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Fighting came to him naturally – after so many centuries of stillness it was surprisingly easy to turn himself inside out, unleash the furnace that had been consuming him onto the world. A furnace is a measured and steady inferno, and he’d had years of practice – he knew how to stoke the fire in never-ending battles, with one mighty demon after another. As even the most hardened of beasts collapsed in exhaustion, he found himself rearing for more, and once he found himself alone, a lone pillar of fire surrounded by an empty, devastated battlefield, could he simmer down - a temporary respite, until he coaxed the flame back out from the cinders for the next battle. The torched landscape in his wake was melded into his kingdom, and as he blazed a glorious and bloody trail, he gathered an army from among those awed and bowed, who chased after the tail of embers. He was a furnace, who burned all the gaff away, and those who made it through his fire came out incandescent, and pointed to a new purpose.
But then when the war was over, he found himself home with his rag-tag army, ash still covering their features, swept back to the base of the mountain where it all began by the final release of heat of a fire dying out. As he was resting in the slumbering war camp, where his soldiers were idling away in anxious anticipation of his next move, without the next demon warlord or enemy army to watch out for, he could feel himself falling to pieces like pebbles through a net.
He started looking up at peaks towering above him - the mountain that had taken shape after he slew a god, the closest place he had to a home. And yet, he’d spent so little time here that he could barely claim to know the place. The forests hugging the foothills, and extending their tendrils up into the crevices and valleys of the upper ranges, were new to him. As a breeze, carrying the smell of maple from up the mountain, softly stirred his hair, he got up and turned away from the camp, starting up the mountain path on a whim.
Feet sinking in the soft volcanic rock, he realized that there were worse places to crumble to small pieces. He made his way up the slope, late morning light playing through the red canopy of maple leaves, casting laced shadows on the russet of forest floor. The amiable maples gave way to a forest of pillars, pine trees rising up the slope as the air grew colder. Conifers gave way to small shrubs, then stubborn, dried-up grass, until he finally reached a chewed-up, crumbled stone landscape. The sun was becoming unbearably hot, but he pushed on as his worried thoughts were shred away by the game of finding purchase on the jagged, rocky path.
He reached the top of the mountain, the Throne, the closest point to the dormant old god, a bare platform rising like a stone hand scratching at the sky. The whistle of sharp wind and the rarefied evening light coating the slopes below made the scenes of the day’s ascent seem unreal and far away. He fell to his hands and knees, the painful touch of the jagged pebbles welcome, and cried, shaking with the question that he’d tried to burn away in his anger, that he’d pushed away as he’d thrown himself into the fray again and again.
He lay there, flat on his back, feeling the heat of his outburst evaporate with the evening chill, as if it were nothing but an ember, and felt the wordless answer to his unspoken question in the firm, dull ache of the ground underneath him. This place, it was like him, new and old, reforged in a violent convulsion. It didn’t belong to him, and he didn’t belong to it, but there was something here that was firm and held him when he crumbled, that was unmoved when he struck it, that took his rage and made it part of something bigger. It could take him in, and the others as well.
Numbed and dazed, he made his way down to the forest line with the last rays of the sunset, and followed a spring to a cave where he spent the night. A few days in the forest, bringing out old memories of being a feral orphan on Mount Ibuki, and he felt his mind settle into the closest he’d ever come to a calm stream.
He got back to his camp to find it in the middle of a feud for the final round of supplies, with two factions being at the point of painting the valley red. He promptly confiscated all the weapons, save for the spears and bows that he assigned to a makeshift fishing expedition, and tasked the rest with building bonfires. He looked up the mountain, with its young forests climbing up the shoulders of large swaths of volcanic earth. They’d need to work it into farms, otherwise they’d eat out the entire wildlife in a few years.
He looked around him, at the camp, at the sea of faces, concentrated over cutting up fish, squabbling over skewer sizes, watching with excitement as the first sparks danced over dry leaves and branches. He wanted to see who this makeshift court of his would become out of the fire of the forge. None of them could really imagine it yet, but perhaps that was the fun part.