Welcome back, everyone. Before you dive in, I have a couple of notes on this chapter in particular, because it is different from the others. First of all, keep in mind that we're taking a break from the main story to recount Ryokan's journey into the Kuze shrine. Unlike the other chapters, which were told in the third person, most of this one is a first person point of view, told from Ryokan's perspective. However, a little bit of it is still third person, as Itsuki will occasionally stop Ryokan to ask questions. If any of you get confused about this chapter, feel free to ask questions in the review section, or send me a PM.

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Chapter 21: The Kuze Shrine

"I'll never forget the day that I arrived on the grounds of the Kuze Shrine. The Manor surrounding it was a massive structure; beautiful, ornate, and buried so deeply in the Mutsu mountains, that many would consider it more a dream than reality. The pall of seclusion surrounding their culture and beliefs was overbearing, much greater than our own. It showed when the other inhabitants saw me. I was clearly not welcome there.

Men were never allowed in the Manor except during the winter season, to mourn their loved ones. Angering the matrons and other Manor inhabitants even slightly could result in death. I arrived in time to catch the last snowfall of winter, but the other mourners had long since left. However, Yashuu Kuze, the presiding ruler at the time, recognized me as a fellow Ceremony Master and allowed me in under supervision. They had a library where I could do all the research I needed to in order to learn more about the underworld. The arrangement was simple: I would finish and leave as soon as possible, and they, in return, would not kill me."

"Why would they be so hostile?" Itsuki interrupted. "Didn't you say that the women knew you were another Ceremony Master?"

Ryokan just frowned at him.

"Yes, they did, and that was the problem. The various ritual shrines of Japan all serve a similar purpose, but really, in the end we are separate religious cults who never share views on how to practice worship and sacrifice. The Kuze Manor and All Gods, in particular, have a grim history with each other, much of it relating to gender issues. In All Gods, men were dominant. Among the Kuzes, men were rarely allowed to live at all.

Yashuu assigned a young girl named Hisame to watch me. She was one of their handmaidens, a type of servant who would tend to the main priestess of the shrine, and she had a reputation as being the most cruel of them all. She rarely let me out of her sight. It was particularly important that I not visit the third floor of the manor, probably because the priestess resided there. Needless to say, I finished my research in a hurry and prepared to leave."

Itsuki frowned in confusion as he tried to piece together everything that Ryokan was telling him. If Ryokan's goals had been accomplished without a hitch, he wouldn't have taken so long getting back.

"So what went wrong?" Itsuki asked. Ryokan shut his eyes nervously.

"On the final night before I was to leave the Kuze shrine, something in Yashuu snapped. I didn't know why at the time, but Yashuu's servants stormed my room and took me prisoner. They brought me to a room called "the blind room". When I arrived, two women with gouged out eyes and giant needles protruding from their arms were waiting for me. They were called Engravers, and Yashuu had ordered them to drain me of all my blood, to be used in their future rituals. They were told not to stop until I had been completely emptied. When I asked Yashuu why she was executing me, she would not answer. She and the other servants departed without a word, leaving me and my tormentors alone.

Without hesitation, the Engravers began their torture. The disfiguring scars that you and Sae saw when I returned to All Gods were the result of the damage that they did."

Ryokan pulled his kimono open to reveal at least a dozen enormous gashes running along his body. Seeing them caused a look of astonishment to cross Itsuki's face. It was sobering knowledge to realize that every shrine had its own strange version of the village's cutting ritual. It sounded like an awful way to die.

"How did you escape?" Itsuki asked in a soft, almost inaudible tone. Ryokan pulled his kimono back up and continued.

"I shouldn't have survived that day. But before they had finished with me, the Engravers just left the room, without a trace. It was as if they had been startled by something unseen. They remind me of our mourners, actually.

While the Engravers were gone, someone else entered the blind room. She was a young, sweet looking woman with a soft face and long black hair. A white blouse and blue dress concealed a slender body that would soon be covered in tattoos. She freed me, cleaned my wounds as best she could, and whispered to me in a voice that was so soft and caring, that it seemed unreal:

'My name is Reika Kuze. You're going to be alright.' "

Ryokan paused to let Itsuki take in all that he was hearing. The white haired boy looked positively enthralled by the story, which was amusing, because the old man was just getting started.

