Mokou pushed the curtain aside and dipped her head to clear the doorway. Why these people made all their entrances child-sized was a mystery she had yet to resolve.
Her host might explain it to her. Assuming she remembered to ask. It didn't matter much in the end.
The only person in the room was a little girl stooped over a miniature writing desk. Upon seeing Mokou, she calmly placed her slate and stylus aside and settled her hands down on her lap. "It's good to see you again, Mokou."
"Likewise."
The features of the hundredth and ninth Child of Miare were wildly different from those of the hundredth and fifth, the most recent incarnation Mokou had met more than in passing. Her short hair and voluminous robes bore no resemblance to Amomoi's long coifs and thin, pale dresses. She didn't look a day over six.
Her smile was the same as ever, however.
Mokou made herself comfortable on the floor, starkly aware of the grime coating her clothes. It hadn't been easy to get this audience. The child's parents hadn't understood a word of any of the languages Mokou had attempted and had nearly driven her away by force. Only word arriving from their daughter had convinced them to let her in. Mokou didn't begrudge them. Obviously they would want to protect their miraculous child from travel-worn strangers who smelled of funeral pyres.
But there she was, in the end. "What's your name this time around?"
The child beamed. "Akyuu. Written with 'urgent' rather than 'request'."
"Back to the classics, huh?"
"My parents believed that the names for the Children of Miare were becoming too long and decided to ignore all but the final number." Akyuu chuckled. "It is actually pronounced quite differently in our tongue, but that is what it truly means."
Mokou's gaze fell next to Akyuu's desk and onto the pile of slates stacked as high as the girl herself. "How's the work coming along?"
"Very well. I should have it done by next summer. Is there anything you would like me to add to your section?"
"Say that I can now beat Kaguya nine times out of ten." Her track record was six out of ten at the best of times, but a little embellishment made for better profiles.
Akyuu picked up the stylus and jotted the comment down. Looking at it more closely, Mokou saw a sharp red light at the base of the stylus, suggesting higher technology than she had seen in at least six hundred years. The more things changed. "Anything else?"
"That's about it. Eientei's ever eternal."
Akyuu's lips curled slightly upwards as she put the stylus down. "Your section is the easiest contemporary one to update. I have barely changed a thing in two thousand years."
Mokou looked at the slates again. It didn't take a detective to tell that Akyuu wrote day in, day out, rushing to complete an update to the chronicle.
She had to hurry. The previous Child of Miare had succumbed to a summer fever on her eighth birthday, shortly before Mokou had had the opportunity to meet her. The incarnation before that had barely lived to nine. Many sections of the most recent edition of the Gensokyo Chronicle were, much like the title itself, relics of the past, meaningless to anyone but the most historically-minded.
Mokou pushed the thought out of her mind. "If you like, I could try coming up with a more dramatic past for myself."
Akyuu's smile gained an edge to it. "I think it's sufficient as it is written."
Mokou couldn't really argue with that. It hadn't been until the eleventh Child of Miare that she had recognised the historian as a fellow immortal, even if her immortality was of an entirely different sort from her own. It had taken until the fourteenth for Mokou to share the truth behind her own existence, the twentieth for the actual, expurgated truth, and the forty-second before she had allowed it all to be chronicled. By that time, all those remaining who had been contemporary to Hieda no Akyuu already knew anyway.
"By the way, Amomoi—" She fell silent as Akyuu chuckled. "Sorry. Akyuu."
"That's all right. You're far from the only one who forgets." Akyuu looked at the slate before her one last time, then raised her chin. "Would you mind going outside with me?"
Mokou listened in the sidelines as Akyuu spoke to her parents, in that lilting, rising tongue that sounded much like the most modern human language Mokou had learned, but which shared none of its vocabulary. It only took a few select sentences for them to relent. The next thing Mokou knew, she found herself back in the open air, standing in the labyrinth of circular platforms she had previously lost herself in.
Akyuu ignored the rusty clouds above and resolutely took the centremost path. Mokou followed.
The heart of Akyuu's city had been carved high into the hillside in the middle of a forest. Sturdy wooden walkways connected the hill to the gigantic trees nearby and the houses built upon their branches. A shock of autumn colours greeted Mokou everywhere she looked. The layout reminded her of both rabbit warren and an ant colony, assuming both rabbits or ants had learned how to build bridges and enjoy living with no roof but leaves.
