"If you're not careful, they'll pluck the eye right out of your socket."
"If you're not wary, they'll reach into you and suck you dry."
"If you're not vigilant, they'll claw the heart right out of your chest."
Lightning and thunder precede Matoba Seiji's arrival into the world.
It's a midsummer's day with no sun in sight. Charcoal grey clouds obscure the sun and cast the world into darkness. Lightning fractures the sky and sets the world alight as roaring thunder follows offbeat. The wind shrieks as it whips the world into screaming, protesting motion. Raindrops thud onto roofs and splash into the ground. The uneven ground quickly becomes home to puddles, deep and shallow alike.
Nature is beautiful but terrible.
This weather, the clan members mutter, is an ill omen. And ill it is, for as a crackle of lightning resounds, Matoba Seiji slips out of his mother's womb as his mother's soul slips out of her hemorrhaging husk.
We are cursed, the Matoba clan knows.
Matoba Takahiro, the man who now calls himself father and no longer husband, blankly stares at the child nestled in his arms. Matoba Seiji, they had planned. There is a tuft of soft black hair topping his tiny, fragile head that draws Takahiro's eye (his other eye obscured by a protective spell). His hair shines brown in the sunlight trickling in through the hospital room's windows, in the same way that his wife's (his dead, decaying Rei) hair shines shined. Seiji has wide dark eyes and chubby cheeks.
Takahiro has a child and no wife.
His and Rei's marriage was no love match born of youthful passions and naïve wonder. Theirs was an arranged marriage between two exorcist clans. Exorcists with strong sight are a dying breed, hence their joining. The hope was to produce a child with equally strong or stronger sight. Their marriage was a conservation effort. But that did not mean that Takahiro and Rei did not grow to love each other.
They complemented each other and melded together in a comfortable, eventually loving relationship. His stern and stoic personality was foiled by her kindness and fierceness of spirit. The grace of his archery found its complement in her clever calligraphy of seals and spells. Her sweet laughter enhanced his quiet chuckles. The quietness of her beauty softened the harshness of his looks.
In each other, they found home.
And now all that is left of her is a slumbering newborn.
Takahiro cannot help but feel utterly alone and lost in the blinding white of the hospital lights.
"Tou-san! Tou-san!" a high-pitched voice squeals in delight. A wide smile dimples Seiji's chubby cheeks as he plows into his father's legs. "You're home!"
Takahiro grunts as the weight of his son impacts his legs. He carefully pries off Seiji's hands from his legs before picking him up in his arms, settling Seiji on a hip with an arm restrained around him.
"Hmm, I wonder what we learned about today with Nanase-san?"
"Youkai!" Seiji shrieks with the boyish glee usually reserved for poking at frogs and pretending sticks were weapons.
"Otou-san, why do you cover your eye all the time?" Seiji's small pudgy hand grazes Takahiro's winding eyepatch for emphasis. Takahiro catches Seiji's hand with his own, dwarfing his hand entirely.
"Ah, Seiji, always going straight for the hard questions." Takahiro cannot help but smile. Rei used to do the same thing—going straight for the jugular, right to the heart of the matter.
"Well, it goes like this: a few hundred years ago when exorcists were as common as the grass that dots the land, as common as the rocks that line the riverbeds, as common as the leaves that cling on the trees, there was a desperate Matoba clan head. And remember, Seiji, what does desperation make of men?"
"Desperation makes fools of men," Seiji recites with all the knowledge of a young boy taught by his elders and all the experience of a young boy kept cloistered from the world.
"Yes, desperation made this head a fool and this is why we leave him nameless for his shame. So it goes, that he was so desperate because a blight had spread from one village to another until it reached his village. Their crops all failed—rotted until the village smelled rotten-sweet. And so the village, as the all the other villages, began to slowly starve.
"As always in those times, help from the government was slow to arrive and so this clan head took it upon himself to revive his barren village, for you see, his beloved wife was with child. So weakened was she that he could bear the sight no longer.
"And so, as a man does, he resolved to make a deal with a rain youkai to purify their village. He journeyed into a nearby forest and found the youkai. The youkai agreed to purify the land on the condition that the head give up his right eye in exchange. The clan head agreed, for what is an eye to the loss of a wife and a child?
"Within a few days, the purifying rain began and washed away the blight from the village. In the place of these blighted crops, there grew new, unsullied crops that filled the belly of every man, every woman, and every child in the village. And so they rejoiced.
"Yet the clan head refused to give up his eye and so he fashioned a spell to protect his eye from this youkai. He then tried to exorcise the youkai away. When he failed, he then tried to seal the youkai away. When he failed, the youkai was, at this point, so enraged that it vowed to pluck every right eye of every male born to his line.
"And so here we are today, Seiji—me with an eye that I can never use and you so curious."
"Why don't we just…get rid of all the youkai?" A long-haired, sharp-faced Seiji inquires with an insouciant swiping motion of his hand.
"As in all things, we must keep a balance. The world is a scale. At one end, there is youkai. At the other end, there is humanity. To tip the scales in either direction is to lose all stability," Nanase lectures, sparing Seiji a narrow-eyed gaze through her glasses. "Additionally, a youkai has as much value as a human does as a tool for the clan." She favors him a smirk that Seiji returns impishly.
