A thin wisp of smoke trailed from the lit reed Hou Hanshin carried into the small shrine. He let the dark curtain fall behind him to shroud the room from the early morning light, and he took three slow steps forward, the smooth wood under his bare feet creaking with his weight. His hand moved in practiced precision, the tiny light it carried soon revealing a candle before him. Once it was lit, he raised his hand to a second above it, then to a third up and to the right, and a fourth an even distance away.
Nine candles in all, arranged in a half circle, and lit from the left to the right as his father had taught him. Nine candles, whose soft glow revealed a figure carved from the stained wood of the first tree felled by the village founders. Nine candles, each one found at the end of nine tails of the figure, and Hanshin stared into the opaque wooden eyes of a fox sitting on its haunches like a hound and waiting to hear his plea.
He extinguished the reed and knelt to the floor. How many times had his father brought him here to speak to Shaxi? Every time they had gone into the forest together at least, and many times after they had returned they would offer her thanks for their successful hunt. His father had never failed to honor the spirits that watched over them.
Even to his final day.
His heart leapt to his throat, and Hanshin swallowed a painful gasp of air to force it back down. He remembered the body. His father had been found less than a mile from the village, a broken bowstring the only certain clue to his fate. The wound that felled him had festered by the time his body was brought home, the creature that made it unrecognizable.
Hanshin closed his eyes and clasped his fist to his chest. “Great Shaxi, hear my prayer. Guard me, and guide me this day. Let my feet be silent and my aim true. Great Shaxi, I beg you. Let this curse on us pass.”
He heard something far off, like a voice raised in the distance. His eyes snapped open, and he held his breath waiting to hear if it had been a cry of alarm from the village, or perhaps his mother or his sister had followed him, but nothing else came to his ear. There was just the wooden fox staring into him as he rose to his feet. Hanshin dared not to let himself think of what that sound may have been, what it might have signified right at the moment of his prayer. Offering a short bow to Shaxi, he collected himself and turned to leave.
The candles he left burning for anyone else to come offer their morning prayer. However many that would be, he wasn’t sure. Something had changed in the village. They had all come to pay their due respects to his father, but the broken bow string had shaken something inside all of their neighbors. Hou Jung had offered his prayers every morning, and had spent days on end in the forest waiting to find the best deer for the annual feast in Shaxi’s honor.
If such a pious man was allowed to die by such a small chance, then who among them would find favor with their prayers?
Time flowed on, days flowed into weeks, and now a month later every hunter in the village returned home with empty hands and empty words of a barren forest. Children screamed at their mothers of seeing monsters lurking and dragging away all the deer, rabbits, and other game. He had seen nothing of the sort on his ventures into the wilds, but he did see the change in everyones’ eyes. Their neighbors did not accuse them, but every day Hanshin would see their eyes linger on him or his family just a touch longer. Whatever ill winds had blown into their village, it had all started with a snapped bowstring.
Pulling aside the heavy curtain to leave, he was blinded by the bright morning light for a heartbeat. Hanshin blinked away the stars in his eyes and slipped his thin shoes back onto his feet, then reached for the spear he left leaning against the wall. The shaft was worn and smooth where he grabbed, the wood discolored from the dirt and sweat over the years, and even its short blade was stained and splotchy in places.
It was from boar’s blood, his father had told him. The spear was the first weapon his father ever put into his hands, and he had told Hanshin the story of his own first hunt--the yells of the other hunters as they flushed their quarry, the fire in the eyes of Hanshin’s grandfather as he shoved the spear into his son’s hands and told him where to strike, and how one clean thrust had fed the entire village that night.
Hanshin rubbed his thumb against a burr of metal near the tip. He had practiced throwing the old weapon for the first time since he was a child, but he wasn’t quite able to smooth out all of the wear and tear he had inflicted. He didn’t need perfection though, just one good throw. Just one throw, and he could prove to the village the game was still out there, that their fear was over. Then he could mend his father’s bow, and life could move on.
