Chapter Text
The heart of Chinju Forest beats in counts of five.
Five pulses of arrowheads against damp wood — hollow, punctuated only by the sounds of the bake-danuki that flickers in the corner of her vision. A constant companion of many days, it is patient and mindful of this daily, ritualistic performance of hers, and yet, cruelly taunting.
Five arrows are its cue to somersault, clap, go up in a plume of smoke, appear a step away.
It beckons, as is its nature, and she refuses, as is hers.
She notches another arrow instead, feels the thrum of the string press against her ear and lets it drown her tiny friend's sounds until—
"Give in to the temptation, General. Shoot. You won't hurt it."
The voice is behind her, familiar and haunting in its lilt, inspiring action with little effort.
It is instinct that drives Sara to turn around to its command, her aim settling on the object of her devotion; the tunnel-vision of a markswoman triumphing over a devotee's wide gaze. She can't see the other's face — it's only a silhouette against the darkness of the forest — but she can sense the shock her action has inspired.
The string strains tightly against her bow.
"Not me, General Kujou," the voice says, a slice of humour whetting its otherwise dull surface, "You would hurt me if y—"
The release is sweet and smooth, the arrow hums low and light.
The naginata that deflects it is a crescent moon that illuminates the ersatz night of the forest.
Behind her, the bake-danuki squeaks and scurries away.
In a flash of lightning that singes the air itself, the face is in front of hers, breath fanning against Sara's own as it searches her eyes for an answer.
She searches in turn, finding life swirling beneath the heavy lashes.
It's a spark rarely seen in those eyes. It's pretty. It's peculiar. It's foreign and terrifying in the way strange things are, but familiar and evocative, too: of memories deeply repressed, of questions that never found utterance.
Now, too, these questions die in her throat — pressed between her own breath and the edge of the other woman’s blade.
And she laughs, a high-pitched, giggling ring that belongs to the body of someone much, much younger. Perhaps its great disuse in her life had left it preserved in some pocket of time, but now it floods out and colours her cheeks without reserve.
She laughs uncharacteristically, brightly, and forces the Archon before her to falter under the absurdity of it all. The blade recedes by just a hair's width, but in doing so, it seals a prayer between them.
“You must commit to the act, Your Excellency. You must give it your all.”
The naginata no longer chills her skin. It is back to the smoke it came from. The bow in her own hand mirrors dutifully.
“You—”
“She's a stranger to hesitation. My head should be rolling already.”
“How—”
“Your bearing's awkward, too. The shoulders go higher.” Sara reaches her hands out to the retreating figure, holding her in place, a thumb pressed to each arm, angling them to resemble the inviolable woman she’d worshipped all these years.
Her actions are only met with sounds. Ragged sounds that die halfway in the other's throat — and suddenly, Sara's glad she didn't start with the questions that now lie rotting in her own.
A beat passes — or is it five? — and they are enveloped in a dull silence instead, threatened only by the opening and closing of a mouth that's still groping blindly for a place to start.
Sara takes pity on it, moving in to fill the gaps.
Her eyes trace the grime that cling to the tail of the Narukami’s clothes, “And she would never walk here all the way from Tenshukaku. It is simply a waste of time.”
The dirt and bramble on the path leading to the forest have not been particularly kind to the silks of the aristocracy.
“It's a long walk, too. You must be tired?”
She is no stranger to the flash of impatience that takes over the other woman’s features. It disappears as fast as it appears: transient but potent, like the lightning she commands.
“Yes.”
The finality of the tone is reminiscent of the one she knows, but the voice isn't.
It is soft; yielding. Sara doesn't know what to think of it. She thought she was prepared, but—
Is anyone, ever, in the presence of the divine?
With a sigh, she relinquishes her hold on the other’s arms and turns away, reaching the branch upon which her sleeves lie hanging; pristine white flags swaying in the soft breeze. It carries whispers of losses far beyond the battlefield.
A swift pull tears sleeves open by the seams, made twice as large as she lays them neatly on a moss-covered slab of rock. “Have a seat.” She has a hand out, the other resting stiffly behind her back; flesh-memory, these old gestures of deference that no longer come from the heart.
Their eyes meet then, and Sara finds herself suspended in a knowing, still impatient gaze.
There is a current in the air, and it prickles her skin, much like the flesh of Amakumo on the tongue, when one indulges in a sliver of the thunder’s rage with utmost faith in its compassion.
She, too, is being indulged then, as the Narukami chooses to waste her breath on the obvious, “Those are your clothes.” Her tone remains doubtful — disapproving, even — but she moves forward to honour the offer nonetheless.
