The moon was white and stretched in the heavens, masked with a blanket of thin, uncoiled clouds. Darkness wrapped itself about the forest as with a confession, the trees murmuring hushed and afraid within the chilly gusts of air. There rose a billow of gray mist from beneath Kurohana Village, the mist embracing the land and swirling about the stone roadways old and dead, like it remembered the shapes of the dead.

  Hakari hung back beyond the broken ward of the shattered talisman, breathing steady, regulated. The protection shield had long since broken—cracked by time, by abandonment, or perhaps by the sheer weight of the cursed relic beside him.

  The mask pulsed softly, as if it could smell the corruption and power around them.

  Kurohana. he thought.

  A village cursed, not by the accretion of time, but by what it chose to hold.

  He strode on, feet bare on the dewy moss, his dark cloak billowing behind him like smoke. The grass hissed when his feet hit it. Even nature winced now. Something in him was no longer human.

  Before him loomed the temple. Its form was half-hidden by the fog, and its formerly sacred architecture now seemed like the jaws of a predator waiting to swallow something whole.

  Hakari didn't care.

  He walked into it like a man returning to the place he was born, or to his grave.

  Far down in Yamaoka, beneath a creaking wooden ceiling that gently rocked in the wind, Hikari woke up.

  Her breath stopped. The room was quiet—but not. Not empty. It was awry, as if the walls had shifted during the night, as if the air itself was holding its breath.

  She rose up from her bed, beads softly aglow at her throat, and placed a hand on her chest. Her heart beat raggedly. Not fear. Not panic. Something ancient. Something primal. A tug behind her ribs, something pulling.

  Kurohana.

  The name slid across her mind like ice on glass.

  She tossed her legs over the edge of the futon and stood, padding barefoot onto the floorboards, still warm from the fire Haruka had kept burning before. The coals had gone out. Her sister in the other room, dreaming probably. Their mother still at the healer's camp. But Hikari…

  She knew.

  The fog she had seen in her dream—no, dream, not vision—was the same one she had noticed years earlier. The same one her father had talked of with such terror when he referred to forbidden territory.

  She walked unsteadily to the window and pushed it open.

  Cold air. Stars like eyes staring down at her.

  And there, out there on the distant horizon—barely seeable through the hills and trees—a strange glint, like moonlight through dirty glass. The barrier it was flickering.

  And then it was vanished.

  Her breath caught.

  "No… something is wrong..."

  She went back to the table, where the red petal still sat. It was glowing. Lighter than it had ever been. She extended her hand, but didn't touch it. It seemed like it throbbed—slow, rhythmic, like a heartbeat.

  Not hers. Belonging to someone else.

  Rinne? No. Something other than.

  The mist was running. Not physically, not in the village—but in her head.

  She gasped, backing away from the table, knocking over the stool behind her. Her knees hit the floor as she fumbled for her beads—grasping them like a lifeline. But it didn't work. The feeling remained.

  Something ancient is stirring.

  Her eyes flicked to the door.

  She wasn't ready. No armor, no traveling supplies. Her head was fogged by sleep, but her soul was screaming.

  Go.

  Her lips had moved before her brain had caught up. "I must go to Kurohana. I must do it."

  In the cursed village, Hakari stepped into the heart of the rot.

  The old shrine was quiet. Abandoned offerings turned to stone by time and neglect still lay at the altar's foot. The scent of incense long past—overpowered by something bitter, metallic.

  Hakari knelt at the altar.

  The mask on his belt throbbed.

  He felt the seal rupturing.

  "I go to the source," he said low. "As your body. As your lust."

  The mist blazed on.

  Something churned beneath the crack in the earth.

  Below Yamaoka Village, within the hidden halls which the elders sealed with blood and prayers, the curse began to weep.

  And upstairs, in Yamaoka, Hikari remained on her porch, petal clutched in hand as a beacon, glowing like lanterns in her dark hand.

  Hidden and silent, the world was beginning to distort.

  A whisper woke the fog at his back—light as a spider's silk, cold as graveyard dirt.

  "You've gone so far," the voice replied, half-sad, half-laughing. "And yet, still, you stand like a man expecting someone to catch you up."

  Hakari did not turn around.

  The air behind him was silent. But he felt him.

  "Rinne."

