Chapter Text

Long before the first king crowned himself beneath the sun, before the royal bloodline had a name, there was a god beneath the earth.

His name was Arahabaki.

The oldest tablets called him the Red God.

The oldest songs called him the Buried One.

The priests of the present dynasty called him a demon.

That last name was the one most people knew.

According to the teachings of the Crown Temple, Arahabaki had once risen from beneath the mountains to punish the first people for their wickedness. He had shattered villages, swallowed fields, and made the earth tremble beneath the feet of men. The first king, blessed by the heavens, had driven the creature back beneath the world and sealed him there.

It was said that the king had spared mankind.

It was said that Arahabaki hated men.

It was said that any mortal foolish enough to look upon the god would lose his mind before the night was over.

Children were taught the story before they learned their letters.

Soldiers recited it before battle.

Priests spoke it over the graves of kings.

And every year, when the ground trembled beneath the capital, the people knelt and thanked the dynasty for keeping their god imprisoned.

But the story was wrong.

Or, at least, it was not the first story.

The first story had been written centuries before the dynasty existed.

There was no heroic king in it. No heavenly blessing.

And Arahabaki had never been imprisoned.

He had gone below the earth because he preferred the silence.

The oldest surviving account described him differently.

A force with a face.

A presence that made mountains bend around him and caused rivers to alter their courses simply because he had passed nearby. His footsteps were earthquakes. His anger was famine. His laughter was thunder.

And yet, according to that same account, he had once loved a mortal.

Only one.

The mortal had no royal blood, heroic lineage, or prophecy written in the stars.

He was simply a man who had been born into a year of famine.

His name has been lost.

Some versions claim he was a beggar.

Others insist he was a farmer.

One surviving fragment calls him a thief.

The priests of the Crown Temple removed that passage long ago.

Perhaps because thieves were not supposed to become beloved by gods.

Perhaps because the truth was more inconvenient than that.

The mortal had been starving for three days when he found the shrine.

It stood beyond the village, where the trees grew too close together and even the birds seemed reluctant to sing. There was no statue inside. No altar. No gold.

Only a stone sunk halfway into the earth.

The mortal had heard the warnings.

Do not enter.

Do not speak the god's name.

And above all—

Do not look at him.

He entered anyway.

He had expected treasure.

He found a god.

Arahabaki was sitting in the darkness beneath the shrine, though the mortal could not later explain how there could have been room beneath the stone for a living thing of such size.

The god's hair was the color of flame.

His eyes were brighter than any fire the mortal had ever seen.

The mortal looked at him.

And the world changed.

For one terrible instant, he saw everything.

The mountains splitting open.

Cities sinking beneath the earth.

Kings dying with crowns still upon their heads.

Fields burning.

Oceans swallowing temples.

He saw centuries pass like the turning of a page.

And somewhere within it all—himself.

The mortal fell to his knees.

Blood ran warm from his nose.

He could no longer feel his hands.

Arahabaki watched him.

Then, very quietly, the god asked,

"Why did you come?"

The mortal should have lied.

But he said,

"I'm hungry."

It was the first answer ever given to Arahabaki that did not contain a prayer.

The god stared at him.

Then he laughed.

The earth shook.

The mortal thought he was going to die.

Instead, Arahabaki reached down.

One finger touched the mortal's forehead.

And the pain stopped.

The hunger remained.

The cold remained.

The scars remained.

But something inside him that had been hurting for as long as he could remember suddenly became quiet.

The mortal began to cry.

Arahabaki withdrew his hand.

"What did you do?" the mortal whispered.

The god looked almost puzzled.

"I touched you."

No scripture explains what happened afterward.

The official histories claim the mortal was corrupted by the demon and died within the week.

The oldest account says otherwise.

It says he returned to the village alive.

It says his fever was gone.

It says the wounds he had carried for years began to heal.

It says he could walk without pain.

And it says that from that day onward, Arahabaki began appearing wherever the mortal went.

Not before kings.

Not before armies.

Not before priests.

Before him.

Only him.

The mortal eventually learned the truth the kingdom would spend centuries trying to bury:

Arahabaki had never hated mankind.

He did not care about them.

The god did not destroy the first kingdom.

The first kingdom had been destroyed by its own rulers.

The god did not demand sacrifices.

The first priests had offered them anyway.

And the god had never been sealed beneath the earth.

The royal dynasty had built its temples over the places where he had once walked and declared the land sacred.

Whoever controlled the story of the god controlled the kingdom.

And there was one final part of the old tale the priests had erased most thoroughly.

The mortal was not merely a man.

His birth had been hidden.

His father had belonged to the old ruling house—the bloodline that existed before the current dynasty.

His mother had been the daughter of a family the Crown had spent generations insisting had never existed.

Their marriage had been forbidden.

