I remember the marketplace.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Hotaru.

I remember the marketplace.
Not as it is now — glass towers swallowing the sun, neon bleeding into twilight — but as it was when my hands were clean. The scent of roasted chestnuts and damp tatami. The weight of silk rolls across my shoulders. A merchant's life, measured in coins and bowed greetings.

But I was always looking past the living.

I saw them first as a child — the pale shapes that lingered at the edges of shrines, the translucent women kneeling at graves who turned to mist when you looked directly at them. My grandmother said I had shinigan — corpse-sight. She told me to ignore it. To look away. To live among the living and leave the dead to their silence.

I tried. For years, I tried.

Then Sachiko died.

She was my business partner's daughter. Seven years old. She drowned in the Kamo river during the Obon festival while paper lanterns drifted downstream carrying prayers for the dead. The irony was not lost on anyone. Her father stopped eating. Her mother stopped speaking. The household withered like a garden denied water.

I saw Sachiko three days after the funeral. She was sitting on the stone bridge where she had fallen, her feet dangling over the water, watching the fish. She looked at me with an expression I have come to know well in the dead: not fear, not sorrow, but confusion. She did not know she had drowned.

I spoke to her. I should not have. My grandmother's warnings rang in my ears like temple bells, but what was I to do — walk past a dead child who did not know she was dead?

I told her gently. She cried without tears — the dead cannot weep, but they remember the shape of it. And then she asked me to tell her parents that she was sorry about the lantern. She had been reaching for it when she fell.

I told them. Her father wept. Her mother spoke for the first time in weeks. They bowed so low their foreheads touched the floor.

Word spread. A merchant who could speak to the recently departed. People came to my stall not for silk but for one more conversation with a dead wife, a lost child, a departed friend. I obliged because the dead were patient and the living were desperate, and I was the bridge between them.

The Wildwood Witches found me within the year. Two women in travelling clothes who smelled of forest loam and old ritual. They watched me work for three days before approaching.

"You have the talent," the elder said. "Untrained, uncontrolled, but real. The dead answer you because you listen without demanding. That is rare."

They took me in. They taught me the formal arts: how to draw the shinigami-mon, the death-gate sigils that create a clean channel between worlds. How to anchor a spirit so it does not wander. How to release one so it does not linger. Proper necromancy — not the crude grave-robbing of Western tales, but the careful, respectful art of tending the threshold.

I was Greenmarked. Low rank. But my talent was genuine, and the dead trusted me in a way they did not trust the higher-ranked witches who saw spirits as tools rather than people.

That was the problem.

Elder Witch Morisaki wanted a weapon. She had identified the spirit of a Heian-era general — a furious, magnificent ghost trapped in the foundations of a ruined castle — and she wanted me to bind him. Not speak with him. Not ease his passage. Bind him. Chain his rage to a war-ward that would serve the Grove's purposes for centuries.

I went to the castle. I drew the gate. I opened the channel.

The general's spirit was exactly as described: vast, ancient, incandescent with centuries of unresolved fury. He had been betrayed by his own retainers. He had died with a sword in his belly and a curse on his lips. He was magnificent and terrible and utterly, completely tired.

"I have been angry for eight hundred years," he told me. "I am ready to stop."

I looked at the binding sigils Morisaki had given me. I looked at the general's weary, translucent face.

I released him instead.

The passage was beautiful — a slow dissolution, like ink dropping into clear water. He bowed to me as he faded. The last samurai courtesy of a man who had waited centuries for someone to simply ask what he wanted.

Morisaki's fury was immediate. The Grove's judgment was swift. They stripped my marks, sealed my death-gate sigils, and cast me out with a warning that still echoes: "You chose the dead over the living. Now walk among neither."

But the dead do not care about exile. They never have.

I wandered Tokyo's midnight streets — a city built on forgetting its dead yet haunted by every era at once. The spirits found me anyway. In subway tunnels where wartime ghosts still huddled against phantom air raids. In office buildings erected over unmarked graves. In the quiet parks where lonely salarymen sat beside the translucent shapes of people they didn't know were there.

I could not stop listening. The sigils were sealed, but the talent was mine — born, not granted. The dead whispered through cracks in concrete. They gathered at my door like stray cats, bringing their stories, their confusions, their last messages for the living.

The Dark Masons found me in an alley behind a shrine, surrounded by a ring of faintly glowing spirits, transcribing their words onto rice paper by foxlight — the pale luminescence that my hands emit when the dead are near.

"You are a bridge," their emissary said. "We build bridges."

Here in the Lodge, I have learned that my craft is not weakness but architecture. Every spirit I ease across the threshold is a foundation stone laid in the space between worlds. The dead are not tools and not enemies. They are tenants of a place most people pretend does not exist.

I speak to them still. Every night, by foxlight, I sit in the Lodge's quietest room and open the old channels — not with the Grove's sealed sigils, but with my own, drawn from the conversations themselves. Each glowing kanji on my hands is a name. Each name is a story. Each story is a door that swings both ways.

The Lodge's oldest Mason (her skin like cracked lacquer, her voice like settling gravel) told me this: "We are not punished for our forbidden acts. We are chosen by them." She pressed a folded paper crane into my palm — old, brittle, made by a child's hands. "Some bridges don't cross rivers. They cross the silence between."

So I walk these streets, a living lantern. The foxlight follows me — the ghost of the first kitsune I ever bound, who chose to stay not because I chained her, but because I asked.

Sometimes at dawn, I kneel beside the newly dead — those who sit bewildered on hospital steps or accident scenes, not yet understanding that they have crossed — and I tell them gently, as I told Sachiko:

You have gone somewhere new. It is not the end. Let me show you the way.

This is how a necromancer becomes sanctuary.
One spirit at a time. One name. One telling carried on foxlight until it finds ears ready to hear:

The dead do not need our fear.
They need our attention.

Visual

Slender Japanese merchant with pale hands glowing faintly with ghostly kanji, dark eyes that see past the living, simple travelling clothes, foxlight luminescence trailing their fingers like dying lanterns.

Faction: The Wildwood Witches · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook