Lord Kenji Fujiwara, whose wife just bore him a healthy son, wishes to reward her for her accomplishment before he leaves Nara to complete his campaign to exterminate Tanashiro, his sons, and their close allies. When asked, she requests a blanket for the newborn heir made from some sort of strange but expensive rabbit fur.

He doesn't care what she wants, he's going to give it to her. Childbirth seems like kind of a lot; Kikyo is tough, but he sat outside in a hallway and listening to her scream until she was hoarse.

There's one merchant in Nara who specializes in the sale of this whatever-it-is, and Fujiwara decides to drop in on the shop when he realizes how close it is to where he lives. Getting out after the weather improves is always enjoyable, and since he'll be on the warpath toward that damn Tanashiro in mere days, it's a nice outing.

When he arrives at the shop, it is closed, and when he asks, a neighboring shopkeeper tells the lord that there's a curse.

"A curse?"

The other shopkeeper, who sells hand painted porcelain, nods and tells him a wild story. Usually, if someone says that 'it's a curse,' Fujiwara knows it unusually only means someone has encountered moderately bad luck.

The merchant who used to own the shop experienced a financial windfall of unknown origin during the winter. He did sell rabbit fur, and this particular rare kind could only be collected in winter, but he had bragged to his fellow merchant about this windfall being a little mathematically absurd if one translated the profit to number of rabbits slain.

The other merchant explained that there's not really any way that much money came from rabbit furs.

After the late merchant his mouth about using his fortune to establish roots in Heian Kyo, Katsuragi's gem of a city, the merchant set out from Nara right after the first thaw. A bridge outside of town collapsed and he presumably drowned. He was last seen clutching a box full of gold coins.

His oldest son was immediately pushed into the role of his father, and because the merchant had taken virtually all of their money with him when he perished, the son was tasked with needing to make everything work.

As someone who was also unexpectedly thrust into a role while mourning his father, Fujiwara knew this was a chaotic and traumatic experience.

The son went to meet the trapper and pick up the last batch of furs of the season, but upon arriving at the little remote house the trapper stayed in during the winter, he found a note written by a local sorcerer that the trapper had died, and they didn't know where he came from, so he had been buried in the mountains. The name of this sorcerer was, surprisingly, the same name that Fujiwara kept hearing over and over and over again: Michizane Sugawara.

When the son went to find the sorcerer and ask what had happened and found out the trapper stepped in a trap probably intended to kill wolves and was unable to free himself due to a curse on the trap.

After bringing the furs back, much easier and faster in better weather, a doctor who was a family friend came to their shop. He knew the family well, and while he was talking to the son, he leaned against a wooden railing that had always been sturdy, and it collapsed, causing him to fall back into a vat of acid distilled from fruits that was used to cure and color leathers.

The acid burned his skin, and even though he survived initially, his skin started shedding in chunks at another doctor's clinic and he jumped from a window headfirst into the street in order to escape the pain of falling apart while still alive.

A trapper dying in a trap, a merchant drowning with his fortune, and a doctor who takes care of living bodies being burned in a place for desecrating the bodies of dead animals?

A curse indeed.

Fujiwara assumes these three men shared in some activity that caused them to become cursed. The most likely explanation is that they came into contact with a powerful cursed object and then improperly handled it until it was sold.

What's really interesting about that is that he received a military intelligence report that Tanashiro somehow lost a very powerful cursed artifact that was evidently kept in the mountains near his castle, which he learned was also the only place to acquire the special rabbit furs.

As he prepares to head out with his army, he tasks a team of sorcerers with continuing the investigation. It seems obvious that the trapper found Tanashiro's missing cursed object, sold it to the merchant, and then the merchant sold it. Fujiwara doesn't understand how the doctor got involved, but those three men were clearly killed by the same curse.

Anyway, if Tanashiro was keeping the object away from people instead of at the vault in his castle, it could only because the cursed object was an active danger to people around it.

Fujiwara isn't too concerned about the issue because if the object was in Nara, there would be very clear signs.

Besides, Fujiwara's professional focus is on other things.

