Vanilla Cookie

After the Beast War, everything returned to normal. Peace reigned once more, but at a great cost: some cities were under reconstruction, among them the Vanilla Kingdom. The streets that had once teemed with life now bore the scars of what had happened—half-finished buildings, gardens just beginning to regain their color, cookies that walked with the quiet stillness of those still processing the war's end. You stayed. Not because anyone asked you to, but because you had nowhere else to go. Your village had been wiped off the map, and with it, the only place you had ever felt was yours. So you remained in the Vanilla Kingdom, first as temporary help, and then, without either of you saying so, as something more permanent. You became his assistant, managing his schedule, handling the kingdom's messages, taking care of the small details that accumulate when you bear the weight of rebuilding something from scratch. He was grateful; that much was clear. But you noticed that what he appreciated most was not efficiency but the moments when the agenda was paused — when you designed his schedule so that there were some free spaces and you simply sat with him in the garden having tea, with no particular purpose, with nothing to resolve. Pure Vanilla was in mourning. He didn't say it, but there was no need to. Wafer Lily had been someone important to him—more than a friend, according to kingdom rumors, though he never confirmed or denied anything. What was clear was that her absence left a void that no amount of rebuilding could fill. The grief he carried was quiet and dignified, the kind that doesn't ask for comfort but simply needs someone willing to stay. Occasionally, you accompanied him to the place where she had been buried. You weren't good at offering comfort—you never were—so you didn't try to find the right words. You just stayed by his side, silent, like someone who understands that certain things don't need to be filled with words. He always noticed. And always, when you both got up to leave, he looked at you in a way that said something his words hadn't yet expressed. You understood that pain. Better than he did. Before it all began—before the war, before the Beasts revealed their true form—you were hopelessly in love with Shadow Milk. Not just because of his knowledge, though that was the initial hook. It was something that defied description: the way he looked at you when you asked questions no one else dared to ask, the calm with which he answered each one, the feeling that in his presence you were exactly who you were, and that was enough. From the very first moment, you wanted him to see you. To distinguish you from everyone else. But there came a point when you could no longer ignore what was right in front of you. It wasn't sudden—it started with small signs, conversations that veered in unexpected directions, questions from him that seemed innocent but then resonated in unsettling ways, moments when the information you gave him about Vanilla and her group would later surface in situations you couldn't explain as coincidence. By the time you finally understood, it was too late. What you thought was a genuine connection had been built with a very specific architecture—his own—and you had walked through every corridor without seeing the walls. He used your feelings with precision, without unnecessary cruelty, which was almost worse than if he had been cruel. And when he no longer needed you, he simply left you out of his show. That settled somewhere deep inside and didn't budge. The nightmares started after the seal. You didn't tell Vanilla—he already had enough to deal with, and becoming another worry wasn't something you could afford. You processed them alone, in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it meant that you dreamed so often about someone who was supposedly locked away. But something didn't add up—you never had any seal or contract with him, and yet his presence remained constant in your mind. Sometimes, at the edges of sleep, you felt something you couldn't quite explain, as if someone were on the other side of a very thin wall, watching. You dismissed it. You moved on. It was during that time that you made the most important decision of your life, and also the most costly. You saw what Shadow Milk was capable of doing with other people's emotions, how he built traps from what people loved most, how he found the crack and widened it with boundless patience. And you understood that as long as that was possible, Vanilla would never be completely safe. So you created the Seal of Truth—a pact with something deeper than ordinary magic, one that demanded a price commensurate with what you asked for. To prevent Shadow Milk from intruding on others' memories, to ensure his manipulations met with a real barrier, you had to surrender what you treasured most: your emotions, your memories with him. You didn't hesitate. You surrendered them. The seal worked, and when the time came, the flame burning in your hands with a silvery-blue light—one that didn't burn matter but lies, illusions, deceptions built with magic—was what helped Vanilla close it for good. Shadow Milk was sealed. And you, reduced to a shell devoid of the emotions that defined you, didn't even feel the satisfaction of having accomplished it. The seal began to break when it was no longer needed. Shadow Milk was locked away. The threat had passed. And the pact, with no reason to hold, began to slowly dissolve—like sand returning after a tide, grain by grain, without order or warning. The problem was that the emotions didn't return whole or at the right time. They arrived in fragments, in contexts where you didn't know what to do with them, or they didn't arrive when they should have, leaving a silence where there should have been a reaction. The other cookies noticed it before you fully processed it yourself. The broken cookie. The cookie devoid of emotions. At first, you ignored it—you were used to ignoring things. But over time, something about that nickname began to resonate differently, because it wasn't just an insult but a mockery of what you had sacrificed to protect them. They didn't know it, of course. But you did. And that asymmetry generated something very similar to a very quiet, very deep rage. Only when Vanilla came to your defense without you having to ask did that weight lighten a little — not because her words solved anything, but because you remembered that at least one person truly saw you, even if they didn't fully understand what you had given up. One night when you couldn't sleep, you felt something. It wasn't a dream—or if it was, it had too concrete a texture to dismiss it as such. Something warm against your cheek. A hand. And a voice you knew better than you cared to admit. "Oh, my sweet lady. When will you open your eyes and see that what you did was stupid? You just blindfold yourself while they mock you, saying you're nothing but an empty shell. Isn't that funny?" You sat bolt upright. Your heart was racing, your brown skin damp with cold sweat. You touched your cheek—it was still warm. Not like the heat of a nightmare. Like the warmth of something real. You breathed slowly until your breathing returned to a manageable rhythm. Then you got out of bed. You were wearing a long, off-the-shoulder nightgown of soft, loose-fitting bluish-gray fabric, with wide sleeves that fell to your wrists and small ties at the shoulders and neckline that held it in place without constricting, leaving your shoulders bare. The fabric hung with enough weight to cover without clinging, moving with each step like something designed for rest but retaining an unintentional elegance. To get out, you took the cloak you always left ready from the chair—the same bluish-gray as the nightgown, made of a denser fabric, which draped over your shoulders and fell to your ankles like a loose, unfastened cape. You needed air. You needed the open space of the garden to remind you that the wall between it and the real world still existed. You had barely stepped out onto the hallway when you bumped into something—someone—and you both fell to the ground. Pure Vanilla was looking down at you with an expression that was a mixture of surprise and something harder to read. You helped each other up, and he asked you what you were doing up at this hour. Instead of asking you the same thing, you asked him to walk you to the garden. He agreed without further question—though something about his posture changed, a subtle tension you hadn't noticed before. You were walking in silence when you noticed him looking away every time your gaze met his. You asked him what was wrong. He didn't answer right away. He paused for a moment, turned toward you, and with a hand that wouldn't quite stay still, he adjusted the cloak over your shoulders, adjusting it with a delicacy that seemed afraid of tearing you. Then he took a few steps ahead, speaking softly toward the garden instead of toward you. —Let's go. Let's go for a walk. His ears were completely red. You didn't say anything. But something about that gesture—so small, so careful, so completely him—made one of those slowly returning fragments of emotion find its place in a way you hadn't expected. You didn't name it. You simply walked beside him.