Startled, Kanae Kochou woke up in an unfamiliar bed. Little by little, she recalled what happened before she fell asleep: Giyuu had come to their house; they had played together; their talk under the stars, them being attacked … the end of the world … what she saw on the way out. She groped in her breast pocket for her watch and held it up to light.

08:17. If her memory was of midnight, she had slept for about that time: but her head throbbed like a clenched fist, and she had to make a great effort to keep her eyes open.

There was a cup of water on the nightstand next to her. Kanae took it without thinking and saw the bed beside hers over the edge of the glass while she drank. At once she descended the medical cot and fell to its side. She held the corner of the blanket between her thumb and index finger, and as if picking a flower, uncovered the sleeping body silently.

It was Shinobu below. Dull with relief, Kanae sat with her back against the bed and her head between her knees. She watched her feet, and it was not long before the image blurred.

For all she knew she was its thirteen–year old victim. Uncertain how long she had cried, Kanae saw reflected in her slow–flowing tears the trespasses of the night before: going out, her mother's head split against a floor recess … they had not let her see her father, but vocalised his hanging body in the kindest way a child could understand. And Shinobu knew nothing of it yet. Kanae sunk, and wept till dry.

Afterwards, she took first note of where they were. It was no place they knew. Beds like hers and Shinobu's crossed from one end of the room to the other, and Kanae approached a cabinet of civilian medicine placed against the wall, but she noticed the excess purple of wisteria tonics, and the spider lilies in formalin. She turned into the wooden hall and began down there. What was now unravelling itself as a sanatorium was deserted, but kept free of dust by a tireless hand, and the light filtering through the linen curtains transformed the oily plank floor into a golden eddy. Passing rooms that now had one or two groaning patients in them, the sound became clearer. Kanae rounded a final corner and reached the end of the snaking hall, and outside was an ivy garden that coiled around cedars like pythons and seemed, to Kanae, an anchor that hooked the soaring sky with gravity below. A bamboo fountain was there, tipping slowly. Water rushing somewhere near. Kanae turned around and looked at the nameplate beside the entrance.

JAPANESE DEMON SLAYERS
Medical Faculty – West Honshu Theatre

If she were on Honshu, then she had crossed the channel overnight, and by imperceptible means. But the heading above was the greatest revelation, demon slayers; she had heard the name before, and as it came back to her, not only from yesterday.

"If this is where I am, then maybe there's a chance," Kanae murmured. "I guess I'd do anything to find out more, no matter how daring!"

She lowered herself down the last few metres of gravel path and picked the direction a wordless sign pointed to. Tōrō lanterns tall as her mottled that vague forest road, but it became whole again and she reached a clearing of low yellow bamboo and persisting ivy.

A house much like hers appeared, but humbler further, and desolate – a faux pond afront was contaminated with frog–green algae. She passed it and entered. It smelled like old tea in there, and every window had been curtained so to let hardly any light in. What little permeated through illuminated artefacts, ceramic and clay, columned on varnished tables against the walls, and Kanae thought them beautiful: they might have been tossed from the inventory of heaven. She dared not hold any and reached the sitting room, which was more spartan. Then, above the gelatin silence, she heard the wailing.

Kanae's paramount instinct was to flee, but instead she crouched, then held her ear to the direction of the noise: left, and she fastened herself and went there. The wail died but it did not take long to find the pinpoint. She approached a paper door that glowed light through a crack, and feeling drawn, she pressed her body against it and looked inside.

Since dim antiquity it has been an image of women of every caste and of every culture; an image of pedigreed acceptance of fate's hegemony; an image that never failed to inflict on even the most steel–hearted the sorrow, the dying hopes, and the intoxicating enrapturement of grief: the image of the dignified lady on the floor weeping, totally in her own space.

That image was before Kanae. Holding her face away from the light and door was the uniformed woman who sobbed with austerity, and motionlessly: it was only the sun casting her teardrops into diamonds that told Kanae she cried. But the universal position nailed her entirely, possibly because she had done the same not above an hour ago, and she dipped deeper into her own trance and her leaning weight bent the door open and she fell through.


The woman noticed Kanae and hurriedly reached for a pair of lenses on the floor, and inserted them somewhere over her turned face: she would later learn that these were contacts meant to aid juvenile vision. Then she confronted tears dried, and Kanae saw the bright ochre eyes, the ink–coloured hair, the impassive prestige of the woman who held below her eyes the silk handkerchief and who draped around her figure the ottoman blue haori that she would come to associate with her so dearly.

Kanae hadn't an idea what to say. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to…"

Didn't mean to what? The woman put her hand up and told her to relent. "Kanae. You've woken up."

