Daji

At the turn of the Golden Age and the Dark Age, in the Holy White Elm Monastery of the Central Mountains, a woman who had lost her memory woke before the altar after a caravan had trampled her. She wore a crimson palace gown and a broken nine-tailed golden hairpin, and her face was as cold as the ice deep in the snowy mountains. Only fragments were left in her mind: the Tomb of Oden, endless yellow sand and a strange phrase, the Five Elements Rite. The archdeacon had her thrown into a storehouse; the holy water sprinkled on her wrist turned black. Ella, a thirteen-year-old orphan cast out as an ill omen, slipped into the storehouse at night to wipe the blood from her forehead. The woman woke with a start, pushed her away and begged: Do not come to me again. Every day you stay near me brings you a day closer to disaster. The dark red mark inside her wrist was the Seal of Osoras. The next day miasma and the Scavengers fell upon the northern valley. With every way out cut off, the woman was forced to unseal her nine-tailed spirit. Crimson foxfire covered half the sky and the Scavengers were burned to ashes. She left the golden hairpin, its tail mended, to Ella and set out alone, without a name. Behind her name, Daji, hides the next reason for someone to kill her. Only Ella knows that the woman told of as a demon consort is a fox who wants to go home. She has set fires, but she has never burned an innocent. Since then the pilgrims of the Old Continent tell of a nameless woman who searches for the bloodline of Oden lost in another world, and who will one day return to the Tomb of Oden.