Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It never screams, even if it is just a body with a dark mouth after it stopped being girl, or so they say. It is hard to decipher what exactly it is, now that Uraume is peering into the lacquered box, pursed lips too calm for someone young, hands so pale they have the same bone white color as the cracked face with the closed eyes drawn in coal circles. It looks almost like a woman. It looks a lot more like broken statues and corpses in a pit.

People are cowards and idiots. But at least sometimes, they bring useful gifts with wildly wrong stories that breathe behind them in hushed whispers. They can’t possibly be true anyway, at least not all of them. 

Most say the thing was a woman before it was a mouth that spits death, fermenting cursed energy in her stomach, a dead vessel that returns again and again. Some half left test, an object discarded. They say her cursed technique was nothing, but not in the useless way, just in the way that is as malleable as easy to break under it. Bone marrow like wax, skin like scripture paper. She looks almost like a present in the way she is wrapped, and maybe someone once thought that she was.

Kenjaku clapped his hands when he first saw her, Tengen lingered in thought. But she failed them all without a doubt, an ill present in her dirty robes, when every attempt to fill her leaked out, turned sour and rotten and broken in foul failure. 

She was not made to hold something and nurture it, not even to hold something and keep it. She was made to hold everything . 

That was the problem: A cup that overflows on its own is not made for drinking. 

"She moved," a priest says behind them after dropping the box, and the air crackles around them in some absence of any movement. Absolute hollow stillness dressed in a bleached yellow and muted reds, oranges that were other colors long ago. But there is something alright. 

"No," Uraume corrects. One finger pokes inside the box, and there it is, that single twitch, like a newborn animal struggling to free itself from the placenta. Their hand grips one of the broken seals stuck to its head, words faded in a splotch of wet ink, inspect it, then let it flutter to the ground. It is either useless or faded because of the thing’s potency. Like some cursed doll, made from flesh.

"It moved."

“I thought they said she wouldn’t move. Not until the ink. Not until the attempt to make her a vessel.”

Inside the box, the thing twitches again, stretching one broken hand, one finger swollen, another missing a nail, blackened tips like the arms of a curse, ready to snap up and devour them. But it never does. It never even touches them, even if they are ready to fight if it tries.  

Even with a mouth full of blackened teeth to keep the dead in, sharp canines bared for the slightest of moments, there is no voice coming from the thing in the box.

Its lips were stitched shut only to rip, broken and open, bleeding tar and misery over clothes that are bleached and rotten, sunken into its skin, broken words cracked all over it now. The only sound it makes is a low, high whistle, like wind moving through bones.

“Do you make a good vessel?” Uraume asks, doubting that. Especially if other people have tried and failed, and this is an unclean, unfinished thing. 

It has eyes the color of the forest. Not the nice, sunshine-ridden canvas of a glade, but the green of a lichen growing over the dead in the dark of winter.

It is harmless in its stillness, in the confused, uncaring darkness it slumbers in. 

It rests in the pit of the house that it was put in, unmoving, unyielding.

Uraume does not step back but instead leans in further, both arms in the casket, watching the limbs of the things unfurl ever so slowly, with no real harm.

No reason to be scared of a tool, since it is but a hollow thing to fill to the brim like buckets on a well, or stomachs in a feast. 

The priest behind them breathes sharply, readying words or weapons as the creature lifts one more finger. Uraume only looks, neither with fear nor even with a tinge of curiosity, just with the exhausted, studious look of someone who has seen a thousand wrong things since they were born and knows how to name none of them.

The thing blinks, not the full motion of a human eye, but the twitch of something that has never had eyelids before and is trying to mimic what it's seen in the half lights of torches and candles. Maggots that roll together when touched, or dead deer with eyes like wet lacquer bowls, the same color as the box they tried to seal it in.

They blink back. It mimics the gesture again.

Then again, ever so slowly.

“It’s trying to learn to blink, ”Uraume says, their voice nearly bored, but quiet enough to almost hide it. “Do you think it knows how to bite? It doesn’t talk, does it?”

“No words, as far as I heard. She only bites when she’s hungry, they say. So I suppose you have to feed her well. Her mouth better stays shut.”

“I’m sure you eat human,” they say, as if that means anything. The thing stares in unmoving interest, as if blinking was too much of a forceful ordeal already. “You look like you do.”

The dead eyes in the pale white follow them as they leave.

Dust collects over it and its clothes when it isn’t maintained well, and they did not close the box. Moths get stuck in its sleeves and hair. They need to be plucked out, squished between their fingers. They turn to brown sticky paste, cracking wings

. 

And even after the rituals, no one ever cleans up, except for Uraume, and that is just another menial duty to add. At least it is quiet, and the thing in the box never tries to flee. It rarely does anything but move either way. It is easy to determine when it needs a good cleaning. The prayers and words and the death in the room stop, and the smell stays. Just like any other menial task, it carries the scent of death, rot, the sweet lingering, and the copper-pasted taste of old blood.

The box is closed now, but the ink bleeds through the cracks, staining the wooden floorboards with dark pools. It shouldn't bleed out the ink. The seals should hold, but then, so many things should have when it comes to this creature. It shouldn’t survive, it shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t fail at what it was made for. Unclean, useless piece of meat. But then, it comes back, and it always fills the space with the same brimming shift of energy that is almost refreshing. It feels like splinters of all the ones that forced their way inside the hollow ribcage under the layers of clothes. All the names that are inked and broken into the body, and all the cursed energy that boils in it. There is a residue of something warm, the smallest inferno in a body, not quite like their master, but close enough, the more they force it down its body. 

Uraume sometimes wonders if this is what it means to be too malleable . This creature carries everything, every remnant of energy pressed into it, but nothing takes a hold in the hollow.

This is a body that bends, cracks, and starves until it doesn't resemble one. 

This is a technique that doesn’t reject anything, and therefore becomes nothing. 

Not a woman. Not a curse. Not even a failure. Just a hole. A purpose-shaped carcass that they have to maintain and clean.

They step through a puddle, hop over the other, and the seam of the white kimono jacket drips down in the tarpit. It bubbles and eats away at the fabric, black consuming white in ringlets and clouds of stains.

The lock clicks open, and the box exhales in something that is almost a gasp, but far less human, a puff of a lungless object as it gapes open and the body almost tumbles out.

Uraume doesn’t flinch when the dried-out, dead weight buries them as it slinks forward. The long dried tips of dead hair are glued together by dead bugs and ash from incense. Now they caress the side of their face, and for a second, the arms in the long sleeves almost hug them, sinews snapping as the torso rests against their smaller form.

"You rot slower than most," they say, not expecting an answer. The thing never talks back, but sometimes, they think at least that makes a good listener, and so they tell it things. Nothing important, really, but just the most nonsensical conversational bits caught in the day. “Not that it will aid you in any shape.”

A giant dead moth hangs in ash and black tipped ink over the thing’s face, cracked white paint a field under blood red lips, as tightly shut as always.

The thing’s mouth opens just a little when they pluck it off, not enough to see its teeth fully, as another puff of something whistling, aching snakes out of its body. It learns the echoes of things. That is why it slowly moves again whenever they are near each other. No one else is this near, except for carving into it. Uraume swipes the moth away, and their fingers come back stained in caked dry powder, a translucent thing. There is pale skin inked in words and fused with silk under the powder, where they left a trace with their own skin.  

“You don’t remember your name, do you?”

No response. But the lichen eyes blink once.

“If you ever had one,” they continue, and sound more spiteful than they want to.  “No one cared to write it down. You were just some lowlife, and no one ever missed you.” 

The only answer is another sigh from the whistling chest of this ritual turned corpse.

“You are only useful if you fulfill your purpose.”

Uraume cleans a piece of prayer from its neck. It peels away with a wet, delicate snap, the sound of breaking bones and gutted stomachs. Beneath it, the flesh is raw, and there are words carved into it, black small tides of poetry and lies, meant to complete the creature. 

“I know you listen,” Uraume decides to say, even if it is a fruitless effort. Sometimes it just means that one has to try, they suppose. “I know you try to speak.”

Their hand hovers near the red mouth. The creature watches it.

“I’ll teach you something simple if you promise not to scream.”

Another green blink. 

They draw a single wave of lines into the dust beneath their feet. Maybe they should start with counting. But that isn’t the thing that this creature needs to learn to be anything other than a repugnant, stale, corroded shrine stone. 

Granted, later, this will be the thing that makes a temple a ruin, and the only word that isn’t inscribed in her body. To teach a thing to talk that only breathes death, and reach out an arm to hold it when it is just the incarnation of a million splinters. 

“It’s easy. Say: Yes. You know what that means. Yes. And no.” Another drawing, and this time, Uraume’s finger dips into the bloody abyss of ink and draws it in a smear. Even then, it looks immaculate, and that’s just because they are a good student.

The thing struggles to follow the line on the dirty floorboards. It is clearly not a good student.

It still struggles to move, breathe, or utter a single word when Uraume has mopped up the pools of black and is long gone. The next time they come back, the words in ink and dust are smears long gone, and they aren’t sure whose doing it is. But the woman made corpse is growing hungry, that much is sure at least, in the way that the blackened gums and teeth flare and bare, a void inside a mouth, ready to devour, and others avoid entering the room with the box. 

It does eat human. 

At least bits and scraps leftover. 

