Bloodbeat Chronicle Repository

Daywalker Chronicle - Character Diary

Hikaru's Diary Although I've long since forgotten my own name or the name of my tribe, I was born on the island of Shikoku in Japan, about 2500 years ago. Japan was, at that time, merely a collection of hunter-gatherer tribes, but this would soon change, as explorers from China and Korea would arrive in the next couple hundred years, bringing metal-working technology and the knowledge of irrigation. By that time, it had been quite a while since I had discovered my immortality; my aging having stopped at an indeterminate point after the end of puberty. My hair and nails continued to grow, so at some level my body was still doing its work, but the process of actually getting older had apparently come to a complete halt. It didn't take long before I became bored with my life. Everything within a few days' walk of my village had been explored, and I began to yearn for freedom. I tried to live a normal existence, and my fellow villagers respected my wishes, revering me as one touched by the gods, but the death of my first wife by an unknown illness left me feeling pain every time I saw something which reminded me of her. Nor were there any other women who could give me solace, since they all knew me for what I was, and none could face the thought of being with me, aging and dying, while I remained the same. My children honored me, but I didn't think I could bear living to see them grow old and die as well, so I struck off and wandered the great island. Somewhere in my fifth decade, I came across a family of traveling fisher/merchants, who agreed to take me to the next island. And thus, I became an explorer. We travelled around the islands together, encountering other travelers and tribes. All of it seemed so uniform: clusters of extended families, eking out a living, generation after generation. I met many people, of course, but I never stayed in one place long enough to grow close to them. I married again, one of the merchant women, and fathered two boys. A storm came, and took them both, as well as my wife. The merchant fleet was dashed against the rocky shore of southern Honshu, and I alone survived. As I lay there, body broken on jagged rocks, the storm blew away, and the sun beamed down upon me, carrying with it a vision of the Goddess, Amaterasu. She smiled at me, and my wounds were healed, and the grief of my loss lifted from my heart. Though I have now forgotten the names of my wives and children, I remember her beauty and the tenderness with which she regarded me. She never once spoke, but I knew how much she loved me, how much she loved all humanity, and I knew of her desire to protect us against our own foolishness. In exchange for my life, she gave me a duty and a burden: she filled me with the knowledge of the dark heart which beats unseen beneath the lighted world we inhabit, and she told me that I must seek this heart and one day bring to it the light of Amaterasu and thus destroy it. She placed her lips upon mine and then departed, rising up into the sky and resuming her place within the Sun. In the centuries since, when my steps have faltered and my strength has waned, I have needed but to touch the memory of her in my own heart, and I have been renewed. My eyes opened to the deceits of the nightwalkers, oni and youma, demon and vampire, all the foul creatures who seek to corrupt and consume the human world, I began my journey anew. I could sense them, see through their false glamours to the hideous beings beneath, and I chose to fight them, thinking that with the Goddess on my side, with my strength of will and conviction, I would be their match. I was a fool. But for luck and my own nature, I would have been dead half a dozen times within that first year. I cannot be easily killed: my wounds heal almost instantaneously, and even limbs rent from my body will grow back, but I still feel pain, and my body requires sustenance to heal. Left for dead, both arms torn off, I almost died of starvation and blood loss, but I was nursed back to life by an itinerant monk; he took my recovery as a sign from the gods that he was on the right path, as I took his fortuitous arrival, and I vowed to be more careful in the future. It was clear that I would need greater knowledge, strength, and resources to battle these creatures. Though immortal, my form was merely human, and I could not hope to do battle with them as though I were the sort of hero who graced the sake- and wine-inspired tales spun in roadside inns. Before I could defeat my enemies, I would need to know their weaknesses, and I would need the tools to exploit them. Accordingly, I sought to become a monk myself, pursuing the secrets of the ages. And so it went, for three hundred years. As time progressed, I realized the difficulty of retaining my hard-won knowledge: I would encounter a rare demon, some last remnant of an ancient, dead race, and I would be hard-pressed to recollect the means of destroying it. I could not place my trust in books or scrolls, or even in the monasteries or caves which had yielded the lore in the first place; the former were too easily destroyed or made illegible, and the latter endured hardly more: too often had I returned to a former home, only to find it destroyed or empty, laid waste by famine, disease, or natural disaster. Or by a disaster of a different type, created by demon . . . or human. Fortunately, I had learned a technique which would allow me to remember all that I had learned. Those who are obsessed with the technological advances of these latter days believe that the mind is like a computer, that the power of memory is no greater than that of a disk drive. Those who believe such things are fools who cannot truly perceive or appreciate their own abilities. With sufficient training, one can turn one's memory into a vault, a palace of endless capacity, where each bit of knowledge becomes a treasure with as much reality and substance as any artifact in a museum. Of course, such a skill comes only with discipline and patience . . . but my love for the Goddess sustained me, as it has in so much, and I persevered. And so I travelled and learned, and I fought. There were many villages, far too many to count, preyed upon by the lurkers in the night. Whenever possible, I would do what I could to help. I realized that I could not let my identity become known to my enemies, so I acted quickly and without mercy, burning entire hives of vampires, destroying clans of demons, purifying their domains as best I could, and moving on. As I travelled, I met others who had fought the darkness. Some of them chose to travel with me, joining the fight. In time, there were a couple dozen of us, a family of sorts, though few of us were ever in one place at a time. And thus we began, we thought, to make inroads against our enemies. Until war came. Though it is taken for granted in the West that war is eternal, it was not always so in my home country. Harmony is a central aspect of Japanese culture, and it kept us free of the horror called war for far longer than in most parts of the world. The wars of the Yamato plain brought an end to that. Duelling clans fought for supremacy over the fertile land there, and the bloodshed was the worst ever seen. And with the wars came the ghouls, the creatures who fed on blood and suffering. I hunted openly, then, and my brethren and I, fellow-travellers in the