by Carly Chase
Tiger, Tiger
Fearful Symmetry: Book 1
© Carly Chase 2019
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
A Message From Carly Chase!
Chapter 1
“Clearly, something has gone very, very wrong...” the priest remarked to his assistant.
The magic circle they’d painstakingly drawn out on the ground using just the right rare, sacred oils, was steaming slightly, and there was a woman there. But she definitely didn’t look like the scrolls had suggested she was going to.
Anya was, for want of a better description, freaking out. Her big brown eyes were wide and her lips moved as if she wanted to speak – or scream – but couldn’t manifest any kind of language to describe her fear and confusion. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as she hyperventilated, and she shifted her head from side to side, looking from one man to the other.
If they were surprised by her appearance, she was a lot more surprised by theirs – after all, they had been expecting to summon someone, and she hadn’t been expecting to be ripped from her couch to wherever this strange wooden room was, with its pungent smell of herbs and oils.
“It could be her. I mean, there was nothing to say that people don’t change in appearance when they are reborn… And she was reborn in another world,” the priest’s assistant said, though his voice was full of doubt.
He was a slim teenage boy with long, straight black hair, clad in some kind of Japanese looking outfit made up of a white kimono top and wide dark blue pants– reminding Anya of the posters for the aikido class at her gym.
The priest, wearing similar clothing, was older - perhaps in his mid thirties. A good looking man, or so Anya would have thought under less bewildering circumstances. He looked at the scroll in his hands, and then at Anya, squinting with skepticism.
“She has nothing in common with the image of Hime-sama at all, though! Do people in that world really look so different? Her skin is dark, her hair is curly, her body is… lewdly proportioned… A sacred priestess wouldn’t have… that chest. It’d distract people,” the priest said, talking about Anya as if she wasn’t there, and appraising her body in a way that implied that he was one of the people who would certainly find a large chest distracting.
“Well, she’s here now...” the assistant said, with an awkward shrug, “we need to do… something.”
The priest looked thoughtful for a moment, and then finally addressed Anya. He turned the scroll to face her, and pointed at the woman painted on it.
“Is this you? Wait… clearly that’s wrong. Was this you?” he asked, speaking loudly and slowly as if addressing a dimwitted child.
Anya looked at the portrait of the Asian looking woman with the serene face, holding a flower, dressed in a kimono.
Just to check – since so much other strangeness was afoot – she looked down at her own trembling hands. No, they looked the same as usual. Her surroundings may have instantly changed in that weird, lurching moment when light and mist had filled her vision, but she was still herself, physically speaking.
“I… I think it’s quite clear that I’m not that person,” she stammered. She didn’t really know what to say, but sitting there looking at the man like he was crazy probably wasn’t going to move the conversation along to a point where she might get some answers about her predicament.
“Wait, master. Would she even actually know if she was the reincarnation of Hime-sama? Do people remember their past lives? I mean, you told me I used to be an otter and I certainly don’t remember that.”
“True…” the priest said, back to ignoring Anya.
“If it helps you, I definitely don’t remember any past lives,” Anya said, feeling somehow as if she was intruding on their conversation, even though really, it was one where she probably had more to say that these men should be listening to than anyone.
“Well, this is a bit of a conundrum, then, isn’t it? She did come through when we tried to bring the latest incarnation of Hime-sama here, and as you say, it is possible that this incarnation would look different, and have no memory of ever actually being Hime-sama, but that means… Well, if she doesn’t remember that she is Hime-sama, how can she help us?”
The priest’s assistant wondered why he was being asked for an answer to such a dilemma. It was his master who usually had all the answers. He shrugged his shoulders.
The priest suddenly made a decisive gasp as if he had been hit by inspiration. With renewed enthusiasm, he turned to Anya, who was still sitting inside the magic circle.
“What powers do you have? You may not know that you might have been our priestess Hime-sama in another time, but if you truly are her, you will have special gifts and talents!”
Anya frowned. She did consider herself pretty talented in her work, but whoever these people were, they probably weren’t really au fait with the toolset used by a graphic designer. They were even less likely to have seen any of her work – even if most modern Americans had, on the packaging for the toys they bought for their kids.
“I don’t have… Powers. I’m good at art. I mean, I can draw, and paint, and do photo editing and image manipulation...” she trailed off, realizing from the look the priest was giving her, that the last two things she had said had clearly sounded to him like arcane magic.
“Hime-sama used imagery in creating her wards against the yokai!” the assistant said.
“Indeed she did! Perhaps there is hope! Tell me, woman, do you use your art powers to protect people from yokai?”
“I don’t know what yokai are. I use my art powers to help people decide which doll to buy their kid at Christmas.”
Her sarcasm was lost on the priest.
