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Cradled by a structure of protein and minerals that took the form of an enclosure made for organs, he was born to a world with the sharp scent of rotting flesh, squirming maggots, and weathered bones.
Birthed by the decaying and dead, Yomi came to be with no mother to call out to and no voice that would ever reach hearing ears.
Surrounded by corpses, this was his home.
But the world wasn’t all about the dead. In fact, it didn’t take long for him to discover that beyond the scope of his home, the stiff bones that laid on the ground worked as an anchor to others, keeping them from this side of his cemetery.
Those creatures walked upright unlike the ones at his feet whose movement of any sort was only possible with the involvement of a third party. Perhaps a critter that faced hunger and swooped in on the flesh. They would carry pieces of the rotting flesh with them to share with the other members of their community.
The Upright. They didn’t need the assistance of such critters. They walked on their own two feet and their flesh wasn’t pale or decaying.
But they wouldn’t stay like that forever.
Eventually, anyone that once breathed would find their way to him.
They always did.
— o —
Something he learned through observing humankind was that no matter how much time passed between a life and the birth of another you could always trace back the lineage of an individual through their blood.
The taste was distinct between those of the same root. It wasn’t very often when it happened. He’s not one for unnecessary bloodshed, at least not beyond what’s required for his survival, but on such a rare occasion, life gifted him with insight into their unique lifestyle.
One such occasion presented itself during dinner.
A tall woman, small breasts, cat-like eyes, the crunch of her flesh between his teeth. He grinded his teeth on the harder parts of the flesh, the sweet natural juice of fat trickling down his throat before he finally swallowed down.
He tilted his head to the side, licking his teeth clean. He’s tasted this before : some time ago when he was a few years younger than now. He doesn’t waste much resources remembering each and every human he’s eaten. The list was endless and to remember who was who was pointless when all they ever were was his source of nourishment.
The woman fell to the ground with a thud and he crouched down, inspecting her features. Nothing rang a bell, but her taste certainly did.
One from the outskirts of the city not that far from this one: a young man returning from work. He would have been around her age if he were still alive, and he knows for a fact human females generally carry one child per term. Those two had been very close in age.
The answer was clear even to the likes of him who had a vague grasp of human morals and traditions.
An affair.
Blood tastes the same across those of the same root. Hair, eye color, gender, height, and so on, it doesn’t discriminate.
Those two had been family.
Not for the first time he wondered what his own blood would taste like.
— o —
Yomi had been roaming the earth for as long as he could remember. That is to say, who knows really how long he’s been around? All he’s sure of is that they were already here when consciousness enveloped his brain.
He was the overseer of their souls taking shape, and eventually when time finally claimed them, he was there as well to take them back. All creatures had a place of origin after all. It was only fitting they returned to the same place they came from after their journey was over.
He was not one of those creatures.
He had no journey or story to be passed down.
Perhaps that has something to say about his dietary requirements. Drink their blood until the last drops have traveled down his throat. Their life passes through him, filling him with the journey he lacks. An insatiable hunger has, in the meantime, been satiated.
They borrowed his time and he borrowed their life. That’s how their little transaction went. But just like how dead men tell no tales, word of his existence would never reach their ears. So Death was a cryptic concept to them, an ending avoided at all cost. Or held off when possible.
Yomi sat in the Underworld watching as humankind built their gadgets, powder that was supposed to ward him off, a system of beliefs that painted his domain as avoidable, all of this and more. He was a star even when he was unbeknownst.
After the many few times, he grew bored of the same cycle.
So usually when the sun was on the horizon about to head out for the evening, he’d head up, walking out of the Gate. It was during those times that he didn’t feel like a foreigner walking the earth despite knowing her far longer than they did.
It was in their cities that he saw a range of curiosities, activities that humans took interest in and partook away from the judging gaze of others.
Seduction was one of them.
Women would display themselves in the streets outside buildings with lights that burned through your retina. Silhouettes casted by the shadow of brightness. The edges of their bodies shone with the colors of a sunset. A day was ending and a darker, more obscure side of the city was waking. Thighs, hips, and breasts, he knew firsthand how tantalizing these could be. They brimmed the most with the sweet juices of protein. He was drawn by them. Humans and him weren’t so different in this aspect.