  "Is that what you still call me?" The man materialized then, not dramatically but with the quiet inexorable of a leaf falling. He stood right behind Hakari, no pressure in his step, no shadow cast beneath him. Through the fog, he looked more dream than man. But the apple in his hand was real, bitten through to the core.

  "Or is that name just a habit your guilt can't lose?"

  Hakari stood up from his kneel, still not facing. "You're not real."

  Rinne's smile didn't quite make it to his lips. "That wasn't sure."

  There was a moment, long and thick. Hakari gritted his teeth.

  "What do you want?"

  "I'm just a question, Hakari," Rinne breathed, voice barely audible, like the rustle of wind through dry corridors. "One you keep asking with your hands when your soul refuses to listen."

  Hakari turned at last. Slowly. His eyes contracting into slits.

  And there he was. Rinne. Just as he remembered—serene, infuriatingly peaceful, the same blank patience of a man who knew he was long dead.

  "You're a ghost."

  "Your form of doubt," Rinne replied, curling slowly around him, mist around fire. "The hurt that you keep feeding by lying about not requiring it."

  "I'm not hungry." Hakari sang on a low pitch, tense. "I'm simply waking on my path."

  Rinne tilted his head as if the response was a joke to him.

  "Comedic. From where I stand, it would appear that you are sleepwalking into the throat of something with which you do not agree."

  "I know more than you ever did," Hakari snarled, advancing, the mask beside him trembling, throbbing like a fevered heartbeat. "You quit. You surrendered yourself like a coward. I'm doing what has to be done."

  "I didn't surrender myself to ruin the world," Rinne said, voice slicing now, like knife-edged glass. "I did it for the only person. Care about you till now."

  A silence that dragged on.

  Rinne glared down at the apple in his hand—nearly devoured now. He raised it, looking at it indifferently.

  "Interesting thing about hunger," he said after a while. "It doesn't disappear just because you've eaten something toxic. It just becomes quieter. More cunning. But even its quiet. Like recurve bow. Its quiet, fast and deadly. It didnt care if its cut one of the important string. Its the thing that can shoot the arrow. Not the stick that useless without it strings.."

  Hakari's brow creased.

  "Speak clearly,"

  Rinne glared upwards.

  "I mean—are you sure this is justice?" He edged closer. "Or is it just revenge with nicer manners?

  Hakari's teeth were gritted. His eyes flicked to the shattered altar, and then the mist, and then to the face which cannot be here.

  "You don't know what they did to me."

  Rinne's voice dropped, quiet now. "I do know what they did to you. I saw them shut away your questions. Declare your flame 'dangerous' like it would burn all the world. Praise the siblings and forget not the shadow."

  He went quiet.

  "Watched the boy I loved like blood change into something. else. And did nothing."

  The words quivered in the air, sensed more than they were heard.

  Hakari's eyes flashed. "Then why—"

  "Because I thought you'd make it through," Rinne panted. "That you'd turn your pain into something real. But all you've done is shape it into a mirror. And now you're staring so intently into your own reflection you can't see anything else."

  Hakari whipped around on him. His cape fluttered back behind him. He took one slow breath.

  "Do you imagine I like to do this?" he said without turning to glance at him. "Do you imagine it pleases me to wear this hateful thing?" His hand stroked the Immortal Mask at his hip, where its malevolent light pulsed softly.

  "I hate it," he breathed.

  "Then why do you wear it as a crown?"

  Rinne's voice turned cold, harsh and biting. "You speak of justice, of awakening, but I see only a boy hoping someone at last would listen to how loudly he is crying."

  Hakari spun on him, his eyes blazing. "Because no one ever did!"

  The words ripped from his throat.

  Silence.

  Only the wind replied. And the sound in the distance, of the mask.

  Rinne advanced again, his expression unpinching. No jokes now. No riddles.

  Only quiet.

  "I see you now," he told Hakari. "But the question is, Hakari… when you burn it all down, when all the elders are dead, every village still, and every judgment reduced to ash—can you stand over what is left and name it peace?"

  Hakari's breath stilled.

  Rinne looked up at the sky—darkened, silver.

  "Pain is a forge," he breathed. "It can forge a sword. Or shackles."

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  The fog came back, coiling around him.

