By the time I awakened, a thin film of dirt dusted my skin all over. I drew up my hand to shade my eyes from the sun’s direct rays. I shuddered, all at once, remembering the soldier who had chased me. My gaze darted about.

The garden spread around me, a ruin of trampled bushes and shrubbery. Silk hung from low boughs of the trees in tatters. Stone pieces of a lantern littered the gravel path. A carpet of once green moss had rusted into an unnatural black.

I knelt and touched the moss. Dry. I bent my nose near and inhaled.The stains made a path through to the back of the garden, and I followed, my pulse quickening as I progressed through a maze of now ruined raw silk, hanging about like gorgeous, though plainly destroyed burial shrouds. I gasped when I recognized the place where the black stain stopped. A mound of earth stood disturbed at the very spot where, not four months prior, I had hidden my own silken weavings.

I stood above the spot, knowing some grotesque thing was buried beneath the soil along with the silk I had hidden there myself.

My heartbeat rose to my throat. Sweat dampened my brow and palms. I couldn’t tear up that soil again. And yet I couldn’t leave it either. I had to know what was there.

It took all of my strength to dig up the ungodly secret beneath my feet. All my strength, and a night of digging, but I finally unearthed the corpses. They could not have been very long dead, but they were well beyond my limited power of recognition. I vomited twice, and then covered the grotesque forms back over.

I had been alone on that night when the soldiers invaded Madame’s gates. Try as I might to rationalize it, I could not escape the probability that it had been me, and no one else, who had killed, then brutalized these men and buried their corpses deep within what, to me, was the most secret, and therefore precious, place in Madame’s garden.

I had never before confronted myself a killer. And yet I knew the defensive potential had always been there: my uncommon physical strength, acute senses, and unnatural quickness. Before my attackers, I had never defended myself from abuse, nor had I the right to, but now I wondered what would have happened if I had. Would there have been more deaths?

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I had always believed my greatest power was constructive, creative, life giving—not destroying. But I could not unsee the maimed corpses in the ground. I could not be blind to this killing, however strangely accomplished.

There was no grief for the death of my attackers. I had killed them to defend myself, but these were conscripted men, and they would be counted. They would be missed! Someone or ones would search for them. They might yet be found. I would be tried an enemy to the Okugawa Shogunate.

A new thought dawned, even as I struggled with these frightening realizations. The truth of my nature explained at least one mystery: why Ansei had held me at such a distance and with such fear. Of course. He was afraid I would harm him, too.

In my confusion, dark thoughts visited night and day. I lost many hours, possibly days at a time to abandoned consciousness.

Whenever I awakened, evidence of violence awaited nearby. In one instance, I found someone, or I, had torn apart the tatami floor and much of a shoji wall. Victims, real or imagined, haunted me, all suffering deaths by poisoning.

I began to question my innocence in Cook and Kame’s passing. I didn’t know for certain, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if I had lifted my hand against them in a dream state. Sometimes I fell into dreams by mid-afternoon and slept through the night until the following afternoon. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all.

I fattened. I didn’t know on what food, but I found it somewhere, and I couldn’t avoid confronting the mystery when once, upon awakening, I discovered a strange goblet. It was very fine, but cracked as though it had been dropped upon the stone walk.

Stranger yet, was the stain of its drained contents, thick and blood red. And perhaps it was blood. I didn’t taste it twice. But I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t done so once. I had little notion where it had come from, but etched on the base of the goblet was a single character, which, if I read it correctly, meant “spider.”

I hid within the garden walls, never setting foot into the town. No news of the disease’s progress reached me. No army or lone soldier ever passed within the walls again. I knew nothing of Madame’s whereabouts or even if she had survived. It seemed so perverse. I was free of my long-time oppressor, only to discover an intangible, darker, and far more powerful captor whose identity I didn’t know.