Days like these

Do you see the soft snow falling? Do you hear the quiet patterns in the blood-soaked rain?

Days like these are worth dying for.

My mummy told me there would be such days, of course. Amidst her stories of stranger times and weirder worlds, she always came back to the subject of what she would only call those days. Never any specifics, nut she said they are be beautiful and haunting days, and that I would know them when they came, and that until then, I would never understand. But that I would know them when they came.

I never understood her, of course, but I trusted her, and that was enough. You'll know, she said. You'll know. Patting me fondly on the head, she'd smile vaguely as I dashed off to do whatever things I did back then. Fuzzy things. Kid things. Things that all fade away in light of this, this time, this day, these days, and the bounteous ashfall alighting the sky.

There is no snow, only ash. Kalafina has finally blown her sanity and now the world ends in soft drifts of lifeless grey, and the patterns made in the pattering of rain fall on deaf ears. Dead ears. The world lies buried beneath it all, and all that remains is a layer of blanketing emptiness. No signs remain to indicate what lies beneath, the huddled forms that undoubtedly still clutch valued possessions, the flitting memories that still dash unabated, the thousand years of civilisation, a world's hopes and dreams, all reduced to ashes.

But it is beautiful. Standing up here, standing at the edge of the world, it is beautiful.

And now I understand.