死乃生

Pai didn't remember what happened.

She didn't remember anything that happened after she closed her eyes in a blink on the sight of Shin stalking towards the Onihitokuchi with his blades drawn, movements fluid and graceful as the most beautiful mountain tiger.

It was like she had just woken from a dream, one that was important and that she needed to remember, for some reason. She knew she needed to remember, she wanted to, but as soon as she woke up, whatever happened in the dream glided away between her fingers like a slippery eel intent on escape, shocking her every time she tried to grab a hold of it.

All she really remembered was the pain that radiated all over her body, pulsing from the point on her back where she had struck the metal crate after the Oni flung her to the side, feeling the all-encompassing pain all the way to the soles of her wet and cut-up bare feet. The back of her neck where the Onihitokuchi struck her with its poisonous serum was a sore ache that registered between every break in the waves of pain that were all she could feel.

And the exhaustion.

That was the worst part. Remembering how tired she was, sitting on the wet ground with her aching back against the crate and hardly able to lift her eyes to watch the whirling dance of Shin battling the Onihitokuchi. She knew that she could have ignored the pain, pushed it to the distant corners of her mind thanks to the adrenaline that had flooded her as she'd fought for her life. Pai felt that she could have perhaps managed to continue fighting to stay alive if she had a broken leg.

But she couldn't get past the draining, bone-deep exhaustion that made her limbs so heavy. It was like someone had taken her muscles and bones and woven them with lead. It was – too much, all at once, leeching onto whatever fighting spirit was left in her until there was nothing left.

Then there was a big, empty, dark blank. Beyond that, she remembered nothing.

She woke up, opening her eyes to a bright light overhead that almost blinded her with its intensity. She blinked, and then Kanou's face came into focus as he leaned over her, calling her name. It had sounded like he was very far away, instead of leaning over her.

She could feel the discomfort of something sharp and metallic wormed into the inside of her elbow, another poking into her hand. When she lifted her hand, she'd seen the needle of an IV drip taped securely over the back of her hand, same with the one in her elbow. Her stomach roiled uncomfortably when she thought of the end of the needle stuck under her flesh, digging into her veins.

She was in a hospital, and something had been very wrong with her. Pai almost couldn't believe it when she was told why she was there, what had been happening, but she couldn't deny the truth of it when there were hollow needles feeding liquid nutrients directly to her veins.

Now Pai tilted her head back against the wall, the magic of the boundary humming through her body and keeping her toasty. It was remarkably cold beyond the wall, thanks to the perpetual chill of the mountain. Worse yet, it was the beginning of winter, so everything would steady grow to be a hundred times colder now as winter progressed.

She liked winter, and how clean (when it wasn't sludge) and white (when the snow wasn't blinding her) everything looked – but she could do without the cold that made her hands and feet perpetually frozen blocks of ice...even when she was wearing heavy, sturdy winter boots that went halfway up her calves and two pairs of thermal gloves from UNIQLO.

She was dressed simply now, in a pair of loose red pyjama trousers and a matching long-sleeved shirt with a sweater on top of it, and a heavy white-and-black patterned haori thrown over her shoulders at the last minute as she had quietly snuck out of her room.

Despite all this already, she knew she still wouldn't feel any warmer away from the wall without layering up even more. She didn't know how to keep the cold at bay, and after almost a year like this, she had given up, just trying to make do how she could. Her increased sensitivity to cold wasn't normal, she knew, but no one knew what to do about it besides wrapping her up in blankets until only the top of her head was visible.

Haru did that once. She was not amused.

Her white braid fell over her shoulder as she shifted to a more comfortable position. She idly reached up to tug it forward, and looked down at the silver ends of her hair, twisting the braid around between her fingers. It was tied off with her usual dark blue silk ribbon that she kept solely for the purpose of keeping her hair in a tameable braid down her back.

She couldn't quite recall when or where she got it, only that she had had it for a long time. She stared down at the ribbon, dimly noting that she was looking at it but not really seeing it, as her mind drifted.

"Are you –" she hesitates. "Are you....sure you don't remember what happened, Shii-chan?"

Shiori's gaze slides away as she picks up the pencil and starts scribbling in her exercise book again. "I told you, I don't remember. Same as you. It's not like I haven't tried, but I just – don't, I guess." She shrugs, nonchalant in a way Pai can't be. It would work, too, if her shoulders weren't so tense. "Maybe we're not supposed to remember.

