Of The Yokai //top\\ | Yuka Scattered Shards

She had only come to recover her brother’s flute, lost in the subsidence three moons ago. But the yokai had found her first—not with malice, but with loneliness. Its voice had been the grind of pebbles, its shape a cascade of broken ceramic tiles arranged in the rough form of a heron. When she had reached for the flute caught in its chest, it had startled. And the shards had flown.

Yuka had not meant to shatter it.

They were not glass. They were not bone. They were memory —the fractured remains of a yokai that had once been the guardian of this valley. A kappa no, a tsukumogami of the old dam, before the river rose and swallowed everything whole. The villagers had called it Kawaraban , the Tile-Breaking Spirit, for it spoke in the language of shattered roofs and cracked hearths. yuka scattered shards of the yokai

The scattered shards trembled. From across the submerged square, they began to pull toward each other, inch by slow inch, drawn by a will older than the water. The yokai was not dead. It was only unmade . And Yuka, without knowing why, began to gather the pieces into her apron. She had only come to recover her brother’s

The lanterns of the drowned market still flickered, even two centuries beneath the flood. Yuka knelt on a tilted cobblestone, her breath fogging in the salt-cold dark, and watched the shards settle. When she had reached for the flute caught