Gilded Cage
The halls were quiet tonight. That should have been a comfort.
Instead, it was a silence so thick that it felt like the house itself had swallowed sound, letting only the faintest noises breathe, like soft footsteps on polished floors, or the whisper of fabric brushing against lacquered wood.
She passed by the great murals lining the corridors, each one older than her, older than even her parents. Painted in slow, painstaking strokes, they depicted a lineage unbroken, a dynasty of faces with sharp, beautiful features and cold, empty eyes. She knew them all by heart, though she wished she didn’t.
At the end of the hallway, a tall mirror stood between two towering red pillars, its gilded frame winding into the shapes of open eyes. A relic of the past, or so they said.
Shion avoided looking at it.
She stopped at the threshold of a grand chamber, its doors open just a crack. Candlelight flickered within, casting elongated shadows against the paper screens.
Inside, Shigure sat on his knees before their parents and the family head, Overseer robes freshly pressed. The moment felt rehearsed, as if every movement had been practiced before a mirror, every word already spoken time and time again in his head before it was ever uttered.
“...a great honor,” one of the voices said, low and smooth. “And a greater responsibility.”
Shigure’s head lowered in perfect obedience. “I will not disappoint you.”
“You never have.”
A warm voice. A gentle voice.
It sent ice through Shion’s veins.
She turned to leave.
“Shion.”
Her body locked up.
Slowly, carefully, she stepped inside. The room was large but suffocating, filled with ornate screens, incense, and watchful eyes. Their parents sat upon the raised dais, poised with the elegance of stone statues. The candlelight carved sharp angles into their faces.
Shigure was smiling at her.
“Father and Mother were just speaking of the future,” he said, voice smooth as lacquer. “Won’t you join us?”
The invitation was a formality. A test, maybe.
Shion met their gazes and felt something coil in her stomach, something she couldn’t name.
Shion stood beneath the overhanging eaves of the courtyard. Her robes were heavier than usual. Deep blue, lined with silver thread. Formal attire, meant to signify her role in what was to come. She felt suffocated in them.
Beyond the courtyard gates, the world was swallowed by mist.
Footsteps approached.
Shion had known it would come eventually.
The attendant had not spoken when they delivered the message, just bowed low, handed her the sealed envelope, and left. The envelope itself was pale gold, marked with the family’s insignia, a sigil resembling a shattered wheel, or perhaps a clock?
No one disobeyed a summons from the head of the family.
She stood outside the doors for a long moment, fingers tightening against the thick paper.
High ceilings stretched into darkness, held up by towering pillars carved with scenes of history, or prophecy, depending on who you asked.
The room was vast, yet strangely bare.
At the far end of the chamber, they sat upon a raised seat.
The family head. Their gaze landed on her the moment she stepped in.
"Shion," they greeted.
Not cold. Not warm. Simply acknowledging.
She knelt without hesitation.
They studied her in silence for a moment before speaking.
"I’ll get straight to it," they said, leaning forward slightly. "A request has been made."
Shion remained still.
"The Overseers require assistance with an execution," they continued. "Your brother, as an Overseer, is already involved. In response, we have offered the aid of our family."
Their fingers tapped against the armrest.
"That means you."
They watched her carefully, as if waiting for a reaction. When none came, they exhaled, something between a sigh and an amused breath.
"You’re not surprised."
It wasn’t a question.
Shion wasn’t.
Her techniques, the very ones that strangely enough had come to her without teaching, without training, had always been viewed as something to be used.
"You understand, don’t you? This is how things are. You have a talent, a gift that no one else in the family possesses. It’s only natural that you use it."
Something about their tone was almost gentle.
That made it worse.
"You hesitate," they observed.
Shion did not answer.
Silence was the only acceptable response.
And then the thing that made her stomach drop.
"Your duty is a certainty," they said, "as is your existence."
A pause.
"You were made for this."
Shion's fingers clenched so tightly against her sleeves that she nearly tore the fabric.
The words were spoken with neither cruelty nor affection, just fact.
The family head exhaled, a sound like the shifting of sands through an hourglass.
Then, the moment was broken by the sound of slow, deliberate applause.
"Beautiful," Shigure's voice murmured.
Shion stiffened before she even turned.
He was lounging against one of the great pillars. Had he been there the whole time?
Knowing him, probably.
Shigure smiled, slow and indulgent. "As expected of my dear little sister. So obedient. So devoted."
Shion’s heart was steady. Her breathing was steady. Everything was steady.
"Come along, dear sister," Shigure murmured, stepping past her toward the door. "We have work to do."
She stood only when the head dismissed her.
Her expression did not change. But something inside her wanted to burn.
Beneath the ordered streets and boxy buildings of the Bureaucratic Quarter, past layers of concrete and labyrinthine tunnels, lay a chamber untouched by natural light.
