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Chapter Text

774 A.C Emperor Konin’s Reign, Nara period.

Etchu Province, Koshi Region

Ever since she was a child, Uraume’s mother insisted she painted her hair red, lest the Gojo clanhead think they were kin. It was an uncommon custom, yet still allowed within the few restrictions priestesses had when it came to how they presented themselves. Her mother was no different, hair secured under her kanzashi ,  a dutiful red line crossing her fringe was not an offense to the villagers but another trait to know her by. Uraume was often witness to her many talents, how she ensnared the senses of the men who frequented her, often seeking relief from the stones that weighed their shoulders or their chests, curses they could not see but Uraume nevertheless said hello before their mother would exorcise them. Afterwards, Uraume’s mother would have her leave the room in little steps, and Uraume would be left alone to decipher in her head whether the moans and sighs coming from across the shoji screen were actually another way humans could express pain. First the man would leave, always sidestepping Uraume like a stone in his way. By the time her mother resurfaced, cheeks fused with pink colour, Uraume would have fallen asleep, scrolls of jutsu upon her lap. Instead of waking her, her mother would first use the red crushed flower paste meant to be used as blush and once again reapply it to her white hair, only after she finished, would she address her daughter. 

“Uraume, what did I tell you about those scrolls?” the child wakes with a jolt, “Did the man see them?” 

“I only took them out once he left, he saw nothing.” Uraume replies, her speech still sleep-addled.

“Doesn’t matter,”her mother insists, "promise me you will be more careful.”

Uraume huffs at this, sitting up and frowning. 

“It is not as if they will understand anything: “domain”, “technique”, “cursed energy”…” she lists “, what is it to them non-sorcerers?”

And although her mother knows she is right, she still answers with:

“Perhaps not if they are common, but some higher ranking officials have already been instructed to look out for those words specifically.”

The kid raises a white brow.
“Including the man who just visited?”

“Most likely.”

Uraume feels betrayed, why would her mother allow herself to be so close to a man who actively prosecutes their kind?

“Mother said we were safe in Etchu.”

“They haven’t outlawed it, yet .” her mother is quick to emphasize, before dipping the brush back into the red paint, and gesturing  for Uraume to come closer. The paint, as always, is then spread across her hair, taking the form of single red strip.  Uraume observes this ritualistic process with foreboding fear, bears through the uncomfortable wetness in her hair and the pungent smell of the pigment tickling her nostrils

“Must I follow in your footsteps, mother?” she asks, unable to contain herself.

The woman, instead of reacting with anger, sighs and turns her chin to face her. Her fingers dig into the baby fat of her cheeks.

“You would be a fool not to, the Koshi’s treat us well.” with the other hand, she pointedly waves the brush around, red paint sprinkling the wooden boards of their shrine. “I am sure one of them will adore you in the future, and you will thank their protection just as well as I do.” Her mother’s circumstances are nothing short of peculiar, once a miko, now a priestess, she once earned the good-will of the chieftain, who allowed her to practice their unconventional shinto practices freely in exchange for warmth and discretion.

“But the governor hasn’t visited you since the last harvest.” Uraume points out. Her mother purses her lips. 

“His friends still come.”

Uraume is not convinced by this answer, she would rather die than be subjected to her mother’s fate, to be used and passed around by the hands of a man who claims to cherish her, to pretend in front of the Miko and the worshippers.

“I don’t want to be a woman.” Uraume announces rather loudly, while her mother is occupied with painting a red line across her hair, the brush stops abruptly at her ear. 

“Listen, child.” her mother starts carefully. “once your first blood comes you will join the miko , and whilst you tend to the shrine you will find yourself a man to fund his sanctuary, I won’t be young and beautiful for much longer, so unless you want to starve yourself to death during the winter, you will have to do what you must to survive…”

Uraume raises her gaze, her plum-coloured eyes pierce her mother’s in an unwavering stare.

“I don’t think I can starve like you mother, I don’t think I can feel cold.”she murmurs, the woman tenses upon hearing this. “Sometimes, I wish I had someone who could teach me the proper ways of sorcery…” she muses.

“Uraume-” her mother scorns, offended and worried someone would hear. Uraume keeps speaking to herself, barely given herself time to catch a breath.

“It doesn’t matter how many times I read the chapter on domains, I can’t figure out how to do it. Positive energy, negative energy, it all comes naturally to me, it’s in the head, not the gut, but to imbue my cursed energy and paint across a boundary I must erect? And still retain a sure-hit? This-” she says, lifting the abandoned scroll on the floor, “, only expands on how to construct lethal domains, but how does this lethality condition apply to my cursed technique? How I am supposed to paint something I have never seen?”

“Uraume you have only ever frozen water and food.” 

Uraume pays no mind to this reminder, and keeps on rambling.

“I should visit Hida, did you not once mention a library with uncopied jutsu scrolls is still standing there? Where exactly was-”

“Uraume!” The so-called clenches her eyes, shutting up immediately, the woman’s breathing quickens as she starts to admonish her. “You will stop this fruitless research at once! I introduced sorcery to you to honor our ancestry, not for you to drown in its bottomless waters. Are you not content already with what you have accomplished? Why on earth would you need a domain?”

“Because…”Uraume starts, “because I think it is quite a beautiful thing, to be able to conjure up one’s own vision of reality.”

“Well, you can explore sorcery all you like when this shrine falls apart, until then, you have duties, and these will come first. It is incredibly selfish for you to consider a future where your mother is left unattended in her old age. Or will you grow our food in your inhospitable domain, if it ever comes to shape?”

Uraume lowers her gaze, she feels guilt at the fact she does not care of what happens to her mother, she is not capable of empathizing with what she cannot understand, and her mother’s choices in life will always be an enigma to her.

“Don’t be sad… There are worse fates than to depend on somebody else, one day you will understand…When love is not available, devotion is its closest substitute.”

Uraume does not comprehend this feeling, but she knows she likes possessing things of her own, her favourite straw doll, the bound book made of washi she keeps under her futon where she practices her Kana , the copy of Confucius one of her half brothers gifted her before he left to study to China of all places, her little pond at the back of the sanctuary where she practices her cursed technique, which is always frozen. All the things she deems precious have something in common, that she would never let anybody else have them. Unlike her mother’s chosen, Uraume hopes her liege treasures her, for if she had a temple she truly thought sacred, she would allow no visitors. She would erect a partition, a screen, between her beloved and the world and she would let nobody else cross it. 

“I… I hope the object of my devotion is worthy then.”she settles with, when she replies to her mother. 

“Mhmm, I am sure they will be, sweet plum.” her mother reassures her, but makes no attempt to hide her own amusement at her naivety. Uraume does not care for her opinion, she never does.

“Uraume,”

“Yes, mother?”

“Just…”the woman starts, as if waging how to approach a certain subject “the library you speak of, they burnt it…” Uraume snaps her neck to look at her, disbelief and anger crossing her childlike features. “, after the empereror ascended the throne, you won’t find anything there but the husk of a forgotten world.”

Uraume answers with a meek, wet voice. 

“Then why did you mention it in the first place?” 

“Plum, I wasn’t talking about the library, I was talking about Ryomen Sukuna, the local deity.” her mother supplies. A buddhist local deity built the greatest shaman library?

“What of him?”she protests, barely registering the name, barely trying to remember its syllables and the way it is pronounced, where the vowels flex and dip.

“Well, he is said to have been the one to put the scrolls there in the first place…”

Before elaborating further, her mother soon leaves, to meet a friend, she says, and Uraume is left alone with her blurry reflection. She notes her mother did not finish the red line across her hair, must have forgotten to complete it during the conversation. Unlike all the other previous times her hair has been stained in red, this time the colour stops just above her ear, Uraume finds she likes how it looks on her. 

***

779 A.C Emperor Konin’s Reign, Nara period.

Etchu Province, Koshi Region

The current governor’s protection seems to be worthless, in the end, his influence limited once the Yamato manage to corrupt the elite of their province, and a new local governor is appointed directly by their hand. In a matter of months, the previous clan loses its influence and autonomy, stripped of their assets and replaced by a new kuni no miyatsuko, or that is how Uraume hears people call them. Amongst these possessions their shrine is included. It is transformed into a tasteless syncretic combination of shinto and buddhist temples, the miko are ousted, replaced by monks with shaved heads, left to seek refuge in other shrines or to wander their way into less official services. The sacred woods become tarnished with new buildings to foster various buddhist traditions: trees are cut, and their wood used to build a bell tower and a gate that rivals the former tori, sacred grass is shadowed forever by the construction of pagodas and halls, and the walls that once saw her grow up are painted with sutras and carvings unfamiliar to Uraume. Few traditional shinto shrines remain untouched, and even those are subjected to close inspection of the chamanistic practices conducted within: only rituals sanctioned by Jingikan (department of divinities) are permitted, any variation or inclusion of unconventional chamanistic practices is therefore condemned and duly punished, including the exorcism of curses. For the first time in her life, Uraume hears villagers and non-sorcerers whisper frightened about cursed energy and sorcerers, even as small curses lick their shins and weigh down their chests. She watches helplessly as their worlds collide, wondering what it once was like, when sorcerers and shamans were known and feared and worshipped across the whole empire, if they ever it would one day all end.

The active priestesses who knew them closely are still considerate not to reveal her mother’s talents, and in extension Uraume’s nature, but not enough to offer shelter within their shrines, fearing for their own survival. Casted out of her social stratum, her mother begs the former governor for funding. Despite her pleas, the man refuses to bring her to his new state, claiming he no longer has the power or the means to maintain as many courtesans. He is devastated as he says it, not for having to let go of her mother whose name he still mixes up with that of another but for having to give up his hold over Etchu. Thus, Uraume becomes another addition to the new governor’s many servants, and so does her mother, whose hair becomes less dense, her skin more coarse, and her overall complexion frail. She is no longer a respected priestess, just a prostitute whom Yamato’s soldiers often visit. She can no longer afford the red paint with which she used to hide the stark white of her tresses, and her paranoia intensifies.

“The Gojos will find us. The Gojos will find us.” she murmurs at night, Uraume accepts there and then her mother has gone off the deep end. Her sanity long broken after Koshi’s expected abandonment. Despite her fear of the Gojos, the woman forgets how to be a sorcerer, she no longer exorcises curses, not even when these cling to her own body, clamp their arms around her thighs, and constrict her breath at night. Uraume must do it for her. It is, in this times, when clans are supposed to take action and protect their kind, so Uraume inevitable asks herself: have the Gojos allowed this senseless persecution? Have the Zenins forced shamans back into the shadows? Have the Kamo weighed the sorcerer blood that stains the floor of evicted shrines?

Are the hands of three clans enough to hold the pieces of a crumbling world?

Then the first snow of the year arrives, and Uraume goes outside to celebrate, despite the foreign ache below her stomach. Her birthday coincides with the first snowfall of the year, for the very simple reason that her mother does not remember the date, only the harsh winter storm that killed autumn 15 years ago. 

She is practicing her technique outside when it happens, crouched in the floor as she is: a single, darkened drop of blood glides across the skin of her thigh and lands in the snow covered earth.Uraume’s eyes widen as she sees the red bloom rapidly amidst the white. 

Her knees hit the ground, her back arches forward and the next thing to permeate the snow is her breakfast, then her tears. Uraume has always taken pride in not crying like the other children, never affected by the fluctuations of her emotions. The very few times her eyes have succumbed to tears were as a baby when she could not sleep and once as a child when she first scraped her knees. Crying, to her, is a natural reaction she has always explained away by a physical ache, it is not something that is torn from the depths of her chest, it is not a stone lodged in her throat, and it certainly is not an ache that comes from a bruise she had ignored since the moment her mother explained the implications of being a woman. No. This pain is unfamiliar, it is a wound that cuts across the fabric of her identity, a truth she cannot swallow that she therefore must force out in the shape of sobs and retching.  

Uraume returns to their home with tear tracks in her eyes, and her mother immediately knows.

“You bled, didn’t you?”

She does not dignify her mother with an answer, she merely reaches for the strips of white cloth, and despite the snow storm brewing outside and the dying fire imbuing their quarters in cold temperatures, she undoes her kimono and wraps the cloth around her chest. She cuts the excess, and buries it in the place between her thighs, blood quickly soaking through it. 

“I will only say this once.” Uraume starts, slowly, carefully, paying close attention to the articulation of each word and the way her mother’s expression shifts and contorts with every sentence that leaves her mouth. “I refuse to be you. I will not become a woman even if my body betrays me. I will not subject myself to the Yamatos nor their governors not even the goddamned Gojos if they ever realize I exist. I will not be used by their men. I will work for them for as long as you live not because I need to, but because you would starve if not for the coin I will have to bring. I don’t need food to sustain myself mother, I don’t need warmth and I don’t need medicine, I could cut my arm and regrow it, I could walk naked in the snow, if I so wanted. I master a technique you wish you had ever been the possessor of, and once you are gone from this earth I will only need to rely upon it to live the life I please.”

Her mother’s pupils tremble, tears gather in her eyes, yet Uraume is not affected by them, she wraps her kosode with haste, and opens the door. The blizzard howls and strikes her cheeks, it makes Uraume’s heart sing with joy at the possibility of practicing her technique outside, unrestrictedly.

"You are a monster..." her mother whispers, just after the door is closed shut.

Over the next few days, after sourcing the right clothes and passing through many aptitude tests, Uraume begins to work at the kitchens. She likes to complete her tasks alone, where the elites and governor won’t find her, and tackles each recipe and meal with surprising passion. It is an unexpected development, and it brings a temporary truce between her and her mother, who is content as long as Uraume is able to sustain them both. It is perhaps the most at peace Uraume has ever felt, she is as fascinated by the process of fermenting soybean paste as much as she was once by the delicate calligraphy of her mother’s friends, she plates each dish as though these were a form of artistic expression, wraps the rice in nori with care, sears the fish in open flames that lick the sleeves of her kosode, and learns to stew mackerel with miso, wild greens and daikon. For someone who often contemplates the thought of forsaking food altogether, she starts to develop a taste, a natural instinct that resembles an extension of her cursed technique: whilst her ability to freeze and summon the harsh winter breath is considered a god-given right, Uraume’s penchant for cooking might as well be the sole non-divine talent she possesses. This peace, however, is quickly cut short.

One day, a sickly man knocks at their door, and although Uraume advises against it, her mother lets him in, and conducts the last transaction of her life. In a matter of days, she is overcome with fever, and Uraume’s ice cold fingers and cool breath do nothing to abate it. Uaume feels angry at her, frustrated at her idiocy. Uraume could recognize a dying man in his evident desperation to seek one last act of warmth when her mother could not, yet she still let them inside. She feels helpless as her mother’s life slowly dwindles, a blanket draped over her whole body.

“We don’t need a doctor,” the woman breathes, eyes fixed on the ceiling rafters, “don’t we Uraume? You could heal me…”

It is the first time her mother acknowledges what is Uraume’s most precious skill, an ability even the most accomplished sorcerers train years to even come close to wield. 

“Reversed Curse Technique,” Uraume starts, and her mother’s breath rattles at its explicit mention,”... is something one is only able to do to oneself. Your body might reject my cursed energy. I cannot help you mother.”

“I don’t believe you…” her mother whispers, turning to face her, lips chapped dry and eyes blotched red. “You have always wanted me gone…”

“I changed my mind.” Uraume declares, clenching her jaw. “You are not permitted to die,”

For the first time in their life, Uraume requests an audience with the Yamato trusted governor, she grovels at his feet, and pleads for her mother’s life. She extends her body, her loyalty, all in exchange for a doctor.

“It is the middle of winter,” the governor justifies from where he is sat, hidden behind the partition separating his world from hers. “and there is an epidemic. Doctors are highly demanded, and should attend cases with good prognosis. Your mother’s condition, as you described, is not promising… I am afraid I cannot fulfill your request, you are dismissed.”

The following days, her mother agonizes, Uraume keeps insisting for a doctor, requests the help of local practitioners, asks for where they are lodged, visits other neighbours, but these shut the door at mention of sickness, in fear of coming into contact with it. 

The day her mother dies, Uraume doesn’t cry, instead, she paints the woman’s hair red one last time, cleans the fever sweat of her cold skin, dresses her with the garments she used to wear when Uraume was nothing but a toddler.

Uraume buries her next to the pond, and places a wooden marker with the characters of her name carved on it. 

Silently, she stares at it for longer than one would think necessary. 

Uraume did not love her mother, love to her stems from admiration and that she always lacked. But she was her mother. She was hers . As was the pond, the doll, the kana book, and Confucious’s battered copy.  All of these things were hers.

Perhaps, because of that, Uraume had decided to preserve her body in ice, before returning her to the earth from which she came from . So that no creature, aside from her, will ever know her inside. 

When the snow begins to thaw, the locals rejoice, even the governor holds a small celebration, he invites courtesans and these play and dance and sing, Uraume is forced to help preparing the banquet, she is forced to listen to their laughter; she has to attend the horses of the visitors and reprimand the idle servants lest they also blame her for their inability to finish their tasks. Her village is closer to the mountains than it is to the sea, unlike other settlements across Etchu province. They are vulnerable towards snowfall in the winter and isolated from the liveliness of the coastal villages. Thus, spring is welcomed with open arms.

And Uraume is warm—so very warm—she sweats, suffocated, and discards her clothes once within the privacy of her home, she defrosts the pond to be able to bathe in it, she freezes her soup and licks it instead of laddling it, she picks the cherry blossoms petals that fall unto her hair and frosts them only to crush them in her fist.

Uraume grows hot with the need for vengeance. Against whom, she still hasn’t decided,

Apparently, she also grows to become beautiful. More often than not, the governor’s men request it be her the one to bring their meals, instead of the women typically tasked with it. Uraume complies, only because she underestimates the extent of their lust. She serves them, for a while, moves to different quarters, closer to the Governor’s palace, all at his behest, who she is sure doesn’t remember she once begged for her mother’s life. She sees him extend mercy and punishment, to all manner of folks, from those who request audiences to those who dare to offend him. 

“Uraume…” The governor says once during a meal, whilst he threads his fingers through her hair. “You know, I once heard that white hair is the highest symbol of divinity, a trait only a noble should bear. Tell me, Uraume, are you happy working at the kitchens?”

“I am, Kuni-no-miyatsuko-sama.” Uraume rushes to say.

With every passing day, the governor’s advances start to become less subtle,

“I never liked your mother, did not understand why my predecessor would fund her shrine despite her old age and lack of worshippers, but you are different, aren’t you, as a beautiful as a star…”

 One night, after having served many cups of sake and withstood uncountable brushes of hand, Uraume comes home to the sight of her own mother staring at her reflection. 

Shards of ice collide with the mirror, the only valuable possession she keeps. There is a crack across her face and it splits her into multiple pieces of who she once thought she was. 

You are a sorcerer.

She reminds herself.

Then why are you still here?

The one thing tying her to this village is her mother’s grave, the pond, two possessions now fused into one. Perhaps for that reason it is that she decides to pay her a visit the next morning. Uraume arrives shortly after dawn, she brings with her a small straw basket, in it a brush and an assortment of flowers—freshly cut from the neighbour´s garden. 

The calming sound of flowing water and birds chirping nearby beckons her as she approaches the resting site. She is still growing used to it, the pond—once a place she kept perpetually frozen—never fostered life, much less schools of carps, but it seems someone brought a few examples, uninvitedly. 

Uraume takes a turn, but when the familiar sight slides into her vision, her feet abruptly stop. The basket, lightweight, tumbles soundlessly onto the grass. 

There is a gaping hole where her mother’s body is supposed to be buried, earth is poorlessly scattered around it, and the wooden marker which used to bear her mother’s name is nowhere to be seen. 

The world falls silent around Uraume, who stares frozen at the disturbed grave. Her mind races with questions, punctuated with each step she takes to come closer.

“Who did this?” Uraume whispers to herself, her long, pale fingers brushing the earth.  “Who defiled her?!” she screams,to the silent kami who inhabit the woods, to the curses who lurk afraid by its entrance, unable to cross it. But of course, there is only one answer, the woods are located behind the governor’s state, any property in the vicinity must belong to those who work directly under him, including the very women he frequents, his children and his legal wife. The violator must be none other than the person who had the river fish be brought. Despite someone else’s clear claim over these territories, Uraume’s blood runs hot with wrath at the sheer ignorance and disrespect of the Yamato and their supporters. Who are they, to claim ownership over what is sacred? Who are they to disturb the resting place of woman they themselves killed in their neglect? Not only do they dig their claws upon the essence of village once free to practice its traditions and beliefs, but subjugate it and disrespect the very same gods that built it! How dare they! To come and strip their women of their ritualistic duties and freedoms! To take what was once Uraume’s, her previous home, her innocence, her mother! Who are they, to burn the jutsu scrolls and outlaw the art of sorcery! To upend the entirety of Nihon and force it to yield to one single will! To claim their ruler is god-sent while scorning the wisdom of sorcerers and curses alike, to forsake the truths of their thousand year old land for the trappings of foreign teachings! Slowly, Uraume rises from her crouched position, and as she does, the frost expands beyond her fingertips and crawls across the earth.

“They think they can take it all, don’t they?” Uraume murmurs, her voice hollow. Snow crunches under the soles of her wooden sandals as she ceremoniously steps towards the pond, “They take and they take,” she continues, watching as its water slowly starts to freeze, and the carp are caught mid-swim in their attempt to flee the stabbing cold. 

The pond freezes completely, and Uraume stares at its edge, at the grass waiting beyond it, and further on the trees, at the mountains peeking behind their crowns. There, beyond those sharpened peaks, awaits the province of Hida. Uraume decides, there and then, that’s where she will go. 

The sunlight, grazing the barks and cloves, returns back to the sky. The song of cicadas, ceaseless, peaceful and insulting, stops abruptly. The wind swirls, water drops are lifted from the ground, pulled down from the clouds, and frozen together into the wondrous shape of snowflakes. 

***

The governor’s men await by the entrance of the small palace, envoys are being sent to the capital, horses are being saddled. Servants rush frantically to the adjacent fields, desperate to salvage the crops before the snow renders them useless. From the lookout platform of his residence, the governor observes the chaos below. Uraume is able to pinpoint the exact moment he notices her entrance, for he raises his hand and quickly barks out an order to a soldier on his right, who soon disappears into the belly of the building, and then emerges from the ground entrance, joined by another. 

Uraume is taken by the elbows and rushed inside, they escort her and push her up the flight of stairs, just as another slides open the door to the governor’s reception room. 

“Uraume!” he sighs in relief upon seeing her up close. “I sent soldiers looking for you. I feared something terrible might have happened. Tell me, child, are you alright?” Uraume is undaunted as he approaches. The governor takes her hand from where it is hidden beneath the linen of her kosade to clasp it in his. Mistaking her silence for fear, the man adopts his best reassuring tone “The storm will soon pass. You need not be afraid. You can take shelter in the palace, with me, no need to go to the service quarters, there is not enough wood to warm you. I have never seen anything like this in my life. Least of all in the middle of summer.” Then, unexpectedly, or perhaps not, the governor wraps his arms around her, and presses her head to his shoulder. The surrounding guards shuffle their feet uncomfortably, staring at one another with questioning gazes hidden behind their bowl-shaped helmets. “Uraume, talk to me, please tell me you are fine, your silence is maddening…”

And so Uraume does. 

“You angered the Kami of the land, Kuni-no-miyatsuko-sama.” she says, in a deep, low voice, it is chillingly devoid of emotion. The hand brushing her hair stills cautiously.

“Uraume…” there is an uneasy smile planted on his face. “What do you mean by that…?”

“A burial mound was violated.” Is Uraume’s only response.

“Oh, that ?” the awkward laugh morphs into a chuckle, he seems endeared, as though Uraume were just a naive miko in need of comfort. “You needn’t concern yourself with that. I’ve received a missive from His Majesty, the Emperor, himself. The land has been reallocated as part of the ongoing reforms. I had no choice but to claim the woods to the north for the crown. As for the burial... it wasn’t even sanctioned, in fact, the body was preserved in ice! Can you believe it? Ice!  Truly an abominable and unnatural sight. Whoever is responsible has not only shown utter disrespect to imperial property, but is a dangerous practitioner of dark magic.” Uraume remains silent through his explanation, and the man, uncomfortable, keeps speaking to fill the silence. “Uraume… My sweet innocent star , the Kami won’t do anything to us.” The ugly, meaningless smile on his mouth starts to fade. “The storm will soon pass.”

Uraume, still, doesn’t speak, and the governor keeps growing more restless with the need for a response. Instead, she suffocates, the air grows stagnant with Uraume’s repressed cursed energy, a weak pulse that slowly starts to ascend, and ascend. It is the unrecognizable beat of raw power, pervading every surface. He notices, and in an attempt to soothe what he reads as mere panic, orders a standing guard to slide the doors to the outdoor platform open.

“Kuni-no-miyatsuko-sama.” interrupts one of the guards, his gaze set outdoors, earning a displeased glare from the governor. “It snows no more, and the ice is melting already.” 

Uraume holds her breath. Her blood is boiling. 

There is a joyful laugh, 

“No need to alert the emperor then!” exclaims the governor, as he too steps into the platform, turning his back on Uraume. Outside, servants and helpful bystanders are shoveling away the remnants of snow and dragging it out of the palace grounds. Despite the clear physical effort and sluggishness in their movements, they are all visibly relieved.  

The governor stares pleased, as though he had been the one to stop the snowfall and thaw the ice.

It would be so easy, to end their lives in a quick strike of ice, to turn every warm body into frozen shells, yet Uraume resists the temptation, she wants them to witness the consequence of their greed. She wants them to see their people starve.

“Uraume, sweet star, come watch!” the governor orders, barely looking backwards, his eyes still raking the grounds with pleased satisfaction. There is no response. “Uraume!” again, the girl does not come. When the governor finally turns to look inside the room they had been in earlier, the servant is nowhere to be seen. “Uraume?”

He steps into the room, confused, there is a trail of snow footprints leading back towards the descending stairs.

