Chapter Text
A Land of Distant Mountains
Part I
I watch as a snowflake melts on my gloved hand, then look up to see the waterfall of the earth’s frozen tears descending upon me.
The keeper at the hostel waved some printout at me before I left two mornings ago. Something about the possibility of a blizzard above twelve hundred meters. He said something in Japanese that sounded like it ended in a question. I nodded the way anyone would when they aren’t quite sure what the other person is saying.
I shrugged my left shoulder at the weight of the strap digging in. The whole thing had become a burden after soaking through hours ago, and I could feel the skin chafing beneath it.
Trees stood indifferent all around me. The key between their canopies was the color of apathy, gray and blanketing. I checked my phone again and saw the same thing I had for the past fourteen hours. I knew there wouldn’t be a signal, but it had become a habit I was now trying to break as the battery icon dropped from forty-four to forty-two while I watched.
I tucked it back into my thermal wool underlayer to keep it from freezing and draining the battery faster than it had been. My portable solar charger was useless and now just unnecessary ounces in my pack.
Somewhere in the last day, the trail I had been following turned into something else entirely. Not quite a trail, but instead the whispered path of deer or other animals. I’m still not sure why I turned onto it. I just felt… called.
At some point beyond that, I looked down at my feet and realized I was making a new trail of my own. Not even the animals seemed to have trodden here recently, but that mattered little now because the snow would erase all evidence I had passed through here.
I turned around and walked back from where I had come for what felt like hours. The trees all looked the same in every direction. That was the way of nature and the forest; it doesn’t care, it simply is.
Vapor gathered in front of my face and hung to my eyelashes as the temperature continued to drop. The cold settled low in this valley between two peaks, where the air was already thinner than I was used to. I’d read about this general location far away from here in the comfort of my living room, where the distant thought of the weather seemed unimportant.
My pack was heavier now than it was at dawn, despite my continued use of its supplies. My right knee had started complaining around the second frozen creek I crossed. I ignored it as best I could because I was good at ignoring things. It was, some days, the only thing that mattered to me anymore. Ignoring my failures. Ignoring that I was alone.
A cedar tree’s bough released its snow somewhere far above me and made its presence known by dumping the clumped weight onto my left shoulder and pack. I stopped and brushed off what I could without removing my pack.
It would be easy, I mused. Not the dying. Just… stopping. There was a difference, I kept telling myself. Stopping was the choice, and it was one I found myself closer to now than ever before. Sitting down would be easy. Resting my eyes and falling asleep would be easy. Let the snow do its work. It would lead me to a place where, for the first time in a long time, nothing would be asked of me.
I kept walking instead. Twenty-nine years of my body doing what I told it to when I asked, and now, when I’d simply thought of something easier… it kept going without an order, one foot in front of the other. Whether mercy or cruelty, I’m not sure.
I’d come here to be lost.
I never said it out loud. I never told anyone or wrote a final letter. I hadn’t even allowed myself to think of those words because thinking meant admitting. I wanted to put distance, not just physically, between myself and my apartment where no one sat across from me at the table for dinner or leaned into me during a movie. I had grown so used to the silence of my empty home that the silence itself had become a presence that seemed to follow me.
As I continued back to where I thought I'd come from, the path widened, and the snow deepened where the canopy had thinned enough to let most of it through. It was deep enough that snow began to invade over the cuff of my boots.
My grandfather's boots. He’d worn them once into a country he never told me of. When he died, they’d been sent to me alongside his fishing rod, a bone-handled knife, and a silver Morgan Dollar in a small sleeve.
That silver dollar was in one of my pockets now. I didn’t bring it with conscious thought, but for the last nine years it had always just found its way with me anywhere I went. I’d stopped thinking about it much because it was nothing more than a familiar weight.
I touched the outside of the pocket it sat in to feel that it was still there. I looked up, unsure as to why, and then something moved at the edge of my vision. On a slope to my left, perhaps twenty or more paces from me, sat a fox. Small and red. Its tail was curled around its paws, its head tilting slightly as it watched me.
