by Jay Kristoff
I just saved your life!
WOULD NOT NEED SAVING IF NOT FOR YOU. GET OFF ME NOW.
I wasn’t the one who maimed you. You’d be a smear on the mountainside right now if it weren’t for me. You want to kill me?
MY WINGS CANNOT HOLD US BOTH ALOFT. YOUR PACK SAW TO THAT.
I’ll die!
BETTER ONE THAN TWO.
They descended below the canopy in a flurry of severed leaves, branches whipping at her face and snapping beneath the impact of the arashitora’s wings. It banked sharply between two tightly spaced maples. Her stomach lurched up into her throat, and a thick bough caught her full in the chest. Yukiko’s breath spewed from her lungs. The branch whipped her backward, she lost her grip on the arashitora’s neck and sailed off between the raindrops. She screamed, spinning down through the branches, skin torn, tumbling toward her death. The world spun over and over itself before her eyes.
She shrieked as a branch snagged in her obi, ripping a long gash up her back. The green wood split but held, arresting her fall and leaving her suspended twenty feet above the ground, dangling like fresh meat outside the abandoned slaughter mills of Kigen city.
She gasped, white pain rushing up and spilling wet from the gouge in her back. The branch swayed, making ominous noises as she looked down at the stone below. Reaching up, wincing, she tried to pull herself off the snag, and with a sound of splintering wood and a despairing shriek, the branch snapped and sent her plummeting down into the black.
Lightning arced across the skies, illuminating the smoldering ruin of the cloudwalkers’ vessel, strewn upon the mountainside in a thousand flaming fragments. Long streaks of burning chi were scored across the mountain’s face—a halo of blue-white illuminating the swirling mists of rain, running through to orange as the foliage around it caught and burned.
The girl hit the stone hard. The thunder echoed across the trees like booming laughter.
Raijin was pleased.
* * *
She pawed away the darkness some time later, hours slipping by like shadows between sleep and the slow opening of her eyes. One was sealed shut by a scum of blood and dirt; she had to prise her lids apart with trembling fingers. The pain in her back was a dull ache. Merciful numbness had spread through her body, spurred on by the falling rain and bitter, brittle cold of altitude. It urged her back to sleep, to simply close her eyes and drift away, to worry no more.
She shook her head, forcing the thought back into the gloom where it had been born. Time enough to sleep when she was dead.
Yukiko pushed herself up on her elbows, wincing at the bruises all over her body. The forest floor was covered in a thick blanket of dead leaves and lush green moss; even the stones were bearded with great growths of it. She ran her fingertips across the spongy surface and touched her fox tattoo in thanks: a fall onto bare rock would have broken her bones, possibly killed her outright.
Kitsune looks after his own.
She climbed to her feet, brushing the sodden hair away from her face. Her dark eyes surveyed the surroundings, glittering with the occasional faint burst of lightning across the hidden clouds above.
Trees with trunks as thick as houses stretched up to blot out the sky. Rain dripped through the knotted canopy, drumming upon leaves in a thousand discordant beats. The trees were ancient and gnarled: bent old men, their skin crawling with fingers of thick moss, mushrooms clustered about their feet in multicolored growths. Her stomach growled and she picked several of the safer-looking fungi, stuffing a few into her obi for later. Panic bloomed as she groped at the small of her back, and she breathed a sigh of relief when her fingers brushed the polished lacquer hilt of her tantō.
She blinked about the darkness, each direction looking no worse or better than the rest. So, with a shrug, she set off down the slope in the direction the arashitora had flown.
“Ungrateful shit,” she muttered.
Her father would have scolded her for the unladylike language. She looked around the darkness, and realizing that there were no adults nearby to chastise her, she began shouting every bad word she could think of. A rainbow of profanity rolled between the trees, gutter-talk bouncing among walls of wood and fern, beneath a ceiling of shadowed green. Spirits slightly buoyed by her tiny rebellion, Yukiko tromped off into the gloom.
Her thin sandals were soon sodden and torn, and she slipped and stumbled across the forest floor. The storm raged above, its volume muted by the lush canopy over her head, the great trees reaching out to entwine their branches like the hands of old, dear friends. There was a strange scent on the air, a smell that lay so far back in her childhood that she took a while to recall what it was.
