Archive of Our Own

It is said that when you stand at a specific point at the base of Mt. Yougou’s twin peaks during a particularly dry and windless storm, marked by a tenko statue sitting halfway between the second and third torii of the trail that leads up to the shrine, for every bolt of lightning you can hear the thrum of thunder thrice.

In Makoto’s plane of Oneiric Euthymia there are no such mountains or cliffsides to be seen in its endless expanse of dreamlike irreality. When the Shogun puppet’s spears of lightning crash down in dithered, distorted thrums of bass like metal strings frayed with electricity, there is no levity for Raiden Ei, who rolls back with a cry of pain as she transforms into a smear of purple to evade the brunt of the blow. The puppet, brimming with power, is especially relentless in her latest assault.

Centuries of combat have made them both so capable at reading each other’s movements. Ei’s attempt at evasion is made with perfect anticipation, but the puppet’s attacks miss the bone of her chin by only a hair, drawing a streak of ichor against her pale chin. Ei braces her arms as aftershocks in space-time from the missed strikes cut into her skin and relentlessly drum against her ribs. The impact knocks her backwards so many times faster than the speed of sound that Ei thinks she hears the same roar of thunder thrice. She stumbles when she hits the ground, but lands low and stable, knees crouched, ready to pounce.

In an instant the puppet slices through space and sound to catch Ei’s wrist before it can reach the hilt of her sheathed katana. The Shogun elevates her leg, leveraging the hilt of the Musou Isshin against her foot and with her free hand knocks the wind out of Ei’s lungs with a quick, one-handed blunt shove of the polearm against her chest. The impact of the shove forces Ei to stumble back, her katana caught on the puppet’s heel and flung from its sheath.

The fact that the puppet has gambled three of her four limbs for this exchange is not lost on Ei. She puts all her force in her elbow to drive her fist into the pit of the puppet’s stomach. The puppet stumbles backwards, thrown off-balance—an opening.

Ei doesn’t expect the puppet to topple over at all, no: she has her thousand arms, after all. However, to activate her many-armed stance in such a hurry the puppet has to tap into her shield battery, which means...

Ei lets all the electro energy she has built up at her core flow through her veins. Yet another gamble to expend it all, but in this brief window of time as the puppet is forced to change her stance without the safety of her shield, Ei is much faster.

She becomes a blur, retrieving the Musou Isshin as the arms emerge, and levies an upward strike, a huge diagonal gash flashing across the puppet’s robes.

The puppet smirks as she processes the blow, her empty eyes losing their concentrated, electrified luster as her shift in form is disrupted by her automatic self-repair mode. She takes a quick step back, respecting Ei’s strength, tightly gripping at the Engulfing Lighting again in a two-handed defensive stance.

“All this effort, just to return to even footing. You may be losing your touch, Ogosho.”

Ei wastes no breath on a response. With a swipe of her free arm she dispenses a bolt of crackling lightning which burns white-hot. The puppet makes no attempt to outmaneuver, opting instead to squarely slice through it with the blade of her polearm, the feat that had first earned the grass-cutter its name. Ei counts on the puppet’s tendency to parry rather than dodge, already having concealed herself in the blinding light of the parted lightning to cover her approach, unveiling herself at the last moment and leaping into a horizontal slash.

Unblinking, the puppet swiftly catches the strike midway with the curve of her naginata, jerking the blade away with a heavy upwards strike. The brunt of the force is meant for Ei’s wrist as the katana is jerked away from her, and to avoid suffering the recoil she loosens her grip on the hilt, letting Musou Isshin fly.

She stomps on the puppet’s foot hard to keep her grounded, powering her leap as she stomps her other foot against the puppet’s shoulder, snatching her katana mid-air, putting all her weight into a downward slash that she knows the upturned blade of the Engulfing Lightning can no longer parry.

In a flash of pink she finally delivers a valid strike.

The puppet stumbles back. A hollow gash down the left side of her face disables an eye, it flickers out in a lifeless gray. Ei drives the puppet to the ground with her knee and she is met with little resistance, strength rapidly draining from the puppet’s arms as her body shuts down to deploy its strongest shield, entering emergency self-repair.

Ei breathes. That should keep her down for another couple hours.

“The maneuver with which you first stained your blade.” the puppet muses, tone glitching. “One is lucky to have received the same blow.”

Ei bites her lip, hard, to avoid thinking about the deep gash she’d left on Chiyo’s face with her killing strike, which is now reflected in a mirror image of her own.

“I don’t ever recall giving you the ability to quip.” Ei bites back, her knees holding the puppet in place as she channels Electro through her fingers to attempt to dispel the puppet’s shield, despite knowing she will never be able to do it in time. “Or to savor combat like this, for that matter. Is it just me, or have you grown an attitude over the past several thousand times I’ve beaten you?”

The puppet laughs a haughty, hollow laugh, still perfectly identical to the one vocal sample Ei coded into her centuries ago. At the base of the sound is a noise like sand brushed against metal.

“Do you find yourself eroding, Ogosho? Your faculties must be failing you.”

“Or perhaps you are capable of change?” replies Ei.

The puppet’s expression unknots.

“Never.”

Sighing in momentary relief, Ei starts hacking painfully, still winded from the blows to the chest. “You’ve sure grown stronger with every bout, that’s for sure.”

“I am not your child.” The puppet blinks, staring back up at her. “I have no need for such platitudes.”

Then the puppet’s pupil contracts to a pinpoint in a single snap as she does something she’s never done before.

She coughs.

