The ropes bit into my wrists like the teeth of a starving animal.
I could feel the coarse fibers grinding against my skin with every tiny movement, every unconscious twitch of my fingers. My hands were bound behind my back — tied so tightly that my fingertips had gone numb somewhere between the second and third hour of kneeling on this cold, crystalline ground. The surface beneath my knees was smooth and dark red, like polished stone made from frozen blood, and it pulsed with a faint warmth that had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with something ancient and terrible sleeping beneath it.
I couldn't use magic.
That thought kept circling in my mind like a wounded bird — spiraling, desperate, unable to land. I couldn't use magic. Whatever they had done to me, whatever was carved into these ropes or woven into the shackles around my wrists, it had severed my connection to my Celestial Core as cleanly as cutting a thread with scissors. I could feel the energy inside me — a frozen ocean trapped behind a dam — but I couldn't reach it. I couldn't even feel its temperature. It was like trying to remember a word that sat on the tip of your tongue, maddening and close and completely, impossibly out of reach.
I raised my head.
The sky above the Shattered Lands was a wound. There was no other way to describe it. Crimson and black clouds churned in a perpetual vortex, swirling around the massive tower of red crystal that rose behind me — the Crimson Spire, Kuron's throne, a monument built from the corpse of a destroyed moon. Lightning crawled through the clouds in slow, lazy arcs, illuminating the landscape in brief flashes of hellish red. The air smelled of ash and ozone, and every breath tasted like the aftermath of a fire.
Thousands of troopers stood in perfect formation before me. Rows upon rows of crimson-armored figures, faceless behind their dark visors, the space where their eyes should have been glowing with that dull, terrible light. They didn't move. They didn't breathe. They stood like statues carved from nightmares, and the silence that surrounded them was worse than any battle cry.
Behind them, the Black Dragons circled in the burning sky — massive serpentine shapes that swallowed the light, their wings cutting through the crimson clouds like blades through silk. I counted seven. Eight. More, hidden in the darkness beyond the clouds. Their eyes burned like dying stars.
And in front of me, standing at the edge of the crystalline platform where I knelt, was Kuron.
The Fallen God.
He was beautiful in the way that a natural disaster is beautiful — in the way that you can acknowledge the terrible majesty of a tsunami even as it swallows you whole. His crimson hair moved like liquid fire despite the absence of wind, streaked through with veins of darkness that pulsed with his heartbeat. His armor — dark red crystal that shifted and reformed constantly, as though it were alive and restless — caught the lightning and threw it back in fractured patterns across the ground. The broken crown above his head rotated slowly, its fragments held together by nothing but will and rage.
His eyes were the worst part. Crimson irises set in black sclera — the whites of his eyes consumed by darkness. They held centuries of fury and grief compressed into something that burned. When he looked at me, I felt the weight of all those years pressing against my chest like a physical force.
I never knew my life would change like this.
That thought — absurd, almost laughable in its understatement — floated through my mind as I stared up at the being who held my life in his hands. The boy who had sat in his room in Kyoto reading manga about magical worlds, who had eaten convenience store onigiri for lunch and complained about math homework, who had wished on a comet for something wonderful — that boy was about to die on his knees in another dimension, surrounded by an army of the dead, at the feet of a mad god.
Is this my end? I thought. Will he kill me?
Kuron raised his right hand. The air around his fingers distorted, reality bending like heated glass, and I could see the mantra forming before he even spoke it — crimson symbols materializing in the air, ancient and terrible, the language of gods written in light and destruction.
His lips moved.
"Setopia Etopia."
The words weren't loud. They didn't need to be. They resonated in a frequency that bypassed the ears entirely and struck something deeper — the soul, the core, the fundamental essence of existence. I felt the mantra's intent wash over me like a wave of heat from an opened furnace: dissolution. Reduction. The complete and total conversion of matter to ash.
The crimson light gathered at his fingertips, and in that moment — that single, endless, crystalline moment — I thought of her.
White hair catching the light of an impossible aurora. Purple eyes reflecting a sky full of magic. A voice, warm and gentle, saying my name like it was something precious.
Yota.
The light consumed everything.
Several months earlier.
My name is Yota Kamikaze, and until recently, I was the most unremarkable person I knew.
I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because it was true — objectively, measurably, undeniably true — and I had made peace with it the way you make peace with the weather. You can't change it. You can resent it, sure, but eventually you just buy an umbrella and move on.
I was seventeen years old, a second-year student at Kyoto Metropolitan High School, and I lived in a quiet residential neighborhood in eastern Kyoto where the houses were packed so close together you could hear your neighbor's television through the walls. Our house was a modest two-story building with cream-colored walls and a dark blue roof that my father had painted himself three years ago, balancing on a ladder while my mother shouted instructions from below that he cheerfully ignored. My room was on the second floor — small, eight tatami mats at most, with a single window that faced east. Every morning, the sunlight would creep across my floor like a slow-motion spotlight, eventually reaching my face and making it impossible to keep sleeping no matter how deeply I buried myself in my blankets.
