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The din quietens and then fades, footsteps against the uneven soil turning to silence and the mass of people turning to only two. It’s the scenario she’d been picturing in her head for months—if not years—to come now, and yet now that they’re actually here, like this, she doesn’t know what to make of it.
Sara’s hands and feet feel like white noise.
Sunset stains the earth in shades of blood and honey and she feels herself falling to her knees in the poisoned light, the surface cutting through her skin and leaving implants of jagged red. She doesn’t care for it.
Across from her, the one with the dawn-sea eyes smiles a little, crowned by settling flickers of gold and the grey of the rocky outcrop behind her, and a fragment of Sara’s heart breaks just a little more, even though she knows it shouldn’t. There are knives in her chest where there should be closed scars and prayers in her mouth where there should be victory cries and she’s starting to think she’s going insane because she knows God’s not listening but there’s a part of her that wishes God would.
“Why the glum face?” Kokomi tilts her head up to meet Sara’s gaze. The sunset light falls into the periwinkle of her eyes and scatters like a million shooting stars, and Sara wonders briefly if her wish would come true if only she just shut her eyes and made one, sitting here like this.
It occurs to her that she doesn’t even know what she should be wishing for.
She won’t cry. She shouldn’t cry, not when they’ve won. Their war is over at last, she thinks, and she knew it was going to turn out like this. She knew, but sitting here like this, she comes to the distinct revelation that no fake funerals would’ve prepared her enough to mourn for the reality of goodbye.
It was going to end like this, she knows, but she didn’t want it to end like this.
Tears burn her throat like a geyser rising into the air and she swallows it down with all the will she has left. She draws a long, wavering breath, and across from her, Kokomi laughs. The sun is starting to sink further beyond the horizon, casting the ground in shadow and leaving only trails of dark along the crimson stained between the soil and along Sara’s knees.
“Shouldn’t you be celebrating?” The corners of her lips twitch upwards further, and Sara wonders how she can be smiling at a time like this. “You were trying to kill me all these years, weren’t you?”
And now you’re finally going to succeed, says the unsaid, and Sara is glad that the words don’t go spoken aloud. It’ll only cement the farewell, and she must really be going crazy, because there’s a part of her that’s trying to deny the inevitability of that happening.
It’s a funny thing, chasing something only to have it break your heart in the end. For years now she had been trying to take down the leader of the Resistance to restore the Shogun’s order, and yet now that she’s actually succeeded, it feels as though she is the one dying instead, as though some part of her heart had withered away, a trail of flowers to line the graveyard she is kneeling upon.
She has never felt this way before. The scorching feeling in the back of her throat tastes like a mix of hard liquor and bitter medicine, but it does nothing to make her feel any better, and it’s not something that can be rinsed away with a few gulps of water. In the distance, the waves of Watatsumi crash against the surface and then fade, the last remnants of evening sun colouring them liquid red. Today the distance they chase, towards where Narukami Island lies, feels less like home and more like regret.
“Congratulations on your win,” Kokomi says lightly, and the half-empty ache someplace in Sara’s soul throbs harder. “It was a good fight.”
The taste of salt on Sara’s lips grows stronger. She doesn’t know if it’s the seafoam carried by the breeze or the tears she’s been trying to keep in her throat.
“I guess I was finally outsmarted, huh?” The last of the sun dips away and encases the sky in a deluge of dark, and Sara watches as the gold-painted stars in Kokomi’s eyes die away into husks of dulling lavender. “But you know, Sara… I’m glad it was you.”
The figurative geyser lodged somewhere between her lungs and mouth finally explodes, seeking asylum in the open air through the blinking of her eyes and the blurring of her vision, tears cold and wet and startling against the numb of her cheeks.
“You’re not supposed to be the one crying,” Kokomi laughs, her voice gentle even with all the cracks and wavering breaths between the words, and Sara swallows hard. “You’re supposed to stand above my grave and laugh, no? You’ve finally accomplished what you came to do.”
She knows. She knows, but now that the tears have started to fall, they can’t seem to stop.
She must be going insane, she reflects in the back of her mind as she lowers her head, staring down at the blur of red below her, trailing from the open gash in Kokomi’s chest to the torn skin of her own knees. The Shogun’s troops have all returned to celebrate the end to the long-drawn war, and she knows that they must be celebrating her, too, the General who had dealt the decisive blow for the glory of the eternal Shogun.
But the Shogun feels like a stranger now in the haze of her mind, and the night that swathes them both fits over her shoulders like a funeral gown, not a victory cape. It feels almost as though she is fighting a different war—one she knows she cannot win.
There are no salves for the wrong souls, God tells her, and this is the price to pay for betraying the divine. And she knows, she really does—and she would, for the God she serves is the very one who sent her to carry out this task—but the wings on her back are starting to feel a little less like angel-feather and a lot more like sin-laden skeletons, reaper-dark and heavy with all the blood on her hands.
“Did you know?” Kokomi asks, all of a sudden, and Sara snaps her head up to meet Kokomi’s gaze. The Watatsumi leader’s breathing has gotten ragged, her eyes half-lidded, and she looks as though she’d cry, too, if only she had enough energy left to.
