The battlefield was silent now, but silence did not mean peace.
It was the silence of flies crawling over corpses, of vultures circling above the smoke, of blades left in the dirt where no hand remained to wield them.
Shaketsu Migen walked among the wreckage like a ghost born from the carnage itself.
She was a vision of white: hair as pale as bleached bone, skin untarnished by the mud and gore that clung to every other living thing. Even her robes—layer upon layer of pale silk that should have been ruined by blood—remained immaculate, though she waded through puddles red as sunset. Only her eyes betrayed her, deep crimson like wounds that never healed.
The soldiers had called it the Battle of Hollow Pines. To Shaketsu, it was only another graveyard.
She moved slowly, each step deliberate, as if savoring the despair left behind. Bodies twisted where they fell: samurai with armor shattered, peasants-turned-recruits with spears still clutched in stiff fingers, and demons whose limbs had been hacked apart but refused to stop twitching. The war was not between men and monsters alone—it was between clans, between faiths, between every lie mortals told themselves to justify killing.
Shaketsu hummed.
It was soft, almost gentle, but the melody crawled through the air like smoke seeping into lungs. A lullaby. One that had been whispered into the ears of countless dying men before the light left their eyes. The kind of song a mother might sing—if mothers rocked their children to sleep in graves.
The wind carried her voice across the field. Somewhere, a survivor whimpered.
Her gaze turned. A man staggered from behind a broken cart, his body wrapped in torn armor, a sword dragging limply in one hand. He was young, though grief made him look older. His face was smeared with ash and blood, but his eyes were still alive—still burning with the stubborn fire of someone who refused to die just yet.
A ronin. A banished one, if the tattered family crest on his sleeve was any proof.
He froze when he saw her. For a moment, he forgot the corpses around him. He forgot the pain in his side. He saw only her, standing untouched amid the carnage, robes billowing though the air was still. She was not beautiful in the way mortals understood beauty; she was terrifying in her perfection, the kind of sight that stripped men of their words and left them naked before something they could not comprehend.
"Stay… back," he rasped, lifting his sword though his hand trembled. "I've no strength left for demons."
Shaketsu tilted her head. Her hair slipped over one shoulder like falling snow.
"Demons," she repeated, her voice smooth as silk sliding over steel. "Is that what you see?"
"You reek of it," he spat. "You walk untouched where men die. You sing to the dying like carrion."
Her lips curved faintly. Not a smile—something colder.
"And yet," she said, stepping closer, "you cannot look away."
The ronin's throat tightened. He wanted to retreat, but his legs rooted to the ground. Her presence was suffocating, not like the roar of an enemy general but like the hush of death itself. He could not decide if she was about to kill him, or if she was the only thing keeping him alive.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
Shaketsu stopped an arm's length away. The air smelled of blood and burned pine, but around her there was something else—a sweetness, faint and unnatural, like lilies blooming over a corpse. She lowered her voice until it was almost a whisper.
"I want nothing. But you…" Her crimson eyes narrowed, studying him. "…you want vengeance."
The word cut deeper than his wounds. His grip on the sword faltered, as if she had peeled the thought straight from his marrow.
"How—"
She raised a finger, silencing him. "Do not waste breath. I have walked these fields for longer than your clan has carried blades. I know the stench of betrayal. I know the weight of blood that is not your own, yet still drips from your hands."
The ronin's chest heaved. Memory flashed—faces of kin who had turned on him, the banner of his clan burning, the moment he realized honor was nothing but painted paper in a world of knives.
Shaketsu leaned closer, until he saw the reflection of his ruined self in her red eyes.
"Do you want forgiveness," she asked softly, "or do you want vengeance?"
His lips parted, but no sound came. The question did not feel like a choice—it felt like a sentence.
"I… I want…" His voice cracked. "I want them to burn."
For a moment, silence again. Then Shaketsu straightened, her expression unreadable. She turned, the hem of her robes brushing past corpses, and began to walk deeper into the battlefield. Her lullaby resumed, faint but lingering.
The ronin stumbled after her. He hated himself for it, but his feet obeyed before his mind did. He followed the pale shadow, the demon mother, into the ruins of war.
And above them, the sky split with thunder, as if the gods still watched—even if they had long abandoned mercy.