Character of the Day - Yami, Huisong’s God of Death, and an added bonus an explanation on the Shinigami
Today’s character is about Yami, a Dragon/Tengu hybrid, God of Death who appears in The Legend of Huisong and is Murasaki’s (an MC) boss as she works under him as a Shinigami. By mortal standards, Yami and several other deities across the Kaeyama are considered ‘the New Gods and Goddesses.’ Since many of them were children or were Guardians who worked under the Old Gods and Goddesses, at the time, were thrown into their new God and Goddess status after the war with the original Twin Goddesses’ Aletha and Nephele occurred.
During the war when Yami was 8, he and his Tengu mother were forced to flee and go into hiding to the countryside of Hyejin, which was his mother’s old hometown before she married Ryuu. This is where he met a Ryukyu girl named Yanai, who was the same age as him. The two of them became fast friends and grew close with their mutual concern for those fighting against the corrupted Goddesses.
2 years after the war broke out, Yami found out his father, Ryuu, was killed during the fighting, and had to take his place since his twin uncles were already filling their roles in the mid levels of the Punishment Realms as Torturers. Despite the new responsibilities thrown onto the child God, he still remained in contact with his mortal friends. Yanai and Yami when entering adulthood started dating.
During this time this is when he found out that someone within her family was abusing her. This caused them to get married soon after as he didn’t want to lose her in that sort of fashion. As he had seen with children, teens, and other adult souls who have passed through before heading to the Hallowed Grounds or the Resurrection Realms.
The two of them had a happy and loving relationship. The only time they ever fought was when Yanai wanted to see her siblings. He understood why, but he didn’t trust her parents and didn’t want to see anything happen to her. This concern and dread became a reality during her parents’ wedding anniversary when she didn’t return home and was missing for several weeks. He sent some Shinigami Scouts to see what had happened. To his horror Yanai’s parents were torturing those who fought against them to protect whatever remaining citizens were there as they were bleeding the town dry.
Yanai was one of those people he had to send to the Hallowed Grounds, which left him with a cold and bitter exterior. But those closest to him know that this isn’t how Yami is and know he’s a hurt deity, who lost too many people in his life, and Yanai was the breaking point. This is what also caused him to create a special Shinigami task force to attempt to prevent things like this from happening again.
The Shinigami are a group of beings who work under Yami. They are what the mortals and other deities refer to them as Guardians*. They collect souls, perform death rites if that person doesn’t have loved ones, and in extreme cases heal the injured. While they may reap souls and take them back to the Shintokami** for processing; they do what they can to prevent needless deaths. These special Guardians range from mortal to immortal. Each person is either half Soul or full Soul. Souls in this world are considered their own species. A person who is half Soul are mortals with unusual sensitivity to their surroundings and can ‘see’ things other beings cannot.
*Guardian is my term for Lesser Gods and Goddesses
**The Shintokami acts as a meeting hall/throne room/dwelling/soul processing place for Yami
Comments