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When creating, the finish sneaks up unexpectedly. There is the long arc of preparation and its associated anxieties and excitements, before turning into the task of making, doing, problem-solving. The haul of determination and focus that is to make and make and make, but the end comes almost as an afterthought.
When Ei made the puppet, she did not know she had reached the end of creation until she had laid her hand over the chest and realized that it was breathing, the gnosis nascent beneath.
Ei stole her hand back, but pride refused to allow her to yank it like she’d touched a hot stove. Instead she hovered her palm over where the kimono crossed over the chest, pale white, (left over right, for the living, not the dead), and stared hard at the face that was so familiar because it was her own face, mirrored. It lent the same uncanny air of not quite being a reflection, and that valley of unease began to swallow her. Expression studiously impassive, she stepped back and folded her hands in front of her.
“Wake up,” she demanded, and the puppet’s eyes opened with a sigh. The spark of life slowly floated to the surface, bringing them to life beyond the gleam of the amethyst and enamel used to create them. Ei’s frozen heart wrenched, and its movement was as much a surprise as watching the figure before her bring up its hands to inspect them, front and back. It was fine as long as it held no expression, and Ei felt her body changing in response; heart racing to force blood to move all the chemicals that brought military readiness to her limbs, and her lungs increasing the delivery of oxygen to her brain. She was a creature of war, of battle, and she had calm (peace) and fury (war) and nothing else between. Grief barely had a space to live between the two.
Yet, perhaps it was indeed perfect; it pushed itself to sit up, long hair sliding over it’s shoulders like the waves against Inazuma’s shores to puddle in it’s lap. It looked up, eyes taking in the data of its surroundings, before latching on to her.
They studied each other.
And then it burst into tears.
Wracking sobs tore its way out of its chest. It grasped at the fabric over it’s chest as if trying to tear it away, the slightly hollow knock of its wooden fingers scrabbling against a wooden chest turned frantic staccato. Ei froze in place, unprepared for such emotion to well up and twist her sister’s face into a mockery of itself. This was not Makoto. This was not Ei. It was an awful mockery of her sister’s expression and demeanor; Makoto had never torn and screamed like this puppet did, didn’t curl up into itself with knees pulled up to the forehead and a scraping sound echoing as it tried to reach what hurt so much in order to tear it out.
It was awful.
“Stop that,” Ei demanded. The puppet’s breath hitched in its chest as her voice slapped through the air, and for a moment it seemed like it had worked. Ei, relieved, took two steps forward to the side of the bed where she’d built the construct. “You are fine. There is nothing wrong. Can you stand?”
The puppet’s breath hitched, then scraped again messily through its throat. It clutched the collar of its kimono and turned to look at her, and that was almost worse; its eyes held a grief and distress so open and wide it cut as deep as the Abyss. On another face, perhaps Ei would have been able to withstand it; but no, this was Makoto’s face because it was also her own face, and what animated its emotions and feelings were nothing that Makoto had ever held. It was a stranger in her body, a thief stealing her face, and it was wrong.
It was wrong.
Ei held herself against the instinct to recoil. The puppet heaved small gasps and cringed back from her, even as it tried to clumsily follow her demands. It swung its legs off the narrow bed to the ground, tottering as it found its center of gravity, but it still heaved and hiccuped as if it could not stop the spontaneous act of sadness. It rubbed at its face, the tears seeping and seeping between eyelid and eye, face and finger. The collar of its kimono was spotted with damp circles.
“You…” She could not find the depths of her determination in this moment; it wavered. That was unacceptable. She schooled her expression and reached for the emptiness that was carrying her through these awful days. “You are my creation. You have been made to act in my stead. Pull yourself together.”
A beat.
“You may speak,” she added, narrowly.
It just stared at her, a tremor running through its body. It’s breath hitched.
All it could do was cry.
---
It had been left alone to its wracking sobs inside of the lab. Ei sat on the edge of the sheer drop of a cliff that sat under the boughs of the newly-born thunder sakura tree, staring at the setting sun cut by the sea. All of Inazuma spread out below and away from her in all its mauled shapes and ruined forms; the broken, burnt out places that had once cradled villages and the mountains cracked by gods fighting demons from the beyond running into the blasted coastline. She could feel the reaching call of quiet, of eternity, of calm somewhere just beyond her. She closed her eyes. It tasted like the winter wind, with the same cold, crisp chill that heralded a time of rest.
Soon.
“Ei.” Yae’s voice wound into her thoughts with the same canny care as the fox winding between ankles, cackling when someone (Makoto) tripped. “Honestly, I expected better of you. You’re just leaving the poor thing to wring itself dry.”
Ei’s mouth twisted.
“It doesn’t stop,” she said. She turned her hand palm-up, cradling it as if holding the Gnosis between her fingers. “All it does is that sound, endlessly. It’s a failure.”
Yae’s silence was full of a thought she was clearly not sharing.
“Unless it eventually stops,” Ei pushed onward, ignoring Yae’s irritable ear-flick, “It will not be able to serve it’s purpose. I will have to try again.”
Yae sighed, and swept herself into a seat next to her. She conjured a tail to lay across her lap against the bite of the high-altitude wind.
“You are too quick to give up,” she said lightly. “Perhaps it merely takes time. This is the closest you’ve come to your goal of a replacement. The Gnosis is an artifact of great power and perhaps it is merely overwhelming it’s system.”
“I don’t have time,” Ei said, mouth twisting downwards.
“Ei,” said Yae, chidingly, but Ei ignored that too.