That window was my alarm clock, and I hated it with the quiet, resigned hatred of a teenager who believed that mornings were a personal attack orchestrated by the universe.
My room was — and I say this with complete self-awareness — a disaster zone. Manga volumes were stacked in towers along the walls, organized not by series or author but by a system that made sense only to me: books I was currently reading on the desk, books I'd finished recently on the shelf by the door, books I'd read more than three times on the shelf above my bed (those were the sacred texts, the untouchable canon), and books I'd borrowed from Satoshi and kept forgetting to return in a guilty pile beside my closet.
Anime posters covered the walls. Not arranged artistically — just taped wherever there was space, overlapping at the edges, some of them curling at the corners where the tape had given up. A poster of Sword Art Online partially covered one of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which itself was layered over an older Naruto poster that I'd had since middle school. My mother called my room "the museum of questionable taste." My father called it "character."
I loved that room. It was the physical manifestation of my inner world — cluttered, chaotic, and entirely built around fantasy.
Because that was the thing about me, the one trait that elevated me from completely unremarkable to at least moderately interesting: I was obsessed with magic.
Not in the way that a scientist might be fascinated by theoretical physics, or the way a historian might study ancient mystical traditions. No. My obsession was pure, childish, and utterly sincere. I wanted magic to be real. I wanted to walk into a forest and find a hidden door to another world. I wanted to wave my hand and make fire bloom from my fingertips. I wanted to fly, to teleport, to speak words of power that reshaped reality.
Every manga I read, every anime I watched, every light novel I devoured under my blankets when I should have been sleeping — they all fed the same hunger. The hunger for a world more extraordinary than this one.
I knew it was childish. I knew that at seventeen I should have been thinking about entrance exams and career paths and university applications like Kanto, who had already planned his entire life up to age forty and was probably right this second studying for a qualification he wouldn't need for another three years. I knew that magic didn't exist, that other worlds were fiction, that the most extraordinary thing that would ever happen to me was probably getting into a decent college and finding a stable job.
I knew all of this.
I just didn't accept it.
There's a difference, I think, between knowing something and accepting it. Knowing is intellectual — it lives in your head, in the realm of facts and logic. Accepting is emotional — it lives in your chest, in the space where hopes and dreams either flourish or wither. I knew magic wasn't real. But somewhere deep in my chest, in a space that logic couldn't reach, I refused to accept a world without wonder.
My mother worried about this, in her gentle, indirect way. She'd find me reading at 2 AM and say, "Yota, the real world is waiting for you in the morning," as if reality was a patient friend standing outside my door, arms crossed, tapping its foot.
My father understood better. He was a quiet man — an accountant, of all things, which is about as far from magical as a profession can get — but sometimes I'd catch him staring at the night sky from the kitchen window with an expression that wasn't professional or practical or adult. It was the expression of a boy who hadn't quite stopped wondering.
He never told me to stop dreaming. Not once.
The morning of March 17th started like every other morning that semester. The sunlight crawled across my floor, reached my face, and I groaned into my pillow with the theatrical suffering of someone who believed that 6:30 AM was an unreasonable time for anything to exist.
"Yota! Breakfast!"
My mother's voice carried up the stairs with the practiced projection of a woman who had been waking a reluctant teenager for two and a half years and had perfected her technique. It wasn't a shout — my mother never shouted. It was a statement. A fact. Breakfast existed, and I would eat it. The universe had been decided.
"Coming..." I mumbled into my pillow, which absorbed the word and rendered it meaningless.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. The poster directly above my bed — Attack on Titan, the one with Eren standing before the wall — stared back at me with the intense determination of a fictional character who had significantly more motivation than I did at this particular moment.
"You don't have to get up early," I told the poster. "You don't have entrance exams."
The poster did not respond. It was a poster.
I got dressed in my school uniform — the standard navy blue blazer and grey slacks that every student at Kyoto Metropolitan wore — and checked my reflection briefly in the small mirror on my desk. Black hair, slightly messy because I hadn't bothered to comb it properly. Dark brown eyes that my mother said were "warm" and Satoshi said were "the eyes of a man who stayed up too late reading again." Average height, average build, average face. Nothing that would make you look twice on the street.
I picked up my school bag — heavy with textbooks I probably should have studied the night before — and headed downstairs.
The kitchen smelled like miso soup and grilled fish. My mother was at the stove, her hair tied back with a blue kerchief, humming a song I didn't recognize. My father was at the table, reading the morning newspaper with the focused attention of a man who took his morning routine very seriously. His reading glasses sat slightly crooked on his nose. He never fixed them. It drove my mother crazy.
"Good morning, Yota," my father said without looking up from his paper. He turned a page. "You were up late again."
It wasn't a question. My father had an uncanny ability to determine exactly how many hours of sleep I'd gotten based entirely on the sound of my footsteps on the stairs. Heavier steps meant less sleep. This morning, apparently, my steps had been very heavy indeed.
