A Storm of Blossoms

It was quiet on the way out of Nephele’s dungeon, and dark. If there were any other lights than the dim glow that had illuminated our cage, I couldn’t see them. I didn’t look too closely, anyway. I didn’t want to know, especially when I was already so overloaded.

Fortunately, neither Saori nor I needed much light. And we could both produce it, anyway. I had lightning crawling through my fur, which cast a dim, eerie green glow. And Saori had some sort of fire magic playing through the fingers of one hand. She’d never done that around me before. I wasn’t sure whether that was just because she’d never needed it, or because she’d wanted to keep her link to the Order of the Shadowed Flame private.

Learning about that had explained more than a couple things about her. I’d noticed on numerous occasions that in addition to the fox-and-spice smell of kitsune, there was an admixture of something else in Saori’s signature, smoke and dark incense. It wasn’t hard to guess that had come about because of her association with Shadowed Flame, and I could feel that scent of smoke particularly clearly right now.…

“What the fuck were you thinking? Were you even thinking? Seriously, bitch, you just…what kind of shit did you use to replace your brain, because I need to find whoever produced it and rip their intestines out.” Saori was pacing back and forth around the cage, in a way that reminded me of an agitated cat, and cussing me out. She’d been doing that with great enthusiasm and remarkable creativity for the past several minutes. I didn’t think she’d repeated herself yet, and I’d heard at least four languages in the mix.

“I already said I was sorry.” I sounded less agitated and more just tired. I was also sitting down and leaning back against the cage wall. I had plenty of room for it; they’d been courteous enough to put us in the same cage, a literal freestanding cage, but it was large enough that there was no crowding.

“And I already told you it was bullshit, yes,” she retorted. “I remember. Unlike some people, I still have enough cognitive functioning that I can recall basic information for ten minutes.” The kitsune sounded…not angry, precisely, but the insults felt less like an affectation than they usually would. “Look, sneaking into the VIP section and taking the table reserved for an actual VIP, I can respect that. It’s got style. But you could have at least told me that was what we were fucking doing.”…

Kali.

Kali, the dark goddess of the Hindu pantheon. The mother and the destroyer. She was the kind of goddess who consumed a whole army of demons in one sitting, and wanted to keep going. She was the endless darkness outside of time itself, the primordial night that had given rise to all things, and that would one day consume all things. She was the goddess of the cremation grounds and the birthing room, the patron of mystics and midwives and murderers alike.

And she was talking to me. I owed her a favor.

I was fucked beyond the capacity of my language or my mind to truly apprehend.…

To my surprise, it really was painless. Portals apparently sucked so much that even a relatively tame one had left Saori semiconscious at best for several minutes, and while she had said that Ways didn’t have the same effect, I had still on some level been expecting this to be at least a little unpleasant.

It wasn’t. I moved forward into the darkness, and I had the feeling of continuing to move forward, just with “forward” pointing a direction I didn’t usually see. I wasn’t sure I was walking, and I had little awareness of my body; the world was dark and deep. But it wasn’t unpleasant, just foreign, and it only lasted a couple seconds before I was stepping out the far side. I didn’t pass out; I didn’t even lose my balance.…