The sound of sizzling food draws Suwako out of a deep sleep. She rolls over with a groan and pulls the covers tighter around herself, but sunlight strikes her face from the window above and she resigns herself to waking up. As her mind slowly prepares itself for the day ahead, the urgent feeling that there's something that she should be doing tugs at her awareness. And then, it clicks: today is the anniversary of her defeat at Kanako's hands. The two thousand, six hundred, eighty-third anniversary, to be precise. Mortal calendars come and go, but her certainty is rooted in something far more profound. There's power in such a date. She will be aware of it until the day she dies.

It gives her the motivation to get out of bed, at least. Suwako slides out from under her covers, and the winter air instantly sucks the heat out of her. She wastes no time in getting dressed. These days, it doesn't take long. Her clothes are simple, little more than a pullover dress with a baggy shirt beneath it. Brushing her hair afterward takes longer. Leaving her hat hanging on the wall, she pushes her door open and steps out into the shrine's living area.

The warm smell of breakfast instantly hits her nose. Sanae's back is to her, leaning over the stove, with half a dozen pots and bowls cluttered on the counters around her. Hearing Suwako's footsteps, she looks over her shoulder. "Ahh, good morning!"

"Good morning."

"You're just in time! My world famous three-fruit waffles are nearly ready!" Sanae turns from the stove now and puts her hands on her hips proudly, then falters when she notices that Suwako isn't playing along. "... not hungry?"

"Hmm? Oh, no, it sounds great," Suwako reassures her, with a deliberate smile. Already, her eyes are turned toward the door. "I just need to take a walk first. It shouldn't take long"

"Oh. Okay! Um, if you see Lady Kanako, can you call her in?"

"Mmhm. I'll be back before while they're still warm, I promise!" Suwako raises her hand for a brief wave, then heads out the door.

Outside, the air is cold and dry, the kind of midwinter chill that feels like it might have enough momentum to stick around forever. The sun is out, though, and the light helps warm her skin once she steps out from under the shrine's roof. The snow on the ground reflects it, giving the entire world a too-bright glaring edge.

She turns and walks along a little-used path that leads around the corner of the shrine. The lake behind it is still frozen, with a placid coating of ice on top and water only peeking out toward the center. After making her way down to the shore, she turns to walk along it. When she finds a suitably rocky patch, she kneels down and presses her palms to the ground, and her senses spread out through the earth.

Beneath her, Suwako can feel the thin layer of soil, then the fractured rocks beneath them, and past even those, the monolithic granite that makes up the roots of Youkai Mountain. She sifts through it until she finds what she's looking for. Near the surface, along the ancient shore of the lake, there's a band of iron-rich rock. She keeps her attention on it as she rises back to standing, then gestures toward the sky, coaxing the rock upward. Initial, tentative cracks spread through it, then larger ones, then it finally shatters and begins burrowing to the surface. The ground shifts and bursts open in front of her. Kilograms of hand-sized stones levitate out of the hole and come to rest between her hands.

Once she has enough to start, Suwako squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on the fine details of the stones. First, she shatters them, grinding them into finer and finer pieces. When they've been rendered into dust, she sorts them into their constituent minerals. The unwanted ones fall to the ground, while the iron ores remain hanging in the air and more stone rises to be processed. As discarded rubble piles up around Suwako's feet, the knot of iron ore in front of her grows. Once it's large enough, she renders the impurities out, until she's left with pure elemental iron.

The iron is still warm when she takes it in her hands. It flows under her touches like clay, and she shapes it with supernatural ease. She draws it into a long rod first, then carefully flattens it along most of its length. Once it's in roughly the shape that she wants, she focuses on the details, putting an edge on one side and polishing the rest of it to a mirror gleam. After only a few minutes of work, a gleaming sword of pure iron sits in her hand. It's one of the gifts that once let her command a kingdom.

Suwako wraps the hilt in a strip of torn cloth and gives the sword an appraising swing. It takes a few tries to get used to the weight, but it's nearly identical to the swords she's been making for millennia. Once she has a feel for the new weapon's balance, she sets off along the shores of the lake, with snow crunching under her feet.

Ever since Kanako had usurped her kingdom, Suwako had spent her days in silent planning. It wasn't her way to face an enemy in direct combat. She commanded the crops, the soil, the very earth itself. She could afford to spend seasons destroying the enemy from within, poisoning her lands and destroying her works. Patiently, like a river wore a canyon into stone. By the time the Yamato goddess realized that she was in trouble, Suwako would be poised to destroy her.

Or at least that had been the plan. She had spent a year like that, secretly dispatching her mishaguji to ensure that crops failed, subtly altering the course of rivers to cause floods. Finding their granaries empty, several outlying villages turned their backs on Kanako and struck out on their own. Her plan seemed to be working.

And then, Kanako announced her intention to travel into the wilderness to cultivate her power.

