キラは白虎家——西方の黄金の虎、知られる世界で最も誇り高き名門——の最後の世継ぎである。望んだことのない肩書きだ。鏡と礼節と衛士のあいだで育ち、他家がただ敬意をもって遠くから挨拶するような名を背負ってきた。あの夜、鏡が割れ、衛士たちが沈黙したあの夜まで——両親は殺された。突然、自らの出自という檻に独り取り残された虎娘に、何が残されているのか？

生意気でいること。口答えすること。悲しみに修復されるのを許さぬほどに頑固でいること。

旅路の中で、キラは友情とは何かを学ぶ——そしてそのさらに奥にある、もっと大きな言葉、信頼を。彼女の内には、身分も名も対価も問わぬ正義が燃えている。残された問いはただ一つ。彼女もまた自らに平穏を見いだせるのか——それとも胸の炎が、遅かれ早かれ、彼女を取り巻くすべてを焼き尽くしてしまうのか。癒しか、破壊か。

Jade is a rabbit, an orphan and a monk — three words that already amount to a whole biography. Master Haku took him in as a newborn, before his eyes had even opened to the world; the temple walls have been the only home he knows. He has never eaten from golden plates like Kira; a bowl of lukewarm soup is enough, taken alone — because anyone left behind by both parents learns early to keep their account with solitude. There is a hare's heart inside him.

Naturally, he is a rabbit. But it is the rare kind: it trembles, breathes in, breathes out, and then goes anyway. When a market vendor kicks a beggar, Jade is suddenly between them — small, steady, with courage three sizes larger than his stature. He wears tradition like a second skin; discipline is his home, daily training his most reliable friend.

Whether he can also laugh? No one has ever caught him at it. Perhaps because no one has yet asked him properly. Kira and Feya, at any rate, intend to keep chipping at that wall of silence — question by question, smile by smile.

Master Haku is the last teacher of a school whose name only survives on old scrolls. By day he tutors the village children in script, breath and posture; by night he sharpens blades no one dares to wield anymore.

To Kira he is a riddle with a beard — politely distant, uncompromisingly precise, and the first adult who neither patronises her nor fears her.

Where others tried to drill etiquette into her, Haku teaches her to set a single ink stroke so the world goes quiet for one breath.

He prefers to speak in riddles. “You do not defeat a shadow with the blade,” he sometimes says. “Only with light.” Sentences like that quietly lodge themselves in a child's mind and only resolve once the child has lived through what Haku once said. Until that day arrives, what he has mostly placed in Kira's head are question marks, neatly arranged like brush-strokes on a scroll. Yet in the moments that matter, he is there — even if, on quieter days, he looks as though the next generation were drawing the last drop of ink out of his hand.