A Lewd New World18+

~Kaguya Monogatari~

My earliest memory is of light. A shining, silver radiance which permeated the entirety of all that I knew.

It bathed me in warmth and bliss, keeping me safe and protecting me from a darkness that I could not then fathom.

That light was the first thing I ever knew.

For a long time, it was the only thing I knew.

But then he came and cut away the light, carving open the celestial womb in which I had theretofore existed. I then perceived, for the first time, that there was more than just light in the world.

I saw the night sky. A black, endless canvass stretched over the earth and the seas. Bright jewels twinkled in the velvety midnight high above, innumerable motes of light both cold and remote.

It was dark, a twilight beyond any conception of my thoughts. Sound came to my ears, a rustling of leaves and woody stalks.

For the first time, I felt cold.

What I would later come to know as wind brushed across my naked skin, fair and soft. I was defenseless against the natural elements.

Dread filled me, and I despaired for the loss of my light. The warmth which had bathed me, the glow which had kept these strange and worrisome things from my knowledge. Dearly I longed to return to that place, to draw that light about me once more.

That was when I felt something coarse and heavy drape over my frame. It smelled strangely, and weighed down unpleasantly on my body... but it was warm, and I drew it close about my naked frame in gladness.

I saw him, then. A young man, hardly more than a boy, smiling at me.

I did not understand what he was, at first, but I saw that he covered himself with something much lighter than what had just been draped over me. Something far too thin to have protected him against that biting wind.

Only later would I understand what this meant: that he had given me his own coat when he saw me there, naked and shivering in the cold, unfriendly night.

"Do you feel better?" he asked me, and I understood his meaning at once.

"Y-yes, I do," I said to him, knowing instantly what to say, although until that point my lips had never formed a word, and it felt strange to do as much. "Thank you very much..."

He simply smiled wider at me, and picked me up. I was shorter than him by a head, and much slighter; for someone as used to heavy labor as he, I was no burden at all.

We were in a forest of bamboo, at the foot of a great mountain. The night sky was dark to my perception, lit by only the twinkling of stars overhead. The lad who carried me was the apprentice of someone he called Taketori no Okina, an old and childless bamboo-cutter, and I myself he had apparently cut free from a glowing stalk of bamboo.

He spoke to me the whole way through the forest, talking cheerfully as he bore me out from the looming, foreign darkness. He said his name was Otsutsuki, and told me about his life.

I remember little, now, of all the idle, meaningless chatter. Few details can I recall from the words he shared with me on the way down the mountain. All that I can remember, if I try, are how warm his body felt beneath me, and how soothing was the smell of his sweat and his labor.

It warmed me far more than any coat over my body.

Earthy, wholesome, pure. Otsutsuki was simple and good-natured, honest and earnest. Something about his hold on me, as he carried me, made me feel as warm and secure as I had in my womb of light, within that glowing stalk of bamboo.