A little walk down memory lane...
It was dark, wherever they were. Nighttime. But the moon was three-quarters full in the sky above, making the scene almost as well-lit as if it were day.
There was a stone building of some kind directly ahead. A few steps led up from the ground to the heavy door, also made of stone; a small person dressed in a kimono, a girl, stepped out from the door to stand on the top of the steps. Her feet were bare, her eyes were tightly shut, her brownish hair moved slightly in the wind. She stood there like someone still asleep.
At the foot of the steps was a dark-haired boy, also wearing a kimono. His eyes widened as he caught sight of the girl. "Oh, Sui." His voice was a whisper.
"Sui's eyeballs are both dead." The wind moved restlessly through the bamboo thicket that surrounded the building, then died away to a still silence. Cloud was standing behind the girl, having exited the stone building with her. He had a lit cigarette to his mouth and was looking at Sui in a thoughtful way. He came down the few steps slowly. Sui stayed where she was. "…But I'll try to do something for her if I can," he continued, pulling a glove onto his right hand.
"If you close your second eyelid for too long, eventually your eyeballs are consumed by the darkness." He said it like it was a rule he had learned by heart. He took one last drag on his cigarette then dropped it to the ground, grinding out the burning end with the heel of his shoe. "Are you ready, Sui? We're going to use the moonlight to chase out the mushi."
The girl sat down on the top of the steps, as if in answer to his question.
"Now… keep your second eyelid closed and slowly open your eyes."
The girl's eyes started to open. At first it looked like a trick of the darkness, but as they opened wider and wider there was absolutely no doubt-rather than eyes, her eye sockets contained only pools of deepest black. It made for an eerie look in her pale face.
After a moment something silvery started gathering at the corners of her eyes. It almost looked like tears, at first, but then…
"That's right, come on out," Cloud murmured, coaxing. "There's light out here, mushi."
…it started coming out of her eyes in a way that made it obvious it wasn't tears, and that it was in fact something not natural to the human body. More and more of it poured out of her eyes and started reaching with strange, pointed extensions of itself for the light of the moon. It climbed higher and higher, shimmering silvery-green in the moonlight; globs of it fell to the ground and writhed there. Whatever it was, the liquid was obviously alive in some manner. The boy watching from the sidelines jumped and flinched a little at the sight of the wriggling silver pools.
Suddenly the liquid stopped climbing toward the moonlight and instead moved forward in a rush to flood over Cloud. He didn't try to move, and if the expression on his face just before it happened was anything to go by, he had been expecting something this.
Inside the rush of slivery liquid, Cloud was staring straight ahead, apparently waiting for something. There was a movement in the silver; a flash of purple, a wiggle of movement not caused by the silvery goo. Cloud moved suddenly, then forced his head above the flood of liquid. "Sui, Now! Close your eyes! Quickly!"
The girl obeyed. Most of the silvery liquid rushed back into her eyes with a sort of shlorking noise, but some of it still clung to Cloud's body. It dripped off him slowly, still wriggling, as he straightened up into a standing position.
Wrapped around Cloud's right arm, its head firmly caught between the thumb and forefinger of his gloved hand, was what looked like a cross between a centipede and a snake with a little bit of scorpion thrown in for luck. It was making little squealing noises as it writhed in Cloud's apparently very firm grip. Cloud's only response was to squeeze the thing's neck-area harder. After only a moment of this, the creature tensed one last time, exhaled a cloud of black smoke, and went limp as its body turned from purple to black. Its body seemed to decompose very fast because even before Cloud released its head the rest of its body fell to the ground in several pieces.
"That should do it." He stripped off the glove calmly. "Now then. Let's see what we can do about her eyes." He walked forward, ignoring the boy behind him.
The boy appeared to be having a very quiet meltdown. "Those were mushi. She was telling me the truth all along. There really were mushi in there."
Cloud opened Sui's eyelids one at a time, inspecting the dark empty sockets beneath them. "Her eyes have been completely devoured. I don't know of this will work, but…" He reached up to where his hair hung over his left eye, reaching beneath the hair and… apparently into his own eye socket, though since he didn't brush his hair aside it was hard to tell. He pulled out… his own eye? with accompanying nasty sound effects, and turned it back and forth in his fingers, inspecting it. "I'll try giving her this." He didn't seem affected at all by pulling the thing out… and there wasn't any blood…
Unsurprisingly, the boy's quiet meltdown only got worse at this new turn of events. Cloud turned to look at him-his free hand in his pocket, rummaging around for something-and said, dryly, "You know, you can stop freaking out, now. You're gonna faint if you're not careful." A pause while Cloud pulled out a rounded black case and a small glass bottle of glowing liquid before he added, "Come on, it's just a glass eye."
He held the fake eye in his fist as he carefully filled the syringe from the bottle. "This is some of the liquid mushi we saw a minute ago. If I inject this into the glass eye, it should turn into a functioning eyeball." His right arm, holding the syringe, was shaking badly as he moved the tip of the needle toward the small orb in his other hand, though it probably wasn't Cloud shaking since his left hand was steady as a rock. Cloud carefully stuck the syringe tip into the glass eye, and pushed the plunger down smoothly. It seemed to work; veins and arteries appeared as if by magic in the previously fake eye, and the glass pupil seemed to focus and gain depth. The sphere also seemed to take on a sort of a glow.
The boy seemed to have calmed down, finally… at least enough to ask a question. "Say, um… can I ask you something? This river of light you mentioned that the two of you say you can see… well, what is it, exactly?"
Cloud stared at the boy for several seconds. It appeared to be getting darker… maybe the moon was going behind a cloud? But he finally turned toward Sui again, and, cupping his left hand around the base of her skull, gently made her tip her chin upward. "What do you mean? Are you saying that you've forgotten?" The glass eye was definitely glowing in the darkness now, as Cloud lowered it toward Sui's left eye socket. "You too could see it once, in the past." He carefully pushed the glowing globe into the socket.
There was a silent explosion of bright, golden light, and then nothing.