The long-dogs were masters of the Dark Light and also its slaves. It
gave strength to their awesome weapons and controlled their thoughts.
It was the lifeblood of their underground world; its beating heart.
But it was a diseased organ; within it were the seeds of a plague that
weakened the body, paralysed the brain and destroyed the soul. In
time, the Sons of Ne-Issan would find a way to tear that heart from its
earthly body. And once it was stilled, the long-dogs would be trapped
like maggots in a buried corpse, forced to feed on each other in the
darkness until the last were overcome by suffocation and the stench of
decay.
But first, their advance had to be halted with the aid of the
Plainfolk. Only then, when a way had been found to overcome their war
machines, could they be driven back into their desert lair and sealed
off for ever from the rest of mankind.
The Dark Light was both beautiful and terrible. It seduced and
corrupted, and made prisoners of all who tried to master it. The fools
who now sought to resurrect it would first be driven mad, then be
utterly destroyed by the demons that dwelt within it. From the moment
the warriors of the Seventh Wave had stormed ashore, those demons had
been banished from the lands bordering the Eastern Sea, and those that
haunted the minds of the long-dogs had been kept at bay far beyond the
Western Hills. But now, moved by blind ambition, a cabal of
domain-lords was planning to let them loose again! It was insane!
Yoritomo felt himself gripped by a deepening despair. Was history
forever bound to repeat itself?.
Like all true Sons of Ne-Issan, Yoritomo knew the story well. It was a
cautionary tale that had been handed down through the ages; a lesson to
which, from early childhood to his accession, his parents, teachers and
advisers had constantly returned.
Ne-Issan, the Land of the Rising Sun, lay on the eastern shore of a
vast continent that, in The World Before, had been called
Iyuni-steisa.
In those far-off days, the warriors whose descendants had given birth
to the Sons of Ne-Issan had lived in a distant place that had also been
called the Land of the Rising Sun. A land of great beauty, whose
people had risen to great wealth and power and had then lost their
souls to the spinners and the weavers of the Dark Light.
The Dark Light was the earth-bound brother of the white sky-fire that
split the heavens when the evil kami of the cloud-world tried to storm
the castle of Ameratsu, God of All. The blinding flash was made up of