It was so tempting that Suwako considered that it might be a trap. Outside of civilization, Kanako would be deprived of the advantages that had let her win their war. She wouldn't have her army with her, or the treasures that had destroyed Suwako's weapons. She would be isolated from her followers, and probably unprepared for battle. With no outside interference, it would be a simple test of the goddesses' strength. Even then, Suwako was ancient, and Kanako had been a mere human decades earlier. Trap or not, it was an opportunity too good for Suwako to pass up.

So, here she was, walking down the banks of a river toward Kanako's wilderness hideout. She'd brought every advantage that she could. In her hand was the finest sword that mortal blacksmiths could produce, wrought from pure iron that she'd ripped from the heart of the mountain. The earth beneath her feet churned with mishaguji. For the first time since her defeat, she was wearing her former court regalia, sewn through with gold and silver threads that made her seem to glow in the light. All of her divine presence was poured into this single manifestation of her self. It was enough power that the earth seemed to tremble with her passing, and behind her, green shoots poked up through the snow.

At the bottom of a gently sloping hillside, the land fell away into a sharp cliff, and the river fell with it. The resulting waterfall kicked up a cloud of mist that blocked out part of the sky. Right near the edge of the cliff, Kanako's encampment was visible. It was little more than a temporary tent made out of animal fur and poles, with a burnt down campfire in front. Kanako herself was sitting along the cliff, her legs crossed and her spear laying across her lap, facing out over the void below in meditation. She seemed utterly unaware of the intrusion.

It was exactly what Suwako had been hoping for. With a series of coded taps on the ground with her foot, she signaled the mishaguji forward. She could feel them spreading out through the soil, surrounding Kanako from a distance. When they were in place, she focused her power, concentrating it into one hand. Her awareness spread out, and momentarily, it felt like she and the mountain were one and the same.

Suwako drove her fist forward and down, slamming it into the ground. The power that she'd gathered rushed out, an extension of her will that branched through the bedrock and sheared new faults through the stone. A shudder ran through the ground. At the first shift of the topsoil, Kanako stirred from her meditation. Beneath her, a ten meter wide section of the ground gave way, first shifting downward, then sliding toward the cliffside. As it gained momentum, Kanako leapt into the air. She shouted something, but it was drowned out by the grinding noise of stone and soil over the bedrock. Within seconds, the section toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell to the ground below. It landed with a smash of splintering trees and shattering stone. Where Kanako's camp had been, there was now only a sloping depression of naked stone.

In those few seconds, Kanako had taken up a combat posture in the air, with her spear in her hands. As the dust cleared, Suwako leveled her sword at her. "Yamato goddess...!"

"... I'm here to take back what is mine!"

In front of her, standing on the shore of the lake, Kanako turns to face Suwako. She gives the spear in her hands a few lazy spins, then points the tip at her. "If you want to be defeated again that badly," she recites, "I won't deny you."

The line completes a millennia-old exchange, one that they've repeated every year since their first confrontation. They both know what comes next. Suwako sinks down into a fighting stance and weighs her options. She exhausted every possible clever strategy in the first few decades. Now, their battles are straightforward contests of force.

After considering her approach for a few seconds, Suwako crouches down, with her free hand touching to the soil. Focusing her power, she forces the earth into sudden motion, and a hexagonal pillar of granite launches out of the ground like a torpedo. Kanako barely manages to step out from beneath it before it comes crashing down. As the pillar smashes into rubble behind her, she's already recovered, and raises her hand. The air shimmers as power coalesces in her palm, and then releases with a soft snap of energy. The effect isn't immediately obvious, but Suwako can feel the magical charge resonating through their surroundings... and then, bullets spray down from the heavens. Overlapping streams of them, kicking up clouds of snow and blasting shallow ditches where they impact. In the second that it takes Suwako to assess the attack, the streams begin lashing back and forth, all of them closing in on her at once.

It's an attack that would never be legal in a spell card duel. The bullets are too tightly-packed to possibly be dodged, and they'd easily shatter a rib if they hit a fragile human. ... but Suwako isn't a human, and this isn't a spell card duel. She reacts the only way that she can. As smoothly as if it were air, she slips downward into the earth. From underground, she can hear the patter of bullets on the dirt in every direction, like listening to a rainstorm from inside the shrine. With a frog kick, she propels herself through the soil, and the patter grows quieter as she moves away from it. She's in total darkness, but her sense of the earth is absolute. Tracing out the local topography, she swims just beneath the surface until she's at a safe distance, then bursts out.

Residual dirt cascades off of her like water, and the world comes back into view. Her eyes scan the air for Kanako, but she doesn't manage to spot her before she hears the shout of, "Too slow!" from behind. Suwako whirls around, but not quickly enough. Propelled with the entire force of her body, Kanako's spear thrusts close enough that she can feel the breeze.

