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There was blood everywhere. All over the staircase, the stairs, and even some on the chandelier.
Sakuya cleaned it up without being asked. Her rag quickly soaked red, then was replaced. This happened many times.
Knee deep in the viscera of some pitiless devoured creature, the young Mistress had approached. It was early in the morning, errands unfinished.
"I hope you are not planning on taking all day with that." Remilia dabbed at her borderline impeccable smile with a tiny, snow pure handkerchief, marred only to the most precise of vision by a single red droplet.
Sakuya shook her head more or less instantly, though she wasn't counting.
"No, Mistress," she said almost as a matter of formulaic output. Courtesy was a simple negotiation of code most everywhere in Gensokyo. Never leave unnecessary corpses lying in the entryway. Never fire a spell card directly at its target; these sort of things had been commonplace even in her old world, so she had no qualms with or quarry against adopting them more or less full time.
Still... It wasn't that time was endless here. Just sliced very, very finely. Sakuya wondered sometimes if there were somewhere threads so delicate they would simply pass by her knife blades unscathed, somehow occupying the exact sheath and strand of cooperating atoms to avoid being culled.
The strands of those potentially tattered threads warped into beams of dust peppered sunlight through the mansions entryway's enormous glass pane windows. The sunlight twisted about itself until it alit into the pale malfeasance of Remilia's familiar grin, a simultaneous bullwark of mischief and resistant despair.
Sakuya bowed her head in apology without even being formally corrected. Back to work. That was always the key.
"My apologies, Mistress," Sakuya read from her internal teleprompter. "The mess will be disposed of shortly."
Remilia's grin persisted, unperturbed by Sakuya's rehearsed servitude.
"...and?" She said, leaving a meanacing glint of fang to shimmer in the sunlight.
"And." Sakuya responded automatically, her hands still wiping thick streaks off the floor. "and...?
Remilia's smirk turned ever so slightly straight. This was never a good sign.
"We are having guests later today," Remilia said. She waited for a single moment, just in case Sakuya wanted to traipse headfirst into making the day even worse. When silence persisted, Remilia spoke again. "Later this evening." She waited again. Silence. "It would not be good to have them arrive in such conditions, would it?"
Oh. This happened a lot lately. When she'd just started... Sakuya shook her head, answering the question and dislodging a tiny splinter from her memory simultaneously.
"No," Sakuya said after waiting again to avoid being tricked into tripping over the lack of sound. "That would not be ideal."
"It wouldn't be befitting of me as a host to escort them in with such a mess, would it?"
Your mess, Sakuya thought.
"No," she said. "It would seem improper and impolite."
Remilia nodded, crossed her arms, and slowly shut her eyes. She waited again, with only the noise of Sakuya's scrubbing to fill the space.
"Good," she finally said. She turned instantly on her floating heel and began back down the corridor to her bedroom.
Sakuya waited before daring to let out a sigh. Just as she'd expected:
"Oh, and please have some tea sent to my room. Soon."
The soon was always sure to follow a please, just in case Sakuya got any ideas about her self worth.
Rag red. Rag to bucket. Water to walls.
"Yes, Mistress. I will deliver some shortly."
Remilia walked away without saying anything further.
There was still a lot of blood.
Sakuya looked at the pocket watch hanging out from her maid's outfit. Early morning on Sunday, and she'd forgotten the tea. That one almost never happened anymore. It must be the phasing.
Well, she could stop now or later. She waited for many moments, giving every shred of herself proper time to come to the correct conclusion.
Yes. It must surely be alright this time, or the weight would have bowled her over.
Instead, she surmised as she reached a hand towards her own face, she'd get away with a warning at worst. And the nosebleed. She wiped the stain off inelegantly on the front of her robes. She could change before she went out, if she really cared about the blood.
As usual, she didn't.
Her watch stopped.
Yes.
That was better.
Then...
Click.
*****
(Half-Moon / First Quarter)
There was blood on the front of the store's door. It was hers.
Sakuya sneezed and a spray of vicious scarlet gathered around the already extant pattern of dispersal. She sneezed again, less so, this time, but still enough to paint a third ghostly handprint of the inside of her sinuses all over the door.
She sighed. With only a handkerchief that would be... inconvenient. Not with allotted efficiencies, one might say. Still, if she allowed herself to hurry, which she never did... Fine.
She got to work. In a few minutes you could barely see the red print if you squinted into the sunlight, and that was good enough.
