Chapter Text
It was in the Summer of the ninth year of Emperor Saga’s reign that the young sorcerer returned to Ezo. He had spent the better part of that year journeying far afield in search of sorcerers, curses, and great treasures that he had once only heard of in songs. Some, he had yet to find, others he would never. Either the singers had fabricated them entirely, or—as the sorcerer preferred to believe—they had been real, but only a very long time ago. Other legends were irrefutably true, now that he’d experienced them firsthand. He had crossed one with his incessant questioning, and dueled with them in the fields they tended; another he had run for his life from, as its thrashing body shook the earth to pieces beneath his feet; the third he now carried in the folds of his kimono, its ragged resting place doing no justice to the truly precious esteem he held it in. That treasure would be the greatest gift he ever gave, or so he thought at the time.
The sorcerer was pleased beyond measure to be home, though he still felt a tickle of surprise at the fact that he thought of Ezo that way. “Home” was as much an experience as it was a place, and as with all of his favorite experiences, the sorcerer hadn’t known it until it hit him. Home was also a person: a white-haired girl just a year older than he, with blue eyes as bright as the stars. She was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most fascinating person that the young sorcerer had ever known.
When the Rabbit’s hour was nearly done, and the light of the sun crested over the mountaintops, the sorcerer came upon a river, across which stretched an old wooden bridge, both of which he recognized and loved. From the shore he now stood on, four years prior, he had first caught sight of the girl to whom he now returned. Most of her body had been hidden behind a tree, save for one bright eye peering out at him. The sorcerer had known, then, that she could see him far more clearly than he could her. He had crossed the bridge without hesitation, just like he would now. That girl had now passed a whole year on her own, waiting for his return, and he wished more than anything to speak with her again.
As he reached the other shore of the river and let his gaze rise from the tree roots to the sky above, the sights began to fade. A black curtain fell between the sorcerer and the woods, darkening as he approached it until it was a solid black mirror. Of all the things the sorcerer had seen in the past year, none had been quite as beautiful as that. He passed through the barrier effortlessly, feeling nothing but the air on his skin, but sensing a difference in how the cursed energy flowed around him. As he took in a breath, savoring the air of home for the first time in a year, he swore to ask the girl what had changed since last they met.
The hut was tucked away between two vast camphor trees that had sprouted before the forest itself. They had grown for so long that they ran out of space and were forced to entwine their branches high above the straw roof of the hut. In the heaviest storms, when the river broke its banks and the leaf litter was washed away by the rain, those branches provided shelter from the sky. The hut’s own roof was rendered almost decorative by their protection. It did serve to keep out the light, though, and that was certainly what the girl had built it for. Though her companion loved to sleep with the bright stars overhead, she hid from them. The vast darkness of the night sky unnerved her in a way that the intimate darkness of her home could not. It was in that small darkness that she spent most of every day, though lately she had ventured out into the woods to try her hand at a new form of sorcery. The apparent success of the project did little to energize her, and on each of the past six nights, she had fallen fast asleep mere moments after returning to her home. Though she had woven dried grass into a blanket for herself, the Summer heat was unforgiving, and she hadn’t bothered to fetch it from outside. As she woke and gained the first hints of her bearings, she hoped that no animals had damaged it while she slept.
As if called from his travels to relieve her worries, a familiar shadow stood in the doorway.
“It’s a lovely day out here,” he said. “You should come to the river with me, if you think you can handle a bath.” The girl rubbed sleep—and flecks of dirt—from her eyes. A bath did sound tempting, especially one with her friend. There was so much she had to tell him, and, surely, he had ten times as much to recount to her. It seemed he was restraining himself; all he said as she stood up and stretched her aching neck was, “I have your robe here, if you’d like.”
She shook her head. “It needs a wash, too. Just carry it, if you will.”
“Of course,” he smiled. “You’re not really naked if you’re covered in dirt.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Kenjaku,” she muttered.
“Just something you’d learn if you came with me for once,” he joked. “But it’s nice to know you haven’t changed, Tengen.”
