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“Five hundred years ago,” the chief priest of the Grand Narukami Shrine tells the ex-Archon of Inazuma, “I bought dango from a stall right here, and ate it right there.”
Ei huffs. A laugh, maybe, if she’d put more chest into it.
In spite of the 500 years that have passed since they last stood next to one another like this, Miko’s habit of over-gesturing hasn’t seem to have changed—though she wears trailing sleeves now, and they swish in the air as she points in the direction of a house, then the house beside it. The Inazuma city of 500 years past had the residential buildings and the commercial neatly split, the little step-wide stream serving as the border between. There’s a bridge now. The stream is a little wider than a step now. Houses, shops, food stalls flank the wide winding paved path, uncaring of the anatomy of the city 500 years ago.
Five hundred years ago, there was a sweets shop where there now is a house, a stone bench beneath a flowering tree where there now is another house. The owner of the sweets shop had known them by name. “She never had children,” Miko tells Ei now. “She married a travelling writer. She publicized the recipes for her sweets before she left, but nobody has managed to recreate them perfectly in the five hundred years since.”
They must paint a strange picture—the chief priest of the Narukami shrine and the Almighty Shogun, staring longingly at two plain houses. “Perhaps I can try,” Ei says.
Miko barks in laughter. “With what cooking ability, exactly?”
#
What Yae Miko doesn’t tell Raiden Ei is that she doesn’t like sweets; not now, not five hundred years ago. But Ei liked them, and Ei’s sister had died in her arms, and Ei had not left her quarters in Tenshukaku in the half-year since that bloody battle. “How could you understand how I feel?” was the last thing she said to Miko, five months ago, voice muffled by the thick, unopening door, though no thickness of door could soften the strike, the bitterness, the finality of those seven words.
What Miko didn’t tell Ei is, “They were my friends as well.” And later on, after the bitterness had passed: “I understand how you feel.” She wonders now, five hundred years after the fact, if it would’ve changed anything.
She thinks now—no, it probably wouldn’t have.
What Miko doesn’t tell Ei is that that day, five hundred years ago, her fortune read, “Today is the day to make amends,” in Ei’s careful hand, when the chief priest then had allowed Miko to write a day of fortunes. Yae Miko from that day, five hundred years ago, had thought it a sign.
Make amends, Ei’s handwriting told her, after five months of silence.
And so she did. So she tried.
And Yae Miko doesn’t tell Raiden Ei that she just knew. Even before the puppet turned cold flat eyes upon her, before it opened its mouth and spoke in Ei’s voice, before it called Miko by her full title in the way Ei had never before—
By then, she already knew. Call it intuition.
Five hundred years ago, Raiden Ei joined the ranks of those who left Yae Miko. She supposes she doesn’t need to tell Ei for her to know. She left, after all. She must know her own actions, if not the consequences. Five hundred years ago, Yae Miko sat beneath a flowering cherry tree, choked down two sticks of sticky dango alone, and did not make any amends.
#
“Seventy-eight years ago,” Yae Miko tells Raiden Ei, “I wrote a book. And two years later, I built the Yae Publishing House.” They stand before it now, dark wood and tea-coloured roofs like all the other buildings in Inazuma. Ei wonders how the city had settled on such a colour palette. They certainly hadn’t asked her about it. “Well,” Miko adds, after a pause, “I hired people to do it.”
In front of the small book display linger two young men. They murmur to one another in the Teyvatian universal tongue, interspersed with phrases in Mondstadtian and Liyuen, though neither seem to have as good a grasp on the other’s language as they think, nodding along in half-understanding. It’s only through what seems like a lot of shared time that the conversation doesn’t crumble to pieces. The wistfulness—she will not call it jealousy—drags a sigh from her chest.
Beside her, Miko huffs in half-laughter, half... something Ei doesn’t know the name of. What she knows: it’s a new development to the Yae Miko patois, one that must’ve formed many years ago with how familiarly it rolls off her tongue. Bitter but bitten back.
