It was in the depths of winter when the decree came to the Abbess Seinyo that she was to be exiled. The wording of the decree was not so exact, but the meaning was clear as day to Seinyo. The blood of sacred emperors and mighty lords flowed in her veins, and she was not naive of political matters and the polite couching of unpleasant realities.
Seinyo had always lived up to her lineage, even after she had willingly taken the tonsure of a nun and devoted her life to the propagation of the Dharma truths and the upholding of the Court and Empire through strenuous prayers. She had been appointed as Abbess of the wealthiest monastery in the Empire and, despite never visiting her temple directly, she had enjoyed the fruits of the world for many a year. But more vital and vigorous than the luxury had been the power and influence she had wielded. Ministers had risen and fallen at her command, love rivals banished to distant isles to die alone and forgotten, and her own name enhanced by the desire of poets and artists for her patronage.
But this decree removed her from her exalted position, and allowed her the “opportunity” to establish a nunnery in the far east, where unlettered barbarians and fearful peasants still dwelt knowing nothing of the truth of karma and the cycle of rebirth. It was an insult to her stature, of course, and over the weeks she did her best to discern the will of Lord Shakyamuni in this seemingly desperate situation.
It came to her suddenly, reading poetry from the continent. Her enemies thought this would be Seinyo’s downfall, but they truly had given her an opportunity! To go out into the world and teach the vanity of things, of the sources of suffering and how they could be defeated – she would win a thousand new worshipers for Lord Shakyamuni by her efforts! And when the Enlightened One saw what Seinyo had done for him, he would reward her and bring her back to the capital, sending her foes scuttling to the dark corners like the insects and lesser beasts they would surely reincarnate as.
Seinyo left the capital at the height of the cherry blossoms blooming, unable to delay her departure any longer. She was given a wonderful send-off, with dozens of courtiers, princes, and monks competing in games of poetry to honor Seinyo's devotion to the Enlightened One. And yet not a man or woman among the throng was truly sad to see the overweening Abbess's back. Her time as the center of courtly intrigue had seen too many jilted lovers and betrayed friendships for anyone to feel regret at the departure of the former-princess.
Once, Seinyo had been the most beautiful woman in the capital – one whose mere gaze could excite a man to the heights of passion. Rumors of her skills in the arts of coupling, learned from secret books from far-away lands, had given her a constant stream of suitors to use as she wished. But new beauties had risen at court, just as new shoots invariably followed the winter. The metaphors used in the poems were not lost on Seinyo, and in her heart she prepared for the day she'd return and set all the gossips and sluts to flight.
The journey to the east took weeks of exhausting travel over awful roads. In their palanquins, Seinyo and the few servants and followers who had chosen to come with her were buffeted by the winds, scorched by the sun, drenched by the rain. Even the mighty and inspiring peak the barbarians called the Fire Mountain, with its top covered in snow, did little to cheer the party, and though they passed it in a few days, it remained in sight behind them for a long while after. Their fine gowns torn by branches and thorns in myriad places, their hair tangled messes, it was with heavy hearts that they arrived at the under-governor’s mansion, a small thing that in the capital would have barely suited a minor salt merchant.
Seinyo, however, said nothing that spoke of how she felt, whether it was anger, or despair, or melancholy at the ruin of the fine things she had brought. When she finally stepped out of her palanquin in the mighty eastern plain, stretching out wider than she had ever thought possible, she saw in the distance a singular mountain with double peaks. As the under-governor welcomed her and her entourage with all the pomp and circumstance he could muster, Seinyo found her gaze falling onto that distant peak, a blue haze between herself and it.
“What is that peak, far off and alone?” she asked him, pointing out through the open doors of the meeting hall the group was in.
“It is the mountain called Chikuha,” the under-governor responded, “some say it is where the ancient deities Izanagi and Izanami came to the world, laid with each other as man and wife, and gave birth to the race of gods and men.”
The rest of the welcoming ceremony held little interest for Seinyo, but when the official asked Seinyo where she desired her nunnery to be established, she pointed to the distant peak. “At the foot of that holy mountain we shall stay.”
Her decision perturbed the official, and made some of the servants draw in their breath.
“There are few villages near there…” the under-governor tried to explain, “It will be very difficult to supply you with food and other necessary goods… and the land is dangerous. Many thieves and brigands live in the forests, by birth both barbarian and subject, and they are cruel villains. Many animals are stolen, and some men who search for them never come back.” The man’s long mustache twitched as he spoke.
Seinyo was no stranger to lies, and she knew that the under-governor was lying to her. But why he was lying she knew not. “I have not come to live in luxury. I have come to demonstrate by our austerities the superiority of the Noble Truths. Those deities too who laid there were subject to karma.”
Her decision final, Seinyo fought the smile wanting to come on her face as she heard the servants behind the doors whisper to each other urgently in their tongue. She may not have been in the capital anymore, but she refused to be diminished.
Soon after, the under-governor had constructed a nunnery for Seinyo near the foot of the mountain, with several villages nearby assigned to it for taxation and the corvee. The peasants, both the rough, hairy type who had always lived here, and the new arrivals from the west, greeted the arrival of Seinyo and her nuns with sullen-eyed silence. They listened to the under-governor’s proclamation of the nunnery’s inviolability and importance mostly with dread for the added work they’d be forced to do.
They had no need for foreign deities, especially one so silly-looking as the Buddha. The statue of Shakyamuni that the nuns had brought from the capital was only slightly larger than life, with an expression as wooden as the material it was made of, one hand raised in blessing and the other reaching out. In the dedication ritual, one of the twelve nuns dropped a bell, a mistake that would have forced the entire ritual to be redone in the capital, but out here was met only with snickers from the few chiefs attending who weren't asleep. It was a bad omen for Seinyo's mission.
For months there was nothing. No flocks of people begging to learn the noble truths, no mass ceremonies of ordination, no great donations of gold or land or even cloth. Seinyo's nuns, instead of having servants mend their robes, had to patch them themselves, a task none of them were very good at. When the first winter hit, the nuns came close to freezing to death as the weight of snow was beyond any of their imaginations. Only the timely arrival of the under-governor's men with a gift from the official and his superior (who resided in the capital) brought the women out of their certain tomb to a warmer hall until the blizzards passed.
Sitting next to a coal-filled brazier, her hand only slowly and stiffly writing a sutra, Seinyo burned with humiliation. Seeing her alone, a young man, the under-governor’s secretary, came and sat by Seinyo. When he saw the look on her face, he guessed what was going through the older woman’s mind.
“You wonder why they ignore you, don’t you?” he asked, and when Seinyo’s hand stopped mid-stroke he knew he had hit the target.
“The people of this country only believe in power they can sense or feel,” he said. “Whether it is a spear in hand, or a fierce mountain wind, or the great bear that hunts his own hunters in the forest, the people here must experience power first-hand.”
“They have no spiritual sense?” Seinyo asked.
“They do, but it is grounded. They have no use for intellectual strength. The hairy men are great individual fighters because of it, but they lack strategies.”
“Do they honor the mountain?”
“That is a harder question. I do not know if they fear it or worship it. We say the gods Izanami and Izanagi coupled there, but if that is why I honor the peak, it is not why my servants do. Sometimes they tell of wolf tracks larger than a bear’s. I think it is fear, but it is a sacred one.”
When the snows passed, Seinyo took the words to heart. She invited chieftains to the nunnery to be blessed with protection by the Buddha, and she actually got two to show up and be impressed with the mandala-drawing ceremony, even if they couldn't understand the sutra readings. That both of them also looked on her with lascivious eyes gave Seinyo an awful idea, and in further communications with them she always made sure to send a nun along with the message bearer, to remind the men that physical beauty and spiritual beauty went together in equal measure.
There was no change overnight, but eventually there were more visitors to the nunnery than just the under-governor's men. Long-whiskered men who saw the Buddha as just one more god to appease came with their little offerings and went home, satisfied that they'd done their part to forestall a curse on their home. Women, hoping for easy childbirth and strong sons also came, and Seinyo and her nuns eventually no longer had to repair their own robes. The rough fare of the country too, came to accrue a certain appeal to Seinyo's palate. With the arrival of summer, even the mood of the nuns seemed to have changed – no more were errant tears shed on their robes when they thought the Abbess wasn't paying attention.
And yet another year passed.
Seinyo, taking the liberty of having the under-governor's secretary as a lover, couldn't help but feel smaller, feel less grand than she used to. She allowed him to meet her at an abandoned shack near a bridge, and that night he proved why he was only the secretary. He had no knowledge of the classics of seduction, and her literary allusions did nothing for him. There was no repartee, no games between the two. He had been completely surprised at the thought of a nun indulging in the pleasures of the body, but the opportunity to bed a woman from the capital had been too good to pass up for religious discomfort.
He kissed her neck, promising her nunnery ever greater gifts from the governor's resources. She let him grope her well-developed body through her black robes, his hands fixating on her hips, his rough fingers scratching the exposed patches of her still-smooth skin. He pushed back her white hood, and nibbled on her ear.
