Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In a realm once shimmering with a ceiling of bubbled shards, coalesced memories glinting like suspended galaxies, the sky has ruptured. The chamber, once supernal, is now ravaged. Cracks vein across the surface of the floor like dried rivers, and jagged mounds of abyssal corruption rise like unholy monuments to failure. Shadows ripple in ways they should not, as if reality itself is weeping.

At the center of it all, atop a shattered pedestal, lies a divine cage: its bars twisted, blackened, and warped beyond recognition.
Something dreadful once sat within.
Now, it is gone.

By the far wall, half-buried in rubble and the lightless warrens of the domain, lies a goddess.

If one could still call her that.

Once elegant, once glorious, her form is now cracked and wounded.

Dheghom, the Earth Mother.

Her skin, once adorned with the flowing patterns of clouds over verdant continents, now bears the scars of planetary anguish, magma rivers trail across her arms, smog and ash churn in her hair like stormclouds, and the outlines of continents shift and fracture like tectonic plates at war. As she rises, slow and trembling, gripping her toga for support, she feels her own divine instability; the erosion of faith given form.

She stares upward, toward the gaping fracture in the vault of her realm, a voidal rupture left in Aku's wake. Though no sound echoes from it, she can feel his laughter vibrating through her bones.

Dheghom clenches her fist.

"That wasn't meant to happen."

Her voice is hoarse, ancient. She stares at the twisted bars of the broken cage.
Remnants of corrupted memory shards lie embedded in the floor like drowning sailors, half-sunken in a sea of destruction.

"How did I let it get to this point..."

Her voice wavers, pain blooming from within. The air tastes like scorched ozone and betrayal. Her once pristine divine skin, once a 1 to 1 representation of the earth... now afflicted by calamity, destruction and misfortune. 

"What have I done..."

Dheghom stands before a memory shard, emerald ferns flowing across its surface. She peers into it

A woman.
Born a weapon.
Taught to kill.
Found purpose in an enemy.
Loved him.
Discovered her heritage.
Faded from existence.

Her name? Ashi.

Dheghom watches the final moments of the erased timeline, the embrace in front of the collapsing Pit of Hate, the love, the reunion and return to the past—and the dissolution. The woman's form vanishes mid-wedding. She does not cry. She only looks surprised as she cups her husband’s cheek.

“Without Aku.. I would have never existed.” 

Dheghom’s lip curls upward.

"I should have never unbubbled it."

Dheghom before another shard. This one, black as pitch.

Aku’s shard.

She sees Mira, forced into bounty hunting. X-49, twisted by hostage-taking. The triseraquins, betrayed. Ashi, corrupted in seconds, twisted into a creature of agony.

And then Aku's death, impaled by the samurai and his lover. Shoved back into the earth's core. A finale of justice.

But the shard pulses. Laughs. 

Dheghom's grip tightens around the edge of her robe.

"So... I failed. I couldn’t…”

More memories: Aku’s rebirth within her domain. Small. Pathetic.
Sudden growth.
Monkey-sized.
Man-sized.
Cackling, as he burst out of the bars of imprisonment
Then fists flying.
The Earth Mother, overpowered.
His absorption of his own black shard, and eight more shards, floating behind him like trailing banners of ruin.

Crimson. Emerald. Gold. Ice. Amethyst. Azure. Citrine. Rose.

"—protect them," she finishes, the words bitter and hollow.

She attempts to stand. Her legs tremble under the weight of her form.

"This is painful," she whispers.

"It really is."

She closes her eyes, breath ragged.

"I know they will come soon. Odin, Ra, and Rama. Gods of sky, flame and thunder."

"I do not wish to give heed to them... not now."

She exhales sharply.

"They are the… reason why it happened.” 

 The black cosmic mass before the gods. Odin, Ra, Rama. Their divine weapons scorch the sky. They blast it into fragments. One remains.

That fragment lands on Earth. Becomes a crater. Becomes a pit. Becomes Aku.

The Emperor fails to destroy it, despite the holy sword bestowed onto him.  Instead he gives it life. Aku is born.

Years pass. A son is born. He trains. Travels the world. Aku ravages his kingdom whilst the young boy learns the arts and cultures of the various groups inhabiting the planet.  Becomes Samurai Jack.

He returns to finish what his father, and the gods started long ago. 

He fails. Aku opens the portal in time. The true suffering begins.

"I requested to intervene."

"I asked Odin, Ra, and Rama to let me act."

"They told me. 'Let the Samurai handle it.' "

  A divine meeting. A realm beyond space and time.

She had requested this meeting with them, and they had granted them that chance.

It was not going how it should have. 

"How is it that I am unable to dictate the fate of the planet I was given conscience by?"

Odin, his voice like the frigid winds of the North, spoke. “With all due respect, Dheghom—"

Ra, arms folded, picks up. "—Even if you are the Earth herself..."

Rama, perched in calm on Garuda, finishes the sentence.  "—you cannot directly interfere with the Samurai, and by extension, every mortal’s fate."

"Why not?"


She pursed her lips, crossing her arms.

"This is the world, from a tangible reality, that birthed me. I span its lifeblood. I am its breath and stone. Why may I not save it?"

Odin, Ra, Rama remain there. Saying nothing. Silent. Unmoving.

She breaks the silence, throwing caution to the cosmic winds on straining relations with them.

"You think yourselves wise. You fear the breaking of fate’s law more than you fear the demise of multiple worlds and realities"

"You would rather watch the planets rot than risk your own hands being dirtied by mercy."

The meeting ends in cold dismissal.

Dheghom lowers her head. Her shoulders tremble.

Three lights begin to phase in at the corner of her vision. White, golden, and blue flame.

Odin. Ra. Rama.

They have come. To bear witness. To judge.

Her ineptitude, incompetence, lack of self control. 

She does not look up.

"I don't want to hear it."

Chapter Text

In the ruins of the cosmic domain, formerly a vault of sacred memory, each a glimmer of preserved fate; the silence was shattered only by the yawning abyss overhead, its gaping maw twisting and laughing as if mocking the gods themselves.

The Earth Mother, symbol of a ravaged world, groaned as she hauled herself upright, her once-stately form barely held together. Her skin, once a canvas of continents wrapped in swirling clouds, now simmered with the molten scarring of disaster; magma veins, storm-wracked crevices, and oil-slick scars left by deforestation and decay.

Rama, calm yet cold, arms folded across his sixfold frame.
“Mmm.”

Odin hoisted his divine spear Gungnir, and surveyed the wreckage.

“Goodness…”

Ra dismounted his barque just as it phased away into white starlight.

“Dear… oh dear.”

Their three voices boom as one, thunder through a cracked sky:

“What have you done?”

Dheghom, clutching her brow as she steadies herself:

“I have not… done anything…”

Odin disembarked from Sleipnir. His footfalls echoed like falling mountains, shaking the foundation of the devastated plane. He gazed down at some of the domain’s fractured remains... what once held the river of time, now clogged and curdled, tapering into a sludge of black fate, crawling toward some unreachable vanishing point.

Ra simply remained silent, shaking his head. 

Rama glided to Dheghom’s side, his voice tight with disappointment.

“We had faith in you.”
“Faith in your ability to contain it.”

Dheghom didn’t attempt to  respond. Her pyroclastic left eye beat faintly, dripping ash as she diverted her gaze away from them.

Odin’s outfit clinked, metal gently chiming against the ravaged void as he inspected the divine cage, now a crumpled husk of twisted bars. 

“I see no trace of the Ultimate Evil..” 

“He…”
Dheghom could not bring herself to say the rest.

They all looked up.

The abyss above was alive, spiraling, the hole Aku ripped into reality still gaping and sneering.

“So this… is how this timeline begins its decline.” Rama mused, slight unease rattling his very divinity. 

“This is its legacy.” Ra crowed. 

Dheghom closed her eyes. Pain rippled across her, not just divine... but personal.

“The divine cage should have worked… I reinforced it. When that fragment fell—"

“Silence.”

All three cut her off.

Dheghom jerked back, fists clenching.
Had she not done enough…?
Had she not tried…?

“You dare—?”

Odin stepped forward, sheathing his spear, disbelief written on his face.

