Chapter 1: Serenity in the Snow
As winter encroached upon the season of autumn in a remote countryside location in Japan, so did the time of gathering firewood to last the following months; the birds had yet to migrate, though many have, but those that remained, still, offered encores to anyone around to listen—and their chirps found their resting place on the ears of a lonely villager by the mountainside, chopping and gathering the supplies he could make use of later on in the following dark days and nights. Sinking his hatchet into the bark of a nearby tree, the middle-aged man prepared to bring back the spoils of his labor.
Saburo hefted the firewood he had chopped onto his back using the basket he tied around his chest, and carried a few more pieces under each of his arms before making his way back to his house. His feet, covered in boots, sank a few centimeters deep into the earth with each step he took, the snow giving in to his weight. The wood made clacking noises every time he moved his somewhat aging body, and the wintry chill of the wind carried more bite to his face than last year's had.
Two years and a half had passed since Tanjiro Kamado's departure from his home higher up in the mountains, around whose foothills Saburo's own home was located, and by that point in time the people of the village had stopped talking about that family; if at all, it was likely to be in thoughtless mentions and nothing more. That morning after he had extended his hospitality to the eldest son of the Kamados during his returning journey from his routine trip to the village, rumors began passing around that their family had been slaughtered by a wild animal; the people with cloaked faces had cleaned up their estate alongside the bodies quickly, yet even that did not go unnoticed by the villagers, which led to even more rumors about it having been a political assassination., but Saburo had had a difficult time trying to understand the logic behind that. They were, after all, mere villagers.
When none of the Kamados showed their faces to the village for the next few days, worried whispers were heard among them, being dismissed relatively thoughtlessly as an illness within the close family, but when a full week had gone without any appearances from them, attempts to scale the mountain to pay them a visit with gifts were turned away by none other than Saburo himself. The villagers may have meant well, and were skeptical of off-handed mentions of demons, but Saburo's mind had been racing during those following days.
He believed in them—the monsters of the night; he had caught a glimpse of such a creature the night his family was devoured when he returned home. It had stared back at him with bright red eyes that should not have been visible in the darkness, but were, with too much uncanny intelligence to be waved off as being those of a feral animal's. Yet its form, crouched and bent in wrong ways, were another cause for the petrifying aura it had emanated, and Saburo would not have been able to remember the detailed manners of injuries inflicted on the remains of his family members' corpses due to the trauma left upon his person if not for the bone-chilling smile it gave him before disappearing into the woods.
He never once slept well again after that night, and never left his home past eight in the evening. It was probably the reason why he had been so worked up over the incident upon the Kamados. Questions ran through his mind every minute of the weeks following—was it a demon? Was it the same one? How many lived on this mountain alone? When exactly did it attack? Where was Tanjiro now? Was he devoured as well? …had he been right in keeping him back that night? To give him what he saw as hospitality to the eldest son of his only friends?
Days where he would lose himself to retrospective thoughts such as those came and went, long after the village had settled down over the disappearance of a family, and it had gradually become something of a coping mechanism for the aging Saburo, who had neither family after their mysterious slaughter, nor friends after he pushed them away out of the subsequent grief he experienced. It had only been a matter of time till he grew more and more distant from the rest of the village; even before he married, he was already known for being something of a loner. Long walks in the snow and in the woods during which he would lose his mind to rage, confusion, denial, and fantasies were not rare—he had only had to take care not to be too close to the village whenever he let out the uncommon lung-stressing scream, and it was one such walk that he just realized he was on right then.
Not for very long, he would arrive at his home. In anticipation of his arrival, he began to conclude his internal thoughts with the idea that young Tanjiro had become one of the great spirit hunters after his disappearance—but that was neither here nor there; it was a mere musing he came up with at some point or another—another fanciful idea he dreamt up, one similar to his family being in heaven, rather than at peace in the afterlife, and waiting for him. …Perhaps it was because he was so lost in thought on his trek back home, and because his mind was laden with the idea of demons, but he reacted rather poorly to catching a glimpse of an unfamiliar sight that was not an animal nor an object half-buried in the snow, by the roots of a nearby tree.
