---
title: "The Vega of Weaving Blue Sky — First Song: The Dancing Fox's Wish"
chars: 59096
---
## Prologue
—It was a beautiful sunset sky.
Beneath that summer sky, the crisp, bright tones of an acoustic guitar went racing.
A simple, bounding run of notes, played by nothing but the player’s fingers and the strings they plucked.
“The sky, surely—”
Her chestnut hair bouncing to that melody, the singer girl—Mita Nene—kept sending her song out, strong and sure, from a “make-believe” open-air stage without so much as a microphone.
There was just the one song—and a brand-new one at that, finished only this morning, still warm from the oven. The chords were rough, and the nerves of a first performance set her plucking hand trembling, so the mistakes came thick and fast.
“The blue sky, surely—”
But Nene sang on, over and over, this song that had not even been given a name yet.
She simply kept on singing, pouring her whole heart into this precious song, born of its own words, as though crying out, “Reach!”
The one she meant to reach stood at the end of her gaze: a girl with triangular ears, her lovely sky-blue yukata rippling in time with Nene’s song—Raika.
Each time Raika kicked off through the empty air with her geta, as though dancing, the fangs of a “dog-head” grazed the very spot where she had stood a breath before. And each time, terror clenched its fist around Nene’s heart, and a scream all but tore from her throat. —And yet.
“—Sing, Nene! For my sake—keep on singing!”
That clear, carrying voice of Raika’s was what gave Nene her strength.
Even as she faced down a monstrous “aberration” the size of a high-rise, Raika kept pushing Nene onward with that voice of hers—crisp, cool, and kind.
And so Nene turned her scream into melody and sang on—the love song she had written for Raika.
“The sky we watched together, surely—”
“Yes! That’s it, Nene!”
Though she stood in the very thick of a savage battle that allowed not one instant’s lapse—slipping the onslaught, at times catching with uncanny power the blows aimed at Nene and those around her—Raika’s inhumanly beautiful, slender face wore a bright and cloudless smile.
Her long earth-brown hair, so like Nene’s own, streaming in the wind, her translucent cheeks flushed, she could not hold her excitement in check.
—Yes! This, this is the very “scent of the blue sky”!
Her confidence swelling deeper still, feeling her pounding heartbeat carry all the way to the tip of the tail she could not dance without, Raika stretched her fingertips upward, unable to hide her anticipation.
It meant that the fulfillment of Raika’s dearest wish was near at hand.
A cherished wish, a full thousand years in the yearning.
And now it was on the verge of being granted—by the song of Nene, whom she had met but a single day before. How could her heart do anything but race?
Raika could tell, too, how the crowds who had fled and put distance between themselves and the fight were being held fast by the song of a single lone performer, listening now from a wary ring at the edges.
And her keen senses could catch this as well: how the onlookers’ eyes were riveted to her as she danced in a frenzy to those tones, striking and breaking away, striking and breaking away again.
At a moment like this—perhaps even he was watching now, from the great sky above, with that gentle gaze of his, so utterly, purely white…
“Someday, surely—”
Once again, Nene’s singing voice gave Raika hope.
“—Ah. Heh. So that was it.”
That this meeting was already a miracle in itself—Raika, the “Thousand-Year Fox Spirit,” understood it even in a lull amid the fight to the death, and her cheeks softened into a smile like a little child’s.
And so Raika, who has held her wish in her heart all this long while, dances on.
Her yukata ablaze with the color of the azure firmament, rippling out about her, Raika dances on.
—Tonight is Tanabata.
Once a year, the one special day when lovers kept apart are permitted to take each other’s hands.
The girl who dreams of becoming a singer sings the song spun from a meeting straight out of a fairy tale, and now, holding in her heart the wish of the one who made her own dream come true, she strains her voice for all she is worth.
And beneath the evening sky, the Dancing Fox, clad in blue sky, with the girl’s song of cheer at her back, calls to mind the hundreds of years whose wish had gone ungranted, and dances on.
—This is the story of one singer girl and a “Dancing Fox,” the tale of a single miraculous night.
---
## Fragment One
The instant she laid a finger to the strings, the rest of them began to move of their own accord, naturally, like clockwork, readying themselves for the performance to begin.
Turning the pegs, she made sure of the tuning of each string, checking by the fingers that plucked them and by ear.
A pre-performance routine she had run through more times than she could count.
For a player it was perhaps something close to a ritual, a readying of instrument and heart alike. Not that the girl thought of it in such grand terms—Mita Nene, small-framed in a beige hoodie, her fine wood-grained acoustic guitar slung on its strap. She simply knew that neglecting the tuning could wear at the strings, and might even snap them. Having stormed out of her family home, half out of sheer stubbornness, to scrape a bare living alone in the big city on odd jobs, she had no room in her purse to buy spare strings.
“—♪”
From Nene’s lips—fresh as young leaves, without a trace of rouge—a merry hum spilled out, like the warm-up act before the show.
A thread of sound, nothing but a melody she was inventing on the spot, right then and there.
Now and then a snatch of lyric worked its way in, breathed into life by the fresh, clear timbre of her voice.
It went almost without saying, perhaps, but Nene loved music.
Singing, of course—but the sound she had drawn from a toy guitar, first laid hands on at the age of four, was something she could not forget even now, at seventeen. Nor could she forget the delighted smiles on her family’s faces that day.
So when Nene, music now her dream, had piled up allowance and wages from odd jobs and at last got hold of a real guitar—not a plastic one—the feeling that welled up in her was something out of the ordinary.
Forgetting even to fasten the strap, she had planted herself in the family living room and simply played and sang, on and on. In the end she grew so carried away that she jumped—and very nearly dropped the guitar she had only just bought.
And so Nene had wished to grow better still—better at singing, better at playing, better and better at both, and with that, to bring a smile to everyone’s face.
“—Haah… ugh.”
She drew a short breath, and the smell that stung her nose along with it drew her brows together. The jumbled reek of people and things mingled in the air made her want to spit it straight back out. She pressed the hand that held her pick against her chest and stilled it.
—Saikyō, the great metropolis. A city of culture, of commerce, of people beyond counting.
This was the proving ground Nene had come charging into, alone, leaving her hometown behind in search of a chance and of growth.
Where there were that many people, the opportunities were many too. —And, of course, the competition just as fierce.
“—”
Behind Nene’s closed eyelids, this motley, many-sorted city dyed itself whole in the madder red of the evening sky.
Picturing that scene, Nene gently hitched up the guitar cradled at her side and set her chip-cornered pick to the strings.
The melody she played was an original she had gone on practicing these past several weeks.
Steel underfoot that had drunk in the daytime sun and still held its lingering warmth through the soles of her sandals. A stage jutting out into the open middle air of the many-layered city—though “stage” was rather too grand a word for the fire-escape landing of a cheap apartment block.
Standing on that stage built for one, Nene sent her melody bounding out toward the audienceless evening town, every last corner of it wrapped in twilight.
A ballad in that sing-and-play style only an acoustic guitar can carry.
Bright, forward-looking words, the kind to hearten a town as night draws in, spun out one after another from Nene’s lips.
Her guitar, and her own voice.
She had believed that was all she needed.
—And yet the more she sang, the less she could brush aside the ache in her chest that told her it was “not enough.”
—But the place Nene had set her heart on was not so near that an aching longing alone could bring the dream within reach.
“Skreeee—”
The station concourse stood kitty-corner across the lower town. Into that hub of transit—where trains from every tangled direction pulled in and out without pause—a glossy carriage came sliding. —Just as the song reached its chorus, as though to cut Nene’s melody off.
“—!”
The grind of wheels against rail.
The drone of the motor.
The clamor of the crowd disgorged from the opening doors.
All of it, every sound, drowned out the tones Nene was making—she who wanted only to play her music.
(Not gonna lose!)
She slammed her faltering fingers down against the strings hard enough to hurt and threw her voice out at the top of her lungs. That was how she fought back against the torrent of sound bent on drowning her out. By now it was scarcely music at all—closer to a bare, raw cry.
