Dead conifer needles and loose soil crunch under Kurogane's boots, staining them a murky gray. Everything in this country is gray and dead. The trees, the earth, the rocks, even the air is gray. A roiling, bubbling layer of clouds cover the sun, casting only flat gray light across the land. It makes Kurogane's head hurt from straining his eyes.

Trembling shadows, barely darker than the air around them, greet Kurogane as he steps into a copse of dead evergreens. The motions of setting up camp are familiar after all this time of traveling. He's so far from home, yet still not to his goal. He longs for the color and life of Shirasagi castle. There is nothing alive here, save for Kurogane and a few stray shadows.

He tries not to think about how this fate awaits Nihon if he fails.

Kurogane knew that something had been worrying Tomoyo-hime for a while now, but he'd decided not to ask unless she volunteered the info first. He trusted her to tell him about any safety concerns she had, but he had the feeling that this was something he couldn't help with. That was until she summoned him to her study.

He let himself in with a gentle knock on the doorframe. She was bent over a scrying mirror, bags under her eyes and knuckles white against the edges of the polished bronze. Kurogane reached out and gently pulled her hands free of the mirror, trying to get a better look at her face while he did so. When she finally met his gaze, there were tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

Kurogane had never liked seeing Tomoyo upset. It happened so rarely — she was a cheerful person by nature — but when she did cry, it made Kurogane want to stab whatever caused it.

"What's wrong?" He asked, trying to stay calm for her sake. He wasn't good at it.

Tomoyo-hime bit her lip. "It's… it's like nothing I've ever seen before. Kurogane, do you know how magic enters our world?"

He scratched the back of his head. "'S from the gods, isn't it?"

"Yes," she nodded, "but it's a little more complicated than that. I'll spare you the details, but our kingdom's patron god is Amaterasu. It is through her that magic enters our world from the spiritual realm, and she ensures we have enough to sustain life and balance, without allowing so much magic in that we are overrun with monsters."

Kurogane grimaced. He'd seen firsthand what could happen when an overworked god's control slipped and allowed monsters to grow too fast for warriors to exterminate them. He stroked the top of Ginryū's head with his thumb, fingers curled loosely around the underside of its hilt.

"So, what do you need me to do?" Kurogane asked. Tomoyo-hime's brow furrowed a minute distance, so he clarified, "I know you wouldn't tell anyone about this until you were sure of how to handle it. You wouldn't have told me if I wasn't involved."

She huffed, a small smile flickering onto her face for a moment. "Sometimes I forget you know me as well as I know you."

It approaches him after the fire has burned down to embers and Kurogane has settled down on his bedroll. He's always been a light sleeper, something which the dead land around him only exacerbates. He watches it through eyes barely held open.

When it first started following him Kurogane didn't give it much thought. He picked it up somewhere at the point where a thriving northern forest turned into dead trees and dead earth, though it took him a while to be sure. It's barely corporeal, little more than the shadows around it. It creeps along on four elongated limbs with a hunched back and head held low. Kurogane doesn't think it's a threat, but he also doesn't know how he would fight it. He runs the fingers of his right hand over the laces of his left vambrace. It's a habitual movement.

Hesitant footsteps are barely audible over the crackle of the fire. It's cautious. Kurogane wonders how long it's been alone. Maybe it's never seen a living human before. Once it gets close to the embers, it hesitates. Kurogane opens his eyes fully and stares. It lowers itself to the ground, tucking its limbs under its torso like a cat.

Kurogane sits up with careful, telegraphed movements. The shadow creature tenses, watching his hands. Kurogane isn't sure how he can tell that, since there's no face on that head — only wispy shadows flowing like seaweed.

"What do you want?" Kurogane is too tired to even pretend to have manners right now. It comes out as a growl, making the shadow flatten itself to the ground and whine. Well, it probably doesn't understand Nihongo, if it's even intelligent enough for speech at all.

A raspy whispering sound comes from the shadow. It has to strain to get even that much sound out. Barely audible over the crackling embers, it almost sounds like language, but not one Kurogane knows. He sighs in resignation. He's so far from Nihon, and he doesn't know what he expected.

