The sun hadn't yet broken through.
Not really.
Only a dull, amber smudge peeled along the edges of the mist, leaking warmth that never quite touched the skin. The world still whispered in that same patient voice—the one that spoke in windless breaths and the shiver of branches just before they dropped their leaves.
Rakan woke slowly.
Not from a dream.
From weight.
Like something had laid across his chest while he slept—not heavy enough to crush him, but just enough to remind him: you are not alone. Not in this world. Not in this place. Not in yourself.
He rubbed his arms.
The Ka'ro was still there.
Calm.
But not his kind of calm.
The kind that waits.
The kind that listens.
"Mornin', kid," came Mazanka's voice nearby.
Rakan looked over.
Mazanka was crouched by a crooked rock, poking at a steaming tin of water with the tip of a twig. His coat hung loose, hair tied back lazily. One eye still bandaged.
He didn't look up.
"You didn't cry out in your sleep. Which is an improvement, considering where we are."
"Didn't sleep deep enough to cry out."
Mazanka smirked.
But it didn't last long.
His gaze slid upward, toward the horizon. His fingers twitched. His Ka'ro stirred—just once, like a gust slipping under a door too tightly sealed.
Rakan caught it.
"You feel that?"
"Mm," Mazanka said. "Kyōgai's changing tempo."
"Is that bad?"
"Kyōgai doesn't do 'bad' or 'good.' Just balance. But someone… something's pushing against it."
"It's them, isn't it?" The shujikō.
Mazanka paused.
Then, slowly—
shrugged.
"I think we've stepped into something we weren't meant to find."
Across the clearing, Teruko sat with her back to a leaning tree, blade unsheathed and laid across her knees.
She wasn't meditating.
She wasn't breathing right either.
Just staring at the steel.
As if it had lied to her.
As if she was waiting for it to do it again.
Mazanka glanced her way. Didn't say a word.
But his hand drifted to his side. His fingers tapped against the device slung at his hip.
The corrupted eye beneath the bandage pulsed once—
A flicker of Ka'ro.
Like something deep inside him had opened its own eye
—and blinked.
The morning moved like molasses.
No birds.
No insects.
Only the sound of dew dripping slowly from leaves too old to fall.
Kyōgai did not welcome dawn.
It revealed it.
Pulled it from the sky like a reluctant truth.
Rakan sat cross-legged near a stone etched in glyphs they hadn't seen the night before.
They hadn't been there.
He was sure of it.
The spirals crawled halfway up the rock like vines carved from Ka'ro itself, slinking in language none of them understood. Not Sōgen. Not Shintei. Not anything sanctioned or sacred.
He glanced to Teruko.
She sat stiffly by a curved root, blade unsheathed beside her. Her thumb rubbed absent circles into the hilt. Her eyes weren't tired. They were watchful—haunted, almost.
"Didn't sleep?" Rakan asked.
She didn't look at him.
"Didn't even dream."
A lie.
He could hear it.
But he didn't press.
Mazanka emerged from the mist a few moments later, chewing something dry and fibrous.
"Alright, children of the void," he said, voice breezy, "time to move. This camp feels too still."
"You're the one who picked it," Teruko muttered.
"Yeah, and I regret it. Just like I regret letting Rakan cook yesterday."
"I didn't cook—"
"Exactly."
Teruko sighed. But a small flicker of amusement passed behind her eyes.
Rakan didn't laugh.
His gaze had locked onto the a stretch of glyphs on the ground, not the same as the ones on the body yesterday. Something new but similarly off-putting .
"They're spreading," he said. "They weren't here last night."
Mazanka glanced down. Then frowned.
"…That's new."
"Which means either Kyōgai is writing to us," Teruko murmured, "or something else is."
Mazanka crouched by the stone, brushing his fingers along the edge—but never touching the glyphs themselves.
"These aren't warnings," he said. "They're breadcrumbs."
"Leading where?" Rakan asked.
Mazanka's bandaged eye pulsed once beneath its wrap.
"To whoever's pushing this balance off-center."
He stood slowly, cracking his neck with a tired grunt.
"We follow them. And keep your Ka'ro close. Kyōgai's speaking louder now, and I don't like the way it listens back."
The glyphs deepened.
Not in brightness—but in density.
They no longer sat gently on stone or bark. Now, they burrowed. Gouged. Sunk their curling strokes into living roots and dead moss alike, pulsing faintly in a language that did not want to be known.
The forest bent to them.
Trees grew crooked, tilted toward the spiral markings. Leaves were edged in black Ka'ro scorch, yet none had burned. There was no fire.
Only the smell of it.
And a silence thick enough to chew.
Rakan knelt beside a stone, its entire front carved in sharp, violent glyphs that pulsed in rhythm with his chest. The longer he stared, the more it felt like they recognized him.
Like the stone had been waiting.
Mazanka crouched beside another formation, one knee on a slope of soil where the glyphs began to spiral inward—an unnatural pattern in nature's skin. At the center of the spiral, a scorch mark. Faint. Dry.
A footprint.
Twice the size of Rakan's.
Not Kenshiki.
Not human.
But shaped like something that remembered being both.
"What the hell leaves prints like that?" Rakan muttered.
Mazanka didn't look up.
"Something that used to be one of us," he said. "Before their Ka'ro started burning them from the inside."
"You think this is corruption?" Teruko asked, voice sharp but quiet.
"No," Mazanka answered. "I think this is what comes after."
They kept walking.
The glyphs became denser.
No longer random.
They formed paths.
Edges.
Structures.
Walls of it on stone faces, tree trunks hollowed into tunnels.
Rakan could feel them under his feet now—like veins in the ground.
Beating.
They found the first mark an hour later.
A burned insignia fused into bark—black and steaming still, though the air was cold.
Mazanka reached for it but stopped before touching.
"It's inactive symbol," he muttered. "Old one. Used by the Kenshiki but the group that used it decommissioned years ago."
"Why's it still burning?" Teruko asked.
"Because someone's dragging up the dead."
They kept going.
The spiral led them further into a clearing—if it could be called that. The trees here didn't pull back. They collapsed outward, like something had exploded from the center.
And at that centre—
A half-buried sword.
Twisted.
Melted at the hilt.
Its Ka'ro signature still clinging faintly to the air, like the ghost of a scream.
Rakan reached for it.
Stopped.
Something about it stared back.
Mazanka's voice came like thunder in velvet:
"Don't."
Rakan flinched.
"Why?"
"Because if you pull it, it remembers its wielder. And if they were taken… so will you be."
The wind shifted.
Just a little.
Enough that the leaves rustled for the first time in hours.
And beneath that rustle—
A sound.
Breathing.
Not theirs.
From the trees.
"We're being followed," Teruko whispered, her hand drifting to her hilt.
"No," Mazanka said. "Something's close by."