Prologue: River that remembers

The river had always been there.

Long before the town grew around it, before the lanterns were strung along its banks, before anyone thought to give it a name it simply was. Still. Patient. Watching.

It remembered everything that passed over it. Every fallen petal, every whispered secret, every pair of eyes that ever looked into its depths searching for something they couldn't name.

And sometimes only sometimes it looked back. "Who are you?"

White stood at the water's edge, hands in his pockets, staring across the narrow river at a girl he had never seen before. 

She stood on the opposite bank, close enough to notice, too far to reach.

She didn't answer immediately. Instead she looked at him the way people look at something that shouldn't be there.

"...Who are you?" Kiro shot back, crossing her arms.

A beat of silence passed between them the kind that feels longer than it actually is. Then the river went quiet.

Not peaceful-quiet. Wrong-quiet. The gentle sound of moving water simply stopped, as if the world had taken a breath and forgotten to let it go. 

White glanced down. Kiro glanced down. The surface of the river had gone completely still, flat as a mirror, reflecting the twilight sky above.

And then it changed.

The reflection shifted not the sky, not the lanterns, not the cherry blossoms drifting from the trees overhead. Their reflections. White and Kiro, staring back up from the water except the versions below weren't standing on opposite banks. 

They were sitting together, side by side, legs dangling over the edge of a cliff somewhere, shoulders almost touching, watching a horizon neither of them recognized.

"What... is happening?" Kiro's voice came out smaller than she intended.

"I don't know." White said it quietly, like he was afraid speaking too loud would shatter whatever this was.

Kiro leaned slightly forward, studying the image in the water. Her own face looked back at her relaxed in a way she didn't recognize, like someone who had finally stopped running from something.

"Is that... me?" White's words came out uneven, stumbling over themselves.

Then, as suddenly as it stopped the river breathed again. The sound of water returned. The reflection rippled, broke apart, and settled back into something ordinary. Just a river. Just two strangers on opposite banks.

Above them, the first firework cracked open the night sky a burst of gold that scattered across the dark like a rumor.

Then another. Then another.

White pulled his hand from his pocket and pressed it against the side of his head, eyes still fixed on the water. "I'm seeing things," he muttered to himself.

Across the river, Kiro had already turned away. Her first step back toward town was slow, like part of her was still deciding.

"I'm going home."

Neither of them looked back.

Two people. Two directions. And above them both, fireworks burned bright against the sky  brilliant and fleeting, the way most beautiful things are.

The river said nothing else.

End of Prologue