Once outside the building, Hikari burst into fits of laughter. She ducked around a corner into a quieter place and held onto her sides as she doubled over. It eventually overcame her ability to stand and she slid down the wall to sit on the ground until she could control herself.

"Oh that was funny," she gasped, "You're going to be good at this. Did you see the look on his face?"

Kenshin smiled down at the heap of his new mentor, "I didn't mean to break his fingers."

"I think he needs a change of clothes, Oh gosh." She fell over on her side and breathed in deep to get control of the breathing the laughter had taken from her.

He squatted into front for her and looked at her, "How did I break his fingers? I didn't hit that hard."

She pulled herself into an upright sitting position, "You're stronger now than you were when you died. You'll have to adapt to that." The smile still colored her face.

Kenshin absorbed the information with a nod, "Will he do the right thing?"

She breathed deeply a couple of times to get control of herself and nodded, "That's why I have so much fun with him. He's so conflicted. He doesn't want to be a good guy. He doesn't want to be loved; he wants to be feared. But in the end, despite all of his fighting it, he always does the right thing. I just like to poke in and remind him of that every so often. Especially when he drags his feet like this."

"You like him," Kenshin said more than asked.

"So do you, despite your better judgment," Hikari answered, taking the hand he offered her to get to her feet, "He's gotten you into more trouble than anyone, and yet you always accepted it, and him at face value."

Kenshin didn't say anything because it didn't need to be said. The kind of communication they shared was as much empathic as vocal, and he could feel her thoughts as she spoke. She had been serious when she had told them that there were no secrets between the kami. All hearts were laid bare and open to each other.

"They don't all work like this, though. Saitoh is for fun, and for the longest time believed that I was some hallucination of his. Let's see, who else have I actually shown myself to that you know? Hiko." She looked skyward first to think of the name, and then down at him, "Of course to him I am an illusion of his drunkenness. I showed myself to you by accident," she frowned, trying to think.

"The emperor?" Kenshin asked, figuring that the emperor could see kami anyway.

She shook her head, "The truly powerful have to be handled with delicacy. They are so afraid of not being in complete control, they won't tolerate even the slightest impression that they are not the ones pulling the strings. Then there are the criminals. Have you seen the ones who will suddenly confess to everything, usually to show off their genius?"

He nodded, "Your doing?"

"Not really, but sort of. You'll learn how to soul whisper. And that's how you handle the delicate situations. You speak to their souls. You convince their souls that fairness and justice are better than the opposite. Or, in the case of the criminal types, you stroke their vanity, make them feel that they are so clearly superior that have already succeeded and wouldn't it be a crime if the world did not know how such a raging success was pulled off. It's a little complicated."

"I do not think I like the idea of using trickery," Kenshin said.

"Why not?" she asked, "Why should I handicap myself in the name of honor, when my enemy would not only refuse me such quarter, but would use my handicap to assure his victory? Trickery is a weapon, as much as sword. When faced with a fight, I will not fight bare handed without using the sword available to me. My enemy would just as soon steal the sword from me and cut me down with it."

"I still don't like it," he said.

"You're getting stubborn," she answered, pulling him through a door.

In the garden of portals, Hikari tripped over stone and stumbled a couple of steps forward.

"Your impatience leads to your own doom," Kenshin remarked.

She straightened at him, entirely too tall, too thin, too pale, and too distant to have ever been real, "Yeah, well at least my wings work." These she snapped out for dramatic effect, and again, that effect of distant thunder rolled through the air.

"And just when do I learn all of these little touches?"

She tried not to smile at him, and failed, though her smiles never reached her eyes. Far from lifeless, her eyes were just cold, as if she watched the world rather than took part in it. Kenshin privately wondered if he would acquire the same ennui that she tried so very hard to cover up.

"When you least expect it," she answered.

If it were in his nature, he would have rolled his eyes. But the resigned sigh conveyed his message just fine. He tried again to move his wings from their folded position, and was unsuccessful.

He felt a hand close over the top of a wing and turned to face Hikari, who pulled the wing out straight, "I can only show you the very basics. It's not that you're too weak to move them, it's that you don't understand how." The pulling seemed to awaken new muscles in his back, and he felt the twinge as nerves fired off the new position of his wing.

"There are two major joints in each wing, and then you'll have to figure out fine muscular control to manage feathers and twist and whatnot. This one here in the middle is like a hinge," she opened and closed it a few times, much to Kenshin's discomfort, "See?"

He winced, "I feel it more than see it."

"You're supposed to feel it. New muscles, have to know how they all work. So like I said, This is a hinge joint, it only goes one way. This," she pushed the entirety of his wing forward, causing him to stumble, "Is a very restricted socket joint, kind of like your shoulder, but with a lot less mobility. You do a lot of your fine tuning here."

As she pushed, he felt the new muscles and began to get an idea of how they worked, She tugged and pulled at joints and feathers until she had gone over the whole thing. She showed him how to spread his feathers, twist his wings, up and down, forward and back, and in the end, it hurt a lot more than he cared to think about. When she released his wings, they automatically curled close to his back and folded as tightly as they could, as if to get away from her.

