Prologue

The first thing I write is my own name.

REN ISHIDA.

The characters float on the page in the moonless dark, blacker than the ink around them. I write them again beneath the first line, pressing hard enough that the brush hairs split.

REN ISHIDA. DREAM-READER. THIRTY-FOUR YEARS OLD.

The paper drinks every stroke. For a moment the words remain solid. Then silver filaments rise through them like roots beneath shallow soil, lifting the ink from the page one character at a time.

My name unravels.

I wake standing in a corridor that does not exist.

Paper walls stretch in both directions beneath rafters painted with clouds. No lanterns burn, yet every surface gives off the weak grey light of old parchment. My bare feet rest on cedar boards slick with black ink. I am wearing the court robes I put on yesterday morning. The right sleeve is torn. Blood darkens the cuff.

I open the leather notebook in my hand.

Every page is blank.

Panic arrives as a practical sequence. Check the pulse. Count the breaths. Locate an exit. Record the time.

There is no incense clock. No window. Above me, where the ceiling should close, a strip of raw white paper continues upward forever.

I write: I am awake.

The sentence lasts three heartbeats before silver thread pulls it apart.

A biwa string sounds somewhere beyond the wall.

One note. Precise. Low enough to vibrate in my teeth.

The corridor changes.

Doorways appear where there were none. Through the first I see Minister Takumi kneeling before a mountain of grain while starving farmers bow behind him. He promises the Emperor that the northern storehouses are full. Black ink spills from his mouth, but everyone applauds.

Through the second doorway, Lord Ishida holds a needle behind my ear. I am younger. Rainwater runs from my hair onto the floor of a courtyard paved in ash. Someone is screaming inside a bamboo cage beyond my shoulder, but each time I try to turn toward the voice, the needle enters my skull and the doorway folds shut.

I write: My clan altered my memory.

The words do not unravel. They sink into the page and remain.

Truth has weight here.

Another biwa note trembles through the rafters.

The paper wall beside me bulges inward. A shape crawls behind it, too large for the narrow corridor. Six bladed legs score lines through the painted clouds. A hound’s muzzle pushes against the paper without breaking it. Its mouth opens, and Takumi’s voice comes out.

“The people are entirely content.”

The wall tears.

I run.

Ink splashes under my feet. The corridor lengthens with every step, feeding on the certainty that I cannot escape it. I force my attention onto measurable things: seven breaths between doorways, four boards beneath each painted pillar, three drops of blood on my cuff. The architecture steadies. The beast gains anyway.

A white thread drops in front of my face.

It is finer than hair, bright as winter moonlight. Letters move within the weave.

LOOK TO THE RAFTERS.

The handwriting is mine.

I seize the thread. It cuts my index finger, but I hold on. The filament draws taut and yanks me upward at the exact moment the ink-hound lunges. Its jaws close on empty air beneath my feet.

I rise past painted beams into a hidden world above the corridor.

Dozens of silver cocoons hang in the shadows. Human forms sleep inside them, their faces peaceful beneath translucent layers. Ministers. Magistrates. A court lady who swore publicly that her sister died of fever rather than an imperial beating. Each cocoon hums with a different lie.

At the center of the web sits a woman holding a biwa.

Dark silk falls from one bare shoulder. Her hair spills to her waist. I cannot see her face because a circular screen hangs between us, painted with the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. Her shadow passes through the screen unchanged from the waist up. Below it, eight long limbs unfold across the rafters.

I should release the thread.

Instead I climb.

“Who wrote this?” I ask, holding up the message in my hand.

The woman plucks one string. The nearest cocoon shivers.

“You did.”

Her voice strikes a place in me that has been hollow for years. My body recognizes it before my mind does: a warmth beneath freezing rain, plum blossoms crushed against skin, a name spoken once with trust and once with hatred.

I reach for the memory.

Pain drives a white needle behind my ear.

The rafters split. For one flashing instant, I see the bamboo cage from the impossible doorway. A woman chained inside it lifts her face toward me. Her wrists are bleeding. Dark hair clings to her mouth. I am standing outside with a torch in my hand.

I hear myself say, “Take her to the black cells.”

Then my own voice, later and smaller: “Erase this.”

The vision collapses before I can see her eyes.

I fall to my knees on the beam. The notebook slips from my grasp, dropping through the web. Silver threads catch it before it reaches the monsters below.

“What did I do to you?” I ask.

The woman stops playing.

Silence spreads outward. Every cocoon goes still. Even the ink-hound waits beneath us with its jaws open.

She rises behind the screen. The monstrous shadow folds itself into the outline of a tall woman. One pale hand appears around the edge, palm upward.

“If I give the hour back,” she says, “the contradiction may break your mind.”

“It belongs to me.”

“So did the truth you asked them to remove.”

I cannot answer. The cruelty in the sentence is too exact to be a threat. It is a wound repeated so often that it has become architecture.

The thread around my finger tightens. Blood runs along the filament toward her open hand. Where it crosses the silver weave, new characters form.

LOOK TO THE RAFTERS.

She closes her fingers around the message.

“You will find me again in daylight,” she says. “You always mistake the cage for the thing that wants to devour you.”

The biwa sounds a final chord.

The rafters invert. The cocoons rise like moons while I fall through a city drawn in ink. My notebook spins beside me, pages fluttering. Words rush across them too quickly to read, all in my handwriting, all ending with the same name.

AOI.

I grasp for the book. Silver silk coils around my wrist, my palm, my bleeding finger. The thread is not pulling me deeper. It is holding the pieces of my mind together while the paper world peels away.

Light presses against my closed eyes.

An incense clock burns somewhere nearby. Plum blossom ash slides past the dragon’s tail. One hour vanishes from the architecture of the morning.

The silk draws tight.