(Sara finds herself crying on her behalf instead.)
“There’s a legend that says Watatsumi dragons are reborn once every hundred years,” Kokomi says softly. “Do you believe in legends, Sara?”
No, she wants to reply, but crowned in just the right shade of crimson and post-sunset light, the world is dark enough to strip away the remnants of anything holy, enough to reduce her beliefs to fine dust and forgotten prayers, stripped bare like bone in the cold of this unforgiving night.
“I’ll believe in yours,” she whispers.
The smile on Kokomi’s face brightens, just a little.
“Tengus… live a long time, don’t they?”
Sara nods. The fire burning at the back of her throat has turned all her words to ash against her tongue, flavoured with salt and the deep, bitter sting of farewell.
Kokomi moves closer, and Sara startles at the touch of Kokomi’s fingers against her cheek. The Priestess’ hands are cold and trembling, but she wipes the tears off Sara’s face with a steady kind of determination, brushing them away from the corners of her eyes before they can fall.
“Don’t mourn for me.” Kokomi’s hand trails down to Sara’s chin, cupping the edge of her jaw and tilting Sara’s head just slightly downwards until they’re at eye level. The distance she had crossed from the outcrop she’d been leaning against to her spot before Sara leaves a jagged line of fresh red down her side and into the uneven soil, but she doesn’t seem to mind, her smile ever-present in the shallowing of her breath and the flickering of her eyes. “Will you promise me that?”
Swearing oaths always seems to leave her with more scars than they heal, and this time may be no different, Sara concedes, but the knives are already littered in every corner of her heart now, so what’s a little more?
“Yeah,” she says breathlessly, and then Kokomi kisses her.
It’s not a kiss that means I love you, or any of the things Sara thinks a kiss is supposed to mean. It’s a kiss that comes out of nowhere, with her widened eyes staring at the softly-closed ones of Kokomi’s. The kiss comes soft and slow and the world around Sara explodes with the intensity of several geysers, and as the blood in Kokomi’s mouth mixes with the tears in hers, she lets herself close her eyes, tasting the sweet of regret and the bitter of all the words unsaid in the melting of Kokomi’s lips against hers.
Kokomi doesn’t kiss her like she’s saying goodbye, or like she’s apologising for leaving. She doesn’t kiss her like there are any haloes waiting for them or like she’s repenting under the sneers of the old Gods. She kisses her like a promise, slow and burning like they’re crafted raw of stars and meteorites, like she’ll take the salves from the Gods herself and rewrite the tragedy they’re sitting in, crafted in red and the dark of the withering night, and distinctly, in the back of her mind, Sara thinks that maybe this is what life is about. Living, not as angels but as themselves.
The kiss is long-drawn, like this little war they’ve raged upon themselves, and it feels barely anything like sorry and even less like farewell, and in retrospect, Sara is grateful for that.
“I’ll be back, my dear Tengu,” Kokomi whispers against her lips just before they part, leaving the faintest trail of crimson against the corner of Sara’s half-opened mouth, a blood oath sworn in marks against cold skin. “Try to stay alive until then, alright?”
Promises are a sacred thing, Sara knows, and she’s happy to make this one. The waves crash against the sand and unfurl in the direction of where the Omnipresent God watches over the land, and the metallic tang of blood that’s not her own in the cracks of her lips tastes a little like rebellion, but maybe that’s why the old tales of adventurers always described rebellion as something sweet.
A hundred years. She’s barely lived past a quarter of that amount, but what’s a century but a drop in the sea of eternity? The day she had sworn an oath to become the Shogun’s General she had promised her eternity—she might as well make the most of it while she can.
“Okay.” Maybe her vision is blurring, or maybe Kokomi’s eyes are beginning to dull and dim away. Maybe both. She feels Kokomi’s fingers, cold and wavering, trail down the edge of her jaw, resting for a moment longer against her chin before it drops away. She watches Kokomi’s hand fall to her side, knuckles brushing the blood that’s pooled against the soil, dark and slick and a stark reminder of the farewell that is awaiting them.
A temporary farewell, Sara reminds herself, looking down at the ground below their knees. The wound in Kokomi’s chest draws a thin red string from the place above her heart to the edge of Sara’s skin where she reaches out with her fingers to trace incomplete circles against the stained earth.
(Their war isn’t over yet, not now and not in a hundred years to come.)
“Good,” Kokomi breathes, the smile on her face growing wider now, blood spilling past the corner of her mouth and drawing itself in a crooked line down her chin, “wait for me a little longer, then.”
Sara watches as her eyes close, and she reaches out instinctively to catch Kokomi’s body in her arms, blood from her wound seeping across the cold of Sara’s skin and leaving warmth in its wake. She knows it is almost time to say goodbye.
Kokomi’s words come out a soft whisper, barely audible, her breath fading against the shaking of Sara’s shoulders. “Because… I want to be the one to kill you.”
The way she says it sounds like a promise, and Sara thinks she really might be insane after all, because nothing has ever sounded so comforting before.