[story] the world is no longer green
author: REI (rei_kurasaki)
email: ravenberg_shien [at] hotmail.com
He is uncomfortable with the smell of smoke. It's alien to him; it smells of the earth burnt dry and of human greed.
He is uncomfortable with the smell of electricity. It crackles between spaces and gleams when it should not. His feathers ruffle uncomfortably whenever he feels it, that subtle sharpness in the air, the sudden tang of metal. It is like nothing the sky has produced, like nothing Raiden has called up. He is uncomfortable with many human things.
He takes another drag on the cigarette anyway.
The forest is nothing like what it used to be.
Nothing like what he remembers.
There are more humans now. Noisy and smelly. They trample over delicate wildflowers and wilt the greenery with their logic and science. Instead of offerings, he finds a scattering of empty food boxes and discarded cigarettes. Once he found a fan, with his kind depicted on it, with large yellow beaks and fiery red eyes - there is a little speech bubble drawn next to the beak and the word "YOU!" painted in bright red kanji. Out of amusement, he keeps it and uses it in the summer when the wind doesn’t blow and the tree sweats under sticky warmth.
This must be how irony feels like, he thinks, as he fans himself.
Human are noisy, and this group below him isn't any different. So he follows them for a while, and watches them with fading interest. He smells them, hears the trees drip jarring laughter from their leaves, as one of the boys kicks over a small shrine that another human had carefully set up. He can’t help what he does anyway; it's in his nature to trick and to lure.
Humans - they’re so easy to trick even now, so he shifts into one of them, and manages to break another, a girl who wears bright pink socks and has angry red streaks in her hair, before he melts back into the forest.
The thrill he feels remains the same.
Life is different from before.
There aren’t so many of him left in the world now.
There used to be days when he could spread his wings and find another of his kind, teasing some hapless human. He remembers Yoshitsune and his burning spirit. Yoshitsune was a wild one, interesting but wild - also, dangerous, even for his kind. It was amusing fighting with him though, mainly because Yoshitsune was still a clumsy human who could not fly.
He remembers how he and the others would pick their victim and impersonate them. Occasionally they drove a couple of humans mad, and they would return to their villages incoherent about the wind and the gods and the forest oh god it speaks--
They had a lot of fun then.
Now, the deeper he goes into the forest, the less of his kind he sees.
There is a kappa living in the lake.
His skin is the colour of mottled moss and sometimes when the kappa comes out to sun himself, they talk. Talking with a kappa gets old fast, mainly because they stay in the water when they talk, and they have a tendency to forget that not all can understand them when they start talking underwater. Not to mention that he doesn't like water. It makes his feathers stick together.
(Although, he thinks, at least he has someone to talk to.)
He learns that the kappa used to have a mate.
He also understands that the kappa's mate is probably never going to come back because really, seldom does his kind return from the humans.
It's a risk they all take.
He asks the kappa about the child's body in the lake instead.
This part of the forest vibrates in hues of green and blue and when he closes his eyes, he can hear the mountain guardians breathing.
Sometimes the guardians talk amongst themselves, a low murmur that floats on the wind, and so he listens.
It's comforting.
It makes him forget that he hasn't seen another tengu for eight seasons.
Once, he had a human male.
The human male used to sit under his tree to read, so sometimes, he would sit on a branch and listen.
His human male used to smell like the grass and the sun.
It wasn't entirely unpleasant.
Occasionally, the human male would leave fruits underneath the tree. Beautiful bruised oranges and unruly wild pears arranged neatly near the trunk and curled with strips of white paper. The human male always said, they're for you, yama-sama, in his low voice, and then he would clap his two hands together.
How nice, his tree used to sigh, and would award the human male with careful shade whenever he took a nap under her branches. He never took the fruits, but the human never stopped putting them. Then of course, the human died and the fruits stopped.
His tree looked a little lonely then.
Today, he smells something sweet in the air. Not sweet like the grass, but something else, more sickening - it hangs in the air like an invisible fog that wouldn't fade away.
It smells artificial.
