✧ Across bodies, across time—Sora.
The streets around the school had already thinned. Students drifted toward convenience stores or arcades, their laughter carrying down the hill before fading into traffic. Above, a train's faint chime echoed—a reminder the world kept moving whether he did or not.
Sora walked beside Asuka, his bag slung loose at his side, each step heavier than the last. Early spring air brushed cool against his face, carrying the faint sweetness of sakura. Petals clung to the sidewalk like scattered confetti, ground into grey by a hundred careless shoes.
He should've said something. Anything. But his throat stuck. Every word he wanted to speak had an edge too sharp, a truth too absurd. If I tell her what really happened… she'll think I've gone mad. How could she not?
Asuka didn't push. She matched his pace, quiet but steady, her gaze flicking sideways now and then as if to check he was still there. Her presence was calm, grounding—like the city's chaos broke on her and never reached him.
Tell her. No—don't. She won't believe you. But if you keep it inside, it'll eat you alive.
The conflict rattled through him like a coin trapped between floorboards. He wanted to explain, to beg someone else to carry the weight of what he'd seen, what he'd felt. The rope on his wrists. The stench of earth. The taste of humiliation he couldn't wash away. But how could he? Those images belonged to a world that wasn't supposed to exist here.
So he walked in silence, fists tightening at his sides, eyes fixed on the glow of vending machines ahead. Their lights seemed too bright. Too alive.
Asuka finally broke the quiet—not with words, but with the soft rhythm of her breath, steady as a metronome, reminding him someone was keeping pace. It loosened something in his chest. Just enough.
He swallowed. "It's like…" His voice cracked, uncertain. "Like waking up from a dream that doesn't let go. You claw yourself awake, thinking it's over… but the bruises follow you out. They stay. And you can't explain why."
Asuka tilted her head, bag hugged close. She didn't laugh it off. Her silence felt deliberate—patient, as if waiting to see if he'd risk another step.
So he did.
"It's like being shoved underwater. You thrash, you fight, and you know you're running out of air. Then—suddenly—you break the surface. Everyone else is laughing in the sun, throwing stones in the river like nothing happened. But you're still choking."
His throat tightened. He glanced at the shopfronts they passed—a ramen place with a queue forming outside, steam fogging its window. People talking, living, oblivious.
"Or maybe…" He faltered, groping for another shape. "…maybe it's like carrying a story inside you. One that claws and claws, begging to be told. But if you say it out loud, no one will believe you. So it just… scratches at your ribs. Every step, it's there. Digging."
The words hung between them, fragile as glass. He regretted them instantly. Too much, too strange. But Asuka didn't recoil. She kept walking, gaze ahead, her expression unreadable in the glow of streetlamps flickering to life.
Finally, softly, she spoke. "Maybe it's like carrying glass inside your chest. Nobody else can see it, but you feel every crack."
Her voice was quiet, steady. Mature in a way that sounded lived-in. For a moment, Sora forgot how to breathe.
Because she understood—not the truth, not really—but the shape of what he was trying to say.
He let out a shaky breath, one hand brushing against his bag strap. You have no idea how close you are. But if I told you… you'd never look at me the same again.
The crosswalk ahead blinked red. They stopped at the curb, shoulders almost touching. Businessmen waited beside them, ties loosened, faces lit by their phones. The world buzzed with neon and voices, yet Sora felt like he was in a glass box, separated from it all.
He spoke before he could lose his nerve.
"There's… someone I want to reach," he said, eyes fixed on the blinking signal. "But it's like they're on the other side of a wall. I can see them, I know they're there, but…" He clenched his jaw. "No matter how hard I pound on it, the surface doesn't break."
The light turned green. They moved with the crowd, but the words clung to him like lead. His chest ached from holding in the truth—that every morning, he woke in her body, tasted her fear, carried her humiliation. That tomorrow he'd open his eyes in her skin again, still not knowing how to save her.
