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The night the world tilted onto its side, the Shinonome house was quiet.
It was one of those still, heavy evenings when the air itself felt like it was waiting for something to go wrong. Akito was ten, cross-legged on the floor of his room, using a chisel he got from his father to attempt to carve a chunk of wood he’d found earlier that day.
The faint scent of oil paints still clung to the house—a reminder of his father’s studio downstairs, where color never truly dried.
When the door creaked open behind him, he didn’t even look up.
“Akito,” came Ena’s voice.
He hummed, pretty distracted. “Yeah?”
There was something off about her tone—she wasn’t here to tease or argue with him. When he turned, the first thing he noticed was how pale she looked. The second was that her hands were trembling.
And then he saw them.
Her fingertips—darkened, not with ink or dirt but something that looked wrong. The color crept from her nails, fading into her skin like smoke. She had small, curved horns protruding from her head.
Akito froze, his mouth going dry. “Ena, what—what the heck is that?!”
“I—I don’t know,” she whispered. Her eyes glistened, wide with fear. “I woke up like this.”
He scrambled to his feet. “Does Mom and Dad know?”
She shook her head so fast her hair flew. “No! You can’t tell them!”
“But—”
“Please, Akito.” Her voice cracked. “Please don’t.”
He’d never seen her like that before. His sister, who always teased him and called him a brat, who liked showing off her sketches—she was terrified.
He swallowed hard and nodded. “Okay.”
They sat together in silence for a long while, both trying to breathe. Ena tugged at her sleeves, hiding her hands. Akito didn’t know what to do, but something in him—the childish determination to fix it—snapped into motion.
“I’ll get you something,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“To cover it—something magic.”
“Akito—”
He didn’t wait for her to finish.
That evening, while their father were busy in the studio and their mother was asleep, he slipped out.
The streets were quiet, the lamps flickering low. He knew where he was going—the marketplace, where the jewel stalls shimmered.
Somewhere among the trinkets and charms, there was one he’d seen before: an illusion stone. He’d heard the older kids whisper about them. Stones that could hide scars, disguise appearances.
He found one on a silversmith’s table. It was small, oval, and faintly warm to the touch, glimmering with a soft light. He didn’t have money for it. He didn’t even think. He just took it.
By the time he climbed back through the window, his chest was pounding. Ena looked up from her sketchbook, eyes wide as he held the pendant out.
“Here,” he panted. “Put it on.”
She hesitated, staring at it like it might burn her. “Akito, where did you—”
“Just do it!”
She did. The stone pulsed once, faintly, and in an instant the color drained from her fingertips, the horns fading beneath her skin.
She gasped, hands flying to her head. “It worked…”
Akito grinned. “See? Now nobody’ll know.”
But the relief didn’t last.
The door slammed open.
Kaori stood there, eyes wide, one hand over her mouth. Behind her, their father’s gaze sharpened, not angry for once—concerned.
“Ena,” Shinei said quietly. “What did you just do?”
Ena froze. The pendant glowed faintly against her chest.
Akito stepped forward, stammering. “It’s not her fault—I just—”
But Shinei didn’t yell. He didn’t raise his voice or demand answers. He stepped forward, slowly.
“Let me see,” he said\.
Ena hesitated, then lifted the pendant from her neck. The illusion fell away, revealing the horns and darkened hands again.
Kaori’s breath hitched. But she moved closer, then cupped her face with both hands. “It’s all right.”
She blinked up at her, trembling. “You’re not… angry?”
“You’re our daughter,” Shinei said simply. “Why would I be angry?”
Kaori nodded. “We’ll keep you safe. I promise.”
The next evening, their peace shattered.
A mob gathered outside their home. Torches, shouting, fists pounding against the door.
“Shinonome Shinei!” someone shouted. “We know what you’re hiding! Hand over the demon child!”
Akito clung to Ena’s arm, his heart hammering. Kaori stood in front of them, protecting her children.
Shinei threw open the window shutters. “How dare you accuse me of harboring such filth! Do you doubt my loyalty to the crown? Do you doubt my hand, which paints the very face of your king?!”
None dared defy the royal painter himself.
Slowly, the torches dimmed. The shouting faded. The mob dispersed.
Inside, the silence was nearly suffocating.
Ena looked out the window, her reflection faint in the glass—horns, dark fingertips, wide frightened eyes. She knew it was only a matter of time before someone came again.
That night, while her family slept, she packed a small satchel. Bread, water, her pendant. She slipped out the door.
She didn’t make it far.
