Prologue - Ashes of Gold
The sky that day was a flawless stretch of sapphire, untouched by even the faintest wisp of cloud.. serene, beautiful, and cruelly indifferent. It was the kind of sky that poets would write about, the kind lovers might share beneath cherry blossoms. And yet, beneath that endless blue, something was breaking. Spring had only just begun to breathe life into the world, painting the earth in blossoms and promise. But for me, life had always felt like spring.. warm, bright, eternal. Until that moment. Until everything changed.
I was born into one of the wealthiest families in Tokyo. I never knew hunger. Never felt the sting of winter seeping through threadbare sleeves. The world bent around me in quiet reverence... its doors opening before I even learned how to knock. My father, Reijiro Arakawa, was a titan of industry, with a hand in everything from pharmaceuticals to aerospace.. his name whispered in boardrooms across continents. My mother, Satsuki Arakawa, once graced the world stage as a concert pianist. She gave it up for charity work, for me, they said. She was revered like a goddess... elegant, untouchable, as if sunlight itself had chosen her as its muse.
Our name wasn't just respected. It was etched into glass and steel. Hospitals. Universities. Skyscrapers. It gleamed on donation plaques and glowed in headlines. People didn't just know us. They envied us.
And I… I was their only son.
I studied at Hōyū Gakuen... the most elite academy in Japan, where the sons of foreign dignitaries and heirs to global empires walked the same marbled halls. I spoke three languages by the age of ten, recited poetry beneath crystal chandeliers, and memorized stock indices like nursery rhymes. I flew across oceans like others took buses, never once waiting in line, never once wondering if I was wanted.
But even my loneliness was polished, hidden beneath the shimmer of tailored suits and silk bedsheets. Surrounded by gold, I grew up quietly starving.... for warmth, for meaning, for something real.
Until the night everything burned.
---
The highway was slick with rain when it happened.
The black limousine carved through the mountain pass in Nagano, its tires whispering danger as they skidded too fast around a blind bend. Outside, the world was a blur of mist and darkness. Inside, a haunting stillness clung to us, broken only by the soft, mournful strains of Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, my mother's favorite. It drifted from the radio like a ghost, almost drowned beneath the relentless downpour.
Then came the moment that tore time in half.
A shriek of metal. A thunderclap. A scream. The sound of our lives being unstitched in a single, violent instant.
The car slammed into the guardrail with a force that snapped my breath away. The world spun: trees, sky, headlights, rain and then, a jolt. Silence. Not peace. The kind of silence that holds its breath before a fall.
We were dangling.
The limousine hung precariously off the edge of the cliff, the front half suspended over a black abyss. Beneath us, only wind and gravity waited. Steel groaned. Glass crackled. The scent of oil and blood thickened the air.
My father was draped lifelessly over the steering wheel, crimson soaking into his white-collared shirt. He didn't speak. He didn't move.
"Mama…?"
My voice cracked, no louder than the trembling of my fingers.
She sat beside me, motionless. Her eyes were closed. Her body slumped at an unnatural angle. Raindrops beaded against her lashes like tears the sky wept for me.
I reached for her with blood-slick hands, the seatbelt carving into my chest like punishment. I didn't care. I had to touch her. Wake her. Save her.
Then the car shifted.
"No! Please!" I cried out, voice shrill and raw, the voice of a child begging the universe to stop.
But it didn't.
The vehicle tilted forward, metal shrieking as it surrendered. The headlights pierced the fog, illuminating nothing but endless air.
And in that final breath before the fall...
Something moved.
A blur in the storm. A howl, not human, not beast, but something ancient. Primal. Eyes gleamed in the dark, like coals fanned by fate. There was a presence: tall, impossible, silent and watching from the cliffs. Fangs caught the lightning for a heartbeat. Claws curled like promises.
Then.
Darkness swallowed me whole.
---
I woke in a hospital bed, but it felt like waking in a grave. Alone. Silent.
Pain coursed through me, every breath shallow, every movement a reminder of the wreckage that had been my body. My ribs were fractured, one leg encased in a cold, unforgiving cast. My face was wrapped in bandages, so many that I couldn't even remember what I looked like. But none of it mattered. None of it ever mattered.
There was a hollow where my heart used to be.
A doctor's voice pulled me from the numb fog. His words were soft, gentle, like he was afraid the air might shatter around us. "They're gone," he said, and I couldn't tell if he was speaking to me or to the sterile walls around us. "Both your parents… and your uncle and aunt, too. The impact was instant."
