Dawn came like an open wound. There was no warmth in the rays of light, only the pallor of a world that had forgotten how to be kind.
Ryouhei awoke covered in dew and dark thoughts. Sera slept a few meters away, wrapped in her cloak, breathing with a calm he no longer knew. He had spent the night without closing his eyes, watching the fire slowly die out, as if witnessing its slow death could help him understand his own.
The echo of the anomaly haunted him.
The Man Without a Shadow, crying in a corner of what was once a home. A child's laughter. A faceless woman. The promise of a god. The silence after judgment.
Ryouhei closed his eyes, but found only shapes he could not name. He hadn't told Sera. He couldn't. She noticed he was different, more distant, but he responded with a sarcastic smile or a practical excuse. Because admitting what he had seen... would mean accepting that something inside him had broken.
He picked up a stone and tossed it into the stream.
—"You weren't a monster… at first," he murmured, unsure if he meant the Man Without a Shadow or himself.
They started moving at noon. The map led them to the Akelion Ravine, a rift between mountains where magic poured like boiling water. Ryouhei walked in silence, and Sera respected that silence, though questions lingered in her eyes.
Now and then, a shimmer crossed his vision. A figure that wasn't there. A fragment of a future refusing to fully reveal itself. The Eclipse of Three Moons seemed… erratic. Unstable. As if it too had been affected by the anomaly of the Man Without a Shadow.
Or by him.
What if the real mistake is you?
The voice wasn't external. It was a thought, one so deep it felt born from his own gut. He tried to ignore it. Tried to walk faster.
That night, while Sera cooked a soup from magical roots (the cauldron, of course, had a voice of its own), Ryouhei stepped away and sat by a dark puddle. The moon reflected, distorted.
And there, for the first time in days, he spoke to someone who wasn't there.
—"Why you, of all people, ended up broken like that? What did they do to you? What did you see that I haven't yet?"
His reflection didn't answer.
But in the depths of the water, for a brief instant, he thought he saw his face without eyes.