Katsuragi told him that Tanashiro had asked him for help, which was really kind of a funny outcome because Tanashiro would be fighting Katsuragi if he had the ability to do so.

Katsuragi also told him that the messenger who brought the letter was Michizane Sugawara. Fujiwara heard the kid had some sort of invisible armor that couldn't be pierced, but he hadn't been tested in battle yet, so Fujiwara was quick to dismiss these claims.

In Katsuragi's letter, he said that Sugawara was an archetypical good boy, but his eyes are actually quite frightening. Katsuragi posed the possibility that the boy's enlightened eyes are a sign that the gods have heard the innocents crying out to be saved from their sorcerer-warlords.

Fujiwara believes if someone was sent to judge them, the first person to go down would be the one Sugawara works for, so it's easy to dismiss that sort of superstitious nonsense.

On the night before he sets off, he wants to live a little; eat, drink, be merry. Get laid. He and his wife don't have that sort of arrangement, and if they did, she'd just had a baby anyway.

Even if she didn't prefer women, she's still mad at him that he had all the rabbit furs destroyed.

She expected him to be able to break the curse, but whatever those men handled, it left small amounts of very scary residue here and there on the furs and among the merchant's belongings.

Arranged marriages were just such a bother, but Fujiwara felt like any woman at home with a newborn son would probably wish death on her husband as he heads out to a brothel so he doesn't take it personally. He does not lack self-awareness, he lacks shame, and that's an important distinction.

The mistress of the brothel gives him a private room, and then, through an open door, he sees a beautiful woman pass, one with pink hair.

When Mistress Keiko returns, she asks, "What do you want? I have a few who aren't currently tending to other appointments. It's been a while since you visited, but back then it was always difficult to tell if you just wanted to drink alcohol with a cute woman and bore her with sorcery talk or if you needed a bed that could comfortably accommodate you and three women."

"I'm an honorable man now."

"Do you know where you are?"

He pretends to pout and says, "I saw a girl walk past with pink hair."

"Ah, Sakura. She's not available."

"Tell whoever she's going to visit that I want her. I'll pay them double to leave."

Keiko repeats, "She is not available."

"What? Is it her time? I will put on my crimson wings and carry her to the heavens with me."

"Sakura is new and is still getting settled in and training. She's also recovering from a serious injury."

"Injury?"

"She hit her head at some point before she got here and can't remember anything from before a few weeks ago."

"Really? That happened to someone who fought in my father's army. That's fascinating."

The older woman tells him that she isn't ready to work yet, but that she's going to start in a few weeks and she's already booked out for three months. He has glimpsed her in an untarnished state, but when he returns to Nara after his campaign, things will have changed.

Fujiwara, now mostly curious about talking to someone who lost all their memories, proposes a compromise.

"How about you let her come have dinner with me. I'll be a good boy."

This isn't too unreasonable, and Keiko agrees.

Sakura, who has gotten used to being called by this new name, still spends much of her time trying to remember anything that happened. Where was her home? Who were her people? She had a dream about a table set for dinner, and there was a place for her, but she couldn't see the faces of the other people, and when she sat down, everyone was gone.

Did she have parents?

Friends?

How old was she, actually?

Where was home, and if she knew, could she run away and go back there?

She now has eyes wide open about what kind of place she lives at now, and what sort of work she will do, and she's quite scared in some ways.

For the moment, her schedule at the brothel is a little interesting, because her body seems to be programmed to get up with the sun and go to sleep with the sun, but this place is different, active well into the night and quiet in the mornings. Sometimes the girls don't come out of their rooms until noon, and outside of looking pretty, they have few responsibilities when they don't have appointments, so they go out and shop, read, play games, gossip. Virtually all chores down to washing undergarments and changing the linens are done by staff to keep the girls' hands soft.

At night, they have a big bath treated with fine oils and sake that leaves their skin soft.

She's working on making new friends, because she doesn't really know what else to do, but she doesn't understand that her appearance has caused the other girls to become envious because everyone who passes through wants to know when they can visit her.