“Kuni-no-miyatsuko-sama!” a soldier standing outside screams.

“Governor!”

“Kuni-no-miyatsuko-sama!” all of the soldiers are calling the man’s title. The governor, alarmed, steps back into the towering platform. 

A scream rings out across the village, followed by another, and another. Mayhem breaks and the governor is unable to identify the source. Until, of course, his eyes land on a slowly moving figure,  her hair blends into the backdrop of the snow, and there is ice corrupting the ground where her feet strike…

“Uraume!” the governor bellows. But despite the loudness of his call the servant keeps on walking, away, closer and closer to the palace’s exit. Finally realizing Uraume won’t obey his order, he tilts his arm and points towards her retreating figure. “Guards, stop her!”

At the command, soldiers run to apprehend her, drawing their swords. 

Before they can even get within three feet of her body, three jagged shards of ice shoot from the ground and impale the men in a brutal strike. The icy, guttural  noise subdues every witness into silence.  Blood flows from their mouths and dyes the snow in incrementing red. Uraume stands at the center, unaffected by the gory sight. It takes only a few seconds for the screeches to start. Every person standing flees into the insides of the castle, some run towards the main gate, whose doors are creaking as soldiers rush to close them before Uraume can make an escape. The motion halts with a violent jerk, and it takes not much for everyone nearby to realize the mechanism that controls the gates is frozen solid, the intricate hinges jammed within unyielding ice, unable to operate properly. 

“Seize her! Arrest her for murder! She’s killed them, she’s killed my men! I’ll see you executed for this!” the governor exclaims, as he emerges from the depths of the building, ten men run flanking all his sides. “It was you! You are the dark wielder!” More numbers flood the grounds, armed with shields and swords, some scream out in rage, their voice cracking as they level their swords against Uraume, others freeze in fear, paralyzed at the cruel odds of facing her. But nothing manages to stop her. Ice formations sprout out from all angles and block all blows, arrows bounce off the crystalline walls, swords clash and bend irreparably, those who try to charge at her die in the attempt, ice piercing their throats, their guts, whilst the few who chose to stay back stare in awe and fear, honourless but alive. Uraume keeps walking with unhurried graze, despite the blood that rains on her hair and the screams ringing in her ears.  “She is a sorcerer! A curse-wielder! Don’t let her leave or I will kill you myself!”The governor’s voice shakes across the air.

 Despite this, Uraume crosses the threshold of the gates, her eyes fixated upon the hills and mountains waiting beyond. Horns are blaring, sending a warning to all nearby settlements. 

The governor screams out a final command. ”Bring me her head!”

Arrows fall everywhere around her, all the forces of the governor spill from the gates, they are too many to count. Uraume stops, and cuts the air with a slashing motion, enormous shards erupt from the ground and draw a fifty feet line between her and the pouring soldiers, who upon seeing it halt their charge. Some, however, still lose their balance and fall into the trap. The governor steps outside as well, Uraume is surprised by his foolishness. He stares in shock at the bloody remains of his soldiers, and then at Uraume herself, her hair bloody,

red . I could kill him, she wonders, but there wouldn’t be a point to that, she decides.

The temperature around her plummets, yet her blood still runs warm. Uraume wants to excise it—this hunger in her gut, this excess of energy gnawing at her insides, blackened since the moment of her birth. It has rotten beyond salvation. It must spread, it must consume—it demands to be unleashed upon the whole of Etchu.

“Closing the barrier fully integrates the embedded technique and enables its sure hit effect. Without that, the caster will only receive an improved cursed technique without a can't-miss attack. [15] ”

It dawns on her then, the answer she’d always sought. So evidently hidden within the nature of her cursed technique, and the lines of those scrolls.  

“Barriers forcibly enclosed using the shape of an outside environment also do not incorporate can't-miss attacks. [16] ”

“Of course…” she marvels, eyes widening with glee, lips curling up in joy. 

The breakthrough, however, momentarily weakens her defences, and that is apparently all that it takes: there is a sharp, almost metallic hiss in the air, Uraume’s ribcage explodes in excruciating pain. Looking down, the curse-user soon realizes there is an arrow lodged on her chest, piercing her right lung, or that is at least the information her brain supplies. Her pulse spikes up, and her eyes well up at the sight. Blood spills out from every tear left in its wake, and spreads both on the cloth of her already blood-stained kosode , and within the confines of her body. Her mind aches with the influx of information. Uraume carefully dislodges the arrow from her flesh, as she commands her energy to sew together the fabric of her lungs, sealing the vessels and arteries closed. She waits until it is fully healed to breathe again. 

The soldiers are no longer shooting arrows, instead, they stare slack-jawed, whether in awe or terror Uraume cannot tell, as she often confuses the two. It seems, for all the miracles she has performed since she revealed her technique, healing one-self is what ultimately defies all possibilities. 

“It cannot be…” the governor mumbles. Bows are being readied to strike another shot, but the governor stops it with a mere hand movement, as though giving up on her mortality. All it takes is a shot to the head … but only sorcerers know that. Uraume calmly waits for the pain to subside before trying to speak, this time addressing the governor.

“You wanted the Koshi land…” the pause is deafening and deliberate,

 she lets each syllable  loom over their heads. “Then you can have it: Echizen, Etchū, and Echigo, all of it…” 

Confusion contorts their expressions: they don’t understand the meaning laced in her words, the subtle condemnation hidden within this big concession. Not until Uraume’s hands start to rise, unbidden, with intentional symmetry and unmistakable precision.

Not until her fingers adopt a mirroring stance in front of her face,

Ryōiki Tenkai.「領域展開」

“Doman expansion: ...” Uraume chants.

The sky darkens unnaturally, the sun cowers behind swirling clouds of ice, the frost beneath her feet creeps outward, hungry and lethally fast,  towards the lush green of growing rice and golden fields of barley, towards the tender shoots of millet and trees of plums . The butterflies will freeze before they break away from the cocoons, and the petals will wither before they bloom into the world.

Fumetsu no Fuyu「不滅の冬」

“...Immortal Winter.”

Chapter Text

Uraume hasn’t eaten in four months, no fish can survive her domain, no vegetable can withstand the harsh cold of the winds she has summoned. Wild mushrooms are buried beneath piles of snow at the root of trees, birds have migrated elsewhere, and bunnies have burrowed their way inside the earth, hopelessly waiting for the winter to end. All traces of live, gone. And despite the effectiveness of her cursed technique, despite the constant healing that prolongs her life and holds her body together, Uraume feels less human with each and every day that passes, her soul more untethered from this whitened earth.

She still doesn’t grasp the intricacies of her domain, its very enactment deserves a verse upon the scrolls her mother bequeathed her. It is incomplete, it uses the terrain as a barrier, it expands wherever she goes. It is painted upon a tangible, physical canvas which would require an enormous quantity of energy, yet Uraume does not need  to do anything to sustain it. She hasn’t tried to make it disappear, however, she is too afraid of what it would do to her. 

Her hair grows long, too, to the point the very few unlucky wanderers who cross her way in the woods believe her to be a spectre, a woman’s ghost. Her mother’s, perhaps. 

Despite her isolation, rumours still reach her, when soldiers and wood-cutters walk beneath her favourite branches, and whisper amidst the glow of a torch of the hardships the people are suffering: famine, disease, river routes ruined by frozen waters and floating blocks of ice, mountain crosses scratched off the map, forcing merchants and traders to circumvent them.  Only the sea is spared, its mass too big for Uraume to consider freezing. Thus, fishing is the only trade that remains unhindered by her technique, but the produce soon becomes scarce and expensive; the region inevitably becomes dependent on the solidarity of its neighbours and the imperial capital not long after exhausting their own reserves of rice and vegetables. Uraume encounters and occupies several abandoned shrines on her way up the mountains, the conditions of the land they were built in too harsh for their keepers to reside in. There are some buddhist temples, too, but these are still occupied by monks covered in heavy garments. too stubborn to abandon their ascetic vows. Thus, the only warmth comes from the funeral pyres and the ashes of their incinerated hypothermic bodies. It never ceases to amaze her, how people become sick and rigid once trapped within endless fields of snow, whilst she is capable of sleeping peacefully blanketed by its soft white surface, like a bird upon a cloud. 

Uraume starts to refer to people as humans, too, as though she were not a human herself. And these, too, start to speculate about her, once she leaves the woods out of mere boredom. She travels to neighbouring villages, but never the one she grew up in. People shoot her sideways glances as she passes, but she pays them no mind. Her eyes set on the consequences of her actions. Children and croons, begging together on the foot of streets. It is not their bony collar bones that catches her attention, or their sunken cheeks, but the red blood-shot eyes and blank unfocused stare. Uraume, overcome with curiosity, addresses one of them for the first time in months:

“What happened to your eyes?” she asks, insensitively.

The child does not register her presence, and the croon responds

“It’s snow blindness.”

Oh, Uraume thinks, so snow can do that too, huh?

She debates with herself whether she should experiment with her technique and try to heal his vision. But the energy of non-sorcerers is volatile and unstable, it would surely reject her own. Besides, she does not want to scare the old croon, or be accused of another death, or worse: be revered for healing people.

Still, the child is apparently freezing, and although Uraume knows it will only do so much, she starts to undress in the middle of the street, shedding off her kosode. The child probably won’t even notice the faded bloodstains, anyway. 

“Here.” and the only thing that stops the croon from rejecting her small gift is the fact she cannot see Uraume’s state of undress. 

“Thank you, thank you…” she says, bowing in gratitude, and keeps doing so, even when Uraume has already marched her way up the street. The lack of clothing rapidly earns several judgemental glances, Uraume does not fault them: there is now only a thin piece of linen covering her skin, and it barely reaches her knees. 

“Shame on you.” one spits, and why does Uraume enjoy being belittled so? 

A group of respectable ladies, the only ones with healthy faces, lower their gazes and step as further away as they can.

“A slut in plain daylight…”

I could have been raped. Uraume wants to tell them. I could have sold my clothes for coin. I could have traded my coin for food, but you wouldn’t know, would you?

She soon gets to the street where the officials are issuing the rations. The peasantry lines up, and Uraume pretends to join only to peek at the food. Several straw baskets sit half-filled with radishes long past their freshness, alongside rapidly shrinking piles of rice, each portion dwindling as the line of people shortens.

Uraume is not as cruel as to take some and leave despite her not needing it at all,

but gods does she miss the process of cooking: the scent of stew wafting in the air, the warmth of flames and the bubbling of boiling soup.

A man, waiting behind her, glances over her shoulder, rakes her body with his gaze. 

“With tits as small as that, I doubt you will get any business today,”

She must put incredible effort into not laughing. She spares him a glance, registers his clothing, eyes lingering on his red clothes. 

A nobleman, then, who clearly did not join the line for his share of the food. 

Uraume channels the act her mother performed so many times. 

“With that sake stench, I doubt you will get any offers, either.” she replies, moving her hair to one side, exposing her neck.

“You are a feisty one, aren’t you?” he hears him whisper, his shaky breath brushing her nape. Uraume grows impatient, so she steps out of the line, crossing the main square and entering a small alley. Every turn she takes is accompanied by the sound of heavy footsteps that do not belong to her.  

Once she is within the discretion of tall stone walls and low tiled roofs, Uraume halts her walk. She turns to see the approaching man, who is now blatantly ogling every section of her uncovered skin now that they are both away from prying eyes.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she says, swinging her hips and stepping closer, “take your clothes off…”

The man, despite the freezing temperatures, rushes to undo the knots holding his garments together, shedding off several layers. The red quickly pools in the ground.

His arousal is evident beneath his breeches. 

“Mhm…” Uraume hums, crouching to pick up the clothes. “Thank you,”

“Hey” he protests, “My coin is not there, I will pay you later, are we cl-”

A shard of ice pierces his throat, silencing him, his eyes widen in terror and his mouth gurgles with cascading blood.

“I don’t want the coin,” Uraume clarifies, as her arms extend the garments to inspect them closely. She is pleased, even if these smell of earth and moist, but nothing a quick wash won’t fix. The man’s body staggers and collides with the wall, watching helplessly as she starts to put them on, “The red is quite convenient.” Smiling, Uraume lifts her gaze to meet a pair of glassy, empty eyes. “Is it not?”

***

782 A.C, somewhere in Koshi Region

One disadvantage of making it snow all year round is that Uraume’s domain blends with the actual winter, and the first snowfall of the year, once used as a marker for Uraume’s birth date, becomes meaningless and non-existent. She has, quite irresponsibly, lost track of time.

To the point that the next time she visits a village—she never visits twice—Uraume learns that another emperor has ascended the throne. When she asks the criers for the date, they scoff and reply:

“It’s the fifth month of Enryaku 1. Emperor Kanmu ascended on the 30th day of the fourth month. You should be ashamed of your ignorance.”

Too embarrassed to ask for the exact year, Uraume performs a small calculation in her head. She left the governor’s state in the summer of Ten'ō 1, two years after she got her first blood, half a year after her mother passed away. Uraume knows not a full year has passed since then. 

She doesn’t know what is more shocking–the fact that the she has maintained a domain for fucking nine months, the fact that she is seventeen and did not even realize, or the fact that they transcended into a new era and she did not even notice. 

The news thrust her into a spiral of thoughts: when she nearly decimated the governor’s state and left to the mountains, the objective had been first to escape and second to discover the secret teachings of old jujutsu awaiting in the province of Hida. What Uraume did not expect, however. was for the governor not to send a search party, despite the suffering of the peasantry, and Uraume being behind this endless winter. It seems too good for her to believe. The second, main reason for her hesitation and lapse in action, is the fact that where Uraume goes, winter follows. If Uraume were to travel to Hida, the province may or may not be plunged into a permanent winter, which brings forth the third reason: Uraume is not quite sure she can dispel her domain, or that she would survive if she did.

It is a deeply uncomfortable possibility: with every night that Uraume keeps on feeding from her endless energy reserve, the more sure she is the after-effects of her domain will clash with her reversed-curse technique, and that her organs will shut down immediately after making it disappear.

Thus, when she stumbles upon a hungry wild boar during her morning walk in the woods, Uraume is presented with a simple solution: to commit a heinous sin, and feed on meat, on animals, and marr her soul with more dried blood. Thus, she hunts the beast, using herself as bait, and freezes it to death. Uraume does not know the conservation process of meat nor how to cook it, nobody knows it, for it is a forbidden act. But she understands that no disease can survive exposure to ice and fire. She skins the animal with an ice knife, the smell is pungent and for a moment she considers stopping, but her hunger, her need to consume something, is greater than this fleeting doubt. 

She discards the organs, separates the meat from the bones, and cuts it into pieces. She freezes them all, and on the fourth day, decides to sear one of them on a flat piece of stone, its natural fat serving as grease. Once cooked evenly on all sides, Uraume takes one piece with two wooden chopsticks, and slowly brings it to her mouth. 

It is after several chews when the taste starts to register: rich, earthy, surprisingly sweet. The texture is dry and overcooked, as Uraume had preferred to stay on the side of caution. 

Perplexed, she stares at the sacrilegious dish, one single question running through her mind: Why is it that humans have convinced themselves they cannot eat this? 

The next time Uraume hunts an animal, it’s venison: she freezes it, sears it, and eats it, its texture tough but the flavour as rich as that of the wild boar. And soon there is no woodland-dwelling creature that Uraume is not willing to prepare and devour: rabbits, squirrel, wild birds. Some are better tasting than others, some harder to prepare, some more tender or saltier. This new nutritious diet seems to restore her energy reserves: the consumption of meat soon renews her reverse cursed technique, and even amplifies the reach of her domain. Not long after this breakthrough, Uraume decides to move her shelter to an abandoned shrine, for the purpose of keeping her cooking station clean. The site is surrounded by the branches of sakaki trees and cypress, which might as well be the only green spot left in the entire mountain.  

The rising smoke of her improvised coal hearth starts to attract some visitors, however.

“You…” A voice speaks from behind the bark of a tree, “You eat flesh ?”

Uraume bites into a piece, and savours the gamey texture of the last deer she killed. She is not at all preoccupied with this intrusion, whoever it is might already know the answer to his question. Thus, she doesn’t even turn her head, not until a twig breaks, and she sees the short silhouette of a boy.

His head is shaved, there are beads around his neck, he is also incredibly thin and under-clothed.

“And if I do?” Uraume says, standing up, her stature towering over his.

“It is forbidden.” he whines, stepping backwards, shaking his head, his eyes roam and land everywhere except for the bones lying on the stone from where Uraume just fed.

“And?”

“It is impure!”

Uraume raises a white brow. And her silence must unnerve him.

“The monks say it darkens the soul, destroys it!”

Uraume presses her lips together, she pities his susceptibleness. 

“Mhm…”she hums, then replies, utterly unbothered “Then mine is dark as ink.”

They boy staggers in search of a fitting response. Uraume rolls her eyes, and starts to pick up her self-made utensils, the boy watches horrified as she cuts the meat into even smaller pieces and stores it on different wooden boxes, burying them in snow. Uraume does not wish to shock him further, so she refrains from using her cursed technique as a freezing method. 

Despite the boy’s horror, he does not seem to want to leave, and Uraume can only figure out why:

“When was the last time you ate?” She questions him. 

“I…” he starts, clenching his fists. “That is none of your concern!”

Snow crunches under her feet as she steps towards him, this time paying close attention to the state of his health, or rather, his lack thereof. 

“Your masters would have you starve to death before they let you break a rule.” Uraume drawls.

“That is not true! The winter is to blame for our suffering!” he exclaims, angered at her candid words. “You are to blame! If you didn’t commit this heinous act perhaps the snow would thaw! You are-” He does not finish his sentence, for Uraume pushes him, and the boy falls on his bottom.

“Enough!”  She spits, grabbing his face, her long nails digging into the sunken apples of his cheeks. “The winter is not the one manipulating you into starvation, your masters, your admired monks are! You along with everyone else could go on living if you only accepted nature’s offer.” she hisses, and when the boy starts to cry, Uraume lets go of him, tired of their interaction. He soothes his cheeks, palms them, and says:

“Your hands are cold as ice.”

And Uraume, calm, replies:

“Yours will be too, when you die.”

The boy’s chin trembles, and Uraume stands up. Behind her, sobs and heaves erupt in chained cacophony,  fear and frustration spilling down his cheeks. She finds herself restless with the need to leave and end this senselessness. And so she decides to do, despite the many utensils and food still left in the shrine, and the red suikan she got from the villager being the only possession she carries. 

“Where are you going?” the boy’s voice breaks, as Uraume leaves the shrine and passes through the torii gate, whilst the boy steps around it.

“To Hida.” she answers, with unforeseen honesty. 

“What about the flesh?”

“You can have it.” she concedes, 

The boy’s footsteps halt in shock.

“I don’t want it.” It is not her he is trying to convince, but himself.

“Then it will rot when the warmth returns.”

Uraume continues walking, and after two long minutes of silence, turns to see if he's still following. All she finds, however,  are faceless barks.

Winter, it appears, is Uraume’s sole companion. It dutifully flanks her as she crosses the mountains and follows its rivers. 

She watches, guiltily, as these freeze at the wake of her steps. 

After four nights of travelling, Uraume arrives to the province's most famous temple and archive, and this one too, is painted under a coat of ice and snow when it receives her: Hida Kokubun-ji, a tall, ancient structure of simple and serene beauty, characterised by its weathered wooden beams and sweeping roofs that stand quietly among the lush greenery. Until then, her clothes—in spite of the questionable origin—have offered her a reprieve and a pass to most monastic buildings. This time, however, the monks look at her wearily, murmuring amongst each other and sharing discreet glances, Uraume is sure they are all noting down every aspect of her appearance, as though previously warned. Interesting.

“I would like to know where the largest collection of scrolls detailing Hida’s traditional rituals is located: specially concerning shinto practices, or any regional record that might shed light on this.” she asks the young scribe in charge of welcoming the archive’s visitors, who stares dumbfounded at Uraume. 

“Eto…” he swallows, lowers his gaze, , takes a breath, and then locks eyes again with her, cheeks red with embarrassment. “We might not have what you are looking for, not in the public section” Uraume stares insistently, unpleased with the answer “There might be some shrines or priestesses who could help you. Nevertheless, we do have various copies of the Nihonshoki, you will probably be enlightened by the many accounts of Hida contained within its pages.”

“ Nihonshoki ?” Uraume parrots. The scribe smiles politely before elaborating.

“Yes. You might as well know of it as Nihongi . We have got several copies, here, if you wish to read one.”

Uraume nods, it is a good starting point, considering she had never heard of it. The scribe gets up from his seat behind his desk and gestures for her to follow him down the archive’s lined shelves. Within each section Uraume finds several of his peers, far older, dipping their brushes on ink and writing on washi, their desks filled with unrolled scrolls and previously copied manuscripts, they all glare at her as she passes by. 

The scribe leads her to a shelf by the middle of the corridor, there he steps on a stool and reaches for a bound book fitted amongst twenty or so, all of which are categorized under the same label. 

“Here” he extends, Uraume reaches for it, hand clasping around the intricate binding, and turns it around. There, on the cover, reads the title and the publication date:

日本書紀

Emperor Genshō 7th year

(720 A.C)

“You will have to read it here, however, within the premises of the temple.” the scribe interrupts. Uraume frowns. 

“Why?”

“Well…” he laughs awkwardly. “Only students and designated individuals are allowed to borrow copies.”

“I understand.” Uraume acquiesces, not in the mood for violence, much less for a book she probably won’t understand without external advice. “Might you suggest any page to start with?”

“Mhmm…” The scribe scratches his shaved head, meditating his answer. “I would start on the 200th page.” Uraume blows air through her nose, “Don’t worry, there is always one of us here, we copy books even after dusk. You won’t need to leave. ”

“Then I guess I will stay in this aisle.”

“That would be for the better,” 

Uraume nods, turning to look back at the bound washi book, if only to stop looking at his overly friendly smile. 

For hours, and until the sun goes out, Uraume sits on the floor, in front of an empty desk, her knees resting on a pillow the scribe rather kindly offered to her. When the aisles become dark, another scribe passes her a candlelight, and Uraume keeps on reading despite not having found anything of substance in the past seven hours. She is about to give up entirely when she sees it, there, its characters inconspicuous, inked with the same precision as all the others, yet characteristically important for the very simple reason that Uraume instantly recognizes them. How could she not? Na- exorcism- is the first character her mother taught her to read. Uraume’s heart skips a beat, when she reads the character inscribed next to it, 宿, suku .

Sukuna (宿儺)

Her eyes blur with memories: laughter amongst the walls of shrines, long naps in the evening and drooling on jutsu scrolls;  her mother’s long, spindly fingers parting the tresses of her hair, the wetness of red paint on her temples.  The current wetness in her cheeks, too,  as she stares at that single name, so harmless, yet inexplicably important.

The library you speak of, they burnt it…

 Uraume, in the midst of darkened scroll shelves and in the glow of a candle, chokes on her own emotion, and starts to recite the words written on the page. “65th year.” she begins, in a soft, tremulous whisper, “In the province of Hida there was a man called Sukuna, who was so formed that on one trunk he had two faces. The faces were turned away from each other.” you won’t find anything there but the husk of a forgotten world. “The crowns met, and there was no nape of the neck. Each had hands and feet. There were knees, but no popliteal spaces or heels. He was strong and nimble. He carried swords on his right and on his left side, and used bow and arrow with all four hands at once.” Plum, I wasn’t talking about the library, I was talking about Ryomen Sukuna, the local deity. “On this account he was disobedient to the Imperial command, and took a pleasure in plundering the people.” Uraume’s voice breaks. Well he is said to have been the one to put the scrolls there in the first place…“Hereupon the Emperor sent Naniha-neko Take-furu-kuma, ancestor of the Omi of Wani,” finally pausing, her eyes land on the last two characters, and there is barely any breath left her in her when she reads them“... who put him to death.”

In Uraume’s vision, there is only the subtle sway of a dying candlelight, in it, she imagines the shape of someone she has never met.

At dawn, the young scribe returns from his rest, carrying several scrolls on his forearms. He staggers in surprise when he sees Uraume, curled into a ball at the foot of the shelves, the Nihongi lying open on the very page she left it. 

“You are still here.” he remarks, Uraume lifts her gaze, and abruptly stands up.

“Tell me all there is to know about Ryomen Sukuna.” she demands, the scribe’s eyebrows arch in surprise. 

“Oh, what would you like to know?”

“Everything.” Uraume breathes, desperate.

“I understand your dissatisfaction, that passage very briefly mentions him. I should definitely  not be saying this, but the Nihonshoki paints in a very bad light all the Empire’s enemies across time, including Ryomen Sukuna.” Then, he pauses, contemplating if he should explain further. His eyes rake the archive, perhaps looking out for the presence of other scribes or anyone who might disapprove of him telling her any of this. “If you want to learn more, follow me.” He turns around, walking discreetly towards the back storage room, where all the  supplies of washi and ink are kept, along with several discarded copies. Uraume follows all too eager. When she enters the small room, she finds him crouched on the floor, looking for a discarded scroll, concealed at the back of the bottommost shelf. “This is a discarded diary, of a monk who kept Senkoji temple.”

“Senkoji temple?” Uraume presses, getting in his space. The scribe, flustered, erupts into a string of barely connected explanations. 

