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Section 1
## Illustrations
## Prologue
The stars that had hung high in the sky were gone. A band of pale light rose in the distant eastern sky, and the forest wrapped in the dark of night began to show its colors. There was no time. A strange monster and a boy stood facing each other. One was a long, serpent-shaped monster whose body was made of countless swords. The other was a boy soaked from head to foot in his own blood. And yet the one on the verge of death seemed to be the monster. The boy took a step forward as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The monster forced its body to move, and one of the swords that formed it ran the boy through the chest. That became its last resistance. The boy stood beside the monster, now utterly still, gasping for breath and enduring a pain that made his vision swim. This was a fight that could hardly be called a fight at all. It was only an act of self-satisfaction, carried out in her place. This was not yet the time to rest. He pulled on the jacket that had been hidden underground and took up the shovel that had been left together with it. The grip, already worn familiar in his hand, gave the boy courage, as if spurring on a partner. The boy walked, leaving red footprints in the mud. His steps were heavy, as if something were dragging at him, and he grew impatient with the slowness of his own body. At last he reached that graveside. The moment he stopped, he began to swing the shovel. After only a few strokes the boy flung the tool aside, dropped to both knees, and started digging with his hands like a mole. His fingertips met brown hair emerging from under the ground. In the hole, a girl slept as if she were dead. Several tracks of tears still showed on her pitiable, lovely cheek. And from...
## Hole:1 GRAVE DIGGER
1 Underfoot was wet, soft mud. At his ears came the rustle of branches and the calls of birds. Though his eyes were covered, he could tell at once that the place they had gotten down was near a forest. Freed from the stench of the escort wagon's old cowhide canopy, his lungs filled with fresh air. To the boy it felt like a fine dessert. Even from before his arrest, he could no longer remember when he had last breathed air this sweet. But in the instant he tried to draw another deep breath, a hard kick landed in his back. "Move it, Prisoner 5722." Hearing the man call his "name," the boy obeyed and went forward. He stood well above average height, and his build was solid. Judging only by the shadow he cast on the ground, he looked every bit a grown man. But the line of his mouth, his smooth, sun-darkened skin, and his sparse body hair all said that he was still a boy. (Where is this? Where am I being taken now?) The boy muttered, uneasy. They had blindfolded him at the detention center, then he had ridden for several hours in the escort wagon, and still no one had told him the destination. He did not mean to ask. He knew well enough that a question would bring only a brush-off, or a few knocks on the head. Walking was hard with his eyes covered. The road, though, was flatter than he had expected. Unable to rely on sight, his other senses had to work harder than usual, searching out what they could of the world around him. Bound to the handcuffs...
## Hole:2 GRAVE KEEPER
1 That singing was bad beyond the ordinary. Swinging his shovel, Muoru sang alone. The song sounded like a military march, and also like a pop tune he had heard a few times on the radio. With no one to hear him, the singer was free to do as he pleased: wildly off-key, the lyrics invented from start to finish, until he had turned himself into a machine for making noise. The volume was loud, but in the end it only died away in the empty graveyard. Perhaps to work off the gloom of endless physical labor, the boy sang like this while he dug. It felt like a return to earlier days—only about a month ago, in truth—and his mood was light. If anything was still missing, it was probably comrades to sing back to him, and a steel helmet. He had grown used to the shovel being a length too short, and to the collar around his neck. What he had begun to notice now was the feeling of having nothing at all on his head. (I wonder if there's any way to get hold of a steel helmet...) It was hardly a necessity for living in this graveyard that looked peaceful at a glance. And if the point was to keep that kind of monster from hurting him, a mere steel helmet would surely not be enough. But Muoru liked the piece of protective gear for no good reason. Back when he and the boy soldiers of his same cohort first handled rifles, he had looked coldly on the comrades who, merely from touching a gun, began to dream of being heroes. Then, on the day the issued steel helmets were handed out, he himself became so taken with his that he wore it even to sleep. From then on, especially during operations, even when everything within ten kilometers had already...
## Hole:3 GRAVE ROBBER
1 In the deep pit a mole had dug. Wedged there was a strange person who looked, on the outside, like a child. ...He had received a steel helmet from that strange person, and doing this was a poor repayment of the kindness. But this was no time to be particular about methods. There was not enough time left. How much longer could Meria hold on? How much pain could her mind still bear? No tool existed in this world that could measure that answer, so no one had any way of knowing... No. Even if such a thing truly existed, there would be no need to use it. All he had to do was keep her from ever feeling that pain again. "All right. Now you're going to tell me the truth." Muoru questioned Karas, wedged in the hole. "First... tell me what you actually are. That mask you showed me the first time we met was fake, wasn't it?" "Nothing of the sort." Karas looked up at the boy. On that innocent, androgynous face sat a white mask produced from somewhere or other. "See? It's real. I got it from a friend of mine among the Hunters." "...Oh. Meaning you aren't one of those Hunters, then." "Your intuition is sharper than any claw, young Mogura." Taking off the mask, Karas spoke in the same flippant tone as always, then shrugged. "I apologize for the part where I lied to you. I thought it would help the two of us talk... Because explaining where I stand is really a bit..."
## Afterword
Nice to meet you all. I'm Enji Arai. To the readers who have read this book, SUGARDARK, thank you. A writer I respect once said, "An afterword is nothing but gilding the lily." I am not here to put that senior's words into practice. Since the chance is rare, I want to use this afterword to talk about why I wanted to write a story about a graveyard—a thoroughly superfluous thing to do. To readers who have not yet read the main story: I don't think this afterword contains any major spoilers (I don't think), so if you don't mind, please read on. The original spark, to be honest, is a little vague. At the time I was still in my school uniform, standing and reading for free in the video-game magazine corner of a bookstore in Takadanobaba. I can hardly remember the game's name or what it was about. I only remember, in a feature on a game that already counted as quite retro, a male player character drawn in pixel art as a mummy. And in that character's class field was written "Grave Keeper." Yes. Grave Keeper. So a grave keeper, the same as "Warrior" or "Mage," could be a class in a game... ...That thought flashed through my mind then. By that time I had already begun creating in prose, and I was suffering precisely because I had no ideas to use (I still am, in fact). This spark that leapt out of a corner of my head was something I had to treasure no matter what. Taking the words "grave keeper" as my starting keyword, I began to daydream. If a grave keeper was going to appear, then it was indispensable...