Yumi no Kuni [Part 1]

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Where am I?

I was disoriented.

The last thing I remembered was being in my room, staring at textbooks deep into the night.

Now I found myself outside.

I stood up and looked around.

It was a neighborhood. My neighborhood. But not, at the same time.

Nothing made sense here.

I stood in the middle of an empty street. A pale, silent city stood before me.

The buildings stretched endlessly in both directions, in almost-too-perfect rows. Sterile, as if no one had ever lived inside them. Each unit was the exact same. Completely symmetrical, completely lifeless.

There was no breeze, no rustling of leaves, no sounds of the world that should have been. It was as if this place was vacant of all forms of life.

And overhead, the moon.

It loomed impossibly large and impossibly luminous. A pale, distant pearl that bathed everything below it in milk. It followed me wherever I walked. Never moving, never setting. 

I knew that time here was meaningless.

I reached out to touch a nearby lamppost, but it rippled upon contact as if I'd just touched the surface of a puddle. 

Here, everything was fragile. Nothing was permanent.

I started walking.

In one direction. Any direction.

The echoes of my footsteps, too loud to be natural. 

And the more I walked, the more bizarre the world around me became.

There was a melody.
One that I’d heard before in my dreams.
The same one that filled my head in the mornings and kept me awake at night. 

Floating objects appeared in the sky.

Books flapped their covers like exhausted birds, their pages flipping as they did.
They moved sporadically, in all directions, as if irresolute of their direction. 

Instruments spun lazily in midair, swirling around me in a dizzying dance. Flutes, trombones, grand pianos… bobbing in erratic, looping patterns. They performed their own concert in the sky.

I continued moving forward. The city around me changed too.

The buildings, once perfectly lifeless in their outline, started to bend and warp. Their surfaces, once pristine, became faceless and crude. Their edges curled inward like twisted parodies of what should have been. 

The roads underfoot cracked open and gave way to dirt and weeds.

I tried to look back.

But the path behind me was already gone.

The path ahead was all that was left.

Eventually, the city had vanished entirely.

I found myself standing in a new space.

A school courtyard. Though, not one I knew.

There were no sounds. No students, no scuffle of shoes, no ringing of bells. Just me.

The air carried the vague scent of something familiar. Like old paper or dried flowers that mingled with the sterile smell of washed concrete.

At the entrance, a sign:

Hoshino High School

I stepped forward.

The scent of concrete disappeared.

The courtyard gave way to an endless field of grass. 

And the sky...

The moon still loomed, an unmovable orb. Except now, it was accompanied by a sprawling cosmic expanse, filling the sky with a sea of beautiful, anarchic constellations. An explosion of colors and patterns that stretched from the moon to the horizon, and back like a Van Gogh masterpiece brought alive. 

And then… I saw her.

Far across the field. Just within my line of sight.

Her figure was small, barely visible against the star-woven backdrop of this place.

She stood there, still, but her hair waved at me.

For a while, we said nothing. Just looking at the other, a hundred yards apart.

Then her voice came. It bounced across the hills of swaying grass and reached me. Almost too distant to interpret. 

“…Who are you?” She said. 

I tried to say something, anything, but the words got caught in the distance between us.

“I—I’m—”

The girl hesitated. “Have we… met before?”

Her outline was like a weak candle flame candle guttering in a storm.

“I… I’m not sure…”

The wind began to stir. It became steadily more difficult for me to hear her voice, and my own as well.

She spoke again, her voice fraying at the ends: “Why is this happening?”

Her voice was becoming increasingly difficult to hear against the whirls of wind. The words took a while to bounce to me.

“Are you the reason for all of this?” She asked. 

It was a question I had no answer to. 

The girl took a step back. The wind tore at the field, bending the grass violently.

“I—I don’t want this!” she cried. “Please, stay away from me!”

The wind was howling now, whipping around me like an unforgiving blizzard. My eyes stung and my throat dried.

The sky twisted. Constellations spun like marbles spilled across the floor.

The girl turned to leave, her form already starting to dissolve into the storm.

Panic clawed at my chest.

I didn’t want her to. I still had much to say.

“Wait!” I called.

The word barely left my throat, carried off in the roar of the wind.

But somehow she heard. The girl turned again.

I had to say something. Anything at all.

“The priestess!” I shouted, cupping my mouth.

The wind tore at the words, but they managed to cross the gap.

She cupped her hands to her ears.

“What?!” She called back.

“Go to the altar! Tell the priestess you saw me! The priestess—!”

The girl began to kneel down as she battled the same wind as I was. 

She said nothing.

I couldn’t tell if my words had reached her, or if she had heard me at all.

Then the sky finally gave in and the constellations imploded. The moon cracked open like a soft-boiled egg. My vision began to cloud.

And everything folded inwards.

The sky.

   The moon.

       The field.

           The girl.

All of it.

Peeling away like tattered fabric.

Melting to black.

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