The Abyss

 Yuya held out his arms, preparing to meet the water in something resembling a dive. His window of opportunity to do so was disconcertingly long. When his clasped hands met water, they stung at the impact, and he felt himself plunge to a depth many times his own height. He felt for the dueling tugs of buoyancy and gravity, only to find he couldn't feel them, couldn't right himself. Though reason told him he would get only stinging pain and darkness for it, he opened his eyes.

Instead, he was surrounded on all sides by jagged points of light.

The first he examined was a dark purple-blue sky with two suns set in it, one bigger and brighter and not unlike Earth’s or Nod’s, the other small and somewhat ruddy, nearly washed out by its greater companion. This view was hemmed by pine treetops, and the surface of the water where Yuya looked out was disturbed by a pair of cupped hands, where a woman in a green robe stooped to drink. She had long, blonde hair, sculpted ageless features, and ears pointed like teardrops.

An elf, straight out of a Tolkien or Sapowski novel. Or their film and video game adaptations, respectively, which Yuya was more familiar with.

Had there been some cosmic screw-up? Was he now seeing the world he had been meant to enter after dying on Earth? He could envision himself emerging from this water into that strange forest, being an immediate object of sympathy and adoration for this beautiful she-elf, making of her the first of many women hanging onto him in desire…

He shook his head. Nod had nearly killed him when he entered it unprepared for physical hardship. He was no more prepared to win any triumphs of the heart than he had been when he left Earth.

There was another exit near this one, one that hadn’t caught Yuya’s eye as strongly. It looked out from a wide body of water on a stretch of desert coastline. Yuya wondered how he had missed a very modern-looking city on the left side of the view, with the distant but unmistakable outlines of skyscrapers forming an urban silhouette he’d never thought to see again. He wondered for a moment what world he saw, didn’t dare to hope…

A freighter drifted into view, an enormous container ship, and Yuya waited tensely for the stern to float by, so he could confirm by a name or a flag flown or painted that the ship was registered in a country on the planet of his birth.

He nearly gaped, came within a single muscle twitch of letting his lungs fill with this water that seemed as one current passed fresh, with another salty.

A white flag, bearing only a vivid red disk. The hinomaru. He could swim forward, breach the waves of this unknown sea, and be on a Japanese vessel before his breath ran out.

Grant would envy him this opportunity. He had people he sorely missed, most of all his fiancee, Sarah. Yuya missed people too, sure: the worst thing he could say about his parents is that they weren’t around any more often than a typical pair of Japanese working parents, and there were friends from school he would’ve loved to hop on some online multiplayer with just one last time.

But he was not far from finishing high school and moving away for university, anyway. And after that, what? He saw what office work in the early twenty-first century did to his mother and father, the constant fatigue and stress. He thought– grimly– that he and his older sister might have been their only source of real satisfaction, the thing that made it all worth it.

What were his odds of having even that much? He was pathetic when it came to girls, scared shitless of even talking to them in any meaningful way. About two-thirds of all young men in Japan were failing to marry or land long-term girlfriends, and that would invariably come to include him, if he returned.

A few people managed to bury themselves in a career and satisfy themselves on that alone, but that seemed to be the exception, not the norm, the way work culture and the economy were going. He enjoyed programming, loved the feeling of agency it could give him, but knew even that would devolve into mind-numbing grunt work once he got out into the corporate sphere. He could either let that fire get burned out, or let it smoulder uselessly in the languid life of a hikikomori, withdrawing to a cheap apartment and indulging in what digital pleasures could be sustained on the money from occasional online or gig work, or with support from parents unwilling to let him shame them in homelessness.

That might have genuinely tempted him, once. He still missed the creature comforts of the modern world, video games and air conditioning and hot showers. But those were only good sensations. Sooner or later, he would need a greater good than those, even something as simple as surviving in a place where doing so defied the odds. Without such an overarching good, something like the chase that had led him to this point, all the rest would begin to turn to ash in his mouth.

If he called the chase completed, came back now, he would at least have a cool story to tell about a strange place called Nod. If at least a few people believed it, he could be in the news for one cycle, get his fifteen minutes of fame. If not, he could write a light novel or code an indie game about it. Either way, that story, if abandoned now, would feel incomplete, have one hell of a disappointing ending.

Is Nod where You want me, Lord of Death?

Wordlessly, through only subtle movements of the heart, the God of Cain directed Yuya’s attention to another opening in the waters, behind him. As he turned, his eyes skimmed over passages to worlds of flint and bronze, nuclear wastelands and the ecumenopolis-capitals of interstellar empires. They came to rest on the mouth of a cave, the top stones of which bore the corpse of a twisted creature, bleeding into the water where it had impacted the only shallowly-submerged rock.

All at once, Yuya became aware of the burning in his lungs, and swam for the light playing off the water’s surface, some way up this shaft.

Do I at least get a share in Your power for this? Access to the spells Sauhur and the White Circle shamans use?

This time, the voice came through in more than just a whisper.

