Work Text:
Where god’s body sank into root and moss,
A thousand saplings claw the blood-warm soil.
Kodama blink awake in the marrow of dead trees,
Their laughter return a chime of bones.
No crown of antlers bends the morning light,
No hooves print the green in ghostly trails.
The wolves’ den cradles only wind tonight,
And the river, once poison,
Now sings through the valleys.
The one-armed lady tends her scarred commune,
Her right arm gone, her left a bridge outstretched.
She tends the furnace with her one good hand,
Her sleeves rolled high, her sleeves where fire wept
“We will build,” she says, “but not devour.”
Her people- lepers, orphans, the war-ax’s scorn,
Raise a village from ash, their hands precise.
Roofs raised, where smoke once choked the sky.
They plant rice where forests were devoured,
And pray to no spirit,
Yet leave offerings where shadows sigh.
The princess kneels where mother-wolves decay,
Her pendant knife, a twin to his scarred chest.
She wears the dagger above her heart,
Its blade cold where his fingers once hurt.
The village breathes. The forest does not yield.
The apes return to nest in trees,
And wolves drink slow,
From streams where men reduce.
She does not smile, but the wolves
Taste her joy in the wind.
Her brothers nuzzle her scars, whisper:
“The forest does not love, it remembers.”
Yet as night falls, she climbs to the highest oak,
Gazes east where lanterns flickering earthbound stars,
And wonders if love is a beast that walks
On two legs or four.
The prince walks borders where mist parts,
His scar fades to a memory, a map of before,
Where curse-black veins once gripped his soul.
He walks the ridge where boar and iron once clashes,
And sees neither sin nor saint.
He bargains peace with both hand and spiel,
Bridging wolf den and hearth in the fragile things.
In the village square, he tends to wounds, not blades,
Learns the weight of a plow, the rhythm of looms.
But dusk finds him gazing where the tree line fades,
Whispering to the wind that carries her tunes.
At dawn he climbs,
He waits for the girl who still wears the forest.
———
The mountain does not care
who wins. It breathes.
The forge does not care
who rules. It burns.
Somewhere, a girl sharpens her knives
To the rhythm of a boy’s footsteps.
Somewhere, a bullet grows rust
In the belly of a shrine.