The moment it came to view and peeked into his periphery, his shoulder blade involuntarily twitched, letting some of the firewood tucked under his left arm drop onto the ground, and almost releasing the ones on his right. He let out several hard gasps he tried to mend into being more shallow and relaxed, but only began perspiring before he could succeed. He crouched low, cautiously, keeping an eye on the unidentified thing while trying to appraise its identity as he picked up the fallen wood with his hands. It appeared oddly to him, before he made out what he was looking at, and why it took so long for him to figure out. Under a sparse canopy with barely enough leaves to cast a shade was a young woman, of foreign hair and skin.
What he saw was her head, angled downward into the earth from what he imagined was a fetal position from the fact that he could see her shoulders, and depending on how long she had been there, she may well have been long dead. He hurried into his home, frantically tossing down the firewood onto the floor without much organization and dropping the load on his back unceremoniously together with them before rushing back outside with a large towel in his hands. More questions ran through his mind as he tried to decipher her sudden appearance in the woods—and among them was one that made him hesitate about taking her in and nursing her back to health.
It was one concerning her humanity.
The cacophony of noises rumbling in his mind settled into a serene quiet as they found their place in his head, thoughts and ideas crawling to the back of his conscience as he drew near. He was mere steps away when he slowed down his pace to take in the situation before him, and the trepidation and apprehension about demons had all but disappeared the moment he made contact with her—she was still alive, as indicated by the steady rise and fall of her middle; yet something about how in-place she seemed almost made him have second thoughts. The moment he caught sight of a puff of exhalation by her chin, however, was when he resolved to bring her into his home—it could not have been that demons would have warm breath in their lungs, after all. To Saburo, that trait belonged to humans and animals alone.
Bare-skinned and unclothed, he could only imagine how it must feel to be sleeping with snow as her only blanket, that he shuddered himself. Moving closer in preparation of wrapping the towel around her, he studied the details about the enigmatic individual in the nude. She was an adolescent, closer to being an adult than a child. He couldn't see her face; a sinister-looking alabaster mask that resembled a human skull with sneering eye sockets covered her profile. Her skin was as dark as coal, and her hair a deep shade of purple—like a terrible bruise—and was short for a woman, but long for a man. Her tousled locks framed her face and stuck to it with what seemed to be her own sweat, in spite of the cold.
However, what truly made her person bizarre was what she clutched at the center of the ball she formed—in the grip of tight fingers was a sword unlike any he had ever seen before: An ōdachi, spanning over half of what her height would be should she be standing up, or perhaps even longer, was wrapped in black bandages around its hilt and sparsely so along the length of its blade. Their edges were frayed as though burnt and stuck to her fingers like poisoned cloth. There was an uncanny "rust", like wisps of black smoke, on the metal of the blade where it was visible, peeking through where the bandages fell away.
He recalled something from a past long gone, then—something someone told him. The great spirit hunters all wielded blades to slay the demons with—they told him that if their sword went through their necks and took them off, the demon would perish the way they would under sunlight…
Perhaps…if this person was in fact a wounded demon slayer, then he could learn more about those vile beings—
There was a sudden, quick, and subtle snap of hope that fluttered away as soon as it came, and he was left with the still quiet of the woods. As though the nature around him beckoned him to proceed, a gentle blanket of wind drew back against the sounds of life perched upon the branches high above—both of leaves and of avians—and Saburo was left to provide her shelter, letting the cold take away any sentiments of his house being a death trap for those that entered. For the long-gone family he missed dearly, and for young Tanjiro who disappeared shortly after accepting his hospitality, this individual, he hoped, could somehow bring peace to his heart by proving a different outcome; a different future…
"I will not hurt you," Saburo whispered in her direction as he covered her, just in case she was cognizant. After learning that she would not let go of the armament after several attempts with his hand on the bandages of the blade, he lifted her—how unnaturally light she was—and remembered having carried children as light as she. Her arms swayed where they were suspended from her limp form, bringing the sword swinging with their motion.
