Where Kaori looked, about two-thirds of the way down the tree, perched amongst the branches, sat an elf. There could be no mistaking it, that was an elf. The man, or child really, was lean and muscular. He had pale skin that somehow didn’t seem to stand out against the tree. He wore a simple leaf loincloth and carried a wooden spear. The thing that made it clear what he was, were his long pointed ears, each reaching almost twenty centimeters from the side of his head.
Kaori was interested in what was going on and she was pretty sure that the creature on the branches was Yajū. But then how was she to get down to where he was at? She was currently standing in mid-air. She then imagined herself stepping down through the air like a set of stairs. With only a little surprise and a great deal of excitement, she found she could do just that and quickly gained confidence.
After a few steps down she began to think how gods moved about in the anime she had watched and wondered if she could simply float over and down towards the creature. With just a little concentration she was able to get the hang of it and glided silently towards the creature. As she drew near, she began to wonder if being close was a good idea. Just as she was coming to a stop there, she heard the voice of Descartes in her ear.
She turned around at the first word but he wasn’t there. His words, however, continued. After a brief couple of sentences, she realized that she had been holding a book in her left hand the whole time. She then looked at the book and immediately spotted the double bar symbol for “pause” on the front of the cover. She started to push it right then but then she remembered the elf youth in the tree below. If she were to pause now, she wouldn’t know why he was there. That by itself wouldn’t be too great a loss. Then there was the question of, why was this creature, that she assumed to be Yajū, watching the elf boy?
After a couple of seconds deliberation, she decided to ask the creature. Having had a message delivered to her ears by what she was certain was telepathy, she decided that she would try that. She focused her mind on the creature in the tree and willed the words into his mind. “What are you watching so intently?”
The reaction was far more dramatic than she was expecting. The creature grabbed both of its ears as though in pain and jumped to its feet. After a panicky glance around it jumped a dozen meters into the next tree over before continuing to search about for the source of her voice. “Well, that went a little too well.” She thought to herself. Kaori then waved at the creature in the tree to get his attention.
The moment she moved he spotted her and looked directly at her. After a brief moment of astonishment recognition set in, not of her but her position. There could only be one type of being that could stand in mid-air and talk directly into your mind. Kaori hadn’t meant to startle him that much but she was glad to see that he seemed to recognize her for what she was.
Then another thing caught her attention and confirmed her suspicions. The branches where the creature had just leapt from never moved in the slightest. Not even one leaf had been jostled in that mad leap of panic. This creature had to be the god of the hunt, “Yajū?” again she pushed the words into his head, and once again he grabbed his head like he was in pain. She resolved to stop doing that if it was hurting him but it was too late this time.
He looked at her and bowed before introducing himself, which put an unintentional smile on her face. It was such a ridiculous looking posture from such a grubby looking character that it almost made her want to laugh. When his words issued from his mouth, she could tell that he wasn’t speaking Japanese by the way his mouth moved, but she heard Japanese anyway. It was like watching a badly dubbed American movie, their mouths moved contrary to the words they were speaking.
Yajū was very intent on the young hunter. This one had been hunting for less than three years and he was still very much considered a child. Despite what the rest of the tribe thought, he was a good hunter with good instincts. Checking the hunting instinct of the young was one of Yajū’s favorite activities. Often, the young ones would sense his presence without knowing why. They couldn’t see him unless he wanted them to but they could still feel him there if they had the instincts for it.
So intent was he on the young hunter and trying to make his presence felt that he didn’t even notice the presence above him. Suddenly there was a booming female voice in his head asking him what he was watching. The voice was so loud that it almost felt it could split his head in two. He wasn’t sure if the young elf had heard it or not but he didn’t have time to think. He jumped to the next tree over and looked around for the source of the voice.
What he saw was certainly not what he was expecting. He might not even have thought to look into the air except that the one standing in the middle of the sky waved to catch his attention. This wasn’t the beastman god who put him over these elves but there was no way that Yajū could doubt that this was another god, well, a goddess.
