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Chapter Text

She came from a long line of women, ama, fisherwomen, pearl-divers clothed in white who would dive beneath the waves and haul in their weathered hands sea urchins and oysters to sell at the market. In her youth she’d sit at the cliffside, dipping her toes in the water as she waited for her mother and aunt and grandmother to surface, and when the sun was highest overhead in the summer she’d shed her kimono and dive with them, holding her breath for as long as she could, but now she was older and had long since let the toils of her ancestors slough off her back like water off downy, waxy feathers.

Gambling was so fun, and she wasn’t a winner but she enjoyed every win and every loss, found something to savor even as all the money generations of women had saved and passed onto her drained bone-dry.

And when she drank herself into a stupor and stumbled to the ocean to let the waves carry away a failure of an ama, a shinigami—a death god—surfaced from the water, a young man who had the same sharp nose and high cheekbones as a young lord of some noble castle, and told her a magic spell. She could recite it in one breath: ajarakamokurentekerettsunopaa. She’d clap, and the shinigami at the foot of beds would turn tail and flee.

“Never,” said the young man, “use this on shinigami who rest at the head of the ill, for they are collecting those who are fated to die.”

“I won’t,” she lied, but life was a gamble and she was an addict. Saltwater ran in her blood but deceit ran through her veins. She recited the spell, clapped her hands, and sent the young man away.

Money came pouring in as she cured patient after patient. Each ryo she tossed away in earnest, expecting nothing but the clatter of die rolled by the hands of a pretty woman. Her ryo would eventually bleed dry, and when she was back at the shoreside with the sand beneath her feet, she knew she had to renegade on a promise she never intended to keep. She picked the first man on his deathbed that sent an attendant after her, had an entourage of men spin him around—ajarakamokurentekerettsunopaa, she recited, and clapped her hands together.

In her youth, her mother had always warned her. “All our living comes from the sea, but that does not mean you should trust it. One day, if I should not surface, it’ll be your turn.”

Good riddance to that long, storied tradition. Good riddance to the women who swam to unseen depths to retrieve the spoils of the sea. Her grandmother grew too old to dive and died soon after; her aunt sprained a muscle and drowned swallowing mouthfuls of saltwater; her mother was swept away by a current and never returned to shore. She took the money they left her and spent it all on frivolous things, but her bloodline could be suppressed and never washed away. The shinigami she had first met had found her, drunkenly stumbling home, and dragged her to a cave deep beneath the sea untouched by sunlight.

She felt her way into the mouth of the cave, stumbling into a sea of candles. Hers, at the very center, was down to the last fibers of the wick. Molten wax dribbled down the sloping floor with every second that passed.

“This should be easy for a woman like you,” he told her, leaning over her shoulder. “All you have to do is transfer the fire to a new candle. But if the flame goes out, so too will your life be snuffed out.”