Aoandon has always been at her most beautiful when she kills.
Higanbana has thought so ever since the first time she saw Aoandon on the banks of the Sanzu. Before that, she had known the other spirit only through the nature of her victims, all of which trickled into the Underworld anonymously, like living poetry delivered with the words branded into the courier's skin. Their souls had wandered down in such vulnerable states - in terror, which Higanbana expected, but also in wonder. They wandered, lost and hypnotized, babbling about stories.
About ghosts.
Her flowers supped well on these victims, but they never gave Higanbana any answers. These new souls were fascinating riddles. She tried to toy with them, but their wits had been riddled like worm-eaten wood, broken and taken far away from even what she could touch.
Then, one day, she had glanced up from devouring one fresh soul to see a woman trailing along the lycoris, strolling carefully through the waves of glittering flowers with an expression of curiosity, not dread.
The staff she carried gave Higanbana pause; the lantern at the end swung heavily, gleaming with the insidious heat of phoenix fire. The woman herself had shown no terror - only excitement - even as Higanbana had spread her arms wide, blooms twining up her fingers in eager welcome.
"Have you come to burn my precious flowerbed?" Higanbana had asked, politely, sweetly, but already bidding the rest of the lycoris awake.
The woman's delighted smile had only gone all the wider. "Oh, no," she purred, halfway a giggle, halfway a gasp. "I'm here to see what's waiting at the end. Won't you tell me?"
They shared their kills for a time, challenging the limits of their own creativity against each other. Higanbana ventured up more often to the mortal world, prowling more than just the battlefields. She would slip inside the boundaries of Aoandon's realm like a beetle burrowing deep between folds of a summer kimono. Sometimes the stories would already be in session, stretching long or short depending on the fortitude of the humans they had trapped. Sometimes the stories would go on for hours.
But in the end, the candles would always go out, one by one, as Aoandon clapped her hands triumphantly to announce the final line of the story - or hissed the conclusion, or brandished her arms threateningly, rising up like a blue-eyed spectre through the smoke.
That was Higanbana's cue.
The performance was always a little different each time, but the looks on mortal faces were all the same when they reached that final tale, and found lycoris burrowing through the walls to claim them. Their shrieks were intoxicating. When their hearts inevitably gave out from terror and awe, their souls could be plucked and eaten right then and there, or dragged into the Underworld to savor for longer.
Delicious.
A single death could feed them both well. Aoandon drank in their horror, while Higanbana only needed the meat. It normally didn't matter to her if the soul - or body - her flowers fed on had any emotions attached; neither fear nor courage would save anyone from becoming food. But she couldn't deny that souls tasted so much better with the seasonings that Aoandon flavored them with, an entire range of emotions that soared past the limits of sanity and into self-destruction.
After their feasts, they would fall into a pile of giggles together as Aoandon would gleefully recite back her favorite parts of the begging, pantomiming the pleas of their victims as she committed their reactions to memory. She would rehearse her own voice, twisting the pitch like a ribbon until she found the right intensity. Fodder for the next round of slaughter, to be forever acted out in generations of escalating desperation.
Higanbana has no particular need to eat fear. Mortals of any type are enough to sustain her, warming her belly and flowerbed. But - after hunting with Aoandon, after sliding her fingers around Aoandon's waist while the other spirit swung her lantern and laughed - she has learned how to wonder what it must be like to die from that ecstasy of terror that Aoandon brings, until a person's very body is convinced that each heartbeat will betray them.
Until there is so much overwhelming a person's heart that they cannot endure it any longer, and the only option left is to surrender to the person causing it, and hope that they will be merciful.
There had been a lull, sadly, when Aoandon had sworn off harming humans - trying not to disappoint Hououka, after being shamed by an onmyoji. Foolish. Wasteful. The souls coming to Higanbana had been as dry as dust afterwards in comparison. Higanbana had had her appetite honed towards the dramatic, and now Aoandon's talents would be squandered forever, all because an onmyoji dared to shake their finger in a scornful no.
Higanbana had stayed largely in the Underworld after that, tending her flowerbed with a vengeance. She had soothed her heart with the silent, glittering beauty of the Sanzu's riverbanks, relishing the crystalline misery of the deaths that came to her shores. They had been enough in the past. They would be enough again.
Someday.
Then the lull had turned to stagnation. Even down on the banks of the Sanzu, Higanbana had sensed the change as well. There had been wars, glorious influxes of souls coming to her still dripping with their own death wounds - but they had all tapered off, with more and more casualties from accident or age. Fewer living humans found their way accidentally to the path of the Underworld. The ones who did were more offended than afraid, accusing Higanbana of being a myth, or a drug-induced vision.
