Chapter Three

I lay in the dark for a long time, but morning’s first light through the windows did wake me. I must have gotten at least a couple hours of sleep. I didn’t feel well-rested, but this was no time to sleep in. Daylight would end sooner than anyone wanted.

I got up, collected my clothes, got dressed in the bathroom, then re-packed my bag for the trip. Me walking around seemed to rouse the others. I heard a door open elsewhere in the house, probably Reimu’s bedroom. Marisa sat upright and rubbed her eyes when I went back into the front room.

“I hope you two can get ready quickly,” I said. “We should go as soon as possible.”

Marisa cleared her throat, uh-HUMs.

“Not going all the ways to Remi’s place in one shots,” she said, her voice raspy from waking. “Gonna spend tonights at my places in the Forests. Small detours, but makes trips a lot easiers.”

“That’s fine, but even if we set out right now, we’ll reach your place after dark. I can make some okayu while you two get ready, if that gets us out the door quicker.”

---

Reimu and Marisa were ready to go soon enough, no further coaxing required. None of us took the time to bathe, since we would be grimy from the trail within a couple of hours anyway. We shared a quick breakfast of porridge, bundled up in our heavy dresses and cloaks, then we were out the door.

It was still snowing, but not as heavily as last night. There had been ample snowfall and wind to erase the tracks of the sword-wielding woman. The courtyard’s white blanket was smooth again, until the three of us waded across to the torii gate.

On the chance that Reimu or Marisa might notice some sign I had missed, I tried to take their attention.

“A cloak isn’t enough to keep us warm all day out here,” I said, “so Patchouli gave me these. Let’s each use one.”

I held up two spellcards for them, while keeping a third for myself in my other hand. Reimu and Marisa each took one, and both read the handwritten text.

“Huh,” said Reimu. “I think this is a reference to St. Elmo’s fire.”

“Could be,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Patchey does like elemental-styles,” said Marisa. “Real good compositions on this, toos. Spell uses nearby wild energies plus a clever blanket effects, keeps heat closes. Could keep warm forevers, until the caster gets wets. Should show this to doll-girl neighbor in the Forests. Wanna study Patchey’s works.”

I had no idea what Marisa was talking about either, but I didn’t let that stop me.

“Just use the stupid thing,” I said. “I have more. If we make it to your house tonight, you can have one to study.”

Marisa sighed. “Everyone says staying alive’s a bigger deals than pursuit of knowledges. Boring way to lives.”

She activated the spellcard, creating the flaming bird-shape above her head, coating herself in a local pocket of warmth. Reimu and I did the same. It was still uncomfortable and tiresome to trudge through the snow, but at least we wouldn’t freeze.

“Marisa’s right,” said Reimu. “Patchouli knows her st— ow!”

We all three stopped. Reimu hopped back and shook her right leg, as if she had stubbed her toe.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I said.

“No,” said Reimu. “It just surprised me. My foot hit something.”

She bent over and dug out the snow with one hand. Throwing handfuls of powder aside, she soon found a silver glint poking up from the white.

Reimu stood up straight, pulling one of my knives from the snow. She held it up, looking at me across the tip of the blade.

“Sakuya? Why is this here?”

“It was last night,” I said. “I thought I heard a wild youkai or some other threat. I threw one knife, but I must have been mistaken. There was nothing out here.”

“She woke me ups with the front door opens,” said Marisa.

“All right,” said Reimu, lowering the knife. “For future reference, if you ever visit my home again, you’re not welcome to leave your murder weapons lying around.”

My heart beat hard once. Sudden anger burned in my gut.

“I understand,” I said, my voice flat. “Keep that one. You might encounter some nasty monster out here. Speaking of which—” I dug one hand into my bag. “— I have extra spellcards for combat. You should take a few.”