The old shrine sat next to the creek that ran through the gardens on the village outskirts, and he filled the skin on his belt before setting out. He stepped over the water and took the long way around the village, careful not to trample any of the crops along his way. They represented the only fresh food the village could eat without going through the trouble of negotiating with the town downstream.
And the only thing he needed less than talk of the curse spreading to affect the gardens was to hear the grumbling of his neighbors about prices and taxes and travel costs.
He welcomed the silence as he went along his way. The peaceful morning gave him time to breathe on his walk and try to excise the worries from his mind. The calm, focused hunter was the successful hunter, and as he came to the forest’s edge he remembered how his father might threaten to send him home from this spot if he thought Hanshin was acting too excited, too noisy to bring with him.
Think of the tiger, his father would say. He feels hunger as we do. He feels anticipation as we do. But until his jaws close on his prey, he has nothing. Just as we do.
Hanshin followed the favored trail of the village hunters. No branches or limbs impeded him, and the dirt underfoot was cool in the morning chill. A loose stone jabbed into the soft arch of his foot, bringing a grimace to his face. He doubted the worn shoes on his feet would last until the end of the season, but mending them required hide that he just wasn’t finding. Hide for shoes, meat for food, pelts for blankets, he could even whittle down the bones and let his sister paint them for the elders to play with. Wao and Song could be more entertaining to watch than the games they played. The tiles clacking against each other in the middle of the table, barbs traded all morning long, and both men poised as cats to swipe away their opponent’s move with an ancient rule on their tongue to argue against it.
The thought brought a smile to him. Anything that might help stave off the frustration before his hunt even had a chance to begin. He might have laughed to himself any other day. The forest was too quiet around him. He wasn’t sure what worried him the most: that a stray chuckle might just scare off a potential target, or that there were no animals around at all for him to hear, or to hear him.
He continued on the beaten path through the undergrowth. Another few hundred paces and he would turn deeper into the trees. There was a pond he knew well, the closest source of water for any creature that didn’t want to lose the cover of the forest to make for the creek. If anything was still living in the forest besides him, there would be a trace of it there for him to find and follow.
At least there would be this time, he hoped.
So set on his plan to visit the pond, he nearly missed the clue he set out to find.
It seemed no more than some discoloration among the debris on the trail, and he had stepped over it at first. By chance he happened to glance down and noticed the imprint into the ground.
Hanshin sprang back and did no more than stare at his find for a moment, struck dumb by the dumb luck he had stumbled upon. The imprint was deep and almost perfectly round. He crouched down for a closer look, but his mind was already racing with what he expected--a track. At long last. A track.
He failed to make out any claw marks, nor any gaps in the imprint for the cloven foot of a deer or boar, but whatever left its mark on the trail had been heavy. The outer ring of the mark was shallow, softer on the edge as the weight pressing down into the earth shifted in stride. Heavy, and alive.
But what was it? He sniffed at the ground, but smelled only soil. Not lucky enough to find a fresh track, if it was indeed a track at all. Perhaps it was misshapen, the same ground stepped on twice. But he doubted a human had left it. He had seen nothing like it until now, so whatever it was must have crossed the trail rather than followed it.
He turned and crawled on his hands and knees without even daring to blink for fear of missing another track. And he found it, another mark like the first. And a third beyond that one, a similar distance, a consistent stride away. Even better, he noticed that each track had one deeper end than the other, where the creature would step, its weight would settle, and it would brace itself to step again. It was difficult to guess without any claws or toes, but Hanshin thought he was going the same direction the creature had moved.
Rising back to his feet, he searched for other signs--a low branch bent by a passing body, or better yet a print from another foot. He had only seen the one so far, but this close to the trees, he guessed the creature’s other feet could have landed among the gnarled roots that rose from the soil and threatened to trip him.
There.
Roughly a foot from the ground, he saw a stain on one of the trees. It had dried, but it still kept a reddish color. Blood? Possibly. The creature might have stumbled and scraped itself on the rough bark, but he would have guessed anything in the forest would have a thick enough pelt or hide to resist that minor injury.
