Golden Raikou

Diary

Long before the haze, Raikou was a blade that never wavered, a samurai whose stillness could quiet a battlefield, but these days his only discipline is holding a lighter steady long enough to finish the job. He wandered into the shaman's lair meaning to run a simple bag on some sleepy degens, floor sweepers dreaming of moon math, when a pig wandered out from behind an altar and looked at him like it already knew his whole sad arc. Something in Raikou's smoke-fogged heart just clicked, some ronin frequency lighting up after years of silence, and he forgot the loot, forgot the shaman's warning chants, forgot basically everything except that snout. He tells the dojo it was destiny, cosmic rug of the romantic kind, that the universe aped into his heart on purpose, though everyone can see it was just a man who hasn't finished a single vow since the wars ended. Now he sits cross legged trying to meditate on detachment while the pig snores against his leg and his weed rolls off the mat, and honestly, brother, he says, some quests you don't finish, you just get finished by.