“If this cannot handle it, then I will make another one,” Ei said.
“What a child!” Yae exclaimed, her eyes bright with mischief, but it held an edge. “Discarding something immediately just because it is not doing what you expected.”
Ei felt irritation trying to break her carefully constructed emotional stalemate, and she instead stood up abruptly. Her hand rested on the spot where her sword should have been, where it waited, nascent inside of herself. Energy made the air crackle and the sky grew dark. Most would have scattered like the leaves being torn by a sudden wind. But only Yae could get away with being so cruel, and both of them knew it.
Yae grinned her sharp, fox-grin as she rose to her feet, tail disappearing in a cluster of sparks. She laid her hands over Ei’s white knuckles.
“Tantrum,” Yae warned her.
Ei jerked her hands away.
“No,” she said. The threat of a storm loomed over Inazuma. “I will revisit the design. Look at it, Yae. Look at it and we will see if it can be salvaged for the next one.”
Yae sighed and tucked her hands back into her sleeves.
“As my Shogun demands,” she said, and it was also cruel enough to make Ei nearly give in to the urge to flinch. It was not her title; it was not supposed to be her.
Ei turned away from Yae and back to the crooked branches of the miracle tree. She stood there finding calm in the drift of the petals from the branches, ever blooming and dying and blooming again. She shut her eyes and could see lines like lightning on the backs of them. When she opened them again and looked behind her, Yae was gone.
The sea swallowed the sun. Night rushed into its wake, making the softer shadows deep and the world clouded.
Ei rather thought that eternity should always stand in that twilight between rising and setting, coming and going. Her eternity would be forever twilight blue.
---
Yae laid out a proper outfit for the puppet by its bed. The thing did cry, endlessly; in hitches and starts and stops, and occasionally long jags. Water in a jug had been placed by its side, in some vague worry that in imitation of a mortal body it might dehydrate, but it had not touched it. Perhaps Ei had forgotten to teach it how to drink.
Yae sighed at the puppet as it stared at her without much comprehension, looking between her and the outfit while tears built in the corners of its eyes. It was not a mystery why Ei had been refusing to tend to her own creation; Makoto and Ei’s face twisted awfully when crying, but perhaps Ei didn’t realize that. It moved with clumsy hesitation, nothing like the persons it had been built to resemble, and Yae found herself impressed by the lengths to which Ei would seek to punish herself. She took the puppet by the arm and urged it to stand, and ignored the sobs to move its arms and legs so she could put clothing over the white under-kimono into which it had been born. It was familiar, achingly familiar, to tug the kimono layers tight over the barrel of its chest and tuck the edges of the obi around its middle. It was like dealing with a particularly compliant child.
“Yes, my lovely. Take a seat here.” Yae moved it around to her pleasure, here on the seat to brush back its long hair and gather it into a braid. A flash of mercurial displeasure at Ei’s everything lately had her plaiting it into a braid, the way Ei liked to wear her own hair. She didn’t think making the puppet a mirror would actually help much, but at least Ei would be forced to feel something.
The crying trailed off into something not unlike a held breath. Yae found herself studying it’s face in the mirror, the red rimmed eyes and the eerily pale complexion at odds with each other. Despite the tears, or maybe in addition to them, it was just as pretty as the originals. Yae leaned against the back of the chair and held it’s chin, turning it’s face from one side to the other.
She felt the slightest resistance to the second round of movement; Yae’s ears perked, and she grinned.
“Oh?” She moved the puppets face to look at her as she leaned over its shoulder, almost nose to nose. “What’s that? I see a little bit of life in you!”
The puppet’s eyes went wide with something akin to alarm. Its lungs expanded, voice scraped dry with crying making any other sound creak.
“Oh, dear thing.” Yae patted it’s cheek and let go, passingly disappointed. “A little fight would do you good. Don’t you look like the prettiest thing, though. Perhaps we’ll take it out of you, and give you a little break.”
She paused, tilting her head.
“Don’t you agree, Shogun?” she called brightly. The shadows peeled away from Ei as she stepped into the light thrown by the lamp, her expression impassive. At her appearance, the puppet put its hands over it’s mouth, as if trying to stifle the compulsive sounds. Yae was close enough to feel it tremble.
“Yes, that is the most logical next step,” Ei said. Her gaze seemed caught on the puppet’s face, trapped looking at it. Yae was certain Ei had no idea what she looked like; as if Ei was holding a breath that she could never release, just like the puppet when it was trying not to cry.
Her poor, poor Ei. Punishing herself over and over.
The puppet shuddered, crumbling. It was wearing one of Ei’s castoff kimono; it had Ei’s long tail of hair. Yae watched with some satisfaction the traces of alarm and discomfort in Ei as she watched a mirror of herself slip off the stool to crumble into heaving sobs.
Ei’s fingers twitched like they wanted to do something, but didn’t know what to do next if it wasn’t drawing a sword.
Yae refused to save her from herself, this time. She folded her hands inside her elbows and waited as the puppet’s cries filled the otherwise silent room, and Ei stood in a perfect line of agony.
Finally, it was enough.
Ei’s mouth twisted and her eyes held a flash of brilliant magenta. She cut the distance between herself and the puppet and knelt decisively, grabbing it by the elbows and pulling it up to stand. The puppet reeled, staring at her with an ingunue’s confusion and sincere alarm in a way Yae had never witnessed personally on either Ei or Makoto. It wore their face, but it was clearly something else entirely; even she was faintly unsettled at the disharmony.
