Chapter Text
The first thing any child is warned about is the demons.
The world around them is filled with magic, and it will be filled with the same energy for as long as the world exists. People feel it in their skin and bones, and those who are the ones that study it, harness that magic to do their bidding. They draw circles and symbols and balance everything like a perfect equation. Magic makes those scholars stronger. It brings them together; brought them from one side of an ocean to another, an ocean crossed by a burning will and magic so strong it kept a ship intact through storms and fatigue and sickness.
But demons are different. Demons exist under the earth and they are born from spirit and souls and prayer, and they bring nothing but trouble.
That is the first thing his mother tells him, as she stays at his bedside like a vigil—back straight, hand on the edge of the bed, without showing the faintest signs of exhaustion.
“Devotion is not dictated by purity,” his mother tells him, second, late into the night, as the crickets chirp outside. Kenma is only six; he struggles to keep his eyes open. “Desire is just as hopeful as it is dark and twisted.”
“That’s…” Kenma says.
“For every demon there is something else born out of spirit, soul, and prayer, and from there springs purity,” she reassures him. “And from there springs the bane of all demons.”
“And those are?”
“The gods fight demons,” his mother answers, and then adds, “but so do humans. With goodness and kindness and magic. You have some of that, I'm sure. It makes us powerful."
Kenma blinks, confused. He does not think he has much of anything. “Why do the have demons power, then?” Kenma asks.
“Because devotion, even born through spite, is a powerful thing, like love,” his mother replies. “The universe responds to it. And they are too arrogant to really believe anything could kill them.”
“Do you think a demon could kill them?” Kenma asks.
“Only time will tell.”
She pauses and looks out into the air. “At the very least, they will not take you away,” she tells him. “You are too strong for that.”
“Tell me more,” Kenma says. “About demons. Why are they all like that? Full of—of spite,” he says, testing out the unfamiliar word.”
“They are demons,” his mother explains, “only because they have grown malevolent. Benefice is the counter against such a thing.”
Kenma does not understand most of it, but—
“Are there any stories about demons?”
She sweeps a hand through his hair. “Your father knew stories about demons,” she murmurs. “Knew them all too well.”
His mother sighs, pinching her nose, and then lights up. “Oh, I remember one!”
Kenma sits up straight in bed.
“A demon once wished to never die, never by the touch of a human, never by the touch of a god. His desire for life was so great it became reality."
"What happened?"
"Reality befell him. He died cold and alone with the touch of magic encircling him from all sides."
"That's kind of sad," Kenma says.
"Maybe so," his mother responds. “But intelligence makes the man. Our magic works so well because we do not try to defy the universe.”
She lays him to sleep.
“Is that what all demons are like?” he asks, as she is about to leave.
She shrugs. “Not all of them are that strong. Most are weak ones. All you need to do for them is take a deep breath and push them away.”
“What about the really bad ones?”
“The gods take care of the world-ending ones, and demon hunters get rid of the rest.”
“What does a demon look like?”
“Enough for tonight,” his mother murmurs, and she blows the candle out. "All you have to remember is that demons are killed with magic. Keep corruption out of your heart and do not let yourself be consumed."
Kenma stares at the ceiling. He watches it twist in his vision as his mother blows out the candle, and he feels her footsteps softly pad away.
It occurs to him that he is alone.
Kenma takes in a deep breath. Demons are trouble, he thinks, hearing an echo of his mother’s firm voice. Demons are bad, bad, things.
Kenma wishes that he could meet just one. He would face it bravely, he thinks, with kindness and strength. Alone and unafraid and filled with purity. It sounds like a magical thing, purity. More amazing than any magic he has seen.
And if Kenma has purity, then it would not matter that he had no magic of his own.
He can hear the sound of his breathing in the night air. He can hear the breeze of the outside.
And he can feel the ground underneath him, and he thinks of the rich dirt of the garden. There’s something awfully lonely that seems to rise in his chest. It’s a sort of anxiety that makes his want to sob until his is spent of tears. It is an unexplainable ache that makes his want something—but what?
Maybe it’s the magic. Maybe it’s the lack of it. Maybe it’s the realization that fearsome things lurk in every walk of life.
