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She does not have a name, at least not one she calls herself.
Perhaps the humans that scuttle around the base of her mountain like ants call her by some impressive name in their own simple language, but if they do, she does not care to learn it. She perches high up on the peak of her mountain where the humans dare not walk and disregards the paltry settlements they form beneath her mighty wings. So long as they do not disturb her, she is content to remain indifferent to their short and meaningless lives.
She is a god of storms and of lightning, of life-giving rain and of the kind of peace that can only exist within the eye of a hurricane. She is pure destruction, constrained only by the idea that all others are so far beneath her that they do not warrant a second of her wrath, much less her indifferent attention.
None but one.
She will not bother to remember his name, but she will always remember his song. It drifts up to her quiet perch far above the roofs of the humans’ little settlements and catches her attention when none of their prayers ever have, and for the first time in her long, long existence, she turns her gaze down.
He is the only human who has ever managed to draw her interest, and the only one who ever will. It is rare for her curiosity to override her disdain for humanity, and yet the innocent song he sings as he strolls along the beach at the base of her mountain has a kind of allure she’s never experienced before.
Seldom does she descend from her nest at the mountain’s peak—it is her throne, a high-up perch so far from the creatures that plague the ground below that she need not worry about being disturbed—and yet the song of the lone child calls to her and bids her to glide down on powerful wings so she can see with her own eyes the source of the captivating sound.
She is not very familiar with humans, but she knows enough to know that this one is young, not half the age of the oldest humans in his settlement—though they still pale in comparison to her own long life. He turns to her with eyes wide with shock and awe as she perches herself on the thick, sturdy branches of a thunder sakura. Up close, the boy appears even smaller than she’d imagined, small enough that one of her taloned feet could wrap fully around his torso and hoist him off the ground with ease. She cocks her head to the side, silently observing the child as he gawks up at her.
“Your song,” she says, her voice rough from disuse, “it is different from the songs I have heard in the past.” She cranes her head down to better speak with the boy, folding her great violet wings against her sides. “Why is that?”
The boy blinks up at her innocently. “Were you listening? That’s kind of embarrassing… I came out here to practice by myself, you know?” He awkwardly rubs at the back of his neck with one hand, averting his gaze. “I don’t think I do anything different from anyone else when I sing. Did you like it?”
She tilts her head, considering his question. Such a simple query, and yet she finds herself uncertain how to answer. “I am not sure,” she admits. “I only know that I have not heard a song like yours before. It is different than the music of the wind in the trees and the calls of animals that I have grown used to, but it is not unpleasant.”
The boy grins, though he looks a tad confused. “I’m not really sure what that means, but it sounds like you liked it.” He reaches up to adjust the brim of his straw hat briefly, almost nervously. “Oh, I’m Ruu, by the way! Um, what should I call you? The elders in my village always just call you Thunderbird, but surely you must have a name of your own.”
“Name?” she echoes. “I have no need of names. You may call me whatever you please.”
“Really? That’s a big responsibility,” Ruu says, a tint of nervousness to his tone, but he gets to thinking on it right away, lifting a hand to his chin with a thoughtful hum. “Then, maybe I should give you a name in Grandpa’s language? I don’t know much, but he did teach me a few words! How about… Kanna Kapatcir? Maybe it’s a little on the nose, but I think it fits!”
The grin Ruu flashes in her direction is bright; she’s left wondering how it is that this child can carry within him an appropriate respect for a being like herself while also managing to still be as bold as he is. “I know not the meaning of these words, but if that is your wish, I do not care to stop you,” she says dismissively.
Ruu giggles, muffling the sound into the palm of his hand. “Well, I guess that’s fine. It’s not like anyone else will use it, anyway.” He tugs on the brim of his straw hat, straightening it on his head. “Hey, Kapatcir? Since you liked my singing, would you let me sing for you again the next time you come to visit?”
She tilts her head to the side, fixing Ruu with her beady-eyed stare. “I do not know when I will return next. The lives of you humans are so short that by the time I return, you may be long gone.” Straightening up, she ruffles her violet wings, spreading them out in preparation to fly. “However, if you are still living the next time I come to rest here, then you will sing for me again,” she states, more of a command than a request.
“It’s a promise, then,” Ruu declares with a smile.
A promise? She does not make promises lightly; the promise of a god such as herself is a rare thing indeed, rarer still when it comes from her, a god so ambivalent to the lives of others. To break a promise with a god would be tantamount to putting one’s life into their grasp, for better or worse, and she is not known as a gentle or a forgiving god.
