Page 45 of All That Has Flown Beyond
The night was crawling over the shrine, its lumbering body casting its shadow onto Kaiyo’s face. He could see the moonlight in Mori’s eyes.
Mori left him for a moment, lighting the oil lamps hanging on their stands.
“I want to see you,” he explained when he was finished.
Kaiyo wanted to see too.
It had been a long time since Kaiyo had been with anybody. He felt the vulnerability of it in the core of his chest, but it wasn’t anything like his experiences in college. Those blind, sickly misadventures that had left him disjointed and lost.
Kaiyo stepped close to Mori, running his hand through the thick, dark hair hanging to Mori’s chin. He leaned in, letting himself feel the excitement, the trepidation, the thrill.
The kiss started with a press of lips and then opened slowly into wet heat. Kaiyo revelled in the solid feel of Mori’s body against his, the strength of his arms as they wrapped around him.
They collapsed onto the futon together. Kaiyo straddled Mori and looked down at his feminine, masculine beauty for a while. Mori’s hands clutched his hips, pressing their bodies together.
Kaiyo leaned down into another kiss. The flames around the room flickered, casting their joined shadows on the paper doors, a beast of two hearts.
**********
When Kaiyo left for America, it was with a heavy, pulling heart.
He’d bonded with the Kanbaras like he hadn’t with any other pack he had visited. Perhaps it was the ancient ties he had with Japan, or Mori’s moonlight eyes, or Hanaki’s complete welcome.
And yet. Despite all that, deep in the subterranean caverns of him, echoed a longing. A calling voice pulling him closer to home.
The years since he left Bamsdale had been long. Time had warped, thinning like treacherous ice during his winters, becoming pregnant with possibility in his springs. But there had been many more preceding these. Years of getting to know the Bamsdale land like he now knew his own Ousía. Years of Thea, of being told off in lessons, and getting into trouble at home. Years of Ahmik. Of his kind, steady hands, his steadfast conscience, his volatile emotion a byproduct of his relentless determination to do right. Of his lips and skin and the way he had been Kaiyo’s, completely.
Of the way Kaiyo had been his.
Still was, sometimes, in his dreams, in the cavernous siren call that couldn’t erase history with joy or with pain.
**********
Kaiyo’s travels did not stop in Japan.
Stepping outside of America made him realize how large the world was, how much there was to learn.
He visited Sweden to help a small town with a Skogsrå. A mist elemental, its deceptive form would materialize as a beautiful person, luring people into the forest and then confounding them into a feeling of disorientation until they became lost in the thick fog. Kaiyo helped the pack he was visiting work with their land instead of battle against it, the Skogsrå acting out as an act of vengeance and frustration in reaction to her depleting forest.
He went to Madagascar, where a tree had been enchanted carnivorous. Its impressive form had been growing for hundreds of years, seeing the rise and fall of petty men, and in its might had acquired enough force to resist most attempts at disenchantment. It had taken Kaiyo and another shaman to undo the spell, and the tree had been left to become restful once more.
He visited a pack of otter-shifters, Kushtaka, in Golaghat, India, learning about their deep appreciation of family, their deep knowledge of the use of correspondences and how they were steeped in tradition and colour.
He visited a pack of Boto in the Amazonian forest, dolphin-shifters which had learnt from the rich land around them how important it was to give as much as they took.
When he went back to Japan, he stayed with a pack of Onikuma, bear-shifters, which had a particular knowledge of the art of Kotadama, exploring the Ousía of language and how it was used.
Each place had a secret to tell, and Kaiyo learnt, above all, to listen.
**********
Kaiyo looked out the train window, watching the abrupt change of the landscape that streaked past. Green, green, green, and then the paintbrush ran out, leaving the world brown and blank.
A tinny voice announced their stop, and Kaiyo and Mori got out at their station.
“They weren’t kidding,” Mori said. Even from the open platform, they could see the effects of the drought. Spring was dead around Kaiyo and Mori. The deep, sweet fragrance of the plum blossom that usually marked the start of the season had abandoned the village they were visiting, leaving dust behind. The air was thick with the sound of premature cicadas. Each of their steps kicked up the fine, dry earth beneath their feet.
“Look,” Kaiyo said, pointing at the landscape. Mori turned, his eyebrows furrowing. The rice fields, which were normally neatly made beds of green, were now brown, ruined canvases.