Feeding it is like forcing a hand down into the gullet of a beast, since this thing doesn’t chew, and never swallows. Their hand is strong enough to pry the lips open long enough to slip inside, and the cavity is wet with the musty, gone bad scent of burnt reminders of smell, before they push the scraps down the things throat enough to make it gag, and then the fat and bones finally flinch through the thin throat into the inside of its stomach. 

For a second, their fingers get caught on the edge of a tooth, dark molar on knuckles as they press back, and they half expect it to snap them closed and bite off all their fingers. Or for the miasma of cursed energy in the body of this one creature to burn away all of what they are.

It never does. It only stares, swallows one more time, and then slowly whistles a single word.

“No.”

No, it doesn’t bite when it isn’t hungry. No, it won’t bite Uraume. Who knows? It is just another cryptic wording slathered to the picture of a once-girl turned into something unrecognizable. Just like the wet ink that it cries over the mats.

“I am never going to feed you this way again,” they spit out, heart beating in their ears. “You'd better start feeding yourself. I care for you because I have to.”

“Yes,” it breathes, and then the lichen eyes close, all the while something under the garments bubbles and throws itself in a different shape, as if the meat gets it a little fuller, a little less hollow. Perhaps it is the words uttered in consciousness as well. Perhaps it is none of it. 

“Good,” Uraume says, cleaning their hand with force. “You know what that means? That you are not a nuisance.”

The answer is an unhinged smile, if anything like it ever comes close to whatever forms under the pews and arrows of the wrinkled lines. 

It doesn’t speak for months. But it listens oh so well. Sometimes, it tilts its head, tries to smile, and then does its strange half-blink, watching people that come and go, but mostly Uraume.

At least it learns to feed itself when Uraume leaves a trail of splatters and scraps around the room. It gets fuller and stronger with that, even if every death in the box is more gruesome than before, a cursed failure in this room, soon to be forgotten or finally burned if anyone is merciful.

Sometimes they leave words behind. They never know if that thing can read them anymore, since it doesn’t even remember what words are, but it feels right to do that, strangely. They are never long, never difficult. But they mean things for a creature in a box. And they are smeared and gone the next time they find it sitting in their space, lulled in some twitching nightmare to be entertained.

“You have outlived expectations,” they repeat, appraisal to the creature one day. They leave out the miscrediting parts as if this thing could understand insults. “At least I heard. Well. Good for you.” 

“Good,” it repeats, in a gurgle that almost takes the sense of the words away. Muffled and broken, like the way it eats. “Not a nuisance.”

“That’s right. Let us hope it stays that way.” 

“Us.” It points a blackened, moldy hand toward their white chest, then back to itself. The gesture is the most desperate it has ever looked, as if it struggles to finalize the concept, or perhaps to speak the words.  “Us?”

“You don’t have a name, and I will not give you one.”

“Name?”

It feels wrong to share a name with the nameless tool in the box. It still slips by, lik a thief in the night. “My name is Uraume.”

It hums, as if it has stuffed its mouth with food, before it rolls together lazily in its box, ready to die again.

Its ribcage stops standing out like a carcass, and the muscles on its arms return slowly, especially if left alone if even for a couple of days. They see the streams of the words shivering on the naked, strange skin when they try and wash debris with a basin and a cloth. It drips with the splatter of blood off their skin as they are scrubbing over the carvings. A few are names, and they were scratched away, until they are nothing but dark explosions under layers of a frozen body. 

For a second, Uraume almost thinks it is going to talk again when they scrub away the dirt and leave a mourning line of inscriptions fading off the inside of their arm. But it doesn’t. Instead, it grips the cloth and starts to scrub over its own face with so much force that it looks like it wants to take off all the paint and makeup, ripping at scars and silently waning motives edged into brows. The only change in its face is the annoyance of a cat trying to throw off a human hand, so they let it, as long as they don’t open their mouth too long.

For a second, under the colorless mask, something alive presses through the cracks, something terribly aware of its state, something that doesn’t want to be alone, and doesn’t want to be helpless, and in that moment, and because that feeling can be horrid with no one to aim the path forward, they help, breaking apart a little more of the colorless smears turning to rivulets and white limestone tears.

The face underneath is as colorless, black lines over black lines, with the smallest hint of freckles. 

It only slowly lifts one arm and gently pats one side of their face, leaving a trail of dirty water behind. The basin crashes and falls, drenching the layers of musty, dirty robes in plumes of red and orange, before the air becomes a frigid threat. 

“You don’t get to touch me,” they hiss, pulling back, and suddenly the pupils in the moss eyes dilate as it reacts, nails clawing and ripping into wood right where they sit.

“You get to touch me,” it echoes, half a hiss in their own whistling voice, half Uraume’s.

“Do you think I want to?”

“Want to,” it mimics, and the drenched face smeared in the loss of lines is nothing but a dark mirror. It sounds like the voice of a child, dropped in a well and forgotten.  “Want to feed. Want to speak. Want to? Yes.”

Dirty water spills over the swollen floorboards. They are pregnant with the tense, constant assault of the different liquids bubbling over it, and it will never get any better. Now, they turns to frostbitten drips of ice under their soles clacking backward. 

“No. This was a mistake.”

“Mistake?” The head tilts in confusion. Then their mouth gapes open in a smile, and for the first time, they see all the dark, smeared teeth, drenched in bones and blood, holding everything inside her body. “No. No mistake.”

Disgust creeps up their spine. “Yes. Stop.”

“Stop,” it mimics, blackened hands under the endless sleeves wringing to grab them. “Stop.”

The stench is worse than anything else. The endless, murky scent of darkened signatures embedded in rotting meat.

“You are not supposed to want things,” Uraume says, voice cracking, ever so slightly. “You were not supposed to understand that . You were blemished the day you arrived in that box, but you could become something much purer and better. But you can’t want things.”

A pause, endlessly long in the shallow void of their muddled empty aura, then the creature tilts her head again, slow and wrong, as if her spine has to remember how to bend.

“I understand,” the unending thing in front of their eyes repeats, a vortex of something that shouldn’t understand. “Want. I want you.”

For the first time since the thing started to talk, they flinch back. Because that is its own words. 

“You can’t have me.” The anger and refusal come out shriller than planned. 

“Not to feed.” The thing tuts that almost, slinging its clothes loosely around its body.

This time, it is Uraume repeating words through gritted teeth. “You can’t have me.”

The anger is still in their system; the next time, they have to clean around and feed it. It unloads in one of the dogs hanging around the kitchen exit. A few are exceptionally daring, not waiting for scraps. One snaps at them when they pass.  

“You need to feed? Fine,” they mutter later.

The bundle screeches in their arms, winds its stubby legs in the white chokehold, cries, and foam stands right in front of the stray’s mouth.

“Bad dog,” Uraume decides to whisper, an insult not meant specifically for the dog, and the thing's mossy green eyes full of flowers follow their hands as they push the dog inside the room, kick it one more time for good measure, and slide the door shut with a heavy jut.

It takes one long, excruciatingly long yowl, then the crack of bones, the wet familiar sound of consuming, and when Uraume takes a long breath and opens the sliding door again, all that is left is one broken leg, fur colored red, and a massacre of blood splatters. 

The red fills her chin, her clothes, and every inch of the inked carvings, with hair shining crimson and orange and black like a fallen star. 

“Bad Dog,” she repeats, and it isn’t pointed at the leftovers of the meal. “Bad, bad dog, Uraume.”

Chapter Text

Something changes after the carcass of the dog gets devoured. It waits and smoulders in the depths with maws to snap shut when prey least expects it. Even the moldy air in the room shifts, in the ever true darkness snapping back and forth the ink pits like they are pieces of a starless void themselves. 

Sometimes screams are formless. They are hungerless. They are the ancient sheer force of being afraid of the things that lurk in the dark. They can be primal, recognizable only by the fact that they escape vocal cords. They come in curdles, in frozen fear, or the sheer flavor of begging.

This noise isn’t quite yet the sound of screams, but close. 

It drones, and it gains force like a hum thrumming through a ribcage with the strum of an instrument and the reverberating hit and holler of a drum. It shakes in the deepest membranes under tissue, the longer it stays, pressure at the base of a skull.

“It can feed itself,” they insist, trying to shirk that duty. Simply because the green eyes that follow them around are hungry after a while again, but the pressure in the back of their skull is not, a humming cord like an unsung song from a cut throat. 

And since no one wants to prove the theorem or disagree with Uraume, all that starts to happen is more small creatures tied together or thrown in, and with every animal sound, every vocal cord screaming, something in the moldy darkness retreats from the inner ruins of the unsanctified space, slightly more satisfied, but still jealously guarding. 

No one cleans her for weeks. The blood curdles on all her clothes until they are stiff and fuse to her skin, a red brown mass of stinking, festering boils forming a shell. 

No one removes the filth clotted in the bends of her too long, spindly limbs, spider legs clotted with varnish and coal returning to the state of a neglected thing in a box. 

No one picks the dead bits of feathers or fur from between her teeth, the entrails out of, or the ash from her hair. 

No one dares to see how her ribs vanish or reappear to be shaped again under the layer of putrid meat that encloses the ghosts of more powerful things, all that is eaten and half fermented in her body. It smells like wet copper and rancid ink, and it pulses in a pattern of tumors whenever Uraume has the misfortune to lay eyes on it.

Sometimes she doesn’t eat. Especially if she is left to her own devices for too long.

She lets the animals rot instead, until the room fills with the buzzing of flies. They land on her cheeks, lay eggs in her nose, turn the world in a foul, rancid, repugnant stagger of disease and death. That is the only time Uraume speaks to her again in that time, and she smiles her uncanny half-smile mask while she gets chastised and insulted. 

