Haku leafed through the silk-bound copy of the Kojiki in astonishment. Someone had put a lot of time and magic into the volume he held in his hands. The technique was impeccable; the spell had been woven so that it lay dormant in the spine’s binding, adding and revising to the tale written in the pages as the history played out. That girl, Risuni, knew about this? Haku thought.
There wasn’t much to the small town that Chihiro lived in. Risuni had shown him around the parks, the small mall, and other public spaces, telling him stories as they went, and had ended her tour at the library. She had left him there and gone home. Haku’s eyes had been drawn to the enchanted tome immediately.
The air in the library was cool and still. The human smell of the other patrons was diluted with the vanillin of old books. Haku felt the small hairs standing on his skin settle for the first time that day. He flipped back to the beginning of the book, to the creation story, to read the book properly.
Haku didn’t know how long he’d been standing there when suddenly he heard Chihiro’s voice moving towards him in the aisle. She was talking softly to herself.
“The beauty of a sharpened blade; thy shadow mirrors that sword point...”
Haku recognized those words, though he had not remembered them until the moment he had heard them. He joined in, singing softly. “Only the forest spirits know your heart concealed in sorrow and anger…”
He heard her gasp and stop her recital. She came to his row and froze. She was still in her school uniform and makeup. There was something incongruous about her flamboyant appearance in the quiet atmosphere of the library.
“Um, hi,” Chihiro stammered after a few seconds of silence. Her face flushed. “I didn’t expect anyone else to be here. I heard you, uh, singing. What was that… I mean, sorry.”
Haku stared at her, perplexed. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Chihiro,” he said. Belatedly, he remembered to bow. As far as she knew, they had met for the first time earlier that day. “May I help you with something?”
“Okay, I guess. I, uh, was actually looking for that.” She pointed to the book in his hands. Her neck and ears were pink with heat.
Haku looked down at the book he still held held in his hands. She was looking for this? Does she realize what this is? He closed the book and handed it to her. "Have you read this?" he asked.
“Uh, yeah, it’s for my history paper…” She stared down at her shoes. She seemed embarrassed for some reason. There was none of the confident manner that she had embodied earlier that day.
“It’s a very unusual anthology,” Haku said. “I don’t know if you realized that.” Could she possibly remember? Could the Gate have had no effect on her?
She slowly opened the book to the first page of the creation story and looked up at him. He nodded slowly. He could see her pulse rising in the exposed artery in her neck. His own heart was pounding, and he wondered briefly if she could see it the way he could. He was afraid. She was so close to remembering, and so close to the war.
Maybe she caught his fear, because she gulped.
“There you are, Chihiro!” Risuni’s head poked into the aisle, startling them both. “I should’ve known. Why didn't you pick up your phone? I only called you, oh I don't know, eight million times,” Then she saw that Kohaku was standing there with Chihiro. “Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting something? I’ll leave you guys to it. Don't mind me.” She grinned at Chihiro, eyes twinkling merrily.
Chihiro glared back. "It's not like that," she protested.
Haku looked from Risuni to Chihiro. Their expressions seemed to be saying something in a secret language, one unreadable to Haku. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “I was just about to leave. It was nice seeing you both.” He bowed to them, and left. Risuni turned to watch him go, winking and smiling at him once her back was to Chihiro. She had known Chihiro would be there, Haku realized. She arranged this meeting.
As he left he heard her say to Chihiro: “It’s getting late, so I’ll let you off the hook today, but you are telling me everything when you come over tomorrow.”
The smile slipped off Haku’s face as the door of the library closed behind him. Beneath his feet, the ground was trembling again.
---
The water streamed down Haku’s sides as he emerged from the spring. The water seemed to flee from his hair and clothes as he transformed, scales melting away into skin and cloth. He trudged toward the house and slid open the paper-screen doors. He had stayed here for a year after he left the bathhouse, and after he had left Zeniba had kept the bedroom furnished for him. He could hear her bustling around beyond the closed door that led to the rest of the house, entertaining a visitor, but he was too tired for conversation. The exhaustion from crossing the borders between the worlds in this way had drained him, but was minor still compared to a day in the presence of human teenagers. His ears felt raw from the stimulation of so many voices.
You’d think that after the bath house… How do humans deal with… And to think that it was in the spring all that time… His mind jumped from thought to thought, but many of them were left trailing off. His weariness was deep, and left him without the energy to follow the trains of thought to their conclusions.
He lay on the bed, staring up into the darkness of the ceiling. In his human form, the ceiling disappeared into the darkness, except where shreds of moonlight illuminated it. He could almost pretend he was looking down into the deep - a deep he once embodied. The edges of himself felt sharper than ever, delineating where his body ended and the rest of the world began. He was disappointed, he admitted to himself. Some unreasonable part of himself had believed that keeping his promise to Chihiro would make him whole again, and he hadn’t realized it. He thought of Chihiro, whose voice had rung out without effort but others ran to obey; whose face and smile radiated confidence and detachment; who held herself like royalty and need notice no one. And then there was the other Chihiro, the one who was shy, who knew the songs of seven hundred years ago, even if the tunes had been lost. The one who was a child. And the other girl, the one who wasn’t human... She said Chihiro was acting. But why? And which Chihiro is the real one? He meant to think about it more, but the day had been overwhelming, and soon the darkness of the room faded behind the darkness of his eyelids, and he fell asleep.