“Very well, child. Then let such a promise not be broken,” she says, her voice softened with solemnity as their vow is set in stone. Without another word, she turns her head to the sky and gives a mighty flap of her wings to lift herself from the Thunder Sakura’s branches, her talons scoring lines along the spot where she had perched. She does not spare another glance for the boy with the straw hat and the captivating song. If it is fated for them to meet again before he leaves this world, then certainly she will remember to seek him out once more.
—
To Kapatcir’s great surprise, she finds herself drawn back to her lonely island perch just days after Ruu’s promise to her is sealed. Her mind is not one to wander indiscriminately, and yet she cannot seem to get the thought of the lone boy on the beach out of her head, nor can she seem to forget the song he’d sung that had caught her attention so fervently.
She can tell that something is wrong the moment she alights on the perch within the hollow mountain she’d claimed as her nest.
It is not the first time she has returned to her home to find the corpse of a human laying at her door, but she has never bothered to seek out its purpose, whether they have been laid there purposefully or if they had simply found her presence to be fitting to die in. Just as a human does not stop to admire the corpse of a dead rodent along the side of the path they walk, neither does Kapatcir pay any mind to the source of the human bodies that occasionally appear before her like offerings.
But today is the first day that her return has brought with it this cloying sense of dread, an unfamiliar tension in the air that speaks of some intense, foreboding future—like a prophecy of some great tragedy about to unfold.
Gliding down from her perch to light on the ground before the body, she takes a moment for the first time in her life to see exactly who it is that’s seen fit to dirty her doorstep with their final moments.
She nearly doesn’t recognize Ruu. He’s deathly pale as all human corpses are, his body devoid of blood and his limbs stiff and unmoving. Though she cannot see his face, turned away from her as it is, she knows that his eyes must be wide and unseeing, the mark of an innocent life taken without regard for the sacrificed.
“What is this?” she demands aloud, spreading her massive wings out wide. Beside Ruu’s head sits a cup, glittering gold against a bleak, gray backdrop and overflowing with red. Is it the source of the stench that now torments her? An unfamiliar emotion sparks within her, swiftly igniting into a roaring blaze. Kapatcir has never known grief, has never tasted the bitter sting that comes with losing a loved one, because she has never loved before. But now, staring unblinkingly down at the still form of one who had so sweetly promised to sing for her again, she feels it as truly as any blade that has ever attempted to cut her.
She looses a screech, loud and shrill, the unfamiliar grief tarnishing her heart swiftly overwritten by pure, unfiltered rage. “What has become of this world? Does a promise made to a god mean nothing?!” Far above her head, stormclouds begin to gather, clear skies turning to a raging rainstorm in a single flap of Kapatcir’s powerful wings. “You promised that you would sing for me again! Was your will so weak that such a vow could so easily be broken by one of your own kind? What foolishness is this?”
A boom of thunder punctuates Kapatcir’s distraught words, bringing with it a flash of lightning so bright that for a moment, the world turns to pure white. She cries out again as it strikes her, lightning dancing over her feathers as her fury takes tangible form. She soars into the sky with enough force that the ground shakes beneath her feet. The thunder sakura on which she’d perched burns as lightning ricochets off of her body and strikes anything and everything in its path.
The people will pay the price of her broken promise with her lives, she decides, sorrow and anger mixing into a nauseating concoction in her heart until there is nothing left but vengeance. At her call, bolts of lightning pierce the ground, scorching anything and anyone within its path. Kapatcir hears the screams of the villagers far beneath her as their houses are burned to ash and their lives are snuffed out. It’s so easy, how the power of her storms can end all of their fragile existences in the space of a single moment. It’s almost laughable.
“Let this be my curse,” she cries above the noise of the storm as it grows stronger, denser, more chaotic. She lets her rage and malice fuel it, calling dense fog to cover the land and obscure the sky above her head. “Let time be frozen here, let mortal foolishness never again touch this land I once called my home. Until the time when the promise made to me is fulfilled and I hear his song once more, let there never be another day of peace for me or for this world. Until that fateful day should arrive, this shall be my vow!”
An unfulfillable promise, an unquenchable vengeance. Kapatcir knows that she will not rest, not until her vengeance has been completed or she’s struck down for enacting it. Whatever the end, it is of no consequence to her anymore. Her blood thrums in her veins, demanding justice for the sins committed against her.
Swallowing down her grief, she succumbs to her anger and allows her hatred to consume her heart.