Records from the Banksi Library

Title: The Legend of the Fox

Record Date: Unknown

Archivist: Unknown

Accuracy: Unknown

In the beginning, there was no world. No earth. No heaven. There was only the Endless.

And in that Endless, two Primordials made their home. Their names were Izanagi and Izanami. Man and woman. Heaven and Earth. Potential and substratum. Physical and ethereal. Manifestations of the duality of the universe. Together, they made the World. They made the sky, the land, the oceans, the forests, the volcanoes. They conceived lightning before it streaked across the sky. They imbued within the barren matrix life with Potential.

They named it Onogoro.

Aeons passed. The World they created grew, became more. It gave birth to newer worlds. Different, sophisticated, each with their own creations, living and inanimate, yet they all revolved around the World they sprang from like children vying for their mother’s attention.

A multitude of species spawned in time in the different worlds. Svartalfar, ljosalfar, dökkálfar, vanir, jotunns, and many more. They developed their own rules, their own realities, and even minor gods to believe in. The Primordials did not care, for they had eyes for only their personal creation.

Onogoro.

The land of the bremetans. The land where people knew about their true origins, about the Primordials. The world that was ruled by Izanagi and Izanami’s daughter: the Empress Amaterasu.

But then, a calamity descended upon Onogoro. A vile wyrm of cosmic proportions that called itself the World Serpent. A draconian creature the empress named Ryujin, the beast of the ocean floors. A being of endless regeneration and venom that could destroy even the divine. A monster that held ironclad control over the dark depths of the oceans. A darkness so deep that even Amaterasu’s Eternal Light could not penetrate it without losing itself to its madness.

To defeat it, they needed something more. Something that could change the Rules. A true exception to the World System was needed. Thus, the Primordials created a being capable of warping reality itself. A creature that would henceforth serve as guardian and protector of the empress.

With nine lustrous tails, each holding its own mystery, the creature was not a bremetan. It was not a monster. It was not a demon. And it was not a god. It was something that did not fit into the World, like a puzzle piece that belonged to a different set, yet somehow managed to blend in. It straddled the line between reality and fantasy, inhabiting both Heaven and Onogoro at once, wandering from one existence to another as easily as walking through a door.

It was the Nine-Tailed Fox.

The fearsome fox clashed with the deadly Ryujin, and after a long-drawn-out war, emerged victorious, banishing the serpent into the endless depths of the ocean. Its job accomplished, it was ordered to return to the Primordials to continue its duty.

But the fox denied the command.

Boastful of its victory and proud of its skill, the fox decided it wanted more. Serving as guardian of the Primordials would not quench its desires any longer. That which could bend any reality, now wanted to forge its own destiny.

And so it did.

Using powers vested upon it by the Primordials themselves, it crafted an entire world, one that was just as twisted as itself. The bremetans called it Ikai—the Other World. A realm that both did and did not exist. This world gave birth to creatures that were twisted caricatures of true life. Because the fox was an aberration, so too were the species its world gave birth to.

Creatures that could not stand the Holy Light took shelter in the dark.

Creatures denied the blessings of the Primordials and existed in a perpetual wraith-like state.

Creatures that were cursed to become the strange apparitions of the night.

They were the yokai.

The yokai were demons. By bremetan logic, they were not alive, nor were they dead; they floated between the physical and the ethereal. Their powers, derived from the fox’s corruptive influence, allowed them to bastardize the World’s energy around them and mutate it, mimicking the elements. Such perversity allowed them to gain power, and with power came greed. Came insanity. Came violence.

In an attempt to outshine the brilliance of the empress, they formed their own empire, centered around Namzuuhuu, a fertile valley along the coast of the great ocean, the very place where the Nine-Tailed Fox won its first victory against the vicious serpent. An empire of leftovers and has-beens. Of svartalfar that had nowhere to go after the destruction of the Nine Realms. Of vanir, and dökkálfar, and jotunns, and countless other beasts. Agglomerations of lower life-forms that did not wish to submit before the might of the empress.

But Amaterasu, in her eternal benevolence, let them thrive.

Until they committed a corruption most vile.

Until they created…oni.

There are no words to describe the atrocity they commited. A vile corruption that was inconceivable to the bremetan mind. A flood of madness and horror followed by a twisted insanity, caused by a fusion of yokai and bremetan—corrupting the very essence of the bremetan soul to become something horrifying.

A mindless predator. A wicked demon with nigh-impossible levels of lifeforce at its command.

And they were being created in the dozens, hundreds and thousands.

Thus came the war.

Amaterasu and siblings Tsukuyomi and Susanoo, both gods in their own right, declared war upon the yokai lands. Tsukuyomi, the beloved Moon God, engaged the Nine-Tailed Fox in a battle of illusions, a battle that led to the curse known to all as the Black Moon. What happened next is unclear. The only thing that scholars agree on is that a Taboo was cast upon the land—an act so ominous that even its mention must be held in contempt. It is unclear what precisely happened, but it ripped all Potential from Namzuuhuu, converting the once fertile lands into a deadly desert that rejects the living. An act of ultimate defilement that not even the World could forgive.

The Nine-Tailed Fox, in a desperate last stand, tried to engulf our World with the Ikai, letting the deadly mists engulf our prosperous civilization and end everything. Neither Tsukuyomi nor Susanoo, for all their might, could stand against that.

It is what happened then that marked the birth of the tale of the Great Goddess.

Amaterasu, who had forever sworn to uphold the duties of the empress, realized how much the World needed her. She embraced godhood, bathing the World with her Eternal Light. In its glorious presence, the mists receded, taking back the shadows with them. Since the day of her ascension, the apparitions of the night could not stand to be in the presence of the light.

And since then, they have never entered the great and mighty Asukan Empire.