They didn't just fear him.
They feared the silence that followed him like a shadow.They feared the weight behind his eyes.They feared how the snow melted at his feet — as if even the cold wanted nothing to do with him.
There was a boy once, born in a village swallowed by frost and whispering trees — a crooked place nestled too deep in the mountains for light to reach properly. A boy who did not ask to be different. A boy who never begged for attention. A boy who only wanted to breathe in peace.
But his breath carried weight.His presence felt like an omen.
Rai Tsuki was three years old when the village named him curse.
Not even old enough to understand hatred — but old enough to feel it pressing in from every side.
The shack he called home barely held together — slumped between two proper houses that leaned away from it, like even timber had learned disgust. The roof was patched with scraps. The door creaked in protest each time it moved. No one knocked. No one visited. As far as the village was concerned, the place was a scar that hadn't yet faded.
Rai stood barefoot outside that morning, toes in the dirt, steam rising faintly where his skin touched the frost-covered ground. The snow had fallen before sunrise — soft and slow, like ash from an old fire. But around Rai, it wouldn't settle.
He didn't notice. Or if he did, he never showed it.
His skin was smooth and deep-toned — a shade the elders claimed came from old blood, foreign blood. It shimmered softly under the early light. Some said it was beautiful. Most said it was wrong.
But it was his eyes that made people look away.
Not brown. Not grey. Not blue.Black. Utterly black.
Eyes like bottomless wells — still, heavy, ancient. When he blinked, it was as if he were thinking in languages the world had forgotten. He rarely moved. Never smiled. Always watching. Always quiet.
The only brightness on him was his hair — messy, wild, bone-white. Snow-like, but warmer somehow. It curled at the ends and danced in the breeze. The old women said it was unnatural. That no child should look like that.
They called him Ashspawn.
Omen. Curse.
Anything but his name.
He wore a shirt far too big for him — loose, threadbare, mended again and again by hands that loved him. His trousers were held up by a twisted rope. No shoes. No scarf. Yet he never shivered.
He wasn't waiting for warmth. He was waiting for her.
And when she stepped out, the whole world softened.
Aria Tsuki.
Once praised for her healing hands. Once trusted with births, broken bones, and fevered children. Now whispered about. Shunned. Branded a traitor to the gods for giving birth to him.
But still, she stayed.
Still, she stood beside him.
"Rai," she murmured, wrapping a worn shawl tighter around herself as she knelt beside him. "It's cold, little moon."
He blinked, tilting his head slightly. His voice was soft, careful.
"What's a cold?"
She smiled, eyes lined with the kind of sadness that never quite leaves. "Something that tries to slow strong boys down."
He looked at her, then nodded. Because if she said so, it had to be true.
The red-thread bracelet around his wrist caught a glint of light. She had tied it there the night he was born, whispering an old prayer from a time even the elders couldn't recall.
"Stay close today," she said, brushing white hair from his forehead. "They're angry. Someone's lost an ox."
Rai didn't ask why that made him a target. He never needed to.
Hatred didn't have to make sense. It just had to hurt.
He didn't cry. Didn't flinch.But when she turned back toward the house, he looked up again — at the grey morning sky — as if asking something that the clouds couldn't answer.
They feared him because they didn't understand him.
But she loved him — fiercely, quietly, without hesitation.
To them, he was a mistake made flesh.To her, he was moonlight in human form — proof that even in the darkest night, something good could rise.
But not even a mother's love could hold back the tide.
Because ash doesn't fall without fire.
And something was already burning.