Nightmare
Everything in her nightmare was pain. From head to toe, her bones ached, her skin burned, her muscles screamed in protest to every motion, and even breathing was effort.
That, however, was not the surprising part of her nightmare. Reika had been having the nightmares for long enough that the pain was just another annoyance.
What was surprising was the fact she wasn't moving, being chased, or chasing, not running down the hallways or making her way through places she either recognized intimately or had never even so much as heard of before. No, Reika was in a cage. The ropes and wood creaked as the cage swung lightly back and forth, suspended in the air.
In the distance, the children continued their singing and chanting, and the sound of hammering continued, but it was background noise. Background noise to what would have otherwise been deafening silence.
Reika turned to move, and her muscles screamed, tensed, threatened to cramp, so she fell back limp and supine at the bottom of the cage. She turned her head enough to gaze out into the big room - she recognized it as the Engraving Shrine, where the Engravers would carve their ofuda at the behest of their guests, allowing the guests to pour out their pains in a quiet, isolated section of the shrine. The only thing on the second level of the Engraving Shrine were wooden beams - Reika knew, she'd played up there plenty of times as a child, and, in fact, she could not think of a single place within the Shrine where there was a cage suspended from the ceiling. She would've known after all this time.
Movement at the corner of her vision caught her attention, and she moved her head as much as she could to look down, but found that her moving her head positioned the corner of the cage in just such a way that she lost sight of whatever was moving. Frustrated, she sighed, but couldn't move, tired and heavy as she was, body uncooperative to moving or doing much more than laying there.
She didn't have the time to pause and think of how ironic it was that she felt sore and tired during a dream, because the cage was moving, lowering slowly, and where she thought she should have ended up on the ground of the shrine, she moved through it, entirely, down and down, further and further, into a strangely rectangular hole in the earth.
Beneath her, she heard moans, groans, the screams and anguished cries of the dead. The lower the cage moved, the louder the sounds became, and she knew she was being lowered right into it. Dozens, hundreds of voices cried out, and the light above her began to shrink, to lower.
The rhythmic hammering noises that usually sounded in her dreams became something more like shakujou, and the ringing thunk of the staves hitting the ground echoed metallically inside the hole.
Reika's skin prickled, and she tried to move, tried to force her aching body up so she could at least see more than the walls slowly moving past her, maybe then she could do something, she could get away...
... But she couldn't move, and the sounds were getting closer and closer, creeping up behind her, until she felt frigid hands move over her face, her neck, her arms, and she shivered without pain. She hated it, she hated the feeling, but she couldn't move, she was trapped, she was sick, she was...
She was going to die down here. Evil, and that was the only word for it, was clawing at her back the lower she went, trying to sink its claws into her, trying to corrupt her very soul and twist her into a monster she was not... but try as she might, try as she wanted to move, she couldn't, she couldn't move at all and even trying made her whole body feel like it was going to come apart at the seams.
Something grabbed her, but she could not even so much as scream as she felt the cold hands sink, clawing, into her throat. Something had draped itself around her shoulders, and it was cold and lonely as death, but twice as evil. It had her, it had nothing but her and it would not let her go from its grip.
Reika wanted so badly to scream, but her lips wouldn't even part, her throat would not work the sounds, so all she could do was sit, silently, trembling and frozen as whatever it was perched upon her shoulders, her head, around her throat.
Reika sighed, adjusting her bag on her lap as she waited for the bus, and tilted her head back to look at the sky. She was feeling well enough today that being out and about wasn't painful - or at least not unmanageably so, but she was tired. It was a long trek from the Kuze Shrine back in to Tokyo, and dealing with Lady Yashuu was always taxing, emotionally, which combined to make her sleepy. She wanted nothing more than to bathe in the sun, and perhaps take a nice long nap beneath a tree, just enjoying the warmth of the summer and the beautiful weather. It had been several days since her last nightmare, and with the pain not flaring up, she supposed it would at least be another couple days before she would have to deal with it again.
A pity, she decided, that she didn't think she'd be able to make the trek the rest of the way to her small apartment on foot to enjoy the weather. That would either cause a flare-up or leave her so exhausted she wouldn't be able to get anything done the next day, and she wanted to at least try to do the laundry.
A noise interrupted Reika's thought process, and she lowered her head once more to meet a pair of large, curious eyes that almost instantly turned away, trying to feign disinterest. Normally, Reika felt like she would have left well enough alone with that, but the girl was familiar - hadn't she asked the girl directions when she was out looking for Shibuya not long ago?
"Hello... again I believe," Reika said, and put on her kindest smile - the kind she used when speaking to Minamo when the youngest miko was upset. The girl before her fidgeted, just like the other girl Reika thought about was wont to do under the circumstances, and she had to stifle a laugh.
"... Hello."
It was such a reluctant hello, that Reika was almost concerned that she'd offended the girl somehow by asking her for directions, but just as she was about to open her mouth to ask what the matter was, the other girl suddenly launched into a question.
