But its innate restraint and the insurmountable gap between them had also forced it to pay a terrible price.
Before long, this wisp of gray mist of death would completely dissipate beneath the sunlight.
"Sir Knight, no!"
The girl on the hospital bed sensed something. Cold sweat beaded across her forehead as she bit down hard on her cherry lips, letting out a mournful murmur in her sleep.
And within the dream.
As the Pale Rider's authority was stripped away, the city from her memories, the smiling pedestrians on the streets, and the birds soaring freely through the sky... all vanished without a trace.
In their place came the stench of death and disease.
The pungent smell of disinfectant flooded her nostrils, while nurses swayed outside the door like zombies.
Kurioka Tsubaki merely hugged her knees in the darkness, wrapped within the Shadow's slumber.
The girl no longer dreamed.
The girl no longer wanted anything.
Because she seemed to have understood the price of having her wishes constantly granted.
If everything had been a lie, nothing more than a daydream, that would have been fine.
But reality was far crueler.
For the sake of her wishes, she had unknowingly hurt many people.
The young girl still did not understand exactly what had happened.
But she understood it personally.
Many people had fallen into suffering because of her.
Because she knew that the doctors and nurses who had cared for her, those she had thought had become her friends, had turned out this way entirely because of her.
—Sorry.
—Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Amid her endlessly repeated self-reproach, even the reason for her apology had become blurred. It merely turned into sediment that continued to deny her very existence.
The world peeled away its surface, and the girl drifted into the void.