It began, as so many things do, in a shrine.

/

"Hiyori," her grandmother says. "Let's talk."

/

A young miko, a maiden of Amaterasu Omikami, took something from the sanctum of her goddess. She stole away with this object in the dead of night on the darkest day of the year. She stole a treasure: the powerful and sacred bow of the Amaterasu shrine. She stole the Hama Yumi, the demon-killing bow, because it had told her how hungry it was.

The first night after her crime, the maiden slept like a beggar in the bushes by the roadside. In her sleep, she received a dream.

Her dream took the form of a massive snake, its gray and green scales dully reflecting the pale, muted dreamlight. She couldn't have run from it, even if she wanted to. It was one of those dreams.

The snake spoke to her.

"You are not the first one to come for my treasure," it said.

In her dream, the maiden was not surprised that the snake had a pleasant, unassuming voice. The echo of it hung in the air like mist, and even in her dream, the girl began to feel sleepy and comforted.

"You are not the first to come, and you will not be the last."

The enormous snake slid itself around her feet until she was encircled completely. Its head reared up in front of her, up, and up, and up. She craned her neck to stare into its ruby-rimmed eyes.

"Do you have a name, little human?" the snake hissed down at her.

Even encircled within its powerful coils, and even with its poisonous, honey-sweet voice dripping into her ears, the girl knew it was very bad judgment to give her name to a dream monster.

"I am no one important," she said.

The snake laughed at this. The sound was disturbing: like wind through the cracks of a door.

"None of you are important," the snake said, still chuckling as though she had told a very funny joke. "And now, since you have broken the trust of your sworn goddess, you have taken away more than that bow you hide."

Outside her dream, the girl felt the hard, thin crescent of the bow against her back, still swathed in its protective wrappings. The knowledge of its realness comforted and strengthened her. She looked the dream snake in the eye.

"The Hama Yumi chose me as its bowmaiden, and I answered."

The snake laughed again, although this time it did not sound amused at all. It was the crazed, humorless laugh she had heard from possessed men. The girl woke up with that laughter tangled in her ears and fire rushing through her veins. She wiped a hand across her forehead and it came away cold with sweat.

She traveled onward that day, fighting a fever that stole her strength and played tricks on her senses.

/

Hiyori stares at her grandmother's hands, intent on how they work with the fabric and the needle in her lap.

"Talk about what?" she asks cautiously.

Grandmother smiles, and Hiyori smells a hint of danger.

"Sit down."

She obediently sits with her legs folded under her on the ground in front of her grandmother's chair. The fabric hisses softly against the old woman's ancient skin. The needle darts in, out, in, out: a sinuous water snake.

Her grandmother sighs a tiny sigh, as though she's been putting off this question for quite some time. Hiyori's stomach drops preemptively.

"How long have you been seeing the god?" her grandmother asks.

Hiyori's jaw works open and shut, but no sound comes out.

"You have hidden a shrine in my house," Grandmother continues. "With a mysterious name on it. You have disappeared many times in the middle of the day, and you come home happily covered in sweat and bruises."

The cloth settles in the old woman's lap, and her wrinkled hands fold over each other.

"And you are wearing a look these days, my cloud girl," she says quietly. "One I haven't seen on you in many years."

Hiyori meets Grandmother's sharp, truth-seeking gaze for several seconds. Then she drops her eyes to her own hands. It's impossible to figure out where to begin explaining herself.

Grandmother sets the fabric down next to her chair, carefully laying the needle on top of it.

"I think it's time for me to show you something."

Hiyori dares to look up again. Grandmother's voice is steel when she says:

"It's also time to tell you…you are not the only one who can see things."

/

After a day of fevered travel toward her village, the girl collapsed once again on the side of the road.

And, once again, the snake slithered its quiet, poisonous way into her dreams.

"If you use the bow for your own purposes, the gods will never smile on you," it whispered. The snake's voice was so gentle, so kind—as if the only thing it cared for was her welfare.

The girl knew this was a trick. Dream creatures such as this were full of shadows and whispers and lies.

"If you return the Hama Yumi now," the snake told her, "and if you beg forgiveness for seven days and seven nights, you can save your soul. If you swear to devote your existence to her worship, Amaterasu Omikami will pardon you."

"The bow is meant to be used," the girl retorted.

"And you believe it chose a soft, temporary thing like you?" the snake taunted.

"I'm the only one who answered it."

The snake circled her again, drawing its coils close around her waist, her chest, her neck. The girl felt something even worse than its suffocating hold on her—something slimy inside her ear, like a soft, probing finger. It was a sensation that was far too real to have any business in a dream.

