The High Priestess III

Nozomi

There was a knock at the door, and then, without waiting, the handle turned.

Eli. Eli and someone else.

A death-saturated spirit watched Nozomi from the threshold. The Shadow was from somewhere else, the somewhere that Nozomi was too familiar with, the Eli with a face that shonetoo brightly with a waist too small. A face too bruised and sallow.

Eli stepped into the room. Winter followed.

"I'm home." The Shadow disappeared. Nozomi stared at Eli, the real Eli, as if she had not been overlaid with a vision of a corpse. Tired eyes. Dry skin. Her hair was pulled back with a black scrunchie and curled wildly at the base of her neck. Weariness that Eli always had, that she'd worn her entire life, that Nozomi had always overlooked due to her illusions of intimacy. Just Eli. The most beautiful woman in the world.

"Welcome home."

"You're still here."

"Where else would I go?"

"Anywhere else."

"I can't leave you alone. Even if I wanted to."

Eli kissed her forever. "I'm sorry."

Nozomi pulled back.

"You look amazing."

"Don't be crass, Eli."

They kissed.

Eli pressed her lips into Nozomi's neck. Plush pressure. Light floral aura, half musk and amber. Elegance of tuberose, half swollen in the sunlight; cold and canny gardenia that slept in the shaded garden.

Nozomi softened, she had surrendered herself countless times, the groove of kissing and being kissed by Eli worn into her psyche, as if this were who Nozomi had always had been; the woman wrapping herself around Eli. She made a small noise in her didn't mean to yield to Eli, her reaction was immediate and Nozomi opened herself regardless, with her chest opening towards Eli's.

###

Nozomi wasn't supposed to do this.

They'd kissed in the shower. Heat beat down their skin. Summer loosened their legs and widened their hearts. Nozomi lost herself in the August enchantment of seduction that begged her to roll over and show her soft underside. Nozomi kissed Eli's neck, shoulders, between the blades, the small of her back. Curved and scarred and pale as death.

Nozomi moved to the back of Eli's thighs.

Transparent bruises on budded on her skin

Nozomi pulled back. She sprawled backwards onto the tile.

"Nozomi–?" Eli looked behind her. Her eyes widened.

The Shadow, with its exposed bones and dried blood, threw itself at Nozomi. The blistered hand clutched and grasped towards her, almost begging for something. Nozomi moved away.

"Eli!"

Eli swung her hands in front of it, wild. 'Stop!"

The ghost stopped. It turned its gaze to Eli, arms swung forever, and Eli screamed.

Look for the ghosts.

Nozomi enfolded her psyche on the Shadow.

Nozomi focused her mental hold on the being, the way she felt during a imagined two hands holding the Shadow in place, gripping it, touching something that was never supposed to be touched.

Eli coughed and coughed, spitting seawater, each grain of salt still burning in the wound of herself.

A red curtain raised itself.

"Who are you?" Nozomi called out. "Where do you go?"

She was in a strange forest inside a stage. Endless rows of seating, with Nozomi and Alisa sitting in the front row. Further back, u's, and even further still were gray-faced people in uniforms. At the end, were the faces of unnamed medics, revolutionaries, and children.

Eli stood under the spotlight. She was red. She was a woman on fire. Hands dipped low, feet moving erratically in a terrified rhythm. A pool of blood spread out like watercolor on wet paper.

"You are the most unhappy woman in the world." A voice called out. "You have been trapped, given hope, and betrayed. You will die a swan." Eli leapt. The mirror glinted and vibrated. She was someone else. "You died the way the others didn't."

In the center of the forest was a hut on legs.

Eli opened the door of the hut.

Nozomi was in the audience, at the end of the auditorium. Someone was speaking to Eli. "You will be free, when this is all over. If you pull the threads back into place, you will have completed the task for yourself. Afterwards, you can do anything you want. Be whoever you want."

Nozomi nodded.

"But Eli still has things to do. She has amends to make. Do you understand?"

Nozomi had always known. There were prices to pay for bloodshed and Eli was going to be paying that debt for a long time.

"Will we ever…"

"That's up to Eli."

###

There was a blended presence in the room. Eli, but not Eli. Nozomi watched with horror and fascination.

Another body laid over Eli's. Her aura spiked and surged and changed forms. The spirit within the remote body was alchemizing. Her skin physically altered itself. The woman was a kaleidoscope of facets. Her face blurred and sharpened and highlighted itself. Smooth cheeks. Sunken bone shipwreck face. Dark circles. Glossy lips, a cracked mouth.

Nozomi could only watch. Hair growing longer, nails jutting out into dirty, broken claws, bones snapping. A long, hollow cry.

And then the process stopped.

The woman who looked at Nozomi had seemed to age a decade. Eli had never had an air of innocence the way some young women did, but her air held the posture and expression of a killer. Her face had changed. She must have had her nose broken once. Her eyes set differently in her face, with a scar running through her left eyebrow.

Nozomi knew who she was looking at, but -

"Where am I?" The woman said, Eli's voice in a different cadence, harsher, with a slight Russian weight to her words.

"Sapporo."

The woman looked around and nodded. "I know. Maybe. I still remember this, but it's like a dream…" She said, in a rasped whisper. "I'm not there anymore…" This was neither Eli of the past, nor the Eli Nozomi had known and loved in the present, but someone wholly new, who did not belong to either world, either life.

"You've done something irreversible." The woman said. "What did you do? What have you done?"

###

Nozomi tried to explain. There was so much to explain.

Outside, the snow had gathered heavy on the windows. Wind shuttered the frame of the house.

"This is absurd. To think - to think I had wasted time on such things. For Alisa…" The woman sighed. "We should have gone into hiding a long time ago. And all of this - based around a formula and a machine and , that somehow only Maki knew the answers too." She shook her head. "Maki's caught."

"Caught?"

"Caught the way I was caught. Doomed to do the same thing over and over, in a repetition of what our fates tell us we are. I would know."

Eli semed to know things even Nozomi did not know. "How?"

"I can see our threads too, Nozomi."

Nozomi went cold.

"But you unknotted mine." Eli stood close to her. She smelled like blood and salt, stood with an arrogance of a killer. "I don't know who I am anymore, Nozomi. You've pulled out my thorns and vines." She bent over, gripping her arm. "God, it hurts…"

"Is my Eli in there at all?"

Eli laughed. "As much as my Nozomi is in you. I think you integrated your timelines best, though. You're not haunted like the rest of us. Well. Now I'm not. You've made your own little singularity, without a single formula or meteorite."

The truth of Eli's words chilled Nozomi. She had meddled too.

"It doesn't matter anymore." Eli put her hand to Nozomi's arm. Her hand was so callused, and yet Nozomi felt the same comfort of it. "We're going to be making an even bigger mess."