Although Seinyo was sure the promise of gifts was only half-true, it was not the unintentional deception that made her uncomfortable. She was self-conscious. Once she'd been the beauty of the capital, willow-thin and able to verbally fence with ministers of state 40 years older than her. But now she was most charitably described as plump, with her large breasts sagging and her belly large enough to squeeze. Crow’s feet radiated from the corners of her eyes, and her lips were no longer as delicate as they had been in the past. No fine paint could conceal that age was leaving its marks on her. Perhaps she should have been happy – she had a younger man burying his fingers between her legs, his rush to couple with her utterly apparent despite her age – and yet it still felt to her like she deserved more.
She missed the artistry of seduction, how the nobles of the capital would woo her with calligraphy and subtle messages. All for even just a single, breathless kiss! But the secretary wouldn't settle for those intellectual and spiritual pursuits. What he knew of the dalliances of the capital was purely carnal in nature, the giggled rumors brought across the breadth of the country, the truth losing details all the way. To be allowed an echo of that experience from Seinyo was nothing short of incredible for a young man like him, and his desires were hotter than the humid summer air.
With the sound of snorting horses not far outside, Seinyo lay on her back as the secretary fondled at her breasts. He kissed her lips, her nose, her jaw, all in a haphazard fashion, totally unskillfully. Seinyo could already feel the straining of his organ in his pants, and wondered if he’d shoot off before even feeling the folds of her tunnel enclose him. When he reached for the cloth belt holding her robes closed, he was so determined to undress her that when he couldn’t figure out how to untie it, he almost tore it apart completely, before Seinyo was able to untie it for him. She wanted to let the robe fall off slowly, but the secretary had no time for that.
Almost tripping over his pants as he pulled them down, the secretary pushed Seinyo’s legs apart, and shoved his length into her wet hole. Their sweaty bodies merged together, her upper and lower mouths equally occupied. He was not lacking in endurance in the natural act, but he was unlearned in the particular techniques of the capital. When he came, the hot slap of his ejaculation went deep into her. But he had hardly satisfied her.
Despite his lack of skill, Seinyo was not entirely unkind to the secretary. She even gave him a glimpse of the techniques she had learned from the exotic manuals, and in those two positions had felt his body totally at her mercy. She praised him for his facility in love-making once they were done, trying to dry themselves with rags. It did not hurt him in Seinyo's estimation that he gave her a direct line to the under-governor, whom she might call upon for favors.
Seinyo quickly began accruing favors among the people of note among this desolate countryside, but she was intelligent on how to spend them. As difficult as it was to live in the rough country, with the only music in the evening being the lonely wind across the great plain, Seinyo did what she could to inure herself. Yes, she thought, she could build her power up here. She could wait out her exile, until a new Emperor ascended the throne, until those who’d conspired against her went to the hells of Horse-Face and Ox-Head, and the capital begged to have her back.
Until then, she would impress the rubes with her position as unofficial tutor of the Capital's ways. Not a small number of men were beginning to ask Seinyo and her nuns to teach their daughters the finer points of culture and literature. Even the young men, desperate to have a leg up on their rivals for any chance to be sent to the Capital and make a good name for themselves, asked to be tutored. Seinyo doled out teachings in sutras, literature, and, occasionally, in the proper use of love.
That last though, she doled out only to those who gave much and promised more. And each time, she felt a little enlarged, a little stronger. Sometimes she heard the younger nuns whisper that a woman her age shouldn't be encouraging young suitors, but she paid them no mind. She paid even less mind to the peasant women who were shocked that a holy woman might have men in her bed chambers. If it helped propagate the Dharma, wasn't it worth it? Anything that empowered her only strengthened the teachings of the Maitreya, for only because of the Buddha did she have her influence.
It was that autumn, as she hosted a moon-viewing party for the notables of the region, that Seinyo began to feel like she could really turn things around. As she reclined behind a folding screen with the other women, passing notes through the screen by servants to the government officials and influential men of the province, she felt a hint of her old power returning. She could feel the men waiting for her notes to pass through, with her quotations they couldn't recognize but pretended to anyway. She let the others compose poems in the rude, untutored way of the provinces, and she made sure that hers in response were intricate and cultured. Everything went according to her will, the conversation flowing this way and that, her opinions shaping others without them even noticing it.
Until the wolf howl came over the trees.
It wasn't the first one Seinyo had heard. She'd heard a number of them, deep in the forests on Mt. Chikuha, but this was different. Those howls had been distant, kept at bay by her walls. This one seemed to cut through the paper doors, and everyone shivered. The howl was the antithesis of her gathering. Where Seinyo and others were using the moon as a jumping-off point for their own games, the howl was addressed to the moon directly. With her brush in hand, Seinyo stopped when she heard it, and the dripping ink had ruined the paper she was writing her poem on. As the howl died off in the wind, she found she was shaking, her heartbeat pounding in her chest.
She tried to keep going as before, but something had changed in the atmosphere of the party with the rude intrusion. Seinyo's control over the party melted away as smoke in a breeze, and she felt each individual in the gathering turn back to their own concerns. The men talked only of hunting the wolves, and how impossible it was to get the peasants to stop worshiping them. Someone mentioned that it seemed foolish to have a nunnery so far from any of the walled government buildings, an insult that Seinyo told herself she'd have to pay back.
In the aftermath, Seinyo locked herself in her quarters for two days. She’d been humiliated by the howling beast. It seemed ridiculous, but were not beasts just evil beings reincarnated into lower forms? Why wouldn't they hate the truth of karma that had brought them to their current state? Why wouldn’t they do what they could to sabotage her attempts to strengthen her influence? She knew now she’d been both foolish and perceptive – foolish to think the Buddha would have no enemies out here, but perceptive in knowing that it had been the Maitreya who had guided her to place this nunnery here, in the midst of his foes. Was this war not even more important than the wars the court fought with the hairy barbarians?
A descendant of generals and subduers of countries, Seinyo knew she could quell these beasts with the Matreiya’s weapons. And she would march back to the Capital with all the glories of her conquest!
First, though, she needed to learn about her enemies, the wolves. She sent bonded peasants into the surrounding country to follow up every sighting and rumor. They found tracks, of course, and bloodied remains of wild boars and other animals. But the wolves were a cunning race, their lairs hidden in primordial forests, their hatred of bow and arrow teaching them the necessities of stealth and speed. Even in the depths of winter though, they left signs of their presence.
The searchers, for their part, were entirely in the dark about the abbess’ intentions, and so were not as diligent as they could have been. Weeks passed, and again and again small groups of men pressed their heads against the ground in front of Seinyo and regretfully informed her they could not find what she wanted. Feeling each empty day slip away, never to return to her, Seinyo’s anger at the wolves began to curdle into something far more bitter, and began to touch everyone and everything around her.
Things came to a head as she screamed at a group of locals in frustration for their continued failure.
“Layabouts! Scoundrels! Traitors to the Buddha! Traitors to the Emperor! Do you think you can ignore my orders?! Do you not think I can’t tell what you’ve been doing?!” The abbess’ voice thundered through the entirety of the nunnery, and the other nuns tried to ignore it as best they could. “Find the wolves! Find where they live! If you don’t, your taxes will be taken twice in a year! Three times! Until you have nothing left and you and your children starve! Do you understand me?”
The searchers left, terrified of the implications. But what did she even want from the wolves?
The Abbess made a fateful decision. She offered a bounty on any dead wolf brought to the nunnery. When it was translated for the people around the nunnery, it was met with a reaction that even Seinyo could tell was bad. The small groups of people who had been making a habit of coming to sutra readings stopped coming. Gifts began to dry up. The nuns began to mutter about going to the under-governor and asking him to take custody of the institution away from Seinyo.
But on the first day of the spring melt, a hunter arrived with what Seinyo wanted.
Rushing out of a mandala drawing at the news, Seinyo was amazed at the sight that greeted her. The hunter was an older man, missing several teeth, and clearly he'd been in his share of brawls and scraps, whether with other people or animals. But Seinyo paid him no mind. With her hands on the doors she'd thrown open, she stared at the dead wolf next to the hunter. Gray and white, the fur on its neck stained with its lifeblood, it lay on a wooden sled, utterly lifeless. Seinyo gloated at the sight, and her reaction was noted with worry by the other nuns.
There, powerless, lay the solution to her troubles. The rubes of the countryside would worship these beasts, would they? Worship brutish animals rather than the incomparable beauties of the Dharma? People did not respect her power? She would show them what they worshiped, and how her power, even made small here as it was, was enough to destroy these "sacred" beasts.
The wolf corpse was paraded between the nearby villages. Seinyo read out long sutras that no one except her and her attending nun understood. The people stood in worried silence as she spoke. They wondered what this would mean for them, and if they would be punished along with the insane woman.
"Look at this beast!" Seinyo shouted, pointing at it. "It has nothing in it! It is dust! There is no power in it you must respect!" Servants translated what she said into the language of the people, and Seinyo heard them groan.
To lose livestock to the wolves was the way of life. Sometimes the wolf took your last ox, and you prayed that you survived the loss. Sometimes you caught the thief, and blood was spilled, but you still left the corpse for its family to take. But every hamlet that heard Seinyo’s rants knew this was wrong, and that divinity was being mocked. That each time she spoke her sutras a wild howl came from the distance was proof enough that she was courting doom.
