Before You Go

Toyo’s body felt weighted, her legs sluggish as she dragged herself through the expansive hallway. Zida marched alongside her with his hand gripped around her arm, his firm footsteps in stark contrast to Toyo’s feeble appearance. As they neared the doorway of the room Toyo had spent the past few days in, they were met by Sina who stood with her posture brimming with an almost oppressive impatience.

“You’re the most callous person I’ve met,” Sina scolded.

Toyo, finding the opportunity to regain her composure, attempted to yank her arm from Zida’s clasp, but to no avail.

“She needed to see the world for what it was,” Zida stated, his voice as stern as ever.

“For all the effort you put in to appearing benevolent, you really can be an aggressive asshole,” Sina raged. But unaffected by her tirade, Zida simply nudged Toyo towards her, with Toyo losing her balance and sending them both tumbling to the ground.

“Tell me why I should be remorseful for someone who would waste a life that they were spared?”

Incapable of finding the words to respond, Sina fell silent, with Toyo simply gawking back at Zida who looked down upon her with an empty glare. As he walked off, Toyo and Sina were left in the confines of the overarching expanse of the vacant corridor. His footsteps echoing in the distance.

Back in the room, Sina asked for Toyo to turn her back towards her as she lifted her shirt up. She began rubbing a paste like substance down her back, making a distinct cross gesture that stretched from each of her shoulders to just below her ribs.

With the attack at the old temple painfully playing back in her head, Toyo turned to Sina and asked her if she had a mirror somewhere nearby. Stepping over to the corner of the room, Toyo watched as she lifted a wooden board leaning against the wall, revealing the mirror on the opposite side. Toyo looked at her back and noticed that the scar from the katana blade had now mostly healed, despite how deep the wound should have been. That would take months, she thought, contemplating if it was the remedies Sina had applied that sped up the process.

“It should be more than good enough for you to be able to enter the baths now,” Sina informed her, but Toyo had her mind too preoccupied to listen.

Toyo stretched her hand over her shoulder, slightly grazing her fingers over the wound. “That was real…” she mentioned aloud to herself. “What was?” Sina followed.

Once again leapfrogging over Sina’s words, Toyo jumped to the next thought that popped into her head. “Where are the clothes I was wearing the day you found me?”

Sina had never seen Toyo so determined before and didn’t want to slow her down. She swiftly dipped down below the bed, lifting up a bundle of tattered and dirtied clothes. It was undeniably Toyo’s school uniform which she’d worn the day she visited the temple. A white shirt with a red velvet plaid skirt and purple bowtie. Stuffed beneath it all was her school bag.

Holding her belongings in her hand, the aftermath of that fateful day held within her hands, helped her hold on to the idea that the world she knew was in fact real. She held her shirt out in front of her, almost as if idolizing the quiet uneventful life she had led before that day.

“Have you ever seen anyone with similar clothes before?

“Me personally, no. But I don’t really spend much time outside of this place.”

Toyo placed the shirt into her lap, slipping her fingers through the tear in the back of the fabric. “Something is wrong here, can’t you tell?” she remarked. Sina was unsure of how best to respond.

Toyo then began fishing through her bag in search of her phone, shocked to find it missing. She questioned if anyone else had access to her belongings, but Sina made it clear to her that no one other than herself and Zida had been in and out of the room. “I can’t say for sure, but they seemed untouched since I first placed them beneath the bed,” Sina explained.

Toyo hastily sifted through her bag once again, but when it became clear to her that her phone had become nonexistent, she came to sudden pause. A feeling of unseen eyes weighed upon her, reinforcing the one thing she couldn’t afford to forget. She was a stranger to everything and everyone around her.

Her school ID then caught the corner of her eye. She pulled it from her bag, and turned to Sina, asking if she could read her name. Sina took a close look, studying the ID for a moment, but then quietly shook her.

With her ID still in hand, Toyo grabbed a hold of her uniform and sprung to her feet. “I have to go.”

Sina eyed her gallop towards the door, stopping inches short of the handle as she turned back once more.

“Where can I find that brick wall?”

Sina’s head fell to one side as she chuckled inwardly, surprised at how obvious it was to tell who Toyo was referring to. “Probably at the Hall of Records in the East Wing, just head straight down this hall and make a right. If you keep going you won’t be able to miss it.”

“Thank you!” Toyo chanted before swiftly making her exit. Sina wasn’t sure of what had overcome her so suddenly, but seeing how invested she was with her belongings, Sina found herself interested in exactly what those unusual items within Toyo’s bag were.

