Sevenfold
I.
For as long as there have been people, there has been love.
For as long as there has been love, there has been life.
For as long as there has been life, there has been death.
– No wait. Scratch that. There must have been the first death. Where did that come from? –
– The first death came from love, right? Yeah, there we go. –
For there to be death, there must have first been life.
For there to be life, there must be love, which can beget hate, which can beget violence, which can beget ANYTHING.
But what about love and death? Do those two things have anything to do with each other?
雨生
The hand scribbling these words moved with slow, tight, deliberate grace. The characters which formed the words were thin, large enough to read but never wasting space. The fresh binding smelled of pulp, so fresh and new that it smelled like the grass, bamboo, and trees that grew somewhere beyond the door of the storehouse. He had not closed the door very well. The night air was thick with unseasonably warm moisture. The humid air caused a tightness in his chest, making it hard to breathe.
Beyond the door, there was a worn patch of ground. Beyond that, there was a field of grass, leading up to the house that stood on the property. It was an empty house, too big for him to do his work. This work, his final work as a son. It had to be, because he knew...
The house had become his because his father had acquired it, a business transaction that had been difficult from overseas. This land was quite closed off from outsiders, his father had told him. You must take care, his father had told him. If it had not been for the unusual state of this land called Fuyuki this year, such a house would not have been available to him at all. It would be sold back at the end of this affair, his father had told him.
His father had entrusted the handling of that half of the quiet transaction to his son, to be taken care of as soon as the last sacrifice had been made. When he had harnessed the power of the blood spilled out upon the ground to summon the greatest vengeful spirit his family could ever hope to hold in their thrall, to be in service to, he would wait three days for the dust to clear. It was never wise, his father had told him, to go into the presence of others while the mark, while the blood, remained upon his skin. When three days had passed, he would go back across the river and find the broker in town. He would sell the house back, letting the land be washed clean of his presence. He would disappear. He would go home.
He was his family's living son. This would be easy for him.
All of those things he had carried with him from the continent, to this island where the ritual was to take place. He had been prepared in his family's art all his life, knowing that it must be held with the utmost secrecy. He could carry himself like a traveler, he could carry himself like a stranger, he could smile at anyone while nothing in his eyes betrayed the cool center of wrath, of anger, of blood owed to another. He should try, his father had said, to never carry himself like a criminal.
One month ago, when the moon had been as full and bright as it was tonight, he had come to Fuyuki. He had smiled as he had hauled his few belongings into the house with the free, easy help of his friendly carriage driver. Leaving two wooden trunks and a satchel in the center room of the house, he had walked with the driver back out to his carriage and his horses. He waited for a moment before fishing into the small pouch at his side. From his place on the ground, he had held up an offering of several coins to the carriage driver, who pleasantly waved them off.
This had not been surprising to him. His father had taught him to expect such kindnesses, and to accept them graciously. With a bow, he had turned and gone back into the house. When it had become entirely silent, he had begun to unpack his things, hauling some of the contents of one of the trunks to the storehouse across the yard, where he now sat. He had needed to lighten the load to drag the trunk here on his own. The weight of chains was heavy and too much to carry alone.
Presently, he tried to remember where he had been in his writing. He frowned at the first page, written like a note to someone he knew. Written like a note to a friend. His eyes lifted up, surveying the dark storehouse, cast in shadows of purple and blue, the orange glow of a lantern doing little to brighten the scene. In the dark, the shadows and reflections of chains alike looked black or sickly gray, like tar. They hung from up high, coiled around rafters and positioned to a central point, over an empty space where basins or jars could be placed.
He stood up, as if drawn in by a rattle only he could hear. His movements were fluid, confident, approaching the network of chain links ended in hooks like a large cat seeking its prey. He reached over his head, his face held calm, placid, almost innocent in its gaze. He tugged smoothly down to draw one of the thick, sharp, refined hooks to center in front of his face. He turned it back and forth, examining its angrily sharp, perfectly pure, bloodless tip.
Without any change in expression, he flattened his hand until his palm was taut and a shade of reflective white. He touched the hook to his hand, hesitating only once as it felt cooler than he expected on this humid night. Then he pressed in, changing nothing as he made a cut at a diagonal, just blood-flow deep, halfway across his palm. It cut across several of the lines present there, and he wondered what that meant.
He let go of the chain when he felt the stinging from his skin start to catch up with his mind, with the flow of living red that began to trickle down across the rest of his pure, unscathed, barely calloused palm. He folded his hand into a fist, feeling the mismatched halves of skin rub against each other. They would yet heal. The blood tried to pool and press and seep through his fingers, but he went back to the book to look at its next blank page. He had to learn what to write now, on his own.
He knew one thing for certain. He had to write it down, because he was never going home.
- - -
Past tense? What is past tense? This story is an attempt to learn to tell more with less prose density. We'll see how it goes. Thank you to You, who has helped me with lore, ideas, and Japanese characters.