As lovely as the forest was to him, there were things and happenings that took a great deal of effort to ignore. Suna didn't mind the occasional flood, influx of bugs, or even when he found the occasional mostly-eaten animal carcass; that was all part of the natural world. Rain filled rivers and caused flooding, that was fine; he knew how to climb trees and find high ground. Bugs reproduced and grew in cyclical patterns; the cicadas were nothing more than a nighttime chorus to put him to sleep. Decaying animals was simply part of the ecological cycle; the scavengers would clear it up eventually. With those things, Rintarou was fine, even if they might scare other people. The screams, however, those screams were not something that he could explain so easily.

Ungodly high-pitched shrieks; they rang throughout the forest in the otherwise calm of dusk and dawn. There was no guarantee that they would sound on any given night, but there was also no guarantee that they wouldn't. They were shrill and airy, like the final harrowed cry of a brutally injured person. Sometimes they were short, only a few seconds; other times, they lasted for minutes. They never sounded at night, or if they did, they never woke Suna, only when the sun was halfway on the horizon.

There was a rational explanation, of course, there had to be. Right? They were foxes, Rintarou decided. If not foxes, then rabbits. The brightly coloured canids screamed instead of growling; Suna had experienced that firsthand. Although, none of the foxes that had screamed at him before sounded quite like the dawn and dusk screams, but maybe those were just a pair of especially strange foxes having a screaming match. Maybe the screams were from the gold and silver fox duo, the one that always followed him. They were off in colouration, so why not in noise? Surely that was the answer.

If it wasn't the foxes, Rintarou supposed it could be rabbits. They also screamed when injured; perhaps rabbits were most easily caught in dim lighting. Or maybe that was just when their primary predators hunted them. Suna remembered his one distant neighbor, Kita was it, who lived on a farm. He used to, still did for all Rintarou knew, raise rabbits, both for meat and show. Once, when they were in early elementary school, one of the does had gotten loose from its hutch and Suna had helped Kita capture it again. He had been more than ready to run down a rabbit, fully confident in his speed, but Kita had failed to warn him of their horrendous noises. When Suna grabbed the skittery rodent in his vice grip, it bared its teeth in a horrid grimace and screeched like a banshee. The night screams weren't quite like that either, but he had only been ten at the time, so he might've remembered wrong.

After the first few weeks of the screams, in which he was rather horrified, Suna rationalized and moved on. The screams were ignorable after a while, no more unusual than the cicadas and fireflies. Still, as numb to it as he grew, he didn't like to dwell on their origins. Rintarou had an explanation, one that mostly made sense, and he couldn't help but to feel that to search beyond that would only bring him trouble. It was like the temple, he figured, follow the set boundaries and there would be no problems. Besides, if they weren't animal cries, then Suna really, really, didn't want to know. Some things were better left unquestioned.

Rintarou was not good at not asking questions. He never investigated the screams, he wasn't stupid, but after the fox's offer, the screams seemed to ring louder. He could never pinpoint where they came from. The direction seemed to change each time, and it wasn't relevant to location, he had checked. Sometimes they were from the north, then south another night, then east, west, sometimes they came from everywhere. When he stayed in the graveyard, they sounded as if they came from the temple, but when he was there, sounded from the graveyard. Sometimes, when he was simply wandering around and lost track of time, it could sound extremely close or sometimes from the mountain across the way. The foxes or rabbits might change location, but there weren't nearly enough of either to explain the nights when the screams were all-encompassing. Suna knew it was better to leave well enough alone, but he couldn't keep from wondering.

The pitch of the screams varied from night to night. Sometimes Rintarou could almost believe they were the voices of men, other times women and children. Occasionally, they were guttural and animalistic as they should be. Morbid as it may sound, Suna preferred the nights when the screams sounded like people and animals. The other option was so chilling that it often froze him dead in his tracks, and then sent him running for the safety of the quartz fountain. Rarely, very rarely, the screams sounded inhuman. Not like an animal and not like anything else Rintarou had ever heard in his life. The cries would be low and grating, somewhere wretched cross between nails on a chalkboard, a disaster siren, and the wet ripping of flesh from bone. Once, when the inhuman screams had dominated for three nights in a row, he had left the forest and casually mentioned them to Kita. The now young man had looked at him with joint concern and fear; it did nothing to soothe Suna's ever-growing tension. Crazy forest boy indeed.

On those nights, when the screams were loud and inhuman, Suna would curl up tightly in the fountain and try not to cry. He didn't know why the noise distressed him so; the sound was cacophonous, sure, but the instinctual fear and despair it instilled in him was not normal. Rintarou, usually fearless and unwavering, felt true terror the first time he heard the inhuman variation of the screams. In the fountain he would hold himself tight, conserving heat even on summer nights, and silently whimper. Each noise he made only heightened his panic and paranoia, creating an ever-growing feedback loop. Nothing was ever worse than those dusks and dawns; they would sour his mood for the next week after.

The screams didn't sound every evening, only occasionally. There was no discernable pattern to the cries, at least not one that Suna could find. Sometimes they would start and end randomly, minutes, hours, even days apart. Sometimes the intervals changed often, other times they would remain consistent for weeks on end. The type of screams changed frequently as well, unrelated to the timing and duration. Earlier on, when Rintarou was younger and unused to tuning out the more unseemly parts of the woods, he had tried to record data on the screams. He kept a little green notebook and wrote everything down as a scientist might, but he quickly abandoned that idea.

Sometimes, if the screams were especially inhuman and common in frequency, Suna would find himself vying for ways to end the noise. Once he had wandered around the forest with a large stick, ready to chase away the noise's origin. Another time, he had supplied his own screams, adding the raucous. The only method that seemed to work was when he left offerings at the temple. It didn't always work, not how he wanted it to at least, but it was better than nothing.

When he felt it necessary, Suna would trudge up to the temple with a treat in hand, rain or shine. He would leave the offering at the altar and return to the fountain. Then he would wait. The changes took time if they came at all, and they only happened if he remained within the grounds of the cemetery. It could take hours, it could take minutes, the change was never instant. Sometimes, if he was unlucky, the screams would only dim in volume, or not change at all. It was the only option he had found that truly worked, though, so he kept at it, clinging desperately to the chance that it would work.

Once, and only once, the screams had been accompanied by words. They were faint and nearly incomprehensible, but Rintarou would swear on his life that they were there. He could only make out a few words at a time from them in that instance, each time seeming as if they were from a different person. He distinctly remembered three, and they chilled him to the bone. Please, mercy, and why were the ones he had recognized. Suna had not left in search of answers for that occurrence, strange as it may have seemed. For that instance, and that instance only, he made the assumption that the noises were human-made, and he had no desire to have a run-in with a murderer. Not that unknown and bodiless vices were entirely uncommon, but those were an entirely different beast.