She took gossip from the Mujou brothers whenever they came by to disentangle the occasional victim from the lycoris. From them, she learned that onmyoji had fallen out of grace, along with the imperial court; a new order was rising in Japan to supplant them. Curiosity drove her to slip back into the mortal world, drifting through their buildings to see for herself just what they had concocted over the years.
The air no longer smelled of battle, but of concrete and oil, factories and tar.
Her flowers were hungry.
And then - then there had been a rush of souls, all at once, with Aoandon's trademark stamp on each and every one. Terror, disbelief, babbling with madness and denial, their minds broken even after their bodies had failed. Aoandon's lust for stories must have sent her back out into the world, surely, preying upon a Japan that had new fears possessing it, and new stories to terrify with.
This time, Higanbana did not wait to see if Hououka would rein things back in again.
This time, she went back up to the mortal world herself.
She found Aoandon in the remains of the Phoenix Forest. The land had changed from a remote sanctuary; human buildings swarmed everywhere, street signs dotting the roads that carved their way through the trees, linking clusters of residential buildings and warehouses. She picked her way forward slowly, feeling a hush sink around her, emptiness where there should have been a warning tingle of protective wards.
As she approached closer to where the shrine should have been, she tilted her head curiously at the wire fencing that had been set across the road, a warning barrier that announced: Environmental Hazard, Do Not Cross.
She went through anyway. The town at the center was abandoned. Cars were scattered haphazardly without care for where they had been left; a few of them had gone off the road. There were no signs of any living humans, but a few of their things had been discarded on the streets: discarded bags and jackets, a stray shoe missing its mate.
Broken windows grinned their glass teeth. Here and there, aging smears of blood streaked the pavement, memorials of where victims must have fallen. Not even the rain had cleared up the evidence yet. Higanbana's flowers wriggled over the spots, nibbling at the residue and she waved them on impatiently.
So much death should not have happened anywhere in Hououka's domain.
She found Aoandon alone in the center of a shopping intersection, the neon lights of convenience stores strobing colors across her shoulders. The yōkai was sitting splayed and careless in the road, head bowed. Her staff was discarded beside her; she did not move.
Higanbana's geta clopped over the pavement, coming to a halt beside her.
"You slew everything," she murmured approvingly, giving another long, appreciative look around the desolation of the town. Then, more firmly: "It is far past time for you to leave. If the humans have already noticed the bloodshed, an onmyoji is soon to come."
"They paved everything over," Aoandon whispered. Her voice held nothing of her stagecraft; unfeigned horror turned it raw. She stared blindly at the pavement between her hands, as if there was a tale hammered into the cracks in the asphalt. "I kept thinking... just one more story. One more story to bring back to her, and then I would return. But when I came back, the shrine was already gone. Humans have been living here for generations. I can't find Hououka anywhere. I don't know what could have happened to make her leave, and let this happen to the forest."
Higanbana surveyed the remains of the buildings again, her geta ticking as she turned slowly, drinking in the carnage. She could not feel the presence of Hououka dominating the region anymore: that hateful, hot energy that refused to lie still and cold. "Are you so certain that she lives?"
In answer, Aoandon lifted her head, and pointed at her lamp, which was still shining strong and bright, powerful in its defiance.
The current world of Japan is different from the Heian years. It is congested, compact, with lights everywhere and not enough private corners. Surveillance cameras and police boxes dot city roads. Human populations have exploded. Like insects, they have built hives and packed themselves into every cell.
Higanbana does not have to stay in it; she's invited Aoandon to live permanently with her by the Sanzu, where everything is peaceful and safe. But the dead who show up there are ones who are too dazed to share their stories, and the river is too serene to start new ones. Everything is tranquil and numb in Higanbana's part of the Underworld - much as Aoandon herself had been in those first few weeks after Higanbana recovered her, carting her away before an onmyoji might have come across the other woman and destroyed her.
For the same reason that Aoandon left the Phoenix Forest, she refuses to stay in the Underworld either. And so - since Aoandon refuses to see sense - Higanbana also keeps her home above.
For now.
Formality has changed and slurred over the years in the mortal world; Higanbana's usual way of speaking is no longer regarded as noble, but quaint, overly ornate. She forces herself to simplify. She cloaks those parts of herself away, learns how to dress in different clothing. It feels like obscuring herself a second time, another stage removed from the person she was before she had stumbled into the flowerbed and the flowers had burrowed into her and filled her up with everything she was missing: eye and heart and blood, replacing all the gaps in herself with them, until they had claimed her completely and their petals crackled in her lungs.
Sometimes she feels the mockery of her own ghost in her mouth when she speaks. Only when she goes home to the Underworld does she feel like herself again, short trips where she does not dare to linger, just in case anything is going wrong in her absence.
