View source for The Fall of Kyoto: the Tomb

{{Cutscene Header
|Date of Scene=2025/10/31
|Location=Kyoto Station
|Synopsis=Emi Hoshino confronts her past and pays the price of failure.
|Tinyplot=The Fall of Kyoto
}}
Over the months that she lived in Tokyo, Emi had never stopped watching Kyoto. Watching for the signs that would tell her it was now or never.

And lately they were everywhere.

It had begun with the usual trickle of exhausted complaints and sleepless confessions.Nothing that wasn’t out of place anywhere else, but lately she had begun sensing a shift in the tone of things that had pushed her to greater urgency. She had to make the others ready, teach them about the dreamscape. Just in case. Now or never.

The people she followed, the support group for lucid dreaming and night terrors she participated in, had deteriorated. People had been disappearing, dropping out or giving up. Those that remained had begun to display sharper edges, a note of desperation ringing clearly if you knew how to read for it.

The nightmares were never the same, of course, but there was a common thread she had begun to take note of. They used words like ‘heavy’ or ‘thick’ or ‘suffocating’. One dreamer spoke of drowning in a dark lake with water thick as syrp. Another dreamed of a forest without sound, the canopy seeming to come down on them: a third woke crying because their dreamer begged them to switch places with them.

Different dreams, different people, all in Kyoto. The same pulse threading through all of them. Something terrible was happening in Kyoto’s dreamscape – and she knew exactly who was responsible for it.

Now or never.

She lingered but a moment once the decision was made. She yanked her bag – the one for this eventuality – out from under her bed, checked the contents. It would be enough. KenKen was welcomed onto her shoulder and she quickly tidied up and made her bed. It would be rude to leave a mess behind. 

With one last glance cast behind her, she took her bat and stepped out into the Tokyo sunlight.

—--

Emi had expected Kyoto to feel wrong. She had not expected it to feel ''this'' wrong.

The moment her shoes hit the platform, she could feel it. A chill, a pressure that settled just behind her eyes, sank into her lungs. Commuters brushed past her in tired silence, eyes dull, unfocused. Little chatter, even less energy. Just worn down silence.


The evening light was already dimming and the station lights were kicking on. They flickered. Once. Twice.

And then came the welcome she was expecting.

A woman holding her child paused mid-step, head turning, eyes glassy and glazed, like someone else was looking through them.

HIM.

“Hoshino,” said the mother’s voice, except it wasn’t hers at all. “You should never have come back to Kyoto.”

A businessman passing on the other side of her didn’t even slow down as he murmured, “I’m disappointed. I thought we had an… understanding.”

A little boy, too ignored by his young, beleaguered parents turned just long enough to let a smile too wide for his face show. 

“Didn’t you learn what it costs you when you don’t behave? Didn’t you learn what happens when you don’t ''stay away''?”

Three voices. One Nightmare.

Emi wanted to flinch, wanted to let the dread tighten into a ball in the pit of her stomach, but she would rather die than give HIM that satisfaction.

“Let’s continue this conversation somewhere more … appropriate, shall we?” she said, voice as cool and cutting as the way she had prepared for this moment on the train over. She straightened her shoulders, as if to brace for a blow that didn’t descend, and then allowed sleep to take her in the span of one… two blinks of her eyes and yet those same eyes remained open and glassy as her dreaming mind slipped between worlds.

Kyoto station – no, the dream of it – unfolded around her. At first, it looked unchanged with its tiled floors polished clean, trains arriving with their familiar chime, travelers hushed and hurrying. Even in a realm built on the back of liminal spaces, Kyoto station was that by definition… but the dream here was -too- normal, normal in a way that made her skin crawl when combined with the darkness she felt outside it.

It was in the way the lighting was subtly wrong, in the quiet squeak of the wheels of a suitcases slowly rolling by her. Half-whispered conversations stuttered into life and then stopped all around her and then... she felt it. 

HIM.

“You’re avoiding the real issue.” HIS voice, now, the one out of many.

Emi stared forward, chin high, refusing to turn her head toward the source. 

“What issue?” she asked lightly. “You’ll have to be more specific. You’ve made it pretty clear I’ve got bunches as I recall.”

“Such bravado,” the voices chided. There it was. The patronizing warmth, something to convey safety where none exists. “Bravado is one of the means by which you run from the truth.”