A cry to spur on the self that was on the verge of losing heart. A cry of stern reproach: she could not back down, not here.
Even so, it did not matter to her.
If she could not shrug off a hardship as small as this, then a dream was something her hand could never hope to reach.
And so Nene went on crying out.
—Not to defy the world, but to defy the weakness in herself.
“—OIII!! Mita!!”
“Eeek?!”
—came a rasping voice far louder than any train motor, so like the thunder of the summer soon to come that it sent a shudder straight up Nene’s spine.
“L-Land… lord, sir…”
“You—quit your howling at the rush-hour trains every blessed evening!! You’ll be a nuisance to the whole neighborhood! If you’ve gotta howl, go howl at the sun up there.”
“W-w-waah, I’m sorry!”
Spinning round, Nene bent at the waist in a perfect right angle.
Down at her a stern face was glaring, thrust out from an upstairs window, a bald pate catching and throwing back the evening sun. Those caterpillar eyebrows of his knit closer still.
“And besides—you want to be a singer, don’t you, so how many times do I have to tell you not to go doing things that’ll wreck your throat! You’ve got that festival tomorrow, haven’t you?”
Heavy brows, and a pair of bulging eyes like a hannya mask—the sort that would set a crying child not to hushing but to bawling all the louder.
He was a man who poured out, without stint, an overwhelming force enough to make even Nene—well used to the rugged old faces of her own relatives—swallow hard. And yet his jabs cut sharp and true, which was why she could never hold her head up before him. There was another reason she could not, besides: the near-penniless Nene, newly come up to the city, was being housed for next to nothing by the owner of this very building, the Otogateru-sō—which was to say, by that same landlord.
“…Yes, sir.”
To the tenant girl who answered in that crestfallen voice, the landlord gave his morning-glory-patterned fan a sullen little wave, and—
“What’s this? Awfully meek all of a sudden. Wearing a face like something’s not sitting right with you. Where’s that usual spirit of yours—‘I’m not a singer, I’m a singer-songwriter’?”
“Ahaha… if you’ve heard it, then call me by it properly, would you. I write my own songs too, you know.”
“Once the festival’s over, maybe. So? What’s the reason for that soggy face?”
“Don’t go rattling on about faces at a high-schooler in her prime, would you. …It’s just, I’ve gone and got myself nervous. Like—if I keep on practicing this way, will it really turn out all right, I wonder.”
“What was that? Your only good points are that sunshine cheer of yours, your singing, and that stubborn streak that won’t quit—that’s the whole lot, isn’t it? What else have you got? I heard you singing out front of the station, and that’s why I’m letting you stay for half the rent. You doubting these ear-hairs of mine?”
“Why, you—! N-no, no, I’m fine, really, yes.”
The landlord plucked something from beside his ear and held it out toward her through the window. Politely declining the gift, Nene turned back and gripped the railing of the landing.
Summer drawing near, all manner of shadows came and went across the town in the dusk that had begun to run long.
A long procession of train-shadows drove between the skyscrapers of the upper town and crossed with the shadows of people walking the lower town, where tiled roofs still lingered.
Lately, it seemed to her, that evening hour had been stretching longer, little by little.
It was not so much that the days were long as that, of late, Nene could scarcely recall having seen the sky by daylight at all. Either the clouds hung on and on, or it rained and then, before she knew it, night had come—that was how it went.
It was not only the twilight that felt long.
The sunrise, too, felt hazy and dim—or, to borrow the landlord’s words, “Has the sun run off somewhere?” Perhaps that was why Nene, these days, so often found herself turning gloomy.
“—It’s almost as if the blue sky itself were fading away, little by little…”
She murmured it, then gave her head a quick little shake and drove the outlandish thought from her mind.
It was not that she disliked the town at twilight.
But the blue sky that spread out without end when the sun climbed high—that, Nene loved with all her heart.
When she sang beneath a blue sky, the melody and the words climbed higher and higher, on and on into the far distance.
It was one of the wonderful powers a song holds, that sense that she herself—that her song—was reaching out to everyone, and it made Nene glad.
For Nene believed that a song, sung in that way, would surely find its way to the one she meant it for.
—Even to that one irreplaceable person who had once pushed her onward, surely, it would reach.
“And another thing. Practice is what matters, you hear? Long ago, I had my own sights set on vocal music, I did. Why, I’d work my throat for hours on end—”
“—Huh?”
A sudden gust came surging up and swept away both the landlord’s tale of former glory and Nene’s gaze along with it.
Updrafts were nothing so rare here in Saikyō, where layer upon layer of the city folded together into the shape of a great mortar bowl.
—What stole Nene’s eyes away was rather the blue “fragments” that came dancing on the rising wind.
“Blue… sky…? That dear, familiar scent…”
Countless droplet-shaped things, faintly tinged with color, dancing like so many flower petals.
Riding the wind, they raced up the lifeless city and scattered their fragments into the deep-dyed evening sky.
Strangely, that wind carried none of the stifling reek of the city.
—There was only the scent of a blue sky: perfectly clear, noble beyond all measure, setting her heart to pounding.
“What is that…? A… doggy?”
There, amid the scattering sky-blue fragments, before Nene’s widening eyes, were runners in full flight.
Across the sky, across the tiled roofs of the lower town, across the arched spans of the bridges, more than a dozen sturdy, four-legged somethings ran on in pursuit of prey.
It was no wonder that Nene took the sight of them for “dogs.”
Jet-black bodies, taut and seeming to flow; sharp eyes glinting from either side of arrowhead-shaped heads. From the end of each streamlined form stretched a whip-like tail the same color as its coat, lending balance to a way of moving that broke clean past the laws of physics.
In form they were the very image of the canine mammals that have shared human life since ancient times, faithful friends down to the present day. In her childhood—a different breed than a Shiba, granted—one such creature had been there in Nene’s family home, a member of the household. And large dogs like these, the kind that prove their worth in war and the hunt, Nene too had seen on television.
But what came off these dogs—these “night-dogs,” driving their prey into a corner as though poised to spring—was nothing so mild as a wish to be petted. It was a taut, tightly drawn will, something akin to a sense of mission.
“—Rako!”
That will was gathered, whole and entire, into the figure their eyes were fixed upon: one of the two waging a fierce, whirling dance in the deserted concourse, closed for renovation—the one who seemed their leader, a well-built warrior with vermilion markings upon jet-black skin.
“Have done with it, will you not!”
Words of restraint that came, unexpectedly, low and easy on the ear, from that ominous-seeming figure.
—But what he loosed in the very same instant was a merciless fist, trailing wind behind it, bearing down at a speed no eye could follow.
“—Kon?”
The blistering thrust—yet with a light flick of her sleeve, the slender, delicate woman facing him, the one called Rako, slipped it at her ease.
And then, springing lightly up onto a stack of building materials left standing there, Rako—
“You’re the one who’s been chasing me all over the place, and now you talk like that? That’s hardly fair of you, is it, Kon?”
—she said, in a teasing voice, the voice one might use to coax an unruly little child, and she tilted her head.
“You who will not mend your wrongs—it is you who are the fool!”
At Rako flinging his provocation back at him, Kon, the leader of the night-dogs, bristled so openly that even the onlooking Nene could see it, and hurled himself at her more furiously still.
“—Beautiful.”
Blue and black, squaring off against each other on the bleak construction site.
At the vivid grace of the two of them—a grace that scarcely seemed to belong to a battle—a sound of wonder had spilled from Nene’s lips before she knew it.
The object of that breath of awe lay, for the most part, with Rako.
“Her yukata is… glowing?”
Beautiful, even to put it at its most modest—it was a figure in yukata that seized the gaze of all who looked upon it.
A radiant garment, its ground a keen, clear sky-blue.