The forest was darker than she imagined. The freezing cold was nearly unbearable. Every rustle made her heart pound in her ears. She tripped more than once, and got lost.
When a hand grabbed her arm, she screamed.
“Ena!”
She turned—and there he was. Akito, panting, his cloak half-tied, eyes wide with worry.
“You—what are you doing here?!” she hissed.
“You’re leaving me?” he demanded, his voice breaking. “You think I’m just gonna stay there without you?”
“You can’t just leave!” he yelled, grabbing her wrist. “You’ll die out here!”
She tried to pull away. “You shouldn’t have followed me! It’s not safe for you!”
“No way in hell I’m letting you go alone!”
“You can’t be here—if they find me—”
“Then they’ll find both of us,” he snapped, grabbing her hand. “Come on.”
Before she could argue, he pulled her along. Deeper into the forest.
Until they reached a small clearing, where a cabin stood—weathered but mostly intact, its door half opened.
He turned to her. “Found it last week. Me, Kohane, and An—we were gonna make it our hideout.” He grinned, though it was quite shaky. “Ken-san caught us before we could. Guess it’s ours now.”
Ena stared at him. “So this is where you three have been going to instead of school”
“Ena—!”
Days passed, quiet but peaceful. Ena gathered herbs and mushrooms, cleaned the old cabin, and tried to make sure they were safe. No one really wanted to go explore the enchanted forests anyway, far too risky.
Akito hunted small animals, fetched water, and talked too much just to fill the silence.
One morning, when she woke up before dawn and couldn’t go back to sleep, she decided to just go and gather some more things. She came home with a basket of mushrooms.
“Akito? I’m back—”
She turned toward the hearth, where he stood by the door to the room he claimed as his bedroom, his hands fidgeting.
“Akito?”
He didn’t look up. “Ena…”
Her heart dropped.
The tips of his fingers were dark—faintly red, the color bleeding from beneath the skin.
And when he raised his head, she saw the beginning of horns pushing through his hair.
“I think…” He swallowed hard. “I think I’ve got it too.”
For a heartbeat, neither moved. Then Ena dropped her basket on the table and walked over to her brother, pulling him into her arms.
“It’s okay Akito—we’ll be okay…”
It had been nearly seven years since that night. The cabin that once seemed abandoned was now a home—patched up over the years with wood Akito managed to get. The forest had claimed it, vines and moss draping over the roof—but it worked for camouflage. But inside, the inhabitants made it feel warm enough.
Ena was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up as she ground herbs into a mortar.
Her horns—two curves, polished from years of handling and obsessing over not letting them turn rough—were as expected, still there on the top of her head.
Back then, her curse would flare up with uncontrollable pulses of magic whenever her emotions spiked, but now, she could control them quite well.
Of course, it wasn’t achieved alone.
“Ena—” the girl with dark purple hair said. “You’re grounding the herbs too much.”
“I know, I know—!”
Then, the door creaked open. A girl with long whitish-blue hair slipped inside, her hood pulled low. She was carrying a basket of herbs, her fingertips slightly tinted with a navy blue tone.
“Found more sage,” she said quietly.
Ena switched moods quickly, smiling at the girl. “Thank you, Kanade!” Ena replied cheerfully. “We were running low.”
Kanade smiled softly, before moving over to help Mafuyu.
“Yahoo~ good morning everyone!” another girl with light pink hair sing-songed, barging open the door to the bedroom she and Mafuyu shared.
“Mizuki! Stop slamming the doors open.”
“But you love slamming the doors close, Enanan~”
“She’s right you know”
“Shut up!”
It all worked out somehow
It started with Kanade
They’d found her by accident—or rather, Akito had. He’d gone to the edge of a nearby village one evening, wearing his illusion stone. He was just planning to buy food and trade herbs. The air had been tense, the square crowded, and he’d noticed the wooden frame before he’d realized what was on it.
A girl. Hanging upside down, bound, her hair tangled and eyes shut. A sign beneath her labeled her a “demon, murderer of her own ‘father’”
Akito’s blood boiled.
He waited until nightfall, when the square emptied, when the guards’ footsteps faded away. Then he climbed the frame and cut her down. She was light, far too light, her ankles raw from rope burns.
He carried her through the forest in silence, ignoring his own fear, ignoring the way his illusion stone flickered weakly from exhaustion.
When they burst into the cabin, Ena nearly screamed—until she saw the girl.
“Oh god, Akito—”
“She’s alive—” he gasped, lowering her onto the old couch. “She’s alive. Help me.”
