#End-Matter Story — The Instant That Divides at the Gate

#Scent — The Instant That Divides at the Gate

zn14 end-matter story · Gravity ★★ · pure Scent (fiction). No rules or numbers appear.

The gate made no sound.

Kagura Nobutsuna (神樂信綱) had disliked that from the first. When a rampart collapsed, the collapse had a sound; when a man died, the dying had a sound. Every great thing in the world came with a sound. Yet this gate alone — this fissure that had inched wider wherever the blood of war had seeped into the earth — made no sound at all, neither in opening nor in closing.

Now, before him, the gate stood half open.

The light that leaked from the far side was less a light than the memory of one. The premonition of swords not yet forged, the scent of an age not yet come, spilled through that seam and wet the snow underfoot. Behind him his people held their breath. The monks of Hiei who gripped the ropes of the seal, those who knew the workings of the gate, and the banner of Kagura.

The banner.

Nobutsuna opened his right hand, then closed it again. He knew, dimly, that where that hand came to rest today would divide all under heaven. Knowing it, still he had not decided.

If he closed this gate.

Then he would become a man true to his own words — that to subjugate the yoma was itself the mandate to rule all under heaven. He would paste paper across the seam and press the official seal upon it, so that the men of later ages would record this place as a mere matter of law and order, and forget it. The name Kagura would remain as the name of a domain, quietly whetting its blade beside whoever held all under heaven. Not by hegemony, but by oath. That was the path most like him — and for that very reason, the most regrettable path as well.

He shifted his hand half a span toward the ropes. There it stopped.

If instead he left this gate as it was, and stood alone before it.

If he made the swords of the future that flowed from the gate into the swords of Kagura, and no one else's. If he held the workings of the seal in his own hand alone and yielded them to no one. Why should it be more wrong for one who has the power to cut down yoma to hold all under heaven, than for one helpless against them to hold it? To raise all under heaven upon a sword's edge — the thought brushed cold across the nape of his neck. What was regrettable was not the path, but the weight of the temptation.

The wind changed direction.

Into the memory of light from the seam, at some point, another scent had mixed. It was sweet. The cloying sweetness of fruit gone long past ripe, softened to the very edge of bursting. Nobutsuna knew it. The scent that slips quietly into a man's heart and blurs whether the hand that grips is his own or another's. Even this hesitation now — even this heart weighing whether to close the gate or seize it for himself — was it truly his own? Had someone, from beyond the gate, or from behind some shadow on this side, quietly pressed a thumb to one pan of the scale? His certainty that all behind him were allies wavered, for the first time.

And then — last of all, most quietly — the light beyond the gate looked, for a moment, like a human face.

A face looking down. Something that rose again not as politics but as second advent, not as mandate but as divine authority (神威). Before it, Nobutsuna's banner and Hiei's ropes alike shrank small. A world where the one who bears the mirror, the one who bears the sword, and the one who bears the jewel are bound so that none can take their hands from the others, and the binding itself becomes a nation. That if the sun rose again, it would no longer matter at all what this hand grasped — that vastness pressed upon him for a moment.

Four shadows swept across the snowfield before the gate.

The hand that closes, the hand that seizes for itself, the hand drawn by another, and the sun risen above the hand. They overlapped and scattered, and no one of them could erase the other three. Nobutsuna looked down at his own right hand. It had not yet touched the ropes, nor the sword's hilt, nor the seam of the gate. In the place where it had shifted half a span and stopped — in the empty air — it remained.

Behind him someone called to him softly. It was a voice awaiting his command.

Nobutsuna did not answer.

The gate still made no sound, and his hand had yet — decided nothing.