That each howl made Seinyo tremble was just another humiliation that she burned to repay.
A few more wolves were killed, but they were left in the middle of the night as secretly as possible, as no one wanted to be painted as helping the mad woman, even if her coins and gifts were good.
Even more donations to the monastery dried up, as peasants did what they could to stay away from the obviously cursed women. With men refusing to do their corvee, the roof began to leak. It took Seinyo shrieking at the secretary to get soldiers to round up anyone they could grab to do repair work on the monastery.
When Seinyo saw the disgruntled look in the peasants’ eyes reflected in the secretary’s own face, it only made her more angry at the wolves. They were taking her power from her! They were fighting back against her because they knew she could defeat them! When he left, grumbling about how her body was flabby and useless, Seinyo knew she would only be able to rely on the Maitreya now.
But she knew she could win this war. She would defeat the cursed divinities of this land with Maitreya watching, and he would bless her with all the good things promised to a believer as firm as her!
As the cherry blossoms bloomed, Seinyo announced her plan to the obviously unimpressed nuns. “I will ascend Mt. Chikuha,” she said, seated before the statue of the Buddha, “and on that sacred mount, I will perform the great austerities. I will purify this land of the karma that has festered for so long, untouched by the Enlightened One’s teachings! It is my mission to ensure that no longer will unclean beasts be accorded honor. If the people of this land are clouded in superstition, then the deities of water and soil themselves must be made to submit to the Four Truths, and pray that they too can escape the awful cycle of desire and rebirth.”
The nuns muttered among themselves, and gave a few concerned warnings and alternatives. But Seinyo would not be deterred from her strategy.
The abbess performed several esoteric rituals in the nunnery, asking for the aid of all the guardian deities of the Buddha to defend her as they had him. She gathered what supplies of candles, ink and paper, and books of poetry she thought she’d need. She also packed some sutra scrolls, and then, at the last moment, decided to bring the wooden statue of the Maitreya. The heavenly scent of the wood it was made from could deter demons, let alone simple dogs..
The men who had to carry everything up the mountain struggled mightily with the added burden, but Seinyo herself found the climb up the mountain bracing and exciting. It was so different from what she’d had to do in the Capital, where the most exertion she’d have was an exciting night of love-play, but this would be a wonderful chapter in the story of her return to glory.
Scrambling up the primeval slope, ancient trees who had begun growing long before men were first born surrounded the small troop. But after the first hour, the novelty of the situation began to wear for Seinyo. A third of the way up the slope and another hour later, and she was a sweaty mess, panting and grasping onto the shoulder of the man next to her to keep herself upright. She had to stop constantly, which made the men carrying the statue have to keep putting it down and picking it back up, their grumbling louder and more annoyed each time.
Eventually, Seinyo’s age and inexperience limiting the speed of the ascent dramatically, they reached the place that Seinyo had decreed for her meditations. The people of the province called it the cave of the mother’s womb, and the people from the capital said it was where Izanami and Izanagi had conceived humanity. Seinyo knew it was the place where her greatest victory would be achieved.
It was a half-dome cave formed from the conjunction of two giant boulders, one providing the floor, raised a shaku from the surrounding dirt and mud, and the other providing a high and curving roof, giving more than enough space for Seinyo to have all her accoutrements laid out with space to spare. Her bedding was put down deep in the cave so that wind and rain would not soil it. The open half faced south, and through the trees, she could see the vast plain spreading beneath the mountain, with all thin snaking trails of smoke rising from the humble buildings scattered between the still-brown fields.
It was all so rude and uncultured for Seinyo, but they would see the light soon enough. With her prayers and spiritual power, all would fall to their knees in worship of the bodhisattva that taught them such necessary truths of desire and karma. Maitreya’s statue was put up on the eastern side of the cave facing west, that his influence might be spread by the rising sun and enlighten Seinyo’s enemies in the Capital of their misdeeds.
With all their burdens unloaded, Seinyo bade most of the sullen men to leave her, with only two manservants with sticks to keep rude beasts away. But she was very clear that those going back down were not to forget to bring her water every day, or their children would be taken as slaves and sent far, far away.
As most of the troop left, Seinyo quickly unrolled the Golden Light sutra, and began reciting it loudly. It would not do for them to think she was lacking in fervor and determination. She continued reading it for half an hour, her voice carried over the treetops and disturbing the birds, the characters moving along one after the other in a sonorous flow, until her throat began to hurt and she stopped. She could not hear anything from the men who’d accompanied her up, and she had to fight the urge to look to make sure they were still there nearby. It would not do to show timidity with these half-barbarian servants.
The afternoon sun dropped towards the great Fire Mountain in the far distance, its sides still glittering white with snow. Seinyo spent the time reading poems of the continent. They spoke of Mt. Penglai, of the homes of the Immortals, of islands in the sea where dragons ruled. She knew them all by heart, but they still touched her with their emotions. She wished she could speak of the feelings the poems brought up in her with someone, anyone. But the two servants who’d stayed with her were only talking quietly to each other of nothing more than plants, and she knew that they would have no appreciation for the rarefied classics.
When they placed her meal in front of her, assembled as she’d demanded, Seinyo took a few bites of the pickled vegetables and miso and fought down her distaste at the utter lack of flavor, even worse than the fare she’d gotten used to in the nunnery here. Of course she was here to follow the monastic precepts of austerity, but this seemed excessive. Was this what people here ate all the time? She found that too incredible to believe. At least she had rice, while they had to subsist on buckwheat.
As the moon rose, Seinyo went back to the Golden Light sutra and started where she’d left off. She listened to her voice drift over the trees, carried by the chilly spring winds, and felt like the whole world was listening to her. She spoke the words, but she didn’t really quite understand exactly what they meant – it was all very abstruse, and the monks who’d tried to explain the finer aspects to her in the Capital had never gotten all the details to stick in her mind. So her mind wandered, even as she read.
She imagined her words rising up on the smoke from the candles next to her, to drift among the multitudes of lotus paradises, a hundred billion on every fingertip of the Buddha, where he would happily lead her to in payment for this powerful exertion on her part. The men even quieted down while she chanted, and she knew that they would be impressed by her work here, as everyone would.
But as she read line after line, she could hear their voices come back. A short, strangled laugh from one of them, and Seinyo had to bite her tongue. She was chanting words of heaven-shattering importance! Didn’t they know how to behave themselves?! She ignored one laugh, but the second one she could not abide.
“Silence, pigs!” she barked from her place in the cave. “Do you have no respect for my work here, for the great deeds I am performing for your sake?! Be silent and listen to your better!”
At that moment, a wolf howl came flying over the treetops. It came from far away, clear and potent. Seinyo froze in her tirade, shivering even in her warm robe. The men were deathly quiet, only the sound of the fire cooking their dinner filling the void.
Seinyo blinked, and shook her head. Her attack had made a hit! What was that howl but the cry of an enemy pricked by a weapon he had never before imagined? She knew now that some demon of the air had carried that howl to her cave, to frighten her into silence. Well, she would not be frightened! Licking her lips, Seinyo started chanting again, loudly. It took the men some time, but they too found their courage and began talking again, quieter this time. The wolf was far away and they had fire and sticks. They knew the wolf was as afraid of you as you were of him.
That night, Seinyo dreamed of ascending the mountain of the sages, and participating in all the good things of civilization – the games, the music, the races, the companionship, the flattery. When she awoke in the cold morning, she found tears had stained her cloth pillow. But she could get it all back, she knew, when she looked at the Maitreya, his hand raised to spread the magnificence of his enlightenment to Seinyo, who would reflect it further afield to this dark country.
When the two servants who joined Seinyo on the mountain returned later that morning with more food and drink, they found her asleep again on her bedding, her robe showing the plump flesh of her leg to them. She woke up before they could get any closer to feel her up, but they still took turns going into the trees and masturbating to the memory and fantasies of what they wanted to do with the older woman later.
The abbess continued her conflict with the wolves and their deities, and finished her recitation of the Golden Light sutra by the time lunch was ready. She considered repeating it, but wondered if moving onto another work might be more effective. Testing her rice and scolding the servants for letting it boil too long, she figured it was fine to take a moment to rest herself.
That evening, as Seinyo was composing poetry about the bitterness of her exile, she heard the men talking about women. They spoke of the beauties of the hamlets and villages – the young maidens who were pink with innocence, and the older ladies who knew how to please a man. Seinyo deigned to listen in, expecting her name to be brought up as the height of refined beauty.
Her breasts were like a cow’s udders, but her words were more bitter than any snake’s poison, they said. The gall of their disrespect stabbed at Seinyo’s heart. But she felt all too keenly her exposed position, especially after the howl the night before. She might need some brutes of her own to keep herself fed, even if they had no appreciation for her labors and exertions.
The second night, the howls of the enemy came again to torment Seinyo. She trembled in her recitation at the first blast, but she did not roll up her scroll in fear and defeat. Her voice continued to stream out of her cave late into the night, until she was too tired to continue, and she crawled onto her bed of stacked tatami mats and wrapped her robes around herself.
