Chapter Text
Grimmjow spots the white fox amongst dry brush.
Foxes have not always been an uncommon sight in these lands. They had once been a frequent nuisance in the chicken pens, but a hunting campaign has curbed their numbers since before Grimmjow was born. Nowadays, they are wise to most traps and do not venture close to town.
Most foxes are red or brown, and their thick winter coats fetch a lovely sum at the market when Grimmjow is lucky enough to catch one.
This one is white like new snow, but it is the thick of spring now and its fur stands out against forest brown and green. It stands on slender legs and the sun sinks at its back. For a moment, it is as if Grimmjow has fallen asleep and risen again only in spirit.
The old folk believe white beasts which should not be white are spirits. Grimmjow believes this beast’s pelt will be a fetching prize to hang on his wall or to sell at market. His heart beats quicker in place of breaths he dares not take. He reaches slowly behind his back for an arrow.
The fox stops and stares at him back. There are prayers one says when encountering a white fox, if you are a person who seeks favor from spirits.
Húli jīng, húli jīng, don your human skins and come you to earthen shrines.
Its eyes are gold and black. It smiles at Grimmjow—laughing, mercy-sung—and then it is gone.
Húli jīng, húli jīng, fit you a man’s skull and lay you sun-drunk in peaches and wine.
...
Grimmjow expects not to see the white fox again. Foxes are twice shy once seen, and they do not frequent again the same places where they have crossed man’s path. A white fox must be doubly cautious, for its striking pelt marks it too stark against the landscape, and this one does not survive to adulthood by being foolish.
Spring stretches on. Grimmjow flies his arrows, collects his kills, and sells the pelts and meat. He does not forget the white fox, but it slips to the back of his mind and rests there.
And then one day at the cusp of dawn, as he lays in wait with his arrow aimed at a pheasant, something white blurs in from the left and the bird vanishes in a collision of fur and feathers.
The white fox rises from the grass with Grimmjow’s prize hanging limp from its jaws, and it looks in his direction and smiles around a mouthful of bird.
Grimmjow changes his mind. He wants that white pelt hanging above his hearth. He aims the arrow again, but the white fox is already on its way.
It is not alone.
Another fox runs behind, chases its tail, and nips at its kill. This one is inky black from nose to tail like the graceful stroke of a brush pen. Grimmjow forgets he means to kill them. He watches them go, his bow relaxes, and the foxes disappear gekkering into the forest.
...
The foxes are seldom seen one without the other.
These two are strange. Foxes are solitary, and Grimmjow has never seen two together that are not mother and kit. He has certainly never seen two together that are each so striking alone.
They are wary but do not fear him. If they so wished, they might disappear into the deep woods and elude Grimmjow forevermore, but they do not. When Grimmjow enters the woods to hunt, he no longer walks alone. His steps are haunted, and the ghosts gekker and bark at each other and at him.
They are like mist and shadow. One moment there, the next gone as if they never were. He learns to expect them: movement in the corner of his eye, flashes of white and black ahead or to the side.
He loses prey to them more than once, usually to the white fox, though the black snags a rabbit once just as Grimmjow looses his arrow. The arrow digs uselessly into the dirt and the fox laughs as it makes off with its prize. Grimmjow retrieves his arrow, returning it to his quiver.
The black pelt will look fantastic next to the white above his hearth.
Stealing his prey is hardly the end of it.
Tree roots rise from the ground to trip his feet and branches swat his face when he does not look. When he kneels to drink from a stream, a shining carp leaps from the water and splashes his face and chest with cold water. He curses at the trees, the water, and every forest spirit who dwells here as he washes river grit from his hair.
The foxes are to blame. He does not know how, or why, or when they chose him for their mischief, but their barking laughter echoes in the wind as Grimmjow shivers in his soaked clothes.
Troublesome, annoying, vicious little beasts. Perhaps when he catches them, he will peel off their hides while they still breathe.
They do not let him catch them. They grow bolder.
They begin to linger in the corners of his vision, staying put for moments long enough to see their gold eyes and smiling faces but never long enough to notch an arrow to his bow. They venture closer; on nights when he sleeps in the forest, he wakes to laughter close to his ears, the brush of a tail against his ankle, paw prints near his head. He finds his food pilfered and his bag stinking of fox urine. Grimmjow scowls, curses at the long-departed culprits, and washes the bag in the river. Fanciful thoughts of vengeance dance about in his head.
