This is Ushiwakamaru, dying:

There's a city at her back.

It's not hers. It's three thousand years too early and two continents too far away to be hers. This is Uruk, not the Kurama Temple—this is Babylon, not Japan. She owes these walls nothing and the people within them even less. She didn't ask to be called here. To be shoved in this trembling body, years before her prime, and thrown head-first against the seething, howling hatred of a murdered god.

Her sword is on the ash-strewn ground, cracked and frozen to stone. Her body is little better; her shoulders feel like they've been replaced by boulders and every time she takes a breath her ribs splinter deeper into her lungs. The only thing keeping her conscious is that she's so busy hurting she can't even spare the energy to fall asleep.

But the worst of all is this: the sky is falling. Not literally. But there's a crushing, suffocating silence that presses down on her skin like the shadow of a mountain. She can taste salt-thick despair on her tongue. It licks into her gut, sharp as seppuku. They're going to die.

They're all going to die and there's nothing Ushiwakamaru can do about it.

She's already tried.

All it got her was to here: collapsed in the cold dirt of a place far from home watching as a monster mocks a man who martyred himself. For nothing. Not even a scratch lingers on those blood-slick scales.

What can she do? What can anyone do? There's no point. It's inevitable.

Just close your eyes, Ushiwakamaru.

Close your eyes and die.

She stands up instead. Shoves herself off the soil with rigid hands and twitching thighs, wipes a scrap of sweat-slick black hair from her forehead, and picks up her sword. Whispers a little song to drown the sound of her geta crunching against the petrified rock that is all that remains of King Leonidas. Sets herself into a samurai's stance and stares at the apocalypse.

Of course it's all pointless. Of course she can't win. Of course she's going to die alone in her failure. That's the story of Ushiwakamaru, the legend that pins her name to the heavens: good, but not quite good enough.

So what?

This is Ushiwakamaru, dying:

It's so much easier the second time.

She stares up at Gorgon's titanic face, past the stone-hard scales and luminous skin and ugly, flailing snakeheads. She meets those soul-stilling eyes, bloody with hate and rage and disdain, and laughs. This is what she's supposed to fear? This is why she's supposed to weep? A slathering beast who doesn't even understand the man she just killed won simply by choosing to fight?

Ushiwakamaru blinks and beneath her ocean-dark gaze something stirs. Hard and trembling like the deck of a boat rocking in the sea.

There's a boy at her back.

This one is hers. A child of Japan, born a thousand years after her failure. He, too, owes these walls nothing and their people even less. He, too, didn't ask to be called here; didn't ask to be stuck with a trembling body years before his prime; didn't ask to be thrown against the seething, howling hatred of a murdered god.

But he remembers her name.

Ten centuries later and he remembers her name.

Do you understand what that means? That this boy honoured the shadow of a woman he'd never even met and thought he never would? That somebody in this world thought—even though she lost, even though she failed, even though she fell on her own sword in ignominy and betrayal—that the name Ushiwakamaru meant something?

The blade in her hand is chipped and cracked. Her teeth are much the same. But she smiles anyway, bright as sunshine, and her sword sparks with the glory of her immortal soul. Stone peels away to reveal the steel beneath. The open wounds on her cheeks are sharp agonies with every word she speaks but that doesn't matter.

The Wandering Tales of Shana-oh, Act Four.

Dan-no-Ura Eight-Boat Leap.

Each step is impossible.

Ushiwakamaru runs across fortress-thick scales and pulsating, bruise-purple flesh and even the stinking, smoking air. She carves furrows and fillets and gouges into the body of a god who will heal them in moments and doesn't even feel the pain. Her eardrums blow out halfway there from the howling thrum of raw divinity spat out like solar flares, and her body is slathered in gore so virulent it eats into her like acid.

She dies seven times just to reach Gorgon's neck. Impaled on fangs thick as her waist. Scoured to ash by bass-drop beams of sheer screaming hate. Smashed out of the sky and dashed to pieces against the rock below with the sweep of a behemoth's tail. Each death is a knife ripped across her skull.

She keeps running anyway.

Are you watching, Uruk?

Are you watching, Ritsuka Fujimaru?

You know what's going to happen. You know how this will end. Everything Ushiwakamaru has, she's spent just getting there. She has nothing left to finish the beast. Gorgon is impossible. Immutable. Inevitable. Not with ten thousand swords could Ushiwakamaru encompass her death and she has only one—one that's crumbling in her hands further and further with every passing second.

She keeps running anyway.

Her blade catches fire. It might be from the fury of her unconquered soul. It might be because she's moving so fast she's igniting the air against her steel. Ushiwakamaru is a meteor through the cloud-strewn sky, so fast she shouldn't be able to be seen and so bright it hurts to see her anyway.

Don't you look away.

Don't you fucking dare look away.

Are you watching, Uruk?

Of course you are. Your soldiers are beating their spears against their shields in a rhythm as old as the world. They're chanting molon labe! Molon labe! The words don't belong to them. They don't belong to Ushiwakamaru either. But that's not the point.

Are you watching, Ritsuka Fujimaru?

Of course you are. Your eyes are fluttering with tears and your heart is clenching in your chest but you thrust your fist to the sky and you keep it there even when the slap of Gorgon's hurricane wings threatens to toss you away like sticks. You will believe in your heroes until there are no heroes left to believe in and even then.

Are you watching, Gorgon?

Of course you are.

You don't have a fucking choice.

This is Ushiwakamaru, dying:

Her heart is lighter than a feather.

Her blade falls heavier than a mountain.

I don't know why Ushiwakamaru's final stand hits me so hard. But it does. So this is how I feel about it, turned into a story.