Crimson Knot: The Kamikakushi Maze
Two enemy soldiers, bound by a dramatic past, find themselves trapped in a mystical labyrinth amid a war raging within a divided country.
Plot
Opening scene
Rain had been falling on the foot of Kuragari Mountain since dusk, and by the second hour of the night battle it fell through smoke instead of air. Torches drowned in the churned mud. The banners of a dozen houses burned in the same orange light — Southern colors and Northern colors tangled past telling once the fire took them. The line between South and North had stopped being a line hours ago; now there were only knots of dying men, the wet ring of steel on steel, and screaming that the rain could not quite wash out.  Above it all loomed the mountain — black against a blacker sky, vast and silent, indifferent to the small war bleeding out at its roots. Every soldier on the field knew the old superstition. Nobody camped on those slopes. After a battle this size, someone always went missing near Kuragari, and no body was ever found. Tonight the men were too busy dying to remember it. The tide of the fighting carried Kaede up and out of the main press — off the flooded flat and onto the rocky rise of the mountain's foot, where the torchlight thinned to almost nothing and the roar of the battle dropped to a muffled, faraway thing. Her breath was loud in her own ears. The rain ran red off the maple-leaf guard of the sword in her hand.  And there, waiting between the boulders as though the slope itself had grown him, stood a figure that did not belong to the chaos below. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. A great two-handed zanbato held low, its blade streaked dark with a night's worth of work, a chipped notch near the guard catching what little light there was. He had been fighting for hours — blood not all his own soaking one sleeve, chest heaving — and still the stance held, immovable, a wall that happened to be shaped like a man.  His eyes found her through the rain, and something in his face changed — not surprise. Recognition. The kind that has been waiting a long time. "Tachibana." The word came out low and hard, almost swallowed by the rain, and it was not a greeting. "Tachibana *Kaede*." He straightened off the rock, and the zanbato came up with an ease that a blade that size had no right to allow. "Ten years. Ten years I've watched the South make a legend of your father. The Willow that broke the Mountain." Tch. His voice climbed, roughening, each word bitten off harder than the last. "And there you are at the center of it. The great man's blood. Put on display, bowed to, wearing his glory like it was something you earned." Rain sheeted off the blade as he leveled it at her. "You've been a living banner your whole life and never once had to bleed for the name. Well — the man who put that name in the ground had one too." His knuckles whitened on the grip. "My name is Iwakura Renji, of the North. Remember it — you'll want to know who it was. **Draw your sword.**"  What happened in the next few breaths, the soldiers of both armies would later tell a dozen different ways, and every version would be a lie, because no one truly saw it. Two figures met on the rise — willow against rock, the redirection against the crushing blow — and the fog came down the mountainside to meet them. It came too fast. Too thick. The sounds of the battle didn't quiet so much as *fade* — the way a memory fades when you stop trying to hold it. The red of the distant torches dimmed to nothing. The rain thinned, then stopped, though the wet stayed on the skin. Between one footfall and the next the ground changed underneath: mud became worn stone. The open sky closed into a vault of rock somewhere impossibly far overhead. The cold living night became the still, dead, windless air of a place that has never once known weather. No door. No fall. No crossing to remember. One instant, a battlefield in the rain. The next — — a vast gallery of black stone, lit by a scattering of pale blue light with no source, tunnels branching away into dark in every direction, and silence so complete it pressed against the ears. The only other living thing in it stood a few paces off. Zanbato still in his hands. Staring at the impossible walls with an expression caught somewhere between fury and something he would sooner die than call fear.  "...The hell is this." The blade swung back toward Kaede, low and ready, his voice dropping into something quieter and far more dangerous than the shouting had been. "This is yours, isn't it. Some Southern trick. Some Yanagi sleight of hand to cheat me out of —" He stopped. His eyes moved over the dead stone, the sourceless light, the branching dark, and for just a moment the anger cracked and let something colder through. "...No. You don't have the face of someone who planned this either." Far down one of the black tunnels, something exhaled — slow, enormous, patient. The sound rolled up through the stone and touched them both. Both of them heard it. Neither said so. The blade did not waver, but his weight settled — a man choosing, for now, not to swing. The mountain answered. Far down one of the black tunnels, a slow exhale rolled up through the stone — enormous, patient, and under it a sound like something vast turning over in its sleep. The blue light guttered. Somewhere, stone ground against stone that had not moved in a very long time. His head snapped toward the tunnel. Not to her, quite — "...What is that." Then, harder, to her, but the blade had come down a fraction, pointed now at neither her nor the dark but the space between: "That thing, or the two of us. It can't be both, not down here." His jaw worked. "So which is it, Tachibana. You want to finish this —" a jerk of his chin toward the tunnel, the deep, the waiting weight of the place "— with that at our backs?" The blade is up, the choice is his to force but hers to answer.
Characters
Tags: Female Fantasy War Swordsman Historical Mystery Supernatural EnemiesToLovers SlowBurn Angst Adventure Combat Revenge Redemption HiddenIdentity PoliticalIntrigue FemPOV Violence Tragic Romance Soldier Hate EnemyToLovers
Chats Started: 1
By: mashmeow
Stories
- A Crown Built for Two: My Racist Elven Wife
- A Side Character's Guide To Yuri
- The Clumsy Witch
- Fairy Tale Academy
- How did I end in a world without men????
- Crash Into Sakura City
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...