Pai isn't convinced.

She turns back to her own exercise book, staring at the catch-up worksheets the teachers printed for her due to her absence from school. She stares, and she wonders what's the point in doing any of it.

Pai glanced up when she heard the door slide open, up ahead. She pressed herself closer to the wall and hunkered down. She knew no one would see her where she sat behind the row of neatly-clipped shrubs planted a few feet from the wall – it was why she chose this spot to hide out at – but still she ducked, paranoia getting the better of her as she kept her eyes focused on a single blade of grass by her foot and sitting as still as possible.

There was a loud wooden clacking making its way across the floorboards of the house. Pai guessed it was one of the Tsukumogami carrying out their duties. A minute later, maybe two, the door slid closed again. She waited a few more seconds before she allowed her tensed muscles to relax.

Even though they were just animated objects that Kouta had contracted to help keep things in order at the house, the Tsukumogami could still get her in trouble by going and telling someone that Pai wasn't in her room. She honestly wouldn't be surprised in the least if Kanou had already tasked one of them with the specific duty of keeping an eye on her.

She wasn't supposed to be outside, at least not for another week. She had already spent two weeks recuperating at Dokokokai Hospital before she was released. Then, Kanou declared her be, essentially, bedridden for another week. Even after that, she was to avoid any 'strenuous activities' for yet another week before she could even think of returning back to her usual chores around the house.

It was overkill, in her opinion, but Kanou was the healer, and he used the power of the human doctor's 'advice' behind him to enforce her mandatory bed rest.

She felt like she was going stir-crazy from it.

The time she spent at the hospital recovering wasn't so bad, at first. She knew she needed to rest, for she had felt incredibly tired, weak, drained, even more so than normal. She had managed to stave off the boredom and twitchy nervousness by sleeping (a lot) and after being released, by rereading all her favourite books. But by the time she had cracked Norwegian Wood open for a third time, she knew she would end up tearing her hair from her head if she was confined to the room for much longer.

Rereading books didn't help much, especially not that book. It reminded her too much of Midori, who loved it. Thinking about her sister, her parents, and everything she couldn't remember gave her a dull ache in her chest.

Another two weeks of doing nothing...this is too much, she thought dispassionately as she flicked her braid back over her shoulder, and looked up at the sky again with her head tipped back against the wall.

The brilliant blue of the sky overhead reminded her of the piercing cobalt of Shin's eyes, though they weren't the same shade. Shin's eyes were a deeper blue than the mid-afternoon sky – more like what the sky looked like on the verge of night. His eyes were almost navy, but maybe not quite as dark, caught somewhere between the bright blue of the sky and the earliest hours of midnight.

An image rose up in her mind's eye as she thought of him; Shin, kneeling close to her, curling her limp hands around the hilt of his tanto blade, the one she never ever saw him without, eye a burning shade of crimson that made her oddly comfortable rather than scared, sharp canine teeth digging into his bottom lip.

Pai had never seen Shin look so much what he truly was as he had, in that moment.

Every time she thought of it, she tried to understand what her thoughts were about it, about him, but she couldn't. She thought she should have been frightened to see Shin look so obviously inhuman, so obviously the Ayakashi he was. She should have been – she had been and still was of every other Hengen. She was terrified when she first woke up in Ayashi House with no memories and surrounded by Hengen she had never seen before.

She should have been scared, but she hadn't been. Strangely, she'd felt safe, even with him so close in state to the very type of being she had come to fear over the years. If what Kouta and the rest of the Daitengu were saying was true (and they had no reason to lie, not about something like this), it was probably what Shin looked like right now, right at this moment as she was looking at the clear blue sky and thinking of him.

She wondered if she would still feel so safe around him now that he wasn't exactly – himself.

It had been two and a half weeks since she woke up from her comatose state. In that time, none of the Daitengu had been able to find Shin. The empty, tense silence bespoke Shin's absence, hanging over all of them like a black wraith.

Shin had always been one of the more elusive Daitengu, and he wasn't always seen even if he was in the same room, he could be so silent. Pai had been startled many times when she would walk into a room and only realize Shin was there when she was turning to leave. Sometimes he would give her this small, understanding smile when she yelped out an apology for not noticing him sooner before running away to hide her flaming cheeks of embarrassment.

But his presence at home had always been an undeniable truth, an irrefutable fact, something that just was.