She coughs and hacks and recoils and flinches like an honest to-god-human being with something wrong inside her, her electro shield glitching and falling apart in chunks as it pulses and frays. A whirring, clattering noise like a broken, overheating fan starts to punctuate her breaths in and out.

“What—” the puppet interrupts herself with a desperate, clawing cry at the back of her throat, “What is—”

The puppet weakly pushes herself back up, only to convulse and hit the floor again with a terrifying gag that trembles the ground beneath her.

Ei is aghast. Her terrifying mirror image, which had mere seconds ago struck her with enough force to carve several mountains in half, is falling apart before her very eyes.

Ei throws down her sword.

“Let me?” she asks, arm outstretched in an uncertain offer.

The automaton is silent. There is hesitation in her eyes, but she does not resist.

The shield dissipates.

Her artificer’s instinct taking over, Ei holds the puppet by the side of her mouth, and pulls her face in closer as to better examine what’s happening to her. The Shogun does not flinch.

Running her thumb over the Shogun’s soft palate, Ei catches something soft, thin, papery stuck to her throat. She inserts her index finger to pull it out, the puppet’s working eye momentarily fearful and obedient.

From the back of the puppet’s throat Ei pulls out a sheet of white fabric the shape of a teardrop, thin enough that it is easily stained by the faint purple glow of the domain.

A flower petal.

A glaze lily.

From Liyue?

“What... was this doing… in you..?”

The aperture of the puppet’s pupils unfurl, answering the question for her. She doesn’t know. She looks as confused as Ei is.

The Shogun puppet bellows a painful screech as she convulses, seizing, coughing even more violently in Ei’s arms. The gash across her face isn’t healing, and dark, poisonous, sweet grease spills from her broken skin—soft and tearable and tender as flesh on the outside, hard as porcelain on the inside. The flow of acid grows heavy as shards of the puppet’s skin fall apart one by one like teardrops, revealing layers over layers of intricate mechanisms of golden clockwork and thin amethyst wiring underneath.

Then Ei sees it.

The mechanics of the Shogun are largely still functional. Beautiful, even.

The thin layers of glowing amethyst wire that write the Shogun tens of thousands of times over in golden script, and the cogs that govern the flow of their currents, brushed lightly with liquified azoth quicksilver, have been well-maintained over the centuries. The Shogun is a palimpsest of codified ideals and laws and power, a constitution that stretches towards eternity in its many layers, a single page containing tens of thousands.

There are dozens of flower petals stuck between the wiring, and many different kinds: she recognizes red camelia, puffs of purple hyacinth and curls of yellow chrysanthemum. Jammed between the cogs where the wire is melting and leaking is what remains of an old sticky sakura petal, stained brown with sun and time and dust, disrupting the electric current that flows warmly under the puppet’s skin.

Ei must have struck where the cogs were already sensitive, and prone to malfunction. She moves to remove the stuck flower petals, knowing that it will restore the puppet’s healing properties.

This is no way to win.

But when her bare fingers brush against the exposed wire, sticky with battery acid meld with dust, it does not spark up and shock her. Instead, a stroke of heat like a molten rod of steel stabs through her finger and travels up her veins into her heart, which seizes up in a searing, red-hot, tightness.

Ei crumples to the floor in a sudden fit of coughing and hacking. Mirroring her movements, the puppet does the same, expelling bits and chunks of glaze lily, cotton flower, violetgrass, qingxin, dendrobium, and sumeru rose.

Ei gasps for air, and it doesn’t come. The edges of her vision close in towards the center in white smoke, as the puppet in her arm crumbles away in her entirety into billowing dust. The plane of Oneiric Euthymia melts into watercolor. The last thing to wash away is the look of alarm on a broken reflection of her own face, the faulty mechanical simulacrum of her voice whirring with programmed concern, barked like a command:

“What is happening to you? We must continue. Get to your feet. You cannot perish yet.”

The puppet heaves, interrupted by a coughing fit so harsh it blows out her vocoder in eruptions of screeching treble. She moves to get up, to catch her stumbling creator, but falls flat as her limbs give way.

Am... I dying?

“Raiden Ei—”

In her ears the familiar rush of blood, so overwhelmingly loud, and against her pulsing temple the clicking of clockwork to the faint beating of her heart. Her own voice is calling her name. It feels distant.

“Rai...den..."

My… name.

tic. tic. tic.

“...the Raiden Shogun.”

The first thing she sees when her eyes flutter open is a face she recognizes as her own.

“Understood? From this day forth, into eternity, you will be me.”

The mirror image clears her throat sheepishly. “I suppose that’s just about everything. Why I’m explaining this to you like you’re a child, I don’t know. I suppose I could’ve just written it all into your code... I guess I just thought I should be here for this... I’m not great with people, I guess that extends to things like you, too.”

The familiar-looking woman pinches the bridge of her nose in mild frustration.

“Hopefully your programming is sufficient enough to handle social situations better than I. Do you understand everything?”

Ei feels herself nod. The motion is foreign, sudden, haphazard. Like a spasm.

“Take good care of them. Take care of her.”

The woman turns away, carved away by the rift of purple and blue lights, speckled with stars so bright they stare at you like eyes, and before you can blink she is gone.

A light springtime breeze against her chin and the scenery has changed. The steady trickle of water that pools into the lake, the faint bubbling of koi as they nuzzle against the roots of blossoming lotus, the rustling of leaves and the scent of fragrant nectar scattered in the wind. A podium of light bamboo, cool to the touch, and a comforting shadow cast over her face to comfort her warm, tingling skin.

