TURBO TIER: Arlecchino Kitsune Shrine Maiden TF (Patreon)

The torii gates of the Grand Narukami Shrine rose out of the mist like teeth. Arlecchino climbed the stone steps without hurrying, her coat trailing behind her in the wind, red lining catching what little light the lanterns gave. Blue spirit-motes drifted along the path, indifferent to her passage, the way most things in Inazuma seemed content to remain indifferent to her passage. She preferred it that way. Attention was a currency she spent deliberately, never carelessly.

The omamori hung from her gloved hand, inert. A small thing, cheaply strung, and yet its presence had cost her three agents and a fortnight of quiet work to acquire. She turned it once between two fingers and let it fall still again.

The shrine's Ley Line signature matches the disturbance recorded in Hanamizaka. Yae Miko. Of course.

There was no surprise in the thought, only confirmation, the kind that came at the end of an equation rather than the start of one. She had not come to investigate. Investigation was for people who did not already know the answer. She had come to get answers for vanishing of Navia and Clorinde, on whatever game the Guuji of the Grand Narukami Shrine believed herself clever enough to play with a Harbinger's patience.

Neuvillette had asked her to look into it. She had accepted, because the alternative was letting a Fontaine matter rot in Inazuma's political undergrowth, and rot had a way of spreading. She did not intend to let it spread to her.

Yae Miko was already waiting — of course she was seated with the unbothered poise of a woman who had never once in her life been late to her own ambush.

"My, my," Yae said, eyes crinkling with amusement that did not reach anything resembling concern. "The Knave herself, gracing my humble shrine. I should have set out the good cups."

"Navia. Clorinde." Arlecchino did not raise her voice. She never needed to. "You know where they are."

"I know a great many things." Yae's fan opened with a soft snap, more habit than heat. "I've also been thinking, lately, that I'm due a vacation. Shrine work is so relentless. One starts to fantasize about someone else minding the incense burners for a season." Her eyes dropped, briefly, deliberately, to the omamori in Arlecchino's hand. "That one wasn't meant for outside hands, by the way. I do hope you were careful with it."

"I am always careful." Arlecchino held it up between them, a piece of evidence, a piece of leverage. "This came from your network. It will go to Fontaine's magistracy with everything else I've gathered, unless you give me a reason not to send it."

"Threats. How very Harbinger of you." Yae did not look afraid. She looked, if anything, faintly delighted, the way a cat looks at a bird that has wandered close enough to be interesting. "Do be careful what you carry, Harbinger. Some things bite back."

The omamori pulsed.

Arlecchino felt it before she understood it — a heat that was not her own Pyro, rising from her palm up through her wrist, cold and old and utterly uninterested in her permission. She did not flinch. Flinching was a thing she had trained out of herself decades ago, in rooms far worse than this one.

This energy is something older. Something that does not care who she is.

She reached for her own flame instinctively, the reflex of a lifetime spent answering fire with fire. It did not answer. It simply — receded.

Yae Miko rose, unhurried, and inclined her head in a bow that was too deep to be respectful and too slow to be anything but mockery. "I really am sorry for the inconvenience," she said, in the tone of someone who was not sorry at all. "But someone capable does need to mind the shrine while I'm away. And you did insist on holding it yourself."

The haze came up pink and total, swallowing the edges of the hall.

Arlecchino gritted her teeth and did not cry out. She catalogued instead — pressure at her temples, a strange lightness threading through her scalp, a warmth that had no business being called pleasant and yet insisted on being called that anyway.

Ears, she thought, when the shape of it became undeniable, two points of white-and-black fur rising through her hair where human ears had been a moment before.

...Ears. I have grown ears.

Somewhere behind the haze, an ornament of black feathers and red bead and crimson tassel found its way into her hair and pinned itself there with the certainty of something that had always belonged.

She turned at a pressure behind her — new weight, new balance, her spine recalibrating around a mass that had not existed a breath earlier. Three tails, white and full, fanned out from the base of her spine, and against every instinct she had cultivated since childhood, her first true thought about them was simple.

They are warm.

Stop. That is irrelevant.

It did not stay irrelevant. Three became more, unhurried, inexorable, the haze weaving each new tail out of pink smoke and settling it into place like a tailor fitting a garment to a body that hadn't asked for it. Her hair lengthened in a long silver fall, black streaks bleeding through it in wide, uneven strokes, cascading past her shoulders with a weight she had never carried before and now could not put down.

Her coat came apart first — not torn, not burned, simply unmade, threads dissolving into wisps of pink that rose and re-knit themselves into white silk and black-diamond patterning across her chest. She looked down at her hands as the sleeves reformed around her wrists.

Her gloves did not change.

The children.

Who will manage the House while I—

No. Focus. This is temporary. Everything is temporary. I simply need to—

The thought did not finish. It could not find its own end, the way a sentence sometimes loses its subject halfway through and simply stops existing.

The transformation carried her deeper into the shrine hall, past sliding doors that had opened for her without a hand touching them. Her trousers unraveled at the hem; a pleated black hakama rose in their place, striped through with a red diamond pattern she did not recognize and yet somehow already knew the name of. Her boots dissolved into white tabi and dark wooden geta, and she stood a half-inch taller for it, though she could not have said whether that was the shoes or something else entirely.

The last six tails came at once, filling the space around her until nine stood arranged behind her like a second, luminous shadow.

And for a moment the analysis in her was almost peaceful, almost satisfied.

...Was I always...

No. I was—

I was the Father.

...Wasn't I.

A wide red obi wrapped itself at her waist and tied into a bow with no hands to guide it. The omamori — still clutched, still hers, the one constant object in a body that had stopped being entirely her own — shimmered once and settled against her sash like something that had never been anywhere else.

The haze turned once around her, slow, ceremonial, and then it was gone.

...Arlecchino.

Silence, after. Not absence — silence the way a held breath is silence, full of something that has simply stopped needing to be spoken.

Her eyes opened. Still red, still cut into that sharp cross-shaped focus, but behind them now sat something that had not been there before — old, patient, unbothered by the weight of centuries in a way no twenty-some-year-old Harbinger had any business possessing. She lifted one dark-gloved hand and touched an ear, tilted her head, considered the sensation with the mild curiosity of someone examining a familiar object rather than a stranger's face in the mirror.

The first thing she said was not a threat. It was not a command. It came out low and warm, edged with an amusement that had never belonged to the woman who had climbed those shrine steps an hour before.

"Well," she said, "I suppose the shrine won't mind itself."

From the shrine's veranda, unseen, Yae Miko watched the new Kitsune Head Shrine Maiden take up the bronze bell resting by the offering stand, testing its weight in her palm with the easy confidence of someone who had held it a hundred times before. There was no triumph in Yae's expression. No theater. Only the quiet satisfaction of a plan that had, after a very long wait, concluded precisely on schedule.

She did not speak again. She turned, fan tucked into her sleeve, and walked unhurried toward the gates.

She had, after all, a vacation to finally take.