Kenma thinks of the garden in daylight. He thinks of the sun and the aroma that is constant even in the dark. He thinks until he just feels and everything but his heartbeat dies away, until even that blends together into white noise and he falls asleep.
There are three mistakes. The first is the wish. The second is the ground. And the third is the fact that he had dared to fall asleep at all.
But perhaps the real mistake is chance. Perhaps all of destiny is just a mistake that lets no plan go perfectly.
When Kenma opens his eyes, a pair of eyes blinks at him. They are a harsh, inhuman type of yellow.
He does not scream.
In fact, he does not do anything. So much for bravery, he thinks.
Slowly, the room begins to light up. His bedside candle flickers to life. And then more flicker to life, on the floor like shimmering mirages Kenma cannot look to closely at. There is a strange sense that the light is avoiding the figure.
Kenma squints, trying to make out his features with the little real light he has.
The… thing looks like a normal boy, except for the yellow eyes and crazy hair.
“Are you… a demon?” Kenma asks.
The boy looks down. He shrugs. “I think so,” he says. His voice is hoarse.
“Ah.”
The demon stands up. He walks closer. His eyes are puffy, Kenma thinks.
“Who are you?” he asks.
Kenma presses his mouth shut.
The demon frowns. His eyes bore into Kenma’s soul. They are a scary, scary shade of yellow.
“Demons are trouble,” Kenma states. “That’s what my mother says.”
The demon steps back.
“I’m supposed to be good,” Kenma continues. “I won’t try to hurt you.” He frowns. “I guess demon hunters and gods kill you, though.”
The demon steps back again. “I’m not…” he begins, and then stops.
“Do I scare you?” the demon asks.
“I don’t think so,” Kenma says. “But I want to sleep again.”
“You are sleeping,” the boys says, and then furrows his brows. “I think? I think so. I know that I’m asleep.”
“But my eyes are wide open,” Kenma says. He frowns. “Unless this is magic. Magic is weird like that, right?” His voice is slightly bitter. Kenma knows nothing about magic, after all. He has none of it.
Ever since the testing day, he’s felt out of place and uncomfortable. Suddenly faces had disappeared, and he’d been left to wallow in the misery that permeated the now dull school.
They say magic brings color and life into things. He thinks it’s not the magic itself that does that, but rather the feeling of being in a brighter place.
The demon shrugs. “I don’t know anything about magic. But I’ve been…asleep for a few days. I’m pretty sure it’s a dream.”
“So it’s not real?”
“This is a dream, but what happens is real,” the demon tells him with a shake of his head. “It’s where I live now, I think. That’s most of what I know.” He looks at Kenma oddly, but doesn’t say anything.
“The dreamworld?”
The demon nods.
“I’ll wait, then,” Kenma says. And he waits and he waits and he waits and he waits. The demon stares at him, but after a few long silent minutes, he shifts uncomfortably and glances around him. Kenma turns away.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, fiddling with his fingers.
“It’s fine,” Kenma says.
There are tattoos on the palms of the boy’s hand, and they seem to mirror the type of veins you would normally see at your wrist. They shift, and the black ink seems to turn of blue.
He stares at the hands for a while. The shifting motion seems to calm him down, and before he knows it, his vision grows hazy and everything fades into a soft black.
He wakes up.
When he walks out into his kitchen his mother looks at him. She freezes, and then rolls her eyes, shoulders relaxing.
“Oh, darling,” she sighs.
“What?” Kenma asks.
“Your arm,” she says, and Kenma stares at the leaf pattern etched on his right arm, like black ink. When he traces his finger across it, it glows gold. Leaves are green, not gold, Kenma thinks.
“Oh,” he says.
“What happened?” his mother asks. She takes his arm and traces her hands over the pattern. It turns a dark blue. And as it turns that color, there’s a shooting pain throughout his arm.
“That hurts!” Kenma cries.
She releases it immediately. “It hurt that bad?”
Kenma nods. His arm is cold where she had touched it. It feels like the way ice bites into your skin and makes it numb.
His mother hums. “Kenma, open your hand.”
He opens it, and sees the glittery gold on his fingertips. His mother grabs his hand and draws a symbol on the floor. It glows a pretty mirage of colors, and a flower emerges from the floor. It is in full bloom, red like the color of ladybugs that Kenma finds in the garden.
