CURSED TECHNIQUE: SWAN SONG
Finally done with this. The design of the character goes to @/cutiicosmo on twitter. All other graphics drawn by me (one day I'll learn to draw and stop doing mockups), none of this was done with AI.
I hope you guys like it! Tell me what you think down below.
Here is an excerpt from chapter 3, which is from her perspective:
Nakazono Fumi’s bed was a set of blankets laid over a wide, green couch in a small room that opened onto the engawa and garden. Tsuguyo had lit agarwood incense to cover the smell of old fabric and dust, and, as the sliding doors would not close, turned on a squat, monochrome TV to drown out the wind screaming through the branches and the rain slapping against the thatched roof.
The incense had worked. The TV had not. Instead, the droning voices of talk show hosts and detectives on Knight Scoop bled into her dreams. Oddly, though, that did not make them any less strange. On a damp blanket or a featherbed, it seemed, the focus of her dreams was always the same: a spinning golden wheel.
Sometimes it turned against the backdrop of an alley in Adachi. This time, it hung over an endless, depthless void. Into that void, Komioka Ryutaro said, “Art is first-class, popularity is second-class, pay is third-class.” When he finished, seven hands reached out from the black, gripped one of the wheel’s eight prongs, and together, they spun it.
They were different hands from the ones she saw when she slept on Mr. Shigeru’s boat. They were always different hands, if not in appearance than in the way they went about their grabbing and spinning, but the look of them, nor the force with which they pushed mattered. The wheel turned and turned anyway. As it spun, she heard it clink.
That was the worst part of it, the clinking. The sound was from the wheel, definitely, but it was also the sound of a door chain sliding open. That or sliding closed. More times than not, when she was younger and in the custody of her parents, it was the latter she heard. They’d go knocking from apartment to apartment in search of elderly men and anxious housewives to sell their products to. Some days it was cookware and other days it was vacuums or magazines. Once they’d had a stint selling ermines and Nakamori Akina vinyls. No matter what they sold, it seemed, for every ten doors they knocked on which happened to open, nine would shut once her mother or father got to talking, and seven of those nine would be newly locked out of rage or fear.
“We aren’t going to make you buy anything!” She had shouted in response to the sound of the chain jingling against itself. It had been a deadly cold that day, and her breath and tears steamed in the air like dragonsmoke. She would’ve done more than just cry and yell if father hadn’t put his hand on her shoulder.
“It’s fair,” he had told her, as the first flakes of snow fell to melt on his thin glasses, “they want their money as much as we do. They worked for it. They need to work for your tears too. Clean your face.” Then he used his big, rough hands to shake her. “Be strong.”
Fumi saw herself in the amber gleam of the lone, untouched prong. Be strong, she thought.
Somehow, she knew the hands which held the wheel had been strong.
But she was not them, and they were not her. Then she blew a raspberry, childishly, and walked away.
Sometime after that, she stopped dreaming.