Ei’s mouth twisted down and she gripped the puppet’s elbows tight enough her fingers dug into the kimono silk of the sleeve.
“Stop it,” she demanded. It cried harder.
“Stop this,” Ei demanded again, louder, and it shook its head back and forth. It scrabbled at its chest again, tearing apart the layers of kimono until the silk slipped off its shoulders in a disheveled mess. Until the lines of light carrying the Gnosis’s power were brilliant and clear, hinting at the hollow in its middle where the Gnosis rested and gave it life.
It stared at her, pleading without knowing what it was pleading about.
Ei stared at this facsimile of herself, of her sister, asking, hurting, and Yae watched all of her determination crumble.
Ei’s expression shuttered closed.
“I see,” she said. Her grip shifted to grab the puppet by the nape, using her knowledge of tearing bodies apart to pinpoint where to keep it most still. It froze in place, mid-hitched breath, like a kitten swept up by its mother. It went limp in Ei’s hands as she traced the edges of the panel hiding that middle hollow, made as cleverly as a trick-box by a master carpenter in the Tennryou. Her fingers slid along hidden crevices that she had carved and grown herself, in an intimacy that could only be held between creator and creation, before she spread her thumb and pinky finger wide on either side of where the heart should have been. She pressed lightly and a click sound broke through the tears.
The panel slipped in and up with the firm twist of Ei’s hand. Purple light threw itself across Ei and the puppet’s faces. Burning brightly, the Gnosis seemed itself to be unstable; it flickered and jolted, like lightning dancing along the edge of Makoto’s sword. Ei stared at it, all of her forward momentum arrested.
The puppet’s hands came up and closed around Ei’s wrist. The slide of wooden fingers were smooth as it covered the back of Ei’s hand.
Ei drew in a sharp breath. She yanked the Gnosis out of her creation, and the entire puppet dropped. Yae did not move to help; Ei reflexively caught it around the waist to arrest it’s fall, the Gnosis tightly gripped in the other hand. The rapid flicker coming from the artifact had died immediately upon removal, and now returned to a steady glow. The blessing of Celestia seemed pleased to be in the hands of its Archon, at last. How unfair.
For a moment it seemed like the puppet had lost all movement entirely; it hung over Ei’s arm as a dead weight. Ei exhaled and slipped the Gnosis into her sleeve, needing both hands to maneuver the body as a dead weight. Yae could see the moment Ei’s memory caught up with what she was doing. Ei took the facsimile into her arms to swing it back into the bed, but it was an unmoving body wearing both her and her sister’s face, and she froze.
It was at that moment that the puppet stirred.
Yae felt her eyes grow wide with intrigue and the moment pulled her out of the corner, where she’d been watching ignored, and to Ei’s side. The puppet still moved and breathed. Life, at least enough to make it easier to carry, filled it again like the slow tipping of water back into a glass. At first the fingers, then the toes, then the spine taking up the task of adjusting its body to gravity again. Its head lolled, long tail of hair sweeping the ground with a flick. Yae leaned over Ei’s shoulder to inspect the flutter of its perfectly set eyelashes.
“I thought it would stop moving,” Yae said, delighted. “This is better than the others.”
Ei shoved her out of the way with her elbow and stiffly walked to the bed, placing the puppet on top of the covers. After a beat of staring down at it, she leaned over and carefully, intentionally, closed the chest cover and tugged the layers of kimono back into place. The puppet, now gone complacent and silent, simply watched Ei through a fringe of dark purple lashes. Ei rested her hand over the puppet’s chest, studying the way the light cut out the shapes of her war-toughened knuckles and fingers.
Then she exhaled, eyes shuttered for just a moment, before she took up the long tail of braided hair in her hands and began undoing it again. The hair spilled through her fingers like water. Yae felt a small warm stab of pleasure; it had, indeed, been bothering Ei all along.
“It is still a being,” Ei said simply. “That means I’ve gotten the technique perfected. The Gnosis is powerful, as you said.”
Yae’s eyes glimmered with the unspoken, ‘Of course I was right,’ that Ei summarily ignored.
Moving on, Ei continued, “It takes impressive beings to hold, let alone use, the Gnosis. It must have overwhelmed the system. We can try again.”
Yae glanced at the puppet’s face, but it still remained silent. It was not even breathing this time. The only sign of life or thought was in the eyes and the subtle way they moved back and forth to watch Ei at work. Emotions seemed to have left it with the Gnosis’s removal. Fascinating.
Ei sat back as she left the puppet’s hair undone. She sat there at the puppet’s hip, hands folded into her own lap, with an appearance of serenity that would have fooled anyone else. Yae could see the tension held in Ei’s shoulders and the ramrod straight line of her back. Moving with care, Yae picked her way to sit down next to the puppets head. She used the edge of her nails to brush the bangs out of the puppet’s eyes. It watched her do it and didn’t even flinch as she touched its eyelashes on the way.
“You are quite the accomplishment, aren’t you,” Yae told it. “You have been made in our glorious Shogun’s image. Her perfect reflection. You should be very proud about it.”
Yae waited to see what would happen. The puppet just blinked at her.
Yae leaned over it and caressed its cheek, lowering her voice, and let her fingers slip down over where a pulse should have beat in its throat.
“You are made very well,” Yae purred. “Do you understand? Do you have any questions?”
“Stop teasing it,” scolded Ei, just short of grabbing her hand away. Yae sighed and pulled back as the puppet continued to do absolutely nothing interesting.
