Hangman Chapter 53

Chapter 53-

The darkness was impenetrable, so deep and absolute, so still and pristine that Gallow did not even realize he was awake, or alive, or existant. The shock of consciousness and remembering that he had a heart and eyes and fingers that could feel was so abrupt that he fell into shock. His breathing became rapid and choppy, the veins in his eyeballs bulged.

“Stop.”

It was the feeling of drowning, not in water, in something else, that made him realize what was happening. The feeling was so familiar, what he’d felt in the Garden of Armony and in Melty’s Dominion. It followed then, that the solution to his panicked drowning was the same as it had been back then: just calm down.

It was easier said than done, but that too was a reasoning he had to fight.

Once his lungs were no longer spasming in fear, he almost kicked himself.

“I’ve been in my soul body this entire time…” he realized. There was no other way to experience that sensation. The same soul that existed in his dreams and deep within the waters of the Spring, where he was a being of pure thought and cognition.

“But if that’s true… then where am I...?”

The darkness was still seemingly impregnable, until he focused his thoughts on what was around him and in front of him. Quickly, the shape of something began to take hold in his vision, it was glossy and reflected the light of his soul back to him.

“Hm?”

He looked the thing up and down, and once he understood what he was seeing, was filled with the fear of God.

For the course of human history, since the time that existential thought was first discussed, philosophers and scientists have debated the nature of time. Was it linear? Recursive? Did it have a shape at all, or was it simply a result of our processing of information?

Time is a crystalline sheet that expands in all directions. As each second passes like a grain of sand, it is burned and smelted into being until it cools and hardens into a 3-Dimensional pane of stained-glass, a tapestry of infinite length. A higher being like Melty Green would have been able to see the pane like anyone would be able to look on a single sheet of glass, but to regular mortals it was an eternal mystery, a secret construction of the universe left up to the philosophers to debate and recant.

Now, that secret had been revealed to Mello Drameda.

The moments after speaking the words, [TONIGHT, TONIGHT], were hazy and confusing. There was a stupendous sound of crashing and grinding, like a massive car pileup, but one that streaked across the sky and throughout the Earth; in fact, it seemed to resonate with everything at the level of the smallest atom.

He stood still, seeing Gallow and Gideon, frozen in place before him, looking glossy and unclear.

It took him some time to understand what was happening, and then he rose quite suddenly outwards, in a direction he did not quite understand, until he was outside of time. The way was difficult to comprehend, many shapes and colors streaked by, and he suddenly realized that they were shapes.

Standing atop time, Mello’s eyes twinkled. It very clearly resembled a block of glass, but it was strange, he could look upon the whole thing at once, every angle, every edge, but all from his single vantage point.

The instant his mind was able to grasp the pane, he felt very light and insubstantial.

“What-?” he thought. “What’s happening to me? Why is my body-?”

And again, a realization struck him. He was no longer in his body, he was peering at eternity from his soul. Mello looked down at his hands, the color of pale lavender, and rubbed his fingers together on each of them. To his surprise, the feedback of touch was not through his nerves, but rather a fundamental understanding of what was happening. He was a being of pure understanding.

“Tiger.”

Mello faced the voice with a start, his killer instincts still sharp. When he turned, he was struck with puzzlement. It was Gallow, standing before him some unknowable distance; it could have been a foot, it could have been ten miles, but it didn’t matter as long as they were aware of one another.

What was more puzzling than this unprecedented sense of space was Mello’s sheer lack of desire. This was his enemy, and perhaps the greatest enemy he would ever face, the man prophesied to bring calamity to Mello’s dream, and had. Yet, as he looked upon him, with his flowing coat and gentle locks of hair bathed in the pale blue glow of his spirit, Mello felt no desire to kill him at all.

“Tiger,” Gallow repeated. “What have you done?” His voice was shaky, it betrayed the fear he’d first felt when first gazing at the pane.

Mello looked from Gallow to the pane of eternity, and a look of sadness crossed his face.

