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Every night, the dream was different.
Every night, the dream was the same.
It was always by the river, just outside the limits of the village, near the stretch where the surface water flowed smooth and gentle but the depths held strong undercurrents that shot down to the secrets that lay in the silt and rocks below. The rush of water masked the sound of movement, so that Sunao could not hear her own footsteps on the packed earth and pebbles of the riverbank. But she was not trying to conceal herself -- someone was always waiting for her, and that someone always turned around to face her as she closed the distance between them.
The clothing, of course, was different every time. The power of a diviner cloaked each of them in garments suited for their chosen style of fighting or in keeping with the circumstances of the wish they had made, but each one always had a personal touch. Some had flowing sleeves longer than those of a wedding kimono, or necklaces of highly polished beads, or bodices covered in elaborately embroidered networks of gold and silver threads that glinted in what little light could filter through the trees of the dense, ancient forest. Even though the village had no real tradition of nobility beyond the courtesy given to the head Tokime family (and that of the Mikoshiba, a dark voice murmured in Sunao's heart), many of the diviners carried long blades, the yari or naginata that many a well-bred young woman in the past would have learned to wield in defense of her home and honour. Still others held short swords, or heavy bows, or weapons of a design that Sunao could not fully take in with the few seconds available to her within the space of the dream. Because each time, as Sunao approached, the person waiting for her would hold up a hand in warning, and Sunao would stop and yield -- for the moment.
You are here to kill me, the strange diviner would say.
It was always easiest when it wasn't a question. It took very little time, in those instances, for Sunao to spot the shattered casing where their jewel would have been in life. Much easier than hearing those words from a diviner whose jewel was blackened, long past the point of purification, but still intact. And there were some -- a few, the hardest few -- whose jewels still had glimmers of bright colour, and whose voices still held tinges of disbelief or outrage, rising in accusation as they confronted the treachery of gods and men.
'I must do so,' Sunao would say aloud, in a dream voice distant from her own. 'I eliminate anyone who goes against the village's will.'
It was at this point that Sunao would see the diviner more clearly, as the dream further revealed itself to her. The isolation of the Tokime clan meant that most families within the Kirimine area were related to each other to some degree, so it was unsurprising that some of their features looked familiar to her -- she might find herself looking into Shizuka's eyes, or seeing the shape of her own cheekbones in the face of the young woman before her. Once, she even thought she recognized Chiharu's firm mouth and chin, a callback to a branch family long since departed from the confines of its ancestral home.
The village's will. The voice of the dead could be bitter, or tearful, or resigned. The village knows nothing, and has no will. The one who knows all, and wills all, is beyond our grasp. And so here we remain, in this river of souls. Suddenly, the diviner's weapon would be pointed directly at Sunao. And you will join us down here, Toki Sunao, floating away on your selfish wish and sinking to the depths of your coward's heart. Whose blood will be on your hands when the waters close over your head?
And every night -- or rather, early morning, as the first rays of the rising sun began to illuminate the sky, Sunao would snap into wakefulness, with her heart beating thunderously and the damp of a deep forest clinging to her clammy skin.
* * * *
Before the Mikoshiba's death, Sunao naturally had kept the secrets of the dream to herself. The ghostly accusations, selfish wish and coward's heart, were truthful enough to bear in silence and shameful enough to bear alone. But when the dreams continued after the great battle with Yurayura-sama, she began to wonder if there was some greater threat yet to come. The nights of interrupted sleep had started to tell on her as well, and when she came to Shizuka and Chiharu with her problem, it didn't take long for them to draw all the details out of her.
'You're haunted by the spirits of dead diviners?' Shizuka said, frowning.
'But I thought....' Chiharu shuddered a little, remembering the oppressive weight of the malice that had nearly sent her and Shizuka to a watery end. 'I thought that the souls of the diviners who became demons were all captured by Yurayura-sama. Wouldn't we have freed them, when we were able to defeat it?'
'I thought so, too, but now I am not so sure," Sunao said, matching Shizuka's furrowed brow. 'Those who became demons during the coming-of-age ceremony would have been devoured by Yurayura-sama, but their bodies are still in the river -- this river of souls, as they say to me.'
'Their bodies...a river of souls....' A light slowly dawned in Shizuka's eyes. 'Charu and I were the first to see those bodies in the river,' she said. 'Everyone would have thought that a diviner had left the village after the coming-of-age ceremony -- that was what I was meant to do. So when those diviners turned into demons, no one ever knew they were dead.' The weight of realization made her shoulders slump. 'So they never received a proper funeral, and no one mourned them.'
All three girls looked down at the rings on their fingers. Most of the time, it was possible to forget that those rings were there, but in moments like this the simple bands felt like vises tightening around them, almost making it difficult to breathe. It was one thing to know that a diviner's destiny was a lonely life, a sacrifice made for the greater good of the Land of the Rising Sun. It was another thing to think of dying alone and forgotten by everyone they loved, without even a memorial photograph or tablet on a family altar.
