Work Text:
“Fear for life I wear as a ring
To bask in your favor, I will kill the King
0.
Depending on how great the betrayal committed was, the deeper your statue would lie within the entrails of the cave, people used to say. Never seen has been the bottom, provisions would never suffice for the journey.
It is said that the bottom is Hell itself and that there burns the statue of Judas.
The demons and solitudes housed within it are mysteries with no known end.
Whether it holds abysses or seas.
The poor souls with curiosity beyond the common measure, for whom it was not enough to enjoy the story alongside sips of warm wine, lost themselves within the labyrinths marked with bones and widows. They vanished, brave after brave, in a futile expenditure of human daring. There they lay dead among cavernous guts. Walls filled with signs so contradictory they had already become useless.
Decades ago, when the territory was still a town with no qualities beyond an unexploited sea, it was known as “cave of the traitors”. No one ever knew where that name came from, the story always managed to tangle itself one generation further back, and another, and another. As if the narrative were meant to outlive the witnesses without names or faces, yet already with epitaphs. Stories older than the finest aged wine.
“I saw it, the very bottom of hell, I saw it years ago”, an old fisherman swore one night in his boat, crossing himself as a vice. “They were made of marble, like the angels in the capital’s cemetery. Hundreds of them, I saw them…”. The allegation of a worn mind.
His grandson stopped his hands, with the insolent mockery only ignorance permits. “Crazy old man, that cave is an entrance for the naive and an exit for absolutely no one. Don’t try to play the hero”. The old man fell silent.
He casted his line into the water, murmuring a prayer.
In the light of the present, the territory was not known for its myths. It had ceased to be only an island long ago. Proudly the most important port in the region could be read in the pages of local newspapers.
It had ceased to be a city in its own right, to become instead a mere nexus between destinations and trade.
And in a port town where the population renews itself so often, where depending on the map consulted it belongs to one place or another, and a native language scarcely remains, even curses were condemned to oblivion. The epic of this legend dissolved in the liquor of drunkards and the haste of merchant ships. Only a timeless image of stone and ill omens remained.
No one truly cared anymore what dead faces were carved into the mold-ridden depths, nor for what purpose.
1.
Satoru Gojo was born blessed by patience, the cruelest of all virtues. Coupled with this, to his hands was bound the talent for sculpture, carpentry, and creation tinged with the craft of a blacksmith.
His master always reminded him that wood, marble, and iron were materials that required flesh, and with it, one had to pay. Now, a little past his fourth decade, he had paid that debt almost in full.
Half of his left ring finger had been torn away in the sawmill, he wore various old burns from careless blowtorches, and a slight deafness in one ear from exposing himself since youth to the thunderous cutting tools. Along with several scars whose origin he did not remember, yet which reached arms, torso, and face alike. Almost like a declaration of self, like proof of the kind of life he had forged with his hands and his experience.
He was a capable man first and foremost, of course, no one in the village would entertain so far-fetched a doubt, but above all he was a Gojo, which is as if to say two times man.
Firstborn of this Gojo generation. Son of hunters came from the valleys of the East, where hearts do not beat at night and wolves have blue eyes.
On the island there was, popularly, a saying of the old tavern-keepers to entertain the usual drunkards. It said that those born in the town would make their lives aboard a ship, and that anyone who arrived by ship would end up having a child in the town.
But Satoru never had children, despite having arrived in his youth. In the present he was still an attractive man, in spite of his age, but mostly because of it.
At times he still thought of it, purely for the pleasure of legacy.
But deep down he was a man very aware of himself, and he was certain he would be a better teacher than a father. He would think to himself with his gaze fixed on his scarred hands, as if the idea of holding a baby in them were an absurdity itself. Instead of offspring he devoted himself to apprentices, three of them, orphaned youngsters whom he took under his wing for years. Satoru taught them to forge the pleasures of iron and the warmth of sculpture.
In the end he was as good a teacher as a father, without ever holding a baby.