Inside his head, the thoughts spun like a wheel that never caught. I don't know what to do. History doesn't bend. What can I possibly change? A boy in Shibuya, sixteen, powerless. How do you save someone a thousand years away?
Hopelessness crawled up his throat, bitter as bile. I can't. I'll fail her. I'll fail again.
Beside him, Asuka shifted her bag, glancing at him with quiet intent. She didn't ask who. She didn't ask what. Her restraint cut sharper than questions ever could.
"You don't have to tell me," she said softly as they reached the other side. "But… whoever it is, whatever it is—you're carrying it like it's the only thing that matters. And maybe it is."
Her voice held no judgment. Just calm certainty.
Sora almost laughed—a hollow, cracked sound that never left his throat. If only you knew. If only I could tell you the only thing that matters is a girl doomed to die a thousand years ago—a story too crazy to believe.
Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets and kept walking, staring at the scatter of pink blossoms along the pavement. Each petal trampled, broken, drifting toward the gutter.
He felt the same.
They descended the station steps, tiled walls reflecting the fluorescent glow above. The air grew cooler, tinged with steel and electricity, the rumble of trains in the floor.
Sora's thoughts churned, louder than the city. There has to be something. A loophole. A fracture in history. Legends, rituals, prayers—anything. There must be a way to pull her free, to break the chain before it strangles her.
But every idea collapsed as quickly as it formed. He was drowning in centuries, in inevitability. I can't. I'm just a boy. I have no map, no weapon, no power—just borrowed breaths in a body that isn't even mine.
They reached the platform. A gust swept through as a train screeched into view, scattering petals across the concrete like pale embers. Sora closed his eyes, exhausted.
Then—her voice. Quiet, but clear enough to cut through the noise.
"You don't have to tell me," Asuka said, eyes on the arriving train. "But… don't stop walking. Whatever it is, don't give up. If you keep moving forward, eventually you'll find the place where the wall breaks."
Simple words. But they struck deep.
He opened his eyes, staring at the blur of windows rushing past. In her reflection, he saw not pity, not doubt, but conviction. She believed in him without even knowing what he carried.
The hopelessness that had been gnawing at him loosened its grip. A small ember sparked in his chest, fragile but real. Don't give up. Keep moving.
As the doors hissed open, the thought consumed him. I will find a way. I'll dig through every crack in history, claw through every lie, rip apart fate itself if I have to. I won't let her die.
He stepped onto the train beside Asuka, the crowd closing around them. The city moved on, indifferent as ever. But for the first time that day, Sora felt the faint pull of direction—not clarity, not certainty, but the start of resolve.
Somewhere, somehow, he would find the way.
After some time.
The train slowed, its brakes shrieking against the steel rails. An announcement chimed overhead, the voice calm, mechanical. Asuka shifted her bag higher on her shoulder.
"This is me," she said simply, glancing at him with that same steady calm she always carried.
Sora blinked, as if pulled from a fog. He hadn't even registered they were near her stop. For a moment, panic pricked at him—like the words he still hadn't spoken might vanish forever the moment those doors slid open.
Asuka hesitated, just long enough for him to find something—anything—to give. "...Thank you," he said, the words rough in his throat. "For walking with me. For… listening."
She gave him a small, knowing smile. "You don't need to thank me." Then, softer, as the chime sounded again: "Just keep going."
The doors parted. She stepped into the crowd and was gone, swallowed by the river of bodies flooding the platform. Sora's reflection lingered in the train window—shoulders hunched, eyes too heavy—as the doors hissed shut again.
The city blurred.
The rest of the day unfolded like a film he wasn't really watching. He remembered the shapes of things—his shoes on the pavement outside the station, the muted buzz of neon, the smell of frying oil wafting from a street vendor—but none of it seemed to touch him.
At home, he moved through the motions: sliding off his shoes, heating leftovers in the microwave, shuffling papers on his desk like homework mattered. The glow of his phone lit the room; his toothbrush foamed in his mouth. All of it fragments, half-seen, half-felt.
Because beneath it all, his thoughts chewed at him without mercy.
