I woke to the absence of Heiwa.
It was the wrong kind of quiet—not the restful hush of dawn, nor the reverent stillness of prayer, but a silence that leaned inward, compressing the air as though the world itself were holding its breath and waiting to see if it would be allowed to exhale again.
I rose at once.
The shrine greeted me unchanged—tatami unruffled, incense cold, shadows where they had always been. That only made it worse. I found Heiwa at the front steps with Miss Lakshmi, both standing too straight, their conversation clipped and economical, as though words themselves were a resource to be rationed.
As Heiwa explained the situation, a stray thought surfaced, absurd and unwanted: that Christmas had arrived early, in a world that—to the best of my knowledge—had never heard of such a thing. Gifts delivered unasked. Debts wrapped in ribbons. Consequences disguised as generosity.
We departed for the neighboring province beneath a sun already beginning its descent.
Heiwa asked for a weapon.
I handed it to her without comment.
There are moments when questions feel like indulgences, and this was one of them. As we walked, I fought the childish impulse to imagine music accompanying our steps—something swelling, heroic, indulgent. The thought embarrassed me. Still, the evening breeze carried a thrill I could not name, prickling along my spine like the edge of a promise.
It felt like standing before something vast.
Something unearned.
Gunfire came without warning.
I raised a hand, and the air obeyed.
Bullets froze mid-flight, each one suspended in a transparent tension, as though the sky itself had clenched its fist. In that instant, a dangerous thought bloomed—bright and intoxicating—that I could touch the heavens. No—take them. The sun and stars were not distant bodies but ornaments, close enough to be grasped if one were audacious enough.
We advanced.
The warehouse doors yawned open, and men collapsed before their fear could organize itself into language. The work of the shinobi—my silent, disobedient guardians. Angels, perhaps, if angels were permitted autonomy. If they listened only when it suited them.
Inside were more men. Ordinarily, such imbalance would have broken me. Instead, I felt emboldened—reckless in the way one becomes after surviving something they should not have.
Drunkenness is not delusion, I thought distantly, if one possesses the intoxication to sustain it.
The shinobi moved.
The fight ended before it could properly begin.
The heiress—Zara—stood amid the splintered remains of her own audacity, no older than I was, her confidence stripped to something thin and performative. Miss Halle was unharmed. We began, tentatively, to consider what came next.
Then the world lost its color.
It was as though the sun had risen again—incorrectly. There were no shadows. No gradients. Light did not fall or reflect; it simply existed, uniform and merciless. Depth abandoned its post. Boundaries dissolved. Space flattened into something infinite and deeply nauseating, like a page scrubbed clean too many times.
With the absence of shadow came sound.
A rushing, omnipresent water—everywhere at once, nowhere to escape. Not loud, not quiet. Total.
My body locked.
Fear—ancient, vast, and unquestionable—seized me so completely that thought itself failed. I could not flee. I could not scream. I could not pray. All such impulses were overwritten, revised out of relevance.
And then—something shifted.
Not movement exactly, but a miscalculation. A subtle distortion of space, as though the air had been measured incorrectly and stretched past its intended bounds. Light bent around it—or perhaps refused to bend at all. My eyes caught edges that should not exist: a line too long, a corner of shadow hovering where no shadow could fall.
Forms emerged.
They were tall. Not gigantically so, not grotesque, but unmistakably too tall—seven, perhaps eight feet, their heads grazing a height that made the space feel suddenly insufficient, as though the room had misjudged what it was meant to contain.
Porcelain-perfect faces surfaced first, blinding in their purity, too symmetrical to be natural. Beautiful. Radiant. Incorrect.
The light burned my eyes, forced tears from them, yet compelled me to keep looking, as though refusal were no longer an option afforded to me.
Their hair framed them like a failed coronation.
Strands of metallic silk—spun glass and pale ash—floated as if submerged in still water. Bone-white. Oil-slick black. Colors that refused to settle on a single truth. The ends never reached their shoulders; instead, they frayed, thinning into smoke and dust, evaporating before they could touch the air below. No strand ever fell. Nothing about them was permitted completion.
Only then did I see their wings.
They emerged from the mid-back, not spread in dominance but hanging in a state of arrested collapse—two leathery appendages, torn and tattered, their edges jagged as though ripped rather than shed. Too small for flight. Too damaged for function. And yet undeniably there: a permanent wound rendered anatomical. The wings twitched faintly—not with intent, but with memory.
They were human-shaped only by suggestion.
Limbs too long. Proportions subtly wrong. Their clothing—if it could be called that—consisted of seamless vestments, monochrome and severe, clinging to their frames like wet parchment. Ash, charcoal, ecru. No seams. No fastenings. The fabric did not drape so much as emerge, as though grown directly from their skin. The hems dissolved into nothing, just as their hair did, refusing to acknowledge gravity or finish.
Hands extended with twelve-jointed fingers that clicked softly as they moved—deliberate, patient, predatory in a way that required no haste.
Around their throats and wrists were rings of eyes—pale gold, dulled like worn halos—embedded in flesh, unblinking.
Watching.
Measuring.
They cast no shadows. Light did not bend around them; it simply failed to register their presence as obstruction. Instead, the world nearby grew thin and colorless, leeched into shades of bone and ash, as though reality itself were dimming in deference.
I felt exposed. Not observed—catalogued. As though something intimate had been opened, indexed, and filed without my consent.
I tried to scream.
My voice died before it was born, swallowed by the rushing sound that filled the space so completely I could no longer hear my own thoughts.
I was torn—between the urge to kneel in reverence before their angelic grace and the instinct to flee from something monstrously, profoundly wrong.
My legs failed.
I fell to my knees.
The eyes turned toward me, concentric rings of pale gold rotating with slow, mechanical interest—like the memory of wheels described by those who had never seen them. My heart, moments ago frantic with terror, slowed.
Not from comfort.
From surrender.
I felt calm.
At peace.
This was inevitability.
And only then—only in that white terror, that sterile divinity—did I realize I had never once looked away from the one who commanded the room.