Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Last Thing You Lose


"We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you."
~ Sylvia Plath ~


"Chou Rokou," announced the captain of the troop that had brought him to the courtyard from his cell. "You stand accused of treason against the Emperor and the Country of Kounan. You have conspired with other traitors across the city, enemies of the new regime, and planned to rope more in to serve in your plan to overthrow the Emperor. Here is a list of names of people you have contacted and intend to contact. Do you deny this is your hand?"

He stood in the middle of the courtyard, his hands bound behind his back and the sun boring into his skull in a way that helped neither his month-long migraine or the revolting nauseous fear. The air was dry and still, and there was the buzzing of complete silence around, though the courtyard was packed with soldiers and members of the court. Boushin sat at his throne, his face completely blank as he stared at some distant spot over Rokou's head. Houki was nowhere to be seen.

Good, thought Rokou, though it did nothing to make him any less alone in his crazy and yet completely clear choice. "No," he said, presently, and was aware of a rustling amongst the people.

"And these," said the captain, lifting his hand so everyone could see the rolls of parchment he was holding. "These are letters we have recovered - transactions between you and your co-conspirators in Sairou. Do you deny these?"

"No," said Rokou, who hadn't the faintest idea what the man was on about.

"Really?" said another voice, and everyone turned as one to look at the Prime Minister's somewhat unimpressive, short and rotund figure at the helm with the Emperor. He was smiling.

"...yes," said Rokou, trying to keep his face blank.

"Do look closely at these letters, Chou-sama, as I am certain you have never seen these letters before," he said, handing the letters to a soldier and indicating for him to take them to Rokou.

"No, I wrote them."

"Do you know why I know you are lying, Chou-Rokou?" he asked, coldly, slowly.

Rokou held his ground. "I am not lying."

"These letters are in the woman's script - it's a form lost to all but housewives. I can't imagine how a clothes merchant such as yourself would come to know of a script reserved for harems and woman's antechambers."

"Well, you do, obviously," said Rokou, though he was shaking now, his hands completely cold, "so I imagine you would know." Now there was a rustle of alarm in the crowd. Jiu had been part of the Emperor's retinue since before Hotohori had passed away. Yet, he was an unknown enbtity as far as the crowd was concerned. This was the first time they had seen him speak so openly, so unbidden and with absolutely no interference from the Emperor. And the crowd was chilled.

Presently, Jiu smiled even more widely, and somehow this was even more alarming. "I would advise you to choose your next words very careful, Chou Rokou. You are in a precarious position, a position even one so simple as you can understand. You are the brother of a dearly departed Suzaku Seishi. One of the last followers of a forgotten tradition. This is a misguided attempt to revive that which has been lost... the time of prophecy and priestesses who rescue the country is over. This is a new era - and you are standing in the way. You are a simple man... but I am sure you can appreciate that you are not even the last of your own kind. You are nothing - not a warrior or a priestess of an Empress or even a thief. You are merely a clothes merchant who has been roped in by people much wiser than you. You can denounce them now, here. You can name those who have seduced you into believing, falsely, that the country is in trouble. These... these are not your letters. So whose are they?"

It didn't help. Somehow Rokou knew that this was his test - his final test, the test he had almost hoped for all his life while wanting to prove his brother and sister that he was brave and wise. He knew what he needed to do, and the words fell from his mouth without him having to think so much about them. But it really didn't help that he had to get through his final test with a stupid slimy bastard reminding him of his most basic fears.

"These are my letters. My brother knew the script - he was fond of the ways of the women, as anyone will remember," the lie came easily to him. "He taught me the script. These are my letters, and it was my plan."

"This is sort of amusing," said Hong Jiu, speaking quite softly now, though somehow his voice cut through the distance, Rokou's mask of bravery, the gut-wrenching fear beneath and all the surety he had ever felt in all his life. The clothes merchant could now feel himself unfolding, being undone, as the Prime Minister's voice almost carressed his ear - though the man stood several feet away. There was something about how he spoke that cut through everything to whatever lay at the core of his being. And it didn't matter, his faith or his heritage or his brother or his determination. In those moments that he spoke, Rokou believed him.

"You are alarmingly mistaken if you believe somehow that your sacrifice will save her. Or maybe you want to reach back through the years and save someone else, which is also... sort of amusing, actually. The end is coming for everyone who believes in the old gods, Chou-sama. There is no avoiding it. Your life is quite meaningless. Your sacrifice is, while sort of noble I guess, also rather meaningless. So you think of that, when the blade slices through you several hundred times. You think of that while your life slips away. It was all for exactly nothing. For nothi-"

But he cut himself off, through Rokou could not see why he would stop. If you were the kind of man to take pleasure in another's pain, this was a great time to do it. He had never been in quite as much agony in his life, or quite so alone, and he was painfully aware of the ordeal before him. A hundred slices of the knife... the punishment reserved for the most hideous of traitors... that was what he had coming. Kounan had in fact not used this punishment since before Hotohori had come to the throne.

