Hereupon Amatsukunitama was pleased, saying, "Bring me a sword, that I might remove her head, and her limbs, and her heart, until no piece remains that one might call Amenosagume, for so great is my anger." A great many servants were sent, and they returned with a twelve-span sword, but before Amatsukunitama could enact his vengeance, the deity Omoikane arrived, saying, "I have been sent by the deity Tsukuyomi to employ this woman in his service, and she should therefore be let to live."


"I've seen to this matter," Sagume said, pushing a scroll across the table.

Eirin pulled it over to herself. "Thank you. I assume that means that the palace's servants were all innocent."

Sagume said nothing, keeping her expression blank. Partially because speaking too much about the outcome of her intervention would risk undoing it, partially because she just liked to see Eirin kept waiting.

But Eirin was pretty good at reading silence. "I'll take that as a yes. I ran my own investigation, I'll have you know. Not into the servants, but into your efforts. Nobody could even say for sure whether you were interested in this matter. It was remarkable."

"Is that so?" Sagume kept her voice carefully neutral. She crooked a finger in front of her mouth to hide even the hint of a smile she was wearing.

"That is so," Eirin said. She smiled and tucked the scroll away.

They were seated in the center of Eirin's garden. It was, to Sagume's eyes, the epitome of lunar design... good and bad. Only a handful of flower species had been brought to the moon and purified for use within the capital, and she'd long since gotten tired of seeing most of them. Here in this pure land, they lived forever in a state of perpetual bloom, and would remain so until the sun burned out. The garden was decorated sparsely to compensate, with mere dozens of flowers planted throughout it. They were placed at just the right points to accentuate each other's beauty though, like some minimalist painting: the lines that defined a garden without any of the substance of a garden.

The manor, behind them, was equally spectacular, a sprawling building as large as most villages that Sagume could remember on Earth. Mere meters in the other direction, the Mare Ingenii sloshed gently against the shore.

She hadn't been surprised when she'd first seen it, though. By this point, everybody knew who Eirin was. She'd always run much of the moon from behind the scenes, but now she had the official rank to back it up, placing her over everybody but the family of Tsukuyomi himself. 'The Great Sage of the Moon,' they called her, in between her dozens of more formal titles.

Sagume did not have a formal title. She had grudgingly allowed them to award her a governmental rank, which said that she was fairly important. Nobody below her was quite sure why, and nobody above her would explain it if they asked. She simply took care of issues that might disrupt the order of things, and she did so quietly.

She'd gotten very good at being quiet.

A few minutes of companionable silence passed before Eirin spoke again."It took some time, but... I'm glad to see that you've settled in."

"There was nothing to settle in to. Compared to trying to drive gods off of the Earth, this is..." Sagume paused, considering her words carefully. It never paid to forget her curse. "... I don't consider it difficult," she finished simply.

"I meant in general. But yes, you've gotten very good at what you do. I expected nothing less."

"You hired a very fine liar."

"Among other things." Eirin leaned forward over the table, steepling her fingers and resting her chin on them. She studied Sagume's face. "Do you know why I chose you, out of all the gods that we could have brought up here?"

"You needed somebody desperate enough to say yes."

"You underestimate me. I could have found a way to enlist any deity I cared to name."

"So modest." Sagume glanced to her, and decided that Eirin really was asking the question seriously. "I don't know, then. Why?"

"You must remember, I am the Omoikane, the Thought-Combiner. There were five thousand gods with us when we came to the moon, and out of them, I could tell you what perhaps four thousand nine hundred and ninety-six will do tomorrow, if you gave me a few minutes to assess their current mindset."

So modest, Sagume thought again, with an extra helping of sarcasm this time. She kept it to herself. She'd already spoken more than she would in most entire days.

"And yes, you're one of the few exceptions. You're cunning." Eirin lowered her hands and leaned forward, smirking. "And contrary, and ruthless."

Sagume raised an eyebrow questioningly, but Eirin ignored it and continued. "The fact of the matter is that I've performed several calculations to predict how lunar society will evolve, accounting for every factor that I can accurately simulate. All of them collapse within ten millennia. But you, you're an unknown factor."

Sagume frowned with surprise, but kept herself carefully quiet. The collapse of civilization wasn't the sort of topic that she needed to take a risk of speaking about, even as a joke.

"Don't take it the wrong way," Eirin said. "It isn't that I expect you to save the entire civilization. It's simply that I know nobody else will. With you, there is a chance."

"I'm not sure there's a right way to take a comment like that," Sagume muttered, still picking her words one by one. It felt dangerous even speaking about anything tangentially related to the topic. "You said that I'm only here for the off-chance that I'll save the world some day."

"If that's all you heard, then you must be slipping. Think about it this way." Eirin's hand drifted across the table and slipped into Sagume's, so casually that even a direct observer might write it off as a coincidence. "Every day, I have to talk to a hundred petty little people who are so straightforward, I can almost predict every word that they say. After that, talking to you is very... refreshing."

Refreshing, Sagume repeated mentally, while her heart skipped a beat. This should have been nothing new. Flirting was just one more weapon in her arsenal, although usually she was on the other side of it, not to mention dealing with somebody that she didn't care about. … which wasn't to say that she did care about Eirin, just—with a mental groan, Sagume shoved the topic aside for now. "... it would seem," she said, "that you have a knack for surprising me too."

Eirin's expression took on the hint of a smile, as Sagume slowly interlaced her fingers with Eirin's. She considered her options.

Romance wasn't strictly banned on the moon, but it had been proposed a few times. It was a messy institution, which drove a great deal of humanity's hate, lust, and sometimes even murders. An endless well of secondhand impurities. It was considered much better to keep courtship as a purely political matter without too many emotional complications.

They were foolish even to do this much. Most of Sagume's informants were servants, after all—in the larger manors, it was practically an anomaly for there to not be somebody or another eavesdropping most of the time. Not to mention that this was Eirin, who really wasn't the first person she needed to be developing more of a debt toward...

… but she was struggling to think of the last time, in the century that she'd been on the moon, that she'd touched even so much as another person's hand.

Before she could respond, the door into the manor flew open. It had barely budged a centimeter by the time their hands recoiled and they both leaned back, all business.

"Miss Yagokoro!" a rabbit squeaked urgently, hurrying up to the table. "There's an urgent message from the Ohotoshi manor. They'd like to see Lady Kishin immediately."

"Miss Kishin is right here, as you can well see," Eirin said, and glanced to Sagume. "Business?"

"Mh. An annoyance," Sagume said, not daring to give any detail lest she upset the situation with her words. If the rumors were to be believed, a servant had heard two rabbits planning a revolution. It was ridiculous, of course. Rabbits across the moon were telepathically communicating at all times. If enough of them were conspiring to make for an actual rebellion, there would be dozens of reports, not a single one from a servant with a history of drinking too much. "But I'm told that matters of the peace are my concern now."

"So they are," Eirin said. "I'll leave it in your capable hands."