Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 16: Onryō Rage, Dragon Shadow

Late afternoon lay over the palm-dappled canal town with the soft authority of habit. Laundry snapped between second-story balconies. The sparring yard behind Old Hu’s tea shed was dusty from boys dragging heels through practice stances. Wooden bridges crossed the canal in stacked angles, darkened by old rain and hand oil. Children shouted over the water. Someone fried fish with too much pepper. Someone cursed at a pump engine that had survived the Horror, the reconstruction, three floods, and every mechanic who tried to love it.

Temujin saw himself at eleven, maybe twelve, sitting on the bridge with a handheld game from before the Horror. The casing had been taped twice. The screen flickered green. The batteries were dying in that slow cowardly way batteries died, pretending until the last second that one could hope to keep playing.

Young Temujin pressed two fingers against the back panel.

“Don’t,” said a girl nearby.

“I know what I’m doing.”

“You blew up Jin’s radio,” said a boy, not yet in two halves.

“Did it on purpose. That loser had it coming.”

He pushed chi into the device.

For three glorious seconds the screen brightened.

Then the game popped, spat smoke, and died in his hands.

His friends laughed until he chased them down the bridge with the corpse of old technology held like a brick. His father came out from the work shed, one sleeve pinned and empty at the shoulder, the other arm dark with soil to the elbow. Batu Qiao walked with a farmer’s gait and carried himself like a man who had misplaced half his body and decided to become twice as exact with the rest. He took the ruined game from his son, turned it over, and clicked his tongue.

“Too much river through too small a gate.”

“I almost had it.”

“You almost cooked it.”

“I did cook it.”

“Ehhh, you’re almost honest now.”

“You say that to everyone.”

Batu set the device on the railing. With two fingers of his remaining hand he touched the casing. A thin thread of chi, pale as warm water, entered the dead machine. The screen blinked once. A cracked little song played for half a measure, then died again.

Young Temujin stared. “How did you—”

Batu’s smile was awkward and quick. “Here’s a lesson an asshole taught me: the splashback can ruin just as much as a spill.”

His mother stood in the doorway behind him.

Mother Mizuki stood proud in the doorway, dressed like a duchess in an anarchist’s revenge fantasy— all that jaded magnificent beauty, caught in cheap jeans. She looked at the smoking handheld, then at Temujin, with her forever unbothered blue eyes.

“Again?” she said.

Young Temujin looked down.

Batu answered for him. “He’s still learning. He’s really good already too!”

“You’re just as bad as him. Muji-chan, just go beat your friends with sticks or something.”

As far back as he could remember, his mother’s voice had the melancholic woodwind thrum of a mourning dove’s call, heard at the wrong hour. Years later, Demon Lung would take that voice from the house one cough at a time. The disease had come like an assassin’s nail: black phlegm, breath whistling, skin graying at the lips, lamps burning all night. Only her, never him, never his dad. 

Her death had broken Mina Town open for him. He had left home because grief needed a road and found martial wandering because anger needed a shape. He made no excuses for himself becoming a delinquent. Boys did what they did. 

That shape was a road slinging him across half the world, crashing him on Devil Fruit Mountain in the Southern Sea, and placing him before a serene, stupidly strong Yaban girl who called herself Enekai and punched like a meteor strike.

In seconds, evening came.

The canal bridges filled with lanterns. One hundred and eight triangular flags ran from a tall pole in the square, five colors fluttering above the maypole games, their tails snapping in the sweet wind off the water. Children ran around the pole until the ribbons tangled. Temujin remembered playing there, remembered his father laughing when he fell, remembered his mother watching from the edge with one hand pressed to the hollow under her throat. One flag had writing on it in a style he had been too young to read. He had tugged it loose once and been scolded so fiercely by his mother that he never touched the flags again.

Now, in the vision, the flag drifted down before him.

Lanterns remained, trembling in water.

Ryūei stood at the far end.