Heian-kyō. The year 1000.
He pictured the avenues he'd read about in books, the rigid grid of streets stretching out from the imperial palace. The Court—shimmering with brocade and ritual, but rotten underneath with Fujiwara dominance. An entire city built on ceremony, where every action, every punishment, every word spoken before the Emperor had a place carved into tradition.
And Akiko was tangled in it, already condemned.
Sora pressed his palms against his temples, elbows on the desk. Think. There has to be something.
Bribery? No. Not there. Not in a case tied to honour and blood. Not when the Fujiwara clan would be circling like hawks, eager to stamp out scandal.
Appeal to a priest? Maybe. The shrines carried weight—but their voices were controlled, bought, and bent by the same families who ran the court. A girl like Akiko would be nothing more than a pawn in their endless games.
Invoke some ritual? He sifted through scraps of memory—New Year rites, purification ceremonies, sacred petitions like kami ni ukagai. But even those were dangerous. To invoke the gods in a matter of justice meant stepping into the current of power that no one person could hope to fight.
Even the Emperor himself—young, ornamental, shackled by the Fujiwara regents—wouldn't risk open defiance.
Every possibility collapsed under the weight of history. The system wasn't designed to let people like Akiko escape. It was designed to grind them down, bury them in silence.
His stomach turned. He pushed away the tray of cold food, untouched.
How do you save someone who died a thousand years ago? How do you claw against centuries that have already hardened into stone?
He tried again, desperate. Maybe a disguise. Maybe she could escape the city under cover of night—flee south, vanish into obscurity. But no: he remembered what he'd seen through her eyes. Guards. Watchful eyes. Bars. Even if she escaped, where could she go? Japan was an island bound by clans, shrines, and records. There was no running.
He slumped back, staring at the ceiling. His room felt too bright, too small, as though the walls themselves pressed closer with every thought.
I can't. I'm just some guy. What am I supposed to do against history itself?
And yet—he couldn't stop. His mind refused to let the wheel stop spinning. Snatches of old lessons clawed at him: the way politics worked, the way stories lingered, the fragile threads of fate that sometimes turned on the smallest act.
Somewhere in there, buried beneath centuries of ritual and inevitability, there had to be a crack. A fracture he could pry open. He just didn't know where to look.
He glanced at the clock. 11:52.
His eyes burned. Papers lay scattered across his desk—half-finished notes from class, a history book splayed open, its spine straining. He tried to read, tried to find some hidden answer in the neat rows of kanji, but the words swam uselessly before him.
Too late. Too heavy.
Sora pushed the book aside and crawled into bed, pulling the blanket up as if it could shield him from the weight pressing down on his chest.
His thoughts still churned, even as exhaustion dragged him under. Images overlapped—the palace gates, the silent torii of a shrine, Akiko's face pale in torchlight. Every option ended in the same place: chains, humiliation, death.
There has to be a way, he thought weakly. There has to—
But the thought dissolved. His body gave in where his mind would not.
And finally, Sora closed his eyes.
Only to open them again, but now they were hers.
Sora woke to warm air and the faint bite of incense, not damp stone. Pale light pressed through paper screens, turning the room the colour of milk. For a breath he didn't move—listening. No chains. No drip of water in a corridor. Somewhere beyond the sliding doors, a bell chimed twice, soft as a heartbeat.
The last thing he remembered when he was here, was the cell—the slam, the dirt, sleep dragging him under like a hand on his neck. Now a futon cradled him. Clean fabric lay against his skin, white and smooth. His hair was dry, combed, carrying a breath of sandalwood. On a low tray near the wall: a rinsed bowl, a few grains of rice glued to the rim, and a tiny cup tipped on its side, sweet with the ghost of sake.
He stared at it. Yesterday. She had lived it.
They moved her. Bathed her. Dressed her.
For what?
He sat up slowly, eyes mapping the room—the lacquered basin in the corner, a neatly folded outer robe on a stand, cords coiled like sleeping snakes. The quiet felt staged, like a theatre before the curtain lifted. He could feel the care in every line—the kind given to offerings, not people.
