You, there, outside in the cold. Won't you come in? I promise I won't eat you. We're not monsters, we're quite like you. See, I'm a person, just like you. There aren't as many of us left, but we live on in our songs. We don't bother writing the good stuff down, it's so much easier and nicer to hear it! It's more special that way. Would you like to hear one? I promise I won't shatter your eardrums. Let's see, which one would I tell you, foreigner... Oh! I know! Take a seat, I think you'll like this one. It's the one about our parents! But you haven't heard? What rock do you live under?! Well then, I guess I'm going to have to sing you a few! I better mash up some herbs before I start, or I'm gonna get tired!

~*~TENRAI HANE ~*~

The skies of the Gods were clear and blue. The sun sat high and bright. All was perfect for the occasion. Goddess Thea, queen of the wild, had grown bored and created a child.

The child was a girl, with pale skin that was eminent like the dawn, and hair that appeared to have been washed in an inkwell. Her eyes were still closed in her slumber.

"How lovely it is to have made something as beautiful as me!" Thea bragged, proudly passing the babe among the gathered spirits. Yet, no matter how many pairs of hands the child found herself in, she never stirred, cried, or even wiggled, almost as if she were not a child, but rather a doll, crafted by Thea as a plaything.

The festivities were interrupted by one deity rushing to the center of the gathering, clearly out of breath.

"Your majesties, I don't have any explanation, but he's made it back up here!"

All of the spirits in attendance instantly wheeled around, craning to see the commotion. Distant screeching was heard coming from a large blackness beginning to blot out the sky.

"Dammit, I thought we banished Moyuk!" Thea exclaimed. But the truth was plain before them, the hellbeast had escaped his confine to the mortal world and returned to the domain of the Gods. "This will not do to have a child while we must work to destroy him" she sighed. Then, Thea's mind lit up with an idea. She resolved to hide the child, and use the babe to her advantage when Moyuk was once again mortal and vulnerable.

Thea reached over and gathered some clay from the firepit, and mixed it together with some water from her goblet, and some cloud from the baby's swaddling. She formed the mash into the shape of a beast's face, and painted symbols upon it with god's blood. The mask was then placed over the infant's face.

"Child, I cast you out of this place, onto mortal soil. This mask shall protect you, and contain your power that is your birthright. You shall remain small, so you cannot be seen, and you shall be beautiful as I am, but you must never look upon yourself. Your being shall house a woman and a beast, and you shall have wings to return here when the time comes. In honor of the mask upon your face, I christen you Tsura. Now, leave here, to where you will be out of the hellion's reach." Thea inhaled deeply, and released a breath that carried the babe out of the heavens and into a blizzard wind. The child was carried to a shrine, where she was raised by holy women until she came of age.

Why this occurred, you might ask? Why would a mother cast her daughter out of her heavenly cradle? This was because it was known to every creature upon the mortal world that Moyuk could corrupt everything indefinitely in the heavens, but if he stepped onto earthen soil, the Queen of Heaven would be able to slay him. Until the Queen rose to power, the hellbeast would reign in terror.

~*~

The dirt was cold. Fitting for the stillborn pups she had just buried. Not like the dirt wasn't cold, it was always cold. Every year, every month, every day, cold and covered in snow. For as long as she could remember. She was awfully young to be given the duty of burying the dead, the last Kagetsuki had died unexpectedly, even for an old dog. She had been the Mayuzuki, the maiden medicine woman, and upon the birth of her pups, would become the Getsurin, the nursery matron. Fate had different plans, however, and she was found to have a deformity that would leave any pups she tried to have stillborn, just like these three buried in their tiny grave. Because she could not have pups of her own, she could never have the ability to tend to a whelping mother or her suckling pups, and was relegated to the barren woman's job of burying the dead. And she would bury the dead until she would need to be buried herself.

