The elders lived at the edge of the village—naturally—perched on a crooked cliffside staircase that looked like it had been built out of regret and warped furniture.
Each step creaked like it was considering retirement.
The entire path twisted up toward a house that didn't so much stand as it perched, like an old bird daring the wind to blow harder. It leaned left, then forward, then left again—like it was in the middle of making a dramatic point but had forgotten what it was talking about.
Its roof was a jungle of moss. One wall bulged outward suspiciously. And the porch—
The porch was populated by four cats that stared like landlords, and one parrot that had long since given up sounding like anything but a bitter gossip.
The moment Teruko stepped on the first stair, the parrot squawked:
"GO HOME."
She froze. "…Did it just—?"
"GO HOME, PRINCESS."
She turned slowly to Mazanka. "Say something before I burn this bird."
Mazanka was already chuckling. "It has a point."
Teruko took a threatening step toward the porch. The parrot puffed up its feathers, narrowed its eyes, and added with venomous clarity:
"She thinks she's smart!"
Teruko's blade made it halfway out of its sheath.
"I am smart!"
"YOU'RE A LOUD LIZARD IN A DRESS!"
Shugoh nearly fell off the stairs laughing. "I love this bird."
"Shut up," Teruko growled.
Rakan stared up at the warped house, eyes narrowed in faint awe.
"That's not a house," he muttered. "That's a dare. A threat. Possibly a cursed warning."
"I've seen scarier staircases," Mazanka said, brushing dust off his coat with dramatic flourish. "Usually after drinking with Itomei."
"Please stop talking," Itomei muttered behind him, already walking up with the gait of a man who regretted every friendship he'd ever maintained.
The building creaked as they approached, as if offended by the weight of newcomers.
And Yori—hovering near Rakan's shoulder—gave a low hum.
It hadn't spoken since the glyph.
Since it whispered that alien phrase like a lullaby left behind by something long dead.
It had simply floated. Slowly. Silently.
Watching.
But not watching everything.
Just Rakan.
It never turned toward Teruko when she ranted. Never glanced at Mazanka's amused sarcasm. Never reacted to Itomei's muttering or Shugoh's chatter.
Only Rakan.
Every time he moved, Yori adjusted.
Every time he paused, it paused too.
And now—on the threshold of something older than all of them—it hovered beside his ear, almost in orbit.
Rakan didn't say anything about it.
But he knew.
And he hated knowing.
The inside of the elders' home smelled like a library that had been politely set on fire, doused with soup, and then abandoned to philosophy.
The air was heavy with incense, mildew, and the ghost of very bad decisions.
Scrolls were piled like drunken towers beside open Ka'ro-etched jars that hummed when stared at. Shelves tilted, buckled, leaned on one another like old friends who had survived wars together. Someone had carved a poem into the ceiling in a language that no one here could probably read.
In the far corner, a hammock swung slowly, as though it had recently ejected its occupant.
One wall was entirely dominated by an enormous, aged mural—a chaotic swirl of Ka'ro lines and cracked pigment depicting… something being torn apart. A person, maybe. Or a god. Or a world. Or, as Shugoh whispered, "an incredibly tragic fruit."
At the center of the room stood a low circular table, surrounded by ten bowls of soup, each completely different. One was bubbling with steam. One had moss growing out of it. One appeared to contain a single blinking eyeball.
And around this table sat three elders.
One was asleep, slumped against the wall with a straw in their nose and their foot in one of the soup bowls. Possibly dead. Hopefully not.
One was chanting softly at a rock, holding it between both palms as if it were giving her instructions.
The third sat cross-legged on a stack of cushions, chewing on what looked like a feather, reading a scroll upside-down and nodding at it like it owed her money.
Mazanka leaned toward Itomei, voice low. "This explains a lot about the village."
Itomei stared blankly at the soup with the blinking eye. "I fear no man, but that bowl concerns me."
The feather-chewing elder blinked slowly—once. Then again, just to be sure.
Her eyes were cloudy white, but not blind—no, they shimmered with soft Ka'ro swirls like distant galaxies watching back.
She placed the feather down like it was sacred.
"You're late," she said.
Teruko stepped forward, bowing with rigid formality. "Apologies. We encountered… anomalies."
"We know," said the elder. "The trees told us."
From the wall, the sleeping elder mumbled, "They didn't tell me."
"You were asleep."
"I was meditating!"
"You were drooling."
"I was channelling ambient moisture."
The feather-chewer ignored him and turned her gaze back to the group. "Which of you brought it?"
Shugoh and Rakan exchanged a glance. As if on cue, Yori drifted forward—spinning once, then hovering still, directly over the floor's centre glyph.
It let out a soft giggle.
The light dimmed. Not all at once—just subtly. Like a candle thinking twice about being lit.
The rock-chanting elder stopped mid-syllable. The rock in her hands hummed once and then cracked clean in half.
Even the soup with the eyeball blinked twice and then looked away.
"…Ah," said the feather-chewer. "That kind."
Teruko squinted. "What kind?"
