Epilogue
It was a spring day in Gensokyo. The sky was clear, the weather was mild, and a sinkhole opened up in the grassy plain of the valley.
Six of Gensokyo’s youkai residents were pulled into the hole by an unknown power. Shortly after, two humans went down after them. Then nothing happened for eight hours.
The adventuring humans couldn’t send a message back. No one knew if they had found the kidnapped youkai, or if they were trapped underground, or had died from the fall.
Four people gathered near the sinkhole, set up a simple canopy to shade themselves, and they waited. The Sun traveled toward the western horizon, and they waited. Shadows shifted, and they waited. Songbirds and chirping bugs changed shifts, and they waited.
There was nothing else they could do. They were sad, scared, felt sick inside, and they waited.
Ran Yakumo, shikigami of the Boundary youkai, was there. She had lowered the two humans in, then left to seek help from the Scarlets. She returned to the sinkhole and since then, she waited.
Remilia Scarlet, mistress of the Scarlet mansion, was there. She had followed Ran back to the sinkhole, sat in the shade of the canopy, and worked spells. As the hours passed, she threw down red beams of energy, only to see them splash on the oni King’s ward a few feet down. She tried spells to unravel, spells to smash, spells to unlock, spells to rip apart, but nothing worked. The ward allowed no magic to pass from above. Tired and defeated, Remilia sat back and waited.
Close to noon, a tengu from the mountains arrived at the sinkhole. One of her clan was among the kidnapped, and she had heard that a river kappa was missing, so she came down to the valley to investigate. This was Momiji Inubashiri, white wolf tengu, as she introduced herself to Ran and Remilia. She didn’t believe that the King’s ward could exist, so she dived into the sinkhole and smashed face-first into the ward. If she were human, the fall would have broken her neck. Ran helped her out, after which Momiji sat on the hole’s rim, and she waited.
Lastly, the living doll and Alice Margatroid’s familiar, Shanghai, could do nothing but wait. She was small and couldn’t work big spells. Sometimes in Ran’s pocket, sometimes on Ran’s shoulder, she waited.
The sky changed from blue to the gold of late afternoon. The four youkai waiting at the sinkhole all wondered what none of them dare say out loud.
Maybe the eight missing people would never come back.
It was about then, when worry deepened into despair, that a blue-and-white ball of light shot up from the chasm. It zipped up past Momiji’s knees and startled all four of the waiting youkai.
“What!” Ran blurted, raising an arm to guard Shanghai in her pocket.
The strange light shot up into the air, sped off toward the mountains.
“What is that?” said Momiji, standing up.
Ran tried to keep her eyes the light ball as it flew away, but it was hard to track in daylight. It looked like it was flying toward something. Ran thought she saw the light’s target, but she questioned her own perceptions. It was miles away and high in the sky. She was stressed.
There certainly couldn’t be a sail ship floating near the mountain peaks.
“It’s flying toward an airborne boat!” said Momiji, who has sharp eyes even by youkai standards.
The ball of light had taken their attention, so they didn’t notice a gap opening nearby. It was behind them, a ten minute walk from the sinkhole. A magically-augmented voice bellowed out of that gap. All four of them heard.
RAN! HEAR YOUR MISTRESS! COME TO THE GAP! WE’RE ALMOST THERE!
Ran, Remilia and Momiji spun around. A ways off, arcs of yellow and purple leaped up from the tall grass. Ran was moving at top speed in a heartbeat. The other two followed one heartbeat later.
“Mistress!” Ran yelled.
They sliced through the grass faster than most living things could move. Remilia summoned her magically-constructed ruby spear. Momiji drew a saber with one hand and had a shield strapped to the other. Ran needed no weapon but her bare hands.
Once they had crossed three quarters of the distance, the gap opened fully. A huge multicolored burst of magical energy spat up like water from a geyser. A wave of kinetic force followed, which threw eight bodies up into the air. A final blast of superheated air came just after, stinking of soot and sulfur. The gap snapped shut and vanished. Enough heat had escaped to light a patch of grass on fire.
The three youkai rushing to help saw the people tossed up from the gap. Their apex would be at least fifty feet. A few of them would not survive the landing, so the three youkai literally leaped into action.