This was not her fate, she decided. Shifting easily into beast form, she broke into a canter and high-tailed it away from the gravesite as quickly as she could. She wasn't expected back until the dawn anyway, as her people required that she take a vigil in the night to ensure the spirits had been welcomed at the door by a one of their Gods. By the time Onna realized she was gone, she would be somewhere else entirely. Another shrine, the capital, the wild unknown, hell if she knew where she was going. Just somewhere that wasn't here.

The blizzard snows stung her eyes as she rushed against the wind, the drifts covering her pawprints. Her beast form was small, and she remained light enough where her footfalls would shuffle through the fresh powder, but not sink into the packed snow beneath, which allowed her quick passage.

Until she tripped over a stone and went tumbling into the snow. Shaking herself off, she realized that the stone was not a stone at all, but something wrapped in a cloth. In annoyance, she snuffled the fabric inside until her cold nose encountered a colder stone. Looking closer, the stone was a mask, white as the flakes, marked up red as their prayer beads. A tiny mouth was quivering below the mask's edge. This was clearly a cruel joke, to cast some pup that looked like that heaven-baby from the song out here for her to find so she wouldn't run away. Which she was still going to do, obviously. But then the pup wailed. The pup wailed its petulant man-cry loud enough to not be drowned out over the howling blizzard. They were far enough away from the shrine where they wouldn't be heard, and the pup would likely die out here if left. The irony of the situation was ridiculous, so she picked up the pup by its delicate fabric wrap and changed course back to the shrine. Once they were close enough where someone would hear the pup's wailing, she chucked it into a bank and peeled off in the opposite direction. Good riddance.

~*~

"Onna! There's a pup abandoned outside the shrine!"

Kanuni, the mother superior of the shrine, ambled outside of her den at the sound of the fuss.

"Is it alive?" she asked wearily.

"It's a human pup! And it's wearing a mask!" the monk barked in reply.

Kanuni's ears pricked up, and she took on her woman form, waddling over to the squalling infant in the monk's jaws.

"Give it here." she ordered, and the monk dropped the babe into her arms. Pulling back the swaddling, she noticed the mask appeared as if it had come straight from the story. When she noticed the darkness of the child's hair, her heart just about stopped. Pups this young were never in human form, they remained as beasts as long as they were still nursing, and didn't take on human shape until they could walk and talk and participate in their pack. The fact that this pup was in human form at all was alarming enough, but adding the fact that this was going just as the story song said it would meant serious business. "Fetch Tamiko immediately." she growled to the monk.

"At your command, Onna!" he replied briskly, and dashed off to bring the Getsurin. He returned within a few moments with Tamiko's round, gray beast form hot on his heels.

"What is so urgent that you had to interrupt me preparing the mothersgrief?" She asked in her no-nonsense shout as she morphed into her equally rotund woman shape. "Yoshiko is heavy with milk, must you keep dragging on the reminder that her pups are gone?"

"Oh thank Thea, it's not too late." Kanuni breathed a sigh of relief.

"Too late? For what?" Tomiko tutted. Kanuni presented the pup to the Getsurin, who immediately shut her trap, but only for a few seconds before frothing at the mouth as usual. "This pup is nursing! Why is it in human form!?"

"It's wearing a mask, this isn't just a pup, it's her pup." Kanuni replied, nodding up at the sky.

Tomiko's mouth fell open, and she had to reach up and close it before she replied "You are meaning to tell me this child is Tsura?!"

"Which is exactly why I wanted to stop you before you dried Yoshiko's milk up." Kanuni snarked. "Tell her to resume woman shape and nurse this babe. She's going to be a mother again after all."

The Getsurin nodded enthusistically. "So if the story song was real, what does that mean for us?"

Kanuni's expression turned grim. "It means that all pups now and in the future will receive battle training, and that I will train Tsura myself. After you bring this pup to her mother, I want you to send Hansuke over here, and make sure he brings over Hake from the vault."

"Hake?!" Tomiko exclaimed. "What on earth do you plan to do with that weapon? You haven't wielded so much as a staff in moons!"

Kanuni smirked. "I'm not going to do a thing with it." She gestured towards the now-quiet Tsura in Tomiko's arms. "But she will."

OF HEAVEN

Rossellini