'That's horrible,' Sunao said softly, voicing what all three of them felt. 'But what can we do about it? The Mikoshiba had records of the outside contracts, but I don't know if we could identify all of the diviners who have died over the years.'
'There was a Koichi Todoroki case where he had to order a body dredged out of a river so it could be identified,' Chiharu said. Her eyes sparkled a little as she indulged in thoughts of her favourite character's exploits, though she quickly grew sober again. 'But we saw...lots of bones down there. It would take a lot of work to identify anyone just from some bones.'
'And it probably wouldn't be very safe to send anyone down under the water to retrieve them,' Sunao pointed out. 'Both of you only barely managed to escape the currents, after all.'
'It would be hard to explain why there were so many bodies down there in the first place, regardless.' Shizuka, deep in thought, reached up a hand to rub at her forehead. 'There must be some sort of ceremony we can do, some ritual to lay their angry spirits to rest.' She lifted her head. 'I suppose we should look at the Mikoshiba's documents and see if there's anything in there that might give us an idea.'
Sunao toyed with the hem of her uniform skirt. 'I doubt if the Mikoshiba would have cared about anything like that,' she muttered.
'The Mikoshiba wasn't the only keeper of our village's lore,' Shizuka said, her chin jutting out in stubborn pride. 'And those practices were still relatively new, compared with the long history of the village as a whole. We can come up with something else that doesn't rely completely on existing traditions.'
Chiharu nodded. 'Every tradition has to start somewhere, right? Maybe this is our chance to do something that will help the Tokime clan find a new path and keep us all in tip-top shape to continue helping people. And besides,' she added, reaching over to pat Sunao's hand, 'we want you to get a good night's sleep sooner rather than later!'
* * * *
It was by no means an easy thing to research. No one in the village, not even the oldest residents, could directly remember a time before the Mikoshiba held sway over the tradition of the diviners. What paper records they could locate often were fragments at best, and it would not be easy to build a ritual only on the basis of a few lines of poetry or some broken sentences. Even Chiharu, with her skill at reading classical script, struggled to make sense of the materials they could collect.
'Maybe we should go down to the river itself,' Chiharu said at last, as she set aside a scroll marked with long squiggles of ink that bore only the faintest resemblance to written words. 'If that's where Sunao-chan goes in her dreams, it must be the place to start, right?'
Sunao had had quite enough of the river to last a long time, but there was no denying Chiharu's deductive logic. So the next morning, when the sun was well up in the sky, the three of them made their way to the spot on the riverbank that Sunao seemed to frequent most often in her dreams. They walked slowly, following the flow of the water, but doing their best to not look directly at the river or think too closely about the scattered bones far below.
'I'm not seeing much of anything,' Shizuka said. She picked up a twig from the ground, twirling it idly in her fingers. 'This is where the dreams take place?'
'Around here, yes.' Sunao scuffed the toe of one shoe against the ground. 'But it's all bracken and moss and pebbles here, the same things I see every night. There's nothing that we can use.'
Just then, Chiharu's gaze was caught by a fallen leaf floating on the surface of the water, and she sucked in a sudden breath as an idea struck her. 'If the diviners who turned into demons never had proper funerals, maybe we should try to come up with a way to honour their spirits, and send them away from this place?' She waved her hands in a vaguely shoo-ing gesture, away from the village. 'Like a real coming-of-age ceremony?'
'If we tried to do a ceremony that sent their souls down the river....' Shizuka traced a circle in the air with the twig, contemplating the idea. 'Let's try something simple first. We need to show the diviners that they are being remembered, and that there are those who mourn them. So let's light the way for them, like the bonfires at the shrine when a new diviner makes their wish.'
Both Sunao and Chiharu looked at her, confused. 'What do you mean?' Sunao said. 'How would we make a bonfire all the way out here?'
'Not a bonfire,' Shizuka s aid. 'That's too much like the Mikoshiba's tradition. What if we were to get some candles, and make paper boats that can float on the water? If we put the candles on the boats, we can send the boats down the river, and light the way for the spirits to follow.'
'And if we say a prayer for them,' Chiharu added, picking up on Shizuka's idea with growing enthusiasm, 'we can encourage them to follow the lights, and leave the village. Once they know that they can leave here, maybe they won't bother Sunao-chan any longer.'
Sunao had no objections. It seemed like a good idea to try, and so they hurried back to the village.
Finding the materials needed to make the little boats didn't feel very ritualistic -- in fact, it felt much more like a last-minute scramble to put together a neglected school project the night before it was due. Shizuka ran to the shrine buildings to find some candles that had not yet been used in the old ceremonies. At Chiharu's house, Chiharu rooted through a jumble of boxes and grabbed some unused New Year's postcards that would be stiff enough to support the floating candles, and told Sunao where to find her school supplies and locate glue and scissors for shaping and securing the boards. While they waited for Shizuka to join them, Suno and Chiharu busied themselves folding simple origami boats, daubing the edges with a bit of glue to hold them firmly together.
