Chapter 125
The gaunt boy struggled to light a fire in a stove that held nothing more than a few twigs thinner than his own fingers. There was no proper firewood or kindling, and the wood was frozen solid, so the fire refused to catch.
Rafaella lay still, only turning her head as she spoke.
“Brother, I want to drink cold water. I’ll just drink it.”
“No. What if your fever gets worse? I’ll warm it up quickly, so wait.”
“We’ll eat warm soup later anyway. I’m so thirsty.”
“Ha… all right. But you have to warm it in your mouth and swallow little by little. You always start coughing if you drink something cold.”
“Okay. I understand.”
The boy brushed back his snow-damp red hair and poured a small amount of water into a tiny cup. After repeatedly reminding Rafaella to drink slowly, he picked up a bundle and headed toward the makeshift kitchen in the corner.
Rafaella rolled the icy water around in her mouth, swallowing bit by bit, yet she couldn’t take her eyes off the boy’s back as he stood in the kitchen.
Even just watching his back, fragments of vague, unfamiliar memories kept flooding her mind.
The boy cut away the rotten parts from the few remaining potatoes, rinsed them lightly with water, and put them into a pot. Then he pulled out a small sparrow from the bundle and began to dress it. After plucking the feathers and trimming here and there, only a body smaller than a potato remained.
As he dropped it into the pot, the boy let out a sigh so quiet that Rafaella couldn’t hear it. No matter how much water he added, it was far from enough for two people.
The fire refused to catch in the kitchen as well. After striking flint until his palms were scraped raw, the boy finally tore a few loose threads from the hem of his worn clothes and used them to get the fire going. Judging by how often this had happened, threads dangled raggedly from various parts of his clothing.
Stirring the soup slowly, the boy glanced out the small window beside the kitchen.
Beyond the forest, completely blanketed in white snow, grotesque pillars jutted up here and there—the ruins of what once had been.
It was a small mountain village that belonged to no nation. The traces of the disaster that had struck it were not hidden even by the raging snowstorm.
Avalanches were common, so before winter the villagers always prepared defenses. The village had been built in a relatively safe area to begin with, and since there were fewer than ten households, everyone lived like family, united and dependent on one another.
The cold was severe, but in autumn they all prepared together for winter. During winter they stayed indoors, making daily necessities or weaving cloth to pass the time. When the long winter ended, they diligently planted crops in spring and busied themselves gathering fresh shoots from the mountains.
That was why the short summer felt like paradise to them—a brief, sweet rest before enduring another long winter.
No one could have imagined that the village would be completely annihilated in that peaceful season.
The area around the village was surrounded by dense forest, with evacuation shelters and crude wooden barricades built to guard against avalanches. But it wasn’t an avalanche that struck—it was a sudden midsummer landslide, against which neither the barricades nor the shelters were of any use.
In the dead of night, without warning, torrential rain caused the earth to collapse, swallowing the entire village. The villagers, asleep in their homes, all fell into an eternal sleep.
When the boy and his father returned—having gone down the mountain to sell cloth and buy necessities—only crooked pillars protruding from the mud remained as traces of the village.
For over a month, the boy dug through the earth with his father. Their hands were torn and raw, and they nearly died being buried again by collapsing soil, yet they kept digging.
“O omnipotent Lord God. Please hear our prayers. Though each has their own story, they are all good people. We beg you—do not take their lives so senselessly.”
They prayed every day, hoping for a miracle. But what they found were not survivors—only the bodies of those who had passed away as if still asleep, people who had been like family.
At some point, the boy’s father stopped speaking much. The boy remembered it being around the time when the number of missing people dropped below five.
Then, in the third week, they finally encountered a miracle.
A rock had wedged itself between the pillars of a house, creating a small space beneath it. Rafaella was there. She was unconscious from dehydration, but she was alive.
The boy and his father clutched Rafaella and wept tears of joy, even crying out in gratitude to the Lord God.
“Thank you. Thank you. Just… thank you.”
But only Rafaella was blessed by fortune. She was the first—and last—survivor. After that, the grim task of finding and burying bodies resumed.
It took another month to recover everyone and build a cemetery for the villagers. Rafaella, who had been unconscious, awoke on the very day the father and son returned after finishing the final grave.
Even saving just one life felt like enough reward for a month of hardship, and they offered prayers of thanks to the Lord God.
But the long winter was already at their doorstep. And, as expected, everything they had prepared for winter lay ruined beneath the mud, unusable.
The boy suggested to his father that they take Rafaella and go down to another village at the foot of the mountain, but his father refused outright.
“Don’t even dream of going down the mountain! That place is crawling with vicious people. Simpletons like us would be killed for nothing.”
Only much later, as his father lay dying, did the boy learn the reason. His father had once been a coachman for a noble household, falsely accused and branded a criminal. And the boy himself was not his biological son—he had merely taken in and raised a child someone else had abandoned.
Even so, the boy regarded him as his true father to the very end, because the man died struggling to protect the boy and Rafaella.
What led his once-healthy father to death was neither the harsh winter nor the landslide.
It was people.
“P-please… help me!”
While wandering the treacherous mountains every day to prepare for winter, the father found an injured man who had slipped and fallen, and brought him home. Despite their poverty, he shared food, gathered medicinal herbs, and treated the man’s injured leg.
He didn’t know the man was a scout from a neighboring country, part of an advance unit preparing for an invasion—sent to find a route for the army.
“I’m sorry.”
Those were the man’s last words.
“It’s unlikely, but if you were to tell the enemy about our existence, it would be troublesome.”
Those were also the words spoken by the other scouts when they stabbed the father.
As if sensing something, the father had already hidden the boy and Rafaella in an abandoned mountain lodge deep in the mountains.
When the boy went looking for his father after he failed to return late at night, he finally found him—on the brink of death.
“The army… will pass through. Hide. Hide deeper… and survive. Gilly, keep your head clear. You must protect Ella.”
Gilly hastily buried his father and returned to the lodge, because young Rafaella was alone.
Gilly packed their belongings and hid with Rafaella in a tunnel the villagers had once prepared as a shelter, carefully disguising the entrance with dense brush. He made sure no smoke leaked out to give them away. They gnawed on raw carrots and radishes, enduring, and waited for the army to pass.
Fortunately, the army passed through before winter fully set in. The tunnel was in a rugged area near a rocky cliff, and the soldiers moved along a distant ridgeline, so they were not discovered.
But Gilly clearly saw the village at the foot of the mountain—the one he and his father had often visited for supplies—and its surroundings engulfed in flames. Even from far away, where he could barely see the fire and smoke, it felt as if he could hear the screams of people dying.
What Gilly felt then was not pity or fear.
It was relief.
Relief that it wasn’t him.
The war did not last long.
After sweeping through villages and laying waste to the land, the army did not return along the mountain path where Gilly and Rafaella were hiding. Instead, groups that looked like a new army marched proudly, waving large banners. By then, it was late winter.
The tunnel they used as a shelter was well equipped for two people, but it had one fatal flaw: rats that had come in to escape the cold. One or two could be dealt with, but hundreds swarming everywhere were impossible to handle.
They stole what little food remained, gnawed at the blankets, and even bit Rafaella while she slept.
In the end, Gilly had no choice but to move back to the old mountain lodge in the dead of winter, with icy winds raging. Even carried on Gilly’s back, young Rafaella could not endure the cold, and as soon as they arrived, she came down with a severe feverish cold.
