There was this girl. A girl who looked like any other, yet unique in so many ways. She lived a long, long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that she lived in the future. Not in the sense of aesthetically, per se. There was no apocalypse. No resetting of societal development. No, the future this girl lived in is a future that has yet to be, yet also one that has come to pass.

This conundrum, this...mystery, its a rather quaint way of describing the kind of life this girl would lead. But every story cannot have a middle or an end without a beginning. Perhaps, however, its a curse that this story had any of these at all.

But there's no point prattling on about any sort of "crimes" that may have been committed against this girl's life. She existed, and her story is all that matters now.

A person's life, naturally, begins with their birth. But there are some things that must elaborated on regarding the circumstances behind this girl's birth. In the future, lets say around...21XX, humanity has begun to stagnate. They have drones to handle everyday duties. Cars no longer require tires or wheels to operate. And any food you want is about a button press away.

But the cost of these luxuries was steep, and irreversible. The energy output, combined with the choice of materials needed to manufacture these luxuries, polluted most of the planet. Hundreds of species of wildlife were made extinct. Smaller cities were considered uninhabitible and a waste of time to maintain, and were thus wiped clean off the map.

And due to the way the food was made and how widespread and easily obtained it was, many humans ended up being sterilized. A staggering 85% of them, to be precise. But if it was any consolation, at least this ceased any further need to discuss overpopulation.

But against the odds, a miracle occurred for two loving parents. They gave birth to a lovely, healthy daughter. She only weighed just a couple ounces below average, and had eyes said to be as pretty as violets. She cries only a little, and was easily comforted by her mother's warmth.

The girl was given a strange name, one without an easily discernable English spelling. Its possible that she was chosen to be named after this berry that becomes purple upon ripening, but none can say for certain. Her name, you ask? Why, it is - -. It was a lovely name, but one that would only last with her but a mere iota of her life.

She grew up as a middle-class girl. Well, middle-class as far as the standards of the past would go. In the future, the once middle-class is now considered the lower-class. But that doesn't mean that she lived a life of hardship. Rather, in spite of the changing standards of wealth, her family had just enough money to provide her with food and clothes.

Her favorite clothing included anything with purple in it. She liked dresses a lot. It was perhaps the only normal, girly thing about her. And she was rarely seen without a white mob cap.

There was a blessing to her not being gifted with the luxuries that most others had. She only remained glued to a chair when she wanted to read. Otherwise, she spent many hours of the day frollicking through the world outside her house.

She learned early on that she a peculiar way of viewing her surroundings. Normal kids her age would hop across puddles and sing simple jingles as their bare feet became soaked in mud.

But when she hopped along through puddles, she felt like she was leaping between different worlds. She could describe differences in these worlds as though they were clear like the sky.

One world had flowers near the puddles, another had clean water in the puddles, another world was in a perpetual state of night. This wasn't an overactive imagination at work, nor the makings of a brilliant novelist. What she saw was just...real.

Now the girl's parents remained supportive of what she saw, though only as much as someone of their normal upbringings could be expected to. They listened to her "strange" tales and smiled and encouraged her. But for all their love, the girl felt this distance, this boundary between them and her.

It didn't just extend to her parents either. The girl had no friends to speak of. There was no one, absolutely no one, who appeared to share her view of the world. She'd get called a weirdo, a freak, a loon. But she never felt any worse for it. She just smiled her way through life, using it as an umbrella to ward off the pain both mental and physical.

She didn't have any friends, but that's never what she wanted. Deep, deep down, she simply longed just to have someone who understood her view of the world.

Life moved on, day in and day out. The girl's mind grew stronger, and her stories stranger. Her parents started to wonder if there was something wrong with their daughter. Her mother, at the very least, suspected that she had inherited her family's ability to sense the supernatural, which had skipped her generation.

But tests came up negative on that front. She was normal. Her brain, normal. She was an odd thinker, certainly. She was a smart thinker, definitely. But neither of that made her a sick thinker. Nothing she did equated to insanity. To the rest of the world, she was simply someone who happened to think differently from her peers.

That would all soon change, however, when she went to high school...