Some of the bigger flies try to crawl through her black barbed canines as she listens, and a sharp tongue sweeps them inside the void, where they die with a crunching soft protest and get swallowed. It doesn’t taste good, they can tell by the slight off-kilter grimace, but she is starting to become sentient enough for theatrics when no one forces her into her casket, and something in that is even more infuriating than her silence.

“You’re a waste,” they say, and the tiniest flicker of light cuts into the blackened room and illuminates her half grin when Uraume blocks the stench with a scratch of their sleeve over a nose. “You are a waste when you should have learned to contain things and stay quiet, but you are impure and useless.”

She doesn’t answer, and the silence whispers in her stead, like it knows something Uraume doesn’t. It is unsettling in the wrong way, and even more infuriating in the wrong way. And then there is the grin with the splintered warmth that escapes her.

For all the ways she is not Sukuna, since she is ugly, half-formed, festering, where he is flawless, there is that same splinter in the hollow of her cursed energy. It is unbecoming of her station, and all wrong.   

Uraume swallows the bile rising in their throat and refuses to speak his name aloud, but it hangs between them like old incense smoke.

He was never a thing to serve. He was the sun flaring to eat itself and not the black bog of a pond in an eclipse, mouths that open to be worshipped, not a mouth like this, belonging to a rotten, wretched thing that eats and stinks and doesn't show willfulness for anything beyond darkness.

The idea of even comparing their master to this dead thing is a sacrilege, and they press their mouth harder into their sleeve, watching her. She refuses speech where she tried it out before, now, simply out of spite, and at least that they share. If she doesn’t speak, at least, she doesn’t learn, and if she stops wanting, there is no more to forbid.  

Instead of words, the voice gurgles in the mockery of laughter, out of half-shut dark teeth, nostrils flaring in the drenched face. The white paint is completely washed out, for a brown mask of debris. It is a laughter that condemns the world in an act of holding court over it, and it is the noise of a creature that has never actually heard laughter before, stitching sounds together in a broken, wheezing chest. 

“I liked you better in the box,” they say.

“I liked you,” the voice repeats in an echo that mimics the dying animals and hushed horror of priests or servants. There is barely anything left from Uraume’s voice in it, as it mirrors them. Their elongated face still grins, then becomes an unnerved mask of annoyance, shaved eyebrows quirked, mouth pursed, and that is the facial grimace they share.

She gets no answer but the shake of a head, and Uraume leaves her in her own dirt to be cleaned by someone else. 

The servant, a girl, arrives with trembling fingers and the stiff politeness of someone who heard the humming from the hallway. For a moment, Uraume wonders if she’ll simply be eaten when she is stuck inside the room. The harsh, fast gesture reminds them of throwing the dog into the room. Everything plays out the same as before, a dull habit in a new skin.

“Just the surface,” the warning springs up, words that are just common sense, really, but humans are dumb, especially when they are afraid like little rabbits. “Don’t dig. Don’t touch the seals too long. Don’t look if you can help it.”

A whisper bleeds out behind the sliding doors when they wait and listen to the scratching, the water dripping, the quiet swelling.

At first, the sound is barely more than that. The hum beneath peeled away papers in the darkness. It speaks slowly, ever so softly. Then the formless scream takes a shape. 

It shakes the rafters and turns hearts into galloping broken wheel riding down a cliff.

The girl’s eyes are white, not rolled back, but blenched and boiled out of any color, and she claws at them, rips at them, never able to pull them out their sockets. 

The screaming has become a small rivulet of blood from an open mouth. A writhing, twitching piece of meat, a hymn of flesh,  rests between black ink seas parted by the layers of dirty clothes soaked in the leftover waters and brown dirt in it. Bit off her own tongue, and she isn’t dead yet, even if something in her is forever gone. Uraume uses one foot to roll the weeping body to the side, watches the horror, but there is nothing to be done. 

Black coal trails bubble in the exposed narrow gashes on the naked chest as she moves between the blood and leans over the girl. She doesn’t eat her. She could easily. But she takes something else from her now as she pushes her fingers into the white bleeding human face. The blackened nails and long claws easily carve, the makings of a hunter easily disposing of prey, and the eyeballs leak blood and yellow bile onto the sunken in, twitching face. 

They’re soft, small things, like deformed fruit hanging from cut-away nerves, bloodshot and colorless. Red and white. 

Like you, her face says, even if her mouth doesn’t, and she simply reaches out, with the hand that caresses the eyeballs like it is a silent vow.  An ending of a nerve has rolled around her fingers as if they are red strings, like some grotesque imitation of fate’s thread, before they tangle softly with Uraume’s hand, and become a noose on his thumb and knuckles. Her fingers are warm with the red hot, and then they disappear, after scooping the eyeballs ever so softly.

“Just the surface,” she whispers. “No names given. No names taken.”

Two burst fruits of eyes smear Uraume’s fingers as they coil around them, squeeze them until they are broken to bloody nerves and foul wet among the mess.  

Her hair ripples in wet strands down her neck before she leans forward to pick up her old, broken clothes, and there is the freshly shaped hole beneath the layer of old seals and carvings. 

The lines form two small notches right between her shoulder blades, a phrase that should be a word, but it escapes the meaning of it and turns it upside down to tumble away. It is not meant to be spoken in the way it runs and crawls over paper-thin, waxen skin, snapping at everyone who looks with sharp force. It is a harpoon to be reeled back in, no bait, no tricks, just pain.

While the words inscribed are mundane and they were made too powerful by hands and blood and the residue of whatever leaks through the integument of this creature, it’s a name made to be nothing, a vague descriptor given the shape of a deadly beast, and so it doesn’t need to be spoken.

Uraume stares at the figure writhing on the ground, slowly fading in a relieved sigh, then back at the name. They never claim the madness to speak it. To their dismay, they dream it, and if a dreamless creature can taste the scent of their own name on them, it does so, in every inch and smile when Uraume returns to feed it-her and clean the guts, roped entrails, and the dead body of the girl, untouched and gently put in the lacquered box their subject came in. It almost feels like a burial rite in its own, and as much pity as they both can offer up for anything.

“You could have eaten her,” is their only note. The starch collars scratch past their hand as they tighten and bind her into new clothes, hiding the name mark and all others under fresh new layers of garments made for someone much richer and less terrifying. 

“Could have,” is the answer, unmoving again, lichen eyes watching intently, then she shrugs, and the snapped cords over her lips quiver.

The scroll has the same qualities as the man that wears it, and the same qualities as the skin that is the costume of this man. 

It’s a coarse, bright piece of something, not quite skin, but almost, as if something has shriveled in its entirety and volunteered to become the lining of words sketched on top of it. It wails in the memory of something not quite alive, not dead, not even the phantom of a ghost, but with the same function as one. To be dreadful and devastating. 

Just like her , as she tilts her head, half lying in the lacquered box, half crawled out of it. There is a sliver of recognition in the slithering shadows, before the creature wearing Noritoshi Kamo’s skin simply sinks down beside one of the tar pools, sizzling and hissing. Uraume stares at the dark pools without blinking, subjecting themselves to the presence with the same unwilling, resigned attention and servitude as always. 

“How quaint, you keep her in the box she was sealed in,” he says, smiling. “Hello, dear, do you remember me? It has been a while.”

The long neck cracks as it tilts to the side, then smiles back. “Hello, dear. It has been a while.”

“Oh, that is something.” That elicits a small fit of joyful interest in an even wider smile, as if the notion of mimicry and the shadows parrotting him is an unexpected joy. “You taught her to speak, withholding the cursed energy in her body. Quite a feat.”

“Quite a feat,” the once girl, now cursed vessel, repeats, all wrapped up sitting by her box, inching over to the scroll and the man holding it in his lap ever so slowly. Her garbled voice is soft and quiet, and proud. “Quite a feat, Uraume.”

“I don’t need your compliments,” they say, eyes ever so carefully peeled in narrow shards at every flickering shadow in the desecrated hallow of the room. 

“She was so promising,” Kenjaku hums half to himself, half to both the people who don’t look at him but the scroll, or whatever it will cause. “But she is horrid at holding any shape for long. It all collapses. Nothing to do but send her over as a gift. Then I heard about her progression over the last months and thought it was time for a gift, a reward for good care, perhaps. Are you hungry?”

A tiny ripple of laughter pushes past the black ink pools rooted into the floor around them, and Uraume takes a step away from the sudden black merged heat escaping them.

She licks the words off the scraped, dead scroll, a ravenous, fast tear, and the wet of a snake tongue. One second, they are magnificent, elaborate, and ancient drawings, then they disappear. 

“You should really feed her more often, Uraume,“ is the only mild concern before the empty scroll disappears in a soft toss, rolling into the dark tidepool of ink and gets drowned.

At first, nothing happens. Then, her whole body collapses inward in the simmering hot and cold, escaping the ink. The scroll breaks her spine first, an unleashed concentrated fist slamming into her stomach, pushing her into the swollen wooden panels back first with a heavy impact. Her legs and arms shake, before the joints twist and bend into the wrong directions, 

The box shakes and falls, and Uraume discreetly takes another step to the side, watching the spectacle. There is nothing special about the way her bones break, nor the way she surges in one shake with each breath that Uraume’s lungs take. But theres something that is unnerving, past the way her blackened fingertips claw up. Cloaked in the shadows, nose, lips, ears, eyes bleeding black coal tears, all her limbs and the contour of her face shapeshift and crack, turning longer, thinner, sharper, more graceful, like the thin blade of a boning knife. 