“You are no fun,” Yae complained. She rose to her feet and shook out her hair, combing her fingers through the soft pink locks around her ears, and stretched her hands to the ceiling until her back arched. She eyed Ei to see if she was watching, but Ei was studying the quiet of the puppet with a focus that she doubted anything short of rift wolf appearing in the air could have broken. In the soft light thrown by the lamp, both the puppet and Ei had the same intense quiet about them, with the only life marked by the brightness of their eyes.
All of a sudden, Yae didn’t want to be there anymore.
She waved at Ei, turning away from them both. “Fine. I’ll be the one making sure that they don’t panic without their Shogun showing up for three days. Later.”
Yae left.
---
Without the Gnosis, the puppet still moved. It didn’t speak, but it tracked Ei’s movements through the room with an unnerving absence of curiosity. Ei had undressed it for the evening, but as they were both not mortal beings, she wasn’t sure why she did it. She envied it’s silence and stillness. Effortlessly, it achieved a piece of that eternity that Makoto had so cherished; it was like a pebble in a stream, with all the water running around it rather than shifting it’s place. It encouraged her to her purpose. Maybe this one would be it. Maybe she could finally solve the problem of erosion, of time, of the slow and inevitable decay of her mortal form.
It did not care when Ei put it through its paces, testing its limbs and measuring its motion. It learned to stand and walk and follow directions. It understood Ei’s speech perfectly, but did not show any outward comprehension of more complex ideas or questions. It sat when asked, and laid down when directed, and Ei wasn’t sure what it did when she left the room, because on her return it almost always remained in the same place she had left it. The downside to this stillness was the lack of warning when she came across it again after leaving to attend to the needs of a country brought to its knees and only barely beginning to stand up again.
Sometimes she almost could think she’d been wrong, that Makoto was still here, that she was there sitting in the window looking out serenely at her country in her soft white under-kimono in a rare moment of peace and quiet. Ei had spent so much of her life watching Makoto that she fell back into those old habits when she caught the puppet at rest. She stood in the doorway, on this side of the line between shadow and sunlight, and just looked at the way the light caressed the curve of it’s cheek and shoulder and hair. She imagined that she could call Makoto’s name and the puppet would turn towards her.
She never did. She did not know what she would do if it responded to her sister’s name.
Days passed. Weeks passed. The puppet showed no signs of decay, collapse, or ruin from the brief stint with the Gnosis in place. All of Ei’s engineering held astonishingly well for something that might as well have been an empty doll. Yae appeared occasionally to poke and prod at either the puppet or Ei herself, but seemed to have lost her patience with Ei’s latest experiment. That didn’t stop Yae from coming into the labs and playing with it, talking to it as if it responded at all to conversation, putting it in clothes and trying to evoke some kind of reaction from its placid nature. Sometimes Ei walked into the labs and could hear Yae’s voice drifting back to her through the open door and she’d find them that way.
Ei chased Yae off when things seemed to go too far, nurturing some strange kind of protectiveness over the puppet’s well-being and boundaries that Yae seemed intent on testing. At the end of the day, when she had dismissed the attendants and government officials and all the rest out of her sight, Ei would come to the labs. She would find the puppet and simply sit with it, and she found herself speaking to it softly in the twilight of not quite the day, not quite the night. She would tell it about the shaking foundation of a country under threat and the ridiculous demands of the foolish and ambitious. She would tell it about the difficulty of finding competent people to shepard the country in her stead, and sometimes she would whisper about all the things she could not do.
“I don’t know how to weave them into a whole,” she told it. “That has never been my job. I am the solution that comes in the night, that strikes in the morning. I am a simple answer to complex questions. I need someone to stand in my stead so I can protect the country in the way I best know how. I need you to be me, so I can be the shadow, where I belong.”
The doll never spoke or responded in any particular way, but it turned its head to her and in the twilight, its eyes were luminous. It seemed to stare straight down and into her, with a blankness unbecoming of something wearing a face that could be her sister’s face, with an emptiness that Makoto had never worn. That was Ei’s job. Makoto had made fun of her, saying that she didn’t understand how anyone could call Ei cold, because she showed all her feelings in her face. The only person who agreed was Yae, who barely counted anyway. No, this was what Ei wanted; a stare that could not be moved, a mind that sat in complete stillness.
Ei reached out and tucked an errant hair behind the puppet’s ear. It did not move away, but neither did it move closer.
“Do not be fooled by my weakness,” Ei told it quietly. “I will stand strong for as long as it takes. I will stand in battle with forever. I will find eternity and hold it for you.”
The puppet’s hand moved. In mirror of her, it reached up and moved a strand of hair behind Ei’s ear. Ei stopped breathing, her eyes going wide. The puppet’s hand dropped back into its lap, not so subtly mirroring her posture. Ei’s heart beat thudded in her ears.
Ei got up abruptly and left. She felt the puppet’s eyes follow her all the way back out of the room. She didn’t stop until she had gotten all the way to the entryway, her breath fast like she’d been running. Yae was just coming inside, and threw her a measuring look with her eyebrows arched high and gaze glittering. Ei pulled up short, feeling oddly guilty, as if she’d been caught at something she shouldn’t be doing.
“You seem full of energy,” Yae commented, and Ei felt laid bare before Yae’s knowing gaze. She wasn’t sure why she felt like she had something to hide. Yae toed off her shoes and wiggled into slippers, taking her time.
Ei turned away from Yae, feeling for the headache starting to pound behind her temples with her fingertips.
“It doesn’t speak,” she said, latching on to a flaw before she could be undone. “I don’t know if it can function in that way. I need to put in more precise logic pathways for it to follow, but that would require tearing it apart again.”
