Desnus 26, 4713 (night, Seinaru Heikiko)

Okay. I just had to know. While Zosi was guiding the wagon, I climbed up front and asked, “Why were you so curious about whether I had…about what had happened to me?”

He turned to stare at the gorgon, or what he’d made out of it. “There is so much to life and the shells we occupy.” He looked out ahead at nothing at all, or something I couldn’t see. “I have enjoyed this cycle as a gnome. They are astounding for their size.”

Wait. What?

He shook his had dismissively, as if he knew what I was thinking. “No, I don’t have any attachment or recollection of my past incarnations. But I do believe that they did exist. Much like the power of Alchemy, we transform the physical and migrate the anima into the next shell. But this time? I plan to gather that information.”

He was talking about reincarnation.

It is widely believed among followers of Irori that those who achieve perfection in life go to his side to serve him in death. Those who fall short are reincarnated to begin the journey anew. That would make him the only deity that embraces it as part of his tenets. Most others frown upon it, though they don’t necessarily object to it, either (that includes Pharasma).

Otherwise, the practice is the domain of the druidic faiths and witchcraft.

Zosi turned to look at me. “Should something extinguish this shell, I don’t want to be anchored to it. My chosen method of restoration will be reincarnation so that I may experience the transformation of matter but retain this stream of consciousness. My plan is to purchase a scroll and keep it handy.”

I nodded. “I understand; I’ll honor your wishes.”

“The only problem I see is…the one who is all fixed on endings.” Qatana. He shook his head, “Groetus. I don’t know much about the divine; I appreciate all they did to create this world. But this Groetus, if the crazy one speaks truth about it, will be the undoing of it all. It’s a dark god with a dark path and I don’t want her involved in my return.

“I don’t trust that her very own transformation is not happening right now, moving her anima toward a destructive darkness. Her delight in the death of others is unsettling. It is one thing when it is a monster from another realm… but fellow humanoid races.” He shook his head sadly, “I know my words hold little weight. You’ve traveled for so long that you are mostly blind to the madness that dictates her conduct, but someday, I think this veil of trust will be lifted. I just hope it is before she turns on Ameiko.”

Why does Qatana always have to make things so complicated? It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times, and it’s one with no answer.

I know why he was worried. And I get it. I really do. But, it was a skewed perception, one that didn’t accurately reflect who she was.

“I grew up with Qatana. I probably know her better than anyone, though admittedly that is not difficult and sometimes I feel I don’t know her at all. I understand why you’re worried. Perhaps this will help put you at ease.

“When she was nine years old, her parents were killed in front of her and she was sold into slavery. I thought I’d never see her again, but she was rescued by Shelalu, and she returned home nearly a year later.

“A year is a long time. For most of it she was forced to do…terrible things. I’ve heard the stories. They are horrible enough that I don’t feel I have the right…they are her stories, and not mine to tell. But believe me when I say they were worse than I could imagine, even many years later when she started opening up to me.

“She doesn’t delight in killing people. Not exactly. But she has developed a strong, if not extreme, animosity towards those who would abuse and exploit others. Her attachment to Groetus is…a coping mechanism, I think. She is only one person. She knows she can’t save a world that is filled with misery. She welcomes the end times not because she relishes in destruction, but because it will do what she cannot: end all suffering, everywhere.”

I don’t know if this helped her case or hurt it.

We ended the day on a much lighter note: I listened to stories about his cat.

Desnus 27, 4713 (night, Sakakabe)

Someone continues to spy on us. My spell alerted me earlier this evening as we were looking for an inn. With a bit of experimentation I was able to determine that the target was Ameiko, which is just fucking great. It means whoever is watching us probably knows who she is.

I tried to get an image of the spell caster but it didn’t work. Which is also just great. Magic can be so unreliable. One wonders how casters rise to such positions of power when our spells don’t work correctly half the time.

Desnus 28, 4713 (late morning, Sakakabe)

Another day, another attempt to spy on us. Once again, I tried to reverse the conduit to get a look at the voyeur, and once again it failed. This time we didn’t terminate the offending spell, but let it run its course as a rough gauge of the other caster’s power and it lasted a quarter of an hour. Which is quite a bit longer than I can manage, and that has me nervous. Very, very nervous.

Should it? Maybe. Maybe not. I know what my capabilities would be if I were that skilled, and suffice it to say that I expected more. A lot more. Either they are content with just watching us, or they have help. Help that is powerful, but limited in its scope.

We found a decorative samisen to present to O-Kohaku as a gift. I used a spell to etch the tea house’s logo—a cherry blossom—on it to give it that added personal touch. Hopefully this will be enough of a gesture to secure an audience with her.

(night, Jikko River)

Gods, what a day. We are now searching for a missing geisha by the name of O-Sayumi. As I feared, establishing Ameiko’s legitimacy is requiring us to prove our honor through an endless string of favors.

That being said, O-Sayumi’s story is rather disturbing, so we are pretty motivated to get to the bottom of it. She worked as a geisha in the Kiniro Kyomai tea house and was apparently very popular with a long list of regular clients who ask specifically for her. One of these clients was a rather well-known pearl merchant named Yugureda Shosaito, only he was more or less obsessed with her and kept inviting her to his home for a “private performance”. For the longest time she refused, but then one day, without warning or explanation, she accepted…and she hasn’t been seen since.

Strangely enough, she seems to have predicted her own disappearance. I would have found this unusual many months ago but now? I just accept as fact that she may be a talented seer. She left clues behind in the form of notes, verbal messages, and curiosities: a strange puzzle box or inro, and a vase.

The inro is filled with three items that are obviously important but in a bafflingly obtuse way. In other words: we don’t know what any of it means. Either she was too clever, we’re too dim, or we haven’t come across whatever it is that will make sense of it all. I am hoping for the latter, but worried it’s the former. What if it never makes sense to us?

We traced the inro back to its sculptor, who then brought out the vase. It depicted an image of a kappa, and when we turned over we found cucumber-scented bath salts stuck inside the unusually deep recess in the bottom. The sculptor explained that he made these items at her request and to her exact specifications, and that she told him to give this vase to the honorable people who were seeking her. Which implies she foresaw her future weeks in advance, to a level of detail and precision that I had not thought possible.

The vase led us to where we are now: the home of The Wise Kappa, Numataro-sama, whom O-Sayumi had referred to as her uncle.

Obviously, they are not related by blood. From Numataro-sama, we learned that O-Sayumi’s mother had been killed by a monstrous tiger when O-Sayumi was just an infant. Her mother knew she was being hunted, and she hid O-Sayumi’s basket under a bush before the tiger caught up to her. The kappa found the infant, and raised her as his own until she was old enough to need the company of other humans.

The kappa believes it was Shosaito that had O-Sayumi’s mother killed. He also believes the merchant is a powerful wizard and an all around shitty person. Which would, of course, follow from the whole “killed her mother” thing. And by the way? I have to agree with the “wizard” assessment. We can see the island where Shosaito lives; it’s surrounded by dark shadows and the landscape there seems drained of color. Whatever he is up to I am betting it is to no good, because come on. Can you be any more obvious?

Why did O-Sayumi agree to visit this person? That is the big mystery, the question that everyone who knew her has asked and that no one can answer. There is more or less universal agreement that Shosaito was creepy and made everyone, especially O-Sayumi, uncomfortable in his presence. There is also universal agreement that she would never willingly agree to go to his home. Which suggests that she wasn’t willing, which in turn implies that she was coerced or blackmailed.

Obviously, that’s just a theory, but it’s the only one we have and it’s one that fits the facts.

We now have a dilemma on our hands. We must go see this pearl merchant-turned wizard-turned kidnapper, but we also have Ameiko with us because we’re currently being hunted, and she’s arguably safer with us than sitting in an immobile fortress that is far from being a secret. And because we have Ameiko with us, we also have Shalelu and Koya with us, and there is absolutely no way we are bringing Koya into something this dangerous, and I have strong reservations about Ameiko as well. But, we can’t leave them alone, either, because see above.

