Haka no Iuchiban

Tomb of Iuchiban

The Tomb of Iuchiban (CCC) was the resting place of the vile sorceror Iuchiban, designed to keep him trapped forever. After the Iuchiban's defeat following the Battle of Stolen Graves in 510, the Emperor commanded the Kaiu family to build the tomb to contain Iuchiban. Despite the most advanced construction and magic being used in the containment of Iuchiban, the bloodspeaker escaped two times, once in 748 and once in 1165.

Construction

Tomb of Iuchiban (CCC)

The purpose of the tomb was to keep Iuchiban inside, as he was a powerful and immortal sorcerer, and to keep his adepts outside. A total of three tombs were built, two were false. The Scorpion Clan made the position of the two fakes spread.

The Kaiu spent three months on the tomb, creating traps and pitfalls, using powerful Phoenix and Scorpion magic to seal the tomb. The chief architect, Kaiu Gineza, remained behind in the tomb to set the last traps so that no one could get in or out. Secretly he had instead been abducted and assassinated by the Scorpion Clan, so that the secrets of the tomb remained safe.

The tomb and the false tombs were along the western frontier, perched in the north of the Twilight Mountains, around a tea plantation. The Scorpion magistrates gradually leaked the location of the two false tombs, in hopes that the surviving bloodspeakers would learn them and attempt to rescue their leader. The ruse was enough to send some twenty cultists to their death, either from the guards or from the traps which lay beyond them.

Appearance

The room were Iuchiban was imprisoned was oddly unimpressive, a large stone chamber empty of all decoration. In the heart of the room laid a large iron casket, reinforced with bars of green jade. The metal was rusted and pitted in places, and the jade was streaked with black. Here and there, rivulets of black jade sludge oozed onto the floor. Gaijin used these to contain their dead in foreign land.

Rebuilt

After the first escape of Iuchiban in 748, the evil sorceror was undone when he attempted to forcefully posses the body of an Ise Zumi. Iuchiban was defeated again and captured, held prisoner with chains of jade until such time as the tomb was altered by Phoenix, Crab and Scorpion shugenja, who were imprisonned with him, to bind Iuchiban's spirit to the walls themselves. It was the Phoenix master of the Void who proposed to bind Iuchiban in the very walls of his tomb. The Council of Five assembled the greatest spirit binders in the Empire and brought them to the Tomb. The process took three days. Somehow the own Iuchiban's lieutenant, Yajinden, aided in the enhancement of the prison, seeking to be free from his master's whip.

Deathly Trap

Iuchiban was trapped within a location known as the Hidden Heart - an inner sanctum of rooms and corridors surrounded by an outer ring of unchanging chambers, the outer chambers. The Tomb's builders wanted anyone who dared to enter to die without exception. While the outer chambers all had solutions to get through, the Hidden Hearth contained nothing but death traps upon death traps, each sealed behind several feet of solid rock. His only companion was the shugenja he had first possessed - Soshi Gidayu, still trapped in his decrepit corpse.

Monsters

The tomb's original builders made no provisions for living guardians; Iuchiban, in the centuries since his imprisonment, wished for servants, or companions, or just something to watch besides his own shuddering corpse. He animated the bodies of dead interlopers, summoned minor oni to serve him, and even infused some of his own essence into the tomb's accouterments to ease the solitude of his existence.

Outer Ring

There were seventeen chambers in the outer ring, each one containing a different trap or monster. All the walls, floors and ceiling were carved from thick limestone. Mystic symbols have been placed on every block, to ensure that the spiritual protections could not be broken. The stones had been inlayed with jade and crystal bars, running through hollowed-out courses in the center of each. These were the chambers:

