It was as though yesterday had replayed itself—the deepest nightmare within a dream, an abyss she would rather die than face again.∽↗,
Yet at this moment, it was laid out before her in its entirety.
Pain had once crisscrossed the heart of the young princess. Even after decades of healing, it remained impossible to mend within the heart of the aged queen.
An endless gray wilderness stretched out before her, painted in a single monotonous color. The air was cold and acrid. Gray snow drifted down from the sky, yet when it landed on her hand, she realized it was merely a thin layer of dust.
The boundless gray dust fell from the sky, settled upon the earth, and covered everything. Thick gray soil rose all the way to her knees.
Some tree branches stood in the distance, gray as well. Before she could even approach, they had already crumbled into flying ash. This monotonous, sole color outlined the shape of the world. The surroundings were utterly silent, devoid of both sound and life.
The Silver Queen walked forward in a daze, one foot sinking deeper than the other, like a puppet. She trudged across the endless plain, her eyes filled with nothing but emptiness. She already knew what she would witness, yet she could not stop herself from moving forward.
Occasionally, rumbling sounds came from above the thick, heavy black clouds. A blood-red bolt of lightning pierced the cloud layer and wound its way into the distance along the clouds, illuminating the undulating mountain ranges far away.
This was the only evidence that time was passing in this world.
She did not know how long she had walked. The world remained eternally silent and unchanged, until she saw the shadows of several towering hills. They were the corpses of