SPOILER WARNING!
SPOILERS FOR SILVER HILLS OF RUINS, THE BLACK MOON (SHIROGANE NO OKA, KURO NO TSUKI)
DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED ALL FOUR BOOKS!
Mistake
How is it possible to screw up this bad?
Rousan had asked herself this question many times over the last six years. Naturally, she asked it about Asen, who'd managed the incredible feat of losing both the king and kirin he'd tried to overthrow.
But those words were also directed at herself.
The first time Rousan met Asen, she'd been fourteen. She doubted he remembered the encounter, or had any idea who she was until decades later.
At the time, Gyousou had been moving back into his old quarters at the royal palace. The Extravagant King had just sent word to the Yellow Sea that Gyousou was pardoned for not following royal orders, and offered him the chance to reassume his post as General of the Palace Guard of the Left. After some thought Gyousou had accepted, and he and Ganchou returned to Tai. Rousan had gone with them, eager to expand her education in ways not available to her in the wilds of the Yellow Sea. Upon their arrival in Tai, Gyousou had wasted no time getting the teenage Rousan a tutor, and so she'd been in a corner of Gyousou's main hall studying for the Tai Royal University entrance exams when there'd been a knock at the door.
One of Gyousou's subordinates went to open it, assuming it to be one of the many and myriad servants scurrying around setting up this, that, and the other thing. Seeing who was on the other side, the startled servant had squeaked,
"General Jou!"
At this, Rousan had looked up from her textbook, diverted. Gyousou had left Tai three years ago, and spent a full two of those years catching youjuu with Rousan's shusei band. As such, Rousan had many opportunities to talk to him and ask him questions about life at a royal court and his far away kingdom. More than once, Jou Asen had come up. Most notably when she'd asked Gyousou about why he'd defied the king's orders and quit his job as a general.
"Honestly, I might not have done it if Asen hadn't looked at me just then."
The campfire had been flickering before them, Rousan and a few other young teens in her shusei band idly stoking it to be the perfect size—low enough not to draw a youma's eye, but still hot enough to cook over—as they listened to Gyousou's tale.
Not one to prolong anything unnecessarily, Gyousou had simply shrugged and said, "To be sure, the king's order was abhorrent and I loathed the thought of carrying it out, but if I couldn't feel Asen's eyes on me and know I'd never be able to meet them again if I went through with it, I might have skipped all this fuss and bother and just done as the king said."
That had been the sum total explanation Gyousou had given for why he'd renounced his immortality, his high position and all his titles, and willingly gone into exile from his homeland. Because he wouldn't be able to meet Asen's eyes again if he did as the king commanded.
So of course when Rousan heard Asen's name, she'd looked up to see him.
Her first impression of him was not stellar.
He smiles too much, had been her first thought, her first misgiving. Asen was always smiling and laughing, giving off an air of good humor and friendliness that drew people in. An air that, to Rousan's eyes, seemed calculated to draw people in.
The Yellow Sea was a harsh, deadly place to grow up. One careless mistake and that was it, you were dead. So naturally, the shusei who lived there had honed their survival instincts to their peak. Rousan was no exception. Perhaps that's why she'd felt Asen's good cheer and amiability were contrived when they seemed to work on most everyone else. Some youma could imitate human beings, after all. To able to tell the difference between a genuine smile and a false one had been a vital survival skill for her growing up.
Despite this, and despite her lackluster first impression of him, Asen had soon enough slipped her mind. She'd passed her entrance exams and gone to live in the university dorms, and for the next three years thought of little else but her studies. Finally, she'd graduated the Royal University at seventeen, breaking all kinds of records. She'd been offered a governmental post and was promoted high enough to be entered into the Registry of Immortals by the time she was eighteen. At that point, Gyousou had invited her to come work in his administrative sector. Rousan had accepted, and thus became one of his retainers.
From that point on, her encounters with Asen gradually increased as she rose up through the ranks of the bureaucracy. And the more she saw of him, the more he troubled her.
Everybody described the rivalry between Asen and Gyousou as though it were a friendly competition, a harmless, trivial amusement for the court. No one seemed to see what she saw. Maybe it had started that way, but for Asen it had long ceased to be friendly, and as time went on she began to fear it would one day cease to be harmless.
Then the shouzan was announced, and Gyousou named the king. Rousan was promoted to Minister of Winter, and could observe Asen as a fellow colleague from a top position at court.
What she saw alarmed her.
Sooner or later, he is going to strike against Gyousou-sama. The thought would not leave her. She'd tested the waters, and found Asen more than inclined to commit regicide.
