The forgotten wing of the Library was a mausoleum of silence.
Shiro pushed open the rotting oak door, and the stale air inside pressed against him like a shroud. Dust lay thick across the shelves, the tomes sagging under their own neglect. The single shaft of light from a cracked window illuminated the gloom like a blade.
He moved deeper, fingers brushing spines that whispered of centuries. On the table lay a ledger, its ink faded but legible. The diagrams inside were grotesque, constellations bent into shapes that did not exist, declinations shifted by decree. Cassiopeia's throne tilted east, Polaris marked wrong. Lies carved into parchment. Shiro's throat tightened.
Is this what Kuro meant by his Stars were wrong?
He pulled another book from the shelf, older, its leather cracked. The diagrams matched the sky he had seen from the rooftop. Cassiopeia tilted west. Polaris held steady. The stars were constant. The lies were human. The truth settled in his gut like a stone. It wasn't just a few errors.
He pulled another volume, then another, stacking them in the dim light. "Celestial Mandates: Year 8765 of the Oji Reign." The diagrams inside showed the same perversions. Ursa Minor's tail was shortened, as if the great bear had been hobbled. Lyra's harp strings were drawn straight and tight, no longer the graceful arcs Aki had described from the old songs. Each alteration was small, surgical, but their collective effect was a sky bent to a narrative.
He found a chart comparing "Pre Shattering" and "Current" alignments. In the old drawing, Cassiopeia's five stars formed a proud, lopsided 'W,' the queen eternally tumbling from her throne in a dance of celestial humility. In the new, the lines had been redrawn, the constellation was tidied into a rigid, almost smug 'M,' seated upright as if on a commandeered throne. A footnote, written in a tight, bureaucratic hand, read: "Correction applied to reflect stable sovereignty. Myth of the 'Tumbling Queen' deemed demoralizing and inaccurate."
Shiro traced the old lines with a trembling finger. This wasn't astronomy. It was propaganda written in starlight. The Kings, first the Iron King Tetsu Oji, and now the Butcher Ryo, hadn't just ruled the land; they had tried to rewrite the heavens to justify their reign only Shojiki didn't fall under this manipulation, to make the very cosmos bow.
His breath fogged in the cold air. Aki's stories weren't just fables. They were a resistance. Her feverish tales of Nyxarion, where stars were alive and laws, were a direct counter to this dead, manipulated sky. She had given him the true map, and he hadn't even known it. The carvings on his shack wall, mocked for their clumsiness, were likely more accurate than the official charts in this Academy.
A wave of nausea hit him. If they could lie about this, about the very fabric of the universe, what else was a lie? The history of the Shattering? The reasons for the plague? The Butcher King's right to rule? The foundations of his world, already cracked by hunger and cold, now felt like they were dissolving into sand. He braced his hands on the table, head bowed, the weight of the deception pressing down. The library's silence was no longer peaceful; it was complicit.
Footsteps echoed.
Shiro turned sharply. Kuro stood in the doorway, storm grey eyes unreadable. He didn't smirk. He didn't sneer. He simply held a small river stone in his hand, turning it over as if it were a talisman. His gaze swept the shelves, frantic, searching.
"What are you looking for?" Shiro asked.
Kuro's voice was low, stripped of performance. "Someone dear to me. Names that begin with N." He didn't elaborate. His fingers tightened around the stone, knuckles white.
Shiro watched him sift through records, pulling volumes, scanning pages, discarding them with growing desperation. The silence was heavy, broken only by the rasp of parchment. Finally, Kuro stopped, shoulders slumping. "Nothing again," he muttered, the words hollow.
He turned to Shiro, and for a moment the mask was gone. His storm grey eyes were raw, pained. He reached into his satchel and pulled out folded cloth. A uniform.
"You need to look the part," Kuro said, his voice rough. "Right now you stick out like a sore thumb. Mother told me to give it to you before she left." The last words caught in his throat, aching. Shiro saw the crack, the boy beneath the cruelty, the wound that never healed.
Shiro's fingers tightened around the fabric. It was beautiful, heavy, regal, scarlet and black with gold accents. He should have felt proud, but instead the gift sat in his arms like a poisoned chalice. Was this kindness, or another mask? To wear it meant to look the part, to blend into the cage. Was he complicit now, another actor in the play? The gratitude in his chest warred with a rising dread. The uniform was not just cloth; it was a costume, and he feared what role it demanded of him.
For a long moment, they just stood in the dusty silence. The performance was absent. It was just two boys in a tomb of lies.
