- XLV -
In the waning of the next half moon, thirteen more villagers died.
Old men. Young men. Sisters. Mothers.
Children.
Twelve were carried into the dark by the Hungering Dust. The thirteenth, an old woman, had set out alone into the twilight seeking her unmarried son, whom had vanished the night before. Ginko had entreated her to stay, but the son was the woman's only family, and so she could not heed his words.
The villagers found mother and son the following morning in the Vale, a sad pair of headless corpses, their fleshless arms reaching for each other in death.
- XLVI -
"Leave him," Ginko says, and he knows his words are harsh.
The boy, Jiro, clutches his father's shoulders and says nothing. Unseen to his eyes, yellow motes of Hidaruihokori have already begun to feast upon the old farmer's body.
"Leave him," Ginko repeats. "We must return to the village before that… the Mononoke returns."
Jiro glares at him, his gaze bloodshot with grief. "You would deny my father his funeral rites, yet you would carry that mere peddler's corpse back up the mountain?"
"He is not dead," says Ginko. "He must not be, for none but he can save you."
- XLVI -
Still, there were a few survivors.
Besides little Ume, six villagers were found alive in the Vale the morning following their disappearances. All of them were children, Ginko notes, and he thinks that it must be more than coincidence.
The only child to die— as recounted by her weeping, frostbite-blackened twin— had perished in the bitter cold before the Dust devoured her.
Each surviving child said they had seen the Gashadokuro. That it had appeared before them, eyes flaming, and seemed to pass judgment upon them, and that it had then retreated without doing harm.
Far beyond coincidence, Ginko thinks.
- XLVII -
Keep watch. Wake one another at the first sign of trouble.
Beware the Dust.
These are the things Gino tells the people of the mountain when he ascends from the Vale, Kusuriuri's body— light, far too light— over his shoulder.
But the villagers there do not trust him, despite Jiro's bloodstained clothes and Kayo's fantastic tale. Monsters and magic are things to be whispered about over fires, or warded against; these people are but of fields and earth and stone.
And so they do not heed him, and the Dust claims two more lives that night.
- XLVIII -
"There's something wrong with my son," the woman says. "His face is strange. The gods gave him back to me after the Dust took 'im, but they didn't give him back right."
"The whole world is backwards," the boy says, miserably.
"Alright, I'll examine him" agrees Ginko.
The child seems healthy, and unwounded by his ordeal.
It is not until Ginko listens to his chest does he realize what the Hidaruihokori had done.
The boy's heart beats on the opposite side of his body—
The Dust had returned him reversed, as though he were his own reflection in a mirror.
- XLIX -
Ginko consults every book and scroll he carries. He sends letters by Uro cocoon to every fellow Mushi-shi he can reach.
Mononoke may be beyond him, but Mushi—
The Dust—
Every time, Ginko receives the same answer: a Hidaruihokori swarm is a harmless oddity. No one before has needed to drive one away.
And so, Ginko must be the very first to discover how.
Mushi are things of nature. Most have a counter, a vulnerability, some means by which they may be defeated. This Dust may have a weakness, too.
Ginko prays he may discover it before it's too late.
- L -
The villagers build a ring of fire around their homes, burning their precious, meager supply of firewood. They slick oil around the perimeters of their rooms, hoping to catch the passing Dust. They light lanterns, hang talismans, chant spells, pray to their gods—all to no avail.
Hidaruihokori, it seems, is not so easily deterred.
Ginko experiments with some newly-captured motes and a few scraps of dried meat. He finds no answers, and can only offer suggestions from what he knows of Mushi lore.
The villagers try everything he says, but still they vanish one by one into the dark.
- LI -
"Is she…?" Kayo asks, voice trembling.
Ginko shakes his head as he scrubs the blood from his hands. "Nothing I could do. Half her organs were already dissolved."
Kayo seems to fold in on herself. "Better she had been taken," she whispers, "than to wake while they were still eating."
