Spoilers for S1, references to S2. Gift fic for Subtext, originally posted on AO3 in 2015. It's been a long time since Ginko first encountered the tokoyami - and time, unfortunately, has a way of catching up.
Tanyuu calls to him in summer, unexpectedly. The letter sent by uro-cocoon sets off an insistent rattle in his medicine cabinet, bumping and clattering, until Ginko trudges his way headlong through a series of bramble patches in search of a mud-free place to sit down and check.
Visit me sometime, Ginko. Sometime soon?
He perches on the curve of an overgrown path and studies the elegant, scribe-shaped brushstrokes. The smoke from his cigarette traces lazy eddies around his fingers. He wonders, a little, what the task might be, or if Tanyuu is simply running low on better stories, or if a fragment of a tale that he'd traded her had turned out to be completely, disastrously erroneous, and had left some other poor mushishi stranded on a lake.
It wouldn't be the first time.
He pens a dutiful reply and turns his steps eastward.
The next month is a series of days led astray. The most direct route to the Karibusa estates is long enough - and complicated enough, when the rain is heavy and rivers are high - that Ginko picks diversions to his path strategically, not wanting to be stranded in a mudslide. He criss-crosses back and forth around the flow of water, trudging through an abundance of plant life, green and flush with moisture. He walks for miles without seeing other humans, following paths that have been so rarely used that he loses track of them frequently in the underbrush, sprawling grasses seeking to reclaim the beaten earth for their own.
After a while, he emerges from the tangled wilderness into the domestication of farmland. The roads here are easier, sloping their way between rice fields that nestle together like squares of fabric, pieced together by the aging hands of a grandmother. Tiny leaves dot the trees, growing in teardrop shapes that Ginko arranges on his palm, their tips withered into yellow as if flames have been trapped within.
The pace goes in fits and starts. Underneath a canopy of leaves so thick that no amount of sun can descend without being stained green, Ginko lingers, admiring the way that the light intersects with branch-cast shadows and blurs their edges, layering them like rice paper shreds. He delays on one mountainside just to watch the dawn slipping back and forth between the clouds, masked entirely in haze before re-emerging to dazzle the early dew. One dangerously swollen riverbank leaves him stranded on the wrong side, while mushi gather around his shoes, jellyfish tendrils wriggling in tentative investigation of edibility. He reaches down and lets them curl around his knuckles, tolerating their interest briefly before shaking them away. The gel from their tentacles could leave a rash if unattended; he slogs upstream in search of uninfested water to rinse his skin, and before he knows it, that's another day lost.
He dallies with weeds, listens to the echoes in the wind, and gradually works his way forward, until the walls of the Karibusa country estate finally rise into view, thatched rooftops bumping over the gate.
Tama is as dour as ever when she lets him inside, but when Ginko bends to remove his shoes, her expression slips to rueful.
"The mistress has already exhausted herself this morning, and is resting now. We expected you to arrive much later this week," she adds, apologetically. "At least I have a room already prepared for you."
Amused at how aptly Tanyuu had foreseen his wanderings, Ginko stifles a chuckle. "I can wait while she recovers."
"I'm sure." Judging from Tama's narrowed gaze, he hadn't done an adequate a job of silence. "Did you wish to peruse the archives in the meantime?"
He considers the opportunity, sorely tempted. It's not often that Tama gives him a free pass - usually his time among the shelves is strictly regulated by her conservative eye - and the lure of the repository is strong. The archives are deep underground, protected from the elements; the combination of stone and wood warps all sense of time, locking visitors into the chronology of candles.
But Ginko has no pressing riddles at hand, and without a goal in mind, it would be far too easy to be swallowed by the scrolls. "I'd better not get distracted too soon," he decides reluctantly, hefting his medicine cabinet back onto a shoulder. "I appreciate the offer, but I have a few records of my own that I should finish up."
