Father of the Gate

Late afternoon slid through the broken shrine windows in thin, pale ribbons, catching on drifting motes of spirit-light that had not yet decided whether they belonged to this world or the other. The safehouse felt like it was floating between breaths. Outside, the forest whispered with things that did not exist yesterday. Inside, Raven lay propped against a pile of folded blankets, her arm wrapped in clean white bandages, her skin still too warm beneath them.

She watched the light bleed through the cedar branches, through the half-healed rifts that stitched the air like glowing scars. Somewhere a wind chime rang with the wrong tone, too clear, too bright.

Takumi stood near the doorway, pretending to read something on his phone while actually listening to everything. Mika leaned against a wooden support beam, arms crossed, her fox eyes sharp even in stillness. The kitsune was rarely quiet, but when she was, it meant trouble was on its way.

Raven felt it before she heard it. A subtle tightening in her chest. A wrongness in the rhythm of the shrine.

“They’re here,” Mika said softly.

The outer door slid open.

Aki stepped inside first, her shoes whispering against the tatami. She was dressed in her Bureau coat again, dark and severe, her hair pulled back into a regulation knot that made her look more like Captain Morimoto than the woman who made tea and folded laundry with practiced care. Fatigue lined her eyes, but there was resolve there too, something that had been sharpened by too many difficult choices.

She met Raven’s gaze and held it, steady and apologetic all at once.

Behind her came the Colonel.

Not in uniform. No medals, no insignia, no rank to hide behind. He wore a simple dark jacket and slacks that looked slept in. His hair was more gray than Raven remembered. His posture, usually so rigid it seemed carved from habit, sagged just enough to reveal the weight he had been carrying since the sky burned blue.

He stopped just inside the doorway, as if unsure whether he was allowed any farther. Raven’s body tightened. Her fingers curled into the blanket. She did not stand. He did not tell her to.

“Raven,” he said quietly.

She looked at him with eyes that had already seen too much. “Colonel.”

The word landed between them like a drawn line.

A flicker crossed his face, something like pain, but he nodded. “That’s fair.”

Aki closed the door behind them, sealing out the whispering forest. For a moment, no one spoke. The shrine hummed softly, a low resonance that had nothing to do with electricity.

“I’m not here as your commanding officer,” the Colonel said at last. His voice was rougher than Raven remembered. “And I’m not here to give orders.”

Mika shifted slightly, just enough to remind everyone she was armed in ways no one could see.

“I’m here,” he went on, “as someone who already buried one woman to this fire. I’m not going to let it take another without at least telling the truth.”

Raven swallowed. Her throat felt raw, like she had been screaming for hours.

He took a careful step forward and knelt beside the low shrine table. From his bag he drew out a slim, sealed data case, its surface marked with old Bureau sigils and newer military encryption. He set it down gently, as if it might break.

“You deserve to know what we built on top of,” he said.

The case clicked open, and pale light spilled out, waiting to tell a story none of them were ready to hear.

The case unfolded with a soft mechanical whisper, its inner screen blooming to life in a wash of muted blue. Symbols scrolled past at first, dense and bureaucratic, then resolved into grainy video. The image wavered as if it were being pulled through old glass.

Raven leaned forward despite the ache in her ribs. Takumi moved closer without realizing it. Even Mika’s usual slouch straightened.

The footage showed a wide concrete chamber that Raven recognized before anyone named it. She had seen it in her father’s house in fragments. It lived in the D Four cabinet. In the way the Colonel went silent whenever certain words were spoken.

Torii beams rose from the floor, half buried in poured steel. Prayer ropes ran through power conduits. An ancient shrine had been swallowed by a modern engine.

“This was under Yokota,” the Colonel said. “Before the base was finished. Before the Bureau and the Air Force agreed on what to call it.”

The video shifted. A younger version of him appeared on the edge of the frame, uniform crisp, eyes too bright with the confidence of someone who still believed in clean solutions. Around him, technicians and onmyōji worked side by side, their tools a mix of clipboards and talismans.

Then a woman stepped into view.

Raven’s breath caught so sharply it hurt.

Her mother was younger there. Her hair was pulled back. Her face was tired, but focused in the way Raven remembered from childhood. She held a small bundle of feathers and beads in one hand, a sheaf of paper talismans in the other.

“Clara Yazzie,” the Colonel said, and for a moment his voice almost failed him. “Your mother was not stationed in Japan. She was brought here. Seconded from the New Mexico team when they realized the Gate was not behaving like a weapon.”

Raven’s fingers dug into the blanket. “The Gate under the base,” she said. “That’s Kagutsuchi.”

