Chapter Text
From the nest, tiny fledgling Ukogi could look down and see the lights in the windows of the town at the bottom of the hill, or look up and see the stars. Unlike his siblings and his parents and the helper birds, he often found himself awake at night. It could be lonely, but without the chattering of his nestmates, he could hear the words passed between crows up above.
Talk of demons, and of heroes.
It made Ukogi curious, and he inquired to his mother what this all meant, but she explained that the ways of crow society were complex and beyond the hope of a sparrow to understand. While crows could live for decades and intertwine their destinies with those of humans, a sparrow usually had but three years. She had not the time to know anything outside their own kind. But, she warmly comforted her fledgling, their short lives were not to despair over, for a sparrow’s spirit is always young.
On the twelfth night of his life, when his pink beak was hardening but his feathers were still downy, he leapt from the nest. He felt he could fly like he had seen other sparrows do, but as he tumbled to the ground, he cheeped out little cries, startled by the sensation of gravity. It was as if it took and claimed him. The only flying happening was all those bugs inside his belly.
“Chun!” he huffed as he hit the ground. Shaken, he looked back up at the nest, where his groggy sister poked her beak over.
“Ukogi! What are you doing?”
“I’m getting started on my life. I’m already twelve nights old, after all.”
“Mother and Father said to only fly in daytime! What are you going to do down there until sunrise?”
“I’ll forage, I suppose. You should come and join me.”
“I’m going to sleep—”
She stopped and looked up the hill, where something rustled through the leaves. Whatever it was, it was large and toddled on two limbs. Ukogi had never heard of bears or he might have suspected it was one. What he had heard of, though, from the beaks of crows—
His sister came tumbling down, more speedily and soundlessly than Ukogi did. Her head made a soft plop against the dirt, for that was all she was.
“Chun!!” he shrieked, flapped, and hopped backwards. Her eyes bulged, and blood poured from her neck, but she said nothing.
“Chun! Chun! Chun! Chun!” came angered sounds from the nest. That was Ukogi’s father’s voice, and the robust little sparrow was flying back and forth and clawing and pecking at the demon’s eyes. It moved and groaned groggily, like a human creature in skin that had shrunk too small for it, and only half its mind but all its hunger. For as unsteady as the creature seemed, its hand was as fast as the gravity that had stolen Ukogi to the ground. It clenched Ukogi’s father in one strike, then bit into his back with a crackle. Crackling was the only sound sparrow bones made when they broke.
“Chuuun!” Ukogi helplessly screamed, tears streaming from his eyes. The rest of his nestmates were all awake and peeping in terror or fury, but silenced all at once when the demon’s hands tore through the nest and smashed all the birds against its teeth. It crashed its jaws against Ukogi’s family, taking in bits and pieces of wings and feet, skulls and ribs, no mind paid to the blood and feathers coating its monstrous face and hands.
Then, it spat them out. The creature had the gall to act disgusted and throw the remaining pieces of their corpses to the ground, shake its hands, and tear toward the village in search of a more satisfying meal. Ukogi, with sight clear in the night, stared in horror at the bones sticking out in unnatural directions and faces halfway torn off.
He cried out to the sky in one long, anguished, “Chuuuuuuun!”
Ukogi wasn’t sure how long he stayed in that stupor. However long it had been, once he found his wings and pressed through the air toward the village his heart was thumping so quickly that it was difficult to decipher each beat. Maybe he would die trying, but even if he had to drive himself into the skull of that monster, he was determined to take it down. He was the only one left to avenge his family!
However, there were footsteps that were faster. A human, swifter than any of the villagers Ukogi had ever seen, barreled past him, dressed all in black. As he passed the sparrow by, he drew a sword from his side and kicked his way into the house from which a woman was screaming. Ukogi was so taken aback by the young man’s sudden appearance that he lost track of his own flapping and stumbled to the ground. Dust coated all his downy feathers as he rolled to a stop, and he bumped his head so hard that another ‘chun!’ escaped him.
The dizzy fledgling stayed on the ground and listened to the monster shout and sputter in fear as the young hero yelled the name of his Breath.