"You shouldn't listen to everything you hear inside your little head, human."

The girl gasped awake, like a drowning person breaking above the water. She filled her lungs with all the air she could manage, and dug her fingers in her ears to make sure nothing was hiding there. Clutching the bow protectively to her stomach, she drew courage from its song against her skin.

She was right to have taken it. She had done the right thing. But after that dream, she tried not to think about snakes anymore.

She could also see the ayakashi.

/

Hiyori does not really understand what is happening when her grandmother rises smoothly from her chair. She flicks her hand at Hiyori: a slight motion indicating that she is to follow.

She feels the first twinges of realization as her grandmother leads her to the back of the house and into the small, dead garden patch. Hiyori stands in the place her grandmother points to.

"Dig," she says.

Hesitating for only a moment, Hiyori kneels down and begins to paw in the hard winter dirt with her bare hands. Her grandmother silently joins her: wrinkled hands working alongside smooth.

A few inches into their task, Hiyori's fingertips brush something that does not feel like rock or soil. She digs faster, uncovering the fabric wrappings that have caked stiff with dirt and age. With some difficulty, she pries the wrapped object from its grave and sets it at her grandmother's feet. Whatever rests within the cloth is long and light, and something clatters when Hiyori sets it on the ground.

Grandmother crouches next to it, brushing reverent, wrinkled fingers over the dusty cloths.

"I meant to let the knowledge of this die with me," she says, prying the wrappings gently open. The light pours over shining wood and taut string. "But you have caught the attention of some very nasty creatures, Hiyori."

Whether through some god's magic, or the simple protection of the sacred cloths, the polished longbow is spotless after its time in the ground. Alongside it lies an ebira and five slender arrows, each of them as silver as the moon. Hiyori's pulse catches unevenly at the sight.

"Was it you?" she asks her grandmother weakly. "Were…were you the one who took this?"

The mild, mid-day sun gleams off the silver arrows to dance in the old woman's hair.

"No," she responds. "It was a girl who lived many generations ago in our family. Thanks to her, the Iki women have always been able to see the creatures of the Far Shore."

Grandmother drapes the cloth back over its contents, and straightens up with a slight groan.

"Thanks to her, we're a bit cursed."

Hiyori swallows.

"But some people have more respect for superstition than others," Grandmother says as she continues stretching her stiff spine. "Even though I could see things that didn't make sense, I had trouble believing in the gods. That is, until my mother dug this up and showed it to me herself."

Hiyori looks at the bow and arrows. They are beautiful, but they don't really seem supernatural. Grandmother either doesn't notice her skeptical silence, or she simply chooses not to acknowledge it.

"And then, of course, I only had a son," she continues with a soft, ironic laugh. "He wanted to see more than what this little village had to offer. So he left, to raise his family elsewhere—and then you came."

Hiyori shivers.

A column of foul-smelling flames on the roadside. A monster with a seductive voice. Girls who smell like water, and cut like glass.

And then you came.

The Iki women are a bit cursed.

"None of us—" Hiyori asks, then readjusts the question. "I mean, you've never used that thing? The bow?"

Grandmother chortles, this time a bit more mirthfully.

"I never needed to. But you are a special sort of trouble, little cloud. The shadows have always tried to follow you home."

/

The ayakashi did not approach her. They knew better than to challenge the bowmaiden of the Hama Yumi. Still, she didn't like seeing them.

They were multi-headed demons that floated and chittered and shrieked. Sometimes, worst of all, they called out in familiar, humanlike voices. In her fever, during the long walk home, she thought she heard her family talking to her. They begged for her to come over to them.

"Cross the line," they whispered. "Cross the line. Come over to us. Cross over now. CROSS…THE…LINE."

"I am not like you," she said.

Their answer froze her blood.

"Not…yet…"

/

The evening is quiet. Hiyori is grateful for the solitude, because she's not sure she could feign anything close to normalcy after the revelations of the afternoon.

After bringing the bow and arrows into the house, her grandmother weaseled out of her the details of her interactions with Nobu. Confiding those events has helped Hiyori more than she expected. The emotional burden is lighter: merely a thin iron chain around her neck, rather than a millstone.

Still, she had managed to keep secret her acquaintanceship with the Yatogami. That's something she can't find it in herself to share.

The sacred bow sits in the next room over. Hiyori is hyperaware of it, like a wasp in the house.

Grandmother clicks her tongue once, and Hiyori looks over at her. She's fussing over the food, but Hiyori can recognize a lecture a mile away.

