It wasn’t long until the stone steps passed between two stumps, each still partly painted red. There was always one of those, Darren knew as much, but where the rest of the gate had gone was beyond him. Whatever had happened up here, nobody remembered - at least not that they could remember.

A flash of white made him instinctively fire, the pistol barking sharply in his hands as the slide kicked back. He expected a shriek perhaps, or a simple piece of accursed cloth floating to the ground, bit as he watched, a figure clad in white slumped down in between the trees. Darren turned away from the main path snaking between the trees, inching slowly towards the body with his weapon at the ready. Maybe it was the yokai realm, or the thing that had happened here, but for the first time, looking at whatever the thing was didn’t hurt. Underneath the bundle of whatever white sheets covered it was something unmistakably, definitely humanoid, though its proportions seemed warped with each of its limbs. A patch of dark ichor stained the white cloth where he had shot it, growing as it twitched in its final moments. The metallic salt-tipped rounds had gone straight through, and he suspected they would have whether or not they had been blessed; in here, they were all in their true forms, and in his experience most things weren’t naturally immune to bullets.

A thought popped into his mind, and for a moment, he placed his free hand on the edge of his goggles. If they had heard the gunshot, then they would have swarmed him already…he had time. He grasped the half of the goggles over his left eye and slowly moved it forwards, away from his face. Then he lifted them completely from his vision. Without the infrared emitters it was dark, and he couldn’t see the mass on the ground in front of him, but he simply got the tablet out of his pocket and turned on its flashlight. The mass on the floor was no longer squirming, but it was still definitely a misshapen body bound in white fabric.

Darren left the goggles on his forehead, switched off the tablet light and turned to peer down the dark path beyond the broken gate. What little moonlight made it through the roof of the realm made it impossible to see anything - that is, until he realised the faint glow of stone lanterns set near the ground, intact unlike those ruins from further down the mountain. He couldn’t see movement between the trees in the dimness, but he could certainly sense them. They had him, even if he could look directly at them, and even if he still had bullets left. Which only meant one thing:

He was being beckoned.

Without enough bullets for all of them, the only real way was forwards. He kept the gun at his side as he stride along the path, which quickly began straightening until it was level, and the stone lanterns got progressively brighter. He soon came to a small curved bridge, rotting and decaying and set over a small pair of connecting ponds, now bone-dry. Beyond it, appearing between one blink and the next, set between two more lanterns, was a small structure. A simple wooden frame elevated slightly by a square stone base, with three walled sides and a sliding panel door not unlike the house he was loaned in the village. The slanted told tole roof with curved corners that brought back his architectural interest in the temple’s awnings, and-

Darren gulped. Deep breath in. He took in all of this and more. Deep breath out. He opened his eyes.

The bridge was intact now. Rotten still, yes, but the wood was reinforced by additional beams and planks which had helped it survive for far longer than the previous iteration. Beyond it, the forest floor had been replaced by poured concrete, a flattened rectangular area that stretched up to the base of the shrine building, which now was flanked by more statues - some canines, some draconic, and small reliefs somewhere between a child and Buddha himself, peeking from around the bottom of the trees that made up the perimeter of the now-expansive clearing. All of it had been regurgitated from the woods in between the moments he was actively looking at it, sprung directly from the belly of some terrible beast that had taken refuge in his mountains. Infovores, he knew, loved inverting to present a friendly interior, and he was now standing right in its gaping maw, with the bridge its unfurled tongue, the two lit lanterns on either side of the shrine building might as well being its piercing, burning eyes locked onto him. If he turned around now, it was likely that there would be no forest, no path back down the mountain. They were anglerfish in the inky sea of reality, and these little pockets of comfort and interest were the lure, putting him into perfect striking distance for a ravenous thing unexplainable.

The trap had been set, ready to be sprung. Darren, of course, understood as much what it meant. One wrong move and the snare would eat him up, leaving only residual memories just like everybody who had come up here before him. And that was all fine by him, but then again, he had a job to do.