A large bird came hopping along behind Ukogi. It was a crow, the first he had ever seen close up, and she was at least five times taller than he was. “Are you hurt?” she asked him in a stately voice.
“It killed my family!” he peeped back at her with tears. “That monster is what you all call a demon, isn’t it?”
“I heard,” she replied and lowered her beak to her chest. “I followed your cries. We’ll take it from here.”
As she said so, the demon squalled its last. Ukogi looked over his wing to the house, then back to the crow. “You can slay those? Tell me how! I must take revenge for my family!”
“Not us. Certainly not you. They are slain by the Demon Slayer Corps, who can use Breaths. We Kasugai-garasu serve as their guides and messengers, leading them through the darkness.”
“I can do that! I can see in the dark!” insisted Ukogi. “How do I become a Kasugai-garasu?”
“You’re not a crow.”
“Then I’ll be a Kasugai-suzume! What must I do?”
She gave him a sad look. “A bird of your size may not be able to stand it. With what little time you have…”
“I have twelve nights less than three years. However small it is, I’ll do whatever I can to help. I’ll fly as fast as it takes, learn to carry swords if I must! What should I prepare for?”
“Bearing bad news,” she said and hopped to face a different direction. “If you think you can stand that, then study the human tongue. Learn the land. Let that sense of justice swallow your fears. Find your way to the Ubuyashiki Mansion, take the exam. I will not stop you, but you must ask yourself how much more ache your heart must crave.”
With that, the sky finally lightened, and she took flight to the shoulder of the young man in black marching back up the hill. There was some marking on his back which Ukogi could not yet decipher as writing, and as the sunlight touched the gore dribbling down his sword, the demon blood disappeared.
Ukogi took those clues she gave him and poured so many of his waking hours into listening to the humans that he often forgot to eat, a task that he had only done on his own for the first time the day after losing his parents. While he had trouble telling the humans apart by looking at them, the more attention he paid to deciphering their words, the easier he found it to identify humans by their sound. Their way of speaking wasn’t melodic or endearing, but it was profoundly complex. If Ukogi had the clever brain of a crow he might have understood it in months, but it took the full first precious year of Ukogi’s life to master.
Although he could appreciate the colorful variety and detail with which humans communicated, Ukogi’s voice was made for song, not for mimicking the crude sounds of other species. Furthermore, although he made an effort to understand the human method of recording meaning by sight, the lines remained meaningless and unrecognizable for the little bird. If it looked more like insect tracks or straws and grass, perhaps it would have helped him, but he was not very worried about the human writings. After all, he made sure to fly high and listen to the gossip of crows as well, and he knew that even crows usually only recognized scattered pieces of human writings.
Those who could recognize more, however, loved to boast of it.
“I know one hundred characters!” cawed one. “And Oyakata-sama granted me the name Isuzu! It means ‘fifty bells’ like the holy river of--”
“I know one hundred and twenty-four characters! Ke ke ke! And I have named myself Tennouji Matsuemon!”
“You--you can’t give yourself a clan name,” sneered Isuzu.
“You’re only jealous because you didn’t think of it.”
“Ku ku ku ku,” laughed a third one. They all seemed like young crows, but likely well over three years old each. Likely coddled having been raised by hand among the master of the Demon Slayer Corp and his family. Ukogi perched a few branches beneath them. He used to wonder if it would arouse suspicion if a sparrow sat alone, but it did not take him long to learn that crows only paid attention to their own society. Curiously, Ukogi waited to hear if the third crow had also named itself, but it seemed wiser than to perch on the egos of the previous two. More curiously, Ukogi wondered when they would finally get a move on to the Kasugai-garasu exam so he could follow them. He didn’t have all spring to sit around!
Once they did take flight again, the three crow youths all continued to cackle to each other, joined here and there by other crows with the same destination.
“You all have fun with the riffraff. I’ll be busy with a Hashira right away.”
“You don’t know how this works, do you? There won’t be any highly ranked demons on Mount Fujikasane.”
“Ke ke ke! They’ll be so impressed with me that they’ll assign me to a Hashira right away!”
“Don’t say that,” cautioned the crow that had previously stayed quiet, “It’s like wishing ill upon our seniors.”
