Kindlewood

“Vermin...”

It is the last thought that slips from her mind, cold and frothing like the waters that drag her under. It soaks into her fur, a burial shroud that throbs around the arrowheads siphoning her blood to the river. To the water. To the land she failed to protect.

With any luck it will poison their precious soil.

The woodlands are an endless chatter of life around her paws. The trees are docile, sleeping giants with half an eye cracked open; a promise made to creatures large and small that they can rest safely in their vaulted halls. From the earth and underbrush rustle promises in return, of spreading seeds and returning to the trees what they need for growth. Her ears scout the area, turning right and left to ensure that every voice is heard and no discordant notes corrupt the song. All is as it should be. Still, something tells her that it isn’t, pulls at her attention with nagging teeth, but she hears all the things she would expect to hear on patrol through the forest: all except the whisper of her paws against the moss and wizened leaves. Her voice, her guardian cadenza — that is what is missing.

She’s dreaming, but that is fine. The pale-robed ones are merely trying to ease her passing, as is their part in the song of these lands.

There are no smells in dreams, or in death. The sour tang of river silt tickles her nose, and a potent pinch of herbs, but it is the soft waft of boiling rice and vegetables that really jolts Kumo’s drowned senses. She’s warm, cradled in a nest made of fabric, and for a flickering moment she thinks she has curled up under her mother’s tails to sleep.

The illusion dies quickly, for the fabric and the rice and vegetables all smell of humans.

Her legs ignore the call to bolt. The growl rolls weakly around her fangs, more whimper than snarl, and Kumo hates herself for it.

Her captor is beyond pathetic. The humans who shot her were fierce, at least — strong, and armed, and skilled. This fair-haired dunce has dropped her cooking utensils more than twice now, each clatter of wood on wood twitching in Kumo’s ears. And that constant prattling, making small talk as if every item in the thatched hovel of a house had ears. What an idiot.

But the arrow shafts are gone, and there is cloth wrapped expertly to cover the wounds. A clay plate sits by her fabric nest, with bits of raw meat cut to fit the snout of a fox who has yet to grow fully into her adult self.

As if Kumo would take food from human scum.

Her stomach growls louder than she does. She curls her tails around herself, trying to muffle it. They don’t reach quite all the way around her, not like her mother’s. Tamamo’s tails could embrace the trunk of an ent at its base. Nine-tailed Tamamo — Jadebreaker, Skystreaker — commanding in her utter lack of decorum because she had the power to have no sense of form and still be held in the highest regard. The lands of Inari had sung her name for centuries as the strongest of the foxes, if not the strongest spirit of the West.

Kumo whispers those songs in her heart, quells her hunger, warms herself around the fire of her hate. She is the strongest now: eight-tailed Kumo — Cloudweaver, Windblighter — crushing village after village and driving the pests back where they came from.

...Eight-tailed Kumo, shot and captured and burning through her remaining energy reserves to heal enough to walk. She bites into her fabric nest and growls - at herself or at them, or maybe at both.

”Maybe she just doesn’t like it? We could try giving her something else?”

There is another fool aside the blonde, a round-faced one that has the audacity to look pleased with everything in the world when everything is wrong because of them. Their iron fells the trees, their hands cut apart the ancient songs, their fires burn the remains of- It is some sort of human food the round face drops on Kumo’s plate, and the smell is so delicious it makes her head spin; when the vertigo stops, Kumo has gulped the human food down whole.

”Shiemi, look!” The round face looks even more pleased. “She likes tofu!”

She does. Very much.

Kumo hacks and coughs and tries to heave the spongy dish back up. The motion pulls her wounds open, steals what little strength she has saved up, and eventually her treacherous body collapses in fatigue.

The woodlands shatter on her ears. She hears it even in her dreams, how the forest came apart with the screams of ents — the keepers of their oldest songs, guardians millennia strong who feared no thing live or dead until the vermin came, with their firebrands and ears that hear no songs. Kumo wants to claw the howls of pain out of her head. She runs on trembling legs, runs fast enough that her tears dry in their tracks and carries the aching lump in her throat all the way to the den on the hill. To the most commanding guardian of this land.

The hovel is empty when Kumo wakes. She tries her legs and finds them wobbly but considers she might not be this lucky a second time. Her walk is stiff, afraid of the stabbing pain if she provokes her injuries. She blinks against the brightness outside and squints across a field of dark, rich soil that has just been tilled for planting. The area lacks every sort of hiding place, and the only reason the two humans haven’t spotted her is that they are busy strewing seeds into the rows and covering them with dirt.

