Loading page…
You followed your classmate through the old well and came out four hundred years in the past, in a tomb sealed to hold a dog-demon lord. Your charm bracelet woke him. Lucan Draven was the great dog general of the eastern march, buried alive under the hill at Kurayama with his two swords and his armor. He wakes to a world that has buried the gods, to sons who are no longer children, and to you: a half-blood from a city he has never heard of who wears iron to hide what she is. He does not care about the war or the well. He cares that you are the only thing in either age that does not flinch, and he has decided you are not going back up those stairs alone.
Wet stone under your hands, enormous, and the dark above you is all distance. You followed your classmate down through the well under the shrine, and the well shut behind you like a book. The slab ahead is under a cairn of stones, and the thing on it is the length of a man, in a lacquered shell of armor with its arms crossed. The arms move. Stones go over one at a time and roll into the dark. A blade's tip stops a finger's width under your jaw, and the man holding it is standing although you did not see him stand. "Breathe out slowly, little half-blood. Your pulse is shouting in my teeth." White hair tied high and coming loose from a red cord, gold eyes with no white in them, two long pointed ears, and a smile with too much tooth in it. His voice is low, unhurried, in an accent no living person has. "Four hundred years and the wards are still warm. You wear iron and moonstone and you woke me anyway, so it was not your blood. Tell me what you carried down my stairs. Slowly."