“My name is Mello,” he said. Gallow was taken aback at his forwardness, unexpected from such a secretive assassin. “Mello Drameda,” he continued. “Your name’s Gallow, right?”

Again, Gallow found himself surprised at Mello’s casual tone.

“Yeah,” he answered tersely, keeping his guard up.

“At one time it was Ajax Clarke, wasn’t it?”

Gallow’s lips parted in confusion, clearly there was something to these questions that was not entirely hostile.

“At one time,” he repeated in reply. “How do you know that?”

“I can see it, can’t you?” Mello gestured to the pane, as if expecting Gallow to make out something he saw.

“See?” Gallow looked out over eternity and understood what it was, but not whatever Mello was apparently seeing.

“Yeah,” Mello’s voice became soft, oddly and uncharacteristically vulnerable as he pointed to different spots. “Right there you are on the way here,” he pointed somewhere else. “And there you are a few years ago, were you in the military? And there- you’re a boy and you look like, well, I guess that’s your mother…”

Gallow followed Mello’s finger but couldn’t make out anything in the glass.

“You… you see all that?” he asked cautiously, feeling a small lump form in his throat.

“Yeah,” Mello looked finally to Gallow once more. “I can finally see all of it.”

Silence filled the space between them.

Gallow spoke, “Can you see up to the present?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see…” Gallow couldn’t expel the words from his throat, they were blocked up by that lump that had formed. The question had remained in his mind for years, ever since that night at the orphanage, like a hanged man whose corpse was never taken down, it remained and rotted until he could work up the courage to take it down. In the end, he could not.

“Do you know if there’s a point beyond the present?” he asked. “Do you know if the future exists?”

Mello’s jaw tightened up, a few small tears rolled down his cheeks, leaked out by his scarlet eyes.

“Yes,” he said in a trembling voice. “I know.”

“Gallow?” Mello called in a restrained voice.

Gallow answered with his eyes.

“What do you want?”

“Huh?”

Mello’s hands twitched, dispelling his anxiety.

“What do you want in your life?” he clarified. “What do you want to mean?”

Gallow chuckled and looked downwards into the abyss.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” he said. “I’m a little jealous of people who do. Why do you ask?”

Mello swallowed hard before speaking.

“I’m beginning to think that what we want to be and what we will be are completely out of our control.”

Gallow took a sharp breath inward.

“Do you mean…?” his voice carried so much terror, so much…

Mello continued, raising his hand.

“What is a Vocation, Gallow?”

Gallow couldn’t answer fully, not in the way that he knew Mello wanted, and so Mello continued.

“People like you and me were blessed with these abilities for a reason, and as surely as mankind killed God, this Vocation, my Tonight, Tonight, will let me shatter what gave it to me.”

“Mello,” Gallow whispered. “What are you talking about?”

Mello faced him again, his eyes blazing with cool, bone-chilling fire.

“The world is an evil thing, every one of its mechanisms was put here to slow down our dreams. It hates us, Gallow, so much that it wants to be rid of us. When our bodies die, we become a part of the world, and it wears away our memory until that’s dead too, and as that passes, so do our dreams. A man is not dead until his dream dies.”

Mello’s words sent waves of chill down Gallow’s spine, to listen to him speak was an almost preternatural experience.

He continued;

“With this Vocation, my dream will never die. My memory will never fade, Gallow,” his voice began to seethe with passion. “My soul will be stained on every shard of glass you see and more, my identity will become meaningless, I’ll finally be a man of action! I’ll cast off everything that binds me to the Earth!

Don’t you see, Ajax? Gallow? I hate it! I’ll overcome it!” By this time, his impassioned gusto had flourished into a stark-raving roar, he stood feet apart and arms stretched outwards, as if ready to embrace the whole Earth. “I haven’t lost until I’m dead!!”

“Mello!”

Gallow’s words were unable to reach him before he vanished from sight. His eyes darted around frantically, looking for any sign of movement, until he caught something out of the corner of his eye: a beam of light, dancing around the pane where it had not been before.