The Prime Minister now seemed struck, speechless. He stood very still, and the air around the congregation slowed down entirely. Rokou had an impression that he was the only one breathing, and his breath was very loud. Then, the Prime Minister raised a hand to his chest and allowed a small gasp of sharp air to enter his lungs. He sounded almost as though he was in pain, which made no sense at all and was also somehow creepy. There was no mistaking it. In the next moment, he turned white, the blood draining from his face.

For a brief, wild moment, Rokou wondered if he was saved. Then he wondered if he was not, and was there to be one more moment of him having to decide if he could take another way out. But that moment passed, and a haunting thought gripped him - he would never know what he would have done in this moment, when he was so scared and confronted by a logical truth. When he was somehow made to test himself and his faith against this logical truth. Would he have chosen differently.

"Death," said Hong Jiu, quietly, but the word reverberated. He turned his gaze, full of pain, to Rokou, who stared back, now truly, grotesquely scared. "By slow slicing. Death to this traitor." 1

And though his words were infinitely soft, the crowd seemed to reverberate with them. Death to the traitor, they mumbled, muttered. Death to the madman who believed in the old ways. Death to the man who plotted the demise of their king! Death, death, death! Death by the slow slicing, the hndred slashes!

And as the crowd grew to a sort of frenzy, the small murmurs giving way to shouts and yells and chants for the same, Rokou watched ashen faced as the Prime Minister turned and walked swiftly away. A moment later, Boushin rose and his face still blank, his gaze never touching Rokou's face, he left as well.

It was as though he was being pulled away from the execution, as though Rokou was meant to face this alone, without Ryuuen or Houki or Miaka or Li-Fen or Kourin. Without the executioner and the king he was supposed to be betraying. All that remained was horror, as he was yanked up roughly and brought to the platform where the throne sat. He was shoved down by a frame of wood, and made to kneel, as they tied him to it. The thoughts, the doubts swirled in his mind wildly, like the churning of the noise and the piercing ache in his head. And as the first knife descended, he closed his eyes and prayed.


Amefuri literally threw her to the center of the clearing, and she landed painfully on her injured arms. But in the face of the fact that they were being attacked (for the third time in two days, at that), Hikari let out a mild squeak and then forgot all about it.

Her friends closed in around her so that she was at the center of the very small circle they could make with their bodies. For a moment Hikari had the scary impression that, if it came down to it, they would protect her with their bodies, literally. She dismissed the idea in the next instant, of course, because how absurd did that sound!

"Give me a swor-"

"No!" Reishun almost roared, and it was rather alarming. Not in the way that Amefuri was sometimes alarming, where you genuinely feared for your life and existence, but in the way that mothers were alarming, or worse, aunts or sisters. Or Hanako. There was something formidably fierce about that too, quite comparable to the few hundred soldiers or the Byakko Seishi who made it rain simply by being irritated. "You stay down!"

If she hadn't been so alarmed, Hikari may have been offended - but she knew as well as any of them that she was pretty much useless in a battle involving anything more palpable than her wit.

Admittedly, the reason she had pretty much missed the last two battles was not so much her lack of ability to fight as much as it was the pink floating Nyan Nyan orb. And she had once saved Reishun, though that seemed almost a lifetime ago. Since then she had done very little fighting. Even then, in fact, she had done very little actual fighting. The power had sort of erupted from her, and Hikari had not been able to think of it since then.

Then, as a whole army of soldiers poured into their little clearing, Hikari lost her train of thought. Dimly, she noted her friends' bodies tense up. Eian had his sword drawn, of course, and Reishun weilded a sword she had picked up from their earlier battle, as did Donghai. Amefuri carried many weapons, a sword that dangled from her waist and a knife in her boots, Hikari knew, but for the moment she was holding an axe over her head, looking quite dangerous.

And drifting over Eian's head were Tomo and Soi. For the first time, Hikari was somewhat grateful for their existence. In the face of what looked like a few hundred soldiers facing this small group of four warriors, one Nyan Nyan and one evidently useless Shinzaho of Suzaku, the ghosts' presence seemed like a small edge that would help them. For the first time since their encounter in Shichang, Hikari had the true sense of being fearful for her life.

And this was wholly different. At that time, she had been somewhat preoccupied by the length of her skirt, and she had this distinctive sense that as long as the pretty and completely crazy Reishun was next to her, she would be okay. On the bridge where they had met Amefuri, though things had been much more dire, they had sped past so rapidly that Hikari had barely had the opportunity to blink - and then Amefuri had punched her and that was that. Now though, she saw numbers. She saw the terribly odds of their situation. And this overwhelming fear could still not mask the dull, decided horror of the person that Hikari had taken to calling the Evil Commander Dude.

A voice boomed through the forest, right on cue. "I am compelled," said the voice, echoing as though someone was speaking from behind every tree, from under every root, "by the old customs to offer you the opportunity to hand over the Shinzahos and maybe we'll spare your lives." Reishun and Eian exchanged a look, though Hikari barely noticed this. A moment later, sounding deeply amused, the voice added, "Well, no, we won't. But we might make it less painful... though that too seems unlikely. Actually, on second thoughts, forget it. Attack!"

A brief moment of general confusion passed as the soldiers caught up with the voice's somewhat contradictory instructions. Then, as though shaking themselves out of said confusion collectively, they charged.