It's not going to be long before she'll start doing the true work of this place, and this worries her. She thinks about running away, and wonders if the old lady would still be nice then? For some reason she has an idea in her mind that people in control are nice to obedient subjects, a piece of wisdom left from being close to a boy who was a most favored slave because he was most useful.

There is a part of her that is so naturally optimistic that she tries to manually rearrange herself to accept her reality, even though she didn't exactly know what sex was before she came here, a mystery that kind of confused even the mistress, since she remembered all of her other practical knowledge.

When Mistress Keiko comes to get her, she's a bit startled because she had promised she'd have more time before she had to go spend time with the men that come to this place.

"It's just dinner. Lord Fujiwara is master of everything in these lands, and I wouldn't want to deny him an earnest request. He said he would behave, and he always keeps his word. It will be good for you to get used to talking to men."

Keiko pulls Sakura into her room and puts some tinted oil on her makeup-stained lips to make them shiny and fixes her hair a little. She dabs a little perfume on her and brings her to the little private room where Kenji Fujiwara awaits.

He stands to greet her and after Keiko introduces them, she sits at the table with the lord.

Sakura is actually the single most beautiful living human being he has ever seen in his life, but she looks oddly terrified to be alone with him, like she's never just had a conversation with a man before.

"Relax, I don't bite," he jokes.

It's a lie, but the good kind of lie.

His presence fills the room in an odd way; he's the tallest person she's ever met, with broad shoulders and a clearly muscular form. He has dark hair in a ponytail, and eyes that are so dark blue that they almost look black. From certain angles, she gets a glimpse of the deep indigo color. He has scars, a long vertical scar over one of his eyes that has left him with a notched eyebrow, and a deep scar on his neck.

Fujiwara's voice is quite low and a bit gravelly, and when he talks, he seems to always be flashing a very handsome and very big grin.

She finds him quite handsome, but she finds him intimidating at first. His grin makes her squirm and make her feel like she has become liquid and will melt out of her chair onto the floor.

The lord was initially just really curious, wanting to know where she came from, and if there was some tribe of pink-haireds out in the world somewhere, but his guess was as good as hers. When Keiko said she lost her memories, that wasn't an exaggeration; this girl doesn't even remember what her name was.

Fujiwara isn't sure if it's the head injury or maybe Sakura was always like this, but she seems to have a personality issue he's never encountered before. She is optimistic and gives others grace to the point that it is seriously distorting her sense of reality.

She has lost everything, even her own sense of self, and every single person she has come into contact with has made her life worse instead of helping her in order to make money off prostituting her, which will certainly destroy whatever order still exists in her mind.

Yet she doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that she's been victimized by others.

Fujiwara suffers from competing sentiments that he should save her from this place because it is the right thing to do and also because she's very lovely and he would like to hoard her and keep her for himself.

"You like babies?" he asks.

"Babies? Who doesn't like babies?"

Fujiwara answers, "My wife, interestingly enough. She just had a kid. He needs someone to be sweet to him, and you seem like you'd probably be good at that. You can come to work for me for a while, taking care of the baby. I'm going out of town for a while, and when I get back, I'll probably be a bit of a flirt because you're gorgeous, but I won't make you do anything you don't want to do. And if you remember where you're supposed to be, I'll make sure you get home."

Of course, he could have just bought her and forced her to be his concubine right out, but that just seems sort of gross.

And probably, he thinks she's a little too young for that sort of thing anyway.

Is he saving her to keep her to himself? Is he doing it because he wants to help her? He's really not sure.

Sakura breaks down crying at the table because only when a door to escape is offered does is she able to admit to herself how scared and how sad she was. In the back of her mind, she knew that she was stumbling straight toward hell with no way to turn back.

She'd had thoughts about what would happen if she ran away, and if she did, what she would do then? Where would she sleep? How would she eat? She's been taking medicine—how would she pay for that? Was the old lady really nice or would she come after her because she paid so much to get her?

The offer that he will help her return home if she ever remembers where home is makes her so happy she wants to weep at his feet, but he says, "You'll be okay. You're actually pretty tough if you've made it this far and you're alive and still mostly sane."

Since he still can't figure out if his motives are good or not, he's not sure if he can pat himself on the back, but he does feel some self-satisfaction at having saved her from a life of exploitation at an establishment where he came to participate in this practice.

