Morning learned my name.
It slipped through the window with the cautious light, found the space between blanket and wrist, and whispered Akira the way the river says stone. I woke to the same room, the same half-burned candle, the same wolf curled like a comma at the end of a good sentence. Yuna lay on her side this time, one hand tucked under her cheek, the other loose on the floor, palm open toward me again—as if the night had been a question she answered in her sleep.
I lay still long enough to feel the house breathing around us: beams settling, bread thinking itself into crust in the oven, Hana's quiet footfall, the small sigh windows make when they give in to warmth. My tail made a cautious arc, then another, testing the air for trouble. It found only day.
Kaji's nose twitched. He yawned without any regard for dignity and thumped his tail once against the pallet. The thump said: rise. The world expects nothing of you but you may come anyway.
I rose.
We ate bread that remembered yesterday and jam that had swallowed last summer and refused to give it back. Hana walked me to the door like she was escorting weather. Yuna trotted backward for two steps, making a ridiculous face to see if I'd smile. I didn't, not yet. She did anyway, as if the loom needed both our threads—one tight, one bright—to hold.
"Academy?" she said.
"Academy," I said back, and the word didn't feel like a cliff this time. It felt like a hill.
The bell chimed a gentle gathering. I moved through the courtyard like a leaf in a current—going because the water went, not because anything pushed. Lila's bees drew little spirals around my head and declared me un-sticky and therefore safe. Elyren nodded, the bells in her hair saying good morning in a language my ears liked.
In the classroom, the teacher—Master Iri—drew a circle on the board. "Perception," she wrote inside it, then put dots along the rim like stars. "Many of you can call fire or coax wind or tell small animals secrets. But spirit-craft begins with attention. What we notice shapes what we can do."
Attention.
I knew that word sharply, painfully. The lab's attention had been a blade. Here, Master Iri's attention was a bowl.
"Let us begin with mirroring," she said. "Not deception. Reflection."
She lifted a hand. Light from the window pooled into her palm as if curious. She turned her wrist; the light made a copy of the maple leaves outside, then a copy of her own hand. Not exact—the lines too soft, the angles not entirely obedient. She laughed at herself softly, and the light laughed with her and faded.
"Anyone willing to try?" she asked.
Hands rose like birds. Lila made a bee appear that was almost a bee, then a flower that was mostly a wish. A boy with deer-brown eyes shaped the shadow of a fawn that forgot which legs went first. Across the room, a fox-eared boy wove a ribbon of color that didn't exist long enough to be named.
Master Iri looked my way. Not expectant. Inviting. "Akira?"
The word went through me like a small stream finding moss.
"I don't know how," I said.
"That's the best start." She smiled, and even her smile taught. "Close your eyes. Listen to the room. Does the light have a scent? Do the shadows have a temperature? Choose one thing to notice so completely the rest of the world politely leaves."
Choose one thing.
I shut my eyes. The room expanded. Paper rasped. Chalk clicked against slate. A bird scolded the sky. Yuna's sleeve brushed the desk when she shifted, a soft sound like leaves agreeing. My ears tipped, hunting the smallest noise and finding—the sound of sunlight through glass. Not a sound, not really. But my body believed it.
I held the light-sound. I imagined its shape: a sheet almost weightless, warm on one side, cool on the other. I lifted a hand because everyone else did, and because the exercise needed a body to live in. The air thickened around my palm.
Something very old inside me turned its head.
A ripple moved across my skin, too fine to be seen, only felt, like the ghost of a breeze on the underside of a leaf. When I opened my eyes, a thing hovered over my hand: not light, not shadow. A suggestion. A shimmer the size of a petal. It tried to be the maple leaves outside and failed kindly, becoming instead a little flicker that could have been water or a veil.
Yuna's breath caught. Not because she was surprised anyone could do a thing, but because I had.
Master Iri's eyes warmed. "Good," she said. "Not pushing. Letting. Mirroring is hospitality."
The shimmer trembled as if embarrassed to be seen. My concentration wobbled. The petal-veil lost its shape and dissolved, a dew-drop on the skin of the air.
