Gasping. In the sun, her hair shone like panels of fire. Her body felt brittle, left dried in the sun too long. She lowered her face to the water and soaked her chapped lips, but it made no difference, not to a clay body. Woozy, empty aching (when were they coming back? When would night fall?). Like a bitter tang in the back of her mouth, the memory of tortuous hell. Why—why did it matter? It was all the same. The same burning under her limbs, the same becoming-molten, becoming-dry. The same as the pyre, the same as hell, the same as his kiss. She could lose everything in the heat of his kiss.
The sky was so completely empty above her, so empty and yawning open like a giant maw coming down to swallow her. In moments like these, pushed by the stifling hand of atmosphere into the soil, she felt herself receding. Passive, waiting for death to take back her leash. She needed air. Water. She took another quivering suck of air and felt it chafe hotly down her throat.
Then, shade—the sun receding behind the mountains, and the quick retreat of twilight's skirts. She craned her head toward the village, hoping beyond all hope. There they came, serpentine and leisurely, her benefactors, her formaldehyde. The shinidimachu bearing the sore, sour souls of the beautiful dead; she felt the touch of one almost close enough to ingest, until the soul-catchers snatched them away, detached and ironic. They let them go gently down toward her, to diffuse into her like salve; she drank their songs in, hearing all the time beyond them the ringing silence of a deserted wood. Alone, always and forever. Surviving on the remnants of the dead. Well-oiled, Kikyou rose, briefly forgetting hell.