I stopped and looked at it in return. It was half the size I’d pictured most foxes to be, but I wasn’t a great judge because I’d never seen one in person. Russet fur lined the shoulders, white beneath the muzzle, throat, and chest. Black socks on each paw and ears tipped in black. The eyes were amber. Bright enough that it seemed to reflect more light than they took in.
“Hey,” I said. My voice sounded strange. An American in the land of the Japanese. Too much of where I’d come from in the tone and too much of what I’ve felt.
The fox blinked, but didn’t move.
“Hey there.”
It watched in a way that spoke of intelligence behind its eyes. Analytical, almost, I’d have said to someone if it wouldn’t sound wild. A man, alone, deep in the snow of a forgotten mountain, reacting to small and natural things as if they were something more. Reading meaning into the snow, shapes of clouds when present, and now this small predator.
“You have somewhere warm to hide from all this, don’t you?”
The fox tilted its head.
“I don’t. I’ve not had a place to go for a long time.”
The fox blinked at me. Once. Slow.
I wanted to take a picture, but I thought of my battery and left it. It also felt… intrusive. Almost rude. This was a moment between man and nature. It didn’t need to be anything else.
For a long moment, with the snow seeming to slow and the trees swaying, growing silent, we watched one another. A small but strange feeling, not a thought, coursed through me that for the first time in a long time, I’d been seen.
A weight I’d long carried in my chest shifted suddenly, ever so slightly, the way a surge of water can dislodge even the most stubborn of stones. A gust of wind cut through the valley and into the veil of white between us, and when visibility returned, the fox was gone.
I stood there for a time. I’m not even sure why. It’s just a fox. “Okay,” I sighed to the empty air. To the place the fox had been. I forced myself to continue walking, and soon the clearing closed in around me again, and I had to navigate around trees.
Somewhere ahead, I thought I heard the sound of running water. A river, perhaps. Follow water, and you’ll eventually find life. And so, I followed. The cedars began to thin, and the snow deepened in areas I traversed, but thinned in others where the wind swept it away. At some point, the light began to change around, but I couldn’t say when. As the river flowed away, a clearing came into sight, and at the center of it, a small… something.
I squinted into the distance to make out details, but the flurries made it impossible, so I pressed on. It was something small; something that nature had been long chipping away at.
Wind moved through the clearing with a soft brush across my exposed face. The shape resolved into vertical lines and symmetry, showing it was made by hands rather than formed by weather and nature. Branches threaded through it, and snow covered every surface.
I’m not sure what it is, but it’s clear to me that it was put here with purpose, a long time ago, and that no one had tended to it since.
A gate. Two upright columns and a curved beam bridging their divide. It clicked into place from the guidebook I’d scanned. Torri. It had once been vermilion. I could see the color in patches that still somehow clung to the wood within cracks, crevices, and areas worn thin by time.
A vine had climbed one of the columns and stopped halfway. Past the gate, nature had reclaimed even more. A stone path, what was left of one, was set into the earth in what looked to be a careful sequence, but leaf clutter, a dusting of snow, and other things had grown through and over it.
It was maybe ten to fifteen paces long, and led to a shrine. I stood just beyond the gate's threshold but didn’t go through. I’d read this briefly as well. The middle of the gate was for Kami. For spirits. I stepped around the left side but touched the wooden column as I did, still unsure if I was welcome.
It was cold and very old. Even through my glove, I could feel the grain. “Excuse me,” I whispered in English because it was the only language I knew.
I walked the path, careful of the uneven stones beneath the dusting of snow. I hit a patch of ice and nearly lost my balance, but I recovered. My breath was short, the cold eating at the little energy I had left. Not that I had much to give from the start.
A stone basin sat just to the right of the path, half-buried. The shrine's roof had collapsed long ago; I could see the broken posts and what looked like the remnant of a fallen tree that had caused the damage. Carved stone weathered at the edges, filled with ice, with a piece of what looked like blackened bamboo laid across it. I stopped there because passing it felt… off. I laid my palm against the rim, and the cold ate its way through my glove in moments.
“Hello,” I said. I’m not sure why.
I walked by it then, no longer feeling that it was wrong. Two stone foxes flanked the last few stones of the path before the shrine proper. They were small. The same size as the fox I had seen. The one on the right was upright but was partially buried in snow. Its features were carved first by hand, then by weather that cared little for the symmetry of men and our creations.
