Tea, Cake and Priestesses

I am fire

I am water

I am Empress

I am thunder

I am flower

I am wonder

I'm the object of your desire

I am beauty, I am grace

I am faith

[Song of Women: The Hu (feat. Lzzy Hale)]

Marin barely noticed the train journey, dimly registering the announcement for her stop. She kept looking at the address on the paper in her hand as she walked. Where she was going wasn't really that far, but it felt like she'd been walking forever, and by the time she found the house she'd been looking for she was feeling hot and tired, and more than a little sick with apprehension.

Twice she raised her hand to press the buzzer beside the door, and twice her hand dropped. Finally, she pushed it swiftly before she could think better of it. As the echoes of the buzzing faded away inside the house, she heard footsteps.

The woman who opened the door was disconcertingly familiar. Her toffee-brown hair was caught back in a careless bun, and the deep shadows under her eyes made her look older, but Marin still recognised her from the paintings in Suzaku's temple and Daisuke's sketch. More than that, she could see the resemblance to Daisuke in the woman's hazel eyes.

The words Marin had been practising on the way there disappeared, and they stared at each other on the doorstep.

Marin blurted, "I know your son."

And the woman let out a breath that was half laugh and half pain.

"Suzaku's Priestess," she said. "You'd better come in, dear. I'm Miaka."

"Is Daisuke here?" Marin asked urgently, and Daisuke's mother was silent for too long.

"Come in, dear," she said again, and stepped back. "We can't have this conversation on the doorstep."

Marin followed her into the house, trying to not be too obvious about the fact that she was staring at everything. This was where Daisuke had grown up, and it felt so weird to be there without him.

Daisuke's mother led her into a bright little sitting room, and looked around vaguely as if she'd forgotten what she was doing. Miaka swept a pile of magazines off the couch and dumped them on the floor.

"So you know who I am," Marin said, and Miaka gave her a tired smile.

"I know what it means when the book of the Four Gods Sky and Earth turns up," she pointed out, "and I found the book in Daisuke's room, along with a distinct absence of my son. I've been following your adventures, and I feel as though I know you quite well by now, Marin. Although not as well as my son knows you," she added with a quick lift of her eyebrow. Marin felt her face burn with a sudden blush.

"Make yourself at home, dear. I'll go make us some tea." And Miaka flitted out of the room before Marin could say anything.

Oh, gods, what exactly had Miaka read? Had the book covered absolutely everything that had happened?

Miaka came back in, a tray in her hands with a teapot and cups, and a small plate of cake.

"I thought we could use a sugar hit," she said, and her tired face lightened in a sudden smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. "And don't worry, I skipped over that part of the book once I realised what was going on. Some things a mother doesn't need to know about."

"So he's still in the book?" Marin asked, and Miaka dipped her head in confirmation. "Is he alright?"

"He's alive. And he's missing you," Miaka told her.

Marin let out the breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding, and reached for the tea cup Miaka had put in front of her.

"I should thank you, too, for keeping Daisuke from doing anything too fatally stupid," Miaka added. "I love my boy dearly, but he does have a habit of throwing himself into things."

"So you know what happened before I came back," Marin said, and Miaka's smile faded a little. "You know about Daisuke?"

"I know. My son is Suzaku. Which does explain a few things."

Miaka blew gently on her tea.

"I had a hard time when he was born. Right about the time Taka and I were trying to have another child, I was having dreams that were so clear they were almost visions. And the clearest ones were of Suzaku. He was fighting something, and being driven into retreat, and in the dreams I knew something terrible was happening in the Universe of the Four Gods, but I just put it down to worrying because I wasn't falling pregnant. One night I dreamed that Suzaku came to me and begged me to hide Him." Miaka's tired smile grew a little brighter. "Not long after that, I found out that I was expecting Daisuke, and I didn't have any more dreams. Which makes sense now."

Miaka shifted slightly on the couch, reaching absently for a piece of cake.

"Daisuke was always reckless, even as a baby. He learned to walk much earlier than Hikari ever did, and he would climb anything, do anything, just to keep moving. He was the one who would be at the top of the playground, and he'd just fling himself into the air like he was trying to fly." Miaka bit into the cake. "All the other parents would panic, but I gave up trying to stop him."

"Nothing has changed then," Marin said drily. "The number of times I wanted to smack him for doing something rash -" she broke off as she remembered who she was talking to, but Miaka gave her a sympathetic grin that reminded her of Daisuke.

