In a cold forest somewhere, the snow keeps falling.

< “Poor thing. How can… [sigh] And I came thinking about the New Year. How meaningless.” > Ben talks.

He is warmly clothed since it is below zero outside. A white bag hangs one meter below his shoulder, suspended by a long strip. Inside the bag, there seems to be something shaped like a tin of paint, a round cylinder. And, in his left hand, an apparatus hangs down from chains interlaced around his arm.

Due to the excessive amount of snow, Ben uses some specialized shoes to walk around.

However, in front of him, a creature isn’t.

There, a wolf-human hybrid is very seriously wounded, behind him a trail of red. While he is stationary now, he seems to have kept wandering in this snowy forest, despite being hurt. However, once he reached a huge tree trunk, he wasn’t able to step over.

Maybe it was because he stopped, and the tiredness overcame his instinct. Or maybe, it was the cold, that once he stopped froze his lower body. Or maybe, it was something else, but Ben isn’t sure. The only thing he is clear about is that this creature is dying now.

Above the tree trunk, the creature doesn’t move or even make a sound. Only its eyes move around, filled with anger and madness.

Deciding something, Ben searches for a solid surface that the creature could easily observe. Once he selects it, he takes the cylinder from the side bag and puts it on the surface. Once he does something with it, he runs towards the tree trunk and stands at the wounded left side.

< “A New Year for us!” > he yells.

[whistle, boom, crack, crack, boom] A series of fireworks go off.

The container is small, and so are the fireworks. However, they perfectly resemble a miniaturized version of some traditional colorful new year’s firework show.

They keep going on and on for around three minutes.

Once off, the cold forest regain is cold silence.

< “I thought you would be living in some village around here. I was looking forward to putting a show before we could talk a bit… about our lives… about the future… about fireworks.” > Ben’s cold voice breaks the silence.

Unfortunately, the hybrid on the ground can’t respond, even if he wanted to. However, his eyes became more intense. Anger, madness, despair, and unwillingness. A mix of emotions Ben would rather not see in the eyes of anything.

< “I can’t save you.” > Ben looks at the curtain of arrows sticking on this creature wounded back. Next, Ben looks at the frosted face, then, at the signs of mutation and deviation, all mixed. Last, Ben looks at the red snow around the body.

[sigh]

< “Sorry. I feel like crying, but can’t. My body is so broken, but I was too excited once I made this artifact work. Surely, I found you, but what now?” > Ben says as he moves the apparatus in his left hand.

< “I am a monster, myself, but I don’t think I can understand your pain.” >

Ben’s right hand begins to rip out the chains on his left arm.

< “Would I despair in silence? Leaving no marks behind?” >

[flesh tearing sounds]

< “Would someone refine me into an artifact? Maybe some medicine?” >

[more flesh-tearing sounds] [chains hitting each other]

[plop, plop] Blood dripping to the ground.

< “Maybe you don’t care about that, maybe you only want to live.” >

[chains hitting each other] The chains hang from his right hand now, with the apparatus now hidden below the snow.

< “I wonder if it is worth. Do you think it is? To live. To suffer. To ask. To seek. To wander. To wonder. To die.” >

[deep breath]

< “Sorry. I can only send you off. I don’t know who is the fucker who is sending us here with those fucking memories, but I will try to keep those a… AH… How ironic of me, such hypocrisy.” >

< “What I treasure the most… Am I wrong to think you have nothing worth keeping? That, maybe, you can be born somewhere else, but without all this baggage of dying, killing, and tragedy.” >

[really deep breath]

Black marks appear on Ben’s face and body.

[crack, crack] The chains begin to break, and lines of energy flow towards the injured.

< “For you, that may have lived on. I can’t save you. I seek, but I don’t have answers. Chained I am, but you may live on. If you retrieved this, I guarded the karmic bullshit. For this new year, I hope you can build memories of a life worth keeping. Happy new… death.” >

[CRACK] The chains all break into little pieces, and flies towards the fallen.

Ben walks towards the wounded and put his hand on his head.

After much effort, reacting, the one lying still opens his mouth and tries to bite. Although he doesn’t even get close, a small sound comes from it. He is somewhat still alive, and his instinct fires and overwhelms his mind one last time.

Time passes, as Ben works on the soul and memories before him.

Eventually, the intense eyes finally close, giving this soul some peace… for now.

After such work, the black marks on Ben melts partially. The dull black liquid slowly runs down his skin before it is pulled back into place by an invisible force coming from inside Ben’s body.

Finished, he stands up and picks up the cylinder, putting it back into the bag.

Then, he comes back before the now dead body and opens his winter clothes, exposing his chest to the cold.

In his skin, a black mark shaped like a flower with five petals wriggle slightly until one of its petals disappears. Before Ben, lava begins to drip from the emptiness above the dead body, falling on it and burning everything.

Ben walks back to a safe distance, but still stays around to look. He sees the lava burning the body, the snow, the tree trunk, before digging its way into the ground, leaving only a hole behind.