He finds the source of the smell two ri away, near a rock cave. It is bright blue and it reflects the sun irritatingly. The odour invades his nostrils and makes his head swim. He scratches it with one bored claw and meets with an odd sound that reminds him of trodden dried leaves. Plastic, he remembers absently and wonders if there's any left to eat.
"You shouldn't eat that, y'know."
He looks up and sees a fox sitting near the cave. He has never seen her before, so he watches her as she watches him with large yellow eyes.
"Human food will kill us," She smiles, showing her fangs.
She gets up and walks up to where he had his claw on the offending item and he watches the way silver hair grabs the sun like it is never going to let go.
"It's something the humans call 'kandii', I've seen the children eat it sometimes." She peers at the blue wrapper and scratches it with a careful paw. "They usually get sick when they eat too much of it."
She sits back on her hunches, cocks her head and twitches her large ears at him.
"Hello."
The problem is that the more humans multiply, the lesser they become.
The gods were the first to go, forgotten as they faded into the sky. Then, his kind started disappearing. One by one, they vanished and never appeared again.
"Do you know why?" The fox asks one day, when she is sitting under his tree, watching frogs dance in the rain.
He doesn't bother to reply, instead, he takes another long drag on his cigarette.
"That's because the humans stopped believing. And they stopped respecting, that’s why the gods and the rest left," She yawns and settles down for a nap.
He blows out a ring of grey smoke and watches it curl up into the sky; she was right anyway.
Don't you have your kind to go back to?, he asks one day, when the white fox is lazing in the sun under his tree.
She opens one lazy yellow eye before closing it again and flicks her tails in dismissal.
"There really isn't anyone left, not even in the temples."
A flock of sparrows breaks through the canopy of trees angrily and swirls up into the sky, complaining loudly to Haya-Tsu-Mujo no Kami. The mountain guardians laugh and the sounds roll over the top of trees like a storm cloud, and promise that it won't rain, so won’t the birds come back now? They wouldn't trick them again, really.
"'Sides, stone feels pretty cold, y'know," she snorts and curls herself up tighter.
Nights in the forest aren't quiet.
There is the kappa, who slinks through the greenery to the nearby village to look for his next meal. Sometimes he comes back with a cucumber, other times he comes back with fruits, stolen from the temple. Rarely does he come back with a human child - he'd rather just lure them to his lake so he can drown them there. It's simpler and works up much less of an appetite (plus, other humans can't hear them scream under water).
There is the group of tanuki who run through the forest with their shrill laughter and jugs of sake pilfered from little shrines set up where the edge of the forest creeps into town.
There is the lone wanderer who walks through the trees and the guardians whisper to him, come back, come back to us. The wanderer smells like the sun and the moon and never of medicine and herbs, never of the stink of humanity. The guardians call out his real name and though they know he hears, he never looks back. The moon weeps every time the wanderer leaves.
Tonight, he and the fox watch with detached interest as a bamboo umbrella and an old pair of straw sandals make their way through darkness nosily.
"I’m going to get wet," the sandals complain loudly, nosily, although the sky is clear.
"That’s why I'm here," Laughs the umbrella, as they hobble into the night.
"Household items," the fox rolls her eyes and gives a disdainful sniff.
There is a human in the forest.
He can smell him - a familiar pungency, with the underlying scent of earth and sky. He hadn't smelt anyone like that in years. It intrigues him; it fascinates him - it makes him hungry.
Out of curiosity, he and the fox go to look for the human.
They find him by the lake.
The human was probably just a wanderer who got lost in the forest. The fox watches him and licks her lips. Near the middle of the lake, he can see the kappa raise his head, watching from the shadows before sliding back into the water again.
"Do you know why humans don't like coming into this forest?," she asks him, and her growl fades into the shadows, "apparently they think this forest is haunted, that the gods will take you away if you stay too long."
She laughs, long and silent, fangs glinting in the shade.
"I think this one will be tasty," she giggles again and her tails shifts silently under the shadow of a protective tree.
This one is ours, he tells the kappa lurking in the waters, we smelt him first.
"No fair," the kappa whines in annoyance before sinking back into the dark waters.
Little human, little human,
Do you know you smell delicious?
Little human, little human
Do you know we follow your footsteps unseen?
Little human, little human,
Can we have a taste?
