Tojiko blinked rapidly and gazed upon the exact same dark corner of the mausoleum as she had before she closed her eyes. She stretched her arms for the sole sake of having something to do.
How long had it been since she had last thought about time? A month? A year? Ten minutes? In the mausoleum, time stood still. A minute was just as long as an hour, which was as long as a day. As ghosts didn't sleep, nothing separated one period of quiet solitude from another. It was always the same stone walls. The same dust. The same utter silence.
Yet, ever so slowly, the world outside changed. Seiga would visit at times, a welcome sight as much as Tojiko disliked her, and give Tojiko cryptic hints about world events. No doubt it was an attempt to entice her to leave Miko's side, but instead of following Seiga outside, Tojiko took every word she said and used them to create countless fanciful theories about the human world and kept herself entertained that way.
Her eyes had long grown accustomed to the lack of light in the crypt; she saw perfectly fine with the exception of muted colours. During her weakest hours, she could feel the darkness dulling her senses, trying to suffocate her mind. It was only then she would truly exert her abilities and light up the crypt with thunder until it resembled an electric summer day.
She tried not to remain idle. She honed her powers. She made up stories for her own amusement. She sang, ignoring how her siblings had once teased her about her singing voice sounding like the croaking of a dying frog. They were all as dead as she was, after all.
And whenever all else failed her, she dwelled in her memories.
It had taken effort, but most of her life had returned to her. Her childhood was relatively intact, and while the Miko in the stony tomb had forever replaced the ghost of the other Miko in her mind, she now remembered plenty of their life together.
And yet, her final weeks remained in the fog but for a few confused fragments, many of them mutually exclusive yet equally possible. And nothing that revealed her murderer.
It was burning Tojiko up from the inside, the uncertainty of it all. No doubt the solution to her predicament lay somewhere in the dusty recesses to her mind. It wouldn't bring her life back, but she still wished to find out exactly who had swapped the jar and exact her revenge.
An image of Seiga immediately swam to her mind, and she grimaced. She would never be convinced of Seiga's innocence, not until someone else was proven guilty.
If not Seiga, however, the second most likely culprit...
Tojiko floated to Futo's casket and looked at her face, so peaceful in deadly slumber.
It felt wrong. Hadn't they been friends? Tojiko recalled arguments, but also perfectly civil conversations, and far more affectionate events she wasn't sure had actually happened. Betrayal might have been in Futo's blood, but to be willing murder a friend for whatever ends?
But then, was such betrayal any worse than the fate of the Mononobe clan?
Tojiko hugged herself.
She had to be sure. Somewhere within her had to be a clue to Futo's motivations, something that would reveal if she had done it. All she had to do was to dig it out.
She sat down on the floor and fell into a brown study.