"I can't understand you," he says, trying to gentle his tone a little through the annoyance. He points at himself and enunciates as best as he can. "Kurogane."

The creature perks up, sitting back on its haunches and gesturing to itself with one spindly forelimb. The appendage ends with five long digits, not quite in the right place to be fingers. It whispers one syllable as hard as it can.

"Fai?" Kurogane asks, pointing at it. It nods and points back. It tries to say "Kurogane", but it comes out as something closer to "Kurotchka". Kurogane decides they can have a pronunciation lesson later. "Okay, I'm going to sleep."

Fai tilts its head at him, but Kurogane just lies down and closes his eyes. "Sleep."

He hears a garbled whisper in reply. It's still a long time before he falls asleep.

"We're not the only country with this problem," Tomoyo-hime told the room. She sat on a raised dais in front of a large bronze scrying mirror laid flat on a low table. Around the table sat her most trusted magicians, priests, and warriors, while her elder sister sat beside her on the dais. "I've spoken across dreams with magicians from other countries, and they've all noticed the same thing."

She gestured to the mirror, and the surface lit up with a map of Nihon and the surrounding countries. The view drew further and further back until they could see both ends of the Silk Road. The map centered itself over the vast northern taiga forest on the mainland. Kurogane didn't know much about the area, but he'd heard that it was cold and miserable there.

"Something is blocking the gods' magic from reaching their lands. It starts out small, just a trickle siphoning off, but the amount draining off has grown in the past months. The same thing has happened to all the lands on this map, spreading like an infection." Tomoyo-hime betrayed nothing behind her calm exterior, but the other magicians and priests at the table looked nervous.

"Where is the infection coming from?" One asked, while another wanted to know where all that magic was going. Tomoyo-hime gestured to the mirror again, and a small point of light appeared in the middle of the vast forests.

"The center is here. Once, long ago, there was a kingdom called Valeria here, but most sources agree that all life within its borders disappeared overnight, when my grandfather was a young warrior." Tomoyo-hime folded her hands in her lap. "Most assumed that their god had abandoned them and taken all the magic from them at once."

"And now you think that it's related?" Kurogane asked, studying her face. She nodded.

"I'm sure of it. If there is any way to find out what is happening to keep Amaterasu's power from reaching us, the answers will be there."

There's something about how dark the tower in the distance is that makes it impossible to miss, even in the ever-present gloom of Valeria. If Kurogane were any good at poetry, he might try to describe it as eating the light around it, or representing the general sense of dread he felt in this cursed land, or any number of other ways to get across just how intensely creepy it is. Unfortunately, it's also his destination.

When Kurogane packs up camp that morning, Fai perks up from where it's curled into a ball and tries to help. Mostly, it just shovels ashy dirt over the embers to snuff them out. Kurogane isn't sure if there's even a point in preventing a wildfire, but there's no reason to get lazy about safety, so he just lets the thing have at it.

He slings his repacked bag onto his back and grimaces at how much lighter it's become since entering this dead land. He needs to pick up his pace if he wants to complete his task and leave before he runs out of food. There's nothing edible here.

Fai slinks over and whispers something, pointing towards the tower in the distance. Kurogane wonders if it's afraid.

"That's where I'm going." He starts walking. The thing is probably just gonna keep following him.

Fai suddenly scurries in front of him, keeping pace, and points with more vigor at the tower. When Kurogane nods, it lets out an excited flurry of whispers and nods back, sending the long tendrils of shadow on its head into motion. Kurogane raises an eyebrow. Is this some kind of trap?

Ultimately, he doesn't really have a choice but to press forward. He's constantly, painfully aware of his mission and the stakes involved. Looking around at the remains of a once-thriving forest, failure simply isn't an option he can consider. If Fai gets in his way, he'll do what he has to.

"It's not that the gods have abandoned us," Tomoyo-hime said, voice soft and eyes steely. "Something is consuming the magic before it can reach us, or it's eating the gods themselves. The end result will be the same, either way."

