756
"...A dream?"
Colin murmured to himself.
Although neither Colin Iliad nor Lovia quite understood what the Dark Angel Sasrir meant, the gloom, dread, and horror inherent in those words still affected them, giving them the illusion of a bone-piercing chill and trembling bodies and minds.
He still did not dare raise his head and look straight into the golden eyes of the God of gods as Klein did. Looking at his toes, he repeated as though delirious:
"Only... a dream?"
The sparse yet magnificent chapters of history in their general education textbooks, the eternally radiant Earthly Heaven before darkness descended, that epic of a being attended by countless angels and surrounded by the Eight Kings of Angels-had all of it merely been a dream God Almighty had while asleep?
Then what were we?
Your dream ended, but what did that make us, Your believers who had truly struggled in the darkness for over a thousand years, who had only survived by personally killing one family member after another? By-products of a dream? Remnants of an old age You refused to acknowledge?
Colin could find no answer for the moment. He felt that this situation held a despair similar to "the Lord was dead," yet was even more complicated and unsettling. But if he had to choose, he would rather the Lord had died than awakened from sleep and refused to acknowledge His believers-even if, to a god, they truly were insignificant, as small as grains of sand and as inconspicuous as dust.
"How could that have been a dream?"
Lovia scratched at her face with both hands. Before the supreme being of her own pathway, she had already exhausted most of her strength and dignity merely to avoid prostrating herself in worship, but now she succumbed beneath the tremendous