This story was written for the "Kousenkyo Chronicles" fanfiction challenge by Alika-Chan Yonsa, who has translated it into French; you can read her translation on Ao3, along with the other entries for the challenge.

Brave New World

When Kainan Nanai first put forth his grand plan, he'd said it would be challenging. Ocean voyages were always dangerous, and they would be sailing further than anyone but the most stalwart traders and a mere handful of Yogo explorers. True, the sea nomads traversed this ocean all their lives - but they also lost many to the sea's unpredictable brutality. Yet, to stay in Yogo was to face the unpredictable brutality of endless war. Torgal and his retainers wanted out; Nanai had given them a way to achieve that. If risking the ocean's wrath was what it took, then that was what they'd do.

They set out in a fleet of ten ships: Torgal, Nanai, their families and servants and those of their most stalwart retainers, and others - commoners - who wanted to escape Yogo - settlers for whom the unknown was preferable to the certainty of violence their homeland promised. The journey had been long, and fraught; they had weathered storms, endured starvation and sickness, been attacked by pirates and befriended the sea nomads at turns. And eventually, they had reached the Northern Continent.

But they did not stop. The coast belonged to the pirate clans; Torgal and his people could not settle there. Instead, they headed up the large river that poured into the ocean from the north. From the pirate-riddled delta, the ships sailed upstream, rowing when the wind failed them. The river was wide and deep, but the travelers were exhausted. Many times Torgal asked Nanai if they shouldn't just stop here, but Nanai told him to keep going - that the stars told him they had not yet reached their new home.

And then, finally, after two major forks in the river, the boats ran aground.

"Kainan, my friend," said Torgal, his skin dark from a year of sun- and wind-burn, his face gaunt and his arms muscled like rope, "please tell me that we can end our journey here? By Ten no Kami, if you tell us to continue, I may well drop dead."

The sun was falling. A flock of white birds with long, pouched beaks and spindly legs flew east. Frogs chirruped in the marshes that bordered the river, and Torgal swatted at a cloud of mosquitos as he waited for the star reader's reply.

Kainan Nanai looked to the heavens. Above, through a wisp of grey cloud against the plum-colored heavens, a single star winked to life. It was the evening star, the one that old myths said was a woman who had been placed in the sky after the god of stars fell in love with her. It wasn't a portent, but Nanai could see just how weary Prince Torgal was. The star reader glanced over the other people on the deck. The noblemen and the commoners alike had been weathered by the sea, turned lean and bony by hard work and harsh rations. A pair of children ran down the deck, laughing; a woman was nursing a baby, one of several born aboard ship. Some of these children might as well be sea nomads for all they knew of life.

Next Nanai turned in a slow circle, surveying the place where they had landed. There was lush greenery everywhere: cattails, reeds, tall water plants that looked like irises or onions. On the bank opposite the marsh was a forest covered in moss, with flowers poking up among the roots. A pair of small deer or goats of a kind unlike any found in Yogo were drinking from the river, and many swallows wheeled and swooped through the evening air, hunting insects. This land appeared fertile and rich. Their crops would grow well in this soil. And there was no sign of human occupation, either - no buildings, no roads, no boats.

Nanai glanced back at the heavens. Truth be told, the stars hadn't been much help of late; Nanai had been telling Torgal they were following the stars' portents because he knew the poor man needed the reassurance of his gods to push him through this endless struggle. In truth, Nanai was just looking for a place that seemed uninhabited and like a good site for a town.

He turned back to Torgal. The prince's hopeful eyes met his.

"The heavens have confirmed it," said Nanai. "This is where you shall raise your empire."

Torgal looked as if he might weep.

Everyone rejoiced when Torgal announced that the Yogo settlers had found their new home. They drank the last of their liquor, made a feast with what little food they had left, and stayed up late into the night talking eagerly of how they would build their new homes and make their fortunes. But when morning came, everyone was hit with the unpleasant reality that, though the long journey had finally ended, the real work was only just beginning.

