I post Noragami stuff

The hand against his cheek is warm and sweet. Freckled. He knows it before his eyes open.

She smiles down at him; his heart stumbles. There it is. That tender ache that he has never felt before, nor since.

“Welcome,” she whispers, and, at last, he realizes where he is.

Ah.

So he has killed me.

The face of his beloved twists, its features sharpening, shrinking, until it is a child’s face. The child he made.

“Yaboku,” he whispers.

“You are in the house of She Who Invites,” utters the child’s voice. “You will not leave us this time.”

The man feels no emotion at this dire statement. When he traveled here before, his human soul had been brimming with hatred—with his devastating will to destroy all that had been built.

But he is dead now, and feels nothing. He is in the house of Izanami, and he is utterly at her mercy.

He is led through great gardens of roots, slimy black flowers, arching skeletal branches. Where he walks, denizens of Yomi follow at a safe distance. They slither out of the darkness, and he smells their hunger. It is only by the will of their mistress that he passes unhindered.

“Lady Izanami wishes to see you,” elaborates his guide, who is no longer Yaboku. Its shape has molded into the form of a masked wolf, prowling ahead of him with footsteps as silent as ink.

With no more words exchanged, they arrive at her door: grand, and silent, and final.

The man steps through.

He sits at a low table, and across from him, sitting cross-legged, is a dark-haired god in a poorly pressed suit. The man recognizes Ebisu: a fool and a fraud, despite his status as one of the Fortunate Seven.

Ebisu is looking at him like he expects a response, despite having posed no question. When no answer comes, the god’s eyebrows furrow.

“I must admit, I am a bit disappointed,” he says. “When my whisperers brought me word that the great god-hating magician fell, I thought he might have been more entertaining.”

For the second time since his death, the man speaks:

“Where is Yaboku?”

Ebisu looks even more aggrieved, and makes an impatient gesture with his right hand. The low table before them is suddenly laden with food. At the same moment, an evil smell fills the room. Everything on the table is rotten: wormy fruit, loaves of mold-crusted bread, little honeyed cakes squirming with maggots.

“Please, eat.”

The man reaches for one of the pieces of fruit. It’s a plum, with skin as soft and damp as rotten flesh. He is never leaving this place, so there is no reason for him to refuse. His teeth break the skin, and the plum bleeds over his lips. As he tastes it, the face across the table changes again. He is regarded with fathomless black eyes.

“Don’t you have any other questions?” Mizuchi asks.

He does not, but his lips form one anyway.

“Who are you?”

Mizuchi’s lips curl in a gratified little smile.

“Forgive me, sorcerer, but it’s a little amusing to see you at such a loss. Who else could I be, but the lady of this place?”

“And why, my lady, have you invited me here?”

There is no breeze in Yomi, but Mizuchi’s hair stirs as though by a gentle current.

“You took this one, did you not?” she asks. “This face is familiar to you, but not like the others I’ve worn. You stole this child from my arms.”

Is that how she sees it?

He had given life to something drowned and miserable. He had given her a name, had bound her tiny, withered soul to his own. He taught her when to speak and when to keep silent. He taught her how to lie, how to dissemble, how to seduce. She was his creature and his tool, and she had loved him absolutely.

“Are you so sure of that?” asks the person sitting across from him: Iki Hiyori, in a wrinkled high-school uniform, her young face twisted with the same wrong, inhuman smile that Mizuchi had just worn. “What do you know of love, you young fool?”

Quite all at once, for the first time since his death, the man feels an emotion. Rage : pure and molton and absolute in its righteousness. It is the prevailing emotion of what had once been his life, and he recognizes it as an old friend.

“Oh, the vengeful ones are always the most entertaining,” Iki Hiyori whispers, before her face pulls apart at the seams.

/

Few people are powerful enough to kill a god; fewer still powerful enough to make one.

But right now, the man’s thoughts are not occupied with heaven’s violence. He is drunk on the giddy high of victory, for a god has just been made.

For a time, there will be nothing more important to the man than this impossible child. He has summoned it into being at last: the perfect scythe with which to harvest a spoiled crop.

Because that is the hubris of the gods isn’t it? They forget that from men they were sown, and by men they can be reaped. But first.

But first, a name.

“Yaboku.”

/

“Why,” says the man, “do you show me this?”

/

The god is still small, still becoming an existence as his maker’s purpose shapes him. Even so, his eyes open suddenly, like he’s been pinched awake.

Already he asks questions: about the shrines that dot the countryside, about the humans who built them, about the world that he was born to destroy. He asks questions about himself. As deeply as the man had wished for this godchild to exist, even he is not prepared for such questions.

He tells the godchild to be silent, and to never wish for such worship.

“You are a blade,” he says. “You are a tool forged by me. You are not a servant to humanity’s whims. You are my weapon, Yaboku, and you are still dull.”

/

“He is gone, then,” says the man, with the passing thought that this, at least, is justice. Yaboku may have ultimately cut him down, but their lives are bound up together in ways that even the gods cannot untangle.

He looks across the table, and can speak no more. It is her.

She sits, silent and perfect. Pale, and luminous, and smiling, and dead. The irises of her eyes are black, and with a quiet pulse of horror the man realizes he cannot remember their original color. Perhaps they were like this always. With another, stronger pulse, he struggles to bring her name to his lips.

“It is so interesting you assume that,” she says.

/

“Is he…?”

“Yes. I think—yeah. He is.”

The crunch of footsteps next to his ear. A boot catches him in the shoulder, flipping him none-too-gently onto his back. Above him, the sky is pale and watery with dawn.

“So…what now?”

A gusty exhale, as the person who flipped him onto his back continues to nudge him disrespectfully with the toe of a boot.

“Find Yukine. Get back to Hiyori. Hope like hell that her radiant majesty doesn’t feel like doing any more murder today.”

/

Not possible. No, Yaboku is meant to be destroyed alongside him. They are meant to be inseparable: the two hands of the apocalypse.

“Do you understand yet, young magician?” asks the woman across from him.

He is starting to. The truth yawns beneath him like an awful throat, waiting for his plunge.

“I like to talk to the ones like you,” she goes on. “The little men who shake their fists and stamp about, thinking they must be kings because they make others bow.”

A delicate, freckled hand takes hold of his chin. The face of the goddess Izanami is a breath away from his, and he sees now that her irises are not just black, but dull and filmy, as though in the process of decay. Her grip on his chin tightens when she feels him weakly recoil.

“I want you to know,” she murmurs against his cheek, “that this is the absolute end of you. The body you stole is all that will ever be mourned. You are already forgotten. Isn’t that lovely?”

He hears a low, suffering noise. He’s heard it before, from animals too wounded to scream. He realizes that it’s coming from him. Against his throat, teeth.