The absence of lotus.
Everything in Kigen was polluted by it, lending its acrid tang to the food she ate, the water she drank, the very sweat on her skin. But here in the deep Iishi Mountains, there was almost no trace. The fields encroached closer every year, but she sensed there was still a purity here; the last stretch of true wilderness in all of Shima. She wondered how long it would take before the shreddermen set their sights on these ancient trees, this fertile soil, and put their blades to work. The motto of the Guild rang unbidden in her head, and she whispered it once into the darkness, fingers to her lips.
“The lotus must bloom.”
* * *
Dawn had spread its gloomy pall across the forest before Yukiko stumbled across the arashitora’s trail: fresh gouges in the earth marking the broken gait of a creature unused to spending much time on the ground. She found no blood, and took solace that the beast wasn’t injured beyond the suffering it had already endured.
She followed the trail for hours down the crumbling mountainside, stopping occasionally to rest and eat, to lick rain off the broad green leaves. Sandals torn, feet bleeding, dripping with the humidity trapped beneath the ceiling of overhanging leaves. She lost the trail several times on stony ground; she wasn’t half the tracker her father was. If only he were here …
The memory of her final words to him echoed in her head. She could still feel the sting of his slap on her cheek, hear the anger and hurt in his rebuke. But beneath it all lurked the fear that he might have died in the crash, that the life raft and everyone aboard had lost the way in the storm and plowed right into a mountainside. Hot tears welled in her eyes, and she pawed them away with the heels of her hands.
He’s all right. You’re worrying for nothing. Everyone will be all right.
Hours passed, the mushrooms in her belt disappearing one mouthful at a time. She lost the trail again as the forest grew darker, cursing herself and stumbling over the uneven ground. Stopping beneath a towering maple, she re-tied her braid, damp wisps of hair clinging to her forehead. The forest had grown noisy as the sun rose, alive with chattering birds, spattering rain, small scuttling feet. She had felt their tiny pulses with the Kenning, searching for the fear that might linger in the arashitora’s wake. But now, as dusk fell, she reached out and felt no sparks, no clusters of warm, furry bodies or sleek feathered heartbeats. Silence had descended: a sweaty hush that fell heavy as a moldy blanket.
Something’s wrong.
Creeping through the undergrowth, she crouched low, her footfalls barely a whisper. Eyes darting about the gloom, pulse quickening at every snapping twig or shifting shadow. Steam rose up from the rain-soaked earth, cloaking the forest in mist. She could sense the faint glow of the setting sun through the canopy above, the chill of night creeping with slow, measured tread through the wildwood. No bird calls. No wind. Just the heavy patter of fat raindrops and the faint scrape of her heels on dead leaves.
Predator?
Touching the fox tattoo on her arm for luck, she reached out again, searching for the arashitora, or perhaps some hungry carnivore stalking her through the green curtain.
Nothing. A vast emptiness, creaking with the echo of old wood, the breath of the slumbering earth. Even when the wolf came, even after the snake strike, she had never felt more frightened or alone in a
ll her life.
She crept onward.
A shape loomed out of the mist. Ragged walls of raw granite, covered with creepers and a thick fur of moss. A temple. Twisted. Timeworn. Rising from the forest floor to squat glowering and grim on the mountain’s flank, surrounded by thick scarlet tangles of wild blood lotus. Yukiko swallowed, averting her eyes from the blasphemous kanji gouged into the stone; dark words calling to darker hearts. There was a palpable sense of wrongness about the place, something decidedly unnatural that took root at the base of her spine. The carvings lingered in her mind, shadows lurking in the dusk, dripping malevolence. A name.
Lady Izanami.
A long piercing scream sounded off in the mist; some animal or bird in the distance giving voice to her terror. Yukiko’s heart thumped in her chest, frigid sweat beading on her skin.
This is a temple to the Dark Mother.