“Ei,” Miko calls, cocking her head. “Knock knock. Are you in there? Are you going to ignore me for 500 more years?”
She laughs, seemingly quite satisfied with her joke, but there it is again: bitter, but bitten back, as if she’s trying not to be bitter. Ei hates it. But in the same way she sat in the Plane for 500 years, so used to the roiling dark that it had just become normal, she thinks it must be the same for Miko. So used to the bitterness that it has just become the way her words taste.
“Ah.” She searches for the threads of the conversation. “What was the book about?” she asks, though Miko’s already making for the book stand, plucking one off the shelf.
“Why don’t you read it and see?”
#
(Four hundred and ninety-five years ago,) “I buried your sister,” Yae Miko tells Raiden Ei over tea. Miko still takes her tea without sugar, ever eternal in her personal habits despite her vehement rejection of Ei’s ideals of eternity—though there’s a jar of sugar at the side, dust collected on the lid, as if it hasn’t been touched in a while.
“Did you now?” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as flat and sarcastic as it does, but Miko only raises an eyebrow. Ei realises then: things have changed. The Miko of five hundred years past would’ve averted her eyes, lips pursed in hurt, soft skin and soft heart on her sleeve. The Miko of the present day raises an eyebrow, and returns the metaphorical blade twice as fast and twice as sharp.
(It crosses her mind later that perhaps this change was her doing. Her fault.)
She had meant it in a ‘how do you bury someone without a body’ way—when a god dies, they leave nothing behind, and they leave nothing unscathed. This is one of the world’s greatest misfortunes. For there not to be a body to be remembered by, no people to be remembered by.
“It’s the sentiment behind it, dear friend.” Only Miko could make the words ‘dear friend’ sound as mocking as they do. She finishes her tea and stands up. “Shall we visit? She’s missed you.”
#
What Yae Miko doesn’t tell Raiden Ei are the details. How she made the trek to Khaenri’ah—the ruins of it—when the cataclysm had come to an end, crawled through debris and choking dust to collect what remained. What remained—nothing. When a god dies, they leave nothing behind. When a god dies, nothing is left unscathed. When a god dies, there is nowhere for the power in their body to go but out, and so—when a god dies, everything around them dies with them. She knew this. She knows this. She had gone anyway, hoping, praying—
She laughs at the memory now. How stupid of her to pray, kneeling in the remnants of the city most clearly and destructively forsaken by those she had prayed to.
What Yae Miko doesn’t tell Raiden Ei is why. Ei doesn’t ask, clutching the omamori Makoto used to wear on her waist, knuckles white. Miko doesn’t have the heart to tell Ei that the omamori is fake, that she’d made it three hundred and eighty years ago, thinking Makoto would think the headstone beneath the flowering tree too cold and impersonal. Though she thinks Ei must know.
After all, when a god dies—
#
“One year ago,” Yae Miko tells Raiden Ei, “it started to rain.”
She speaks so suddenly it startles Ei. She had been so quiet and unmoving, standing before the ward on the hill, hair slicked to her head with rain. Ei thought she simply hadn’t noticed her—the rain is loud, after all.
Miko reaches out to touch the ward. It is wreathed in sickly violet fog, and the woven rope holding up the paper wards is severed. Ei needs no explanation here. Miko still gives one. “One year ago, the resistance undid the wards holding back the Tatarigami.”
She doesn’t say it, but it is said nonetheless, by the rain and the choking air of Yashiori Island: Because of the Vision Hunt Decree, endorsed by you.
Because of the snake god Orobashi, slain by you.
Because of you.
Miko is too kind to Ei to say it, but it is said, and Ei listens.
They advance a mere few steps before a house pushes through the veil of the fog. Miko nudges open the gate with a gentleness that Ei—it strikes her, then—hasn’t seen in so long—as if she’s been there hundreds of times before. Perhaps she has. Ei wouldn’t know. Miko’s mouth forms a hard line at the sight of the dark interior.
On the table is a note, which Ei picks up.