"So you get it. But the other side is that all that fire burns brightly in all the best ways too. Hikari is the steady one, he shines like a star. But when Daisuke figures out what he wants to do with all that creativity and energy that makes him so restless, he's going to do amazing things."

Miaka's hazel eyes, so much like Daisuke's, regarded her steadily, and Marin's own eyes dropped. "And really, that's what seems to happen, doesn't it? We get pulled into the Universe to bring balance, and Suzaku is all about love and passion. I know He helped me find what I love, and showed me what I was prepared to do to hold onto it. What are you passionate about?" Miaka asked a little mischievously.

The easy answer would have been Daisuke, but as Marin stared down at the tea cup in front of her she realised that it wasn't quite that simple. The truth was, she'd been feeling passionate about a lot more things since Daisuke dropped into her life and set it on fire, and she was grateful to him for that even while he drove her crazy.

"Seiryuu is the god of war," Miaka was saying, "and His priestess, Yui, was always the one to stand her ground and fight for what she thought was right. I wish Yui was here. You'd like her."

"Natsumi was like that too," Marin said with a quick catch of sudden grief in her voice. "I didn't know her all that well, but she always seemed like someone who was looking for a cause to devote herself to. A fighting spirit."

"I still can't believe that Tai Yi Jun has turned evil. I didn't think that was possible. She was a weird one, and put me through a few nasty moments, but she always seemed to be on our side, and gave us all some pretty powerful gifts." Miaka was frowning, as if she was trying to remember something. "And when Suzaku sent Taka and me home, there was… I think I saw…" she shook her head sharply. "I have a suspicion that we saw her real form. I wish I could remember clearly."

"It's not Tai Yi Jun. It would almost be better if it was, because it means we're dealing with a being powerful enough to defeat the Emperor of Heaven and take her place, and it's already taken over three of the four gods too. It's been trying to influence the Seishi and use me to get to Daisuke… Suzaku," Marin came to a halt over the names, and Miaka gave her a small smile.

"I know. It's confusing. It took me ages to work out what I was supposed to call Taka."

Marin took a breath. "In one of his books, Einosuke Okuda describes different versions of a malevolent being. And all those stories sound terrifyingly like what I saw in Tai Yi Jun's palace. Okuda called it the primordial Chaos."

"How on earth are you supposed to defeat that?"

"I don't know. In Okuda's research, the Emperor of Heaven, whatever name he went by, was the only one who could put it down for a while, but we don't have Tai Yi Jun anymore and we're down to one god and two wishes."

The former priestess didn't mention her son, but Marin could see her hand shake a little as she put her cake down.

"I used to think that this was the real world and the Universe of the Four Gods was some kind of made up fantasy. I think it's a bit more complicated than that," Miaka said unevenly, and Marin nodded.

"I'm coming to the conclusion that the link between the worlds is more vital than we know. I just wish I had Okuda's research on the Book of Sky and Earth. I feel like I'm flying blind here, trying to find a solution without enough information, and that was always the bridge between this world and that one."

"Now, there I can help you," Miaka said, and stood.

She pulled a slim, university-bound volume from one of the shelves beside her, and handed it to Marin. When Marin opened it randomly, she could see yellowed pages crowded with old, handwritten notes, and the occasional annotation. She flipped to the title page and almost choked on a gasp.

"This is Einosuke Okuda's personal journal on the Four Gods Sky and Earth," she breathed. She turned another page gingerly. "I thought all of his notes about it were destroyed after his death. How on earth did you get hold of this?"

"I didn't. My brother stole it," Miaka said with that grin and the wicked twinkle in her eyes that was disconcertingly like her youngest son's. "The Book of Sky and Earth has a mind of its own, and it's indestructible. My brother persuaded the National Library to lock up the Okuda collection to keep it safe, but we've seen how well that worked out, and Keisuke felt that leaving the research notes there with it probably wasn't a good idea."

Marin looked up from the volume in her hands. "Wait, you couldn't destroy the Book?"

"I know more than a few people have tried to destroy it. Einosuke Okuda's assistant tried to burn it in an industrial furnace, and it didn't leave a mark on it according to Suzuno."

"You talked to Suzuno Osugi?"

"My brother did, not long before she passed away. Her father was Okuda's assistant, and he was worried Suzuno would find it and become a sacrifice to the beast god. Which was a fair concern, as it turned out. But he tried several times and several ways to destroy the book and nothing worked."

"And I would have to assume that other attempts have been made," Marin said, keeping her voice controlled. "It's claimed more than a few lives over the years."

"Yui and I made it back, and so did the priestess of Byakko," Miaka pointed out.