Their child had been inconvenient.

And when the old dynasty fell, the infant disappeared with it.

The kingdom called him a bastard.

Then a traitor.

Then, eventually, nothing at all.

It was easier that way.

If the mortal's bloodline were ever uncovered, the current king's claim to the throne would become a question rather than a certainty.

And questions were dangerous.

So the kingdom changed the story.

It made Arahabaki a deity.

It made the mortal a sinner.

It buried the old bloodline.

It taught every child that looking upon the god would bring ruin.

For centuries, no one questioned why the oldest paintings of Arahabaki showed something entirely different.

A god kneeling before a mortal.

His enormous hand resting gently against the man's cheek.

As though, in all the long history of gods and men, Arahabaki had found one human being he could not bear to see suffer.

The painting had no title.

Only seven words written beneath it in a language no modern priest could translate.

But the oldest scholars believed the inscription meant:

No god has ever loved a man like this.

His stomach was emptier than the light in his eyes.

There was nothing left inside it. Not bread, not scraps, not even the bitter remains of whatever he had managed to swallow the day before. Only a hollow ache remained, twisting through him with every step, acidic and patient. His own body had begun to turn upon itself for lack of anything else.

He held his clothes closed around himself with one hand.

They were dirty, ragged things, far too large for his frame and riddled with holes that had long since stopped pretending to be tears in the fabric. The sleeves swallowed his hands. The hem dragged through the mud. He had once tried to mend them with thread stolen from a laundry line, but the stitches had come undone within the week.

Now he simply wore the holes.

Perhaps there was some dignity in that.

Or perhaps dignity was another luxury of the well-fed.

Bells began to ring.

One after another, they trembled through the streets, their bronze voices rolling between the houses until the entire village seemed to shudder beneath them. Doors opened. Wooden shutters were thrown aside. Lamps were lit in hurried succession.

But not for him.

Never for him.

Families emerged from their homes and fell to their knees.

Mothers gathered children against their chests. Old men pressed their foreheads to the earth. Fathers raised trembling hands toward the heavens, their mouths moving in desperate prayer.

They praised Arahabaki.

They begged Arahabaki.

They pleaded with Arahabaki to spare them.

Dazai kept walking.

He looked up.

The sky had flooded with red.

It was only the last light of sunset caught beneath a ceiling of clouds, but the distinction had ceased to matter. Grey masses gathered over the mountains, swallowing the remaining daylight. Along the horizon, the sun burned through them, staining the world with a color that made every roof and face look briefly unfamiliar.

Dazai coughed.

Nobody looked at him.

That was almost a kindness.

There were priests gathered in the square ahead.

They wore long, layered robes unlike anything Dazai had seen among the villagers—dark indigo fabric crossed with strips of vermilion, their sleeves embroidered with curling patterns that resembled roots, flames, and serpents. White cords were wound around their waists, each tied with small bronze charms that chimed whenever they moved. Their tall lacquered headdresses rose like the roofs of miniature shrines, decorated with black feathers and narrow strips of gold leaf that caught the dying light.

They looked less like men than relics.

Men dressed as men imagined priests should look.

One held a wooden tablet covered in old characters.

Another carried a branch of sacred sakaki, its leaves trembling in his hand.

The eldest stood before them, reciting the proper rites in a voice trained to sound certain.

"Bow your heads. Do not meet the heavens. Offer what is precious, and Arahabaki may remember your obedience."

The villagers obeyed.

"Give thanks for the mercy of the god."

"Mercy," Dazai repeated under his breath.

His voice was too quiet for anyone to hear.

He watched the priests speak of Arahabaki as though they knew him.

They did not.

That was the strange thing.

They praised the god with mouths that trembled.

They promised the villagers that Arahabaki could be appeased with rice, incense, blood, prayer. They taught them which offerings would satisfy him, which words would prevent his wrath, which rituals might persuade him to look elsewhere.

Yet every priest kept glancing toward the mountains.

Every one of them looked afraid.

Dazai found that almost funny.

He could not understand why people continued pretending to know the nature of something they feared so profoundly.

Perhaps that was what humans did when confronted with terror.

They named it.

They built temples around it.

They wrote rules for it.

Then they convinced themselves they had understood it.

Dazai's knees weakened.

He stopped beside the road.

For a moment, he thought he might sit down.

He did not.

If he sat, he suspected he would not rise again.

His body had already begun making the decision for him.

The earth trembled.

A cup fell somewhere behind him.

A child screamed.

The bells began ringing again, faster now, their voices colliding in the air until they became one great metallic wail.

The villagers clung to one another.

Dazai watched them.

How odd, he thought.

They were afraid of dying, and yet the first thing they did was reach for another living person.

He had never understood that instinct.

The need to be held when the world became unbearable.

He had no one to reach for.

So he remained where he was.

