Chapter Twelve

I ran down the path, cherry petals fluttering past me in a wake of pink particles.

Just like running in a dream, the thing I chased moved away in lockstep. The black cloud rushed through the trees at my exact speed so I could never catch it – but it never pulled farther ahead. It kept killing every cherry blossom it touched, spraying a blizzard of withered petals at my face.

Neither of those things stopped me. I ran as quick as I could. I’d trip over my own feet if I tried any harder.

“Reimu!” I yelled after the racing black cloud. “Please stop!”

Much to my surprise, the cloud did exactly that. It came to an immediate halt, no deceleration time at all. I was still dashing at full speed. I ended up stumbling, tripping, and barreling headfirst into the umbra beneath the cloud.

If I weren’t a ghost, I would have been covered with scrapes and bruises when I rolled to a rest on the path. It still hurt as if I were scraped and bruised, but there were no actual injuries on me.

As I steadied myself, getting back on my feet, I saw something far more worrisome than ghostly pain. The netherworld around me had changed. The sky was no longer a fog of pastel pink and blue. It had turned into sickly orange with patches of putrid green. Every cherry tree, the whole arboretum as far as the eye could see, had withered and died. They were all blackened trunks with bare, skeletal branches, many of which had snapped off and littered the ground with deadfall like an unbounded field of twiggy caltrops. The streams that loosely webbed the landscape had all run dry.

The sight stunned me at first – but then I remembered, I wasn’t in the mortal world anymore. This didn’t mean Yuyuko’s realm had suddenly dwindled. It just looked this way when I came under the cloud, because...

“Reimu,” I said, looking around. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

“Nothing is even close to being all right.”

Her voice startled me, coming from behind me. It sounded like Reimu, but only after she had spent all night drinking and woke up with a hangover. Her voice was dry, craggy, exhausted.

I spun around, and was startled again to see her. She was a ghost too, but not like Marisa and me. She stood there, the same height and shape as her mortal self, but completely opaque and solid black. Her form shifted and wiggled so that she seemed unstable around the edges, as if she were a human-shaped puddle of oil in quaking ground. Worst was her eyes: a twin pair of lights that swam with harsh white and wrathful red. Her eyes crackled like little bonfires, occasionally spitting out sparks that fell to the ground and vanished.

“Reimu?” I said, trying to accept what I was seeing.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” she said. “Why try to find me? Want to gloat over your kill?”

“No.” I gave her a deep bow. “I’m sorry, Reimu. I acted out of panic in a bad situation.”

“Oh, I know. Yuyuko showed me. Remilia raised you to be a murder machine, so those old habits took over when the violence started.”

“Y-yes. I’m not trying to avoid responsibility. This is my fault, and I’ll do whatever I must to make it right.”

“Good. Then you can hurt.”

Reimu raised an arm, which ended in a fuzzy shape roughly like a human hand. Her eyes flared with flashes of red and white. Magical energy of the same colors swirled into her palm. I winced, looked away, bracing myself to receive some punishment. After one more heartbeat, a magical lance would stab out from her hand and impale me. Her rage, her need for vengeance, would manifest into an offensive spell and nail me to a rotting tree trunk.

I anticipated this as if it had happened a thousand times before. I saw the event unfold in my mind. I was ready for it, willing to endure any pain Reimu would inflict upon me.

… except, it didn’t actually happen. A few red and white sparks spat out from her hand and flickered to nothing on the ground, but that was it. I looked back at her, my stance easing.

“The part I hate the worst,” she said, lowering her arm, “is that I know revenge won’t make me feel any better.”

I just stared at her.

She took two steps forward, coming uncomfortably close. The dark cloud above us followed, centered on her as if she were invisibly rooted to the cloud’s heart. The sky, land and trees all around us remained discolored and dead.

Reimu spoke again. Standing this close to her, I could barely see a mouth-shape moving in the depths of her face.

“Should I do it anyway?” she asked me. “Try out some good old-fashioned eye-for-an-eye?”

