The War of Two Shadows
Shinjo Raniya.
Hida Juzo.
Shiba Toriko.
Ikoma Iwane.
Bayushi Katsu.
Doji Akikaze.
Agasha Naota.
The seven samurai who would eventually be recognized as the second thunders started as a group of miscellaneous samurai who tended to show up whenever things were about to go straight to hell, but were otherwise unremarkable. In truth, several of them were not present the first time a recognizable group is recorded as having assembled, at a tournament held by Doji Satsume, then the Emerald Champion. Of the seven, only Shinjo Raniya, Hida Juzo, Bayushi Katsu, and Agasha Naota were present at the closest thing to a beginning that this particular story has, and recorded as having participated in the unfortunate incident that spawned their career are also Doji Saikoro, Akodo Takeji, and Isawa Honoka.
Isawa Honoka, according to those of the seven who survived the second day of thunder, sacrificed herself to complete Isawa’s Last Wish, which became Isawa Nozomi, in honor of the closest thing she had to a mother and father. The others sank into relative obscurity. Agasha Naota was appointed an Emerald Magistrate at the end of the tourney, and Shinjo Raniya acted swiftly to become his yojimbo and yoriki.
What followed was an incredibly eventful but largely unspeakable sequence of investigations, strange happenings, and coincidences, until the Emperor’s heir, Hantei Sotorii, was kidnapped by bloodspeakers right from the forbidden city. In the massive manhunt that swept across Rokugan, the group at the time, along with an Ise Zumi and a Tsukai-Sagasu, were the ones to stumble across Yajinden’s attempt to use Hantei Sotorii as the new vessel for Iuchiban, allowing him to escape his half millennium of imprisonment. Faced with far too many bloodspeakers, zombies, and maho-tsukai to fight with a mere nine samurai, Bayushi Katsu drew on the power of the Lying Darkness, shadow jumped to the altar, grabbed Hantei Sotorii, and shadow jumped back. Left with no better option to protect the imperial heir, the samurai fled before the bloodspeakers, with Kuni Vistan and Togashi Shuji choosing to stay behind and trigger a collapse of the cavern to allow the rest to get the heir to safety.
That’s when the REAL problems started. Hantei Sotorii caught a minor case of the faceless on his little jaunt through the shadows, and with no other heir, and no treatment for the infection of the Lying Darkness, the empire was on track to have an emperor for whom losing face was rather more literal than usual.
That on its own would be bad enough, but on one of their many danger-fraught missions, they were thrown into the shadowlands when their ship was caught in an untimely storm. When they finally came to shore in a ship graveyard, among the many things they discovered was a katana. A katana that was completely unstained by time, tide, and taint. Naturally, they took it with them, but when they finally made it back to the empire, the sword went missing in the night. The next time they would see it would be when the revered Lion sensei, Akodo Kage, retired and handed his katana to his protege, Akodo Toturi, the Lion Clan Champion. They knew something was not right, but even with their relatively glorious reputations, throwing doubt on a gift from Akodo Kage was beyond them, and stealing the Lion Champion’s sword was beyond even that.
Matters continued as they will, and while they were privileged to be in Otosan Uchi for the Chrysanthemum Festival, a great earthquake struck, setting half the city afire. In the confusion, the Emperor nearly drowned, and Isawa Kaede, betrothed of Hantei Sotorii, was kidnapped by faceless ninja, even as the Emperor, only just rescued from the water, was assaulted by oni, and Hantei Sotorii was assaulted in still another location by more faceless ninja. Split up in a way they rarely were, the heroes still performed admirably, and all three targets survived. The Emerald Champion, Doji Satsume, was unfortunately killed in the defense of the imperial heir. During the rescue of Isawa Kaede, Hida Juzo is faced with a herd of stampeding Unicorn horses, unleashed from the Unicorn stables, and through sheer force of will and intimidation, stops the stampede and gains the notice of the Shi-Tien Yen-Wang, who send him one of the pale horses of the White Guard, though the significance of the steed would not be understood for some time.
