A shroud of fog hung about the battlefield, hiding the forms of men who lay in the mud contorted. I did not know the face of any man whom I encountered or what armor they had worn. They were now simply bodies representing an incredible loss. As I moved a dead comrade away from my path with my shaking hand, I felt like I was desecrating them. Iron and I did not know if it was my blood or the earth's coated the tongue of my mouth. My armor, once a representation of rank and discipline, was tattered. It had become an old rusted cage that protected me not against the biting cold that had penetrated to my bone.
Somewhere, the faint sound of war drums had gone away. However, perhaps my ears were deafened from all the screaming and can't hear any longer. My knees sunk into the frozen sludge as I knelt. I tried to keep my fingers relaxed while running them parallel to the edge of the wet paper in my hand. The blood of my master, which was dark and had a coppery smell, was all over the wet paper. This map was my only connection to something that might not even exist – an island that the Shogun could never reach. It was the last thing the man had told me before he died during our battle.
The trees around me had been calling out to me. Not through a gentle breeze or animal sounds but instead through a rhythmic clicking sound that produced a thudding in my head that I was deaf to. I was being watched by something there, I could feel it, some presence? Some eyes perhaps? Perhaps a worse thing? Waiting to see if I would give in to fatigue before I came to an end.
It took me a long time to rise, my joints protested at every movement I made there. The feels of my daisho still on my side but off-balanced. The condition of the scabbard was dreadful. Every step in the mud was like a march towards my own death. It also served as a reminder that the world that I had been raised to serve had now disappeared and with it the moral clarity that I had always understood from the Bushido code was now nothing more than a cruel joke. What I had always feared, the beginning of my world, was coming to pass. This was the first time in my life that I prayed not for honour but instead for silence.
The sound of metal hitting the ground grew nearer to me and cut through the misty haze of the valley, but it wasn't long before my katana was the only thing that held me still. My throat felt tight and the sound I made was loud in the unusual silence of this valley.
The person who was following or hunting me was not going to be quiet. He made heavy footsteps like he expected no one to resist him and was confident in knowing that a lone survivor was no better than a stray dog in mud.
I pressed back against the base of an old stone lantern, covered in moss, peering out into the darkness. The fog continued to swirl and choke the valley to where it eventually parted ways; a man then appeared. He was wearing the rusted and soot-covered do (armor on chest) of my defeated clan and had no kabuto (samurai helmet), but instead had blood on his hachimaki (headband) that was bandaging his head. He was dragging a yari (spear) that had the tip broken off and only a jagged metal end was left as a point. He was walking as if he were asleep and had no focus; only God knows what he was looking at. He stopped near the torii gate, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the stagnant air.
"Kenji," he rasped, sounding like someone who had lost the ability to use their voice.
My heart raced against my ribs as I imagined it beating like a trapped bird inside of my chest. My second-in-command Saito was right there next to me just before the formation broke apart. I watched as he was pierced through the chest by a spear and I saw him drop.
I stepped out from behind the stone lantern and placed my hand just over the hilt of my blade. "Saito? You... fell. I saw you fall!"
He turned toward me in jerky movement, like an abandoned marionette that was left with frayed strings. His eyes were not really eyes anymore, they were just white, clouded orbs of fog, reflecting nothing but grey mist.
"The map, Kenji," he whispered in a voice so weak it sounded like dead leaves blowing across pavement. "The master must have the map to open the path."
I drew my katana. It rang out with a ringing sound - a clear, ringing sound and seemed to be the only thing I recognised as true and real in all this madness. I had no idea if I was facing a man; a ghost, or if I was simply imagining this terrible sight as the result of my own broken mind. When Saito moved to raise the broken yari, I knew one thing would not happen - no way would I give up the map!
The atmosphere around the torii gate felt stretched out; it vibrated at a frequency that sent a jolt of pain into my teeth. I didn't stop to look back at where Saito had turned to ashes; I proceeded ahead, walking through the two pillars of rotting cedar.
And then, for a moment, existence stopped.
There was no sound or fog or chill; only a void, pressing against my body.
Then, things came crashing back into place.
I stumbled as I planted my feet onto an unfamiliar surface; it wasn't the mud that sucked me down in the battle, but rather the solid, baked earth covered with a carpet of blackened, dead needles. I looked up and was unable to breathe. The sky here was not gray; it was a colorless, sickly violet and was filled with clouds that flowed in a crude, hypnotic fluid motion.