He settles into the guest room with the practicality of a traveler who isn't sure of the duration of their stay, and knows that unpacking too much only results in things being left behind. Now that he's not on the road, he has no excuse to not catch up on his accounts. There are letters to be answered, maps to be corrected, but most important are the records he needs to describe, to be passed on to other mushishi who might benefit from his experiences. Some masters are too proud to either share or partake; Ginko has no such illusions of self-sufficiency when it comes to staying alive. He doesn't have particularly interesting cases to detail this time, but even noting the concentration of mushi that were around this year could save someone's life later. It all adds up.
He's halfway through reviewing a report on excess mugura when Tama taps twice on the door and slides it back after his call. "Ah - I'm sorry, Ginko, I didn't realize you were still awake. Were you reading?"
Ginko pins the page down with his finger, and grunts, learning forward to hunt for a bookmark. "Just a bit."
"Ginko," Tama says, and there's a guarded wariness in her words, "your lamp has gone out."
Oh.
"I - ah. I can see well in the dark, Tama. You know that," Ginko tries to laugh, but even as he speaks, the depth of shadow around him becomes more obvious. The plainer lines of the tatami, the greying tint across the walls - it's pitch-black outside the circle of Tama's lamp. Or, rather, it should be.
"Not like this."
Ginko starts to answer, starts to deny, and then gives up entirely as all reasonable excuses desert him. "I've been forgetting lately to use something to read with," he concedes. "Candles are... a warmer kind of light."
"Candles are a necessary light," Tama corrects, but she lets the matter pass. "I wanted to let you know that the mistress will be resting until tomorrow morning. Did you," she hesitates, "need anything?"
"Some of your lamp oil," he requests softly, and means it. "I don't want to forget again."
After Tama leaves - and the flame is properly lit, the wick alive and steady - Ginko rocks back on his heels, and frowns at the walls.
His vision has always been good, far beyond that of a normal human. It was a sense that had grown sharper over the years, not duller; he used to rely on a lantern at night, and then simply a candle, and then starlight. Then only mushi-light, using the illumination from stray creatures that wandered the woods alongside him. Then nothing at all. He can travel at night unaided when the moon is gone and all the mushi are hiding and rain has washed the stars out of the sky, yet never feel the lack.
But even with that freedom, Ginko had always preferred the utility that a lantern would bring, shedding ripples of gold and orange over the landscape while it kept him company between villages. Its practicality extended further: using a light helped reassure people that he was normal, even for a mushishi with white hair and a single eye. Fire scared away many forms of wildlife that were better off avoided. It shared its heat when needed, sterilized in emergencies, and - most importantly - showed him what the world looked like to everyone else.
Fire was a habit. Ginko had kept himself in the cycle of using lanterns and lamps and oil-fed flames, carrying them around so he wouldn't forget that other people needed them. The practice was one he'd thought of as rock-solid, as instinctive as turning up the collar of his jacket against a chill wind.
Somewhere along the way, the world had shifted under his feet.
When the nights have arrived, he hasn't noticed how effortlessly he's been slipping into their grasp. Instead, his senses have been flush with the serene greyness of the world, the one he's forgetting should be filled with sun. Against the flatness, the colors of mushi shine that much brighter, like rainbows blown across mist, so fragile that they shiver out of existence at the first breeze. Animals bother him less at night; he's not as cold, not missing heat. When he steps into the wilderness without a lamp, it's like entering a rippleless pond: he disturbs nothing, and vanishes into the depths without a trace.
When Ginko tries, he can't count back exactly when the change began. He might as well try to measure a sunset into two lines, bright and dark, creating arbitrary guidelines for differences even as the night crawls in around him. There, in the darkness, he still finds his way, walking like a phantom against a world as monochrome as an inkwash painting.
There - in the darkness - he forgets that he's forgotten at all.
