In the months following the ritual, the ever-present storms that wracked Daizo-Shikigami had vanished completely. No more was the constant veneer of dark clouds, the erratic and almost malicious lightning strikes, the black shadow that infected the local yokai, turning every attempt to expand out from the landing site and the summer a palace from what should have been relatively normal construction jobs into the deadliest undertakings ever since they had arrived. In their absence, the sky was filled with the twinkling lights of an innumerable number of other worlds, many of which the human race had set foot on and bent to their will. For Daizo-Shikigami to join the ranks of the conquered, given its unique circumstances that rendered it particularly resistant to colonisation, was absolutely unprecedented. When word had reached the shogunate, the bakufu officials scrambled to change their narrative, their poisoned gift having unexpectedly borne greater fruit than any they had imagined. There they now sat, in the shade of an extravagant pavilion with its parts flown in from some more prosperous world, surrounded by a small battalion of samurai officers and their rifle-wielding ashiragu, untouchable in the presence of a community that they had expected to die a slow and painful death. The sentiment was thick in the air, but none spoke of the irony; all eyes were locked on the ceremony in the middle of the courtyard, between the flames of the braziers that formed the perimeter of a makeshift stage.

The performers consisted of masked men and women, currently re-enacting a scene where a storm god listens to the pleas of his subjects, having had to sacrifice yet another of their children to the eight-headed serpent, as they did annually. A story as old as time, or so the books told Kofuku, standing on her tiptoes to see the dramatic dialogue and exaggerated movement that defined that form of theatre. At seven, she was barely taller than any of the other children, but standing up on her chair whilst the other palace attendants sat around her was sufficient to give her a good look.

“Kofuku-hime,” one of the guards sitting to her left said, gently reaching up and tugging the sleeve of her dress. “Please get down. It’s quite improper to be standing like this.”

“Shh!” She shook him off, her eyes glued to the performance. The storm god spun, and with a poof! Became a gilded comb in the hair of the couple’s final daughter. Beautifully as she was portrayed, there were characters Kofuku found herself liking more than she.

She began to hop in excitement when the storm god turned back into his human shape, and with a gigantic prop sword, struck the four actors whose arms puppeteered the heads of an intricate serpent costume and sent them tumbling to the ground.

It was in that moment that when she landed, her wooden clogs caught the edge of the chair she was standing on, pushing it backwards and sending her into freefall, her head turned towards the floor and-

Her nose was stopped a few inches from the granite platform the place attendants were assembled on, and Kofuku blinked, confused, before she was once more turned upright and placed back into her seat by Kimura. “Careful there, hime-sama.”

“Kimura!” She pulled him into a hug, only managing to grab his midsection. “You’re back!”

“I did say I would come back.” He took the empty seat on the other side of her from the guard. “Are you enjoying the show?”

“Susano is so cool!”

“Susano-o no Mikoto. But yes, he is very, very cool.”

She began to stand up again, but Kimura stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “What if you fall again?”

“You’ll catch me again,” she said haughtily.

“I won’t always be around to catch you, hime-sama.”

With a pout, Kofuku sat back down. “But I can’t see!”

“The story is over anyway. How about this: when we go to the lake, you can sit on my shoulders and watch everyone make wishes.”

She beamed. “Yes!”

“Then it’s a deal. Just sit down a few more minutes, and then we’ll get going.”

She obeyed and sat back in the chair, turning her attention to the lights in the distance, along the shape of the mountains that cut across the sky. In the past, there was no way to even see such a thing thanks to the rain and even when there was a lull in the storm, a fog would descend from the slopes and consume everything. But now, thanks to the installation of blazing bright lights along its length, she could see the jutting bones of the leviathan that laid along its ridge; a storm god pacified, sanctified, and now depersonified in favour of harvesting its corpse for materials with which to make artifacts. Kimura had shown her how he carved sigils derived from the precursors of their Xingram tongue into bits of the god’s bones, empowering what was simply script into a tangible magical item that could warp and transform the world around her, even in just a minor way. Maybe when you’re older. That was what he had told her, and every time since that she’d begged him to actually teach her to do all of the cool things the onmyo mages did like casting fire, destroying boulders and driving away dangerous wildlife with a brilliant display of lights.