Aoandon, on the other hand, adapts quickly. Language is the backbone of stories. Stories are her feasts. She learns the new dialects over the years as ready as she might mimic different accents for telling a tale, and carelessly ingests slang like a fresh can of convenience-store snacks. She rehearses her litanies endlessly at home, murmuring sentences over and over again in the bathroom while brushing out her hair.
Vary the pitch. Experiment with the delivery. Aoandon never stops talking, even during sex.
In those times, when Higanbana fiercely misses the tranquility of her flowerbeds, she is forced to acknowledge that Hououka is a better fit for Aoandon than she is. Hououka is the remnant of a phoenix; she is a fanatic, as Aoandon is a fanatic, and the two of them together burn as brightly as the inferno in Aoandon's lantern.
Higanbana, on the other hand, is a creature of riverbanks and silence, of sleek malice and sudden betrayal, and the smug satisfaction of a trap sprung at last. She cannot create the type of stories that Aoandon wants. All she can do is trail along behind the other woman, like a human helplessly limping down a candlelit road, lying to themselves with each step about what will be waiting at the end.
One decade passes, and they find no clues as to what might have happened to Hououka. Two decades, three. It's enough to make Higanbana wonder again, selfishly, if the phoenix-spark is dead forever. Then she would have Aoandon to herself for all eternity, to gloriously lure and tease and taunt mortals to their petaled doom.
"Her fire still burns in my lamp," Aoandon answers, when Higanbana breaches the subject as innocently as possible. "It keeps me alive. So she must be, too."
It's hard not to be discouraged by such blind certainty. Higanbana adjusts her response to be only mildly reproachful. "At some point, even you must give up."
Aoandon frowns.
For a moment, Higanbana wonders if she's finally convinced the other yōkai; then Aoandon sets down her pen resolutely, pausing her precious work. "Hououka is a creature of passions." She reshapes the word experimentally even as it leaves her tongue, allowing it to drawl: passions, pass-ions, an automatic echo as she paces her speech. "She said once that that was what she loved the most about me - that I had that same fervor in my eyes whenever I would tell a story. That my dedication to them was everburning. Devotion is the quality that Hououka admires the most. It's what drew her to save my life, now and always."
With that, Aoandon falls silent for a long, drawn-out moment that would be fit for any tale, staring intently at her lantern as it flings dancing shadows across the room. "So I'll hold my faith in her for the rest of time itself," she adds, with gravestone finality. "Even if this world itself ceases to exist, I will believe in her."
There is no doubt in her voice. There is no flinching.
It isn't fair that Aoandon can commit herself so thoroughly. She's the embodiment of a promise itself, a promise to pursue that which she loves no matter the cost, far more fervent than any mortal could endure - as proven by her yōkai nature now, for her human body could not bear the path Aoandon had ridden it down. Aoandon's spirit had transcended her flesh. Aoandon had loved too much.
It isn't fair that Aoandon is perfection itself - and Higanbana found her far too late.
Unaware of Higanbana's simmering jealousy, Aoandon picks up her pen again and flips open another notebook, searching through it for an empty page. "Hououka always talked about how she and the other sparks wanted to follow the phoenix that birthed them. Maybe she found where hers finally went after it was reborn." Another thoughtful scribble across the paper, a quick chart of names and places. "And even if she did die, she still was created from the energies of rebirth. If I can find her remains, maybe I can reignite them."
"Would that not kill you?" Higanbana said. She makes a study of keeping her voice at the level of sparse interest, as if merely commenting on a change in weather. "If you give her all the flame from your own lantern, what would be left to sustain you?"
Judging from Aoandon's lazy, easy shrug, the possibility is one that she's thought of already. "Perhaps only a fitting story."
They hunt together again these days, up in the mortal world, since it isn't easy for Aoandon to eat on her own anymore. Her lantern keeps her from entering most buildings or moving through dense crowds, and it will kill her to leave it behind. But phoenix fire is not easily concealed, either, and most establishments won't let her carry an open flame. Safety code, they say. Put it out.
Aoandon does her best to disguise it as harmless electricity, concealing it under layers of illusion to appear as harmless as a light bulb flickering behind a paper sleeve - though one that puts off far too much heat. Even so, she has to take care. Anything touching it will burn.
Higanbana once suggested she stuff it into a flashlight, and Aoandon's vexed glare had almost been worth it.
They seek out victims as often as they please, with the thrill of a taboo broken except that there is no longer any taboo being enforced. The onmyoji have fallen from public grace. The only authority they can muster is that of their own spiritual powers, and these, they must keep from mortal eyes as much as the yōkai they hunt. Instead of onmyoji, there are police officers and night curfews and cameraphones everywhere - but very few mortals can recognize supernatural activity, and even fewer yet are willing to investigate it.
The tools of Shinto priests have spread insidiously far to compensate. There are omamori charms everywhere, dangling off phones and in the bags of schoolchildren as they cram for tests, in cars for safety and even on the collars of pets. Not many of them protect specifically against creatures like her, but their presence is enough to sour Higanbana's appetite.