Desnus 25, 4713 (late afternoon, Seinaru Heikiko)

Sandru is leaving. This is not really a surprise: he was hired to get us all here, and now that job is done. He and Ameiko are very close friends, but he still has a business to run and taking up arms in a revolution was never part of the plan. Bevelek and Vankor certainly didn’t sign up for it, either, and they are eager to get back to their family.

Their return trip should be a lot easier. There are no crazed disciples of Sitthud commanding winter storms, no armies of the dead, and no enraged white dragons standing between here and Avistan. On top of that, he’ll be crossing the Crown at the proper time of year. To accomplish the latter, though, he has to leave now. It will take over a month just to reach the Pass, and he needs to be on the ice by the middle of Erastus. That doesn’t leave him much time to prepare, provision, and hire any help he’ll need to get safely across.

The finality of the caravan departing is sinking in. For nearly a year it’s been about the journey, but now we are here and there is no more going back. I mean, we could, but we’d either have to leave the Seal behind us or run away with what we can carry. Neither option is particularly attractive much less realistic, so here we are.

It took only an instant for Qatana and I to return to Jiro’s camp. Heading back here took a little longer because we needed to bring the Seal, and that meant relying on Qatana’s spells. And then we had to explain to Olmas why Ameiko wasn’t with us (which didn’t take very long, but sure felt a whole hell of a lot longer).

What can I say? She’s not going to just sit quietly in her room while everyone else goes outside to play. She’s an adult and capable of making her own decisions. If she’s going to build support among the people here, then she’s going to have to demonstrate that she’s worthy of it. The Seal can only prove her claim—it can’t rally people to the cause, or instill them with morale. And establishing trust with Jiro before he knows who she is does make a certain kind of sense. The impact of the Big Reveal, assuming this all works, will be that much greater when it happens.

That being said, we need to rein this in. Ambushing second-rate bandits on horseback is one thing, but some of the filth we get mired in goes way beyond that. Ameiko can’t claim the throne if she’s dead, and there are some forms of “dead” that can’t easily be undone. If she’s going to take risks, then we need to make sure they are measured ones.

Fortunately for us, and for Olmas, wiping out the raiding parties seemed to go off without a hitch. We had this elaborate plan in case any of those bandit teams made it back to the fortress, but ultimately we could have skipped all that work and just slept in, instead. Literally one horse returned. One. It was scratched up a bit but it had obviously fared better than its missing rider, whose blood was all over the saddle. Radella used a spell to talk to it (the horse, not the saddle) and we learned the raiding party had fallen afoul of ether Jiro or Hatsue. Just to be certain, Dasi used one of those creepy spells of his on the rider’s blood and got much the same information, only with a lot more attitude.

It’s been several hours and this whole place still smells like bacon. This is what happens when you put Ivan in the kitchen. Not that I am complaining about the food, but gods, that smell lingers.

(evening, Seinaru Heikiko)

We needed to use the Seal. Obviously this was not a surprise but we weren’t really eager to pull it out and start waving it around. I mean, sure, it’s not a beacon or anything. It doesn’t actively alert people that it’s out of the box, but if anyone associated with the Five Storms happened to be looking for it at the exact same time then we’d be standing in the center of a giant bullseye.

How likely is that? We don’t know. A few months ago I’d be skeptical that anyone would spend the resources to search for it day and night, every day for months on end, but now that we’re sitting in their back yard? If it was me, I’d try my damnedest to make it happen. I can only assume they’d do the same. So, it was a huge risk and literally no one was comfortable with the idea. We spent quite a bit of time, in fact, grasping at straws for ways to avoid it, but we were just delaying the inevitable. The vault would not open no matter what Ameiko tried. It wanted a scion in possession of the Seal, and nothing short of that combination would do.

We had a long talk about the right way to do this. The worst thing that could happen would be that we’d find ourselves in the middle of small army of oni, so the idea was to prevent that from happening. With the right spells, they could see the room we were in and teleport straight to it, so we had to make that as difficult and unlikely as possible. Fortunately, I have already fallen into the daily routine of preparing a spell to detect this sort of scrying , and I prepared a spell that suppresses all magic (including my own!). These two together were about as effective a defense as I could prepare. Just to be safe, though, everyone readied themselves for a fight. Olmas even set Suishen ablaze. I am sure this did not make Jiro or Hatsue nervous at all.

That advanced planning may even have saved us. When Ameiko touched the statue with the Seal, the floor in the center of the room slowly sank down into a hidden vault. And within seconds, my spell alerted me to magical sight, focused somewhere in the room. I immediately cast my next spell, and all the magic around us when dark. Save for Suishen, whose flames continued to burn inside the field. I remember thinking, That’s interesting.

When my spell expired, the scrying was gone.

Jiro has pledged his service to Amatatsu Ameiko. Seeing that vault open, and finding his family’s ancestral weapon inside, were proof that he was in the presence of an heir to the throne (in fact he was in the presence of six of them, but we decided not to muddy the issue). I got the sense he had been waiting for a moment like this for a good part of his adult life, and it had finally arrived.

Building a rebellion, however, is going to be a lot harder than knocking two statues together. The good news is, the Jade Regent is as terrible a ruler as he is a person and that gives us a significant opening. He’s relying on brute strength to take and hold the throne since he knows he does not have a legitimate claim. A significant piece of his military is a private army that he calls the Typhoon guard, and of course armies, private or otherwise, must be paid. This has resulted in a plague of surplus taxes, and the internal strife in general has strained Minkai’s relationship with other nations in Tian Xia.

As Jiro sees it, Ameiko needs the support of the nobility, the military, and to some extent, the criminal underground to take advantage of this situation. Testing that theory through concrete action is, of course, the rub.

First, the nobility. Merchants are the key to Minkai’s economy, and Minkai’s souring diplomatic relations are putting a damper on trade. That, in turn, is driving Minkai into a recession which is clearly not endearing the government to anyone. The ruling class, in the mean time, is dealing with the additional tax burden, which they are either soaking up or passing on to their subjects.

The geisha of Minkai have some influence with the merchant clans (or guilds, or whatever they are called here), and political influence inside the nobility in general. Jiro suggests that this is the best way to start. There’s a renowned tea house in Sakakabe owned by a particularly notable geisha named O-Kohaku. It turns out, her uncle was the governor of Kasai…before the Jade Regent had him killed. We’d have to be outright incompetent to not get her as an ally.

As for the military, they see the Jade Regent’s private army as direct rivals if not an outright threat. This also means more political rivals for the military, all vying for leverage inside the government. Officers who once found themselves in positions of power may be seeing their influence wane as the Typhoon Guard takes their place.

Convincing the military to turn against the government in an honor-bound society, however, is tricky business. Before they will take any such step there needs to be a crack in the dam, and that crack takes the shape of the local daimyo in the north, Sikutsu Sennaka. Already locally famous for allowing these bandits to prosper, Sennaka has other wonderful qualities, such as using blackmail, intimidation, violence, and outright cruelty to maintain his authority, and using his power to bully the neighboring provinces. Cutting that thread may be the catalyst we need to bring at least part of the military on board.

The underground is the one that worries me most because I am not convinced they would be reliable support. One would, in fact, think that a corrupt government works to their advantage. Jiro, however, has suggested that the ninja clans may be sympathetic to a regime change; they have their own sense of honor and, morality aside, the Jade Regent’s government may be something of an affront to their principles. The theory is, even if we can’t get them to side with us, we might be able to convince them to not get involved at all. To do that, we need to travel to Enganoka where representatives of three of the more powerful clans gather every month during the new moon. It is one of the few times you can meet with them to discuss matters more complicated than hiring them for their “services” (and I am sure I don’t want to know what those include).