"Seiji-kun," Nanase-sun uncharacteristically murmurs as she kneels in front of Seiji, gap-toothed and ten years old. She strokes a shaking hand across his plump cheek and gazes into his wide reddish-brown eyes.
"Your father—" she begins tentatively.
"He's dead, isn't he?" Seiji knows from the pained crease near her eyes that he is right. His father is dead. As dead as the mother he has never met. Dead as in an empty shell of a body that decays and rots. (What will they do with the body? Is there even a body? Has it been swallowed whole? Ripped limb from limb? Outwardly pristine and inwardly ravaged? Bloody? Pale? Grey? Horrified? Tranquil? Accepting? Empty?)
He has been abandoned.
Seiji is twelve when Nanase-san introduces him to archery instructor Tanaka Kohaku, a Matoba clan retainer who was one of his father's peers (there are no peers, betters, servants in death, for death is the greatest equalizer of all). It is a beautiful spring day when they meet on the archery grounds. The sky is clear; the sun is shining; and the wind is gentle. It's early spring and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. In the air, their scent is weak and barely detectable.
In his petal-soft hands, Seiji holds a sleek wooden bow. "It's a recurve bow," Tanaka-san explains. "Requires less strength to use than a longbow." Seiji listens attentively and watches as Tanaka-san demonstrates proper form. "Keep your hands in the proper placement and rotate your elbow like this." The snap of the string and the hiss of each arrow Tanaka-san releases towards the circular target is strangely soothing.
"Once you master archery, then you will be able to do more than just hit a target. You'll be able to focus your spiritual energy into your weapon. You must know what it means to use a bow and an arrow. You must know what it means to be an arrow, swift and deadly depending on intent.
"How much energy do you imbue into it? An arrow is not a rock—a blunt instrument that you can blindly distribute energy into it. An arrow is not your hand—an instinctive weapon that you can channel your energy through. The arrowhead is only a small portion of the arrow itself. Do you imbue the energy into the shaft, the arrowhead, or into both? Or, perhaps, into the bow itself? Will you build your own bow? Build your own arrows? With your own two hands? Will you chant your sutras and spells as you fire? As you build your weapon? This, Matoba-san, I cannot teach you."
"You are now Matoba-san," Nanase-san firmly states. "You were the heir and now you are the head of the Matoba clan. In all things, you represent us. You will either bring us glory or shame. All things you do will be to further the Matoba clan. You will carry out the duties of the Matoba clan. We are exorcists here to protect humans and to keep the worlds in balance. You are our emissary to the youkai, to the ignorant, to the exorcists.
"And you will do all this with one eye, Matoba-san." Her strong, wrinkled hands wind a protective cloth over his right eye.
For all that he has gained, Matoba cannot help but feel a sense of loss tightening his chest and throat (he has lost more than his eye, he knows for certain).
Every afternoon, Matoba practices his archery. He uses no armguard. "You will learn from the pain of your mistakes," Tanaka-san had decreed. In his early days, when mistakes were aplenty, his right arm had been streaked red and blue with welts and bruises from the string of the bow. As time increased, he was able to use a greater draw weight and able to increase his distances.
The whoosh of an arrow slicing through the air is heady; the thud of an arrow hitting the target is satisfying. There is a serenity to archery. Repetitious movements and soothing sounds lull Matoba into tranquility. Archery is his way to unwind, to unspool his soul from his burdens.
"Do you see the kimono, Matoba-san?" Nanase-san murmurs as they draw closer to the meeting house. "Hanging off that tree?"
Matoba follows the direction of her eyes. The dome-like shape of the maple tree is home to a dangling kimono. The fabric is a deep crimson with floral patterns embroidered—stunning chrysanthemums in gold and sprawling peonies.
"Tell me, Natori-kun, what did you see?" Matoba husked with a foxlike smirk flitting over his face.
"Did you see it, Natsume?" Did you see what I see? Are you like me? Are you better? Are you worse? (Am I alone? Will I still hear echoes with every step I take? When I knock, will it be hollow? Open up, open up.)
Binding each of his youkai has been an…interesting process.
Matoba is glad that he has gotten into the habit of growing his hair.
Sequestered in a desk compartment is a weathered picture of a man and a woman. The man is taller than his counterpart. His tallness is amplified by bulk of his broad shoulders, trim waist, and the muscles that came from hard use. His short black hair gleams in the sunlight blue. His features are harsh and masculine with only a touch of softness—the barest of smiles curving his mouth. His eyes are dark crimson-brown irises with his pupils blown wide in the sunlight. It's summer.
The woman is finely featured with a slim build overshadowed by the large swell of her stomach. A wide smile splits her face, lighting her up from the inside out. Her hair is a dark silky cascade that shines brown in the sunlight. Her eyes are wide and dark enough that iris and pupil are indistinguishable. Happiness creases her eyes.
On the back of the picture, an elegant hand had inscribed "8 months!"
Seiji looks at the picture twice a year.
So close and yet so far.
"I wrote an uncharacteristically long letter. Really, I wonder where on Earth it could have gotten to. But anyway, if you didn't read it, then that is that...perhaps this is fate," Matoba muses.
Reaching out to others was never a skill he was taught. Born and raised in the Matoba estates, he was only groomed to be the clan head. And, oh, how he excels.