The feeling of being watched lingered.

  Nevertheless, the burst of fright that had sent Hino running soon dissolved; diluted by the cool rain on her cheeks and washed away entirely by her good sense. The kodama had come for the fire, not for her. They would not follow, and bounding about in a panic would do her no good—not in the dark on steep and slippery stone, and certainly not when she’d come so far already.

  Though reason did little to alleviate her unease, Hino clung to it. She counted the steps as she climbed them, willing her pace to slow and her breathing to calm. Mount Tsukigami was not hospitable to those who rushed—Father’s tales and Grandfather’s histories had assured her of that. And so, she would proceed with care and fall back on what was left of her meticulous planning.

  As she went, her gaze swept the border of barren branches, seeking a strip of red or white linen—those small but reassuring symbols of her own readiness. She’d left them not only to signal shelter and supplies, but to track how far she’d travelled and, importantly, to remind herself to rest while she ascended. She had pushed hard today with the torch in her hands, and she would need quite a few hours to recover before continuing.

  Two of her waymarks remained. She would stop as soon as she found the next one. From there, all would fall back into order.

  At first, Hino blamed it on the way the darkness stifled her vision, on the blurring quality of the rain. Spotting a bit of damp cloth amidst the tangle of vegetation would, of course, be challenging—even making out her own hand in front of her face was difficult. But it was not impossible, and Hino was determined.

  She let her progress dwindle to a crawl, squinting at brush and bramble. Occasionally, there’d be some flicker of motion in the corner of her eye; a stirring of limp leaves or a quivering of empty branches. And often, with her heart in her throat, Hino fought to convince herself that it was simply the wind. But nothing appeared before her, least of all the waymark she sought.

  More than an hour passed. The clouds parted and drew the curtain of drizzle from the mountainside, giving the sky to a bright and brilliant moon. Lit in crimson, the stairs rose ever upward with the forest clustered around its edges—boughs conspicuously bare of leaf and linen. There was neither dark nor rain left to blame, yet Hino could not admit what the moonlight had revealed, what even her body had begun to insist.

  She searched on, ignoring the tightness in her chest and the burning fatigue in her limbs. Each step grew more arduous than the last; the carrying stick, even the sodden drape of her clothing, pressing heavier and heavier into her shoulders.

  Air sickness, Grandfather had called it. A tell-tale sign that she had come too high, too fast.

  But how could that be? She had arranged the waymarks to avoid exactly this. Foregoing a few stops should not have afflicted her so—not when she hadn’t yet crested Mount Tsukigami’s shoulders. That would come well after her final waymark. It was impossible that she had gone past it!

  A shadow fell over her, then—too dense, too deliberate to be of the forest’s making.

  Hino went still, blinking up some hundred steps. Silhouetted against the glowing moon, a torii gate stood silent guard over the stone path; upright columns, far thicker than any cedar trunk, rooted in the sloping earth, sweeping crossbeams cutting a smile into the blushing face of the moon. Beyond it and to either side, the mountain disappeared in a mist of swirling white and pink and red.

  The Cloud Gate.

  Hino swayed, collapsing to her knees; overcome, at last, by fatigue and confusion. There was no mistaking it, though she had never seen it with her own eyes. It was the first of the three gates she would pass beneath to reach the Red Moon Shrine; the first boundary between the mundane and the upperworld—that realm so rarely breached by humans. With its open mouth before her, she found herself unable to get up.

  She should not have reached it until moonfall tomorrow.

  For the first time since she’d parted ways with Teru, Hino looked back. Over her shoulder, her shadow stretched down into the rose-tinted dark as if pulling her to return the way she had come. Somewhere below were the lost fruits of her preparation; a trail leading to a mountain spring, a shelter carved out of a mound of earth. There’d be another torch, too, and fresh socks and sandals kept dry in wax paper.

  Hino’s eyes stung, and she squeezed them shut. She had to leave it all behind. Her hand drifted to the Dawn Dragon’s Blessing, hidden beneath Father’s warm stole and tucked under her kimono. The Blessing could only be moved toward the Red Moon Shrine, never away from it. This she had learned from Grandfather, and he from his grandfather, and he from his.