“What flower is that?” Kenma asks.
“A carnation,” his mother replies, on instinct.
Huh, Kenma thinks. The carnation looks so lonely there. He reaches out his hand to touch the stem with gold still on his hands. The flower bursts into a shower of sparks and then there is another flower by its side, colored purple-blue. The sparks do not hurt, Kenma notes.
The gold falls off his fingertips like dust. And the leaf pattern fades from his arm.
“A hyacinth,” his mother tells him, brows furrowed.
And then she makes breakfast.
Kenma sits at the table, staring at the place where the leaf pattern used to be.
“Mother?” he calls, hesitant. “What was all of that?”
She turns towards him and pushes a bowl of rice and curry towards him. “A lot of things,” she responds. “We can talk after eating.”
So they sit down and eat. Kenma does not think of the leaf pattern on his arm. He does not think of the way it made him feel warm when it turned gold. And he does not think of the way the sparks seemed to make his skin tingle, almost as if he was a firework.
“Kenma,” his mother asks, meeting his eyes, “Did you make a deal with a demon?”
“No?”
“Then what happened? Because that was demonic power that I saw.” Her voice is stony, but Kenma sees the worry in her eyes.
“At least the worst is out of the way,” she sighs. “Tell me whatever’s bothering you!”
So he takes a deep breath and tries to tell her everything he remembers.
When the story is done, his mother has not lost her frown. “You don’t talk to demons, Kenma,” she says. “You don't give kindness to them. You just must be kind.”
“How do you do that by ignoring them?” Kenma asks.
“Be unmoving. Do not respond to anything. Keep the goodness in your heart where no one can touch it.”
Kenma nods. He feels the warmth in his arm. What's so bad about this? he thinks, but his mother looks far too worried for questions.
She takes him towards the garden, as the flowers bloom in numbers. Spring, Kenma thinks. The prettiest time of year.
“These are roses,” she tells him, pointing towards a cluster of red flowers. They are a much deeper red than the carnation from earlier. “Classic. Romantic love. Everyone wants these.”
Kenma nods. She takes him through the meaning of some other flowers—tulips, daisies, and some that Kenma forgets the names of. They don’t go to the other part of the garden, where there are herbs and all types of medicines. Those are for later, when Kenma will learn what each plant is for and how to grow them. For now, all he can do is learn what each flower looks like and what they mean.
He does other things as the day passes. He finishes reading the book he’s gotten from the library. A princess with golden hair is locked away in a tall, tall tower. The art has been painted carefully on each page, and the gold in her hair swirls like the way paint does when it’s been touched by magic.
There is a man who seems to move in jerky movements. He looks strange, but
His mother tucks him into bed again, with a firm reminder about demons and a kiss on his forehead.
Kenma thinks about the vibrant reds and purples of the flower the demon had given him, and he falls asleep with those colors lighting up the room like the soft light of candles.
The demon is there again. This time, he is surrounded by a cluster of those hyacinths and carnations. The petals of the hyacinths seem to glitter like stars in the night sky, and Kenma can feel himself being drawn in.
He cannot describe the feeling, but is so much stronger than what he has felt before, so overwhelming he thinks he may just topple over.
But he does not say a word. He sits in the shifting space and tries not to feel sick.
The demon’s eyes blink at him, eyes bright in the dim light. “Did I make you mad?”
Kenma clamps his lips shut.
The demon inches closer. “Uh, I’m sorry.” His voice is oddly strangled.
Kenma breathes in. He will not move.
They both look at each other, and Kenma can see the ache mirrored in his eyes. He wonders if it is anxiety about the future, or just fear of one thing or event. He wonders if the anxiety swirling in his gut is just worries about the future. The demon opens his mouth once or twice, but he does not make a single sound.
And he does not move, and the demon stares at his hands, so they sit in the dream until everything goes blurry and he wakes up again.
His mother is standing above him when Kenma opens his eyes.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes,” Kenma responds. “I—I didn’t move, like you said. So the—the demon should go away, right?” He hopes she doesn’t see the sweat on the back of his neck.
“Right,” his mother repeats. “The demon.” She nods to herself. “It’ll go away, don’t worry.”
