On impulse, she dropped her gaze to the amber-covered Kotogatari in her hands. She was going to have to read it. Everything that had affected Akari’s life was written down on these pages.
She knew she couldn’t let the demon just crumble into dust like this.
With trembling fingers, she turned the page.
The fluid calligraphy was instantly familiar to her. She leaned in, focusing on the story it told.
Thus ended the demon’s long campaign of tyranny since ancient times, and it lost both its name and its head. It was sealed in a kubizuka as an Onigami, its deep grudge everlasting, and became known as the Golden Demon.
After many years, the enshrined demon soul met a young child. As wild as ever, its mind selfish, it nonetheless forged a bond with a human for the first time. The child performed a narration, manifesting the golden form of the demon and sealing it away as a Kotogami, thus marking the final entry in this Kotogatari.
……──
I gave it the spirit name of Tomohito Yagyou. But the village child always called it…
A demon, one of the two locked in battle on the day her village was destroyed. Little Akari’s much-longed-for childhood friend. She had called him…
“Mr. Demon…”
The gold demon paused mid-grapple with the Raiju, its body quivering.
Akari kept flipping through the pages, the memories coming back to her like a flood.
The book didn’t describe everything. But it sparked her memories, her childhood spent playing beside the kubizuka tomb of the spirit enshrined in the forest. The deep voice she heard from beneath the stones, the conversations they had together…
“Mr. Demon! Come out, come out and play!”
“…I cannot. I am only a head.”
“Hmph! Well, if you ever manage to get out, come and play with me. Deal?”
“Stubborn child. If you ever saw my true form, you would sob and shudder with fear.”
“Nope! ’Cause you’re the coolest, Mr. Demon! I just know it! Hey, if you get out, we can eat sweet bean candy together!”
“…All right, then. Although I doubt such a chance will ever come, if I do ever find my body again, I shall play with you.”
Akari bent over, a wave of nausea rolling through her.
She remembered now.
Her friend had always seemed so gloomy whenever she spoke of him coming out to play.
She recalled when it began. She’d climbed onto the mossy stone mound and heard a voice reverberating from beneath the stones.
“Is it fun for you, to sit on top of my head like that?”
Akari hadn’t known what a kubizuka burial mound was. But she was tickled by the talking rock heap. She started going there to play every day.
Even after she found out that the rocks housed the village spirit, she continued to visit “Mr. Demon” daily. It may have been one-sided, but she’d begun to consider him her friend, and she imagined what he would look like based on the things he told her about himself.
The tales he’d told her in his deep voice…they seemed fanciful, like fairy tales, but they excited her all the same.
She had finished reading the final entry in the Kotogatari now. She raised her head from the book just as the air was filled with a thunderous roar, and clouds of dust began to swirl.
She lifted her arm to protect her face as the golden demon went rolling, crashing into the ranks of grandfather clocks and sending them falling like dominoes.
The Raiju, too, seemed to have been dealt a devastating blow and was lying immobile.
“Oh!”
The gold demon struggled to sit up as it clutched its right arm, which was starting to drop gold dust particles too. If Akari’s reading of the Kotogatari wasn’t enough to stop the disintegration process, then that probably meant the book itself was reaching the end of its life span…
But the demon turned to Akari with a bittersweet smile.
“I wanted to disappear before you figured it out… Things didn’t go as I planned.”
Even in this monstrous form, that calm, polite voice was the one she knew so well.
As she listened to the kind voice, Akari was filled with awful regrets, her soul in turmoil. From its words, it was clear the demon remembered her child self, too.
“Why…why didn’t you say anything…?”
“How could I? I was your childhood nightmare.”
The demon frowned at her question. But she could read Tomohito’s expression now, at long last. He was filled with immense remorse.
“There is no need for you to fret over what happened. I opted to be called forth as a Kotogami in order to protect you. But I let you come to harm, and I let your village be destroyed. Now that we have met again, all I want is to be wonderful again in your eyes, to somehow make amends…”
Akari couldn’t follow what he was saying at all. But the demon seemed so earnest.
“In place of the family I stole from you, you have Mayoi and Kansuke. In place of your lost village, you have the Bookhouse. In place of that sweet, innocent heart with which you narrated my tale…well, there is no way to restore that, I’m afraid. But everything else will be perfect, as long as I disappear. The demon is always slayed at the end of the story, is that not correct? An appropriate fate for the monster who laid waste to a village.”
“You did this to…repay me? You waited around like this for me to grow up, for twelve years?!”
“Yes. This is the end of my at-will manifestation.”
“But I was so afraid of you…”
The demon showed something like a clumsy smile as the emotional words spilled from Akari’s lips.
“It’s strange, isn’t it? I used to take such joy in the terror of humans. But I’ve never been able to forget that look of horror on your face.”
Akari was starting to cry now. The contrast of the demon’s fearsome form and its soft words was too much to bear.
The demon reached out its hand toward her, but its arm was already crumbling into gold dust. Its face twisted in frustration.
“Despite it all, I really wanted to be narrated with your words…”
Akari felt her chest aching with a pain that was mostly sadness.
He had wanted to return to her what she had lost, or at least provide her with replacements, and he had planned everything out so carefully to achieve that goal.
Ah, but he was so inhuman. She was so terrified of him as he stood there smiling at her with his demon face, even with both of his arms now crumbled away to dust.
She recalled the things he’d said on that night when she’d spiked a fever. He’d been talking about himself, after all. And yet, he hadn’t blamed her for forgetting him. His regret had spurred him to try to fix things.
And all the while, Akari had kept talking about how much she hated stories.
There was so much she didn’t understand, but she felt she was beginning to.
“So, Mistress Akari…please run now. Even in my current form, I believe I still have what it takes to defeat that malformed beast.”