Ryoichi Tanaka was dead. Or erased. Or sublimated. Whatever the term, he was gone. And yet, in the oppressive twilight of his best friend's bedroom, surrounded by the ghosts of his passions, he had never felt more alive. He had left behind a final puzzle, a breadcrumb trail leading from the heart of a forgotten constellation to the truth.
The four of us—a boy who remembered, a girl who calculated, a boy who grieved, and a ghost who was a mystery even to herself—were staring at the hand-drawn star chart as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was Ryoichi's last will and testament, written in a language of celestial bodies and cryptic warnings.
The sky forgets, but the stars remember. Her name is a constellation. Find it before the next new moon.
It was Aoi, naturally, who broke the reverent silence. Her mind, unaffected by the emotional gravity of the situation, immediately began to dissect the riddle.
"The statement contains three primary components," she announced, her voice a stark, analytical counterpoint to the room's somber mood. "One: a location or subject, 'Her name is a constellation.' Two: an instruction, 'Find it.' Three: a temporal deadline, 'before the next new moon'."
She was already typing on her phone. "The current date is August 6th. The next new moon occurs in seven days, on August 13th. That is our operational window."
One week. The words hung in the air, instantly transforming the cryptic puzzle into a ticking time bomb. The sense of impending finality was a physical pressure, a tightening in my chest.
"A week to do what?" Renji asked, his voice rough. He was staring at the chart, his expression a turbulent mix of pain and familiarity. "This is classic Ryoichi. He never did anything directly. It was always a game, a puzzle box. He believed answers you found yourself were the only ones that mattered."
"'Her name is a constellation'," I murmured, tracing the red circle Ryoichi had drawn around the constellation Lyra. "Whose name? Yuki's? Or... Mio Asakura's?"
At the mention of her name, Yuki, who had been hovering silently near the Eidolon camera, flinched. The name Mio was still a fresh wound, a ghost she was only just beginning to see. "Lyra," she whispered, her gaze fixed on the chart. "The lyre of Orpheus."
"The musician who journeyed to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice," Aoi supplied instantly, her mind a repository of cross-referenced information. "He charmed the gods with his music, and Hades agreed to release her on one condition: he could not look back at her until they both reached the world of the living. He looked back at the last moment, and she was lost to him forever."
The myth, a story I'd vaguely remembered from a literature class, was suddenly imbued with a terrifying, personal significance. The parallels were so sharp, so precise, they felt less like a coincidence and more like a prophecy.
Ryoichi, the artist who could charm the very laws of reality—Orpheus. His journey into the secrets of the Phenomenon—the descent into the underworld. And the lost girl he tried to save—Eurydice.
"Ryoichi loved that story," Renji said, a far-off look in his eyes. "He was obsessed with it. But his take was different. He didn't think Orpheus was a musician." Renji looked at us, a spark of his friend's brilliant, strange mind igniting in his own eyes. "He said Orpheus was a 'reality tuner'. That his lyre didn't produce sound, but a specific 'existential frequency' that allowed him to phase between the world of the living and the world of the erased. He saw the myth as a garbled data fragment from a previous cycle, a historical record of a sensitive who tried to break the rules."
My mind reeled. Ryoichi hadn't just been studying the Phenomenon. He had been building a unified field theory of myth, physics, and supernatural law. He had been trying to write the instruction manual for the universe.
And the story ended in failure. Orpheus had looked back. He had lost Eurydice.
"It's a warning," I said. "Whatever he's telling us to do, he's warning us about the cost of looking back."
"A warning, yes," Aoi agreed. "But also an instruction. The myth is not just a parallel; it is the key to the cryptogram itself."
And so, the investigation began anew. Renji's bedroom, the dark sanctuary of his grief, became our war room. The air, once thick with despair, was now charged with a frantic, desperate energy. We were a broken, dysfunctional team, but we were a team nonetheless.
Aoi commanded the digital front, her laptop open on the floor, her fingers flying across the keyboard. She was our oracle, pulling data from the ether—astronomical charts, mythological variants, local folklore archives. Renji was our historian, our 'Ryoichi whisperer', providing the crucial, unorthodox context that no database could hold. He paced the room, running his hands through his ash-blonde hair, channeling his lost friend's thought processes.
"Think like him," Renji would mutter. "It's never the obvious answer. It's always the one hidden in plain sight. It's about the connections between things."
Yuki was our compass. She sat near the Eidolon, the star chart spread before her, her translucent fingers hovering over the paper. She had her eyes closed, trying to do what she did best: feel. She was trying to resonate with the Artifacts, to pull a coherent signal from the static of her own fractured memories.
My role? I was the bridge. The translator between Aoi's cold logic, Renji's pained intuition, and Yuki's ethereal feelings. I was the one who had to take all these disparate threads and try to weave them into a single, coherent rope we could use to pull ourselves out of the abyss.
Our first focus was Lyra.
"The primary star in Lyra is Vega," Aoi reported, reading from her screen. "In Japanese folklore, Vega represents Orihime, the weaver princess, separated from her lover Hikoboshi, represented by the star Altair. They are allowed to meet only once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month."
"A story of separated lovers," I mused. "It fits the theme."
"Ryoichi knew that story," Renji confirmed. "He took a picture of the Tanabata festival two years ago. Said it was the 'saddest happy ending' he'd ever seen."
Yuki, her eyes still closed, shook her head slightly. "Separation... yes... but that's not... it's not the right feeling," she whispered. "The myth... Orpheus... it feels... colder. Sharper. It feels like... failure. A permanent loss."
She was right. The Tanabata story was bittersweet. The Orpheus myth was a pure tragedy. The emotional resonance was different.