With a magic boost, Ran jumped up and grabbed the nearest vulnerable person, the human witch Marisa Kirisame, with a full-bodied hug. Ran oriented her body so that much of their momentum rolled onto the ground at an angle, instead of hitting it head-on. Ran kept her arms around Marisa’s head and back to shield her from impact while they rolled to a stop.
Remilia used her spear to stab a small explosion of scarlet at the ground behind her, launching her up and toward her librarian, Patchouli Knowledge. She grasped a hand on Patchouli’s flailing arm, then used her other hand to transform her spear into a flat, bat-shaped glider. Remilia couldn’t lift off in such a short time, but her glider slowed their fall enough that they tumbled to the grass with no injury.
One of the victims had her own power of flight: Aya Shameimaru, the tengu reporter. A pair of shady wings grew from her shoulders, which she used as aerodynamic rudders. She twisted around and grabbed the elbow of the river kappa, Nitori Kawashiro, with one hand. Then Aya pitched up so she could grasp the ankle of the doll magician, Alice Margatroid, with the other hand. She couldn’t quickly ascend with two peoples’ extra weight, but she could ease their descent. The three of them hit the ground with a few bruises but nothing broken.
The Boundary youkai, Yukari Yakumo, needed no help to land safely. One sideways blast of yellow magic knocked her away from the patch of burning grass. Then she summoned a purple mist that she fell on like a down pillow.
The oni outcast, Suika Ibuki, didn’t bother with magic tricks. She flew straight up, fell straight down, and crashed into the burning grass at terminal speed. She rolled out of the fire to extinguish her hair and clothes.
Momiji saw that of the remaining people flying and falling, only one was likely to be a human who would die from it. She jumped up and lifted the shrine maiden, Reimu Hakurei, in both arms.
That is, she caught me.
---
I was screaming my throat raw, Gyaaaaaaaah! The white wolf tengu cradled her arms under me in midair. I hugged her upper body and held on for dear life.
She didn’t use horizontal momentum to roll us to the ground like Ran had. Instead we went just far enough to avoid the grass fire, then she landed on her feet. Her legs took the full shock of our combined weight. Her knees jabbed up hard into my back, but she had a firm hold on the back of my head so my neck didn’t snap downward.
I still screamed, even when we had stopped moving. I screamed until I ran out of breath.
“If you let go of me now, I can set you down,” said Momiji.
I forced my arms to unlatch from her, and she laid me in the grass. I swallowed, tried to catch my breath, stared up at the sky and marveled at every gorgeous square inch of it. The soil of Gensokyo felt better than my own bed.
Momiji stood up, slid her sword into its sheath with a shiink-thunk.
“What happened to you, human?” she said. “You act as if you just met Death himself in the very maw of Hell.”
Aya had flown over and set down by her side. “You just answered your own question, my dear wolf.”
Momiji turned to Aya and lowered her head in respect. “Mistress Aya, relieved to see you whole. I saved the human here from her fall. Was that improper?”
“It was proper!” I yelled, still flat on my back. “It was the properest!”
“Be at ease, human.” Aya knelt down beside me, took my hand in hers. “The meaning of today’s events is not lost on me. You and your witch friend displayed courage that all tengu will envy when they learn of it. If ever again you meet grave danger and the tengu are able to aid, I will face that danger by your side. I swear it.”
---
Just after landing, Nitori jumped to her feet and sprayed constructed water at the grass fire. Soon nothing was left but a blackened patch of ground. New grass would grow there before long.
Once the life-or-death panic faded, we picked ourselves up. Hugs were shared. Tears of joy fell. Affirmations of relief and love were spoken.
Shanghai popped out of Ran’s pocket, flew over and glued herself to the side of Alice’s head in a full-body hug.
“Mistress!” the doll sobbed. “I am ever so ingratiatedly absolved of all recent worries of the fear of the despair of the separation anxiety that besieged, perplexed, or vexed m—”
Alice stuck a finger on her mouth, shutting her up. “I missed you too, Shanghai.”
That’s when Marisa came over and slammed into Alice with a hug of her own.
“Never go missings like that agains.”
---
Patchouli was shaky, but Remilia helped her to her feet – then propped her up when those feet weren’t steady enough to support her.