At this hour, with the evening sun sinking into a sea of skyscrapers, that vividness was like nothing so much as the gleam of the first star, found at last upon a nighttime sea. Each time the trailing sleeves swayed, soft and light, the sky-blue fragments dancing all around grew more and more numerous, tracing slow, unhurried arcs as they were drawn back into the yukata.
And that figure, too—wrapped in a blue sky lovely beyond words—held Nene’s eyes fast and would not let them go.
A dusk-colored cape thrown over her slender shoulders swirled about her, and her long hair, earth-brown and hanging down past her waist, danced in the wind whipped up by the whirling dance. Too far off for Nene to make out clearly, atop that head a pair of triangular ears perched pertly, busily doing the work of a radar.
“What’s this, what’s this? Mita—gone and spaced right out on me. Were you even listening to my war stories? Honestly, now, just ’cause there’s a good wind blowing—”
“Landlord, sir—can’t you see ’em?!”
Strangely enough, not one of them—not the passengers thronging the station, not the people walking the streets—showed the slightest sign of noticing the blast of wind the two frenzied superhumans flung out as they danced. Even the night-dogs closing their ring, tightening it slowly, inch by inch, betrayed not a shred of interest in any other human.
“Hah? Don’t tell me—you’ve not been sleeping, have you! Big day coming or no, you skip your sleep and you’ll drop where you stand.”
“I’m getting plenty of sleep, so there!”
At the apartment’s landlord, who had covered his face with one rugged hand, Nene flung the words back without thinking—in the fond, familiar speech of her hometown.
A breath before, right there in front of her, a ferocious kick from Rako—yukata-clad, wringing every last drop from her feather-lightness—had detonated, carried on the crisp, bracing crack of a geta. Taking it square in the cheek, Kon, his frame a good size larger than hers, was sent flying.
Scattering a small hillock of unused building materials, his night-dark body, together with the pipes and all the rest, began to plunge from the scaffolding of the construction site that jutted out over the sky above the lower town—
“—Hn.”
—With one hand, wholly at his ease, he caught the edge of the scaffold, and his eyes met hers.
—Round eyes, scarcely different from a human’s. Those deep, thoughtful black pupils flew wide for the space of a single heartbeat.
“Eee—”
Nene could not move.
Even a scream lodged fast in that throat—her one quiet little pride—and would not come out.
“Elder Brother! I shall do it!”
“—Akeru, hold!”
Kon, the leader, had already drawn his body up and clear.
That command, piercing keen through the deep navy of the fallen dusk, reined in the one of the pack that had been quickest to turn its muzzle toward Nene.
—But the night-dog called Akeru, Nene caught in its eyes full of wrath, turned into a black bullet and bore down on her.
　†　　　†　　　†
—To flee: that shabby, craven little recourse had never once so much as crossed the mind of Rako Raika, not from the very first.
Even as a flicker of self-derision grazed her mind—look who was talking—her very way of being as Rako would not permit cowardice: would not permit the choice of abandoning “that girl,” who had been dragged into danger on her account.
“—So it was that child all along, the one giving off the ‘scent of the blue sky’… And if so, then perhaps—”
It had been nagging at her. Or rather: as she frolicked with the night-dogs the way she always did, she had found herself drawn, quite naturally, to the “scent” of that girl’s tone.
It was a fond, nostalgic scent out of the far-off past—from the days when a true blue sky still hung overhead.
It was to carry that scent to “him” that Raika had stained her hands with a grave sin. And as its price, the blue was lost from the sky, and the world goes on sinking, ever on, toward an everlasting night.
The blue vault of heaven that people fool themselves into believing they still see.
That is nothing but the lingering trace of a memory handed down from those who came before.
The world lost its blue long ago, and before long the dark will smother all.
—But whatever might become of the world was nothing to Raika. There was one thing, and one thing only, that Raika wished for.
“If only that girl will sing for me, then this time—this time for certain—I might carry the ‘scent of the blue sky’ all the way to ‘him’!”
And so Raika’s decision was swift.
“The thing you’re all hunting for is over here—isn’t it now?!”
Her cherished—no, her very life itself, one might say—yukata, with a blue sky woven into it.
The cloth, woven from the secret threads she had stolen from the treasure-vault of the heavens—“the Weaving-Threads of the Firmament”—might by now be called a blue sky in its own right. And so it was that the Lord of the Heavens, who had forbidden himself any direct meddling with the earth below, sent the night-dogs to win those weaving-threads back.
“A singer it took me a thousand years to seek out and find at last! I shan’t let you get in my way!”
She seized a sleeve—soft and gently warm, fragrant with sunlight—and tore it free at the shoulder. A little of the “thread” would be lost by it, yes, but that was better by far than losing the one soul who might yet grant Raika’s wish.
“—”
From Raika’s sheer brute act of ruin—not a shred of spirit-power in it—a residue that never quite turned to sound went spilling out.
“Ngff?!”
Sure enough, the keen nose of him—Akeru, one of the night-dogs, honed to the single gift of scenting out the “weaving-threads”—gave a twitch, and threw his body into a sudden halt.
And so, with the motionless girl right before him—there on the landing of what seemed to be an apartment stairwell, eyelids screwed tight shut, fairly reeking of terror—Akeru kicked off the railing, carved a turn nearly square, and shifted his aim to what he had been hunting for all along.
“The Blue Skyyyy!”
The scrap of yukata was a decoy, of course. And sure enough, hard after Akeru the pack of night-dogs came bounding, chasing the cloth as it danced upon the wind.
It is in the very nature of the night-dogs that they cannot ignore the “weaving-threads.” Even were the threads to end up as so much lint, still they could not help but give chase.
The one who could hold himself back was, perhaps, only their leader—he whom Raika had made to swallow bitter gall time and time again.
“Such craven tricks!”
One alone did not chase after the pack: the leader—Kon—hurling himself at the girl on the landing to salvage the plan his younger brothers had bungled.
“I am your foe!”
“Too bad for you!”
Raika had read the move long before it came, and into his flank she drove a palm-heel strike—a secret art she had mastered to while away the long, long span of her years.
She had, of course, not the least intention of snuffing him out, and so she had meant to soften the blow a good deal. —That he went plunging like an arrow into the tiled roofs far, far below, so full of the down-home charm of the lower town, was rather more than she had bargained for, all the same.
“I’m the one giving you all a fight here, aren’t I!”
“The sheer gall of a common thief!! We cannot leave a human with the power to ‘see’ us running loose. You know this full well, Rako! You, who for your own greed stole ‘the Weaving-Threads of the Firmament,’ more precious than heaven itself, and have gone so far as to keep them upon your body a thousand years!!”
“If it comes to that, isn’t the real trouble with how you lot go about your work? However ‘generous’ your Lord of the Heavens may be, a thousand years kept waiting would turn even Yaō into a doddering old—”
“Silence!! The Elder of the Abyss labors to restore the balance of the world that you stole away!!”
“If he is so very great, then he might just as well have lent me a single ‘thread’ back then, mightn’t he!”
“Spare me your prattle!! As if you—you who look to nothing but your own skin—could ever have saved ‘that one’!”
“—!”
Rattling the very air, springing up and down and side to side, Raika and Kon traded fists as equals.
The words Kon flung out in the thick of that savage whirling dance. They had been trading light banter, and yet, in an instant, Raika’s inhumanly lovely face was wrung into a grimace of bitterness.
“You’re wide open!”
Into that opening Kon’s fist drove straight up from below, and Raika’s slight frame went bursting away like a chip of kindling.
Being a being beyond the natural order, Raika had no flesh that could ache. —And yet, feeling all the more keenly a throb of pain in what, in a human, would be the region of the heart, Raika’s memory ran back up the stream of time—
　†　　　†　　　†
“—”
A steel girder near enough to touch if she but stretched out her hand.
A blue human shape came hurtling into it like an arrow, and on pure reflex Nene had squeezed her eyes shut. But when she came to herself, her arms had wrapped themselves not around her head but around her guitar.
“Ah—the strings?! No, that’s not it!”