“Better this way, Satoru”, his old father had said once. A man with hair as white as his own, but eyes black as the ether, sharp enough to catch even the slightest flutter of a pulse in his neck without fail. His features looked as though they had been hewn with the edge of an axe. “Better this way. The blood of the East can only be born strong in its own land, and your blood is already weak enough, Satoru”.
The glass he had been pouring for his father struck the table between them. Not out of anger, but rather to make a point.
He drew in a breath, he was never truly capable of losing his temper. “Is that so, Father?”, he answered. “Back to your old hunter’s musings again? I thought that when senility found you, you’d take to drink, not to dragging your own blood through the mud”. The man’s half-smile was almost grating, his blue eyes seemed even lighter when they filled with condescension and mockery.
His father turned his gaze toward the window, as if meeting Satoru’s eyes repulsed him.
“My blood runs in your veins, but it’s your own that’s flawed”, he said, his voice heavy with an old, lingering resentment. The kind that festers and poisons a man over a lifetime. “Hunters, every single one of us, have dark eyes. The East demands it, Satoru. Eyes meant for the hunt, to endure the scorching sun of the plains without ever looking away from the prey. A simple condition for survival. And you… you were not born to be a hunter. That is why we had to leave”.
“We didn’t have to—” he began with a low growl, the stubborn sound catching in his chest as he held back what he truly wanted to say. In the end, he let it go. There was no point in arguing against what the old man had already chosen to believe. He simply listened, weariness clear on his face, to the same words he had heard all his life.
That he was an anomaly.
And yes, he could understand the rigid, almost stubborn logic of old hunters like his father. He had grown up surrounded by it, after all.
For an elder from his homeland, that whole string of superstitions and hard-held beliefs was beyond question. And to a point, it made sense. Generation after generation, it had sustained a community that was strong and secure. Not necessarily as a direct result, but the connection was hard to deny.
And indeed, that community had its own peculiar traits.
Every one of them, without exception, had black eyes, men and women born of the East. It did not matter how their blood had mixed, as it so often had over generations, nor whether a child was conceived with someone of foreign features.
The children of hunters would have “eyes meant for the hunt”.
According to his father, eyes like Satoru’s belonged only to wolves. And for a lineage that wore those animals’ skins and prided on hunting them with nothing but skill, that was as far from a compliment as one could get.
Old man’s superstitions, perhaps, but to his father, a son like him reflected poorly on his own blood, on his own manhood, a shame no one had truly nurtured but the old man himself.
The illusion of an artificial flaw, perhaps even imagined, but plain enough for any veteran willing to lean on prejudice and gossip.
He never had more children, he did not have the gut to find out which of the two Gojos carried the truly “flawed” blood.
“Eyes like yours are meant to stand on the other side of the bow, or beneath the knife’s edge, Son”, he claimed, taking a drink. “You may be a wolf, but even wolves are nothing more than prey with longer fangs. Sooner or later, there will be an arrow aimed right between your eyes”.
Satoru only spat on the ground.
2.
From the wolves Satoru remembered nothing but the howl. Not because it was a memory particularly rooted within him, not because it had any special connection to the man he had become.
The answer was different, one which central axis focused on that characteristic element of the city that reminded all that traitors deserved more than death.
With long sips of foreign liquor, he let the night settle in. It would be difficult for Satoru to determine at what point in his life this small nightly ritual began. Was in that past summer when the insomnia worsened? Perhaps that winter when it snowed for the first and only time on the island? Or was it after?
He gave up trying to remember dates. Deep down, he would never ask himself anything that might remind him of the age he already bore. He let out a soft laugh at the thought.
As on every night, he settled beside the window, lights extinguished. The glow of a single candle vying for prominence with the soft glimmer of the moon within the room. Satoru dragged over a heavy stool, like those he once made for that tavern fond of unpolished ebony pieces.
He let himself drop carelessly onto the solid wood. One drink, two.
And then, as he poured a third, it happened, as it always did.
