This place, is it even real? It feels like a dream.

I take another step, feeling the dry grass give way under my heavy feet. It’s cold. I can’t stop shivering as the unnaturally frigid wind stabs at my bare arms. My breath forms in the air as icy, shimmering clouds. I reach out absently to touch one and it dissipates between my numb fingers.

The wasted hills stretch around me for as far as I can see. The rolling knolls are pock-marked with hundreds of dying oak trees. The sky is deep gray and bleak. The clouds are so dense that I would not know the day from night were it not for my fatigue. I have been walking in this unlikely desert for what seems like decades. The cold never lessens underneath a permanently overcast sky, the plants never grow when the sun cannot touch them. The land is still but for the bitter northern wind the blows relentlessly from my right, rippling the stiff, dull grasses and the brittle branches of the withering oaks.

Bitter nights like this sometimes make me wonder why I even go on wandering in this empty world. What part of my weary mind can keep me stumbling along restlessly, keeping my tired eyes wide open as I look for any sign of…?

But is it worth it to keep trudging this blind trek across the fading hills without even the memory of how time is supposed to pass? I crest a hill only to be hit by another strong gust of icy wind. I walk on, ignoring the cold a little longer.

I falter heavily on a log, barely catching myself. It is difficult to see, it is always so dark, and I am so tired. Mistakes like this are becoming quite frequent. I shakily regain my footing and keep walking.

Looking around at the memory-blurring, dreamlike place I feel bizarre energies playing tricks on my mind. It seems, sometimes, that the landscape shifts before my eyes. Usually I even forget what I am looking for. It is as though my mind is faded and torn at the edges. All that I can be sure of is that I am searching for sometimes. I continue this search because my mind can find little more meaning beyond it. This quest is all that I have.

Time here is erratic and impossible to tell, whether by some force unknown or some deterioration of my thoughts. I struggle to count the passing minutes but become distracted as I arrive at a place that brings a new feeling: recognition.

It is a flat-topped hill just a small bit taller than the others. At its peak stands an ancient oak tree. Its colossal boughs are mossy with age. The grass on the hill is dry and dead but the old tree seems to have kept some of its color.

How have I arrived at this place without knowing? Returning here brings me a beautiful flood of memories from the brighter days, and I know for the first time in very long that it has not always been like this.

It was near here that I had first really met her.

We were only children then. We had no idea that fate would place us into a story of such trials and such danger, such tribulation and such honor. Back then I had no idea how much I would come to love this ignorant but beautiful creature………..I had no idea that I could lose her and somehow lose the world as well.

“Aria………” I find myself whispering to the wind. I touch the bark of the trunk softly. “Should I give up this hopeless walk and sleep here? Is that what this means? Should I stop here?”

As an answer the clouds above me open and the moon shines down onto the old tree. I am suddenly lit by the pale blue light, it almost hurts my eyes. I glance around in a state of weary awe as I behold the light spreading across the frontier as the clouds above swiftly deteriorate into nothing. Soon the hills all around me glow like precious stones and I can see for many miles. I feel my consciousness slowly reawakening…as if the new light revealed my mind to me as well. I felt myself being slowly freed from a dreamlike darkness.

I notice at once when the cold wind stops. I look to the north, as if expecting to see some great wall blocking the way of the once tireless gale. As I turn I feel a different wind hit me from the west.

This is a warm wind, dense with something mysterious but almost affectionate. I hold perfectly still and can almost feel her on the wind. Is it my broken mind imagining the sound of her sweet laughter? Is that just the sound of the wind sliding through the tree’s dying branches?

But now I can smell roses and I know that she is here with me somehow. I let the wind warm my aching joints while I bathe in the sweet, disembodied scent. I swear feel her soft hand press against my wounded cheek.

“Aria?” I ask again, this time as an actual enquiry..

A voice on the wind whispers in her voice. She still sounds like the voice of an angel or a fairy or a stream or a thousand other pretty things.

“Please, never give up, Siro,” she begs to me. I am filled with a sort of guilt as I hear her voice, weak with a forlorn desperation.

“It is hard,” I state simply, I can think of no other words. I touch my cheek, wondering if I can feel her warm hand resting there. I can not feel it with my hands, but the strange and soothing feeling of her hand on my cheek is always present.

“Please,” the whisper speaks almost into my mind. “You can follow the wind out of any false place. I shall be waiting for you so find a way to me. Promise?”

The whisper goes silent and the feeling of her hand on my cheek fades, but the warm wind and the scent of one hundred roses continues all through the night. I sit, at last, letting myself rest against the trunk of the giant tree that made me feel safe so long before. I am filled with renewed purpose.

“I promise.”