Dim candlelight spread along the direction of the curtains. At the edge of the light stood a beauty who looked as though she had been carved from ice. Her face, emerging from the darkness, resembled the ethereal snow fairy described in myths, yet her straight nose and chin seemed carved with a chisel, every line sharply defined. She was watching the young man before her, and from time to time, a deep-blue glimmer flashed in the depths of her eyes. The young man sat on a dusty wooden crate, his body slumped and brows tightly furrowed. He propped his cheek on one hand, his elbow braced against his thigh, while unconsciously grinding the glass shards scattered through the dust beneath a pair of polished riding boots.
The sharp fragments glittered in the candlelight like pearls among grains of sand.
"Grita, you seem rather impatient?" The woman's voice seemed to come from beneath the abyss of a nightmare, like a biting Ice Wind sweeping past. Everything it touched froze, giving off a brittle rustling sound that made ordinary mortals' hair stand on end. But the young man called Grita was no mortal. More precisely, he was dead. The dead could not feel cold, because they had no body temperature at all. Hearing the question, Grita raised his head and fixed the Queen of the Banshees with the deep-red Soul Fire in his eyes, flickering like surging blood plasma.
He then revealed an elegant smile, one even more refined than that of the most genteel human gentleman. Yet it appeared incongruously on a colorless, cold, rigid face. It did not seem eerie in the least; instead, it gave people the feeling of basking in a spring breeze. "You already know the answer, Ms. Alvitt. I never wanted to come to this godforsaken