Cold, biting rain poured ceaselessly from the deep grey of night clouds as the fireweed of impact craters, Mei Ryuuran, sloshed through the flooded streets in boots which would never be as fluffy or as white ever again. It was her very first New Year’s Eve on the Earthly Realms, and she was damned if she’d let the overly zealous Celestial Nun who’d attached to her tell her how to spend it.
She loved Sister Miu (Mei would not call her “Sangarasu”. It sounded too obnoxious.), she really did, but the older Celestial was just as bad as Mei’s mother in preaching. What, really, was the issue in enjoying this world how the Earthlings did it? The average Celestial was an indulgent being, delighting in the pleasures of heavenly existence - Why did Mei have to be any different, even after her fall to Earth?
But wandering the drenched city at night, looking for a party she could join was not as easy as it seemed. The downpour got stronger the closer to midnight it got, and Mei’s legwarmers were not enough to contain the chill of water running down her thighs from her waterlogged skirt.
“Oh, now that’s a pitiful sight.” A familiar smooth voice cut through the pitter patter of rain, a sharp nail scratching the back of her neck.
“Shura!” Mei turned back and grabbed the phantasm’s cold wrist, holding back her needle fingers. Despite the heavy storm, Shura Namikaze’s shironuri did not melt away like Mei’s glittery eyeshadow - the Celestial Witch was beyond these sorts of things, she supposed. “Can we not do this tonight? I’m cold and I’m sick and it’s miserable out here!”
The devil woman laughed, an acrid and cruel thing.
“You wouldn’t like me to make a Discord Beast out of fireworks to fulfill your belligerent desire? Why, I am insulted.”
It seemed fighting was not on her mind either, though. She would’ve armed something by now if she really meant business.
“What do you actually want, Shura?”
With a swish of her skirts, Shura spun herself into a courtly bow, holding Mei’s hand to her cold, red-painted lips.
“To take you on a little tour for this beautiful night.” She lifts her eye, a malevolent smile crinkling the scarred skin under all the white. “Weren’t you looking for a party of lesser beings?”
It made Mei’s anger sublimate into flustering. It was always like that - Shura would give her a nightmarish horror with one hand and cradle her face with another. There was no constancy in dealing with Witches, Mei had learnt.
“Don’t…” I don’t like being played around like this. But the alternative was returning home soaked and angry and having Miu lecture her. “What’s the catch here?”
Shura tapped her pink talons on Mei’s wrist.
“Well, you know the types of beings I keep company with, don’t you?”
The Celestial Witch pulled Mei by the hand through the streets and into a portal long ago carved into this world, a door into the Abyss below Heavens and Earth: the yawning Cosmic Ocean a smidge of rock above the sixteen Hells, where the Celestial Devils of Shura’s kind had made their home after being expelled from the Heaven of Thirty Three Stars, so long ago neither of them had yet been born. The shift of Realms stripped them of their human disguises, once again Celestial Warrior Chamerion and Celestial Witch Mela, a creature immaterial and formless and another shattered and mended in gold, both incomprehensibly big to the denizens of Earth.
Chamerion had never been to the Ocean, much less the Abyss, even once in her eight million years. Miu had described the homeland she strived to forget as a dreary place - a darkness so deep it made hearts dark too, even if the beings that lived there were still arguably superior to men in their countenance -, but Chamerion would have to disagree. The petroleum blue expanse stretching before her six eyes was undeniably beautiful, slivers of scattered light making the falling detritus glitter like snow.
Glitter like the rainbow metallic sheens on Empetra, Miu’s true form. Maybe even like the broken porcelain of Mela’s skin. Chamerion wondered if these characteristics already existed when they lived in the low Heavens of her own provenance or if they were acquired after the fall, their bodies becoming like those of abyssal fish in the darkness.
“It’s beautiful…” was all she could think to say.
But her awe was not appreciated by one who’d been bound to this place.
“You higher beings always know how to make us feel inadequate, don’t you?” Mela’s voice was acid, cold as she dug her talons into the formless goo of Chamerion’s wrist. “Even the Abyss is beautiful to a creature so disgustingly pure.”
Chamerion was stunned by the sudden vitriol, but maybe she shouldn’t have been. Why else would a Witch take her to town if not to humiliate her? She made the mistake of wandering into Mela’s territory, where the radiant light of Venus could not erupt from her body in self-defense.
Mela’s piecemeal myriad hands, like a broken statue’s, dug into the star pulp of Chamerion’s body, so much more dangerous than anything else had the right to be to a creature shapeless.
“You who live in the Heavens might be blithe and stupid, but your feelings are always so kind. Superficial, hedonistic. This is why you’re so prone to falling down the Realms once your time is up.” Her shattered face was so close, the heat of molten metal feeling as if it was pouring down her throat. “What will a simple mind like yours do once your good will has dried up? When your arrogance and shallowness reduces you to an unhappier rebirth? Can you imagine yourself an animal? A ghoul? A denizen of Hell as I’ve been?”
Why did Mela hate her so? Just because she was akin to a child in her joie de vivre? Chamerion couldn’t fathom a reason for such disdain. Weren’t devils meant to be jealous of their usurpers?
Mela shoved her back through the rift, shifting them back to their Earthly forms in the still pouring rain.
“You’re hopeless, pretty girl.” This time, the water seemed to actually touch Shura, flattening her wild hair and melting the white makeup off the grievous scars that covered her body. “I’ve bloomed like a red lotus for ten thousand lifetimes for the heart of a lofty being like you. Even in this life I cannot escape being marked for it. I’ll hate you for as long as that which is me wanders the Earth.”
How could love condemn Shura to the deepest of Cold Hells-? Unless…
Realisation set in like a rock in her stomach. Mei’s legs finally gave out on her, leaving her on hands and knees in the dirty drainage.
Despite it all, Mei laughed. It was a mad, mirthless laughter, but it was loud and clear like a bell in the dark night even over the sounds of fireworks in the distance.
“This world… it really isn’t fair, is it?” She said through soaked silver bangs.
“For those of us born under Heaven, it never has been.”
And just as suddenly as she had appeared, Shura vanished from sight, disappeared into the first night of the year.
It was still sullen and shellshocked in the gutter that Mashiro eventually found Mei, clothes and body dirty beyond repair.
The serpent woman caught the despondent girl under her arm and took her home under cover of her umbrella, mumbling this and that about how Sister Sangarasu was soooo sorry for making Mei upset, but was not relenting on keeping her to just one shot glass of cloudy strawberry sake for the night.
It scarcely mattered now though. Wasting her life on intoxicants seemed just so… trivial after all she’s learnt.
“Mashiron…” Mei broke her silence at last, “Has Sister Miu ever told you about a Kiyo Reishiro?”
Mashiro looked at her oddly.
“If I’m supposed to recognise that name, I don’t. Why would Sister Sangarasu tell me about some human?”
Mei bit her lip, lost in thought about the secret she now possessed.
“Never mind.”