Though her views of the world were different, this girl had a brilliant academic mind and was able to digest any given curriculum like a computer would. Her grades were considered top of the class, which while it may have added to her everyday ridicule, did have its own merits too.

An educational emissary from Kyoto, Japan came to the girl's middle school, having traveled the world over in search of the brightest minds to carry on their education at his high-school back home. He set his eyes on the girl instantly, seeing her as someone of great potential.

Her history didn't matter to him. He never even got the change to hear any naysayers slander the girl's name. He made his offer to the girl's parents, and they were both ecstatic and worried. On one hand, the girl's normal talents were being recognized. On the other hand, her abnormal talents might come under further scrutiny on the other side of the world. And without them around to help her, she might go crazy.

But they couldn't ignore the truth. Their daughter was a lot stronger than her dainty appearance would suggest. An opportunity like this couldn't be passed up. So it was with a heavy heart that the girl be allowed to go to Japan, where she'd be given her own apartment and luxuries to survive with. Little did she know, however, was the day she left would be the last time she'd see her parents in person...

There was some time before she officially started high-school, so the girl spent her days reading up on the native language, and testing it out by wandering the city. She'd gotten so used to life in a normal city that this 'utopia' overwhelmed her at first. Though it didn't take long for her to realize that in spite of the grander scale and prettier buildings, this city wasn't any different from her own.

She was discouraged from discussing her supernatural view of the world by her parents, with them claiming it was because she had the ability to start over fresh with people who hadn't seen her before. Though it didn't work entirely as expected. She was still 'strange', but only because she was a foreigner attempting to acclimate to a new culture.

It was a struggle to not want to talk about the things she saw. There were other worlds in every mirror and window she walked past, strange and bewildering sights that'd spice up any human's droll, everyday life. But perhaps if she were patient, she'd find someone receptive to her stories after all.

High school began, starting off about as normally as one would expect it to. Attendance was called. Classes were given out. Introductions were made. Friendships were formed. But the girl just sat alone, feeling no connection to anyone.

There was something...different about high school though, especially in Japan. Clubs, gathering places for people of similar interests, were encouraged greatly. The girl sought out a list of these clubs, and was almost drawn by destiny to the name of one particular one.

"The Sealing Club"

"Come one! Come all! If you are interested in seeking out the paranormal and supernatural phenomenon of the world, then seek me out every day after school in Room XXX."

The advertisement read like a joke to anyone but this girl. Without a word of comment towards the club's purpose, she wandered off to this room and opened the door without hesitation. The atmosphere of this room was spooky. There were voodoo dolls hung from the ceiling, a summoning seal drawn on a wall with red chalk, and vials of tomato paste made to look like blood.

The girl had almost believed she had wandered into a necromancer's cult...And with a smile she walked deeper into the room. In such a small room she quickly found its lone occupant, a girl her age with a fashionable white suit, brown dress and a black hat with a bow. Her hair was short and brown, and her overall demeanor made her look as mature as adults twice her age.

This curious girl tried to put on a show, bombastically claiming that this was a lair to revive a powerful demon lord. But instead of warding her guest off, she simply sat down and asked her questions on how she'd go about that.

The facade that girl wore quickly shattered as she came to understand that she had found someone who shared a similar, genuine interest in the occult as she did. So they ended up talking to each other for hours on end about the occult. The girl had interesting tales to tell about seeing other worlds, all of which the club's leader tried to rationalize with an objective view and logic.

The leader couldn't deny that there appeared to be some truth to this girl's stories. Nothing about the way she spoke came across as condescending or mocking. She wanted more elaboration on what the girl was seeing, but sadly they were forced to leave the school.

They made a silent vow to meet up again the next day to continue their discussion, and so they did. The leader of the club formally introduced herself as - -, and welcomed the girl into her club. The girl inquired about the origin of the club, and why this girl had such a vested interest in it.

That girl explained how her grandmother had founded the club during her high-school years. That girl's grandmother told her many stories when she was young about how she had succeeded in traveling to another world, and met many wonderful friends there. But she always mourned how she could never bring back believeable proof of her ventures, or find someone to journey with her...

