Within Kuroikaze there are what they called the Noble Three: Sakai, Miyazaki, Gotō—a trifecta of samurai families sworn to Akanetarō that vie for influence over the whaling settlement.
Gotō supplies Blackwind Village with sorcerers, wielders of jujutsu and genjutsu, able to mould the substance of the spirit—reikon—with ease and bind mitama, the dead souls of the ancestors, to do their bidding as one might a serf. Entertainment through the conjuring of minor illusions and defence through concealing the isle in a ward of obfuscation so that no leviathan happens by from the depths of the ether and swallows Kuroikaze whole.
Though there have been close-calls.
Miyazaki oversees resource production and artisanal quality, the backbone of the settlement’s economy and a major stopgap between Gotō and Sakai. Though not martially-inclined, the Shrine-Veil Clan assumes the important integumentary function of the Kuroikaze organism. From armourers to bowyers to onmyōji-priests, Miyazaki takes care of both body and soul.
Sakai is the martial house, producing warriors of both the bushi and shinobi variety—naked steel and hidden steel, respectively. The militia and even the fighters of the other clans are trained by predominantly Sakai tutors, following the kata of the Way of Hollow Cinder; a martial style that errs towards the unpredictability of a wildfire and the ruthlessness of sand thrown in one’s eye.
In between these three behemoths, a single premature child is born when the priests had divined two instead. Though a person might be reared by a given family, they are only considered part of one after their coming-of-age ceremony on the solstice in the cycle in which they are to be fifteen-cycles-old—measured in the standard time it takes for Mount Fushi to revolve around the Rinnegan, the Eye-of-the-World; the remnants of the dead sun-goddess Amateratsu.
Megumi-Noroi is the given name that the child is bestowed and burdened with—blessed and cursed; disaster and fortune walk hand-in-hand in the wake of that which should have been two. They are reared without a mother and goaded by a father that knows only to measure success as disappointment; but even within darkness there is light like the distant stars beyond the Skysea’s boundless expanse.
Yuriko dislikes being called Okaasan for the disrespect it engendered in the woman that died to give birth to Megumi but they knew that was merely skin-deep; in the marrow of their bones, Yuriko was their mother and that was that.
Today was the solstice of the fifteenth cycle of Mount Fushi since the day that Megumi’s mother died. From hence on, their future was their own to decide and no one could take that away from them—not Father, not the expectations of the Sakai Clan, not the shadow of Mother’s death, not even Yuriko’s protectiveness.
Their path was theirs to tread; whether they tripped and fell into the bottomless abyss or walked surefootedly upon thin air, Megumi was going to do so on their own two feet.
They stood before the torii gate that marks the boundary of Blackwind’s shrine. A spirit of midnight flame was said to be housed within the shintai box, accursed and blessed like Megumi themselves. Seals hung on the gate’s twin pillars, kami-blood their ink and yokai skin their paper—there was power within those little ornaments, greater than one would think possible for such a small thing.
“Walk, O child,” said the priest from within the throng of people that had come to witness the solstice’s coming-of-age, “the path you are to tread until the day your soul is welcomed once again into the Rinnegan.”
And they did so, walking through the torii gate to pray before the godling of famine and cinder Kaku Eater-of-Broken-Dreams. A presence rippled forth from the shintai, the spirit’s phylactery, inundating them in a thick morass of despair and acerbic self-loathing.
Within the shadows of the shrine, eyes peered out, those of Father and those of the other children that had mocked and derided Megumi’s very existence—ostracization, worthlessness, unwelcomeness, hatred. Fifteen years of unbelonging rendered in a single blink.
Megumi felt themselves measured and judged and found wanting as the kami disregarded their value as anything but a common footsoldier—’bushi,’ whispered Kaku into their mind’s eye, spitting out the word as if it were magatsuhi, the leftover and impure filth of creation.
They cried tears but they weren’t of sadness for Megumi could not have been happier; their destiny was not some grand thing decided by others but instead well and truly their own. They were well accustomed to abuse and so it flowed over them like water off a spirit-swan’s back.
Upon hearing the Kaku’s divination, Megumi sat down upon the flagstones in the Lotus Form, crossing their legs from the kneel of prostration they had held themselves in whilst awaiting the Dream-Eater’s answer.
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They opened the warded bakemono-leather purse at their side and took out a small bead of purest black-sakura wax fired within alabaster, translucent as a clouded amethyst with roots of amaranth threaded throughout. Magatama—a man-made one, yes, but a magatama all the same; an origin-seed that moulds itself to the substrate in which it is planted. Megumi swallowed the tomoe-shaped jewel and felt it combust within their stomach, stirring awake the nascent spirit within.