"We are focusing too much on the constellation's name," Aoi stated, shifting her line of inquiry. "The note says 'Her name is a constellation'. Not 'her name is in a constellation'. This could be a semantic misdirection. The constellation itself could be a metaphor for a person's story or identity."
"His favorite phrase," Renji chimed in. "'Everyone is a collection of stories. A private constellation.' He was so damn dramatic."
"So if the constellation represents a person's story," I reasoned, thinking out loud, "and the story is the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice... then we need to identify our Orpheus and our Eurydice."
"Ryoichi is Orpheus," Renji said with a grim certainty. "The one who went looking. The one who failed."
"Then who is Eurydice?" I asked. "The lost girl he tried to save."
My eyes drifted to Yuki. She was the ghost. The lost one. It had to be her. "Yuki," I said. "The name... does it mean anything in relation to stars?"
"'Yuki' means 'snow'," she said softly. "It has no direct astrological connection that I know of."
We were hitting a wall. The logic was circular. The answer felt close, tantalizingly so, but we were missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. We were looking at the board, but we didn't understand what the pieces represented.
Frustrated, I picked up the Eidolon camera. Its metal body was cold and heavy in my hands. It felt like holding a dormant weapon. I looked through the viewfinder, aiming it at the star chart. Through the strange, modified lens, the hand-drawn stars seemed to warp and shimmer, the lines connecting them glowing with a faint, ghostly light.
"It's about the price," I said, a thought crystallizing in my mind. "We've been so focused on Ryoichi and Yuki. On the artist and the subject. But we're forgetting the most important part of the equation. The sacrifice."
I turned to Aoi. "The other girl. Mio Asakura. Pull up her file again. Everything you can find. Hobbies, online activity, anything."
Aoi, sensing the shift in my voice, immediately complied. The screen filled with the sparse data of a forgotten life. AV Club member. Library records. Then, Aoi's fingers paused.
"I have accessed a cached version of the old school web forum server," she said. "There is a user profile here linked to Mio Asakura's student ID." She enlarged a section of the screen.
My heart stopped.
On the profile page, next to the default school avatar, was a username. A handle she had chosen for herself to navigate the digital world.
Eurydice77.
The silence in the room was absolute. It was the silence of a final, devastating revelation. The key had been there all along. We had been trying to unlock the door with the wrong name.
Ryoichi was Orpheus, the reality-tuner who journeyed into the dark. And Mio Asakura was his Eurydice. The girl whose name was a constellation. The girl whose story was the tragedy.
The riddle wasn't about Yuki. It was about the girl who was erased to pay for Yuki's miracle.
But why? Why would Ryoichi, a third-year, be so invested in a first-year he barely knew? Had they been friends? Lovers?
"They knew each other," Yuki whispered, her eyes flying open. They were filled with a profound, dawning horror. A new memory fragment was breaking through. "The library... It wasn't just me and Mio-chan talking. There was someone else. A boy. Tall... with kind eyes... He was talking to us about the books. About myths. About..." Her voice trailed off as she looked at the framed photograph on Renji's wall. The picture of the city at night. "...about photography."
It was Ryoichi. The three of them. A sensitive, a fading ghost, and a curious first-year, all drawn together in a quiet library by a shared fascination with the unseen world. A club of three, a secret society of anomalies.
And Ryoichi, their Orpheus, had been forced to make a terrible choice.
"He tried to save you both," Renji breathed, the final, terrible piece of the puzzle clicking into place for him. "He must have seen that you were both targets, Yuki. Or that saving you would incur a cost. He couldn't pay it himself... not if he wanted to complete his work. So he chose. He saved the ghost he could anchor over the living girl he couldn't. He sacrificed Mio to save you."
The room spun. Ryoichi wasn't just a compassionate scientist. He had played God. He had chosen one life over another. He had saved Yuki, but in doing so, he had condemned her best friend to oblivion.
This was the truth. The terrible, ugly, heartbreaking truth at the center of the labyrinth.
"Find it," I said, repeating Ryoichi's instruction. My voice was hoarse. "He wasn't telling us to find a star. He was telling us to find this. The truth. The story of Mio's sacrifice."
"And the deadline," Aoi said, her voice grim. "The new moon. August 13th. What happens then?"
Renji looked at the Eidolon camera, his expression one of dread and understanding. "It's the darkest night of the month," he said. "Ryoichi always said it was when the 'signal noise' was lowest. When the veil between what is and what was... is at its thinnest." He looked at us, his eyes burning with a desperate intensity. "He didn't just want us to find the truth. He wanted us to see it. The new moon is the only time the Eidolon will have enough power, enough clarity, to look back. To view the moment of the erasure itself."
To look back. Like Orpheus.
The final stage was set. The objective was clear. On the night of the new moon, in four days, we were to use a camera built from magic and science to witness the metaphysical murder of a teenage girl, in the hopes of understanding the sacrifice of a boy who committed suicide by reality, to save the ghost who was at the center of it all.
I looked at my team. Aoi, the cold analyst, her face pale, for once unable to quantify the sheer horror of our task. Renji, the grieving survivor, now tasked with reliving the events that led to his friend's destruction. Yuki, the ghost who was now haunted by her own ghost, her face a mask of silent, unspeakable grief for the friend she had just remembered and the price of her own survival.
And me. I was the one who had to hold the camera. I was the one who had to press the shutter.
Ryoichi's final message was a map, but it didn't lead to a treasure. It led to the scene of the crime. He wanted us to be witnesses. He wanted us to look back.
And I had a terrible, sinking feeling that, just like Orpheus, looking back would cost us everything. The finale was no longer approaching. It was here. And the curtain was about to rise on the darkest night of our lives.