When Alice came to, she was choking on ash. Her fingers scrabbled the hard earth, convulsing until the black ball of congealed smoke shifted within her and she found herself back in her body, unable to breathe, unable to rise, but very much still alive.
She gasped, expelling fire in her breath and drawing more in. Her entire body jerked as she coughed, desperate to vomit out the tar lining her innards. Nothing came out.
After a long stay in this personal hell, the curtain of smog on her mind began to part. She was lying on the ground, half face-down, half foetal. She gulped in more air even as it burned her. The dirt was warm against her cheek. She dimly recalled falling from the air as she had attempted to land by her house, succumbing to the smoke a few short feet from the ground.
Smoke. Yes. The memories slotted back into her mind, splinter by splinter. Her arms shaking with the effort, she pushed herself onto her knees and sat up.
The forest was no longer there. In its place danced an ocean of flames, painting the sky in hues of red and orange and soft warm yellows so bright they outshone the moon and the stars.
Alice turned around and watched the wavering lights and the trees reduced to thin shaky shadows all around her, feeling the heat even from a distance. A single sluggish thought crawled through her mind, feeling as though it belonged to someone else using her brain to think it.
Aurora Borealis.
She couldn't even bring herself to shake her head. Obviously this was no polar light. Obviously. But somehow, the impression of ethereal beauty remained even as another fit of coughing set her lungs aflame and forced her to double over.
She wiped a single tear of exertion from her eye. It immediately evaporated. Was it strange she had survived? Magicians couldn't rely on the kind of physical invulnerability most youkai took for granted, but they were still shielded from several human frailties. She decided surviving the poison which had stoppered her blood had been her due and began taking stock of her circumstances.
She studied her head with her hands. Her eyebrows and most of her eyelashes were gone, but only the ends of her hair had suffered. No doubt she was covered in soot, but that couldn't be helped: most likely the fires had boiled all the water in the woods. Her clothes? Singed, but intact enough to keep her decent. Her grimoire? Blessedly unharmed — she had landed on it when she had fallen, shielding it from the smoke.
Her house?
A distant tree crashed with a tremendous dry echo as Alice turned to look at the blackened wreckage which had that morning been her house. A single glance was enough to tell her there was no chance of salvage of any kind. It was to be expected. She had only just restocked on black powder the day before.
All was.... all was...
No. She couldn't. If she stopped to think of what she had lost, it was over. For now, she would have to puppeteer herself, encourage the part of herself that thought this was all a dream to keep sleepwalking. She would make her limbs move, make her brain think, make herself dance with joy if that was what it took to keep herself going.
She felt like a newborn colt scrambling to her feet, but she managed to remain upright. The flames seemed just as tall as they had on the ground, rising up to threaten the heavens themselves.
She clutched the grimoire to her chest. It was all she had, after all.
Step by step, she began making her way through the parts of the forest where the fire had already burnt itself out. Flying above the flames would only mean inhaling more smoke. Did she have spells to protect herself from it? She ought to have, yes. Such things were rarely flashy enough for Gensokyo, but she knew she had researched one. Only...
Dolls. She needed dolls. To make dolls, she needed materials. To find materials, she had to keep moving.
Marisa's house was slightly less of a wreck than hers had been. It was regardless utterly charred through: a remaining fragment of the wall evaporated into soot as she touched it. However, at least the ceiling had collapsed in on the house rather than exploded to smithereens. She looked at the assorted ephemera within, stained black and melted into puddles. Embers smouldered beneath the mass of former treasure, awaiting a foolish move to reignite them. Some things, while undoubtedly smoke-damaged, were more intact and looked potentially useful.
She stepped back and looked at the yard instead. Pitch black debris lay haphazardly in the clearing. Debris, and one other thing, small and curled up to its side. The yellow of the hair and the white of the shirt were dimmed by smoke, but remained recognisable.
Magicians were frail for youkai. However, they could still survive certain things humans could not.
Although the crackling of the devouring flames grew deafening as the wildfire crawled closer, Alice stayed in place for a long while.
Eventually, she did what needed to be done, then followed the direction of the wind.
Screams and wails travelled with the air currents as she approached what had recently been the Human Village. Humans and youkai alike had escaped into water and climbed onto mountainsides, and enough of them had survived to fill the world with their cursing and weeping.
Alice's world was red and black and cracked underfoot as she walked on. She was blind to the inert figures strewn on her path and moved past them without a single recollection of dodging them. She was only barely more aware of the people stumbling past her, fleeing as far from the nexus of the destruction as possible. She felt neither the embers searing her skin nor the burden on her back. Her eyes saw only the bright flares of flame flickering on the horizon.
