#datm

Hiyori sat there, curled into her strange silk chair for what could have either been a few minutes or several hours. Then a knock came at her door.

She didn’t have to open it, because the person who had knocked immediately poked her head inside. It was a rather strange head—one covered in pink curls, with an impish, catlike face that suggested its owner should never be left unattended near fragile objects.

“H-hello?” Hiyori said. She started to get out of the chair, but the intruder bounced into her room with a delighted shriek.

“No, no, no, no no no, don’t get up just for me!” the pink-haired person squealed. “I just came to see if it was true!”

Hiyori sank back down.

“If what?” she asked, thoroughly perplexed.

The intruder gave an insolent wink, a dirty grin playing hide-and-seek on her lips. “If the boss really did kidnap a pretty girl from upstairs, and bring her down into his lair for his own evil purposes.”

The stranger ignored the raging blush that surged into Hiyori’s cheeks, and perched on the arm of her chair like an exceptionally large kitten.

“He didn’t—wait—kidnap?” Hiyori sputtered, wondering exactly how fast gossip spread in the underworld.

“I’m Kofuku,” the stranger said, thrusting a tiny hand toward Hiyori. “Fate of the Damned. It’s nice to meet you.”

Hiyori gave Kofuku’s hand a tentative shake.

“Hiyori,” she offered. “Fate of the…Damned?”

Even as the words left her mouth, she wondered if she really wanted to know the answer. Kofuku leaped off the arm of the chair and crashed to her knees at Hiyori’s feet. She settled her elbows across her lap, staring up at her with a wide, unnerving smile.

“I want to be friends with you, Hiyori,” she said. “So let’s not talk about my work, okay?”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Let’s talk about you instead!”

With that, Kofuku bounced upright again. She seemed incapable of remaining still for five consecutive seconds.

“What do you want to know about me?” Hiyori asked.

“Everything!” Kofuku chirped, proceeding to tick them off on her fingers. “Your best friend, favorite color, favorite animal, greatest fear, guilty pleasure, favorite food—”

She cut herself off suddenly, putting her thumb to her lip.

“Hmm. Maybe not that last one.”

Hiyori felt a return of the dizziness she had experienced while standing on the edge of the cliff. Kofuku’s questions clamored against the inside of her skull like so many hummingbirds. At last, she took a deep breath and said:

“I think…the first thing you should really know about me is that I’m supposed to be dead.”

Kofuku’s gaze locked on Hiyori again. This time, her eyes weren’t mischievous. They were unfathomable.

“Silly Hiyori,” she said quietly. “I already knew that.”

: : :

Without the rhythm of daylight and dusk, Hiyori quickly lost track of how long she had spent in the underworld. After silently escorting her to her new home, Yato had disappeared, and for the last two days (or what she assumed to be two days), she had seen neither hide nor hair of him. She didn’t know where to find him, and after their last interaction, she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

She had not been offered any hospitality beyond the provision of a room. In fact, Kofuku had, in the strictest manner she was capable of, instructed her not to eat anything. Hiyori’s interest was piqued.

“Do none of you eat?” she asked. No god nor spirit needed physical sustenance, but it was highly uncommon for any to abstain entirely. Kofuku wrinkled her nose and raised a reprimanding finger to Hiyori’s lips.

“No,” she said. “No, we can.” She grinned hugely. “I lo-o-ove eating.”

Hiyori’s brow furrowed, and she opened her mouth to press the issue.

“You shouldn’t, though,” Kofuku said suddenly. Her voice was suddenly low and serious. “Please remember that.”

Hiyori paused, and then nodded with equal seriousness.

But no one had told her she couldn’t explore.

The palace itself was not an impressive structure: a series of vaulted, interlocking chambers built into the lofty walls of the underworld itself. Hiyori’s room was near the front, close enough to the opening archway for her to see the lanterns from the door. She didn’t venture much farther into the palace, but she sometimes heard voices echoing within the deeper corridors. She recognized Yukine’s more than once.

She often walked outside the palace, among the blue lanterns that lit the way down to the riverbank. She followed the winding, silent water along its length, noticing how its shallow ripples reflected the motionless constellations above.

She sat down, and closed her eyes, and for a moment she could imagine that the pebbled, grassless riverbank was lit by the real sun. But when she opened her eyes again, it was still a cold river, and a silent black world, and a blanket of beautiful, dead stars above her head.

: : :

She caught Yukine on one of his passes by her room.