Execution? The thought arrived first and worst. Not here, but soon. Purify the body. Make it clean before the blade. Seppuku flickered across his mind—he crushed it. Wrong era. Heian killed you without poetry.
Another bell answered the first, deeper, closer. Voices floated past the door—measured, ritual, the shape of words more than their meaning. A shrine, then. Not mercy. Procedure.
He pressed his palms together until the bones complained. While he'd been safe in his own bed, she'd walked whatever road led here. He hated the gap—hated that he could only read it in clues: the combed hair, the sake's sweetness, the whiteness of the robe like snow laid over a grave.
Footsteps whispered on the other side of the screen. Two shadows halted. A hand hovered at the frame.
"Yamashina-dono," a woman's voice said, even and empty. "It is time."
The screen slid open without ceremony. Two shrine maidens entered, white sleeves brushing the floor, scarlet hakama whispering like breath. Their faces were unreadable, eyes fixed somewhere past him, as though he were already less than human, already an object of ritual.
They moved without words. One set down a folded white robe on the mat. The other reached for his arm—not roughly, not gently, but with the impersonal touch of someone guiding a statue into place. Sora let himself rise, legs stiff, mind racing.
Every detail sharpened. The faint iron tang of ink brushed on the robe's hem. The hollow clack of their sandals as they circled him. Even the air felt different—thicker, charged, like the hush before lightning.
They undid the simple robe he'd woken in, neither hesitating nor blushing. Their hands worked like extensions of the shrine itself. Fabric slipped from his shoulders, pooled at his feet. His skin prickled under their gaze—not from shame, but from the realization that this wasn't preparation for trial. It was preparation for offering.
The new robe settled across him, heavy, immaculate. The cloth was too fine for death, yet its color—pure white—left no room for mistake. The tie was knotted high, firm, pressing into his ribs. He swallowed, pulse hammering against the fabric.
They combed his hair next, dragging a wide-toothed comb through black strands until it gleamed. Each stroke was slow, ceremonial. Sora felt the weight of it: this wasn't for him. It was for the gods. For whatever eyes would be watching.
When they finished, both women stepped back in unison, bowing low. One murmured something he barely caught—michibiki, guidance.
Guidance… to what?
A drumbeat sounded outside. Low, resonant, rippling through the floorboards. The maidens turned at once, sliding the door open wider, waiting for him to step through.
Sora looked at the bright corridor beyond. His throat was dry.
Every instinct screamed to resist, to cling to the safe darkness of the cell. But his feet moved anyway, carrying him toward the echo of drums. Toward whatever waited.
Not for him. For Akiko.
For both now.
The corridor stretched long and silent, lined with paper lanterns glowing faintly in the morning light. Each flame shivered as he passed, as if the air itself leaned toward him. Sora's sandals slapped softly against the polished wood, his every step swallowed by the drumbeats outside.
Two shrine attendants walked ahead, their posture rigid, hands folded into sleeves. Behind him, the maidens from before followed, closing the corridor like a pair of shadows. He was caught in the middle of a ritual procession, yet no one spoke. The silence pressed heavier than chains.
Through an open side, he glimpsed the shrine courtyard. Rows of priests in layered robes knelt beneath a canopy, their heads bowed. Beyond them, nobles clustered in murmuring knots, their silks whispering like restless insects. And above, set apart on a raised dais, sat the lacquered palanquin of the Emperor, veiled by white screens. He could not see the young sovereign, but he felt the weight of that gaze, distant and absolute.
His stomach twisted. This was no simple rite. This was theatre. A stage where every gesture mattered, where one misstep could be read as defiance against the throne—or worse, against the gods themselves.
They led him across the courtyard, past incense braziers whose smoke curled unnaturally upward, forming shapes that broke apart too slowly, too deliberately, to be coincidence. Faces? Hands? Sora blinked, unsettled. The priests didn't react. Perhaps they couldn't see it. Or perhaps they pretended not to.
