Chapter Text
He woke to the sound of rain breathing through the trees. The cold water dripping soaking into his shirt. The cold rain and air didn’t bother him, he barely noticed it at all. The bones beneath his skin felt unfamiliar, the weigh of his limbs uneven, foreign. It was like wearing someone else’s shape… Someone who no longer needed it.
For a moment he simply laid there, half-buried in the wet grass and scattered leaves. The forest rose around him like a dark cage, towering trunks and branches heavy with black leaves that shivered under the wind. The air was thick with the earthy smell of damp soil and crushed moss. Staring up, he felt an unsettling emptiness surrounding him.
He sensed this empty void inside him and knew something was wrong.
There was a tug in his chest, like a thin thread pulling him toward an unseen presence, distant yet achingly familiar - and a voice calling out to him: ‘Hikaru.’
He could feel the pain and yearning behind that call, a pull not confined to this life alone. It stretched through echoes of past moments he had never lived but somehow remembered, carrying the weight of love that had been meant to bloom again and again - a connection that fate had tried to sever before it could flourish.
That name hold a promise and reveal the truth of who - or what he is now. It whispered of promises and of truths hidden beyond the trees. He had to find the presence and follow the thread that had endured centuries that still called to him across time and death.
He pushed himself upright, unsteady legs that felt both too long and too light, as if the ground might reject him.
And so Hikaru began to walk and search for the voice that calls out to him.