“It’s the temple he founded, all records of his life were kept there.” the scribe extends the scroll upon the floor, and shows Uraume the diary entries. “We are not allowed to make copies of this anymore, orders from the imperial capital.” he clears his voice, and starts to read, in murmurs that barely reach Uraume’s ears. “ Supporters of the Yamato and the Wani clans will tell stories about the fall of Ryomen Sukuna, and these will prevail over all others: but know that it was not Naniha-neko Take-furu-kuma who defeated him, but his own twin brother, who sided with the Yamato and betrayed him. In mockery, they twisted the memory of our protector and fused the two into one single being. The twin brother, bound by a sacred oath, is said to have died soon after Sukuna-sama fell in battle. A binding pact—one they swore upon their childhood—was shattered. Despite this temple’s claims for a proper burial, the emperor decreed the two brothers would  be interred together in a coffer hidden away on the mountains of Hida, where their tribe originated from. I have dedicated my entire life to finding out where this resting place is, and I am certain it is no other than Kuraiyama (  位山  ), if only for the abnormal curse activity that lingers there. Some speak of the ancient Takayama Kamezuka Kofun, but it is merely a distraction; it is Kuraiyama where he is at, not the burial mound many think he rests at, for the latter is only a reposit for half of his brother’s torso and legs, as well as this one’s armour and weapons.” The scribe stops reading, glancing at Uraume. “This is one of the entries. I am going to read the other one now.” Uraume nods, heart hammering in her chest. “Given the present climate and the growing hostility toward shamanistic practices, this temple has no choice but to fully embrace Buddhist teachings as expounded in the Lotus Sutra. Any shaman seeking enlightenment here will find no trace of the old ways. The temple stands emptied of such knowledge.” Uraume’s lungs deflate with dread, no, it cannot be, there must be some way to get it all back, she thinks, as the scribe finishes reading. “ I have arranged for our protector’s writings to be preserved in his honorary archive, yet the most advanced teachings were either burned or seized upon his burial.”

It is the ease with which he reads it: cursed activity, shamans, binding pact ; the lack of hesitation, the understanding in his eyes, that finally pushes Uraume to voice aloud what she has been suspecting all the entire time.

“You are a sorcerer, aren’t you?” she says.

The scribe’s hands paralyze in fear, the scroll tumbles into the wooden boards.

“What makes you think that? It is a grave accusation.”

Uraume, sighing, crosses her arms, shutting the door to the storage room with her back.

“Your cursed energy is stable. And you read that with impeccable fluidity.”

He stammers in search for a response, but she keeps speaking. “It also explains why you are being so helpful. You are afraid. You know what I am. You know what I would have done to you and this temple if you had denied me access to the writings.”

“I…” he stutters, swallowing his fear. “I sensed it, yes. The cold, unwavering energy that follows you. But…”

“But what?”

“We were given a warning.”

“A warning ? By whom?” 

She remembers it, then, the way they'd all glared, the unwelcoming way in which she was received, why they had their youngest be the one to speak with her, why they allowed her to stay after closing hours. 

“Etchu’s envoys, and our own government. They said to expect and monitor an individual who will bring with them the winter, and to return this person to them, if we wanted to avoid being succumbed to the same fate as Etchu.”

It all fits into its place, Uraume realizes, why the governor had not sent men looking for her during the first months, waiting instead for her to eventually get tired of their land and go somewhere else, using the spread of the frost as a lead for her precise whereabouts. 

“They are coming, aren’t they?”she asks, though at this point, it is glaringly obvious. 

The young scribe nods, vowing his head in apology,

“The head archivist sent word of your sighting yesterday. They ordered me to keep you here for as long as I could, that’s why they didn't mind you staying the night. They are waiting for Etchu’s forces to get here, they mentioned something about a squad, the Desshi Pacification Squad? I can’t remember.”

“Then why would you show me this?”Uraume gestures towards the restricted manuscript. The scribe’s gaze snaps up to look at her.

“Believe it or not, I grew up here, surrounded by whispers and stories of what this province once was like, of Him ,  I have seen Senkoji and met the stuffy old men who keep it, I have trained on the foot of the mountain and challenged the curses that lurk there. I only became a monk to access all of this. And then you appear, and you are the strongest sorcerer I have laid my eyes on, and ask for my assistance, did you really think I wouldn’t genuinely try to help you?”

“The winter is my domain.” Uraume confesses, in a rushed whisper. 

The scribe, on the other hand, stares speechless, as though doubting his own hearing. Uraume waits for him to grasp what she is saying.

“ What ?” She is growing impatient, but if she wants him to tell her where that mountain is, she needs him to understand what’s at stake. The scribe erupts into chain of murmurs, his mouth going off with possibilities “But a domain is… Inherently difficult…It has been months…”

“I don’t know how to dispel it, I have been running on RCT for months now” This too, sends him reeling in shock, and Uraume decides better not to mention the flesh eating. “, but perhaps I can find something on his tomb, if they truly took his private notes, I assume those would still be there.” And although that paints a very clear picture of what Uraume seeks to do, it doesn’t even begin to cover the whole of it, no: Uraume wants to know all there is to know about this sorcerer, who once controlled and protected the entirety of Hida with an iron fist, who was betrayed by his own kin, who founded temples and libraries, whose memory was tarnished by the will of his enemies, her enemies. “Listen, You said so yourself. They are coming, but by now you should know they won’t be able to kill me. I won’t risk dispelling my domain under those circumstances, and the winter will continue, for as long as I am not free.” Upon that, the poor boy starts shaking, realizing what she is asking of him. “But if you take me to that mountain, to his tomb, I will be able to figure out a way to dispel it, safely, and the spring will return to our two provinces.”

“What if you don’t find anything? What then?”
“I will be high enough to still try to make the domain disappear, and I will take the risk of lowering my defences.” Uraume is honest about this. She has had enough, and the mountain is the safest place for her to try and heal in case she is surrounded. Yet, despite this reassurance, there is a sliver of doubt in the scribe’s eyes. And a sudden, fleeting, red. She has seen it before, in the eyes of good people.

“Do you realize how many people have died because of the prolonged winter?” he accuses

“What of it?” Uraume asks, tiredly.

“I am an archive keeper. I have seen all the burial records, especially those sent from Etchu, Echigo and Echizen.”

“Then which, pray tell, is the number of people I have killed?” Uraume, despite the slight discomfort it causes her to think of it, asks for him to voice it.

 “63,400 deaths.”

It should scare her, how numb she feels when she hears the staggering figure. 

“There is nothing you can do to take those lives back, just as there is nothing you can do to punish me for it.” Uraume argues, voice hollow, a storm waging in her chest. There is a weight lodged between her ribcage, “But you can stop those numbers from rising, if you take me to that mountain.”

“I would be helping a murderer.” he mumbles, tears in his eyes.

“You wouldn’t be helping me, you would be helping yourself, and all sorcerers. Make your choice, boy, we don’t have much time.”

In spite of the urgency, and the pressing need to leave, Uraume allows him mull over his decision. It must not be easy, she reflects, to have one’s own hands be so inextricably tied by one's own morals.

“I… I will only take you halfway there, and tell you where I think his hallows are, once the area is within clear view. Is that… is that enough for you?”

Uraume’s lips curl upwards.

“Deal.”

***

It takes them four hours to reach the site, for Uraume this is more an exercise in patience than in physical effort. They ascend the mountain with ease, though they have to cut their way in between skeletal branches. Indeed they follow a pre-existing trail, but this one has been so engulfed by nature it barely serves as a path. The snow, which Uraume caused, might have once been an impediment if it weren’t for the fact Uraume had only just arrived at the province. Eventually, they reach a clear, which looks upon the whole mountain range, a deep expanse of jade and green, now blanketed in snow. 

“Why have you taken me to an abandoned shrine?” Uraume’s voice is etched in patience as she passes through a crumbling Torii gate, the shrine is humble and unkept, unquestionably old and unremarkable. 

Suketada, whose name Uraume has bothered to learn, flinches but presses on:

“It’s Minashi Shrine, (水無神社), I used to practice here. I believe the hallows are located in a cave further up the mountain, this is the closest I could take you…”  The scribe turns to look at Uraume, whose eyes are still raking the place with evident displeasure. “Listen, I am sorry, but the climb is too high, and you can sense the cursed energy, can you not?”

Uraume, despite her frustration with the boy, exhales sharply, centering her senses into the cursed energy surrounding them.

The harsh winter howls. It rattles the prayer bells, though these have long ceased to call upon what is holy. There is indeed an ancient, dormant malice, it is cursed, yes, but it is also far more than that. It is a corroding, suffocating pressure in the air, a deafening sound at the back of her ears. In it she can hear the wails of women, the clash of swords, the cutting of flesh into several pieces and the rush of powerful blood, the greedy laughter of vengeful men. 

It is a calling, and Uraume can feel it, she can feel its four hands , one pressing on her shoulder, one wrapped around her chest. One constricting her breath, and the other lifting her head, guiding her vision towards…

She sees it, then: a small black spot, visible only for the fact it resembles a drop of ink amongst the white of a fully snowed rock formation. 

Her gaze shifts to Suketada, who unknowingly stands waiting for her to part, or to at least say something. Does he know? She asks herself. Does he know that that is not just a tomb?

“You can leave, I thank your help.” Uraume murmurs. 

The boy, confused by her sudden acquiescence, merely nods, shrinking back. 

Uraume decides to go alone, because if her suspicións are correct, he will do anything to stop her once he realizes.

Decidedly, Uraume starts her way towards the back of the shrine, where the mountain keeps growing, where the path to the cave must be. Her feet step on moss and climb up the stone steps, and these are soon covered in frost. The bells rattle with fury, but this time there is no wind. 

“Wait! I didn’t tell you where the cave was!”

“I know where it is, return if you want!”Uraume howls without turning. The path beyond the shrine has been fully consumed by thick undergrowth, frost covered moss carpets the ground in thick patches, and branches claw towards the heavens. Some she must cut away to advance, others she grips, using them to climb the jagged rocks. Uraume, frustrated, starts to summon ice beneath her feet, hoping the formation will lift her up the mountainside. But its structure is weak—a side effect of her prolonged domain—and she is barely halfway up when it shatters, and her body lands unsteady, heaving. 

The cursed energy, his cursed energy, still thrums in the mountain like an unyielding pulse, steady and relentless, waiting, whilst hers fades and flickers with exhaustion.  The air keeps growing thinner, but Uraume does not cease her climbing, as she looks for breath amongst snowflakes, her hands scraping against the sharpness of rocks, pale skin splitting with blood. 

At last, her fingers find purchase on a protruding rock at the mouth of the cave. With great effort, Uraume lifts her whole body, and collapses onto its wet cold floor, heaving and panting in the dark, her blood staining the stone. 

Its inside is fully shrouded in darkness. In order to see, Uraume produces a light-emitting crystal, one that encapsulates her cursed energy, it emits a dim, eerie glow, but it is enough for her to inspect the inside of the cave. 

The air is static, it is the first thing she notes. The dust it carries sitting unmoving. Uraume realizes it probably hasn’t been disturbed in centuries.

The walls of the cave are littered with carvings and pictoric messages, most of these detailing a battle. Others feature a birth, a woman’s stomach cut open, and a two faced baby resting on her lap, on its face a malicious smile that curls up towards a set of four red eyes. Uraume quickly recognizes it for what it is: the tale of Ryomen Sukuna, the story the Yamato contrived, staining the cave walls with dried and flaky paint. Nowhere is there a single mention of archaic shamanistic practices, nor of what Uraume is searching for. 

Despite the jagged stalactites that frame the rest of the cave like the teeth of some great, slumbering beast, Uraume moves forward, the brittle bones of dead creatures crunching beneath her feet and the glow of her crystal lighting her way. Shadows coil around her, stretching and shifting. The walls are slick with condensation and streaked with veins of mineral deposits, and these shimmer  faintly whenever the light of her cursed ice reflects off them. The passage narrows not long after her entrance, and Uraume must carefully pass through a treacherous path of uneven rock formations and looming dagger-sharp stalactites that hang from the ceiling and softly scrape across her scalp. 

The cave walls keep on pressing inward, and soon she reaches what appears to be a chamber, brimming with the petrified roots of mountain trees. This time, the walls are empty, devoid of paintings or writings. The cursed energy, however,  is so intense Uraume wonders if she has accidentally found the entrance to hell, or if she has already been here, in nightmares perhaps. The silence is absolute, too,  thick and suffocating, except for the deafening pulse of his cursed energy.

At the heart of the last chamber, a rectangular stone-like structure sits, fully sealed by a massive stone lid. Its surface is coated in layers of dust, and Uraume can’t help but step near, dragging her fingers against it. Dust lifts into the motionless air, forming ghostly tendrils, then settles slowly. Beneath it, worn scriptures claw at the rock, their meaning eroded by time. 

Uraume takes a deep breath, anchors her feet on the cave’s floor, and pushes at the stone lid. It barely shifts at first. Despite this, she persists, applying more strength, until the first inch caves, then the second, and soon the stone lid groans as it slides across, revealing its inside.  Instinctively Uraume clenches her eyes, panting and terrified of looking, lest she find nothing at all. 

When she finally forces them open, her breath catches. 

Ancient scrolls lie everywhere, the washi wrapped around what can only be Ryomen Sukuna’s human remains. She doesn’t understand why, but the sight makes her want to cry with joy and rage.

Her glee at the discovery, however, is soon shattered by a horn blaring in the distance, and Uraume can recognize it only for the fact she has heard it countless times before. It is Etchu’s forces, probably the whole region’s, coming to get her. 

“Wrapping cursed objects in talismans is an proven method of sealing that degrades over time. The idea is to use a curse to contain a curse. However, powerful cursed objects will eventually break down the seal and attract cursed spirits ”

Thus, Uraume hesitates no further, there is no time. She knows what the washi are, she only needs to take one to confirm. Whether these are Sukuna’s writings or something far more worse, Uraume will move forward. Whatever the outcome, her coming here won’t be in vain. 

Thus, the curse-user starts to gather some of the scrolls in her hand, throwing them to the ground for her to read more quickly. There are characters written everywhere, columns and columns filled and brimming with them. Hastily, she brings the glowing crystal to the fading washi. The first words start to appear, and Uraume frowns in confusion, her heart sinking, it is written in chinese, and she can barely put together the meaning of the whole sentence: curse, destruction, nascent sun, are just one of the few she is able to interpret.

此安置両面宿儺之咒，將降日本滅亡。

"Here lies the curse of Ryomen Sukuna, who will bring forth the destruction of Japan."

It confirms everything, and Uraume’s hands tremble with excitement and terror, the talismans crumble in her hands, the characters fade. The principle is simple: curse is used to bind another curse. But for something as powerful as Sukuna’s spirit, such seals are destined to rot away, to be found, drawn to ruin by the very thing they seek to imprison, fated to be destroyed by someone who has run out of options, who cares not to die. Hence, Uraume hastily unwraps every piece of washi that swathes his remains, meters and meters of scrolls acting as talismans, with the recurring sentence inked on every one of their margins, until every part that once belonged to him is bared to the world, exposed and free.

It instills an unfamiliar feeling in her chest, when she stares at the yellowed bones and ribs: it is as if she is looking at her own. Uraume has never felt such a profound sense of kinship.

For a second, nothing happens.

But then, a thousand invisible daggers cut across her skin, and Uraume screams in pain, her reversed curse energy automatically brimming to life and starting to heal every cut that follows. Her whole body falls to the ground, the glowing crystal rolls away, the cuts are never ending, but only superficial. Uraume’s hands crawl across the remains of dead animals, whilst behind her, there is only the sound of stone cracking,

Suddenly, the whole cave is lit up by the hue of an unyielding fire, it casts shadows among the stalagmites and rocks, and Uraume sees it: on the ground, in the walls, growing bigger and bigger, the silhouette of a man, a monster. Four arms, and a stature so towering its shadow swallows the entire cave ceiling. The man, the curse, inspects his own clawed fingers, his second pair of arms, touches his own jagged face. He grows still with understanding, and Uraume holds her breath. 

For an infinite, painful moment, he is silent, and so is she, hidden amidst the stalagmites. She stops her energy flow to conceal herself, waits for him to move, to do something. Eventually, he turns around, and Uraume guesses he must be observing the place where they decided to give rest to his body, the scrolls lying everywhere, the sentence he must be capable of reading, the absence of his own bones, of his brother’s. 

“Hey, you.” A rich, deep voice cuts across the cave. “Whoever unsealed me, you have thirty seconds to leave before I cleave this place and everything within it into pieces.”

The coldness of imminent death seeps into Uraume’s bones, as she quickly jumps to her feet and starts to run towards the mouth of the cave, behind her, his voice speaks again, in apparent impatience:

“Twenty seconds.”

And whilst she runs and trips on roots and dagger like rocks, Uraume turns around, her curiosity betraying her. She can only glimpse his muscled back, two black arching lines bracketing his backbone, his four clenched fists. He is not even looking or watching her leave, he doesn’t care whether she makes it or not, of who she is. Uraume, in that moment, thinks of the scribe, to whom she promised she would dispel her domain if she were to fail. She knows she won’t, there is no way for her to safely do so, not now, at least.

Uraume is leaping out of the mouth of the cave when its entire ceiling collapses and the whole mountain splits open. The air rattles with the deafening rupture of ancient rock. Boulders, some the size of temple bells, are flung into the air around her. Uraume gathers her energy and softens her fall, but it doesn’t stop her body from rolling down the cliffs and brushes she climbed up only just a moment ago, their branches clawing against her skin and tearing apart her clothes. Uraume summons as much snow as she can on the rapidly expanding ground, using it to cushion her fall enough for her reversed technique to tackle the major but reversible injuries that follow after. 

The mountain rumbles, but that’s not what chills Uraume’s bones, no, it is the four, leather clad pair of feet that make up her vision the moment she opens her eyes. 

A voice speaks, and it is not the governor’s, not any she may recognize. 

“Well, she was quite easy to catch.” 

It makes the others laugh.

Uraume’s pulse escalates, as she picks up the energies flowing from the four individuals, powerful and unmistakable. Sorcerers, some of them special grade. 

There are more steps, these more confident and weighted, another person is approaching, and Uraume does only need to look at their shoes to recognize them. She has cleaned those shoes countless times before. 

“Governor.” She spits out, with disgust, blood trickling from her lips onto frost covered cloves. 

The figure crouches, and Uraume can pick up the stench of the sake he would always have her serve him, his characteristic sweat and charged breathing pattern.

 Uraume raises her gaze and looks at him, white eyelashes full of snowflakes, hair bloody, and for a moment she can’t help but think of her mother, whose hair was always painted red, both when she was alive and when she was dead. 

Mother, they found me, you said they wouldn't if my hair was painted red. So how come they found me, mother?

He smiles with pity and longing, yet beneath those two emotions unrestrained satisfaction pulls at the corner of his lips.

Uraume has never hated someone as much before, 

“Did you seriously think I would let you go after the slaughter you committed?”

More blood spills over her tongue. Somewhere in the haze of pain, she realizes one of the sorcerers is already working their technique on her, waging their power against her broken body. “After the thousands of death, the famine, and the disappearances of so many?”

“You are a coward.” Uraume coughs out, words laced with hatred and disgust. “All this time you were waiting for me to leave Etchu.” The governor’s smirk does not falter, and Uraume presses on. “You were not even able to defeat me yourself. You had to resort to the help of the very people your emperor despises.”

“Well that’s where you are wrong, Star , some of your scum are more than willing to align and help advance the empire’s will, such as the Abe clan. I would like you to meet them, in fact.” And Uraume cannot help it, but she looks at the group of sorcerers looming over her subdued body, who all sport shaman robes and weapons—Uraume assumes these are cursed—on their hands, others keep them sheathed on their belts. “In the capital, they are known as the Desshi Pacification Squad, though you are only seeing four of them.” Their energies flow with impeccable, stable strength, the product of years of sanctioned training. Training Uraume was never granted. “They are quite formidable, are they not?  It's a pity you were already exhausted by the time they found you, I truly wanted a show.”

Despite the governor’s continued speech, Uraume cannot stop looking at the faces of the sorcerers and their smug expressions. Her heart rages with envy, the debris of the fate she was robbed off digging at her lungs. They never had to hide their techniques, they were granted that freedom whereas Uraume had to hide her own and wait for winter everytime she wanted to train. She feels betrayed, too, by her own kind, by sorcerers who would rather hide their world and prosecute all non-worthy of being inside, by clans who only seek more power and influence through the oppression of all other chamans and secret alliances with the empire. 

“I will let you make a choice, my Star .” the governor announces, it doesn’t shock Uraume, who is acquainted with his unwelcome fixation on her, but it does paint surprise on the other witnesses. “Stop the winter and surrender, lend your powers to me and I will pardon your crimes, or-”

“No, you can all freeze and starve to death.” Uraume sentences, dry and concise. The governor’s carefully crafted expression falls. 

“Silly girl, I know how domains work, I will have them kill you if I must.”

“They are welcome to try, just as I am sure they tried to overcome my domain with theirs only to realize mine was stronger.”

A katana, infused with cursed energy, hits the back of her neck, and Uraume howls with pain. She receives another attack on her shoulders, and another at her waist. 

“You call this a domain?” One of them spits with anger, “It is barrierless and incomplete.”

“And because of that yours can’t overcome it, can it?” Uraume rasps out. 

The governor sighs, and with some sick sort of sadness, voices a command.

“Take her head.”

All four of them nod, 

Uraume’s eyes widen, they must have gathered at some point she uses reverse cursed technique to heal herself, and that’s why this time he is trying to have her beheaded. Uraume struggles, but the cursed binds crafted by one of the squad members makes it impossible for her to move, sending excruciating pain across her body everytime she struggles against its grip. 

“You would kill one of your own?” Uraume accuses. the sorcerers frown, and tilt their heads in a mocking gesture. 

“You are a curse-user.” One of them, the leader, says. “You are not our own.”

Before Uraume can respond, an ear-splitting roar rattles across the howling wind, a shocking force sends the sorcerers and governor to the other side of the clearing, except Uraume, whose binds keep her in place. The mountainside rumbles, tremors roll through the ground, and it is then when Uraume, and everyone else, sees it. 

The whole mountain range, cleaved in half, then into three pieces, four pieces, five. And at the center, an elevated silhouette, painted into the sky, his arms embracing destruction, and his hands opened towards the clouds, as though expecting payment from their indifferent gods. In his face, a joyous, sadistic smile, stretching wide beneath the gleam of four merciless eyes.

“What have you done?!” One of the generals screams, their voice breaking against the howling wind.

“Is that another curse-user?” A woman’s voice, who until then had remained silent, exclaims, her tone filled with disbelief. 

“That is no human. It must be a curse.”

Uraume starts laughing uncontrollably, not out of madness, not out of desperation, but out of something dangerously close to hope. 

Ryomen Sukuna is too far away to take notice of them, but the power and destruction held in his hands is nothing like she has ever seen. Suddenly, trees start falling like mere pieces in a board, their trunks and crowns shaved off by a slashing force. The sight is exhilarating and it sparks a fire in Uraume’s chest, and a realization. 

“It will not be the winter who kills you, or me” She breathes out, and it is almost reverent. “It will be him .”

One of the sorcerers, then, grips her elbow, and the earth dips and twists. 

A teletransportation technique, it seems, is what brings Uraume and all the rest to a place where Kurai mont is merely a detail on the horizon, and now a glowing column of rock, smoke and destruction. Even where they are, the ground still quakes with the force of Sukuna’s awakened curse. 

One of the generals grips her neck, but Uraume is not daunted by this, she knows they need her to speak more than they need to execute her.

“You cursed bitch.” he says. “ What was that? What did you do on that mountain?”

Uraume, naturally, does not give him an answer, she couldn’t have, even if she tried, for they all started talking over each other’s sentences. 

“He was an abominable creature.” 

“I could sense its cursed energy even from where we stood.” 

“We have to warn Angel.”

“He is a special grade, the three clans should be alerted immediately.”

“The Abe said to warn them first if anything like this happened. We should first inspect the damage.”

“I can sense the entire balance shifting. I am certain the clan-heads and the school can, too. Fuck, what is happening…?”

Uraume coughs more blood, and oh , she thinks, I’m really dying, aren’t I?

Still, tears of happiness gather in her eyes, for she too has felt it. The change, the tilting of the world, the energy in every form of life fluctuating like a moonless sea. The energy in her gut too, transformed forever by his.

It is proof, proof that those who sought to chain their kind, to erase them, to bury their techniques beneath centuries of oppression and the soles of the few privileged sorcerer clans—will finally know fear.

And if Uraume cannot be the bearer of this terror, this devastating revolution, then at least someone else will. 

It fills her with sad relief, if only she could witness it .

“That thing was so impure…” Another comments.

He was perfect , Uraume thinks, desperately trying to remember how he looked.

“In Hida of all places. How dare she provoke this, how dare she disrupt its sanctity.”

“Uraume…” It is the governor’s voice, Uraume’s eyes snap to his, there is terror twisting in his expression, his eyes are fixed on the destruction. Despite his calling of her, he doesn’t continue.

“Did you honestly believe,” she whispers in a rattling breath, and all heads snap to look at her. “That I would risk my life for a mountain trip?”

The governor sighs, there are tears in his eyes, and it crosses Uraume’s head that he might be worried about something, or someone, or simply himself. Either way, it is a pathetic sight. 

“There is no hope for you, child.” Is his reply. “You truly are a monster.” The words strike her, only for the fact he is not the first to say them. “Sorcerers. Execute her.”

However, before the wave of their tecquiches clashes with her own, before they raise their cursed swords and aim at her head, before they attack in all manner of ways with all manner of strategies, Uraume does something she herself thought she would never have to do. It is the first time in her life she knows she is outpowered and outnumbered, even at the full of her capacity her technique wouldn’t be enough to inflict damage upon four special grade sorcerers attacking together. 

Thus, with her last sliver of energy, Uraume erects ice, but instead of summoning it towards them, she makes it appear around her feet, engulfing her own legs, her thighs, her hips, it rises and rises, circling her waist, clawing at her chest, her neck.

“What are you doing?” the governor exclaims, extending his hand, failing to stop her.

But Uraume cannot answer, for she is fully encased in ice. Her eyes, and her mouth cannot move, her lungs cannot breathe. But the ice, itself, is healing. Unlike all the other times she has used it, Uraume has decided to embed her reversed cursed energy on it. It cannot be broken, and it cannot kill her, for it feeds from outside energy and Uraume’s own domain. A perfect, divine loop, and an ultimate resort, if one is willing to lose their freedom in order to remain alive. 

