Moriko stared at the arm sticking through her chest, shock dumping adrenaline through her body.
“What-” She gasped.
“It doesn’t hurt, does it?” Glory murmured. “Getting punched in the chest by a ghost.”
“...no.” Moriko observed with shocked wonder. “It doesn’t.”
“Listen.” Glory insisted, digging her ghostly fingers into Moriko’s heart. “We don’t have much time together, you and I. The Cycle will permit me this one meeting, so it’s important to me that you listen to me.”
She jerked her spectral hand from Moriko’s chest.
“Your abstemious nature is... so strange to me.” Glory remarked curiously as Moriko’s life in the Shrine of the Ancient Pine seeped into the other woman’s mind. “It must be very lonely for you and your Shrine Maidens. I cannot help but wonder how many sticky fingers and messy bedsheets there must be in such a place.” She teased.
“I am tired of your insinuations and insults. If you-” Moriko began, but Glory cut her off with an impatient sigh.
“You hear, but you don’t listen. You listen, but you don’t understand. My words go into one ear and right out the other side. I cannot help but mock a fool that is willfully ignorant.” She complained, shooting Moriko an arrogant look.
“What is it that I’m expected to understand?” Moriko asked, exasperated.
Glory smiled gently, warmly at Moriko. “The blood of the dragon flows through your veins as it does mine. It will bring you no peace.”
Moriko stood up in the pool, the water sluicing off her immature form. “We are finished here, I think.”
Glory laughed. “Were you not warned? Did nobody tell you the dangers of being touched by a spirit?” Moriko gaped at the woman as a sudden numb coldness spread in her chest. A wave of exhaustion and dizziness washed over her, and she staggered and lost her footing in the pool of water.
Glory loomed over her. “Yes, that’s right.” She nodded. “The touch of the dead is a death sentence. If you don’t light your own fire you will die here, princess.”
“...what?” Moriko gasped, struggling to breathe. Her arms, where she’d grappled with Glory before, were numb and limp and useless. Her heart struggled to beat in her chest.
“Light your fire.” Glory urged. “There is a rage in your breast, is there not? A fury?”
“...is...” Moriko mumbled loosely.
“Breathe in the life of this place, warm it in the fires of your heart, and breathe out your flame. Only then will you survive.” Her voice dropped a little and a certain hungry urgency entered her voice, even as she gently embraced the young Yamato girl.
“Here, let me help you.”
*****
The Ancient Pine did not care for the world around it in the traditional sense. It had no reason to care for what armies of men might crawl upon its surface like ants.
Men and women and elves and all the rest died, crumbled to ash, were reborn, only to die and be reborn, again and again and again in an endless cycle. Only the world was eternal. Only the sun was eternal. Only the simple tree-dreams were eternal.
Except something had happened.
Slowly, ponderously, in the comfortable, eternal peace of its thoughts, things began to take shape. A thing, an event, unforeseen, unheard of, unthinkable. A tree with no voice found itself in need of one.
Fire, something it thought long immune to seared in the fissures of its bark, ran up its mighty trunk and devoured a massive branch, greedily chewing through thousands of years of unhindered, uninterrupted growth. It was an old branch, scarcely alive compared to its mighty trunk, nothing in comparison to the much younger, higher, stronger branches above, but the pain was real. The fire was real.
Urgently, it severed its connections to the branch and allowed it to fall, and for the very first time in its very long existence, it began to pay attention to the tiny people that had built themselves shelters of wood and stone under the shade of its mighty branches.
*****
Moriko gasped and choked; her vision dimmed, wavering as if she were drowning. She struggled to move her limbs, to swim for the surface. Her heart was an icy stone in her chest, and one of her arms wouldn’t move right.
You have something, right? A goal, a reason to live, a need to keep going, no matter what, no matter the cost, right? Something that will keep you on your feet even as you die, something that screams and rejects the world, right?
All my life I have been raised to live in harmony with the world.
Yes, but you and I know that the world is cruel in its indifference. It’s overwhelmingly unfair in how fair it is. To live is to stand in defiance of death. To exist is to defy the world. Shout your heart at the world and demand that it be so!
I can’t, it’s so cold.
There is life here, is there not? The secret of the Dragon. Breathe in the life of the world into your lungs. Heat it in the fires of your heart, and breathe out your unwavering defiance!
But what if-
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Don’t worry. I am you, and you are me. We are one, now. We have always been one. Now... breathe.
A searing feeling of heat and anger swelled in her chest, seemingly breaking the thaw that had settled in her chest, allowing her to take a second frantic breath. She coughed and choked again, burning embers spitting from between her lips. Feeling was returning to her body, she took a ragged third breath and breathed out a streak of flame.
A sizzling streak of flame raced up the trunk of the mighty pine, striking embers against the thick armor of the trunk. It slammed into a branch in a coruscating shower of sparks and swallowed the branch whole.
*****
Alba Jadescale; Glory the Morningtide, spoke one more time in Moriko’s mind as Moriko struggled to drag herself away from the trunk of the Ancient Pine, coughing and choking on smoke she couldn’t see.
Her fading voice was punctuated with a splintering crash as a massive branch from the Ancient Pine snapped and fell on part of the Inner Temple, blazing as if it had been doused in oil and set alight, boiling with fire, crushing the rooftop, scattering globules of burning pitch and tufts of flaming needles in every direction. Shouts were raised, alarms rang,
Shrine Maidens rushed to quench the blaze as the Shrine Priestesses used their ofuda to magically snuff the fires as they were found.
Moriko could only stand and gape in numb shock at the catastrophe. A branch of the ancient Pine had broken off? It was burning? How could this have happened? What did this portend?
