Hi everyone! Still at it, still at it. SkyHearts and I are so happy and so proud to present this chapter after such a long silence. =(^u^)= We're tired, overworked university students, ahah. But school doesn't last forever, though it might feel like it: I hope that's a comforting thought for all you other busy students. Set your jaw and keep pushing, one day you'll reach the light at the other end!
/Dimwit
how do you tell if a story is true?
Days fall like raindrops into rusty barrels with their greedy pits, in idle darkness lost and never found. Lost. (it tastes like dust and bread gone foul) Days lost, time lost, light lost in a million trickster rays breaking softly on the barrel's sightless eye each time the sunshine paces East to West. To nurse and nourish. To nurture all the things that grow, every plant and friend and thought and
lie
Shiemi tries to count the moments till the King of Earth returns but finds that, really, no time seems to pass at all. There is no lengthening of shadows, no evening chill to nest the dew for morning, and no starry blanket come to tuck the sun to sleep.
There is no sun.
There is light - at times a little fainter, at times a little brighter, at times from all around and nowhere, but no shining lantern in the sky.
how do you tell if a story is true
when it is but dewdrop days and blinding light?
"Grave soil." The words come softly; dewdrops letting gently go of petal lips. They drop, they fall, landing ripples on the ice that stretches silently from disembodied soul to body without soul. "If we use grave soil for the golem, it might work. My family doesn't cremate their dead, we prefer to return to the earth. There's a family grave, back home… under the linden tree."
Amaimon blinks, touches thumb to lips but doesn't bite. "Flesh of your flesh, dust of your dust." He nods, in thought, in eras past. What she speaks of is old magic. Strong magic. "An organic body made of inorganic material…" A madman's wager – but who's to say that madmen haven't on occasion touched on genius? If one straw can break a camel's back then who's to claim that grasping straws presents a futile exercise? "It might work. If it's human enough."
"As much like me as possible." Shiemi nods, too – would have, had she had neck and head, like the plant that holds her in its petals. "Just not Baa-chan's grave", she says – first time, seed leaves out of ashes – and clutches her convictions tight against the quivering in her heart. "It's the newest one."
"Nettles", Shiemi thinks.
They grow in Baa-chan's garden, those tower citadels with stinging, saw-toothed kisses daring no one to approach. An oxymoron, Yuki would say. (he would be proud to hear her use the word) The nettle contradicts, it is deceitful in that way, making boastful show of its hostility yet dried and powdered it would nurture aching bodies back to health.
They are pranksters, too, the nettles. Hiding tender sprouts in flowerbeds and berry orchard grass, waiting for a calloused gardener hand in search of weed or fruit. The unexpected sting hurts most.
Amaimon brings the soil (the dead), brings heaps of it (her dead), dumps it on the grass and on the weeds and on the flowers' gentle stems without ceremony or care.
Shiemi thinks of nettles.
Shiemi knows the earth. Her hands are gardener hands, lined with secrets soil and roots have told them. They know what lullabies to pour on seedling feet to make them grow, when to save the plums and peaches from the tree top fall, and when to cover fragile roots from frost. The book of life is in those gardener hands, inscribed with earthen ink in cracked and crinkled runes that nourish all they touch.
Amaimon is the earth. His fingers sing the heartbeat of the soil, not needing any staves or grime-stain clefs to guide; they sing the sun and wind and dewdrop days onto the pages of that book of life and pour its secrets into every bud and plant. His are hands that ripen peach and grain and draw their stems towards the sky, and while dead things have no tears Shiemi feels she must be crying.
The soil gains life under his touch, and sculpting seems too small a word for what he does; he paints, Shiemi thinks, and cannot tell herself the dusk-dark mud is anything but liquid. He paints the air with graveyard soil and wonder, birthing life from death just like her garden friends at home. He colours her into existence with a stream of flicks and slashes on a canvas only he can see, every motion of his fingers falling sharp against the gentle form they mould. Sharp. Yes. Wondrous but terrifying, beautiful yet... sharp.
Amaimon's hands aren't gardener hands.
There is too much of her. This existence is peculiar, whatever it may be: too much, too little, sometimes swelling like a bud unbroken and at other times she breaks and floods with fire.
Fire.
Shiemi smiles, or imagines that she does. Sometimes you need fire, when you need to burn away the old so something new can grow. When you need to change the things that won't. It is a bubbly pride that adds the secret to her book of life: a common girl once stood her ground against the King of Earth.