Before anyone knew what had happened, a huge bolt of lightning struck the area in between the Seishi and the soldiers. Blinded, disoriented, the latter scattered as everyone in the group - other than Tomo, who looked bored, and Soi, who was busy conjuring another bolt of lightning, though neither were visible to anyone but Hikari of course - looked at Amefuri with something like awe.

"It wasn't me," she growled, characteristically furious, but also quite astonished.

"What i-" Eian began, but was cut off.

The next bolt of lightning struck, and everyone yelped a little, though it was nothing to the foremost soldiers, who were sort of scurrying around like befuddled bats.

"What's going on!?" demanded Reishun, looking about wildly for the source of this information.

A large shield rose around them, seemingly made of some steel like substance, some sort of metal. It rose like a barricade and then pushed outwards, so soldiers actually stepped back, falling over each other in utter chaos, until the wall pushed through them.

It was an illusion, Hikari realised, and then turned to look at Tomo, speechless. The painted face, despite its elaborate designs, looked almost bored, as though this was child's play and ever so tedious. "You might want to stop looking like a bunch of dimwitted owls and get a move on," he suggested, rolling his eyes. Hikari was frankly too impressed to be annoyed.

"Um," she said, a moment later, shaking her head. "Um, we should - let's, like, run?"

So they did, after another moment of collective bafflement. They ran, and were extremely aware of the bolts of lightning in their wake, horrible illusionns that seemed to emerge from nothing and chase back the soldiers. Even so, they had to battle their way through the throng, Reishun and Eian taking the lead - Reishun had reverted to her strategy of picking up heavy objects (which were sometimes soldiers) and throwing them at the retinue of men before them, while Eian took the slightly more elaborate and decidedly more elegant way out - Donghai running with Hikari and Nyan Nyan and Amefuri bringing up the rear.

What was rather amazing and impressive was the sheer numbers of soldiers they encountered. How had all these people managed to creep into the woods unseen and unheard? Their run, however, turned out to be short-lived.

Reishun suddenly stopped - Hikari ran solidly into her, though the woman, rock-like, did not budge. Hikari noted, with some resentment, that Eian, who had in fact been behind Reishun, had avoided this entirely. But she realised very quickly that they had significantly bigger problems.

Looming over their heads was a monstrous snake. It rose several feet over their heads, black and enormous, its amber eyes glowing maliciously. Its neck, or body, was about as thick as a trunk, and Hikari could not see how far into the darkness it extended. The woods fell silent; even the soldiers fell quiet, and Hikari had the distinct impression that this was the first demonstration of such power they were witnessing.

It was a mark of how far in her journey she had come, she realised dully, that she was not wildly surprised. She was deeply unsettled and completely unsure; and alarmingly aware of that they were now surrounded by soldiers as well as small black snakes that slithered along the forest floor to where they were. She was certainly very afraid, for her friends and for herself also, but she was not entirely surprised.

For a very brief moment, she had this wild notion that maybe, just maybe, she could do what she had done with Reishun before - so many nights ago. But before she had a chance to push herself forward to protect her friends without having the slightest clue how - which was stupid, but really the only instinct she was aware of; - she was enveloped in pink.

She yelled, but it didn't matter; the pink pressed in around her. Hikari knew what came next. She also knew she was fairly powerless to stop it from happening. Nyan Nyan was a very harsh mistress for a bobbly pink demi-goddess. But, damn it, she did not have to happy about it. "NYAN NYAN NO I DO NOT WANT YOU TO TAKE ME AWAY DO NOT DO THIS YOU MISERABLE PINK BOBBLEHEAD."

In the split second that they lingered by their friends, Hikari noted that none of them seemed too bothered by her yelling or her spontaneously turning into a pink ball (which was what she thought she looked like) and knew instinctively that her yelling was not heard. Of course, this made her scream all the more. This started in the general area of protests - "DON'T TAKE ME AWAY FROM MY FRIENDS!" - and moved to to general complaining - "YOU ALWAAYS DO THIS AND WHYYY WON'T YOU LISTEN!" - and there was admittedly some actual fear - "THEY NEED OUR HELP NYAN NYAN!" - but it all swiftly degraded to the realm of general, if elaborate rudeness - "YOU ARE A HORRIBLE %$^t#(u%* ( !" - that would, while certainly ot leading ot Tasuki actually blushing, have likely made him smirk.

However, all of this, and their hurtle through the space-time-continuum (or whatever the hell it was), came to a very abrupt halt as they ran into what felt like a tree, which was an unprecedented experience in the life of Sukunami Hikari. Perhaps it could have been compared with being hit by a bus or run over by a train, but as neither of these things had happened to her, she found herself completely bewildered and in a lot of pain. Her body and mind - her being, really, responded with utter confusion. She felt no pain though she knew she was in a crazy amount of pain and when her body's internal defenses ran out, it would not be fun. Also, for a couple of moments, as though her senses had lost it entirely, she saw stars. Not blinding spots of light that happen in the aftermath of a solid knock to the head, but actual stars - constellations glowing bright, red and somehow meaningful, except that she did not understand. She squinted, and pain exploded in the general area of her head.

