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The river was alive, fresh and clear and with it, it brought the scent of the young mountains of the West.
Here, before it passed through town, and before even the first fishermen kept their boats, the river laid undisturbed of human action. Clean and chaste.
The weeping willows hung low over the surface of the lively water, crying leaf after leaf into the stream, lost to the heat of the approaching summer.
Beneath the oldest of the trees sat a man. He was dangling his bare feet into the clear water of the stream, enjoying the coolness as opposed to the air that would soon, when the sun reached its zenith, begin to flicker and shine, promising wonders of far worlds only the sun itself could ever reach.
The man was unperturbed by his surroundings, as he was concentrating on the idle work in his hands. With a short knife and a small block of wood he had stolen from a neighbour’s stack of firewood, laid out in the sun to dry, he was carving.
Nikaido Yamato did not know what he was carving, no, he never even carved before. For some unknown reason he had, when searching for solitude, felt the inexplicable need to pick up this very same block of wood and work on it with his knife. Happily he watched as bits and pieces of rough firewood fell into the stream and made acquaintance with the tree’s tears floating on the surface.
He didn’t think of himself as an artist, or someone who did anything but laze around in his free time. Yamato was the one most confused about his sudden creative burst.
Maybe it was exactly because of his lack of experience in fine arts that his next carve missed the wood and cut the hand that was holding the wood.
Yamato’s yelp of pain pierced the silence of the riverbank and the block of wood he had worked on so diligently fell into the water and drifted away in direction of town, together with a drop of blood that diffused in the clear river like a drop of ink would in a bowl of water.
Quickly his artwork was out of sight, and Yamato sighed. There was no helping it, he had to give up on the new diversion that he had come up with and go back to the ones he had long known to be his favourite.
He laid back, his back resting on the soft moss that overran the riverbank and closed his eyes. The heat of the sun made him sleepy, and soon the pain of the newly acquired wound that wasn’t deep enough to spend a second thought on, was forgotten in the daze of his catnap.
A huge splash shook Yamato awake. He sat up suddenly, to look at the river to find what had made this noise.
He had expected a lot of things, like an overgrown fish, or another animal that had fallen into the water, but what he actually saw was baffling to him.
Not out of this world, or at least not out of Yamato’s world, a man looked at him from the water. Or was it a man? He was peeking out of the water, but only his head was visible. His brown hair was flattened as it stuck to the head with wetness, and two horns growing out of the head seemingly naturally. They were blue like the sea and the sky and the eyes of the most beautiful man in town – actually Yamato had never seen a blue more beautiful than this man’s horns.
When he opened his mouth and two rows of pointed teeth blinked at Yamato, he at first didn’t realise that someone was talking to him, because the voice was drowned by his thoughts. Only the second time the other said the words Yamato realised that he was spoken to.
“Are you injured?”, the man, or creature, asked with his voice of water as clear as mountain crystal, so clear that one could see fish playing between the rocks on the bottom, and see every speck of sunlight reflected by their scales.
“Uh”, Yamato said unintelligently. He was distracted by the sheer perfection of the person in front of him, and the wonder and mystery of his appearance.
“This is your blood I sensed”, he stated and got closer to the riverbank. Yamato didn’t move. “You’re bleeding. Why?”
“I just… uhm. Cut myself by accident”, Yamato said. “While carving.”
“Carving? Are you a sculptor?”, the man had now hosted himself up to sit at the ledge. The clothes he was wearing were more luxurious than any clothes Yamato himself had seen before, and had it not been for the horns and the teeth and the fact that he had just emerged from a river, Yamato would have thought him to be a king or prince of some kind. He had dried himself within seconds, though something Yamato could understand even less than his very existence.
“A sculptor? I guess sometimes I’m a sculptor too.”
“You’re very interesting”, the man chuckled. Even sitting his size was impressive. He was definitely taller than Yamato, who was already not a small man himself. “My name is Ryuunosuke. What’s your name?”
There was true curiosity in Ryuu’s eyes. They had the colour of the sun when it shone its last dying rays onto the surface of the river close to the outfall.
“My name is Yamato”, he answered truthfully. “Why did you come from the river?”
“Because I live there?”, Ryuu didn’t seem to have understood what Yamato had asked. He cocked his head to the side in question.
Yamato nodded. He didn’t want to ask more. It was clear that Ryuu was not human. He had to broaden his horizon and accept that something he had not thought possible until a few minutes ago was actually very real and very alive, and only sitting a little away from him, with very dangerous looking teeth in close proximity of his throat.
Yet he was not afraid.
“Is it nice living in the river?”
