xiv.
Un hérault De la Fuite Sémiotique M’a soutenu mordicus Que toute issue défavorable Était MAL Ce à quoi j'ai répondu Explique Ou va prier
Nothing special until you decide otherwise
xiv.
Un hérault De la Fuite Sémiotique M’a soutenu mordicus Que toute issue défavorable Était MAL Ce à quoi j'ai répondu Explique Ou va prier
Interlude I: Between Clocks
No one on the benches. Not because the night was cold. The light above the bus station display board was too still.
The timetable had gone dark days ago. Only one thing remained: a digital countdown. Unexplained. Unauthorised. Unmoving—until now.
02:09 01:36 00:58 It ticked down like a launch. Or a warning no one had received.
Across the road, the analogue clock above the railway station turned without care. A soft, mechanical tick each second. Then a pause. Then forward again.
No one noticed they were out of rhythm. Not yet.
00:04 00:03 00:02 00:01
And the analogue clock outside stuttered— a sound like teeth locking in a jaw too tight. Then silence.
The display board flashed once. Then nothing.
The Guardian did not intervene. But he was standing exactly between the two clocks.
The Guardian: Foreword
Before the rail. Before the mask.
This is not a story. It is what remains when silence is taught how to move.
You will not find names. Only gestures. Only echoes.
There is no quest. No rescue. No cause to follow, only the space where something once was and now waits to become nothing again.
Some doors do not open. Some watches do not tick. Some guardians do not guard you.
Step carefully. The silence is already listening.
No One Watching: Kiyomi (The Guardian – episode 6)
Alone. At last. Walls closed, shoes off, air still.
Relieved— but angry.
Angry that it took this much just to stand still. Angry that the world outside doesn’t pause unless you break in front of it.
I hate necessity. The rituals of errands, of smiling like I’m still part of it. Of pretending the air isn’t poisoned with something I can’t name but feel each time I cross a street.
I want to breathe before I do. Before I answer. Before I’m pressed into shape.
Sometimes I dream of boarding a train that isn’t a commute, isn’t a schedule. Just a one-off bow from this world to me— no destination. Just quiet, forward motion.
Just this once. Let me leave before I have to become what they expect again.
—————
And outside— somewhere past the curtains, past the hum of heating pipes and hallway light— a shadow did not move.
But the air shifted. The sound of the distant tracks was not passing.
It was watching.
The Bridge of Fireflies (The Guardian – episode 5)
It should have been beautiful. A bridge of fireflies. But beauty, in this world, burns the wrong way. What crosses is not light. What returns is not whole.
That echo haunted the space before the ritual— not as memory, but as a thing unfinished.
A star inverted, framed in old letters that never truly left the page.
Two candles. One white. One black.
His tanto, unsheathed— not for violence, but placed with care. Zatoichi style. Edge forward. Intention inward.
Frankincense lingered, its thread of smoke trembling in the still air of the corner he never named— but returned to whenever something could not be saved.
That was all he could do. Compassion, from a distance. For Kiyomi. And perhaps not even that.
Yamabushi, and the Forbidden Wisdoms (The Guardian – episode 4)
It was not a temple. Not even a ruin.
Just an alcove beneath a flyover, stone-faced and leaking, caught between industrial storage and a commuter station where no one looked up anymore.
And yet— it had weathered.
A gate leaned there, half-swallowed by rust. Ropes hung loose, like hair forgotten. And a votive mask rested on an iron box with no slot, no inscription, no name.
He stepped through the space— not the gate, but the air beneath it. The threshold.
And the world hushed itself.
Behind him, a train passed without sound. Ahead, the light changed. Not in brightness— in density. As if the atmosphere had been pressed with a blade.
There, beside the mask, a man stood.
No approach. No breath.
Just presence.
No colour on him. No emblem. Only the stance.
One hand loose at his side. One hand where a sword might have rested, long ago.
His face was not a face— only a direction.
His gaze was not cold— only finished.
The Guardian did not speak. The figure did not blink.
Then the yamabushi moved—once. A tilt of the head. The barest shift of weight. And the scent of pine reached them, though there were no trees.
The air tightened. Not with threat. With truth.
