Hades

Chapter One - The Vow

 This one's for my dear friend Ani-chan.

Part One – Spring

Chapter One: The Vow

The young man in black watched and waited, shrouded in the shadow of a large cherry tree. It was a warm, glorious day of spring, and despite the drowsy tedium in the air his eyelids stayed open in calm, purposeful observation.

He had a job to do.

Everyone else in the park that day had their minds on leisure; the warm spring weather would permit nothing less. All was tranquil. Sunlight bore down, and the damp grass of the park glittered from every direction. Children's laughter rose up all around like birdsong, infectious and musical.

But one child's voice fell away from this chorus when a sudden updraft gusted her hat from her head and then guided it, as if by some unseen hand, over to the biggest tree where the young man in black stood. He stepped forward, his hand outstretched, and caught it; a big floppy straw thing with a ribbon tied around it. Blinking away bursts of colour blossoming before his eyes (this sunlight business really made you wince after being underground for so long, he thought) he leaned back, feeling a little dazed as he held it out to its approaching owner.

The small girl dashed up to reclaim it, barging into his shade of gloom, and tipped him a brief, sweet smile of thanks. And then, as their fingers briefly touched, she set herself apart from the dozens of other children playing in the park that day who simply would have returned to their happy existences without a backward glance. As she turned to go, clutching her hat, something stopped her. Perhaps a realisation, or fate, or some kind of intuition; whatever you want to call it, it was something innocuous yet momentous. 

The young man's hands had not even returned to his sides before the girl with the sparkling yet serious green eyes considered, spun around, and enquired in a hushed, quizzical whisper barely audible over the breeze:

'Are you a shinigami?'

*

The young man in black looked down, startled.

A 'shinigami' was a god of death in Japanese folklore. Realising that his, drowsy, indifferent mask had been replaced by a jaw drop of near-comical proportions, he shook himself and reappraised his inquisitor with uncertainty. How was he to deal with her? They never mentioned this in the handbook. Human children were annoyingly more alert than their elders, and could be as hard to get a grip on as a biscuit fragmenting in a coffee if you weren't cautious.

He said in a low, wry voice, 'I thought you Japanese people placed high value in the virtue of good manners?'

Her brow wrinkled. 'We do.'

'Well,' he said, 'just because your culture believes that gods can be found all around, is it not considered a bit rudeto walk around asking random strangers if they're a god of death?'

The girl tilted her head. 'You have to admit, you sort of look like one.'

The young man was aghast. Just because one stood apart, a lone figure clad in black from top to toe despite the heat of the day; just because one looked slightly out of place, he would allow, did not mean one should be left open to such unpleasant assumptions. A shinigami, indeed! More importantly, how on earth had this pipsqueak of a human managed to form an assumption so dangerously close to the truth?

The girl standing before him was nothing more than your typical scrap of human childhood. Grass stains smeared her shorts. She gripped her rogue sunhat in both hands, her fingers (sticky, he didn't doubt) turning white from the pressure. Her expression was as hard and simmering as lit coals, and her wide, curious eyes flashed in the sunlight. It was her eyes and her eyes alone which made the young man's back straighten from where he reclined against the tree like a slouching schoolboy. Her level gaze set off a strange dizziness in him. She seemed an ordinary little girl, but those were no ordinary green eyes. They were the green of fresh grass and they did not blink or avert or break their gaze for even a moment, making him most uncomfortable. They held no humour in them – only an expectancy that could outlast the world.