"I was reading," I said, sitting down at the table.
"Manga?" my mother asked, setting a bowl of rice in front of me.
"Light novel. It's different."
"Mm," she said, in a tone that communicated she did not find this distinction meaningful.
My father finally looked up. His eyes — the same brown as mine, though his had more crinkles at the corners — studied me over the rim of his glasses. "Which one?"
"Re:Zero. Volume 18."
"Is that the one where the boy dies and comes back?"
"Yeah."
My father considered this. "Sounds stressful."
"It is. That's the point."
He nodded thoughtfully, as if I had shared a piece of profound philosophy rather than the premise of a fantasy novel, and returned to his newspaper. That was my father. He took everything seriously — not because he thought everything was important, but because he believed that anything his son cared about was worth caring about.
I ate my breakfast. The miso soup was perfect, as always — my mother's miso was a work of art, though she'd dismiss the compliment with a wave of her hand and say it was just dashi and paste, anyone could do it. The grilled fish was slightly overcooked on one side. My father had probably distracted her with his newspaper again.
"Yota," my mother said, sitting down across from me. "Your aunt called yesterday. They want to have dinner together this Sunday. Your uncle wants to talk to your father about something."
"Sagiri will be there?" I asked.
"Of course Sagiri will be there. She asked about you specifically. She said, and I quote, 'Tell Brother to bring that manga he promised me.'"
I winced. I had completely forgotten about that. Sagiri — my uncle's daughter, my cousin, two years younger than me — had asked me to lend her the first volume of My Hero Academia three weeks ago, and I had said "sure, next time" and then promptly buried the promise under seventeen layers of new reading material.
"I'll bring it," I said.
"You forgot, didn't you."
"I'll bring it," I repeated, with slightly more conviction.
My mother gave me The Look — the one that said she loved me unconditionally but was also keeping a running tally of my failures that she would present at an unspecified future date.
I finished breakfast, grabbed my bag, and headed for the door.
"Yota," my father said from behind his newspaper.
I paused, one hand on the doorknob. "Yeah?"
"Have a good day."
He said this every morning. The same words, the same quiet tone, the same way of saying it without looking up from his paper. It was so routine that I almost didn't hear it anymore — the way you stop hearing a clock ticking after you've lived with it long enough.
"Thanks, Dad. You too."
I opened the door and stepped into the March morning.
Kyoto in March is a city caught between seasons. Winter hasn't fully surrendered, and spring hasn't fully arrived. The mornings are cold enough to see your breath, but by noon the air warms to something almost comfortable, and the cherry blossom trees along the school route are swollen with buds that haven't quite decided to open yet. There's an anticipation in the air — a feeling of something about to happen, about to begin, about to bloom.
I walked to school the same way I'd walked every day for two years: left at the convenience store on the corner (the one that sold the best melon bread in the neighborhood), straight for three blocks past the row of traditional machiya houses with their wooden lattice facades and narrow entrances, right at the small Shinto shrine where the stone fox statues guarded the torii gate with expressions of permanent disapproval, and then straight again along the tree-lined avenue that led to the school gates.
It was a fifteen-minute walk. I could have done it blindfolded. I could have done it in my sleep.
"YOTAAAA!"
The voice came from behind me — loud, energetic, and accompanied by the sound of running footsteps that were approaching with the inevitability of a natural disaster. I didn't need to turn around to know who it was.
Satoshi crashed into my back with the force of a friendly cannonball, throwing his arm around my shoulders and nearly knocking me off balance. He was grinning — he was always grinning — with the boundless energy of someone who had definitely gotten eight full hours of sleep and probably gone for a morning jog as well, because Satoshi was the kind of person who did things like that and somehow didn't understand why the rest of us found it offensive.
"Morning, brother!" he said, squeezing my shoulder. "You look like a zombie. Did you sleep?"
"Some," I said.
"Some is not enough. You need eight hours. Studies show that—"
"If you quote another health article at me, I'm going to put you in a headlock."
Satoshi laughed — a big, full-bodied laugh that turned heads on the street. He was taller than me by about five centimeters, broader in the shoulders, tanned from spending every free moment on the soccer field. His hair was short and spiky, his eyes were sharp and alert, and he had the kind of naturally athletic build that made you wonder if he'd been specifically designed by some cosmic engineer to make the rest of us feel inadequate.
But he was also the most genuinely good person I knew. Not good in the way that people perform goodness — posting about charity online, making sure everyone sees them being kind. Good in the quiet, consistent way of someone who simply can't help caring about the people around him. He'd lent me his notes when I was sick. He'd walked me home when I was too tired to think straight. He'd sat with me in silence on the days when I didn't want to talk, asking nothing, just being there.
Satoshi was my best friend, and I didn't deserve him.
"Where's Kanto?" I asked as we walked.
"London preparations," Satoshi said, rolling his eyes affectionately. "He's at the embassy today getting his visa paperwork sorted. Said he might come to school late."