The other one had fallen over. Not broken at a glance, just toppled from its pedestal. I stood and watched it for a long moment. I don’t often think much of stone, carved or not. I’ve never cared, at least not before this very moment. I would have walked past it at some point in my life.
But it looked so small in the snow. Out of place. I knelt beside it and pulled my gloves off to make sure my grip was good. It was so cold it almost burned. I lifted it anyway, its weight catching me off guard. With a heave of effort and bracing my elbows on my knees, I pulled. It seemed stuck, resisting my strength, and as I neared my limit, it finally gave, as if it had decided it was ready to stand once more.
I pulled it up with myself, holding it against my heaving chest for a moment. I’m not sure why; it just felt like something I needed to do. A carved ear pressed against my left collarbone, and snow melted from it where I had contact, trickling down my sleeves.
I put it down in its rightful spot. My hands shook, and I then noticed the pedestal was uneven, slightly leaning. The fox looked like it wanted to rock forward and back to the ground. I settled it once more until it sat in place where it belonged. I brushed the snow off its head, curved tail, and paws. I stood back and looked at it.
It seemed to look at me in return.
I put my gloves back on and curled them into my pockets to conserve what feeling I still had, which was less than I wanted and more than I expected. I looked over the shrine. Small was the first thing that came to mind. A building set on a low stone base at the back of a flat opening in the valley, nestled against a cove of mountain face and stone.
Walls of silver-gray cedar that had long lost their color. Doors at the front set behind two small steps. No offering box sat before the doors. A box must have sat there once. A pale square stone stood clear in the snow, the size of a laptop, in its place.
I knelt before it without thinking. The snow was thin here, and the stone seemed to contain its own warmth, or what felt like warmth in comparison to the fox I had just set upright. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m an American, kneeling in front of a shrine to a god or spirit that I know almost nothing of, in a country whose language I don’t know, and lost in a valley days from the hostel I had left.
I have no business here. I don’t belong. I… have nothing I could offer that a shrine such as this would typically receive. But I did have something. I worked my silver dollar free from my inner pocket. An 1889-CC. My grandfather would lecture me for it, but I no longer needed it where I was going.
Not yen or rice or sake. But it’s what I have. I pulled my glove off to feel the worn silver one last time, then placed it on the flat stone of the platform where the offering would normally go. The silver rang for a moment when it met the stone, almost like the toll of a small and distant bell.
I don’t pray. I haven't prayed since I was a child, and even then, I borrowed those words from an adult who told me I had to say them. I’m not sure what I believe, but…
But now I have words.
“I don’t know if anything is listening or not,” I said, my voice hoarse from limited use and the cold. “But if you can hear me…”
I stopped. I don’t know how to finish. I hadn’t planned this prayer. I closed my eyes, noticing that my shivering had recently stopped. Snow was on my shoulders and pack. The cold numbed my face. My grandfather's silver lay in front of me, offered to something I wasn’t even sure existed.
“...I need help.”
Those were words I hadn’t spoken in nine years or allowed myself to even think for nearly as long. It wasn’t torn from me in a moment of desperation or despair, but came forth as a quiet defeat that knew an end of some kind was nearing.
“I need help,” I said once more, to make sure that the stone heard me. I knelt there for a time with my eyes closed and listened to the silence around me.
The wind had died down to almost nothing. The snowdrift from the cedars had quieted. Even the distant river seemed gone. This was the kind of quiet hunters and hikers spoke of in passing when hushed whispers were passed about the dangerous areas of forests that no man should enter.
I was afraid to open my eyes, but not because of what I would see. Fear of what I wouldn’t see. Afraid to open my eyes to the same indifference and small, flat, uncaring stone with an offer of silver on it that I had seen when I closed them.
In the long quiet of my mind, in this frozen forest of a forgotten valley, kneeling before a forgotten shrine, I heard what I thought was a single footfall in the snow from somewhere behind me.
I didn’t turn.
It was small. Close. Closer than what a man should feel comfortable with when he finds himself alone and lost. The right thing to do would be to turn, the smart thing. I didn’t. I’m afraid nothing is there. I’m more afraid something is.
