The sun, red in all its tired glory, bled across the east.
A dull warmth clung to rooftops and cobblestone, painting the city in rust, lilac, and dying fire.
Even the air seemed weary—thick with history, heavy with smoke that refused to rise.
The clock tower muttered at a quarter to six.
Below the window, life carried on: carriage wheels whispered against stone, paperboys cried out the day's tragedies, a woman laughed too loudly for her station.
It was the kind of noise that made silence feel alive.
"Yes, hello — you know the voice."
Smooth. Practiced. The tone of someone who'd sold truth too many times to believe in it.
"I've delivered the goods to a member of the Venomous Silence Hall. Yes… payment received."
They leaned against the window, watching the street — a slow river of hats, coats, and desperate faces pretending the world wasn't falling apart.
"I'll be expecting a report once the results are confirmed," they said softly. "Goodbye."
A click.
The receiver settled into its cradle, and the faint hum of aether drained from the line.
Silence moved in to take its place — thick, expectant.
Then came the voice.
Not from the room, but from within.
A harmony of whispers, layered like glass over water — beautiful, haunting, and terribly amused.
"Ah, business concluded?" it purred. "You always sound so terribly professional when you're lying through your teeth."
"Seere," I muttered, turning from the window.
The reflection staring back was a stranger's: calm eyes, delicate jaw, a liar's mask too well-worn to remove.
"We already got our pay. And you've seen the reports — the human nations are crumbling from within. Someone will come looking. It's been a long day. We leave."
A low laugh rippled through my head, silken and cruel.
"See? A sensible thought. Green suits you — fear always does some good when taken in adequate doses."
I ignored the jab, pulling on my gloves and straightening my coat.
The air in the room was stale — coffee, dust, the faint metallic sting of mana residue.
Time to move.
I stepped into the evening, the wind clutching my coat like an old friend who'd overstayed their welcome.
The city moved to its dusk rhythm — frantic and serene in the same breath.
Smoke mingled with incense and sake; the scent of iron lingered beneath.
We walked. Or perhaps only I walked, and Seere drifted — a consciousness folded within my own.
For a while, only the noise of the crowd filled the silence: the calls of vendors, the hiss of lamps being lit.
Then Seere spoke again, their tone sharp with amusement.
"How quaint," they mused. "A contractee wandering the mortal plane so freely. You don't see that often."
"What?" I asked, half-distracted.
"Look," they whispered. "Ahead. The one with the moon pendant."
I followed their gaze — and froze.
She was crossing the street, heading toward a small restaurant bathed in amber light.
Victoria.
The girl from the festival.
The pale blue yukata draped around her like print on a bookmark.
Her hair — black streaked with bone-white — caught the last of the sun and reflected it wrong, like the page of a book bathed in an evening star's glare.
Something otherworldly pretending to be human.
And yet not a single passerby spared her a second glance.
"She doesn't look like she belongs here," I murmured. "And yet everyone acts like she's just another face."
Seere chuckled, a ripple of overlapping voices in the mind's dark water.
"You sound almost jealous. But yes — she's different. And see the pendant around her neck?"
"The silver one?" I asked. "What about it?"
"That little trinket hums with something. Something old. The kind your scholars at the Universities would sell their souls to study."
I frowned. "You keep throwing that word around. The Arcana. Who are they supposed to be — some lost sect? A dead religion?"
Silence stretched, sharp as glass. Then Seere's voice, smooth and cold:
"If it mattered to you, you'd already be dead."
"Comforting," I said dryly.
"But," they added, "if you're still planning to vanish, that pendant could make your escape far easier. There's power inside its light that makes stories read like fiction — I can tell that much."
I looked again at the girl in the restaurant's doorway. She was smiling now, bowing slightly to a group of merchants.
It was an easy smile. Too easy.
The kind people wear when their mind's already elsewhere.
"If I still had my fire affinity," I muttered, "this would be straightforward."
"Don't mourn what's burned," Seere sang softly. "It's unbecoming. Move — you're being suspicious."
I adjusted my hat, the brim dipping low. "Foreigners draw attention. Women more so. I can work with that."
