•❅─────⋅☾✦☽⋅─────❅•

A world.

Monochrome and vivid.

His eyes were opened up to a hazy halation at the periphery of his vision. In a trance, his conscience subtly dispersed. A canvas of jet-black darkness spread across the heavens whilst an illuminant surface plainly stretched beneath to the ethereal horizon beyond–

–or was it simply the monotonous environs that was bleeding into itself? Intermittent light would at times cascade out into eerie darkness, prominently corrupting the world.

But what could corrupt a world of darkness except baneful light?

He couldn’t truly say as all light from the world would blink out of existence, leaving only a faint outline of anything and everything visible. It was like a shutter where unsightly distortions and specks would appear, remain that way before eventually disappearing.

Ad nauseam.

A vacillating state of metastasis.

A world that didn’t comply with logic, didn’t have a single star of scintillating light, nor a Moon beaming rays of light could be witnessed in its form of a circular mirror, hanging upon the night skies.

The world could not be defined within the vast void. Such a reality shook his senses as the sky and ground would never touch on the horizon. Truly, it was a mysterious sight that reality shouldn’t ever be accepting of.

He couldn’t tell if their foothold was palpable, tangible nor even textured for that matter. Be it grassy plains or a marble surface, it was indiscernible all the same.

But even then, on his right he saw a Victorian gazebo coated in a creamy colour. It was like another primeval world meant for one another’s company. A shelter only they could have occupied, innocently keeping it to themselves.

‘Were we seated there a moment ago?’ he wondered as he stood on one side of a road that similarly led to oblivion.

His eyes continued to survey the world before him. On the other side of the road, the edifice of what appeared to be the entrance to a mansion with entablatures adorning it, stood grandly. Beyond a set of stairs, up upon a plateau were doors befitting its grandeur. To him, it may as well have led to another world where they didn’t belong.

But none of that mattered.

He was content with being kept all to their lonesome. He needed nothing else. He could have spent an eternity within the confines of this world.

Everything was like all else, emitting a bright brilliance of darkness that could never be–

–hence all was nothing but a reflection in darkness compared to her.

In the end, his eyes caught sight of nothing but her back turned towards him, a peremptory vantage that captured all his being and attention. She was the reason why he could gloat upon the desire to stay an eternity in her company of which he wished nothing more. And yet, it was simply a feeling he couldn’t connect with as it seemed to be lost on him.

He couldn’t believe. It was beyond him to even fathom how he could bask in such contentment. The vestiges of fragmented memories supposedly once long forgotten – or was it simply a fallacious and illusory dream conjured from imagination, he wondered?

A youthful girl the same age as him in this phantasmagorical scene; a single pair of young children not even half the age of a decade old.

Beautiful, flowing locks of hair – the hue of midnight – rode the winds which could not be felt in this lawless realm where reason was scattered amongst the four winds.

Nothing but a swaying white petticoat just below knee height that danced along with irrationality donned the girl before his eyes.

In front of him was a familiar young lady he knew he should have recognised. Instead–

“Who… are you?”

「I know… I know… I know… I should know… I should know…

...I should, yet I don’t remember anything about her.」

A heart-clenching sensation threatened to rip his heart from his own incompetency, his own forgetfulness, his own indolence – an emotion of painful longing burned his『soul』, unaware of its regretful woes, crying a waterfall that coalesced over who knew how many years?

And it was only an infinitesimal amount away from spilling in inundating waves.

But in lieu of the atrophying affliction to his heart of hearts, an astoundingly egregious confusion rose into his mind a moment later as if what he felt was nothing but a white lie.

The preceding nostalgia having disappeared without a trace; a hollow void that should have been filled; a conflicting sorrow creeping into his heart.

All because of the single question he asked.

The girl spun her head around to look back to him. Let alone her eyes, he couldn’t even make out the girl’s countenance at all, save for her endearing smile, flashing brilliantly at a distance shorter than a stride, longer than a light year.

“?????”

She began to speak.

Her lips moved with a fervent elocution, but felt on deaf ears.

“Hnn?”

Tilting his head, he couldn’t make out a sound from her as if they were in a vacuum. Rather, it may have been remotely impossible. Those words, never to be heard of ever again in this life, forever lost in yore.

Realising this, the girl frowned slightly in a forlorn gesture… before deciding to speak once again despite the futility of such an act.

“??? ?? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ??????? ??? ??????? ??? ???? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?????? ? ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ??? ???? ?? ???”

But before he knew it, his time in this world had already come to end. In his perplexion, he no longer had the leisure of wondering the cause of this fateful encounter. His visual acuity began diminishing before it finally began blurring out the world of monotones the very instant her parted lips were restored to its sealed state.

The last expression he saw on the sylphlike girl in this transitory world was painted in altruism, estranged from any of the colours ubiquitously absent in this prosaic realm… and at last his etheric consciousness was cut, disconnecting him from that place which he knows not of.

In his soul an expletive, he swore a vow that he would one day return to her – the fragile, transient girl in her lonesomeness.

And to that, the girl smiled again once more.

I will return–

「To you, whom I remember not…

…in this unforgettable world.」

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

‏‏‎ ‎

•❅─────⋅☾✦☽⋅─────❅•