Eighteen Years Ago…

  Early March, 2003

  I should’ve listened to them.

  I’d taken this gap year to try and find myself, I told my cousins. I’d taken it to follow our family’s roots, to learn where we came from to try and better understand myself. But when I’d said that I wanted to find the family compound of the Japanese side of our family, to learn about the Imperial Japanese officer who’d helped occupy Shanghai, who’d used his power and position to rape a poor Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe who could do nothing to resist?

  They told me where to go, and in the same breath, told me to give it up. That something out there was wrong. That something in their bones practically screamed at them to stay far, far away.

  But I’d refused, because I needed to know. I needed to go there and see for myself. Because I needed answers — answers to questions that nobody else in my family wanted to ask.

  What kind of pain leads a man to inflict such horrors upon other people? What kind of suffering leads a man to abuse his power and station, to cause such incredible harm to people who had no power to fight back? What kind of environment fostered such anguish that the only way to soothe it was to impose such cruelty upon others?

  And did it have anything in common with the nameless misery that followed me around day after day, dragging at my feet, stabbing at my soul, making every second of life just that much more awful than the one before it?

  I needed those answers — I needed to know. So I ignored them.

  My cousin Satsuki begged me not to go when she saw my train ticket to Takayama, pleaded with me. Yelled that our family had already lost Tatsumi, that they didn’t want to lose me too. I didn’t listen.

  I hadn’t been there thirty minutes when I realized — I should have listened to Satsuki. God help me, but I should have listened to every word.

  I hadn’t noticed anything amiss during the two hours of hiking. But then I crossed some invisible boundary, and two minutes later, I couldn’t not notice it. It was so quiet; no, it was too quiet. The Japanese forest was so noisy during springtime, even up here in the mountains. Life was everywhere, from the insects to the birds to the mammals.

  And yet, it took me two whole minutes to notice that all of them had gone dead silent.

  I’d wanted to turn around, then. But the moment the thought crossed my mind, I could swear I heard my father’s voice jeering at me, mocking me. Stop being a wimp, Joshua, so vivid that I could practically see his sneer. Be a man, for once in your goddamn life.

  And as much as I hated, loathed the way that I couldn’t get my father’s snide bullshit out of my head even with an ocean and thousands of miles between us, I still listened to that phantom presence. I still gritted my teeth, set my gaze on the path ahead, and kept going.

  Another half hour of hiking finally saw me to my destination. The trail was basically nonexistent, mostly overgrown by trees and wild plants, so much so that I’d actually needed to use my compass the way it was intended — much as I’d hated getting forced into those camping trips with Eli and my dad, at least something useful came of it. That last half hour was the most disconcerting — forests aren’t supposed to be so quiet, so dead. And yet, the world seemed to hang on bated breath, hiding in fear of something that it didn’t want to share with me.

  But eventually, I arrived. What awaited me was exactly what I’d been told to expect, but at the same time… it was nothing like what I thought it would be.

  I made it to where my great-grandfather was born, to where the man who would eventually become a war criminal lived and learned.

  To the place that had raised a monster.

  A sprawling, traditional Japanese family compound spread out before me, multiple smaller buildings and mid-size houses leading to a massive central ‘manor’ in what probably looked like a stairstep pattern when viewed from the side. The buildings themselves were less run-down and ramshackle than I’d expected, which wasn’t to say that they were pristine — it’s just that the damage didn’t look like the wear and tear of years. The place looked more like… like something had gone through it in a frenzy.

  The sliding doors hung open, some of them outright pulled off of their rails, which afforded me a clear view of the smaller homes’ interiors. The rice paper walls had holes in them, not from something like moths or other insects eating them, but more like somebody had punched into it with a heavy object, and dragged it down through the separator. The tatami mats were torn, claw marks suggesting that something had fought here — or maybe something had tried tearing at them to get underneath? I didn’t know.

  What I did know was that something here was Not Right. Off. Wrong. People had lived here, once. The signs were all there; wear on the exposed floorboards where people swapped from shoes to slippers, the scuffs and dings of activity, and a thousand other things I wasn’t sure how to define. But all of the people who’d left those creases in the fabric of everyday life were gone.

  And the damage I was seeing didn’t track with packing their bags and leaving this place behind.

  I eventually made it up to the largest building in the complex, the ‘manor’ — and paused. This building’s sliding door was still intact. Well, mostly; there was a great big hole in it, at about head height. But that wasn’t the thing that had me worried. No, I was more concerned about what I could see around the edges of the hole, on the parts that had been pushed out by whatever pierced the paper in the first place. It was brown and crusty, most of it flaked off already, with only the barest smidgeons remaining. But I still knew what it was. I’d seen it on too many Band-Aids and bits of tissue not to recognize it.

  Old blood, long dry.

  I swallowed hard and controlled my breathing, hoping that I could keep my heart from beating out of my chest. You can do this, Joshua, I thought to myself. Be a man. Do it.