"That shrine, you foolish child—! Inviting kami into my house, without my knowledge—"

Hiyori winces, but her grandmother soldiers on: "Of course, you couldn't know it would invite other things too, but still…"

She sighs deeply, as though her granddaughter's temporary sojourns into the misty land of gods and demons are simply a brief and regrettable outburst of teenage rebellion. She flicks a hand toward the air, dispelling the distasteful idea.

"And now you seem to worship a magatsukami, which isn't exactly what someone my age wants to hear—"

Hiyori gasps in horror, clutching both hands over her heart.

"You—you know about that?!"

Grandmother clicks her tongue again, louder. "I know now."

Hiyori wonders if it's physically possible to perish of humiliation.

"You're lucky that magatsukami seems to like you so much," Grandmother observes with an incomprehensible smile. "Otherwise, you'd be past saving."

Hiyori sputters incoherently and blushes with enough ferocity to melt the skin from her bones. Her grandmother has already brushed her hands off and walked into the next room. She returns with the wrapped bow and arrows in her arms.

"Come, little cloud," Grandmother says. "Since you summoned that evil 'Nobu' thing to this place, you can at least learn how to defend yourself. And I don't mean with your crude punches and kicks."

Hiyori's blush won't fade. She stares from the bow, to her grandmother, back to the bow again. Grandmother sets it down on the floor to unwrap it, and Hiyori is struck once again with how shiny it is.

Maybe all holy relics are shiny. This is the first one she's ever seen.

"You mean—with that?" she quavers. It seems illegal to touch the thing, let alone shoot with it.

"What else?" Grandmother asks perfunctorily. "Unless you plan to throw that little shrine of yours at him."

Hiyori presses her lips together. She stalks up to her grandmother and holds her hands palm-up, waiting. There's a single breath of silence before Grandmother smiles.

"Good."

She sets the bow in Hiyori's hands.

It's much lighter than it looks. Her fingers close around it; she feels the faint hum of the string throughout the wood. Hiyori shuts her eyes to listen.

The bow is singing.

It has a thrilling voice. It is the music of wind, and war, and magic. It is music that makes Hiyori's veins feel full to bursting, and her heart plunge frantically to keep up with its beat. It is music that sings not with breath and tongue, but with bone and muscle.

It tells her it is hungry.

She opens her eyes again.

Grandmother is still looking at her. A slow, pleased smile draws creases under her bright eyes.

"I think you are holding it wrong, little cloud," she says.

/

The snake came back to her dreams. This time, it came back as many, many snakes, all with the same pleasant, deadly voices. They said in unison:

"Return the Hama Yumi."

The snakes attacked her. They slithered along her body, between her lips, down her throat, quivering and hissing in her stomach.

"If you return it, your death will be painless. If you return it, your fate will not be the fate of an ayakashi."

The dream snakes wound inside her arms and through her fingers, making her body something that was not hers. The snakes wrapped her in an unfamiliar skin, and moved her in ways she did not want to move.

"Tell us your name, little human, and you will wake up from this."

Her tongue was still hers, and she did not speak. The snake who was many snakes had taken her body, but not her voice.

"What is yours?" she asked.

The snakes stopped moving. She listened to the silence for a moment, then asked again:

"Do you have a name?"

"They did not give me a name," the snakes whispered. From her heart, where the snake heads had buried their fangs, she could feel their emptiness.

"Is that why you want mine?" she asked.

The snakes did not answer her. They released her heart, and wriggled out through her body, pouring out of her mouth and from under her fingernails and from her eyes like long, dark tears.

The bowmaiden woke with a cry, clutching the Hama Yumi tightly to her chest. The fever claiming her ever since she left the shrine had finally broken.

/

When Hiyori finds herself in the clearing again, it isn't to throw punches and kicks at invisible enemies.

She holds the bow with more confidence than she did the first time. Its song does not surprise her as much, now that she knows to expect it.

She didn't bring the arrows with her. Instead, she searches around her feet for long, slender sticks—long enough to serve as makeshift projectiles. There aren't too many of the kind she wants, so she has to be careful to collect them afterward. Once she has found four or five, Hiyori looks around for a target. Eventually, she has to settle for a small rock balanced on one of the lowest tree branches at the edge of the clearing. It's not what she would have chosen, but it will have to do.

Hiyori sighs. This isn't even the hard part. Retreating to a fair distance, she eyes the stone balancing on the branch.

Her stomach sinks. It is so very small. Maybe this wasn't the right way to practice.

As if in response to her trepidation, the bow thrums against her sweating palm. It wants to be used. It wants her to trust it.

So Hiyori closes her eyes, and tries to.