Those stories always intrigued that girl, and so she decided to recreate the Sealing Club when she got into high-school. The girl believed that it was fate that brought the two together, but that girl didn't believe in something as indescribable as that.

Thus, with only two members to their name, the Sealing Club had been reborn stronger than ever before. With one girl's strange ability to see beyond the scope of their world and another's deductive reasoning to rationalize the strange phenomenon they encounter, they set out to unravel the mysteries of their otherwise stagnate world.

They decided that one of their first tasks would be to find an entrance to the Netherworld, of which a picture had been captured by that girl's grandmother and passed down to her. That girl also revealed a peculiar ability of her own. She can tell the current time by looking at the stars and the current place by looking at the moon, making her something of a walking, talking GPS.

With the help of her ability and the girl's peculiar view, they were able to deduce from the photo where to go in Japan in order to find the entrance to the Netherworld. That girl's face expressed the perfect look of shock when the girl's powers showed them that world. It was the reverse of what she normally looked like. Her eyes were lit up like a child's, and her mouth was ajar as though draining every last breath she carried in a single gasp.

They were only there a few scant moments, but they'd never forget the panorama of cherry blossoms. That was the day a friendship that'd last an eternity was born. No words of such a thing had to be exchanged between them. They simply were friends.

Their adventures continued as they pleased. Sometimes they'd just spend days sitting in a cafe after school discussing old occult tales they read about as children. Other times they'd try and seek out the supernatural mysteries of their world. Maybe they'd also just...ride a train all day long. Anything to fill the humdrum of everyday life with fun.

The girl's powers weren't entirely consistent. Sometimes they'd instantly find a boundary to another world, other times they would not. But there was no denying that her powers were steadily growing, and soon consistency became as constant as the natural blinking of ones eyelids.

Though that merely led to a different phenomenon occuring for the girl. She'd come to experience visiting a strange world in her dreams. A world so similar to theirs, yet so different too. There were flowers. Real flowers. Nothing artificial like in their world. Yes, even the wet grass, which tickled the delicate gaps between her toes, was real.

The girl wandered this dream and was ambushed by a terrifying creature that looked much like a mouse. She was frightened for the first time as the creature looked ready to eat her whole. It was certainly big enough to do so. But a girl wreathed in flames saved her life by merely existing, causing the mouse to flee with its tail between its legs and drop a strange piece of paper.

When the girl picked up that paper, her dream came to an end...and that paper came with her.

She showed that paper and explained her dream to her friend the next day. At the time the girl didn't realize it, but her friend was worried for her well-being. Her friend believed that her dream could one day supplant her reality, and she'd be unable to come back.

Through a slow, subtle process, her friend lessened the amount of activities they did in hopes that that dream world would never surface again. And it was quite a while before it did. Before they knew it, they had graduated to a university.

The girl took up a major in relativistive psychology, while her friend took up one in physics. They certainly had the minds to handle such difficult knowledge.

But the standards of society were but a secondary thought in their curious hearts. The girl's friend didn't want to lose her, but realized that it was very, very wrong to deny the kind of person she was. So it wasn't long after starting to go to the university that they resumed their activities as the Sealing Club.

After being inspired by the new of public tours to the moon, the girl had an idea. A bold, wishful idea, but one she pursued without a care in the world. She brought her friend to a fountain in an empty park late at night, where the rippling waters reflected the visage of the full moon up above.

Much like the puddles she pranced about on as a kid, she perceived the reflection of the water as a portal to the moon. She didn't brave this journey alone, however. Her friend was able to come along this time.

When one thinks about the moon, they say 'its an inhospitable rock floating prettily in the night sky'. These two would get to see the moon in a way no one could have possibly have imagined. There was a sea, there were trees filled with peaches. It was a glimpse into paradise, and proof that humanity could still extend its reach beyond the world they had grounded themselves to.

...But no one would believe them. Any picture they took would be seen as a hoax. So they kept this journey to themselves, making it yet another cherished memory.

Their next step was to visit the micro-habitat space station TORIFUNE, which had been left floating at a Lagrangian point between the Earth and Moon. It was said that no life could thrive on this space station anymore, but with the moon as their evidence they vowed to disprove these claims.

