Gilded Ashes

Hikari opened her eyes. The cold had reached her cheek first. The side of her face that was not pressed against Raizen’s shoulder and had gone cold enough that the sensation of it had woken her, and the rest of her body - once she registered the cold on her cheek - had begun catching up: the chill across her forearms, the stiffness in her left hand from holding his fingers through the entire sleep, the small numb patch at her hip from sitting in one position for what had clearly been longer than twenty minutes.

Above them, the auroras were still moving.

The sky was still doing what skies were supposed to do at this time of year. The temperature, with the dome opened, was no longer being comfortable, and the night’s wind has begun to push its way down.

Raizen was asleep right next to her shoulder.

His breathing was slow and even, the rhythm of a person who had finally given in to something he had been resisting all day. His hand was still in hers. His head had slipped sideways during the sleep until his temple was pressed against the underside of her jaw. He had not moved in a long time.

She looked at him for a moment, the colours from above shifting across his face.

Then she sighed and got to work. Moving him took patience. She slid her shoulder out from beneath his head one centimetre at a time, supporting the weight with her free hand so the transition would not wake him up. She turned his body in slow, careful motions - arm, then shoulder, then hip - until his weight was distributed in a way she could lift. She got one arm under his knees and the other behind his back, braced her legs, and stood. He shifted once in her grip, but did not wake.

The trapdoor was the hardest part.

She crossed the rooftop in small, even steps. Lowered herself onto the first rung of the ladder with her boots finding the rungs by memory while her hands kept him stable. The descent was slow. She did not channel any reinforcement Eon - the use of it would be enough to wake him, since he was so close to a solid output. She carried him down the ladder with her own arms, the way an ordinary person would. At the bottom, her shoulders were burning by the time her boots touched the floor of the attic.

She crossed the attic, sneaking through Kori’s boxes to their part of the room.

His mattress was where it had always been, against the wall, the blanket folded neatly at the foot the way Kori had taught all of them to fold things. She lowered him onto it carefully, drew the blanket up and adjusted the corner under his shoulder. He turned his head once on the pillow and settled into a position that suggested his body had not realised it was no longer on the roof.

Kori stood up and carefully brushed her hands to shake out the stiffness.

Her own mattress was thirty centimetres away.

She looked at the gap.

The clock on the far wall ticked twice in the silence.

Hikari bent down, gripped the edge of her mattress and slid it sideways across the floor, as slow as she could. The mattress moved. Twenty centimetres. Ten. Five. Two. It came to rest with its long edge against his.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she lay down on her side, facing him, with the blanket pulled up to her chin and her body close enough to his that she could feel his breathing in the air between them. The colours from above filtered through the small attic window in soft bands of colors. The house was completely quiet – maybe Kori and the others were already asleep.

She studied his face.

...She did this for a long time. The clock counted the seconds at its slow steady rate. Somewhere downstairs, the building’s heating system cycled once and went quiet again. Somewhere outside, a vehicle passed in the street. The sounds were small and ordinary.

The first scratch came faintly through the northern wall.

Hikari’s eyes flicked toward the sound. She held still and listened.

Suddenly, nothing. The clock kept ticking, the house kept being quiet.

A few minutes passed. The scratch came again - softer this time, lower on the wall, closer to the floorboards. The kind of sound a small animal might make crossing the outside of a building. Hikari didn’t give it much attention - The districts around had occasional rats. Birds nested in the gutters in the warmer months. Sounds against the side of a house at night were not, in and of themselves, signals.

The scratching stopped.

The silence that followed was longer than the silence before it.

Then she heard the climbing.

It came from the side wall now - the one that led up to Kori’s room. Something small was moving up the exterior of the house, slowly, scraping faintly against the siding with what sounded like very small claws. The motion was clumsy - it paused several times, but right after, it started again. The sound moved upward along the wall by inches, working its way toward the window.

A muffled thud reached her - the sound of something landing on a flat surface, small enough that it could only have been heard by someone who was already listening very carefully.

Silence returned again.

It held for nearly a minute.

Then she heard small footsteps – whatever had been bothering her was already inside the house.

Whatever it was had entered through Kori’s window - and was now walking, on small feet, across the floorboards of the living room. The steps were uneven. One foot landed harder than the other. The pattern suggested either an injury or a body that was not entirely the right shape for walking. The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs and began climbing.

Hikari sat up.

She rose from her mattress without making a sound, staff already in her hand – she had developed a weird habit of sleeping with it. She took a combat-ready stance, her bare feet silent on the floorboards, positioning herself around one meter away from the top of the stairs with her staff angled down toward the descending sound.

The luminite gem at the head of the staff came alive.

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