Truth Unveiled.

ARC 1- CHAPTER 1: TSUKISHIRO

Rain had fallen over the capital since dawn, and by the time it reached the Tsukishiro compound, it had softened into a fine, silver mist that clung to the cedar roofs and dripped, unhurried, from the eaves of the covered walkways.

Lynn Amatsuki liked the compound best like this, hushed, damp, smelling of wet stone and wet pine, the koi in the garden pond rising slow and pale beneath the surface. She sat on the engawa of her private residence with a book open on her knee, though she had not turned a page in some time. Her attention had wandered, as it often did on mornings like this, to the sound of the rain itself: the particular rhythm it made against tile, against leaf, against the black lacquer of the garden lanterns.

Her veil rested undisturbed over her face, the fine opaque silk giving away nothing of what lay beneath it. She was alone, or as alone as the daughter of the Shogun was ever permitted to be. Two of her household guards stood at a respectful distance beyond the garden's moss-covered stones, silent as the rain itself.

"You've been on the same page for half an hour, my lady."

Lynn had long since learned to recognize Sayo's footsteps, soft as they were, against the wooden walkway.

"I am absorbing it slowly," Lynn said.

"Mm." Sayo, her longtime attendant, knelt beside her with the unhurried familiarity of someone who had served in this household since Lynn was a child. She set down a fresh pot of tea, the steam curling up to meet the mist. "You were thinking about the deaths again."

It wasn't a question. Lynn folded her hands in her lap.

"Three in just as many months," she said quietly. "The steward's assistant, and now the girls from the kitchens. All of them healthy. All of them found without a mark on them, and yet—"

"And yet everyone insists it is simply bad luck," Sayo finished, pouring the tea with practiced care. "I know. The household is uneasy, my lady, whatever they say to your father's face."

Lynn accepted the cup, though she did not drink from it, not yet. Drinking through a veil required either patience or privacy, and she had grown skilled at waiting.

"My father does not tell me things," she said. "Not truly. He tells me enough to keep me from asking further questions, and thinks that is the same as honesty."

"He is trying to protect you."

"I know." Lynn's voice was soft, but there was an edge of quiet stubbornness beneath it that Sayo, of all people, knew well. "It does not mean I have to accept it without question."

---

Three deaths in three months would have troubled any household. In the Shogun's own compound, it was closer to catastrophe, not because three deaths among hundreds of retainers, guards, and servants was statistically alarming, but because of the manner of them. No wounds. No poison the physicians could identify. No signs of struggle. Each victim had simply been found, in the early hours, as though they had lain down somewhere quiet and never risen again.

The Shogun had said little of it publicly. Privately, within the walls of his own study, he had said a great deal, mostly to a folded letter bearing a seal Lynn did not recognize, sent out under cover of night to an organization whose name was spoken in careful undertones.

The Demon Slayer Corps.

Lynn did not know this yet. She would not know it, in fact, until the household itself learned it, until the day, some three weeks after that quiet rain-soaked conversation on her engawa, when word came that a Hashira had been summoned to Tsukishiro, and would be arriving within the fortnight.