Hi folks! This is all new stuff that was never posted on the Dreaming of Sunshine forum. I'm going to write up to that stuff instead of starting with posting it.

This contains spoilers for, at the very least, everything up to and including the Land of Hot Springs arc of Dreaming of Sunshine by Silver Queen, which hopefully you've already read if you're reading this since this is a recursive fic!

.

prologue — dirge without music

.

your death will open the gate, whispers the vast monster on the outside of Nara Shikako's universe. Aoba is dying and Shikako is laying on an altar. The animals in the village are dead. The children in the village are dead. The men and the women are dead. The light goes out in Aoba's eyes. The chalice is full to the top with his blood.

Jiraiya had said, 'People only think so many ways,' but the thing trying to crawl through her is hardly people. Shikako hadn't always belonged, but that hardly means she's going to share.

The monster has made a mistake, reminding Shikako that there's a gate, that there's an outside. A seal master has what they need with them all the times. A chance, a choice, a hope — if Shikako is going to leave everything behind again, she'll do it on her own terms. By her will, and when that's all she has there's no form a seal can't take.

Aoba is dead.

There is an outside.

Where there is a way in, there is a way out.

The ritual creates the doorway, but Shikako herself is the liminal space. The door sill, the jamb, the head. She's the frame, the hinge, the knob. Something has to be between here and there for the god Jashin to enter, and that thing is Shikako. Of course it is.

A seal is a way to exert willpower on the world, and free of the constraints of chakra and ink Shikako can fit a lot into a seal. Shikako gathers up every scrap of anything she can remember that might apply.

Shikako has a good backing in sci-fi from Before, an excellent imagination, and something like proof, considering her rebirth. Her understanding of the universe — the multiverse — is fundamentally more... messy, more complex, than the Yondaime's ever was. She put the Hiraishin into her single, desperate tear, but the Hiraishin could never work as intended for Shikako. Namikaze Minato was a genius, a brilliant man, but he'd never considered that a time-space technique might go... out of bounds.

There's light and power like a beautiful harmony. It tears Jashin away from her. The door shuts, and Shikako and the monster are both outside. Shikako is pulled in directions she didn't even know existed, through and out and away, and Gelel's music is so loud that it drowns out Jashin's impotent rage.