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AKARI’S eyes flew open and her body stiffened. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her heart was hammering against her rib cage.
She could tell her fever had only worsened. It didn’t look as though it would break before morning.
She was lying on the bed in her room. The surroundings were familiar and comforting, but everything seemed fuzzy around the edges.
It was still dark. Probably close to midnight.
She didn’t feel as if she could sleep any longer. She’d finally remembered the dreams she’d been having.
“Why am I only recalling this now…?”
Akari’s memories of the incident were so hazy. Before she knew it, the village was empty and she was alone…until a Narrator had come along and saved her.
With most of her memory gone, her home village had started to feel as though it were a million miles away. She’d even forgotten what had happened there.
How could she have forgotten it? That place had meant so much to her.
She supposed it couldn’t be helped. She’d left the village forever twelve years ago, after all…
Akari shifted. She felt heavy and sluggish and sick. There was something damp resting on her forehead; she could feel it.
She removed it with her hand, realizing it was a damp cloth. She recalled getting out of her kimono herself and crawling into bed, but she didn’t remember putting this on her forehead.
“Mistress Akari…?”
Akari turned her head to the side and saw Tomohito standing in the doorway, light from the hallway spilling in around him. He was carrying a basin of water.
“Are you awake?”
“What…are you…?” As she mumbled thickly, Tomohito’s face lit up and he bowed apologetically, his tone anxious.
“Forgive me…I know you said I must not enter your room. But the nursing book says to monitor the patient closely, and I just didn’t feel right about leaving you. If you could make an exception just this once…”
Akari smiled a little as Tomohito continued to sweat.
“There’s no need to act so afraid of me.”
“I…I see.”
Tomohito smiled with relief and snapped on the lights, then approached the bed and set the basin down on top of the Western-style chest of drawers. Then he scrutinized Akari’s face closely.
“Is there anything you need? If you can’t sleep, I could tell you a bedtime story. Oh, no, you wouldn’t like that…”
Tomohito chewed on his bottom lip. Akari smiled a little and croaked out a request.
“I’d like some water.”
“Ah, certainly.”
Tomohito brought a cup to her lips. Akari was a little taken aback but tried to sit up to drink from it. As she did so, she felt a streak of pain in her back.
“Tss!”
“What is wrong, Mistress?”
“My wound hurts…”
Akari wished she’d never said that. Tomohito blanched and gasped. He grabbed her shoulders and tried to pull her upright, but she shoved him off.
“It’s fine; get off. It’s an old wound…more of a scar now, really.”
“I…I see.”
“Can I just have the water, please?”
Tomohito hesitated before offering her the cup of water again.
Akari took a sip and realized she was far thirstier than she’d thought. She grabbed the cup and began gulping the water down. Tomohito watched her from his seat beside her bed, his brows knitted with concern.
Akari wasn’t sure what to say. Maybe it was the fever.
She got the impression from his intense staring that Tomohito wasn’t going to drop the issue, so she put down the cup and turned her back to him. Gathering her hair over one shoulder, she pulled down the back of her collar, just a little.
“M-Mistress Akari?!”
“You can see it, can’t you? My scar, I mean.”
Tomohito had yelped at first, but as he realized what she was doing, he fell silent. Save for a gulp, that is.
He could see part of her scar, formed by the deep raking of claws. The scar was discolored and stood out from her skin. It stretched from her neck all the way down her torso, right to her lower back.
It was the kind of scar that drew concerned comments from the other patrons at the public bathhouse. Akari had long ago grown tired of this, and she always tried to use the bathhouse at unpopular hours.
This scar was the only remaining proof of Akari surviving the tragedy of her childhood village.
“It starts to hurt when it rains a lot, or when I’m not feeling well. That’s all it is.”
Recently, with all the bad dreams, she’d awoken every morning with her scar stinging.