The base is quickly made, and simple. There are the fundamental parts, like legs and arms and head, but none of them yet shaped to mimic hers.
"How tall was it?"
"165 cm."
From thin air he pulls a tape to get her measure right: he's not far off at all, a slight compression of the mock-up is enough.
"How wide?"
He might as well be asking her to describe a lost umbrella, Shiemi thinks, and feels that, maybe, she does have a bit of prickly chestnut in her after all.
"I wasn't that wide!" Her middle swells like rising dough, thighs and hips and tummy and – well – setting soft waves to her silhouette.
There is complaint in every syllable but he whisks his hands over her curves (Shiemi wants to scream) and the soil obediently peels. "Better?"
Better, yes. She knows it, that fullness feeling well at home within a kimono but not so much in skirt and thigh-high socks. A flash darts through her mind (cinder, ember, spark) and faster than she realises it springs out of her: "A little bit thinner."
There are pollen words and there is pollen grown without a single word; Kamiki appears in mind, her shape as lithe as wisps of steam within the bathhouse changing room – the shape of all the girls in magazines with pleated skirts and pretty knitwear blouses. (she is a swelling bud now, definitely) Her eyes a little smaller, yes, less a clueless child's and more the grown-up she envisions; cheeks less round, as well, and those uneven teeth that can finally be put in line... Little things, barely bumps in paths of trailing thought, but now that opportunity extends its hand so sweetly they are aflurry like a beehive at the break of summer.
Amaimon's gaze is dull, and long, and steady, and when he ceases his corrections he is so still Shiemi might have taken him to be the golem of the two.
"This isn't what it looked like. Why pester me to make a host like your old one if you don't want it to look like the old one?"
"I do want it to look like the old one! I want it to look like me, just – more the way I wanted to look." Incomprehension might just be the one expression he can manage without involving facial muscle. "Have you never wanted to change anything about yourself?" she tries, the gentle coax of gardener hands a hum within her voice. "Some small thing you wished was different? If you could choose?"
A vitriolic huff is all she gets, as that spikemoss demon shuts inside himself. His fingers shape the winding morel bowls of ears, and there is little else to do but watch. And wait.
There is patience in plants and gardener hands; the sun has taught them day by day, that light that comes to live in those who seek to warm the world. The sun sees all that grows, from seed to gangly sapling and from there to touch the blossom sky. She sees the timid girl (servant guardian in her garden pen) with friends in injured rats and tickleberry trees, sees her grow with mighty heart and fragile roots, and all that's growing with her. She sees the barnacle calligraphy of callouses imprinting on her skin, the crescent black that crown her humble fingertips and the sunshine laughing in her eyes. She sees the stretch of limbs grown longer, and the shadow flicker nesting in the corners of her smile. She sees the softening from scrawny bones to roundness ripe and
squishy, like mochi
The sun sees all she buried in the shade where things unwanted sleep. Sees it grow.
parasite
There are things that grow away from sunlight's touch, things that sharpen shadows till they cut the light out of the eyes and leave the underbrush to scramble for the warmth.
Shiemi is a honeysuckle, she has known it since before the day the demon took her legs - far too frail to stand without support and worried that her clinging will asphyxiate, worried that
"I'm... bald?!"
She can hear the grove fall silent. (and maybe Nii-chan fidgets in her stead)
"Wear a wig." He is tired of suggestions, so tired he might just sculpt away her mouth as measure for the future.
"Can't you just... make hair?" It is a sheep's request, and she knows it, yet she would let him undo all adjustments for the sake of having hair.
"Hair is a damn nuisance, it'll be easier with a wig."
"But I'm sure it will look better with-"
"We don't know how long your greenman can keep up the flower, why waste time on something that can be fixed afterwards? It'll look just fine with a wig - see?"
A tuft of grass looks nothing like a wig but laughter leaps her heart without precaution, without a thought - the grass-haired golem strikes a chord in memory, of all the cram school boys dressed up in skirts and borrowed wigs. It fills her up, drags her in, and for a moment she is free of worry burden, a singularity of pulse and tinkling light.
Amaimon doesn't laugh. Shiemi sees the spikemoss in his hands, the tension in his stance as he's about to curl into himself again.
"Not you! I wasn't laughing at you!" she assures - without her usual shake of head and wave of hands to underline, the words feel naked. "I was thinking the sculpture looked so funny with the grass wig, I couldn't help it, and then I started thinking of when all the boys in my class turned up in girl's uniforms - really, it wasn't you, I promise."
