The coldness of death embraced the soul, which floated and fell with eerie grace—like a weightless lotus petal sinking into water, defying the buoyancy that should've held it up.
This soul had no colour. No shape. No true presence. To be frank, it wasn't anything at all. It slipped into the dark, frigid waters of the River Styx, indistinguishable from the current that surrounded it. It didn't float alone. Countless others—souls hollowed of identity and purpose—drifted with it. No, not drifted: they were the river.
The gentle, unnervingly calm waters of the Styx rippled as something new entered.
A soul with shape.
With color.
With buoyancy.
It dipped its metaphysical form into the water, not fully dead yet—but close enough that its presence stirred the slumbering currents. This wasn't a rare event. The river saw many who lingered between death and life, and most joined the collective silently.
The souls that made up the Styx did not move. They knew better than to disturb the wayward.
All but one.
The river distorted around its own water—twisting around itself. One indistinct soul, nestled among the others, began to change. It grew darker, less translucent, more defined. It coalesced into a shape—a tar-black form like a leech or a tiny worm.
It lunged.
Grasped.
Pierced the floating blue soul. Their hues bled into one another, merging in slow, surreal spirals. A new being was born: unique, yet unnatural. A fusion of two fates—neither living, neither dead. Something that should not be.
An act of defiance.
Against fate.
Against nature.
Against death itself.
Somewhere else, far from myth and memory, within the untamed wilds of Hokkaido—
It was humid. Oppressively so. The middle of summer baked the air thick and heavy. Trees stood tall in solemn dignity, branches interwoven like guardians of the forest.
And beneath their shade, a tragic scene.
A body.
Bloodied. Still.
Eyes wide open—empty, dark brown orbs dulled into lifeless glass. His face was young, soft in structure. Not handsome, not ugly—average in the way most lives are. His medium-length hair lay matted against the forest floor, soaked in his own blood.
A clean horizontal cut ran across his neck, viciously precise—slicing through both carotid arteries.
His school uniform—a white button-up—was drenched in deep, humid red. The scent was thick in the air: coppery, human, grotesquely fresh.
And then—
The wound began to mend.
Flesh knitting. Muscle reconnecting. Blood vessels rethreading like ghostly hands guiding a needle.
The stagnant corpse stirred.
And the boy's eyes—
once dull—
shone again with the flicker of stolen life.