[UPDATE IN PROGRESS] Onmyou-Pocketville: Fallen Dusk

Chapter 16: The Kitsune Priestess

"What? What do you mean?"

After hearing the distressful sentence that escaped from the snout of the Onmyoujin Queen, Tia's thick fur puffed up.

Ava's ears drooped. "We haven't heard from him in a long time..."

Ava paused for a moment, holding back tears. She did not want to show too much emotion in front of the visitors because she feared she would ruin her "royal composure", despite Malorie and Tia seeming like they would care less. She sat the other way, facing the window and heard the rain fall outside, her back arched and neck bent upwards. It was like she was showing them she is old, though in reality she wasn't as old as Lilie, who still kept her youthful stature albeit with a full head of locks carved from shiny platinum. She turned to face Malorie with her gloomy blue eyes and a long, sorrowful meow.

She knew how it felt to lose someone that was close, such as a family member or a beloved friend. She lost her parents and grandparents from both sides back when she and her sister were still in their first years of adulthood. Piece by piece was their ideal childhood slowly torn away from them and dragged into the dark.

Ava reminisced about the time at the grand palace shrine where she, Eva, and a few other Onmyoujin watched their mother and grandparents' Final Flame rituals, but not their father's as they were being taken care of by a handmaiden at the palace at that time. Especially her mother Tomomi's. Ava's mother did not look quite elderly, and seeing her mother's lifeless body resting in a small futon decorated with Tomomi's favourite flowers in the engraved box right before the altar seemed unreal to her; it was like Tomomi was just sleeping soundly. Everyone was silent during that ritual, not a single sob was heard. Absolute silence. But Ava remembered sobbing whenever the shrine maidens closed up her mother's box and took it out in the shrine terrace so they could incinerate her body into ash and move them to a smaller box meant to put on the altar.

That was the last time the twins saw their mother. At least in her living form.

For a while Ava couldn't let go of the small ornate box containing Tomomi's ashes. She would always keep it next to her futon so she could feel her mother's aura right beside her whenever she slept. A few days after she became queen, she had the strength to place Tomomi's ashes inside of a memorial doll on the family altar, which resembled a young female Tenneko gijinka with similar markings to Ava's mother, long strands of dark brown hair that were cut from Tomomi's mane, and wearing a crimson kimono with little butterflies and a crown of silky red roses.

For her grandmothers on both sides, they were much different as they both had gotten quite old, and only Ava, Eva, and Amaterasu's colleagues were present at their rituals, as they were smaller-scale to make way for Ava's extravagant Ceremony of Enthronement. Ava thought Yuina looked very sad even though her face was immobile, having lost a loving daughter before her, and something similar went for Hitomi.

Both their ash boxes were also placed in memorial dolls that looked a lot like Tomomi's and were made the same way, but appeared to resemble grand old gijinka rather than the young lady Tomomi's doll was, wore different coloured kimonos, other flower crowns, had their hair tied up, and their bodies had painted markings that resembled their respective ones. Yuina's doll wore a very pale pink kimono that was close to white with some golden accents, and a golden sakura clip in the mane, while Hitomi's wore a black kimono, with fabric flowers resembling hellebore blooms.

The memorial dolls of the Omori dynasty were all made by a master class of dollmakers that the monarch or its heirs appointed to create different kinds of dolls, even dolls that were meant for the royal children to play with.

Ava wasn't able to attend Evershell's ritual. He lived way too far into the Shiroyama mountain range, north of the capital and very distant from the hilltop palace.