As the two friends’ horses journeyed higher into the foothills of the Black Mountains, Sha’nom drew his cloak more tightly around himself against the cold and inhaled more often from his pipe. The cat yokai shugenja was satisfied that his supply of smokable plant mixtures would once again last him quite awhile. The Mishimoto Estate had bequeathed to him a generous amount of the catnip that they grew specifically for him. Additionally, with money from the also generous pay he had received from them for his battlefield magic services against the Oni Overlord’s forces, Sha’nom had purchased quite a few of the other components that he enjoyed using in his pipe and employed using for his magic at an herbalist shop in the nearest settlement.

As the warmth from his pipe filled his insides, Sha’nom looked at his friend Ishi, who had been uncharacteristically mostly silent as they had journeyed toward the Black Mountains ahead. The Black Mountains were actually an out of the way detour for them (the coastal harbor towns from which they could set off across the ocean to Wa’ay were the opposite direction), but a necessary one. Sha’nom didn’t like that. Detours and delays would only give his friend more time to brood. Sha’nom thought that what would be best for his friend would be to embrace his new lot in life quickly as the new Togashuma daimyo and begin adjusting to it by finding purpose and meaning in what was actually going to happen as opposed to worrying and fretting over things that might not happen, or that might turn out differently than expected. Perhaps Ishi would thrive in his new role. Perhaps what seemed like a restriction on his freedoms would actually open up new possibilities for him to explore. Perhaps being a daimyo in Wa’ay was different from being a daimyo in Hoshihana. In Sha’nom’s opinion, observing humans for nearly two centuries, he had seen that at least three fourths of the things humans worried about never even happened, stressing them for nothing. It was much better to live like a cat, to take life as it came, dealing with what was really happening, rather than always trying to prepare for all sorts of horrible contingencies that would never even occur.

Regardless of how the future might turn out, Sha’nom knew that all this brooding on the trail wasn’t good for his friend in the present. Ishi had soundly rejected his shugenja friend’s attempts so far at the levity or the philosophical conversations that the two companions usually enjoyed on the trail, so the cat yokai tried a different tactic. He asked about the functional and pragmatic details of the immediate present.

“Tell me more about this cousin of yours we’re going out of our way to pick up.”

“There’s not much to tell. My father had two younger brothers, thus I had two paternal uncles. All three brothers became samurai. The youngest passed away in the wars before the Shogun brought peace. The older of my father’s brothers, Kenshin, seemed for a long time to be unable to have children of his own. He and his wife Ayana tried for many years, but no children came, until finally, by surprise as they neared old age, they had my cousin Kojiro.”

“What’s your cousin like?”

“No one has met him. By the time he was born, like I said, my Uncle Kenshin and Aunt Ayana were nearing old age. Kenshin had retired as a samurai to this mountain estate we’re headed for. They hadn’t expected to have a child. Kojiro has only recently come of age to become a samurai.”

“Why do you think your father wants you to take him with you to Wa’ay for you to train him?”

“I think my father wants me to have a living link with me to Hoshihana and my roots in the Mishimoto Clan though I am to become the daimyo of the Wa’ay Togashuma Clan across the sea. That would be something my father would do. Also, no one of any other family branch of the clan will care or complain that a young, untrained boy they’ve never met, from a family branch they had politically written off years ago, goes away.”

The first sign that Ishi and Sha’nom noticed that something was wrong up ahead was the sudden nervousness of their steeds. Then, they could hear shouting, loud ki’ai shouting, signifying a samurai or bushi summoning their ki to perform at their maximum potential. These shouts were followed by loud crashes. The crashes didn’t sound like the clanging of metal on metal, as clashing weapons would. They sounded like the sound of rock or stone striking together. That was strange.

Around a bend in the road, the reluctant daimyo and his court wizard came upon a gated wall. The gate bore the Mishimoto Clan symbol with the name Kenshin inscribed over it. The gate was torn asunder however. From the looks of it, only one thing in Hoshihana could have torn a metal gate apart like that, an oni.

Ishi and Sha’nom spurred their steeds, tired as they were from riding uphill into the mountains all day, through the broken gateway toward the sounds of battle.