Chapter 387: There Are No Gods.
The lantern rose alone.
A single amber flame climbing through the dark air above the platform, wobbling slightly in the northeast breeze, its paper dome glowing warm against the white cloud ceiling. Below it, the city was still preparing - the scattered early launches hadn’t yet merged into the synchronized midnight release, and their lantern climbed through a sky that was mostly empty, a solitary light ascending toward the hole with nobody else’s light to keep it company.
Saffi’s hands were still open. Fingers spread, palms up, the position they’d been in when the lantern lifted, frozen in the posture of release.
"I let go too early" She stared at her own hands as if they’d acted without her permission.
Raizen checked the scanner’s clock. 11:57. Three minutes before midnight, three minutes before the synchronized launch that Saffi had calculated wind patterns and trajectory angles for, three minutes before every other lantern in Ukai rose together and their lone flame would have been one voice in a chorus instead of a solo in an empty room.
He watched the lantern climb. It moved well - steady, straight, the trajectory slow but certain, the compressed wood burning with the patient flame that the design intended.
Saffi’s calculations had been perfect. Yet somehow, the timing had simply slipped.
"Well..." He sighed. "Mistakes happen"
Saffi looked at him. The expression on her face was the one she wore when something small went wrong and the smallness of it made the wrongness worse - the specific frustration of a person whose standards were too high for the errors their humanity produced.
"But-"
Raizen shrugged, didn’t let her finish. "It’s already up there. It’s flying. The wind is right, the flame is good. Does it really matter if it went up three minutes early?"
"The whole point was the synchronized -"
"The whole point" Raizen mumbled under his breath, "was to watch it fly."
Saffi closed her mouth. Opened it, then closed it again.
They watched it fly.
The lantern climbed through the hole’s edge and entered the open night sky above the clouds, its amber glow transitioning from warm-against-white to warm-against-dark, and from the platform it looked like a new star being placed carefully into a sky that had room for one more.
Then it exploded.
A violent, fiery burst, the paper completely shredded, visible even from hundreds of meters away.
The Eon currents – the ones guarding whatever sat beyond – apparently still flowed above the visible fracture in the sky. Or maybe the intensity wasn’t as strong as those in the clouds, but still way more than enough to rip apart a paper lantern.
The ripped edges lit up from the flame that was already ripping apart, one fiery thread after another, creating small particles against the black sky.
Saffi watched everything with wide eyes, and after a few minutes of silence, sat back down on the bench.
Raizen followed. The woven branches shaped as a bench received their weight with the same warm creak, the same impossible comfort, and the night sounds settled around them.
Her hand found his.
Or at least it tried to. Her fingers slid toward his on the bench’s surface, crossing the small distance between their legs, the tips reaching his knuckles and resting there. Light, tentative, the same provisional contact she’d offered with her head on his shoulder - ready to retract, giving him the choice.
Raizen offered the same answer – he didn’t move.
He didn’t pull away. But he didn’t close his fingers around hers, didn’t turn his hand, didn’t reciprocate the contact. He sat still, his hand where it was before, his fingers on the warm bark of the bench, and Saffi’s fingertips resting on his knuckles. The gap between those two things - between touching and holding - remained open.
She tried again. Her fingers curled slightly, wrapping around the edge of his hand, gripping gently. An invitation, more direct than the first, the provisional becoming intentional.
Raizen’s hand stayed where it was. Neutral. Present but unresponsive, the way a wall is present to the ivy that gently, slowly grows against it - there, solid, not pushing the contact away but not growing toward it either.
Saffi’s grip loosened. Her fingers slid back to her own knee, and the distance between their hands on the bench returned to what it had been. She didn’t look at him. Didn’t acknowledge the retreat. Just placed her hands in her lap and looked at the sky with the composed expression she always wore.
Down below, the festival’s energy was nearing its peak - the clusters of amber light growing denser, the music rising in pitch and tempo, the collective excitement of thousands of people preparing to release their lanterns together pressing upward through the canopy like heat.
"Saffi" Raizen called silently, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Yes...?"
"Your parents." He was looking at the sky, not at her. His voice carried the weight of something he’d been thinking about since she’d mentioned it on the bench. "They died protecting a book, right?"
The festival hummed below. A lantern - someone else’s, launched early like theirs - climbed past the platform’s edge, its amber glow briefly illuminating both their faces before continuing upward.
"Yes" Saffi answered.
"What kind of book is... Worth dying for?"
The question was genuine. Not rhetorical, not dismissive, not the setup for a point he was about to make. Raizen wanted to know. A book was paper, ink and binding - it was information, and information could be copied, stored, reproduced. What could possibly live inside a book that two researchers would choose death over surrender?
Saffi was quiet for a long time. The silence wasn’t reluctance - it was organization. She was deciding how to describe something she’d spent her entire life studying and still hadn’t finished understanding, something she carried with her the way other people carried photographs of their dead.
"It’s old" she said. "Really old. Thousands of years, maybe more - the dating is uncertain because the original texts were copied and recopied across generations, and some of the source material predates any recording method we can verify." Her voice had shifted into the register she used for information delivery - precise, measured, each fact placed carefully, with zero emotion behind it.
