To the Flames of the Sun

Chapter Eight

Le Butterfly Sisters.

Miodori's POV

I gently placed the flowers on the tombstones, one by one, before kneeling on the grass in front of my father's tombstone and folding my hands together in a silent prayer. Even though two years had passed since the unexpected twist of events that had befallen my family, I still regretted that I could not have been at the bedside of the adults who had raised me when they had died from the curse of the Mark.

Not the then Water Hashira, not my foster mother, and definitely not my uncle or father. I hadn't been able to hold any of their hands during their final moments, all because they had sent me away to a place too far for us to ever be able to reunite in a desperate bid to save my life.

I had fallen unconscious when I had slipped through that strange time traveling device, and opened my eyes in an unfamiliar room on an unfamiliar bed. I hadn't even been able to register for a moment if that was a bed at all, mainly because it wasn't a regular old futon bed on the floor but a mattress on a four-legged platform. So, quite obviously, I had started to panic and hyperventilate and cry and scream for my father, only to immediately be hugged by an unknown girl. But I hadn't felt alarmed by her embrace.

On the contrary, the warmth of being in her arms had somewhat started to calm me down.

Then she had taken one look at my face and rushed me to the bathroom to let me puke it all out.

When she had washed up my face and carried me back to that odd bed, I had found another girl, who looked slightly older than the girl holding me, waiting with a smile.

That girl had been Kocho Kanae, the Flower Hashira who had ascended to the position three hundred years after Kasumi-san. And also the Flower Hashira whom I was supposed to be sent to.

She, and every Flower Hashira before her, had been granted access to the books written by both the very first Flower Hashira as well as her biological ancestors before her, hence providing her with the knowledge of the unnerving time machine and all. She had just never expected that she would be the Flower Hashira on the receiving end when the time machine would be activated, all the way back in the Sengoku era. But, from what I'd been told, she had acted quick. Just as Kasumi-san had predicted, the Butterfly Mansion of the future had the advanced surgical technology required to save my life, and so they had used that very surgical technology to save my life, all while I had still been unconscious. After that, the Flower Hashira and one of her two younger sisters, Kocho Shinobu, had taken turns to watch over me. When I had asked why they themselves had gone to such great lengths for a complete stranger instead of instructing some nurse to just do her job, the older of the two had simply smiled at me and quoted that they felt a kind of special connection to me.

She was the only one who admitted it though. Kocho Shinobu had just muttered angrily about how she was being overworked without being paid enough for it. It had taken me a while to realize that that was just her personality. She liked to stay angry most of the time for some reason, but her bitter words were also her words of love for those she cared about. I had been requested not to judge her too hardly for that; she hadn't always been that way and had developed such a surly personality only after her and her sister's parents had been killed by demons.

Why was I ever going to judge her for a personality change because of a reason like that? I had known since a young age that every person who became a demon slayer entered this profession only because they had lost a loved one to demons. Besides, I had lost loved ones too. Not to demons, but I had lost them anyhow.

The Kocho sisters had allowed me to rest for a while, with the older of the two trying her best to cheer me up by telling me about many exciting wonders of the Taisho era, the new era, I had arrived in. I had appreciated her efforts, I really had, but I'd still kept crying quietly from how much I'd been missing my family.