The Tale Before - Nisshoku's Endless Shadow

In the year that followed Nisshoku’s endless shadow, the sun became a faded memory. Night was the norm; daybreak merely a lighter shade of darkness. Without the border of dawn and dusk, the line between life and death was also blurred, where the spirits of Yomi now walk with the living.

Such was also the ominous mood that overshadowed the Emperor's ascension, the very day the eclipse engulfed the land. At first heralded as the change that would move the country forwarded, the continued darkness weakened the faith in the Restoration. Feudal remnants of the former Shogunate persisted in the original seat of power in Heian even as the Imperial Court moved to Yedo to consolidate its power. Loyalties were now divided. Each individual had to negotiate their place on the boundary between blood and water, survival or defeat.

The late Torikawa shogunate was marked by increasing resistance to open the Island of the Sun to the outside world, so much so that the law had reverted to the bakufu, or military governance, with the last Torigawa shogun obligating the daimyos to his banner to enforce greater control over the political instability that resulted. The last straw was when the shogun's supporters moved from Yedo to ancient Heian, declaring the thousand-year-old city the proper capital of the land, a final act of defiance.

The Imperial loyalists won, but as in the case of any civil war, there were no real victors. Lives lost, alliances broken, territories asunder, economies ruined. The religious and the superstitious all subsequently agreed that they had incurred the wrath of the heavens when the Eclipse persisted. But the opposing factions did not know how to make peace, engulfed as they were by the darkness within them.

It had been a year following, but it was harder and harder to count days when they did not differ from nights under the endless shadow. Nor did the distinction of life and death matter as much, for the dead now walked amongst the living, those who had given their lives in battle now back as if they would, as if they could rewind to a brighter past. Yokai, spirits and demons, previously the substance of tales and legends, were now made manifest even as the line between myth and reality was no longer clear. It was as if all the deepest, darkest aspects of humanity were given form.