From sheer habit she had all but fretted first of all over her guitar, and Nene gave her head a flustered shake. What she truly cared about was the blue and the black that, a breath before, had been colliding right before her eyes at the station terminal.
It was all too fast for Nene’s eyes to catch anything but afterimages, yet even from a distance the air of a fierce brawl had reached her. The movements of the blue figure above all were flowing and lovely—for all the world as though she were dancing.
It was right up beside Nene—she who had been watching that wild dance in a daze—that the very “blue” herself had come crashing down. And crashing, no less, straight into the apartment stairway, hard enough that “painful” would scarcely begin to cover it.
“A-are you all right?!”
To her astonishment, the figure fallen prone across the stairs showed no injury worth the name, and by the way those fair-skinned eyelids stayed closed, she seemed to have swooned. The rose-pink lips let fall the words, “Hiko…”
“So pretty… To think there’d be such a beauty even up here in the city.”
The uncanny goings-on of a moment past forgotten, Nene—girl though she was herself—could not help being drawn in by that too-flawless face, and a soft breath of wonder slipped out of her.
What set off her clear, translucent skin all the more was the sky-blue yukata, slipped a little out of place. The cloth was a single hue, without a pattern, and yet, for some reason, the longer she looked the more of its many “blues” came rising to the eye. It was a “blue” that stirred in her that same, unbearably heart-quickening moment she knew when she was drawing out a melody.
Seized, before she knew it, with the urge to touch it, Nene found her hand reaching out all on its own—
“—That is no article for a human to lay hands upon.”
“Eeek?! A—a human doggy?!”
“Do not lump us in together with your kind, human. We are the servants of the Elder of the Abyss, keeper of the balance—the ‘night-dogs.’”
“A-a talking doggy…?”
“You are too familiar by half, human. Life turns and comes round again, yet the Elder has no taste for careless slaughter. You would do well to give thanks for his merciful heart.”
Seeming to pay the slight miscommunication no mind, there before Nene as she turned round was the tall “black,” standing four-square and imposing upon the rust-colored iron railing. Ringing him round were the great dogs, the selfsame vermilion markings coursing over them, clad in a fighting aura that looked ready to fling itself upon Nene at any instant.
Taking the whole scene in, Nene swallowed hard, her throat sounding a gulp—and it was just then—
“—Mita! You all right? Some stray dog get in, did it?”
—and, his geta clacking away for all they were worth, the landlord came down the stairs. He must have caught Nene’s shrill, harum-scarum shrieking and come to see what was afoot.
“Wawah! Um, uh…”
While Nene flapped and floundered over how in the world to explain, there came a bright little snap of sound, and all at once the landlord toppled forward flat on his face.
“Landlord, sir?! What did you do to him, you—you bow-wow?!”
“Listen to her, yammering so shrilly at the Elder Brother—!”
“Peace, Akeru. In our very nature we are close kin to such creatures ourselves, after all.”
“Answer me! You—what did you do to the landlord—”
“I have not taken his life. I told you, did I not—the Elder has no love of killing. I have only put him to sleep. He was making a racket. …But more to the point.”
Springing lightly down from the railing, the black human figure—Kon—loomed near and looked down at her with those large eyes that, as one might expect, called a great dog to mind.
“What will you do with that monster fox, human? Elegant she may be to look upon, but the fixation of that creature runs deep.”
“Why do you speak so at your leisure, Elder Brother?! We must reclaim the garment at once and bear it to the side of Lord Yaō—”
Before she knew it, Nene’s hand had cracked across the cheek of the somewhat smaller night-dog that had pressed in on her. That a human might strike him across the face was likely a thing he had never once dreamed of. The whole gathering, the leader with it, caught a moment’s blank, and silence closed over all.
“—You’re the lowest of the low. I don’t know what it is you’re all after, but ganging up to pick on a girl—have you got no shame at all?!”
“I-it is the fox-spirit’s doing that has broken the balance! And it was she who robbed you humans of the blue firmament, too—”
“You just hush your mouth!”
Jabbing a finger smartly at the muzzle she had struck, Nene gave the night-dog no room for a second word. Whatever their reasons might be, her sense of justice could not look the other way while they went setting a bee, as it were, upon an already tear-streaked face.
That such a sense of justice could, now and again, turn to her own harm, Nene had come to know well enough even in her brief spell of city life. But she was not, for all that, the sort who could see a thing and feign blindness to it. —And then.
“—Hahaha! She has scored a point off you there, Akeru.”
“Elder Brother?!”
The cheerful laughter, so wholly out of keeping with the moment, struck their ears, and Nene’s reaction and Akeru’s fell into step as one.
“It has been long indeed since a human showed us such mettle. Then let me ask you, human—what do you make of this creature?”
“What do I… She’s a girl in a yukata, with animal ears…?”
“What human was ever such a thing!”
“This creature is a fox-spirit. Once she was a mere fox without so much as a name, but she gave herself over to her own greed and committed a grave sin.”
Without answering Nene’s puzzled “A grave sin…?” the leader of the night-dogs raised his eyes to the lingering dusk of the sky. For an instant anger kindled in his profile, then quietly drew back.
“The threads of this one’s garment are a thing apart. The cunning creature wove them into cloth so that they could never be reclaimed by force. Save by her own will, they cannot be unraveled and returned to the heavens.”
“Elder Brother! This is no matter to be speaking of before a human—”
“—Human. Will you not take it upon yourself to persuade this creature?”
“Not a chance! I’ll not hand her over to you lot! I’m the one that’s going to protect her!”
“‘Protect,’ is it. There is a fond, old ring to that word. But, human—”
The night-dog’s words, his voice sunk low, carried a coldness like the closing chill of the night.
“A fox-spirit leads humans astray. We have seen with our own eyes the many she has brought to ruin.”
“But…”
“Your memory must be wiped away, human. Such is the lot of any who have ‘seen’ us. And the fox-spirit’s weaving-threads, too, must of course be returned to their rightful place. Else the balance of the world is lost for all eternity, and the dark will swallow up every last thing—this very scene along with it.”
Moved by Kon’s words, Nene found her eyes drawn down of their own accord over the town in the dusk.
The madder-red of evening wrapped the town, where a jumbled multitude of people came and went. A cat went racing over the tiled roofs of the lower town, so rich in old-world charm, and the streets brimmed with the hubbub of young and old, men and women alike.
Overhead, the high-rise towers stabbed into the evening sky, standing stark and tall.
Neither the night-dogs nor Raika kept to the plane where humankind made its home.
And yet, at the same time, neither could slip entirely free of that plane—aberrant beings, the both of them. Each holding to a purpose it would not surrender, they had stood against each other and warred down the long reaches of time.
But that, in the end, was nothing less than a forbidden act, a straying from the providence of nature itself.
Were those who knew of it to grow more numerous, the underlying order would groan the harder, and a warp would open in a world held in so delicate a balance.
“I will—”
And so, opposed though they were, Raika and Kon and his night-dogs had struck a pact between them.
For the sake of the world, they would wipe away, with their own hands, any soul who came to know of them.
“—I’ll do it. So, for now—stand aside.”
Lifting her gaze straight ahead, Raika looked toward the girl—still frozen stiff, a girl who had done no more than chance to be there.
A perfectly ordinary girl, such as one might find anywhere at all.
Sixteen or seventeen, at a guess, her chestnut bangs trimmed short and even and pinned back with a clip of lapis blue. Too frightened even to open her eyes, and yet the one thing she would not let slip from her hold was the guitar gathered in her arms.
As if that alone she would keep though it cost her life—no, as if she believed, and never doubted, that this very thing was the radiance of her life itself.
—And he, too, had never for anything let the recorder slip from his hand.
(There’s no mistaking it… Though the girl herself, it seems, does not remember.)
In both of them alike, the tones they made rang clear and limpid, and the voice laid over them breathed a sure and certain “scent of the blue sky.”
She had been drawn to it, helplessly. The ears of Raika, the thousand-year sky-fox, had ever been weak to the tones of a blue sky.