The first thing she notices is the smell. Every tiny forest scent clamors against her senses: sap, and animal droppings, and old smoke, and something else she doesn't recognize. Something pleasant and musk and otherworldly. The back of her nose burns with the influx of sensation. She takes a shallow inhale before raising the bow.

The second thing is the music, humming through her fingers and down her arm to the rest of her body. The bowsong spiders out through her nerves, raising every hair on her arms and the back of her neck. The music unsettles her with its restless desire. It reminds her that although the bow is an ancient and sacred relic, it is also a weapon.

It is also hungry.

She opens her eyes. The forest is blurry and silent around her. The only thing she can see—the only thing that is real—is the stone on the branch, her target. Hiyori takes aim.

A crash—like a huge, wounded animal stumbling through the forest—breaks her focus.

Hiyori drops the stick, and the bow falls to her side. She stares wildly around the clearing, seeing nothing that could cause the commotion. But her nose, sharpened by the bowmagic, is overwhelmed with a thick, coppery scent that nearly makes her gag. Suddenly, there's a shout—a human shout, immediately cut off and followed by another series of crashes and thumps.

Without hesitation, she takes off across the clearing toward the noise, the bow knocking against her leg with every stride.

/

The bowmaiden had only one more night before she arrived at her home.

She knew what would be waiting in her sleep, even before she closed her eyes. "I'm not returning the Hama Yumi," she began, but the snake interrupted her.

"Little girl, I already know you won't."

She gazed up, uncomprehending, into the snake's large, triangular face. Its tongue flickered lightning-quick between thin, scaly lips.

"I am here to propose an exchange," it said.

The bowmaiden cast all her guards up. Exchanges with dream creatures were always one-sided.

"If you give me a name, I will abandon my job as the bow's guardian," said the snake. "You will not dream of me any longer, and the bow will be yours as long as you can hide it."

She waited for the other part of the bargain. She waited for the snake to tell her what the real price was.

"Will you accept?"

The bowmaiden hesitated.

"If all you wanted was a name," she said slowly, "then…why wait to ask me? Why not sneak into another person's dreams and bother them for one?"

The snake laughed, and rather than the hissing noise she had heard before, this laugh sounded almost…human.

"The Hama Yumi and I are bound tighter than you know," the snake told her. "I am chained to it—compelled to visit its master three times before I can make my own request. And here you are, little bowmaiden. You have passed my test."

She was still wary. Something felt missing. A name was such a simple thing to give.

"This is all you must do," the snake said, bending its long body in a circle around her feet. "Give me a name, and I will leave your dreams alone forever. I will be in your debt."

She thought: what if it were true?

"Please, sweet bowmaiden," it asked pleadingly, sorrowfully. She felt pity for this nameless creature, for this monster with the stretched body and the wooing voice.

The bowmaiden decided.

/

She follows the noise, sometimes clipping her head on a branch or entangling herself in deep vines. The crashing grows louder, punctuated by scuffles and grunts.

Then the first voice cries out again, fractured with pain, and Hiyori's breath catches.

She trips through the thick underbrush, toppling unsteadily toward the thinning of the shadows. It spills her out at the edge of another dim clearing.

Someone is laughing. She's heard that laugh before. Terror pours down her spine.

"You aren't much without that nora of yours, are you?" someone shrieks gleefully. A fleshy, awful sound of impact makes Hiyori cringe farther back into the shadows. The iron taste in the back of her throat nearly chokes her.

Another grisly smack echoes through the trees, and a cry of agony rends the air.

Hiyori's feet begin carrying her forward before she can do anything to stop them. When she bursts through into the muted sunlight, her sudden appearance arrests the two fighters in their tracks.

She first sees Nobu.

He is more more disturbingly inhuman in the daytime than he is at night. Despite the shriveled twigs that pass for his arms, he has a convincingly large rock raised above his head, ready to smash down on his target below.

The target—in this case—Yato.

Splayed with his back against the forest floor, he heaves broken, tortured breaths. When he turns his face toward her, one of his eyes widens in shock. The other seems to be crusted over with something unpleasantly dark and oozing. Hiyori gasps at the state of his face and neck: tattered with half-healed cuts, bruises spreading a mottled mosaic down his chest and disappearing under his mud-caked yukata.

"Hiyori…?" he wheezes. His expression works its way from disbelief to terror.

"Hello there, little sweet," Nobu says. He still holds the stone aloft, positioned over Yato's unprotected skull. "You've come to see me after all?"