“You don’t even know what truth is,” Emi hissed back.

“I am the ONLY truth.”

HIS declaration thundered through the station, loud enough to reverberate through her bone and blood. The lights flickered and then dimmed and the dreamy reflections of travellers and stories of years passed hesitated in their endless sojourns.

“You pretend at grand purpose,” the voices cooed from every corner of the dream-crossroads now, everywhere and nowhere all at once, like he was the walls, the ceiling, even the floor. “But we both know what you really are. Nothing more than one more frightened little girl, crippled with the knowledge that you can only fail, again and again, as you always will. To fail is your nature.”

Emi didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The silence spoke loudly enough for her. 

The tracks wrenched behind her, bending at impossible angles. The signs on the walls became smeared with darkness. Every passage suddenly seemed to lead to the same twisting void. The ground beneath her feet seemed to become unsettled, the tiles rippling.

“See?” came that voice again. “Already shrinking away, already running.”

And she did run.

Her boots hit the ground hard, echoing through the seemingly collapsing dreamscape. Above hjer, cracks of pure black energy slashed through the great vaulted ceiling, branching like veins of dripping tar. They spread down the walls, chasing her, racing ahead of her and cutting off paths before she could even choose them.

“Where will you go?” came the mocking voice all around her again, “There is no will beyond mine. There is nowhere you can go that I am not already waiting for you, no horizon that I have not already swallowed.”

The ground beneath her feet gave way, plunging her into darkness.

Emi slammed into a mountain of books. She could only afford to wheeze but a moment before the books themselves came for her, snapping shut on her arms, her wrists, her legs, biting, tearing. She ripped herself free and knew exactly where she was.
The library.

Jagged, twisting stacks and shelves spiralled into the dark and she heard HIS laughter above, coming closer.

Emi didn’t look up. Her boots pounded the warped floorboards as the shelve grabbed at her like claws. Pages peeled free from their books, slicing at her like little paper knives, leaving gashes first in her clothes, then in her flesh.

“Poor little Gin. All that terror, and you couldn’t protect her from her a drop of it. Failure.”

Ahead of her flickered light, silhouetting a figure, a ghostly, gowned woman with an open book for a face, pages open and bleeding ink – ‘help me!’.
“I’m sorry, Gin,” thought Emi, silently, as she barreled through her, barreled through the shelves and smashed right into…
…Desks. Rows of them.

Her palms hit the cheap laminate with a thunderous clap that drew every eye from every child sitting squarely at their seat right to her. All of the students in their seats, except for the small, quiet girl with the mismatched eyes.

“Look who finally rolled in.”

“Didn’t you drop out?”

"I heard she got arrested”

“What a ''freak''.”

She’d heard it all before. All the uglier for the accuracy, this time. The teacher’s voice rose above them, hoarse and gravelly like chalk scraping. “Late again, Hoshino? Can’t you ever show up on time for anything?”

The chairs scraped as the students stood. A tide of bodies surged around her, grabbing her hair, her sleeves, the cuts slashed into her aching as her skin was stretched. The laughter piled on heavier than their weight.

“Gonna cry again, Emi?”

“Everyone is glad you’re gone. We’re better off without you .”

Emi thrashed, elbows and knees, grabbing fingers and kicking free of hands clutching her ankles. Her breath hitched as she let herself marinate in the memories, the sobs she swore she’d never let anyone HIM hear again.

“You can not run from yourself, little failure. Who you are will always catch up with you eventually. What is knowing you but a burden to be beared until it becomes intolerable? Until you become ''discardable''? Only I can offer you peace. Only I can offer you freedom from that most terrible burden of all: being ''you''.”

Emi burst through the school exit and found herself charging into a kitchen.

Her kitchen.

“...no,” said Emi, not for the first time. A pain lanced through her chest. Heart sick.

Her father turned first and then away, his face a mask of exhausted resignation blended with disgust. Her mother looked up from her tea, lips pressed thin in silent disappointment. And then… her little sister. Yuzuki. The one she couldn’t look in the eye most of all. Yuna.

“Why did you come back?” asked her mother.

Her father didn’t even look at her and the last words he’d spoken to her hung heavily over her anyway.

“Just go. We’re tired of this …chaos.”

And then Yuna.

“You fail every life you touch. If you had never been born, they’d all be happier.”

HIS voice – through her.

Emi screamed.

