伊弉冉尊
The clouds are the ground she sits on.
She should be more concerned about that, but she isn't.
When she looks down, through the misty clouds, she can't see any land. There is only a dark mass of broiling ocean below her, hardly discernible through the pot-hole patches in the cloud-ground she can just as easily plunge down through.
Above her only yields a sight of endless darkness. No light, no sun, no stars penetrate through the shadows that linger so close. Pai lifts her hand, up to the mist, to see if she'll come up against anything solid. Her arm goes up through the mist and meets nothing, fingers curling into a fist and drawing back to her chest as a sliver of unease worms through her stomach.
She can hear the beautiful, mournful wailing of what sounds like women in the distance, and the abandoned roar of strange creatures rising up from the raging waves, the tortured cry of birds unknown screaming in the air far above her.
She tips her head back, staring unblinkingly at the mist that hangs over her. She draws in a breath, lungs freezing from the cold bite that invades her. She blows. The air rushes out of her and swirls the grey-white clouds, into the blackness beyond, but nothing is made visible.
A gust of cold wind wafts from her back, and Pai shivers. She lifts her hands to her arms to rub some warmth back into her, and realizes, as she glances down at herself, that she is completely naked. The cold wind raises goose flesh over her chilled skin. Strangely, she sees there to be nothing wrong with her nudity. It is as if finding herself in a new and unfamiliar land, completely naked, is normal. There's nothing to be concerned about.
There's something wrong with that, she knows. She can't quite bring herself to care.
When she looks down again through a hole by her foot, she sees the scaly, ridged backs of strange serpentine creatures as they wade through the crashing waves. She watches in rapt fascination when a gigantic serpent lifts its head out from the surface of the ocean.
The creature's skin is a dull, glistening white, its scales massive with water streaming down between its back like thin, silver rivers. The serpent has a fanning hood, like that of a cobra. It moves as the serpent shakes water from its head. Its snake eyes are pure white, as if the creature is blind. Through the fog of clouds she can just make out the disconcerting white of its eyes as the serpent raises its head to the sky.
It opens its mouth. She sees that it is filled with sharp teeth, canines longer than Pai's whole body. As it parts its mouth wide open, it draws in a powerful breath –
And screams.
The sound is unlike anything she's ever heard before. It is unbelievably loud, and she instinctively raises her hands to cover her ears. The powerful vibration of the scream pulses and echoes through her body, sending a frigid shiver down her spine. The sound comes from the maw of the giant serpent, and it is clearly the cry of a beast, but it sounds so human.
Her heart is heavy as she continues to stare, enraptured, at the screaming serpent as it roars balefully to the heavens. It is so sad, and angry. She can't imagine what could have grieved it so, and she's not sure she wants to know either way.
Then it stops abruptly, lowers its head, and plunges back into the black waters of the boiling ocean. Its body sensuously curls and winds as the massive creature swims away, down into the hidden depths of the waters below.
She lets out a laden sigh, watching the serpent swimming away from her until she can no longer see it.
She looks down, raises her foot, and brings it down hard in a stomp. There is something solid beneath the clouds. Her foot doesn't go through as she'd expected it might, and she is not falling through them either. There has to be something under the clouds, holding her up. That, or she is going insane in her dreamworld – for this strange place can only be that; a figment of her imagination.
Pai looks up again, swinging her head from side to side, wondering if there is any break in the never-ending landscape of brown clouds and thick smog around her. As she does so, a strand of her loose hair falls over her face. She jerks back, blinking in surprise. Almost reverently, she lifts a hand to touch it. It is a dark, dark brown, almost black, where before, it had been white.
It looks like how her hair used to, before something changed, something she can't remember.
This must be what my subconscious looks like, she thinks. Clouds I don't fall through, a ceiling of mist, and dragons swimming in a black ocean.
She wonders why it – wherever this place is – looks like this. She wonders if this really is her subconscious, or if this is some sort of weird lucid dreaming. She knows she isn't awake, as surely as she knows that all her limbs are attached to her. There is no way any of this can be part of the real world. It's too chaotic, too primeval. It is too much like what she imagines the earliest of the world's times was like. Everything is wild, and primal, and dark and a more than a little scary and intimidating.
She walks a thin line between forced calm and full-blown panic because she does not know where she is, even though she knows she can't possibly be awake.
She vaguely recalls what happened before she passed out. Pai remembers the Onihitokuchi, the gun warm in her hands as she tried to shoot the creature in its one large eye, to somehow incapacitate it so she could run to save her own life. Then Shin was there, crashing through the glass windows she herself had thought to escape from.
Shin...
Her memories become incredibly hazy, then. She remembers that Shin knelt before her after wounding the Oni. He gave her his tanto blade. She remembers looking down at the name inscribed on the hilt, noting that it wasn't 'Hayashi', but...something else. It wasn't his family name inscribed on it, but someone else's.
He said something to her about it, too. She can't remember that, though, and it frustrates her.
"Will he come?"
Pai jumps, startled, and whips around.
Her eyes fall on a woman sitting cross-legged on the cloud-ground a few feet from her. She wears no clothes and is totally unbothered by her surroundings, much as Pai is striving not to be.
She is astoundingly beautiful, with long black hair pooling around her. Pai thinks that if she stands, her hair will trail behind her on the ground, it is so long. Her skin is porcelain white, smooth, with not a blemish to be seen. She has a regal face, cheekbones high, plump lips pressed into a petulant, almost childish pout that is at odds with her mature countenance.
