“Tsukuyomi! You silly little boy. What did you do this time?” shouted Hanabira as she took him from the arms of the man that brought him to the farm. He was the town’s blacksmith, a man with ashen hair and leathery tanned skin, still in his working clothes, covered in soot and hints of blood. Mizuki, twelve years old, just one younger than Tsukuyomi, stood next to him. Hanabira unwrapped the dark-red stained cloth bandage around her son’s head and gasped. She immediately ran off, muttering “Oh my boy! Oh my boy! Oh my boy!” like a mantra, and quickly returned with a homemade salve of herbs and oils. She applied it thickly on the boy’s crescent moon shaped gash that ran bloodied along the back of his head, surrounded by his short dark hair. Tsukuyomi looked up at her, still dazed. No wrinkles yet betraying her thirty-eight years of age. She looked angelic to him.
“Who did this?”, Hanabira said to the blacksmith with anguish.
“I have no idea ma’am, I was just working when I heard…”
“He fell from a wall! I was with him. It was an accident. Right Mr. Blacksmith?”, Mizuki nodded at the man.
“But there was no walls where I…”
“Yes there was,” Mizuki smiled at the blacksmith and kept nodding quickly. Fortunately for her, Hanabira was too preoccupied to notice the obvious fabrication.
“Right, right, yes, the wall…”
Hanabira ran inside “Water, I need water! And a bandage! And more salve!” The clattering inside the house was loud enough to startle some nearby birds into flight.
Tsukuyomi softly grabbed Mizuki’s hand. “You saw it too, right?” Tsukuyomi’s eyes glazed over with a twinge of fear as he remembered.
The young boy, barely twelve years old, looked in the direction of the shout, watching on as flames engulfed another section of the Blacksmith’s workshop. Fire licked the sky, giving shape to the surrounding barren field on one side and forest on the other. His eyes reflected the growing flames as he hid, his grimy hands holding on to the entrance fence of the humble estate, muck caking the underside of his nails.
The sizable, looming figure he had studied so well over the years rushed out, dashing across the waist-high grass, past the fence — which the boy had now completely ducked behind — and towards the tree line at the northern end of the estate. As the young boy peeked over the fence once more, he saw the curved streak, no longer than a palm’s width, shine on the back of the figure’s head surrounded by its short dark hair. The large scar, so familiar to the boy, reflected the ambient light. The figure seemed to be heading in the direction of the Lakontey Mountains, which dominated most of the moon-lit sky in the forms of sinister, almost silhouette-like waves across the darkened heavens.
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