She stumbled backward through the kitchen door she’d come in through, and then fell through walls, through her own memories, her world seemingly collapsing around her in a suffocating blur of a childhood full of dread. So much fear. The ground dropped out from under her, her scream trailing into a smaller and smaller and smaller still space.

A chair scraped against a floor. A single table. One overhead light. No doors. No windows. Just a mirror. Just her breathing, ragged and shaky. 
And HIM.

Just him, and nothing else.

He savored her silence. He leaned forward, a slow, deliberate calm in his voice that grated. “We’ve sure been here before, haven’t we?” He said, laughter behind the words. 

“Let’s try something different today, shall we? I’ll explain your narrative for you.” His voice cooed, layered. Silky, clinical, and most of all, patronizing. “You see, Emi, we must consider the facts. Every choice, every hesitation, every misstep, has led you to this moment. Led you to me. You have consistently failed to meet the expectations laid out for you, to meet the expectations of those you love, and even your own expectations of yourself. Predictable and expected. Understandable, really.” 

“Now, let us consider the consequences. Every effort you made to protect others, to intervene, to guide… it all crumbled. Why? Because, we see,  you have never truly understood the pattern of your own mind or, more importantly, the patterns of those around you. You overextend. You hesitate and  you retreat. And the world. Well, the world continues, and will continue, without you.”

“So, let us ask the important question here. What have you made of your life, Emi?”

Emi didn’t answer. Didn’t lift her head.

He tilted his head in mock concern.

“Ah. Silence? How like your father to turn away from a problem. A common reaction to honest self-assessment, too.” He tutted. “But, Emi, we mustn’t avoid the truth. How else are we expected to grow?”

“You have built your life into a cathedral of failures. And you – what are you but a parasitic burden? You will become as a cautionary tale, whispered by those that will come after you. ‘Do not be like her. You have carved the stones of this tomb yourself, and immured yourself within it.”

HIS shadow loomed over her.

Elated. Victorious.

Certain.

And then HE saw it.

A flicker in Emi’s expression. A smile.

This tired, soft little thing. Worst of all, it was knowing.

The shadow recoiled.

“What have you done?” he asked, his voice suddenly nearly as small as he had made Emi feel.

The walls were closing in. Not on her... on ''him''. 

“You don’t know? You’re the one who followed me here. Just something I learned from a girl. Her name was Reiko Fujiwara.”

“This...”

“...isn’t your place of power, yes. It’s mine. You chased me into myself and you’re right: this will be a tomb.Your’s. And I will be its keeper. 

You may be too powerful for me to stop outright, but here? You’re never going to hurt anyone again.”

“No,” he hissed, his voice shaking with fury.. “No, this is, this was your weakness! Your shame. Your ruin!”

“It was called bait, dipshit, and you chased every last morsel of it.”

Emi smiled.

She had him. She had him.

The walls shook with his impotent rage, the webbing binding its stones together holding fast. He brought his power to bear against her, will to will.

She was unmoved.

“NO!”

He bore down on her with her guilt.  He lanced her with her fear. He hurled the memory of every failure she had ever believed was real. And she let it break against her like waves on a cliff face. She thought of her friends. Their laughter. Their bravery. The futures they deserved – futures she could help buy for them in this moment, where she rectified her greatest mistake. It could be worth it. 

“It was a nice dream,” she thought, “while it lasted.” The words felt oddly familiar to her even as she thought them. 

“No,” he hissed, voice warping into a dozen layered screams.. “No, no, no! I will not permit you to decide this ending! I will not!” 

“You may have lured me into your mind,” he snarled, “but your mind is still connected to Kyoto’s dreamscape, and I am connected to EVERYTHING that suffers beneath its black skies. You think I need to break you? I only need to poison your TETHER.”

She could feel it: darkness and nightmare energy crackling down the connection between her dream and the Kyoto dreamscape itself. Her sanctuary, her trap... It shook, trembled, and then broke apart despite the effort of every screaming fiber of her being to hold it in place. She was left crashed into a wasteland of her own shattered memories, coughing, bruised and alive only because she was too damn stubborn to die.

A brief wind stirred, lifting prismatic vapors into a black and moonless sky and she looked up and saw HIM, and then she looked down, saw the vista of countless nightmares flooding towards her.

She rolled her neck.

“Pity,” she said, “Guess we’re doing it the hard way.”

And she dove into the flood.