Paper Trail

I gotta get out from under my bed

I can see again the lights in front of me

Hey, I've been waiting to get home a long time

[Lights of Home; U2]

Marin slammed into the ground, breathless and burning, as the storm of Suzaku's fire swept away as fast as it had caught her up. For a long moment she lay still, her eyes closed. Every inch of her felt fevered and sore.

Her ears rang with a quiet that felt strange after the noise of the battle and the tengu, and she couldn't hear any of the Seishi.

Slowly, it occurred to her that the quality of light on her closed eyelids was odd. It was too even and pale for sunlight. She opened her eyes and found herself staring up at a white plaster ceiling and the opaque bars of fluorescent lights. With agonising care, Marin levered herself upright, wincing in pain, and looked around at the familiar metal bookshelves of the National Library towering over her. There was carpet under her hands, and she focused on a familiar bag leaning against the chair legs beside her.

There was the pen she'd dropped when she'd opened the Book of Sky and Earth, and the pages of her homework scattered on the table above her.

Marin climbed ungracefully to her feet, and the rough silk of her robe tangled around her legs, erasing any last thoughts she'd had that she might have dreamed it all. There was also little doubt left that the Universe of the Four Gods could impact this world.

There was no sign of Daisuke when she pivoted to scan the desks and shelves around her. The library was silent except for the faint, distant creak of trolley wheels and the soft thud of books being returned to their shelves. The clock on the wall above her was telling her that it was nearly nine in the morning, and she took a few slow, deep breaths, trying to calm the too-rapid racing of her heart. Surely Daisuke had made it home, too. He had just been sent back to the place where he'd first opened the book, hadn't he?

Think, Marin.

The wish had worked. She'd been sent home, but she had no idea what had happened to Daisuke and the Seishi. She had to find out. She had to get back to them.

Think.

She was surrounded by the resources of the National Library and internet access, and she had a little time before the library would open and people would start asking questions. She needed to get as much information as she could, get home and collect the resources she needed from her bedroom, and then find a way back into the Universe of the Four Gods.

Marin gathered her incongruous robes around her and slid into the desk chair, switching her laptop on. She ran through every search she could think of that might give her something useful.

She ran through a swift cross-check of all the details she'd gathered from the records in the Universe of the Four Gods. One by one, she ran searches on the the names of every priestess that she could recall, feeling sicker with every result that flashed up confirmation of what she already knew. Missing girls, girls who she knew would never make it back home again. She buried her face in her hands for a moment before returning to her laptop with renewed determination.

There was one more name that she needed. This one would hopefully lead her back to Daisuke, and maybe the Universe of the Four Gods. She had to work fast. She had to get back to Daisuke.

She scribbled down the details and shoved her laptop and her notes into her bag. Marin headed quickly for the restricted section and the Einosuke Okuda collection where she had found the Book of Sky and Earth.

The automatic light flickered on as she pushed the still unlocked door open. Marin quickly skimmed the shelves, but the only thing of interest seemed to be the space where the Book had been. There were collected folios of his journalistic pieces, and even a scrapbook of newspaper articles that had been written about him, and about the mysterious events around his death and that of his daughter. There was nothing that shed light on how he'd first heard about the Chinese works that he'd translated into the Book of Sky and Earth, or how he'd tracked it down.

But his work on Chinese mythology and translation was what had interested her in this collection in the first place, and there was a passage in one of his books that she wanted to look at again. Her fingertips brushed rapidly over Okuda's published books on mythology until she got to the one she was looking for, and she pulled out the author's copy of his collection of essays on Chinese origin myths. It had stuck in Marin's mind because it had mentioned a Japanese location and story in the middle of all the Chinese myths, and her memory threw it up now because it sounded horribly close to what she'd just faced in the Universe of the Four Gods.

She flipped through the slim volume… There it was. Marin skimmed quickly down the page. She needed any clue she could get about what they were facing.

'… story of the Star God who refused to cede to the rule of Heaven and was subdued and imprisoned in the soul stone that can be found at Omika Shrine in Hitachi, Ibaraki Prefecture. What makes this story particularly interesting from the point of view of this study is the connection that has been made between this Star God and the primordial Chaos that existed before …'

The inclusion of the Star God's story in the middle of a study of Chinese origin stories was less of an intriguing academic puzzle now. The specificity of it, the concrete location here in this world, made it unsettlingly real.