“Around here it’s very quiet and enjoyable”, was the answer, “But when I try to go to the ocean there’s a lot of humans and I have to be careful.“
“I’m sorry about that”, Yamato said.
“But a sculptor doesn’t go fishing”, Ryuu said and smiled. A toothy grin became a whole other meaning with him. Yamato thought the teeth were fascinating, intriguing even.
“I… guess I don’t. As a sculptor.”
“But your injury…”, Ryuu said. “Show it to me.”
The wound had since stopped bleeding, and Yamato showed Ryuu his hand without any hesitation.
Touching Ryuu was astounding at first, because for some reason Yamato had thought the skin of the other would be wet. Instead it was dry and felt just like a human’s. Yet there was something very not-human about those hands.
“It doesn’t look too bad”, Ryuu mumbled. “But be careful, Yamato-kun.”
“Careful?”
“You never know who your blood will call if it touches the water”, Ryuu said. “Maybe you were lucky today, but tomorrow someone else could turn up, suspecting easy prey.”
Yamato swallowed. “So… no more bleeding in the river?”
“Indeed”, Ryuu said and smiled again. “We don’t want trouble with humans, and if one of theirs disappeared…”, he didn’t finish the sentence, and instead turned Yamato’s hand in his and pressed his lips against the place where the knife had cut skin. It did not feel like a kiss.
Without another word the youkai slipped back into the water and left Yamato baffled and without a trace of a wound on his hand.
When Yamato returned to the town in the afternoon there was a commotion in the centre. Of course he had to know what had caused it, so he pushed through the masses. Voices were whispering about an object, recovered from the river by a fisherman, an object that had to be a sign of a god of the forest above the town.
Finally Yamato had gotten through the crowd.
Finally he saw what had caused the fuss.
A block of wood, slightly worked on with a knife.
Yamato wanted to see Ryuu again.
As soon as he had discovered this desire inside of himself he had tried to hide it, supress it. He hadn’t been very successful in that endeavour.
And so he found himself carving again. This time he had taken the block of wood from his own stack of firewood, and was not planning on letting it fall into the river again.
His mind trailed off, to faraway places, the bottom of the ocean and the highest skies, all together with that Youkai he had met. Beneath the fantasies occupying his mind like a perfect fever dream he was wondering. What had him daydream like this, about someone he had only met once?
Magic? Love?
The thought of love made him grin. There was no such thing as love for someone like him.
But just as he had thought that, the same as last time happened: The knife missed the wood and cut his hand, as if it had been waged by a hand that wasn’t his.
Once again, a drop of blood hit the surface, and once again, the head with the horns emerged from the water, this time quicker than before.
“Are you injured?”, Ryuu asked, the same look of concern as last time. “It’s the sculptor Yamato-kun!”, he exclaimed then. He seemed happy to see him.
“Hello Ryuunosuke-san.”
“What happened?”, the youkai asked him.
“I just accidentally cut myself while carving”, Yamato said. He smiled at the irony of his own statement. How strange it was that this had been their hello two times in a row now.
“Silly Yamato-kun”, Ryuu said and smiled at him like he had done during their first meeting as well. “You have to be more careful. How will a sculptor who cannot control his own blades survive?”
“Barely”, Yamato said. He found that the ruckus inside of him had finally subsided, as if Ryuu had calmed the storm. Maybe he had. He probably had.
“Is that what you were sculpting?”, the youkai asked with a look at the discarded block of wood in the moss.
“Yes. It’s a fish.”
“A fish?”, he turned the shapeless block in his hands. “I’ve never seen a fish like this.”
“It’s not finished yet.”
“Oh!”, Ryuu exclaimed. “Can I watch you work?”
“…If you’d like.”
His companion sat on the riverbank like he had before, and eyed Yamato with his curiosity, hyperaware of every single move Yamato made.
Yamato began carving again, ignoring the tiny wound that had called Ryuu here, and slowly but surely the rough form of a fish became visible in the wood. It was in no way near the level of an actual sculptor, but Yamato was proud of his work.
A noise made him startle. The fish dropped from his hands, and fell, yet before it could hit the surface of the water and be transported to town, Ryuu caught it. He had also been the source of the noise that had startled Yamato – he had not known that fish could also yawn.
“Is it boring?”, he asked. “I can stop if you’re bored.”
“No, don’t stop”, Ryuu said. “Don’t bother because of me. I just tend to get sleepy when I leave the water.”
“Is it dangerous for you to leave the water?”
“Hm, I’m not sure”, Ryuu said. “I can breathe air like a human as well, but the water is my home.”
“Home, huh”, Yamato said.
“Say”, Ryuu said. “Can I keep this?”, he held up the wooden fish that he had caught.
