Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Ribbons of colour moved across the underside of the cloud cover. They did not flow the way wind flowed. They moved the way light moved on the floor of a deep pool - drifting, curling, tracing slow arcs that began somewhere on the western horizon and travelled eastward slowly and quickly at the same time.

Hikari let out a small breath.

It was not a gasp. It was the involuntary exhalation of a body that had been holding something tight and was finally, just for a moment, releasing it.

Raizen looked at her. She was watching the sky with both eyes wide, staff still laid across her lap. Her hands, which had been resting on the staff nervously, had loosened. Her shoulders were down.

"This feels familiar," she whispered with a voice so quiet it was like she didn't want to disturb the sky.

"...You've seen the third day before, right?" Raizen didn't take his eyes off of her.

"I… Do not know. I know it happens every year, but I can't remember" she rubbed her temples. "…Yet it somehow feels really familiar."

Raizen waited. They did miss the previous one, since they were still with Takeshi, in the Underworks.

"I don't remember anything from before you found me," Hikari continued. "You know that. Around… What is it? Almost a year and a half ago. Whatever came before that is just... gone. There's nothing there when I try to look for it." She tilted her head a fraction. "But this - when the clouds do this - it feels like I lived somewhere where they did this all the time. Not once a year. Every night. Like waking up under a ceiling that was always coloured this way." She paused. "I have no memory of it. I just… Feel like I have been there."

Raizen's chest tightened. He had felt the same thing in Ukai. The strange song on the second day, the harmonic from the horizon, had reached into him with the recognition of a lullaby his mother had hummed without knowing the source. Hikari was describing the same sensation, anchored to the third day instead of the second, and neither of them had a memory for what either of those memories meant.

He didn't push.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"It is."

They sat with that for a while. The aurora ribbons continued their drift. Somewhere across the city, a clock chimed twice - late, signaling the middle of the night, maybe.

Hikari shifted, her left hand leaving her staff. She turned the staff slowly in her right, the luminite gem at its head waking up and emmiting its pale blue light, and from the tip of the staff-end, a small construct began to form. It was not large or impressive at all. It was a shape Hikari was building with maybe a hundredth of the channelling capacity Arashi had described earlier - a small four-petaled flower of pale light, looking like a kind of flowers Enya showed Raizen before… The Spider Lily, if he remembered correctly - the size of a coin, rotating gently in the air a few centimetres above the staff's head.

She did not look at him to gauge his reaction. She just watched the construct slowly turning in the cold air, the petals reflecting the colours of the aurora above and tinting the white light with the same soft shifts of the rainbow above.

"Arashi made it sound like I've been learning how to… Wreck things," she said.

"You know Arashi, he can get a bit too enthusiastic."

"…And he personally loves wrecking things."

"Yeah..."

"I've been practicing the small ones too." She turned the staff a few degrees. The flower drifted with the motion. "Walls and blasts are the part of training that's easy to measure. People watch you do them and they cheer. But the hard part of Eon - at least for me - is the precision. Holding everything steady. Making something small. Not letting it expand into a wall the second you stop concentrating."

She let the flower dissolve. The light faded petal by petal, the construct dispersing into the air with the same slow grace it had appeared.

Raizen, who had spent the last fifteen seconds quietly forgetting to breathe, did not say anything for several other seconds afterward.

"That was -"

"Don't."

"That was -"

"Don't compliment it. Arashi will hear from across the city and come back and probably blab to you about how I cut the top of a building in the Arena."

"YOU DID WHAT"

"I said don't-" Hikari pressed her own hand against Raizen's mouth He laughed. The sound surprised him; he hadn't laughed all day, and the laugh came out short and a little hoarse. Hikari's mouth lifted at the corners as well. "You'll probably see me blow up stuff, but I want you to remember this part of me…"

He turned to face the sky again, laying on his back. His shoulder was a centimeter from hers.

"Hikari."

"Mm?"

"There was a thing in Ukai I didn't tell anyone about."

She didn't answer. She just turned her head slightly toward him - not enough to properly look, just enough to listen.

"You remember the night-mission, the heist, what we were doing for the files." He paused. "There was a creature with me. A lizard. Really small-sized, summoned from somewhere I still don't understand. It came out of one of my Eon attempts, and it... stuck around – I couldn't make it collapse into my own Eon again, like normal Eon summons do. I couldn't even control it – It was like something came out of me and took its form. It even talked! Also it insulted everyone it met."

"During the heist," he continued, "the door we needed to escape through started closing. Hydraulically. It was going to seal us in. But the lizard jumped under it and held it open with its body while I slid through. The door closed on it."

He breathed. The cold air made his ribs ache in the place where his chest pressure usually sat. "It knew what was going to happen, but it jumped anyway."

Hikari was very still.

"It died for me," Raizen said, "because it had decided I was worth dying for."

The aurora above them shifted. A new ribbon of purple crossed the white, paler this time, the colour dissolving into pink as it travelled.

Hikari did not say anything for a long time. When she did, her voice was quieter than it had been all night.

"I'm sorry, Raizen." She reached over. Her fingers found his, slid between them, and stayed.

The contact was warm – that was the moment Raizen realized how cold his palm actually was. The warmth did not feel like effort. It felt like a thing that had been arranged correctly, the way a key fits a lock that has been waiting for it. Her thumb moved once across the back of his hand - slow, gentle, a single small motion - and then settled.

Then her head found his shoulder.

It was not the way his head had been on Saffi's shoulder this morning. That had been gravity and exhaustion, mostly. This was somethig else. Hikari turned her head sideways and rested her forehead against him.

He didn't move.

He didn't tense. He didn't even try to think about it - there was nothing to think about. She was where she had decided to be, and the part of him that had spent the entire day asking for something he could not name had received its answer without having to ask out loud.

Raizen also noticed, in the silence, that his chest didn't hurt.

The faint tightness he had been carrying all day - the one he had been dismissing as fatigue, as the residue of a sleepless night - was simply gone. The occasional ringing in his ear was gone. The pressure that had been pulsing through him since the red and black lightning, since the rooftop alarm, since the slate, since Slushie's lazy attention from her propped elbow - all of it had quieted to nothing.

He did not know what that meant.

He just knew, sitting on this roof with Hikari's hand in his and her head against his shoulder, that he felt okay for the first time in a really long time.

A small, unwelcome memory surfaced.

Saffi's voice, from the bench above Ukai. There's someone you already like, right? And his own answer, clumsy and honest. I don't know. It might just be empathy.

He had not been sure when he said it. He had not had a way to test the difference.

Empathy was the mirror. Empathy was the recognition of someone else's pain because the shape already lived in your memory. What he had felt for Saffi on the bench - the careful, terrible care of a person who could see her hurt and could not provide what she needed - was empathy. He understood that now.

…And a few meters away, through the space of a slightly-opened trapdoor, the other two – that said they were going to greet Kori – were throwing each other satisfied looks.

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