Alive.

Her hair was tied back loosely, though strands had escaped near her face. She wore pale court robes, real cloth with weight and fold, not the dead white garment of the arena. 

Behind her stood his parents, younger than he had ever seen them.

Batu Qiao was thin in this vision, a farmer’s son with broad shoulders and uncertain posture, standing where he did not belong beside greatness. Still one arm. Mizuki wore dark blue court silk with an embroidered collar, hair high, face sharpened by pride before poverty had sanded it down. Her hand cradled an infant. That was him! All the old photos said he looked like a potato, and God he was uglier in person than he thought.

Temujin stared until the canal lanterns blurred.

“What is this?” he asked. “Am I dying?”

Ryūei watched him with living eyes.

“I won’t let you die stupid.”

“That’s generous.”

Then she pointed towards Mizuki.

“I killed her.”

The lantern flames froze. Dark condors watched from the roofs.

Temujin’s first feeling was blankness. Then the blankness cracked and anger came through.

“She died of Demon Lung.”

“Yes.”

The answer moved through him once and returned sharper.

Demon Lung.

Of course.

The black phlegm. The breath like paper tearing. The doctors who would not name where the sickness had come from. The little cold spot that always entered the room before her coughs worsened. The lamp-flames bending though no window stood open.

He stepped toward Ryūei. “Why should I believe you?”

Her finger spiraled from his mother’s face to the eye-blue Moon Marble at her throat.

The bridge became a palace.

Lacquered pillars rose into electric gloom. Court banners hung beside amber display panels scrolling imperial seals. Bronze incense beasts smoked under fluorescent strips. Servants moved with old sleeve etiquette while security drones hovered above their heads, each one painted with the Yang crest. The Yang Dynasty court belonged to no clean century. It carried swords in silk corridors and broadcast scandals through screens hidden behind carved jade. It prayed to ancestors under neon. It spoke of virtue while calculating oil, mines, satellites, tribute routes, and marriages.

Lady Mizuki Haruna walked in.

—Jade-like beauty? he cried. Jade-like beauty, what does that even mean?

He had handled thirty-five jade beauties, he said, and had honored each by comparing her to cruelly smoothed alabaster, to moonlit carvings, to river stones polished by gods with nothing better to do.

— Yet Mizuki, he declared, sinking to one knee in gold robe, gold pants, and black sunglasses pushed down the bridge of his nose, to call you jade is a slur. Language itself should crawl to you and beg forgiveness.

He cursed the gods for allowing no proper rhyme, no heavenly meter, no syllable soft enough or rich enough to express the totality of her preciousness. He sighed. He cried. He pressed her fingers against his brow.

— I am yours, forever yours. Bless me with you. Bless this withering fool, this royal insect, this sinner at the foot of your kannon.

Mizuki smiled. She smiled like the villainesses Temujin had spent his life killing.

The courtiers had been poisoned all their lives by the toxic lavender air of palace intrigue. They loved in gossip-spasms and fan-twitches. They lied until even their silences wore masks. They saw daggers in tea-ripples, insults in sleeve-folds, treason in the number of plum blossoms embroidered on a hem.

Lady Mizuki happened to them like war.

Total, polished, beautifully unmoved by the suffering of one life or a thousand.

She knew what she had.

There prostrated one green-rober, Lady Maryam— the Desert Consort, Temujin recognized, her face many years yet unbroken by Enekai’s fist. She begged to become Mizuki’s imperial lice-picker, shoe-licker, fan-flicker, slipper-washer, scalp-servant, anything the foreign beauty required. The court inhaled through painted teeth.

Mizuki looked down at her. Then, to the astonishment of every woman who had mistaken cruelty for imagination, Blue-Eyes reciprocated.