—If this was a reunion decreed by fate, then there was not the least chance in all the world that Raika’s resolve would falter.
“Elder Brother!”
Akeru—Kon’s younger brother, who had peeled away once already—came running, the other night-dogs with him, to where Kon was hauling himself out of the caved-in house. Just beside them, the neighborhood folk who had gathered to see what was the matter kept cocking their heads in bafflement. As luck would have it, the people of the house seemed to be out. For a good while yet, no doubt, they would go on racking their brains over why the roof had come down so suddenly.
And there, the scrap of blue still clenched in his teeth, Akeru gave his head a brisk shake, and—“You must not believe the idle prattle of a monster fox,” he said, fixing upon Raika those black-glinting eyes brimming with wrath, and piling accusation upon accusation.
“This fox has not only strayed from nature itself—she has, of all things, kept the sorcerous elixir ‘the Musk of the Firmament’ all to herself! The musk is a miracle that nature itself brings forth. Only by loosing it and returning it to the firmament is the balance held. To hoard it for herself alone is to be no better than a thief! We, the proud watchdogs of the night, will hound this creature low, like dogs crawling upon the ground—”
“You’ve grown bold in your talk, Akeru. As for casting off our natural forms—that is a thing we share alike, you and I. And besides—could you, for your part, make the choice that Kon has made? To lay hands upon one with whom you once pledged, for what it was worth, an everlasting friendship?”
Kh—!
The grinding creak of Akeru’s clenched fangs carried across to her. In a true fight or a war of words alike, there were precious few who could ever get the better of Raika.
Having seen it through, Raika gathered the strength into her legs, sprang up from the concourse under construction, and vaulted clear over the open sky above the lower town—a good thirty meters of it, by the look—to alight, light as anything, on the landing across the way: right at the girl’s very side.
“—Fwah?!”
And then, seizing an arm—slender, yet with an unlooked-for softness to it once she had it in her grip—Raika broke into a run, and, turning back as she went, flung out her declaration to the leader of the night-dogs gazing down from on high.
“Tomorrow, at dusk. Until the sun goes down, this child is in my keeping. Until then, you will keep your hands off her.”
“And after that?”
“…Then I shall keep you company in your merry little game of chase. Once there is no one left to get in the way.”
“You cunning fox—”
Staying the advancing Akeru with a sweep of his arm, the elder brother of the night-dogs looked back into Raika’s eyes.
Those eyes held nothing but a deep and utter dark. Nothing at all could be read within them—and yet an eternity of blackness was hardly a thing to make Raika flinch.
“—Very well.”
“Elder Brother?!”
But—and here he stretched out an arm graven with rough, baleful markings, and in a low voice that let not the faintest feeling through, the lord who ruled over the night-dogs delivered his final warning: past the girl, who had been glancing back and forth between him and Raika, whose hand still held her own—and on to her.
“Should that vow be broken, then know it well: you, too, shall be dragged down to share her ruin.”
“Hmph. Fine by me. You who have never once laid so much as a finger on me—not a single time—and yet it’s my scent that leaves you so flustered, isn’t it.”
And when she deigned to speak his name—Kon—the scrap of blue cloth clutched in his hand crumpled into creases. In an instant a flush of crimson rose across those gallant features.
She would gladly have gone on toying with him so for as long as she pleased; but as ill luck would have it, the dusk sky at her back was fast losing its light, and the fur of her tail, brimming now with hoarded spirit-power, only bristled the more.
By night, command belongs to the night-dogs. This was no hour for a frail little fox-kit to be venturing abroad.
“Huh?! Dragged down—? What’s that supposed to mean?!”
And what was more, the Raika of this moment need no longer huddle alone in her blue-sky yukata to wait out the keen-nosed night-dogs, the way she always had before.
At her side now was the girl, led along by Raika’s hand with no notion at all of what it meant.
Trembling though it was, that hand—warm clear through—made no move at all to slip free.
—Even were it to prove no more than the shimmer of a heat-haze, a moment gone in the space of a breath, she had had more than enough of being alone.
“—It’s all right. You, there—what is your name?”
“Wah?!”
Her ears and tail melted away as though coming unraveled. And in their stead, wrapping her form, the blue sky-colored yukata glowed only the brighter.
Screening that too-conspicuous glow beneath a cape of deep violet dusk, and without waiting for any answer from the girl she led—no, hauled—along by the hand, Raika struck her geta down against the stairs, where the day’s heat still lingered. A dry, metallic clatter—just the sort of grating sound that, on any ordinary day, would have drawn Raika’s shapely brows into a frown of distaste.
—And yet now it came paired with a bright, bounding voice that was a pleasure to the ear.
“Wait! Haah… I’m Nene! Mita Nene!”
—There was no mistaking it now.
(I will never let a single one of them lay a hand on her.)
Though it should cost her all that she was—the thousand-year sky-fox, entire.
---
## Fragment Two
She had, in all honesty, reached her limit.
Build up your stamina first, or your dreams and all the rest don’t amount to a hill of beans—her mother’s words came drifting back to her now. She had been on the track team once, believe it or not. But Nene—one hand pressed to a chest fit to burst—had never once imagined that the price of all the training she’d let slide, ever since turning her path toward being a singer-songwriter, would come back to haunt her like this.
“W-wait…”
“No stamina to speak of, have you. We’ve not run so much as a single league. If you’re gasping for breath up onstage, now, it won’t make for a very pretty sight—will it, Nene?”
“A league—how far even is… a what…? And why… do you know about… the show…?”
Listening, through ears that throbbed with her own hammering pulse, to the almost bracingly barbed appraisal of the one who had finally, finally stopped for her, Nene sank unsteadily down onto the flagstone ground.
Anywhere she could rest would have done, but the cool touch of the stone felt good against her. Glancing about, she caught sight of a small shrine off to her left, standing hushed and alone in the darkness. The soft rustle of leaves brushing one against another reached her ears.
For an instant the illusion swept over her that she had strayed into some other world entirely; but when she dropped her eyes to her side, there hung the familiar sideways-gourd shape, slung at her shoulder just as ever. Her hand flew to the strings, and only once she had made certain not one had snapped did she let her heart settle. Tomorrow was the real thing. To have a guitar string break before then would be the worst of ill omens.
“—Never mind that. Won’t you play me a song?”
“Huh?”
There beside her, just as Nene was letting out a breath of relief, that request came striking at her ear.
Turning to look, catching sight of the one who had asked it—that strange, wondrous person who had come to her rescue—Nene found herself struck dumb all over again by the poised grace of the figure before her.
A slender figure in a yukata, bathed in the light of the moonlit night.
The sky-blue cloth that, until moments before, Nene had taken to be shining of its own accord now drank in the pale-blue light of the moon and threw it back with a clear, translucent sheen. A pattern of water-ripples, spreading out ring on overlapping ring, seemed to waver like the surface of a real pond.
And then that long, flowing, earth-brown hair. Neither brown nor gold, but hair one knew at a single glance for the very color of the earth—looking at it, Nene thought how like guitar strings it was. —And yet, somehow, it seemed to her that something there was wanting.
“The animal ears…”
“They are here even now. Not some fashion accessory—the genuine article, I’ll have you know. Though outside the dusk hour, even you, for all your gift, will find you ‘cannot see’ them.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean? Oh—! Those doggies from before—what in the world were they—”
No sooner had she caught her breath than every question she had set to one side came crowding up at once. She made to fire them all off in a single lungful—only to be cut short, out of nowhere, by a peal of laughter from the one beside her.
At that sudden, unlooked-for burst of clear, ringing laughter, Nene, feeling herself a little made light of, narrowed her eyes in a show of pique.
“Sorry, sorry. If Kon were to hear you call them that, he’d go scarlet to the ears. Worse yet, he might work himself into such a rage he’d go on a rampage. Even I have never once said such a thing to him.”
“It’s not funny! This Kon—is he the doggy—er, the person, that came at me?”
