She stood and flowed toward him. “We were chosen, remember? The dress wants us to do good now.”
She’d spoken many times about being a “bad” capable of “good” and that’s why the dress chose her. Why all the dresses chose who they chose.
But he was not the wearer of a dress. He was just an eight-foot man with a broken pike and no memory of why he had hungers.
The dress fed them somehow, but they were still there, powerful and deep down in his bloods. Strong. Every single soul whipping around inside his chest wanted to feed, except for him.
He rubbed his ear. He confused himself as much as Anthea confused him about “kingdoms” and “power” and there always being a kernel of good. Always. Otherwise there wasn’t a circuit to exchange energy. And without the circuit, and the exchange, there was no life.
That’s how all the magicals came about, she’d said. That kernel called out and power rubbed up against power. Sparks followed, and energy flowed. And then the chaotic destruction of the universe coiled itself up into something that gave enough of a damn to regulate the flow.
Thus began what Anthea called the Universals: Turbulence, Injection, Deletion, and Entropy.
He walked over to her rock. A thin layer of ice had formed over most of the lake and reflected the volcano at the end of the valley.
She pointed at the lake. “This is not the land of the valkyries.”
He’d seen images of that mountain before, of its snow-capped symmetrical cone and its steep sides. Of the plateau of clouds that formed around her peak. Of the valley that now framed the view.
“Where are we?” he asked. He remembered images drawn on rice paper traded from faraway lands, and later photographs. Silk armor, too, and swords so sharp they severed limbs with ease.
“I think that’s Mount Fuji,” Anthea said.
Were they in… Japan? Nippon, he thought.
Her eyes widened and she pressed up against his side. “There are oni here,” she breathed. “Oni who have taken the attributes of vampires.”
She pointed.
The fox sat on the shore of the lake grooming the black tips of her ears as if she were a cat. She wiggled her fox snout. Then she stretched forward and shook her red fur from her head to her tails.
One, he thought, as he watched. And then it was three. Then seven.
And when she stretched her back legs and shifted her body forward, her front legs becoming arms and her head becoming human, he counted nine.
Then she became a radiant woman, beautiful beyond words with the silkiest, blackest hair and perfect porcelain skin. She dressed in flowing traditional robes in primary colors, in patterns that screamed imperial.
He blinked. Anthea inhaled.
The kitsune stood directly in front of them.
“Well, well,” she said. “What do we have here?” She cocked her head to the side at a painful angle and poked him in the chest. “Is that a dragon I see on your armor, my dear huge warrior?”
He looked down at the crest on his dull and lifeless armor. “Perhaps,” he said. The insignia was stylized, so he did not know for sure what it represented. A dragon was certainly possible.
The kitsune clapped once. “It is!”
Anthea looked up at his face, then at the kitsune, then back up at him. She opened her mouth, but then pinched her lips shut.
The kitsune grabbed Anthea’s jaw. “This gift.” She swirled her hand near the dress. “Is precious beyond all the magic in the world, my Lord!” She laughed. “We thank you!”
She stuck her fist into the blackness of the dress.
“Do not touch!” Anthea screamed.
“Why?” the kitsune said. “You are the sacrifice here, are you not? The gift to those from whom the Master of Vampires would demand tribute?” She reached for the dress again. “He knows the truth. I am a more worthy host.”
The dress recoiled and ballooned out like a sail to keep the kitsune from touching it.
The kitsune frowned. Her nostrils flared and she waved her hand at the wider world. “Why do you fret so? Your sibling has been busy with the mundanes, has it not? So, so busy.” She tsked. “Do you not wish to ride again?”
“You have no idea what I am,” Anthea said. She blinked as if suddenly aware that she hadn’t said the words that had come out of her mouth.
The kitsune shrugged dismissively. “Is that so?” She laughed melodically as if Anthea had said the silliest thing. “You are four. That is all that matters.”
“Leave her alone,” he said. This creature made his skin crawl as if that part of him who remembered the prison, and the sun, and the fresh sea air understood what it was looking at.
The kitsune covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers as if to stifle a giggle. “Come now. You must be famished. I am.” She cocked her head to the side again, kissed those fingers, and reached out as if to set that kiss on his lips.
He grabbed her wrist. “How dare you touch me, minuscule worthless fox,” he growled. But he hadn’t said those words any more than Anthea had said You have no idea what I am.
She’d been correct; he had no idea who he was. What he was. How he carried so much magic—he felt it coiling around his body, and Anthea’s, and this horrid little vermin’s. But this part of him in control—the part that responded to the world so mundanely—it couldn’t access that magic.
But he could.
“I have a brother.” He remembered a bolt of lightning. Old magic, and a fool named Victor Frankenstein. And a… bride. A woman.
He looked up at the moon as it gleamed off the shoulder of Mount Fuji. This land was a paradise mundanes did not deserve.
Nor did the kami and their yoked demons.
The armor once manifested by the most willful of his parts lifted off his skin. It puffed into its constituent ash like a shroud of visible magic. Then it settled back onto his shoulders