He knelt when they gestured, folding into the seiza position at the foot of the shrine steps. The boards were cold beneath him, seeping into his bones.
The drums ceased. A single flute note pierced the air, high and trembling. Then silence.
From the shrine's shadowed interior, a figure emerged—a high priest, robes layered in white and gold, crown gleaming. He carried a staff capped with jade rings that chimed faintly as he walked.
Every eye in the courtyard followed.
Sora's heart pounded. He knew, with bone-deep certainty, that the true ritual was about to begin.
The high priest halted before him, staff raised, and the courtyard seemed to hold its breath. When he spoke, his voice carried with a weight that made even the nobles fall silent.
"By the will of Heaven, by the eyes of the Sun Goddess, and by the command of His Majesty the Emperor, we open the veil. Let the truth be seen."
The staff struck the ground once. The jade rings clashed with a sound like breaking ice.
Sora flinched. Not just from the sound—but from the way the air itself rippled outward, a visible shiver, as though the courtyard were a pond struck by a stone. The nobles glanced at one another. Some muttered prayers. Even the Fujiwara, lined in their measured ranks, twitched ever so slightly at the sight.
Priests began to chant, their voices weaving into a low, resonant hum that seemed to sink into Sora's ribs. It wasn't like music, not like the flute or drums—it was deeper, primal, a sound that made the world itself vibrate.
Then came the offerings. Dishes of salt, rice, sake, and fresh-cut branches of sakaki were set on the altar. The shrine maidens poured water into a bronze basin, and its surface rippled—though there was no wind, no touch. Sora stared as the water stilled into perfect glass, and in its surface he saw something that couldn't be.
Her. Akiko's face. Not the way he saw it in mirrors when he wore her body, but truly her—lips parted as if mid-breath, eyes wide with fear, hair damp with sweat. She mouthed something, but the words did not carry.
His breath caught. No one else reacted. The attendants remained bowed, the nobles whispered as though nothing stirred. Was it only him? Or was he meant to see?
The priest raised his arms skyward. A breeze swept through the courtyard—yet the banners did not move. Only the sakura branches shivered, shedding petals that spiralled down in slow, deliberate patterns. They didn't scatter randomly—they circled around him, landing at his knees, forming a shape he didn't understand.
A boundary. A cage. Or a seal.
The priest's voice deepened. "Kami ni ukagai."
The words reverberated like a bell tolling across centuries.
Sora's skin prickled. The ritual had truly begun.
The chanting thickened until it wasn't song anymore but pressure—layers of voices woven so tightly the air itself seemed to strain. Bells tolled from somewhere above the eaves. Candleflames leaned as one, not with any breeze he could name but as if an unseen hand pressed across the altar and the flames obeyed.
Sora kept his head lowered, eyes tipped up just enough to watch the scroll of incense as it climbed. He clung to it the way a drowning man clings to driftwood. Smoke behaves. It curls, eddies, unravels. He told himself this even as the ribbon of grey rose true and straight as a spear. No feathering, no tremor. A perfect white pillar.
Heat folded against his face. Sweat gathered at his lip. The pillar did not waver. It pivoted.
Slowly, deliberately, the smoke bent aside from the altar and angled towards him. Not to the priests. Not to the ranks of nobles. To him. The tip of it found him like a pointing finger.
Someone drew a breath too quickly and choked on it. Silks rasped. The nearest priest flushed and pressed his knuckles to the floor. A young maiden's mouth opened, then shut again as if she'd remembered she had no right to sound.
He searched the rafters for any crack, any hidden funnel that could have pushed the smoke. Nothing. Paper screens were tight. Lanterns hung still. Even the dust in the high beams seemed to hover in place.
Air currents, he told himself. Heat columns. Something. But the words were brittle things and broke in his mouth the moment the bells answered.