But women weren’t the only ones participating in this seduction. In more darker nooks of the city, behind buildings, among dumpsters, blood marred the pavement with its most exquisite color. Down the drain it’d go, parting midway from their journey there once sensing its master. The blood would break away from its original path and instead trickle under his boot, unlike the footsteps bouncing off the walls, running further and further away from the crime scene.
Their loss.
Men and women—humans weren’t the only ones inhabiting the cities. Beastmen mingled among humanity. But in the throes of their cohabitation, animosity ran rampant.
Most of these creatures ran the Underground. Their attributes permitted them certain physical advantages as opposed to humans, perfect to run these kinds of businesses. Some, like humans, even had families. And others…
Others were much part of seduction as their human counterparts. Brothels specializing in Beastmen would be located right across human’s. It was a rising industry that brought in good money judging from the way more of them kept popping up.
When it came to desires of the flesh there seemed to be little to no differences between the two societies. In these hubs of seduction, men and Beastmen chatted away amicably about terms of contracts. If there was a common ground between the two, it certainly had to do with the kind of income they would gain from this industry. Just like their flesh and blood was Yomi’s sustenance, money served that purpose to those two groups.
A handshake later and a deal was done.
Soon after, they would be laying with each other, exchanging bodily fluids amidst the height of pleasure.
This he was witness to countless times in his walks.
A man old with age, married judging from the ring on his finger— ah there it was, one of the few only ceremonies he was ever an esteemed guest for. An old friend, ‘til death do us part’— entered the brothel. It wasn’t long before he was writhing and gasping underneath a Beastman, and afterwards paying a handsome amount of money right after. A purely transactional type of relationship.
Curious, really how they didn’t shy away from this relationship in this context. Perhaps he had a thing or two to learn from them.
Then, there were those that weren’t of transactional nature. Mostly hidden, purely frowned upon, families born from the union of a Beastman and a human.
It was a taboo one, but another kind of lineage had been created. He sat in his domain considering this for a moment. Humans and Beastmen, all of them could track down the origin of their civilizations.
That night the length of his dining table didn’t leave his thoughts.
It was all so quiet.
A dream began to take form in his heart.
— o —
The day he was born his world shifted on its axis.
Maga slithered out of the Gate like snakes, ready to take the world by the neck. He’d been just behind the Gate when he smelled it. The scent was unlike anything he ever encountered before. It wasn’t the alluring aroma that had his stomach churning with hunger. On the contrary, it nudged his nose to the side. ‘Not me’ it told him. He would not get anything of nutritional value from it.
Eyes wide, and head filled with curiosity, he crossed the threshold to the world of the living. Maga swiveled past him with jaws snapping wide open as they ran after humans. He paid no mind to this. The Gate remained open behind him, trickling with the blood of the alive.
He followed the scent into a back alley. The smell of another kind of organic decomposition filled his senses, the kind that humans took their nourishment from before tossing it for disposal. That too went back to the earth.
Brain lathered with familiarity, he shifted his eyes down to his feet, waiting for the trail of blood to come searching for him.
There was none.
But the smell of blood still called to him. He continued his tread forward.
“I told you she was no Beastman!”
He stopped on his track to listen to the voices.
“But I saw it! Her nails were as sharp as a cat’s, her canines as well! What else could she have been? Certainly not human in my book!”
Yomi tilts his head to the side, peeking around the corner of a building. The backstreet is dirty with body fluids mixing together with sewer water. In the middle of it all lies a woman with her legs spread open, a slimy watery substance coming out from somewhere between her legs. She’s panting, trembling as a naked infant curls on her stomach. Her vibrant red hair is splayed across the rough pavement.
A man grips the long strands unkindly. “You told us you were one of them!” He spits at her, adding to soil on her face. But the woman remains quiet, trembling with cold on the freezing wet ground. Her clothes weren’t enough to provide the necessary warmth. She was draped in rags.