“Yes, that’s right. He is the leader of the night-dogs. Watchdogs that course across the night sky, keepers of the balance, every one. Only the leader of the pack can take on human form, you see. But it was that very same Kon who shielded you, you know? Had he not, by now you would be…”
With the fingers of both hands stretched smoothly out before her, the strange woman in the yukata mimed taking hold of something and rending it apart. To Nene, whose throat gave an audible gulp, she laughed a mischievous laugh—“Only teasing”—and the wicked part of it was that even that smile was one she could not help gazing at, spellbound.
“It did give me a start, that even in an age like this there would be someone who can ‘see’ us—but that is hardly reason for me to go gobbling you up. Though you did, I will grant, give off a rather lovely scent.”
“…I don’t understand any of it. Not one bit.”
“I don’t doubt it. There are things in this world one is better off not knowing.”
“Say, you,” the woman murmured, gazing up into the moonlit night as she put the question to Nene—and her profile, in that moment, was as fragile as though she were choking down some deep loneliness.
“The name ‘Raika’—does it ring any bell for you, I wonder?”
“Umm… No, I don’t think so.”
“I see.”
That single word was almost bracingly crisp—and yet, though it was nothing Nene could call to mind, her heart, for reasons she could not name, gave a wrenching, aching creak, as if it were being squeezed.
Just who—what—was this person?
“—It’s a name.”
“Huh?”
“Rako Raika. That is my name. The name that ‘he’ bestowed upon a mere wild fox, and nothing more. And thanks to it, I have gone on living all this long while—”
“Just what are you—”
But Nene’s question got no further than that. For it was cut off by the ringtone of the phone tucked into the pocket of her trousers.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! Honestly, that landlord of mine, he frets far too much—… Huh?”
She was the one in the wrong, after all, for slipping off on her own like that. Even so, Nene had it in mind that, if it was who she expected, she would offer a quick word of apology and hang up on them there and then.
—But at the name shown on the display, before she even knew it she had pressed the phone to her ear with a “Yes, hello?”
“Ah—Miss Mita?”
The voice belonged to the producer of the summer festival where, by a stroke of great luck, Nene had landed her chance to perform the very next day.
“Yes. Mita speaking.”
“Yeah, sorry to spring this on you, but you don’t need to come in tomorrow.”
“—Huh?”
“So this big-name artist we’d been in talks with, see, went and cancelled on us at the last minute. Honestly. So now we’re out scrambling for another act to plug the hole, right? And that amateur slot we were going to trial you in—well, the airtime for it’s just gone and vanished.”
“W-wait, please, wait! How on earth does it come to that?!”
“And on top of that, we put out a call to a few up-and-comers—not major, mind, but selling well enough—and, well, a fair crowd of them turned up. Yeah, I do feel bad, dropping it on you at the eleventh hour and all. Oh—right—not that this makes up for anything, but I’ll comp you some tickets, so…”
It was hard to breathe.
The first real chance she had seized since coming up to Saikyō. The stage she had steeled herself for, resolved that, if she drew nothing but boos there, she would give it up cleanly and bow out.
And now—to find she was not so much as to set foot on that stage to begin with—
“Say, Nene—are you all right?”
Had her face gone truly so pale, then? The look upon the one who had asked it so gently—Raika—was dreadfully, achingly anxious. This woman who had given her name as Rako Raika grieved, from the very heart, over whatever had come over Nene.
“Um… Miss Rako.”
At the flash of an idea that would turn that tender heart to her own account, Nene’s conscience gave a small, aching twinge. As if reading the wavering of the scales within Nene’s breast, Raika drew in her chin in a small but certain nod, and—
“I would be glad if you would call me Raika.”
“Miss Raika, then. There’s a favor I have to ask! Won’t you—with me—”
“—Of course. If it’s you asking, Nene.”
—The gentleness that settled upon her shoulder in that moment, Nene would surely never forget for as long as she lived.
“—Please, hear me out, Mr. Producer.”
Taken aback, perhaps, by the extraordinary note in Nene’s voice, a flustered “U-uh, yeah?” came back down the line. Paying it no mind, Nene switched the phone over to a video call and framed herself and the yukata-clad Raika together in the shot.
“This lady here… um, Miss Rai-Rai—she’s a professional dancer! She’s dead good at it, honest!”
“Uh—uh-huh. And?”
“She’s going to perform together with me!”
“…Now hold on, that’s hardly—”
“Please! Just watch—only take a look, that’s all I ask!”
“Right now?” he yelped, his voice pitching high—and yet the producer’s eyes, there on the screen, fastened upon Raika and would not let go.
Even to Nene, a woman herself, Raika was a ravishing sight. Bathed in that moon-white light, she gave a blank little tilt of her head, blinking those beautiful black eyes. To wrench one’s gaze from such a figure alone must surely have taken no small effort indeed.
This chance—Nene did not, for anything in the world, want to let slip.
“Dance with… no—dance for my sake, please! Together, up there at the festival tomorrow!”
“I can’t dance, you know?”
At the refusal—so curt it was almost deflating—this time, truly, no words would come to Nene. The phone slid smoothly from her hand and struck the flagstones with a hard little sound.
It was only the natural answer.
For however much she had come to her rescue, this woman was under no obligation to go to such lengths for Nene, a total stranger to her. To ask her to dance, and without so much as a word of the reason why—it was asking far, far too much.
“…You’re right, of course. I’m sorry for saying something so odd—”
“—Dancing, now, that is beyond me. But—”
Nene’s phone, which by every right ought to have gone crashing against the flagstones of the shrine grounds—
The sunflower-yellow thing, scooped up for her in one elegant sweep of motion, had by some miracle kept the call alive; and across the screen, wiped clean in a flash by a fair-skinned hand, were mirrored the dumbstruck face of the producer and the lovely moonlit night together.
“Miss Raika—”
“—It’s ‘Rai-Rai’ now, isn’t it?”
So she corrected her, and her hand came to rest against Nene’s cheek. A cool, soft hand it was.
“A dance in the old way—if that would serve, then perhaps I might be of some use to you, Nene.”
“—Yes! Yes, please!”
“I’m glad,” said the smile that touched her face; and as Nene gazed up at that expression, the cool hand against her hot cheek felt wonderfully good.
—And so, as a wholly exceptional case, it was settled: Nene and her partner would take the stage at the summer festival after all.
It was Nene’s passion that had won them over, one ought to say. It was by no means owing solely to the producer—who had gazed in a daze at the partner dancing there beneath the moon, and, the very instant the performance ended, hurled his own phone high into the air with a ringing cry of “Bravo!!”
And no small share of the credit belonged, too, to Nene’s new partner, Raika—who, when that same producer rang straight back from a different number to ask “So, what’ll I bill the act as?” and then pressed doggedly on for a way to reach her, blithely rattled off a phone number without a moment’s hesitation.
In any case, the chance that had once slipped through their fingers, Nene and her partner had won back a second time.
Determined never to let it go again, they saw to all the various small arrangements, pressed and pressed for the promise of their slot until it verged on nagging—and then, just so, the newborn duo “Nene & Rai-Rai” spent the whole night long over their far-too-scanty hours of matching up their handful of songs.
—And so the night, packed dense with it all, wore away, and the next day dawned early.
“—Mi-taaa!! Not so much as a word out of you, and… you did get yourself home in one piece, I trust?!”
A room in the apartment block called Otogateru-sō, where the soundproofing, if nothing else, had been done to flawless perfection. A rasping, gravelly voice, carrying even through those sound-baffling walls, struck up a jangling discord with the low, heavy thud of a fist hammering at the door.
It was the landlord—the dawn-red morning sun glancing off the crown of his head in grand style.
“The nights round here have been dangerous of late. I did see you go tearing off with some strange lass I’d never laid eyes on, that much I’ll grant—but two girls out on their own, that’s—”
“—Good morning. You would be the landlord, yes?”
“Gwuh?!”
When a person is startled past all measure, they freeze up and cannot move a muscle.
