There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.


There was a man, I recall. Did he have black hair or brown? Brown eyes or blue? I can't remember. All I can see when I look back on those days is his smile, that morbid, fainting thing. But you see there was also a charm to him. Despite everything that we knew he was, the other girls and I were brought to our knees by his charm. Was it because of his dashing yellow belt, or his jacket vest that looked like something far out into the future? I cannot say any of us knew. We were simply stunned by him, and something about him. So we, being the curious creatures we were, flocked around him like birds to an assortment of crumbs.

In good conscience, I would speak of this no more. But my conscience is not good, nor is it clear, nor shall it be. What followed our addiction to him was a hundred years of torment, detailed finely and crafted to perfectly suit his needs.

Year One - I recall.
It was when we first began to develop feelings for him. It was when our eyes dazzled and our hearts went alight, his morbidity seeming farther and farther away. We were lost by something, it was like a powerful spell that overcame us, one we did not attempt to resist. We became his harem. We became an extension of him. Though we had not yet lost our individuality.

Year Five -
We had grown jealous to a point, after all of our emotions for him grew so substantially. We still had homes of our own, some of us worked the fields and others had rich and noble fathers so we could only contemplate our future with this man. Behind his sight, though, in our own little world, we grew vicious. We began to scheme and plot against each other, and why? It was all so foolish.

By the year's end, we began to realize how horrid we had grown. Chia, one of our friends, had been found dead down the river leading to the western lands. At that point, we were irreparable. We could no longer trust one another at all.

Little did we know that her life had been taken by him.

Year Ten -
After so much time, our dynamics had changed. Our lives had changed. You see, this man was not ordinary. How else would we all be so drawn to him, with our efforts so cherished by our families? He was everything but normal.

He was not human, not a man at all. Everyone knew that. He was a religious figure. We believed him to be a spirit sent to guide the humans that walk the plains. He was handsome and immortal and so unbelievably powerful. The great shinobi leaders in the west, the south, the east, they did not rival him in the slightest. He was our lord, and we all fought like beasts for his hand in marriage. As he was like a God, we deigned to be his Goddess. Not all of us. Just one of us.

But our merit was proven not by the smiles and the subtlety of romance, he said, but on the fields of battle. We trained. We went to war.

Year Twenty -
Almost all of us had died by then, twenty years into the running. I was one of the few left, I suppose I proved myself by slaughtering hundreds on the field. I was something. I was strong. He began to cherish my company, he began to tell me things, hidden secrets that he wouldn't dare reveal to the lessers around me. I was his mistress, now, you could say. I had grown old, I had grown rugged, I was scarred. But I was his mistress, somehow.

He told me the truth, about life, about the world, about him. I was shocked to hear it, and yet not. He brought me to the past and revealed that creatures different than we once walked the foundation of the world.

They were a race, similar to man, but apex in their entirety. They claimed to have the ear of God, though they did not. Instead they had the ear of another, a creature far more spiteful than any put to ground combined. It was a demon named Xhu, a monster of terrible power that stood over all of them as the bulwark; it was a creature that once roamed as well, and dominated all in sight. It was a God-like monster with no comparison. But it was not what you might expect. It did not look like a tailed beast or any such thing, just a masked man.

Xhu gave great power to these immortal creatures. He gave them all ninjutsu, and some specific talents; genjutsu, fuuinjutsu, bukijutsu, other such things. They were his Lords, and they brought the humans into line. Eventually however as they grew more powerful and more loved, their ambition grew and they began to look towards a brighter future; one where they ultimately ruled, without such a demon to commandeer them. They conspired together, the hundreds of them, to take down the creature that was quite possibly the base of all things.

And so they did it. They watched God bleed, they watched him die. They watched his body swell up, his energy dividing into hundreds of masses that then became other things, no longer a part of the whole. The nine demons rose. The Three Great Wonders rose; the Tree of Life, the Great Desert Beast, and the Gedo Mazo. The world changed forever.

Many of these creatures died, killing their demonic God. The ones that remained were weakened forever, their source of energy drying up slowly until their lives began to fade, their souls leaking from their skin. Eventually, there came a time where the man I speak of was the only one to remain.

His name was Atenu, the strongest of them. The slayer of Xhu. And he became convinced that he was going to one day regain the life he'd lost. Even as his energies left him, he carefully presided over his nation, and from all of the people in his land, a great harrowing began. Eventually, it came down to me.

Year One-Hundred -
Even as I lay old and dying, he waits above my bed. I know it's coming soon. My life is fading. He will be waiting for the moment to arrive; the moment where the liquor of my soul, that he has grown and cherished so sweetly, will ripen to the flavor that he needs. He'll wait forever until the time when I am finally ready for him. For him to take apart. For him to claim his own.

For him to make his vessel.

The demons are manifestations of Xhu, the dark monster that once roamed the earth.
Beneath Xhu, there were hundreds of powerful creatures beyond the reach of humanity. These were known as the Oni. However these creatures did not expect that upon killing their Lord, they would all begin to weaken and die.
The Oni all died but one, but the last of them discovered the way that an Oni can survive without the existence of Xhu. It is a means that is incredibly precise and horribly gruesome. It is by torturing the soul of a human until it has been broken entirely.

It is a level beyond trauma, fear, hatred. It is a waking hell that these people must experience. And, when they are finally beyond repair, their body can be inhabited so that the Oni may leave their diseased, dying, cursed form.