Fox and Sparrow by Ginger Breo

Chapter 2

Of Nijo-jo Castle

In the year 2 AH (Ato Higeki, or After the Event), Japan slowly started to drag itself towards recovery. People reclaimed the cities. Recultivated the land. Banded together for safety, for help, for hope again. It was in this weakened world that an opportunity was spied, was grasped, and people gaining ground in a ravaged world saw their desperate lives shatter once more.

The first raids came from the mountains, and without the speed of technology to aid the telling, without phones and computers and television, the stories spread slowly and at first telling weren't believed. Analog cameras and homemade darkrooms produced grainy images of horror. Word-of-mouth spread from the northeast, but when it reached the cities people dismissed the accounts as mad, outlying ramblings from mad, outlying people. Creatures with the bodies of snakes and the heads of women, animated skeletons, giant dogs the size of bears with razor sharp teeth. And even stranger things—things you had to see to believe—just before they started to eat you. Faery tales leapt off the page in horrific ways. Hell had cracked open and spilled forth yokai, and within weeks it was fight or be killed. The starving and the sick and the terrified took up arms. There was no third option; there were no sidelines.

After five years of intense and bloody war, of citizen rebellions and civilian militias and homemade bombs, there was hardly anything left. There was no fuel. Bullets expended, guns lost their purpose. The safe zones were forts surrounded by razor wire, more like refugee camps than havens. People still starved. They fought each other over bread, over blankets—and the yokai picked off the survivors. After five demoralizing years, there was no hope left. Emperor Miramoto, the last of his line and facing the extinction of all life on the islands, had long since despaired of ever reaching anyone else in the world who would or could come to their aid. Radios had been silent for nearly 2,000 days, without even the crackle of static. The sky was empty of planes. The technologies of his earlier years were something he only dimly remembered, like a dream someone else had once had. No help was coming; Japan might as well have been the last bastion of humanity on planet Earth. With no other options and facing enormous pressures from his advisors, he surrendered to the chief of the yokai. Tenzu, a terrible thing made of bones and teeth, gave these terms to the Emperor: what was left of humanity could live if they promised never to raise arms against yokai. The temples belonged to the yokai, every temple in Japan. Any human foolish enough to live near the mountains was food. And Tenzu himself could have anyone he wanted, at any time, for any purpose. The Emperor agreed; indeed, there was no ground for argument when the alternative was genocide. The first sacrifice to the yokai chief was Miramoto's daughter. Tenzu sealed his accord with humans by sending the Emperor her shin bone, the end sharpened into a point that the ōdokuro had used to pick her gristle out of his teeth.

Rebellions rose in time. They always rose, given enough hunger or a cold enough winter. There would be a few years of uneasy peace, and then some human would take it in his or her head to stand up, to fight, to refuse to bow to the yokai. Each rebellion was surgically destroyed. The heads of the rebels were piked around the thunder gate at Tenzu's home, Sensoji Temple in Tokyo, strips of flesh blowing in the wind, a perch for carrion birds and even more terrible things to feast on. It was ten years of this unsettled and terrible period before a man appeared who was different from the other rebels.

He was known only as Harada. He was one man. He was a hundred men. He was a woman. He was tall, short, had long dark hair, was clean-shaven, and had a beard. He was bald. He was powerfully built, with muscles that rippled over his arms and chest. He was thin and wiry, like a scarecrow come to life. He was half yokai, his mother raped by a hanadaka-tengu. He had neko ears, sharp teeth. He was a samurai, a ninja, an action hero. He was legend. He raided yokai nests and single-handedly broke them. He liberated towns huddled in the dark, terrified of their monster overlords. Bands of yokai started to go from encampment to encampment, town to town, offering food, safety, security from attack if any would give up the human known as Harada. No one would comply. Tenzu offered huge bounty to any who would bring him to Tokyo. There were no takers. In a starving, seething populace that had seemed bent on destroying itself within a generation, the yokai had unwittingly stumbled on the one thing the humans agreed on. They would stab each other over bread, but they would not give up their hero. And in Harada's wake, other changes took shape.