Chapter 2: The Mentor in the Woods

An old woman lived on the edge of the grove, close enough that they weren't as alone out there as it sometimes felt — sharp-tongued, kinder than she let on once you got past the tongue. She became something like a teacher to Kaguya, and did more to root her in the mortal world than Genkurō's devotion ever could, mostly because she refused to treat Kaguya like anything holy. To her, Kaguya was just a girl who didn't know anything yet.
Under the old woman's impatient instruction, Kaguya learned to sew. Coarse fabric. Uneven stitches. Needle after needle until her once-flawless fingers were calloused and pricked raw, the copper taste of a bitten thumb becoming as familiar to her as breathing. She loved every bad stitch. Every single one.
"Slower." The old woman swatted her knuckles, no real heat behind it. "A stitch rushed is a stitch redone. I've got nowhere better to be. And neither do you."
Herbalism too — slow, unreliable, nothing like the effortless healing of the heavens. Kaguya sat in the dirt grinding bitter roots in a stone mortar, the smell of crushed leaves sharp enough to sting the back of her throat, learning which weeds did something and which just looked like they should. The old woman never once said she was proud of her. Kaguya learned to hear it anyway, buried somewhere in the gruffness.
But the hardest lesson was about the danger she was in.
"A face like yours isn't a gift out here, girl." The old woman didn't look up from her mending. "It's a target. Bandits. The kind of nobleman who takes what he wants and calls it a favor after, like that makes it decent." A nod at the mud drying on Kaguya's hands. "Better plain and breathing than pretty and gone."
So Kaguya learned to make herself plain on purpose. Rubbed mud into her own face before she left the hut. Worked more into her hair until the shine went out of it. And it got under her nails and never fully washed out before the next time, and after a while she stopped noticing she was doing it at all. The way you stop noticing a scar.
The weight of mortal affection
In heaven she'd worn silk that weighed nothing at all. Beautiful. And as much a cage as anything with bars.
Genkurō's version of love looked nothing like that. When he came back from trading at the edge of the village he never brought just what they needed. He brought things that weren't necessary at all.
A wooden comb, once. His scarred hands shook a little holding it out. "Saw it and thought of you." That was all he said, not quite meeting her eyes, like the admission cost him something to make out loud — this from a man who'd once held a blade against three armed strangers without so much as a raised pulse, undone by the simple act of giving someone a comb. A dyed kimono another night, heavier and richer-colored than anything she owned. Red bean paste wrapped in leaves, still warm from wherever he'd gotten it.
"Why do you keep doing this?" She turned the comb over in her hands like she still expected to find a price tag on it somewhere. "I don't need any of it."
"I know." He shrugged. "That's sort of the point."
None of it made sense to her at first. Centuries of offerings made out of fear had trained her to expect fear behind every gift. He just wanted to see her happy. First few times it happened she cried without really understanding why.
Between the old woman's blunt chatter and Genkurō's quiet way of talking, the language came fast — faster than should've been possible for anyone who wasn't a god. And the strange rolling dialect of the void faded out of her voice. What replaced it was plain, unremarkable peasant speech. She liked it better.
There was a cost to that, though.
She was forgetting what she used to be. But she couldn't forget what was coming. Somewhere underneath everything else she always knew this was borrowed time — the sky still watching, still waiting to take back what it considered its own.
On the bad nights she'd close her eyes and look for the thread. The one only she could see, running straight through her chest, humming faint with the rhythm of his tired heartbeat. She'd hold onto it in her mind. Choose him anyway. Again. Every time. Whether or not the clock was running out.
The distant lanterns
Late one summer evening the quiet of the grove finally broke.
Taiko drums, faint and steady, through the trees. The thin bright sound of bamboo flutes under them. Somewhere down in the valley the village was holding a festival.
"Take me." Kaguya stood in the hut, face already smudged with mud for the night. The plain words came easier now than they had even a month before.
He didn't look up from the knife he was sharpening. "It's not safe. Not for you, out among that many people."
"I don't want the square." Fast, like she'd rehearsed it and didn't want to lose her nerve partway through. "The ridge, at the edge of the woods. Far enough no one gets a good look at me. Close enough to watch." She wanted the dancing. The kids running wild through the crowd. People being happy for a while, at a distance that kept it safe.
He set the knife down. "And if I say no?"
"Then I go alone. And you spend the whole night wondering if I made it back."
He didn't like it. Took her anyway — picked a careful path through the dark trees to a rock outcrop looking down over the whole valley.
Standing in the shadows, both hands wrapped around his sleeve, she watched the dancers stumble over each other and laugh about it, the smell of grilled skewers and woodsmoke drifting up even this far from the square. Nothing like that existed in heaven. Joy that messy. That unplanned. She leaned her mud-streaked cheek against his shoulder and felt, for the first time in longer than she could measure, completely safe.
Then the ground gave out.
Days of rain had turned the embankment to mud, and it didn't so much crumble as disappear. One second solid. The next just gone. And his arm was already around her waist and there was nothing left under either of their feet, and then the fall, and then the river — hard, black, cold enough to stop thought — the current ripping her out of his arms before he'd even finished trying to hold on. He went after her anyway, half blind, until a boulder he never saw caught him across the ribs and every bit of air left his body at once.
She was gone downstream before he hit the water a second time.
Alone.