Nobody Answered

"…And so, in the blink of an eye, a blizzard swept across the North. All things froze solid, as though everything had vanished in an instant.
Amidst the extreme cold, no story could ever again begin with the words ‘Once upon a time’.

This was the final stroke inscribed by the heavens in blood to mark the strife, and the snow was the most merciful edict of the heavens’ own decree.
Thereafter, the words yet to be told from the fragmentary manuscript began anew from this point.

———May the beat of the rain‑invoking drums resonate in unison with the sound of snow falling in your homeland."

The birth of Vegtelen was the lingering legacy of a conflict in the North.

He had never imagined that he would be forcibly dragged from the gap between the army of the Gods and the army of the “Iron Fist”—dragged from beneath the battle standards of the two opposing armies, which had already fallen and become entangled after the remnants of both forces had been frozen into ice sculptures by an extraordinary blizzard.

The first sound he heard in this world was the rustling of the battle standards as they fell back to the ground, mingled with his own gasping breaths and the violent pounding of his heart—that heart to which death had granted life: chaotic, out of place, and having arrived far too suddenly.

When he finally managed to struggle free from beneath the fabric of the battle standards and fell backward onto the center of the battlefield, attempting to gather his wits after the chaos, a biting gale howled past, swiftly refreezing the fabric that had long since been soaked by melting snow—solidifying it into ice, a monument to this eternal battle formation.

Those dark‑gray eyes, symbolizing deathly silence and military might, finally opened. The first thing to catch his gaze was neither his own disheveled winter robe, nor the fierce battle that had come to an abrupt halt—
but rather the midnight sky, so blue it was almost pitch black, with snowflakes still swirling within it.

The snow continued to fall.
The earth lay blanketed in silver‑white, where the sacred and the desolate coexisted.

…Perhaps after that, all battlefields melted away into this snow‑white world.
For on this icy frontier, at the very moment Vegtelen was born,
the wind and the snow were the beginning of all things.
For they never ask who the traveler is.

How could a newborn child know from the very beginning that he bore the souls of those whose bodies had been sealed by frost?

Perhaps this truth only dawned upon him upon beholding the statues of the valiant warriors within his field of vision. For the faces of all those warriors appeared so unfamiliar yet strangely familiar to his eyes.

Each ice sculpture preserved their final gesture as they fought until the unexpected struck: charging into battle, collapsing from exhaustion, transforming their flesh and blood into martyred monuments, etched into the scene of clashing blades—whether they believed in the gods or blasphemed against them, whether they harboured no hope or had fallen from the heavens. Those lingering echoes churned ceaselessly within his thoughts, day and night.

Then he reached out and touched the ice sculpture of one of these nameless generals.

……Nobody answered his question.

"Where do I come from?"

But he no longer asked who he was.
For even before that, the sky had already told him the answer.

———It was the shaman’s drum found in the hands of this nameless general.

Its owner unknown.

As the constellations shifted and the stars shone brilliantly,
though it was the depths of winter, the scene remained ethereal.

In truth, he did not fear the cold, for the frozen wasteland was his homeland.
He could harbor no nostalgia. Were he to carry such thoughts with him, he would become the very calamity of the past.

Vegtelen gazed silently at the night sky:

"Whose fall, exactly, shaped my soul?"

The bloodstained yet pure remnants of the army surged forth:

"Who else but us!"
"None have gone back on their word beneath our blades!"

…………

"…None have gone back on their word."

Under his touch, his bell drum emitted its first beat: muffled yet piercing through wind and frost, heavy yet supple.
Until the cold wind stirred by the drumbeat cleared a path for him to head south. And the stardust continued to twinkle.

Travelling alone along the path for an unknown distance, whenever fatigue set in, he would lift his gaze to the starry sky once more.

"…Whose words—or rather, whose words among them—have made you take this so to heart?"

The frozen plains were now filled with the howling wind and the screaming gusts, yet both sides of the enemy had perished:

"Ginnung believed that our doom was inevitable, and so proposed the destruction of the Garden in the Council!”

The radical sentiments of one faction of the remnants echoed in the wind：

“And it was Lord Claudius’s ruling that prevented the collapse of Utopia! We are therefore all the more determined to stand firm and prevent the annihilation of civilization!"

"No!! Lord Ginnung’s actions were intended to correct the gods’ tendency to reify their own identities as religious symbols, thereby forcing us into excessive worship of them!"

The echoes of the more rational wraiths from the other faction drowned out the former:

"But the consequences of this matter do not warrant the overthrow of the existing order! The rules we established were all destroyed in an instant by the Iron Fist! How can this be forgiven?!"

"This matter began with the gods and shall end with them; if mortals were to act upon it, it could hardly be deemed righteous!"

A gust of headwind swept straight toward Vegtelen: perhaps the roar of the Iron Fist Army had transformed into a howling gale sweeping down from above. It forced him to brace himself against the cover that had originally belonged to the rear supply line, barely managing to steady himself.

"…Enough. There is no point in arguing any further."

After straightening himself, Vegtelen struck his bell drum once more; wherever the sound carried, his voice followed.

"Even should the gods return,‘Endless’ will once again observe their deeds."
"For the gods come from the Aether. That is where they dwelt before they exhaled their first tangible breath———

Please do not look upon the gods; look instead to where they come from."

"Has the world ever truly been perfect?"

In the vast, snow‑covered wilderness, even the very end of the journey lay shrouded in the snowy landscape, unable to escape the silent yet tumultuous labyrinth of ice spires.
Fine snow and the wind, now gentle, now fierce, continued to drift down, accompanied by the unconscious drumbeat produced by Vegtelen’s footsteps, guiding him along a path from which, once taken, there would be no turning back.

He knew where he must go: when the snow turned to rain falling from the sky, when the precipitation carried by the air currents no longer condensed into the curse and fate that froze all things in place, only then would his mission truly begin.

The journey south was a long one, yet he never regretted it.
He is the One Who Longs to Return, irreplaceable.
He embodies ten thousand souls; the heavens are his home.