“If you want it”, Yamato said.
“Thank you”, the Youkai said and hopped down from the riverbank and into the water again. Without Yamato processing, he took his hand in his again and pressed his lips against the wound. A tingling sensation crawled over the open skin, and closed it. “I will treasure it, sculptor Yamato-kun.”
The “I hope to see you again” that rested on Yamato’s tongue was left unspoken.
When he got back to the town the rough of wood that he had dropped into the river the first time was not alone anymore.
The fish sat by its side and the towners feared.
Time and time again Yamato met up with Ryuunosuke, talking for what felt like eternities under the cover of the weeping willows. What had been Yamato’s solitude in silence for years, had now become a secret place for his forbidden meetings with something he hadn’t dared dream about.
And Yamato was in love. He knew he was, and he also knew that Ryuu felt similarly.
With every visit he grew more and more concerned about Yamato’s blood in the river, claiming that creatures other than him would be attracted to the scent of the red delicacy as well, and that Yamato was in danger whenever he bled. Yet, Yamato didn’t even cut himself on purpose. Whenever he carved there’d be a moment where his mind would be occupied with thoughts of unknown kind, and before he knew it there’d be life in the river, red and more beautiful than even the best paintings of the unnatural.
Without fail Ryuu would appear.
“Are you injured?”, he would ask.
And without fail, Yamato would answer. “I accidentally cut myself while carving.”
Fate, Yamato thought more often than not, was a curious thing.
The town’s collection of his sculptures grew as well, and there was a shrine that had been constructed to milden the temper of the god who was sending these sculptures as a bad omen, because that was what the people believed. Yamato didn’t manage to tell them that it was neither a god, nor any other supernatural creature that was leaving the statues, the carvings, and the other half-finished artworks that he dropped in the river during his rendezvous with Ryuu. For one it would destroy the illusion of the creature of the river that was causing the towners to reconsider their treatment of the (now) precious water, and second he had been going to the forest in secret. It was not allowed to visit those holy woods, as to not anger the gods supposedly living there.
Yamato had always gone to the forest – how could he not, as a disobedient child, explore a little? He wouldn’t go far, for sure. And soon he went a little farther, and farther, until he had found that place one night, when the summer heat had just dissipated into the cold night air, and the moon was illuminating the water, reflecting onto the leaves of the weeping willows. Yamato had stood there breathless, eleven or twelve summers old, looking that place straight out of a dream. The grief of the trees had struck him hard, making his heart grow heavy. Yamato didn’t remember that first evening clearly, but he did remember washing stains of tears off his face the next morning. His reflection had looked terrible in the bowl of water.
From then on the place had become his place of solitude. And he was not about to give that up, ever. Not even to reveal to the other towners that he was the ‘god’ they were asking for forgiveness for a sin they hadn’t committed.
“Yamato-kun”, Ryuu asked, after he had spilled his blood in the river once again, and Ryuu had turned up with his usual phrase, and Yamato had given his usual answer. The statue wasn’t out of sight yet, bouncing up and down in the water, like a drowning person would stick out their head to gasp their last breath before being pushed underwater and never reappearing. “Yamato-kun, why do you keep coming here? Why do you keep bleeding?”
Yamato breathed in deeply before he answered. He needed to sort his thoughts, flying faster than the quickest bird dives down to catch its prey.
“Ryuunosuke-san”, he said then. “Do you believe in fate?”
“Fate?”, Ryuu answered. “I’ve met her once. She was wonderful, really dedicated. If she wasn’t eons older than me and by far more powerful and influential I’d want her as my little sister.”
He didn’t know how to answer this revelation. “Then… do you think fate – she – might have something to do with us meeting?”
“With us?”, Ryuu blinked up at him.
“With us.”
“Of course she does”, he answered matter-of-factly. “I just told you. She is everywhere, and does everything. Have you been searching for meaning this entire time?”
Suddenly Ryuu was close, closer than Yamato had expected. The colour of his eyes felt like water running down his throat.
“Ryuunosuke-san… what if I told you that my answer to your question is that I have continued carving and accidentally hurting myself, because I wanted to see you?”
The touch was like the first time they had touched. Dry and very much not-human, yet Yamato would give anything for those hands to hold him.
“Yamato-kun…”, Ryuu whispered as Yamato slung his arms around his neck. “You don’t need blood to see me. Just call me by my name from now on.”
Yamato only sighed as an answer, and then a bystander couldn’t have told who was who from their silhouettes.
Town was quiet when Yamato returned, a scale in his hand, and his hair more dishevelled than it would be when he woke up in the morning. But Yamato did not care. He was glowing, his happiness an own sun in his chest, warming him.
