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He wakes to the feeling of something warm on his face. When he opens his eyes—and it is a laborious task, for he feels somehow that to open them is to invite great misfortune—he sees that he is in a traditional room, empty save for the tatami mats on the floor, a folding screen depicting watery cranes, and a low table he kneels before. Sunlight streams in through the open window next to him, pale and weak with the frailty of midwinter.
In front of him is a woman, and he knows instinctively that he is to trust her. But the urge feels foreign. As if it belongs to someone other than himself and perhaps may be deceiving him.
And she is not a woman, he argues silently. There is nothing human about her.
“Good morning,” says Raiden Ei, and so he looks upon his maker with a gimlet eye. Upon first inspection, his maker appears too perfect to be real. Even gods must feel the passage of time, musn’t they? She bears no scars upon her skin, pale white as the moon, and only her eyes appear to hold anything at all. But they are cold, and they are flat, and they are dark. He does not trust Raiden Ei even as she smiles benignly, tilting her head as if waiting for an answer.
“Good morning,” he says, because it is the polite thing to say when in front of the person who built you out of scrap wood, lightning, and rice paper.
Ei considers his answer even as she sits back on her heels, exhaling as if in annoyance. “Can you speak for yourself?” she asks, sharper than the blade he knows she wields. “Do you have wants? Needs? Or do you only echo my words back at me, like every other failed puppet I’ve completed?”
He glances through the window and sees a world illuminated by that weak sunlight, as fragile and flimsy as his own fingers feel to him. Purple roofs disappear into the distance and beyond them, endless and eternal, stretches the glittering Inazuman sea. The tops of trees, shades of blue and violet, somehow persist even in the dead of winter. Perhaps Ei keeps her plants in stasis as she attempts everything else.
“I want to go outside,” he says finally. “And I want a name.”
Humans have names, and humans are allowed outside. Perhaps if he does both, he can pretend he is not an automaton of rice paper and wood with lightning, rather than blood, in his veins.
Ei purses her lips. “You have no need of a name,” she tells him, imperious as she always is, “for your life will last only as long as it takes for you to walk outside of those doors. If you survive, then perhaps you are deserving of one.”
He does not look at her as he braces himself on the low table with one hand, then slowly draws up one leg. The movement is smooth, practically soundless, and yet it shakes even as he forces it upright. Scrap wood is not meant to sustain such rough treatment as the act of movement. It does not stop him from pushing himself up to stand, even as his limbs tremble beneath him. The tatami is rough under his rice paper skin but he hardly feels it as he takes one step by uncoordinated step. The intricately carved doors, he estimates, are now fifteen steps away. His feet feel as though they may only last three more.
That does not stop him either. He takes those three steps, though each spans an age of gritting his teeth and willing his legs to move, and then he takes five more. He is more than halfway there and yet his breathing already threatens to shake something inside of him loose. To walk to the door is to trust in Ei’s pale, long-fingered hands, and pray the ribs she carefully wrapped around his heart will hold.
He takes another three, and there are only four left, but the shaking has spread to his hips. He has to lean against the light-paneled wall for support as he drags himself forward.
It does not hurt in the way that it should. Ei is a god who has never been truly in physical agony, and so her attempt to program mortal pain gives him a muted sense of it. The shuffling, creeping discomfort of walking fifteen steps is pain, but felt sideways, and through a murky veil of guesswork. He is grateful for her willful ignorance in this, because it means he takes two more steps before it hurts enough to stop. He leans heavily against the wall, his chest heaving for breath beneath the azure-flowered yukata she clothed him in. If she had failed so with pain, why give him the need for air? he wonders.
Ei is silent behind him, and he wonders, too, if she looks upon him with scorn. Her fragile, weak puppet, who cannot even take fifteen wobbly steps. After him, she will build another—one she can use, one built to her exacting standards, and she will build her out of materials that do not shiver and bend. But he knows that he will die here, in this light-paneled room, and he will die having never seen the sun but through a pane of glass if he does not keep walking.
It is enough to make him take another step, and then one more. He grasps onto the wrought copper door handles and pushes outward.
With a shudder and a gasp, they groan open. And he feels the wind on his face.
“Congratulations,” says Ei. She is standing next to him with an inscrutable expression. “Perhaps I underestimated you.”