I couldn't speak. My tongue felt thick, foreign. My throat closed, suffocating.
I didn't cry. I couldn't. Not then. It was as if all the tears had already drained out of me, swept away by the wreckage of the car, the crash, the world collapsing on itself.
They were gone.
And all that remained was the echo of their absence, too loud in the silence.
I stared at the ceiling, at the sterile lights that flickered like mocking stars, and I felt the weight of a world that no longer held meaning.
My golden world.. everything I had ever known, every comfort, every illusion of safety... had crumbled. And it had all gone up in smoke without a sound, without a warning, without me ever truly understanding the depth of its fragility.
I was left here, alone. And the silence, it suffocated me.
---
The funeral was a spectacle of grief, a grand affair designed for the cameras and the world that would forget them tomorrow. Hundreds attended, dressed in their finest black, their grief polished and measured. Paparazzi flitted outside the cathedral gates, capturing the pain of others as if it were a momentary trend. Inside, people wept beautifully... delicate, staged tears that glistened in the sunlight streaming through stained glass. They left flowers wrapped in silk, as if the fragility of life could be captured in something as fleeting as a blossom.
But I was still. I was hollow.
The black suit they'd chosen for me hung off my frame, too large, swallowing me whole. I was a child buried beneath the weight of a world that had been taken from me. My face was pale.... pale as if my soul had already left, leaving only a ghost behind. I didn't know if I was breathing or not. I felt nothing. Nothing except the stillness.
I watched, detached, as the caskets were lowered into the cold earth, all four of them. My mother. My father. My uncle. My aunt. Four caskets, four lives reduced to ash, to memories that would soon fade like smoke.
But I had no tears left.
They'd been drained from me long ago ripped away by the crash, the emptiness, the silence. Every drop of sorrow I could have shed had evaporated into the void the night I lost them. Now, I could only feel the cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones, numbing you from the inside out. The kind of cold that makes you wonder if you were ever truly alive to begin with.
The world went on, as it always does. But I stayed still, frozen in that moment buried with them, in a way. Forgotten, alone. The mourners were all there, their faces etched with sympathy, their hands pressed to their hearts but none of them saw me. None of them could feel what I felt.
And in that crushing silence, I realized, I was already gone.
---
I never returned to the mansion.
The sprawling house that once felt like a home, its grand walls, its polished floors became nothing more than a hollow monument to a past I could no longer touch.
In a matter of days, the Arakawa family. The smiling uncles, the doting aunts, the so-called relatives, shed their masks. Beneath their carefully crafted facades, they were vultures. Like jackals scenting blood, they circled, each one clawing for a piece of what my parents had left behind. The inheritance, the companies, the sprawling estates: all of it was up for grabs. The family, who had once feigned love and loyalty, was now an arena of greed and betrayal.
"He's just a boy," they said. "He can't manage any of this."
"There's no will. Reijiro never finished it."
"We'll handle it for now, for the good of the family."
Their words were like knives, cutting through the air, carving into what little was left of me. I sat in the corner of a cold, sterile boardroom, silent. Detached. Watching it all unfold. My heart felt like a withered organ, shriveled from grief, suffocated by the weight of what had been stolen from me, what I had lost.
By the end of the week, everything, everything was gone.
The mansion. The businesses. The legacy. My parents.
And in the quiet aftermath, there was only me; alone, discarded like the useless heir to a forgotten empire.
---
Everything… except her.
"Let's go," she said that night, her voice trembling but resolute, like a fragile thread pulling me from the abyss.
Yuzuki Arakawa. My cousin. She had chestnut-brown hair that caught the light like autumn leaves, and eyes that held a quiet strength, an unwavering steadiness in the midst of chaos. She was two years older than me, orphaned just like I was. Her parents had died in the same crash. I couldn't even bring myself to say it out loudz they were gone. But Yuzuki hadn't been with us that day. She should have been. She was supposed to travel with them, but a bad cold had kept her in bed, and the universe, in its cruel irony, spared her life. A twist of fate.
While the rest of the world fought over the pieces of our family's legacy, tearing apart what was left of my parents, Yuzuki stayed silent. She didn't join in the battles. She didn't care for the riches or the power.
She wasn't like them.
She was different.
She was the only one who didn't leave me behind in the wreckage of it all.