At the river, as Tengen washed herself, Kenjaku sat by the edge and tended to her old white robes. All the while, scarcely looking up, he regaled her with tales of his recent journey. Heian-kyo was a highlight, but soon, he went off on a wholly new tangent.
“…Emperor Sudo was just as terrifying as I hoped. I spent the whole afternoon nearly drowning before I finally got my hands on him.”
“But you got away,” Tengen finished for him, absentmindedly scratching the dirt off her elbow. Finally, her uncut nails had a use.
“I exorcized him, actually.” Tengen went entirely still, then looked up at Kenjaku with wide eyes. Wider than usual. Her lips were just barely parted, but she didn’t say a word. “Are you surprised?” Kenjaku asked rhetorically. “It wasn’t as difficult as you’d expect it to be, once I reached him. He was strong, and he had much more cursed energy than I did…” Kenjaku held out one hand as if he meant for Tengen to take it in her own. “…But I was more creative.”
He began to whisper a mantra to himself, enunciating each syllable yet keeping his voice low enough to not be understood. Tengen waded closer to him, her eyes trained on the hand he had offered up. An instance of cursed energy appeared deep in Kenjaku’s abdomen, then rose through his chest and neck and finally came to a head in his brain. From there, Tengen watched its color change entirely. What had been a mote of dark, venomous, cursed energy was now a sweet, silvery, purely positive light atop Kenjaku’s palm. It licked at the air above it like a young flame. Hesitating, Tengen came closer. She cradled Kenjaku’s hand in her own, brushing her thumbs across his palm to feel the aura, when normally she was content to watch from a distance. She only realized what the energy was when the cut on her thumbtip suddenly closed.
“Reverse-cursed technique,” she whispered, awed.
“And externalized, no less. It’s the first thing I can do that you can’t,” Kenjaku said, pride radiating from his face just as positive energy did from his hand.
Tengen didn’t say anything more for a long time. She didn’t deny that she was incapable of performing the technique, nor did she criticize Kenjaku for assuming as much, since he had been correct. Either way, she had been developing in her own way; as she pondered how much her friend had grown since last they met, it felt much more important that she tell him about her project. She finished bathing in short order.
“Don’t you want to let it dry first?” Kenjaku chuckled, watching his friend slip her soaking robe on.
“It’s clean,” said Tengen, “that’s good enough.”
“Oh, yes, don’t waste time caring about yourself…”
“Care is a resource,” Tengen declared, already starting off down the path and leaving Kenjaku to pick up her sandals. “I keep enough to myself for me to survive. All the rest goes to my work. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“You know sorcery is what I came for,” Kenjaku smiled, “but it’s not like I don’t care about you, too. Here, Tengen, put on your shoes. You just washed your feet off, come on.” He got out in front of her and dropped the sandals between them. Tengen gave them a rueful stare. She had avoided wearing the shoes when possible, lately; they both had irregularities in their lacquer, one of which even reached half the width of a hair. Nonetheless, she relented, slipping the decrepit things on and continuing along the path.
She started once more: “I’ve changed the barrier recently.”
“I can tell,” said Kenjaku.
“I had to sacrifice some conditions…”
“Such is the nature of sorcery.”
Tengen flashed Kenjaku the most commanding look she could muster. Her eyebags somewhat diminished the effect, but her message was ultimately received. Fighting his nature, her friend managed to be quiet a moment. Finally, Tengen had time to explain herself as much as she saw fit.
“People—other than you—have been able to enter freely for the past forty days. None of them have,” she added, grateful. “Once a wall is there for long enough, I think people stop trying to pass it. Even once you take the wall away.” She realized that she had said more than she meant to with those words, and swiftly moved back to the topic at hand. “Anyway… with that gone, I had more room to change the barrier, so I started working on a complex imposed vow to apply to some living things inside of it.”
Kenjaku held his tongue for a few more steps, but when it became clear that his friend was done explaining, he let it loose. “What is this vow, then? How complex?”
“More complex than any we’ve made before.”
“Will I even be able to see it, then?”
“You will.”
