☙ When Oda Broke the Seal, and Darkness Stirred ❧
“There are places even the kami will not enter. Places sealed not with stone, but with silence.”
Long before the Knights of the Order set foot on Japanese soil, their loremasters had recorded whispers—half-translations of accounts buried in temple annals and foreign merchant journals. Each pointed to one name:
Nata-dera.
And to one sin: Oda’s descent.
✠ The Seal Broken
It is said that in his relentless quest for dominion over the land, Oda Nobunaga sought not merely mortal submission, but spiritual supremacy. He burned temples, mocked the gods, and scorned the old ways.
But it was at Nata-dera, beneath the sacred cliffs of Kaga, where ambition turned to sacrilege.
The caves beneath the shrine were sealed long ago by priests who spoke in murmurs of “something old” buried before the dawn of Shinto. Nobunaga, scouring the land for forgotten weapons and forbidden knowledge, broke that seal.
What emerged is not fully recorded. Only that the villagers fled, the shrine fell silent, and Nobunaga soon met his strange and fiery end at Honnō-ji.
✠ A Summons Across the World
Centuries later, during the Meiji Restoration, new disturbances returned to the slopes of Nata. Local priests petitioned Tokyo. Tokyo sent soldiers. The soldiers did not return.
And so, the call went outward—westward.
The Arch-Principality of Vulgaria, bound by old treaties and older debts, dispatched a Foreign Contingent of the Order: firelocks, ritualists, and engineers. These were the early Vulgarian Fusiliers, under the banner of the Black Chevron.
They sealed the caves anew—not with brick, but with blood and scripture.
To this day, the Order maintains a quiet post near Nata-dera, and the Japanese government has never rescinded their extraordinary exemption to modern arms control laws.
✠ Some Doors Are Meant to Stay Closed
The shrine has been rebuilt. Pilgrims return. But those who know—truly know—never stray too close to the hollow mouth in the stone.
The moss there grows oddly.
The air hangs still.
And even in high summer, the wind moves only inward.