Honed by decades of warfare, Kanako was a sharp, hard, and brutal thing, like a piece of flint. She drove Suwako backward with thrust after thrust of her spear, each one forcing her a bit farther off-balance. In the air, she didn't have to worry about ceding ground, but it left her too guarded to focus on a counterattack.

Instead, Suwako simply... stopped flying. Her body plummeted downward to the earth, and she landed in a crouch. She stayed there for just long enough to issue another tapped command, then leapt back into the air, launching herself along a trajectory safely far from Kanako. As she took flight again, the ground roiled and burst. A dozen mishaguji arched upward, and a dozen pairs of red eyes opened, with glowing energy streaming from them. The mishaguji closest to Kanako pushed itself upward and snapped at her with whiplike speed. The goddess rolled in the air, easily dodging the attack. It was merely a feint, though, and before she could get her bearings again, the other snakes began exhaling black venom into the air. The vapor spread out into oily clouds, an oppressive wall of darkness that forced Kanako to drop to the ground.

It was just where Suwako wanted her. The mishaguji began leaping and snapping at Kanako, and as she guarded herself from the attacks, Suwako rushed forward. The ground rose up behind her, a wave of stone that would scour Kanako from the earth, and...

With a single gesture from her hand, Kanako summoned a typhoon-force downdraft. Under the force of the gust, the cloud of venom dissipated, and the mishaguji were bashed to the ground. Suwako was sent stumbling, and her wave of stone crumbled behind her. Before she could regain her balance, another blast of air knocked her over. And another, and another, until Suwako was beaten flat against the ground. Above, the sky grew dark. Past the haze of snow and dirt kicked up by the wind, she could just barely see black clouds gathering above Kanako. Thunder rumbled in them, and with a wave of her hand, Kanako beckoned lightning forward. Searing pain burst through Suwako's body before she even saw the flash. Every limb was instantly numb. It was the kind of thing that would have killed a mortal in seconds, and even for her divine physiology, it was too much to continue fighting.

The winds subsided, and in the resulting silence, Suwako could hear Kanako's footsteps approaching. Giving a thrust with the butt of her spear, Kanako pushed her over onto her back. She didn't even have enough strength to resist that. Kanako raised the spear slowly, seeming to enjoy her victory, and leveled the tip at Suwako's neck.

The two glared at each other across the length of the weapon. Suwako waited for her body to stop shaking and her breath to steady itself before she tried speaking. She'd been defeated, but she could still hold on to some dignity. "If you're going to kill me," she spat, "then get on with it."

"If you're going to kill me," Kanako says softly, "then get on with it."

Suwako keeps the sword leveled at her neck for a few seconds. In their two millennia of battles, this isn't the first time she's won. It had taken centuries after her initial defeat to regain enough faith to beat Kanako. By that time... the world had changed. She had changed. In her victories, she no longer feels any urge to drive the sword into Kanako's neck and end this.

"As much as I'd enjoy it," Suwako says, repeating Kanako's ancient response with a growing smirk, "I still have use for you. Perhaps in another year." With those words, the exchange is complete, for the two thousand, six hundred, eighty-third time.

After so many iterations, there is power in the ritual. Power enough to sanctify one goddess killing another... or help bind their unlikely union together. Suwako chuckles under her breath as she lowers the sword, then buries the tip in the ground and crouches down to offer Kanako a hand up. "Ahh, I can't believe you still tried to use the spear again. You haven't used that thing in centuries, have you?"

"I thought it would work for an ambush," Kanako grumbles, as she pulls herself from the ground with a soft grunt. After brushing some dirt off her clothes, she kneels to grab the spear again. "I guess I'm out of practice with it."

"I'm not surprised," Suwako says, and turns away from her, looking out over the lake with both hands resting on the back of her head. "An old lady like you shouldn't be jumping around like that, anyway. You might break a hip or something~."

"Which one of us is supposed to be the 'old lady' here?"

"You, obviously. I'm too cute to be old."

"Hmh." Kanako steps up behind her, wrapping her arms around the shorter goddess' waist for a lazy hug. "Well, I can't argue that."

"Mmhm." The pair look out over the frozen lake in silence for a few moments, until something spurs Suwako's memory and she perks up. "We should head inside."

"We can't enjoy this for a few more minutes?"

"We could, but Sanae is making her special waffles. … she was pretty excited about the big harvest this year, you know. She'll probably kill us if we miss them."

"Hmm." Kanako still lingers in the embrace for a few minutes longer before taking a step backward. "Well, if she can intimidate a fierce goddess like yourself, who am I to argue?"

"Exactly." Suwako looks toward the shrine, then hesitates. "... hold on." Turning around, she grabs the handle of her makeshift sword. One last burst of power is all it takes to make it explode into rust. Once the powder has all mixed in with the sand, she wipes her hand off on her dress, then reaches out and takes Kanako's hand. She's held thousands of swords over the years, but this still feels far more natural. "There. Now, hurry up! Breakfast is waiting."