---

We went under the torii, then made it down the stairs without injury. From there, we started down the slope of the mountain path. Our boots quickly sunk into the snow. We had to choose between plowing our feet through, or lifting our knees up with every step. It was slow going, but we trudged on in silence. None of us were comfortable enough for chit-chat.

The daylight strengthened a little as we hiked down the mountain. Slowly, little by little, the trees thinned out. The woods opened, and we could see the snow-caked Gensokyo laid out before us.

“I’m just now realizing,” said Reimu, breaking the silence. “The whole valley is completely buried. How can we follow the roads if we can’t see them?”

“Don’t worrys,” said Marisa. “Hakkero’s got a homeward beacons, can light up the trails in the Forest of Magics.”

“That still means we’ll be cutting cross-country up to the woods,” said Reimu. “We’ll have to walk carefully so we don’t step into a hole and twist an ankle.”

The downward slope finally leveled out. The mountainside woods opened up to the grasslands. We had reached the valley floor. Here we would have turned left to begin the long walk to the Forest of Magic, but that’s when a giant snowman attacked us.

---

It happened just that suddenly. There was no warning. A thirty foot-tall snowman rolled around from behind a protruding patch of the woods and barreled towards us.

This snowman didn’t have any vegetables in its face for a nose, nor coal lumps for eyes, nor twigs in its sides for arms, but its shape matched the snowmen that the village children grew sick of building months ago. Its bottom was the size of a small house, but it skated along the snow’s surface in silence.

I wasn’t the first to see it. I knew something was wrong only by the horrified look on Reimu’s face. She pointed behind me and shouted, “What the hell is that thing!”

Marisa and I turned and saw it. There was no time for quips or strategy. Raw panic-fueled survival instinct kicked in.

“Run!” I yelled. “Back to the trees!”

Marisa took Reimu’s hand, and they bolted. Neither of them could outrun me on the best of days, and the snow slowed them further. I pushed at them from behind. The woods ahead were dense enough that the monster snowman wouldn’t fit between the trees, but it was closing on us too fast. Within ten seconds, it would overrun and crush us.

As if to mock its own silence up to that moment, the snowman yelled as us.

“Your debt payment is due!”

It was so loud that it hurt. Everything in me vibrated: my bones wanted to shake free of each other, and my muscles wanted to melt. I think I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself. The snowman’s yell echoed to the mountains and back again. Its voice sounded like an angry little girl yelling a thousand times louder than any human could.

There was no time for subtlety or grace. I shifted, but Reimu and Marisa were too close to me to be affected. I still had my hands on their backs. For the first time ever, I carried two people into frozen time along with me.

It felt like a camper who shoulders his bag to find it’s five times heavier than expected, only the extra burden weighed on the inside of my head rather than my back and shoulders. My eyes unfocused as a headache cracked through my skull. I ignored the pain, kept pushing Reimu and Marisa toward the relative safety of the trees.

“What just...?” is all Reimu could say to experiencing my shift for the first time. She didn’t understand in the heat of the moment.

We kept running for the trees, kicking snow out of the way as we went. Every step sent agonizing waves of force through my head. White patches bloomed in my vision, and I was deafened by a screeching hiss in my ears.

The snow on the ground was shallower under the trees, because the canopy offered some protection against winds and snowfall. Reimu and Marisa made it over the final drift and ran in between the trunks. I had fallen too far behind to keep them unaffected by my shift, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t hold it any longer.

Bringing two extra people along was far more effort than I expected, so much that I regretted it. I lost control of my limbs. My left shoulder banged against a tree trunk, but I didn’t feel it. My legs went limp and I fell prone, but I didn’t feel that either. The right side of my face pressed into the snow.

My hearing and vision began to clear, and my body might have started working again if I could rest for a minute – but I didn’t have a minute. The giant snowman was moving again, perhaps surprised to see its prey teleport up the slope and mostly make it into the woods.

“Sakuyas!” Marisa screamed from up ahead.

“I’ll get her!” came Reimu’s scream next. “Shoot it, Marisa! Shoot it!”