"Who are you?"
The words were almost more of an accusation than a question, and Reika figured it would have been just as easy to substitute 'what' in that sentence with 'who'. She frowned, but tried not to let herself react too strongly. There was definitely something odd about the girl, and she didn't want to frighten her.
"I am Reika Kuze; I'm a miko from the Kuze Shrine."
The girl studied her until it became uncomfortable, and though she was the older one, the feeling like Reika should squirm wormed its way down her spine. The look she was receiving was as though the girl didn't quite believe Reika when she had spoken, but then, all of a sudden, the other girl's gaze dropped to the ground and she bowed, hurriedly.
"I'm sorry. Something very... strange happened the other day when we passed on the street," with that said, the other girl turned toward the street as though to watch for the bus to approach.
"... Ah," Reika tilted her head, unsure of what else to say. Should she press? It seemed to have been something significant if the girl was willing to give her a look like that, but on the other hand, dredging up memories was probably not in anyone's best interest. Still, curiosity was high, and after an inordinately long silence, Reika spoke again. "I don't think I'm capable of curses. I know how to make ofuda against them, though, if you would like one? Maybe it was just bad luck."
Taken by surprise, the other girl jumped, then turned, and immediately lowered her gaze again, as though ashamed of her reaction. There was a terse silence, and Reika was almost entirely sure the girl was going to tell her no, going to keep ignoring her request, or something else similar, but was surprised when she saw the short black hair sway with a nod.
"Alright. Um... if you know how to ward against... a... against nightmares?"
Reika gasped, but bit the inside of her lip. She didn't need to tell the other girl that she had them, too, but there was something about the both of them being in proximity and having nightmares that just grated against some part of her and she didn't understand what.
"I... I think I can make something that will help with that. The Kuze Shrine is well-known for our ability to take pain away from other people, and I think I can make a ward for nightmares if I do it right."
The girl nodded again, then fished around in her messenger bag for a scrap of paper and a pen, hastily writing down a place to send the ofuda to - a dormitory from the way the address looked when Reika received it and looked over it, and what was more, the girl wrote her name.
Kurosawa Sae.
Reika nodded, and then smiled at the girl, trying to be reassuring, despite the unease that had plagued their conversation thus far. There wasn't much conversation between them again and when the bus arrived they went to separate sections - Reika sat near the front of the bus, near the door. Sae seemed to make it a point to go almost all the way to the back, sit near the window, and stare at the buildings as they made their way past.
Reika fingered at the paper she held in her grip, now re-folded so no one would be able to get any information that wasn't supposed to be able to get the information, and her mind wandered a bit. The girl wanted a charm against nightmares? Perhaps, Reika thought, she should make one for herself. Her thoughts drifted to the feeling of being in that cage, of being immovable and helpless as she was lowered into the dank pit. Whatever that was.
When she arrived back at her small apartment, Reika immediately set about looking to see if she had made sure to bring back some blank talismans with her, but wilted when she realized she no longer possessed any. After a quick search around the house, she pressed her eyes shut and sighed with the realization that she would have to call back to the shrine and have them sent to her.
The miko glanced out of the window of her apartment, looking at the steel and glass structures that she could see just a little ways away, of the great metropolis Tokyo that spanned almost as far as she could see before her, and sighed. Somehow, even though the mountains were gone, it still felt as though she was in a cage...
... Perhaps that same cage from the dream.
The buildings weren't really any less of a cage, they were just... louder. Brighter. There was more energy and there were more people, but she was still trapped. She was trapped because of her illness, and she was trapped because of her situation, and she was trapped because no matter how far away from the shrine she went, there was still a leash, a tether, that kept her connected to it. One that Yashuu needed only yank on just the right amount and in just the right way, and then Reika would be in an even smaller cage than before.
And...
... She missed him. She missed the one boy that had come to the shrine and stole her heart away. She didn't regret falling for him, only that their time together had been so short. She never thought Kaname would leave, and what was more, she never thought that he would fall out of contact almost immediately after he did. It was eerie, jarring, but he had promised to come back.
Reika knew that her not being at the shrine might make it a little bit more difficult for Kaname to get back in touch with her, but with no sign of hide nor hair of him in so long, she figured she wasn't hurting her chances much by coming out to Tokyo. Besides, Amane knew that she was waiting for a visitor, and had been for many years. They didn't talk about it much, but Amane knew, and Amane, Reika also knew, would let her know immediately of any visitors to the shrine that came for her.
With a sigh, she set her gaze back forward, then looked to the phone where she'd accidentally left it on a shelf by the door, before trudging over to it. She just came back from the shrine, and now she had to call again. It was a terrible feeling in her stomach that clenched and burned and wouldn't go away. It wasn't that she hated the Kuze Shrine, but being away from it certainly made it feel that way.
Reika picked up the phone, snapped it open, and dialed the familiar number.