Then, a dark shadow passed over her head and her senses seemingly started to realign. It took her what felt like many long minutes to register that she was looking at the shape of a man, looming over her head. And she knew, that Nyan Nyan had been sorely mistaken in trying to get them to safety.

Nyan-Nyan...

Blinking, she tried to sit up and look around, bending her elbows to try to prop herself up. A sudden sharp pain burst through her arms and she realised, without needing to look down to check what the wetness was, that she was bleeding again from the wounds that she had been so certain were healing from the shen-qu's medicines - they hadn't hurt too much in a while, after all. But she had deeper worries. Trying not to groan, she looked around. Nyan-Nyan?...

He was saying something, in his familiar cold voice, the man looming over her head, though she couldn't entirely make out the words. A cold panic was rising in her chest as she looked around for the demi-goddess. It didn't help that something was blurring her vision, something warm and slightly sticky that also seemed to be slithering down her forehead. Hikari didn't know - didn't care that she was bleeding or that she was about to be in a lot of pain very soon, if not actually dead. She cast about, increasingly frantic, for Nyan Nyan.

The commander was speaking about bravery and friendship and how it wasn't terribly brave of her to try to leave her friends behind. He was reminding her of her actions before, and that maybe she could have actually saved them if she'd tried. Or maybe he wasn't speaking at all, and her ears were ringing. She could feel something wet run down her cheeks now. She tried to sniff these away and be brave, but she scared and horrified that Nyan Nyan was dead or wounded or something awful and she didn't know what was going to happen to her friends, and maybe, just maybe, the voice in her head was right - she could have fixed this and she didn't even try...

"Nyan Nyan!" she burst out, her voice unrecognisable.

"Oh, she's alright," said the man in his cold voice. It took an effort to look up at him and follow his hand to what it was pointing at - the crumpled figure of what looked like a child at the base of a tree. "You both just made quite an impact and she bore the brunt of it."

Hikari tried to stand. She in fact attempted to leap forward to check on Nyan Nyan - she actually willed herself to do it but her body could not comply with her commands. What the hell was wrong with her body?! "Nyan Nyan," she said, a little stupidly, but that was really all that could come out. "I-"

She found herself grabbed by the arms and straightened up. "Save your strength," she heard Xiang - or this version of Xiang - say, as her head spun horribly. "You will need it when you meet the Black Dragon."

Then, blackness took over, and she knew no more.


A grim silence echoed through the woods, despite that it felt as though there were enough people in their to populate a small country.

Reishun could see, from their spot in the clearing where the giant serpent loomed over them, the man - who looked rather pasty faced and somehow serpentine with, with teeny nostrils and really looked nothing like Xiang, though it was clear to her that he was definitely one of his "forms" - towering over Hikari's prone figure, Nyan Nyan by the tree. For a brief, paralysingly scary moment, she thought Hikari was dead. But as the girl shuddered and struggled to get up, this fear was abated.

Two soldiers grabbed Hikari by her arms, which seemed to be soaked in blood. As she went limp, they carried her into the darkness of the woods, illiciting a yell of something like desperate rage from Reishun. She would never know what she had yelled - she wouldn't even know what she had intended to tell. Something deep inside her was raging - against her, against the commander and the army, against the possibility that Hikari could be lost. Where the hell were they taking her?! What did they intend to do?! She stood there, shaking, in between Amefuri and Donghai, and found herself, for the first time in her life, blindingly angry and with no idea what to do with it.

Later, she would imagine this was sort of what Amefuri felt like all the time.

The man turned and smiled, almost pleasantly. Next to her, Amefuri stiffened. Very reluctant to stop looking at the spot where Hikari had disappeared, Reishun turned slowly and found, to her deep and unpleasant horror, that the tiny black snakes all around them had raised their heads and were looking at them.

"Well, that was easy," said the man, presently, and though he did not yell, they could hear him. His voice came from the darkness, from the small snakes snaked around them, the huge looming shadow over their heads... from their own bones, it seemed. Against her will, Reishun was reminded of the invasiveness of Commander Xiang's painful black magic, or whatever it was that he did, and despite her rage, she shuddered. Hikari... "And almost engaging. Well, I'm going to leave now - I would say it was pleasant to meet you, but you're all rather boring and predictable. Though, never mind," he added, placatingly, "you'll be dead soon. And I get to tell you that you die having failed - to protect the Shinzaho, the country - falling as we speak-"

He cut himself off as Eian took a step forward, but was forced to stop as he found a spear his throat. The man seemed amused and really quite self-assured. It was, Reishun reflected, quite annoying. "Yes, it's difficult," he said, as though speaking to a very small child. "But in about ten minutes it won't matter. Goodbye, warriors of the old gods; there really is no room for you in this world any longer."

Then, he turned and walked into the darkness.

For a moment after he disappeared, there was silence. The warriors waited for the soldiers and serpentine creatures around them to attack, and the latter, it seemed, had been waiting for some sort of sign with such intent that they'd missed the wagon somewhat.

Then, the serpent reared, making an awful roaring sound - Reishun would later spend a significant amount of time wondering if all snakes made those noises, but humans just could not hear them - and descended. Someone grabbed her hand and yanked her roughly out of the way, and she crashed to the ground as the serpent crashed behind them where they had been standing. Reishun looked around to check on the person who had made sure she'd not been killed, but Amefuri was already on her feet and lashing out somewhat alarmingly with the axe.