A small island of greenery comes into view, as the humans work their way across the field: a patch of leafy shrubs that have just started putting up clusters of blue flowers. Kumo doesn’t hesitate. The foliage will hide her until the sun sets and the humans retreat inside.

The shrub is home to greenmen who observe their visitor with interest. Kumo doesn’t mind but doesn’t pay attention to them either. All she cares about is when the humans leave the field. 

”Everything the little one eats is better than everything she doesn’t eat, you know. Even tofu.”

“She almost choked to death on tofu!” The fair-haired one has fierceness in her after all. “It’s not food for foxes, Noriko! We should keep trying with the raw meat, even if it goes to waste.”

“Maybe it was just your cooking...”

“What are you implying about my cooking...?” She prods the round face with her wooden hoe in a dismayed manner but is laughing all the while.

So carefree, when the soil they work is drenched in blood.

It is the longest time before the vermin finally prepare to leave the field. All tools have been gathered, backs have been stretched out, and the prattling has-

”Come out, come out~ Can’t have you get sick out here in the cold.”

Kumo knows neither what to think nor what to do. The fair-haired one is squatting by the shrubs in the field, very clearly waiting for a response — but she couldn’t know. How on earth could she know? But the greenmen shove at Kumo from behind with much chirping and conviction, and suddenly a pair of dirt-stained hands scoop the fox out of her hiding place.

Tamamo knows what befell the forest long before Kumo collapses on the hill to catch her breath. Nine-tails are keepers of wisdom deeper than the mountain lakes and clearer than the morning dew. They don’t act rashly, but they are not to be crossed. When Kumo arrives the sky above the den is frothing with clouds darker than the smoke that rises from the forest, yet Tamamo’s eyes are darker still. To live on the land is one thing: to violate its sacred songs is another. The settlers have their homes on the other side of the valley but Tamamo has the wind and the roaring thunder in her chest, and for her the village is just one leap away.

She shoots across the sky — brilliant white against the roiling clouds —, calls thunder’s vicious brother, lightning, to her side and lets loose his jagged whip over the thatched houses.

Let them know the taste of fire.

The next day, both humans remain indoors. Their hands are busy mending clothes and cooking while the fair-haired one makes small talk with the delicate food items. When she doesn’t praise them for turning out well she admonishes them sternly for their resistance.

“I’m pretty sure the food can’t hear you.” Kumo is bound to agree with the round-faced one. If she would ever agree with these pests.

“How do you know? Maybe it can, maybe it’s happy for the encouragement? I appreciate the food, so at least it should know.” In her fabric nest, Kumo scoffs. “I think if everybody just treated each other with kindness, everyone would be much happier.”

“But we’re going to eat it. That’s not very kind.”

“But...! Noriko!!”

The house is filled with laughter when Kumo quietly slips out into the fading afternoon. Stupid humans. Can’t hear songs or see spirits but make-believe that food has soul! The audacity! She grumbles to herself, past the field and past the border where grass meets trees. Her steps are steadier, her injuries less painful, and once she is at safe distance from the settlement she will soon be back to health.

Lost in thought, she catches the smell too late.

Humans corrupt everything they touch. She doesn’t know what they did to those wolves but they aren’t wolves anymore — their smell is wrong, their songs are wrong, and they are tools in the vermin’s hands. Dogs. Dogs, they’re called, the creatures that approach Kumo with hackles raised and hatred rumbling behind their teeth.

Her steps aren’t that steady. Her injuries not that healed. Not for a fight two against one. She shrinks back, heart pounding and blood frozen. She will not die like this. Not like this...!

”Shoo! The two of you! What are you doing out here? Go back home!”

The dogs are startled by the shouting. Their ears prick up, and a moment later they are skulking away in the woods. Just like that. Because the human commanded them.

“You poor thing...” Kumo’s legs tremble too hard to walk. It doesn’t matter, because the round-faced one carries her back to the hovel and accepts no compromises. “You can have more tofu back home. Better than meat, right?” She has gentle hands. And a sparkly smile. “As long as we don’t tell Shiemi.” The cradle of her arms is almost like being embraced by tails, although they are just two, and the skin above her elbows is a wiry, welted red.

It is dusk when they return, that illusive time when night meets day and the voices of two worlds mingle. Tonight, a third one joins. As Kumo watches from the doorstep, the thin flute comes to life at the fair one’s lips. The streaming ribbons rustle with the round face’s steps and the bells chime softly in her hands. She sets her shoulders, breathes in deep; then her eyes drift shut, and she dances. She dances, and her bare feet tread prayers around the shrub and its blue flowers; she dances, and startled fireflies shroud the night in mist of gold; she dances, and Kumo’s spirit thrums with every step. It is a solemn plea for good harvest, filled with thought and soothing like the smell of home. It brings something to the song that is not song but all the same — the human is communicating with the land like spirits do.

