Violet Evergarden

Chapter 5

The Prisoner and the Auto-Memories Doll

Ashen snow danced about nimbly. It all started with a single flake, morphing into several others flocking together and eventually covering the soil. For villages that had not prepared for colder periods, travelers crossing highways on foot, and fields and mountains where vestiges of autumn still lingered, the manifestations of winter made its power known.

Why did the four seasons exist? There was no one that could possibly answer such question, yet it was incontestable that said seasons were necessary, since they repeatedly regulated life and death and assisted the world's cycle so that it would not delay.

In the middle of a certain battlefield, a girl observed the sky. As the white cold substance slowly floated down, the girl asked the Lord beside her, "What is that?"

"That's snow, Violet." taking off his gloves that smelled of gunpowder smoke, the Lord held an open hand in front of her. A flake descended onto it and soon liquefied.

The girl let out a puff at the oddness of the sight. For the first time, she attempted saying the name of the substance that had dissolved in her Lord's hand, "Snow..." Hers was the intonation of a small child that had just started to learn words.

"That's right, 'snow'."

"Are there... types of snow that melt... and types that don't?" the girl turned towards a dead body on the ground that still held onto a weapon. Snow amassed over it like a coat of powdered sugar.

There was not only one corpse. Around the area the two found themselves in, countless soldiers' bodies were scattered all over the frigid earth, as if they had been abandoned without so much as graves to reside in.

"The one on Major's hand melted. The one on those corpses... did not." she pointed at them with the battle-axe in her hand.

Making no comment on her lighthearted attitude towards the deceased, the Lord merely lowered the weapon down. "Snow fluxes when it comes in contact with warmth. If it falls onto cold things, it merely piles up. Give me your hand."

The girl did exactly as told. As the Lord removed her glove, which was of the same color as his own, her pale hand was exposed. Snow fell onto her porcelain-like skin as well, turning into water. For a second, the girl, whose doll-like face lacked emotion, widened her eyes.

"It melted..." She exhaled again with a, "Hooh..."

One could not discern the expression on the Lord's gaze as he watched her reaction from the side. He seemed just as aloof. Once he wiped the droplet on her hand with a finger, he added, "As it evidently would."

"Is that so? I thought... it might not melt on my hand."

The envoys of ice that cascaded from the sky continuously touched the girl's hand and the Lord's one that grasped it, melting onto the two palms of different sizes.

"So I, too, am warm." The girl stated the obvious with the tone of someone that had just witnessed a miracle.

"You are... alive. That's why you are warm."

"But... I was often told that... I seem to be made of ice."

"By whom?"

"Well... they might be amongst those that perished..."

With just a glance, it could be noted that, amongst the heaps of dead bodies that lay on the prairie, some wore the same uniform as the girl and the Lord. The girl displayed no signs of sorrow or pain at that fact. Winter wind blew strongly in the space between the two of them with a whistle.