Story:

A moment later, and night had folded itself over the mountain.

Behind the shrine temple, the sky was spilling its whole treasury out—

A deep country sky, no city smoke anywhere near it, the Milky Way running from peak to peak like a spilled river of salt.

In that light, on that hill, Miko Shiro sat alone in meditation, spine straight, hands folded—and accomplishing nothing of it.

Her mind would not settle. Every breath she drew came up tangled: the farewell, the empty square.

The war councils, the seven days, the smoking mountain above them all. And beneath everything, oldest and deepest, the one thread fate kept refusing to cut—

She did not hear the Violet Witch approach. She simply became aware of her:

Euphy settling quietly down onto the grass beside her, radiating warmth and the scent of her prefume.

Shiro opened her black eyes. Paused her failed meditation. Said nothing.

Euphy lay back on the grass, arms behind her head.

Shiro, after a moment, followed—and the two of them lay side by side on the hillside, staring up into the burning star-fields, while the crickets ran their long rhythmic argument in the grass below.

"...I don't understand fate," Shiro said at last, to the stars. "I really don't."

"Mm," said Euphy, inviting more.

"Ten years I've served this shrine. Ten years of purifications and wards and hunts. And he—"

Shiro's hands closed in the grass, tearing up little roots, "—the vampire. Bel. Or Bill Ebonhart—if they're even the same person, I've never been able to prove it, never been allowed to catch him, from time to time, over a decade."

"And now, the shadow rift in the cave below the waterfall opens, and the war arrives, and it's him again. Him under everything. Him underneath the demons, underneath the nest, underneath this entire age." Her voice cracked, quiet.

"It's like fate won't let me go in this lifetime. Like he's the curse of my whole existence, and I am chained to him until one of us ends."