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
Stormdancer 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 since 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.
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