Perhaps he will not kill them after all. It may be more amusing to trap them alive and keep them collared and leashed. He can piss on them in return.
The bag still stinks when he takes it home.
...
Grimmjow’s legs are bruised all up and down the shins from how many times he has tripped or fallen over wayward tree roots and stumps that rise up from the earth where they were not before. One day he checks his traps and they have all been sprung with nothing inside them. He finally gets the stink out of his bag, but the next day he leaves it unattended while he cleans a kill and it reeks like fresh fox piss again. He rescues its contents and abandons the bag in the forest. The foxes can have it, the wretched little monsters.
His resolve hardens.
He no longer cares about pelts or coin. He will catch these heaven-forsaken little fucks and string them up by their tails. Grimmjow does not care to torment helpless animals he hunts, but these foxes are far from helpless, so he will certainly torment them in return for the torment they have heaped on him.
He sits outside his house, hands occupied in the tedious work of cleaning hides and curing meat, mind occupied in the more pleasant task of imagining what he will do with his tormentors once he catches them. He imagines the still-warm body he is gutting to be not a rabbit but the white fox who stole his dinner on his last hunting trip. He pretends the blood congealing under his boot comes from the black fox who nipped him awake and left the mark of its teeth in his ankle.
He can almost hear its cries, for once not laughing but high and afraid.
He does hear its cries.
Grimmjow looks up, and the black fox stands at the edge of his property, half hidden among the tall wild grasses. Its gold eyes are on him. It opens its mouth and a high, yipping cry jolts Grimmjow from his seat.
What is it doing here?
His house lies on the periphery of the town such that just beyond his small, unkempt garden are the woods. Even so, the foxes have never ventured so close to town before. How does it know where he lives? Has it come to torment Grimmjow more in his own home?
Grimmjow throws down the rabbit and hefts his gutting knife.
“Mongrel,” he snarls beneath his breath. “Come here, you miserable cursed fuck!”
He snatches up his bow and arrows, and the fox darts away as he comes at it. But it does not disappear into the trees like usual, just runs far enough that he cannot get a good shot at it, stops, and cries at him again. It does this again and again and Grimmjow is half a mile into the woods before he realizes what is happening.
Stopping short, he watches the fox stop as well before turning back to look at him and cry. It blends in with the forest floor, but it watches him as he watches it.
It leads him somewhere.
At the edge of the woods stands a wood marker struck deep into the earth. It is old, worn smooth by many years of rain and sun and wind. Grimmjow passes it every time he enters the wilds, and he knows by heart what it says. But this time, the words carved down its length echo in his mind.
Keep no secrets from these trees
Show us the depth of your terror
And let us in
It is an old warning, begging caution in entering the deep wilds. For beyond the known world of man-built towns and traveled roads live old magic and spirits bound by neither laws nor morals. There are many such markers in these lands placed at the edges of wild places, but Grimmjow has never paid them mind before. Now a trickster fox leads him forward, and he pauses.
The fox cries at him again, plaintive and high-pitched like an infant’s cry. He is used to gekkering and laughter as they play tricks on him; this sound is not one he has heard before.
It is still a trick, but an obvious one. He will probably end up in a gully or dumped into the river again if he continues following the fox. But he is curious.
The fox comes closer, crying at him again, and Grimmjow scowls at it, brandishes his bow and arrow. “I will skin you for sure if this is yet another trick,” he tells it.
It does not laugh at him, does not even grin, just yips and trots a little ways off before stopping and looking back at him.
Grimmjow shakes his head. “More fool me,” he mutters and follows.
...
He does end up in a gully, as it turns out, with the black fox yipping and darting around a tumble of rocks. As Grimmjow follows, slower as he makes sure of his footing, he hears an answering call. The white fox.
Both foxes look at him when he makes it over the rocks and it is the first time he has seen them so still or so close. His hand clenches on the grip of his bow, his fingers itch to pull out an arrow. They are close enough that there is no way he would miss, a clean shot on both of them.
The black fox is quiet now, but the white one picks up the slack, gekkering at him, ears pinned back. But it does not move away, huddled in a gap between rock and embankment.