“We gave you shelter, we gave you work, and this is how you pay us? This child is no Beastman!” The man gripping her red strands yelled.
A second man walks towards the pair, hand closed into a fist before he lets his hand fall open. A single ring falls to the ground. The golden band bathes in her blood.
“You really thought I would play family with a whore?” He says looking down on her with a condescending smile. “That child is no use to us as he is!”
The first man lets go of the woman’s hair. A hard smack resounds on the walls of the alley as her head meets the ground. “Leave it. Let it die along with the mother”
“How about we take it? We need the hands either way. Free labor”
“And have another mouth to feed? We aren’t making nearly enough for that. Those Beastmen are taking more over the business with each passing day”
Amidst their discussion, Yomi has yet to remove his eyes from the familiar red hair. A rebirth he was as acquainted with as the critters that inspired his work. If someone is imobile then provide them with the tools for them to stand up again.
Red hair, same as the one from that day. A memory plays on his head of a young woman whose death came for her too early. A failing heart, her composition was far too weak. But she loved with the strength of a thousand working ones. Shame that she was abandoned. The family couldn’t handle the medical bills. Her hope laid on the hands of the wonders her beauty worked on the hearts of men.
For a while that had been enough to keep her alive, but the human world doesn’t run on love.
She was a burden. And the pure innocent love the lovers had for each other turned ugly. She was in love, but his love ran out just as soon as his money had done.
In came the day when the lover didn’t come back, and she died from a broken heart waiting for him to return home.
Death. That was his domain.
A few droplets is all it took for her to come back, her sickly heart healthy like it had never been before, and her beauty must have charmed someone divine as well because her neck didn’t stretch out of her body like many who drank his blood had done. Her eyes weren’t swallowed inside the mass of her flesh, and her body didn’t transform into a beast that reflected hunger, all mouth and teeth little space for anything else.
A family member was born.
Yomi narrows his eyes at the infant on her stomach and catches a sniff of that scent again. Warm and sweet, cradled in the arms of death and the decomposition of organic matter. His tiny heart was pumping out blood, blood that his nose tells him can be traced back to an origin.
He smiles despite himself.
This is a first, for both this expression and this scent. What is this silly little feeling?
“How about we kill it and be done with this business?”
He emerges from the shadows then. When he speaks even he is surprised by his own voice. Holding conversations with others is not something he does often.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. You see, that child is family and seeing him gone would make me very sad”
The men take to the front, shielding the scene from his eyes with their frames.
“Who are you?!”
“You better fuck off, we don’t play in Gokurakugai district!”
Around their frames, Yomi manages to catch the red-haired woman’s eyes. The skin around her eyes is dark and sickly, the strength she should possess from his blood nowhere to be seen. She had taken the blood well when she first presented, so this could only mean one thing.
This girl had yet to eat a human. It’s been a good minute since then.
“Hmm” he lets his hair fall to the side.
“We told you to leave!!” one of the men comes running towards him, clutching a dagger in his hand. But the sharp edge reaches nowhere near him, an invisible barrier impedes him from doing so.
“The hell?”
Yomi smiles at that, eyes searching for the infant boy on top of his mother’s stomach. Look how much joy you bring me .
The man keeps swinging the dagger at him without results. When the other man gives a hint of aiding his colleague, a Maga comes falling from the sky and lands with its mouth open wide on top of the man eating him whole. Shortly after the scene, it falls into the open jaws of a Gate. All traces of it disappear along with the man.
Yomi is left standing with one lone survivor. At witnessing the carnage, the man takes a step back, eyes wide with fear. The man raises his hands, looking between him and the ground below, unsure of whether what he’s seen had been a figment of his imagination.
Yomi would gladly eliminate all traces of doubt, but he was far more interested in the bits of information the man could provide. It is his blood after all that he can also smell in the boy’s.
He studies the man for a moment. His hair and his eyes—everything, really—is bland to say the least. There is no defining feature that he can find, he’s the complete opposite from the woman on the ground. His eyes return to the mother, So this is the man that captured your heart this time around.
Healthy or not, it seems she has no luck with men.