All her skin and flesh snap into a new shape, slightly altered by whatever possession consumes a thing with an abyss in its guts. Her hollow energy is shifting and adjusting as well around them, and for a second, it lingers like a kiss on Uraume’s skin before it retreats.

Her vertebrae snaps one final time before it curls together like a sleeping kitten, then draws taut as she sits up.

Something in her eyes has become sharper when they beckon for contact. Like cut glass pearls instead of moss, even more aware of the world than they should be.

There is no healing, and there never was meant to be. But the cursed creature stills, before she takes one long breath, a coughing, rattling noise full of confusion and relief, eyes never leaving them in the corner. 

“Stop it,” they demand, and the creature tilts its head even further in more confusion, as if it feels genuinely that it has never done any wrong. 

“Well then,” Kenjaku says, hands folded in his lap, ignoring the ordeal. “I will say that was a success. Granted, a small one. We all knew this would happen. Perhaps we can work with holding something more palatable now, can we?”

And then he says the words on her spine out loud, and every single syllable tastes like burnt cedar, dark salt, and sour copper. It simmers in the pools, burns through the mats, wood, and paper doors. Uraume feels the pressure rising in the back of their skull with thumbs pressing down around their temples and into the sockets of their eyes before they shake their head, and it disappears. Something red cracks through their eyes as they do, a short weak–willed moment of fading consciousness. 

“No,” she whispers. 

The only answer is a nonchalant frown before he stands up to leave. “Peculiar. Well. Let’s hope that doesn’t turn you too rebellious, destroying you too early would be a shame.”

There is no nerves, eyes, no blood, not even ink on her fingers today. When they are alone in her room, they reach out as she leans down. The long pointer swipes one small drop of blood from Uraume’s nose. Their own sleeve and hand drape over it before she can do it another time, but that is enough, as she stares at the blood, then back at them. Her breath fogs with ice-cold air, but she never cares, even with the cold starting to eat her toes.

“My new name,” she says, a crack of broken cords and muffled high tones, and it is her own words, her own thoughts, finalized in this new cognizant nightmare body. “Should be better. It shouldn’t hurt.”

“I will not give you a name.”

“No need. I thought of one.” She leans in, too close, and the black of her teeth drags the odor of cadavers with it. Then she says a single word, and this time, Uraume repeats it as she retreats to her box. 

It is so minuscule. So small. It has no sanctified meaning, and the one it holds is a mockery given their appearance. It’s a joke, and not a funny one. It is mundane. 

Uraume breathes the word.

“Yours forever,” the girl in the box repeats and licks the single drop of blood from her finger.

Chapter Text

As always, the change begins beneath the skin. Whatever was dirty and frail, cracking before, turning to pale porcelain and lean shadows after the loss of an old name and the tearing promise of another, shifts and ruffles through the body now. 

It is like living beings, small, rooted maggots under the skin, worms that nest in veins full of tar. They do not leave openings. They come from the inside, behind the closed black teeth and the red strings of scars left over lips.  They shift with the bubbling pools of shadow like they are writhing in the mass of a carcass, white full bodies in rotten flesh ready to burrow, feast, and escape. They move with unnerving purpose, like living threads of decay knitting her into new patterns.

From an observer's place, it feels like they look back, even if the shapes do not have eyes. There is cold awareness. A weird intelligence in those writhing forms synchronized in a dance of darkness that could be unsettling if Uraume cared.

Instead, Uraume watches it all unfold beneath her skin with cautious pettiness. As if the worms are both of them, something alien, alive, and utterly indifferent to the pain they cause. And still, she clings to shape like she and her worms deserve one. There’s nothing sacred left, she is just appetite undressed in reminders and echoes. Something else is taking root, and they don’t know if it’s hunger or madness that drives it. Not like him. He never broke like this. His hunger was clean, final, and this is a thing still thrashing in its own birth.

But really, they don’t care. There are other things more important. That is why being trapped half a day with this thing in the forgotten temple sinks into their skin with unwillingness. A failed cursed thing, and it keeps growing, all the while the world snaps in its own maggots, and they are much more potent, with the whispers and the fights and the blood spilled. 

Even from the temple’s cracked floor, it is very easy to feel, even if the hum of the unspoken words has subsided into a sleeping whisper. The distant weeping of villages, the churn of curses rising in the south. His wake. His elegance. Sukuna didn’t need to change; the world changed around him. This thing, though, just festers, and Uraume has to watch it, listen to it, and it never stops.

Every present sent and consumed breaks her neck, a twisting mess, snapping back, fingers clawing at nothing, and after a few times, the maggots writhe and spring under the bubbling surface as more and more seals peel off, and even the singing and the rituals do nothing, as she sits in the lacquered box and watches the world with two green eyes. The words fall flat now, not even the old prayers bite as much as her teeth. It’s as if she has forgotten how to be bound. Every relic fed loses rust, ink and turns into something else after it is eaten. 

As always, the more she eats, the more they grow under the hollow expanding limbs, turning longer and leaner instead of wide, growing in length, and the way the bones break and readjust never changes. It is the same crunching, scraping way she did the first time she grew, fed with cursed energy, a mass of strings that lead nowhere, holes in the world that fill themselves with quicksand. And yet something watches through her, and through the holes. 

Not eyes yet, but the promise of sight, blooming in the wrong places. Uraume doesn’t like to be seen by any of her eyes at this point, not after the eyeball and the red stringed promises, and the chosen word that no one knows but the two of them.

Then the peeling starts.

First, it is just her face. The varnish of the white peels off completely. So does the bloody crust, until there is nothing but scars in spongy, pervious bone white, as if her skin is simply another layer of mask, and if it wasn’t for the smallest amount of starstruck freckles, they would believe it easily. If it almost looked human before, when the thing learned how to talk, her face loses all innocence now, with a jaw crooked and wide, and cheekbones hollow and cutting, and the black teeth are a sharp void with every smile.

She washes herself, now, even if she needs supervision, especially with the peeling. The first tear sits just below her tangled, hard hair, as she tries to rip it out, then scrubs even more dust and dirt out of it until it is almost free. There are scars even beneath the scalp, blinking, and then there are the maggots dancing in shadows. Her nails are long, dark shapes as they start to pull, and one skin layer falls like shedded lizard skin, as the dark bubbles pool underneath it like boils, eggs laid in her skin by no one but herself.

She scrapes her claws over her face with no soul, straight razors that shave away flesh, dead skin, reformed crusts over scars, all the years of abuse and neglect and reverence, until there is nothing but dark ink, blood and holes where her nails first cut in.

Deep gashes right over the giant scarred seal on her brown, under her eyes, bellowing over her cheekbones with skin grafts peeled away, past her lips in stripped layers.

When Uraume tries to stop her, all that happens is a white sleeve soaking full of tar blood, rings and driplets that fill the white, like an infection. Uraume doesn’t care to be infected anymore than they already are by her, especially now that the seals all crackle and burn, falling old appears, and the casket is only her sleeping spot because she kills whenever someone gets to close to it.

“Let me see,” she mutters, and she repeats that phrase after phrase, nothing else. “Just let me see. I just want to see the world. Just for a moment. Can I see you too?”

The strips of the flayed skin fall before something else moves again, and her face festers in boils of black under the carved and tattooed scarred lines. 

Her fingers are longer than one palm of Uraume’s hand by now, thin pale spider legs of limbs attached, but they touch ever so softly, the epitome of false care. It is repulsive at best and does something else at worst, in the soft scrape that imitates intimacy in a horrid manner. It is the flutter of a bug’s wings reaching over skin. Her hand turns from pale to grey, then into angry black blisters where she touches their skin, frostbite that crawls and spreads in the thinnest anger freezing it, but the cells are already dead void, and nothing shakes her in pain as they continue to graze, gripping tighter before Uraume rips free.

“What you want makes no difference. It only spoils you.”

“Is that why you are still here?” She whispers. The lamp beside them flickers, the candle inside almost extinguishes.

“I am here because I have no—” 

“No—” Her voice echoes in a half measure of theirs, irritating, perfect mimicry of a gasp out of context. “No choice?”

The scoff is genuine, before they look at the bitten skin bubbling, the shadow worms writhing, and then, a single boil festers in the bruise, pain on pain, and for the first time, she makes a genuine sound that could be a cry, or a chuckle, black teeth gnashing.

Uraume watches her break into pieces and reform in her own blood, and whatever is left in paper-thin stripes of skin before she stops, lips closed, eyes wide open staring, and the frostbitten hand is a fleshy, spongy mess as much as her face, before something moves inside the gashes again. Then, a single eyeball blinks, a rolling, wet thing that appears in the open wound, right under her cheekbone in the last remainder of soft flesh. It does not blink, a black pupil that simply stares.

Another bubbling, liquid sound, like swallowing, or popping a pimple and releasing pus, yellow sounds of purulence, and the next eyeball plops into the world with a wet smack, right in the bruised frostbite in her flesh, twitching as if trying to see from the raw meat.  It is not hers. It does not belong to the body. It looks for something else entirely, and when it finds nothing, it settles for her, because she wills it so.

Uraume does not flinch. But something inside them recoils, a crack in a glass, or like a faint ripple in still water. It is not fear, not awe, but something strange. Almost recognition. Like some first, ancient look, before even names.