He slumps to the ground, breathing hard. He is sure that if he could sweat, he would be. As it is, he says nothing.
He watches as Ei’s shoes come to stand before him, the only part of her that he can see with the way his head is bowed, and then as she crouches down to one knee. The fingers that had so meticulously mapped veins made of wire and thread under his skin, long and thin, tilt his face up by the chin. Ei runs her gaze over his upturned face with a calculating fierceness, and then she nods. “Kunikuzushi,” she decides. “I will allow you to live.”
And then Ei turns, lets his head fall, and he hears her footsteps fade as she walks away.
Country destroyer. What a twisted sense of irony that woman has, and what a cruel sense of loss to compromise his victory. He could not destroy even a fly in the state he is in, much less a country, and both he and Ei know it. The wind tastes bitter in his mouth even as he hauls himself up to his feet. Had she just abandoned him outside of her private workshop? Did she expect him to stay knelt on the ground, awaiting her return? He grits his teeth and takes trembling, shaky steps down the stairs, his one goal to make it to street level. He does not need Ei. He does not need anyone.
—
Months pass, and they turn into years. Eventually, Kunikuzushi gets used to moving, to walking, to running and to jumping and climbing. He starts to believe his initial difficulties were the result of Ei’s amateur attempts at wiring his brain and limbs together. While everything was connected to the correct places, there simply hadn’t been enough. But with every day that goes by, it becomes easier.
He spends them wandering. Inazuma is beautiful, and while he has seen every inch of it in Ei’s memories, no pale imitation can compare to seeing it with his own eyes. He spends three whole months drifting through the sakura forests by the Narukami Shrine even as he evades Yae Miko, who would surely recognize him as soon as he comes into her field of view. His joints ache, and his rice-paper skin was never meant to withstand such things as wind and rain, but it is worth it for the view at the top of the mountain. He reserves two months for Araumi and its ruins, weathered and mysterious, but spends two extra when he falls into the caverns below. It is after that incident that he takes a jaunt off of Narukami Island, having grown weary of its secret caves and foggy forests, to explore Tatarasuna.
The vagrant life is an easy one for a doll, as he has no need of food or drink. He is powered by Ei, and her eternal lightning, and so he can walk on forever if he so chooses. But he likes to sleep. Being aware is simply too much, especially if he must stay awake for more than a single day. Kunikuzushi spends entire afternoons and evenings in gentle, silent repose.
It is during one of these afternoons, soft and humid in the way of new spring, that he hears an excited whoop through the trees. His eyes fly open as a man crashes down in the grass before him, dressed in red and black with a curious blue scarf thrown haphazardly over his shoulder. “Kazuha, you coward! Jump down!” he yells.
Kunikuzushi eyes him and, seeing nothing that particularly piques his interest, shuts them again.
“I don’t want to break my knees,” says another voice. “And I don’t think we’re alone.”
“Eh?” says the man, and Kunikuzushi hears a sound like him whipping around. When the rustling of fabric ceases, there is a brief moment of silence.
“Oh my god,” says the man. “Is that a—is that a person?”
A soft thump sounds nearby but Kunikuzushi stubbornly keeps his eyes shut. He will get his nap even if it means enduring their scrutiny.
“Are any of us really people, in the end?” asks the second voice. “What box have you inflicted upon this poor stranger, having labelled him so?”
Personhood? What a terrible thought. Kunikuzushi is of the opinion that the second voice should reconsider whatever career he currently has and perhaps go into writing asinine poetry. He has spent so long wandering the wilds of Inazuma that he simply cannot be bothered to deal with humans. After all, they have precious little in common with him.
He feels something sharp jab at his knee and lets out a reflexive shriek, scrambling backwards until his back hits the trunk of a wide tree. He opens his eyes once more to see the man in red and black bent over, jabbing at him with the sheathed sword in his hand. “Oh,” says the man, almost sounding disappointed. “I thought you might have been dead.”
“I am not dead,” Kunikuzushi snaps. “Watch where you put that.”
The man grins at him, bright and sunny. He has a slash of a scar across his nose, dark on his already tan skin. It stretches with his smile, Kunikuzushi realizes, and there is something so open and welcoming about his expression that it immediately puts him on edge. “Just checking. No harm done, yeah?”
