Dragon Lands - Shiro Kitsuki, and Last Step Pass

[Vutall]

Shiro Kitsuki
Spires of green tile and gold fixtures pierce upward into the thin sky above the frozen mountain ridge ringing Dragon Clan lands. Thickly forested and abundant in wild animals, the forbidding peaks are to the Dragon as a stout bailey is to a fortress. Their gatehouse is Shiro Kitsuki.

Shiro Kitsuki straddles Last Step Pass, the broadest and most easily traversed in the mountains—and perhaps the only one viable without local guides. Observers in the castle’s highest towers can see troop movements across the entire province. A major road and a navigable river, the only fast routes to the Dragon’s mouth, approach the foothills below. The shiro’s strategic value tantalizes foolhardy commanders who crave the glory and prestige of storming its unconquerable heights. The Dragon would have it no other way. However, Shiro Kitsuki’s first and foremost purpose is to train Dragon esotericists and specialists. Few non-Dragon ever think of Shiro Kitsuki, let alone visit. But Shiro Kitsuki’s trials confer fame and status on those members of the Dragon Clan who are tough and smart enough to over-come them, and trusted allies of the clan are sometimes invited to undertake the challenges as well.

Elemental mystics, shrewd investigators, and high-land soldiers all owe their mettle to time spent at Shiro Kitsuki in study and practice. But this remote loca-tion, so long occupied by eccentrics forced into close contact, is home to numerous long-standing grudges between its various residents. Shiro Kitsuki’s greatest weakness may be itself

Strengths and Weaknesses
Last Step Pass is X-shaped, and Shiro Kitsuki’s four keeps rise from the heights to the north, south, west, and east of the pass. While the eastern keep is camouflaged within the wilderness, the northern, western, and southern keeps are classic yamashiro, or mountain fortresses. Rings of ramparts give way to a literal maze of interlocking baileys, spiraling up the mountainside like a spider’s web. Most baileys have multiple gate-houses so attackers cannot be sure which leads to a keep. The gatehouses and baileys themselves are full of puzzles and traps designed both for use in training Dragon cadets and to confound attacking forces. The primary structures surmount each peak in hashigokaku layout, consisting of three rectangular structures ascending the keep like stairs and connected to the others via several sky bridges

The Top of the World
Outside the baileys, Shiro Kitsuki’s first line of defense is the surrounding terrain. Few non-Dragon know how to navigate the mountains without falling victim to avalanches, rock slides, frostbite, or wild animals. There are traps and training grounds outside the walls as well. A stone maze of narrow paths carved into a rocky mesa confounds one approach. Another looks like an ordinary mountain forest but is full of hunting traps including covered spike pits, swinging and rolling logs, and tripwires

Attackers climbing to a keep must also face the cruel obstacle of altitude sickness, a set of symptoms that low barometric pressure and thin air inflict on those who ascend too quickly. The Dragon defenders, accustomed to the height and well provisioned, can take advantage of their foes’ shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness, and dehydration

Shiro Kitsuki’s remote location has its drawbacks, however. The quartermaster carefully rations provisions, since inclement weather and bad harvests can take a serious toll on the valley farms that support the castle. Forage and game make up a significant quantity of the food served there. But Shiro Kitsuki’s greatest weakness is the disunity among its various factions that practice different disciplines. Few outside the Dragon Clan, even among their trusted allies who visit Shiro Kitsuki to train, understand the long-running buildup of petty squabbles that make the castle’s inhabitants their own worst enemies. An infiltrator who understands these divisions could easily play them off one another, forcing the castle to devour its own tail.

Castle Culture
Everyone at Shiro Kitsuki is involved in a journey of self-improvement—either their own or someone else’s, as an instructor or mentor. These journeys are physically, mentally, and spiritually demanding, to the point where many residents and guests—particularly those on the younger side, in the thick of their own training—have little energy for social life and casual conversation. Those who thrive in quiet and wild places tend to feel at home on the castle grounds, where the wind, trees, and animals are generally louder than the people. A person who passes someone on a path will receive a respectful acknowledgment, but small talk is unlikely unless one goes hunting for it. People tend to be a little blunt and abrupt when they begin conversations, thinking nothing of introducing serious topics without the customary buildup.