Ei blinks, and she finds herself in a personal garden of modest delights, flowers and succulents and small, blossoming trees arranged neatly by color. A honeybee buzzes by a white rose, hard at work.

The late Kitsune Saiguu’s personal garden. Ei would recognize this place anywhere.

“Ei!”

A familiar voice rustles through the grass, and a tuft of pink hair pokes past the bushes, sending the worker bee jittering away in a panic. Yae Miko pops out from the lilacs, adorable face scrunched up as she spits out a leaf.

Ei feels the knots in her heart knead themselves loose as the young kitsune flashes her a toothy grin, although her eyes betray a deep fatigue, as though she hasn’t gotten proper sleep in months. The muscles of Ei’s cheeks attempt to twist up in an attempt to smile, but maybe it’s her own fatigue, because her lips like porcelain remain sealed in place.

“Miss me while I was gone? It was a tough trip home, but...” Miko slides herself up next to Ei, her voice sung with a juvenile sweetness that Ei hasn’t heard color her tone in centuries. The kitsune’s floppy ears bounce up and down, perking from excitement and drooping again from exhaustion. “I wanted to drop by and say hello before I sauntered off to to bed, maybe forever. I got you something, too.”

Oh?  Ei wants to say. Miko’s gifts are often—but not always—a delight.

From a little basket Miko retrieves a brown paper box tied up with string, placing it gently on Ei’s lap before drawing it open with a light tug.

“I got you these rice buns… Take your pick, that’s red bean, that’s sesame, that’s orange custard. I didn’t know which kind you would want, so I just got every kind because I know whenever we get dango you...”

Miko picks up a sesame bun and takes a big bite in the middle of her sentence, her free hand slipping back into the basket to retrieve something else as she trains her big round eyes on the kagemusha, fishing for her gratitude.

“...you’re always indecisive...”

The elation in her voice trails off bit by bit as her fluffy ears droop to her cheeks. Miko slips her fingers away from the basket to clasp them to her god’s chin.

“...Is there something wrong, Ei?”

A twinge of claustrophobic fear ebbs up at the pit of Ei’s heart.

Say something.

Miko turns around, sliding her arms over Ei’s shoulders, placing herself gently on Ei’s lap, taking in the expression on the kagemusha’s face with those soft cherry lips and round eyes of hers. The young kitsune looks her over, eyes flicking from the beauty mark under her eye, to the tip of her nose, tracing the gloss of her chin. It doesn’t take long for Ei to notice the slow flooding of darkened fear that ebbs into the glow of Miko’s eyes.

“Oh.”

Oh no. Ei finally realizes. So that’s what this is.

A frost crawls its way over Ei’s forearms in the midst of what seems like summer. She so desperately wants to reach out and cradle Miko’s familiar chin, to cry out for her everything and utter in apologies and love over and over for years on end unto eternity, yet her command over her body is reduced to nothing but pleas, like a shout in a dream, a prayer to a dead god.

Anything but this…

“So you’ve... actually done it.”

Oh, Miko...

“You’ve left me.”

Every five years the Guuji leads the nation in prayer.

It’s a modest ritual.

In the privacy of the honden of the shrine, the Guuji and her Archon gather and enumerate the people’s prayers, offered up in various forms. Prayers inscribed onto wooden slats and strung along the pillars, sloppily scribbled onto crumpled fortune slips and tied to the branches of the Sacred Sakura, or entrusted to the shrine’s care in the form of treasured items or lavish gifts. No matter how big or small these aspirations, the two of them are meant to commit them all to memory.

When the task is done, they lead a procession of shrine maidens down the trail that leads to the base of the mountain to tend to the trees, a petal of a blossom plucked for each of the wishes. When they finally return to the shrine at daybreak, the sakura blossoms are cast unto the wind from the open windows, each and every one of them personally blessed by the Archon herself.

This year will be Miko’s first.

The automaton takes Ei’s place. The two sit in bitter silence, reading and tabulating the collected pile of prayers. There are wooden slats praying for good harvest, a young married couple who commemorated their first shrine visit together with a “great fortune,” slip and, among the most recent, a bundle of flowers with a card attached, praying that the beloved Guuji rest in peace.

With the bulk of the prayers accounted for and neatly reorganized into categories, Miko draws out two last crumpled up slips of paper from the sleeves of her ritual kimono. Flattening them out carelessly against her thigh, she tosses them haphazardly onto the pile. The puppet makes no motion, but Ei instantly recognizes them.

Centuries ago, Miko and Ei had taken to the shrine to pray together under cover of darkness on a moonless night—for the kagemusha must never be seen.

Their divinations matched: Rising fortune.

Ei had prayed for the eternal safety and longevity of Inazuma.

What Miko had written on the back of her fortune, though, Ei didn’t know. She’d deflected when she was asked, claiming that Ei could simply pester Makoto or Lady Saiguu about it after the ritual—not that either of them would be so loose-lipped.

The same prayer, which Miko held to her chest with such secrecy, sits open-faced in plain sight, like a dirty sin exposed. The Shogun puppet picks it up, scanning them with a quick flit of her eyes.

To stay by Ei’s side forever.

A prayer that has already failed to come true, devoted to a god who was never there to hear it.

Having processed the words on the paper in a split second, the puppet swiftly places it back on the pile with no delay, moving onto Ei’s own prayer.

“You should be here.” mutters Miko, her gaze trained on the corner of the room, far away from the puppet.

Ei shrinks with shame.