He found it difficult to balance himself, taking a few moments to regain his footing; though she was light, the space she occupied in his arms was another matter entirely. Steeling himself to focus on his current task, however, he dismissed the matter of her weight as being unimportant toward his objective, moving on to look for a place to settle her, wary of the sword the whole time. His breathing grew ragged, but not because of his struggle—its source was his anticipative excitement; something he had not felt in a long time. If this person truly was a demon slayer, he could get answers.
Answers to questions about a world he knew existed out there, yet could not confirm, could not make sense of—it was something completely intangible to the likes of him, a humble pseudo-hermit who could not let go of his past, and was powerless to move on from it. It could be the end to his sleepless nights…or perhaps even the beginning of more. He mentally gathered himself—and that was the end of that, for then.
Laying her down in a futon after contemplating it, he drew a blanket over her and turned away to heat up a kettle filled with water using the firewood he had collected. Though Saburo had looked for injuries, there were none to be found, but physical damage might not be an affliction of high priority, if the fever was of any indication to him. It would be intuitive to contact a medical practitioner from town for her ailment, but given how awkwardly long it had been since his last visit there, some changes were bound to have occurred; he would have to reintegrate into their community to begin with… Ever since he began living the life of a faux-hermit, he had been hesitant to truly reintegrate himself to the life of the common folk, his only connection having been the Kamados, but even they were gone, then.
He stood back up, the house beginning to warm while he sat. There was a silence that followed—one that he became familiar with—and he couldn't help but allow his mind to wander a little. He began to remember the time he would spend with his family in there, and as he reminisced certain spots in his house, his eyes came to land on the towel he had used to cover the young woman, collapsed in a pile by the side of the small cabin. He furrowed his brow upon its sight; it might be a mere trick of the light in the dim room, but there appeared to be dark splotches on the sheet… He moved to investigate, and noticed a few shallow holes slowly burning through the fabric, their rims stained with a color he could not quite make out; a sinister observation.
His first instinct was to doubt the foreigner, but that felt somewhat uncalled for, considering that it was of his own volition that the following events had transpired. He sensed a miasma aloft in the air, and it suddenly became somewhat difficult to breathe properly. Yet things kept pointing in that direction he first looked in; if his initial suspicion had not been enough, then the fact that a literal miasma pouring out from the blade itself and filling the room left no doubt spared. They billowed from the ōdachi, like smoke, coiling upward and pushing against the ceiling as though it was an evil spirit trying to escape the confines of his house.
He blinked twice to ascertain that he was indeed watching the phenomenon occur, yet only found that the darkness in his room had grown more intense. There were no signs of smoke. He took a deep breath of air to relieve his petrified lungs, but it did not register to him that what he sucked in did not quite allow his organs to relax just yet. Already, feelings of apprehension began to settle in once more, and he felt perspire dribble down one side of his face. Standing to his full height, he made to approach her. An inexplicably frightening aura emanated from the blade… He tried to understand what he was being confronted with, but all his experience in life could not offer him a satisfactory answer that did not disparage his mental condition.
A quietly aggressive sizzling noise broke him out of his thoughts, and he realized, from the periphery of his vision, that the towel he used earlier was beginning to corrode—no—to melt, as though it had been dipped in extremely powerful acid and was only then starting to dissolve. Saburo swallowed, gulping back a lump in his throat that had formed without his knowledge. Before he could do anything else, however, there was a rustling from her end.
As the enigma began to stir from her "slumber", the mask concealing her face slipped to the floor, and whatever darkness had consumed the atmosphere of the home was dispelled.
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Hot, hot; it felt like she was going to melt. Under normal circumstances her skin would be burning off, but as it was then, it only served to internalize the heat. She felt as though her mind could be consumed by the clammy warmth, her body's tightening in response to it suffocating itself. She couldn't breathe; and her heart was going to burst…
She stumbled around in the abyss around her, footsteps light, taking careless strides. Her legs wobbled, yet she couldn't help but allow them to; at one point she felt like the path she walked was free, but when she took the liberty of moving however she wanted, she tripped countless times and fell through invisible pits—it was all black to her. She could see nothing…
Then she came upon a meadow. It was atop a hill elevated upon an endless plain of flowers. She sat among the lilies, and plucked out a few of them to admire. Blue lilies, blue roses, blue chrysanthemums, and many others she couldn't name dotted the landscape in a wondrous display under the starry sky she found herself under. Then, one by one, the stars went out, and they rained from the sky across the earth as far as she could see. The further her eyes looked, the more the blue blended in with each other, swirling into the same pit of blinding blue which slowly descended into the color of poison.
