Simple wooden steps led into the building; there was nowhere else to go on this tiny island surrounded by ink.
I stepped forward, and saw the first victim.
He lay at my feet, nearly buried in the grasses that sprung up around him. He wore armor, like some kind of samurai, but his eyes were empty, staring at a future that wasn’t there, his breastplate splashed with ink.
I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound escaped my lips. A dream, I thought. Another Kami nightmare.
I looked around the steps of the castle as I moved forward. Dozens of men lay slumped in horrible, lifeless heaps, ink soaking each of them as they lay beside their shattered weapons and snapped bowstrings. My feet moved toward the building against my own will. I didn’t want to see what was inside. I didn’t want to know what was responsible for this.
The stairs creaked as I went up them. Inside, the room was musty and dark, the only light shining from the windows near the raised platform at the end of the room, where great white curtains billowed out with a wind I couldn’t feel. The bamboo tatami mats were cold and hard against my bare feet as I stepped forward. There were fallen soldiers here, too; what horrible battle had taken place?
Wait, that one’s alive. I looked and saw him crouched in the corner, a dark shape hunched over his bended knee, a sword on the tatami beside him.
His silver earring glinted as he tilted his head forward, his blond highlights slipping from behind his ears.
“Jun,” I said, and he looked up at me. He lifted the sword; it almost looked as though it was made of stone. It was a deep black, like the inside of a cave, and the blade of it dripped with a darkness that must be ink. Or blood.
“It’s over now,” said a woman’s voice.
I turned to the raised platform in front of me, where the voice had come from. A woman knelt on the floor, the folds of her crimson kimono stretching in a pool of red around her. The sleeves of the kimono layered in a dozen different colors, all variations of black, red, gold and silver. An elaborate golden headdress rested on her head, the strings of golden beads tinkling against one another as she tilted her chin to the side.
“Okami Amaterasu,” I said, stepping over a long smear of ink on the tatami. I glanced at the fallen soldiers in the throne room as I walked toward her. “Who did this?”
“You did,” she said, and the world went cold with fear.
I shook my head. “I could never do something like this. And I only just got here.”
“There is only death,” she said. “There is no escape.”
Tomo had said those words so many times. He heard them in his nightmares, too.
“No escape from what?” I said. “Fate as a Kami?”
Amaterasu smiled sadly. “No escape from the past.” She twisted her knees to the side, the fabric of her red kimono swishing as she moved away slowly, and I saw one more body beside her.
“Tomo,” I whispered. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to wake up. I pinched my arm, hard, to remind myself this wasn’t real. It’s just a dream. But there was no comfort from seeing him there, lifeless, drenched in ink.
“Tsukiyomi,” she answered, and I saw then that his hair wasn’t copper, but black. I’d thought it was ink staining his hair, but he looked different—older, more worn and...less human than he’d ever looked, an almost angelic beauty that left me feeling terrified. He looked like a trickster fairy, the kind that was too beautiful to trust.
He was, and wasn’t, Tomo. I couldn’t explain it, except that dreams are strange and never quite right.
“I don’t understand,” I said. Was this all meaningless nightmare stuff? Why was I seeing this?
“I loved Tsukiyomi,” Amaterasu said. “And so I killed him.”
Ikeda had mentioned the story to me before, that Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi had once been lovers, before Tsukiyomi lost his mind.
“I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made.”
“The August Ones?”
“And now he’s dead. But he lives in the shards of his soul that carry on.” She motioned at the ground, and I saw shattered pieces of glass in every color.
“Like Tomo,” I said.
“Taira no Kiyomori, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yuu Tomohiro, all of them magatama of one soul,” she said.
I tilted my head. “Magatama?”
She motioned again to the broken glass. “Susanou shattered it,” she said. “Only the sword remains.” I looked to Jun and the stained sword at his side.
“Listen to me, child,” Amaterasu said to me. “Green means an eternal circle. You will betray Yuu Tomohiro, just as I have betrayed Tsukiyomi.”
The heat rose up in my cheeks. “I would never hurt him.”
She leaned back, the golden beads jingling on her headdress.
“You will kill him, before the end.”
My mind reeled. I wanted to retch. Kill him? Me?
I fell to my knees. “No,” I said. “This is just a stupid dream. I don’t have to do what you tell me. We make our own fates.”
“There is only one fate,” she said.
I looked down, my clothes soaked in ink.
I woke to my own screaming, to the sound of Diane thumping across the floor to hold me tightly in her arms.
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Tomo said, his eyes wide and filled with concern. We were hiding inside one of the Yayoi huts at Toro Iseki. His dad was asleep at home, after stumbling in from overtime work sometime in the middle of the night. Considering the whole separating-us-for-a-month business, this had seemed the best place to meet without anyone knowing.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said. “Anyway, I was pretty sure these were just typical nightmares. I mean, they don’t mean anything, right?”
Tomo pulled me toward him, wrapping me in the warmth and smell of him as we held each other. “They don’t,” he said gently, his voice against my ear. “I’ve been fighting them my whole life. Don’t listen to what they tell you. I never have.” But that was only half-true. He fought against it, sure, but he believed it, didn’t he? He believed he was a monster, that he only had a short time left, that in the end, there was only death.
I hadn’t told him everything about the dreams. It sounded stupid, but I was scared that if I said it out loud, that Tomo had died, that it would come true. I didn’t want to tell him Amaterasu had said I was the one who would betray him. Maybe she’d only meant the stupid mistake I’d made kissing Jun? But Tomo had forgiven me, and, anyway, Amaterasu’s face had looked like the topic was a whole lot more serious than a kiss.
Instead,
