Of Monsters and Madness

A Beauty and the Beast retelling meets Japanese Mythology.

• Beauty and The Beast Retelling
• Japanese Mythology
• Cursed Characters
• Dark Themes (Death/Murder)
• M/M Romance

On the night of his grand birthday celebration, the Emperor of Kaho, one of the four islands of Haruka, ends up with a curse that has turned him into an Oni. The Kitsune Witch responsible leaves him with a Sakura tree and the hope that if he can find true and honest love than he can break the curse that has been placed upon him and his Palace. After fifteen years of watching a blossom fall, the tree is nearly bare and Ryuichi's hope has all but left him.

Can he truly find someone who could love him as he is?

In the small fishing village of Minoru, Ichida Kiyomi has lived a quiet life with his father, Nobu, an inventor and craftsman. Together, they are content with their simple lives. Being refugees from an island south of Kaho, Kiyomi and his old father escaped the plague ravaging Hareta to live out the remainder of their lives on Kaho. After Nobu is commissioned for a piece that will serve as a birthday gift to the Icy Empress of the North island of Yukicho, he is lost in the woods of the Jubokko Forest. The forest, once beautiful, is a man eating death trap that keeps those cursed stuck on the Palace lands. Nobu's survival brings him before the Emperor, but the Emperor, cruel in nature and lacking hope in his situation, threatens to throw him back out into the forest for either the ghouls to eat or the Jubokko.

In his moment of fear, he mentions his child waiting for him back home. Intrigued, the Oni Emperor gives him a choice; his life in exchange for the child or death in the darkness of the forest.