Moriko staggered back to where her robe lay on the steps leading into the Inner Temple. She took long, slow breaths to steady herself. Glory had awakened something within Moriko, something that Moriko had only once experienced before: a mortal terror for her own life.
There was always a sense of danger, of risk, in her training. You could become wounded as you learned your weapons, as you struggled with the other acolytes in the martial arts, but there was always supervision. The wounded were quickly tended to.
Fear was important for the training, for the lessons learned, but there had never been a sense of fundamental, mortal terror that seized the heart in icy bands.
Moriko had learned the sudden, suffocating sense of mortal terror that overwhelmed the senses and strangled the breath in the lungs... and had come out the other side. She wrapped her robe around her and hugged it tight against the chill that trickled ice down her spine. She’d had no idea what it was like to feel that way.
Discipline. Focus. Concentration. Put away unimportant things and pay attention. Her visit with Glory had opened her eyes in a way that the trip to the Stony Pool had not.
There had been an academic understanding of the world outside of the shrines, but Glory’s experiences and memories, briefly glimpsed, now fading into incomprehensible dreamstuff that would eventually be forgotten, had showed her that there was a whole world of possibilities out there.
Moriko knew the founding legends of the Yamato. Two islands, one populated with elves, the other with humans. A plague that had forced them to unite their strengths or die. Then Glory the Morningtide had arrived, bringing the blood of the Dragon.
Humans thought of the Yamato as elves, the elves thought of the Yamato as flawed, human-blooded mockeries of elves, but the Yamato were more than that. They didn’t just carry the ancestry of elves or humans in their blood, they carried the noble blood of the Dragon in their veins.
When the Anglish encountered them, they’d demanded, “Are you elves?” And the Yamato had answered flatly, truthfully... fruitlessly. “No. We are the Yamato.”
And there was something else, as well: She took a deep breath, imagining a great, angry furnace of fire in her chest and breathed out... a few sparks and embers. The woman in her dreams, the woman she now recognized as the first Empress of the Yamato could breathe fire. The best Moriko could hope for was a few paltry sparks and embers, but now she knew, truly understood the depth of the separation between herself and the other acolytes.
They had given her flexibility and leeway because she was abandoned royalty, left on the steps of the Imperial Shrine, evidence of a forbidden tryst, a scandal hidden away.
She’d struggled to deny her heritage. She was not royalty. She was not special. She neither needed nor wanted special dispensation. She was of the Shrine. She was an acolyte in a sea of acolytes. She would be a Shrine Maiden in a sea of Shrine Maidens. She’d told herself these things over and over again, that being a Shrine Maiden was all she wanted.
But now things had changed. The dragon was awake in her blood and behind her eyelids, coiled in her guts and sizzling in her nerves.
I want to be a Shrine Maiden.
A voice taunted her in the back of her mind, redolent in the smooth, dulcet tones of Glory: Are you sure that’s all you want?
*****
“You! Moriko, are you okay?” The Eldest Priestess asked, a smear of ash on her cheek, one of the sleeves on her robe dotted with pinhole burns. Moriko blinked, coming back to herself.
“What happened?!” She exclaimed urgently, taking in the smoke and coughing a little.
“We’re trying to learn that right now.” The harried woman informed the girl. “As it stands, the Acolytes have been gathered and moved to safety; I’ll have you join them.”
Moriko waited in the room prepared for the Acolytes, listening to them voice their fears and concerns. They huddled together for comfort, waiting for answers.
Moriko was silent; too much had happened much too quickly and her mind was occupied with trying to process it all.
*****
A week later, the Maidens were rebuilding the demolished parts of the Inner Temple. A Shrine was self-sufficient, and the reconstruction of a damaged part of a shrine could only be performed by members of the shrine, anyway. Moriko had been part of the reconstruction effort herself.
One evening, the Eldest Shrine Priestess invited Moriko to tea.
“Did you meet one of your past selves?” The Priestess asked curiously as Moriko stepped into the Priestess’ office, where the eldest Shrine Priestess waited, seated formally, a patient expression on her wizened face.
Moriko blinked at the question, and the Shrine Priestess smiled and reminded the newly minted Shrine Maiden that it was possible to meet one of her past selves in her dedication ritual.
“I met her.” Moriko growled, her hands in tight fists.
The Priestess nodded thoughtfully.. “It’s very rare to meet one. Was she your Origin? Did she give her name? Can we look her up in our archives?”
Moriko frowned at the question, and the older woman raised an eyebrow at the fire in Moriko’s eyes.
“Must I? Must you?” She demanded, and she could feel tears pricking at her eyes. “I don’t think I like her very much.”
The Priestess laughed a little, but it was a bitter laugh, heavy with sympathy. “I, too, did not like who I had been. But with each new turn of the cycle, we improve.” She paused. “It’s important to know who we were just as much as it is to know who we are, so that we may then strive to be who we will become.”
She laid a comforting hand on Moriko’s shoulder. “Think of someone out there in the world, dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years in the future. Think of what they might see in you, when they meet themselves.”
Moriko frowned, but behind her lips, the Dragon smiled.
*****
Under normal circumstances, Shrine Maidens were not often allowed into the presence of the Ancient Pine. Prayers were usually done simply, discreetly, with a small sliver of wood that had been carefully chiseled from the tree and fashioned into a protective amulet. For larger prayers there was a shrine built from wood culled from the Ancient Pine itself. Though the Ancient Pine gave out powers, it didn’t respond to prayers for guidance or wisdom.
Lately, however, a sprig of new growth from the massive tree bulged appreciably from one of the titanic roots, a tiny pine tree with the delicate, fragile green of spring on its needles. The Shrine Priestesses and Maidens often stopped by from time to time to pray and pay respect to the budding new growth.