“Easy!” said Remilia. “You’ve been through too much of an adventure for your delicate physique.”
“You know only the final moment of it, Mistress. Today’s ordeal was beyond intolerable.”
Remilia smiled. “I can’t wait to hear all about it. You’re back and you’re alive, which is all I care about for now.” Her smile faded. “I didn’t want to lose a second member of House Scarlet today.”
Patchouli looked at her. “What was that, Mistress?”
---
I tried to stand. That’s when Suika threw herself at me like an oni-missile and knocked me back down.
“Rei-muuuuuu!” she cried. “We made it! You saved me and we got out alive!”
“We all saved each other. Otherwise we’d be a charcoal smear in the underworld right now.” I patted her back, then remembered something. “Oh, by the way. We met Yuugi on the way down. She wanted me to tell you that she misses you. She hopes you’ll meet her again someday.”
Suika gasped, eyes wide and face alight. “You met Yuugi? How was she? Did she have two Reds in headlocks?”
---
Yukari composed herself, brushing as much dust and grime off her nightgown as she could. Ran walked up to her.
“I notice you didn’t aim to catch me from my fall.”
“You didn’t need me to, Mistress.” Ran’s hands bunched into fists. Her eyes grew pained. “I knew you couldn’t be dead because the Boundary remained, but... I started to wonder if you would be trapped underground for days, or years. What took you from Gensokyo?”
“The only thing that could have: one of Phoenix’s peers. Yatagarasu.”
Ran inhaled, leaned back. “The three-legged sun crow?”
Yukari nodded. “Merged with a raven youkai, as Mokou was merged with Phoenix. She used us for a ritual that she believed was necessary to save one of her family. She flew away shortly before we popped up here.”
“Oh, no.” Ran turned away. “The raven fled? We saw something come out of the pit just before you returned, an apparition that appeared as a globe of blue and white. Was that—?”
“No, that was something else. Where did it go?”
Ran pointed off to the mountains. “Over to the peaks, but nothing seems amiss now.”
They both looked. The tips of the mountains looked the same as ever. Some snow remained above the line that spring had melted. Wisps of cloud were threaded along the slopes.
“That’s near the shrine I visited yesterday,” said Yukari.
“That’s not where Reimu lives,” said Ran.
“No, Ran. The other shrine.”
---
We all gathered near the opening of the sinkhole. The canopy offered no shade this late in the day, so Ran started pulling the stakes out of the ground. Yukari was about to address the group, but the kappa jumped in front first.
“So that was a wild ride, huh? You all seem like nice people, so please don’t take offense when I say: After today, I never want to see any of you ever again. Thanks for saving my life, and now I’m going home.” Nitori turned and walked away. “Gotta see if I can get ol’ Froggy to do a cleanse on me or something.”
She went around the hole and jumped into the small river. With a quick spell to make her boots slide against the water’s surface, skated upstream and left us behind.
“She has the right idea,” said Yukari, looking back to the rest of us. “All of you should go home and rest.”
“Piggyback!” yelled Suika, like a child might before jumping on an adult’s back and demanding a ride. Instead she pointed to her back, then held her arms to the sides to receive my legs. “I don’t care if Yukari can gap us home. I’m carrying you there myself. Use my horns like reins.”
That was a degrading suggestion, but I was too weary to argue. I climbed onto Suika’s back and trusted my weight to her. My feet almost touched the ground. No one laughed at us, at least not out loud.
“I wouldn’t dare spoil your fun, Suika,” said Yukari. “The entity that the underworlders called Nue came to the surface, and it flew off to the mountains. Ran and I are going to check and ensure there’s no danger.”
“I hope you’re quick,” said Remilia. “Now that you’re back, I could use your help finding Sakuya.”
“Wh- wait, Sakuya?” I looked at Ran. “You said you were going send her down after us. What happened?”
“I tried,” said Ran. “After the rope fell loose, I hurried straight over to the Mansion. I explained what happened, and Lady Scarlet led me up to Sakuya’s room....”
“She wasn’t there,” said Remilia. “I had Meiling and Koa scour the Mansion, and they even checked at the village where Sakuya goes shopping. No one has seen her. She’s missing.”