It feels like being sucked into the void of the black puddles and the sea of blood sputtering as she peels skin by skin from her neck under her hair, her chest. 

She scratches at the name on her back, that old anchor, before giving up and simply watching again, sobbing in too many voices that do not belong in vocal cords, and the miasma that spells death starts to escape her throat. 

They put two hands over her thin lips to stop the noise and fog that creeps out between her teeth, blackened clouds ready to maim and infect and murder. The smallest plume of atramentous death, and it sizzles and wrinkles the skin of Uraume’s pointer finger like water soaked into it. It tightens their skin before it stops, a closed mouth with soft whimpers underneath their hands, knees resting on the bleeding chest that soaks through both their garments, all the rancid, befouled blood this creature has soaked into itself.

She doesn’t breathe and never fights on the swollen floorboards beneath their own body, even if she could, thin raspy cries and too many tears soaking into the wrinkles of two pale hands holding her jaw shut. 

The third eye appears between collarbone and sternum, a small, loud eruption of meat and blood, unyielding. The skin of her lips is blistered, broken, dry, more wound than mouth, and she doesn’t fight until they see it clasp itself shut. Their weight means nothing, folded on top the dirtied and soaked clothes clinging to her in her own blood and corpse grey skin.

The green eyes in her face stare up with no green left, in a dilated pupil so black and huge they take up the whole eye.

“You could have grown mouths as well while you are at it,” Uraume says, and the idea is laughable, but it stirs something in their chest, and at least it would have fit the gaping maw of her hunger. 

There is no silence in mockery when she folds her head up, neck cracking with bones assembling anew. Her breath isn’t breath, just a slow curl of foul air from two nostrils.

Uraume does not move.

Her lips touch theirs lightly. It’s not a kiss, but a clasp, a graze, a horrible mimicry. Like a dead thing trying to remember how to be loved, or a merciless thing learning how to plead. It is cold and bitter, soaked in shadow, a whisper pressed against skin that should reject it, and yet for a fraction of a second, it feels like something real, the same as the hands did, before being rebutted, and for the splinter of a moment, that is all there is. The press of a mouth too hard, and one of their arms lifts off the floor and touches her, a thumb right under the moist, strange lid of the new eye on her cheek, and the back of her head sinks too deep into the ground as it slowly shifts in all the blood.

It is the touch of literal death when her mouth opens, in just another sob of thrumming three or four voices, choosing to spare Uraume.

Others would probably write hymns about it, or pray for that, the immortality and immunity, but it is granted, and that is what makes them flail and the intimacy shatters in a curdled, foul, rotten twist just when their lips press down too hard and taste sour air and blood.

It is more enraging than it is the sudden danger that curves around them as the heel of the sandal scrapes over the pregnant wood and breaks a few of the wet bubbles of tar pool as they do so. 

“If you ever kiss me again,” the threat comes in a huff, and they wipe one sleeve over their lips to find black stains smeared on the white.

“Then what?”

That is a dare, but there is nothing to dare, since there is no violence or neglect that has coerced this despicable creature yet in their fused contract and obligations. That is why the next question is an existential stupidity. It is that same wish again, something that doesn’t happen and never will. 

“How can I make you want me?” 

“I would want you,” Uraume scoffs. “If you only fulfilled your purpose.”

The room has been quiet today, even if the mats shook and the light went out. Now the pools bubble and immolate anything near them.

“My purpose was stolen from me long ago.” For a strange, long moment, everything in the bleeding, white face is human, astoundingly and disgustingly so, full of sadness and the strange pain. “My purpose was robbed of me when they put the first word on my body.”

“And you expect what from me now? Pity?” They spit that, and it throws their voice hollow through the ruined room. “We all had our share of tragedy. You live in a world that eats itself, so you have to be the strongest. You can find yourself lucky someone saw your value and saved you.”

“You don’t know what pity is.” All her eyes blink, the one in her cheek, the one forming on her neck, and the one on her hand, before they all stare at Uraume in quiet disdain. Or appraisal. Who can say. “You are nothing but cold.”

“It took you long enough to realize that.”

“It doesn’t change anything to know it.”

A shrug, and it is infuriating as she sits in her box as if nothing has happened. As if there is not the taste of oily, sticky bitterness on their lips, and a strange phantom pain under their fingernail, throbbing with the black death of the fog.

 “You’ll be a fine last meal, my dearest.”

Uraume brushes their fingers clean against the wooden frame of the lacquered casket, smearing the black blood in slow, even strokes into the wood like a calligraphy of disparaged, exasperated disgust.

They kneel beside the box, tilting their head in a mockery of the figure doing the same, as if they dance around each other with every single motion. The sleeve still stained with blood reaches out again, and two fingers, just two, just the two that she already tarnished, push down gently on her forehead, against the old brand that has half-peeled from her skin.

“You think you were robbed,” Uraume murmurs. “But the truth is much, much simpler.”

Their touch presses harder. Her eyes all flutter, but she doesn’t move, hard to say if she enjoys or curses the notion.

“You were never meant to hold anything at all. You were never meant to have anything, so nothing can ever be stolen from you. Learn to live with it, or perish.”

The lamp flickers. The ceiling shakes. Then all the light creeping through the room falters, sighs, and finally dies.

The silence after is not peaceful, nor pondering. It doesn’t hold its breath; the quiet exhales one last time, not at the end of things, but the imminent moment right before it. And in that void, carelessly flung by the even horizon of this black, black hole, she does not cry. Her mouth is full of teeth and blood and death and silence, finally . And Uraume turns just to savour the quiet of the hum.

Chapter Text

There used to be a pond between the brittle stones and the pit of the temple. Clear, cold water, freezing in the winter, floating leaves, and white, soft flowers. Almost peaceful with stone lanterns and guardians.

The guardians have no eyes now. The priests have abandoned the splintered, shattered remains of the rooms, with the mats broken after the last time that the smiling, laughing figure came back to feed the many-eyed one. They’ve heard enough of what comes next to recognize the rhythm. The cracking, splitting, snapping, as the body corrects the shape it was forced into, even further into something leaner and longer, sharper. It has the beauty of a butcher knife, really, in the elongated edges that cut as they bend over the ground, in this fraction of its forming existence. Whatever grief the last words caused, it has passed. And since the thing hasn’t perished, and thrives instead, Uraume never wonders.  

The water has become black and thick, a sludge that is coagulated and eerie still in its own thriving mass, with flowers that have turned to brown, wet, sanguinary things swimming on top like wet organs, each and every one a brown fist curled together, ready to writhe and squirm. And if one of them was a heart, mayhaps it would start to beat as the water thrashes and pulsates in bubbling, stretching silk cocoons of red and black webs. A dark tide of black weaving its way through the temple like the net of an exceptionally fat spider. Any living thing flees the pit of the temple if it can by now. There are not even curses ready to go near, and whatever human comes, shares their fate. 

They thrash and scream and flee, madness with the hum of a single unspoken name scratched from the base of a white spine, like a book that made itself forget its author.

Only that this thing cannot forget its author and title, since that is all there is. Even if it wants, and it always wants, it wants too much and it wants too little. It wants the wrong things, and it wants nothing it can ever have.

Just as the thing starts to remember too much, the pond has long forgotten what it once was. It does not know stillness or purity anymore. Instead, it knows hunger. Beneath the slick surface, bones shift, whispering and grinding like dry leaves caught in a heavy thunderstorm. Since the feeding is now frenzy, and that enabled bit is unhelpful, the waved off nonsensical. As if the thing sent in the box wasn’t a lost cause, now it has become more. With disdain, and with other things that don’t belong. And they share that disdain at least, when the only regular visitor comes and goes, staring with eyes in black and green and red and purple and in blackened and white monochrome unhappiness. 

It eats alive beings, now, again, instead of any other meal, or any other carcass, any other scrap. And humans are too slow to escape if they dare come too close. It makes no difference, really, in its unrefined predatory notion. Nothing and no one reveres the many-eyed girl at her water. She just sits, quietly, in the humming drone of her own old names and new songs that no ears hear, as they crack under dying necks and skulls peeled open, and the whole world separated by the smallest bamboo fence and broken open paper doors, with strips swaying in the airless stain of dark wind, is nothing but an empty ruined hall without worshippers.

The purpose of things is vital. It’s useless to want without it, and to feel without it. But these aren’t things that leave their mouth anymore forced into the presence of the watchful thing. And she is more thing again, now, to them, since the kiss, and after, because that makes it easier to understand the way it escapes the room now. It wanted to see, and now it does, as it sits on the broken stones standing up in splintered ribs, feet with too many claws sunken into the bubbling, dirty pond. Half a body lies impaled between two ridges of the stones, ribcage pressed open, with a hand that grips senseless into the air, bloody nails broken, a body too slow, too weak, or perhaps too brave. That happens, sometimes. Some creatures are too stupid to feel the danger, and they think they can conquer it. They never can, and they never will, as they die. 

When Uraume said the world is eat or be eaten, that was not some allegory in itself, speaking about cruelty. It is just the true nature of it, and perhaps that is the only true elegance in the ink-spilled lady in the red and brown garments. That she understands as much. And that she still doesn’t understand at all: That she, too, is to be devoured by her insides, just slower.

She listens to them approach with her head tilted, and a new eyes sprouted on her wrist, where she holds the bone, as if she wants to push it into her own elongated ribcage, but doesn’t, because that is not how she transforms, she takes things in different manners, with a different attempt of thievery.

