Monogatari Series - Volume 6 - Chapter 7.01

Final Chapter- Tsukihi Phoenix

001

By revealing the true nature of Tsukihi Araragi, I will at last reach a full stop in our tale. As aggravating as she is clever, the story of my littler little sister will mark an end to this episode about me and the friends I’ve grown so close to. Not that our lives end with this story, or that the world ends with us. When all is said and done, our lives will be spared─besides, whether life, or the world, having an end promises any salvation is something we’d all do well to think upon more often. To long for an end that never comes, to wish to stop and to be unable. Don’t people experience and endure such a hell on an ordinary or extraordinary basis all the time?

Take me, for instance. Koyomi Araragi.

During spring break, I was attacked by a vampire─a legendary vampire, an ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire, the king and slayer of aberrations. My blood drained, my life and being drained, my physical body drained, my mind and psyche drained, afterwards nothing was left.

Correction. A monster was left behind. What was me was subtracted from me, and a monster remained. Hide as I might I could not hide, run as I might I could not run, and die as I like I could not die─it was the beginning of two weeks in hell.

The truth is, even now, I can’t truly say that those two weeks of hell are entirely over. Of course─even without bringing up my own unusual circumstances, there is something unreal about a word like “end” in the first place.

There is no shortage of people who choose to take their own life─but in a broad sense not even that act can truly be called an end. When the dust settles a suicide becomes its own departure point, the origin of yet new developments.

Even if justice eradicates evil…

A new evil will simply be born.

Evil may be eradicated, but it cannot be exterminated─in fact, it is quite possible for the new evil that arises to have started out on the side of justice.

Now, if my other sister, Karen, heard me say that, she’d be none too happy. In fact, her own brother or not, she’d probably make my face unhappy with her boot. She’d do so spouting that she wasn’t kicking me, the righteous blood flowing through her was.

But eventually she’d learn. Even if I never told her. It’s nothing difficult.

Even raised in a peaceful, happy-go-lucky nation and with only a normal education, she’d learn─that at the end of the day, justice is no more than a setup to be overhauled by some new justice.

Everything is an opening act, to everything.

The revolutionary can’t become a settler.

Backs are turned without fanfare, promises are broken without scruple, debts are left totally unpaid, and the weak are hardly protected.

Those are the rules.

The rules of this world.

However loudly my two sisters, my pride and joy, proclaim justice, the concept of justice is rooted in fighting evil, in being hostile to evil, so it’s inevitable.

Evil, too, has its reasons. Evil, too, has family.

Faced with this reality, few could persist in their righteousness without a shadow of doubt─and you’d be hard pressed to call those few just.

Ultimately, justice and evil aren’t binary opposites.

It isn’t a dualism, nor is this humanism.

When we start down that path, we never get started and never get finished.

We languish─and that’s how it goes.

Even supposing that a person can be just, it’s only in still images and commemorative snapshots rather than vids─eventually, the passage of time degrades meaning and significance. Negates the original sense.

Of course, this isn’t all bad─everything I’ve said hints, too, at the possibility that what exists as evil can likewise turn into justice. There is still room for penance, and for change.

Instead of stubborn pessimism, it’s probably best to accept that hope─just as after descending into hell, I found Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara, there is no telling from where salvation might come.

It can come from anywhere. We could put it this way: It is because nothing ends that salvation exists.

This placeholder might seem little more than hypocrisy, but I don’t see the harm in it. In fact, we might say that it is a clear and present representation of this final tale, replete with fakeness.

Well─in any case, I don’t want to be bombastic here on top of all that.

Let’s not speak, then, of justice and evil or of good and hypocrisy.

Of endings and beginnings.

Of living and dying.

Why put on airs?

We have no thesis. We won’t discuss noble themes.

The story I am about to tell is simply that of my sister.

Tsukihi Araragi. One half of the Fire Sisters.

My younger younger sister, my littler little sister.

In the second grade of middle school, born in April, fourteen years old, blood type B, prone to hysteria, cunning, subject to mood swings─

And also, immortal.

The tale of a mere fake.