The Ethos

A people beyond the known worlds

The Ethos are neither human nor demon. They are named in Chapter 12, at the Tower dinner table, when Shun Sato answers a question about his eldest daughter by stating plainly that she is not human and not a demon either — that her kind call themselves the Ethos, and that they originate from an entirely separate realm.

Mimi and the question of age

The disclosure is prompted by Mimi Sato herself. Shun introduces her as his eldest daughter and notes that although she looks to be in her early twenties, she is in fact forty-three. The Ethos explanation follows as the answer to that discrepancy, which makes the people's existence inseparable, in the published story, from the household the reader already knows.

Six realms

The same conversation places the Ethos realm within a wider cosmology. Shun states that there are six realms in total, clustered together in the spatial architecture of a water droplet, illustrating the arrangement with his silverware. This is the only description of the arrangement given at this boundary, and the Ethos realm is not otherwise located within it.

Chapter 13 refers to Mimi in passing as “the young Ethos,” confirming the word as an ordinary term of reference inside the Tower household rather than a piece of specialist lore.

Zero

Chapter 21 identifies a second Ethos within the Tower household. Describing Zero's refusal of his master's order at the portal, the narration gives his stare the coldness of an Ethos who has lived for a thousand years. The same passage says that Zero, though Shun's butler, had always served a higher master, and Zero's own words refer to a “She” who is never wrong. The published story does not yet say who she is.

This extends what the Chapter 12 disclosure implied about lifespan: Mimi is forty-three while appearing to be in her early twenties, and Zero is described in terms of a millennium.

Undisclosed details

How Shun came to know of the Ethos, how Mimi and Zero came to the Tower, whether travel between the realms is possible, and the identity of the higher master Zero serves are all undisclosed at this boundary.

Zero's Lady

In Chapter 22 Zero looks up through the forest canopy and speaks to someone who is not there: “My dearest Lady… Our Eye of the sun…” The chapter does not say who she is, or whether she is the “She” of Chapter 21.