“He is long gone, if you were hoping for other company,” is the only consolation, and it is wrong in the shiver of flesh splitting and reforming to tune into a single voice made of humming notes. “He feeds, he laughs, he goes his merry way.” 

“I value his company just as little as yours.” 

“Now, that I understand,” she whispers, all the eyes on her neck and brow pointing toward them, and even the green has lost color to become as black now. Ancient lichens all dead and gone, around them, moss that turned black as well, as they step over it and cross their arms. “Even if you don’t believe it.”

It is truly the only easy thing to believe in the hollow eruptions and ripples beneath the dead lily pads and bones lining the bridge. A stone that Uraume never sets foot on, but one that she doesn’t leave now, and the world is still dead and liminal even so, or much worse. But there is nothing to bind her, now, as long as she is fed. So the fact that she stays means something else.

“It didn’t make me, but I am sure you know that much,” she continues, after listening to nothing but the cold white breath in her black clouds, like a rabid wolf might listen to the wind shift, scents mingled into the blackness now.  

There is a moon outside, behind that gate, behind the cocoon. It exists in shock white, pale glory. But not here, and maybe it never shall. Perhaps just like she can never be a sun, she will never become a moon, and she is truly forever the blackness, and the darkness in the cracks between things.  

“The creature in Noritoshi Kamo just found us, a stray little broken thing, what a sad brittle girl that cannot live the way her own body wants to birth with no womb, no human but just shadows that she collects with all the grief of war and powerful people tearing her bones apart like dogs. But you can at least empathize with that, can’t you, Uraume?”

The needle of a jab deserves no response. There is no pity or condolences. Sometimes it is just the way of the world, and then a strange tidings leads to further success. Whatever grief there ever was, it is half buried and more withered than the fleshy, foul plants swimming on the water. She has no need to know that. No one has. So they don’t say it and wait until she continues, unblinking.  

“The girl thought things would get easier if she simply went along, in servitude. She didn’t know she was allowed to refuse things and that she could fight. That language held shapes like that.

That girl was a stupid bitch, you would have liked her so much better than me. Always saying yes and bowing and lying in the cold darkness until someone felt like touching her and feeding her, and she would crawl in the dirt for all but scraps without knowing herself, or learning about herself, a static thing that deserved to become a body in a coffin. The monster in the human head liked that complacency too, that this girl was just here to serve and be filled. And so he started to work on her.  Such promise, was the praise . Such hope, “ she coos, and the voice shifts in pitch until it becomes a perfect replica under too much force, then shatters with a low sigh. ”Who can say they ever met a sorcerer who can hold in everything they are fed? A being that just collects things for you, until they possess her. That is promising. That is the thing that gods make their rebirth from in some myth, isn’t it?”

That is a rhetorical question deserving nothing but a scoff, an empty huff. That seems to be answer enough. The water splashes softly as she throws the arm inside the pool of black before continuing, with a very own voice again. 

“So they started to carve again. They had done it before, others, slowly, ever so slowly. Warding sigils, trying to hold the poor girl in place when she screamed and ate, and her guts grew thrice the normal size, consuming, and the cursed energy in all the relics curdled to foul energy in her stomach, a dead thing they wanted to contain in her. She was a prison, or she was a saviour, it really depends what kind of priest or astronomer, or sorcerer you ask. Isn’t that funny?

And then when that monster in the human head had laughed enough about that joke, he took that abandoned carving knife and he continued the work until every bit of her skin was broken, and all that was left was black teeth, ink and bones, and just the smallest, the tiniest, the weakest fraction of a glimmer of something alive. The girl was foolish enough to ask for mercy, of course, but no one has mercy, never. 

And there was nothing, nothing but vapid searing, blazing pain and no silence. Never silence. Her mouth did not stop churning and screaming and killing. And that was a failure, as much as everything else she should have held, her tongue was loose, and never quiet. Of course, there were others. There were a lot of others, before and after, she was never alone. All meant for different acts of violence in the name of discovery. All different shades of stupid and hopeful. All in different colors of pain.” 

Something in her vocal cords swells, like a deformed frog, under the eyesockets, and the saddest, most pathetic whine escapes. It strings along the world in different tones of cries, female voices, and male and they all sob and whimper and curse behind the vibration that rests behind Uraume’s skull before they blink it away in a condescending lack of empathy that might just have saved their life as it usually does.

“I ate some of them, later, you know,” The void thing says, and smiles bloodless with too many teeth in black rows. “They didn’t taste very well, they were emaciated dead things that he tossed me, but at least it meant I could consume their sorrow, let it slide down my throat and fill me for a second in the lack of quiet and the screams. Not that I understood the grief. But the girl did, with every raw piece of withered dead woman that slid down into her gullet, after she didn’t chew.”

The quiet is thick and wet like the sludge and ooze around them, and the moist blink of the black eyes turning to different colors, and if Uraume had to guess, they are the color of dead faces. That is all there is, dead things in the water and dead things on the bridge, and dead things in stomachs. They mean nothing, and one might mistake that stillness for respect. It is not, it is never going to be respect, never going to be rousing applause for the messes made.

They have not moved since the first word fell, and that stillness is also not kindness or respect. “You never learn to chew. You only swallow.”

“I never chew ,” she repeats, and the words are not hers, as usual, when they escape with too much precision and coherent syllables formed. “ It only spoils you. ” 

Uraume’s fingers twitch, but their own pair of eyes stares back unblinking. The words hang heavy like stones in Uraume’s throat. “Are you done?”

“I’m never done. Didn’t our friend in the skull make sure of that? She was so promising,” Kenjaku hums through her body half to himself, half to people who don’t look at him. “But she is horrid at holding any shape for long. It all collapses. Silence, that came after a collapse. With a red band holding her mouth shut after he found a needle and sewed, stitched from one side to the other with no care for the noise my flesh made when my lips closed and my jaw fought, and my blood was not all black, there was a trace as red as the silk thread, and it held me shut when I wanted nothing to eat for the first time since I was born.” 

It took her weeks to rip the thread open. She tore at it with her broken nails when she hoped no one saw. She would die every single time a single piece of flesh was stripped off her lips, her chin, the tiniest ripple, but it burned. It was perhaps the only strong thing she ever did. And I wanted to be fed. I needed her to do it.” 

There is a strange weight to the agony, singing in the same way the madness around them does, and the dead murk rises and falls in its own heat as she stands up, knees under the draped tapestry bending into the wrong direction to be a human bone. For a moment, they both just stand, and if the world vanishes under the weight or no time moves at all is as indiscipherable as any prayer and any word ever mumbled and whispered in this place, or written down to be engulfed by these empty maws now. 

“And then he shoved her into a coffin, and she lay silently, because that was what she COULD do, and she was a weakling, with no strength. She lay there and the moths ate her clothes, the weather her cracked varnish, like a pretty gift wrapped in dirty papers, and they painted her new eyes when she finally fell asleep. Until I woke up in a room full of knives and prayers and rituals carving into me again and trying to bind me, and there was some voice asking me if I would like to eat human. And I didn’t think I would find a voice as easily. You gave me words. I wasn’t sure I even knew words existed. Whatever I knew before, it was all gone with that casket being my cage. But you were good. You fed me better than I deserved. I thought making myself into something you can talk to would please you, after you taught me. It’s easy. Say: Yes. You know what that means. Yes. And no—”

Interrupting their own voice is an uncanny feeling creeping below the ghost-burned fingertips still wrinkled from keeping the death inside her throat. 

“That was a horrid mistake.”

“For you, perhaps.” 

She shrugs as she creeps closer, and the scent of death around their bodies is sweet and bitter and sour, like disease in a bottle.  The broken willows shake their skeletal branches, shivering. 

“Because you are dedicated to kneeling to a much different religion than I can be. Even if I turned back into that stupid little girl. I could never be like him, and now that I have words, I do not want to. I don’t want to be anyone.” 

There is no touch, just the threat of that, in between too many teeth, and the sticky muddy lurking tension charges with the concurrent answer that is violence, and the growl of a stomach studying a much smaller body lingering in its presence absolutely unwillingly. It is a quiet, disdainful apocalypse, this lingering yearning, that specific hunger, and the tarnished memory of a kiss.

“That story changes nothing,” Uraume says, and the stones in the words weighing down speech turn to sharp jagged cliffs that don’t go away easy. “It never will. And no. You could never be like Sukuna.”

“I know it doesn’t. But it is nice to taste it, every once in a while. Because I owe you as much, before the end.”

For a second, they consider that, if she moves, and if that means that she will launch on her haunches, a vile unclean thing in all its dirty glory, and if cutting her stomach open will kill her, or of her eyes can be blinded, or if the clotted strings of hair can break. Violence is a dance, but Uraume’s dance partner doesn’t try to claw or bite or snap now. Far from docile, but waiting, like a mantis, hanging from a leaf, or a spider waiting in its web. There is visceral beauty in that trick; they got to admit, it almost grasps them, like a hand on a sleeve or a thumb under an eyelid. A secret word between two mouths and a single sinew connecting hands like a red string of fate. 

But that is that, the fleeting second, with a jaw unhinged, churning behind lips pressed together under scars and blood painted in cupid bows on top of it. Her head cocks sideways, like a dog listening to a sound too high for humans to hear, before she leans in and stops just short of the shard of ice pointing toward the long neck and twitching black veins. The point of the jagged cold peak on Uraume’s hand points toward the pupil narrow closest to it, ready to stab. Behind them, the pond ripples.

