<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Still out of breath from the contest — but they won! — Akiko stood before the iwakura. The fire still towered into the sky, its light burning bright against darkness that seemed to threaten from all sides, looming over, blocking all but a tiny circle of blue sky.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Taking a deep breath, Akiko reached for the mask.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Even before her fingers reached it, the column of fire bent over and poured down into her like a waterfall. She felt it fill her, running through her veins, her nerves, into her eyes and ears, blotting out everything else with the sheer power. For a moment she forgot where she was, forgot what she had to do.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The shrieks from behind her brought her awareness back. The ohnusa was in front of her, and she bowed before it, twice.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“Please try to be calm,â€ it was Shiraishi’s voice. <em>Why?</em> “She is perfectly all right.â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“Somebody call the…â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“<em>No!</em> Please be quiet for the norito.â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;"><em>They can see! They can see the fire!</em> Akiko suddenly realised. As she began to recite the words of the ancient norito, she wondered what that meant.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She finished and bowed again, but the ohnusa was unchanged, still paper streamers on a wooden rod. She reached for it, with hands she could see were wreathed in flames, and as she touched it the flames spread from her hands to the ohnusa, each strip of paper burning a different colour, scattering sparks of light and flame as she lifted it.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She turned back to the gathered ujiko, and raised the ohnusa. A few bowed their heads immediately, the other after a few moments. She swung the ohnusa, and fire exploded from it, across the shrine grounds, out to the boundary, and beyond, rushing out across the city. Akiko was filled with exhilaration. <em>It’s working.</em></p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She swung it again, and the fire rushed out once more, but this time the kegare stopped it some way outside the shrine, a boiling wall of blackness that was pressing in from all sides, pushing the light back. Akiko swung the ohnusa again, but the kegare was too strong now, pushing back hard in all directions, pressing right up to the edges of the shrine.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The fire in the iwakura flared up again, sending out wave after wave of fire, but they were all checked by the kegare. Things moved within the darkness, things with claws and wings and beaks, things that tested the barrier of fire, and then withdrew.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;"><em>It’s still not strong enough!</em> Akiko thought, wildly. <em>How can we…</em> The fire was eating at the darkness, and for a moment created a hole, a hole that was rapidly patched by kegare flowing in from other sides.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">And suddenly Akiko understood what was happening. All of the kegare was concentrating here to contain the aramitama. If they won here, they would win everywhere.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">But it wasn’t at all clear that they would win here. There were places where the darkness extinguished the flames, and while the aramitama quickly reinforced it, the strength it had gained from the festival would not last for ever.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Akiko knew what she had to do. Turning, she replaced the ohnusa in its stand, and then ran for the woods. She heard Shiraishi call after her, once, and then fall silent.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The woods felt more alive than ever, even the ground under her feet lending her strength and bearing her up. She reached the kami tree in moments, faster than she could ever remember, and wasn’t even out of breath as she paused to bow before it. She shrugged her happi coat off, and quickly undid the loincloth, before stepping forward to embrace the tree.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">For a moment there was agony, as the fire burned at her, and at the tree, and she felt the tree’s pain as her own, but then she was the fire, and the tree accepted her, letting her through.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She stood in the forest, the trees above her drawing their branches back from the flames that still leapt up from her body. Putting her hands together in front of her, she began to intone the harae norito once more. The flames drew in, concentrating above her hands, forming into an ohnusa of fire once more, but as she kept chanting Akiko seemed to flow with the fire, her awareness entering the ohnusa, her voice continuing to chant from behind her and above.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She raised herself, and turned herself loose.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Akiko and the aramitama, a distinction she felt she was losing, rushed through the forest, filling it, surrounding the trees, pushing at them, opening them, embracing them.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Pouring through them, like through a dozen open doors, and bursting out into Kawasaki through the trees, trees which shook themselves and put out new leaves and twigs as they passed, growing larger in a moment. Akiko laughed as she saw Kawasaki from many places at once, the shrine unmistakable within a dense cocoon of kegare, while the light swept between and through houses, under the streets, along power lines, burning away the kegare that was left, purifying everything as it rushed onwards, spreading out to the edge of Tamao’s domain, lapping gently against the realms of other kami.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Concentrating itself like a tsunami as it converged on the shrine, on the kegare around the shrine, the kegare fighting against the light within, turned in on the shrine, not prepared for the fire to strike it from all directions at once.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The scream filled Akiko’s soul as the waves of light crashed down on the corruption, and she exulted in it, gloried in it as the kegare held for a moment, and then collapsed, burning up under the light, dissolving into particles of darkness that vanished into nothingness, a cocoon of kegare that became a film, that was burned through, that vanished as the light without rejoined the light within, a sea of cleansing fire that covered the whole area, burning the clouds away from the sky. The joy of completion filled Akiko, submerging her soul in ecstasy.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Tamao was coiled around the pool, his eyes gazing deep into the light.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“Bright Child, come back.â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Akiko was not the aramitama. She was…</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“Bright Child, come back.â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She remembered. She remembered a body. She was not a spirit, she was a body, human. Tamao looked at her, the light refracting through his scales and scattering in a million colours. He was calling her back. She let her awareness extend over the whole of his domain for a moment longer, confirming that it was all purified, through to the deepest level, and then answered his call.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“You have done well, Bright Child. You have done very well.â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">There was something in the pool, something pale, something familiar… A body. Her body.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">“You are still human, Bright Child.â€ Tamao had not taken his eyes from her. “Remember that.â€</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She remembered. She remembered bruising her knee against a table. She remembered the taste of umeboshi. She remembered the feel of silk on her skin.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She was in her body.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She rose from the water, the scattered droplets turned to burning diamonds in the light from the iwakura.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The air was clean under a blue sky, and Akiko’s mind was at peace.</p>