Of course, we’ve had some experience with ninjas that makes me skeptical of all of this, and I said as much to Jiro. We explained about Kimandatsu, the Frozen Shadows, and of course our good times in Ordu-Aganhei. Hatsue turned to Jiro and said, “Oni Mask?”

As you might guess, anything with the word “oni” in it gets our attention.

There are many ninja clans within in Minkai, but over the years four of them have risen to a level of prominence: the Black Lotus, the Dragonshadow, the Ruby Crypt, and the Emerald Branch (which is more of a vigilante group). About 80 years ago, however, a new clan emerged and quickly rose to the same heights through a string of ruthless assassinations and a penchant for targeting government officials. They call themselves the Oni’s Mask. The more he talked, the more it sounded like an extension of the Five Storms and of course the timing was right, both for the oni’s campaign against the royal families of Minkai and the appearance of the Frozen Shadows in Kalsgard shortly thereafter.

And let’s not forget the telltale sign of the Five Storms: the painfully obvious name, “Oni’s Mask”. Only the Five Storms could come up with something so dumb.

Where does all of this leave us? The new moon is two weeks away, and we’re obviously not ready to launch an assault on the daimyo, so that means starting with door number one.

(night, Seinaru Heikiko)

Hatsue is a sohei of Irori. That took me by surprise. I tried to talk to her about it since we had some common ground, but she was a bit more focused on the sales pitch for coming back to his church than just talking. Honestly, I think this was my fault. I inadvertently made the conversation about me which is pretty disingenuous.

That little faux pas aside, this explains her rather intense (some might say “fanatical”) devotion to her deity. It probably also explains why Ivan’s infatuation with her soured quickly. He wanted to learn a little bit about Irori, but Hatsue doesn’t do “a little bit”. It’s like asking Qatana about Groetus, only less disturbing.

Desnus 26, 4713 (mid-day, Osogen Grasslands)

Zosimus and I are heading back to Seinaru Heikiko again. Yes, I said “again”. Zosi needs his wagon, and with Sandru leaving we had to bring it back ourselves. Technically, Zosi doesn’t need me for that, of course, but teleporting there shaved a day off of the round trip time which was in everyone’s best interest.

I could have just teleported back, but making him travel alone didn’t seem wise, or polite. And, in all honesty, I was interested in spending the day in his alchemy lab. It’s a little cramped, but there is no shortage of stuff to look at, and it’s another opportunity to let him rifle through my spellbook for whatever he can adapt to alchemical formulas. We just need to take turns up top to make sure the wagon is still headed in the correct direction.

We’re being pulled by an animated gorgon. The gorgon we killed back in the House of Withered Blossoms. It’s more than a little unsettling, and for all appearances we have blurred the line between hero and villain, but in a way this works to our advantage. Who is going to walk up to an armored wagon being pulled by the animated corpse of a gorgon? You’d have to be out of your damned mind.

We were both up top for a while, just talking about random things when he asked me out of the blue, “Have you ever died?”

It’s not the kind of question you’d typically ask in polite conversation, but we’ve been together long enough now that this is the sort of thing that passes for normal.

“Never, but there were times I thought I might.” I sensed he was looking for more, so I said, “I was knocked unconscious once. When I was younger. I was told I had a concussion.”

“What was that like?”

“I…I don’t remember a lot of it. When I came to, I had no sense of time and couldn’t put names with faces. I was hit very, very hard.” The way he had asked was all very clinical which made me uncomfortable. And I really didn’t like talking about it, anyway. “I…don’t really like talking about it.”

I was better conversation than this one moment, honest. But it’s what stands out.

Desnus 25, 4713 (small hours, Seinaru Heikiko)

Qatana has gone to a very dark place and I don’t know what to do about it. Or even if I should do anything about it because, let’s face it, I am hardly an impartial judge here myself. I was visibly shaking not an hour ago, and my hands are still trembling now. The farther we travel the more it’s obvious that people are the same pretty much everywhere. We color our skin, dye our hair, change our clothes, but it’s all just a veneer over a core that is no different from one place to the next. In the face of anomie, people revert to their worst qualities and those qualities are as sure as the setting sun.

I fear that maybe mom is right. What if there really are souls that aren’t worth saving?

There were seven women held in slavery here. And not just held in slavery, but imprisoned in it, jailed at night in bamboo cages “because they had to sleep somewhere”. They range in age from their early teens to their mid twenties, all of them captured and forced into servitude, some with their families killed in front of them, and their villages burned. When we rescued them, one of the first questions they asked Radella was if we were their new owners. They literally thought they had been sold like property.

It’s no wonder Qatana is in a state. Hishasi’s guided tour of the fortress led her through Kaer Maga and emerged thirteen years in the past. That he’s still alive is not a measure of any sort of restraint, either hers or mine: it’s purely a practical decision, and even then, for me, it was a struggle. In a way, all the surviving bandits are fortunate that I prepared my spells to subdue rather than kill. Any attempts at instant justice would just ring hollow, and that played a significant part in my internal debate.

One of them was not so lucky. After we saw the defaced shrine, both Qatana and I had reached a breaking point. She acted first, and ordered the remaining bandits into one of the bamboo cages. One of them hesitated. She did something with her hands while speaking the words to a spell, and he screamed in abject terror and died on the spot. You might say it had a sort of chilling affect on the others. The insurgency ended before it even began; with a newfound obedience, they stepped inside and we locked them up.

And then, by gods, it got worse. Qatana brought in the recently-freed slaves and asked them if any of our prisoners had taken advantage of them. They were in no condition to answer anything, even seeing their tormentors locked in cages, but Dasi had a spell running and it told us enough. They’d all been abused, even the youngest of them, and every one of the men had taken liberties with someone. It was impossible to know who had victimized whom, but at that point what did it matter? If I’d had prepared my spells differently, I could have incinerated them all on the spot and walked away with a clear conscience.

And I probably am fortunate, there. Maybe. If I am being honest, I am still undecided. Maybe I should have done it, anyway.

Except that the others would have objected. And then I’d also have to explain myself to Ameiko. Not that she wouldn’t understand given that business with her half-brother, but it would be more the principle of the thing. I am supposed to be better than that, even if I’m not.

Would Ameiko understand, though? I have to wonder. Everyone knows Qatana’s story by now, and Ameiko knows it better than most, but only Qatana lived through it. Only Shalelu got to see it first-hand. And as far as I know, only she and I heard the stories—and only I got immersed in them, the details slowly trickling in over the years the followed.

It took months for Qatana to even open up at all. When I first saw her in Korvosa she was still in a state of denial over what had happened. I didn’t know what it was at the time, of course—what 10-year-old understands these things?—I just knew that it wasn’t normal, that she seemed both fully aware yet blissfully ignorant of what had happened in the preceding months. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but I knew it was bad. Worse than what I had been going through. Worse than I was capable of imagining at that age. (Now? Not so much.)

So who would understand? Almost certainly not Olmas. He and Qatana had a very long talk after the incident at the cage. I don’t know what they said to each other, but neither left looking particularly happy so I can probably guess: he expressed concern that she was taking the role of jury and executioner against prisoners who had surrendered to us, and she didn’t understand why there was a problem. Rationally, I know he’s right, but I am having a hard time being rational. Maybe that’s the point, though. Do we really make the best decisions when we can’t separate ourselves from crime and victim?

But it’s not like we’re serving up vigilante justice here, either. She even said their fate would be decided by Jiro. As the ancestral owner of this place, and in the absence of a daimyo who gives two shits about his villeins, I think that’s more than fair. And, so what if she had to make an example of one? It was obviously necessary. I mean, if killing almost everyone here wasn’t proof enough that we should be taken seriously, then gods only know what they would have tried to do when we weren’t watching. At least now we can be relatively certain they won’t oush their luck. Or test our limits.

