Paper Thin

Crossposted from

Title: Fireflies
’Verse/characters: Dragon King’s Daughter/Araumi, Yau, Akiu
Prompt: #54, Air
Word Count: 167
Rating: G
Notes: Birds are often associated with the dead. A short scene from early in the story.

The storm would miss the city proper, the shifting currents of heat and air driving it north, but the wind was strong enough without it. They leaped up to the highest point of the roof, looking down at scuttling leaves and the rattling branches of the ancient cherry tree; the wind whipped and swirled around them, driven into wild currents by the buildings, smelling of decay and demons, carrying bird-cries and feathers, and above the thick clouds shifted, shredding and rejoining without ever letting the sky behind them be seen.

They stood full in the wind, Yau in the west, Akiu in the south and Araumi in the east, and shook loose the souls trapped in their scales like grains of sand. The firefly-lights surrounded them, blown about by the wind but close enough to touch, until the birds rushed down on a gust that smelled of summer, catching the souls up in their feathers and flying back up into the sky to vanish against the clouds.

prompt 67: Snow
Title: Sealing
’Verse/characters: Dragon King’s Daughter
Prompt: 67/Snow
Word Count: 149
Rating: G
Notes: Loosely inspired by Hiroshige’s Benzaiten Shrine at Inokashira in Snow.

Snow falls steadily from the low dark sky, drifts over the thin ice on the lake, settles on the handrail of the red bridge and the branches of the ancient pines.

The island shrine is snow-capped red pillars and white sacred ropes around a rough-hewn grey rock the size of a man. Snow drifts in the hollows of the stone and on the dark hair of the woman standing before it.

She thrusts a knife into the rock, where the heart would be on a man. Snow melts into steam from the top of the rock to the edge of the pillars, and the rock itself groans like breaking ice. Before the sound can die, she breathes out a cloud of fine red mist; the mist drifts around the stone, the pillars, the ropes, settles with the snow, and disappears.

Snow falls on the silent, empty shrine until dawn.