"It contains... principles. Guidelines for living. How to treat other people, how to make decisions, how to carry guilt and how to let it go. Thousands of years of accumulated moral architecture, written by different people in different places across different centuries, all contributing to the same continuous document. It’s like... A library."
"A library? In a single book?"
"Yes. A library that feels... Inspired by the same thing"
"Like what?"
She paused at the question. Her hands were still in her lap, the bracelet catching the light.
But she didn’t have an answer.
"It contains history, too." She continued. "Not just moral instruction - actual events, actual people, actual civilizations rising, falling and rising again. Wars, exiles, migrations. The patterns of what happens when societies forget the principles and the patterns of what happens when they remember."
She paused again. Longer this time. More considerate. The next part was different - Raizen could feel it in the way her breathing changed, the way her shoulders tightened slightly against the bench’s backrest.
"And it talks about something else," she continued. "Beyond the human principles and the history. Something... Above them. A presence. An intelligence behind the design - not the design of the book, but the design of everything. The principles, the patterns, the history, the fact that the history repeats in ways that look intentional rather than random." Her voice dropped. "It describes a supreme entity. A creator. Something that existed before everything else, made everything else, watches everything else and cares about everything else."
Raizen turned his head slightly, looking traight in her eyes. "You mean..."
"...A God."
Raizen looked at the sky. At the glowing clouds, the hole, the absolute black night beyond it. At the faint white points that might have been the stars from his visions, scattered across the infinite dark by something or someone or nothing at all.
"There are no Gods."
The words came out of his throat flat, emotionless and most certain, carrying no malice and no contempt but absolute conviction. The statement of someone who had seen enough of the world’s cruelty and enough of its indifference to arrive at a conclusion that no argument could relocate. If a God existed - if something watched and cared and had the power to intervene - then the swordsman wouldn’t be dying in a loop. The villages wouldn’t burn. The children wouldn’t stand in roads holding sleeves that used to be attached to people.
People he knew – Lynea wouldn’t have suffered her family’s selfishness. Ichiro wouldn’t have the luminite stone in his shoulder.
There is no God. If there was one...
His own family wouldn’t have died right in front of him.
If there was a God...
His father wouldn’t have to suffer a Nyx’s hand.
If there was a God...
His mother wouldn’t have had a hole in her chest.
If there was a God...
Takeshi wouldn’t have had to die because some cursed minds were gifted with power.
There are no Gods. The universe ran on physics, Eon and the accumulated choices of beings who were too small to see the full picture and too stubborn to stop trying.
Or if there truly was a God...
A God that created everything...
And if that very God allowed every small evil in this world to exist...
Then he wouldn’t want to believe-
The sound arrived from the horizon.
It came from the southwest - from the direction of the shores, from beyond the ocean. It traveled through the air without diminishing, reaching the platform with a clarity that suggested it hadn’t been affected by distance the way normal sound was affected by distance.
It was harmonic. Not a single tone but a layered one - multiple frequencies stacked on top of each other in intervals that produced something richer and more complex than any instrument Raizen had ever heard.
It sounded almost like a voice. Almost. The shape of it - the way it rose and fell, the way it held certain frequencies longer than others, the way it moved through patterns that felt structured rather than random - had the cadence of speech. As if something very far away was saying something extremely slowly, each letter stretched across seconds, each syllable lasting long enough that the meaning dissolved before the next one arrived.
Raizen couldn’t make out words. The sound was too slow, too vast, too spread across the horizon to resolve into language. But it felt spoken. It felt like something with intention behind it - not the random harmonics of wind through a canyon or the resonance of a large structure vibrating. This sounded like it was being produced deliberately, by something that had something to say and was saying it at a speed that no human ear was designed to parse.
The second day event.
The sound held. Long, sustained chords that sat on the horizon and filled the air between the platform and the edge of the world with a warmth that wasn’t physical but was present, the way the bench’s warmth was present - unexplained, offered freely, asking nothing in return.
Every single paper lantern in Ukai rose at once.
Hundreds and thousands of hands letting go of the amber lights, all at once.
Raizen’s jaw was tight. His hands were still on the bench, flat against the bark, and he could feel the sound in the wood beneath his palms, the vibration traveling through the branches and into his fingers. The sound wasn’t Eon. He would have recognized Eon. It wasn’t anything he could categorize or explain away with the confident certainty he’d just applied to the existence of Gods.
It was just there. Vast, harmonic and speaking too slowly to understand, coming from the direction where the sky met the ocean.
Saffi sat very still beside him. Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted, her hands gripping the bench’s edge.
The silence after his declaration - there are no Gods - sat next to the sound the way a match sits next to the sun. Small. Confident. Absolutely certain of itself.
And absolutely dwarfed by what was answering.
Saffi hesitated. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again, the words forming slowly, carefully, each one placed with the reluctance of someone who wanted to agree and couldn’t quite commit.
"...Yeah..." she said. Very slowly. Very quietly. Her eyes still on the horizon, where the sound was fading but hadn’t fully gone. "Maybe there really are no Gods."