The woman sitting before her isn't a stranger.
It's Midori.
But it's not her sister, at the same time. Her hair is too long, curls too much, more like Pai's own rebellious hair than her sister's. The cruel, sad twist of her face is utterly unlike Midori. Her eyes are dark. Not brown, but black. They are filled with such grief, hurt at some betrayal Pai can't fathom, that they seem alive with a power of their own. Pai feels that if she looks into them any longer, she'll fall in and never find her way out again.
The woman looks up at Pai, as if she is only just realizing she is standing there with her. She tilts her head to the side, her hair cascading in full curls down her shoulders.
"Will he come?"
Her voice is smooth and crystalline, like tinkling chandeliers. It is almost musical to listen to. But there is something broken in it, something that warps the innocence in it to madness. Unconsciously, Pai takes an involuntary step forward to the woman clothed in her sister's skin, drawn to her despite the faint glimpse of something wrong she sees lurking in the depths of the woman's eyes.
Pai stops herself just short of standing before the woman, shakes her head to clear her befuddled thoughts, wondering at the lukewarm slowness of her body.
"Who?" Pai asks.
The woman's lips twitch. "Yours. Mine. Will he come?"
Pai shakes her head, failing to understand. "I don't – "
"Sit."
With a single command, Pai suddenly loses strength and her legs collapse under her. She falls with a startled gasp. Panic sweeps through her in a powerful wave as she closes her eyes and waits for that horrible feeling one gets when falling a great distance. The waters of the ocean, filled with unknown creatures, seems very far away. Her breath shoots out of her in a harsh gasp when she lands painfully on the cloud-ground...and does not fall as she expects to.
She feels cold stone beneath her palm. Pai draws a shuddering breath of surprise as she lifts her eyes to the woman, who sits before her with her legs folded beneath her. The fog of the clouds twines around the woman's lithe body, conveniently concealing most of her except for her beautiful face and hair. It's a little disturbing, to see only above her shoulders. Almost as if that's all there is to her body.
Pai tries not to think about that.
She also tries not to think about what it means that this woman was able to make Pai sit, just by telling her to.
The woman leans to the side, peering down a hole through the cloud-ground that provides cloudy view to the watery world below.
"We've been waiting for so long. He should come for us now. It has been long enough. When will he get here?"
Pai frowns as she inches back, too close to this beautifully strange woman for comfort. "Who are you talking about?"
"Our husband. Our lover. Ours." The woman sing-songs. "You do not know him?"
Pai is not sure that the woman is totally sane. There is a wandering look in her eye. She looks confused. It is like she knows where she is, but not why she is here, even though she seems to accepted the fact of here but for the why.
"I do not know him," Pai says firmly. "And I don't know who you are."
The woman frowns. Even that fails to contort her face to ugliness.
"How do you not know?" she asks, confused. She tilts her head to the side. The action reminds her, disconcertingly, of Shin. "Your mortals tell so many stories. Oh, so many twisted, warped stories of us – but they're all the same, in the end. They're all the same."
"What?" Pai is only getting more thrown off by the woman's words.
She hums, completely ignoring Pai's confusion. "Sit. Sit, and wait with us for them."
"For who?" Pai asks again, but she crosses her legs to show that she'll heed the woman's 'invitation'. There is really anything else to do.
This woman doesn't look like she means Pai any harm. All Pai can see, for miles and miles around, is the cloud-ground, the mist, and the dark sea, through foggy patches of the clouds that are the only things keeping her from falling down to that very sea. It's better to sit and listen to the delusional rambles of this woman than to try running and inevitably fall down a hole. She isn't sure she wants to take her chances in that ocean, with that giant serpent swimming in there, along with whatever else lurks in those dark depths.
"For yours. For ours. He is ours, and he is yours. Yours, ours. We are the same. We will wait for them to come for us." The woman smiles. "We have been waiting. We will wait more, and when he comes, we will wake all the way up. All the way up."
A chill tiptoes down Pai's spine at her words. There is no warmth in them. No comfort to be had. The words themselves say it will be good if whoever the woman waits for turns up – but only for her. It might not be so for the one she is waiting for.
Also, what does she mean 'wake up'? Is she not awake? What is all this, then?
"What," Pai licked her dry lips, deciding to play along even though absolutely none of this makes any sense. "What happens when you wake up?"
The woman cocks her head to the side, curiously eyeing Pai, the way a cat would a fly.
As Pai watches, stunned and horrified, white creeps into the woman's hair like paint slathered on her head, spreading from the roots and combing down to the ends of her hair gathered around her. Patches of her skin start to rot, sinking in to bone, mottled with skin peeling back on marrow. The woman's eyes, where they were black, fade into blind light as she smiles disarmingly at like nothing is wrong.
Pai scrambles back when tooth-pick like, sharp teeth lengthen in the woman's smiling mouth. For the first time since finding herself in this world, terror – pure, unadulterated terror – squeezes Pai's heart tight. Her only thought in that moment is to get as far away from this woman, this monster, as she possibly can.
She doesn't see the hole in the ground.
Pai stumbles back, her hand missing the firm cloud-ground and plunging through a hole. Her vision winks out for a second. When she blinks, she sees the black ocean with roaring, crashing white waves getting closer and closer. A heavy, dragging sensation in her stomach pulls at her as she falls. She screams as the woman's voice echoes in her mind.
We will wait for him, and while we wait, we will remember what they did to us. Will you remember?