Story:

The Yamato Shrine was quieter without Shiro, Ai, and Mai in it.

It was remarkable, Chitose thought, how much sound three people could carry away with them.

The dormitory wing stood dark at the wrong hours. The training yard held its forms and drills with two gaps in every line.

Even the cats had gone sulky, prowling the empty verandas, yowling at doors that no longer opened to three particular pairs of hands.

A shrine full of miko still lived and worked and chanted here—yet the mountain itself seemed to know that something essential had gone out through the back gates, past the waterfall, into the dark between worlds.

Shrine Master Kannagi Chitose knelt in the main temple, before the great altar of the guardian deities, and prayed.

She was past the age of asking the kami for small things, and she did not ask for small things now. She prayed for her daughter—not her daughter by blood, but the daughter the mountain had given her anyway, and those weigh more.

She prayed for that unconscious girl from ten years ago, now walking in a world Chitose could not imagine, toward a battle Chitose could not picture, against a foe Chitose could not name, with two foreign witches and two cursed children at her side.

Impossible mission, the old woman had called it, to herself, honestly. Send five souls through a wound between worlds to slay the root of a demon lord at his source. No scroll in the shrine's oldest archive held a story half so mad.

So she pressed her forehead to the cold floor of the temple, and prayed the only prayer that mattered:

Let fate be on Shiro's side. Let the road that dropped her here, carry her home. And if the gods are listening, you owe this shrine a debt ten years in arrears—so protect her. Protect all five of them.

The lamps guttered. The mountain smoked. Somewhere on the backhill, the waterfall fell, aura over a sealed cave.