  I reached for the door, closed my eyes, and slid it open.

  The entryway was nothing special. I saw a lowered area to remove one’s shoes, now filled with leaves, dirt, and all other sorts of detritus, which spilled in from a hole in the roof that I only saw now that I was inside. The hallway behind it was covered in a layer of dust and grime, with what looked like paw prints from an animal headed down the hall and towards wherever else it led. I wasn’t sure what kinds of animal lived out here in the forests of Japan with paws that size — hell, I wasn’t even sure there were any animals here at all, with how quiet it was — but whatever was in here, it had gotten some or other critter’s attention.

  I stepped through the doorway, and barely didn’t flinch at how loud the dead, dry leaves filling the shoe well crunched underfoot. Well, if anything was still in the area, it definitely knew I was here now, plus the dust… oh, right. I’d had a bandana tied around my wrist for easy access, which I now undid before tying it over my face and mouth. It wasn’t much, but any little bit would help. I stepped deeper, following the pawprints in the dust to see where they led.

  My footsteps echoed in the emptiness, almost too loud for the space I was in. The wood flooring gave way to a tatami mat living room, with empty plates and broken chopsticks sitting atop a kotatsu. All of this suggested that something had been living here until it very abruptly wasn’t. That feeling was all but confirmed when I stepped around to the other side of the kotatsu and saw more of those crusty brown stains both on the side of the blanket the table sat atop, on a cushion half-slid under the table, and on the tatami below.

  Run, I could swear I heard something say. Leave, now, before it’s too late.

  But I ignored that little voice in the back of my mind, like I’d ignored it so many times before. Instead I pressed on, following the pawprints in the dust to another room — this one with a closed door before it. I wasn’t sure how whichever animal created the pawprints got past the door, if it had been closed since the moment this building had been abandoned — but they led inside. So I opened the door, and followed the trail.

  Tatami mats gave way once more to bare wooden floorboards, polished to such a mirror sheen that I could still see it practically gleaming through the pawprint holes in the dust. The room itself was small, maybe the same size as the entrance hallway itself had been. But whereas that had just served as a passageway, this room was set off to the side for a seemingly ceremonial purpose.

  Because at the end of it, nestled into a corner, lay a shrine. That little shrine was where the pawprints led — and ended.

  I stepped towards the shrine carefully, finally feeling… I wasn’t sure. Out of place? Like an intruder, maybe. Hesitant steps brought me directly before it, and I kneeled down to inspect it.

  The centerpiece of the shrine was a large photograph, faded and damaged. What I could still make out showed a man in Imperial Japanese officer’s garb, holding himself stiff and rigid for an official photograph. The edges of the photo showed some wear, gnawing and nibbling from the local wildlife, perhaps.

  But most troubling was that… well, the head was missing. Something had torn a hole into the photograph to remove the head.

  Even without that, though, I still knew who this was. There was nobody else it could be.

  This shrine was dedicated to my great-grandfather. The rapist. The war criminal. The monster.

  I wanted to… I didn’t know. If not for this man, I wouldn’t have been here. I wouldn’t even exist if not for his crimes. But at the same time… I wouldn’t have had to exist. I wouldn’t have had to live with this awful, crushing misery, this feeling that I could never put into words, this nameless ennui that made everything in my life just feel so… so off. Like there was something missing from it. Like there was something missing from me.

  I stood there for a bit and stared at that photo in silence, realized that it had no answers for me, and decided to leave.

  And that was probably what saved my life.

  I turned around — and froze. I hadn’t heard anything moving around in the building. Hell, I hadn’t heard anything moving around anywhere for the last hour. And yet—

  It clung to the ceiling like some kind of twisted, awful spider. Too-long fingers ending in wicked claws carved into the rice paper spread between the wooden beams holding the ceiling up, so sharp that the holes they cut made no sound. The arms and legs jutted out at awful angles that simply weren’t possible for a human, looking almost perpendicular to the way the joints should attach. The skin itself was a mottled, ashen gray, the kind of color that those horror movies Eli always forced me to suffer through only wished they could match. The hair was matted and filthy, caked with blood and viscera and God only knew what else.

  But the worst part was the face. Not because of the ruddy crimson eyes that looked out at me from it, sclera black and hideous. Not because of the teeth, too many for a human mouth and yellow-black with rot. No, not that. It was because… because—

  Because I knew that face. Because I’d seen it before — clung tight to the surety it provided, the reassurance that I wasn’t some ugly cuckoo born into a family of swans.

  Because I recognized it from my grandmother’s most treasured possession: a locket, holding a picture of a woman she would never get to meet.

  This — this thing, this revenant — it was a nightmare, a horror, an abomination.

  And it wore my great-grandmother’s face.