“Hello,” she said in a friendly voice, stepping out in front of him. The boy nearly jumped almost out of his sandals at her sudden appearance.

“Hello,” he said suspiciously, eyeing her like she was more dangerous and unsettling than the millions of dead people who occupied the underworld. Hiyori cleared her throat.

“I was just wondering,” she said, “if there were any way for me to talk to Yato.”

Yukine’s lips pressed together.

“I’m very busy,” he said shortly.

“I know, and I really am sorry to intrude.” She held her hands out in a supplicating gesture.

“We just,”—she cleared her throat softly, trying to sound persuasive. “He and I…made an agreement. And I’d like to speak to him about it. If you could help me, I would appreciate it beyond anything.”

Hiyori gave him a genuine smile, and Yukine reddened to the tips of his ears.

“Fine,” he squeaked. “This way.”

He began marching stiffly past her through the wide corridor, and Hiyori followed. Even in the dim lighting, she saw that the back of his neck was pink.

The corridor twisted and narrowed, and smaller hallways spidered off of it into complete blackness. Torches were set into brackets at uneven intervals along the walls, but failed to completely dispel the dark. Hiyori shivered, and trotted to keep up with Yukine. He was walking so quickly that Hiyori found herself thinking he might be trying to shake her off.

“H-how do you find your way around in this place?” she asked when she caught up to him, huffing a bit.

“It’s easy when you’ve been here a while,” he said shortly.

They passed under another torch, and Hiyori studied Yukine’s face in the brief wash of light. His cheeks were puffed out, and he stared straight ahead with a stiff neck. She wondered if he felt ill.

“You really know how to get everywhere?” she asked him. “That’s kind of amazing.”

Yukine’s eyes flicked over to her in surprise, and Hiyori gave him a kind smile in return. His ears darkened from rose pink to a deep, brilliant plum.

“Not—not really,” he muttered, and ducked his head.

Just as Hiyori was about to ask Yukine how far exactly they were going to walk, the corridor began to widen in front of them. Beyond the final pair of torch sconces, it opened into a large, domed stone cavern. A wrought-iron lamp hung from the ceiling, casting living, flickering shadows along the stone walls. A rough bench was carved into the wall of the cavern, curving around the whole room. On the opposite side of the chamber from where the corridor ended, Hiyori saw a pair of enormous, elaborately carved stone doors.

“Are we…here?” she asked hesitantly.

Yukine gave a curt nod. “Can you wait a moment?” he asked, gesturing to the bench. Hiyori sat down, and watched Yukine cross the room to pull one of the doors open. He vanished inside, and the door closed behind him with a final, resonant boom.

As the minutes passed, Hiyori tapped her fingers on her lap. The light and shadow from the lamp danced across the wall, and her mind jumped unbidden to the celebrations of spring and harvest. Suddenly, more than anything in the whole world, she craved the feeling of grass beneath her feet. She wanted to run, not over unforgiving stone, but over the soft earth, through the whipping wheat stalks, on the banks of rivers full of flashing fish. She wanted her skin to taste sunlight.

Something cold had begun growing in her, ever since she fled to the underworld. Hiyori didn’t want to think too much about what would happen if that cold ever reached her heart.

From behind the stone door, she heard raised voices.

Slowly, stealthily, Hiyori scooted across the stone bench. It curved around the wall, moving nearer to the door. She strained her ears, trying to make out the words of the conversation inside.

There were two voices. The higher one was definitely Yukine’s. The other could only be—

Suddenly the doors slammed open, and Yukine stormed out, letting it slam closed behind him. Hiyori couldn’t even catch a glimpse of the room behind it before she had to rush after him down the dark hallway, lest he leave her alone in the waiting chamber.

“How did it go?” she asked Yukine’s back anxiously. He made an inarticulate, irritated noise, and Hiyori was suddenly reminded of an angry squirrel. Even his hair seemed to poof in agitation.

“Can I speak to him?” she tried, her hope fading quickly. Whatever had happened behind that closed door, it hadn’t been friendly.

“No,” Yukine said harshly. Hiyori flinched. They were walking even faster away from the throne room than they had walked toward it, and despite the fact that his legs were shorter than hers, Hiyori was practically sprinting to keep up.

“Well—what happened then?” she demanded. Yukine stopped abruptly in the middle of the hallway, and Hiyori barreled into him. He turned to face her, and she reeled back, too shocked to apologize.

His eyes burned in his sharp, pale face like twin suns, and Hiyori stifled a gasp. There was no ordinary soul aflame in this strange boy.

