Good day! I'd like to share a small fiction I wrote to outline the creation of a Meishodo Talisman. Please note that this fiction contains spoilers for Palace of the Emerald Champion. I presented it first to my game master as part of my downtime action, and at his permission, am sharing it here. I hope you enjoy it.
Also, some of the details and events discussed likely only make sense if you have run or read the adventure, but I had to balance narrative with backstory, as well as constantly keep in mind that the adventure module in question is a copyrighted work, and I didn't want to cross that line into using another person's writing completely.
Moto Khujaji sat cross legged on the boulder, contemplating the weapon in his lap. The jitte that Shosuro Koharu gifted him a mere week ago had been changed as much as his own heart and mind had over the scant past days. Her words after training him in its use still echoed, making him wonder if he had been righteous in his actions. Honor, truth, he had pushed those aside and acted, spoke, for what felt like was the best for the Emperor, the Empire. As rigid as the tool in his hand.
The hard forged iron of the main shaft, once plain in its hexagonal cross section, now glittered with the words inscribed on it. Khujaji felt once more the remember sting of the blister on his palm where the acid he used on the blade had caught him. Covering the steel in wax, and delicately scraping away the words before dipping the blade in the corrosive liquid overnight, had taken him nearly a day’s steady work. After the words were burned in, he had scrubbed it clean, and filled them in with beaten copper leaf. Along one flat of the blade shone the words of the Code of Bushido. Compassion, Honesty, Courage, Honor, Duty, Courtesy, Sincerity. Perhaps Compassion shone brighter, was larger in its strokes than the others. Perhaps.
Along the back of the tube of steel, facing him to always be what he would read upon drawing it, the word screamed through the decades by his family. “Never.” Between the top and bottom faces of the blade, Names of Power in scripts unknown to most Rokugani spiraled and danced. Names of stone, and earth. Names of purity.
The kagi, once a simple iron hook attached to the shaft, had been replaced. The curled steel spike had been forged at his request by a weaponsmith of the palace, and inlaid with silver and dark iron wire. A unicorn horn, striped in brightness and darkness, ready to charge first into battle.
The hilt was wrapped in tight cords of silk, purple and white threads spread in a weave to secure the grip in his hand. The pommel… Khujaji felt the large round stone affixed to the hilt with his right hand, and the matching gouge in the boulder on which he sat, with his left. This boulder, that had previously been used to hide a passage in the underground cave in which he sat, a passage where the Emerald Champion, paragon of the Emperor’s Law, had written and hidden his heresy against that very law.
Feeling the scars in the rock, Moto Khujaji cast his mind back, meditating on the fury in which he had attacked the stone with his spiked hammer. Fresh from being confirmed as an Emerald Magistrate, unsure and unsteady, he had crept that night into the cave where he had found the damning scrolls. Used in his past to take samples of ore, or free gems from the stone that held them, he dug with the hammer’s spike into the raw granite, trying to reconcile the understanding of who the man he should have admired truly was, and his own part in hiding the Champion’s sins. A large chunk broke free, and rolled to his feet, a crack in the stone looking like a smile, raised high on one side, like the Smiling Crane’s own scarred visage. He had picked up the stone then, an idea in his mind.
That stone now sat, polished and round, a hole through it fixing it firmly in place, the kan flush against the shining speckled surface. The crack had been widened and shaped, and filled with crushed lapis, mixed with the Champion’s own favored blue ink, and fine ground glass. The smile made grotesque, Khujaji had added a small nose of emerald green, and eyes filled with ground jade powder and and copper ore. Other fine lines were filled in with fine black and white powders designed to fill smoothly when heated to form the cloisonne glaze.. The whole stone gave the effect of a Kabuki mask almost, but not quite, like the Moto mon that adorned his robes, with one side of the mouth grimacing, the other upturned in a mockery of a smile, exaggerated and extended. Any who had seen the Champion before his death, or his ghost after, would instantly recognize the caricature of Doji Satsume. Khujaji ran his finger along the smile. “Your memory will serve to never let me forget. For that, at least, I can thank you Doji-ue”
Circling the top of the stone, spiraling from the outer edge to meet the hexagonal kan in the center, were dark words in the Ujik-Hai script. Formed from clay made by mixing soil Khujaji had collected at each of the three spots they had met and spoken to the Champion’s ghost, filled into fine lines he had laboriously etched into the stone, and baked with the rest of the jeweled embellishments to a hard ceramic, the words contained the Name of Power of the elemental stone of Purity, the name in that language for Jade and the spirits that lived within it. They also contained the lesson imparted to him in his training. “The Law Serves The Emperor” Running cross to that script was the rejoinder he found his hands carving before his mind knew what he did. “The Emperor Serves the Empire.”
“The Emperor serves the Empire.” He tasted the words for the first time, said out loud for the first time, and looked around, wondering at his own thoughts. The Emperor IS the Empire, he knew. Yet. So were the Samurai. So were the peasants. The Great Clans may have the blood of the fallen Kami in their veins, but all who lived in Rokugan, all who toiled, grew, loved, hated, fought, bled, and died. All were the Empire.
Doji Sastume believed this, Khujaji knew. That all could be noble. His own servants, Ryu and So, were… Khujaji stilled his thoughts for a moment, on the edge of potential heresy. Knowing his thoughts struck against the Celestial Order, but thinking them anyway, he let the thoughts free in his mind, loosed like an archer’s shaft to pierce his doubt. Ryu and So were as noble, as strident to the Code of Bushido, as most of the Samurai he knew. Perhaps, he dared to think, perhaps more so than some he knew. And this was because Doji Satsume treated them as such. Expected such.