“Mello!”

Gallow dove towards the glass. The closer he flew to it, the more gigantic he realized it was. It was not actually one whole piece, but rather broken up into countless shards that were in such tight formation that they appeared to be solid when viewed from above.

It was a dizzying sight, far too much to take in. The sheer size of eternity was barely able to be grasped from above, now that he was surrounded by these mountains of time, it was all he could manage to see them as more than just shards.

“Mello… Mello… I need to find you!”

The imprint of Mello’s soul was memorable, ironic for a secretive man like him, and Gallow was forced to close his eyes and sense around where he felt him to be.

“Over… there?”

Upon closer inspection, Gallow saw that the mountains weren’t even whole themselves, they were also cracked and broken, massive crags lined the walls which he flew nearer to. Inside the cracks, he could almost see something…

He reached a hand out and slipped into the crack. His mind and body were forced through a strange, existential experience. He couldn’t remember what happened the moment Tonight, Tonight was activated; everyone was likely unaware of what was happening save for Mello himself. Now, Gallow felt the same otherworldly sensation of moving in the fourth direction, easing back into a sliver of time. It was strange, wrong, really; his mortal bearings couldn’t have comprehended it, yet his Vocation allowed for him to understand it.

When he opened his eyes, he was in a place completely unfamiliar to himself. Immediately, he saw a lake; then something else became apparent to him.

Storm.

Mud.

Rain.

Was this right? There was no one around, for one, and Gallow was certain that Mello would start for Sonsee or for his own physical body. Why would his impression be here? Then, as he hung in the air for a second longer, he was able to understand something else about the scene.

Suffering.

“Huh?”

He looked around until he saw something in the dirt and mud, hidden by the overflow. A woman was lying on the ground, her lower half on its side and her back on the ground in a horribly uncomfortable position. Her hair was long and black; her skin, even caked with mud, shone under the faint moonlight, her dying eyes were a brilliant shade of red.

“What the-? What is this woman doing here? Why is this place tied to Mello?”

His senses turned his gaze downward; a stream of blood, so diluted in filthy rainwater that it was nearly invisible, streamed from between the woman’s legs. At her feet, just a few feet away, a newborn infant was crawling through the muck. It scraped its weak hands against the ground, straining its soft muscles to pull itself further and further.

Looking upon this scene, Gallow was struck with grief, the kind of empathy for the suffering that stabs one in the stomach and twists the further one is forced to look at it. The understanding came down upon him like the torrents of rain: This was Mello Drameda.

For a brief instant, he pondered whether or not he could change the future from inside this place. He wondered, just for a heartbeat, if he could kill this child.

Gallow’s memories replayed in his mind; the degree of suffering this one man had caused, how many lives? How many had died just in one day? How many were driven to follow him? They had seen something in Mello’s dream, enough to stake their lives on it.

“Who would die for someone else?”

In a way, he understood dying for a loved one, but a leader? It didn’t make sense to him that a free man would die for their general, their commander, their king. But Susarion… had Mello given a man like him purpose? Meaning?

“Was I willing to die for Janna’s dream?”

Gallow felt frozen, nothing was certain. The look in Noire’s eyes as he ripped off the mask echoed in his mind like a dead-ringer.

“If I kill him here, what did that mean?”

Gallow’s hands were near to trembling, his feet, planted firmly in the air, felt rooted in place.

He clenched his fist, shaking himself. He let out a nervous gasp of a laugh.

“What am I talking about?” He took one more look at the newborn Mello. “Could I kill a baby?” The feeling in his heart was fickle, like the needle of a broken compass, but he had to move past it. There was a better way to win.

Closing his eyes, Gallow felt that same broken compass point to the fourth direction, which he moved into and out of the shard. This time, the voyage felt shorter, he was getting more used to moving in the fourth dimension.

Gallow looked around once more and focused.

“Don’t look for Mello,” he realized. “Look for Sonsee and Janna, and I’ll find him.”

