Chapter Eight

WHACK!

A sharp noise rang through the buildings. It sounded like wood smacking onto stone. All three of us looked behind Yuugi, where the sound had echoed from.

“What was that?” I said. “Part of a building falling off?”

“Nope,” said Yuugi. “Someone’s over there. They’re runnin’ away right now.”

Once Yuugi’s voice fell quiet, we could hear a TAP-TAp-Tap-tap-tap... recede from earshot.

“Gonna go after thems, oni-girls?” said Marisa.

“Nah. No reason to, unless they come sneaking around me like you two did.”

Yuugi threw her third bottle, now empty, off to the side. She stood up, brushed some of the dust off the front and back of her skirt.

“In any case,” she said, “break time’s over. I need to chase down my people, and you girls best be on your way.”

“We’re not sure where to go,” I said. Both Marisa and I got back to our feet.

“I have a guess.” Yuugi picked up the mostly-full wine shelf with one hand, hefted it up onto her shoulder. “I’ll lead ya there on my way out of town.”

---

We followed Yuugi through one of the alleys, out of the courtyard, back to the main road. Her huge strides could have left us behind, but she walked slow enough to let us keep a normal pace. The bottles in the shelf on her shoulder clinked and clanked as we went.

“So, ya said some youkai friends got dragged down here. Were they still alive?”

“They were,” I said. “Still are, I hope.”

“Then it was somethin’ very unnatural that brought them. Even if the oni were still here, it wouldn’t’ve been us. We never wanted the youkai from Gensokyo.”

“In facts, King made barriers to keep outs,” said Marisa.

“That’s right. I’d expect dead youkai to come down, cuz that’s normal. Sometimes if we look close, we’d see their sparkles fly through Jigoku. I’d bet that’s our version of the glow-bugs that ya get in Gensokyo.”

“Th- that’s pretty ghoulish,” I said.

Yuugi snickered. “Sure is! You’re walkin’ the youkai death path right this minute, girl. If ya lived here, you’d get used to it and appreciate the pretty colors.”

She rounded a corner, headed onto a perpendicular road. It was still an uphill walk. As we followed, I looked for signs of the person we heard running away earlier. I didn’t see so much as a shadow.

“Speakin’ of which,” said Yuugi, “that’s where I’m takin’ ya now. The sparkles wander a lot, but eventually they all go to the same place. Straight ahead.”

With her free hand, she pointed far down the road. The cobblestones ran out of town and to the wall of the cavern, maybe a mile distant. Light came from the wall, showing some structure or carving in the rock. I couldn’t see any more from this far away.

“What’s over there?” I said.

“The Earth Spirit Palace,” said Yuugi. “They’re not a part of oni society. A family of youkai hermits live there.”

“What kind of youkais?” said Marisa. “Gotta be crazies versus what we got in Gensokyos.”

“They’re not that weird,” said Yuugi. “It’s just two sisters and their pets. We call ‘em the Espers cuz of the initials of their house: ESP.”

Esper? I had read that word somewhere. It was a piece of outworlder slang, but I couldn’t remember what it meant.

“Ya should try askin’ the Espers what happened to yer friends. Thing is, dunno if they’re gonna show any hospitality. Espers and oni didn’t bother each other, to keep the peace. We worked out a non-aggression pact. Each promised to stay out of the other’s space unless a written invitation was given.”

“So that means you’re not coming with us,” I said. “Even if a strong fighter like you could be the difference between Suika’s life or death.”

She was quiet for a few steps, took in a deep breath, let it out.

“That’s right. Suika knows I’m a Deva. I’ve got responsibilities greater than her life or mine. Same reason I didn’t abandon Jigoku and follow Suika to Gensokyo last year.” Yuugi glanced at me. “I can’t set foot in the ESP, not even if I’m the only oni here. It’d be an international incident, and I won’t risk that.”

“I’m surprised your neighbors haven’t complained already.” I kicked at a broken drinking gourd that my foot happened to pass by. “This whole town is a broken-down mess – holes in the walls, trash in the streets. The battle between the loyalists and separatists must have been terrifying.”

“Battle?” said Yuugi. “There wasn’t a battle. Oni can’t kill oni, so there’s no point in fighting.”

“Then why all this?” I waved a hand around.

