day 2: legends / myth
Legends say, in the span of time between dawn and twilight, when the world is still and quiet, the reaper comes. Undead and soulless, she descends in a flurry of pale snow and vicious red, a whisper of sound barely passing through open lips before life is extinguished and the reaper departs. She leaves an imprint: a fatalistic grin carved painfully onto the ground, and when the sun rises, he looks down upon the carnage she leaves, and sighs pitifully.
She stalks the lands, hands seeking emptily for bare warmth. Her skin is cold and her eyes are slitted. Skin as pale as snow, they say. Lips as red as blood, hair as pure as alabaster — and yet, she is no princess, she is no Snow White. When her lips would kiss another's, all life is sucked away in the vortex of passion. She likes to close her eyes here, likes to pretend the arms wrapped around her are a pair of lover's arms. Not merely another victim, not merely another blurred face to add to the ones which haunt her every step.
If she could, she would indulge in this fantasy forever. But her eyes eventually open, and she is greeted with faces of horror, faces of desperation, faces of hatred. Blood drips from her lips, warm and salty —
No. These are tears. She raises her hand and wipes it away. In the eternal moonlight, her skin glistens. She shakes it off, this strange emotion clawing up her chest, and runs off. She wanders again, alone and without destination. The hunger in her stomach unsatiated, she yearns for more.
More flesh? More blood? More, more, more; until her head spins and her heart jumps to her throat and she throws up. More, more, more, and yet her hunger never seems to be fulfilled; an eternal yearning.
And when the sun comes up again the next day, he sighs and shakes his head at the tragedy that the reaper leaves in her wake. Pale lips part and shape around a name, one that has rusted to dust, so unused and forgotten. The sun speaks of a plea, one he prays the winds will carry to her, wherever she may be.
"Hinami, please come back to me."
The winds hear, and yet she does not. Legends say she continues to wander aimlessly, until her hunger is sated, or until the sun catches up to her and pulls her back into his warm embrace.