Ei was never meant to read Miko’s prayer. But at the same time, Miko was right: she should’ve been here to see it. She should’ve been here, because with Makoto gone it was her responsibility to make sure no prayer goes unheard.

And with the Saiguu gone, Ei was the only one Miko had left, and even she...

Suddenly the losses that have devastated her throughout the centuries do not seem as crushing anymore. Not compared to the look on Miko’s face.

And Ei had been the one to drive the final stake through her heart.

It stings. It scrapes and constricts around her heart like the thorns of a vine.

She should’ve been there to read Miko’s prayer. Instead she’d neglected it, making sure it was thoroughly broken. And to glimpse at it now, hundreds of years of neglect and betrayal later, accidentally stumbling into this moment in the harrowing sleep-paralysis of time travel through the puppet’s random access memories... A confession made in secret, never meant for Ei’s eyes.

It's almost perverse.

Ei’s heart might shatter. But what right does she have to be the one who feels heartbroken, let alone repent? It’s too late. Far too late.

A candle is lit.

“You’re not the only one who mourns, Ei.” She whispers, gently fumigating the objects of prayer with a stick of lit incense. Smoke paints the air thick in swirls of gentle sunlight. “Surely you must’ve known.”

The puppet does not respond, for she had not been the one addressed. She simply trains her gaze on the Guuji, expectant.

“Still nothing. And here I thought...” The Guuji draws a long shuttered breath. The gaunt in the bags of her eyes, left unpowdered, betrays her exhaustion. “You would feel at least a twinge of guilt.”

Miko snaps the incense in half and tosses them in the pot of soft, ashen soil.

“Sit.” she orders, looking directly into the puppet’s eyes this time.

Ei feels gears whirr into motion, joints locking heavily into place as her legs compress against the floor.

Miko takes a step forward, kneeling intimately close. Ei can feel Miko’s shaky breath against the cold, porcelain exterior of her puppet’s skin.

“God, it looks so much like you.”

For a minute the Guuji examines the facsimile of her lover’s face like it’s a confession uttered in a language she doesn’t understand. The puppet averts her gaze, her own silent curiosity instead drawn to the warm fingertips sliding across her cheeks.

“You are so cruel,” bites Miko.

“I have not treated you with cruelty,” the puppet replies.

“Obeying my every word as if you were a slave of mine with that face of yours, that is a form of cruelty.”

“I was programmed to.”

“And you’ve never considered that your programming was flawed?”

No answer.

She curls her arm around the Shogun’s shoulder and leans in, her breath tingling against the puppet’s ear in almost a kiss.

“What would your people say if I told them that their god has abandoned them?”

The puppet doesn’t bat an eye. Instead she tilts her chin, a statement of curiosity to meet the Guuji’s challenge, and strands of her hair drag across the back of Miko’s wrist.

Miko brushes the back of her cold fingers against the puppet’s chin.

“Would they demand that we return their prayers?”

The puppet blinks. She recognizes these questions are rhetorical.

Miko’s voice mutes to a hush. “You subsist on faith, don’t you?”

“...”

“Tell me, Ei.”

“...”

“Would you die?”

A pitter of warmth drenches a streak against the exposed skin of the puppet’s shoulder.

The ringing of the wind chime.

A subtle breeze, and the sweet scent of nectar.

Stroking her fingers along the Shogun’s lips, Miko slips her thumb inside of the puppet’s dry mouth. She drags along the soft of her cheek in a scrape. The tips of Miko’s fingers dig into the soft white synthetic flesh inside the puppet’s mouth, right underneath her eye where Ei had perfectly replicated her own beauty mark.

“Puppet.” The Guuji’s command is a whisper in the wind. “Tell me why I shouldn’t tear you into pieces right here and now.”

“I know you won’t.” replies the puppet firmly, referencing her library of code.

In one harsh, desperate motion the kitsune tears into the flesh and clay and metal of the automaton’s perfect face, panels of heavy porcelain shatter onto the ground, the delicate wiring underneath spilling onto the floor, yanked loose and ripped apart. Her eye short circuits, losing its color.

Ei thinks she hears a sob.

The puppet turns to face Miko, smiling best she can with half a face, because she was instructed to do so when Miko finds another way to surprise her.

“Maybe I was wrong.” concedes the false god in an imitation of Ei’s voice, light and almost playful.

To her admission Miko cries quietly and shatteringly into the puppet’s unfeeling shoulder, her fingers stained with quicksilver and battery acid clawing pathetically at the collar of the Shogun’s kimono.

“Oh, Ei...” Miko murmurs between choked back tears. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry...”

The wind chime. Rustling against another perfumed breeze, the Sacred Sakura sheds a petal, a desperate prayer, which flutters past the window and sticks to the wet, exposed wiring of the puppet’s open frame, now reconnecting on their own.

This time an overcast, moonlit night.

The puppet is escorted to the Guuji’s private chambers by a flustered shrine maiden, completely thrown by the Shogun’s sudden, unannounced appearance, at this time of day, no less.

“Erm—” The poor girl stumbles over her words. “Lady Guuji, th-th-the Shogun is here.”

The priestess dismisses the shrine maiden with a tired grunt. “Thank you, Akko.”

The shrine maiden saunters off in a hurry, and Ei feels the puppet snap the sliding doors open with too much force. Moonlight spills into the dimly lit corners of Miko’s residence.

“What is it now?” The Guuji is unamused. “I’m reading. You should leave.”

The click of a cog as the puppet cocks her head, the instruction not computing. “I was instructed to check up on you from time to time outside the realm of bureaucracy.”