In her eyes, flickering between death and life, a light of recognition appears to twinkle. So you do remember me , little runaway. Her parched lips move with words that can’t seem to take voice. All this time, and you couldn’t give up on living like a human.
Yomi takes a step forward and that incites the man to take a step back. A golden ring clanks on the pavement from the feet that flicks it away in an act of retreat.
“Stay back! I’m warning you! S-stay back!”
Yomi reaches down, picking the ring with the tip of his finger. He flips it over, feeling the smooth surface of the band with his thumb. Marriage , he thinks. The sealing of a bond. A symbol of commitment.
His gaze flickers to the man, he’s shaking in his spot, and then to the woman. Her ring, he finds, has been spared from the blood and fluids staining the back alley. It rests fittingly around her finger as if the differences between the two were not the distance of two planets. He fits both their frames in the window of his gaze.
“How hard you creatures dream and how easily that dream crumbles” In the back alley of a lawless city, a dream is just another piece of gum stuck on the curb.
His sentence seems to awaken something in the man. Encouraged by misplaced courage, perhaps a last effort response to what could be his grave, he runs forward with arms extended on either side in a position that would have them grappling if it reached him.
“Not the smartest of your kind, I see”
Yomi wonders how these species have managed to survive this long. Usually, he lets fate do the work, other times like with the man’s partner, he lets the Maga feed. But with this man who’d first shown cowardice and later tenacity for a fate that was already handed to him in this dark alley, he prefers to deal with himself.
A choking sound hits his ears. The man kicks his legs, sputtering, as nails do their best to try to pull him away. Beneath his fingers, the man’s skin bleeds black like a piece of fabric soaking up dye. The promise of death runs from all directions as it reaches the chest, the toes, and finally the head. When he lets go, the body of the man slumps to the ground with a thud. Not a single more breath is heard from him.
But that causes an even stranger phenomenon, at the end of a breath commences another. It erupts from the core of a body, a lungful of air, and then a scream. Cries and tears erupt from the small boy like he wasn’t quite none the wiser about the life he had taken.
Yomi finds himself enraptured with the boy. Without meaning to, his hand lifts towards the infant. It’s only a second later that he realizes that his eyebrows have tensed up into a gentle frown.
Could this be concern? The tug in his chest heavily implies so. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, one that grows stronger as the boy’s cries fail to cease. His muscles twitch.
The moment is interrupted by another noise, one that has less of an impact on him. The red-haired woman looks at him between lidded eyes. Her mouth sucks in air in spasmodic movements, like a heart pulled out of a chest — a final contraction before finally calling it quits.
Her dead partner lies beside her. “Go ahead,” he says, flicking his eyes to the side where her food awaits her. Only a bite would suffice.
In a demonstration of stubbornness, she closes her mouth. Her eyes close shut as well. The baby on her stomach continues weeping.
Yomi drawls a sigh, looking at a symbol so easily dismissed on his fingers.
When she dies, the beauty she once possessed wilters. Yomi takes out a handkerchief from a pocket in his jacket and makes quick work of the sullied ring, leaving it shining anew.
He crouches down, taking the infant in his arms. He covers the woman’s right hand with his own.
“I hope you take more after me than him,” he says to the boy, throwing one last glance at the dead man before fitting the newly cleaned ring around his finger and leaving the mother’s ring softly resting on the boy’s chest where his heart should sit.
You shouldn’t run away from me,
The red boy wiggles his fists over his chest in discomfort. Yomi observes tears trickling down from the corner of the boy’s eyes. There’s a wail. Out of that unexplainable feeling taking hold of him once again he raises the boy so his forehead touches his. Contact. Something inside him tells him to reach and touch in an attempt to soothe the ache of this child of his. But the baby continues crying louder until his whole body has turned red like his hair.
His heart clenches at the sound. It confuses him. How does he stop this?
And like a gem waiting to be found, his answer comes in the same color. Red pools at his feet from the body of the father, the husband of a mother.
Yomi wastes no time. He plants a foot on the corpse’s stomach and pulls with a free hand an appendage. An arm snaps cleanly off the body.
