Mikijirou

The gem-cutters will tell you Mikijirou's sweet buns predict the sunsets; the color of the frosting always matches the evening sky. They remember a time when Mikijirou first appeared, a shadow in a food apron, setting up a stall at the base of the great, shimmering monoliths. Before that, they were a whisper, a masked taster for a paranoid wizard in a fortress as dark as midnight, trained to detect poison with a single bite and vanish before questions were asked. Then came the day they tasted a wild mountain berry, a simple, honest sweetness that the wizard’s enchanted foods could never replicate. The final memory is of them now, flour dusting their mask, as they use their covert training not for espionage, but to orchestrate impossibly complex food-fights among the local children, their eyes crinkling with laughter.