It Sleeps

I. The Incident

It started by the river.

A bend in the water, not far from the walking trail. Weeds high, sky clear, and no adults around. Just three kids. A boy named Eliot. Another named Max. And a girl named Hana.

She was the smallest.

They’d taken her backpack, thrown it across the mud. She tried to get it. Eliot shoved her back. Max laughed. It wasn’t anything new. It had been happening for weeks—low-stakes cruelty, familiar patterns. Until today.

Today, Max had a slingshot.

It wasn’t a real one. A Y-shaped branch with rubber bands knotted around it. He’d made it the night before after watching an old movie. Thought it might be funny. They’d practiced on soda cans and fence posts. But now Eliot pointed to a rock near the edge of the bank.

“Try it,” he said. “Hit her shoe.”

Hana didn’t move. She was crouched near her bag, arms around her knees.

Max hesitated. Then picked up the rock. Flat. Palm-sized. Nothing special. The kind of thing you forget as soon as you throw it.

He loaded it.

He pulled back.

He let go.

It veered.

Not her foot.

Her forehead.

The sound wasn’t loud. A dry crack. Her head snapped sideways, and she dropped, face-first into the weeds.

Max stepped back.
“I didn’t—”
But Eliot was already moving.

The blood wasn’t much at first. Then more. It ran down her temple, soaked into the grass, and trickled down into the dirt. The boys stood still. Max’s hands shook.

She wasn’t moving.

Under the grass, the blood found its way to stone. The earth drank it in. Molecules slipped into pores carved by time, pressed into mineral, absorbed like a memory. A vein pulsed.

The stone remembered.

Heat built—not fire, not light, but pressure.

Deep inside the rock, something ancient unfolded. Not thought. Not voice.

Recognition.

II. Stone Is the Bone of the Earth

Before language. Before trees. Before breath.

There was weight.

Mountains shifted. Not slowly—violently. They crashed like beasts. Teeth of granite grinding into one another, carving valleys where none were meant to be. Lava cooled into crust. Crust cracked. Pressure released.

Jizo was not born. It formed.

It had no name. It didn’t need one. It was an anchor. A mediator. It watched as continents argued and plates split the seabed open. It steadied cliffs, cradled rivers, caught falling sky.

It was not worshipped.

It did not want to be.

In time, the world cooled. Storms lessened. The fires sank. Mountains held still.

And something fragile began to walk.

Humans.

They built fires. Stacked stones. Drew pictures in the dark. They used sticks, then bone, then metal. And always, they stepped on rock without looking down.

Jizo did not judge. It simply watched.

A child once tripped and fell on a ridge, cracking his head. His blood ran onto a stone. The tribe buried him where he fell. They stacked more stones above him. Called it holy.

They didn’t know it was Jizo. That was a name they’d give it later.

But in that moment, it stirred.

Not in anger.

In warning.

Now, in the present, the same blood slid down a girl’s scalp. Into the earth. Onto the stone.

And again, the pressure began.

Not heat. Not noise. A tension, slow and gathering. Like the start of an avalanche deep inside a mountain no one had noticed.

III. Steel, Silk, and Blood

Centuries passed.

Jizo remained stone, embedded in a hill near a river crossing—half-submerged, moss-covered, mistaken for part of the landscape. The village that grew nearby called it a guardian. They tied red cloth to the trees around it, burned incense, and whispered things they wanted buried.

It never answered.

Until the duel.

Two men stood across from each other in the field just beyond the shrine. Summer heat. Cicadas loud enough to feel in the teeth. One wore the white of mourning. The other wore nothing ceremonial. His sword was sharp. His eyes sharper.

They bowed. Then moved.

Steel struck. Once. Twice.

Then a misstep.

The younger one slipped, fell sideways, and his blade sliced not his opponent, but the stone.

Not a scratch appeared. But something deep within Jizo’s body—stone older than names—tightened.

The older warrior dropped his sword. He knelt beside the rock and bowed, forehead pressed to moss.

The younger one stood, confused.

“It’s just a rock.”

The older man didn’t reply. He stood, picked up his blade, and walked away.

That night, the younger man returned with a hammer. He struck the stone once, laughing.

A week later, he drowned in the river, though no current was running.

No one touched the rock after that.

The villagers built a fence. A boy placed a small statue near it—round head, gentle face, hands folded in prayer. Someone painted “Jizo” on its base.

The name stuck.

Jizo did not protest.

But it withdrew.

Back in the present, the girl groaned.

Max stepped toward her, then stopped. Eliot pulled out his phone but didn’t dial.

The stone under the grass was hot now. Not burning. Just enough to radiate through dirt. A reminder.

Jizo remembered steel.
And the sound of disrespect.
And the moment just before deciding to act.

IV. Ash and Industry

The cutting never stopped.

Not swords now—blades of steam and rivet. Iron claws stripping mountains, burrowing through hills. Tracks laid over valleys, nails driven through what had once been sacred ground. Jizo no longer rested near shrines. Shrines were torn down. Their wood burned. Their names repurposed for train stations.

One day, workers drilled into a hillside and struck a dense mineral they didn’t recognize. Too strong for the drill. Too fused to the mountain.

They blasted it.

Fragments fell.

One shard, no larger than a coin, was hauled off, melted down, refined, cast into a casing. It became part of a torpedo shell.

It struck a ship off the coast of Okinawa. Hundreds died.

Jizo felt all of them.

Not the deaths—that had never disturbed it.

The misuse.

To be broken, reshaped, weaponized. To be used as tool and target. Not by the mountains it once calmed. Not by rivers or fault lines. But by men who tore it apart just to kill faster.

That was when Jizo decided.

It rejected its form.

Not out of fear. Not out of mercy. But because it saw no future in being touched.

Jizo fractured itself across the Earth. Into statues mistaken for gods. Into gravel ignored on roadsides. Into pebbles. Dust. Particles so small they could no longer be forged, only stepped on.

That’s where it stayed.

Until the present.

Until the slingshot. The stupid, trivial slingshot.

The shard that hit the girl wasn’t one of its weapons. It was one of its forgotten selves.

And now, it remembered the torpedo.
The boy who mocked it.
The furnace.
The blood.

And it pulsed again.

The girl moved. Groaned. Rolled over.

Max gasped. Eliot backed away.

She sat up slowly, face pale, hair stuck to her skin. She touched her forehead. The cut was shallow. Bleeding, but not deep.

She was fine.

The stone cooled.

Jizo hesitated.

Not because it forgave.
Because it wasn’t sure.