Cringing just a little, though inordinately grateful for the woman's swift instincts, Reishun clambered for her fallen weapon, shoving a soldier who got in her way aside - he flew to the nearest tree and lay there, prone. There was a sudden alarming clarity in Reishun's mind: make sure Donghai (who she had got into this mess) was okay, get to Nyan Nyan, and then follow this particularly smarmy and irritating version of Commander Xiang to wherever the hell they'd taken Hikari. And again, later, she would imagine that this was how Amefuri thought pretty much all the time - with the kind of clarity that battlefields loaned to you. There was a good and a bad, a preferable and a non-preferable, and all shades of grey, doubts and worries, all thought, really, did took a backseat to this. Reaching her sword, she cast about.

The giant serpent was now engaged with Eian - who was somehow battling it off with bolts of lightning and other ephemeral dark shapes that flew at the creature to distract it long enough for him to get a stab or two in. There was something slightly odd about this, but Reishun did not have the time to try to work it out. It seemed that both Amefuri and Eian were okay where they were.

Looking around, she found Donghai quickly enough. He had adopted to swing his sword around like a whirlwind while yelling as though the end of the world was upon him (for good reason). He had created a sort of circular space around him - he was the eye of his own storm, in a sense, as he kept turning as though not sure of how to stop. Indeed, if he had stopped, the soldiers surrounding him would have closed in and he would have been unable to fight back.

Pushing another man out of the way, Reishun went to assist. She wound up stomping on something squelchy and knew without looking down to check that this was one of those tiny black snakes. She smirked, somewhat grimly. Not good for much other than squelching, apparently. Fueled, she acquired a shield from one of her attackers (when she was clear about what she was doing, this kind of stuff came to her very instinctively) and shoved her way through the throng of soldiers, stopping just short of where Donghai was pretending to be a whirlwind. A particularly brave soldier tried to lunge at her, and really this was sort of fortunate, because Reishun had had no plan as to what to do after this point - or how to get Donghai to stop being a whirlwind, which was pretty crucial. The soldier found himself lifted over her head, his yells adding to the din that Donghai's were already creating. Then, she threw him, rather unceremoniously at the troops around them, causing general alarm and disorganisation.

"DONGHAI!" she bellowed, because she didn't know what else to do and also because it really seemed like he wasn't sure how to stop.

And she sounded so very much like an angry shepherd (and she did, in fact, belong to a family of angry shepherds-turned-merchants) that he stopped short, looking stunned and guilty and extremely scared all at the same time. "What?" he squeaked, but as Reishun gave him a look that was simultaneously incredulous and furious, he registered what was happening. "Oh," he said, a little stupidly, and then they both charged at the soldiers, Donghai significantly encouraged by her presence.

They both had similar strategies and strengths, it seemed. Donghai was an unnervingly large man and he had been a bandit for a while now, and Reishun had really spent a long time sticking with the "pick up heavy object and throw it at threatening things" philosophy, no matter what Amefuri said about finesse and strategies. It worked just fine with a small battalion of soldiers. What was quite disarming was how many small battalions of soldiers there seemed to be.

Around them, the noise was growing inordinately overwhelming. Lightning crashes and monstrous roaring filled the woods, but also, more and more soldiers seemed to be pouring into the clearing. It was almost unreal - and had it not been for the very real battle they were in, Reishun would have been baffled. They seemed to emerge from the darkness itself, an unending train of soldiers.

Not to far away from her, Eiann let out a most un-Eian-like battle-cry. Reishun turned - a crucial moment passed in which she saw Eian run through the monster's neck with his sword - and then let out a yell of her own as a soldier caught her hard on her shoulder with his sword. The pain flashed like blinding white light for a split second, but her rage - the battle rage she had never, in this life time, felt - took over in the next instant. She raised her sword, and, furious, pushed back at the the troops with her shield, blood gushing from her shoulder. But about halfway through this, all the soldiers vanished entirely, and she felt face first to the ground.

Stunned, and groaning, she pushed herself up to find a tiny black snake looking at her intently. For a moment, she thought it would bite her and that would be that - but it turned and slithered away, joining the many other snakes that were slithering away. Blinking in confusion, Reishun looked around. The soldiers and the monstrous snake had vanished; Eian stood there, his sword planted in the ground where it had struck after the snake had vanished, a dark mist swirling around him like dust that had yet to settle.


"Yuuki-sensei."

Keisuke, who was now compulsively drinking tea at the dining table, turned and looked somewhat guiltily, but also with budding apprehension, at Hanako. The fact was that the last few times the girl had popped up, it had been with really bad news or an immediate disaster following her in. She seemed innocuous, but he knew these things. He had a sister much like that. Disaster pretty much followed Miaka wherever she went, especially when she went where she was going looking particularly innocuous. Much like Hanako did now.