Relief floods through him. He doesn’t like the look of his mother’s face when she’s worried. Kenma smiles at her, and she smiles back.
His mother and him have… a thing. Kenma does not have magic like his father, and so his mother teaches him things. She talks about his father as they work, sometimes, when the air is quiet enough and her shoulders relax. His father died of sickness when Kenma was a year old. And Kenma does not like talking with others. They are loud and it’s terrifying when they look at him because he lives away from the village, and he cannot do magic. And maybe being non-magical would be fine, if there wasn’t such a clear dividing line: these are the people that you are not. These are the people you are.
Kenma doesn’t like any of that. But his mother is gentle and smart and there are no lines around her. They live on the hill and the hill is where home is. Their garden is vast and the ground beneath them is rich and Kenma loves the feeling of it. He can feel the earth humming as the flowers unfurl their petals, and the heat on his skin is warm unlike anything else. It is the same feeling that the pattern on his arm had given him.
That day leaves him in peace, warmth curling around his heart.
But in night, he sees the demon again. The demon’s eyes blink through shadows, silently watching him. He does not come close to Kenma. He just looks at him, eyes narrowed in slits.
Kenma curls into himself. He does not move.
The dark seems to curl over him like a wave; it seems to take everything away but the bright eyes of the demon.
When he wakes up, his body feels cold. He drags himself awake, but he can’t seem to feel energy for anything.
His mother presses a hand to his forehead when he tells her he’s not feeling well.
Her eyes bore into him. “Did the demon visit you in your dreams again?”
Kenma looks at the worry in her frown and eyes. He looks at her, and he says, “No.” Everything will be over soon, he thinks. I did not move.
His mother treats him with gentle hands for the rest of the day. There is a permanent crease in her brows, and Kenma wonders where exactly he went wrong. There is—or there will be—no demon. There is no reason for her to worry.
Night falls, and Kenma succumbs to sleep.
The demon’s eyes follow him around in his dreams. He cannot get the shape and shade of them out of his head. They are brighter than any human eyes Kenma knows. And they draw him in, like a moth to a flame.
Kenma does not move.
He falls asleep. Again. Again. Again.
The demon floats into the air.
A week has passed, Kenma thinks. He swallows. “Hey,” he says, accepting defeat.
The demon’s eyes blink in surprise. The room starts to lighten up.
“Why are you still here?”
“I need somewhere to be,” the demon replies, slowly, “and you… smell like magic.”
“I’m not,” Kenma snaps. “There’s no magic here.”
The demon frowns. “I guess I have to find another dream,” he mutters.
“What do you want to do with those dreams?” Kenma asks.
The demon shrugs. His face is uncaring, and chills run down Kenma’s spine. Demons are trouble, he is reminded, and they are filled with spite.
“Did you know your eyes are yellow?” Kenma asks.
“I did,” the demon replies. “Why?”
They draw me in, Kenma thinks, like nothing else has before. And that’s not how things are supposed to be.
The demon tilts his head. “You okay?”
Oh, Kenma realizes.
He’s in danger.
Kenma wakes up again.
He thinks he feels a little better. But there’s still an ache in his head. His mother is rubbing at her arm when he walks in.
“Something wrong?” Kenma asks.
She sighs. “I found a demon in the fire, and it got into my arm…”
“They can do that?”
She nods. “Demons corrupt you, Kenma. But you can get them out if you do what I tell you to.”
“With… kindness, right?”
“Well, yes.” His mother bites her lip. She reaches into a cabinet and pulls out a white crystal. “This should protect you, too. The apothecary knows how to make protective charms, did you know that?”
Kenma vaguely recalls the face of the apothecary; a brooding man with gray hairs and a permanent scowl. There are legends about him in the village; he apparently once traveled across the seas as a demon hunter. His mother is on good terms with the apothecary. She grows herbs for many of his medicines.
His mother places the crystal in his hands. “It’ll take care of that pesky demon, alright?”
She knows, Kenma thinks. It’s hard to hide things from his mother.
The crystal glows in his hands. It is cold to the touch, and the color reminds him of snow.