“They can always be replaced,” Sara says, watching the woman settle herself in a corner and leaving a wide-open berth next to her. It's a wordless question paired with a gesture that borders on the blasphemous: an invitation to speak as equals.
“Can they? When you haven't shown your face in the city for three months?”
Sara bristles under that expectant gaze, the prodding edge of that voice; warm and alive and friendly.
Sacrilege, she thinks, to have a glimpse of these strange, heretofore concealed facets of this elusive stranger that inhabits the body of someone hauntingly familiar.
Sara wants to wipe this spirited image off the slate of her memory. She wants the stillness instead. She wants the calm fury. She wants what's familiar and cold and comforting. She wants—
“Do you plan to change that any time soon? To give Ogura-san a visit? In that case, you may come up to Tenshukaku and...”
There's an enviable ease in the way the Goddess lays down the bricks of the possible. It makes the taste of denial in Sara's mouth just that much bitter.
She wants to think of sweeter things.
“Do you like mandarins?”
“Huh?”
“Mandarins. The fru—”
“I know what mandarins are, General, bu—”
“Good. Would you like some?”
A pause. The soft glow of the forest's flowers illuminates the creases on the woman's face: the raised brow, the twisted mouth. Displeasure at being interrupted, perhaps?
In another time, the prospect would've terrified Sara.
Now… it pleases her, almost. A flush of triumph that quickens her pulse and pulls up the curve of her lips just so.
How odd, how truly odd.
“Sure.” And how odd for an Archon to acquiesce, too. How pliant: how unlike the enduring figure from the myths, how unlike the unflinching woman she'd once known.
“Good,” Sara repeats, as if cooing an unruly child into a lull. By then her wings unfurl outwards and carry her up to the high branches that shade generously; hiding treasures in crevices where the greedy hands of the bake-danuki do not reach.
Up here, she can feel the sun on her skin, dappled gold on her dark form as she unties a knot on the cloth that holds the promise she's made to the one waiting below.
And as if impatient already, her voice curls after Sara, “Where do you find them? They don't grow out here, from what I remember.”
She looks out to the horizon, where the edges of the forest disappear into the sea and then rise again to meet the borders of Inazuma City, “The kids bring them to me. You must have passed them on your way here. They like to gather by the shore at this time.”
Sara descends softly, hands full of that particular kindness that only children who’ve known the miserly sting of war may bestow upon a stranger.
“I was too distracted to have noticed,” comes the reply, the Archon's brilliant gaze settling on her, coaxing Sara with the hand that comes to pat the empty space beside her.
Between them, there are the clouds of dust she had kicked up with her landing. Sara wishes they were thicker, that she were as brutish as her tengu blood would deign, and had conjured a storm that could hide the sight that now beckons her closer.
No, she was lamentably refined instead. All graceful landings and graceful words: the yōkai in her long stifled to make room for a comportment befitting that of a lady of the Kujou clan.
Even in the savage depths of the forest, she's bound by those chains of polite society; nigh-incapable of denying that which is asked of her.
And before she knows it, she's beside the stranger, peeling mandarins and speaking platitudes, “Ah, well, you'd like them. They're the good sort. Their families are new to the island — refugees from Yashiori.”
There's a disquiet around them, and Sara can feel those eyes boring into her — daring her to meet them, some sort of a challenge — as she goes on, “Without my name, they don't recognise me and are far more friendly than they have any right to be.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Say what?”
“That they're friendly? As if you don't deserve their kindness.”
“Because I don't,” she moves then, meeting the other's stare boldly, seized by the ghost of that old self who relayed battle reports in even sentences, “Not when I had my part to play in their misery.”
She thinks of the worries which knot themselves into the brows of the young when they speak of their ramshackle houses in Konda: of the lack of trade and money to be made in that sleepy village, of the struggles to scrounge up enough mora to make rent in Hanamizaka someday.
She wonders if the stranger before her knows any of that; if mortal prayers ever breach the high walls of Tenshukaku; if their lives were any more than flickering curiosities in the grand tapestry that the Raiden Shogun strives to weave.
If she ever pauses to observe the threads in her hands?
“So the ones who do recognise you, are they less friendly then?”
For her part, Sara feels both seen and heard: small and weak and taut as a string.
“The ones from the city?” she sighs, considering for a moment, “Once the war picked up, I was never really around. So I can't say I've had the chance to feel their ire up close, but… I have heard my subordinates talk, and, honestly, I— I can't imagine it would've been any worse than how it used to be.”
Her mind's eye is alight with the faces of all those she'd stripped of their Visions; but before that, of those she had to engage with in her capacity as part of the Tenryou Commission; or before still, of those that grew prickly at the sight of one that carried the blood of the infamous tengus, “I've never lacked in giving them reasons to resent me.”