If there was a tipping point he reached, it's been long lost on the roads behind him. Even his cigarettes have gradually shifted over the years, leaving first only a sour aftertaste and then a bitter tang, until Ginko finds himself wanting to avoid the smoke as much as the mushi do.
His worries ease the next morning when he finally wolfs down a meal of miso and rice, and Tama escorts him to one of Tanyuu's workrooms, one with all the windows open to let in the sun.
But Tanyuu is not overbrimming with cheer. Her pleasure at seeing him is as fast as a bird on the wing, a flicker of a smile which sobers quickly. He takes a seat across from her at the narrow table, eyeing the cords of rolled-up scrolls, inhaling the reassuring smell of her pipe. One of the scrolls is half-open, a long river of paper across the wood; when Tanyuu notices his inquisitive glance, her hand descends to gently cover the lines.
She observes the traditional pleasantries with sincerity, asking after health and safety first, and laughing when he relates a story about a mushi that had caused its victims to sneeze and hiccup simultaneously. Then she folds her hands on the table, revealing the hint of a frown. "I hate to bother you when you're so busy, but I came across some accounts that I wanted to talk to you about. It was a tokoyami that affected you when you were a child, right?"
"That's what I've been told."
Tanyuu nods, as much to herself as him. "Earlier this year, we received a few stories about them from another master. Old ones - he had collected only tales, rumors here and there." Her fingers rub against the table in a rare moment of distress; she is too well-disciplined to fret against a parchment. "Tokoyami can be observed safely while using the right precautions, usually at a distance. But those who got too close for too long all ended up with the same symptoms. Their hair whitened, their eyes changed. Some of them remembered seeing glittering lights. Others lost all memory, even of the tokoyami itself."
The air in the room suddenly presses against Ginko's throat, dry and heavy. "Like me."
"Like you." Tanyuu pauses, seems ready to stop there, but plows ahead. "Ginko... none of these people ever lived to see old age. Sometimes it was swift. Sometimes, it took years. It wasn't illness, or madness, they all just - "
"Tanyuu," he interrupts gently, "I know."
The sudden silence between them fills up every corner.
Tanyuu breaks it with a long sigh, her shoulders reshaping into a slump. Her gaze drops away from him as she reaches for her pipe, mechanically knocking out the ashes before refilling the tiny bowl.
"I thought so."
Ginko is tactful enough to give her time to consider, letting the pipe speak for them both while Tanyuu coaxes the tiny flame to life. Feeding it with only a few long breaths, she props her elbows on the table, balancing the long pipe-stem across her knuckles. Her lips are tight in the corners; they mirror her eyes, too wise to pretend to ignorance.
"Are you in pain?" she asks, and there is no anger in her voice, not even now.
"No. I've lived so long with it, we seem to have an understanding now. It will happen when it happens," he tacks on swiftly, to keep her from asking how much it affects him, how much he thinks things are going to change. How much has changed already. "Whenever that might be."
Tanyuu detaches one of her hands from the pipe, letting her palm dip beneath the table to rub against the lump of her blackened foot. "The longest span I've read so far was just over twenty years." The number isn't offered out of hope. "That doesn't leave you much time, does it?"
There is no answer to that, no contradiction to be made, so Ginko tentatively fumbles for comfort. As many times as he's ordered the phrases in his thoughts, they stumble out of his mouth now, stiff and clumsy once exposed to another's scrutiny. "As you said, accounts of tokoyami aren't common. Memory loss makes them risky to study. But they all end the same way: people who are affected vanish in the night, leaving all their possessions behind, as if they turned into air, or water, or - "
"Or darkness," Tanyuu finishes for him. "Darkness complete."
He acknowledges the conclusion with a nod. "The tokoyami that's trapped inside me already ate my memories. If the stories are true, it sounds like it'll have the rest of me eventually." Talking about it doesn't make anything easier. It should, and it doesn't. "Like other mushi, you can learn how to coexist with a tokoyami, but that won't stop it from continuing its life cycle someday."