The tower looms in the slowly closing distance as Kurogane continues his journey. Fai continues to follow him, but now it's right by Kurogane's side instead of slinking along from a distance. In the evenings, it sits close to his side and stares into the fire.

Now that it no longer feels the need to hide, Kurogane can see more of the thing's personality. It's animated and it never shuts up. Its whispers have been getting louder. Kurogane still doesn't understand what it says, but they've taken to exchanging words when they can. Now Kurogane can tell it to pipe down, and when Fai ignores him he knows it's deliberate.

After so long of traveling alone in silence, he doesn't mind so much.

Fai never touches him, but it does everything short of that in an effort to get him to the tower faster. Kurogane wants to know why it's in such a hurry. He's never been a good conversationalist, so it surprises him how much he misses being able to communicate.

The moon has waxed to full and waned again and the tower is no longer so distant. It looms like a dark line of ink spilling from the clouds, diluting into the earth and staining everything. The only light comes from a small window at the very top that drips a quavering white glow onto the stones around it. It pulses like a human heartbeat.

Fai has changed, too. Its proportions are no longer so spindly and uncanny. Instead of slinking across the ground, it now trots along, occasionally even standing on two legs for a better look at the tower. It wobbled an alarming amount the first time Kurogane saw it do that, but by now it has little trouble standing and even walking a few steps. Kurogane wonders if it's trying to change itself to look more like him — the only other living being around. It's more solid as well. Before, Kurogane could look through Fai and see all the dead trees behind it, but now it's gone from a thin wash of ink on a sumi painting to the bold black of a calligraphy stroke.

By the time Fai tries to borrow Kurogane's writing brush, its hands are almost human.

Kurogane is by the fire, updating his logbook with the few details worth mentioning from the day. Fai has watched him do this plenty of times, and it's even taken to grinding the scant amount of ink he uses each night for him. Tonight, Fai holds his hand out and gestures for the brush and ink. Kurogane pauses his writing.

"You want this?" He gestures with the brush.

Fai has picked up on enough Nihongo words to understand short sentences like this, so it nods and holds its hands out with a heavily accented murmur of "please". Its voice has grown stronger as its body has changed, and it has to strain less for Kurogane to hear it.

Kurogane sighs, nods, and holds up one finger. He needs to finish writing before he loses his train of thought. He blots the wet ink, closes the book, and holds it and the brush out. Fai wiggles in excitement. Their hands brush, and Kurogane finds out why it never touches him.

Fai's fingertips burn like hot metal against the back of his left hand. He pulls back with a yell of pain at the same time that a pulse of violet light erupts from under his vambrace and pushes Fai's hand away. It yelps, drops the logbook, and raises the digits to its shadowy face. It looks like a little kid sucking on a cut.

"What the fuck was that?" Kurogane yells, standing and shaking out his hand. There are three small burns in the shape of fingertips across the back of it now.

Fai cowers, mumbling "prosti, prosti, prosti,"¹ around its fingers. Kurogane is pretty sure that's an apology. He wants to keep yelling. It would feel good, to take out all his frustrations on this creature. He's so sick of being here in this wasteland, away from home and all the people he's ever known. He misses colors — blue sky, green leaves, rich brown soil. The absolute unfairness of the situation makes him want to take out his sword and start hacking at anything around, just to release everything he's been shoving down within himself for the sake of his mission. A mission he didn't ask for.

He stands and throws the writing brush and logbook on the ground. Fai scrambles back, curled in on itself and watching him like a scolded child. With a growl, Kurogane stalks away from the campsite.

Kurogane followed Tomoyo-hime into her study and waited until she'd closed the door and set up a privacy spell to start yelling.

"What do you mean, you're sending me?" He shouted before she'd even turned to face him. "I don't know a gods damned thing about magic!"

"Kurogane…" She sounds tired, but she often sounds like that when he argues with her.

"There's gotta be someone else who knows what to look for. I'm not going."

"Kurogane, you have to go. There's no one else I can send." Tomoyo-hime had her fingers pressed to the crease between her eyebrows.