Their ropes hung slack. No hands on them. No wind to stir them. Yet the bronze throats gave a sudden, violent shiver—as if struck from within—and crashed together in a knell that rattled the boards beneath his knees. The note wasn't one of the shrine patterns he'd already heard that morning; it was a raw, jagged sound, metal shouting. Maidens flinched back on bare heels. One of them, the younger, lifted her hands instinctively to cover her ears, then remembered and forced her palms back down to the mat, eyes wet and wide.
He tried to see the rig—the pulley, the hidden boy tugging the line, the clever stick propping a clapper—but there was nothing to find. The ropes beat faintly against the pillars, still and useless, while the reverberation clanged on inside his teeth.
The bells stilled. The chant returned, thinner now, with tiny fractures in the voices that hadn't been there before. On the altar, a shallow bowl of rice waited. White. Clean. Lifeless as carved bone.
It changed.
At first he thought the candlelight had fooled him. A shimmer across the top as though oil lay there. Then a dulling, a withdrawal of light into the grain, a grey that spread from the centre outwards like frost. He leaned forward despite himself. Each kernel seemed to soften, sink, and there—between them—a wetness welled up. Not spilt from above, not poured from a hidden reed. It came from within. A drop collected, trembled, and slid, red as a mouth cut on stone.
The smell found him a half-breath later. Thin. Metallic. True.
A prayer cracked out of an old priest's throat like a cough. Another man prostrated himself so hard his forehead struck wood. The high priest, to his credit, did not move. He stood very, very still and watched the rice bleed.
Sora swallowed against the taste that wasn't his. For a stupid moment a corner of his mind supplied the obvious: pigs' blood. Trickery. A bladder pricked with a pin. Then he saw how precise it was, how the stain pulsed in time with the chant as if the words themselves pulled it to the surface. No man's blade could have timed that.
He shut his eyes and opened them again because there was nowhere to hide, and that was when the light came.
It entered the world as if the roof were a veil and someone above had cut it with a single, careful stroke. Sun did not spill; it drove straight down in a column and struck him, hot enough that the skin on his forearms prickled. The courtyard around him stayed cool and shaded. Candleflames did not flare. The white of the high priest's robes did not brighten. Only the circle where he knelt burned bright.
He lifted his hand. The back of it gleamed. And on the boards behind, his shadow stretched, crisp-edged and wrong. He moved—only a fraction, the way you do when you think you've imagined something and want to prove you haven't. His shadow didn't follow. It hung where it was, then slid after him with the laziest delay, half a heartbeat late.
The breath left his chest. He didn't believe in omens, in heaven, in anything you couldn't weigh on a scale. His life until now had been timetables and exams, train schedules, facts packed tight in rows. He had the kind of mind that always wants the string, the lever, the hand inside the puppet.
And yet there she was inside that lag. Not face. Not voice. A pressure. Like standing close to a door with someone on the other side pressing their palm against it at the exact same time you press yours. A rhythm that wasn't his breath tugged at his own and tried to make it match.
Akiko.
A ripple went through the crowd the way a wind passes over long grass. Nobles bent together until their lacquered hair ornaments touched. The priests' chant thinned to a thread and almost broke. The Fujiwara line—the purple and gold—held themselves very straight, very composed, but their eyes were not the eyes of men watching a show they had paid for. They were the eyes of men recalculating.
A younger priest spoke without meaning to. "We have no record—" His superior's hand silenced him mid-breath. But the truth hung there anyway: they had nothing in their books. Not the incense pointing like a finger. Not the bells acting as if heaven had plucked them. Not the rice bleeding. Not a spear of light in a roof that held. Not a shadow that refused to obey its body.
In all their decades of chanting norito and combing hair smooth and laying out salt in clean lines, none of them had seen this.
The high priest's jaw worked. He lifted his staff and set the jade rings chiming. A small, human sound in a space that had forgotten humans for a moment.
Then the Fujiwara elder took his step forward.
He did not hurry. He did not raise his voice. He had no need. Authority sat on him like a second garment.
"The signs reveal what words could not," he said. "This vessel is not as she appears. A fate rides in her that is not her own. A shadow follows that does not belong to this world."