“‘What happened,’ is not your business,” he said. There was an authoritative ring to his voice that told her he was not just being petulant. “You are not to explore, and above all, you are not to try to leave. You will receive no more explanation, and you will demand none..”

Hiyori stared at him. Everything in his face and posture had changed, making him seem taller, older. There was something already careworn about him, despite his youth.

“Is something wrong?” she ventured, hoping he wouldn’t take it as prying.

Yukine’s eyes wandered away from hers, looking somewhere past her head.

“There are rules you must follow to live here, Hiyori,” he said. “We all must.”

Then he turned, and walked onward in silence. She followed him back to her room, and then let him shut the door behind her.

: : :

There may not have been a reliable way to tell time, but Hiyori was starting to learn the rhythm of the underworld.

She was accustomed to reading the angle of the shadows, and mapping the trajectory of the sun and stars, but here there was no sun, and the stars never moved. There were only candles, and the strange, cool blue light that seemed to suffuse the entire landscape. Nevertheless, she hadn’t missed the hum of energy here that ebbed and flowed with the hours, and Hiyori thought she could untangle it enough to know when night was approaching.

She was sure it had been several hours since Yukine marched her back into her room. If that had been early afternoon, it was now the time of sunset. Or something like that. She did not like her ignorance of what the hour should be, but there were more pressing matters than her timetable.

Hiyori sat on the bed, cross-legged, eyes closed, concentrating with every ounce of her focus on the branching forks of the underground hallways. Right, left, left, middle, left, right.

Her eyes opened, and she got up from the bed. She removed her sandals and walked to the door with footfalls as quiet as feathers. She unlocked the door, and it swung silently open. Hiyori shut the door behind her and began walking, into the heart of the labyrinthine corridors that Yukine had led her down only hours previously.

The passage forked. Right. She walked down the righthand path, which was broader, well-lit with sconces every few feet along the stone walls. She listened for voices, and heard only the soft crackle of flames.

Left. She chose the narrower path at the next fork.

Left. Narrower still. She remembered nearly tripping over an unevenness in the floor as she strove to keep up with Yukine’s quick steps. Her toe hit the shallow stone ledge, and it reassured her she was still going the right way.

The corridor split again, this time in three directions. Hiyori paused.

The middle passage was what she thought she remembered, but as she looked at the righthand hall, her memory began to betray her. They both looked like the correct route to take. She ground her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, trying to recall it—forcing the knowledge to reveal itself.

She emptied her brain, making room for the pathway to unfold itself in front of her like a ball of thread in a maze. And then, she heard voices, coming from the righthand passageway.

And they were close.

Hiyori threw herself into the middle corridor, her feet slapping heavily on the stone. The middle tunnel was quiet and dark, the uneven walls pocked with holes and nooks. Hiyori darted a few feet down the path, and then, when the voices drew near, she tucked herself behind a stony outcropping, pressing a hand over her mouth to hide her harsh, panicked breaths.

She heard a voice, magnified and echoing against the stone walls.

“…not sure anyone knows what will happen if he finds out the contract was breached.”

This voice was unfamiliar. A male voice. It sounded young.

“But isn’t this sort of thing exactly what he would want?” said another voice. Kofuku.

Hiyori hid a small intake of breath. For some reason, it had never occurred to her that the odd girl had business in the palace beyond sneaking into her bedroom and asking her embarrassing questions.

“You can say his name,” said a third voice. Yukine. As usual, he sounded annoyed. “It’s not like it’s a curse. Besides, Yato knows Fujisaki’s methods better than anyone else.”

Hiyori stiffened at Fujisaki’s name. The stone wall against her back felt suddenly much colder.

“But he hasn’t exactly been subtle about wanting Yato dead,” the first voice said uneasily. The three sets of footsteps were receding, and Hiyori had to strain her ears for the last snippets of their conversation.

“Why wouldn’t he use any excuse to wage a war?”

“You don’t tend to fight the dead and win,” Yukine countered, and Kofuku giggled nervously. She said something else, but it was lost to the echoes and emptiness of the tunnels.

Hiyori removed her hand from her mouth, and stepped out from behind the outcropping. As far as she could tell, the hallway was empty again. She slipped out of the shadows of the middle corridor, catching a glimpse of the retreating backs of Kofuku, Yukine, and another figure she didn’t recognize. Wasting no time, she darted down the path from which they had just emerged. Hurrying through its twists and switchbacks, she finally found herself in the circular waiting room where Yukine had left her earlier.

