The Hunger of Silent Gods

he sky above Kaiyn didn’t open.It was torn away.
Shards of false firmament drifted like broken glass, each piece reflecting a different city — some older, some yet to come. Hiyoru walked among shadows that moved without bodies, as if the city’s memory had been given flesh.
Dead Spring hung heavy in her hands, its weight more than bone and membrane. The flowers inside beat with uneven rhythms, each one like a heart out of step with her own. One wept silently. Another turned to dust the moment she blinked. Every step pulled petals loose, as though moving forward itself were an unforgivable crime.
On the horizon, fossilized megatowers rose into the scarred sky, wrapped in cables that dangled like veins. Some leaned into the void, others stretched so far upward they disappeared into the wound above.
And then — the city breathed.
Not with air.With pressure.Her bones ached as if she were standing inside a giant lung.
— “You don’t belong to what breathes.”The voice between thoughts returned, sharper now, close enough to sting.
Hiyoru said nothing. Words felt dangerous. Every time she tried to speak, it was as if another part of her identity slipped away.
Ahead lay a suspended walkway, leading into a circular opening that pulsed like a mouth made for swallowing more than flesh. A half-erased mark was carved into the rim: ENRAIA – The Threshold of the Transplanted Mind.
She stopped at the edge.Too soon, she thought. The second threshold already calling her.
From the depths came no shape, no form. Only voices.
They rose in chorus, layered and fractured — thousands of people speaking at once through a single throat. From the sound, a figure climbed upward: faceless, covered in jars filled with preserved organs, glass tubes breathing on their own, eyes drifting in liquid. It was not a body. It was an archive of stolen memories.
— “Hiyoru Tsukari…”Her name entered her mind without being spoken.
She raised Dead Spring. One flower burst open. Rain fell.
But the drops never reached the ground.The figure drank them in midair, smiling without a mouth.
— “You lie to avoid being replaced. But you already were.”
The floor cracked like glass underfoot. Mirrors surfaced, each one showing her — not as she was, but as she might have been. A child smiling. An old woman with hollow eyes. A corpse with stitched lips. None moved with her.
The weight pressed down until her knees shook. For a heartbeat, she believed none of them were false. Perhaps she was.
Dead Spring trembled.And then, for the first time, it bled without a lie.
Flowers fell in waves, each one a secret without an owner. And somewhere in the distance, something laughed — a laugh without sound, the kind that made her realize the city was not just ruins. It was watching.
Hiyoru inhaled sharply, the taste of rust thick in her throat.And with nothing else to hold onto, she stepped into Enraia.

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Inside Enraia
The corridor refused to stay the same. One moment glass under her feet, cold and fragile. The next, soft flesh that pulsed with her steps. She had the sense she wasn’t walking through space, but through something alive.
Jars lined the walls, each containing a human silhouette. Some whispered broken words. Others screamed soundlessly, mouths wide against the glass. Her chest tightened when she realized the faces were all hers.
Different ages. Different scars. Different smiles she didn’t remember.
Dead Spring dragged at her arms, heavier with every step. The flowers beat faster now, like borrowed hearts running out of time.
— “You don’t remember because you weren’t meant to.”The voice came from a jar to her left.
Inside, a version of herself stared back with transplanted eyes, each iris replaced by a shifting symbol. That other Hiyoru slammed her head against the glass, again and again, until cracks spread across it.
— “Let me out. I’ll take your place.”
The jar shattered. Liquid poured across the ground, and the replica crawled forth, boneless, her borrowed eyes glowing with a thousand memories.
Hiyoru stumbled back.Dead Spring opened of its own will, releasing two flowers at once. The rain fell thick, acidic, a storm meant to erase.
But the replica did not melt. She opened her mouth and drank the lies. Each drop that should have burned her instead became fuel. Her body stretched taller, skin forming around stolen faces.
— “The more you lie, the more I live.”
The floor cracked wide. Circular mirrors rose around them, showing not reflections but futures. In every one, Hiyoru was dead. Except in one — where she still lived, but faceless.
Her grip failed. She tried to shut Dead Spring, but the umbrella resisted. Flowers kept forcing themselves open, spilling lies she didn’t know she carried.
The replica smiled with borrowed mouths.— “I am the true you. Without flaws. When I take your place, no one will remember you were ever here.”
The walls groaned. More jars burst open, spilling dozens of copies: children, elders, corpses, each crawling toward her, each wearing her skin.
Hiyoru’s throat burned. She gasped — and a flower bloomed inside her mouth.
Pain tore through her as petals cut their way out, blood mixing with translucent drops of memory. Each breath was rain against her own lungs.
But in that agony came clarity.The flower wasn’t her enemy. It was a seal.
She forced herself to swallow it whole.Swallowed the petals, the blood, the memories that weren’t hers.
The replica shrieked, body cracking like overheated glass. The other copies disintegrated into bone dust, pulled into the abyss yawning at the center of the threshold.
Dead Spring flared open.Every flower withered, falling as pale ash.And in their place, a single new bloom rose — colorless, transparent, refusing to reflect even light.
Hiyoru touched it with shaking hands.And the voice between thoughts spoke clearer than ever before:
— “The first lie wasn’t spoken. It was swallowed.”
Enraia shuddered.The jars collapsed. The walls tore open. The ground dissolved into nothing.
She had survived. But survival didn’t feel like victory. Her throat burned. Her identity felt thinner, stretched to the breaking point.
When she emerged back into Kaiyn, the city was wrong in new ways. Towers leaned like voyeurs. The sky’s scar pulsed like a living eye.
And someone was waiting.
A woman with hair like black water stood in the shadows. Where her face should have been, there was only a shattered mirror.
The mirror tilted, catching Hiyoru’s reflection. And behind her, infinite others.
— “Now you know you’re not the only one. But you still don’t know if you’re the real one.”