"He's really going through with it?"
"You know Kanto. Once he decides something, it's already done. The universe just hasn't caught up yet."
That was accurate. Kanto was the third member of our trio — quieter than Satoshi, sharper than me, and possessed of a terrifying efficiency that made him seem like a forty-year-old businessman trapped in a teenager's body. He had decided two years ago that he would study abroad in London, and since then, every action he took was a calculated step toward that goal. He studied English for two hours daily. He researched universities. He maintained perfect grades not because he enjoyed studying but because imperfect grades were an obstacle, and Kanto did not tolerate obstacles.
I admired him. I also found him slightly terrifying.
"He still wants to go, huh," I said.
"Of course. You remember what he wished for."
The Halley's Comet.
The mention of it sent a small electric current through my chest — not painful, exactly, but sharp. Like touching a doorknob after walking across carpet. I'd been trying not to think about that night. Or rather, I'd been trying not to think about why I couldn't stop thinking about that night.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I remember."
It had been four days ago.
Satoshi had called me in the evening, his voice crackling with the particular excitement he reserved for things he considered once-in-a-lifetime. "Yota, listen. Halley's Comet. It's coming. It only passes by every 75 to 82 years. We might only see it ONCE in our entire lives. We HAVE to watch it."
I'd been lying on my bed reading Overlord Volume 14, and my initial reaction was the same one I had to most of Satoshi's enthusiastic proposals: mild resistance followed by inevitable capitulation.
"Where?" I'd asked.
"Mount Daimonji. The clearing at the top. You can see the whole sky from there. I already convinced Kanto."
"How did you convince Kanto?"
"I told him the networking opportunities of a shared experience would strengthen our social bonds in ways that would benefit his future career."
"...And that worked?"
"I also told him I'd buy him that English practice book he's been wanting."
I'd said yes, of course. I always said yes to Satoshi's plans, partly because he was persuasive and partly because deep down, underneath my practiced indifference, I wanted to go. I wanted to see something extraordinary. I wanted the sky to show me something that wouldn't happen again in my lifetime.
We'd hiked up Mount Daimonji after extra classes, carrying thermoses of hot tea and convenience store onigiri. The trail was dark, lit only by our phone flashlights and the ambient glow of Kyoto's city lights below. Kanto walked ahead with purposeful strides, as if even hiking were an activity that could be optimized. Satoshi bounced between us, talking about everything and nothing — the soccer match last week, the new ramen shop near the station, whether aliens existed ("statistically probable, Yota, you can't argue with the math").
I walked behind them and looked up.
The clearing at the top of Mount Daimonji was everything Satoshi had promised. The city lights of Kyoto spread below us like a constellation of earthbound stars — warm oranges and whites scattered across the dark landscape, the ancient temples illuminated with spotlights, the river cutting a dark ribbon through the urban glow. But above — above was where the real spectacle waited.
The sky was impossibly clear. Whatever atmospheric conditions needed to align for perfect stargazing had aligned that night with the precision of a cosmic clockwork. The stars didn't just appear — they erupted. Thousands of them, millions of them, scattered across the darkness in swirls and clusters and rivers of light. The Milky Way was visible — actually visible, a band of luminous mist stretching from horizon to horizon, and I understood in that moment why the ancients had named it after milk. It looked like something had been poured across the sky.
"It's beautiful," I whispered.
I hadn't meant to say it out loud. I don't usually say things like that. But the sky had reached past my defenses and pulled the words from somewhere honest.
Satoshi set up the thermos and poured tea — green tea, hot enough to fog the cups. We sat on the grass, the ground cool beneath us, and waited.
"So," Satoshi said, wrapping his hands around his cup, "they say if you wish on the Halley's Comet, your wish comes true."
Kanto pushed his glasses up — a gesture of academic skepticism. "That's not a documented phenomenon. The wish-upon-a-star tradition originates from various cultural mythologies, none of which specifically reference periodic comets."
"I didn't ask for a research paper, Kanto. I asked if you're going to make a wish."
Kanto considered this with the seriousness of someone evaluating a business proposal. "I suppose the psychological benefit of externalizing goals through ritualistic action has some basis in behavioral science."
"Is that a yes?"
"...Yes."
Satoshi grinned and turned to me. "Yota? What about you?"
I stared into my tea. The steam curled upward, distorting the starlight. "I already know what I'd wish for."
"Yeah?"
I didn't answer immediately. Because saying it out loud felt different from thinking it. Thinking it was safe — a private fantasy, contained within the walls of my skull where no one could judge it or dismiss it or tell me it was impossible. Saying it out loud made it real. Made it vulnerable.
But the sky was so clear. And the stars were so close. And for one irrational, beautiful moment, I felt like the universe was listening.
"I want to live in a magical world," I said.
The words hung in the cold air between us, visible for a moment in the fog of my breath before dissolving into nothing.
Satoshi blinked.
Kanto adjusted his glasses.