I have gone out to look for my mum. Mama, if you are reading this, I cooked your favorite dish for you. Please eat. Don’t leave again. Please wait for me to come back. I will come back if I can’t find you and Papa in Sene Senzh Snezhanaya.
Love, Chouji
“His parents are dead,” Ei realises aloud.
“Ei, they’re all dead.”
Ei knows better than to ask who ‘they’ are. She’ll find out within the hour. They next come to the singular heavenly statue on Yashiori Island, which is, oddly, scored with deep, frenzied marks.
Sword marks, she finds out. The anger of the residents of Higi Village, she finds out. The abandoned Higi Village has been taken over by ronin, who lie beneath the scant stripped and burnt trees left on Yashiori after a year of thunderstorms. There’s a different sort of nihilist exhaustion in their hunched shoulders and chipped blades.
Here, she catches sight of something tucked beside a house. Folded paper. Having been shaded by the edge of the roof, it’s marginally less soaked than everything else, though still Ei has to gingerly peel the pages apart and they still disintegrate further beneath her fingers. Here, she reads ‘Higi Village Residential Register’, and watches the village chief go mad through a list of names and deaths on soaked paper.
Here, she finds out.
“A year ago,” Miko says from behind her. It is her turn to stand, quiet and unmoving, frozen by a power greater than the one vested within her. “It started to rain. Ei, it hasn’t stopped raining since.”
#
Yae Miko does not tell Ei that she had found the gnosis, even though it had clearly been left for her, even though Ei must know Miko had found the gnosis because it was not there when she left the Plane of Euthymia. Ei does not ask, so Miko does not tell.
Yae Miko does not tell Ei that her finding of the gnosis had been by chance, the chance that the Miko of four hundred years past had still been the soft-skinned soft-hearted Miko that Ei remembered, the chance that she had thought that one hundred years was a long enough time to hold a grudge.
What matters: she was, and she did.
When she had entered Ei’s quarters—she remembers repeating to herself that it was Ei’s quarters, not that imposter of a puppet’s—the puppet, kneeling before the kotatsu, hadn’t even opened its eyes. She does not remember clenching her fists, but she remembers her nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms, drawing blood.
She’d knelt.
“Ei,” she’d said, staring at the puppet. It opened its eyes, but it was not Ei who stared back. “Please come out. I need to talk to you.”
The puppet said nothing.
Several days passed. Nine, to be exact. The dawn of the ninth marks the beginning of Miko’s four hundred year grudge, though a contrarian some may say it just marked a hundred years into a five-hundred-year-long grudge. On the ninth day, Yae Miko stood up, found the gnosis on Ei’s nightstand, and thought about smashing it onto the ground. She did not smash it to the ground. She tucked it into a pouch at her waist, and walked out of the puppet’s quarters.
And for five hundred years, the puppet continued to say nothing, and Ei never came out.
#
What Ei doesn’t tell Miko is not scrawled over four sheets of paper, three of them crumpled and the last ripped to shreds, though she’d sat at her desk and certainly tried to put words onto the paper, brush heavy with ink dripping with every word she couldn’t find the words to convey.
Dear Yae Miko,
Dear Miko,
Yae Miko,
Miko, I
Miko will understand, she thinks. She pulls the gnosis from her chest and leaves it for her to find. Miko will understand, she thinks, as she seals herself into her sword. But Miko does not understand. And by the time Ei realises, it has been five hundred long, long years.
#
Two things Ei does not tell Miko:
I’m sorry.
Goodbye.
#
“Two hundred and thirty-seven years ago,” Yae Miko tells Raiden Ei, “the restaurant that made my favourite fried tofu closed down. The son of the restaurant owner didn’t want to run the restaurant anymore… He went to learn how to metalwork.”
They sit at the open counter of a restaurant. Two seats over, an older woman reads a book while splitting fried tofu with her chopsticks, and Ei wonders if there’s more to the story. There usually is. Instead of continuing, Miko turns to flag down the waiter wiping down the restaurant’s rickety tables. He jogs over, somehow stowing away both cleaning bottle and rag and magicking out a notepad and pen in the time it takes to travel three meters. “Evening, Guuji. The usual?”
