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You give it one more chance.
He is a wee baby, incapable of pain, nemesis of wrongdoing.
This isn’t right. You are the Balladeer, the one who dances with devils, burns with the hatred of a thousand pyres. You itch to throw that woman whom you call Mother to the ashes, pin her arms down and let her burn along with the rest of her divine brethren. Perhaps then she will know what it feels like to be castrated to the shadows.
Part of you hates this. Part of you has begun to despise dealing with humans. They snap like blossom twigs in winter, too brittle to be held or dabbled with.
And then there is that part of you that yearns for that fragility. There is something innately beautiful about how they bloom into life so swiftly and wilt into death just as quick; this little one is no exception.
“What is your name?” The boy reaches out his hands for yours after introducing himself. Kazuha, not of the Kaedehara clan. Along your travels, you’d heard of a young boy being born into the royal Kaedehara family a few years ago, but this boy does not have the handsome white hair you see plastered on newspapers around Konda Village.
Where are his parents? Have they forsaken him like your Mother has?
You are thirteen (thousand) years old and cracking by the day. One more human won’t hurt.
“Shouki no Kami.” You see his eyes open wide as you tell him your title name to gauge his reaction. The first ever friend you’d told this to had called you an abomination. Humans are not so different from gods, after all. Both see nothing about you beyond your Mother who gave you the husk of a soul.
You didn’t kill him, of course. He’d been with you ever since he found you near Tenshukaku, unconscious in water, lightning spearing your body in thousands of arcing purple tendrils. The core of an Archon is in your body, after all, but you were the one to keep that secret from him for three mortal years. He dropped you like a rucksack at the edge of his mountain lodge before parting; the fall from his back to the forest floor, though not high, made you feel as if you were dropping from Ei’s Plane Of Euthymia, all the way down to the beaches of Tenshukaku.
“Shouki no Kami.” The boy repeats, smiling. “Are you a god?”
“Do gods exist?” You ask.
“Of course. You are standing in front of me.” The boy pokes your chest with ease. Somewhere along the conversation, you’ve knelt down to his eye level. Baby blue lulls with white foam inside his eyes. It’s nothing like the tumultuous waters you’d fallen into.
“What if I am lying?”
“Gods do not lie.”
You laugh for the first time in months. Your chuckle turns into a ceaseless cackle that fogs up the brain, making it hard to think. You laugh and laugh and laugh, so much that your head spins and twirls. You are all airy breaths and gaping inhales as the boy stares at your trembling form in confusion.
“Where are your parents?” You still can’t stop laughing.
“Parents?”
“Yes,” You violently spit out the next few words, gasping for breath. “Like a mother. A father.”
Silence. Kazuha stares at you with the emptiness of a thousand stars, and you realize then, that maybe—just maybe—you are not so different from the brittle blossoms ripped away from the boughs that birthed them.