Pushing away these thoughts, Khujaji stood, jitte held in his hand. He could not let these doubts break his harmony. While technically a man, having passed his Gempukku at the Topaz Championship, his school, the Iuchi training he had spent long years memorizing and practicing, said he was still a child. Until he did this one thing, practiced in pieces, but never in whole. To be a man, a true Samurai, worthy of the Honor that hung sharp in his obi, he must complete this final task. And to accomplish this task, he must be united in spirit and thought.
He worked slowly through several kata with the jitte, mimicking blows to knees and elbows, sweeping loops to trap weapons turned against him. As his body fell into remembered rhythm, his mind fell further into memory. He thought of the Dragon Shugenja whos bed he had shared several nights past. Several years his elder, she had fought him with exuberance as the Emerald Magistrates in training spent a night of mock fights, for fun and glory. They fought to a standstill, sweating and out of breath. Near collapsing, she had asked him, impressed, to share a bottle of sake. One bottle turned to two, and a shared drink became a shared night. His mind traced again with wondering fingers the scar that had stood out in the moonlight, as they laid together, running from underneath one breast to below her navel. Blackened, almost burnt, the flesh rough and unable to feel. “A demon.” She said to him, as if it were nothing. The shake in her eyes betrayed the clarity of her voice though, he knew she still feared the memory. “A summoning gone wrong, an oni released into the dojo. I stopped it, but…” She paused, motioning to the scar. “I purified myself with fire, to prevent the Taint.”
He thought of Hida Suki, met weeks past at the Topaz Championship, steadfast in her demands that all true Samurai should work to defent the Empire at the wall. At her stories of Goblins and Oni, the creatures of darkness that were determined to pollute and destroy the wonder of the Empire. These beings cared not if they slaughtered and feasted on Samurai or peasant. All blood fed their hunger, no matter how Noble.
He thought of the stories he was raised on. Of the Unicorn’s return to the Empire through the lands of the Shadow. Of the assault of Moto Tsume, and horrific fate of the few who survived. Of the dark riders seen in the Shadowlands, the stain on his family’s honor. The horrors of the Shadow and the taint of Fu Leng. He struck out with the jitte in a practiced blow, imagining a black helmet with a purple horn, red eyes glowing underneath, crushed by the steel shaft, screaming as if giving the First Shout, “NEVER”
He thought of his teachers. The Emerald Magistrate who taught him the invocation known in the Empire as the Jade Strike, and the kami who could give it power. He knew this invocation by another name, the Iuchi called this power The Rebuke of the Sacred Earth. He knew the Name of Power from the Book of Names that could bring this mystical force to bear, searing and purifying the taint of the Shadow. The name now inscribed upon the stone on his jitte. He had never cast the invocation by the Name, only by the invocation taught him in the past few days, the names of Kami now written safely in his own Book of Names, hard won knowledge to return eventually to his lord, expanding the knowledge the Unicorn had once had and lost.
The turmoil of man could wait for another day. Today, he would let his soul burn with the righteousness of the Heavens. Today, he would wash his spirit clean with the tears of Lady Amaterasu. Today, he would prove himself a Samurai.
“Spirits of the sacred earth, who hold Rokugan firm in their grasp, hear my call. Spirits of the purifying clay, which cleanses all that passes through it, hear my call. Spirits of the sands, that catch and hold any impurity that treads upon them, hear my call.”
Khujaji felt the ground tremor slightly beneath his feet, the spirits of the land awakening to his entreatment.
“Cloak me in the fire of Lady Sun. Bring to me the sacred purity you hold, the powers of the Jade to protect and to burn.”
He felt the spirit flowing power up his legs, centering in his belly. His hands began to burn green as he finished the invocation as taught by the Dragon teacher. He focused his resolve, knowing what he must do to meld this training with his own, to bring the power under his control. He called upon the name on the jitte.
“Nephrigal, burning stone of purity. Come to my call. I summon your power to punish those who would defile the sacred earth.”
The magic he long knew, the power of Names, blazed in his veins. The green aura that licked at his wrists, flowed around his fingers, doubled in brightness, the blaze filling the cavern, banishing all shadow in limelight. Holding on to that feeling of power, instead of releasing it in a blow against a foe unseen, he gripped the jitte in both hands, blade pointed to the sacred earth, bringing the stone to his chest.
“Nephrigal, by your Name I call you. Nephrigal, by your Name I entreat you. Nephrigal, by your Name I bind you, the words of your Name on this stone your home. Serve me willingly Nephrigal, and we shall smite the Tainted. Bind your Name to me, and we shall purify the Empire.”
Moto Khujaji forced the energy into the jitte, focusing his mind on the power that threatened to burst forth from his flesh. The stone glowing, the letters of Nephrigal’s name bursting with color, the eyes of the caricature of Doji Satsume glowing green, the mask shifted to become even more menacing as the called spirit flowed into the stone, the blade, becoming one with the Meishodo Talisman. Subtly, the spirit Named made the jitte it’s home, altering subtly the work of Moto Khujaji, leaving it’s mark. The mystical auras faded, until only “Never” glowed red upon the jitte’s blade, then all color left the cavern, and Moto Khujaji stood in darkness, sweat dripping from his brow, the breath ripping into his lungs in ragged gasps, his proof of adulthood, his first Talisman, held tightly in his hands.