"Redemption"

We leave the boulder and its motto behind us as we turn the corner. Eguchi looks at the stone proudly; it must be his own writing, his deft hands that wrote poetry. I’m about to ask him to elaborate on it, but after we turn one more corner, we’re at the temple.

Or, at least, what’s left of it.

“NO!” Eguchi cries out, the sudden rise in volume nearing scaring me out of my skin. Before us is a clearing, a clearing so large that the stone courtyard can’t cover it all, so a ring of grass surrounds everything. A final Torii gate marks the entrance; beyond the gate is the temple. It must’ve been a proud temple at one point. Five hundred years ago, hell even a hundred years ago, this temple might’ve been painted in a fresh red coat, its priests walking silently across scrubbed stones as they performed their duties.

But this is Nobuhide’s territory. The storm has been intense, so strong and powerful that several trees in the forest have fallen right onto the temple. Their erratic limbs and thick trunks have broken right through the roof of the temple, caving it in wholesale. The rest of the temple teeters and totters; I can hear creaking and groaning. The structure that houses an eternal flame isn't going to last that much longer.

All of Eguchi’s enigmatic mystic, his mysterious aura, has vanished right before my eyes. He’s just a scared old man now, sprinting down the stone walkway to the fallen temple. Eguchi trips on a cracked statue; he shakes his head and gets right back up, ignoring the tears on his black cloak formed by the jagged edges of timber beams.

“This is gonna collapse!” I call out to him.

“Then we need to save the flame!” he answers back, not even looking my way as he vaults over a tree trunk and disappears inside. I groan, but then I follow him into the temple, ignoring the stares of the scattered statues and invisible spirits of this temple’s former occupants. Back in Hoshinomori, Eguchi told me about the end of concepts themselves. The last priest here has died. If it weren’t for Eguchi, Miyagawa, and myself, the temple would’ve been lost to the mountains, to Nobuhide, utterly gone. Would anybody have missed it? Would anyone even have noticed it was gone?

The wind howls; Nobuhide growls. I pass by a statue that once depicted him as a great warlord, but only the ankles and feet remain connected to the foundation, the rest of his body cast like dice across the courtyard. I make it inside the temple; I can hear Eguchi’s cries echo out from the dark rooms ahead of me.

I make it to a large room deep inside the complex. Fallen trees and the sands of time have destroyed the entire back wall, revealing the clearing around us. It’s just grass back there and trees beyond it all. Eguchi kneels on the stone floor in the center of the room, raising his hands in worship of a bronze chalice the size of a person rising from the ground. A crack runs down the center; I don’t see a flame. When I arrive next to him, there's slight sparks and dying embers in there. The candle light is going out, perhaps for good.

“We have to fix this!” Eguchi wails. He lurches around, looking for firewood, but all the wood is soaked or crumbles away in his hands. The thunder picks up; I hear a tree fall in the distance.

“We have to leave!” I tell him. “The temple’s going to collapse!”

Eguchi’s face has gone as white as a sheet. He crawls on his knees to the chalice and places a hand on it. “Then we must take this with us!” He grips it tightly, but the chalice won’t budge. It’s firmly planted in the ground below.

Nobuhide grows furious, pelting the temple with rain. Through holes in the roof, the droplets fall like bombs, exploding on impact. Eguchi hoists himself over the chalice to protect its embryonic embers.

“It wasn’t supposed to end this way,” he cries. “The Shinkumekai? That was me. I couldn’t sit by any longer. I had to save this prefecture again. I would’ve been the man behind Takeuchi, ruling from the shadows. We were going to save Yoshiaki!”

Thunder shrieks overhead - or is it from inside the temple. I feel all those eyes on me, all the statues that have lived here for centuries. There are whispers on the wind, lightning in the distance.

“I just don’t know what’s going on anymore,” he mumbles. “The world’s passing me by. I don’t understand anything.”

“What’s going on is that we’re going to die!” I approach him, gripping him by the collar.

He swats my hand away. “Then let me. Let me die with this old temple. Let me die with the old Yoshiaki. Nobody will mourn my passing, anyway. And soon, there’ll be no one left to mourn the passing of old Yoshiaki, either.”

“You entered my life,” I tell him. “I’ll mourn you.”

"Then die with me!" he pleads. "Your life's already peaked, hasn't it? What more do you have to look forward to?"

