The first few minutes were slow-going. There was so much they did not understand. It was always a trying task to speak of things unknown to you, even in the best of circumstances—which this was most certainly not. They often gawked and stared at what they passed, and they just as often received stares in return. A few of the hospital’s personnel—wearing their strange, modern dress—came up to reprimand them in words they did not understand. Ichigo earned his keep by growling and making faces at them, sending them skittering away in terror, shaking their heads within the unfathomable see-through head-dresses they stuck on their faces.

“Bi Bi E,” Horosha had called it.

Ichigo was convinced the transparent bits were made from thickened air.

But for everything that words could not convey, there would be something for which they were not needed.

“I have stood after battles, watching the crows feast,” Yuta said. “There is not half as much dread there as there are in these halls.”

Dread and drudgery lurked everywhere Yuta looked. He saw it huddled in desperation on the floor, spilling out from sculpted chairs, or sealed away in skin-toned bags. The atmosphere was painfully familiar. Bits and pieces of his memories were gone, but feelings remained.

It made him think of curdled blood and crinkling fires. He’d wandered such battlefields before, killing people he did not know in the name of a cause that meant…

What did it mean?

He couldn’t remember. Perhaps Ichigo did, but it didn’t matter. He knew it wasn’t worth fighting for, and that’s all he needed to know. Glory’s promises were reapers, and nothing proved their hollowness quite as powerfully as the horrors at battle’s end.

The voices of the dying.

The agonies of the dead.

It was the kind of experience that turned a person’s cares into lead.

And the same was happening here.

But then, as they turned down a hall, something changed.

It happened in an instant.

It started with a single Tsurentu-jin running into the room with all the composure of a panicked dog. He rushed up to a consuru on the wall and touched the screen, causing the display to change. Then, stepping away he shouted to everyone in earshot, pointing at the consuru behind him as he ran to make the same changes to every other consuru in view.

Though, obviously, Yuta couldn’t understand what the man had said, he did recognize one word: Rasedaitu.

“What’s happening?” Ichigo asked.

Yuta shook his head. “Something with their religion, I believe.”

A look of concern flashed on Ichigo’s face. The young man approached one of the consuru, only to get knocked back as many Tsurento-jin flocked toward it.

In seconds, the hallway lost its deathly languor as a far more visceral terror took its place. The screams started all over, and spread like wildfire. Every Yuta looked, the people showed the same reactions. First, they would pause, stunned, as if they’d just seen their child beheaded. After the shock came panic. Wide-eyed, flailing panic. Then fierce, cough-studded conversations erupted as they talked amongst themselves, and their reactions finally began to diverge. Some fell to their knees and made Rasudito prayers. Others stepped around in catatonic stupor.

Then the crowds began to form, and the physicians and their assistants were powerless to stop it. People shouted in anger and terror. Men in black armor tried to calm the panic, but they seemed as shaken by the consuru’s messages as the people they were trying to shepherd. Some of the physicians stood up to the growing mob, yelling at them, trying to make them submit. Others walked away, glancing back furtively, reluctant to abandon their posts.

Yuta and Ichigo looked around in confusion. In the middle of the commotion, behind one of the physicians’ see-through masks, Yuta saw the face of a woman that could have been a younger version of his honored wife, though her beauty was marred by exhaustion and plague. Dark lightning crawled up beneath her cheeks. Bits of black daubed the edge of her nose.

Yuta reached out and grabbed the woman by the shoulder. Her garment’s solid blue fabric was firm and pleasantly smooth beneath his grip.

She froze at his touch, and then bolted around to face him with fearful eyes. She said something in Tsurentu, and then began moving in a way that told Yuta she was about to push him back. Ichigo must have noticed it, too, because, in the corner of his eye, Yuta saw his retainer reach for his sword. Yuta stopped him with a wave of his hand as he asked the woman a question.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“What’s going on?” He spoke as quickly as he could. Yuta knew the woman understood him, because she stopped to stare at him.

She said something in Trenton to which Yuta shook his head. “Noh-u Tsurentu,” he said.

After having risen to the rank of samurai, Yuta, like all other colonial nobility, had been expected to study the Tsurentu language. Unfortunately, languages had never been easy for him, and his Tsurentu left much to be desired. But, however meager his knowledge might have been, it was not too little for the Green Death, which had stolen it away, like so much else. It was the strangest feeling: knowing that he once knew, but knowing no longer.

The woman stared back.

“What is going on?” he repeated.

Then, in a fretful voice, she answered:

“The missing Rasudito has returned,” she said, “and he is a monster.” She wept. “It is the end of the world.”

Yuta wanted to ask more, but she slipped away before he could get a word in. He turned to Ichigo. “I think we should keep to the quieter hallways.”

Ichigo nodded, only to scowl and growl as a passerby bashed into Yuta’s side.

