It started with the wind.
Or rather—the lack of it.
Not a stillness bred of peace, but the kind that follows a scream.
As if the world was waiting to exhale.
As if something had just taken its first breath after eons of slumber, and all of Kyōgai had stilled to listen.
The air grew thicker with each step.
Ka'ro clung to the trees in strange new spirals, curling along bark in forms Teruko didn't recognize—impossible coils, old as language, older than meaning. The light filtering through the canopy was tinted wrong, faintly violet now, bruised and trembling. Not from the sun. Not from any celestial body.
It was the light of unrest.
The light of something stirring.
They hadn't spoken since the grove. Not properly.
Rakan walked in silence, arms heavy at his sides, Ka'ro still flickering across his skin like the aftershocks of a dream that hadn't quite let go.
Mazanka trailed at the rear. No jokes. No smirk. Just the quiet calculation of a man taking in a world he no longer trusted.
And Teruko… she kept ahead. Tense, attentive, but unusually quiet.
Her hand hadn't left the hilt of her blade.
"We should find somewhere to rest," she murmured eventually, not turning. "The terrain ahead sharpens—higher ground. Safer. More defensible."
Mazanka didn't respond at first.
Then:
"Safer than a grove that vanishes when you turn around? Kyōgai's really rolling out the welcome mat."
Rakan said nothing.
He just kept walking.
They made camp in the hushed shadow of a ridge, surrounded by slanted stone pillars that looked too deliberate to be natural—and too worn to be recent.
A Ka'ro channel ran through the rock beneath them, old and faded, veins of power glowing faintly in the soil like the dying embers of something long ago caged.
But the lines didn't pulse right.
They shimmered the way heat does above a flame, bending the air.
And something about them felt… off.
Like the glyphs weren't just inactive—but watching.
Mazanka sat with his back to a tree, one hand behind his head, staring up at the hollow sky as if looking for answers he no longer believed would come.
"Walk with me," he said, eventually. Not a command. Not even a request. Just a thing said with the weight of something unspoken.
Rakan hesitated. Then nodded.
The world shifted again when they left camp.
The ground softened, too soft, as if walking across something still growing beneath the earth. Rakan's steps sounded strange in his own ears—muffled, like his footfalls weren't reaching the world properly.
Above, the trees had changed shape.
Their branches knotted backward.
Their leaves curled inward.
Somewhere behind them, a bird gave a short, strangled cry—and then nothing.
"This place is… wrong," Rakan whispered.
Mazanka just nodded, eyes scanning the horizon.
"Ka'ro's been touched. More than touched. Twisted. And that flare of yours didn't help."
Rakan flinched.
Mazanka paused. Then softened.
"I'm not blaming you, kid. But we stirred something. Or maybe woke it up."
The wind shifted.
And suddenly—the scent.
Sickly-sweet.
Like honey rotted through with bile.
It wrapped around them like a warning.
Mazanka stopped.
"You smell that?"
Rakan nodded, throat dry.
"I think something's close."
And then they saw it.
Just ahead, crumpled near the base of a gnarled root-knot that once might have been a monument:
A figure.
Still.
Facedown.
Its robes were Kenshiki.
Or had been.
But they'd been shredded, charred at the edges, smeared with blackened Ka'ro glyphs that crawled up the arms like something burned in and not quite dead.
The earth beneath the body was cracked.
Not in the way of blunt force, but in the delicate, surgical break of something pushed from within. The stone itself was marked—symbols too old to be understood, glowing faintly, whispering across the surface.
The Ka'ro here did not hum.
It hissed.
Like it knew they were watching.
And was deciding what to show them next.
Mazanka crouched beside the body, fingers hovering just over the scorched robes, not touching. His expression didn't change, but something in the air around him tensed—like his Ka'ro itself recoiled.
"This one's recent," he muttered. "But not from battle."
Rakan knelt beside him, trying not to breathe too deeply. The stench here wasn't blood—it was older, fouler. Like old parchment soaked in iron and buried under moss for too long. Something was rotting… but it wasn't flesh. It was Ka'ro.
Teruko approached slowly, eyes narrowing.
"Those glyphs…" she murmured.
The lines along the Kenshiki's arms writhed—not moving, exactly, but giving the illusion of movement. Like they had once been alive and still remembered how to be. They weren't from any school of discipline. No Ikū, no Shintei, no Sōgen. They were… foreign.
Jagged.
Uneven.
They bled into the robes, into the skin, curling along veins like parasites etched in flame.
Mazanka's hand hovered over the back of the dead Kenshiki's neck.
"These markings—they aren't made. They're grown."