"I didn't know it at the time, but Reika was the tattooed priestess; the single most important woman in the entire shrine. It was anyone's guess why she wanted to help me so badly, but I didn't have time to think it over. Not five minutes after Reika had arrived in the blind room, I heard Yashuu's bellowing, panicking voice resound through the entire manor. She as well as her handmaidens had finally noticed that their priestess was missing. Within moments, every woman in the Kuze shrine was looking for us.

Reika and I fled as fast as we could, but my injuries were slowing me down. Yashuu and her servants cornered us, and I was forced to put the blade of my sword at Reika's throat in order to keep them at bay."

"Were you bluffing?" Itsuki asked. Deep down, even he didn't believe that Ryokan would have it in him to hurt someone like Reika, who had risked everything to save him. Much to his relief, Ryokan nodded.

"I would never have hurt Reika. She was too important to the Kuze family's ritual. But Yashuu was too concerned for Reika's safety to call my bluff. Instead, she ordered the Engravers and Handmaidens to let us pass. Before we moved on, however, I took the opportunity to demand that Yashuu tell me why she tried to have me killed."

"And...?" Itsuki asked impatiently. A dark chuckle escaped Ryokan's lips.

"Funny thing about the Kuze family, Itsuki. They don't require that their members be born into the family, as we do. In fact, they frequently adopt women from other villages and use them in their rituals and practices. Reika, for example, had been adopted after a plague called "the Third Pandemic" spread to her village, leaving her as the only one who survived its disease. Her birth name was Reika Yukishiro.

What I didn't yet know was that Yashuu had been adopted as well. Her birth name was Yashuu Kurosawa.

It was one of the best kept secrets in our village, and it sounds impossible, but when I returned home, I searched my library for evidence proving or disproving Yashuu's story. I found a hidden document verifying Yashuu's birth in my family. She is the first born child of my father, Sengoku, and my older sister by twelve years."

Itsuki's eyes were hollow. He was stunned silent for a moment, but Itsuki also found it a little funny to think of what "Ryokan + 12" must have looked like. He didn't realize that people could possibly live for that long.

"Wipe that smile away, Itsuki. According to what she told me, Yashuu had been very outspoken about her ideals even when she was young. She told my father, when she ruled All Gods village, that she wanted to change the order in the village to make women more important. But my father was very traditional, and he didn't approve. Faced with the threat of his daughter becoming the new Ceremony Master, Sengoku banished her on her twelfth birthday when my brother and I were born. He never mentioned her to either of us, and removed almost all evidence of her existence. She would have died, but someone in our village took pity on her, smuggled her out of this village, and handed her over to the Kuze shrine. She has wanted revenge on my family, and our entire village, ever since.

But her plan to kill me failed, and Reika and I eventually made it to the Engraving Shrine. It was the place where the priestess would have her skin tattooed. But more importantly, it contained the opening of an underground tunnel called "the last passage" that, in turn, led to the Abyss of the Horizon, the location where the dead cross into the afterlife. Reika knew that no one would be guarding it, since they didn't think that I knew about it. Of course, they couldn't predict that Reika would drag me down there.

Finally, we made it into the depths of the Abyss. It wasn't dark or dismal, like our own Hellish Abyss is. It was a beautiful place, and seeing it with my own eyes was a gift that I didn't deserve. Reika led me to a rowboat and then pointed toward a tunnel. She told me that travelling through that tunnel would lead out of the mountain and place me well outside the Kuze shrine, and from there I would be able to make it back home without being followed.

Before I was allowed to leave, however, Reika told me her true reason for saving me.

First, she told me about a man named Kaname Ototsuki. Apparently he was the boy, about her age, that she had fallen in love with before becoming the tattooed priestess. However, in the Kuze shrine, priestesses were forbidden from remaining attached to anyone of this world, especially a lover. It was why men were not permitted in the Kuze shrine under most circumstances."

Itsuki cast an anguished glance down at his cell's floor. The talk of priestesses in love reminded him too greatly of Sae, and how he had been forced to push her away, if not for the same reasons.