Her eyes were almost magnetically drawn to the enormous, intricate doors—which were firmly closed.

Hiyori squared her shoulders. It was hard to summon the strength of her will down here, so far away from the sunlight, from the soft and growing things that shared their vitality with her. But she would still try.

She walked to the doors. Putting one hand on each door, she pushed: at first tentatively, then, as the carvings bit her palms, she put more of her weight into it. The doors scraped against each other with the rough, ugly noise of stone against stone, but did not open. Hiyori grunted, sweated, pushed. She collapsed against the doors, her breathing coming in short, sharp bursts as her heartbeat thundered in her ears like a god’s hammer. She tasted the bitterness of exertion in the back of her throat.

It was making her weak, this place. She would need to ask for help.

Hiyori closed her eyes, leaning with one shoulder against the unrelenting door. With her eyes closed, she reached above her head with her thoughts, looking for something alive.

There was something there—far, far above her. Something that grew thick and strong in the warm, sleeping dark. She felt it: a strong, living, fibrous web so far above her head, and then she began to whisper.

At first, there was nothing. For a long time, there was nothing.

Then, the smooth, domed ceiling of the room began to crawl. Something—many somethings—crept along it, twining and interlocking, searching without eyes and listening without ears. They poured through the ceiling, loosening the deep, wet soil, raining dirt and rocks that clattered against the metal of the chandelier. Around the massive door the roots gathered, eating at the rock, finding footholds in the hairline cracks of it. The roots burrowed in the hinges, forcing space to exist where there had been none before, choking and squeezing and tightening until the doors cracked tortuously away from their frame with a sullen crash.

Hiyori opened her eyes, feeling the weight of success rumble through her heels as the doors fell. She sucked in a small gasp at the sight of the thick, ropy tangle of roots she had pulled out of the ceiling. Maybe she wasn’t as weak as she thought.

Pushing her way through the mass of black roots, and brushing a few of the smaller tendrils away from her face, Hiyori entered the throne room of the underworld for the first time.

The room beyond the doors was large, but not as large as she expected. She had thought the place would be at least as grand as the heavenly throne room, if not more so. As it turned out, the room looked a great deal like the rest she had already seen.

It was a long, narrow chamber, with sconces burning every few feet along the damp stone walls as they did in the tunnels. It looked almost like a temple, save for the long, plain table running lengthwise from where Hiyori stood. The table’s surface was completely bare except for a few sheafs of parchment, which lay scattered across it. A few were strewn on the floor, as though someone had tossed them roughly aside. Beyond the table, at the end of the long, dim room, the floor rose in shallow steps up to a dais, where Hiyori saw a chair.

This chair was quite obviously a throne. It was big, and heavy-looking, and carved out of something that glistened like polished silver in the torchlight. The back of the chair rose almost as high as the shadowy ceiling, and Hiyori noticed it was wrought in the same elaborate designs that had covered the doors. It did not look like a very comfortable place to sit.

It was also empty.

She frowned. This was not ideal. Her grand entrance had gone completely unnoticed.

Hiyori had thought, at the very least, that Yato would be here in person so she could demand an audience. As it was, she had just used a lot of innocent, confused roots, and a lot more of her dwindling power, to break into an empty room.

She tried not to let herself feel defeated. He was in this room often, wasn’t he? This was where Yukine had brought her. Reason stood that if she waited here long enough, someone would arrive.

She looked around the large, uninviting room for somewhere to make herself comfortable. There were no chairs around the long table, and there was no bench, as there had been in the circular antechamber.

In fact, there was only one seat available.

Hiyori walked past the table and up the shallow stairs toward it. Her heart was beating faster than normal. It occurred to her, just in passing, that anyone who was not meant for the throne of the dead might find themselves cursed as soon as they touched it.

It also occurred to her that she couldn’t very well get more cursed than having to flee heaven and seek refuge among the spirits, gods, and other strange beings of the underworld.

So she sat down.

The throne was more comfortable than it looked. Despite the silver spirals and knobs covering it, the huge chair seemed to bend and soften to accommodate her body. Hiyori adjusted to it, rolling her shoulders experimentally and settling her elbows on top of the intricate armrests. When no curse immediately manifested itself, she even ventured to think she could sit here for quite a while, if necessary.

She leaned her head against the back of the throne. Her lips twitched upwards at the thought of the look on Yato’s face when he walked into the room and found her sitting in his special chair.