---Two weeks later---

---Hokiyama, City of Scarlet Knives---

---North Arasaka Prefecture---

Patriarch Kanade Jung calmly placed another pale stone disc on his Moji board, sitting back with some small satisfaction as he waited for his opponent to make his move.

“Father, you are holding back on me.”

Prince Yamrah reached into his own pot of discs and placed one on the square beside his father’s. He then proceeded to take his farthest disc and use it to hop across at least two-thirds of the board, capturing the white discs that represented his enemy.

The Patriarch of the House of Blades stifled a slight laugh under his breath, stroking the thin threads of his wispy beard and fixing his son with the eyes of a patient, venerable monk.

“You have improved, my son,” he said. “Like the Makriesh flowers that bloom in this very springtime, you are coming into your brightest stage of life. Finally, you are putting the theory of Moji into practice.”

Around the two players stretched out a flower garden in full bloom. It was known throughout the Yokun Empire that the gardens of Patriarch Jung’s pagoda were a majesty rivaled only by the Kingdom of Heaven. A running stream brushed gently against a waterwheel to give it motion, and lily pads dotting the stream’s liquid skin glistened in the naked spring sun. The Patriarch and his third son had been at this game for the past five hours this morning, each assessing the weaknesses of the other’s strategy and re-implementing their own moves with brief reflections on the beauty that surrounded them.

“Conflict within a realm of peace,” the Patriarch said. “Moves within countermoves. War is a contradiction, Prince Yamrah. The acts men commit in its name are barbaric beyond belief, and yet we find justification for such acts through the vision of peace they provide. The road to progress is paved with the blood of the fallen.”

“But heretics deserve no sympathy,” Yamrah said, nodding at what he assumed his father’s next words would be. “Such as the humans we tread upon.”

Patriarch Jung furrowed his aged brow, collecting his discs and considering his next move.

“You are always thinking ahead of your opponent, my son. But take care that in anticipation of a predictable future, you do not blind yourself to the present.”

The Patriarch did not show any outward satisfaction in jumping his son’s discs as he made his move—a simple Gomrarh maneuver that he had once learned from a former slave he had played, who had such impeccable knowledge of the game of Moji that he had earned his right to freedom. On that day, the Patriarch of the House of Blades had learned humility. He now took some small pleasure in teaching it to others.

His son watched as all his discs were jumped and cleared off the board, leaving him with just two dark pawns left against his father’s sixteen.

“By Akira!” his son exclaimed. “How could I have missed something so simple?”

“It is the way of war, and of life itself,” his father replied. “Remember: the ancient Yokun before us believed the Moji board to be a representation of the universe. One thousand squares. Perfectly etched into the wood block in absolute uniformity. Yet, the possibilities of play are near infinite. No two games of Moji have ever been the same. Thus, the Moji board represents an extremely chaotic stage. This is the truth of our world, and the art of war: order and chaos in equal measure, wrapped together in disharmonious union.”

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His son scratched his sapphire scales as the sunlight glinted on his brow. Such pigmentation was a stark contrast to his father’s dark emerald hue, yet there was no mistaking that the young one was his son. Yaresh had often teased him when he was younger. Nagoya had reprimanded any who dared speak ill of him. And Yamrah had taken such teasing in his stride. The boy knew who he was and what his bloodline meant to him. That, and that alone, proved to Jung that the boy was truly his.

“But as the game goes on,” Yamrah stated, “the possibilities lessen. Eventually, the game does take on a semblance of order, and all remaining moves are predictable. Once one has studied every move and countermove, there is nothing left to victory but the will and intelligence of the individual player.”

The Patriarch’s wrinkled slit of a mouth curled up at his son from across the table.

“You are indeed learning, my boy,” he said. “Shall we play again?”

At that moment, a new presence made itself known in the garden. It was uncertain how long she had truly been lingering there, listening in to what might have seemed an innocuous conversation between a father and son engaged in recreation to the uninitiated.

But a Matriarch of the Yokun Empire knew better: any conversation between a Patriarch and his Prince was anything but banal.

“Your Graces,” the comely voice of the new arrival said. “It is time to sojourn to the Red-Room.”

Patriarch Jung sighed as he heard the voice, knowing that his Matriarch had come to collect him for duty and, in so doing, demonstrate her authority in front of his youngest heir.

With the way Yamrah nodded unquestionably, getting up without even looking at his father, it was more than clear to Jung that his son was in the full grip of the speaker’s womanly charms. He cleared the board swiftly and bid his son sit right back down.

“Your Grace,” the voice insisted. “Your vassals have come a long way.”

“I will decide when it is time for my son to be bored by dismal economic discussions with stuffy old men, and when it is time for him to get his butt whooped in another game of Moji,” he said with a jovial wink at the Prince. “Do relay my apologies, but the Patriarch of the House of Blades has decided to postpone this council meeting till lunchtime.”

His son smiled down at him. But it was a smile as fleeting as the early morning sun that now slowly dipped below the roof of the pagoda balcony.

“I understand your prerogatives, Your Grace,” the female voice said calmly. “A pity. Your Brother Patriarch and his wife have come a long way.”

Jung stopped as he was about to place a new piece on the game board.

“And the news they bring from the South is hardly pleasing, especially that which concerns the status of your son, Prince Nagoya.”

Now the Patriarch turned to meet the glare of the speaking woman. Tail coiled around her thin, leathered legs, and replete with a robe depicting the dagger against a black sun that symbolized their House’s authority, Matriarch Harumi peered down at her Patriarch and caught the shock that her statement had registered in his son.

“What... what has befallen my brother?” Yamrah demanded. “Well? Out with it, woman!”

The boy stepped forward when the female said nothing further and was only restrained by his father’s quick arm that stopped him from making a fool of himself.

“Peace, Yamrah,” he said. “The Matriarch is not our enemy here. She is relaying the importance of this meeting to us, that is all.”

Harumi bowed low, letting the feathered plumage that lined her shaven cranium fall over her hetero-chromatic eyes—something that would usually have made her a target for Anraka. Her cold-blooded nature, however, had not only kept the knife of the State off her breast, but it had also been used to propel her to the position she now held—second only in authority to that of the Patriarch of the House of Blades. She was the uncontested War-Queen of the Yokun Empire.

“If it pleases you, Your Graces,” she said as she turned to go. “It does not do to keep one’s equals waiting.”

Yamrah followed her before his father, still barking questions to which he’d get no answer. If Jung knew anything about his Matriarch, it was that her lips concealed more secrets than even her sister in the House of Whispers could hold. The boy’s impatience would be his undoing if he did not tread carefully.

But the Patriarch could be forgiven if, in that moment, his son closest to him was suddenly no longer his priority.

“Nagoya...” he murmured. “You could not fail. Not you. If you have fallen, then Akira forgive me for the hell that shall follow.”

He regarded the Moji board as he rose steadily to leave, seeing that two dark pieces flanking a single white disc were all that remained.

...

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