  She could not go back—not while she carried the burden of rekindling the sun. To do so would dull the Blessing’s power, and without it, the Dawn Dragon would not hear her prayers.

  It took a long while for Hino to muster the strength to open her eyes again. Even then, her tired body refused to do much else. The air sickness had come upon her fully, now. Her temples throbbed. Her stomach churned. She knew that she should eat and find a proper place to rest, but for now, it was all she could do to sit upright and shivering on the cool, hard steps.

  It would have been unbearable to keep looking down, wondering after her missing waymarks. It would have been perhaps worse to look up, dreading the Cloud Gate that awaited her far earlier than expected. Instead, Hino leaned her head back and studied the sky. For a moment, she allowed the memory of Teru’s warm presence to intrude; his familiar shoulder against hers as they delayed a goodbye, the promise she had made to him still fresh on her lips.

  She had known this would be hard. It was only a little harder than expected.

  Eventually, the shaking in her legs abated, the ache behind her eyes receding. Weakly, she pushed herself to her feet, the carrying stick wobbling on her back precariously. It stabilized, and so did she. Taking a deep breath, Hino slipped into the woods.

  Yet, the feeling of being watched followed.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Countless times, Hino woke in the muted moonlight—some snap or rustle jerking her from slumber. In that tender, terrifying place between sleep and wakefulness, the empty shadows played tricks on her. Bulging roots and small rocks sometimes took the shape of kodama. Twisted trunks and reaching branches morphed into all manner of things human and inhuman. And though her bleary eyes gradually revealed them to be nothing more than what they were, it always seemed like they resumed their watching as soon as she looked away.

  That she slept at all was a miracle of sheer exhaustion

  Hino’s final, fitful awakening was to the sound of wings flapping overhead. She sat up just in time to make out a departing rush of ink-black feathers, a branch in the tree above her bobbing. A crow—the first she’d seen since starting her journey. Groggy and unsettled, she frowned after it, tracing its flight until it vanished into the charcoal sky.

  Despite her troubled rest, the worst of Hino’s air sickness had eased. Though her breaths were a touch short, her body a tad heavy as she picked her way back to the stone steps, she welcomed the warmth that came with movement. She was not ready to risk lighting another fire, and staying put for too long without one could be just as harmful as a bit of air sickness.

  A faint crunch underfoot drew her gaze. Here and there, pockets of snow still hugged the spaces where shade had blocked the dying sun. Stippled across the icy drifts were Hino’s own tracks from hours before, an unsteady line through the forest. And among them were the prints of an animal; each one neat and delicate, just barely overlapping with where Hino’s sandals had sunk in.

  Pausing briefly to inspect them, gooseflesh raised along Hino’s skin. She had never seen such pawprints before. Similar to a dog’s, but narrower, more light-footed. A fox’s—yet, unlike any fox’s prints she had ever seen, too. She hastened away, scanning the brush nervously.

  The kitsune of Father’s stories always had nine tails. Fickle and mischievous creatures, Hino had especially hoped to evade their attentions.

  This one, it seemed, had two toes too many.

  Trying her best to keep an even pace, Hino felt little relief at breaking from the forest. On the stairs, she was confronted once more by the Cloud Gate. Without the moon, it cast no shadow to envelope her as she approached. Instead, it gleamed, a deep red against the restless mists beyond—simultaneously an invitation and a warning. And although Hino understood both, she could accept only one.

  With each of her steps, the Cloud Gate loomed taller and more imposing, dwarfing even the Earth Gate at the entrance to Kōmyō Temple. Past it, there was little to be seen in the thick fog—vague outlines of stairs and forest that dissipated almost as soon as they appeared. If only she had managed to bring a torch, perhaps more might have been revealed—but there was no use dwelling on that now.

  She did not hesitate when she reached its feet. After all, duty had left her with only one direction to go.

  Hino bowed and passed beneath the Cloud Gate.

  Cold mist curled away from her, slithering into the undergrowth. It coated the ground thickly, like a simmering mass of snakes, coiling up tree trunks to twist among their branches. Strangely, it was brighter within the mists than it had been outside of them; a diffuse light that pulsed gently along each tendril—almost with the cadence of a breath.