The two wandered on, past Tengen’s home and then a little more, until they were well and truly in the thick of the wood. Kenjaku scanned the area around them. Leaf litter formed a wild carpet across the ground, stuck through with bushes and saplings and storm-fallen branches. Breezes whispered through the tops of the trees, but none blew forcefully enough to enter the forest itself. Tengen, no doubt, saw a much more vibrant picture; at Kenjaku’s request, she had once taken six seconds to gaze at a grove, and subsequently pointed out to him the exact location of every squirrel within it. That was when he had taken to calling her eyes, “Six-Second Eyes,” a name she claimed to have no opinion on, but never used. Kenjaku firmly believed from the first day he and Tengen had met that, if he were ever to have an innate technique, he would want it to be the Six-Second Eyes. At the very least, he would want to see others than Tengen make use of them—no insult intended to her, of course—but the two of them had only been friends for four years, and while she was dedicated to her work, it still seemed terribly rude to ask her to bear his child. Not to mention, I’d make for a much better mother than her, he thought, amusing himself enough to pass the time in the uneventful wood.
“We can wait here,” Tengen began, then she froze. Kenjaku, too, tensed up, sensing from her reaction that whatever she had meant to wait for must have already been upon them. What is it, then? A curse? Surely, if it were a curse, I’d have already sensed it… maybe it’s a phenomenon caused by the barrier, but then, wouldn’t she be able to predict that? Perhaps she built in some form of randomization? The prospect brought on a rush of excitement; a randomized barrier effect, something totally outside of the creator’s control, yet still undoubtedly created by their hand. If that was indeed what Tengen had come to show him, his development of reverse-cursed technique would absolutely pale in comparison. Before he realized it, Kenjaku’s face had opened into a wide grin, his eyes darting in every direction to see his hopes be realized.
When they came to rest upon the rabbit, he was all at once disappointed and intrigued. It was obvious even to his mundane vision that the animal was what Tengen had come to show him. He didn’t understand what about it made that so clear, he could only tell that something about the rabbit was profoundly, inarguably off . It was missing something, perhaps? Or was something about it there when in any other rabbit it would be absent? Not meaning to startle it, he reached out slowly and pinched the wet sleeve of Tengen’s robe.
“That’s it?” he asked, his shortness betraying his fixation. Tengen nodded, then said:
“I didn’t expect it to come until I left you.”
“You wanted to leave me alone?”
“I didn’t expect it to come until I did.”
Kenjaku frowned. There was, after all, something very wrong with the rabbit. Its soul was broken, for all he knew, and while he thought of that sarcastically, it felt a little too close to the truth. What on Earth had his friend done to this being?
The rabbit, for its part, simply sat between the bushes and watched, its wide eyes reminding Kenjaku, in an odd way, of Tengen’s. Its hair was snow-white, like hers. Most of all, it resembled her in the simple fact that it was clearly afraid.
“Tengen,” Kenjaku said, “what did you mean when you said that?”
“That I didn’t expect it to—?”
“Yes, that you didn’t expect it to come. Why would you need to expect it? Couldn’t you see it?”
Tengen was silent for a prolonged moment. Finally, she quietly answered, “No better than you can.”
Kenjaku let go of her sleeve. Still wary of making any sudden motion, for he wanted nothing less in that moment than to see the rabbit hop away, he raised his hand to cover his mouth. “It has no cursed energy,” he breathed, a part of him still unable to believe what he could clearly see before him. The rabbit had been missing something, that whole time; he had been right. The thing it was missing, though, wasn’t just something all rabbits had, but something all things had—living things that is. Seeing it up and moving, clearly alive, without any hint of an aura was akin to seeing a rock float, stable, on thin air. There simply wasn’t an explanation for it. Yet there had to be. He looked to Tengen, who had not looked away from the rabbit since it first appeared. This was her project. Her masterpiece, if Kenjaku said so himself. Nonetheless, she looked tense, uncomfortable, even unnerved looking at it. Then, Kenjaku started to wonder, does she know how she made it? Or can she truly only see it no better than I can?