“What is this Christmas, where people buy their offspring magical dolls?”
This priest sure jumped to some weird conclusions, but Anya felt it was getting her further to just go with it.
“Christmas, well, it’s a religious holiday, but it’s sort of more a social thing these days – gifts, parties, decorations, lots of food and alcohol… It’s not just for spiritual people.”
“Feasts with sake! For the blessings of the gods! To keep the yokai at bay! Ah, now we are getting somewhere! And so, you make the charms, in the form of dolls, and they keep the children safe? Maybe you truly are our Hime-sama!”
Is this guy an idiot? I design the boxes for action figures…
But now that she had realized these men weren’t looking to cause her harm, and were probably not especially sharp, either, Anya had calmed a little. Yes, whatever was going on here was undeniably weird. She had no idea where she was, or why she had gone from enjoying a Sunday morning coffee in her apartment to being in a big, crudely furnished room where everything looked to be made of wood or paper, with a couple of weird guys going on about strange stuff. But her survival instincts weren’t telling her she was in immediate danger. They were telling her to find out what was going on, and gain some kind of hand. She resigned herself to the situation – if only
out of curiosity.
“Sure, why not. So, umm, why did you want me, or Hime-sama or whoever to be… wherever this is? I’m happy to help you out, but then can you please just send me home? I’ve got a lot of work to do...”
“Home? Oh, you misunderstand! You came here when we raised the summons because this is where you are destined to be! Our Hime-sama was lost in another world, her soul wandering in the fog when she was most needed here in her homeland! Now that I, the master priest Mamoru have brought you back, you can fulfill your destiny and save our lands from the yokai once more!” the priest said theatrically.
Anya frowned.
They can’t really mean to keep me here. They’ll send me back once they realize I’m no real help to them.
“As I said, guys, I don’t even know what ‘yokai’ means. In fact, I don’t know what half the stuff you just said means. Actually, how can we even be speaking to each other?”
As she spoke, Anya indicated around the room, where hangings displayed words in a character set completely foreign to her.
This was a good question. These men looked like they were from a different time, and a different continent, yet Anya understood them, and they understood her.
“You can’t read?” Mamoru asked, looking horrified. Clearly his Hime-sama was a learned woman.
“I can read! I just can’t read this language you have written all around here. But if we are speaking to each other, and it’s only some of your words, like yokai, that I don’t understand, well then… What does that mean?”
“Master, I think it’s possible that in the world she was reborn into, people use a different language and way of writing. Probably, we can understand each other because there’s some spiritual link between her and our world or something, but maybe that doesn’t carry over to reading… It’s perhaps a little bit… uncouth to suggest that she never learned to read…” the assistant said.
Anya got the impression that this youth was used to gently correcting his master, and had long since found a way to do it that didn’t cause offense.
“Of course, of course. I am sorry, ummmm… what, should we still call her Hime-sama? I’m still not convinced...” the priest said, touching a finger to his cheek thoughtfully.
“Anya. My name is Anya. Just call me that, convinced or otherwise.”
“Anya… Anya. You know not of the situation we are facing, this much is clear.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you that!”
“And you really don’t know about yokai? Maybe they just have a different name where you come from?”
“Master… It seems she understands our words, but when there isn’t a direct translation her mind knows, she just hears what we actually say. That would mean the word yokai is so unfamiliar to her that there isn’t a way that that concept can be communicated in her language.”
Anya was starting to like this, as yet, nameless assistant boy.
“Exactly. You have said some things I didn’t understand, and I just heard them as new words. It happened the other way around too, just like when I said ‘Christmas’ and you didn’t know what that was. Whatever mechanism allows us to understand each other is also telling us where there are big differences in our worlds. So if I don’t know what yokai are when you speak of them, it is not because of a language thing, it means I really, truly don’t know what they are.”
The priest Mamoru sighed in resignation, realizing that what Anya and the kid were telling him had no logical counter-argument.
“Then, we have a Hime-sama that doesn’t know of the yokai? This is going to be a lot harder than I anticipated.”
Chapter 2
Demons. Though not quite demons, not in the sense Anya thought of the word. Not from an organized netherworld or hell, not minions of any specific dark force. Just things that were, and had their own individual priorities and agendas – like people, perhaps.
Spirits. That wasn’t quite the right way to think of them either. They came in many forms, some even shifting between animal and human bodies, others wispy shapes in the air. Some could communicate with people, and had human intelligence – some were perhaps even smarter than that. Some were no closer to a human than a jellyfish. As the priest Mamoru explained the yokai, Anya realized that it was true – there really wasn’t a similar concept in her mind, carried over from her life in modern America. At least not one that gave an exact match. The term yokai seemed to mean, all at once, something that could be a god or a werewolf, a faerie or a little creepy monster with a hundred legs that could be stamped underfoot.
