Pioneer Diver of Dead Waters

A beast's muzzle cage strapped tightly around the prisoner's face, keeping the rebel from baring his fangs and attacking others.

The night on Orkron is covered by thick layers of cloud, and a glittering planetary ring wraps around it. Purple-red snowflakes fall onto the heavy helmet, quietly filling the rusted grooves and hiding the marks of corrosion left by time. She and that other girl sat among a forest of cedars… the journey paused for a moment.

“Look! The air on Orkron tastes of raspberries.” Purple-red snowflakes fell onto the cotton candy, soft as a cloud, and quickly melted away. The small Nameless from Toyro laughed softly, then at once bent over and held her stomach, laughing at the way she had put it: a taste cannot be seen with the eyes! After the laughter, the quiet turned sharp as a blade, and the air seemed to freeze in an instant.

“Frebass, are you still going on with your journey deep into ‘IX'?” The question came from the companion who always carried a long sword. She was a good comrade, but no one knew where she came from.

The small Nameless, hidden inside her heavy diving suit, was silent for a while, then passed a slightly charred marshmallow to the other, her eyes shut tight like a sail full of longing:

“Of course, because I want to walk a road deeper and farther than even Akivili's!”

“Like a current on the seabed,
whispering and soothing her bones, in the moments of rise and fall,
she passed through the stage of old age and of youth,
And then stepped into the whirlpool.”

The girl had heard a story like this. In the story, the world in which everyone lives is described as a forest of soaring tall trees, formed out of ownerless energy. “This kind of energy cannot be seen, cannot be touched, cannot be understood, and has no meaning at all,” she thought. “Just as IX has no meaning either.”

The small Nameless was a little downcast, worried about how she would find her bearings once she stepped into the deep “Nihility”. But before long she had an idea. When she was fourteen, her mother left her one last birthday present, a small compass.

“If that is how it is, then all I need is to have the compass sense not a force field but that ‘energy', and is the problem not solved?”

The small Nameless removed the needle from the compass, but when the girl dived into the darkness, she realized that the only direction the compass had was down.

Frebass, the Nameless from Toyro, has been dead fourteen days and nights,
she has forgotten the crying of the gulls, the sound of the waves in the deep,
“Profit and loss.”

The small Nameless looked toward the planetary ring, broader even than the great avenues of Toyro, and decided to hurl herself into the singularity of the black hole.

“Even Akivili could not reach that place.” The girl always heard the sound of waves lapping gently within her: “I am certain I can go deeper and farther than he did.” She had prepared thoroughly for this: rusted iron plating of unknown origin, an old oxygen tank, an old gyroscope style control panel, a circulating life support system and a rectifying cone… She welded all the materials together and made sure that her finished suit of armor had no vent at all, for she felt that this would protect her from the harm of “Nihility”.

She lifted the diving helmet her father had left behind and pinned on the “Badge of Honor” she had made herself. Before leaving, she and her companion went to the cedar forest once more and roasted one last marshmallow.

Afterward, as Frebass's ship drew near the rim of the black hole, that was all of the last memories she could recall of Orkron.

O you who turn the wheel and watch the way of the wind,
think of her, Frebass,
“She too was once as beautiful and as tall as any of you.”

The lead shoes, like an anchor, pull the girl endlessly downward. They are being faithful to the mission for which they were designed from the very start.

From beginning to end the girl did not close her eyes, holding out against the cold, dark loneliness. She remembered the first time she heard the story of Akivili; remembered the first day she set out upon the journey, when she made the “Badge of Honor” for herself with her own hands; remembered the thirty days she traveled with her companion; remembered the first and the last time they met in the cedar forest, where the air carried the taste of raspberries; remembered the whistling, the guitar and the bamboo flute, along with the song they sang together; remembered the purple-red snowflake falling onto the soft cotton candy, and then quickly vanishing.

At the end of the memories that appeared before her eyes, a great emptiness opened up, and the girl unexpectedly saw a bright red mark appear at the center of that dark world.

And so the small Nameless remembered the last time the girl with the sword took the cotton candy from her, and laughed to herself inwardly:

I never thought I would meet someone like myself. On this “road”, the distance you have gone is far greater than mine.
So you will surely stay with me until the very end, will you not?
Of course, our ending has already been decided… but as you said
Even if in the end I become a shallow stretch of dead water, on the road to that point I can still do a great many things. So no matter what, I must try
“Because I want to walk a road deeper and farther than even Akivili's!”