But if she thought she would be left to sleep, she was quickly disabused. The howls sprang up in all the country around them, louder and closer than the night before. Seinyo ground her teeth together as she covered her ears with her monastic hood. They thought to cow her, to make her accept defeat! She would never allow it!
Seinyo awoke bleary-eyed, but even more emboldened than before. The worried looks on the faces of her servants only confirmed for her their inferior spiritual qualities. Inevitably, they would waste their limited lives on ephemeral things and be reborn into the cycle of desire and suffering, almost certainly as even lesser beings than they already were. She figured the fat one would be a grubby worm, and the thin one was surely to become an ant. She would show them how the monastic precepts strengthened one even in the face of terrible demons!
Each night, the howling came closer to the cave. From the north, the south, the east, and the west, the animal cries approached in defiance of Seinyo’s righteousness. Each night, the lupine voices flew over the land, the army of demons growing greater and greater in size and boisterousness as they came nearer and nearer.
By the 6 th night, the chorus of beasts surrounded the cave on the mountain ridge, and dozens, scores, hundreds of wolf families and clans laid siege to Seinyo’s cavern. Their howls easily drowned out Seinyo’s exhausted chanting, barely more than muttering at this point. But for all their bravado, Seinyo knew they would not enter her cave. They had made a show of force, but it only showed the emptiness of worldly valor, that had no real courage to back it up. They were afraid of her, she knew it! They were afraid of the powers she could draw on, the powers that lay beyond all mutability and illusion!
The morning after the great noise, Seinyo’s servants pressed their heads into the dirt in front of her, almost weeping. They begged her to keep to the plan she’d told the nuns, and to come down from the mountain that day.
“You have done many great deeds!” the fat one said, knocking his head on the ground as he pleaded. “We have heard you speak with gods and buddhas and all sorts of spirits! No priestess or shaman compares to you! We will tell everyone of what we have witnessed here, and how you brought the ravenous wolves to heel!”
The older man’s voice was just as vehement. “Your efforts have clearly borne fruit! The be-beasts have come from far away to listen to your voice! They acknowledge the dominion of the mighty son of heaven far away! There’s no more need to spend time in this lonely and empty place, lady of pure birth!” The fear was in their throats, ready to spill out in an instant.
Seinyo saw through their words for what it was – empty flattery. It meant nothing. There was nothing behind their words, not even reason. Only fear, blind and crawling. She was too tired to give the cowards the hiding they deserved, though. Instead, she sneered at them with all the command of her illustrious bloodline behind it, causing the servants to wilt and tremble.
“I have almost won,” she mumbled. “I will not retreat and lose my chance for final victory.” Her fear was in her belly, making it hard to eat anything, but she would not obey it. With all her foes gathered here, she knew the great battle was upon her.
Her preparations took the whole day. She burned fine incense before the statue. She composed a poem about her impending triumph and wrote it on a fan. She used her bronze mirror to perfect her eyebrows and dab her lips with luscious paint. It would not do well to be unkempt when everyone saw her glorious return.
The full moon arose to find Seinyo prepared for battle, but so were her enemies. She could feel their eyes on her, just deep enough in the trees that she could not see them. She could hear them panting, licking their lips, stamping their feet in the leaves and dirt. But their numbers did not frighten her.
She had all her candles lit and laid out around her reading table, so that even if the wind blew one out, she could still recite the Lotus sutra. It was the only one she hadn’t read yet, and she remembered the monks of the Capital put great store in it. She couldn’t remember what it was about, though.
Seinyo took a breath and opened her mouth, and the forest erupted. The trees themselves shivered with the howling to the full moon. It seemed like every wolf within a hundred leagues had come to drown out Seinyo’s voice in their barbarous clamor. Unable to even hear herself think, Seinyo’s hands trembled in rage. The servants cried out in abject terror, all blood drained from their faces, clutching each other for safety.
Unable to accept this foul defiance any longer, Seinyo shot up from her mat. “I am Seinyo, devotee of the Enlightened One!” she roared out. “Do you not acknowledge the inevitability of rebirth and the weight of karma? Do you cling to this perishable world so tightly that you will wallow in ignorance and die in sorrow over and over again? Accept the teachings of the Maitreya and obey me!”
For a moment, silence covered the mountain. For a moment, Seinyo was sure she had finally, painfully won her battle.
Then heavy, padded footsteps came from the right, and out of the shadows and into the flickering light of Seinyo’s candles emerged what she knew without words or contemplation to be the lord of the land. He stood taller at the shoulder than Seinyo herself, his fur a grayish brown, his eyes staring directly at the abbess. The beast’s eyes burned in the night, unlike anything Seinyo had ever imagined could exist before.
The mighty head arched back and up to the night sky, and the howl that emerged flew into the heavens and spread out over the countryside faster than the swiftest horse, from the mountains to the north to the gentle sea in the south. The howl she’d heard at the moon-viewing party the year before had been only a distant child of this most ancient and most confident of cries. Seinyo could only think of it as the sound a beast from the age of gods could make.
The divine force was too much for Seinyo’s servants. They fled shrieking down the dark slope, kept running by snapping jaws at their heels and backsides, even as they fell and rolled and got back up to continue their mad dash away from the cursed woman.
Seinyo herself cowered in the back of her cave, having fled away from the howl and tripping over herself to get as far as she could, her body trembling like a leaf in the face of the primal beast. Her terror was beyond her strength, borne from depths inside her she could not control. It was the same fear she’d felt when she was a small child and a shattering earthquake hit the Capital – a fear of the pure, dispassionate power of nature that could crush her like she would a fly.
“Help me… help me! Help me, Lord Buddha!” Seinyo cried out to the statue, crawling and wrapping her arms around its legs. She couldn’t stop this monster, but he could. A snap of the Buddha’s fingers made a hundred kalpas pass in the blink of an eye, he could surely shield her from this beast, couldn’t he? Shakyamuni would definitely protect her because of her strict devotions to him, she knew it in her heart!
Seinyo looked over her shoulder to see the beast growl, drooling onto the ground. For a moment, she told herself that it could not pass the threshold into her cavern, that the Buddha had saved her.
The giant wolf stepped onto the stone floor of the cave and walked in, approaching Seinyo. He opened his mouth, revealing the set of bone-shearing teeth, and his hackles raised up.
“No! No! I don’t wanna die! I don’t wanna die!” Seinyo repeated in a terrified stupor, scooting away from the menacing beast. Tears of fear ran down her cheeks, leaving ugly trails in her white makeup. When the maw came closer to her head and she smelled the damp breath surrounding her, thick with the scent of blood, Seinyo lost all control over her body. She let out an inarticulate cry of horror, and hot urine spilled out of her crotch, filtering through and soaking into her voluminous robes.
The animal paused, its nose sniffing once, then twice. He smelled something ripe and ready about her. Slowly, the jaws of death closed, and Seinyo, her cheek pressed against the cold stone, tried to curl up into a ball. “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me, please!” she begged, though her words were so choked that the noises that came out of her mouth were little more than wet sobs.
The wolf snapped forward, his jaws grabbing at Seinyo’s robes, and he reared back, his teeth shredding through the many layers of fabric like paper. Another bite, and more of Seinyo’s body was exposed to the night air, and the beast’s direct gaze. “No! No, please!” she screamed, expecting at any moment for the teeth to sink into her belly and for her entrails to come spilling out. Or would the beast snap her neck before feasting on her body?
Seinyo tried to scuttle away. This angered the beast, whose growl only made Seinyo’s crawling even more desperate, knocking over sutra scrolls, a container of ink, and a few dead candles. Not a few shaku away, she felt the rebirth-promising jaws clamp down on her shoulder, hot blood beginning to well up and dribble out of each wound; the wolf’s jaw so large that she felt its front teeth digging into the top of her breast.
The terrified woman shook her head. “No! No! Don’t eat me! Don’t eat me, please!” The wolf responded by growling into her body, and raking at the shreds of her robes still on her body. Held in place on her hands and knees, the beast heavy on top of her back, Seinyo’s fear made every sound she heard and every movement she felt into the harbinger of her death.
It was only when she felt something hot, hard, and dripping against her plump ass that she realized the beast wanted something else from her before eating her. “No…! Noooooo!” she shrieked as the wolf’s canine organ pressed between her trembling, urine-wet thighs. She couldn’t see it, but she felt it, hotter than any male she’d had before, his inhuman organ huge and smooth. The pointed tip pressed against her pussy, and her panic took a different turn. “No! It won’t fit! I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!”
The wolf didn’t listen to Seinyo’s fears. He pushed his red cock between her legs, the tip spreading her outer lips handily. Pressing against her hole though, fear made her muscles tight and inflexible, unable to spread to accommodate his girth, wider than her wrist. The wolf’s anger rumbled out of his chest and into Seinyo’s back, making her sob incoherently. The cock wasn’t going to fit into her. The wolf was going to eat her.
The wolf pushed and pushed and pushed at Seinyo’s hole, and bit by bit forced his way into the woman below him. Seinyo groaned as she felt her muscles forced apart, her inner walls stretched out more than she’d ever experienced. The heat inside her was like a coal being pushed inside her, burning her from the inside out. She thought she might die just from that, immolated from her crotch outwards. She kept shaking her head, each little push of the cock deeper into her forcing wet, pathetic sobs out of her throat.