The instructors, staff, and garrison soldiers are more garrulous and relaxed than trainees. Cold winter nights often give rise to gossip sessions or impromptu debates around the hibachi braziers, with plenty of strong shōchū to keep everyone warm. Visitors some-times struggle with the Dragon habit of turning what seems like an innocent conversation into a discourse on philosophy or religion, an off-the-cuff lecture, or an elaborate thought experiment of the kind most people prefer to avoid after hours

Shiro Kitsuki is not a densely populated castle, and most of the instructors have worked there for a very long time. Accordingly, old rivalries and grudges have had a long time to develop. Teachers compete with one another to secure the admiration of the most promising students. Successful students boost a teacher’s reputation and are therefore an investment in the teacher’s family’s success. Positively influencing promising students also means the teacher gains access to favors from those students as they rise in status after they leave

While anyone committed to “eating bitter”—toughing it out and staying focused—at Shiro Kitsuki may train in any of the teaching divisions’ chambers, focusing on one line of study usually yields the most reliable results. As they spend more time at the castle, many of the students and teachers assigned to each division grow cliquish and inward focused, to the point that rivalries pop up between the different divisions. A prominent visitor to Shiro Kitsuki may find themselves with invitations to three or four simultaneous social events hosted by the different divisions of the castle complex. While the visitor may simply think they have a choice of events to attend that evening, the conflicting events are in fact efforts by the division heads to undermine one another. By choosing to attend one, the visitor ingratiates themselves with their host and frustrates those they turned down.

Recreation
Low-key activities make up much of the Shiro Kitsuki social life: board games, music, poetry circles, or visits to nearby valley ryokan for tea ceremonies or hot-spring bathing. Once visitors become accustomed to the altitude, wandering in the highlands brings them to unparalleled views of the valleys below, the stuff poetry is made of. Bears, macaques, sable, serows, foxes, boars, and wild cats are visible on such hikes, but hunting for sport rather than for food is strictly prohibited for fear of angering the mountains’ kami.

The Investigators' Masquerade
In addition to classwork and case studies, the Kitsuki Investigators use recreated crime scenes to give rookies the next best thing to on-the-job training. The annual culmination of these exercises is the Investigators’ Masquerade. The senior leaders of the Kitsuki Investigator School leverage their skills in disguise and subtlety to adopt fictional personae and stage a simulated crime and attendant mystery, redecorating the Shiro Kitsuki grounds as the setting. Kitsuki Investigators and any allies they wish to enlist then have a week to uncover the truth behind the mystery. The first team to come to the masquerade committee with the solution receives a prize of great value. Recommendation for high-status placements, masterwork paired sets of katana and jitte, and renowned hunting dogs and warhorses have been prizes in the past, but the glory and respect winners receive are of equal value. This hands-on investigative exercise grows gradually more elaborate every time it occurs, and it always includes puzzles, social challenges, and athletic or martial tests that contain concealed clues

The Compass Keeps
Each of the four keeps organizes and administers a curriculum of training procedures to prepare their trainees for a certain calling. A curriculum consists of a series of “chambers,” each of which is a challenge or set of related challenges that a trainee must attempt and eventually complete. Each chamber has a proctor who oversees it, sometimes with the aid of assistants, and decides when a trainee has mastered the chamber sufficiently that they may be graduated to the next chamber. Some chamber challenges take place within a single room built for the purpose, such as one of the outer baileys’ gatehouses—hence the name “chamber.” Some of them tend to take a few days to clear, others multiple weeks or even months. While students often sing the praises of whoever completes the chambers fastest, instructors admire a trainee who succeeds only after weeks or months of hard work at a chamber that does not come naturally to them.