  Rinne's body vanished. The apple dropped from his hand and landed with a clatter on the stone. No rot. No blood. Only the bite.

  Hakari stepped forward—but Rinne was gone.

  And he was alone again.

  The mask pulsed once.

  Then stilled.

  The gate creaked open on a soft whisper, old from time or desire, Hakari did not care which. Fog and quiet greeted him on Kurohana's boundary. The cursed trees nodded forward like onlookers, watching him pass. No priests hung about to chant. No seals hummed in warning. Only the cave waited—a half-forgotten temple to half-forgotten gods.

  He walked the path in silence. Every step echoed on moss-wrapped stone. Inside the cave, the air thickened. Old blood. Older regrets. The faint glow of the Judgment altar still flickered beneath soot and cracks, like a wounded eye refusing to shut.

  Hakari exhaled once and stepped forward—

  “You’re really doing it,” came the voice, slow and calm, from the darkness behind him.

  Hakari froze.

  “I wonder,” the voice went on, “if you’ll feel full after. Or just hollow with a prettier name.”

  Rinne stood there again. Half-in shadow, arms crossed like a bored prophet. His cloak didn’t stir in the cave air. His eyes held no judgment. Just that frustrating, serene calm.

  Hakari’s lips pulled tight. “You talking again.”

  Rinne tilted his head. "How many times do you need to walk into a fire to prove you're not made of wax?"

  Hakari's hand twitched. The mask pulsed. "Is this what you do all the time? Whisper clues? Creep like fungus?"

  Rinne stepped forward, hands behind his back. "I simply ask. If this was your conclusion you were crafting, why does it have the sensation of a beginning you fear?"

  Hakari spun on him, fire in his veins. "Fuck off!" he roared, voice cracked. "You're not real! You're not even here! What are you even doing here?!"

  Rinne chuckled. Soft. Almost kind.

  "Cursing," he replied, "doesn't make you cool. It just makes the silence wait a little longer."

  Hakari's breath clogged in his throat. Rinne's expression didn't change. He looked over Hakari's shoulder then, to the entrance of the cave behind him.

  “I’m not here to fight you,” he murmured, tone shifting. “Just. buying time.”

  Hakari’s eyes narrowed. “Time?”

  Rinne nodded once.

  “For her.”

  A sound—soft, swift.

  “Hakari.”

  Hakari turned.

  And there she was.

  Hikari stood at the entrance of the shrine. Hair tangled from running, judgment beads trembling faintly against her chest. Her expression was not fury, not fear.

  It was heartbreak.

  Hakari took a step back. “How—”

  “You left the path burning,” she said quietly.

  He looked back to Rinne.

  But the soul was gone. As if he never was. But the ringing sound of his footfalls vanished, leaving only the acrid tang of smoke in the cave air.

  The mood between them coagulated like congealing blood. Shrine wall stones witness in silence, carvings permanent and ageless, recited prayers to dead men and dead women long. The judgment stand glowed half-heartedly at the back of Hakari, but his attention was only on her—on his sister.

  Hikari.

  She looked older. Not age-wise, but weight-wise. Something brittle on her shoulders. A weight not to be soothed with bandages or magic.

  "You don't need to be here," Hakari said first, voice low, distant. "Go. Home."

  "I was home," Hikari snarled, stepping further within. "Until you destroyed it."

  Hakari's teeth clenched. "Don't start."

  "No, you started it!" She yelled at the stone, hard with tears. "Father's in a coma, the elders are slaughtered, and you're playing with haunted objects like a crazy goddamn fool."

  He snorted, shoulders rising, hands at his sides curling into fists. "They had it coming. And father—" He spat the word out, biting— "He did this to me."

  She shook her voice apart. "I know that!" She crept closer. "I know this isn't all your doing."

  Hakari winced.

  "But you shouldn't have done this," she went on, softer now, breath shaking. "Y-you shouldn't have—" her voice caught on the edge of her throat— "you shouldn't have made it worse..."

  He turned back slowly, shadows creeping over his face. "Made it worse? You think I wanted this? To be the cursed son? The mistake?"

  "Do you think you're the only one cursed?" Hikari snarled. "Do you think I wanted it? To be the chosen one? To watch our family kill itself and you disappear into shadow?"

