<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Her vision did not clear, and slowly she realised that she was wreathed in flame, that the light blinding her was the fire up against her skin. But the mask protected her, and she did not burn. She took a cautious step forward, and the ground rang again, smooth and slick under her foot, like metal. She looked down, but there was nothing but light. The feel of her vestments on her skin reminded her of what Yoshiko had said; it seemed that the mask really was protecting her clothes as well, this time.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She knelt on the ground, bowing her head respectfully, and waited. There was a humming in the air, a tension. The anticipation leaked into Akiko, and she felt her heart speeding up, her breathing becoming shallow and rapid, as fear and hope tumbled over one another in her stomach.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">And she could see herself, kneeling on white-hot metal, the mask still firmly fixed over her face, the red and white of the vestments barely visible in the light. But she, she was in the fire now, and could feel it gathering, drawing in, becoming denser, a swirling mass in her centre.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She moved, in a direction she could not name, and was within the iwakura, looking out, light spilling from the stones and illuminating Kazumi and Shiraishi, who seemed frozen in place. Between them, two sakaki branches hung in the air, caught in the moment of falling to earth.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">There was kegare there, too, and it was not frozen, writhing in the earth, flowing through the air, battening on the grass, drawing the life from every stem. Strands of the black web were already reaching into Shiraishi and Kazumi, threatening the lights that shone in the cores of their beings. Akiko felt the anger of the Aramitama, and her own anger at the pollution rose up to join it, as the light boiled out of the iwakura, catching the lines of kegare, igniting them so that they blazed with a furious white light for a moment before vanishing. The fierce exultation of the Aramitama merged with Akiko’s own feeling, as it paused for a moment at the curtains, before surging through.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The spectators were also frozen, most looking towards the curtains, but others concentrating on the food they had just bought, or on other attendees.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Kegare ran through them, reaching out from the ground to join the dark shapes that writhed and boiled in their hearts, pollution and weakness settled into their souls, eating them from within. Akiko felt an overwhelming surge of disgust, transforming into bitter anger, rage against anyone who brought such pollution into the kami’s home, a rage that wanted to burn, to cleanse, to leave the shrine pure.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">As it started to move, Akiko’s mind exploded in panic. <em>It is going to kill them all!</em> She struggled to pull it back, pleading with it to wait, to think, but it was like beating the seats of a train; the Aramitama was moving forward, every moment stretched out in Akiko’s awareness as the flames reached towards the first of the spectators, the one closest to the curtains.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Satomi.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The corruption was lodged deep in her heart, running through her whole body, bursting through the skin even now, pestilent mouths searching for the streams in the air. She was a plague, a rot. She carried decay.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;"><em>She is my friend.</em></p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;"><em>I am not here, </em>Akiko suddenly realised.<em> I am seeing through the Aramitama, but I am in my body.</em> And with that, she knew what she had to do, though her mind shied away from it. As she hesitated, the flames moved closer to Satomi.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She reached up, behind her head, and felt the threads holding the mask. For a moment, her courage failed, but then she imagined Satomi burning, not just in a vision, not just for a moment, and slipped the knot.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The mask fell.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">Akiko was looking out of her eyes, but she could see nothing as the agony swept through her, clothes gone in a moment, flesh curling and falling away as her body was consumed to ash, to dust, to nothing.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She was in the Aramitama as it swept towards Satomi, and now it was the easiest thing in the world to sweep it aside, swing round her, and then dive in, focusing on the kegare, following the lines of corruption into her heart even as the pollution flexed and twisted to escape, not even attempting to strike back.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">As if it could strike back against the inferno.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The fire pierced into Satomi’s heart, consuming every last trace of kegare, and the woman’s life was, for the briefest of moments, utterly open to Akiko. And then it was gone, as the Aramitama swept on, guided by Akiko, striking at the kegare in every spectator, splitting into two streams, then four, then eight, doubling each time until there was a web of fire filling the precincts, linking all the spectators as their pollution burned away, white fireworks against the dark sky.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The streams of fire merged and flowed out across the shrine, no threat now to the purified spectators, flowing across the open grass, through the house, into the woods, around the base of the sacred tree. All the kegare was burned up, consumed, and the rage began to change, to harden into satisfaction and defiance. The light reached the edge of the precincts.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">And stopped. Beyond, a great wall of dark smoke, within which eyes and mouths and insectile limbs and gaping wounds weeping foul liquids moved and hissed and mocked, forbade passage. The light rose up against it, making its own wall, claiming its own ground. The kegare shrank back a little, giving no ground but avoiding contact. The kegare was not afraid, though. Akiko could feel no awareness in it, nothing beyond a mechanical repulsion from the light.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The fire soared upwards above the shrine, cleansing the air, raising a shield over the shrine that covered the trees of the forest, and the air above them, a shield that closed into a burning roof, as the fire poured down again, into the heart of the iwakura, and further down, down into the hill beneath, driving the kegare from the cracks in the stone and awakening something that had been dormant for years.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">The hot water rushed up through the rock, bearing Akiko with it, bursting up through the iwakura, bouncing over the rocks to splash onto the ground, which sank away beneath it, forming a pool, a pool that rapidly filled with water. Akiko could feel the water warm on her skin, relaxing, calming, refreshing.</p>
<p style="margin: 8.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 28.0px; font: 13.0px Optima;">She stood, and stepped out of the water, the mask in her hands, her vestments perfectly dry.</p>