I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

— Borges

He remembered golden fields of hyper-oats stretching from horizon to horizon. The way his shirt, soaked in blood, clung uncomfortably to his body. The sound of Kogami’s voice behind him. The cold weight of a gun barrel pressing against the back of his head. And then—

Nothing.

Something cold dripped onto Makishima Shougo’s face, and he opened his eyes.

He was sitting on the ground, slumped against the trunk of a tree. The air carried the damp scents of an autumn forest. A pale, overcast dawn was breaking. Mist clung between the trees, their leaves gleaming wet — there had been rain not long ago. It was a strange forest, as if a careless painter, unconcerned with realism, had chosen to work with only two colors: rust-brown and black. Or perhaps that was simply what late autumn looked like when the rains came? Makishima, a child of a technological age, knew little of trees, seasons, or any of this; to him, Four Seasons meant Vivaldi, or at best, Tchaikovsky — not the living world.

His head throbbed, but in the way it does when childhood friends accidentally nail you in the skull with a ball. When someone blows your brains out with a gun, there really shouldn’t be anything left to hurt.

His shirt bore no trace of blood, though it was undoubtedly the same one. Crisp, white, as if fresh from the store — unlike his pants, which bore the clear evidence of sitting in the autumn mud.

Makishima scrambled to his feet and tried to brush himself off, though with little success. Theories flooded his mind, each more outlandish than the last, about how he might have survived and somehow leaped forward in time. But deep down, he knew, with absolute certainty, that none of them were true.

I died, he thought, without surprise. Died and…

“…found myself in a dark wood,” he said aloud, savoring the words, then smirked. “Oh, come on. Seriously?”

There was no sign of a road or a path, so he set off in a random direction. Every so often, he glanced around, half-expecting — perhaps half-hoping — to see Dante’s leopard, lion, and gaunt she-wolf blocking his way. But the forest was empty. Heavy with rain, silent, save for the occasional patter of droplets against fallen leaves.

By the time frustration began to set in — at the endless, senseless wandering among the identical dark trunks, at the lack of a Virgil to guide him somewhere, be it Hell or Paradise — he spotted a silhouette through the morning mist. A house. And in one of its windows, the outline of a lit lamp.

The dark wooden door was unlocked. When he pushed it, it opened slowly with a creak. He hesitated, then stepped into the unlit entryway and made his way toward the room where the light was spilling through the doorframe.

The air smelled of dust and paper. Books filled the space — lined up in rows on towering shelves, stacked on the floor, scattered across the windowsill. His eyes caught more than a few familiar names — Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, his beloved Swift, and of course, Dante, damn him. Of course, Dante. But many of the titles were unfamiliar.

Despite the overhead light, the room was empty. Makishima pushed open the next door and found more of the same — bookshelves, bindings, dust. He moved from one room to another, each a maze of books, until finally, at last, he heard a sound of human presence: the clink of a fork against a plate, the soft chime of a spoon stirring in a cup.

He followed the noise and found himself in a room unlike the ones he had seen before. A kitchen. The kind that hadn’t existed in his world for a long time — where machines had long since taken over such mundane matters. But this was a kitchen, in the most quintessential sense. A Platonic ideal of a kitchen, straight from the early to mid-20th century.

A warm, buttery-yellow glow from a lamp under a fabric shade cast soft light over cupboards, a stove, a table. And the man seated at that table, stirring sugar into a cup. He hadn’t even looked up. His head was bowed slightly, so at first, Makishima saw only a tousled mass of black hair.

"Well, hello there," Kogami Shinya's voice was edged with quiet amusement.

Makishima froze, fingers gripping the doorframe, caught between hesitation and a desperate urge to step forward. His heart plummeted, then lurched into a wild, erratic rhythm.

For a moment — one that stretched into eternity — he stared at the man before him, who, with a sharp motion, tossed back tangled dark strands and lifted his gaze. And Makishima realized, with relief — or was it disappointment? — that he had been mistaken.

Of course Kogami wouldn't be sitting there, hunched over, holding a cup so awkwardly it looked like he might drop it at any moment. The voice wasn’t right either. The person at the table was a stranger — a young man with mourning-dark eyes, underscored by such deep shadows that he might not have slept for nine hundred years.

"I'm dead?" Makishima finally stepped inside as he spoke.

"Dead, dead. Hey, watch the shoes — take them off!"

"So this is Hell?" Makishima asked, ignoring the command about his footwear.

"Or Heaven. Who knows…" The stranger shrugged. "Anyway, since you've already dragged in half the forest, grab the sugar from that cupboard. You’re standing right next to it. Coffee?"

"Sure," Makishima said, still not quite grasping what was happening, but obediently handing over the sugar box.

"Then pour yourself a cup," the young man instructed, conversational, almost friendly. He began dropping sugar cubes into his coffee — one, two, three… Makishima counted six (and that was on top of whatever sugar had already been in the cup). He suppressed a shudder. His own coffee remained jet-black, bitter as life itself — and, as it turned out, absolutely terrible.

Settling into the empty chair, he studied his peculiar new acquaintance. The stranger looked a few years younger than him, with a face that might have been called handsome — if one had a taste for Byronic heroes. But the impression was somewhat ruined by his posture, his mannerisms, and the slightly manic glint in his eyes, suggesting some variety of neurodivergence.

"Name's L," the young man finally announced, tilting his head slightly, as if sharing a great secret.

"El? As in Elohim?" Makishima felt slightly breathless, overwhelmed by the sheer number of literary allusions manifesting around him. "Are you here to judge me or something?"

"What?" L sounded almost offended. "No. Just L Lawliet. Not my fault they named me that."

"My apologies, I didn’t mean to mock you. I’m Makishima Shougo."

"I know!" L said in what he probably thought was a deeply mysterious tone. "I know everything about you. Read your story. You reminded me of someone I used to know, and I got curious to see you in person. And—"

Makishima cut him off. "My story?"

"Uh-huh. The perfect society, the Sibyl System, your ever-flawless psycho-pass, your sworn enemy Kogami Shinya." L tapped a book lying on the table. "A bit cliché, but—"

Makishima choked on his coffee.

"Cliché? That’s all you have to say about my life?"

L gave a helpless little shrug. "Look, I haven’t read half as many books as you, but even I know that ‘man sees the rot in society, rises in rebellion, and tears it all down’ is… not exactly original. And, no offense, not particularly smart."