The forest was different. The trees twisted into patterns of writhing limbs that seemed as if they were in the midst of a seizure; bark was peeling off the trees like old skin. This was not the valley where I had just battled. This was not the Japan I knew.
My fingers brushed against my map that had been tucked into my pocket when I reached for the water canteen. The heat radiating from the map had transformed from a warm feeling to a pulsing, energized vibration that was in sync with my own heartbeat. I pulled it out to see what had changed. The faded ink of the map that had appeared before, hazy and unaccurate, appeared to be flashing.
Only flat lines of contour which previously had marked the areas of land were now replaced by a bright red arrow indicating the direction of a large mountain range on the horizon that rose through the purple clouds high above; the existence of this mountain figuratively "stabbed" the clouds like a jagged tooth.
It was at that very second when I realized that the map I held in my hands represented not only a place to go but an area in which my destiny had been secured once I had passed through the entrance of the gate into the new land.
I felt a low-toned, vibrating sound pass through the ground beneath me. The sound was different than before; instead of vibrating, the sound that I experienced echoed loudly throughout the grinding of my bones with a large guttural sound. The source for this sound originated from the mountains in front of me and not the battle field behind me.
I was not in a different accompome now; I was in a land designated as a hunting ground with me as the only target.
I held on tightly to my katana, ensuring I was still in control of my weapon. The air was strange, and I could hear metal on metal as the air consumed my senses with ozone, a stark contrast to the mustiness I have previously experienced on the battlefield. There had to be an elevation point; with an elevation point, I would be able to determine the rules of this world and figure out how to stay alive.
Using my learned ghost step, I was able to stay low, moving of the balls of my feet. The forest ground was filled with dangers; amongst the black needle debris were roots bulging from the ground that would remind you of exposed veins. Continued movement resulted in various poses as I attempted to listen to the other-type sounds all around me. Each time I stopped; I had to stop to hear if there were any birds, or crickets, or a mouse moving in the bushes, but there was no movement to hear.
I came across an outcropping of jagged rock that stood above the tree line (over 80 feet high) and looked over the valley below me. I could begin to see the placement of various landmarks in relation to north of my location, such as the mountains that I had seen on the map; they resembled the spine of a sleeping dragon and were preceded by an infinite labyrinth of exhumed stub shrines with a "living" fog filling the labyrinth robbing me of my breath.
But as I looked at the horizon, I felt my breath catch.
Some thing was following me through the darkness of the charred trees, high up in the air. The thing was way too big to be an animal or a human, and it moved differently than either. I was watching the thing move in leaps among the dark and distorted branches, defy gravity with its jumps, but I could hear no sound as it moved. I could only feel the shift of air as the thing moved through the trees. The pressure from the air flowing past me was in sync with the pulse from the map in my tunic.
The creature was herding me, not chasing me fast to catch me. The creature was keeping me on the only trail that led directly to the centre of the island.
I crouched lower against the freezing marble-like rock behind me while I tried not to make my heart race any faster than it was. My samurai training forced me to fight, to draw my katana, and wait for the creature to fall to the ground. My instincts, however, which had been made through the mucky real world, told me that if I had to engage in close combat to have any chance of winning, I wouldn't.
I didn't know what the creature wanted with me but it clearly wanted to deliver me to the mountains. The real question is: what was up there that the creature went through so much trouble to make sure I got there?
I looked at the map one last time. The red needle was no longer just pointing, but also glowing and the ink bled into the paper to create a new symbol, a single eye with no details, only where the eye would be placed on the head.
The forest below me changed, and the shadows became longer. The sun was not going down anymore; something was rising up out of the ground. The hunt was moving to a new stage.
I chose not to run. I had seen people run away from their fate; so I would not. The silence of the forest would have to tell me what to do next.
Below the clusters of boulders where I had been standing was a slope fractured into several sculptures of height that appeared as though they were hardly hammered together. Thick vines draping this outcropping looked like thick braids; hidden under these vines was the mouth of a cave. This cavity opened up into a dark, toothy cavity that smelled of damp, weathered rock; its musty air reminded me of an unmarked tomb that had not been opened for thousands of years.