She sat Maryam on a cushion, took wooden knitting needles to the Desert Consort’s scalp, washed Maryam’s slippers with her own pale hands, and sometimes fluttered Maryam’s chicken-skin fan to cool the older woman’s brow. The intimacy became scandal, then fashion, then a weapon. Women who had tried to insult Mizuki by kneeling found themselves outmaneuvered by tenderness performed as dominance.

Temujin watched Maryam laughing under those needles.

He wondered if his mother had ever truly liked her.

Temujin saw the Dragon prince: gold robe, gold pants, soft mouth, eyes cocky behind black sunglasses. He peacefully dreamed of half of what she offered in war, sextuple the joy of what all the court ladies together could hope. 

What was she but another foreign girl at the edge of the Yang court, hailing from the ascending land of Yumekuni, close enough to the prince’s bed that lesser nobles bowed too deeply and wives looked through her as though through thin, expensive paper. 

They settled to marry after she would give birth. 

Then came the prophet.

Prophet Raskolnikov, they called him, though some laughed behind fans and called him Northeastern Bottle-Master. 

He staggered into the chamber drunk on plum wine, omen smoke, and a kind of holiness gone feral, fingers red with cinnabar.

The aged Empress trusted bottle-drunk foreign mystic Raskolnikov, more than her harem-drunk husband, and listened to his naked revelry:

— A blood moon child, he cried. A bodhisattva, reincarnation of a great ancient warrior, born under the red moon who would unseat the Twelve Kings and break the Great Patriarchs, and bring ruin to order, sow chaos under heaven, be the death of the thousand year empire and all its monuments. A child born as a bodhisattva, the healer of men, the Chosen Child comes! The mother will flee with it and bring devastation!

— A child, a child the court ladies cried; who had borne a child in her arms, who carried blood nursed in her arms? No one, no one yet. But, they knew who had just fallen onto her back.

Their baby came under the darkest lunar eclipse. Bloody even after cleaning. Ruddy and furious under red moonlight. Around the palace roof and the red chamber balcony, twenty-three white condors circled in silence, pale wings sliding through the dark like scraps of torn prayer paper.

This was the child of prophecy.

Heaven would tremble.

Temujin saw the bundle in the royal red chamber and felt his heart quicken.

All this time, he was—

The court turned on Mizuki with the soft speed of silk catching fire.

Every great lady seized the chance to advance against Mizuki. The Emperor jealously disregarded the gossip and the prophecy as the rantings of a drunken maniac, and instead challenged the prince on his infidelity and shame— he already had a wife, a loveless wife whose name even the Emperor could not remember when pressed. Why should this new child be of true royal blood?

— Father, consider that this child has been born with magnificent power! Consider that this child has been born at all! There is no love nor willingness between myself and the arranged marriage, but I promise to bear more with Mizuki. This can be your chance to spread influence westward and grow a little closer to heaven.

He annulled the first marriage before the incense burned down. But he also demanded to be presented with this Chosen Child.

Then he demanded to see the Chosen Child.

That was when the court ladies discovered the art of kneeling together.

They filled the hall in a rustle of silk and righteous breath. Lady Maryam knelt at the front. Her face looked wounded, faithful, exquisitely reluctant. Her little grin hid under tears.

She betrayed Mizuki with soft words.

— My lord, Lady Mizuki has committed high treason. She has killed the newborn child.

The Emperor did not believe her at once. He knew the ladies hated the upstart. Hatred was the palace’s most reliable weather.

Maryam bowed lower.

— The child looked like a potato, she said. The Blue-Eyed Wench could not bear to have spawned such a disgusting infant. Those were her words to us. Her plan was to destroy the royal marriage, shame your son, and bring disorder.

A murmur crossed the hall.

Then another lady cried:

— My lord, my lord, the Blue-Eyed Harlot has fled the palace. She seeks to repeat the same scam in another king’s realm.

Temujin’s heart fluttered.

It reached the red chamber where Mizuki cradled her covered child. For the first time in years, she looked into the baby’s face and felt the honest joy of a smile take her by surprise. All the years crippling lesser women’s ambitions, all the effort spent pulverizing princesses, consorts, and their inferiors, parried at last by an ugly infant’s spontaneous grin.