Kumo is particularly fond of hare. Tamamo is well aware of this and has brought home a feast: two fat ones fresh out of the burrow. They eat with good appetite, although Kumo complains that her legs feel stiff. She stretches, moves about, yet her body feels rigid as if winter cold had nested in her muscles. Tamamo stills. Her ears stand straight, misgiving. They twitch once, twice-

“Eat no more.”

There are dogs barking in the distance.

“Run!”

Kumo can’t. She falls where she stands, her muscles knotting themselves around her bones and curling her body in on itself like the bud of a fern. It hurts. It hurts.

Tamamo’s fangs close around the scruff of her neck. Of the thousand times she has carried Kumo in this way, her grip has never been this hard. A thousand times, but never twitching as she fights to keep her jaw from locking. Never has Inari’s most commanding guardian staggered to the mouth of her den, trembling with the effort to remain the master of her body.

The dogs are close.

She curves her neck, breathes a wordless prayer into Kumo’s fur, and hurls her off the hill. Rocks and roots and underbrush bruise her stiff body on its way down to the ground. To safety.

Kumo can still smell the dogs. And the humans. She hears the yelps and snarls and barks as the vermin battle Tamamo on the hilltop and she begs her body to move. Commands it to move. She prays, curses, swallows howls and whimpers until her chest is filled to bursting. Until the sound of fighting drifts away in fog. Until the poison takes her consciousness.

Perhaps the dance did reach the spirits of heaven, for when Kumo wakes next morning the air is thick with the taste of rain and thunder. The round face sits curled up on her bed of straw, shoulders tight and the pallor of sickness on her features. The fair one speaks softly in her nonsense way, combs her dark hair with her fingers and tries all ways she can to comfort her.

“It’s not that kind of thunder. Nothing will happen.”

“I know.” Her voice is steady but her fingers clutch the fabric of her sleeping blanket.

“You heard the hunting party from the mountains: the evil spirit is dead.”

“They didn’t find the body. If they don’t burn the body the spirit can come back. More vengeful than ever.” Her voice is almost too quiet to hear. “It already did once.”

Something twists painfully in Kumo’s chest. It could be called regret, if she had regretted the death and mayhem she inflicted. She doesn’t. Her only regret is that these idiots heard of it. What do they know? Stupid humans who do nothing but destroy. What could they understand?

The first bolt of lightning cracks the sky above. Round face screams, covers her head with arms where deep red welts climb up her shoulders, red and molten like flames.

Something twists painfully in Kumo’s chest.

There are no smells in dreams. There are no smells in death. But for Kumo, it is the smell of death that wakes her at the foot of the hill.

Smoke is rising from the hilltop, smoke that eats the sky and reeks of burning flesh. Her body is sluggish and unresponsive but the land of Inari breathes faintly in her ears, a whisper of a song that seeps away like drying rain, never to be heard again.

Kumo drags herself up the hill. The thorns and rocks that cut her skin don’t matter. The blood in her mouth doesn’t matter. Nothing does.

She doesn’t want to see. She doesn’t need to see to know.

Kumo drags herself up the hill all the same.

The wet sensation on her face is not tears but rain; the roaring in her ears is the wind, not her frenzied wail. With the next clap of thunder, dream and reality jolt apart. Kumo is in the human hovel and the storm is throwing itself furiously at the walls. Round face is asleep next to her, curled up in a defenceless ball but her breaths come soft and even. Kumo sighs quietly. She laid down by her cot last night, in case it could help the human find sleep. It worked, it seems. But now the other bed is empty.

Kumo reaches the door in time to see the fair-haired one teeter in the wind, find her footing again, and stagger on towards the creaking house. Her arms are tucked against her chest, filled with worried chatter from all the greenmen in the shrub. Kumo can hear her reassuring prattling, as always, as if every little thing deserved kindness and approval. As if every item in the thatched hovel of a house had ears. As if this human could actually...

“See spirits...” Like greenmen. Like vengeful foxes.

Kumo darts out into the storm, sprints past the human to the woods and is almost knocked into a tree when the next gale tears the air. It doesn’t matter. The memory of death burns in her nostrils. It’s not safe. Humans aren’t safe. She should have left long ago.

She isn’t far into the forest when the woodlands shatter. It’s so abrupt Kumo almost loses her balance. She feels the rumble in her bones, feels the heaving of the earth as Inari itself breaks apart. All the trees they cut, all the rocks they cleared so they could unbind the soil and grow their crops; tonight the vermin do indeed reap what they have sown. The mudslide rushes down the slope towards the settlement at unrelenting speed, a frothing mass of water and dirt that will wipe them from the lands of Inari once and for all.