It was vast, so vast that their footsteps did not echo, for the darkness swallowed all sound.
The chamber stretched endlessly in all directions, its ceilings lost in shadow. Dim, electric-blue lanterns pulsed in slow intervals, spaced too far apart, offering only slivers of illumination. Each light revealed portions of the cold stone beneath them, glimpses of ancient carvings, warding sigils, unreadable to all but those initiated into the Lunar Temple’s rites.
An unexpected location to find this, outside of the Lunar Ring Borough, which only made sense when one considered that this was a joint operation between the Overseers and the Lunar Temple.
hion stood still. Rigid. Proper.
Shigure stood beside her, hands clasped behind his back, posture relaxed as if he were here for casual entertainment.
The only movement came from the Lunar Temple’s priestess.
She stepped forward, fabric whispering against stone, her silver-threaded robes glimmering with the shifting light.
Shion’s posture was perfect, back straight, hands at her sides, gaze lowered. Shigure stood beside her, hands clasped behind his back, posture relaxed as if he were here for casual entertainment.
Outwardly, she was as she had always been.
But inside-
She exhaled, long and silent.
“...Nervous?”
The voice came from the priestess.
"Not at all," Shion replied, voice even.
"You must understand," she began, ignoring Shion's answer as if she knew better her.
“This is not an ordinary execution,” she said. "This is justice at its most necessary.”
She tilted her head, studying the bound figure in the center of the chamber.
Or rather, what remained of him beneath the bindings.
The prisoner was more chain than man.
Thick, iron coils wrapped around his body, his arms, his legs, his torso, his throat, even his skull. Some shackles had been bolted shut with seals etched in celestial script, others fused into heavy plates of metal that seemed to have been welded directly into his flesh. A cage encased his head, leaving only slivers of his hair visible beneath the steel bars.
The priestess exhaled.
“His karma is an affront to justice,” she said.
Shigure hummed in amusement. “So I’ve heard.” The priestess ignored him.
She turned to Shion.
“I do not speak lightly. This is the worst I have ever seen. The worst many in the Temple have seen." she took another step towards Shion. “It is not merely blackened. It is not merely corrupt. It is overflowing. If bad karma were rain, this man has drowned a thousand times over and still continues to flood the earth with the sin of his presence.”
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Then-
“You don't know half of it,” a voice rasped.
Shion froze.
The priestess visibly stiffened.
The prisoner had spoken.
His voice was rough. His throat was dry from disuse, so the sound was more exhale than word.
The priestess straightened, then turned sharply, raising her arm.
"It will be done," she said.
A signal.
Shion felt it, the shift in the air, the pressure of expectation.
She stepped forward. Her form was perfect. Unquestionable.
Her hands moved, slow and precise, as she traced the first line into existence.
The markings spread.
The lightless stone beneath them began to glow as snaking lines traced their way outward from her fingertips, forming the great wheel of time.
The shape completed.
She activated it.
The Wheel turned.
4,320,000,000,000 years passed in the span of a millisecond. The chains decayed. The shackles crumbled.
Yet the prisoner remained.
The silence that followed was different now.
A deafening, terrible kind of silence.
“...Hah.” a breath of laughter.
The priestess exhaled. Shion could feel her irritation. The prisoner hadn't moved from that place, only shielding his eyes with his hand. What little light was there was already enough to blind him.
He stood there, still as ever, squinting into nothing.
“Bit bright, yeah?” he muttered.
The priestess composed herself.
She turned to Shion.
“That will be all.”
Shion opened her mouth.
Closed it. She had questions. She was not allowed to ask them.
The priestess gestured to the exit and Shion was ushered away.
She cast one last glance over her shoulder.
The prisoner was still standing there.
Like this had happened before.
The summons came as expected.
The words did not.
“The execution was a failure.”
Shion sat perfectly still. Her hands folded in her lap, her posture flawless. Across from her, the family head, along her parents, spoke as if they were commenting on a change in the weather.
“The Lunar Temple and the Overseers have… revised their approach.”
Shigure made a small sound. A chuckle, almost.
“They finally gave up,” he mused, stretching his arms behind his head "Though I have to admit, even if they mean for him to suffer, letting him go is a bit..."
The words slid past Shion’s ears, but they did not sink in.
They let him go. Her voice, when it came, was not meant to come.
“How can they do that?”
The family head turned their eyes toward her.
Her throat closed.
"You are not to question the decisions of your superiors. Your words ceased to matter on this situation after your failure”
A simple statement, which might as well have been a knife to the throat.
Shion lowered her eyes.
“Ah, don’t be too hard on her." said her brother "It was her firts time participating in something like this. She just doesn’t understand how things work yet.”
He was looking at her. She could feel it. That usual, indulgent gaze.
The one that wrapped around her like filth.
