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foxinthestarsI made the normal daily quota; didn't start making up my shortfall, though, so I will have to do that in the next few days.
Mirrorverse Tenkou is a windbag who desperately wants to justify his presence in this story. Sorry, dude, you're just here to babysit Mitsukake until his plot point. On the other hand, I revealed some stuff in that scene that I'll have to decide as I go along whether I wanted to tip my hand about this soon, but for now... (Hotohori has more backstory queued up for later and it gets referred to here, and the story Tenkou tells about Sairou is planned as a crucial element later when we meet the Byakko contingent and they tell about their quest.)
I'm actually not pasting in everything I did today quite, because I wanted more time to think about the scene after this one and skipped it over and started on the scene after that to make my word-count, planning to backfill it tomorrow and then post from there.
Chiriko frowned thoughtfully, and Yui drank her cider in silence. It was enough to keep her worries at bay but not quite silence them --- if helping her was the standard, she didn’t necessarily have faith in Hotohori to think it through to the extent of keeping himself out of trouble --- and mention of Mitsukake brought back the feeling of loss, fear, and guilt. Chiriko had laid the medicine jar on their table, and it stood there in front of her like a memorial tablet.
I really did just drag him into this...
*******
It was only for a few minutes every day that the sun’s luminous shadow fell over the high crag where Mitsukake remained trapped. It didn’t irritate him as it had at first; if he was sleeping, it woke him, but in any case, he only sat still with his eyes closed until it passed, as he was doing now. The violent restless fire in his body and the clotted fog wrapped around his mind had passed away with the days, giving way to a clinging, leaden shroud that ached when he tried to lift it, slowing down his movements and trying to pull him down on the ground.
When the sunlight was safely gone, one of the demons from below brought up food for him. Every day it was the same creature, the lower half of an overgrown insect with the upper half of a miniaturized human, and he couldn’t decide whether its regular appearances endeared the thing to him or disgusted him. Every day it was some ostentatious delicacy arranged prettily on the plate; that was consistently annoying, and he would immediately stir and smash it into mush before setting about the work of eating it.
“This time of day, I know that you’re awake,” Tenkou’s voice came up from below. “You’ve taken to sitting where I can’t see you.”
Mitsukake did spend much of his time sitting in the center of the crag where he couldn’t see or be seen from the cave’s floor. He also did his best to ignore his captor’s monologues, but they were the only clear sound, so he couldn’t help hearing, and with nothing else to do, he could hardly help paying attention.
“It must strike you as very strange to hear someone say that he wants to throw the world into chaos,” Tenkou continued. “But then, it would strike others as very strange that a power like yours, that heals the sick and simply dispels evil, should have such tragic results. The gods are still dumb, savage beasts. Has it never struck you as absurd for them, to pluck juvenile girls from some strange, far-off place, to make those the ones to whom they grant omnipotent power, to whom they subordinate all the struggling masses of their own world? I have met my share of Mikos in my time; ignorant, selfish, and spoiled, every one of them. Of course, that would be the sort that would find their way to me, but I believe I prefer them. They expose Heaven in its essential corruption. If yours is not of that kind, it is blind luck, I assure you.
“And even those who wish this world well, what can be gained from such a ridiculous power? Once, very long ago, a Byakko no Miko wished to turn Sairou’s desert into a garden of paradise. It lasted until the end of that age, then it all withered away. The people had behaved as though the garden would be there forever, and without it they starved by the thousands. Their entire society was brought to its knees. They were driven into the arms of your own Empire to send food down that river to them, and for years Konan controlled them as a puppet state. Of course your people have long since forgotten that you ever did such a thing, but I am cursed with a long memory.
“That long memory tells me that the gods never give anything without taking something finer and purer away. You of all people know that too well.”
Mitsukake sighed in annoyance; he didn’t want to hear Shoka dragged into this diatribe, but there was a captive audience.
“You had been summoned to the capital, isn’t that right?”
He drew a breath in surprise. “How did you...?”
“I know as many secrets as Taiitsukun knows,” Tenkou told him.
No one but Shoka had known that. When the court physician had come from the capital, pleading with him and telling him that the Emperor was beyond anyone else’s help, Mitsukake had at first resisted. He had already known that he was a Sei of Suzaku, and feared it was a ploy to lure him away from his home and hold him in the palace, but the man had given him every desperate assurance that he would keep Mitsukake’s identity a secret, if that was his wish. He had been as good as his word, and he had been telling the truth.