We’ve had enough surprises for one day as it is, so my patience for those is paper-thin. The women we rescued said there was another girl being held captive, one they referred to as the “cat lady”. She was, of all things, a were-tiger, kept as the personal slave and concubine of the “scary man”, the druidic shaman Kamuy-Paro. Turns out? She wasn’t a slave, or held against her will. So. Surprise!

She put on a good act, though. Zosi found her chained to a bed in Kamuy-Paro’s personal quarters, and she played the part of the unwilling prisoner and play thing of Kamuy-Paro to a tee, even going so far as killing one of the bandits that got in her way. She had convinced all of us of her story, captured and forced to be bitten by a were-tiger to inflict the curse upon her for his amusement (for all we know, that might actually be true). But, really, she was just biding her time, looking for a chance to strike. Considering she was a willing submissive in whatever depraved sexual fantasies Kamuy-Paro was living out, she took the evidence of his death—that would be his still-bleeding-out corpse—rather well (which, I suppose, should have been a clue). It wasn’t until Zosi and Dasi informed her of their plans to make maps from his skin (eesh!) that would “reveal his secrets” that she couldn’t sustain the ruse any longer. I guess they weren’t specific on what those secrets entailed, and there were secrets she wanted keeping. Like, who she fucking was.

She attacked us while Olmas, Radella and Qatana were on their tour with Hashasi. She probably thought she could take us. She was wrong. Surprise! I conjured a pit underneath her, and then Ivan gave her a push with a spell, and down she went. She couldn’t get out, especially after I covered the walls with sleet and snow. Zosi dropped bomb after bomb on her until the screams went silent.

Good riddance.

Gods, these people. Kamuy-Paro was a lunatic who we’re told set people on fire. Their chieftain, Gangasum, built his fiefdom like an Ulfen raider short on manners. The guards used their slaves as personal toys, and killed them out of hand (the women said that they haven’t seen the stable boy in a while; when asked about that, Hishasi said, “We need a new stable boy”). And, of course, all of them found sport in desecrating a statue of Shizuru, which tells you plenty about where they stand.

And the daimyo turned a blind eye to all of it. So to hell with him.

(predawn, Seinaru Heikiko)

The women warned us not to enter the secret garden at night. Come to think of it, Kamuy-Paro said much the same. This was Kamuy-Paro’s rule, and he knew what he was talking about. Based on what we learned about him? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was somehow responsible.

I have no idea what those things were. It was like the a pile of firewood just stood up and attacked, ignoring all of our magic as if it wasn’t there (except, unsurprisingly, for magical fire). This makes me suspect they were some form of golem, but who knows? Now they are kindling and splinters so it hardly matters.

Ivan and Radella are talking to the women and helping get them settled in. I have not been included in that discussion because I am quite obviously not in a state where I can be a calming influence. Right now, I am not what they need, and even if I tried I’d almost certainly make things worse rather than better. It’s for the best I stay out of it.

It’s been a long night. The sun will be up soon, just in time for us to go to bed. Later today, I teleport with Qatana to fetch Ameiko and Jiro because we suspect we’ll need the Seal to open the vault. They will come back on Qatana’s spell since it’s faster than the chariot I can conjure. I’ll teleport back because I am impatient and not likely to be good company.

And we have a new problem to worry about. While we were fiddling around in Kamuy-Paro’s garden, my spell that detects magical scrying alerted me for just a couple of minutes.

Someone is watching us.

Desnus 23, 4713 (early afternoon, Osogen Grasslands)

Finding Jiro’s camp was so easy we practically stumbled into it. After several hours passing farm after farm and village after village, each one looking more and more like the one before it, I thought we’d be stuck wandering out here for weeks. But the funny thing about rebel armies is that they have to train, and you just don’t see many farmers practicing in their fields with bows and arrows. Not dozens of them, anyway. In the same place. All at once. So you might say this kind of stood out. It really was as ridiculously easy as Miyaro had suggested: follow the river and look around.

Part of me wonders if it’s wise for them to hold military-style drills like this so brazenly, even up here in the north. But there is, I suppose, the notion of hiding in plain sight. With bandits plaguing this region, and an unsympathetic (if not outright hostile) daimyo overseeing it, people do need to protect themselves, their families, and their homes. How unusual would it be for a ronin and samurai to help teach the common folk to defend themselves? Aren’t there stories of ronin wandering the countryside, saving villages from threats both mystical and terrene? What better cover could they have?

Their drill sergeant, Hatsue, is a serious if not humorless woman who is not one for idle talk. Figuring we had the right place—because how could it not be?—we stopped and watched them practice for a while. Eventually, she figured out that we weren’t going to leave, which I am sure she didn’t find suspicious or alarming at all, and started walking our way. That’s when Olmas and Dasi rode out to meet her.

I had no idea what they were saying to one another, and was just wondering what version of the truth she was getting when Olmas waved me over. So I guess it’s the merchant story, then?

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve spun these lies. Enough that I can almost believe them myself. I don’t even have to try to be convincing anymore. All that mastery was lost on Hatsue, though: she was quickly distracted by my naginata, which I had very deliberately brought with me. She kept glancing at it while I spoke, and I could see that moment when recognition dawned. What can I say? I like to save time.

“How did you come across that?”

I let Dasi answer first. “We discovered a hold in the Forest of Spirits. We investigated, and found it deep inside.”

Then I added, “We took it from a ja noi oni that was living there.”

Hatsue was not exactly impressed. “It was obviously stolen by the oni, and it should be returned to the noble house that it belongs to.”

And there’s the rub. We know the noble houses are all extinct, save for the Amtatsus. And I said as much, leaving out the latter, crucial detail of course. “How do we return it to a house that no longer exists?”

Hatsue answered that the daimyo here would be the appropriate owner, but her eyes kind of clouded over and her expression hardened as she said it. I was not in the mood for bullshit so I called her on it. Lacking a good answer, and somewhat taken aback by my impeccable social graces, she suggested we meet with her commander, the one and only Hirabashi Jiro, and discuss the matter.

I think I am making this sound worse than it really was. Honestly, she was just suspicious: of us, our intentions, and I suppose even our story of the Forest. I would be, too, in her position. Given how abruptly her day had gone from routine to peculiar, I was impressed she held her composure.

That may have something to do with her dedication to Irori. It took only a few minutes with her to figure that one out. I mean, I would know, right? She had the kind of discipline that only comes from the constant study and training. The kind I wasn’t capable of, myself.

I was surprised to see a Shogi board set up in the command tent. There are countless variations of this game around the Inner Sea: Chanturanga, Samanty, and Senterej come to mind, so naturally it caught my attention. When I asked about it, her whole demeanor changed and we kind of got lost in a discussion of rules, play strategies, and even her game in progress. Clearly, I had found her passion. We were still in the weeds when Jiro entered, glanced over at us, and then shook his head while muttering something under his breath. I don’t know what he said, but it was clearly the manner of someone who had seen this scene play out dozens of times before.

We gave Jiro a more complete version of our story, including the tale of the Amatatsu family fleeing across the Crown of the World to safety, and the surviving heir to the throne. You might say that he was skeptical, the way one might say they like breathing. I was half-expecting him to laugh in our faces. Then Olmas pulled out Suishen—who of course remained stubbornly silent because that’s just the way it is—and that changed the tone gods-be-damned fast. Just wait until you find out who Ameiko is.

After a long silence, he said, “You seem to be collecting ancestral weapons.”

I wisely didn’t say anything. The first two responses to enter my mind were unlikely to move the conversation in a positive direction.

He took our measure by giving us a thought experiment of sorts: A samurai, loyal to her daimyo, is brought before a peasant. She is given two blades, and ordered to test them and see if they can behead a man in a single stroke. What is the honorable thing for the samurai to do?