There is a troubled shuffle next to her; indignant.
“It is not your burden to bear. Everything you did had my tacit approval, so if there's any—”
“Yours?” She cuts, beset by both impatience and curiosity, with little to offer as apology than the piece of fruit she places in the other's open palm.
There are several dimensions to her inner turmoil, but the Narukami, even in her infinite wisdom, is privy only to one.
It is something Sara has come to face recently: the limits of the divine's domains. They may control the elements, all that sustains life, the heavens and the earth, and yet, mortal hearts remain beyond their grasp. Forever guarded, revealed only in prayers—
“Hm?” The Shogun stares, but doesn’t see, her gaze lost to some vast middle distance, a frown on her pursed mouth.
“Your orders?” Sara offers again.
She watches the woman turn away and bite into the piece, a moment of reprieve she uses to contemplate.
Silence stretches between them — but this time, Sara doesn’t bristle. She merely sits in wait, offering fruit to this strange God that wavers between thought and action. And in that much, she finds the Narukami to be comprehensibly, almost painfully, human.
“I take it that Miko explained things to you?”
The familiarity and fondness in those words is patent. Sara swallows. She thinks of swirling cherry blossoms, of a cup of hojicha tea gone cold beside solemn conversations, of a particularly windy day from years before that had swept aside a canvas of pink hair to reveal the magatama hanging along a slender back.
“The Guuji?” She thinks of the trust placed in that title, of a trust that bears the weathering of time, and surfaces, centuries later, to shake the will of a God, “I haven't talked to her since that night.”
Sara's always known that she isn't subject to that primeval strain of absolute trust that rests between Priestess and Goddess. Still, there is something inexplicably painful about having it reiterated with a sound — a question; a suspicion — that probes for what she’s left unsaid: “Oh?”
She shakes, smothered memories burning bright again, “Well, she was by my bedside when I came to. But we didn't talk, not really.” Her heart singes at the image of waking up to a smiling kitsune — smiling knowingly, as Guuji Yae always does, as if privy to some great, world-ending secret she was aching to unleash upon Sara.
But... the Guuji had said nothing. She had only smiled and wiped the cold sweat off the tengu’s brow, rendering her tender beyond compare.
“I remember thinking then, how odd that was — for her to not even tease me,” she says, her words laced with the finesse of a thought that had been mulled over a million times and more. And if her audience didn’t know any better, Sara would even sound wistful, “She's not one for restraint, after all."
“Not even a word?”
“Ah… Goodbye? Some sort of a farewell. Something unremarkable.” That is not a word one uses often for Guuji Yae, but Sara has no substitute to describe that night she stumbled to her feet, gathered her clothes and armour, and left Tenshukaku with only a quiet, watchful kitsune as her witness.
“She never mentioned seeing you.”
“I'm not surprised. She's fond of her games.”
“Mhm. Strings that belong to her alone. She wouldn't let me look for you either. Always an excuse or a distraction.”
Yae Miko as puppeteer; whether it's an accusation or an admission, Sara cannot tell. She finds that she cannot bring herself to care, either.
The Narukami's voice trails evenly, “But that doesn’t matter now. We must look to the future. The war is over and an army needs its General. Your absence is felt most strongly—”
“Is that why you’re here? Because your army needs a leader?” Sara feels bitter. It doesn't seep into her voice, but the hiss of the green-eyed serpent that curls along her spine and spits venom into her thoughts is unmistakable, “And the Guuji has finally deemed matters of military important enough to relinquish her hold on you?"
“It’s not like that. I—” There’s a blend of exasperation and regret on the Archon’s otherwise placid face, and Sara finds herself turning away from its glare as she elaborates, “It’s not just that.”
In the distance, the lanterns at Ioroi’s shrine glow like melting coins.
“I felt like I owed you an explanation.”
She hears the bake-danuki sing again, a hollow clinking in this pocket of time and space. Singing, perhaps, of the follies of the indebted.
“You owe me nothing.”
Sara shudders, appalled for some reason she cannot truly comprehend. The matter isn’t simple, yet all they speak in are simple phrases. Never before has language failed a pair so thoroughly.
When she turns back, the face before her twists in a sorrow so nameless that she wants nothing but to hold it in her hands — hold it, still it, so that it may echo the tranquility she's always known it for.
It was duty, she wants to say. A whisper: it was duty and devotion and beggars nothing in return.
And yet, as a hand reaches out to graze her elbow, Sara flinches with a horror that shocks the both of them into silence for the briefest moment, before the words are picked up once more, “I do.”
