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Mist combed through the space in between the graves, lost like hands reaching for a light in the mid-morning dark. The frail, shivering shapes of leaves twisted themselves free from the trees, slipping through the fingers of the boughs on the hapless drift of the breeze and finding welcome purchase nestled among root and cobblestone. Today, the spirits were calm, flickering between this world and the next as they appeared, intertwined, and vanished. It seemed just this once as if they lacked either courage or ambition to part the autumn chill and invade the momentary stillness.
A nip of that cold imparted itself onto a lone hermit's ear at faintest touch as she tucked back a stray strand of pale pink hair. This deep into the cemetery, even the voice of the temple's yamabiko became distant. The shadows cast by the headstones and the trees stretched and yawned long by the glint of morning sun. In one such shadow's familiar shape, the woman stopped, letting the breeze of that moment tug at her silhouette. The latest of many long, long moments passed in silence.
In slow, practiced ritual motions, she stooped low, placing down her bag to retrieve the incense, placing it without a sound and setting it to burn. A bandaged hand met the other in a gesture of solemn prayer.
No matter how many times, how many years, it always felt too early to let herself open her eyes.
But, she breathed in deeply, there was work to be done.
Reaching into her pack again, she laid her scene for herself; a mat to sit upon, length of scroll, a pot of fresh ink, a calligraphy brush. For her, as ever, the first line would prove the hardest. This time, though, this year, she had prepared herself in advance. Reminding herself of her thesis, hand calm and smooth like the stride of a tortoise, she--
"Don't come any closerrr," came a clumsy, slurring voice from behind her. The hermit looked over her shoulder with ears perked high. Hopping out from whatever hiding spot she must've fallen into, the graveyard's local jiangshi sprung forward about a step at a time on stiff joints. "This is no place for the likes of you to... um..." The warning abruptly trailed off into an anticlimax. "... Actually, we moved the entrance to the mausoleum a while ago, so... Is there even anything I'm supposed to protect here?"
Kasen could only force herself to smile after a hesitation which anyone with warm flesh would have noticed. "Good morning, Yoshika." Be cordial, she thought. It isn't her fault. "Don't worry, I'm not here to intrude anywhere I do not belong."
Head rolling limply to one side in a rudimentary display of inquisitiveness, Yoshika droned, "What are you up to around here, then? I don't get it..."
"... Poetry," she explained simply, keeping her head down. "It's an old tradition of mine. Around this time each year, I sit here, and I write, until I think she would call it finished."
"Oh." Hopping a little closer at a time, Yoshika entered Kasen's periphery arms-first. "Usually Seiga doesn't let me wander around because it's still kind of hot outside, and I rot more when it's hot and wet. But it got cold early this year. So here I am."
"... That's lovely, Yoshika," she lied with an almost maternal warmth. She offered a pat on the zombie's head, softly squishing the material of her hat. "Feel free to have your fun, I won't intrude."
"Who's 'she'?"
"A-ah?"
Seemingly processing the conversation at a speed one might expect from a genuine corpse, Yoshika stared innocently as Kasen dropped her brush in surprise.
"Just now, you said 'she'. There's nobody here."
"Well..." Kasen did not want to have this conversation today. Her already faltering expression was challenged further as she inspected the unsightly streak she'd left in the parchment.
"There's nobody in that grave either. I checked."
"You... you see..." She really, truly had been depending on her ability to postpone this conversation indefinitely.
"It's really disappointing. I wanted to get to meet someone with the same name as me, but those annoying Buddhists kept shooing me off. And then there wasn't even anyone inside. I had to go home hungry and everything."
"... I'm the one who requested this grave be placed here."
Yoshika blinked for the first time since she'd stepped foot into the graveyard. Her mouth gaped just slightly wider.
"Huh...? Why? That's not your name, it's mine..."
"Because..." Kasen's eyes glistened as she gathered herself. "It is, in fact, for you, Yoshika."
"Whaaa...?" Dull and pale, Yoshika gawped. "But, I'm not dead... I mean," she corrected herself while trying to scratch the side of her head with stiff arms, which looked more like rubbing her ear against her shoulder, "not thaaat kind of dead... I still have a bed I use and everything. I don't need a grave." That bewildered monotone was befitting of a child.