“We entrusted you with stewardship of this plane. You failed to uphold it.”

Ra’s ankh spun, leaning against a barely visible cosmic wall.

“You got careless.” 

Dheghom’s jaw tightened. Her oceans boiled behind her eyes.

“I asked to intervene. Before this.”

The anubis-headed god basked in the inverted glow of the domain, shaking his wrist back and forth.

“The Samurai and his partner defeated him. The problem had resolved itself.”

“They weren’t just partners,” she groaned, unsure why they would not comprehend her point.

“They were the hope that undid his rise. They mattered. And you ignored that.”

A flashback played in the abyss.
The Gods vs. The Black Mass.

The gods were locked in an arduous void battle. One fragment escaped—landing on Earth.
Triggered a mass extinction. Became a black forest bordering a prosperous kingdom. The Emperor had tried to destroy it with the weapons the trio had bestowed upon him–and failed. Gave it sentience. The demon was born. 

Dheghom’s voice trembled, barely containing her rage.
“You were the ones who failed first. You made him possible.”

“We accept partial responsibility… but you let him finish what we started.” Another projection manifested over Ra temporarily, as if to back him up.

Another flashback appeared, complementing the first abyssal projection.

Internally, she crumbled.
It was her.
Dheghom.
Unbubbling the black shard in her almost blissful curiosity. The high-pitched whine. The tendrils slithering. The shard calling to the fragment in the cage.

Ra’s tone was sharp, as if his beak was tearing through the flesh of the tension. 

“Still playing this game?”

“Nobody came to my aid!” Dheghom snaps. “I begged for support!”

Odin sighed, his armour clanging as he remounted Sleipnir. 

“Enough.”

Ra and Rama opened their palms. The portal shimmered, signaling it’s readiness to transport the divine envoys away from her domain. 

“The point is lost on her.” mumbled Ra. 

“Let fate decide the consequences now.” Rama rubbed the sides of his temples. 

In her last ditch effort to avoid being disgraced, Dheghom stepped forward.

“Wait. Don’t go. ”

The gods paused, turning once more.

“How can you abandon the one who came before you?”
“How can you leave me , a spirit born before stars, given sentience by the will of a thousand timelines, alone in this?”
Her voice rang out, desperate and yearning for understanding from fellow members of her pantheon.

Odin exhaled again, exasperation weaving itself into his words.

“Dear Dheghom… we know your heart aches for what birthed you.”

“We know you grieved the Samurai.” muttered Ra, matter of factly

Rama finished with the reason.

“But your power waned.”

The forgers of the dynasty’s sacred sword spoke to her one last time in unison.

“You thought curiosity and compassion could contain evil.
You were wrong.” 

With that, they vanished, the portal welcoming them in.
They would never meet again. 

Dheghom was left alone.

Her domain? Shattered. Her purpose… stripped. Her divinity? Declining.

She slumped to the cracked floor, gazing into the abyss above.

“How could they…?”
“How could they just… leave me?”

Ash falls like snow. Fragments of time litter the floor.

Silence reigned, save for the buzz of failure.

A distant forest. Time unknown. Location uncertain. A place untouched by sun, ruled by root and mist. The trees clawed at the sky like twisted hands. Fog coiled around the bark like mourning veils. No birds sang here. The only sound was the faint hum of silence grieving itself.

A rupture split the heavens.
A star, or something pretending to be one, screamed through the clouds like a burning prayer denied.

It hit.
First once, then again.

Two crashes, one thunderous, one deliberate. The ground convulsed from the force. The second crater rippled faintly with voidal energy.
Something had arrived.

From the smouldering earth, its blackened rim still hissing, a shape slithered upward. Not born, but rewoven.
Flesh knitted itself like a cursed memory reversing entropy.

Gnarled feet touched the soil. Bark-textured skin cracked into form. Elongated limbs twitched as if unused for eons.
Six horns jutted from its skull, bent, jagged, uneven. A monument to corruption and regrowth.

It straightened its back.

It breathed in.

Aku, reborn, smiled.

“Fresh… air.”

His voice creaked, like tectonic plates grinding under pressure. Slowly, experimentally, he flexed his new limbs, as if surprised they still remembered how to move.

He stepped forward.
Mud squelched between his toes, cold and thick. Thorns stabbed his scaly dark skin, then recoiled as if their disgust at what they had made contact with knew no bounds. He grinned wider. A grin not of joy, but of ownership.

He plucked a leaf from a low branch. It crumbled to ash in his palm.

Then, his beard and eyebrows caught fire. Not the flaming red-orange of old, but a calm, flickering blue . Ethereal. Cold.
A flame shaped not by wrath; but by restraint.

“Ha.”

He scanned the forest. The fog recoiled. Trees, ancient and twisted, trembled though no wind stirred.

“So this is my new existence…”

He exhaled, amused.

“Much appreciated, Earth Mother.”

A memory flashed.
Him, brutalising her in her own domain.
Her cracked shield. His fist shattering it.
The rain of memory shards as her screams echoed into the abyss.

Aku laughed . Hard.
His frame shook.

“BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

He doubled over.
Then stood again, serene.

“The world is my sandbox now.”

Something moved.

He stopped. His head turned toward the fog.

A figure stirred. Distant. Deliberate. Watching.

“Huh?”

He cupped a hand to his mouth like a child announcing himself:

“Heeeeeellooooooo?~ I come in peace~”

No answer.

But the shape stepped forward.

She emerged from the mist.
Tall, cloaked, armed.
Combat boots caked in blood and dirt. A white jacket slashed and stained. Dark pants soaked in fluids from unknown sources.

Her lips, cracked and red.
Her face, scuffed, scraped, hard.
Her body,  tired, but composed.
Her belt, lined with sickles , knives , guns.

She was panting. Heaving slightly. She had just come out of something—but not this.

Aku tilted his head. Recognition slowly curled into his grin.

“Ah… so we meet again.”

She furrowed her brow.

“We’ve met before?”

Her tone was incredulous. Wary. Her hand hovered over her holster.

To Aku, she looked like a painting nearly remembered. As if another version of her had once stood at the edge of a memory he’d devoured.

“I do not usually say things like this,” he said lightly, “but I am forever indebted to you.”

She flinched slightly. Her breath caught. Her spine straightened.

“Could… you at least tell me your name?”

She noticed the shards orbiting around his horns now; eight in total. Each flickering with a different cursed hue.
Crimson. Emerald. Sapphire. Amethyst. Icy Blue. Gold. Citrine. Rose.

“What are those?” she asked. “Are you… hostile?”

She drew her gun, adrenaline overriding her exhaustion. 

Aku chuckled softly and waved dismissively.

“Settle down, woman. That little thing wouldn’t hurt me even if you tried.”

She hesitated. But slowly, she lowered her weapon.

He stepped forward again, theatrically slow, like a stage actor basking in fog.

The shards danced gently behind him, trailing whispers of history. The air dropped, as if  pulled to the ground by the mere presence of a reborn demon. 

He stroked his chin, blue beard of flames recoiling from his spindly fingertips.

“They called me… Aku.”

She blinked. Her pupils contracted slightly. A flicker of recognition passed through her—but she couldn’t place it.

“Hm…?”

“Not familiar?”

He smiled. Not wide. But sharp, fangs protruding from black gums. He was an angler, and her, the fish.

“I can help with that… if you wish.”

Chapter Text

In the heart of the dreary woods, the world was silent except for the hush of fog weaving through gnarled trees and the distant, trembling hoot of an owl that knew better than to linger. Moonlight struggled through the dense canopy, pooling in pale, uncertain patches on the forest floor.

At the centre of it all, a woman knelt.

She was tall, towering, really, even hunched in a rare display of humility. Blood still streaked her jaw, her hands raw from battle and pilgrimage. The hem of her cape dragged in the muck, tangling with brittle twigs and shed leaves.

Before her stood a shape half-shadow, half-god, Aku in his new guise. His fangs flashed in the moonlight, his smile almost impossibly wide, as he surveyed his first worshipper.

"My loyal first follower, what would you request of me to do for you?"

Azumi did not look up, but her voice carried clear as cut glass.

