Whatever It Takes
Everybody waiting for the fall of man
Everybody praying for the end of times
Everybody hoping they could be the one
I was born to run, I was born for this
[Whatever It Takes: Imagine Dragons]
They didn't have long to mourn. Something had been waiting for them, and darkness rippled like a river down the steps to meet them. The last dim light in the grey sky went out as if the sun had been swallowed and all the stars had been snuffed out, leaving Suzaku's constellations as the final, pale pinpricks of defiance.
The first tengu arrowed down through the black air towards them. More and more crows came, blotting out the last stars with ragged wings, until the tengu descended in screaming waves.
Darkness swirled out across the courtyard, swallowing everything.
"Go!" Zifeng shouted imperatively. "We will hold them back!"
The Seishi lit up, one by one, as the marks of Suzaku blazed red. Daisuke met Zifeng's unyielding dark eyes for one last time as Zifeng inclined his head stiffly, and Tamahome's mark burned like a brand on the swordsman's brow.
Zhao Zifeng swept up his sword to meet the coming attack.
And Daisuke gritted his teeth as he turned to run. Beside him he could see Marin hesitate, her wide eyes on the courtyard, and he risked a gentle shove to push her into motion. He saw her close her eyes in anguish and turn. With the shrieking, ringing noise of deadly battle behind them, Marin and Daisuke broke into a run.
They veered sharply away from the main palace building towards the library, trying not to trip in the darkness. Down the corridor of pillars, Daisuke followed Marin as she kilted up her skirts. Her hair was unravelling in wild disarray. They hit the doors of the archive chamber and shoved them open as Meixing's brilliant light exploded behind them and tengu rained out of the air, shrieking in destruction as more swept in to take their place.
Marin stumbled through the doors and Daisuke spilled in behind her. Before he could say anything, there was a thunderous roar. Daisuke staggered, feeling some force break and whiplash through him as the walls of the palace bowed outwards and scrolls rained down around them with deafening noise.
"It's here!" he shouted.
Daisuke scrambled backwards, dragging Marin with him. Past the falling scrolls and shelves he could see Tai Yi Jun's huge bronze mirror swell and bulge, and then something stepped through.
Darkness rippled over the floor, swallowing everything it touched, and sharp, bone-grey spurs unfurled wings of sulphur and shadow that swept up into the rafters overhead.
"I've been looking for you," a dry, reptilian whisper crept and reverberated through the maze of shelves.
Daisuke spread his hands a little. "Here we are."
"I think I'm offended," the voice said. "I had thought you returned to see me, not my collection of books."
Daisuke backed up, working himself and Marin towards one of the rows still standing.
"Well, our Priestess does like a good read," he said lightly.
"Whatever could she be looking for?" the darkness speculated, but there was an edge of unease to it as it shifted slowly closer.
Daisuke felt the heat spark under his skin, and pulled it into his palms, feeling the flames dance over his fingertips and race up his forearms. Flames ran down the blades of his daggers, playing over the faces of the bronze firebirds and turning them into wicked, winking figures with a life of their own. He grinned.
"Get going," he said under his breath to Marin, jerking his chin swiftly towards the corridor of books. "It's my turn to hit something."
Marin hesitated as if she was going to say something, then with a quick shake of her head she ran for the Records of the Four Gods.
Daisuke shook his shoulders loose and shifted his stance, his full attention on the looming shadows now.
"Oh, don't worry," the shadows chuckled. "I have no interest in your little girlfriend there as long as I have you to play with. No god, no wishes."
"I might not be that easy to kill," Daisuke challenged, his grin growing sharper.
The shadows stalked him. He let them, drawing the condensing darkness into the narrow spaces away from Marin.
"Yes, you have the demise of three gods to your credit. Although they weren't really themselves when you fought them. They weren't very satisfactory puppets, and Genbu was long gone before you stuck your little knives in His withered husk. I felt that, you know. I should have known then that you were Suzaku." There was a susurration of a dry chuckle. "I had hoped that Seiryuu and Byakko would take care of you for me, but I suppose I'll just have to do it myself."