"That's enough," Master Iri said before my chest could tighten from failure. "First reflections are shy. Be gentler than you think necessary."
Gentler. Than necessary.
In the lab, gentleness had been a absent variable, a blank that never got a value. Here it was the method.
After, when the class spilled into the courtyard like a jar of buttons, Yuna bumped my shoulder—not hard, not careless. "You made a thing," she whispered.
"It was not a thing," I said, a stubbornness rising before I could stop it. "It was almost."
"Almost is a kind of thing." Yuna grinned, then revised herself. "A good kind."
Lila appeared like a well-meaning weather event. "You mirrored! Did it taste like honey? Sometimes it tastes like honey. Or like wind if the window is open. Do you want a berry?"
She offered one so round and red it looked like a poem about summer. I took it because refusing Lila felt like stepping on a song. Juice ran. Sweet shocked my tongue. Want sharpened a little, and did not hurt.
"Thank you," I said, and my voice almost smiled for me.
By midday, the halls were too full. Too many shoulder-brushes, too many voices making the air busy. I slipped around a pillar into a side garden where the bellflowers grew and the fountain forgot to be loud. Kaji had followed us to the edge of the courtyard and waited with wolf patience. He found me as if my name had left a thread.
"Walk?" Yuna asked, finding me with the same ease, a question already unlocked. "Just to the grove. I told Hana."
I nodded. The room in me that held the day felt crowded; the grove sounded like a door with good hinges.
We followed a path that was only a path because feet agreed it should be. The maple's red melted into green deeper in. The trees changed—they were older here, their bark written in long slow sentences. Moss listened at their feet. The air cooled. My ears pricked without my telling. Birds alphabeted the canopy. A vole moved under the leaves; my attention moved with it—there and then away, not hunger, not hunt, simply knowing.
Yuna walked quietly. She knew the language of not-saying. Kaji padded ahead and back, the forest treating him like a cousin who never stays long but always knows when to come.
Halfway to the grove, a smell interrupted itself: iron and crushed grass and the sharp, sincere reek of fear. Yuna stopped with a silence you learn by living with wolves. Her nostrils flared. She glanced at me. "Stay behind—no, stay beside me."
We crested a small rise and found the fear. A boy—young, younger than me but old enough to be stubborn—sat against a fallen log, both hands pressed to his calf. Blood threaded through his fingers. Beside him, a snare snapped and clicked, anger without target.
"Hey," Yuna said, her voice doing the thing that makes rooms remember they are safe. "May I come closer?"
The boy's eyes were wide glass. He swallowed and nodded without knowing why he trusted the sound of her.
"Akira," Yuna said softly, "can you hold his hand if he wants? Or just sit where he can see your calm."
I did not know if I had calm. I had steadiness, the lab kind, cold and tight. But Yuna's ask didn't turn it into a demand. I knelt at the boy's side and offered my hand without touching. He looked at it like it might bite, then put his fingers on top of mine, barely. His nails were dirty. Mine were all wrong and careful.
"What is your name?" I asked because the silence needed a handle.
"Ren," he whispered.
"Ren," I said back, and the name gave our hands something to hold that was not fear.
Yuna crouched by the leg. The trap's teeth had torn more than punctured; the edges were meat and mess. Kaji snarled low at the metal, offended on the world's behalf.
"This will hurt before it helps," Yuna said. "I'm sorry. I will be quick."
She breathed once, deep and even. Her palms glowed the smallest glow, not a light you see with eyes, a warmth you feel with marrow. She set her hands to the wound and gathered the edges as if convincing a quarrel to listen. The smell of iron lifted. The torn flesh shivered, then knit, not magically instant, but like a time-lapse of moss reclaiming a fallen branch.
Sweat tracked her temple. She kept her voice soft and silly for Ren while the work grew hard. "When I was your age I thought snares were only for rabbits who didn't do their homework. Did this one bite you because you forgot numbers?"
