A Dragon's Curse

9. Masanori

4

Masanori

Chittering creatures whizzed through the ginkgo trees behind Masanori as he ran.

Slits of moonlight guided him through the thicket. Branches sliced his arms, ripping his haori and covering him with stinging cuts. Fog leaked through the foliage, fanning from the thick underbrush. Strands crossed the path and locked Masanori in a nightmarish world of purple.

Crimson eyes peeked through the hazy canopy.

“Einu!” Masanori pressed a hand to the gash of his shoulder, courtesy of his horse when she’d bucked him off her back. He needed to find her before the Nightmare devoured them both. Mist pooled over the ground, obscuring any tracks Einu left in her flight.

Claws swiped at Masanori from above. Fabric tore when he spun to escape the creature’s hold. His sandal caught on a loose rock, and he buckled, tumbling through the underbrush. His naginata, Seishinito, went clattering to the side. He lunged for the weapon, fingers locking around air.

The yōkai hissed and leapt from the trees. Masanori rolled, hands locking around the blade’s shaft, and jabbed up. Black, steaming ichor leaked down the wood as he plunged it into the body of an ashy-blue monkey.

The creature swayed, limbs stretching and drooping toward Masanori as though its skin was melting. Violet pulsed beneath its fur. The creature growled, clawing for him with renewed fervour.

Slaying a yōkai immune to a regular weapon was as simple as invoking Goddess Shirashi’s power to finish the job—summon the correct element, and blam. Dead. Masanori had spent years trying to earn her favour, never earning himself a lick of ki. He’d been so desperate as to brute-force his way into a shortcut, gaining a bit of her ki by way of his tapper—the device he designed to let him access the energy hidden deep inside him.

His tapper hummed at his throat, linking with the identical metallic disc and sapphires mounted to his naginata. Seishinito sparked in anticipation. The monster dropped closer to Masanori’s face.

He did not call to the ki at his disposal. He would never rely on the Goddess again.

A darker power flickered inside him, as purple as the fog drowning the forest.

With a roar in his throat, the energy burst upward, incinerating the monster’s flesh and hair. The sulphuric scent invoked intrusive memories of similar gore. Masanori tossed the screeching creature aside, and it thumped against a nearby boulder. Hot liquid gushed over his hands, and he was back in that room of death, kneeling in a pool of Aihi’s blood.

A horse screamed in the distance, disrupting the scene before it unfolded.

Masanori scrambled to his feet and ran toward the sounds of hungry demons. He tightened his hold on Seishinito. He would kill every last one of them, and eventually, every yōkai loyal to the Goddess for what they’d done to him.

He splashed through ankle-deep sanguine pools, the stickiness coating his feet and squishing between his toes. A decapitated head watched him, propped on a nearby rock. Masanori kept his gaze forward. There was too much death, and if he lingered too long, he feared he would get pulled into it, too. Just keep looking ahead. Find Einu. Then keep running.

They would find relief from this madness. Giving up wasn’t an option, not when Masanori’s family had given up on him. He was the only one who cared about his survival now. And he would find the end of the Nightmare.

Ahead, a dozen of the apelike creatures swarmed Einu, several hooked onto her flanks and mane. She galloped in wild circles, her screams growing weaker. Red streaks slicked her grey coat.

“Get off her!”

He stabbed the yōkai, and it burst into a cloud of steaming scarlet and purple mist. Fog lingered around the remaining creatures but, all at once, the coils froze midair. Masanori blinked. The haze flew back into the trees, ejecting him from the Nightmare’s hold.

Seishinito impaled the empty space. Einu whinnied in alarm as the blade streaked past her. She twisted away, circling around him. Verdant ginkgoes glittered in the moonlight, and he breathed in the damp earthiness of the forest after late rainfall. Fresh air, not laced with copper and the rotting dead, a scent he hadn’t indulged in since leaving his home a whole ten days—a jun—ago.

Was any of this real, or another trick of the mind? Masanori had been trapped in the world of violet and crimson for so long that he couldn’t tell. His head spun in circles of uncertainty.

Einu nudged his shoulder. He scanned the canopy before scratching her ears and then ran his hands along her side in search of wounds.

The way she’d screamed before, that couldn’t have been his imagination. But she had nothing more than a few scrapes, not deep enough to be claw marks. He pressed a fist to his forehead.

Masanori couldn’t trust his own senses to tell reality from Nightmare. But whether trapped in the Nightmare or in an illusion of fresh air and autumn trees, he was real. Alive and breathing. So was Einu. He latched onto those two facts and held them close. If they were to survive this, it would be together. They were lost deep in the Silent Hills in search of the Seika Shrine. If he was cursed, the kami there could heal him. Or so he hoped.

He hefted Seishinito, pausing when he glimpsed the black streaks on the blade.

Demon blood.

Masanori threaded Einu’s reins around his fingers. The creatures hadn’t been a simple construct of the haze. They were real. The Nightmare wasn’t just a figment of his worst fears, created to torment him. It was present in the world, interacted with his surroundings.