It is a sacrifice, because Uraume cannot escape it, but it is a worthy one, 

For her domain is untouched, and now eternal for as long as she is inside this cage of her own. Only a stronger, barrierless domain, could break it. 

Outside the ice, some voices can be heard, the sound is barely audible, there are screams of anguish, probably coming from the governor, whose distorted face behind the crystal is the picture of pure, inhibited horror. A string of “no”s , of curses, of accusations, and attacks is thrown between all present. For they too have realized what she has done. 

It is thus how Uraume, an orphaned  curse-user from Etchu of unknown heritage and unprecedented technique, 

becomes known in official jujutsu historical records as the Frozen Star. And in that verse, their names sitting side by side and sharing the same sentence, so is recorded the first appearance of what from that moment forward, sorcerers and curses across all waters of the world would know as the King of Curses,

for he emerged from Mont Kurai , meaning throne .

Chapter Text

EXTENDED DISCLAIMER:
This chapter contains references to the theme of human flesh consumption. While graphic depictions of the act itself are NOT presented, the topic is touched upon as part of the fictional worldbuilding and character psychology. I want to make it explicitly and unequivocally clear that I, as the author, do not condone, romanticize, endorse, or in any way support this act—in fiction or in reality.

The inclusion of this element is purely in service of exploring the moral depravity, emotional contradictions, and psychological dissonance of specific characters who exist in a fictional, mythic setting. These characters' actions and ideologies are not reflective of my own beliefs or values. If anything, their handling of such matters is meant to disturb, challenge, and evoke critical thought—not admiration or emulation.

I have tried to approach this subject matter with the deepest sensitivity, awareness, and narrative responsibility, and I urge readers to interpret these themes within the intended literary and symbolic framework, not as endorsements of the behaviors depicted.

Reader discretion is strongly advised.

ALSO, IF ANYONE NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE ORIGINAL STORY BY GEGE AKUTAMI FINDS THIS, HE WAS THE ONE WHO MADE SUKUNA LIKE THIS, NOT ME. I AM WRITING ABOUT A PRE-MADE, PRE-CUT CHARACTER.

“If you leave me, you will have to give me your arms and eyes,” Sukuna had once reminded his brother, with morbid jest. To which the reply had simply been: 

“I owe you my life, Sukuna, you can have them, since I will never leave you.”

And then, unconsciously asked, a question that would thread a binding pact.

“Do you swear it?”

And an answer that would weave the threads together, 

“I do.”

Sukuna is standing in front of a large keyhole-shaped tomb, its mound, once shaped by human hands, is now weathered by time and consumed by the gnarled roots of cryptomeria and pine trees. The burial chamber, nestled deep within the rugged and forested mountains of Hida,  had been hidden beneath soil and centuries of rain and moss when Sukuna had arrived.

He has dismantled it, exposing the bones and rusted armour kept inside. Only a glance served as confirmation of whose bones those were, if not for the missing arms and shattered skull.

“How foolish you were.” Sukuna says, gyrating in his hand the only thing he had been searching for, a small weapon that resembles a tojjosho , with a thin dagger-like blade on one of its sides, “Giving up everything for the favour of that scum.”

During his seal, Sukuna had come to forget the shape of his own soul, the sound of his own voice in his head. There was only stone and infinity tearing his essence apart. There was awareness without conscience and memories without beginning nor end. An existence characterized by the absence of self, until the weight of words was lifted from him, and the binds on his soul gone. Until the stone surrounding the last remnants of his soul cracked, and his form took shape.

And with it, pain, agonizing, all consuming pain. Not the type one feels when their flesh is wreathed from nothingness, but when awareness returns in jagged shards, and thoughts, hunger, identity, are burned back to life beneath the lids of his eyes. Wave upon wave of restless memories, striking the shore of his mind, bringing with them the blood his brother shed: a blade leveraged at his heart, where a hand should have been stretched. 

“For centuries I have wondered if you knew—when you betrayed me—that you would die.”

The collarbone in front of him doesn’t answer, nor does the clavicle or the fifth rib.

It had been the only question he had been capable of thinking during his soul’s confinement, for it had been the question he had died thinking of. 

“And I have decided it doesn’t matter, you are vermin in eyes. Whether you planned to die or not, whether you thought your life was a worthy sacrifice to achieve my death, it doesn’t really matter. Your memory ashames me, brother , more than this cursed body you have given me.”

For all the actions and atrocities Sukuna committed, from those he believed to be justified to those which helplessly weren’t, there is something he would have never done, and he wishes he could scream it at him, that there exists a line his brother crossed that he would have never trespassed. To slay one’s own kin , he wants to reproach him, is the sin you committed, and I did not . 

Then, he presents the weapon to the halved skull, its missing bone now encrusted in his own face, “After everything you have given me:  your arms, your eyes…You wouldn’t mind if I took your precious Kamutoke with me as well, would you?” Sukuna turns the tool in his hands, passing it across four palms, inspecting its grip section, unmistakable and just as he remembered: on its sides, two flat hoops crossing at an angle, giving the illusion of spheres. “At last this weapon will have a worthy master…”

Then, he turns his back on his brother’s remains, the burial mound open and violated. But, before taking his leave, realization hits, and he cannot help but laugh at the sheer irony. He slightly turns his profile, enough for two eyes to glance one last time at the kofun—one shines with satisfaction, the lesser one with regret.  

“I would have liked to see your face, if someone had told you back then the Yamato would erase your name and write mine on top of it, that you would get the burial of an emperor, only for the folk to believe centuries after this is where I lay.” He looks around, at the overgrown roots and piles of earth, at the rolling, stretching mountains of Hida the summit overlooks. “At the very least, I think you hoped you would be remembered for ridding this world from me. Honour, glory, good ,” he lists, with spite latching at the syllables “, all the dreams you coveted, were just pointless endeavors in the end.”

His eyes land back on the bones, on his brother’s rusty armour, his iron swords. 

“I don’t think I would have mourned back then if you'd died fighting for me,” He admits, if anything, he is profoundly aware of his lack of attachment. This in the past he would have tried to hide, but tears he is a stranger of, has never understood how they are born nor how to kill them upon somebody’s cheeks. Thus he knows he would not have cried, if he had lost his twin in a world as inhospitable as this one… Not when he was expecting him to die from the beginning, much less if he had known what he would later do. 

“...but I would have at least written your name on your tomb, brother.”

And then, another possibility, a truth even a being as proud of himself can’t deny. 

“And I would have given you everything, Jin , had we won.”
If he still had a heart, with blood drumming inside it, perhaps he would feel emotion choke his throat, but all there is is indifference, and admittance of a past weakness. 

“I shall not make that mistake again.” 

***

If the first thing Sukuna felt after being born as a curse was pain, the second had been cold. 

A foreign, unwavering cold, stabbing at his skin, and seething his lungs. It had sparked his flames instantly, lighting the offending cave where the Yamato had decided to confine his self back to life. 

It hadn’t taken him long to realize—after leveling the mountain, except for the shrine he built—that his being had been awoken in the midst of winter. 

Having lived in Hida for the entirety of his mortal life—and having this one not changed much throughout the centuries, if not for the newer trees and villages and the absence of the older ones—Sukuna can say he knows its seasons quite well: scorching heat in summer, the crispness of leaves in autumn, the slowness of falling cherry petals in spring, and the smothering snowfall in winter. 

But this coldness, these crystalline snowflakes that fall onto his outstretched hand, only to instantly melt, are not right . No, this frigid air, this oppressive chill, feels as though it has been born from a different kind of force. Something more... controlled. Sukuna wonders if cursed energy has truly evolved, if it has fused with the elements themselves, for he cannot explain this phenomenon in any other way.

He decides to experiment with Kamutoke in an open clearing, summoning the thunder in the throes of a midnight snowstorm, the weapon his brother once wielded now shaking with force as Sukuna unleashes it free. Electric waves crack and shatter in the clouds, and on the earth, the tree he had chosen as target erupts into blue cursed flames.

It is there where it happens, the shape of another human, an intruder upon his training, Sukuna does not shred them into pieces if not for the promise of an entertaining fight.

“Who are you?” He quickly demands.

“I am a-an envoy of the Abe.” The figure stutters, then regains composure. Sukuna does not face him, instead he twirls the weapon in his palm.

“You are foolish if you believe that suffices.”

The sorcerer nears, and Sukuna marvels at his stupidity.

“I have been instructed with the task of observing your movements.” The envoy admits. Sukuna finds this whole encounter not just offending, but equally pathetic. 

“Do your friends not care about your survival?” he laughs,

“I am the one less likely to die by your hands.”

It is his audacity which snaps the final string of his patience and has him reveal his cursed technique, sending a cutting strike to where he is standing, aimed at his torso and legs. But before anything can happen, the man is gone. Sukuna turns around, slightly amused, and finds him standing on the other side of the clearing. He attacks, but this time he sends the cut towards all angles and quadrants, so that wherever he appears, he would die. The sorcerer materializes mid air and falls after Sukuna’s strike, which causes the nearby trees surrounding them to topple down.  

“A transportation technique, useful, but dreadfully boring.” Sukuna drawls. “If that’s the only power you can leverage, you just made the naive mistake of revealing it.”

The sorcerer seems unshaken by his taunt.

“I came here to hold a peaceful talk.”

Sukuna sends another attack, this time not just at where he is standing, but at the air overheads and all space within a radius of 20 meters. The boy however successfully materializes outside this range, at a 21 meter separation from where Sukuna is at. He keeps on speaking, and Sukuna allows it, as he ceaselessly sends his cleave motion, not to kill him, but to observe the pattern of his defenses.

“At the behest of the Abe? Are they the ones pulling the strings this time around? They were quite the sycophants in the past…”

Sukuna remembers quite well, how they all had poured their strength into defeating him, fruitlessly, until the only resort left had been to corrupt the intentions of his own brother, who would have lived on, if it were not for the trust Sukuna had placed on him. 

“The three clans are still standing.” the envoy clarifies, barely escaping another of Sukuna’s attacks. The confirmation has Sukuna’s still blood warm with rage. There are no three families he destets more, and to know the blood of his past enemies still remains beating inside stranger’s hearts is a maddening thought.

“Then I don’t care what you, or the Abe, have to say.”

Sukuna sentences, turning around and taking his leave, dismissal in his steps. The messenger grows desperate at his indifference.

“The others would send all their special forces against you, no being would want that.”

Their eye-rolling arrogance never ceases to surprise him, and it seems it has only increased with the passing of time. 

“I am extremely looking forward to it.” he drawls in notable boredom, 

The messenger materializes in front of him, and Sukuna, who already has tested both dismantle and cleave on him, wonders if he should just summon his domain and trap the sorcerer’s innate technique within it.  

“As your enemy, might we at least have the right to know what you are?”

“Have sorcerers truly evolved to be this stupid? I am a curse.” Sukuna mocks. 

“You don’t talk like a one.” he remarks, and Sukuna wonders what state is their land in, for sorcery to have evolved in such a way that not even its sorcerers are able to separate a curse like him from a mere imaginary one, and he expresses so.

“Your own ignorance and willingness to hide from humans have led you to forget the true nature of curses.”

The sorcerer takes a moment to reply, he steps upon the fallen trees, and balances his body on the fallen barks. Snow curdles in the air as he lets out a breath, behind him the  backdrop of dark moonlit night. It takes him a moment to gather his composure, or courage. 

“A kofun, not far from here, was violated, a relique was reported to be missing.”

“So what? Don’t make me laugh, have you also come to take it back?” Sukuna mocks, a sardonic laugh erupting from his stretched, tilted smile.

“The burial mound, it was supposed to hold Ryomen Sukuna’s remains,” the sorcerer continues, and Sukuna knows what story he will tell, doesn’t stop him only because he would like to revel in its irony once more. “... a Hida warchief from the years of Emperor Nintoku” Laughter claws at Sukuna’s throat. Those are not my remains, he could say, but how much more entertaining would it be to let them believe it. The sorcerer presses on, “Whether you accept it or not, know that all clans are now starting to refer to you by that name.”

“That’s a daring assumption.” Is Sukuna’s sole reply. The sorcerer raises his head, a deadpan expression drawn across his ice burned skin.

“The warlord was said to be monstrously deformed, with two faces and four arms. It is a fitting description.”

Sukuna doesn’t respond, instead, he twirls kamutoke in his hand. The weapon glints, a thunder pulses in the distance, and anger seizes his still heart. 

Did they actually describe him as such? Of course they did . They would craft any story, any tale, to twist him into the shape of a being he never was, to erase his fight from the world’s memory, and distort the drawings of his face upon ancient scrolls.  The Yamato once looked at the dismembered body of his brother, his arms and halved face, and decided Sukuna’s curse would bear their weight forever. Sukuna does not care, if not for the fact that it all became true.

“If they want to keep a modicum of the life they used to have, let them know they should erase it from their tongues.”

Behind the curtain of rain, the sorcerer speaks. 

“The clanheads do not wish for a prolonged war, leave our shores and confrontation will be avoided.”

“Is that the grand negotiation you came here to make?” Sukuna mocks, in genuine disbelief. “An offer of surrender?”

“It is the best a curse can hope for, before all sorcerers in the empire unite against you.”

A derisive chuckle, long contained, rumbles through his throat, it sizzles with countenance and crackles with menace. The pressure in the air begins to intensify.

Sukuna starts to near the sorcerer, and this one flinches away. 

“Listen, brat, in the time you have been in my presence, I have already figured out a way to effectively kill you. The only reason you are still standing is because I might want you to relay this message to your precious clan heads and masters: now, run back and tell them this, if they dare challenge me, there will be no war, only a massacre. I will carve through their strongest and build shrines upon their bones."

The apple in the human’s throat bobs.

“You would make all sorcerers your enemy?”

Unlike before, Sukuna’s lips do not curl upwards, he has grown tired of his theatrics, of feigning tolerance or entertainment. What’s left is the raw, scarlet hued expression he wears beneath it all. 

“Don’t flatter yourself, you are not enemies to me, just corpses.”

After hearing this, hope breaks and cracks in his enemy’s eyes. Enough for today, he decides,  turning around. Behind him, watered snow crunches as the sorcerer’s knees topple to the ground.

And then, a whisper.

“I doubt you could kill me.”

Sukuna stiffens, and decides, there and then—regardless of what the sorcerer says or does— the man is dead.  

“ What? ” He spits, turning his profile around, his crimson eyes glowing constant amongst the white wind. 

But the sorcerer does not seem to take notice of this bloodlust, instead, he keeps muttering to himself. Shoulders hunched, posture crouched, and grasping at the locks of his hair.

“And if you did, it would be worth it, so many would live…” he says, hands trembling, clenching his jaw and shutting his eyes with force, reigning a breath. “But a domain, no one has managed to summon one in a year.” The snowstorm howls, and it is the only thing that can be heard across the clearing. “That’s why I did not care about coming here.” He continues, “If you manage to defeat me with your domain, people will be saved.”

Sukuna remains still, watching as tears stream down the brat’s face. His words fill him with a dreadful realization: he is unmoored and estranged in an unfamiliar time, to the point his ignorance of the current events fills him with unwelcome diffidence. Sukuna turns over the sorcerer’s words, his mind firing with possibilities. No one has managed to summon one in one year. 

“You knew already only a domain can counter your technique?”

The sorcerer raises his head, still bowing on the ground, he clenches his eyes, but his tears do not cease. 

“ Yes .” He admits, accepting his own death. 

“And you don’t have one to defy it with?” Sukuna questions, as his hands start to raise, unbidden and indifferent to his answer, there is no preventing this. 

“ No. ”

The sorcerer did not come here to relay a message or negotiate peace, he came here to sacrifice himself for some unknown grandiose cause. And if he decides to kill him, Sukuna will further down this goal, and satisfy those who wish to eradicate him from this world.

But if he doesn’t, the boy will escape, and summoning a domain will make even less sense then.

His hands adopt a praying stance in front of his unclothed chest, his fingers mirroring each other, and taking the deathly shape of the Enmaten seal.

Ryōiki Tenkai.「領域展開」

“Domain Expansion”

A veil of darkness shrouds their eyes, for a moment, the world goes still on its axis, the clearing fades away, snow melts around them. 

「伏ふく魔ま御み廚づ子し」 Fukuma Mizushi

“Malevolent Shrine.”

A pressure unlike anything grips the heart of his victim, the darkness shatters like cracking glass, in its place a demonic mockery of a zushi shrine. Bovine skulls erupt from the ground, and Sukuna’s silhouette emerges slowly from a grotesque gigantic mouth situated at the threshold.

The sorcerer starts to laugh in joy, and Sukuna stares, for he might be the first person to ever do so while trapped in his domain.

Then he too, notices: the snow is gone, as though it had never been there in the first place, the  cold too is replaced by a sudden, humid warmth. Sukuna observes his own domain with curiosity, expanded over a radius of 200 meters, and realizes there is not a single corner that seems to have been touched by the icy grip of winter. 

He has summoned it enough times to know that is not supposed to happen. Domains vanish and overwhelm the barriers of other domains, they don’t alter nature or change climatic conditions, he at least knows his is not capable of doing so. Is that what the sorcerer was referring to? Is that the reason why he is kissing the green cloves of grass with disgusting relief?

But then, he stills. He lifts his head slowly, eyes wide open and pupils trembling.

“This domain…” he starts, “It is barrierless.” A truth, desperately posed as a question.

“Your technique detects the binding vow.” Sukuna says. “Perceptive.”

Only after confirming this, does the sorcerer attempt to escape, he materializes overheads, 10 meters above the top of the trees. Sukuna punishes him for it, cleaving his body in half.

Before he dismembers him, however, he manages to hear a cry of anguish, not at the pain registering across all endings of his skin and flesh, but at the sight he must be witnessing. 

Immediately after, the upper part of the boy’s body lands abruptly on the ground. His guts pouring into the grass. 

“Why is it not fully gone?” the dying sorcerer mumbles, amidst bursts of blood cascading down the sides of his face, each syllable carrying less breath than the last. “Why? Why?”

Sukuna stares perplexed, his gaze shifting to the skies, clear and devoid of clouds, the constellations visible. His brows furrow, his legs pivot.

Now he is levitating where the sorcerer appeared before, his malevolent shrine below him, the clearing entirely visible, as well as its surrounding trees. He does a complete turn, eyes raking the land for any anomaly, any clue as to what could have stricken the sorcerer’s goal. Immediately he is able to see the barriers of his domain, for beyond them, there is a curtain, a veil of snow. Clouds part around it, encapsulating it within an invisible dome in the sky.

And yes, this does intrigue him, but still he does not understand why the sight wrecked the boy in such a way, which only infuriates him more.

His four eyes land again on the constellations, there is a triangle of stars presiding over all others, hanging just above him.

His blood freezes, a chill courses through his bones. 

That cannot be .

But it is, he confirms, once he is comforted with the offending spark of Shokujo star, the weaving maiden; Kengyū , the cowherd star, and Ama-no-Yotsu , Heaven’s four, shining the brightest amongst all three, and crowning the unmistakable shape of the Sankaku , known as the Summer Triangle. 

“It cannot be.” He voices aloud. His eyes then look for the drum stars, if it were truly winter, they would be reigning too, but Tsuzumi-boshi is conspicuously absent, as is the Subaru cluster. Everything else, too, falls into place, why the nights are longer than he remembered, why the snow hasn’t thawed since he arrived into this time. 

It is supposed to be summer . 

His feet leave a denture on the ground when he returns to the sorcerer’s dying body, whose cursed energy flickers faintly, attempting to tether his consciousness to his fading flesh. 

“Why is it snowing in the middle of summer?” He asks him, cutting to the chase, but the boy doesn’t respond, there is barely any force left in him. Thus Sukuna does something he didn’t think he would have to do: he touches his throat, and heals him enough to be able to speak. 

The sorcerer gasps for breath, and screams in pain. 

“Why is it winter ?” he repeats, impatient for an immediate answer.

Amid the cries of pain, the sorcerer manages to exhale a laugh.

“You are asking the wrong question.”

Sukuna cleaves his arms in response, and the sorcerer lets out an ear splitting scream. 

“Who is behind the winter?” He asks again, calmly. Yet the sorcerer refuses to speak, what’s left of his body writhing in agony. “If you answer, I will heal you.” Sukuna lies. 

He knows the boy doesn’t believe it, but humans cling to blades when there is nothing else to hold onto. To them, hope is as natural as dying. 

Thus, the boy answers with the last of his breaths.

“The Frozen Star.”

And before Sukuna can demand more of him, his eyes turn glassy, his shaking ceases, head tilting to one side. Sukuna stares at this empty husk perplexed, wishing he could revive him only to extract more answers out of him, but even he lacks the ability to awaken the dead. 

Instead, he is left with only a moniker, a fabricated name, that could belong to anyone or anything. He contemplates all that just happened, recalling each scattered piece of information to put together the most plausible explanation: 

And if you did, it would be worth it, so many would live…

But a domain, no one has managed to summon one in one year.

That’s why I did not care in coming here.

Why is it not fully gone?

“I see.” Sukuna murmurs, in understanding. “The Winter is a domain.”

And then, an insidious smile creeps up into his face, “well that’s certainly an interesting development.”

Unsurprisingly, when he vanishes his Malevolent Shrine, the greenery and luscious green remains, even after its invocation. He walks, and takes a clove of grass in his hand, still cold, but renewed from months of frost and ice. These sorcerers… This domain is weak, it was so easy to counteract it with mine, and none of them could even summon their own?

It wouldn’t have helped much anyway, he knows, using his agility to materialize outside the perimeter he used for his domain, to where snow keeps falling like gossamer draped from the clouds. A closed domain would just rise amidst the winter without inflicting any damage, and a barrierless domain like his, although effective, only works within its range. 

 There is an ache in his stomach, and he briefly questions if the weak sorcerer managed to get a hit at some point, but rapidly rules it out and ignores it. He is too focused observing the beauty of an unprecedented opportunity. 

His enemies will not hunt him for as long as the winter domain is erected, for they would be sealing their own fates to a death by relentless cold and ice. They could beg him, to sweep all lands affected and summon his domain a hundred times until not a single spot is left covered in snow. It makes him laugh at the absurdity, if some fool approached him with that request he would kill them instantaneously. 

Unlike them, the cold does not affect him, he still has his flames, he still can cook the passing deer he sees, the remains of those who have already succumbed, frozen still. Although lately those meals don’t do much to sate his appetite.

But the so-called Frozen Star, however, the culprit of this war on life itself, poses an entirely different question. Is he truly satisfied with the thought of a remarkable sorcerer existing alongside him… without eventually confronting them?

“If they were hiding somewhere, they wouldn’t have sought me out first, they would be doing everything they could to execute this user or curse.” He voices out loud, and then he laughs at his next thought, “Gods, they will be left with no choice but to eat each other.”

His laugh is cut short however, by an unbearable pulse in his stomach, a restless gut and a void so painful it makes Sukuna frown in confusion before falling to his knees and howling in pain.

“What is this ?” he bellows, confused and furious at this deeply, tangible, human feeling he can only identify as hunger. That sorcerer must have done something to his body, a cursed weapon or venom, he tries to reason with himself. He turns away from the comforting curtain of snow, snowflakes quickly melting on the burning skin of his face, and staggers his way back to the clearing where the sorcerer’s body lays. Each step back to the site feels like a descent into madness, his body folding in agony, every breath shuddering with restrained moans as he grips his stomach and pours reversed cursed energy into himself—desperate to heal the  invisible crater gouged into his very being, to no avail.

“You!” He calls when he reaches his corpse, his feet stepping on the blood-slicked earth. “What did you do to me?” He asks, perfectly knowing he won’t answer, but he needs someone to blame. 

Instead it is his own body who replies, bending forward, a violent spasm wracking his chest and climbing up his throat, and then he is vomiting onto the ground.

Among the bile, he sees it, the remains of the venison he had been eating for the past week, half-digested, slick and pitiful in the snow. The sight is disgusting, and it makes his breath rattle. Sukuna wipes his mouth then, eyes wide, and stares at it as a million thoughts rush through his mind. 

His body, once human, now rejects the food of men. 

He is a curse, he knew something like this would occur, but when he had started feeling hunger for the first time since his awakening, he had ruled it out, and had thanked his senses for still being able to delight in a meal.

But now, now his bile is mixing into the blood of this sorcerer, so close to his face its metallic smell wafts into his nose. And he cannot help it, but he relishes in it, because for a moment, the smell serves as a balm against the bottomless void in his gut, and his mouth waters.

No. 

The word strikes loud in the walls of his mind, resolute and finite. His mouth watering more, his throat drying, his stomach churning, empty and expectant. His body consumed by an unbearable craving.

No, No. No. No, No.

He chants, and it might be the first time he pleads to the gods.  

Of course they would make him do this, of course they would make him pay this price.

To forever forsake the only thing he genuinely enjoyed doing whilst he was human, and now replace it with the flesh of those he detests. 

Forever condemned to depend on them.

He could have woken without arms, without face or legs, a levitating, grotesque and shapeless curse and it still would have been a better fate than this. All his brother’s limbs he could have lived without. His four arms and second pair of eyes, all of it, if it meant he could keep this last thread of sanity . 

“Anything but this!” Sukuna screams, angered at the acts and twists of cursed energy and the invisible hands that mold it. “Any price but this.” he murmurs,

A normal person, a moral man, would have fought against it. Would have gotten away as far as possible from his victims body and fought the urge until it gnawed his insides away. But Sukuna is not a person, nor is he a moral man. He is principled, nevertheless. As a human, he would have found cannibalism abominable and sacrilegious, an offense towards the pillars of society and all humanity stands for, despite his lack of it. He would have mercilessly executed anyone who dared commit such an act within his lands. He would have never condoned, or turned against his own species like this. But as a curse, as a powerful one, the thought of a fetter such as this weakening him and forcing into violating such staunch and natural law scares him beyond death. And there is only one single way for him to find out and rule the possibility out. 

Without looking, he dips his fingers on the scarlet blood of the sorcerer, and brings it to his tongue to sample. 