“Girl, we had a party. It was a going-away party we threw for ourselves.”

Marisa’s laugh could have been heard anywhere in Jigoku.

---

We trekked through the width of Jigoku, which meant reuniting with the uphill-flowing river. As the buildings grew smaller and sparser, the river came parallel to the road. Both led up to the front of the Earth Spirit Palace. In contrast to the Eastern-style of the oni town, the Palace’s front showed grand Western architecture.

A staircase led up twice Yuugi’s height to the cavern wall. A pair of pillars stood on either side of a great door. All of this was made from stone chiseled out of the wall, every surface smooth and clean. Off to our right, the river ran up to a narrow inlet that must have flowed into the Palace interior.

Torchlight from within shone through a pair of stained-glass windows, just inside the stone pillars. The window on the right was colored into a portrait, a fair-skinned woman facing to the left. She had short pink hair, wore a blue blouse, and a strange thread looped in the airspace around her head and body.

The window on the left had a portrait of another woman, this one facing to the right. Her hair and eyes were both green, though her hair was lighter. She wore a yellow blouse with a dark green kerchief at her collar, and she had a thread of her own looping around her.

“Are those the Esper sisters?” I said.

“Yep,” said Yuugi, “but they don’t look that regal. Meet ‘em in person, and they’re pretty normal.”

We came to the foot of the staircase. Marisa and I walked up the first few steps, then stopped and looked back at Yuugi. She stood one stride back from the first stair.

“Here our ways part,” she said. “Head up and knock on the door, if ya want. Hopefully the Espers don’t mind human visitors.”

“Thank you, Yuugi,” I said. “We would have gotten lost if we hadn’t run into you.”

“If ya wanna thank me, do me a favor. If you see Suika... tell her I miss her. Tell her I’m hopin’ I’ll meet her again, even if it’s years from now.”

I nodded. “I’ll tell her.”

Yuugi smiled, bittersweet. “Best of luck, then.”

She turned and started walking, the shelf of bottles clinking on her shoulder. That sound grew farther away, until it was too soft to hear from where we stood on the Palace steps.

---

Marisa and I climbed the stairs. Just as I set foot on the landing, a sharp KA-BANG! echoed through the entire cavern.

We looked back over Jigoku. Far off, more than half of the cavern’s width away, the roof tiles of some building exploded up and outward. There was a big plume of dust, which quickly flattened out to settle.

“Yuugi didn’t go in that direction,” I said.

“Probably’s other persons we heard run aways,” said Marisa.

“I don’t want to know who it is. Let’s go before they try to find us and introduce themselves.”

We hopped onto the landing and walked up to the stone door. In the same artistic style as the portraits on the stained-glass windows, the image of a raven and a black cat was painted onto the door, sitting and facing each other. Between their feet hung a great metal ring, probably meant both as a knocker and as a handle to pull the door open.

“Oni-girls did say to just knocks.” Marisa pointed to the metal ring. “Want the honors?”

“Not really, but here I go anyway.”

I wrapped my hand around the bottom of the ring. The rough surface of the metal, surprisingly warm to the touch, was the last sensation I had before waking up at home.

---

I gasped, ripped off the blankets and sat up.

“What? How... what?”

I was in my bed, in my bedroom, in my house, in Gensokyo. I had on the nightclothes that I used to wear to bed two years ago.

“How did I get here?” I demanded, though no one was around to answer.

Something caught my eye from out my bedroom window. It was nighttime, but there were no stars to be seen. The sky was filled with haze, colored so deeply red that it was nearly black.

“Oh god, no.”

There were patterns in the sky-haze, mixing and churning. The longer I stared, the more detailed the shapes became. Screaming faces and clawed hands. A young girl beating her fists on the door of a locked room, crying for someone to free her. One man stabbed another through the chest, then ripped out his heart, brought that heart to his mouth and pulled off a strip of sinew with his teeth.

These scenes came with words, huge letters made from different thicknesses in the mist. HELP ME HATE YOU KILL YOU COME HERE KILL YOU PLEASE, DIE DIE DIE KILL YOU PLEASE HELP ME DIE.

“No!” I yelled. “Flandre got better! This isn’t happening again!”

