By: Annie Yu

How long ago was it?

I don’t know, Hakucho.

Akio! How can you not know?

Hush, child. It’s night.

How–

Hakucho. Quiet.

It had been a long time since someone had visited her shrine. Even the shrine maiden had left, taking days of polished stone and sleek marble with her. They were replaced by centuries of torn fabric and dull colors. Days and days of dust that seemed to never end.

Akio Sakura had seen many suns rise, and many moons fall. Too many to count. She was wise, wise beyond her centuries. She could rattle off every name in the dreary woods she called home, speak nearly every language known to her (none of which were particularly useful), and know how to win every single card game. People tended to go insane after being alone for so many years. Akio had to find some way to keep herself sane. Talk to people.

Learn new things. She had existed for so, so many years. She’d figured out some of the great questions of life — there was just one more question lingering in her.

How?

Akio would’ve liked that question to be answered — preferably before she disappeared into the void. She’d seen some of the older shrine spirits do that. They’d keep going to the dou di zhu table, four of them, until one of them disappeared. They were always replaced. Akio was one of the four now, the oldest of the current four, waiting for her time to come.

It had been so long since she died. The older ones used to tell her that her appearance would hint to what she died of. It didn’t work that way, not for Akio. All she had was a slightly tattered Nozomi Zetcho Academy uniform and paling hair (a sickly shade of silver) put up in space buns.

How?

Akio could feel herself failing, feel herself falling into the void. She held her two hands up in the air, examining them. They, too, were paling — a translucent shade of turquoise. She could hardly see the tips of her fingers anymore. Her veins stood out like dark ravens painted against the bright blue sky.

It lingered inside her, like a flame that refused to go out.

It’d been so long. It’d been a good death. Akio had enjoyed every second of it, watching as all the newer souls confusedly integrated themselves, playing cards with everyone else, feeling the exhilaration of being able to race amongst the stars and the sky, laughing with everyone else.

Akio didn’t want to let it go.

She could feel her soul reaching for the stars. A final goodbye.

Maybe she had to die with the question. Take it to her next death.

A second death?

A reincarnation? What would you call it?

Akio felt herself fading. Quicker than it was supposed to happen.

The older ones said you’d have a moment of remembrance before you died for the second time. Akio’s dull eyes fluttered shut as the memories fled past, projecting themselves onto her eyelids, flashing past like a carousel. Utsukushi and her melodious violin. Aster and his constant love for revenge. Lorelei and her raging passion for just about anything. What would everyone else remember her as? Who would she be?

Her eyes blinked open, before she was pulled into another void.

Her past.

Akio’s hair flows behind her, a whirlwind of silver-blue as she smiles up at the moon, her feet dangling off the edge of a cliff, hands weaving into the bright green grass. Her eyes are like pools of emeralds, the moon glinting off of them as she sits there, alone.

Akio’s eyes blinked open again. Dull gray instead of the bright forest green they once were. Everything about her was fading: her hair, her eyes, her soul. Her past.

Transparent.

What comes after death?