On Daizo-Shikigami, the summers were long, sticky, and just all around unpleasant. There was certainly something to be said about how the heat was relatively dry and moderate - lacking the stifling, oppressive humidity of Talosa's tropics and or the scorching rays over the dunes of Theremis - but to the people of Daizo, as it was often called, the comparisons were little more than attempts to detract from why there was a colony there to begin with. In some ways, it couldn't have been helped. The little planet had started out with a fraction of what was considered Earth-normative gravity, necessitating an extensive suite of mantle mass injections to bring it to par. An alteration to the way Daizo spun was expected, inevitable even, but once the time compression step had elapsed, the planet's most important features were inadvertently shifted up close to its new equator. With the United Coalition Front already in debt and the results merely less than ideal, there was simply no space for a fix.

And so it came to be that the first major development project on the surface of Daizo was the summer palace, dropped from low orbit in parts and stitched together to create the residence of the Daimyo and his family, freshly flown in from some other UCF stronghold as a reward from the shogun. Some reward it was. The sentiment was thick in the air everywhere, even if nobody dared to call it out: Takeshi Kofuku was a veritable rising star among the other retainers, and the shogun, in his great wisdom, understood exactly what that entailed. Had it not been for the decades of passivity, of inaction against the growing threat of war encroaching them from other corners of the "human empire," or the well-founded rumours of his lazy, lavish lifestyle lacking in the spirit of those which had created the UCF, perhaps the idea of tradition and nepotism would have held. Under the very real threat of meritocratic restructuring, Takeshi Kofuku was given a world and the uncanny treasure that lay buried on it, debt be damned.

In the years since the first landfall, a town had blossomed out from around the palace, its buildings a sea of concrete roofs vaguely shaped to half-heartedly meet the aesthetic expectations set by the palace, strapped with rows and rows of chrome fans and cooling units, not unlike the amalgamations that clung to and interspersed with the motifs in the palace's own walls and roofs. An outsider might have declared it an affront to the UCF's rich history or architecture, but what did they know of surviving in such a place? To live on Daizo was a symbiosis, one which those that turned away from the trivial discomforts had no hope of understanding, for underfoot, in the very soil itself, were the remains of a long-dead god.

Which god, of course, had been the ongoing debate since even before the colony's founding. Such things were leftover from a different era of history, one which had ceased to exist long before the gods had returned. And when they had returned, they had been met with the fires of human innovation, from nuclear to plasma to photonic, a wicked symphony heralding their obsolescence. Whoever, whatever Daizo's god had been, nought remained of its majesty, save for the leviathan bones jutting out of the planet, testimony to a once-grand thing, now lifeless, conquered, downtrodden.

But even in death, gods were still gods. Prior to the terraforming there were reports of lightning storms, rain and hail and sleet, even when it hadn't made sense in the alien atmosphere. A storm god! cried the mythologists. Whether or not it made sense, the idea had stuck. As its essence bled into the dirt and brought forth verdant forest and fertility like no other, as the storms tamed and calmed with the increase in offerings, the god became akin to Susano-o, slayer of the great serpent and defender of humankind. It was ironic then that at the height of summer, the precession of people snaked all the way from the town square, past the summer palace and to the boneyard beyond, a brushstroke of white and red across the grey and green landscape, shrouded in the coiling wisps of thousands of sticks of incense.

To Akiraka Kofuku, it was a truly magical sight. From her perch by the window on the fifteenth floor of the summer palace, she could see most of the line, one going out to the shrine among the broken ribs, one curling right back, looping around the other side of her home. Most shuffled along with their heads down, their faces covered in reverence, bit others sang and danced and preached, enthralled in the act of worship itself. Those were the ones she liked watching as they flailed around almost drunkenly, swinging their incense-holders and lanterns in a fervor, becoming motes of light in the night as the sun went down.

"There you are, hime-sama."

Kofuku almost jumped out of her skin and she turned around to see the middle-aged man in the doorway. She hadn't even heard the door open. "No! I want to watch the parade!"

"You have a test at the end of the week," the man said sternly, crouching down to her level. "Besides, it's getting dark. You won't be able to see much."

She crossed her arms and puffed up her cheeks. "How come father gets to go outside? I wanna go outside!"

"Maybe when you're older."

"But it's not fair! Don't you want to go outside, Kimura?"

Kimura chuckled, standing up. "Not tonight, sorry. There's a lot you still don't understand."

"Hmph. Like what?"

"Well...do you know onmyodo?"

She gave him a blank stare, trying her hardest to look angry. When that didn't work, she sighed out the breath in her cheeks, flopping over. "Is that the magic thing?"

"It's a lot more than that, but yes. To participate you need to understand onmyodo, and to understand it you have to study..."

She kicked at her feet. "Why does everything have to be study?"

"I don't-" Kimura caught himself mid-sentence, and pursed his lips instead. "How about this: if you study for the test this week, I will teach you a little bit of magic."

Her eyes lit up. "You know onmyodo?"

"A little bit. I might know someone who can teach you too. A real onmyoji."

She hopped up and down in place. "I wanna be a magician!"

"First things first. The exam, okay?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Yeah. But you better keep your promise!"

"Deal." He held out his hand.

She grabbed it, and as he led her out of the room she turned to look out the window again. It was so dark now that the people had become specks of light either from their burning incense or lanterns. She knew her father was down there, somewhere; it wasn't her first ceremony. But this time, something felt different. Of course, at the age of six, she had no idea of what any of it could mean, just that it felt off somewhere deep in her gut.

And then she saw it.

For a moment, the light of the shrine played off the incense smoke in the air, rising high above the precession, curling and twisting, and just then, she thought it looked just like the open jaws of a vicious fanged serpent.