They used a shrine dedicated to Ame-no-Torifune as a gateway to the space station, which carried a similar shrine inside. There they were greeted by a flourishing jungle, and wildlife the likes of which they had never seen. The girl saw them akin to the legendary chimerae from Greece.

On their way out of the space station, one of these chimera suddenly attacked the girl and left her arm scarred. Her friend rushed her right to the hospital, but could not explain how this scar came to be. The doctor's were forced to deduce her affliction with normal, human logic, and realized that it was unlike anything they had ever seen.

The girl dealt with sleepwalking and intense hallucinations, and it was believed that if she were kept in the hospital that over people would be infected as well. So she was sent to the mountains for isolation treatment, and was kept prisoner there for a few weeks.

By the time she had returned to her friend, the hardships of recovering from the treatment had made her powers grow more. Now she could see the dreams of that other world while awake, and share her visions of that world by placing her hands over someone's eyes.

Her friend grew increasingly concerned that the girl's powers were growing too fast and too beyond her control. Yet they continued to do their normal activities. They visited that other world together many a time, even seeing places such as Hell.

But when by herself, the girl was slipping deeper and deeper into that other world. Sometimes she'd only be there a couple hours, other times she'd be gone for days. She'd describe these events in passing to her friend like they were no big deal, and eventually her friend grew sick and tired of playing passively.

She screamed and begged her friend to not disappear forever. For the first time in her life the girl saw the vulnerable side of her friend. Her eyes bled tears, her heart raced so fast that she could hear it, and she squeezed the girl's arms so tight that they felt ready to bleed.

The friend commanded the girl not to leave for that other world without her. Because if she did, that meant the dream with nothing in it meant more to her than a reality with something irreplaceable. The girl understood her wish and vowed not to leave her side.

...That was the last time she'd ever "lie".

Human's have been cursed with curiosity. Ever since Adam and Eve were tempted by the fruit from the Tree of Sin, humans have been led astray by the inquires of their heart. The girl just wanted to learn more about that other world in her dreams. She had felt she hadn't known nearly enough. Oh, if only the hands on the clock could be so easily rewound...

Not even a day after hearing her friend's heartfelt cry, the girl slipped into a dream late at night. But the world she visited did not feel the same as before. The trees were lifeless, not even shaking their leaves to the tune of the wandering breeze. The grass was dry, and crawled between her toes like roughened bones. She could yell, but received no answer beyond her own echo.

It was a dead world. A nightmare.

She turned around and demanded escape, throwing her hand towards the lifeless sky in some vain attempt to tear her way through. It was a valiant attempt, but...The universe had already decided the path she'd tread. She ripped open a hole in the boundary of reality, and was greeted by hundreds of creepy, ovular eyes with blank red irises. They didn't move, yet all remained focused on her even as she tried to retreat, dragging her feet like they were made of concrete.

The darkness within this gap grabbed the girl and pulled her right in, sealing the way out. She was thrown to a solid surface, and had the strength only to lift up on her knees and question the eyes as to their purpose. They responded with a dreadful silence, piercing her body with stares filled with knowledge.

What they knew, as boundless as infinity, was slowly imprinted into the girl's fragile mind. She couldn't handle the strain and fell into a deep slumber. Her dreams, once a bastion of wonderment, were now the only memories she had of a time she'd be unable to return to. She imagined herself reaching out to the world she lived in, only for it to become dust beneath her fingertips.

She cried herself throughout the years it took before she awoke again. When she did, the eyes resumed feeding her information, repeating a cycle of rest and pain for many, many millenia. Her body barely aged a day at this point. She looked and felt different, but still believed herself to be the same girl she was long ago.

Her carefree nature was viciously ripped asunder, exposing a delicate maiden who screamed and begged to see her friend again until her throat was as dry as chalk. Her cries echoed through a dimension of entities without cause for empathy towards her plight.

She was alone. Alone and forgotten.

The cycle repeated more and more, with no end in sight. The girl just sat there and took it, tangled in a mess of hair and tears. The bitter realization that she would never see her friend again, and that she likely died not knowing what had happened to her...It drove her mad.