  Father had spoken of it being so—of the mists being like something alive—yet Hino still flinched to see it for herself. She went carefully, following his words. Always, she waited for the mists to thin, to clear a path for her, before moving forward. The heat of a flame would have pushed the vapors back, she knew. But as things were, she’d have to rely on the warmth of her body to coax them away.

  More than once, Hino heard the crackle of twigs and dried leaves nearby, or the beat of wings from high above her. Once or twice, too, the sound of her own name whispered to her across the fog. She jumped, certainly, but she never turned to look.

  Father had never told her and Teru what happened to those who looked, and Hino did not want to find out.

  At length, the stone stairs began to flatten, tapering away into a rocky incline with the occasional, rough-hewn step. The forest changed, too; hardy ferns and bushes coming to stand where tall cedar had been. Their scraggly branches tugged at Hino’s sleeves from within the mist, except when large boulders lined the margins of her path.

  She relied on her sandclock, now, to judge when she should rest. And she needed to more frequently than she had before. At times, it felt as if she breathed through water rather than air; at others, the repetitiveness of the climb made her dizzy and lightheaded. But she’d never be sitting for long before the chill came on; a numbing heaviness in her limbs accompanied by the slow, persistent creep of the mist around her.

  To sleep, she would need to start a fire—regardless of what eyes it drew—or else she would risk not waking.

  That time came far sooner than Hino would have liked. The moon had not yet risen, though the pearly glow of the mists had swelled in the deepening dark. Crouching, her hands already trembling, she began to gather branches and twigs and dead leaves from the surrounding brush. Small rocks, too. When she had enough, she arranged them—rocks in a little circle, dead leaves at the bottom for kindling, twigs and branches in a cone over top.

  Finally, she reached for the leather pouch she’d strung upon her carrying stick; the one containing her fire striker. Fingers brushed her rolled sleeping mat, her cloth-wrapped provisions. Then, nothing.

  Hino’s eyes found the empty space before her mind understood what she was seeing. She fell upon her hands, mouth agape, breaths labored. Her fire striker was gone. Dropped somewhere she could not return for it—or, perhaps, taken. It did not matter which. Hino knew, as certainly as she felt the cold in her bones and the strain in her lungs, that the outcome would be the same.

  But the fate of the morning was in her hands.

  Shuddering, Hino lurched to her feet, grabbing her things. She would not let the mountain have her—she could not. There was another way. If she could not light a fire, she could, at least, hide from the cold. That might give her a few hours to assemble enough strength to keep moving. What came after that—ascending to the Sky Gate, the Moon Gate after it, and the Red Moon Shrine itself—she would worry about later.

  First, she had to survive.

  Mindless of the fog, Hino stumbled off the path, bracing herself upon whatever she could find. She could not have moved quickly if she wanted to. The terrain was steeper and rougher than she was accustomed, slippery with pebbles and loose dirt. But there had to be something, somewhere—some hollow or groove to huddle inside. Yet, within the small circle of visibility the mist allowed her, nothing of the sort appeared.

  Hino’s head spun. She gasped for breath, nausea bubbling up within her.

  Then, the sound of fluttering linen floated to her—oddly distinct in the silence. Without thinking, Hino turned.

  A tunnel had opened up through the sea of mist. At its end, a knot of linen hung tied to a stunted tree, rippling in a nonexistent breeze. Hino frowned, blinking to clear eyes that had begun to dim and blur. One of her waymarks? That did not seem right. But the tree itself was perched on a rocky outcropping, and just beneath was a small trench—the first promise of shelter she had come across.

  She moved toward it at once, sandals sliding on the uphill, sending gravel skittering down as she went. But she would make it, with her head pounding so hard she could hear it and her knees wobbling as if to buckle. She reached for the tree to steady herself. The piece of white linen kissed her hand. She would make it.

  The slope dipped beneath her. With a yelp, Hino caught herself upon the rock, nails digging in. Then, the ground gave way altogether.

  For an instant, her arms cartwheeled desperately for purchase. In the next, she was weightless, the world tilting strangely about her. She heard her own cry—piercing, helpless with terror—and she saw the ink-dark sky above her, scattered with tiny, white stars—impossibly high, impossibly distant, growing ever more so.

  All except one—glinting molten gold. Streaking toward her.

  Hino closed her eyes. The mountain rose to meet her.