What is time? What is fate? What is destiny?
These are questions that have plagued the minds of humanity for as long as they couldn remember. These abstract concepts were eventually deemed as some sort of necessary but invisible forces or beings that propelled existence forward. Things that, regardless of human intervention, could not be changed or even perceived.
These were all facts that all of humanity had come to universally understand and accept. That is, all but one single young boy. This boy, who had witnessed unacceptable atrocities of life and perceiver despite all of it, steeled himself against the blasphemous forces or beings known as time, fate and destiny.
'No. They aren't some sort of almighty beings, they are nothing but thieves! Thieves that set their sights on what is not theirs!'
This boy, who so despised these beings and resisted their influence with all his being, was ready to do whatever it took. But even for him, no matter how hard he tried, he was destined to never be powerful enough to escape their grasp. The grasp of the thieves who robbed people like him of opportunities.
The opportunity to grow. To create cherished moments. To be happy. Leaving us with memories too fleeting, and burdening us with a longing for more.
For that young boy, Mathew, this was all too true, as those unwelcome thieves had come to visit.
***
The young and dark-haired Mathew was sitting in an old, rusted, and run-down car in the middle of a lonely road. Surrounding it were a dozen pillars of ice that shot up from the ground. The air was cooled to the point where he could visibly see the breath he exhaled. At his side, there was a thinner pillar that pierced through the center of the car.
'What the hell? What happened?'
Turning to it, his eyes opened wide.
Sat in the driver's seat was his mother with her deep blue eyes fixed ahead.
"Mom?"
He called out but got no answer.
"Can you hear me? Mom!"
But still, he got no response, and her eyes remained fixed on the road ahead. Not because she was focused on driving, after all, the car hadn't, and currently couldn't move an inch. So what was wrong?
Suddenly, the sound of ice cracking echoed in the car.
Quickly shifting his gaze to the pillar, Mathew glanced over it, but found nothing wrong.
He heaved a sigh of relief. But if there was nothing wrong with the pillar, what was making that sound?
Again, the sound of ice cracking echoed in the car, this time louder and clearer. He looked to the pillar once more but still found nothing. But as if by design, his eyes fell on a protrusion of the pillar. Mathew raised a brow in confusion and leaned forward, following the protrusion.
His gaze landed on his mother's neck, and his eyes opened wide.
The protrusion had pierced her neck, and around it, he saw a growing ring of ice snaking over her skin. His mind immediately began racing, but before he could think to act, he noticed a hand reaching in through her shattered window. It gripped her neck with its large palm and wrapped its fingers around her throat, gripping it with a vice-like hold. Mathew tried desperately to scream, but no words formed, and only the faint sound of wheezing escaped his lips.
The ice slowly started to crack under the rising pressure.
'No, no. Please no.' His mind raced with the desire for this scene to vanish.
'Stop it, you bastard! Get away from her!'
Mathew tried desperately to wake up from the lifelike nightmare he was having. But no matter how much he hoped, whom he prayed to, or how he begged, no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn't escape the reality of his situation. The echo of the ice breaking rang in his ears. The cracks rapidly spiderwebbed across the surface, covering every inch of her fair skin until suddenly, it stopped.
'Mom...?'
What followed was burned into his memories forever.
The hand twisted, and a sharp snap resounded in his ears. From start to finish, he could not blink, and once the deed was done, his eyes remained glued to what had once been where his mother's head rested. Now reduced to nothing but a frozen stump of flesh.
He stared at her corpse for what felt like an eternity as his lonely heart wrenched at the sight.
A second passed. Then another. Then another.
After the long pause, Mathew shifted his gaze. Looking straight at the empty street ahead, he let out a sharp, eerie laugh. It was a bitter sound tinged with rage, pain, and desperation as he struggled to hold himself together.
Right before his eyes, his mother's lifeless body slumped onto the steering wheel.
Choking on the grief that clawed at his throat, Mathew collected himself, took a deep breath, calmly opened the door, and stepped out. Taking one step after the other, he found himself standing before his mother's killer.
Looking up, he was greeted with the most nonchalant expression he had ever seen. Then, with just as equal nonchalance, he cast his gaze down and grimaced. In the ice covered hand of the man, his mother's head dangled by her long brown hair. The point at which her head and neck were separated was frozen solid, leaving no traces behind where one would expect a bloody mess to be.
He clenched his jaw, looked up, and locked eyes with the man, no, the bastard who dared to take his mother from him. In front of him was a man dressed in a neat black suit, with a white unbuttoned shirt underneath. The killer had deep blue eyes and snow-white hair. He was more handsome than most men in this wretched district, Mathew called home. Yet to Mathew, he was nothing but a murderous monster.
Mathew clenched his fists, his nails digging into his palms.
"Bastard," he muttered under his trembling voice as he tried his best to restrain his flood of emotions.
The man raised a curious brow and tilted his head, studying Mathew with a faint, almost amused expression breaking through his previously stoic demeanour.