He started to ask if he could learn to fly now, but rather, his back was in so much pain, it stopped him. New muscles ground against the old ones, and if he could have stooped and kept his balance, he would have.

Hikari wandered off suddenly. She just turned around and started walking away.

"Where are you going?" Kenshin asked.

"I don't know," she said, "Just going. I'm hungry and want something to eat. Are you coming?"

Kenshin sighed again, she caused him to sigh a great a deal. He closed his eyes and listened to the choir, hoping to be able to pick out a comforting voice. It was the shriek that broke him from his reverie, not one of fear or pain, but anger.

His eyes snapped open and he took off after the sound, he felt Hikari close in behind him. The passage opened into a grove of trees where a skulking smoky image wavered. Agape, who leaned against a tree glaring at the shape and holding his/her arm tightly, though the blood spilled over his/her fingers.

Hikari hissed in surprise and stopped, conflicted as to whether to help Agape or to deal with whatever had gotten in here. Kenshin made the decision for her, not even thinking about pausing as he closed the gap between himself and the shadow.

Her voice cracked like lightning, loud and sudden, and Kenshin felt a wave of warmth as a white nimbus surrounded him. It was so long-practiced a move that it came without thought or hesitation, just the drawing and putting away of a blade. Oddly, he thought of why the blade had come with him, when he had given to Yahiko so long ago.

The shadow recoiled from his swing and regrouped itself into a vaguely human shape. It swiped at Kenshin, and left a freezing trail behind it that left a blue stripe down his hand. Then Kenshin heard the voice. A word. I was a single word that consumed his mind and slipped from his lips as quietly as a whisper. The ground seemed to swell with the word and it swallowed the shadow in a gaping maw of burning light. Just as suddenly as it had began, it was over.

Kenshin started to turn and thank Hikari for her help, but it wasn't Hikari whose voice he heard. And it wasn't just Hikari and Agape who swung into his field of vision. The golden features of Firrin came into focus. Hikari held Agape close to her, whispering soothing comforts, though Firrin stood facing Kenshin with his arms crossed, looking down at him.

It was Firrin who had made him say the word, Firrin who had embraced his mind. Kenshin could only look into the golden eyes with surprise. His head still hummed with the power of the act of speaking the word. It had been one word. One solitary word that had welled up inside him with the same force as the great choir that seemed to fill the air. It was as if all that power had focused itself into that one word. A part of a secret language that built and destroyed worlds with a whisper.

Firrin didn't even bother to speak, he didn't have to. Kenshin heard him just fine, felt him. Felt the bottled aggression, the hurt, the anger the desire. Not any kind of sexual desire or attraction, the sole desire for the restoration of what had once been the status quo.

Hikari looked up at Firrin, he seemed to tower over her, to dominate her with his presence. And in a strange way, Kenshin saw how someone so larger than life seemed so much smaller than this moment they were standing in. Agape was clutched to her like a too large child, his/her head resting on her unarmored shoulder, eyes closed. Hikari was bent at the knee as she tried to gather up her charge, but her eyes, wide and frozen were fixed on Firrin. She showed not indignant rage, or possessiveness, but a sort of lack of control.

That eternal passing instant was the ultimate truth for Kenshin. He saw how small they all were, their sole existence to serve an ideal that was as ephemeral and everchanging as mankind itself. They were insignificant. They were nothing. Four nothings standing in a garden of doors born of the desire of men to escape.

Everything is nothing. It spins and whirls in this great dance of eternity, the creator is created by his creation, the god of common thought, the divine consciousness was not a distant choir. They lived within it. They thrived and died by the whim of men, and despite their immortality, these servants were as fragile as the breath of a baby. All of these places and portals palaces and people, they were all reflections of this divine will and existed within it. Their fight was not with the infernal. Their fight was with their creator, a begging crying voice to not be forgotten. The forgetting would ever be their doom. It was all an illusion before him, and he saw them all for what they were.

Hikari was no imposing powerful creature, she was a shadow of men's dreams, she had never known what it was to live and love and breathe. She couldn't look on men with compassion and empathy because she had none. It wasn't a natural anomaly that her gaze was so cold, she was truly that cold. Agape was a twisted and limping creature, battered by the abuse of love, the confusion of lust, the bleeding wounds were not an accident, they were the traces of the wounding of betrayal. Firrin was a wisp of smoke, an ephemeral thing as insubstantial as anything around him.

Truth was wisp of smoke, Love an ugly and battered thing, and Justice, Justice hurt the most, he had loved her, he had given himself over to her, and she was a distant thing without the capacity for mercy that his mortal conscience so desperately demanded.

Then, as if looking outside of himself and at himself, he saw the illusion he had become. He had his own mental image of himself, and stumbled in shock when he saw himself as a bloodstained youth. Blood both dried and damp clung to his face, his hands, his clothes. It dripped down the point of the blade and left a gory trail where it had passed. He stank of blood and sex and opium. His face was not the youthful bright visage he had thought, but a haggard sack of bones with hollow amber eyes filled with cold ennui.

It had all been a lie.