He felt himself rising up, high above the glassy mountains of time into the pitch black atmosphere. It was impossible for him to search through all of time for his friends, so he needed to track them like a bloodhound.

“Remember their faces,” he thought, concentrating himself. “Remember what their souls sounded like…

Sound?”

Gallow could recall distinctly the noise of their souls; whenever he left his body, a faint resounding noise echoed off of them. No other time before had he truly taken into account the fact that each tone was different. Janna sounded like a small set of bells, Sonsee was like rain hitting a great brass bowl.

Staring into the massive expanse of time, he was utterly overcome by its sheer magnitude. How could he pinpoint a single place and moment in time? The gargantuan shards floated around him; the beam of light was nowhere to be seen, Mello was probably far ahead of him.

“Think!” he commanded himself. “You’re not stupid, you can figure this out! There was a sound every time I left my body, so something had to cause that, right? What caused it? There has to be some kind of mechanic that I just don’t understand yet-”

As soon as he finished his thought, something obvious occurred to him.

“Okay, maybe I am stupid.”

The answer was painfully simple.

“Just don’t think about it,” he realized. “This place is nothing but reason, if I give in to it, I have to understand something.”

Gallow relaxed himself, his shoulders eased back and his head tilted upward. The doubt and anxiety clouding his chest evaporated in seconds. For a minute, he contemplated nothing at all. Among these great mountains of eternity, with their shimmering peaks and scattered shards, the glowing cracks that spiderwebbed throughout their walls, all of history was contained, and the time long before that, and even before that.

And the future…

Was it real? As his mind unwound, Gallow thought to himself that he didn’t care as much now as he did just a moment ago with Mello.

“All I need to know is that there is an answer, what it is doesn’t matter. All I need is the peace of mind that even in a place like this, there is an answer…”

Suddenly, the answer came to him. As if his mind was a knot, the gradual loosening of its many strings allowed the solution to sneak its way in undetected, until it was clear.

“Of course,” muttered to himself, all alone. “I’ll find just where they are.”

He reached his hand out, glowing a brilliant pale blue; six small round cylinders, the same color as his soul, burnt to life round his wrist. The process came naturally, the words came naturally.

“[NAVIGATOR- BLUES]!!”

The cylinder nearest the top of his wrist burst into a thin shot of flame that arced through space. He closed his eyes and looked around, multiple waves of sound spread through the air like drops of rain on a lake. All sorts of different noises burst from the mountains, a symphony of souls that would have crushed him had he not known what to listen for.

Gallow’s eyes opened as easily as the smile on his face.

“Got it!”

He dashed off in the direction of the tones he was searching for. After some time spent traveling, he saw a shard floating in space. It was isolated from the others around it, it would have appeared very clearly to be broken from above. This was the best case for ground zero of Tonight, Tonight, the most jagged, broken looking piece of time.

Entering the shard, his stomach plummeted.

Describing time in a place outside of time is oxymoronic, so Gallow could not have known when Mello reached this point, it could have been virtually any moment after he stole away.

Mello dropped down into the sliver of time, a sheer instant. From inside, everything looked strange, like the world was drowned in water, it all had a dark blue coloration. Hitting the ground, he was back on the torn-up street surrounded by frost, ash, and corpses. The first person he focused on was Sonsee.

“I’m sorry, woman, but you’re one of the few who know too much now…” He glanced for a moment at Noire’s body, then back at her. “And you’re the easiest to eliminate before I kill Gallow. Goodbye.”

With that, he stepped towards her, his soul body rushing forward with incredible ease, swaying from side to side as he kicked off the ground. He spun around as he reached her, his bare hands slicing through her body like paper.

“No!!!”

Mello looked upwards and smirked.

“Gallow…” his calmness was remarkable and unsettling. “Come here, face me.”

Gallow landed; crimson streaks had opened across Sonsee’s body where Mello had struck, blood on the cusp of spilling.

Before any words could be exchanged, they lunged for each other. Before Gallow had reached Mello, he touched off the ground and launched himself upward and backward.