'… Chinese mythology has another story in which Chaos emerges. Early stories tell of a mirror world that lived alongside the human world until the night when the mirror people attacked without warning. They were strong beyond reckoning, and Chaos itself. Only the Yellow Emperor had the strength to defeat the mirror people and drive them back into their mirrors, but even the Emperor's spells are not strong enough to bind the mirror people for all eternity. One day, the spell will fail and Chaos will once again be unleashed into this world.'

"It already has been," Marin whispered to the book in her hands.

'All these disparate myths seem to have little in common, but look closer and we see certain parallels. These stories are many faces of the primordial Chaos that spawned the material world, and in these stories we can see hints of a darker interpretation than the benevolent or indifferent primordial beginning. Here we see a Chaos that resents and resists the order that was forced on it. We see Xingtian, eternally opposing Heaven.

'In the Chinese myth of the mirror world, and here in the Japanese tale of the Star God trapped in the soul stone, it goes further and we find the suggestion of Chaos waiting in growing malevolence to strike back at the order of Heaven and the material world.'

In the margins in Okuda's own hand was a scrawled note that cryptically said 'It's in the Book!' That hadn't made any sense to Marin the first time she'd read it, and she'd passed over it without much thought, but now it took on an ominous significance. She kept going. She didn't have much time before the library opened.

'… the common thread of suppression. With all the forces of Heaven and Earth mustered against these avatars of chaos and rebellion, it is made clear that Chaos has not been defeated for all time. Xingtian eternally opposes the Supreme Divinity and even decapitation is not enough to stop it. The Yellow Emperor himself was unable to do more than temporarily bind Chaos within the mirror; the myth makes it clear that the mirror world is merely biding its time to return. Amatsu-Mikaboshi, the Star God, was defeated but not destroyed, and remains imprisoned in stone.

'The hidden lesson here is that the primordial Chaos that gave birth to all things cannot be destroyed without unmaking the world, and that the all-consuming void waits to reclaim Heaven and Earth.'

Marin swallowed hard, waiting for the sickening wave of dizziness to pass. This would have been fascinating if she didn't still feel the bruises and bleeding marks that Chaos had left on her body.

Her options for dealing with that thing that had taken over Tai Yi Jun were narrowing with every line that she read of Okuda's research. Even the Emperor of Heaven's full power could only subdue it for a time, and Tai Yi Jun, the Emperor and Supreme Divinity herself, had fallen to it. Marin could wish it into submission, but it would still be there, waiting for a moment of weakness to strike back more savagely than ever. And she couldn't wish it to destruction without destroying the Universe of the Four Gods with it.

She wished she had more time to cross-reference Okuda's information, but the library would be opening soon, and even without his connection to the Book of Sky and Earth, Okuda was still the best authority she knew on the subject. It was why she'd been in his collection in the first place, and it was unlikely that she would find anything else of more use even if she had the time to dig deeper.

Marin froze with the book in her hands at the squeak of trolley wheels approaching the restricted room and prayed that no one would notice the light under the door. The squeaking drew closer, and Marin didn't dare to breathe again until the trolley and the sound of footsteps on the carpeted floor had passed.

She waited long enough for the deep silence to settle outside the door, then she stuffed the book back into its place and slid out of the restricted room. She bundled up her bag and hurried down to the library entrance. She was going to stand out like someone escaped from a Chinese fantasy drama, and she'd have to time it so that hopefully none of the librarians who knew her saw her leave, but there was no help for it. Drawing a deep breath, Marin kept going, pausing out of sight of the main entrance desk until she felt that their heads were turned away, then she snatched her shoes from the locker and hurried as fast as she dared through the security gates and out the doors, expecting a shout at any moment, expecting someone to stop her.

She kept her eyes down as she reached the street. She just had to get home, get some less conspicuous clothes, and pray that her mother wasn't home.

"Hey, pretty lady! Nice costume!" someone shouted, and she made the mistake of glancing back at the four guys lounging on the library steps. One of them straightened, leering at her.

"Come and hang out with us," he called out. "I'll play any role you want!"

She kilted up the brocade skirts and broke into a run.

When a hand shot out of the alley and grabbed her arm, jerking her around, she thought for a moment that he'd caught up with her. Marin let out an involuntary shriek and passers-by turned at the sound. She found herself staring into the glittering black eyes of a tengu warrior.