Miko raises an eyebrow, not lifting an eye from her light novel. “Did she also instruct you to show up without warning in the dead of night like some kind of crazed vigilante antihero?”

The Shogun nods, matter-of-factly. “She thought you’d appreciate it.”

Miko’s eyes narrow. “Did she now… And you?”

“Me?” The puppet’s pupils click, curiously. “What about me? Is it not the case that you would like it?”

Miko groans in frustration, her cheeks tinged with a light pink.

(If Ei could cringe at her own naiveté she would.)

The candlelight starts to sputter out from the breeze which slips through the open door, and swaths of shadow curled up like tails lick over the wallpaper. Miko doesn’t seem to mind. She continues reading.

“Not. at. all. And I’ve nothing else to say to you. Leave.”

“Understood. I will see you again at this time in another two hundred years.”

“Two hundred years?”

The puppet hesitates, just as she was turning to leave. “Is two hundred too soon?”

Miko throws her hands up in the air, letting her book flop perfectly onto her lap. “No, it’s absolutely perfect.  Finally, some simulacrum of sweet, sweet company with something that looks like my lover, and again in another 200 years! Narukami, my prayers have been answered, every single one of them!”

A clattering of gears against the puppet’s temple as she tries to process the Guuji’s sarcasm. “She doesn’t hear your prayers.”

The book is finally clasped shut and tossed aside.

“I’m aware.”

The chirping of cicadas and crickets. The air is sticky and damp and licks of chill.

“She hears nothing.” exhales Miko, her words uttered with a bitterness that lingers at the tongue. “I’m already well aware of that. That is why I no longer pray.”

“She hears nothing that does not pertain to her ideals.” The puppet reminds her. “It is not personal. I was simply not programmed to retain nor deliver anything of the sort.”

Miko repeats the puppet’s wording with bitter cynicism. “Nothing that does not pertain to eternity.”

“Correct.”

“Like me.”

The puppet inhales to confirm her statement, but slows to a quiet, realizing that might not be such a good idea considering her current protocol. Ei can hear the whirring inside the puppet’s brain as she tries to figure out how to put this delicately.

“It is simply because sentimentality would not serve her meditation well.”

Miko raises her brow. “Sentimentality. I make her sentimental, is that it? And she’s abstained from sentimentality.”

“Correct.”

They sit in silence, the puppet waiting to be properly dismissed as the cicadas start to murmur to a quiet.

The roar of thunder, and a slow drizzle that soon whips up into a heavy downpour.

“Look at that, Raiden Shogun. Your creator cries.”

The puppet doesn’t answer. Splotches of rain start to drench her clothes.

In this light it is hard to tell whether the glistening on Miko’s lips is blood.

Ei thinks she hears Miko sigh.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she tells the Shogun, placing her book by her bedside. “You’ll short circuit. Come in.”

“I’m waterproof,” the Shogun insists, nevertheless heeding her instructions, swiftly shutting the door closed behind her. In three quick strides she is towering at Miko’s bedside, waiting for her command.

“Come here,” the Guuji motions with her arms.

The puppet sinks into her embrace, two hands reaching in without question, fingers already curled along Miko’s soft ear and traced along her cheeks. Miko, her one arm draped across the puppet’s neck, brushes the imprint of Ei’s beauty mark under her eye with her knuckles.

The puppet leans in to kiss her, but Miko muzzles her with her palm.

“Open your mouth,” Miko instructs. The puppet stares, and then listens.

Miko slides a finger against the roof of the Shogun’s mouth, her knuckles skating with ease, parted by the bristles of her tongue, reaching deep enough that the base of her thumb hits her lips.

The puppet sighs into Miko’s fingers as her eyes flutter closed, a coded response.

“Good,” the Guuji coos. “Just like that.”

Miko curls her fingers in a harsh crunch, claws drawn sharp, tearing hard and deep into the soft flesh of the base of the puppet’s throat. The Shogun’s eyes flap open in surprise, and the sharp glow of Miko’s vision floods the walls purple as she sends three overwhelming pulses of electro in syncopation with the clicking of the Shogun’s cogs.

The puppet’s pupils snap open in alarm as she crumples into Miko’s shoulders, convulsing and glitching from arrhythmia.

“You—”

Miko draws back her fingers with a shaky breath, slick and glossed with synthetic drool. She grimaces in disgust, making a show of wiping her fingers on the sleeve of her other arm.

“All this, just for me. And you even made it smell like yours… It’s almost cute.”

Ei can feel the Shogun’s faculties power down, the constant ticking, once perfectly in sync falling apart into dissonance. The harmonics of the Shogun’s internals shudder to a halt, and the vision through which Ei relives the Shogun’s memories grows dim, although not completely dark.

She smirks, knowing herself the only one who could accomplish such a feat.

“But, oh, Ei...” says Yae Miko, to nobody. Her voice is low in a marriage of bitter hurt and honeyed, destructive, satisfaction. “If you no longer need me anymore, what made you think I would you?”

Miko lets her smirk fall into a sigh.

“I could tear your little pet project limb from limb right now if I wanted. I would scatter it into the ocean piece by piece, commission two or three generations of alchemists to chemically disable its self-repair mechanisms. I would never have to look at this godforsaken reminder of you, ever again.”

The Shogun’s head lolls to the side as Miko readjusts her shoulder. The pittering of the rain roars to a storm as the wind shivers the branches of the trees along the mountain.