"You can try," Daisuke taunted.
"You creatures. Humans, gods, you're all so sure of yourself, but it didn't stop me from taking over your supreme Tai Yi Jun, did it? Do you know what brought down your precious Emperor of Heaven in the end? The sheer arrogance. The beast gods were smart enough to know when they were outmatched, and you were clever enough to go into hiding in another world as the child of Suzaku's former priestess. But Tai Yi Jun was always so certain of her own superiority."
The shadows roiled and deepened and formed an indistinct human shape out of abyssal void that came towards him.
"She had the gall to steal my perfect chaos out from under me and scribble worlds all over it. She ripped me from the void and nailed me to your world in stone, but the star stones that pinned me down have cracked and loosened my bindings. And you left the door wide open back into this world when you granted your priestess' wish to stay with her Tamahome. A god-granted wish is a powerful thing," the darkness said conversationally.
"In the end, it was all too easy, and then I only had to nudge the beasties into calling on their priestesses to fix everything. That lured the gods out of hiding so I could claim them for my own. And now I have you here – the last one in the set. You were smart enough to run last time. That's not going to work now."
Daisuke kept backing up between the shelves, his eyes on the fluctuating figure following him with vaporous wings that swept over them and blotted out the light. He just had to keep its attention for long enough for Marin to find what she needed. He just had to keep from getting killed for that long.
"Did you take over Zhang Yong like you did the gods?" Daisuke asked, and the darkness crackled with laughter.
"Your precious Seishi are still afforded some small protection," it conceded. "And after all, I didn't need to."
The shadows circled and swirled around him, but Daisuke kept his attention fixed on the clotted pitch at the heart of them.
"I took him in after the tragic destruction of his village," the form said mockingly, and Daisuke was certain in that moment that it had been the author of that destruction. "I trained him, and it didn't take much to feed that burning anger and shape it for my own purposes. Your little Chiriko had his uses, but in the end he was an inadequate tool."
Daisuke felt a lightning stab of blinding fury for the boy who had been broken and cast away, and his enemy took advantage of that moment of distraction to strike.
Daisuke danced out of the way. Books and papers shredded like confetti, igniting into brief sparks as they brushed the flames coiling around Daisuke's hands then falling in charred scraps to the floor. Daisuke grimaced.
"Marin's not going to be happy about that," he muttered, then yanked himself out of the way as the wings rushed down at him and he shoved off the shelves with one foot to launch himself into the air. As the bookcase fell with a resounding crash, and another that took down the one past it, and the next, cascading in a cacophony of destruction, Daisuke came down in a streak of fire that tore through the edge of darkness.
The shadows swirled away with a hiss and closed in again, rolling around him like a wave of blackest ink. Daisuke laughed, and pivoted out of reach, pushing off the wreckage. Scorch marks scarred the wood where his daggers struck, and paper fires bloomed in the darkness. Every time he managed to land a hit he heard the whisper of rage, and his grin grew fiercer.
Daisuke had only a split second to realise that he had been backed into a corner and there was nowhere to dodge when the darkness whipped around him in a fury, edged with the sulphurous wings that stretched up into the vault of the ceiling and crashed down over him.
Brute force drove him down. The darkness filled the chamber, swallowing everything and hiding it in sightless shadows. He crouched under the crushing force. Flames dancing like living things around Daisuke as he flexed his fingers against the hilts of his daggers.
Deliberately, he turned his thoughts to his Priestess in the scroll stacks behind him. He called up every memory of her, every moment, and she was never far from his mind anyway. The flick of her dark, wayward hair as she gave him that unimpressed look of hers, the roll of her eyes, and that glorious smile. The look in those beautiful eyes and the way she'd exhale as she ran her hand along a row of books… Daisuke felt Suzaku's heat rise, and he fanned the flames.