  I wanted to run. I wanted to turn in the opposite direction and sprint away from this abhorrent thing as fast as I could. But the tiniest part of my mind, the part that somehow wasn’t gibbering in terror, told me that that might not work. I didn’t know if the walls were entire massive panes of rice paper, or if there was something in between them to help support it; if I tried to run, there was a non-zero chance that I slammed head-first into a wooden beam and knocked myself out — and if that was the case, I was dead. But if I didn’t move, didn’t at least try something, then I was dead anyway.

  I was caught in choice paralysis, stuck between two equally awful options, and that led me to make the even worse third choice: I hesitated.

  But the creature with my great-grandmother’s face didn’t. It used those precious seconds to get closer, and closer, until I could smell the rot and decay pouring from its unbreathing jaws, and hear the awful moaning rattle that was just too low in pitch for me to pick up from any further away.

  And then it was reaching for me, reaching out with clawed fingertips crusted in the same dried blood I’d seen at the door, that stained the kotatsu and tatami in the living room—

  Blue.

  A flicker of blue, a sudden spark of azure flame, burst to life between the monster’s hand and my face. It flinched away from the flame with a shriek, pulling both hands to its face in apparent fright.

  And without its handholds, it couldn’t keep a grip on the ceiling. The creature fell to the floor in a heap, awkwardly splayed limbs slamming through the rice paper wall to another room I hadn’t visited as it fell. But the creature wasn’t the important thing, because when I followed its ungainly descent to the floor, I caught sight of the one responsible for the pawprints I’d followed inside in the first place.

  It was a fox. A fox with silvery-white fur and glowing blue eyes the same color as the flame that had just interrupted the monster, which dimmed to a brilliant amber when the light faded away.

  「ここに、早く！」

  I wanted to just stop and stare, because, well — a talking fox. A talking fox! With its own powers! Yeah, there was apparently some weird shit out there, but that was only if you believed the same people on IRC chats who tried to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn! Or the same crazies who went around saying that King Arthur was back and had cursed Buckingham Palace! Or any of the other stupid things people said to trick the same idiots who fell for the Nigerian Prince scam! It was all a hoax, it wasn’t real!

  And yet there I was in the middle of nowhere Japan, jumping over a horror movie zombie monster to follow a superpowered talking fox to safety! What was I supposed to believe anymore!? And sure, maybe I couldn’t understand what the fox was saying, but I didn’t really need to. The fox had stopped the monster with my ancestor’s face from attacking me.

  Was it any wonder that I did my monolingual best to listen to it?

  The fox turned and raced to the next doorway right as I was about to reach it, where it turned around and watched behind me to see if the thing followed — which was about when I noticed the other thing about this silver-white fox. It had more than one tail. Like, a lot more than one tail. It didn’t look that way when moving, but the moment it stopped, fanned them all out behind itself? It was impossible to miss, and similarly impossible to believe. But I was seeing it, with my own two eyes; if I couldn’t believe even that, then what could I?

  I followed the fox out of the manor and onto the cobbled street of the compound proper. It paused out front and turned, all of its tails flared out with their tips pointing at the door, each of which let loose a burst of blue flame that turned into a dancing wall of fire barring the exit. I had a moment to count the tails properly this time.

  Six. The fox had six tails.

  I blinked. And in the time it took me to do that, the fox had turned around and gave me a Look, one that said I should follow it, moments before it broke into a run once more. I followed again, without thought — it wasn’t like I had a better option. I ran to match it, and the fox slowed its pace, hanging just barely far enough behind me that I couldn’t see it out of the corner of my eye, but could still easily hear its claws clicking off of the cobblestones. The main ‘road’ of the compound was so long, though — a quarter mile didn’t feel like very long when you were just leisurely walking up it, but when you were running for your fucking life from some kind of unholy thing, it just never seemed to end!

  And the lightweight hiking backpack that had felt so unobtrusive earlier wasn’t helping matters, either!

  「まっすぐに行って！」

  The fox was talking to me again, and while I still didn’t properly understand it, context was a powerful thing. There were only so many things that it could be telling me to do in a situation like this, so I made my best guess. I gritted my teeth, balled my fists, pumped my arms harder, and picked up the pace. My run grew to a stride, then to a sprint, the forest growing closer with every step I—

  「町に—！？危ない！」

  “Wha—!”

  I’d turned to look over my shoulder when the fox started speaking, and barely caught sight of its silver fur before I felt it slam into my side with far more force than should’ve been possible for an animal that size. Pain blossomed on my side where it struck me with its haunch, and the blow knocked me off my feet with enough force that I went flying off to the side of the cobblestone road, into the dirt that lined it. If I hadn’t had experience sliding on dirt from the times overenthusiastic base runners sent me flying, then I probably would’ve just lain where I landed, shocked and stunned at the hit. Instead, I let myself roll and bleed off the momentum, which meant I could get to my feet faster and turn back to see—

  A wordless, agonized howl had me flinching and wincing again, averting my eyes from — no, no! I slammed a fist into my leg, gritted my teeth, and looked.