I slid down the shale using my feet to steady myself as the chainmail of my armor clanked against the rock surface. Tonight, I wanted my movement to be slow and controlled. If that thing above could see me moving, I wanted to use the mountain to conceal my movement.
I entered into the darkness of the cave at the same time an enormous synchronicity came crashing down from the trees directly above me. Rocks fell off the walls of the cave above me, and dust rained down from the roof of the cave where I was now hiding; as I held my breath and the grip of my katana until my fingers went completely numb.
The gloominess in this place is very heavy; this is not just darkness, but darkness that you can feel. Now that my pupils have adjusted to the lack of light, it is becoming apparent that I am not in some form of natural cave. The walls of the cave have been smoothed either by human hands or by some other method that took years to create the smoothed surfaces (i.e. chiseling into the rock).
On the floor are many detailed symbols that have been carved into the rock, and in the carvings are some phosphorescent dust (the same phosphorescent dust that lights up the symbols on my map); the phosphorescent dust is pulsing along with the symbols on my map.
I may be in an ancient shrine or an ancient prison.
I stepped forward away from the light coming from the entrance; as I took my first step away from the light, my foot slammed into something solid. I looked down while shielding the glow on the map with my cloak, and realized I had just stepped on a skeleton, one that had been buried 1000 years before the first shogun. The skeleton is laying on the wall with a broken scroll still clutched in its hands.
I bent down, my heart beated fast in my chest and reached out to touch the scroll. It was not made up of paper; it has been made up of the cured skin of a dragon. I could feel the heat radiating off of the scroll and touch it; as soon as my hand struck the scroll, the phosphorescent dust on the walls began to glow, lighting the entire cavern.
I wasn't by myself. Hundreds of other beings, whose bodies had decomposed long ago and whose bodies had returned to dust, were resting silently against the back wall as though they were in deep thought. They did not die fighting, but they had died shall we say; waiting for something to show up.
The map in my hand was beginning to smolder.
I felt the truth hit me hard as I realized that what I had thought of as a sanctuary turned out to be the resting place for everyone who had come before me and failed at their attempts to listen to the map.
My fingers touched the dragonhide scroll, and at the same time, the bioluminescent dust on all four walls of the chamber exploded with a strobe-like burst of violet light. A low, wet grinding noise came from somewhere deep in the back of the chamber. The "statues" weren't what I thought they were.
One of them, the rusted do connecting its body and head long since decayed into cobwebs, moved slightly. There was a noise that sounded like parchment ripping as the thing's head turned toward me slowly; it was hollowed out with only that same purple light coming from inside its skull.
I didn't give it any time to get to its feet; I took off running backward over the badly uneven ground and out through the cave just as the thing raked the air over my head with its claw like hand.
The creature above me let out an ear-piercing scream, which I took as my signal to leave.
I stumbled through the mud outside and never took a moment to catch my breath, but just kept running. The air tasted of metal in my lungs, and my legs felt so heavy from my plate that they would buckle under me any moment. The map that was just vibrating now felt as though it were burning through my tunic and into my skin and I could smell my tunic beginning to burn with the distinct smell of singed wool.
Each step was an act of rebellion against the pressure of the fog on my body. The back of the cave was alive with sound; the sound of rusted metal on stone, many dozens or more, flooding out of the dark cave into the twilight sky. They were not moving swiftly but without relent.
The path before me narrowed into a small gorge. I had no option to do anything other than jump into it. There were sheer jagged peaks of the mountains before me, the gate to a great enigma. I was being corralled like a cow before it is slaughtered, when the map flared one last time and illuminated the walls of the gorge with a series of old and very bright source runes.
They weren't just decorative. They were instructions.
I stopped for a split second, gasping for air, and realized the runes were counting down.
The Gatekeeper's Gambit
Like molten gold spilling over the cold damp stone walls of the canyon, the runes carved into them were flowing and reconfiguring themselves. The geometric pattern of these runes seemed to mirror those we had seen in the Shogun's military formations; however, they were far older than the ones in the Shogun's forces and twisted by some unknown entity.
I was not aiming to harness the power of the map; instead I aimed at my sword.
As I stood with my feet planted firmly in what I had thought was firm ground (instead, it turned out to be wet and muddy) I swung my katana not at the creatures that were rising from the tomb but rather at the canyon walls we stood on. The sound of steel hitting stone screamed through the narrow gorge as my sword bit into the sides of the canyon walls. I was not simply making slashes into the walls; I was tracing the reverse rune that I had seen many years earlier on the handle of my Lord's sword, which had been broken during battle.