He raised his free hand, covered in ice, towards Mathew, and the young cynic's rationality screamed at him. Telling him repeatedly to run, but the sight of his mother's head swinging in the man's hand ignited his rage, and instantly overtook his sense of logic. He couldn't possibly run with his tail tucked between his legs. It wasn't that he couldn't. He just wouldn't do it. No amount of reasoning could compel him to give this bastard the satisfaction of seeing him cower or run like some weakling.
Mathew growled through gritted teeth, his vision narrowing until nothing but the man and that gruesome sight of his mother's severed head filled his focus. The killer's icy gaze bore into him, but he didn't flinch. He tracked the man's every movement and at the same time, in the corner of his eye, he searched for something, anything at all, to even the odds.
After all, the person in front of him was a herald.
His hand brushed against the car door, and he noticed it. Something glinted in the light of the streetlights. The moment he laid eyes on it, a wicked grin flashed across his face.
He glanced back at the white haired devil, and was now only a few steps away. Steeling himself, Mathew put all the strength he could possibly muster into his legs and darted forward. In that same motion, he reached out his hand and grabbed a large, jagged shard of glass embedded in the cracked window frame. In less than a second, he breezed past the car and closed the distance.
The edge of the glass bit into his skin, drawing blood as he gripped tighter, but in that moment, it didn't matter. If it meant he could kill this murderer, the pain was more than worth it. Propelling himself forward, he thrust the makeshift dagger at the man's abdomen. With the slightest wave of his hand, the icy murderer raised his free hand, and a wave of cold air burst forth. In the next moment, the cold air coalesced, and a thorn of ice formed and shot forward. Without missing a beat, Mathew dodged to the side, leapt onto the hood of the car, and propelled himself forward. Mathew felt a rush of adrenaline as the make-shift dagger cut through the air and hit its mark, striking him right in the neck. Mathew's manic smile grew even larger as the images of the icy bastard suffering played in his mind on repeat. But unlike the vivid images he had pictured, seeing the man writhing in pain with blood gushing from his neck, reality was far less forgiving. His feeble attempt at an attack had been nothing more than a light breeze against an immovable wall. The man was a Herald after all. And what could a mere human do before such power? In an instant, the man moved too quickly for the young cynic to react, grabbing him by the neck and clamping down like a predator with its jaw sinking into the flesh of its prey.
Ignoring the immediate pain, Mathew raised the shard of glass above his head, and as quickly as he could, he brought it down on the arm of the man. The jagged shard of glass collided with the man's skin and shattered before his eyes. As the glass splintered into a thousand tiny shards and fell to the pavement below, Mathew's heart sank, and a faint sliver of panic found its way into his eyes. The icy grip around his throat tightened, cutting off his breath and intensifying his panic. Desperately squirming and clawing at the man's arm, Mathew stared daggers into his cold and unfeeling eyes.
The herald chuckled at his meek defiance and tightened his grip. The ice on his palm slowly spread all over his body from the point of contact. He struggled, kicked, and scrambled for the smallest gasp of air, but the murderer just grinned as he watched Mathew suffer.
It was almost as if he was deriving some sort of sick, twisted pleasure in his quiet suffering.
The oxygen in his lungs faded, and his vision slowly blurred. But even on the verge of death, and through the suffocating haze, Mathew's cynicism somehow managed to claw its way to the surface, and he asked with a defiant tone.
"What's… the matter? Is that... all?"
The Herald's grin widened. Managing nothing more than a bitter chuckle in response, the young cynic was on the verge of unconsciousness when the Herald hurled him into the car's side. At the moment of collision, the sound of his bones breaking resounded in his ears, and he felt something within him snap in two. The herald stood over him, looking down with the most condescending and irritating expression Mathew had ever seen. Sat there broken and bruised all over, Mathew had no strength whatsoever left in him. All he could do was watch as the man walked away with his mother's severed head. He strained to move, but lifting even a finger felt beyond his reach. In fact, moving anything below his neck was proving to be a difficult task. After a few minutes of struggling, he came to a grim realization. He couldn't feel anything from the neck down, and he knew without being told, his spine was broken, and if left in that state unattended, he was no longer long for this world.
"This is it, huh?"
A heavy sigh escaped him.
"I should've... done more."
Could he have thought? From the start, he had never been in control of the ridiculous situation that unfolded, so doing something 'more' was out of the question.
"I could've run… I should've run,"
Maybe, but once the Herald showed himself, there was little he could have done to escape. And he couldn't exactly leave his mother behind to die.
"I should've been smarter. I should've known better."
Now this... this was true. Deciding to try and kill a Herald with a shard of glass was probably the dumbest thing he could have done.
But what's done is done.
Teetering on the edge, Mathew's regrets piled up. Denying him the comfort of pretending he'd done the best he could. His body was on the verge of shutting down when a final thought flashed by. No... It was more of a final acknowledgment in life, and it was something he never wanted to accept.
'I never had a chance.'
It made him sick to his stomach to admit. But it was true. After that futile struggle, all Mathew could do was lie there, left with nothing but the bitter taste of failure. Just as he felt himself crossing the borders of life and death, a voice came cutting through the haze, as a bright light enveloped his vision.
[Mathew, welcome, to Ygdrassil]