• Entrance Chamber: rectangular in shape and dominated by four massive pillars at the corners, carved into the shape of guardian samurai. In the center of the chamber stood a stone staircase, which led up to a pair of vaulted doors against the upper half of the walls. Four doorways - two to the left and two to the right - led deeper into the tomb. One of them was sealed shut, the rest lied open. The stairway was designed to collapse should anyone apply pressure to the false doors, and brought a series of timed and weighted stones down upon the entire room.
• Endless Corridor: the trap was a powerful Phoenix spell wrapped around a Kaiu optical illusion, intended to keep anyone in the room trapped in this limbo until they starve or go mad. As one moved the corridor pulled the far end away from him into infinity. Cutting off all visual stimuli would return to corridor to its natural length.
• The Pit of Dust: holes perforated the north and south walls at regular intervals. Southern ones began to suck the air out of the chamber, while northern ones began to pour dust into the chamber. Sealing the holes before the flow of dust would stop.
• Fear the Goblin: the walls were decorated with a series of twenty huge stone faces, depicting ogres, oni, and other fiendish creatures.
• The Lady and the Tiger
• Written Words Speak
• Test of the Void
• They Drink You: the floors of this room sloped downward from the four corners to a pit in the center, like an inverted pyramid. Eventually, the steps leading down to the pit would flatten, transforming the inverted ziggurat into a sloped pit. Anyone sucked by the pit would die, desiccated.
• Bide, bide: once the doors were closed, they bond almost magically with their surrounding frames.
• Be Quick: a long corridor stretched out into blackness, dotted by a few sooty torch-holders on the walls. A pair of hanging blades from the roof woudl swing down crosswise into it.
• Rotating Knives, Yes: a large hollow spinning cylinder took up the room. The inside of the cylinder had been fitted with serrated blades at regular intervals.
• Spinning Wheel: the room was taken up by a pair of huge wooden wheels on the east and west ends. The wheels stood perpendicular to the floor and constantly turned in a counterclockwise motion. A long steel beam connected the two, rotating counterclockwise along the length of the room as the wheels turned. The floor, apparently, did not exist.
• The Razor Gauntlet: a narrow corridor slanted diagonally through the center of this room. The walls and ceiling were studded with razor-sharp spikes. Eventually, a series of pulleys would maneuver sections of the wall back and forth along the corridor.
• Three-Skull Monty: six round stone pedestals in two rows of three each dominated the room. Each pedestal were topped by elaborate carvings in the shape of a huge skull, with hollow eyes and grinning smiles. Each skull had a different symbol carved into its forehead - "Mercy", "Fulfillment." "Trust," "Pain," "Caring," and "Peace," Another symbol, "Choose," had been carved into the rock above the sealed doorway. If three skulls had been turned before the door opened, gas flooded most of the room and began to interfere with breathing.
• Friends in Need: this square room contained a pair of shallow alcoves in the north and south wall, directly across from one another. The trap here was suggested by a cunning Scorpion as a proper reward for Bloodspeaker loyalty. Once it had been activated and the doors had shut, the north and south wall would begin moving slowly towards each other. The trap tested thei devotion of those trapped to each other and their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice for a comrade.
• Entrance to the Hidden Heart: it was the final room of the outer ring. The rectangular room had six pillars, carved into the likenesses of undead samurai, screeching oni and inhuman ogres. On the far north wall stood a shrine to Osano-wo, the Fortune of Thunder, defending Rokugan from Iuchiban's horrors. A stairway descended from the foot of the shrine down into the earth. Twenty-six stone steps marked the passage from the outer ring to Iuchiban's final resting place. At the foot of the stairs stood a great marble wall, which once held warnings to flee from the evil which lay beyond, and images of Bloodspeakers suffering horrible deaths at the hands of the imperial guard. That changed when luchiban was imprisoned for a second time, as he learned to shape the stone encasing him, so it contained carved visages of all the souls he had slain - distorted images of men and women howling their torment in silence. As Iuchiban's essence seeped into his surroundings over the past three hundred years, the wall became his only window to the outside world. Iuchiban had the power to open the wall like a living curtain, allowing others access to the Hidden Heart.

Hidden Heart

The traps designed for the Hidden Heart were all dead-ends. Once Iuchiban's spirit was bound into the walls, however, that changed. The trap mechanics and protective wards of magic gradually crumbled before luchiban's iron will. The cunning death traps that once existed there had changed or been supplanted with other horrors. Anyone who was killed while in the Hidden Heart became a thrall to Iuchiban.