"But Takiko Okuda didn't. And there were priestesses before that, when the book was still in China. The cycle seems to repeat every few hundred years or so. It's a little hard to measure. Most of the priestesses, I couldn't find out what happened to them in this world, but the accounts of Suzaku's priestesses in the Rongyao Palace library, and the Records of the Four Kingdoms on Mt Daichi went into a fair bit of detail about what happened to them in the Universe of the Four Gods."

Miaka made a rueful face. "You're a lot more studious than I ever was. I never even knew there was a library in the Palace. I was too busy looking for the kitchens."

"The records all talk a lot about consuming the sacrifices. I'd always just thought that that was poetic embellishment until I made the first wish, but it's not, is it?"

"No, it's not," Miaka said.

"What I felt in the mirror of the girls from this cycle was worse than that."

"It was worse," Miaka said bleakly, and Marin remembered that she had read what Marin had experienced. "It didn't feel like that when Suzaku began to take me over."

There was a moment's silence between them.

"What was it like?" Marin asked eventually, almost fearfully, and her hand went unconsciously to the deep tissue burns on her shoulder. She looked up to find Miaka watching her with sympathy in her hazel eyes.

"You've made the first wish, so you've felt it a little. But I'm not going to lie – it gets worse. And it leaves its mark on you." Miaka pushed up one sleeve, and Marin could see white scars under the skin, coiling around Miaka's arm like the ghosts of flames and feathers. "Yui still has the scales. But the hardest part is that the power of the beast god is very seductive, even while it's destroying you. You want to give in to it. Yui fought like the devil to come back, and I had the thought of Taka to help bring me home."

Her gaze shifted, turning inwards. "I think that's part of what the quest is all about, making the priestess' will stronger and giving her a reason to come back. And sometimes it's not enough."

Marin made the connection, and felt her face turn pale. "What if I have no reason to resist Suzaku? What if He's what I want?"

"I don't know," Miaka said, her face tight with distress. "Oh, my dear, I don't know. This isn't like when I went into the Universe."

"This isn't like any of the priestess cycles that I've researched."

"What are you going to do?"

"I honestly don't know," Marin said slowly. "But I really hope there are answers in here." She hugged the Einosuke Okuda notes closer. "I don't want to be the sacrificial victim here, and I'm going to do everything I can to come back home, but if it comes down to it I want to make sure that what I do counts for something."

Miaka's eyes were full of tears. "Now I know how Keisuke felt all those years ago, watching everything that was happening in the book and not able to do a damn thing."

She looked up, and Marin caught the conflicted anguish fleetingly before Miaka shuttered it behind a neutral expression that looked odd on her normally animated face.

"You don't have to go back in," Miaka said carefully. "You don't have to risk yourself like this."

"I have to get Daisuke back."

And Miaka's hazel eyes closed as she made a soft sound that might have been relief, or guilt. Or grief.

Marin could feel something beginning to choke her, and she stood abruptly, the research notes still in her hands.

"I think I need to go into the book now, before I completely lose my nerve. And the longer I leave it, the more chance there is that Daisuke's going to get himself into trouble," Marin added with an attempt at light heartedness that she could tell wasn't fooling Miaka.

Their eyes met, and then the older woman reached out to gather her into a tight embrace. Marin clung to her in a way she never had with her own mother, and as Miaka's warmth and love enveloped her and gave her strength Marin thought she understood why Suzaku had been drawn to this woman.

"We priestesses have to stick together," Miaka whispered, and Marin drew a shaky breath before she stepped back.

She followed Miaka up the stairs, feeling odder with each step that brought her closer to Daisuke and the Universe of the Four Gods, and further away from her normal life. She couldn't have said with any certainty whether she felt more anticipation or anxiety as she stepped through the doorway into Daisuke's room, and she looked around with a peculiar sense of dislocation.

His rumpled bed, with a sketchbook half-hidden under the messy quilt, looked oddly out of place, and she could read traces of his personality that she'd seen in a very different context. Miaka saw her looking at the collection of lighters and matchboxes on a shelf beside his bed, and gave her a wry smile.

"He's always had a bit of a thing for fire. It made for some very nervous times when he was growing up. It makes a lot more sense now, though."

And there on the desk was the book Marin had last seen in the National Library, open and expectant. Marin took a half-step towards it.

"Marin."

She turned back to face the older woman, and Miaka reached out to cup a trembling hand against her cheek.

"Look after my boy," Miaka said softly. Marin nodded briefly and turned back to the desk and the book waiting on it. Before she could lose her courage, Marin turned the page, and willed herself into the Universe of the Four Gods again.