And so Kasen explained, as if this girl were merely a child. "You're still... a corpse, Yoshika. You are a person's dead body."
The branches of the nearby trees rustled softly in a moment that went on for far too long.
"... Ohhhh..." Yoshika's deadpan rose and fell, and had it been anyone else in Gensokyo, the sound of it would have come across as sarcastic. "I never thought of it like that. I guess that makes sense. Cool..."
Suddenly keenly aware of the absence of a drink in her pack, Kasen cleared her throat. "... I knew her, personally, that Miyako Yoshika. Would you like to know about her?"
"Ooh... That sounds like fun." Yoshika's greying blue lips curled into a smile.
"Take a seat. I'll tell you." Politely, she scooched herself aside and beckoned, before realizing, "Er, wait..."
Yoshika, meanwhile, let herself plop backwards onto her rear, legs and arms unbent and fully outstretched, leaning onto her hands and forming something of an uncomfortable triangle with herself. She seemed perturbed primarily by Kasen's concern.
Shifting her focus to a theoretical place to start, Kasen... Kasen struggled, regardless of if she would admit to it. She looked to the weathered text engraving the name onto that headstone, the hints of moss beginning to gather at its base. "The Yoshika I knew was... She was someone who was very delicate with appearances. Her hair and nails were always tidy."
The jiangshi's eyes crossed up, aimed past the tag laying across her face. "My hair is pretty..."
"Appearances are likely why she imprinted upon me so easily, like some kind of stray." Memories painted in aged pastel color washed over Kasen as she spoke. "She saw me as a hermit worthy of disciplining her. While I would... dearly love to lie and say the feeling was mutual, her ambition was so lofty that I could tell from the first that she would prove a handful. I..." And snapping back into focus, she reached out and wiped the corner of her dead friend's mouth with her bandaged arm. "Yoshika, dear, you're drooling."
"Oh... Sorry." While the apology was sincere, she did not stop dribbling from between her pointed teeth. And, in her defense, she offered no such promise.
"She was very..." The scents of ink and incense mixed on the misting wind. "... She was excitable about those sorts of things. She dreamed of eternal life, of mystic arts just out of her reach, and she would always rush headlong into training that required one to be pragmatic and patient. But for each time I would scold her," she ran her touch across the stone as she waxed nostalgic, "there would be two times she would amaze me. We would watch the same scene, and from her eyes, with her voice, she would give me just a glimpse into the world as she saw it. Forgive me for lingering, but, her writings were... irreplaceable in their beauty. Poetry was always her truest passion, I believe that."
"Ooh..." Yoshika's head tilted again. "What's 'poemtry'?"
... An uncomfortable twinge shot through Kasen's expression like lightning, hearing that from her dear friend's face.
"... Ah." She distracted herself with a tousle of her hair, and avoided eye contact. "Poetry is... the art of binding feelings to words. When an idea is too complicated to share with someone else, and yet you try regardless. To describe the sunset a thousand times, a thousand different ways... I'm being too flowery, aren't I?"
"Word art...? I think I've seen those," Yoshika related, her vacant eyes looking right past Kasen, locked onto nothing in particular as usual. "Seiga and the prince showed me a couple of times."
... It isn't her fault, Kasen held fast onto the thought once again. Don't be angry. Don't despair. This is the crime, not the criminal. There's no use for those feelings anymore. "Right now, I'm working on a piece," she said, opting to change the subject to the present. "If I don't choke on my own sentimentality before finishing it, and you would care to read it, I would love to share."
Thanks to the rising sun, Yoshika almost had a glimmer in her long-dead eyes. "That sounds fun...!"
Kasen reclaimed her brush and freshened the ink at its tip. "Then, hobble along, have your fun, and be back by sunset. Creativity permitting, I should be done by then."
Demonstrating surprising talent, Yoshika sprung from her seat while bending hardly a single joint, rising to her heels as if by magic with a simple, understated "Yay...!" And as quickly as she had intruded into the scene, she disappeared.
