It’s Spring 1123, and Bayushi Minoru sits in a makeshift office in Hirosaka, reflecting on the symbol of office he was given after the calamities of the winter. He is the new Emerald Magistrate for the team now that Kitsu Shogo is assumed to be dead, and is tasked with helping to rebuild the city as well as acting as a general Emerald Magistrate in this part of the Empire. As he leaves his office to meet with his yoriki, he notices that Seppun Ishima, the local magistrate for Hirosaka, has been watching him. She is also new, replacing the Moth clan magistrate who went missing in winter. She doesn’t want to blur the lines between jurisdictions, but is otherwise friendly enough in her interactions with him.
Now that it’s the right season for delivering documents to the office of the Emerald Champion, Eiko is getting ready to send off the paperwork Shogo entrusted to him in the winter. He’s spent the past few weeks reviewing and copying documents, aside from those that he feels are off-limits and for Doji Satsume’s eyes only, including letters between the Emerald Champion and the Moth. Yuzume has been helping him, but the two have spent a fair bit of time at each other’s throats (a not uncommon occurrence), in spite of Yuzume’s overall good mood upon hearing that the Emperor’s Blessing will be focused on rebuilding Ryoko Owari this year.
Several of the documents use a local dialect that seems to have died with the Moth, with no way of translating them, much to the annoyance of the two, and other paperwork indicates that the Moth were unhappy with the way that other clans (the Great ones in particular) mistreated their non-Samurai castes. They’d been making an effort to publicly change things, and as a result every Great Clan other than the Phoenix and Dragon had been trying to grab control of the region and undermine the authority of the Moth and other nearby Minor Clans.
The records indicate that the Moth were requesting Emerald Magistrates be sent to the city to protect them from aggression and economic warfare, as their ability to care for their vassals was compromised by the actions of the Great Clans. This paints the five clans in an awful light, in particular the Crane, who have been pushing for control even more than any of the others, and have made the region dependent on them to pay their taxes to the Scion of Heaven.
Eiko also notes that the Moth are able to grow opium and other controlled substances, but that the Scorpion have ensured that they can’t sell it, and as such it’s limited to local use. The Lion have been shutting down Imperial investment in the River of Gold, and claimed that the region can only be controlled by force. The Crab have been trying to set up a river port nearby, which the Crane complain is a waste of money when those funds could go to the Wall. It’s obvious that they want control of the region because its fertile farmland could help them recover from the Tsunami. The Unicorn are making claims, but there are no obvious actions on their part beyond treating Hirosaka as a main trading post.
With all of this information, Yuzume stats to wonder which one of these five clans were behind the fires in the winter, as they were clearly not natural in origin. In spite of how bad the paperwork makes his clan look, Eiko sends all of the paperwork to the Emerald Office, confident that the Crane courtiers will be able to spin things positively for them, and sends a separate letter to a contact to warn them of what may come.
Meanwhile, Hajime has been tasked with recovering the swords of Kitsu Shogo so that they may be returned to his family. He volunteered for this duty, as in spite of how glad he is for Minoru to have his new position, he deeply misses Shogo. Attempting to intuit the route Shogo may have taken through the rubble and ruins of the Moth keep, he searches each room as methodically as he can, but to no avail. The only thing he can find is a protective talisman under the ash. Drawing on his strange connection to the Void, he intuits that it has been passed down through generations to keep its owner safe from malicious dream spirits. Examining it further, he discovers that it was left there for someone when the fire started, perhaps from a parent to their child in the hopes it would make it to them before they succumbed to the flames.
Turning, he realizes he’s being observed by someone scrying with the air kami, but instead of meeting a shugenja he comes face to face with a Shiba bushi who looks ready to fight him. He claims that Hajime shouldn’t be holding the talisman, and that his ward, Isawa Nobuo, is its rightful owner. He claims Nobuo is a representative of the Elemental Council, which Hajime knows immediately is nonsense, and talks the Shiba, Kizuki, out of trying to take the talisman so that Minoru can take a look at it first. The two part on amicable enough terms, though Hajime remains suspicious of him as he leaves.
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