And that seed, it grows all day
And that seed, it grows all night
And our veins are intertwined
"Wake up, Natsume Takashi. Wake up." Soft and sibilant, the voice slithers into Takashi's dreams. It drags him into wakefulness, as a fishing line drags a fish into the air, abrupt and gasping.
Takashi wakes up. His eyes snap open and devour the sight in front of him: hair, dark and loose; eyes, oily iridescence and sharp; mouth, thin and smiling; face, pointed and strange; and body, lightly muscled and lean. It is the Erlking in crown and robe. The moonlight transforms the planes of his face into inhuman divinity. It refracts off the silver dangling from his horned crown. He glows with an internal and external luminescence that he had lacked before.
Memories flood Takashi's mind. The recalled terror of the chase floods his body with adrenaline, oiling the gears for flight. Outmatched, his muscles tense to no avail.
He cannot move.
His breathing speeds up. Puffs of air continuously condense in the cold air. A shudder of goosebumps cascades down his form. His breath stutters. His heart skips a beat, jarringly so. The silence of it all does nothing to console him.
Takashi forces his limbs into motion once again—it makes no difference. The movements are aborted by his bindings. He is encased in branches and vines. Tiny buds bloom from them, soft and sweet. Their nectar slides down his open throat. He cannot scream.
The scent of wisteria smothers him in its fragrance. A vine of it crowns him, its weight light on his head and drooping in his peripheral. It moves gently in his hair, entwining itself further. There is horror in the unnaturalness of its undulations. It's alive, so wrongly alive. And he can feel the bark of a tree press up against his naked back, as if it wants to swallow him whole, scrape by scrape.
Then, and only then, when Takashi is consumed by panic, the Erlking speaks. His voice crawls into Takashi's mind—a low croon wrapping around the outskirts of his mind. It resounds; it echoes. His mouth does not move. It just smiles with a mouthful of far too many teeth and darkness so complete it sucks him in.
"I can sense your fear and desperation... it's only natural... the prey must never let down its guard, not even for a moment... in the presence of its predator."
"Please," Takashi gasps, "why am I here? Where are we? Let me go…" Tugging at his bonds once again does him no good. He glances down at the gently waving buds of the branches that encircle his ankles. In that split second, a pale, long-fingered hand jerks his chin up. Golden eyes meet shadowy iridescence.
"Silly boy," he laughs—that soft, airy laugh that harkens back to their first meeting. "Where else? You are in my woods, as I had promised you."
The Erlking moves closer to him, hand still clenched around his chin. His forehead touches his—cool and smooth. Takashi breathes it in. The scent of wintergreen overpowers his senses. A cold gust of winter. Sharp and biting. Invigorating.
Yōkai are tricky beings but even they cannot make false bargains with the unwilling. Triumphant, he says, "I never agreed. You can't keep me here. Let me go."
The Erlking laughs, unlatching its hand and blessedly stopping their skin contact. "Perhaps if you were still human, I would be forced to return you."
Still human? Takashi is human. He's not anything else. What else could he be? His last memory is of passing out as Nyanko-sensei yowled up such a racket that he mentally cringes at this recollection. And, and if he even died, that wouldn't make him a yōkai, the only other option besides humanity.
"Ah, I see you are confused," the Erlking comments. Thanks for pointing out the obvious. Thanks for being cryptic. Thanks for kidnapping him. Thanks for tying him up. Thanks for being such a creep.
"My love," he says and Takashi rears back so fast, his head collides with the trunk behind him, "I told you your beautiful form enticed me. I ought to have been more accurate—it was your soul that sang to me." Oily hunger, reminiscent of fats dripping off cooked carcasses, illuminated the dark and deep depths of his eyes. "Such power! Ah, how could I resist. And to find it such a perfect complement to mine…what else could I do but free you of that shell of yours?"
"Free me? I'm still human. This…this is my body." How strange it is to contemplate his body as merely a human shell housing his soul. What an alien concept. A shell, as if it is so easily discarded in place of another. What sort of creature did the Erlking think he was?
"No, no, you and I, we have become a matched pair. I plucked that soul of yours right out of your body. I brought you home. I planted you deep in the earth. Such promise, such potential! You should thank your grandfather for that. And so you have bloomed. You are the land and the land is you. And so am I. Our veins are intertwined."