The world around me had changed and I could sense it even without my eyes. The way you feel something watching you, but you don't know where. The hair on the back of my neck reacted; my heart did, too.
Then something touched my right shoulder from behind. Not heavy or fast. The press of a warm palm settling over the wet fabric of my coat, seemingly careful not to hurt what lay beneath. A second came down on my other shoulder a single heartbeat later. Warmth moved through the fabric and into the skin beneath, as if my layers weren’t there.
I made a noise, but I’m not sure what kind.
“Easy,” said a voice. Soft and low. Above me. “Easy now.”
The fingers tightened, but it wasn’t a grip. Not really. It felt more like someone was… gathering me. The way one might gather a grieving friend when you know they are fragile.
“Open your eyes for me, please,” the voice said. “I would like to see them.”
I opened my eyes. The shrine was still there. The doors were still closed. The coin was where I put it.
“Slowly,” it said, in a whisper. “Turn.”
I turned my head, and the warmth of contact moved with me, sliding down to the sides of my arms. First the cedars came into view, and then…
She was there.
Kneeling behind me in the snow, her knees pressed into the white, not far from me. Her face was no more than a couple of hand-widths' distance from my own. Closer than I ever expected someone to get without me hearing it.
She was a fox.
That was the first thing my mind latched onto. A fox the size of a person or larger, kneeling in the snow with her paws on my arms, the white of her throat and chest, the red of her shoulder, the black tips of her ears, and the amber of her eyes.
Amber I’d seen before, I realized.
“Hello,” she said. The breath of her word was warm against my face. “There you are.”
One of her paws left my arm and went up between us, slow and carefully shown, as if she were reaching out to a frightened animal. Her paw was the same red as her shoulders, but ended in white fingertips, black pads, and white claws.
She turned her wrist and laid her paw against the side of my face.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh… you’re freezing.”
The warmth of her pads spread across my cheekbone and down into my jaw. I closed my eyes and leaned into her paw because the warmth was so sudden and so filling. She made a noise, almost like a soothing coo. Her other paw came up to the other side of my face, her fingers spreading along my jaw and behind my ears, the heels of her palm pads warm along my jaw. She leaned down and pressed her forehead to mine.
The fur of her brow was warm. Soft. Dense. Her breath was warm. She smelled—I’m not sure, in this moment, what she smells like, but I don’t mind it.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You came to my mountain. To my shrine. You knelt. You spoke. You offered. I heard you. I’m here. Do you understand?”
I tried to find words but fell short. I closed my mouth and swallowed, then tried again. “Y-yes.”
“Good.” Her thumbs moved, slow circles over my cheekbones. “Good. Stay with me. Look at me.”
I opened my eyes again, not even realizing I had closed them once more.
Amber. So close I could see the slit pupils and where they were focused. The corners of her muzzle were lifted enough to show a hint of white fang. She is smiling, I want to say, though it’s not a human face or human smile. What I can understand is that I can almost feel that she is pleased to be looking at me, and that I am looking at her.
“There you are,” she said once more. “You poor man.”
She tilted her head and laid her cheek against mine. The soft, warm fur of her face pressed into the cold that still lingered on my skin and made a low noise in her throat that was almost a… purr of a kind. A chirring. More vibration than noise, but it carried through and into me.
She pulled away but then repeated the movement on the other side of my face. Rubbing the weight and strength of her face alongside my own, making that same low sound. Warmth spread beneath her movements, and my skin began to tingle as life came back into it. She never stopped making the chirring noise.
“I’m marking you.” She chuffed, and I read it as if she were almost amused by it. “I’m sorry. I know we’ve only just met, but I’ve been waiting a very long time, and you smell of cold, and you smell of nothing else of mine, and I cannot stand for that.” She pulled her face away, her amber looking into the gray of my eyes.
“There. Better.”
I couldn’t find my voice.
One of her paws left my face, and the warm pad of her thumb brushed against my lower lip; gentle, a small touch.
“Your lips are blue.” Her eyes moved to my hands. “Show me.”
She reached for them without waiting for my response. I had kept them close to my core after placing the coin on the offering stone. She found both wrists and lifted them, noting the pale white skin.