Little human, little human,
You won't be able to run away.
It's the third day since the human has been found.
Watch out, the guardians whisper and the leaves rustle in agreement, watch out.
But humans have long lost the ability to understand what the guardians tell them. This one is no different, so he continues through the forest, confident in his logic and his disregard, while the fox and the man-bird stalk and slinks and relishes, while the trees lean in closer and masks their footsteps.
The guardians laugh, and he thinks it's just the wind running through the leaves. The guardians watch, and he thinks the animals have gone to sleep. Silly human, they say and the forest rumbles silently with mirth, stupid man.
The tanuki come to watch the human, but he isn't carrying alcohol and they lose their attention quickly.
When the human sleeps, the kappa creeps near and begs, just a taste, just a tiny little taste, and the fox swishes her tails and bear her fangs.
"Let us have this man," she purrs and the tip of an ivory tail brushes the underside of the kappa's beak before trailing off, "and I will bring you a human child next time, all for your pleasure."
The kappa doesn’t ask again.
(Your grandmother used to tell you, don’t go into the forest, and you used to stare at her old wrinkled hands, they won’t ever let you go.
Who, you ask, who are "they", grandmother?
But grandmother only raised one gnarly finger and whispered, they are the old ones, they are the ones who keep our rivers running and our crops green.
But, you say, that's due to the mayor erecting a new watering system, and you roll your eyes at her, technology is keeping us going now, you have got to stop being so old fashioned.
When the sun is high in the sky the next day, you will have already forgotten what she had told you.)
The human in the forest forgets that what he's looking at isn't really what he's seeing at all. The human forgets that when he thinks he's treading on grass and rocks, he's really just treading rocks worn bare. He forgets that when he's breathing in the wind pushing against him, he's really just standing at the edge of the world he knows. He forgets that his eyes lie to him; he forgets that he's not alone.
He doesn't realize it until it's too late.
The sun hides her face behind a large white cloud, while the kappa can only sigh wistfully at the scent of blood in the air. The guardians close their eyes and laugh and the trees shake in agreement.
The sky turns a deeper shade of blue.
the end
email: ravenberg_shien [at] hotmail.com
He is uncomfortable with the smell of smoke. It's alien to him; it smells of the earth burnt dry and of human greed.
He is uncomfortable with the smell of electricity. It crackles between spaces and gleams when it should not. His feathers ruffle uncomfortably whenever he feels it, that subtle sharpness in the air, the sudden tang of metal. It is like nothing the sky has produced, like nothing Raiden has called up. He is uncomfortable with many human things.
He takes another drag on the cigarette anyway.
The forest is nothing like what it used to be.
Nothing like what he remembers.
There are more humans now. Noisy and smelly. They trample over delicate wildflowers and wilt the greenery with their logic and science. Instead of offerings, he finds a scattering of empty food boxes and discarded cigarettes. Once he found a fan, with his kind depicted on it, with large yellow beaks and fiery red eyes - there is a little speech bubble drawn next to the beak and the word "YOU!" painted in bright red kanji. Out of amusement, he keeps it and uses it in the summer when the wind doesn’t blow and the tree sweats under sticky warmth.
This must be how irony feels like, he thinks, as he fans himself.
Human are noisy, and this group below him isn't any different. So he follows them for a while, and watches them with fading interest. He smells them, hears the trees drip jarring laughter from their leaves, as one of the boys kicks over a small shrine that another human had carefully set up. He can’t help what he does anyway; it's in his nature to trick and to lure.
Humans - they’re so easy to trick even now, so he shifts into one of them, and manages to break another, a girl who wears bright pink socks and has angry red streaks in her hair, before he melts back into the forest.
The thrill he feels remains the same.
Life is different from before.
There aren’t so many of him left in the world now.
There used to be days when he could spread his wings and find another of his kind, teasing some hapless human. He remembers Yoshitsune and his burning spirit. Yoshitsune was a wild one, interesting but wild - also, dangerous, even for his kind. It was amusing fighting with him though, mainly because Yoshitsune was still a clumsy human who could not fly.