When nighttime comes, he holds it to the candle, and the flame dies. The crystal glows bright, and Kenma can feel the heat in his hands before the crystal goes cold again. The light of the crystal is comforting in all the darkness, but the lack of warmth makes it hard to sleep at all.
He opens his eyes and sees nothing.
The crystal is in his left hand. So Kenma uses the little light that emanates from it to look around.
“Hey.”
Kenma jumps. He looks upward. The demon is above him, staring at the crystal with unabashed curiosity.
“What’s that?” the demon asks.
“A charm for demons,” Kenma says. “So they don’t bother me.”
The demon drops to the ground. “You mean me.” His voice is flat.
“...Yes,” Kenma admits.
“You’re afraid of me,” the demon exclaims, eyes wide.
“Why are you still here?” Kenma asks, trying not to betray any panic. “You’re not supposed to be here!”
“Because!” the demon cries. “You have magic!”
“I don’t!” Kenma yells, holding the crystal in front of him. It flashes, and the room bursts with heat. It stings Kenma’s skin like the chill of winter.
The demon steps back. “Why do I scare you?” he asks.
“You’re a demon,” Kenma responds, babbling, “and you look scary, and I can’t sleep because you’re giving me nightmares--”
The demon disappears.
Kenma’s arms fall to his sides. The dark seems even more oppressive than all other nights. He stares at the harsh light of the crystal. There is nothing he can see here.
Kenma waits it out. Instinctively, he knows that this is the last night.
There’s an uncomfortable ringing noise where the silence should be. Kenma feels the ache in his head grow stronger. The ringing gets louder.
Kenma’s eyes flash open. The crystal is pressed into his hand. When he places it on the bedside table, there’s an indent of it in his hand.
“Kenma?” his mother calls.
“Coming!” he shouts, jumping out of bed.
He heads outside. The sun is already high in the sky, and Kenma already feels tired, but he knows that soon enough, he’ll sleep normally.
His mother’s hands are steady as she ties the flowers to a piece of curved metal. They are a pale, delicate shade of pink. “Slept well?” she asks, not looking up.
“I’ll be better,” he says. “Thank you for the crystal.”
She smiles. “That’s great. Get changed—we’re going into town.”
Kenma switches out of his clothes into something slightly neater, and his mother runs a comb through his hair, working out the tangles.
“Want me to tie it up?” she asks.
Kenma shrugs. “Sure.”
He feels his hair being pulled into a ponytail, and then something is pushed into his hair.
“What’s that?”
“Flower.”
Kenma hums absentmindedly as his mother washes combs her hair.
“What kind of flower is it?” he asks, as they walk down the hill.
“A white lily,” she replies. Kenma doesn’t remember the meaning of that one.
He can feel eyes following him as he walks on the road. Kenma steps closer to his mother, wondering if it’s possible to disappear. Or turn invisible. The eyes on him make him uncomfortable and vulnerable.
They reach the apothecary’s store.
Kenma walks in with hesitant steps.
“Ukai?” his mother asks. An old man pops out from the back of the shop. “Chinami,” he acknowledges. “Need something?” he asks, noticing that her hands are not full of bags.
She holds up the headband to him. “Could you maybe make these flowers last longer?”
Ukai studies the headband with a critical eye. “I could freeze them as they are,” he offers.
“Great,” his mother says, sounding relieved. She hands the headband to Ukai, who produces a stick of chalk from his pocket. He draws a circle on the floor and writes a few symbols, before placing the headband on the circle and tapping it twice with his wand.
The messy circle glows, encasing the headband in an icy cover, before cracking and revealing the same headband underneath.
Kenma shivers. The air feels several degrees colder.
He stares at Ukai’s wand. It is pure white, with crystal embedded in it in swirls. The end which Ukai holds is tipped with a splash of crimson.
Ukai hands the headband to his mother, and then they are off, again.
She knocks on the door to a house Kenma does not know, and then hands the headband to a young girl with black hair. The headband fits snugly on her head, and she smiles.
She notices Kenma at the door, and nods at him.
Kenma lifts his hand in a wave, and then the girl hands his mother a handful of coins before closing the door.
“Do you always do deliveries face-to-face?” Kenma asks.
