The final cherry blossoms had fallen in the night. The ground around the trees was covered in snowy petals.
Beyond the grove, spring had already begun giving way to summer: irises bloomed, the portents in the sky spoke of rain, and the leaves of the maple trees had reached their full depth of colour. When the wind rustled the treetops, they roiled like green waves.
It was within this ocean of foliage that Yukari watched the silent procession approaching the Saigyou Ayakashi. There were less than a dozen people overall, all but two clad in sun-catching white, but it was still more of a crowd than Yukari had expected. Perhaps they had feared that with too few people present, the tree would simply lure them to their deaths one by one.
Despite the shrouded litter being carried at end of the procession and the hastily dug grave between the two largest roots of the tree, what Yukari was witnessing was barely a funeral. To the humans beneath her, it was above all a ritual meant to seal away the demonic powers of the Saigyou Ayakashi. Which one of them if any had conceived of the notion, she neither knew nor cared. Perhaps it had even been Yuyuko herself in all those letters she had once written.
She briefly looked away from the procession. Far removed from everyone else, barely within the boundaries of the grove, Youki Konpaku followed the proceedings in silence. His expression didn't alter as the litter was brought to the tree, but when the burden upon it was lifted to be transferred to the ground, he closed his eyes.
Yukari did not. She did not blink once as they consigned the shrouded body into the ground, affixed the seal upon it, and begun conducting the ritual in earnest. It was so sparse and without pomp that if she hadn't known better, she would have thought they were merely paying their final farewells to the departed.
From there, she ignored them. They were humans like any other. They meant nothing to her. The only human who had mattered was the one now in the ground.
You knew perfectly well youkai can survive without breathing.
The two humans who had handled the body began to push the disturbed earth back into its place. They did a poor job of it: Yukari could still see several patches of white cloth when they set their tools on their shoulders and retreated. Perhaps they expected the Saigyou Ayakashi to absorb the corpse into its embrace all by itself. Perhaps it even would.
You never seemed that forgetful. Nor that impulsive.
Was my lifelessness merely a convenient pretext?
It had only been a matter of time before Yuyuko would have succumbed to her own powers. In fact, wasn't that precisely what had happened, in the end? This was the outcome Yukari should have anticipated from the moment she had decided to allow Yuyuko to keep her own will. The death of a human wasn't a surprise, but an inevitability.
Then why was it that she felt as though every filament in her body was snapping one by one?
Their task concluded, the humans retreated from the grove. Youki remained for a moment longer, his head bowed, before he too shook his head and turned away. Only Yukari and the tree itself remained, its branches barely moving in the breeze, its blossoms brighter than ever.
It was time for her to leave as well. She had long since regained the power to enter the maze of reality and re-align its borders to travel wherever she pleased. In fact, she had never felt stronger. She could do anything she wished to do.
That was, she could do almost anything she wished to do. She seemed to be incapable of waking herself from this dream of a spring that should never have come.
She opened a gap behind her with little more than a thought. It took her far more time and effort to finally turn towards it.
Really. She had to go. There was nothing to be gained by staying.
All the same, she couldn't help but look back. She imprinted the blossoms of the Saigyou Ayakashi and the sight of the grave between its roots forever into memory. She inclined her head.
Farewell.
A piece of her remained behind as she stepped through the gap.