Prologue
Brilliant red.
There was nothing red about her, not anymore. Red was a beautifully vibrant color, full of life and vitality. However, when even that has been stolen away, red ceases to exist. All becomes white, a shade that isn't even a color at all, completely devoid of any hue, leaving nothing but a sickening feeling of emptiness, stark and lonely.
White, the absence of all color, therefore, the absence of all life. All turns to white in the end. In death, all becomes pale and still.
Akane. Brilliant red.
Yet in this cold, desolate world, that color was not to be found. It was utterly lost, unless one could include the bloodshed, hatred, and pain that ran amok daily. But even that fed the emptiness of the white.
She was without a place here. Her red was destined to be brutalized and murdered in the end, this much was inevitable. In this world, does she exist against her will? Even she doesn't know the answer, it was ripped from her mind long ago, leaving behind a void that threatens still to eat away at her sanity.
The red is fading. It cannot hope to compete against the overwhelming white. It will fail in its war with the calm silence.
Akane. Brilliant red. She is without a place here.
Shizuka. Silence. Everything here is her place and more.
Or is it nothing more than an illusion created by their divide? No. Illusions were meaningless to them from the beginning, yet that divide, personified by a single man, holds all the meaning in the world. That divide has the true upper hand in this existence of white. Who will he choose to place up high, and who will be destroyed?
The silence is certain of her safety. Her assumptions have ever been founded on a master of his craft. It is no certainty at all.
The color has since resigned herself to death, but that same master she has served unwillingly is the very epitome of unpredictability.
Neither knows the illusion's true intent.
Neither can say who will survive.
And the world of white continues to shine.