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Before the moon, she had not come to terms with her own loathsomeness. Ryo had told her once: Does the mudfish see itself in its mire, surrounded by filth? It is that which runs through her mind at this moment.
Kita is alone in the brush. Her ear is against the ground, the other exposed to the mist. Tall grass looms above her. No cicadas in this sunless meadow. She is below the trees where the leaves fall. Her hair is a mess; she could not bear to see it. She cannot bear the touch of it on her skin, the mattedness of her fur.
She looks beyond the misty vale and beyond it a river. Loping down the slope where there are skids of ash and treevines webbing over the moon like a gothic harp. She bowls her hands and dips into the river and drinks. Her bones ache. Her spine writhes and shivers.
The firelight from the camp has vanished. Now only under this moon may she eke the subtle frames of the wild, lidless eyes forever beholding in the dark. She moves like some jellied mud-thing slithering about the toves and the ivies. A sharpened stick cuts with its dead bark into the redness of her palm.
She clutches the twigs in her other hand, cloaked in tufts of straw so coarse against her. The crook of her heel bulges in her boot. Bounding through the meadow. Watching, clearly, the rapids rush over pallid rocks like little eyes gazing for the stars. White, bleary spider eggs shifting beneath her feet. The grass and the willows. The filth clinging to her bones.
She has all but forgotten the way to the camp. Now Kita crouches like some lycanthrope made man, head hung low and bobbing about the earth like some mowing scythe drenched in scarlet. Breathing raggedly. The mist of her mouth thick in the air, a diabolical fume.
Hitori rises from the brush.
“Kita?”
Kita flips around and beams. “Hey, Hitori!” she says, holding up the sticks. “For the fire!”
“Kita, what are you doing?”
“Bushcraft!”
Hitori blinks. “Well… Y-You should come back to the camp. Nijika’s worried you’re, uh, lost.”
“Oop. Sorry!” She bounds after her, two dark shadows bleeding through the undergrowth.