Sakura and the warm world

I came to demonstrate my power. I said so at the gate. I had something in my hand and I wasn't afraid of anything, which I'd been told was a quality, and before anyone could stop me I walked into their forbidden walk of the beasts.

You don't walk in there. That's what forbidden means. I walked in. I walked out the other end. And by the time I reached them I'd been bled nearly white, and I sat down on the ground, because it was there.

They bandaged me. All five, on their knees in the dirt, and the snake holding the lamp in its mouth so the blind one could see what his hands were doing. And while they worked I watched them notice I wasn't like them. It goes across a face.

"She's like a machine," the one with the forehead said. "A human machine."

"Built," said the blind one. "Not grown."

They were right. Every part of me where it should be and none of it accidental. I did things as a child. I won't list them; the list isn't the point. The point is that whatever I did, I'd been made to be able to, and somebody had made me, and I had walked up a road to show it off to five old people on a hill, and they were tying my arm up with a strip torn off a sleeve.

"Why did you go in?" the blind one said.

"To demonstrate my power."

"Demonstrated," he said, and tied the knot.

I healed. Of course I did. And I got engaged to the Kaiser of Japan, and lived.

···

Together we tried to bring peace back into the world. I want that said first, before the rest, because the rest is loud and this was quiet: a made girl and a man married to a djinn, sitting down at a table, trying.

And we brought our know-how. All of it. His folds and his kaleidoscope and the old system.

The old system's long overdue. Everyone knows it. But it's still there, stripped down, in a reduced set of functions, for legacy, because you can't just switch off a thing that a thousand years of marriages were folded on. So it runs, quietly, underneath, the way the folds run under the kaleidoscope.

And releasing the old burdens, all of them, the accumulated weight of every system nobody had switched off, brought us something we hadn't planned for.

It opened the doors to another world.

···

Our worlds are cold. Rigid. I hadn't known it until there was something to stand next to. Everything through the doors was warm and radiant. It looked like an old world, the kind the gods leave. I stood at the door with the blind one, and the snake did the thing it does, went still, and he said, "That's where the fun went."

Naturally our worlds made a pact with it. We shared our dilemma; they were concerned; they offered a deal. For our most valuable treasure, knowledge, they would share their powers with us. And that's how the first real magic came into our world. Not the kind you count. Not gravity and cameras. The real kind.

But let it be said, and I'm saying it: just because a thing sparkles doesn't mean it works properly.

Together we developed the technology of the future and spread it, so that the beings could live among us and become, with time, part of our community. And it worked. Mostly. For a while. Which is the most you can say about anything I've been part of.

···

Then it came round a second time.

You won't believe it. I didn't, and I don't disbelieve things; I'm not built for it. The whole thing happened again. All of it. The water going, the spirits at the seams, the wall, the door. But a bigger round.

And to get to the bottom of it, the hero of our time decided to give up his body and solve the problem from over there, from inside it. A blind man from a teashop, with a snake. He didn't ask anyone. He said he couldn't see who to ask.

It didn't help, not for a long time. The portal closed after a while, and it's closed today. He's on the other side of it.

So am I. I walked in. That's what I do.