Akari quickly pulled her collar back up. Tomohito wasn’t really a young man, he only looked like one, but she still felt awkward having his gaze on her bare skin.
“Are the bad dreams related in some way?”
Akari looked over her shoulder at him in surprise as he murmured tentatively. He was gazing into her eyes, a tearful expression on his face.
Akari sighed and flopped back down against the pillows. If he’d been there all night, he must have noticed her night terror. She still didn’t feel sleepy, so perhaps this was a good opportunity to talk.
“I’ve just been remembering the past a little.”
It was probably the Nue that triggered her. And that gossip she’d heard at the office had been enough to give her dream tangible form. Tomohito sat silently beside her, listening earnestly.
“Tomohito, do you know about that Aragami demon attack that happened twelve years ago?”
Tomohito’s face went blank. It seemed that incident had left its mark on spirits as well as humans.
“I recall…a yokai that was enshrined in a village went on a rampage… The Narrators managed to seal it into a Kotogatari, but it was too late… The whole village was annihilated.”
“I think I might have been the cause of it all.”
Tomohito’s eyes widened as Akari debated on how best to phrase it.
Her body felt sluggish from the fever, but her mind was clear now. She felt she was starting to realize why she hated stories—no, not hated, feared—and why they gave her such a nagging discomfort inside.
She kept talking, as if cataloging her memories out loud. “I was friends with a spirit, you know.”
The words were spilling out, sounding nonsensical even to her own ears. Tomohito looked stunned, but he listened without comment.
“On the outskirts of my childhood village there was this kubizuka…you know, one of those burial mounds for people whose heads were severed in battle? It was kind of my playground. I always went there alone to play. And there was this voice, coming from the mound. It would always chat with me. It was a spirit, enshrined in the mound…”
The spirit in question had been cruel and brutal, and its tale was part of the folklore of the village.
It was pure evil incarnate. It kidnapped children from their beds, ate rich men alive, and stole anything it could get its hands on. It killed everyone who tried to stop it. The Imperial Court trembled in fear at the mention of the beast’s name.
Eventually, the beast was beheaded by the Narrators, but its soul’s wrath continued. In an attempt to appease the spirit, they honored it by enshrining its head in a sacred kubizuka mound. The same kubizuka where Akari had played, on the outskirts of her village.
But the voice that came from the mound and spoke to her…it was kind. It set her soul at ease.
She couldn’t remember what the spirit had said to her…but she knew she had come to regard him as a treasured friend.
“…A Narrator came to the village, and I think I told them about the spirit… I wanted someone else to know about my friend. Then one day that Narrator brought me to the kubizuka and handed me a book…
“And he asked me…to narrate the tale of the village demon.”
The Narrator’s name was Neo, and he’d showed concern for Akari as a child.
“It’s to protect the village.”
He’d said something like that…but at the time, Akari hadn’t understood.
He told her that if she just did this one thing, then, in exchange, her spirit friend would be freed from its kubizuka. It could run through the fields with Akari, eat meals with her, and go on all sorts of adventures with her…
She remembered thinking, How? But the prospect of freeing her friend seemed so thrilling, and wasn’t Neo her friend too, after all?
“So I narrated…and manifested a demon. And after that, my village was no more.”
Looking back on it now, she knew that the book Neo had handed to her was a demon’s Kotogatari.
She still didn’t know why Neo chose her for this. She was just a child, with none of the abilities of a Narrator. But her narration had indeed manifested the demon, and it had crushed the village.
It was easy to kid herself that the whole thing had been a childish delusion. That she had done nothing wrong, and that she alone had been spared the rampage out of dumb luck and nothing more.
But after, when she’d been sent to live with relatives and was still grappling with survivor’s guilt, Neo had come to check up on her. He’d told her never to tell anyone the truth about the massacre. He’d told her to forget everything.
That alone—his concern—had made Akari suspect that she’d done something terrible after all…
Whatever Neo’s motive had been, Akari had never known it.