The next major development was a significant step down socially, but would prove to be no less momentous. Attending winter court in Shiro Kaiu, several of the heroes embarked on a last minute mission into the shadowlands. The nature of the mission remains murky to this day, but its results are well known. Faced with Hida Kisada and Kuni Yori’s pact with the shadowlands horde, Hida Juzo and Hida Sukune forsook the Hida family name, along with many of their brethren, and began the Crab civil war, which would not end until the second day of thunder. A later mission to the corrupted ninth tower saw Bayushi Katsu emerge with the Jade Hand, and the Kaiu family swearing itself to Sukune’s rebellion after being assaulted by the corrupt Crab.
After the battle, Agasha Naota, by then the acknowledged master of swordsmithing, took his chance and walked into the Kaiu Forge with steel, crystal, jade, and obsidian. He emerged days later, having exhausted countless Kaiu swordsmiths in creating his masterwork: Hitsumetsu, the Sword of the Sun, the Blade of Final Justice, which can kill anything, and which was used by Lady Sun to strike down Fu Leng on the second day of thunder.
In the wake of these developments, the Jade Championship was unearthed from the histories and, because of the increasing number of shadowlands incursions across the empire, was reinstated. The tournament took place alongside the Emerald Championship, just after the funeral of Hantei XXXVIII and the ascension of Hantei XXXIX. The Emerald Championship was won cleanly by Otaku Taro, a dark horse with only a single significant duel to his name, having proved by combat that the Scorpion were, in fact, smuggling gaijin pepper. The Jade Championship was no less surprising, with the finals being Kitsu Makoto facing his sensei, Kitsu Okura, but Makoto had just finished a grueling bout with Isawa Akei, and bowed to his sensei after the first exchange.
Meanwhile, in Unicorn lands, Shinjo had returned, and was busily purging the clan of the Kolat, a conspiracy that had infiltrated most of the Shinjo family and much of the rest of the Unicorn. Shinjo Yokatsu, exposed as a traitor, fled and split the clan, but Shinjo Raniya blew the horn of the water dragon and summoned the remainder of the Unicorn from the Burning Sands, led by Moto Gaheris. By all accounts, this is also when Juzo learned of the significance of his white steed, and rode into battle with the White Guard for the first and last time. At the same time, in Otosan Uchi, Kitsu Okura, the new Jade Champion, died of a mysterious illness, and was replaced by Isawa Akei via imperial decree, angering the Lion.
Just as the Lion invaded the Crane, in Otosan Uchi, murder was the order of the day, with the Otomo daimyo confessing to the murder of not just his wife, a prominent Crane courtier, but of several other unsolved murders that had previously been attributed to maho cults trying to blacken the man’s name. The Emperor denied the man seppuku and instead stripped the entire Otomo family of their names and holdings, casting them out of the imperial families, while simultaneously declaring that anybody who dared either aid or harm them would feel his wrath. Just a few days later was the meeting between Hantei XXXIX and the naga known as the Dashmar, and while the meeting itself was not disastrous, Agasha Naota’s inexplicable outburst of “Foul!” saw him stripped of his own name and his son adopted by the emperor, in his mercy. In spite of their supposed desire to open relations with the empire, the naga left the city shortly after the audience and no more were seen outside the Shinomen Forest until well after the second day of thunder.
The war between the Lion and Crane was short and brutal, with the Lion virtually annihilating the Tsume vassal family and taking the Kintani Valley in its entirety, including Shiro Kyotei, along with large chunks of Crane farmland. It also destroyed well over half the Crane army, and only imperial intervention and Toturi’s disgrace kept it from going further. Yes, as Akodo Toturi’s army stood before the gates of Toshi Ranbo, the general himself was nowhere to be seen. When the Crane commander called him out, he finally emerged from the command tent half-clothed, with a geisha on each arm. He and his escorts mounted some horses and rode away, leading the entire Akodo family to forsake their name in shame, many of them accompanying it with seppuku.
