A/N: I myself am much more familiar with Ori and the Blind Forest than I do with the Touhou Project, but knowing a bit from Touhou wikis and by looking at it the series briefly myself, I decided to do a little crossover involving Ori's storyline anyways. Even I wonder how it will turn out.

Completion of "Ori and the Blind Forest" game and knowledge of the "Touhou Project" (better knowledge than me at least) is recommended for the best enjoyment of reading.

Ori will be referred to as a "he" for convenience.

All characters will inherently understand or speak the same language for convenience, also.

The Spirit Tree's words will be italicized with quotation marks, you will know when you see it.

Grammar mistakes will be fixed over time.

The following date has been visibly chosen as to find a way to least disrupt the Touhou timeline, while also making sense of the actual release day of The Blind Forest. Funnily enough, Ori and the Blind Forest will be 10 years old.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the rights to most of the content in this story. They go to either ZUN, Moon Studios, or Microsoft.

Now let's begin.


MARCH 11, 2025

- Marisa Kirisame's House, the Forest of Magic, Gensokyo -

Stormy Midnight

A thunderstorm in a springtime midnight drifts over the Forest of Magic in Gensokyo. The sounds of wind gusting the trees filled the air and rain poured heavily from the skies. The trees shook almost violently as if they were about to timber. Some did. However, the Forest felt... expanded, bigger, than what is usually was in Gensokyo. Something was different, especially with a storm this heavy. Youkai residing in the Forest were also vastly annoyed by this kind of weather.

This night was not a pleasant night for Marisa, who was in her house, struggling to sleep in her bed.

"HRUUUUUUGHHHH!" Marisa whined, whilst using a pillow to cover her ears and trying to dampen the sound of the violent rain. It is sensible for her to have some irritation to nature. Youkai were also scrambling around the Forest, allegedly adding insult to noise pollution, ticking off Marisa even more. The furniture in her house was rumbled a bit too, although not enough to classify as an earthquake. That would be way worse. Either way, this was not one of those normal nights, no less a normal thunderstorm. However, this storm would be a precursor to an insane journey that Marisa would embark in only once in her lifetime.

- Swallow's Nest, the Forest of Magic -

From the words of the Spirit Tree:
"We shall always remember the night"

Just somewhere else in the Forest of Magic, a distance from Marisa's residence, was a large, tall, and otherwise ambiguous tree that is almost double the height of any other tree in the Forest. This tree was massive and had a strange glowing blue orb of light at the top of its trunk, secured in the branches and leaves like it was housed there with a great sense of power. The also shook in the reckless storm as well with its branches and leaves. Some leaves from its branches were glowing white, distinct from the regular green lush leaves it had. Youkai had recently found this tree to be foreign, yet they dub it "The Spirit Tree". Marisa was not aware this tree even existed in the Forest yet.

And then, after some seconds of more gusty winds, the force was strong enough to rip one of the glowing white leaves off of one of the Spirit Tree's branches. The leaf flew away from the tree, like a child being ripped from its father. In the howling wind and pouring rain, the leaf glided in the air, gracefully, yet lost, as if it was searching for shelter. Where would it land?

"When I lost Ori to the Great Storm"

Swallow's Nest is cave-like area, somewhere graphed on a mini plateau in the Forest of Magic. A being, or creature, who resides there goes by the name of Naru. Naru is rather large, burly and thick creature compared to the usual animals in the Forest and has traits akin to a bipedal grizzly bear. The difference from that is that Naru's fur is purple, with her face having no fur and white skin showing instead. Of course, there were her eyes and mouth.

Naru was sitting at the edge of the plateau of her home, looking out to the vast Forest of Magic. It doesn't seem the storm was bothering her much considering the burly physical structure of herself. She spots the flying glowing white leaf that just passes over her head. Curious by the sight, she gets up and starts walking where the leaf was headed. Still following the leaf, it would then land on the cold wet grass in front of her.

Then the leaf started to glow brighter, and brighter, and much brighter, until it flashed and disappeared. What remained instead was a small, white, glowing creature. It was a bipedal creature, had hoofs as legs, arms of average proportion to its torso, a tail, two regular long ears and two short antennae-like "ears" on its head.

"When Naru embraced my light"

Naru took a closer look at the creature. Even by looking at the physical appearance, Naru could tell this was a child. It was sleeping like how a rabbit would sleep, with its limbs cutely tucked and head curled towards its body. Naru then picked up the creature with her arms and held it closely to her belly, hugging it. The child felt the warmth from Naru while still sleeping as Naru carried it back to her home, a cave within Swallow's Nest.

"As a child of her own"

The name of the child... was "Ori".