“Oh, brave foolish thing.”
She brought my hands to the dense fur of her throat and pressed them flat against the white fur. The warmth was so immediate and filling it hurt; my flesh thawed into a blade, and blood surged through my fingers once more.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. Hold still. It’s only the warmth returning to you. I’m here.” She reached for the back of my neck with one paw, her thumb at the base of my skull moving in circles.
Her chin lowered until it rested on the crown of my head, warm, heavy, but not in a way that it felt a burden. That chirring purr began again in her chest, and I felt it travel through her throat.
“Do you remember me?”
“...the fox.”
“Yes.”
“That was you.”
“Yes.”
“You were watching me. For how long?”
She made the same amused sound she had made after scent-marking me. She didn’t answer and removed the paw that was holding my hands in the dense fur of her neck, then reached for my face and brushed the back of her fingers across my jaw, then up my cheekbone, across a brow, brushing snow out as she went.
“Long enough,” she said. “Long enough to know the weight upon your shoulders. Long enough to know the way you walk in your grandfather’s boots.” Her thumb stopped at my temple. “I almost showed myself to you sooner.” She lifted her head from mine.
“How—” I stopped because I didn’t really know what I wanted to ask. She slid her paw down to my jaw, curled her fingers beneath my chin, and lifted my face as if inspecting it.
“Look into my eyes. I want to be sure you’re truly with me.”
Bright amber. Black tip of muzzle. Soft white fur flowing down from her chin to where my hands were still pressed into her fur. Both of her ears were trained on me, listening to my breathing as if I were the only thing she could hear.
She brought her second paw between us, palm-up. A small blue flame bloomed to life in the center of her palm pad.
It looked like a candle's flame, but there was no smoke, and the fur of her paw didn’t singe. The color was off as well; not the normal blue of a flame one might see on occasion. A warmth spread over my features. The cold I’d been carrying like a weight eased further from my troubles.
“Foxfire,” she said. “It is warm, but cannot hold back the night’s temperatures for long when they arrive. May I take you somewhere warmer?”
“I…” I struggled to look away from the foxfire. “What?”
“May I take you somewhere warmer?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The speed at which I answered caught me off guard, as if another voice had given permission. She left the foxfire stay in her palm as her other paw left my chin and slid under one of my elbows. She rose, lifting me with her. The strength I could feel in her was the strength of something not troubled by my weight, but she was careful as if she were worried she could hurt me.
My right knee popped, and it took several moments for my legs to remember how to stand. I looked up at her. It hadn’t fully registered while kneeling. Now, as I stood next to her and looked up, I realized my eyes were level with her breasts.
She looked down at me. That same amused look on her face. The corners of her muzzle lifted into that not-human smile again.
“Small thing,” she said with a distinct soft edge to her voice. “Look at you.”
She bent and pressed her forehead to mine again, then her nose touched the bridge of mine, cool and moist, before she straightened to her full height once more. Her paw left my elbow and slid to the small of my back. Her tail came up behind me and curled over my opposite hip, settling against my form.
Then a second tail slid over my back, preventing the wind from touching it. Another found its way to more of my body, warming me even more. My heart stuttered as I looked at the multiple tails enveloping me.
“There—” I stopped, my voice beginning to smooth after some use. “You have three tails!”
Her ears flicked. “Mmm.”
“Three…”
“Yes.”
“Is that—”
“Is that what?” She looked down, the amber of her eyes radiating again, her smile clear.
I don’t know how to finish my question. Is that a normal thing? Is that supposed to mean something specific? I couldn’t form the rest of it.
“Three…”
“Three.” She nodded once. “Come now. The cold is bad for your kind, and I have a fire to warm you.”
As she began to walk, pulling me along with her, her paw guiding me from the small of my back, her tails at my hip and spine, her foxfire extended out as if guiding us, I found myself staring up at the profile of her figure. She looked at me with the edge of her eye, chuffed, and focused forward once more.
The forest looked the same as it had when I came into this place, but now I was walking with some kind of fox spirit into a new place; hopefully one where I will find warmth and comfort, and not the things the distant back of my mind screams at me as being possible, or impossible.