"I ask of you… to change this world."

The demon cupped his chin, as if pondering the stars through the shroud of the trees’ canopies, though his eyes gleamed not with wonder, but calculation. A gust of wind whipped through, tossing Azumi’s matted black hair across her face.

"Yes. Yes, that I shall."

He crouched closer, the air bending with cold that stung like a slap. His question, when it came, was almost gentle.

"You, dear woman, are my first follower. What should I call you?"

Azumi’s answer was nearly a whisper, but her certainty filled the space between them.

"It doesn’t matter what you call me, strange being. My name is not relevant, for only my faith and my loyalty that I can offer to you matters."

Aku recoiled slightly, surprise flickering over his face. This did not happen before. Not in the erased timeline.
Someone was giving him faith.
Willingly .
Power, not taken by terror, but handed over in trust.

It was intoxicating. He'd come across a pot of 400-year old aged alcohol and was now choosing to indulge in it. 

He grinned, the tips of his fingers pressing together like a villainous prayer.

"A deal."

He stretched out his gnarly hand, veins black as oil, and as his palm opened, a blood-red shard coalesced, a memory of another timeline, humming with the weight of everything lost.

Azumi flinched, just for a second. Her eyes flicked to the shard, then to Aku. The fog around them thickened, as if holding its breath.

She reached forward, pressed her hand to the shard.

“WH…!”

Agony flooded her senses. Her body spasmed, memories and commands lancing through her mind, burning with voices and images not her own.
She fell to the floor, mud immediately caking her long, matted hair further to her back. Her legs twitched, the memory recovery sending more than shock through her nerves. 
Clutching her face, she could see it. Projections manifested in her mind's eye, mentally burning themselves into the folds of her brain. 

"Seven daughters to do your bidding, Master. They will succeed where so many others have failed..."
The cave's walls had been cold, but the spirits of all the cultswomen inside were burning with passion, with devotion... with faith. To the Aku of old. 
To the High Priestess, who had just birthed 7 human-demon hybrids. 


She'd beaten these young women. Thrown them into magic tar from young. Never had she let up on the pressure for them to kill the wandering old grizzled ronin. Beaten them, berated them, battered their wills to live, when they didn't do her bidding. 

She'd taken away food from them, stomped on them regularly. She knew they deserved it. Of course, if one failed to master all the weapons, develop resourcefulness and awareness, or even just broke momentarily from formation, for the short-tempered High Priestess, all grounds for severe repercussions, which she gladly did so. 

Her daughters would never see her without the mask. Behind it though, she was always smiling, always happy to dish out hell on her daughters for failing to do the Lord's bidding. 

"Teach this one a lesson!!" She'd watched, as the eldest, green eyed child of hers had bashed a cultsmember's head in, the other 6 preparing to do the same.

"Ashi, kill the Samurai!!!"

"You were always the weak one..." She raised her hand to slap Ashi... then with miraculous restraint, maybe Aku telling her not to do it, she'd stopped. 

"Destroy the Samurai, Ashi."

"Then you too will die." 
She'd said, witnessing the woman in the leaf dress protect that wretched, bearded samurai, meditating on the cliff, the corpses of armoured orcsmen around them. 

"How could you betray your family? He killed your sisters! And you let him live!"
She could not remember Ashi's response in these memories; only that Ashi's response must have been vitriolic as mother and daughter dueled with sword and ram horn respectively.

"We are forever grateful and ever in your service."
She'd prayed... before lunging at the Samurai once more. Then Ashi had stopped her, knee raised, leaf dress straining under the weight of battle.

“The samurai is evil. He must die.”

"NO!" She could hear the anguished cry of her disowned spawn. 
An arrow speared her torso. 

Her screech. 
No last words. 
Her vision fading as the floor of the dark cavern rushed towards her. 

It was like being reborn and erased at once, a lifetime condensed into moments of pain and devotion.

Azumi collapsed, gasping, fingers digging into the earth.

Aku simply watched, lip upturned, arms crossed over his torso. It’s medicine, he thought. It’s her reward for being so patient with the universe.


When she finally rose, her face was a mask of calm; the red glow in her irises cut through the fog like embers. She flexed her hands as if rediscovering her own power, then fell to one knee and pressed her left hand to her chest.

"Lord Aku… Thank you for your benevolence and guidance. I now know who I am, and who I should be."

Aku’s grin was pure satisfaction.
This was his new strategy.
Not rule by fear… rule by belief.
Rule via a symbiotic relationship, a mutually beneficial arrangement between him and the masses.

And she, this towering woman battered and bloodied, was the first domino.

The two turned away, Aku striding through the shadows, Azumi trailing close behind, her steps as sure as any prophet’s. Fog swallowed their silhouettes.

They were seeking to transcend even good and evil, to become something more; a gospel of ruin and devotion.

I never chose to be born this way.

Memory unspooled; a life defined by tension, survival, and the search for power. She was five, shuffling home on gravel, sliding open shoji doors with small, steady hands.

“Azumi-chan! How was your day~~”
“My day was good, mum.”
Her mother smiled, running a hand through Azumi’s silky hair. “That’s great to hear! Later I’ll have your favourite smoked unagi coming right up!”
Azumi nodded absently, dropping a satchel by the door.

But when the doors closed, the act faded.

“Adults only play happy for outsiders. When we’re alone, nothing is real.”

She slipped a small object from her sleeve.
A severed rat’s head. She grinned, packed it in with other bones and fur, and tied the bag of her personal stash tight. 

“Power is power.”

She hid the evidence, then played quietly with a kitten, letting it twist between her feet. Power could be kindness, or violence, or simply control.

Teenage Azumi was even taller—throwing men in street fights, breaking bones, winning status in the world’s forgotten alleys. She watched her father and mother threaten each other with weapons, at times landing slashes on each other. Yelling was common in the middle of the night, and if sleep didn’t catch her, then the reality of her situation would.
She watched her own father steal from his family, watched the law crumble, watched nature on screen tear prey apart.
She watched as he died, wound to the head, dropping feebly to the ground as his assailants stomped on his body.
She felt nothing. Just stood there blankly, sack of wheat in her hand, expecting to also be shot.
And they didn’t.
A fate worse than death. Cars drove by like nothing was amiss, nobody had the will to report anything, nobody even helped her. Iron and construction fumes drifted into her nostrils, poignant reminders of the lessons reality wanted to teach her.

“The strong survive. The weak fall.”

She was kicked out at fifteen for dishonour. Her mother had become an alcoholic and lost her farm to rival factions. One time, she had come home… only to be met with a glass shard to the face.

“She became an alcoholic, stumbling through the remains of our old family home.”

“Detachment is more of a virtue than affection, in this case.”

And so, she left.

She became a vagrant, drifted through ruins, went to lands distant yet near, far yet close to home. She learned a hundred ways to fight and kill. Melee styles. Taekwondo, hapkido, karate, wing chun. Assegai, kunai, cutlasses, zweihanders, dao. Projectile-based weapons; crossbows, slingshots, cannons. More modern ones, like laser blasters, electronic jamming equipment. Psychological warfare; blackmail, manipulation, clandestine data collection.

She defended strangers, robbed bandits, and wandered from city to wasteland. Vagrancy had settled in, becoming one with her being. 

Yet, she never had luck finding a place where trust was possible between her and other people. 

“There had to be an end goal. “

“I tried to understand society.”

“Especially after the breakdown of so-called law and order across the globe. But it seems as if I didn’t succeed.”

Maps changed hands. Deals were made-and sometimes struck down where disagreement happened. 

She found herself at the edge of “Zangai no Mori”, a forbidden wood in a distant land, where the legends said a demon had been slain by a lone samurai, who had experienced an entire lifetime in the blink of an eye.

Azumi, standing in the fog, felt only kinship as the demon’s legend filled her mind with the tantalising promises of power. 

The shape within the fog had six horns, ambition radiating from it like heat.  The hole he had come out from, swirling with darkness, to Azumi, was everything, despite it’s origins from the hollowing out of the Earth into nothing.

“We were both swirling with the need to be somebody.”

She should have been afraid, should have run.

But she didn’t.

