Burn the Ashes

A constellation of tears on your lashes

Burn everything you love

Then burn the ashes

[My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark: Fall Out Boy]

When Daisuke told her to Go! Marin had a moment of paralysing terror as she glanced at the gathering darkness. She couldn't leave him there to face it on his own. She couldn't.

And if she didn't trust him to bloody well stay alive and not do something monumentally reckless, then everything, everything would be for nothing. This was not her battle – her challenge was somewhere in the walls of shelves behind them.

Marin swallowed everything she wanted to say. She stepped back before Daisuke could say anything else and ran.

Marin skidded down the tight lanes of the bookcases, careless of the mess of dark strands whipping across her face and the silk skirts bundled up around her knees as she ran. She tried to ignore the thunderous crash from behind her, and the noisy pounding of her own heart in her ears.

She leaped over a fallen mound of books, their pages splayed and spines broken, and reached the open space between the shelves where she had studied the Records. The table where it had been was crushed, its lacquered legs broken and the top split by a falling cabinet, but the scroll wasn't there. Another crash shuddered through the archive chamber, and the lanterns hanging at the end of the aisles swayed precariously as Marin's head whipped around to follow the sound.

She fought the instinct to run back and help Daisuke, and kept going. Think, Marin. She forced herself to focus on the books around her, the ones that were left on the shelves. Think. She turned, letting her skirts fall as she scanned the nearby shelves, mentally cataloguing the scrolls among the folios. Too small, too big, scroll spindles the wrong colour. There was a box…

Marin blocked out the sounds of fighting and destruction. To one side, the stored works were histories of Beijia's dynastic succession. She dismissed those, and focused on the shelves beyond those, moving quickly down the aisle. No. No, no… her hand ran swiftly along the shelf over treatises on the stars and astronomical charts that gave way to accounts from each of the countries on the advents of the gods. And then… Yes!

She snatched up the ornate box and tipped out the heavy scroll as the whole building shook and darkness rolled through the rafters. There was only a tiny puddle of light left from one of the lanterns hanging at the end of the aisle, and Marin almost threw the unravelling scroll towards it. The ancient Records spun out, catching on the shelves and broken furniture with ripping sounds that tore at Marin's scholarly soul, but she ran down the wide ribbon of yellowing silk, past the portraits of priestesses she knew and the script that grew more faded and antique as the Records unrolled.

There was a soft clink as the scroll reached its end.

Marin dropped to her knees beside the tattered silk and barely legible crude markings that were the earliest words. It was almost impossible to make out the last - the first - writings at the beginning of the Records of the Four Gods, and she scrambled up again to bring a lantern closer.

With a sigh, Marin made out the words, and for one brief second she let her eyes close in relief. Under her fingertips, the first - the last - passage thrummed with power, and she pulled her hand back abruptly.

What she did next violated the bedrock of her soul, and she gritted her teeth, squeezing her eyes shut, as she reached out and tore that fragile passage from the scroll. Threads of silk ripped and clung to her hands as she tugged it free from the carved spindles.

Under the ruins of a table she found the crushed remnants of an ink stick and a brush and she prepared them as best she could with the last few drops of water in the broken pot beside them. She closed her eyes, focusing, and then she opened them and began to write a careful translation beside the ancient characters of the incantation on the silk scrap, trying not to think about how she was defacing a sacred treasure. In the far reaches of the library, Marin could hear the boom of falling shelves and the violent crackle of flames, but she fought the instinct to panic and rush. None of this would mean anything if she didn't get the translation right. She inked the last line, and then Marin stood quickly, refusing to look back at the vandalised Records as she spun around and ran.

She crashed into bookcases as a lightless black engulfed the library, but she kept running towards the fire that sent flames and sparks ripping through the darkness.

Daisuke!

Ash rained down over her, and she kept going, clutching the fragment of scroll protectively to her chest.

In the shadowed wreckage of the library, Marin could see Daisuke in front of her. Flames licked down the blades in each hand and his shoulders heaved and bunched as the lightless void took on the form of Tai Yi Jun and said something to him.

"What are you talking about?" Daisuke snapped in response, and the old woman's eyes shifted to Marin in the dim aisle behind him.

"You haven't told him yet," Tai Yi Jun mocked, and Marin tensed. Something else, though, sparked at the back of her mind. Marin's eyes narrowed as it dawned on her. Tai Yi Jun's direct attack had failed.

"Haven't you realised by now?" There was a hint of a smile in the shifting darkness that turned Marin's stomach, and the words whispered suggestively through the ruins of the library. "The only way to keep me out of this world now is to destroy it. At least this way your priestess will be saved."

"Until you come for our world too," Marin interrupted, taking another step forward.

