So, today was the day of the banquet celebrating Justia’s victory.

‘But why?’

Yantis Kal, the man known as the leader of Justia and the savior of Attica, could not bring himself to believe the scene unfolding before him.

“…Bel?”

Beneath the soft glow of the lights, Yantis’s radiant face twisted in a strange, uncomprehending way.

His clear violet eyes trembled in fine, rapid shivers as they swept frantically over the person standing before him.

Jet-black hair that seemed to dissolve into the dim surroundings, dark eyes he had once thought looked like the night sky transplanted whole, and delicate features set in a small, pale face so white it seemed untouched by a single ray of sunlight. It was unmistakably the Bellus he knew.

He knew how much warmth and color lay hidden beneath that ever-expressionless face, beneath that faded, achromatic stillness. That was precisely why she had been so precious to him, so rare, rare enough to stir a possessiveness in him that was unlike anything he’d ever felt.

And yet, why?

Why was it that from her dry, impassive face standing before him now…

He felt nothing at all?

“Why are you……. Did you hear about our operation? Is that it?”

He swallowed down the question he couldn’t bring himself to ask, the one about why she was here, and in its place spilled out something idiotic and incoherent. It didn’t matter how nonsensical he sounded.

He was simply desperate.

But even as Yantis’s voice trembled like a fragile petal swaying perilously on the edge of a cliff, even as the steady line of his eyes, which she had always touched so gently, crumpled into something pitiable, Bellus’s black eyes remained still. Sunken. Without the faintest flicker of emotion.

Those mineral-flat eyes, looking at him the way one looks at a stranger, made the corner of Yantis’s mouth quiver. The frail smile he had been struggling to hold finally crumbled away.

‘Why? Why are you making that face?’

A vast, consuming dread swallowed him whole, and without thinking, Yantis took a step toward Bellus.

Click.

“Lord Yantis!”

The violet eyes Yantis had once said resembled amethyst froze over like glass. Unable to believe the barrel now leveled at him, more than Natura’s frantic cry, he stared at Bellus with a dazed expression.

His thick lashes trembled helplessly, fluttering in slow, dazed blinks, before his gaze found her eyes again.

And when their eyes finally locked together.

“Don’t come any closer.”

Bellus, who had kept a heavy silence all this time, opened her mouth. Her voice was low and flat, worn into her naturally by a soldier’s life, and it remained as composed and unyielding as ever.

Like someone who had prepared for this sudden standoff dozens of times over.

“…Let me leave.”

The words came low and resonant, her dark eyes dropping slowly, her voice carrying what might have even been a trace of exhaustion. That faint thread of emotion leaking from her yanked Yantis’s mind up from where it had been drowning, submerged deep like something diving through still water.

What filled his frozen eyes at last was a vivid, scorching rage.

‘…She’s going to leave me?’

Did she have any idea what those casually spoken words meant to him? The damp eyes that had been full of confusion and fear just moments before went cold, twisting with a desperate, clinging obsession.

“Bel, how exactly do you plan to get out?”

It was a remarkably composed question, at odds with the roiling turmoil threatening to break loose inside him at any moment. Almost gentle-sounding, even. Yantis spoke the words and then looked at the barrel Bellus was holding steady and straight.

Even now, her stance behind that aimed gun was without a single crack.

The rough revolver in Bellus’s hand had been given a graceful gilded finish under Yantis’s careful attention. The paulownia inlays fitted here and there were all pieces he had carved and lacquered himself.

Had he known, back then, that he would one day be on the receiving end of that barrel?

He wasn’t sure whether the scorn was directed at himself or at her. But Yantis simply waited. Waited for her to realize, quickly, that she was trying to slip through his hands in the worst possible way.

And then, at last, Bellus’s impassive pupils lurched.

“Remember? The mana barrier. I never thought it would end up being used to catch you.”

“……”

Watching the deep dismay spread across Bellus’s face, Yantis laughed. He laughed the way someone cries. His laughter fell from him mechanically, and yet unlike the dryness of his face, it seemed to carry a damp, soaked weight within it.

Among the countless days they had shared, one night came back to him.

A conversation he had with her at the tail end of summer, when the air already carried the cool scent of autumn.

‘I want to see Atlan covered in snow.’

Before those clear eyes that sparkled as though drinking in the stars of the night sky, he had made a promise on impulse.

To look down together at Atlan blanketed in brilliant snowfall.

His violet eyes, tracing the edges of that faint, aching sorrow, glistened with a thin sheen of tears.

So he would not let her go.

The winter he had promised had not yet come.