the Onryo waited for him. There were four of them, each one a monster.

The Century Blade was dead. The Gilded Crone was gone. The Ticking Clock was worse than dead.

young Cochtan boy, Dorje.

The master of the Onryo had come for him.

"We have work for you, Master Onmyoji.

Shiki was a playful little spirit who loved to possess animals, but she rarely gave much thought to the position she was leaving them in when she gave up the possession.

She'd been Haruto's companion spirit for as long as he cared to remember, but her antics still never failed to make him smile.

"She's a spirit."

"A yokai? That's worse."

"I'm an onmyoji," he said. "We don't kill spirits. Well, we do, but only evil spirits. Yokai mostly. Shiki is not a yokai."

How many had died the night of the fire? And which of them had risen again as a yokai?

"Every teacher here was a master, every student a hero in the making. Who could do such a thing? Why would they do it?"

Basan of Toroto village?"

trying to lure them in with compassion, a human desire to comfort its insatiable grief,

He wore a necklace of cogs, springs, and bolts, so Haruto guessed he was

This creature was real, a vengeful spirit formed from one of the teachers or students of Heiwa when it burned.

He was an hasshaku now, a yokai who would abduct children, feed on their blood.

In order to trap the yokai, he needed to place the staffs in the perfect order and pattern.

The hasshaku were a type of mononoke, a pitiful type of yokai. Haruto chided himself for the thought. No, not pitiful. Tragic. They deserved compassion, not pity.

"Omoretsu," he said, invoking the name of his shinigami patron. "In your name, I act. In your stead, I serve. With your blessings, I bring peace to the dead."

I will carry it. I will take your pain, carry the burden of your grief.

One more pain he would carry.

A type of yokai

"Onryo,"

He prayed to an obscure shinigami, a lord of death, a reaper, and he carried the shrine with him.

Despite being given to Haruto by Omoretsu, she really did not like the shinigami.

"It's unwise to gain the attention of a lord of death."

"The onryo do not serve any shinigami. They are free to do what they will."

"The onryo are strange. Spirits might be drawn to them as dust is drawn to an eddying wind."

the Library of Nothing.

"Tian was my friend," the old woman said. "We taught together at Heiwa." Her frown lifted and she gasped. "You think Kira destroyed Heiwa? No. She was a student there."

"And you're an onmyoji travelling with the bandit Blood Dancer.

He was renowned for his technique of setting his own hands on fire.

following the trail of spirits that always seems to be left in the wake of onryo– a village full of dead people."

not going anywhere, Mirai,"

And so he named her the Gilded Crone, eternal stable master, slayer of foreign gods, the greatest hero of the Nash.

"Your brother came by the other day. He... kept asking about a prison.

On and on about the prison. He was very demanding and wouldn't touch his tea, kept saying it was too cold. I told him, the only prison I know of is Sky Hollow, and then he left.

"The fortress where Ipian shintei warriors are trained.

Onryo were rare and powerful, and he had to admit, in all his long years, she was the first he had encountered.

He wouldn't need a spirit blade for this yokai.

Sleep was never easy for him, not since he'd made his deal with Omoretsu so long ago.

"The lost things are returning to the world, Snow. Spirits, techniques long forgotten. The onmyoji won't stand for it. They'll purge you all all over again."

The other students were all human, after all, and she was... well... not. She was stronger than them, different.

Also, ten years cooped up in the academy after eighty years trapped in a mirror had been frustrating on top of boring.

"Old enough to be a parable."

She heard more glass cracking, felt a tingle race along the skin of her arm. Then a hand on her shoulder was pulling her back. Yanmei.

an onryo but able to move past his ritual barrier? A yokai but more human than any he had ever known?

He was no stranger to being hated or feared.

an onryo somehow: half yokai and half human.

Her eyes were dark orbs, voids of light.

If it was a god or another shinigami, one in opposition to Omoretsu?

it had been more than a century since he had last seen the place.

Never interrupt an enemy when they're talking. You never know what they might reveal."

The shape of her eyes, the length of her nose, the tiny scar on her chin.

his feathers draped over his shoulders like a cloak, his tengai hat, a large bucket- shaped thing of dried bamboo, on the floor beside him.

He went by the name Ice Heart and had apparently accomplished many heroic deeds.

Except for Crow herself, none of them were more inhuman.

They needed to find the Fourth Sage Under Heaven to heal Yanmei.

"She's an ungaikyo," Yanmei said. "I rescued her from a mirror about a decade ago."

"Onryo are yokai who have reclaimed something of their humanity," Haruto said eventually. "Sometimes by staying around after getting their revenge, and sometimes by another method."

"She feeds off my qi. As long as I'm alive, she has the energy she needs to stay here on earth.

"Onryo generate their own qi, just like a human. They don't need to feed off people.

"We do not attack people for no reason,"

"It doesn't matter," Yanmei said. "They need someone to be angry at, and the magistrate has made us the target.

"Snow covered beauty, covers old rot, filth and bile. Eyes open to truth."

She had been in love with one of her father's bandits, Zhihao, and they'd tried to run.

Blood Dancer had killed her brother, but that was a lifetime ago now, and Daizen was always a psychopathic little brat who took after their father too much and delighted in tormenting his younger sister.

One thing she had long since learned was that childhood trauma was never truly dealt with.

She could see and hear, and touch with her smoke, but she mostly relied on a general sense of things around her, knowing where everything was without sight, hearing without ears.