  The monster had caught up to us somehow, snuck up on us. Probably the same way it had crept up on me back in the house, from above. And just like back there, I hadn’t noticed a damn thing. But the fox had. The fox saw the creature pounce, and shoved me out of the way.

  It had shoved me aside, and taken the ambush meant for me.

  The wretch had clamped its jaws around one of the fox’s six tails, blood spurting past its jagged teeth and staining the rest of its silver-white fur. The fox was struggling, trying to angle its own fangs back at the creature, pain and panic in its glowing blue eyes as that same shining fire I saw earlier flew about in a wild attempt to make the monster drop it.

  Finally, a streamer of flame found purchase, scoring a blistered and blackened line across the thing’s eyes and making it reel back in pain.

  But it didn’t release its grip on the fox’s tail. And with a heave, a wrench, and the horrid, squelching tear of flesh—

  My furry savior’s anguished cries cut off with one last agonized yelp as it fell, finally released from the creature’s grasp. It tried to get its paws back under it, but the pain was too much, its legs were too shaky. It fell back to the stone beneath as an eldritch blue glow ignited the small stump that remained of its tail, burning it away into a small pile of ash.

  The monster’s stolen prize burned away too, drawing further shrieks of shock and agony as it let the severed limb fall beside the fox. It burned far faster than it should have, leaving just another pile of ash where the fox’s sixth majestic tail had been.

  The fox looked me in the eye and flicked an ear. It murmured something, voice growing stronger as it spoke.

  「逃げろ。お願い、逃げろ！」

  I didn’t know Japanese. But I’d watched enough shows with my cousins translating as best they could. There were some words that I could recognize. Words like these. ’Onegai, nigero.’

  Run. Please.

  The monster rallied, the scorched flesh bubbling and blistering before it smoothed back out into that same rotten ugliness, apparently unaffected by anything the fox had done. It shrieked again, its horrid voice angry and hateful, and stepped back towards where the fox still lay shaking in pain.

  The monster with my great-grandma’s face was going to kill the fox. The fox had gotten so badly hurt for my sake, and now this creature was going to kill it.

  No.

  The fox had told me to run — but no. I couldn’t do that.

  “Hey!” I yelled as I picked up a rock from the ground. “Granny Lillie!”

  The creature didn’t respond to the first word. But it sure as hell did to hearing the name.

  It turned its head to face me with a disgustingly loud crack of its neck. If I hadn’t already been moving, I might have frozen right as it laid its beady red eyes on me. But luckily for me, I was already in motion, and despite how much I hated all the damn sports my father forced me into, it had at least ingrained enough of a habit to let me finish my throw and follow through.

  I was nowhere near the baseball player my brother was; he was the MVP first baseman who’d carried his team to nationals as a high school junior. But I was still a halfway decent shortstop — and more importantly, a nasty relief pitcher.

  The rock was a poor substitute for a proper baseball, but I still had good aim. My throw slammed into the thing’s eye, tilting it back before it limply lurched forward, ending up suspended over the fox on all four of its awkwardly arranged limbs, like some kind of fleshy crab-thing. I kicked off with as much speed as I could and slung the hiking pack off of my back, preparing myself for the pain… and threw my weight down into a slide, securing the fox in one arm as I left my backpack behind from where I’d grabbed it. I held the fox tight as I finished my slide, rolled around to my front, and made to stand—

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  But that was when the weirdness started. Because when I dropped my bag and readied my hand to push me back up, I’d somehow snagged a fistful of the ash left behind by the fox’s severed tail.

  And the moment that ash touched my skin, it ignited.

  Blue flame leapt up around my hand and fingers. I froze, my breath caught in my throat as I expected the pain — but none came. The flame just danced merrily between my fingers, the blue deepening to a wondrous amethyst as I watched. It didn’t hurt. It felt… good.

  「そんな、まさか！」

  I ignored those words despite the audible surprise I could hear in them. Instead, I looked past my burning hand and at the monster as it pulled itself upright again. Its baleful crimson eyes glared at the fox tucked tight against my chest, but when it turned its gaze to my hand, it froze.

  I don’t know what possessed me, what gave me the idea. But I looked at my hand, looked at the monster, and couldn’t help the vicious snarl that spread across my face.

  “Fuck! Off!”

  I swung my hand like I was throwing another rock, and when I did, the flame leapt from my outstretched fingers. Fire flowed over the monster in a violet tide, its crackling heat drowning out whatever cries of agony issued forth from the fiend.

  I didn’t stop to watch. My hand was clean now, with not even the slightest trace of ash remaining. I brought that hand and arm tight over the fox, turned towards the forest, and ran.

  The path up to the property was hard enough to navigate at a brisk walk. Trying to run through it was an order of magnitude more difficult — there wasn’t time to find a good path, or test my footing before putting my full weight down. And that was all before factoring in the almost thirty-pound bundle of fuzz and fur in my arms, or that it had started to struggle maybe a minute after I broke into the woods.