This was an ancient technique that the masters said would store energy. I was unsure if this would work in this miserable violet hell I was in but needed to make an effort anyway.
With each blow that struck the stone, I could feel the energy from the strikes resonating along with my own body; my katana hummed loudly as it struck the stone and vibrated inside my mouth, and the final strike of the ground was made. I was directing the source of my ki—the last remaining remnants of my training as a warrior into the stone.
My voice was echoed by the wall as I commanded the stone to "Hold!"
There was silence for a moment; then I heard the mountain groan. The runes I carved alight with a brilliant white. All shadows disappeared from the gorge. A wall of air slammed outwards, catching the advancing skeletons mid-stride in the process.
The skeletons were thrown backwards and their rusty armor shattered like ceramic as they hit the barrier. The canyon's floor shook violently. As a result of the mountain's resonance, a large slab of granite slid down from above to completely seal off the entry to the gorge.
I fell down on my knees with my katana slipping through my numb fingers, my vision becoming blurred as the adrenaline from all of this started to fade away, leaving nothing but a cold ache. I've bought time, but at what cost? The map inside my tunic is now quiet as well; its glow has gone out and I am nowbelow the top edge of the gorge and deep in the shadows of these mountains.
As I looked down upon my weapon, I noticed that it had been riven by some sort of fracture or fissure. It dawned on me then (as I continued to look upwards) toward my next ascent; that this mountain was much more than a physical barrier—it was also a trial to see how much I could endure.
Holding tightly to the hilt of my weapon and feeling the steel pierce into the palms of my hands, I felt as though I were no longer alone in the stillness of the abyss. I did not hear anything else except the sound of rock shifting behind me. I had never felt this way before. The world had changed.
Off in the distance, I heard a voice; it was a human voice, carrying down through the mists; in an eerie, but familiar tone. I could hear it reciting words repetitively like a prayer—you could tell that something terrible had caused this scream.
"By the Shogun's promise, the light shines through! Someone out there... by all that is holy... please tell me that your voice is still alive!"
The very thing that kept me alive during the massacre in the city was telling me that I should be going the opposite direction, trust is a privilege afforded only to the dead. But the voice swore an oath, an ancient Northern Province oath long discarded prior to the beginning of the war.
I looked up at the ridge. It was a straight drop, nothing but loose dirt and rock providing little if any support for a man in full armour. The voice had become somewhat muffled, barely cleansed of all that had been living and dead from the birth of the world.
"I have come!" I said in a voice that sounded like stone grinding on stone.
I started my ascension. Every attempt to climb up was painful. My armour creaked and wrenched against the rock and evidence of a crack on my blade successfully resonated with the strike on my temples.
When I got to the top of the final shelf of ice along the ridge, I found him.
Pinned against a rock wall, he faced down the cliff where everything disappeared into a maelstrom of violet fog. He was a young man, just a boy really, and he wore the tattered remains of the indigo kosode of a mountain guide. He was standing there chanting with a small wooden carved charm in his hand. He was completely surrounded by three of the husks—those half-skeleton soldiers that I had found in the tomb.
They weren't attacking, they were circling him; all three of them were doing it with precise timing and moving in scary precise manners; clearly they were waiting to see if he would run out of strength.
I didn't think about what the odds were that my broken-off sword blade wouldn't break in the next blow. I drew my steel from my side and jumped off the edge of the rock leads and landed between the boy and the closest husk.
"Stop!" I yelled, my sudden appearance paused the husks in their circling motion. "You have two choices; turn around or I end your eternal watch now."
The young boy stared at me with fear; he had completely lost his courage. "You have the Map," he stammered. "You are the one who carries the light."
"I am just a man," I stated; however, the sound of the humming sword created vibrations similar to those I had just used to close the gorge, meaning I was no longer just a man. "And you are in my way."
The atmosphere around us was heavy with an unknown rhythm. The air surrounding the three armored figures charged at me had the same rusty swords cutting through the purple mist as the map pressed against my chest burned; it was crying out—not whispering—but screaming!
The parchment erupted into a blinding flash of light and forced me to shield my eyes. The light did not disperse into the mist; instead, it coiled and wound around me and the young boy in a cocoon constructed of liquid memory.
