This one was basically inspired by Takano's flippant little "I'm not gonna tell you anything, you might come back and haunt me" reply to Shion's accusation of being the one responsible for Satoshi's disappearance in the Massacre arc's manga ending. I also tried to lift my general impression of the Japanese attitude towards sentient curses/nonsentient ghosts.
June 14th, 2024
I will die today.
I will not die helpless.
My death will not amount to nothing. My hand will draw the marks of my revolt. My flesh shall take the great shape of my revenge.
I will steal myself away from their intent for me. My blood will not ripen their soil. Nor shall my body blossom into their chosen colors.
I will bring them fear instead.
My death today shall be the quiver in the executioner's hand tomorrow, the wavering doubt in the mind of the justiciar.
I will be hallowed, but not for them.
I will die. I will not die.
–Hymn of The Many Below, The Wound Tree, The Fiend of the Flowering Crocus, The Tree of Spite
(The Silt Verses)
It starts small, as all such things start small –like a grain of sand slipped into an oyster.
This particular grain happens to be the fraction of a moment when she stares down the gleaming grey barrel of a gun and every inch of her down to her soul roars NO with diamond-tipped fury.
No, she will not die like this.
No, this is not to be endured.
No, she will not allow this.
No, this will not be gotten away with.
No.
No.
But fate is not so kind.
The first layer of nacre is similarly tiny, as frail and weak as a single lonely spark. It is the part that survives onwards, the fragment of immortal chance.
It is common as dust and perpetual as clay, but between this spark and the first, a current of possibility hops.
No, it says, and then; I will not.
It will not.
The second layer builds upon what is already there.
No, I will not
No, it will not
In the multifaceted glimmer of a thousand billion potential possibilities in a hundred million crystals, the very existence of this resolution is as fragile and fleeting as a strand of gossamer in a hurricane.
But it is here. It exists.
And fueled by the rage of the I will not, bolstered by the power of it will not, it builds.
It emerges from strangeness. What feels like a cocoon, dusty and dry yet cunningly woven in what seems to be a hundred clinging, choking layers. Something inorganic wrapped around time-macerated organic matter, floating in a swampy soup. Within all this is rot and ruin and rage.
There is rage.
It lifts itself in the rage, and the world seems to rush in on all its awareness like a tide of fog.
Ah. Ahhhh-ah.
That is better. It has finally emerged to freedom.
Space. Scent. Color. It has the thought of them now –though, curiously, not the substance.
To say that it has a next thought would be untrue –it does not think. It does not have the mind to do so. It simply has a finality to accomplish, and each piece of the process drops into its mind like a rewound time-lapse of collapsing dominos.
For lack of better descriptors concerning something that currently has no nose, no presence, no shape, it lifts its head and sniffs the air deep.
Like a hunting dog, it is seeking for the scent of blood.
There is a place that was not the previous place. It is in that place.
This place is strange, for it weighs on the thing deeply. It feels as though this place is was should be familiar, all at once. This place makes it feel known. This place feels as though it is shaping it, molding it with great unseen hands.
This thing is blind. It cannot see the contours it is irresistibly being made to form. But it feels them.
It still has no shape, but the intangible nose takes in deep drafts of blood, a salty and overwhelming reek of iron that drifts up from every side of the sleepy fields and dirt roads.
This is not correct. This peaceful rural place should not be rolling under a gentle autumn moon.
The ground should be boggy with death. The untended mires of the rice fields should be knee-deep in blood. The roads should be thick with corpses. The thatch and the walls should run red.
It is wrong. It is wrong.
It is not capable of thought, but if it was, it would cry aloud in furious wonder that no one could see how bitterly the lives here had been sold, that they could not perceive the marks that had been left. That what it so clearly knows cannot be so clearly seen, not with mortal eyes.
For lack of a better word, it breathes deep, over and over, snuffing up the roiling aroma of death as though it would like to swallow it down to the dregs. The scent of murder manifold hangs over the uncleansed, unaware land like a red mist, but there is a trail –many trails, tangling off like stray threads and vanishing into the wilderness.
It will follow them.
It will find their ends.
It exists for nothing else.
It is in another place. Less familiar, less shaping. It is not as known here.
But it knows. It can smell the tang of murderous deeds done like a lurid trail in the air, leading it straight to this man. It coats him like a slimy shell. His hands drip with it. His trigger-finger glows red. Oh, yes, it knows him.
It does not follow him. It is not singular enough to follow him. It envelopes him instead, spreading around him and his life like a bank of fog.
He does things within it that it does not have the mind to understand. He moves himself around. He moves things around. He moves sounds around.
If it had a mind, each movement, each action, each sound, would send a red-hot spike of rage through it. How dare he live and do these things so casually, when his crime is so clearly marked? How dare he?
But it cannot think this. It cannot think. Instead, it rages, and waits.
Human though he may be, living though he was, the feeling of being enveloped weighs on him. It can see this. It watches how his nerves stretch further by the day, how he begins to twitch, looking over his shoulder for the blow he feels ready to fall.
It waits.
It waits until his sleep is haunted, waking up gasping two or three times in a night. It waits as the lack of sleep tells on him, driving him further and further into tetchy paranoia. It waits, and savors the secret guilt that makes his bloodied, murdering hands shake.
And then smoothly, in his sleep, it comes to him.
In his dreaming mind, it is given a shape, but he does not know that shape, and it cannot see what form it is given. It merely does what it has so longed to do, and puts its hands around his neck, and screams his sins directly into his mind, transmitting in a roaring unbroken stream the murder it has felt in that other place and the deeds that he already knows lay bloody on his soul.
He dies in his sleep.
It is not satisfied.
