Mother oni's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Mother Oni pressed the folded map into her child's hands. The paper felt warm, almost alive. She opened her mouth to speak, but her legs gave out. The floor rushed up to meet her. Purple veins spread darker across her baby blue skin as she fell. Her child caught her before her head struck the ground. Mother Oni's fingers trembled as she reached for her child's face, touching it like she was memorizing every detail. She tried to form words, but only breath came out. The scar on her arm pulsed with a faint violet light, matching the rhythm of her failing heartbeat. Her eyes moved to the map now crumpled in her child's grip, then back to her child's face. They were inside the tree lab where Mother Oni had spent years studying her illness. Glass vials lined the shelves, each filled with samples of her darkening blood. The journal with the face on its cover lay open on the worktable, its last entry unfinished. The face seemed to watch as Mother Oni struggled to breathe, its expression knowing and sorrowful. Mother Oni's hand fell away from her child's cheek. Her chest stopped moving. The map would have to speak for her now. On it, one world was marked with a symbol drawn in her own blood—the place where everything had changed, the place her child would need to go to understand why their mother's body had turned against her.