Crow Witch

Voice

Warm as a favourite aunt and precise as a contract lawyer. Every word she says is true and none of it is honest, and she finds most of it very funny.

The arc

The team first meets the Crow Witch the way you meet a figure from a fable: two desperate children walk into the woods at the edge of Furumi looking for a miracle, and she's there. She hears them out, sings them a cheerful warning about everyone who's come to her before them, and hands them a golden sunflower with a single rule that she knows they won't be able to keep. When the rule breaks, she arrives in a flurry of crows and scatters the seeds across the land. For most of the season the kids talk about her as the big bad, and keep finding black crow feathers wherever they go, sure she's pulling the strings behind every town. She mostly isn't. She's a trickster who enjoys the chaos, and her mischief is the one part of her existence that she gets to choose for herself.

Her story is told in the latter part of the season. She began as an ordinary crow, chosen by the Tengu of her mountain to become an immortal karasu-tengu, one of the lower spirits who help the great Tengu by working among the humans, often disguised as healers and medicine women. She has spent decades supporting the towns of her mountain, and from her side of it the work has been endless and nobody has ever said thank you. Her immortal life comes at the price of perpetual work, and there's no promotion at the end of it. That makes her sympathetic, though what she does about it is entirely selfish.

Which is what Kabocha really is to her. She finds Kabocha alone on the road home after Kabocha walks out on the team, 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?" She finishes the corruption the splinter started, and for one duet she has company for the first time in a very long time. Then Kabocha and her friends prove her wrong, and the witch runs.

When the team finally brings her the seeds and asks her to lift the curse on Kabu's head, she tells them she can't. The magic she put on the sunflower was a spell someone else gave her, and she won't say who. Whatever happens to Madarao, she disappears after egging the kids on up his mountain. She ends the season still stuck, still angry, and holding the first real evidence against her own philosophy she's had in centuries.

Relationships