The mistake he had not accounted for was thinking he could stop once he did.
He doesn’t.
Instead, his pupils blow wide, his cursed energy flares—relit and reinforced—, and what remains of his human restraint is torn away like flesh from bone.

When the sun rises, he wakes—his stomach empty, but sated.

Against his will, he opens his eyes, already knowing the sight he will meet.
An unrecognizable body, bones stripped of all flesh save for the organs and the face, staring blankly back at him.

It is the most horrifying thing he has ever witnessed.

He wishes—from the bottom of his condemned soul—,that he did not remember how it came to be.
But he does.
He remembers every vile second of it.

There is wetness on his cheeks.
He knows it's tears.

This time he understands how they were born.

***

It doesn’t take him a lot of time to figure out the intricacies of this new, unwelcome weakness. When he had taken back his brother’s weapon, a fortnight had passed since he had woken up from his sealing. It was then when the first sensation of hunger struck, and relieved he had gone to hunt the venison. A week after, he met the sorcerer as he practiced on the clearing, and that’s when his countenance was torn apart— his world upended, and he no longer the same person he had been, if he still deserves to call himself one. 

Thus, Sukuna came to the conclusion that in order to keep control of his senses and manage his hunger he needs to consume at least one body per month. Not more, not less.

He has also found he can still digest greenery and non-animal produce, but these only satiate his hunger temporarily. Whilst venison, veal, squirrels, birds, or any other meat that is not human sits painfully on his stomach, his body rejecting it.

Sukuna decides to stop his travelling, too, bored of the cold, inhospitable conditions, and seeks out one of the only refuges he knew of as a human — a safehouse he built himself, sat atop the hills of Hida and not far off from where they had put his bones to rest: Senkoji temple. 

He finds it still standing, stubborn against the erosion of time. The temple crouches against the slope, half-swallowed by the advancing forest, its old steps sagging under the weight of centuries. Its wooden beams, which he once ordered to be lacquered in proud red, have dulled to a tired brown, and moss clings to its stone base like a second skin.
He expects it to be dead, abandoned, just another ruin of a world he no longer can come back to. But as he approaches, he sees a thin trail of smoke curling up into the grey sky, and hears the faint clatter of prayer chimes in the wind. In the air, the scent of burnt wood and old rice hangs— signs of life.

Some monks, draped in simple robes, move slowly across the courtyard. One tends a small fire, the other sweeps away the snow gathering in the temple’s eaves. They do not see him at first, and he watches, silent, hidden in the mist that pools around the crumbling stone.

It rankles something in him — that his fortress, his relic — has been claimed, domesticated, turned back into a shrine for gods he once defied.
The monks' presence, however, is not an offense worth blood. Not yet.
Instead, he lingers on the threshold.

One of them, one who sits weaving a bamboo basket — its frayed ends rubbing against his tattered robes—stills without turning around, as though sensing Sukuna’s presence.

A sorcerer among them, then, that’s interesting. 

Sukuna does nothing but wait, he is already visible if they all care to notice, standing at the top of the stairs and at the threshold to the main courtyard. 

The young monk shows his profile, slowly turning his head around, and looks up at Sukuna, eyes widening. 

“It cannot be…” he breathes, before throwing the basket to one side. He crouches and bows, lowering his head until his brows brush the ground and his nails scrape the stone. 

“Suketada! What is that all about?” The oldest monk exclaims. 

“Look!” Another points to him. 

And suddenly Sukuna’s presence is known to everybody, but his eyes are fixed on the young monk who is trembling before his eyes. 

“Kneel” He commands the others, but some of them are still frozen in shock, and hesitant of his request. So Sukuna does the only reasonable thing: he cuts one of the buildings in half. It was not his favourite anyways. They let out a scream, or whimper, he cannot tell, and bow like tumbling cards. “I will cut to the chase.” he says, tired of theatrics and suspense. “I founded this temple hundreds of years ago, and now I have come to claim it. I will pardon your lives to thank the labour you have done in keeping and taking care of it. But if you remain here, you will become my dinner.”

One of them raises his head to speak. 

“Did I say you could raise your head?” Sukuna reprimands, feigning offense, sending a cleave to his scalp, which erupts in blood. 

“I am sorry. I am sorry. Forgive me.” He whines in pain, staining the stonesteps with blood, tears and spit. Sukuna ignores him, his eyes landing back on the monk who recognized him and bowed without needing to be told. 

“You.” he calls, his voice striking like a whip. “The one with the basket.” The younger monk's hands, for all their trembling, paralyze.  “They called you Suketada. Is that your name?” Sukuna questions.

“Yes.” he hears him murmur in response. 

Sukuna hums, already assessing him.

“You were the first to recognize me, and you bowed without hesitation.” he explains.

The other monks, though not allowed to lift their heads, shift slightly, sending a glare toward the young monk, some’s expressions are visibly confused, while others are already teeming with accusation and betrayal. “Why?”

“I know who you are, Master Sukuna.” is the monk’s response. At the mention of his given name, the rest of the monks erupt in whispers and barely suppressed gasps. Sukuna is not just pleased by this answer, he is beyond intrigued.

“Rise. I would like to speak to your face, not your spine.”

The monk lets out a sigh of relief, his knees buckling slightly before forcing himself upright. Despite having been told to face him, he avoids Sukuna’s gaze—a decision that pleases Sukuna more. Smart, he judges, probably weak, but smart.

Instead, he glances around the other monks’ way, his eyes landing on Sukuna after, and subtly gives a shake of his head.

“I see.” Sukuna says, understanding immediately. “Follow me. We will take this inside.” Then he turns around and climbs the steps to the main pagoda, already hearing behind him those of the monk. He waits for him in what in the past he would have referred to as the reception room, and only speaks when he hears the doors be slid shut. “When we come out, all of them will have already fled. You will be alone.”

“I know.” Suketada whispers, head still lowered. 

“You are a sorcerer, you recognized my energy immediately.” he states, not a sliver of doubt in his words. Suketada’s admission follows suit.

“You are correct, master.”

Sukuna pauses for a moment, paying careful attention to Suketada’s posture, his restlessness is not a sign of fear, but childish contention—as though he were mentally reminding himself not to say or do something. 

“I have the feeling you were expecting me, but do not know how to speak of what is troubling you now that you have me in front. If you know something, speak with freedom, I will not dole out any punishment.”

The boy regains his bearings, taking a breath of courage. 

“I joined the monks keeping this temple in hopes of meeting you.” he begins to admit. “I knew you could come Master, because I was there when you were awoken…” and then, for the first time since encountering him, the boy takes enough time to measure his words, and says something Sukuna was not expecting, “, and know the person who made it happen.”

Although he tries to, Sukuna cannot manage to hide his momentary disbelief.

“Do you?” he tests, incredulous.

“I was merely a helper, I led her–him–I don’t know, to Minashi Shrine so she could find your cave. At the moment, I thought she only wanted to go to fetch any possession you may have been buried with, but it soon became pretty clear she had more in plan.”

Sukuna’s skin burns with anticipation.

“Who was this person?” He asks, voice low but brimming with something volatile: he wants to hunt this person down, meet them, reward them, face them, accuse them of raiding his tomb, ask them why they sought him out in the first place, why they thought they had the right.

“She looked like a woman, but she wore a nobleman’s clothes, red.”

“I don’t care of their gender.” Sukuna groans, bored. “Tell me who they were and what they wanted.”

“They…” Suketada begins. “They are a curse-user, Master. Powerful, I think, I must admit I lacked the courage to confront them.”

Sukuna notes immediately the use of that wretched word sorcerers coined to separate the cattle of law abiding sorcerers from the few who broke away from all of it. He is pleased to know he was not awoken by a mere, wandering apprentice, or a spineless temple boy, but someone ruthless enough to be excommunicated from sorcerer society altogether. A creature not unlike himself.

“Do you have a name for this curse-user?” he drawls, curious, and circling the monk like a vulture. 

Suketada’s gaze is still lowered when he responds:

“They never mentioned it. But… among court-insiders they know her as the Frozen Star, or so I’ve heard.”

Sukuna stills, that name sending a chill of recognition through his skin. He turns around sharply, his four eyes narrowing when they set on the monk’s figure.

“Why did you help her?”

The boy’s shoulders shrink, recognizing immediately the menacing inflection in Sukuna’s tone.

“I…”

Sukuna closes in, his presence crushing the boy’s stance, who tries to steady his own hands and miserably.

“Why. did. you. help. her?” he enunciates. 

“To end the winter master,” the boy quickly admits, “she promised she would call off her domain after retrieving what she needed from you.”

Huh, interesting, so the Frozen Star dallied with the help of a monk who clearly… cares for the peasantry’s wellbeing, and all non-sorcerers. Yet the winter howls outside, and Sukuna cannot help but cackle at the irony.

“Well she lied to you. It has been almost a month.”

The monk, though, shakes his head.
“I don’t blame her, master. I know she was sincere”

Sincere?

“However so?”

“ Because they took her. And now… now she is stuck in an ice formation she herself erected to protect her body from the sorcerers who tried to execute her.”

Sukuna frowns, the convoluted story slowly taking shape in his mind. 

“Who were these sorcerers?” He asks, though he can bet his fourth arm they are linked to the one he… devoured

—the one he defeated.

“The Desshi Squad, members of the Abe and Sugawara clans.”

Sukuna grunts at the mere mention of them. 

“So she is imprisoned.” he notes, disappointed already at this cursed user’s defeat.

“She was taken to the capital, I believe. But they couldn’t harm her, and she is not rotting, which means she is keeping herself alive thanks to the ice. They are doing everything they can to break the ice or her domain, they have come to the conclusion the two are connected.”

Sukuna is admittedly impressed with the information, to the point he extremely doubts how an ascetic monk living in isolation could come to gather it. 

“And you know all of this, how?”

The monk bows again, rushing to explain, sensing the skepticism in Sukuna’s remark. 

“I possess animals Master, that’s my innate technique.”

A thought crosses his mind: the few animals he encountered on the way up the mountain, the crow picking at the sorcerer’s bones. 

“Have you been observing me?” His voice sizzles with threat, and the boy starts to shake his head with vigour.

“Only to confirm that you would come.” Sukuna does not listen, he throws his body and nails him to the wall with one of his arms, the boy’s feet flutter and kick the air.  “I swear this! I would never overstep!” Sukuna’s grip on his throat loosens, but he does not lower him yet. “Besides my technique works based on proximity, I switch from animal to animal, wolves, squirrels, deer, although  there are not that many, so I resort to birds and once I am forced indoors, I switch to dogs, mice, bugs…”

Sukuna has heard enough. He cares not of what he knows or what he has seen regarding him, the boy could never even come close to having any leverage over him either way. 

“If you want to survive today,” Sukuna interrupts him, getting to the heart of the matter, “you will tell me everything you know of the Frozen Star, and you will take me to where they have her.”

Suketada, instead of cowering in fear, narrows his eyes in recognition.

“Funny.” he murmurs, “That’s the exact thing she said.”

***

July (7th month) 782 A.C, 

Heijō-kyō  (Modern Nara),

“Well, that’s certainly discreet.” says Sukuna, as he stares mockingly at the black dome , “A cursed veil extended just beside the court district. Subtle as ever.” The curtain ripples in the windless air, shrouding a cluster of buildings located in the northside of the city the Yamato now govern from, though Sukuna doubts this tenure will last for much longer, judging by the state of its neighbouring streets, the rot that permeates the wooden structures and the overflowing drainages. Snow clings to its upward looking roofs and covers the expanse of the city in a blanket of white, its streets cutting across it in the shape of checks and squares that mimic those of a shogi board.  “If it were not for the veil, I wouldn’t believe this is the capital.”

Suketada, standing behind him, adds his own comment.

“There are rumours the court is planning a move soon, though I don’t know which city the emperor will sit upon this time around.”

This doesn’t surprise Sukuna in the slightest, Heijō-kyō is a dying thing. The city rots from the core out, even the earth it sits on seems to want to unburden itself from its weight. 

“I believe who we are looking for is currently held in the private temple within Heijō Palace” Suketada provides, Sukuna hums, and without turning to look at him, utters a simple command:

“I don’t want to waste any time. Switch now, find out exactly where she is, and then report back to me.”

Suketada, however, does not move. 

“Master…”

His hesitation grates on Sukuna’s patience.

“Is there a problem?”

The young monk’s cheeks grow red as he begins to explain himself.

“The veil wasn’t here the last time I came, I doubt I can cross it.”

Sukuna sighs, a low, irritated sound. This is exactly why he refuses followers, why he slaughtered most of the ones who tried. Inconvenient. Hesitant. Slow.

Nevertheless he doubts he will let his temperament get the better of him this time—Suketada’s technique, although weak, could still be of use to him in the future. Especially now that the lack of contextual information is his biggest disadvantage.

At Sukuna’s prolonged silence, the young monk reconsiders his words. 

“But I can t-try master…”

It’s too late, though. Sukuna has already vanished, his figure now hovering over the laid out court district, a mere meter away from the veil.

As he nears, the water-like surface thrums in response like a sentient thing, as if it were capable of sensing Sukuna’s slicing technique before this one reaches it.

When it does, the veil starts to tear and ripple, its surface shaking with tremors and insufficient cursed energy to battle Sukuna’s own. 

Twenty-nine seconds, that’s how long it is able to withstand Sukuna’s technique before it ruptures, its pieces falling like an assortment of fragile, blackened leaves.

Sighing, Sukuna lands in the main courtyard, already registering the talismans affixed to every beam and lintel, the barriers woven like spider silk across entryways. He recognizes intricate sorcery when he sees it, and if the writings on the talismans and complex energy rippling from the barriers are of any indication, he knows the sorcerers who put them there will be immediately alerted the moment they’re disturbed.

He steps forward anyway. Let them come , he tells himself. 

Inside, he is met with lacquered walls and incense stained rafters. The temple is engulfed in unnatural silence, and the wood groans and creaks under the weight of his foot as he steps further inside. The place reeks of ancient suras and charred offerings. 

The talismans inside continue flaring with his presence, emitting a glow that lits up the space. Unlike the wards, they don’t collapse, they scream . 

And oh how his skin burns with excitement when he hears it, Heijō-kyō awakening in fear: the temple’s bonshō bell as it begins to ring once, twice—then frantically, the sound echoing through the temple’s halls. Soon, distant Taiko drums follow, a martial cadence pulsing across the city. And at last, from the hills beyond the court district, a conch horn moans.

It’s a matter of minutes before sorcerers come to confront him, and he would rather have found the Frozen Star by then. 

Sukuna suspects the cursed user is located down by the temple’s kura , a subterranean storehouse where tombs and secret rituals are often concealed—the coldness stabbing the soles of his naked feet only confirms it.

He drives his heel downward, his blade-like cursed energy ripping through the temple’s beams and tearing the wooden boards asunder. A massive hole opens in the ground. Sukuna—sensing the nearness of the prize—, does not hesitate to drop into the darkness, the bare soles of his feet brushing against the frost covered stonesteps.

“ Fuga ” he murmurs, conjuring up a flame that flags from one his fists.

The passage narrows, and walls are consumed with the glow of Sukuna’s fire and a distant, diamond shine. Frost clings to the moldy stonewalls. For a moment, he lets himself wonder if this anticiàtion is what she felt when she found his cave on Mont Kurai. If the cave’s stale air felt as suffocating as the cold draft now entering his lungs. 

It doesn’t take him long to find the chamber. It is no bigger than a garden shed, its ceiling so low he needs to bow his head before stepping inside. 

He lifts his gaze.

And there she stands, encased in a gemstone of ice, not shattered, not cracked. Not pierced by seals or spears or inscriptions. Simply preserved, her head tilted downward, white hair frozen like ink in water, blood clinging to her temples and crowning her in red. Eyes closed, a hand placed over her stomach, where he suspects a blow was dealt. Her clothes dark red like Suketada described, melted at the shoulders, where the cold is densest. 

The ice is  unnaturally clear, it glows with unparalleled cursed energy, stemming from a source deep inside her, feeding from the cold outside, her own domain.

He is not staring at a frozen corpse, he is staring at a girl untouched by death and decay.

For the first time in his existence, Sukuna marvels at the work of another sorcerer.

“Let’s see if you are worth the trouble,” he murmurs, before raising his hands and adopting a familiar gesture.

Ryōiki Tenkai.「領域展開」

“Domain Expansion” he whispers, and the ice begins to screech.

「伏ふく魔ま御み廚づ子し」 Fukuma Mizushi

“Malevolent Shrine.”

This time, he forgoes the decorations: no zushi shrine, no bovine skulls, only the binding vow, and his sure hit. For the first time, he designs his domain not with the intent to kill or threaten. 

Just as he expected, the temperature rises, the coldness licking at his skin slowly fading into nothing. The ice shrieks again, devoid of energy source, its glow flickering on and off. 

Sukuna sends a cleave to it, but his technique merely scratches the surface. Frowning, he realizes the ice is far more durable than he believed it to be, as if it were forged of a diamond, not water in its solid state. 

“Impressive,” he hums, before lifting his four palms and pressing them to the ice. He shuts his eyes, takes a breath. 

Flames glow behind the lids of his eyes, and water starts to rush beneath the touch of his palms, pooling at his feet. The ice begins to melt, and this strangely relieves him.

But when he senses an unfamiliar cluster of cursed energy nearing, he is reminded of the lack of time. Sukuna rakes his eyes across her figure, she is smaller than he expected, is she still a child? He wonders. Or was she just malnourished? He shakes his head, enough with the questions, the ice is melting but too slowly, and soon the kura will be overflowing with sorcerers. 

With a certain desperation he would never admit to himself, he tests another dismantle on the ice, this time it cuts and ruptures with precision. 

With no time to spare, and without caring for aesthetics, Sukuna sends a cleave across the top of the ice, sparing her neck, and cutting her hair at the length of her jaw. 

Only after this does the ice encasing her head finally rupture, breaking into clumps and gliding into the floor where it breaks and shatters at the impact.

The next thing he hears is a breath so deep and so human it chills him more than the frozen air ever could. Long-held, dragged from the depth of a body suspended too long in stillness. It scrapes the air, catches on the edges of her throat, then escapes in a single, trembling exhale—like a prayer spoken through frostbitten lips.

The lids of her eyes flutter open, revealing the colour of a blood-stained plum, and immediately, their gazes lock. 

Both are too speechless to even utter a word. 

She is the first one to break the silence, and Sukuna is too enraptured to protest.

“If you have found me, they must all be dead.” her voice is not as shrill or immature as he expected, not high pitched like the smallness of her body indicates, instead it carries resignation and experience, deep, rich, yet undeniably feminine.

His mouth curls up at her question, 

“Not quite yet” Something flickers in her gaze, an answer to the bloodlust in Sukuna’s four eyes. Her gaze follows him as he begins to circle her, eyes noting every small detail in her ice covered body. “You are who they call The Frozen Star.” he voices, a statement, not a question. 

“Is that the moniker they gave me?”

Oh she is young, unable to hide disdain and spite when it latches onto her words.

“Would you rather it be something else?” Sukuna hums, enjoying this conversation far too much.

“I would prefer they not  know of me at all, I would much rather my name be erased from their mouths, its syllables impossible to pronounce.”

Sukuna understands this sentiment.

“Why won’t you break out from the rest of the ice?”

The curse-user takes a moment to answer.

“I don’t trust my bones to hold my weight if I do.”

I don’t trust you .

“Your bones? How long have you subjected yourself to this?” He asks, even if he already knows it’s only been a month. Her response, however, is far more than he had hoped for.

“The day I was captured was the same day a curse was born, it was a welcome distraction— it gave me ample enough time to plan how I would protect myself from the sword.”

Sukuna does not know if he should be pleased or offended at the omission of the fact it was her who awoke him .

“What curse?” he prods, his back turned.

Her gaze chills his spine as it sweeps over the black markings on his back.

The girl’s voice is level when she answers, each word carefully weighted, irony flashing in every pause.

“I only heard its name: Ryomen Sukuna, a disfigured, two faced, four-armed, two meter tall oni who was said to have disrupted the sanctity and purity of Hida province, an abomination men wouldn’t survive if they beheld it.” Sukuna’s ears eat and delight at every insult. “A true example of the Gods capacity to err and create something not worth the use of matter.”

She knows and she is not stupid, he tells himself, she knows who she is speaking to. She is indulging him and playing, dangling that tempting provocation to test his character. 

It’s almost suicidal . 

“Were you afraid,” Sukuna drawls, licking his lips. “...when you heard of this abominable creature?”

He hears her take a breath.

“I was relieved to know something stronger, more violent than I awaited them. When one realizes their defeat, they are comforted by the thought of someone else succeeding in doing what they could not.”

Oh, he has stumbled upon a cause-driven curse-user, it seems, someone deranged enough to believe their ideologies could align with his. 

Sukuna slowly turns around, showing his jagged profile, the two eyes on his right side fixed on hers, and gleaming with a sort of recognition he has never fostered. 

Power answering power.

“And what are you now? Are you relieved, or afraid?” 

The innocent mask she was wearing, that of a simple bystander narrating a hearsay rumour slips of her face with ease, leaving behind two thin, purple lips curling upwards. 

“I am in awe, for I am staring at him at the eyes, am I not?” she says, the admission slipping deliciously from her mouth, a dimple on her cheek, a white eyebrow slightly raised in challenge, “And still I find myself capable of speaking…”

Sukuna’s mouth, too, stretches into a mirthful smile.

The moment, however, is cut short when a voice from above echoes into the subterranean passages. 

“He’s here! In the Kura! Surround the entrance!”

Sukuna groans and sighs, throwing his head back, reminding himself why he ever thought this was a good way to kill time. 

He hears a crack, and he knows it is girl’s ice finally caving in and collapsing into scattered pieces. When he gazes at her again,  he finds her crouched on the floor, clothes wet, her breath coming in short takes. 

Sukuna knows his size is incomparable to that of humans, but the girl is still a midget: in that position, she barely reaches his knees. It is almost comical. 

At the unmistakable sound of footsteps on top of them, she looks up to the groaning ceiling, assessing the situation, then like Sukuna did before, she closes her eyes, as if in dismissal of the world above them.

When they open, he only finds determination.

“Can I fight with you?” she asks, quietly. 

“If you can keep up.” he scowls, looking at her weakened shape. 

Flushing in clear embarrassment, she rises to her feet, her knees weak, but still functioning. 

Sukuna says nothing, nor does he warn her when he dismantles and tears the whole temple apart. The whole passage opening up into the evening sky, boulders repelled away by the slice and force of his technique, shredded talismans raining slowly from above. 

The silence is deafening, but soon shattered by the coughs amidst the debris and dust, the screams of their enemies and the Frozen Star’s intake of breath as she shields her eyes from the mist of  destruction. Sukuna stares at her form, already testing her resistance. 

He cannot help his disappointment, though, when blood begins to flow from her mouth. Upon noticing Sukuna’s eyes on her, she turns her faze away, her whole body stumbling down, and Sukuna decides to ignore her for the moment. 

In the chaos, a squad of sorcerers emerges—six, four of them marked with the sigil of the Sugawara clan, garbed in ceremonial coats, their faces covered in binding charms. The Desshi Squad, Suketada had warned him. They speak no names. They draw no weapons. Instead, their cursed energy flares in tandem, a wall of pressure folding over the remains of the temple like a collapsing star.

They seem to quickly make sense of the situation, as their eyes bounce from Sukuna to the young girl currently bent over on the splinter covered soil.  

“Ryomen Sukuna.” One of them sentences aloud. “You have been accused of desecrating imperial grounds, the murder of appointed guardians, the theft of a cursed object sealed by decree of the Yamato Court, the disruption and destruction of Hida’s mountain range and the abominable crime of consuming human flesh.”

Then, one of them deposits a coffer on the ground, and opens it to show the remains of the sorcerer Sukuna killed mere days ago.

Everyone, even him, turn their eyes away at the grotesque sight, all except for the young and weakened cursed user he just freed, who stares at it in nauseating shock. 

“You have henceforth been sentenced to immediate execution with no pardon to your soul.”

Despite this, however, none of them throws themselves at him, none activates their techniques, or try to commence any obscure sealing rite. Sukuna waits.

“Nevertheless,” another interjects, “You have managed to shatter the ice of the Frozen Star, a criminal who has caused the deaths of thousands of people and whose sins and crimes need to be paid back with her own blood.” Oh, so they are gonna play that game, he thinks.

“If you hand her to us, we will not fight you today.”

Sukuna’s throat rumbles with an incredulous cackle, these sorcerers and their negotiating skills are a neverending entertainment: he did not come this far to easily forsake the prize, even if that prize is currently barely breathing. If anything, he would rather end them now than having to inconvenience himself with a fight later on in the future.

Surprisingly, it is the Frozen Star who speaks next, and what she says not only stupefies him, but everyone who is close enough to hear it:

“Immortal Winter, thaw .”

It is uncanny, how just a murmur can overturn everything. 

How she can unfreeze a whole kingdom with a whisper.

Upon hearing it, something instantly shifts in the faces of Desshi, something akin to hope, yet Sukuna can discern glimpses of fear too, in their widened eyes, consuming their gazes as snow begins to fall upwards outside of Sukuna’s domain. As clouds roll back and the heavens open up like a curtain, showing the tinted unmistakable colours of an emerald dusk.

He does not need to look at the Frozen Star to know what she is doing, it seems she is not just willing to cower behind his knees. He can leave her to her own devices, he notes, quite pleased.  

Then, he feels her presence next to him, the weight of two small feet shuffling beside him into a calm, poised stance. The crown of a white head, still marred in red. Sukuna takes a moment to study her shape: the blood has stopped pouring from her mouth, it seems, and her body looks intact save the stains from past injuries. All of her cursed energy flows with unreckoned potency. Every speck of frost, every flake of snow, every shard of ice across the entire kingdom has seemingly  returned to her body. Sukuna is not familiar with her innate technique, nor as much as the other sorcerers seem to be, but if he had to wager a guess for what just happened, then he would bet his brother’s weapon the girl called of her domain to take back all the cursed energy she had poured into it for over more than year. 