Unless it was already injured.
Hanshin sucked in a sharp breath.
He had seen a track like this before. Several years ago, he had called his father over to look it over. Neither of them could guess what it was, but they had followed its trail to find a pathetic sight: a young fawn left behind to bleat for its mother, tripping over one of its own misshapen legs that ended in a gnarled club.
They had done the merciful thing and swiftly ended the small creature’s terror. He thought an infant could never have survived for long carrying such a flaw, but the tracks he saw on this day belonged to something far, far larger than a youngling that hadn’t seen its first change of the seasons. Perhaps he had been wrong, or perhaps the creature he was now following had been injured somehow. Perhaps the bloodstained tree bark had torn into a fresh wound as the creature stumbled into it.
Crippled or wounded, both possibilities gave him a chance to catch up.
Spear held tight in his grip, Hanshin stalked deeper and deeper into the trees, sniffing every so often in the chance he would smell blood. That could prove his only warning before a desperate beast would turn and attack, but he only smelled the wood and leaves around him. Strangely, the more he followed this odd path he was on, the less he understood of it. He saw more signs that he was going the right way--leaves knocked from a low branch that had fallen behind the creature and not been stepped on, stems and twigs left broken after something heavy had stormed past them--but the creature had never wavered from this path.
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It had never stopped going straight ahead. It had never stopped to forage for nuts or berries or any kind of food. It had never sought any water, never made a step for the pond. It had never even hesitated when the terrain started a sharp climb uphill. Hanshin felt his heart beating against his chest, his breath coming faster and faster, but the strange tracks showed no sign of slowing or struggling.
At the crest of the hill Hanshin saw a beam of sunlight shining down on the forest floor, and as he walked closer he saw that it pooled around a small cluster of broken branches, the green tint of living wood still fresh around their jagged edges. He looked up and saw the blue sky through a hole in the canopy above him. Not flashes of blue as the leaves fluttered in the wind, but a roughly shaped hole as a fist left from slamming through a wall.
Hanshin leaned on his spear to catch his breath. Something strange was going on. The riddle of the tracks was strange enough, and now they had led him to this. The branches hadn’t fallen on their own, nor were they cut or severed. They had been snapped violently off, as if something had torn through them. He crouched to study the ground but saw no clues to help him. No mark of impact of something falling, no tracks of something that may have come to investigate or been scared away save for the heavy foot he had been following.
Moreover, those tracks had finally changed course. They brought him straight to these branches, and now they veered off deeper into the heart of the forest. Perhaps he was right to be cautious earlier, when he thought he heard a voice at Shaxi’s shrine. The voice must have been shouting for him to stay away. He should have taken it as a warning, like a shout should be considered, not acted as though it was a blessing.
A sound came to him through the trees, something low and guttural.
He snapped to attention, spear held at a low guard, his eyes darting around as he tried to gauge where it had come from as it echoed around him. He judged it to be from the new direction of tracks.
A shriek tore into his ears, paralyzing him for a heartbeat. Shrill as it was, its echoes dwarfed those of the low growl that came before. Only one creature lingered in his mind that could be as large and high-pitched enough to cry out like that: a woman.
Hanshin leapt forward and tore through the undergrowth with each one of his rapid footfalls switching between curses at himself for being rooted to the spot like that and pleas that whatever spirits were listening to gave him the speed he needed to get there in time.
Leaves whipped at his face, and tangles pulled at his feet. He stumbled and slammed his shoulder into a tree trunk, bouncing off and forcing himself to keep going forward. No time to check the tracks, no time to dither or guess about what he was looking for anymore. Precious seconds were all that separated life and death in the wild, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a broken bowstring.
Another scream came to him. Closer. Louder. She was still alive. She, definitely, as he heard indecipherable words rise and fall in her cry.