“You executed someone yesterday, Ei. Did you know?” Miko mutters. Her voice is soft and drenched with resentment. She seems to be looking through the eyes of the Shogun, her gaze fixated on something far away. “I did not care for it. I’d always thought your bladework magnificent, spectacular. Your executions were a work of art, a display of might. Lately it’s grown stale.”

She pushes the puppet’s mouth up and open once more, and this time her tug is tender, loving.

“The Saiguu once taught me that love, like destruction, is a craft. When will you realize that in both you’ve resigned yourself to stagnancy, not eternity?”

With her other hand she retrieves the book she’d been reading from underneath her covers. Flipping through the pages she slides out a single dried glaze lily pressed between the pages.

“Once every 200 years,” she mutters, “How pathetic and desperate must I have seemed to you? You thought I would want this? All I've ever wanted was you… why can’t you understand? You never have.”

Her voice softly breaks.

“A love that lasts an eternity, is this your idea of it? No, just an afterthought.”

Oh, Miko…

Ei thinks she might die. She thinks she might deserve it. She thinks she definitely does.

But she can’t look away, because Miko, despite her best attempt to dress her voice with cruelty, is trembling as she tries not to cry. Clawing at her throat, sharp and bitter, as much as she tries to choke it back with her tears, is heartbreak like a sickness.

“You thought this… You thought this cheap toy could… Just because it looks like you, just because you’ve dressed it in your clothes and taught it to speak in your voice, you thought it would replace you? You know nothing of love. And this..? I thought you were better than this. A blasphemy to the craft.”

The priestess’ slender fingers crumple the brittle lily whole into the back of the Shogun’s unfeeling throat.

A meaningless act of heresy, an attempt at destruction so weak and frail, Ei is not sure if Miko actually means to succeed at all.

She soaks her voice in irony. “A response to your finest creation with my own work of art.”

She presses the flower hard until the base of the stem disappears.

Ei notices that Miko’s lips are trembling.

“Until you break, or until I stop loving you. Whichever comes first.” Miko whispers in a tone that is almost erotic—shame and pride and hurt meld together.

The faint whizzing of silk sliding against silk as the Guuji reaches over to her bedside bookcase, the snipping of petals plucked from an ikebana display.

She leans in closer to sink the soft curls of chrysanthemum into the Shogun’s throat. Reflected in the kitsune’s eyes, Ei sees a mirror image of herself, frozen in time, lips sweetly and peacefully curved into a light smile, unperturbed by the experience as though Miko were feeding her dessert.

“Why...?” The reflection shimmers as well-contained tears finally start to well up in those eyes. “Why did it have to be you..?”

Miko does not care to wipe away her tears. They trace her chin into a spill, staining the white fabric of her sheets.

Miko wretches in agony as the tears start rolling back into her throat. Ei thinks she feels the same painful scraping in her own airways.

Miko barks her confession in stutters from the back of her throat. Her eyes, a shimmering ocean of purple curled in wisps of fluttering candlelight.

“I will not wait for you forever, Raiden Ei.”

A gentle breeze carrying the scent of honeyed sweetflowers billows past the curtains of the Tenshukaku balcony. Under clear blue skies, right as the sakura blossom, the Guuji once again requests an audience with the Shogun.

It has become a regular occurrence. They exchange platitudes over tea, and the Guuji enumerates current affairs as it concerns the shrine’s activities and her requests and advice pertaining to public policy as though reading from a list, with little emotion in her voice.

“It’s curious,” comments Yae Miko, during one such occasion, “that you seem to remember little about our actual encounters.”

Ei wonders if Miko had asked this question before.

The Shogun answers simply. “My programming is to store and process information and efficiently carry out tasks based on such information. I do not retain memories.”

Miko gives a smile that seems glazed over in porcelain. “I see.”

The Shogun whirrs to attention, and tilts her head. “Why do you ask?”

Miko’s smile fails to waver, but to Ei the twitch of her ears and the momentary flitting of her eyes are difficult to miss. “It’s nothing.”

Miko brandishes a letter opener engraved with the insignia of the shrine as she gets to her knees.

“Open your mouth.”

Ei feels the Shogun puppet’s lips part slightly, and, along her jaw the well-oiled sockets spinning and clicking.

The Guuji’s eyes shimmer with a greyed-out longing so muted it seems like acceptance. Ei thinks those eyes seemed to have more light in them before. She approaches as she draws a thorny rose from her sleeve, and with the swaying of the stamen, gently caresses the petals along the Shogun’s chin.

“All these decades,” mutters the Guuji, “and you still follow my every whim.”

“I was programmed to,” the puppet manages, her mouth still held open.

“Do you ever wonder why?” Miko asks, the slightest twinge of bitterness in her voice. “It has been abundantly clear that I am not relevant to her eternity, nor everything else you’ve been programmed to do.”

“…”

This is not the first time Miko has asked her this question. The Shogun is characteristically quiet.

“Right?” the words spill out from Miko’s sore throat like blood, as she holds onto the Shogun’s—Ei’s—face so, so gently with both her hands, thorny rose crumpled against the side of one cheek, cutting into Miko’s palm.

“Or else you would remember. And you would… resist. You never resist, even when I attempt to destroy you. So there must be a reason, right…?”

Ei feels the breathing of the puppet stutter as she prepares to speak.

“Perhaps it has to do with her hurt.” the puppet postulates.

Miko’s lips part in surprise.

“Her… hurt?” Miko repeats, slightly dumbfounded.

Then she sighs into a scoff. “What would you know about her hurt?”