Darren stepped onto the bridge and over it, keeping his sights locked in the shrine’s front screen window. As he got off onto the concrete on the other side, a figure stepped onto his path, also clothed in the white but stylised with an immediately priestly fashion, its empty slack jaw hanging ajar under its covered face. Impossible to identify under any circumstances, but he had an idea. “Good to see you, Taiko,” he said nonchalantly. The tone was more for his own comfort than any real deductive reasoning. “You’re not looking so great.”

The thing that was likely not even Taiko raised an arm, pointing past him. This too was wrapped partly in white, but Darren could see where the blackened, frostbitten flesh ended and intersected with the white silk. So there had been yokai up here, specifically flying bolts of silk, and they had also been devoured and muddled with whatever people now misremembered or forgotten. The ability of an infovore to take was incredibly dangerous, but the intricacies of conscious experience and the living mind were far too complex to accurately reconstruct. Without real experiential understanding of any persons, the erased would often become melded together, unrecognisable and inseparable, at least at first. No doubt if he kept watching, the real Taiko would eventually emerge, but he was hardly going to give it that opportunity. Darren nudged his way past the thing, ignoring whatever sound it was attempting to reproduce, and reached for the shrine door with a shaking hand.

“Dee?”

It was a whisper, nothing more. And yet he froze.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice as bright and concerned as he had last remembered.

That was all it took for him to falter. The shrine was gone, and before him was a long wooden dining table under a large vaulted ceiling, chandelier hanging from it, but turned off. Instead light streamed in from the massive windows to his left unhindered by the curtains tucked to the sides, bouncing off the wood grains and the shiny frame of the paintings opposite them, displaying some distant relative or other of his bloodline. Before him was a spread of documents, some or all of them required for his passage across the southern sea and to the port that would slingshot him across the stars.

“I’m busy,” he said, flipping over a document to reference a number on the back.

“You’re really going?”

“I can’t stay here.”

“That’s not true.”

“I’m sick of arguing. Can’t you just let me do my own thing?”

He heard her take a few steps closer. When she spoke, it was directly from behind him. “Is this about dad?”

“He’ll never let me be me.”

“We can still talk to him.”

He sat up straight, sighing deeply. “You’re not going to change my mind.”

“You sound just like him.”

Darren grit his teeth. “If you’re not going to help, fuck right off.”

“I am trying to help. There’s a better way out of this!”

“Okay, that’s worse.”

She snorted. “Be that way then. And when you come crawling back, I’m not vouching for you with mom.”

“Yeah.” He forced the snarky tone, trying to keep his focus on signing what he needed. “Whatever.”

The sound of her stomping away and slamming the door was almost too much. It took every fibre of his being not to turn around, to call after her, to beg for forgiveness for what was about to come. But that was what it wanted, and his training made damn sure he knew that. It was a tiny, miniscule leak from his mind, actively being devoured right out of his skull. He brought a hand down to his side, the pen in it turning into a pistol grip, and as he squeezed his eyes shut and felt the tears flow down his face, there was a sharp pang in his gut.

“Nice try.” He opened his eyes, and found himself back in front of the shrine. “Was that everything you expected?”

The interior was lit now, and the silhouette of someone sitting inside was visible through the translucent panels. There was no reply.

Darren tore the sliding door open, coming face-to-face with the backlit corpse slumped inside dressed exactly like how he would have imagined a shrine maiden. He pointed his gun at where its face was mostly obscured by a veil and headdress, but she was smiling. Not in a mocking or jeering manner, just…smiling. It was almost warm in a way. Darren’s hand began to tremble even more; at this range it hardly mattered. There was something about that damned smile. It sapped the rage roiling in his stomach, just enough that he relaxed his grip. A thousand lines ran through his head, cruel and kind, and apologetic and repentant and stubborn and riven. None of them made sense at that moment, and with a sigh, he settled. This was some local deity, some kami-sama warped by the monster it had attracted from higher spheres, likely in an attempt to give comfort to the village that would never feel gratitude for its efforts. Digested as it was, maybe, just maybe, it was still trying to grant that same blessing.

“I release you,” he said.

Darren pulled the trigger.