The ground shifted beneath his feet.

A crack tore through the street.

People cried out.

The priests abandoned their measured chanting and began shouting over one another.

"Do not look up!"

"Bow!"

"Pray!"

"Do not speak his name!"

The sky opened.

Light poured down.

It came without warning, without judgment, without the grandeur men liked to give disasters after they survived them. One moment there was only the red evening and the trembling earth; the next, the world had become heat and light.

Dazai stood beneath it.

His clothes snapped in the sudden wind.

He knew he was going to die.

He knew it as surely as he knew he was hungry.

As surely as he knew the bells would continue ringing.

As surely as he knew the priests would continue calling the thing descending upon them a god they understood.

The light drew nearer.

The villagers screamed.

Dazai closed his eyes.

The heat became unbearable.

It prickled beneath his skin until even breathing seemed to irritate something raw inside him. His clothes clung damply to his back. The soles of his feet ached, yet he kept standing.

There was nowhere else to go.

This will all end.

The thought came without comfort.

It will end.

His breathing had grown unsteady by then, each inhale thinner than the last. The ground trembled so violently that he could scarcely tell whether the shaking belonged to the earth or to his own exhausted body.

Ahead stood the palace.

Even through the smoke, it was impossible to mistake.

Its vermilion walls rose above the surrounding houses in tiers of lacquered wood and dark tile, every roofline curling upward like the horns of some enormous creature asleep beneath the mountain. Gold ornamentation caught the infernal light and flashed whenever the ground moved. Red banners hung from the highest balconies, each bearing the same ancient crest: a circle split by three crooked lines.

The people called it the God's Vessel.

They believed Arahabaki rested there.

Dazai had never understood how a god could require a vessel.

He had never understood much about gods.

He did not know what Arahabaki looked like.

Perhaps no one did.

Perhaps the priests knew and had simply decided that knowledge was too dangerous to share. Perhaps the statues scattered throughout the kingdom were accurate. Perhaps they were inventions fashioned by frightened men who had needed to give a face to something they could not comprehend.

Dazai supposed he would never find out.

He walked past the palace.

He did not turn toward it.

Above him, the heavens had become vermilion.

Not the gentle red of evening, nor the muted color of autumn leaves, but a fierce brilliance that erased every other shade from the world. The light seemed to have no source. It occupied the sky,  so vast that looking directly into it felt like standing beneath the gaze of something that had no reason to notice him.

Dazai finally lifted his head.

He should have looked away.

Every priest in the kingdom had taught him to.

Never meet the heavens during an awakening.

Never look upon the light.

Never invite the god's attention.

But Dazai was tired.

Too tired for fear to seem worth the effort.

So he kept looking.

Then, without quite knowing why, he raised his right hand.

Three fingers touched his lips.

Three pressed against the left side of his chest.

The gesture was familiar. He had watched countless people perform it from doorways, roadsides, temple steps.

He had never bothered to learn its meaning.

His mouth moved anyway.

"Arahabaki."

His voice was scarcely louder than the trembling earth.

"If you are listening, I have nothing to offer you."

The words sounded strange spoken aloud.

He swallowed.

"No rice. No incense. No blood. No name worth remembering."

His fingers remained against his chest.

"So take nothing from them."

The light above him intensified.

Dazai's eyes remained open.

"Take nothing from the children."

His voice faltered.

"Take nothing from those who still have someone waiting for them."

He hesitated.

"...And if you must take someone..."

His fingers pressed more firmly against his lips.

"Take me."

Dazai finished the prayer.

"Let it end."

His hand fell from his chest.

Only then did he realize the light was gone.

His eyes remained closed for another heartbeat, perhaps because he had forgotten that he was supposed to open them.

Then he did.

His vision returned slowly.

The palace blurred.

The burning streets blurred.

The kneeling figures became indistinct shapes beneath a sky that had somehow regained its ordinary darkness.

Dazai blinked.

Something was sitting across from him.

Not a priest.

Not a soldier.

Not one of the villagers.

A boy.

He was crying.

There was no theatrical grief in it, no wailing fit for the end of kingdoms. His arms were locked around his knees, his shoulders giving the occasional small, involuntary tremor, as though his body had become too exhausted to continue producing tears and yet refused to understand that it ought to stop.

Blood covered him.

It had dried in narrow trails along his arms and neck, gathered beneath his jaw, disappeared into the folds of his clothes. Some of it had darkened almost black. Some remained crimson beneath the dim light.

Yet beneath all of it—

his skin was unblemished.

No wound.

No scar.

Not even a bruise.

Dazai stared.

The sight unsettled him more than the blood.

The boy's body should not have been capable of looking so untouched after everything that had happened.

His skin was pale beneath the ash-filled air, carrying a strange brightness that did not belong to anything Dazai had ever seen in the village.