There, accompanied by the burn of alcohol, he would hear the howl of a grown wolf slipping out from the rocky jaws of the cave. Each time the swift, whistling wind from the bay swept into the cavern, it stirred that echo, one that felt deeply nostalgic to him, pulling an animal sound from a lifeless throat of stone.
And every time it happened, somehow, Satoru felt it was meant for him.
3.
It took only one night for the town to remember the curse that had lain forgotten for years beneath a veil of salt and routine. The reminder came simply, yet in a way never seen before.
Someone was coming out of the cave.
He carried himself like a nocturnal creature, framed in an old, quiet elegance. He walked along the beach with the confidence of the only man who could describe hell in detail. He was the midpoint between a faceless man and the peril of a mortar round.
He left the sand behind with a firm stride, like a wild crow. One so accustomed to the heights that to tread upon solid ground now felt an act of dominion. Of near sovereignty.
He reached the edge of the road.
From his broad shoulders hung a dark mantle, a shred of fabric bearing patterns that could only have belonged to another age, fastened with a brooch shaped like the pearlescent head of a white dragon with golden eyes. The cloak made no effort to conceal the black and gray garments that wrapped his body, a blend of intricate weaving and fine silk.
On anyone else, such attire would suggest nothing but mourning. Yet the stranger’s countenance hinted that something as banal as grief would, at the very least, seem irreverent to him.
His long, dense hair spilled down his back like an endless dark river, from the half-tied crown, slipping down into strands that fell over his eyes, making him look almost as young as he seemed to be. Seemed.
His pupils held a violet hue found only around a wound, the reflection of some manner of necrosis of the soul.
A color that this plane alone was not enough to fully comprehend.
A color that required a measure of suffering to exist at all.
The stranger looked upon the moon as one who recognizes himself in it.
4.
Had they possessed a voice, the dogs would have told everyone what they felt that night. They barked as if tearing their own vocal cords apart were a good idea. Tense, desperate, defensive, as though they sensed the onset of an earthquake, or simply the end of the world.
Every snout in the town caught the same odor in the air.
It was an impossibly anachronistic scent.
The white-haired man had already drank more than usual, the cave had fallen silent far too early tonight. He scoffed, if only to fill the silence that now pressed too heavily around him. One time, two times his foot struck the floor before giving up.
Hands marked by healed cuts sealed the bottle, as if in honor of his disappointment. But then, a sudden phrase brought the world to a halt.
“The square”.
It echoed through his mind with such might that he doubted it was his own.
The ebony stool struck the wall behind him as he rushed out.
5.
The square, at night. Footsteps from all directions, some passing through, others choosing to remain. A drunkard sat onto the cool ground to sober himself; a woman takes the shortcut toward the harbor to sell hot infusions; a man bearing the scars of labor pressed on in search of the unknown; and an extravagant dark-haired figure slaked his thirst at the fountain.
The water warm from the summer, ran down his chin to die at his neck, where his Adam’s apple stood out like a perfect coordinate. A satiated sigh.
Lit by the ochre glow of the streetlamps, he sat upon the fountain’s edge and, between his hands, stifled a daring smile, the kind worn by one who has overcome all things and has yet to believe it. Sardonic wit and adrenaline, subtly entwined.
He was free.
Even as every being upon the earth remains inexorably bound to a finite existence, to the promise of a grave bearing their name sooner or later, Suguru Geto stood as testament that even death knows its own limits. Or perhaps not, perhaps he was but a kind of Cain, to whom death would grant no gentle shelter: a wanderer upon the earth, with the world as his path, yet never his home.
Perhaps there are souls that ought not to be called souls at all, repelled equally by heaven and by hell. A dead point within existence.
The ordinariness of the nightlife around him was almost suffocating, an oppressive weight against the strangeness of that exact moment’s mere existence. Like invisible gunpowder streaking through the warm air, like a crystal-clear river whose waters run calm yet poisoned.
Some gazes lingered on him, brief, distant, fleeting, truly of no importance at all. Even so, they scratched at his mind with traces of something long past, enough to spark a dangerous fuse within him. Something that had already cost him dearly, longer ago than anyone present could encompass within an entire lifetime.