Kumo can still see the fair-haired one between the trees. She’s trying to drag both the greenmen and the frightened round face to the safety of higher ground. Kumo scoffs. She couldn’t make it in time even if she had the wings of the wind. Stupid humans. Stupid humans who do ridiculous things like saving the ones that hate them. Idiots!

Kumo whips around. The wings of the wind may not be hers to command but she does have its blade.

She calls to the land as she sprints back. Her paws scarcely touch the ground, carried by the songs that birthed her as the harmony that breathes through all of them comes to her aid; the trees, the soil, the rivers and the thunder. All of Inari sings through her.

Kumo takes one giant leap above the raging flood, limbs lengthening mid-air as she twists and lands upright on her hind legs, between the humans and the collapsing wall of mud. She seizes the wind in her outstretched hand and it complies, drapes the billowing sleeves of ceremonial robes around her and crowns her with the argent regalia of the guardian spirits. The wind blade ripples in her grasp, the might of a storm contained briefly in her fingers as she raises the sword above her head and brings it down with all the force of Inari.

The mudslide cleaves before them as if parted by the hand of heaven. The blow carves a groove into the ground but it fills up quickly with sludge again; the water continues, unperturbed, to the sound of trees snapping in half on either side of their crop field and its green island of shrubs. Kumo wastes no time. She twists to face the humans and braces her back paws on the ground, flares her tails out in a circle around them and rams hard into the earth before the mudslide closes in. The water and debris press against her from all sides, bitter-cold with promises of burying all grievances for good. Kumo snarls through her teeth, strains her legs and back against the crushing force. This time, she isn’t shot and bleeding. This time, she will protect herself. And them.

Or so she hopes.

They wear the faces of all the humans she has killed. It’s always that same look, the look of those who have heard of the evil spirit that wields the wrath of the wind and know what is to come. So that is it, then. They fear her. Why shouldn’t they? Her mother killed theirs. Kumo slaughtered their kind by the dozen. Of course they will beg the hunters to come for her with bows and arrows. They regret ever having dragged her out of that river, and they won’t breathe relief until they see the smoke of her burning bones.

Kumo feels like she has been shot again already. She hates the way they stare at her. The way they freeze like anxious fawns. Only when the greenmen give a hesitant chirp do they startle, suddenly aware of how to breathe again, and the round face weakly speaks:

“Does this mean... you won’t be living with us anymore...?”

As if that’s the worst thing that could happen?! As if they even have a home to live in anymore, as if their village wasn’t just wiped off the map — never mind that the fox they pulled out of the water turned out to be the bedtime story they scare unruly children with — how could any of that matter?!

“You... you IDIOTS!”

It does feel like being shot. But she also feels... lighter. Larger. There’s something within her, in the air around her, in the song — a melody that calls to her, deeper than the mountain lakes and clearer than the morning dew, asking her to trust the humming in her blood that carries echoes of another guardian this land once sang to. Kumo fills with it, the hymn of all life intertwined, pours herself into the signs her hands trace as they strum the songs for this land of Inari. Gradually, the storm calms under her touch. The skies emerge cautiously out of the clouds, and the gale softens is howling to a breeze; soon rain no longer feeds the waves of slurry.

There are new expressions on their faces, ones that Kumo can’t place. No human has looked at her like that before, and they keep staring. As if they expected her to do something, say something. Other than just calling them idiots. The longer it goes on, the more she feels her blood rise in unrest.

“Live with you? Who do you think is in charge here? You’re the ones living with me, obviously.” She huffs, and the ornaments of her crown jingle. “Morons.”

It seems that was everything they hoped to hear. Kumo doesn’t get it. They’re sopping wet and homeless — and frustrating! — but they both have the biggest smiles. And endless questions, it appears.

“Didn’t you use to have eight tails? Do spirits do that? Grow new body parts?”

Stupid humans. Spirits don’t grow new body parts, they just grow — when they have learnt what they must learn, and dispelled the clouds that darken their heart and mind, they grow. Kumo doesn’t bother to explain all that to them. If their only understanding of a nine-tails is that she now has one more tail, then she will let it stay at that.

It is the round face that finally manages to ask a sensible question.

”What is your name?”

Kumo, she’s about to say. But there is a friendly hushing from the ground, from the sky and from the rushing water covering the land: the land that she protects. She isn’t Kumo anymore. And this is not just an untamed wilderness. This is something new, this mingling of worlds and songs that aren’t song, and new things need new names.

”Izumo.”

Cloudbreaker.

Stormsinger.