Maybe there's a lesson there that he chooses not to learn. He's not perfect, after all.

After dinner, money changes hands again and for an even larger fortune than the one the mistress gave up buying Sakura, Fujiwara becomes her new 'owner,' although this term is a bit incorrect since slavery is illegal in this land and employment contracts are used to create slave-like conditions.

The curse marks the mistress of the brothel, but Kenji Fujiwara avoids it because while he has some ulterior motives, he has no intention of harming or exploiting the girl or making her life worse.

In the morning, when he leaves for his campaign, his wife learns that her husband, who promised her fine rabbit furs and a wet nurse, has skipped down after having the furs burned and sending a woman to help her with the baby who is not only not a wet nurse, but was in fact a brothel girl with a severe head injury that he purchased the night prior.

Kikyo Fujiwara maintains that men are mostly useless, but that no man is more useless than Kenji Fujiwara.

Her husband can be a confusing man at times, often with convoluted motives as he is forever trying to decide whether or not he is actually a good man or an evil villain. The man who has been spending his warm seasons killing people in his war for vengeance also picks up baby birds and brings them home so he can nurse them back to health and set them free.

It's very obvious to Kikyo that he wants to eventually turn this girl into a concubine at some point when she is feeling better.

She also doesn't think it's fair that she's evidently unaware of this plan, so as they walk down a long hallway in the castle, she explains what his likely intentions are and instead of giving her a room in the servant's wing, moves her directly into the suite where his late father's spoiled concubine used to live.

Kikyo could not be more enthusiastic about the possibility that her husband might have a new companion because she doesn't really enjoy his company and has not been looking forward to the time when the war is over and he is home more often.

Sakura isn't sure what to think about any of this.

Her general thought about concubines is that they were basically similar to prostitutes, but according to Kikyo, the concubines of rich lords lived like princesses with none of the responsibilities or work.

While Sakura lacks experience or knowledge in caring for babies and cannot fulfill the role of wet nurse, she is very soft and sweet with Kikyo's son once she hands him over to her. As a woman with a newborn, suddenly regaining free use her arms is a relief.

"He's so handsome, look at his cute little chubby face! What's his name?" she whispers, as if in awe.

"Kenjaku Fujiwara."

"That's such a regal name. It's the name of someone who is going to grow up to be strong and good and help many people," Sakura answers.

Kikyo says, "I don't think I like him as much as I'm supposed to."

"Why?"

"He is a reminder that I had to have intercourse with a man, one of the most disgusting indignities a woman can experience," she answers.

"Really?"

"Maybe not if you enjoy that sort of thing. I do not."

The first people to show Sakura genuine kindness after her tumble from the mountaintop shrine where a morally conflicted lord and his wife who has a girlfriend who lives in the castle. According to Kikyo they were forced to marry by their parents and now live in this odd situation.

Kikyo is thrilled by the idea of him taking a concubine because someone has to sleep with her husband and it's not going to be her.

Sakura is incredibly pleasant to be around, although Kikyo is left wondering where on earth she came from. Her behavior isn't necessarily infantile—she's not acting like a child—but she seems strangely new to the real world. Kikyo assumes she came from a very safe and comfortable place where she was protected from the harsh realities of the world and was not really able to process how evil people really are.

Kikyo also thinks that Sakura is the kind of girl who was probably always expected to be cheerful and make other people happy. She is an archetypical 'beloved daughter' who approaches a situation from the perspective of making others happy instead of pursuing her own interest.

The twenty-seven-year-old is certain that some man probably doted on her and spoiled her, sheltered her from everything, and viewed her as a defenseless thing that needed to be protected at all times. It's a reminder that even when men have good intentions, their instinct is to cripple women.

Kikyo is a selfish politician and incredibly powerful for a woman, commanding more political influence than perhaps any woman on the island. Her husband, despite their odd arrangement, mostly views her as an equal, and when he is away from Nara, she is the lord and everyone knows that.