As the summer waxed and waned, the men, women, and children dismantled the ships, chopped down trees to clear a space for houses, build mud walls in the marshes to make paddies for rice. It was nearly midsummer; they needed to plant as soon as possible if they were to have food for the winter. Some of the group were delegated to catching fish and hunting game to smoke, dry and preserve; others were designated as explorers, to scout the surrounding land for edible plants and any threats or resources. Slowly but surely, their settlement - and their food stores - began to grow.

Three weeks into their building, a pair of scouts, Yuu Rakusuran, who was a veteran and very reliable, and Togo Amusuran, who was only fifteen, returned from their expedition with urgent news: this land was not the uninhabited arcadia the settlers thought it was.

"We found people!" gasped Togo, his eyes wide, as he went down on one knee before Torgal and Nanai.

Torgal started, then looked searchingly at Yuu. "How far away? Are they hostile? Do they know of us?

Yuu shook his head uncertainly. "They live in the hills all around the river confluence. There are a lot of them, but they don't seem warlike. We ran into a child, but she ran away before we could try to talk to her. I had Togo follow a group of them into the hills while I monitored one of their villages, and neither of us saw any obvious warriors. But..." His brow furrowed.

"They're magic weavers," Togo barely whispered. Magic weaving in Yogo was the realm of dark deeds; he had reason to speak of these foreign shamans with fear.

Torgal looked at Nanai. "Can you and your apprentices sense these... magic weavers? Can you protect us from their spells?"

Nanai frowned. Magic weavers, here? I should have been able to sense them, he thought, annoyed and disturbed. But aloud he said, "Yes, your highness, my men will ask Ten no Kami to keep us safe. I will pray to the gods to guard us. But I think it would be wise to send a delegation to speak with these natives. Better that we announce ourselves to them in peace than that they stumble upon us by accident and assume we're invaders."

Torgal nodded; he looked distressed. "Very well," he said. "I'll put together a group tonight and we'll head for the nearest village in the morning."

The delegation included a sea nomad who had fallen for and married one of the Yogoese bachelors during the journey, a woman called Salina. She translated Yogoese into the pirate language, and an old man in the village who had been to the coast often translated the pirate language into that of the natives, who called themselves Yaku. The translation process was tedious, but in this way, slowly and surely the two groups were able to communicate.

Nanai had made Torgal stay behind; he had taken Yuu, Togo, a few of the tougher noblemen, a couple of commoners who were good at unarmed combat, and the sea nomad and her husband, Ron. The natives saw them approaching and came down to meet them in the valley, by the easternmost of the two rivers. There, the delegations spoke.

The natives' village was called Yashro, and the people who lived there had never known war. The Yaku, it seemed, did not fight each other for land or resources. This country was so bountiful that food was never scarce, and there was enough land that no one need push another off it. The Yogoese, too, were welcome to live here. The Yaku didn't live in the land between the rivers because it was prone to flooding during the spring snowmelt. If the Yogo people wished to settle there, the Yaku recommended they fortify their huts against the floods.

Heartened but wary, Nanai asked them about their magic weaving. The Yaku explained that there were two worlds, and that here, in this region, the worlds touched. "Nayug", they called the world that could not be seen; Salina added that her people knew of this world, too, and called it "Nayugul". The physical world, which everyone could see, was Sagu. The Yaku used magic to connect to Nayug, allowing them to call helpful spirits to protect them or make their crops more productive, and shoo away bad spirits that caused disease and misfortune.

Nanai was fascinated. In Yogo, magic was almost exclusively used for evil ends. This peaceful civilization really seemed too good to be true.

Just as the delegation was about to leave the village, they heard a loud cry. "What's that?" asked Togo, alarmed.

Through the translators, the Yaku headman explained that a child in their village had been chosen by a Nayug spirit to carry its egg - the Nyunga Ro Im, he called it. The child was beginning to slip into Nayug as the time of the egg's hatching approached. "It is very sad," said Salina, listening to the Yaku translator explain. "This child will be eaten by creatures from Nayugul. The egg cannot be freed from his body any other way. The egg will grow into a spirit that will bless the land with rains. The child is a sacrifice to keep the land from dying of drought."

Kainan Nanai nodded. Too good to be true, just like I thought.

"The child will be eaten alive?" whispered Togo, looking white. "Your holiness, surely if you ask, Ten no Kami will protect this child from such a terrible fate."

