Moonlight Harvest

Join a ninja girl in exile finding her true self.

The daughter of the shogun was once a young girl. She watched on as her brothers trained in the Samurai arts. She too dreamed of fighting, but this was not allowed by her family. So instead she went out every night with two katanas she had stolen and let nature be her teacher in the art of ninjitsu.

After years of training in secret, the daimyo’s court found out about the girl’s secret ninjitsu training and decided to exile her lest she proved herself by completing an impossible mission. She was to sail west to foreign lands and assassinate an escaped samurai general who had once tried to overthrow the shogunate.

When the girl disembarked from her voyage, she was met by a vast new world, an endless plain of golden wheat under a warm sun. For the first time in her life she felt carefree, a world of possibilities in front of her.

The edge of the plains was lined with foothills, the outcrops of some far flung sleepy kingdom. Only a few common folk enjoyed a rustic life out here.

The paysage in which the ninja girl found herself was truly infected by the spirit of autumn, although in a way she had never experienced before. The land bore a cornucopia of fruits she had never even imagined.

A tradition amongst the common farmers in the far reaches of the kingdom is to gather bundles of wheat and cherries to welcome in the autumn. As well as these, bees were finishing their combs of honey, a delicacy for those which knew how to relinquish it from their stinging custody.

As the sun sets over the swathes of wheat, it’s warmth remains as it’s replaced by a full moon. Fireflies begin to appear and dance with the stars as the sky turns to ink.

After 3 nights, she stumbled across a dark grotto with blood red flowers and mossy green roof, as if sewn into the fabric of the woods itself. A wild maiden bearing the sigil of a wolf was caretaker to this place, very much beyond the limits of the kingdom and bristling with magic. This was the first time since landing in this foreign land when the ninja girl felt comfortable enough to reveal her presence. Here she stayed for a night as she soaked up the energy of the dark forest and felt beckoned to set foot further into the wild plains…

Lavender was harvested in the province, but beyond the borders of the realm, just like the wheat, an endless plain of purple heralded the gateway to a sleepy swathe of endless possibilities.

As the ninja girl thought back of home, the same purple sky but only oppression instead of endless tranquillity, she wondered if she would ever go back, and began to question if she even wanted to complete her mission, or let it slip away into the ether and begin a new life of freedom.

The ninja girl held her katana up to the moonlight and let the lunar energy flow into it. She suddenly realised that she had always been a child of the moon, since it was the one who had guided her on all of those long nights growing up, and it was the one still watching over her now.

Deep in the endless plains of lavender and wheat she found a magical grove, a forest which no human had ever set foot in before. The air glowed with a conflux of moonlight and fireflies, the trees laced with the night’s sky itself. This would be her new home, hers to watch over and protect. For the first time in her life, she felt a sense of true belonging.