The Spider's Thread (before battle)
Sweetie.
Subjectively speaking, let me say that you are far more beautiful now than you were earlier. But...
... do you have any idea what you just lost... What you just let go?
…….
Ryōshū has crawled out from the depths of hell, bringing herself up solely by a spider's thread.
She emerges, her fingers around the scabbard closed from all that leaves and lives.
You sent away the most precious thing in the world with your own hands.
Everything that made up that child... has now been cut away because of you.
What you returned here for, what you wished to protect, what you longed to meet again...
All of it is gone now. You have nothing left.
We on the outside, we still remember... But ironically, it was within yourself that it all passed into oblivion.
Right.
I've lost... everything.
<That's not true, Ryōshū.>
<You're still holding it in your hand.>
Ryōshū slowly opens her fist...
... as if she wasn't aware she'd been clenching it.
Resting in her palm, the scabbard presses against her skin, its shape and weight filling her senses.
... The more you treasure something,
the less of it you ought to keep - just enough to fit within your hands.
…….
Rien, you of all people...
You always knew what I was gonna become, didn't you?
... Yes.
And had I reached completion...
What would you have had left?
... Who knows.
Only Hermes, who deigns to grace me with the whispers, would know the answer to that.
... Is there even a single thing about you...
... that doesn't come from the Prescripts?
Hmm... now that you mention it, sweetie...
I suppose there really isn't.
One day, the Prescript told me to change my name,
so I made a new one.
One day, the Prescript told me to start a family,
so I got married and raised a child.
Then another day, the Prescript told me that someone would be killed right before my eyes, and that I was to do nothing but watch it happen.
And so, I waited... without lifting a finger.
Even in their final moments, my wife and child never understood why I simply watched it happen to them.
And you just... accepted that?
Hmm... Do you think I shouldn't have?
Darling, remember that story about a spider that wanted to leave its web?
Unsatisfied with merely gazing upon the sky, it wished to be free of its webs.
Seeing that, a long-lived chrysalis, who was as wise as it was old, told the Spider....
... to circle its web 3,000 times. If nothing changes, another 3,000 times. Another set should nothing change still.
Round and round, the hopeful spider circled its web more times than it could count, yet even after thousands of repetitions... all it saw was the same old web.
The spider, full of despair, went to confront the chrysalis, who had now metamorphosed into a butterfly. "I have circled my web countless times," it said. "Why hasn't anything changed?"
Flying off into the distance, the butterfly answered:
"Resign yourself to the fact that you are forever bound to the web, and close your heart to the beautiful sky above until it ceases to stir any feelings in you."
"That is the only way to be truly free of the web."
My darling daughter, you'll end up losing everything if you let yourself be shackled by what gives you these feelings - happiness, wrath, sorrow, joy... Because once you get a taste of them, you'll learn the truth that to live is to suffer.
That is why I must remain in the House of Spiders.