“Do whatever you need,” I said. “I’ll help as best I can.”

Her head shook, casting black wisps to either side that fell down her shoulders.

“No, I don’t think so. You want me to. You’ll feel better if you suffer like I did, as if that would make us even.”

“If you’d prefer that I bear the guilt for the rest of my existence, then I’ll do that.”

Her eyes narrowed. Those cold-burning flames snapped as if a handful of leaves had been tossed into them, spitting sparks. A few fell on my feet, stinging pinpricks.

“That sounds good,” she said. “Go and suffer forever.”

Reimu turned and began walking down the path. The cloud followed her. I wanted to yell after her, but I didn’t know what to say.

Maybe this was it – my future was never meant to include Reimu’s forgiveness. We would probably never meet again, eventually both finding our own ways across the Sanzu. A judge in Higan might revisit how I spent my last-ever day in the mortal world, but Reimu would never learn of the verdict. She didn’t care. We were no longer in each other’s lives.

The shadow of her gloom cloud had almost passed when Marisa marched by. She stomped up to Reimu and grabbed her by the wrist.

“Nopes!” she snapped at her friend. “No more of thats. Getting you some helps.”

She literally pulled Reimu down the path. Reimu went limp and fell, pulled by her wrist while her butt and legs scraped along the cobblestones. I couldn’t believe how light she was, seeing Marisa drag her like an old doll.

“Come if you want, maid-girls!” Marisa called back to me over her shoulder. “Probably last chances.”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed.

---

Reimu left a gray-smoky trail that wafted past my legs as I walked along behind them. She didn’t resist, aside from protesting like an unhappy child.

“Marissaaaa,” she groaned. “Let me goooooo.”

“Soons as you stop being dumb mikos!”

We rounded a curve in the path, and came upon something that I could have sworn wasn’t there before. All the little streams had dried up, except for this one circular pool. The water here avoided the withering that killed everything else. Even the water’s appearance defied our surroundings; clean, deep blue, its surface shimmering from the light of a sun that didn’t exist.

Marisa marched up to the water’s bank, dragging her friend behind her.

“Go soaks until you feel betters!”

Back in the mortal world, Marisa didn’t have the upper-body strength to fling Reimu into a pool with an overhead toss. Here in the netherworld, she managed it with almost no effort.

“Oh damn it,” Reimu said in a flat tone as she arced through the air and crashed into the water’s surface. Her smoke trail quickly dissipated in the droplets that leapt and fell from her splash.

I stepped up to Marisa’s side. The water was deeper than it appeared at first, and it seemed to clean Reimu as she sank. Like a piece of loosely-packed ash held underwater, layers of black sloughed off of her. It should have billowed out to turn the whole pool into a muddy gray color, but the clean blue pushed back and remained.

“How did you know to do that?” I said.

“I didn’ts!” said Marisa. “Just seemed like right things. So does this!”

She swung her arm around and delivered a full-force slap to my lower back. In the mortal world, I would have stumbled forward. In the netherworld, I went flying. My hands went up reflexively, but I still smashed face-down into the water.

I sank in, just as Reimu had. The water here wasn’t a heavy, suffocating thing like back in Gensokyo. It felt more like stepping outside on a bright, clear winter day after being indoors too long: cold but clarifying. I could still breathe – or I didn’t need to breathe because I was a ghost? I’m not sure.

Now in the water, I could see the shape of the pool’s basin. It was big enough down here that a typical house from Jinri could be submerged, maybe with just its roof above the surface. Rocky slopes were covered with vibrant underwater flora. There were strange flowers of which each petal was a different color, shimmering moss that seemed to wave along with the refracted light patterns, and long ropy leaves that looped and unraveled.

The basin was roughly cone-shaped. Looking down, I saw her sitting at the deepest point, arms wrapped around her legs, knees to her chin. There was still some darkness shedding off her, but the bulk of it was gone.

I swam downward, kicking my legs, using both hands to scoop water from in front of me out to my sides.

“Reimu?” My voice carried underwater no differently than normal.