• Zombie Guard Room: the room shaped to a fortress courtyard, with a wide and smooth floor, and the ceiling had a high vault, allowed Iuchiban's army to drill properly while they waited for war again. There were some twenty zombies there, standing in parade formation and staring ahead with blank expressions. Iuchiban had raised his zombies using the force of his own will, not through kansen, so the undead in the Hidden Heart did not have the porcelain masks.
• Memories of Fire and Blood: the chamber appeared to be a patchwork concoction of construction, a thousand locations in search of unity, and finding none. It served as a repository for Iuchiban's human memories - his thoughts and experiences from birth all the way up to his current imprisonment.
• Imprisoned Skeletons: 24 stalls jutted out from the walls, circling the chamber and broken only by the four stone doors exiting the room. Within each stall was a skeleton, clothed in ancient rags and bound by a set of manacles to the wall. The bodies there were those intruders Iuchiban did not feel were worthy of shaping into zombies.
• Mirror of the Soul: the mirror within the room was originally an early offering from Asahina Yajinden to his master. Through it, Iuchiban could see the true nature of any soul who had looked into it. He used it to screen early members of the Bloodspeaker cult. It was thought to be lost during the Battle of Stolen Graves. Iuchiban was able to spirit it there to his prison, fusing it into his essence, and modified it to capture the souls of unwary interlopers who approached his sanctum. Fushiki the Undying could be seen here, trapped within the mirror.
• Grasping Walls: the stonework run through with the spirits of the damned. They pushed and bulgef along the walls and floors, causing human-shaped impressions to travel up and down the stone, and different monsters were intermingled with them.
• Iaijutsu Armor: a large ring of wood was inlaid into the floor in the center of the room, similar to the dueling ring in a dojo. A series of mats lied along the left wall, while a judges' stand sat opposite them. Five suits of armor - including helmets, standards, and daisho - sat to the right of them, arranged neatly in a row. Another disembodied suit of armor stood within the wooden circle. Defeating the spirit would allow to free a previously defeated bushi and restore him to life, such as Kakita Motomari, Hida Shigetoshi, Kaiu Yoruto, Mirumoto Oyori, or Akodo Keisei.
• The Beating Heart: the room appeared like the inside of a stomach. The fleshy confines were a runny yellow in color, shot through with arteries and veins, expanding and contracting. The moisture along the walls was vaguely acidic and might eat through clothes and flesh. Long columns of jade and crystal could be seen through the translucent flesh.
• Secrets Uncovered: this room replayed memories from a distant past to each of those who entered it, and displayed a dishonored act or a unique incident which was relevant to them.
• The Devil's Bargain: this room had been broken into a quartet of steel cages, each bracketing off a corner. Only one of the cages was occupied, by Adisabah the Cruel, a rakshasa, but the others contained evidence of use at one time or another.
• Fountain Cave: the wall of this room arced into a natural-looking cavern. Stalagmites and stalactites decorated the floor and ceiling, while water dripped from an unknown location. A large pool of dark water sat in the center of the room. Four wooden doors stood in the empty space around the pool, where the Oracle of Blood were.
• Storm Chaos: a storm surrounded those who enter the room on all sides; the walls were formed by tumultuous clouds and forks of lightning. A single square of solid stone floor floated in the eye of the raging hurricane. Iuchiban created this area as a means of revealing the

intruders' weaknesses. The room generated a field which modified characteristics of anyone within the room.

• The Secret Heart: originally, this room had no doorways at all; the sepulcher was closed off, for Iuchiban wished to hide his shame as deeply as he could. The mad shugenja created a single opening to lure his adversaries in. A two-tiered platform, carved directly out of the surrounding rock, rose from the center of the room. Atop it lied the remains of a jade coffin.

Tomb's guardians

In 903 the Daidoji garrison guarding the Tomb was attacked by bloodspeaker disguised as the garrison regular supply train. The guard was strengthtened after it. In 1120 Asahina Yajinden managed to foul the guards and entered the Tomb, but never left it.

Awaken

Deep in the fields and forest of the empire, the three powerful tombs had rested for centuries. When in 1128 the Clan Wars shook the earth, a spirit was awakened within them, a spirit that would feast on the blood for years to come.

Keeper of the Tomb

Shinko Kamiko was the keeper of the Tomb of Iuchiban until his death in 1120. During the War of Spirits another keeper roamed. Deep in the Shadowlands, a new threat arose. People find oni chewed as if by the wind, torned apart, with limbs missing and torsos frayed. Something collected hearts and bodies and eventually it would came to Rokugan. Hida Hio was advised by the nezumi the Shadowlands warring between them, but the rokugani were too busy with their own war.

Final Escape

In 1165 Mohai killed the Emerald Magistrates who guarded the tomb. Iuchiban escaped for a second and final time, when shortly after a descendant of Gineza, Kaiu Kuma, and his wife, Kaiu Sui, a Kitsu Sodan Senzo, were tricked by Iuchi Shahai into releasing the bloodspeaker. Since his escape and subsequent permanent destruction in 1165 the Tomb has remained empty.^{[citation needed]}

External Links

• Tomb of Iuchiban (Anvil of Despair)

References

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