The human who owned the shop deemed not to pay the difference any mind either way; he cowered internally the moment he saw a maid lingering on the doorstep of his shop long before opening hours.
If Sakuya had been in the mood she would have read his mind, but she'd just finished cleaning... Why did it feel like twice? Or she'd sneezed, no, wait... Three times? And what was this old man doing here? She was just... Oh.
There must have been stains all over her outfit, surely. She hadn't paid it any attention in her hurry. Ergo her handkerchief was soaked, and that would leak, and that would drip, and that would leave a bloody red indicator running all the way down her leg. She'd look like she just finished.
"Good morning," she said to the man, cutting off his stumbling tongue with alarming dexterity. Sakuya bowed as low as her spine and courtesy would allow, then instantly pulled a smile from the masque of her inside self. If she'd had fangs it all would have been over, but the old man even smiled back cluelessly in a hopeful sort of way. It was amazing how much blood you could wash away with a smile.
Sakuya let the man open and fuss about the counter as she politely waited for his morning rituals to finish, even adjusting the odd items set out so they would catch the sunlight better when the daily market was on. Slowly, but eventually, the old man completed his prescribed allotment of fussing and stood behind the counter at his appointed place.
"I need three of the green vial," Sakuya said, interrupting another dawdling thought from the shopkeeper before he could speak it. She pointed to a vial simply labelled 'herbs' on the far side of the shop, for some reason kept locked behind a shiny glass exterior. Any ready minded thief would smash the case easily... Sakuya couldn't help but be intrigued by its absurdity. "And two of the orangish red one". She pointed again. The old man got the items and put them in a bag.
"Thank you," Sakuya said, handing over her money and taking the items right out of the old fellow's grasp before he was even certain he'd agreed to the transaction.
Something at the back of the man nagged to spring up. It suppressed itself for the same reason thoughts about Sakuya always did. Besides which, there wasn't anything really strange about the girl, was there? That 'blood-soaked' aesthetic must just be some kind of fashion trend in one of the nearby more 'with it' villages. And who would he be to scoff at such a young and well dressed young person getting their errands done in the morning? Even if those errands, were, well... Anyway. He shouldn't be ashamed of selling them, and neither should she for buying them. Come to think of it, hadn't he seen her once before?
"Miss," the old man said with a snail's urgency "don't I know you from last month?"
"Yes," Sakuya said to her own surprise. Normally she would have silently left the moment her hand touched the bag. Things were taking longer; that would be the phasing again. Dammit. The nosebleeds were one thing, but this...
The shopkeeper practically leapt into the sky at the agreement with his instinct, though his old bones would have surely protested the landing. "I knew it! You said you were getting them for, oh, um, that nice young girl what always has a book with her, you said..."
No she hadn't. Or had she? Uncertainties were getting uncomfortable again. She hated this stupid phasing.
Hmm. 'Stupid'. Was that really the best she could do?
"Stupid," Sakuya said aloud.
The old man blinked at her in a way that said, silently, 'yes?'
"I mean, yes. Yes, that was me. Thank you."
You can't just end a conversation that abrubtly, the man started to say. Then something in him stopped bothering. Besides; when he looked around for a pair of eyes to aim his reply at, Sakuya was gone.
Click.
*****
(Full Moon)
She had been twelve years old at the time.
There. That was a sentence that scanned in almost every reality. Close enough to be copacetic at least.
Full moon. Hmm. That meant something. Sakuya couldn't remember what.
The first time... Twelve? That seemed incorrect. She far more distinctly remembered thirteen, eleven, the outliers which somehow served as a shelter for the phasing. Yes, that was happening too, yet somehow, she kept forgetting. Let it be set straight: she had gathered the medicine, then gone home.
Then what?
That half-ghost girl who played at moving faster than a grain of sand... What was the name of her attack again? Sakuya heard the words 'idle' and 'unfocused' drift into her mind's eye and begin harassing her senses. Close enough then. Was she idle? Only ever by optics. Was she unfocused? Only as a magnifying glass might be to an ant. Then she was solid at least.
Yes. Sakuya pinched her arm so hard it drew blood. That was fine. Blood was easy to clean.
She was solid. Here. Full moon. Then she was... When? Or how, perhaps, was a better question.
The phasing had never been this bad before. Not knowing the hour was one thing, and the day was another. But the month, the season, the individual moments? The village was always having some stupid full moon festival... There was that word again. Well, she felt stupid. Let it be known.
Tick.