In an instant, Yuta’s hand was on his retainer’s sword, stopping Ichigo from using his weapon.

“No!” Yuta snapped.

“Why not?” Ichigo demanded. “Look at them, running around like headless chickens! They were fools in our era, and are fools in this one. They have no respect.” Ichigo pointed at the hallway the woman had run off to. “They cast you aside, like you are a fishwife offering goods. I won’t let them treat you like this!”

“I forgive their trespasses, Ichigo,” Yuta said, “as should you. They are not their ancestors. We have no quarrel with them.” He gazed off at the gathering crowd. “Come.”

They walked onward.

Yuta sighed and then coughed horridly, once again feeling the fire in his chest. “Here, on the far side of time, there is no hope of justice or revenge. There was little hope of it in our time, either, and I do not wish to dwell on it. I would rather see wonders than more misery.”

“I…” coughing, Ichigo bowed in deep apology. “I understand,” he said. “Forgive my impertinence.”

Yuta smiled at that. “You’re getting better,” he said.

Of all the lessons Yuta had tried to teach Ichigo, few were as valuable or difficult as learning to control his fiery temper. The Munine people’s sense of honor was at once their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. Though it gave them the solidarity to act as one, it left them vulnerable to vanity and reflexive action. Honor without reason was hardly honorable at all.

It made Yuta proud to see how much progress Ichigo had made since he’d first come to him. He just wished the young man would have had the chance to use it.

Ichigo looked down in embarrassment, bowing again. “Please,” he said, “lead the way.”

How far he might have gone, he wondered.

Taking the lead once more, Yuta took the path of least resistance. The quicker they could get away from the main pockets of commotion, the better. And it was quite the journey. They passed halls and concourses of indescribable make, filled with sculpted boxes and magicked windows. The artifacts flashed like jeweled beetles, or like marsh fireflies beneath a starry night.

It was Ichigo who noticed the doors—solid, but entirely glass. Working together, they pushed their way through, as they’d seen other wanderers do at other doors, and stepped out onto a long balcony, and then walked up to its edge, and stood, and looked. The porous stone walls sculpted at the balcony’s edge felt like ice beneath Yuta’s hands.

They watched for a long while. Yuta’s neck began to ache from all the time he’d spent looking up, but what was one little pain among millions?

The streets were ordered walls of gleaming spires that stretched up into forever whose tops melted away where the glint of their metal skins merged with the glare of the nourishing sun. Flying machines roared past, fluttering Yuta’s and Ichigo’s gowns, shining cones of light onto the streets. The things were thickened, visored rafts, with cylindrical plinths that belted out sound and wind.

Down below, vehicles passed through the streets. There were scarcely any of them left, maybe two or three. One was not unlike the ones Horosha had shown him—though of a larger, stouter build—but the others were something different altogether: large, ugly, angular things that trundled down the street, men popping in and out from them like mice from their holes.

“How do you think they move?” Ichigo asked.

“I wish I knew,” Yuta said.

It gave them much to discuss, as did the scattered columns of smoke Yuta saw rising up in the distance.

“So,” Ichigo said, “this is it, then? This is the city of tomorrow?”

“I think it was, once,” Yuta said. He shook his head. “To think, we were too late to see the city of tomorrow. Perhaps, if we’d come several days earlier, maybe then…” He smiled sadly.

The city of tomorrow was barely even the city of yesterday, and, soon enough, it wouldn’t be a city at all. Fires burned in the distance. Nightmarish creatures stalked the shadows. Here and there, battle drummed and burst. Fire and light filled the skies.

Yuta filled with melancholy as he contemplated these sights. There was wonder here, but it was on its way out.

“I wish I could have known this place,” he said. “I feel like I would have found something beautiful within it.”

They stayed like that for a while, watching in silence, until—after far too little time—one of the head-dress wearers stumbled upon them and interrupted their peace. The man waved his consuru over their right hands again and again, clearly expecting something to happen, only for his complaints to get louder and more frustrated each time the result he expected—whatever it was—failed to materialize. Eventually, he relented, though not enough to leave the two time-travelers in peace. Instead, he beckoned them to follow him with a wave of his hand.

“Where do you think he intends to take us?” Ichigo asked.

“Somewhere new, I think,” Yuta replied. “Let him have his moment,” he added, interrupted by a coughing fit. “He probably deserves it.”

So they followed him, letting the man lead them down the halls, turn after turn, until Ichigo spotted something so outlandish, he simply had to go see it for himself. Yuta followed suit, darkly curious, as did the head-dress wearer. The man was not pleased with this turn of events, and yelled at them, even over his own coughs.

Ichigo responded to him with a smile and a wave. “Bye-bye.”

The man replied by indignantly repeating the word “goodbye,” but mispronouncing it: sayonar-ruh, rather than sayonara. But then, after another coughing fit, he finally gave up, throwing his arms up before storming off down the hall.