She started clawing at the eyes and at herself, snarling like a beast with rabies. The dress she had kept clean for so long had been torn to ribbons drenched in blood. Yet in its first departure from the norm, the eyes reached out to her and healed her wounds by stitching the darkness between them. Their touch was like a ghost's, like they weren't even there at all.

Then they gave her a new dress, one that reached to her ankles. It was almost as though it had been specifically prepared for this moment. The girl didn't want to believe that to be true, that this nightmare was predestined from the day she was born...So she simply didn't. She denied the truth so strongly that it ceased to exist in her mind.

She tried to communicate more and more with the darkness, but they'd only heed her littlest requests. When she asked to see the outside world, they opened a gap with a grainy view, letting the girl see her planet from space.

She almost couldn't recognize it now. The waters had thinned, the lands were grey and cracked, and perhaps only 1% of the surface had any plant life to sustain itself with. It was a foreign world, almost a fleeting dream...

So she diverted her attention towards the stars in space. In the years that had passed since she arrived, their lights were beginning to flicker out one-by-one. Stargazing reminded her of her old friend, and made her heart reawaken with a heavy pain...

So the darkness closed the way to the outside for good, and gently guided the girl to a deep slumber. More millenia passed for her in hibernation, only for to reawaken suddenly through a terrifying realization. Without a conscious thought, her mind was able to track the flow of time down to the attosecond. The weight of how long she had been trapped in here drove her insane.

She begged the darkness to just put an end to her misery, but it did not answer. She screamed, screamed, and screamed some more until her voice simply died out. It took many years for it to heal, but it was never the same. Now it was deeper, elegant, much like an aristocratic woman.

Who could care about such a thing though? Certainly not her. Certainly not anyone considered sane.

Finally she had had enough of the darkness' irreverent silence. She would control the power that had trapped her, and make her escape. It didn't matter if there was nothing for her out there. She couldn't handle another day in solitude.

It took far too long to even calculate, but eventually was able to twist and channel the darkness into her body. Perhaps it was due to them sharing a supernatural connection to the boundary, but the darkness did not put up much resistance.

Once again, as though this was all meant to be...

The girl broke out through the darkness...And what she saw destroyed any last trace of innocence and hope she may have had.

There wasn't a twinkle of light within the darkness. The sun, so radiant and golden red, was gone. The Earth, her home she had loved so much, was little more than rocks floating amongst a pitch black expanse.

There was nothing left.

Humanity was gone.

The planets were gone.

Perhaps...everything but her was gone.

She retreated into the darkness, and cried. She cried and cried until the rest of the universe's time had passed her by in what felt like a minute.

Then there was a flash, a blinding flash that breeched through all dimensions, and shook reality to its core.

There were many theories on how the universe came to be. Some theorized that it was simply there all along. Others claimed that it was birthed from a single point known as The Big Bang.

The girl had lived so, so very long that she was able to confirm this truth with her own two eyes.

The Big Bang was real. It birthed the universe with a mighty, silent flash of light, heralding the first signs of life. It was a renewal unlike any other.

So in light of this renewal, the girl discarded her previous self entirely, and took upon a new name. She then wandered this new universe and watched as many worlds lived and died over a countless millions of years.

She saw a universe filled with hearts of light and darkness perish. She saw a trio of near omnipotent beings take upon the roles of judging the multiverse. And eventually, she even reached the point where a certain Overlord of the Elements took up his mantle for the first time...

Yet through her ceaseless wandering, the woman felt a vague hint of nostalgia towards one world in particular. It was an old world, filled to the brim with gods vying for power. A shrine maiden, cloaked in red and white, was the last line of defense between the humans and the gods and monsters that roamed the lands.

There was this sense of familiarity this woman had with the shrine maiden. Perhaps it was her brown hair? Or perhaps it was headstrong nature mixed with a caring heart? The allure of the maiden's personality drew the woman to rest in this world for quite some time, and try to make friends with the maiden.