When he hesitates there, and there's nothing else to fill in the gap, Ginko defaults; he rambles, saying words they both already know by heart, an empty lecture that would be cruel if it weren't so desperate. "That doesn't mean there's no reason to keep going, Tanyuu. The tokoyami is a part of this world as well. You and I both know that. Mushi aren't good, or bad. They simply exist. They live, and sometimes, other lives are caught up with them."
"Ginko," Tanyuu parries, cutting him short. On the edge of her voice is a tremble. "I wish - "
He leans forward before she is forced to complete her fluttering thoughts, before she finds herself contradicting every principle that she's lived by all her life, the ones that allow her to limp to her work each day and never curse the cause. He stretches a hand gingerly across the table, crossing the white boundary of the scroll, ignoring the words painted upon it that spell out the limits of his own life.
Tanyuu's skin jumps under his touch. She does not look up; her gaze is pinned to the pale segments of her fingers.
Ginko's next words are barely louder than the sound of her breath.
"I know. It's harder, watching someone else accept. I know."
The knot of emotion drains away from Tanyuu at his words, like water breaking a gate, easing out of her face as fast as it had risen. She bows her head away from him, hiding her expression like a secret wound.
"If you become a mushi yourself and never come back," she says, her voice thick, but gaining strength, "then someday, a master may encounter you too. When that happens, I will find your story and I will write it, so you will be part of the collection forever."
He smiles, allowing his hand to linger before finally letting it slip away.
"I'd like that."
He leaves Tanyuu the next morning, before either one of them has time to let regret settle in and undermine their decisions.
"Try hard to stay alive, Ginko," she says in parting, the old joke between them turned twice as meaningful now that they both know how limited that request can be.
"Remember," he replies, as he has a million times before, "I'm hard to kill."
And, just like every time he bids Tanyuu farewell, relief washes over him at the sight of her gentle smile - always tinged with a degree of sadness, but a sorrow that comes from knowledge, not grief.
Tanyuu doesn't blame the mushi. She doesn't blame him for not doing so, either. Both of them treasure the creatures that so many in the world fear, and love the mysteries that others trample across. Both of them have been marked by the creatures who claimed their lives; both of them know about fate.
Neither one of them has space in their lives for hate.
She understands him, and they both spend their days aware of the price that the mushi will exact.
As part of his visit, Tama gives him a few medicines in exchange for some of the more elusive herbs he's gathered on his route. They trade knowledge and rumor between each other with the sharp-eyed banter of those who have one-upped each other so often by now, they've lost count of wins and losses. Ginko stocks up on cigarettes in bulk. The herbs that Tama uses are always higher quality, refined and valued as befits the Minai family. Only the best for the best
But the finer quality backfires on him later; he lights one a few hours down the road, and has to take it out of his mouth quickly when the smoke catches in his throat and makes him light-headed. For a terrifying moment, his vision swims. He sits down hard, not caring about the dirt, and forces himself to breathe slowly until the world is back to normal.
The cigarettes don't just ward away mushi, he knows. They're meant to protect against any influence that those mushi might bring, leaving the smoker untouched.
"Can't keep me safe from myself, mm?" he asks aloud, and regards the cigarette wryly.
Holding it away from his body, Ginko reaches up and traces his fingers of his other hand around the rim of his empty eye socket, circling the edge like a heron stalking a pond. It might be his imagination, but his skin of his palm feels a stir in the air, a phantom pressure against his flesh and bones.
That's right, he thinks wryly, we're in this together.
He puts the cigarette back in his mouth, taking only shallow draughts this time and setting it carefully aside whenever he starts feeling too giddy. The route to the next village is a scenic one, easy on the feet, and Ginko lets it draw his attention away. Bushy clusters of trees nod together as their leaf-crowned heads melt away into mist. Flower blossoms dot the surface of slow-flowing rivers that reflect back the sky. The rhythmic lapping of water against boats is like a heartbeat, one that Ginko drowses away to as he joins the travelers being ferried downstream, cradled in the warm, wet smell of wood.
