Interlude: The First Mark
The street was empty.
Not quiet—empty.
No wind. No crows. No idle chatter rising from balconies. It was a small neighborhood on the city's southern edge, the kind where people still left their shoes by the door and old grandmothers watered flowerbeds every morning. But not today.
Today, something had peeled the noise from the world.
A boy no older than ten crouched behind a rusted fence, the hem of his uniform caught on barbed wire. His knees were scraped, dirt caked into the blood. He didn't notice. He couldn't move. He just stared.
At the alley.
At the thing inside it.
It looked like a person once. Like someone trying very hard to remember what human faces were supposed to look like. It had two arms, maybe three, and a mouth filled with fingers instead of teeth. It was whispering prayers backwards. And around it, the air was still. Not in a way that calmed—but in a way that warned.
No one had ever taught the boy about curses. He'd never seen a ghost, never felt anything beyond the scrape of concrete and the warmth of miso in winter. But his body remembered something older than lessons. It curled into itself. It shook. And somewhere inside his bones, an instinct screamed:
Wrong.
The creature bent backward, spine creaking, legs folding inward like a dying spider. It was bowing. Not to the boy—but to something else. To something behind it. Something in the alley's mouth.
And then came the flower.
It bloomed from the pavement like a wound, slow and shimmering. Petals unfolded without air to carry them. No color, no scent, just presence—as if gravity bent differently around it. The whispers in the alley twisted. The thing that had once been a man began to cry.
Not like a curse.
Like a child.
And when it screamed, the glass in every building on the block cracked outward.
The boy wet himself.
He didn't even flinch.
He just kept staring, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. His mother would find him like that three hours later, huddled in a corner, still silent. He wouldn't speak again for weeks. Not even to say what he'd seen.
Because how do you explain peace that burns?
How do you tell someone that a flower looked at you, and in that moment, knew you?
How do you explain the mark?
Not the bloom, not the thing that bowed, but the change. The feeling that something ancient had turned its face toward the world. That for the first time in memory, the cursed were not the only things watching.
Far above the neighborhood, nestled on a rooftop, a figure in muted robes closed her notebook. She said nothing, though her breath came shallow. Her fingers trembled around her pen. She'd seen spiritual echoes before, even recorded minor anomalies across rural sites—but this…
This was different.
The mark wasn't just residual.
It was a signal.
And whoever it was for—they weren't done yet.