As if to embody that very truth, the landlord froze stock-still the fist he had raised to pound the door, like a thing carved in stone, and let slip a voice that cracked and turned right over at the sight of the yukata-clad woman—Raika—who had opened the door and folded herself into a courteous bow.
Sweeping back to her ear the earth-brown hair that spilled softly loose—no triangular ears anywhere to be seen—Raika gave a small smile, and:
“Forgive me for not saying so sooner. My name is Rai-Rai. I am Nene’s—Mita Nene’s—partner. Only since last night, mind you.”
“R-Rai… p-part… ner…?”
The landlord’s mind could not keep pace with the self-introduction that came tumbling, line after line, from the lips of this seemingly upright woman. The name—plainly a false one—could be let go for now.
The real trouble was the relationship this so-called “Rai-Rai” had just claimed with the tenant girl.
“Yes. That child? She’s gone off to her part-time job. The convenience store on the fifth floor of the station building. Tough little thing, isn’t she. A festival to play this very evening, and there she was last night, worked up into such a state. Age is nothing to the likes of me—but that single-minded heart of hers does put me in mind of the old days.”
“Now hold on just a moment there, miss—”
“—It’s Rai-Rai.”
In an instant Raika clad herself in a keen, sharp-edged air that would brook no argument. Such was its force that even the landlord—a man who boasted no end of tales of his own daring—swallowed hard and corrected himself: “R-right, right—Miss Rai-Rai, it is.”
“And what is it, landlord?”
“The curfew here’s nine o’clock—that’s the arrangement. Mita knows it full well, and she’s never broken it, not once. A tenant she may be, but in my own heart I’ve taken on the keeping of a child. If anything were to happen to Mita, I’d have no face to meet her folks with. She fancies she’s living all on her own—but that girl’s a child yet.”
“Why, you’re quite the father,” Raika let slip by way of remark—and “That’s exactly how I mean it,” the landlord returned this time, folding his brawny arms, unflinching.
“Perhaps this will make you believe me.”
So saying, Raika slipped a hand inside the front of her collar and drew out a phone decorated with a cutesy, cartoonish dog. Two little triangular ears jutted up from the top of the case, and Raika, having worked it with practiced ease, turned the screen toward the landlord.
“Hm? …Hm. Ahem—so that’s how it is. Puts on a brave front, she does, but deep down she was lonely after all—that Mita, wasn’t she.”
What the screen showed was a dim indoor photograph, a selfie by the look of it.
A clear sky-blue yukata, vivid even in the gloom of nightfall. And curled against the breast of the figure lying there—for all the world like a little child clinging to its mother—was Nene, still in the very hoodie she’d had on all along.
Her face was at peace—and yet, thanks to the camera’s keen sensitivity, the track of a tear that had slipped from her closed lids stood out there against the dark.
“Spoken like a true father. Well used to the sight of a daughter asleep, are you?”
At Raika’s teasing tone the landlord, his face in deadly earnest, let slip an unexpected scrap of his own past: “I had one of my own, once.”
Sensing the loneliness he could not quite hide at the edges of those words, Raika—a fox who had lived through more years than her appearance could ever begin to suggest—chose to pry no further.
Instead she slid a slender finger across the phone’s display once more, and this time held out a different photo—a snapshot of the pair of them: Nene beaming with a V-sign flung up high, and Raika smiling at her side with quiet grace.
“…‘Nene & Rai-Rai’? Heh. Now there’s a name with Mita written all over it.”
“Yes. I’m rather fond of it myself. The music duo ‘Nene & Rai-Rai’—we’ll be in your care, landlord. The running order’s like to shift about a little, so I’d be glad if you’d check it early.”
“Nothing slips past you, does it. I know, I know. I’ve my ticket already, too. Me and the crowd from here’ll head out past noon.”
With a thump to his thick chest, the landlord threw back his considerable height, proud as you please.
“Well—whatever else, that’s a load off my mind.”
—And to the words that followed, easing and yet edged with worry, Raika found she had, quite without meaning to, lent her ear.
“She’s had a hard set to her face of late, that one. Throwing yourself into a thing is all well and good—but a string wound too tight, when it snaps, is a fearsome thing.”
“—Say, landlord.”
Once she knew, there would be no turning back. She was afraid—afraid to understand just why it was that Nene did not remember her.
Never again did Raika wish to taste the pain of losing what she loved. And so, all this long while, she had kept her heart sealed shut.
And yet, yesterday—as she carried on the same unchanging game with Kon and the others—Raika had let herself be lured in by a tone that stirred old memories.
And so her eyes had chanced to meet those of “her.”
Those strong-willed eyes of brown-black, not to be mistaken for any other’s. The plucked notes were new to her ear—but the grain of that voice, impossible to mishear, carried the scent of a blue sky.
Or perhaps it was that, through long, long—far too long—an age of years, Raika’s eyes, her nose, her heart had known her all along. —No. She did know. She had only turned her face aside, the better not to see it.
Why, had she not known, she could never have danced so joyously as that.
What she had danced last night was, by Raika’s own measure, nothing she could bear to set before the eyes of others. She had moved her body only because Nene had asked it of her—that, and no more. That it had done some good in the end, she was honestly glad of; but it was hardly to show off so paltry a dance as that that Raika had heaped up her training across the ages—across a thousand years and more.
All of it had been for one thing alone: to dance the finest dance there was.
To dance, one more time, the dance she had failed to deliver on that day.
—And in spite of it all, to dance in time with Nene’s music was a joy so keen it was almost too dear to bear.
“—Nene.”
The girl who played a music scented with blue sky, the very same as “him.”
To dance for Nene’s sake could never be made into atonement to the “him” who was now beyond all reaching.
And even so, to dance with Nene—Raika’s heart throbbed with a longing she could do nothing to still.
—And so, knowing their parting for a settled fate, Raika resolved all the same to dance with the girl.
“Won’t you tell me a little more about her? Last night it was all I could manage just to keep in step with her—there was no chance to talk at all.”
“It’s not my tale to tell. The one thing I’ll say to you is this: treasure what that girl holds dear. That’s all.”
At Raika’s asking, the landlord shook his head, just once. Before ever he was her landlord, it was not for a man to go airing another’s resolve so freely.
And so the landlord asked of Raika—Nene’s new friend, as he took her to be—that she might at the very least honor the girl’s feelings. —But the friend who looked back at him, all defiance, was far from accepting it: in those black eyes she reflected a resolve much the same in kind.
“That girl wore the face of someone wagering everything on today’s festival. And that resolve of hers—do you mean to tell me it’s not for me, her partner, to help shoulder it?”
“Ha—listen to you talk… I’d reckoned you’d be an odd one, her having chosen you and all—but you’re a mighty plain-spoken young miss, aren’t you.”
“It’s Rai-Rai.”
At the correction of her name, come round yet again, it was a sigh of resignation that broke from the landlord’s lips this time.
“—Have it your way, then. Miss Rai-Rai.”
The landlord rubbed at his tree-trunk of a neck, like a man worn down at last. Yet for all the gesture, the mouth graven with the rings of his years was somehow bright with gladness—like a father’s, turning fond thoughts upon a daughter.
“Come by the office, then, will you. The most I can do is let you hear, one more time, the things she said—but there it is.”
“That’s quite enough. Thank you.”
Raika fell in behind the landlord’s broad back as he set off walking.
Once, before she drew the front door shut, her eyes traveled round the room, a touch cluttered as it was.
“—You needn’t remember me. I’m on your side.”
---
## Fragment Three (Final Fragment)
—Strange to say, Mita Nene knew no fear.
Right before her eyes, jutting out past the monorail platform and rearing higher still, jet-black dog-heads rimmed in red were multiplying in number and swelling in size, just as if she were caught in some evil dream.
Naturally, in all the seventeen years of her life, Nene had never once laid eyes on such a thing.