“That’s the problem with making something that you can’t change on a whim,” Yae said, but the close way she was studying Ei made it clear she wouldn’t let this go. “Are you certain? It seems stable. Perhaps it needs the Gnosis to unlock higher functions. It seems otherwise a perfect copy.”
Ei couldn’t look Yae in the eye. She focused instead on the vase sitting on the entryway table, itself three hundred years old, that held a single sakura branch in eternal bloom that Makoto had been gifted by a craftsmen’s guild seeking her favor. It had been some ridiculous little wrinkle of policy that Ei had no patience to follow. All she remembered was being irritated at the way they’d thought Makoto could be so easily swayed, at how short-sided and simple they believed her ability to plan, and how Makoto had touched her elbow and chided her against looking so much like she wanted to eat the man alive.
Memories disrupted her mental calm and Ei wrenched her thoughts away. No. No, she would not travel there, she had other things to do.
“Ei.” Yae stood at her elbow, unusually passive. Ei turned with the touch on her elbow and was forced to meet Yae’s gaze. They looked at each other for a long moment, and Yae’s ears smoothed back. Her expression schooled into exasperation as she reached up and plucked the hair pin out from behind Ei’s ear, tucking the hair back more neatly before replacing it, leaving Ei in a morass of confusion.
“Show me your puppet,” Yae told her.
Feeling oddly cowed, Ei just nodded and lead Yae back into the labs. The puppet wasn’t precisely as she’d left it, but it still sat at the window watching the movement of the wind making the trees outside bend. It’s hair was an unbound ink spill down it’s back. It’s eyes tracked the shift of the trees and the flip of the leaves, and especially the darting flutter of sparrows. Yae crossed her arms and tilted her head, watching it ignore the two of them in the doorway.
“You have to try again,” Yae said.
Ei pressed her mouth into a thin line. “I know.”
“Why haven’t you?” Yae said, the question too light for how it made Ei squirm. She opened her mouth and found it empty; she didn’t know. She didn’t know how to answer Yae. Instead, she let silence fill the air as she watched the way the puppet sat in a casual spill of limbs that Ei, herself, could never achieve. Ei needed order. Ei needed boundaries. Ei sat with elegance and precision and in a way so she could leap to her feet at the barest hint of danger. She didn’t even know if the puppet could fight or coordinate itself well enough to hold a weapon, let alone wield the sword that would house Ei’s mind.
That part she hadn’t shared with Yae quite yet.
The puppet wasn’t perfect. It didn’t talk. It looked like Ei, but it moved with a strangeness that did not echo her. It had no determination. It didn’t do anything. It just existed in perfect stillness.
Unless it could hold the Gnosis, realistically, Ei had no need for it. The others had been destroyed by attempting to place the Gnosis inside them, burned right up by power they could not contain. This had just been the first to survive.
Yae waited. Yae’s fox eyes caught the glow of the lamp and turned yellow with it as she watched Ei work her way through permutations of tangled logic until she could no longer escape herself.
“Tomorrow,” said Ei. “Tomorrow.”
---
Tomorrow turned into a week rather easily. Ei kept finding excuses to avoid the matter, which was easily enough done between pretending to be her sister and trying to maintain glacial levels of calm at the same time. Yae would appear and ask, and Ei would demure with one reason or another. Her own lack of determination frustrated her, and in the end morphed into anger.
“You’ve said tomorrow seven times,” said Yae, perched on the table that held a scattering of notes Ei had been keeping about the replacement’s design. Yae idly picked up one of them, flipping to a middle page. Her ears flicked this way and that, tracking the scuttle of mice or the subtle scrape of the puppet’s joints in the other room. Ei had felt driven to close the door and afford it privacy. Or was it more about Ei feeling like she wasn’t being overheard? Either way, she found her patience run thin, especially since Yae was right.
“I’ve had my reasons,” Ei said sharply, feeling the flare of temper that had no place in her goals or eternity itself. Her eyes flashed with magenta light and the air shifted, an ozone smell lifting off her hair and shoulders. “I am happy to give it’s care to something else. I have no desire to keep it. But if it tears through it, then I am back to starting again.”
“All the others burned,” Yae said heartlessly. “You started again without much care for the consequences. You seek perfection, at least commit to the path you are on. Are you going to stop just short of your goals?”
“No, I am not,” Ei said with finely ground calm. “You know that. This is for Inazuma. I will not be subject to the whims of time when the country needs the steady hand of the assured. I will continue what was started.”
Yae knew she had avoided saying her sister’s name. What Makoto had started. What Makoto had wanted. Ei could tell from the way Yae smiled a shark’s smile tasting blood in the water.
“Then try the Gnosis,” said Yae.
It was a mean ploy to imply that she’d be betraying her sister if she failed now. Ei stood there shaking with the fury of it, her hands curled into fists and lightning dancing through her veins and muscles and nerves. Her hair lifted with the rise of ambient static and the end of her braid lighted and twitched back and forth like the tail of cat. Yae caught her eye, and still smiling, glanced behind Ei’s shoulder.
“Oh darling, look at you! Moving on your own,” Yae cooed. Ei staggered with the sudden drop in her stomach. All the fight emptied out of her as she slowly turned.
The puppet stood in the doorway. It was dressed in the thin, fine cotton of the white under-kimono still and its feet were bare. It was watching them with its hands held loosely at it’s sides and an utterly blank look on its borrowed face. The only exception were those eyes, those not quite empty eyes, that pinned Ei to the spot.