"We are, after all, yokai. Vengeful spirits. Did you think I had died peacefully? We all died horribly,

"But it's idiotic. Not swearing doesn't make you a better person. It just makes you a sanctimonious tit. Besides, you do swear. The words you use aren't important. It's the intent that matters. Substituting vegetables for swearwords doesn't mean you're not cursing."

"Oaths and vows should never be taken lightly. There is power in a promise that goes beyond the words.

Hate for a man who was so skilled, yet had done so little with it.

battering Nightsong with greater strength, greater skill, and the experience of one who has fought and lost and fought again.

Nightsong lost because he chose to fight only against those he knew he could beat. He learned only to win, not to fight.

Their devices had many uses including, apparently, locking away titans.

In his time the tianjun had been Mira, the god of harvest, but she was dead now and the god of missed opportunities sat the Jade Throne.

thought the Century Blade had killed the last one.

For as the dragons fought, so too did the elements.

Orochi, the eight- headed serpent, would win. He was their king, you see, the greatest of them all.

"Did you know the dragons can take human form? They are kami, the greatest of spirits and shifting to other forms is just one of their many techniques.

Forest of Bamboo.

Once more he had let himself love, and once more his heart had been broken.

"How were they imprisoned?"

that is another story altogether. That is the story of the Century Blade and his Abenjazu."

Wherever Haruto went, there were always people like this. Men, usually lords, who thought themselves divinely important to the world. They were almost always wrong.

Over the past decade, so many lost things are returning to the world. Spirits, lost techniques, imprisoned dragons.

"It's a buruburu. They cling to people and try to scare them, conjuring up their past."

The onmyoji were an order of occultists who considered it their duty, sworn by the shinigami, to find yokai and move them on.

Until the Century Blade killed the dragons. With them gone, there wasn't enough kami to protect the spirits. People started asking the onmyoji to get rid of harmless spirits as well as yokai, and the onmyoji thought why not as long we get paid."

Failure was always much easier with a good excuse.

"The Imperial City of Kodachi

Each bridge had a small shrine on either side of it, dedicated to Toshama the God of Lakes and Rivers.

Divination was not a simple technique, but the Fifth Sage Under Heaven had taught her the basics back at Heiwa.

A gigantic man with a feathered cloak and a straw tengai over his head.

Worse yet, he was seen before the slaughters took place.

demon most vile. A herald of dark times.

Hosans came to call this tengu the Herald of Bones.

was almost as though all mirrors led to a space that both did and didn't exist,

Proof that power and wisdom do not always go hand in hand.

that nothing swept away worries of the mind quite like exertions of the body.

realised this wasn't Kira at all, it was the yokai. The ungaikyo rising to the surface and assuming control.

"It's the job of the shinigami to collect the souls of the dead and direct them to the next life,"

"But they're not the most willing or energetic of workers. They're spirits themselves, great kami given the unending task by the gods. They see it as a burden, whereas other kami, like the dragons, get to fly about free as a bird and do whatever they damn well please.

'Ask a man to wait a minute and it will seem like an hour. Ask a man to wait an hour and it will seem like a day. Ask ten men to wait a minute and it will be ten seconds'.

"It's alright to be scared. Fear doesn't make you weak, it makes you human."

And perhaps even more surprising that the lessons hiding in the stories are the same ones told time and time again."

"Countless stories and countless terrible poets like me who continue to pass them down through the generations. Whether they really happened no longer matters. They have become real by becoming history."

it's a good way to teach a person that if they desire all they see, they'll never appreciate what they have."

plucked

Nevertheless, he supposed the point of a vow was to show your commitment to a cause by giving up something you loved or were good

Demons are not spirits. They are not bound by the same rules."

Tengu are demons. They serve the overlords of hell, whether they realise it or not. Demons exist to cause chaos and strife wherever they tread. This creature you hunt will stop at nothing to throw the balance of heaven and earth into turmoil."

Trauma is a monster, Mirai. One you can... never be rid of. You can't ignore it. Can't hide from it. If you try... it will catch you. You have... to deal with

Grief did that to a person, robbed them of their energy as well as their will.

He came across a pair of katana, one a glorious silver blade, undoubtedly the work of the great sword maker Mifune. It was planted in the earth, crossed with its partner, a sword with a blade as black as onyx and no tsuba to guard the hand. They were both fine blades,

The whispering blade... Cho

tengu were not yokai. They were demons, created by divine curses to summon war and death wherever they went. And they served the kings and queens of hell.

She stood, careful not to cut herself on the shards of mirror. They hadn't disappeared, she realised. Usually, her mirrors disappeared after they shattered, but this one was still there, albeit in pieces.

Kira bowed her head before the statue of her mother.

The world continued on, heedless of what it had just lost.

Crow did not know how she had become onryo nor who she was or had been.

He told her who she had once been. Xifeng, the midwife of Ban Ping. Every family of wealth wanted Xifeng to help deliver their children, and nothing gave her greater pleasure than helping bring new life into the world. But Xifeng had a secret: no matter how many times she and her husband tried, they could not conceive.

Think themselves better than you."

"The Herald of Bones did this," Guang said. "Caused them to turn on each other. That's what he does in all the stories. Causes madness, incites war. Tuns brother against brother and all that."

"Hah! Well, that's life, isn't it? You don't ask for a lot of the stuff it throws at you, but you either look at it like a gift or a curse, and then figure out the rest from there."