Note: the section titles are prompts taken from the LJ comm 7_chakras, which was meant to be for Avatar: The Last Airbender fic. I loved the prompts so much I saved them, and now I'm pinching them to use in other fandoms!
1 meditation
There was a flat stone pedestal in a quiet grove in the outer grounds of the Kuze Shrine. The Handmaidens called it the snow-stone, although there was no snow on it this early in the year. It was here, according to the Kuze family head, that Reika had to meditate in preparation for becoming a priestess.
Reika had never meditated before; even if she'd had the time or inclination, there had never been enough peace and quiet in her village, and she'd always been distracted or busy with something. Things were different here.
The family head taught her how to sit, with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap in a way that felt quite unnatural at first. The cold from the stone seemed to soak upwards into her, and the clothes that had felt adequately warm inside did little to keep out the chill here. This was what priestesses had to do, though, so she did not complain.
'Now,' said the family head, when Reika's back was straight and her eyes were closed, 'think of suffering. Any suffering will do, even your own. Later, you will concentrate on the suffering of others. Try not to move.'
It was easy to think of suffering; all she had to do was allow herself to notice how cold she was. Instead of resisting it, she let the cold close over her. Her hands ached. Breathing in was painful, like inhaling water. She imagined herself slowly, slowly freezing, a shell of ice forming over her, becoming a pillar, becoming a tomb: the stillness, the silence that would come then. The pain was like long needles piercing her through and through.
This was easier to think of than the other pain, the grief of losing her family. That would come. They waited, lined up along the mountain path, for the time when her thoughts would turn to them. That would be great suffering. But for now she was encased in ice, and only the frosty wind could reach her, and that was pain enough.
She did not know if the family head had been with her all along, or whether she had left and then come back. She didn't know how long it had been – time had slowed like her heartbeat; that too had been frozen.
The family head's voice sounded like a glacier grinding rock. 'That will be enough for today,' she said. Her hand lightly touched Reika's shoulder, and Reika thought ice was sheeting off her as she moved. It hurt. Everything was heavy and cracking. She slid from the pedestal and almost broke her ankle when her stiff legs didn't move the way they should, but the family head steadied her. Reika's eyes had watered, and her eyelashes were frozen together; she looked down through splinters of ice and saw her hands perfectly white, edged with blue.
Inside, the family head instructed her to sit a little way away from the brazier, and to let the warmth return gradually. Reika resisted the urge to shiver and rub her hands to warm them; her fingers began to burn and prickle as the heat came back to them, but she sat as still as she had during her meditation. She couldn't shy away from it. If she was going to take on the pain of others, she had to come to terms with her own, first.
2 something i never knew
It was a while before Reika allowed herself to think of her family during meditation. The weather was growing ever colder; today the snow-stone had a thin glaze of ice, and a few flakes of snow sifted down. They would not settle, but they were a reminder, a promise of what was to come. They brushed her cheeks as lightly as feathers, and she herself was so cold she perceived them as neutral temperature.
And out of the snow, her brother came, surprising her. But then, he had always been impatient. He stepped out from between the trees, weightless and white as a snowflake, but his eyes were like black stone. She wanted him to smile at her, but the dead do not smile, and she nearly cried out with the pain of his unsmiling face. It pierced her, and just as she thought she could no longer bear it, her mother stepped out as well, and then her father. All of them had the same white faces, the same long ridges of bone standing out beneath their skin. They asked her, with mouths pressed shut, why she was not with them. They were joined by all the other people who had died that day, and everyone else she had known who no longer lived; one by one, they crowded into the grove to stand before Reika and demand of her, without words, why she had stayed behind alone.
As awful as it was to see them, it was worse when her brother lowered his bitter eyes and walked past her, beyond her, into the shrine at her back and deeper still, into the place she could not follow. The rest began to go with him; she could not even turn to watch them go. She only knew they were departing without her.