Ahead, he saw a clearing through a small gap between the trees. Two figures darted in and out of his sight, too fast for him to make out much detail. One was brownish and seemed roughly his size, the other a mass of gray that bounded after it, shorter in height but broad, powerfully built. He couldn’t guess what it was yet, but he was closing fast. He flipped his hand to grip the spear from below, ready to draw back and throw as soon as he was clear of the trees. The brown-clad woman just needed to hold on a little longer.
She danced and spun away from the creature’s next attack, but she had no time to flee before it whirled about and charged her again. She leapt over it in a graceful dive Hanshin had never seen anyone even attempt before, and she hit the ground in a forward roll that left her crouching right in his path, turning to face her attacker.
Hanshin called for her to stay down as he prepared his throw. And he realized, this was no woman.
She was not clad in brown--she was brown. Hair. Her sleek body was covered in light brown hair save for a skirt of blue silk around her hips. She whipped around at his call and looked at him with large dark eyes that seemed colorless until he saw flashes of white as they flicked about to look him over. Her face was also covered in short hair, framed by two pointed ears ringed in black and a long snout that drove all thoughts but one from his mind: Shaxi.
The fox waved towards the clearing and snarled, “What are you waiting for?”
A sharp growl snapped his attention back to the creature he had pursued, but nothing he considered during his trek came close to the reality. He looked into the sunken skeletal face of a small head that sat upon a broad torso like a shriveled, rotten berry left to wither on the bush. Two large teeth jutted down from its mouth, and it growled again in a raspy sound he had never heard before. Wrinkled gray skin sagged from the body as it bent down to all fours, each finger on its hands as long as knives by themselves and tipped with jagged claws. It sprang forward, a long naked tail bouncing behind it.
Hanshin faltered. He stepped back, lowering his spear to hold it to this chest as if it were a shield that he could hide behind.
“Move!” the fox cried and shoved him away. She barely had enough time to recover before the beast slammed into her. They fell to the ground and Hanshin heard teeth snapping as they rolled and wrestled with each other.
Cursing himself, he took aim and raised his arm again, but again did not throw. He could only wait for a clearer target.
The fight stopped with their hands locked together, the fox on top. The beast lunged up to bite her throat, but she twisted out of the way. She got to her feet in an awkward, doubled-over stance, the beast refusing to release her. Its teeth snapped shut and just narrowly missed her arm. She raised her foot and stamped down on its elbow, filling the air with a sickening crunch before wrenching herself free of its grip.
The beast recovered quickly and bound after her. But the injured arm collapsed under its weight, and its momentum carried it behind cover as it crashed. And again, Hanshin lowered his spear.
“To the clearing,” the fox said. “You’ll get a better shot there.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him along as she ran, all but throwing him into position behind her in the center of the clearing. “You do know how to use that thing, right?”
He gripped the spear tightly and nodded.
“Okay, I’ll try to give you an opening. Just be ready.”
They did not have to wait long before the beast followed them. It staggered like a drunkard, one arm limp at its side and swaying side to side as it came. So intent on trying to predict its motion for his throw, Hanshin nearly forgot what he already knew. “The foot!” he cried, pointing down at the thick mass it struggled to walk on. “You can knock it off balance!”
She nodded and braced herself for the attack. Hanshin had seen martial fighters come through his village before as caravan guards, troublemakers, even some extravagant displays from entertainers, but he hadn’t seen a stance quite like hers before. She held her arms in front of her, one extended in front of the other, both of them black from the elbow to her fingertips, with her palms up and open as if waiting for something to fall into them.
The beast obliged her, throwing its injured arm in a wild swing followed by a slash with its other claws. She slapped the first attack away and caught the second. She spun around and dragged the arm along with her to force the beast’s weight onto its lame foot. It staggered and fell to the ground.
Hanshin saw what was happening and stepped into position. The fox finished her spin with the arm trapped in her grip and her elbow pressed into the beast’s head to stretch out its neck. With his quarry kneeling, trapped, and exposed, Hanshin thrust his spear into its throat.
Blood seeped out of the wound and spilled to the ground. Hanshin pulled the spear out as smoothly as it had gone in, and the beast slumped over. The fox released her grip, letting the body crumple to the red-stained grass. Neither of them spoke, or even moved, for what felt like minutes to him. Everything was still and silent around them.