Yae turned her mercilessness back on Ei.
“You’ve drawn it with your temper,” said Yae. “I think it might like a try. Won’t you, dear? Do you want to see if it will work this time?”
Ei took a calming breath. She reached for that icy place inside and under her ribs, the one that rested just to the left of her breastbone and forehead. She pulled it over herself, a blanket of eternal snows that turned her temper to frost and her thoughts clear as ice. She pushed past Yae with a firm hand and crossed the room to the puppet that merely shifted it’s attention from Yae to her approaching silhouette. Ei took charge of one of the puppet’s shoulders.
“Come,” she said, and it required little effort to make it walk with her to a chair.
“Sit,” she said, and the effigy of herself sat with a soft rustle no louder than wind disturbing brush. A hiss followed the fall of its hair as it sat on it, and Yae made a small sound and swept down on the puppet to arrange it more comfortably. Ei ignored her as she conjured the Gnosis into her hand, the artifact holding its own gravity as it floated above her palm. It drew the gaze of the puppet, as if it could know what it was and what it could do. Maybe it remembered the last time. Ei thought she saw something approaching a nervous twitch in the twist of its mouth, but that might have just been her own projection onto something so close to her own face. A trick of the light or Yae pushing it around.
Yae stepped back, arms crossed. For all her talk, Yae fell silent as Ei approached the puppet one more time with the Gnosis in hand. As she knelt back down in front of the puppet, they were eye to eye, and Ei could not dismiss this time the feeling that she stared into her own mirror. A reflection far more perfect than Ei could ever achieve on her own in this body. At least, not yet.
“Hold this open,” she told it, and she moved it’s hand to peel back the layers of kimono to bear it’s chest to her. She tried to put out of mind the avid way its gaze seemed to follow the path of her fingers, and the way she imagined an abbreviated flinch when she opened the chest panel.
Even Yae had nothing pithy to say as Ei braced herself.
Ei held the gnosis to the puppet’s chest, to the hole where there should have been sternum, muscle, rib, heart. The Gnosis turned over in her fingers, a compass trying to find north when disturbed by rough seas. She found herself holding her breath as she flicked her fingers, sending it into the cavity designed to contain the power of the gods.
The puppet shut its eyes, and its hand was around Ei’s wrist. Ei wasn’t sure when that had happened. Its fingers gripped the bones of her wrist through the glove on her right hand, pressing with a dull warmth appropriate for wood. Ei should know. She was the same temperature.
Light cut through the tracery on the puppet’s chest and arms. Brilliant violet glowed with a sputtering, cutting brightness. Ei brushed the pads of her fingers against the puppet’s collarbone, the dip above the sternum. She watched as its eyes flew wide and a gasp dragged past its teeth and into its lungs. Ei trembled and wasn’t sure what it was she hoped for when the puppet’s eyes suddenly snapped to meet her’s, filled with life and scrabbling surprise and desperation. With life. With a personality, an existence, a hurt that filled it up unendingly.
Someone else twisted Ei’s face, Makoto’s face, into someone Ei did not know and the puppet collapsed into heaving sobs. Shocked, Ei could only sit there, staring as it bent over her hands and sobbed into her shoulder. Hot tears soaked through to her skin. The puppets' hands squeezed her hands with enough latent strength to actually harm her. Ei did not know what to do.
“Take it out, Ei,” said Yae softly. Ei heard her from close by. Yae’s hand pressed against the skin between her exposed shoulder blades, soft and warm. “Let it be. Let it be.”
Ei pushed her fingers into the flickering cavity of the puppet’s chest, and scooped the Gnosis back out of its heart.
The crying stopped like someone had stolen it. The resulting silence made Ei’s ears ring. The puppet remained curled over her, braced against her shoulder, without collapsing like it had the first time. Its hands still held her hands. Ei knew the shape of those hands, or thought she did. She’d made them based on her own, after all, but her hands and Makoto’s hands had been mirrors of their skills. They had the same length to the middle finger, and the same knobby joint at the thumb, but Makoto’s hands were soft when Ei held them.
The puppet’s hands were smooth, like Makoto.
Ei forced her heart to stop racing. She wound her will around herself and told herself to stop, and with the Gnosis in her hand, she felt more than just herself pause. For a moment, even time was suspended for her. For a moment, Ei stopped feeling anything at all.
Ei carefully pushed the puppet’s head off her shoulder and stood up, disconnected her hands from it. It moved with the familiar, slow and even way it had been moving all this time. It didn’t seem to care, or mind, that Ei just left it sitting there in favor of crossing the room to her notes. She took up a pen.
“Ei,” said Yae. Ei ignored her.
“Ei,” said Yae again, this time the word snapping in the air. Ei added notations about power thresholds, about conduits, and about ensuring that there was a self-generating source of energy to power a pre-programmed sentient landscape.
Yae’s irritation expanded and expanded but it would eventually collapse. Ei knew this. Yae knew this. Yae sighed and muttered under her breath, and Ei listened to her fuss over the puppet.
“You poor thing,” said Yae. “All that power and all you can do is feel it straight through, don’t you? A heart that’s not even your very own.”
“Leave it,” said Ei, underlining the words ‘avoid emotions overriding rationality.’ “I need to start on the next one.”
Yae’s silence felt like shock. Ei looked up to find Yae staring at her, one ear flicking errantly, from where she had crouched next to the puppet. The puppet wasn’t tracking motion anymore. It’s attention was on it’s gently folded hands.
“Honestly, Ei,” said Yae. “What are you going to do with this one?”