Then Satoshi burst out laughing — not unkindly, but with genuine amusement. "That's so YOU, Yota. Only you would wish for something like that."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. It's just... you know that's not how the world works, right? Magic doesn't exist. Other worlds don't exist. You've read too many light novels, brother."
Kanto nodded. "The probability of alternate magical dimensions is, statistically speaking, indistinguishable from zero."
"You guys are the worst," I said, but I was smiling.
"Hey, look!" Satoshi pointed. "THERE! There it is!"
I looked up.
The Halley's Comet didn't just appear — it arrived. It came from the western horizon like a slow-burning arrow shot by a god, trailing a tail of luminous dust that stretched across a quarter of the sky. It was brighter than I expected — not blinding, but radiant in a way that made everything else in the sky seem dim by comparison. The tail shimmered and shifted, a veil of cosmic debris catching the sunlight from beyond the horizon, and the head of the comet was a concentrated point of fierce, almost defiant brilliance.
It was real. It was actually real. Something that had been traveling through space for billions of years, something that had passed this way when samurai walked these mountains, when Rome was still an empire, when humans were still learning to write — it was here, now, burning across the sky above three teenage boys sitting on a mountain in Kyoto.
"Make a wish!" Satoshi said. "Quick, before it fades!"
I closed my eyes.
I pressed my palms together — not in prayer exactly, but in the gesture of someone reaching for something. Reaching for something beyond the edges of what was possible.
I want to live in a magical world.
I thought it clearly. I thought it purely. I thought it with every ounce of that foolish, childish, stubborn hope that I'd carried since I was old enough to read my first fantasy manga.
Please. I want to live in a world where magic is real.
When I opened my eyes, the comet was already fading — sliding toward the eastern horizon, its tail dimming, its brilliance retreating. In minutes, it was gone. The sky returned to its normal starfield, still beautiful but somehow diminished, as if the most interesting person at a party had just left.
"What did you guys wish for?" I asked.
Satoshi stretched his arms above his head. "I wished to go to the U.S. someday. Road trip across the whole country. Coast to coast."
Kanto folded his arms. "I wished to become a famous guitarist."
Satoshi and I both stared at him.
"A guitarist?" I said. "You? Kanto, you play guitar?"
Kanto's ears turned slightly red. "I've been learning. Privately. It's a... personal interest."
"Wait," Satoshi said, holding up a hand. "The guy who plans everything five years in advance has a SECRET HOBBY? This is the greatest night of my life."
"It's not a secret hobby. It's an undisclosed personal development activity."
"It's a SECRET HOBBY and I am DELIGHTED."
"I regret sharing this information."
I laughed. Genuinely laughed — the kind that comes from your stomach and makes your eyes water. Kanto, the human spreadsheet, secretly learning guitar in his room at night. The image was so unexpected, so wonderfully human, that it cracked something open in my chest.
"What about you, Yota?" Satoshi asked, still grinning. "You wished for your magic world, right?"
"Yeah," I said.
They looked at each other. Then back at me. Then they both burst out laughing.
"Yota, bro," Satoshi said, wiping his eyes, "I love you, but you know that's never going to happen, right? Magic isn't real. Other worlds aren't real. You've got to focus on reality at some point."
I looked up at the sky where the comet had been.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I know."
But I didn't know. Not really. Not in the place that mattered.
We walked down the mountain together, talking about normal things — school, sports, the upcoming exams that none of us wanted to think about. The conversation was warm and comfortable, the way conversations between old friends always are, and by the time we reached the bottom and said our goodbyes, the comet felt like something that had happened in a dream.
I walked home alone. The streets were quiet — it was past midnight, and the neighborhood was sleeping. The only sounds were my footsteps on the pavement and the distant hum of a vending machine on the corner, its blue-white glow the only light on the darkened street.
I let myself into the house quietly. My parents were asleep — I could hear my father's faint snoring from the master bedroom downstairs. I slipped off my shoes, crept up the stairs, and collapsed onto my bed without changing out of my clothes.
The ceiling stared down at me. Eren Yeager stared down at me. The manga towers along the walls stared down at me.
I thought about what Satoshi had said. Magic isn't real. Other worlds aren't real. You've got to focus on reality.
He was right. Of course he was right. I was seventeen years old. In a year, I'd be taking university entrance exams. In two years, I'd be a college student. In ten years, I'd probably be an accountant like my father, or a salaryman, or something equally ordinary. I'd eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, sleep. Repeat. For decades. Until I was old and grey and sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, still thinking about the magical world I never got to visit.
Was that my life? Was that all there was?
The thought should have been depressing. And it was — partially. But underneath the depression was something else. Something stubborn and bright and refusing to die, like embers in a fireplace that everyone thought had gone out.
What if my wish came true?
Ridiculous. Impossible. Childish.
What if?
I turned onto my side and pulled the blanket over my head, creating a cave of warmth and darkness. My body was exhausted — the hike, the cold, the late hour. But my mind was electric, humming with possibilities that I knew were fantasy but couldn't stop imagining.
