Story:

The earthquake was a malice that had come alive in physical form, hatred given tectonic weight, the ground itself shuddering the way a body shudders in the grip of something that hates it.

This is not nature, Kicho's whole being screamed. This is a signature.

We know this rot, Euphy's mind answered, cold and old. We have smelled this exact rot before.

The shaking stopped. The lanterns slowed. In the ringing silence, sixty seconds of aftermath hung in the air—dust, spilled sake, the whimpers of servants, and a Shogun of the realm still curled under the table.

Euphy was the first to move. Her head snapped toward the great windows on the eastern side of the hall—and she gasped aloud.

"Look," she said, and her voice was not the banquet voice, it was the war voice. "Everyone, look."

They looked. Through the lattice windows, beyond the rooftops of Kyoto, the eastern sky was curdling—a vast, evil red storm boiling up from the horizon where no storm should be, the color of infected wounds, pulsing faintly like something breathing.

Every person in the hall, farmer's daughter to empress, felt the same instinctive knowledge settle into their gut, wordless and absolute:

Something very evil had appeared there. Something had just been born, or summoned, or unsealed, in the east.

The palace erupted. Alarm bells began tolling from gate to gate, guards' shouts stitching through the corridors, the night filling with running feet and clattering armor.

Mitsuhide, restored to himself, was already bowing crisply to the Tenno, requesting permission to attend to the city's defense, and was gone before the words finished—out the door with his wits gathered around him like a general's cloak.