"Who is 'N'?" Shiro asked quietly, not looking at him, focusing on the faded spine of the book Kuro had discarded.
Kuro didn't answer immediately. He ran his thumb over the smooth river stone in his palm. "Someone I lost. Someone my father... removed. From the records. From the histories. From everywhere." His voice was stripped bare, hollowed out. "I have a fragment of a memory. I thought... maybe a name survived here. It'd rejog my memory.
"Why a stone?"
A ghost of a smile, bitter and young, touched Kuro's lips. "She gave it to me. From the river behind the summer palace. Said it was a piece of the world that couldn't be edited. Cold, hard, and true." He clenched it. "It's all I have left. Sometimes I think I imagined her. Then I hold this, and I know I didn't."
Shiro dared to look at him. The prince's face was pale, his storm grey eyes wide with a vulnerability that made him look like the child he still was. "You could ask mother. She'd know."
Kuro flinched as if struck. "I can't. Asking makes it real. Makes it a... a demand for a truth that could get her killed. She already carries enough of my ghosts." He finally met Shiro's gaze. "You can't understand. Having someone to protect is a luxury you can't afford when you're the heir to a cage. You just... you make sure the walls close in on you, not them. Even if it means becoming one of the walls yourself."
The confession hung between them, vast and terrifying. This wasn't the bored noble or the cruelty of the past few days. This was a boy drowning in grief and duty, building a fortress of cruelty to keep everyone else safe from the fallout of his own existence.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Shiro stared at Kuro intently, "Why do you do this?" he whispered. "Why are you one person here, another out there?"
Kuro's jaw tightened. "Because crowns are cages. And cages demand masks."
Before Shiro could answer, voices approached. Nobles entered the library, their eyes sharp, expectant. Watching. Waiting.
The change was instantaneous and chilling. One second, Kuro was a raw nerve; the next, his spine straightened, his chin lifted, and a familiar, contemptuous light flooded his eyes. But Shiro, now watching for it, saw the mechanics. Saw the deep breath Kuro took before he turned, the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw before he spoke, as if steeling himself for a distasteful task.
"Pathetic, Malkor!" Kuro's voice rang out, too loud, too crisp in the quiet. It was a stage voice. He strode forward, not towards the entering nobles, Lord Fenric's sneering son and two of his sycophants, but for them. "You think dust and rot will teach you the heavens? Scrabbling in the dark for scraps better men threw away?"
He reached Shiro and shoved him hard against the table. The impact was real, the ledger scattering with a crash. But Kuro's hand, where it gripped Shiro's tunic for a second to steady the 'attack,' gave a brief, urgent squeeze before letting go.
"This archive is for scholars, not charity cases!" Kuro continued, turning to address the nobles directly, spreading his arms in theatrical disdain. "Look at him! Like a gutter rat who's found a discarded crown and thinks it makes him king!"
Lord Fenric's son, Arin, laughed, a sharp, delighted sound. "Putting the new pup in his place, your Highness? Good. The Malkor name is thin enough without him dragging mud through it."
"Someone has to," Kuro sneered, the mask perfectly in place. But his eyes, when they flicked to Shiro over Arin's shoulder, held none of the mockery in his voice. They were flat, warning, and impossibly weary. Play along, they seemed to say.
"Come, let's find real texts," Kuro said, turning his back on Shiro with finality. "The air in here reeks of desperation." He led the nobles away, their laughter bouncing off the ancient shelves. As he passed through the doorway, he didn't look back, but his shoulders were held with a rigid tension that spoke of a performance that cost the actor everything.
When they left, their laughter echoing down the corridor, Kuro, his mask firmly back in place. Their laughter was not simple mockery. It was grotesque, theatrical, the satisfied chuckling of spectators leaving a playhouse after a well performed tragedy. They filed out like patrons departing a pantomime, delighted by cruelty as entertainment. Shiro stood in the wreckage of the act, the ledger scattered, the uniform heavy in his arms, and felt himself reduced to a prop in the puppet prince's theatre.
Shiro remained, chest heaving, the uniform clutched in his hands. His mind was a storm. Which is real? The boy who searched for names with a stone in his hand, who spoke of someone dear, who gave me this uniform with aching words? Or the cruel prince who performs for nobles like a puppet in a play?
He pressed his forehead to the scarlet cloth, fury and despair twisting inside him. "I'm lost," he whispered. "I don't know who you are."
Above, unseen by either boy, the prismatic crow perched on a crumbling gable. Its fractured eyes shimmered with unnatural colours, unblinking, watching.
