by Carly Chase
“I will, Anya, you have my word. But not now. We have something else we need to do now.”
“Oh, sure, I mean, I didn’t mean to ask anything rude, I’m just… curious about yokai is all. No rush. But what is it we need to do now?”
“Go and see Shiro. You’ve been awake all day and so I want to see if the potion has worn off on her too yet, so we can find out exactly what was going on in the town. And whether Ikari and I need to cause further problems for that priest...”
Kiba, truthfully, had been planning to wait for Sakura to let them know once the girl, and by extension Yuki, had woken up, but going there now suddenly seemed like a good idea. He’d just let the right time to show Anya his true form present itself once she seemed to feel safe enough with him.
As they walked the now increasingly familiar forest paths to where Kiba said Shiro was being kept, in Sakura’s home, Anya couldn’t help but admire the village. The pine forest made way for houses off of fragrant paths with wildflowers, as well as some other basic amenities like the village’s meeting hall, and a small row of market stalls. It was the houses that most impressed her though – ornate and beautifully decorated with lacquered flowers on the outside, and gilded details on things like window frames. She had never seen anything like it anywhere – not even in books. The small house she was staying in – apparently a vacant one that Sakura had offered her use of for as long as she needed – was humble on the inside, but just as pretty from outside.
“The kitsune have such amazing homes. As an artist, I just want to sit down and paint them!” she remarked to Kiba.
Kiba shrugged.
“They’re just wooden shacks – I would have thought the houses in the priest’s town would have made much better subjects for a painting.”
Anya gaped. How could he call these lavishly designed houses just wooden shacks? She was about to ask what kind of home he must have to find these so unimpressive, remembering that he was the leader of the tiger clan, so maybe had a palace or something, when Sakura came gliding out of her house towards them. Her effortless smile made it clear what had happened.
“The girl is awake, and ready to talk now – please, come and listen. Though, she has already assured me that my Yuki is going to be OK. Come, Ikari is already inside.”
A pang of nervousness dug into Anya. It was going to be weird meeting Shiro, after what had happened. Instinctively, she found herself shrinking closer to Kiba as they followed Sakura inside, his confident way of moving helping her feel a little stronger.
The girl was recovering in a similar room to Anya’s: bare, but not uncomfortable, with a futon on the ground where she was sitting up, smiling serenely, just as she had in her sleep. In the corner of the room, Kiba’s younger brother Ikari sat on a wooden chair, his pose indicating nonchalance, with his ankle crossed over his knee, but it was the practiced nonchalance of a man in early adulthood who didn’t want to look too fazed by things – his expression belied his concern for the girl.
Didn’t Kiba say Ikari and Yuki belonged together? They must have been in love.
“Now, everyone who may be able to add some understanding of the matter is here. Please, can you tell us what happened with you and Yuki and the priest?” Sakura asked the girl gently, kneeling down next to her bedside.
“Who’s she?” Shiro said, instead of answering the question, tilting her head in a curious, rather than confrontational way at Anya.
“This is Anya. She’s human. She was in the room at the priest’s house where you were being kept drugged, until Ikari rescued you.” Kiba said.
“She’s different, isn’t she?” Shiro said, her tone wistful.
Anya felt she should speak - Shiro had probably never seen a black person before, and now she was dressed in the style of a kitsune woman too, Anya knew she probably made for a very unique sight for the girl.
“I, well, it’s hard to explain, because I don’t fully understand it myself, but your brother Mamoru was trying to summon someone here, and he got me instead. I’m from another world and another time, if that’s not too unbelievable. But, they don’t have yokai where I come from. I have only experienced kindness from the yokai who brought us here – I’m certain we’ll be safe here. I just hope you don’t think I made a bad choice doing, well, less to maybe stop that happening, I didn’t know what was going on, and I’m not much of a fighter, but Ikari seemed only to want to help you, despite what Mamoru had said, so I didn’t try to stop him… And then I passed out too, and now... we’re here.”
“Oh, of course we’ll be safe here with Ikki and everybody! Wow, a world with no yokai? I bet you love it here then! Much less boring!” Shiro said stretching.
But Ikari was leaning forward now, confusion on his handsome face.
“Ikki? Only Yuki calls me by that stupid name. Who are you?”
“I am Yuki, sort of. Except now I’m Shiro too. I guess I’m Yuki-Shiro!” she said cheerfully, seemingly unmoved by how weird an answer this was.
“Maybe you should start at the beginning?” said Sakura.
And so, Yuki-Shiro told her version of the events Anya had first heard from Mamoru.
Chapter 11
Shiro and Yuki had been best friends since childhood, with Yuki being the only girl her age in the kitsune village, and Shiro in a similar predicament in the human town. They’d met when Yuki was exploring and experimenting to see how close she could get to a human barrier, and Shiro had wandered outside of the wards to pick flowers. Shiro had been intrigued by Yuki in her fox form, which she’d used to sneak around the forest by the town in. But as soon as she’d realized this was not a real animal, but a girl the same age as her, Shiro had felt not the fear that her brother had encouraged her to feel towards yokai, but a strong desire to be friends. Yuki had shown her how she could use her kitsune illusion magic – which only worked on humans – to play pranks on passing merchants. Harmless, silly pranks, but vastly more fun than anything the young Shiro got to do in the town.
