Ishi’s Uncle Kenshin’s estate was much smaller than his father Oda’s. Kenshin had come up to the lower slopes of the Black Mountains to retire with his bride, with neither descendants nor servants. The estate had been largely built single handedly by Kenshin himself over the course of five years. It was simple and had a minimum of buildings: a modest house, a blacksmith workshop, a small stable, a corral  for sheep, a pen for pigs, a coop for chickens, a smokehouse, and a shrine. The estate was painted and decorated in the Clan Mishimoto colors of red and black. Though it lacked the opulence of Oda’s estate in the lowlands below, Ishi thought it was very nice and homey, or had been until recently.

The roofs of several of the structures were smashed in. Blood-spattered clothes fluttered in a light breeze as they hung on one half of a clothesline. On the ground in the middle of the clothesline, right where the clothing stopped, sat a basket half-full of laundry, indicating the attack had come while someone was hanging up or perhaps taking down the line.

The two riders paused. The only sounds present were the breathing of their horses, the flapping bloodied clothes, and, out of sight over a slight rise near the shrine at the back of the walled estate, the continuous, repetitive ki’ai shouting accompanied by banging stones that had drawn the two friends into the compound.

Slowly, they advanced their horses up the slight rise, around the main house, and toward the shrine. The set of main sliding doors at the front of the house were torn off. Being made of wood, they were in much worse shape than the estate’s metal gate had been. Ishi could see into the first room of the house, and into another past that one since it’s wood and paper walls were destroyed. It looked like it had been a lovely home before something very large, probably an oni, had attacked.

The presence of an oni in the area worried Ishi. Uncle Kenshin’s estate was in the opposite direction from the front lines of the battles with the forces of the Oni Overlord. This particular oni might have been a deserter from the Overlord’s forces, or perhaps an oni ronin, owing the Overlord no allegiance whatsoever.

Ishi’s mind was pulled away from his musings about oni by the sight that greeted him at the top of the rise. In front of the shrine were two stone cairns, side by side. The one on the right was complete. The one on the left seemed to somehow be self-assembling before Ishi’s eyes. Around the second, incomplete cairn, were gathered an array of stones of the same type as the cairns. Once every few moments, a ki’ai shout could be heard emanating from one of the stones yet to be placed. Then, the stone from which the shout had come would leap, all by itself, onto the left hand cairn, advancing it one stone closer to completion. Only about twelve stones remained to be placed.

“What sorcery is this?” Ishi asked Sha’nom, a little more loudly than he intended in his surprise and shock.

His shugenja friend stared at the flying rocks for a moment. Then opened his mouth to answer, but before words could come out, the same voice that had been ki’ai shouting with the placement of each rock boomed at them from the vicinity of the left hand cairn.

“There is no sorcery here, unless you bring some with you. Who are you? Are you bandits come to pick over my father’s estate now that the oni has wrecked the gate and killed my mother and father?”

Confused, Ishi placed his hand on his sword but did not draw it. “Where are you? Show yourself!”

“I’m right here, you big oaf. And I warn you, if you are in league with the oni who killed my parents, I will kill you before you can dismount.”

Ishi then saw a tiny figure, no larger than a dragonfly, leap like a grasshopper from the top of the left hand cairn, taking the distance between the cairn and Ishi’s horse in three bounds. The thing was fast. Ishi’s eyes could barely follow it. After the third leap it leaped a final time and land

ed in his horse’s mane.

Ishi found himself staring into the eyes of a tiny, miniature samurai warrior, wearing a perfectly to-scale suit of Clan Mishimoto o-yoroi armor. The tiny warrior grabbed hair from the horse’s mane and wrapped his left arm in it to secure himself. He reminded Ishi of a sailor or marine climbing the rigging of a sailing ship by using the horse’s mane that way.

At the same time, the diminutive samurai, dangling from Ishi’s horses’ mane, seemed to suddenly notice Ishi’s clan colors as well. Somehow, perhaps through magic, the tiny one’s voice sounded loud enough to both Ishi and Sha’nom to hear him quite clearly.

“You are of Clan Mishimoto? I am Mishimoto Kojiro.”

Ishi was stunned for a moment before responding. “I am Mishimoto Ishi.”

“Then we are cousins,” replied the impossibly small samurai warrior.