The first of the morning lights lit up as Yumeko escorted Alice through the gates of the sleeping Pandemonium.
They walked, slowly and hand in hand. Lady Shinki had insisted they take every measure not to tax Alice by forcing her to exert herself in the air which was now toxic to her. Yumeko was fine with it. Yumeko was fine with most things.
Besides, the long journey gave her time to contemplate the way she felt the fibres of her being ticking towards a distant but inevitable extinction. Ever since Mai's uprising, time, till then more a vague suggestion in what felt eternal, had been moving decisively forward.
Alice must have felt it too, but she said nothing. She looked ahead with a stoic expression, her head held high. Already she was changing, and once it was over her time in Makai would seem like another life, lived by another person.
Their destination, the very gap Alice had torn into Makai's protective barrier, was already visible at a distance. Why she wished to return to the realm that was the source of her misery, Yumeko didn't know, but Lady Shinki had agreed to it and Lady Shinki's word was the law.
"The path may not exist in the future." Speaking felt like shattering the bubble of silence that had developed around them.
Alice took this warning with the same acceptance she had taken everything after drying her tears on the day prior. "Then I'll find a new path."
Yumeko nodded, leaving unvoiced the possibility there would be nothing to find. Who knew where the ripples running through reality would settle?
Well, Yumeko did.
"Once you're in Gensokyo," she said out loud, "you will shortly become a youkai. A magician, to be precise."
Alice nodded. If she was surprised by the proclamation, she didn't show it.
Yumeko let no emotion reflect on her face, either, but she felt a strange shudder running through her. Rarely, if ever, had she put stock into the idea of comforting others. It was not what she was created for. Even so, she felt better telling Alice of what lay ahead of her.
"You will carve out your own path," she continued, increasingly amazed of how clear her vision of the future was, as flawless and precise as a well-wrought sword. Had the world-altering affected her too, granting her the gift of foreknowledge? "You'll find a purpose similar but unlike your mother's, and a place to call home. You will make friends and aid in many heroic endeavours."
"And will I return here?"
For the first time since her creation, Yumeko hesitated. "I can't see that far."
Alice nodded once more. There was a spark in her still-shifting eyes that hadn't been there before.
They walked the rest of the journey in silence. At the gap, Yumeko relinquished her hand and looked on quietly as Alice checked to make sure she had everything she needed — just her grimoire, really, now firmly locked — before finally looking up.
"Goodbye, then." Her voice was lower than before. An affectation of maturity or a genuine shift? Yumeko could no longer tell.
She curtsied briefly. "Until we meet again."
For a moment, Alice looked as though she wished to say something further. The look melted away, replaced by a tight-lipped, but hopeful smile. She turned.
Yumeko stared after her for only a while longer, time flowing through every inch of her being. Duty called.
The very last thing she saw before she phased away was Alice, small but straight-backed, walking briskly towards the great unknown future.