The cave was silent, save for the rhythmic bubbling of the tea and the distant roar of the falls. Yorimitsu sat with his back against the damp stone, his gaze fixed on the old woman.
His eyes were like two pools of stagnant water, still, dark, and bottomless. There was no fear left in him, only a vast, echoing emptiness that made his voice sound as thin as autumn dry rot.
"What is it?" he asked, his tone flat. "If it's a price you want, I don't much care. I can even give you my left hand if you want it. Take the right one, too. They've never been good for anything but carrying other men's filth."
The old woman paused, a bundle of dried mugwort frozen in her gnarled hand. She stared at him for a long heartbeat, her milky eyes searching his face, before throwing her head back. A sound like dry leaves skittering over a grave erupted from her throat.
"Kekekekekeke! What the hell happened to you, Minamoto? To give up on life so much at such a tender age?"
She sat beside him on a low bamboo stool, her movements surprisingly fluid as she began brewing a bitter-smelling tea over a small charcoal brazier.
The steam rose in silver ribbons, curling around her Hannya mask, which she had set aside. Even without the mask, her face remained just as shadowed.
Yorimitsu spoke. He kept it brief, his words stripped of emotion as if he were recounting the history of a stranger. He told her of the blood-red sky of his birth and the years of slavery under the Minakaze.
Finally, he spoke of the silk cord around Hikaru's neck—the final snap of his world. He told her of the realisation that he was not a person to them, but a curse to be exhausted.
The old lady stayed silent, sipping her tea. Her gaze seemed to pierce through his skin, reading the jagged map of his soul.
"Mmmm, I see now," she hummed, setting the iron cup down with a soft clack. "To think that brat Minamoto did something so cruel... I don't believe it one bit. I know the lineage of that house. There is no way a boy of that blood should be such a hollow demon."
"I guess people change," Yorimitsu answered somberly, his gaze fixed on the flickering embers.
"Change? People don't change, boy. They just stop hiding who they really are," she countered, her voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "But I don't believe that is who your father really is."
Yorimitsu looked up, a spark of curiosity finally cutting through the gloom. "Who are you? How do you know of the Minakaze? How do you know my name?"
The old lady stood up, cackling as she beat around the question, shooing a phantom fly from her tattered robes with a frantic wave of her hand. "Who am I? I am the rust on the blade, the rot in the wood, a nobody who has lived too long to remember her own mother's face!"
She leaned on her staff, her expression turning uncharacteristically solemn as she looked toward the cave's mouth. "You can call me Yama-uba. This forest is my home, and I am the caretaker of every creeping, crawling, and howling thing within it. And for now, little cub, that includes you."
"Yama-uba... the witch," he muttered, staring at her.
"A witch? Who are you calling a witch!" She raised her staff, the wood whistling through the air as if ready to strike, but she checked her motion at the last second, huffing a breath of steam. "You are lucky that you are hurt, brat, otherwise I would have beaten you to death for that mouth."
The first winter was a trial of bone and ice. Yorimitsu's body was a prison of pain, his shattered limbs protesting every movement. Yama-uba was a relentless shadow; she would kick him awake before the sun breached the peaks, forcing him to fetch water from frozen streams.
"Move, you lazy noble-born weakling!" she would shriek, throwing a wooden pail at his head.
He would stumble into the snow, his hands bleeding as he chipped at the ice. My hands bleed every day, he thought, his breath hitching in the frigid air. She mocks me, she starves me, but for the first time... the pain feels like it belongs to me. It isn't for a master's sport. It's for my own survival.
By the time the plum blossoms began to bud in the second year, the skeletal boy was gone. In his place was a youth of lean, hard muscle. His relationship with the old woman had shifted into a strange, frantic rhythm. They would sit by the fire, Yama-uba arguing with a rock or a pot of soup, and Yorimitsu would offer a dry, biting retort that would send her into fits of cackling laughter.
"You're getting bold, brat!" she'd bark, swinging a ladle at him. "Think you're a man because you can skin a rabbit?"
"I think I'm a man because I can survive your cooking," he'd answer, his lips twitching into the ghost of a smile.
"She is insane," he'd think as he watched her dance around a bubbling cauldron. "But she hasn't looked at me with disgust once. To her, my face is just another part of the mountain. Like the moss or the mist."
The third year brought the ironwood. Yama-uba no longer gave him pails; she gave him a wooden bokken. The training was brutal. She would strike him with her staff from the shadows, teaching him to move not like the rigid soldiers of the capital, but like a predator of the Aokigahara.
One evening, Yorimitsu stood at the edge of the waterfall, the roar of the water drowning out the world. He held the wooden sword in a low, perfect guard. He looked at his right arm—the black lines were silent now, but he could feel them pulsing deep within his marrow.
"I haven't thought of Mai in weeks," he realised. The rage was no longer a wildfire; it had compressed into a cold, dense bed of coals. He looked at his reflection in the spray of the water.
"I am finally at peace," he whispered.
"Hey, old hag!" he yelled over the falls. "The tea is getting cold!"
"Don't call me an old hag, you ungrateful sprout!" Her voice drifted from the cave, followed by the familiar clack-clack of her staff.
He was whole. He was ready.