The kingdom of Pana was a land that never forgot. Its hills and rivers carried memory the way flesh carried scars, and its people clung to the belief that blood itself preserved the sins of those who came before. In Pana, a man's honor—or his disgrace—was not buried with his bones. It seeped into his children, flowing like an unseen inheritance through their veins.
So it was for Omi, once a proud warrior of the royal guard.
In the early years, Omi's name had carried weight. He had marched in golden armor through the palace gates, spear glinting beneath banners embroidered with the king's crest. Children had shouted his name in play, pretending their sticks were spears, their cries echoes of the battlefield. He was said to have the steady heart of a lion, the kind of man who stood firm when others faltered.
But honor in Pana was as brittle as glass.
No one could say for certain what had broken him. Some whispered that Omi had betrayed a comrade in battle, leaving another man to die beneath the spears of the southern tribes. Others swore he had spoken words of defiance to the king himself, an insult too grave for forgiveness. A darker rumor claimed treason—that Omi had plotted with enemies, that he had dreamed of placing another upon the throne.
No one knew the truth, save perhaps the king and Omi himself.
But in Pana, the truth did not matter as much as the story people chose to believe.
And so Omi's fall became a tale carried in hushed voices: a warrior stripped of rank, armor torn from his body before the royal court, spear snapped across the stones as the king looked on without mercy. He was cast out not as a man, but as a warning.
They sent him away like a beggar, banished to a nameless village on the kingdom's edge, where roads turned to dust and the shadow of the palace no longer reached.
It was there, in exile, that Jiki was born.
The villagers whispered from the very first breath the child drew. His eyes, too sharp and unyielding, seemed to pierce through the skin and into the soul. A baby's cry should sound fragile, uncertain—but Jiki's was strong, cutting through the night like steel scraping stone.
From the beginning, he was not like the others.
When he was three, he fell from the cliffs beyond the village, tumbling against rock and thorn. Any other child would have died, but Jiki rose with only bruises, his bones unbroken. At five, a fever swept the village, carrying away infants and the elderly alike, yet he did not even sweat. At seven, a serpent with venom black as pitch sank its fangs into his arm. The villagers wept, certain death would come by dawn. But Jiki awoke the next morning, stronger than before, the wound closed as though weeks had passed.
To his motherless world, this was no miracle. It was an omen.
They gave him names not meant for a child.
"Wraith."
"Demon-born."
"The Deathless."
Names that clung like chains, that burned deeper than any scar.
And Omi—already broken by disgrace—looked at his son with bitterness that could not be hidden. To him, Jiki was not salvation but a reminder, a living monument to his shame. If his son had been ordinary, perhaps Omi could have rebuilt his pride through him. But instead he saw only strangeness, only the inescapable weight of a curse.
By the time Omi's body gave in to the slow poison of despair, Jiki had long since learned silence. He dug the grave himself, the soil cold and heavy beneath his hands, and laid his father to rest without tears. Not a single villager came to mourn.
When the last stone was placed, Jiki stood alone above the earth.
The curse of blood had passed fully to him.....
And Omi, broken by his own disgrace, never gave Jiki love. Instead, he looked at his son as though he were the cruel reminder of all he had lost.
By the time Omi died—a wasted man full of bitterness—Jiki was no longer a boy but not yet a man. He buried his father with his own hands, in silence, and not a single villager came to grieve.
Jiki grew like a shadow stretched thin beneath the sun. Though he walked among the people of the village, he was never of them.
Children learned early that he was different. At first, their games began with nervous dares—who would touch him, who would stand closest when he walked past. Their laughter was brittle, too loud, the kind of laughter born to smother fear. Then came the stones. Small at first, pebbles flicked from childish hands. When those stones struck, he bled, yes—but the blood dried almost at once, the skin knitting before their eyes. The boys who threw the stones gasped, then threw harder, desperate to prove he was still flesh. But every wound became proof that he was something else.
Soon it was not games. It was ritual. A cruel kind of sport.
The women whispered more than the men. They pulled their children away from the path whenever Jiki passed, fingers clutching small shoulders too tightly. "Do not look at him," they would mutter, though their own eyes followed him, wide and fearful. Some swore that even glancing into those sharp, unblinking eyes could curse a child's dreams.
Old men spat at his feet, their mouths full of bitterness and phlegm. The younger men avoided him altogether, unless they wished to prove their courage. And even the dogs of the village, lean and scarred from hunger, growled when he drew near, hackles stiff, lips curled back from yellow teeth.
Jiki did not fight them. He could have. His arms were stronger than boys his age, his steps quicker, his body hardened not by kindness but by necessity. But fighting back would have only fed their hatred. So he learned silence.
He moved like one unseen, his footsteps quiet, his eyes lowered. In time, he discovered the places where hatred did not follow him—the woods beyond the village, where the trees grew tall enough to block the gaze of men. There, among moss and stone, he found a kind of peace.
The woods became his refuge.
He taught himself to hunt, fashioning crude snares from twisted vine, sharp spears from wood hardened in fire. He studied the tracks of deer and boar, the scratching marks of rabbits in the dirt. Hunger forced him to patience, and patience grew into skill. At night he made fire, small and careful, hiding the smoke so no villager would see. The flames were his only companions, the stars above his only witnesses.
Sometimes he lay flat on his back, the earth cool against his spine, staring at the night sky. He did not know why, but there was comfort in those distant lights. Perhaps because they were as far from him as everything else. Perhaps because, unlike the villagers, the stars did not hate him.
Yet the nights were not silent.
Dreams came often, filled with the face of his father. Not the father who might have once carried him as an infant—if such a memory ever existed, it had long since withered away. No, the father in his dreams was the bitter Omi, his breath sharp with rice wine, his eyes sunken with grief.
"Because of you," Omi would spit in the dream, voice cracking, "because of you I was sent here. You should never have been born."
The words clung to Jiki even after waking. They were chains that bound him to the earth, heavier than stone.
By the time he reached the edge of manhood, he had become a stranger even to himself. He knew the shape of his hands, the scars across his arms, the sound of his own breathing—but he did not know what it meant to belong. He had no one to measure himself against, no one to tell him who he was meant to become.
When he passed through the village, the silence grew thicker than smoke. Conversations faltered, eyes dropped to the ground, and yet he felt their stares burning into his back. Even those who dared not speak his names—Wraith, Demon-born, Deathless—thought them, and he could feel the weight of their unspoken curses.
He often wondered if perhaps they were right. If perhaps the gods had cursed him before his first breath. If perhaps his very existence was a mistake, a wound in the world that would never heal.
But when those thoughts grew darkest, he returned to the woods. There, in the rustling leaves and whispering streams, he could almost believe there was a place for him. Not among men, but among trees, rivers, and stones.
Still, a man cannot live without longing.
And in the quietest hours, when the fire was low and the sky pale with dawn, Jiki felt the sharp ache of something he had never known: the touch of a hand that did not fear him. A voice that spoke not in whispers or curses, but in kindness. He did not even know what such a thing would sound like, yet he yearned for it all the same.
But the village offered no such thing. To them, he was only the hated son, cursed by blood, cursed by fate.
And so he learned to carry silence as both shield and sword.