“Love sign!”

The snowman had reached us. It crashed into the line of trees, ramming most heavily into the thick pine beside me. The trunk bent under the impact, sounded out the deep cracking-whining of wood threatening to splinter apart. The ground at the tree’s base puckered up, its roots partly tearing free from the earth. The snow stored in the tree’s branches shook loose and rained down.

I would have been completely buried in snow, immobile and suffocating, if not for Reimu. She had run over, fell to her knees beside me, planted one hand on my back, and held a spellcard up in her other hand.

“Guard sign: Duplex Barrier!”

“Master Spark!”

Two spells fired at once. Reimu’s spell created a shield to cover us. Multicolored patterns of squares and octagons contorted into a dome which pushed away the snow that would have drowned us. That snow fell off and flew across the ground in all directions. Reimu was completely within the spell’s effect, but it had only covered me down to my waist. My legs were buried and pinned.

Marisa’s spell sent a beam of light searing through the air over our heads. It didn’t melt the snowman with heat, instead slamming into it with brute physical force. Snow blasted out the back of its body in a spray of white.

The voice screeched out in protest.

“Stop it, warm bodied-humans! Just freeze already!”

The voice was still enough to make my ears ring, but it wasn’t as loud as before. Marisa moved her light beam up and down, impacting new parts of the snowman’s body. More snow dislodged and sprayed out its back. She caught some tree branches in the beam, snapping them off in little bursts of snow and pine needles. It was a strain for Marisa to keep her spell up so long. She let out a yell of exertion, Yeeeaaggh!

The snowman tried to disengage from the trees and roll its bulk backward, but too much of its body had been ripped away. There was no longer enough matter for its spells to hold together. The snowman lost its shape and dissolved into a mountain of inanimate snow, the edge of which had buried me to my waist.

---

The two spellcards faded. Everything fell quiet. The pine tree was halfway ripped up from its roots, but it didn’t look ready to tip over. I was on the ground, but quickly regaining control of myself. Marisa, a few strides further into woods, had fallen on her butt. She had dropped her hakkero and her arms were shaking.

“Reimu?” I said.

She knelt in front of me, trying to catch her breath.

“Is it...,” she swallowed, “is it dead?”

“I think so.” I tried to push myself up with my hands on the ground, but my bottom half was stuck. I wiggled my feet, then rocked my hips back and forth, but I couldn’t get far. It’s surprising how solid snow is when you’re buried in it.

“Reimus! Sakuyas!” Marisa was on her feet, stumbled once as her foot caught an exposed root, then jogged over to us.

“What is this thing?” said Reimu.

“S-something’s in its!” said Marisa.

I twisted around to look back. A bulge grew out from the side of the snow mound, as if a burrowing animal were digging a hole up to the surface.

“Oh no,” said Reimu. “That can’t be—”

“Help me out!” I snapped. “Now!”

Reimu grabbed one of my arms, and Marisa took the other. Both using their full body weight, they pulled back, trying hard to yank me from the snow. I scooted back and forth, pushing the snow-pack aside to free my legs.

They pulled me far enough that I could get to my hands and knees. My head had mostly cleared, and my limbs obeyed me again. I was standing just in time to see a single hand burst out from the snow mound. It waved around as if feeling for something to grab. The hand found a dead branch hanging off the tree’s trunk. Using that leverage, the hand’s owner pulled herself out from the snow mound, exposing her head and the tops of her shoulders.

“Oh my god!” said Reimu. “It is you!”

A little girl had emerged, with short light-blue hair topped with a darker-blue ribbon. She spat twice to clear snow from her mouth, p-teh! p-too! Then she locked her eyes on us and scowled.

“How dare you!” she said. “You’ve destroyed Cirno’s greatest creation, the Gunky!”

I looked at Reimu. “Do you know this youkai?”

“She knows Cirno!” said the girl. “Cirno has come to collect the debt she’s way past-due on!”

