Eight
Transcribed from eye-witness accounts. Final draft, editing in progress. On indefinite hiatus.
Lavi fully intended to give it a proper title, but he couldn't think of one straight off. So just in case, he wrote "missed train, India" on the cover. No one else would snoop over something that bland, and Kanda would be able to figure it out.
Lavi started it, "Once upon a time," but scratched this out and started over.
Forty years ago, there was a village that stood next to vast fields of lotus flowers of the deepest pink hue. The fields stretched so far in every direction that to stand in the center was like being in the middle of the sea, eyes fruitlessly searching for land in any direction.
It was very beautiful. When the blooms were in season, they were like an endless fleet of lanterns on stalks, set afloat on the clearest waters that would reflect the sky. Every breath filled the lungs with their perfume. The lush green leaves were like buoys everywhere, protecting them from sinking. When the sun set on them, it was like seeing a cloud carpet strewn with flowers, like a path a goddess had laid to guide her mortal lover into the heavens.
Despite of this, villagers did not find them beautiful. The village was very poor, and grew the lotuses only for their livelihood. Buyers would come and take them away for a pittance. Later, rich people in cities would pay exorbitant sums to lay the flowers on their altars, and nibble on the roots and seeds in the most delicate dishes.
Meanwhile in the village, mothers hit their babies for picking up and rattling the dried seed pods, which were for sale, not for play. Before they could talk, children joined their parents at work in the fields. Every day was exhausting and numbing. They cut rhizomes for new plantings in the spring, cut blooms for the flower stalls in the summer, and cut roots and seed heads for the food market in the fall. Their hands and feet would bloat with water like sponges, never completely dry. The smooth-skinned beauty of their youth was fleeting, for the low-growing plants offered no shade from the relentless sun.
By the time a man looked upon his new bride and a woman looked upon her new groom, they were disappointed by each other's cragginess, earned in labor to the lotus.
So it had been for hundreds of years. Not a single white-haired soul would turn its head on its thin pillow without thinking "I hate the lotus…"
One day in the summer, the season for harvesting flowers, two strangers came into the village. They wore black uniforms and called themselves exorcists of the Black Order. The villagers did not know it, but there was a single lotus in their fields that would open and close in a fluttery dance under the full moon, and each one of its seeds would grant immense power if eaten.
When the strangers asked if they knew of an unusual flower in their fields, the leaders of the harvest scratched their heads. Lotuses were just lotuses. When they asked how long it would take to check each one, they laughed and waved a hand towards the fields, the gesture implying thousands, millions.
Exchanging looks, the man and woman asked if they could stay and help with the harvest until they found what they were looking for. And because their mission added a rosy tint of mystery to their dull lives, the villagers agreed.
The man was dark-eyed and dark-haired and slightly ill mannered, but very handsome. He changed out of the heavy, long coat he arrived in into the lighter cotton garments of the field workers. The girls giggled at his broad back and shoulders, but this only made him confused and surly.
Even in the fields, he carried two blades. They never saw him draw, so they never knew what his skill was with them. But it was soon clear that he was very strong. He would lift cut lotuses in tubs heavier than himself onto wagons. He never tired. He stubbornly claimed this job for his own and would let no one else take on the back-creaking chore.
Every night the men tried to express their gratitude, and perhaps tease him, by pressing home-brewed liquor on him that would melt guts of iron. But he would drink them dry and stay as sober and ornery as a mule.
The woman was very beautiful, but slender and slight. She insisted that she was hardy enough to work in the fields, but she worried them, so they gave her the lightest work of mending clothes and watching babies. The flaxen hair of her bowed head would shine as she looked down at her needlework. She was a terrible seamstress but out of politeness they never told her so.
Her uniform was stark black like her partner's, but it was such a pretty half-jacket and full-length dress that she always had an air of elegance about her when she went about the village. She would fetch water or tinder, singing light-heartedly in a voice that made the village children wander up to her and put their hands over her mouth.
She was also a healer, like a shaman. One day the other exorcist cut himself with a careless swipe of scythe. He bore his injury bullishly and the men carried him back from the fields.
Their eyes all glowed with fascination as she passed her staff over the gash and it sealed like mud closing over a footprint. But they also noticed they way her hands lingered over his skin. They saw how he watched her, his scowl softening until his expression became a lonely one, since she would not look up from her work.
And so villagers knew that the two exorcists were in love with each other.
What puzzled them was that they did not seem to want to marry. They were often seen laughing together, with him helping her carry something or her giving him a treat she had made. But if it went on too long they would turn their faces away from each other and go their separate ways.
The man became instantly sullen and unpleasant if anyone asked him about it. But the woman kindly reassured them they need not worry for them, as it was merely due to the their jobs as exorcists. They had good lives, and lived with the rest of their comrades in a faraway castle.
The villagers did not understand this very well. What kind of work left two people young and beautiful, madly in love, and forbidden to be together?
"Because if something happened to either of us, the other would fall," the beautiful young woman tried to explain another way, but this made no impression. They were only upset to see the sadness in her pale blue eyes, so the women comforted her by pressing freshly baked bread and their children into her arms.
She loved flowers, so one day after the work was done and all the field workers were back in their homes for dinner, he brought her the most beautiful blooms of the day. She buried her face in them to hide her blush, to the amusement of the other women working alongside her.
A fireball crashed into the side of the house and knocked them all hard to the ground. The woman was the first to scramble to her feet, her grip lost on all the lotuses except one. Flying to the door, she threw it open and cried out in anguish, "Akuma!" although this meant nothing to anyone except the man. The flower left in her hand, once no different from the rest, started to hum and glow a violent green. Screams erupted around the village.
She exchanged one fleeting look with the man, then snatched up her staff and ran off in a whirl of skirts. Her friends protested and wailed, begging to know where she was going.