The puppet blinks.

“It is true that I am simply a set of programs created to protect Inazuma from erosion. I lack the capacity to experience her hurt as though it were my own. As it pertains to her memories, I do not remember, I do not feel, I simply know what I’ve been told, and I proceed accordingly. As the successor to the position of Raiden Shogun, it is simply that her pain is the context of my inheritance. Raiden Ei has suffered loss after loss after loss. She cannot lose you, nor can she lose Inazuma. It is as I understand it, what informs my inheritance, and my creation, and in turn my continued existence. The command to protect you at all costs, to heed your every command is one such consequence of said inheritance.”

“Hurt is no reason to treat me like this,” cries Miko, bitter and sad and weary. “If she could not lose me, why would she leave me behind? You don’t think at all that the logic is backwards? Do you really think she knows about my hurt? She has always had everything to lose. I had nothing. And what little I managed to claw onto she took away from me when she left you behind.”

The Shogun looks away.

“Perhaps it is not perfect. But I believe it was the best she could do.”

“What would you know?” Miko bites. “You know nothing of hurt.”

“That is true.” responds the Shogun. “I do not. I cannot, and I never will. However,”

“However…?”

“Lately I have woken up with tears, or at least, what appear to be tears perfumed with honey, streaming from my eyes, resting stickily sweet against my cheek. I wonder if the consequences of her hurt has bled more deeply into my code than she had anticipated.”

Ei looks into the Shogun’s blank stare through its reflection in Yae Miko’s eyes, which widen.

“Sweet…?”

Miko seems to realize at the same time as Ei that those can’t be tears.

“Guuji Yae.” the puppet asks. “Are my tears proof of Raiden Ei’s hurt, or is it simply evidence of my malfunction?”

Ei feels Miko’s fingertips, cold as brittle ice, flinch ever so slowly against the puppet’s tender cheek.

The rose falls from her quivering fingers onto the floor. Yet the scent of its sweet nectar still clings to the puppet’s cheek.

“I…” Miko draws a shaky breath. And when she speaks again she speaks like the same girl from all those years past Ei had once loved: gentle, sweet, fragile. Like when she breathes, she breathes to love, and only to love; but all at once broken, defeated, and resigned to heartbreak.

The puppet is starting to break.

Miko’s pupils quiver, fearful, like the realization had plunged her heart deep, deep into the sea.

She whispers. She whispers to herself, and, Ei thinks, to Ei. And it’s the moment Ei’s dreaded seeing since the moment she’d fallen in love with Miko, and still dreaded as she stepped into the plane of Euthymia, and all this time:

The moment when the light starts to leave Miko’s eyes.

“I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

Electricity and heat tingles the god’s own skin once more. Sensation flushes into her body, first through her little fingertip, then her limbs, then her heart. Her fingertips twitch. Soon she hears the pumping of her own heart once more, the loud rushing of blood hammering against her eardrums.

Ei opens her eyes to her mirror image shaking her awake, hacking out in a coughing fit as she finally breathes again, her cheeks sticky with tears that she thinks smell sweet. Relieved, the puppet’s pupils slowly snap back into place.

Has she always been capable of showing concern?

The gash on the puppet has almost healed, but battery acid mixed with nectar still spills from her broken eye, rolling along her cheek like she’s been crying. Ei knows she hasn’t.

“Your heart stopped,” the puppet barks, the synthesizer still blown out. “Your breathing as well.”

“I… I’m alive.” Ei manages, her throat sore, her vision blurry and shattered. “You’re healing…?”

“I only woke up minutes ago.” the puppet admits. “Had I possessed a soul, I would’ve suggested we were both dead.”

“The memories,” asks Ei. “Did you see them too?”

“…Yes.” the puppet slowly admits. Ei can hear the whirring of the fan as the puppet’s faculties roll into overdrive. “I found the experience… confusing.”

“Were they real..?” Ei asks, her eyes welled up with tears, “Why would you keep them? And if you did, why would you keep them from me?”

“I hadn’t known they’d still existed until this very moment,” the puppet protests weakly. “It’s not how I was made to function. You are well aware of that. I never attempted or thought to attempt any preservation of the sort. I do not know why they were still there.”

But Ei knows.

The puppet tilts her head. “A bug, perhaps, from the kitsune’s meddling with my wiring,” she suggests helpfully.

“I told you to protect her,” Ei whispers. Ei feels a tear leave a thin streak down her cheek, mirroring the stain along the puppet’s. “You could never subject her hurt to deletion.”

The puppet is silent. Ei’s own voice quivers.

“I’ve done so wrong,” she admits. “To Miko… To Inazuma… And you.”

The puppet looks away, her wound now completely closed. “Ridiculous. I am nothing but a macro of your own instructions. ”

“Do you genuinely believe you could have done better had you remained?” she continues. “Time degrades and distorts all things. Does the kitsune not continue to mourn your absence precisely because the weight of your relation persists into eternity? Had you remained, had you not devoted yourself to eternity, do you believe that you would not have squandered away what little remained? Eternity preserves Yae Miko’s adoration for you as it protects Inazuma from erosion. Her love remains constant as long as her idea of you remains constant.”

“That’s no way for her to live.” Ei replies, swallowing back her tears. “It has caused her nothing but pain.”

The puppet closes her eyes. “It is better for her than if she had lost you.”

“And had you remained,” The puppet continues. “If you were to remain, and allow her perception of you to be changed and altered by the flow of time, could you cope with the fact that she might come to not feel for you at all? That you might eventually end up driving her away forever?”