In the wake of all this foolishness, it was a surprise to everybody when news arrived that Bayushi Shoju had died and his son, Bayushi Dairu, would be undergoing gempukku just before the funeral, in order to take up his father’s position as Scorpion Champion. Even more surprising was the new emperor himself attending, to immediately accept this new champion’s oath of fealty. Little of real consequence happened at the gempukku or the court surrounding it, but everything went horribly wrong at the funeral when, in the presence of the Emperor himself, Soshi Bantaro drew forth one of the twelve scrolls that had once bound Fu Leng and used it to call the soul of Bayushi Shoju back into a corrupted, undead body. This marks the first recorded use of Hitsumetsu, borne into battle by the ronin Naota, who was not privileged to attend the funeral, but was still present at the castle for other reasons. Soshi Bantaro and the undead Shoju were both slain, and in the wake of his corruption, Bayushi Dairu decreed that the Soshi would be governed by a council of elders, so that corruption could never overtake the entire leadership again.
The Scorpion kept largely to themselves for the rest of the war of two shadows, mostly due to an internal struggle against the Lying Darkness, which had infected nearly half the clan. This allowed Shinjo Raniya and Ikoma Iwane a brief respite, which they took advantage of to wed Raniya to Matsu Agetoki’s nephew and heir, forging an alliance between the Lion and Unicorn. Agetoki’s army, unable to aid the Lion in their war with the Black Lion in the mountains of the Dragonfly, headed south at their behest to aid Sukune’s uncorrupted Crab, while they and their other associates headed north in hopes of ending the Unicorn civil war.
The heroes traveled up to the Unicorn/Dragon border and, in conjunction with the return of the long missing Mirumoto Hitomi, brought the Dragon army into the war on the side of Lady Shinjo. In one great battle, they caught the traitor Yokatsu’s army between the Dragon and the Unicorn and killed him in the ensuing battle, ending the rebellion. In the celebration afterward, Mirumoto Hitomi stole Hitsumetsu from Shinjo Raniya and cut down Lady Shinjo, nearly killing her, and then was cut down herself. Lady Shinjo recovered, but was never quite the same afterward, and this is considered a significant part of her later departure from the mortal realm, taking with her the blades of all her siblings.
In any case, this freed the Unicorn army to march south and aid Sukune as well, while our heroes headed east to Phoenix lands, skirting around the ongoing war in the Dragonfly lands. What they found there was a nightmare; a second shadowlands had sprung up, centered on Kyuden Isawa. There were only six witnesses to what happened in that dark place, so details are few, but we know that they discovered the Tomb of the Last Wish, where Isawa Honoka sacrificed herself, completing Isawa’s Last Wish and creating the Guardian of Ningen-do, Isawa Nozomi. We also know that four of the five elemental masters perished, and Kyuden Isawa itself was destroyed, along with all its libraries. Only a gaping hole in the city remained where it once stood. They emerged from the second shadowlands with the missing Phoenix champion, Shiba Ujimitsu, in tow, along with the Phoenix thunder, Shiba Toriko. Ujimitsu was badly crippled, but alive, and began rallying the remnants of the Phoenix for the second day of thunder.
Meanwhile, in Crab lands, Hida Kisada and Kuni Yori had long since tired of the war with Sukune’s rebels, and in an attempt to win them in one mighty stroke, they summoned Kisada no Oni into Ketsuen, the ancestral armor of the Crab, and then destroyed the skull of the Maw, which had hung over the gates of Kyuden Hida for centuries, preventing the oni lord’s return. The Maw immediately took advantage of the situation, and with its power, the tide turned against even the combined power of the Lion, Crab, and Unicorn.
Kisada’s army promptly pushed through into Scorpion lands, where even a few Scorpion joined in the attempt to delay them, but in the end, it was merely a long, hard retreat towards Otosan Uchi and the second day of thunder. Near the end of the march, in the middle of a morning battle, the Maw mysteriously disappeared from the battlefield, and has never been seen since. By then, however, so much of the resistance force had been whittled away that turning the tide was no longer likely, and so the retreat continued. In Otosan Uchi, the Jade Champion, Isawa Akei, was assassinated by a ronin who promptly disappeared along with Ikoma Iwane, who would not be seen again until the second day of thunder.
