Hitsugi no Maou

After leaving the protection of the priest to the soldiers and letting him return to the king's capital first, Dust opened each and every coffin of the villagers and began to peek.

It must have been a great struggle to start a fire to cremate humans in the heavy rains they wouldn't stop. By the way, the white bones that were burning and crackling would have scraped off the meat that could not be burned, leaving traces of the blade on many occasions.

On the chests of the white bones are small stone planks inscribed with their own names.

The dust touches every one of them and peeks around the orbit of the cavity of the corpse.

There were no words. Because I knew that neither regret nor apology would make sense.

The acquaintance, the friend, the one who was not particularly close, was seen after death, and gave me only my gaze.

Eventually, Dust turned his imagination around.

How much strength does it take to make the corpses of all the villagers so beautifully white boned and ready?

It was just a starvation that was even difficult to survive lying still.

The village, which failed to successfully deliver the rationed food and emergency crops, did man on the rotten meadows and caught low-length buds that did not get direct rain or the surviving bugs and ate them with salt.

Hands on inedible mud shrimp, some crazy. Most of those villagers had abandoned their jobs other than to eat.

I had to give up.

Then what was the priest who did the heavy labor of cremating all the villagers eating?

I wonder why he's the only one who survived.

... Dust recalled how the priest was farewell as he opened his own mother's coffin.

Relaxed, with his dead fishy eyes, he apologized only one last word to Dust.

I'm sorry.

I thought that was against the words I threw up on the dust... but the truth is, maybe that wasn't all.

Her mother's, staring at the bones left over from the blade marks, but Dust laughed, duh.

That's not true, Mother.

Finish your eyes with your hands on your half-baked skull and cheeks.

"Even the dead meat of a muddy animal was cooking and eating. I'm sure it is..."

Even if it wasn't. There is no need to pursue facts and reveal them now.

I don't deserve that.

As Dust engraved the feel of the white bone into his memory, he eventually closed all the coffin lids and left the church.

Signs of rain, which had been falling for two years, remained with water full of air.

Dust walks in the mud as he rocks his hair in the wind coming across the rotten meadows in the fallen blue and black world of the sun.

We must return to the royal castle by tomorrow. Then in the middle of the night, I thought I'd bury the villagers' coffins.

If we tell King Lugassa what's going on, he'll lend us dozens of soldiers to Dust shortly after he thinks.

But Dust wanted to bury the villagers, his mother, with his own hands.

I wanted to scratch (was) at least to dig their graves a hand that didn't reach out to them who suffer.

Eventually, as his feet stepped on the dirt ground rather than mud, Dust kept walking and searched for a scenic spot. From time to time, while stepping on rotten dead meat, the dust looks out at the gray sky and proceeds.

On foot enough, at the end of the meadow, I could see the blue and white mountains.

At the top, there is fine snow.

Dust chose a burial site for its location, where it could see a world close to the sky, other than rotten grass and mud.

When you take the iron dagger out of your jacket, you start digging the dirt at your feet.

The area was already dark and the wind was intensifying.

I should have provided the lights, but I didn't feel like moving into action. I even wanted to dig dirt now, even though it would be extremely difficult to dig a hole or turn back to the village if my vision was good.

I wanted to be swallowed by the darkness.

I even wanted to disappear as I wished.

I'm not sure if the emotions that fill my chest are guilt or hopelessness.

I wonder what the hell I've been up to in my life, what I wished for.

I couldn't help but think of myself, the person who calmly watched the suffering of the beloved people and let them die as they were, in Dust, now seemingly indelible.

Going through the dirt even, digging holes. To fill all the villagers. There is only one thing in this world, to bury the people who made up my hometown.

I should have loved you the most in the world, to bury my mother.

- - If... if Dust had done it (...).

If I had completed the tomb, carried one coffin from the village at a time, and filled it, and put all the corpses to sleep.

Though Dust suffered from his past, he would surely have lived the title of hero of Coffin with his cross on his back until his death.

Unless a blade that digs through the soil suddenly penetrates an empty deep hole in the ground and falls upside down from body to body as it is...

We have to hit the sand mountain in the back and meet an unusual, giant monster at the bottom of the hole.

Dust, as just a sinful fool, was supposed to live.