He remembers how he and the others would pick their victim and impersonate them. Occasionally they drove a couple of humans mad, and they would return to their villages incoherent about the wind and the gods and the forest oh god it speaks--
They had a lot of fun then.
Now, the deeper he goes into the forest, the less of his kind he sees.
There is a kappa living in the lake.
His skin is the colour of mottled moss and sometimes when the kappa comes out to sun himself, they talk. Talking with a kappa gets old fast, mainly because they stay in the water when they talk, and they have a tendency to forget that not all can understand them when they start talking underwater. Not to mention that he doesn't like water. It makes his feathers stick together.
(Although, he thinks, at least he has someone to talk to.)
He learns that the kappa used to have a mate.
He also understands that the kappa's mate is probably never going to come back because really, seldom does his kind return from the humans.
It's a risk they all take.
He asks the kappa about the child's body in the lake instead.
This part of the forest vibrates in hues of green and blue and when he closes his eyes, he can hear the mountain guardians breathing.
Sometimes the guardians talk amongst themselves, a low murmur that floats on the wind, and so he listens.
It's comforting.
It makes him forget that he hasn't seen another tengu for eight seasons.
Once, he had a human male.
The human male used to sit under his tree to read, so sometimes, he would sit on a branch and listen.
His human male used to smell like the grass and the sun.
It wasn't entirely unpleasant.
Occasionally, the human male would leave fruits underneath the tree. Beautiful bruised oranges and unruly wild pears arranged neatly near the trunk and curled with strips of white paper. The human male always said, they're for you, yama-sama, in his low voice, and then he would clap his two hands together.
How nice, his tree used to sigh, and would award the human male with careful shade whenever he took a nap under her branches. He never took the fruits, but the human never stopped putting them. Then of course, the human died and the fruits stopped.
His tree looked a little lonely then.
Today, he smells something sweet in the air. Not sweet like the grass, but something else, more sickening - it hangs in the air like an invisible fog that wouldn't fade away.
It smells artificial.
He finds the source of the smell two ri away, near a rock cave. It is bright blue and it reflects the sun irritatingly. The odour invades his nostrils and makes his head swim. He scratches it with one bored claw and meets with an odd sound that reminds him of trodden dried leaves. Plastic, he remembers absently and wonders if there's any left to eat.
"You shouldn't eat that, y'know."
He looks up and sees a fox sitting near the cave. He has never seen her before, so he watches her as she watches him with large yellow eyes.
"Human food will kill us," She smiles, showing her fangs.
She gets up and walks up to where he had his claw on the offending item and he watches the way silver hair grabs the sun like it is never going to let go.
"It's something the humans call 'kandii', I've seen the children eat it sometimes." She peers at the blue wrapper and scratches it with a careful paw. "They usually get sick when they eat too much of it."
She sits back on her hunches, cocks her head and twitches her large ears at him.
"Hello."
The problem is that the more humans multiply, the lesser they become.
The gods were the first to go, forgotten as they faded into the sky. Then, his kind started disappearing. One by one, they vanished and never appeared again.
"Do you know why?" The fox asks one day, when she is sitting under his tree, watching frogs dance in the rain.
He doesn't bother to reply, instead, he takes another long drag on his cigarette.
"That's because the humans stopped believing. And they stopped respecting, that’s why the gods and the rest left," She yawns and settles down for a nap.
He blows out a ring of grey smoke and watches it curl up into the sky; she was right anyway.
Don't you have your kind to go back to?, he asks one day, when the white fox is lazing in the sun under his tree.
She opens one lazy yellow eye before closing it again and flicks her tails in dismissal.
"There really isn't anyone left, not even in the temples."
A flock of sparrows breaks through the canopy of trees angrily and swirls up into the sky, complaining loudly to Haya-Tsu-Mujo no Kami. The mountain guardians laugh and the sounds roll over the top of trees like a storm cloud, and promise that it won't rain, so won’t the birds come back now? They wouldn't trick them again, really.
"'Sides, stone feels pretty cold, y'know," she snorts and curls herself up tighter.
Nights in the forest aren't quiet.