He didn’t remember much about the time he spent trapped in the warlock library with Aihi and Hidekazu, only caught glimpses in his nightmares. Aihi as the empress, a tyrant. His family dead at her hands. Her dead at his. They were his memories, as much a part of him as growing up with a family that had discarded him like nothing.

Rustling sounded in the trees. “Can’t you smell him?”

Masanori scanned the canopy and hanging vines. Movement caught his attention, and he noticed the violet wisps hovering between the highest branches.

“Who’s there?” he said.

Layers of the fog swirled away, opening the sky to a vortex of plum streaks and a pair of massive crimson eyes. Bloody moons, they were, staring down at the forest. Masanori backed into Einu, and she snorted, pushing him away.

A shadow hung behind the figure in the sky, framing them with a rack of twisted antlers.

He recognized this monster, even if he didn’t know its name.

“You,” Masanori said.

The creature did not seem to notice Masanori, keeping its attention trained on something far in the distance. Rows of sharp fangs glinted from beneath the shadows.

Of the few things Masanori remembered from the Nightmare, this monster had never left his deranged mind, not since it had appeared during his endless cycle of butchering Aihi. Masanori’s hands were slick with her blood. Seishinito slipped in his hand, and he struggled to keep his grip on the naginata.

“Fulfill your purpose. Fulfill your Calling. See us. Help us, or your next prison will be far worse than this one,” the creatures had whispered in his ear.

And yes, they had released Masanori from the endless cycle of murdering Aihi. But now he was trapped in the Silent Hills, a different kind of Nightmare made reality. How was he supposed to help anyone? How was he supposed to help himself?

Lavender threads brushed against his arms. He welcomed them, letting them coil up his biceps and merge with the hint of darkness inside him. This creature needed to die. And at his hand, it would.

The yōkai’s silhouette shifted. “Finally, you come. How long must I wait when you are the one in search of favours?”

“Now, now, so impatient, see?” Another shadow coalesced far above, plum-coloured eyes blaring like malevolent suns in the discoloured sky. “Our deal, struck, all very clear, much for you, much for me.”

The appearance of the goatlike face and his grating voice left Masanori scrambling to keep up. He lurched, sliding as he tried to climb onto Einu’s back, urging her onward.

Death followed him wherever he went—a jun with no company but Einu, blood, and corpses.

And now, looming over him, were both of the reasons why: Lacotl and the monster from his Nightmare.

“I am tired of coming here only for you to turn me away,” the yōkai said. “What is the point of this, keeping yourself in chains, when your freedom would do better for us all? It is time for you to come back.”

“Prison, ah,” Lacotl said. “The princess is much fun, thinking she is so smart, so safe. Soon, what I need, she will bring. And for good, I will leave, and take the last ehecoatl home with me.”

“I care little for your shishajya pet. Kuro Hana must become whole again; she is the only one willing to risk breaking our curse. Where is the boy?”

“Wait, wait, wait and see.”

“If you keep me much longer, you will find yourself scheming alone. I will find him on my own if I must. The Nightmare reeks of him. How hard can it be?”

“Alone? No, silly kawama, alone is not—Oh.” Lacotl’s face shifted in the clouds. “Oh, you are right, I smell him, yes... so close, he is, come!”

Masanori broke into a small clearing where, for the first time, he observed the yōkai—the kawama—and Lacotl in full view. The kan’thir’s silhouette flickered in the screen of fog, glaring directly at Masanori. Next to Lacotl hovered the kawama, with thick corrupted coils twisting around its head.

Every smell and sound came into focus as he neared them. The whine of creatures in the forest. The crunching leaves beneath Einu’s rapid movements as she hopped over fallen logs and around trees. The sour, putrid scent of the Nightmare. Tainted mist settled inside him; he was, as much as Lacotl and the kawama, a creature of darkness, void of the Goddess’ love and power.

And the darkness in his blood called him to them.

“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.” Masanori held his naginata high. “And then this will all be over.”

Lacotl grinned. “Welcome, young master. We’ve been waiting for you.”

“You should hav—”

A clawed shadow hit Masanori. Fangs snapped for his jugular. He twisted, and the creature gnawed his shoulder instead. Einu screamed when another yōkai jumped from the grass. She thrashed and bucked, throwing the monster away, and Masanori from the saddle.

Masanori landed, glimpsing Lacotl and the kawama one last time before his head whipped into a rock and the world went black.

Amethyst leaves and fog and moon-burnt sky spiralled above Masanori. Glistening intestines swayed like hanging vines in the shadows. They vibrated in place with the movement of the yōkai in the trees. He blinked, but this time, the gruesome image didn’t disappear. They couldn’t be real, and yet the demons pinning him to the forest floor were real enough for him to feel their jagged teeth tearing at his flesh.