Tengen picked up on the fact that she was now being watched by two pairs of eyes. That evidently discomforted her even further, and so, leaning towards Kenjaku, she said:
“If you want to know more about the rabbit, you should catch it.” She paused. “I’d also like it if you catch it. I’m not hungry. I just need it done.” Kenjaku raised an eyebrow at her, but she offered no further explanation on the matter. “Once you have it,” she said instead, “come back to our home. If you don’t catch it by sunset, come back to me anyway.” It was the last thing she left him with that motivated him more than all the rest combined: “I’ll tell you once you have it,” she promised, “every detail of how I made it.”
Once Tengen had scurried off and the rabbit hadn’t, Kenjaku gave it a condescending look and stretched his arms up. The rabbit had already begun to nibble and graze at the grass nearer to Kenjaku. Tengen, it seemed, was the only one it had any fear of. That’s a relief, Kenjaku thought. He had been feeling invigorated since the moment he came back home, and he had been dying for an easy job ever since he left Heian-kyo. This, he imagined, would be satisfying in the same way as cracking one’s knuckles in the morning.
“It’s nothing personal,” he joked to the rabbit, but truly, he did think the animal was very personally stupid. As it grazed the wet grass, it had already done most of the work of catching itself for him. Without the ability to sense its location by its aura, he had feared it might escape him if he couldn’t catch it in one go. Nonetheless, it was still only a rabbit, and a sorcerer as skilled as Kenjaku with basic cursed energy reinforcement could easily catch mere rabbits bare-handed. Now that it was nearly within his reach, it didn’t stand the slightest chance of escape. Tengen, said Kenjaku to himself, I hope you enjoy explaining yourself just as much as I do. Because you’re going to be telling me a lot, tonight.
He lunged forward to snag the rabbit, and watched his hands close in slow motion around its little body, until finally… they whiffed past each other and caught an armful of thin air. Kenjaku crashed, face-first, into the leaf litter. Embarrassment alighted within him, alongside immense gratitude for the fact that Tengen wasn’t there to see him make a fool of himself. The great prodigy Kenjaku, botching his attempt to catch a single, particularly stupid rabbit. It was ridiculous on its face.
But as he leapt back to his feet, brushing the leaves and needles from his cheeks, something was obviously not right. The rabbit was still there. Not where it had been, exactly—Kenjaku had hit that spot with perfect precision—but it now sat only a single bound’s length away. It was as if it had simply stepped aside the instant before Kenjaku’s fingers fell upon it, but such a feat would require impossible speed, not to mention control, for such a small and ordinary creature. Kenjaku began to suspect that the rabbit was an illusion, but Tengen wouldn’t lie to him like that. Just to be safe, he didn’t lunge at it again. He needed a clearer view, this time. For his next strategy, he picked up a cedar cone from the ground, reinforced it with a bare bit of cursed energy, and then tossed it full force at the rabbit’s side. Again Kenjaku focused his vision, pushing it to speed up past its normal limit, so he could understand exactly what the rabbit was doing. The cone spun through the air on a perfect course to spear the little animal’s flank. The rabbit continued grazing in slow motion until the projectile had scarcely a hair’s width more to travel. Then, too quickly for Kenjaku to react, its head rose from the ground and turned. Its wide eyes locked onto the cedar cone, its nostrils flared, and then…
There was an immediate burst of motion, leaves flying in one direction and a snow-white blur going the other. The cedar cone lodged itself with a dull thunk in the soil, right past where the rabbit had been a moment ago. No hit. Kenjaku had seen it, though—barely, just barely, like a bolt of lightning—but he had seen it. And it was no illusion, as evidenced by the leaves that were still falling to the ground. Needless to say, he had never seen a rabbit move so fast, nor so forcefully; such a thing, he had believed, was simply impossible without the help of cursed energy reinforcement. But he had never seen a rabbit reinforce itself with cursed energy, nor was that remotely possible for this particular rabbit, which had none. So, then, how did it move like that? Kenjaku turned to see where it had stopped. It was, once again, grazing nearby as if nothing of interest had happened. And why not? Clearly, to such a creature, a prodigious sorcerer was simply not a threat. That feeling—the sense that he was thoroughly out of his depth against a novel being he couldn’t understand—excited him more than anything else in the world. Muttering to himself words of amazement, he felt his blood begin to flow more quickly. Without further consideration, he leapt into the hunt once more.