Ei studied the puppet. Her calm was implacable and immense. The demands of her purpose was bigger than herself. She could look at the puppet wearing a face of herself, of her sister, and at least like this it didn’t haunt her in the same way as it did with the Gnosis inside.
“Give it time,” said Ei quietly. “I’ll put it somewhere quiet while I work on the next one. We’ve almost achieved what I need from the technique, and I might need to refer back to it.”
Yae’s mouth twisted. “Ei, you can’t just-” she started, but Ei stopped her with a shake of her head.
“Its kinder than forcing it to live with the Gnosis,” said Ei. “I cannot allow it to be the vessel. It will not survive, and I need something that will withstand even myself.”
Yae rose to her feet, expression cocky and closed. Her nails dug into the shoulder of the puppet where she had put her hand on it. It didn’t seem to notice that particularly, but it did look at Ei in imitation of Yae’s focus.
Ei couldn’t withstand the weight of its gaze. She focused on Yae instead.
“Well, if you’re going to be so determined, there’s nothing I can do to stop you,” said Yae, and Ei didn’t entirely understand why Yae was being quite so upset over all of this. “At least treat it appropriately and follow through.”
“I intend to,” Ei said in the most even tone she could conjure. “It may not be what I need, but it is a being of Inazuma none-the-less.”
Yae shook her head and tugged the puppet up to it’s feet.
“Come, darling,” she told it, voice dripping with sweetness. “Lets leave the Shogun to think about her choices and put you back together again.”
Ei watched Yae lead the puppet back into what both of them now considered ‘its room’, even when Yae shut the door a little too hard. A beat, another, and Ei heard something snap. She blinked and looked down at her right hand, dripping ink, the fountain pen cracked down the middle between her fingers.
Ei pressed her lips together and moved to clean up the mess.
---
Ei didn’t know what moved her to lead the puppet to the wide veranda of the domain, the one that looked out on maple trees caught in eternal, flame-bright autumn dressing. When she had claimed this domain, it had been partially an experiment; after all, with her plans, she needed to know how to craft a place outside of places. Now, it served as her secret and her lab, as her alchemist’s study and the whetstone where she honed her will and purpose.
The puppet moved with soft dullness. Ei found herself thankful for the complacency; the silence and calm of the puppet helped her also find silence and calm. She pushed them down to sit with one hand, which they did in an untidy sprawl.
“Fix your legs,” Ei said, and the puppet obligingly tucked it’s legs into a sideways sit and straightened its back. It settled its hands in its lap. Ei sank down into a seiza next to it, her heels under her and her toes angled for take off. Even sitting, her body knew only patterns best suited to a bodyguard.
She sat side by side with the puppet for a long time. Her body experienced no pains or aches through training and effort. The puppet did not express distress that it couldn’t have. They watched the leaves rustle and shift under the touch of the wind. Ei closed her eyes and searched for anything that resembled sitting side by side with her sister. Maybe someone else could have pretended that Makoto sat there, but Ei could not. Makoto could be still, but the air around her was always full of delight. Even her breaths came in an even pattern created by her pleasure at the world around her. At any moment, Makoto might reach over to touch Ei’s knee and tell her to look at that sparrow, its such a bully! Isn’t it being a bully, Ei? Chasing off anyone who comes close?
The puppet sat in a passive silence. It did not even think to breathe.
Ei opened her eyes. She rose to her feet.
“Come,” she said, and it followed her. It followed her wherever she went, a shadow for a shadow. Yae did not approve, Ei knew that; there was a silence in the air between them now. But as Ei moved on to the next attempt, gathering materials and carefully thinking through the design, the puppet seemed content enough. It sat in the room and watched her, hands folded in its lap, eyes responding mostly to movement. A ghost for a ghost. A shadow for a shadow. Ei did not stop it and Yae seemed to have given up on intervening.
But one morning, it turned out that the puppet had needed the Gnosis after all.
Ei came into the domain and opened the door to the puppet’s room. It lay on the bed like the dead, like every other time that Ei had found them, laying on it’s back with its hands folded over it’s chest. As if Ei found Makoto dead every time she entered the domain and it reminded her why she needed to accomplish this wild goal and set her thoughts more firmly ahead.
“Sit up,” Ei told the air.
The puppet did not move.
“Sit up,” Ei said again, fingers digging into the lintel of the door where she touched it. The veneer threatened to crack.
The puppet did not move.
“I said, sit up,” said Ei again, but nothing would make something move that could not move. Ei cut through the room, swept down over the puppet, and cupped it’s face in her hands. She stared intently at it’s mouth and eyelids, searching for signs of life insomuch as the puppet could be alive. It had not particularly learned how in the last two months. It was only through her intense familiarity with her own face that she saw the puppet’s eyes moving underneath closed lids.
It was asleep.
The puppet was asleep.
Ei sank to the floor. She put her hands over her face and breathed through her palms.
Ei half-expected Yae to pop in, but the horrendous silence was Ei’s alone to bear. She reminded herself of Makoto, of how Ei imagined she had looked when she died. Makoto, alone, in the way she never should have been alone. Alone, when Ei should have been there. When Ei should have been the sword, when Ei should have done the fighting, when Ei should have been the one cut down.
Makoto, turning to her. Makoto, saying with a smile, “I want Inazuma to feel eternity. I want this land to last forever. I want my people to always have a home.”
Ei wrapped up the panic, and the loss, and shoved it back where it belonged in the deep cold calm that she required to walk this path. She stilled her breathing. She calmed her limbs. She pushed back up to her feet, expression impassive, and forced herself to look at the puppet’s face. To look at her own face.
