You are fast, but not fast enough; skilled, but not skilled enough. Pray to your gods. Your time has come.
It begins in the early 17th century, with a masterless man.
His birth name has been lost to history and he is now known only by his shadow name, Hagetaka (“Vulture.”) The circumstances of his life before the Awakening are lost to history, though his writings obliquely suggest that he became a bandit and assassin after his lord was slain through treachery. Interestingly, Hagetaka never writes of his Awakening, and makes many assumptions about the reader’s understanding of the events of his life before his lord’s murder. Most modern onikaze swordsmen consider this assumption of familiarity to be subtle Mastigos underhandedness at work, and some wonder if there really ever was an Awakened fallen samurai who went by the moniker “Hagetaka.”
Whatever the case, the Legacy’s texts tell of Hagetaka’s aimless wanderings, of a lack of focus and discipline and the elusive sense that something moved just beyond the brigand’s perceptions. Balancing serene meditations with a life of violent crime, Hagetaka eventually came to a “place of visions,” whereupon he experienced within a deep trance a sort of communion with what he called “the restless ghost of a great dragon of the western seas.” The substance of his exchange with this “dragon” is recorded only as a series of 98 mutually-contradictory koans (36 of which have never been satisfactorily deciphered by
any practitioner of the Legacy), but he came away with two things: the desire to offer the Adamantine Arrow the benefit of his experiences as a man of honor and a man without, and an awareness of what he called the onikaze: the “demon wind,” which transcended space and time.
The writings of Hagetaka thereafter chronicle his self-appointed quest to assemble those that might apprehend the vision revealed to him by the dragon. He fought many great warriors and conversed with many sages of martial philosophy, converted no few to his cause. All of these, Hagetaka eventually brought to an isolated and abandoned temple somewhere in the mountains. The place lay in ruins, and the first onikaze swordsman made his disciples work to restore it, forbidding them the use of their magics and instead commanding them to work with their own hands and minds, even as he imparted upon them — some nine students in all — the secrets of the demon wind. The morning after they had finally completed the years-long work of restoring the temple, Hagetaka’s students awoke to discover their master gone, with kanji inscribed into the cobbles of the courtyard: “These are merely stones, and the wind ceases its motion for no man. Your hands, your wills, your selves: you need nothing more.”
To a man, Hagetaka’s students left behind the product of their long labors, going out into the world to put into practice the training that they had been given. Some become great heroes and others, villains, but all took on students of their own, and, in time, the Wave-men as a whole were gradually adopted into the Adamantine Arrow, leaving only a scattered few to carry the philosophy in other directions. Legends tell that the Wave-men periodically gathered at Hagetaka's temple thereafter, to address matters of great importance to the entire Legacy, but the records of such gatherings are few and considered by most to be largely apocryphal. In modern times, the location of the temple — if, indeed, it ever truly existed at all — is lost to the Brotherhood, and most agree that such is for the best. While reverence for the past can be a source of strength and wisdom, it is also attachment, and the way of hte Wave-man denies such fetters. As Hagetaka himself said, "These are merely stones..."
Spreading across the world at the forefront of the wind from which they take their name, the warriors of the onikaze are wanderers, fifighting for the causes that appeal to them or sometimes just those that pay. Some embrace the romance of the samurai and defend the weak and downtrodden, setting their blades against wickedness and tyranny. Others, perhaps more prac- tical, sell their services — either as swordsmen or as teachers of the martial arts — to those who can afford them. A rare few even manage to carve out places for themselves and obtain positions of power and respect in established Consilii. Most, however, spend at least some part of their lives as lonely pilgrims, moving from place to place, upon musha shugyo, in an endless pursuit of the perfection of the blade.
Interestingly, while the Wave-men have always been relatively few, their numbers have survived the trials of time relatively undiminished by various wars and calamities. The very wanderlust that motivates their many quests and keeps them scattered has served to protect them from ordeals that might have grievously wounded or even exterminated a more close-knit Legacy. Thus, while they shall forever remain but few, it is likely that the swordsmen of the onikaze will always be out there, in one way or another.
Attainments
- Yanagini Kaze
- Tazeini Buzei
- Akumano Ken