This all sounds a lot more wholesome than what Mamoru was imagining…
Shiro had tried to persuade Mamoru that Yuki was good, and her friend, but he remained insistent that it was yokai trickery, and wouldn’t listen to a word of it. Instead, he insisted that Shiro make do with his assistant Reo as her only friend.
“He really wanted me and Reo to get married. I hope Reo gets up the courage to tell him he prefers boys sometime soon!” Yuki-Shiro said, with a cute giggle, as if sharing fun gossip.
Anya realized this part of the story was being told for her benefit, as the others in the room were probably already aware that the Yuki they knew had a human friend. So, as intrigued as she was to hear more about what the friendship between the two lonely young girls had been like, she felt it best to move on to the part that Ikari, Kiba and Sakura had been waiting so anxiously to find out about.
“So, Mamoru told me that you, well, Shiro, was cursed when he found the kitsune – Yuki – trying to attack her in the woods. He said he’d purified the kitsune, but in its last moments it had cursed Shiro, and that is why she was in a coma when I first saw her.”
Anya was finding it hard to know how to address the girl, now she was, supposedly, two people, both of whom appeared as separate beings in the story the priest had told her. Ikari let out a grunt of disgust at hearing what he thought already to be the priest’s lie, though, and Anya knew they’d understood her retelling perfectly well.
“No, no, that’s not what happened. Well, the first part may be what Mamoru thought happened, but the curse part… No. I have all of my memories – those that were Yuki’s, and those that were Shiro’s, and I can tell you what happened from our perspective. I – Shiro-me – snuck out to meet Yuki, which we used to do all the time, so it didn’t feel like it was going to be dangerous. Yuki-me transformed into fox form, because she wanted to show me that she’d got her eighth tail – and tell me something else too, something concerning Ikki that I won’t go into now...” she blushed slight
ly, and with a sideways glance Anya could see Ikari’s face light up.
“So she wasn’t attacking you, but Mamoru thought she was, maybe?”
“I guess, but Shiro-me didn’t look afraid… Although maybe I did, maybe I looked afraid when I saw my brother, because I thought he’d do something like… Well, what he did. Shiro-me begged him not to, and Yuki-me dashed behind a tree to try and transform back into human form and reason with him – couldn’t do that in front of him, my kimono was behind the tree...”
Of course, when they change forms their clothes can’t possibly just magically reappear, they must have to get naked...
Anya pushed back the fleeting thought of what Kiba might look like naked – now wasn’t the time, even if the idea was rather appealing.
“Shiro-me was between the tree, and Mamoru, but he shot his spell right through all of us. The thing is, Mamoru, he’s not a very powerful priest. Not powerful enough to purify a powerful kitsune in one shot. Also, he assumed the spell would just go straight through Shiro-me, because I was human, but it had some weird effect I guess. Yuki-me was badly damaged – she lost her physical form altogether – but somehow Shiro-me opened up, and in that moment our spirits or souls or whatever merged and – ta-da! Yuki-Shiro!”
She sounds like she’s happy about it… Well, I guess they were best friends, and for Shiro it’s almost certainly an escape from the life she found so boring. But to become a whole new being with two people’s memories… That must be pretty trippy.
“So what about the curse? Why were you being kept unconscious in that room?”
“When Shiro-me realized what had happened, I let Mamoru think his spell had worked properly and Yuki-me had been purified. I was crying and yelling at him anyway for even trying it, so it was easy to make him think I was upset that my friend was gone. But, when we got to the town barrier, I realized that I couldn’t pass. I’m at least half yokai after all! And it hurt, it hurt so much that the Yuki part of me was screaming, and then I transformed without meaning to. Mamoru must have thought that was some kind of curse, and so he forced me to get so close to the barrier I passed out. That’s all I remember. I guess he was keeping me unconscious like that because he was scared of me now, maybe trying to figure out how to get rid of Yuki-me...”
“You can still transform into fox form?” Sakura asked, looking delighted that this might be the case, and she might be able to see a version of her daughter she remembered again.
“Not quite. I have a new form now. Everyone close your eyes and I’ll show you! I have to mess about with my nightdress a bit to do it...” said Yuki-Shiro, like a kid who wanted to show off an impressive new trick.
Anya looked nervously to Kiba who shrugged and closed his eyes, so she followed suit.
“OK, I’ve done it! You can look now!”
Anya gasped, and hugged herself a little – she’d worked in the toy industry long enough to know that the girl’s other form was just plain adorable! Her face and body remained as they were as Shiro, but now her long black hair was white, like Sakura’s, with white fox ears sticking out from underneath it. Anya briefly wondered if she still had human ears too, but that was a question for later. The irises of Yuki-Shiro’s eyes were now a burning red-orange, but the biggest change was poking out behind her – the reason why she had had to ‘mess about with her nightdress’. Soft, bushy, white fox tails. Anya counted them, but before she could finish, Sakura said -
“Nine tails. You’re all grown up!”