They met often over the next few months. Summer went over quickly, and with autumn the leaves turned the colour that Yamato used to see when he called Ryuu with his blood.
“Why have you called me?”
“Because I wanted to see you.”
There was a tension in the air, when he wanted to leave for the forest, to meet with Ryuu. A towner came running towards him, running into the direction of the town square.
Yamato called out to him, to ask what was going on.
“Have you not heard? They say the god of the river is angry. There have been no statues at all since the sun was the warmest!”
Of course Yamato knew that. He had carved the statues. He hadn’t carved since that day.
“And that means that the gods are angry?”
“Of course it does!”
“Well then…”, Yamato sighed. It was time to end this. He should tell the towners that he was the one who had carved all those statues.
He walked towards town square together with the other person. It felt like the entire town was assembled. Every face he knew and didn’t know was there, and Yamato could still feel the tension in the air, like a cloth, stretched to the breaking point.
“That’s him!”, a voice ripped the cloth, and the tension was released, washed over him, and the neutral faces around him turned angry. “That’s the man I saw going into the forest!”
Hell broke loose. Yamato could barely react, as his arms and legs were grabbed by various different people and he was restrained. In the chaos and clamour of accusations he could filter out that someone had seen him enter the forest, and that the town had concluded that he must be the cause of the god being angry.
“Wait!”, Yamato exclaimed. His throat was raw and dry from the panic, and his eyes couldn’t focus properly. “Wait! I can explain!”
The crowd was calmed like the sea after storm, and Yamato was brought before the village eldest. He was still being held by two of the warriors, both taller and stronger than he was, and their touch made his skin crawl. He hated this, he wanted to escape.
An arrowhead reflected the light.
“What do you have to say? Speak”, the village eldest declared.
Yamato took a deep breath. He braced himself. “The one who was carving the statues was me”, he said then. “There is no god in the forest. It was me all along.”
Calls of ‘Liar’ reached his ears. Of course nobody would believe him, not after he had left them believing in a nameless, faceless, god full of anger that sent statues to the village as a warning about his own anger.
“How would you accomplish such a feat?”, the eldest asked. Yamato couldn’t see their face, because the world was growing hazy in front of his eyes.
“By being very bad at carving”, he answered.
Wrong answer. The uproar was so loud that he lost the last of his hopes, that he’d get out of this unfazed.
With a spark of premonition the muscles in his back contracted.
The calls grew louder. Nobody believed him. He had to do something, or his fate would be sealed.
Ah! He had to get to the river. Water. Ryuu would save him. He surely would, he was strong, and he could come here. He just had to–
Yamato broke away from the guards holding him with a strength he didn’t know he possessed and broke into a sprint. He just had to reach the water and call for Ryuu. Everything would be okay then. He’d be safe, and nothing would happen to him.
The surface of the river was calm and blinked like it was inviting him.
Now he only needed to call Ryuu’s name, and then nothing could happen to him. Nothing–
As he tried to breathe in, the air behind him buzzed with the force of a swarm of arrows flying towards him.
The surface of the river was angry and grinned at him in deadly red.
A silence engulfed Yamato, as he felt his body grow colder with every drop of life that he was giving the river.
“Yamato-kun!”, Ryuu’s voice was worried. It only reached him through a fog in his head. “Are you injured? Why? What happened?”
Of course. Like the first times they had met, his blood had called his lover.
“I just”, Yamato pressed. “Cut myself while carving. Accident.” He coughed. “Because I wanted to see you.”
He felt his senses fade away into the fog.
Ryuu in front of him was panicking almost as much as he had just done in the hold of the guards. He collected the last of his strength to reach for the youkai’s face.
The hand on Ryuu’s cheek went limp under tears he didn’t know he could cry.
The river was alive and clear, yet it brought the scent of death from the mountains of the West.
Here, before it passed through the valley where a town had been, and before even the first wrecks of boats that had once belonged to fishermen, the river laid undisturbed. It was grieving.
The weeping willows hung low over the surface of the sobbing water, crying drop and drop of blood into the stream, lost to the chill of autumn.
In the solitude beneath the oldest of the trees laid a man. He was laid out at the riverside, where he had met with his lover oh so often. There, in the safety of the willows his lover had laid him out, where he had met with him oh so often. The sun vanished behind the horizon; its last rays began to paint worlds long passed onto the river surface.
The man was unperturbed by his surroundings, as he had long perished. Surrounding him were works of art he himself had crafted with a short knife and small blocks of wood he had stolen from neighbours more often than not.
Until the end of time, the river youkai’s grief would colour the air.