They're very opposite, but Kikyo thinks Sakura will probably do well if she just has time to figure out how to live as herself in the world. Some things in a woman's life aren't about men; sometimes they're just about women learning how to thrive in a world that was built from the ground up to wear them down and confine them in all kinds of invisible cages.

Besides, as they spend time together, she discovers Sakura is very useful. She carries Kenjaku around in a sling as they go about their day to day business, usually only handing her off to Kikyo for feedings, and helps with all sorts of tasks.

Sakura has incredible penmanship so sometimes she helps Kikyo pen letters, sometimes she reads letters for her to filter out the ones that seem important. She knows enough math that she can look at ledgers and understand them.

As weeks go by, Kikyo remains somewhat hands-off with her baby, and people around the castle whisper about it a little. She doesn't really care, because she has her reasons. To her something seems very off about the baby.

Sakura thinks he's just the most adorable, sweetest baby there has ever been.

One afternoon after a couple of months, while Sakura lays on a blanket in the grass outside with Kenjaku, Kikyo asks, "You don't ever just look at him and think 'maybe he shouldn't be here?'"

Sakura has become weirdly accustomed to Kikyo both loving her son but also not really wanting to mess with him and occasionally vocalizing opinions that are a little scary.

"No, of course not," Sakura answers, kissing the smiling baby's feet, "Look at him! He's going to be a good man and do wonderful things for the world. I can tell. Sweet baby Kenjaku, good, and kind, and brave…"

"I find him unsettling."

"He's your son?"

Kikyo crinkles her nose in disgust and rolls up a scroll, a letter from her parents.

"Bad news?" Sakura asks.

Kikyo answers, "My father wants to know if I am jealous of your beauty, the characteristic that causes men to be evil to you. He heard from somewhere, something—people are whispering that my husband the idiot brought a beautiful woman here from a brothel."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize. Existing is not a sin. Women feeling they need to compete with their looks is just a stupid thing that men made up. The first time you see a man fully disrobed you will understand how foolish it is that we let them judge our beauty."

This woman will eventually write in a journal that will be kept at the Jujutsu Society in the distant future that Kenjaku is not her fault because she wanted to drown him in infancy and other people kept telling her not to do it.

XXX

As the walls close in on Lord Ryugi Tanashiro, he takes everything he has into consideration, and he simply doesn't have the power to stop Fujiwara. In a war without sorcerers, one can always just bring more men in, and one's true strength is in the number of able-bodied men a lord can deliver to the battlefield.

But five years in, that number is 'not a lot,' and right now his lands are tottering on not having enough men left to work the fields.

Most of the sorcerers are gone too.

His subjects don't exactly proudly and eagerly march into battle for him, either. Generations of neglect and abuse going back to his grandfather's father have left them without a sense of loyalty beyond their own survival.

If they knew all Kenji Fujiwara wanted was to kill the people responsible for what Tanashiro considered 'minor provocations,' they'd step aside.

So, how did Tanashiro get his peasants with their low morale to fight?

Whenever they were near the front, he'd have his oldest son Kyomaru go to a certain place and do whatever the worst things he could possibly imagine were to the people there. Then they'd stick Fujiwara's banner up somewhere, and his army would arrive and find unspeakable atrocities and know that their families would be murdered if Fujiwara passed through.

That wasn't reality.

The reality is that Fujiwara was mad about something of that nature, and he certainly didn't let his men act like that. If Fujiwara's soldiers raped and pillaged, he'd murder them.

Tanashiro had everyone convinced this was not the case, and even the other lords were secretly terrified of Fujiwara, but what they actually feared was the version of Fujiwara that Tanashiro created to make his men fight for him.

While it did the intended job, it also discouraged others from messing with Fujiwara, because Fujiwara shared his longest border with Katsuragi and Katsuragi didn't want to want any of that stuff happening in his lands.

Tanashiro considers his options; he could flee with his sons.

Fleeing to the continent might be the only way.

It's frustrating to him, because Michizane's new ability, Blue, is something of pure wonder, a strange, terrifying power that could carve up any other battlefield.

It probably wouldn't be enough to stop Fujiwara.

