The bamboo which had been mere saplings when Mokou had gone to sleep had grown into a thicket by the time she awoke in the morning.
She pushed the stalks aside with practised ease. You never forgot what it was like to live in a bamboo forest. Much like she would never forget her first time sleeping by the plant: she had chosen her spot poorly and had awoken in the evening to find herself skewered on a stalk. She had lived to extricate herself, but not for long after.
Now, however, her body was without extraneous holes, and so she grabbed her belongings and set off towards open ground. There was no path across the meadow between the forest and the village, and so she stepped wherever she found the best footing, avoiding the flowers where she could.
Halfway across, she felt her legs give way. She collapsed backwards onto the grass.
She stared up at the sluggish clouds and the startling azure behind them. When had she last eaten? A week ago, perhaps? No wonder. Better gather her strength for a moment longer and enjoy the soothing wind and the smell of summer.
As she breathed in and out, wondering whether her legs would last her till the village or if it would be more prudent to scrounge up some wild plants, a pair of gossamer wings emerged in her sphere of vision. They were followed by their owner, a fairy with insect-like black eyes and bark for skin.
Mokou smiled at it. "Hello, little one. Never seen one quite like you before."
The fairy flew closer to her, wriggling its tail-like appendages and antennae in the air. It chittered something indecipherable, Mokou kept smiling.
A moment later, the fairy got bored of her and began flying away.
And turned into a smouldering pile of ash before Mokou's eyes.
As Mokou stared at the ashes being swept away by the wind, quite certain she hadn't invoked her powers and that she had just witnessed a case of spontaneous combustion, a smooth, familiar voice spoke just by her ear: "Creatures like that have no place here."
"Why not?" Mokou tilted her head to see Yukari, who had now fully emerged from a gap and shielded them both with her parasol. "What was wrong with it?"
"She didn't belong to Gensokyo." And that was all Yukari was ever going to say on the subject. Mokou felt the most uncanny of déjà vus.
Yukari opened another wound in reality. She plunged her hand in. It returned with a bowl of rice.
"I would like take a stroll with you today," she said as she handed Mokou the bowl, followed by chopsticks and a plate of small fish.
Mokou discovered to her dismay that she could no longer recognise the fish. That didn't prevent her from sitting up and digging in. It had been so long since her last mouthful that her body was actively rejecting what it needed, but that was something she had learned to counteract millennia ago: she chewed slowly, even when her stomach lurched in protest, ignoring the taste and smell and texture whenever it offended and focused instead on the scenery.
Another fairy sprung up from grass, its white dress flowing, the sunflower it carried in full bloom. Yukari smiled drowsily at it.
Mokou polished off the last of the rice. She could easily have gone for more now that her body finally understood that what she was shovelling in was not poison and was in fact rather delicious. But it was enough. "Thanks."
Yukari smiled and spirited the plates away. Mokou momentarily amused herself by imagining a ring of bowls and cutlery circling the Earth's orbit.
Yukari offered Mokou her arm. Mokou leaned on it just long enough to stand up.
They travelled in silence, Mokou with her hands in her pockets, Yukari gliding elegantly across the grass. Already from a distance, Mokou could see the villagers milling about, opening their shops and setting up signs, sweeping their porches and chatting with their neighbours.
She and Yukari didn't attract the least bit of attention as they walked through the gates. As voluminous as Yukari's wide skirts were, somehow they were always a hair's breath away from ever coming to direct contact with anything in the village. Mokou followed behind her, taking in the sounds and smells of life. The owner of the noodle stall already opened for the morning, and despite her full stomach, she found her nose inevitably leading her towards it.
Shaking her head, she followed Yukari through the village. She had no money, and though in the past, she had often exchanged goods for her labour or by acting as a guide, well... circumstances were different now. There would always be another time for fresh noodles.
The dragon statue stood where it always did. its eyes were clouded over, as they had been every time Mokou had seen it during the past year.
She turned towards Yukari. "Do you have anywhere in particular you want to go to? Or are we just ambling about?"
"Whichever you prefer. There is no rush."
That was definitely keeping with the spirit of Gensokyo. It had always been roughly eleven months of peaceful, unchanging relaxation to each month of high-energy incidents. Furthermore, few of those incidents had concerned Mokou, and so her memories of the land was mostly about wandering the woods, taking one day at a time, and...
Yukari tilted her head, catching Mokou's attention. "Shall we move on?"
"Sure." The samey buildings merged into one another as Mokou walked by. How many small wooden shops had she seen over the years? How many stars were there in the firmament?