She turned to leave, and a nightmare shape swung down from the trees behind. Twice as tall as a man, long arms like an ape, rippling with ropes of sinew. Its skin was as blue as cobalt. Its face mirrored the fearsome masks of Yoritomo’s Iron Samurai, but instead of polished metal, this face was carved in flesh, twisted and evil. A wide grinning mouth was flanked by two iron-shod tusks, a long black tongue lolling from between serrated teeth. Twin embers burned in dark eye sockets, spilling a ruddy glow across its jagged grin. A studded iron war club was clutched in shovel-broad hands, a rope of spherical beads was strung about its neck, each as big as her head. The blasphemous kanji on the temple walls was repeated on polished onyx.
It dropped to the ground in a crouch, one vast palm flat on the earth, regarding her with those awful, glowing eyes. Then it bellowed; a choir of screaming children reverberating across a rusted sky.
Amaterasu, Lady of the Sun, protect me.
Monsters from legend, the stuff of nightmare, a threat to disobedient children from exasperated parents. Never in her blackest dreams did she think they might actually exist.
In the distance, Yukiko heard another bellow in answer.
Oni.
14
GRAVITY
Hungry.
Belly growling. Footsore.
Stinking snarl of heat and green. Storm singing above his head, primal and complete, making his chest ache with want. Its pull like gravity, like moon to tide, urging him upward. But his wings wouldn’t work. Couldn’t fly. Wretched monkey-things maimed him. Scarred him. Cut him to pieces.
KILL YOU ALL.
Game fleeing at his clumsy approach. Claws crunching on fallen leaves and brittle twigs, wings dragging through soaking underbrush, making more noise than Raijin himself. Small fleshlings could hear him coming from too far away. No hunt. No food.
SO HUNGRY.
So he walked. Many steps. Too many for counting. Water flowed downhill, so downhill he stumbled, hoping for a river and fat, slow fish. Ignoring his growling belly. Ignoring the lessened weight of his wings, the flat shapes of his maimed feathers. The fury at what they had done to him swelling for hours at a time, until at last it would boil up and over and he would lash out with hooked talon and razored beak. Tearing saplings from their roots and fallen logs from their rotting beds, roaring his frustration at the rumbling clouds above.
No answer.
He would stand there afterward, chest heaving, tail lashing from side to side, head bowed with the weight of it all. And deep inside him, a single thought would raise its serpent head and whisper with forked and darting tongue, a truth so far beyond denying that it might have been carved into the bones of the earth itself.
SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME HERE.
He walked on. Stumbling through the curtain of emerald green, clumsy as a newborn cub. The same cycle of rage and release, building and breaking, over and over again. And then, amidst the fading echoes of his roars and the crash of black clouds and the voice of the howling wind, he heard it among the boughs of the ancient trees.
A scream.
It took a second for him to recognize it for what it was: the wail of the monkey-child. The one who had spoken in his mind, freed him from the cage, saved him from burning death. She was calling out in terror, breathless, desperate. And in answer to her wavering song of fear, he heard an echoing bellow. Deep as the grave. Twisted and gurgling. Behind him. Back toward the ruined stone and stink of grave soil that he had known well enough to avoid.
He sniffed the air. Smelled death. Heard the sound of running feet in the distance; one set as light as the dreams of clouds, another, pounding heavy upon the earth. Falling trees, a roar of anger and pain. And he thought of the monkey-child in the rain, flooding his mind with her wretched, unwelcome pity as he awoke to find his wings mutilated. He thought of her trembling fingers on the lock to his prison, sliding the bolt free as the flames reached toward them with hungry hands. He thought of debts unpaid, heard her voice in his mind; a memory of old words that filled him now with a faint and nagging guilt.
“I wasn’t the one who maimed you. You’d be a smear on the mountainside right now if it weren’t for me.”
Blinking up at the ceiling of leaves and the hidden sky beyond, he flexed his crippled wings. The rain and wind caressed his ruined feathers as the monkey-child’s words played over and over inside his head. He heard faint, gurgling laughter over the storm, dripping and malevolent. A black voice speaking, the tongue of the Dark Ones, poisonous and vile. Lightning stabbed at the gloom, the predator’s instinct quickening his pulse. And then he was running, loping through the scrub, bounding over fallen logs and clawing branches toward the fading sounds of battle, azalea petals falling like perfumed snowflakes in his wake.