"Bullshit! You have plenty of warriors and plenty of mages who could make the journey!"

"And you're the best I have."

"How do you expect me to protect you if I'm halfway across the continent!?"

"Protect me from what, Kurogane!?" It was the closest she'd ever come to losing her temper in all the time he'd known her. Her eyes were red from the effort of trying not to cry, and the sight made Kurogane shut his mouth. She threw her hands up at him. "Do you think it will matter whether you catch another hundred assassins, if all of Nihon is going to die in the next few decades? Kurogane, our crops are already beginning to struggle. We don't have the resources to send multiple people, and we don't have the time to train anyone else to survive this mission long enough to find answers!"

Kurogane swallowed. She was always so collected. He sometimes forgot how young she was, how much weight was on her shoulders.

"How can you be certain I'd succeed? I don't even know what to look for."

Tomoyo-hime's shoulders loosened. He hadn't agreed yet, but he was willing to listen now. "I can't be certain, but I'll teach you as much as I can. You're the only one I can foresee having even a chance at success."

Kurogane ran a thumb over Ginryū's hilt. That was a lot of faith to put into one person.

 After an hour or so of letting his frustration out on some dead trees, Kurogane brings the resulting firewood back to camp and dumps it a short distance from the fire pit. Fai looks up from where it's scribbling in the logbook and freezes. Kurogane forces his posture to relax. He's too tired to hold onto his anger at Tomoyo-hime, let alone at this creature. There are three small patches of dead skin on the back of his non-dominant hand now, which is less of an injury than he'd get from a normal day of sparring.

"Sorry. I'm not angry at you." Saying the words out loud is something he has absolutely no practice with, but the partial language barrier somehow makes it easier. He sits down on his bedroll and starts picking splinters out of his knuckles. 

"Kurotchka?"

Kurogane looks up and sees Fai crouched in front of him, holding out the logbook to him. The brush and inkstone are clean and sitting on top of his pack. For some ungodly reason, Fai is holding the logbook with the back cover open and drawings on the very last page. There's some writing that he has no hope of understanding, which looks distressingly like it's written horizontally left to right. What the hell kind of language is this?

Curiosity wins, and Kurogane gently takes the book back. He and Fai are both careful not to touch. The first drawing is of two small boys.

"Yūi. Fai." Fai points first at one boy, then the other. Kurogane looks up, then points between the drawing and the creature in front of him. Fai nods. Kurogane stares at him. Fai gestures for him to keep looking at the book, so he turns his attention back to the pages. Fai is surprisingly skilled at drawing.

A tall man has the boys by their arms. They stand at the base of the tower, then in the barred window at the top. The man stands over them with a knife in the middle of a large circular rug. No, Kurogane realizes it's not a rug. It's a magic circle, with just enough detail to get the point across without being an actual powered spell.

One of the boys lays in a dark pool at the base of the tower, face down and hair spread around him.

Kurogane has trouble deciphering what the next drawing is, but it looks like the man is pulling something out of the sky and into his mouth. The remaining boy is screaming, with shadows crawling up his body. He has the ritual knife in his hand.

The boy stabs the man in the back, and then there's a drawing of the tower with darkness spilling out into the land. Even Kurogane knew that interrupting such a powerful ritual would cause unthinkable backlash. Enough, perhaps, to wipe out an entire country.

Fai is sitting cross-legged in front of Kurogane, trying to give Kurogane the answers he's searched for this whole time. If this is what caused all life and magic in Valeria to vanish, then Fai has been trapped here, alone, for decades. No wonder it — he — had latched onto Kurogane.

Flipping back to the first drawing, Kurogane looked between the boys on the page and the shadowy being in front of him.

"King kill him," Fai says in Nihongo, brushing a finger over one of the boys. "King kill god. King kill Valeria." He tilts his face up at Kurogane, who sees resolve in every bit of his body language. "Fai kill king."

Kurogane nods and places a hand on Ginryū. He still feels out of his depth, but now nothing can keep him from seeing this through.

"I will help."

