From the Human Heart

A Gift

"You made a deal, and now it seems you have to offer up

But will it ever be enough?"

(Florence and the Machine, Rabbit Heart)

You tightened the fabric of your cloak around your neck to avoid the freezing air, but still had to endure the cold wind passing upon your face like a blade as you waded in the hill's difficult soil, reaching up forthe forest's entry. Your hand holding the fabric was becoming numb, but you managed to protect the other one under your sleeve as it held your bag under the cloak, on your right side, a rough matter with the mission to protect the jewel.

You grew up hearing your father and your teachers telling stories about that precious stone and how it was forged, how it could change the courses of life and how it came to your family's hands. Your father, the master of your village's Jujutsu sorcerers, told you about how he and his allies fought to free it from the power of the King of Curses and brought it safe to your home, where no filthy hand would have another opportunity to touch it. It was said that he, a cursed spirit like no other in malevolence and perversity, stolen it long before you were born and that he has been using its power to dominate those lands and turn their people into his slaves, but the Jujutsu masters under your father's leadership sacrificed themselves to take the stone from him. Without the jewel, the King of Curses couldn't maintain his control over the humans, so he left the region and was said to be in a profound sleep, waiting for an opportunity to come back.

That small, red chrysanthemum-shaped stone was presented to you just one year before, when your father decided that you were experienced enough in the Jujutsu arts to properly meet it instead of just hearing stories about it. Your father wanted to turn you into his successor, a means to guarantee that your people would not have to worry about the return of the King of Curses after his death, so he took you to the jewel's room and started telling you about the secrets of the stone that you still didn't know.

You were impressed by the jewel's beauty and delicacy as any other person would be in your place, but you had no personal interest in it. Besides, time passed since that glorious conflict your father liked to speak about and today you knew well how arrogant some Jujutsu sorcerers were, so willing to slay each other if they had the chance just to own that jewel even after all the things they had to endure to take it from their enemy.

Well, as you grew up having to study, train and mold all your activities and goals according the Jujutsu world, you came to find everything about it tiring, not to say absurd. Yes, you could create and use cursed energy as all the Jujutsu masters you knew and have been fighting curses for years, becoming so used to this life that it as hard to imagine yourself living in a different way, but you still wouldn't think twice if you had the chance to leave your father's house and start a new life as a normal person, maybe in a different land, away from the Jujutsu practitioners and their problems.

At first you just used to say that all of it was annoying and not as important as your father claimed it to be, but as time passed and you became an adult, aware of the intrigues and subtleties around being a sorcerer, you essentially started to hate the Jujutsu world. And now that you were no longer a child, you didn't do any effort to hide your disgust from your father, a man who had the bad habit of thinking that he could unveil and manipulate the course of other people's hearts as if they were his own. You always thought that this character failure of his was the reason why your mother ran away from the village and from him, as well as why he never had a good word to say about her. The fact that he forbade you to seek for her only reinforced this idea.

None of this, however, was more infuriating to you than his obsession with purging the existence of a creature you only knew from spoken stories and books – Ryomen Sukuna, the dark god who was said to be the King of Curses. You doubted half of the things you've heard and read about him – humans had a big imagination and big tongues – but knowing curses the way you did, you always had some curiosity about why he, among all, was chosen to bear this title, and if he was that powerful, how did he allow himself to be defeated by humans and separated from the precious chrysanthemum.