There is the kappa, who slinks through the greenery to the nearby village to look for his next meal. Sometimes he comes back with a cucumber, other times he comes back with fruits, stolen from the temple. Rarely does he come back with a human child - he'd rather just lure them to his lake so he can drown them there. It's simpler and works up much less of an appetite (plus, other humans can't hear them scream under water).
There is the group of tanuki who run through the forest with their shrill laughter and jugs of sake pilfered from little shrines set up where the edge of the forest creeps into town.
There is the lone wanderer who walks through the trees and the guardians whisper to him, come back, come back to us. The wanderer smells like the sun and the moon and never of medicine and herbs, never of the stink of humanity. The guardians call out his real name and though they know he hears, he never looks back. The moon weeps every time the wanderer leaves.
Tonight, he and the fox watch with detached interest as a bamboo umbrella and an old pair of straw sandals make their way through darkness nosily.
"I’m going to get wet," the sandals complain loudly, nosily, although the sky is clear.
"That’s why I'm here," Laughs the umbrella, as they hobble into the night.
"Household items," the fox rolls her eyes and gives a disdainful sniff.
There is a human in the forest.
He can smell him - a familiar pungency, with the underlying scent of earth and sky. He hadn't smelt anyone like that in years. It intrigues him; it fascinates him - it makes him hungry.
Out of curiosity, he and the fox go to look for the human.
They find him by the lake.
The human was probably just a wanderer who got lost in the forest. The fox watches him and licks her lips. Near the middle of the lake, he can see the kappa raise his head, watching from the shadows before sliding back into the water again.
"Do you know why humans don't like coming into this forest?," she asks him, and her growl fades into the shadows, "apparently they think this forest is haunted, that the gods will take you away if you stay too long."
She laughs, long and silent, fangs glinting in the shade.
"I think this one will be tasty," she giggles again and her tails shifts silently under the shadow of a protective tree.
This one is ours, he tells the kappa lurking in the waters, we smelt him first.
"No fair," the kappa whines in annoyance before sinking back into the dark waters.
Little human, little human,
Do you know you smell delicious?
Little human, little human
Do you know we follow your footsteps unseen?
Little human, little human,
Can we have a taste?
Little human, little human,
You won't be able to run away.
It's the third day since the human has been found.
Watch out, the guardians whisper and the leaves rustle in agreement, watch out.
But humans have long lost the ability to understand what the guardians tell them. This one is no different, so he continues through the forest, confident in his logic and his disregard, while the fox and the man-bird stalk and slinks and relishes, while the trees lean in closer and masks their footsteps.
The guardians laugh, and he thinks it's just the wind running through the leaves. The guardians watch, and he thinks the animals have gone to sleep. Silly human, they say and the forest rumbles silently with mirth, stupid man.
The tanuki come to watch the human, but he isn't carrying alcohol and they lose their attention quickly.
When the human sleeps, the kappa creeps near and begs, just a taste, just a tiny little taste, and the fox swishes her tails and bear her fangs.
"Let us have this man," she purrs and the tip of an ivory tail brushes the underside of the kappa's beak before trailing off, "and I will bring you a human child next time, all for your pleasure."
The kappa doesn’t ask again.
(Your grandmother used to tell you, don’t go into the forest, and you used to stare at her old wrinkled hands, they won’t ever let you go.
Who, you ask, who are "they", grandmother?
But grandmother only raised one gnarly finger and whispered, they are the old ones, they are the ones who keep our rivers running and our crops green.
But, you say, that's due to the mayor erecting a new watering system, and you roll your eyes at her, technology is keeping us going now, you have got to stop being so old fashioned.
When the sun is high in the sky the next day, you will have already forgotten what she had told you.)
The human in the forest forgets that what he's looking at isn't really what he's seeing at all. The human forgets that when he thinks he's treading on grass and rocks, he's really just treading rocks worn bare. He forgets that when he's breathing in the wind pushing against him, he's really just standing at the edge of the world he knows. He forgets that his eyes lie to him; he forgets that he's not alone.
He doesn't realize it until it's too late.
The sun hides her face behind a large white cloud, while the kappa can only sigh wistfully at the scent of blood in the air. The guardians close their eyes and laugh and the trees shake in agreement.
The sky turns a deeper shade of blue.
the end