Therefore, Keisuke regarded the thirteen-year-old with a certain healthy fear. He also regarded her with some shaky disorientation because he had now had around twenty cups of tea while sitting across from a very calm and smug looking Nakago, and he was really wired. It may have made more sense to toss something along the lines of very strong alcohol in the tea at some point, but that moment was long gone, and now he felt, and probably looked, like a particularly hyperactive old lady.

"What now? Is the book black again? Did Li-Fen break something expensive? Is Yui losing it? What is it?"

Hanako raised an eyebrow and her gaze drifted to the kettle and Keisuke's tea cup, and then back to him. "I thought I'd let you know I phoned my parents and told them I'm staying with Hikari and her uncle. They may call."

"Oh," he said, as this information settled in. Then, he looked almost abashed. "Well. That's not scary."

"No, it's really not," Hanako agreed.

Keisuke cleared his throat. "Everything's a bit bats."

"This is true," nodded Hanako, her tone determinedly neutral. "Also Li-Fen thought she'd cook."

"Oh," said Keisuke, now positively stuned.

"Yes," said Hanako. "Maybe I'll take the tea from you?"

"Ah," said Keisuke, holding the teacup with some determination of his own. The teacup was all he had, he thought, a little wildly. The teacup was pretty much the only thing that made sense. Hanako reached. He shirked, and then found himself clutching the teacup all the more in the face of the frustrated, despairing sort of look she cast towards him.

"Well, now that Jun-chan is safely in bed," said Tetsuya, walking in with the somewhat relaxed air of the ignorant parent who didn't know what his child was up to, "what shall we do?"

"Ah, Tetsuya!" Keisuke announced, getting up and moving, with teacup, aware from Hanako. "Li-Fen's making some food," he informed his friend, almost a little desperately, as though in need of some sort of explanation as to how a person could travel through the universes, arrive in a virtual battle zone, be confronted by Nakago and Yui (not in that order) and somehow arrive at the point where she thought she would make food for everyone.

"Wow," said Tetsuya, with feeling, and sat down. "Yui's ordering pizza."

"Wow," said Keisuke, sitting down beside him. "Women."

Nakago looked very much as though he was going to nod and look impressed but had decided not to do so at the last moment.

"Right, this is weird," announced Hanako, wrinkling her nose. "You guys do... er, this, and I'm going to... be elsewhere for a bit. Right-o. Off I go."

She departed, muttering something about weird non-romantic non-superhero men, as, in vain, the Book tried. Its life flickered a bit, and impending doom (in the scary, non-amusing, non-literary-device kind of way) drew closer around it, it made one last valiant attempt. The inky blackness shifted and swirled...


"What happened?" Reishun demanded, agitated.

"An illusion," said Amefuri, from behind her. She walked up, looking sigificantly battered but also a little alarmingly centered. "It was an illusion."

"All of it?!"

"It would seem so," said Eian, pulling his sword out. He was looking, with an odd expression, at Amefuri. "How did you do that?"

"How did I do what?"

"The lightning, the ... other things?"

"I told you, that wasn't me," said Amefuri, shortly, turning away from him to look critically at Reishun. "You're bleeding," she said, and sounded very much as though this was annoying.

Reishun however had other things on her mind. Suppressing a rush of annoyance with Eian, who seemed more interested in strategy, and Amefuri, who was just being rude as always, she moved swiftly across the clearing to where Nyan Nyan had fallen. But she knew, even before she got there, with a tremendous sinking feeling, that Nyan Nyan was no longer there. The grass by the tree where she had fallen was ruffled up, but that was all that was left of the demi-goddess, whose body had seemingly vanished entirely. Reishun did not know what this meant or how demi-goddesses worked. She was sure, though, so sure that Nyan Nyan was okay and couldn't be permanently hurt or worse, that it took her entirely by surprise that tears sprang to her eyes.

Exhaustion, she thought, brushing them away roughly and trying to breathe evenly and deny the sinking sensation that even a person as indomitably optimistic as her had to identify as defeat and fear. Exhaustion was all it was.

She turned, clearing her throat and looking at her comrades. "Okay, what now?" she demanded, determinedly brisk. "What's the plan, how do we get them back? Can you track them?" she demanded of Amefuri, who did not seem remotely bothered by the briskness and moved past her to check.

A tense silence descended on the woods for the two minutes it took Amefuri to return. It was an odd silence, laced with a feeling that was almost out of place at a time like this. Reishun wasn't sure where it came from - or she tried very hard not to be sure of where it was coming from. But she could not look at Eian despite herself. Donghai came over and offered her a scrap of cloth from his gargantuan shirt, which she accepted and attempted to pat onto her wound.

"I need to go back to Eiyou," said Eian, presently, so softly that he was almost speaking to himself. "If Kounan is falling... If he was right... I need to get back."

Then, he fell silent, leaving Reishun to struggle with that displaced sort of feeling of disappointment that underscored everything else she was feeling at the time. The sense of clarity that the battle had loaned her had fled in the face of everything that was happening. She was terrified to the point of weeping for Hikari and Nyan Nyan; it took her completely aback, the fear, because she had been reared in an environment where fearing for the life of one's friends was not within her context. It had never seemed possible to her that she could lose a friend, and yet that notion of loss was familiar, elemental, primal. Something deep within her - that had nothing to do with her, for Suzaku's sake - was stirring phenomenally at this, and it scared her - for these stirrings brought other fears, of wolves and of cold, lonely deaths. Then there was Nyan Nyan's abilities, which had been a solid way of getting to Hikari, but were now missing along with the demi-goddess. And because none of this was comprehensible, she seized upon the disappointment that gripped her by the throat at Eian's words.

