"…and I will rise…"
From The Ashes
prologue, guillotine by yadi
V
"A-an unexpected case, sir?"
Botan's voice caught on the surprise welling in her throat.
She didn't stutter. As a seasoned ferry girl of the Underworld, the reikai, she had seen all that the eons had to offer; or, so she had thought. Standing in her master's chamber surrounded by his princely aura and the luxurious evidence of his great power, she had already been uneasy. However, now, she was decidedly off-balance.
The heavy sleeve of her kimono slid down to reveal a thin pale wrist as she brought her hand to her mouth. Botan stared at it, uncomprehending, until she realized she hadn't remembered to tuck the edge under her fingers to keep it in place. She really was out of sorts.
Given the circumstances, however, she thought she couldn't possibly be faulted. This was far beyond her expectations. Even her wildest imaginings could never dredge this up!
"That's right, Botan," the mighty Lord Koenma assured her, nodding sagely. Though he appeared to be only a toddler, she knew him as her god. He had been born in the distant mists of the past and would live long past her lifespan. One day, this harsh taskmaster would be the one to rule the Underworld in the place of his father, the revered Lord Enma.
Botan, born of the spirit world to serve him, could feel the pull of his power in her very soul. There were very few in the spirit world who dared question the authority of the royal family when their very existences called them into servitude.
"Apparently a young girl," the god-child continued, glancing over the papers littering his desk, "was killed unexpectedly in your sector."
That word again. She almost flinched to hear it. To think that someone, a child, could die and they would be unprepared! She couldn't begin to fathom how they would process such a soul. There was no place made for her in heaven or in hell. She hadn't been cleared for reincarnation. There hadn't been a hearing, or a soul weighing, or a judgment meeting! There was absolutely nothing to be done on such short notice!
Oh, how awful, Botan fretted, the poor dear. Unexpected cases were…rare. The odds of occurrence were astronomical. Botan had heard of one or two instances in the past, long before she was born, of souls whose destinies had been radically altered and whose deaths nearly tipped the balance of the worlds.
But these were incidents perpetrated by the supernatural! Never, never a completely unexplained demise! A car accident! They should have been able to predict that, down to the last nanosecond!
Oh, oh, one soul out of place and they would lose centuries, even millennia of work. Careful calculations decades in the making would have to be thrown out! One pebble in the stream of time could irreversibly alter the world: changes would ripple outwards, every person the girl affected and every event they caused and everything they interacted with, on and on and on into infinity! They would have a madhouse on their hands!
The spirit world would completely lose track of the souls they were meant to guide! A human soul trapped in the spirit world for so long would begin to decay. In the living world, they could end up as malevolent spirits, or else so mixed up one couldn't tell that they had once been human at all!
How incredible, how impossible, that one poor girl could have such a dramatic effect.
The only possible solution was to repair the rip before it could unravel the rest of the tapestry. They had to catch up with the ripples already begun, and they had to stop new ones from becoming.
She would have to be revived.
Botan shivered. The reversal of death was no easy feat. She had never conducted a spirit through the trials of revival; she wasn't even sure what they would entail.
Guidance would be necessary, certainly. Botan would be the girl's only instrument of salvation, her only confidante in a spiritual world she had been thrust into like a baby chick in a fox den.
For a moment, Botan doubted. It was so much on her shoulders…
Then, she steeled herself. She straightened her back and tucked her hands into her sleeves. She was no greenhorn ferry girl. Perhaps she'd never run this sort of operation before but she experienced and cool-headed. Of course she could do it.
Her wise god would not assign her a task he felt she could not complete.
"Go to this soul immediately," he ordered. "Explain the situation and make sure she understands. Return to me, together, and I will assign an ordeal to test this soul's worthiness."
Ah, how clever. There was no way to know the true depth of this soul if they had so badly misjudged it. Her master was no fool: there was much work that had to be put into repairing and readying the body for reentry, prepping the soul for reconnection, calibrating calculations, and the like.
