Gilded Ashes Chapter 346: Under the Same Sky

The second day was the sound.

Raizen rembered it arriving the way a gentle rain arrives - gradually, ambiguously, the kind of change you noticed only when soone else ntioned it. He’d been in the yard, the year he was ten, kicking a leather ball against the grain storage wall, when his mother had stopped in the doorway and tilted her head.

"Do you hear that?" she’d asked.

He’d stopped kicking. Listened. Heard nothing - the wind, the chickens, the distant sound of soone hamring.

"Hear what?"

His mother had stood in the doorway for a long mont, her head still tilted, her eyes unfocused in the way they got when she was listening to sothing far away. Then she’d shaken her head. "Never mind. Maybe it’s nothing."

But it wasn’t nothing. Raizen learned that later - years later, pieced together from overheard conversations and half-understood explanations. The sound on the second day was real, but only so people seed to hear it. A faint sound, they said. Musical, in a way that was hard to describe. Slow and steady, changing gradually, shifting through patterns that almost made sense but never quite resolved into a lody.

Calming. That was the word they all used. Whatever the sound was, however it reached them, it settled sothing in the people who heard it. Made them slower, gentler, more inclined to sit in doorways and watch the sky than to argue or rush.

His mother had heard it. She’d never said so directly - she wasn’t the kind of person who announced things about herself - but Raizen had seen it in the way she changed on the second day. The softening in her posture. The way she humd without realizing it, a lody that wandered through notes he didn’t recognize, drifting in and out of patterns that felt familiar even though he was certain he’d never heard them before.

She’d humd it while cooking. While folding clothes. While sitting on the roof beside him on the second night, her hand on his back, the clouds still glowing white above them.

He’d tried to hum it back, to immitate it, once. Couldn’t catch it - the notes slipped away from him the mont he tried to rember them, dissolving into silence like water through open fingers.

"Don’t force it" his mother had said, still humming. "If it’s ant for you, it’ll find you."

It never found him. Not that year, not any year after. The sound on the second day remained sothing other people experienced and Raizen didn’t, a door that opened for so and stayed shut for him.

He hadn’t minded - he had the third day.

The third day was the aurora.

It ca at dusk, and he saw it for the first ti the year he was six - the year he’d finally been allowed to stay up late enough to see it from the start. He’d climbed ridge, his mother too tired to make the walk, and he’d sat in the soft grass with his knees pulled to his chest and watched the sky erupt into colour.

Threads first. Thin lines of light that appeared between the clouds - not breaking through them, not parting them, but weaving between them, as if the cloud layer had seams and the light was finding every one. The first threads were pale blue. Then green. Then gold, and red, and a violet so deep it looked like a cut in the sky.

They multiplied. Spread. Wove into each other the way rivers rge, the colours bleeding together and separating again further down, creating patterns that shifted and reford and never held the sa shape for more than a few seconds. Aurora after aurora, threading through the gaps in the clouds, layering on top of each other until the sky was a tapestry of moving light that stretched from horizon to horizon. All the colors reflected in the sea, making the view even more breathtaking.

He’d sat on that hill for three whole hours, neck craned, mouth open, watching the colours chase each other across the ceiling of the world. His eyes had watered from not blinking. His neck had ached for days afterward. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen at the ti.

Sitting alone on a ledge in a village that didn’t matter to anyone outside of it, Raizen had looked up and seen sothing that made him understand, for the first ti, why people used the word wonder.

The mory faded. Slowly, the way mories do - the colours dimming, the ledge dissolving, the soft grass under his knees becoming the wet steel of the elevator platform under his boots. The sky above him was Ukai’s sky, now raining again, not his village’s. The clouds were still glowing white - the first day. Day one.

Which ant day two was coming.

And day three.

The platform reached Ukai’s lowest level, and Raizen stepped off onto solid wood. Kenzo was in front, hamr floating next to his shoulder, his eyes still drifting upward every few steps.

The festival was tomorrow. The firefly festival - the event the whole city had been preparing for, the thing the unicycle boy had been delivering sky lanterns for, the reason Saffi’s eyes lit up every ti soone ntioned it.

Raizen looked at the glowing clouds one more ti through a gap in the canopy. White. Even. Sourceless. The sa light he’d watched from a clay roof with his mother’s hand on his back, years ago, in a life that felt like it belonged to soone else.

"Hey, Kenzo" Raizen muttered.

"Hm?" Kenzo turned his head the smallest degree.

"Was the sky like this when you were a kid, as well?"

Kenzo slowed down, until he was next to Raizen "Well... Yes, as far as I can rember"

Raizen scratched his head. "And have you ever seen what’s beyond?"

"Beyond?" Kenzo tilted his head, in confusion.

"You know... Beyond the clouds... What’s after?"

Kenzo turned his head just enough for Raizen to see his eyes. There was sothing in them Raizen had never seen before. Not fear. Not annoyance.

Confusion.

Kenzo opened his mouth to speak-

But sothing stopped him.