But even as they left, even as that pain burrowed into her core and into its cold, permanent hiding place, she kept scanning the crowd of dead faces. It took a while, but before they had all filed through and disappeared, she was sure that Kaname was not among them.
He was alive, then. Somewhere out there, he was alive. She had hoped, but she hadn't been sure until now.
And though she concentrated on the pain, it was not so bad as it had been.
In the evening, when her meditation was over and she had returned to the house, she put her hand to the earring he had given her. She twisted it until her earlobe hurt, throbbing the way it had done when he had first put the needle through it. She remembered that first night with the earring in, a secret pain reminding her of him, of their connection, a pain she could hold in her hands and keep for herself. With what jealous pleasure had she held that secret, that ache.
She must have loved him. She had not known that, either.
3 united
It was a memory she dreamed that night, but it was not of her parents, or of anything a priestess was permitted to dream about. It was Kaname, of course.
He held the earring, and a needle that he'd heated over the fire. She was quivering on the inside, afraid of the pain, but more nervous of something else entirely, though she had not put a name to that yet.
'Do we have to?' she said, putting on a show of reluctance. She was exhilarated with fear.
'Not if you don't want to,' he said.
But she wanted to.
His hand pushed the hair out of the way of her ear. His fingertips grazed the skin of her neck as he combed back a few more stubborn strands, and her heart was beating in her fingertips and everywhere he had touched.
'Are you sure?' Kaname said. He pinched her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, and she could feel warmth radiating from his skin. She breathed quickly, shallowly.
'Yes,' she said, 'I'm sure.'
'Maybe it's not a good idea,' he said, and as she was distracted and about to argue, he pushed the needle through.
It hurt so much that all the solidity seemed to go out of her surroundings. Everything wobbled and blurred. He held onto her earlobe, doing something there – putting the earring in, she would decide later, though at the time she could only think about the black inkblots of pain blooming on the inside of her eyelids.
'There,' he said, when she had recovered enough to stand up. 'Now there's a connection between us, forever. No matter where we are, we'll be able to hear each other – we'll be together.'
She was aware of how close he was to her, his face taking up all of her vision, but they didn't kiss. It was not her mouth that remembered him, but the skin of her neck, her temple and her ear. It was the palm of her right hand, which she had touched to his arm to thank him.
When she woke, her earlobe was still throbbing from the way she had twisted it earlier. The stone lay against her neck, warmed to the temperature of her skin, and she felt the same thrill of the forbidden that she had felt back then, hiding the earring under her hair so her parents would not know what she'd done – what they'd done.
'Can you hear me?' she whispered, the sound burying itself in the heavy darkness.
But if Kaname heard, she did not know whether he replied.
4 solitude
In three weeks, they had put her in a cage. She hung, suspended above an empty room, guarded on all sides, and alone.
The meditation made her feel different. The more she did it, the more difficult it was to get warm again afterwards, and she had become accustomed to a constant chill that never left her. She slept more, too, in the cage, and her dreams were strange. She did not feel they were quite her own. They were full of the whispering of voices she didn't know, and she saw unfamiliar shadows moving, as if on the other side of a paper screen.
She told the Engraver, one of the women who guided her through different stages of meditation now that the family head was busy elsewhere. The Engraver said she was beginning to feel the dreams of others, and it meant she was ready to be a priestess.
Two days after that, the little girl, Amane, told her that the snow was falling. It was nearly time.
5 soliloquy
They gave Reika a mirror with a snake and holly pattern engraved on the back, and told her that this would be the receptacle for all her attachment to this world. She gazed at her face in it, and tried to see that girl as not herself. She saw that girl turning away, wandering into the mirror-world to search for Kaname, while Reika remained in her hanging prison, waiting to dream of the dead for eternity.
She sat in her cage and whispered of her love, her longing. He was out there somewhere, she told the mirror, and although she wanted to be a sacrifice and take on the pain of others, she also wanted to see him again.