What would a magical world look like? Would it have forests that glowed? Would there be castles and kingdoms and dragons? Would people cast spells with words or gestures or thoughts? Would there be a girl — a princess maybe, because every good fantasy has a princess — who could show me how it all worked?
I smiled in the darkness. A small, private, foolish smile.
I want to see it. Even if it's just in my dreams. I want to see a world where magic is real.
My eyelids grew heavy. The exhaustion of the day settled over me like a second blanket, pressing me deeper into the mattress, deeper into the warmth, deeper into the darkness behind my closed eyes.
I fell asleep.
And then I opened my eyes.
The first thing I noticed was the sky.
It was blue — but not the blue I knew. The sky above Kyoto was a pale, washed-out blue, the color diluted by light pollution and urban haze. This sky was different. This blue was deep and rich and luminous, the color of sapphires held up to sunlight, the color of the ocean in photographs of places I'd never been. It was so intensely blue that it almost hurt to look at, as if my eyes had been calibrated for a lesser reality and were now struggling to process something more vivid than anything they'd been designed for.
The second thing I noticed was the grass.
I was lying in it. Soft, thick grass that cradled my body like a living mattress, each blade reaching up to the height of my ears, swaying gently in a breeze that smelled of flowers I couldn't identify — sweet and clean and alive in a way that no Kyoto garden had ever managed. The grass was green. Impossibly, overwhelmingly green. Not the tired, dusty green of city parks, but a green that seemed to generate its own light, as if chlorophyll itself was showing off.
The third thing I noticed was the tree.
I was lying beneath it — an enormous tree whose trunk was wider than my entire bedroom and whose branches stretched overhead in a canopy so vast that it created its own landscape of dappled light and shadow. The bark was deep brown with veins of silver running through it, pulsing faintly with a rhythm that might have been my imagination but felt disturbingly like a heartbeat. The leaves were broad and thick, and they caught the light in a way that made them seem almost translucent — I could see the network of veins inside each one, delicate as lace.
I stared at the tree. The tree, presumably, stared back.
This is not my room, I thought.
The observation, while accurate, was not particularly helpful. A more productive line of thinking might have included questions like "Where am I?" or "How did I get here?" or "Am I dead?" — all valid queries that deserved immediate attention. Instead, my brain, operating on approximately four hours of sleep and the lingering disbelief of someone who had clearly lost his grip on reality, produced the following thought:
The grass smells really nice.
"Wake up. Wake up!"
The voice came from above me — clear, musical, and tinged with a concern that seemed disproportionate to the situation. Someone was leaning over me. I couldn't see them properly — the sunlight behind them turned their outline into a silhouette, a dark shape against that impossibly blue sky — but the voice was female, young, and increasingly insistent.
"Hey! Wake up! How long are you going to sleep here?"
I blinked. The sunlight shifted, or my eyes adjusted, and the silhouette resolved into a face.
And every thought in my head stopped.
She was — and I want to be precise about this, because the word "beautiful" is overused to the point of meaninglessness, applied to everything from sunsets to sandwiches, and what I saw in that moment deserved better than a word that had been worn smooth by careless use — she was the most extraordinary person I had ever seen.
Her hair was white. Not grey, not silver, not platinum blonde — white, the pure, absolute white of fresh snow on a mountain peak, falling straight and smooth past her shoulders to the middle of her back. It caught the light filtering through the tree's canopy and shimmered with an almost metallic quality, as if each strand had been spun from moonlight.
Her eyes were purple. Deep, vivid purple, the color of the sky at the exact moment between sunset and night, when the light dies and something richer takes its place. They were wide with concern, framed by long lashes, and they were looking directly at me with an expression that suggested she had been trying to wake me for some time and was running low on patience.
Her face was delicate — a small nose, soft features, skin so fair it seemed to catch and hold the light. She wore a circlet of silver in her hair — thin, almost invisible, but I noticed it because it caught the dappled sunlight and threw a tiny rainbow across her forehead.
She was leaning over me, her white hair hanging down on either side of her face like curtains, and she was close enough that I could see the tiny imperfections that made her real — a small freckle below her left eye, a faint crease between her brows where she'd been frowning with worry, the way her lips were pressed together in the universal expression of someone who had been saying "wake up" for too long and was considering more aggressive methods.
"You're awake!" she said, leaning back slightly. Her voice carried a mix of relief and exasperation. "Finally! I was starting to think you were dead!"
I opened my mouth. What came out was not, unfortunately, the suave and composed greeting that the situation called for.
"Wha— huh— where— who—"
Eloquent. Truly eloquent.
I sat up too quickly. The world tilted. The impossibly blue sky swung around me like a carnival ride, and for a moment, everything — the tree, the grass, the girl with white hair and purple eyes — smeared into a watercolor blur. I pressed my hand against the ground to steady myself and felt the grass between my fingers, cool and real and definitely not the sheets of my bed.
