The Story So Far

Just after midnight on Friday the 19th of June, Yānshān woke. While the lava flow was mostly harmless to the west, a column of ash climbed miles into the eastern sky and drifted down like a grey snowfall across the highlands of Jīnjiǎ, the eastern reaches of Sìshuǐ, and the ridges of Tōngzhì. The town of Chìyán Gǎng, built on the mountain's own slope, has fared worst of all: ash lies ankle-deep in its lanes, and residents cannot venture outside without cloth held close around their faces.

Panic spreads as the extent of the damage to local crops and livestock is estimated, and no one is entirely sure what to do. Merchants of Aldermark are already offering their newest machines to help, claiming out of their benevolence that payment need not be worried about until later. Others say this is a sign of the spirits' anger, and that only pleas to the spirits of the wild will restore the natural order. Word has it that the Empress is headed to the volcano in person, there to attempt to treat with the spirit of the volcano, Huǒbào.

Against this background, the royal and noble houses mobilize. A presence in Zhūwān is more important than ever: to make deals with the Aldermark merchants, to prevent others from falling to their schemes, or to ensure their people and lands get first claim on any foreign food aid.

All through the grey weeks after Yānshān woke, the five kingdoms argued about what the mountain meant. Aldermark's factors called it opportunity and asked no payment yet; the shrine-keepers called it the spirits' anger and asked for prayers. But in the ash-country itself, wandering heroes kept asking a plainer question: what made Huǒbào angry? They followed what the ashfall had half-buried. Foreign charcoal on the mountain trails. Slag of an alloy no guild smith could name. Crucible clay bought by the cartload under borrowed names, and a respected fire-smith vanished from his forge without a word to his neighbors.

The answer, now spoken openly in tea houses from Chìyán Gǎng to Zhūwān, is this: the eruption was no act of heaven. In the weeks before the mountain woke, a small band of outsiders came ashore in secret from an eastern-island ship. With hired carters, their cartloads of clay, and the coerced fire-smith Tie Guanhu, they climbed to the volcano's sacred throat-forge and there forged blades by a guarded island rite never meant for a foreign fire. It was that trespass in Huǒbào's own forge that enraged the spirit and brought the mountain down on the farmlands.

The trail ended at the Cāngyán caves of northeastern Qiānjīn, where the strangers had gone to ground beside a hidden spring. They were not the only ones hunting. Brokers of the Gilded Abacus, moving on Ruan Suye's orders, meant to take the fugitives alive at dawn and sell what they knew to the highest bidder. Having been defeated, the true nature of the strangers was revealed. They are Shirogane, sword-sworn retainers of the royal White River line, and the quiet lord they guard is a prince of that line, fled from an assassination attempt with his loyalists around him. With assassins and bounty hunters on their trail they turned to the mountain to forge more of their famed curved blades to defend themselves, unaware of the true nature of the spirits in the Empire.

With too many soldiers for one band of adventurers to arrest and a prince untrusting of those longstanding as enemies, he and his entourage of refugees fled the mountain to go into hiding elsewhere, with who knows who or what still seeking them.

The hunt that began among the ash-drifts of Yānshān has ended not in a broker's vault or an unmarked ditch, but beneath the open sky of the Wàngpō country. For weeks, quiet corpses across the eastern provinces had borne the same peculiar marks, needle-wounds and clipped white river-reeds left by men posing as grey-clad island tea-merchants. The realm now knows them for what they truly were: the Hollow Tide, a lethal assassin cell of Shirogane stalkers answering to Reiko Kurahashi. They were dispatched across the sea by Lord Sadanobu Akizuki, the usurper-regent of Hakurei, carrying a black edict sealed with his own hand. His command was cold and absolute, ordering his agents to finish the river, slay the exiled Prince Takenori Shirakawa upon foreign soil, and steal away the sun-blade Asahi while leaving the Empire to bear both the corpse and the blame for the shattered mountain.

When the Hollow Tide cornered the hunted prince and his retainers, wandering heroes stepped between the blades. Rather than taking the assassin's coin or surrendering the refugee lord to foreign blades, the adventurers broke the ambush and brought down the pursuer Reiko Kurahashi. From her fallen grasp they seized the usurper's foreign edict and heavy purse, laying bare the conspiracy before the eyes of the five kingdoms. The prince, known among the common folk as Takenori during his desperate flight, was not left to the wolves; instead, the heroes chose to escort him back up the trembling slopes to the very source of the realm's calamity.

At Mount Yānshān's fiery hearth, amends were made where mortal pride had once trespassed. The half-quenched blade Asahi, whose stolen forging in the sacred throat had stirred Huǒbào into fury, was brought before the mountain's wrath once more, not to provoke, but to atone. With the prince standing beside the hearth under the heroes' watchful guard, the ancient spirit's fever was appeased, cooling the choking vents and stilling the tremors that had threatened to tear the slopes apart. The dark ash that blanketed the valleys has begun to thin into harmless mist, leaving the mountain quiet at last.

Now the five kingdoms look across the eastern water with hard, unblinking eyes. The threat of an uncontrolled eruption has passed, but the ink of Akizuki's black edict cannot be washed away by quieted stone. Aolang was meant to be the graveyard of the White River and the scapegoat for a foreign regent's ambition; instead, the prince lives, his unfinished sun-blade rests under watchful eyes, and the realm possesses undeniable proof of an island court's treachery. Peace has returned to the scorched earth of Yānshān, but across the seaports and tea houses, the talk is no longer of prayer or spirit-wrath, but of the reckoning owed to Hakurei.

It has been eleven years since the eruption of Yānshān, when wandering heroes of the five kingdoms prevented the assassination of the fugitive Shirogane prince and returned the blade he had forged to the mountain's spirit. Since then many new refugees from Shirogane have arrived, and some aspects of their culture and martial traditions have become more prevalent in the Empire. While the decade since has passed mostly in peace, increases in the fertility of the land have led to a concerning growth in poppy farms.

For as long as anyone could remember, a ship from Saldoria had put in at Zhūwān perhaps once in a decade, sold its silver and its horses, filled its hold with tea and silk, and vanished for another ten years. But improvements in their merchant ships mean they have come to venture to the Empire all the more frequently, cutting against the winds to do so.

This year the Saldorian crown sent word, first through its factor in the foreign quarter and then in a letter under seal to the Imperial court, that Crown Prince Teodoro Esmoráz will come to the Empire in person. He is to spend some weeks in Zhūwān overseeing his kingdom's trade and opening talks on formal relations between the two crowns, and then to go on an extended tour through the Five Kingdoms. Seeing a great opportunity, the Governor of Zhūwān has declared his intention for the city to host a week of festivals and a grand tourney, and representatives of the Five Kingdoms now jostle to ensure the proposed spectacle favours them most.