Sayo didn't remember falling asleep.
One moment she had been staring at the black obsidian crane on the inn's windowsill, the next she was plunging through a dream so real it felt like a memory: a house standing alone in a field of snow, where time folded in on itself like silk.
When she awoke, the crane was gone.
And so was Ren.
---
She searched the inn first. The tearoom below was empty, its hearth still warm, tea left steeping on the table. The innkeeper was gone too, her slippers by the door, steam rising from a kettle no one watched.
Then the pages of the Book of Remnants began to glow.
Sayo opened it cautiously.
A new symbol had appeared—two intersecting circles with a line through the center. Time.
Beneath it, a note written in a hand not hers.
> "The second fragment hides in the house that has no hours. Find the place where you waited longest."
Sayo blinked.
The phrase felt like a whisper from a forgotten life.
She whispered aloud, "The waiting house."
---
Yurejima's maps didn't show the forest north of Mount Ashina. The locals never mentioned it. But when Sayo followed the road that led beyond the rice fields, she found it—an ancient path overtaken by creeping moss and leaning pines, wide enough for a cart but choked by silence.
Hours passed. Or seconds.
It was impossible to tell.
Then the forest opened, and there it was.
A house with no doors.
Just walls, tall and black and windowless, and a staircase that led to nowhere.
She didn't question.
She stepped inside.
---
The air shifted.
Suddenly it was winter.
Snow fell, even though outside it had been spring.
Inside the house was room after room, hallway after hallway, a labyrinth of old wood and candlelight. Each room was different—a memory, frozen and looping.
In one, she was a child again, folding her first paper crane.
In another, she sat with a dying grandmother who whispered stories of gods and love that defied lifetimes.
In a third, she sat alone at a train station, waiting for someone who never came.
Ren.
She pressed onward.
---
She found him in the fourth hallway.
Ren stood in front of a grandfather clock, unmoving, as though spellbound.
"Ren?" she called.
He didn't answer.
She ran to him and grabbed his hand. His skin was ice-cold.
Then a voice boomed through the room—not from a person, but from the house itself.
> "Only one may leave. Time must feed."
The walls closed in.
Sayo pulled Ren back.
"No," she said, to the house, to the gods, to the very fabric of this place. "I won't lose him again."
A thousand paper cranes fell from the ceiling.
Each one whispered a name.
Hotaru. Akiko. Hanae. Yui.
All the lives she'd lived, the names she'd worn.
She remembered them now.
She turned to Ren.
And said the one name that had always woken him in dreams.
> "Akihiko."
His eyes snapped open.
---
Time shattered.
The hallway exploded into light, and when it dimmed, they stood not in the house but in a void of stars and mirrors. Cranes floated in the air, their wings unfolding to show brief flashes of lives lost and regained.
From the void rose a staircase.
At its summit, a door pulsed with red light.
The second fragment.
They climbed together.
At the top, they found a single room.
Inside: a tea table, two cups, a deck of hanafuda cards spread across the floor.
And a figure sitting cross-legged at the center.
It was an old woman.
Sayo recognized her instantly.
Her grandmother.
But not from this life—from a past one. The priestess who had taught her the sacred songs.
"Sayo," the woman said. "Hotaru. Hanae. It does not matter what name you wear. You are the girl who remembers."
Ren knelt.
The woman smiled.
"You have carried the weight well."
She reached beneath the table and held out a stone.
Carved with the same symbol from the Book: Time.
"This is the second fragment. It belongs to you."
Sayo touched it.
---
The world turned inside out.
They stood in the inn again.
Ren beside her. The obsidian crane on the sill.
The Book of Remnants shimmered as the second fragment slid into its pages.
Two down.
Five to go.
Sayo closed the book slowly.
"I think I'm afraid to find the next one."
Ren looked at her with quiet eyes.
"Then I'll be afraid with you."