Did I recognize Hotohori when he came to my door? Is that why I was so angry? he wondered; that year had altered his appearance amazingly from the sickly figure whose bed Mitsukake had been secretly conducted to, but it was possible.
“With the power the god gives them, it isn’t natural for one of the Seishi to become ill,” Tenkou pointed out. “You had to lose the one you loved because Suzaku gave a Sei’s power and the Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven to a pitiful weakling. Unless of course, it was all part of some larger plan...”
Mitsukake had finally stopped listening. His mind still shied away from thoughts of Shoka, but he could turn over in his mind that night in the palace, when the palace physician had ensured that he could work alone and unobserved, and he had used his power to heal the Emperor. Although in his mind he had known, it was a surprise to him when Hotohori’s mark of Suzaku had appeared, seeming to call out feebly to his own from within a tangle of invisible black threads. He still didn’t know what it was; he hadn’t seen anything like it since. It wasn’t large or intense, but it wouldn’t just melt away like the diseases he was used to treating, and it had taken hours of patient work to unwind it.
Even in this place, even after the tragedy that had awaited him after it, Mitsukake still felt a quiet surge of pride at having done so. With his patient noticeably breathing more freely as he went, he could have done part of the work and considered it sufficient --- the thought had crossed his mind at the time; he had arrived very late and was tired --- but he hadn’t taken that easy way out. Whatever those snarls might have been, if they yielded to his power, then he knew that they were causing pain and destruction to no good purpose, and he had sat for as long as it took to straighten them out and remove them, the same for the Emperor as he would have done if it had been a poor old woman back home in Choukou. I used to do things like that, he thought. To look back on himself in that way pleased him, but wistfully; it was so long ago, so far from this place that he might never escape from.
I can’t help anyone anymore...
Tenkou was still talking to himself. “...No, the gods should leave this world alone, although I admit that it gives me great enjoyment when I can see one of them be summoned and subject themselves to a girl cruel or stupid enough to make them look as contemptible and ridiculous as they deserve. What this one would do to Seiryuu; that, I would like to see...”
*******
Mirrorverse Tenkou is a windbag who desperately wants to justify his presence in this story. Sorry, dude, you're just here to babysit Mitsukake until his plot point. On the other hand, I revealed some stuff in that scene that I'll have to decide as I go along whether I wanted to tip my hand about this soon, but for now... (Hotohori has more backstory queued up for later and it gets referred to here, and the story Tenkou tells about Sairou is planned as a crucial element later when we meet the Byakko contingent and they tell about their quest.)
27386 ★ 50000 (54.77%)
I'm actually not pasting in everything I did today quite, because I wanted more time to think about the scene after this one and skipped it over and started on the scene after that to make my word-count, planning to backfill it tomorrow and then post from there.
Chiriko frowned thoughtfully, and Yui drank her cider in silence. It was enough to keep her worries at bay but not quite silence them --- if helping her was the standard, she didn’t necessarily have faith in Hotohori to think it through to the extent of keeping himself out of trouble --- and mention of Mitsukake brought back the feeling of loss, fear, and guilt. Chiriko had laid the medicine jar on their table, and it stood there in front of her like a memorial tablet.
I really did just drag him into this...
*******
It was only for a few minutes every day that the sun’s luminous shadow fell over the high crag where Mitsukake remained trapped. It didn’t irritate him as it had at first; if he was sleeping, it woke him, but in any case, he only sat still with his eyes closed until it passed, as he was doing now. The violent restless fire in his body and the clotted fog wrapped around his mind had passed away with the days, giving way to a clinging, leaden shroud that ached when he tried to lift it, slowing down his movements and trying to pull him down on the ground.
When the sunlight was safely gone, one of the demons from below brought up food for him. Every day it was the same creature, the lower half of an overgrown insect with the upper half of a miniaturized human, and he couldn’t decide whether its regular appearances endeared the thing to him or disgusted him. Every day it was some ostentatious delicacy arranged prettily on the plate; that was consistently annoying, and he would immediately stir and smash it into mush before setting about the work of eating it.
“This time of day, I know that you’re awake,” Tenkou’s voice came up from below. “You’ve taken to sitting where I can’t see you.”