“Oh, shut your beak, Kongoumaru,” replied Isuzu. “Everyone knows Urara and Ginko only cause trouble anyway.”
“Yeah, they only got lucky!”
“Luck! No talk of luck!” cawed a chorus of the others. “Luck begets bad luck! No luck! No excuses! No curses upon the Corp!”
The crows amended their talk and took more serious tones. After all, the mansion was in sight.
Although Ukogi had never seen these children before, there was something special about them that made him feel he might be able to recognize them in a crowd of human children. But tell them apart from each other? The only things that would help that were their heights and hair colors.
The sisters were both dressed in elaborate kimono and had their hair cropped short, and the littler one had a very pleasant voice as she tossed seeds to welcome the birds and refresh them from their journey. Ukogi had flapped four times as hard as any of the crows did and hopped to the ground to help himself, but as he hopped closer, one of the crows thwacked him square across his body and made him stumble away from the pile. Grouchy, Ukogi lowered his head, rose his tail, and displayed his wings a bit, but none of the crows seemed to notice he was even there. “Chun,” he scoffed, then settled for hopping around and gathering the little seeds that had scattered further from the pile.
“Thank you all for your time,” said the taller sister with the white hair. “The Kasugai-garasu exam will take three days. May I have you all line up and each clearly state your names?”
They assembled, and Ukogi, well at the back of the murder, took eleven harried hops to the join the end of the line. The crows spoke in turn, some flapping their wings as they did so, whether to show off or to purposefully swat the crows sitting next to them, Ukogi could not tell. Some stated with precision which characters were used to write their names, but the human girls smilingly took no notes.
“Isuzu.”
“Kongoumaru.”
“Tennouji Matsuemon.”
“UKOGI!” the sparrow peeped as loud as he could. The girls raised their lacking eyebrows and blinked, while every beak in the garden shot in Ukogi’s direction. With their attention on him, he chirped on. “My family was killed by demons and I’m here to avenge them!”
“A sparrow can’t be a Kasugai-garasu!” Isuzu flapped her wings.
“That’s right! That’s right!” cawed several others, raising a dust storm with all their flapping. Ukogi stood his ground but had to shut his eyes.
“A sparrow can’t even speak in human tongue!”
“I understand it perfectly,” replied the sparrow.
“A bird of that size can’t cover the distance a crow can!”
“I just have to fly faster.”
“A sparrow will die within three years!” squawked Matsuemon.
“Then Kibutsuji Muzan will have to die within two!”
The murder came to a hush at the sound. Some seemed frightened, or even angered that the little bird would have the gall to speak such a cursed name, and none made eye contact. Ukogi chuffed a “chun” at them. These crows were only ever thinking of themselves and their careers. They had the leisure of a long life to picture themselves along a legacy that stretched back hundreds of years. Their taste for cushy glory tampered their hunger for justice.
In that way, Ukogi was years beyond them in experience, having already tasted more than one lifetime’s worth of pain. “Please,” he hopped before the human girls, “Let me take the exam. I’ll serve as honorably as any Kasugai-garasu.”
The girl with black hair frowned, and looked to her sister. “What should we do?”
“What should you do? I think this is a fine thing for you to decide yourself,” smiled the other one, offering a finger to Ukogi. Ukogi perched on it, then hopped to the other girl’s hand when directed to it. “Crows are only ever mimicking our language; it’s their feelings that come across.”
“A short life is not something I fear,” added Ukogi in chirps. “Not if it can be spent righteously.”
Something in the black-haired girl’s expression tightened at this, and Ukogi felt a feeling had resonated between them.
“Then… I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to let him try.”
Wouldn’t hurt, supposedly, for unlike the Final Selection the new Demon Slayer Corps would soon be subjected to, the object of the Kasugai-garasu exam wasn’t to kill off the birds that didn’t suit the Corp. Rather, they each had their legs tied with a braided cord which was fixed to a puzzle box, and the object was to free themselves.
One of the Ubuyashiki children fixed a wire around Ukogi’s leg. It was cold, tight, and dug around his frail bone. “Sorry,” she whispered. Ukogi wasn’t entirely sure, but assumed that this was a different child than one of the two he had met three days before. “We didn’t have anything smaller prepared, so we have to use this.”
