Inside the darkness
my love softly blossomed
like a flower for the first time
I'm sure you don't realize it
You held out your hand to me
and although I found no strength to take it
I want you to hold it out to me
for just a while longer
That is my ray of light in the darkness
I don't want to know the future
of my love just yet
Koyomi
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What? A stone?
Yeah, a stone.
What about it?
Well...
I guess it could also be a stone statue.
A stone statue?
I mean, it's not a stone statue, but...
I was just thinking that Oshino might want to know about it since he collects stories like this.
Stories like what?
Urban legends, gossip, idle rumors, and hearsay.
I thought the Seven Wonders of the School would fit right in.
Seven Wonders?
We don't have any stories of students meeting an untimely death inside the school.
Um... What are we talking about here?
I'm sorry, Hanekawa.
You left out one too many details.
I totally lost track.
Uh, like I said,
it's a ghost story about a stone.
Now I see.
It's hard to say one way or the other if this is a stone or a statue.
Is this the stone you were referring to?
Yup.
Oshino helped us a lot over spring break, right?
I figured we could tell him if something ghostly happened at our school.
As a way to repay him.
I see.
The school doesn't really have a long history,
so we don't really have any ghost stories as of yet.
There's just one thing that's been bugging me.
This stone?
Or stone statue... Or something...
Yes, exactly.
You know, it used to look different.
I probed around the school grounds when I first came here.
Why did you do that?
Wouldn't you want to know more about
the kind of place you'd be spending the next three years?
So, basically what you're saying is that two years ago when you looked around,
this flowerbed didn't have the stone in it, right?
No, no. The stone was here.
So what's the problem?
I told you, it used to look different.
The stone was here, but the shrine wasn't.
The platform wasn't here either, nor the offerings.
In the two intervening years,
someone propped the stone up like a statue
and began to worship it.
There you have it.
We figured you'd be interested in hearing it.
Hanekawa wants to thank you for what you did for us.
It's hard to call this a story about oddities,
but it is interesting.
I'll write it down.
So what do you say, Oshino?
Two years ago it was apparently just a stone.
Now, two years later, it is the object of religious worship for an unknown section of the student body.
Do you think it's an oddity or something similar?
Physical objects turning into oddities isn't so rare.
Is it being worshipped because it's an oddity?
Did it become an oddity from the worship?
I can't decide.
Is it worshipped because it's an oddity
or is it an oddity because it's worshipped?
No, no.
The question isn't whether it's an oddity because it's being worshipped.
The question is whether it's being worshipped because it's an oddity,
or whether it became an oddity because it was being worshipped.
Well, I admit the tenses aren't the same, but I don't really see a difference.
In this case, perhaps.
It's kind of hard to tell just from your narration.
Can you draw a picture for me, Araragi?
I don't really have a talent for drawing.
Perhaps you're surprised by that.
A sketch is fine.
All right.
Black
So the shrine looks like this.
To me, the altar just seemed like a place to put the offerings,
but when I looked at the shrine itself it seemed like it was clumsily imitating something.
Maybe I saw something like it at a temple somewhere,
or some wayside statues.
I don't know.
I feel like I've seen its shape before.
That's the kind of nugget of wisdom I need to know first.
Did you save it for last to trump up your erudition?
No, it was just a vague feeling and only putting it on paper helped me get the words out.
I don't really remember anything concrete.
I kind of feel like I've seen it somewhere before...
That something central about it isn't new to me.
Do you know what it is, Oshino?
No, can't say I do.
However...
However what?
Don't just stop.
Tell me if you figured something out.
You seem lively today, Araragi.
Did something nice happen to you?
All right, Araragi.
Tell the prez this.
It should be enough that she can understand.
You can ignore the ghost stories for the moment.
Try looking into Naoetsu High School's curriculum.
Studying is what students should really be doing.
What's going on?
Oh, I was just unnecessarily anxious.
Hanekawa, please try!
You should be able to explain this in a way that I can understand.
Please try, huh?
Black
Think about the curriculum we have at this school.
Remember how we could choose between art classes in our first year?
I picked fine arts, but there was calligraphy and woodworking too, right?
When Oshino suggested we look at the curriculum, that was what he was hinting at.
You mean woodworking?
If I remember correctly, the people in woodworking had to make a small house of wood.
Basically, one of the little wooden houses got turned into the shrine we saw.
Judging from how it looks, it was probably a failed attempt.
This is what I think happened.
One of the students was making a little house in woodworking and it went awry.
But since he made it in class, the teacher told him to take it home anyway.
Since he'd only throw it away at home anyway, he decided to sneak it into the school's garbage.
On his way there he walked past the flowerbed.
It makes sense.
The trash is very close to the flowerbed.
He walks past and sees the stone.
He looks at it and figures, well, this wouldn't look so bad with a stone inside.
The stone doesn't look like a statue because of the shrine around it.
The wooden junk looks like a shrine because there's a stone in it.
Both stop failing as their own objects.
The other way around.
It's the other way around.
It's still a pretty childish thing.
The student probably went home after he saw his failure transformed
from something bound for the trash into a little shrine, a house, basically.
And so produced a stone statue that seemed like it was the object of worship.
And now I can relax.
Thanks, Araragi.
Why would you thank me?
You told Oshino that the shrine reminded you of something.
I bet that was when he realized it too.
It isn't imitating something that you saw.
You once made the same thing in class, right?
I bet you took woodworking instead of fine arts.
Yeah. Right.
You're right.
Case closed, then.
Black
Hey, don't run in the hallway!
And now for the epilogue, or rather, the punch line.
Black
Obviously it was I who made this in woodworking two years ago,
didn't take it home with me, but left it in the flowerbed.
I understood the reason for Oshino's odd smile.
I'm sure he was desperately suppressing his laughter.
Is it being worshipped because it's an oddity?
Did it become an oddity from being worshipped?
Those were Oshino's words.
They were cheap sweets, but this stone came a long way.
There is no disputing that,
and perhaps my thoughtless actions turned this stone into an oddity.
Perhaps it turned from a normal stone into the stone statue I needed,
and from there into an abnormal oddity.
The normal becomes the abnormal.
Perhaps that is what happened.
In light of that, going to school without direction can have real consequences.
I decided to go back to the classroom and ask Hanekawa
whether being unable to appreciate normality meant that I was like stones and wood.
This stone...
is just concrete.
I kick a stone away to get rid of my worries,
I'm downplaying the flutter I feel this April.
We were happy children full of curiosity,
I was the one who pushed you forward,
from that day onward.
Let's escape our confines
and take our time along the way
Let's ride our bikes to far away
carrying our hopes and dreams in the basket
Is the future we heard so many rumors about,
a nice place to be?
Even if we ask our extending shadows about it,
we'll still be none the wiser