That's right... The night drew the insects out. Grasshoppers, crickets, cicada, or small burrowing things that would steal away her marrow. So neat and fine they barely left a mark. Sakuya wished she could be so elegant.
The cricket rang out nearby. Sakuya squinted, but saw nothing but moonlight.
"Mistress?"
She felt foolish instantly. Where was the mansion, the palatial estate? Where was her watch?
Tick.
Ah, there.
That was better.
Slower now.
Snail like.
Until--
Click.
*****
(New Moon)
If time would stop... That would be pliable, but inconvenient overall.
If space would stop... That would be something else. That would mean no more blood. No more stains. No more busywork.
There was that stupid music again.
This festival--which one out of countless many, all of them so redundantly named--revellers of all sort were, well... revelling at Hakurei Shrine. That stupid girl was there, and the stupid magician, and her magician friend, and the rabbits, and the drunk girl, and the stupid phantoms playing their insufferable pentatonic melodies.
A paper lantern had caught from a knocked over candle as Sakuya stumbled across the stage. She didn't remember this part. That was usually bad. She did a pirouette on impulse and kicked the flaming lantern sideways in a spray arc of inferno, launching embers into more of the scenery and shrubbery and all ablaze. She leapt through the quickly spiralling torrents and landed in front of a now scattering audience.
The Prismrivers stared at her, poltergeist countenances agape, somehow stunned into silence despite their stupid musical instruments fully capable of tuning and playing themselves.
"MIstress has no heed for fire," she found herself singing, dipping into pitch trills and little warbled ornamentations.
A voice in the background screamed 'Oni! No! Dog of the Devil begone!', somehow remarkably articulated in the growing blaze and the screech of festival goers vanishing into their own panicked shouts. Dog. She had certainly heard that before.
"Dogs go wan," she said. She pulled out her watch and smiled glumly. Not even half full. It sloshed and ticked as she tucked it back in.
This wasn't working. There was cleaning to get done. Mistress would be unpleased.
That was it.
A Prismriver shouted, but she was already gone into the night blaze. A wolf howled in the distance, it's mournful cry caught in its throat as the flames grew from their source. Another cry, then garbled choking noises, gutted on smoke and airborne ash. Then a final, defeated whimper. Then just the low hum and crackle of burning branches and grass.
Click.
***
(Waning Gibbous)
"--and I don't want any of the raspberries actually ON the plate. Just the sauce. Are you listening?"
That was the YOUNG young Mistress. She frequently got along well enough without any of Sakuya's assistance, but warranted an occasional checkup, especially when things around the mansion grew strange enough to suggest she was getting bored. Young young Mistress when bored was an instant translation to a mismanaged future and poorly spent budget.
"Yes," Sakuya said without thinking--and, then, because this Mistress actually allowed her time to think and speak at the same time "no". Admitting ignorance was only worthy of reproach when weakness was synonymous with guilt. Something like that. "Forgive me, Mistress. I must confess my mind was momentarily elsewhere."
Flandre tilted her head to the side and opened her eyes wide, impossibly earnest even in her smallest movements. Utter naivete, the real Mistress would say, though not within earshot of her younger sister.
"Oh really?" she asked, her voice painfully optimistic. "Where was it instead?"
This could be a trap. On the other hand, a walk back from the netherworld would probably clear her head. Sakuya flipped a mental coin. It landed on its side.
"It was in the past," Sakuya said simply. She waited a moment's silence to see if more was necessary.
Flandre's mouth turned to a slight smile, exposing just a hint of fang that looked sharp enough to puncture a single atom.
"That must be nice," Flandre said
"You can just wander back to some time you were happy, can't you?"
The pain slammed into Sakuya's sinuses from the inside of her spine. Every morsel of living tissue in Sakuya's body screamed at her simultaneously, all her bones and tendons and ligaments and musculature and everything just howled at her, at a pitch so high shattering glass was a trivial wake up exercise. She fell to her knees, but that just made her limbs riot against the impact. Her stomach seized. She vomited hard. There was a lot of blood. She wiped some off her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she threw up. Again.
Flandre peered down at the floor, leaning forward with her hands clasped neatly behind her back.
"Ooh," she said. "Is that for me? It doesn't look like raspberry, but I guess I could give it a go..."
Flandre giggled. Sakuya groaned and sneezed. Blood misted over the contents of her guts, which also appeared to be blood. Somewhere in another sneeze or retch it felt like a piece of the inside of her skull had come out.