Death to the weak, punishment to the fool.
A loud, uneven breath snapped his attention aside. A tall man approached the fountain, white hair clinging to his face, drenched in sweat and gasping. Between shallow exhales, his blue eyes like wells of fresh water, darted about, watchful as a wild animal. He broke into a dry cough.
“You may drink from the fountain, sir”, the stranger offered, their gazes now meeting.
“I’m agitated, not deranged. Not yet, at least”, he replied with a hint of humor, still catching his breath. He looked him up and down with the kind of insolence only age affords. A foreigner, most likely. He steadied himself a little. “Besides, with all due respect, young man, that water looks like it tastes of dirt”.
“This water tastes like glory, sir”.
A snort. “Perhaps for someone who hasn’t had a drink in a long time”.
“Exactly”, the stranger replied, with a somewhat unsettling amusement.
The older man sat on the fountain carelessly, he did not answer at once. The young man seemed sufficiently sound of mind, and he was not one to contradict him. The local herb liquors wreaked far worse havoc on the body, and he drank them with pleasure.
The man was clearly not from there, that much was beyond doubt. Satoru knew everyone, and everyone knew Satoru.
Gojo looked at him over his shoulder, upright, with no attempt to hide it. A white eyebrow disappeared beneath his fringe in a sign of bewilderment. The man looked young, quite a lot younger than himself if asked. Presumably a couple of years past twenty-five.
It was not the clothing that left him somewhat disconcerted, no. After all, in a town like that, where most people were only passing through, eccentricities came and went like the salty waves.
There was something else.
Earrings? On a man? He tilted his head slightly, absorbed in his theorizing. Perhaps a jewel merchant… or the companion of one. Anything was possible.
And how could a man grow his hair like that? Down to mid-back, so thick and well kept, with a sheen like the oils of expensive herbalists, almost like the—
“Sir, you are staring”. A silent oh formed on Satoru’s lips, without the slightest remorse and without withdrawing his gaze in the least. Merely curious.
“Your hair looks like that of the courtesans the aristocrats bring from the capital, the ones who resemble freshly painted dolls”. He said it bluntly, just like that. The younger man smiled in an incredulous gesture, offering no reply, perhaps leaving a small margin for the other to explain himself or reconsider the comparison he had just made so lightly aloud.
He didn’t.
“And did you truly have no better comparison than a courtesan for a man you’ve just met, sir?”. He rose to stand before him, looking down with nothing but amusement in his eyes. “Is it that you do not usually measure your words, or are you simply well versed in matters of bedchamber women?”
“None of the sort, just a general observation”, he said, twirling a finger as if to lighten the remark. “Believe me, it was a reasonable comparison”. The stranger asked for no further explanation, and Satoru did not offer one.
With the curiosity proper to extraordinary events, Satoru took a dark lock between his scarred fingers, not without first articulating a silent “May I?” to the stranger, who nodded with trivial ease.
He examined the strands with a master’s eye, as though they were a rare material, like the knots in the wood he worked, as if searching for hidden patterns within them. Shades of black blending into one another, swallowing the light and yet returning a deceptive sheen. He thought of ropes made from wild horsehair, like those crafted in his homeland to tame the youngest horses.
How the beast tames the beast.
“But truly, gentleman-”, he cleared his throat, opting this time for a somewhat more formal address, “this level of care I have only seen in madams… or in the young ladies that accompany nobles who come to attend business. And, anyway, if that is not the case…”, he let the lock slip, adopting a feigned air of disinterest, “if I am mistaken in my assumption… are you, perhaps, a procurer then? I mean, it would make sense, there are plenty around here, and here you are, looking charming and expensive—”
“Oh, do you think I am charming.” It was not a question. The man offered an arrogant smirk to Satoru, who crossed his arms over his chest, like an anchor.
“I’m merely old enough for any youth like yours to seem worth a second look”, he mocked, a fleeting mischievousness crossing his face.