Nanai glanced at the boy with a raised eyebrow. "If there were some way to save this 'Nyunga Ro Chaga', don't you think these natives would have discovered it already?"

"But they have never met our gods!" Togo insisted. "These Yaku no nothing of Tendo! Perhaps they have been unable to protect this child in the past simply because they had not found a power strong enough to protect him - but is Ten no Kami not strongest of all the gods? Please, your holiness! We cannot let this child suffer something so horrific."

"Hush, Togo," said Yuu, putting a gentle hand on the boy's arm. Togo was an orphan; his father, Shin, had been Yuu's closest friend. Togo was outspoken and overemotional sometimes, but he reminded Yuu so much of Shin. Yuu had made it his purpose to be a father for Togo, because Shin could not and because Shin's brother Sei had children of his own to raise.

Nanai, however, did not respond by chastising the boy's forwardness. Instead, he said thoughtfully, "You may be right, young one. I shall consult my books. It will be a good gesture towards these people if we attempt to protect their 'sacrifice' - and even better if we succeed. I will consider how best to proceed."

When they returned to the settlement, Nanai consulted his books, as he had promised. Then he gathered Torgal and the men who headed the eight most-loyal noble houses among his retainers. These men had been his bodyguards in war-torn Yogo, where assassination plots lurked around every corner. Over the course of the journey, the group had become as close-knit as brothers. Seated around a campfire under the trees, swatting at mosquitos and drinking fish broth, no one here resembled a noble - not even Prince Torgal. But they were hearty and strong and dutiful, and they listened to Nanai with grave interest.

"We'll do it," said Torgal when Nanai had finished outlining his plan. No hesitation. Prince Torgal had been a coward when they left Yogo; the star reader was pleased to see how much the prince had grown up over the course of the journey. He was still young, yes - he was still gullible, and he was still not the brightest of men - but he was wise enough to know how to ask for and accept advice from others, and his heart was always in the right place. When it came to compassion and a sense of justice, Torgal was very like one of the heroes of legend about whom stories and songs were written.

One by one, his eight nobles chimed in their agreement. They did not know these Yaku, but they would help them regardless, in any way they could.

Nanai felt a swell of pride. Sometimes he wondered, when the journey had been especially difficult or the path uncertain, if they had been right to leave Yogo. But now, looking at these men who had been transformed from the weary wealthy into pioneers, he felt absolutely certain that he'd never made a better choice.

Torgal and his eight best men outfitted themselves for war. Nanai and his star readers said prayers and incantations to Ten no Kami and the other gods, and blessed the warriors as they prepared to follow the Yaku villagers to the place where the egg was to be hatched. Nanai watched them go, praying fervently that Torgal and his men would return intact.

Days passed. The star readers, including Nanai, kept up their prayers day and night. They took shifts, so that someone would always be offering prayers to the gods for Torgal's safe return, and Nanai studied the stars each night, searching for any sign of what was happening far up in the distant hills. Yet the gods offered no answer, and each night Kainan Nanai fell asleep tormented by worry and uncertainty. They were so close to accomplishing his dream. They had found a perfect location to build their city; the natives were peaceful; the land was bountiful; the soil was rich and the rivers would provide fish and a trade route to the sea. But if Torgal were killed, or even any of his men, that could throw the entire plan into jeopardy. Without leadership, their fledgling city would be smothered before it even emerged.

Then, at last, more than a week after their departure, the Yogoese warriors returned.

Togo, who had not been allowed to join them because of his age, spotted the men first, crossing the alluvial plain at the river confluence. He leapt up and ran around the settlement, shouting that they were back; and people flocked from the fields and the building sites to greet them. Nanai was roused by the shouting and hurried to see if Prince Torgal had been triumphant.

As the men approached, it became clear that all of them had returned alive, and Nanai breathed a sigh of relief. But they had not returned triumphant. In a word, they looked bedraggled. The men were dirty, soot-stained, and many wounded. Namitarou Amusuran, Togo's youngest uncle, was being carried on a stretcher, being too injured to walk. Sakuzo Sorusuku was being supported by Rikyu Orutoran to walk. Yuu's arm was in a sling, his head was bandaged, and he limped heavily as he approached. Even Torgal himself wore a bandage. More worrisome still, all of them had scorch marks on their clothes, and some had burns.