  「人間—」

  “Stop, squirming,” I hissed out between breaths, squeezing the fox tighter in the hopes that maybe it could intuit what I was saying from that. “We—”

  A piercing, awful shriek practically stabbed into my ears as I pulled up short, barely not tripping over my own feet as my momentum painfully bled out. The sound reverberated through the forest, enough raw volume behind the sound that the branches around us shook from the force of the decibels alone. I strained my ears, hoping that maybe this time I would be able to pick up on some sign of the creature’s approach, that maybe I’d be able to notice—

  Something white flashed in front of my face. I instinctively flinched away from it, but when nothing else happened, I was able to see what I’d tried to dodge. It was one of the fox’s tails.

  I looked down at the animal still cradled in my arms, and the same tail that had waved to get my attention pointed off to the side of the rough trail I’d carved through the woods, next to a tree surrounded by a particularly dense patch of greenery.

  「そこに、一緒に隠れて！」

  I didn’t have a goddamn clue what the fox was saying, but its voice was heavy with urgency and concern. And if the superpowered talking animal that had already saved my life twice was telling me to do something, then I was damn well gonna do it! So I leapt off the path and over towards where the fox had pointed, doing my best to leave as little of a trail as possible. Yeah, I was no Eli, but I could still hide my trail at least a little bit — and in this situation, even ‘a little bit’ was a hell of a lot better than nothing!

  I rounded the side of the tree, and found a large crevice, hollow, whatever in its side. I didn’t know the specific terminology here, nor did it matter; all I knew was that this would help block line of sight, so I pressed my back into it, and peered around the side of the hollow to look out at the rest of the forest. Or I did, until the fox’s tail swung into my eyes again.

  I looked down at the fox, hoping that it could read my annoyance from the expression on my face, but all it did was bring that same tail in front of its snout in a… disturbingly human gesture. Like a finger held in front of its lips to ask me for silence.

  「静かに。」

  Its amber eyes glowed blue again, and wisps of blue flame filled the air around us. They were scattered about seemingly at random, and when I tried to look at one more closely, I found my eyes slipping off of it.

  I didn’t get a chance to so much as start asking a question, though. Another of those horrid, trumpeting shrieks filled the woods, following which several of the fox’s tails surged into motion. They clamped around my wrists, my torso, and the leg that wasn’t pressed against the tree trunk, after which its fifth and final tail wound around my mouth and pulled tight. I panicked for a moment there, only held fast by the iron grip the fox’s limbs had on my body, and peered down to look the fox in the eyes, where I saw them narrowed in concentration.

  Then something shifted in the corner of my eyes, and I glanced over to see the reason for the fox’s sudden caution.

  The thing had appeared a ways out from us, flickering into view so suddenly that I thought it might have been there the whole time, and I’d somehow missed it. I blinked, and it shifted again, only this time it was even closer to our position. It wasn’t looking at us, though, and I couldn’t stop myself from blinking again and—

  Oh shit it was right in front of us now.

  Maybe fifteen feet separated us from the monster, such a short distance that I had no doubt it could cross that span before I had time to even consider running. It scanned the woods around us, dead, ruddy eyes peering carefully for a trace of blue or silver in amongst the greenery. The monster looked to the side, then turned its blood-red eyes on us—!

  … no, wait. Not on us. It was looking in our direction, yes, but not quite. It was hard to tell without practice, but there was a crucial difference between when someone was looking towards you, as opposed to looking at you — and here, it was clearly only looking towards us.

  It should’ve been able to see us, to see that its prey lay right in front of it… but it couldn’t. Was this the fox? I looked at one of those wisps of flame the fox had made, felt my eyes slide off of it despite my best efforts. Had it… it had hidden us, hadn’t it?

  But would it hold?

  Each second that passed felt like another eternity, another moment for the fox’s fire to go out, for the illusion to fade, for the thing to suddenly notice that not all was as it seemed and gut us where I stood. I held my breath, unwilling to possibly give away our position with an exhausted exhale, and hoped that the thing would give up and look elsewhere before the pain in my chest grew too great.

  It took a step towards us. Its eyes seemed to narrow, its focus drawing to a point closer than the forest beyond—

  Then I blinked, and it was gone, a freshly broken branch that I somehow hadn’t heard the only thing to show for its departure.

  I exhaled slowly, and slid down the trunk of the tree until I rested on the ground as the fox loosened its hold on me. Holy fuck… dear God. It was gone — it had left. But… I looked around, seeing the flames still dancing in a phantom breeze.

  We quite literally weren’t out of the woods yet.

  A flicker of white passed in front of my vision again, and I saw the fox’s tail hovering before me. I looked down to meet its eyes. It gave me a slow blink and gestured ever so slightly back up, towards the tail it had positioned tip-first in front of me. I licked my lips, looked back up at the fox’s tail, and took a deep breath — in, hold, out.

