Mourning Mitsune

The cheap hotel room was a wound, peeling back its patterned wallpaper to reveal the raw, bleeding plaster beneath. Kaelen-7 watched, mesmerized by the slow, viscous ooze, a visceral echo of the torment that festered within him. He’d been told the sky wept, but he hadn’t imagined it would weep from the walls of his own temporary sanctuary. He’d expected weather, yes, a cleansing rain on the surface world after his subterranean ordeal, but not this internal deluge. This was something else. Something more profound.

He’d collapsed on the threadbare carpet, the damp seeping through his fatigues, a stark contrast to the inferno he’d left behind, seven miles beneath the earth. A star, he’d seen it, a miniature sun igniting in the crushing darkness, the final, terrible act he’d been meant to orchestrate. But the coin toss… the coin toss had changed everything. He was alive. Technically. The weight of that survival pressed down on him, heavier than any rock, colder than any subterranean chill.

Forgiveness. The word itself felt like a betrayal. Who was he to ask for it? He was the one who breathed, the one who walked under a sky that now seemed to weep for him, for them. For the forty-three. For the one whose fate had been sealed by the capricious spin of a metal disc. He’d watched it fall, a glint of silver in the dim light, a judgment rendered in an instant. One takes the tags, the letters, the names. The other stays with the sun. He’d stayed alive.