Ren hiccuped a laugh he didn't mean to, and Yuna's shoulders loosened with relief at the sound.
Then the glow faltered.
It wasn't dramatic. It was a candle's flame leaning in a draft. Yuna's face went too pale. She swayed, stubbornly remaining an anchor while her own body tried to be a boat.
"Yuna," I said, not meaning to let fear in my voice and failing.
"I'm fine," she lied in the voice of someone who knows very well what fine is not. She pressed anyway, pulled herself open anyway, gave anyway.
My chest squeezed until my breath forgot its way. The lab had taught me the shapes of pain I could not fix. It had not taught me how to watch someone choose to hurt to help.
"Stop," I said, my hand shaking under Ren's as the word blew past my old walls. "You will break."
"It's only a small tear," she said, and winced as if the words themselves cut. The glow steadied, then guttered. A thin nosebleed drew a line to her lip.
Kaji whined, eyes like gold water. The forest leaned in. The air thinned.
Something in me leaped to be useful. The old part. The trained part. But it reached for a tool and found not a blade, not a plan—a mirror.
Not deception. Reflection.
I did not know how to heal. I knew how to notice. I pulled the shape of Yuna's warmth into my mind: not its light, its gentleness. I held that gentleness so closely the rest of the world took a step back.
"Akira?" Yuna said through her teeth.
"Shh," I said, and the shh wasn't for her, it was for the air. I lifted my hand and imagined Yuna's glow without touching its center, only its outline—like tracing a leaf with a finger in the dark. A thin shimmer gathered over my palm, then bled down my wrist in a quiet ribbon. Not light. Not heat. Softness.
I set that softness near her hands. Not onto the wound. Onto her. The tremble in her shoulders eased as if someone had slid a pillow under a sore place. Her breath evened. The nosebleed stopped being dramatic and decided to be dignified.
"Borrow it," I whispered, not sure if I meant the air or Yuna or the forest. "Take the shape and do it yourself."
She gave me a look that was half astonishment and half warning—I had done something and should not burn for it. Then she nodded once, as if to say: later. She finished the stitch the body wanted. The last of Ren's skin crept together like shy friends meeting in the middle. Yuna released him and sat back onto the ground as if gravity had suddenly remembered her name.
Ren stared like gratitude had turned him into a stone that could only whisper. "It doesn't hurt," he said, and then he began to cry, the exhausted kind, the kind that makes room.
"It will ache," Yuna said, wiping her lip with the back of her hand, leaving a pink smear she didn't notice. "But you will run tomorrow. Not far. Don't tell your mother I said that. She'll come scold me."
Ren nodded ferociously, which meant he would absolutely run farther than he should.
I helped him stand. My tail, without consent, curled around my ankle in a protective loop like a guard that happens to be fluff. He hobbled, then steadied, then stood taller because standing taller is what boys do when someone sees them.
"Go," Yuna said. "The path is clear. The world is allowed to be kind today."
He went, turning twice to see if we had turned into any other sort of story. We hadn't.
When he was gone, I turned on Yuna because fear curdled into anger when it has nowhere else to go. "You didn't stop," I said. The words came too fast and tripped. "You—why—"
"I wouldn't have let him keep that hurt," she said simply. She pushed her hair back and left a small dirt-smear on her temple and finally looked tired in a way that made me want to put the whole forest between her and anything sharp. "I know my limits. I dance on the fence. Today I didn't fall."
I did not know how to say Please don't make me watch you disappear piece by piece to fix every break you find.
So I said, "Next time, I help better."
She blinked. Then she smiled, slow as moss. "You helped now."
I looked at my hand as if something new might be written on it. It looked the same. It did not feel the same. The shimmer I'd gathered had left a coolness, like I had held riverlight too long and it had remembered me.
Kaji bumped Yuna's shoulder with the sort of controlled force that says the wolf is worried and will not admit it. She scratched his ear and leaned against him without arguing pride. She did not ask me to carry her, and I would have, though I was not sure how one carries someone without turning them into cargo.
"Home?" I asked.