I jumped out of bed and headed for the door. If I had gotten thrown back in time, Marisa would be sleeping in my fortune booth tonight. Intending to rush out to the shrine courtyard, I slid the bedroom door aside and nearly stepped on a cat.

It yelled a MEOW! at me, sitting on the floor just outside my room. Its eyes were bright red, not the pale gold I would expect, and its tail was forked into two.

I shook my head down at the animal. “No, I’ve never had a cat. Where did you come from?”

The cat stood and stepped back from me, its rump waddling. Its fur was mostly black, but showed red highlights as it moved. It had been sitting on a folded piece of paper, and now tapped the paper with one paw.

“Nor have I ever gotten a letter from a cat.” I knelt and picked up the paper. “But I’ve clearly gone insane and I’m hallucinating, so I’ll play along.”

I unfolded the paper, read handwriting scrawled onto it.

You are trapped in a magic ward.

Your witch friend is too.

I sent Orin to you. She will try to guide you out.

I am working on helping your friend. Don’t worry about her. Worry about yourself.

Follow Orin.

As soon as I was done reading, the paper dissolved out of my hand, fell to the floor in a small shower of pink sparks. It must have been a magical construct.

I looked down at the cat. “Are you Orin?”

She meowed at me.

“Can you understand my speech? Meow twice for yes.”

Meow! Meow!

“So you’re more than a normal cat. Where are you going to take me?”

She turned and walked down the hall, looked back and meowed at me, beckoning me to follow. Her eyes were a pair of twinkling red spots in the dark.

I went after her, my bare feet sounding thmp thmp steps on the floor mats. This looked like my house, sounded like my house, smelled like my house. If Orin hadn’t shown up, I’d be tempted to believe the whole underground adventure was a bad dream.

Then again... it would be harder to accept that the last two entire years had been a dream, and I just woken up the night after bringing heavy groceries home under a red-misty sky.

Orin led me through the main room, past my kotatsu, to the front door. She stood on her hind legs and pawed at it. Meow!

I stepped up, pulled the door open, and my eyes went numb from searing white light. Even though my windows showed nighttime outside, the door opened to full daylight. A blast of cold air with flecks of snow blew into me. I winced, squeezed my eyes shut, and wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. This is when I noticed I wasn’t wearing my old nightclothes anymore. I wore a long dress with a coat and cloak, carrying a satchel over my shoulder. My boots were ankle-deep in snow.

I opened my eyes. I stood in a clearing of the Forest of Magic. The trees all around were barren of leaves, their branches caked with snow. Off to my side was a big mound of land with a flat face, and a little mud hut stood at its base.

I looked down at my hand, saw there was a silver throwing knife clenched in my glove. The initials S I were carved into its base.

“No!” I shrieked, and threw the knife off into the woods. “Don’t make me relive this!”

I looked all around, checking if Marisa, Sakuya, Chen, were around. No one was in sight – but if the nekomata came at me, the knife was gone. I couldn’t stab her in the side, which meant Sakuya wouldn’t kill me, which meant I wouldn’t go to Yuyuko’s realm and see the first stage of the human afterlife and—

It was hard to breathe. My eyes welled up, sending tears to cut hot trails down my face. My knees buckled, and I fell to them, so that the snow came up to my thighs. My hands were in fists and I couldn’t open them. I was having a panic attack.

Meow! Meeeeooowowowow!

Orin’s voice took my attention. I couldn’t tell where she had come from, but she ran up to me by taking bouncing leaps through the snow. She shook the white powder off as best she could, then reared up onto her hind legs and clawed into my cloak with her forepaws.

“Wh- why?” My voice was thick. “Why am I back here?”

Meow! Rowor! She rubbed her head on me, like any cat marking a human with its scent. This gesture did something to me. Humans share a bond with domesticated animals, so I felt compelled to give Orin a pet. I ran a gloved hand over her head and back. She arched her back into my touch.

“You’re a nice kitty, right?” I wiped my eyes with my free hand. “Chen wasn’t a nice cat, but you are.”

Orin purred and rubbed up against me. She was youkai for sure, but her acting like a cat did wonders for calming me down. That must have been her intention.

“You must be cold in the snow. Can I pick you up?”

Holding a cat in my arms would make me feel even better, but Orin didn’t give me the chance. She bounced off into the snow again, headed to the mud hut against the flat mound.