And the Guardian understood. Not through words. Through absence. Through the sudden collapse of doubt.
The man stepped back, and did not vanish. He became part of the structure— as if he had always been the moss on the stone, the rust on the hinge, the shadow under the canopy.
And he, The Guardian— he too became structure. The bolt that never rusts. The window that does not fog. The pause no one remembers.
But the wind shifted.
There was no reason. No summons. No call or vow.
Only this:
“You’ll be guarding, unseen.”
No more. No less.
So he left.
And the cities received him— distant, aching, closed, sometimes restless— twin cities divided by their common heritage.
They did not mark his arrival. They did not need to.
But somewhere, far from their timetables and trembling lights, the shrine still stood. The man still stood.
And though he did not move, the Five Rings spun— albeit motionless.
To those who can see it.
From Yesteryears (The Guardian – episode 3)
FACES.
Faces, yes— hundreds of them thousands. Night and day. Restless. Shifting. On buses, beneath flickering lights, in the cracks between the twin cities.
Not living— not truly. Sleepwalkers, all of them, wandering from one façade to the next.
They laugh. They cry. They shout into nothing, as if noise might shield them from being unmade.
But their eyes betray them— lifeless, dulled. Only a single, weak vibration threads them together, like a wire pulled too tight across a graveyard.
The world does not weep for them. It crushes softly. Efficiently. Simply gets rid of them— as soon as they are born.
The world does not kill. It cues the noose. And every face steps forward, on time, on mark, smiling faintly as the curtain falls.
But then— one day. Or perhaps one night, (for time was thin that hour), he saw her.
Not clearly. She flickered. A pulse in the air before his gaze. A moment the city failed to blur.
Kiyomi.
She did not see him. How could she? He was folded into the landscape— between lampposts, rusting rails, muffled engines and vending light. Just another form mistaken for absence.
And he, he was not to name her. Not to reach. Not to disturb the shape she wore as she moved through the steam and heat and asphalt haze of a city roasting under a merciless sun.
Kiyomi.
Alive. But not untouched.
There was something inside her— a fear, a pain so tightly wound it mimicked focus. She walked like one disoriented but unwilling to show it. Pretending only to be lost in the maze of streets and signage, while the wound beneath her skin shivered like a thread too near breaking.
Later, as he slipped back into the city’s skin, he left behind a trail so faint they would call it mist— not knowing what it carried.
He did not look back.
But in the stillness of his path, a thought began to form. Not sharp. Not whole. Just a tremor, rising through the long quiet like smoke from an unseen flame.
A solution. Some solution.
In his lair— not a room, not a shelter, but a space the city no longer claimed— one page shifted.
Dust rose. The air stilled.
A single sheet in the unwritten diary had folded itself. Dog-eared, faintly creased— as if something unseen had marked a beginning without words.
Platform 3, No Tracks (The Guardian – episode 2)
steel river pulses- glass towers blink like eyelids shut no wind, just waiting
When The Strings Tremble (The Guardian – episode 1)
Beneath clouded light, the city folds its limbs— half-built, half-remembered. It breathes through vents and glass seams, never fully born, never truly lost.
From within the wall, I am stillness carved into structure. A flaw mistaken for design. A presence not meant to be seen.
I hear it— one note, bent by fog, drawn from a koto no hands should still be touching.
It drifts.
I do not move. But there—across the square, he walks.
He wears my outline. Carries my silence. Leaves no footsteps, only doubt.
The towers part for him like actors in a scene long forgotten. Their lights blink in patterns known only to machines and ghosts.
Two buildings face each other, siblings who never speak. One breathes in. The other exhales. Between them, he moves.
The river below holds no stars, only memory, soft as breath against an old blade’s hilt.
He pauses.
Looks up to where I dwell— within stone, within absence.
He does not see me. Yet something in him bows.
Another note. Lower this time. Like a name left in the throat of someone who no longer prays.
He descends. Mist takes him. River forgets him. The city unbuilds him.
But I remain. In lintel. In crossbeam. In the echo of the string.
A life lived twice and never wholly. A blade drawn only in remembrance.
And the koto still trembles.