Bone Marrow Chapter One:

Imortal

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"Are you listening to me?" she asked in the same harsh tone that her teachers sometimes took with her. The doll stared back in answer with wide, unassuming glass eyes. Fake cheer to turn back some of the rooms somberness. Looking at her silent companion for a while longer to satisfy herself she continued on, assured of her audience's fixed attention.

"The god did a very terrible thing you see." she said. "He threw the body of a skinned horse at her maids and broke their loom. The loom splintered into a thousand pieces and hit each of the women in their womb", she said the last word a little too heavily, the letters thick like honey on her small tongue - but it was the way her teachers always told the story so she said it anyway. "And so she locked herself away for a very, very long time . . . "

The girl turned her head sideways and looked out past the window to see if anymore leaves had fallen from the tree Outside while she had been telling her story. Where could he be? He said he would be back when the leaves had fallen from the trees but it was already early December and a few clung stubbornly to branches. If they never fell would he not come at all?

Her teachers didn't seem to think so, dressing her in the finest deep blue silks and allowing her sit in the big room with the low polished table that was near the front door. If she leaned a little to the left she could see the hallway that would take her out past the doorway and into the front garden. If she leaned that was, better to not let her teachers know she knew the layout of the house so well incase they were watching he had told her, and so she sat obediently staring foreword at the doll she had been allowed to bring to amuse herself incase she should grow restless while waiting.

Get to the part about the girl the doll whispered.

"No I'm tired of this and you already know this story", she picked idly at a few embroidered strands on one of her sleeves, wishing she had brought some other doll now. Maybe the lady one that had a tiny fan attached to its hand instead.

The girl, the doll whispered again and she felt the first real stirrings of irritation. Sorry now that she had brought up the damn story at all.

"Her first son descended from the heavens carrying the mirror, the jewel and the sword" she dully recited. "There had been emperors before him but none had been able to rule with such peace and law and so he became the true First.

Worried for their nephew Susanou and Tsukuyomi taught Kamatari secrets to ensure the emperor's survival during his life on the earthly plane." She said secrets the way a snake might, the same way her teachers did because somehow, even though she didn't know just how yet, the word was important. "And he gave Kamatari his new name Fujiwara when he became onmyouji for the imperial family.

Fujiwara had four children and one of them was named Maro who had a daughter named Hamanari. While Tsukuyomi had taught Fujiwara astrology and divination Susanou had taught him even greater secrets still to insure the emperor's reign, but Fujiwara was a cowardly man and refused to use what the great Susanou had taught him, passing the knowledge only on to his youngest son Maro."

She paused here and look at the doll to see what it's reaction would be to hearing that name - it never seemed to like him. But it kept silent and after a moment she continued on.

"Maro knew that the only way to protect the land and the emperor was if he and his brothers used all of the secrets the great ones had told his father, but his brother's refused, the only person who would listen to him was Kaedemaru his brother's daughter and so together they planned to . . . to . . . "

There was a sound coming from outside the door now. She held her breath and waited to see what would happen but after a moment the sound stopped and the house returned to silence.

Kaedemaru survived though, the doll sighed again. She survived for many a year.

"Until she was burned as a Shadow Sacrifice for the emperor's brother. Their children went on to form a whole clan of people who could get burned for emperor's brothers" she nodded her agreement. "But they didn't really need to do all of that then because they had already done another doll for the country and that was what was most important. That was why Amaterasu had sent her grandson in the first place. He himself was not important - it was the land which was important because Japan is sacred," she breathed the last words out in a hush.

"That was what Maro and Kaedemaru understood that their brother's and father's did not. The emperor was only a key to the rest, the land its self was what mattered and if anything should happen to it that all would be lost. So they planned a way to keep it safe until The Day came when things could be properly decided." She began to smile to herself a bit, this part of the story had always been her favorite. "There was a great cherry blossom tree that Maro's daughter Hamanari liked. Cherry blossoms are sacred to the land because their roots burrow deep inside the earth. So one night Maro and Kaede called upon the spirit of the tree and made a contract with it - that they would give it eternal life and power if it acted as vessel and gateway for all the souls they needed to trap to protect their land. When the spirit of the sakura agreed to this they buried Hamanari alive beneath its roots."

She was smiling fully now, little girl cheeks plumping with the action.

She's still there, she feeds on the souls they give to her. She wants to die.

"I know that" wanting to roll her eyes but knowing it was impolite. "And she's already dead so how can she want to die? Now she is sacred - she is The One Who Eats, the One Who's Burrial Mound is the Cherry Blossom."

She didn't want to die, they tied her up and buried her anyway. She screamed and screamed - afterwards Kaede said it was the hardest thing she had to do in her life. She never forgave herself.

