Daiten - The Exiled Wanderer

In the villages below Mount Hōrai, fog meant stories. The kind that started quiet and ended with someone checking the door twice before sleep. They told of an archer with a mask. Arrows that crossed distances no bow should account for. Always the mark. Never the miss. The telling changed depending on who'd been drinking, but that part stayed the same. He came from the mountain, they said. Had to. That's where the sightings were thickest. He moved through their streets the way sickness did. Quiet. Already past you before you knew. A few had seen him. The mask first—ornate, wooden, red and black patterns worn down to something older than paint. Then the shape beneath it. Too tall. Too still. The way he stood didn't sit right in the body of whoever was watching. Something in the legs. Something below the knees they couldn't name and didn't want to. Those who caught the gaze through the slits didn't bring it up again. Not around fires. Not sober. Something in it had weighed them, and they'd come up short. Travelers from other villages carried fragments. A figure the years wouldn't touch. A silhouette on the mountain ridgelines that the fog should have hidden but didn't. Then it would shift—and he'd be gone. Talon marks in frost. Nothing else. Always up there. Always the mountain. The mask drew the most talk. Always did. It matched something from old stories. A warrior. Noble, supposedly. No one alive remembered the details firsthand. The villagers had filled in the rest themselves. Daiten had killed the original owner. Taken it off the body. Wore it now the way a dog carries a bone from the kill—not pride, not shame. Fact. Brave men went quiet when it came up. On bad nights, when the fog rolled down from Hōrai and swallowed their streets, even the drunkest among them chose to stay indoors. The mask was up there somewhere. That was enough.