  Then I leaned forward, and let the tail rest against my forehead.

  It wasn’t some profound thing, some blooming awareness or anything like that. It was just a sudden surety, the knowledge that something else was there, set beside my very existence in a direction that defied description.

  I only knew what it was because of a visit my middle school received from one of the Manhattan NMR branch’s superheroes, Card Shark. He was a telepath, able to read the minds of people who looked in a direction of his choice, and speak into the minds of those people as well. He’d asked all of us to think about our favorite flavors of ice cream, after which he announced the most and least popular. Card Shark then told us that while chocolate was the most common choice, there was only one person, a girl, whose favorite was green tea — a lie. Because I’d also been thinking of green tea ice cream at the time; more specifically, I’d been thinking of how rarely my father let me have it, how he kept saying it wasn’t something for ‘real men’, and how my cousin Satsuki kept having to sneak me some during our biennial visits to Japan.

  But back to the point of all of that — I’d felt something rather particular when Card Shark read my thoughts.

  And the sensation I had right now, that odd feeling of having somebody next to you in a non-physical direction, was exactly what it had been like.

  ‘Oh, child. I told you to run.’

  The fox’s mental voice was the same as the one I’d heard — deep, resonating. A man’s voice, clearly. But this time, I could understand it; no, I could understand him. And that made sense, actually. Because the thoughts filtering through my head weren’t language. They were meaning. Language was just how we translated meaning into something we could communicate.

  But there was no need to translate that here.

  ‘Yeah? You saved my life,’ I thought back at him. ‘Wouldn’t have been right to leave and just let you die. Besides… whatever that thing is—’

  ‘Onryou,’ the fox thought at me, and this time, it was clearly language — but accompanied by a burst of meaning to help me comprehend it. ‘A lingering curse of revenge, a grudge.’

  ‘Yeah, that,’ I thought with a shrug. ‘It’s wearing my great-grandmother’s face. I wasn’t about to just let someone get killed by my grandma’s ghost.’

  ‘Your ancestor?’ the fox asked. ‘Then, your great-grandfather… was he—?’

  Thought and image flashed before my mind’s eye, memories that weren’t mine. Of a squalling boy who’d been lucky to survive the first winters. Of a child who grew strong, and rejoiced at his siblings’ plight. Of a young man who’d wed a much younger, reticent woman, and delivered unto her four children. Of a grown man who went to war, and there abandoned his restraint. Of a man defeated, barely clinging to the rags of power and calling them honor. Of a specter that followed him home from the war, a wraith of blood and hate.

  Of the day the fox’s tether to his goddess’s hideaway snapped, restoring him to flesh and blood — and in the same instant, freed the vengeful spirit to unleash its wrath upon the victims it had long been denied.

  The world swam back into focus, the fox’s memories fading from my sight. I would’ve fallen over if I hadn’t already been sitting down; as it was, I was still left disoriented, so I closed my eyes and laid a hand on the ground to try and ground myself back in the here and now.

  The fox’s memories didn’t lie. I don’t think he could’ve faked them if he wanted to. It was all too visceral, too real. And some of what he’d thought, what he’d known? It was all—

  No. No, I didn’t have the time to let my mind wander. The fox was keeping the monster, the onryou from finding us, but there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d be able to keep this up long enough to get back to civilization. Nor was there any guarantee that the onryou wouldn’t just follow us back and kill us there, either. But even ignoring all of that… I couldn’t just sit idly by and let that monster, the horrific cursed thing born from my great-grandmother’s corpse, keep going on its merry murderous way. It had to die, for real this time.

  ‘How do we stop it?’ I asked the fox. He looked up at me with surprise in his eyes, before his expression melted into something… warm.

  ‘The onryou is the culmination of thousands upon thousands of curses, child,’ the fox whispered into my mind. ‘Your great-grandmother’s pain is merely a vessel for the rest to inhabit, an animating force to drive it forward — but because of that, it can be undone far more easily.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘What do I have to do?’

  The fox didn’t answer immediately. He wriggled and squirmed, clearly wanting me to let him go. And since I wasn’t currently running away from the vengeful spirit of great-grandmas past, I had no reason not to let him do as he wished. I moved my arm and let the fox up. He took all of two steps forward before turning around, keeping the one tail touching my forehead as he let the other four sway behind him in an almost hypnotic fashion.

  ‘The onryou was born from suffering, and sustained through much the same,’ he explained, the growing blue glow in his eyes hiding the amber beneath them. ‘If infliction can birth such malice, then it can be unmade through the reverse. And in you, oh dear child…’

  The fox padded forward, placing hesitant paws on my shoulder and cheek as he leaned forward to rest his head under my chin.