"Eiyou?" she asked, staring at him. "What about Hikari?" And me? What about me? But she didn't say this; just stood there, looking at him. It helped her stay just a little calmer than she felt, focusing on Eian and her collossal personal disappointment in this second. When he looked even more dismal at this, she raised both eyebrows. "Hikari is the Shinzaho of Suzaku."

Eian took a deep breath. "You don't understand, Reishun-chan," he said, almost as though he was speaking to a younger sibling who had failed at their lessons.

Reishun was sure she did understand. She did understand because she knew what it was to feel the tug of past loyalties. She wouldn't have been here, in the woods where he was, if it hadn't been for those past loyalties, which of course he did not understand or see. She was saved from having to respond to this, as Amefuri returned, looking grim.

"I can't track them - it's like before," she said to Reishun. Her eyes drifted to the Suzaku Seishi's wound, Donghai's apprehensive face, and then back again, and she looked distinctly disapproving. Reishun narrowed her eyes, and, without realising it, stuck her lower lip out in defiance. "They've completely vanished. All of it," she added, with frustration. "The soldiers, the snake - everything, it just upped and left."

Reishun, pulling her lower lip back in, looked at her aghast for a few seconds. "So what now?" she demanded, back to the brisk planning mode. "What the hell do we do now?"

"We should go to Eiyou-"

"And abandon Hikari?!" she snapped, finally, turning on Eian furiously enough to make him look a tad wary.

"We don't know where she is, Reishun, and our duty is to the country also-"

Your duty! she nearly screamed in a fit of jealousy. But instead, she said, "We need to track Hikari - that was our responsibility. That's why we're here, isn't it?!"

"But we-"

"Eiyou is the only way for us to go," said Amefuri, just loudly enough to cut them both off. Ignoring Reishun's openly betrayed expression, she pressed on, in her terse manner. "If Kounan is falling, as he says, it means they've found a way to bring down the center. Mt. Taikyoku," she explained, as they looked at her blankly. "For no other reason would the Nine-Headed Beast take over Kounan. He has been waiting to do just this for many years - centuries. We need to get to Mt. Taikyoku before it's too late, and for that we do need to go back through Eiyou. It is," she added, "the fastest route. Though we're closer to Taikyoku-zan, as the crow flies." 2

Reishun stared at her, trying not to feel enormously betrayed by the geography of her country, though it really felt like it had abandoned her in her hour of need. But Amefuri had laid it out for her in that particularly brutal, straightforward way of hers. Oddly, this dulled the pain in the center of her chest more than Eian's gentleness and subtlety that left her confused and resentful and so, so hurt. Nothing, though, could dull her fear. "And Hikari...?"

"I think," said Amefuri, and even she sounded a little less terse - by her standards, this was almost gentle - as she said this, "he plans to sacrifice her to summon the Black Dragon."

Cold silence followed this, as everyone digested this. It wasn't as though it was unimaginable, or even as though it was unlikely. Really, it shouldn't have surprised her at all - and yet, Reishun found herself overwhelmed and bewildered, and really, really terrified. Something niggled gently at the back of her mind, but her fears overwhelmed her and all she felt was hollow. "So we failed," said Reishun, bitterly. She looked away from Amefuri at her fellow Suzaku Seishi, but he had bowed his head. She wasn't sure why this disheartened her all the more, but it did, and she had to look away. "We failed..."

"Not yet," said Amefuri, calmly and very softly, so only Reishun could hear her. It took a significant effort on Reishun's part to turn around and look at the solemn grey eyes, studying her with something that was just a little more malleable than the perpetual frigidness of her more common expressions. It was vulnerability, Reishun realised, with a sudden jolt, in the way that hope was vulnerable - which was probably why it was so difficult for Amefuri to admit to any. And even in this moment, where her world really felt as though it was crashing down around her, she could appreciate this. "Not yet," repeated the Byakko Seishi, and Reishun, though she could not imagine what to do next, nodded.


Faith took effort. Not grand effort of the kind that the warriors of the old gods were making at the moment, though grandiose gestures merited acknowledgement, if nothing else. But faith, real faith, took effort of the everyday variety. Hong Jiu knew this better than anyone, really, or so he believed, for he had lived with his secret all of his extremely long life.

His had been a painful and fragmented existence; he was certainly more than a man, but also less than a ninth of an almost god, and he had been this way for many hundreds of years. In this time he had grown to value people and the human existence, in a way that most did not... could not even begin to appreciate. Like that fool of a man sacrificing himself for his version of the greater good, in the courtyard of the Palace. Like the Empress he had imprisoned in her own room. They had no idea what a pure, magical gift they was in possession of. The beauty and power of an unfragmented soul... Jiu knew now that there was something formidable therein, something beautiful and purely powerful. And to him, who had wandered the earth for so long so fragmented, it was also quite unknown.

