Prologue

The girl walked into the café. It was old, barely standing, but she determined that she liked it there. The streets of outside Kyoto were busy with crowds of people with places to go. She hated them all. Loneliness ate at her, but this was what she wanted, to be alone and forlorn; and for today, this dead café would have to do as her sanctuary.

Shadows plastered themselves to the peeling wallpaper and crept under the dusty tables. Twisted chairs moved when the dim lights from the streets hit them. The glass was shattered and the paint on the ceiling, which was once splendid, was now chipped into awkward shapes. All these things went unnoticed by the girl. She carelessly walked across the tile floor letting her tennis shoes be cut by the shards of glass; her face was uncaring and distant. The girl was Japanese and answered to the code name of Kitsune, the word for fox. And like a fox she was too, with her mysterious stance and mischievous nature. Her skin was pale with clown-like make-up, her spiked hair streaked crimson, and her clothes a mess of shredded fabric. She was short like her mother and strong like her father, but who cared about such things now.

Kitsune propped herself against a table that seemed secure enough to hold her weight and heaved a disgruntled sigh. Her mind swirled with thoughts that had no real purpose, the boy that she left and the family that hated her almost as much as she hated them. Her loyalties were spent and her imagination jumbled. She had nowhere to go and nobody to talk to; her life as they say appeared to have reached a dead end. Her jumbled mind turned to ideas of death. Suicide would be the honorable thing to do, so her wide and dark eyes peered longingly at the glass on the floor. "Like a play," she whispered. "They wander to and fro." She smiled slightly. "Beautiful puppets on strings of fate." She glanced down to look for strings on her own wrists. "The puppet master cuts the strings one by one." She continued, her lips barely moving to form the syllables of the poem. "The dolls, they fall." Her head dipped to the side. "Like toys, God plays with his creations. On a whim they are lost." One last time she peers curiously at the glass and finishes with a flourish. "Porcelain shatters, and fancy frocks are wasted, light dances gleefully on an empty stage." The girl could not recall where she had heard the poem. It had just appeared in her mind, and the words spilled out across her lips like they were meant to be said. She repeated them to herself again thinking over the words before slipping off the table and landing on the floor with a dull thud.

She casually strolled down a row of ghostly chairs, her fingers touching them almost reverently, until she stopped, and her hand dropped to her side. There, in front of her, was a dim corner that she had not seen when she had first arrived. She also took into notice a pile of scattered paper that had gone unnoticed for an obviously long span of time. She cautiously crept over and stooped to gather them up when, in the corner of her eye, she noticed the tattered book from which the pages must have come. Kitsune crawled towards it, the glass cutting into her already dirty knees so that she could pick it up. The book was a strange creation, she decided, with no author or title. She scooped up the crinkled pages and returned them to the book according to the numbers written on the bottom of each page. She couldn't help but notice fragments of passages that caught her attention and it wasn't long until she realized that she had been reading it with rapt attention. So, flipping to the first page, she started to read, whispering the lines into the empty room.