Rewrite of chapter 1
Ren glanced into the glass cell wall at the boy with the spider's body. Before the other boy noticed him, Ren turned his head away, drumming his claws against the wooden coffee table.
The other three cells were empty, the shackles in each hanging from the back walls. Water dripped from the ceiling above the occupied cell, splashing into a bucket on the floor. Ren turned his head away again, eyes almost catching the other boy's gaze.
Ren rubbed his forehead. He felt another headache coming on. It wasn't enough to warrant taking a pill, but the throbbing in his brain was still making him want to bash his horns against one of the cell walls. Coffee would fix this, if he had access to it right now. He was told to keep watch over the prisoner.
How do I watch something I've never seen?, he thought.
Ren turned back to look at the boy. The prisoner was probably the strangest thing Ren had seen in a while - blonde hair with a tinge of red, pale skin with freckles, and no horns or claws. Most strikingly was his lower body, which was that of a spider's - not the boring brown kind Ren used to catch in the palace, but a bright yellow, purple and black, patterned with circles within rings.
Ren had only heard legends of this species: of their betrayal, xenophobia and the destruction they brought in the wake of their massive armies. And in his history books and bogeyman stories, they had only gone by one name as a group - Tsuchigumo.
The tsuchigumo finally noticed Ren's gaze and looked straight at him. The spider-boy's mouth was half-open, showing two short, black fangs. He brought his shoulders back, and Ren could see his chest - bare with the exception of a red bandanna around his neck - move with each heavy breath. It was similar to the display Ren had seen the city's larger spiders do when cornered. They would bare their fangs and bring their front legs up to try and scare off any attackers.
Ren perked his pointed ears. The basement door had creaked slightly.
"Hey, Saburo?" Ren glanced up at the stairs behind him. "That you?" He pushed the wooden stool back under the coffee table and stood up.
"Yes, sir." A low, grating voice responded, getting closer with every footstep. "I'm sorry. I'm getting old, y'know." A scarred and red-skinned figure descended onto the basement's concrete floor. He sighed and scratched the base of one of his horns.
"I keep telling you I don't want to be called 'sir'," Ren said, looking up at Saburo.
"You'd better get used to that kind of authority. They're going to be calling you emperor soon." Saburo lumbered over to the cell containing the tsuchigumo. "You're coming too."
Ren's eyes widened. "Why? I don't know anything about the tsuchigumo."
Saburo snorted. "Exactly."
They both entered the cell, and Ren closed and locked the shatterproof glass door behind them. Besides the obviuos perks, the empress's son gets a lot of cool stuff, he thought, putting the ring of keys in the pocket of his hakama pants.
"As a member of the Akamachi police unit I permit you to speak," Saburo said. "Tell us your name and your clan."
The tsuchigumo's mouth opened, then snapped shut. Saburo rubbed his balding head.
"I said, I permit you to speak. Look, I don't have all day here, I have to report back to the cheif in an hour and a half." Saburo said.
"M-Madara. Of the Lycosid clan." His words came out quickly, and Ren had a hard time understanding them.
Saburo took a small book from one of the pockets of his large police vest. He shoved it in Ren's general direction, frowning. "See if you can find anything on the Lycosid in here."
Ren started to flip through the untitled book. From what he saw, it was all about the different tsuchigumo clans and their relation to the other species, mostly the oni. The pages of the book were a stark white and the text black. Ren's head began to throb again.
"So, Madara, what happened that made you end up in our fine city? I'm sure you know you spider-legs aren't welcome here," Saburo said.
"Uhm, I was going back to my burrow, and uh, everyone was dead, so I wandered for a while to look for help. I ended up on some guy's farm and the police brought me here."
Saburo crossed his arms. "I need every little detail, Madara. Right now I figure I could just call you a spy and have you executed. Of course, I'm not that kind of guy. Tell me your whole story"
"Found it," Ren mumbled, hand on his forehead. "Says the Lycosid are a clan that defected from the other Tsuchigumo clans during the Kumo Wars. They apparently didn't agree with the Minister at the time."
"Never heard of 'em," Saburo said. "So, Madara tell us how you ended up here."
"Uh, I guess it started when I was coming home from hunting alone..."
*****
Blood was everywhere on the burrow's surface. There was so much blood that Madara was afraid to descend; afraid to even touch the stained silk trapdoor that enclosed his home.
But then he heard a second roar, and he knew he had to.
Sidling into the trapdoor and climbing down its gentle slope, hands pressing against the dirt walls, Madara smelled the tang of tsuchigumo blood. It was the same smell he remembered when he cut his finger on a dagger training, only worse.
Madara opened the final trapdoor at the end of the stone staircase. The underground home of his clan lay in ruins, the huts and houses tromped on by what he could only imagine as the feet of a giant lizard. Bodies lay everywhere on the cobblestone paths, tsuchigumo with the lower halves of their bodies crushed, exoskeletons ruined by the brute force of something much larger.
He glanced around the dirt cavern and saw something moving in the shadows. He pulled a
A worm-like dragon, its body curled around the cavern. Its black scaled glimmered from the light of the underground gas-lamps. Its body moved slowly like a snake, still tired from digesting its last meal. Its eyes were a dark, clouded over blue.
He didn't have long to think about the dragon, though, because as soon as it has been there, it had gone. Madara shook his head. Had the dragon been there at all? Was it a hallucination, a figment of a crazed mind? Still the bodies remained, the blood and the darkness of the cracked gas-lamps. He heard a scuffle of feet in the distance, but nothing more. The cavern was silent.
Madara hopped down from the staircase and began to survey the damage. His parents seemed to have escaped, as he didn't see their bodies anywhere, but many others lay dead. The kind old man next door, his ex-girlfriend, even the janitor for the elementary school, the one that every young tsuchigumo knew on a titular basis.
Before Madara left, one thing caught his eye - a blue downy feather, tainted by the blood spatter from a dying tsuchigumo.
He put the feather away, then heard another roar, and decided it was in his best interests to run.
He ran back up the underground passage. In his haste his hair became matted with blood and dirt and his bare chest - along with the red bandanna he always wore around his neck - got covered in thick, black, clayish mud. By the time he managed to push up on the trapdoor he had slipped several times and gotten his spindly legs and waistcloth muddy as well.
Madara walked for a few days, hopeful that he'd see another burrow that he could ask for help, but he saw no openings in the grass or dirt. He had heard that his clan moved farther west before he was born, far away from the clans that had instigated the war against the other species. But as the air around him started to taste of seawater he wondered if he had wandered too far.
As he wandered, he saw several large block-like structures rise above the horizon, faded blue against the sky. He stopped to marvel at the strange shapes. What were they, and why were they so large? The answer to his question must lie towards the setting sun.
There was a man up ahead wearing a straw hat. Through the tall grass, Madara could only see his upper body, which was colored red. A sunburned tsuchigumo?
"Excuse me!", he yelled out.
The man turned toward him and raised the straw hat off of his head in a greeting. As Madara got closer, he saw the smile on the man's face slowly change into a look of horror. Upon approaching, Madara thought he recognized the stranger.
The man with a straw hat was an ogrelike creature with red skin. Tusks extended out from his lower jaw, and straight, red horns sat on top of his forehead. Instead of the spidery body of the tsuchigumo, he had a straight lower body and two legs. Madara had only heard stories of these people, of their lust for power, their wartime brutality and betrayal and genocide of the humans. And in the bogeyman stories he had always heard as a child, they had gone by one name, as a group -
Oni.
But now he knew they weren't legend. They were as real as the man before him, the same man who took the blunt end of a hoe and sent it flying towards the back of his head.