“Oh! There were still eight before – I guess the last one came in while I was unconscious! How long has it been?”
“35 days,” Ikari said quietly.
“Well, that was fast for my last tail! I guess Shiro-me was a little older though before, so… Well, I guess I’m a ninetails human-yokai Yuki-Shiro girl now! But… Do you like this form?”
The last line was clearly directed at Ikari.
Anya saw the glass of tears in Ikari’s eyes, and he smiled gently, just as she’d seen him do when he’d picked the girl up in his arms at Mamoru’s house.
“I love it.”
Yuki-Shiro grinned.
“Good, cos I’m gonna stay in this one most of the time – both parts of me like it better than being a normal boring human! Oh… No offense – you’re not boring, you’re from another world and have pretty brown skin and cool hair!” she added to Anya.
Sakura was smiling.
“Kiba, I think your family – our family – we are to be blessed with a lot of firsts.”
Anya had no idea what she meant.
Chapter 12
After the revelations were over, Sakura discretely suggested that she was going to prepare some food in the kitchen, and that she’d bring some over to Anya and Kiba at the house Anya was staying in when it was ready. It was clear that her intention was to leave Ikari and Yuki-Shiro alone together, and Anya and Kiba took the hint and excused themselves, back out into the forest where the sun was now setting.
“She doesn’t seem upset by any of this at all, does she? I mean, she just seems like a happy, cheerful girl...” Anya mused, as they passed through the trees in the hazy light.
“People may say the same about you. You have been stolen here from another world, drugged, and brought into the affairs of races of people you didn’t even know existed, who are usually hated and feared by your own kind. Yet you are calm, and kind, and despite the strangeness of it all, you’ve used your strength and intelligence only to help.”
Anya felt her cheeks warm pleasantly.
Is that really how he sees me? I have just been trying to be logical about things so I don’t go insane… Really I feel like completely losing my shit is always only one wrong thought away.
“To be called strong by the leader of the tiger clan is high praise!” she said, trying to make light of how much his compliment had moved her.
“There are lots of different types of strength. Yours, and Yuki-Shiro’s, may exceed mine when it comes to some things. Nonetheless, I will never see you as anything less than equal, I can promise you that.”
That was quite an unnecessarily intense thing to say… Why is he being so serious?
“So, uh, did you know Yuki before? Did she seem very different now?”
“I think that most of what we heard there sounded exactly like Yuki. Yuki was – is – a girl with a love of life, and fun, and mischief, one who delights in making friends and entertaining people. Perhaps Shiro was a shier person, and now they are one, her Yuki side does most of the talking, and her Shiro side comes out more in her private time. Though that is only speculation – none of us met Shiro when she was awake after all.”
“Won’t it be strange for Ikari, though? He loves Yuki, right? Will he struggle to accept her Shiro side? Especially given that’s the human part of her...”
Can a yokai ever even conceive of being with a human?
“To Ikari, this will not matter. This was destined to happen to Yuki, and so if it is Yuki he loves, he will love her in any form.”
They’d reached the house now, and went inside, sitting at the small table in the room adjacent to the bedroom, facing one another. There was still summer evening light coming in through the window, creating a kind of golden glow that bathed the room. Somehow Anya liked the close atmosphere it created too much to want to light any of the lamps just yet. There was the sound of cicadas outside and the smell of wildflowers all around, where someone – presumably Sakura – had hung some to dry by the window. It felt incredibly peaceful, and incredibly intimate, as they sat for a moment in thoughtful, comfortable silence.
“People I’ve met here, both the yokai, and the priests, they all talk about destiny a lot. I’d never really thought about whether I believed in it, back home,” Anya said, after a while.
“And what do you think now?”
“Well, Mamoru – that’s the priest, not your favorite guy I imagine – he told me that the reason I came to this world, when I’m not the person he t
ried to summon, was that my destiny was tied to this place. That’s why I can’t go back. I’m supposed to be here, he said. So I guess, it’s better to believe in that and have something to live for, than to not….”
“The priest told a lot of lies, but that wasn’t one of them. I can promise you, there is a reason why this happened to you.”
“But, do you believe that about everything? That everything happens for a reason and there is no free will? Doesn’t that make everything feel a bit pointless? Like, why worry about a decision, when you’ll inevitably make the one you were always going to make? Like, do you think everything will always turn out alright?”
Kiba’s beautiful face looked pensive in the ever diminishing light.
“It is true that we see things that have happened to us as part of our destiny in this world, but we have nothing to guide us. We have to think through our choices as much as anybody who doesn’t believe in destiny, because destiny doesn’t give us any clues – well, except about a few matters… The only difference is that when something distressing or strange occurs, we know that it is part of something bigger, more important, and necessary. As for everything always turning out alright, well, no, we can’t believe that, at least not on a personal level. I may be destined to die in a conflict, and that conflict may cause strife for many for generations, but its eventual resolution will be better for the world. Destiny isn’t kind to everyone, in fact, some of us, in our darker moments, when we think about it too much, can feel like meaningless dust, within a much grander enterprise. So we just live our lives, like anybody else. We try and survive. We are just aware that there is at least some meaning to it all, even if we’ll never live to see what it is.”
