"The Crystallized Prayer" In a world locked in white frost, the saint had long been kneeling. With every sorrow gathered, every wordless suffering drawn close and held against their own chest, each prayer rippled outward in quiet rings and dissolved into the frozen air. Yet the weight of accumulating wishes — and the cold that never relented — slowly eroded the saint's very outline, turning even their warmth into crystals of silver-white. The figure who once stopped for others no longer hurries to be found; it has simply settled into the landscape, becoming one with the silence. The echo of a prayer carved into frozen earth…… Until the whiteness covers everything I will go on standing here The cold that reaches my throat is here to extinguish the heat I once knew What spills from my fingertips — is it prayer, or merely a fragment? The borderline dissolves, carried off by the wind The distant forest is already beyond reach Only the heavy folds of my robe hold this silence close Call my name, just once more But even that voice is swallowed by this white ◈ Artist's Note When I began this piece, the image in my mind was one of "the silence that waits at the far end of devotion." A being who goes on offering everything for others eventually reaches the end of that role and melts into the landscape — I wanted to capture that moment, at once a little melancholy and quietly beautiful. The subject here is a saint who, in a land of deep snow, once took upon themselves all the suffering that people entrusted to them. I wanted to portray not simply a figure standing still, but the gradual process of being transformed into snow crystals while enduring the weight of prayer — the body yielding, bit by bit, to something harder and colder. To that end, rather than rendering the saint's face in sharp detail, I let the head and shoulders blur softly, giving the whole figure a deep, enveloping texture. The contrast I cared about most was between the texture of the saint's body and the tones of the background. For the saint's robes, I layered a fine granular quality — as if each snowflake were crystallizing one by one. This was not simply "covered in snow," but a deliberate attempt to make visible the transformation: the flesh worn away by the weight of prayer, hardening into crystal. Rather than making the background white uniformly, I spread a faint, slightly blue-tinged tone across it, so that viewers could sense the cold of frozen air and the quiet depth that lives within it. The forest-like shadows visible in the distance are intentionally left indistinct, drawing out the feeling that the saint's presence is, even now, in the process of merging into that silver-white world. While working on the piece, I found myself wondering: "Is this saint waiting to be found by someone?" But after receiving so many prayers, perhaps the act of simply existing becomes the whole purpose — and gradually even the edges of one's own self begin to disappear. It was that coexistence of a gentle solitude and a quiet sense of fulfillment that I wanted to hold in the work. In the poem I placed alongside the image, I tried to put into words the saint's final sensations. The line "The cold that reaches my throat / is here to extinguish the heat I once knew" carries within it the process by which the passion (warmth) of prayer turns to ice. And the closing line — "But even that voice / is swallowed by this white" — entrusts to the reader the quiet ache of a being becoming part of the silence. I hope that those who see this work feel transported into a still world where only the sound of snow can be heard. Who is it standing there — or is it the "prayer" that exists somewhere inside your own memory? I would be glad if each viewer found their own story within it. ◈ Edition This work is a limited-edition giclée print from the Mystique In Enigma series. ◈ Keywords Saint / Prayer / Winter / Snow / Crystal / Solitude / Silence / Frozen / Spiritual / Landscape / Digital Art / Mystique