The Fallen Sword-Saint
Kaito Ren
Once the Court's finest blade. Stripped of his name after the Western Wall fell, he guards the gate he was blamed for breaking. His katana, Yoake, has not been fully drawn in eleven years.
01 — The Story
The Sun That Never Set
A hundred-year dusk. A disgraced swordsman. A child carrying a piece of the sky.
Kōga is the last city beneath a sky that stopped a hundred years ago, frozen at the moment of sunset.
Kaito Ren was the sword-saint of the Celestial Court until the night the Western Wall fell and the Hollow poured through. The Court carved his name from every monument and left him a single duty: guard the wall he was blamed for breaking.
Then a child named Sora walks out of the dark carrying a shard of the frozen sun, and for the first time in a century the sky begins to move. The Court sends its emissary with a bargain, and its shadow to make sure he takes it.
「夜が明けぬなら、俺が明けさせる。」 If the night will not end, I will end it myself. Prologue
The bell on the Western Wall had not rung in eleven years. Kaito Ren knew this because he had been standing beneath it for every one of them.
Above him the sky held its breath, as it had for a hundred years: a sun split down the middle and caught at the edge of the world, bleeding a red that never deepened into night. The old ones called it the Long Dusk. The young ones called it the sky. There was no one left in Kōga who remembered anything else.
The bell rang.
He was on the wall before the sound finished, blade half-drawn, and saw only a child. Small, barefoot, walking out of the dark beyond the gate as if the dark were a road. In both hands she held a shard of light the colour of the wound in the sky, and where its glow touched the stones, the stones remembered they were warm.
"Are you the sword-saint?" she asked. "They told me to find the sword-saint."
Behind her, far out in the dark, the Hollow began to sing.
本編に続く Continued in the comic