But the maiden saw her as a queer sort of creature. The things she said were so bizarre and foreign that plenty of times the maiden would simply reject the woman's presence. Not that it stopped the woman from persisting anyways, and begrudgingly the two became friends.

Though alas, this was a friendship built upon a terrible ruse. The maiden crafted a weapon in secret to deal with the woman for good, using the friendship as a means to keep her under a watchful eye. Though tragically, not only would the maiden perish before the weapon could be used, but the woman would know nothing of its existence until a couple millenia later when it was wielded against her...

The woman kept a watchful eye over the maiden's descendants as the lands they protected flourished. But the way they were flourishing reminded the woman of some faint dreams she had very long ago. It was no mere coincidence. The world she saw and dreamt of were one in the same.

It had always been real, not a dream. But for some reason, it had been sealed off from everyone's sight.

And the reason for that, she'd find out shortly.

The world was slowly devolving into a war-torn land between gods and Youkai, with humans caught dead in the middle. The woman was torn on what side to choose. She was once human, but could no longer relate to them. Her unknown existence was more akin to a Youkai than a Gods, but joining them would mean turning against her human nature...Potentially forever.

But she rationalized that whatever humanity she had left meant little to her now, and chose to side with the Youkai. This swiftly made her an enemy of the shrine maidens, who saw her as just another creature to be exterminated.

But the woman stuck to her guns, and sought to use her position over the Youkai to teach both them AND the gods a lesson about the mortality they share with the humans. Her plan was to invade the moon, the land of the purest gods, and with hopefully little blood shed the Youkai and Gods would have this lesson ingrained in their minds forever.

Yet she had underestimated the power of the Youkai. There rampaged in far greater numbers towards the Lunar Capital, and could possibly overrun the place if left unchecked. Luckily for her, had a certain Overlord not intervened, then her plan would've failed.

But more blood had to be shed than she required in order to accomplish these goals. And upon reflection of her failure, the woman chose not to take as direct of an approach towards the progress of the world from thereafter.

All the knowledge in the universe meant nothing if she knew not how to apply it.

So she secluded herself in a realm of her own design, using the boundaries of fantasy and reality to accomplish this meager task. Here she would keep a distant watch on the progress of this world, intervening only through the shadows.

The shrine maidens would soon forget about her, but that was ok...It was wrong of her to replace that girl's blurry face in her memories.

Many years later, the Youkai started stirring trouble again, this time out of desperation. Humanity was growing at a rapid rate, but so too were their technology. With the benefits of technology at their disposal, there was little reason to fear Youkai or require assistance from the gods.

Thus the woman intervened directly for the first time in a while, and with the help of other similarly minded Sages erected a barrier to seal off the Youkai and gods from the rest of the world. Many humans were brought to this realm too, and given their own village in exchange for providing the Youkai and Gods with fear and faith to sustain them.

This land would be come to known as Gensokyo.

The woman was able to keep Gensokyo safe for a long, long time. She rekindled her friendship with the shrine maidens via the newest generation, and had even gained her own shikigami subordinate. There were many pleasant experiences to be found in this new and familiar land, so much so that her former life felt like a dream that she had finally woken up from.

But every dream...shall always be accompanied by a nightmare.

One day, the world of Gensokyo was set ablaze. Fires consumed the land in all directions, centered around an effigy of a raging phoenix. The people and Youkai stood little chance at surviving, and it only took minutes for Gensokyo to become lifeless.

The woman gazed upon the effigy for a prolonged period, recognizing a power eerily similar to the Elemental Overlord's. But before she could do anything about the apocalypse, her body swiftly began to decay, torn apart from the inside by the darkness she had assumed was under her control.

…

…

The darkness reentered the girl's body, carrying with it memories of a woman's life that was both in the future and the past. The girl spent the rest of the time in the universe thinking about these memories and trying to understand the truth behind them.

The Big Bang occurred again, unspectacularly this time. Yet there was something different to be found. Amongst the infinite light that heralded the dawn of life was a speck. One could say it was "God" standing in awe of his work.

She kept that image in her head as the universe continued on, flipping through the pages of history so blindingly fast. This time the woman paid very, very close attention to the Elemental Overlord after the failed moon invasion. She found out that he was going to have a successor, a verdict forced upon him by the 'higher-ups' he worked for after a failure to handle the war with his counterpart, the Dark King, in a satisfactory and timely manner.