For the next four hours until sunset, Kenjaku danced through the forest with that rabbit. Thirst and exhaustion pulled at every fiber in his body, but he scarcely noticed a thing. The untouchable, undetectable rabbit stole his attention from the world and refused to let it go until he could catch it. But even once the last rays of sunlight were swallowed up by the distant mountains, the young sorcerer remained empty-handed. It was with great shock, and a deep longing, that he watched the rabbit finally dart away. Only once it was out of sight—surely to find its own resting place for the night—did he realize that it was late. He was late, to Tengen’s and his home, and he had still not caught her rabbit. He hadn’t even told her about his treasure, he realized—it was still bundled up in the folds of his kimono. That could wait, couldn’t it? He had to resolve Tengen’s challenge to him first.
I’ll catch you, he vowed, watching the leaves settle on the rabbit’s path. I will catch you tomorrow and thank you, for being the second most amazing creature I’ve met. Tengen, of course, still held the top spot in that regard. Indeed, the success of the little rabbit had only elevated her further.
Crickets spoke through the walls that night. In the starry sky above, owls flew, ears trained for the sounds of rodents that scurried too quietly for a human to hear. Somewhere far away, an Ezo wolf huffed at the dirt, and started once more on its hunt for a single, strange rabbit. Tengen had wrapped herself in the straw of her blanket, though it made her feel so clammy on a night like that.
Her eyes could see everything.
Her eyes could see nothing.
They were off.
She considered turning them on. But her head ached fiercely, and she knew, though it displeased her, that the overuse of her cursed technique was to blame. Her eyes weren’t like her barriers; she couldn’t just feed them cursed energy and leave them going. Not yet, at least; if she asked Kenjaku about his newly developed healing technique, perhaps she could set it to work on her head… then, she could leave her eyes running without any interruption, and she would never be uncertain, or anxious, or surprised about anything ever again.
A shadow crossed in front of the doorway. Tengen, surprised, clutched the straw blanket closer around her. Her eyes ignited, sky-blue flame in the midst of the darkness. A spike of pain rammed its way through her temple, and the light flickered out of her eyes immediately as she grabbed her head and groaned. Kenjaku smiled apologetically from where he stood in the entrance to the hut.
“Was this a bad time to come night crawling?” he asked, making his way to Tengen’s side and coaxing her into meeting his eyes.
“…It’s a bad time for jokes,” she retorted, teary-eyed, as he raised a hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief as the soothing aura of reverse-cursed technique engulfed her head. By the time it was gone, so was all the pain. It works, Tengen realized, pleased that she had correctly identified a solution to her problem. The trouble now, as always, was figuring out how to do it herself. Something about positive energy didn’t make sense to her, didn’t make sense to her eyes. Perhaps Kenjaku’s ordinary senses, a fact he had so frequently lamented, had ended up being the key to his discovery. But now, it was his turn to ask questions.
“My friend,” he began, “what did you do to that rabbit?” It was the most baffled she had ever heard him be.
“I imposed a vow on it.”
“That’s what you changed the barrier for?”
“Barriers are the only way to force a binding vow on something. So, yes.”
Kenjaku took a moment to consider, his chin resting in his hand. “What was the vow?”
“It was… it was a shared restriction and reward, applied to three of the littermates. I didn’t mean it to, but I had told the barrier to identify them before they were born, and I think that was the problem. Those three must have come from one 'seed.'” Kenjaku straightened up beside her, clearly intrigued. “It viewed them all as one subject, so the vow’s effects were… ‘partitioned’ between the three of them. I only meant for it to produce one physically weak rabbit with abnormally high cursed energy capacity.”
“And you got one normal rabbit, one with a large amount of cursed energy, and one with a weak body, is that it?”
“…Not exactly, but close. The first rabbit was shriveled, the runt of the litter, but it could move just fine with reinforcement. I killed it myself once I made sure of that; all I wanted to know from this experiment was whether an animal could learn reinforcement on its own. I had my answer.”
