Rein froze. The meaning was clear, but her thoughts were not... the very idea was unfathomable. She had accepted that Signum was here, with her, but somehow she could not imagine that the knight would die and she would live. While she had lived the knights had shared in her unimpeachable permanence, and she had died so that they might live as well. It was not...

Fair. A foolish sentiment, from one who had seen only disaster for millennia. She had admonished Hayate, for thinking this same thing when she was about to die, but here with her master's heart she felt the same. She had thought she had made everything right. For a beloved knight, who had protected her through the long ages she had not deserved it, even blind, and at last been freed from that darkness to far from her master's side and that promised end-

"Say it," she said in a voice hollowed by pain. "Please."

A cruel request, perhaps, but it was a cruelty too to leave her that small sliver of doubt, that only nagged more the more she told herself it was unthinkable that there could be any other meaning to the reaper's words. And she wanted to hear something, even those words, more than she wanted to chase this feeling in her mind as she had her sorrow in the old days...