The clamour of Eight-Hundred-Eight at her back, Miyabi climbed a gentle slope.
At the top stood an old roadside teahouse, built on a rise that looked out over the city.
The neon light did not reach this far — it was that quiet. Only the electronic moon floating in the night sky cast its pale light across the eaves.
In one corner of the teahouse, a man sat alone, eating dango with no particular ceremony.
A patched and faded kimono. Sandals at his feet, visibly more worn than Miyabi's own.
His eyes held a warm light, and his face had an easy, likeable quality about it.
As Miyabi passed by him, she caught the faint scent of earth and wind.
The man glanced at her over his dango, but neither spoke, and only the night wind passed between them.
Miyabi took an empty seat and brought the dango that was set before her quietly to her lips.
A hand tugged at her sleeve.
Looking down, she found Kareno — wearing artificial skin now, with a fragile, human quality to its face that suited the name it had been given.
Without a word, Kareno pointed to a single volume among a collection of old books set in the corner of the shop.
In its stride and the movement of its fingers, the hard, mechanical quality of the droid it had once been was gone —
replaced by an uneven, drifting quality beginning to resemble the individual habit of a person's movement.
The fingertips of Kareno — which had been gradually taking on a more human appearance — reached without hesitation to where they had sensed the "trembling" pressed between the pages.
Miyabi took the book and turned the pages, and there, tucked inside, lay a single bookmark.
The fourth bookmark — the texture of it against her fingertips carried a weight that electronic data could never hold.
As Miyabi looked at it, the proprietor approached with a tray.
"...Ah, young one — were you looking at that?"
At the proprietor's question, Miyabi nodded quietly.
"...A good wind blows through it. This paper."
"Ha — it's just an old scrap, is all. But if someone with an eye for such things is the one to carry it, I'd say the paper itself would have no complaints.
Take it, if you like."
At the proprietor's generosity, Miyabi answered with a brief "...I am grateful," and tucked the fourth fragment into her collar.
As she moved to leave, Miyabi stopped — and, quite uncharacteristically, ordered another dango.
"...To take away. One more, if you would."
Kareno tilted its head, puzzled, but Miyabi offered no explanation — she took the wrapped dango and walked on.
On the way back down, she opened the wrapping and took a bite as she walked.
In the ordinary way of things, she would sit somewhere and savour a meal properly — but now, for some reason, she felt an urge she could not quite explain: to taste this moment inside the movement itself, inside the walking.
Looking down from the hill, Eight-Hundred-Eight spread below as a sea of coded light.
The beauty that had once lived there — imperfect, and beautiful because of it —
the *tsuki*, the elegance of things — had crumbled away like sand, and what remained had changed its shape entirely.
"...Miyabi. What are you doing in a place like this. And eating like that — how undignified."
At the unexpected voice, she looked up to find Hanabishi Tsuya standing there, her crimson kimono pinned with characteristic precision.
Tsuya's eyes went wide at the sight of Miyabi eating dango as she walked — a sight she had never seen before — and she let out a resigned sigh.
"...Nothing in particular. The wind tasted a little sweet, that's all."
Miyabi swallowed the last bite and turned her gaze back toward the sea of light.
With the fourth fragment now in hand, something had begun to kindle quietly in her eyes — the afterglow of the "trembling" that the great verses of the past had once held, and lost.
Battle Haiker Miyabi.
Down the hill she walks, her back companioned only by the night wind — and the faint promise of a verse not yet written.