Mid afternoon in a small field, a tall figure was standing wandered to an empty space in the middle. He was there, but he was not there.
There were no others in the grove, but the signs of battle still lingered. Kunai and shuriken littered the ground and were embedded in the surrounding trees.
Looking up towards the sky, the man seemed lost in thought.
"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But my words will endure forever.
"Have I been bested?"
"That's right, you have been bested. This is no nightmare from which you will soon awaken. Gone is your castle and principality."
The image of a stately manor flashes through the man's mind. Now in ruins; corpses litter the grounds, small fires seem to have broken out in various places.
"Your loyal minions…dead to the last."
Brief flashes of a blonde young woman in a short uniform smiling up at him like a puppy expecting a treat. A young black haired boy tearing through a battlefield grinning like a madman.
"The Host's mark too, leaves her precious flesh. She will NEVER be yours!"
He sees his master, standing proud ordering him to lay waste to her enemies.
"You have nothing. You are nothing!"
He scowls at the sunlight. It is unpleasant but he will have to bare it for the time being. "That troublesome cat. I suppose I should find how long I've been away."
He wanders through the forest, eventually coming across a camp of men. He could smell the blood, sex, and unwashed flesh from miles away. They seemed to be in quite the heated argument. In what seemed to be some odd dialect of Japanese, the words most repeated were "monster," "magic," and "sage." Other men were boasting about their latest conquests, both on and in the aftermath of the latest raid.
A stranger in a strange land, most of what he heard didn't make a great deal of sense. The tall man decided the best way to make sense of what he was hearing was to go straight to the source. It had literally been ages since he had eaten, and he was positively famished.