Yato quickly rolls toward Nobu's ankles, sweeping them out from under him. The rock flies from his grip and hits the mud with a wet thwack. Hiyori can't see much from her distance, except for the fact that both men seem to be weaponless. This does not stop either of them from throwing fierce elbows into each other's throats.

Nobu rapidly gains the upper hand again due to his opponent's injured state. He grabs both Yato's arms, yanking them back and down behind his body. He twists forcibly, popping the right arm cleanly out of its socket. He jabs his leg up and against the elbow of the now-useless limb. Yato's arm bends in a way that it shouldn't, and she can hear the snap of splintering bone.

A devastating scream makes Hiyori's hair curl.

Nobu releases Yato's weight, and he slumps forward into the mud. The right side of his face hits the ground first. Hiyori sees his arm buckled wrongly at his side, like a tree root ripped from the ground. There is mud all over his yukata, in his hair, smeared in clumps of reddish black over his torn face and throat. To her, right then, he doesn't look like a god at all.

He looks like a boy who is about to die.

/

"I name you Nobu," said the bowmaiden, and she woke.

The snake was still there when she woke up—except he was a man in the world of the living. He stood tall over her, admiring his new skin and limbs.

He was not a handsome man. There was a reptilian sheen to his skin, and a wrongness about the shape and color of his eyes, and his teeth when he smiled down at her were gray and large. He held a hand down, a silent offer to help her stand up. When she saw the long, swollen fingernails, she recoiled.

"Thank you, Tamanone," said the snake who was now a man.

Her heart stopped when he spoke her name, and his terrible smile grew a bit wider.

"We had an exchange," he reminded her. She began backing away from him, sick with the knowledge of what she had done. Then, the Hama Yumi began to sing. It was an awful sound, splitting the morning mist with its rage. The girl named Tamanone covered her ears and curled into herself to wait until the singing stopped.

The singing either ended very quickly, or it never ended at all. Regardless, when she looked up again, Nobu was gone. She glanced at the Hama Yumi on the ground, and it looked the same as it always had. Its bowstring lay silent. She reached toward it hesitantly.

When she touched it, her fear was confirmed. The Hama Yumi had revoked its choice, because she had released the demon. She bent over the Hama Yumi and wept.

It would protect her, but it would never sing.

/

"Yato!"

Hiyori stumbles toward him, desperate for a sign that he's conscious—for him to move at all, for a muscle twitch, anything.

Nobu takes a step back to pick up the rock that had been knocked away. He pauses after lifting it up, his back toward Hiyori as he tests its weight in each hand.

She drops to her knees next to Yato, letting the bow fall out of her grip as she reaches forward. She stops just short of touching him, fluttering her hands uncertainly over his body and trying to gauge whether her attention will only injure him further.

"So the magatsukami has a real name after all," Nobu says musingly, pondering the rock in his hands.

"Yato, wake up," Hiyori begs.

She builds up her courage to touch him, but only to brush the muddy hair out of his face. His eyes are closed. she lifts an eyelid to see his eyes are rolled back in his head.

"That would have been useful to know," Nobu continues, speaking to himself. Then he turns back to Hiyori, cradling the heavy rock in his emaciated arms like an infant.

"Please, Yato," she says, half-sobbing. She gently shakes his shoulder, careful not to move the damaged arm. No response.

Hiyori lets go of his shoulder. She cups his upturned cheek in her palm and leans forward, all the way until her forehead brushes his temple. His skin is very warm. He smells so beautiful and alive. Hot and quick, two tears slip down the end of her nose to splash onto his cheekbone.

On the other side of Yato's body, Nobu's footsteps approach.

The fingers of Hiyori's left hand find the bow in the mud next to her, wrapping tightly around it.

"Hold out your hands, little sweet," says Nobu. His honeyed voice is thick with anticipation.

"I think I'll like watching you kill him."

Hiyori's hands twitch. But she does not take the rock.

Nobu makes a soft, surprised noise.

The bow has taken Hiyori's hands away from her. The song of it thrums through her muscles, winds itself in liquid silver armor around her fingers. Protecting. Preventing.

"What kind of bow is that?" Nobu asks. His voice has lost its honey.

Hiyori lets out a quiet breath, stirring the hair against Yato's forehead. Her hand tenses around the bow.

The shaft of an arrow presses into her knee, even though she had not brought any with her. I am hungry.

"Oh, for the love of all the gods—" Nobu hisses. He grunts, lifting the rock high. The air shivers around them, tight as the atmosphere before an explosion.

Hiyori sits back on her heels.

"I want you to stop calling me 'little sweet'."

A silver arrow sings past Nobu's head. It carries his ear away with it.