He lingers: in his eyes he holds his work for scrutiny, like a client contemplating if the item in his hand is worth the money in his pocket. Shiemi sees them all the time, the exorcists that come for one thing specified and leave with two things bought, or more. There is discovery in their eyes when they pick out an item for consideration, one that touched some unthought seed of an idea and sparked its growth.
What idea that touched the King of Earth she'll never know, as he swats the grass wig off with a dismissive hand and resumes his work without a word.
Shiemi makes a note to bring the hair up at a better time. She can wander lost in fantasy till then, and dream like caterpillars do of iridescence borne on wings to heaven high. (she even has her own cocoon) Maybe dreams are all they are, Shiemi thinks. When they melt their flesh away to naught but protein soup, then somehow reassemble and burst the limits of their world to fly; Kamiki-san explained it down to detail once, when Shima-san would not leave her be. (he spoke no more that day)
Perhaps she is a molten dream right now, waiting to wake up and find it real.
Shiemi shudders, touching on the memory of that body where there was no waking up. The dream came near to nothing in that emptiness where all things slip away and bury, same as in that forest where her story ended.
"Why wouldn't my old body work?"
"It's dead."
Yes, but so's the one he builds from blood and bone of ancestors.
"I know, but what is the difference if-"
"Older Brother used to do that sort of thing, bind souls to dead bodies." The King of Earth is splitting eyelashes, hair by hair and empty gaps between, as if the words he spoke held no more weight than one such lash - and still, Shiemi's mind slips through through the gaps and sinks. "They weren't much different from ghouls, just didn't have the appetite or the strength. Most went insane." Even if she has eyes... will she see, if they are made of dirt... will she be human... if she is made of soil...? "Not sure if it was because they weren't meant to be alive in the first place, or if it was the realisation they were dead and decaying that made them snap. They all rotted away eventually, and Brother stopped making them."
Shiemi knows rot. It feeds her garden, that pungent smell of sweet gone sick (is she to be the same?) but that first class of Seals and Symbols shook her senses still. (or worse?) The things professor Neuhaus summoned were a different kind of rot. (some dead things just want to die) Amaimon's brother did that sort of thing…? His older brother, who would kill him if he killed any of his students.
The bits align like shards of broken earthenware, all grating and complaint from edges seeking better mates for matching.
"Sir Pheles is your older brother, right?"
"Yeah."
His eyes don't leave his work, and for that she's only grateful. There is a question caught between those sullen edges, one that must be carefully removed to let them slide in place, but words are pollen and some seeds are better never planted. There can be rot in words, in knowing, a mashou not contracted like the usual but more than potent in itself. There are words of foulness, toxic things not wishing to be touched, and some come tipped with nitroglycerine excited for the flame. The question grating in her mind is both.
"Are all Demon Kings brothers?"
It is not that question.
The silence is more deafening than any answer, as though the clearing, too, knows she faltered when the true inquiry tiptoed on her tongue. Shiemi flusters, fidgets, shoots again to miss the mark: "Then, Rin is your brother, too? Does that make him King?"
The clearing fills again, when silence scurries from the warning rumble in the ground, when dewdrop words unspoken seep into its rifts and strain them deeper. (perhaps he does have body language after all)
Nettles, nettles, stinging anyone who dares approach. It is their way, their nature, and Shiemi doesn't tread among them if she can avoid it; to force is not her way, not her nature, nothing like the demon halfling boy who barged into her Baa-chan's garden with his pollen words and smashing sword and... fire.
Sometimes you need fire. Some things need to burn so they can grow.
"Why did you kill me?" she asks, with all the grace of currants squeezed until the breaking point where everything inside comes splurting, and once it's out Shiemi is a woodlouse scurrying for shelter, having compromised her home under the pot. She doesn't want to know. (it hurts) Who wants to know why they were deemed unneeded? Who really wants to know the reason someone felt their life was better spent as fertiliser? (finally not useless)
"You think I did it?" Amaimon looks at her. He looks at her, confusion cast in flesh, and she can think of absolutely nothing to respond. He didn't? He didn't want her dead? Then who...?
Amaimon huffs, a derogatory noise that expected this and nothing more from such a dimwit human. "Nemetona killed you."
"Who…?"
"Nemetona." His eyes and hands have all returned to work, not inclined to waste of his attention. "The forest spirit you ran into."
The forest skims her mind, a dream caught in the tangled web of memory: of bones that whisper in dead tongues, of stones engraved with names forgotten and of ground steeped red by blood yet starving.