It is not horror, but offense, Sara supposes. A feeling that it is somehow criminal to entertain this imposter who offers to explain the unexplainable.
“After all that you've given to pursue my dream of eternity.”
“Not yours. Hers.”
About this much, she wants to be certain. Her loyalty wasn't easily given, and it wouldn't be easily shared.
“Yes,” the reply is punctuated, an expression that speaks partly of knowledge that’s still obscured from Sara, and partly of the desperation to share the same, “After all you've lost, you—"
“There are people who’ve lost their lives.”
It is uncharacteristic of the General to unravel like this, doesn’t suit the deference that has been pinned into her veins for a lifetime — but really, her patience for people who know too much (and hide too much) has thinned beyond measure.
It’s a cheap, impulsive bravery that courses through her instead.
“Yes, and I’m nothing if not sorry for that. If I could, I would apologize to them. If I could pray for their souls… I would.”
Sara doesn’t know what to say to that, this image of a God bowing on behalf of her fallen soldiers.
What does the one at the summit cede to? What is there to reach for but the forlorn decline?
She can only pity the figure before her: this woman that worries seeds between her fingers as she contemplates, singular in her authority, with no one to turn to but herself — both spoiled and troubled by a stubbornness and impunity that belongs to the Gods alone.
There is a lonesomeness to her that Sara cannot put a name to.
So she lets the moment fester by itself, says nothing until the figure turns to her once more, “I know you think me cruel, General. That you must have had a change of heart over the months. That you must have doubted me, and above all... yourself.” Her voice is low, delicate, each word delivered gingerly, “I believe, truly, that it would ease your misgivings if you would just let me help you understand me.”
Sara nearly balks at that, because try as she might, she cannot shake the sense of wariness that a show of such naked vulnerability teases from her.
It begs an openness that she cannot bring herself to return in kind. No Kujou can.
“Forget about me. This is not about me. Do you want to be understood?”
The ghost of Takayuki’s fingers knead lovingly through her hair.
“Because it would change the nature of our relationship. You, of all people, should know,” she says, breathing deep, crushing all that’s dreadful beneath her ribs, short of her lips, “You should know, how— how—”
The ache in her chest grows until it eats her words whole. There’s a pitiful creature in there, rattling the bars of its cage until its pleas stir the surface of her skin. She runs a hand over her arms and feels gooseflesh sprouting beneath her touch.
The action doesn’t go unnoticed.
“How understanding begets uncertainty, and how the divine is bedfellows with wonder alone. How its recession, and understanding’s arrival — well, breeds heretics.” The Narukami speaks, and Sara can simply hear her smile, an amusement that grazes the edge of something provocative.
“But you don’t need me to tell you any of that, do you, General?”
There is a peculiar relief to being caught red-handed, a euphoric fatalism that welcomes with open arms.
It’s a pin-prick against Sara’s skin that tears her open and suffuses her with a calm she hasn't known in a while, shoulders easing visibly as she answers a question as yet unasked, “Only after the events of that particular evening. Never before have I doubted you — not even for a moment.”
“Oh?” There's a rustle of silk as their shadows move closer. “Would you care to elaborate?”.
Her hands find the discarded peels of fruit in her lap, nails digging into them in a desperate bid to keep them from shaking.
“It's… strange, for lack of a better word. To find yourself waking up to a different world, where everything you've known and fought to preserve is proven to have been held together by false or flimsy tales.”
Digging, digging further in.
“Your family has betrayed its ideals, the war that uprooted so many lives, that you were at the helm of — orchestrated and entirely in vain, the decree that had you turning people into shadows of themselves… pointless — all of it — swept aside in a day.”
Digging, still.
“And the Shogun you served… Well, she — you… you're not her, but — tsk, now the Shogun is someone you do not know. She mingles with her people and they whisper behind her back about her penchant for dango milk and light novels.”
Digging, and now she feels the sting of the rind's remains seep through a cut on her finger.
She winces.
“How… absurd. So much, in fact, that I…” — here, she gathers the waste in her lap and chucks it aside — “...I think it better to not dwell on it. Suddenly, the thought of turning over a new leaf was the most appealing thing I'd ever heard.”
The ache in her chest has settled along her jaw now, a vibrating hum that chastises her for every wanton word.
“I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. I couldn’t trust my own senses.”
She’s spoken too much. She’s spoken more than she has in three months put together.
Yet, it didn’t seem to matter — it’s only a drop in the ocean. There’s so much more she still has to answer to.
“Hm,” a clinical assent, slick, as blade against flesh, “And what was it that gave me away in particular?”