A crooked grimace, just a second in which nostalgia and resilience collided in the stranger’s features. “Yes, youth, of course...”, he replied, no longer looking at Satoru, the words seeming to follow a different conversation, one already past. From another time.
The man in black moved a couple steps away, thinning the other’s playful expression into one of curiosity. Only a moment later, that curiosity turned to unease.
Suddenly, the air grew heavy, and Satoru knew with absolute certainty that the coastal air never lied.
His gaze fixed on the stranger like a moth to a flame. Under the artificial light, his skin had a pearly sheen, almost mineral.
It also did not seem as though he was breathing at all.
Stunned, at the very least, he got to his feet and made him turn driven by absurdity. He seized the other’s wrist without warning.
It had an odd smoothness, the kind you do not see in skin or in fabric. It was a cold, compact one, one Satoru knew but could not place. He clenched his fist tighter, and the other showed no reaction beyond a faint laugh of mocking superiority.
The touch was smooth, but to Satoru it seemed like it should not be, that something was out of place.
6.
The drunk man was recovering, slowly getting back to his feet, the woman with the infusions was already arriving at the harbor, and the extravagant dark-haired was holding the scarred man’s face.
In a sudden, intrusive kiss Satoru recognized the icy taste of marble. Everything was starting to make sense. He was terrified by what stood before him.
He shoved at the other’s chest with both hands, realizing there was no heartbeat there. A switch flipped in his mind, setting off a chain of unhinged conclusions.
It made so little sense that it felt rational, so he spoke.
“Do you… come from the cursed cave?”. He breathed shallowly, blue pupils blown wide, drained of their color, his body tense in a stance of alert.
“I’ve never seen a sculptor afraid of a statue, Satoru”, he joked brazenly, adjusting the brooch on his chest.
How did he know that?
How did he know his name?
Satoru bristled, he was being mocked to his face. The irritation, in the span of a second, became more pressing than anything else. That creature knew of him. He felt watched, studied without his permission. Or worse, without understanding how, or since when.
And that was not good for the other. Oh, not good at all.
If he knew of him, he should already be aware that no one trifles with those who come from the East. A punch seemed like a fair reaction.
7.
“My betrayal was monumental, unrepeatable, far too vast to fit within that cave. I suppose from the very beginning I was destined not to remain in it”. That was the explanation he offered for his freedom. “The traitors were taken there; they remain at the bottom, cursed, frozen in stone”. His eyes burned with a resplendent, ancient fury. “It is like the most unrefined version of hell”.
They were talking now at the harbor. Satoru lightly clenched his right hand, still aching from the impact a moment earlier. That man had made him lose his temper, and he had not reacted as he should have. Which, it must be said, was quite an event for Satoru, who was the very embodiment of patience.
“To be honest, I cannot in any way picture what you’re telling me. I am a fully grown man, believing what you say would make me feel like any common madman”. He took the liberty of pressing lightly against the other’s carotid, to no avail. Nothing. “But if I did not believe what stands before me, I would be a perfect fool”.
“I understand. I stood right there myself far too many years ago. Curses, unreality, everything so absurd”, he exhaled a heavy sigh.
And it truly was absurd. For one of them, the world was being returned to him. It felt as though he had been walking since the day he was born, and now, at last, he had arrived somewhere. The other was suddenly finding strange cracks in the universe, suddenly fairy tales were true, suddenly long-dead legends were waking from their prolonged sleep.
Suddenly, such things as curses existed.
“Gentleman, what is your—?”
“Suguru Geto”, he interrupted, his voice deep, almost a solemn introspection. “Spare me the ‘gentleman’. You may call me simply Suguru, though it already feels to me almost like a posthumous name”. Satoru jabbed his shoulder with some force, he did not like being interrupted.
“And how do you know about me… Suguru?”, he asked, the unease that had been building in his skull finally surfacing.
Suguru raised his brows in a feigned gesture of obviousness. Then he laughed, as though mockery were the most fitting answer.
