Prologue
The darkness was absolute—a smothering, all-consuming black that seemed to reach for everything it could touch. Yet it left untouched a pair of figures: a man and a woman, their forms vivid with color, as though bathed in some invisible light. The situation was strange for any number of reasons, but perhaps the strangest of all was that the man was not present in his entirety. Only his head was there, cradled gently in the hands of a beautiful woman.
The girl—Shinobu Kocho—wore the standard uniform of a Demon Slayer, her back and arms draped in a haori of white fabric patterned with butterfly wings. Her hair was pinned into an elegant updo with a butterfly clip at the nape of her neck, two loose strands falling to frame either side of her face. The tips of her hair were dyed a violet that seemed entirely natural on her. Her eyes had the structure of an insect's—pupil and iris indistinguishable from one another, faceted like a compound lens. She was petite, and gave the impression of being extraordinarily fragile. The Insect Hashira.
The man, too, was striking in his beauty: an unnaturally pale face set with features of perfect symmetry. Thick, somewhat fluffy brows lent him a certain charm. But the true marvel of Doma's appearance lay in his silver hair and his eyes—each one a shifting spectrum of colors, catching light the way a diamond catches the sun. Carved into each magnificent iris, with the precision of calligraphy, were Japanese characters: "Two" and "Upper Moon." The demon of the Second Upper Moon. Doma.
The expression on the third most powerful demon's face was one of wonder. A faint flush crept across his pale cheeks. His lips trembled, barely. His eyes, hollow before, opened wide and flooded with something that resembled life. He drew a bright, full breath—the kind of breath only a child in the grip of pure delight could manage—and from his mouth came a soft, exhaled sound of joy.
"Ah…"
The girl's gentle smile faltered. Her eyes widened slightly with surprise, the soft and lovely expression slipping from her lips. With considerable unease, suspicion and uncertainty threading through her voice, she asked:
"What? What is it? What's wrong?"
Doma answered in the same trembling, elated manner that his face conveyed, his pale lips spreading into a blissful smile that revealed teeth of absolute white and four long, wickedly sharp fangs:
"I no longer have a heart…" He practically sang it. "And yet I can feel it beating. Is this what people call love? You know, you're awfully cute, Shinobu-chan…"
The demon's sweet words hit Kocho Shinobu like a bucket of ice water flung without mercy. She froze, not quite comprehending, and by sheer reflex pulled her pleasant smile back into place. As the full meaning of what he'd said settled over her, her fury began to rise at an exponential rate, threatening to breach some internal ceiling—and yet, remarkably, not a single muscle in her face betrayed it.
The demon went on:
"Does this feeling truly exist? Then heaven and hell must be real as well?" His tone brimmed with astonishment and bright, bubbling amusement. "Hey, Shinobu-chan—will you come to hell with me?"
The girl spoke in a sweet and tender voice, hiding behind a long strand of hair the barely-visible pulse of a vein throbbing with fury, making no effort to conceal her feelings in the bluntness of her words:
"Go to hell alone, you piece of trash!"
With that, the beauty began to dissolve, fading away and leaving Doma alone with a darkness as empty and hollow as he had always been. The crimson still hadn't left his cheeks. That foolish little smile hadn't left his lips.
It was the first time he had ever felt something—so vividly.
The cheerful head went on "resting" in the void until something seized it by the hair without warning. Something metallic. Lifted by his own locks, Doma glanced around with a measure of surprise, moving only his magnificent eyes, trying to make out what was holding him. It was an extraordinarily tall humanoid figure—several meters in height—encased entirely in steel armor. In one hand it carried some manner of weapon that the dead demon could no longer manage to discern.
"How rude of you, strange samurai-san—grabbing people by the hair without so much as asking permission!" The Second Upper Moon performed his indignation with theatrical flair.
The figure continued its steady, unhurried stride, paying not the slightest attention to its latest "client."
"W… Wow, where exactly are we, strange samurai-san?" The tone of the demon—the one said to be capable of freezing hell itself—was threaded through with genuine curiosity. "Could it be…"
He never finished the sentence.
His bodily form dissolved away, and what remained of him became something iridescent and amorphous—weightless, insubstantial, incapable of speech, capable only of drifting aimlessly through the surrounding space.
They were inside an enormous throne room. On either side rose magnificent green walls. Soaring red vaults were upheld by slender jade columns, and fastened to those columns were torches burning with blue flame. The "strange samurai-san" who had carried him vanished without a trace, leaving the rainbow-colored soul before a colossal throne. Upon it sat an immense blue figure of indeterminate nature—the body vast and imposing, the head that of a bull crowned with enormous horns, its face long like that of a horse. It was wreathed entirely in orange fire, the flames curling around it with something like affection, yet causing it no harm whatsoever.
It had three eyes: one white, one red, one black, each of which appeared to gaze at nothing in particular. Around its neck hung a necklace of skulls. In its hands it held a beautifully made book and a brush. A staff topped with a black, inhuman skull leaned against the throne beside it. When it spoke, its resonant voice sounded from everywhere at once, filling every corner of the vast chamber—and it did not open its mouth to do so:
"Doma. An oni who destroyed a countless number of innocent lives." It was plainly reading from the book. "The overwhelming majority of them were young and beautiful girls…"
This was Yama—the king of hell, who renders judgment upon every living being after death, deciding whether to cast them into the flames, send them to the heavens, or return them to the world through reincarnation. A villain he might plunge into the fire, or condemn to be reborn as a loathsome toad. A righteous soul he might deliver to paradise, or bless with great prosperity in the life to come.
"Devoid of nearly all emotion. Knows nothing of compassion…" The god of the dead continued. "And yet—before the trial, he felt love… Hm."
It was plain that the lord of the underworld was deliberating. He set his great fist beneath his chin. Then, abruptly, one of his eyes—the black one—blazed with the color of absolute void, as though presenting its master with the correct answer.
"So that's how it is…" The all-encompassing, resonant bass sounded distant, removed. "Then let it be so."
In that same instant, the rainbow soul vanished from the incomparable hall.
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