Kainan Nanai rushed over, though he was still in pajamas. "Your highness! Did the battle go ill?"

Torgal looked at Nanai with great weariness. He exhaled, his eyes closing for a moment, and Nanai thought the prince might cry.

"We failed," he said at last. "We could not kill the evil spirits. We could not save the boy."

As the warriors were given a hasty meal and healers hurried over to check and treat their injuries, Yuu explained, at Torgal's prompting, what had occurred. The Yaku, with the keeper of the water spirit's egg in their midst, had led the Yogo warriors along a long road into the mountains. Other Yaku from other villages joined them along the way. Many sang; Salina and the Yaku translator, who had travelled with them, transmitted to the Yogoese that these people were celebrating as they would a funeral, and honoring the Nyunga Ro Chaga for his forthcoming sacrifice.

"The boy himself, however..." Yuu's eyes fell with sorrow. "He was afraid. He had his parents with him, and he kept asking his mother when he could return to Yashro. And his mother... She just wept. It was terrible to behold."

Rikyu, who had seen much battle in Yogo and wore many scars, said softly, "It was like being home again, seeing boys sent off to war to die. We asked the Yaku to tell us everything they could about the spirit creatures that we were going to fight, but all they could tell us was that they came from beneath the earth."

Nanai had sent a star reader with them; he would have gone himself but they could not leave the settlers leaderless. The star reader had explained that earth was weak to fire, so the Yogo warriors, under Rikyu's direction, had constructed fire-based weapons - arrows, lances, bombs - like those they had used on the battlefield back home. The Yaku they met along the way, encouraged by the foreigners' determination, had helped and had given them any supplies they asked.

"We were sure we could defeat the monster," said Yuu sadly. "But when we reached the 'place of rejoicing', where the egg was to be released from the boy, he... he acted as if he were possessed. He ran across water - and then he leapt into the trees and flew away from us. It was like nothing any of us had ever seen."

"We chased him," said Torgal. He rubbed his forehead. "I'm sorry - would someone make some sharam tea? My head is aching. I'm sure we could all use something to help with the pain."

Several of the listeners hurried to obey. Nanai set a hand on his friend's arm sympathetically. He didn't push, and Yuu took up the story where Torgal had left off.

Jimin Hororin had tracked the boy into the mountains, higher and higher til they reached a strange ravine. There the child sat, in a V of rock, as if drugged.

"That," said Yuu, "was when the claws attacked."

The Nayug creatures had appeared as if from nowhere. There had been too many of them to count. They didn't just have claws, but long, ropy tentacles and huge squidlike beaks. It seemed they only entered Sagu when they were about to attack, and could not be touched otherwise.

"We surrounded the boy in a barrier formation," Rikyu explained, "and then we threw everything we could at these... demons. But they just kept coming."

"Did the fire not harm them?" Nanai asked, perplexed and bothered by the tale.

"It did," said Yuu, "and we killed many of them. Dozens. Maybe hundreds." He sipped some of the tea, a pain-relieving brew which all the warriors were now drinking, and winced slightly as he readjusted his position. "But for every spirit monster we killed, another appeared."

"The prince was nearly struck down by one of them," said Rikyu grimly. "If Namitarou hadn't jumped in front of him..."

"He saved my life." Torgal looked at the unconscious man on the stretcher, who was being examined by two healers and a star reader. "And Yuu saved his."

Yuu gave a crooked smile. "I couldn't lose another friend. Not here."

"Not here," Torgal agreed. "Kainan, there wasn't supposed to be war here, and fire, and death... but fighting those spirit demons - it was like being on the battlefield in Yogo again. Worse, even. It was..."

"It was like a vision of hell," said Yuu. Torgal nodded.

"But... I don't understand," said Nanai almost plaintively. "If you were able to kill the creatures with fire, and if you were able to hold them off from the boy, how could your mission have failed?"