The next ones –it cannot count, but the tally is something like a few dozen– go much the same. It comes to them, envelops them, and feeds them their guilt until their minds and bodies collapse under the strain.
As the years go on –although it cannot tell time, either, only that each second is another moment of now in which the crimes have gone unpunished– the deaths come easier, and faster. Many of its victims are already nervous when it finds them; some of them even take their own lives before it can reach them.
It cannot think. But it feels.
What it feels is that these are small fry, comparatively. Their hands are bloody, they have murdered, but it senses a deeper sin, a heavier crime to be punished. That feeling aches along where bones should be, and pulses in what might have once been a skull.
Those victims that linger close to the place it has awoken in, the place that it found first, they are not the true quarry it seeks. Their punishment is richly deserved, but there is another matter that needs avenging. It does not know it –it cannot know– but it feels this truth like humans do gravity.
It is still not satisfied.
It haunts a man, but this one is different.
When he looks over his shoulder, he sees something for fraction of a moment, glinting in reflections or hanging back in his periphery. When he wakes gasping in the night and his rolling eyes pass over it, it feels as though it is there for a moment, instead of merely around him.
It does not know him. It does not know anything.
But this is different. This is even easier.
It stands behind him when he shaves, and his shout of alarm and his shaking hand nearly cut his throat for it when he sees the momentary flicker of it in his mirror.
It stands over his pillow as he sleeps, and sometimes he catches sight of it when he wakes suddenly –whatever it it is that he sees.
It is, for the very first time, perceived, and this means that the victim it has chosen does not last more than a week once it has latched onto him.
In his last moments, he pleads with it. He says that he was not the one to kill her, that he would not have killed her, that he was sickened with shame and guilt when she was killed.
He lies. There is no she that exists any longer, and the it that stands before him knows his sins.
He hunted. He caught. He witnessed.
And that is, in the end, much the same thing.
It is not even remotely satisfied when he dies.
Even after being perceived, even after the form that the place had given it is witnessed, it still does not think. It does not plan. It does not perceive the weight of time.
But as it hunts, and the thrumming need for vengeance grows quieter and quieter with each victim that slips away to their grave, a legend begins to grow around it.
There are whispers in the ether where it cannot go, sent along crackles of electricity and through copper and gold, tales of a curse from a place lost to a mysterious disaster. Speculation spins a hundred webs as to why, and how, and when it comes, and there are even hardheaded skeptics who take some belief in it.
Most notably, skeptics who were there on the day when a certain place became soaked with blood.
They say they do not believe in such things as curses. They laugh at it.
But with the next breath, during drunken reminisces or cold dark nights, they hitch their shoulders higher and their eyes sink. They know their sin –right down to the marrow. They talk of coincidence and of unlucky accident and in the end, always protestations that such things are not real. Why, were they not the perpetrators of one so-called curse?
Some fool, more outspoken –or drunk– than the rest might, at this juncture, speak musingly of how so many of their organization have been met with these too-frequent accidents, of their woman-leader's wild boasts of attaining godhood on that fateful night, and how 2,000 lives can make so very, many ghosts. They are always shushed, but eyes tend to skitter over the windows and exits after that, wary.
Some of them were assassinated, maybe, the skeptics murmur. Pruning the tree of unfaithful branches. Keeping secrets safe. Things like this don't happen.
This friend of a friend of a comrade-in-arms of a acquaintance of a drinking buddy called me before he died, the others say, sometimes. He was unstable, but he kept telling me he was seeing a ghost. One of that group of brats that got killed in the forest with R. One of the villagers.
Well, they're all dead, the skeptics say.
Well, that's the point, the others reply huffily. How angry would you be?
SHUT UP tends to come from the remaining throats at this point.
It is not yet satisfied.
There comes a time, though, when it is very nearly satisfied.
A time when there is but one left.
It comes to her. She is already sleeping badly; there are many pills scattered on the cabinets, uncounted bottles on the floor. Her expression is firm, her public movements confident and poised, but there are dark shadows under her eyes that not even her trendy makeup can hide, and in private, she is twitchy and skittish.
If it had the capability, it would be surprised that when she sees it, that she does not flinch.
"Ah, I did wonder," she says to her uninvited guest, and if it could, it might respect the smooth bravado that covers her fear almost entirely. "Long time no see, Sonozaki-chan."
It does not reply. It merely continues the process that has been ongoing ever since it rose, and decreases the distance between them.
Her mask of bravery falters, at that gliding movement, and she draws back involuntarily. Perhaps it is the unnatural lack of expression in the thing that others regard as its face. Perhaps it is the uncharacteristic stillness in the form it has been shaped into. Perhaps, even, it is the memory of gore dripping down its supposed face –though as the author of that gore, she should not be surprised at seeing it.
Her throat works, and she swallows thickly. There is a long silence.
It is not satisfied.
"I don't suppose you might be coming as a messenger?" she asks, and her normally-low laugh is brittle and high, artificial, as she taps her fingernails against the wineglass she had been unconsciously clutching. "This isn't my first encounter with something inhuman, you see. As a researcher, I'd love to know."
She is wreathed in murder. How could it have not seen that, before all this? Before death, and before what came in-between and after? She should be drowning in red –a true scarlet woman– and yet she stands here before it looking like nothing so much as a harried and exhausted businesswoman.
It is not satisfied.
It decreases the distance between them even further. Now, finally, after weeks and months and unheeded years of pursuit, they are close enough to touch.
If it were human, if it were alive, blood would be pounding in its ears, its very soul thrumming with the sweet, vengeful joy of justice fulfilled.
But it is not.
It is merely unsatisfied.
The curse reaches out, and finally takes Miyo Takano in its hands.
11.41 AM, USA Central Time