Chương 52: [B2] Chapter 10: Before Shadows

The evening came and went, and Miho did not say anything about it, which told Yukito more than if she had. They'd continued along the compressed trail as planned, following the same unnatural flattening of undergrowth that had led them through three territories already, and had found nothing new in the doing of it.

When the agreed window passed without any sign of Zero or Viria at the rendezvous point, Miho's only comment was a single glance at the darkening canopy, and a decision, spoken rather than debated, that they would make camp where they stood rather than backtrack blind in failing light.

"They probably found something," she said, once the fire had caught.

"A better food source, further out than expected. Or the river ran longer before it gave them anything usable."

"Probably," Yukito said. Neither of them said the other possibility out loud.

"Try again," Miho said, once the fire had settled into something steady enough to work by.

"You've been putting it off since we stopped."

"…Fine." Yukito stood, shook out the tension in his shoulders, and let his shadow spread wide across the packed earth, thinner now than it had been the first night, more deliberate. It rose. Held. Thinned at the edges into something that resembled, if he squinted at it in the low light, the rough suggestion of a wing. [Skill Attempt Logged: Umbral Glide (Unstable)] Duration: 26 seconds. Insufficient completions for formal acquisition.

"Twenty-six seconds," Miho said flatly. Though her tone carried something gentler underneath it she'd have denied if he'd pointed it out.

"Still not holding weight."

"Neither does water, and yet it carries things." Yukito considered that longer than the comment probably deserved, especially considering he had heard Zero share Miho's wisdom earlier, and found he still didn't have a counter for it. He sat back down across from her, the shadow settling back into its ordinary shapeless self at his feet.

"Where did you learn to think like that?" he asked.

"Comparisons like water carrying things."

"My uncle." Said Miho.

"He said most techniques worth learning already existed somewhere in nature, and cultivators just gave names to things water and wind and stone had already figured out first." A small, private motion at the corner of her mouth that wasn't quite a smile.

"He would have liked watching you fail at this. He appreciated things that refused to work at first."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation. You may interpret it as flattering if you'd like." Yukito chuckled.

"You sound like Zero." Miho didn't deny it.

The fire burned low, and for a while neither of them spoke, the comfortable kind of quiet that had taken most of a book to earn between them.

"May I ask you something?" Yukito said, eventually, in the voice he used for things that mattered enough to need permission first.

"You may certainly ask."

"Before your clan fell. What were you like?" The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Miho's tails went still.

"I have told you about my clan."

"I know what happened to your clan. I don't know what you were when you were like, nine. Before any of that mattered." She was quiet long enough that Yukito wondered if he'd overstepped, and then, slowly, she answered anyway.

"... Loud," she said, "Before the training took hold properly. My cousins, along with my older sister and I got into more trouble than the elders had patience for." Something in her face shifted, softer than he'd seen it.

"We gossiped constantly. About the instructors, about which junior disciples liked other junior disciples, about the boys that we liked, or girls, in my sister's case. We talked about anything that felt like ours instead of the clan's. We got caught more often than we didn't."

"That's… not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Discipline. Straight spine at age five. Sword forms before breakfast."

"That came later. When I was nine, I was mostly concerned with whether Rezu—my sister—had actually kissed the blacksmith's daughter or not, or whether my aunt would find the note we'd been passing about it before we could burn it." The almost-smile again, sadder at the edges.

"We were not good at keeping secrets. We got caught constantly." Yukito found himself smiling, quiet and real.

"What… happened to them?" Miho's expression closed, not sharply, just settling into the stillness she wore when a subject had reached the edge of what she was willing to say tonight.

"The same thing that happened to everyone else."

The silence stretched for hours.

"What about you?" Miho finally.

"Before your shadows." Yukito looked at the fire for a long moment before answering.

"Normal," he said.

"Genuinely, boringly normal. I liked spy movies. The old kind, where nobody's power was real, just gadgets and disguises and someone always turning out to be someone else underneath." He almost laughed at the memory, a version of himself that felt impossibly distant now.

"Mystery novels too. I read everything I could get my hands on. And for a while I got hyperfixated on cryptography. I had notebooks full of ciphers that I'd invented myself."

"Cryptography?" Miho asked, unfamiliar with the word.

"Secret writing. A way to send a message so only the person it's meant for can actually read it. Anyone else who intercepts it just sees noise." He shrugged, self-conscious.

"I liked the idea that you could hand someone information right in front of an enemy, and the enemy would never know it had happened at all. That the only thing that mattered was whether the right person understood it." Miho was quiet for a moment, turning the implications over.

"My sister and cousins would have loved that," she said.

"They invented codes for the notes we passed, so the instructors couldn't read what we said about them if we got caught. None of the codes were any good. We got caught anyway."

"You needed a system. Not just substitution. Something that couldn't be guessed by pattern alone."

"You would have saved us considerable trouble, apparently."

"I was a kid. I mostly used it to write messages to myself that I never needed to hide from anyone." Miho looked at him for a long moment, something unreadable in her expression.

"It is a good thing to have been," Yukito said.

"Before my shadows. Just a boy who liked mysteries and codes." A pause.

"It is good that something normal existed first," said Miho. Yukito didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't try to produce one. He let the fire fill the silence instead, and found, for the first time in longer than he could measure, that the silence didn't need filling at all.

It was the length of that silence that gave the wrongness away. Yukito noticed it first as a held breath he hadn't realized he was holding, and glanced at the gray sunrise beyond the fire's light before he'd fully decided why. Miho noticed it a half second later, in the stillness her tails had gone into without her telling them to.

"They should have been back by now," he said, quiet, careful not to sound as certain as the thought actually was. Miho didn't answer immediately. She was already reaching for her sword.

"Something must have happened to them." Yukito opened his mouth to offer some version of reassurance, some explanation that would make the silence smaller than it was, and got no further than a gathered breath before the sound reached them both at once. It came from somewhere beyond the tree line, distant and enormous, a deep, guttural roar that carried no single register a living throat should have been able to produce, half primal rage, and half something more complex.

The fire between them guttered in the wind that followed it. Neither of them moved for one full second. Then both of them did, at the same time, toward the sound neither of them wanted to be anywhere near.