there is peace amongst the hills and the night will cover all my pride

Chapter 01: blessed are they who smile from bodies free
Chapter 02: the ice-cold knife has come to decorate the dead

They always used to bathe in streams, in cold and clean places so unlike the bathhouses of rich men. Neither Lora nor Haze particularly enjoyed being cold, stung and chilled by tiny little vibrant shocks to the nerves that kill slowly, slowly, slowly, but they did like to splash in the fresh waters in the morning.

It was one of the few truly unadulterated pleasures they had. You cannot steal water. You cannot thieve waves. There is no blood, no stain, no sin that cannot be washed away by enough of the most fervent, most well-intentioned water.

Not that water isn't neutral. Not that water knows morality. Indeed, water slicks the same on the skin of Driver and Blade alike. Water washes hair both silver and red and reddish-brown flecked with green. Leaks of ether and blood both will run freely away.

Is that a conscious choice? This water and that of the Cloud Sea are different. Maybe the Cloud Sea is not so kind.

But the Jin of such times wasn't thinking about that. He was only thinking about how free he was, to wash in the water and run in the river and get away from the gutters near which he had almost never been. How glad he was, to care for those girls.

A house has running water, that the most core privileges of life might always be called upon and then again called forth. You can't live out in the woods and the fields forever; everyone knows that.

They were so free, though. They really hadn't a care, from day to day. This was their life. This would always be their life. Even Haze hadn't brought so very much change.

Whenever I lose my way, Jin must have thought, and perhaps jotted down in his journal, let me find it again in a stream or a river. Let me do as I have always done, no matter who I am, and then I will be happy.

Things are not so golden, now.

He stumbles to the stream, breathing ragged and body limp, and knows not the shapes of his armor as he casts it off, undoes every hastily profaned buckle to get at the third scar, an unholy fissure not and never marking triad to the thin twins above it.

The water goes frigid, from marshy to liquid clarity in an instant. Bitter Minnows flit to the underside of the banks, away from the cracks stabbing across that vile viscosity which signals the unnatural tampering that goes with his being no longer a paragon example, exemplar, of a Blade.

He could catch them. In an instant, he could stab them up with his nodachi; the speed of his Core's processing seems to have been universally heightened, if only he can will it into that precious higher gear.

He is confident that he could catch fish. Even though he was never the icthyological whisperer that Aegaeon was, he always could.

He always had the water around him in which to gaze and ponder how he might, anyway. And yet it has never drowned him before. No, not before.

It stings, stings, stings at the lips of the scar; the cavity of his chest does not want to drink this sustenance in. The filth shoved deep within has seen all it wants to see, and never again will that gaping maw of a gash open.

So Jin drinks. In great gulps, he swallows the water, and feels the heaviness of the way it sloshes within him.

Water, the most fungible compound, is real.

The heart does not do that. The heart is enormous, and it is there, but it is not...there.

Lora. He must go back for Lora.

This stream runs in to Ciesias Grove, if he has the patience to follow it far enough. He doesn't, and he doesn't have the presence of mind to summon that supranimal speed, and he feels horribly sluggish.

Down his head goes into the war. The silver drips and crystallizes into icy shards.

He is dangerous. He is not kind.

He is no benevolent caretaker, no masterful steward, as he splashes the retrieved corpse with eddies of the simplest substance on Alrest.

It doesn't run clear. It will never run clear. His conscience never again will run clear.

She will discolor, greens and grays, if he leaves her this way. He does not trust his ice. Has he ever?

So with that sword, that horrible sword, that terrible blade of that terrible Blade, he carves her up. Like an animal.

Out come the intestines and the lungs. Should he take them too? Maybe he'll need them, eventually.

Or maybe when he does, he won't...want them anymore.

The moon's smile is pale. Alrest's place is not with the sun, anymore.