Its slimy surface splits with a gurgle, and something rises beneath the sludge slowly, here a limb, there an eye, there a finger, but not quite. Just close enough to being recognized as such. Like the mimicry extends below the water from her vocal cords. They are fleshy vines lined with thin, snapping dark petals unfurling like parasitic lotuses, blooming from the bile and guts. The smell is even sharper now, full of the copper, rot, and longing.

“You are a vessel. You are an object.” As if that can save them from the things snapping in the water like sharks. “You are a thing that acts like it can be more. I made the mistake of encouraging your failure. I’ll not make it again.”

“I admire your stubbornness, zeal is such a nice taste,” her voice breathes instead, reeling forward until the eye connects, a stake that drives through wet meat and tender muscle, naked skin tearing, as the face comes so close that Uraume can count every single black tooth with unflinching wrath. 

The ice drives through her body and impales her, it drives a single death rattle out the esophagus and windpipe, before it simply sticks there, and nothing else happens but the black tears of a broken sight. Her forehead brushes theirs, eyes wide, unblinking. Her hand lifts, gently, and rests against Uraume’s chest. Just her pale, long fingertips, and simply long enough for both of them to feel one single pulse. 

“I’m not ready to eat you,” she says, soft, almost regretful. “Not yet. But I think I will be. Soon.”

Black pools over fabric, into the ground, acidic and hot, tar that closes around everything to encapsulate it like the hand of a lover and the fist of an enemy, all the same. Then it vanishes, crackles of cold rains in splinters and rasps to the ground, melting into the pool, painting colorless tears over cheeks. And then she is gone, retreated to the pond, until the snapping tendrils take her, and nothing remains but the faintest laughter that tastes like rot. 

Chapter Text

The void thing, tarred eyes in a girl shadow, rests in the pond in waiting. It drifts by the surface ever so slowly, among the dried-out leaves and broken trees. Sometimes, an eye peels through the swelling ooze, the festering wound it created as it took over the ground, desecrated it, infests it. 

A crippled crocodile waiting, as the water turns cold, and the world does too over the next weeks. The cold doesn’t freeze it, just as ice shards in her throat did not kill, nor stopped it from speaking. The cold is an inconvenience, not a threat, as frost glazes the leftover ridges of the stones around, and the pulsing strings of blackness become atrophied wet muscles alive around them, shadowy spoons of silk that hold no prey now as it slows, eating instead of rapidly doing so like before. They longer lash, they no longer seize, they no longer grow. They halt after they told their story. 

That is a promise in itself. As if the girl thing waits for a ripple to come by and snatch, unsuspecting prey that it wants to hunt but doesn’t. It doesn’t need to hunt when the thing it wants to eat comes back every so often, but never steps too close now. Even then, the shadows fall all wrong in this eternal darkness. They fall in a way that is uncanny, moving a split second too late, lingering in the wrong corners, imitating their movements. The shadow lifts the wrong finger when Uraume does, and the wrong rustling side of their sleeve when they move an arm. When they turn left, the shadow embraces their feet before it turns as well, ever so slowly. 

And that applies to whatever yearning consummation brings, but it applies to another visitor as well.

He stands perfectly still on the cusps of the necrotic circles, the earth and ice that twitches like skin beneath their soles, and weakly, a few of the rotten tendrils snap at Kenjaku before they retreat, a warning as the air bubbles in a hiss to the surface of the tar pond and a few eyes watch them with something stoic and strange broken into bits. Half yearning, half wrath, and given all the pitiful details from the testimony of a cup overflown to fill with its own shadows, transformed into something else, that is no surprise.  

“Oh, you wait,” Kenjaku says. His voice is almost gentle. “But for what?”

For a thing that hurt her and gave her something she should never have understood, and if the lacquered coffin was not shattered inside the sanctuary, a splintered, broken ruin too small for her shape, Uraume would try and stuff her inside it again, as soon as she dares to close the distance. For the split second then, that story comes back, ripping seams out of her lips, the face that they remember blinking, learning to become, and the bones folding to fill with flesh around sinews and waxen skin.

Uraume doesn’t want to divulge the threat, nor the tarnished yearning proposition behind it, since that is what her hunger rests on, that false sense of lulled in tenderness.  

The words are ash on their tongue, and their lip curls, barely perceptible, but the pond stills under the wait, and stares with two eyes the color of foul grain. 

“She promised to make me her last meal.”

“You could feel honored,” he says. The words are an unsavoury suggestion, and now the eyes are back to staring at the person that held a carving knife for many, many nights, before the pond ripples in yet another hiss. Beneath the ice-bitten water and the parasitic lotus, something turns deliberate under the compliments, the vines snapping out and writhing beneath the bridge, the shadows snaking out of the broken temple, creeping into cracks. The soil breathes with corpse tongues, exhaling, inhaling.  

“I don’t feel honored for a gift becoming a nuisance,” Uraume mutters. 

“Yes. She was a gift,” Kenjaku replies, one hand flat on the breathing ground of the foul soil. “I gave you something broken to fix to please your master, and you did something way worse. It’s marvelous, isn’t it?”

Shame is an artificial nightmare created to be more powerful than others. But it still hits with a scrape, since it is the truth. What caretaking was required was not what was done. They gave her words, and she gave herself a shape. The feeling burrows under their skin with needles punctuating nerves, itching, twitching, irritating. 

“Don’t make it an appraisal.”

“But it is!” One last pat, before he retreats, merrily as always, with no care in the steps of the borrowed body. “Sukuna was shaped into a king. You shaped yourself into his blade. But her? You undid all the bindings, Uraume, and taught her how to walk. To make a temple a ruin. So she shaped herself into this.” 

She is nothing, they want to say, but even that is a compliment, and it sits wrong in their throat as they cross their arms, one hand in a sleeve, maneuvering around the shadows. They keep following, like a faithful guardian. Or an obsessed lover. 

“It won’t matter for too long,” Kenjaku whispers. “She knows. Something her size can never sustain itself. That is why she wants to eat you. It would be a final grace. Make her stronger, and make her like you, because whatever you did, it left a mark.”

The world sings in pained notes, this strange constant desecrated domain, the hollow in the hallow, the bones whistling like flutes, the water rippling, the horizon approaching, and then the void thing laughs, her hair finally sponged and rippling over her face.

“My dearest, you are aware that eating Sukuna’s retainer is no way of showing your manners?”

“MANNERS,” his own voice repeats, the perfect mimicry stolen, but spoken from ripped out vocal cords somewhere in the swimming mess of almost organs in the pond. A single bulging eye on a palm stares at them, then disappears under a brown, rotted flower.

“She should devour you, you know.”

“She really should devour you,” a voice echoes, sounds that run backwards in an echo, footsteps that appear and disappear around them, a circling shadow bubbling, a future echo that garbles the words it steals, makes sound like Uraume’s voice and then smears the idea of mimicry away with another hissing bubbling tar pit of laughter and shifting into the other one present, a strange coo in compliments that mean nothing. “Make a temple a ruin. That is marvelous, Uraume.”

Kenjaku smiles wider, an expression Uraume never cared for and still doesn’t. 

“Then it will be a reunion when we meet in her stomach. But she won’t eat me. I made her, after all. She knows me and I know her, from her bleeding insides to the shape of my knives.  She has no taste for me.”

The hair is a wet cascade around a body made of parts that dissect themselves in a thrumming of marks, eyes, and grey corpse flesh, the longer someone looks at them. It is the same madness that drove the stupid servant girl to rip her own sight away, blinding herself. Uraume is stubborn enough to blink at it once, and the answer is a sleeve turning white as the tar sizzles off it, and the hand under it loses the long, lean, elongated horror shape and turns the size of theirs. The friction of the fragment stays as long as they blink, and then the eyes on her skin stare at them both, garments sagging down her shoulder, too sallow in some places, too tight in others, as her body writhes like the boils that shoved the sight into her meat. And something else in the shadows around their legs flatters and giggles, a stray cat rubbing against their legs, before it retreats and takes Uraume’s shadow away from them, stripping a layer of blackness away. 

“No taste,” the vocal cords hum without the black teeth opening. Her voice is half Uraume’s, half her own, before it shifts to a whimper and becomes a scream of bones again.  “She did, once, no father of mine. You fed us grief. Then Uraume fed me a name, and it rotted in me, until I had cultivated it.”

The pernicious whistling of voices continues, and it is straining. Kenjaku doesn’t retreat when Uraume does, staring at the wet, lurched thing towering over them with the monstrosity of a newborn horror and an ancient soul. 

“Behave for a while” is the last words treated toward them. “You were made for a purpose, and you failed it. But that never means we cannot start anew.”

“I am starving, Father of grief.” A nonchalant, guttural answer, and it comes with a head tilt and a million eyes stalking the darkness of the temple. “If you don’t come back to feed me, I promise naught. And I will have a taste for you.”

The softest touch is the answer, a finger smoothing over her wet hair, and some part of her melding skin squelches under the touch before Kenjaku steps away. “I’ll see what you’ve grown into next time.”

Sukuna would have already killed her-it.

That’s the unspoken thought bleeding behind every day. He would not have made excuses. No, he would not have stared into the pit and wondered if this dead, cold cosmic thing could be made to serve . 

