Sea of the Wind, Shore of the Maze, Prologue

little more. As a result, he  immediately felt and retreated from a sharp, cold pain. He could feel the snow melting on his knees, melting  into an icy water that trickled down his calf.
    He sighed heavily the way children do.
    A puff of wind suddenly brushed the back of his neck. It wasn't a cold, empty draft but a very warm  breeze.
    He looked around because he thought that someone had felt sorry for him and opened a door for his  sake.
    However, after he looked all around him, he found that all the windows were still shut tightly. The  window facing the opposite room was covered in a thin fog because of the warm air inside.
    He tilted his head suspiciously and looked around once more. The warm air still didn't stop blowing  onto him.
    He looked towards the side of the storehouse and immediately blinked his eyes in surprise.
    A white object extended from the small crevice between the storehouse and the wall.
    It looked like a person's arm, a completely bare arm, white and full, reaching out from the crevice  behind the storehouse, but he couldn't see to whom the arm belonged. He thought, Could they be hiding  behind the storehouse?
    He felt like that was unthinkable.
    The space in the crevice between the storehouse and the wall was too small. Yesterday, his brother had  cried the whole day because he couldn't get the baseball that had rolled into the narrow crack. Even with his  or his brother's small bodies, they couldn't fit anything in the crevice but their arms. That arm looked like it  belonged to an adult, yet how were they able to fit into that space?
    The forearm portion of the arm was swaying as if it were stirring water. He realized that the hand was  beckoning to him, and then he took a step toward it. It was very strange that although his knees were numb  from the cold, they didn't make any dry, rough sounds.
    He didn't feel the least bit frightened, because he realized that the warm air was blowing from that  direction.
    He was really very cold and he also didn't know what he should do, so he obediently walked over  towards the arm.
    The snow had already completely coated the ground, almost covering all of his little footprints,  eventually leaving no trace of him.
    The white sky resembled faded ink, the color gradually changing.
    The white of the short winter day gradually turned into the color of night.

Chapter 1
    No one knows how a life is actually created. Especially speaking of the biology of things that are not  human, this is even more of a riddle.
    Life and consciousness suddenly arrived upon her body just like this.
    When she came to, her body was under a white tree branch, and there was only one name in her mind.
    --Taiki.
    In the process of getting up, this name slowly occupied the whole of her mind. At the same time, she  also got a hold on the rest of the situation: who she was, why she was born, as well as what her most  important mission was.
    --Taiki.
    She propped up her upper body. These ideas were still flooding her mind, and they simultaneously  spread into every corner of her body.
    She straightened her waist, as if she was letting water that had dripped onto her body trickle onto every  surface. She lifted her head and closed her eyes. Teardrops slid down from the corners of her eyes and  dribbled into her damp hair.
    She tried to move her feet, which did not yet have any strength in them, and bumped into the wet soil  and golden shards next to her feet.
    The shards once belonged to the egg shell that protected her, and the liquid that had originally filled the  egg had already been absorbed by the soil. She had just hatched from inside the shell, and the golden egg  that had contained her had fallen down from a branch, breaking into pieces all over the ground.
    She stared at the shards of the golden egg, and after a little bit, lifted her head again to look at the white  branch in front of her. As if it were made of white silver, the long branch extended beyond the top of her  head and outward. The root was sturdily set into the high cliff wall.
    On the branch, there were still a few little, round golden fruits. Although no one had told her, she  already knew by intuition that there were still unhatched lives inside all the fruits, and not too long ago, she  herself had also waited like this in the fruit to be hatched.
    This is how life is actually created.
    --Taiki.
    She used her strength to prop up her four legs and stood up, while she cried once