“What?!” Mello felt a spike of frustration, time was in the grasp of his hand, he was through with waiting for what he wanted, and he desperately, dearly wanted to kill Gallow.

Gallow stretched his hand out towards Mello and cried:

“[BLUES]!”

“Blues?”

Unseen by Mello, a second cylinder burst to life, burning up as a streak of flame launched forth. He rolled out of the way of the direct shot, but was launched away as it struck the ground, letting out a spherical blast of blue flame.

Mello adapted quickly, using the momentum of the explosion to land with a running start. He kicked off the ground and flung himself into the blown-out window of a nearby building.

It was some kind of office, a series of desks were laid out with lamps and paperwork strewn about. Evidently, the employees had tried to evacuate, as there were still two or three heading for the door.

Running forth into the hall, Mello quickly took stock of what had happened.

“That’s not his Vocation-!” he analyzed. “Blue, did he say? What was that?” He turned a corner and was hit by an idea.

“In the same way that my Vocation evolved, has his too?”

Ducking into a nearby office space, he jumped to the corner of the ceiling and pushed his fingers into the wall, holding himself in place. It was the same method of hiding he’d used to end the Andeidra-Demeena War, how he’d ambushed President Perren. Now, he’d lie in wait for Gallow to search for him through the building; from this angle, he couldn’t have seen him through the windows, so going inside was the only option.

Suddenly, one of the walls he was gripped to quaked and burst apart, another sphere of flame enveloping his body.

Tossed to the floor, Mello writhed in pain, his entire soul body charred by the attack, he was thrown into two wooden desks, knocking them over and tossing the papers into the air. As this was only an instant, the desk and papers both remained falling almost immediately after he had stopped moving them.

“What the hell?” he spat, his breath heaving. “How did you-?”

Gallow stood in the doorway beside the wall he’d blown open. After striking Mello with Blues, Gallow had heard the distinct noise of his soul, it resounded clearly in Gallow’s ears, and even as Mello escaped from him, the din followed him like a trail.

“You don’t hear that?” Gallow asked with a kind of genuine curiosity.

“Hear what?!” Mello held his arm in pain, grimacing with pain.

“The sound of your soul body,” Gallow replied.

Mello shifted on the floor, eyeing something that had spilled off the desk and was now floating in space.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Gallow thought for a second and explained, “It’s like the sound of a sharp rock scraping through leather.”

Mello stared into Gallow’s eyes. The noise of the explosion, the slamming of desks and the things thrown off of them, they hung in the air in a muted, otherworldly way. Then, without warning, he kicked himself off the ground; in the air were two shards of glass from an inkwell that had shattered in the commotion, the cloud of ink floating above his head. Mello grabbed the shards between his fingers and cascaded his body backwards through the air. Before Gallow knew it, five shards of jagged glass were flying at him; he was fast enough to dodge them with ease, but Mello knew that. He took the opportunity to take a running start out the window of the office.

As his feet left the window sill, Mello realized that he was not bound to gravity as he was in his physical body, he didn’t even need to use Spaceboy.

“This is it!” he realized. “This is the ultimate spite! Not bound by the real world, this Vocation is the final form of my dream!”

He flew so gracefully through the air, like a leaf carried by the wind. Mello felt like he could reach out and grasp the future at last, his heart shone brilliantly.

Before his shimmering had gone on any longer, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

“What-?”

Gallow’s hand was on his shoulder, hand on his back. They floated there in space for a second, Mello’s eyes wide with despair and anger.

It was checkmate.

Gallow held him above the ground so steadily that the emptiness beneath their feet was like solid ground.

“Mello,” he said. “I want you to know that I don’t hate you.”

Mello’s jaw quivered beneath his stony eyes.

“I hate you,” he replied.

Without even looking him in the eye, Mello’s voice alone communicated his crackling, icy hatred.

“There’s something I want you to see…” Gallow whispered.

In a flash, they moved out of the shard and up above the pane. Their bodies moved at immeasurable speeds over unknowable distances.

