The West Wind's Destination - Chapter 85
Bea had a dream for the first time in a long while.
Before her stretched the desert. The West, always swirling with sand-laden winds. Only the pungent smell of dust and dry heat filled the air.
This time, it seemed to be memories from her childhood.
Dreams were always of this kind. Reproductions of what she had experienced before.
Sometimes it was about repelling people charging at her on the battlefield. When she finally decapitated them with the weapon she had, the dream usually ended. Other times, she saw a caravan being destroyed in a transmutation circle. The place where she stayed as a slave breaking down, stepping over the blood of dying slaves to face her master, and then the dream ended.
To Bea, dreams were neither fantasy nor delusion. Just a reconstitution of past realities.
Since the mind is recreating what it has already experienced, she could immediately recognize it as a dream.
The more physically tired she was, the further back into the past she went. Her brain, wishing to rest, displayed these scenes, and she thought it would be harder than usual to wake up this time.
—We love you.
Why doesn’t this voice fade away? Bea found it tiresome.
—Just wait here, we will come back for you soon.
Hearing that, Bea stood in one place for days on end, waiting for her family.
She only understood and accepted what this act was later.
It was a custom to abandon children in the desert to reduce even one mouth to feed on the barren land.
Of course, it was nicely packaged.
Offering a sacrifice to the god of the desert in hopes that the land would be blessed with bounty. The child isn’t killed by the sandstorm but taken early by a god for care. Indeed, with one less mouth to feed, there was a bit more abundance, even if just a sliver.
What a foolish act.
There is no god watching over the desert.
It’s just succumbing to the harsh nature before them, clinging to superstition because they can’t overcome it.
How silly.
Focusing on understanding why such phenomena occur allows one to not depend on useless illusions.
The act performed by her family was pragmatically correct. In such a harsh environment, a child who can’t even fend for herself is useless. This was merely the natural course of life.
She had experienced it once before. Now that she knows, even in a dream, Bea shouldn’t wait for a nonexistent god to pick her up. She needed to move on her own instead.
That’s why… she needed to move to survive.
Now she knows how. To scrounge something barely enough to fill her stomach from beneath the ground, to draw whatever moisture there was to quench her thirst.
From securing the materials to make simple tools, the task should be straightforward since I know what to do and how to act.
However, Bea could not move her body as she thought she would.
It was because she couldn’t find a reason to live to such an extent.
Perhaps she had always been seeking a reason to survive in the desert.
There is no illusion that shatters harsh reality and allows one to feel beauty. It doesn’t exist. So, rather than relying on fiction and illusion, Bea found a way to face reality.
Aseph once said that it was really a sad thing.
—If you’ve encountered such things and your heart has never been moved, it’s truly sad.
He said that he wanted to move her heart.
But the dreams and fantasies given to Bea were filled with nothing but harshness.
While begging for understanding, Aseph gradually broke down the walls that Bea had firmly built up with her survival instincts.
Maybe that’s why. In the end, those words broke down Bea’s will to survive.
The existence of Myron Devesis had merely helped Bea bury the past and focus on the present phenomena.
If she is moved by the endlessly raging sandstorms of the desert, rather than accepting them as phenomena, she must first acknowledge that she is a being abandoned by her family and god.
So, she had no thoughts of moving.
Dry sand. Stinging wind. A mere human with nothing.
Because, after all, that is reality.
If I were to become a part of this storm, that would be fine too.
—Just wait here, we will come back for you soon.
Maybe this time, god might actually come to take her.
But the sandstorm that seemed to engulf and sweep me away only subsided as she quietly waited. And then, Bea saw something running towards her from afar.
Something white as snow grew larger as it approached. By the time she realized what it was, it had already come close.
A giant wolf with fur as white as snow, the size of a house.
It had a clean coat of fur that didn’t match the desert, without a single spot.
Moreover, the colors of its eyes were different.
Where in the world would one find such a wolf, too unusual to even be called a mutation?
It was the first time something unrealistic had crashed into Bea’s dream of reconstructing reality.
—Bea, I’m sorry.
This was nothing but foolish fantasy.
The wolf even started speaking the human language.
That it resembled Aseph’s voice was ridiculously stupid.
—I made you wait too long.
I wasn’t waiting for anything.
This is unrealistic. One must learn to accept phenomena as they are.
Such things don’t exist.
There’s no such thing. It’s silly.
There’s no god to take me in.
If she continued to cling to such things, I would be…
“…”
Bea had so much she wanted to say after seeing such a foolish dream.
But nothing came out of her mouth.
She just approached the wolf in front of her and hugged it tightly.
Just as Aseph Vilkanos always did for her.
