Within the hall, a flight of forty-seven steps connected the terrace to the interior. A crimson carpet ran down from the top, and a gloomy portrait of Edward, the seventeenth High Priest of the Moonless Sanctuary, hung above the passage. He was thin and gaunt, holding a staff in one hand.
Brando and Freya stood on opposite ends of the staircase, one on the terrace and the other in the hall. Their gazes met across its length.
Freya drew a deep breath. It was as if she had been living in a dream—a dream that had begun in Buchi, passed through Ridenburg and Brags, the Royal Knight Academy, Ambersell, Jandernel, and the battlefield of Manowell, and finally arrived here. The scenes of the dream shifted until this very moment. "Brando, am I dreaming? I'm standing here, and this is Madara's capital. Did you really do it? Just as you promised us, Buchi has returned to Eluin, the village has been rebuilt, and everyone has gone back to their homeland. We followed the road we fled along that day and returned to the embrace of the Yusong Mountains. Is that nightmare concerning Madara really over?"
Brando looked down at the girl who had tied her light-brown hair into several bundles behind her head. Her long ponytail had been cut much shorter after the battle of Ambersell, leaving only shoulder-length hair. The locks she had cut off, bearing her grief for her comrades, had been laid in the snow-white tombs of the Holy City alongside withered Eluin lilies.
Freya's eyes were brighter than they had been in that era—more confident and more resolute, like gleaming brown gems. Her heroic brows were raised high. There was no longer any confusion, weakness, or hesitation in them, nor the deep weariness that remained most vivid