Rakan flinched.
"What does that mean?"
"It means whoever did this didn't draw Ka'ro. They infected it."
He stood, brushing the edge of his coat aside, Ka'ro flickering faintly under his bandaged eye.
"The Shujikō," Teruko said, voice like stone, turning to Mazanka. "It has to be. This goes against all laws and principles of the Kenshiki. It has to be them; nobody else is crazy enough."
Mazanka didn't answer. But the silence between his lips agreed.
They stood there for a long time. The wind did not return.
The glyphs continued to pulse gently across the corpse—like a warning. Like a seed waiting to bloom.
Mazanka drew a soft breath through his teeth.
"We burn it," he said. "We don't leave this thing whole."
"We should study it—" Teruko began, but he cut her off.
"No. Not these kinds of glyphs. These don't teach. They leech. You want to take something back with you, you take memory. Not the curse."
He lifted his hand.
And set flame to the Ka'ro.
It did not burn easy.
The fire resisted at first. Like the body did not want to go. Then, finally, it caught—and the glyphs screamed. Not aloud. But through the trees. Through the roots. Through the very veins of Kyōgai.
As though the forest had just learned their names.
They returned to camp in silence.
The air had not cleared.
And though the corpse was gone, something still lingered. The taste of ash. The echo of symbols that refused to fade.
That night, Teruko did not sleep.
Not well.
Not for long.
The sky flickered distaantly, forming failed glyphs before morphing into a blur of things, and it wasn't long before her lids became too heavy and she found herself consumed by sleep.
Teruko was running.
Through corridors of breathless trees—
their bark carved with twitching glyphs that blinked like half-closed eyes.
The ground was soft beneath her, and wrong.
Sometimes earth.
Sometimes teeth.
Sometimes the trembling lattice of memory cracking open.
Something was chasing her.
No footsteps.
Just presence.
A pressure behind the lungs.
A knowing.
She ran faster.
But the world folded with her.
Then—
A clearing.
Vast and too quiet.
The sky above it hung low, dragging the horizon like a soaked veil.
In the centre—
A figure.
On his knees.
Not bowed in pain.
But crushed by it.
Rakan.
His body shook with soundless sobs, shoulders heaving like a boy made of glass, hair slicked against his brow. Ka'ro bled from his back like wings that had never learned to fly.
And his face—
Gods, his face—
Torn by something ancient.
Though he looked older than she remembered, it was not from age. Not sorrow.
But despair so human it felt sacred.
He looked up.
Saw her.
And reached out.
"Teruko—"
Her name—
Not shouted.
Not commanded.
But pleaded.
Desperate.
A child's whisper wrapped in a dying man's cry.
It made her stomach drop.
Because it was the sound of someone who had already accepted that he was beyond saving.
And still wanted her to try.
She took a step—
And the sky split.
Behind him rose a shape too massive to comprehend.
A shadow of bone and ruin.
The echo of a world crumbling through his skin.
She tried to scream—
But her throat was sealed shut by fear.
He kept reaching.
And weeping.
Calling her name.
And then—
She woke.
Teruko sat up with a gasp, chest rising too fast, throat dry from a scream that had never made it out.
The camp was quiet. Still.
The sky above was a pale indigo, barely touched by dawn. Mist wound through the stone like a creature with no bones. She could still feel the echo of her name in his voice—
Teruko.
"Teruko—"
Teruko.
It haunted her ribs.
Too fragile.
Too human.
She swallowed hard.
It was just a dream.
But her Ka'ro pulsed uneasily.
Not loud.
Not violent.
Just… watchful.
Like it, too, had seen what she saw.
She glanced to her side, where her blade rested—neatly placed, untouched, as it always was.
But the moment her eyes landed on it, she froze.
Because the glyphs were there.
Faint.
Barely visible.
But unmistakable.
They slithered across the steel like frost spreading too fast—etches of spirals, hooks, crescents unbound by logic. They didn't move. But they felt alive. Like a breath held too long. Like the whisper of a language just before it's spoken.
One glyph curled along the edge of the blade, branching into a dozen smaller runes—each one unfamiliar. Foreign. Ancient.
Her Ka'ro did not resonate.
It recoiled.
A single thought dropped into her skull, unbidden:
These are not from me.
They're from the world.
She reached for the blade.
Her fingers brushed the hilt.
And the glyphs—
Vanished.
Gone.
Not burned away. Not erased.
Simply… not there anymore.
She stared.
Blinking.
Heart thundering.
"What the hell is going on…"
She gripped the blade tighter.
Waited.
Nothing returned.