Hina's first few days in the outside world were uneventful. The mountaintop environment was inhospitable to most demons, so she didn't meet anyone as she travelled down the mountain. She was honestly a little disappointed—she'd maintained some hope of meeting fellow ice demons up here.
That was her plan, inasmuch as she had a plan at all. She knew there were other ice demons out here, and she hoped to find a group of them willing to accept her, and make a new life for herself among them. She had quite gotten good at using her ice powers, and thought she would enjoy learning from other types of ice-users, and perhaps teaching them a few things as well.
Still, by the time she reached the bottom of the mountain, doubts and second thoughts were starting to flutter around in the back of her mind. Her determination had carried her this far, but as she approached the base of the mountain, she was finding it harder and harder to set aside the fact that she had no real destination. Mount Hinome had been her destination, the target she had pinned all her hopes on, and when no obvious path showed itself from there, she found herself lost and adrift. With the desperation of a drowning woman grasping at a life preserver, she had set her eyes at the base of the mountain as her new goal.
Now that goal too was petering out. As the terrible emptiness of aimlessness threatened to rise around her, Hina paused to logically consider her options.
She still had plenty of food—the top of the mountain had home to many of the same ice-plants the Koorime cultivated. They were plants such as no one in the human world had ever seen, with fractal patterns only occasionally dividing into discernible leaves and stems, almost every part of them transparent or frosty white veined with shades of purple or pastel blue.
Hina's favorite was chimi, the bloodfruit. The three-lobed fruit was blood-red, a rare color in her icy world, and grew nestled in the center of an ice-fern, with its spiraling pattern of fronds that spiked out into impossibly fine points. The ice maidens had to harvest the fruit just before it was ripe, otherwise the flowerlike fronds, tightly coiled around their precious cargo, would suddenly snap backwards, shattering the plant and launching the spinning fruit high into the air. When it landed, it too would shatter, dispersing its seeds to the winds.
Hina still had several chimi from the top of the mountain, but they, and all the other familiar, ordinary plants of her homeland, had long since left been behind. She had left the snow behind, too, which was a new experience for her. Bare rocks and the beginnings of small green plants surrounded her now.
As she was calculating how many days' supply of food she had (finally deciding it was about four), she noticed a nearby ledge that would make a convenient vantage point. She hadn't stopped to assess her surroundings since she had come below the cloudline, so she stepped out onto the ledge to try to find somewhere to go.
She was in luck. Off near the horizon, easily within even the most leisurely of four days' walks, lay what looked very much like a city.
Hina had never been to a true city. She had grown up in a village, or possibly a town, if you were generous with the definition. There was no settlement on Koorime anywhere near large enough to be called a city.
As she set off down the last slope of the mountain, Hina reviewed what she knew about typical cities, and how she should go about looking for the information she wanted once she got there.
She might never have been to the outside world, but she had not come completely unprepared. There was a fair amount of information about the outside world available in the country's large library, though most of it was very old, collected in the days before the Koorime had become so isolationist, when there had still been contact and travel between them and the outside world. Now, though, Hina was the first traveler in over a hundred years to reach the outside world. She could just barely remember when the last one had come back, and had known even then that it was a rare thing indeed. It hadn't been expressly forbidden—it still wasn't—but the elders hadn't exactly been happy with her. The woman had ended up leaving again, never to return.
The library had become one of Hina's refuges as the years after her hundredth birthday had gone by. One by one, everyone her age had had children, and then everyone with a new daughter had been younger than her. She had become more and more cut off from the one thing they were all supposed to have in common. People had begun ignoring her, had stopped inviting her to do anything. No one had said anything to her unless she spoke to her first. Only Rui had persisted, making the effort to see her when she was invisible to everyone else. At least she would now be free of that burden.
With rejection on every side, Hina had lost herself in stories of the outside world, or in one of the academic pursuits of her people, or else by practicing her ice powers on her own. As a result, she had become both well-read and extremely good at controlling her abilities. The former, she hoped, would help her find her way in this world, while the latter would keep her alive long enough to do so.
Once she reached the city, she would find an inn or tavern—she did have some money that should be accepted out here—and try to find information there. Along the way, she would keep her senses on the surrounding youki, trying to find someone with ice-type energy. She wasn't at all sure she would be able to tell the difference—after all, she had never felt any other type—and she knew it was unwise to simply approach a stranger like that. Still, she didn't many options if she wanted to make a life out here, and besides, what did she have to lose? Only her life, which had been growing steadily more unbearable for decades. Either she would succeed in finding a place out here, or she would fail and succumb to one of the many dangers the ice mothers warned their daughters about. Either way, she would win.
With all these thoughts filing through her head, Hina walked on towards the setting sun. The sky, always red in this world, was beginning to darken behind her, but ahead of her it was full of brilliant purples and blues and yellows, forming a sunset the likes of which her sheltered island companions had never even imagined.
Author's note: If you're having trouble picturing the plants, try googling "fractals" or "fractal art". That'll give you some idea what I was going for—plus, they're really cool.