When Lilyca pulled her feather hoodie off, Rinne felt like he had been hit by a meteor.
Yes. A full, extinction-level, world-reshaping meteor of the kind that fell from the sky once every few million years and rearranged the entire landscape on impact.
His brain stopped. His lungs stopped. His heart stopped and restarted at a completely different tempo.
It felt like he had never seen any single thing more beautiful in his entire ten years of life.
The black hair, the silver-white eyes, the small, solemn face that seemed to hold secrets older than mountains… The way the light caught her features as the hood fell away, illuminating her like a figure in a stained-glass window, like something holy that had wandered out of a temple and into his father's sitting room.