Yet even these talismans are weaker than they used to be. Heavenly gods no longer visit the mortal realm. Earthly gods do not show their faces to their worshippers. A single omamori against ill luck does nothing against Higanbana; she watches one soak in a pool of blood while Aoandon croons questions to the teenager they have pinned against the wall.
Aoandon picks their meals, most of the time. She skims through online forums and plants suggestions carefully in the ripest ones, promising something really super crazy if you go to certain underpasses at night, sowing rumors of ghosts and games to play. Other times, she simply takes advantage of the dares that humans already trade between each other, baiting the ones desperate to prove themselves.
Turn off the lights, she agrees. Give the doll a knife. Don't call anyone until the morning after. Make sure you're alone.
Make sure you're really alone.
Sometimes - if she can't track down an address - she simply waits with Higanbana in the most convenient bars they can find, the ones where everyone's faces already blur together, and no one makes note of who leaves with whom.
Do you want to hear a story? she teases, giggling, her breath heavy with liquor as she leans against the mark's shoulder. Let's go back to your place. All three of us. It'll be such a good time. I'll tell you all kinds of things.
This night, they've managed to net a pair of businessmen, both eager to paw at women they think are half their age. Higanbana stretches out on the couch, flexing her naked toes. Her shoes had pinched her skin all evening, and the chairs at the bar had been uncomfortable, leaving her lower back aching. Maybe she could indulge in a hot bath while they're here.
A flower finishes burrowing through the corpse that's leaking on the floor in the middle of the room. It presses insistently at the body's skin like an awl against the surface of an orange, until it breaches the flesh and pops out, long petals unfurling like the tongues of a lizard. Blood drips in glistening pearls. The flower's roots spread out deeper as it finds purchase in its new, fleshy bed, seeking out convenient channels of arteries and veins, shooting up through them like cars on a highway.
The living businessman screams again as dark root-lines paint themselves under the skin of the corpse's face, like spiderwebs in black and plum.
Aoandon's gaze jumps greedily between him and the body, memorizing each detail for a more realistic retelling later.
So much noise, Higanbana thinks disinterestedly. The sounds will breach the limits of Aoandon's boundary realm if they're not careful. It might be wise if Higanbana sends her flowers to the next apartment over, just in case, and eats the woman sleeping there in her bed.
Aoandon, however, isn't nearly done yet. She strides across the room, bare feet quick as a cat, and straddles the living man. He scrabbles desperately at the carpet, but there's nowhere to go; his back is flat against the ground, and roots are already twining around his legs, holding him fast in place.
"Tell me all the stories you know about phoenixes," Aoandon demands, crouching down and grinning as she watches the way tears leak down his cheeks. Her eyes are lit and hungry. "Tell me everything."
They stay in the man's apartment that night. They spread out the covers on his bed, giggling and squealing as they play their fingers along each other's skin in feather-light touches. They wrestle for position; Higanbana wins when she flips Aoandon over, trailing kisses down her stomach until she reaches the junction of Aoandon's thighs. She slides her tongue over the other woman hungrily, lapping at her flesh as if tempted to make a second feast of her, while Aoandon whimpers in delight.
The dying man - so intent to cling to life - moans softly as well from the living room, insensate from agony, but still managing to beg instinctively for help.
Higanbana likes it when the flowers have time to properly finish their meal, tendrils questing over the corpse as they digest each grain of meat and fluid, breaking down even the bones. By midnight, there will be only a skeleton, coated with a quivering carpet of stems and petals, a layer of second skin like a million ants chewing.
By morning, there will not even be that.
After they finish lounging in the man's bedroom, Aoandon roots through his DVD collection, sorting it neatly into what she has and hasn't seen yet. Higanbana looks through his liquor. She's already pilfered his wallet and has checked for other resources; disappointingly, he has very few bills in the house, but she can take the cards and accounts to trade to other yōkai, ones who are braver at dodging human surveillance.
Her flowers make everything easy for her. With no body, their victims are marked down as missing persons; in many cases, they are never investigated at all, society assuming them to have fled from debt or guilt or some other responsibility-dodging shame. The bloodstains are regrettable - her flowers dislike scrounging - but are easy to overlook, so long as they make sure the apartment looks like it was abandoned on purpose.
They leave new stories behind to be read in the evidence of absent clothes and suitcases, stories that the humans are glad to embrace: deserters, shirkers, runaways.
Japan is a country that still values its ghosts. It's tantalized by urban legends - but, even so, it's harder to draw out that terror to the proper intensity when help is only a few thumb presses away, and humans can carry light in their own hands. Not many houses in the city are suitable for the right rituals anymore. Higanbana and Aoandon would have to travel to the countryside to set the proper staging, which would expose them much more quickly to any onmyoji's senses. City life offers protection, but also challenges.