The child smiled up at her with dark bright eyes.

Mizuki smiled back. She jumped startled at furious rapping and banging at the door. It was Lady Maryam.

— Lady Mizuki, dearest of all my friends, you must listen! Our heavenly Emperor has acquiesced to the Empress and has condemned the infant over Raskolnikov’s drunken prophecy. You must discard your child immediately, or face immediate expulsion, or worse! 

The prince, who had called himself her royal insect, her sinner, her fool at the foot of her kannon, looked at the door, then at the bundled child, then toward the place where his future might be standing with a sword at its throat.

— The child must die, he said. There is no other way to escape.

Mizuki left.

The infant began to cry.

When the Emperor learned she had fled, his face hardened into insult more than grief. He ordered men to give chase.

Temujin saw the chamber.

A nurse crying into her sleeve.

A little red-lit room.

A baby with dark bright eyes.

His eyes.

Those were his eyes.

Temujin could not breathe.

The infant ghost appeared in Ryūei’s arms.

They were his eyes.

But they were not on his face.

“That baby,” he said.

She had his eyes.

Mizuki bent over the child. Her hair had loosened. Her sleeves were stained. Moonlight lay red across the floor.

— Tsukiko, she whispered. Tsukiko, my child. Take this as your name before you die.

Tsukiko.

The name from the flag. That was— 

Temujin wanted desperately to look at Ryūei.

She did not look back.

The ghost baby stared down at the infant below with the curled brow of a weeping face.

The condors, following me all my life, and there were more than ever here.

The Moon Marble, blue as his mother’s eyes…

Bakuga whistled. “Wow. She’s something. That’s, like, anti-nirvana.”

I saw my own face and name drift one notch closer to the center. Ryūei came before me and watched me progress.

“She has your eyes.”

Someone Temujin could not see stepped from the shadow.

Someone Temujin couldn’t see stabbed the infant. It kept crying. They stabbed and stabbed again, until it cried no more. Then they ran.

“Four hours old,” Ryūei said. “The Dragon Princess, Heaven’s Vengeance… slaughtered like a sick dog.”

“The prophecy failed,” Temujin said. “But…”

Ryūei’s anger cracked the rocks.

“I was killed for nothing.”

“But… What happened to my mom? If that wasn’t me— if I’m not the Chosen One…”

The world around them trembled and the palace fell away into wasteland. All faces screamed and contorted into strange shapes. 

Mizuki ran weeping like a desecrated baby. The Emperor’s legions came. Some came in round-collared black war coats and lamellar cuirasses laced with red cord. Some came in helmets with cheek-plates and neck curtains and in three-eyed masks of lacquer and bronze. Some came on motorcycles armored in vermilion cowls and shrine-bell tassels and some on whining hover bikes with yellow warrant strips snapping under the chassis and some on horses plated to the muzzle in little cutely decorated scales and some on demon-steeds with smoking nostrils and sensor halos and brass bits foaming black at the mouth, and all of them, all of them, ready to fire compact bullpup carbines, stab-stab to death with dao-bayonets. All of them, faces twisting in horror and anger and panic, all of them ready to hunt the babykilling ruiner of heaven.

Two men came upon her, aiming their rifles at the fallen lady. Foot-to-neck, fist–to-spine. 

A young man offered Mizuki his hand.

—I came to steal treasures from the royal palace, he said, smiling like an idiot before an execution squad, and it seems I’ve found the biggest jewel of all.

Mizuki looked at her savior.

Temujin knew that look. He had seen his mother give it to his father in memory, in photographs, in the strange softness that crossed her face when Batu entered a room carrying firewood badly stacked.

That was him.

Batu Qiao.

Young, sly, and lean, wrapped in black garb and laced wristwraps. Both arms still on him. One of those arms, the arm he would lose, reached toward the fallen lady.

