[hr][hr][h2][center][color=9e0b0f]Hashinau-I, Mistress of Blades[/color][/center][/h2][hr][hr]
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/T8Zzs6I.png[/img]

[sub]Art by [url=https://twitter.com/Cy_lindric]Juliette[/url]

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2anGTALAV4]Theme[/url][/sub][/center]

[color=9e0b0f]Name:[/color] [indent]Hashinau-I[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Titles:[/b][/color] [indent]The Mistress of Blades, Sword Sage, Thousand Army Killer, Mountain-Cutter, Swordsman’s Doom.[/indent] 

[color=9e0b0f][b]Age:[/b][/color] [indent]120 Great Years of the Old Tri-Lunar Cycle.[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]World:[/b][/color] [indent]Rakunen, a feudalistic world of towering mountain ranges, verdant river valleys, and dense bamboo forests. For as long as anyone can remember Rakunen has been a world divided by many warring Empires and Kingdoms.[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Race:[/b][/color] [indent]Hanin, a race of slight tanned humanoids with dark hair and almond shaped eyes.[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Form:[/b][/color] [indent]Hashinau-I is a withered old crone of diminutive stature. Her famous blood stained hair has faded to almost complete white, only streaked by crimson here and there. She wears ragged roughspun robes and goes unadorned save for a pair of copper disks that stretch out her earlobes. Her lips and teeth are stained blue for her near continuous smoking of Oolachi leaves. 

There’s a hard edge to the old woman and her mind and tongue are still extremely sharp despite her age. Her scarred arms are still coiled with lean ropey muscle and she stands straight and unbent. [/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Legend:[/b][/color] [indent]No one truly knows where she came from, or who trained her in the deadly Sword Arts that she evidently possessed. But the Legend of Hashinau-I was born on the battlefield, the travelling mercenary who could not be defeated, who slew every man put before her, who could singlehandedly fight off a hundred men. 

She held the esteem and terror of every Sovereign, controlled the fate of empires and nations with her whims, became richer than any lord or merchant prince. And she gave it all up to live as a hermit on a mountain. 

After she split the mountain, Hashinau-I returned to the world below, but never again did she take up her blade in the service of another. She sought out all the great Sword Masters of the world, to find one that could do but a fraction as she had done. She found only disappointment.

Finally, after many years, she gave up her travels and lived in a barrel in the market of the Great Yellow City. Never taking a single pupil, never raising her sword again. She lived in absolute debasement and squalor, lower even than the stray dogs. Occasionally great men, emperors and sages, would seek her out for her wisdom and try to rouse her to action, to take part in their affairs once more. They all left with the same answer:

“Be gone, worms. I am trying to think like nothing.”[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Will:[/b][/color][indent] Hashinau-I comes from a violent world, constantly at war with itself. She has seen thousands upon thousands die by her hand for nothing more than the petty squabbles of children. Hashinau-I is the ultimate practitioner of violence that her universe has ever produced. And she has learnt to abhor it.

She seeks to face the Gods and ask them why the cycle of violence must be so. And if their answer does not satisfy her? Then she will cut them down.[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Mastery:[/b][/color][indent] The greatest swordsman to have ever lived on Rakunen cowers before the might of Hashinau-I, there is no equal when it comes to her ability to turn men into corpses. In particular, she is highly skilled in the Art of the Cut, the act of cutting something, anything, everything. 

Even without a sword, it is said that Hashinau-I is still more deadly than any other Sword Sage. To quote the Mistress of Blades herself: ‘A Sword is just a tool to cut with, the actual cutting is done by your Will, given sufficient Will, anything can be a sword.”[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Ascent:[/b][/color][indent] It is said that on the last day of Hashinau-I’s earthly existence, she had been sat in her barrel, smoking from her nikishi pipe as she did most days. By this time she was an old woman, ancient by the standards of most of the Hanin. Men who were old enough to remember when Hashinau-I had split the mountain were all grandfathers or great-grandfathers themselves by this time. Many only knew her as the crazy old woman who lived in a barrel. 

None-the-less, it is said that all gathered stopped what they were doing when the ancient crone’s pipe suddenly dropped from her mouth and she began to laugh hysterically. From beneath her tattered robes she had pulled out a tiny stump of blade, barely extending past the sword hilt, that few in the market had ever even seen.

“Everything is nothing. And nothing is everything.” Hashinau-I had exclaimed as she had climbed atop her barrel.  “I do not exist, you do not exist. This sword does not exist… This world does not exist.” 

As she spoke, a halo of divine fire spread its way around around her head, until it crowned her in the light of the stars themselves. It dripped down her arm and onto her sword hand, until the blade glowed as bright as her did. Those who witnessed it said that they suddenly realised that the stumpy broken sword blade was not small at all, in fact it stretched longer than any there could see, it stretch wider than the universe itself, it stretched to infinity.