"But Reika wouldn't give up. She was desperate to say one final goodbye to Kaname, and she knew that, with her ritual mere months away, I was her last chance of getting a message to the man that she loved. She handed me a letter addressed to him, grasped my shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and made me promise on my soul that I would pass the message on exactly as she had wrote it. Knowing that she had saved my life, I knew I had to agree."

A spark of life flashed through Itsuki's eyes. Something had just occurred to him.

"That note that you handed to Sae when you returned!" He said. Ryokan nodded.

"The words 'don't forget me' were the last ones on her letter. After escaping the shrine and resting while my wounds closed, I searched for Kaname. It took forever, and left me with many lonely nights to think, but I finally found the village that Kaname was currently living in. I knocked on his door and told him that I had come bearing news about Reika."

Itsuki smiled. It was impressive that the old man had ventured so far just to fulfill Reika's wish. He could have easily thrown the letter away and come back to the village.

"So then you gave him the message?" The white-haired boy asked. Ryokan sighed bitterly.

"I did give him 'a' message. I told him that Reika Kuze was dead."

At that moment, All Gods village grew a little darker as Itsuki felt his hopes scattered like butterflies blown away by a rough wind. Ryokan's face was filled with regret.

"At first, I had full intention of delivering Reika's letter to him. But when Kaname answered the door and heard her name, I knew the look on his face. He was like you, Itsuki. I knew that, if Kaname had believed that Reika was still alive, he wouldn't have rested until he had her back in his arms. He would have gone to the Kuze shrine and ruined their entire ritual. I may hate the Kuzes, but I don't hate them enough to let them all die.

The Kuzes call the disaster that results from the failure of their rituals 'the Unleashing', just as we call ours 'the Repentance'. I couldn't let the Unleashing happen, and for that reason, I had to break Reika's heart."

Ryokan, his mouth and heart both dry from recounting the story, looked up at the storehouse window again, but Itsuki wasn't there anymore. Ryokan didn't blame him. After a few moments outside in the cold, Ryokan turned to the gate and walked toward it slowly.

"I know you can still hear me in there, Itsuki. I know you think I'm a terrible person, but I do have a conscience. I know so, because Reika haunts it every night that I try to sleep. She appears to me in a dream, inside a rundown, withered version of the Kuze shrine where the Unleashing has occurred and killed everyone. Gone is her soft kindness, replaced by a vengeful demeanor not unlike Sae's. Every night, she seizes me by the throat with icy fingers and lifts me off the ground, demanding to know why I broke my promise. But neither you nor her will ever understand what being a leader is really like."

The former Ceremony Master undid the lock on the gate and opened it. Right before he passed under it, he offered his final words to the white haired boy who had come so close to understanding him.

"You have your answer, Itsuki. You wanted to know why I returned to this village with no hope. The answer is that I realized on my journey that 'hope' is just another word for 'impossible'. There is no real hope, just decisions to be made. Remember that, Itsuki. Hope didn't save the Kuze shrine from its doom, I did."

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So there you have the story of Ryokan's journey into the Kuze shrine. Did I manage to surprise anyone with the "Ryokan has a sister" twist?

I have a note regarding the end of this chapter, where Ryokan describes his dreams. Keep in mind that, in the timeline for the Fatal Frame games, the Unleashing does occur sometime before the Repentance. I implied at the end of the story that Ryokan failed to save the Kuze shrine from destruction and, by hurting Reika in the way that he did, he actually became the first non-Kuze person to suffer from the Tattooed Curse. That's what his dreams are.

However, Ryokan doesn't know any of this, and he believes that her appearances in his dreams are just because of the guilt that he feels. Since he is already being hunted by Sae and the Kusabi, it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Ryokan will live long enough for Reika's spirit to ever become an issue, so please note that she probably won't be mentioned in this story again. When the next chapter goes up, hopefully within a couple of weeks, the story's main plot will resume in full, and will not be interrupted again.

Also, I added a little surprise to this chapter by citing "the Third Pandemic" as the reason that Reika's village was destroyed. In actual history, it was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague that occurred in Asia about 160 years ago. It didn't affect Japan very seriously, but the plague killed millions in China and other countries, and most of it happened within about 10 years of the events of Fatal Frame 2 and 3. The coincidence was too good to pass up.

I hope you all enjoyed this crossover between the two games. Thanks for reading, and reviews will be appreciated.