Prologue

Some curses are born of hatred.

Others are born of grief.

This one… was born of both.

Long before Yuna Tsukimori was old enough to name the dreams that bled into her waking hours, the Kōgō-shiki already had her scent. It had been waiting... patient, like a spider with centuries to perfect its web-spinning its threads between the worlds of the living and the dead. No one in her family spoke of it. They thought the past had been buried, its horrors sealed away in ink and talisman paper. They were wrong.

They called it superstition.

They called it misfortune.

But the old onmyoji knew better.

For the Kōgō-shiki was no mere spirit to be placated with offerings. It was a hunger. A wound in the fabric of life itself. A thing that could not be reasoned with, for it had no voice—only a laugh in the dark, and hands that reached for the soul before the body could even fall.

And Yuna, though she did not yet know it, was its chosen thread.

Every dream she dreamt, it pulled tighter.

Every loss she suffered, it fed stronger.

And when it finally came—not as a whisper, but as a storm—no shrine, no spell, no prayer would be enough to stop it from weaving her into its story.

Because this was not a battle between light and dark.

It was the binding of two fates, knotted together in blood and inevitability.