The guiding wind formed ideographs upon Megumi’s mind’s eye, etching the knowledge of their being before them as if ghostly ink upon thin air—a vestige of the dead divinity Fūjin that encompasses all things like the air itself, guiding all souls through the Rinnegan.
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Soul-embryo awoken: Scales-Balance-Upon-the-Needle
Shinrikyo-rank: Ishi (Wax)
Godai-nature: Akasha (Primary) - Shadow (Secondary) - Reflection (Tertiary)
Ryōiki (Domain): Bestows tamashi with the reflection of shadow’s visage and the aspect of a life unlived. Two souls; one sole flesh.
Kōsoku (Restraint): Binds tamashi with the promise of equilibrium. Double-edged swords cut not only forward.
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This was their true nature—their kokoro, their core—made manifest before them. How strange it was to comprehend the totality of one’s being as naught more than ideographs, each fibre rendered in brush strokes of the wind.
A dormant thing all their lives, Megumi-Noroi now bore the brunt of this awoken aspect of themselves; the substance of spirit, reikon, sublimated around them in a nimbus of white vapour. Curlicues of pure essence spun in lazy eddies, limning their form as does Amaterasu Mount Fushi during the eventide in a midnight sun.
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Magatama subsumed: Whisper-of-the-Dancing-Leaves
Shinrikyo-rank: Ishi (Wax)
Godai-nature: Wind (Primary) - Shadow (Secondary) - Death (Tertiary)
Ryōiki (Domain): Bestows reikon with the breath of a thousand-thousand falling leaves and the shrill wail of boughs barren under autumn auspices. Secrets are hidden within the fickle dance of the winds.
Kōsoku (Restraint): Binds reikon with the fate of ash wrought by the bellows. Dry leaves burn quick and are naught but tinder before the flame.
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They felt the magatama revolve around their kokoro and in turn dragged the soul-embryo along into an elliptical orbit such that both spun about one another, greater than the sum of their parts for it. The newly-awoken spiritual proprioception was hazy at best, only vague shapes and relative momentum discernable to their mind’s eye.
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Tomoe formed: Sorrow-of-the-Koi
Shinrikyo-rank: Ishi (Resin)
Uzumaki-pattern: Futatsudomoe (Twofold)
Godai-nature: Akasha (Primary) - Wind (Secondary) - Shadow (Tertiary)
Ryōiki (Domain): Bestows magatama with the stillwater of a lake under winter and the repose of a frozen moment in time. Darkness armors the sleeping koi, brittle and refulgent.
Kōsoku (Restraint): Binds magatama with the ephemerality of the shade of the black-sakura tree. All things must end.
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Slowly, the nimbus of reikon dissolved as their spirit settled in its new homeostasis, the scales of their being returning to balance.
When now Megumi drew breath, they brought in essence from the ether into themselves, spurred on by the vacuum generated by their tomoe’s revolution. There, in the core of their core, was a captured spark of the transcendent, a shard of shattered divinity that could be nurtured to reach even Takamagahara. The reikon settled within their kokoro like snow upon Mount Fushi.
As was customary to the ceremony, Megumi-Noroi forsook their previous child name and took a new name fitting for their reborn soul. Futago—Gemini, the Twin-That-Is-One. Yuriko had called them such all their lives and now they would cement the hypocorism as the lynchpin of their identity.
Having told Kaku of their new name, Futago turned around, dismissing the kami of the shrine just as it had dismissed them. They did not spend one lick of a blink longer there than necessary and already the divinity’s jeers were forgotten.
The torii gate loomed large, lacquered in holy tar taken from a yokai beehive that produced not honey but instead shadow made tangible; black-sakura pollen rendered into nectar and then further distilled into a sublime varnish that did not so much as paint the torii gate a rich and deep umber as it did devour any light that dared to come near.
Like the firstborn gods arisen from the primordial oil of Takamagahara, Gemini stepped past the threshold into the world beyond.
When they appeared before the waiting throng of people, they uttered but a single word that severed all ties of their past life, transcending even the bounds of the coming-of-age ceremony. It was the sword that cuts away the gangrenous limb, the fire that washes away the stagnant old growth, the parting of water from water.
“Rōnin.”
A wanderer of the waves, rōnin are sellswords that drift along the Skysea in search of yokai to slay, contracts to take on, and treasures of the fallen gods. Gemini would find the worth of their soul not through quiet introspection but through adventure of a ruined world where spirits and monsters alike roamed free no different than wind in the ether.
The Dream-Eater had divined that Futago was to be a warrior but not specified that they had to be tethered to Kuroikaze. And as Kaku had spurned them so too would they spurn Blackwind in an act of reckoning for fifteen years of torment.