The being held semblance... to a pupa enwound in rubescent thread, or else a fetus folded into itself, crouched in the posture as though its nativity precluded.

The filaments, convoluted past disentanglement, had agglomerated into a globular pellicle...

And through that enclosed interior, scarlet threads meandered like blood vessels.

As the only immediately apprehensible truth was its outward integument, wholly woven of thread...

I shall herein endeavor to consign to writing the inexpressible sensations that befell us as we sought to sunder those strands.

To my own perception, it was as though I had bisected a moment already forfeited to the irretrievable past.

Miss Ryōshū later recalled that it was akin to piercing a scene whose advent still lay sealed in futurity.

What Heathcliff described was akin to crushing, in this present locus, a butterfly whose being belonged to the now.

And thereafter, it simply took wing toward some indeterminate distance—

Neither hatched nor undergone metamorphosis; it merely stirred its meager wings to depart.

→ Oho! Did ye behold it?! No sooner had we smote the great wyrm than the pupa did manifest anew!

→ The target disappeared with a spark of flame upon the elimination of the red threads. While there were no significant losses warranting a report, Executive Manager, I advise we maintain full vigilance.

→ Oho! Did ye behold it?! No sooner had we slain Young Hohenheim than the pupa did manifest anew!

→ "S-slain" Mister Hohenheim...? I mean, I guess that's what we did, but... it's not like we <i>actually</i> killed Mister Hohenheim...

→ Phrasing the outcome as "slaying Hohenheim" does not deviate from the observable result. Faust determines that no correction is necessary.

→ Uh... Frau Faust. Sounds like you're getting just a tad bit personal there.

→ Oho! Did ye behold it?!
(The rest of the entry is missing. The page appears to have been cleanly sliced off from this point.)

By means of diminutive wings, the butterfly appears to have departed to a remote distance.

At first, past the shadow of the dragon fallen earthward, the butterfly fluttered those small wings, as though making trial of an appendage insufficient for flight.

Thereafter, from beyond Young Hohenheim's refraction, it disclosed itself again.

The final revelation of its form was from behind the figure of Rien, the Index Nursefather of the House of Spiders—its wings in full bloom, the shape of its flutters transient as though through time:

At one juncture, the fervency of iron made incandescent within a crucible...

At another, the pellucidity of glass that renounced all reflection for transparency...

Then, in yet another instant, a ferruginous red, akin to a weapon left to molder in disuse.

It would seem now that the butterfly does not exchange one locus for another.

We believed we had observed it in accordance with time's succession...

Yet with every severing of those crimson threads, time does not conduct that thing onward, but instead passes it askance.

→ The actions taken by the Sinners who faced the Abnormality appear to be exerting an influence on later battles in some way.

→ Ugghh... This is seriously giving me the creeps... Dante, should we try changing something? Maybe our Identities or weapons?

→ Change what, exactly? Ain't like we can tell what'll come of it right this second, innit? Better fight 'em head-on instead of faffing about doing things different.

→ Yeah. Let's stick to what we've been doing, like Heathcliff said.

Because present existence, in its proper and primordial state, remains moored to but a singular time, we bestow names upon those disparate points in the stream.

Yet that butterfly... It appears that all that it was, is, and will be has been twisted together into a single entanglement.

If life be but a thread, then that one is a strand over-spooled, coiled and re-coiled beyond measure.

There is a commonality shared by such lives.

The more one refuses to face them, the more they burgeon; unattended, they swallow life itself and the world entire at last.

There are recollections which remain unrisen, though one may dredge the years in reverse.

And there are recollections which remain unforgotten, though one may spend those same years turning resolutely away from them.

The more I turn my eyes toward the past, the more the past shall consume me in conflagration.

The more I turn my eyes toward the present, the more the present shall hew me away, coldly and keenly.

The more I turn my eyes toward the future, the more the future shall rust, abrading away my very usefulness.

They had not vanished. Rather, in places unseen, they must have continued to twist and entangle upon themselves.

→ To disclose my reflection upon the matter, this Railway turns in samsaric recurrence upon the same locus.

→ Thus... if we are returned to the beginning, the vestiges left upon past, future, and present shall, in turn, assume different forms.