Wasn't it strange? How even if your world died, the rest of the world kept spinning around its axis? How the sun kept rising and setting as if nothing had happened? I wanted to scream at the world, ask it to stop, to wait for him, to wait for Izuna because he wasn't on this world anymore, and needed time to clamber up. I wanted to ask the world how, how could it still keep going without him? 

I contemplated this, contemplated the hundreds, thousands, millions of sunsets that would happen without him. In time, they would happen without me as well. I couldn't wait for such a time.

I stood at the top of the cliff over the Nakano river. Our spot. The second... The second sunset after his death. My first time here since he was alive.

Our spot looked exactly the same. I didn't understand what I had expected, but somehow, I had expected it to change. To be filled with the absence of him.

It wasn't.

Suddenly, I heard a screech. I had learned that our brain was bad at distinguishing the direction of sound, even if it was good at deciding distance. That was why our ears were shaped the way they were. The patterns in the ear enabled the sound waves to bounce in such a way that the brain could interpret whether they came from right or left, above or below, front or back. Which was why I could locate the screech as coming from above me.

I looked up. There was a bird of prey, circling. I turned my head up towards the sound. It was a bird of prey, encircling something down at the river.

I looked down. There were two birds. A blue one, standing still, cleaning its wings. And a brown one, jumping from one stone to the next. The bird of prey dove, went for the brown bird, just as Izuna had suggested that day long ago. On pure reflex, I reached for my sword's sheath, grabbed the handle, and threw the sword down at the diving bird of prey.

My sword shaved off some feathers on the side of its head, just as I had intended it to. It scared the bird of prey so much that it deviated from its line of action, also just as I had intended it to. The blue bird stood still at its stone. The brown bird kept jumping from one stone to the next.

I fell down to my knees and wept.