There was just that for a moment. Just that happening. Just her and the girl and blood.
"This isn't supposed to happen," Sakuya said from the ground, refusing to give up to the urge crying at her to curl into a ball. "I'm not done my chores." She coughed. Blood.
Flandre giggled even harder, like this was a private show being put on for her amusement, which it may as well have been.
"You're funny," she said. She floated a little closer, reached out, and gave Sakuya a demure but still utterly demeaning pat on the head. "I like you."
There was no choice this time. Phasing could do this when it wanted to; could desync you so badly even your breathing was off beat. It could make your heart tick sideways and leave your blood in a location separate from your body. That was why she almost never went below half. But this was... Degrading. Absurd. Far below the professional standards she'd long since committed herself to.
Wordless, she stood. She spat, and the fat gob landed in good company with the newly conjured mess of bile.
"Thank you," she said. "Goodbye."
The watch sounded before her hand reached her pocket. Bad sign. That was an always bad sign.
Dial of...
Click.
*****
(New Moon)
(Again)
She'd let herself get clumsy, obviously.
Sakuya fell to her knees. There was a lot of snow. She fell forward into it. Then there was more snow.
If I stay here forever nothing else can find me.
The little snowflakes fall like petals from an autumn tree, or cherry blossoms, when they're in season .
They're never in season anymore.
Sakuya attempted to pick herself up from the drudge of the snow pile. She made it to her arms out stiff for a few seconds before they gave up and set her back into the softish warmcold embrace of the puffy frozen clouds.
Determining links on a chain. If one link is damaged the whole chain is worthless. If paradise is warm then chores are cold, freezing, frigid bespoken ice limbed death. If the clouds are just hesitant rain...
It was night. The moon felt spiteful.
Sakuya opened her eyes in a snap flash, begging for the shimmering aura of faeries somewhere in the distance to let her know she'd only just been misled. Anything would be better than the prospect of the alternative.
Colder now. She ran forward into the blinding hail that seemed to have been poured from an ice bucket chilled in the depths of seven hells. Sakuya wondered how she could remember the name of anything; how even the word 'snow' was stupid if you thought about it too much, how it did little or nothing to convey the truth of frigid isolation, and instead lied and turned it into a stupid fluffy poem about clouds and daffodils and puffy warm pillows and then your limbs fell off from frostbite and you cursed the name of every god you knew while your blood refused to stop its stupid pumping and just let your body to naturally to that place beyond. The Buddhist paradise should be warm, they said.
Snap.
Sakuya could tell she'd stepped over something small and frigid and brittle; either just a branch cut from its source, much like herself, or else... A tiny mouse maybe, making its last shelter in a buried path of white. And now it was home.
Home.
Tick.
Sakuya let out a scream like the kind that had waited in her for over a thousand real years before that moment with the Mistress. Vampires could see thru space, thru borrowed time, thru a stupid maid making her way down an endless set of corridors and only barely stopping to wipe her fingerprints along the way. Time could not stop if those nearby refused to participate in belief of said time, no matter how adamantly nearby clocks insisted.
So she'd stopped doing it then, mostly. For cleaning mostly. Sweet dragons above it was cold now... All of Gensokyo was somehow a battle between snow and blood, and she was the obstinate metal edge keeping fingertips thinned and wanting gazes watching.
Tick.
She didn't have to move with any celestial signs or bodies of water... But she did. What was a Tuesday on Gensokyo? Who was 'Tues' and what was his day doing there?
Tick.
She grabbed her own hand as if it belonged to a passing yokai and shoved her fingers in her own mouth, then bit as hard as she could, remembering the old trick; pretend it's just a carrot.
Nothing. Time refused to move in anything but kalpa the size of a flea's atoms, as small as the hair on a sketched neutrino, as small as the quantum causal glue that makes anything this or that or it transit of this or that or having the Properties of this or that. Or which gave rise to... Sakuya felt the front of her own face. Ghostly. Pale. Stained with blood and snow into melted water smearing it into her skin.
How many shops had she seen like this? How long was it until her chores were done?
It had taken long enough to build her schedule, and then even longer to destroy it. She had gone on walks. She had 'exercised'. She had gone on research binges and miserable pseudoasthmatic study searches and decades worth of time wasted on worrying about nothing. She had destroyed everything she'd learned and written--twice. And then she had remembered silver and garlic and neither of those had worked, and Mistress had been very impressed. So, reasoned Sakuya, had she been assigned perpetual cleaning duty. That was simply the logic of it.