"Not yet," she said. She tilted her head toward the deeper trees. "The grove is close. It's quiet there in a louder way."
We went. The path narrowed to a ribbon and then to suggestion. The trees made a room of their own—a circle of boles with bark like old hands. In the center stood a stone that had lost all its edges to rain and time. Hanging from a branch above it: a string of small bells gone mute with age, each with a little fox face carved into its metal.
Yuna lit no fire. The grove did not expect fire. She sat on the root of a beech that had grown like a bench on purpose. I stood because sitting felt like admitting something I hadn't learned to admit.
"Close your eyes," she said softly, "and listen for what doesn't need you."
I did. The forest came, not in a rush, not a flood—a presence. Ant feet muttered under bark. A woodpecker debated a trunk. Light traveled between leaves with the patience of old people walking to market. My tail stilled because the world asked it to.
Under all that, a thinner sound. Not heard. Remembered. A ringing wrapped in distance, like bells underwater. My ears tipped, but not my fox ears—something older, interior. The sound rose, shivered along my bones, and for a heartbeat the darkness behind my eyes grew very bright.
The grove were not just trees. It was a place where the world's skin is thinner.
A picture unfurled—not drawn, not given. A moon hung low enough to touch with a fingertip. A fox stood on a ridge of cloud, not a fox like me, a fox built of night with stars caged in each tail. Ten tails arched behind it, not countable, counted anyway. Its eyes were lamps and lakes. Not kind. Not cruel. Vast. When it looked at me, my ribs remembered being a door.
A whisper that wasn't a voice: We are the shape you will be when your choosing is done.
Choosing. Not destiny. Choosing.
I gasped. The grove let the sound dissolve. Yuna's sleeve brushed my arm as if reminding me of ordinary cloth.
"What did you hear?" she asked, voice a hand on a ledge.
"Bells," I said, and the word felt too small. "And a… tail I cannot count."
Yuna's lips parted, then closed. She had learned when to pry and when to place a question down like bread on a table for later. "The old fox shrines used to hang bells," she said. "We don't keep them anymore. But sometimes the air remembers. It lends memory to those who need it."
"Do I need it?" I asked.
"I think so." She stretched her legs out and winced because her muscles had opinions. "Maybe the memory needs you, too."
I didn't understand, and yet the not-understanding rested easier in this room of trees than it would have in any other room.
We stayed until the bells I couldn't hear grew quiet and the shadows agreed to become evening. When we walked home, Yuna's steps were slow. Twice I offered my sleeve the way she had offered hers. Twice she ignored me out of pride. The third time, she didn't. She hooked one finger in the fabric near my wrist as if catching a promise before it could blow away.
Hana put tea in us before questions. It smelled like mountains that had decided to be gentle. She nodded once when Yuna confessed the half-truth of the day, then put a cool hand to her forehead without drama.
"Eat," Hana said. "Tomorrow is not an argument; it will be here when you arrive."
After bowls and bread, the house learned to be night again. Kaji made a nest of himself at the hearth and declared it sacred. Yuna sat on the floor with her back to the bed frame as if the day had decided to rest against her on purpose. She looked at me in the candlelight with eyes that seemed to find me where I hid and then stop, on purpose, at the threshold.
"Will you be okay if I sleep?" she asked.
The question cracked something invisible. "Yes," I said. Then, before fear could turn it into a lie, "If you leave your hand."
She could have laughed. She didn't. She slid her palm onto the pallet the way you place bread where a shy cat can smell it. I moved my hand until my fingers hovered above hers and then, carefully, lowered them until our knuckles touched. Skin. Warm. The sort of contact that does not ask, only includes.
"I had a dream," I said. That wasn't true; I had had a vision in the grove. But the night had its own words, and dream was the closest.
"Tell me," she said, already half gone into sleep but still offering her attention like a small lantern you keep lit even when the room is bright.
"Many tails," I whispered. "And bells that are not bells."
"Mmm," she said. "Sounds like you are growing."
I made a doubtful noise that would have been a laugh if it had learned to stand.