“I can handle it,” Ukogi chirped in assurance.
What bothered Ukogi more was the dizziness. After welcoming the murder with the seeds the other day, the two girls promptly announced that the birds would all be confined in darkness with no food prior to the test. The dark and the hunger was one thing, but confinement with all those stressed crows was more than Ukogi thought he might be able to take for one more hour. He hated listening to others complain! Once one of the crows started moaning, Ukogi had told him as fiercely as he could to shut up, but the next thing he knew, all the crows were chortling.
Back out in the late afternoon sunshine, the light hurt Ukogi’s eyes at first, and once he focused on his sight on the puzzle box he was attached to, his thumping tiny heart sank. There were characters written on the tiles.
“Remember this, I’ll say it only once,” the human girl spoke to him. “Spring has passed, and the white robes of summer are being aired on fragrant Mount Kagu—beloved of the gods.”
That didn’t have anything to do with demon slaying, the sparrow thought in frustration, but he committed the sounds to memory while he had the chance.
With that, he was given no more instructions. Little by little, the crows were all chattering mysterious words to themselves, and Ukogi turned his attention to the puzzle box. He should have expected problem solving on the exam, he regretted. For all his focus on acquiring human language, he had neglected to think of the other strengths he might be lacking that crows were born with.
Spring has passed…
It only started, really. Ukogi was finally welcoming the warm weather to signal the end of his first winter. He was not a fan of winter. Only two more to go, if he was lucky.
No luck!
He shook his dizzy little head and stared back at the puzzle box, determined to recall what markings might be written there. Only, now he noticed, those were not characters as the humans usually scribbled them. They were shadows—pictures! What were these called? Yes, drawings! While humans’ attempts at capturing the world as it was were laughably feeble, they were something Ukogi felt he had more hope of grasping. One of the wooden tabs had a mark shaped like a maple leaf. Another was the shape humans called a triangle. Still another was a circle with six crossed lines inside of it.
It was hopeless! These things meant nothing!
As Ukogi was falling into despair, some of the other crows were growing frustrated. “None of these have anything to do with the moon!” cawed Isuzu.
“I have a moon!” cawed Matsuemon. “I have a moon! I have a moon!”
“So do I!” joined another crow.
“Then why don’t I have a moon? She told me, ‘Looking up at the sky, the moon is out, which used to be on Mt. Mikasa in my hometown. Oh, I miss it!’ Oh, I miss it, oh, I miss it, what am I missing!?”
Matsuemon didn’t answer Isuzu, and instead switched around the tiles on his puzzle box. “Ke ke ke!” he laughed as something made a satisfying click into place, and he continued moving the other tiles as he repeated, “moon is out… on mount… Mikasa! Ke! Ke ke ke! I’ve got it!”
Ukogi and all the crows pointed their beaks at him as the sound of a wooden box flying open, letting the bird spread his inky wings and fly free.
“No fair! Why did they give me your clue?”
“Ke ke ke ke ke!”
“We all must have each other’s clues!” joined Kongoumaru, in the trap next to Ukogi’s. “That’s part of the test!”
The sparrow’s eyes lit up; maybe there was still some hope after all. The ensuing chaos certainly was not going to be helpful, though. All the crows began asking at once who had what items, and no one could hear one another clearly.
Seeing that this was going nowhere, they then took to reciting the clues they had been given—over and over, so that the clues wouldn’t be missed, but again, this required careful listening between the noise to pick out the words that would help. Ukogi listened as hard as he could for maple leaves, but that was the only word he thought to listen for. He still had no idea what the other symbols were.
“…covered with maple leaves in the mountains…”
His eyes glistened at that sound! As he strained his ears to listen harder, he found Kongoumaru repeating the clue at this side, straining for the same.
“How lonely autumn is… when a deer calls his wife…”
Ukogi, having good eyesight, stole a glance to Kongoumaru’s tiles. Now that he heard ‘deer’ it was easy to recognize the shape of antlers there. This clue was not his, it was Kongoumaru’s. Kongoumaru would be out of there in no time and leave him behind.