None, but to his dignity. Kunikuzushi smiles back at him, the baring of his teeth decidedly unkind. “Now that you’ve ascertained I am among the living, could you kindly leave me to my rest?”
A second man steps out from behind the first. He is shorter, more slight—willowy like the reeds bordering the sea-facing inlets—and he is dressed in white and orange. There is a dark red streak through his hair, and he has a softer face than the first.
“Sorry to have disturbed your nap,” he says. And he is the voice from earlier, the one with a talent for bad poetry.
“You should be,” Kunikuzushi sniffs, and closes his eyes. He hopes that perhaps the two of them will leave the clearing, but the universe, as it seems, has no kindness left for him.
Because Kazuha and the other man, whose name he quickly learns is Tomo, do not leave.
Instead, Kazuha plucks a leaf from a low-hanging tree branch and sits next to him. With a look in his eye that Kunikuzushi can only describe as mischievous, he puts it between his fingers and plays a simple tune—two low notes, and a long, piercing high note. There is a brief silence. Then some bird, far off in the foliage, sings the same tune back.
“Good thing your crashing didn’t scare away the mockingbirds,” says Kazuha, smiling at Tomo.
“My crashing would never,” he sniffs.
He resists the urge to snarl. “Are you done?” Kunikuzushi asks sharply. “Or am I to postpone my nap so you two can be irritatingly loud?”
Tomo frowns at him. “What are you, an old man? A clearing is a clearing, you know. We’ve just as much right to it as you do.”
Kazuha plays another three-note ditty on his leaf. “The wind led me here,” he says laconically.
“What does that even mean?” Kunikuzushi demands.
But Kazuha does not tell him, and neither does Tomo. They remain in that clearing and...they speak to each other. Occasionally to him, but mostly to each other, and Kunikuzushi gets the sense that they are like Ei and Chiyo once were, or Makoto and the Kitsune Saiguu. Two people, drawn inexorably into each other’s orbit. As if by remaining in the same clearing and contributing to their conversation, he has fallen somewhat into their gravity.
He does not understand how two humans could do a thing like that, and so when they leave, he goes with them.
But the more he watches Kazuha and Tomo, the more he wonders about humanity. Ei’s opinion of them is written in his bones—a fickle race with a propensity for short-sighted decisions and foolish, simple desires. Their lives burn out like matches in the rain—quickly, and uselessly. Perhaps that is why, according to what he hears, she is taking Visions back. For her grand view of an Inazuma in everlasting stasis, mortals who can command the elements must be an abomination.
But he wonders, sometimes, if Ei was wrong about them the way she was wrong about him.
“Kunikuzushi!” Tomo yells across the training ground. He has found himself at a camp on Watatsumi Island, the supposed base of the resistance. Their numbers are few but their proponents fanatic. He finds that he cannot bring himself to like their head priestess or her general, but Kazuha and Tomo remain tolerable. And while Kunikuzushi does not care about the affairs of mortals, about their Visions or their politics, he finds that his life is kept interesting by wandering with the two of them.
Tomo skids to a stop in front of him, and Kazuha is, as ever, close behind.
“Lady Sangonomiya has a mission for you,” Kazuha says softly.
“I won’t do it,” Kunikuzushi says immediately. “I have no interest in her or what she wants and, frankly, her grasp of both tactics and warfare is tediously flawed.”
Tomo seems to deflate. “She figured the ‘country destroyer’ would be able to help us out, is all,” he mutters.
Kunikuzushi scoffs. “I have not, and never will be, a ‘country destroyer.’ The Shogun just has a terrible sense of humor. I can barely wield a sword.” Though he knows that if he practiced, he could. He has Ei’s sword forms emblazoned in his wiring and her elemental techniques forever written behind his eyelids. “Besides,” he grumbles, “I hate that name.”
“Why don’t you change it?” Kazuha asks.
“To what?” he snaps. “I certainly do not know any alternatives.”
Kazuha considers this, almost as if it was less of a deterrent and more of a challenge. Kunikuzushi realizes that he has just asked a word problem of a poet, and he sighs.
Kazuha snaps his fingers then. “‘Shun’ is a nice name,” he says.
“Much less of a mouthful than ‘Kunikuzushi,’” Tomo adds.
He considers the name, and he considers the meaning, and then he throws back his head and laughs. He must sound deranged, but neither Tomo nor Kazuha back away.
