The town was shuddering.
It wasn’t the shaking of an earthquake. It wasn’t the swaying of the wind. It was a quieter, more persistent tremor—that unpleasant vibration you feel when someone drags a long sheet of paper across a wooden floor.
A short walk past the harbor of Kaizu, rows of wooden houses stood in silence. No one was there. Though the windows were shut tight, the lamps remained lit. These hollow dwellings were acting out a night that had no one left to witness it.
Koyoi pressed his palm against a pillar. It wasn’t warm, yet it wasn’t cold either. It simply trembled, ever so slightly. An eaves-sign creaked. There was no wind, yet it swung left and right in time with the tremors.
The characters on the sign were illegible. Whenever he tried to focus on them, the shuddering ground pulled his eyes away.
“The town itself... is being rewritten,” Kuon spat the words out.
“By the Observers?”
“No, not just them. The very records of those who lived here are trembling. They’re shifting their shapes, trying to flee before they’re erased.”
Asahi stared into the depths of the alley. The further in one went, the more violent the tremors became. The shadows of the houses were growing thin. The boundaries were creaking.
“...This is bad.”
“How so?”
“The tremors steal your footing. It’s the kind of place where the ground you step on never comes back.”
Asahi tapped the tip of his scabbard against the ground. A dry clack rang out. For a single heartbeat, the trembling stopped. In that brief window of stillness, Koyoi took a breath. The scent of the tide mingled with the smell of old paper. Even as it shuddered, the town was struggling to remain a “town.”
“Can we... get through here?”
“Whether we’re allowed through isn’t up to the town,” Kuon said, readjusting the Catalog in his arms. “It’s up to us.”
Koyoi placed his fingers over the warmth of the droplet in his pouch. The tremors resumed. The lights in the houses flickered weakly, as if urging them to hurry. The three of them stepped into the shuddering depths.
The ground bucked beneath them, like something was poking it from below. Small, rapid thumps. Koyoi felt it through the soles of his feet. It wasn’t just a tremor. It was a rhythmic pounding. Beneath the earth, something was hammering upward.
“Names.”
Kuon came to a halt. His glass eye glowed, as if peering through the very stone.
“Names moving through the underworld have reached a bottleneck here. They want to surface, but they can't.”
“Are they sealed in?”
“Yeah. The Observers have placed a lid over the town's foundation. It’s a mechanism to stop the Names before they can reach the Well.”
That was the truth behind the shuddering. Names were hammering against the ground from below. Hundreds, thousands of them, searching for an exit just beyond a thin layer of stone.
Asahi pressed his ear to the ground.
“...I hear them. They’re scratching. It’s the sound of fingernails.”
Koyoi knelt, placing his hands on the cobblestones. They were cold, yet a faint warmth seeped through from the depths. The heat of the Names.
“Can we help them?”
“If we break the lid, they’ll get out. But the moment we break it, the Observers will be on us.”
Kuon threw open his Catalog. A lattice-like pattern of sealing lines shimmered across the page, mirroring the town's layout. In one spot, the lines were faint.
“There. The seal is weak in this corner.”
“Then—”
“Wait. It’s not weak. It’s the wake of a Name that already forced its way through. A hole was punched open, and then sealed again.”
The eaves-sign from before sat directly above that mended breach. It hadn’t been swaying because of the wind. It was because a Name was hammering directly beneath it. Koyoi reached out for the sign. The moment he touched it, the characters became legible for a fleeting second.
It was a Name.
The name of the entity that had forced its way through was burned into the wood. A mark of passage. A record that someone had escaped.
“So... you can pass through,” Koyoi whispered.
Kuon nodded.
“You can. But the seal thickens with every passage. The next time will be harder.”
“Even so, a Name made it through.”
“Yeah. They did.”
Asahi stood and tightened his grip on his sword.
“Then we’ll be the ones to punch the next hole.”
The town’s shuddering stopped for a single beat. It felt as if the Names below had all held their breath. Koyoi kept his hands on the stones, listening to that silence. They were waiting. Down there, so many Names were waiting.
The houses with their eternal lights watched the three of them. The tremors returned almost instantly, but this time, they were a little more rhythmic.
Like a heartbeat.