Chapter Text
Tucked deep within the folds of the northern mountains, Tsuyukusa was less a village and more a living shrine to grief. It did not bustle. It did not shout. Even in the height of harvest or the warmth of festivals, its people spoke in soft tones, as though the wind itself were listening. Hushed murmurs and sacred silence allowed for the dead to speak, and for the living to listen and honor the wisdom and grievances they provided. Joy wasn't permitted. Smiles few and far in-between.
The fog never truly left the valley floor. It draped the cobbled paths like old silk, veiling the morning with a soft gray hush. Moss grew thick between every stone and wall, fragrant and dewy. The cedar trees surrounding the village rose like sentinels, branches thick with dripping needles, letting in only speckled shards of light. When the sun passed overhead, the entire village shimmered — not in gold, but in pale, spectral silver.
There were no bells rung at midday. No drums of festivity. Time was marked not by sound, but by ritual.
Each household in Tsuyukusa maintained a family altar, not just for their ancestors, but for those whose names had been lost to time. Incense coiled endlessly in narrow trails from homes, blending with the earthy smell of wet leaves and woodsmoke. Every door bore a small bundle of dried flowers — violets, lotus, spider lilies — bound with black silk cord, refreshed each moon cycle in silence.
Mourning was the culture, not the aftermath. It was ritualized, woven into birth and marriage alike. Children were taught the names of the dead before they learned the names of seasons. Before any harvest was blessed, a prayer was spoken not to gods, but to those who came before — to spirits who walked the mist beside them.
The people did not fear ghosts. They embraced them. Decorated them with flowers and folded paper charms.
It was said that those who died within Tsuyukusa never left. Their bones were buried beneath the cedar grove, wrapped in mourning cloth dyed with plum and ash. Graves were simple—flat stones marked with nothing but the family’s crest and a pressed flower. The flowers were never allowed to rot. If a blossom withered, it was burned at the Hollow Altar in the woods — the same altar where Ruri would one day kneel in terror.
The village shrine, Kurohana Shrine, sat at the highest point of the valley, carved into the mountainside. It was not grand. It did not glitter. Instead, it stood humble, with weatherworn beams and a single bell that was never rung. It was not meant to beckon gods, but to keep them silent. Priests maintained it with solemn care, bowing thrice before entering, never speaking above a whisper inside. And it was there the village’s most sacred rituals were held — burials, name-passings, and the Night of the Falling Petals, a yearly event in which the villagers wandered through the cedar woods at twilight, carrying lanterns and murmuring prayers to guide any lingering spirits home.
The people of Tsuyukusa did not ask for protection. They did not believe in saviors. Their peace came from obedience — to silence, to balance, to the unspoken rules passed down for generations.
No one questioned the shadows in the woods. No one spoke of the bargain.
But every man, woman, and child knew that something listened from the trees — something ancient, something vast. And so they burned their flowers. And so they whispered their names. And so they lived quiet, delicate lives, wrapped in the silk of denial. And within that hush, Ruri was born.
A girl of long hair and dark eyes, with hands always folded, always listening. The village mourned before it celebrated. So she learned to grieve before she learned to smile. And that, too, was Tsuyukusa. A place where even the air knew sorrow. A place that never raised its voice, not even in death.
─── ⋆⋅ ♰ ⋅⋆ ───
As the years passed her by, the stench of ignorance grew more pungent – stifling, and hard to swallow, Ruri’s skin crawling beneath the gaze of the unknown shadow that always remained just out of sight. How does a whole village ignore the weight of a burden this great? How does a whole village not crumple to their knees – hands folded and heads bowed with desperate prayer – with the knowledge that their whole existence lies within the hands of someone only spoken of with hushed words? Despite the seed of paranoia that had begun to unfurl within her heart, she remained steadfast in her duties as a mourner-priestess, finding distraction in her Mothers expectations.
Washing and anointing the bodies of the deceased with fragrant cedar oil and wisteria water. Dressing the corpses in hand-stitched mourning robes, dyed with soot, plum extract, and pressed black petals. Tying black blossoms to their hands and mouths — believed to keep their final words sealed, preventing wandering spirits. Etching the names of the dead onto memorial slats and placing them in the family’s ancestral shrine. Personally performing the burial under the cedar grove, using no tools but her hands unless the ground was too frozen. Her fingertips remained often calloused and cracked from the ritual burial digs, dirt permanently beneath her nails, however, it never fazed her.
Ruri found herself alone this particular morning.
Already, she had brushed the moss from the family headstones, the scent of damp earth lingering on her sleeves. She’d swept the stairs of her family estate until even the wind seemed hesitant to disturb the stillness she left behind. Her fingers ached from folding mourning papers—hundreds of them—until the joints of her hands throbbed beneath the strain. She'd done it compulsively, again and again, unable to stop. As if the perfect creases in each paper could somehow keep everything else from collapsing.