Tai Yi Jun's form collapsed into darkness as it swelled and lashed out at her, and met the blazing shield of Daisuke's fire. It recoiled, and gathered again at a safe distance.

"Maybe once I have all four gods, I'll be feeling lenient," Amatsu-Mikaboshi's voice said slyly out of the lightless void under the vaporous wings. "Maybe once I've reclaimed this world I won't need yours. Maybe I might even keep this world intact once I've rearranged things to my liking, and your little Seishi too, if they prove useful and not too troublesome."

"You killed Zhang Yong," Marin said.

"Oh, please. As if you really cared about that little crawler. He tried to poison your lover there, and you expect me to believe that you're not happy he's gone? I did you a favour."

"You destroyed Tomoe and Yuki. And Natsumi."

"Their gods would have eaten them if I hadn't done it first."

Marin gave a convulsive shudder. "I felt it! I know what you did to them, and to the gods, too. Do you really think I'd let you do that to the whole world?" She sucked in a breath. "Do you really think I'd let you do that to Daisuke?"

"Do you have any choice?"

The darkness crawled closer, and Marin stood her ground, even as it writhed with stomach-curdling intimacy.

"If you make those wishes, you will burn," it whispered to her.

She said, "I know."

Daisuke shifted his grip on his daggers as the darkness that had been Tai Yi Jun seemed to contemplate the Priestess. Marin tilted her chin and stared it down, but Daisuke could see the infinitesimal tremble in her clenched hands, then something shifted and its attention turned to Daisuke.

"And you're really going to let her do this?" it asked, and it sounded as though there was an undercurrent of rising panic behind the incredulously mocking tone.

But Daisuke's gaze was fixed on Marin's dark eyes through the fire and smoke between them. She was watching him seriously.

"You know what I want," she said softly, and he closed his eyes in anguish. He knew.

"Because if I'm right, then whatever happens when I make my wish – whatever this does to me – you'll bring everything back."

The agonised laugh was ripped from him. "No pressure," he choked.

"You trust me to know what I'm doing, even when it scares the hell out of me," she told him in a voice of supernatural calm, even as the shadows flung themselves at the rising flames and burned with an unholy scream of rage and desperation. "Trust me now."

He felt her reach out and tuck a fragile scrap of silk into his shirt, next to his heart.

"This is the invocation that will restart the world. Don't lose it."

He looked down at insignificant fragment with a sense of rising panic.

"I can't do this! I can't create a whole world!"

"You can," she insisted. "You already have – I've seen your artwork."

The darkness of Amatsu-Mikaboshi howled and battered its way through Suzaku's fire, shredding like ash even as it forced itself through the barrier of flames towards them.

"I can't fix this!" Marin spoke over the violent noise. "I can make the wish, but you're the one who has to make it come true!"

Then she grabbed a fistful of his shirt and hauled him closer, kissing him with a desperate ferocity that left him stunned.

"I promised I'd send you home," she whispered, and stepped back out of reach.

Daisuke cried out, his voice raw with pain.

"My second wish is to destroy the Four Gods Sky and Earth, down to the last page and grain of sand," she commanded, her voice stolen away and carried back to him on the burning wind that swept through the remains of the library.

And Daisuke cried out again as his eyes burned with a fierce fire that swept through him. He threw his head back, his arms spread wide.

Marin shielded her eyes against the light as Daisuke burned with bright fire. His shoulders rippled, and wings swept out, blazing with savage red feathers of fire in the darkness.

Suzaku opened His eyes, the signs of the fourth god etched in livid fire on His skin. He lifted His hand and crimson tongues licked at His fingers.

"Marin!"

His voice was both strange and familiar.

"Don't do this!" Suzaku begged, even as He gave her everything He had.

Marin's eyes held His.

And as the world caught fire around them, He heard her last wish.

"Go home and write the next chapter," she commanded Him. "Write Amatsu-Mikaboshi subdued for all time and the world restored. Write our friends the chance to be happy. Write the Universe the way it should be."

Through the gold and scarlet fire He could see her, dark smoke and white flame, as she turned. He felt the fire blaze into dangerous life within Him, responding to her even as He fought to hold it back, just a little. Just enough to save her.

No. Don't hurt her!

"Kai."

Her hand lifted, her dark eyes meeting His through the crimson tide between them, and Amatsu-Mikaboshi screamed in fury.

"Jin!"

Their fingertips touched.

Hands met, and the only sound she made was a small gasp as the gold and crimson fire swept through them. She looked up through the flickering motes of flame, her fingers tightening on His, even as He fought to pull free, and Marin smiled so luminously that it shone even in the inferno around them as the black void beat in futile desperation at the flames.

"No matter what happens, I'll always love you," she whispered, and then she was gone, a faint breath of smoke on the hot winds.

And the god Suzaku wept tears of fire.