Beast Gacha System: All Mine

The cemetery stretched wide and flat across the winter landscape, a vast field of snow and stone that seemed to go on forever.

The ground was buried beneath a blanket of pristine white, the snow so smooth and undisturbed that it looked like a sheet drawn over a sleeping body.

Here and there, the dark fingers of dead trees clawed upward toward the gray sky, their bare branches rimed with frost, their shadows long and blue across the snow.

The headstones were old, some so weathered by time that their inscriptions had worn away to nothing. Others stood at angles, sinking slowly into the earth as though the ground were calling them home.

In the middle of this vast stillness, a woman in a white dress stood alone.

She was not in front of any particular tombstone, she was simply standing, her breath misting in the cold air, her eyes fixed on some distant point that only she could see.

The wind tugged at the hem of her dress and stirred the loose strands of her hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. She seemed, in that moment, as still and silent as the graves themselves.

An old man passed her on his slow, careful walk through the cemetery. He was bent with age, bundled in a heavy coat that had seen better decades, his face weathered and kind.

He carried a small bundle of winter flowers, pale, hardy blooms that could survive the cold, and he paused when he saw her standing there alone.

"Lady, are you alright?" he asked, rough from the cold but gentle.

The woman turned, and her face was revealed in the pale winter light. She was beautiful. A beauty that made the old man think of the paintings in the temple, the ones of holy women with eyes that had seen too much and still managed to be kind.

Her bearing was noble. Or more than noble. She looked... perhaps divine.

"Yes," she answered steadily. "I am just taking a short walk."

"Ah." The old man nodded, his breath puffing white in the cold. "Perhaps you are looking for a burial space, my lady?"

Cecilia raised her eyebrows. Did it seem that way?

She wasn’t looking for a burial space. She wasn’t planning to buy one either.

She was simply... missing her mother.

Summer Silver’s burial didn’t exist in this world. It didn’t exist in their real world. Summer had been cremated, her remains scattered at some unknown place by relatives who had never cared about her.

She truly couldn’t do anything for her mother, not even protect her after death.

But perhaps saying that to herself, thinking it now, as a grown woman, was too cruel. She had been only eight years old when Summer died. A child. What could a child half-kidnapped into being the Saintess have done?

"But there are no remains to be buried," she said suddenly.

The old man flinched, his weathered face creasing with sudden sorrow. "Oh dear, oh dear, I’m so sorry..."

"No." Cecilia shook her head, her expression softening. "I just... don’t have a place to mourn."

That was the heart of it, she realized. She couldn’t find and enter other worlds just to mourn her mother. She couldn’t chase Summer’s ghost across dimensions, searching for a grave that didn’t belong to her real mother.

But she needed somewhere. Somewhere to kneel... to remember.

"Then make one," the old man said.

Cecilia’s eyes widened.

"People in the east built ancestral halls, displayed tablets with names, and created altars in their homes," the old man said. "Here, we can just erect a tomb with a name. Isn’t it the same thing?"

Cecilia fell silent.

Of course she had thought of that. She had thought of erecting a tomb and acting as though Summer were truly buried beneath that ground.

It was what truly mattered, after all. Not the tomb itself, but that Summer truly was buried peacefully.

Summer Silver had never wanted to be cremated. She had been afraid of fire. And yet she had been cremated anyway, because her distant relatives had taken charge of her death and made decisions that had nothing to do with who she had been or what she had wanted.

Ha.

"I’ll show you the perfect spot," the old man said, gesturing for her to follow him.

He turned and began walking slowly through the snow, his boots leaving deep prints that Cecilia followed like a path. He led her past rows of weathered headstones, past a copse of dead trees whose branches clicked together in the wind like old bones, and past a frozen pond where the ice was thick and gray.

They stopped at the edge of the cemetery, where the flat plain began to slope gently upward into a low hill. A single ancient oak stood here, its branches bare and black against the sky, its trunk so wide that three men could not have linked their arms around it.

The snow beneath it was untouched. The view from this spot looked out over the entire cemetery and beyond, to the distant line of mountains that marked the horizon.

"Here," the old man said. "Under the old tree. It’s the best spot in the whole place. I’ve been saving it for someone special." He turned to Cecilia and smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "I think your mother would like it."

Cecilia’s eyes widened. How did he—how could he possibly—

"I knew that was you. You’re Dr. Silver’s little girl, Cecilia, right?" The old man asked, his weathered face softening with a recognition that spanned nearly two decades.

Who was this man?

Cecilia searched his face, her mind racing backward through years of memory, through the fog of childhood and the sharper clarity of grief.

He was old now. Older than he should have been, perhaps, worn down by time and loss. But there was something in the way he smiled.

"You are..."

"I’m the dumb younger admirer who pretended to get a cold once a month just to look for your mother’s sneer whenever I got the chance." The old man’s smile turned rueful, almost embarrassed. "You used to call me Uncle Rhett."

Cecilia’s breath caught.

Yes. Yes, someone like that had existed in the past. A young man, younger then, at least, who had come to Summer’s clinic with fabricated ailments and transparent excuses, who had lingered at the counter long after his consultation was done.

She remembered how he would bring small gifts of fruit and flowers and leave them on the doorstep without a note.

Summer had always known it was him. She had always rolled her eyes and called him a fool. But she had never turned him away or told him to stop coming.

Perhaps this man had been Cecilia’s first exposure to love between man and woman. The clumsy, hopeless, devoted love of someone who asked for nothing and expected even less.

He had loved Summer Silver. Not the way Cecilia loved her, of course, but perhaps he was the second person who had loved Summer the most in all the world, after Cecilia herself.

"I heard you were being chased out by the new Saintess. People said you were fake, but I don’t believe that," Rhett said. "The people in this little town too, they don’t believe that."

Cecilia looked at him in disbelief.

But Rhett just smiled. "Everyone who visited Dr. Silver’s clinic until seventeen years ago knows how real you are."

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