Autumn will change the temperature here, but not the majesty. Pollen will be replaced by the tang of charcoal burning in the mountains, penetrating the air as it turns cold and thin. Red and gold leaves will overtake the green, as ripe as fresh paint spilled over a tatami mat. Teahouses will serve up the subtle sweetness of pears, their innards as soft as silk; figs will leave the line-up, replaced by persimmon wedges. Sauce over festival dumplings - a parade of shifting flavors - and then snow, sharp and crisp in Ginko's nose, in his throat.
Then spring again, beginning another cycle of renewal and fresh life, whether or not Ginko will be around to see it.
The inn at Ginko's destination when he arrives is modest, but welcomes him in, offering rice and soup to fortify his belly. He takes the bowl of broth and waits for the heat to ease, juggling it between his hands. Oils pool together in golden lenses that float on the surface of the liquid, jostled by tiny currents stirred up by the motions of his fingers. Chunks of mushroom bob slowly to the top like driftweed, the gills under their caps wide and washed.
This could be the last meal he ever eats.
Ginko lifts the bowl to his mouth, and drinks.
Summer turns, and takes the days with it. Sunrises and sunsets start to lose their rhythm. Silver skies melt seamlessly to gold. Gold merges back into silver. It seems as if Ginko's hungry less, but tired more; his history with sleep has always bordered on a love affair, hibernating all winter that one time, but now it seems as if it's easier and easier to fall into drowsing, losing hours and days and weeks to add to the years that have already gone.
A cause for concern, perhaps. A cause for panic. But, like everything else he's learned to let go of over the years - fear and resentment and himself - Ginko lets this also disappear with grace, slipping away down the well-worn path inside himself into knowledge and inevitability. He sets the terror aside as neatly as an empty teacup. He relinquishes worry over what might be happening to him, what has always been happening since that first darkness he could remember, full of its doubled moons.
He fills in the gaps with beauty instead. When he travels between villages, he lets the forest crawl inside him until there is no room left to miss the things he might have lost. He takes longer to walk, appreciating the way that rivers collect their reflections into small pockets of color, streaked through with weeds. He wraps his thoughts under curtains of mist and rain, inside whispering bamboo and wonder. Once the sun goes down, he focuses on the tides of starlight in the sky instead, and sleeps with a head full of the moon.
Moss is his pillow at night; moss covers his heart.
The forests have grown into his soul, soaking up the loudest noises and the worst pains. The trees swallow his uncertainty. The mountains shelter his bones. He's grateful to them each time he lies down and rests in their stillness.
He sees the light veins more clearly in the earth these days, sometimes when his eyelids aren't even shut. And - more and more - there's something else in the darkness when Ginko's not near a vein, like a stray bubble of kouki rising to the surface: a stream of light, silver and branching. A brilliance that loops and twists, circling like a ribbon in the darkness, making serpentine patterns like a paintbrush through ink.
Ginko knows better than to look too long at strange glowing objects, but this one always vanishes on its own, leaving him reluctant for its departure. There's an odd familiarity in the shape, one he can't pinpoint, but one he'd swear he could never forget now that he's discovered it. It imparts the sensation of a warmth that has no heat, of wordless comfort - a feeling like coming back to a place he's never been.
A feeling of home, one that he'd never have to leave again.
He doesn't know if this means he'll be compelled to fling himself headlong into a light vein someday; the tokoyami still won't let him get too close to one, though it doesn't seem to mind when he follows the other shape. It wouldn't be the first time a foreign mushi has lured him astray, and Ginko knows he should be cautious - but his own curiosity keeps tugging him along.
He follows the silver light whenever he sees it, waiting for the moment of danger that never comes. Sometimes he wanders so far into the blackness, it's not until he wakes up that he realizes he was asleep the whole while.