Kanade woke up the next morning. When Ena offered her some soup, she only mumbled, “You should’ve left me there, I don’t—”
Ena hugged her tightly.
That was the start of it. Kanade stayed. She played music—after all, she was a bard.
Then came Mafuyu.
A noble’s daughter who stumbled into their woods with a torn dress and a blank stare. Ena recognized the look of someone quite running not from danger, but from expectation.
She’d been suffocating under it. After all, the curse did burn from shame. Ena had taken her hand and said simply, “You can stay.”
And she did.
Mizuki followed months later, carrying a half-filled satchel and eyes that sparkled with mischief. She joked too easily, laughed a little too loudly, as if to hide the fear that someone might call them a monster. And likely, it wasn’t just from the horns—one full, one a fractured nub.
When Ena spotted the faint black at Mizuki’s fingertips, she said nothing—just handed them one of the spare illusion stones.
At one point, they ran away. Akito chased her down and brought her back.
“Welcome home,” she’d said, holding onto them tightly.
They had found each other here.
And every month, without fail, letters came.
Ena kept them in a wooden box under her bed—letters from her and Akito’s parents. Carefully written and sent off. Sometimes there were copper or silver coins hidden in the envelope—never gold, never too much. Enough to keep them comfortable, not suspicious.
They took turns going into town for supplies. The illusion stones hid their horns and markings well enough, they’d learned how to blend into the crowd.
It was strange, Ena thought sometimes, how peaceful it had all become.
Ena didn’t usually look up from her sketchbook when she heard the front door creak open. It was usually Akito coming back from one of his “supply trips,” which sometimes meant firewood, sometimes meant food, and sometimes meant… well, sneaking letters from home that he pretended didn’t exist.
So she just kept drawing, quiet in the lamplight that filled the cabin’s main room. Kanade was humming to herself on the windowsill, pen tapping against her leg as she wrote a new composition. Mizuki sat on the floor, surrounded by scraps of fabric, occasionally asking for opinions on some lace. Mafuyu was reading something near the fireplace, her eyes in that unreadable way of hers.
It was the usual calm, the kind that came after years of making the ‘cursed’ feel safe.
Then the door opened fully, and the room fell silent.
Not because of Akito—no, they were used to him coming back at ungodly hours—but because someone else stepped in behind him.
Ena’s head snapped up.
The boy looked about her brother’s age, maybe a little older. His clothes were dirty, half-torn in the way that said he hadn’t had a place to rest in days. His grey eyes scanned his surroundings.
And then she saw the horns.
Not entirely hidden—one full, one nub, faintly glowing under the fading illusion. The fingertips of his left hand darkened to a dark indigo.
The curse.
Akito closed the door quickly behind him.
“He’s with me,” he said immediately. “He’s… he needed a place to stay.”
Ena blinked, setting her embroidery down. “Akito,” she said slowly, standing. “You—brought him here?”
“Yeah.” He avoided her gaze, rubbing the back of his neck. “He was—uh… kind of in trouble.”
Kanade glanced up from her papers. Mizuki had already half-stood, excitement sparking in their eyes because ‘new person.’ Mafuyu just quietly closed her book and set it aside.
Ena’s gaze softened as she took in the stranger again. His movements were careful, hesitant—like someone who didn’t quite trust them yet. There was still the faint shimmer of magic around him—Akito must’ve used an illusion stone for the trip back and it was starting to fade by the time he got home.
She wanted to ask a dozen things—who was he, where did he come from, what happened—but all that came out was, “You’re safe here.”
He looked startled, as if he hadn’t expected kindness. “I—thank you,” he murmured, his voice quiet, a little too polite. “My name is… Toya.”
“Toya,” Ena repeated.
She turned to Akito—and blinked.
Her little brother was standing awkwardly beside the newcomer, cloak still around Toya’s shoulders, his cheeks faintly pink, and his eyes flicking anywhere but her direction.
The realization hit her all at once.
Ena’s brows arched slowly, deliberately.
Oh.
“Ohhh,” Mizuki said first, ever the chaos-spreader, a grin curling their lips.
Akito froze. “What?”
“Otouto-kun, who did you bring home~?”
Akito scowled, “Shut up! I just found him in the forest.”
Mizuki nodded, but was clearly giving him a shit-eating grin when the red spreading across his ears betrayed him.
Toya, completely unaware, blinked between them in confusion.
Meanwhile, Ena was still trying to wrap her head around where the name ‘Toya’ came from that made it familiar.
Then a thought popped into her head, memories of that name coming back.
Akito brought home the prince.
What the fuck?