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*
Minamoto no Yorimitsu dies with blood chasing the laughter on his lips.
Anticlimactic, the rumours say. Pathetic, say the youkai, reveling in their sudden freedom. But of course the great Lord of the Minamoto would be brought down by his own hubris. A stray arrow above his breastplate, and someone took the opportunity to slit – his – throat!
Look how his own household mourns him!
There is no body to be found, nothing of him left to cremate, and bury after. The Minamoto clan holds the funeral rites in a perfunctory fashion, everything fitting for a patriarch and not an iota more. Prayers for the soul, on the tenth day of each month, but who can say if any attended?
For the demon who’d thought himself a sword, the demon forged, shattered and remade by his master’s hands, the fire in the hollow of his chest simply gutters, and goes out.
He doesn’t think about it.
* *
A gash in his thigh, weeping. Bruises purpling his left arm from a nasty fall, a shattered forearm remnants of a block gone awry, its sluggish healing a reminder of his failure. Yet once he sees the particular feverish cast of his Master’s eyes, as he yanks his sword from the last corpse with too much force – he knew what would come. Wordlessly he mounts after his Master; like a storm they ride, thundering until they reach the outskirts of the city, and go further in. Aching in every joint, hands still sticky with blood, he dismounts and follows where the air lies still, thick with age-old power and the acrid smell of ash and rotting wood.
He follows his Master through the hollowed-out carcasses of buildings. Their footsteps rattle and echo, the wind is very quiet.
A cherry tree stands defiant, in spite of its fire-scorched trunk. The spreading canopy is lush, but the clouds of blossom have long disappeared since the last time they’d visited. In the height of summer the foliage is thick and verdant, sporting clusters of bright hard berries fit only for birds to pick at. His Master drinks from the flask, pours the rest over its roots slowly, pensively.
“For the dead. May their souls rise swiftly to the heavens.” An offering to all, but, as always, he has the inkling that it is said for only one person. He has never been told whom it is, that his Master mourns.
He is just about to turn away when he hears his voice again, low as an afterthought:
“It’s precisely for
scattering without regrets
that you are admired:
cherry blossoms, it’s hateful
remaining within this world.”
“The… nobles have a particular name for this.” His Master sets himself apart deliberately, though the derisive curl of his lips seems subconscious. “They’re usually too fixated on frivolous matters, but in this they’re not entirely wrong.
“We are like cherry blossom, or the fire in a brazier, destined to be snuffed out, too quickly, in service to our people, and then replaced.”
He takes one long, last look at the tree. Then, seeming to come back to himself, his Master turns to study him, really look at him, for the first time. His body feels fragile, paper-thin and hot everywhere he’s laid eyes – he wishes he were not so bruised and battered, imperfect, but his Master gives a nod of approval at the myriad ways in which his body has been used.
“Give everything to the cause,” he says.
He says, “Death in this manner is honour, Onikiri. Always remember that.”
“Yes, Master.”
* *
Onikiri tries, with the Demon King and his partner, and the girl youkai of the maples. He is welcomed back with open arms, and for a while it’s enough to stay in their roughshod settlement at the edge of the mountain; fending off lesser youkai pests, hunting, spending lazy afternoons staring up at the patches of sky between the leaves. Those oni that remain don’t know him from before, but Onikiri relearns the customs by simply – living. It's a relief, like stretching a long disused muscle and feeling the rest of his body thrum, then relax.
But whenever he catches sight of Shuten there is that scar, stark and vulnerable as he bares his neck, raises his chin. When he sees Ibaraki his arms remember the hard jolt of cutting through sinew and bone, the curdling miasma that crowds into his mouth and nostrils and – his eye, a sharp bright shard of pain that lingers for hours on end.
He looks at Momiji and it’s even worse. Remembers covering a defenseless girl’s mouth and slipping a knife between her ribs as she struggled, incapacitated in her heavy silks, remembers that voice soft in his ear, create allies for us, Onikiri, for the glory of the Minamoto clan – he meets her eyes at last, manages a smile in return, yet can’t help but catch the tension that ripples across her skin, inadvertently, whenever she looks at him.
I’m sorry, he says to all of them, and then, I don’t deserve your forgiveness.
And so Onikiri runs.
And so once again, he is alone.
* *
“Master,” he asks, “How do you forget?”