Kasen waved her off, as if Yoshika had the articulation to turn back to watch her do so. She did this wondering who she was bidding farewell to.
The uneven scratch of ink crossing the scroll to one end all but directly taunted her for losing her composure, however momentarily. She read back to herself the phrase or so that was still legible, and questioned briefly if she had either the heart or the clarity of purpose to simply try again; the idea she had brought to the page this year was originally going to be something more hopeful, and yet here she was, laying down in dull melancholy all over again.
With a shake of her head to relocate her stoicism, she simply folded back the ruined length of parchment, unrolled further length, and opted to start over from scratch. Let her brush take her where it may. She half-remembered which old conversation she had taken that mantra from before dashing it like an image in smoke, so that it wouldn't catch her with fresh barbs.
"Boo!" Inches behind the back of Kasen's head, the folds of an umbrella suddenly splayed wide, and from a long, thin smile sprung a thick, meaty tongue with a length more comparable to a human arm, flailing wildly with all sorts of vigorous rustling. "I curse you! Know my pain!"
"Good morning to you, too, Kogasa." Kasen's brush continued unerringly.
"... Aw, come on," the umbrella collapsed back into itself, and the karakasa wielding it pleaded with her red and blue eyes. "At least pretend a little, I haven't had breakfast."
Barely one line into her new poem, Kasen stared long and hard into the fresh ink and twirled the brush absentmindedly between nimble fingers. "Do forgive me. I think I'm simply out of the energy to patronize for the day."
Sighing exaggeratedly and leaning herself against a tree, Kogasa rubbed her aching belly. "Yeah... I don't know what chance I stood if the jiangshi didn't even scare you. At least you got her gone; more for me if anyone else shows up."
"The two of you don't get along, I take it." Miyako Yoshika would have loved such simple-minded pranks.
"Of course not! Her spellcards are so annoying, and her head's so rotten, I'm surprised you could even talk with her that long!" Miyako Yoshika could hold a conversation for hours.
"You just need to exercise patience. She doesn't know any better." Miyako Yoshika hated when she acted so maternally.
"Ah, what good would I get out of someone like that anyway? I don't see the point in getting along with her, not when her whole routine is just spending all day drooling and hopping around trying to eat people. It's complete schlock! There's no soul to it!" Miyako Yoshika was a clever, honest, beautiful person.
"I've been surprised by people before." Miyako Yoshika was an irreplaceable gift.
"... Are you okay?" Kogasa leaned to try and find eye contact as Kasen let her hair shadow her face. "You're not usually one of the ones who ignores me like this."
Miyako Yoshika has been dead for hundreds of years.
Slowly at first, then all at once, the statuesque posture Kasen had been maintaining began to deflate. "... I don't know what it is I feel right now, Kogasa." Not content with the eulogizing prattle she had apparently written in her hardly-attentive state, she crossed the words out, creased the page once again, and started over. "I don't know what someone is meant to feel when you have to meet someone all over again, years after you've finished crying for them."
Gradually piecing together the story from a hazy recollection of rumors, just the occasional scuttlebutt about this hermit and that other hermit over the years, Kogasa whispered as if to her parasol, "Oh, I see..."
The soft tip of the brush hid itself behind the walls of the pot. "I've made my peace with it; at least, I thought I had. I can't feel happy as if she's still an old friend. I don't feel sadness; that time came and went long ago. I can't make myself angry even if I were to try, not with her; she didn't ask for an experience like this. She's clearly still enough of her own person; she walked herself here, after all, and it certainly sounded as if that were her own volition speaking." The nails of her left hand softly nibbled Kasen's cheek as she lay her head upon it. "I feel like my mind is racing to draw some kind of closure, but I'm only left feeling..."
"... Scaaaaared?" Kogasa's face loomed on one side while the umbrella's heft of tongue lolled out beyond Kasen's other shoulder. Receiving only a nonplussed reaction, her streak of petulance insisted upon itself, "Come on, not even the slightest bit? It's a zombie wearing your friend's face, that's a horror classic!"
