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Night had fallen heavy over Falconia. Silence moved through the streets; even the stone walls seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. But in the high tower, at the window touched by moonlight, Griffith was awake. He had his hands clasped tightly on the windowsill; between his fingers lay the remnants of a war, and in his eyes the echo of the past. As the wind passed through the distant stone courtyards, a single sentence rang in his mind each time with the same sting and the same guilt: “I have my own dream.” That sentence… it was the moment everything began. And perhaps the place where everything ended. For Griffith, time had become only an echo. He had no future, no dream left worth sleeping to see. Only that voice, that gaze, that lost touch remained.
Once, Guts had entered his room quietly. In the middle of the night, in a room wrapped in silence, he carried a bowl of water, a few cloths, a little care. Griffith had injured his arm in battle, but he did not let anyone know no one except Guts. “I know you want to be alone,” Guts had said, “but sometimes you don't have to carry it alone.” Griffith said nothing then. He only looked with that deep, piercing gaze. That look stripped him not of armor but of being itself. Because Guts saw him as no one else did: not as a god, but as a man. Breakable, incomplete, frightened, and longing. And that night, Griffith for the first time could not be certain of his dream. A loneliness that questioned even his own dream had fallen over him.
Years passed. Now Guts sat among the ruins of a church. The walls were covered in moss, the roof had long since collapsed. The wind passed between the stones like a burnt hymn, as if whispering a lost prayer to him. Casca was in a safe place, he knew that. But he himself could find no place in either the past or the shore of the future. In his hand was an old flask; in each wine he drank was the taste of an old night, and in his heart an unending emptiness. “Why do you still affect me…” he murmured. “Even though I hated you, even when I was close to killing you…” But anger was not enough. No hatred could fill that void. Because the shape of that void was Griffith.
And every night, when he closed his eyes, the same dream returned from the dark. There were no swords in that dream, no blood. Only a wide field of grass, a quiet sky, and two young men sitting side by side. Guts sat with his knees pulled to his chest. On Griffith’s face was that old, pure smile the smile that belonged only to Guts. The wind ran through his hair and Griffith turned to him; his voice was soft, like an echo from the past: “If we had met in another life… I would still want you by my side.” Guts woke every time. He clenched his fists, caught his breath, and his eyes became wet as he looked at the sky. When the first light of morning fell on his face he whispered to himself: “Maybe in another dream… maybe one day, even in dreamless sleeps, you are there.”