She dug out from the snow, revealing the rest of herself. She wore a simple blue dress which left her hands and feet bare. A set of crystalline fairy wings stood off her back, though they were caked in snow. She tried to stand upright before realizing her left leg wasn’t completely free, so she lost her balance and tumbled down the snow pile. Her back smacked into the tree trunk on the way down, leaving her on the ground with her face in a grimace.

“Ow!” she said. “Cirno feels pain!”

“Not yet,” I said, stepping forward.

She got her hands and knees under herself. I let her do that much, because it gave me enough room to pull a leg back and swing a kick straight into her gut. My boot impacted with a whump noise, knocking the fairy onto her side and forcing a hacking cough out of her.

“Sakuya!” yelled Reimu, her tone that of a scolding parent.

I pressed my attack. Before Cirno could get up again, I had pinned both of her arms to the ground with my knees. With one hand, I grabbed her hair and forced her to look up at me. With the other hand, I whipped out a knife and pointed it to her throat.

“Now you feel pain!” I yelled into her face. “Why did you attack us, you icy runt?”

“Because of her!” said Cirno, pointing to Reimu with one of her pinned hands. “She owes Cirno! She agreed to get frozen!”

I glanced back at Reimu.

“She’s... she’s not lying,” said Reimu. “She and I made a deal, so she helped us across the lake to reach the Mansion last summer.”

“Are you serious?” I said. “You made a deal with a fairy?”

“Seemed like good ideas at the times,” said Marisa. “Had to reach Mansions quicks. Didn’t know how much times we hads.”

“See?” said Cirno. “Now please, get off Cirno! The wrath of winter is on you!”

I yanked back on her hair, pulling her head against the ground. My knife had a clear angle to pierce her throat, if I chose to. She struggled, but she couldn’t get out from under me.

“Great job, Reimu,” I said, ignoring the fairy. “That means we have to put her down.”

“No you don’t!” said Reimu, stepping forward. “Look, she’s beaten. She knows she can’t fight all three of us.”

“That’s not how fairies work!” I spat back at Reimu. “They will always come to collect, tomorrow if not today.”

“Then why didn’t icy-girls show up ‘til nows?” said Marisa. “Cold weather’s been around plenty longs.”

“I haven’t left home since the snows got this bad,” said Reimu. “It’s been so awful-cold that it made more sense to stay in, at least until I ran out of supplies.”

“That’s right!” said the fairy under me. “Long has Cirno lain in wait, until finally she came down the mountain. You can’t stop Cirno from collecting a debt, or winter itself will find you.”

“Cirno, listen!” said Reimu. “If you want to live, you need to forget about my debt. If you promise to leave me and my friends alone forever, we’ll let you go.”

I shook my head at Reimu, glaring at her.

“C-can’t promise that,” said Cirno. “D-debts have to be paid. Cirno will find help!”

“Then go find your help,” said Reimu, “but understand this is your last chance. Attack us again at your own peril. Sakuya, let her go.”

“This is a mistake,” I said. “When she comes back, don’t expect me to help again.”

“I don’t. Let her go.”

I leaned back far enough to take my weight off Cirno’s arms. She wriggled out from under me, then scrambled back to her feet. She stepped back from me, but remained close to the snow mound. She stuck one leg in, and the snow parted to her as if she had stepped into water.

“You’ll regret this, warm-bodied humans,” she said. “Cirno will see you all killed three times each! Do you know how many deaths that is?”

That last part sounded like an actual question, as if she wanted help with the math. She didn’t give us time to answer, instead diving back into the snow mound. She burrowed away, the crrmp crrmp crrmp sound of compressing snow rapidly fading to silence.

Cirno had dug past the snowman’s remains, and into the field beyond. She was gone.

I stood up myself, brushing the snow off my dress. I took in a deep breath, let it out.

“We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t find us again before tonight,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”