A formidable strategy, he admits to himself.

“If you want her,” he tells the sorcerers, “Come and take her.”

She doesn’t wait for the sorcerers to come, however. 

A sweep of her palm sends dozens of ice shards scattering—a fan of translucent daggers blooming midair and ripping toward the Desshi Squad. One sorcerer raises a barrier, but it cracks immediately as the first ice petal splits the air like a bell.

Then the wind hits, a shrieking cold peels the lacquer off their ceremonial armor, turns the Suwagara sigil into shreds. The ground beneath the sorcerers begins to tremble with frostroots — glacial veins shooting from her feet like rivers toward them, latching onto their feet, climbing up their ankles.

Uraume’s ice stabs one on his throat, 

whilst another starts to choke on it as it punctures the inside of his throat. 

Four remain, the Sugawara: one of them slams his palm to the ground.

A ring of crimson flame erupts—a warding halo that carves a path through the snow. The flames eat at the air, forcing Uraume to recoil slightly, shielding her eyes.

Sukuna hums at this, surprised by the presence of a cursed fire user. 

The two strongest move as a unit. One counters Uraume’s ice formations with firepower, the other warps the space around her with low-vibration cursed sound — her stance crumbles for a heartbeat. 

That’s all Sukuna needs.

He sighs, stepping forward like a bored god among children.

“I was going to watch,” he mutters, “but I am getting impatient.”

The air splits.

When he had summoned his domain, he had only crafted enough for the sure-hit effect to bind the sorcerers within his radius. Just as he foresaw, the absence of a shrine or other intricate domain work has lured their enemies into thinking they are all still fighting on neutral ground. 

The Desshi don’t know what’s coming—but still they scatter, sensing the shift in the air, flash-stepping in all four directions.

It doesn’t matter.

His voice is calm:

“ Dismantle. ”

Lines etch into the world—thin, glowing red.
One sorcerer’s head slides from his shoulders, still turning to look back as it falls.

Another blocks—but blocks nothing. His arms drop seconds before the rest of his body catches up.

Two remain.

One panics and reaches toward the Frozen Star, desperate to take her down with him, using some sort of cursed rope to bring her down. 

“He will kill you, just like he killed our friend. He will eat you. Help us, please!”

The Frozen Star extends a single, ice covered finger.

“As you said, I am not one of your own.”

The air around the sorcerer crystallizes instantly—his last breath turns to ice in his throat. He shatters before hitting the ground.

The final Desshi staggers back. Sukuna doesn’t even walk, or turn to look at him, his eyes are too fixated on the girl, his mind still echoing what she just said.

Behind him, the last sorcerer splits open—clean, silent.

There is no shock in her gaze, nor fear, only indifference, and perhaps hesitation. 

They don’t know what to say, or do now that the carnage is over and the path has been cleaned for them to leave. 

They both wonder what the other will do next. 

“Are you, perchance, descended from the Gojo clan?” He asks the girl, curiosity getting the better of him.

“Why would you think so?” Is her answer. He can’t help but laugh at how casually they are both able to converse after everything that just happened.

“Well, your hair, for starters,” he says, approaching her, his feet stepping on blood, 

he tries not to breathe its smell. 

When he is close enough, he raises a hand to her hair, and combs a strand with one of his fingers. He doesn’t need to state the obvious, the girl’s hair is a clear give away. She shivers, recoiling from his touch. “, and the fact you used Reversed Cursed Technique to heal yourself.”

“Anyone can learn it.” she says, trying to deflect the subject.

“At such a young age, I doubt it.” he counters “Only clan descendants are able to master such techniques that quickly. And me , of course.”

The girl sighs, and he braces himself for a tedious family story.

“I was mothered by a whore who was the daughter of a whore whose father was a  man who betrayed his wife with, unsurprisingly, a whore.” Sukuna raises his unmasked brow, his four eyes glinting with amusement at her crude language. “And that man was the spare heir to the Gojo clan.”

The blood of his enemies, flowing inside the flesh of this young girl he just fought alongside with.

“Fascinating family tree…” he jests. The girl lowers her head, whatever thoughts are crossing her mind Sukuna cannot guess. “Never I conceived myself capable of entertaining the company of a Gojo, but here I find myself. Mhmm, I should most definitely kill you.”

He of course, doesn’t mean it, not yet at least, she apparently knows that too, because she laughs: a soft, elegant cadence vibrating in her throat, a laugh raised in a silent shrine. 

“This place will be soon pouring with soldiers,” Sukuna contemplates, as much as he wishes to test this new acquaintance amidst the destruction they just brought, they should start making their leave, “and whatever we do now, we should avoid drawing more attention to ourselves.”

The girl nods unquestionably, straightening her clothes. She begins to walk to the temple’s ruined exit. 

Sukuna sighs with exaggeration, reminding himself he is the one who decided to pick up this stray. 

“We will be more efficient if you just sit on one of my arms,” he reasons. “I will take us to a mountain not far from here.”

The girl stills, cheeks flushed, but nods with quiet resolve. If he were not so wrung out, Sukuna would tease her, instead he just extends his two right arms— the top one raised like a backrest, the bottom one curved like a seat.

The girl is not a prude, because she doesn’t fluster or flinch when Sukuna’s arms grasp her at the hips and the back, his palms resting on her stomach and sternum. 

Good grief, it is like holding an ice stalagmite. 

Then, he pivots, and even though the girl’s breath shakes, her composure does not falter. 

Beneath them, Heijō-kyō stretches out like a carcass, its buildings gaunt with ruin, the snow stained with soot. The military bell continues to toll — slow, warning strikes that echo across the stone walls and staggered roofs. Someone has found the bodies. Someone has begun to count them.

“Too slow,” Sukuna mutters to himself. The girl turns to look at Sukuna’s shoulder, shielding her eyes from the wind. The ends of her now short hair brush and itch at the skin of his torso. 

They land before a mountain crevice near the top, concealed behind the tops of trees and clinging bushes. Unsurprisingly, the site is still blanketed in melting snow—Sukuna lets her down without a word.

The girl inspects the place, looking out for any anomaly, and assessing the safety of their temporary shelter. Sukuna observes her, like an erudite studying the behaviour of an unfamiliar creature.

“I don’t know if you would like to receive my gratitude,” she starts to say, surprising him with the gravity in her tone. “But I still would like to express it, were it not for you, I would have remained there for years.”

Sukuna says nothing. The night is moonless, and the lights of the city are too far to spill on them. He summons a flame, and lets it float between them. Their shadows joining on the mountain wall. 

Her stare is fixed on him, expecting a reply. 

“Consider the favour returned.” he says, not wanting it to acquire that much importance. As much as he would like to, he cannot ignore the truth: he wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her either.

The girl’s eyes widen,

“You knew ?”

Sukuna cackles derisively,

“Do you think I would go through all that trouble if I didn’t?”
Guilt, or shame, he cannot distinguish, flash on her expression. 

“I think you are above debts and favours.” she muses softly, holding his gaze. It makes him uncomfortable.

“Sukuna-sama.” he corrects, his tone more firm. Confusion flickers briefly in her eyes. “ And you are not wrong, I am above those conventions.”

The girl bows her head, her fringe fusing with her lashes. 

“Forgive my impertinence, Sukuna-sama.” 

The way she pronounces his name is overwhelming, for reasons he still cannot name. He is not blind to other’s intentions, he sees where this is going: the girl plans to follow him, she is not running away, she is trying to make sense of his actions.

He needs to leave before things escalate, now . 

“As I have said, I have already done enough, much more than I typically endorse. Don’t waste the second life I gave you.”

Behind him, he hears the brush of a finger against the chalky limestone on the mountain rock. A beat passes. The girl keeps fidgeting. 

“And if I want to serve you?”

And just like that, this young curse-user lays her blade on his feet.

It is one thing to wonder, and it is another to hear the explicit confirmation, the verbal expression of her desire to join him. He knows not how to react, he is desperate to look at her and pick her words apart, tear her open at the seams, if only to comprehend why she would want to submit to him beyond simply surviving their encounter. 

“You would die,” Sukuna reasons, more to himself than her. “you would one day bore me, or grate on my patience.” He is not lying, this is what has already happened. He is not able to keep a following or staff, he acts alone, survives and prevails alone. Only his brother had the privilege of accompanying and it all crumbled down anyways. 

He swore this would never happen again.

“And if I don’t?”

He snaps his head to look at her, her restless finger stills.

“Please,” he scowls, his eyes raking her fragile little form, her exposed bony collarbones, her terribly cut hair and the sharpness in her plum coloured eyes as she hears the mock beneath his words, “ you are just a girl, even if you were a thousand year old sorcerer you would have nothing of value to offer me.”

He expects her to deny this, to reiterate her own power, reassure him of her usefulness. He expects her to draw attention to the fact she has already made a name for herself, has already instigated fear and respect across both the sorcerer and non sorcerer world. 

That if not an equal, she would qualify to be a worthy subordinate. More powerful than his brother ever was.

Her response, however, is neither of those things.

“I can cook.” She murmurs, calmly. As if she were presenting a simple, mundane offering. The domesticity behind her proposition renders him speechless.

“What?” he utters.
Despite his visible disbelief, the girl remains undaunted.

“I can prepare your meals.” she repeats, wiping chalk from her fingers, holding his gaze.

He, for once, does not know how to respond, has no rebuttal, his perplexity twisting and narrowing his features. Does she not know what she is implying? Did she not listen to his charges when they were announced?

“You saw the coffer. You know what was inside.” He states, not just reminding her, but himself: the shock shrinking her pupils, the white in her eyes swallowing her gaze, the almost subtle shake of her head, and the lurch in her throat when the nausea hit. 

He can see a sliver of it now, as she gulps before replying.

“I did.” 

When he speaks, his mouth is dry,  doubt and amazement etched into his tone.

“You would betray your own kind like that?”

He has seen enough to know she is ruthless, has heard enough to know she is maniac and dangerous, devoid of conscience or moral fetters.

You have managed to shatter the ice of the Frozen Star, a criminal who has caused the deaths of thousands of people and whose sins and crimes need to be paid back with her own blood.

But when he looks at her, he still sees a human, not a curse.

The girl purses her lips, weighing her response. Sukuna waits, his blood running where otherwise it would sit still. 

“Do you enjoy it?” she asks instead, and Sukuna knows he must answer, because her answer verges on his, doesn’t it? She doesn’t excuse it. She just wants to understand what kind of thing he is. To clarify, she says “Do you enjoy consuming the flesh of humans?”

He should lie. He should most definitely lie . If he does, she won’t have any reason to follow him, she will be abhor him, she will attempt to leave, and he will strangely let her, hopefully without resorting to violence, lest they undo all the effort they went through to be having this conversation in the first place.  

But he can’t, for his own sake, force himself to voice such a statement; that he enjoys committing such an aberrant act. To say it aloud would make it real. And him no longer a god, but something worse — a beast that accepts itself. A being that glorifies the collapse of his own morals, however frail they always were.

To tell the truth however, to admit it is a necessity rather than a choice…Sukuna’s jaw clenches. 

“I detest humans,” he settles with, omitting the fact she is a human herself. “Even when I was one of them. I hold no empathy, no guilt or remorse when they fight me and perish. I delight in their fear, their terror and reverence when they finally submit.” 

Sukuna pauses. The air grows hotter, his flame flickers, and the girl’s coldhearted eyes glow with foreign warmth. She waits, as though she can read and see through the walls of his hatred. 

“But no, I don’t enjoy the act.” he finally admits, baring himself in front of her. 

She doesn’t smile like he expects, doesn’t sigh in relief, just nods in quiet understanding, and rises to her feet. Sukuna stares as she clasps her hands in front of her stomach, hiding her hands beneath her sleeves, poised like a trained miko, a faithful monk. 

“Then betraying my own kind is a price I am willing to pay.”

“Why?” 

“Humans never wanted me among them to begin with, I would rather live amongst curses.” Is the only reason she gives, but it only opens up more questions, it is still not enough. She knows this, and can sense his dissatisfaction. “You need not explain your actions to me, Sukuna-sama. I have already gathered it is something you do out of extreme necessity, not choice.” Sukuna is not strong enough to deny it, and too proud to confirm it. “ I would like the same treatment in return. At least when it comes to this.”

This girl, this girl who has been thrown over the edge of society, slipped through the cracks and onto his path; this girl who has always known what it means to be someone other, casted out of sorcerer society at such a ripe age. This girl who overflows with power, chills his skin and disarms his plans— This girl whose real name he still doesn’t know.

“Frozen Star.” he says, deciding he should just embrace this offer, “What syllables do I need to pronounce to call you by your given name?”

Something flares to life in the girl’s eyes. 

“U-ra-u-me, 裏梅” She says, 

Sukuna turns her name like a blade in his hand, he weighs it like a weapon, testing its balance…

Uraume. Uraume. Uraume.

Does he imagine himself calling this name when he is bored or hungry? Will he have to say it a thousand different ways before she fits its shape? Will she ever measure up to what he wants it to mean? Can he see himself summoning her in battle or combat, like he would his own domain?

Can he wield her, like he does his late brother’s weapon,

can he make this name the exception ?

“U-ra-u-me, huh?” When he finally uses it, the girl inhales—sharply, involuntarily, and meanwhile Sukuna begins to circle her, not like a predator, but like someone evaluating an unopened offering. Her gaze tracks him, head turning in careful rhythm. She won’t lose sight of his face. “Your name presents you with a choice, one I will let you make: ume ,  a plum, something harvested to be devoured and consumed within a bite,” 

Then, he extinguishes his flame, and darkness swallows the space between them. Sukuna can barely draw her figure agains the dark of the night, but he still feels her, hears the hitch in her breath, the way it brushes his chest. “or ura , something meant to stand behind another’s back, something destined to be in the shadows.” he murmurs, closer now. “Which meaning do you choose?”

Her hair still smells of fresh blood. He breathes it in. Accepting the violence wrapping this gift.

“Whatever meaning you assign to me,” she murmurs,“ I will become.”

Oh, Sukuna can feel his control slipping:

He wants her to mean both, or nothing at all.

“You would leave your fate up to me?” 

He can feel her take a step back, and he doesn’t protest: it’s for the better. 

“My fate was yours the moment you found me and spared my neck.”

The flame starts to flicker back to life, lighting their faces in intervals. 

“Well, Uraume,” he sighs, “I still haven’t decided on your fate”

He has , he knows , this girl could fit any space he carves like water and turn herself into a sculpture of ice.

“When Sukuna-sama decides on one, I will follow willingly.”

But he still doesn’t understand why .

“Will you, really?” he challenges, his tone sharpening,“Are you the type to bow to another? When you offer me your servitude, who are you trying to convince? Yourself, someone else? Do you really know what that entails?”

Her voice is quiet and rich when she answers, confidence and spite besetting every sentence.

“I have served many men, all of whom I deemed unworthy of my servitude, their weakness and worldly vices undid whatever respect their tyranny managed to evoke. In the end they tried to have me beheaded for my insolence.”

Sukuna, like them, is too a man—a curse, he mentally corrects—of many vices, but he doesn’t wish to tell her any of it, not yet. 

Instead he probes her further:

“Will you be insolent with me?”

The girls’ brows arch again, the flame now glowing ceaselessly, and every twist of her features visible,

“Mhmm…Will you behead me if I am?”

Eyes locked, Sukuna doesn’t answer, his mask and scarlet stare giving away nothing. Yet Uraume’s gaze doesn’t falter. 

He doesn’t know what to do with this surrender of her will, doubts she will keep her promises. At some point, she will leave or betray him, it is a matter of time,

and Sukuna can’t wait for it all to unfold in ways it never did before. 

“We should camp here tonight,” he says, when the tension settles. 

Both exhale a breath. “ I would like to rest, and you should too.”

That’s his first command. Uraume nods.

By the time he lies down on the stone mountain floor, she has already taken her place against the rock. Far, but not too far.

The fire dims. He closes his eyes. Slows his breathing.
Pretends.

“It’s obvious,” Sukuna murmurs into the quiet. “But you will have an opportunity to leave once I fall asleep.” There is a faint turn of cloth, as she shifts to look at his silhouette. “Away from me lies your freedom. If you regret this, take it. I won’t hunt you down.” he promises, this time he doesn’t lie.

“Sukuna-sama…” she tries to interrupt him, quick to reject his offer already, this last gift to the person she was before meeting him. Sukuna doesn’t let her,

“But if I wake tomorrow,” he continues. “and you are still here,” her body shifts again, she holds her breath.  “Your life is mine.” 

The silence stretches. He can hear her barely breathing.  “And if you leave then, or any time after without me wishing so. If you betray me…”

The summer breeze murmurs against the top of the trees, brushes the soles of his feet and sweeps dust and snow off the mountain rock. Sukuna closes his eyes, a beat passes.

“... you will wish you were never born.”

The reply is not immediate, and he doesn’ expect it to be.

Then it comes, whispered into the dark. 

“I was born today.”

***

The sun filters through his eyelids, a beetle wanders in the stone where his arm lays, tickles his tanned skin. The heat of summer is unbearable, and for a moment, he wonders if she has left. 

At some point, during his sleep, he did feel her shift, rise and walk around. 

He knows she hesitated, heard her murmur something to herself. 

He fell back asleep before he heard her come back. 

She is gone , he tells himself, yet not opening his eyes to confirm.

He dreads both her presence and her absence, and so he delays knowing.

But the mourning doves keep chirping, 

and the sun burns against his skin. 

Against his will, he opens his eyes, not knowing the sight he will meet—braced for everything, for nothing.

What he sees is a small body, lying in a pile of snow that refuses to melt, hair falling over sleep veiled eyes, chest rising and falling with quiet rhythm. Her little hand rests palm-up in the space between them.

It is the most irreversible thing he has ever witnessed.

Chapter Text

Summer

July (7th month) 782 A.C, 

Heijō-kyō  (Modern Nara)

Is this what you meant mother? The one worth kneeling for? 

There is a god in front of Uraume,

and that god is shrouded in speckles of blood. And that blood follows him wherever he goes. 

And so does she.

He is an invisible scythe, wielded by the very same air she breathes, that cuts through everyone and everything on its path. And Uraume trails after it, her heart frozen, pieces of ice still stuck to her skin, despite the scorching summer heat trying to melt it. His pace is rapid, his steps enormous, putting Uraume’s short legs and small feet to shame. She has never looked for so long at someone’s back, has never memorized their stature or shape the way she does his, always in her line of sight. Never leaving, like a wraith she persistently follows, a night terror that sits oppressively by her side at night. 

The god barely speaks to her, only utters simple, straightforward commands. 

“Wake up, we are leaving.” he says the first morning, Uraume’s lids fly open, her heart seizing with an agonizing combination of nerves and excitement. 

“To where,” she asks, her voice gravelled with sleep.

The god sneers at her, his stare heavy,

“Does it matter?”

It doesn’t. She has no choice. 

Her life is now his. Just as she had vowed, and there is no way to undo it. And even if there was, Uraume would still go down this path, and will come to realize she will never regret it. For there is a quiet relief in surrendering one’s own will to someone greater, someone worthy of commanding it. 

Sukuna does not tell her where they are headed, but in between that destination and the imperial capital there are a number of villages. Outposts. Temples. Strongholds. 

Neither are spared. 

At first, Uraume assumes it is a strategy. Targeted, logical. But that illusion collapses quickly. There are soldiers stationed at regular intervals, their tents lit and guardfires glowing. Horses sleep near iron lances. They don’t coil with violent intent when they near and pass by them.
They were warned, yes. Told to keep watch, report anomalies, prepare for cursed manifestations, if the patrols and rotations and waiting silence is of any indication. Perhaps the powers above thought they could map Sukuna’s movements. Track his path like a rogue star.

It made no difference.

Sukuna killed everything just the same. He did not distinguish between enemy and innocent, sacred or profane, awake or dreaming.

Regardless of the empire’s own grandiose perception of itself, no army is sent to stop them, no local warriors come to face them, such a thing would be a futile and tragic endeavor, 

because Ryomen Sukuna is not a man.

And thus they react as though the land had been plunged under a natural, spirit-driven event. They react to him the way men react to floods, storms and earthquakes. Not with flying arrows. But with incense, and the smoke of burnt offerings gathering in the sky. 

Uraume could feel it in the air, clinging to their feet as they moved across groves, fields and mountain passes: barriers placed hurriedly by trembling hands, cursed sutras scrawled in panic, and wards charged with the cursed energy of those who had never really faced the thing they were instructed to contain. It is all fruitless. 

Sukuna removes every obstacle, inanimate or alive, ruthlessly and with spectacle. There is nothing that could justify this preemptive attack. The only reason, which would be to leave no footprints, is immediately overridden by the pools of blood left on his wake. 

“ Watch ,” he says, voice flat, gesturing toward a valley just below the hill they are standing on top of. She obeys, her eyes fix on the army turrets, the temple sat in the middle, circled by small, innocent houses, some notoriously empty, others glowing brave with torchlight. 

His technique cleaves through it all, and Uraume watches as the wooden houses are shred to pieces, as they collapse inside out, as roofs are upended and torn, and stone is sliced into infinitesimal parts.

A thousand screams of anguish ring in the air.  Short, immediate, and brutally silenced. A gust of wind carries the rain of blood towards them, sprinkling their skin. And through it all Uraume only wonders if the colour touched her hair. 

It soon dawns on her there is no purpose to this violence and destruction, no grander strategy or greater picture, only that she witnesses it and remembers .

 If you betray me... you will wish you were never born.

***

“Why did you have to wake me during an age of weaklings?” Sukuna spits out with a huff one night, head pillowed on one of his arms, his hand twirling that weapon he always carries. His voice is soured with boredom, and Uraume just listens, her mouth sewn with fear.

She too feels unmoored, his presence has hurled her into a world different than the one she knew, one she no longer recognizes. One where resistance is conspicuously weightless and absent. One where, for the first time, she can let go of the role of the monster, and pass it on to someone else.

For that’s all there is to it really, that’s all humans are, puppets stringed along the events of a play, forced like kugutsu to obey the will of a wandering puppeteer.  Some were born to die, others were born to make sure others were born. But in every performance there is always the monster, the strongest, the threat to all the former.

Uraume had always been this puppet, forced to be the thing most feared, and now—for the first time in her short life—the strings have been cut, and she can watch the performance instead of playing in it.  

At some point, her winter had once been publicly feared by all souls, but even then warriors had been sent to stop her, spies had been posted everywhere to report any sighting, and sorcerers had gathered and joined forces to ultimately check her into submission. 

But this was different.

This was something the world did not even know how to fight.

Sukuna had attacked the imperial capital. Liberated her— one of the most sought-after curse users.  Killed high-ranking nobles of the Abe clan. Obliterated entire fortified paths on their way to gods-know-where.  And still, no one comes to stop him. 

She knows he can walk the air, and can render a mountain to pieces. She had seen him extend his arms in triumph when he first emerged from Mont Kurai, had she not? She had seen his mouth contorting with glee. Yet it all pales in comparison to what he forces her to witness during those first three days in his service. And worst of all, Uraume suspects this barely scratches the surface of what he can do.

“Master,” she is brave enough to ask, halting her step. Sukuna’s gaze pierces her immediately, as he turns to look at her, oozing impatience. Uraume can barely muster the courage under the weight of his four eyes. “Is there a limit?” 

His expression is unreadable, and Uraume gulps, forced to elaborate, “To… to your technique?”

He doesn’t respond, not in that moment at least, he whips around and keeps on walking. Uraume is grateful that is his only reaction. Like always, she follows after him, hissing whenever a branch catches on the skin of her shin, swallowing her complaints about the lack of rest.

Or food. 

Or water. 

Sukuna tortures her slowly, pushes her to the limits of her Reverse Cursed Technique. Observes silently as she heals the scraps she gets along the way. He never checks to  see if she is following him, never adjusts his monstrous pace, forcing her to leap instead of walk. It all soon becomes humiliating, to the point Uraume has to quietly request multiple times during their journey if she can relieve herself in a nearby tree, only to run after him when she finishes because he never waits, cicadas laughing at her.

And although she has her Reverse Cursed Technique to fall back on, the summer heat becomes unbearable, her clothes soon scented by sweat, old blood, and sun-baked earth.

Only at night, when it is too dark to see the path ahead, he lets her rest. By this point, Uraume’s knees have already given in, falling to the ground, caving under the weight of hours and hours of ceaseless walking. And Sukuna, settled against the nook of a tree, an arm perched on one knee and a hand hanging loosely from it, just watches from across his fire as she massages her feet and cleans herself by conjuring ice and melting it by the warmth of his flames. He gazes as she licks the cursed water from her own dirty hands, and makes no comment on her workaround.

But the next night, he withholds the fire, forcing them both to sit in darkness, barely lit by the crescent moon. This time, he watches as Uraume waits instead for the ice to melt on her hands, fruitlessly hoping the summer warmth will counteract the coldness of her palms.

Sukuna chooses this moment to answer her question:

“I haven’t tested the limits,” He states, and the ice shakes in her hand, her fingers trembling as she turns to look at him. His gaze glows red in the dark, the sight is akin to a nightmare come to life. 

“Why not?” She asks, voice quiet. Sukuna just shakes his head at her naive reply. 

“Because it is limitless, that’s why.”

“Still.” Uraume whispers. “If it is limitless, you could end it all, could you not? Turn this world to dust. You could dismantle everything that exists, hurl all of us into oblivion…”

Sukuna rewards her comment with a humorless laugh, he extends one hand towards her,  a single flame flares to life, flags between their faces, almost burns the tip of Uraume’s nose. 

“If I did,” he says, teeth showing, face closing in, “there would be nothing left to taste.”

The ice melts. 

***

Sukuna’s violence ceases once they enter the Hida mountain range, as though he had brokered a truce with nature herself, or in particular, this section of the map. Not that he announces this to her, of course; it is Uraume who comes to the conclusion after recognizing the familiar dips and spikes of its mountains, the vibrant emerald green that until then had been hidden under the brushstrokes of her winter. 