Only one task remained. Tending the altar.
The mist was heavy this morning—thicker somehow, like breath held too long. It curled around her ankles in ghostly ribbons as she moved through the path that cut between the cedar grove and the edge of the village shrine. Her footsteps whispered against the mossy earth, barely there. Ruri had always moved like this—softly, like a memory trying not to be forgotten.
A wooden bucket swung from her hand, filled with saltwater, pressed wisteria petals, and the faintest trace of incense ash. She carried it the same way she carried her grief—carefully, but close enough to spill.
At the foot of the altar, she knelt, her knees sinking into damp moss. It was a humble shrine—old, weatherworn, but lovingly maintained. An unmarked stone slab stood at its heart, veined with lichen and shadow. The altar was bound in creeping roots and circled with smooth river stones that bore no names. Only silence.
Ruri dipped her cloth into the water and pressed it gently to the stone. One hand moved with instinct, the other with reverence. She whispered as she worked, her voice small, uneven.
"Forgive our trespasses... May you find rest where memory clings... May the soil take you softly."
A bead of water rolled from the altar’s face, tracing the carved hollow where prayers once pooled in rain.
Then—
The fog changed.
It stopped moving. Halting in time with Ruri’s next breath, unable to push further as if having met an immovable wall. The birds had long since fallen silent, but now even the trees seemed to hold their breath. The cold air pressed against her nape like a hand. Every part of her body told her to stand, to run, to scream, but she did not. Could not.
Instead, she lifted her eyes. And saw him.
He stood between two cedar trunks, just beyond the line of ancestral offerings—tall, inhumanly still, as though carved from the night itself. Pale robes trailed behind him like smoke on water. His hair fell past his waist, silver not with age but with something far older, the color of moonlight that had never known warmth. He was barefoot. The fog curled around his feet like worship.
But it was his face that stole the breath from her lungs.
His eyes were as still as frozen ponds—silver-ringed and hollowed of light. Beautiful. Terrible. A mask of sorrow worn so long it no longer needed expression.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Ruri’s chest rose with a quiet shudder. "You’re not a ghost," she said.
The demon tilted his head, only slightly—just enough for her to feel studied. "No," he said, voice like petals falling onto glass. "But I am remembered like one."
Her heart slammed against her ribs. Her throat felt dry as ash. "You’re... the Bloom."
He stepped forward, slow, unhurried. The air around him trembled. The temperature dropped. The leaves refused to move.
"I am what your ancestors knelt before when death came wearing too many faces," he said. "What they sealed in hushes and offerings. I am what you thank when no child dies in the night."
Her lip quivered. "We’ve kept the pact."
He stopped. Close now. Too close. She could smell him—not of flesh or decay, but of cedar smoke, winter air, and something cloying beneath it all... rotting plum blossoms.
"Did you?" he asked gently. Not cruelly—never cruel. Just truth, sharpened to a blade’s whisper.
Ruri didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Because she knew. Every tremor in her hands. Every burial that didn’t feel complete. Every missing blossom from the altar. Every night she’d dreamed of black petals and faceless souls — they’d all been signs. And she had ignored them.
She tried to speak. Instead, her knees gave out, and she dropped into a bow so low her forehead touched the cold moss. Pinpricks of pain delivered by the bite of unswept stone unable to ground Ruri from the terror that had wrapped around her throat.
"I—I'm sorry," she whispered. "Please. We didn’t know."
The demon crouched in front of her, and she felt it before she saw it—the weight of presence like stone pressing on her chest. Limbs trembling, she refused to move from her place upon the floor, prayer after prayer echoing within her skull with utmost desperation.
"You kept the ritual," he said. "But not the balance. Something was taken. Something left unacknowledged."
"I can fix it," she said. Her voice cracked like ice. "Please—tell me what I must do."
His silence stretched like dusk across a mountain. Then, he stood again. Behind her now, looming. "I have not come to end you. Not yet."
Her breath caught in her throat.
"But know this," he murmured. "The village is no longer yours to protect. It was never yours to save."
A pause.
"Only to mourn."
When she turned around, he was gone. But the mist had deepened. The woods no longer felt like home. And the altar stone, so warm from her touch, had turned cold.
Ruri remained kneeling long after the fog had cleared. Her hands shook. Her fingers were stained with salt and crushed petals. For the first time in her young life, the rites were not enough. And something inside her—something vital—began to break.
─── ⋆⋅ ♰ ⋅⋆ ───
She didn’t remember rising. One breath she knelt at the altar, hands still raw from scrubbing the cold stone, the demon’s absence a gaping wound in the forest’s air. The next, she was walking. Barely.