He stares into the ruined mess he’s made of the demon’s chest. His mind ticks, ticks. There are two states, two extremes; he has yet to come down from the euphoria of the fight, yet to turn over each dead body in his mind – attuned to every detail.
(In the blank indifferent hours before dawn, when the only evidence left is the iron tang settled close, intimate as a second skin, he will see them all.)
His Master laughs.
“If you kill those who would kill you, what need do you have for remorse?”
* *
Kill those who would kill you.
And like a knife to the heart, scraping with every breath: atone for your existence.
Onikiri pays, and pays.
One day he comes to in an airy room, swords nowhere to be found, and the surge of panic is nauseating until he realizes that his bandages have been expertly changed – he’s unbound and also cleaner than he has been for months.
The form of the person bending over him resolves into gentle hands and a face framed by a fall of long white hair; soft not cruel, very pretty, with grey-blue eyes instead of red. Onikiri resists the urge to claw those eyes out, doesn’t make the same mistake again.
“Abe no Seimei!”
“Please calm down and rest, Onikiri,” Seimei says, pushing the food at him. “I would hate to find you collapsed again from exhaustion.”
His sleeve brushes against his knees. Onikiri looks down and analyses his choices automatically; an overrobe of plain white glossed silk, the ruri blue of his gathered trousers deep as lapis, simple but undoubtedly fine.
“You didn’t need to go so far, for an invalid.” For a demon.
Seimei’s face crinkles a little as he smiles. “I was brought up to be a respectful host, no matter whom I receive.
“He has also taught you well,” Seimei says. Neither of them need further elaboration.
For a while there’s silence as he eats, until Seimei breaks it delicate as the peck of the hototogisu on wood.
“I know what you’re doing,” he says, cautious and slow – Onikiri blanches, then forces himself to relax, for Seimei doesn’t read as a threat. “Disposing of humans that are… shall we say, abusing their powers.”
Onikiri retorts, “They all deserved to die.”
Seimei makes an abortive motion towards his face, perhaps to massage his temples, but stifles it with a clear effort. Distinct unhappiness lingers, still; Onikiri wonders what is behind it.
“You know that I cannot exactly condone your actions, but – I trust you to make the right choices.”
Trust, that single word, so loaded it turns his stomach. Onikiri cannot be trusted with anything. He can only destroy.
Abe no Seimei becomes the only constant in the haze, tracking him down in intervals and making certain of his health. Then Onikiri can ask – how long has it been? and receive an answer, three months, seven months, two years, five. He’s grateful for it, these rare moments of clarity.
As time passes Seimei barely changes, stays beautiful and unknowable and leaving rumours scattered in his wake that take root, thriving in the gossip-mines of high society. Some whisper that he is blessed by the gods, while others mutter behind closed doors of suspicions, of youkai blood in him – for is he not too lenient on his charges? Onikiri does not particularly care, but sometimes he smells the same fire on Seimei, the same primal stink that had permeated the ruins they’d visited so long ago, and it makes his hands itch.
He asks him, once, why have you not bound me? The answer: I would not take your freedom from you, not now.
* *
“Yes, Master,” he says, and cuts down hundreds upon thousands of demons. (Too many, now, to etch upon his soul.)
“Yes, Master,” he says, as he accepts the casket, as he catches the faint whiff of power from the woman in white, as he draws his sword and slices off her arm –
* *
It’s a surpassingly lovely day, one most suited for viewing the masses of wisteria blossom hanging shroud-like and heavy far as the eye can see. Yet Onikiri closes those eyes with a gentle touch, those eyes that would never see the daylight again, let alone flowers. He had worked fast. Their deaths were very clean. Better than itsumade traffickers of their caliber deserved.
Their horses have long since fled; the carriageboys had not been far behind. The problem remains, then, of what to do with the women inside, lily-white and powdered pale and like flowers in their own right, gaudy and immobile. They don’t even scream when he sweeps open the blinds, proceed only to gape at him in mute horror. For his part, Onikiri thinks the lurid jumble of their sleeves more terrible than anything he can conjure; that thought presses lazily against the edges of his consciousness, meanders slow like a leaf in the thaw.
Gold winks from a feather as its wearer trembles; the surface of his calm is disturbed. He reaches for his sword –
“Let them go.”