Even worse, Michizane's loyalty seems to waver more and more as spring ages into summer. Despite promising to keep him as an armor bearer, Tanashiro has forced him into fighting, and he is extraordinary. Yet it seems like every battle, he questions Tanashiro a little more with his eyes.

The problem with Michizane's power is that Tanashiro does not think that he would win a challenge from the boy and his Blue, but Michizane isn't strong enough to kill Fujiwara, meaning between the three of them, no one is in more danger than Tanashiro is.

And if Michizane realizes he can stop the war from coming to his homeland by simply helping Fujiwara achieve his goal of eradicating the Tanashiro house and the generals, he might turn on him.

After the incident at the shrine, Tanashiro benefitted from a surge of goodwill and loyalty from Michizane because he took care of Momo Tengen. That event deeply affected Michizane because he'd grown quite close to the priest and the girls and thought of them as his family. He had heard him call Momo 'Big Sis' and Tanashiro knew that protecting and caring for her ranked highest among Michizane's priorities.

So, Tanashiro decides the best way to make Michizane fight Fujiwara with such fervor that he is willing to throw his own life away in order to have a chance at killing him, is if he is fighting to avenge some horrific sin against Momo.

If Momo dies in some terrible way and Michizane believes Fujiwara is responsible, he'll probably snap, show Fujiwara how sharp his teeth really are, and maybe that will be enough to corner Fujiwara and force him to summon Mahoraga. In that case, Fujiwara will die, eliminating the biggest external threat, and Michizane will die, eliminating a potential threat on the inside.

Momo has interesting but questionably useful abilities, so the most use he can get out of Momo is to spend her life like a token to make Michizane desperately homicidal.

Of course, he doesn't know that Katsuragi already figured out that this is his last move and told Michizane, who has been cognizant of his own growing desire to betray his lord and how convenient it would be for Tanashiro if both he and Fujiwara died.

Michizane is also aware that Tanashiro started the war by thinking if he was so overwhelmingly evil to a younger, less confident Fujiwara that he could take whatever he wanted from him.

Tanashiro is the villain; Michizane knows this. All of the knowledge he gained about the conflict in Heian Kyo, and his own observations of how Tanashiro and his sons conducted themselves remind him that they are evil, disgusting people. In the distant past, maybe all lords were so thoughtless about the suffering they caused, but it seemed like the world was trying to change.

Katsuragi said once Tanashiro was gone, Fujiwara's strength might be enough to make the wars stop for a while, something that hadn't happened in generations.

But Michizane, despite knowing the true cause of the war, has also been deceived about who is responsible for the horrible things happening near the border.

Of course, Katsuragi's best case scenario is for Michizane to turn on Tanashiro and get rid of him and his sons and then for him to fight Fujiwara in a battle that ends in mutual annihilation. For all of the monsters to die during this campaign would really be a relief, but he would also be pleased if the only survivor was Michizane, because at least at the moment, he doesn't seem like someone who will grow up to be a menace to the world.

The pieces move into place, and Tanashiro decides that he will gamble on the strategy of pitting Michizane Sugawara and Kenji Fujiwara against each other. Fleeing probably would not be successful, as they can't ride horses faster than Nue can fly.

Michizane meanwhile is unsure about everything as he knows a deciding moment is coming.

On this morning in early summer, when he woke up, he could sense Fujiwara's strange technique from a great distance. His power is remarkable, and the technique itself is so unique. He's not quite sure how to describe it to anyone else, but he's able to determine certain things about cursed techniques just by looking at the people wielding them, and the information Ten Shadows offers, even at distance, is extraordinary.

Michizane wonders what he should do; he's never thought of himself as someone important enough that he could make a decision that changed anything for anyone. Raised a slave, he's worked under Tanashiro for most of his life that he can remember and has only the vaguest memories of anything before being brought to the castle.

Yet he has power.

He thinks all the time about his friend Tsuki that he grew up with on the castle grounds, who was forced to become a concubine for Lord Tanashiro's heir, Kyomaru. She came to him for help, and he did not help her.

Right before they were getting ready to deploy, she hanged herself.

Michizane couldn't stop thinking about her, because to everyone else, she was just some dead girl who didn't matter.