Only a few residents were around, dressed warmly in spite of the lingering summer heat. Their turquoise earrings jangled as they walked forty feet above ground level without once looking down. Many of them stopped to stare at Akyuu and Mokou, but none approached. Idly, Mokou wondered who they feared more: the dusty wanderer, or the strange scion of whatever the Hieda clan was called around these parts.
They had only just made it past their second tree when Akyuu began to flag. She said nothing, but her steps, short to begin with, grew more uncertain by the minute.
Mokou watched her soldier on for a few moments before stopping in the middle of the walkway — there was plenty of room to go past her if necessary — and crouching down. "Come on. I'll give you a ride."
For all their years of friendship — or perhaps because of them — it took a long moment before Akyuu actually climbed onto her back. Mokou stood up and said nothing, certain that if she had asked if Akyuu wanted to be carried instead of merely offering to do so, her friend would have refused, not wishing to be likened to all the literal children Mokou had borne on her back over the years. Or perhaps she wouldn't have minded. People changed.
"Past your bedtime?" Mokou teased as she slowed down to take in the scent of a lilac bush growing straight out of the tree. Upon closer inspection, it wasn't a lilac as she remembered them. But it was close enough.
"Not quite yet." Akyuu leaned her head against Mokou's neck. "Each day, I manage to stay up a little longer. Things are already so much smoother than they were a year ago."
Mokou mulled this over as she kept moving. Was having to learn to speak and walk and write all over again a simple task, or an endless source of vexation? Was Akyuu's reincarnation like Mokou's own deaths, something one eventually grew used to? Or was it the opposite, like trying and failing to get used to the deaths of everyone else?
She knew they had already discussed their similarities and differences in depth back when the floors of the Hieda Mansion had been made of bamboo, and again when they had been a mosaic of imported stones. It was simply the content of those conversations which eluded her.
Near the outskirts of the town, underneath the leaves of a maple tree at least two hundred years old, there was an age-blanched bench with a view of the fields ahead and below. Mokou slid Akyuu off her back and placed her gently down. Akyuu's eyes flickered open and shut, but they focused when Mokou sat down next to her. For some moments, they admired the view in the not-quite-silence of droning insects and people living their lives nearby.
"I have only ever been outside in a carriage before." Akyuu kept her eyes ahead as she spoke, peering at the crimson plains just barely visible beyond the fields.
"Huh." Mokou assumed she meant the veiled chairs she had spied on the ground near the city entrance. She hadn't seen any during their walk. Either they didn't travel in the treetops, or they were only used when necessary. To carry invalids, perhaps. Or children of dubious health.
She didn't bother saying anything else. After a hundred reincarnations and literal decades spent in each other's company, Akyuu already knew everything Mokou could possibly say.
The ensuing silence was mostly comfortable and remarkably long. It was so long, in fact, that if Akyuu's eyes hadn't been open, Mokou would have been convinced she had fallen asleep.
She began drifting off herself. The air was cool, but not so cold it made her shiver, and the location seemed safe enough. The journey to the forest city had been a gruelling one, and after days spent on the road, anywhere that wasn't directly on the edge of a precipice felt like a great place to sleep.
A single leaf, yellow and red and a tiny hint of green, was wrenched from the maple by the wind. It landed on the platform alongside dozens of its brethren.
"The next time I die, I will relinquish my right to reincarnation."
Mokou snapped to attention. She knew she had heard correctly even before she saw Akyuu's expression and her distant eyes still staring into the horizon. It did nothing to melt the ice filling her guts.
Akyuu turned, drawing her feet onto the bench as she did so. "I have been self-conceited for too long. I thought that because of my special circumstances and my wealth of knowledge, I would always be able to continue with my work and have it be meaningful. If anything, I believed my growing experience would make each new update to the chronicle more profound than the last. I believed all this even once it became obvious that the world had moved on without me."
Mokou said nothing.
"The truth of the matter is simple," Akyuu continued. "I have become a thing of the past. I still mostly understand those around me, but I no longer feel what they feel. The threads I am clinging to are unravelling, and there are few of them left to begin with. This world will soon be something I will never again understand. Thus, I am no longer fit to chronicle it."