At that point, Rousan had two choices. She could have gone to the court and accused Asen of conspiracy. Of course, as she had no solid evidence it would wind up being a matter of his word against hers. And Rousan did not enjoy the benefits of charisma like the affable air Asen so meticulously cloaked himself in. By all measures, she was a hard person to get along with and possessed few friends. Meanwhile, Asen had a literal army of followers. In a case of her word against Asen's, her only chance of prevailing was if Gyousou backed her up. But Rousan wasn't sure whether Gyousou was aware of Asen's true nature—sometimes it felt like he was, and other times it felt like he wasn't. Even if he believed her, he might not support her with no more evidence to her case than her gut feeling and some ill-advised words from Asen.
So Rousan chose her second option: have Asen out himself. In other words, help him actually commit undeniable, concrete treason, and then flip the tables on him before things had gone too far.
The first part of that had worked spectacularly. The second part had also been spectacular: a spectacular failure.
It was hard to say if the failure was hers or his, or a mix of both: his failure for letting his emotions cloud his judgement and screwing up his attacks on both Gyousou and Taiki, and her failure to realize that someone as emotionally unstable as Asen was never going to follow her nice, logical plan for how to get the king and kirin out of his way safely.
And so, both Gyousou and Taiki disappeared off the face of the earth, quite literally in Taiki's case, and Rousan was left standing at the scene of the disaster and wondering how in the world she was supposed to put everything right now.
She'd advised Asen to cut off Taiki's horn. Do that and Taiki would lose all his powers, she told him. What she did not tell him was that magical creatures could regrow body parts. Obviously not quickly, but in time Taiki's horn would regrow, his powers would return, and when they did Asen would be blindsided.
Or so she'd thought.
Send his shirei on a wild goose chase, then cut off his horn and imprison him, she'd told Asen. It had sure sounded like a reasonable enough proposition at the time—not ideal, obviously, but it sounded plausible enough as a method of insurrection while being fully reversible given time. Asen hadn't insisted that he must kill Taiki in revenge for not choosing him as the king, nor ranted that disfigurement and imprisonment were far too easy a fate for a kirin who'd committed the terrible crime of selecting Gyousou instead. He'd simply agreed, and she'd thought that was that.
Then the meishoku occurred.
My god, he's killed him—that had been her first thought. As the earth shook and sky turned blood red, Rousan had been seized with the anger and dread this must be what had happened. Asen had pretended to agree to her plan and then turned around and killed Taiki.
The truth was little better.
Asen claimed all he'd done was cut off Taiki's horn, but this was not nearly enough to trigger a meishoku. A meishoku ripped apart the fabric of the world itself. It was worse than a hurricane, worse than an earthquake, a calamity that only came about when reality itself was torn.
Naturally, a tender-hearted beast like a kirin was not inclined to cause a such ruinous calamity over every little papercut. The only times meishoku were recorded to have struck was when a kirin had been brought to the brink of death. Meaning while Asen hadn't struck to kill, neither had he restrained himself to a clean blow. And that blow had been to Taiki's head.
Taiki might not be dead, but if his wounds weren't treated that could well change. Except Taiki wasn't there anymore. He wasn't even in this world anymore. And she had absolutely no way of going after him.
For more than a year, she'd feared Taiki had succumbed to his wounds and died somewhere beyond her line of sight. After two years passed and the White Pheasant still hadn't fallen, she knew he must have managed to pull through. Yet he hadn't returned. Of course he hadn't. Asen had cut off his horn, had robbed him of his powers. She'd thought a kirin's horn would regrow like the appendages of far less powerful magical creatures, but she'd thought this of an otherwise healthy kirin. Hourai was not a good environment for kirin. Look through any record of lost ranka and it was clearly so. There was no predicting how being in the other world would affect Taiki's recovery, but from his continued absence Rousan could only imagine the worst.
Not only had Taiki gone missing in extremely dubious condition, but thanks to Asen's screw ups on his attack on Gyousou, Gyousou was also missing. And without Taiki, Rousan didn't have a good way of locating him. She'd sent out word of his last known location to those she could trust, but had yet to hear any news of him.
Not even Asen knew where exactly Gyousou was now, nor if he was currently alive or dead. He had to keep a bamboo straw leading to the White Pheasant to monitor whether it had fallen or not. Meaning Gyousou was trapped somewhere Asen thought him likely to die at any time.
This is all my fault.
She'd lit the fuse to the ticking time bomb and failed to contain the resulting explosion.
That was why Rousan had to put matters right—had to mitigate Asen's damage where she could, keep what branches of the government she held sway over functioning, seat Gyousou back on his rightful throne, and save the millions of people whose deaths and oppression she was responsible for.
She had to save them. The people, Taiki, and Gyousou.
At all costs.