From there came storm clouds—they swirled in the sky and swallowed the falling stars, growing even larger with their consumption. Purple smoke descended from them, and she rose from her seat, and came to see that the flower in her fingers had wilted, having been engulfed in that smog, its petals drifting off into the purple all around her that had darkened into black.
The ground beneath her gave away, and though she tried to flee, her limbs felt frozen in place and once more she fell through another abyss—that was when her body grew frigid. Upon bones did she fall, then, and she scattered them, tossing them aside, fear gripping her heart as she came face-to-face with empty skulls one after another… Their eyes—empty as the abyss they were in—held a shallow depth in their sneer—their squint, as though they had found their next target. She ran, stepping on skulls, cracking some under her soles, and finally collapsed when enough splinters of bone had pierced the arches of her feet.
Her chest expanded and contracted rapidly with trepidation, vision darkening, and raising her head, she perceived the faint outline of a lone skull in the void. She moved to hold it between her hands, not because she wanted to, but because she felt the urge to. She fought back against it, not wanting to touch it, yet her body moved against her accord, as though she was being commanded by a will that overpowered her own.
It had horns extending from its temples. They pointed toward the heavens, curving inward to each other at a sharp angle, with turned edges at their points. Upon its forehead was the tainted image of crossing blades, smeared in purple, and its sockets were wide open. There were creases between its brow ridges embedded into its expression, and it looked more alive than dead; even merely looking at it felt too much for her…but that was where its distinctions ended—like all the others, it was missing its lower jaw.
But that did not stop it from speaking to her—from the darkness beyond her comprehension came a deafening sound that shredded her senses as much as it spoke through them. She could not make the words out, for she was paralyzed with fear, as was her mind had been—for that time, she was naught but a faceless, human-shaped void for the will to convey its message.
Through the tremors of scrambling noises she stared into its sockets, which did not sneer—she looked ahead into them, and for the duration of her role as its audience she felt unlike herself, as though she was a different entity altogether, with herself keeping down the only sense of familiarity it had to her identity. They were widely gaping, empty, clenched and judging—till there came a spark of fire within them; a blue flame. Before she could let go—she could not let go—they flared up, becoming more powerful and ever-bright. It grew in intensity and lit up the darkness all around her, burning it all from black to the color of light.
She didn't realize when she began screaming as the conflagration consumed her body and soul, when she felt a blade piercing her stomach and coming out the other side. It kept sinking into her, and showed no sign of stopping—she dared not move, however, and her mind continued registering the unending motion of the blade sliding through the folds of her flesh, warm liquid squelching out within the gap formed; blood dripped onto her toes and ignited—they did nothing but tremble in place, growing cold within the fire, and she realized that it was not the blaze that burnt, but rather her senses as her body crumbled from the bottom.
Yet what truly burned her to the core was not the fire, but the gaze behind it.
Hot, hot; it felt like she was going to melt. Her skin was burning off, incapable of internalizing the heat; her mind was disappearing into the raging flare, her body disintegrating in response to the burning. She breathed in, and her heart exploded—and she had become nothing more than dust in the void…
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…was what it had felt like. It took several moments for her eyes to readjust. Everything was blurry, and for a while her ears provided her with a ringing she wanted to get rid of. Useless, audial information her brain could not decipher flooded her head, and her sense of touch was no better. She felt burnt out for some reason, skin crawling with cold knots where her hairs stood.
Her droopy, glazed eyes suddenly shot up, and her senses all returned to her spontaneously. In the rush, she tossed aside any covers that hindered her; the jointed overhaul and forced reconfiguration of her senses caused her to vomit clear liquids onto the wooden floorboards of the house she found herself in.
