It stood on the outskirts of town.
A massive wooden frame loomed against the sky, its beams stretched upward like a pair of reaching arms. It stood nearly fifty feet tall. Countless strands stretched across its crossbars, swaying in the breeze, each one emitting a dry, brittle rattle.
A loom, Koyoi thought.
But this wasn’t for weaving cloth. What he had taken for thread were actually thin metal wires. Rusty and reddish-brown, the lines let out a low, resonant groan every time they shuddered in the wind.
“It’s a device for turning names into the wind.”
Kuon turned the blue glow of his prosthetic eye toward the frame and flipped through the pages of his catalog. “You pass a name through the strings, and it’s converted into vibration. The names woven into it scatter into the wind. It’s a mechanism designed to render them into a form that can never be restored.”
Asahi reached out and touched the base of the frame.
Instantly, a tremor surged from his arm to his shoulder, rattling all the way to his teeth. He pulled his hand back and stared at his fingertips. The numbness lingered. “...This thing’s still moving.”
They had thought it was broken. Several of the crossbeams were snapped, and more than half of the metal wires hung limp and severed. Yet, a faint shudder still dwelled within the frame’s core. Every time a gust blew, the remaining wires sang, scattering uncontrolled sounds in every direction.
Koyoi strained his ears.
Something was mingled within the noise. In the gaps between the high and low pitches, there was a resonance almost like human speech. Names. The echoes of names drifted there, unable to fully dissolve into the wind.
“I can hear them...”
Koyoi pressed his drawstring pouch against his chest.
The droplets inside were pulsing. Fast. A small tremor bled through the fabric of the pouch. The droplets were reacting to the loom’s vibrations.
“...The same... sound...”
A thin, frail voice reached him from deep within the pouch.
It was a frequency the droplets recognized—a frequency meant to pass the names of gods through strings and turn them into the wind. Perhaps the droplets had once been on the receiving end of this very process.
Kuon narrowed his artificial eye, reading the frame’s construction. The blue light traced the metal wires one by one, illuminating the joints of the broken crossbeams.
“This isn’t just a simple destruction device.”
Kuon closed his catalog and looked up at the frame. “It turns names into vibrations and sets them adrift on the breeze. You can’t catch the wind. You can’t lock it in a bottle. It’s more insidious than freezing them. Once a name dissolves into the air itself, there’s no way to take it back.”
A strong gust blew.
The severed metal wires lashed out, erupting in a burst of discordant noise. Koyoi wanted to cover his ears, but if he did, the echoes of the names would vanish. He gripped the pouch with both hands and bared his teeth.
Within the sound, he found a child’s name.
The outline was already crumbling, but the intonation of the call remained. The shape of a voice from when someone had once called that child’s name.
Asahi stood before the frame and crossed his arms. “Should we break it?”
“Even if we do, the names that have already scattered won’t come back.”
Kuon’s voice was flat. He was merely stating a fact. And yet, within that flatness, Koyoi heard his anger.
“They didn’t just freeze them,” Koyoi whispered, his voice trembling. “They dissolved the names into the air so no one could ever hold them again. That’s what this place was for.”
The wind died down.
For a single heartbeat, the sound of the loom vanished. In the silence, a single droplet in the pouch pulsed with a sudden, powerful rhythm.
An echo of a name released one final note into the sky, and then it was gone.
Koyoi pressed the pouch to his forehead and closed his eyes. The wind began to blow again. The loom creaked. The sound continued.
The scattered names would never return. Even so, the shape of the voice calling the child remained in the depths of Koyoi’s ears. He would remember it before it faded. It was the only thing he could do now.
The three of them turned their backs on the loom and began walking upwind.
The dry, metallic clatter continued to strike at their backs.