There were little hints of him everywhere; his laundry, his personal quarters only a room down from Kouta's, the zori sandals placed outside his bedroom door, the place at the dinner table that was exclusively for him and in which no one else sat, even when he wasn't there. There was the cloth and whetstone he used to clean and sharpen his katanas still right where he left them, in the courtyard on the other side of the house relegated to the outdoors training area. The two wooden staffs he used in replacement of his blades when sparring with the other Daitengu in the dojo inside the house where he left them in the racks with the other offensive training weapons.

Pai had never been more aware of the dozen little things that were incontrovertibly marked as Shin's as she was now, with him gone and there being no certainty that he would return – that he would come home.

Guilt gnawed at her like a hungry rat.

She was under no illusions; she knew it was because of her he'd lost his Mask. If he hadn't had to come save her – no, if she wasn't follish enough to be so unaware of the Oni tailing her, she never would have been kidnapped by the Onihitokuchi. Shin wouldn't have had to come for her. The Amanojaku wouldn't have gotten the chance to snatch Shin's Mask while he was distracted with the Oni wanting to eat her.

Two plus two equalled four.

"It's not your fault, Pai-chan. You and Shiori can sense Ayakashi, that's true, but Oni are altogether a different matter. They're a different kind of supernatural to us," Kouta told her after seeing the familiar look of guilt reflected in her eyes when she tried to avoid looking him in the eye. She felt guilty even speaking to Kouta when she saw the shadows under his eyes, evidence of sleepless nights spent looking for Shin.

Two plus two equalled four, and it was her fault that one of his closest friends lost his Mask and was now missing.

Pai drew her haori tighter around herself, shivering as a draft of ice cold wind blew past, ruffling the leafless branches of the tree overhead. The tree was the one that Shin had perched on when she'd come to collect the dry laundry, almost a month ago. Those simpler times seemed so far away, only now a memory compared against the gaggle of problems facing the Tengu of Ayashi House.

When she could no longer stand the chill creeping through her body even with the proximity of the wall, she stood, brushing over the bits of grass and hardened soil that clung to the back of her pyjama trousers. She wiggled her socked feet in her shoes as the blood rushed through her legs with a surge of pins and needles that made her wince.

She walked across the yard and slid the door open carefully, quietly, to avoid that one spot where the door creaked when it was open or closed because of the dampened wood that held it together.

When she was sure that the door was securely closed and locked, she turned and walked slowly down the halls of the house. She kept her hands in the opposite sleeves of her haori to keep their shivering from being seen. She clasped them around her wrist to try to get used to the icy coldness of her skin.

She wished she wasn't so cold all the time.

Hardly anyone was around as she walked. Most of the Daitengu were around the city, still tirelessly searching for Shin. The Daitengu came back at irregular intervals for breaks to eat and rest before going back to scouting out the region.

Jirou and Yuu and both heading slowly back to Sapporo from Kyoto last she heard, returning from informing Kouta's father in-person of everything that had happened. On Kouta's orders, they were taking a roundabout route back home, searching around the path of Japan they took in case Shin had already left the city and there was any sign of him elsewhere.

Karasatengu sent over crows to them every day; the crows relayed back reports that despite combing the areas they stopped at during the day and flew over in the night, there was no sign of Shin. It was like he had vanished off the face of the Earth, or become so perfectly attuned to nature, to camouflaging himself in and with it, that no matter how hard anyone looked, he simply couldn't be found.

Pai stopped walking when she heard the wooden clacks of a cane hitting the floorboards. For a split second she froze, her heart stopping, a bout of goosebumps rising up over her arms as she unintentionally remembered the purposefully flicking of the Onihitokuchi's talons striking the concrete ground at the warehouse, taunting her. She shook her head from the blurring memories and looked up as Obaasan rounding the corner.

Her heart stuttered in her chest.

Obaasan narrowed her eyes at Pai, peering at her suspiciously. "Weren't ye supposed to be in ye room?"

She nodded, a little guiltily. "Yes. I was just...taking a walk." Saying she was sitting out in the cold would sound worse considering she was still in recovery – which, in hindsight, really was probably a terrible idea.

"Hmph." Obaasan stared at her as if she was looking into her soul, and Pai shifted uncomfortably. At long last, the old woman sighed. "So. You been to the shrine yet?"

Pai stared blankly. That came out of nowhere.