I looked around.
I was in a meadow. A vast, open meadow of golden-green grass that stretched in every direction to the horizon, broken only by scattered groves of trees similar to the one I'd been lying under. In the distance — far enough that the details were soft and hazy — I could see mountains rising against that sapphire sky, their peaks touched with something that might have been snow or might have been light. The air was warm but not hot, carrying that sweet floral scent, and there was a quality to it that I couldn't identify at first — a faint, almost electric tingle on my skin, like static.
This was not Kyoto.
This was not Japan.
This was not, I was becoming rapidly and uncomfortably certain, anywhere on Earth.
I turned to the girl. She was standing now, watching me with her head tilted slightly to one side — a gesture of curiosity that would have been charming under less existentially terrifying circumstances.
"Who are you?" I asked. My voice sounded strange in this air — clearer, somehow, as if the atmosphere itself was a better conductor of sound. "And where am I?"
She blinked. Then she folded her arms and tilted her head to the other side.
"Same questions," she said. "Who are YOU? And why were you lying unconscious in the middle of the road to Sukushi? Are you hurt? Are you sick? I've been trying to wake you up for almost ten minutes."
I stared at her. She stared back. Neither of us seemed to have the information the other needed.
"Sukushi?" I repeated. The word felt foreign in my mouth — not Japanese, not English, not any language I recognized, and yet I understood it somehow, as naturally as if I'd been speaking it my whole life. That realization — the casual impossibility of it — sent a cold thread of something through my chest.
"Yes, Sukushi," she said, as if I'd asked something obvious. "My village. It's just beyond that ridge." She pointed to the east, where a gentle slope of green hill rose against the sky. "I was on my way back from the outer gardens when I found you lying here. I thought—" She paused, and something crossed her face — a flicker of genuine worry beneath the exasperation. "I thought someone had died on the road. You weren't moving at all."
I looked down at myself. I was wearing... not my school uniform. Not my pajamas. Not anything I owned. I was wearing a simple tunic of soft, dark fabric — something between cotton and silk — and fitted pants that were definitely not the grey slacks of Kyoto Metropolitan High School. My shoes were different too: soft leather boots that fit my feet perfectly, as if they'd been made for me.
When did I change clothes? I thought, and the thought was so mundane, so practically grounded compared to everything else that was happening, that I almost laughed.
"What is this place?" I asked again, more to myself than to her. "Where am I right now? This doesn't... this isn't..."
She studied me. Her purple eyes narrowed slightly — not with suspicion but with concentration, as if she was reading something in my face that I didn't know was written there.
"I think you've lost your memory," she said, her tone softening. "It happens sometimes — travelers who push their magic too hard, or who come through unstable terrain. The outer roads can be disorienting. I should take you somewhere safe. Maybe you'll remember once you've had food and rest."
"No," I said quickly. "I haven't lost my memory. I remember everything about myself. It's this place that I don't know. This world — this isn't—"
I stopped. Because what was I going to say? This isn't my world? I fell asleep in my bed in Kyoto, Japan, and woke up in a meadow in a place I've never seen, wearing clothes I've never owned, talking to a girl with white hair and purple eyes in a language I've never learned?
She'd think I was insane. She'd walk away, and I'd be alone in a place I didn't understand, and—
She was still watching me. Patient. Waiting. Her head was still tilted, and there was something in her expression that I couldn't read — something that went deeper than curiosity.
I took a breath. The air tingled on my tongue. The grass swayed around us. In the distance, something that might have been a bird but had too many wings crossed the sapphire sky.
"My name is Yota," I said. "Yota Kamikaze. And I think... I think I'm very far from home."
She was silent for a moment. Then the corner of her mouth lifted — not quite a smile, but the beginning of one.
"My name is Yui Onara," she said. "I live in the village beyond that hill. And..." She paused, studying me one more time with those impossible purple eyes. "By the look on your face, you don't seem like a bad person. Or a dangerous one. Just... confused."
"Confused is an understatement," I muttered.
"Come with me," she said, and turned toward the ridge. "I'll take you to Sukushi. You can eat, rest, and figure out whatever it is you need to figure out. If you've truly lost your way, the least I can do is help you find it."
She started walking. Her white hair caught the breeze and lifted gently, and the silver circlet in her hair threw tiny fragments of light across the grass.
I stood up. My legs were steady — steadier than they should have been, considering that my brain was currently processing approximately seventeen impossible things simultaneously. The grass came up to my knees. The air hummed with that faint electric quality. The sky above was so blue it made my chest ache.
This is a dream, I told myself. This has to be a dream. You fell asleep on your bed after watching the Halley's Comet, and this is a dream. A very vivid, very detailed, very convincing dream. You'll wake up any minute now. The sunlight will hit your face, and your mother will call you for breakfast, and this will all dissolve like—
"Yota?" Yui had stopped and turned back. "Are you coming?"