Mizuki recoiled with the same sneering lip she had once given low-class attendants. Another pair of soldiers approached like revolutionaries coming upon the besieged queen— she took the man’s hand and he pulled her onto his steed. He pulled a sword from hipside and slashed the offenders down, and the two rode off. 

Somewhere along the way, one of those laced-wrapped arms fell red in the grass.

“That was… My parents…”

The scene sank behind fog the color of funeral ash. 

Along a border road between ghost country and Makai, among pines left black in silhouette underneath a saturnine overcast, there meandered a little spirit. Pale orbs reached and pulled along the ground without the memory of limbs or their motion. It cried without greed, too faint to be heard by curious approaching fireflies. Air perturbations— less than breezes, less than breath— carried the fading shape. Black condors followed in uneven procession, fleeting shadows passing into the night. 

In soughing gusts and cold sunshine, it rippled and clutched air back to its non-shape; under cloudy nights, it wisped about letting out soft cries fainter than the drone of firefly wings, and this continued on, days on, dazed and liminal. It was not trying to live. It knew nothing of living.

Somewhere past the pines, where the stygian road thinned and the ground sloped toward a black lake, the spirit settled on a pinecone and did not continue. It held fast to the hard petals with all the strength left in its little ruin.

A foot crushed the pinecone, and continued onwards to a lake. 

The masked ogre took two more steps before stopping. He lifted the boot, turned it slightly, and saw the residual spirit-energy splattered on the sole in pale, angry flecks.

— Ouch! Oi! What’s this? Something burned my boot!

He had an old magic man gather the remnant from the charred leather, muttering and pinching and swatting at it until the spirit took the shape it had before its wandering.

Tsukiko cried out to the world again. 

— Another unwanted piece of trash from Human World. Never had one kill a boot before.

He seized the baby by one foot and held up a dagger.

— I’ll sell your heart for some gold.

Then the beast puked blood and dropped her. Another figure snatched the infant by the neck before she hit the ground. The ogre’s blood splashed over her withering face, a devil’s baptism. Temujin thought he saw a sword retract from the fallen ogre’s chest, but the hulking armored man who held the baby had no weapon drawn or sheathed.

It was the baby.

A sinister shadow-blade withdrew into Tsukiko’s little left hand.

The ogre stood again, dazed, slinking, bowing, begging, screeching, called back by the baby-sattva’s pudgy touch. Life had been shoved into him like an acidic enema into a corpse.

— This infant, said the demon holding her, is strange.

“The man holding me was Yara-Ravana, Demon King of the Svlic Mazoku,” Ryūei said behind Temujin.

He turned. She watched the vision with a face that did not change, yet he recognized something in it. Fondness, maybe. Or a demon’s nearest cousin to fondness.

“Tsukiko lived without life, reborn as mazoku.”

Years folded into Makai years, strange and deep. 

Tsukiko wore the clan’s silver-and-green mazoku dogi before she had earned it. This mattered to demons. It mattered enough that envy sharpened into daily ceremony. They poisoned her food. They stabbed through her closed doors. They walked in while she dressed and refused to leave. They called her human trash, little corpse-brat, lucky pet, boot-burner, king’s foundling, pale palace maggot; they hated that she sat near Yara-Ravana’s knee by fortune while they had clawed for decades and centuries toward the same shadow.

Far from the Demon King’s hall, a skinwalker cornered her among the wet stones behind a shrine oven. He stretched his jaw and distorted himself into a drooling wolf-thing, all yellow teeth and laughter.

Ryūei said, “Even as a child, Tsukiko found tremendous pleasure in spilling her enemies’ blood. Their screams of terror and agony satiated her.”

Temujin saw the three-year-old Tsukiko standing over a red smear, holding the last crumbling pieces of the skinwalker’s skull in both pudgy hands.