The elder stood slowly—robes dragging like drowned silk—and stepped toward Yori.
"She's not a tool," the elder said. "Not an artifact. Not a cursed vessel. Not even a warning."
"She?" Rakan echoed, uncertain.
"She is memory. Distilled. Sharp. Folding into itself."
Mazanka stepped in. "What is it remembering?"
The elder stopped walking. Her voice was soft now—almost kind. "That depends."
"On what?"
She turned to look at Rakan.
"…On who she sees when she wakes."
Yori pulsed again. A slow flicker of white-violet glow.
Mazanka didn't move. But his eyes narrowed.
The elder stepped even closer to Rakan now.
"You felt it, didn't you?" she asked. "When it said your name. When it looked at you."
"I didn't hear my name."
"Not with your ears," she said.
Rakan swallowed hard. He didn't like the way Yori hovered—so still, so… present. Like a compass needle that had stopped spinning because it had found home.
Teruko stepped between them sharply. "Okay. No. No cryptic riddles. No jungle epiphanies. Just tell us what we're dealing with."
The elder didn't flinch.
Instead, she reached out—fingers wrinkled and dark with ink—toward Yori.
The box pulsed once.
And then, it spoke.
Not with childish mimicry. Not with one of their voices.
It spoke like a memory.
Like wind blowing through an ancient tunnel filled with names no one dared write down.
"Echo returns to source. The breath remembers its lungs."
The mural on the wall cracked.
Yori rotated once. Its light dimmed to a faint, steady white.
Mazanka stepped back instinctively.
Even Itomei looked unsettled, shifting his weight for the first time in hours.
The elder sighed softly and lowered her hand. "It's already begun."
Teruko's hand moved to her weapon. "What has?"
The elder turned slowly, looking to the mural—the half-faded scene of a body split into two, screaming with its mouth closed.
She traced one finger through the air in front of it.
"This," she said. "The old story. The first breath. The broken cycle."
Mazanka's voice was quiet now. "But that was just myth. That wasn't—"
The elder looked at him over her shoulder. "You ever wonder why some myths wake up?"
The room fell still.
Then she turned back to the table, casually lifted a soup bowl, sniffed it, and nodded.
"You'll need to let go of the old map," she said, sipping. "This forest doesn't care about the trails you planned."
Mazanka looked sideways at Itomei.
Itomei was already seated, legs crossed, drinking deeply from a bowl with something still squirming in it.
He paused long enough to say, "This one tastes like regret. My favourite."
The group left the elder's hut with more questions than answers.
Mostly soup-related.
Apparently one bowl had been Ka'ro-infused. One had been ceremonial. And one had allegedly been watching them the entire time.
No one knew which was which.
Mazanka was silent, arms folded, brows faintly furrowed beneath his otherwise calm expression. That usually meant he was thinking something dangerous.
Teruko marched ahead of him, muttering, "The breath knows its lungs… What does that even mean? Why do old people talk in riddles? Can't one of them just say, 'Hey, this thing is evil, run.' No. It's always metaphors and lung-breath poetry."
Itomei was arguing with a tree again.
Yori hovered behind the group, drifting with slow, dreamlike weight. It spun gently. No words. Just an occasional sound like a sigh made of static.
Rakan had fallen to the back of the group.
His thoughts were… not loud, exactly. But restless. Heavy. Like something just beneath his skin was unsettled.
Watching the inside of his ribs.
He kept feeling that same shiver—that moment from inside the elder's hut when the box had looked straight through him. When it had said something in a voice too old for sound.
"Echo returns to source…"
Rakan exhaled.
And beside him, Shugoh—who had been unusually quiet for at least forty seconds—finally spoke.
"You okay?"
Rakan shrugged. "I don't know."
He glanced sideways. "That box… it doesn't feel like a box anymore."
Shugoh nodded like he'd expected it. "It never did."
Rakan squinted. "You named it."
"That's called emotional investment," Shugoh replied proudly. "It's how you survive cursed artefacts."
Rakan smirked. "And if it explodes?"
"Then I die loved."
Rakan stared at him. "You're so weird."
Shugoh shrugged. "Takes one to know one."
They walked a few more steps.
The group ahead was already halfway down the hill—Mazanka trying to wrangle Itomei, who had stopped to insult a mushroom.
Rakan looked ahead.
Then back at Yori, which was still floating behind them… but closer now.
He whispered, "…You want to test it?"
Shugoh's grin was slow, sun-warm, and completely reckless.
"I thought you'd never ask."
Rakan hesitated.
Looked again at Teruko's back, the group getting smaller as they rounded a bend.
His fingers twitched.
"…Let's go," he said.
And turned sharply off the trail.
Shugoh followed without hesitation, practically skipping.
And Yori—
Yori drifted after them immediately.
It made no sound.
But its light pulsed once.
Not in warning.
In recognition.
Like it had been waiting for this moment all along.
Like it was going home.
They slipped through the treeline like kids sneaking out past curfew.
But instead of chasing mischief or moonlight, they dragged behind them something impossibly old—an artifact with a name it had given itself and a voice that didn't belong in this world.
