Chapter Text
Not even the ghosts greeted me when I returned home. The silence slithered like a snake amidst the abandoned fields, and sometimes its hissing could be heard in the creaking of an old door.
I rushed to that place that became my second home, but the closer I got, the more my legs trembled. My breath became short, my heart on the brink of bursting: I felt haunted by this emptiness. As though it took shape, and came into being as a monster.
Again I was the child that was brought here after being rescued.
However everything else had changed.
I understood it before seeing it.
No one inhabited the shrine by the lake, its bared womb quiet, too quiet.
She was gone. Shishirui Seishirou was gone.
It was gone, even the scent of rain.
She took it all away.
I have been travelling in the attempt to grasp the two mirroring sides of the world, I have been on a journey to understand the human heart and its aberrant reality, but only then I learnt I had yet to face the most dreadful of apparitions: abandonment, and absence. Abandonment was something I already experienced, yet it sunk inside my chest anew.
My wounds will not be soothed like that first time when I found shelter in her golden embrace. A sweet memory that once lulled my heart, and now bedevilled it just as mercilessly.
She – She was the god of this place. I am sure you have heard of her, and this might be a pointless tale. A story that will survive, that will outlive me and the eerie silence that dwelt the houses.
But among these very ruins, I want to remember.
I haven’t witnessed her birth, but I was told the lake birthed her, and with her came the rain that quenched the earth’s thirst and the mouths of people that became dry with prayers. Where the lake once was towered her temple, and among her people she lived, and the land flourished in those villages she protected. Where I come from, however, some people did not believe – they refused the goddess’ favour, and her gracious help. I believed, though, when those glad tidings reached my ear - I needed to. And I wonder to this day if it is because of that belief, that hope, that I could be saved.
Yes, a calamity befall my village. A mysterious calamity. On that day I was not spared loss, but I was spared death – or worse, something which is not even death. On that day, my entire fate was shaped. A fate that began among the wrecks of my house, and lead me to the wrecks of my home.
I haven’t witnessed her birth, but I stand before the aftermath of her end.