"Me, a yōkai?" Disbelief arches Takashi's brow and twists his mouth. In life, there is a certain sense of a rhythm—the beating heart, the shifting eyes, the inhales and exhales, the minute shift of muscle and sinew. In yōkai, in the Erlking, that rhythm is absent. Takashi breathes; his heart races; his eyes twitch; and his muscles shift. He can't be a yōkai. It doesn't make sense.
"You always had the potential, Takashi. I merely, hmm, nudged you along." The Erlking promptly begins to slice off the vines and branches off Takashi with claws that sprout from his long fingers. Those claws shine black in the moonlight. The vines and branches speed up the process by slinking away by their own volition. Takashi pauses in responding, overcome by the slithering movement of the flora.
"Ah, there it is. Look at yourself, Takashi. You shine!" The Erlking clasps his shoulder. A sudden rush of energy courses into Takashi. It is strangely dark and heavy. Coldness sluices through his veins. Yet, Takashi can feel a warmth inside him perking up in response. Standing stockstill, Takashi stares blankly at his hands. They glow golden—a warm radiance bathing even the Erlking in its glow. Gold and silver fade into each other.
"In all things, a balance," the Erlking murmurs, clasping golden hands into his own silver grasp. There is a hungry reverence in the shadows of his face. The moonlight distorts all things in the darkness. "I have waited so long for you, Natsume Takashi."
No, no, it can't be true!
And the neck her head's on is a tunnel of dawn
But darkness will come
But darkness will come
For sure, it's gonna come
"A celebration is in order," the Erlking muses to his captive audience of one. Takashi frowns silently, idly playing with the gold fabric of his silken kimono. He unwillingly perches on the arm of the Erlking's wooden throne. It was either that or his lap, which Takashi had vehemently contested.
"Come now, silence does not suit you. Nor is my patience endless." Takashi would say those words held a threatening undertone but honestly, it was more like an overtone—painfully obvious.
"A celebration for what?" Takashi asks, clipped and unwilling. Thoughts of escape linger on his mind, like algae floating atop a river. Humoring his captor is not one of his priorities, even if it would be better in the long run.
Takashi just wants to go home—be with Nyanko-sensei, his parents (and oh, the thrill he gets even now when he thinks of the Fujiwaras as his), and his friends (human and yōkai alike). He doesn't want to pretend anymore—to pretend that everything is alright and that he has nothing to lose. He has so much to lose that it's painful to contemplate never returning. But can he really return with the way he is now? A yōkai, of all things. Impossibly true. Has his human body been truly shed? Is his body cinders and ash?
"Why, our union, of course," the Erlking laughs. The faint taste of rotting fruit consumes Takashi.
"What union?"
"My, I would have thought you had realized by now! Do you not remember my promises, my confessions? I told you I would clothe you in gold, did I not? And who else but my consort would wear gold?"
"Consort? What…"
A grave look finally overcomes the Erlking's features, chasing away the dissonant serenity of his favored expression.
"It has been winter for far too long in my domain, Natsume Takashi. As my domain grows, so does its need for energy. I can no longer be both moon and sun, darkness and light, death and life. The balance…" he trails off as a grimace flickers across his face. A hundred years' pain unravels the perfection of his form. His skin stretches taut over his face, sharpening his cheekbones. Ductile metal revealed to be brittle ceramic.
"Winter," Takashi murmurs, dredging up the memory of his first meeting with the Erlking. "Was that why you lured out all those yōkai? Their deaths for your subjects' lives. You told me they were hungry…" Revelation unfolds itself in the way a flower bud blooms—slowly and painstakingly. All this talk of balance and to think it had merit.
"Now you understand. I do not kill idly. A true hunter kills for sustenance."
Rustling wings cut off Takashi's attempts at a reply. He angles his head away from the Erlking and watches a crow yōkai approach the throne. He bows before the Erlking and utters a deferential "my lord".
The Erlking watches the yōkai kneel with sharp eyes. He does not order him to rise from his obeisance. In the silence, the soft plop of falling liquid resounds. Moonlight trickling through the leafy canopy illuminates the redness at the crow's wingtips. The earth hungrily absorbs the dripping blood, leaving no evidence behind.
"Is that exorcist blood I smell?" the Erlking questions in a low gravelly tone that does not invite any answers.