Serenity filled the space between its brows and in the neutral line of its mouth. Calm hid in the elegant turn of its wrists over its chest. It did not suffer and it did not want. It existed in a simple place that was only between, like twilight between day and night. Perhaps that was better. It was better.
Ei gently combed the puppets' hair out from under its shoulders and over its shoulder. She smoothed the lay of the kimono over it’s legs. She took the blanket and pilled it up to its chest, tucking in the edges with military precision. She pulled the door shut gently behind her when she left.
Yae found her bent over a fine white piece of wood on the table. Ei ran her fingers along the soft bark, searching for cracks formed by the whip crack of rebounding ley line energy. It seemed perfectly intact.
“Where is the little shadow?” Yae asked.
“Asleep,” Ei replied.
“Asleep? Well, I’ll wake it up then,” Yae said, heading for the door with a dangerous look to her eye. Ei listened to the door open. Ei listened to Yae’s footsteps draw close to the bed. Ei listened to Yae stand there for a good long while, and to the soft shush sound of fabric being touched and moved.
Yae reappeared, slinking around the room to Ei’s side. Ei’s hands rested on the branch of pale, ley-line tree wood, but she no longer paid any attention to it.
“I see you’ve moved on,” Yae commented carefully.
“No.” The power latent in the branch vibrated against Ei’s fingertips. “I do not think it will wake again. It cannot handle the gnosis. I will let it sleep. Perhaps it is the most fortunate of us all.”
“You’re going to let it just stay that way,” Yae said. “That is cruel. It will have neither a beginning nor an end.”
“Isn’t that Eternity?” Ei replied quietly. “Isn’t that what Inazuma needs? Stability? It has shown me the way.”
Yae’s ears set back on her head. Her arms crossed over her chest. Yae’s foot jerked, as if tempted to kick Ei’s shin.
“Your stubbornness is going to be the end of me,” Yae said. “You insist on dragging everyone with you. You’re the only one who has decided this.”
“I am the only one who can,” said Ei. “I cannot rely on this body. I cannot stand in the face of time. Eternity is impossible for someone who decays.”
An old argument lay in the frustrated silence between them. Yae drew herself up tall and straight, teeth snapped shut, ears flattened. Eventually the drawing tension released, and Yae slipped away from Ei’s side and cast Ei an amused look on the way. Every time Yae had to choose between Ei and something else, she always fell on the side of Ei. One way or another. Even if it wasn’t in a way Ei herself could understand.
“You are such a stubborn fool,” Yae said, eyes alight with a purple glow. Her Vision swung perilously from the twitch of her ear. “You haven’t even learned the lesson from this one. I am curious to see if you can see this through.”
Ei knew full well that Yae disapproved of this entire endeavor. She’d made it clear over and over again. It twisted at the fox spirit in ways Ei could not follow or understand.
“I will.” Ei gathered herself and reached for the branch. “I will find Eternity, one way or another.”
---
The evening before - before, Ei visited the puppet one last time. It slept in a clean room that had been put carefully together as if waiting for its occupant to simply wake up and need to wash its face, or comb its hair, or dress itself. The puppet’s bed lay under the light of a window that looked out on the maple trees. Ei had visited multiple times between the beginning of its rest and now, sometimes simply passing time, and other times unable to enter. She often avoided it for weeks, months at a time before finding herself sitting by its side. Once the Shogun had shown promise, it had become more and more infrequent, but she still had a few final tasks before she stepped into Eternity.
Ei entered the room. She knelt by the puppet and rearranged an errant strand of hair, dark like her’s, purple like her’s, and fading to a soft lavender at the end. She opened her palm and studied the mark of the Shogunate resting in her palm. The feather formed out of pressed gold was, by itself, an expensive piece; the meaning, even more dear. She tucked it into the fold of the puppet’s kimono collar. If it ever woke up, everyone would know it lay under her protection. In Eternity, it would be aided - perhaps even brought directly before her. It would know no want. I would know no strife that she could not push aside. Surely she would know. Surely, she would see it coming, and could ask what it thought of Eternity now that Inazuma was safe.
Ei rested her hand over its empty chest, then rose to her feet. She put her back to it and left the sleeping visage of herself behind.
--
Yae remembers this:
After the first attempt to put the gnosis in the puppet, Yae sat with the puppet and combed its hair. If she didn’t it would turn into a giant mess. It was Ei’s hair, after all, and Ei’s hair needed constant tending or else it coiled on itself.
“I wonder if Ei will figure out why you cry when you have a heart,” Yae mused to the mirror, studying the blank edges of the puppet’s face. “Of course you cry. Ei is filled with grief, and you are a perfect imitation of her. Who wouldn’t cry?”
The puppet’s hands shifted in its lap, exchanging top for bottom. Yae’s mouth split into an unkind grin.
“You cry for her. You cry all the tears she denies herself. How unfair. How terribly unfair for you to carry her grief, when you haven’t even lived enough to have any of your own.”
The puppet would not remember any of this, later.
But an Eternity later, when the puppet stands before Yae, she remembers. She grins at the fury in his face, at his shorn hair, at his false vision. At his hubris and pride and snide language. And she thinks, ah, maybe there has been enough grief after all. Ah, maybe this will work out much better than she had imagined.
“The Gnosis?” Yae says, holding it dancing and turning over the tips of her fingers. “Of course you can have it. A fair trade, don’t you think?”
After all, it had been his the whole time.