He stopped breathing.

For one terrible moment, it felt as though something had reached beneath his skin and caught hold of his pulse.

His fingers went cold.

He almost stepped back.

Instead, he walked toward him.

There were instincts older than fear.

There was something about the boy that made retreat impossible.

Only when Dazai came closer did he notice the clothes.

They had once been magnificent.

The boy wore several overlapping layers of silk, arranged in the formal style of the old court: a deep crimson kosode beneath a pale outer robe, the fabric embroidered with fine gold thread in patterns of curling waves and flowering branches. A narrow obi held the layers together, though its knot had been loosened and dragged crooked by whatever violence had brought him there. A ceremonial cord hung from one shoulder, its tassels stained red.

The garments belonged to someone who had been dressed to be seen.

To be presented.

To be recognized.

Not someone who was supposed to be found alone on a ruined street with blood drying across his skin.

One sleeve had been torn nearly to the elbow.

The outer robe had slipped from his shoulder, exposing the pale blade of it beneath.

Dazai's eyes burned.

He blinked.

The water gathering there had nothing to do with the smoke.

He hated that.

He hated the humiliating weakness of it—the way his body could betray him before his mind had even decided what it was feeling.

Then he saw the boy's hair.

Red.

The color of something that had survived the fire.

It carried the same fierce shade that had filled the sky moments before, except this red did not destroy anything.

It belonged to a boy.

That seemed somehow more frightening.

The boy raised his head.

Their eyes met.

Dazai's left eye went white.

Pain struck behind it so suddenly that he grimaced, one hand flying toward his face. His vision dissolved into a pale blur, as though someone had poured milk across the world.

Still, he did not stop.

He crouched before the boy.

"Are you hurt?"

The question sounded absurd the moment it left him.

Of course he was hurt.

There was blood everywhere.

Dazai tried again.

"Can you hear me?"

The boy's breathing hitched.

Dazai waited.

He studied the boy's face instead.

There was something unbearably young about him.

Then the boy looked directly at him.

His eyes were blue.

Not the blue of the sky, which had already proved itself capable of burning.

Not the blue of polished glass.

They were the blue of deep water beyond the shore, so vast that Dazai could not tell where they ended.

His heart slowed.

The sensation was peculiar.

It did not feel like peace.

It felt like drowning.

Dazai knew what it was to sink into something and stop resisting.

Except this time, there was no water.

Only the boy's gaze.

The boy lifted one hand.

Dazai should have moved.

He did not.

Small fingers approached his face with the uncertainty of someone who had never been taught whether touching another person was permitted.

Then the boy's palm rested against his cheek.

Everything stopped.

The grime vanished.

The rancid taste at the back of Dazai's throat disappeared. The ache in his stomach loosened. The soreness in his feet, the fever beneath his skin, the dull throbbing behind his skull—all of it fell away.

Then came the stranger thing.

He could no longer find the old pain.

It had been there for so long that he had stopped distinguishing it from himself.

Now it was absent.

Dazai inhaled sharply.

His ruined eye began to clear.

White receded from his vision in slow, delicate increments until the world returned: the torn silk, the blood, the boy's fingers against his face, the palace beyond them.

He could see.

Both eyes.

For one instant, Dazai understood what it meant to inhabit a body that was not actively asking him to endure it.

The realization frightened him.

The boy whispered something.

Dazai did not hear.

He only saw the shape of the words.

A small movement of lips.

Soft.

Familiar.

Buried beneath years of hunger and cold, something shifted inside him, carrying with it the faintest vestige of another voice—his mother's, perhaps, from before memory had become something unreliable and cruel.

He could not remember what she had said except for the warmth of having once been spoken to gently.

Then hands seized the boy.

Dazai barely understood what was happening before the small body was pulled away from him.

The boy's fingers slipped from his cheek.

The miracle ended.

Pain returned.

It rushed back into him with such violence that Dazai nearly collapsed. Hunger twisted through his stomach. His limbs became heavy. The grime seemed to settle over his skin again. His damaged eye blurred.

Everything he had forgotten came back.

Someone was dragging the boy away.

Dazai did not know who.

He did not care.

His hand lifted.

He reached.

Not because he understood what the boy was.

Not because he knew his name.

Not because he believed he had any right to ask for another touch.

He reached because, for the first time in his life, something had touched him and left him with less pain than it had found.

His fingers stretched toward the boy.

Almost.

Almost.

Then the distance widened.

The red hair disappeared beyond grasp.

The blue eyes vanished.

The hand that had touched his cheek was gone.

Dazai's fingers closed around nothing.

He remained there, arm suspended in the empty air, staring at the place where the boy had been.

Whatever had happened between them lasted no longer than a breath.

And yet Dazai would spend the rest of his life remembering how it had felt to be alive without hurting.