The house was alive with laughter.
Candles flickered on the dining table, silverware clinking, voices rising in celebration. A surprise, they had said — a celebration for Haruma. The room brimmed with warmth, chatter, and the bright colours of joy that seemed almost too loud for Yuma to bear.
He stood in the corner, a faint smile carefully placed on his lips, his posture straight. His eyes scanned the room but did not settle. The excitement was not his; it never had been.
In a world where magic has faded into obscurity, Sakuramori Rion lives his tenth life.
Three centuries ago, the Sakuramori clan stood as guardians against evil, tasked with capturing and sealing beings that brought calamity to humanity. On the night Rion attempted to seal the most dangerous of them all—Wasureri—tragedy struck. Possession, bloodshed, and irreversible choices left the clan destroyed, and Rion condemned as a practitioner of dark magic by the one person he sought to protect.
University brought freedom, or at least the illusion of it.
Haruma enrolled in a local university but chose to live at home. His friends understood him, the layers of fear and fragility that still lingered from that long year of survival. The bodyguards remained — mostly in the background now, occasionally stepping forward when an unexpected event reminded the family how vulnerable he had been.
Yuma did not stay home.
By the time they were seventeen, the house had settled into a fragile kind of peace.
Haruma no longer startled at every sound. His visits to the hospital had decreased, spaced out into predictable intervals. The psychiatrist appointments remained, though less frequent now, and medication sat untouched for weeks at a time — sleeping pills prescribed but rarely taken, anti-anxiety tablets reserved for days when the world became too loud.
Haruma woke one morning and didn’t speak.
Not to the doctors.
Not to the nurses.
Not even to their parents.
His eyes opened, dark and unfocused, and when strangers came too close, his body trembled violently, breath hitching as if he were drowning in air. Alarms were raised more than once — not because his heart failed, but because fear had taken hold of him so completely that his body forgot how to calm itself.
The first time Yuma saw Haruma, he didn’t recognise him.
His brother lay on the hospital bed, swallowed by white sheets and tangled wires, his small body impossibly still. Tubes ran from his arms, his nose, his mouth — machines surrounding him hummed and beeped, their steady rhythm the only proof that Haruma was still alive.
Yuma’s breath caught in his throat.
Haruma was supposed to be waiting by the school gate.
Shuuji checked his watch for the third time, irritation prickling beneath his skin. Parents were already pulling away, children waving as cars disappeared down the road. The afternoon bell had rung nearly fifteen minutes ago.
Still no Haruma.