“He gave me my life, my purpose, my identity. And for that, I will always be grateful to him. For his benevolent gesture towards somebody like me.”

Chapter Text

They stepped out of the woods; two shadows, one a fallen god, one all too human.
Azumi stalked behind Aku, still brushing splinters from her battered jacket, every movement taut, predatory. The air here was drier; weeds curled around her boots, grabbing at her like the hands of the dead.

Her shoelace snagged on a root.
Azumi’s jaw tensed, fingers twitching with the urge to rip the tree out by its heart.

“Cursed thing…”

She hissed, ready to snap.

Aku, glancing back, offered something she’d never seen before on his monstrous face: a tender smile .

“Aha. Show restraint, Azumi.”

He sauntered over, knelt with a nonchalance that could be mistaken for affection, and almost daintily, snipped the lace free with a single inky finger.
She stared, half-suspicious, half-struck.

The forest thinned. Ahead stretched an open plain, overrun by weeds and time, the skeletons of a once-great kingdom barely visible in the moonlight.
Minka huts had crumbled to dust; a thousand empty stalls rotted beneath ghostly mountains; the central castle’s bones sprawled like the ribcage of a fallen god.

Azumi’s eyes glowed with interest, a crimson flicker beneath the cold sky. Stiffening her gait, she rose up to her full height once again, an obelisk of authority against the sea of stars and forest. 

Aku paused, surveyed the ruins, then drew himself up, arms wide, voice booming as if performing for an audience of ghosts.

“Let me tell you a story, Azumi.”

“Loooong ago, in a distant land… I, Aku, unleashed an unspeakable evil upon the world!”

He spun, wild as a prophet in the pulpit.

“Then, a fooooolish samurai warrior, wielding a magic sword, stepped forth to oppose me!

“He was blessed by the heavens, who cast out my… progenitor for blasphemy.”

“I fell to earth. Across all versions of this place through space and time, it deemed me a blight upon this land. It was mortal folly that gave me sentience, a cursed arrow that woke me from my slumber.”

“I clashed with that emperor, that dynasty… and, after much struggle, was sealed in the earth.”

He whirled back, blue beard and brows flaring, voice cracking the silence.

“BUT I RETURNED!”

His shoulders slumped, his bombast deflating into something darker.

“He had a son. And that fool was as relentless as his father. I clawed my way back, but before the final blow, I tore open a portal in time... flinging the young prince into a future where my evil was law!”

He grew quiet.

“He vanquished me, in the end. Along with our daughter. That weak, pathetic child. They erased us from history.”

Azumi shook her head, expression unreadable.

“Go on.”

Aku’s eyes glimmered, as he bent one knee down, spreading his hands out. He almost looked like he was receiving a round of applause from an invisible audience. 

“Yet a fragment of me endured. And that is who you see before you.”

She didn’t flinch. Instead, she ticked points off on her fingers, pragmatic as ever.

“So you lost twice to that dynasty, you let your hubris get the better of you, and you are now the benefactor of my memories of that timeline? And now you’re weak?”

The demon-turned-deity let out a snort. A condescending half laugh, half scorn.

“What a mouth you have, woman.”

He floated till he was nose-to-nose with his new disciple, moonlight painting him monstrous and mythic against the backdrop of the ruins behind him.

“You judge this version by its cover. But this is only the beginning.”

Hovering close, Aku planted his face inches from hers, a mask of black tar, smirk as sharp as emeralds and blue flame, both beautiful and wrong.

Azumi’s heart stuttered; she braced for a blow, a curse, anything .

Aku only shrugged, sinking back to earth.

“This time, it’ll be different. You’re right. I am weak. Now. But not for long.”

She scoffed, folding her arms.

“So I made a deal for nothing?”

Aku’s scowl was brief. His head tilted, making a groaning noise, much like an old wooden door being pushed to it's limits.

“Comparative advantage, my dear, not absolute. Don’t mistake my present weakness for permanent defeat.”

She narrowed her eyes, but he only grinned.

“Here’s what I forgot about the mortal world… Hope. It was hope that undid me.

“All those rebels, the Scotsman, the Triseraquins, the archers, the Woolies—hell, even our own daughter. The hope she gave him nearly broke fate itself.

“So. Next time… if we were to make those daughters again, we’d do it differently.”

He gestured, voice low, dangerous.

“Make them resent each other, pit them against themselves—but let them choose. Free will is the secret weapon.”

Azumi shivered, the idea settling in her bones.

“My… Lord…”

Aku gazed upward, watching stars die and rebirth themselves in the cold sky.

“If you control fate, you control not just this universe—but all possible worlds. The Pantheon will have no choice but to let me in.”

He turned, eyes burning with a vision only he could see.

“That is how we win. Not by brute force. But by rewriting the very rules of existence.”

Azumi stood by his side, the red glow of her eyes reflecting the ruin—devoted, ambitious, ready.

And in that moment, the world seemed to hold its breath, sensing something ancient had begun again.

The Earth Mother lay there, her domain deteriorating slower than before.  Once lush riverbanks, flowing with consistent trickles of her timeline’s memories, now charred, black, razed to the ground. Bubbles of shards she had been tasked to watch over at one point that adorned the aether of her domain… now popped, as the coalesced memories fizzled out of the ground. Her skin, earthen and serene on her right, a canvas of destruction and decay on her left.

She sighed.

“I’m older than those three.. Odin, Ra and Rama.” She grabbed the bridge of her nose as she stood up, balance still feeling foreign to her feet.

“The disrespect they show to an elder.”

Dheghom’s head pounded, her throat heaving as she coughed.

“Gah…”

Black rocks, much like jagged obsidian landed in her right palm, shaped vaguely like crescents, daggers, and blades.

The ancient goddess’s brows furrowed.

“So. This is how it is.”

“The hypocrisy.”

“They had the most direct involvement and the most amount of faith placed into them by the Emperor and his son.”

“Odin, Ra and Rama would never tell the truth to them.”

Her skin bubbled with magma, tsunamis crashing into the coastlines as her entire right side rumbled, tremors rippling up and down multiple times across her body.

“If I was allowed by the forces above me to do this.”

“I would tell the Samurai that…”

Dheghom paused, scowl on her face as she sat cross legged on a smooth abyssal mound, trying to will the anger out of her already unstable being.

“...The divine are rarely ever honest.”

She exhaled.

“I have to recover.”

“Or try to.”

“I know that the Dark One. The former Shogun of Sorrows.”

“He will come for me… if I don’t recuperate in time.”

With that, Dheghom closed her eyes, head buried in her knees, thoughts draining from her mind for as long as she needed to, nestling herself within the desolation of her former sanctuary her only company for the foreseeable future.

Chapter Text

The moon hung low, pale and sickly, the heavens threatening to drop it on the damned, as Azumi and Aku walked through a road long devoured by weeds.

Ahead, through the mist, a few kilometres away from the ruins of a kingdom that was once the centre of trade of the region, lay the ruins of a village. Wooden beams sagged inward like broken ribs. Wind whistled through hollow eaves. Paper lanterns, tattered and colorless, swung limply from rotting posts, their faint clatter the only sound. The houses were abandoned, their interiors once vibrant with life and chatter, now reduced to termite-ridden structures on the verge of collapse. 

Azumi tugged her tattered cloak tighter around her shoulders. Her boots crunched against gravel and glass. She could smell it now.

Miasma, sweet, cloying, almost metallic.

The so-called god smirked, as his blue flames swayed gently in the mild, slightly chilly breeze.
“Hm. Another relic of the Samurai’s past life.”

Azumi raised an eyebrow.

“You speak of him as if he were still here.”

Aku chuckled darkly.

“His absence does not erase his shadow.”

They entered the village. The air grew colder. Somewhere in the fog, wood creaked—like a slow, deliberate step.

A shape unfurled from the mist, a woman’s silhouette, draped in torn silks that floated unnaturally, her hair cascading like ink. Her face was veiled, indistinct, but her presence carried weight. The miasma thickened around her like a second skin, wisps of mist seeming to spiral inward in fear at her presence. 

Aku folded his arms, a disinterested sigh escaping his green lips.
“Ah. An ikiryō. A soul anchored to its own jealousy and death.”