After agonizing moments of tight pushing, the wolf continually spraying precum into Seinyo’s tunnel, the woman was finally wet enough for the animal to slide in. He pushed in, and his tip speared through Seinyo’s interior until it slammed against the top of her tunnel, the cock pressing her womb from above. Seinyo’s eyes widened as her mouth fell open in pain and discomfort. Then the beast began to fuck her. It was only after a dozen thrusts that Seinyo could finally scream. “Nngggaaaaaaaahhh!” she shrieked, her voice bouncing off the close walls of the cave to ring in her ears.
“Hgggnngggaaahh! Gggkkhhh! N-nnhhooooo! I’m… I’m dying…!” she sputtered out. But the wolf didn’t stop, or even slow down. He pistoned into her, driving himself down into her hole and striking her organs with his immense, primal force. Each time the animal dove into her to the limit, Seinyo had the breath knocked out of her.
There was no love-play here, no chance for a quick-witted reference or apropos poetic composition. There was only the brute animal act, bodies joined in defiance of the reason of Heaven and obeying no law except that the strong do what they will. No man had ever before dared to take her body through violence, and now a mere beast was defiling her. She didn’t want to die, but this was even worse.
The cave echoed with Seinyo’s cries and the wet slapping from their joined crotches. Eventually, Seinyo was too exhausted from the pain to do more than just moan and babble, incoherent words spilling from her mouth like the spit drooling out of her lips. She begged the wolf not to kill her. She begged the Buddha to help her. She wanted her daddy to save her. She didn’t want this. She was utterly, completely powerless, at the mercy of the wild animal on top of her.
When the wolf let go of Seinyo’s shoulder, she moaned in pain and relief, only to shriek again as the wolf readjusted his jaw onto her neck. She felt the power in the immense muscles, and knew the beast could decapitate her as easy as if he had a sword. She closed her eyes and wept.
If she survived, how could she go back to normal after this? As the animal fucked her, she felt each hammer-blow like the animal was a smith trying to reshape her insides. Each thrust inside spread her muscles apart painfully, and they only retracted a little when he pulled back. The triangular tip scraped along the top of her tunnel, where some of her skilled lovers had known to press the attack to please her. This animal had no such care for her. It was merely the side-effect of the beast working himself into her at different angles.
Seinyo didn’t know how long the wolf fucked her. Maybe it was minutes, maybe it was hours. But she was lost in a haze of pain, unable to move with her neck in the wolf’s jaws until her whole body except her crotch was stiff. Then she felt something grow at the base of the monster’s cock. The wolf growled, and Seinyo whimpered in response.
Each thrust became harder and more painful, buffeting the entrance of her tunnel hole with something even wider and just as stiff as the beast’s erection. Seinyo sniveled, wondering if this was the end. The beast was already stretching her beyond human endurance, how could something even wider get inside her? That would break her apart from the inside.
The brute didn’t care what would or wouldn’t break Seinyo, though. He thrust his knot against her pussy lips until they were utterly battered and bruised, and then he pushed. He pushed the knot against her weakened hole, using his grip on her neck to help shove his seal into her. Seinyo let out a heavy, bodily cry of pain as the knot began to slide in.
When her pussy finally gave way, and the knot sank into her before her muscles closed in behind it, Seinyo was too overwhelmed by the sensations, and lost all consciousness.
She dreamed she saw the Lord Shakyamuni in the distance, beckoning her into the paradise of nirvana. The woman ran, but with each step, the blessed figure of Enlightenment receded ten million paces. As he disappeared, she knew that he was demanding she follow, but how could she ever catch up? She began to slow down, but as she did, her feet began to sink into the swampy mire. She struggled, screaming, until she realized it wasn’t a swamp she was in, but the mouth of a massive wolf below her. She shrieked, and the jaws closed shut around her.
Seinyo knew she wasn’t dead when she woke up, because no torture from the King of Hell could match the pains in her body. Her whole body hurt, but at least she was alive. She groaned, feeling her belly slosh with every little movement she made. She could still feel the wolf buried inside her, the knot keeping them tied. The wolf had laid down on his side after cumming, taking Seinyo with him. Opening her bleary eyes, Seinyo saw the mid-morning light touch her cave. Looking down first, she saw her belly, larger than usual, and knew that the animal must have pumped undignified amounts of semen into her. The liquid had cooled down in the hours of her unconsciousness, but she thought she could feel it moving inside her.
“Unngghhhh…” she groaned, touching her belly and seeing her finger sink into the inflated flesh. Laying on her side, next to the apparently sleeping wolf, she could feel each and every hole in her flesh that the wolf’s teeth had made, the chilly wind across them making her shiver. It was only the heat from the wolf, both his belly against her back and his cock inside her, that kept the nun warm, totally nude as she was now.
Seinyo’s eyes drifted to the statue of the Buddha, and a strangled mewl dribbled from between her lips. Why? she asked in her heart, why aren’t you saving me? But the Enlightened One’s wooden eyes only continued to gaze impassively at the illusion of the world.
The immense animal slept the sleep of the innocent, his chest rising and falling slowly and rhythmically, his mighty heartbeat pulsing into Seinyo’s back and through his cock into her belly. She hated it, hated herself for being so stubborn and stupid. For the rest of the morning, her thoughts revolved in the same cycle of begging Buddha for help, wanting to die, wanting to not die, and hating everything.
Seinyo felt the deity awake when a ragged burst of air came out of his nostrils. With his knot still buried inside her, she felt every little twitch as he roused from slumber. Slowly at first, then all at once, the wolf was on his feet. The movement yanked Seinyo along, dragging her across the stone floor. “Ahh!” she cried out, but when the wolf growled at the sound, she slapped her hands over her mouth and whimpered as quietly as she could.
The smell of the wolf was the smell of the cave, or maybe it was the other way around – that the earthy, stony scent Seinyo had covered with incense and perfumes was just a reflection of the autochthonous being she was tied to. Whatever it was, the beast sniffed a few times, and was clearly unhappy at many of the fripperies and useless things Seinyo had brought to the austere den.
He moved to her bed, the layers of tatami which had gotten jumbled and fallen out of alignment when she’d tried to run from the wolf the night before, and began to tear it all apart. He pulled Seinyo along on his cock, scraping her semen-filled belly across the stony ground, making her groan and tear up. She listened to the shredding of the straw mats, and the growling as the deity spread the scraps into a bed of his liking.
But he wasn’t finished there. The animal ripped apart the sutra scrolls, sending the golden characters fluttering in ragged strips. The labors of years, meant to alleviate the burden of karma on the artisan and commissioner alike, were casually destroyed. Her reading table, with its designs of lotus blossoms and arhats, was smashed into splinters with a step. The bronze incense holder in front of the Buddha statue was knocked far away, the metal ringing as it landed among the rocks and roots of the slope.
Bit by bit, the animal tore apart everything that Seinyo had brought up, pulling her along the whole time through the knot inside her. She could feel it begin to weaken slightly, shrinking bit by bit as he almost lazily asserted himself in the cave. Finally, coming to the Buddha statue, a lazy swipe knocked it over, the impact on the stone ground making the head pop off and revealing the hollow interior of the statue. For a moment, the sweet smell of the precious wood, infused with centuries of incense, erupted from the broken joints.
This was too much of an affront to the animal. He strained to pull his cock out of Seinyo, only to shake her around without effect. Baring his teeth and raising his hackles, the wolf snapped his jaws a few times. Seinyo, crying, understood, and grabbed onto a small bit of the floor and tried pulling herself off. The strain on her muscles was immense, and she felt sweat begin to bead on her forehead and run down into her eyes. After a few minutes of useless grunting and exertion, the animal snorted, and pulled on his end.
Seinyo’s eyes bulged as the knot began to wriggle out of her hole, and with each extra movement more lukewarm jizz spilled out from the seal onto the scraps of paper, cloth, and straw beneath. Finally, with a wet pop, the knot came free, releasing a torrent of slimy liquids from the woman’s abused and cavernous hole. Her hips fell down into the puddle, and she lay there, gasping for breath. Her hole gaped so widely that she could feel the breeze fly into her tunnel, a sensation that made her weep even more into a little piece of her sleeve she grabbed.
With his dick free of the woman, the wolf padded over the toppled statue. Raising his leg over it, he began to let out a stream of urine onto it. The smell, acrid and sour, invaded Seinyo’s nose and made her gag. But the insult was met with no divine retribution, no peal of thunder, no announcement of the Shakyamuni’s judgment on the blasphemous beast. Only the sound of the stream splashing off the wood and dripping into a puddle beneath it, and the smell of animal territory.
Satisfied with the state of his dwelling, the beast padded past Seinyo and laid his bulk on the oval of bedding. Raising her head to look at him, Seinyo saw all the arrogance and pride of the greatest lords of the world. She looked at the red cock, still hanging free from the sheath, and marveled that she survived it being put inside her.
