A/n : And I'm back with a new story! Although many of you reading this will not be familiar with my name as I have never written in this fandom before now. So, if you will indulge me, allow me to present a few brief notes. Rather than fill up this page with them, please go to my profile and click the link for the “Kai” website.

If you can't be bothered with reading that, I should just tell you that this opening chapter is intended to be read as a “trailer” for the rest of the story – it is a single scene taken from the main story.

Kai

The Carpenter Wall

The sun was setting to the west, seeming to sink into the wastes of the Shadowlands, the dying red light striking the great stones and rice-flour mortar of the Carpenter Wall obliquely, staining them crimson. Blood trickled off the parapet, down the murder holes in the outer crenelations and made its searching way through the square maze of the mortar between the stones. One top of the ramparts, the Crab tended to their dead with unceremonious decapitation and tended to their wounded with gritty Jade shoved, blackening, onto open, raw, bleeding meat.

In the centre of the Crab line, fastidiously wiping red-black blood from his painfully bright, obviously new katana, a tall youth stood, having seen maybe fifteen or sixteen Winters, but already showing the harshness of his life near the Wall. He was slimmer than most of the warriors crowding around him, but with a hard, wiry, rangy strength in his sinewy frame. Like almost all Rokugani his hair and eyes were dark, framing a face in which the bones were the main feature. A taller, stockier, older Samurai – Jade-seasoned blood trickling from between his armour plates – clapped the younger Bushi between the shoulder blades. Despite his strength and youth, the Bushi staggered.

“Well, Kai,” the older man boomed, gesturing with his tetsubo at the hideously ugly head at Kai’s feet, “You’re a real Crab now!” The young Bushi sheathed his Katana and looked up at his Clansman.

“Hai, Hida-sama,” Kai said formally, “I suppose I am.” His voice was as cold and hard as Jade, and he did not meet the gaze of the older Samurai. And then he looked into his superior’s eyes, grinned like an Oni, and took the tetsubo from his hand. A glance to take aim, a swing of his arm, and the Ogre’s head went sailing off the wall to land, bouncing and rolling, in the Shadowlands. Laughter rose from a score of Crab throats as the flamboyant Bushi bowed and handed the tetsubo back.

Flasks of saki were produced from nowhere and knocked back as the Tsukai-Tsugasu looked on disapprovingly yet – as the Crabs celebrated their newest recruit’s first kill on the Wall – not a one of them knew that people were even now climbing to the ramparts to make sure it might be his last.