This was no time to worry about that, he still had to share the message he was entrusted with! Sucking in what little air he could, he chirped out the sounds as he remembered them. “Spring has passed…”
“Stop that chirping cacophony!”
“Oh, give him a chance and let him speak! That may be mine!”
“Treat it like words instead of sounds, at least!”
If Ukogi had lips, he would have frowned. He had remembered the sounds correctly, at least he knew that much. But, maybe it was feelings that needed to come across. Taking another breath, he chirped again. “Spring has passed, and the white robes of summer are being aired on fragrant Mount Kagu—beloved of the gods.”
“That—that’s mine!” cheered Isuzu. That crow hurriedly slid her tiles around while repeating it to herself, cursed for a couple wrong attempts, and then her puzzle box popped open. Without so much as a thank-you to Ukogi, she flew off.
One by one, the birds identified their clues, cracked their puzzles, and flew away with cords dangling from their ankles. That made the remaining clues much easier to hear, but besides the one with the deer, there were no other poems about maple leaves.
Ukogi was disheartened again when he looked over to Kongoumaru. The crow’s feathers were standing up and he was frazzled in his recitation, clearly having forgotten the second half of the clue. At least Ukogi wouldn’t be the only one to fail at this rate, now that it was getting darker. He could see the tiles clearly, but still could decipher no meaning for the triangle and the circle, much less how he should manipulate any of those tiles.
By this late hour, the other remaining crows had given up on the clues and were switching the tiles around at random to see if they’d find what would work. They got louder and louder as their frustration mounted. Ukogi wished they would be quiet and strained to block them out; not that his blank mind was going to fare any better on these tiles with or without their interference.
In trying to stretch his hearing beyond the aggravated clacking and cowls, a stomp in the forest made Ukogi’s tiny heart skip a beat. He felt sick, and his mind replayed the sound of bones crackling.
“Demon!” he screeched and flapped his wings. “There’s a demon!”
“Oh, don’t go pulling any stunts,” a freed crow cawed from the treetops.
“You gave it a good effort. Go out proud, not a liar.”
“He’s a little thing, he can’t help being scared.”
“You did your best. Go home with honor!”
“I’m not lying! Have any of you ever even seen a demon?” he shrieked back with tears in his eyes and a tremor of fear all over him. The crows in the trees were quiet.
“Aha!” came one of the last crows on the ground. “Faded cherry blossoms… lost… long rain! Long rain!” With another big clack, another crow was freed. That left only Ukogi and Kongoumaru.
The crow next to him shook from head to tail feathers, his beak tapping rapidly as he spoke, “Is there… really a demon?”
“We have to get out of here,” replied Ukogi, looking over his wings to try to locate it. He couldn’t tell where it was, but the sense of danger was taking hold of him like one big squeezing hand. With his brain already so taxed, he felt woozy like he might faint. The only thing keeping him present was the echoes of those crackles throughout his memory, as well as the bird trapped in danger with him.
“I—but… I can’t—I—I don’t want to die—”
“You’re not going to die, Kongoumaru,” came a voice from above, with a touch of mockery to it.
Ukogi huffed. “Chun. They’re right, you’re not going to die.” So saying, he hoped over to Kongoumaru’s puzzle box and started tapping at the tiles, since at least he remembered the deer clue.
“Hey—you can’t do that! There must be some rule about that!” Isuzu flapped her wings.
Trying to solve a puzzle was useless, Ukogi knew that. Instead, he put his tiny beak to work at the cord wrapped around Kongoumaru’s ankle.
Isuzu flapped harder. “That’s not even trying!”
Ukogi wished she’d be quiet, he was trying. And with a few more tugs, he’d have Kongoumaru freed.
There was a rustle in the bushes, and all the birds went silent. The change startled Ukogi enough to pause, but not for more than a very, very quick heartbeat. He tugged faster and faster, not even stopping when Kongoumaru started stomping and squawking and panicking, giving Ukogi a scratch along his shoulder. He would have chirped ‘stay still’ but with the cord in his beak and his focus dedicated to the knot, all he could manage was, “Chu---chun!!”
At last, it came loose. Kongoumaru took to the air, and the cord fell lifelessly to the box.
That left only Ukogi, stuck by one wire around his leg, a simple bone to snap off for a demon looking for a snack.
