The Gate Beneath The Roots
The gate to the underworld was not beneath the shrine, as Hana had expected, but beneath the camphor tree on the hill behind it — the oldest tree in the prefecture, its trunk so wide that five people could not link arms around it. Master Endo showed her the entrance at midnight, when the tree's roots glowed with a faint phosphorescence that he said was the light of the world below bleeding through. The opening was narrow, barely wide enough for her shoulders, and it breathed — a slow, warm exhalation that smelled of wet stone and something sweeter, like incense burned a very long time ago.
She carried nothing with her except the fox god's ofuda — a paper talisman inscribed with the god's name in the angular script she had seen on the basement walls. Master Endo had pressed it into her hands with fingers that trembled, and she understood that he was sending her to a place he did not expect her to return from. The old priest had been tending the shrine for forty years. He had heard the god breathing too, she realized now. He had simply lacked whatever quality it was that allowed her to hear it clearly. He had been waiting, all these years, for someone who could.
The descent was longer than it should have been. The passage wound through rock that was warm and faintly yielding, more like flesh than stone, and the phosphorescent light intensified as she went deeper until she was