In those blurred phantoms of time, he wielded blackfire, battling fiercely against those terrifying dark figures. Opponents of that caliber were easily melted down in his flames, but one black-robed figure proved his equal, even overpowering him for a time.
She could not hear their conversation.
The ripples of time concealed far too much, making even the battle itself flicker between clarity and obscurity.
But in the end, he still defeated them.
And when she rushed over, trembling, to help that battered figure up, he gasped violently, as though an immense dark dream were about to pour from his eyes and drag him into that bone-chilling finality.
"What happened... what's wrong with you? What on earth were you fighting?! And those things... those..."
But Lynn did not answer her.
For a long time afterward, Lynn sank into a profound silence.
Sometimes, when she tried to approach him, her outstretched hand passed straight through his body, as though he had never belonged to this history, to this space-time.
The body that housed him seemed to have suffered terribly as well.
That day.
For the first time, she felt panic.
Although she had always said she did not like this man, she certainly did not hate him. At least now, after these thousand years, she did not.
She wanted to know what had happened to him. For the first time, she wanted to care for someone.
But then she discovered.
She did not even know how to do something so ordinary for a person.
All she could do was wait.
Wait, day after day.
She did not know whether something had happened in the future and affected him, or whether something had gone wrong with him personally, causing this terrible effect that seemed to erase him from existence.
And finally, after a