All that I have is yours. In coming to this place, you have asked; already, you have received.

Thank you. Although… I don’t feel much different.

You are still you, Yamamoto Yuya.

And what is the fate You have in store for Yamamoto Yuya on this shithole moon?

Your path lies across the lengths and breadths of Nod. I am confident you can find your way in this second life you have been granted, end this journey at My side in a place more joyful than any of these worlds. But I will not dictate the exact course of that path. Do only what is right, in this place where it is seldom easy. Beyond that, I would only make a request of you, not extracting any promises or threatening to withdraw My favor. A request, and not a command.

Well, it’d be damned ungrateful of me not to at least hear you out, wouldn’t it?

Help the other Penitents, as best you can. Grant, to be patient; Misha, to be charitable; Konoe, to be temperate… the ones they call gods to become truly God-like at last, if that comes to fall within your power… I would especially like to welcome Cain home. He plans now to do great things, which call for terrible sacrifices. In anything you might do to help or hinder him in these, hold him to the father’s love he professes. Do not, if at all possible, let him repeat his first sin against all of Nod.

Sunlight filled the water around Yuya as he emerged at the bottom of a wide, shallow lake. His head breached the surface, and he gasped, drawing in the air of Nod, the air he had resolved to breathe for as long as his chest still rose and fell.

As soon as that breathing steadied, he murmured, “So be it.”

When he swam to shore, he found a man waiting in the tassel-veiled hood and bronze mirror harness of a Cainite shaman. Not Sauhur, too short by far.

“Who are you? What happened to my apprentice?”

“He is dead.”

“How?” His eyes lingered on Yuya's shoulder. “You’re that Penitent that self-righteous White prick Sauhur picked up, aren’t you? Did he put you up to this? I’ll make you both pay!”

The shaman reached up, and the thin morning mist rolling from the lake flowed into his outstretched palm. It congealed and changed color until it was two opaque streams of vapor, a thinner one of red and one thicker of black. The two lines twisted about each other until they formed a face, first red with bulging black eyes and lips, then suddenly inverting on itself to form a shadow-face with eyes and mouth as of fire.

Yuya had some intuition, he could not say where from, for what manner of spell this was, the meaning behind the shaman's slow chant in the Antediluvian speech as he wove it. Violently, cruelly, he was binding an equally violent spirit by force, either one of the perfectly evil true spirits Sauhur had taught Yuya of, or a demi-spirit so far fallen as to not be much different. In his own tongue and his own prior understanding of such things, yokai was perhaps the least scathing word that might describe the entity here being given form, and akuma likely more appropriate. A spirit of pure malice, and now, the shaman– of the Black Circle, that much was now clear– hurled its countenance, which was itself an instrument of suffering, at Yuya.

Yuya had been taught only the barest of spell formulae before being plunged into the Abyss. “Hiway.” he muttered softly, one of the several titles the Lord of Death was known by, derived from an Antediluvian verb meaning to be or to become. Of the handful of Antediluvian words Sauhur had taught him, this was the only one he could remember in the moment. With the deity invoked, he cobbled together the rest of the spell with an outstretched hand and a thought– not nearly as effective tools as that most ancient of languages, but useable in a pinch.

Where repeating complex Antediluvian incantations after Sauhur had done nothing before, this single word and gesture created a distorted barrier in the air between Yuya and the spirit. It shattered as the misty face impacted it, but the thing paused stunned for a moment, and Yuya threw himself back into the water, plunging beneath the surface.

The face searched the lake side to side, then froze when it lingered on its own reflection. It hung dumbly, and before it moved again, Sauhur stepped around a rocky outcrop onto the lakeshore. He struck the Black shaman over the head with a walking stick, then held out a hand. The face was drawn into it, then released again as simple, mundane vapor.

The Black shaman had fallen to his knees at the blow, and now crawled weakly away, slinking into some nearby bushes with muttered profanities.

Yuya emerged from the water, and Sauhur beckoned for him. “You have seen the Sea Beneath All Things?”

Yuya nodded.

“And spoken to the Lord of Death?”

“He bade me remain here, to journey all across Nod. He asked that I tend to the souls of my fellow Penitents as I go, including aiding or opposing the designs of the Khan of Khans as serves his own good.”

“And what of the Black Circle’s missing apprentice?”

“Dead. Attacked me under possession. We fell together, and I was the luckier of us two.”

“The Black Circle are ever eager to find shortcuts to power. You may fight battles alongside them, as a fellow Cainites, but they will never be your friends.

Sauhur tossed him a loop of string. It was a necklace of beads carved from bone and turquoise, and from it hung a medallion, bronze and mirror-polished to show Yuya's haggard face with perfect clarity as he examined it.

“I trust, after repelling an attack by that particular spirit, you might intuit why a shaman wears mirrors as wards against demons and other vile things of the Veiled World. Their countenances are weapons of fear against others, but even more powerful weapons of shame when turned back on them. Wear it always. Welcome to the White Circle, initiate shaman Yuya of the Sethites.”