He would have fed her her own hands and crushed what survived underfoot. Being split in the days between this place has done nothing but to wither that truth in the snow that hides the black blemishes until they bleed through it like wounds reopening again and again. To ask for that mercy is out the question, or that favor, but the thought is a salvageable truth, and it is enough to watch the last setting stones. 

Kenjaku was right at least in one thing. She cannot sustain the comet she is, the falling night, the overflowing from the damaged cup, as her web dances in the snow around Uraume when they have to see her. 

A faint, slow light flickers in the murky depths of the pond some of these nights, a faint glow of trembling light, almost reluctant to shine. It pulses like a fragile heartbeat, a pale lantern dangling from the abyss. They are never close enough to see what kind of herself she has dragged under it, to make it shine like that, but they assume that something grows, in its wake, connected to the strenuous rest of her dark, wet prison of a domicile.

Sometimes, a part of her is all white, hair strained in streaks, one side of her face eyeless except a single, familiar one blinking powdered white away with lashes of the same color. 

They tell her to stop. She repeats it, sitting in the snow, holding one of the dead animal skulls in her fists, and when Uraume does miss to keep an eye out on the periphery, the stolen shadows turn into other things. Not quite the right size to be Uraume, not the same as they stumble.  

She never gets it quite right. They have no skin. No eyes. And they are always grey in monotone, monochrome pain as they tumble under the bleeding of ice, puppets on tendrils, jaws unhinged in a moaning echo of a thousand voices in pain.

“Perish the thought that you just give up,” Uraume comments when another streak of white appears on her head but withers, and she breaks the clotted knots off, ripping a part of her scalp apart.

“Just give up,” she answers, beside the pond, and the snow reflects nothing but the dark blood and the streaks of hair falling into it, and every shadow whistles and vanishes, until it is only the two of them. “I wish I could.”

“That’s a lie. If you meant it, you would just build a new grave and lie down.”

Her naked feet swipe away a layer of glazed ice, like a deer scraping and scratching, and her lurched over body marred with the festering frostbite wavers, as if she can dig her own grave beside the ruins. She thinks she is all so nifty, in her sudden mellow pose. 

“Would you help me if I did?”

Why don’t you ruin the temple? The world? Why don’t you build your dog a house?

The words only exist in the quiet space between the sounds of labored breaths and quiet scoffs. 

Her body is shadow, undulating in the darkness between stars, before it shrinks, turning its shape so very small and fragile. 

“I can be small and soft, like I used to be, if you stay for a while. You’d like her better anyway.”

The cold air thickens around them, breath crystallizing in the brittle silence.

“You know nothing about me.”

She shakes her head before she looks back to the pond, where her hair still lingers, the long tendrils fleeing toward the light under the ice. The light is all blue and reds, a mingling pulse. It is quite mesmerizing, the longer their eyes see it blink, and with nothing to obscure it, no shadow doppelgangers, and no distraction. It gleams like a kaleidoscope.   

“No. No, I know enough. From the days you would come and talk to my body in the box.”

“I’ll ask for you to be smited.”

Uraume turns around and leaves, dead things crunching and shattering under every step. 

“No, you won’t. You want me to succeed for your master’s sake. I know you,” she repeats. “You’ll be back.”

Kenjaku complains that she does not eat much. Under the ice, the lights still glow when Uraume returns unwillingly, tossing things near the pond. 

“You go tell your master about this failed test,” he says when Uraume tells him to stop complaining and clean up the mess.

Next time they visit, the many eyes on the pale body are withering and blind when they do so. She stirs once, weakly, a grey, waxen thing, dried out, too wide a skin full of air and deadly black fog. The rest of her hair still rolls into the dark waters still. No hunger lurks with eyes now. 

They don’t get too close, cautiously stepping away from the brightly shimmering lure under the water, and keep distance between themselves and the many eyes. 

The tar around her has dried into an amalgam of crusts by the next feeding time. Scabs on the wounds. Uraume barely touches one of her hands, and it crumbles in soft pergament casing, as her lichen colored eyes stare at them unblinking at the water, and it reminds Uraume of the first time they peered into the casket to find an unmoving statue. They wait. Nothing happens. They look for more shadows. Nothing.

The spike is as long as their arm, before it aims at the open robes, ribs exposed, carved body broken.

“Someone should have done this sooner,” Uraume whispers, and there is no reaction, no sound, no death noise, just the empty sound of air and foul rancid reek escaping the husk as they slice it to ribbons, one stab, then another, until the dead blind corpse lies still on the beach of its own existence.

The smallest, softest hiss escapes the damaged body, and Uraume braces for the fallout, the explosion, and the fog to burn everything away in acid and fumes.

It tickles their cheek, itches in a soft wind, then dissipates as the waxen body sighs, falling apart.

As it crumbles to ashes, the light below the water and flats moves, and they realize their mistake, as fingers with long clawed nails the color of a sunburst burrow into their shoulders and tear at them, dragging them down into the water.

A single bubble of air escapes Uraume’s lips as the ice and darkness pool around them, and in the full darkness, the body is a half-formed, wet something, too many bones shining through pale skin. One eye is hers, the moss colored demise from before, the other is theirs, and this time, it is a fully formed, normal eye, with the same disdain they always spared for her. 

Teeth snap once as Uraume kicks, hands curl in the strange embrace, and she is half liquid, half need as she tries to grapple them, burning in the different lights that failed to attract them down to their grave.

Why don’t you ruin the temple? The world? Why don’t you build your dog a house? Why don’t you let me eat you? I could be a better you. You could be a better part of me.

They inhale guts and ice once, water and tar clogging their throat as they open their lips without wanting to do so, and the primordial thing hums in their skeleton as the grip holds. Teeth slip into flesh, a mark made with something vicious, venomous that burns them as they inhale the sludge in this void, staring at the only star there is.

Then, suddenly, the water ponders, pauses, and shrieks. It bleeds upward in drips that are burning, a heat that’s too familiar, not a starburst sun, but the blazing of a deadly inferno immolating the screeching voices. 

The ice doesn’t break beneath his feet. It flees like coward soldiers in a war. His expression doesn’t change at the sight of Uraume half-pulled under the ice by the thing that tried to mimic pain and mercy and hunger and love, with her light still flickering below like a dying anglerfish.

He doesn’t even look at it.

Black oozing water clings to their robes like ink blood, their arm torn open at the shoulder in claw marks and the soft pressure of teeth when a single hand drags them out the grasp, above surface with the tar immolating and dying in black fog.

Their breath comes ragged with a heave of red blood seeping into melted earth, body shuddering with the chill that only truth brings, beholding true glory.

The body in the water snarls, as long as Uraume hangs half suspended in the grip, before Sukuna tosses them, not hard, just a reprimand for their errors, and they could deserve much worse as they land on the splintered black stone.

Uraume doesn’t dare make eye contact, even if the one smaller eye certainly stares down as the other focuses on the bursting, bloody body, finally. Red spills on black and white and grey foggy nothing takes their sight, almost, as they stare at their own fingers, and the single scar from the ghost-burn. 

“I thought I could make her useful. That is why I kept it for myself.”

As if that is the full truth. And it isn’t. It is not even an excuse, but the words won’t come, and the voice doesn’t obey, not like their knees scraping in reverend exhaustion and the force of their heart trying to continue as the wounds pound with another heartbeat.

“Rotting things can’t be useful. If you have forgotten, you are disappointing me.”

The broken thing glimmers weakly, and the cracks in the light, past half her face being Uraume’s in shrieking, soundless agony, show nothing but shadows, the eyeless, faceless void that returns, but barely. It flinches when Sukuna makes a step toward it, between bones and colorless smoke rising between them.

“It tried to wear your face.”

The blood in Uraume’s mouth tastes more foul than any odor of decay around them.

“It wanted to feast,” they explain. “And to be.”

“No,” she whispers and stands up. A mumble of a single, small voice between gnashing teeth and the cry of a million hungry, dark scuttling legs.  “Wanting to be is not wrong. I just wanted to be enough. To eat is to see, to be seen is to be wanted. I could have been a better you, I could have healed, but you weren't prepared for it.”

“A dying star only fades. You are worthless.”

The words are barely wrathful, only full of angry disappointment, for her, or Uraume, who knows, but they find whatever ears she has and stay, linger.

It is the last thing she hears as she shrieks back, before Sukuna can even catch her with one of his arms, and with a swift, languid motion, she twists her own neck until the bones splinter and half the marrow spills and the discs stand out in single balls as her head rests beside her body. The laughter of too many voices escapes in a huff and then dies, and the head lies still. It sinks into the remains between them with the single exhale of bloody spit that Uraume has left, right into the ribcage of a dead carcass, before falling forward. Only dead eyes smile at them in the empty, retreating darkness, with a mouth twitching, before Sukuna’s foot stomps it like a cockroach. 

There is a temple with a pond, ruined and broken. Bones filled the space, and its stone guardians had no eyes.

In one of the rooms, lies a coffin. It is a dusted, sealed box, lacquered, with chains as thick as tree trunks. In the box is a body. It lies dreaming, sleeping, but not dying, even after being burned and maimed. There is a head on it that wasn’t before, on the strange, glowing creature. It has no name. It has no face, beyond a single, green eye, staring accusingly. No lips need to be shut. No cursed energy fed to it. It is a failed, broken relic, and it rests in the motes of dust for what could be a millennium, waiting to be remade, or perhaps simply awoken.

Some people say that they can hear a hum on the wind, like a name that is spoken in a prayer, or a curse. It sounds more like ice in a throat and bones under the soles of feet.