“And you wish me to kill it?” The tall woman said, hand stroking her chin, her cape's fabric strained by the suddenly strengthening winds. 

Aku’s grin was absolutely filled to the brim with enthusiasm.

“Consider it… a test.”

That mangled witch raised her head. Her voice was soft, distant, like it came from another room entirely, and her movements resembled that of a Bunraku puppet without strings. 

Janky, unnatural, ungraceful. Inhuman. 

“Leave… this place.”

Azumi’s voice was more befuddled than fearful. “Why so, silly witch?”

The witch instantly went from equally as disinterested in the charade, to irate.

“What did you just call me?”

Azumi crossed her arms, brushing her long wavy locks of hair out of her face.

“Silly witch. You have a problem with that?”

The witch instantly froze. Nobody had ever talked to her like that.

“My name is Rokujō. Leave. I rule this domain. I have jurisdiction over this place that you so trespassed.”

Azumi smirked, cracking her knuckles.

“Make me.”

Rokujō drew first blood. faster than Azumi expected.

She let out a grunt as something like a bright, irregularly shaped projectile hit her abdomen, her diaphragm contracting painfully with the impact.

Aku tilted his head slightly, expression fairly nonexistent. “Hm.”

Her knee dug into the gravel as she tried to steady herself, her vision doubling as she looked back at Rokujō.

The cursed yokai laughed, thumbing her crooked nose at Azumi.

“What funny things humans are.”


Her form split into three ghostly images that swept across the village square.

One lunged; Azumi sidestepped, grabbing a splintered plank from the ground and swinging hard enough to break the phantom in half. It dissipated into mist.

As Azumi stalked forward, plank in hand, the miasma thickened. Rokujō’s veiled face rippled, features warping… then shifting.

The bewitched yokai cackled, her fingers dancing with each other in pure mischief and schadenfreude.

“What the…?”

Her crimson eyes widened.

Azumi stood there, bolted to the ground, her knees suddenly feeling like 10 ton sacks of concrete.

She was not in a ruined village, but in a sunlit street. Wooden houses, slightly raised above the stony ground lined the streets, as maples, fir and sakura trees lined the edges of the street, a brilliant canvas of green with a healthy smattering of pink, showing the bliss of the floral bloom before her.

Children laughed nearby, tugging kites against a clear sky. A small, warm hand slipped into hers, when Azumi looked down, a bright-eyed girl grinned up at her, kimono breezily drifting around the figure.

A cherry blossom landed on her nose, tickling it as if baiting a sneeze from her.

“ Please come home,” the child said, tugging gently at her hand.
“Dinner’s waiting.”

Her breath caught. The sound of crackling hearth fires, the smell of grilled unagi—it all clawed at her memory, too real. For a moment, her fingers twitched, half-tempted to squeeze back.

Behind her, a man’s voice, low, warm, familiar. Humanlike, but not really. 

“Azumi… you don’t need to fight anymore.”

Her chest tightened. Her knuckles whitened on the plank.

Then a whisper cut through it all.

Aku’s voice, silken, steady, behind her:

“What do you see, Azumi?”

She blinked, her spine almost buckling from the weight of it all, and the vision flickered—the girl’s face melting like wax, her hand cold, clammy. The “man’s” voice cracked, distorting into an inhuman hiss.

The illusion shattered, and she was back in the miasma-choked square of the ruined village. The “child” was gone. In its place, Rokujō lunged, claws bared, her lips stretching unnaturally wide in a jagged grin.

Azumi roared, swinging the plank in a brutal arc that smashed across the witch’s face, wood splintering from the force.

Aku, softly, almost amused, only watched the carnage happening through the clouds of dust that were thrown up from the battlefield.

“Good. Tear the falsehoods apart.”

He dodged a stray rock, the sound of trees snapping behind him a reminder of the raw strength of the two fighters. Birds flapped upwards, eager to get to a safe distance away from more sudden disturbances. Animals went silent, the crickets stopped.

“Ha.”

The personification of benevolence clapped slowly, noting his new subordinate’s tenacity and perseverance, even in the face of such long odds.

The real Rokujō lunged, nails elongated into black talons, slashing for Azumi’s throat.
Azumi ducked low, sweeping her leg and kicking with a ferocity that snapped wood beneath her heel. Rokujō toppled back, shrieking, twisting unnaturally mid-air to land on all fours like a spider.

He knew he was her mentor in this world. Her saviour. Her everything.

His nails dug into his elbows, barely able to contain his glee at the bloodlust that he had egged her on to partake in.
To prove her worth, as The High Priestess… and the aide of the future he sought to build for himself.

“Use what’s around you, Azumi. The world is your weapon.”

Azumi snatched a rusted chain dangling from a collapsed awning, wrapping it once around her forearm. She lunged, swung wide, hooking it across Rokujō’s neck and yanking down hard, slamming her into the dirt.

The witch retaliated—her body splintering apart into ash and reforming behind Azumi, who spun and headbutted her full force, cracking skull against ghostly face. Rokujō hissed, staggering back.

“This ends now…” 

Without a second thought, the taller woman’s fist wrapped around a jagged roof tile.

“I don’t know how much power I hold now.”

“Neither do you.”

The tile, emblazoned with a vibrant furious aura embedded deep in Rokujō’s shoulder. Azumi’s accuracy had stunned her.

“AAARGH…”

The witch shrieked, lunging in desperation, only for Azumi to meet her with fists and boots, driving her down with savage, efficient strikes.

At last, Azumi wrapped the chain around Rokujō’s head, twisted, and snapped her neck with a sickening crunch .

“What… power…”

Rokujō choked, as she felt her body and soul fleeing from the mortal realm.

“I had never expected this.”

The miasma evaporated. Silence returned.

Azumi stood panting, cloak tattered, combat boots slick with grime and blood. Her crimson irises cut through the haze, a look that any other observer would have understood was the prey turning into predator. 

Aku stepped forward slowly, clapping once, twice, thrice. His beard flames danced lazily in the breeze, his towering form motionless otherwise.

His voice was silky, so was his gait as he descended from his position on the rocks.
“Dear Azumi.”

Azumi turned, chest heaving.

“…My lord.”

Aku extended a clawed hand. In his palm, a compact cylinder of pure void coalesced, twisting, reshaping, extending with a hiss of black energy.

“Here. Take it.”

Azumi stared, eyes wide, as it unfolded.

a tri-pointed naginata, its edges shimmering like sharpened obsidian. The stars twinkled brighter momentarily, and the wind rustled the trees behind a little harder, as if nature itself momentarily acknowledged her triumph.

“For me…?” 

The demon tilted his head, a sinister grin on his face, his neck creaking like that of rotted timber.

“It’s yours to bear now, my dear High Priestess.”

She gripped it with both hands. It felt heavy, perfectly heavy, balanced like it belonged only to her. The faint echo of her own heartbeat thundered in her ears.

Aku stepped closer, taloned hand resting lightly on her shoulder.

He grinned. He knew that she had become who she was always predestined to be.

“You fight as though the world owes you blood.”

“Good. Let that fury guide you.”

Azumi’s lips twisted into the faintest smile.

Under the moonlight, standing amid miasma-stained ruins, weapon in hand, Azumi finally looked the part: the First Follower, The High Priestess herself… reborn. 

Behind her, Aku towered, blue flames swaying in rhythm with the wind. Azumi, naginata in hand, silhouette sharp against the ruined village. Two figures at the dawn of a new empire.

Away from this nameless ruined village, nestled in a small valley, lay a gravesite, cold, forlorn and forgotten by most of the world.

Tombstones lined the small clearing, monuments to souls that had once passed and once inhabited the area that once flourished underneath the former dynasty’s rule.

Fragments of a soul, carried indiscriminately by the wind, landed on one particular grave, a site situated under a pale cherry blossom tree, trunk, branches and leaves as gaunt as snow.

A small sotoba, barely legible and half corroded with time, stood behind of one of the tombstones, a small, albino leaf fluttering gently onto it.



Jōren-in Myōke Shinja .
"Quiet Lotus Temple, Wondrous Flower, Faithful Woman"

Genryaku 2, 4th month, 7th day .