“Will everything from you be questions tonight, eh, Satoru?”. The blacksmith stood, deciding to cool his head. He did not know how to process, how to act. The situation was terribly strange and unsettling, yet the man did nothing but get under his skin in the worst way while he had real concerns.
The idea of another punch itched in his knuckles.
He turned, his nerves sky-high, this was not the calmest night of Satoru Gojo’s.
“Yes, they will be! Everything from me will be damned questions, because I have them, do you understand that? And I also think answering them would be the most courteous thing on your part, Suguru”. The name left his lips like a whip cracking against the ground, his blue eyes burned with fury amid the scars on his face.
His right boot struck the dock like lightning on a stormy day. “The dock you stand on right now, the fountain you drank from a moment ago, almost everything in this town will bear a trace of my name in its making. Because I am over forty years old, I have hands to be proud of, and the certainty that I have forged a life in which I have earned the respect I am given. I am no boy for you to toy with at your convenience. I deserve respect, whoever the hell you may be”.
In the blink of an eye, Suguru was face to face with him. He did not see him move, he could not react. A hand seized the back of his neck with alarming ease. The dense aura around him was as sudden as it was unmistakable.
“Oh, I know. Believe me, I am aware of it”.
With the white hair clenched in one fist, he pulled him back, while with his other hand, firm against the other’s chest, he forced the older man to step backward trying to put some distance between them.
“I know you are a respectable man. It is not my intention to cast doubt on something so evident. But I know other things…”. Satoru’s robust body could not prevail, for some reason beyond his strength or size, he simply could not.
He could not.
He could not
He could not.
Panic began to pump through him like acid.
“I also know that your blood is unlike any other. Even in the cave, I could smell it”. The fist in his hair tightened, but nothing more. The absence of violence, when everything in those bruised-hued eyes screamed danger, was even more unsettling. The expectation of a catastrophe, the evil forewarned.
Like the onset of an earthquake, or simply the end of the world.
His blue eyes reflected the moonlight in a portrait steeped in horror. A visceral fear his body tried to answer before his mind could fully grasp it, his animal brain in its purest form. All the blood rushed to his limbs, ready to flee, yet unable to. A cold sensation spread through his chest, as though his heart threatened to stop.
Because even now, Satoru was nothing more than prey with longer fangs.
Sooner or later, there will be an arrow aimed right between your eyes.
Suguru’s large hand loosened its grip, as if breaking a spell. A second, just one, but the older man could breathe. The adrenaline tasted like cold metal in his mouth. The stranger inhaled against his shoulder and languidly brushed the back of his head, almost with familiarity. Satoru tried to step forward, failing against the opposing strength.
“I know something else as well, Mr. Blacksmith”. The words fell against his shoulder like warm honey. “Something as interesting as it is absurd. You noticed me in a certain way. Oh, you did, you even listened to the cave like a damned lullaby”.
“I didn’t—”
“Then what were you doing looking for me in the square today, Mr. Blacksmith?”. Even with his face turned as it was, he could make out the stranger’s smile. The cold hands released him, and by reflex he stepped back in haste.
The dock was not enough beneath his feet, he had driven him to its very edge, like a trap. He fell into the salt water below the high platform. Suguru followed him with his eyes, watching him swim furiously toward the nearby shore.
He had made sure the man would keep his distance for a while. Without taking his necrotic gaze off him, he continued in a sepulchral tone.
“And for that, Satoru, for the respect I owe you as a man, I beg your forgiveness”.
He turned, moving back into the crowd gathered at the harbor, that look of loathing blooming once more across his features.
“I beg you to forgive me for having lied to you”.
“For having told you it was unrepeatable”.
Death to the weak, punishment to the fool.
8.
When the man, drenched in salt and fury, reached the shore, he launched himself back toward the dock.
He searched for him, but nothing of him remained.
Nothing but a dragon-shaped brooch on the ground and a coldness similar to marble in the body of every inhabitant of the town.