Shadow trilogy

It wasn't the pain.

Not the white sword buried in the ground beside him,

nor the left eye—now a gaping, bloody void.

It was the sound.

A roar, like a distant ocean trapped inside his skull,

rising whenever he tried to remember.

The shadow.

That ashen phantom,

the one that had crawled out of his eye and devoured Kazuya like a casual meal.

"Who... was that?"

He tried to rise,

but his body was heavy,

his bones weighed like molten lead.

The white blade — Shirai-no-Tsurugi — trembled when he touched it,

as if it recognized him.

---

The village beneath the mountain was no longer a village.

It had become a grotesque painting.

Houses flipped onto their roofs.

Trees twisted like the fingers of a corpse frozen mid-spasm.

But the most terrifying of all—

Blood flowed upward.

Scarlet lines stretching from the dirt to the clouds,

as if the sky itself were sipping what little life remained.

And in the middle of it all,

standing before the collapsed well,

was the White Priestess.

---

She wore no white.

Her skin was the white of diseased snow.

Her eyes—devoid of pupils—widened when she saw him.

"At last... the Son of Shadow has returned."

Her voice scratched the air like fingernails against dried flesh.

Takeru raised the sword.

"What are you talking about?"

She pointed to his missing eye.

"There... where your heart should've been... he sits now.

Waiting."

Then her knees gave out.

She collapsed—vomiting black blood.

Before he could reach her,

her intestines burst from her mouth like a ravenous snake.

---

At the center of the black blood pool,

lay a message:

"Find me in the Temple of Entrails.

I hold the final piece of you."

Takeru looked at his hand.

The blackness had reached his shoulder.

And the white sword...

was melting in his grip, like snow on a fevered tongue.

---

Night closed in like the lid of a coffin.

Where stars should've been,

seven eyes opened and blinked in rhythm.

Kazuya was still alive.

And he was hungrier than ever.