'How many should we make?' Chiharu asked. 'We can't make one for every single diviner who might be in the river.'
'Why don't we start with just three?' Sunao gave her a slightly wan smile. 'One for each of us. If it helps with the dreams, we can always make more. If it doesn't, then at least we haven't wasted candles and paper for nothing.'
Shizuka returned with a handful of new candles, looking flushed and triumphant at her own daring for having sneaked into the shrine on such a clandestine errand. The three of them swiftly worked to test the boats to make sure that they would float, first by themselves and then with a candle nestled in the folded paper. By early afternoon, they had made three sturdy little boats. They had only an hour or two before dinnertime, so unless they were to wait until the next afternoon, they would have to head back to the river now, and hopefully would get there just as the sun was about to set.
'We have to make this into a ritual,' Shizuka said. 'So let's transform, and carry the boats down to the river in respectful silence.'
Sunao and Chiharu nodded, and each took a boat and a candle in hand, with Shizuka carrying her own boat as well as a box of matches. It seemed appropriate for Shizuka, as the head of the clan, to give the directions for this new ceremony. In single file, the three diviners walked through the village, eyes fixed firmly ahead as they carried the little boats in front of them, cradling them with a reverence that anyone watching them might have found odd, considering that their precious offerings were little more than a handful of folded and glue-daubed postcard paper and a stolen candle.
They reached the river right at the appointed time, as the last light of the sun sought to penetrate the thickly forested treetops, and Shizuka turned to her fellow diviners.
'Let us light the candles, and give our thoughts to those within the river of souls,' she declared solemnly. Let us then place the candles in the water, and speak with the voices of those who mourn their loss.' Her face and voice lost a little of their lofty expression as she leaned in to mutter the next instructions to Chiharu. 'Charu, you're the newest diviner, so you should start. Sunao will go next, and I'll finish it.'
'Oh! Um, okay.' Chiharu almost fumbled her boat as she tried to juggle it and reach for the match, so Shizuka lit the match for her and Chiharu held it up to touch the candle wick to the flame. Once the candle was lit, Chiharu's brief flare of nerves seemed to have vanished. She turned around and walked right up to the water's edge, where she held up the little boat, arms outstretched over the flow.
'O diviners of the past,' she said in a loud, clear tone that rang out across the water like a bell, 'Please accept this offering from those who mourn your lives, and honour your sacrifices. We don't yet know who you are, but we'll do our best to find out, and tell your families so they can be proud of you.' She started to bend forward to place her boat in the water, but paused and hastily straightened up again. 'And as a surviving member of the old Mikoshiba family, but someone who never knew about the crimes they committed, I swear to you we'll never keep secrets from any other diviners in the future, not ever!'
Quickly, as if confronted with the awkwardness of her own outburst, she bent down and pushed the boat with its let candle into the current. Stepping back away from the water, she glanced up at Shizuka, and said in a low voice bursting with self-consciousness, 'Did I do it right?'
Shizuka nodded. 'Yes, I think so,' she replied, trying to keep her own voice low as she hid a smile.
Sunao then stepped forward, and allowed Shizuka to light a fresh match for the second candle. She approached the water more slowly, more carefully, and copied Chiharu's movements, though her own voice wavered slightly as she spoke.
'O diviners of the past, forgive those who did not know that you had passed from this world.' The strangely formal cadence did not sit well with her, and she let it go long enough to speak from the heart. 'You don't have to be alone in the dark. Please follow the candles, and they will guide you to peace.'
She let her boat go into the water, and felt tears stinging her eyes as she stepped back from the river's edge. She was in no shape to help Shizuka light the last candle, but she heard her friend move forward, and a moment later she was aware that Chiharu had moved to stand beside her, and a small arm linked with hers as they waited for the final part of their ceremony.
'O diviners of the past,' Shizuka began, much more at home in the formal speech than Sunao could ever hope to be, 'I, Tokime Shizuka, diviner of the Land of the Rising Sun and head of the Tokime clan, acknowledge that our clan has much to atone for in its ignorance and isolation over the centuries. Knowing the truth of your suffering and sacrifice, we hereby declare that generations to come will be taught the truth of those whose remains rest here within the river -- for no lies or deceit may erase the memory of the honoured warriors, cherished daughters, and faithful diviners who came before us. May you find the peace denied to you for so long, and know that we mourn you as sisters and friends.'
The final boat slipped into the river, chasing the other two along a winding course. As the sun dipped low enough to shroud the forest in twilight, the trio of candles glimmered in the distance, and the diviners watched until the last hints of light faded from sight.
* * * *
That night, Sunao dreamed that she, Shizuka, and Chiharu were all walking through the woods outside the village, alongside a river awash with thousands of little boats and flickering reflections of otherworldly candlelight mirrored over and over again. No strange diviner awaited her, and the only sounds around her were those of rushing water and the dim cry of cicadas in the cool darkness.
The following night, she did not dream.