The boy hiccups a breath.
“Shhh” Yomi bounces the boy on his arm before hoisting the bleeding appendage to his lips. The reaction is instantaneous. The boy holds on to the closest thing to him and sucks, drinking the essence of life from a bleeding finger.
By the time the bodies are found Yomi has since long been gone.
— o —
The boy is easily shaken.
A man, a woman, a child, no matter who it is when it comes to preparing their dinner, the boy wails, fisting the air in anger. The sound shakes Yomi’s core.
He finds that out of everything the infant awakens in him, this one he doesn’t like. It makes him feel helpless.
So he tries preparing dinner out of his sight. It still doesn’t work.
As soon as he returns from his short departure, the boy shakes on his arms, a pout already forming in lips and a cry seconds away from erupting. It’s like he can smell it on him, the unique perfume of those humans on him. He’s got a sharp nose just like him.
“It’s okay,” he comforts, trying to feed the baby, but the boy is too busy crying. He can feel his own cheeks moisten at the sound of pain. It’s unbearable. Instead of feeding the boy, he’s too preoccupied with following him in his cries.
“Don’t hate me,” he begs on top of his red tufts of hair.
He makes the Maga do it. They bring him bits and pieces to hold above the boy’s lips.
It’s only then that the boy’s tears don’t fall on Yomi’s shirt and things appear, for once, to be resolved.
But it’s another issue that has risen to his attention.
It’s been too long since he’s returned to the Underworld. This world cannot support him for long. He’s begun to feel it, the way his bones feel like seconds away from falling, yearning for the moist ground underneath. The way his flesh loses its luster. He must return soon.
The baby on his arms sleeps.
Any other day he would have, but the boy holds him back. His smell is just like his, but there’s another thing mixed in there. It’s human. And no human can cross his Gates.
He must return, that’s out of question. He’s no use to anyone like this.
Only a few days will suffice. That’s all, he tells himself when he opens the Gate and enters, leaving the boy close enough that he can hear him from the other side.
He’ll still be watching. Nothing will go wrong.
On the first day on the other side, he stays seated with the red liquid of the Gate reflecting back the image of his child. He’s laying on a makeshift bed created from the torn fabrics of the clothes of the humans they’ve fed off. His little hands reach to the sky.
Yomi tilts his head, closing his eyes in delight.
For lunch, he has the Maga roam for meat. He watches them tear human after human. They’re mindless creatures after all, all sense of self gone.
Only for a while. He can close and open Gates at will, have them tear one human or two and quickly open a Gate to swallow them back in so they don’t leave such a mess behind. Normally, he wouldn’t mind the mess but he has to be more cautious now. Especially since someone’s waiting for him outside. There can be nothing tracing it back to him.
But Yomi’s handle on the Underworld has dwindled after being gone for so long and he can only open so many gates before his body tires out. Being dead sure takes a toll on the body.
At the end of it all, the boy managed to get fed.
On the second day, he receives visits.
“Yomi-san” the soft voice calls to him from the back of the room. The man never turns his eyes away from the screen of red.
“Who is that?” the voice of the dead woman says with an inquisitive tone.
“A family member,” he says without missing a beat. Not a ‘new member of the family’. He’s not an addition to something existing, not something he's had a direct hand on creating like he’s done with his family. The blood of his veins in no moment slid past the boy’s lips with an objective in mind. No. His blood coursed naturally through him in a cycle that would never fade out. A gift from nature.
He was no ‘new’ member of the family.
He was his.
“Humm,” says the voice from behind in something that sounds like disappointment. Yomi knows that sound. Before dying, she had the people that showed an ounce of interest in the source of her affection killed. A stalker and a murderer, the man couldn’t live with the weight of her actions and he hung himself. She committed suicide shortly after in hopes of following him to the afterlife.
Yomi lets a single eye unfold before her.
He only gets a bashful smile in return before he’s left alone once again. His eyes return to the boy who’s sleeping soundly on his bed. He has no roof and no four walls for protection. He’s vulnerable. Yomi could have found him a better shelter, but the Maga weren’t exactly the most discreet in dropping off his food.