There was an admitted fragility about souls; it was why he had made this journey to begin with, to escape the fragile cycles of birth and rebirth. But he was now but a piece of the puzzle - a puzzle to which he hardly knew the answer himself. He had never loved, never hated, never wept from bitter resentment or laughed out of pure joy.

In many ways, he was just functional - it was why he had so often taken on roles like this one - that required an everyday structured approach, that required care and planning. He was good at that. He was good at keeping the end in mind, even when he did not know what the end was. In these last few years, particularly in the last few days, he had waited patiently for the fruition of a plan that he did not know the entirety of. He knew of only a fraction, some of the instruments, some of the principals. But that was about it. The rest was unknown.

The rest was faith.

And faith sometimes required ordinary effort. Like the kind of effort it took him to walk in calm, even, unfaltering steps from the courtyard to the palace, through the corridors to his room. The kind of effort it took to close his door calmly and stand before the mirror to unfasten his clothing, and read the characters forming with excruciating slowness across his chest, slicing through his flesh as somewhere, one of his own, carved into his own chest.

It took minutes - though it may as well have been hours - and by the time it was done, the Prime Minister's face was soaked with tears - of pain, bitterness and sudden agonising hope.

This was no grand gesture, and he knew it. But he knew, and he alone would know, what it took for him to pull his clothes back over the characters now emblazened upon his chest, to fasten them with shaking hands. To then wash his face and hands in the bowl in his room, and set out calmly, as though nothing had happened.

He made for the stables, where his wagon was ready and waiting - for just this contingency. He had made arrangements, of course - he was a careful planner, a cautious more-than-man-less-than-god-creature. As he took his seat in the carriage, he let out a shaky breath, and bade his horseman to ride. He had heard that it took a day of continuous riding from Eiyou to Mt. Taikyoku if you knew the way... and the way was now revealed to him.

Just as some other things were not revealed to him...


As Li-Fen set down the large bowl of stew, to Keisuke and Tetsuya's great awe, the book had a breakthrough.

The ink swirled and the dark mass rose off the page. Hanako noticed this first and dropped a plate on the floor, alerting everyone to what was going on. The dark mass of ink took on many different shapes, one after another.

First, it acquired the shape of a great snake, and a man who sliced through its head - the head fell and the image exploded into a dark mist. They then saw the snake reform into a coiled mass, carrying the shape of a young girl seemingly limp. This procession carried on for a minute - ending at a large mountain.

"Taikyoku..." whispered Yui.

But then the mist swirled again, and formed the image of a snake running to a carriage. As the snake disappeared into the carriage, another figure, of a woman with a bun on either side of her head, ran up and leapt onto the carriage as well. The carriage moved forward at the earlier image had, reaching the large mountain.

Then, the dark mist fell back into the book and lay there, nothing but a large inkblot, uncommunicative and silent.


Author's Note: Phew. This was the first of about four central chapters that I anticipate will be difficult to write. Thanks for sticking around... and yes, it's going to get a little more grim for a bit now. And, yes, I snuck something into the last four lines, and yes, it is likely to be what you think. Enjoy!

1. About Slow Slicing: Wikipedia says: "Slow slicing (Lingchi) (simplified Chinese: 凌迟; traditional Chinese: 凌遲; pinyin: língchí, alternately transliterated Ling Chi or Leng T'che), also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts (simplified Chinese: 杀千刀; traditional Chinese: 殺千刀) or "千刀万剐", was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. The term língchí derives from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly. Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe, such as treason and killing one's parents. The process involved tying the person to be executed to a wooden frame, usually in a public place."

2. Geography: So, basically, the Shoryuu river lies to east-northeast of Eiyou (meaning more east than northeast, but more north than just east *helpful look*). Hikari and co have been travelling a while, and you have to remember that Nyan Nyan teleported them into a pigpen near the Shoryuu river from Eiyou, so they covered about a day's journey in a very short time. From that point, they've basically travelled the distance that fast-riding warriors could probably make (with minimal rest) in about four days. They have however taken significantly longer, what with all their adventures in between and various kidnappings.

There is a SHORTER route to the mountain from where they are, but since they are in the mountainous reaches of Kutou, Amefuri is right about route through Eiyou being FASTER. THAT said, there are things that Amefuri doesn't know. *solemn, mysterious nod*

(Additional information that you probably didn't ask for: I did a lot of digging for maps at this point. There are many maps of the Universe of the Four Gods, but I have to say, from the poin of view of constructing a actual geography of "ancient China", as this world is supposed to be, these are kind of useless. However, there is ONE map, created by the absolutely amazing owner of the etherella (and there's a dot here) com (and a slash here) fushigi yuugi website. (I have not read her fanfiction which can be found here on as VraieEspirit, particularly because she has written about Hikari and I am scared to find parallels and whatnot between her Hikari and mine - but I intend to reach it after I'm done, in like twenty years) and her character biographies are absolutely fabulous. But more to the point, she has a map, which places the Shoryuu river significantly more to the north than I imagined it here.)

Thanks so much to Tsukunami Ayumi for reviewing and FlashyFireBird for the nod and to MercuryMoon for the messages!

Standard disclaimer (from previous chapters) applies.