The obvious answer, of course, is to refuse to obey, and leave the service of her daimyo because honor does not trump morality. But there is also the peasant, who is presumably an innocent man, whose life is now in danger, and who the samurai has also sworn to protect. So she must ensure his safety, which may mean killing her daimyo in defense of the peasant’s life.

Of course, real life isn’t this simple. In Ordu-Aganhei, the Prince did something very much like this, and no one stepped up to stop him. Why? Because they feared for their lives, and their family’s lives, and probably the lives of anyone they knew. So an act of defiance may have repercussions far beyond your personal exigency.

Zosi pointed out that, in an honor-bound culture such as Minkai, such actions can stain your family for generations. In which case the correct answer is for the samurai to kill the daimyo to protect the peasant, and then herself to preserve her honor. Except, again, in the real world I don’t think it’s this simple. Honor isn’t a shield. There’s no guarantee your family won’t be punished just because you did the favor of punishing yourself. And “death” and “death with honor” both start with “death”.

Jiro and Hatsue fell on different sides of this debate. Hatsue was all for killing herself to preserve her honor, while Jiro took the more reasonable stance that a dead man can’t help people. It’s probably an old debate between them, just rehashed with fresh voices.

It was a lively discussion, but it did little to convince Jiro that we could produce an heir, or rally anyone behind us in a march on Kasai. So, as I had predicted, he’s asked us to prove ourselves and our commitment first. I wonder how often this is going to happen. Is everyone we meet between here and the Five Storms going to demand we do them some favor? It will be an endless chain of “just this one thing”.

Desnus 24, 4713 (morning, ravine near the Kosokunami River)

We’ve spent the last 12 hours camped in a dense region of the woods away from the fortress the bandits have occupied, under cover of a spell that suppresses our light and sounds so that we don’t attract attention. The ones who came here by Qatana’s spell are also taking turns scouting the fortress, keeping an eye on the guard changes and any new arrivals (or departures). Unless something significant changes, we’re going to take it tonight—or more precisely, early in the morning—after the owl shift comes on duty.

Jiro calls this place Seinaru Heikiko. Apparently it was built by his ancestors generations ago, and they served one of the royal families. He wasn’t forthcoming with a lot of details, like what it’s doing in the hands of bandits, which is a sign that either either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to talk about it. My guess is it’s the latter. But it’s still a good question. We’re told they’ve since renovated the place, repairing and reinforcing some structures so that it would serve as a suitable fortress for themselves. A quick look when we got here confirmed that. As long as you were trying to approach from the ground, you’d be hard pressed to make it inside.

We won’t be approaching from the ground. Do this right, and we’ll make it inside without making a sound. Whether we can keep it that quiet remains to be seen, but the farther we can go without raising an alarm the better.

I can’t help but draw parallels to Ravenscraeg. The cliffs of this ravine are less intimidating, and the fortress itself is on the ground, but there’s enough in common to put them in the same category. It’s yet another “break in to the fortress in the middle of the night” deal, made easy by their defensive strategy which is seemingly based on a frontal assault on the ground. In another life, maybe instead of attacking we could sell them a better security plan.

Why is this even necessary? Apparently, the daimyo here is a real piece of work, which explains why the normally-disciplined Hatsue had trouble hiding her contempt. These bandits operate here, and grow in strength and numbers, because literally no one is stopping them. Which means the daimyo has given them tacit permission to do as they please. It’s a good way to keep the people living in fear, and probably to also keep them from organizing.

Part of me thinks the daimyo is going to have to go, too. That’s pretty seditious of me, but isn’t that why we’re here? Mom would say that politics tend to be local, and that average person is more concerned with living day to day than who sits on some throne. If that’s true, then solving their immediate problems here might build the support Ameiko needs. This is obviously Jiro’s theory as well.

We may get more than just good will out of it. Jiro says there’s a vault of sorts somewhere inside and that vault can, supposedly, only be opened by a member of a royal family. Take the fortress and open the vault, and we’ll be proving to Jiro that we can produce an heir of the Amatatsu family. That would give Ameiko more than just public support: it’d be giving her legitimacy. Of course, Jiro doesn’t know that there are, in fact, six of us that can do that (ten, if you count Ana, Etayne, Sparna and Kelda), but I don’t see the need to concern him with this pesky detail. Especially since we’d then have to explain it, and I am not sure I’m ready to go there. Maybe we’ll test it first to see if it works and to avoid any potential public embarrassment (dad would call this a “soft opening”), then bring Ameiko and Jiro over for an official unveiling.

Zosi is making some thunderstones for us. I want Nihali up on one of those rooftops tonight, ready to drop a stone or two if we stir up trouble. A little added confusion might help us out.

Gozran 3, 4713 (evening, Muliwan)

I brought the last of the rescued into town this morning and took them to where Dasi has been staying. He’s worked diligently over the last couple of days to get them all settled here, setting them up with the money we provided and, in the case of those who need it, people to care for them while they recover. He’s done well putting this all together. It helps that he’s charming, more or less native to the area, and a good judge of character. Normally, I’d worry about townspeople taking advantage of them after we left, but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem here.

Despite its small size, Muliwan seems to be the right sort of place for them. As a trading town, it’s got plenty of foreigners and none of the hostility towards them that seems pervasive on the plains of Hongal. It’s also far enough from Ordu-Aganhei to not be under its influence, and I don’t think I have to explain why that matters.

I’m spending the night here again because I feel like it. We’ve got over a month of travel ahead of us, and I’d like another night in a real bed before we go. That, and I want to be around people for a little while longer, the sort that are just going about life without some sort of mask on. You go outside here and talk to someone who says they are a baker and odds are pretty good that they’re just a baker. They’re not hiding a mysterious past or living some double life. You can almost feel like you’re normal when you’re surrounded by it.

Qatana asked if I could make a large tureen and some bowls in the usual Groetus motif. She’s setting up an impromptu soup kitchen in a couple of nights to help the needy and homeless here—human settlements are pretty much the same no matter what part of the world they’re in—so I said yes. I have often wondered what Shelyn thinks of this sort of thing. It’s not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that I’ve whipped something up in this theme. She obviously doesn’t disapprove as there’d be no question about that if she did, but that does not necessarily imply approval. Or maybe I am overthinking this. Maybe art is still art, even when it’s creepy, grinning skulls.

And then there’s Nihali. Am I flaunting my nonconformity? Heretical is probably a little strong, but entering a Shelynite temple with a black raven on my shoulder has to at least qualify as eccentric.

Gozran 7, 4713 (early morning, The Forest of Spirits)

Zosi looks nervous. We’re leaving for Minkai—again—in the next hour or two and his anxiety suggests he is not eager to go. He doesn’t talk a lot about hinmself or his life before joining up with us so I don’t have any idea what it could be, but clearly it’s not his first choice. Which means he more or less signed on with the wrong crowd. If we are successful, we’ll be there for a while. If not? We’ll be there a lot longer.

Gozran 27, 4713 (evening, The Forest of Spirits)

We crossed a major river today. It was a lot easier than that time we forded the Taraska at the Crown, when we had to find shallow waters, wait for low tide, and float the wagons across the icy river. This time we had the benefit of spells and literally built a bridge. It won’t win any awards for design, but it did the job.

So this is it. We’ll be out of the Forest in just a couple of weeks.

We asked Miyaro for advice, as just rolling through Minkai in a caravan so obviously not from this side of the world seems unwise. She suggested seeking out a band of ronin in the Osogen grasslands. It appears that the nascent rebellion has begun in the north, which makes sense since that’s about as far from Kasai as you can get.

Since Dasi is actually from here, and has lived under the Jade Regent, we asked him what he knew. He remembers Emperor Shigure coming to the throne, but being sent into hiding for his own safety when rumors of an assassination plot came to light. Most of the people in Minkai are waiting for him to return.