It seems Sukuna—despite his disposition to plunder the south—is inclined to keep untouched whatever life occupies the province he once lived in. The thought comforts Uraume, only because of what that reveals of his character. 

Hopefully, her master will soon settle somewhere, preferably a place suitable for cooking, so that she might indeed give him something to taste and fulfill her role.

She should have expected it, in all honesty. She remembers that boy—Suketada—mentioning it in passing, a temple nestled high on Hida’s impressive terrain. Old and decrepit yet brimming with untold history and the traces of Sukuna’s human life. A testament of his legacy. Perhaps the only place in the world that has been left exactly as he remembers, or the only one he cares enough to revisit. 

Senkō-ji.

It is when Sukuna starts explaining their new accomodation when Uraume realizes just how little words they have exchanged during the duration of their trip. The thought plants doubt in her mind. The night she met him— properly met him, for fleeing a collapsing cave does not count—Sukuna had not spared any word or a moment of breath. Yet all the days that followed had been filled with pressing silence, only broken when necessary, or in moments of undeniable weight. Uraume had thought, for a second, Sukuna was rationing every word spoken to her.

As though such a thing could starve her. 

His tone is clinical now, his instructions brief as he names each room and hall, explaining its purpose. 

“This is the hondo ,” Sukuna says, when they enter the main hall, still filled with traces of worship everywhere. “I suppose the monks held the main ceremonies here. In the past it simply served as a reception room for any of my audiences.” That’s what I intend it to be now , he means. Uraume suspects Sukuna will not be attending any of these audiences himself, and will have her sit there for hours in his place. The thought of him listening or heeding the pleas of non-sorcerer folks is simply ludicrous. Unless, of course, he means something entirely different by “audiences”.

Uraume’s eyes linger on the ceiling panels. Above them hangs the sight of an empty circumference, a canvas for an artwork that was never painted. It looms over them like a fate yet not written.

It also imbues her with a profound and inexplicable dread, to the point she mentally thanks Sukuna when he moves on to the next room.

It is as extravagant as the last, the only difference is its smaller size and the stone statue sitting in the middle. At first glance, it resembles a Buddha, but when the second face comes into sight—attached grotesquely to the deity’s expression—Uraume realizes she is staring at a sculpture of him . She makes no comment on it. Neither does her master.

They keep sliding and passing through shoji doors, until they cross into a different building.

“The kuri , the residential building,” he announces when they enter a more austere, yet lived-in space. It is filled with low tables, sitting cushions and rolled-up futons. “The only building whose function the monks got right.” He snarks, not bothering to hide his condescension.

For a second, Uraume frets over the thought of them having to share a sleeping space, which is ridiculous given the fact they have been camping together for the past eight days. This worry vanishes the moment Sukuna leads her to more rooms and winding corridors, all walled in thin, air-worn shojis—each a replica of the previous one, a testament of its previous occupants’ lack of personal or material attachments.

“It has seen better days,” Sukuna adds, and Uraume wonders if it once housed intricate furniture and regal decor, if that’s why he scowls at the sight of opened scrolls, stale half-filled tea cups and half empty rice sacks.

“And of course, the engawa ,” he says, referring to the veranda that wraps around the temple. “As you can tell, it is quite worn. The monks did a poor job in keeping it.”

“Men care less about detail,” Uraume supplies, brushing her fingers against the underside of the wooden railing, her tips gathering dust. Sukuna observes her, his expression unreadable. When Uraume notices, he turns his face away, clenching his jaw.

“Exactly,” is all he says. Uraume realizes she has perhaps spoken too freely, and does not interrupt him again. After a prolonged silence, Sukuna gestures toward their view.

“See that cluster of pine and cedar trees?” Her head whips to glance at the forested land surrounding the temple. Indeed, the veranda overlooks an impenetrable woodland. The sunset barely breaks through the leaves and barks, for these stretch so greedily toward the sky, they feed from what little light remains.

“Yes, Sukuna-sama,” she replies.

And she might as well have pulled an invisible thread, because the next moment, the air splits.

Uraume’s eyes widen, her body registering the immediate danger, the caress of death at her skin.

Wood, branches, and the weight of centuries groan, severed from their roots. The entire grove breaks. Not one tree, not a few, but all: every pine, every cedar and cypress standing in between the temple’s eye and the world beyond—trunks bend and snap and fall. The earth trembles as they collapse in succession, toppling into one another and rolling down the mountainside like vanquished deities.

Birds fly away, crowing and perturbed, and Uraume’s head snaps toward Sukuna, heart hammering in her chest, cursed energy flaring at the nearness of his cleaving technique just mere moments ago.

Every time she thinks she has him figured out, he finds a new way to unmake her expectations. The only predictable thing about Sukuna is his absolute unpredictability.

A pleased expression plays faintly across his features.

It is then she notices—perhaps too late—that without any trees to shutter the world, the temple, enthroned on the top of the mountain, overlooks a limitless expanse. They can see all the villages and settlements painted across the characteristic green of Hida’s valleys; the winter-stripped fields that soon will be growing sustenance, stretched out in rectangles of pale gold and grey.

It is breathtaking.

***

“There are in total 19 different buildings,” Sukuna explains in a bored tone, once they are back on the temple’s main courtyard. “18 now.” he corrects, amusement sitting in between his lips. Looking back, it is the longest they have conversed since that night on the capital.

Right now, however, Uraume is too occupied staring at the halved building to appreciate the truce. Sukuna explains it was a tactic to scare off the old monks keeping it, and she mentally thanks him—she would rather sweep and shovel up debris than scrub blood off wood.

“And that red one, what purpose does it serve?” Uraume asks after, head nodding towards a small, recently red lacquered building that Sukuna forgets to mention. His silence is prolonged, and for a moment Uraume fears she somehow struck a nerve.

“I did not build it,” he admits, a subtle frown pulling at his expression.

Inside, apparently, are housed a total of 64 Buddha statues, according to the few writings they find; a man named Enko, born in the beginning of the century, is its author. His work is impressive, Uraume has to admit, but completely useless. Perhaps it is because of that, and the fact the building is separated from all the rest, concealed and discrete, that Uraume says:.

“Sukuna-sama.” She begins, tone solemn. Sukuna, picking up statues with his hands, only hums to show he is listening. “Should I convert this into an ice house?”

Later, she will remember how he stilled, how the muscles in his back flexed as he acquired an unconsciously defensive stance; how he slowly turned around, a statue still in his hand, his only brow raised.

“To store…” Uraume adds, picking at her nails beneath her sleeves, trying to hide her nervousness and remain poised for him. “To store your food.”

Whatever peace, whatever amicability they have brokered during their inspection of the temple, shatters in this moment.

When he finally says something, his response is scathing and blunt, his tone flat.

“As I have said, I did not build it,” he says, placing the statue back into the closest shelf. Uraume can’t see his expression—he is purposefully avoiding looking at her. “I couldn’t care less what you do with it.”

Then, without turning to look back at her, he leaves, and Uraume is left there standing with an apology hanging on her lips.

It is hours later, when Uraume finally finds the courage to seek him out later that day, that she realizes Sukuna has left Senkō-ji altogether.

At first, she thinks he had gone out for a walk, but when the sun sets and he still hasn’t returned, Uraume believes it more likely he had chosen to stay away for the night. Perhaps he has set off to hunt, to meet with an ally or fetch some possession of his. Perhaps he has decided to venture on a trip without her—no explanation, no planned return date. Uraume does her best not to stay idle and makes use of her time; in some way, she prefers to work unobserved, without his eyes tracking and picking apart every one of her movements. Thus, it is not just logical but easy for her to start turning the temple into something that resembles a livable space. She finds a barn behind some fallen trees that had miraculously survived her master’s technique—in it, shovels and a few old tools, still intact. Armed with these and bolstered by her bottomless cursed energy, Uraume begins work at the break of dawn each day; shoveling up tiles and splintered wood planks, then sweeping the stone steps with a straw broom to lift off the sawdust. Each morning, she clears a section of the main courtyard, her progress slow, but visible.

In the afternoons, she visits the nearby settlements, hiking down overgrown trails, tall grass brushing her shins. The locals make no effort to hide their weariness—mothers yank their children to their other side whenever Uraume walks by, but cannot do anything against the former’s gazes being drawn to her unique looks, her snowed hair. 

She barters some golden trinkets she finds in the temple for other missing, more essential goods. She buys what little they have of some seasonal vegetables: daikon, burdock, scallions, ginger. Uraume does not ask for rice: thankfully, the monks kept enough sacks for her to ensure a base for most of her recipes.

On the way back, she always gathers firewood and local herbs; some flowers began to blossom—almost miraculously—after the frost was lifted. Uraume cuts the bulbs and collects them in a bamboo basket she found lying about the courtyard, half-woven.

She spends her evenings foraging—mosquitoes and ticks ignoring her, the blood flowing beneath her skin too cold to beckon them. The area, perhaps due to the wet weather, is prone to all different species of mushrooms. Uraume, aware of the existence of some poisonous kinds, searches for any scroll in the temple on different fungal species. She finds one, with detailed watercolored drawings of some edible examples. From then on, whenever she recognizes one, she cuts it from the stem. Herbs are also easy to find, if one knows what to look for—the woods abound with yomogi (mugwort), which proves useful for baths and teas, and nutmeg, which can repel the summer insects and also be used as incense.

Since the end of the winter, many shrines have been filled with offerings as gestures of gratitude. Uraume does not feel an ounce of guilt every time she visits one to collect these, seeing no use in leaving the goods to rot. In some twisted way, the offerings are hers—for she had been the one to thaw the winter, had she not? Never mind the fact she is the one who summoned it in the first place.

Therefore, her collection of goods keeps growing, and with each passing day, so improve her recipes.

But Uraume always cooks a single-pot, a single serving. And sits alone by the hearth, with no one to share the food with.

By the seventh-day mark, Sukuna still hasn’t returned, and the work in the temple grows scarce once the courtyard is rid of the only proof her master was ever there—no signs of destruction left to fill her routine. Each day she sits by the veranda, legs hanging limp from the edge, a cup of herbal tea in hand, sipping and waiting for him to make an appearance at any moment. But he never does.

Sometimes, she stares at that damned red building with all those useless statues and curses the day she thought he would appreciate the idea of her turning it into a sacred space for their condemned actions. Every time she passes by it, she turns her face away.

It is, on one of these nights, when she first notices the presence of an unfamiliar cursed energy nearing.

For an embarrassing second, Uraume wistfully hopes it is him, finally showing up. But the energy is too dim, too contained to belong to someone like Ryomen Sukuna.

In the end, it is just a sorcerer who comes to scout the area after intercepting rumours of a white-haired woman of short stature living in isolation—clearly sent by the jujutsu upper-crust to confirm their suspicions of that woman being Uraume herself, a curse-user with an execution order on their head.

The sorcerer is naive enough to challenge her, and thus Uraume kills him with a mere flick of her wrist, a spike of ice impaling him.

What a waste , she thinks, but it was necessary, especially because she does not wish for any more visitors to come wonder and disturb her peace. Sukuna’s peace too, when he reappears.

It forces her, for once, to visit the red building again.

I couldn’t care less what you do with it.

Like she does with her mother’s corpse once, Uraume preserves the sorcerer’s body in ice.

She should know better than to expect it to end there, however. On the third day, another sorcerer comes—more trained, sharper, and viciously set on avenging his friend. It does not matter. Uraume defeats him effortlessly. Brings him to the icehouse. Freezes him. All in that order.

After, comes the friend of the friend. Then the friend of the friend of the friend.

Then the friend of the friend of the friend of the friend.

With each death, her methods become more clinical, more practiced—her attacks rehearsed, predictable only to those who have already fallen victims to it, and terrifying to those who haven’t yet.

Most of them venture into the temple’s lands not knowing what they will face. Sometimes, they get too close for comfort, expert in masking their own energies.

Uraume, whose humanity is already irreparably gone, decides to let her domain do all the work. She perfects a variation of it, performs countless iterations, before she finds the right pattern in which to weave her cursed energy.

Ryōiki Tenkai.「領域展開」

“Domain expansion.” This time, however, it is different. A domain not created with the purpose to endure, but to arise whenever it is threatened by the presence of another sorcerer. A domain built to lure, to conceal itself, and only awake when Uraume wills it, wherever she is. Invisibly embedded into every bark, leaf, branch and clove of grass, lurking beneath warmth, green moss and summer dew.

Shizuka Naru Fuyu「静かなる冬」

“ Silent Winter.”

Its function is akin to that of a veil, meant to guard off sorcerers. Unlike veils, however, its range cannot attract sorcerers’ eyes. Only those who dare trespass fall victim to it. Unlike her traditional domain, it retains a sure-hit effect and only requires Uraume’s energy once it is activated, which means summoning it again is necessary only after its automatic execution.

Whenever that happens—and Uraume curiously wonders which sorcerer has come to disturb the temple each time—the victims are already dead, bodies frozen in the snow. Uraume never needs to directly fight them, for the cold is so inhumanly impossible to withstand most of them die instantaneously, others hold on long enough for Uraume to deal the final blow, and are too weakened to stop it.

Every time this happens, Uraume takes their blood and paints her hair red. As she always has, the act is a tradition as innate as her technique. A ritual she cannot skip.

Thus, the first intruder who ever manages to cross this natural, lethal barrier Uraume has built can only be Sukuna himself.

Neither believe what they are seeing: him, standing tall in the centre of the courtyard, just as strong and majestic as the day he left, only slightly leaner, the snow of Uraume’s domain clinging to his ruffled hair, kamutoke gripped in his fist, a robe clad over his shoulders, Hida expanding behind him like the backdrop of a painting.

And Uraume, one hand finding purchase on the veranda’s beam, mouth hanging open, eyes widened in disbelief, heart hammering in her chest. Her domain, torn to pieces, sliced and surpassed by Sukuna’s own.

“You came back,” she whispers, voice cracking with hope, dread, excitement, fear.

Anticipation.

He slowly shakes his head, he too not believing the sight in front of him, but his eyes don’t leave her.

“You did not leave,” he breathes out, and has the gall to look offended.

He makes no comment as to the improvements she has made in his absence, but his eyes linger on every detail and change: the cleanliness of the courtyard, the burnished boards, the lack of cobwebs and the absence of dust. And Uraume, instead of pointing any of this out, does not seek for him to acknowledge any of it. Nor for his gratitude, or praise.

Inside, he sheds his cape. Uraume extends her arms and he welcomes the gesture, letting her take it off as she bows. It momentarily soothes her fear at being once again in his presence.

“I assume the reason I almost froze on the way here is your domain?” he quips, as he strides to the residential building. Uraume trails after him, his robes folded in the perch of her arms.

“Forgive me, master, I never meant to inconvenience you.”

Sukuna waves a hand to appease her.

“It was entertaining, rest easy.” Then, he sits on the tatami floor, cross-legged, two of his arms extended like a backrest. Uraume waits by the threshold, poised as always. There is a ceramic pot of tea, still steaming. Sukuna pours himself some into a clean cup. As he brings it to his lips, he asks, “It was different to the last one you summoned, though. I see you altered its conditions.”

The question is unspoken, but Uraume does not know how much depth of answer it invites.

“It served a different purpose, yes.”

“To function as a barrier, that would detect intruders.” Sukuna continues, following the same logic. Uraume nods—a veil would have been too noticeable.

“A veil…” She begins to say, but Sukuna interrupts her, his tone low and contemplative.

“Would be a beacon for more sorcerers.”

Uraume watches as he sips the tea, his eyes sweeping every corner of the room, every element that is new and every element that is missing. Behind him, tendrils of incense swirl and trickle up to the ceiling.

“The domain was a poor patch-up work,” Sukuna adds, “ wouldn’t hold against that of an experienced sorcerer.”

Uraume’s pride is wounded. 

“Then you would be disappointed with the sorcerers of today, considering some have perished to it already, Master”

“Have they tried to reach the temple already?”

“Indeed, Sukuna-sama.”

He raises his single eyebrow, cracking a grin.

“What did you do with them?”

Perhaps he asks because he saw no bodies on the way, because Uraume had gotten there first. She is not brave enough to mention the icehouse again, in fear that it might drive him away like it did the last time. So instead of giving him an answer, she diverts.

“Are you hungry, master? There is enough food in the pantry.”

At the mention of food, his expression tightens, and Uraume hates to be the cause of it, but she cannot keep lying to herself—not when he is already seemingly stuck in a cycle of denial.

“I cannot eat your meat.” he says through his teeth, avoiding her gaze and putting down the cup.

“I know,” Uraume tries to reassure, “ I don’t have any animal meat, at present. I had planned to prepare miso soup with rice. Would Sukuna-sama be interested in that?” She offers, hoping he will at least consider it.

“As long as it is not animal meat, I can eat it, so I will say yes to that.” he concedes, but it does nothing to soothe her qualms. Uraume ignores the limitations and requirements of his dietary restrictions, but by the looks of it—and judging by how he reacted the last time she alluded to the subject—Sukuna has not yet consumed any… not before they last saw each other, at least.

“But will it sate you, master?”

He clenches his jaw, shuts his eyes. This time, unlike the others, his frustration is no more directed at her than it is to himself.

“Temporarily.” he murmurs, low and deep. At his answer, Uraume holds her breath, and taking note of her concern, he continues, “I will hunt for someone tomorrow,” he declares, and then “ you need not worry for now.” You were not expecting me to come back, he means to say.

“Is the hunger not painful?” Uraume genuinely wonders, eyes sweeping his gigantic torso, his lean, sculpted stomach, his protruding elbows and collarbones; the veins clinging to the skin of his wide arms.

“It is unpleasant.” 

Uraume nods, it is as much vulnerability as she can hope to get . Sukuna, almost as if trying to shake off the weight of his own honesty, leans back slightly and gives her a feral grin, a fang showing, “Are you worried I might eat you instead?

Uraume’s skin warms, with dread, but also embarrassment at the mere thought. Instinctively, she hugs his robes closer to her chest, hoping to hide her flustered state.

“My flesh would be too cold.” She comments, voice flat, cheeks red.

The grin on his lips does not fade, not even as he stands up and walks around the room, a curious hand sweeping the frame of the shoji screen, gathering no dust.

A chill crawls through her spine when Sukuna turns, and slowly begins to walk towards her.

“Yes,” he agrees, savoring the s , his voice adopting a dangerous lilt, “and I do prefer my meals warm.” Then, his eyes wander across her figure, until they set on the robes. “Take them to the room adjacent to this one, I will sleep there.” Uraume nods dutifully, thankful for the momentary reprieve. But before she can leave the room to carry out his command, his voice stops her. “Oh, and bring dinner after. Whatever you want, let’s see what’s the deal with your food.”

Uraume bows again, lips twitching with a repressed smile, not believing he is truly back, ready to install himself and already giving her tasks.

“Of course, Sukuna-sama.”

An hour later, Uraume brings him the first ever meal she will serve him: small plates neatly arranged across a tray, and two pots of steaming soup. Only one of them still has the lid on.

“What took you so long?” he protests. Uraume, who is very much aware of the reason why, bows her head in apology.
“Forgive me, master, I had to make some adjustments and start from scratch.”

He hums, too hungry to scold her, too eager to sink his teeth into the food already.
“Well then, don’t keep me waiting any longer, serve the goddamned food already.”

Uraume nods, knees falling to the cushion, taking a seat opposite him. She carefully and methodically places one empty bowl, paired with chopsticks, and in the center the other smaller plates: chilled, lightly pickled cucumbers, daikon served with rice bran and yuzu peel, and sauteed vegetables coated in sesame and soy.

Sukuna stares, visibly impressed, glancing briefly at Uraume, then at the remaining elements on the tray.

“There is more,” she breathes out, her heart beating impossibly fast as she brings the two pots to his attention. The scent and rich colour of the soup piques Sukuna’s interest, as he subtly leans in to smell it. “The first is a fermented soybean soup made with stock from wild mushrooms, nori, green scallions, crushed ginger and rice as base.” Then, Uraume opens the lid of the second pot.

In it, lie the contents of a soup exactly identical to the one Uraume has just presented, were it not for the sight of shredded meat in the stock.

“I thought you didn’t have any meat.” Sukuna comments, tone languishing over the syllables, his eyes narrowing with distrust. “Is that for you, then?”

Uraume’s breath shakes, her heart silencing the world outside and Sukuna’s voice. Her hands begin to tremble: this is it.

“I cannot eat that,” she murmurs, avoiding his gaze. Beneath her sleeves, Uraume tries to steady her hands. “You could, if you wanted. That’s why I brought two pots, so you may choose from which to eat, as there is enough for the both of us in the first.” oh , she is ranting, “You are not obligated to eat from the second, it is just there, in case you need it now.”

Sukuna, for all his intelligence and sharpness, just gapes, his brow furrowing, his pupils shrinking in realization, red glinting underneath. Uraume watches as thousands of emotions fight to take over him, some she recognizes in herself, some she has never seen.

“What is in the second pot, Uraume?” he rasps out, though he already knows. Uraume begins to tremble, terrified at what he might do, at the sight of his clenched fist, the violence predating his gaze.

“You asked what became of the sorcerers…”

Then, he yanks her hand from under her sleeve, the corner of the table digging into her thigh as he pulls her towards him, close enough for his eyes to inspect her lean fingers, her palms, roughened by soap and water,
and the blood crusting beneath her nails.

He curses upon seeing it, dropping her hand in the center of the table, his eyes now set on the second pot.

“This?” he spits, snapping his head towards it, his hunger momentarily replaced by stupefaction.

“Yes,” Uraume says, as she clenches her eyes, pushing down the images and memories expanding like pools of blood in her mind.

“It looks,” he begins to say, pursing his lips, wrinkles forming at his forehead as his expression contorts almost painfully, his nostrils flaring, half due to restraint, half due to him taking in the scent of the dish. “It looks like normal meat.”

At his observation, Uraume bows again.
“That was the aim, master.”

And she hopes, with every bit of herself, that she has not made a mistake.

“I didn’t know it could look like that,” he continues, blinking with wonder. “so… discrete, it is…” His tone treads a fine line, between admiration and abhorrence, between relief and dread. “ I told you I would go hunt tomorrow,” his voice drops, deep and dark, “yet you went and acted behind my back and without a command to back it up with, what gave you the confidence to do such a thing?”

Uraume has never seen him so shaken. 

“If Sukuna-sama prefers to hunt for a villager himself, then I will never overstep like this again.” Uraume declares, then licks at her lips, as she takes a breath. “But,” she keeps saying, drawing out her voice. “If instead… he would rather not have to think of the matter of food at all, then I can handle it.” Uraume swallows, “I will handle it.”

He isn’t the only one behaving strangely—as if possessed by a different will, or one too buried deep beneath—she is too, speaking with a softness that feels deeply alien to her. It scares her.

Their gazes lock over the table, the lanterns casting shadows over their profiles, the food, if one can call it that, waiting in between. 

Sukuna’s penetrating gaze remains on her all the time, features schooled back into his usual, hardened expression. Seconds pass as he assesses her, mulls over her words, considers, calculates, and redesigns his plans, all the while judging Uraume’s sincerity and disposition.

The silence is too unnerving, even more so after he speaks again:
“You are more monstrous than you look.” he judges, low and sincere, his four eyes piercing her. The words don’t sting—in his voice, they are almost admiring—like he has just discovered something rare, buried beneath the snow.

Coming from him, Uraume can’t decipher if this is a backhanded insult or some sort of veiled compliment.

“They were sorcerers,” she feels the need to remind him, not like he cares who they were anyway, their stories, or dreams, their voice or faces; their loved ones, those who came looking for them and those who never did, all of these things she too doesn’t know because she hadn’t cared either. “All of them, I needed to kill them anyways if I meant to protect this place.” she says, with cold nonchalance.

Raking a hand through his hair, Sukuna leans back.

With a sick, sort of smile, he asks:
“How many?”

Uraume deflects the question, and instead, she tries to deepen her understanding of him:
“How many do you need to consume, how regularly?”

She fears she has taken the life of too many, or not even enough. Both possibilities terrify her—any more blood and she won’t even be able to see her own skin, or the white of her hair.

Meanwhile, her master’s tolerance is beginning to thin, with every time Uraume bypasses his questions or tries to corner him into admitting things he clearly would rather keep to himself. In spite of this, his answer comes. He does not raise his voice, but silence still bends around it, and Uraume is yet again reminded that every minute spent in his presence, every second, is a calculated gift that can be just as easily taken away.

“One, per month,” he bites out. “But it is too recent a development for me to know for certain. Now stop dodging my questions before I lose my patience,” he orders. “ How. Many ?”

“Enough for a year,” is Uraume’s quick answer, counting the incidents. “11 precisely.”

Something flickers in his gaze, too brief for Uraume to understand, but enough to undo the previous tension, unraveling the knot and letting the weight of that figure settle: what it means for him, for them.

Uraume expects him to lash out, scoff, or leave just like he seems to always prefer, but instead he just hums, gesturing towards the pot.
“I will take the second.”

Uraume swallows the lump of worry stuck in her throat, relief washing her face, and hastens to do exactly that. She ladles a hefty amount, and pours it onto the ceramic bowl she has chosen for him.

“What are you waiting for?” he mocks, as he casually brings an overflowing spoon to his mouth, “Food is getting cold.”

“Servants don’t eat with their lieges,” Uraume reminds him, flabbergasted, “I brought no plates for me.” And trip to the kitchen station would be almost counter-productive, she thinks.

“Do as you like, but I won’t have you leave my sight while I eat.” Sukuna declares, “So unless you don’t mind eating cold meals for the rest of your life, you can suit yourself.”

And thus Uraume gives up on the notion of keeping up such inviolable principle and hastens to find a bowl to place in front of his. 

Soon, she finds herself sitting in front of him, back straight like a rod. She busies herself with each bite, her gaze unfocused. The silence between them stretches, occasionally broken with the clink of his wooden spoon as it hits the bottom of the bowl. She hears this movement increase in speed, every taste more urgent than the last.