"Of course you can," Seere purred. "You always did turn eyes into opportunities. But tread carefully — the person she's staying with doesn't like losing strangers. Call it motherly nature."
"Then we'll act before it notices."
I smiled faintly. "A shrine without allegiance, no banners, no interest in sect politics — no one will care if I light a torch to pray."
Several bystanders glanced at me — a woman talking to herself in the street, beneath the bleeding sun.
I forced a laugh, turning it into a cough.
"Nothing to see here."
Seere sighed in mock dismay. "Compose yourself, darling. We mustn't look mad — even if you are."
I moved on, the light dying behind me. Lanterns flickered to life — tiny golden wounds stitched into the dusk.
"Chilly," I murmured. "Seems autumn's already here."
"Fall," Seere whispered back, "always comes for those who think themselves warm."
---
Victoria's POV
It's been about a month now.
I finally started at my new job — though, truthfully, I think they only hired me because I looked harmless enough.
I can't cook. I can barely wash dishes without breaking one. I was torn between apology and contempt toward Dōngzhì.
The owner says my smile sells better than soup, so they keep me near the customers — greeting guests, clearing tables, fetching tea.
A thousand yen an hour. Not much, but enough.
The world outside is getting colder, more brittle. Prices rise, tempers fray.
The owner says the restaurant stays busy because it "brings in gentle souls."
I'm not sure if she means the living ones or not.
The other girls tease me about the amulet I wear — a small silver fox hanging from a dark cord.
They say it glows sometimes, especially when I laugh.
I've never seen it myself, but it feels warm. Like it's supporting me.
Dōngzhì gave it to me on my first day. She told me never to take it off — if I could help it.
She didn't explain why. Only that some doors should always remain open, in case you need to run.
I try to practice Ki when the restaurant closes, the way she showed me — breathing with the earth, feeling the pulse of things.
But every time I reach for it, I hear static. Like a bad signal.
Like the world's heartbeat playing through a broken radio.
Sometimes I dream of bamboo gardens and still lakes. Sometimes, a field of red lilies swaying beneath an unseen moon.
And sometimes — though I try not to think too much about it — I dream of a voice whispering my name from nowhere.
Maybe I'm losing my mind.
Tonight, the wind's colder than before.
I step outside with a basket of trash, breath curling like smoke, apron fluttering in the gust.
"Ah," I murmur, smiling faintly to no one. "It seems autumn's here."
The sky above is red and orange, but not warm — a dimming ember with no light.
The puddle by my feet holds a fractured moon, trembling with each drop that falls from the eaves.
Something shifts in the air. Just slightly.
The kind of stillness that comes after something notices you.
I glance over my shoulder.
No one.
Only the hum of lanterns, the hiss of frying oil, the faint laughter of strangers through paper walls.
Still… I can feel it.
A gaze — deliberate, patient, waiting.
---
Meanwhile
Across the street, in the shadow of a tea shop's awning, a figure lingers.
Hat brim low. Coat buttoned to the chin.
A faint wisp of smoke curls from the end of a half-burnt cigarette.
They don't move. Don't breathe.
Inside, the choir stirs.
"Ah," Seere whispers, voice soft as a smile. "So she's just a child. No wonder the air reeked of inexperience."
I keep my eyes on the girl in the light. "You're certain?"
"Her soul hums like tempered glass," Seere croons. "Break her wrong, and she'll sing for hours — maybe."
Victoria looks up at the sky — her face brushed by lantern glow, the moon pendant pulsing once like a heartbeat.
"Will you strike?" Seere asks, too softly.
"…No. Not yet."
"Or perhaps," Seere teases, laughter bleeding through thought, "you're hesitating."
I watch her turn, her shadow slipping through the doorway like ink.
The street swallows her whole.
"Maybe—calculating," I admit.
The cigarette dies between my fingers. The night reclaims me.
And the city exhales — unaware, uncaring, utterly doomed.
Above it all, the horizon folds into itself.
The last light bleeds, the lanterns flicker like half-remembered prayers.
And the sun, in all its weary glory, finally sat too.