Desnus 29, 4713 (early afternoon, Yugureda Shosaito home)

Shosaito obviously didn’t want anyone stumbling across his unseemly research, but living on a private island with a murderous pet nue while surrounding himself with undead of his own making apparently wasn’t secluded enough. To fix this galling error, he created a maze in the shadow plane and linked it between his sake cellar and his laboratory. Because that’s where everyone puts their shadow plane mazes, obviously.

I don’t know what he was thinking. The shadow plane is dangerous, and leaving it open to the material plane like that is equal parts brazen and blithe. Shadows, kytons, nightshades…these creatures and worse could literally just wander through at any time, placing untold numbers of people in very real danger. But from what I can tell from his research journal and personal diaries, Shosaito did not have a strong grasp on the concept of consequences. Frankly, I am surprised he survived his own recklessness.

O-Sayumi’s clues led us almost straight to her. It was Ivan that figured it out. It wasn’t just the objects inside her inro, but their numbers: one silk cocoon, two rings, and three camphorwood beads. She had divined the correct path through the maze and left us a tactile map of the gates in their correct order. We have no idea what would have happened had we chosen a wrong path, but if the mirror traps were any indicator we would have been licking some wounds at best.

While we did find O-Sayumi, what we weren’t expecting was to see another woman with her; their bodies sat, unmoving, on the floor of a lavishly decorated sitting room. Ivan’s spell said they were neither alive nor dead, but I could tell there was a spell in place to prevent them from decomposing. We later learned that the elderly woman was Shosaito’s current wife, and that’s when the whole story came into clear focus.

He tried to place her soul in O-Sayumi’s body. In his journals, he comments on how much O-Sayumi resembles her long-dead mother, Kaori, the woman he had murdered. I don’t understand what goes through the mind of someone who would kill his first wife, then lust after his own daughter to the point of placing the soul of his second wife in her body. What is wrong with people?

Maybe it’s best not to ask because I really don’t want to know the answer. We’ve confronted many people who have corrupted themselves thoroughly for a supposedly higher cause, but none that had done so purely for their own, selfish reasons. And I am not sure which is worse. There’s no scale for something like this.

I was not surprised to learn that a man careless enough to create a portal to the shadow plane was also overconfident in his own abilities. His spell went awry, and though his wife’s soul was pulled from her body it did not enter the pearl he used as the magical jar. Unwilling to return O-Sayumi to her body, as that would permanently break the spell and leave his wife’s soul lost forever, he simply…kept them here, like this, and continued his work, desperately searching for magic that would safely reverse what he had done.

That magic was far beyond him, and it is far beyond us as well. We did the only thing we could do: forcibly break his spell, and return O-Sayumi. His wife is now lost forever, her soul condemned to wander the planes, unable to pass on, out of even Pharasma’s reach, and unable to return to life. It’s a terrible thing.

At first, I was upset about this, to the point where someone—I don’t remember who—asked why I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to fix it. I answered, “Because it was not her fault.” And that’s true. Shosaito’s notes show he tried to get his wife to support what he was doing, but she refused. But he did it anyway, without her knowledge. It’s sickening.

But, then we spoke with O-Sayumi and learned his wife knew that he had corrupted the lives of the others on their island. That she was complicit in turning the villagers and their house staff into undead. It was not that, but this business with her soul, that was the bridge too far. And that is what did it for me. “That was where the line was?” I said to no one in particular. “Not ‘let’s make undead from our house staff’, or ‘let’s unleash ghoul fever on the village’?” Eternal punishment may be disproportionate to her crime, but she was certainly no innocent.

Perhaps, some day, Ashava will find her and lead her home.

The island is empty now. Yugureda Shosaito is dead. His wife is dead. His nue companion, the one that killed O-Sayumi’s mother, is dead. The manananggal and lacedons have been destroyed. It’s probably the first time in years that this island has seen fresh air.

I can’t wait to leave it.

(mid-afternoon, Namidakame Lagoon)

I stand corrected. Now, this island is empty. Much to our surprise, Shosaito’s personal barge was crewed by ja noi oni. Because of course it was. Oni are the flies in humanity’s garbage heap.

Destroying ja noi oni is something we’ve recently gotten pretty good at, to the point where it was impossible for me to take them seriously. There were only a dozen of them, which was about as threatening as a petting zoo. Of course they were too dim to figure this out, even as we were mercilessly grinding them up. But what really gets me is, they weren’t sent here to kill us. They didn’t know who we were or who was with us. The Five Storms wasn’t ordering them around. They were just some random oni, fighting to the last man to protect a barge. Did it not occur to them that this wasn’t something worth dying for?

Maybe, like goblins, they really think that, no matter how bad the odds, they’ll be the one that turns it around. That they’ll succeed where their companions have failed and died. It makes a certain kind of sense.

I wish I’d had more lethal spells prepared, and said as much after the last of them had been cut down. This earned me a number of looks, and a bizarre debate with Ivan when he asked me why I thought it was OK to kill oni but not, say, people.

“They’re not real.”

“What do you mean, they aren’t real? Of course they’re real.”

“They’re not from here. Not from our world or our plane. They aren’t real people.”

“They’re both outsiders and native to this plane.”

“They’re evil spirits, manifested in humanoid bodies. They don’t count.”

Obviously, he doesn’t get it. But then again, none of the others seem to, either. Except maybe Ameiko. And sometimes I wonder even about her.

There’s a saying about how if you can’t get anyone to see reason, then maybe you’re the one who is being unreasonable. This is not a comforting thought.