She stopped at the entrance of the hut to call back at me. Meow!

“I don’t want to go in there,” I said, “but if it gets me out of this nightmare....”

I forced myself to my feet and stumbled through Orin’s bounce-tracks in the snow. She could hop out of the snow and trot in, but I had to get on my hands and knees. I crawled out of the bright white of the snowy Forest...

… and my bare hands gripped into the moist soil of Gensokyo’s grassland. It was nighttime again. Blades of grass poked into my face. My head snapped up, turned skyward so I could see if the mist was still up there. The sky was clear; I could see the the stars and a full moon – but it was hard to focus on that, because a man-shaped kashoyo behemoth stood over me.

A yelp burst from me, ghyaaa! I rolled to the side, just fast enough to avoid getting smashed by a giant fist made from dead fairy parts. I took a split second to look down at myself, and saw my clothes had changed again. This was my normal going-out dress, except pink and blue, and embroidered with butterfly patterns. The Saigyouji mantle!

The kashoyo monster turned and raised its fist again, readying another downward strike. I held out a hand and willed out a burst of magical butterflies, which would sear the kashoyo with the light of Yuyuko’s power.

Except, that didn’t happen. No spell shot out of my hand. I didn’t have Yuyuko’s power after all. The kashoyo was over me, one second away from flattening me.

ReeeeOOOORRR!

With an ear-stabbing screech, Orin flew at the monster’s arm from the side. She dug tooth and claw into the burned-fairy mass, which knocked the fist aside in a way that shouldn’t be possible. Orin was the size of a cat. She didn’t have enough mass to trade blows with a kashoyo man-shape, but she did anyway.

Orin cut clean through its arm. From that break, the conglomerate of fairy parts dissolved rapidly. The whole monster burst into a shower of pink and purple sparks, which drifted down to disappear on the grass. Orin landed with grace, then whipped her tails once.

“Enough!” I shouted at her. “No more of this! Take me back to Jigoku, or wherever I was!”

She chirped, mrrap, then trotted off into the tall grass. I got up and chased after her. Grass stalks poked up my skirt to whip at my legs.

“I’m serious! What’s next? Are you going to send me to the future where Ran throws a tantrum and breaks my spine with her pinkie? I’ll stand there and let her do it! Don’t test me!”

My vision grew blurry, making it hard to track Orin’s shape in the night. I rubbed my eyes to clear them, but that didn’t help. A feeling of soft warmth spread over me, as if I were wrapped in a down quilt. My senses changed what they were telling me, but not all at once. I went from running through the Gensokyo grasslands at night—

---

—to lying on stone, shifting from one to the other on a gradient. It felt like waking up from a dream, smoothly transitioning from being asleep to being awake.

“Reimu? Marisa? Have you returned?”

I pushed myself up into a sit, feeling groggy. Marisa was nearby and recovering too. She must have gone through something similar to what I had just experienced.

We were on the doorstep of the Earth Spirit Palace, now with the door hanging open. In the doorway stood one of the sisters whose portrait was on the stained-glass windows. She was shorter than I had pictured, but she had the pink hair, and the blue blouse with a pink skirt. When seen in person, her “thread” looked more like a tube, like an external blood vessel. It was connected to her hairpiece, looped around her back, tied into a brooch-shape over her chest, then docked again on her left arm.

Most striking of her appearance: several parts of the tube held up a big, bulbous eye, suspended over her left breast. This eye seemed to be a living part of her. It twitched, it looked around, had a red lid that blinked in unison with her two normal eyes.

“My sincerest apologies for any harm that my ward did to you,” she said.

The cat Orin peeked out from the doorway, looking identical to her appearance in my dream. She meowed at me, then jumped into the woman’s arms.

“Who are yous?” said Marisa, rubbing her face.

“Yes, of course. I know your names, so it would be rude not to share mine.” She bent her knees a little, the closest she could get to a curtsy with her arms full of cat. “I’m Satori Komeiji, Lady of Chireiden. The little one here is Orin, whom Reimu already met.”

“What just ha—” I started to say. She cut me off.

“No, no, please. Time is short. We must walk and talk. Please pick yourselves up and follow me. We’ll get you a hot meal and discuss the task ahead.”