The Weight of the Lie

The city of Kaiyn sleeps like a corpse that refuses to rot.

Buildings crush the streets with their brutalist presence, windowless, like hollow concrete colossi stained by age. The pillars curve under their own weight, and spiral staircases lead nowhere — steps ending in holes suspended mid-air. The sky, if it still existed, was a pale-gray membrane, artificial and unmoving, like a pane of smoked glass under which the rain fell endlessly.

A rain that did not wet — it simply passed through.

Hiyoru Tsukari walked through this metaphysical debris. Her feet left no trace. The roads were covered in symbols scratched by nails, as if souls had tried to write their pain into the concrete before disappearing.

She carried an umbrella.

Or something like it.

It was made of thin bones, long and interwoven into the shape of an inverted flower. The structure trembled with a wind that didn’t exist, and petals of translucent membrane throbbed like living flesh.

The name they gave it was Dead Spring.

And every time Hiyoru lied, it bled.

Today, three flowers had bloomed. Three lies.

Or were they stolen truths?

The most recent still pulsed, freshly opened, on the edge of the umbrella. It had the texture of a warm memory and the color of an old regret.

When she looked at the flower, a voice echoed in her mind:

— "I never wanted to be born like this."

She froze.

She didn’t recognize that memory.

But she knew it was hers.

---

In the distance, the bells of an inactive cathedral rang — though no sound could be heard.

The city responded to her presence as if she were an intruder in a play rehearsed a thousand times. Broken windows closed as she passed. Shadows slipped away. Statues turned their eyes, denying her existence.

Kaiyn had been built atop the remains of a dead Threshold — Oriun, He of Rotten Compassion.

Even in ruins, his influence echoed through the bowels of the city.

Hiyoru could feel it in her veins. In her spine. In the silent sound of rain.

She approached a mirror hanging from a dead tree, whose bark was made of dried human skin. The mirror did not show her reflection.

It showed a child with hollow eyes and a mouth sewn shut.

The child raised a hand.

Pointed to the umbrella.

The newest flower closed.

And then, fell.

---

Hiyoru picked it up with trembling fingers.

The flower was light — but it carried an impossible weight.

The moment she touched it, a new vision flooded her thoughts:

A hospital.

A hallway with mirrored floors.

A figure in white, its face turned inside out.

Herself, perhaps.

Lying on a bed with tubes stuck in her eyes.

Voices in echo:

— "She lied to herself until she no longer knew how to stop."

She recoiled. Vomited black ink onto the floor.

The umbrella moaned, a sharp note like a muffled cry.

The remaining flowers pulsed with fear.

The sky changed. A crack tore through the horizon — as if the world were a shell about to break.

And from it, something fell.

It had no shape.

It had intention.

---

She ran.

Not out of fear.

But because, for the first time, she felt something remembered her.

Not the Hiyoru of now.

The one from before the first lie.

The one who might still be waiting... beyond the Nine Thresholds.

The umbrella fully opened.

It rained dead flowers.

And so, she walked on.