Onikiri frowns, turning. The voice is unfamiliar but the figure it belongs to radiates power, and he is – so tired, so he closes the blinds, slaps the rumps of the oxen and watches the carriage trundle off. There is a more pressing issue to deal with, now.
He steps closer. Gathers his own power to him like a protection, like a threat, yet they are undeterred. At the junction where the wisteria meets the water, the figure is cloaked half in shadow, half in light, and the effect is luminous.
He steps closer. Tastes the air, realizes that the notes at the back of his mouth are alien – why would any youkai defend humans?
Closer, and at this distance he can make out black hair, tied high and plunging to the waist, the reddish tinge of his fringe. The coarse hemp of his workman’s hitatare, the tachi and tanto belted at his waist of a rather finer make than expected, partnered with the easy languid stance of someone well-versed in their usage. Scars crisscrossing his left wrist –
“Well met, Onikiri,” says Minamoto no Yorimitsu, and as his voice warps and modulates the rest of the illusion falls away, too, along with the foundations of Onikiri’s world – here he is, your Master, back from the dead! But with irreconcilable differences, for the whites of his eyes are now dark, and jagged horns spiral from the top of his head.
Yorimitsu is a youkai now, a demon himself. The irony makes him want to laugh until his lungs split.
“Since when have you ever advocated for mercy? Yorimitsu.”
The first time he’s spoken the name in a decade, and it feels – foreign. Impossibly, pathetically devoid of all the things he felt – feels – for him. He shapes the word in his mouth, experimenting.
“We thought you were gone. All of Heian-kyo thinks you’re dead.”
Yorimitsu says, “You are absolutely correct.
“Youkai form in the presence of strong emotion, a strong wish, a strong resolve. As it happens, I possessed all three in multitudes, that day I died.” Yorimitsu makes a curious face, a rueful twist to his mouth. “A simple enough explanation, Onikiri. Yet I cannot rule out the presence of a curse, or the meddling of the gods…”
“Because I could not kill myself,” he says, wonderingly. “As much as I wished it, I could not die.”
“Why?”
Onikiri swallows, tries again. “You’ve always said that death was a matter of honour. Why would you willingly throw away a second chance?” He can’t resist the barb. “Are you a coward?”
Yorimitsu – looks tired, hollowed out. “I had become what I most detested. I am – I was – only human, in that moment.” He grimaces at the absurdity of it all, because Minamoto no Yorimitsu had always wanted to be more.
Then, softer, “It has been a long time. I have my regrets. I have lost too much.”
A pause. Their eyes meet, and hold.
“So tell me, Yorimitsu,” Onikiri asks, careful, now that the lines between them have been blurred with years and distance, a vast unfathomable sea of unknowns. “What made you do all this?”
A simple question carries too many connotations, too much weight.
Yorimitsu is silent for a span. “I believed demons and humans could never coexist. Compared to gods, compared to demons, humanity is so fragile. I would have done anything, to protect them all - but not through the power of that snake. Not through the necessity of sacrifice. Only with my own power.” He gazes, unseeing, at his wrist.
“But it was – unfortunate, how you came to be involved.”
“You took me from my clan! You made me slaughter my own kin!”
“I cannot bring myself to regret this in full. You were extremely useful, Onikiri. Always and forever my greatest masterpiece.”
“Was I just a tool to you –“ his eyes burn. “Just a – sword?”
Yorimitsu’s smile takes a cruel edge. “A very fine one, indeed.”
Then the weathered grips of his swords are in his hands and the resulting clash judders down his arms, through his teeth as Yorimitsu parries with a turn of his wrist. His body is half a step faster than conscious thought but Yorimitsu meets him unerringly each time, matching him blow by blow, seeing through his feints as if it’s been a day since they last sparred instead of ten years – here, a move they perfected together, Yorimitsu drumming it into his body over and over until he grasped it – fury threads through his veins how dare you use it here –
It’s a flawless, intimate dance, one that flows longer than human limits could permit. This Yorimitsu is stronger. With his body augmented by a youkai’s endurance, they could spar for days and be evenly matched. The tip of Yorimitsu’s sword bites into his abdomen, a starburst that stoppers his breath momentarily, but pain is familiar, pain centers him, pain makes him laugh and laugh and laugh.