“Shun,” he says, testing the name out on his tongue. It tastes like sunlight and the sound of Kazuha’s leaf whistles, and it tastes like sticking it to Ei. He finds that he likes it.
“Does this mean you’ll go see Lady Sangonomiya?” Tomo asks, and he sounds pleading. He makes a face like a kicked puppy.
“You look ugly when you pout,” says Shun, but he gets up off his pile of crates regardless. “I make no promises about if I’ll accept.”
Tomo’s whoop of victory follows him all the way up the path and to the Head Priestess’s war room. It is there that she welcomes him formally to the resistance—never mind that he has never expressed an interest in properly joining—and asks if he would do her a favor. The favor, she explains, is to leave Inazuma on a boat, brave the thunderstorms that form a loose barrier around the islands, and recruit foreign allies to their cause. She fears that her ragtag band of discontented farmers and disillusioned former Vision-holders will not be enough in the coming conflict, and Shun finds that he agrees.
He might have called her a pitiable excuse for a revolutionary and a myopic tactician on his way out, but he agrees regardless. It is only when he finds himself back at the training grounds that he realizes this favor of Sangonomiya Kokomi’s, as outlandish as it is, may have been a convenient excuse to exile a potential information leak without causing unrest. Tomo and Kazuha find him there again, still laughing.
“Has Lady Sangonomiya won you over?” Kazuha asks.
Shun, his face half covered by his hand as he gasps for air, shakes his head. “Perhaps not won me over,” he says, “but impressed me.”
Tomo grins at him. “That’s our Lady!” he cries, and drags Kazuha into a one-armed hug. “Didn’t I tell you it’d work out?”
“You did,” agrees Kazuha placidly. “So what was the favor, Shun?”
He stops laughing, then, because it has only just hit him that he would be leaving. Leaving the two of them, and something about that thought forces an unnatural stillness over him. “She wants me to recruit foreign allies,” he says. “Something about Sumeru, and a school there.”
Kazuha understands before Tomo does, his expression freezing. “You’re leaving,” he says.
“You’re what?” Tomo asks.
“Are you deaf or just stupid?” Shun snaps. “I am to leave Inazuma. For a year, perhaps two. However long it takes to secure the resistance’s future, because Sangonomiya was not as short-sighted as I may have assumed.”
Tomo’s face falls. “You better write,” he grumbles. “Kazuha and I will miss you.”
“Of course I will,” Shun scoffs on reflex, without even considering why he was agreeing. “And I have time before I am to leave. A couple months, Sangonomiya said.”
Tomo visibly brightens. So fickle, that one, Shun thinks. “That’s enough time for me to teach you how to fight!” he says, and grins at him. “I’m not going to let you leave without knowing how to defend yourself, you know.”
Shun raises his eyebrows in mild horror. But Kazuha only nods sagely, crossing his arms. “I will help,” he agrees.
And so Shun is dragged further into their orbit, only half-willingly. He spends those three months of respite learning sword forms with Tomo and Kazuha, both of whom are surprisingly demanding taskmasters. But while Tomo’s style is grounded and straightforward, Kazuha darts around the battlefield on cushions of wind that Shun has to work to track. Fighting the two of them teaches him to check his blindspots and to never, ever forget to look up.
He learns, too, that Kazuha likes to take walks in the rain, and he learns that Tomo will embroider anything he gets his hands on. He learns that Kazuha hears poetry in the sound of rustling leaves and the brush of feathers against bark, and he learns that Tomo collects his poems to bind into chapbooks. He learns that Kazuha earned his Vision when he became a true wanderer and that Tomo earned his when he resolved to become the best swordsman in the world.
They spend long evenings training, and laughing, and talking. Kazuha always speaks like a character out of a historical war novel while Tomo has a habit of tripping over his words when he gets too excited—which is all of the time. Shun finds one morning that he has become so much a part of the two of them, and the two of them a part of him, that the thought of leaving makes his doll’s heart ache.
So when Shun leaves Inazuma on Sangonomiya’s smuggler ship, he finds that he spends a lot of his journey looking back.
—
He returns a year and a half later to a rebellion floundering in their own lack of manpower. For so long spent only writing letters to Tomo, Kazuha, and Sangonomiya herself, the sudden activity of the camp is overwhelming—and their faults and foibles only distress him.