A growl shook her from her contemplation, and she felt each tooth that had been in her and knew that at any moment, her flesh could be devoured by this monster. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out what he wanted. “Of-of course! Clean! You wish to be clean! I can… I can do that!” she said, unsuccessfully hiding her terror.
Crawling forward, hoping to push her death off, Seinyo went up to that obscene organ and laid her hands on its hot, slick surface. When she grabbed a scrap of her robe, damask and silk, he growled again and she dropped it like it was on fire. “Y-yes! My… my…” her head whirled around as she tried to find something else to clean, but then she realized she could use her tongue. “My tongue! Yes, right away!”
With both hands on the inhuman length, Seinyo opened her mouth and let her tongue out. She immediately began licking up and down the wolf cock, without skill or technique. She just lapped up the cooling mixture of semen and her own juices. It was bitter and slimy, but she knew that if she spat it out she would not survive the day. She swallowed each mouthful of the thickening slop along the length, and down to the shrinking knot. As she went up again towards the tip, the lingering taste of the wolf’s piss mingled with everything else, and Seinyo fought down her retching.
When her tongue touched the top of the organ, and she ran it around, the beast’s leg kicked slightly in pleasure. Her eyes widening, Seinyo began to devote herself to the pointed cock-tip. She kissed it, licked it, sucked on it like it was a lover’s finger.
Her actions were enough to keep her alive, she knew, and the wolf’s cock shrank and pulled back into his sheath, where Seinyo pressed her mouth against the furry hole, slobbering on it without thinking. She didn’t know when she should stop, so she didn’t, and kept kissing and licking at it, her hands massaging the sheath like she had once massaged a lover’s back.
It was only when she heard other, smaller wolves approach the cave from behind that the wolf gave her a sign to stop. She quickly pulled away from the sheath, coughing from the smells burning in her nose, the stray fur in her mouth, and terror mellowing out into horror at the situation she found herself in.
Looking over her shoulder, Seinyo saw an army of beasts that had assembled. Not only the immense number of wolves that had congregated over the week, but bears, wild boars, tanuki, deer, troops of monkeys, and clans of snakes all had gathered. Some of the beasts came forward, and left tribute before the cavern. Nuts and seeds, fruits and berries, fish from the rivers, honeycombs and birds’ eggs, as well as recently-slain calves and foals from the farms, the results of a hundred hunts, great and small, were all laid out for the great lord.
The smaller wolves bowed their heads and barked twice. A silence that Seinyo had never before experienced descended on the host. It was full of honor and respect, and even love.
The giant eventually responded with a bark of his own, which sent the assembly jumping and howling in excitement. Seinyo cowered, unable to comprehend what she was witnessing. She was a princess! She was meant to wear brocades and be served on plates of lacquer, not nude and covered in bites, the lowliest slave of an animal.
The offerings made, the beasts dispersed. The great wolf stood up and began to take from the offerings. He took a bite from everything, but it was the calf and foal that he relished in tearing apart. Seinyo watched as blood stained his jaw. Her stomach growled, and she trembled at what his reaction might be. Hearing it, the wolf raised his head, blood dripping from the pointed tips of his crimson-stained fur around his mouth, and the beast threw something Seinyo’s way that made her yelp as it landed with a heavy thud in front of her.
Lowering her hands from her face, Seinyo let out another strangled shriek as she saw the calf’s eyes staring at her from its bloody head, separated from the body. Hearing the crunch of bones being sheared, Seinyo cringed. It would only take a moment for her to end up like this innocent animal. But the vow of vegetarianism was one of the great monastic vows she had taken, and even Seinyo had kept strictly to it with her wide and varied diet of exotic tastes.
Looking around at the other offerings, Seinyo grabbed at some of the hard nuts and berries and furtively chewed on them. The tasteless ones were at least better than the ones that were actively bitter and disgusting on her tongue. But even those had some use in cleaning Seinyo’s tongue of the lingering bitterness of the wolf’s semen. She ate as much of the plants as the wolf had left behind. It took the edge off her hunger, but she wondered how long until her stomach growled again.
Looking around the cave, she caught a glimpse of herself in her mirror. Scrabbling over to it while the demon continued tearing into the foal, she gasped at what she saw. Her face was no longer that of a dignified lady of Dharma truth. Her makeup was almost totally melted away. Her hair pins had been lost at some point, leaving her long black hair tangled and mired with sweat and wolf cum. She looked like a vision from a nightmare, a demon meant to haunt the virtuous. How could she ever look at herself in the mirror again, without this image coming back to her?
The presence came over Seinyo as she contemplated her ruined beauty, and the woman felt the pain as teeth dug into her arm and she was flung bodily into the primitive bed like a doll. Her cries died on her lips as she beheld the giant beast. She could have fought and died. But the most basal and fundamental urge she had, that had never been effaced no matter how she might have nominally assented to the doctrine of non-substance, had always been self-preservation.
The nun grabbed at her thighs and spread her legs, her still-open hole presenting itself to the beast’s attentions and desires. Before she knew it, she was almost doubled over, her legs spread to either side of the wolf’s frame, her pale skin wrapped by brown fur. Without foreplay, the beast plunged itself into her before he was even fully erect. It was both a blessing and a curse for Seinyo, as she found that the less engorged he was, the more her body could successfully turn the sensations she felt from shame into pleasure.
Because it was pleasure she felt, and no amount of self-deception could hide it from the beast. His fur tickled at her clitoral hood, before his crotch slapped against it with each thrust. His balls, heavy with his virility, made a mockery of her behind, plapping against her plump cheeks. His tongue ran over Seinyo’s heavy breasts, her nipples standing up proud and stiff from his ministrations. No matter what Seinyo told herself, she was still face to face with a feral wolf, panting the air with him, her tunnel slick with her irrational, bodily desire.
But the window of pleasure did not last as long as Seinyo wanted it to. Soon the cock piercing her was as big as it had been the night before, knocking her breath out of her chest, so large that she could see her belly bulge from within as the male organ was buried in her. Tears blurred Seinyo’s vision as she was pummeled deep inside, coughing and spitting up flecks of saliva in ways that might have been moans.
What did this beast want from her? She just couldn’t figure it out, until she felt his tip press against her cervix. When the beast hit it, he hammered it over and over again, making Seinyo’s legs spasm wildly, her toes curling and stretching as her body betrayed her and an orgasm unlike any she had ever before felt hit her. It was not the subtle climax she was accustomed to, not the slow burn that left her languid and satisfied. It was not something she could place in her conceptual universe, except as some animal part of herself being brought to life.
“Gnngggaaaaahhh!” Seinyo mewled, her hands on the wolf’s chest gripping his fur tightly. When he didn’t stop, she shook her head in disbelief. “Nnnggghhooooooo!” she slurred, spit dribbling past her bloody lips as she came again and again.
Was the beast trying to make her cum to make her submit? Was it some sort of play for domination? She had known plenty of men who saw a woman’s orgasm as a sign of her docility, no matter what the truth of the matter actually was. But when she looked in the beast’s eyes, she saw nothing of that. There was no human social relation here, no jockeying for position between the two, because even that assumed a kind of equality between them that couldn’t exist.
It was when the beast’s knot began to inflate again, and he pressed the tip of his cock against Seinyo’s cervix that she realized what he was doing. He was just breeding her. Pure, animal desire had Seinyo pinned beneath the great furry body, and the realization of it made Seinyo cum even harder, her eyes rolling back in her head as her mouth opened up in an incoherent, inarticulate plea. Whether it was for him to stop, or never stop, she wasn’t quite sure.
This time, Seinyo was awake to experience the animal’s ejaculation. His knot firmly locked inside her, his heavy testicles twitched, and his cock pulsed inside her. The first splash of watery cum scalded her cervix, and Seinyo threw her head back in awe at the orgasm it gave her, despite the pain and shame. Again and again the awesome organ pulsed, spilling rope after rope of seed into Seinyo’s deepest parts. She felt the pressure inside her build up as what could only be at least a shou of cum was poured into her. The liquid wormed in between every muscled fold of her tunnel, until not a single part of her inside was not painted.
When the beast was finally done ejaculating, Seinyo was a sweaty, panting mess, crying tears of relief, frustration, fear, and confusion.
The beast wanted her for something besides a meal. Maybe there was something to be thankful for, even if it meant her debasement and defilement.
A kind of routine settled in. The beast pounded Seinyo into the cave floor whenever he got a chance, forcing his immense knot into her every time to ensure his seed had time to trickle into her womb before he popped out hours later. After the first days, Seinyo’s hole never closed tighter than three finger-widths, and her outer lips had begun to take on an even darker brown hue and more wrinkled texture from all the abuse.
The wolves offered meat to the cave-dwellers, and Seinyo did her best to avoid touching the polluting flesh. Instead she wandered around the cave, picking what she thought she could eat from the trees and bushes. It worked for a few days, barring a few mushrooms that left her curled up and retching, but once she’d picked the area clean, she felt her hunger more than ever before, her stomach stabbed with pain periodically. But she still thought that if she kept the monastic precepts, Shakyamuni would be more favorable to her, and more likely to step in and save her in a dramatic fashion.