( Godai: Chi, Sui, Ka, Fū, Kū )
  "The Five Elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void"

Chapter Text

Mist clung low to the valley like a stubborn ghost, swallowing the crooked silhouette of Kisaragi Station. Its once-white timbers were now greyed with rot, the kanji on the signboard bleeding into the wood grain as if ashamed to still be here.

Azumi stepped lightly over a warped plank in the platform, her cloak drawing in around her like the wings of a bat. Aku followed, boots clicking on the weathered boards, eyes lazily tracking the fog-wrapped tracks that vanished into the mountains.

The diminished demon strolled back and forth on the platform, surveying the rotting benches and cracked glass:
“What an old, decrepit place…”

Azumi, the weary yet haughty towering hulk of a woman she was, glanced up at the faded sign. Her irises widened slightly as she stretched her arms out, feeling the tension will itself away from her muscles.

“Mhm. Kisaragi Station.”

Aku gave a low chuckle, warm blue flame flickering faintly at the edge of his beard.

“Hahaha… hm. And where does this charming line lead us?”

Azumi’s gaze wandered into the mist, voice dipping.

“To the western region. Cuts through mountain, steppe, plain.

“the gods themselves once blessed the labour to build it. It was humanity and divinity’s greatest collaboration.”

She sighed, the sound almost an ethereal spirit in the wind.

“Now… it’s not well maintained. Bandits, smugglers, pirates, they’ve all made it theirs.”

The screech of tired brakes echoed from the fog.

The train emerged like a dying beast, a bullet model long past its prime, paint faded, windows spiderwebbed with cracks, panels rattling in the wind. A handful of humans and animal hybrids disembarked without a word.

Azumi beckoned to him, keeping her voice low.
“Let’s go in, Lord Aku.”

The demon smiled.
“Sure.”

Hours later, the train hurtled through jagged valleys where the trees thinned into frozen grassland. The air grew sharper; mountains fell away to wide, endless steppe.

Inside, the light flickered, and every jolt of the track sent a metallic rattle through the damp, sagging seats. A smell of rust and mildew sat heavy over the cabin. Shadows of other passengers, lone, hunched shapes; kept to themselves, trying not to draw attention to and from each other. 

The devil mused dryly as he glanced at the cracked window, the barren landscape outside almost begging for inhabitants.

“So this is how you travel?”

“We don’t have a choice. It’s how we trade across the world.” was the response.
Azumi, normally a woman of great proportions, was now the smallest she had been in a while.

“And the journey?” Aku drawled, 

“A day… if we’re lucky. Longer if the train breaks down or is even raided or sabotaged.”

Azumi let out a sigh, clearing her matted mane of hair from her head.

“Speaking of that…”

Her eyebrows furrowed downward as a horde of burly figures, their strapped sandals pounding in perfect rhythm came through from another compartment of the rickety bullet train.

The train groaned as it rounded a curve — and a voice broke the stale air.

From the aisle ahead, six men loomed into view, their skin wind-burnt, armour dented, spears in hand. The lead one’s voice carried an oily swagger, his cuirass clanking, a sound that spelled no mercy for anyone unlucky enough to catch his wrath. 

“Oi. It’s Brotok. Leader of the Firagaux Spartans. Pay up.”

Another, darker-skinned but equally broad, looked Aku up and down.

“You. Six horns. Got anything?”


Aku shrugged, small puff of air leaving his nose. “No.”

Azumi shifted her boots, muscles tensing under her cloak.

“I don’t have bread.”

The spear tips began to glow faintly blue.

Aku’s gait straightened, his confidence growing.
“I can take them,” he thought.

“Don’t hurt her.” were the words that exited those arrogant green lips instead.

Brotok grimaced, raising his fist. 

“Dare resist?”

Another man from the back pushed forward, his voice harsh over the clatter of the train.

“If you don’t pay up, we’re gonna have to kill you!”

The other passengers,  a handful of humans, a fox-headed trader in fraying robes, a pair of mute, grey-furred hybrids, barely shifted in their seats.
No one reached for a weapon.
No one even whispered.
They just watched, eyes flicking between the gang and the strangers, as if this sort of shakedown was as common as the rattling of the tracks. The unspoken sentiment hung heavy: Better them than us.

Aku’s gaze swept lazily over the would-be killers, a hint of disenchantment in his voice. 

“This isn’t right.”

He leaned forward just slightly, voice dropping into something colder, quieter, more deliberate.

“You’re attacking others who haven’t laid a finger on you.”

Brotok’s jaw twitched, the veins in his neck bulging as if he’d just been spat on.

“You.”
“Come HERE.”

The man’s fist shot forward, a blur of muscle and rage.

Aku didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. He stood as though rooted to the floorboards, every line of his posture calm and unyielding.
The rushing wind outside whistled through a crack in the window, carrying the faint tang of frost into the cabin, yet Aku’s stance remained utterly unshaken, the faintest glimmer of green flame curling in his eyes.

The train lurched violently, almost lifting off the track. In the same breath, Brotok’s head snapped back with a wet crack. His jaw hung in two torn halves as he hit the floor of the locomotive, iron staining the already grimy foam carpets.

Aku exhaled slowly over his fist, the faint blue aura still fading from his knuckles.

“Who’s next?”

The Spartans faltered. Seven armed men, suddenly not so sure, began dragging Brotok’s twitching body away, muttering oaths under their breath.

Fighting the urge to lick his hands clean, he casually rubbed his fingertips against their adjacent palms, smiling without warmth. “How imbecilic of you all.” 

He slouched back into his seat as whispers spread through the cabin.

“Who is that…?”
“He just destroyed the Spartan king’s estranged son…”
“Don’t mess with a man’s wife, that’s for sure.”

Azumi bowed her head, her voice low.
She rubbed the sleeve of her white jacket, unsure of what to say at the spectacle for a moment.

“Thank you… Lord Aku.”

Aku’s gaze returned to the window, watching the steppe roll endlessly under the cold sky.

“Like I said, Azumi… this world will be reshaped — with you and I at its helm.”

Chapter Text

Metal shrieked against the rails, and with an unsteady jolt, the train lurched forward and vanished into the fog. Its fading silhouette left behind only a rattle in the earth and a lingering smell of oil and rust.

Azumi adjusted her cloak with the grace of a raven against the canvas of night, stepping onto the cracked platform first. She didn’t bother to look back.
“We’re here.”

Aku thumped a clawed finger against his nose, surveying the surroundings with clear distaste.
“Hm… is this any place in particular?”

The future priestess’s gaze of crimson swept over the abandoned station building, shutters torn loose, paint peeled until bare wood showed like exposed bone. She gave the faintest shrug.
“…No.”

They walked together past the station settlement. Scraggly humans glanced up with eyes hollow as dried wells, then quickly back down to their chores. Roofs sagged under the weight of neglect; hay-tile shingles drooped like broken feathers. At one house, a boy strained to haul a pail of water from a well, his arms quivering; at another, a woman in rags hammered a warped sword back into shape on a rock that passed for an anvil. Grain sacks were shouldered by bent backs, their carriers moving like ghosts repeating a tired ritual.

Aku let his fingers brush through the low branches of a beech tree as they left the settlement behind, his flames casting long shadows through the thinning wood.
“So… this is your world now.”

Azumi coughed once into her sleeve, tugging her white turtleneck free from a snagged branch before resettling it across her frame.
“Yes.”

“How unsightly,” Aku muttered, shaking his head.

She nodded without hesitation.
“So you understand, Lord Aku?”

A grin split his green lips.
“Of course I do.” He slowed his step, letting the silence stretch, then added with relish: “In fact… I don’t just understand this world.”

His eyes narrowed, the grin deepening.
“I pity it.”

Azumi only shrugged, her long hair falling over one shoulder.
“It is what it is, Lord Aku.”

The two pressed deeper into the forest, leaving the skeletal settlement behind. Pines rose taller here, the canopy breaking the sun into fractured beams of gold and shadow.

“Woah!” Aku stopped short, barely stopping himself from physically flinching.