Oh, to be uselessly, pathetically human! To leave behind Ei’s glorious, terrible eternity for that ephemeral dream of happiness! To live, and to live truly, without his contemptible excuse for a body. To dream, to dream, to dream—the thought consumes him even as he looks upon the dissolute rebellion and despairs.
What godforsaken sentiment stops them? What is it that makes them fear her lightning? Is it that certain termination of their mayfly lives that scares them so? But they will all die on this path they’ve chosen, and likely screaming, so Shun does not understand why they fail to storm her battlements. Ei pretends at immortality while hiding inside her puppet shell, deluded into believing she is immune to the erosion that all gods are cursed with.
But Shun? Halfway here and halfway there, some semblance of a mortal in the image of a god, eternity in a vessel that rejects it—perhaps he is immune to erosion.
Or perhaps that is the human hubris speaking. He is no longer sure if he is a doll or if not, because dolls do not dream of mortality. Dolls could not fathom the things he dreams of.
Then he hears that Tomo is preparing to leave camp, determined to confront the Vision Hunters before the throne, and he storms into his tent without a second thought.
“Why?” Shun demands, because Tomo is human and so he is mortal . Ei is not, and so any venture against her in single combat is invariably doomed.
“Would you believe me if I said I was curious about the Mussou no Hitotachi?” he asks, grinning up at him with that sweet summer smile. He has his sword in his lap and a polishing cloth in his right hand, half-abandoned when Shun barged in. Shun, himself, is still holding an empty flask of water someone had handed to him earlier.
Shun sneers as he closes the tent flap. “I could demonstrate it for you,” he says, and calls up the images of the form and the function of Ei’s sword forms easily. “You know I could. But you’ve never asked.”
Tomo laughs. “Too sharp for your own good,” he says, and the words are fond even as Shun starts to feel as though the world may be crumbling around him.
“This is not about her sword,” says Shun, and he takes a step toward him with an anxious, rickety feeling in his gut. “This is about retribution.”
“Retribution is the currency of the damned,” says Tomo mildly, and he says it without a hint of irony as he wipes down the edge of his blade. “I don’t particularly mind being damned, though. There are worse things.”
The flask Shun holds shatters in his grip and shards of it, glittering in the amber light of early morning, fall to the ground. Tomo looks up from where he was polishing his sword, his expression gone alert. “Shun?”
But Shun is already pulling a sword off the wall and strapping it to his back, a grim feeling burgeoning in his heart. “Stay,” he snaps. “Stay here, you reckless fool, and wait for Kazuha. I’ll return soon.”
“Where are you—”
Shun cuts him off by fisting his hand in Tomo’s collar, and he memorizes the way the rough fabric of his red haori feels under his fingers because he knows that once he leaves, there will be no turning back. Then he pulls him up and out of his seat, paying no mind to the clatter of metal on the ground.
“I have every move of hers written in my skin,” Shun says matter-of-factly. “And my death, if her will is so insurmountable, will be no great loss to your cause.”
Tomo gapes at him, and Shun has never seen his eyes so bright.
Then his slack-jawed expression hardens into something that shines like gold, those amber eyes of his narrowing in some emotion Shun cannot read, and he grips Shun’s fist with his own hand. “To my cause, perhaps not,” says Tomo, his voice low. “But to me?”
He lets the question hang in the air for a single breath, though to Shun, it may as well last forever. He finds eternity in an instant, dreams held in the flash of Tomo’s eyes.
Tomo pulls him forward to knock their foreheads together, soft and fleeting like the brush of a sakura petal on his skin. “Come back,” he says fiercely. “Come back for me. And if not for me, then for Kazuha.”
Shun is suddenly glad, irresponsibly so, that puppets cannot cry.
“I’ll come back,” he promises, and it is a reckless, foolish promise that he cannot keep, but that does not stop him from making it. “For you both.”
—
“You are not the challenger,” observes the Raiden Shogun. Her voice is the same ice of midwinter that he remembers from when he first awoke, but empty as a lake in autumn. There is nothing left of Ei in her voice, and that is how he knows she succeeded.
“I come in his stead,” Shun declares, and unsheathes the sword from his back. It is a dull iron blade, made all the more underwhelming by the nicks on the tsuba and the ragged cord wrapped around the handle. But while it may not look the part, Shun knows it is a sword fit to battle a god.