He works his way eventually to Adashino's village, eager to trade out his summer wares to the fishermen before autumn is too visible to deny. By the time he gets there, he's already saved two different cases of wandering merchants, cleared one house that was infested with more spiders than mushi, untangled the innards of a weaver's loom, and - briefly - fell victim to a strain of mushi that had afflicted an entire village with bright red ears. That last job was the worst; the cure had involved soil that had to be harvested from the rivers just before dawn, when the waters were coldest and he was most prone to stumbling directly into them by accident.
He arrives at Adashino's thoroughly muddy, stained, and in need of several long scrubs. Upon seeing him, the doctor wastes no time in scowling and shooing him to a side yard to rinse, bustling away to get the bathwater started.
Ginko winces as he unslings his medicine cabinet. The straps feel like they've cut permanent ruts into his shoulders. He hesitates, however, when he peels off his clothes. Slowly, he presses the collar of his shirt against his face, inhaling deeply until his head pounds.
The river meets his nose. Ginko's shirt smells of crushed grass and fish, and of the miasma of the swamp he'd had to trek around for three days straight. The rotting logs he'd slept against have left flecks of bark in his sleeves; his clothes reek of every tree he's bumped into.
Not of sweat. Not of oils, of musk, of the grime of being against skin for days straight. The odor is heavy with wet leaves, not the stale smell of sweat. Ginko can even detect the traces of cigarette smoke that have managed to soak into the threads, less pronounced these days than usual.
But that's all that lingers. If there's evidence that anything human has ever worn these clothes, he cannot find it.
He closes his eyes, and sighs.
Adashino chooses that moment to stalk back into the side yard, shaking ash off his hands. "Well, Ginko?" he scowls. "Don't waste the fire while it's going. The sooner you get yourself clean, the sooner we can eat. Here, give me those," he adds, thrusting out an imperious hand towards the source of Ginko's disquiet. "Hang the rest of it on the door and I'll pick it up. I'll lend you a yukata while your things dry. Go on, shoo."
Ginko surrenders the clothes obediently and makes his way to wash.
As he soaks in the doctor's tub, listening to the crack and pop of firewood, he watches color seep out from the stove's tiny grate. Smudges of orange, crimson and gold bloom along the walls of the bath shed, glowing with the benevolence of a tiny sun. Evening has come fast on his heels; the slatted windows show only dark rectangles, too early or too overcast for stars.
Ginko splays one palm in the air, and then closes his fingers as if to gather up the firelight like a wad of cloth, half-expecting to see radiance shining through the layers of his skin, and half-expecting not.
He lingers as long as he dares in the fishing village, stocking up on supplies. The next stretch of villages won't be for days if he follows the coast; he could cut inland towards one of the rivers, but he'd also be at twice the risk for getting lost. Either way, if he doesn't get started soon, he'll risk getting caught in the mountains. The first snows always come too fast.
But there is contentment in the days spent with Adashino, talking about nothing in particular, listening to the man's complaints and nosiness. There's peace in having reliable meals and a fire always nearby, and the flurry of visitors looking for him, the doctor, or both - and Ginko soaks this up too, as if his soul has been similarly dropped into bathwater, gradually warming to the temperature of its surroundings.
On the afternoon that Ginko finally gathers up the energy to move, Asashino finds him on the porch, halfway through the meticulous work of packing up his medicine cabinet.
"Already in a hurry to be on your way, Ginko?"
Ginko leans back on one arm, and considers the question. If he closes his eye here, the sun still comes through the skin, leaving afterspots behind when he blinks. The heat feels as if it bakes him into shape. Peace is in every inch of his body, every muscle relaxed and convinced of its of safety, of the sun, of warmth like this forever. Lassitude has replaced his bones; he wants to stretch out on Adashino's porch and enjoy it like a stray cat. Just one more hour, one more day. One more eternity.
He smiles, lopsided, as much at himself as Adashino.
