The snow kept falling.
It drifted around the shrine like a slow tide, erasing footprints, softening the edges of broken stones, blanketing the past without mercy or judgment. The world had been muted by white, and in that stillness, Raito moved.
He walked toward Seigi with a blank face, his footsteps barely audible against the fresh powder. She sat where he had left her, graceful and unmoving, her silver-black robe blending into the graying world around them.
Without a word, Raito lowered himself beside her on the mossy stone, his arms resting casually on his knees.
For a while, neither of them said anything.
Then, voice quiet but firm, Raito asked,"What do you want to do now?"
Seigi didn't look at him. Her pale gaze was distant, fixed on the crumbling shrine gate half-buried in snow. A long moment passed before she spoke.
"Maybe I'll seal myself again," she said solemnly.
Her voice lacked anger, lacked even sadness. It was simply... tired.
"It's boring in the sealed place," she admitted, almost like she was confessing a crime. "But it's peaceful too. No humans. No betrayal. Just silence. I don't want to deal with them right now."
Raito didn't react. He simply tilted his head up and stared at the falling snow.
The wind sighed through the ruined beams of the shrine, rattling old charms and loose tiles. The cold settled in deeper, but neither of them seemed to notice.
For a while, it felt like Seigi might say no more. That maybe she would simply rise and vanish into the mountain mist without a trace.
But then, her voice returned, softer this time. Almost uncertain.
"You..." she said. "You're different from the others."
Raito's eyes followed a snowflake drifting past his vision, but he didn't look at her. He just nodded slightly, as if she had merely confirmed something he already suspected.
Another silence fell between them, heavy but not uncomfortable.
Finally, Raito asked, still gazing upward,"Is that really what you want?"
His tone was level. Not accusing. Not persuasive. Just a simple question, stripped bare of any emotion.
Seigi hesitated.
For the first time since he met her, she seemed unsure—truly unsure. Her fingers curled slightly in her lap, and her mouth pressed into a thin line.
When she answered, it was barely louder than the whispering wind."I don't know what to do."
The words carried a weight that even centuries of silence hadn't crushed out of her. A vulnerability that not even betrayal had erased.
Raito turned toward her.
Slowly. Deliberately.
His face was still unreadable, a blank canvas against the backdrop of falling snow. His dark hair was dusted with white, his coat heavy with melted flakes.
His voice, when it came, was just as quiet.
But it carried something new beneath the surface.A thread of conviction.
"I know something you can do," he said, "if you really want to help humans."
Seigi turned to him too, their eyes meeting through the slow dance of snowflakes.
There was no hope in her expression yet. No expectation.
Only a cautious curiosity.
"Really..." she asked, as if daring to believe it.
Raito nodded once.
The snow thickened between them, covering the broken past, the uncertain future.
And for the first time in a long time, something fragile stirred in the frozen air between them—
Possibility.