Toyo darted through the halls as she made her way to the Hall of Records. Passing by a number of individuals, all turning their heads equally consumed by awe and confusion. The building was massive to say the least, striking Toyo as nothing short of a majestic castle. But she barely wasted any time admiring it as she soon found herself approaching her destination.

The room’s interior struck Toyo with awe. An inconceivable design that stole her focus. The walls twisted upwards like the threads of a screw, with seemingly endless rows of books in a constant motion running alongside each groove in the wall. It reminded her of the ice cream cone statues that some stores would place outside during the summertime in Japan. It’s soft serve top rotating and giving the illusion of the vanilla and chocolate swirl being in a perpetual twirl.

Her admiration of the architecture clouding her focus, she nearly forgot the reason she’d trekked all the way to the Hall in the first place. With a quick scan of her surroundings, she passingly noticed Zida seated off to the side. Snapping her focus back into place Toyo made her way over and tossed down her ID and uniform directly atop the open pages of his book.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before around here?”

Zida glanced at the items and quickly dismissed her, “Well… I’ve seen a shirt, neckpiece, and skirt before. Design aside, it’s not particularly unusual.”

Toyo sighed, finding the expanse between Zida and Sina’s character becoming a drag to bear with. She then pushed her ID closer towards him, Practically placing it right underneath his nose. “What about this writing?”

He hardly looked at it for a second before the change in his expression answered the question for him. But regardless, Toyo pushed for more answers.

“Do you think the Village of Plastos would write with symbols like this?”

Zida leaned back into his chair, finally following with a nonchalant reply. “No. We’ve already checked, there’s no official records of this writing system ever being used anywhere.”

Toyo slammed her open palm down on the table. “You see!”

“See what exactly?”

“That I don’t belong here!”

As the words fell from her mouth, her throat suddenly clenched up, a wave of anxiety hitting her like a tsunami. Toyo’s body stiffened, unable to move as a faint thought pierced through her mind like a bullet. “What’s wrong?” Zida asked, but Toyo quickly regained her composure, batting her eyes as she murmured, “This isn’t right.”

Toyo grabbed a hold of her belongings and made a beeline towards the exit. Pacing down the hallway, she unwaveringly marched forward in search of a way out of the manor. The energy that emanated from her was ripe with denial.

Just as she pushed her way through a door leading into the front garden, Zida called to her, asking where exactly it was she planned on running off to. Toyo looked at him with a sated scowl, fanning out her torn shirt to him, its bloodstained tears front and center.

“This, right here, this is what happened to me. Not whatever the hell it was that you dragged me all the way to that village to see. I don’t have anything to do with it and I’m not gonna just let myself be prisoner to whatever it is that you’re looking for.”

She tried to speak with confidence, but the pain in her voice traveled like a dog whistle to Zida’s ears. He didn’t say anything to her, hoping the air between them would help ease the tension brewing within her. But as Toyo felt her words falling on deaf ears, her arms slowly dropped, and her face sank. Returning the deafening silence that he’d offered her, Toyo turned away and continued down the garden path.

“Before you go…” he reached out, but Toyo kept marching forward. Finally, finding the will to tun her back on whatever it was that prevented her from leaving sooner.

“Did you ever ask yourself why you found yourself in this manor of all places?”

Without thought, her feet stopped moving. She had begun to hate herself for her lack of willpower. It was that very weakness that made her climb that mountain that day with Akari and the others, and it had become the quicksand that kept her where she now stood. “Because you think I’m the cause of whatever it is that wiped out that village, right?” she retorted.

“Yet you’ve lived in luxury ever since. That sound quite right to you?”

Toyo turned to Zida, an anxious feeling sinking through her entire body. “I don’t understand.”

Zida began to turn away and head back inside the building. “Consider it a hunch, but I’m sure you don’t know a damn thing about what went on at the Village of Plastos. But you did survive it… The last time a so-called survivor was allowed to live, an entire empire was destroyed overnight. The council wants you dead before that can ever happen.

“I’ve bought you a week. So, if you want to keep walking, go ahead. If you can manage to make it past the city gates, maybe you’ll buy yourself an extra day or two before you’re hunted down and executed.” He scoffed through his nose, “Perhaps that’s a better fate then having the empire’s blood on your hands.”

Toyo watched as he headed back inside. Her mind overflowing with conflicting thoughts. As a flock of birds took flight within the drifting breeze, Toyo looked up at the sky above, letting its glow muffle the noise for once. As she peered into its deep expanse, she realized how she’d never seen a sky so blue before.