"Um. No. Why would I?" she had no reason to go there. Obaasan was the one – the only one in the house, really – who made the treks down the hill to pray there. Why would she think Pai had done so?

Obaasan shrugged nonchalantly. Pai was immediately suspicious. "Ye never know. Sometimes when ye pray to 'em Kamigami, they answer."

"Why would I pray to them?" Pai asked bluntly. It was a struggle to keep the scathing tone of indifference she held to the Kamigami from seeping into her voice...even though she was not sure why the reaction was so strong.

After all, it was not like the Kamigami had made it a habit of answering prayers over the last few thousand years. Why would they start now?

"It wouldn't hurt to try, Pai-chan." Obaasan replied in a surprisingly gentle tone. "Ye look like ye in need of relieving the guilt ye carry on ye shoulders. If ye can't talk to someone here, talk to the Kamigami."

Pai's lips twitched as she took a deep breath through her nose so as to make her irritation at the mention of the gods not so obvious.

"I did, Obaasan. Every day since I came back, I prayed that I would find my family, or at least find out what happened to them. I am still no closer to finding them than I was when I came back." She cleared her throat against the tremble, the build-up of emotion balling up in her throat. "Forgive me if I do not put much faith in them to answer my prayers."

Obaasan looked at her silently for a moment longer before she hobbled past, patting Pai's shoulder for a brief second before she continued on her way. Pai was about to head back to her own room (if Obaasan was wandering about and so easily found her, Kanou might as well) when she paused and glanced back at Obaasan's hunched, retreating figure.

"Obaasan?" she called. The old woman halted and glanced back at Pai, her usual look of mildly disguised irritation back on her face.

"Yes?" she answered, as if bestowing a great honour upon Pai that she even bothered to reply.

"Why did you suggest I go to the shrine?" Pai asked curiously. It really had come out of nowhere.

She watched Obaasan's eyes drift from hers to stare at the wood panelling by her shoulder, at the dancing shadows playing out across the wood from the flickering electric light swinging above head that needs to be replaced.

"I am a human being," Obaasan finally said, turning to face Pai. "And I find myself surrounded by Ayakashi, creatures from folklore that I was taught to fear, because they are not human like me. Sometimes, I see something that reminds me of that, and I am torn between what I was taught and what I see with my own eyes. Praying gives me the guidance I need. Ye seem like ye need some of that."

Obaasan turned on her heel at that and left, her cane clacking on the wooden floorboards, making Pai wince at every strike. Obaasan was probably going to the kitchen to supervise the Tsukumogami helping Mizutani and Yukiji prepare the midday meal for when the Daitengu eventually came back, in turns, to replenish their strength from their endless searching.

Pai watched her for a moment longer before she turned the corner and went up to stairs to reach her bedroom. Obaasan said the strangest thing sometimes – and it wasn't strange because they were random, it was because a lot of the times, Obaasan...was usually right.

Once in her room, Pai draped her haori over the back of her desk chair and walked to her bedroom window. She turned the hook and pushed it open, shivering as the wind blew in immediately. She had only walked to the little yard at the back of the house and returned to her room, but she was already so tired. Maybe Kanou was on to something about keeping her on bed rest for so long.

She lowered herself to the floor, on her knees as she rested her elbows on the window frame and stared out to the view of the forest behind the house.

It was a beautiful sight. The forest's intense green density and lush leaves only full came into view the further down the slop from the mountain one went. Even the trees at Maruyama Park, which Pai had always loved, paled when put up against the trees in this forest. It seemed to go on for so long, and a heavy mist hung over the treetops, giving the forest an air of mystery that both alluded to and scared her.

She imagined it would be so peaceful to walk amongst all those trees, all that nature, and to know that one was truly alone when in there. But then, that wasn't really the case, because there were still all the animals in that forest that could easily rip her apart, even though they tended to stick to their own deeper territories. That wasn't taking into account all the insects in there, too.

And again, that still wasn't thinking about all the Yori Chiisai that lived in those woods.

Good and bad, she mulled, thinking of the Hengen and how they needed to control their True Ayakashi, just so they could have a chance at a normal life. Some of them were good, so good, but their True Ayakashi was another. They were two sides of the same coin.

Nature reflected that so perfectly.

