Chapter One

Picture a young woman returning home from a shopping trip. She’s headed to the Hakurei Shrine after buying some foodstuffs. Slung over her back, she carries a twenty-pound bag of rice, two sides of salted meat, vegetables, cloth, paper and pens.

The path up to the Hakurei Shrine isn’t a fun trip. The place is nestled in the mountains where the foothills end. This means a zig-zaggy path up and up, past thick groups of trees and little streams that run down to the lake in the valley. The girl’s ears pop from falling air pressure as she climbs. She breathes deep to keep from getting light-headed. She’s sweating, even though the air is cool. There’s no sun out to heat the day.

After leaving the packed dirt path behind, she comes to the hundred stone steps that lead up to her home. She’s happy to be back, but the sight of stairs is a bitter one.

“No wonder I don’t get more visitors,” I said.

Up I climbed.

---

My name is Reimu Hakurei. To use the old language, I’m a miko. The modern translation is shrine maiden. A miko lives and works at her shrine. She cleans the place, patches holes in the roof, sweeps the courtyard with a bamboo broom. Her doors are open to those in need of spiritual guidance. She talks people through their problems. She organizes festivals and get-togethers, sells fortunes to love-struck teenagers, then helps children catch goldfish out of artificial ponds with tiny fishing nets.

Heavy lifting isn’t in the job description. Maybe I should hire someone to go grocery shopping for me, or so I thought as I stepped into the courtyard, under the torii gate at the Shrine’s entrance. Being home made the burden on my back feel lighter.

I looked up to see the Boundary – but in my weariness, I’d forgotten about the weather problem. Despite how close I was to the Boundary, I couldn’t see it. During the day, the Boundary usually dances with sunlight. It shifts with patterns of all colors like rainbow crystal, starting at the mountains and reaching up farther than the eye can see. Clouds on the other side look psychedelic and spectral, like puffy gemstones in the sky.

Even better is seeing the Boundary during a full moon. The moon’s lesser light ignites the Boundary into a hypnotic swirl of pastel color. I’ve guessed that it’s at least as pretty as the auroras that some outworlders see. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and it’s a big reason why I love living at the shrine.

This is why my heart sank when I looked up and couldn’t see the Boundary – at least, not the way I like it. It wasn’t the lovely prismatic colors that I can stare at for hours. Instead it looked like a pane of dirty glass. There was no sunlight for the Boundary to reflect. No one in Gensokyo had seen the sun for days.

I set my groceries down on the cobblestones, turned and looked up at where the sun should have been. In its place, there was an orange-red coin hanging in the sky. Around it was an aura of rusty mist. The rest of the sky was a blanket of smog, darkening to mud brown at the horizons.

“These aren’t rain clouds,” I said to myself. “It’s worse than yesterday, too.”

It might keep getting worse, maybe until there was no sun at all. No one would know when it was daytime. Crops wouldn’t grow, leaving us nothing to eat. The snow in the mountains wouldn’t melt, leaving us nothing to drink. If the mist didn’t blow away, everything in Gensokyo would die.

I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. When down in the valley, I talked to people. I chatted with the merchants and farmers, asked how the kids are doing. Did so-and-so get married? How is business going? By the way, might your make its way up to the Shrine soon? I wasn’t going to mention it, but we’ve got a big discount on fortune telling right now.

People were worried. I could tell not because people were talking less, but because they were talking more. I learned that three new babies had been born. The parents forced me to memorize their names. The livestock weren’t eating enough, because youkai roamed the fields more freely these days. Soft hemp and cotton were selling better than ever, so things balance out. Did you hear that some guy kissed some girl behind the blacksmith’s place? They best keep it secret from the parents, or heads would roll!

All the gossip told me one thing: people were scared. Their families were threatened by an unknown danger, and they could do nothing about it. People tried to be happy, tried all the harder because something wanted to take their happiness away.

I was scared too. I wanted to help. I wanted to make things better. But what could I do? I’m just a miko. At best I can chase infestations of youkai out of my shrine. I’m not an elementalist. I can’t write a spellcard that makes clouds go away, especially not when someone else’s spell put them there in the first place.

I folded my arms around myself. What if it was magic blocking out the sun? A sorcerer strong enough to darken the sky must be god-like. Even if he could be tracked down, I couldn’t imagine how to stop such a creature.

More importantly... why? If some super-magician caused this, he would have to know that blocking sun would kill Gensokyo. Who could hate people that much?

I shivered, and not because of the chill air. I looked up at the sun, and my eyes didn’t hurt. That was wrong. You can’t to stare at the sun without going blind. I looked down and shook my head. What does a good miko do when frightened and confused?

She meditates.