The youth of Japan still find the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai to be a subject of interest - but few of them last all hundred tales, not properly, not without a source of light easily nearby and their phones humming reassuringly in their hands. There is no lantern leaking cooling smoke that their terrified fingers might struggle to relight, already hearing the slow scrape of footsteps behind them.
Even with Higanbana's help, Aoandon doesn't eat as well as she could.
It is harder than it used to be to find what the storyteller needs, but not impossible. It's a matter of juggling isolation. Even with such population density, there are loners who live in single-person apartments, and who can be coaxed into setting down their phones, drawing the blinds, and daring themselves with a good story. People can still die and be forgotten in this modern Japan, their corpses slowly decaying until landlords are called in.
Aoandon would stay forever on the internet if she could, crouched up on her chair and wolfing down sugar while she tabs through websites, trading gossip and hunting down rumors. But stories from a distance don't nourish her the same way as a living performance. Their souls are too far away to properly feed on.
And besides - there are bills to pay.
Usually, they go through the homes of their victims, pilfering whatever looks salvageable. The yōkai who have been able to work their way into government make a pretty profit from spirits like Higanbana and Aoandon, who need to be able to lie successfully about having mortal lives - and have the paperwork to do so. Everything requires registration, it seems. Japan is a new land with a new capital of paperwork, no longer Heian-kyo. Kyoto is used to refer to a city to the west, and Tokyo a city to the east, and yōkai are welcome in neither.
It's not the detectives or police which worry Higanbana the most, but the onmyoji slinking about, who know what to look for. Aoandon, and other yōkai like her - Hangan and Shoyo and more, all the storytellers and scribes and information brokers - would be a massive loss if they were ever caught and bound, forced to surrender every name they know. They are the weakest links, the most critical to protect. Their integrity can never afford to be doubted.
Hundreds of yōkai would be lost if Aoandon were compromised. Maybe more. Even Higanbana doesn't know how many contacts Aoandon has, only that there's never an end to the list of lost names, or of the ones hoping to find them.
These newer onmyoji have no sense of when to stop. They treat yōkai as monsters to either hunt or capture, a checklist of tools to enslave. Like filling out a book, they see yōkai as points for bragging rights, not as people. For these onmyoji, Aoandon's inventory would be a gold mine. They would plow through it unrelentingly, crossing off names line by line, until they reached the end and demanded even more to own.
Higanbana and Aoandon both are luckier than many of the the other yōkai. So many names and faces that Higanbana knew - and even more that Aoandon met on her vast travels - are gone now. Some of the ones who can transform into human forms have successfully hidden that way, borrowing faces from new victims as the years roll by. Others, who could already appear mundane enough with a little illusion, have been able to mingle with mortals for longer periods of time. Humans don't suspect transformed spirits among them anymore; the foxes and tanuki have it easiest, slipping into human faces for decades except to giggle at themselves in the mirrors when alone.
Other spirits have not had that option. The Kyonshi family fled to the outskirts of the Underworld long ago, unable to enter, but unwilling to leave. The jorogumo have skittered away into the mountains and mining pits. Spirits too weak to shift themselves fully or wield solid illusions have been forced to stick to the edges, using clothing and isolation to conceal their inhumanity.
Even more others have suffered as their environments have become polluted. Forests have become cleared for houses and farmland. Streets pave over soil. Mountain spirits have retreated further and further away; the fields have become choked.
On too many afternoons, Higanbana wanders behind Aoandon down the banks of the Arakawa River as the storyteller calls fruitlessly for any of the water spirits still alive. Plastic bottles clump on the shores. The river itself has been forced by humans to stay in a new, docile channel, the course of it tamed from its natural unruly floods. Over the years, it has been hemmed in by jogging paths and cycling roads, given wastewater to bear, and had its fish slaughtered more than once by chemicals.
The humans never saw what else they killed.
Aoandon collects all their stories, recording the fallen and reconnecting those who fled for their own lives along the way. Everyone is an ally now on the same side of a war of attrition; old quarrels have fallen to the wayside as every yōkai worries first about survival. They all know the value of a storyteller. Tales are the oldest form of news being shared, of history when all the books have been burned to keep them from being used against you.
Aoandon's days are always filled with emails and texts and hushed meetings, a never-ending parade of supplicants. In every crevice and corner of humanity, spirits hide. They hide from onmyoji - and they hide from each other, more often than not, because they are still the most common weapons used to hunt down their own kind.
No one's tried to bind Higanbana in decades. The last time had been bad enough. She still vividly remembers being summoned to a filthy back room halfway across the country by an onmyoji who'd been persistent enough to hunt down her spiritual essence like a scent trail, hoarding anything that even vaguely hinted of lycoris.