Behind the silk screens, onne of their parents nodded once, acknowledging Shigure’s statement before continuing as if trying to defuse the situation. “The Overseers will be monitoring him. He is never unwatched.”
The family head confirmed it.
“Every moment, every step. He is bound to his karmic debt. The world itself will see to his punishment.”
Shigure hummed, a satisfied little noise.
Shion had mastered the art of silence. A skill honed through necessity rather than choice. In this house, this gilded cage of agony, even the creak of a floorboard could summon something she didn’t want to face.
The main estate was vast, but she knew its every twist and turn, every hidden alcove and disused passage. The floors, polished to a mirror sheen, reflected her dim silhouette as she approached her brother’s quarters.
Shigure’s door wasn’t locked. He never felt the need. Who would dare enter uninvited? But she knew his habits. She had left the door to her own room slightly ajar, ever so slightly. Enough bait for her degenerate brother.
At that time, Shigure was probably snooping around her room, while Shion entered his.
His room was a mess of contradictions. On the surface, it exuded the refined taste expected of an elite, the furniture was elegant, the fabrics expensive, and the scent of incense lingered in the air. But then, strewn about with casual neglect, were the signs of his perversion. A disheveled bed, garments that weren’t his, personal trinkets he had clearly taken from others just to amuse himself. A grotesque mix of wealth and indulgence, refinement and filth.
Shion’s stomach churned. She had seen the sigil before, just once, when Shigure had shown it off to some Overseer acquaintance, lazily boasting about their surveillance methods. It should be here.
A rustle of parchment. There. She slid the slip of paper free from a small stack of official documents. The eye inked onto it was stark against the pale surface, open and unblinking. It watched. It recorded. It was a window into someone else’s existence.
Shigure had a dozen of them, and even if he noticed one missing, Shion decided to gamble on the fact that he wouldn't snitch on her. For once, she felt almost relieved that her brother was a freak.
Days later, in one of the guest rooms of the family state (no way she'd sleep in her room after her brother had been there), she held the Sigil in front of her, barely hesitating before activating it.
The world swam into view.
At first, disorientation. The sigil’s perspective wavered, shifting between angles, struggling to find clarity. Then, like a lens adjusting, it focused.
A man. Shackled. Filthy.
A bunch of brutes, probably part of some gang, surrounded him, muttering under their breath, eyes full of open disdain.
A sharp kick landed against his ribs. His body jerked slightly from the impact, but he made no sound.
Another kick. This time harder.
Still nothing.
One of the guards spat at him. The filth mixed with the blood on his cheek.
“Piece of shit.”
“What, not gonna beg? Not gonna cry? Thought a guy like you’d be screaming for mercy by now.”
They eventually left, but things didn't stop there. People sneered, threw things, rotten food, stones, curses. A merchant tossed a bucket of filthy water at him, laughing when it soaked into his rags. Somewhere in the crowd, someone called for him to be set on fire.
He just kept walking.
Day after day, through the sigil, Shion witnessed his torment. A world that had decided he was beyond redemption. That he didn’t deserve even the barest shred of dignity.
Was he really that terrible? Was his karma truly that vile? It didn’t matter. She didn't really care for him at all.
At first, his suffering had been a morbid curiosity. A distraction. Something to keep her mind occupied. But over time, it became something more.
It became the only thing keeping her sane.
Her own existence was no less of a waking nightmare.
The family’s expectations weighed on her like an iron vice, but it was never as simple as duty or obligation. No, her suffering had been designed. Cultivated.
The whispers of unseen figures, discussing her as if she were an experiment rather than a person. The way they would watch her, not with parental affection, but with analytical scrutiny. The feeling of her self being, broken apart and reassembled in ways she didn’t understand.
They never called it torture. They never needed to.
She had lived through countless loops of agony, each moment blending into the next, each instance erasing the proof of the last.
It never really happened, so why should it matter? That was their excuse. Their justification.
She had screamed herself hoarse more times than she could count.
One night, as she curled into herself on the cold marble of her chamber floor, she realized something.
She wanted to die.
It wasn’t a dramatic realization, nor was it some breaking point where she crumbled in tears. It was just… logical. Inevitable.
She could not endure this life.
She did not want to.
She thought about it constantly, in every quiet moment, in every sleepless night where her body ached from punishment, where her mind throbbed from exhaustion. She traced the methods in her head like one would solve a mathematical problem. There were so many ways. So many chances.
But every time she reached the precipice of decision, something in her held back. Hesitation. Why? Why couldn’t she just end it? It wasn’t as if she loved life. It wasn’t as if she had hope.
Another night of hesitation. When she brought the blade to her wrist, she found herself unable to go through with it.
Her breath came in shallow gasps. The sigil lay beside her, still active, thet guy’s suffering displayed within its inked eye.
