He had heard the inner voices of Mom, Dad, and other people for as long as he could remember, and they had always been unconditionally kind to him.
So he trusted someone he shouldn't have trusted. And that was all the fault.
His father died immediately after being drafted, and soon his mother went to the front, so Sheen and his brother were raised by a Catholic priest.
He was from the village where their concentration camp was now located, as the only reminder of this was a surviving church in one of the back streets.
The Holy Father himself was from Adularia, but he was categorically opposed to the "eighty-six" camps, so he refused to evacuate behind the wall, as the rest of the clergy did, and continued to live behind barbed wire.
The Eighty-Six avoided him because of his race, but he was friends with Shin's parents. When the boys were left alone, the Holy Father took them into his care.
If it wasn't for him, Shin and his brother might well have died. The inhabitants of the camp resented and resented those who had turned their lives into a theater of the absurd, including the Albs, who had founded the camps, and the Imperials, who had unleashed the war. Had it not been for the protection of the Holy Father, the two high-blooded Imperial scions might well have become scapegoats.
Shin was about to turn eight. It was the night he learned that his mother had died.
At the time, he didn't fully understand that he no longer had parents.
His father and mother were far away, so he couldn't talk to them, but he kept hearing their "voices" all the while—until they suddenly disappeared. And soon the alert came. It said that both of his parents were dead, but those words seemed completely out of touch with reality. It was the first time Shin had encountered the idea that humans could not live forever, but he had never seen a body with his own eyes, so for a young child, this verbal "death" was not something irreversible or irreparable.
Shin didn't want to scream or cry, he was just confused. He was told that his parents would never come back, that he would never see them again, but why this happened he could not understand.
"Be a good boy, obey your holy father and brother." He remembered his mother saying it on the morning of her departure and patting him on the head with a smile, but why she could not come to him again, he could not understand, no matter how hard he tried.
So Shin decided to ask his brother about it.
Ray was 10 years older than him and could and knew absolutely everything. His elder brother always protected and cherished him more than anything else.
He'll be sure to explain everything.
Ray stood motionless in the middle of his room, his back turned to the entrance. The lights were off.
"Brother."
Ray turned around slowly. His black eyes were red with tears, and it was as if a storm of despair and rage was raging inside, while his gaze remained completely blank, which was a little frightening.
"Brother!" And what about your mother?
His black pupils narrowed.
Shin was looking directly at his brother, but he couldn't understand his grief yet, so he continued to speak. How he regretted it later...
"She's not coming back?" Why?.. Why did she die?
There was a silence that seemed to put an end to something.
In the next second, his brother's empty and icy eyes flashed with anger, and something terribly squeezed Shin's neck and pinned him to the wooden floor.
His lungs were bursting, and the merciless suffocating force did not allow him to take in air. Due to the lack of oxygen, my eyes quickly darkened. My brother used all his muscle strength and his own weight, so that his neck looked like it was going to break.
The black pupils were very close.
They glistened with excitement and hatred.
" It's your fault .
He growled through clenched teeth.
"Mom went to war because of you. She died because of you. You're the one who killed your mother!
"If only you weren't there."
He heard his brother's "voice" drowning out even his booming roar. They were undisguised, sincere thoughts, and they burned like the flames of hell and pierced like an assassin's dagger.
"I wish you weren't here. Why were you just born? But you can end it right now. Disappear from this world."
"Die."
"Shin." Your name. How it fits. It's your fault. It's all because of you! Mom's death, and now my imminent death, is all your sin!
He was scared. His brother's roar. A "voice" full of hatred.
Shin couldn't shut himself off from him. He couldn't even move.
And then he ran there . To the farthest depths, to where my parents went, to the most secret corners of my soul.
Suddenly, his consciousness left him, and the whole world crumbled into fragments, plunging into darkness.
Shin woke up in his own bed and saw the Holy Father beside him. "It's fine," he said, and Shin noticed that his brother wasn't around. He was still in the church, but they never met.
Ray enlisted as a volunteer and went to the front a few days later.
Shin went out to see him off, hiding behind the Holy Father.
His brother didn't say a word or even look at him, and it was clear from his face that he was still angry. Frightened, Shin didn't say anything to him either.
From that moment on, his brother's familiar "voice" was gone forever, and no matter how many times Shin gathered his courage and tried to contact him, Rei never responded. Gradually, Shin came to terms with the fact that he had not been forgiven... and that he could not be forgiven.
The scar on his neck thinned over time, but never disappeared, a reminder of the moment he first realized he was hearing strange, distant voices.
He couldn't make out the words, but he understood what they wanted to say.
Soon, a chorus of human voices sounded in his head. All of them, sobbing, asked for the same thing and repeated themselves like a jammed record.
Shin understood where these voices were coming from and why no one was hearing them.
Apparently, his brother killed him after all. He died, but he didn't disappear, he just began to hear the voices of the same dead.
Then, one day, in the midst of his habitual weeping, he heard his brother's distant voice.
Shin realized that he was dead and was calling for him.
On the same day, he volunteered.