Chapter 1: The Priest’s Distraction
The incense was always thickest just before dawn. Noritoshi knelt on the worn floorboards of the main hall, the coarse weave of his hakama biting into his knees. The shōbu incense, sharp and cleansing, coiled in the still air, its smoke catching the low glow of the tōrō lanterns to weave phantom shapes above the altar. He breathed in, held it, let the ritual focus him. His fingers, dry as old parchment, smoothed the sacred symbols on his hachimaki. Silence, deep and granular, filled the shrine.
A floorboard behind him let out a soft, familiar groan.
Noritoshi didn’t open his eyes. “I am in prayer.”
The cold came next. A damp, penetrating chill that seeped through the layers of his ceremonial robes and touched the skin of his lower back. It was always startling, no matter how many times. A shadow fell across his folded hands, not blocking the lantern light, but drinking it, making the world dimmer.
Slender, translucent fingers, pale as moonlight on water, slid over his thighs. They were insubstantial, like being touched by river mist, yet the intent behind them was solid, desperate. The fingers crept beneath the hem of his hakama, tracing a path up the sensitive skin of his inner thighs. The cold was so intense it burned.
Noritoshi’s breath hitched. His eyes flew open.
Kai was there, coiled between his legs like a vapor. The ghost’s dark, vacant eyes were fixed on him, unblinking. The black tear tracks running down his cheeks seemed to bleed into the shadows of the hall. A drop of that strange, sweet-sour liquid welled at the corner of his pale lips, trembled, and fell, vanishing before it hit the floor. His layered kimonos, the burial-white inner layer and the grey outer one with its jagged red ruffles, pooled around him on the ancient wood. The red ribbon on his ankle was a vivid scratch of color in the monochrome gloom.
“Kannushi-sama.”
The word was a breathy sigh, barely more than a shaped exhalation. It held a universe of want.
“Kai,” Noritoshi said, his voice rough. He tried to summon authority, but it was fraying at the edges. “This is not the time. The rituals—”
The ghost’s cold mouth pressed against the linen covering his groin. Noritoshi jerked, a bolt of shocked sensation shooting through him. Through the fabric, he could feel the wetness, the impossible coolness of that tongue. Kai nuzzled him, a slow, needy motion, and Noritoshi felt his own body betraying him, responding to the chill touch with a gathering, heated warmth.
“Stop,” Noritoshi commanded, but it came out strained.
Kai looked up, his hollow eyes wide. A shiver ran through his translucent form. “Kannushi-sama?” This time it was a question, tinged with a whine of confusion and hurt. He didn’t move away. His fingers, which had stilled, curled, their phantom tips applying the faintest, most maddening pressure.
Noritoshi squeezed his eyes shut again, but not in prayer. In frustration. In a kind of angry resignation. This had been the pattern for months now, since the lonely, clinging spirit had first manifested in the shrine’s grounds. A lifetime of discipline, of channelling spiritual energy, had given him the ability to perceive and interact with the dead—a blessing that sometimes felt remarkably like a curse. He could see the loneliness in Kai, a bottomless well of it, and a foolish, soft part of him had offered comfort. A touch on the shoulder. A patient ear for wordless woes. It had been a mistake.
The ghost had attached itself like ivy, interpreting kindness as an invitation for this.
And his body, old but not dead, thrumming with the very energy that made this contact possible, was treasonous. He could feel himself hardening under the ghost’s attention, the fabric of his fundoshi growing taut.
Kai sensed the change immediately. A low, pleased sound vibrated against him. He shifted, the red ruffles of his kimono whispering against the floor, and then Noritoshi felt the dizzying slide of a cold, wet tongue along his length through the linen. The contrast was obscene: the chill of the grave, the heat of his own blood.
“By all the kami,” Noritoshi gasped, his hands flying down to clutch at Kai’s hair. His fingers passed through the dark strands like thick smoke, but the spiritual energy in his grasp gave him purchase, solidifying the sensation. He didn’t know if he meant to push him away or pull him closer.
Kai took it as encouragement. With a devotion that was almost religious, he mouthed at Noritoshi’s cock, his cold lips seeking the skin beneath the cloth. His repeated whisper was a mantra against Noritoshi’s flesh. “Kannushi-sama. Kannushi-sama.”
Each utterance was a different shade of need. A reverent whisper. A hungry plea. A breathy promise.
“You are… impossible,” Noritoshi groaned, the last of his resistance crumbling. The sacred space around them seemed to contract, the incense smoke now feeling like a veil for their profanity. With trembling hands, he fumbled at his own robes, loosening the ties of his hakama and the waistband of his fundoshi. The cool air of the hall hit his exposed skin, followed immediately by the shocking, silken chill of Kai’s mouth.
No breath. No warmth. Just liquid coolness and a relentless, sucking pressure that defied physics. Kai’s vacant eyes were rolled up, watching his face, studying every twitch, every grimace. A strand of that sweet-sour fluid connected Kai’s lips to Noritoshi’s flesh, glistening in the lantern light.
Noritoshi’s head fell back, a strangled curse lost in the high, dark rafters. One hand remained tangled in the ghost’s insubstantial hair, the other braced flat on the groaning floorboard. The pleasure was acute, twisted through with guilt and a profound, unsettling tenderness. This wasn’t desire. It was solace. A broken spirit seeking connection in the only way it remembered how, and a lonely old man, tethered to a forgotten mountain shrine, too weak to refuse the company.
“Is this…” Noritoshi panted, speaking more to himself than to the eager ghost between his legs, “is this all you remember? Is this the only language left to you?”
Kai paused, pulling off with a soft, wet sound. He looked up, his pale face tilted. A fresh black tear traced its path through the dust on his cheek.
“Kannushi-sama,” he whispered, and it was the most heartbreaking iteration yet. Full of a simple, tragic gratitude.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He bowed his head and resumed, with renewed fervor, his strange and silent worship. Noritoshi let him, his protests dying, his body arching into that cold, gifted mouth as the first grey light of dawn began to bleed through the cracks in the old shrine walls.