  "Then maybe you shouldn't have grabbed it!" he snarled. "Maybe you should've refused the beads, refused their blessing, refused the lie they wrapped up in you."

  "I did try!" she shouted, tears brimming. "But nobody hears when you stay quiet. Nobody hears unless you yell—or bleed."

  The following silence was stifling.

  "I know you are hurting," she stuttered. "I know. everything started a long time ago, even before the shrine, before the mask. I know what they did to you."

  She stroked her chest, over the area where her beads rested. "But Hakari, you are my brother. You did not need to be the thing of their fear."

  His voice was a whisper now, but keen as a knife. "They feared me even before I was it."

  Tears had come at the tip of her lashes. "And now you have given them cause."

  They were there. Brother and sister. Both remnants of a broken home. Both shards of the same accursed vow.

  The silence had fangs now. It curled around them like smoke—thick, choking, impossible to ignore. The shrine didn’t stir. Not even the wind dared to move.

  Hakari stood like a statue carved from shadow, shoulders stiff, eyes locked on the ground. But his hands trembled—barely. A flicker.

  Hikari’s breath hitched. Her throat burned, but she spoke anyway.

  "Do you ever wonder," she said, voice low, cracking, "what we might've been, if none of this ever touched us?"

  He didn't answer. Of course, he didn't. But something in his jaw eased—tensed.

  "I do think about it," she went on, moving a little closer. "Too much. I think about who you were… who I was… before the shrine, before the beads, before Father made us blueprints for monsters."

  Still silent. Still no gazing at her. Still the pressure pressing.

  "I remember your laugh," she whispered. "Even though only echoes now. I remember you chasing fireflies with Haruka. You said you would catch one, preserve its light, and give Mom a nightlight for her garden."

  She let out a sigh that sounded uncomfortably close to a wail.

  "But then… the training started. And the rituals. And suddenly the light wasn't something we sought. It was something we were meant to be."

  He flinched at that, just a little. But she noticed.

  "I kept thinking—if I did everything just right, maybe you'd come back. Maybe we could sit under the trees again, talk about silly things, anything but duty. Anything but what they pounded into our heads."

  Hakari half-turned away from her, but remained silent.

  "I'm exhausted, Hakari." Her voice cracked on the words, trembling like a bowstring that had been snapped in two. "Exhausted of pretending that it's all fate. That Its all miracle... Exhausted of watching you vanish into the darkness and calling it purpose. Exhausted of being chosen for things that taste like death."

  He exhaled—slowly. As if he'd been holding his breath for years to do so.

  "Think I haven't dreamed it?" he snarled, finally. His voice—softer now. Raw, unraveling. "A home that wasn't carved out of orders and silence. A family that wasn't a battlefield. A father who didn't shape me into a blade and then demand to know why I cut too deep."

  She stepped closer. One step. Then another.

  "I thought," he went on, still looking down, "that if I made myself strong enough—loud enough—they'd notice me. That one day someone would say my name like it meant something more than failure."

  He regarded her then. Actually looked. Grief-hollowed eyes, but filled with something else—pain that wasn't yet tinged with hate.

  "I never wanted to be feared, Hikari."

  "Then stop being something they can be afraid of," she said to him, voice shaking. "Please."

  His breath snagged.

  "I came here." she began, eyes brimming with unshed tears. "Not to fight. Not to save you. I came because—because I think I'm the last thread still tied to you..."

  He stared at her, shocked.

  "And I'm scared," she whispered. "That if you continue to unravel the rope, there won't be anything left of the brother I loved... People can change Hakari... P-please... Please just... Comeback."

  Tears fell quietly from her cheek. "I'm not telling you to forget what they've done. I'm not even asking for you to forgive me. I'm just—" she lost her breath, "—I'm just asking you not to keep moving towards the cliff as if someone's not pulling you back."

  "Please... Hakari..."

  Hakari looked at her as if he had no idea how to possess that sort of love.

  Like it hurt to be noticed.

  And for a moment—one—he didn't feel cursed. Or threatened. Or a ghost.

  He simply resembled her brother again.

  Hakari's eyes lingered on the cave wall, where the light of the ancient shrine trembled as if it remembered something—it shouldn't. Dust danced through the still air like memories unwanted, and the silence between him and Hikari was drawn out until it felt as if time itself had forgotten how to elapse.