His mother shakes her head. “Usually I have a merchant take them out through the country, but if someone from here wants anything, I’ll make it. I have to make trips here anyways. Speaking of which,” she continues, “I’m going to go buy some cloth.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out Kenma’s book. “How do you feel about staying at the library?”
“Fine with me,” Kenma says.
She drops him off at the library with a pat on the head. Kenma returns the book to a woman he doesn’t know.
He strolls through the shelves aimlessly. Maybe he’ll choose a fairy tale again. The art in those are always beautiful.
Something catches his eyes. The script is written in shifting, glittery gold.
On Magic.
He flips it open and there are symbols and sign and so much text, and the pages seem to glow. He brings it to the front desk. The girl looks at it disinterestedly. “This isn't even in the records,” she mutters. She leans over the counter and looks at him. “Do you want to keep it?”
Kenma bites his lip. The words in there are complicated. Kenma will need an incredibly long time to read it.
He nods.
She waves him off with a shrug and a “have fun!”
Kenma opens the first page.
Intelligence makes the man is written in fancy script. He stares at the words. Why would his mother read a book on magic?
He voices the question when his mother comes back.
“Oh,” she says. “I wanted to know a lot about it, since your father was a demon hunter.”
“He was?” Kenma asks. It occurs to him that he knows nothing about his father.
“Yes,” his mother says. “He used to travel and sell those flower accessories for me while on the job.”
Demon hunter, Kenma thinks. It doesn’t leave his mind for the rest of the day. He stares at the glittery gold of the title. He wonders what being a demon hunter is like. If it makes people strong.
His mother enters the room. She takes the book from his lap and places it on the table.
Kenma reaches for the white crystal. It is a clear, glassy color.
His mother blows the candle out.
Kenma thinks of gold and drifts into sleep. His head is empty of any strange feelings. And if he has any weird feeling, they’re certainly just a joke. A dream.
When he wakes up, something is… different.
Or maybe he’s not awake. Maybe he’s dreaming and dreaming is always like this. The place around him is dark. Kenma can feel the crystal in his hands, and he blindly tries to hold it up to his face. The tiny glow is enough to make his heartbeat calm down.
This is different from before, Kenma thinks, looking everywhere around him. The demon is not here.
A pair of eyes pop in front of his face, and Kenma jumps back. They are a dark amber color, and it sends chills up and down his back. The eyes are close enough that Kenma can see red flecks in them, like the carnation the demon had given him.
“Who are you?” he asks.
The room flashes white, and Kenma can hear a ringing sound in his ear. Who are you, the room echoes mockingly, who—wHo—are YOU? Something in his ears cackles, and—
Another pair of eyes. And then another. A fourth, and a fifth.
Kenma chucks his crystal at a pair of eyes.
The crystal glows that red-orange color, like burning flames, and then glows brighter and brighter and brighter, lighting up the whole room.
Kenma finds himself looking at shadowy almost-human figures, swaying in unnatural rhythms. Their eyes are wide and piercing. Their hands reach out to him, long spidery fingers, brushing across his skin.
The flames turn black, and the demons grin.
Kenma screams, backing away, bumping into each shadow, feeling the rough skin rub against his.
Kenma, they whisper, and the ringing grows louder, like a chant that envelops around him. His name feels ugly on their hissing tongues.
Kenma Kenma KeNMA—
The crystal breaks, the room goes dark, Kenma screams louder, and then Kenma wakes up.
“Kenma!” his mother screams, shaking his shoulders. He blinks his eyes open with a full-body shudder.
She slumps down by the side of the bed. “You wouldn’t wake up,” she mumbles. “I was so scared.”
“I—” he begins, moving his hands to sit up, and then winces in pain. He hisses and pushes the blanket off of him. His left hand is bloody from the pieces of crystal embedded in his skin.
“Hang on,” his mother says, lip wobbly. She lifts him up and sits him on a chair, careful to not touch the crystal shards. She leaves the room and reappears a minute later with a broom and a trash can. Carefully, she sweeps all the shattered pieces into the the trash can. When she’s done, she walks towards him. She inspects the pieces in his hand.
“This is going to hurt,” she warns.
Kenma closes his eyes. He grits his teeth, and then—
She pulls a piece out. It hurts, but he can manage it.