Sometimes she looks at him, catches him as he picks from the smaller dishes mid chew, stuffing his mouth with whatever he can find. If he notices her gaze on him, he stops, daring her to watch, and Uraume immediately focuses back on her own food.

The soup grows cold anyways. Sukuna’s presence intimidates her so much that Uraume becomes extremely mindful of every sound she makes.

“I hope it doesn’t taste as horrible as it feels.” she comments, if only to distract herself from her watered down appetite.

Sukuna takes some time to reply, swallowing down a spoon-load.
“Do you want to know what it tastes like?” he drawls, voice laden with cruel intention.

Uraume’s grip on her two wooden sticks tightens.
“No.” and she is sincere, she doesn't want to know. The question alone makes her stomach shift. How could he, after what she has done, be so callous as to even ask her that?

Her response only seems to intrigue him more. His gaze sharpens, darkens. He isn’t watching the food anymore—he is watching her, his mouth slowly adopting the shape of a curved blade.

“You may have fooled yourself, but you cannot fool me,” he sentences, each word spoken with unforgiving incisiveness. “If you had taken a look in the mirror perhaps your act would have been convincing, but I see the red clawing at your eyes.” Then, he breathes out a laugh sunk in vitriol, “I bet you cried like a little girl while holding the knife.”

Uraume immediately lifts her hand to cover them, but speaks nonetheless, tone soaked in anger and finality:
“It is the first time I had to butcher a body, the sight left something to be desired.” she retorts, finally rising to meet his cruelty, “It is inconsequential, I am still doing this because it is what you require of me. I was aware when I joined you.” Then she pauses, and adds coldly, “And judging by the marks branded on your skin, the legends following your name and your merciless attitude, there are a lot of heinous acts you wouldn’t hesitate to commit,” Their eyes meet, and despite the unreadable expression on Sukuna’s face, Uraume’s don’t waver, don’t shy away. “But this—this” she almost spits, glancing pointedly at his dish, “—is not one of them, is it?” she hisses.

Sukuna is speechless, his jaded smirk erased from his face, so is the cruel fascination that led him to push her thus far. 

Chest still rising rapidly after her outburst, Uraume ceaselessly stares at him.

“I didn’t even feel like crying," she murmurs, biting a laugh, because that is what terrifies her. “I just tried cutting an onion that went bad, and I teared up.”

Sukuna looks at her, truly looks at her, and his expression is, for a brief, unbelievable moment, haunted by conflict, memories, as though a war against something she can’t even come close to comprehend is being waged inside his head.

And upon seeing it, the ice in her eyes melts, her expression thaws, and her voice softens.
“Forgive me, master, for making you doubt me.”

And then, from the depths of her chest,
buried in the snow of her thoughts:
“All I wanted was to bear this sin for you.”

Her words flake and land softly in the silence between them, just as a summer thunder roars somewhere in the night-clad valley.

No more words are exchanged that night, but before Uraume goes to sleep in the furthest room from his, Sukuna—back turned against her, says:

“Uraume.” A long pause, “You did well.”

The unexpected praise sets her soul on fire.

Uraume steals a glance, taking this as an opportunity to truly look at him—the faint candlelight colouring the ends of his pale red hair ablaze. She tries to burn the image of his silhouette, his back, his body into memory—like a prophet standing before a god they must one day describe upon sutras and scripture. But the impossible breadth of his shoulders, his inhuman stature, the sheer presence of him—is just too overwhelming.

It’s too much, he is too much .

She almost runs to the opposite room, making sure to shut the shoji screen fully, shedding off her kosode, summer sweat clinging to her skin. She buries her legs in between the sheets of her futon, closes her eyes and wills the sight of Sukuna away, the sound of his rich commanding voice, of his cruel laughter, ripping through her skin.

***

August (8th month) 782 A.C, 

Uraume always thought peace could only be found in frozen ponds and frost covered barks, in soulless woods and abandoned shrines. 

She always thought its sound was the absence of sound, its touch was the coldness of winter. Its smell, the steam of a boiling soup and the burning of incense. 

Its taste had always only been the taste of scalding tea.

Uraume had always defined peace as the sight of a stretching, empty landscape. Open and suffocating, liberating in its vastness. 

She had defined peace as the absence of prayer, for to be at peace meant not needing to pray at all. 

That was all before him . 

Now, she finds peace scrubbing blood from beneath her nails, only to dirty them again in wet soil, pressing down the root of a leek.

She finds peace every time she sinks her fingers into a bag of rice and scoops some in her hand, every time she hangs freshly washed linen from a rope drawn tight across dry barks to warm under the sun.

Peace is no longer a landscape but a temple that is not abandoned. 

It is picking the right colour of red to lacquer its weather worn walls. 

It is the taste of his favourite dish, the only one she can eat too.

It is wiping the dust off the moldings in the wall, and pressing down leaves to steep green tea. 

It is folding clothes that smell of iron and sun-baked earth. 

She even prays too: every time she sharpens a knife she herself bought with coin that came from the pockets of a nameless corpse. Every time she wipes the knife in the same direction. Every time she separates a fish from its spine and throws a bone into a pot. 

A bone that did not come from fish.

She prays for the peace not to leave. 

Sometimes the peace answers her, unlike all the gods she never prayed to.

Sometimes it calls her.

“Uraume.”

Uraume lifts her gaze, Sukuna is staring at her across the low wooden table, strewn with opened scrolls and illegible calligraphy. In one of his hands sits kamutoke, the only object in Senkō-ji temple she is not allowed to touch, in another there is a cloth Uraume herself sourced from a passing traveler’s robes, already stained with the weapon’s grime.

“Yes, Sukuna-sama.” she responds, eyes flickering back to the persistent blood stain, the tips of her fingers yellowed from gripping the soap lathered drag.

“You are gonna draw a hole in my robes if you keep rubbing the stain like that.”

Uraume’s hand stills, beneath her sweaty fringe she sends a glare towards him,

His teeth are already showing, lips stretched into a sardonic, rotten smile. 

“White robes,” she enunciates, for the thousandth time since he appeared through the threshold that morning. At this, Sukuna cannot hide the cackle rolling low in his throat. “You decide to indulge in a village skirmish with white robes.”

The dam breaks, the man, the monstrous god she serves erupts into laughter. The sound is all-encompassing and it briefly silences the birds chirping outside. She never knows if his laughter means indulgence or warning. Not yet. Not completely.

“Tomorrow we can go to the village to get another one.” he tries to compensate, reaching for the rag in Uraume’s hands. Uraume, still hellbent on fixing the stain, turns around and keeps scrubbing at it. “We can trade the offerings we collected this morning.”

That was the only good thing that came out of his little violent spree. Due to his appearance coinciding with the end of the winter, the peasantry has started to spread rumours of a Hida deity being the bringer of summer. On the good side, it has brought them with goods and utensils that would otherwise be hard to come by, on the bad side their enemies now have a greater lead as to where they are hiding. 

Uraume’s domain always intercepts them mid journey. Her way of killing is much less bloody than his, and she would rather make laundry easier.

She can feel him getting up from his comfortable position on the tatami mat. His body looming over hers and his shadow swallowing the wall.

“Ura,” he calls again, and this time it is the opposite of peaceful.

“Yes, Sukuna-sama.” she responds, not bothering to hide the exasperation in her tone.

“ I told you to stop. ”

Uraume’s hands still mid motion. During the weeks she has spent with him Uraume has come to learn to differentiate between playful banter and firm commands. This is the latter. 

She looks up to him. He stands with two of his arms crossed, bare chested as he always is when they are in the privacy of the temple. His skin bathed in the dim glow of the paper lanterns currently swaying on the temple’s veranda. She lets her eyes wander, to the lines and circles marring the skin of his arms. 

The markings of a criminal.

Straight thick lines for stealing.

Circles for slaughter, or treason.

Sukuna had all of these in spares. 

He must be a deity, it would explain why the folk can see him even if he is a curse, why Uraume wants to paint him on the temple’s walls even though she knows not how to paint. 

“You are gaping like a fish.”

Uraume throws the soapy cloth at him, and of course he catches it mid air. Effortlessly and with ease, the cloth hangs limp from his hand, and drops of foamy water land next to his sandaled feet. He stares at it in mock offense, his smile betraying his amusement. 

“ Uraume ,” He tisks. That's the third time he uses her name. He seems to never get tired of it. “Tell me what is the logic of cleaning a blood soaked robe with another cloth. Won’t you have to clean this as well?” he says, feigning interest and inspecting the rag, which due to all the scrubbing has now too acquired a shade of red. 

Uraume rises to her feet, 

“I need some fresh air.” She says, straightening her clothes, wiping the sweat off her forehead. 

“And a bath, you look like you have been sunk in oil.”

The wooden boards of their veranda creak when Uraume steps outside, sighing and relishing in the cool caress of the mountain breeze. 

“You are testing me today, Master” She says, throwing her head back, leaning against the beam. Beside her she feels the weight of Sukuna mirroring her stance, him too basking in the late summer air. 

“Don’t I always.” he rasps, closing his four eyes. 

It is the first time Sukuna admits to such a thing.

Breathing out a sigh, Uraume delights in the view the temple possesses as she does every time she steps onto the engawa.

She smiles, it still is breathtaking. 

Even now, at night, with only the moon to light the valley in the pitch dark, except for the distant candle lit houses spotting the fields like stars banished from the sky.

“I don't know what was more satisfying,” his voice interrupts her reverie, “getting rid of all those insufferable trees or seeing the look of shock on your face.”

Uraume bursts into a barely suppressed laugh, shaking her head. Her cheeks hurt from trying to school her features into a serious expression. 

“It was not any more shocking than seeing that halved building.” She quips, remembering that too. 

A low chuckle rolls low in his throat at that, and Uraume basks in the sound.

She still can’t believe her life now looks like this, that just minutes ago she was getting rid of a stain, that the both of them can travel to the nearest villages and create a life here; that she holds audiences in his name because none of his worshippers are worthy of his presence; 

that she no longer has to dismember the bodies hidden in the icehouse because just yesterday, Sukuna had told her to unfreeze them, and after she did he ordered her to leave the icehouse and not come back until he had done so too.

When her master had resurfaced from its interior, he only had said:

“Freeze the meat again, or it will spoil,”

And left to his rooms with no further explanation.
When Uraume came back inside to do as instructed, none of her victims were recognizable. There were no faces, no hands, no feet. Nothing that could torment Uraume at night. Sukuna had made sure of that, traces of blood everywhere, glimpses onto their identities nowhere to be found.

For some reason, both were exceptionally good at shouldering what the other could not: yet horrible at accepting any kindness shown towards them. 

In her case it is because she believes herself unworthy of this purpose, undeserving of his presence, his attention, his temple. 

As to him, she assumes his reluctance has something to do with deep bone-sat distrust, a past betrayal. Uraume still remembers that diary entry, because she tore it out of the notebook that scribe Suketada had shown her when he wasn’t looking, carried it with her during her journey to Sukuna’s cave and during her imprisonment, and hid it beneath the sheets of the futon she now sleeps in: 

Supporters of the Yamato and the Wani clans will tell stories about the fall of Ryomen Sukuna, and these will prevail over all others: but know that it was not Naniha-neko Take-furu-kuma who defeated him, but his own twin brother, who sided with the Yamato and betrayed him. In mockery, they twisted the memory of our protector and fused the two into one single being. The twin brother, bound by a sacred oath, is said to have died soon after Sukuna-sama fell in battle. A binding pact—one they swore upon their childhood—was shattered. 

Sometimes, she catches him looking at her like one would stare at a bird whose cage door is opened, apprehensive of it taking flight, going away. And sometimes, she catches herself waiting for her name to be called, fearful of the day she will stop listening to him pronouncing it. 

 “You sure are pensive today, Ume .” he says, perhaps taking notice of how her smile froze upon revisiting those thoughts. Uraume glances at his thick forearms, perched on the railing, then at his uniquely wrought face. He is looking at her through the corner of his second left eye, the one which is not masked by bone. “Spit it, shyness doesn’t become you.”

“It’s not shyness, Sukuna-sama,” she rebutes, shaking her head. “ I just think it is prudent not to burden you with my thoughts.”

“It would be more prudent not to bore me,” he huffs, two arms crossed, turning to look at her. He is standing close, almost as if he were trying to make sure she won’t run away. As if she would do such a thing.  “And at this point I am sure our guests in the ice house would give me better conversation.”

Uraume sighs, arranging her words into a question that has been gnawing at her mind every single day since they both merged their lives. 

“ It was all deliberate, wasn’t it?” She asks, not cowering when she senses the shift in his relaxed posture, his scarlet gaze fixed on her. “Not speaking to me during the journey back here, starving me, not just physically but…mentally too. Leaving the temple…”

“What are you getting at?” he warns, 

Uraume can feel his energy sizzling. Still, she doesn’t retreat, her neck already too deep in his maw. She takes a breath, attempts to smile.

“Forgive me, master, but you said it yourself. You have been testing me.” She glances at him through the strands of her fringe. His posture stiffens, but she pressens on, tilting her head, lifting her chin to angle their faces more closely, despite their height difference. “Were you hoping I would leave Senkō-ji that week you disappeared and left me here?” she murmurs, not with accusation, but mere curiosity. Then, danger glints in her eyes. “Were you looking for an excuse to kill me?”

“Uraume,” he interrupts her, his voice low, 

 “ I don’t need an excuse to kill you. ”

I don’t need an excuse to kill you.

He doesn’t, she knows this, they are both too condemned to need excuses, too deep into their violent nature to remember logic or fairness. Their souls too caught in the branches and briars of past sins to free themselves. She imagines him doing so, the thousand different ways in which he could end her, she imagines her blood staining his clothes like that of his victims. She imagines him wearing those robes for the rest of his life, too unbothered to wash them. 

It is unnerving how that thought—too—, brings her peace.

***

Uraume should have known better. She should have seen it coming. Any stretch of calm around Sukuna is never accidental—only a truce, temporary and loaded. A lull in violence is not mercy unintentionally given, but the quiet part of a cycle; the breath before the blade. That he hadn’t shown cruelty in days should not have been cause for relief, but alarm. Pain always returns. It is law, not punishment. And Sukuna? Sukuna writes that law in flesh.

“ Again ,” Sukuna says, severing her arm from her body. Uraume wails in agony, as blood cascades down her side for the tenth time that day.  

“ Faster ! Uraume, you don’t heal fast enough !”

Uraume obeys, visualizing her energy, multiplying it against itself. Immediately tissue begins to grow, but before Uraume’s technique manages to reconstruct her humerus Sukuna cleaves through it once more.

A flock of birds takes off from how hard Uraume screams.

***

“No wonder your domain crumbles so easily,” Sukuna mocks, taking hold of her hands and inspecting the seal. Uraume feels like crying, she can barely feel her fingers, she even comes to wonder if they truly belong to her after the many times she has replaced them with newer ones. “The last time, you put your index finger between the middle and the ring one, and your left thumb over the right. You cannot change the seal and expect the domain to come out equally strong.”
“I can’t even notice the difference. This domain looks just like the previous three.” Uraume justifies, even though she knows she is in the wrong,

Sukuna glares with impatience. And Uraume’s head pounds with a headache.

“I can’t visualize it master,” Uraume pleads, holding up her hands, “Just— please —arrange my fingers, you know which domain out of all three I summoned was the strongest, whereas I don’t even remember which hand seal I used.”

Her master’s eyes narrow, most likely disappointed at Uraume’s limitations. But still, he complies, and starts to carefully manipulate her fingers, changing the position of her thumbs, the angle at which her knuckles bend, the space between her palms. The touch of his hands is searing, in how strangely tender and comforting they feel around hers.

“When you cook,” he starts, and Uraume is thrown off guard by such a massive change of subject, “Do you follow a recipe, or do you just go by your instinct?”

“I…” She considers, already guessing where this is going, “I do both . It is instinct at first, but once a recipe works, I follow it… I… I would even measure the temperature of the ingredients if I could, even though such a thing is practically impossible.”

Sukuna hums, stepping away, eyes not leaving Uraume’s hands.

“And would you say a thing such as a grain of salt can change the taste of the whole dish?”

“ Yes .”

“But not how it looks, or feels at first?”

“ No. ”

Sukuna hums again, pleased by Uraume’s monosyllabic responses. 

“Your innate technique—your proclivity and precocious skills—are all a byproduct of your instincts, talent, however you prefer to name it, like it happens with cooking.” His voice surrounds her as he begins to circle her, the back of Uraume’s neck shudders, and her whole body freezes when two of his hands land on her shoulders, his nails digging into the cloth, pressing into the dips of her skin. “It is something no one can ever steal from you or imitate. ¿Or would you say anyone can prepare a tasteful dish without a recipe?” Uraume gasps when his foot forces her two feet further apart. 

“No,” She manages to say, “Not everyone can.”

“ Exactly .” Sukuna drawls, his second pair of hands circling her waist, correcting her posture.

“Powerful sorcerers are scarce because whether it is the innate technique or the sorcerer’s discipline and ability to channel it, most users never strike a balance between both.” Sukuna says, voice low but razor-sharp “A technique, no matter how gifted, is worthless without structure. Instinct must be forged into method. Refined. Repeated. Until it becomes infallible.” Uraume listens with rapt attention, knowing he is not one to explain things twice.  “Most sorcerers, if they’re lucky enough to receive proper training, only master control at the end of their lives. They spend decades polishing technique, refining battle strategy—over and over. Discipline, they have in abundance. But raw material?” A scoff. “That’s what they lack. And here is the truth that most of them die learning” Sukuna pauses, hot breath fanning the crown of her head. “, it doesn't matter how masterfully you wield it, a sword made of iron will always shatter against one of steel.”

Uraume hisses when his thumbs suddenly push against the blades of her shoulders, straightening her back. 

“Did you know most of them become prisoners of their own mastery?” Sukuna whispers into shell of her ear, bending to her height. It sends a shiver down her spine. “Once they find a recipe, they never dare change the dish. They don’t dare disrupt the combination of ingredients, they don’t experiment with the taste.” Then, she feels his hands grab her elbows, lowering just an inch. “Truth is, Uraume, domains cannot be barrierless, it is deemed impossible .”

At that, Uraume’s head whips to look at him, an incredulous look flashing on her face. What is he saying?

Sukuna groans.

“ Don’t. Move .” Grabbing her chin, he forces her head back straight. Uraume’s bloodshot eyes fix on the tall trunks of the trees, heart racing with adrenaline. 

“I thought barrierless domains were just incomplete domains.” she speaks, earning one of Sukuna’s laughs. 

“An incomplete domain, Uraume, is a domain whose barrier is not entirely closed.” he explains, stepping now in front of her, eyes picking her posture apart, searching for flaws. “What you are doing here is not that simple, it is cooking a dish without a pot.” 

Uraume’s eyes widen, trying to picture how such a thing would even work. Sukuna continues, crossing his arms, leaning against the tree she was focusing on earlier..

“Your domain is not incomplete, because there is nothing to complete in the first place. It just is .”

“But I don’t understand,” Uraume interrupts, and unconsciously, her elbows shift slightly. 

“After all the effort I put into arranging you just right… if you so much as flinch, I’ll slice you down the middle and leave you to admire your own insides.”

Uraume’s pulse skips a beat. Slowly, she lowers her elbows back to where he put them.

“Master,” She starts to say. Sukuna, visibly satisfied, watches as only her lips move,  “if such a thing is impossible, then how come both of our domains are barrierless?”

He is silent for a moment. 

“We only know of that which we tame.” he says, and Uraume can’t do anything but soak in every word. “Cursed-energy users, especially those who are humans, are arrogant to the core. If they can’t do something, they never blame themselves, they just claim it is impossible.”

It is almost humouring, to hear Sukuna speak of arrogance as if it were a trait he himself never suffered from. Perhaps if one did not know of him, if one only ever heard of his name but never witnessed the man himself, then his actions, the manner in which he walked the earth, could be considered arrogant. 

But he is not. Sukuna is not arrogant, despite what everyone would like to believe. 

“In the past,” Uraume asks, slowly, curious, craving for glimpse into the whole of who he is, desperate to understand him. Sukuna fascinates her beyond anything. “Did anyone ever teach you how to summon a barrierless domain?”

For a second, Uraume fears she has offended him, by implying perhaps such a thing did not come naturally to him. Sukuna’s expression is unreadable, and his answer doesn’t come, not yet at least, he just stares, and keeps doing so for longer than she can withstand. Her whole body aches from how hard she is trying to hold still. 

“Uraume.” He says at last, but makes a pause. Whatever he is about to say, he clearly does not want to share it with her. “Apart from you,” he continues, another pause. He seems to be truly considering whether it is wise to answer. “Apart from you, and myself .” he adds, sighing, displeased , “I have never known of anyone who could summon a barrierless domain.”

The admission takes her breath away,

“Nor of anyone who can change the conditions of it.”

She opens her mouth, gapes for an embarrassing moment, then closes it. 

“What are you waiting for?” Sukuna mocks, breaking the tension, not letting her reflect on that. “Summon your domain already. The posture and the seal are perfect. It won’t hold against mine but it will be decent at the very least.”

Uraume shuts her eyes, tries to forget this life-changing revelation. 

Ryōiki Tenkai.「領域展開」

“Domain expansion,” 

Shizuka Naru Fuyu「静かなる冬」

“ Silent Winter.”

Immediately, her domain sparks to life, sensing Sukuna’s presence inside. But before Uraume can smile with self-satisfaction, 

her left calf is severed from her leg.

“ Fuck! ” she cries, body toppling to the ground. “Ah! Fuck! Master, what the-!”

Sukuna’s laugh rattles like bells through the air,

Uraume watches him as he crouches, dipping a finger on the blood pooling below her mutilated limb.

“Uraume, I still haven’t finished with your Reverse Cursed Technique.” he rasps, mouth stretching into a grin, his pupils blow at the sight of Uraume’s crimson blood. “Let’s see if you can heal just as fast when your whole energy output is already poured into your domain.”

And then—Uraume cannot believe her eyes—Sukuna licks his finger.

***

“Uraume,” he says later, when he is soaking in the bathhouse, water lapping at his shoulders, his arms resting against the stone edge of the large wooden tub. Uraume, behind him, practically coils. 

“Yes Sukuna-sama,” she answers, with barely any voice from how hard she has screeched during the day.

Sukuna laughs at her pitiful answer. The muscles of his back ripple. Uraume tries to focus on the chant of the cicadas, and not on how hard her heart is beating against her chest.

“I can hear how loud you are thinking.” He whispers into the suffocating, steamy air of the room.

“I don’t think I can even muster a thought right now,” Uraume whispers back, “Even my brain bled today.”

“Get used to it.” Sukuna answers drily, “I won’t always be there to heal it.”

That, in itself, is another revelation she hasn’t truly gotten the chance to unwrap yet.

Sukuna can heal others. Something—until then—she had believed impossible. To the point she had once told the same thing to her mother while she died before her eyes from what had probably only been an air-borne disease. If only Uraume had known then what she knows now.

Humans are arrogant to the core. 

If they can’t do something, they never blame themselves, they just claim it is impossible.

Impossible.

She too, like him, has come to resent the word.

Sukuna chooses this moment to stand up from the tub, barely giving Uraume any warning—water rushing down his tanned, inked skin.

Immediately her head snaps to the side, her cheeks coloured red from embarrassment and Sukuna’s blatant shamelessness. But ignoring him proves impossible.

Her gaze, unbidden, is drawn to the droplets clinging the corded muscles of his chest, his four arms, the black bands wrapped tight around his skin. To the water streaming down the defined valley of his torso, tracing the chiseled lines of his abdomen, a path that leads straight to the deep cut of his hips, where his muscles dip and furrow, where water laps with greed. 

Uraume stares hard at the stone floor, knuckles white as she grips the yukata in her hands. She tells herself not to look again—but part of her aches to, specially when she feels him come closer, each footfall against the wet stone—slow and deliberate—creating a dangerous cadence.

Sukuna has to basically tear her fingers off his yukata.

The cloth brushes her as he throws it over his shoulders, sheathing each of his arms. Her hands are wet from his touch, her fingers uncoil.

When Uraume finally looks at him, Sukuna is tying the knot with a small, predatory grin, the cloth clinging mercilessly to his manhood.

This is perhaps Sukuna’s most dangerous habit, and the one which she can barely comprehend. 

He is so convinced of his own monstruosity, he believes that enough reason to prance around naked in spite of Uraume’s presence. He undresses in front of her sometimes, not bothering to go to another room or instructing her to leave, he forces her to wait with his yukata as he bathes each day, treating Uraume like a hanger on the wall. It is almost insulting, not because he is basically parading himself, which others would consider disrespectful, but because he thinks so little of her presence, he simply cares not if she actually sees him. 

Thus, it is not unusual, nor uncommon for her, to sometimes accidentally catch sight of the shape of his cock. 

She fiercely looks away, cheeks red, belly on fire, when once again she is confronted with the sight of it jutting out noticeably against the flimsy cloth of his yukata. 

Until then, Uraume had thought she had seen her fair share of cocks, most of them accidental peeks behind the curtain her mother used to drape between her room and Uraume’s small child-sized futon. She remembers them as these hairy pieces of flesh that would hang ridiculously from between the legs of those salivating men, as things that flopped around and could barely measure up to the size of a hand. 

Sukuna’s, on the other hand, is as large, and as imposing, as the rest of him, and thus incomparable to anything Uraume had ever known before, or imagined possible.

“You should take an ice bath Uraume.” Sukuna comments, listless, as he passes by her side—slipping his feet into the sandals waiting by the entrance of the bathhouse. A droplet of sweat rolls down her temple, her nose catching a waft of his scent: yomogi, charred wood, incense and iron. “You are practically melting.”

Uraume comes to a dreadful realization later that night:

Sukuna has already killed her,

He has mutilated and dismembered her so many times during her training, that Uraume doubts there is a part in her body except for her brain that she still recognizes as hers. 

Or of her mind that is not his .