them.”

Snow knew this too. The revelation was received in various ways in various countries. Most either thought they had just had a meaningless dream or kept the revelation hushed.

Akelan’s previous Ceres received the revelation in the form of a dream. It was different from the revelations that had been loudly engraved on stone tablets until then. He received such a revelation for the first and last time as Ceres. “Forget God,” the Goddess told him in his dream.

So the previous Ceres appointed the calm, leadership-oriented, yet God-doubting young priest Martadia as the next Ceres. With a tiny fear that what he had dreamed might simply be a dream, he couldn’t tell Martadia about the content of the revelation until the end. However, he was confident that she would lead the temple as well as any other Ceres.

“And finally, I issued a revelation to Akelan’s Grand Temple. A child resembling God will be born. Her will is my will, I said. I wanted to give as much as possible to the ‘me’ who would be born anew. I wanted to make it so that the child born to receive God’s revelation would be revered and live without knowing pain, sadness, or suffering. I didn’t want to hurt anymore.”

“That’s not all, is it?”

Snow pointed out sharply.

“Freia. You didn’t gather the calamity, and you knew you weren’t in a state to judge properly. So you postponed the choice to your future self. You entrusted everything to the child who would be born, to ‘me.'”

—She shall be born. One who will receive my breath shall be born.
Her breath is my breath,
Her smile is my smile,
Her anguish is my anguish.