Her anatomy's thermoregulatory systems were out of flux with her mind and body's concurrence; the heat within her dreams and the naked exposure to the snow was too much a combination for her to tolerate all at once. She couldn't help her wobbling arms as they held her off of the floor, and quietly stayed in that position, trying to regain a semblance of control over her own figure.
For the next minute or so, all she could hear was her own labored breathing, and all she could feel was the straining of her weakened arm muscles in their try to support her inadequate weight and the runnels of sweat dribbling down her back and front. Her vision went on and off constantly, and she was left to shut her eyes to prevent the further encroachment of nausea from taking over. Her fingers felt strangely restricted as well; she tried experimenting with one of her hands—she could not tell which—and faced an inexplicable powerlessness over the manipulation of it.
It was the binding around it that prevented free movement over that fist of hers, which in turn was connected to something even heavier than her entire arm—she could feel it touching her foot behind her; it was a paraphernalia that only served to weigh her down at this stage, but even then she could not help but be wary of the object—not because it proved to be a barrier between her and bodily liberty, but because of something she could not risk delving into at the moment, lest she throw up again—
—why was her head lower than before? At that point, her forehead touched the wood, and the unsteady sway of her body rubbed it against the floor. The hair framing her face strayed forward to the pull of gravity, and she felt their tips touching the slime she had regurgitated, the strands on the left side of her face brushing against something hard. She had given up, resigning her nose to suffer the same fate to the enlarged pool of oral refuse. She could not even feel sorry for herself, or pathetic. It was, at this point, her natural state of being: what even was she?
She suddenly felt hands on her sides—she was too weak to react to them—and they lifted her up and put her back down onto something soft—the same something that one of her legs had been grinding down on. There came another soft, yet firm, thing being put below her head, just above her nape, and never before had she felt as secure… There came unintelligible words being spoken to her—something she knew was being directed at her, but could not understand—from the person helping her into position, and she drifted off to a peaceful sleep somewhere amidst her failed endeavors to extend her gratitude towards him…
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Saburo looked on in stifled bewilderment. Looking at her face, the young woman could not possibly be older than twenty. She had eyes filled with innocent wonder, as disoriented they may be, and features that complemented the idea of a peaceful life on the outskirts of a small town, based on his experience meeting with the family of the Kamados—yet she made him feel a way that only dangerous people had ever done. He had been suspicious of her ever since the odd and peculiar occurrences transpiring in the house came to his notice, but at the same time he felt as though he had to curb such sentiments due to him being the one to have brought her in himself.
For a brief second her saw her eyes scanning the room in quick disorder, and that alone had endeared him to her—like a newborn, looking around the room they came into the world through, and experiencing the first spark of thought that their being knew. And, of course, like newborns, came an involuntary reaction from the body—she vomited.
Saburo wondered if it was something that newborns would do: to support themselves with developed limbs and try to prevent themselves from creating their mess, if they could. He bit his lip, wondering if this was…all right. If it was okay for him to see his children in this person, though delusional he might have been—he knew that, that he was delusional in some capacity or another. He was probably delusional when he saw the towel melt, or when her skin and hair grew a bit more like a human's when she threw up, and the other villagers had told him that, either directly or passively. Avoiding the village had not originally been his own plan he followed of his own volition.
After the deaths of his family members, the townspeople began to suspect him of having committed the act—but he flew into a fit of rage; what kind of father would murder his own children? How could they see him that way? But that had only fueled their preconceptions of the entire occurrence—Saburo, the loner who no one was truly close with, who refused to associate himself with people in general more than he needed to, who chose to live in the outskirts of town of his own volition alone for most of his life, when in reality he had merely been a more awkward person than most, who only grew less wary as he matured into an adult—but by then, he already had almost nobody he could trust.
The Kamados were the exception. They were a warm family, despite living higher up in the cold mountain than he. He had witnessed and helped with the birth of their youngest children, and they had come to grow up considering him as an uncle of sorts during the uncommon visits throughout the year. He had been invited for dinner by Tanjuro at several occasions, and had had supplies shared with him by Kie whenever the seasons changed and food ran low, and in return had offered Tanjiro a place to stay whenever it got too dark during his trip home after he took on the duty of selling charcoal to the village following Tanjuro's passing.