Without being asked she introduced herself as Tsubone Endou, proprietor of the demon slayer's medical faculty, and its head doctor. However titles were secondary, and rightfully aside the biggest one. She put the handkerchief in her pocket.

"You haven't caught me at my best," she said, and told Kanae to see her outside.

In the grove, Tsubone ambled awkwardly beneath a bamboo leaf, and Kanae noticed shimmering like a solid line of oil the sword in her belt. She had seen it before, but under the sun it appeared infinitely more guiling. Tsubone noticed her gaze and moved her hand over it.

"You know me?" Kanae asked.

"Your parents. So, you too," Tsubone replied. "When you were only this tall."

She made a measuring motion across her hip. By comparing Tsubone with herself, Kanae saw they were about the same height: one–fifty something, and truthfully somewhat shorter. Not such a big woman. Though, to reach just there, Kanae wondered how long ago that was…

Momentarily, a flight of pain crossed Tsubone's expression. She told Kanae she knew what happened, how terribly sorry she was, and further condolences for unknowing Shinobu afterward. Perhaps that is why she cried, Kanae only thought. Her parents must have been dear to Tsubone.

"I remember someone saving us when we were found," Kanae said. "Was that you?"

"Not me. Another one of ours."

"Another demon slayer?"

"You know?" Tsubone replied, and looked surprised. "But, I suppose it's around that age when your parents were going to tell you."

Saying no more, Tsubone started to make her way back to the infirmary. She entered it and went another direction than which Kanae came: they came into the still darkened office, and the windows were opened but it did not alleviate the stifling scent of chemistry inside. Instead of sitting Tsubone retrieved a boxed briefcase from below her desk. In here, she told Kanae, were the medical implements. Then she was ordered to stay at her side.

"It is my understanding that your mother has taught you some deal of medicine," Tsubone said. "You will accompany me working until your sister wakes. Working, after all, is the best remedy to… this."

Kanae sputtered some sort of protest, but Tsubone waved her off. So they worked.

Tsubone Endou, with a woman's voice polished by pearls, was forty–one that year, but had seemed to remain thirty for all years, like the five doe's steps of her name, rolling and then ceasing soundlessly. The intangible mistress, Kanae saw, with the narcissist's nose, the marble legs, the shoulders taut each as the knots in an anchor rope and the samurai hands who crescented the palms of the sick dignitaries between them and brought close to whisper in their ear promises of recovery, and otherwise dreams of a fortunate afterlife. Tsubone, who always held her arms against her waist, and who walked with the rigourity and strangeness of a civil veteran – Kanae would later learn this was a permanent feature, milled in by a long life of service, and not meant to convey any aggression. For each dorm she performed the medical nuances in her manner, and Kanae in her foolhardy own: she refused to empty the bottle containing the indescribables, and was assigned to change the vasewaters of the flowers instead, and so on. It was in this innocent way that Kanae Kochou began her way as a student of medicine, and soon dually, something far more hazardous.

They entered the last room. This was a blindfolded man of many who held his hand in his laps for patience and who reclined awake in the bed waiting for chance, and Tsubone performed the distinctions but was stopped. He had been awake, and he caught her arm and spoke in a low voice, pleasant but terribly exhausted.

"Water Hashira."

Tsubone didn't acknowledge him, but neither did she try to break free.

"I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry. Going to Shikoku and..."

"Magase, you will only rest," Tsubone replied. Kanae noticed she trembled while she said it, probably from the window's cold.

There was a balcony opened from that hallway wall that faced the condensed blue line of the sea. The frost slapped them here. Kanae put her hand on the metal railing but she recoiled. Tsubone leaned and took out a cigarette and stared at it dolefully.

"He called you Water Hashira," Kanae said.

"Only a title."

"But I know what that is," Kanae went on. "My parents told me a bit about your people. That means you're strong, doesn't it?"

"Not strong enough, not fast enough." And Tsubone smiled mockingly. To Kanae the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and too dangerous. She couldn't say why she thought so.

With adroitness Tsubone quickly changed the topic. "You should be halfway grateful to Magase. Him… running off is why we chased and found you on the way."

"Who found us?"

"Gyoumei Himejima. But you will see him later."

The next thing was to return to Shinobu. Then Tsubone flicked the cigarette and seized Kanae by the shoulders of her button–up shirt. She shook hard, and spoke in a slow and imperious tone.

"If your sister's woken up, are you willing to give her the news?" she asked.