"I can't stay here much longer," he reminds the doctor gently, as gently as he knows how, and means every word.
Adashino rolls his eyes, shrugging away the only meaning he assumes lies within the sentence. "So what if we pick up a few more mushi for a while? What's a few more around this place?"
"You really never do learn."
Adashino barks a half-rueful laugh, but even he knows the routine. He surrenders with a flap of his hands. "Suit yourself. But just look at that ocean today! I don't think I've ever seen it glitter like that before. I could stare at it for hours. There's something about it that's different, I think. Is it you, Ginko? Did you attract a mushi here already?"
Ginko glances up, expecting to dismiss Adashino's fussings as so much superstition - but his breath is caught by the view, caught and held in his throat like a sleeping bird. The breeze has died down far out over the waters, leaving them as smooth as a kimono hung flat. Thick clouds diffuse the afternoon harshness; the waters are streaked with silver, glazed like a potter's sheet.
Far out where the horizon should have been, there is only the faintest line of white, which might be spray or clouds or nothing at all. Impossible to draw conclusions, impossible to tell.
But it's not just the ocean that fills up his sight. Everything around Ginko is magnified in his senses: the dotting of grasses across the coast, the clatter of carts along the village roads, the musty smell of aging boards holding together homes. The echo of jokes with Adashino from that morning, still laced with laughter, settling in the back of Ginko's thoughts. The taste of tea in his mouth, steeped long enough to be bitter, leftover from lunch.
The moment stretches out infinitely wide, claiming every sensation for its own. It's stitched together from the smallest of things, delicate and precious, multiplying together in cobweb lines as they bring brilliance to the world. Like the fading of a sunset, there's no single thing Ginko can point to and say, this is it, this is what's important. Nothing can be pulled out from the whole.
He tries anyway, tugging at the flashes in his thoughts: the sunlight, giving of itself freely over the village, the laughter of children as they tumble up and down the roads. The smell of salt as fishermen work their nets. The knowledge that Adashino will spend his evening grousing angrily about his account ledgers, looking forward to the next purchase to add to the warehouse. It's the thought of Tanyuu and Tama, and even Kumado, having dinner amidst the musty smell of the latest scrolls. It's the local mushi tangled in the trees, coiled like windswept yarn as they hope for insects to brush carelessly against them; it's the next village that Ginko might see, the path that will lead him there, and the path that will lead him away.
It's everything here in this moment, everything that he's been able to be a part of for so long. All these things combine together like tiny mushi on a light vein, flowing together into a draught of kouki. A thing to become intoxicated on, to pour out in precious drops, to share and partake.
Life itself.
All the memories that Ginko has been collecting well up inside him suddenly, overwhelming him in a flood of green forests and growth. Everything he has ever seen and will ever love pins him down; he can't breathe against its weight. He's drowning in it, choking on his overfull heart, as if he's already fallen into the light vein, or has changed into one himself: a light vein formed of memories, of fragments of sight and sound and taste, of touch and thought and hope, a tide of impressions too impossibly vast for a human form to contain.
If he takes a step forward, Ginko thinks suddenly, he could sink into this river too, and dissolve.
He could. It feels so close.
He shuts his eye, and then shuts it again, blotting out the village completely. True blackness wraps itself around him. In the distance - vague at first, and then steadily brighter - is the glow of the nearest light vein, brilliant with the shine of all the mushi carried along inside it. So small on their own, each overlooked in passing, but creating a current together that could sweep away the greatest of mountains like a breeze.
Or maybe it's not the light vein at all, but the other shape he's been seeing so often; the color's too faint yet to tell. If he looks a little longer, maybe he'll figure it out.
Maybe he's finally ready to know.
"Ah, that shine! Ginko, Ginko, tell me - what's making it so beautiful today?"
His eye still closed, Ginko smiles into the darkness.
"It's the world, Adashino. It's every little thing in the world."