[sigh]

< “That is what I would call an expensive send-off, my fellow lost soul. I can’t… I… “ >

[silence]

< “Live on.” >

Ben leaves. Going into the distance, his hand slowly regenerates, but blood keeps dripping from it for quite some time. However, later when he is not in sight anymore, the blood on the ground begins to evaporate. The marks disappear, leaving behind only the unrecognizable indentations of where the blood was.

Snow keeps falling on this cold night of January.

“Sir?”

“Sir! Are you alright?”

“Sir!?” Dinna yells.

After being repeatedly called by Dinna, Ben’s mind breaks from its trance.

He finds himself lost momentarily. Hence, all his muscles become tense, his mind sharpens, and he instinctively moves his hyper-focused eyes around while trying not to make any sudden movements. Soon, the picturing of his surroundings is completed, so his wariness wears down.

‘Did I forget something? Why now?’

Instantly, Ben knows that something isn’t right.

He feels cold, despite being inside a temperate controlled room. Moreover, he feels an intense sorrow, the kind of distress he hasn’t felt in a long time. Thirdly, he feels some extreme psychological pain from his left hand. Besides all that, he also feels unforgettable intense anxiety towards something missing. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time he feels such a thing, so he quickly predicts what happened.

“Sir?” Dinna calls, afraid.

Ben slowly moves around and sees the young woman. Once the distinctive appearance enters his eyes, he remembers that a conversation was going on. After some of the details finally comes back to his mind, he finally feels grounded again.

His presence of mind resurfaces, as he regains the understanding of where he is and when.

‘Death, Trade, Poison, Time. [pause] Purple…’

A smile comes to Ben’s face as he responds: “Sorry. I got lost in thought for a bit. What were we talking about?”

Dinna notices the first-ever forced expression coming from the elder before her, but she holds her curiosity inside.

“Arrays? Surviving?” she answers.

“Ah, right! The past… I will stop talking about the past. Oh… What was that? I think I had one last piece of advice ready for you. It is escaping me…”

Ben looks around, his eyes temporarily stopping at the projects above the tables. He scans everything, trying to remember, and then he looks at Dinna. Coldly, he looks from her toes to her head before stopping at her eyes.

‘Why daydream now… I need some time alone, but at least I should give her one last advice. For someone talented like her…’

He deeply stares at her deep purple eyes before slowly saying: “Don’t listen.”

Despite feeling hurried, he still waits for her response.

She ponders for a moment, before asking: “Isn’t that contradictory?”

“Only if you take it or anything else absolutely. Don’t listen. Look around carefully, and ask yourself who did you listen to? And should you? Should you listen to me, to them, or even to yourself? Question it. Because time passes, you grow up and collect a bunch of knowledge and experience, and then what? So, develop your mind not to be so limited. Rob any experience and knowledge you can, look at the world, and observe everything, but don’t abide just because.”

Once he finishes talking, Ben readily turns around and walks towards the table with many animals remains.

However, he doesn’t pick a bone. Instead, he chooses a small amber stone. This amber is about the size of a closed fist, but smooth and flat rounded. Within, two different leaves can be seen, one smooth and one serrated.

Taking it into his hand, Ben then goes through Dinna’s tool in this table and picks an Array drawing pen. Afterward, he begins to draws on the ember stone. He quickly does so on both sides while energy undulations appear around him. However, the interference doesn’t spread out, staying confined in a region around Ben.

While Dinna can’t take her eyes from the show from Ben’s right hand, some tiny amount of energy flows from his left hand’s fingertip into the ember without obstruction. The flow is so inconspicuous that Dinna doesn’t notice it.

A minute or so after, Ben finishes and then offers the small object to her.

Accepting it, Dinna begins to observe it. She tries to figure it out, and the first thing she notices is a glaring difference. While one side has a drawing very smooth looking, the other one is crude and ragged.

“Which side?” even while in a small trance, she hears Ben’s question.

Moving her eyes, Dinna looks at the old man. He is calm and composed.

“I will leave you at that, and go outside and take in some air.” he continues.

“I can lead yo…”

“No need. I can find my way out and ask people around for some tea. I am sure you were already bored enough, so go spend some time with your toys. First, look around. Also, once you figure the amber out, that will be self-explanatory, so no need to be hurried.”

“I will see you later,” Ben adds, then bows and leave the lab.

Left alone, Dinna begins to frown at the ember.

She notices both sides have a few similarities, like the initial reactions to her trying to trigger the Array. Also, both are drawn in three dimensions. The web of circuits not only going through the surface but also going inside the ember like roots in the ground.

On the other hand, she also notices a few differences. Besides the appearance, the way her energy flows through is radically different, as so are the techniques used to build the Arrays.

What Ben made puzzled her. It seems to try to do a bit of everything. Transmutation, cryptography, multi-outcomes, multi-purpose are only a few things that she quickly identifies.

What Puzzles her, even more, is how easily she finds herself able to activate them and through multiple paths, so she instead chooses to hold back since all her tries seem to have as an outcome the destruction of the ember stone.

After spending some time on the ember, she moves her attention to the projects around her. Dinna begins to question who did she listened to? Why did she decide on working on those? What could she have done differently? However, since such questions were too big, she ends up sitting down and looking back at the ember stone. There she stays for quite a while, her mind, bombarded with a shower of thoughts.