Even gods could not perform miracles. This soul, should she prove to be evil, would be sent to oblivion, a problem literally erased from existence. It was the only other option if they were to set the worlds to rights again.
Botan clenched her fists, hidden in the folds of her garment. She would not allow that to happen. As with all souls, she would safely ferry this girl through hell and high water. It was what she was born to do and, moreover, it was what was right.
She would not fail.
She hid a face of stone with a bow, folding stiffly at the waist.
"Of course, Lord Koenma, I will go at once."
She left the grand office.
Hands still folded in her sleeves, she wove her way carefully through throngs of ogres and spirits rushing to and fro. Even now they were attempting to recalibrate their sensors and redo their calculations. They had to account for the changes that had already been made. It was her job to stop them before they got out of hand.
What sort of soul could have shifted the hands of destiny like this? The sands fell with the grace of free will, it was true, but any mathematician could tell you that there are only so many trajectories a single grain can have when one knows the starting point. The gods knew enough to calculate such things. They knew enough to prepare for the inevitable, however many "inevitables" there were.
This unusual child had somehow flipped the hour glass, toppling the mountain of sand that had been building for centuries.
Her future was so vague now. That child…it would be murky forever. It was almost selfish, Botan considered, returning her to a life in which she would have no fate at all. Not every string cut in her death could be retied. She would live a life filled with obstacles. And yet, everything was now uniquely hers, an experience they would al live as unknowingly as she did.
Botan wondered what image would appear in these shifting sands. In her soul, she knew it would be great.
A soft voice startled her from her musings.
"Leaving already, dear Botan?"
The ferry girl found that she had reached the gate, still staring down at her sleeves. She blushed and bowed.
"Oh my, please forgive me, Miss Ayame, I didn't see you there!"
Ayame was an elite among the ferry girls. She directed the eastern effort. She was far older than Botan, and perhaps even older than Koenma. (She had heard rumors that she played nursemaid to the lord during his first years!) She didn't perform the scurrying that the other ferry girls did. She coordinated their efforts in the east and ensured that everything ran smoothly.
Though she was tall, she was unobtrusive in every way. Demure, clad in a dark gray kimono with black hair done up in an elegant bun. She was soft in manner and speech with warm eyes and a gentle smile. She stood to the side of the opened gate, dwarfed by its enormity and its brilliant, bold, eternally new colors.
Yet Botan was trapped in the intensity of her presence. Ayame commanded respect without uttering a single command. It was humbling but inspiring. She was what Botan would live up to, the person she aspired to be.
She giggled nervously, realizing that she had not answered her senior's question. "Yes, yes, I've got an urgent new assignment! An incredible case has shown up!"
Ayame smiled a little wider. She reached into her sleeve and withdrew a small gray book. A guidebook. Botan's blush deepened. She felt rather silly, now. Ayame was the head ferry girl! Of course she knew about the case! She was probably the first to be consulted.
The book was much thinner than most of the guidebooks Botan usually handled. Though children's books were usually a little lighter, she wondered if it was the strange circumstances surrounding the death that made it so severely deficient.
"I didn't think there would be one!" Botan exclaimed.
She accepted it with two open hands.
"It was very last minute, I apologize," Ayame said, bowing slightly. "I'm afraid it's a skeleton read."
Botan hastened to bow herself. "No, no, that's quite alright! It's wonderful to not be flying in blind! I'm a little worried, what with how rare this case is!"
She bit her lip. Silly girl, running off at the mouth! Where'd her confidence run off to?
Ayame's smile brightened. "You'll do fine, my dear Botan. I wish you luck."
"Thank you, senior." Botan bowed deeply in gratitude.
The gates groaned, opening wider in anticipation of her departure. Botan stepped out of the palace, into the open air of the spirit world.
She conjured the oar of the ferry girls and took flight.
The Sanzu river stretched below her, endless and bending as time itself.
[I find it appropriate that the ferry girls travel a river.]