Tail of the Raiju

Trigger warning: violence and gruesome death.

Astraphobia: defined as the extreme fear of thunder and lightning. It is also known as brontophobia and keraunophobia.

Corin Downing went out for a walk on a Sunday morning, stopping by the book shop in downtown Naperville. She looked at some books on Japanese folklore, looking into myths related to the yokai. She was interested in this research after realizing through a blood test that she had Japanese ancestry. She was hoping to connect with her family's roots. She spent so much time, engrossed in learning about dragons like the Ryu and the Orochi, that by the time she was ready to walk back home, it was raining and the clouds were looking bleak.

Corin walked back home, but then it became a downpour and started thundering. She couldn't run because of the risk of getting struck by lightning. Corin was afraid the bolts behaved like motion sensors, attracted to quick movement coming from the ground beneath the clouds. The woman had to keep going though since her phone battery was too low to hail an Uber back home.

This lasted until Corin went under the bridge for the train tracks by the main road out of downtown. She was able to stop and catch her breath. Corin finally noticed that she was completely soaked from head to toe in water from the rain. The thunder and lightning beyond the bridge she hid beneath kept roaring loudly, much to her fright.

The thunderstorms lately sounded very violent in town, especially at night when there was uncertainty until she woke the next day. Corin distinctly remembered a few nights where it was hard to sleep at night from fear of the lightning striking her home or even her head from within her bedroom. She even prayed to God during the night that the lightning wouldn't hit the house.

This particular day almost reminded Corin of when she drove home from the bar and it was raining so hard that it was almost hard to see what was in front of her. She couldn't go as fast as she wanted from the motion sensing lightning that could've smite her. It was a perilous drive home.

Corin knew the only option was to wait until the storm let up so she could continue her walk home and avoid slipping on the wet ground. However, after an intense flash of lightning, something peculiar happened: a cat with blue fur and a wolf tail scurried passed her like a gust of wind. Corin has had many cats over the years, but none of them ever had fur that blue, nor a tail as bushy as a wolf's. She had to follow that animal, even though she knew that the storm hadn't let up much. Corin was worried about the weird blue cat and didn't want it to be running in this weather.

She went after the cat, careful with her speed. As Corin saw the cat within her sight, she noticed she was in a wooded area by the railroad and that the storm was more intense the closer she got to this creature that was now jumping between trees. She stopped when lightning struck the ground in front of her. The woman froze when the cat was looking at her with blue eyes like that of the lightning bolt before the cat morphed to a blue tiger with a wolf tail and snout. It angrily growled at her before turning away to continue running by jumping on the trees, damaging them with its electrical movement. She watched in shock and awe literally as the creature disappeared.

Corin went home with the storm having let up after what she had witnessed. She went on her computer, entering into the search engine "blue cat", but it only came up with Russian blue cats as the top result. She then typed in "blue tiger" which only resulted in either a sports team for a high school or a cryptid that was tied to karma more so than electricity. She finally typed, "lightning wolf mythology", which gave her the result of Raiju.

Before Corin could open the top result on the search engine, the power went out from the storm picking back up once more. She yelled, “Oh come on!” Thunder roared outside like a monster waiting for her to come out of the house. All three of her cats, Peaches, Seymour, and Coco, went running towards the basement, with their bodies and tails hunkered down. Before long, Corin saw the same tiger wolf pass by the house, jumping between the trees that were right in front of the house. She came outside to see the path of the creature, causing some flames upon some trees to spark, but mysteriously, there was no rain. She followed the lightning wolf, but was careful on being seen by hiding behind these trees.

This lasted until it struck a nearby house. A scream could be heard from within the house that was then muffled by the sound of raging thunder. Before Corin could process what had happened, the creature came out with another one like it, but much more wolf-like. They saw Corin and struck fear into her with their blue eyes before they went up into the clouds in a flash of lightning. Then it started raining at that moment.

She went to bed alone, with the cats hiding in the basement from the looming storm. Corin was scared of the roaring sounds and the flash of lightning outside. There was even a point where the lightning almost seemed like it was inches from her head.

This caused Corin to dream she was in a misty forest. She was surrounded by lightning blue creatures with piercing blue eyes, but only two of them were wolf-like and were ones she had seen already. The other three were a fox with big ears, a big squirrel, and a big house cat. The main tiger wolf Raiju appeared before her, and she shielded herself, thinking she was going to be attacked by all these creatures. Corin was surprised when the creature pressed its head up on her and then rubbed up to her like her cats. She looked at the Raiju, and she was reminded of her oldest cat, Archie, who passed away three years prior due to old age. She still missed him even after all this time, and was surprised by the resemblance the Raiju had to Archie, especially when they both had big and bushy tails. The Raiju came back around to stare at her with its piercing blue eyes as the other Raiju around them went further into the forest, away from them.

Corin sprung awake from her bed. She looked outside to find all the trees damaged in different ways. Some of the trees had gashes on them like claw marks, but most of them were burnt beyond repair. Corin went out and saw that the house that got struck by lightning in the middle of the night burnt down from the fire that came after the lightning strike, killing one person inside. The other person that lived there had miraculously survived.

Corin went online and looked up the Raiju. She found out that it was a beast that embodied thunder and lightning; it took the form of many different quadrupeds, but it mostly resembled a wolf, cat, or a weasel and was the companion of the Shinto god of lightning, Raijin. It was a beast that was calm and harmless, but became agitated during storms and leapt on mostly trees, fields, and even buildings. It was a mystery as to why it came across her that rainy day and then stuck around the area she was in when the Raiju came from Japan as one of their yokai. Maybe it knew she had Japanese lineage and was trying to protect her from something that would threaten her life? Maybe it was a divine messenger sent on a mission by its thunder god master. That last question wasn't too far off when she thought about Hermes as a messenger god that answered to Zeus in Greek myth and the angels that were messengers of God in Christianity.

The remaining bit of information she found on the Raiju, however, was the most interesting: Raiju were fond of sleeping in human navels. People often sleep on their stomachs during bad weather, especially when sleeping outdoors, for a stronger Raiju or even Raijin himself will shoot lightning at the creature hiding in a navel to wake it up, harming or even killing the person that it was resting in in the process. She remembered that she saw the Raiju go into a house, and heard a scream before seeing it leave with another like it, but it was impossible to say if the person deserved getting what seemed like an accidental smiting. At best, they were just very unlucky to house a lightning wolf resting in them that night. The way it happened though, it was almost like a specter of death that smite someone that was suffering and was bringing them up to the heavens along with the other beast. Corin saw her cat within this group of thunder beasts is the weird thing, so maybe her pet was watching over her as a guardian angel in a sense.

Corin never knew what happened to the person who died until a couple weeks later, when her friend, Terri Zamora, met up with her for dinner in an outdoor venue in downtown Naperville. She told Terri about the weird lightning storms that were occurring lately, as Terri then notes, "Oh yeah, Mr. Noble! I heard he's been sick a lot and had the ambulance called on him a lot more recently for heart problems. His wife died the year prior and apparently the weather was crappy that day too."

They say lightning never strikes twice, but with what happened, it added up that the beasts were like heralds of death that knew when the time came for certain people that believed in them, and that the bell tolled for that couple and for probably other people lately. They answered to prayers though with how they not only never touched Corin, but one of them actually knew her in a past life. So whenever there was a thunderstorm outside, she knew to be cautious in case the bell tolled for her at the hands of these thunder beasts.