Revealing the Ancient Wisdom
Once, it is said, there was a land known as the Jade Empire, which rested by the shores of a deep blue ocean. A powerful emperor ruled this land, known to those who lived there as ŇRokugan,Ó and kept it in peace for many years.
A samurai ambassador, Miya Mashigai, was sent from the EmperorŐs court to gather news. As he set out, however, he met with a terrible tragedy: his ship, battered by storms and thrown far out into the deep ocean, wrecked upon the shoals of a foreign land. There, peasants found the samurai and carried him to their barbarian lord.
"Tell me of your land," said the foreign lord as he knelt later beside the sickly ambassadorŐs resting chamber. "Speak to me of the place from which you hail."
And so these ancient stories were written of the heroes and villains of that great Empire, brought across a storm-filled sea and into your hands. They are the tales of the long-ago Empire, the tales of those who made Rokugan a legend.
It is believed in Rokugan that wisdom can be taught even by those who know nothing. So too, can great truths be shared, even when lands are as distant as the Empire of Rokugan from the small green island upon which the honorable Miya Mashigai's ship stumbled.
Somewhere, Miya Mashigai lifts his weary eyes from his scribe's final page. The scribe slowly rises and sets his feet toward his home, leaving Mashigai and the implements of his labors behind. Mashigai lifts the journal onto his lap and looks at the distant, blue-green mountains of the foreign shore. As the.light flees from his eyes, the scribe's withered brush rolls gently in the ink of the stone and the wind turns the journalŐs pages one by one. Mashigai's body will forever rest there, on the shores of a distant land, but his spirit returns once more to the days of honor and glory in the Empire that he loved.
When the first page of the journal opens beneath his cold hand, the tales he recorded begin once more. Do you have the courage to read them, and become part of the tale?
"Once, there was a land of legends...