He tasted their first kiss on the bridge again, and gave in to the visceral memory of moving inside her and the way she'd looked as she came undone, the feeling of his world beginning and ending with her.
The all-consuming wonder and terror of the moment that he knew she loved him.
The flames rose higher and swept out in streaks of gold and red as Daisuke braced himself and shoved back, shredding the vaporous wings that were closing in around him.
He felt the welcome heat sweep through him, wreathing him in fire and sparks, and the darkness hissed and reared back as he struck. Daisuke went up in a conflagration of power that swept through the wreckage, and the library blazed in the inferno.
When he came to his feet, the darkness was coiling and writhing just beyond his reach, flapping in burned and tattered rags of shadow where his blades had torn through it. Daisuke's grin grew sharper.
"Not quite as easy to kill me as you thought it was going to be, is it?" he taunted.
"Oh, clever," the sibilant voice whispered and rippled around them, but there was an edge to the words. "Clever, clever. Suzaku got the girl. You're not siphoning off some second-hand passion between the Priestess and Tamahome anymore. This is the pure stuff, the powerful stuff."
The shadows had retreated a little, coalescing into a vaguely human shape. Sharp white spurs of bone curved in vast wings over it, coiling with a sickly yellow vapour that melted into a lightless black.
"You are aware that it's not enough to stop me."
"It's strong enough to hold you off, though," Daisuke taunted, and bared his teeth in a bright grin at the darkness.
There was a noise like escaping steam. "Oh, I'll admit you've surprised me. But even the Great One couldn't keep me out forever. None of you can keep me out forever."
"Let's find out, shall we?" Daisuke challenged, fingering the hilts of his daggers.
There was a dangerous surge that rippled through the earth below and shook the rafters, but Daisuke stood his ground, the fire in his hands flaring brighter, as the force withdrew and regathered.
"Give me Suzaku." The unsettled darkness solidified for a moment and became Tai Yi Jun. The sly old woman fixed Daisuke with a sidelong, knowing look. "I'll make it painless for you, and I'll even send your little priestess back to her own world, safe and sound."
Daisuke covered the sudden hiss of his breath with a sarcastic laugh. As if she could read his thoughts, Tai Yi Jun gave a cracked chuckle.
"She may hate you, but at least she'll be alive to hate you."
"What are you talking about?" Daisuke asked before he could stop himself, and the flames around him flickered and fell back. Tai Yi Jun's shrewd gaze shifted past his shoulder to where Marin had come up behind him, a tattered silk scrap held tightly in her hand.
"You haven't told him yet," Tai Yi Jun gloated.
Daisuke shot Marin a sharp look.
"What is the old bat talking about?"
"The moment your little girlfriend makes those wishes, all that raw power of yours is going to burn her up."
"Marin?" he said uneasily.
"It's a risk," Marin said, and the corners of her mouth were tense, but her eyes met his unflinchingly.
"Give me Suzaku, and I'll send her home," Tai Yi Jun proposed again, and Daisuke turned back to the old woman, feeling suddenly divorced from the movement and the sense of his own body.
"You must think I'm a real bastard if you think I'd just let you destroy the Universe of the Four Gods," he said with a dry mouth.
"But this isn't a real world, is it?" Tai Yi Jun asked softly. "It's just a story in a book."
Daisuke thought of Jing Yun and Zhu Yi and Tian Zhen snuffed out of existence, of bright Meixing and Xuelian, of broken Zhang Yong thrown aside by his beloved master, and proud, loyal Zhao Zifeng who still fought for his Priestess even after she'd left him for another man.
Amatsu-Mikaboshi's sibilant voice crept into his head persuasively, "Haven't you realised by now? I am the blank page this world was written on; the only way to get rid of me is to destroy it all. At least if you give me what I want, your priestess will be saved."