There is no myth in Gensokyo which ends with 'Blood Soaked Maiden Expires in Deepest Snow', but in Gensokyo that was more of a bad sign than a good one. This was the land where myths could spring up just from the seed of an idea, and drunken meetings of particularly suspicious and foolhardy humans could spawn over a dozen new myths in an overly talkative evening.
Sakuya hated myths. They hated her back, so that was fine. But myths functioned in units too large to digest in any real capacity... Man loses his cat, goes insane, becomes possessed by spirit of wandering garbage can, haunts newcomers to the valley when festival of stars is near... Just insert any random variable substitution and get a roughly equivalent teleology.
Sakuya hated books too; usually they were just some old and dead person's idea of what was vaguely true a thousand or more years ago. Sometimes they were about vacations on large miserable barges and the stink of other passengers. Sometimes they were about what to wear on the latrine. Mostly all of them would be much better as kindling.
So she'd gotten sick of stories, fables, myth; of any narrative that seemed like it had an overarching purpose and wasn't like real life, which was an incoherent mishmash of energies and remembered instants and colossal overwhelming moments and all the kalpa in-between... And then she'd gotten sick of reading anything about other people's problems when no one ever seemed to grant her the inverse liberty. Mostly she would have just said the cleaning took up too much time.
And now there was too much time; everywhere. It was leaking out and bleeding and bulging and swelling and doing all the verbs time is not supposed to do. Time can heal. Time can mend. Time only destroys when it is in a particularly bad mood.
Right now, Time was pissed. It left a firm letter to the manager, and when that didn't work it went right for sinus pain, tooth decay, and, Sakuya's favorite, oscillating temporal blindness. Meaning every few however long Sakuya couldn't tell where she was, she also couldn't tell when she was. And given the long history of culture and eras of slang simultaneously melting into each other at any slice of Gensokyo's history, saying something in the wrong version of language could cause further anomalous interactions which would only cause further phasing.
It's like something with near infinite speed, she would always say to the Mistress in a failed attempt to explain. Imagine it being caught, then suddenly flinging free. Its movements would seem coordinated based on pivot points that were technically only stopping grounds for the implied...
Then she would get a blank stare and give up... At least for the rest of the day.
Days.
Something clicked in her head. No, I mean it went
Click.
***
(New Moon)
Manor foyer. Sakuya swept the room with her eyes, daring a single mote of dust to make itself known. She scowled up at the chandelier, which had never convincingly proven its usefulness to Sakuya's satisfaction.
Still... The blood was gone.
Sakuya tentatively reached up to her face. She traced a finger under the bottom of her nose and found it came away the same; no trace of her overly gruesome sneezing.
This wasn't right, then.
Phasing didn't just go away on its own. It took days worth of explanations, translation of temporal coordinates...
Sakuya stopped.
That's right. Outside Gensokyo... Yes. But inside...
She might seem immortal. Maybe even godlike in the most imaginative of reference frames.
But the reason--the REAL reason she always stopped here, no matter what... Is that she couldn't remember a time when she hadn't stopped. She couldn't remember a time when Remilia hadn't simply sneered at her through the veil of a thousand gleaming knife blades and a pocket watch laced in blood and said, wryly, 'Is that it?'
Things in Gensokyo were always, more or less, exactly what they seemed. That was why she'd stayed here. Why it was so much better than going back.
And the other thing was... She found herself thinking real, new thoughts as she waited and watched the doors open, as she escorted the guests for the evening inside. She had the feeling she'd had this feeling before, and again, and again, and that something somewhere somehow was working in a mysterious way, like a clock made to tick forever in the background. If you felt lost, or hopeless, or even bereft of entertainment, you could listen to that pulsing metronome and know there was, somehow, a single consistency somewhere in the world; so many shades of light, so many degrees in a circle... So many tides and oceans in the pull of a simple moon.
She remembered the phases came before words... That was new. That a collection of something could come to be, then be split apart and only remembered in those inverted fractions.
I wonder if... Hmm.
Sakuya sighed.
It was all a bit heavy sometimes.
Still. She led the guests to the waiting room. Led them again to the kitchen. Led them at some point to something called a drawing room, which may as well have been a room which drew. Then the balcony to feast on the full display of stars.
And then... That was a day.
That was twenty four hours.
Twenty four minutes, twelve seconds, six intervals of the spin on a caesium atom.
Sakuya sighed.
She hated atoms.
But at least they were easy to clean up.