"Why does she do that? All those people…" Shiemi freezes without skin. She was not the first, and more unfinished stories will be woven to its walls in time. "Why?" she repeats, the earthenware not yet wanting to assemble and Amaimon not the one to answer what he deems redundant.
His gaze is dull, it always is, like a dagger that has feasted much too greedily on flesh: it dulls further at her question, sinking inwards in pursuit of something comprehensible to human thought.
"You place offerings at your kamidana every day, don't you?"
"Uhm, yes?" She had somehow not expected he would pay attention to such specific practices. (too mundane)
"Why?" He has the curtness of a snapweed pod and would have made a scary pop quiz teacher.
"To make sure the house kami are satisfied and happy."
"And what if you stop giving them offerings?"
Pollen words, pollen thoughts, and the sound of bursting buds of mulberry.
"Then they will grow angry and bring misfortune", she murmurs, and those broken bits of pottery fit perfectly at last. "Then, Nemetona… She's angry because humans forgot about her? She used to be a kami but nobody gives her offerings anymore?" Offerings, she says, for a word like sacrifice is more than she can bear.
"She isn't angry. She's…" He stills and tilts his head, as if whispers from the forest maze could carry on the wind like dandelion seeds. "Lost. Her existence has no meaning." And that is that. That is all. The King of Earth is once again absorbed in drawing life from death.
Shiemi barely notices. Her mind is in her garden, tucked away in safety where the kindness of her Baa-chan nurtured all the little saplings, whether human child or plant. Until she died. Until the garden fell apart and all she knew with it.
It hurt.
She made sacrifices then (stupid girl) to protect her world with borrowed power, when her own fell sorely short and what was left of her to lose was less than what was lost already. Useless, stupid girl.
It hurt.
To be taken by the demon hurt but to be helpless hurt more still, and that might be why sacrifice is such a painful thing to say: of all the words to ask for help, it is most desperate, most lost, most at the mercy of another.
It hurt.
And Nemetona... hurt. Her name had left the lips of humans long ago yet the taste still lingered, sweet and phantom fresh, a flower withered and preserved for memory alone. Years grew in between those precious petals, grew from decades into centuries while the forest grove forgotten dreamt of blood and solemn prayers. For harvest. For prosperity. Things humanity no longer asks for. (she demands)
Human hand has tamed the soil since then. She has harnessed the wind and water wells and outgrown the need for sacred groves and goddesses. Goddesses who want to be needed.
nothing wants to be forgotten
"That's terrible…"
"What do you want now?" Amaimon stills his hands and waits for her to specify what other aspect of the vessel warrants her displeasure.
"Huh? No, not that: Nemetona. She killed me, but, at the same time…" Shiemi is a gardener, and gardener hands are nursing hands. "I feel sorry for her."
Regardless of the depths his dull eyes search, he finds no reason. "Why?"
"She's lonely, and forgotten… nobody cares about her… It's just so very sad."
Amaimon doesn't follow, and there will be no more pursuit of that elusive reason either as his patience wears out faster than a shovel left in rain.
"You're human", he says, and flicks the word aside like a pencil picked by accident when what he wanted was a brush; dismisses, as if care and sadness are but mishaps of the mind, and too trivial even to correct.
Amaimon's hands aren't gardener hands.
"What's so bad about being human? We feel sorry because we care - you should be the one feeling sorry for her." Shiemi is not trivial, nor is she a mishap: she is human, and that is not to be dismissed.
"Me? What does this have to do with me?"
"It's sad!" If she says it loud enough it will eventually reach him. "You're the King of Earth! The king of plants! Nemetona is your kin, don't you care that she's suffering?"
"She's not suffering", he persists, voice touching something slimy and unpleasant and recoiling in disgust. "She's weak. Getting so obsessed with humans and their approval that she can't be without it, it's a disgrace to demonkind."
There are words of foulness, toxic things not wishing to be touched.
"People aren't weak for needing each other", she drives her argument before her like a shield, like an ant too far from home and from the numbers substituting strength but too entranced by fire to give up ground once won. "I don't think that makes demons weak, either."
parasite
Amaimon glares. It is sharp enough to cut each layer of her counterfeited confidence and spear her insecurities. (like Rin) The thought is candle flame in downpour, gone as soon as it was lit, but she sees it: blue eyes striking home, striking true, striking at her unseen shackles. Differences aside, they are brothers, absolutely.
But this one has more thorns and more trichomes.
"What do you know about demons." There is no question left, with the taunting drip of acid melting down his words unto the bone. There is no need for questions when the answer is already known.