Pai was startled from her ruminating by a ding and buzz. She glanced back at her messy bed that she had crawled out of only half an hour before (normally she would have made it immediately, but the lack of activity and resulting laziness always had her thinking, It can be done later, it can wait...and down the rabbit hole she went). She shuffled over to her bed and pulled her phone out, handling it with almost frightened gentle care. It was a new one, another gift from Kouta since she lost the other one in the skirmish with the Oni.

She knew he didn't give this one to her to make her feel guilty – phones were a utility that were actually necessary – but shamed she felt anyway, especially considering her role in everything that happened.

She crossed her legs as she settled comfortably on the ruffled blankets on her bed, elbows on her knees and phone held in her hands, staring blankly at her fingernails unseeingly for a few moments. She blinked abruptly and realized, with a belated start, that she needed to cut her nails. They had gotten so long already. They clacked as she drummed her fingers on the silicone back cover of her phone, a strangely satisfying sound.

She shook her head to rid it of cobwebs and tapped on the notification to view the message that just pinged through.

The blatant concern bleeding through the screen, poorly hidden by Shiori's attempt at nonchalance, had irritation like a red-hot needle poking her in the arm flaring through Pai's chest. It was stupid, she knew, but it annoyed her whenever Shiori texted her to 'discreetly' ask after her health. She didn't know why it irritated her so, only that she didn't like feeling as though she was being handled like a glass china doll simply because she wasn't at her best.

She just wanted everything to go back to normal.

Pai breathed in deeply to calm the simmering volcano in her chest as she slowly typed a response. She read it over again and again to make sure she didn't sound as annoyed as she felt. It was impossible to really tell, though. It was just a random assembly of characters on the screen – there were no inflections in the words, no way to tell what the underlying emotion was, unless she threw in several dozen emoji like Shiori liked to, and Pai didn't do that.

It would be weird if she did.

It annoyed her, normally. She liked being able to talk to a person face-to-face – not that she particularly enjoyed being around people to begin with, but she wanted to be able to read the emotions on their face or in their eyes and know how to navigate around them. Texting made that harder to do.

Now, she was glad for the lack of emotion. It was easier to hide how she really felt.

She paused at Shin's name, eyes tracing over the lines of the kanji of his name as she felt her mind slip away from the moment for a few seconds. She wondered why his parents chose that kanji for his name – 'death'.

It sent a small shiver of unease trailing down her spine as she looked at it. She was not sure if it was from the cold drifting in from her open window, or the disquiet at the the way Shin's name was written.

She blinked again and felt her mind stick back into the present, slowly enough that she almost wished that she could have permanently drifted off.

She shook head, focusing on the conversation.

Pai stared at the glow of the screen. She's lying.

Shiori rambled a lot, but her chatter was always about mundane trivialities. She didn't talk about things that scared her so casually – despite the fact that she loved Kouta, that she trusted the Daitengu and was close with Yukiji and Mizutani and loved the kids, Shiori was still afraid of the Ayakashi.

Yori Chiisai, Hengen, Oni, it didn't matter; the supernatural scared Shiori. She wouldn't say something like that if she didn't mean something behind it.

Just like that, she was gone. Another irritating thing about phones – it was too easy to avoid someone with them.

Pai sighed.

Pai locked the phone and braced her elbows on her knees, dropping the phone on her interlocked legs as she leaned forward, frowning at the floor.

After she woke up, Kouta, Shiori, and Kanou had explained to her what happened. They said because of her already weak constitution, it was like the poison from the Onihitokuchi's tail rendered her vital organs in an almost paralyzed state (or something like that). It was a stroke of incredible luck, apparently, that she was still able to walk. Her spine had been bruised enough to worry the doctors, along with the toxin's effects on her body.

Then Kanou meticulously began to explain that the Onihitokuchi's venom wasn't the only reason she nearly died. He told her that her body was failing, but scans the human doctors took at the hospital (whom she suspected were on Tengu payroll) took showed that her brain was working perfectly normally.

Pai put her chin in her hand and stared unseeingly out the window as she remembered what Kanou said to her, while she was still barely able to sit up in the hospital bed with her mind foggy with echoes of pain pumping through her body. She had asked if there was some medicine she could take to help with the fuzziness, but Kanou got a little shifty and said it wouldn't do to give her morphine.

She had been bitter about that, because everything hurt and she had just wanted to sleep some more but she couldn't even do that because her limbs were so heavy and ached with a dull pain that kept her awake.