Till now, the deaths of the Kamados still felt unreal to him. When his family disappeared, he mourned and grieved intensely for months, till it subsided into a more bearable second nature for the following years, and when Tanjuro passed, he wept. Yet when the entire Kamado family was swept away, he could no longer feel much else for either them or himself, leaving aside the occasional days where he actually felt anything enough to spend on tears.
So…he was desperate. For what, he could not admit, nor could he answer it himself. He knew what the answer was, but it was not something to be said. It was something to acknowledge and witness the transpiring events of, and they would begin there—with the visitor in the snow.
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"So, the remaining demons in the southern provinces have been eliminated, you say? And that minimal damage was made in the process, with one person injured? Well, what are you waiting for, hurry and send some Kakushi from the Butterfly Estate to the site! Make sure they bring the necessary tools to perform the medication, and bring some incense as well to alleviate the worries of their family! We don't want the foreign ambassadors to shake their head at Japan, do we?
"What was that? A Demon Slayer went missing around the foothills of Mount Ooe? A tsuguko, no less? This is why I said not to send in individual units! Demon Slayers will be sent there. Tell them to make sure to not involve any government officials in the area—I know they've been upping their activity across Japan, which was why I wanted that operation to have been a complete success! Now grab the hashira responsible for them and deploy a squad immediately! And tell them that they have an audition with me after they return!
"The Kasugai crows stationed at headquarters aren't feeling well? With winter coming, that should only be expected. Who was in charge of their health these past years? Muzan's attack may have caused a large amount of damage to be sustained by this place, and that included the aviary, but that is no excuse to delay renovations, even if personnel is spread across operations scarcely. Call up the carpenters who live close by. We will pay them with the money from the wages intended for the Demon Slayers with no dependants who were deceased as of the last battle."
Officers milled about in an orderly fashion, back and forth, upon a ruined mountaintop garden. They were lined up in a single file, each individual waiting in line holding an important report to hand over to their current acting leader. Kagaya Ubuyashiki, the previous head of the Demon Slayer Corps, met his demise early on in the battle against Muzan that took place a few months earlier. With his decession, his responsibility fell upon his only son of eight ripe years, Kiriya Ubuyashiki. It had proven to be too much for him to bear, as many reparations and amendments were to be made following the catastrophe that occurred.
As proven by his subsequent fever, the position of the leader was far too much for him to handle. That was when their current acting leader was appointed. A foreigner, with bright blond hair and piercing red eyes—the initial impression he might give was that of a cruel, merciless tyrant, but the wisdom he demonstrated all but dispelled that notion, and he had proven himself the most worthwhile asset to the organization of the Corps that they had come across in a long time.
King Gilgamesh, as he had commanded for himself to be addressed as, had been overseeing the processes within and without the Demon Slayer Corps for several months, then, and despite all the busy work that met him, he showed no signs of slowing down. If it had been any other person who displayed such haughty pride, nobody would have been so compliant—but the skills at management that he displayed had so consistently bore stellar results that he had earned everybody's respect under the span of a week—and they called him as he had asked with no qualms. While he was not as soft-spoken and kind as their previous leader, King Gilgamesh was a man who appeared to treat his new position with light consideration, yet still excels at it greatly.
Beside him sat Kiriya Ubuyashiki himself, who diligently took notes and directions from the wise ruler, working hard to improve himself and to learn from the "King".
Hours passed like that, and eventually came a Demon Slayer who wore hanafuda earrings. Although he had made himself meek and presented himself humbly to King Gilgamesh, the man raised a hand that signaled for him to stand proudly before him. "Tanjiro Kamado!" His voice, loud and clear and charismatic, carried with it an air of pride as he said his name. For the first time in the entire day, he bore a wide smile on his face. "Esteemed Demon Slayer who played an instrumental role in the final battle against Kibutsuji Muzan, raise your head! You have earned your audition with me."