Yorimitsu – pauses, strangely, and that is enough for Onikiri to slide his sword to the hilt and twist. He falls. Onikiri follows, using the momentum to throw him to the ground, knees either side of his torso, and in the sudden stillness the only sound is their breathing, and the rage thudding in time with his heart.
Then he looks down, and whatever self-control he still possessed frays into nothing.
“You did this to me,” he snarls, meaning the emptiness, the guilt, everything, and as he wraps fingers around Yorimitsu’s throat Onikiri knows he’s already lost whatever implicit game they are playing. His skin is too thin and too hot beneath his fingers. Yorimitsu’s smile is placid, still, and for a wistful hungry moment Onikiri wants to tear into it, to see the blood, the jagged edges where the jaw fits to his skull – something real, and his bones ache with the effort of resisting.
Yorimitsu closes his eyes. Onikiri realizes –
“You want me to kill you!”
“Very good.” The last is said with no inflection at all, and Onikiri almost, almost gives – in –
He lets go.
The imprints left by his fingers are raw, bloom an angry red; the revelation sours on his tongue. He is, if possible, even angrier, yet hopelessly, helplessly so.
“Live on,” Onikiri says instead, slow and deliberate to the figure at his feet. He's worked it out.
“Live on. Don’t feel that this is some penance you owe me.” Like the bitterness of crushed gentian in his mouth, the words ferment until he works them round, spits them out. “You can’t pay for what you’ve done with your death, Minamoto no Yorimitsu. You can’t escape what you are. Your pride won’t allow anyone else to kill you but me –“ he laughs again, a jarring dreadful tumble of sound, “and I won’t let you die.”
A part of him recoils at that, the part that bays for Yorimitsu’s blood insatiable and ferocious; it asks him, incredulous, what are you doing? But it is muffled like sound through water; Onikiri tamps it down and refuses to think on what it means, this paradox of his own creation.
“So do something with your regrets, your disgust – or live with them.” And he doesn’t say, forever, forever, giving shape to the curse that would bind him. Takes in it a vicious joy.
It is strange to give orders to the one who had been his master, even stranger to know that he will obey without question, as if the sky and earth are tipping, inverting, and he is dizzy, suddenly, and sick with it. But Yorimitsu regards him with those black-red eyes, utterly composed with fraying sleeves and his back pressed against the dirt, and Onikiri hates him even more, that he can watch the rest of his eternity be determined with nothing more than a smile, soft and secret, playing about his lips.
That he can look to him like something precious, even now, is perhaps what hurts the most.
When Onikiri walks away, he does not need to look behind himself to hear, to know; the familiar tread he’d followed for years upon years, and then again in dreams.
* *
The bruises on Yorimitsu’s neck purple and darken into ugly mottled blotches, like an aberration. Onikiri feels guilty looking at them and so he doesn’t, after the first few times. Instead he nurses the hollow beneath his heart. Alight, again, with the revelation that Yorimitsu is –
Yorimitsu is alive.
Onikiri cannot kill him, when that would set him free.
He thinks, there are many facets to the definition of “alive”, and seeks Yorimitsu out every night. No blades, because that could turn lethal too fast. But his body is already weaponized, hard muscle and movements honed to sleek deadly efficiency, and if his nails carve deep rents in the fabric of Yorimitsu’s skin, well.
That urge hasn’t disappeared at all, the desire to make Yorimitsu bleed.
By daylight an uneasy sort of alliance is maintained. Yorimitsu accompanies him on his missions, in turn, he follows Yorimitsu, and sees what he has been doing these past ten years – the same kind of penance, he thinks, mirthless. The very same…
He sees. When two youkai ravage a village beyond repair, killing for sport instead of sustenance, Yorimitsu tracks them down to the scene of their latest victim. Lets slip a little of his own youkai scent, illicit and tempting as a woman’s features spied through gauze. They both relax subtly upon seeing, sensing, one of their own kind – and Yorimitsu’s sword slices their jugulars open.
Blood sprays, and in the fleeting split second before it lands Onikiri glimpses the expression on his face. He knows it all too well. Has felt it simmering in his gut ever since he’d learned the truth, and had no one to direct it towards except himself. But Yorimitsu is nothing if not pragmatic.
Onikiri says, instead, it’s good that your hair is black. All the blood doesn’t show up.
