[3rd place in the Brewing Flair Awards]
A ShiMayu fanfiction based on the manga "Sousei no Onmyouji".
A legend was told among the people of Tsuchimikado and Narukami, that one day a falling star would appear at the firmament, announcing the end o...
Besides, she had only little knowledge about the geography. The books she had with her dealt with nature, the animals and plants on the islands surrounding Narukami, the agriculture and the seasonal changes. Nowhere was written, how long it took to cross the sea or where exactly Tsuchimikado lay.
And so she decided to look for a map.
Passing by the market stalls, she looked for a vendor of maps, scrolls or books. Her gaze skipped over many stalls selling all kinds of goods. Candles, cloths, baskets and all other things she had never thought of being of importance.
Then in a corner under a wooden stand she spotted another vendor with a silver beard and similar colored hair, which fit the winkles carved into his face. His goods were hidden in the shadows of the stall's roof. But she could see, what she had been looking for, scrolls and books.
High staples of books rested on the old looking stall, scrolls were lying around here and there. And the ones in the front were bleached by the sun and dirty by the dust of the earth carried by the wind.
With a smile Mayura approached the friendly looking vendor. "Hello, good man, do you sell maps?"
The old man with a long and twisted goatee answered cheerfully, "I most certainly do. What particular region would you like? I have maps of the city, the harbor and the towns nearby."
Mayura nodded, letting her gaze slide over the many scrolls. There was surely a lot of maps hidden within the rolled up papers – but the map, she needed, hadn't been in his enumeration. "Do you have one displaying the sea and the land beyond the border?"
The look of the vendor's eyes changed, as he squeezed them into slits and mustered her from head to toe. Empathizing every word, he responded, "I have but one."
Feeling nervous thanks to his piercing gaze, she crossed the finger of both hands in front of her and slowly asked, "Can you show it to me?"
The man nodded once and turned away. Instead of searching in the pile of scrolls, he reached out and grabbed a scroll behind him.
Unrolling it, he spread his arms to show her it's total length.
The scroll was three spans long and maybe two span broad. On it's inner side it revealed a map created with careful strokes.
She could see the outskirts of Narukami and the sea spotted with a lot of smaller islands. With 晶, the character for the Crystal, the island, which bore the Crystal, was marked. Beyond the sea a larger, long stretched island lay, described with the word Tsuchimikado. Near the coast the city of Tsuchimikado began. It's size seemed to be bigger than Narukami even.
Beyond the two big islands was nothing but the sea. Nobody knew, what lay across the big space of water, outside of he Crystal's reach. Mayura had read stories about scouts being send out to investigate and having never returned. People say, their souls refused to leave the Crystal's reach and escaped their bodies on their way.
At the border of the map was a caption giving rough measures of space and travel time.
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