The forest wept gold and shadow.
Unnatural halos of gilded light hung motionless in the air, like tears shed by the void itself, pulsing faintly in the fog-choked clearing. The trees stood twisted, their blackened trunks coiled inward, not in fear, but in revulsion. And at the heart of it all stood something that had once been human.
He didn’t enter the clearing.
Kaeru Tsuchiya lurched forward, limbs jerking like a marionette on frayed strings. Every step sent spasms through his body, unnatural, out of sync. His tousled hair, a light brown, clung damply to his skin, while gnarled, crown-like branches jutted from his scalp. Embedded within them, golden eyes blinked, except they didn’t. They remained wide, unblinking, alien.
His coat, thick black fur threaded with luminous golden beads, shimmered in the mist. Beneath it, a dark crimson dress shirt clung to his frame, its crisp collar untouched by the decay around him. But the true horror was the Sorrow Seed pendant fastened to his chest, throbbing like a diseased heart. Each pulse leached the warmth from the air.
He stopped.
His hands trembled : pale, bloodstained, fingers twitching as if resisting an unseen force. His shoulders jerked. A ragged breath escaped his lungs before he finally looked up.
And then you saw his eyes.
Yellow sclera. Black irises. Pale, hollow pupils.
Not the emptiness of loss but the kind that stares through you, searching for a feeling it can no longer recall.
“You came.”
Kaeru’s voice was a frayed whisper, scraping like sound dragged across stone.
“Of course you did. All heroes do.”
He took another shuddering step. The golden beads on his coat hummed in response.
“They smell like rot.” he rasped, his breath hitching. “And think they can fix it.”
His right eye twitched violently. His jaw clenched, then cracked with a sickening snap. He blinked rapidly before his lips split into a grin, too wide, too jagged, his mouth smeared with blood from relentless gnawing.
“Do you feel that ?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “That sickening pulse in the air ? That’s not power. That’s regret. Yours.”
The Sorrow Seed screeched : a warped, glassy shriek, like agony trapped in amber.
Kaeru’s body tensed.
And then, the outburst.
“YOU THINK KINDNESS IS REAL ?!”
The clearing trembled. The golden crown-eyes flared open. Shadows slithered up from the earth like tendrils grasping for a light long extinguished.
“You want to save me ? Understand me ?!”
His voice dripped with contempt.
“Pathetic.”
His spine arched, a violent tremor wracking his body. His fingers splayed like claws, shaking against an unseen force. And then, his lips curled. Not into a smile. Into a wound.
“They used to call me Kaeru Tsuchiya…”
The pendant surged, the air cracking under its pulse.
“…But names are for the remembered.”
Slowly, deliberately, he raised his head. The eyes embedded in his crown blinked one by one, golden, glistening, wrong.
“Now I’m the Tearstone Herald.”
Behind him, golden lights flickered in the dark, not like fireflies but like dying memories. They cast no warmth. Only dread.
“And I’ve come to show this world the truth behind kindness.”
Then, quieter, colder :
“You’ll find no redemption arc here, little savior.”
His voice was almost gentle now. Somehow, that made it worse.
“Just a boy who watched the world erase him… and chose silence over salvation.”
Another step. The golden beads on his coat began to spin : slow, spiraling orbits of trauma and distortion.
“I don’t hate you…”
A mockery of sincerity laced his whisper.
“I just want to see what breaks first…”
His lips twisted into something almost childlike, sadistic in its fragility.
“…Your hope… or your spine.”
And then, the clearing fractured. Light bent. Shadows crawled.
Kaeru—no, the Tearstone Herald, raised a single hand.
And the world held its breath for what came next.