"It was the boy himself," whispered Torgal, his expression one of pain and disbelief. "We fought all day and all night, but as the sun was rising, he- just...- Kainan, I swear the egg had possessed him. He'd been so afraid to die, but suddenly, with no warning at all, he- he leapt over us - over our heads! - and straight into the demons' mouths."

"Sakuzo tried to go after him, but one of the claws caught him in the leg, and by then... it was too late." Yuu's voice broke. "The child was ripped to pieces before our eyes. There was nothing we could do to stop it - it happened too fast, and by then we had run out of arrows and bombs and oil and had only our swords. One second he was safely behind us, the next, he... wasn't. Just blood spray and his lingering screams on the air." He closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands, unable to speak. All of the warriors were silent, heads bowed. Torgal swiped at his face with one sleeve, like a boy.

"And the water spirit's egg?" Nanai asked at last.

"The demons spit it out," said Rikyu. "After they ate the child, they spit the egg into the air, and one of those birds with the pouch under its bill swooped in and caught it and carried it away."

"And then the sun rose and the demons disappeared," said Torgal. "As if they'd never been there."

Nanai felt a momentary flare of worry. "The Yaku... they didn't... hold you responsible? For the boy's death?"

"Not at all," Torgal sighed. "They praised us for our efforts. No one has ever come so close to saving the Nyunga Ro Chaga before us. But the bearer of the egg can't be saved, they said. We were noble to try, but they had known all along we would surely fail. Because no Nyunga Ro Chaga has ever survived. And a hundred years from now, it will all happen again. And there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it then, either."

Kainan Nanai surveyed the men and felt the sorrow and defeat radiating off of them like a cold breeze. They had left this place as heroes, and returned having witnessed a ten-year-old child torn apart and eaten alive before their very eyes, all in spite of a valiant, nightmarish struggle on their part, for a whole day and night, to save his life. They had seen defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, as it were, and it had left the men emotionally broken - and, for several of them, physically broken as well. As a gesture to secure an alliance with the native Yaku, it had worked; but otherwise, the errand had been a terrible failure.

As the days passed, the men who had been injured deteriorated rapidly. Soon Yuu was bedridden and delirious. Torgal, despite having only been grazed by the demons' claws, developed a fever and chills. Namitarou and Sakuzo, the worst-injured among the group, worsened to the point that the healers feared they would die without help. The demons' claws, it seemed, were venomous, and the venom was killing the Yogo warriors long after the battle had ended. Desperate, Nanai sent Togo and Salina to Yashro Village at a run to see if someone there knew an antidote to the poison.

Nanai had hoped for herbs or instructions for a cure. Instead, Togo returned with a half-dozen Yaku, men and women, whom Salina explained were herbalists, healers, and magic weavers, and could heal the wounded men.

As the Yaku went to work, Nanai found himself tensing up. These are magic weavers, he thought. We cannot allow their impurity to taint the prince. But this was a new world, Nanai reminded himself. This is not Yogo. The magic these people wield is not the dark magic of home. We helped them - tried to help them - and they are grateful. Trust them. Let them help, themselves, if they wish.

It wasn't easy for Nanai to quash his long-held prejudices, but he didn't have any choice. This new land required new attitudes - about everything. In Yogo, noblemen would never have worked alongside commoners, planting rice and building huts. No one would have looked royalty like Torgal in the eye, much less called him by name. But if they followed the rules and norms of Yogo, the settlers would die.

It was the same now. Kainan Nanai was wise enough to know when help was needed, even if that help came from so unpleasant and unexpected a source. He sat still, kept his mouth shut, and simply watched the Yaku healers work.

His open-mindedness was rewarded. Torgal's fever died down almost immediately after the Yaku magic weavers had given him an herb to chew, put a poultice of other herbs on his cut, and said an incantation over him. Yuu regained consciousness. Within a day, so did Sakuzo and Namitarou. Their wounds healed at breakneck pace, leaving hardly a scar.