A pause. He let it settle over them all, let the crowd begin to nod. Sora felt the weight of the words grinding toward their conclusion like millstones.
"She is shielded," the elder went on, and he made the word sound like an accusation. "Shielded by forces she should not bear in her body. That protection does not cleanse what is false. It only makes the false more dangerous."
He turned, the sleeves of his robe moving like water, to give the high priest the courtesy of a look that was not a question. "Such a being cannot be permitted to walk free."
Faces lifted. The impulse to agree rose like heat. It would be cleaner that way: agree that something wrong sits here and cut it out.
Sora's mouth could not find air. He wanted to protest, to say I am not a curse, I am a person, I am trying to help, but his voice would not hold in this place, in this ritual, under this light. He was a boy in a girl's skin kneeling in front of an altar that bled. Nothing he could say would cross that gap.
Another step, different shoes on wood. A court official in layered robes marked with the chrysanthemum stopped at the edge of the stairs and bowed so deeply his forehead touched the board. When he rose, his fan closed with a dry snap.
"Your words honour caution," he said towards the Fujiwara elder, and managed to make it sound like a compliment from which a piece had been carefully removed. "But the signs do not submit to the meaning you would give them. The gods have not cast her from the circle. If they had, the incense would have turned away, the bells would have fallen silent, the light would have deserted. They have not deserted."
His gaze slid—not to Sora but over him, to the pillar of light that had no source, to the thin ring of petals that had spiralled earlier and now lay, inexplicably, in a clean bright curve at the edge of the step as if someone had placed them one by one.
"Protection," the official said. "You named it correctly. That cannot be ignored. We are servants. We interpret. But we do not overrule."
There was power in the way he said we.
He turned then, not to the crowd but to the veiled dais where the Emperor waited behind the white screens. The whole yard seemed to shift its weight towards that translucent square.
"Your Majesty," he said, voice lowering, and the chant finally died, leaving his words naked. "Let Heaven judge its own omen. Let not men spoil it with their fear. If she is what they fear, the gods will abandon her when steel is drawn. If she is under the Sun's eye, the gods will uphold her."
Silence. Even the cicadas outside the walls seemed to have forgotten their lines.
Sora felt his heart scrape against his ribs. He would take a trial of books, of arguments, of records. He would take any exam Shinjuku could think to throw at him. But steel? He glanced down at his hands. They were steady in the light and did not feel like his.
From behind the screen came a small sound. Not a word. The scrape of something—perhaps the Emperor's sleeve, perhaps the move of his fan. It was enough. The high priest let out a breath he might not have known he was holding and lifted his staff.
"By Heaven's leave," he said, and now his voice was not quite so certain and not quite so old. "The decree shall be made upon the field of blades."
It went through the gathered people like a tide. Relief in some, horror in others, outrage masked as piety in the Fujiwara ranks. But none of them said no. None of them dared say the signs were theatre, because none of them had ever seen theatre like this.
The elder dipped his chin, conceding nothing and everything. "So be it," he said. "Let the spectacle purge doubt."
It was meant as contempt. It sounded like fear that had learned to wear a better face.
Sora's shadow finally caught his heels and lay down where it was supposed to be. The light did not ease. He wished he could believe he had imagined the lag, that his mind had split under pressure and given him a trick. Then he felt it again, that faint press behind the breastbone, that almost-synchrony of breath.
He thought a word without planning to. Not a prayer. A name.
Akiko.
He did not hear an answer. He did not need to. The knowledge felt like when you step onto a boat and the world tilts under your feet to teach you the shape of water. They were here together. It would have to be enough.
The priests began to move again, grateful for movement. Offerings were lifted, blood-wet rice poured into a vessel he could not see. The bells, shamed by their own outburst, hung quietly and pretended to be obedient lumps of cast metal. A boy in grey swept the fallen petals into his sleeve; when he shook it out, they leapt from the cloth and arranged themselves back into a circle on the stone. The boy froze, eyes huge. The older attendant took the broom from his hands and pretended he had seen nothing.