After two weeks, Seinyo awoke to find the giant wolf gone, his absence making her shiver in her nudity in the still-cool Spring wind. Squeezing her arms around her, she trembled, drawing her legs up close. For a moment, she only sat there unthinking. Her hand went into the bedding, now utterly soaked through with the stench of their joinings and bodies, from their sweat to their spit to their piss. She felt the cold metal of her mirror, and pulled it out of the sticky mess, wiping straw off the surface.
Seinyo was practically unrecognizable to herself in the little mirror. Her hair was tangled into an untameable, knotted mess, glued with drying and dried wolf semen. Not a single patch of her body had been unsoiled by cum. Her body was covered in bruises and scabs and scars. Blood had dried and melted and then been replaced on her skin so many times that she wondered if this was how her soul looked now.
No! This wasn’t her!
Seinyo screamed and threw the mirror. She got to her shaky feet and stumbled out of the cave, past the shattered and scattered remnants of the Buddha statue. The body of the sculpture had been torn apart and ripped to shreds leaving only the head intact, still staring with the slight smile of impassive Enlightenment. Seinyo begged the Buddha for help now, for now was the chance for him to show his power.
“Let me be lifted by cranes! Let me fly to safety!” Seinyo begged over and over again as she started picking her way down the slope. Her footsteps were unsteady and slow, her feet still not used to traversing mountain paths. “Please! Great Buddha! Save me! Save me! I don’t want to be here any more!”
Seinyo ran as fast as she could, heedless of the sharp pains in her feet. But even as she went down one slope, she found herself at a cliff face she couldn’t traverse. She tried going another way, always trying to go down, but she found herself turned around over and over again. She passed the same flat boulder three times before she even realized she’d seen it before. She tried to catch her breath, but in the distance she heard the swift feet of the smaller wolves.
Fleeing wildly, fear for her life and what her jailers might do to her when they caught her driving her like whips, Seinyo tripped over a root, falling head over heels into a root hollow, filled with leaves and detritus. She waited there, her hands over her panting mouth to keep herself quiet, listening. Her mind repeated her prayer to Shakyamuni over and over and over again deliriously. Despite her terrors though, the wolves did not approach. After the sun began to sink low, she thanked all the Buddhas and their divine followers for hiding her.
She crept out of the hollow, leaves and sticks stuck to her body. But if she had had trouble getting off the mountain before, it was even worse in the dim evening light. She scrambled and tripped and slipped down small slopes for what felt like hours, only to find herself back at the hollow. “No… no… please, Buddha, don’t leave me here…” she mewled.
But if the Maitreya had heard Seinyo’s cries from her heart, he did nothing. A fierce wind blew through the forest, making the tree branches bend and trunks groan. It was like a blast from the depths of winter, and Seinyo felt it chill her to her bones. She wrapped her arms around her nude body, feeling like a leaf herself. She stumbled further, feeling the warmth of her body leeched out by every breeze. She begged the Maitreya to light the fire of Dharma truth inside her, but nothing happened.
After another stretch of hours in the chill, Seinyo was too cold to even rub her arms. Her breath fogged up only a tiny wisp in front of her, her eyes dull and barely able to trace out a path in front of her. It was then that she came back to the cliff face, at the bottom of which was a long pile of jagged stones. She heard the footfalls behind her, and knew the wolves had found her, that this whole time they’d shadowed her.
She thought of falling over the edge and letting her body break at the bottom of the drop. It wouldn’t even take effort, all she had to do was let go. But Seinyo couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give up her spark of life. She thought of the warmth of the wolf, and she turned her back on the cliff face. Unable to walk, she let the pack help drag her up the slope, crawling on her hands and knees the whole way. Her dread had been wrong – the smaller wolves seemed to treat her with a gentleness and concern, hurrying her out of the cold as quickly as they could. She could not figure out why they were so thoughtful, not then.
Back in the cave, she crawled into the den and tried to cover herself in branches and the larger fragments of her soiled clothes. She didn’t think, she only moved and reacted, shivering in the cold of the night. When the great beast returned in the depths of the night from whatever had taken his attention, Seinyo did not even try to resist. She needed the animal's warmth, no matter how it was gotten.
On all fours, she pointed her ass to him and spread her thighs with her hands. “Please… I’m cold…” she muttered, knowing what she was bringing on herself. The animal savaged her with his mating again that night, and her screams were violent and desperate. But she was warmed up from the inside and outside.
After her failed escape attempt, Seinyo found herself wondering how long she had left to live. The beast had no desire for delicate love-play, no idea of what it even entailed, so she improvised as best she could to keep the beast interested in her ministrations. She used her body in as many obscene ways as she could think, hoping that sheer variety would show him her worth.
Her mouth, which had recited sutras with ease and commanded ministers of state, now licked and kissed at giant, furry testicles, each one too big to entirely fit in her mouth. Her breasts, that had never nursed a child, even her own, she wrapped around the hot, red canine dick, rubbing them up and down the length while sloppily attending the leaking tip with her tongue. Her voice, which had seduced many men with her skill and deftness with words, was reduced to purely animal noises: grunts and moans and cries that could be nothing but honest, unable to deceive about her reactions and feelings.
But she knew in her heart that it would all be for nothing. The beast wanted to breed her, but how could an animal breed with a human? She was no bitch, couldn’t he tell? Surely he would realize the futility of his enterprise at some point, and when that moment came, she knew that her rapist would end her sufferings with a quick snap of his jaws on her bruised, scarred throat. But maybe that would be a relief then? Maybe then, she would plead her case to all the ranks of gods and buddhas, denounce the injustices done to her, and demand paradise in recompense?
In between matings, Seinyo made do with water dripping off a stone next to the cave, but her hunger was fierce enough that she finally had to break the monastic vow of vegetarianism. To die quickly was one thing, but to starve was another. She took a little boarlet that the giant had passed over, its blood still warm and its belly sliced open, and pulled out its entrails sloppily. Holding them in her fingers, Seinyo unwillingly brought the bloody mess to her mouth, and bit down on it.
The coppery taste of blood burst on her tongue, and she knew that she had soiled her soul. She fought down the urge to vomit as she stuffed more of the flesh into her mouth, swallowing the slippery meat and organs, desperate for the strength to survive the biting and scratching she endured with every mating. How far she had fallen, who had once offered sweet sake to Shakyamuni, and had tasted sweet victuals from far-off lands! Her self-hatred grew with every body-shaking orgasm she succumbed to. But she knew that this was how she herself would end – a bloody jaw buried in her belly.
Early one morning, some weeks after the last of the cherry blossoms had bloomed and fallen, Seinyo was wracked with stomach pains. She ran to the edge of the cave and doubled over, vomiting. When she was done after a few minutes she was on her knees, leaning against the cave wall and shivering, but not from the cold.
She knew this feeling, this sickness inside her that was both the curse and blessing of all women. Her hands went to her belly, where she could still feel the semen from her last mating sitting in her womb. But there was something more in there now.
The realization hit Seinyo like a thunderclap, shaking her out of the dire listlessness she had fallen into. Her mouth began to turn in a grin, and she giggled like a young maiden. Then she laughed, like she’d heard the men of the court laugh when they were deepest into their cups. Then she started cackling madly.
She understood everything now. She was in the presence of a great divinity. A power of the land itself, punishing her for her presumption and insults. But she had only acted in that way because she’d thought she was protected by a greater power.
The woman cast her gaze back into the cave. At the other end, past the still-slumbering deity, sat the head of the Buddha, scratched and battered, sitting in the little pond of piss that the wolf rained on it every day or so. Scrabbling over the stone to it, the ragged, disheveled slave seized the hollow wooden head with both hands and raised it up.
It stared at her without emotion, without regard. Enlightenment meant the end of all attachment, and what was loyalty but an unnecessary burden of karma? For this non-being beyond all illusion and all desire, she was nothing, no matter the words she said or the vows she made.
With manic glee, the woman began frantically beating the head against the stone floor as hard as she could. “I don’t need you!” she said, her voice sounding strange in her own ears. “You never helped me! Never! Never!” Each strike made the head shiver and let out a clapping sound. “But I don’t need you anymore! I don’t need enlightenment! I don’t need nirvana!”
The cracks in the head began to grow and widen under the repeated blows. “Better a slave to a dog here forever than your worthless paradises!” The head finally split apart into several pieces, but the woman was not finished. She kept smashing each part as best she could, breaking them apart into smaller and thinner fragments until, in her rage, she found herself gnawing at one fragment, trying to chew it into splinters.
Throwing the largest chunks off the side of the mountain ridge behind the cave and giving the smaller ones to the inquisitive wolves, curious at the noise they had heard, to bite and gnaw into nothingness, the woman knew she was no longer Seinyo, the “pure nature of all things,” abbess and devotee of unserious saviors. She was Yama-no-miko, priestess with an even more intimate link to her deity than even her sister at Ise!
Yama-no-miko took to her new devotions with much more sincerity than she had ever had in the Capital, for this deity, older than any buddha, was far more deserving of her seriousness. This deity had planted life in her, and how could she not repay him for such joys?
