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 all 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.