Episode 208: An Imperfect Future
The world turned white. It lasted only a moment. In a single blink, Koyoi found himself somewhere else.
Asahi and Kuon were gone. The gravel beneath his feet had vanished, replaced by the sensation of soft, yielding earth. He stood in the center of a vast meadow where the grass grew waist-high, its tasseled heads swaying in the breeze with a dry, papery rustle. The sky was high and immense. There were no clouds.
Names were drifting in the sky.
They weren't written characters, but grains of light. Like specks of dust dancing in a sunbeam, countless names flowed slowly through the air. They weren't frozen, nor were they melting. They simply hovered. Untethered from gravity, resisting nothing, the names existed there.
Koyoi understood instinctively: they had been liberated. This was a world where names were finally free. The world beyond the Well, beyond the Freezing, and beyond the Observers.
He looked down at his own hands. They were more wrinkled now. His knuckles were thicker, and thin scars ran across the backs of his hands. The shape of his nails remained the same, but these were the hands of someone who had walked for many years. Sun-baked, wind-scoured, yet hands that had never stopped reaching out and grasping.
A drawstring pouch hung at his waist. The fabric was faded, its original deep indigo washed out to something closer to grey. The cord showed signs of being knotted and re-knotted many times, and in one spot, it had been spliced together with a different string entirely. Yet it held its shape. He was still holding it. He was still carrying it.
Koyoi touched the pouch. He could feel the presence of the Droplets within. They weren't as hot as they had been in his youth; they felt steady, quiet—a warmth nearing the end of a very long journey.
In the distance, he saw two figures.
One was large. Asahi. What he carried on his back was no longer a sword. The blade had snapped in the middle and was held together with wire. The line of the edge peeking from the scabbard was unnaturally bent. He hadn't thrown the broken thing away; he had fixed it and was still using it.
The other was Kuon. He held his Catalog tucked under his arm, one hand pressed to his forehead. The blue light that usually occupied his prosthetic eye was gone. Instead, a black eyepatch covered his left socket. The edges of the fabric fluttered in the wind, and Koyoi knew that beneath it, there was nothing left.
It burned out, Koyoi thought. After using that blue light for so long. After seeing everything there was to see, the eye finally consumed itself.
Both of them were looking toward him. Their expressions were unreadable from so far away. But they were standing. Their backs were straight. They were alive.
The names in the sky drifted on the wind. The particles of light scattered, vanishing the moment they touched the tips of the grass. New grains rose from the earth to join the sky. It was a cycle without end. Names being born, floating, descending, and rising once more.
It was beautiful. So beautiful it made Koyoi’s chest ache.
But when he looked at his feet, he saw a crack in the ground. A black line running beneath the meadow. The roots of the grass stretched across the fissure, desperately trying to hold the earth together. But the crack was deep, and its bottom was invisible.
A wound in the structure of a world that no longer had Observers. This was the earth deprived of its supports after the system that managed the names had vanished. If you break a cage that has stood for centuries, the things the cage once propped up will inevitably crumble.
The names were free. The world was broken. Both truths existed here, side by side.
Koyoi took a breath. He smelled grass, soil, and the scent of distant rain. A rain that had not yet fallen. Though the sky was clear, the air held the weight of water.
His vision blurred.
The white light retracted, the grains of names vanished, and color flooded back into the world. The sensation of gravel returned beneath his boots. The smell of the meadow was gone, replaced by the dry dust of the highway.
He was standing in the middle of the road. Asahi was to his right, Kuon to his left. Both were young. Asahi’s sword was whole. Kuon’s prosthetic eye glowed with a sharp blue light. Their present selves were right here.
"Koyoi."
Kuon’s voice. Low and sharp.
"Don't stop. Keep walking."
Koyoi blinked repeatedly. An afterimage of the light particles lingered in his vision—the glow of names vanishing against the grass. It faded quickly.
"...I saw it."
"Saw what?"
"The future. Or what might be the future."
His voice trembled. He didn't know if he was frightened or in awe. It was both.
"All the names were floating in the sky. They were free. Like grains of light, not tied down to anything."
Koyoi searched for the words. The hand gripping his pouch was slick with sweat.
"But the world was cracked. There were huge fissures in the ground. Your eye was gone, Kuon, and Asahi's sword was broken. I was still holding the pouch. A very old, faded pouch."
Kuon narrowed his prosthetic eye. The blue light flickered faintly. It was the look of a man calculating—evaluating the contents of a vision and weighing the gravity of its possibility.
"It wasn't a prophecy. Likely just an aftershock of the resonance. One possibility among many. Not a promise."
Asahi snorted. He crossed his arms and tapped the scabbard of his unbroken sword with his elbow.
"Was it just the sword that broke?"
"Yeah. You were standing, Asahi. Both of you were standing."
"Then that's good enough for me."
The three of them began to walk.
There were no names in the sky. The wind was dry. The highway was flat, and they could not see what lay at the end of it. The pouch swung quietly at Koyoi’s hip. The lingering echo of the resonance had finally faded.
But on the back of Koyoi’s tongue, the taste of the rain that had yet to fall remained.