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rock crumbles beneath her heel, and the tengu knows she is approaching the end of the cliff. fierce wind batters her back, ruffles the feathers of her injured wings, and still she cannot back away from that damned edge. she’s been cornered. misshapen beasts of miasma press in closer— the tengu, inexperienced as she is, young as she is, frightens.
she takes a step back.
from that nameless mountain, she falls.
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kujou sara wakes up with a sense of vertigo. raven-black wings materialise into the world, poised to catch her from a fall she never entered. in the end, they are only stark against her bedsheets. she breathes in, once, twice— five times.
balance has always come in fives.
she has not been that nameless girl for decades, now. they’re practically strangers. sara does not know why she dreams of her in times like this. with a mind cleared of sleep-fog, she wills her wings into that quiet pocket left of reality that keeps them hidden. their weight plagues her nonetheless.
(they hadn’t felt so heavy when she was young. when flying was as natural as walking.)
(kujou sara does not remember how to fly. kujou sara has never known how.)
one cursory glance out of the window of the barracks tells her it’s still the small hours of the morning, long before daybreak was due. good, she thinks. nightmares— had it been a nightmare?— should not affect her routine. sara was a respected general, the unofficial right hand of the almighty shogun. she didn’t break schedule. especially not for something as stupid as personal reminiscences.
she rises from her bed, and so does the mighty general’s day begin, before the soldiers under her command are even dreaming of being awake.
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“yes, your excellency.” she says.
my God, she doesn’t say, my lone conviction. kujou sara would lay the world at her feet.
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“for the almighty shogun!” she yells across the silence of the battlefield, and the soldiers around her spring into action.
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kujou sara learns that war is long.
there is dirt under her fingernails, and the rusted handle of the spade is rubbing callouses into the meat of her palm. she keeps digging anyway, until the sun is low and starkly crimson in the sky. her comrade— ishikawa, his name had been— deserves better than a shallow grave.
better than a general that hadn’t managed to keep him alive, too, but sara’s bitter grief is too little too late.
he looks miserably young when she finally finds the courage to start pouring loamy soil over him. well rested, she thinks, morbidly. sara hopes the ground will be good to him. cool, and soothing, unlike the burning battlefields she had led him through in his life.
she kneels before the mound of freshly-turned earth, marked only by ishikawa’s blade, and prays. kujou sara has never doubted her excellency— but plagued by the memory of his face in the ground, she prays that eternity will be worth it.
almighty shogun, she mouths, please guide us to an eternity without strife. sara thinks that she’ll carry this misery forever. ishikawa’s unusually peaceful face stored in the same space as her wings, rotting alongside them. he had never looked like that living. he had always been so animated, so boisterous, so loud. she used to give him extra laps for trying to sneak extra rations.
she’s so tired.
as per tradition, she leaves an offering of dendrobium at the grave. they were her favourite flower, once, before she had learnt to associate them with death. she hopes ishikawa had liked them, too.
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“my general, come to my side.” the raiden shogun calls to her, with that same stern voice that has dictated most of sara’s life.
she has never disobeyed her excellency on any front. she will not start today. with the heavy pit of reverence in her stomach, she kneels beside the almighty shogun. sara feels rubbed raw just being so near, she couldn’t imagine her God meant for her to stand— to indicate them as anything resembling equals.
the raiden shogun lowers her hand into sara’s hair, as expectant of her acceptance of the situation as an owner is of their dog. “my general, who enacts my will with a persistence like no other in my army.” she says, and it feels like a precedent for something else.
kujou sara is too smart to think the almighty shogun’s attention is anything but cold steel at the back of her neck. her excellency demands subordination. sara almost laughs. for her God, for her country, for her duty, she thinks she would give anything. there was never any need for demand. she has snapped her own bones for less.
everything that she is, she owes to the almighty shogun. sara has never forgotten this. so she ducks her head, allows the archon to card her hand through her hair. when those divine fingers come to press at the nape of her neck, she knows she was right to consider them a blade.
“have you been doubting me, kujou sara?”
sara knows she is being tested. her name is weightless in her God’s mouth, so meaningless and so small. she knows it could be taken from her at any time. the room is so, so cold. swallowing back the lump in her throat, she keeps still. “no, your excellency, your will is paramount. i will fight for your eternity until i am dead.” she says, a mantra that she has warmed over in her heart for months.
that hand departs from her hair, and she knows the raiden shogun is pleased. “so you will. go, then, and know my judgement is absolute.” the archon tells her.
sara has never thought of the almighty shogun as anything but absolute. in her life, her measly little life, she is the only absolute. kujou sara has always been known for her piety.
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an outlander has found their way into inazuma. sara watches them hunch over the man arrested on suspicions of making a boat, all luminous eyes and warrior’s confidence, and turns to leave. she has never believed in involving civilians. neither, it seems, does the traveller.
“be quick, before i change my mind.” she tells the naganohara girl and the traveller. an acquiescence. sara will arrest the man again without hesitation, should the matter be pressed, but she knows the quiet parts of the resistance that work in the cities walls are smarter than that.
she’s counting on them to be.
kujou sara exits the prison without giving chase. the traveller is a threat to eternity, no doubt, but—
she just wants the war to end. surely that’s not the same as eternity. her excellency’s eternity could not mean the same thing as war.