Azumi was crouched low in the brush, her hand buried in the undergrowth. She pulled free with a swift tug, vines snapping, and from them, a rabbit squealed in terror, legs thrashing.
“Got you,” she muttered flatly, tucking the animal under her arm as it writhed.

The fire crackled low, its smoke curling upward in pale threads that vanished into the canopy. Azumi sat with her back against a broad pine, a strip of roasted rabbit meat clenched between her teeth. Grease ran down her knuckles as she tore another chunk away, chewing with sharp, deliberate bites.

Across from her, Aku perched on a boulder, hunched slightly forward, his clawed fingers drumming against the stone in a slow rhythm. His flames cast shifting light across his angular face, the shadow of his shape embracing hers. 

“Hm.”

Azumi licked her lips, crimson eyes flicking toward him. “Delicious,” she muttered, voice muffled around her food. “You should try.”

Aku stroked the blue beard of fire at his chin, lids heavy, the barest curve of a smile tugging at him.
“I will pass, thank you.”

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, the motion careless, then bent back over the rabbit. The crunch of bone snapping echoed between them as she split the carcass in two. Munch. Munch.

Aku’s gaze lingered longer than he meant. Ah well. Poor thing.

I almost feel empathy for it.

Once I’m more powerful… perhaps I should find ways to reduce such needless suffering.

Azumi’s head snapped up, hair wild around her face. A strip of meat still clung to her lip as she chewed. “You’re staring at—” chomp “—me…”

He raised both hands slowly, mock-surrender. “My apologies. That made you uncomfortable, didn’t it?”

The poor lagomorph’s skull clattered as she tossed it aside into the underbrush. Her expression softened strangely.
“No, actually. It’s like… for once in my life, I have a purpose.”

The words hung there, caught between them, until a distant yell tore through the silence. The unmistakable sound of scuffling — boots grinding gravel, blades clashing, a strangled cry.

Aku’s grin spread, his claws flexing with delight.
“Hear that, Azumi?”

She wiped her hands on her cloak, already rising. “Let’s go.”

The fire hissed as she stomped it flat with her boot. Together, they moved quickly through the trees, shadows darting between trunks until the canopy broke. Ahead, the cliff face rose jagged and stark, and at its base, a cave mouth yawned black.

Figures spilled across the clearing, bandits in battered armor, jeering and shoving at a huddled group of ragged villagers. The atmosphere was tense.

Aku rubbed his hands together like a merchant about to strike a bargain. His voice rolled low, playful.
Aku only rubbed his palms together, eyes gleaming.
“Right,” he said, voice low and silky. “This will be a good fight.”

One of the bandits turned at the sound, sneering at the tall woman and the six-horned silhouette beside her.
“Oi! You two, get lost. This isn’t your business.”

Azumi stepped forward, cloak trailing, the faint red glow of her eyes cutting through the gloom.
“It is now.”

The bandit’s sneer faltered for a second, but he puffed his chest.
“You’ll regret that, witch.”

His words were cut short when Azumi blurred into motion, her boot slamming into his knee with a sickening crack. He went down screaming, weapon clattering from his hand.

The clearing froze. Villagers gasped.

Aku laughed, low and pleased, his voice booming off the cliff walls.
“Good… good! Let them see what happens when they prey on the weak.”

The other bandits gritted their teeth, closing ranks around her. Spears lowered. Swords gleamed. Azumi stood in the middle of them all, a hulking monster of a woman. Her feet dug themselves into the soft soil as her fists tightened.

She tilted her head just enough to glance back at Aku.
“Permission?”

Aku’s smile stretched impossibly wide.
“Granted.”

Azumi wiped a crimson smear from her cheek with the back of her turtleneck sleeve, still breathing hard. “Hm.”

Aku looked down at the last of the bandits, crushing his bloodied face with his heel as if simply flattening a floorboard.
“All in a day’s work… BWAHAHAHAHA!”

“Braton suis!” A voice called from up the slope, a stocky, bearded villager with a patched wool coat came jogging forward, flanked by others in animal-hide cloaks. “Thank you, thank you!”

“No problem, humans,” Aku replied, brushing invisible dust from his sleeves as if he hadn’t just driven a man into a rock hard enough to snap his spine.

Another villager, younger, with plaited hair, cloak patchy and ragged, stepped closer, eyes wide. “What would you have us do, great one?”

Aku scratched his beard, gaze flicking to the cave mouth half-hidden in the snowdrift above them. “Hm…”

Both Aku and Azumi expected the cavern to have been cold, decrepit and useless, fit only for nematodes and shrimp to grovel in till the end of existence. 

Instead, the interior was vibrant, the vagrants clearly cognisant of their predicament, and as such, were making do with what they had.
The firelight painted the rough stone in amber hues, catching on trinkets hanging from the ceiling: braided wreaths, carved amulets, dried flowers, even a boar’s skull adorned with painted spirals.

“Oh wow,” Aku murmured, striding up to the largest alcove at the far wall.

A tall, weatherworn statue loomed there, chiselled in the image of a man with a triple-faced head and a sheaf of grain in one hand. Dust lay thick in its folds; its stone eyes were lifeless and blind.

“Yes,” said the bearded villager from earlier, following Aku’s gaze. “We have offered flowers, wreaths… even the corpses of our enemies to the statue of Lugus. Yet it has been long since he has visited.”

Aku nodded slowly, arms folding over his chest.

Another villager, voice trembling: “So you… our saviour… you must be Lugus.”

The words seemed to ripple through the gathered crowd. Men, women, and a pair of broad-antlered cervidfolk sank to their knees. The fire crackled. Aku’s shadow stretched up the wall, vast and curling like smoke, the air taking on a faint, unnatural glow — a soft, confident blue that painted every bowed head.

He stifled a laugh. “How amusing.”

“I am not your deity of old.”
His grin sharpened, voice thick with iron certainty.

“I’m a better solution.”

Chapter Text

They brought the offerings at dusk.

Bread still warm from ash-ovens. Knotted wreaths of dry grass and winter flowers. A handful of bent spearheads, laid down like teeth surrendered to a larger jaw. The villagers arranged everything in a crescent before Aku and Azumi, then knelt on the cold earth, heads bowed, breath fogging in little, frightened prayers.

The elder lifted his face. Lines like riverbeds cut his cheeks; his voice was hoarse with years and smoke.
“ You saved us. Are you… gods? Are you here to deliver us?”

Aku only smiled, blue flame licking lazily at his beard—and turned his head a fraction toward Azumi.

She stepped forward. Cloak sloughed off her shoulders; the tri-pointed naginata caught the last light like a shard of night. Her crimson eyes moved over the crowd—faces raw with hope and hunger—and her voice came low, steady.

“Not your Lugus. Not the god who let you rot.” She tipped her chin to Aku. “This is Lord Aku. Greater than what you prayed to. Greater than what ignored you.”

Murmurs rippled. A young man whispered, “Then… what must we do?”

Azumi did not blink. “Serve him. Not with empty rituals. With loyalty. With strength. You will not be answered with silence again.”

A tentative laugh broke somewhere in the back—half sob, half relief. Backs straightened. A woman pressed her palms together until her knuckles whitened. The elder bowed so low his forehead touched the dirt.

Aku’s smile widened. His shadow climbed the palisade like smoke.

The wind changed as night fell.

It came hard from the east, cold enough to fret the fire to a nervous hiss. Clouds shouldered across the moon; the trees began to speak in a dark, crowded tongue. Azumi felt the village breathe in, one long, collective inhale of animals who sense a storm.

The first sign was the lamplight bending.

Flames leaned toward the old cave on the ridge, as though tugged by a tide. The offerings’ shadows lengthened and braided together. Frost crept over the carved idol the villagers had hidden there... triple-faced, triple-eyed, a sheaf of stone grain cradled in its arm. and out of the frost, a figure stepped, haloed with a sickly, gilt light.

He wore a crown of withered laurels. His three faces were cracked. Chains of pale script, oaths etched in dead languages, wreathed his arms and dangled from his hands like strings for wayward marionettes.

“Faithless worms,” the god said, voice heavy as an old debt. “You swore in my name. And now you kneel to this shadow? This carrion?”