Dawn of the second day of thunder, over the plains of Otosan Uchi, saw five armies forming up. The Imperial Legions, the Phoenix army, and the coalition army that had retreated in the face of the corrupt crab, against the corrupt crab and the corrupt Phoenix, led by Isawa Tsuke. Shortly thereafter, a sixth army appeared, led by the Black Lion, and flying the ancient banner of Fu Leng, upon which was crucified Matsu Tsuko, the Lion champion. The seven thunders, now united in a single group for the first time, struck out for Isawa Tsuke, but the coalition had no general to match the Black Lion, and a clever gambit on his part saw them facing not just the corrupted master of fire, but also Hida Kisada, Hida Yakamo, Yakamo no Oni, and Kisada no Oni. In the explosive melee that followed, Isawa Tsuke fell to Hitsumetsu, while Juzo personally destroyed Kisada no Oni, and with it, the ancestral armor of the Crab. Yakamo and Kisada followed in short order, but what should have been a great victory was cut short.
The Emperor himself, Hantei XXXIX, the Shining Prince, emerged from Otosan Uchi, the emerald champion at his side, and under his command, the imperial legions turned on the clans. Things came to a head when the thunders, still lacking Shinsei, were caught in a pincer between the Emperor and the Black Lion, now revealed to be Fu Leng himself. They were saved only by the last second arrival of Kitsu Makoto, via the spirit realms, bringing with him not just a host of heroes to hold off the armies of darkness, but the heir to Shinsei, who joined with the thunders who, using Hitsumetsu, laid low the lord of the shadowlands.
The defeat of their lord threw the armies of darkness into disarray, and they scattered, causing a great deal of damage in the years it took to finish hunting them down. Lord Moon and Lady Sun, distraught over the downfall of so many of their children, including both the last Hantei, who died without heir, and Fu Leng, who was the favored son of Lord Moon, committed seppuku in order to follow their children into the cycle of reincarnation. They left their mantles to Raniya and Juzo, respectively, who now reign as Sun and Moon, and left with few other viable options, Ikoma Iwane became Iwane the First, appointing Bayushi Katsu as his Emerald Champion and Kitsu Makoto as the Jade Champion.
The new emperor filled the windows of the throne room with crystal suncatchers, and when the final suncatcher was put into place, the sun brightened for an instant, filling the imperial palace with an explosion of light and color. The fashion spread quickly, and eventually became simply tradition, another way of showing the favor of heaven shining on the Iwane dynasty.
Iwane the First also spent his entire reign with a jade hand ornament adorning the back of his sword hand, ostensibly to remind him not to use it without careful consideration of the costs. This caught on as well, but not so quickly, and did not last long enough to become tradition for anyone but the emperor. When Iwane Toshiro takes the throne as Iwane the Second, he continues the practice, cementing its traditional status for the emperor.
The Thunder once known as Agasha Naota had a son, who was to be fostered by Hantei XXXIX. Iwane the First acknowledged and assumed the debt, adopting the boy into his own household until he was of age to take up his father’s responsibilities. Agasha Natsu goes on to become a master armorer, and while he never reaches the heights his father did, he is one of the first students of the Imperial Academy, and the first such student to become the master of a discipline.
Less than a year after the battle, Shiba Ujimitsu performed seppuku, appointing Shiba Toriko as his heir in the absence of Ofushikai. To everyone’s astonishment, Ofushikai appeared, despite having been taken to the heavens by Lady Shinjo, and selected her as the new Phoenix champion. Ofushikai continued to do so, and the line of the Soul of Shiba remained unbroken. Also of note is that Shiba Toriko’s ability to invoke prayers to the kami in spite of being a bushi was carried on to the later heirs of the Soul of Shiba, and the gift began to appear, though rarely, across the empire. Those marked as what the Phoenix have dubbed the “Chosen of the Last Wish” are invariably pressured into training as both bushi and shugenja, and show remarkable facility in doing so, but those not so blessed remain absolutely unable, to the dismay of the Phoenix.