Down I sank, eventually coming to sit on a small stone outcrop beside her. She was surrounded by a dingy-grey cloud as the water kept working, but I could see the transparent form of the ghost within.

“We really don’t need to do any more of this,” she said. “I know there’s no point in holding a grudge. Live and let live. Love your enemies. Forgive not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. Reciting cliches like that was literally my day job.”

“Is it harder to practice than to preach?” I said.

“Yeah, but whatever. I’ll get over it. The bigger problem is... I don’t know what to do. I wasn’t supposed to die this young.”

“Me neither. I wasn’t supposed to be raised by monsters who needed human meat to survive.”

Reimu looked up at me. “So now what? Am I supposed to march merrily into the afterlife with my best friend and the woman who killed us?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have any answers. All I can do is offer service. If you need another friend, then I’ll try to be that. If you need a servant, or a bodyguard, or forward scout, then I’ll try to be that. If you want me to leave you alone forever... then I’ll do that.”

Reimu rolled her eyes. She had regained enough presence that I could see her doing it.

“Oh, believe me. Part of me would love nothing better than to never see or think about you ever again, but we’re stuck with each other now. We hurt each other and we acted as allies, at least for a short while. That will be a part of us forever. You never lose the mark that experience leaves on you.”

I tilted my head. Were insights like that the reason my mistress had been so eager for Reimu’s help?

Reimu unfolded herself and stood up. The murk around her had all but cleared.

“Besides,” she said, “I have to follow you into the afterlife. I won’t know peace until I make personally certain that you’ve made amends with each and every one of your victims.”

“You don’t have to take that upon yourself.”

“I’m going to. You want to earn my forgiveness? That’s how. The instant we’re past the Sanzu, you will spend every waking minute working to fix everything you’ve broken. I will be a brutal task-master, way worse than Remilia ever was, even if it takes us ten thousand years. If there’s any justice in the universe, the Higan judges will agree with me and make our arrangement official.”

I thought for a moment. Then I nodded, scooted forward off my seat and knelt on one knee before her.

“So be it,” I said.

---

Our heads breached the surface. We both shook our hair out, sending a spectral spray around us.

“Doing betters?” said Marisa, standing on the bank with her arms folded.

We swam toward her, then climbed out onto land, dripping wet. I shook out my hands, then tried to wipe my face dry.

“Uh, guys?” said Reimu. “Did everything just change?”

With my eyes clear of the pond, I looked around and saw what she meant. Hakugyokuro had returned to its old self; pink and blue sky, blossoming cherry trees. Even the waterfall had reformed at the head of the pond, making a continual pleasant splashing noise.

“This place got a lot prettier while we were down there!” said Reimu.

“Always looked like this. Silly mikos just too sad to see its. Look a lot betters now, thoughs. You two good friends?”

“Friend is too strong a word,” I said.

“We’ve come to an understanding,” said Reimu. “I don’t know about you two, but I’d rather not waste any more time here. Yuyuko said we’re supposed to rest and recuperate, but I can’t rest knowing that judgment waits for me on the other side of the River. I’d rather head straight there and get it over with.”

“I think I feel the same way,” I said.

Marisa snorted. “Impatients for eternities? Guess so, may as well get over withs. Don’t wanna be left alones, so I’ll come toos.”

“But where do we go, exactly?” said Reimu. “I’ve got no sense of direction in this place.”

So far in Hakugyokuro, I had found everything as soon as I needed to find it. That seems to be how the spiritual realm works, and it happened now. I again saw that titanic cherry tree. It stood away in the distance, its blossoms towering over all the land around. It should have dominated the skyline ever since Yuyuko set me loose, but I noticed it only now.

I pointed toward it.

“We should go that way.”

Reimu and Marisa turned. Their mouths fell open, and they both went bug-eyed.

“Oh my god! How is that possible?”

“Biggers than a mountains!”

I walked past them, headed away from the pool and down the trail.

“I think that’s where we’ll find Yuyuko,” I said. “If anyone can help us, she can.”