Yae grew worried that Arai wouldn’t be able to take them all out by himself. Just as she had that thought, an especially large black deer skeleton ripened and fell to the ground. It cried, “Broken.” As if resonating, the other skeletons also began to cry out variations of “broke,” “broken,” and “Why is it broken?”
“Oh, I see… This thing is just like me,” Arai muttered, suddenly lowering his sword.
“Huh…?” Yae responded.
“Or it’s how I could have been. If you hadn’t purified me, I might eventually have become like this,” he explained, his voice dry. He turned to face a bewildered Yae. “This thing is the same kind of being as me and Sui. I can feel it. It has a trace of divinity. Something corrupted it. No, I know what happened—the people of this land did something to it. Its resentment is what caused the outbreak of deformation.”
Yae quickly thought about what he had just said. I’ve never seen shirabyoushi in this world before. Were the dancers dressed like that because this being drifted here from Japan like Arai and Sui? Maybe it’s similar to Lady Bihin. Then the people of Miya Province harmed it, which resulted in the elders being punished and inflicted with deformation… But none of that matters right now! I need to do something!
Yae looked at the black deer skeletons as they cried, “Broke, broken, why is it broken?” and dropped down to kneel where she was.
“Honored spirit, I will heal you!” she yelled. “I am a skilled healer! I am a doctor of the supernatural! I healed Sui, so I have proven results!” The large deer responded immediately with a violent cry. It jumped high over Arai’s head and charged straight at Yae.
“Run!” Arai shouted, but she couldn’t. Her body wouldn’t move. Right as she despaired that she was going to die, a white tiger leaped from behind her and hacked apart the black deer skeleton with the white sword gripped in his mouth. The bones were sent flying.
The white tiger wasn’t the only one who rushed there to save her. She heard a whoosh as an arrow flew past. She darted her eyes about and found Akanagi and Hoodori on the crumbled cliff, both holding bows. She wondered if they had been dragged into the shifted dimension as well or if they had forced their way in like Arai.
Dazed, Yae glanced around herself and suddenly realized there was something in her lap. She thought at first that it was one of the deer skeleton’s bones, but it wasn’t. It was a wooden comb, broken in half and blackened by soot. It had a daffodil pattern carved into it, and it looked quite old.
“I’ll heal you… I’ll fix you.” She stroked the pattern with her fingers, and the falling black snow stopped in midair as if time had frozen. It then slowly returned to the sky.
Transparent light-purple buds began to grow from the ground around Yae. They bloomed into flowers before her eyes. There were morning glories, pansies, hydrangeas, irises, columbines, and balloon flowers. The purple flowers swallowed the ground like waves.
The black trees also turned to a light purple, and white vines and ivy wrapped around them. The vines also crawled up the cliff and grew small purple berries that looked fresh and juicy. The black deer skeletons, which had stopped moving at some point, were covered in flowers, too.
The flowers budded and bloomed in rapid succession, all without a sound. A sweet scent permeated the area. A springtime wind passed through, and the flowers were illuminated by dappled light as if filtered through the branches of invisible trees. The petals sparkled with morning dew. Two small birds with wings blue like jewels flew by Yae’s side in perfect harmony. She looked up and saw that the sky was a bright shade of pink.
Before long, everything went dark as if someone had snuffed out a candle, and the land returned to normal. There was nothing unusual about the cliff, the houses, or anything else. Iron torches lit the quiet night.
Akanagi seemed lost in a daze, until he suddenly yelled, “Elder Hotaru!” and raced down the stairs of the cliff. Yae turned around and saw a gentle-faced man walking toward them from the river with the support of some guards. He was a slim man with wolf ears on his head. His gray hair was cut neat and short.
Yae’s and the man’s eyes met. She was still sitting on the ground, and he crouched down in front of her. “Thank you,” he said with a smile. Yae’s eyes went wide, and Arai ruffled her hair from behind. The white tiger jumped up to put his paws on her shoulders.
The villagers began to rush from their doors, having noticed the change. The houses lit up one after another. Conscious of the broken wooden comb in her hands, she watched the man—Hotaru—as he was buried by an onslaught of elebeast pups.
“It’s over, Yae. Let’s go back to Shishina,” the white tiger pestered, casual as ever.
Yae blinked, then smiled and said, “Okay.”
It was the third day after they had returned to Shishina. They had used the excitement after Hotaru’s recovery to slip away mostly unnoticed.
“In short, it was my family’s mistake,” Hotaru said. He looked about fifty years old, but he was apparently much older. “I’m sure the other provinces are in much the same situation, but our contact with the outside world has been severed as a result of overpopulation of a single Nature. That might be a good thing in the sense that there is no conflict, but it has also resulted in stagnation. A narrowed worldview creates narrow-minded people… Yes, a member of my family struck upon a terrible idea. He thought he would try to steal the power of a being that has been long sealed by one of our ceremonies.”
“Is that being the owner of this wooden comb?” Yae asked, holding out the broken item. Hotaru nodded.
“I don’t know who or what that owner was, though,” he said.
“If the divine treasure is a comb, maybe they’re a god related to combs?” Could they be a member of Arai’s family…? No, it would be better not to think about that.
“The issue is not the nature of the comb’s owner, but rather that whatever it was, it was too much to handle, and that is why it was sealed. My family member failed to understand that. After releasing the seal, he realized it was something he should not have done. The divine treasure was defiled and cursed, and it caused an increase in deformation. Fearing my reprimand, he consulted with the other elders. It was then decided that the young man responsible for this would be married off to another province.”
“Was that to keep him away from the wrath of the being he had unleashed? That would be like taking out two birds with one stone since they would also be bringing in women of a different Nature.”
“That’s right. However, the impurity continued to spread even after the young man left the province.”
That might have been the reason Yae and the marriage procession were attacked by shades when traveling to Miya Province. That impurity also gave strength to Lady Bihin… I wonder if that’s what enabled her to control the shades and steal the black sword from the Whiskey House. She now knew why Arai had found the increase in shades so strange. To think there was such a dark secret behind the marriage discussions…
“As a relative of the young man who defiled the divine treasure, the curse moved to me. You know the rest of the story. But then, you all grew suspicious that my deformation was abnormal, caused by a curse. Some grew fearful that if Kaki Province learned of our province’s failure, they would demand to have their women back. Panicking, they broke the divine treasure and tried to pass the curse to you,” Hotaru explained.
“So after I turned down the offer of a good husband, they figured I wouldn’t be staying in Miya Province anyway and decided to shove the curse onto me…?” Yae asked.
“…Yes, Elder Tamao got carried away. He had innocent children give you candies mixed with hallucinogenic powder to put you in a vulnerable state, then attempted to move the curse to you…”
Yae forced a smile. Thank you, black sword, for rattling into my bed! I asked Arai about it afterward, and it sounds like it really did that all on its own. She swore in her heart that she would give the sword all the affection it deserved from now on.