Yara-Ravana came upon the ruins of his celebrated wolf-shifter and asked,

— Was this your doing, child?

She nodded, not knowing how to lie. Yara-Ravana kneeled by her side and said to her,

— You’ve sent too much river through too small a gate, child. You need only use five percent to slaughter such weak fools.

“He was to become the closest person to a father Tsukiko would ever have.”

Then Temujin saw little Tsukiko clutching her bleeding face as she stumbled to her knees before the Demon King’s elite minions.

Five cackling shapes stood above a four-year-old girl in ripped clothes: a baphometic wizard with jeweled horns; a spider-goblin with rings on every leg; a swivel-eyed rakshasa whose pupils never agreed; a punk-rock sadist with razors sewn into his jacket; a masked dominatrix with a silver crop and a voice like crushed glass. All of them laughed with silvery tongues.

Tsukiko shifted her foot. She lifted one unsteady hand, two fingers crooked. Her leg swept wide, wrong, unstable, childish.

Ryūei said, “The Demon King recognized Tsukiko’s horrible power and cultivated her for his own gain. He even taught her to laugh.”

The dominatrix scuttled backward against the wall and pulled at a vent. She pushed herself into the narrow space until the metal tore long strips from her shoulders. Her fingers dug into the grating and shredded down to bone. She screamed. She wailed. She begged. A hand grabbed her by the roof of her mouth and pulled off the top of her skull, jaw unhinging, skull cap tossed next to the punk’s fingers and one impaled rakshasa eyeball. What remained of her body dropped to the floor left dampened by gored mulch, five former bodies scattered, smothered, and covered in each other.

Tsukiko toddled from her bedroom and tugged a servant-boy’s robe, pointing peacefully toward the gore, pleading to come see the ‘snowman’ she made.

“Eventually, she slaughtered her father and his men. Not even she understood why, but she did not regret it.”

And so Temujin observed and saw the truth appear in a new vision, unembellished. ‘Slaughtered’ was a daughter’s diminutive. 

What was left of the Demon King hung badly from a crucifix, wrought out of a fallen giant’s bones, that rose out of a blood-marsh in the middle of a newly quiet stone temple. Little Tsukiko sat curled in the shadow of the dripping cross with her knees to her chest.

“The Demon King’s old rivals and subjects seized the chance to take his territory. Armies gathered.”

Xia, ronin, paladins, thieves, corpse-monks, clan deserters, ogre-captains, hungry cousins of men Yara-Ravana had ruined— all came upon the Svlic temple in their masses across the years. One by one, by ten, by one hundred, they entered Ghost Country with banners and torches, and one by one, by ten, by one hundred, they dropped and decayed from savage wounds.

“At first, Tsukiko fought for survival. Then out of joy. As long as she lived in Demon World, joy bled bright. Her girlish love of pretty things bloomed, and the prettiest things were red and black.”

Temujin saw the ten-year-old Tsukiko playing with shrunken— he assumed, hoped shrunken corpses. She arranged them in a tea circle around a cracked porcelain cup. Their little faces still screamed.

Demons fled through Ghost Country’s forests, first carrying pilfered jewels, then later carrying only panic after realizing where they had stumbled. One man crawled only surviving as legs, luckily enough spirit left to form a mouth in an unfortunate place, and told his tribe:

— Horrible! Some kind of monster haunts the border between Human World and Demon World. It looked like a little girl with a dragon’s shadow.

His comrades picked up their swords and charged into the woods.

“Tsukiko began to enjoy, in greater and greater rapture, the thrill of being challenged more than even the kill itself. The mazoku began to awaken. But she was never satisfied. As she meditated atop a mountain of sludge— the festering, fetid, rotting, putrid corpse-throne she earned in frenzied battle— she remembered her sin-borne name. All the killing wouldn’t satisfy her because it couldn’t. She was a child, demons her toys, blood her treat, and what she craved most was her mother’s milk spilled red.”