The fox pointed down with a trembling hand. “What in Creation was that thing?”
His eyes snapped to her face, and she only stared straight back at him. With the danger passed, his mind raced to catch up with what he now faced. She stood at roughly his height, and she wore nothing but her silk skirt, not even shoes for her feet, covered in the same black hair as her arms. Hair. A fox. A fox was speaking to him. She stood and spoke like a human, but her face still looked as if it had been carved by the same hand that crafted the idol back in the shrine.
The shrine.
He cast the spear aside, tainted by the foul blood of the beast as it was, and the fox sprang back a step. Dropping to his knees, Hanshin bowed and clutched his fist to his chest. “Great Shaxi, forgive me. I should have been faster, thrown faster. I beg you, forgive me for endangering you.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“I tracked this creature for an hour. I tarried along the way. If I was faster I might have found it before it attacked you.”
She didn’t answer him, and in the quiet he could do nothing but study the body between them. Even with it lying dead before him, it did not look real. It’s arms were long and spindly, too long for the squat torso, almost like loose threads pulled out of place. And his face burned hot as he thought of his words. If he had found it before it attacked her, he would have been useless against it. He had frozen, would have been run down and killed if he had fled. His hands dropped to his side, and he looked up at his savior. “Thank you, Great Shaxi, for saving my life.”
A smile spread across her face, and her tail swished behind her. “My name is Sofi. Just Sofi the One-Tailed,” she said, and she reached down to him. “And who are you?”
He flicked his gaze between her hand and face. Something he said must have amused her greatly, because her smile never faded as she waited patiently for him to take her hand. He finally did, the fine hairs on her fingers almost tickling him, and she helped him to his feet. “I am Hou. Hou Hanshin. I thought you must have been... hiding. Shaxi can take many forms.”
“Can she now? I’ll have to ask her about that.” She walked over to pick up his spear, and he watched, mesmerized, as she went. He had heard tales of the Celestials, beings like Shaxi that each city or town claimed as their guardian, but though she moved like anyone from the village, he could not take his eyes off her. She stood oddly as though her heels never touched the ground, but she still looked calm and certainly more relaxed than he felt.
She seemed to be lost in thought too as she fingered the weapon in her hands, spinning it around and around before raising the bloody tip to her nose and smelling it. Oddly, she did it twice before nodding to herself and turning back to him. “I’m here on Shaxi’s behalf to try and figure out what’s been happening. You could help by answering my question: what is that thing?”
He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. It must be a demon.”
“No, I’ve dealt with demons before. I know what they smell like. This creature...” Sofi knelt beside the body, balancing his spear in her lap. She ran her fingers along its wrinkled skin and lowered her nose to it. Hanshin jerked forward to pull her away, but stopped himself. She had helped him to his feet, but it was prudent not to presume. “This creature smells like the forest, like it belongs here. The blood doesn’t even smell tainted.”
“It was following you, wasn’t it? I tracked it for an hour, and the trail was very... straightforward. Single-minded.”
The fox looked up at him, a strange look crossing her face. Though, as he gazed upon her pointed snout and large, dark eyes, he couldn’t begin to guess at what she was thinking. “And what brought you here, Hou Hanshin? Why did you follow its trail to me?”
He fidgeted under her gaze. “It was the first trail I’ve seen in the forest in weeks. No one in the village has had a successful hunt since--” He swallowed, trying to collect himself.
“Since the game animals have fled. I thought that was the case, and now I know why.”
“You think they left because of this thing?”
“No,” she said, standing up. “I doubt just one creature, no matter how it looks, could drive off every bit of wildlife for miles around. This mystery isn’t solved yet.” She looked at him again, and again he struggled to guess what she would say next. “You’ve killed more of these things than I have, and you rushed to my aid even before you knew what we were up against.”
Sofi held out her hands to offer him his spear. “Will you help me again, Hou Hanshin?”