As the years deepened, the rhythm of the mountain shifted, becoming jagged and unpredictable.
Yorimitsu had transformed from a skeletal slave into a predator of lean, corded muscle, but the woman who had knit his bones back together was beginning to fray at the edges.
Yama-uba grew thin, her frame becoming so slight that the heavy indigo robes she wore seemed to be draped over a skeleton. Her frantic cackles, once sharp enough to pierce the thickest mountain mist, now frequently dissolved into wet, hacking coughs that left her clutching her chest, her face turning a sickly, translucent grey.
One evening, after a particularly violent fit of coughing, she leaned against the cave wall, unaware that Yorimitsu was watching from the shadows.
"Hehehe... I really am running out of time, ha?" she whispered to the cold stones, her voice a papery rasp. "Purging all those spiritual connections from him... it took a tool I didn't think I had left to pay, and his control is suffocating. I can feel it grow day by day."
The cave began to feel unnervingly hollow. There were nights when the charcoal brazier sat cold and dead, the comforting scent of burning mugwort replaced by the damp, oppressive chill of the deep earth.
Yama-uba would vanish for days on end, slipping into the lightless depths of the forest where the trees grew so thick the sun never touched the soil. When she returned, her robes were often shredded as if by briars or claws, and the metallic, copper-sweet scent of fresh blood would cling to her. It was a thick, heavy smell, too abundant to be her own, yet she offered no explanation.
"Where do you go?" Yorimitsu asked one evening. He was skinning a mountain deer. The black ink-lines on his wrists pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, reacting to the spiritual energy he was unconsciously drawing from the air.
"To pull weeds, brat," she wheezed, collapsing onto her bamboo stool with a heavy thud. She looked smaller than she had only a day before. "The forest is choking. The darkness is a rising tide, and someone has to keep it from spilling into the valleys before you're ready to stand against it."
She reached out, her hand trembling like a dead leaf in the wind, and touched the black spiral on his brow. Her skin was fever-hot, nearly scalding.
"You were born of spiritual bondage, Yorimitsu," she said, her voice dropping into a gravelly solemnity that silenced the crackling fire.
"What…!" Yorimitsu frowned, his knife pausing mid-stroke. "What are you talking about—"
"Shut up and listen, brat!" she snapped, a flash of her old ferocity returning to her milky eyes. "You are a knot tied between the human realm and the spirit world. You spent your youth breaking because those two parts were at war inside you, blood and spirit, trying to occupy the same space.
You aren't a curse; you are a bridge. You have a purpose greater than your petty grudges against the Minakaze, though I know your heart still burns for them. But even they... they were just pawns, moved by hands you cannot yet see."
She looked at him with a sudden, piercing clarity that made him feel as though his ribs were made of glass and his secrets were bared.
"When I am gone, someone must be the caretaker. This mountain, this forest... they need a sentinel. One day, you will take over this role. You will be the wall between the evil spirits and the bridge for the good."
Yorimitsu opened his mouth to protest, to argue that she was the Mountain Witch, a force of nature that couldn't die. But the words died in his throat. In the flickering firelight, her skin looked almost liquid, moving in ways that shouldn't be possible.
That night, the dream returned—or what he told himself was a dream.
A strange, guttural lowing sound woke him. It wasn't the howl of a wolf or the shriek of a hawk; it was a primal, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated through the stone floor and into his very teeth. The moon was obscured by thick, suffocating clouds, casting the cave into a world of oppressive, shifting charcoal shadows.
Yorimitsu sat up, his hand instinctively gripping the ironwood bokken beside his bed-straw. At the mouth of the cave, silhouetted against the misty grey of the night, stood a figure.
It was massive, its back arched and covered in coarse, bristling hair that looked like obsidian needles. Its arms were grotesquely long, ending in talons that scraped against the stone with the sound of a thousand needles on glass.
Two ivory horns curved upward from a head that looked more like a prehistoric beast's than a human's. It exhaled, and a plume of white frost drifted into the cave, smelling of ancient pine and raw power.
Yorimitsu's heart hammered a frantic rhythm. He rubbed his eyes until he saw stars, trying to clear the hallucination. Is that... Obaasan?
As a sliver of moonlight finally broke through the clouds, the beast was gone. In its place stood the old woman, leaning heavily on her staff, her breath coming in ragged, whistling gasps. She looked smaller than he had ever seen her, as if she were shrinking into her own bones.
"Staring again, sprout?" she rasped, her back still turned. "Go back to sleep. The mountain air is thick with ghosts tonight; it plays tricks on the eyes of the weary."
Yorimitsu lay back down, pulling the rough furs to his chin. His mind was a storm. What is going on with her? She doesn't eat, she vanishes for days... she isn't sick, is she?
He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the logic of the mountain into his brain. I'm just exhausted. The incense she burns is making me see things. She's just a woman. Just an old woman.
The days became a desperate race. One night, as the wind screamed through the crags, she sat him down. "Brat... do you know of Shuten-dōji?"
"No," he answered blankly.
"Then it is time you know," she began, the firelight casting long, dancing horns on the wall behind her. "Long ago, Shuten-dōji was not a demon. He was a being of immense greed who walked the celestial halls.
He stole a Great Treasure from the heart of Heaven, a relic that held the balance of the realms. As punishment, the gods cast him down, stripping him of his divinity and cursing him to wander the earth as a monstrous Ogre, a king of filth."
She leaned closer, her eyes reflecting the dying embers.
"Every demon you see, every crawling terror in the dark, they are all his offspring, his malice made flesh. He sends them out to find those with 'Heavenly Bodies,' rare souls born with a spark of the divine.
He seeks to devour them, to use their essence to unlock the seal the gods placed upon him. He wants to go back, Yorimitsu. He wants to wage war against Heaven itself, and he will turn this world into a slaughterhouse to do it."
The next morning, Yorimitsu woke to a cold cave. The charcoal was grey ash. Yama-uba was gone. One day turned into two, then three. The silence of the mountain began to feel like a physical weight, a suffocating shroud.
She's been gone too long. She's too weak to be out there alone, he thought, his hand tightening on his ironwood blade until his knuckles turned white. She might have fallen down a mountain and hurt herself. He took his bow and sword. I'm going to find her—even if I have to tear this forest apart to do it."