"She was a fool" Setsuka sniffed with absolute certainty. "Maro never said anything like that and he was her father so he would have known best." She wanted the story over now, wanted him to come home and stroke her hair.

"When the rest of the family came to ask where Hamanari was Maro told them. Told them because he wasn't ashamed. They got in a huge fight and Maro never came back to the family. Kaede was banished to the mountains where she taught their daughters and sons her art but the emperor had to send people to her, she could never leave the mountain. Fujiwara's sons wanted nothing to do with him after that but the emperor's assistants were no fools and kept him close at hand when the time was right."

She's forgotten what it was like to be human there in the dark. She's forgotten and now she lives there in agony feeding off of the souls they give her. She's become greedy.

"You've already said that part - I'm tired of this story. And dolls don't talk so be quiet." To her relief the doll obeyed. Sometimes it didn't and it would shriek so loudly she thought she would go deaf. But today her father was coming home so the things in the house that usually whispered around her were keeping silent, hoping he wouldn't see them. She had threatened to tell him about them if they bothered her too much.

"She Who's Burrial Mound is Beneath the Cherry Blossom . . . " she repeated to herself. There was more to the story. Lots and lots more and her teachers told her more still very day. How Fujiwara's sons had split and taken on different names. The one's who stayed by the emperor by day still using the secrets of the stars taking on a name that reflected it - Sumeragi, while Maro had renamed himself and his son's and daughter's years earlier. That was her name - Sakurazuka. The one with the same character in it for the pretty tree Hanamari had liked. The one they had buried her under. She liked that part of the story the most - imagining the girl scared and frightened as she was placed in a spot that her father and mother who was also her aunt had dug out for her. What it must have felt like as the soft wet soil piled in on top of her and knowing with that final sickening dread that there was no way out.

She told this to him once and he had given her a strange look and told her one day she could go ask Hamanari herself if she wanted to. That Hamanari kept court under the sakura's roots with all of her descendants as people in her kingdom. That all of her brothers and sisters joined her under there one day. This was a part of the story that only they could know - the teachers had never known this much. He had told her the last night he had been here in the summer when it had been warm enough to go Outside at night and lay with the warm earth pressed against her naked back and legs. He had told her parts of the story that no one else could know until her back itched from laying with the soft grass and leaves from the garden pressed against it for so long that she had to turn, press her young breasts to the ground instead and that had felt good, to have the grass pressed against them already warmed from her back, so she had sighed a little even though it knocked his hands away from them. That had felt good too she had said afterwards.

"Knowing her name is just something to do - it's not really important now." he had told her running a hand down her back, brushing off a few blades of grass and twigs as he went.

"Why? Is it dangerous?"

"No. But what's the point in keeping the name of a person who doesn't even keep it for themselves?"

I'll ask him about that too when he returns, she thought watching and giving a small inner cheer as the wind knocked a particularly stubborn leaf from it's hiding point high atop the maple. As the leaf relinquished it's spot she heard the door out in the hallway slide open right as if on cue. Smoothing her kimono out she put all thoughts of the doll and Hamanari burried in the dark beneath the Sakura Burrow behind her. Her father was home.

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End Chapter One

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First chapter in what will be an ongoing story about Setsuka's early years and her rise to assassin-hood because there just is NOT enough love for her in the world.

While preparing to write this story I did far more research for this than I have any other piece, reading up on assassinations, child murder, consensual homicide, contract killing, honor killing, human sacrifice, lust and ritual murder, serial killers, famous and sometimes more disturbing than I would have liked true crimes, feral children and psychological dwarfism, solitary confinement, as well as the Fujiwara family of the Heian period which I included in the story as well even though the time periods are disjointed. The names in the story are all of the actual persons who are listed as starting the Fujiwara family tree. On it only one of the children of the original Kamatari-Fujiwara, Maro, had one child Hamanari whom that section of the family line ends very abruptly. Needless to say it got me thinking. The story about the skinned horse and the loom is from the actual Amaterasu legend. I tried very hard to stick to the facts.

While the story of the early splitting of the Sakurazuka and Sumeragi clans is fiction it is based entirely in fact, the most notable part being the burial. While searching for instances of human sacrifice and ritual killings in ancient Japan I was surprised to find that the area was virtually non existent. Then I came across a small untitled print in my book Japanese Prints of the Tokugawa Era (now out of print I'm afraid) that detailed the preparation of a human sacrifice in which the books authors mentioned another form of human sacrifice known as hitobashira ( lit; "human pillar"), young women who were buried alive at important sites to insure the long term safety of what ever was to be built there.

Shadow sacrifice, kekkai, hitobashira - I couldn't have found a more suited fact to add to the X world I've been writing for if I tried and from there the story built upon its self. .

Please let me know what you think of the story so far, your reviews always make me smile.