My commoner’s guise, Yorimitsu says, sardonic, widens his new sea-green eyes clear and guileless, and despite himself Onikiri has to quickly smother a laugh in his sleeve. The contrast is as hilarious as it is horrifying, but Yorimitsu never unravels the illusion, even in sleep.
With time these details begin to overlay his memories; sometimes Onikiri thinks of Yorimitsu in passing and recalls those same green eyes. He doesn’t know why that unsettles him so.
That night, heedless of the risk, Onikiri asks for the truth of him.
Yorimitsu acquiesces. Throws back his head of white hair, and before the illusion fades out fully Onikiri is upon him. Without the moon it’s a brawl of instincts with no finesse, the weak glimmer of the stars doing nothing but bringing out shadows on the ground.
It feels better, feels right. He discovers a new line of vertebrae at the back of Yorimitsu’s neck, a ridge of sharp spikes that he cuts his knuckles on early in the fight. Yorimitsu has both his wrists in a stranglehold, crowding him against a tree’s trunk with its bark scraping his back, but Onikiri kicks him, hard, and soon has his own hands upon his neck, exploring the edges and depressions of the spikes with an abject fascination.
He digs his fingers into the exposed bone, leans in and whispers, low and fierce:
“Don’t ever think you can own me again.”
* *
In a village only by name, a loose circle of hovels abandoned by gods and youkai alike, two boys are threatened by a man wielding a sickle as a sword. They’re siblings, from the similarity of their features, and the elder cowers in front of his brother with arms braced above his head.
A distressingly normal scene, except Yorimitsu takes one glance and inserts himself bodily in the middle of it. The sickle falls with a sickening thud.
He says nothing, merely removes the blade from his flesh casual as a morning stroll, and perhaps his eyes blaze inhumanly frigid, perhaps the crush of his power suffocates; the man, fearing retribution from some guardian deity, flees.
Onikiri says, later, “It’s unlike you to be so reckless.” Instinct drove him to reach for bandages and a poultice; the wound had cut to the bone, and would have been much worse without the enhanced durability and accelerated healing inherent in most youkai.
Yorimitsu, after the first start of surprise, doesn’t look at him as he works. The illusion stretches thin and wan around the corners; it’s only this that gives Onikiri an indication of his pain.
“I had a brother,” he says, tight-lipped, and Onikiri’s hand slips.
I had a brother.
“He was a fool,” Yorimitsu continues, as if unable to stop. “He told me to be my own self, and then was consumed by the clan and its ambition like the rest of them. But he was still my brother, and then he died, because I was too weak.”
Pieces of a long-forgotten puzzle begin to fall into place. Onikiri turns this over carefully, delicately in his mind, thinking. Surrounded by vast stretches of plume grass, an autumnal stain of rust across the earth, it’s quieter even than the Underworld, and further devoid of life, so he startles a little when Yorimitsu speaks again.
“Did that brat – did Hiromasa – ever visit my grave?”
“Yes.” Onikiri can’t bring himself to lie. He continues bandaging his arm.
“Ah,” says Yorimitsu, mollified.
* *
“The Hyakki Yagyou,” Onikiri says, speaking rapidly, urgently. “Yorimitsu, do you remember?”
Yorimitsu falters. For the first time he looks hesitant, unsure, adrift in the press of shifting bodies and the shrill trilling scream of the flute – and above all, the taint of the supernatural intoxicating and delirious. Bone twines like a living thing about his shoulders, his neck, and his eyes bleed and blacken as the youkai reach in and tug him forward, as Onikiri lays a placating hand on his arm and nods, power like trapped lightning arcing over his skin.
He allows himself to be led.
* *
“Yet if not to you,
Then to whom might I show it?
The flowering plum!
Only the knowing can know
both its colour and its scent.”
“Master, this poem is a season too late. There aren’t even any of the right flowers to match it.”
Yorimitsu’s laughter is silent, shows only in his eyes. “Well? What would you do?”
On the fourth day of the fifth month, the day before the festival, they sit on the veranda with scattered handfuls of melia flowers like tiny violet-centered stars, riots of hot Chinese pinks, sweet-flag roots curled delicate on the wood. Here is an island of calm; Yorimitsu sits with poems from dignitaries requiring his response, while he is given letters prepared beforehand, poems missing their second half.
He considers. “To expand on the poem’s conceit of ‘layers of knowledge, revealing one’s true nature’, I would choose an unassuming bloom, but one known for its strong sweetness – perhaps the osmanthus.”