Figures between the trees. Smell of black blood. A raised sword. A demon, Yomi-spawn looming twelve feet tall over the fallen monkey-child, skin of polished midnight blue, ready to spill her open on the acres of swaying green. Thunder rolled across cloud, Raijin hammering his drums in the skies above, hollow, booming echoes sounding in the depths of the temple ruins at his back. He leaped on the oni’s shoulders, a flurry of razors, broken blue sparks and beating wings. Tearing. Biting. Pounding the air and gagging at the foul blood on his tongue.
The taste of charnel pits and ashes. The stink of burning hair and open graves.
A war club scythed toward him from the darkness. He sprang from the demon’s back and took to the air for a few brief and wondrous seconds, almost forgetting, tiny whirlwinds of falling leaves dancing in time to the thrashing of his wings. Weightless. Flying.
He heard the crunch of breaking spine behind him, the spittle-thick death rattle of the pit demon as it crumpled to the ground. He landed hard, unsteady on maimed wings, digging bloodstained claws into the earth. Turning his eyes toward the remaining oni, he breathed deep, inhaling the stench of black gore amidst the steaming green rot. The oni glanced at its companion’s corpse, shifting the war club from one hand to the other.
CAN SMELL THE FEAR IN YOU, LITTLE DEMON.
A bellow. A war club raised high. Lightning arced across the skies, bathing the whole scene in fleeting, brilliant white: the endless wilds, the stranded arashitora, and the pit demon poised to cave in his skull.
A charge across broken ground and the pair collided, crashing earthward and tumbling about in a flurry of feathers, petals and screams.
Dark splashes staining the white azalea blossoms.
A crunch, a choking gurgle, and then a vast, empty silence.
He emerged from the shadows, feathers stained black with blood. He saw the monkey-child laid out in the dark, face spattered with gore. A tiny splinter of sharpened metal lay near her outstretched hand. He stalked toward her and lowered his head, a growl of challenge building in his throat. She groped toward the steel, even as her world began fading to black.
She was weak. Frail. No real threat at all.
If this was victory, it was his alone.
Gravity returned as the rush of battle faded, the weight of his flesh and bones painfully real. The wind and rain sang a melody he had known sin
ce birth, too distant now to be of any comfort. He felt like a child torn early from its womb, bound to wretched earth, helpless in the grip of its hateful pull. Longing to fly, he spread his wings, sparks breaking on the edges of mutilated quills. Listening to the song he was no longer a part of, he felt it calling like iron to lodestone. As a victim calls to vengeance.
He roared at the skies, emptying his lungs, a hurricane scream of rage and longing.
At his feet, the girl surrendered to darkness.
PART 2
SHADOWS
Yet all flowers fade.
Lady Izanami’s life, childbirth’s labor stole.
To reclaim love lost, Lord Izanagi walked deep, to black Underworld,
Yet to slay cold death, and break Yomi’s bleak embrace, no power had he.
And there she dwells still; the broodmare to all evils,
Her name, Endsinger.
The Book of Ten Thousand Days
15
NAMING THE THUNDER
Eight years old.
Playing in the bamboo every day, she and Satoru, their favorite game. He the brave hunter Masaru, she the Naga Queen, arrows of venom and snakes for hair. She would topple the imaginary forms of the squires Akihito and Kasumi, slay the Hunt Master Rikkimaru and stand poised over Shōgun Kaneda, ready to end him. And with a fearsome shout, Masaru, Rikkimaru’s brave apprentice, would snatch up his sensei’s spear and thrust it into her heart, and she would sink to the cool ground, cursing his prowess, vowing that her children would avenge her.
Serpent Empress. Mother to All Vipers.
Almost a year to the day after the Naga Queen’s death, their father had come home to stay at last. And though they didn’t really know him, they loved him fiercely.
It was their mother who raised them, who forced them to do their chores and eat their vegetables and punished them when they misbehaved. Masaru had always returned from his long treks with trinkets and stories and broad smiles. Sometimes Uncle Akihito or Aunt Kasumi would come too, bringing small mechanical marvels from Kigen: music prisms or glittering spring-loaded contraptions that mapped out the path of the hidden stars. Masaru would sit by the fire and tell hunting tales. Satoru’s eyes would fill with pride and he’d say, “One day I will be like you, father.”