I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

By the time Nathan and Hanzo made their way back to the village the day had burned down to its last light, the sky above the trees deepening into that particular shade of blue that exists for only a short while before it decides to become night entirely. People were still outside, small clusters of Shinobis speaking quietly or simply sitting, taking the evening at the unhurried pace of those with nothing immediately pressing to attend to.

Nathan was already thinking about the waterfall. The morning’s training and the long walk back had left a familiar layer of sweat and dirt on him, and the cold clean sound of the water had been sitting in the back of his mind as a promise for the last hour.

He had taken perhaps three steps toward it when one of the Shinobis appeared at Hanzo’s side with the silent materialization that Nathan had largely stopped being startled by. The man extended a rolled parchment toward her without a word, the seal still intact.

Hanzo took it, broke the seal, and unrolled it. She read without expression, or rather with the kind of stillness that in her functioned as expression. Nathan watched her face the way he watched everything, quietly and without appearing to.

“Something happened?” he asked.

She looked up from the parchment. “My uncle has given us the signal to begin.”

“Which means?”

“He is calling us to Norihiro’s domain,” she said.

“The festival begins in three days,” Nathan said.

Hanzo nodded. “We should arrive ahead of it. There is planning to be done on the ground before anything else happens.”

“Finally,” Nathan said, and meant it simply, without drama. He had been patient. Patience was a tool like any other, useful when the situation called for it and a waste of time when it did not. “When do we leave?”

“I have preparations to finish here before we can move. Tomorrow at dawn,” she replied.

“Fine,” Nathan said.

He turned and left the logistics of it entirely in Hanzo and Genzo’s hands, which was where those logistics belonged. They knew Norihiro’s domain, knew the layout of his power and the shape of the festival and every angle of approach that the operation would require. Nathan’s role was to arrive and do what he did, and they both understood that clearly enough that nothing more needed to be said about it.

What did need thought, as he walked toward the waterfall and the evening air grew cooler around him, was the fact that Norihiro was not Yorimasa and was not Morosuke. The man sat at the head of the Four Daimyos for reasons that were not ceremonial. He would know by now about Yorimasa’s death. He would know about Morosuke. He was already the sort of man who handed cursed artifacts to warlords as casual gifts, which said something particular about the resources available to him and the way he thought about power. Norihiro had been thinking about threats for a long time.

Against Yorimasa, Nathan had been careless, moving with the confidence of someone who had not yet been given a reason to expect the ground to shift beneath him. That carelessness had cost him a lethal poison that was still working its way out of his system. He would not carry the same confidence into this. He would go in with his eyes open and his assumptions loose, let Genzo and Hanzo do the work they were built for, and move when the moment was actually right rather than when it merely felt convenient.

If Norihiro fell, the south fell with him.

Failure wasn’t an option.

The waterfall clearing was empty when Nathan arrived, which was exactly what he needed it to be.

The last of the daylight had gone while he walked, and in its absence the place had become something else entirely, quieter and more private, the moonlight coming down through the gap in the trees and catching the mist rising off the water in pale shifting curtains. The fireflies moved through it in slow drifting patterns, their light small and unhurried, and the combined effect of all of it was the kind of accidental beauty that nobody could have arranged deliberately.

Nathan set Kyomei down against a rock with the careful habit of a man who does not put his sword far from reach even in peaceful moments, and shed his clothes. The water when he stepped into it was cold enough that most men would have reconsidered the decision entirely. He barely registered it. Cold was a sensation he noted without it meaning much, a piece of information the body provided that did not change anything about what he chose to do.

Still, cold water was cold water, and he had no particular reason to tolerate it when he did not have to.

He plunged one hand beneath the surface and let the fire come.

It spread through the water around him immediately, the temperature climbing fast, and within moments the clearing had transformed into something resembling a hot spring drawn from the earth naturally, steam rising in soft columns and drifting apart in the night air, the fireflies circling the edges of the warmth as though curious about it. The cold rushing sound of the waterfall remained unchanged at the far end, providing a backdrop that made the heat feel even more deliberate by contrast.

Nathan settled back and let the water hold him and looked up at the sky through the gap in the canopy.

It would have been better with Yukihime here. That thought arrived without self consciousness, simply as a fact he acknowledged and set aside. She had left that morning with the quiet purposefulness of someone attending to something private, telling him only that there was something she wanted to see. She rarely chose to leave his side, and the rarity of it told him enough. Whatever she was going back to, whatever piece of her life before she became what she was now, it deserved the space she was giving it. After Kastoria she intended to follow him to Tenebria, to close the Chapter of this place entirely and begin something new. Before that closing could be clean, some things needed to be visited one last time.

Nathan had not asked her to explain it and did not intend to.

He closed his eyes.

The pain announced itself in the quiet the way it always did when there was nothing else demanding his attention. The mark on his neck sat like a brand pressed against the skin from the inside, the purplish discoloration spreading from the bite down toward his chest in patterns that had not fully faded despite Amaterasu’s steady work against them. The Yamata no Orochi’s poison, even secondhand, even drawn from a duplicate rather than the original, had proven itself considerably more persistent than he had expected. It burned with a low constant intensity that had become the background noise of his days, something he had learned to function around rather than through.

And then the Curses of Pandora sat alongside it, doing what they always did, their weight pressing against him from the inside in the particular way of something that has made itself at home in a place it was never meant to occupy. He had grown accustomed to that discomfort over time, built a kind of tolerance around it the way the body builds tolerance around chronic cold or constant noise.

The two of them together, however, were a less manageable combination. The poison and the curses occupied different registers of pain but they harmonized badly, each one seeming to amplify the edges of the other in the quiet moments when there was nothing else to push them back.

Nathan breathed slowly and let the hot water do what it could. Just the warm water already soothed the exhaustion clinging to his body as expected.

Then the footsteps reached him before the voice did.

Nathan kept his eyes closed. He had been learning to read them the way Genzo and Hanzo had taught him, not just as sound but as information, the weight and rhythm and intention carried in the way a foot meets the ground. These were light and unhurried, belonging to someone with no reason to approach carefully because they carried no threat in them at all. A woman, moving without the quiet of a Shinobi, simply walking the way people walk when they are going somewhere they have decided to go.

He stayed where he was.

“I do not remember there being an open bath here.”

Nathan opened his eyes.

Ayame stood at the edge of the clearing, taking in the steam rising off the water and the warm glow the fireflies cast across the whole of it. She crouched at the water’s edge and dipped her hand beneath the surface, and a small smile settled on her face.

“Perfect temperature,” she said with a satisfied smile.

“What are you doing here?” Nathan asked.

She looked up at him, still smiling. “I came to speak with you.” She paused, something shifting in her expression as her eyes moved across the clearing once more. “But…”

Her delicate hands moved to her tailored and carefully dressed kimono and she loosened the ties almost too slowly. The fabric slipped from her shoulders and pooled on the ground, and she stood at the edge of the water without any of the self consciousness that the moment might have invited in someone else.

“I think I will take a warm bath while we talk,” she said, and stepped into the water.