They repeat this for all the big pieces, and then she takes his right hand. “We’re going to the apothecary,” she declares, and leads him down the hill.
The walk down feels longer than usual. Kenma can feel the blood running down his hand and he sees it stain the grass or road when it drips off of his hand.
“What happened?” she asks.
“A demon,” Kenma responds.
She frowns. “It’s still bothering you?”
“No!” Kenma says. “It left. These were… different.” He shudders. “There were hundreds of them, and they were everywhere—”
“Oh, dear,” his mother says, trying to look calm. “Hopefully Ukai will know something.”
Ukai pulls out all the small crystal pieces from Kenma’s hand at once, and he bites his tongue so hard he thinks that he would feel blood if it went on any longer. Ukai rubs something on it that makes it sting, and then he wraps Kenma’s hand with bandages, not saying a single word.
Kenma thinks that he recognizes the crystal.
“So what do you think?” his mother asks, when she relates the story to him.
Ukai frowns. “Demons chase people with magic. You don’t have any, kid. Anything seem off to you?”
Kenma wonders if it is good that Ukai is speaking directly to him. If it is alright that he calls him ‘kid’.
Kenma thinks about what the demon with yellow eyes told him. “What do they do with that magic?” he asks.
“They take it,” Ukai says. “Only if you’re weak enough for that to happen, though.”
Kenma sighs. He just wants the nightmares to stop.
“Do demons always appear in dreams?” Kenma asks.
“About that,” Ukai begins. “They should be able to visit you everywhere. Have you felt anything recently?”
Kenma shakes his head.
Ukai looks up at the ceiling, brows furrowed in concentration. “That’s strange. Demons sometimes specialize in places, but they can go anywhere.”
“There’s no demon that has to stay in the same place?” Kenma asks. The first demon had said that he couldn’t go anywhere else.
“Never,” Ukai says. “They’re everywhere, like the gods are everywhere.”
Kenma nods.
Maybe that demon is special, he thinks. His yellow eyes had something that Kenma does not think exists anywhere else. Dream demon, Kenma titles him. The only dream demon that exists. Those dreams were more peaceful than the one last night. They felt like candlelight.
“The nightmares should stop if they realize he doesn’t have magic,” Ukai advises. “If they don’t, those demons might be after something much worse.”
Kenma wonders what the dream demon was after.
He stares at the candlelight for a long time before he blows it out. Kenma closes his eyes. He thinks he can still feel that phantom warmth in his right arm. The script of his book glows in the night.
I need to sleep, Kenma thinks. He turns away and closes his eyes.
The dream starts off easy. In fact, it starts off almost soft. Kenma blinks his eyes open and sees himself staring at a mirror. His eyes are a lighter shade of brown than he remembers them being.
His hair is getting long, Kenma realizes. Coupled with his dull expression and his light eyes, he looks almost frightening.
His eyes start to glow, and then they melt over into a distinctly orange shade.
Kenma freezes. He watches as his eyes turn from brown to orange and as he stares into the mirror he swears he can see red flecks appear—
And then there are demons behind him they’re everywhere—
The demons did not leave him alone.
Ukai examines him again the next day. “Nothing bad is happening,” he says, “except for the lack of sleep. Chinami, do you think Kenma should be tested for magic again?”
“You can’t see his magic, can you?”
Ukai shakes his head.
“Then nobody else would be able to,” she says.
Kenma barely understands those last few words; he slips back into sleep.
The demons keep coming. They grow in number. And they do not take anything from him, but they are always there, and they will never leave Kenma alone.
He feels the ghosts of them in the daytime, like phantoms across his skin. The cuts on his hands heal, but Kenma does not feel any better.
First, he tries to force himself awake. It never works. He eventually falls asleep and the dreams are a thousand times worse and a thousand times longer.
Then he tries Ukai’s crystal. They feel icy and unfamiliar in his palm.
He throws it at a demon, watches it glow like fire and everything burns—
It shatters and cuts open his left hand again.
Kenma stops trying after that.
The dream demon was trouble, Kenma thinks. He should have never said a word. The ringing sound follows him around constantly. It is louder than the beating of his heart.
Every child is warned about the demons.
And sometimes the warnings aren’t enough.