“And this changed the other two in some unpredictable way, I’m sure,” Kenjaku said, smiling.
“Very,” Tengen agreed with a frown. “The ordinary one began to lose weight—I caught it twice, to make sure—but it was generating even more cursed energy than its sibling had.”
Kenjaku’s smile widened, as he now had a clearer idea of where the story was going—but, crucially, he had absolutely no clue how it would get there, and that was what excited him most. Tengen continued.
“I killed it, too, once I had evidence that it wouldn’t be doing any more sorcery than the one before it. It was more useful to me as meat; eating something with so much cursed energy refreshed some of my own. I thought that was the end; I’d only known the rabbits to be twins until then.”
“And then you found the third.”
Tengen nodded. “I saw it when I was out to pick up water. It startled me, because I could only see it when I looked at it.”
“Oh, poor you,” Kenjaku sighed, falling dramatically into Tengen. She laughed, and, without thinking much, lifted the blanket from her own body to wrap it around them both.
“It’s unsettling,” she confessed, “since I’ve never lived my life like that. Nothing escaped my eyes until then.” To confirm what she said, she lit up the eyes once more, and immediately she could see every little detail of the world around her; the cursed energy flowed through crickets and mice just as it did through Tengen herself. Kenjaku’s presence burned brightly by her side, his aura stronger, more refined than it had been in Summers past.
“Why is it,” he asked, “that your rabbit lost cursed energy and gained strength, rather than the other way around? That was how it worked for the other two.”
“I don’t know,” said Tengen.
They both sat in silence.
“Perhaps your barrier misread your intentions?” Kenjaku proposed after a time.
“It never does,” said Tengen, “It’s a perfect listener. If it works wrong, it’s because I instructed it wrong. Even I do that.”
“Rarely,” Kenjaku qualified.
“Rarely.”
“But, however you choose to word it, the barrier didn’t do things how you wanted it to, how you thought it would. Maybe, then, it was enforcing a two-way trade-off between cursed energy and physical strength, rather than a more specific, ‘less physical strength for more cursed energy?’”
Tengen considered for a moment. “That would make sense,” she said.
“And since the vow had been split oddly, with instruction to target three rabbits as if they were one, it must have put opposite restrictions on two. That would look like balance to a barrier, right?”
“Yes,” Tengen said, energized by her friend’s clever reasoning. “Yes, that would make perfect sense. Kenjaku, I think you have it exactly right.”
“I can outsmart even you sometimes,” he bragged.
“Rarely,” Tengen qualified with a smile.
“Rarely,” Kenjaku agreed.
He leaned into her a little more, then a little more after that. His eyes were closed, and the conscious control he had over his cursed energy began to slip. It seemed she had exhausted all his energy for conversation, and as energy for conversation accounted for nearly 100% of Kenjaku’s energy total, that meant he was ready to sleep.
“Kenjaku,” Tengen whispered, gazing out at the world far beyond the walls of the hut, “will you promise me something?”
“But I only just dealt with my last promise to you,” he said with a quiet chuckle.
“Catch the rabbit for me, before Summer ends.”
“You’ll be glad to know that I planned on it.”
Tengen wanted to smile. “I would help you, but…” she didn’t know how to justify her inaction. Sitting back out of fear, while she sent her friend out to hunt the monster… she was like one of the girls from the fairy tales, and Kenjaku the hero who saved her. Yet she wasn’t calling on him to hunt a curse, a demon, or an eight-headed serpent; the threat she feared, from the bottom of her heart, was one little rabbit that she couldn’t predict.
“You don’t need to explain,” Kenjaku assured her, yawning. “Just enjoy your Summer lazing around in here. I like being the doer in this relationship. It makes me feel less like some fox spirit you accidentally married.”
Tengen laughed a tired sort of laugh and truly closed her eyes. The world was once again as small as the hut she sat in. And it shrunk smaller still; the whole world, from then until she fell asleep, was only as big as the blanket that covered her. It was too warm for a Summer night, but that didn’t matter, as long as it held her and her best friend together.