But he does not battle a god, not that day. The Raiden Shogun sends her right hand man down the dais, a formidable archer whose prowess he knows from the rebellion’s battlefields. Kujou Sara is not who he expected to fight, but she will be an easier battle than Ei herself.
She would have been a bad match for Tomo, he thinks, because her style is explosive and meant to maim while Tomo has always tried to debilitate first, permanently harm second. Kazuha would be even worse, his soaring acrobatics on the field making him an easy target for sniper shots and lightning strikes. But for him, who fights in close and has no fear of Electro energy, Kujou Sara is an inconvenience at best. Shun walks into the great open floor of the Tenshukaku with that burning relief in his heart.
“Begin,” says the Raiden Shogun.
Shun dashes forward before Kujou Sara can put any space between them. She is Tengu, and so she is fast—perhaps faster than he—but she is not used to being put on the back foot so early in a duel. He presses that advantage ruthlessly, forcing her to block his strikes with the armored sections of her longbow. Even as she tries to bat him back with uncontrolled pulses of Electro energy, sparking a violent purple in the dim light of the Tenshukaku, he gives no ground. He is made of lightning. To brave its glow is nothing.
Kujou Sara’s wings flare out in an impressive display of agility and strength, but they cannot save her from a sword strike through the shoulder. His dull blade cuts clean through the cloth of her uniform and sinks deep into her flesh, and Kujou Sara lets out a visceral wail of agony. Shun only pushes his sword deeper. She is the Raiden Shogun’s iron fist of the Vision Hunt Decree, and if retribution is to be his currency then he will pay in full. “Yield,” he grits out.
Kujou Sara struggles once, twice, caught like a fish on a line, and then lies perfectly still. Her face twists into a placid mask of complete acceptance of what is to come, and Shun pities her for a brief moment—that she cannot muster up the will to fight off death, even at the very end.
But, knowing what he does of humans…
He crouches down to whisper a question, and Kujou Sara murmurs her answer.
The Raiden Shogun descends the dais and pulls out the Mussou Isshin, that terrible, bloodstained sword that has seen so many executed. She raises it high. But in the flash of the weak winter sun on steel, Shun catches a glimpse of another future.
“Wait,” he says, and the Raiden Shogun, inexplicably, does. She looks at him impassively with her sword upraised and a stern tilt to her mouth. “Speak,” she orders.
“I have no need for a Tengu’s useless life,” says Shun. “And both of us are proxies. May I propose a different outcome?”
The Raiden Shogun says nothing, and so he continues.
“I suggest a trade. Kujou Sara’s life for your sword.”
The words hang in the air like time itself has frozen around them, broken only when the Raiden Shogun laughs. “A life for this sword?” she asks, and for the first time, emotion colors her voice. She sounds incredulous. “A sword that has served me for centuries, for a woman who has only served me for three years?”
Shun catches the way Kujou Sara’s expression tightens and so presses on. “Yes,” he says, and scoffs when the Raiden Shogun does not reply. “I did not take you to be heartless, Ei. You know as well as I do that you’ve killed enough of the people you love—or have you finally lost your mind? All that grief, and it erodes until you can add another to the long list of people whose lives that sword has taken, and do so without an ounce of hesitation? Tell me, when did your vaunted eternity become drowning forever in your guilt? You’re pathetic.”
The Raiden Shogun still does not reply. But then, before he can react, a rift opens in the fabric of the world—and he is swallowed up.
He finds himself in a windless arena. The sky, red as the color of spilled blood and spider lilies, stretches out endlessly beyond ashen torii gates. And the moon, fat and immobile in that sea of blood above him, is the only source of proper light beyond a dim, diffuse glow. There is a woman in the center of the arena, perched on nothing at all.
Not a woman, he corrects himself. A god.
Ei—because this must be Ei—unfolds her legs and opens her eyes. They are as dark and deep as he remembers, like bottomless ponds on cloudy nights. She looks upon him with disdain, and perhaps some curiosity.
“Kunikuzushi,” she greets. “It has been a long time.”
He bares his teeth. “Call me Shun.”
Ei raises her eyebrows. “Shun?” she asks, then laughs. Her laugh is a delicate, tinkling thing, so unlike her that he has never been able to reconcile her face with the sound. “A name for a single instant, a flash of light in the dark. Did you choose that name in defiance of my eternity, or was it simply a coincidence?”
