While a large collection of the guests of the capital were meeting elsewhere enjoying the revelries of the evening... There was one man whose fires were blazing too strong for enjoyment. The world was cold around him... but particularly so with the heat his soul was exuding into the world.

The hot springs seemed the most comfortable to him... to surround himself in their warmth and draw energy from their comfort.

He slipped down into the pools, closing his eyes and feeling the flow of energies between him and the volcanic hot pots... It was hard to see which gave warmth to the other.

At some point, a steamy soak companion materialised; perhaps she'd been there all the time, or he'd phased out and hadn't seen her coming, or she'd just emerged out of the wisps of the steam, like an ancient spirit. Whatever was true, she didn't care to explain, but leaned back and sighed.

As he opened his eyes he turned to see the familiar bright hair of Shinjo Ryoko.

He offered a nod of his head and a slight smile, "Good evening Lady Shinjo. How does the first day of our winter seclusion see you?"

"The day is blinded by the light it owns, reflected by all that snow, so it has seen me weakly and blurred, a grainy speckle on the canvass of the world." She looked up at him quizzically with her strange, otherworldly coloured eyes, as if recognising his presence only now, recognition slow to arrive. "Neither have I seen it back too well, for the same reason. Do you know you can get snow-blind if you stare too much on it? Your eyes will burn as if you stared at the day itself, by the secret light you'll never see anyway."

A thin smile appeared. "So I am not perplexed. The day and I shouldn't be seeing eye to eye."

He offered small chuckle in response and a smile.

“I’m sure the day would hate to get in an argument with you were your inability to see eye to eye devolve into anger. You have a dizzying intellect.”

"How can I get angry at any day if I know it dies old every dusk whilst I survive to see her offspring time after time? My mother wouldn't forgive me such a lapse in compassion." She smirked, her eyes focused on a single droplet of water dancing on the tip of her index finger raised to her - and Kakita's - eye level. The droplet acted as a prism for the dying light of day and cast a rainbow spectrum onto the water between them. "What's dizzying about you, Kakita-san?" She apparently remembered the name... or knew it otherwise.

He tilted his head, "About me? Very little I would contend. Not too many twists and turns. Straightforward..."

"And if the space you passed through were curved, would you still move straight forward?" She blew the droplet and the rainbow shattered, leaving no trace of it on the increasingly shadowed surface of the water in the spring.

He nodded, "I suppose I would. Much like the wind... flow through the space that is open."

She tapped her bow-shaped lips in thought. "Tell me, Kakita-san, if you light a candle, does its flame look the same to you from both front and back? Think how light travels. Of that candle, or of a distant star." She looked up. Some of them were showing up on the darkening blue.

"It looks similar from whatever side you look at the flame...?" He said with some confusion.

"It indeed does. Because it travels in all directions at once. And the less air there is, the faster it travels." She pointed up. "You don't feel the breath of stars, it shall never reach you, but you see their light. Wouldn't you rather be like light then, Kakita-san?"

"Light does push away the dark..." He said as he put a hand to his chin.

"I don't have much of a mind for metaphor though... Though I like the connotation of light."

"I do too!" She chuckled into a balled fist, apparently amused, but then her gaze and voice took more haunting tones. "But this is not a metaphor. I am telling you of the real world, Kakita-san, not the world your eyes see. In the Void, light goes everywhere unrestrained, illuminating everything in its path to whoever looks, as it is the messenger of existence. It is only when it meets utter, heaviest darkness that it cannot rebound or turn back to tell the tale, but has to accept the ordeal. Darkness calls for sacrifice, it remakes whoever enters it."

Kakita squints his eyes and nods his head not quite sure what to think of all of that.

"You see much of that kind of darkness...?"

"Of course I don't, it gives back no light!" She threw her hands in the air. "But I can know where it is by how I can't see it while I can all else."

“So… you are able to see things not readily visible in the world?” He asked.

"I can see the tapestry of the universe." She declared with sudden solemnity, bringing her hands back to protect her modesty, wrapping them across her chest. "Though illusions covering it usually don't give in without a fight."

“And so… if something dark was trying to elude observation, you could potentially find it?” He asked.

"Depending on circumstances, I could try to do exactly that." She mused, looking at him with kindled curiosity. "The closer it is, the more familiar the place, the greater the chance to find it. Are you hunting darkness, Kakita-san?"