She was supposed to be putting all of her pain into the mirror, and that was why she talked for so long each night. But as she talked, she was also aware of the earring. It tickled her neck sometimes, or became caught in her hair, and then she would take it between her cold fingers and wonder whether Kaname was listening. On those occasions, she spoke to him, too. She wanted to tell him, somehow, that she would be here forever. If he came, he would always be able to find her.
Her mind wandered into the world on the other side of the mirror, the world she would have to shatter and abandon one day. She imagined paths of glass, snow-silver, on which he walked, approaching to the shrine, coming to look for her.
And if he did, would she be able to see him just once and turn away, go down into the hidden chamber deep in the shrine, where all the other priestesses slept? Or would she slip away with him in the heart of the winter night?
She remembered, and imagined, his hand brushing the hair back over her shoulders the way he had before he pierced her ear. She remembered, and imagined, his face close to hers.
Reika tried to concentrate on the pain of being left behind by her family, the pain that she would carry down into the Rift with her. That was hers; that was all she was permitted.
But the reflection of her face in the mirror was smiling, just a little.
6 not alone
The feeling of needles piercing her flesh was familiar. While it was happening, she stayed quiet, lost in the maze of somebody else's grief. They came into the shrine, one by one, and knelt on the cushion before the altar, hands on their thighs, whispering.
While the Engravers inscribed the pain onto her, Reika let her head fall sideways, looking through the reed screens at each of the people who came to make offerings. They all had their faces covered and revealed nothing by their postures; their whispering was like the sound of flowing water, unrecognisable as speech. She did not know who they were at all until the night, when she would dream their dreams.
The first she dreamed was a woman pulling a child out of the river, frozen, blue and white, like snow under the light of the moon. The woman had knelt on the riverbank and sat there unmoving for hours; she had nearly died herself. Reika felt the pain as she had done meditating on the snow-stone, splinters of ice penetrating her, sealing all around her until she was a pillar.
That was the first night she heard the song of the Handmaidens, a lullaby seeping through the walls of the shrine, ringing all around. It did not lull her, exactly, but it resounded in her dreams, and it made the pain a little less. In the morning, the Engravers washed her new tattoo with a sheet of icy water, and the colours glowed, violet with an indigo heart, part of her forever.
As the winter went on, Reika was engraved with more people's sorrows, and each of them came to her in her dreams. Even when she was suspended in the cage and the manor all around her was buried in silence as deep as snow, those strangers' voices were inscribed upon her skin. She was never alone now.
7 coming to terms with myself
Reika had tried and tried to put her thoughts of Kaname into the mirror, but even in the midst of other people's dreams, his face kept resurfacing.
She had told nobody but the little girl Amane, who was very good at keeping secrets. She had asked once what the consequences would be if anybody knew she had a friend in the outside world, but Amane had not told her.
The truth was, she had come to realise, she could not excise this part of herself. If she took the earring out, the hole would not close; there was someone in the real world whom she loved, and she could not forget that. She might dream of the dead forever, but always, breaking through like the most slender ray of light, would be the memory of one who was not dead, and just a little of her pain might be alleviated.
Only her face and her neck were bare now, so the girl reflected in the Mirror of Loss was still as she had always been, whispering to Kaname that she hadn't wanted to leave him, and that she would be waiting for him in the shrine. That girl had no tattoos, only a stone earring, and that was the only thing binding her. In her dreams, she listened for no voices but the voice that might speak to her from the echo stone, and if it came, nothing could stop her leaving this place at once.
Later, Reika would break the mirror, attempting to shatter that part of herself, but she knew it would never work. There was nothing to be done about it now, in any case; she bore the tattoos, therefore she was a priestess. She was willing to go down into the Chamber of Thorns and sleep there forever. She was willing.
But perhaps it would not be so wrong, in the secret darkness of the Rift, to keep dreaming of him.