Her gaze drifted back to him.
If she wanted to die, then surely he must want the same.
His suffering was a spectacle beyond anything she had ever seen, beyond even her own. She watched him through the Watching Paper Sigil, fascinated, absorbed. The world hated him. It hunted him. Tormented him. The very air conspired against his existence.
Even she wouldn’t trade places with him.
And so, a thought, fleeting at first, but growing, rooting itself inside her like a cancer.
Shion’s family was not like others.
They did not love in the way most did, nor hate in the way most did. They did not pursue things with fleeting interest or idle curiosity. When they desired something, it consumed them. When they despised something, it burned them from the inside out. There was no moderation in their veins, no casual indulgence in their actions.
They were creatures of obsession.
The head of the family was obsessed with legacy, with the shaping of history, with the perfection of time itself. The world was a grand equation, and he spent his life rearranging variables, pruning mistakes, altering the flow of what should be. Even she, especially she, was a product of that obsession. Not a child, not a daughter, but a manifestation of his will.
Then there was Shigure.
Shigure, whose obsession was her.
Not love. Not in the way a brother should love a sister. He fixated, delighted in her rejection, took pleasure in every scornful glance, every insult. The more she pulled away, the closer he leaned in. And it wasn’t just her, he took everything too far. His work, his desires, his indulgences. He was a man of refinement, of poise, of twisted elegance, but beneath it all, he was ruled by his compulsions, the way a puppet is ruled by its strings.
Shion had always thought herself different.
She had been detached, empty, cold. Unmoved by the things that stirred her family. They obsessed over their goals, their wants, their ambitions. And she... she had nothing. No dreams. No purpose. Just a dull, persistent resentment for her life and an unwavering certainty that she did not want it.
But then she found him.
And suddenly, something in her latched on.
She had never been the type to crave, to cling, to fixate. Yet the sight of his suffering unraveled something inside her, an ache so deep she couldn’t tell whether it was relief or something far worse.
She watched. And watched. And with every day that passed, she understood more and more.
This was her obsession. When he finally broke, when the endless torment snapped him in half and he gave up, then, and only then, would she finally have permission.
Permission to end it all.
But then, as time stretched and misery piled upon misery, something began to fester.
He wouldn’t break.
She wanted him to break. Needed him to. She had seen the things that happened to him. The way the world twisted itself to make him suffer. He should have given up a thousand times over. But no matter what, no matter how deep the wounds, how overwhelming the pain, he kept going.
And every time he did, she hated him more.
Hated his endurance. Hated his refusal. Hated that he kept living when he should have collapsed. Through the Sigil she even saw him smile once. It made her nauseous.
She should have let go. She should have walked away from the sigil, stopped watching, killed herself and been done with it. But she couldn’t.
She didn’t want to wait anymore. She wanted him to break.
So she made a new decision.
The night she ran away, she abandoned everything. It was like cutting off a limb, like carving out a piece of herself just to be free of it.
The city devoured her. She drifted through its streets, lost in the chaos of Youdu. She found work, lost work. Moved from place to place, taking whatever she could get, scrubbing floors, cleaning filth, fetching water...
She had no talent for any of it and failed, time and time again.
Some employers were cruel, some indifferent. Some clearly wanted to take advantage of her in ways she didn’t want to think about.
Hayato Taida walked the roads in Limbo like they were paved just for him.
Shion trailed behind him, silent.
"So, what’s a beauty like you requesting work in a place like this?" Hayato asked, glancing at her over his shoulder with a grin.
Shion didn’t answer.
He chuckled. "Not the talkative type, huh? That’s fine, I like a little mystery. Keeps things exciting."
She kept walking. He kept talking.
"Welcome to Yahata, sweetheart. We’re a real warm and welcoming bunch. Family, even."
Shion highly doubted that.
"You’ll be handling housekeeping, right? Kitchen duty, laundry, sweeping up after the boys? Pretty simple stuff. Unless you got a hidden talent you wanna share, massage, maybe? I’ve got a lot of stress in my shoulders lately."
Shion stared at him, unimpressed.
Hayato grinned wider.
"Alright, alright, I’ll behave. For now." He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat, his voice shifting to something more businesslike, though still retaining its easy charm. "You might find that the other members aren't exactly... model citizens? But don't worry, they're fine people. You do your job, you get paid, and no one gives you any trouble. Simple as that."
Shion remained silent.
"And if you ever wanna give me trouble, my door’s always open."
Shion gave him a look so devoid of amusement that it could have dried out an ocean.
Hayato laughed, unabashed. "You’ll like it here," Hayato said as they neared the gates. "It grows on you. Like a rash."
Shion said nothing, but something about the way she stared up at the fortress told him she wasn’t entirely convinced.
"Don’t worry, sweetheart," he added, flashing her a grin. "You’ll fit right in."