As she fell, Yurie was shedding skin.

  The black mourning dress that had clung to her body all the way through the morning of the seventh day tore under the rushing air—rip, rip, like paper forced to pretend it was cloth—and flew apart. Heavy fabric unraveled from her fingertips first, threads snapping as if someone were unpicking her with invisible nails. What remained broke down into a scatter of words that had failed to become speech, then dispersed into the fog.

  Funeral. Hospital room. Alcohol swabs.

  Those weighted concepts peeled away like old paint from inside her skull and vanished into the void. The images went with them: the fluorescent ceiling, the beeping that never stopped, the sting of sanitizer that lived in her cuticles. The darkness chewed and chewed until even the edges were gone.

  In their place, an impossible white dress—too clean, too innocent to exist here—rewrote her outline. It fit her like a lie the world insisted on believing. The duties of the left-behind, the chain called time; the accelerating dark ground them down between its teeth.

  —What remained was only the bite of the strap in her shoulder.

  Her brick-colored Gamaguchi hung against her side, the strap cutting deep into the white of her skin, a dull pressure that refused to disappear. That ache alone kept its mass, as if it were proof: you left something behind.

  “…Ah…”

  Her throat trembled. Before she realized she’d made a choice, a faint vibration spilled from her lips—air that was not quite a word, not quite a sob.

  “…la… lula…”

  She didn’t know why it came out. She couldn’t have explained it if she tried. And yet, each time that tremor traveled through bone and struck behind her ears, the air—hard as shattered plastic—returned to color for the briefest instant. A thin wash of warmth. A quick, impossible pulse. Then it was gray again.

  A soft bloom followed.

  An ecstatic scent brushed her nostrils: roses, enough to make her choke, like a garden at its most violent peak. The residue of life, reckless and thick, crushing the chill of despair and the stale presence of death with brute insistence. It didn’t ask permission. It simply arrived.

  It ignited inside Yurie as a heat without a name—something that burned even as she ran toward forgetting.

  And then her soles found the cliff.

  Stone—cold, rough, wrong beneath her feet—caught her as if she’d been dropped onto it rather than landed. The surface was stripped of color in wide, flaking patches. Gravity here did not behave. It curled and bucked like an injured animal, tugging at her ankles, testing whether she would hold.

  Above, the sky was frozen lead. At the edge of the world, the “paint” of reality had peeled away like scenery, exposing a flat white underlayer as if someone had built the horizon out of stage props and then stopped caring.

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  Every breath scraped her throat with tiny cuts. The air tasted like chalk.

  —and the moment she stopped, she understood.

  This place punished stillness.

  If she stood still, she would “fall again.” The ground itself tried to pry her loose, tugging at her feet, insisting on another drop. It was the kind of pressure you felt right before fainting, the moment your body decided it could not keep you upright.

  “…Ah… u…”

  Her cheeks were hot.

  Somewhere along the way, tears had started spilling. Salt slid past the corners of her mouth. Droplets fell onto the gray stone and were swallowed without sound, as if the cliff drank them. She tried to stop. It didn’t work. Reason had no leverage here; logic skidded off the surface and failed to stick.

  It was strange. Why was she crying?

  The memories that should have held up an answer were already sunk deep beneath the melody’s bottom. Even so, something in the center of her chest throbbed—left behind, still hurting—and something that nearly became a name caught in her throat and refused to pass.

  The tears pretended to be a mere “phenomenon,” but they were closer to a signpost, running down her face to point her forward. She had forgotten, and yet her body knew. As if her soul had found it first, ahead of her mind.

  That heat in her chest affirmed her crying—like it was the correct solution to a problem she couldn’t remember reading.

  At the tip of the void, gold wavered.

  In a world that rejected color, that one spot carried an overwhelming warmth of life.

  Mermi stood there wearing the dignity of a stern mother. The same back that had always stopped Yurie when she tried to go the dangerous way—unmoved, unshaken, as if she had been waiting for this exact moment. Even at rest, she looked ready to launch.

  “How long are you going to cry like that?” Mermi said. “Were my daughter’s legs always this weak?”

  She didn’t even turn around. And yet her voice was crisp enough to rattle Yurie’s spine. Golden fur lifted along Mermi’s back, bristling up into a proud little mohawk. Her tail-less rear gave a single, irritated twitch. A tiny snort escaped her nose—sharp, almost offended by Yurie’s hesitation.

  “M-Mermi…”

  “Yuri.” The name struck like a tap of a ruler. “Listen. If you have time to weep, then look at your footing. There is no time left to stand still.”

  “I… I don’t—” Yurie’s words broke as a sob pushed through. “I don’t know why I’m crying, Mermi. I don’t know, and it won’t stop—”

  Mermi received the plea in strict silence. No sweet comfort. No gentle lie. She guarded Yurie with something firmer than words—

  a back kept half a step ahead.

  “Have you forgotten the sound of my footsteps?” Mermi asked at last, cool as a diagnosis. “If so, I dread what lies ahead.”

  Then Mermi kicked off with all four paws and sprinted toward the monochrome forest that spread beyond the cliff. It was not a normal run. It was the familiar, ridiculous, terrifying burst—like a rocket was strapped to her ribs. Her nails clicked once against stone, then she was gone in a blur of gold.

  “Wait! Don’t—don’t go, Mermi!”

  “Then chase me!” Mermi barked, her voice cutting the empty air. “Your Gamaguchi is still empty, isn’t it? If there is something you mean to protect, you cannot afford to stop!”

  The shout tore through the void.

  It pierced a buried possibility deep inside Yurie—something sleeping beneath her missing memories—and struck it awake. Her fingers tightened around the strap. The bite in her shoulder sharpened, and for a moment it felt like the only reliable thing in existence.

  Yurie clenched her shoulder Gamaguchi hard enough to make her knuckles ache, then pushed off the cliff where gravity warped and misbehaved.

  A hundred kilometers an hour—no, faster than her body should have allowed.

  Colorless wind slapped her cheeks. The white dress snapped and streamed behind her like a flag. She ran as if the lingering rose-scent were a guidepost, as if she could follow that life-residue by smell alone.

  Ahead—at the mouth of the monochrome forest—a dull silver light winked.

  The first pain she would have to gather.

  The Magician’s rusted silver needle waited there, as if to test her—poised to stitch the shattered laws of this world back together, one cruel thread at a time.

  (End of Prologue.)