“Coincidence,” he lies, because Kazuha has a twisted, ironic sense of humor, and he would not put it past him to have chosen the name as such.
“How serendipitous,” Ei murmurs. “And you’re here for my sword, are you not?”
Shun holds her cold, dead gaze, and he feels the crackling pull of the lightning in his veins light up in some strange, sympathetic recognition. “I’m here for you, Ei,” he says. “I won the duel. Let me spare your Tengu warrior and come with me.”
“Why would I do that, my impertinent puppet?” she asks, and she almost sounds amused. “Sara lost, and she knew she would pay for the dishonor with her life.”
Tell me. Would you die by her hand, and do so willingly?
I would. Her hand, better than a thousand other deaths.
“Devotion is a rare currency these days,” Shun tells her sharply, and flicks his sword in emphasis. But in answer, Ei pulls out her spear, a naginata with a pale purple blade. She looks upon him with a cold, clear look of judgement.
“Perhaps if you make me submit, then you will have shaken my eternity,” she says, and in that moment, she sounds less like Ei and far more like the Raiden Shogun. Shun wonders when all that made her good, all that made her compassionate and lovely, froze in the hoarfrost of her inner domain. Was it the grief? Was it the loss?
He resolves, then and there, that he cannot let Kazuha nor Tomo suffer that same fate.
The fight against Ei is nothing like the fight against Kujou Sara. The Tengu warrior was light on her feet and plenty powerful, but her command over lightning is nothing compared to Ei’s. And Ei, for a woman who has been alone in her own mind for so long, is surprisingly fast. Shun would strike at where she had been, rather than where she is, and have to leap backwards away from her naginata. She has the reach advantage on him, what with her height and the length of her spear.
But Shun is still glad that it is him, and not anyone else, for what other being—past perhaps a slime— could cut through Ei’s lightning without feeling a thing? It does not hurt him. It cannot hurt him. He was made with the scrap wood of the Thunder Sakura and her own energy brought him to life.
“Do you know what this place is called?” Ei asks, lazily blocking his overhand strike.
“Your hideout?” Shun sneers. He twists away from her retaliatory blow and rolls, getting to his feet a safe distance away.
“My Plane of Euthymia,” she says. And Ei sounds as if she is dreaming, as if this fight is nothing more than a blink in a long delusion. “It is here that I achieve true eternity.”
Shun dashes forward, hits her again, and as she catches the strike with her blade, leans in close. He feels erratic like a fish on a line. “Eternity?” he snarls, breathing hard. “What eternity? I only see suffering! You would kill Kujou Sara to preserve your own loneliness!”
Ei throws him off with a spin of her naginata, unphased. “For eternity, I would do anything,” she says then.
He thinks of Kazuha, with his wanderer’s heart and easy smile. He thinks of Tomo, bright-eyed like fireflies at twilight. And he thinks, somewhat inexplicably, of the quiet acceptance in Kujou Sara’s expression, placid even as the woman she loved raised her sword to take her life. That burning feeling of frustration and rage bubbles over and he darts recklessly forward.
“Your eternity is shit!” Shun shrieks, and in his desperation to make her understand, takes a slash to the arm from her blade. But he ignores it, even as it tears through rice paper skin and scores a line through the dark wood beneath, and drives his blade into her stomach.
Ei staggers back, clearly not expecting the blow. “What—”
“Your eternity,” Shun repeats, “is shit! Humans—their lives are so short and yet—and so they spend their time pursuing what sets them aflame. And you take that away! You take that away because you’ve forgotten what that’s like!”
Ei opens her mouth, slack-jawed, but he presses on. “Kami,” he breathes, and yanks the sword out of her before stabbing her again. “You built me out of paper in the image of a god, and when I awoke I did not understand! Because you’ve forgotten, but I understand now, I understand, and you have locked yourself in this place because you are terrified to remember!”
“Shun—” she starts, and chokes. When she coughs, blood trickles out of the side of her mouth.
“Ei,” Shun says as he stands over her, fallen to the floor and holding the wound in her stomach, “your fear makes you weak.”