It took Tomoyo-hime and her mages months to gather all the supplies and cast all of the enchantments on them that Kurogane would need for his journey. On the final day before his departure, she presented him with an enchanted pack that could hold enough food and water for months. Inside, it also held a bedroll that would keep him dry and warm in any weather and a book filled with blank pages which the elements couldn't touch.

"I know you're a man of few words, Kurogane, but please try to remember to write down anything you come across in here. We have no way of knowing what the solution to this catastrophe will be."

Kurogane promised to write down what he could.

"All of our prayers go with you," Tomoyo-hime said. She took his hand and pressed a small object into the scar she'd left on his palm when they'd met. When she pulled away, he held up the small omamori ². It nearly glowed with the amount of power it held. "You must keep that on you and never remove it."

Kurogane tied it around his wrist and put his vambrace over it, lacing it snugly. "What does it do?"

"It will keep you under Amaterasu's protection, even in a land where all magic and life drains away. Nothing can steal yours while this shields you."

That night, he swore on his true name to complete his mission, no matter what. The next morning, Tomoyo-hime saw him off with a powerful blessing and a teary smile.

The tower looms above them, closer than Shirasagi keep stands to its main gate. Kurogane stands next to Fai, staring between the erstwhile king before him, and the large pool of stagnant blood and the small, broken body at the man's feet. Madness glints in the man's eyes as shadows whip around him. A pulsing thread of light runs from his hand to the single window at the top.

Fai is shaking. He looks almost human now, with only a few shadows clinging to him, and by this point Kurogane is pretty sure that it's the proximity to the ritual site that dictates how strong he is. He just hopes Fai is strong enough for this.

The king looks at Kurogane briefly before turning back to Fai. He says something in Valerian, to which Fai snaps a short reply and steps in front of Kurogane. With a humorless laugh, the king waves a glowing finger and the air around Kurogane shudders. He grips Ginryū's hilt tighter. The sword is ready to draw.

"Nephew, were you hoping your friend would remain ignorant to your shame if you never let him understand you?"

Fai's jaw clenches. "You are no family of mine."

"Of course not," The king says. "No family should have the curse of twins born to them. By ridding myself of you two, I was only correcting the error our god made."

"By trying to take their place?" Fai points an accusing finger at the man. "The entire country is dead because of you!"

The king steps forward and then he has Fai by the throat. Kurogane sidesteps and swings Ginryū at his back, but a crackling shield of magic flares and knocks him away. He bounces, rolls, and lands on his front, still clutching Ginryū.

"Kurogane!" Fai calls, struggling in the king's grip.

"Sure, now you can say my name," he grumbles, hauling himself to his feet and searching his brain for a plan of attack.

"You interrupted the ritual! You released all that power before I could complete it. If you had just died with your brother, none of this would have happened!" The king squeezes Fai's throat harder as manic laughter crawls out of his chest. "The blood of Valeria is on your hands, Yūi!"

Fai's flailing hand catches on the thread of magic and yanks. The filament splits into two and Fai wraps his around his wrist, then punches the king in the face. The old man drops Fai and staggers back.

"And what of this?" Fai demands, using the magic as a whip to strike the king in the face. "Stealing the magic from other gods and other countries, just to maintain this miserable excuse for existence?" He follows his attack up with a conjured volley of ice spikes. They skewer the king, but otherwise have little effect. The king just keeps laughing.

"You had to come back eventually, you little wretch. I knew you couldn't leave your brother's corpse forever." He walks over to the small, broken body. "I need this power to finish what I started, and then Valeria will finally have the god she needed."

He raises his hand and pulls a broadsword from thin air. His swing is aimed to remove the corpse's head. Fai screams and readies a spell, but Ginryū catches the king's blade first.

"You know nothing of true power," Kurogane growls, "and you are not a god."

"Perhaps not, and yet you cannot stop me with only your mortal sword and mortal life force." He shoves his sword forward, forcing Kurogane to duck and jump backward to escape what he's sure would be another corrosive touch. The king turns his attention back to Fai.