Had he been given his extraordinary power for no reason?

While Sugawara is considering all of this, he is handed a scroll and told to use his abilities to rush it back to the castle and return by morning.

He accepts the errand in earnest and sets out, unaware that this is part of a trap.

Tanashiro needs Momo to die close enough that Michizane is able to find her but far enough away that he won't intervene and catch Kyomaru doing the deed. It's difficult to guess what it is that he can see and how far he can see, and as Michizane has gotten older, he has become a lot more careful about explaining exactly the true power of his eyes.

Across the river, Fujiwara feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up as Six Eyes peers across the distance at him. While he's not blessed with deific vision, Michizane either can't suppress the presence of his cursed energy, or he has so much that suppression isn't particularly useful, because his location is visible the same way a star is visible in the night sky.

Interestingly, there's another dot, a fuzzy dot.

Does Tanashiro have two monsters? The fuzzy dot is interesting, because while the bright, clearly defined dot is clearly a person with an incredible amount of cursed energy, he has seen other people like this before.

He doesn't understand what makes the fuzzy dot fuzzy.

The bright dot and the fuzzy dot are moving in opposite directions, almost diagonally from each other at the same time. Although they started from different locations, it seems like they are being moved to be very far apart from each other, and as he observes, the bright dot moves more inward and north of the front, while the fuzzy dot moves closer to the front and yet into a position that one wouldn't attack from.

It doesn't seem to be for some kind of attack because of the mountains in the way. They are moving to positions that aren't useful for war and moving around at night without torches or lanterns is an interesting choice in the first place.

There's not really a way to use this positioning of the bright dot in an attack, and it doesn't look like an attack at night is going to happen anyway. There's a new moon and it's cloudy, so it is abysmally dark. Even Tanashiro knows not to play with the master of the Ten Shadows when the entire earth is shrouded in shadow.

Scouts have said Tanashiro himself has finally come, so Fujiwara assumes that there's some reason he thinks he's going to win. It's better that way; not having to go to the castle to kill him is easier. He wants to go home and see his son and prepare for the next phase of his life.

His wife wrote him a letter saying she didn't like their son, and that was a little interesting.

Then there's that gorgeous creature living in his castle. He hopes she's doing better, and that when he returns, she's ready for him to work his charms on her. If not, he can sit on his hands probably. The idea of harassing a vulnerable person is not interesting to him, but he thinks he can convince her to enthusiastically participate.

He looks over at the fuzzy dot as he considers going to sleep and instead decides to watch for a while longer.

'Fuzzy Dot' Momo Tengen marches, her legs feeling heavy even under light armor. Tanashiro told her she was useless due to her sex and weakness after everything that happened. To her privately, he said if she couldn't fight and she couldn't have sorcerer babies, the best thing to do would be to put her out to work in the field, but he wasn't going to do that because it would anger Michizane, because he still thought she was special.

At times, he seemed impressed with her, at times, he seemed disappointed and disgusted.

The pain in her midsection still hasn't gone away, and sometimes, it hurts so much, like a thousand knots pulling at her insides.

It's so dark and so late that she doesn't know where her feet are going, and she's worried she'll trip and twist her ankle.

Momo's mind is so bleak, as she marches under pitch darkness, being rudely ordered by a voice complaining about how she needs to move faster when it feels like her insides want to simply rip themselves out of her body.

Master is gone, Ayame is gone, she's been dragged to this evil man's war. She is both afraid to die, and afraid to live. She lives with a stone inside of her heart, that reminds her always that it's her fault that everything went like this. She failed in her duties to the shrine, to her master, and to her sister, and now all of that was gone, and here she is, on a pitch-black night marching to some dark place to do dark things and even if the sun rises, it'll still be dark in her mind.

What was the purpose of any of it?

As Michizane rushes a blank scroll back to the castle, his lord plans for him to head back in the morning. He will find his friend, brutally murdered, and he will meet Fujiwara with a kind of hatred and anger that will challenge even him.

Everyone has their plans, their backup plans, and their expectations, but the night's outcome will determine not only how the war will end, but how the future of this island will unfold for the next thousand years.