She'd been lucky, powerful enough to break the circle before the onmyoji could react to what they'd caught, her flowers crawling out from the barrier like rippling red centipedes. The onmyoji had forced an unfortunate kappa at her as a flimsy distraction while trying to escape; Higanbana had had to kill them both.
After the summoning circle had lost its power - flinging her back to the kitchen of their modest apartment, dinner rice still bubbling innocently in its cooker - she'd shuddered for hours at how close it had been.
That yōkai was taken last week, a whisper may go. Or another: a nest in Iwate got raided. All the tengu from there are bound now. Ootengu and Ubume are seeking information on the onmyoji responsible, so that they can destroy them.
"Tsukumogami are a dying species," Aoandon remarks one humid summer afternoon, reviewing the notes in one of her folders as Higanbana shoves her face against the fan and tries not to sweat herself to death. "Everyone now is obsessed with new things, especially here in Japan. No one keeps something around for over a hundred years anymore. Used things no longer are seen as worthy of love."
"I suppose we're all doomed, then," Higanbana sighs, melodramatically; she does not care about tsukumogami, which are bloodless by default and cannot feed her flowers anyway. "For we are all, by now, greatly used."
When Aoandon doesn't respond to that snippet of poetry - alas - she adds, "Is there any word on Enenra?"
"The one I had a lead on isn't the one we know." Shaking her head, Aoandon flips another page and draws a long, sullen stroke through a name. "She must still be on the run."
"It'd be easier if she remained in her smoke form," Higanbana remarks. "Even if she does set off half a dozen sensors and air filters."
This almost earns a smile from the other woman. "Her brother is harder to hide. And she'll never leave him behind."
True enough. Higanbana does not voice her thoughts this time - that Enenra will get herself killed trying to protect Kamikui, who won't outlast his sister for long anyway - because it's hardly her place to criticize what people choose to protect anymore. If anyone had asked her years ago if she would have willingly ended up back in the mortal realm, huddled like a scavenger in a cheap human hovel, she would have laughed and laughed and laughed.
Maybe Enenra's simply trying to make sure that her brother won't die alone.
From mountain to river to forest, spirits who once conquered now build sanctuaries instead. The most powerful among them have become beacons to flee to, grimly taking on yōkai who might otherwise had never earned their notice, let alone their protection.
Other yōkai are forced to maintain their duties because they have to: being part of the balance between the spirit and human worlds has never been an option for them. They are bound to the edges for as long as the worlds exist. Even Enma has had to extend unexpected generosities to those spirits struggling to keep afloat in the mortal world; the gate to the Underworld is a refuge now, not a threat.
Spirits who can't find Shoyo in one of the government bureaus - scribing false family registries and school documentation - turn to Hangan's penmanship instead. Kuro Mujou and Shiro Mujou perform duties for both the living and the dead stubbornly, both of them in neat black business suits with a touch of illusion to cover up their eyes. Kuro's suit is lined with red; Shiro's is white. He used to dress in a completely white suit from the start, his hair hanging down long and loose, but the two of them attracted too much attention from people thinking they were cosplayers or idols, and practicality got the better of him. These days, they hand out identical business cards with the name of their funeral parlor neatly printed in black and gold, and smile politely when people ask if they've been in the industry for very long, they look so young.
No one's seen spirits like Shishio in ages.
They see the newer yōkai occasionally, the ones who are less than eight hundred years old, who have never known the true menace of an onmyoji. These ones grew up already able to blend in with their prey, and with more reliable sources of food - but without the luxury of being able to walk openly among humans, enthralling them with flashes of another world. Now, whenever a mortal sees them, that mortal is immediately dismissed as delusional. Stress breakdown. Hysterics. There is no beauty, no fascination: there is no magic in the shadows.
Everything is concrete to these mortals. They develop new sciences to ensure it is so.
To these recent spirits, hiding is normal. It's the status quo. They sneak out in the corners of photos and videos, stretching their mouths obscenely to horrify viewers later. They lurk and wait inside closets until someone records themselves alone. They wait on streetcorners in face masks, and ask if they are pretty.
They've never known what it is to reveal themselves in all their glory, and reap entire towns. They've never known the celebrations, the revelries; they've never lifted their heels proudly in a Demon Parade, delighting at each mortal to fall helplessly into their lure, devouring or transforming their victims depending on momentary whim.
They have always been on the outskirts. They have never been celebrated. Their world has always been separate from the mortal one.
In their lives, this level of glory is the only kind that exists, because it's all they know as normal.
"We'll have our day again, Higanbana," Aoandon reminds her, whenever Higanbana tumbles into bed grumpily after one weekend of fruitless hunting, muttering fragments of phrases from Heian-kyo, and refusing to speak Tokyo-cant. "There will always be stories. There will always be the dead. As long as spirits can survive, we'll find a way to walk boldly among humans again."