It cannot move. Gossamer-thin lines of red wrap around and through the white fur, anchored to the rock, to a tree at the top of the embankment, and the fox is tangled in them. A trap, but not a hunting snare. Not a trap that Grimmjow would use. This is a cultivator’s trap, meant to hold malevolent spirits and demons in place until they can be eradicated or cleansed.
Grimmjow walks closer. The fox is taut, front legs pulled one way, hind legs pulled another. The web of red threads entangles every limb and neck and tail, and blood stains the white fur wherever they wind. The threads are glossy and translucent like spider silk. The air hums around them, and the hair on Grimmjow’s arms and neck stand as though touched by static. Paper talismans are stuck to the rocks and trees around them, and they are written with words of protection and binding.
The white fox turns strange black-and-gold eyes to him, and it bares its teeth at Grimmjow and barks.
Grimmjow smirks. “You are in no place to be spitting insults.” He takes another look and tilts his head. “So you are a boy. Is that one there—” Grimmjow jerks his head at the black fox. “—your bitch then?”
The white fox narrows its eyes but can do nothing. Grimmjow half expects sharp teeth sinking into his leg as retribution, but the black fox only trots back and forth around the trap, burning enough restless energy for the both of them. Grimmjow watches them.
The white one is still, immobilized by a thousand threads of binding red. The black one circles relentlessly.
One breathes in. The other breaths out. One is silent, and the other speaks in angry fox noises. In, out. Silence and sound.
Movement and stillness.
Grimmjow is almost in a trance, and for a moment he feels as though detached from his body watching these two foxes breathing, speaking, living in tandem.
He can kill them both. He can slay the white one with his bare hands, snap its slender little neck like a dry twig. He can shoot the black one with an arrow or impale it on his knife, gut it open as he had fantasized. He can be rid of them both and free from their torments.
His hands weigh like stones when he reaches for his weapons. He wants to wet them in their freshly gutted corpses.
But not like this.
Not helpless and spread belly-up in some other man’s trap. A cultivator’s trap, the tool of a person who uses the mystic arts to hunt down things whose nature offends him. Grimmjow knows why this trap had been set. The towns around these old forests fear the spirits and ghosts who dwell here. There have always been stories of animals who transcend basic instinct by cultivating qì, and those who do so by wicked means.
Húli jīng are the most well-known of these, and the most gifted among them can take the shapes of beautiful young women. The old stories say a fox who finds a well-fitting human skull gains the power to change its shape.
There are many people who have gone missing in the woods, and their corpses are found without heads. It is the sort of thing cultivators are often called upon to aid with.
But it does not offend Grimmjow. To the strongest go the spoils of life and power. It is the way of the world, and what effort is spent fighting this simple truth is better spent strengthening the body and mind. He dares enter the wilds when other men cower, because if he is to be killed by a stronger creature, then it is a death deserved.
This pair of foxes is no exception. Had he caught them himself, trapped them in a snare or finally brought them low with an arrow, he would have done so without hesitation. But this…this is not strength as nature decrees it. It feels like cheating.
Grimmjow glances between the foxes—black and white and only the gold of their eyes shared between them—and the red strands, the talismans. His hand tightens around the hilt of his knife.
The white fox does not flinch when Grimmjow steps in close, knife raised. It watches him with steady eyes, as if daring him to take advantage.
“I must be mad,” he mutters to himself, but his hand is steady when he makes the cut.
The threads part like spider silk and fade into nothing. The white fox slumps against the rock, and all three of them are still for a moment: Grimmjow with his knife held out, blade bare inches from the snow white pelt, the white fox staring right at him, eyes luminous in the fading light, the black fox an inky patch of shadow just above.
Then the foxes burst into motion, moving in tandem as they leap up to the edge of the gully, barking back and forth. At the top, they curl into and around each other, a flowing pattern of black-white-black-white until they separate again, looking down at Grimmjow. The black fox barks at him, the white now silent. Grimmjow holsters his knife again and wonders if he will regret this decision come morning.
The fox barks again, this time at the talismans and the remnants of the red thread trap. Each piece of paper bursts into blue fire and burns into small streaks of ash. The fox grins down at Grimmjow.
And then, between one blink and the next, they are gone in an echo of laughter.