Shiemi flushes, knowing Nii-chan and the sea god whale (she was absolutely useless in that battle) but no more than that, and that is not what he is asking. He is asking for her ignorance in deep deferent black on white submission. (to step again on honeysuckle roots)
Shiemi scrapes together what her humble spirit has of proud defiance and returns his scorn to what extent she can: "W-well - what do you know about humans!"
A surprising lot, if you count tourist spots and video gaming trivia. Or history. Vivid recollections of the worlds that were before are poured into her mind, a hundred thousand raindrop days collected in his frost-glass eyes. All alike. To him they're all alike.
how do you see
when the light is blocked by clouds
how do you tell
if your story is true?
A/N
I've just wondered, ever since the backstory with Kuro, what's happened to all those Old Gods whose religions have died out, those that had individual names - like Astaroth, or Iblis, or Amaimon - but no one speaks those names anymore. Do they go back to being lesser, nameless demons, like just a bakeneko, or an ifrit? Do they throw a fit about it...?
Seed leaves is the name of the first leaves a plant sprouts, which are technically part of the plant embryo, and they can look vastly different from the "real" leaves that come once the seedling has stabilised itself. The Swedish name is nicer and I was a little disappointed that I couldn't use it: heart leaves.
Trichomes are the fine hairs on nettle leaves that deliver the sting.
Nemetona is an ancient Celtic goddess associated with sacred groves. Very little is known about what actual worship of her looked like, only that hawthorn seems to have been particularly important to her. And I'm morbid, so what springs to mind when I think of hawthorn is shrikes, also known as butcherbirds. These birds catch insects, small frogs and the like and impale them on any conveniently sharp spike nearby – barbs on a wire fence, or thorns on a shrub. They then tear off flesh in bite-sized portions and eat. C: And this lined up well with another mythical entity called the umdhlebe!
Umdhlebe is a Zulu "demon tree", said to be able to move around and to self-fertilise by killing animals that go near it. It has been hypothesised that the umdhlebe would kill through carbonic gas released to the area around it through its roots. I picked carbon monoxide for the umdhlebe trees in Nemetona because it's colourless, odourless and tasteless, and a potent killer. It targets the oxygen transport of the haemoglobin, keeping oxygen from being circulated to the body by blocking the sites where oxygen should have bound. It causes symptoms like headache, dizziness, confusion, hallucination, nausea, fatigue, coma and respiratory depression, ending in brain damage and/or death if untreated. Since carbon monoxide thus only affects organisms dependent on haemoglobin for breathing (i.e. organisms with blood), plants aren't bothered by it. That's why Nii-chan was fine in there.
As one having ShIzuNo as OT3, the scene is forever etched into my mind where Shiemi looks at Izumo in the public bath changing rooms and blurts out she's so slim and beautiful. QvQ' I wouldn't say Katou has made clear any body confidence issues in Shiemi - her complimenting Kamiki's looks might just be a frank, upbeat friend honestly complimenting a friend. Shiemi herself had an initial worry about looking weird in a school uniform and not wanting her face to look so childish, but that's all, really. Hers is more of a self-esteem issue where she didn't see her own strength and value.
Kamidana I'm sure most of you have heard of. It's a Shinto shrine in the home, where you can pray and make offerings just like at a regular Shitno shrine.
Snapweed is one of those plants that don't care for wind or insects, they just catapult their seeds away to spread them. Another name for the species is Impatiens, which is exactly the word it sounds like. xD
I used to draw portraits on commission, classical graphite photorealistic ones, and the f*cking hair… x'D It's a repetitive work that takes more patience than I think Amaimon is capable of.
Dear Yoko-Zuki
Oh? Well, I think Amaimon has plenty of artistic talent – when he sees the point in using it. Just like I think he doesn't do facial expressions because "why use muscles that don't do anything?", I don't think he sees any practical use for exquisite art/fine sculpting. This is a thought I've had about demons vs. humans in general. We humans are tied to our bodies more strongly than a demon ever will be tied to its host. To many of us, our body is (part of) our identity, and it matters very much to us what that body looks like. But for a demon? Who uses a body more like we use an apartment or a car, and goes through a great number of bodies in a lifetime? I don't think they would identify with their body. I'm not even sure they would care much how it looked, as long as it had all the convenient features they're used to (air conditioning, adjustable seats, heating, etc.).
*yes yes Samael, you probably care how it looks, but not everything is about you*
In essence Amaimon was just being lazy with the first body. =P