Mitsukake did spend much of his time sitting in the center of the crag where he couldn’t see or be seen from the cave’s floor. He also did his best to ignore his captor’s monologues, but they were the only clear sound, so he couldn’t help hearing, and with nothing else to do, he could hardly help paying attention.
“It must strike you as very strange to hear someone say that he wants to throw the world into chaos,” Tenkou continued. “But then, it would strike others as very strange that a power like yours, that heals the sick and simply dispels evil, should have such tragic results. The gods are still dumb, savage beasts. Has it never struck you as absurd for them, to pluck juvenile girls from some strange, far-off place, to make those the ones to whom they grant omnipotent power, to whom they subordinate all the struggling masses of their own world? I have met my share of Mikos in my time; ignorant, selfish, and spoiled, every one of them. Of course, that would be the sort that would find their way to me, but I believe I prefer them. They expose Heaven in its essential corruption. If yours is not of that kind, it is blind luck, I assure you.
“And even those who wish this world well, what can be gained from such a ridiculous power? Once, very long ago, a Byakko no Miko wished to turn Sairou’s desert into a garden of paradise. It lasted until the end of that age, then it all withered away. The people had behaved as though the garden would be there forever, and without it they starved by the thousands. Their entire society was brought to its knees. They were driven into the arms of your own Empire to send food down that river to them, and for years Konan controlled them as a puppet state. Of course your people have long since forgotten that you ever did such a thing, but I am cursed with a long memory.
“That long memory tells me that the gods never give anything without taking something finer and purer away. You of all people know that too well.”
Mitsukake sighed in annoyance; he didn’t want to hear Shoka dragged into this diatribe, but there was a captive audience.
“You had been summoned to the capital, isn’t that right?”
He drew a breath in surprise. “How did you...?”
“I know as many secrets as Taiitsukun knows,” Tenkou told him.
No one but Shoka had known that. When the court physician had come from the capital, pleading with him and telling him that the Emperor was beyond anyone else’s help, Mitsukake had at first resisted. He had already known that he was a Sei of Suzaku, and feared it was a ploy to lure him away from his home and hold him in the palace, but the man had given him every desperate assurance that he would keep Mitsukake’s identity a secret, if that was his wish. He had been as good as his word, and he had been telling the truth.
Did I recognize Hotohori when he came to my door? Is that why I was so angry? he wondered; that year had altered his appearance amazingly from the sickly figure whose bed Mitsukake had been secretly conducted to, but it was possible.
“With the power the god gives them, it isn’t natural for one of the Seishi to become ill,” Tenkou pointed out. “You had to lose the one you loved because Suzaku gave a Sei’s power and the Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven to a pitiful weakling. Unless of course, it was all part of some larger plan...”
Mitsukake had finally stopped listening. His mind still shied away from thoughts of Shoka, but he could turn over in his mind that night in the palace, when the palace physician had ensured that he could work alone and unobserved, and he had used his power to heal the Emperor. Although in his mind he had known, it was a surprise to him when Hotohori’s mark of Suzaku had appeared, seeming to call out feebly to his own from within a tangle of invisible black threads. He still didn’t know what it was; he hadn’t seen anything like it since. It wasn’t large or intense, but it wouldn’t just melt away like the diseases he was used to treating, and it had taken hours of patient work to unwind it.
Even in this place, even after the tragedy that had awaited him after it, Mitsukake still felt a quiet surge of pride at having done so. With his patient noticeably breathing more freely as he went, he could have done part of the work and considered it sufficient --- the thought had crossed his mind at the time; he had arrived very late and was tired --- but he hadn’t taken that easy way out. Whatever those snarls might have been, if they yielded to his power, then he knew that they were causing pain and destruction to no good purpose, and he had sat for as long as it took to straighten them out and remove them, the same for the Emperor as he would have done if it had been a poor old woman back home in Choukou. I used to do things like that, he thought. To look back on himself in that way pleased him, but wistfully; it was so long ago, so far from this place that he might never escape from.
I can’t help anyone anymore...
Tenkou was still talking to himself. “...No, the gods should leave this world alone, although I admit that it gives me great enjoyment when I can see one of them be summoned and subject themselves to a girl cruel or stupid enough to make them look as contemptible and ridiculous as they deserve. What this one would do to Seiryuu; that, I would like to see...”
*******