"The Gashadokuro would have been no more merciful than the Hungering Dust. At least she was with her family here."
Kayo does not raise her eyes. "We are all going to die, aren't we?"
He grasps her shoulder. His fingernails are still stained crimson, and it is but cold comfort.
- LII -
Ultimately, all they can do is watch.
They sleep in shifts, now. Those left awake must keep a vigilant eye for the first faint fading of their slumbering family or neighbors' extremities, the first signs that the Dust has begun to feed.
It is easier for Ginko, for he alone can see the motes themselves. But his eyes cannot be everywhere, and even he must eventually sleep. And like the villagers, even he does not know whether he will wake in the morning in his own bed—or in the very maw of the Gashadokuro of the Vale of Bones.
- LIII -
The stolen children continue to survive, but now they all come back wrong.
One boy will never walk again. His feet are misshapen lumps of flesh, the muscles and bones mixed together beneath his skin.
The living twin girl is missing an entire arm. The Dust had gifted it instead to the sister whom had died of exposure.
How much longer will it be, Ginko wonders, until the mad Hidaruihokori reassembles one of the villagers inside-out? How much longer until the Dust no longer needs the Gashadokuro to make it corpses to devour?
These people are running out of time.
- LIV -
"It's no good," announces the carpenter's son, sweeping off his ice-rimed cloak. "The southern pass is snowed shut. And to the north—avalanche."
His face is grim, and marked with grief. So too, are the faces of the rest of the villagers crowded tightly around the fire in the headman's home.
"So we are trapped," says the village elder. "This is our end." There is despair written into every line of his withered skin.
He turns to Ginko.
"Please," he says.
"Please, is there nothing more you can do?"
For a long moment, Ginko is silent. "Perhaps," he replies. "Perhaps."
- LV -
The stranger floats in the void—
Unmoving, a fixed star in a swiftly -spinning universe.
Flying faster than thought, a darting sparrow in a frozen sky.
The severed scarlet threads that bound him to his flesh twine around him like the hair of a drowned woman. One shouts a faint echo of a whisper of pain; the Hungering Dust has come to feed on his mortal shell again.
His Otherself speaks a word and the golden motes flee, singing songs of terror.
The stranger will wake soon. The stranger will wake within eternity.
All moments are one and the same.
- LVI -
"What do you call something neither asleep nor dead?"
"Is that supposed to be a riddle?" asks Kayo, matching her stride to his longer one as they pass amongst the snow-shrouded houses.
"No time for riddles," says Ginko. "I'm merely preparing to disregard reason. "
His steps slightly falter.
"Mushi have rules. You can learn their secrets. Predict them, to a point. But this business of Mononoke, that is part of a realm of which I know little. And I don't care for it"
"I understand, I think."
"Still," Ginko says, "I will see this done, no matter the price."
- LVII -
The stranger wakes in a darkened room, the taste of freely-given blood on his teeth.
The Mushi-shi sits beside him, regarding him impassively with his lone eye. "I know not whether you're a god or spirit, or something beyond my ken," the human says. "I do know, however, that you are all that stands between the people of this village and the horror below the mountain."
A bandage, steeped in crimson, is wrapped around the man's forearm. "Did I guess wrong?" he asks.
The stranger's tongue flicks a few stray drops from his painted lips.
"Your offering… is most welcome."
- LVIII -
Ginko slides the door of the medicine seller's hut closed behind himself, and takes a deep breath of the frozen air. The cut on his arm throbs.
Form and Truth and Regret.
"And if I uncover the last two, the village will be saved?"
"There are never absolutes when it comes to exorcising Mononoke, Mushi-shi. But if we do not find them, this village will most certainly be destroyed."
Form and Truth and Regret, thinks Ginko.
Kusuriuri has armed him with knowledge of these things, and so he must seek them out.
"Kayo," he says aloud. "Bring me a spade."