Basho Genji sits in practice, but his mind swirls.

It has been a morning of whistful memories and strange images. Perhaps it is merely the danger of this coming mission, or perhaps some strange disturbance in the fields of magic. Murasaki Tanka often spoke of such things, of harnessing and bending them. Genji has been plagued today with images of his youth. He wonders about his parents, whom he had not seen in months before falling onto Dereth. His father had been ill. Is he still alive?

Memories. The smell of mud in the pens. The grunts of hungry hogs. The bubbling of the pot over the stove as his mother made soup, huming quietly to herself and shuffling between this counter and that in the small kitchen. His sister laughing. She would be of twenty years, now. He thought he saw her, once, across a marketplace in Shoushi. Basho Jiri. It must not have been her. But she was gone in the blink of an eye.

Basho Genji does not fight these images, but rather embraces them. He sits, now, not in meditation but in memory. The world around him comes closer and closer as his mind leaves its practice behind. Birds. Wind. Smells. The deafening float and fall of snow. He embraces the illusion, loses his focus.

He snaps open his eyes. There, as the day before, ancient glyphs are carved into the stone of the shrine. Empyrean. No one knows what they say. Their meaning is gone with the hands that carved them.

History. History of the false, of the illusory.

Basho Genji frowns. Nostalgia pulls at his heart. Murasaki Tanka would be disappointed.

And what of the old teacher? What becomes of him? Was not Basho Genji tricked into the portal as he defended his teacher from attack? Was not Murasaki Tanka injured? Basho Genji sees him, there in the grass, his hand reaching toward him as it all stretched away into gray nothingness.

"I shall have some sake," he says. "Then I shall sleep. And that shall have been my day."

He stands and heads slowly down the road toward Shoushi, staring at the ground. His thoughts are heavy, and the Stones seem far, far away from his heart.