Hashinau-I made her final cut – and disappeared in a flash of light.[/indent]

[color=9e0b0f][b]Ephemera:[/b][/color][indent] It is said that you will know Hashinau-I by her two Icons. First, the Infinite Blade, the broken stump of a straight bladed Jian that is actually longer than the universe. Second, a bronze and rosewood nikishi pipe, said by Hashinau-I to be far more valuable than any ugly hunk of metal. [/indent]

[hider=Hashinau-I and the Mountain][sub][color=9e0b0f][b]H A S H I N A U - I   A N D   T H E   M O U N T A I N[/b][/color][/sub]

[indent]There is an old tale told in Koshi'ni Highlands, peculiar to the local people there, who have inhabited those lands for countless aeons, of how the Great Mountain, Kuraka-Ko, came to be known as the Split Peak. Today, the Great Mountain is cut down the middle by the Gorge of Tenshai, through which the famous river of the same name now flows. But according to the Koshi'nin this was not always the case.

Long ago, before the arrival of our Great and Bountiful Empire (long may it prosper), when a hundred squabbling pretty kings ruled and warred in these lands, the mountain of Kuraka-Ko was whole. There was no gorge cut through this highest of peaks, and the river Tenshai instead snaked its way through the wide valleys around its base. 

In those long ago chaotic days, a stranger came to the lands of the Koshi'nin. A warrior woman from the lowlands below, a mercenary who had fought under the banner of every king and who had bathed so long in the blood of a hundred armies that it had stained her hair the brightest red. Her lips were stained blue from the smoking of Oolachi leaves, and she carried a fine nikishi pipe of bronze and rosewood.

This stranger was Hashinau-I, the Mistress of Blades, the greatest wielder of the Sword Arts to have ever lived, who you no doubt know from countless other stories.

Hashinau-I had grown tired of fighting the wars of men, for men were too easy to slay and she desired a stronger opponent. The villagers, fearful of invoking the terrible wrath of the Sword Sage, delicately told her that there were no worthy opponents to be found amongst them. Hashinau-I only smiled, and told them she had not come to fight any of them.

She had come to slay a mountain.

At first the villagers thought that Hashinau-I was joking, but as her face darkened at their laughter, they quickly realised that she was perfectly serious. Privately they decided that the great swords woman must have lost her mind. But they could ill afford to make an enemy of Hashinau-I, who had once slew the Titan or Yrre with nothing more than sharpened finger nail, so they humoured her, and gave the great warrior their hospitality.

Hashinau-I took up residence on the great peak of Kuraka-Ko, living as a hermit in a little cave below the summit. The people of Koshi'ni would make offerings to her, but seldom did the Sword Sage come down from her mountain. When emissaries from the petty kings below sought her out so that she would take up her blade once more in their service, she sent them away in disappointment, occasionally missing a few of their limbs if she thought they had been particularly disrespectful.

For the first three years, she wandered the surface of the mountain. Getting to know every feature of its sloping sides, its forests and streams, every rock and every crag, how the wind blew against it in the winter, how the sun warmed its flanks in spring. When she knew every blade of grass and every pebble on the mountain, Hashinau-I went back into her cave and started to dig. 

She used the sword that she had cut down countless men with to dig a tunnel deep into the back of the cave. Scarce did she emerge from the tunnel, and few of the villagers were brave enough to enter to see it from themselves. Those that did said that she had dug her way deep into the heart of the mountain. Scraping away at the dirt and rocks for years and years until her sword was ground down to just the stump of a blade, its edge incomparably fine. 

Finally, when Hashinau-I had reached the very centre of the mountain, she carved a small chamber there and sat and meditated. For thirty days and thirty nights she sat in complete darkness, unblinking, heart beat and breathing slowed to the point of near death. 

On the thirty first day she emerged from her cave, walked down from the mountain, turned her broken blade to it, and [i]cut.[/i]

And the mountain split in two.

Before she left one of the villagers asked Hashinau-I how she had done it. How could one woman cut a mountain in half with the stump of a broken blade? Hashinau-I had only smiled enigmatically as she had puffed blue smoke from her nikiseri pipe and said: 

"To cut a thing, one must understand it. It took me three years to understand the surface of the mountain, and many more to understand what lay beneath it. But the most difficult part is learning to [i]think[/i] like a mountain." 

Hashinau-I never visited Koshi'ni again, but she would go on to have many other adventures, and cut many more things. To this day, however, there is still a shrine dedicated in Hashinau-I's honour that can be found at the mouth of the Tenshai Gorge, where the entrance of to her cave could once be found.[/indent][/hider]