Prologue – The End of Fire
The world burned.
Izumi could not breathe. The air was smoke and heat, the crackle of collapsing timbers and the faint, impossible sound of someone screaming his name. His house—his whole life—had become a red furnace. He had been upstairs when the first blast of flame rolled through the hallway. In an instant, everything he loved was gone.
He found his mother in the kitchen doorway, already still, the light of the fire dancing on her open eyes. His father's arm reached from beneath a fallen beam, fingers curled as if still trying to protect them. He didn't find his younger sister at all.
For a few long minutes, Izumi just stood there in the roaring heat, his mind hollow. The world outside was sirens and shouting, but it all felt far away. Something inside him cracked quietly.
When the firemen finally pulled him free, he did not resist. He heard them say "he's the only one", and that sentence stayed in his mind for the next six months—through the hospital, through the empty apartment his relatives gave him, through the slow grinding of days that no longer had purpose.
By eighteen, he had learned to smile when people checked on him. But one gray morning he walked to the bridge at the edge of the city and looked down at the water, gray like the sky. The wind was cold. He whispered an apology—to no one in particular—and stepped forward.
The impact was silence.
Then there was only white.
---