“Yes,” he replied. “And it was cracking. Not opening. Cracking. Bleeding resonance into everything around it. We thought it was a containment problem. Your mother knew it was something else.”

The footage showed Clara stepping closer to the shrine, chanting softly. The same words Raven had whispered in the desert. The same lullaby that had followed her through her life like a shadow.

“She believed it was a wound,” Aki said quietly, her eyes fixed on the screen. “A tear in the fabric of the spirit world. Not a door.”

“And wounds,” the Colonel added, “do not want to stay closed.”

The video spiked with static as the shrine flared. Red white fire licked at the air. Soldiers shouted. Onmyōji threw up seals that burned as soon as they touched the light.

Raven saw herself in that chaos. Not physically, but in pattern. In rhythm. In the way her mother’s voice did not waver.

“She volunteered,” the Colonel said. “Not because we asked. Because she realized the only way to stabilize the Gate was to bind a living resonance into the seal.”

Raven turned on him, fury and grief tangling in her chest. “You let her.”

“No,” he said softly. “We could not stop her.”

On the screen, Clara began to sing louder, her voice carrying through the roar. The flames twisted, slowed, bent around her like a storm recognizing a center. The torii glowed. The Gate shuddered.

“She knew it would kill her,” he said. “Or trap her. Or something worse. She never told me which she expected. Only that it would give you time.”

The image froze on Clara’s face, caught between fear and fierce resolve.

Raven felt something inside her break open. Not a clean fracture, but a deep, aching split. The song she had always thought of as a lullaby was not meant to soothe a child. It was meant to hold a god at bay.

Her mother had not died in an accident.

She had become part of a lock.

Raven bowed her head, breath coming in short, uneven pulls, as the truth settled over her like falling ash.

* * *

Spirit-light washed the forest in broken colors. It bled through the trunks and leaves like moonlight that had learned new tricks, casting shapes that did not quite belong to the world anymore. The shrine house behind them hummed softly, wards straining against a reality that no longer knew where its edges were.

Raven stood barefoot on the wooden steps, wrapped in a borrowed jacket that still smelled faintly of incense and Mika’s citrus perfume. Her wrist throbbed beneath the bandage, not with pain so much as with awareness. Everything felt too close now. Too present.

The Colonel stepped out after her. He did not close the door. He did not try to cross the small distance between them.

“You should have told me,” Raven said. Her voice did not rise. That was somehow worse. “All of it. The song. The Gate. What she did.”

He nodded once, slow and careful. “If you had known, someone would have come for you sooner. The moment the lullaby became a key instead of just a memory, you would have been a resource. Or a weapon.”

“So you lied.”

“I protected you,” he said, then let the words sit in the air long enough to taste their weakness. “Or at least I tried to.”

Raven turned to face him. The devastation in her eyes had nothing theatrical about it. It was the look of someone who had just found out that the ground under her entire life had been a story told to keep her still.

“You let me grow up thinking she just died,” she said. “Like people do. You let me believe the worst thing that happened to us was an accident.”

“And it was the kindest lie I knew how to tell,” he replied. “If you had understood what she became, the Bureau would have marked you. The Oni would have smelled it. Every faction that trades in resonance would have wanted a piece of you. I could not give you a normal life, but I could give you time.”

Raven laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Time for what. For the fire to remember me anyway.”

His mouth tightened. “The Bureau is not what it pretends to be anymore. It never really was, but now it is fractured. Some still want to contain Kagutsuchi. Some want to use it. Red Mask is only one face of that hunger.”

“And me,” Raven said quietly. “I am the door.”

“You are the interface,” he corrected. “The strongest one we have ever recorded. Your resonance matches the Gate in a way no algorithm can predict. That makes you priceless. And it makes you prey.”

The forest stirred as a breeze passed through, though there was no wind. Shapes flickered between the trees, spirits half caught between worlds. Raven watched them move, understanding for the first time what her mother must have seen when she chose to stand in front of the fire instead of run from it.

“I will not become another seal,” Raven said. “I will not disappear into that thing just so everyone else can pretend the problem is solved.”

He stepped closer then, not as an officer but as a man who had already lost one life to the flames. “I failed Clara,” he said. “I do not want to fail you too. Whatever choice you make, make it because it is yours. Not because the world is afraid of what happens if you do not.”

Raven did not answer. She looked out at the rifts bleeding light into the forest, at the way the fire still reached for her through every fracture in reality. She finally understood what her mother had done, and why Kagutsuchi had never let her go.

The truth did not bring forgiveness. It brought something heavier.

It brought responsibility.