(Discontinued )
(Work Dated: May 24 2021)
The streets of Shikagami City have a secret.
To save themselves from paying their severe debts with their soul to a Verdish Goddess of the Underworld, a desperate restaurant mascot has to help a Junhic fox...
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You decide to follow the fox.
After all, it had trusted you to feed it. What if it's scared and needs a friendly hug or a calming scratch behind its ears? Foxes don't seem to be the hysterical kind, very much unlike your dogs back home. Even then, the calmest of the group had required a lot of coaxing to return to normal after a terrible lightning storm. You steal away from the crowd of amateur videographers trying to record footage on their smartphones.
You spot a white face peeping from behind the bush. It's looking at you, you notice, and very intently that too. Over the cacophony of the crowd, you can hear its insistent yipping and moaning. You swipe the flaky ashes off your eyelashes and jog down the pavement. The children have begun fleeing from the tall towers through the colourful corkscrew slides. They slide onto the sand at the bottom into their parents arms. The shrine-people have taken up positions near the exits, leading some people out and helping others find their misplaced family. You hide from them by slipping into the long shadows cast by the overgrown trees.
Just as you approach the fox, it dashes off into a grove of tall willows, lichen-encrusted oaks and pines, pulling its tail underneath the feathery leaves of the ferns. You tail it forward, and watch it flee further in, fur brushing against the soft white mushroom caps sprouting on the tree trunks. A moss covered placard announces it to be the contribution of the Green-fingers Club of a local school. When you read the date, you chuckle as you learn that the children would be of your grandparents age by now. The air turns freezing cold when the wind blows again. The fox yips yet again from deep within the mists obscuring the tall trunks. You plant a tentative foot into the soft loam and follow it up with the other. Behind you, the burnt husk of the tree has sprouted thick plumes of smoke. The crowd has reduced to a bare three people excluding the firefighters.
Soft fur scrapes across the back of your knees, tickling you. When you turn around, you're facing a different fox of roughly the same size as the one who had run off. You can still hear it howling for you from afar, cry after cry fading into the rustling and swaying of the leaves. At one point, it even sounded like a lost baby bawling for its mother in the park.
The second fox has a reddish-orange pelt, that shines like copper in the light of the rising full moon. Unlike its very vocal sibling, this one is silent and determined to make you trip over by looping the loops around your legs. You're careful to not stomp its bushy tail as you tread on the leaf and snow layered soil, holding onto the trunks and the low lying branches of the trees for support and balance. The fog here is thick and sweet-smelling, dousing the woods and its apple green flora in a bluish-white filter. You can't hear a critter other than your friend as you walk on.
Then you ask yourself why you did this. There was absolutely no need to follow a fox into a strange forest at roughly seven in the evening. Alarmed, you turn around and realise that you can't see the jungle gyms or the Western Gates anymore. You're deep within a temperate deciduous forest, with trees stretching in all directions in a plantation-like array. Oak, pine, fir, willow. Oak, pine, fir, willow. Oak pine, fir, willow ad infinitum.
