The campfire burned low, its flames flickering in the dark.
No trees grew near the Sea of Oblivion. The fuel Asahi had gathered consisted of the drifting wreckage of records—scraps of wood carved with letters that crackled and popped in the fire. With every flare, the characters would glow brightly for a single, fleeting moment before turning to ash.
A short distance from the fire, Kuon sat with the Catalog spread across his knees. The pale blue light of his prosthetic eye illuminated the pages. Tonight, the grey of the paper was faint, making the text easier to read than usual.
“Hey. Did you find something?” Asahi called out while tending the flames.
Kuon didn’t answer immediately, his fingertip tracing the corner of a page. The golden veins of the Catalog were pulsating. There, at the edge of a restored entry, was a hand he recognized.
“It’s Yae’s script.”
Koyoi looked up. He had been sitting with his drawstring pouch on his lap, his eyes half-closed as he soaked in the warmth of the fire.
“Yae-san’s?”
“Yeah. It’s the same handwriting as the prescriptions I read in the sutra library. But I’ve never seen this one. It seems an entry from another page has migrated here.”
Kuon tilted the Catalog, letting the blue light bring the characters into sharp relief. Koyoi left the fireside and knelt beside him, while Asahi added one last branch to the fire before moving to stand behind them.
At the bottom of the page were three lines of delicate script. The ink was thin, but every stroke was deliberate. These weren't words written in haste; they were words chosen with care over time.
Kuon read them aloud.
“‘Patient’s condition: Stable. Independent ambulation confirmed. Cease all further medication. Discharge. Walk on your own two feet.’”
The fire popped. The characters within a splinter of wood flared white, sending tiny sparks dancing into the night sky.
Koyoi stared at the three lines. “...It’s a prescription.”
“The final prescription,” Kuon said, his eyes never leaving the page.
Yae’s prescriptions. They were the guides the apothecary had left behind for their journey: the procedure for drawing water from the wells; how to gather names; the method for crossing the rifts in the laws of the world. Everything had been recorded in the language of medicine, a series of instructions disguised as encrypted clinical notes.
The three wells were the three keys—the core of Yae’s "treatment." Learn the name at the Southern Well, wash the name at the Western Well, and return the name at the Northern Well. Yae had framed these three steps as a course of medication.
“'Cease medication, discharge'—so you mean she’s not giving us any more orders?” Asahi asked, crossing his arms.
“That’s right. Yae wrote nothing beyond this. She’s telling us that past the Sea of Oblivion, we must walk for ourselves.”
Koyoi clasped his hands over his chest. He didn’t know Yae’s face. He had never heard her voice, never even met her. Only her words appeared at every milestone of their journey, pointing the way. Through names of medicines. Through diagnoses. Through discharge papers.
“I wonder... did Yae-san think of us as her patients?” Koyoi asked.
Kuon stared at the page for a moment before answering. “I don't know. But an apothecary doesn't write a prescription if there is no one to treat. She wrote this believing there would be someone to read it.”
“When did she write it?”
“Judging by the degradation of the Catalog’s pages, it’s quite old. At the very least, it was written before you began your journey, Koyoi.”
Koyoi took a sharp breath. Before he was even born, Yae had been writing this prescription. Believing that one day, someone would read it. Believing that someone would wander the three wells, gather the names, and arrive here to cross the Sea of Oblivion.
The flames danced. The last fragment of wood collapsed into a heap of ash. Asahi started to get up to look for more fuel, then stopped.
“That’s enough for tonight. Sleep until dawn.”
“Asahi.”
“What?”
“I want to say thank you to Yae-san.”
Asahi let out a short grunt. “Then say it. Though I couldn't tell you if she’ll hear it or not.”
Koyoi reached out toward the three lines in the Catalog. As his fingertips brushed the page, Yae’s words felt faintly warm. The pages of the Catalog were supposed to be cold, yet those three lines felt as if they possessed a pulse of their own.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
His voice was small. The embers of the fire cast a red glow over the page.
Kuon closed the Catalog. Usually, he slept with it open so as not to miss a single record. But tonight, he quietly shut the cover and rested it on his lap.
“The prescription is over. From here on, we draw our own map.”
The blue light of his prosthetic eye dimmed and eventually vanished as Kuon closed his eyes. It was a rare sight.
Asahi leaned his back against a rock, clutching his sword. “That apothecary was pretty strict. 'Discharge,' 'Walk on your own'... she could have found a gentler way to send us off.”
“But I think that’s just the kind of person she was,” Koyoi said, hugging his pouch to his chest. The Shizuku within pulsed slowly, its warmth spreading through the fabric. “Once you’re healed, you’re sent on your way. But until you are, they look after you. That’s what it means to be an apothecary, I think.”
“Are we healed, then?”
“I don’t know. But if Yae-san wrote 'discharge,' then at the very least, that was her judgment.”
Asahi closed his eyes. “Fine by me. We can walk without a prescription. We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?”
The fire went out. The red of the embers faded, leaving only the white mist of the Sea of Oblivion to fill the silence.
Koyoi kept his hand on the cover of the Catalog and closed his eyes. Yae’s words remained burned into the back of his eyelids.
Walk on your own two feet. Cease medication. Discharge.
Strict, and yet kind. These were the final words of a master he had never met.
In the mist, the Shizuku pulsed quietly. A night without a prescription had begun.