The elevator platform rose slowly.
It was a wide, flat square of old wood, suspended by thick cables that ran through a pulley system bolted to the underside of Ukai's lowest platform level.
Raizen stood at the rising platform's edge, one hand on the solid metal railing. The way Ukai combined traditional wood things with technology was truly weird - you can see a stall selling carefully handmade wooden animals, and just a few steps to the left, a full-metal drone trimming excess branches.
Raizen looked up. The clouds were glowing. The pale luminescence had spread across the entire visible sky - a soft, even white that turned the cloud ceiling from its usual grey into something that looked like frosted glass with a lamp behind it. The light filtered down through Ukai's canopy in diffuse sheets, touching everything equally, casting no shadows, giving the ascending trunks and platforms and bridges the flattened, dreamlike quality of a world lit from above by something that shouldn't be there.
Kenzo was watching it too, leaning against the opposite railing, arms folded, his face tilted upward with an impenetrable expression
Raizen had seen this before. Every year, for as long as he could remember.
The recognition had settled into him quietly, the way old memories surface when something in the present touches the right nerve. He hadn't thought about it in months - hadn't had reason to – a year ago, this time of year, he was still in the Underworks, probably doing drills in the Rust room.
That realization hit him just as hard. One whole year. One sixteenth of his life, he spent on… All of this: Vanguards, Alteea's affairs, shady missions…
Memories came flooding in again. Marcus. The trial. The mountain. His days in the med wing. Everyone coming to cheer him up. And now… Ukai, with everything it had to offer.
The glowing clouds now felt like something that belonged to a different life, a different version of himself, buried away in the part of his mind that held the village, the people in it and the feelings of a world he'd left behind.
But the sky was still there.
He was eight. Maybe nine. Sitting on the sloped roof of his family's house, legs dangling over the edge, bare feet swinging in the warm night air. The roof tiles were clay, rough and somehow warm beneath his palms, and the village spread out below him in a small bunch of low buildings, dirt paths and the occasional lantern swaying on a post.
His mother lay beside him.
She was always beside him for this. Every year, when the clouds started glowing, she'd find him - wherever he was, whatever he was doing - and take him somewhere high. The roof, usually. Sometimes the hill behind the far wall, where the ground rose enough to clear the village's roofline and give an unobstructed view of the sky, or – her favourite place – the ledge overlooking the whole sea. She never explained why it mattered. Never gave a speech about tradition or significance or the importance of watching. She just took his hand, led him up, and sat beside him, and they watched.
The clouds had glowed white that night, the same way they were glowing now - even, soft, sourceless. The entire sky becoming a single sheet of pale light that made the night look like a sunless morning. The village below had gone quiet, the way it always did on the first night. Not because anyone announced it or enforced it. Just because people looked up and something in the light made them want to be silent.
His mother's hand had been on his back. Warm. Steady. The weight of it between his shoulder blades, resting there without pressure, the way you hold something you don't want to drop.
The village had looked different under the glow. The familiar shapes - the fish stall, the well, the crooked fence around a family's yard that nobody ever fixed - all gained a softness they didn't have during the day. Edges rounded. Colours muted. The dirt paths between the houses turned pale and smooth, and the lanterns that usually defined the village's nighttime geography became redundant, their amber light swallowed by the even white coming from above.
People sat on their roofs. Or in their yards, on chairs dragged out from kitchens. Or on the wooden wall that ran along the village's eastern edge, legs dangling, faces tilted up. Nobody organized it. Nobody announced a gathering or rang a bell. They just came outside, one by one, drawn by the same instinct that drew moths to lanterns - except the lantern was the entire sky, and the moths were everyone.
Some years, Raizen's father joined them on the roof. He'd climb the ladder with a blanket and a jar of something tasty and sit on his mother's other side, saying nothing, watching the sky with the patient attentiveness of a man who didn't need to understand something in order to appreciate it. Other years, he was away - fishing, or traveling on the sea, or doing whatever it was that kept him absent for weeks at a time and present for days. On those nights, it was just Raizen and his mother, and the roof, and the sky, and the silence.
"Is it always white?" Raizen had asked, the first year he was old enough to form questions about it.
"The first night, yes," his mother had said. Her voice was quiet - not whispering, just quiet, gentle, the way sometimes Hikari spoke. "Always white. Every year."
"Why?"
She'd smiled. He couldn't see it - he was looking at the sky - but he could feel it in the way her hand shifted on his back, the muscles in her arm adjusting the way they did when her face changed.
"I don't know, dear" she'd said. "Nobody does. It just happens."
And that had always been enough. At eight years old, sitting on a clay roof with his mother's hand on his back and the sky glowing above him, the absence of an explanation wasn't a problem. It was the sky. The sky did things. You watched.
And then…
He rememebered the second day.
