Difference between revisions of "Misao's Visions"

Latest revision as of 00:45, 4 May 2022

The visions begin in earnest almost two months before the rainbow games, well after you've known you would participate, before preparations for travel are even really started. You don't often get visions of the burning sands, but when you do, they're obvious from the terrain, at least. A young Lion man, someone you've never seen before, tall and kind of silly-looking, watching the desert horizon nervously. He never sees the arrow that takes him from the side, dark and swift, and is dead before he can do more than weakly gasp a warning.

The visions are quiet after that, for a time. It becomes difficult to trigger one even with the cards your mother left you. The next is horrific, a young woman, nearly wider than she is tall, from sheer muscle, bursts into a room, and you with her, revealing a tableau of blood and viscera. A half dozen people, it's impossible to tell anything about them anymore, lie scattered in parts across a room, the walls liberally painted with their blood in dizzying patterns. A small child sits in a circle of viscera and raises her arms to you, crying and wanting a hug. The young woman steps forward, and the vision ends just as she embraces the poor thing, and her bones begin to snap.

The vision stays with you for days, and even the ancient ritual around which your duties are based cannot bring you comfort. It's almost a relief when the visions come again, an ancient and peaceful shrine, bearing the mon of an ancient and now vanished family. It takes a moment for you to recognize the markers for plague warning, and just as you do, a door slides slowly open, and a young man crawls out, reaching desperately for a small pond. Even beneath the marks of the plague, he's almost unspeakably beautiful, and it's a shame when he gives up on his crawl to water and lays there, on the front steps of the shrine, as he lets out his last breath.

Only three weeks until you leave for the games, and another vision comes. A startling one, that same tall young Lion, and that same caravan. Grasslands of some sort, an oasis perhaps, or the plains of the Unicorn, for beside him is a young man of the Unicorn. A long vision, you're lost in it for what feels like an hour, and given your tutor's annoyance, it may well have been an hour, watching them as the alarm is sounded, and bandits attack. The young Lion survives. The Unicorn, for all the Lion's medicine, does not, alone among his patients.

Two weeks to go, and a vision comes of another young woman, wiry, but with the movement of a swordswoman. She walks to an old storage shed and pulls it open in the fading light of day. Inside, a pair of men, New Citizens by their looks, are both armed and clearly surprised by her entrance. They leap to the attack, and she defends herself, but she is unarmed, and they move almost like Kakita in their graceful deadliness. She falls in moments beneath their knives.

Other visions flash by in the final two weeks, but these are happier, and make it easy to almost forget the horror of those initial visions. A child born to happy parents in Owl lands. A major attack from the Yodotai repelled by the Lion just in time to save a Ra'shari encampment. A meeting between the Ujik and a group you do not recognize, but they must be Usurran, for at the end of the matter, they transform into a bewildering menagerie of animals and retreat calmly into the forest. A person of strange features, more foreign than even the Yodotai, and more pale, but as they near what is obviously a Rokugani city, they do something, and now is a beautiful young man or woman of the Crane. As a patrol demands their travel papers, they make a strange twist of the hand, and papers appear that were not there before, and though nothing is written on them, the patrol leader nods and grants passage. The young Crane looks over their shoulder, directly at you, and winks broadly. When you awaken, it is nearly time to leave, and you've yet to pack.

Spoken in Old Nezumi, translated: Who can unbreak what has been broken? Dreams are the beginning, and the end. What men sought to avoid, and the People sought to flee, is now the problem of both. Tomorrow never dies.

"I saw an Orochi samurai, and the number 143. Then I saw you and a group of Lion samurai, and he was between you and them, staring them down. And then...I saw the Orochi man dead or dying, or at least bleeding heavily, and there was a man standing over him, a Lion samurai. Thing is that the Orochi looks like he's some kind of yakuza. There was definitely time between each of those visions. That doesn't seem like it's useful at all for finding somebody reliable, does it?"

A small estate in the forest, clearly a samurai's home and flying Matsu banners, has been nearly destroyed. The small wall around the place has a great breach in it, the four buildings of the house are mostly collapsed, probably because an immense boar, big enough that it overshadows the two floors of the buildings, has fallen on it. The ground is littered with dead boars, dead peasants, dead samurai.

Their courses thus decided, the Kitsu heads east towards the mysterious shrine that has always been there for at least the past week or two, while our heroes head west, to Beiden Pass. It's a nice, smooth journey along major imperial roads, and Beiden Pass is nice and comfortable this time of year. It's during a stay at an inn halfway through Beiden Pass, a massive three floor structure that's as large as some small castles, aptly called the Halfway Inn, that Misao has another vision. Thankfully not while she's asleep, again, but rather during dinner, she simply... isn't quite there anymore. She's on a boat, surrounded by water, watching the coast. She can see a city, a Crab one, probably Maemikake, and beyond it, the sun rising over the Kitsune forest. It's a beautiful morning, crisp and clear, and the city is visibly beginning to wake. Then she's back in the inn, her dinner a little colder... and everything shakes for several long seconds. In the wake of the shaking, it's odd to realize that there's no wreckage. Nothing has fallen off shelves, nothing has fallen over. There are no sounds of rockslides from the pass outside. Only shouts and animal cries in reaction.