Pouches are handy little things.
He keeps all sorts of things in them, and they are everywhere, hidden in corners and at the back of his closet.
He has one for trinkets he had collected as a kid running around on the streets – there are oddly shaped stones and pebbles, half of a straw, one of his baby teeth.
There's another that's already ripped, and he uses it to wipe the dust from the framed photo that he keeps by his bedside. A photograph from when he smiled and laughed differently, ignorantly.
He has one for his shuriken; he keeps at most five, stacked when he has time, jammed roughly in when he doesn't.
He always keeps one with him – it's tiny, woven with rough brown wool, sewn together with thick rope. Crude – it was made by someone who wasn't used to using his fingers and his hands, patching up a pouch just by memory of how one is supposed to look like. He straps it to his belt, tucked under his shirt, always, just so he won't lose it easily.
It is not particularly heavy, but it isn't light either.
He clenches it in his fist when the pain in his stomach is too much, or when the sultry voice whispers too loudly in his ear. He daren't close his eyes for fear of what he'd see.
It always works.
But this time he stares down at the dark marks swirling on his skin of his abdomen, slithering free from its coil and oozing off his skin. The seal that it forms breaks, and he only remembers tightening his grip around the pouch before the voice laughs, gentle and sweet. Then he is deaf and blind and when his friends trample through the forest, screaming and dying in the flames of the fox demon, they run by his pouch, forgotten, on the ground.
The heat that devours the trees, sweeping through the undergrowth, cracks open the ball of sand within the pouch, freeing a tiny glimmering ring and the memories it held.