---

A Western priest would call this prayer, asking for the guidance of a supreme deity, but I’m not a monotheist. An imam in a mosque would lead his flock to touch their heads to the mats, but I wouldn’t practice in a group. Buddhists are more familiar for me, but the image of ornate temples with big golden statues is never one I identified with. A good miko is humble and non-materialistic. She doesn’t need porcelain idols or padded floors to commune. She’s not above kneeling on the ground, even if it hurts her knees and gets dirt on her dress.

I find that praying in an uncomfortable position can help. It reminds me of the real world and, for me, that’s what meditation is about: getting in touch with reality. It sheds all my doubts and fears, seeing the world as it really is.

I knelt there and focused. It soothed my anxiety, just until I heard a soft swish swish sound behind me. I felt warmth on my back. I panicked. Don’t turn your back on food while outdoors in Gensokyo.

A small dance of fairies gathered towards my groceries. The largest of them was the size of a child’s doll, about eight inches tall. She had two pairs of wings that glowed with blue light, and wore a frilly white-on-blue ballroom dress. The smaller fairies following her were naked or nearly so. They had only one pair of wings each, which didn’t glow as brightly as their leader’s.

While my back was turned, they floated out of the woods and crossed the courtyard. Their tiny feet never touched the cobblestone, so I heard nothing until their wings were flapped nearby. They settled on the ground, interested in my hard-earned food. They gathered towards the meat, but the largest fairy knocked her minions away with her wings. She would have first pick of the good stuff. The smaller girls would settle for dry rice grains until their leader was full.

That was, only if I sat and watched.

“Hey!” I reached after the big fairy, intent to grab her by the wings and throw her back into the woods. She saw me coming, wrapped her hand around my forefinger, pulled it down to her mouth and chomped.

“Ow!” I yelled, pulled my hand back and shook it out. I stood up and backed off, then checked my finger for damage. The skin on my fingertip was dented but not broken. A miko’s calluses had just saved me from catching a disease, like my blood clotting up and ejecting from my body in vomit and diarrhea, or my hair falling out and not growing back for six months. Some magical pathogens are deadly, and some are just embarrassing.

“You little beast!” I yelled at the fairy.

She ignored me, tore open the cloth sack that held the cured meat. The smaller ones had already started on my rice, popping in one grain at a time and crunching them down.

“You’ll regret this,” I said. I walked around the fairies and headed up to the main building of my shrine. My bamboo broom stood against the wall, right by the front door. I grabbed it and ran back down the courtyard, ready to whack Little Miss Fairy Pants right out of Gensokyo.

Again, she saw me coming. I swung the business end of my broom down at her, but her wings carried her up and back so I missed. I scattered the smaller fairies working on my rice, and hit the bag of rice itself. The impact pushed a burst of rice grains out across the cobblestones.

“Agh! No!”

I wasted a precious second lamenting my lost rice. The big fairy flew straight at me, her face twisted in anger. I lifted my broom to swat her out of the air, but she dodged aside. I missed her again, but at least it kept her away from me.

I swung my broom again, and she dodged again. I felt like an old man trying to swat a house fly with a rolled-up piece of paper, except my fly was a lot bigger, and she got ever closer to biting my nose off.

“Oh noes!” said a voice from the courtyard entrance. “Reimu’s locked in mortal combats!”

I had time to turn and look at the voice’s owner. I had enough time to say, “No! Don’t you—”

“Don’t worries!” She ran forward and held up a small piece of paper. “Stand asides! Love sign: Master Spark!”

---

I was stupid enough to look straight at her when she used the spellcard. The daytime sun was no longer bright enough to hurt my eyes, but this certainly was. White light erupted from the girl’s hand, shot out in a beam that seared across the courtyard. If I had been standing two feet to the left, it would have punched a hole clean through my chest.

The spell caught the fairy dead on, but it didn’t last long. As the spell’s caster was running forward, her foot slipped on the rice grains I had spilled. If she were more careful she might have kept her balance, but this girl was neither careful nor balanced. She fell to the cobblestones and lost control of her spellcard. The beam of light angled up, shooting off into the sky.

The light died out, leaving me with red afterimages. I rubbed my eyes with my free hand, then looked back to see the damage.

The spell had knocked the fairy to the other side of the courtyard. What little of her hadn’t vaporized did so now. Her flesh and clothes dissipated into little sparks.

I smiled. Bitter satisfaction. This battle with the youkai was won.

Content knowing my nemesis was reduced to her base energies, I went to check on the new girl. She was still prone on the ground. I nudged her shoulder with my broom.

“Marisa?” I said. “Are you dead?”

She looked up, grinning with grains of rice stuck to her face.

“Nopes!” she said. “Just fines. Loves coming over to plays, Reimu. Never fail to entertains.”