Misaki & Baby Izumo Art (+ EXCERPT) (Patreon)

More art I commissioned pre-Sword of Kaigen. The artist is Tiffany Jones (Tuffuny) and you can check out more of her work at the following links: Tumblr / Twitter / Society6

Most of you have probably seen this artwork (it's one of my favorites) but I'm posting it now to go with this excerpt from an unpublished chapter of the now-discontinued Theonite series:

[SPOILER WARNING: This excerpt takes place 13 years post-Sword of Kaigen, so please stop here if you don’t want to be spoiled for that whole book]

Kaa-chan always laughed that Takayubi’s blizzards were nothing to the storms that used to batter the Arashiki, where she had grown up, but that day, even Misaki, daughter of the Stormfort, had sent her staff home early and closed the restaurant.

Izumo had been washing dishes when he heard the back door open to a frenzied howl of wind. Thinking that Kaa-chan must have forgotten to fix the latch in place, he shed the water from his hands, hopped from his bucket, and hurried to close it, only to find Kaa-chan standing at the back stoop.

And there was Kazeko, long hair caught in the wind, shaking from head to toe. Her pale lips, nearly blue from cold, moved, but Izumo was too far away to hear what she said.

“Absolutely not,” Kaa-chan said and pulled the waifish girl inside. “It’s too cold out. You’re lucky you don’t have frostbite.”

Izumo’s first thought was that they were all about to die. Kaa-chan had let in a demon into their house and they were all going to die in wind and chaos. But the wind stayed outside after Kaa-chan had closed the door.

Kazeko’s wild hair settled on her shoulders as Kaa-chan clutched her little hands and gently massaged them between hers. It took Izumo a moment to realize that she was working the girl’s blood, restoring circulating through the fingers. Could demons lose circulation in their hands? The hands in question weren’t clawed now that he had a better look at them. He was just wondering if Kazeko was the type of demon who took on human form to lure unwitting victims into her jaws when his eyes caught on hers—

and a rift opened in the world. A gray-black infinity that was neither sky nor ocean but certainly so vast that Nami herself could never know its depths.

Kaa-chan had once dissected a sheep’s eye with Izumo, using her flexible jiya to peel back one liquid layer at a time. He knew for a fact that eyes were just that: layers of aqueous humor, cornea, vitreous, blood, and retina that extended less than two koyinu back into a person’s head before meeting the optic nerve. Just liquid machines designed to convert light into information.

All those facts disintegrated in Kazeko’s eyes, and Izumo had the feeling that if he looked at them too long, he would drown. But he couldn’t stop. Was this how the demon took her prey? By pulling him into the starless, bottomless softness of forever?

Access to the rest of this chapter is available through the $3 Saber Tier.

You can find more commissioned pieces and fanart from the world of Theonite on this page: https://mlwangbooks.com/theonite-artwork/