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Hana awoke to the high chorus of birds and the soft sound of rustling fabric. She opened her dual coloured eyes, stiffening as she adjusted herself so that she could see her splinted arm.
Broken, her mind supplied at the tenderness of her left limb. She must have landed on it wrong when she fell down the well.
"You're awake. That's good." An elderly priestess with an eyepatch said to her. "We found you stuck in the bottom of the Bone Eater's Well and quickly came to the conclusion that you are from Kagome-chan's world."
"Kagome-chan's world?" Hana repeated, squinting and taking in her surroundings. Does she mean Higurashi-san?
Her breath hitched.
"Where am I?" She demanded with eyes wide in alarm.
She was in a wooden building—one that didn't belong in what she considered modern Japan, or most modern countries for that matter.
She still was in Japan however.
The elderly priestess was most certainly Japanese.
No, she thought again at the sight of various primitive objects of a past long gone. When am I?
Hana laughed forcefully and lay her right hand on her forehead.
How absurd...
She must have been crazy to even entertain the thought.
Time-travel.
How absurd, Hana repeated desperately.
It was insane in a way that made no sense. Then again, there was little reason in madness.
Was she mad?
She hoped not.
"I'm dreaming." She decided instead, struggling briefly as she sat up, "I hit my head harder than I thought when I collapsed."
A strange dream was a far better explanation than madness or genuine time travel.
"This is no dream, child." The priestess told her. "I am Kaede, the priestess of this village and the one who tended to your arm. This belongs to you, I believe..."
Hana accepted her purse from the priestess and quickly glanced inside.
"Oh,"
The bark was missing.
Something like dread and trepidation swelled in her chest at the haunting reminder of her vision and what had been warned.
"Do not lose this sacred bark or else you will never be able to return." The Spirit of the Sacred Tree had said to her in a dream.