Her limbs moved like marionettes on frayed string. Her feet sank softly into the soil of the path she’d known since childhood, but it felt foreign now—wrong. The trees stood too still. The wind passed her without recognition. Her village—once a heartbeat behind every breeze—was now just a whisper of what had been.
She stepped through the front gate of her family estate and closed it behind her with aching care. The wood clicked against the frame with a finality that made her skin crawl.
Inside, her mother’s voice called from the kitchen—gentle, oblivious, safe.
“You’re back late, Ruri. Did you fall asleep again near the shrine?”
Ruri did not answer. Her usually prim posture shackled by the burden of knowledge, body hunched in on itself as if making her body seem smaller than it already was would allow for Ruri to hide from the Hollow Bloom's gaze. It'd permanently engraved itself into the depths of her very soul, seeding the beginnings of what would become deep-set paranoia as time passed.
Her hands were already dirty, sleeves soaked from mist and memory, and her gaze - hidden by dark strands that fell over her visage - remained vacant. She muttered something—nothing—and slipped past the room, past the warm light and the clatter of tea cups. Her mother watched her go, brows drawn with quiet concern, but said nothing more.
In her room, she lit no lamp. She didn’t need light anymore.
How would it find her after the truth she'd been exposed to? How would it carry the same warmth and comfort as before when it only seems to carry the same hollowness of his eyes now? Ruri alone was responsible for the holding onto punishment she knew was coming. Why else would her people lay in ignorant bliss if not for the fact that he'd found no reason to warn them of their own demise?
That night, sleep did not take her, it devoured her. The dreams bled in like ink into water—slow at first, then sudden. Twisting into nightmares that sought to drain any semblance of hope and delusion-driven wishes for redemption from her aching heart.
She stood in the woods, the same as before, her hands filled with petals that melted into puddles of blood that wept between her trembling fingers. The trees trickled tears of ash. The air stank of scorched incense. Her people were there—hundreds of them, standing in silence, their faces smudged and eyeless.
One by one, they reached for her.
The rice merchant, teeth missing, still smiling.
Her mother. Her father.
They did not speak. But their mouths moved.
Over and over again:
"You should have known."
"You should have stopped it."
"You were the only one who saw."
Then came him.
The Hollow Bloom stepped between them like a god through smoke, his hands gentle as he touched her chin. He leaned down, his mouth close to her ear.
"You were never meant to save them." His voice split the world in two.
Ruri woke choking on her own breath, soaked in sweat, her bedding twisted like burial shrouds around her limbs. She crawled from the futon on hands and knees, gasping, shivering.
The sky outside was still black, the stars hidden behind thick clouds. But dawn was near.
And already— Already, she could hear it: Her duties calling.
By the time the sun crested the ridgeline, Ruri had already washed the front steps of the estate twice. The stone gleamed wet beneath her feet, her knees bruised from scrubbing. She washed her hands again and again with the steeped wisteria water until her skin pruned, then tightened, then cracked. It was not enough.
Not nearly enough.
She swept the gardens, dusted the headstones, refolded every prayer slip that had even the faintest crease out of place. The incense holders were realigned. The altar cloth was changed three times. She spent twenty minutes burning the last one because she thought the corner had brushed the wrong flower.
Her mother found her kneeling before the family shrine, placing a bowl of rice precisely at the center point between two urns. Ruri’s hands trembled, but she would not let go. Her gaze was distant. Focused in the wrong direction.
“Ruri,” her mother said, kneeling beside her, voice soft. “You’ve done enough today.”
Ruri didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Her breaths were no longer her own, merely running on limited time.
“Have I?” she whispered. “It still doesn’t feel right.”
Her mother reached out and gently cupped her daughter’s hand. It was ice cold, fingers stiff from exertion. The tips twitching with the muscle memory of folding prayer slips over and over again.
“You’re doing too much,” she said. “They know you care. You always have.”
Ruri’s throat moved with a swallow that didn’t go down. Choking on a combination of a silent sob and the faint breath she forced past her lips.
“I have to be perfect,” she said, and her voice cracked. “If I’m not perfect, it’ll come undone. I know it will. I can feel it.”
The woman pulled her into a soft embrace. Ruri stiffened, then allowed herself to fold forward like collapsing silk. Just this once. Only for a moment, she'd tell herself, because after tonight .. tomorrow wasn't promised, and Ruri refused to lie on her back and submit to the fate that Hollow Bloom had painted. She couldn't.
“My sweet girl,” her mother murmured, brushing a hand through her hair. “Peace does not come from being perfect. It comes from being faithful.”
But Ruri couldn’t believe that. Not anymore, because the peace she’d believed in wasn’t real. It had never been. And no amount of prayer, or sacrifice, or folded offerings would bring back what was already rotting beneath the roots.