The question rattles around my skull. Red letters float from Kanako - she's in the statues, judging me. Suga stands in the corner, staring at me. An audience of old memories and dreams - and nightmares. A technicolor whirlwind, good and bad, because that's the crux of the matter, isn't it?

The world is inherently good. The world is inherently battered, unfair, imperfect. A walking contradiction, yet I still think it's good anyway. Because I met some nice people along the way and I still got many more to meet. Life's gonna punch me? Well, I'm gonna stand right back up, because the punches are few and far between, yet they make such an impact you tend to remember them more than anything else.

At the end of the day -  the world kind of sucks, but the world is also kind of neat. It's not a perfect world, but it's the one I live in. It's the only one I can experience. So I'm gonna experience all that good, roll with the punches, live a little, follow the turning hands of the clock hand-in-hand. I'm hitting escape velocity, like you read about...

Suga locking himself in his room.

ANXIETY.

Kanako disappearing into the end of winter.

HESITATION.

Can't forget the past, can't glorify the past, gotta meet it head-on.

PATIENCE.

Sadness is sadness, you can't avoid it, you shouldn't forget it, but I still got my own life to live.

"Like hell we're gonna die here!" 

I grab Eguchi from behind, slipping my arms around his chest, holding him close. I shuffle away from the chalice - he resists, gripping its bronzed lips, but he’s ninety-seven, so I manage to peel him away. I can see both of our reflections on it, the cracks turning our faces into kaleidoscopes. Eguchi thrashes, trying to free himself, but then he realizes where we’re heading.

“Out the back? But there’s only grass out there-”

“I know.”

“Are you insane? That’ll kill us for sure!”

“There aren’t any goddamn mines up on a mountain in the middle of the prefecture!”

Eguchi’s hyperventilating now. “But, my father, he said he planted them everywhere, everywhere, no patch of grass left safe-”

Fully automatic gunshots of thunder interrupt him. Then I feel it. The floor below me shifts, the wood above groans and creaks and croaks, and I hear a tremendous, bellowing sound, like the belly of a beast. Nobuhide’s grabbed his prey and won’t let go, and now he’s going for the finishing blow. I hearing ominous popping sounds, wood grinding against wood, metal against metal, and I know that this temple has slipped away into the sands of time.

Right as the temple collapses, I throw Eguchi and myself out of it. He screams as we land in the grass; it’s slick with rain and my clothes are instantly soaked. I scramble to my feet and haul him further across the clearing. Behind us, the chalice still stands, despite it all, in the center of the maelstrom, but then Nobuhide swallows the land whole. The temple, chalice and all, disappears in a cloud of dust and forgotten memories as it collapses once and for all. I can only sit on the grass and let myself get soaked by the rain as I watch the dust clear, revealing a mound of twisted wood, rags floating away in the wind. The chalice is no longer visible, covered by layer upon layer of the temple’s end.

Eguchi’s entire body trembles. He’s laying on his back, his eyes closed. But no explosions come. Ever so slowly, he opens his eyes. Rain falls on him and the grass. He slowly pulls himself up so he’s kneeling with both legs. We both gaze at the destroyed Temple of the Eternal Flame.

“Why did you save me?” he finally asks me.

“I can’t just let a person die.”

In a daze, Eguchi falls back, sitting on the grass, resting his face in a tired palm. “What’s the point? The flame’s dead. Old Yoshiaki’s dead. The past can never be again.”

“What’s the point?” I repeat. I turn around on the grass to face him. “I’ll tell you what the point is. It’s that we shouldn’t go around glorifying the past. Selectively remembering it. Nor should we forget it entirely. The point is to meet it. To come to terms with it. To move on, understanding the good and bad, using it as we keep living. It’s not just about the new, because don’t new things eventually become old, too?”

I rise to my feet. “Past, present, future. You can’t have any of them without the others. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. I’m not saying you can’t appreciate the good without the bad or anything like that. I’m saying that we’re gonna experience both good and bad no matter what. A series of events, positives and negatives, across a period of time - you know what that is? It’s life.”

I walk over to him. “You know what makes the world vibrant? Living life. That’s what makes the world colorful. Meeting life, experiencing it, not turning away from it, understanding and living it wholesale. Taking the good and bad, one day at a time, and meeting some nice people along the way.”

Eguchi ponders my words. Slowly, ever so slowly, he pulls out a patch of grass. He studies it for a moment, then lets it go, watching the blades drift away in a gust of wind, one final message from Nobuhide.

He takes my hand and gets back on his feet.

“Let’s return to civilization, Shunsuke.”