Even so, she could recognise the exact shade of blue in the striped curtains by the florist's shop, and the pair of children playing with a temari before it. She recognised the slight imperfections in the grain of the shop's walls, and the signs of wear on its surface. Yukari had gone to such meticulous detail in her recreation of Gensokyo that Mokou wasn't sure even Eirin, for all her superior intellect and nigh infinite knowledge, could have done better.
She stepped to the shop and touched the wall, sliding her fingers against the grain. Her finger snagged into a splinter.
Yukari smiled at her as she sucked out the offending bit of wood and spat it on the ground. "Did you expect the wall to give way?"
"No." She had already touched plenty of surfaces during her stay. None had been false. "Sometimes it's just good to remind yourself that it won't."
Yukari's smile vanished. As Mokou turned to find the cause for this sudden change, she nearly bumped into it.
Reimu Hakurei's rich brown eyes swept across Mokou with only a flicker of attention. She walked forward, in a slow but not particularly lackadaisical pace, her head held up, her expression level and inscrutable, seemingly oblivious to all the villagers staring at her and hurrying out of her way.
Even in a world of immaculately preserved details, Reimu's simulacrum appeared sculpted with exceptional care. Every line on her face, every slight imperfection of her skin, every bent strand of hair had been placed with a hand concerned at creating an exact replica. Mokou could no longer remember the Hakurei shrine maiden with enough detail to compare this spectre to her memory — in the interceding years, she had forgotten even the colour of her hair — but she had no doubt this Reimu was an exact snapshot of the original Reimu from a single moment in time, right down to the very last pore and cell.
Not a single muscle moved on Yukari's face as Reimu passed them by. It didn't matter. Mokou had seen enough.
She turned and left, confident Yukari would follow after her when it suited her.
"It's time for me to return to the real world."
"So soon?"
Mokou picked at a paper ribbon coming loose from her hair. Now that her stomach was full, she could fully appreciate the beauty of her surroundings: the whispers of the wind in the grass, the kaleidoscope of flowers, the slow procession of spotless white clouds marching across the skies. The air was a delight to breathe; the waters were bright, as clear as dew and home to beautiful water lilies and jewel-like dragonflies. She could fall asleep right where she lay now with no fear of suffocating on pollution, no fear of acid rains eating away her skin or toxic insects burrowing into her flesh and laying eggs into her innards and leaving her begging for death.
Truly, Gensokyo had been paradise.
"It's been a couple of centuries since I tore Kaguya's head off," she said. "She gets even smugger than usual if I don't beat it out of her. Trust me, you don't want to meet her when she's given time to get smug."
"I wouldn't dream of it." Yukari was nowhere to be seen, but Mokou knew she was close by. She always was. "I can take you directly to her and bring you back once you're done letting off steam."
"I'd rather spend some time on the outside anyway. I don't want to lose my touch."
"I see."
Much like the youkai of the original Gensokyo had become softer, more comprehensible, more human in every way, Yukari too had changed, but in the opposite direction: she still wore the skin of who she had once been, but whatever lurked beneath it was anyone's guess. If there had ever been anyone who had crossed one border too many, well...
Mokou smiled. Who was she to judge?
"I'll come back later," she said. "I like the peacefulness here."
"It's a good place to rest." If Mokou hadn't known better, she would have called Yukari's tone wistful.
Mokou closed her eyes and leaned backwards. The back of her head met with Yukari's lap and stayed there until she drifted off, unsure what kind of a hell she would awaken in next, but certain it would be no worse than what she had left behind.
Maybe the truth is obvious to whoever's reading this, but for all the time I spent with her, I never did figure out just what Yukari was. She was inscrutable like someone who had long since crossed the border between youkai and goddess, and then the border between goddess and whatever lies beyond, but then she would turn around and act so human in ways I had long since forgotten how.
I have to assume that for all her stupendous powers, she had once, long ago, started off as a human. Not that it matters. Any traces of humanity that clung to her eroded over the years, ground away like all earthly things not tainted by the Hourai Elixir.
Whatever she was and whatever she became, I didn't see her again. She may have died. She may have decided to remain in her Gensokyo for rest of eternity. If I had to make a real guess, however, I would she reached the borders of reality and crossed to worlds past my comprehension. If so, I wish her all the best.
It's only sometimes that I wonder what I would have done if she had asked me to join her on her journey. I still don't have a conclusive answer.
But then, it has long since ceased to matter.