"And she's harmless, and she's clearly lost the faculties to know any better," Kasen concluded. "I can still speak to her. She's..." The hermit bit her tongue to catch the phrasing she had nearly chosen. "... She's still something akin to a person. I just don't know HOW to speak to this Yoshika."
"... Heavy," came Kogasa's insightful commentary as she took a step backwards out of Kasen's personal space. "And a lot more thought than I've ever put into it, too."
"I can tell," Kasen didn't say, no matter how much she wanted to deliver that between closed eyes and a smile.
"Well, I'm dying of hunger here," the karakasa shrugged, "so I think I need to be off. If you need to talk, you know the temple. Byakuren was always better at this sort of thing than I am anyway..." Opening her umbrella, her curtsy dipped low before leaping twelve vertical feet, and she began to move as if caught on a stiff breeze. "I'll be baaaaaack!" she intoned as if to be menacing, even as her voice grew more and more distant.
Her feelings reshuffled, but not any more organized for the effort, Kasen impressed herself with just how much she failed to enjoy the ensuing lonely silence, even after such undue hassle.
The brush's bristles dripped onto the stone as she took it up once more.
---
"Hey, hey, miss Kasen!"
Blinking herself out of an hours-long trance, Kasen looked up from her scroll and into a sun that was fast-setting to see Yoshika and her hopping shadow. "Welcome back, Yoshika. Did you..."
"Look, look...!" It was like listening to the dry moans of the wailing dead, all of whom wanted their crayon drawing posted upon the refrigerator.
"Huh?" She tightened her squint, recognizing her misshapen silhouette as she realized the jiangshi 'carried' something on stiff arms. "Well, what's this?"
Like an excitable, rotting puppy, Yoshika's hobble brought her up to Kasen with uncomfortable closeness, to show the scroll she precariously balanced upon her cold biceps. "After what you said earlier, I wanted to try writing poetry again...! I asked for some help and I got to make this."
A beat or two passed before Kasen realized this was meant for her. She took it with a delicate touch, unfurling it for examination. A short passage in still-warm ink traced from edge to edge. "You... Huh." Restraint left her bewildered expression for a moment. "Forgive me for underestimating you, Yoshika. I'm impressed."
"Read it, read it!" Yoshika begged, and in so doing likely mustered more life in herself to express it than ever before in all her undeath.
"Of course, of course. Pardon me," she adjusted her collar, unsure precisely what she was due for...
Which ghosts are the ones we mourn?
We mind not the lights that rise from the loam
The will that lingers, the embers that burn
Their faces long rotten,
Their names gone forgotten,
Their dreams etched on weathered stone
Which yields under boots of marching time.
Walk yet by, walk yet by,
Each of us a drummer, each year a footfall
And the procession leaves these spirits behind,
So that the long shadows of beloved phantoms
Might find soothing in the song of ages
And in earned respite may one day disappear,
Taken theirs of two paths that never converge again
A person, alone, at a quiet and empty grave,
Mourns the shape it takes of a person no longer there.
Something that could never scare anyone again
Someone who could never hurt her anymore
A memory with no teeth, no nails, no voice
To which no mind need be paid, no breath be held
Little more than an empty room, a laugh unshared
A thing from which one becomes perfectly safe
A canopic jar filled with but fleeting memory.
Among death and danger and decay, she sits.
In the drift of the restless, she prays.
Not for her safety as the vengeful loom,
But for that nothing which now draws out idle silence
To reach out and take hold of something now lacking in shape
To prove it no longer lacks in meaning
An empty vessel is still a work of art,
For we are there to hold it
Where they are not there to fill it.
"... You... made this?" Kasen's disbelieving eyes trailed up and down the page, and then a third time, and a fourth.
"Well," Yoshika confessed, without conceding any of her enthusiasm, "I can't hold a pen so good on my own... But, when I said I wanted to do a poem, the prince was really nice about it, and she helped a whole bunch."
Kasen's brow furrowed further. "... Of course, I can tell it's Miko's handwriting, but the voice... isn't quite hers..."