“Very good,” Yorimitsu says, and returns to frowning at his letter.
“You hate this.” It is a statement of fact, nothing more or less.
The reply is equally bland. “Of course I do.”
“Then why do you insist on training me in these matters?” He is genuinely curious. “It will be a rare event indeed for anyone to ask of a poem from your retainer, let alone their opinion on one’s dress, or knowledge of fragrances.”
“The time may well come. And when it does, you will prove your magnificence; you will be a reflection of me.”
“But Master, I am only your sword.”
“You are my masterpiece,” Yorimitsu says, touching his cheek. “My Murasaki.”
The final letter is a simple twist of pure white paper, spelled to an opalescent shimmer as he unfolds it and holds it to the light.
“The water I cupped
in my hands, drenching my sleeves,
has long been frozen.”
He doesn’t flush, not visibly, but it’s a very near thing. In a tentative, uneven hand, he writes the last two lines:
“Today, with the start of spring,
will it melt in the wind?”
Yorimitsu watches him. His eyes are very dark.
* *
Rumours thicken, crawl like a bed of ants, a cloaked maze full of riches for the practiced ear. Onikiri sifts through them, captures a few for later scrutiny, but one, rooted deep, makes him pause in disquiet.
“They’re close to finding out what you are.”
Seimei’s eyes flicker, though his expression remains still and unperturbed as weathered stone. In this proximity the fire-smell of him is overpowering, laced with wildflowers; as he tilts his head the half-light renders him ethereal, brings out the red tint above his lashes. Fox eyes.
“The only service they have done us was to keep it as confidential as possible, these high-ranked Minamoto onmyoji,” Onikiri adds. “If something were to happen to the key players… if a few of their storerooms were destroyed… they wouldn’t think to question the motives.” Smiles, with teeth bared, “So arrogant."
At last Seimei says, “It has come to my attention. But I must stay ignorant; I cannot move without endangering everyone under my care.”
“And here I thought you a fool – a hypocrite,” says Yorimitsu, wry. “Seimei.”
Their eyes meet in a moment of mutual understanding.
Onikiri says, with a tone of finality, “It’s time to show the Minamoto what we can do.”
* *
The fifth day of the fifth month, the festival of exorcisms, of purification, and the soft nutty aroma of the sweet-flag strewn on the rooftops, the silvery wormwood entwined round the pillars, is so thick he’s drowning in it.
Sweetness turns saccharine. His robes, layered plum and gold and brocaded dense with gentians, tangle about his feet. A herbal ball is bound to his wrist, coloured threads nestling in the hollow of his palm, and he – he’s not a demon, but it still burns – and the crowd murmurs out of sight like the soughing of the sea but even that gentle noise sets him on edge, trails out-of-tune vibrations along his bones.
“Let them see how strong you are, how beautiful.”
Yorimitsu – no, his Master – holds him immobile, locked against his body. For the briefest instant he thinks about – escape, about struggling free, but he's utterly helpless against the force of him –
* *
“We shall have to enter as our true selves,” Yorimitsu says. “The wards of that estate are potent, and will detect all but the most simple illusions.”
He passes a hand over his eyes. Onikiri – shifts, settling gingerly into the dark hair of his previous form, and his breath hitches, for there’s no discomfort. That past is as much a part of him as anything, now.
Seimei allows them full rein over his wardrobe, and the story forms as they choose their garments together; Yorimitsu as a lord from a provincial branch of the family, distant enough for a dead man to take his place, and Onikiri as his first retainer.
“A bold choice,” says Yorimitsu, as they’re crossing the bridge. Onikiri is all scarlet with a flare of gold beneath his sleeves, stylized flames rippling across the damask.
Heian-kyo is awash in festivities, enticingly bedecked with pink and yellow lights, yet Yorimitsu is untouched. He looks the essence of a shadow, wearing figured silk of dark-leaf green and a purple noushi cloak dyed so deep it’s almost black. The prodigal son’s return home, allowing none of it to reach his skin.
They step forward, side-by-side, and it's not at all a lord with his retainer, but as equals. Yorimitsu smiles like a knife’s edge, like the promise of frost, and Onikiri’s answering smile is just as feral.
The Minamoto estate gleams before them, spread out in all its opulence, with lanterns like fire in the night.