It’s just what they call anything that isn’t a human or a normal animal. Anything outside of the laws of nature… Yokai means supernatural beings of a wide range of types, then. But if that is the case…
“Are they all a threat to the people here, then?”
Anya was no longer sitting inside the magic circle, and was instead drinking a tea the assistant had made to help calm her. Most of the panic at being brought here had subsided, or at least, she’d managed to ignore the scariness of actually thinking about the fact she had been transported to another world by instead focusing on how, well, it was all quite interesting, really. Her own mind was protecting her from the oddness by allowing her to think of it as some kind of fascinating trip – like studying in Europe or something. She felt like as long as she kept asking questions and learning things, her sanity could remain intact.
She was kneeling on a cushion in front of a low table, emulating the way Mamoru, across from her, was sitting. It was a style of sitting she had seen in movies and pictures, and believed to be traditional in some parts of Asia, but it was pretty uncomfortable to her. Considering she was wearing short pajamas and a robe, she also felt quite bizarre acting so formally. She’d been lead into this room by Mamoru, through some sliding paper screen doors, and it seemed a lot more homely than the room with the magical circle. Well, it stood to reason that they probably didn’t drink their tea in the same room they used to summon people from other worlds, or whatever other kinds of weird stuff these guys did. After bringing the tea, the priest’s assistant had returned to the magic-circle room, and Anya could faintly hear the sound of the floor being scrubbed.
The rooms she’d seen so far didn’t have any windows to the outside, so Anya deduced that the house must be quite large, and this room somewhere in the middle of it with no external walls. Or perhaps she was in a basement. It was hard to know. Oil lamps made it bright, but without outside light she was also unable to tell if it was day or night. It had been morning in New York when she’d been summoned here, but it seemed unlikely she was still in the same timezone… She clearly wasn’t even still in the same dimension.
“Well, we’ve never heard of a benevolent one…” Mamoru said, rubbing his chin.
“But, if all yokai are individuals, and they are not all working towards the same goals, doesn’t it stand to reason that they wouldn’t all be enemies of the people? Aren’t there some who just leave humans alone and carry on with their own affairs, or like, I don’t know, maybe yokai who have disputes between themselves and so have other enemies than humans?”
“Oh, it is certainly true that some are a bigger threat than others. Some are low level creatures that can be kept at bay with even the simplest wards, things a child can make. And so those never end up getting anywhere close to human settlements. Presumably they find some other way to amuse themselves out in the forests and mountains, and don’t trouble us. But that is not to say they wouldn’t, if they weren’t too weak. Then, yes, there are some yokai who are much higher in type, nobles among yokai – if such an idea isn’t too perverse – and they believe humans to be no more important than the animals in the fields. They don’t waste their time attacking humans, any more than humans hunt mice for sport – they simply aren’t interested in us. But of course, with such disregard for our lives, they think nothing of letting us be harmed in the course of their own disagreements with each other.”
“And then
there are some in the middle that actively attack humans?”
“Precisely. So wherever a yokai stands, it is always a threat to humans in some way.”
“Why do the ones who attack humans do that? Do they eat us, or something like that?” Anya said, trying to figure out whether these things were just like hungry wild beasts, or something with an actual hatred for humans.
“Their reasons may be as diverse as they are. Some seem to envy our way of life, or just want to take things we have like our harvests or land, killing us in the process. Others seem to hunt us for fun, or perhaps for food. Then others still seem to have in them a hatred for humanity that stems from a personal grudge. Among those, some will even specifically target a certain person or community.”
“For revenge… I see.”
Anya sipped her tea, which wasn’t unpleasant in flavor, and which had an aroma of jasmine to it.
As an outsider it was hard not to think that, if Mamoru and the other people here viewed all yokai as an enemy to be hated and feared, it was probably only inevitable that some yokai would seek vengeance for things done to them by humans. Maybe they weren’t even wrong to.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind…
“Wait, you’re not trying to sympathize with the yokai, are you? Anya, I fear that you aren’t quite grasping the gravity of the situation the people in this region are in...” the priest said, noticing the skepticism on her face.
“Well of course I’m not – you haven’t told me what it is yet! Only that yokai are individuals with different levels of reasoning, and that some attack people, perhaps with good reason to! If you, and your Hime-sama and whoever else have been fighting them, it’s a damn reasonable viewpoint that you are as much to blame as they are… I’m just, I don’t know, wondering if things may not be as cut and dried as you might be conditioned to think they are.”
The priest was looking at her almost with pity, as if to say ‘you sweet innocent thing, you will not take that view when you know more’. He said nothing, but Anya could tell he wasn’t persuaded to even try and look at things from a different angle.