Save Me From The Monsters (TomoeXReader) • Completed •

The Smoking Shrine

Dedicated to: Buttonsforaeye for all the constructive comments ❤️❤️❤️

Chapter 19: The Smoking Shrine

Word count:1560

I wake: and I breath in ash, my lungs wrenching upon inhaling the fire in the air. I snap my eyes shut in response to the burning that meets them when they attempt to open. Cold tears fall down the sides of my burning face as I heave on the hard ground. A sweat breaks out on my forehead and through the pain I am vaguely aware that I am either alive, or in the 7th circle of hell.

The pain forces me back to consciousness every time the darkness attempts to take me, yet it fails to give my muscles the motivation to move, and so I lie there, coughing and crying until the acrid smell leaves the air and I can open my eyes without difficulty

My whole body is stiff, and I find it extremely difficult to even move my head, yet I manage, gasping in horror to see Tomoe at my side, his head resting in a pool of crimson blood.

A scream leaves my throat at the sigh of his eyes, the blood around his sockets and nose beginning to crust over the obvious path of a sharp blade.

This is my fault.

The sobs leave my body uncontrollably, and I cry like that until the darkness takes me again as the numbness leaves my body and the real pain reaches me.

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I wake again, but this time with a start. My back leans against something cool. And a soft hand touches my face. My eyes gaze into golden ones, and although I should be afraid, a calm washes over me.

"Ōkuninushi, that is my name" the god speaks with a soothing voice. "I am the god of medicine." I try to speak but needles shoot down my throat in the place of words. Ōkuni chuckles.

"Hush child, there will be plenty of time for questions once you are rested." He runs a hand over my forehead, and within an instant I am once again prisoner to my dreams, only now, my dreams hold Ōkuni, and in them he gives me the answers to the questions I had not spoken.

Yes, Tomoe and I are both alive, and will survive to fight another day.

Yuzu brought dark magic to the Mikage shrine, but he had first planted it in my heart. Love is the only cure for a soul cursed with dark magic, as cliche as it sounds. Love is the most powerful magic, and Tomoe, still battling with his own heart, is having a hard time defeating the magic that took his eyes.

My sins are forgiven because they were committed with pure intentions, and it is for that reason that the  dark magic had not taken my soul the way it had my brother.

Yuzu gained his immortality from a fallen god, and therefore was servant to that banished being, doing such favors and crimes for the fallen god until it became his own will do so, and all Love was banished from his body.

Divine punishment has been following Yuzu around since his first favor to the fallen god, burning his village. Yuzu has shielded himself with the assistance of many fallen gods has made his body invulnerable to the magic that we living gods posses, and so his divine punishment has been delayed as they scramble to find the solution.

Mikage is currently devoting his life to researching this dark magic, but no one ever suspected that it would take this long.

We must find him, we must take a journey across the Japanese alps to find our god and his research, and with it I must kill Yuzu.