Her voice was real. The wind was real. The grass beneath my feet was real. The faint tingle of something nameless and electric on my skin was real.
No dream had ever felt like this.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm coming."
I took a step. Then another. And then I was walking beside Yui Onara through a meadow in a world that couldn't exist, toward a village I'd never heard of, under a sky that was too blue to be anything I'd ever known.
And somewhere deep in my chest — in that space where logic couldn't reach, where a stubborn, foolish hope had lived my entire life — something lit up like a candle in a dark room.
What if this is real?
I didn't say it out loud. I didn't need to. The thought burned bright enough on its own.
We walked in silence at first. Not an uncomfortable silence — more the cautious quiet of two people who had each encountered something unexpected and were still deciding how to feel about it. Yui walked slightly ahead of me, following a path through the grass that I couldn't see but she navigated with the easy confidence of someone who had walked it a thousand times.
I watched her as we walked — not staring, exactly, but observing, the way you observe something you're trying to make sense of. She moved gracefully, each step light and precise, and her white hair swung gently with her rhythm. The silver circlet caught the light with every step. She looked like she belonged here — like she had grown from this landscape the same way the trees and flowers had, naturally and inevitably.
She's a real person, I thought. In a real place. Having a real conversation with me. And she mentioned magic — no, she mentioned unstable terrain and pushing magic too hard, as if magic was as ordinary as the weather.
The path crested the ridge, and I stopped.
Below us, nestled in a vast green plain that stretched to the distant mountains, was a village. But "village" was the wrong word. "Village" implied something small — a cluster of huts, a few muddy roads, the kind of rural settlement you might find in a historical drama. This was something else entirely.
At the center of the settlement stood a tree.
Not just any tree. A tree that made the ancient oak I'd woken under look like a sapling. This tree — and my mind struggled to process the scale of it — rose from the earth like a pillar holding up the sky. Its trunk was so wide that it would have taken fifty people holding hands to circle its base. Its branches spread outward in every direction, reaching, stretching, creating a canopy so vast that it shaded the entire central plaza of the village below. And it was glowing. Faintly, softly, with a silver-white light that seemed to come from within the bark itself, as if the tree had swallowed a moon and was slowly, contentedly digesting it.
Around the tree, the village spread outward in concentric circles. The buildings were like nothing I'd ever seen — structures of white stone and living wood, where walls seamlessly merged with growing vines and flowering branches. Some buildings had trees growing through their roofs, branches emerging from windows and balconies as if the architecture and the vegetation had decided to collaborate. Flowers bloomed along every wall, their colors shifting and changing as I watched — blue to violet, violet to gold, gold to silver — in slow, hypnotic waves.
The streets were paved with smooth stones that emitted a soft, warm glow — not bright enough to illuminate but enough to create a gentle warmth that I could feel even from this distance. People moved through those streets — dozens of them, hundreds of them — going about their lives with the easy, unhurried pace of a community at peace. Some carried baskets of fruit and vegetables. Others walked in groups, talking and laughing. Children ran between the buildings, chasing each other with squeals of delight.
And then I saw the magic.
A woman standing beside a garden raised her hand, and the flowers she was tending bloomed in an instant — buds unfurling into full blossoms between one heartbeat and the next, as naturally as breathing. A man carrying building materials gestured toward a wall, and the stones lifted from his arms and floated through the air, settling into place with gentle precision. Two children playing in the plaza were tossing a ball of light between them — actual light, glowing and warm, bouncing from hand to hand like a living thing.
Magic. Real, genuine, actual magic. Being used as casually as I might use a fork or a phone. Being used by ordinary people — farmers, builders, children — as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Because in this world, it was.
My knees went weak.
"Yota?" Yui had turned to look at me. "Are you all right? You look pale."
I couldn't speak. I couldn't think. Everything I'd ever dreamed of, every fantasy I'd ever had lying in my bed at night, every wish I'd ever made while reading manga in the dark — it was all here. It was real. It existed. A world where magic was as natural as sunlight, where flowers bloomed at a gesture and stones floated through the air and children played with light.
I want to live in a magical world.
My wish. My stupid, childish, impossible wish.
It came true.
I must have made a sound — a choked noise somewhere between a laugh and something that might have been the beginning of tears — because Yui's expression shifted from concern to something gentler.
"Come on," she said softly. "Let's get you inside. I think you need some food."
I nodded. I didn't trust my voice.
We descended the ridge toward the village, and with every step, the world became more real. I could smell cooking food — something savory and rich that made my stomach growl audibly. I could hear music — someone playing an instrument that sounded like a cross between a flute and something that had never existed on Earth, its melody floating through the warm air like a living thing. I could feel the ground beneath my boots, solid and warm, and the electric tingle in the air grew stronger as we approached, until my skin hummed with it.
If this is a dream, I thought, I don't want to wake up.
And then we entered the village, and my life — my ordinary, unremarkable, average life — changed forever.
And I didn't even know the half of it yet.
END OF CHAPTER 1