13 Deadly Deals

Departure 4: Unlucky

     Mafuyu was a ferocious, soul-eating monster.

     And his power did not so much lie in the bite of his fangs or the temper of his claws, but rather the emotional pull of his words. So the irony wasn't lost on him when his tactfully honed linguistic skills boiled every event in the past twenty-four hours down to a single word:

     Unlucky.

     And even that couldn't do his situation justice. Unlucky was smudging his favorite book with leftover plum sauce. Unlucky was tracking mud over his mistress's favorite kimono. Unlucky was the unmentionable thing she transfigured him into after discovering said kimono.

     It was not unshakable pain pulsing through Mafuyu's nerves like fire. It was not a contradictory cold darkness that scattered his thoughts into a million jigsaw pieces. And it certainly wasn't a throbbing vertigo that gripped him when he tried to make sense of what happened.

     Was this death? Was this icy-hot feeling what happened when souls were riven from their bodies? No...no, he didn't have one of those. Monsters like him probably just faded into the nothingness. They didn't try to piece back the memories of flames and darkness overpowering the entire room; didn't recall lashing out like a beast at the pompous king before them; or remember the rabbit Handmaiden taking the brunt of his uncontrollable hunger as his flames engulfed them—

     "Tsuyuki!"

     Mafuyu shot to his feet—and instantly regretted it. His legs noodled, uselessly slamming the fox back against something cold and hard. The scents around him were wrong. The water did not carry the normal tinge of sweetness; the soil around him was too strong, enough to gag him through the dry heaves. The air felt heavy, smelled like nothing...like there was no magic in it at all. Mafuyu's eyes snapped open, eager to figure out where in Yurei he was—

     Monster, I purge you from my world...

     Mafuyu's ears flickered, his breaths ragged, his eyes wide.

     I cast you into a magicless world. A place from where you cannot return...

     The kitsune gasped at the dilapidated structures surrounding him. Dark, ruined roads; broken buildings of brick and mortar; vegetation that grew strange, and wild, and unfamiliar. Broken, and wrong, and stray from the pristine perfection of the Sapphire City.

     And now, irreversibly distanced from whatever precious thing that brought you here.

     Mafuyu was not in Yurei. Not anymore. Not ever again...

     "Fuck!"

     Mafuyu punched the wall. Hard enough to only realize the pinpricks of blood after. Enough to blink at the sudden realization. Was this anger? Had that feeling not fled him in his final moments as a yokai? The confusion was only answered by the dead stillness surrounding him. And the blaring question rattling his thoughts as he nursed his sore knuckles like a wounded beast.

     What was he supposed to do now? What could he do now? The question draped over his shoulders like lead. Because it had no genuine answer. Just a reality so dark and heavy that he craved distraction. On habit, the fox reached for his engagement ring around his neck—

     Mafuyu's engagement ring was missing.

     A jolt of something fierce threw the fox up to his feet. A difficult task with the ground being an uneven patchwork of rubble and bricks. He could only guess it came from the massive hole in the ceiling structured above him. A hole that reached high not to the light of day, but a more impossible darkness. The land was strange indeed. But Mafuyu did the only thing he could right now: move forward.