Yumejirou

“That paint isn’t for war,” a fisher once explained to a traveler in Waterfall City. “It’s a promise.” Every dawn, before the mist burns off the great falls, another chimp helps Yumejirou apply the crimson lines. One stroke for the day they first shared an apple stick by the plaza’s fish statue. Another for the vow they whispered in the pale stone temple straddling the rushing water. The final, sharpest line is a ward against a memory: the sight of Yaban-hito’s uncontrollable rage, a vision of what happens when savagery consumes the soul. Yumejirou wears the fierce marks not to intimidate the world, but to remind themself of the gentle life they are protecting from it.