Now then, they’ve circled back to where they started. Sara cannot escape the rain.
“Something Guuji Yae said. Something about how people believe whatever it is they wish to believe. That there are things they do not see, simply because they do not wish to look.”
Those words had rung verbatim in her mind for days: a sing-song melody whose recollection left a knot lodged in Sara’s throat and rendered her mute. It beckoned older memories to it, vignettes of a childhood of rote and routine. In the dōjō of the Kujou clan, as her sword sung against her brother’s—
“It is as Kamaji likes to say... that I’m plagued by a terrible sense of practicality — his exact words — oh, like a horse with blinders on.”
With eyes only for the goal, she charges mercilessly. His human reflexes are no match for her tengu agility, and she hopes to bring this match to an end as swift as the thousand others before it but—
“I don't question things. I'm too afraid of it, in fact. Afraid of…”
Blood blooms invisibly over dark silk. The gash runs deep along the length of her thigh.
It will scar. It will tell a tale, and a cautionary one at that.
Takayuki's shadow stretches long and dark on the courtyard. The sun is a halo behind him as he mouths words — disapproving ones, she's certain, despite her ringing ears — over her fallen form.
It will tell a tale about humility, too: that the brute force of the yokāis can pale against the ingenuity of the humans. Kamaji may be weak of body, but his mind—
“Afraid of what the right questions could reveal about you. Yes, but more importantly perhaps,” she pauses, finding her feet on the edge of a sinful precipice, “what they would reveal about me. The proverbial monster under my bed — the forms it takes.”
Sara sits still. So still that she can hear the Narukami’s soft exhale over the sound of her beating heart.
“Are you calling me a monster, General?”
She doesn’t have to look to exact the teasing nature of the question, can simply picture it: the wide mouth that wrinkles easily into a smile.
“Monster. God. What difference does it make?”
This is a lesson from the dōjō, too. Takayuki’s voice, resounding against the steady rush of blood in her ears, his dictations on the morality — or the lack thereof — of the battlefield.
As you aim for the enemy’s heart, think of not who, but why. Your purpose, Sara. Your purpose as the Kujou clan’s weapon of war.
“Their purpose in a story is the same. The watchful eyes behind the protagonist’s back, the presence that whips them into shape, that defines which is mystical and mystifies which is real.”
An expectant silence blooms between them, rolling like the ocean and breaking upon the shore of their ears. The other woman doesn’t disturb it, as if keenly aware that Sara’s yet to finish her piece.
“It’s the door to easy answers. The hook the hero pins their guilt onto.”
Ahead of them, a bird alights on the torii gates and titters in a dull repose. Sara nods in its direction, shifting in her place, feeling the transition upon her, from smoke to substance.
“You watch a man die with your arrow in his heart — an arrow you loosed upon him. His blood, on your hands.”
“It is a heavy burden to bear.”
“It is. You would know. We’ve all heard your tales. The thousands that have met their ends by your hands.”
Sara turns to face the Narukami once again, looks, yes, but sees, perhaps for the first time, the way her eyes crinkle, the shadows that nestle deep beneath her high cheekbones. She sees them move as the other speaks, as oil on water.
“And what do you think of that? Of me?”
“I—” she chokes, words failing her when she needs them the most — standing upon a realization as she is, on the prow of a ship far out at sea, having come across the detritus of another, all but lost to time.
It is easy to recognize their likeness, weathered away by five hundred years of storm and salt, until only the differences remain. Skeletal, fundamental as they are, “You have no God to turn to.”
“That I don’t.” An easy smile that pulls the shadows deeper still, an otherworldly creature that both haunts and awes.
Sara cannot peel her eyes away.
“Then you don’t understand, after all.”
There is a poignant ringing in her ears, a bell, singing of mutiny, submerged in blue depths she cannot reach.
“Or perhaps I understand better than—”
“No. You don’t.” Despite the seasoned evenness of her voice, there is a tremor running through its heart. It settles heavy in her lap, in a fist wound so tight that it cuts crescents across a warrior’s tempered palm, “You don’t — cannot — know how terrifying, how unlike anything, that certainty is.”
She looks, but doesn’t see: the hand that reaches out until the space between them dissolves into nothing.
The touch is tender, light, but coercive all the same. It stills her, compels her own coiled hand open as it traces a finger along four welted half-moons, “And now, Sara? Now you’re not so certain anymore?”
She has never known a force so cruel, so gentle.
“No.”
Both. Neither.
“Such a shame,” she feels the stranger's lips brush against her knuckles, a feather-light murmur that sinks, indescribably fervid, from skin to nerves, “Then allow me.”