  ‘I feel your truth, sense the anguish you have labored with for so long. The nameless pain you’ve carried — you need not bear it any longer, child.’

  Something hot and ugly rose in my gorge, and heat pricked at the corners of my eyes. I wrapped my arms around the fox and pulled back just enough to hide my face in his tail’s fur, unable to resist the sudden urge to hold him close, to block out the world, to try and smother the awful feelings that I’d spent so much time trying to ignore, hoping and praying and begging they’d go away, that I wouldn’t have to keep feeling so awful and wrong and like things would never, ever be truly right. Of course he would know. Of course he would feel it, find those horrid thoughts and emotions I’d smothered and buried for so long. He was peering directly into my mind — into my soul.

  And while our tongues and minds could lie, our hearts never could.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, trying and failing to push back the tears that fell into the fox’s fur. ‘Why would you… why are—’

  ‘Oh, child.’ The fox nosed at me, and wrapped one of his tails around me. ‘For the same reason that you would not leave me when I was hurt. Because regardless of anything else, regardless of what might come of this — it is the right thing to do. And I need no more reason than that.’

  I… that…

  The fox pulled back from where he’d nestled himself under my chin, licked my nose, and looked me in the eyes. He — God, there… there was so much warmth in those eyes, so much love, for… for me?

  But I didn’t do anything to deserve that… I just—

  ‘It does not matter what we do or don’t deserve.’ The fox’s thoughts were a whisper caress. ‘It is only ever about what we can do. And for the sake of my family, our family, and for the sake of your happiness — I shall do aught within my power. Now, child.’

  The fox brought another tail forward, and placed it over my heart. Azure flame flickered along its length, transitioning to a shining, brilliant amethyst as it reached my chest and ran back along the fur.

  ‘Close your eyes. Open your heart. And when my Lady Goddess smiles upon you from Her stellar temple — do not look away.’

  I didn’t get any time to ask what the fox meant by that. Moments after he’d finished conveying that last bit, the shining violet tail lying over my heart shifted, becoming an intangible mass of flames in the vague shape of the fox’s tail, and plunged into my chest.

  And only an instant later, the rest of the fox shifted into brilliant sapphire flame, followed his first tail into the sump of my soul—

  And my body fell apart as I burned with the radiance of a thousand suns.

  The forest around us was no longer mere leaves and vegetation — it was pure, unadulterated life. Glorious, incredible, indescribably beautiful life, as I’d never understood it before. The sun shone in the sky above, but it was no longer just a sphere of roiling plasma and light, merrily burning away in the cold blackness of space. No, it was more — it was the essence of existence, the zenith of hope, the cradle of ambition and adventure itself.

  And the moon… the moon, which had not been visible to my earthly perception, hung high in the sky, a dark sphere encircled in arcane traceries of power and intent, their perfect symbols marred by the tiniest smudge —

  I felt it, then: the sense of being noticed, being seen by something so unfathomably beyond my own existence that even the smallest piece of its purest self might blast my soul clean. That presence, that being looked upon me, upon my very soul, upon the human and fox who had been united by chance and fate.

  And

  it

  S M I L E D.

  Something surged from within the very depths of my soul. The lines that defined us, that separated us from one another, smudged and blurred under the loving gaze of his Goddess.

  We stood as one, then. United in body and soul. United in heart and mind. United in duty and purpose. For even though there was nobody to blame for it, the onryou had been allowed to roam free and indulge in its senseless slaughter for far too long.

  And we would not allow it to continue.

  Our gestalt took shape upon the forest floor. Roiling fire resolved into the rough shape of a human body, [my/their] body, with [his/my] five tails arrayed behind it, a lone beacon of glimmering violet surrounded by four shining sapphires. And though we stood endlessly aflame, the forest was unscarred in our wake — for this was a place of life, and our foe was a being of death. Indeed, life flourished in our wake, new growth emerging from the soil, the plants drinking in the life that flowed from this wondrous inferno.

  But this existence, this state of being — it was a temporary thing, and we could not sustain it for long, lest it burn [my/their] soul to cinders. Our duty lay before us.

  The hunt beckoned.

  The onryou, our prey, had fled the sudden eruption of purest life, racing back to its redoubt — the site of [his/my] greatest overreach, its consequences patient and far-reaching. It was the work of but an instant’s thought to fade into the world itself, and let the currents of life carry us to our destination.

  Where the forest had been teeming with life and wonder, this compound was the opposite. It was dreary and dull, the same soul-sense that found the forest so vibrant only seeing this place as coal-black and grave-gray. Nothing was here, and here flourished naught. It was perfect for the onryou — for where else would a yawning, devouring pit hide than the very remnants it left behind?

  There was no point in letting it hide, though; no point in letting the site of failures long past stand.

  A negligent wave of a tail, and all but the manse burned.