Yori hovered lazily beside them, glowing faintly like a sleepwalking god.
They didn't speak much on the way.
The further they walked, the quieter the forest got. Even the trees seemed to be leaning in, not watching—listening.
The shrine didn't have a name.
Didn't appear on any village map. Not even the bad one drawn by the kid who sold "souvenir roots" out of his backpack.
It sat sunken beneath a collapsed ridge, cocooned in broken rock and half-swallowed by vines the color of bruised blood. The outer pillars were cracked like bones. Glyphs shimmered faintly over its face—etched into the stone like they'd bled there on their own, long after the hands that carved them were gone.
The air felt… thinner here.
And the wind blew the wrong way.
Floating pollen glowed faintly and drifted against the current—upward, sideways, backward—defying gravity like it had forgotten its place.
Rakan stepped into the clearing with slow, wary steps.
Everything smelled faintly of ash and memory.
Shugoh was already ten steps ahead, hands on hips, positively delighted.
"See? This is perfect. Old energy. Weird glyphs. Definitely haunted. Ten outta ten."
Rakan scanned the structure. "It looks like it collapsed in on itself and then regretted it."
Shugoh grinned. "That's what makes it authentic."
"What if this place was sealed for a reason?"
Shugoh threw his arms wide. "Then we unseal it! For science!"
"Is this science?"
"It is," he said proudly, "if we survive."
Rakan opened his mouth to reply.
Yori floated forward.
Quietly. With intent.
Its glow began to shift—blue, then deepening to violet. Glyphs on its sides rotated inward, curling into a spiral pattern that pulsed, slow and deliberate, like a second heart trying to remember its beat.
It hovered directly above the shrine's centre.
And stilled.
Rakan stepped forward, slower now. Something in his stomach coiled, not in pain—but in recognition.
Not power. Not fear.
Familiarity.
A strange warmth slid across his spine like fingers on piano keys.
Like being in a room he couldn't remember—but knew, somehow, he'd once cried in.
Long ago.
And not as himself.
Yori stopped spinning.
The wind died.
Rakan raised his hand. "Let's just start with something simple. Low-output."
"Got it," Shugoh said instantly, already flaring Ka'ro from both palms like a child lighting candles with a blowtorch.
"Shugoh—"
Too late.
Shugoh flicked a thin arc of Ka'ro across the shrine floor. It danced like liquid lightning, spiraling upward—
Yori caught it mid-air.
No flare. No flash. Just a sound—like a bell deep underwater.
Then it returned the energy, not as mimicry, but something more.
The Ka'ro had changed.
Sharpened. Shaped.
It struck the ground like a violin string snapping in a cathedral—too pure, too exact, and entirely wrong in a way Rakan couldn't describe.
The glyphs across the floor lit up like candlefire catching dry bone.
"That… wasn't mimicry," Rakan said, stepping forward.
"Nope," Shugoh said, eyes wide with childish wonder. "That was interpretation."
He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a brittle charm woven from vine-thread and bone dust—some kind of jungle trinket from the village's strange market. "Let's try this—"
He tossed it into the air.
Yori didn't move.
But the charm unraveled mid-flight—not torn, not snapped, but unwound at a molecular level, reduced to dust, and then reformed as glowing Ka'ro fibers, braided with impossible symmetry, before gently floating down to rest at Rakan's feet.
Rakan crouched.
Reached out.
The threads reacted—not to his hand, but to his presence.
They pulsed. Then shrank from his touch. Then returned to it again, like a child recognizing an old lullaby.
Rakan's voice dropped. "I don't like this."
Shugoh crouched beside him, grinning ear to ear. "I do. This is the best worst idea we've ever had."
Rakan stood, gaze locked on Yori.
"Yori…" he said softly. "What are you?"
The box turned.
Slowly.
Directly to him.
And for a heartbeat—everything else stilled.
Even the breeze.
Even the glyphs.
Yori's light deepened—not brighter, but heavier. Like time pooling in one place.
Then it whispered, barely audible. Not with its mimicry voice.
With something older.
"You."
Rakan's breath hitched.
It didn't sound like an answer.
It sounded like a recognition.
Shugoh blinked. "What did it just say?"
Rakan didn't answer.
He couldn't.
Because the stone beneath their feet had just shifted.
Like something inside it was waking up.
The glyphs lining the edge of the shrine began to glow—not violet. Not red.
Gold.
Rakan stepped back, heart hammering. "Shugoh—"
Too late.
The Ka'ro ignited.
It didn't explode.
It bloomed.
A blast of light surged around them in a ring, wrapping the entire shrine like a molten crown. The glyphs lifted from the stone—rising upward, spiraling like awakened insects circling a dying sun.
Yori hovered at the center, still and silent.
The sky above them rippled like fabric being torn, stitched, and torn again. The wind began to curl inward, and then backward.
The trees bent the wrong way.
The light fractured into colors they didn't have names for.
And then—just before the sound disappeared entirely—
Everything snapped.