  Then he spoke to her. Quiet. Precise. The words tempered by restraint.

  "Hikari."

  Her breath was snagged. The name seemed heavier on his lips than it ever had before—like it was the weight of years they neither of them yet would have.

  She looked at him. His eyes did not find hers.

  "You were choosen," he said to her. "The judgment bead summoned you. It made you Kanshisha—the arbiter. The one who answers for the weight. To look into men's hearts and decide who is worthy of light… and who is worthy of nothing."

  A breath.

  "But you forgot."

  His voice did not erupt. It did not need to. The disappointment in it sliced deeper than any fury.

  "You forgot what it means to be chosen. What immortality costs."

  She looked on, mouth widening, heart ascensionning upwards into the thorax.

  "You'll endure them," he continued, finally lifting eyes to hers. "Father. Haruka. Mother. They'll all die off. Leaving you. Intact. Alarmed."

  One step further and he'd draw near the significance of which outweighed all else.

  "In a century," he persisted, "what'll you remember? Who will whisper your name? Who'll care what price was paid by you to hold this bead?"

  Hikari's hands trembled slightly at her sides, but she said nothing. Couldn't.

  Hakari departed from her, into the shadows of the shrine, his words hanging behind like a wound.

  "I didn't follow this path to defy. I didn't do this to be feared. I did this. because eternity isn't strength. It's rot."

  There was a moment's silence. The air chilled between them.

  "Immortality doesn't make you fearless," he breathed. "It makes you forget how to die. And when you forget how to die… you stop knowing how to live. How to survive."

  They sliced through her like an old dream recalled too late.

  Then—

  "Immortality doesn't make you fearless," a second voice whispered behind Hakari's own. Low. Gentle. Unescapable.

  "It makes you sloppy."

  She gasped.

  Rinne.

  It wasn't memory. It spoke to him—a voice beneath his, thrumming like an unheard heartbeat, stitched into his grief.

  Hakari didn't appear surprised. Only tired.

  "I hear him sometimes," he breathed. "His words. Not because he's here. But because I know now. I understand his meaning behind those riddles."

  He shifted slightly, just enough for her to see the tired rim in his face. The haunted lucidity.

  I walked this way to feel something. To hold on to purpose before eternity dulls me the way it dulled them.

  She tried to speak. He forbade her—softly, gently.

  "You'll see one day. When all the people you love die and leave you with a world that no longer knows how to remember you."

  He turned to face her completely then, his eyes black, not with anger—but with melancholy certainty.

  "We weren't chosen because we were special, Hikari."

  A pause.

  "We were chosen because nobody else would. Nobody else dare."

  Then he spun. Shadows swallowed him up like old friends, taking the sweep of his cloak and the resonance of his voice.

  And the shrine was silent again.

  Too silent.

  As if the world had shifted, just a little… and everything would never be quite the same again.

  The shrine air was thick, thick with something intangible—grief, maybe. Or the load of history yet to be remembered. The golden illumination of the altar no longer touched Hikari, its radiating warmth feeble against her loose limbs.

  Her throat closed, and her words came out barely a whisper, as light and ethereal as threads of air.

  "Hakari."

  He did not desist.

  "I… I can do this by myself," she growled, her voice shaking. "I-I know this is a curse. But do-don't make yourself go through the curse I'm bearing."

  Still, he walked. His back turned. His footsteps slow and sonorous on the stone floor, each one peeling away from her like a final goodbye.

  And then—

  A voice behind her.

  "You forgot your job, Hikari."

  The words crept into her bones, seeping with something harder than malice—certainty. She did not turn around. Could not. Her breath stalled in her throat, and her legs were rooted. Behind her, the atmosphere shifted—not as if someone was standing there, but as if something was unrolling, slow and relentless.

  "The judge who hesitates becomes the executioner of delay."

  "The scale does not bend to feeling. It tips to truth—or collapses."

  Her eyes stared straight in front of her, open and weeping. The altar shone softly in the darkness, and Hakari's shadow vanished.

  "You wear the bead, but you tremble at what it demands. Is the bead heavy, or your heart too fragile?"

  "You were given order. The time is waiting. The scale already heavy. And yet. The duty hasnt even touched."

  "S-stop." Her voice shattered like delicate ice.