Sleep didn't land like a blow anymore. It arrived like weather.
It brought with it a different place: white hallways, long and sterile, the slap of bare feet. Not mine. Many. The old dream. The lab. The failed alarms. A technician's mouth opening around a shout that turned into the word containment. The crown over the chair. The tearing. The thread tugging behind my heart. The fall through a stairwell that became a forest.
"Don't," a voice said—mine, not mine. "Don't step out—"
The window exploded again. The air punched me. Glass sang my name with little knives. I felt the thread yank and the stairwell stretch until the world became a straw and I was water.
I woke with my breath forgetting how.
Night pressed. The candle was a lonely star. The house was a ship at anchor, safe but moving anyway. Panic spread thin over my skin like the memory of ice.
"Akira," Yuna said without lifting her head. How she knew my name had come out like a broken thing, I don't know. Maybe the bed frame told her. Maybe my hand did. Maybe the room had learned us both.
"I'm here," she added.
The words were a rope thrown lightly.
I didn't take her hand. I moved my fingers until they slid into the spaces between hers, hesitant, like a child stepping into ocean for the first time. Our hands were not small. They were precise. They were here. Yuna's fingers closed—not trapping, enclosing. "You're here," she said again, and made the here wide enough to fit the lab and the forest and the candle and the wolf and me.
My breath found its way back like a dog that had run off to chase a foolish rabbit.
"I hate the glass," I said into the blanket. "It sings."
"I know," Yuna said. "The worst songs are the ones nobody meant to sing."
We lay with the candle making the ceiling into water. Kaji snored once as if scolding a dream. Hana's chair creaked a small mother-sound from the other room and then went quiet.
The wideness in my chest surged. I let it. The pricking behind my eyes asked permission. I gave it. Tears moved without drama; Yuna did not count them. She did not say it would be okay. The silence said: it may not be okay and also you are not alone inside the not-okay.
After a while, the room shifted. Not sound, not light—me. A hush along my spine, a tiny pulse at the base of my tail. I rolled just enough to see in the candle's patient flame.
For a heartbeat—less—the air behind my tail thickened, a seam of brightness opening like a silver fish turning under dark water. Not a second tail. The promise of one. A ghost-thread. It flickered, then folded back into skin and breath and ordinary.
Yuna's hand tightened on mine, not from fear. Wonder.
"Did you—?" she began.
"I don't know," I said, though I did. The grove's bells had followed me home.
"Good," she whispered, and the word made the ceiling higher. "Growing is loud in quiet ways."
We didn't speak more. The candle knelt lower and lower until it bowed itself out. The dark that settled wasn't emptiness. It was a quilt. When sleep came again, it did not bring the lab. It brought the grove, the bright fox with its many not-countable tails, and a sense—not of destiny, not a map—a horizon.
Before I drifted, a thought floated up like a shy fish and bumped my ribs from the inside: when Yuna had said my name in the morning, the room had answered. When I said hers now—very softly, so softly even wolves would claim not to have heard—I felt the room answer again.
"Yuna," I breathed.
"Mm?" she answered, already two steps into dream.
"Thank you," I said, the words so new they stumbled.
Her thumb stroked the back of my hand once. "Goodnight, Akira," she murmured, and sleep tucked us in.
Dawn returned like it likes returning. The candle was a stub. The air had the taste of first bread and old wood and the echo of bells no one had rung. My tail lay along my leg like a bridge. When I lifted it, a faint shimmer ran the length—not light, not fire, only the idea of light remembering itself.
I almost smiled, and the almost was echo enough.
Outside, the village began again. Inside, so did I.
Somewhere between sleep and waking, a voice the size of a leaf said: Ten is only a number. Grow in kindness. The tails follow.
I did not know if the voice was the grove, or the fox, or my own bones practicing being older than they were. It didn't matter.
I turned my head. Yuna slept with her hand still where our hands had been, palm open toward me. I put my fingers beside hers, not touching, a mirror—not deception, reflection—and watched the light sneak in to learn our names.