Of course, we know that’s not going to happen. We told Dasi about the visions we had in Brinewall when we found the Seal. To say he seemed concerned would be an understatement. He was probaby holding out hope, but I am convinced that, deep down, he knew. We just stripped away the veneer.

Desnus 17, 4713 (afternoon, Minkai)

After nearly ten months and some 9,000 miles of travel we have finally arrived in Minkai. The caravan emerged from the thinning forest into rolling grasslands.

There was this moment when I had a flashback to the visions from Brinewall. I was standing here, or somewhere very much like here, as legions of oni descended into the country spread out before me, storms raging overhead. It was a metaphor, obviously, but the view was real. The place is real.

Desnus 23, 4713 (morning, Osogen Grasslands)

Miyaro is guiding us to a series of farms and rice paddies near the Kosokunami River, just below they Kyojin mountains. The ronin Hirabashi Jiro is known to live here, and is potentially sympathetic to the idea of an uprising. That we’re somehow going to find literally one person in thousands of square miles of landscape strains credulity, but Desna is no stranger to Minkai so I’ll just have to trust that she’s laid the path.

We have passed a number of villages and farms, and with each mile they become more frequent and more populous. After so many months of isolation it’s a welcome change.

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.

Pharast 28, 4713 (evening, The Penance)

There is nothing to do here but sit and wait. And, I suppose, prepare for the next day, but that is just one of many hours that we have to pass. So most of us are making ourselves busy. We’ve gotten good at making ourselves busy. We had months of practice.

Ivan set up some traps around the collapsed bridge while I and a couple of others searched the artwork for…anything, really. Clues or hints or some sort of story that might tell us what we are facing. My hope was that this would be a pictorial history of the Five Storms, but there is no story here. The vast majority of it is simply fantasies put to stone and ink: depictions of hobgoblins torturing humans, conquering humans, performing unspeakable acts against humans, all intermingled with images of oni doing much the same, with an obvious obsession for Minkai. They don’t just desire it, they lust after it, and that lust is on display in every square inch of these walls. I’ve seen such an excess of depravity in so little time that I have become numb to it.

One pillar in the hall did stand out, though. Instead of the usual violent and obscene portents, it depicted five oni. The one at the top was the largest and most distinct, very clearly a wind yai looming over the others. Below that were three more oni, more heavily stylized but almost certainly yai of some sort. And at the bottom sat the unmistakable, but heavily stylized, image of Munasukaru.

What does this tell us? For one, it’s pretty obvious where Munasukaru stands, and that’s “at the bottom”. As we’ve long suspected, we will be facing the runt of the litter here shortly. It also suggests that the leadership of the Five Storms might, literally, be five oni. Whether that’s just a coincidence or the name is intentionally descriptive is anyone’s guess, though common sense would suggest it’s the former (If it was the latter and you had to add a sixth oni to the leadership ranks how exactly would that work? Do you have to rename the organization? Print all new business cards? Change the company letterhead?) But then again, common sense has not exactly been a theme so far.

The image at the top also, rather heavily, implies that a wind yai oni sits in the coveted executive position. That…is bad news. The yai take the form of giants, generally those with a connection to one of the elements. Giants based on air tend to be tougher than their brethren, so if that holds with oni, too, then there is that to worry about.

For now, though, the focus is on tomorrow. None of us likes the idea of blindly dropping through the drain at the base of the steps. That means scouting ahead, and the safest way to do that is with the spell I used to explore the pagoda (gods, was that just two days ago?) That means an early start to the day, as Qatana will need to know what we are facing before she begins what passes as prayers to Groetus. And, no, you don’t want to know.

There was this moment when she and I were hovering over the drain, staring down into the darkness. The sound of rushing water echoed around us and it was almost hypnotic. I could feel myself being swallowed by the inky void, the din of the cascading water fading as I descended.

Qatana’s voice snapped me back to the present. “You haven’t had to pee in years.”

And it was such a random, bizarre statement—directed at no one because we were the only ones there, and she wasn’t talking to me—that I reflexively looked over at her. She was still hovering at my side; still staring down into the hole below. She must have noticed my surprise and confusion as she met my gaze and said, simply, “Beorn”.

“Ah.”

She kept mice more or less as pets when she was living in Magnimar. I say “more or less” because that sounds more formal than it was. It’s more like, she was living somewhere and that somewhere had mice and so she had mice. She talked to them when they were alive, and she still talks to them now. Each of them has a distinct personality: Beorn is aggressive and unpredictable, Star is equally aggressive but rude, Badger is sneaky, Huffy is friendly, and so on. Sometimes she asks them for advice, sometimes they just offer it up. It…took some getting used to as she has these conversations out loud. At the start of this it was more than a little unsettling, but now it’s just Qatana.

Are her mice really talking to her, or are these voices just aspects of her personality asserting themselves? In other words, is she being driven mad, or is this her madness? I don’t know, and I am not even sure the two are mutually exclusive. But, my suspicion is that those who seek out Groetus either are mad to begin with, or are driven so by his providence. The price of drawing spiritual power from him is to make that madness essentially incurable. Cutting it away from Qatana would be excising a significant part of her identity and existence. We’ve certainly been witness to our share of the fantastic and paranormal on a scale where Qatana’s affliction is mere noise. So here we are.

What does it say about us that all this passes as normal?

Pharast 29, 4713 (early morning, The Penance)

We have a much clearer picture of where we are headed. With my spell, I was able to explore three chambers below us until the eye could go no further. I sketched a rough map for my friends based on what I saw, pointing out potential hazards and foes. Now we’re just waiting for Qatana to prepare her spells.

We were right to worry about water. That much seemed obvious already but I always welcome validation where it can be found. In the cavern directly below us the water is only a foot deep, but it drains into another where it’s easily four to five. The former is merely an inconvenience, but the latter is trouble. Or would be, if we didn’t know in advance.

Even without the water it’s going to be a challenging descent. I could see two ja noi oni in the first cavern, torturing human or humanoid prisoners held in cages that are suspended from the ceiling. These oni are almost certainly more of Munasukaru’s spawn, much like Ichirou (though possibly not as spineless). In the second cavern I saw two naga that must be her daughters swimming in the water. Or undulating. Or whatever it is that snakes with human heads do in water. They are more dangerous than their oni brothers; before we face them that water will have to go.

The final chamber is actually a room of carved stone. The water from above doesn’t drain there, but it leaks in through the ceiling so the floor and walls are wet. More problematic than wet floors: the near end of the chamber is crisscrossed with metal chains and blue-skinned human-like beings lurk among them.

Kytons.

You can’t spend time in Shelyn’s church without learning about her brother and the thing he has become. While not all kytons are his servants, there are common themes of torture, mutilation, and an affinity for chains. That is enough of an overlap to get my attention. I don’t know what arrangement Munasukaru has with these things but I don’t really care: they have to go, too.

At the far end I saw prisoners hung in metal gibbets along the walls. I couldn’t tell if they are dead or alive. That is…not a good sign, and it’s put me in a somber mood. Some of the others, too.

This will be over soon.

(continued)

Munasukaru tried to buy us off. Or rather, a ja noi oni samurai that claimed to speak for Munasukaru tried to buy us off. That tells me two things. First, Munasukaru is clearly concerned because otherwise why even ask? Every single oni we’ve encountered so far, including to some extent Ichirou, has bordered on egomaniacal and you don’t try to cut a deal when you’re convinced you’re winning (or too stupid to realize that you’re not). Second, she doesn’t understand us at all. Which, I suppose, is not too surprising. From what we’ve seen so far, rational thought was an early casualty here.

Just in case we were morally bankrupt, we were offered riches and rewards once Minkai falls to the Five Storms. What riches and rewards? Her spokesperson didn’t provide details, but I imagine we can take hints from the decor.