"Found you, little Priestess." The tengu's beaky mouth stretched in a nasty grin, heedless of the attention they were drawing. "My master wants you."

The creature wasn't expecting the sudden blade that Marin snatched out of her sash and drove into its arm, and it gave a raucous shriek of pain. If her reaction hadn't been so unexpected, maybe the tengu might have thought through its next move, but it flew at her and inadvertently drove itself onto the wild, defensive thrust of her knife, scrabbling savagely at her arms and chest with spindly fingers that turned into bird claws that fell away. The crow landed dead at her feet with a soft whump of scattered feathers.

Hidden in her sleeve, Marin could feel warm blood dripping down into her palm, and she couldn't tell if it was from the stinging gouges the tengu had left in her arm or the tengu's blood on her knife. She was breathing in swift, panicked gasps, adrenaline spiking her veins.

A faint click snapped her head around to stare into the lens of a phone camera and wide-eyed, gaping onlookers.

"How did you do that?!" someone was asking, staring at the dead crow, but Marin took off running, gathering her gown up with one hand. Her book bag and laptop smacked painfully into her hip with every step and the bleeding claw marks were soaking the torn edges of her sleeves as she kept running. Finally her building complex loomed ahead, and Marin raced past the doorman, ignoring his startled yelp as she slammed into the waiting lift and the gilt doors closed behind her.

The empty silence of her apartment was both a relief, because it meant that she wouldn't have to come up with explanations, and unnervingly strange. Marin felt as though she was moving through a bubble of unreality as she pushed open the door of her bedroom and dropped her bag beside her bed.

She glanced down at the knife still open in her hand. A weapon that no one's expecting. The crow's blood was drying on the blade, and Marin wiped it on her gown, leaving another rust-red streak on the ruined silk. She dropped the knife and the gown both on the floor of her bedroom and snatched up a random handful of clean clothes, retreating to her bathroom. Daisuke wasn't wrong.

Marin stepped into the shower and gave in to the temporary bliss of shampoo and soap as the grit of the Universe of the Four Gods swirled away down the drain. The very ordinariness of the steam, the smell of soap, and the feel of the smooth tiles almost convinced her for a moment that everything had been a dream. She had not just spent months in another world, fighting demons and monsters, falling in love with a god.

The crow scratches stung and bled as the hot water hit them, reminding her of just how real it all was. Her hand paused against her throat, feeling the bruises there. It had been only hours since Tai Yi Jun had gripped her hard enough to choke, and she swallowed. A tear rolled silently down her cheek, followed by another, until she leaned her forehead against the glass of the shower screen and shook with great, heaving sobs that caught in her chest and scraped her bruised throat.

But time was short. Every second she wasted here was weeks or months or years that Daisuke was stuck in the Universe of the Four Gods. And every second ran the risk that her parents would come home and try to stop her from going back.

Marin turned her face to the shower spray to wash away the traces of tears. She pushed her palms against her stinging eyes until she saw starbursts. Reluctantly, she reached out and turned off the water. It wasn't until she was pulling her blouse on that she felt the faint burn of another injury that she hadn't noticed until now. The soft cotton rasped against her skin and Marin winced at the contact. She twisted awkwardly to look at the smooth red marks left by her first wish that swept across her shoulders and down her back.

In the mirror, she could see more of the burn marks under her skin and she prodded them gently, leaving white patches that slowly dissolved in the middle of the fading red. The sensation felt more like a memory of pain, a sunburn almost forgotten, and she pinched at the skin wondering why it didn't hurt more.

She slid her blouse over the red marks and frowned at her reflection in the mirror. It felt strange to be wearing her normal clothes again. The sleeves felt too short, and there was no swirl of fabric around her legs as she moved. She pulled her still-damp hair back and tried to smooth down the wisps of dark hair that insisted on escaping.

Marin drew a deep breath. It would have to do.

The front door slammed shut, and footsteps strode angrily down the hall. Marin took the address she'd scribbled down out of her bag, and she scooped up the butterfly knife from the robes on her floor. Her train pass was in her school uniform pocket somewhere in the Universe of the Four Gods. She snatched up a handful of coins from her dresser for the train and reached for the door handle just as her mother wrenched it open.

There was a frozen moment when they stared at each other.

"So you finally decided to come home," her mother said coldly. "I've just had a call from the Academy to inform me that my daughter didn't turn up to school this morning, and I had to leave in the middle of a crucial meeting to deal with this, after you kept us up all night worrying."