“Gallow…” Mello thought to himself, watching the mountains of time flow past like the currents of a river. “Even here… Even now… Freed from the limits of time… Your calamity laps at my feet like a dog.”

When they reappeared, Mello felt the strength leave his body. It was shocking; his knees hit the thick mud.

“What…” he sputtered, breathing heavily. “What is this place?!”

When his vision had sharpened, he fell back to his seat and saw an expanse of lake before him. An iron maiden smashed shut on his heart.

“NO!” he cried, gnashing his teeth. “Why am I here?! Why did you bring me-?!”

“Look,” Gallow quieted him with a single word. The sun was coming up, painting the sky in what warm shades could be intuited through the blue veil drawn over every shard of time. The leaves of nearby trees shook in the morning breeze that carried the sweet singsong of birds.

Gallow’s hand gestured to something behind them. With great burden, Mello tightened his fist and threw himself forward onto his knees once more. His breathing labored, he forced his legs to move, lifting up his scarred and burned spirit. When he was on his feet, he turned around, causing his vision to blur once again. When it was finally clear, he looked in the direction Gallow had motioned to.

“What?” he panted. “I don’t…”

His eyes glanced downwards, and he saw a newborn in the dirt. The instant he realized it, the infant’s cries came into focus. The realization appeared in his mind as sharply as the child’s howl. The exhaustion that had set into his body wasn’t physical, it couldn’t have been; this place was weighing down his very soul.

“Before I came here,” Gallow explained calmly. “I was curious, so I stopped by a place I have a strong memory of.”

Mello struggled to look behind him at his enemy, his eyes radiated anger as Gallow continued.

“I just want to know why you hate this place so much.”

“Shut up, you…” Mello’s voice dripped with disgust. He saw his mother’s body, laying still on the ground. The mud had partly dried overnight, as if the Earth was slowly taking her back, sealing her below ground.

His heart sank peculiarly. He’d never seen his mother, never known her, he had never really thought of her. Seeing her corpse here, with a stillness greater than that of even the frozen time, it sent a shudder through him, the awakening of his history.

“You know,” Gallow started. “I don’t know if you care, but you have your mother’s eyes.”

Mello turned around quite suddenly, his sanguine eyes burned so hot that Gallow could feel the heat radiating off of his soul. The swiftness of his movement seemed to indicate a change in his heart, but Gallow had little time to react or contemplate this, as Mello burst forward at such a velocity that his body was a blur.

Gallow’s last-second block came in with just enough time to intercept the blow, but the sheer force was like a train crashing into him at full speed. He dug his boots into the ground, but couldn’t stop himself from sliding backwards from the incredible explosion of energy; it continued blasting him in waves as Mello’s fist kept contact with him. Gallow’s hair blew violently in the wind, and eventually he lost his footing and was sent sharply backwards, gliding out over the surface of the water.

He’d skid easily thirty feet before stopping. Mello shot forth again, leaping into the air and closing in on him within a single bound. Gallow dove deep underwater, trying to use it as a cushion for Mello’s strikes. He sped downwards at breakneck speed, reaching near the bottom before looking up to see a speck of shadow touch the water’s surface.

Mello had fallen from the sky, leg poised to kick the surface. The instant he drove his boot into the lake, an astounding force rocked everything within a ten foot diameter of the point of impact. Gallow felt the water around him heat up to a near boil, and then rise, shot upwards by Mello’s attack. A pillar of water ten feet wide and thirty feet tall launched into the air, leaving nothing around Gallow but open air and walls of undisturbed water frozen in time.

Mello rocketed downwards like a shooting star; Gallow aimed up at him and cried out the command:

“[NAVIGATOR- BLUES]!!”

At once, three of the flame capsules were consumed, sent skyward as a roaring missile. The three tones of his Vocation had become a single chord that nearly cut instantly through Mello’s body.