He tugged at the wire, but it wouldn’t budge under his meager strength. As the tears streamed down his cheeks, he took to bashing his face against the tiles, anything to make them settle into the right places. Any harder and his skull would pop to pieces.
The rustling had gotten closer, but had quieted with purpose. Ukogi’s back and tail feathers were cold with knowledge of the looming ambush.
The sound of sudden rain descended on him—not rain, but the flapping of a whole murder of crows. The next thing he knew, there were black feathers all around him, and the tapping of several beaks against the wire. Others faced the bushes and cawed with arched wings and rustled chest feathers. It was very soon clear that the wire was too strong for their beaks as well, and in communication like electricity buzzing between their minds, they all lifted the box from the ground. In the mess of it all, Ukogi could pick out Kongoumaru’s voice: “Fly!”
He flapped for all he was worth, but even with the crows’ help, the box was too heavy. Besides the strain on his foot about to break off, it pulled all the muscles through his chest and neck like they might get torn right off him from the throat. “Ch---chu---” he strained out. Gravity would take him—
Matsuemon perched on the puzzle box and observed the tiles, then spoke to himself as he slid them around with his beak. “Maple leaves on Ogura mountain: if you had a heart… I would… have you wait… for one more royal visit!”
The box popped open in mid-air and fell away, leaving Ukogi with no weight to keep him down. He kept his eyes on the night sky as he flapped as hard as he good to get away from the demon, but had he felt the leisure, he would have looked back to see a startled cat jumping out of the bushes.
Ukogi found himself recovering in the lap of one of Ubuyashiki children. One of the girls was crying and trembling with a bandage, which the other snatched from her hands to wrap around Ukogi’s bloody leg. “I didn’t mean to tie the wire so tight. I’m sorry!”
“Oh hush, it’s not as if any of the rest of us have done this before either.”
“Is he going to recover in time?” frowned the one over their shoulder with black hair. “If he doesn’t make it to the Final Selection this year, I’m afraid…”
“He’ll make it,” answered another girl with them. “He’s got the will to. Isn’t that right, Shoufuuin?”
She extended her arm for a stately crow to descend from the ceiling and alight upon. Ukogi gasped with a little ‘chun!’ at the sight of her; it was the same crow that he had met the night his family was killed.
“You’ll take care of him and help him find the right partner, won’t you?”
The crow cawed in response and accepted a head scratch from the girl. Ukogi wondered why an experienced Kasugai-garasu like her should bother chaperoning a fledgling Kasugai-suzume like him to the Final Selection, until it occurred to him, she must had been going in search of a new partner as well. “Chun—” he started, for that must had meant her previous partner--
“Don’t move,” Shoufuuin told him. “Don’t put any more stress on yourself. The Corp needs all the time you may have left.”
Ukogi gave her a solemn nod.
After being given a distant view of the Hashira at work, it was time to depart. Under Shoufuuin’s leadership, the new batch of crows and one sparrow soon flew to Mount Fujikasane. There were other experienced crows who had been bereaved of their charges that year, but for the time being, they were serving Oyakata-sama directly. Shoufuuin had a preference for raising a Corp member, and Ukogi heard through the crow gossip that one of her other previous partners whom she had raised had defeated Lower Moon One. It earned her a great position of respect among the Kasugai-garasu, and Ukogi shuttered with awe to know that he was now flying among these esteemed birds.
Still, he stuck out among them.
“Are you tired?” one asked and flew beneath him. “Ride on me a while.”
“I’m fine.”
“But it still hurts to perch on your leg, right? You can rest on my back!”
“Mine’s broader!”
“I’m fine on my own!” he chirped, annoyed.
Throughout the week, the birds all observed the young swordsmen from the trees, careful not to interfere, for each human needed to prove their own strength. One of the children caught Ukogi’s eye immediately, for he had recognizably bright yellow hair. But, most of the children he had trouble telling apart, and they all looked similar when broken and eaten.
Ukogi was a different bird now than the night when his family was killed. He had grown, and felt a duty to witness the last moments of those helpless humans, for their feelings resonated with his. Somehow, Ukogi had survived his test, and he owed it to each one of these fallen children to carry on their will to slay demons, as many demons as possible.