"Most of the words are mine. She helped make it sound a bit nicer sometimes, though. I'm hungry." These thoughts were delivered with the same inflection, as if of equal import.
Early Autumn evening caressed her tender cheek with a soft, bitter chill. Anticipation made even the dead shudder.
"... Heh. Haha..."
"Wha...?" Yoshika leaned back in surprise, bones creaking slightly as she wobbled unevenly. "Why are you laughing? It isn't supposed to be funny..."
"It's..." The tear that threatened to roll down Kasen's smiling cheek was snatched by her bandaged thumb. "It's not like hers in the slightest. The cadence and language don't match at all. The formatting, the sentence structure... She would have drawn an entirely separate conclusion, she would have said entirely different things about the subject matter..."
"Not like... the prince?" Yoshika guessed with her limited attention span.
As she fondly admired the work in her hands, Kasen's soft, breathy laughs slowly formed the words to explain this feeling in her chest.
"... You really aren't her anymore."
Waggling her arms in distress, Yoshika wailed as best she could with her dead voice, "Waaa, did I mess up...!?"
Her flailing was put to rest by the soft pat of Kasen's hand atop her head again. Yoshika didn't understand why that felt as comforting as it did, but she also didn't think to question that.
"... It's beautiful, Yoshika," the oni-hermit praised her in earnest, finally finding it within herself to smile genuinely at this girl. "It's different, and it's unique, and it's beautiful. I mean that."
"Oh... So I did good?"
"You absolutely deserve your applause for such hard work."
"Yaaay...!" Yoshika's klutzy, sharp-toothed grin shone with the setting sun forming her a makeshift halo. "... Can you help me, though? I can't clap on my own..."
"Boo!" The fabric of an umbrella exploded out from above as the karakasa landed in the dying tree overhead, the one-eyed smile of her parasol-body letting its tongue droop and dangle and wriggle like bait upon a hook. "I'll haunt you 'til you die!" she shouted, oblivious to the impotence of that threat among her choice of audience.
Yoshika stared longingly into the tongue, judging it for its value as a slab of meat. "Oh... is that dinner?" This time, Kasen couldn't contain herself, giggles escaping into the back of her hand whether she approved of them or not.
"Ohh, come on!" Kogasa stamped her feet hard, not realizing just how weak the branch upon which she perched had become with her weight. "W-wahh...!" Almost immediately, with a snap and a crunch, she lost her balance and didn't think to take flight in the second it took for her to plummet to the dirt.
Not nearly so taken with the comedy of the scene as her friend, Yoshika began slavering again like a poorly trained dog left unleashed.
Scrambling to a crawl just in time to evade the springing of the jiangshi, Kogasa whined, "Oh, not this again...!"
Watching the two of them begin to dash between graves erratically, one in lazy but unrelenting pursuit of the other, Kasen touched a hand to her chest, touching the petals of the rose decorating her tabard as the wind picked up its fringes.
"Well, I'll be. I never took you for the type."
Kaku Seiga's bright blues and smug grin slid into Kasen's periphery, appearing as if from nowhere in a way only a wall-passing hermit like her could. Kasen spared a passing glance, but otherwise left herself affixed upon the chase unfolding before her.
"I only came to pick her up for the evening," she weaved her hairpin between her fingers with callous dexterity as she teased, "but I didn't expect to see you here, let alone with such a smile. Are we finally starting to see the appeal of my darling little Yoshika?"
With a rather traditionally 'Gensokyo' sort of superficial amiability, Kasen tucked her hair behind her ear. "Oh, Seiga, you misinterpret me. The very sun will burn out long before I ever forgive you for defiling someone so dear to me."
"My, how horribly blunt." The wicked woman's lips split a narrow curve like an open wound. "Even after the time it allowed you two to share in that field of lilies those years ago?"
The rose-colored hermit proved too wise for the feigned indignity in Seiga's tone. "Make no mistake; You, personally, couldn't torture gratitude out of me."
Watching the jiangshi's rigid bounds take her a dozen feet at a time after her prey, Kasen let herself reconcile out loud.
"... I simply wouldn't trample a flower that bloomed out of her grave."