The Woman in Black
I couldn't breathe.
It wasn't because someone's rough hands were strangling me.
My body, right now, was untouched by any other person's contact, and this place was hardly short of oxygen.
Nor did I suffer from any chronic illness affecting my breathing—much less was I thrashing about underwater.
And yet I couldn't breathe. Invisible to the eye yet felt against my skin, a sense of some other shape pressing close—that alone was enough to steal the air from my lungs.
I lift my head. Clutching a chest too heavy and suffocating to calm, I stare forward. A single shadow stood there, silent and unmoving.
Everything about the shadow's owner was black. The long, loose hair spilling over her shoulders. The sleek gloves embroidered with butterfly motifs.
Even the shoes without a speck of dust on them, down to the strange blindfold that covered both her eyes completely.
"You told me, you told me. You promised me."
The voice drawn from her lips was black, and so was the twisted will carried in it—and the smile that curled there, the deep, savoring laugh, black as well.
"……You said you would stay by my side, didn't you?"
Every syllable she breathed was steeped in darkness. She was a woman for whom the word black was no exaggeration at all.
The woman in black was facing me. While I was lost in thought, one step.
Somehow she had already reached me, and she reached out. Slowly, gently, with the delicate care of someone soothing a child.
I wanted nothing of it. The black woman's black touch stirred only fear and revulsion. The instant she drew near, I flinched, and my body shook.
"……Even though my eyes cannot see, I can feel everything else a hundred times more keenly than anyone."
She laid her hand on my chest. Ba-dump, ba-dump—my heart, pounding madly with tension, raced along beneath her palm.
The corner of the woman's mouth climbed a little higher.
"Your trembling hands…… your heart, so lovely that even its wild beating is sweet to hear…… yes, all of it."
The woman was blind.
"So I know. I know why you're so afraid of me."
She took my hands in hers. There was no room to resist. Her strength was far, far beyond anything I could muster.
"Tell me. You promised, didn't you? We are bound by a vow of a hundred years. You said it yourself, with your own lips."
The woman was a warrior.
Her grip tightened. I couldn't move a muscle, and she drew her face closer still. She meant to force an answer out of me.
Silence. Time pressing against my skin felt as though each instant were being split into fragments. Nothing existed but her black breath.
Unlike my frozen body, my mind raced, weighing every option. What could I possibly say? What words could I pull out of this situation?
I wanted to live. I had to live. But would confessing a lie change anything? Before that—could I even break free of this place at all?
Bubbling foam, murky black, so dark it made me want to retch.
The woman was a madwoman.
"……I never made any promise like that."
And then—ah. A single wretched syllable escaped me, in a voice that could barely be called mine.
That truth, spat out carelessly while drunk on an atmosphere too dizzying to bear, pierced straight through her heart.
It was an absolutely terrible sign.
"……Aha."
She laughed. My face went rigid. She laughed louder. My face grew more rigid still.
"That's fine. It's all right. I can't see what's in front of me anyway, so it doesn't matter."
Carefully, she released our joined hands and began gliding her arm up along mine. From hand to wrist, from wrist to elbow, from elbow to shoulder.
The hand that had stopped at my shoulder traveled back down and settled at my elbow. Apparently she had judged that this was as far as was proper.
"No matter what shape you may take."
She raised her head again, and the face I met held not a shred of hesitation. Her absolutely unshakable will was fixed on me.
I couldn't breathe.
