Aza sat in the tree and watched the moon, the way he'd done for centuries. It had always comforted him, somehow, the moon . . . and yet now, even that seemed cold to him. Cold, just like everything else. . .

At first, after he'd awakened, he'd paced his room for hours, searching himself for a trace of what he'd lost so suddenly, tried desperately to force himself to feel something, anything. He'd dredged up every memory of Zei he had, playing them over and over in his mind like the movies that Inomi loved so well, and finally, overwhelmed by the emptiness that loomed over him, had sought to mourn what he'd lost and found himself incapable of even that. He could not find the tears to grieve, and perhaps that hurt more than anything else so far.

Now he sat, watching the moon, and felt lost. He'd fled outdoors when his room had become too suffocating to bear any more, hoping that the icy night air would shock him back to where he'd been before, where he belonged.

Fate didn't favor him with such luck, however.

He didn't even give me a choice, Aza thought bitterly, leaning on the trunk of the tree. If he wanted to be rid of me, he could have at least given me the chance to die. . . . Death, any death, even if it wasn't peaceful, seemed an incredible luxury to him now, and one that he could not longer touch. Zei could have granted him that, at least, but now it was over, and. . . . Nothing could kill him now. All eternity stretched out before him like a vast, shimmering plain, endless and cold and as barren as the snow-covered ground below him. An eternity of winter. An eternity of this- this deep hollowness inside him, this numbness. . . all he felt now was a gnawing sense of emptiness and the frantic desire to fill it.

That, he thought, could wait.

It was like death and rebirth all over again, he realized. The point where his memory became more than hazy fragments felt much like this- the same achy, unfocused feeling of loss, of being lost and not knowing anything for sure anymore. . . who he was or where he belonged or where to go from here. But it was different, too- this hurt more, in it's way, because he'd been so trusting, so very sure of everything, and now he wondered if he would ever regain the peice of himself that had died when the veil of innocence had been at last torn away. So perhaps in a way, Zei had given him the death he wanted, but it was unfinished, and he lacked the skill to complete it. And this was what he got for it- winter.

He closed his eyes. Fine. It didn't really matter anyway, did it? None of it mattered anymore. Everything he had thought or said or did in the past year had all been rendered useless and irrevelent last night, everything he had become and was now- none of it made any difference.

He opened his eyes and looked around him. All he saw was winter.

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