It’s with this in mind that he sends someone on a mission, not quite a mindless Maga, but mindless enough to do his bidding.
Yomi should have known that a person doesn’t change even after death. His child, it does things to him he can’t fully comprehend.
He’s on his final day on the other side of the Gate when he lets his eyes close for the barest of moments. Only for a bit. He hasn’t slept in a good while, counting those he spent on the world of the living caring for the boy.
But a few minutes end up being a few hours and when he wakes up the boy is nowhere to be seen.
He crosses the Gate, finding blood spilled all over the backstreet. It isn’t his, his nose tells him, but the scents are all muddled over. It’s human, it’s supernatural, it’s death, they’re hard to pick apart.
After some searching, a clue presents itself to him: a tuft of blonde hair. A sheepish smile that hides a seething anger underneath. Poison disguised as innocence.
Yomi opens a Gate that leads him directly to the woman. She’s sitting on a bench in a park, brushing her hair.
“Yomi-san!” She says excitedly, her cheeks burning with adoration.
Yomi takes a seat beside her. “Have you seen young Yamato-kun?”
“That boy? Of course not! I only have eyes for you Yomi-san!” Her hands run over her long dyed hair. Her fingers arranging and rearranging a certain spot on her head.
“I see” he says before holding her hand mid-brush. He tugs a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Families don’t lie to each other” he whispers, smelling the lie on her borrowed flesh.
The woman shakes beneath him, not something quite born out of fear, but out of frustration. She lets out a cry, “It’s not fair!!! I understand, Yomi-san, that he’s just a babe, but why are you paying so much attention to him?! You don’t need anyone else, right? You just need us! You said so yourself! So why, Yomi-san?! Why are your eyes only on him?!!”
Yomi holds her close, patting her back placatingly.
“A good guardian knows when to listen. So I thank you for opening up and being honest with me”. Yomi looks at her honey-gold eyes. She lights up at his words, “And a good guardian ensures that an aggression is met with the appropriate consequences so mistakes don’t repeat themselves”
He stands up to leave.
Her hands reach out to him but she stops herself before fingers touch skin. “Wait! Yomi-san!! You’re not angry with me are you?” Panic settles on her voice.
Her fear is pungent, an old thing that could not interest him less.
He leaves without giving her an answer.
The young teenager in question, he finds struggling in a hangman’s noose made of blood.
“Everything just went out of control! She came and then they came—”
“Who came?”
“Humans, Yomi-san. I believe they heard the commotion. I was about to change the boy’s location per your orders when she came barreling down. It was a mess!”
“They took him?”
The boy nods regretfully.
Yomi begins the search for his blood.
Looking for the boy is not a hard feature when he already knows what to look for. The scent, it’s as unique as one could find in the land of the living. It’s the spontaneity, the lack of routine of the people that have taken hold of him that makes his mission a bit more troublesome.
The boy passes through many individuals, and as such, leaves him following paths that end up being dead ends.
It takes him the same amount of days he had to stay across the Gate to finally locate him.
Somehow, someway, he’s found himself sharing the same destiny as his mother. The Beastmen that have him inspect him closely, nosing his vibrant red hair. They shake their heads in confusion. He’s not one of them, not exactly.
‘Mixed race?’ Conversations of origin are held. Nonetheless, they’ve taken him in.
Yomi watches with eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights as the boy sleeps soundlessly in the top story of their business. Far from the gritty dirty stuff. The Beastmen treat him well, they feed him, they coddle him. He’s found a home among these people, one his mother couldn’t find in the same industry but ran by humans.
An understanding befalls him then. As long as the other half of the boy remains human, he won’t ever fully be able to take care of him. Yomi will always have to return and the boy will never be able to cross the Gate.
He runs his fingers on the red strands, a farewell taking place on his lips, before taking out a thin silver chain from a pocket. A ring gravitates down the length of the silver until it reaches the bottom. Yomi places the necklace around the boy’s neck.
For now, he will have to settle with watching him from afar.
Until the next time they meet.