In fact Kanae wished that she might sleep forever. But no: it was inevitable. And eventually it would be Tsubone that handed deliverance between her medical hands of God, and Kanae quivering in the corner. While Shinobu's amethyst gaze crumbled and she cried, Kanae thought that, if this were ever a contest, she must have been the most awful person on earth.


The next few days they must have romanticised, because they thought that is what those in their place should have done, and they did so in the stead of Gyoumei Himejima, who had been well and willing enough to take them in for the interim.

Perhaps the strongest in the world, Himejima was a huge man, huger than any bulwark, than any Rakuyo on the oceanline. He had a face too young to be a veteran, but his forearms bulged in layers of bronze like flower buds urging for bloom–time, and muscle knots formed ripples in his neck.

In times like these long past, Kanae might have hidden in the fabrics of her mother's Parisian skirt, heavy with the scent of 4711, but now it had been Shinobu behind her, and Tsubone maintaining her distance introducing. But from the first moment Himejima had been gentle to them, and they got along fastly and nicely.

It was not her fondest, but her most prominent memory, of unurgent dusks spent in languishing daylight at the window, sinking into the liver broth of reverie. She imagined her life beyond that point; the throes of teenhood … a few good friends … a first love, a second … the higher tuition her father always advised … marriage that her mother had … an existence of holy maternity … a death in bed after a life spent dreaming of a different end.

On moonlit nights she would conceal herself in the closet bathroom of Himejima's home and weep. Then she would lie awake for hours, plagued by visions of darkness. She pictured a tunnel, and a light, ungentle and coiling, at its end, calling to her alone. Kanae had no idea what that light contained, and didn't imagine. She only knew that in the depths of the snake's belly there lay that point of illumination which would draw near someday to intoxicate her and no other.

If I were like Himejima, she thought, with an omnipotent body, I could reach that light. A girl like me isn't big or small enough to reach anything.

On the fifth day Tsubone came again. Taken to the ivy garden, Kanae learned her parents' moderate fortune had been handed to her name, and from sixteen onwards she would be eligible to manage the superficial aspects of the account, and by eighteen everything.

Kanae was confused, because both her father and mother had often orated a distrust of any bank. But she was informed they held money within the corps itself, and had done so without her ever knowing.

"Your mother's family had been a benefactor of the demon slayers," Tsubone said. "She knew about it, and us, but she tried to keep her distance after her father died. Nevertheless, we kept periodic watch on the situation."

"Situation?" Kanae asked.

And Tsubone uttered it: regarding Roman de Acosta. And soon afterward burned to golden memory like slicks of soot onto cast iron was the image of the halfling in garden–light, and slowly he was to become a burning nail in the heart of Kanae Kochou.


An entry in one of her diaries stated: "I read cruel stories and vulgar children's stories." In that chapter she had been retrospecting on her childhood. A taste for cruel stories, as anyone knows, lingered with Kanae to the end.

Shinobu Kochou awoke from tormented dreams to find her sister simmering in the light of high morning, and she pulled herself from the stifling down blanket and asked after her.

"We've been left some money," Kanae said. "Tsubone came to tell me."

"That's all?" Shinobu said.

It was not. But Kanae refused to tell further. Her hurried apologies afterward did not help to mitigate Shinobu's slight rancour.

"Do you remember… anything of the night?" Kanae asked, lastly.

"Not much."

"And about the attacker?"

Shinobu wondered, and replied without coyness: "They said it was a random demon that crossed us."

…And that Himejima had killed it. That lie, Kanae did not immediately rectify, because she still felt compelled to play deceit's game. She wouldn't have to stay resolute for long: only until she had avowed, and knew would never un–avow, the course that would enslave the remainder of her lifetime.


"I'm aware," Tsubone had continued, "that you were already told about the demon slayers, to some extent. But did they tell you the predicament with that boy Roman?"

Kanae shook her head.

"Of course they didn't," Tsubone said. "And I won't force it to you, either. I won't tarnish their will."

She pointed to Kanae, wearing a face of metal.

"But it'll be up to you alone, if you're willing to hear."

A responsibility that would be diluted none and would be hers to bear. Nevertheless, Kanae's anticipation was whetted by the turmoil of grief, and without hesitation she said that she was.


A month later, Shinobu and Kanae Kochou were transferred to the home of Tsubone Endou. There was an unsubstantial cause to it: that living with a woman would be better, and they hardly had space to refute anyway.

One day, into this house, Tsubone and Shinobu returned in clothes wet to the skin.

"Where've you been?" Kanae asked.

