Lost Saga - Sakura

He didn't draw a weapon. He opened his palm and showed them the petal from the real world—the one that had fallen on his shoulder when he first entered. It was different from the loop’s petals. It was whole, un-cursed, from a tree that had grown from the original’s seedling centuries ago.

"Does she know?" Kaito asked.

"If you had told her the truth. If you had said, 'They are already dead, let us run anyway.' She would have said yes. She would have chosen you, not because you were good, but because you were honest." sakura lost saga

The setting was always the same: a single, ancient cherry tree in a courtyard, its bark scarred with kanji. Surrounding it, the ghostly afterimages of a ceremony gone wrong. Kaito could see the figures flickering: a bride in a blood-red kimono, her face a porcelain mask of grief; a samurai with a sword half-drawn; a priest scattering not rice, but ashes.

"Look," Kaito said, holding it up. "Your tree still lives. Not here, but in a garden in the new Kyoto. Children play beneath it. Lovers carve their names into its bark. The sorrow became soil, Ren. The loss became roots." He didn't draw a weapon

On his first cycle, he simply observed. He watched Sakura braid her hair, her fingers trembling. He watched Ren sharpen his blade, his jaw a knot of iron. He watched the fatal meeting, the single tear on Ren’s face as his sword arced down.

"That her father gave Ren a false choice. There was no village. Ren’s family had already been slaughtered a week prior. The warlord just wanted to break his spirit. He wanted Ren to live with the guilt of killing the only thing he loved, for a lie." It was whole, un-cursed, from a tree that

"She would have said yes," Sakura whispered.