Then, the battle was removed, the mountains gone, and the three armored beings also disappeared. I was standing in a wood-paneled room, lit by candles, watching the boy—or someone who looked just like him—hunched over the drafting table. His hands shook as they wrote the very same map I held as a guide; I discovered he was not a guide but rather a scribe of all that was hidden from view, drawing lines of reality that were not meant to exist.
As I was about to understand something, his image faded from my vision and I was again looking at his face; it was as if he was no longer a child of this time but an echo of a time before the Shogun, someone who was sent to map out this island prison in order to prevent anyone from ever getting lost inside its jaws again.
"You have misunderstood," he said, not aloud but inside my head. "The map that I drew for you was not made to bring you to this place Kenji, but to give you a destination to end."
Then the light shattered and I was back on the ridge, gasping for breath while cold air hit my sweaty body; the three things made out of metal had stopped their mid-strike motion, and were now in a state of decay and could be turned back into their original forms as a result of hundreds of years of living and dying in such a bad place as this and could collapse back onto themselves as they were created before being destroyed by my experience here and by what I saw while I was on the ridge.
The boy was slumped against a rock face with shallow breaths and instead of looking up at me with a deep fright that comes from being attacked by someone else, he was looking at me as if we were close friends for years.
"You remembered at last," he said quietly while he gripped the same piece of wood from earlier.
With my heart raging, I looked down at the boy laying before me with my sword in my hand forming the only barriers against my own panic. The adrenaline that had kept me alive before him was losing its grip on me and I would not get another chance. This moment was not a method of escape; it was the moment I was destined to find what I was meant to accomplish as a person (or part of the whole) in this reality.
As I knelt down next to him and extended my arm to help him up; it felt as if my armor had become a heavy suit of lead, sapping strength from me at an alarming rate. I was about to discover the first step of my survival when I turned and looked out at the jagged peaks that were now covered with the hues of violet. I felt that the real war—the battle for my own sanity (more than any other reason)—was just beginning.
Although the fog had just returned to me again it was still a veil; now it was simply a curtain waiting for the next act. I now have a map, a survivor and a final destination that defied the very laws of the world that I had left behind.
I look at the boy laying on the rock and then down the edge of the highest peak where I see the mountain continuing to bleed the shadows left by the setting sun into the violet sky.
I announced that we would proceed on foot; my intention was firm but the journey itself is presently unclear.
With one hand on the young man's arm, I pulled him upright then faced the mountains, turned away from the chaos and death of the battlefield, turned away from the many remnants of my past.
The fog had settled in place of the shroud over my loss, casting a heavy cover over the place of my demise. I cast my eyes from the boy to the mountain top where shadows of the peaked mountain poured into the violet sky. He was a warrior—a warrior who was a reflection of a purpose I had buried deep within the weight of my own failures.
I put my arm around the boy and lifted him to his feet. His hand was cold and thin, like paper; however, it burned hugely for me in my calloused hand. My map and his heart beat like a rhythm in the same manner; the connection between them had an ancient and agonising connection.
"We walk," I said as a vow to walk down this nameless path.
I did not pay attention to the site where a fight took place with Saito but instead focused on the sharp, jagged edge of the black mountain. I heard the groaning sound of the gorge I was closing behind me where it was sealed shut with rock and stone as if I were ringing below me a bell to announce the end. I felt the air in this area starting to become a different density. The temperature dropped and the density of the air will change from that of ozone and ancient blood which has become a part of the air.
I would not look back. I did not want to shatter my reality the instant I saw it was no longer there. I had travelled this far as a slave until now when it was just too far for me to travel any further. I was an individual with no one to serve. I was carrying a secret that was consuming me. I was headed to a land that would require my soul as payment for entering.
With one step, I made noise and the boy walked beside me, keeping up with my pace, but I could see that his eyes were focused only in front of him, and he never looked toward me or at the shadows which appeared at the periphery of our field of vision. He was beginning to realise what I was just beginning to suspect; we were not going to the island to travel on it but we were being eaten by it.
The violet tinted sky had started to fade when I noticed that the fire had gone out in my map; it was no longer warm but had turned cold—so completely cold—as if it had finally been put out of its existence and content to lie there.
I am no longer lost, but rather moving toward another place.