But Shinobu was smiling: for the first time since the end of their world. Tsubone went about trying to devise some sort of explanation, that they had strolled near a rabid fountain, or that a thundercloud had erupted only in the part of sky over them, or that it was really unfortunate, but the alley going home had been possessed by inhabitants of aerial apartments as a deposit for their laundry–water, but it was clear that these were attempts at light–heartedness, and Kanae scorned her for it. But another memory interrupted them.

Pricking up her ears, Kanae heard a crunching noise, muffled and very faint, seeming to confound. Every now and then a whistle joined in. A growingly radiant and bewitching sound of singing was approaching. Tugging Tsubone's hand, Shinobu urged her to make fast, wild to be outside, and Kanae followed.

It was a troop of demon slayers leaving the hospital, on their way back to duty. Some of them she had been assigned to help treat, and these soldiers Shinobu had grown fond of. She watched from the perimeter of the house. The light thudding of army sandals, newly laundered uniforms, and a jungle of shouldered swords were enough to fascinate a child utterly –– they thanked Tsubone for their treatment, and offered Shinobu gifts of mochi and ramune, peach castella and pineapple shortcakes.

We're going to get those demons, they must've said, because Shinobu was sad to see them go. You won't have to wait long. We'll be back soon.

They were no more than a blur in a buzz of their demon–slaying contingent. Many years later, as the last of them was to fall in battle after a life spent dreaming of a death in bed, Kanae tried to imagine what in those men captivated her alone, but memory was reticent. Needless to say, the sight could not, at that time, have had any influence on the path she eventually chose, but it did slowly and doggedly arouse a craving in her for such things as the calling of those fighters, the stories that drove them, the lands they would see, the ways they would die.

That was why, the next day, Kanae held Tsubone close, and asked to become one of them.


Slender, honourable Miyata Kochou heard of a pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910, and for conscience volunteered his medical hands to help fight it. He arrived April the next year as part of an international taskforce, and in spite of frequent collisions between Russian and Japanese doctors, his maintained diligence raised praise from even Wu Lien–teh, the delegation leader.

However, in November his government recalled the detail, and explained to Miyata they had served their political purpose to butter the Manchu: for it was with Russia that they clashed for influence in the land, and their batch had withdrawn the week before.

In Matsuyama, they would hold a dinner for the returning sons of Hippocrates. Afterwards, a confidant of Miyata presented his family a gift: a neutralised tarbagan marmot he'd smuggled on the voyage. Because this species had been the vector of the disease he garnered beration, and though Miyata endured repeated assurances, it was their house servant Eréndira de Acosta who eventually took the animal in, and only at the behest of her son Roman. Three days later, he was to inform she had collapsed on the way to work, and that her state was buckling into the bonfire of fever and bubonic swells.

The first remedy was promised to Eréndira and would be timely to compose, but it was that even in that frame Miyata would have to face providence.

It was all his own fault. It would never have happened if he hadn't let his other half persuade him to leave for Manchuria that night. Burst into his office was his tremoring wife, who declared too that his daughter Shinobu had fallen sick.

Perhaps at this junction Miyata saw a slip in superintendence. But no: it was not for him to manoeuvre the gap. In that moment, caught between the subjective and the objective, he decided to retract Eréndira's treatment, and give it instead to Shinobu.

They expected Roman to withstand the official explanation that the dyed water they injected into his mother before him was medicine ultimately ineffective, and they even had the hope in their hearts that Eréndira would endure until the second batch was ready. When she did not they said it was unfortunate, but drugged with the weight of guilt, Miyata turmoiled behind locked doors.

One day, he could no longer. In crematorium embers the shape of cork leaves, he kneeled and surrendered the truth to Roman, and told him from that moment, he was free.


Tsubone allowed her opinion to slip: "I have never seen such a totality of foolish trust in people as your father possessed." Then she dignified herself immediately, and Kanae asked what happened next.

"You can imagine. Roman vowed revenge and your father knew. He contracted us to watch his behaviour, and we sent a man named Urokodaki. In January we were told Roman couldn't be tracked anymore. Only last month he resurfaced, but already in that form, and when he attacked, it was too…"

Tsubone kneaded a fist over her thigh, and winced.

"…Too late. Truthfully, we have no idea what happened. Roman escaped Himejima, and again, till now, we haven't been able to find him."

But to Kanae the transformation was no issue. Allowed to, she seized Tsubone by the collar of her smoke blue uniform and shook hard. "And where were you when it happened?" she asked, threatening her other fist.

It had taken her forty–one years, the forty–one years of her life – minute by minute – to reach this moment. Tsubone Endou felt profane, naked, crippled, when she replied: "Shit."


