Celty Sturluson was not human.

She was a type of fairy found from Scotland to Ireland, commonly known as a dullahan: a being that visited the homes of those close to death to inform them of their impending mortality.

The dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm, rode in a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar pulled by a headless horse, and approached the homes of the soon to die. Anyone foolish enough to open the door was drenched with a basinful of blood. Thus the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.

One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing whether this was true.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.

When someone back in her homeland stole her head, she lost her memories of what she was. It was that search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.

Now with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.

But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and her memories were still lost.

Celty knew who had stolen her head.

She knew who was preventing her from finding it.

But ultimately, she didn’t know where it was.

And she was fine with that.

As long as she could live with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could happily live the way she was now.

She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face and held this strong, secret desire within her heart.

That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.

Yes, she was a dullahan.

Celty Sturluson was not human.

She could not become a human, and a human could not become a dullahan.

But still, she did her best to understand what it meant to be human.

She learned about humanity through a variety of things and took great pains to live as a human being did.

A rare and powerful sense of reason built her persona, and despite the lack of a head or legal identity, she gained an almost perfectly human mind and lived as an individual within the city of Ikebukuro in Japan.

Which was why nobody could predict what exactly would happen to a dullahan that had lost not only its memories, but also its sense of reason, whether out of anger, sadness, shock, or pain.