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when the traveller escapes the damning blade of the almighty shogun with the help of the kamisato’s retainer, sara pretends she is feeling anything but relief. a devotee should never be relieved by her God’s losses. sara is known for her devotion. had built an entire identity around it.
which is why she isn’t relieved.
she plasters warrants for the traveller’s arrest all over the city. the fact that their serious face stares out at her from a poster, instead of a coffin, makes putting them up feel like a resistance of its own. her lack of discomfort at the thought of the traveller far from inazuma city, safe and uncaptured, makes her a defector. defective thoughts are still defecting, in the end.
kujou sara thinks she might be no better than the rebels.
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still, inazuma’s civil war rages. both sides have long since exhausted any fighting spirit, there is no sense of glory when they clash now. no conviction in the way their blades meet. when some men fall, sara wonders if they had really been bested, or if they had decided they were too tired to deny the sword a home in their flesh.
nobody says anything when they gather to bury the dead and treat the injured. nor does she. there are no more rousing speeches left in her. instead, there is only the battered remains of a platoon, bowing their heads and making an unspoken pact to just make it out, damn it.
somewhere after the third and before the ninth grave kujou sara dug, she had stopped praying to the almighty shogun. instead, she prays directly to the fallen. forgive me, is what she mouths, wait for me on the other side so i can just say sorry one more time.
the shogunate does not advance on the rebel forces that evening, when they realise the fire burning on their side of nazuichi beach is a funeral pyre.
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sanganomiya kokomi’s smile is a blithe thing. “just what are you to the raiden shogun?” she asks, blasphemously. like her and sara are at liberty to discuss anything. like they aren’t enemy officers, consorting against all reason.
the sake burns in sara’s throat.
“i’m starting to think i’m nothing at all.” she confesses, quietly, and she feels caught by that shining gaze. helpless. the divine priestess of watatsumi island has a way of making her feel like a fish on a reel. it’s ironic. it’s frightening.
kujou sara has never backed down just because she was afraid.
it’s sanganomiya who looks away, still armed with that wan smile, like she’s too pristine to find any real anchor in the world around her. sara has only ever been worth the world around her. they’d make an awful pair, even in peace times.
“i think your loyalty is poisoning you, general kujou.”
sara doesn’t know how to tell her that her loyalty is all she is. without it, she’s nameless again, falling— falling, falling. so how can it poison her, if it’s the tenet of her entire existence? she settles for laughing, a dry and brittle recreation of the act.
“you think a great number of things, rebel insurgent.”
sanganomiya reaches for her cup, wraps slim, dainty fingers around it; and raises it to sara in a mock salute. sara raises her own in turn, and they drink.
later in the night, when the light is low and they’ve both said far more than should be considered smart, she realises the priestess looks tired. lost. they’ve all taken up a mantle too big for their shoulders. eternity was only ever meant to be her excellency’s burden, and now it weighs on even the natives of watatsumi.
“i’m turning in for the night. you should, too, so that you might be at your sharpest when we next meet on the battlefield.” sara tells her.
sanganomiya wears that struggling little smile again. “war is long, general. goodnight.”
she wonders if it’s a form of desertion to feel more understood by her enemy than by her God.
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in eventuality, it all stops.
like everything does, kujou sara is starting to realise. devotion, lives, conflicts— all of it destined to burn out, disintegrate to ash like a cigarette left alight. she thinks eternity must have been a pipe dream.
worst of all, not even her pipe dream. the dream of a God. except maybe all Gods are really just gods, if she’s learning anything. you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can teach it new melancholy. it should be funny, to know her excellency is as fallible as any bag of bones on teyvat. oh how the mighty have fallen, pulled by their knees towards the earth by grief, of all things.
except kujou sara is not a laughing woman. so it’s just terribly sad.
she doesn’t even know how it happened. it was all there, briefly— the electrifying grief of her clan’s betrayal, the cold weight of duty solidifying in her heart as she marched to tenshukaku. one fast, dazzling glance at the eighth harbinger; then nothing.
nothing.
just the cold floor and aching bones in the morning. glimmering ash scattered around the room. later, in the brazen daylight, a ceasefire from her excellency.
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“sara.” her excellency says, warmly. there is a light in her eyes, like the strike of lightning coaxed out from behind thunderclouds. has she always looked like that?
human, almost.
kujou sara has never known the raiden shogun to be anything but expressionless, divine, eternal.
this god’s brow furrows, an ephemeral emotion— fleeting. concerned. she’s staring at her excellency, a blatant disrespect, and it takes her a moment too long to fall to her knee and lower her gaze to the floor.
“yes, your excellency?” she says, and she is leaden. hollowed out.
“i have reconsidered my plan of action.”
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she dreams of flight. except all her feathers have been clipped, neat diagonal incisions that tether her to the ground.
“general.” a familiar voice calls from behind her, and sara does not need to turn to know which hand is holding the clippers. she cries, filthy, sheds the last of her dignity in fat rolling teardrops that mingle with the mud.
ishikawa’s slack expression is barely unearthed by her tears. sara can’t breathe, anymore. alveoli cut like her wings.
when she wakes this time, her back is bare. not even an ache. her lashes are still damp.