Kanou went on to explain his theory that something about her disappearance, about what happened to her in the three-year gap in her mind that was bad enough to turn her hair white from the shock of it and for her mind to block the memories out, to repress the memories to the point that all she had in her mind now was a blank hole of that time. Since Pai was stuck in her subconscious, he hypothesized that she was reliving those memories and unintentionally influencing her body to...stop working.

Pai still had a hard time trying to wrap her mind around that.

Shiori was the one who drank something called jade water – some special kind of water brewed from crushed jade stone, which made no sense but Pai had long since learned to suspend any disbelief when it came to the Ayakashi world – which enabled her to get into Pai's subconscious and convinced her to wake up. Pai supposed it made sense, in a very strange way that gave her a headache to think about.

The thing was...she didn't remember any of it.

She didn't know if she was supposed to remember what took place in her own subconscious or not – it irked her nonetheless.

When they were finally alone – Kanou gone to concoct some believable tale to the doctors as explanation for Pai's sudden awakening, Kouta to talk to the Daitengu, which Pai hadn't been aware of at the time – she turned to Shiori and asked her what happened.

Shiori had said she couldn't remember. Pai had felt the gentle taps of Shiori's knee hitting the underside of the bed as it jumped up and down with nervous energy.

She was lying.

But Shiori didn't lie. She was not the type to hide and lie about things. She was an open book, and she hated when subterfuge and subtlety was used for no good reason. She often rubbed people the wrong way with that attitude, but Shiori had always been proud of it.

Why would she lie about something like this?

Another ping and vibrating tickled Pai's leg. She glanced down with only the movement of her eyes as she kept her chin in her hands. She debated just ignoring whatever notification she had just gotten – she did that a lot.

After a moment, she brought the phone up to hover in front of her face as she unlocked it again and read the incoming message. 

Pai frowned. It was true, she felt like she was going actually crazy from doing absolutely nothing and hardly being able to leave her room except to go to the bathroom and for meals, and occasionally Shiori's room to waste time or help her with homework (or with her own Math homework that Pai cared very little for).

She needed something to occupy herself during this confinement period. Besides, there couldn't be much harm in it. Shiori didn't have basketball practice, so she would get out of school early enough to run her errands and be back before twilight. Shiori knew the dangers of being caught out when twilight fell, and she was wary enough of the Ayakashi that she would do anything to avoid that.

Pai smiled at the emoji, then hunted around for the earphones she knew were somewhere tangled up in her blankets since she fell asleep with them on last night. Once she found them, she popped them in and clicked over to one of the playlists she had for movie scores. She selected the first song and flopped back on her bed, staring at the ceiling overhead and the myriad cracks ingrained in the wood as violins filled the space between her ears.

The ceiling looked closer than normal. She had been sleeping in a bed these days, not her futon. During the colder months all the futons in the house were switched out with wooden beds that she was not quite sure how the Tsukumogami managed to noiselessly move in and out of rooms every few months.

She folded her hands over her stomach, lips twitching in a small, aimless smile as her stomach gurgled appreciatively. Yukiji cooked lunch today, and as per usual, it was delicious. It was baked tonkatsu with tender and juicy pork loins wrapped in crispy golden panko crust, served with tonkatsu sauce and freshly ground sesame seeds. Mizutani had helped her make lunch instead of Pai, as she had been doing for the last few days.

That was another thing Pai missed doing; cooking. It was not one of her absolute favourite pastimes, but cooking reminded her of the happier times in her life, when she used to stand on a stool when she was too short to see over the counter as her mother cooked and, as she got older, where she helped her mother make meals.

Things were so simple then, with everything having a place in her life with clearly drawn lines. She knew what to do, and what not to do. She knew to pay attention to teachers in class if she wanted to get good grades and see her mother and father looking proud of her, and for Midori to ruffle her hair with a big grin. She knew to nod seriously whenever her father went on his tangents about politics until he gave an exasperated smile and pulled her nose. She knew to stay away from the knives her mother used when chopping things up, though she was allowed to squeeze out the excess water from mushrooms or the leafs of whatever vegetables her mother had just washed.

She knew to ignore the Yori Chiisai that wandered down the streets, the Yosei that hounded unsuspecting humans and made their lives miserable. She knew to avoid those creatures who were grotesquely, but popularly, featured in horror stories told by generation after generation. She knew to listen to the auntie who lived around the corner who was being looked after by her granddaughter whenever the old lady started talking about some tale or other, because Pai never knew if she'd need the answer to the riddles often featured in those stories.

