Storm. Amanda Sun
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in front of me, where the voice had come from. A woman knelt on the floor, the folds of her crimson kimono stretching in a pool of red around her. The sleeves of the kimono layered in a dozen different colors, all variations of black, red, gold and silver. An elaborate golden headdress rested on her head, the strings of golden beads tinkling against one another as she tilted her chin to the side.
“Okami Amaterasu,” I said, stepping over a long smear of ink on the tatami. I glanced at the fallen soldiers in the throne room as I walked toward her. “Who did this?”
“You did,” she said, and the world went cold with fear.
I shook my head. “I could never do something like this. And I only just got here.”
“There is only death,” she said. “There is no escape.”
Tomo had said those words so many times. He heard them in his nightmares, too.
“No escape from what?” I said. “Fate as a Kami?”
Amaterasu smiled sadly. “No escape from the past.” She twisted her knees to the side, the fabric of her red kimono swishing as she moved away slowly, and I saw one more body beside her.
“Tomo,” I whispered. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to wake up. I pinched my arm, hard, to remind myself this wasn’t real. It’s just a dream. But there was no comfort from seeing him there, lifeless, drenched in ink.
“Tsukiyomi,” she answered, and I saw then that his hair wasn’t copper, but black. I’d thought it was ink staining his hair, but he looked different—older, more worn and...less human than he’d ever looked, an almost angelic beauty that left me feeling terrified. He looked like a trickster fairy, the kind that was too beautiful to trust.
He was, and wasn’t, Tomo. I couldn’t explain it, except that dreams are strange and never quite right.
“I don’t understand,” I said. Was this all meaningless nightmare stuff? Why was I seeing this?
“I loved Tsukiyomi,” Amaterasu said. “And so I killed him.”
Ikeda had mentioned the story to me before, that Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi had once been lovers, before Tsukiyomi lost his mind.
“I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made.”
“The August Ones?”
“And now he’s dead. But he lives in the shards of his soul that carry on.” She motioned at the ground, and I saw shattered pieces of glass in every color.
“Like Tomo,” I said.
“Taira no Kiyomori, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yuu Tomohiro, all of them magatama of one soul,” she said.
I tilted my head. “Magatama?”
She motioned again to the broken glass. “Susanou shattered it,” she said. “Only the sword remains.” I looked to Jun and the stained sword at his side.
“Listen to me, child,” Amaterasu said to me. “Green means an eternal circle. You will betray Yuu Tomohiro, just as I have betrayed Tsukiyomi.”
The heat rose up in my cheeks. “I would never hurt him.”
She leaned back, the golden beads jingling on her headdress.
“You will kill him, before the end.”
My mind reeled. I wanted to retch. Kill him? Me?
I fell to my knees. “No,” I said. “This is just a stupid dream. I don’t have to do what you tell me. We make our own fates.”
“There is only one fate,” she said.
I looked down, my clothes soaked in ink.
I woke to my own screaming, to the sound of Diane thumping across the floor to hold me tightly in her arms.
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Tomo said, his eyes wide and filled with concern. We were hiding inside one of the Yayoi huts at Toro Iseki. His dad was asleep at home, after stumbling in from overtime work sometime in the middle of the night. Considering the whole separating-us-for-a-month business, this had seemed the best place to meet without anyone knowing.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said. “Anyway, I was pretty sure these were just typical nightmares. I mean, they don’t mean anything, right?”
Tomo pulled me toward him, wrapping me in the warmth and smell of him as we held each other. “They don’t,” he said gently, his voice against my ear. “I’ve been fighting them my whole life. Don’t listen to what they tell you. I never have.” But that was only half-true. He fought against it, sure, but he believed it, didn’t he? He believed he was a monster, that he only had a short time left, that in the end, there was only death.
I hadn’t told him everything about the dreams. It sounded stupid, but I was scared that if I said it out loud, that Tomo had died, that it would come true. I didn’t want to tell him Amaterasu had said I was the one who would betray him. Maybe she’d only meant the stupid mistake I’d made kissing Jun? But Tomo had forgiven me, and, anyway, Amaterasu’s face had looked like the topic was a whole lot more serious than a kiss.
Instead, I’d told Tomo about the castle and the dead samurai, about Tsukiyomi dead beside Amaterasu. “What did she mean by the Magatama?” I said as Tomo and I sat on the packed dirt floor, our backs pressed against the wall of the straw hut. “What is that?”
“It’s a curved jewel,” Tomo said. He lifted his hand palm-up, and I could see the ribbons of scars peeking out from under his soft wristband. “I’ve seen it before in my nightmares, too. Like glass in my hand...” He closed his hand slowly, remembering. “It shatters, and the shards dig into my skin. Kuse, they burn like fire.”
“It was broken in my dream, too,” I said. “There were sharp pieces all over the floor.”
“The Magatama is one of the Imperial Treasures,” Tomo said. “But I don’t get what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s just kami memories, from when they ruled Japan.”
“Imperial Treasures?” I wrapped my arms around my knees. “Like mythical, or real?”
“Real,” he said. “Well, sort of. They’re called the Sanshu no Jingi. They’re real, but I don’t know if the myths surrounding them are. There are three of them—the mirror, the sword and the jewel. I think they’re kept in the palace in Tokyo. The mirror is linked to Amaterasu. Not sure about the sword and Magatama.”
The large brass mirror, the one the paper Amaterasu had held in front of Jun in Nihondaira—it had revealed the truth about all of us, that we were tied to some kind of awful tragedy that kept repeating itself with the kami’s descendants. Jun and Tomo would always be enemies, because Susanou and Tsukiyomi were. And Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi, in love until...until what, exactly?
I shivered in the morning cold. “What happened between Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi?”
Tomo pulled the top of his knit hat until it snapped off his head, his copper spikes flopping around his ears. I felt the warmth from the hat as he gently pressed it onto my head, smoothing it over my hair and pulling it down over my ears. “Better?” he said. I nodded, and he grinned. “I don’t know what happened, Katie, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t us. They’re long gone.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But we still have to deal with their drama.” The mirror, the sword and the jewel. The sword...was it the one I had seen beside Jun? How did these treasures tie into all this? Were they really just fragments of kami memories?
Tomo took my hand in his and pulled me up from the ground. “We’ll beat this,” he said, his deep eyes searching mine. “You’ll be just fine.”
“So will you,” I said, and he smiled, but I saw the sadness in his eyes, the disbelief. Amaterasu’s