  Life leapt hungrily from death to death, devouring every last bit of material it could find. Ash remained in its wake, free for the wind to carry afield, to bring the remnants to where they could nurture life anew. But that was but a side effect. The flames searched, scouring the grounds for the creature’s hiding spot, flushing it out so—

  There!

  It burst forth from one of the last of the smaller homes to fall, throwing aside scorched wood and burning rice paper as it reached towards us with grasping, hungry claws, fangs bared and dripping with the malice of death itself. But it could not harm us like this — it could not even touch us.

  [My/their] incandescent body briefly lost cohesion and fell apart into formless flame, and the onryou simply fell through the burning curtain. It caught alight where it touched us, shrieking in agony as it rolled on the stone to put itself out before standing on all four limbs and casting its head from side to side in a desperate search for new shelter. It turned at last towards the woods, and made to flee from its center of power, the nexus of its suffering, and—

  No.

  Our self resumed the vague outline of a human form as [his/my] tails lashed out, blurring into four azure pillars, and speared its limbs. It cried out again, its horrid voice making mock of the suffering it had inflicted time and time again in the decades of its freedom as we lifted it aloft. The fifth tail, the lone amethyst, reached deep into the core of our being, dredged up the pitch-black cinder of misery that [I/they] had carried over these few years, our silent horror at how heavy it had become in so little time sending ripples through our gestalt. But here it was — expunged, excised, and exactly what we needed to exorcise this beast.

  [His/my] — no, that wasn’t right, our central, amethyst tail worked the nugget of anguish into a cold, black nail.

  And with the roar of righteous flame, we slammed it home into the long-dead heart of the onryou.

  “From misery were you born,” we intoned as one, not in language, but in raw intent. “For misery’s sake do you remain!”

  Flame built around [my/their] hands, azure and violet surging together — and a smile from above refined it into a gleaming, divine white.

  “And with misery’s end shall you depart!”

  With one final roar, we let it loose. Brilliant, beautiful flame billowed forth, washing over the monster, the onryou that had been born from my great-grandmother’s misery and death, nurtured over the decades by hate and rage, and gorged on bloodshed. The flame flashed ash-gray as something dislodged from the creature when the nail burned away, purified by what could only be holy flame.

  The roar of the flames died down, fading away until only the heat haze remained to tell of their passage. That, and a spot of soot-black stone, which stood as the sole remaining sign of the onryou’s grim existence.

  Power coalesced back into our incandescent core, the suggestion of a body fading away into formless flame. With a final flash of blue leaving purple, our gestalt severed, separating us. That last shred of what I can only call divinity guided me on how to restore my body around the scaffold of my soul, and when that was done and the otherworldly presence at last pulled away from me, my ethereal perception of the base layers of existence itself faded away with it.

  My eyes were closed when bodily awareness returned to me, and when I opened them to find my normal vision restored, a blue will-o’-wisp hung in front of me for only a moment. I barely had time to blink before the flame resolved into the form of the silver fox, who landed gracefully upon the stone, fanning his four tails out behind him.

  … four? He’d lost one to saving me from my great-grandmoth—no, that hadn’t been her anymore. He’d lost one when saving me from the onryou, earlier, yes, I remembered that clearly. If he only had four now… but, how? Why?

  “Thank you, for helping me right the wrongs long left to fester,” the fox spoke. “And in granting you reprieve, redeeming the failures of ages past.”

  Except… that wasn’t what I heard. That was what I understood, just like when the fox and I had spoken heart to heart, mind to mind. But we weren’t doing that now. We were talking, using language and words. I’d heard him speak, and understood.

  But what I’d heard had been in Japanese.

  “What—”

  I gasped. My voice was… that wasn’t the voice I remembered.

  And then the other sensations registered. Something had moved atop my head. And something else had twitched, at the base of my spine — something that I could feel touching the ground.

  I turned to look behind me, and saw… a tail. A tail, its fur the same color as my hair, its tip resting lightly on the ground. That I could feel resting lightly on the cobblestone road.

  What had happened to the fox’s fifth tail?, I’d just asked myself.

  “Child?” the fox asked, tilting its head to the side in question. “Are… are you well?”

  “I…”

  It wasn’t just the tail that I’d seen when looking down, though. It had been the rest of my body. The shape, the contour, the, the… the everything. How right it felt to just stand there, to feel the air filling my lungs, to make all the tiny shifts and adjustments that we needed to keep our balance… all of it was different, but in a way that just felt so… all of it was… it was—!

  My heart pounded in my ears, the world sounding tinny and small and so far, far away. I tried to focus on the fox in front of me, on the white-silver fur swaying behind him, but it was all starting to meld together, falling out of focus.

  I tried to take a step—

  “Child!”

  The ground was cool, but… shockingly comfy? All of this, all of it was just, so much, too much… was this an adrenaline crash? I was so… sleepy…

  The last thing I saw before the curtains fell on consciousness was the snout in my face, worried amber eyes flickering blue.

  And then, nothing more.