It actually took some nerve to stage a formal ceremony in the middle of a gods-be-damned torture chamber in order to make the offer, especially mere seconds after a cloud of poisonous gas had rolled over them (I’ve been having fun). If I was in their position I’d not be in the mood for diplomacy after that, which suggests Munasukaru has a pretty strong grip on her faithful. I can almost hear her saying, “Suck it up.”

Dasi responded that we represent the Amatatsu family. That put an abrupt end to the negotiations. Then Ivan put four arrows in the oni, putting an equally abrupt end to Munasukaru’s State Department. Cleaning up the kytons and the hobgoblins took a little longer, but only because there were more of them.

Four of the prisoners hanging from the gibbets were still alive. Like the others, we can heal their wounds but there’s nothing we can do for their memories.

Pharast 28, 4713 (early afternoon, The Penance)

The farther in we go, the more I see the echoes of a long-lost grandeur. I hesitate to describe anything the Five Storms have touched as magnificent, but this place has the feel of a once-great hall deep into its decay. How long were they held prisoner here? Hundreds of years? Thousands? That is a lot of time to excavate. The rubble in the hall suggests there was a collapse at some point. How much more was there? Are we just scratching the surface?

What did they do here? Did they entertain visitors? The kami said they were forbidden from leaving, but it was a prison with no guards save for the complicated rules that kept the oni from leaving. There was nothing stopping outsiders from coming and going as they pleased. You could build an empire that way.

It really begs the question, “why so lax?” Was it assumed the oni would just sit in here and rot for all of eternity? Clearly they had other plans. Whoever created their jail (and more crucially, this arrangement) was afflicted with a startling lack of imagination. And Minkai is paying the price.

Whatever this place once was it’s more mausoleum now; a crumbling monument to another time. It’s dark, dank and depressing. Even the oni that remain are depressing. The guardian of this checkpoint, as he called it, was as decrepit as the hall itself, though at least he was reasonably aware of the pathetic nature of his role. There was this moment when I was invisible, hovering just close enough to see him when he called out to us in the darkness. Qatana, for her part, managed a very credible impression of Ichirou’s voice and insisted on passing through. He tried to talk “Ichirou” out of this decision, reminding him what had happened the last time he’d visited his sisters. When “Ichirou” insisted on going anyway, he buried his head in his hands and just shook it sadly.

Can you imagine? Proud samurai Oni of the Five Storms, reduced to babysitting. Such tales of glory and fortune he must have had.

Wretched though he was, he was in our way. And he was mounted on a gorgon because of course he was, which also made him dangerous. We went for a reprise of yesterday’s trick: Qatana cast her spell, I walled them off behind a barrier of ice (because they can’t fly), and we let them beat each other to death while we took pot shots with arrows and bombs.

His living quarters was the height of elegance with its lice-infested bed and living, wall-to-wall carpet of beetles. I swear I am not making that last one up. What was even keeping them there? This place keeps challenging my notion of “the worst thing I have ever seen”. Repeatedly. It is not supposed to be a competition.

Speaking of “worst thing I have ever seen”, the decor in this hall includes an image of a hobgoblin nursing two snakes. Just in case there was any doubt about that.

(midafternoon)

One down, one to go: we found the bonsai tree, discarded and forgotten in a dark storage room that is leading the race to dilapidation. Like everything else here the tree is barely clinging to life, probably from days or weeks without sunlight. If it wasn’t for the water leaking through the walls and ceiling it probably would have withered and died.

Yet again, I am left wondering what the plan was here. Why bring a plant—one which quite obviously needs sunlight to live—to a place completely steeped in darkness? How were they planning on keeping it alive? The only light in here is in the fire pit, and even if that were sufficient it’s two stories up. The would-be gardener was obviously not thinking this one through.

Now that the tree is safely in our possession maybe we can afford to be more indiscriminate in our methods. (OK, fine, we were hardly careful up in the pagoda. But there were no hobgoblins there, and no hobgoblins meant no tree. It was solid logic, and as it happens, we were right.)  Or maybe not. Yuka’s memories suggest Munasukaru gets personally involved when it comes to her prisoners, and that means there may be some down below. I’m guessing we’ll have to do this the hard way.

I probably should have thought of that sooner, before I sent a cloud of poisonous gas down that hallway. Fortunately, it was just a few hobgoblins, a hill giant, and these bizarre lizard things that were far more dangerous than anything else we’ve come across. Which makes me think they weren’t part of the original plan. That, and the pile of hobgoblin bones. They reminded me of that thing that attacked us up in the arctic. These lizards were blind, too, and they tore into us with huge blasts of sound. Except like everything else down here, they couldn’t fly (so maybe they were part of the original plan after all?)

Gods, it’s been a long day. I am spent. Qatana looks exhausted. Dasi’s voice sounds like it’s going out. We even lost Zosi’s puppets: they tried to walk across the bottom of the lake and something—we never saw what, but it was something big—extirpated them. They are utterly gone; there aren’t even any remains! I shudder to think what must be in that murky water that’s capable of (I assume) swallowing them whole. The pool is closed until further notice.

This underscores how unprepared we’ve been for water. We’ve mostly avoided it so far but it’s been a consistent theme and I wonder if our current tactics will hold. At the end of that hallway, where the lizards were, water pours in through cracks in the cavern walls and flows down the steps into a drain at its base. Which means we will have water to contend with down below, too. What if there’s something in the water that we have to confront?

The good new is that we have a few hours to figure this out as we are going to shelter in this hall for the rest of the day while we recover. Is this safe? Not really. Is there someplace safer? Not really. Not unless we want to leave and come back, which seems particularly unwise. If anything tries to come up from below, or descend from above, we need to be here for it.

Pharast 28, 4713 (late morning, The Penance)

Now I can add “copulating hobgoblins” to the list of things I neither want nor need to ever see again.

Ichirou was one of Munasukaru’s children. The hobgoblin women he was…ahem…entertaining said as much when we descended on them. They avowed that we would never take the great spawn of the even greater Munasukaru from them, and bravely fought to the death, giving their lives to shield him as he even more bravely begged and pleaded to not be killed, and surrendered and bound himself at Radella’s demand. While the battle raged on. Yes, you read that right: he surrendered at the beginning, while his concubine fought and died in his honor. What madness is this?

In the interest of accuracy, only one of them actually fought. The other one was caught up in the web from my spell, and she burned to death in her lover’s bed after we set it ablaze. Incinerating her was more satisfying than watching the aranea roast, though it was probably no less disturbing. I think. Yuka’s memories are pretty clear on what the hobgoblins had done to her so it’s hard for me to look at this objectively.

I overheard the others talking earlier and someone, I am not sure who, said “Kali seems more bloodthirsty than usual”. That is definitely true. It’s hard not to be when you see what I have been shown. And I know I should, but I just can’t feel bad about what I’ve been doing. Or her memories won’t let me.

Ichirou kept referring to himself as the greatest or the chosen spawn of Munasukaru. I have my doubts about that. Not about him being her son, but about that bit where he is “chosen”. Given how quickly and readily he surrendered, how desperate he was to spare his life, and how he was all too eager to sell out his own mother—an Oni of the Five Storms—in return, it’s difficult for me to see what’s so great about him, and why anyone would choose him for anything of any importance.

I didn’t sit in on most of the interrogation because Yuka was more or less urging me to burn him alive, so I had to settle for the executive summary. He was supposedly the “overseer” (those were his words) of this level of what his mother calls “The Penance”, but his official duties seemed limited to bedding hobgoblin women. The answer to every one of our questions apparently got sidetracked into women in general, the Sisters of the Broken Path specifically, and when and where he’d rendezvoused with all of them. Even the map he sketched out for us was more or less referenced in relation to his sexual escapades. Do I need to keep going on here? No? Good, because I have had enough of it, too.

