Epilogue

In the late night, Lindy led a cloaked figure into the hospital. Accustomed to people adjusting their pace to his limp, Lindy found this person, dressed in black with a hood covering the face, paying no heed. Lindy cautioned, "Slow down, and tread lightly. Do you want to get noticed?"

The advice lasted only a few seconds, and Lindy had to quicken his pace to keep up. Days ago, the guards on this floor were removed to avoid attention, but patrols still roamed below. Lindy brought the person through an emergency passage behind a building.

They reached the fourth floor, and Lindy halted in front of a ward. The cloaked figure stopped too.

"This is it." Lindy pushed the door open slightly and withdrew his hand.

The person in black glanced inside through the crack, then pointed to the adjacent room behind Lindy.

"He's in that room...?"

"I can't tell you. You can only enter through my door, as agreed, three minutes. I've left a note on the office door regarding this matter. If you don't remove it within ten minutes, the duty staff will know something's amiss. It doesn't concern me, but you might face trouble, and you know it. So, three minutes."

"You don't trust me much."

"Oh, I trust you, but... two minutes and fifty-six seconds."

The person in black said nothing more, pushed open the door, and entered. Lindy heard him say, "Don't lock it," and merely closed the door without locking it. The person sat on a chair beside the bed.

The room remained dark, lit only by a small patch of composed moonlight. Filtering through the gray-blue clouds in the night sky, the light circled a church steeple, grazed the rough wooden window frame with the night wind, and finally slipped into the room. It settled on Dalia's face, not revealing everything but highlighting her features. The person in black pushed the hood back, allowing the shadows to retreat, revealing Mardias.

Mardias stared at his mother without moving. After a moment, he took a dagger from his robe, laid it flat in his right hand, extended it a bit forward, letting the dim light reveal the letter 'J' engraved on the blade. He flipped the dagger, glanced at it, then shifted his gaze back to his mother.

On the night of the incident, he arrived at Dalia's house. Prevented from entering by those blocking the scene, no one informed him of what happened, even though everyone recognized him as Mardias. Aimlessly wandering around the house's perimeter, he encountered a child. Mardias felt the child looked familiar, but he dismissed it. However, when he passed by without much attention, he was attacked. The child brandished a dagger, too large for his hand, and attempted to stab Mardias. Dodging the attack, Mardias recognized the child as the one he had beaten in front of Jorgen. He also recognized Jorgen's dagger.

Later, he learned that Jorgen's dagger was lost during the altercation that day, never found. The attack he experienced was irrational, and Mardias sensed the child's hatred, genuine and uncontrolled, akin to true animosity after emotional turmoil.

Mardias thought, 'You shouldn't hate me like this. Last time I struck you, it wasn't of my own volition. I was just following orders...,' but he couldn't articulate it. He knew there was nothing to explain.

The child continued the assault. Picking up stones and throwing them, and when the stones were exhausted, he ran back a few steps to retrieve more. In all the attacks, only one stone hit Mardias, and it didn't hurt, but looking at the dagger in his hand, he felt dizzy. Recalling how he failed to kill a prisoner under Jorgen's orders, Mardias saw those two bodies he personally dragged into the sea rising again. They muttered with decayed lips, "You can't kill."

Mardias looked at the dagger. He had seen Jorgen use it to kill multiple times and knew it had been Jorgen's weapon for years. At that moment, he felt a calmness, thinking that with this dagger, things would be simpler.

He clenched it and thrust it towards the child.

—But he didn't hit. It wasn't a matter of skill; Mardias knew it wasn't a mistake. He stopped at the last moment. The child was petrified, dropping the stones and running away. Although the dagger remained bloodless, Mardias felt a sense of release. He was capable of taking action, and his inner calmness told him that killing this mentally unstable child would be foolish.

This morning, he killed a resisting criminal using his own dagger. Jorgen's dagger was concealed in his armor, and he didn't deserve to own it anymore. Mardias thought the dagger might stay with him for a long time; the next time he needed to kill but couldn't for some reason, he might need it.

"They can't protect you both." He said. "But I'm different, Mom."

He stood up, gazing at Dalia's closed eyes for the last time, covered his face again with the hat, and walked out of the room. The room's moonlight remained calm and secluded, focusing solely on Dalia's face, like a river untouched by anyone other than her.