The southernmost keep of Shiro Kitsuki houses its military academy. The academy teaches conventional and unconventional warfare techniques (especially those related to alpine warfare), didactic methods for drill instructors, and the philosophy of war, including concepts like just war and the application of Shinseist thought to martial arts, tactics, and strategy. Wargames, involving field exercises in warm weather and Go, shōgi, and miniatures exercises in extreme cold, take place year round

The western keep is the home base of the Kitsuki Investigator School as well as the residence of the current castellan, Investigator Emerita Kitsuki Ma’aya. The multistory library and Kitsuki family archives are housed in this keep. Most of the interior consists of small offices and lecture halls in which Kitsuki Investigators hone their craft and train the next generation

The northern keep is a Shinseist monastery maintained by the Dragon Clan’s tattooed monks. The monastery is in charge of Shinseist services for the entire castle complex and liaises with the small temples in the valleys that minister to the lower-class laity. It is austere and spare even by monastic standards, many of its halls and walkways exposed to the bitter mountain weather as a means of teaching the monks perseverance and stoicism. Stairways rimed with ice and courtyards buried deep in powdery snow mark the northern keep, giving it the appearance of an abandoned facility even when fully occupied

The eastern keep looks strangest of all. Viewed from afar, visitors might think it no keep at all; the structures are smaller, and fewer of them protrude through the trees that cover the peak it sits upon, in contrast to the stepped towers surmounting the other three. Many of the keep structures are built into the mountain’s caverns and under its rocky overhangs. The eastern keep’s arrangement reflects the shugenja who occupy it and their quest to eliminate the difference between the physical self and the elemental self. Every winter, some rooms and cells must be abandoned to massive bears who decide to settle in for their winter torpor there instead of bothering to dig their own dens. Visitors are often advised to remember that bears do not truly hibernate but rather wake every now and then in search of choice morsels—and to bears of this size, a human is a choice morsel indeed.

What Attracts Visitors
Shiro Kitsuki houses many important facilities for the Dragon Clan, including archives, an armory, a sword-smith’s forge, several vegetable gardens, and a modest dōjō for Mirumoto fencers. That said, the entire castle’s most important role is as a training facility. It primarily serves the Dragon Clan, but trusted Dragon allies are occasionally invited to join in maneuvers or spend a year training alongside Dragon Clan students. These out-of-clan visitors need a great deal of patience to weather not only the harsh environment and the difficult training, but also the idiosyncratic, philosophical culture the Dragon Clan fosters in its members

Supernatural Phenomenon
Shiro Kitsuki teems with rumors of aspirants who looked too deep into the abyss: trainee shugenja and monks who fell too far into their meditations, who traveled out into the mountains and never came back. Lost in their own heads, infused with powers beyond the human norm, they lost the ability to relate to standard society and gave themselves over to the wilderness. Most of these stem from the sudden dis-appearance of students who tired of Shiro Kitsuki’s frustrations and left to rejoin lowland society. A few of the stories, however, are true

Agasha Pōsan was once the most promising shugenja studying at Shiro Kitsuki. One of her explorations to find a remote location for meditation and practice took her into the domain of a demonic entity, deep within a mountain cave. The ravenous being from Gaki-dō, the Realm of the Hungry Dead, had long been stranded without prey. As Pōsan reached the end of her meditation, her resolve and clarity faltered, and the ancient evil was able to trick her into becoming its conduit by taking the guise of a kami

The few shugenja at Shiro Kitsuki who went after her recognized the monster that had infested Pōsan’s soul. They transformed the area around the cave into an icy tower to contain the hungering horror. Upon their return to the castle, they said Pōsan had died in her meditations, and they declared the mountain peak off-limits. That was a generation ago. Only one of the shugenja from the initial cover-up remains, wracked with guilt in her old age. Pōju is Pōsan’s biological sister, and she dreams of freeing Pōsan before she dies. But her health will no longer allow her to consider climbing mountains. Unless she finds someone to confide in, someone courageous and capable enough to approach a possessed shugenja in her place of power, Pōju may leave this world with her heart still breaking with regret