Higanbana lets Aoandon fluff the blankets around her, strands of their hair mingling and sliding over the pillows. "There is a vast difference between one's ability to live, and one's ability to survive," she quips back, rolling over onto her back and covering her face with an arm. She can already hear Aoandon humming, practicing that particular delivery to herself for later: always the dead, always surviving.
"No one here is dying of poor dental hygiene before the age of twenty, either," Aoandon points out. "And people take baths. I wouldn't trade any of that, would you?"
Aoandon's lantern glimmers from its position in the middle of the room. Its flame ripples as if in silent laughter.
Higanbana eyes it mulishly. It's the constant third party in their relationship: always watching, never forgotten.
She distracts herself by reaching for Aoandon, hiking up the other woman's shirt with her fingers. Aoandon's belly is smooth under her palm, and Higanbana strokes it slowly, trying not to look back at the light. Aoandon: her precious, sublime horror-weaver. Killed by weak-hearted humans, and now she'll survive them for all time, preying on them back. Eternally alive, if Higanbana can help it. Eternally their predator.
Aoandon wriggles. Higanbana mouths the other woman's ear, more to remind herself of the shape of it than any true lust.
Sensing her distraction, Aoandon reaches up and brushes hair out of Higanbana's eyes, tracing the curving outlines of a heart on Higanbana's face as if painting her for the stage. "Don't worry so much. It's far too early for stories like ours to end. We can always hide in the Underworld, if it comes to that."
"Even the Underworld can be destroyed," Higanbana counters quietly, remembering the hissing of serpents rippling along the banks of the Sanzu. She remembers the dead kappa she slaughtered, forced to fight her even while it was screaming to be spared. "Death may be eternal, but we are not."
Higanbana does not like the shape of the current world. She resents the thought of Aoandon running loose in it without her even more. Hououka already disappeared once. Aoandon already had to obey a set of rules that constrained her. Only with Higanbana is the storyteller free to practice her craft with abandon.
And the modern world is deadly to Aoandon on her own, far beyond what the storyteller cares to watch out for. All it would take would be for some ignorant human to steal her lantern away, demanding safety ordinances or as some kind of prank, and all that beauty would be lost forever. Snuffed out. The phoenix-fire would glitter on, but Aoandon would be gone, severed from the energies that Hououka used to save her: Hououka's own flame.
It will be even worse if they do find Hououka, because then Higanbana would lose Aoandon anyway.
Without question. Aoandon would thank Higanbana sweetly and depart with the other woman, and never kill again. She'd have no reason to hate humans, not with Hououka restored and radiating disapproval. Aoandon would never again taunt humans, never tease, never lead them down dark alleyways of their mind until they become transported out of their very flesh, soul severed from their bones through the transcendence of fear. No. She would collect her stories harmlessly, supping off simple amusements and mysteries. She would never have a blood-rich meal filling her belly again, not like Higanbana could offer.
She would never want the things that Higanbana can provide.
Aoandon was right about the conveniences of modern plumbing. Clothing, too, is simpler; while Higanbana could go outside in her kimono, such behavior draws more attention than she would prefer, and she can appreciate the convenience of better undergarments. Carpet is softer than reeds on the floor. Hot water is addictive to have on tap.
Higanbana takes the bath first this time, soaking herself gratefully in the water as if immersing herself back in the Sanzu. She is lazy with her hair tonight, letting it drape over the side of the tub. Aoandon washes her own scalp patiently as she perches on the plastic bathstool, head tilted as she pours bowlful after bowlful of hot water to rinse it.
The drain gurgles. Higanbana slides further into the liquid.
Flowers crawl out of her belly, tendrils prying apart her navel. They creep out like ruby spiders, blooming in a mirror of the Sanzu itself, the Underworld rising up around her naked limbs. The bathwater darkens, reflecting pink, then crimson as the flowers bloom. They multiply in swarms. The water is glistening red now with the bulk of their bodies, as if she'd slit her arms in a suicide.
Only her hands and head are visible now, the lycoris twining up around her neck like dense scarlet lace. These places are where Aoandon kisses her, her mouth moving across Higanbana's pale flesh, bringing it back to life as it flushes hot beneath her tongue. Her lips pull gently at Higanbana's skin, as if expecting it to detach and slither away like a leather shroud, revealing flowers coiled where wet muscles should have been.
Higanbana arches her back, exposing more of her throat as the flowers spill back into the bathwater.
"Let's kill again," she suggests, half-panting with desperation. If she can build a fortress of bodies that's tall enough, high enough, maybe she can block out any sight of the outside world for Aoandon forever. "Let's find someone else soon."