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Her posture spoke loads about her, he could tell that she was ill at ease standing in the air. He couldn’t figure out why but gods of great power are allowed to have their mysteries. He could tell that she came from a world that was much tamer than his own, perhaps the same one as the beastman god, they had the same feel about them. He could also tell that she was a trifle scared of him but not overly so. It was more like the way he watched the people of the forest, she was reluctant to get too close because she didn’t want to startle him any more than she already had.
Her next word made many more things clear. She spoke his name. it had been so many centuries since he had heard it that he had almost forgotten, however, it came back to him in an instant. He knew in a flash of head-splitting revelation exactly who she was. This could only be a more powerful goddess in front of him. The fact that she knew his name meant that she was here to replace him, destroy him, or rule over him.
It took a couple of moments but he remembered the life he had once lived before becoming a cursed beast and then dying. Long before he became a god of the hunt, he had to interact with others of higher station than him. Once he had been a miner and a huntsman, a proud underman of the Stonebeard clan. There were many other undermen who had stations higher than him and it was customary to lower your head in recognition that they were higher than you. As he did this now it brought back a flood of memories from a life long-forgotten.
One day Yajū was on the hunt for a beast to prepare for a wedding feast. While he was out in the deep forest, he was bitten by one of the beasts of the forest. For a time, nothing came of it and the wound even healed over very quickly so he thought nothing of it. Eventually, he began to notice that something was different. The undermen each began to smell different to him and the scent of a woman in her prime time was a scent he could smell through hundreds of meters of tunnels. He started noticing sounds that he had never paid attention to before and most of them hurt his ears now.
It got so bad that he couldn’t use his pick anymore because of the noise that it made. However, he could hunt better than anybody else in the clan and suddenly he became very popular. Then everything took a turn for the worst. It was a harvest moon festival and there was a lot of good food, stiff drinks, and bawdy company to be had for everyone. He was one of the favorites of the women since he had brought most of the meat that was being served that night. It was a great night until he blacked out.
The last thing he remembered was that he was bedding down a woman who was only too willing and then he felt an indescribable urge. He then lost all control and gave in to the urge. When he awoke he was groggy and felt a little sick at his stomach but that was probably the drink. As he went to sit up he put his hand down and felt something cold, wet, and slick. What greeted his eyes was a horror unlike any he had ever felt. The woman he had gone to bed with was torn to pieces and parts of her had been eaten by some kind of animal.
The sight was so horrible that he threw up. That was when the real horror began, his vomit had bits of flesh and bones and amidst it was a finger, her finger. He passed out. When he awoke, he was in a cage, the realization was sudden and terrifying to him. He recognized this cage. This cage was made for executions and hadn’t been used for generations, since the last clan war. The method was simple, the bottom fell out over a deep hole full of liquid rock. He would be burned to a crisp. They waited till the next full moon and opened the big stone lid that covered the hole the cage hung in. as he began to lose consciousness at the sight of the moon, he felt the floor give way.
When he awoke it was in a forest, and he was the beast he most feared. He could, however, think like himself. That was when that damned beastman god appeared and told him that he would be given another chance. He said that there were certain things that he could teach the people of the forest but he was to try to bring them to a better level of society.
At first, he had taken the job seriously but the more he told the people about hunting the more exciting things got. He would never let them see him, he only whispered to them from time to time. They would listen to his words and would gain insights about the forests around them. He could tell them of things in the deeps of the forest that they would never have noticed. They venerated him for it, as the god of the wilds, the god of the forest, but most of all as the god of the hunt.
Occasionally one of their mystics or shamans would catch a glimpse of him. There was a totem to him in the center of several of the villages. It was little more than a log with a lot of long grass tied to it but it served just fine. He was appreciated again and it felt glorious.
But all things come to an end, now there stood one of those who would take the people of the forest and make them the people of a town. Knowing this, he decided that he was okay with being disposed of. They wouldn’t be his people of the forest anymore. And so, he bowed. It was a bow of both subservience and acceptance of his fate.
Even though he could accept his fate, he still didn’t feel she needed to yell at him. “Yajū is my name great one. I am at your call. Might I ask your name, and if it’s not too bold of me, that you please not yell at me?” He needn’t worry about how wrong that last part was because he knew he would be disposed of anyway. But something about the way she acted gave him pause, she didn’t look like she was ready to get rid of him yet.