Now look at me, she thought, feeling that odd haze fall over her mind where she knew she was drifting but didn't care to pull herself back. I live in the same house as some of the most powerful Ayakashi in the country, Shiori is engaged to the future King of the Tengu...and it's my fault Shin lost his Mask.

She frowned, blinking the haze away and turning on her side, closing her eyes and focusing more on the violins in her ears than the thoughts in her mind.

She spent the next hour fitfully dozing, slipping in and out of naps that she knew weren't long, but felt so. Sleeping was the only other thing she could do, and it was the one thing that always eluded her. It was as if her body realized that it had gotten all the sleep it could possibly take, and refused to let her drift back into the land of dreams.

She sat up, white braid flopping over her head and dangling in front of her eyes. She ignored it and pouted at the end of her bed as she blinked heavily. She wanted to sleep, but she didn't.

She didn't know. She wanted to – to do something, but she didn't know what.

She frowned as she recalled Obaasan's words. They looped over and over in her brain in a ceaseless chant. She pursed her lips as she turned to look out at the tips of the trees of the forest she could just see over the window ledge.

"I am a human being, and I find myself surrounded by Ayakashi, creatures from folklore that I was taught to fear, because they are not human like me. Sometimes, i see something that reminds me of that, and I am torn between what I was taught and what I see with my own eyes. Praying gives me the guidance I need."

Did it really help? She wondered, finding herself somewhat understanding Obaasan. She was born in a time when people were more intensely superstitious of the supernatural. Now she was living in a house full of Tengu as the legal guardian of her orphaned grandchildren. Her granddaughter was in love with and engaged to a powerful Tengu.

It was no wonder Obaasan must have felt like the world was flipped on its axis with all this versus all she was taught about the 'other world'.

Pai stood and went back to the window, staring out at the forest without really seeing it. She nearly went croyss-eyed from how intently she was focused on the thoughts zooming to and fro in her head, and she was almost dizzy when her attentioned snapped to as she came to a decision.

She closed the window and walked over to her closet, puling out a pair of black woollen stirrup leggings, a dark blue t-shirt, clean mauve socks, a grey cardigan that she could comfortably hide her hands in, and a light blue coat with a white, simple belt (that Shiori bought for her, far more fashionable than anything Pai would have gone for on her own) to tie around her middle. After a moment's thought, she pulled out a blue scarf and looped it around her shoulders. She strapped her watch on, moving on automaton as she went through the motions of getting ready. She tucked her phone in one coat pocket, and her wallet went in the other.

She was about to leave, but paused at the door with her hand on the door handle. The sight of her bare fingers had a coil of nerves tightening in her stomach, and with a jolt, she remembered why. She went back to her closet and opened it again, picking up the unassuming silver ring from the shelf and sliding it onto her finger. Daichi made it for her, infusing it with trace amounts of his own blood. It was to keep Ayakashi and Oni alike from her, to trick any cursory glance over her into thinking she was Hengen.

She forgot to put it on, the day of the outing with Shiori and her friends.

She quietly tiptoed to the front of the house with her dark brown boots in one hand. If one of the kids saw her – though they should have all been napping now – she knew there would be no way she'd leave Ayashi House unnoticed. As she walked, she wondered if she'd actually be able to do this; go all the way down to the shrine on her own, even though it wasn't far.

It wasn't like she had some intense social phobia, or that she was afraid of doing things on her own. It had just...been a while, since she'd actually done it. Despite her pouting objections to remaining under practical house-arrest and doing literally nothing as she recuperated, she felt safe at Ayashi House.

This would be the first time she was leaving on her own, leaving the safety of the magical barrier that kept Yori Chiisai – and Oni, she now knew – out.

She swallowed nervously as she continued walking to the front of the house. I'll be fine. It's the middle of the day ,and I have the ring with me. Nothing can touch me with it on. She wiped the image of the Yamajijii from her mind. I'll be fine. Nothing can happen.

Her steps faltered as an insidious voice whispers in her mind, That's what you thought last time.

No. That wouldn't happen again. She knew better, this time.

She ignored the voice and sat on the front porch, pulling on her boots as quickly as she could. She stood and walked to the front gate as she wound the blue scarf around her neck. She was so busy looking down at it to tie a nice, big knot at the front that she almost walked straight into the standing, imposing Karasatengu right in front of the gate.