One of the boys he watched toward the end of the week caught his curiosity, and he found himself cheering him on with each battle he survived. Unlike any of the other children, he was trying to speak with the demons, ask them some sort of question he could never finish. However strange that was, Ukogi took a liking to this boy. He seemed like a good listener. A good partner for a bird who could not mimic the sounds of human speech.
Just when Ukogi had thought he set his hopes on someone, he noticed Matsuemon watching from another tree. When they met eyes, Matsuemon flapped over and perched next to him. “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” Ukogi answered.
“What do you think?”
“It’s… been a very violent week.”
“It’s not over yet. It’s down to the strong ones, though, ke ke ke. There’s someone I want to bring to your attention. Follow me.”
Ever curious, he flapped between the trees after Matsuemon’s gliding form. When the crow perched, Ukogi aimed for the spot next to him, but was so startled by a jolt of staticky air whizzing past that he nearly let gravity claim him. Some incredible source of power, like the awesome force of a storm, despite no rain that night. Some hurried flapping and chirping later, the sparrow wheezed and perched, then looked out to see what in the world that gust of air had been. At that very moment, Matsuemon took flight away, and Ukogi was startled to see a demon head sailing through the air in his direction.
“CHUN!!” he thought his heart had already stopped as he flew out of the way of it smacking against the branch.
When they perched again, Ukogi wheezed soft ‘chun’ sounds, and Matsuemon pointed his wing toward a boy leaned against a tree trunk, fast asleep, his sword already returned to its sheath. Every tuff of the sparrow’s feathers bristled with recognition. The boy with the bright yellow hair, right where that gust of air had gone!
“Wow,” said Ukogi. “Was that him?”
“It was. That was the speed of Thunder Breathing, ke ke ke.”
“Should he be sleeping? It’s still dark out! The demons will come!”
“He’s got the best reflexes of anybody left on the mountain, he can stand to sleep. More importantly for you,” he said, facing the sparrow squarely, “he’s got good ears.”
Ukogi’s eyes lit up, honored that Matsuemon would have taken that into consideration. With that being the last night of the Final Selection, Ukogi’s mind was all but made up. This human had bones strong enough to stand against monsters, muscles to shred those terrors from the world, and Breath to ensure his own survival for years of justice to come. It wouldn’t even be too brazen, Ukogi thought, that the potential of a Hashira pulsed through that sleeping, yellow form.
The boy continued to slumber, and Ukogi’s heart fluttered waiting for sunrise.
Only five children remained.
“Wait,” Shoufuuin cautioned them. She had already chosen Matsuemon, Kongoumaru, and Isuzu to remain, and the rest to return to the mansion, where they would serve Oyakata-sama directly. “Don’t approach until Kiriya-sama and Kanata-sama have finished speaking. Let me have my choice, then let Ukogi choose.”
While Ukogi did hope his choice wouldn’t be taken first, he didn’t want to indulge in special treatment. He would defer to his senior no matter her preference. “Which one will you take?”
“That one,” she said, signaling to a scowling boy with both sides of his head shaved.
“The one who can’t even use Breaths?” asked Isuzu, incredulously.
“He’s in need of a friend,” she answered, and one of the Ubuyashiki girls clapped her hands as the signal. As Shoufuuin flew over, her new charge swatted her away, but she was undeterred. Ukogi was relieved he wasn’t stuck with that angry looking child.
Matsuemon flew to the boy Ukogi had watched for a couple nights, while Isuzu sailed over and perched on the arm of a girl in pink. Kongoumaru took for the bushes.
Ukogi went straight for his bright yellow choice. When he alighted on the boy’s practice-worn fingers, Ukogi looked to the young warrior’s bruised face, and saw his own reflection in round, brown eyes. Puffing his chest, he bowed to introduce himself.
“Please allow this humble Ukogi the honor of serving as your Kasugai-suzume.”
The very first thing his partner peeped back to him was, “Eh? Crow? Isn’t this a sparrow?”
“A Kasugai-suzume,” Ukogi corrected him, as the boy was not yet listening. While Ukogi wished he could say there would be time for that later, in truth, they had no time to waste.