"Kurogane, get out of here!" Fai yells, throwing up a shield spell and another ice barrage in quick succession. The king responds in kind, but Kurogane can tell that Fai has stolen enough power from him to even out their abilities. It's a stalemate, and Kurogane has no idea if Fai can break it.

"You moron! What happens to you, then?" He yells back, circling around and grabbing the body before anything else can happen to it. Fai is silent while the king's laughter climbs in pitch.

"I just need to break his connection! He can't keep eating the gods' power with no conduit!"

"You don't have the strength to defeat me, and the only other person here is useless against me." The king has a gaping hole in his back where the ritual knife entered, dripping viscous black ichor onto the ground below. Kurogane nods to himself. Only one chance to get this right.

Fai has summoned knives of ice and is holding off the king and his sword, dancing just out of reach. The king gets sloppy in his growing frustration, swinging wilder and sending spells all around. Kurogane drops Ginryū with a murmured apology, sets the body back down next to it, and brings his left hand up to meet his teeth. The laces of his vambrace snap as he tugs. "Fai, get down, now!"

The omamori flies true as he throws it. As soon as it leaves his hand, a wave of weakness comes over him. The charm hits the old king deep in the gash on his back before exploding in a brilliant flash of violet light. Kurogane falls to his knees, then his hands, and finally keels over beside Fai's brother. He pulls the body into his arms to protect it from the tsunami of unrestrained magic just as it washes over them.

When Kurogane was fourteen, he lost everything. Suwa became overrun with monsters as their god, Ginryū, lost control of their power. The grief of losing their favorite priestess to sudden illness was too much for them to bear. Kurogane remembers taking his father's sword from his severed hand, and then he remembers waking up surrounded by corpses, pinned to a rock by an arrow of light.

"Amaterasu has taken you under her protection," Tomoyo-hime told him as she wiped the blood from his face. "There will always be a god who will love you, even if your first one has gone."

A soft blue glow lights up the mirror on the low table in Tomoyo's chambers, and she scrambles over from where she's been stowing the day's jewelry and hair ornaments in her jewelry box. She doesn't even bother to lock it. A thick book appears atop the mirror moments later. A book she recognizes.

She's been on edge all day, certain that she felt something change, but unable to pinpoint what. She murmurs a quick prayer for Kurogane's safety, then picks up his logbook.

She can hear his gruff voice through his words on the pages and utilitarian calligraphy. It surprises her how much he's written over his journey. There are weeks at a time where each day's entry is a simple "Nothing happened", but even that is so like him that she laughs and cries a little bit after two straight weeks of that.

The final entry is longer, and addressed directly to her.

Tomoyo-hime,

I'm going to be gone from Nihon for a while longer. Fai is new to this whole godhood thing, and it's going to be a while until he can fully bring life back to Valeria. He's been tied to this land for so long, he doesn't know if he can leave anymore, and I can't leave without him.

I apologize for destroying the omamori you gave me, but it let Fai take control long enough to win, so I'm not actually that sorry. I'm sure he'll write a big long tale in here, so I'll spare you the details.

I'm safe, and so are the gods. I will always be grateful to you and Amaterasu for what you've done for me, but there's another god protecting me now.

Your loyal servant,

Yōō 

On the next page, there is indeed a lengthy explanation in a different hand — rather, in a different language, enchanted to allow her to read it. In it, Fai introduces himself and explains all the details Kurogane didn't bother to include. The description of the ritual his uncle performed, while vague, is enough to make her queasy and requires her to set down the book and breathe. His assurances that he's destroyed any record of how it was performed make her feel better. If Kurogane trusts him, she will as well.

I know it wasn't for my benefit, but I am forever in your debt for sending Kurotchka here. I could never have succeeded without him, and I'm not sure how many more years of waiting I had left in me. Thanks to him, my brother can finally rest, and new flowers can bloom on his grave. I feel alive for the first time in decades.

Anything you should ask of me, if it's in my power, I will grant you. All I ask is that you allow Kurotchka to remain by my side for a while longer. I swear to protect him and keep him, as any god would be honored to do.

With endless gratitude,

Fai, god of Valeria.