Villagers collapsed to their knees, some with a child's quick whimper. “L-Lord Lugus…”

Aku laughed. The sound rolled along the fence posts and came back larger.
“So the dog shows its ribs at last. Pathetic.”

“Pretender,” Lugus spat. “A shard of chaos wearing stolen flesh. You will not take what is mine.”

Azumi stepped between the god and the people. The naginata tilted, a spear of midnight.
“Your ‘mine’ starved them,” she said. “I will fight in his name. I’ll show them who deserves their faith.”

A hundred, hundred little contracts cinched the air.

Chains of light snapped from Lugus’s hands—fine as thread, strong as iron—wrapping Azumi’s forearms, ribs, throat. The runes along them pulsed and sank into skin like frostbite. Azumi’s breath hitched; her heel slid backward, gouging the dirt.

“You are bound by oath,” Lugus intoned. “Submit.”

Azumi bared her teeth. “I never swore to you.”

She wrenched her arms apart. Muscles bunched; cords stood out along her neck. The first chain cracked like ice on a river, then another, and another. She dropped low, spun, and swept the naginata’s haft across Lugus’s shins. The god staggered, more in outrage than pain, and the air bloomed with new bindings, crisscrossing like a spider’s temper.

Illusions surged with them. For a heartbeat the world shivered: the villagers vanished, replaced by a long table and parchment stacked like snowdrifts, every page bearing Azumi’s name beneath a tidy clause—Promise, Obligation, Forfeit—each lined neatly with blood.

She snarled, stepped into the hallucination, and broke its back with a forward drive of her shoulder. Paper burst into ash. She followed, headbutting through the remaining veil; stars flashed in her eyes and she welcomed them.

From the edge of the square, Aku’s voice slid like oil along steel.
“Yes. Tear the falsehoods apart. Show them you are mine.”

Lugus lifted his arm. Spectral chains coiled like serpents and lashed for her throat. Azumi raised the naginata—not dainty, not priestly, but like a brawler lifting a club—and met the bindings head-on. The tri-pronged blade bit, snagged, twisted, then wrenched sideways, dragging the god a half-step off balance. In that breath of stagger she was already moving, knee driving into his sternum, shaft snapping forward to crack across one of his faces with a sound like a temple bell shattering.

The crowd flinched; the god reeled, his laurels shedding a brace of gray leaves.

“Enough,” he hissed, and the ground itself signed against her, sigils rushing up through the dirt to lock her boots to earth. For a blink she froze mid-stride.

Azumi exhaled once. A long, feral breath.
Then she tore free, not neatly, not cleanly, but with an ugly, ripping sound that said no.

She pivoted. The naginata blurred as she swung.
One, two, three strokes.

The first took the chains at his wrist.

The second bit into the seam between two faces.

The third thrust was all intent and straight line, a spear of black glass driving clean through the god’s chest.

Lugus arched, eyes wide with insult. Light leaked from him in a fine golden mist. He looked down at the blade inside him, surprised by the speed at which Aku had overpowered him. 

“This is… not binding,” he whispered, incredulous.

Azumi leaned in, voice almost gentle. “It is now.”

She shoved. The prongs split him like parchment. His body came apart into sparks and drifting letters, the runes unspooling in the wind, the last of them fizzling against the palisade with the faint scent of rain on old ink. The idol in the cave cracked from crown to heel and slumped into a harmless pile of stone.

Silence held. Then the village exhaled.

The elder dropped to both hands, forehead pressing the dirt. Others followed—men, women, the cervidfolk with their antlers scraping the ground—until the square was a field of bowed backs.

“It is true,” the elder breathed. “Lugus is gone. And you… you are stronger. Lord Aku… forgive us.”

Aku stepped forward, clapping once, twice, savoring the echo.
“Forgive?” he said, almost amused. “No.” His smile bared the hint of a fang. “Serve.”

Azumi lifted the naginata. Blood—divine and otherwise—dried in a dark crescent along one prong. She turned, meeting the villagers’ eyes one by one.

“Your faith has a new master now,” she said. “One who answers.”

By midnight, the wreaths had been torn from the cave and carried to the fire. The idol’s fragments were hauled down and stacked into a ring to keep the wind from the flames. At Azumi’s nod, a few of the smiths bent red-hot scrap over stones until a simple sigil took shape: a six-horned silhouette scratched into iron, crude and undeniable. They fixed it over the arch to the square.

Children slept for the first time in months without waking at every gust. Women washed blood from the stones. Men stared at the stars like they could read a new calendar there.

Aku stood at the edge of it all, watching the work with an almost scholarly interest. “There,” he murmured, as if to himself. “Not demanded. Proven.”

Azumi joined him. Soot smudged her cheek; her breathing was even again. “This is how it spreads.”

He inclined his head. “Yes. The better solution.” A pause. “Tomorrow we move on.”

High above the mortal plane, beyond air and cloud, a realm woven deep into the fabric of the cosmos glowed faintly coral-red. It’s galactic patterns rippled outward, stars glinting like the scales of a sea beast across the void.

Three thrones of impossible age sat in a semicircle, overlooking the veil of reality. From here, time itself bent obediently to their sight.

Odin shifted in his seat, the horned cap low over his brow. His single blue eye narrowed as he recoiled Gungnir, its spearhead humming faintly from the rift below. “This cannot be good,” he muttered, voice like a mountain rolling on its own roots.

Ra stood beside his golden barque, tossing his ankh from hand to hand as the cosmic wind tugged at his striped nemes. His eyes flickered with a heat deeper than the sun. “He has figured it out.”

Rama, cool and collected on his lotus-adorned throne, bowed his head, two of his six hands pressed to his chin while the others rested against the great bow at his back.

“Is he preparing for retribution?”

“Yes,” Odin answered, heavy as stone.

Rama sighed, almost weary. “How… annoying.”

Ra tilted his head toward the rift, where on the other side, they could witness Aku’s six-horned form now standing, wreathed in mortal adoration.

“The paradox binds us. We may only aid mortals. Yet of course, in this form, the demon is immortal.”

“He is fundamentally a part of our realm.” 

“And now,” Rama added, eyes half-closed, “he pretends to be a god. The murder of Lugus is significant.”

A silence, then Odin stroked his thick beard, the white and gold folds of his cloak stirring with each rumble of breath. “Mmm…”

Ra’s voice cut, sharp as a falcon’s cry. “He breached her containment. Dheghom was too slow. This timeline is now infected… but in a way far worse than before.”

Together they watched through the rift: mortals in rags bowing low, foreheads pressed to the dirt before a horned shadow, a tall crimson-eyed woman standing beside him like judgment incarnate.

Odin’s jaw tensed up. “Perhaps we should not have shirked responsibility.”

“Mayhaps,” Rama said softly, “but the Earth Mother grew too curious. She failed to contain what she was meant to bury.”

Ra’s golden fingers drummed against the ankh.
“Could we at least measure how many timelines the Dark One has breached?”

Rama lifted his hand, forming a mudra; the rift shuddered, stabilizing into a lattice of branches, each representing a worldline.
“So far… only one. Had there been more, we would face a true crisis.”

“A relief,” Odin said. “For now.”

“Yet look closer,” Ra countered, gesturing.

The image sharpened: Aku’s beard and brows flared, not red, but a clear, searing blue. “That fire burns harder. Faster. Stronger than before.”

“This universe clearly registers that he is a better entity than his erased counterpart.” 

Odin’s boots shifted inward, as if bracing. “Dangerous.”

“Yet we cannot interfere,” Rama reminded, his tone calm but firm.

“He has not crossed any unspoken boundaries. Not yet.”

Ra tucked the ankh behind his arm, his eyes dimming like an eclipse, his biceps slackening as his hands dropped to his sides.

“If he pushes further… we must appeal to Fate itself. And pray it does not grant him an ascension.”

The three gods exchanged a final, silent nod. One by one, they opened their own rifts and departed, Odin into cold mist, Ra into ochre flame, Rama into shimmering, lotus-speckled light.

As their thrones stood empty, the coral-red air of the realm seemed less steady, as though a thread had been pulled loose. The fragile border between mortals and divinity trembled.
Snipped, perhaps, already too late to sew again.