As he tumbled down into the pillar, Mello felt no pain. He hit the ground and sent a shockwave through the lake floor, standing up effortlessly. There was a hole in the surface of his arm; pale blue flames remained, burning away slowly at his soul.

Mello’s eyes looked for a moment as if they’d expelled the same crimson light contained within. He drew his arm back as shadows suddenly darkened them from above. The pillar of water was coming back down to crush them.

In a flash, Mello raged forward, trading blows with Gallow one-for-one; one to the head, one returned to the stomach, one blocked by the arm and redoubled. Their movements were as lightning fast as the speed of sound, and when the water finally rushed down into the space they’d carved out, they were both swept up by the rapid flow. Gallow and Mello swirled around, watching each other.

“Gallow…” Mello swore. “Before this fire consumes my body, I will kill you!”

They were only six feet apart when Mello abruptly disappeared from view. He flashed back a moment later, behind Gallow, his fist barreling forth.

“DIE!!!”

A great explosion of pale blue light rocked his body from the side.

“AGH!!” he couldn’t even comprehend what had hit him. Gallow had turned around in the water and was staring at him calmly.

“When did he fire… A second shot…?”

Gallow’s second chord-bullet had pierced him straight through his midsection, not a grazed shot like the first, but a critical, fatal blow.

The blue flame raged through Mello’s body, burning him up from the inside. His body was almost completely separated top from bottom, only a few pieces of it remaining intact.

They stayed there underwater for a few seconds as Mello was gradually incinerated.

“Mello,” Gallow asked honestly. “Where do you want to go?”

The dying man’s eyes looked wildly and desperately at him.

“What do you want?” Gallow insisted in an earnest tone; his hair swirled in the water, there wasn’t any anger in his eyes, even as he looked at Mello. “How long have you spent your life angry?”

Mello didn’t even have enough strength to close his fist when Gallow glided through the water to him.

“Just take it away, you can go there.”

---

The air was humid and the breeze passed lazily through the tall grass, Mello felt it brush against his legs. The sun was high, not a single cloud painted the sky. For miles and miles around there was nothing but fields, a dirt pathway led far off into the horizon and branched.

A little house stood nearby, a farmhouse. It’s white-stained wooden walls were decorated with potted plants, and a flowerbed lay at the west side.

An intense calmness washed over Mello’s body. It was deeper than that, though, for the first time in his life, his heart was at ease.

“Is this…?” he couldn’t finish his sentence when he saw someone move behind the window of the house.

Was this a sliver of the past, in some time, in some place? Was this the future? For so long had he relished in his absent tomorrow, it was as if, for this moment, it was present.

Mello looked behind him, where Gallow was standing peacefully in the tall grass.

“Gallow…” he said softly.

Gallow replied with a clear voice, like a mountain stream,“Go on, it’s coming to the door.”

Mello looked back and saw the door open. He took a step closer, then another, until he was walking steadily to the porch.

Abruptly, he stopped, his senses came to him very startlingly.

“Before I go,” he stated with a stony voice, restraining his emotions. “I first heard of you from an oracle.”

“An oracle-?” Gallow was taken aback.

“They didn’t speak to me in Andeidra, they contacted me from their place in New Hopeland, through my mind.”

Gallow’s brow furrowed.

“Through your mind?” he asked cautiously.

“I thought that it was an angel at first,” he responded.

Gallow’s eyes dilated.

“Where were they- in New Hopeland-?” he asked, his voice edging towards frantic.

“They didn’t say where exactly, but they said that if I were to ever look for them, to go to the Serpent Isles.”

“The Serpent Isles?”

The location sounded familiar to him, where had he hear it-?

“Of course!” Gallow thought. “Where Disael’s father was from! But… what does that mean?”

Mello had spoken without turning his back, and as he stepped forward, his last thoughts echoed from his mind to Gallow’s as if he were speaking out of his soul.

“What a pretty house, he thought. “What a pretty garden.”

Gallow watched him stride through the grass and climb the porch steps.

“Mello…” he lamented quietly to himself, heart swirling with questions. “What did you want?”