"This lake looks deep," Haiiro murmured to the grey cat curled in his lap.
He stared out over the murky green water, his gaze vacant. Zai merely yawned, blinking up at him with bored, slitted eyes. It was a phrase she had heard him repeat across seven agonizing years—ever since she had awakened in this world, trapped in the body of a beast, piecing together the shattered memories of her past life and the master who now sat before her.
Her master, Haiiro.
He was a ghost of a man. Though he appeared withered, hollowed out, and utterly frail, the latent terror he once commanded still slumbered beneath the surface, waiting for an awakening he had forgotten how to seek. When he had first been cast into this realm, it was as though his very soul had been siphoned clean—no anger, no grief, no memory, and not a single shred of purpose left behind.
Even his name was a stray scrap of charity. An old, half-blind woman had looked upon his hollow cheeks and mistook his pale blue eyes for ash-grey, calling him Haiiro. She had fed him scraps out of pity until the cold took her. Everyone who crossed his path looked at him the same way: with repulsed pity. His limbs were as brittle as dry wheat stalks, his cheeks sunken inward as though the muscle had been excised from the bone.
"Maybe this is it," he whispered.
A momentary spark flickered behind his iris, though the rest of his face remained as blank as a gravestone. His voice scraped out rough and dry, like a beggar who had subsisted on ditch water for a week.
Zai didn't bother trying to hiss. For seven years, her master had sought every conceivable method to end his own existence, and for seven years, the curse of the Council of Gods had denied him. She had screamed at him in her mind, clawed at his ankles, and pleaded for it to end, but she was trapped in silence. Worse still, she was tethered to him by the same celestial punishment. Death would have been mercy for both of them, but the binding rites left her no path to abandon him.
Before she could shift, Haiiro stood and stepped off the ledge.
He had made sure the clearing was empty—no well-meaning travelers to drag him ashore. He plunged straight toward the dark depths of the green pool.
There was no violent splash, no desperate struggle against the current. The laws of nature simply broke around him. Instead of sinking, his body hit the water and bobbed back to the surface like a strip of dry balsa wood, floating entirely flat against the stillness. The curse held him suspended, refusing to let the lake take what belonged to the gods.
After drifting passively for long minutes, the gentle lap of the current pushed him back toward the mud bank. Haiiro pulled himself onto the stones, soaking wet and entirely unfazed. There was neither rage nor disappointment on his face. He lacked the capacity to mourn his failures; he didn't even truly understand why he kept trying.
It had all begun years ago when he watched a laborer slip from a high scaffolding, striking the cobblestones and never opening his eyes again. The gathered crowd had whispered among themselves, murmuring that the poor soul had departed to the other side.
To the other side.
For the first time since his mind had been emptied, a hollow desire had stirred in his chest. He didn't want to live, but he desperately wanted to see what lay beyond this cage. Every time he witnessed someone slip away into the dark, he mimicked them.
And every time, the invisible chains of the gods dragged him back to the mud.