From that point on, the settlers turned to the Yaku for help whenever they could. Nanai especially devoted himself to learning their language and their customs. He had been shown that mere peace with these people wasn't enough. Yes, the Yogoese could live and work in isolation, doing their best to create a New Yogo here on the Northern Continent as if they'd never left home. But the Yaku had lived here for as long as their oral history recalled. They knew this land, and they knew the other land, Nayug, that sat on top of it unseen but everpresent. They knew things the Yogoese could never guess at. The Yaku could teach and guide them, and ensure no further disaster befell them. Nanai realised that he and his people needed them. He and Torgal encouraged the Yogoese to befriend the Yaku and learn from them, and they took the lessons and applied them to their nationbuilding efforts. Without the help of the Yaku, many would have died. The settlers might even have given up and left. But with the Yaku's aid, they thrived.

It took years. Nanai made sure that everyone learned the Yaku language, especially the children, and the people of Yashro Village did their best to learn Yogoese. Some of the bachelors, who had been sailors on the ships, took wives from among the Yaku; some of them settled in Yashro, but others at the river confluence where the pioneers were building their own village.

They made walls to protect their huts from the floodwaters. They dredged out the river courses and built up the land between them. They turned the marshes into rice fields, cleared forest and built strong, Yogo-style houses with slanted roofs. They planted trees of their own - fruit trees from Yogo, cherries and persimmons. They made parchment and surveyed the area, and Nanai planned out how the city should grow - where the trading district should be, the fishing district, the fields, the star readers' observatory, the prince's palace. At Nanai's suggestion, Torgal invited whatever Yaku wished to move to this upstart civilization to join them in their efforts. They turned the braided fluvial plain into a town between two deep rivers that could accommodate ships. They sent a few of the sailors downstream on a newly-built ship, small and fast, to initiate trade with the pirates there. The pirates wouldn't come here; it was too far a journey to interest them, and there were no flashy riches to be had. But they would trade tools and metal for rice and fruit and preserved meat - tasty necessities they couldn't procure at sea. And the Yogoese used those tools to better construct their new home.

The settlement became a village, the village a town. The Yogo people broke ground on the star observatory, and on a new, sturdy house where Torgal and his family would live. As Nanai stood on the site of the observatory, looking down the valley at the transformed landscape before him - the rice paddies gleaming in the sunlight; the whitewashed houses glowing like pearls on the land that had been dredged from the twin rivers by hand; the little fishing and trading vessels that the former sailors had built, with their sails like flags fluttering proudly in the breeze; the rows of young fruit trees thriving on that rich black soil - the star reader felt a swell of pride. He could practically see the future laid out in front of him. The town would grow into a city, and the city into a metropolis, and from that metropolis a nation would be born. We'll do it right this time, he thought, smiling.

"What are you looking at, old friend?" asked Torgal, walking up beside him.

"Our city," said Nanai. "We still haven't named it."

"Why not New Yogo?"

Nanai shook his head. "No. This needs to be something all its own. We came here to escape the mistakes of our ancestors; we should name our capital accordingly."

As they stood there, silent in thought, the sun caught the rivers - both of them - where they met and joined into one. It had rained that morning; even the trees seemed to glitter as the sunlight winked off of them.

"Shining fan," said Torgal.

"What?"

"Shining fan. That's what we should call the city." He pointed. "See? The valley is shaped like a fan. Here, we're on the fan's handle, and as you go downvalley, the fan widens and spreads out, til you reach the rice paddies and the confluence - that's the edge of the fan."

Nanai nodded in understanding. He'd never really paid attention to the area's geography in such a way that he'd think to make such a comparison. He'd been mostly concerned with city planning, not with poetic revels. But he could see it now, the way Torgal described.

"With the sun like this, catching the leaves and the rivers and the rice fields, it's like a fan made of silver, or gold. But 'Silver Fan' doesn't sound right, and 'Golden Fan' sounds too pretentious. But 'Shining Fan'... that sounds... hopeful. Right? 'Shining Fan'." He repeated the name in Yogoese: Kousenkyo. It had a musical ring to it which Nanai liked.

He studied Torgal's face. The prince had been changed by everything that had happened. His failure to protect that Yaku child had left an indelible mark; he'd been sad and serious ever since. But for the first time since that terrible day, Kainan Nanai could see the smallest hint of a smile on Torgal's face. And Nanai smiled back.

"I like it," he said. "Your highness, behold your city. Welcome to Kousenkyo."

THE END