That was, until she saw someone in the air. A naked blade in both hands, white hair reflecting molten iron, Youmu Konpaku looked out of place, a pristine being in a ravaged world, lacking the frozen uncertainty and blind panic of the survivors Alice had met thus far and instead gliding onward with great determination.
Upon spotting Alice, she swooped closer, landing softly on ash which had once been grass. Her eyes were liquid metal as she studied Alice. "Are you here to solve the incident as well?" When Alice nodded, she frowned. "What's in that box?"
Alice shifted her shoulders under the straps of the box on her back. It had been among Marisa's surviving possessions and rose several arm-spans above her head. "A doll."
Youmu seemed satisfied with the answer and unperturbed by the damage the smoke had wreaked on Alice's voice. She turned to look over her shoulder. "The most recent explosion came from just over there. She's near."
With that, she kept moving.
Alice followed Youmu's lead and took to the air, flying low to avoid the black plumes of smoke above the flames.
She was indeed near. High above the village, her black wings stretched wide, her cape flapping in the wind carrying rivers of embers to all four corners of Gensokyo, Utsuho Reiuji gazed silently down upon the razed earth. Without paying attention to the newcomers, she raised her cannon and sent a blast of light into an already burnt segment of the ground. A pulse of silent pressure rushed through Alice, followed by a roar of heat and noise.
Youmu didn't wait to see more. She launched herself through the steaming air, swords akimbo, drawing Utsuho's attention at once. The raven's eyes flashed gold.
Alice didn't pause to ponder the strange colour. Youmu's assault gave her time to find a safe spot on the ground, hitch the box off her shoulders, and undo the clasps holding it together.
Above her, Utsuho aimed her cannon at Youmu and fired. There was a flash of steel and then a rain of golden light as Youmu's sword cut through the blast. The gleaming fragments hissed as they struck the ground and evaporated, but not before Youmu careened sideways to dodge another attack.
That was the last Alice saw of the attack. She focused on her task, flexing her fingers, ensuring all the strings were attached where they were meant to be, then took herself and her doll to the air.
It was easier to tell something was wrong with Utsuho when floating at the same height as her. Her eyes were barren safe for a golden glow, her expression entirely blank. She stared at Alice for only an instant before aiming at Youmu again, dodging her strikes sluggishly yet somehow mostly avoiding them. Even the cuts which grazed her did so to seemingly no effect.
Alice folded her fingers together, then slowly pulled them apart again to make her doll hold out its hand and begin channelling. Once she was ready to unleash the attack, she called out, "Youmu! Duck!"
To Youmu's credit, she didn't hesitate. She plunged towards the ground, avoiding an enormous globe of pulsing red light in the process. The next instant, the place where she had been and everything behind it was engulfed by a giant white-hot laser. It looked like danmaku. It was not.
Utsuho was already falling when the aftershocks of the spark began to peter out. She fell with a sharp thud close to where Youmu was hovering, her face obscured by her feathers.
Youmu looked at her for just long enough to ascertain she wasn't about to move, then looked up at Alice and her doll. Her eyes went wide. "That's..."
Alice lowered her hand. The doll which had once been Marisa did likewise.
They descended onto the ground simultaneously. Alice made the doll put the mini-hakkero back in its pocket, then looked at where Youmu was studying the sprawled Utsuho. "Is she..."
"She's alive. Just unconscious." Youmu stared at the shorter of her blades for a long moment before sheathing both, then turned to stare at Alice instead. "You have a grimoire."
"I have forgotten all of my spells." And it was true. The flames had not burnt the pages, but they had burnt the magic in her mind. "I had to use what I could."
Youmu shook her head, but made no further objections. She did, however, shudder as Alice settled the doll's head gently onto her lap and began undoing the strings attached to its joints, rendering it back into a corpse.
As Alice worked, her body and her mind pulled her in different directions. "Do you know why she was acting like this?" She nudged her head towards Utsuho.
Youmu shook her head again. "I only did what Lady Yuyuko told me to do."
"I see." Searching for answers would have to wait for another day, or perhaps for another person. Dawn would reveal how much remained of Gensokyo. It was likely more than it seemed like as they sat there in the growing shadows, surrounded by enough embers to rival the stars. Some things could be recovered. Many could not.
The nearest flames were dying out. Perhaps it was their desperate flickering which masked the nearby movement for so long. All Alice knew was that the corpse suddenly coughed.
Youmu bolted upright at the sound, but Alice was too stunned to move. She could only stare as Marisa blinked and attempted to brush her fringe off her brow. As she failed, she found Alice's gaze.
"Uh." She squinted. "Pretty warm here, innit?"
The voice was cracked and hoarse, but it was Marisa's all the same.
It was then, as Alice gathered Marisa in her arms and hugged her close, all the while allowing the slumbering part of herself to finally awaken, that she discovered there was still enough emotion in her for tears.