Although that worry obviously hadn't kept her mother from her usual routine, until the school had interrupted her. Marin swallowed the rebellious words that rose like bile in her throat, and dropped her gaze.

"I hope you have an adequate excuse."

Her mother came into the room, sweeping the space with that assessing look that catalogued every misaligned book and misplaced pen and tallied it along with all of Marin's other flaws for future dissection. Her eyes fell on the crumpled mess of damask robe smeared with blood and feathers on the floor, and her lips thinned.

"What sort of trouble are you in now?" she asked with icy precision.

Marin stung with the unfairness of it. When had she ever put a foot out of line?

"Why are you so sure I'm in trouble?"

Her mother gestured sharply at the blood, the feathers, and the torn and filthy silk as if it spoke for itself. Marin was acutely aware that there wasn't a word of concern about where the blood had come from, or if she had been hurt.

"I had to hear all about this from the doorman downstairs. It will be all over the building by now, and then what will everyone think? Your sister may behave like a delinquent, but I expected better from you."

"I wish I was more like Kimiko!" Marin cried.

"Defying your parents and shaming your family?"

"Having the courage to actually live my life and make my own mistakes," Marin retorted, and her mother's eyes narrowed furiously at the unaccustomed back talk.

"No daughter of mine is going to throw away her life running around with Heaven only knows what kind of riffraff, wasting everything we've worked so hard to give you. I've put up with Kimiko's defiance, and you wasting your talents on frivolous studies," her mother's tone was scathing, "but there are going to be changes around here."

"Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want to spend my life building a political empire like you and father did?" Marin asked, and her mother frowned.

"Don't be ridiculous," she said flatly. "You don't know what you really want. One day, you'll realise that all those ridiculous poems and stories you waste your time with have no real world applications, and you'll be grateful I made you take your head out of the clouds."

Marin felt her nails cut into her palms. She had always hated the way that Kimiko defied their mother openly, flouting the rules and turning the apartment into a seething mass of arguments and shouting and slammed doors, while Marin tried to block it out and focus on her schoolwork. But what had being the perfect daughter ever achieved for Marin?

"I have to go," she said, her voice shaking with tension and certainty, and she reached for the door. She was brought up short as her mother's manicured hand closed over her wrist.

"You're not going anywhere, young lady. You will stay in here and focus on your studies until I decide that I can trust you out of my sight," her mother snapped, but Marin broke the hold with a sharp turn of her wrist that Daisuke had taught her. She stepped out of reach and kept going, pausing only long enough to slip her shoes on at the front door.

"I can't stay," she said, one hand on the doorknob. "Ground me when I get back, but I have to go now."

It was considerably easier to defy her mother and walk out the door knowing that that there was a good chance she wouldn't be coming back to face the music. Knowing that the alternative was leaving Daisuke to face his fate alone in the world of the book made it easier still.

"Marin!" The door closed on her mother's fury. By the time Marin reached the station, she was running.

Ed notes:

This chapter was kind of research-heavy, and I went down the rabbit-hole. I don't know if anyone's interested, but Amatsu-Mikaboshi in particular was fascinating and frustrating to chase down, and the Marvel character muddied the waters a lot.

Amatsu-Mikaboshi is referenced in the Nihon Shoki (the second oldest book of classical Japanese history, written around 720CE), and is also given the name Ameno-Kagaseo, or Kagaseo, in some sources. There's a fair bit of debate over Amatsu-Mikaboshi's name; I've gone with the most commonly accepted translation of Dread Star of Heaven. Omika Shrine in Hitachi, Ibaraki claims the legend of Amatsu-Mikaboshi, and there's a stone there which is supposed to contain the spirit of the star god. The history of the shrine gives a little more detail on the story. There were other scattered references that I came across, some of which I was unable to confirm with my limited resources, but the common thread seems to be that Amatsu-Mikaboshi was a star deity from before the order of the gods, and that he would not submit to Japan's gods, so he was defeated and imprisoned. Resistance and rebellion is the theme of Amatsu-Mikaboshi, and I've used that to link him in this story to other myths of chaos, resistance and rebellion.

Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountain and Sea) was a source for some of the Chinese stories, such as Xingtian and Hundun, and my main reference for the mirror world myth was Turbulent Mirror: an Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness by John P. Briggs and F. David Peat.

If I've massively misinterpreted anything, I apologise.