“You know it,” Miko sings, scanning the menu. “And a red bean soup for my friend. As sweet as your father is willing to make it.” The waiter snaps her a salute, they both laugh, and the young man disappears into the kitchen.
The curtain flutters shut.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What happened to the restaurant?” Ei asks, not even sure why she cares about the restaurant with the fried tofu and the son who closed it to work metal. It’s just one restaurant amongst the hundreds of restaurants in Inazuma over the years. It’s just one man amongst the hundreds in Inazuma over the years. She doubts it’s even the only restaurant in Inazuma that sold fried tofu and closed because someone didn’t want to deal with it anymore. But there’s always a twist, an amusing tidbit, something in the stories Yae Miko tells her. Somewhere along the way she’s come to expect it, so it’s such a surprise when:
“I told you. It closed down.”
“…that’s it?”
Miko turns to face Ei, elbow propped up on the counter. In the mid-evening light, her eyes reflect not only Ei, but the shadows and the lantern-lights, all of it. For the first time since Ei took her hand and left the Plane of Euthymia, she sees the Miko of the past.
“You know, I spent fifty years looking. There wasn’t a single place that had the same taste. Even when the son sold me his father’s recipe book, I couldn’t recreate it, nor could I find a chef in all of Inazuma who could.”
“Perhaps I can try,” Ei says, but that little jest falls flat. Miko’s somewhere else. A familiar memory for her, a strange land for Ei. The knowledge that their years apart have led them on different paths, to different places, to different experiences, is a constantly renewing pain.
“By the time fifty years had passed, the father had long since entered the dirt and the son had retired from swordsmaking and only then did I realise I had forgotten what the tofu had tasted like—only that it tasted good. I could not describe the spices or flavours or even the texture. Ei, we immortals have no concept of wasted time, but those fifty years of mine were utterly, completely, wasted. You know, Ei, things don’t always come together in a satisfying, storybook way. Restaurants close for as little a reason as a son being born who loathes making swords less than cooking. The land changes for as little a reason as a particularly terrible storm. People die for as little a reason as no reason at all. Ei, all we can do, in the face of that, is live.”
She turns, and that sincerity is all shuttered and shuffled away then, the Liyuen soft-sword that Miko’s become slid and curled neatly around the waist, sharper for all their pliancy but always kept hidden otherwise. “Ah, our food is here! You better only have good things to say, or I’m never taking you out again.”
#
“Yesterday,” chief priest of Narukami Shrine Yae Miko tells Raiden Ei (just Raiden Ei), “I bought a dango from that shop.”
“I know,” Ei says, brow pinched. She still does not quite understand Miko. She does not think she ever will. “I was with you.”
Miko smiles. “So you were.” She buys a stick of dango and a plate of fried tofu, and they head for the grove of cherry trees. It is spring. Somewhere, a bird is chirping.
They find a seat, and the locals do not scatter like they had the times prior. Miko offers the sweet to Ei, balances the plate on her knees, and snaps apart the chopsticks—all neat, practiced motions. Instead of eating, though, she leans against the arm of the bench and watches Ei, eyes dancing with something Ei still isn’t quite able to parse. “Ei, do you know what day it is?”
It had been that way for a long time—she’s come around, she thinks, and even the memory of immortals is impermanent. The Miko from her youth, like her memories of Makoto, are blurred. Fond reminiscences. She no longer needs to be able to read Miko like a book—Miko will tell her what she needs to know, and Ei will allow her her private amusements, even if they’re often at Ei’s expense.
“Ei, dear.”
She blinks. “Hm?”
“It’s a special day,” Miko says, a singsong quality to her lowered voice, and in her eyes, the falling cherry blossoms dance as they die. “On this day, five hundred years ago,” Miko tells Ei, “you left the Plane of Euthymia, and were returned to me.”