Without a word, she reached for my hand... her touch warm, steady, grounding me in the midst of a storm I couldn't escape.
And we left.
In the quiet, unspoken bond between us, I found something I hadn't realized I was searching for. Someone who, despite her own pain, was still strong enough to pull me out of the darkness. She didn't need words. She didn't need anything except that quiet promise in her grip.
Together, we walked away from everything we had lost.
And for the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn't alone.
---
We lived in a small, modest house, tucked away in a quiet suburban neighborhood, an existence so far removed from the marble halls and towering skylines of our former life that it felt like a different world entirely. The world we had known, the one of wealth and grandeur, was a distant dream now, slipping through my fingers like sand. No more gold chandeliers that glittered like stars. No more garden maids with bright smiles, tending to lawns that never needed tending. Just cracked kitchen tiles, faded tatami mats that creaked underfoot, and a leaky faucet that whined endlessly in the silence of the night, like the echo of a life that no longer existed.
Gone were the chefs who prepared exquisite meals, the chauffeurs who drove us to places I couldn't bring myself to visit anymore, the polished floors that gleamed like perfection. Now, we boiled cheap noodles on a small stove, flicking through expired DVDs that offered little more than fleeting distractions. We learned to live with less, and in some ways, it felt as if we were learning how to live without at all.
Yuzuki, always the steady one, worked part-time at a bookstore, stacking and shelving books with a quiet diligence that seemed to hold everything together. She never complained. She never asked for anything more. She did what she could to survive, to help us breathe in this strange, unfamiliar world.
And me? I tried to sleep through the nightmares. I couldn't escape them. The crash, the silence, the weight of my parents' absence, it followed me into every dark corner of my mind, wrapping itself around my thoughts like chains.
The world moved on. The Arakawa name, once a symbol of power, of status, of life, faded from the headlines as though it had never been. No more whispers of the great empire, no more photos in glossy magazines. We were forgotten, swept away by time, reduced to nothing but a footnote in the history of a world that no longer cared.
But in the quiet corners of this new, stripped-down life, something fragile began to take root. A small, stubborn seed that refused to die. A thread of something that felt like hope, even if it wasn't quite hope yet. It was delicate. It was barely there. But it was enough to keep us going.
---
One night, months later, as we sat together under the kotatsu, the warm steam rising from mismatched tea cups the only sound between us, I asked the question that had gnawed at me since that night. The one I'd never had the courage to voice until now.
"Do you think... someone saved me?"
Yuzuki blinked, her eyes wide with surprise, as if the words were foreign in this quiet world we had built together. "Saved you?"
I nodded slowly, the weight of the memory pulling at me, even as I tried to dismiss it. "I remember something. Just before I blacked out. Claws... silver eyes... and a sound like thunder."
I said the words quietly, almost as if I feared they would shatter the fragile world we'd managed to construct. My heart pounded in my chest as the images flickered in my mind again, too vivid to ignore, too strange to be dismissed as mere imagination.
Yuzuki's face tightened, and she frowned, hesitant, as if the question itself held too much power. "You hit your head hard. Maybe it was just a dream... or the shock. Your mind was probably just... playing tricks."
"Maybe," I murmured, my voice hollow with doubt.
But something inside me said otherwise.
The silence between us thickened, and the quiet crackle of the kotatsu was the only thing that kept us tethered to the present. But my thoughts, my memories kept pulling me back. Claws. Silver eyes. Thunder.
The wind outside howled through the cracks of our humble home, the old wooden beams groaning under its force. The howl seemed to carry something ancient, something untamed.
And somewhere, deep in the mountains beyond the cold night, something howled back.
-----
That was the night I remembered the fangs.
Sharp. Piercing. A flash of white in the darkness, just before everything went black.
And the promise of claws.
A promise that had never left me. Not really. Even as I tried to bury it beneath the rubble of everything I'd lost, something deep inside me, something primal and refused to let go.
And then there was her.
The girl.
The one who would return one day.
Not for the boy of gold that the world had once adored. Not for the heir to a shattered empire. No, she would come for me, for who I was now..broken, lost, untethered and claim me as her own.
Not as a symbol of wealth, not as a fragile remnant of a once-glorious family. But as a mate of fate.
I didn't know how or when. But in the depths of the night, in the silence of the mountains, I felt it. The pull. Like an invisible thread tugging at me, drawing me into a future I couldn't yet understand.
A future that wasn't mine to choose.