  "Blinds you with light now?" Rinne's voice had something gentle, like a hand running over glass before it broke. "Or is comfort what corrupts your mind? A flame will not linger. Fire that lingers is smoke."

  Her legs felt shaky. She gripped the cloth around her waist.

  "You look down the road and wonder who laid it out. But did you ever take time to wonder who you became on it?"

  "I-i said stop," she whispered again, voice higher now, cracking more. But the voice didn't yield as tears stream down her cheeks.

  "Who is more dangerous, Hikari—the one who breaks the law, or the one who enforces it while questioning its worth?"

  Her breath was shaking, unstable. Her throat was burning.

  "You think judgment is righteousness. But even purity drowns when it forgets not to swim in dirty water. Are you drowning, Hikari? Or just too afraid to dive?"

  Her fingers curled, nails into flesh.

  "R-Rinne…" she shouted now, but shivering. "Stop."

  The silence that met her was not relief. It was waiting.

  Then her voice came back—soft, low, but hollow with the weight of a truth she hadn't realized she needed to ask.

  "I... I-i always wondering."

  "Are you really the mentor of judgment to the righteous?"

  She turned, just slightly—just enough to glance over her shoulder, still shadowed, still smiling.

  "Or are you the mentor of judgment to the wrongness?"

  The dead tree was like a monument to forgotten gods, its twisted branches scratching the black sky. Against its bole, Rinne leaned, one hand dully holding half an eaten apple, the other buried in the folds of his cloak. His eyes shone—silver, empty, unreadable. Not alive, not quite. Not dead, not yet. And when he did speak, his voice crept through the air like a silken knife.

  "A saint. A hero. A teacher. A villain. A sinner."

  He chased them away like they were titles carved onto a headstone. "Its funny I've worn each name. Some more than once. And its make me know better each perspective."

  His head canted, not sneering, not sympathetic—just a man looking at something that once did make sense.

  "But never," he said, walking into the moonlight that didn't quite touch him, "have I failed my role."

  Hikari stayed paralyzed. The cave behind her folded in around her like she was holding her breath. Her arms would not move. The bead on her chest was warm, a steady reminder that it still looked at her. Still waited for her.

  "You weren't chosen because you're right," Rinne continued, her voice husky, smooth, maddening. "Nor because you're powerful. But because you see the rot and the root. Because you understand the cost of choice, and the weight of being in the middle."

  She flinched. Barely. His words were not audible—but they rang, in the marrow of her brain.

  "You are the balance," he stated. "And balance is not peace. It's tension. Stretched taut between mercy and execution. Between love and duty. Between doing what you know you ought to do and doing what you must do."

  Hikari's mouth fell open, but her words broke, as though they had to struggle past too many quiet thoughts.

  "I never. I didn't ask for this," she whispered.

  "No one does. Does a mouse choose its life to live in sewer? No they has to do it for living," Rinne replied quietly. "You don't ask to be the judge. You just figure out how to be one."

  Her fists trembled. She turned away, couldn't meet the gaze of the man who sounded like every burden she'd ever tried to forget.

  "Am I meant to do good?" she said. "Or… become judgment itself?"

  Rinne's expression didn't alter. Not a little bit.

  "That," he breathed, "is the wrong question."

  "To be judgment is not to do good or evil thing. It is to weigh, to witness, to end. It is to become the blade without needing to believe in the justice of the cut."

  Then, softer, almost a whisper:

  "So no. You were never meant to do good. You were meant to decide what survives."

  The wind picked up. Leaves that weren't there crunched. And like that—he was gone.

  No flash. No goodbye. Like he'd never really been there at all.

  Only the apple core remained, lying in the roots of the tree, still wet with dew.

  Hikari stood in the silence. Alone, yet not alone.

  Her hands hovered at her chest, fingers against the judgment bead.

  It throbbed. Once. In silence.

  Not asking. Not leading.

  Just… waiting.

  She looked towards the entrance to the cave. At the steps of black stone.

  At the weight of a thousand lives, hanging on a single choice.

  And she saw—there was no peace for either side. There is no right thing to do.

  Only the pressure.

  Only the justice.

  Only the way.

  And the question that would plague her well past memory had turned to myth:

  What is justice, when there's nobody left to tell you which one is right?