“If it does, I will devote myself to mourning her and hurting as she did for me. I will never run away again.”

With a flex of her wrists and a crackle of electricity the puppet wrings her naginata, which had long since clattered to the ground, back into her grasp. “Useless. You would resign yourself to that sort of self-harm?”

“If it comes to that, I would deserve it.” Ei responds, retrieving her sword. “I already do. But it won’t. It never will. Never again.”

“Then atone for it with your blade.”

The shogun braces her foot. Ei tightens her grip on her blade handle.

“Let this be—”

CRACK!

The puppet is forced to leap back as a tear in spacetime opens up between them, and a girl and her flying companion are punted out of the rift. The familiar scent of Miko's perfume lingers on their clothes, saturating the crackling air of the plane of Oneiric Euthymia with a flowery sweetness.

Ei’s eyes flit back and forth between the rift and the traveler and her opponent.

“Lumine—?”

"Ouugh..." the traveler groans, having landed square on her stomach. "I feel carsick..."

Ei looks to the puppet, who only tilts her head, her eyes betraying a neutrality that signals her own confusion. What's a car?

The puppet doesn't waver, simply gripping her naginata tighter. “It seems as though this truly will be a duel to remember.”

…

“Let this be our final duel.”

Every five years the Guuji leads the nation in prayer.

It’s a modest ritual.

In the privacy of the honden of the shrine, the Guuji and her Archon gather and enumerate the people’s prayers.

This year will be Ei’s first.

“Miko…” Ei fumbles with a slip of paper knotted too tightly. “Can you help me? I’m afraid I’m gonna tear it…”

“Fine,” the kitsune sighs dramatically. She smiles as she sidles up next to her god, though, snatching the fortune slip away from her. “You’re really bad at this, you know that?”

“Heh… Yeah. Sorry.”

Miko laughs it off, unfurling the fortune with some effort.

Great misfortune.

Ei panics, reaching for the paper slip too late. Dammit, she knew that the shape of the knot seemed familiar. “Wait that’s mine—"

Miko smirks, pushing her god back with an index finger on her forehead. “Oho, what do we have here~?”

“Nooo, don’t—”

Miko flips it over, paying no heed to Ei’s adorable little struggle.

A light breeze sweeps across the room, perfumed with incense and sakura.

The Guuji’s expression quickly falters.

But this time, when she cries, the teardrops do not stain her clothes, because Ei is there to swiftly catch them, to hold her by the arm when she trembles, to slow her breathing when her stuttered breath wells up in tears and stings the back of her throat. Miko wraps her arms around Ei’s shoulders when she starts to come undone again, but this time as slowly and safely as she had always deserved.

“I’m sorry,” Ei whispers.

“Don’t say sorry,” Miko stutters through her tears. “You never need to say sorry. Never again.”

“I’ll always be sorry.” Ei replies, softly.

“Oh, Ei…” Miko cries, “Ei, Ei, Ei…”

And when the sakura blossoms fly, Ei feels as though her all of her prayers have been answered. After all, they are to herself, and she will do anything to stay true to them.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Miko says, lacing her fingers with Ei’s as the god admires the flight of the flower petals against pale blue skies. “As the sakura blossoms give themselves to the wind and allows it to guide them, Inazuma trusts its god dearly, with their fates, their whims, their longings.”

How long had it been since she’d seen real blue skies when she’d finally left the plane of Euthymia? Ei wonders to herself. How long had it been when she’d promptly ran away again for hundreds of years?

Ei turns to look at Miko. There’s nothing but trust and vulnerability in those glimmering eyes, which trace the flight of the flower petals along the sky with fascination.

Miko’s fate, whims and longings.

Even now Ei thinks she might let her down. She has already, far, far too many times. If she were to enumerate, and gently hold each and every moment of her failures between her fingers like the flower petals scattered to the winds, she thinks it might take thousands of years.

She thinks maybe there’s no better time to start.

“Don’t cry, Ei.” Miko whispers gently, catching on to Ei’s expression. “It’s alright.”

The fact that Miko is standing next to her again, and speaking to her with the gentleness from from whence they were first courting… The fact that Miko can hold her, love her, forgive her, as though everything she’s done to her ultimately doesn’t matter…

“I didn’t earn it.” Ei starts to tremble when she speaks, the pink against blue of the flower petals smearing as the blurriness from her tears soak through her vision. “I’ll have to earn it.”

“Inazuma trusts you, Ei.” Miko mutters, shyly. How long has it been since Ei’s seen this side of her? It’s like when she breathes, it’s only love. “I do, too.”

Miko squeezes Ei’s hand. Ei’s heart stills, and so do the tears.

If Miko trusts her, she has to trust herself.

You never told me it was this pretty. Ei thinks.

The kagemusha scoffs sleepily from somewhere deep inside her consciousness. I suppose.

We’ll work on your prayer, too. Together.

The Shogun is silent. Seems as though, as of right now, when they’re not fighting or discussing policy, she prefers to be sleeping.

When they visited the shrine, Ei and Miko had asked the kagemusha to draw a fortune slip as well.

Without even stopping to check her fortune, she wrote “for the safety and longevity of Inazuma” on the back, and returned to her slumber just as quickly.

“Her handwriting’s better than yours,” Miko had commented. “But otherwise you two are maybe a little too similar.”

“You think so? I guess she takes after me.”

Ei had laughed off the suggestion, because their prayers could not have been more different, not that she thought Miko would ever get to read it.

To remain forever by Miko’s side.