Songs of the Illusionary Veil: The Sea of Stone
A Touhou Project story by Achariyth
The border of the Great Moon Palace was always being churned under by the motion of spreading stone and regolith. It had always been so, or so it seemed, from the days when Reisen's namesake had been a birth-blind bunny, and the scholars in their tall caps whispered that it would always be so, until the rocks finally buried the Great Moon Palace. Indeed, if a rabbit were so inclined, she could watch the slow creep of stone chew away at her home. Only from the Palace side, of course. The other side was nothing but airless desert, and, again, the scholars whispered that it would always be so.
None of the auguries ever explained just how the deadly excess of earth swept all life away, but back at the proscribed eight spans of eight strides from the desert, Reisen read her book in safety. It would take a year and a half for the desert to reach her. She'd be finished with the series before then, and that included the visits to Earth to hunt down the sequels. For the moment, the serene quiet allowed her to imagine what might have been and what might yet be.
The lop-eared moon rabbit peeked over the top of her book and licked her lips. A young scholar-in-training, built like a blacksmith's apprentice instead of an aesthete, knelt by the regolith and charted its spread. Perhaps he would prove to be as attentive to poetry and anatomy at night as he must be to the ancient classics in the day. Reisen pursed her lips and watched. Would he respond to a coltish maiden, or would the brash coquette catch his eye?
"Reisen, darling!"
Or would another come by and steal him away? The moon rabbit cringed and turned towards her name. With a wan smile, she greeted her master. "Hello, Princess Toyohime."
The radiant Princess of the Moon, with her flowing hair and wide-brimmed hat, glided towards her. Princess Toyohime's eye caught the scholar at the border. "I was worried about why you would stay out here in the shadow of death. Now I'm sure that it isn't death that you are seeking. Have you tried to play hard to get?"
"It won't matter now." Reisen closed her book and rocked to her feet. The young man hadn't been attentive until Princess Toyohime had arrived.
"Two centuries ago, I would have agreed." Lady Toyohime turned her back to the scholar and raised her voice. "Alas, I am now a respectable woman, and must only console myself in my husband's arms."
The scholar turned quickly to his work, occasionally casting a glance at the two moon women. Reisen combed out her white ears and arched her back. To her delight, the young man found renewed enthusiasm for his duties even as his eyes wondered more. She glanced over at the princess, who stared forlorn out at the sea of stone and shuddered. "Princess?"
"How do you stand it out here?" Princess Toyohime whispered. She held a hand atop her hat as a gust blew through the grey rock border. "The gardens would be more suitable to pleasure and courtship than this desolation. How can there be joy here, where the mechanical age grinds wonder into dust?"
Reisen shuddered and crept away from the slow churn of regolith. The mechanical age had been the lament of the Moon for centuries. Wonder had slowly died as the humans on Earth poked into the strange and made it familiar, and the familiar, contemptible. The ancient tales, flayed and diagrammed for all to see, no longer reigned in the imagination, so the ancient wonders on Earth and above it, such as the Moon Palace, faded.
The moon rabbit looked up at the blue and white marble in the sky. Following her namesake's footsteps, she had floated upon a moonbeam with a mooncloth robe, and found wonders of her own in a hidden valley. Reisen pursed her lips and gathered her thoughts.
"Some say I should enjoy the decline and chase the dragon with love and wine until I no longer notice what is being stolen around me. Others, that we must return to the Earth and embrace the cycle of life and death that we rejected centuries before. Still others, that we must flee to the stars, ever doomed to an eternal procession of lost homes." As the princess bared her soul, her face grew to match the encroaching rock. "I'd wager that if we asked your scholar, he would tell us to embrace the ways of the anchorite in austerity and venerate the ancient tenants. Yet the old philosophies offer no consolation
"What room is there for wonder in these clockwork days?"
Reisen's breath caught in her throat as two tears slid down the princess's cheek. The moon rabbit swallowed and chose her words with the care of a jeweler sorting stones. "Before I met Sanae, Wind Priestess of Youkai Mountain, I would have thought the same."
Princess Toyohime wiped away her tears. "What does the rival of my sister's reluctant apprentice have to do with the Moon Palace's fate?"
"I've read through a few of her books, the ones she brought from the greater world outside of Gensokyo. They were full of heroes rescuing and rescued by maidens, mighty deeds, and breath-stealing spectacles. Sages commanding Nature herself across countless strange lands. Just like in the tales of old. The mechanical age did not destroy the old myths, but just changed their clothes." Reisen tapped the book in her hand.
Princess Toyohime leaned closer and ran her finger across the book's spine. "Dressed them up in rags, you mean."
Reisen shook her head. "Who among the ancients dreamed of building a ring in the sky larger than any star? Or would seed the night sky with new diamonds, each a home to a new nation? Remember, it was wonder that drew Apollo's arrows here to the moon."
The princess tapped a fan to her lips. "I thought it was because of a competition between nations."
"They still chose the Moon for their quest, constructing devices that still cause the gods of the forge to tremble." Reisen looked and scrunched her shoulder so as to hide her neck from an executioner's blade. The Apollo excursions still wounded the pride of the Moon Palace. "Your Highness, perhaps we have confused wonder with worship."
The Moon Princess's face had turned into an inscrutable stone mask leveled at Reisen. Princess Toyohime reached out with the same fan that had driven the Apollo astronauts from the moon and tapped her servant at the base of her neck. "Explain."
"It is true that the Earthlings have forgotten us. Read about their heroes, though. Watch as they control fire, water, wood, wind, and metal. Can you tell me that, even in this mechanical age, that you cannot see echoes of the gods in their knights? In their aliens, our angels and demons? In their planets, the uncharted lands where once was written 'Here Be Dragons'? Can you tell me that people have truly forgotten wonder?" Reisen trembled underneath the paper fan but refused to shrink away.
"I would, but I have yet to read the tales of which you speak."
The moon rabbit handed over her book. Toyohime, Princess of the Moon, stood on the shore of a sea of stone and the tales written by dreamers from another world. She turned over a page, and then another, unmindful that Reisen squeezed next to her, until with two final words, she closed the book. "I must show this to my husband."
"You will give that back, right?" Reisen asked as the book vanished into her master's pocket.
The princess nodded and, with sudden mirth, pointed to where the young scholar finally walked away from the regolith. "I think he's delayed his duties as long as he can." Princess Toyohime spun Reisen about and shoved her in the young man's direction. "Better hurry!"
Late that night, after the Earth had set, a scholar-in-training had found delight in a coquette's kisses, and a husband counsel from his wife, the regolith waves ground to a stop. For the first time in centuries, the sea of stone ebbed away from the Moon Palace's lands.