The man said calmly, "She's going to draw them away from the village. We'll fight them in the fields." The women shrieked as the two blades fell into his hands and burst into green fire.
Seeing their distress, he said, "Don't worry, we came here to protect you." They saw him smile for the first time since he had come to the village, and then he too was gone. When the women ran outside the only thing to see was pentacles swarming up their walls like cockroaches.
For the next part, Lavi only wrote,
"No one knew what was happening. They were being attacked by bulbous puppets made of bits of flesh and metal, the ugliest things they had ever seen. Those that tried to run were shot by their cannons, and disintegrated into gusts of stars and ash. Some glimpsed the woman running towards the fields. The creatures seemed to be drawn to her, and would abandon whatever they had been destroying to follow her. The man killed off the monsters that lingered in the village before going after her.
The most terrible explosions rocked the walls of their houses, so they understood that the man and the woman were fighting in the fields. They grasped each other's hands, safe within their walls, and prayed fervently for them to win. When the night eventually fell silent, they allowed themselves to be hopeful and looked to the fields. But they saw that everything, even the water, was in flames.
Not long after, they heard him calling for her."
No one saw this next part. But this was what Lavi correctly guessed to be what happened. He did not write it down.
The man ran to the fields, hundreds of akuma streaking ahead of him in pursuit of the girl and her prize. He cut down those he overtook, and back in the village they could feel the impact of their bodies slamming into the earth. The enemies he defeated splashed down into the water, and soaked him by the time he reached her.
He saw her facing the biggest akuma, a hideous thing made of sharp metal plates and oozing sores. It floated above her, avoiding the illuminated point of her staff.
As the man got closer to them, it drew itself up. The spikes on its back shot out like javelins. It caught the man in the chest and brought him to his knees.
She saw this and screamed. She immediately thrust her hands up to the akuma, and her meaning was clear: No, no, don't kill him, take it, take mine!
The lead akuma swooped down to size the innocence she was offering—the lotus in her fist. Before its claw could close over it, the seed head whistled like a hot kettle, and then the petals flew off in a burst.
The rest of the akuma responded by falling upon the man like wolves.
She screamed his name.
She gasped as her staff splintered into pieces in her other hand. Splitting into thousands of vicious ribbons, they lit upon the akuma and torched it and the others into blazing infernos. The streaks of her innocence then converged on her like a flurry of arrows. One lashed out from the rest and speared the man, throwing him far across the field.
She collapsed out of sight, slipping into the black water below the waxy leaves and pink flowers.
Elsewhere, the man floated on his back with blooms and leaves coolly kissing his face. He clutched at the shard of her innocence and the poisonous akuma bone embedded in his heart.
Lavi continued to write,
All through the day and all through the night, they heard him calling to her, crying like a calf for its mother.
The villagers hid in their homes, waiting for the water to stop burning. Some of the of the bravest men climbed up the roofs to see what was happening. They came back with black liquid spilling out of their eyes, leaving cat-like streaks on their faces. The fields were covered with stars like the spots of a disease, and fire smoldered in glowing red veins like lava. They could not see anything of the young man past the smoke clouds hovering over the fields, but it was agony to have to sit and listen to him calling the woman's name. They all did so anyways.
The next day the men climbed up on the roofs again. The day was clear and sunny, the sky a perfect blue. The fires had died down, boiling away all the water the lotuses grew in. All about them was waste, strange heaps of wreckage made of almost-human appendages and cooking metal. A sickly smell like rotten flesh steamed out of the ground burned black and bare.
But to their amazement, there was a cluster of lotuses growing at a distance, pure and untouched. They stared in wonder as the flowers peaked upwards in a mound like a hand reaching for the sky. Then, a barely perceptible outgrowth appeared in the side of the mass, spiking in the direction of the man's voice. A lotus bloomed, and then, a little while later, another. They fell into line like pearls on a single strand. The men on the roofs shouted for joy and slapped their hands on the tiles to alert those below. Muffled cheers burst forth from within the walls of the houses.
They dared not go into the fields because they feared the toxic stars, so they were gladdened to soon see men and women in black uniforms coming in from the distance. They shouted and waved at them excitedly, pointing. At first, they wondered why the newcomers stayed where they were, making no reply but quietly keeping watch from the edges of the field.
Soon enough, they realized that they did not mean to help.
The words of the woman came back to them: "…if something happened to either of us, the other would fall".
And they knew that the lovers had lost their value to the ones they had called their comrades.
On the third day, the lotuses slowed, as if their life force were weakening. They stopped spreading on the fourth. On the fifth day, he fell silent. On the sixth day, the last of the stars faded from the earth and the new exorcists in their formidable black coats entered the fields. They tore apart the lotuses, and took them back.
Money arrived from the Black Order. It was to pay for the scorched fields, and, it was insinuated, their silence. The village used it to start a new trade in painted pottery. Patterns of thick lotus leaves and dainty pink lotus flowers flowed from the tips of their brushes.
They held each other and their children tighter. Years passed, and it became a delight to behold the radiant, smooth-skinned beauty of their newest sons and daughters at their weddings.
Among vast seas of fallow mud they now gather clay from, there is one last patch where lotuses still grow. They tend to it devotedly. Older villagers often visit to give thanks. Younger lovers go to receive their blessing. Thirty years later, they still weep for the two fallen lovers.
Now they can see the beauty of the lotus.
Lavi had meant to bind it in leather and finish it with the simple dedication of "For Kanda". He meant to inscribe it on the inside cover by when he got back.
He never came back, so Kanda reads it as a string-and-paper manuscript in Lavi's room. He drops it to the floor and covers his face with his hand.
Lavi is not here.
Author's notes: Thank you all for the wonderful feedback so far. One more section to go.