cause of light, waged a war of our own . . . until a disguised oni convinced his clan lord that we were a threat, and we were all but driven from Honshu altogether. This lesson reinforced the realization that we would need to move quietly. Unfortunately, night was not our ally, and we didn't dare rely on its cover to conceal us. Thus we realized, not without trepidation, that our methods would have to be, to an extent, those of our enemies. People see what they expect, and where they saw us, they would see neighbors, friends, family. We arranged signals and passphrases that we would use to recognize each other, knowing that it might be years or decades or generations before we saw each other again, and we scattered across Japan, each one of us moving into a community, a village or town or city, and settling down. We were just like our fellows, but with one important difference: we saw what they did not. For centuries, then, we learned all we could, and we fought in the dark, following reports of evil-doing, intervening where we could, and always planning for the day when we could begin to move openly and strike down our enemies without fear of reprisal from those we sought to protect. Lords came and went, but we remained. Periodically, perhaps once in a decade, one of us would travel from village to village, making contact, bringing news and keeping the channels of communication open. Perhaps it was the time. Perhaps it was the times. The others had waited for so long. Their children had waited. They had done what they could. They had fought and died, frequently alone, with no one to celebrate their sacrifices or mourn their deaths, and they did not have my patience or perspective. How could they, with their short lives and their limited existence? And I, I had forgotten what it was to be mortal, impatient and demanding. My life had become a cycle of constant, regular movement from place to place, village to village. I would settle down for a few years, as long as I could before my unchanging appearance began to draw suspicion. I would change my appearance as much as I could, shaving my head when I had last been seen with long hair, growing a beard when I had been clean-shaven. The turn of the years became as the turn of the seasons, and I began to lose sight of my goal, thinking I was moving forward when I was merely standing in place. The rise of the Mist Fox cult shook me loose from my complacency. The Mist Fox had originated in China, and they worshipped the nightwalkers, in particular, the vampires. Although the nature of our group's existence remained a secret, our activities could always be kept so, and the Mist Fox moved through the land, seeking out our agents and eradicating anyone suspected of being one. Still, I was loathe to strike at other humans directly, so I made ready to travel to China. I took with me a small band of trusted compatriots, and we set sail for the mainland to root out the heart of the cult. England Journal Entry 1: While travelling in this benighted land known as England, I have run afoul of a creature which calls itself "The Demon." I had taken on the guise of a "witchfinder," a person who seeks out those in league with the Devil, the primary source of evil in the Christian mythology. Since these barbarians lump all practitioners of magic in with malevolent supernatural creatures, I have been forced to conceal my limited magical capability‹not that Iıve had much opportunity to use it, given that the way magic works in these realms is heavily reliant on ley lines, the nexus points of which all have churches built upon them. In this guise, I travelled with some unsuspecting fanatics, priests and the like, who sought to aid me in rooting out evil. Almost immediately upon my arrival from Denmark, I began to hear rumors of a highwayman in the north of England who was wreaking terror upon the denizens of that area. While that was, in itself, of little surprise in this benighted and uncivilized land, the rumors also contained hints that this was no ordinary band of rogues. Realizing that the stories might just have been fancifully embroidered by increasingly elaborate retellings, I nonetheless set off to investigate them in the hopes that I might encounter some heretofore unknown sort of creature. I will leave aside the tedious details of discovering "The Demonıs" whereabouts. Suffice it to say that I took up his trail, discovering along the way that it appeared to be some sort of man/dog hybrid or shapeshifter, one possessed of extraordinary strength and speed, and with an apparent dislike for the English nobility. It seemed for some great while that my pursuit would come to naught, as the creature appeared to be uncatchable. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. As we pursued the creature in a southerly direction, towards London, we were ambushed, and my companions and I were slain. In the course of this battle, I discovered that while I was a superior swordsman, the creature was much faster, to the point that I could barely land a glancing blow. My companions dispatched, I turned to face "The Demonıs" henchmen, only to be struck down from behind by the creature itself. England Journal Entry 2: Having returned to life, I realized that I would need to recruit some more effective physical assistance. In this aim, I rounded up a pair of Christian priests and a half dozen rogues and mercenaries. We set out from London, following tales of "The Demonıs" depredations, which appeared to be moving in a circle around London. Finally, we were able to apprehend one of his human companions. We interrogated this fellow at some length, discovering little of material worth but that this man was fanatically loyal to his leader, shrugging off the most arduous of our questioning techniques. I am confident that he would ultimately have broken, but I will never know, since we were set upon by "The Demon" and his other followers, and my companions were slain once again. I myself was made to endure some crude torture at the hands of the creature and its men, the details of which are unimportant. I discovered that this entity appeared to be a human, possessed by some sort of spirit or demon and determined to wreak havoc. There seemed something desperate and uncertain the quality of the creatureıs need to do harm; it may be that the man yet lived inside the beast and was struggling to rein it in. Other than that, it was fairly stupid, albeit possessed of a base cunning, and I was able to trick it into believing that I served a cabal of greater, more evil and powerful creatures, and that I had been sent to test its abilities. The creature insisted on accompanying me to a purported meeting in France with agents of my "superiors," and I was forced to endure its odious presence for some additional days. I was finally able to escape when we set sail across the English Channel, called "La Manche" by the French, and I jumped overboard. This entire experience has left me with a foul taste in my mouth but with two important realizations. The first such realization is that I must take care to bring sufficient armsmen with me in the future. The second is that these Western creatures do not seem to have the knack of sniffing out humans that those of Nihon and China possess, making them more vulnerable to infilatration, a method to which I may give some additional consideration.

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