The Twelve Kingdoms: The Shore in Twilight

adult and could work in concert with other adults and together devise a plan to protect Gyousou.
    The stark reality returning to his thoughts again and again, Taiki was left with no other option but to pray zealously in a corner of the gardens. His personal weakness was mortifying.
    Take care. Be safe.
    He had prayed more times than he knew when he heard the faint sound of footsteps behind him. He turned around and saw him standing there. Taiki was relieved to see that it was neither the royal headmaster nor his bodyguard. Rather, he was the one who'd informed Taiki about the dire straits Gyousou was in.
    So he didn't have to pretend there was nothing for him to worry about. "Gyousou-sama is okay, isn't he?" Taiki asked as he ran toward him. "Have you heard anything more about him?"
    The man shook his head.
    "I sent the shirei. I'm sorry."
    Promising to candidly pass along any information that came his way, the man had implored Taiki not to rashly send the shirei to Gyousou. But while the man had apparently kept his end of the bargain, Taiki hadn't done as he'd been asked.
    "I simply couldn't stand by and do nothing while awaiting word."
    The man nodded and drew forth the sword he wore at his waist in a single motion. Taiki stopped in his tracks. Not because he was particularly afraid. He still trusted the man. The man's actions simply perplexed him.
    "What's going on?" Taiki queried, suddenly beset by worry, noticing for the first time that the man was casting off a threatening aura that he'd hitherto hidden from view.
    "Gyousou is dead," the man said.
    Seized with an unconscious dread and beginning to retreat, Taiki's feet froze in place. "You're lying--" he said, looking up at the man.
    The man brandished the sword. Taiki's eyes opened wide. He couldn't move. He couldn't cry out. He stood there like a post.
    "Too bad you've only got two shirei." The sword glimmered like white ice as it arced downward. "Your mistake was choosing Gyousou."
    Even Taiki would have found it impossible to say whether the naked blade struck first or whether--exercising the only best option at hand--he had already reflexively turned his body and readied to run.
    In either case the assassin's sword bit deeply into Taiki's horn--that he possessed as a unicorn, not as a person. Taiki howled, a pure and visceral reaction. Not from the pain alone, but from the sense of betrayal and the agonizing loss of his irreplaceable lord.
    The cry of a beast in extremis, its life in the balance. A cry whose intensity knew no equal. Driven by his instinctual will to flee this place, Taiki abruptly melted away.

    " Taiki? "
    The violent shock aroused from Sanshi a high, piercing scream. The white and frozen mountains reached out beneath her. Bun Province lay before her. She emerged at the summit of a small peak in order to determine her location.
    Something had happened.
    "Taiki--"
    What was this pain? The frightening pain and numbness raced through her body. Sanshi moaned. No sooner had she come to her senses but she dissolved her body and psychically projected the essential nature of her self within the earth. Her body slipped into the ground.
    She knew the veins and courses that laced the mantle of the earth. Carried along without form, her "self" raced along these subterranean streams that were at once there and not there. Though "raced" was a poor description of the actual meaning. She traveled as if through the dark ocean depths, in the midst of nothing but the chaos of oblivion, with nothing but the weight of that oblivion surrounding her.
    Sanshi plunged forward in her mind and with all her might. Far in the distance she set the bright, vivid splash of golden light in her sights.
    Pressing forward through the veins of the earth, she rose as if to sea level. Bursting from a dragon's lair she rode a current of air, flying forth and soaring high. So great was her velocity that the world above the ground shrouded in mist and quickly lost shape and form.
    The golden light grew stronger. Gleaming, sparkling, growing all the more brilliant, illuminating her vision and then filling the entirety of her vision with light.
    A golden color like twilight. The moment she slipped into the dusky, golden darkness, Sanshi was soundly thrashed and ejected from it.
    Taiki's shadow.
    And Taiki own psychic stream, twisting with a frightening force, tearing free of the circulatory systems of this world.
    Her flesh crawled with fear. It so closely resembled the golden