"I haven't noticed anything wrong with your recent writings." Granted, it had been four hundred years since Mokou had read any of them, but what was four centuries in the grand scheme of things?
Even as she smiled, Akyuu shook her head. "Perhaps it wasn't yet noticeable in them. But now the world changes faster than I can chronicle it. It takes me two lifetimes to gather knowledge and write it down instead of one. You see what the problem is." Her smile widened, wry in the face of everything. "The longer I go on, the more obsolete I become."
"I'm sorry."
"It's not something anyone has to apologise over. It is simply my time to go. Only, it's..." Akyuu paused and stared down at the hands on her lap. "Difficult to let go, sometimes."
"I'm sure you can stay if you want to." Akyuu reincarnated specifically for the chronicle, Mokou knew, but surely there had to be a way. A reward for ceaseless service, perhaps? The Ministry was supposed to commend that.
Akyuu shook her head again. "It's time. It's..." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "It may be a feature of the reincarnation process. If the enma have spoken of it, I have naturally forgotten. But for the past fifteen hundred years, I have begun to feel..." she hesitated. "Some strain."
"Strain?"
"It's the best word I have to explain it." Akyuu placed her fingertips on her temples. "It's not pain, not exactly. Rather a discomfort, but one that makes my body feel like a prison. It is as if my skull is collapsing in on itself and dragging my spine askew until everything within me is in the wrong place. It makes me wish I could tear off my flesh so I could set it all right again." She took a deep breath. "Sleep alleviates it, sometimes, but it never quite goes away. And it grows worse the more I reminisce."
When Mokou next spoke, she heard the words as if something spoken by a stranger. "Maybe there's only so much a human mind can take."
Akyuu nodded. "Precisely. Perhaps it would be easier if I could simply forget some of my less eventful lifetimes. But I cannot forget. I can never forget."
Mokou could forget. She forgot most things she saw. And still... "I know what you mean."
Akyuu stiffened, as though she had been descending to deep thought and now had to halt and return to the surface. Only then did she look up at Mokou's face. "You feel it as well?"
"Yeah. Not..." She paused to consider. "Not as vividly as you put it. But it's there."
The look Akyuu gave Mokou was both ancient and very, very tired. It conveyed such immense pity that Mokou nearly choked on it.
And then, after a mayfly's lifetime, it was gone. Akyuu averted her gaze. When she next looked up, it was with a smile far more befitting her physical appearance.
"You must be starving, travelling all the way here," she said. "I will ask my parents to fix you some food and a bath. They will be happy to do so."
Mokou had long since learned never to turn down free food, let alone a soak. "Thanks, Akyuu."
Perhaps it was remembering her name that made Akyuu laugh. The sound rang like a freshly minted bell across the treetops.
"Me? A historian?"
Akyuu nodded and drank from her cup before speaking. "I don't see why not. You could write a chronicle of your own, perhaps."
It had been hours since they had returned from the treetops. They sat in Akyuu's garden beneath black leaves and a starless sky, lit up by a translucent obelisk-shaped lamp affixed straight onto the bedrock. Its glow reminded Mokou of fireflies.
She wrapped the blanket Akyuu had lent her tightly around herself as she tried to think of a reply. "Where would I even start?"
Akyuu let out a tiny yawn and rubbed her eyes. No matter how brilliant her mind, it was still prey to the limitations of her body, and it was hours past her regular bedtime. "Wherever you want to start. That is how all writers do it."
"I'll think about it," Mokou said carelessly. She meant it as a "no", and assumed that Akyuu would immediately interpret it as such.
Instead, Akyuu kept watching her. The ancient soul staring through a child's eyes might have been comical under other circumstances, but there and then, on that crisp autumn night, shrouded in a white blanket with only the pale glow of a single lamp to illuminate her, Akyuu appeared regal. Not even that. Divine.
Not for the first time, Mokou wondered how exactly Akyuu had managed to accumulate so much wisdom than with far fewer years on Earth.
"Write it." When Akyuu smiled, it was a smile from a world long gone. "Who else is going to tell your story if not you?"