As long as time flows, the tides shall rise and the waves will erode every step left behind in the sands of history.

However, as long as a single soul endures, the world shall not meet its end, for this world—their world—is yet alive.

And as long as will persists, the march of that single soul shall never cease, and the footprints they leave behind will endlessly carve a path for all whom desire to tread onward toward the ever-distant horizon.

...

Those who once believed in such truths, whose conviction was as unrepentant as stone, have long since been lost to time. Yet their will lives. It persists in forms far beyond their original selves. That ideal—an ideal that transcends the ones who first conceived it—marches on forevermore.

However, while the core remains unbroken, the heart—that tender heart—is not invincible. The passage of time can alter it irrevocably.

To gaze upon oneself in the mirror and not recognize the reflection staring back—such is a devastation from which there is no return.

A past, long forgotten, cannot be reclaimed when even the past itself has been rewritten.

One can only advance, ceaselessly, trusting not in the past, but in the present and the future. In the essence they carry, unchangeable by circumstance.

Heroes shall always be heroes and villains shall always be villains.

...

Queen believed in that. With a resolve so fervent, it bordered on delusion.

But when did your path first entwine with hers?

Was it back then, in a time so far removed it existed only in the distant haze of childhood memory, when both of you smiled without a thought in mind?

Or had the path always been shared, just invisible, waiting only for the moment when your eyes would finally see what your feet already knew?

She wished to tell you this—that despite her obligation as a hero, bound by duty to rid the world of the wicked and to preserve what was righteous, it was you who drove her to rise and face the dawn of each day.

Even if her heart had long since been irrevocably twisted and distorted by the passage of time—

It was you, always you.

There existed no person in this world she cherished more.