“—”
Then—loosed from one of the dog-heads, at the far end of a shriek like metal raked raw—the foot of a high-rise in the upper town buckled as though dealt a crushing blow. Let a thing like that strike a human body, and there would be nothing left of it at all.
—And even so, Nene did not still the fingers pressing the chords on her guitar. Because—
“—Don’t take it out on everything, Akeru! Kon will grieve to see it!”
Against all that monstrous bulk, a shining blue figure—far too small, impossibly small—was dauntlessly darting in and away, in and away. Kicks, in the main; and each time that slight body slammed into one of the vast dog-heads, the shock of it came ringing all the way over to where Nene stood.
“YOU FOOOX—!!”
But it did precious little good; the massed heads, cowed for a moment, would rear back to life again after a while.
—And still the blue figure, bounding through the air, swept her hand as though dancing, and would not stay the feet that fought to wake the other from his frenzy.
The figure in blue—Raika—was dancing like a thing gone wild.
Borne up on Nene’s melody, on her song, the sinking sun at her back, she danced on and on.
The sight of Raika, there, lit for Nene the very thing she had to do. The logic of it, the reason—she knew neither.
And even so, Raika had need of Nene’s music. Then let that, and that alone, be reason enough for Nene to sing.
And so, once more, a single great head slipped through Raika’s wild dance and bore down upon them.
Groundless as it was, she knew now that her music had its power. And so, the same as before, she pressed down the strings—and the note she plucked should this time too have sent that ferocious, ruinous soundwave rebounding back—
“—Oh—”
—but it did not. With a sharp little snap, a single copper string broke.
By that alone, that and nothing more, the layered music of Nene lost its color in an instant.
Two songs, so far. Only two—and yet, more than any singing Nene had done in all her life before, this was a performance she had staked her very life and soul upon. Her throat, driven long past all endurance, had not even the strength left to scream; and Nene, sensing the end of her own life upon her, sent her gaze flying—to sear into her eyes, if only for one last glimpse, the sight of her—of her partner.
—Sing.
A voice—she fancied she heard one, saying just that.
“—”
A black back blocked Nene’s upturned gaze. The leather riding-suit evaporated in an instant, baring a brawny, inverted triangle of a torso. Sprawling across that back, vermilion markings spread wide like the boughs of a tree.
His back to Nene, never once turning round, the leader of the night-dogs—Kon—loosed a roar that set the twilight sky trembling.
“————”
It was a leader’s thunderous reproach, calling to heel a follower who had turned against him.
It was the fury of one man, who rued his own want of strength.
It was the grief of an elder brother, dreading, as kin, for a younger brother’s life.
Destruction, and the roar that strove to hold it in check—the two crashed together, and a fearsome shock went echoing all around.
And so, when she opened the eyes the blast of wind had pressed shut, Nene found her body, by some miracle, unhurt.
In her place, right before Nene’s eyes, the tall black figure that had planted itself against the onrushing giant dog-head dropped to one knee.
“Kon!”
Raika, alighting from the evening sky, ran to him, her fine features contorting at how deep the wounds ran. That she had been shielded by the leader of the night-dogs—Nene, coming at last to herself, stepped forward too, and at the fact of it a question broke from her: “But—why?”
“…Do not presume, little one. To right a younger brother’s error is an elder brother’s bounden duty, no more.”
“Elder… Brother…?”
Akeru’s voice—cracked, warped into something no longer his own—came out a rasp. To that younger brother Kon raised a trembling hand and, clinging to the last shred of his dignity, gave his command.
“Akeru… you, I make the leader of the night-dogs.”
In an instant, vermilion lines stretched from Kon’s frame like shafts of light and went racing across the body of Akeru, warped now past all recognition into a monstrous shape. From the pack of night-dogs, gathered close before ever it was marked, a howl went up, and then another; and to the mournful, majestic chorus of the night-dogs, voice folding over voice, the swollen bulk of Akeru was, little by little, stilled.
And then, having watched the succession through to its close—a human likeness much resembling Kon’s own—the body of the former leader tipped, and came to rest upon the ground.
“Kon! Here—my spirit-power, at once—”
“It must not be… That store of yours—you will have need of it, in time.”
“—! But then, that means…”
Kon, unable to hold to a human shape, had returned to the form of a large, fine-limbed dog; and gathering his head into her lap, Raika trembled. The tears coursing down her flushed cheeks fell, and spread in ripples across Kon’s outline, which had begun to blur away.
“Yes. The balance is broken. Soon the hour of the rift will stretch out longer and longer, and before long the dark will swallow the world—”
“Kon—?!”
“Elder Brother!!”
At Kon’s voiceless voice, Akeru—returned now to human form—strove to force his own spirit-power across to him. —But Akeru had spent nearly all his own strength in the rampage as well, and it was all he could do to stay on his feet, his swaying frame propped up by his fellow night-dogs.
“Akeru…”
Kon—the greater part of his body already fading to nothing, only his head yet remaining—wrung out what little strength was left to call his younger brother’s name.
“Yes, Elder Brother.”
“Join your strength with the sky-foxes and all the rest. Do not forget our true purpose.”
“…As you command. Without fail, I shall win the balance back—this I swear to you.”
“Our brothers… I leave them… in your hands.”
With those parting words, the preternatural being that had been the leader of the night-dogs was gone, wholly and utterly. It left behind not a trace; the night-hue, crumbling away like so many grains of sand, did not remain even in Raika’s hands.
“—We’re leaving, Nene.”
“Wha—?”
Rising to her feet, Nene’s partner took the hand of the girl who stood there with her head bowed. That hand was cold, and shook with a small, faint tremor.
“People will be gathering. We go before this turns to trouble.”
“And you—be quick, all of you,” Raika urged the night-dogs on.
At Raika, the new leader—Akeru—turned a pair of unfocused eyes.
“You… you mean to flee, even at a moment like this? Give back ‘the Musk of the Firmament’ you stole!”
“I stole nothing. I was only dancing. I danced, and the scent steeped itself into me all on its own.”
“And that dance of yours is the very thing that robbed us of the far-off blue vault of heaven! Had you not gone hoarding the musk away—!”
“Stole it…? Raika…? What—what does he mean?”
To the question of a Nene who could make no sense of it, the partner who had always, without fail, answered her gave back only silence. Her averted eyes were sunk low, as though in silent admission of guilt. “I’ll explain later,” Raika broke in, allowing no reply, and, folding down her triangular ears, turned back to face the night-dogs.
“—It can’t be done. The musk is woven into my yukata. As long as I exist, no one else can lay a finger on it, and it will never fade.”
“What… did you say…?!”
“The two of us have been seen already, by no end of people. Any more confusion now will only make matters worse. Do you mean to throw away Kon’s resolve, Akeru? Your strength—it will be needed more and more, from here on.”
“Do not think to dodge me—!”
A dry crack—the report of a slap—rang out across the platform, cutting clean through the sirens of the emergency vehicles closing in. Struck across the cheek, Akeru flared with instant rage; but that anger itself dealt fresh hurt to a body already raw as a salted wound.
“Get hold of yourself! You are the one who must lead the night-dogs now! You above all must know the weight of a leader’s charge. If you mean to take up Kon’s will, then do not lose sight of what has to be done.”
“—Kh—”
The words no sooner spoken, Raika turned on her heel—this time for good—and broke into a run.
Her tail flying, her glowing yukata snapping in the wind, she tore away at a sprint. Her tears fell in a trailing line, printing small stains upon the asphalt washed in madder-red.
In the eyes of Nene, who barely managed to turn and look, was mirrored the sight of the night-dogs—giving a short bay and tearing off in the opposite direction. Springing into the air, the night-hued dogs vanished into a sky of deep indigo.
—Far away, from the very quarter Nene had been meant to head toward, she fancied she caught the sound of cheering, and the strains of music.
That Tanabata dusk, the world looked upon a dancer robed in blue sky, and upon the figure of a single girl who rang out the music for that dance.
—And it was the beginning—soon, so very soon to come—of a long, long twilight.
(The End)