The silence in Elder Takuma's study felt heavier than the ancient stone walls surrounding them. Arashi sat rigid in his chair, fingers absently tracing the worn grain of the wooden armrests, a nervous habit he'd developed as a child during his lessons. Beside him, Kira's face had drained of color, her hands clenched in her lap so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. A tendril of her dark hair had escaped its practical braid, and she kept blowing it away from her face with short, anxious breaths. Outside, they could hear the sounds of the village preparing for a siege, hammers on wood, orders being shouted, the ring of metal as weapons were distributed.
"You knew," Arashi finally said, the words falling into the silence like stones. His voice carried that peculiar blend of anger and hurt that only betrayal can produce. "All these years, you knew what I was."
The scent of old parchment and ink hung in the air, mingled now with the metallic tang of fear that seemed to emanate from both himself and Kira. Elder Takuma stood by the window, his silhouette sharp against the unnatural crimson light filtering through. Outside, that light cast the familiar streets of Meirōmura in an alien glow, transforming the village where Arashi had spent his entire life into something foreign and threatening.
"I suspected," Takuma corrected, his voice carrying the weight of decades of secrets. "There's a difference between suspicion and knowledge." The old man's hands, spotted with age but still steady, clasped behind his back, a gesture Arashi recognized from countless lessons when the Elder was choosing his words carefully.
"But the crystal," Arashi pressed, leaning forward. The familiar pressure behind his eyes intensified with his frustration. "You knew it was Seraphic in origin."
In his mind, Arashi recalled all the times he'd asked about his parents, about where he'd come from. Each time, Takuma had redirected his questions, offered vague answers about refugees from the border regions. All those years of half-truths suddenly took on a different weight.
Takuma turned to face them, his weathered features solemn. In the crimson light, the deep lines of his face resembled ancient runes carved into stone. "Yes. I recognized it from my time with the Twilight Wardens, before I came to Meirōmura. Such artifacts are rare, jealously guarded by all three nations. To find one wrapped in the blankets of an abandoned infant..." He shook his head. "It suggested possibilities I wasn't equipped to understand, let alone explain to a child."
Arashi noticed how the Elder's eyes flickered briefly to the wall where his collection of maps hung, maps that showed the boundaries between Lumina, Umbra, and the Neutral Territories. For as long as he could remember, Arashi had been fascinated by those maps, spending hours tracing the mountain ranges and rivers with his finger, imagining what lay beyond the only home he'd ever known. Had that fascination been part of his nature all along? A fragment of his true self trying to emerge?
Kira, who had been silent until now, finally spoke. She'd been picking at a callus on her palm, evidence of her daily work in her family's smith, but now she looked up, her dark eyes intense. "So Arashi is... what? Part Seraph? A reincarnation?" Her voice held a mixture of awe and fear, but beneath that was a stubborn practicality that was so essentially Kira. No matter how strange the situation, she always tried to bring it back to solid ground.
"The Seraphim don't reincarnate," Takuma said automatically, then paused. He moved toward his desk, fingers brushing over the spines of several ancient texts that Arashi had never been allowed to touch. "At least, that's what the orthodox teachings claim. But there have always been whispers, theories about the Fallen, those Seraphs who chose mortality during the Great Sundering."
He moved to the chest where he kept the crystal, unlocking it once more. As he did, Arashi caught the faint scent of cedar and something else, a sharp, clean smell like the air after lightning strikes. "The appearance of that particular Hollow One, with its malformed wings and ability to recognize Arashi, confirms what I've long feared. Someone, or something, has been searching for you. And now they've found you."
A chill ran down Arashi's spine, raising gooseflesh along his arms. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. "The writing on the wall, 'The Fallen Awakens, The Choir Approaches.' What does it mean?"
"Nothing good," the Elder replied grimly. He paused, listening to the increasing urgency of the preparations outside. Through the window, Arashi could see Captain Hiro directing the village militia, his broad-shouldered frame moving with the confidence of a man who had defended these walls before, though never against such an enemy. "The Choir... there are ancient texts that speak of a force opposed to both humanity and the Silent God. A collective entity that some called the Void Choir. Most scholars dismiss it as allegorical, but..." He withdrew the crystal, this time unwrapping it fully. "I believe this contains memories, knowledge that was meant to be preserved."
Arashi stared at the teardrop-shaped object. Now that it was unwrapped again, he could see that what he'd thought were shifting patterns within were actually symbols, flowing and changing like living things. They reminded him of the script he'd seen in the crimson light on the wall. The crystal hummed at a frequency just below hearing, more felt than heard, a vibration that made his teeth ache.
"I should have told you sooner," Takuma continued, regret heavy in his voice. His shoulders, usually straight despite his age, now curved inward with the burden of his choices. "Prepared you better. But I hoped..." He sighed, the sound carrying decades of worry. "I hoped you might live a normal life, that whatever purpose brought you here might never need fulfilling."
Arashi thought back to his childhood attempts to fit in with the other village children, his frustration when they could do things he couldn't, sense Resonances, perform the simplest harmonics. He remembered nights spent staring at the stars, feeling a strange longing he couldn't explain, as if the heavens were calling to him. Had it all been leading to this moment?