She looks up at him, mouth agape and eyes blown wide. He sees his own reflection in those violet mirrors—a young man, his yukata torn and filthy, but looming over her with an unhinged, deranged scowl. For the first time in his memory, and in the memories that are ultimately hers, she looks truly afraid.
“So come with me,” he tells her breathlessly, all the wind taken from his sails. “Come with me, so you can remember again.”
Ei’s expression slackens.
In a flash of light, infinite galaxies whirl and twist before his eyes. And then he is not inside Ei’s Plane of Euthymia. He is standing once more in the Tenshukaku, Kujou Sara long gone, and the Raiden Shogun stands before him. In her hand is the Mussou Isshin, sheathed once more.
She holds it out to him. “Take it,” she says. “She will not be able to return until she recuperates completely. You damaged her.”
Shun stares at her, taken aback. “Just like that?” he asks.
The Raiden Shogun shrugs, emotionless once more. “You prevailed over her in battle, did you not? Ei may not be Liyue’s God of Contracts, but she is a woman of her word.”
Shun steps forward. “No tricks?” he asks.
“I am incapable of them,” says the Shogun, and he believes her. He lifts the sword from her outstretched hand. But before he can turn to leave, she opens her mouth again.
“Take care of her,” she says.
Shun looks down at the sword in his hand, at the object of Ei’s will and her grief, and then back at her puppet. “As you say,” he acknowledges.
And then he steps out of the doors of the Tenshukaku and into the sun.
He barely has a moment to breathe before Kazuha collides with him, crashing in a flurry of red and white cloth. “You’re okay!” he cries, arms tightening to cage Shun in a hug. “I heard in the marketplace that there was a challenger to the Vision Hunt Decree and that he was to battle the Shogun, and at first I thought it was Tomo, but—”
Shun wraps his arms around Kazuha and tucks his head under his chin, resisting the urge to smile. Kazuha’s hair smells like rainwater and the morning breeze, and it comforts him.
“It was to be Tomo,” he says. “I talked him out of it. He would have lost, and then died pathetically, and what good would that do for anyone?”
“You’re so cruel,” Kazuha mutters into his yukata, but clutches him tighter regardless. “I feared the worst, you know. I would have run up here and found you dead on the floor, too late to be of any use at all.”
Shun pulls back then, searching Kazuha’s face. He looks on the edge of distraught, and it makes something in his puppet’s heart twang in remorse. But he does not know how to say that it would be better he on the floor than Tomo, for both the rebellion and Kazuha’s own heart. So instead, he shakes him gently by the shoulders.
“I survived,” he says quietly.
“You’re just as bad as he is!” Kazuha shoots back, and Shun feels briefly that he should feel insulted. But his train of thought is derailed by Kazuha straightening, cupping the back of his head and pulling them together until their foreheads touch. “Archons, Shun. I was so scared.”
Shun swallows down some indescribable feeling. Is it guilt? Can a doll feel guilt? Or is guilt something reserved only for the truly human?
“I survived,” he repeats. And because Kazuha is still looking at him with that watery, anguished expression, he says, “I’m sorry. For worrying you.”
He feels that Kazuha is shaking.
“I don’t know what I would do,” Kazuha says. “I don’t know what I would do if I had to watch either of you die.”
“I won’t die,” says Shun. “I’m a puppet.”
Kazuha baps him with his own forehead, as if with some great frustration. “What makes you a puppet?” he mutters. “What makes you a puppet and what makes me human? What does it matter?”
“It matters,” says Shun mutinously.
“It does not,” says Kazuha, and his voice is fierce the way it almost never is. “It does not, because you love, and you feel, and you can die like the rest of us humans even if our lives last the blink of your eyes.”
“And yet I was built to follow orders,” he points out, because Kazuha—Kazuha is right, Kazuha and his terrible poetry is right, and he is not ready to accept it.
“When,” says Kazuha, and now he sounds so terribly exasperated, “have you ever followed orders?”
And then Shun has to laugh. “Point,” he admits.
Kazuha sighs at him, looking so put out that he cannot help but laugh again. “Let’s go home,” he says. “I need to yell at Tomo too.”
Shun looks down at the Mussou Isshin in his hand, and the promises he made to Ei and the Shogun ring clear in his head. But they can wait.
“Let’s,” he agrees, and so he and Kazuha leave the Tenshukaku—and the Shogun herself—behind.