Aoandon lifts her head, her long hair heavy and damp, clumped into hanks that dangle heavy against the petals of the lycoris.
"Okay," she agrees: eager, guileless, beautiful.
They run into Hannya in Kichijoji, while he's hunting at Inokashira Park. He's not much different, dressed in a T-shirt with an anime character on it, a tiny pair of little-boy shorts. He's changed his hair to black again, straight-cut. He even has a backpack to round out the disguise; Higanbana wonders who he devoured for that.
"I've been eating pedophiles," he informs them blandly, kicking one dangling foot idly back and forth on the bench. The flip-flop dangles from his toes, cherry-red and plastic. "I'll never go hungry."
"A service for the community," Higanbana can't help but needle, arching one eyebrow.
He wrinkles up his nose. "It's convenience, not by choice. All I have to do is sit around in the right places - like these - and they show up. But pedophiles prey on other humans. So why should I stop them from that?"
Aoandon gives them both a distasteful glance. Children are special in her eyes; children have wonder. Most importantly, children have the willingness to walk down paths alone at night. Having humans be the monsters waiting at the end ruins the mystery, in her eyes.
That's the problem with rarified diets. Flesh is the easiest fuel; the flowers don't care about who it belonged to previously. Souls, too. The taste may vary wildly, but the flowers will keep on rooting themselves as long as there is life to feed them. Higanbana doesn't have to worry about stories, about music, about faith.
The flowers are very practical. They're not as picky as Aoandon - but Higanbana can't fault that of her, either.
She's never asked if Hannya eats like she does, but there's a difference between preferences and needs.
Sometimes that difference is very, very small.
Even in a park, they don't have the luxury to linger. Three yōkai in one place is no longer a commonplace event; their spiritual energies will send up an alert sooner rather than later, and then they'll have onmyoji sniffing the area like panting dogs. Aoandon trades her gossip quickly, asking after news on Maestro and Mannendake. Hannya is persistently aloof, always insisting that he doesn't need the same support network as other yōkai, the dependency - but he trades information with Aoandon readily enough about the latest sightings of Kamaitachi.
Higanbana tunes them out as they chat, disinterested in the banking and selling of gossip. Instead, she watches the walking paths around them. All she can see are human families, parents out escorting their children; hardly anything to be concerned about yet. But - unseen in the bushes - her flowers are recoiling. They're curling away from something in the air, as if there is acid in the rich park soil, dissolving their stalks.
She decides to heed her instincts, rather than risk it any further. "It's time to leave," she says, short and clipped, and brooking no argument. "We'll draw too much attention if we stay."
Hannya has enough respect for Higanbana's power - despite his own talents, and the wounds they've both inflicted on each other throughout the years - that he doesn't argue at first. But when Aoandon stands up off the bench, smoothing down her skirts, he lifts a hand to stop her.
"Wait," he says after all, scowling at himself as soon as he speaks. "Have you seen..."
He feigns disinterest promptly, letting the question trail off, but it doesn't quite hide the longing in his eyes.
Higanbana makes an impatient yank on Aoandon's sleeve, but the other yōkai lingers. "No," she tells him, regretfully. "Not yet."
They finish up their week with a fresh victim after all, though Aoandon tries to claim it's work-related; this particular kill had been a lover of rare books, a dilettante, and he had gathered volume after volume of sordid stories littered with classic illustrations. Higanbana reaches out a clean finger and flips open one that claims to be a definitive record of satori; she's not sure what half of the yōkai would think about being drawn as rapist monkeys.
Aoandon hums off-key as she roots through the refrigerator. She makes a cry of delight upon discovering a box of frozen popsicles, happily peeling open one and leaving the shredded wrapper on the counter.
"Hououka wouldn't like how much you enjoy this." Higanbana warns, joining her at the sink so she can rinse off her hands.
Behind her, the flowers pulse and burrow through the fresh kill.
"She can yell at me all she wants when I find her," Aoandon purrs. She pulls at Higanbana's wrist, guiding it away from the stream of tap water and up towards her mouth. The pink flash of her tongue darts out to lick at Higanbana's palm, tasting the blood.
Higanbana draws in a sharp breath, fingers twitching instinctively towards the wet heat.
Almost as quickly - whimsy ruling her - Aoandon lets go of Higanbana, leaning her weight insistently until Higanbana is forced to roll over. The kitchen counter jabs her spine. Aoandon settles against her like a warm, smug cat, matching hips to hips, belly to belly.
"Do you want to hear a ghost story?" Aoandon asks. She smiles, wide, the middle of her lips stained deep purple from food dye. "There once was a woman who was turned into a yōkai - "
Higanbana touches her finger to Aoandon's mouth, sticky with popsicle juice, and the other yōkai falls obediently silent.
"No," she answers, and leans in. "Don't let me know how this one ends."