The Sisters of the “Broken Path”. That’s what he said the hobgoblin monks (all of them women, obviously) are called. What does that even mean? The path to where, exactly? And how or why is it broken? The name is as ridiculously arbitrary in Tien as it is when translated to Common, seemingly chosen for its edginess and mysteriousness.

Ichirou wasn’t the only one passing the time here with romantic interludes. His mother has, apparently, been busy herself. Ichirou says he has siblings, and there may even be some he doesn’t know about since he doesn’t get downstairs too often. He talked a lot about his two sisters. They are “mean to him” (gods, it’s like talking to a child), and more helpfully, that they are large, snake-like beings with faces. We put our heads together on that one and concluded they are naga of some sort.

So Munasukaru lays with hobgoblins and gives birth to naga. How does that work, exactly? I mean, sure, oni are demons in the flesh, but the biology just doesn’t make sense and even magic has limits. And, is it a failure or a success, anyway, when an oni mates with a hobgoblin and gives birth to a naga? On the one hand, her daughters are apparently still alive so that points to the latter, but on the other hand, Ichirou was still alive, too, so that’s not much of an argument. Maybe we’ll ask Munasukaru when we see her.

Ivan shot and killed Ichirou after we were done talking to him. While he was still bound. I should probably be feeling bad about that.

(noon)

Why are there so many oni still here? Why is Munasukaru still here? I mean, what is the point? The Kami said they couldn’t enter the House as long as even one oni remained. Well, we are up to our ears in oni here: Fujai, Ichirou, and of course Munasukaru and however many other oni she has spawned over the years. If it only takes one, why do they all stay? They can obviously get out because the rest of the Five Storms did it, so what’s keeping everyone else here? Can’t they take shifts or something? This makes no sense.

The only explanation I can think of is that Munasukaru has gone completely mad. She must want to stay here, and that means she is out of her gourd.

The rest of this place makes no sense, either. There are all these hobgoblins down here, and they are living in filth and squalor like it’s paradise. Why? To be closer to their “living god”? What god chooses a garbage pit for their domain? Who follows their god into a sewer? What could she possibly be giving them that is worth being trapped underground in your own refuse? Maybe we’ll ask her that, too.

Pharast 28, 4713 (mid morning, beneath the House of Withered Blossoms)

I think I overplayed my hand. In fact, I am pretty sure I did and now I’m concerned that I’ve done the exact thing we were trying to avoid: spread the alarm ahead of us as we go. My intent was to avoid the long slog through this cavern—having to fight our way through ambush after ambush on their terms—to reach the end by having the end come to us, instead. That part certainly worked, but the commander of the garrison here knew something was up when he came. And the whole thing just took too long, so we more or less knew that he knew. But how did he know? That’s the question that has me worried.

Maybe Munasukaru never actually comes up here. That’s certainly possible. No matter how good my illusion, no matter how clear my memories of her, none of it would matter if it was just all wrong on that basic level. It goes back to what Ameiko and Sandru have tried to teach me about bluffing and disguise: the details matter, yes, but you have to get the broad strokes right first. My game with the hobgoblins was fun, and they were certainly too terrified to think too much about what was going on, but their commander may have known better because it just doesn’t happen. Or at least, not in that way, or without his knowledge.

That’s the more benign theory, and to be honest, I don’t give it much weight. The more problematic one—the one that I think is more likely—is that they sent a messenger further…in? down?…wherever, in order to find out if she was really here. Or maybe they sent to her or someone close to her using magic, and learned that, no, she’s exactly where she should be and who is crazy and/or foolish enough to try and imitate her? (A rhetorical question when I ask it, though maybe more of a head-scratcher for them.) In which case, now several people are aware that something is going on, even if they don’t know precisely what that is.

If we’re lucky, they’ll blame the trickery on Akinosa. Though I am not feeling particularly lucky.

But, hey, at least we avoided the slog. Or, part of it, anyway. And, as a bonus, we ended up springing a trap without having to be there for it. So there is that. But, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve compromised our long-term success for short-term gains.

It was a pretty nasty trap, though. Or would have been, had it come as the surprise that was intended. We learned a little about constructs back at the academy and I’ve picked up some here and there in my own studies, but this was the first time we’ve come face to face with one. They are largely resistant to magic and even physical blows which is probably why they are so coveted as guardians. These clay ones, though, are particularly nasty because the injuries they inflict simply do not heal, resisting even magical intervention (something we learned through personal experience). Imagine having to fight our way through waves of hobgoblins after tangling with that.

(late morning)

While the others searched the store room I took the time to memorize a couple of spells. That seemed more productive than digging through rusty tools, junk-drawer supplies, moldy vegetables and racks of cured mystery meats. Gods, this place is disgusting. It’s like an estate sale for someone who died while I was still living at home.

I remember when I first came here. It was a long time ago. Long before I was born. It wasn’t the hobgoblins but the aranea. There were so many of them back then, more than we normally see around the forest, and they wanted to know why (I don’t remember who “they” were. Give me a break; it’s been half a century.) I stumbled onto the House, only I didn’t know it had a name back then. It was just this improbable pagoda rising out of a depression in the forest.

It looked a lot different. The aranea hadn’t gutted it, and of course we hadn’t burned what was left. Now it’s just a chimney, but when I first saw it? It was beautiful. The pit was there, though. It looked different, too. This was before the front lines of this stupid war were really drawn. I made my way down because I was curious.

Because Yuka was curious, and because it didn’t make any sense. She made her way down and she was captured by the hobgoblins, and eventually brought before Munasukaru.

I don’t remember how long I was down here. How long she was down here. But I She remembers being tortured and killed, personally, by Munasukaru. And no one should have to remember that. I shouldn’t have to remember that. It wasn’t even me, but she remembers, and so I remember.

(later still)

This part of the … whatever this is … is as an even bigger joke than the cavern above. One of the lines of defenses was, of all things, a leper colony. Really? That’s one of your tactics? You’re going to defend this place with a bunch of sickly hobgoblins by transmitting a disease with a one month incubation period? Exactly how does that work? We start the battle, then come back in three to four weeks?

Also, news headline for you: we can fly.

It was so easy that I almost felt guilty. Almost.

Next up was this ridiculous open pit, criss-crossed with bars with mist or fog rising up from below. We were trying to figure out what it was when three hobgoblins stepped out onto the bars and started threatening and taunting us. Something about this scene triggered Yuka’s memories, and I realized I was looking at a sort of bizarre dojo.

Here’s what I’ve learned about taunting your opponent: don’t. Just don’t. Not before the battle’s over, anyway. It may feel good at the time, but it doesn’t really accomplish anything and it’s always possible that they know something you don’t. And then you look stupid. And then you die, looking stupid.

Here’s the thing: We. Can. Fly. Do not taunt your opponents while balancing on metal bars above a steaming pit if they can fly and you can’t. Why do I even need to explain this?

And even if we couldn’t fly, we are quite deadly even from a distance. We knocked two of them to their deaths without breaking a sweat. We never even got close to them. We didn’t have to!

I have to wonder what went through their minds as they fell into the pit. Was it regret, maybe? That feeling you’ve wasted your life training for exactly the wrong moment? Or maybe it was just the sinking sensation in your stomach, when the realization dawns that you were fighting the wrong battle?

Or maybe it was just abject terror. The sounds from below…the noxious, billowing mist…we think it may be a gorgon down there. I wouldn’t want to fall on one of those, either.

(even later still)

We can hear sounds of … well … an intimate moment through one of the arches off the pit. I picked up just enough to make out the words, “I thought I heard something on the lattice,” but another voice said to ignore it, and then they, um, resumed their thing.

Or at least, that’s what it sounds like. It’s a lot louder than…never mind. I guess this explains why they didn’t hear us earlier.