---
Two visitors sat around Zeniba’s table. One was a young man named Yauxal, brown skinned with a nose like a beak and several long, sleek feathers in his hair. The other was a pale, sickly old woman named Ystlum. Her dark hair was short and thinning, and her skin hung loose on her bones. Zeniba had just set down the tea tray and sat down at the table when they heard the french doors shut with a snap.
“What was that?” Yauxal asked.
“It’s just Haku coming in,” Zeniba said.
“That’s right,” Ystlum said in a quiet voice. “He lived here for quite some time, didn’t he?”
“That was a while ago,” Zeniba said. “He still visits occasionally.”
Yauxal made a face. “Why is he here, Zeniba? Are you keeping him from us?”
Ystlum put a bony hand on Yauxal’s arm, quieting him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. She turned to Zeniba again. “Don’t you have another tenant? Where is your No Face?”
“He’s running some errands for me at the moment,” Zeniba said.
“You have a No Face?” Yauxal asked, fascinated. “How do you control it?”
“A human girl earned his loyalty, and left him with me,” Zeniba said. “He seems quite happy to help me out with this and that. They’re not dangerous by nature. They just magnify the emotions of those around them. This one was glutted with greed and almost destroyed my sister’s bathhouse.”
“I heard about that incident a few years back. A human girl extracted him?”
“The same one that dredged Tenryu’s banks,” Zeniba said.
“Will she be the one?” Ystlum said.
“I’m sure of it,” Zeniba said. “He just needs a push, and she’ll provide it.”
“Sure of what? Who are you talking about?” Yauxal asked.
“Never you mind,” Ystlum said.
“To the point, then,” Yauxal said irritably. “What are we going to do about the Onagawa incident?”
“I’m almost certain he had something to do with it,” Zeniba said. “We just need proof. Then we have all of the standing we need. Nihonkai will have to act.”
“They looked through the security footage and couldn’t find anything.”
“They were careful then,” Zeniba said. “Meanwhile, we have to calm those idiots down and stem the exodus. The bridges can’t handle the torrent of traffic in this state.”
“We’ll get our people out there,” Yauxal said. “Try to convince them.”
Suddenly, a feeling of wrongness made all three of them pause. Zeniba hurried to the front door and threw it open. They stood on the threshold, scanning the darkened sky for the source of the feeling.
“There!” Yauxal said, pointing. A shadow darted across the face of the moon. Then another, and another. It looked like a flock of swan geese migrating in a V, but it was the wrong time of year. Suddenly, one of the goose spirits faltered and dropped. Four of the others dove to help their sister, and then flew back up to the flock, supporting the injured goose with their backs and necks.
“They’re headed for Aburaya,” Zeniba said, following the shapes with her gaze.
“You can smell the taint he left on them,” Yauxal said.
“They might have our proof, then,” Ystlum said. “I will go speak with them.” She hugged Zeniba and gave Yauxal a stern look, then turned into a bat and flew after the geese.
“I will go, too,” Yauxal said, “to rally the people. Tenryu’s got his eye on that human girl, but we still need an heir, Zeniba.”
“Have patience. He’ll come around,” Zeniba said.
“He’d better. He’s shirked his duty for long enough.”
“Off with you,” Zeniba replied.
“Alright, alright.” He leapt into the air in eagle form and soared away.
Zeniba waited until Yauxal had flown out of sight, then turned her attention to the swamp. She couldn’t speak to the water like the dragons could, but she had been out there every day for centuries, and her senses told her that things weren’t right. They never had been. She had built her house here when she realized that the worlds were still connected here beneath the rock, and at first she had thought that the wrongness in the swamp was because the lake was polluted on the human side. But the small silver fish that used this point to cross the border told her it wasn’t so. They told her that it was because the lake was dead. For a long time she could not understand how this was so - the lake existed and things lived in it, so how can it be dead? - but its spirit had never awakened. And she saw that the problem was much more widespread than Swamp Bottom. There were many such “dead” places. It had begun when the two worlds split off from one another, but in recent years the number had grown exponentially. Did it have something to do with the barrier going up? Was it related to the scarcity of spirit children? No one could understand it, and few tried.
That’s the problem when you are your territory, Zeniba thought. Why pay attention to anything else?
And then, seven years ago, Haku showed up at her door. Rivers had been destroyed by humans before. The spirits of those rivers had died. Haku survived. He seemed to have no memories of his past and only the most rudimentary of a dragon’s magic, but he was alive.
A spirit without a river, and a spring without a spirit. It had seemed like a perfect match. Zeniba had hoped that the spring would somehow adopt Haku, and that it would heal him in the process. Haku had been reluctant, but had also wanted to please her, and so for the year and a half that he had stayed with her, she had watched him go out there every night to sit in the water, letting his magic flow out over the surface. Nothing had ever come of it. Something prevented Haku from inhabiting with the spring. Perhaps such a thing was never possible. It was clear to her how devastated he was by the this failure, no matter how well he hid it, so she could never bring herself to ask him what it felt like, or if there was a reason to it all. Even so, she thought, of all of Nihonkai's sons, he has the most potential. Even now.
Beside her, a shadowy spirit faded into view. The white surface of its mask shone under the light from the lantern and the moon.
“No Face, you’re back,” Zeniba said, smiling. “Did you find her? Did it work?”
The figure nodded.
“Good work,” Zeniba said, ushering No Face into the warmth of the cabin. “So,” she muttered under her breath. “She dreams.”
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