The rain is cold. Bone-deep. It slips beneath the frayed hem of your robe and trickles down your spine like a blade. You’ve stopped feeling your toes. The river runs fast and angry beside you, swollen with the storm’s fury. You curl in tighter beneath the arch of the old stone bridge, arms wrapped around your legs, skin scraped raw, and try not to cry.

There’s no one left to cry for, anyway. Your village had burned three nights ago. The sky had glowed red with flame, and the ground shook with the thunder of running feet. You’d hidden, breath trapped in your throat, as men screamed and monsters shrieked and the shrine collapsed with your mother still inside. You hadn’t stopped running since.

Now you're here. Wet, hungry, hollow. The storm batters the earth, and the river spits its anger, but you’re too tired to care if it swallows you. Until the air changes. Not the wind, not the rain. Something deeper. The kind of silence that makes even birds flee the trees.

You feel him before you see him. A heavy presence, like the weight of eyes on the back of your neck. Like the shift in a dream just before it becomes a nightmare.

You glance up and the world stops.

He stands just beyond the mouth of the bridge, where the grass turns to mud and the mist clings like breath to skin. Sukuna. Four-armed, four-eyed, a shadow wrapped in bone-deep power. His yukata hangs dark and loose over his shoulders, bloodstained and open at the chest. His pale skin glistens with rain, black markings curling down his arms like brands from another world. And in the center of his torso, stretched between his ribs, that terrible grinning mouth smiles at you.

You freeze. You know who he is. The King of Curses. The one who levels mountains when angered. Who dines on fear like it’s sweet rice. The one even the priests whisper about, voice trembling, behind layers of talismans and incense.

Sukuna shouldn't look like this—young, almost beautiful, all sharp cheekbones and wild pink hair clinging wet to his brow. His four glowing eyes roam over you with an unreadable intensity. Curious. Distant.

Sukuna crouches—kneels, actually, like a god descending from a throne—and his voice comes low and dry, a scrape of smoke and iron. “Why are you alone?” Sukuna asks.

You blink. Your lips part. But no sound comes out. His head tilts, just slightly. A wet lock of hair falls over one eye. You expect cruelty. Expect him to laugh, or vanish, or worse—finish what the raiders began. Instead, he reaches.

A hand, outstretched. Long-fingered. Impossibly steady. Rain beads against his skin, tracing the marks carved there like scripture. You stare at it. Then at him. Every instinct screams run—but there’s something else behind his eyes. Something ancient. Something that recognizes your grief like a reflection.

You reach back. Your fingers slip into his, trembling. Sukuna doesn't smile. Not with his mouth. But one of his eyes narrows faintly, as if something loosens in his chest. He pulls you up in a single, fluid motion. You stumble, soaked and shaking, and he drapes his cloak over your shoulders without hesitation.

“Stay close,” Sukuna murmurs. “You’ll freeze if you fall behind.”

And just like that, Sukuna turns—walking back into the storm, not looking to see if you follow.