And so Temujin spoke, “You mean— our mom?”

She nodded. “Tsukiko wanted her mother. She wanted her mother writhing, wailing, vulnerable, in despair, helplessly pleading for the memory of Tsukiko’s mercy. Instead, she saw the woman living a new life, refusing to be shamed, and living with actualization greater than she would have known. All the ones who damned Tsukiko to Hell lived and laughed and loved, it made her SICK.”

The landscape shattered all around Temujin, and he would have fallen if standing were possible. Ghost Country’s trees lifted into the sky, twisted by rage until their forms rolled into spirals, mouths unable to become smiles or frowns, faces unable to hold one expression, the world itself becoming a nightmare-wall of incoherent patterns.

“The yūrei became an onryō. The onryō learned martial form. The martial form remembered its wounds. The Dragon Princess became the Dragon Shadow.”

Temujin turned. “So that’s it, then. That’s why all this is happening. World’s worst case of mommy issues.”

“She failed me,” Ryūei said as one of her black condors glided down and perched itself on a beckoning finger.

The vision showed Mizuki in Mina Town years later, simpler clothes, rougher hands, beauty dimmed by hunger and guilt. Batu Qiao loved her with his one surviving right arm and his whole foolish heart. He loved the foreignness in her, the courtly chill, the way she cut vegetables too finely for a farmer’s wife, the way her old arrogance survived even while she patched sleeves, the sad eyes, and the fanatical love. 

Then Temujin was born beneath an ordinary sky. 

No blood moon.

No omen.

No courtiers whispering through screens.

No violence.

No struggle.

No failure.

No sadness.

No expectations.

No prophecy.

No one from two nothings.

She turned. “The prophecy failed. Completely and absolutely.”

“Then why me?”

Ryūei stepped close.

“Because you lived.”

The answer entered him and found every place where he had ever enjoyed being alive.

“You inherited the house she built over my grave. You inherited the father who loved what was left of her. You inherited her second chance. You inherited the road. You defied fate and mocked even my worthless death!”

The palace, the bridge, the prayer flags, the baby, the court, Mina Town, the Southern Sea, Devil Fruit Mountain, Enekai smiling in sunlight with impossible strength, all of it turned slowly around him.

“You and your friends broke the Twelve Kings, and yet you couldn’t even do that right,” Ryūei seethed. “I have seen enough of the road to know that much. The prose of fate crawled around my corpse and was defiled by your will to power.”

Temujin looked at the infant in her arms.

“What do you want?”

Ryūei’s living face twisted.

“I wanted my mother’s life. I took it.”

The marble glowed. 

Blue like mother’s eyes.

Blue like mother’s soul.

The baby floated between them.

“I captured Mizuki’s dying soul in this Soul Gem. The years I should have spent as a silly schoolgirl, I spent dreaming of her wailing in my palm. I thought that would be enough.” Her voice choked for half a syllable, then hardened. “Nothing was enough.”

Temujin knew the answer before she spoke it, and hated knowing.

“Humiliating mother enraged me beyond words. So frail, as humans are. Consuming mother’s life energy strangled me in her failures. So bitter, rotten flesh. Killing mother disappointed me. Fleeting pleasure, like gold in a beggar’s hand.”

Her face had wrinkled and pulled into crags and sharp lines; her eye had rolled towards him, bloodshot. 

“You can’t do this to someone. You— I didn’t take your life.”

“No.”

Her eyes burned hotter than the onryō cold, hotter and crazier, almost alive.

“You took its place.”

“And for that, you’re gonna kill your brother? You can’t let me live for you?”

There was a motion on her face that could have become a snarl the same way she could have become a woman. It died. Her face smoothed into a smile and that smile opened into a girlish grin.

“Fight me to the death.”

“Eight!”

Temujin gasped, looking to find who spoke the number. 

Ryūei’s form blurred.

The infant ghost lifted its forehead from Temujin’s chest.

He awoke.