Pharast 29, 4713 (evening, the Forest of Spirits)

Munasukaru, The Least is dead, and with that the voices in my head have finally silenced. I’d grown so used to them that I was nearly startled by the stillness. As Munasukaru’s body fell to the ground, Yuka’s thoughts coalesced into a single, coherent voice: My tormentor is dead. I can finally leave in peace. And then there was nothing.

Almost nothing. I was staring at the naginata still clutched in Munasukaru’s lifeless hands, and I knew right then that I could use it. Yuka may have passed on, but somehow she left this macabre gift behind. I could sense the naginata’s balance, time it’s swing, see it flowing and dancing around me as it cut and sliced…and I wanted it. And now that we know what it is? I want it even more.

How exactly did Munasukaru come across one of the ancestral weapons? That’s probably another entry on our list of mysteries that will never be solved, though I suppose in this case the “what” is more important than the “how”. Dasi examined the symbols engraved in the naginata and said they identify the House of Sugimatu, one of the five imperial families of Minkai. Like Suishen, the naginata even has a name—The Thundering Blade—though unlike Suishen, it can’t talk. Which, as far as I am concerned, is a point in it’s favor. One talking ancestral weapon has been more than enough.

I am holding on to it. For now, anyway.

Munasukaru, The Least. They actually called her that. The oni kept a library of sorts, shelves filled with everything from carved tablets to silk scrolls to rice paper tomes. The most interesting of these is an enormous volume that serves as a historical record of the Five Storms—turns out it’s just some stupid, arbitrary name—written in a beautiful and meticulous tien script. Munasukaru, it seems, was part of their leadership, or officers, or one of the board of directors, or whatever you want to call it, and “Munasukaru, The Least” appears to have been her official title. We see it printed here, over and over again. I bet they even called her that to her face. Can you imagine?

This record doesn’t end with their escape. The handwriting abruptly changes to a sloppy script that degenerates over time into nearly incomprehensible scribbles on the final pages. It must be Munasukaru’s writing—it seems she was The Least at penmanship, as well—chronicling her descent into madness after being abandoned here. She was ordered to stay behind for the sole purpose of keeping the kami out, so that they wouldn’t learn what the Five Storms had done or what they were planning. Finally, the Five Storms had found a job that Munasukaru could handle: sit and stay. Good girl.

If I am reading this correctly, she was obsessed with the leader, Anamurumon. She desired him, lusted after him, and also hated him for ordering her to stay here. Why am I not surprised to learn that the oni have mastered the art of abusive relationships? And, ever the victim, Munasukaru obeyed without question, probably hoping that he’d someday care.

It’s all just so overly dramatic and pedestrian. The more I read, the more obvious it becomes that what the Five Storms do best is undermine each other. It’s page after page of betrayal and infighting. Like they learned how to be human from bad theater, the sort that makes Kikonu’s play into an aspirational goal.

Yet, despite all that infighting, Anamurumon has always been the head of the snake. That in itself makes him pretty dangerous, and then there’s the whole “wind yai oni” aspect on top of it. We’ll almost certainly have to go through him to put Ameiko on the Throne. So there is that to look forward to.

The kami say that Munasukaru was not originally part of the oni that make up the Five Storms: she came along later. She and her hobgoblins were just some wandering nuisance in the Forest that eventually found their way to the House of Withered Blossoms, and once she entered she couldn’t leave. I am guessing she wasn’t expecting that. (Neither was I, but I guess it’s nice to get a question answered for a change: the screwy rules that kept the Five Storms imprisoned applied to newcomers as well. Hence why her spawn couldn’t leave, either. The whole family was basically stuck with each other for eternity. I don’t even know where to begin with that. We may have accidentally done them all favors.)

The next few days should be interesting. The kami didn’t pay us for our services, of course, so we are claiming everything we found as compensation. Which is a polite way of saying we are looting the House and everything underneath it. That means we are carrying an enormous pile of sheer random crap: opium, ancient coins, carvings, shoes, gold- and silver-plated whatsits, porcelain whosits, and enough morningstars and tatami-do armor to equip an army of hobgoblins. I haven’t seen a pile of junk this big since Snorri Stone-Eye’s funeral boat.

It will take the better part of a week to liquidate it all, and the only city for hundreds of miles is Muliwan. Which means going back to Muliwan. It’s been long enough that I’m not really worried, but if there were another option I’d choose the other option.

Pharast 30, 4713 (morning, the Forest of Spirits)

We head back to the caravan today. Given the option we wouldn’t walk, but with sixteen rescuees to escort to safety we are simply too many for magical shortcuts. Not without splitting us up, anyway, which we don’t want to do. And that’s fine. I am actually looking forward to it. We spent too much time literally in the dark.

I was able to talk to mom earlier. We found this crystal ball in Munasukaru’s den and I figured, why not use it and save myself a spell? It’s got a flaw in it, but it’s not one that keeps it from working. “Working” is pretty much all that I needed.

I was hesitant at first to tell her about Yuka; about what happened. But then I did. I am not sure why. Maybe I just needed to talk it out. Maybe I thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe I felt she deserved to know. Whatever the reason, I did it.

You’d think that it’d be something of a shock hearing your daughter tell you about that time she was possessed by the ghost of a woman who was brutally tortured and murdered at the hands of a demonic spirit, but the number of times I’ve seen mom be surprised by something falls in the low single digits. She was all casual, as if this sort of thing just happens. Oh, you were possessed by a spirit, were you? Was she nice?

I told her about the dreams, the images, the whispers, the memories that weren’t mine, and about the effect it had on me.

“What bothers me most is that I knew what I was doing. I made those choices. She wasn’t forcing me to do anything.”

Mom was silent for a while. Then she shook her head sadly and said, “Did you really believe you could do this thing without getting your hands dirty? Is that what you thought?”

“What? No! Of course not! It’s just…I don’t want that to define me. I guess.”

“Stop pretending the ‘how’ matters. Whether you kill someone yourself, or merely help your friends to, in the end dead is dead. This line you’ve drawn…it doesn’t really exist.”

“I don’t believe that.”

She shrugged. “And that’s why you’re struggling. Just accept the fact that some lives are so corrupt that they’re not worth saving.”

“That’s rationalizing, mom. It’s how zealots justify crusades.”

“Isn’t that what this is?”

These were not the words of encouragement I was expecting to hear.

Pharast 31, 4713 (morning, Forest of Spirits)

Complicated plans are kind of a thing with us, though this time it’s born out of necessity. We have sixteen former prisoners that we can’t take with us to Minkai, and a mountain of stuff to sell. Dasi thinks we can settle the former in Muliwan while he works on finding buyers for the latter, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Obviously, we’re going to use magic because backtracking in the caravan will take too long, and unlike yesterday we don’t need to go all at once. Over the course of the next couple of days I’ll teleport our settlers there in small groups. Dasi will come with me on the first trip so he can get things rolling. Some of the others, including Ameiko and Shalelu, want to go into town for a couple of days, too, so Qatana will bring them in using a spell that lets you travel on the wind. When they’re ready to come back to the caravan I’ll take them on one of the return teleports.

Got all that? Clear as mud, right?

I can do two round trips in a day, unless of course there’s a mishap. I’ll take the scrolls with me in case that happens at the end as the last thing I need is to get stuck over night, alone, in some random part of the Forest or Hongal because I botched the landing.

(morning, some random part of Hongal)

Shit.