I see a sword that grants death,
A shackle of destiny,

Next to the silver-haired girl,
Worshiped at the demise's hallow.

The sword stained with unknown blood, lying shattered and snapped.
The shackle chained pale wrists, dotted in thickening rust.

The priest asks with a shaking voice —
Upon whose fingertips will the butterfly perch?

The girl never answers,
Like death itself, wreathed in silent solemnity.

People often say that,
Dying is to meet the palm of the Hand of Shadow,
And dreaming is to be brushed by their fingers a little.

In the mirages when the girl petted death,
She sees black waterfalls foaming and bellow.

Pouring down from a chasm in the sky,
Where a solitary tower withstands torrents sallow.

When she wakes, she can still feel the water's freezing touch,
And the cacophony's billow —

Like the wail of the dead, the howl of beasts,
In confusion, delirium, and clamors hollow.

The girl's embrace is not meant for the living.
Thousands have entered the eternal sleep in her arms,
Granting to the dead solace and dignity.

She mentions a ferocious warrior, feared in battle…
“She did not go with a smile, but to me, she cursed —”

“O, life's end! How ugly you are! How despicable!”^[1]

And from that day on, she adorned herself.
Her dress, white as a radiant moon,
Became always dotted with flowery petals.

“For if death cannot be avoided…”
So says the girl,
“I wish it could contain beauty more plentiful.”

Among the thousand ceremonies in life and death,
The ones she knows with most intimacy are funerals.

One burial after another she presided over,
From the angelic visage of a babe passed in the cradle,
To the despairing eyes of the mother drowning in sorrow.

From the scars on a war-battered general's torso,
To the unending tears pouring from his bereft widow.

Yet she remembers not a single living human she had seen,
Even in the mirror, she thinks her own face strange, with an alien glow.

In the countless words buried in forgetfulness,
The only thing she manages to gleam is a mockery to fate, a sarcastic whistle —

“Stay alive.”

When she cast aside the shackles and stepped beyond Aidonia,
a déjà vu most violent seizes her whole.
Did she, perchance, conduct some previous escape?

Illusions dance across her eyes —

She had once drifted in an endless river,
Then drove her single boat out of the deluge.

She had wandered in the battlefield covered in corpses,
Then recovered the path back to life.

Why must she escape? Over and over again?
She now knows the answer and quivers, for it is a ludicrous surmise —

The woman embodying death walks this world,
Only because she knows she must stay alive.

But alas —
At the time, she knows not,

That death is not the end.
It is only a butterfly landing on a withered branch.
Utterly meaningless. Profoundly trite.