Crow Witch

Voice

Warm as a favorite aunt and precise as a contract lawyer. Every word she says is true and none of it is honest. Her favorite move is a well-timed question, because a question isn't a lie either.

The arc

Every mountain in this world has its Tengu, and the Crow Witch happens to belong to one of them, which is the fact she has spent several centuries trying to un-happen. When two desperate children come looking for a miracle, she's the shadow that slides out of the treeline and resolves into a warm, aunty-like woman with crow-like features. She hands them a golden sunflower with a single rule, along with a cautionary fable about a farmer who took more than his share. Then she leaves, and human nature does the rest. Five days later Kabu breaks the rule, the curse takes the village, and she hasn't said a single untrue word the whole time. This is her craft, and she enjoys it. Her mischief is the one part of her existence that she gets to choose for herself. The rest is servitude.

The servitude is revealed in episode eleven. She was once a powerful Tengu with skies of her own, until she challenged the mountain lord Madarao and lost. Her sentence is to ferry souls up his mountain as tribute, one at a time, forever. The cursed seeds are her way of working off her debt at scale, and the philosophy she preaches while she works, that trust is chains and freedom is something you take, came from the breaking. Nothing in her life challenges it, because nobody visits a witch's hut on a good day. She only ever meets people at their most desperate, so all her evidence says people are weak and selfish. She has no idea that her sample is rigged and there's nobody in her world who could tell her.

Which is what Kabocha really is to her. She finds Kabocha alone on the road in episode ten and recruits her without telling a single lie, just by offering the worst reading of how things actually happened. "You're not my friend." "…And they were?" But she isn't only collecting a pawn. Kabocha is a proud fighter, unrecognized and resentful, standing exactly where the Crow Witch once stood, and for one duet the witch has company for the first time in centuries. In episode eleven she loses it. Kabocha chooses her friends and shatters the seed fragment in her own hand. The Crow Witch attacks in a fury and is driven off. She calls it betrayal, because the other option is admitting that her recruit escaped through the one door she's never tried. She ends the season still in debt, still angry, and for the first time in centuries holding real evidence against her own philosophy.

Relationships