Chapter Twenty-Three Rui #2
“The boy Seizan gasped with the breath of life, and woke again, shaken but alive. All looked upon him with awe. The god saw the great sacrifice the young boy was willing to make. This willingness, not to die, but to give up everything on the slim hope that he might save another, with nothing gained in return. This selflessness is what the gods admired most; and so the gods intervened, and acted not on their own account, but for the sake of the young boy who had such a willing heart. They saved him. And they blessed him for that, Rui. May they bless you.” He pressed a damp cloth on her forehead and prayed. “May they bless you.”
In Rui’s fever, the spirit-world seemed to come alive.
She saw moving shadows, ghostly giants walking at the edges of her vision, as though passing through the edges of the world; tall as mountains, they turned to her, seemed to look her in the heart, skeletal faces grinning with bone and fire in their huge, lidless eyes.
“Go away!” she screamed. “Leave me alone!”
Shhhhhhhhhh, they seemed to say. Deathhhhh.
As they reached for her, she jolted back to reality, shaken and scared.
“What are you doing to me?” She saw herself in darkened woods.
“I told you,” the Hososhi said. “You are mine…”
“What do you want from me?”
The sound of the god’s laughter floated to her through the earth. The wind and the trees bent over, and the world seemed to grow immense, unknowable, and cold.
“You have a role to play, Rui Misosazai,” they said. She could feel the Hososhi in her still, their presence in her chest, their invisible eyes watching her own and watching through her own, their face behind her face, their shadow in her shadow.
“I will have a use for you. Before the end.”
“Why are you doing this?” she gasped. “What do you want from me?”
“I want to repair the gates.”
“What does that mean? Tell me, please! What does it mean?”
“I will show you.”
Instantly the world changed before her eyes.
She was floating in darkness, a strange whistling sound in her ears.
A great pressure passed over her like wind, and then she was falling, falling onto a hillside that hadn’t been there before.
Strange, confusing images passed before her, unsettling and intimate as those in dreams, and swift as wind from the mountains.
She saw a river in the rain, a little girl standing on a bridge.
A child, a young boy, bawling, by the sea.
She saw an infant crying on a beach of sand, surrounded by shells.
She saw herself, holding the child in her arms, a temple bell, three wells in a courtyard of polished river-stones and barren trees; she saw Sen, thin as sticks and bones and a great-span crow that plucked out his eyes; she saw monstrous creatures, giants, tall as mountains, hawks and shadows and feathers in the air; a brilliant light, a god flowing into view; it looked like an animal, a fox or a dog, but it had boar’s tusks, a long nose like an elephant.
“You belong to me,” the Hososhi said.
“What if I don’t do what you want of me?”
“You will.”
“What if I die before that happens?”
“Then you become a hungry ghost. A corpse that walks, never satisfied, cursed to wander on the road to hell, until the end of time.”
“What if I kill myself right now!”
“I won’t let you.”
Roots pulled up from the ground, unearthing themselves and spindling upward, combining and wrapping around each other to form a twisted shape, vaguely like a human, towering above, with a hood of writhing branches and a body made of roots and rotten vines.
It shifted, changed before her eyes, seeming at one moment to be a single creature, then the next appearing to be many, intertwined, moving in and out of themselves; their eyes glowed green from deep inside their shadowed face, somewhere between the roots, and their voice seemed to be the voice of many voices, coming from the earth itself.
The vision ended.
She gasped as though doused with water, coughing, and rising to find Jobo looking down at her, concerned. He pressed a damp cloth to her forehead.
“I saw… a god,” she said. “I saw… I saw giants…”
He sighed. “The monks believe them to be portents. When the barriers between the world grow weak, they say, the giants walk the earth. They bleed over into our world. They come when something has gone wrong.”
“Who are they?”
“We call them the pilgrims,” he said. “What did you see?”
“I saw a baby, crying in the rain,” she said. “I saw an ocean of crystal blue… trees… mountains… a bridge over a river… two temples, on either side. I saw a great stone well, in a courtyard… a little girl standing on a bridge.”
She drained away; her whole body felt sore. She could still hear them, whispering in the back of her mind.
“You see the great saltwater lake,” he said, “and the Temple of the Three Wells.”
“What’s there?”
“Two temples, the Temple of the Three Wells, and the Temple of the Far Earth. They are twins, on either side of a river: the three wells symbolize the precepts of birth, life, and death… and the far earth is the life-that-is-waiting.”
A sound at the door revealed the Hassho Tayu, rough-hewn cloth cloak dragging slightly at the floor. “This curse was not meant for you,” the Hassho said. “Beware. Fires rise in the west. Peace will not hold. A demon in white walks the land.”
“Do you know what it is I see?”
“They have shown you a glimpse into one possible future. The Temple of the Three Wells.”
“But what’s there?” Rui asked.
“For you, no one can know. If the god Hososhi has unveiled it, then that is where you must go.”
Jobo said: “I’ll take you there. We may be able to find passage at Harbor Slope and sail from the Unasaka coast to the capital, and from there travel along the small-roads to the temple of the wells.”
“Something evil is coming,” the Hassho said. “If the Hososhi made themselves known, it can only mean some great danger has come, and has damaged the endless barrier…”
“What of the other?” Jobo asked.
“You are not the only one the gods have cursed,” the Hassho said. “It was your friend, the Hoshiakari, who struck them first.”
Rui’s heart lurched.
“The gods always require something in return. That is why you are bound to stopping this evil that has come across the gates. But so is Sen. Bound, for ever, until it is done. Your friend is tied to this as much as you.”
Rui asked: “What will happen to him?”
“He will die. As all things do. No one can see his fate.”
Rui rose, dizzy. “Then we have to warn him—”
“Rui Misosazai.” The Hassho fixed Rui in her gaze. “There is a demon in your heart. A shroud, on your soul. It will consume you. Unless you can find a way to quell its wrath.”
“Can’t you stop it?” Rui asked, afraid. “Can’t you find a way to kill it?”
“You can’t kill it, child. The curse is in your heart. The only way to kill it… is to die.”