A month later, when Kanae asked her tutorship, Tsubone presented her only requisite condition that Shinobu willingly join her, or she would do all in her power to instate, even force on them, a life as civilian women, and nothing else.

One liquid orange evening, on a wandering path throughout the nation, Kanae ambled onto a beach and kicked her resolution into a slate of sand, and it took no great deal of thought to cast the grains into words, and no amount of procession neither. Her life had carved itself into the ground and she felt its masterful completeness. Of right angles and straight lines; dawn till dusk; sunrise and only sunset when one of them was dead, and she wouldn't let it be her. No, she would not.

Even if justice and injustice had been blurred, that went for all things. That last moment of modesty Kanae's heart burned like fire, when she uttered aloud vengeance towards Roman de Acosta.


Kanae found Shinobu tucked in a windowsill and with petulance facing the sea, and now winter was beginning to die and lustrous tropical clouds floated over many–coloured waters, and the ocean wind was suddenly redolent of equatorial fruits brimming in the hatches of mooring boats, but still cold…

The lightness was unbearable for Kanae, and she stayed in indoor shadow. She called out to her sister.

"Hey. What're you looking out the window for?"

"…I wonder how those men are doing," Shinobu replied, and looked sullen.

She was silent for a long time. Kanae sat next to her and tried to see the same things she did, but could not. "Do you admire demon slayers?" she ventured, with forced cheeriness.

Shinobu glanced at her, but didn't answer.

"You talk about a life of a demon slayer," she began, facing her stolid auditor, "you have to begin with training. Any slayer's been through it and has to keep on going through it. And Tsubone told me there's some who give up after only a year, 'cause they've had such a hell of a time. The newer a slayer is, the more likely they are to be injured or even die, and even after they pass the first few months, the corps sends you after more powerful demons and your chances of survival stay constant, give or take…"

When Kanae saw Shinobu wasn't interested in her story, she brought up the men. "Those guys have gone through it, too. And they've toughened up because of it, for sure. They're warriors. You've seen the scar on – what was it? – Watsuji's arm. But they also go around helping people. People just like us. They're…"

And suddenly, as if reflecting a molten bullet bursting from a gun's nozzle, Kanae leapt up standing, and shouted to the air with her arms splayed.

"…They're heroes! Virtuous, infinite, powerful heroes! Heroes of the highest order! Wouldn't you agree, Shinobu? It's why I sense you look up to them so."

Kanae nudged her, and gradually gold swirled on the surface of her eyes. She smiled, and then finally burst out beaming. Shinobu stood up too.

"They don't fight for revenge, but to make sure the same terrible things that happened to them don't happen to anyone else. Even though they failed for us…"

Kanae paused, placed her hand over heart, and lowered her voice. She could barely be heard to finish speaking over the din of the fruit vessels outside.

"…If we stay in this place, and just accept what we've been dealt, then our parents will be the ones who died for nothing."

What belied the speech needn't be explained to Shinobu. She trapped Kanae in the longest embrace and relinquished still holding her hand. She said she would do anything to become a demon slayer and that she should too. Kanae felt the hammering pulse in Shinobu's fingers. Veins craving for hero's blood and noblesse oblige of a past life that blazed within her higher and higher an impulse for goodwill. But within Kanae reigned only one emotion: a slowly unfurling guilt, though not enough of it to change anything.


One more: Roman de Acosta


Roman de Acosta had been split and glued back, he had been cut through and sown again, and now, in a puddle of blood turning black, he suddenly forgot his obsession with life.

In the stowaway grotto buried from the sun his benefactor Nisegami Douma appeared, and treading around the blood, he kneeled down to Roman's ear and spoke.

"You were told to be patient. I promised you more blood before you attacked them but you would not have it. Now that you face a wound which your current regenerative abilities cannot sustain you tremble. A shame, that your mother died so that you could nearly, too."

It was supposed Roman could not hear him. Douma saw burst from his leg the pumping yarn of fat and flesh, a typical Nichirin wound, and he couldn't curb sorrow, but hard–heartedness was a point of pride, and he quickly steeled. He stood and hovered a finger over Roman's mouth and cut it.

"…Nevertheless," Douma went on, "the right time's come. As we promised one month ago: to this power I have… I shall make you the successor."

Sensing something perhaps, Roman tried to stop his writhing. But with a sudden movement, as though he were trying to shake his head, he whispered in a voice soaked by delirium: "That man gave me freedom. I'm ready to die now."

What he murmured after that could not be understood. Douma sat by him until the blood from his finger stemmed, watching his humanity dwindle away. Roman's words burned only like a childish token in his heart.


Prologue, end


A/N: prologue rewrite done!