The priestess, her belly growing with every day that passed, spent her every moment and action to honor the vital divinity. She muttered prayers of worship and praise to the god before her, into his mouth as he stuffed his tongue into hers, the slimy and steaming entrance of his sheath, his virile balls, his might-filled paws. The warmth that flowed from him into her own body invigorated her more than any finely-wrought brazier ever could. His whole body was worthy of her deepest and most constant appreciations.
No more would Yama-no-miko be distracted by useless fripperies. Life itself demanded not only her body, which she gladly gave, but also her heart and soul. How could she have spent time bandying vain words with empty, lifeless men who thought that destruction of the self was good? No wonder she had been so angry, so arrogant! Now, she knew divinity in the most intimate reaches of her body, and felt it growing inside her, so much more powerful than any dead statue!
This would be her legacy – not some absurd doctrine of nothingness and rebirth, but flesh and blood borne of the land’s strength, planted in her womb and borne of her body. The deity allowed her these rituals, and she knew that her worship was right and just. Everything she asked for he provided for her – his protection from demons, his warmth at night, enough of his offerings to make her strong and healthy for birthing. What else did she need from life that he could not provide for her?
Her newfound conversion did not stop him from biting and scratching her, marking her just as brutally as he had done before, but now she reveled in it for what it was, the seal of a god cut into her flesh over and over again, so no one could doubt who her master and ruler was. Yama-no-miko shrieked as she orgasmed over and over again, screaming in painful joy.
The fools in the Capital had cast her away when she’d outlived those charms they were fixated on. But the god here knew her true worth.
In that cave, Yama-no-miko had her revelation. That her breeding would never end; that Life would never end.
*****
Autumn was usually a good time in the little village, called Maruyama by the governor’s men, and “the village by the gods’ cave” by everyone else. But a heavy pall lay heavy over the dwellings this year, thicker than the smoke rising into the gray sky.
Wolves had plagued the entire countryside, from the mountains in the far north to the sea in the south, like no one had any memory of. They were aggressive and brutal and sometimes senseless in what they slaughtered. Animals disappeared, but just as often they were just killed and left for the farmers to find. Animals were also the least of the losses – more than one community knew of a babe stolen at night, with only howls in the distance naming the culprits.
But the wolves’ war was not the only problem, for many cattle and animals had been taken from the governor’s farms as well. So many had been lost that the under-governor had just announced an extraordinary levee on farm animals, to be rounded up from every village and hamlet, as an extra tax, along with a second requisition of produce and grain. How were the people supposed to survive without even seed grain or draft animals to help plow the fields?
It had all been the fault of the mad abbess, everyone knew. She had been the one to incite the beasts to violence with her flagrant insults and obscene behavior. But she had paid for it with her life, as her two former servants had attested. How could anyone survive an encounter with the lord of the mountain and country, having disrespected him so blatantly?
Near Maruyama, the abbess’ nuns still cowered in their nunnery, afraid of every sound and creak of wood they heard beyond their walls. No one visited them, no one gave them the taxes and labor they demanded. It was cursed, and everyone knew it, surrounded and suffused by devils and evil pollution.
The older manservant sat against the wood and mud wall of his sister’s home, listening to the muted sounds of the villagers as they went about their work. He still shivered when he remembered the sight of that terrible beast on the mountain, and the experience of the mad dash he and his friend had made, with a thousand devils snapping at his heels the entire way. He remembered the last sound he’d heard of Seinyo, the screaming that had seemed to come from the bowels of hell itself.
No one dared approach the mountaintop since that night. Some of the bravest hunters had gone up the slope, only to hear animal cries that made their hair stand up on end and send them back down, slightly embarrassed.
What madness had taken hold of Seinyo? Had it been mere arrogance? Or something more? The servant wondered if the Buddha had been good to her in the end, and taken her into those 100 billion lotus paradises by now, or if she had reincarnated into a higher being for a more pleasant and peaceful existence. All attachment to the world was karma, he knew, and he knew he was still attached to many things, like his nieces and nephews. But still he said a prayer for Seinyo as he always did when he thought of her, however meager his spiritual learning and hope for paradise was.
The former servant felt the change in the village atmosphere before he heard the mutterings and confused noises. A strangled shout, and the sound of running feet going multiple ways. Thinking it was soldiers, either looking for him for punishment or to take what they wanted for the governor, he peeked his head out from behind the house. What he saw was instead something awful and terrifying.
A woman stood in the middle of the village, surrounded at a fair distance by confused people, and right next to her by four wolves, growling at any who came too close. She was disheveled, her long hair tangled into impenetrable knots and sprinkled with leaves and twigs and pebbles, and great patches of tangled hair grew from between her legs and under her arms.
Her body was covered in a thousand brutal scars. Claw marks ran across her back, her thighs, her arms, and even her face, where three deep and wide scars covered her blind left eye. Bites covered the spaces where claws didn’t, and her huge, milk-leaking breasts were pockmarked by them. Her belly showed her to be in the last days of pregnancy, her gravid stomach hanging heavily from her frame.
The servant looked at the face, and saw the smile of command on it, and he shook his head. It couldn’t be her! But no woman he’d ever met had that same sneer but Seinyo.
“People of the land!” the woman cried out, “Yama-no-kami is angry!” She lifted her hands up, and the wolves howled, making the people cry out. “Yama-no-kami is the land, and he has been forgotten!”
The wild woman groaned, her hands grasping her pulsing belly, and a rush of liquid out of her crotch made the audience gasp. What kind of child was within her? Was she going to give birth here and now?
The scarred priestess raised her shaking hands again. “Yama-no-kami is the life of the land! He is the strength of the land! Of mountain and forest, of river and plain, he was here before plow and ox, before man! His howl is thunder! His jaws are lightning! His claws are the earthquake that rends soil and stone!”
More and more people ran to the growing crowd, and when the older servant got to his knees and bowed, more and more people followed suit.
“Hear me, his priestess Yama-no-miko! Yama-no-kami has taken me as his war-bride, stolen from weakling buddhas! He has planted his seed in me, so that all might know the power of the land!” The speaker groaned, and began straining as more bloody water dribbled down her thighs. She tried to speak through the exertion. “His demands… his demands…! Hrrnnggghhh!” In her voice, every woman who had given birth felt sympathetic pain. But they heard in her voice something more, something transcendent, an orgasmic pleasure she was trying to keep going as long as she could.
“He demands honor and worship! He will not be forgotten for foreign gods!” The woman panted as she pointed to the west, where the nunnery lay. “For the insults made against him, he demands the women who devote themselves to useless mummery be made to give back to the people and land they have lived off like ticks! Take them, as he has taken me, so they may learn true worship!”
Surprise and wonder spread through the growing crowd, everyone in the village listening with awe. Old women and young children alike all bowed to the priestess, her spiritual power clearly overwhelming. She had been touched by the divine, even if it was just her mind.
So the skeptical thought, until the priestess threw her head back and howled her orgasm. Bowing her legs out, she pushed and pushed, her hands under her tunnel to catch her child. “Look! Look at the proof of the divine power, the seal on me! Nnggaaaahhhh!”
Something emerged from between the priestess’ legs, and the screams and cries of the audience joined the priestess’ ecstatic shouts. A wolf pup, half as large as a human babe, came out of Yama-no-miko’s tunnel into her waiting hands, where she brought it up to her breast and held it out. “Look! The sons of the land will be respected! You will defend them! You will honor the deep ruler through them!”
For another hour, the priestess birthed pup after pup, her wolf servants taking those she couldn’t hold and licking them clean of the birthing fluids. As word of the sight had gone out to the surrounding homesteads, men on horseback had come, chieftains of the larger clans and warbands, and prostrated themselves before the miracle of Yama-no-miko’s litter.
When Yama-no-miko was done, she had birthed eight squirming pups, and held two of them to her milk-dripping nipples, letting them suckle from her life-giving breasts. They were already energetic as they suckled, giving her a low-strength orgasm.
“You have seen the power of the divine wolf, master of the land here!” her hoarse voice flew over the awestruck audience. “Now go! Honor him, lest he take more women as his brides!” With her message delivered, the priestess stumbled back towards the mountain with the wolves, disappearing into the trees with her divine children, back to her master.
*****
The terrible revolt began, so the under-governor reported to the Capital many months after he had been driven out of his province, when a host of men had stormed the nunnery of Seinyo and burned it to the ground. This act of defiance had grown and spread among all the villages and hamlets where rebellion lurked under the surface, until all the east was ablaze with revolt. Seinyo herself had died in the blaze, along with all her nuns, the secretary confirmed.
There was sorrow at the loss to the Imperial family, but more stinging and worthy of vengeance still was the defiance of Imperial authority. Armies were dispatched under barbarian-subduing generals, and conflict tore at the people for long, painful years.
But after each bloody ambush, after every massacred village, after every horrid battle, there was always plenty of meat for the growing numbers of wolves.
Many years later, a brave young woman went up to the cave of Inazuma and Izanagi on the top of Mount Chikuha to make offerings to all the mighty deities who could claim presence there. The tales of the wild wolf and his woman were still spoken in awed whispers. But in the spring afternoon, she found nothing but an old, scratched bronze mirror. And when the wind was right, she thought she could hear panting, words of devotion, and howling; howling that never ceased.