Shiro didn't move until the last echo of polished boots faded. He slid down the leg of the table to the cold floor, the scarlet uniform bundled in his lap like a wound. The fabric was fine, the embroidery precise. Mother told me to give it to you. The words echoed, a lifeline in the chaos.
His mind, a storm of contradictions, finally latched onto her. Valeria. The soldier with gentle hands. The woman who buried children and carried a ghost of kindness. The anchor in Kuro's tempest.
Is she like him? The thought slithered in, cold and unwanted. Does she have a mask too? A kind one, instead of a cruel one? Was her care for Aki, her promise of safety... was that just another layer of someone else's game?
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. No. He couldn't believe that. He wouldn't. The memory of her applying salve to Aki's scarred back, the focus, the lack of pity, the raw, practical care, it had felt as real as the pain in his own scarred hands. She had looked at Aki and seen a person, not a tool. She had looked at him and seen a son, not a pawn. She wouldn't, he told himself fiercely. She wouldn't lie. Not like that. Not about Aki.
Valeria felt like the echo of the mother he never knew, fierce, protective, true. She was the solid ground in his shifting world. Kuro's performance proved how deep the deception ran in this world, but Valeria's presence was the proof that not everything was a lie. She was the guard at the gate of a different kind of cage, one that kept the monsters out, not in.
The fear remained, a thin, cold wire in his chest. But he wrapped the certainty of her around it. All he had to do was wait. Wait for Valeria to return. She would make sense of the shattered boy. She would ensure Aki's safety was real. She would help him navigate this labyrinth of performed cruelty and edited stars. She had to. Because if she was just another mask, then the entire world was a stage, and he was the only one who didn't know his lines.
He clung to the uniform, to the memory of her steady voice, and made his choice: he would trust, just a little longer. He would wait for the storm to pass, and for his anchor to return.
The walk back to the dormitory was a blur of cold stone and colder thoughts. When Shiro pushed open his door, the lone candle on his desk illuminated a single, folded slip of parchment that hadn't been there before. No seal. Just crisp, precise folds.
He snatched it up, unfurling it. The handwriting was achingly familiar, the same sharp, elegant script from the first note left on the cartwheel, the one signed P.P. The one about Cassiopeia's tilt.
Malkor,
The academy roof. Above the forbidden library. Tomorrow night after Harkens lesson.
Come alone.
P.P.
He stared at the letters. P.P. A dead poet. A paranoid scholar. A puppet Prince. The puzzle he'd never solved. But now, he knew. He'd seen this handwriting a hundred times over in the last few days, correcting star charts, carving notes in margins. It was Kuro's.
A hot, sudden rage boiled up from his gut, so fierce it stole his breath. He crumpled the parchment in his fist. Why? The question screamed inside his skull. If the boy in the shack was real, why this? Why the performance, the cruelty, the shove in the library? And why only show the other you to me when we're alone?
He paced the tiny room, the crumpled note like a burning coal in his hand. Am I a deeper part of your game? A special kind of fool you keep close to laugh at? Or am I just... practice? Someone to rehearse your humanity on before you have to bury it for the day?
The uncertainty was a cage worse than any he'd known in Higaru. At least there, the threats were straightforward, hunger, cold, violence. Here, the threat was a person who could be a brother and a tormentor in the same hour, whose truth shifted with the audience. Which one is the lie? The kindness or the cruelty?
"I'm lost," he whispered to the empty room, the admission scraping his throat raw. "I'm really, truly lost."
He sank onto his pallet, the stiff new uniform still folded beside him. The rage bled away, leaving a hollow, aching exhaustion. He wasn't a player in this game; he was a piece being knocked back and forth, and he didn't even know the rules.
He clutched the blanket Valeria gave him, a child's plea forming in the dark. Mother. Please. Come back. He needed her steady voice, her unflinching eyes. She would see through the masks. She would tell him what was real.
Fatigue finally pulled him under, but his dreams were not of stars or cages. They were of smoke and candlelight, of the shack's warm, crowded gloom. He dreamed of the two weeks of laughter, of Aki's weak but genuine smiles, of Valeria's patient hands, and of Kuro, not the noble, but the boy. The boy who argued about star tail bends with passionate, childish intensity, whose laugh was short and genuine, who carved a chaotic, caged star token and called it a gift. He dreamed it so vividly he could smell the wood dust and the herbal salve. For a few fleeting moments, he had a family. And he had a brother.
He clung to that dream as he slept, a fragile lifeboat in a sea of lies, even as the crumpled summons from the puppet Prince lay on the floor beside him.
Waiting for tomorrow.
Will Shiro Go To The Rooftop Tomorrow?