Hints of the ordinary crept back into the courtyard the way sound creeps back into a room after a shock. Nobles murmured about auspicious days and forms that would need to be observed. Somewhere behind the screens a cup clicked softly against a saucer. The shrine breathed.
The Fujiwara elder stepped closer to the high priest and spoke behind his sleeve. Sora could not hear the words, but he did not need to. The meaning walked their faces plainly: choose a time that gives us room to arrange. Choose terms that tie her hands. Choose a place where our retainers hold the gates.
The Emperor's official bowed a second time, as if to remind them that however they arranged it, the name of Heaven had been spoken over it. There were limits now to how naked their cruelty could be.
He did not look again at Sora. Sora was grateful for that small mercy.
He lowered his gaze to the boards. The knot of his white sash pressed against his ribs. When he drew breath, the knot pressed back. He counted it. One. Two. Three. The numbers steadied him more than any charm could have. He could recite court ranks, Fujiwara titles, the names of regents and their years, the way a child recites multiplication tables. None of it helped him hold a sword.
But he could stand. He could breathe. He could put his feet where they told him to and refuse to fall before they struck him.
He could fight for her.
A maiden's shadow spilled across the edge of his vision. She bowed very low, so low he thought for a second that she meant to place her head on the floor. When she rose, he saw that her mouth had lost its mask. A very small, very human tremor in her lip. She had seen nothing like this, either. She wanted him to know she had seen.
"Yamashina-dono," she whispered, softer than the bell's echo, "when they bid you rise, rise slowly. The cords bind high. If you rise too fast you will faint."
It was the first kindness he had been offered in days. He nodded once. It made something hot move behind his eyes and he bit the inside of his cheek hard to stop it leaking out of him here, in front of gods and men.
The high priest's staff fell to the floor in a final chime. "It is done," he said to everyone and to no one. "Heaven has opened its eye and closed it again. What is left will be settled by men."
The column of light thinned as if it had heard him. It did not vanish. It receded, thread by thread, until the shade of the eaves touched Sora's shoulders once more. His shadow obeyed him again, docile and ordinary.
For a moment the courtyard looked like it had at dawn—orderly, clean, full of people who knew their places. If you hadn't been here, you could convince yourself nothing had happened at all.
But everyone had been here. Priests had the taste of iron in their mouths and would taste it again next time they raised rice to an altar. Nobles would lie under lacquered roofs and stare at their own shadows to see whether they lagged. The Fujiwara would dream of smoke that points. The Emperor would sip his tea and wonder whether a god had smiled or bared its teeth.
Sora shifted his hands on his knees and let the cool of the board seep into his skin until the tremor went out of them.
A duel, he thought. They will name a day. They will name a place. They will choose an opponent who is skilled enough to make a lesson out of me.
He heard again the official's words: if she is false, the gods will abandon her blade.
He did not believe in gods. He believed in leverage and timing and the way a body learned under pain to move where it must.
He could learn. Quickly. Or die.
The maiden breathed in and the sound signalled the end of stillness. "Rise," she said, and when he obeyed, he did it slowly. The knot did bite. He did not faint.
He bowed to the altar as they had taught him in the hall before the court, to the height and the angle they had demanded then. He did it not because he revered the space, but because he had to live inside the rules of the men who claimed it. The incense had already chosen its own rule.
They led him back across the courtyard. The faces were changed now. The same mouths, the same paint, the same serried ranks—but some expressions had lost their polish and let stray thoughts peek through: fear, awe, curiosity, calculation, something like excitement. One old man pressed his palm briefly to his chest as Sora passed, the way a sailor touches wood before a storm.
At the edge of the corridor, Sora looked once at the veil that hid the Emperor. He couldn't see the boy behind it. A faint shift in silhouette might have been a head turning. Or the wind stirring a screen that, today, had never moved when it should.
He kept walking until the shade swallowed him, and the drums that had opened the morning began again, light as a heartbeat and distant as a dream.