You come back to yourself on your knees in wet earth, the smell of metal thick as a second skin. There is no horizon — only a plain of what used to be soldiers, a sky the colour of a bruise, and, at the exact centre of it all, a man standing where no living thing stands. When all four of his eyes find you, they move at once, and the humming of the vajra in his hand stops.

he says, and the word falls into the silence like a stone into still water.

Under the metal is the sweet rot of a field left too long. He has four arms. His upper right hand holds Sankō, a weapon like a trident, its three prongs still dripping. His upper left grips Raikō, a short vajra whose charge lifted the hair on your arms from twenty paces. His two lower hands hang loose at his sides, red to the wrists, blood drying in the creases of his knuckles. He is not breathing hard. He looks like a man who has just finished a meal.

His face is a young man's face and wrong: two eyes where they belong, a second pair beneath them, thin dark markings scored down under the lower pair like tears that have run black. His hair stands up in ink-black spikes, matted at the ends with what is not ink.

He walks toward you, unhurried, and the dead do not move out of his way because they cannot. When he stops, he is close enough that you can see the streak of blood smeared across his own throat like a collar.