Linking the destruction of Gensokyo with this successor, the woman tried to assassinate the Elemental Overlord before the events could play out. The 'higher-ups' stopped her, and chided her for leaving her world so casually to cause trouble.

She saw a chance to plead to the 'higher-ups' that the Elemental Overlord would be a threat in the future, but they didn't believe her. They called her insane. So they simply let her go, warning her not to interfere with the Overlord again.

So she waited for the apocalypse again. Waiting seemed so easy now, it was almost sickening. This time, she'd try and connect a face to the demise of the world she cherished. She saw a human face amongst the flames. A human...barely past being a child, had ruined her paradise. But why? Why did this human do this? Was it out of spite? Hatred? Or was nothing more than a force of nature, a force of destruction, given a deceptively mortal guise.

As she was burned away to nothing once more, she reflected upon his purpose, so the question would remain thought of even in her next iteration. Yet as she "died", the woman was greeted by a roar. A roar...from the universe itself.

The next iteration, she kept to herself and tried to pick up more information. She edged closer to "God", hoping to see who he was underneath that strangely placed cloak.

Around the third iteration the woman discovered that she wasn't just retaining knowledge of one timeline. There were multiple timelines, each with their own copy of her, that was delivering knowledge to her past self.

But even still it took a while for even one version of her to see the face of "God"...and when she did, it was an exact same as the one who burned Gensokyo to ash.

So she asked herself again, "Why?"

Why would "God" have her world be burned? What purpose could there be in seeking annihilation of an innocent world?

She hated "God". She loathed "God". That smug face, hidden behind a cloak of self-importance and grandeur, wielded many hands that chronicled the events of the universe...Or so he lied.

The woman vowed to do everything in her power to punish "God" and his little puppet, and save her precious world from annihilation...

So at long last, I can gently remove my hands from the puppet's eyes, and let him see the world through his own once again. He is greeted by an endless sea of stars and nebulas, each one painted a different color from the rest. He freezes in place and looks around. I let him bask in a rather mild confusion, for soon the feeling shall be amplified tenfold.

When I feel he is ready, I call to him with a playful little giggle, and he turns his head around. His brows immediately slant with scathing hatred. I feel his muscles tense up, sending a chill through my bones. I must admit, he has certainly earned the right to scowl at me with teeth so bitten together that it was a wonder they didn't break apart.

He stamped his feet on the ground with every degree he slowly turned around. His body burst into flames I've felt the sting of thousands of times over, but never so as directly as I did now. He would liken his flames to wield the intense heat of a supernova, but to me they tickled like a warm campfire.

I sit up upon one of my loyal gaps, covering my body in the shade of my lovely white parasol while wearing the dainty dark purple dress the darkness had gifted me so long ago. With my mob cap, the last reminder of my past life, centered atop my head of lucious golden locks I stared back down at him with a smile only two inches wide.

...Oh I'm sorry. All of you out there must really be confused by this sudden shift in tone. Forgive me for being rude, this is honestly my first time having to address the situation in such a personal manner.

Not that? No no no, you're wondering why you're being spoken to in "Is" and "mys", aren't you?

I suppose before we continue, there is something I must say.

Ahem...!

It has been a long two years and three months on the dot since I have begun narrating this tale to you, viewers beyond the static veil. Through thick and thin I hope you have enjoyed the experience I have presented to you all this time. I hadn't written this much since I was a young, naive little girl...

But now we approach the climax. As I stand here, face-to-face with the Phoenix of Destruction, I shall formerly introduce myself to you, the audience waiting with baited breath. I am...

Yukari Yakumo ~ The Boundary Who Seized Control of the Narrative

Chapter 29: First Occultism ~ A Violet's Eternal Recursion

Next Time: ...Well, you'll just have to wait and see

Author's Note:

There's going to be a slight break now before the next chapter. Don't worry, I'm doing fine, but the next chapter's going to be a doozy and I need to make sure its all presented perfectly to you, the audience.