He writhed, trying to topple the creatures huddled over him. They hissed and sputtered, and Masanori tossed aside one of the apelike monsters, only for another to descend from the canopy. He whacked a fist against a skull. A knee below a chin. Snapped a short, fragile arm. More of the creatures came. They came until he couldn’t lift his arms or legs at all.

This was the end for him, the fool who ran off into the wild, thinking a horde of yōkai could be no worse than his family.

He wasn’t ready to die, to become another body in a landscape of death.

“Lacotl. I won’t l-let you...” The words were a mere vibration in his throat, barely birthed before they were silenced.

Each drop of blood Masanori lost to the grass worked to drain the last of his energy. He demanded his arms and legs to move, but his body disobeyed him.

One demon after another claimed him for a meal. Masanori had thought to beat his father at his own game by running away; losing the Genshu name wasn’t a punishment if he didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t a punishment to lose his family if he left them first.

He had thought that his family’s proximity to the Nightmare—the memories of them mutilated and bloodied at Aihi’s hand—were responsible for conjuring the demons hiding in the shadows. Leaving them should have cured him.

A witless dream. Though the Nightmare hadn’t succeeded at eating Masanori alive in the warlock library, it would take him now.

You better not come back.

Hidekazu’s last words to Masanori. They echoed in his mind, as clear as the night Hidekazu had said them. Now, Masanori couldn’t come back. He would join Kansai, his former teacher, in the ranks of the dead before he had a chance to ponder how Lacotl was so far from the Cedar Palace at all.

Masanori opened his eyes, finding himself transported from the reality of his death and into another, one of equal brutality.

Crismon caked his hands, his arms, the shard of glass in his hand. Aihi lay beneath him, her abdomen gushing rivers. “Ma... sa...” she said. “I thought... I thought I meant something to you.”

You did, Masanori wanted to say, you did, before you betrayed me, before you slaughtered thousands, before you murdered my family.

But the words never came, and his muscles continued acting without his consent, stabbing and stabbing until he cut his hands to the bone and he healed and she healed and everything started over again.

This memory weakened Masanori’s struggle. He deserved this, to be eaten alive by these monsters. They were reflections of himself. He shuddered with the dissonance of both his realities—him lying here in a pool of his own blood, a pool of Aihi’s blood, his flesh hewed off by rabid yōkai.

Lilac fog belched around him, melding his nightmares and reality together. The voices of the spirits that plagued him whispered in his mind: “You will depart this Nightmare, but these memories will haunt you forever. And through them, you will see. See us.”

Masanori shut himself off to the world, and everything turned to speckles of grey as he lost his will to fight. He gave in.

The haze refused to release him from torment.

“No, no, no, not so easy, little Genshu.” Lacotl’s voice floated in the void of Masanori’s mind. “My friend needs you, he does.”

Masanori thought that the sound of the kan’thir should send him into a fury, but he just felt tired. Tired of Lacotl’s taunts, of playing a never-ending game, of living in a world of madness and despair, where everything he thought he knew had been wrong. He wanted to sleep.

“Call your Goddess, yes? Disbeliever, wretch, xaortl.”

“I’d...” Masanori choked on his own blood. “I’d rather d-die.”

Lacotl cackled, a sound of sheer delight. “Figured it out, hm? Good. Die, you would, with her watching. Your family has served, but she does not love you, not anyone.”

“Kill me.”

“Kill? No, no. Alive, you are needed. For all your family has done, you will pay. Each ehecoatl lost. Murderers.”

No one needed to tell Masanori that the Goddess didn’t care. If she did, she never would have let him witness the Nightmare. But the rest of Lacotl’s statements became jumbled in Masanori’s head, and he accepted his death, willing it to come quicker so Lacotl could not extend this torment.

The nearby trees rustled. Blazing orange light shot from behind the branches, obliterating yōkai still arguing over the scraps of his body. “Begone, fiends!”

The words echoed in Masanori’s mind, covering him with dark, unwashable stains. No matter how hard he scrubbed, the scarlet remained, leaking over his face, his hands, the world around him.

And so, when the creatures screamed, their agony bounced against rocks and trees, and he screamed, too. The sound was hollow, like him, for he was gone again, trapped in the memories that haunted him. Another flickered before him.

“I am sorry for the grief you endured at my hand, Masanori. You should resent me.” His grip on Masanori’s shoulder loosened. “But one day, you will also learn to thank me. No power comes without cost. Remember that.”

“I resent you... I resent you... I’ll...” Masanori mumbled, the words growing fiercer as the memory peeled away, layer by layer, returning him to the present. “No... let me die. Why? Why did you come for me again?”

In the haze of, not purple, but gold, a figure raised a hand. Masanori flinched at the gesture, expecting the man from his Nightmare. A woman commanded the fog to part around her. Flames licked the forest floor as she walked, waving behind her like four billowing tails. Her eyes and hair like sparkling tiger lilies.

“I am sorry, love. I am not the one you expected.” She burned brighter than the sun. “Rest now.”