The crowd began shifting as the shogun - a hooded figure whose features Kofuku had never seen, not even once - and his entourage got up, moving around the vacant stage and made for the gate at the northeastern side of the palace grounds. Once his ashirgaru had fallen into a marge behind, the rest of the people began to move too. The foreign ministers next to the pavilion went first, then the architects and engineers in the front row seats, then the company men and their uniformed staff assigned to mine the bones of the dead god going after them. Each reached under their seat and retrieved a collapsed, angular paper disk, with a little metal basket and a candle within.

Kofuku looked under her seat, and found the same device, quickly picking it up and showing it to Kimura.

“Have you ever released a lantern, hime-sama?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you how.” He grabbed his own flattened lantern, and got into a squat in front of Kofuku’s seat. “Come on. It’s a bit of a walk and your legs are too short.”

Kofuku giggled as she climbed on, and Kimura held onto her ankles, letting her sit up straight. Ahead of them, the parade of people looked like ants crawling along the winding path that had been forcefully excavated through the hills, leading to a moon-reflecting lake far, far below. By the time they left the courtyard, the first lanterns were released, the shogun’s being a grand thing of many shapes, trailing a series of jagged tassels. She looked at the black zig-zag pattern on her own lantern, comparing them. “Lightning?”

“Come again?” Kimura looked up towards her.

“Lightning pattern.”

“They’re thunder lanterns.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Thunder is the sound of lightning after the flash.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Well…there are no superstorms anymore. Sometimes there is a rainstorm with lightning and thunder, but for the most part, we are not in danger of them anymore. So when we release the thunder lanterns, it’s like saying we make the lightning now, not the storms. We win.”

“Huh.” She looked over her lantern again. “Where’s father?”

“He’s…busy,” Kimura said, sharing a glance with the guard beside them. “You’ll see him again later tonight, I’m sure.”

“But father did this, right?”

“Kind of.”

“He stopped the storms,” Kofuku said. “He made everyone safe! That’s so cool! Did he use onmyodo?”

“In a way. Technically he didn’t stop the storms, he just moved the c-” With a glare from the guard, Kimura pursed his lips. “Yeah, I guess he did stop the storm. Yay.”

“Yay! He’s so cool!” She leaned back and stared at the lanterns, now numbering in the hundred, filled the sky.

Kimura didn’t say anything to that, leading them down close to the water as the entourages before them began to trek back up to the palace. As soon as they were close to the edge of the lake, he crouched and let her down, and in one move, expanded his lantern to full size.

Across the lake, dark figures between the trees released their own lanterns, appearing more like bags than the angular shape Kofuku’s was designed with, but floating all the same to join the bright swarm above. Yokai, she thought. With the end of the storms, there was peace. That was another thing he had done.

Kimura reached down and inflated her lantern for her. “Are you ready?”

Kofuku nodded. “We need fire?”

“Yes, but don’t release it just yet.” He snapped his fingers, generating a small flame above his fingers. He lit the wick of his own lantern’s candle, then knelt down to light the wonderstruck Kofuku’s wick.

The lantern became a little bit warmer in her hands on either side of its envelope, and she felt a force tugging it upwards. “What do we do?”

“Now we close our eyes and wish.”

She closed her eyes. “I wis-”

“Silently, hime-sama. Nobody else should know your wish. Just think of the wish, and when you’re ready, let it go.”

“Okay!” Kofuku closed her eyes again. She brought the lantern closer to her face, until her forehead touched the fabric and felt the warmth from its candle. She thought of the storms, the flood, the shadows…and of how he had beaten them all and put them in their place, under him. Under them.

I wish, she thought, to be just like him.