Onryo Ieyasu Champion Lore
He is called Onryo leyasu. None know his true name. Throughout Yakai he wanders, gleaming-eyed and tireless. Countless Demonspawn tyrants and warlords have fallen to his blade and bow. Wailing spirits have been dispersed at a stroke, and shambling Undead turned to dust by his blessed shortsword. Through these triumphs he has saved many innocents, but never once has he stopped to acknowledge them. He does not pause a moment upon any victory, but begins anew his slow, measured walk, pulled by currents of magic and intuition toward the next evil he must destroy.
leyasu is ancient, older even than Yakai as a coherent state, born when the area was called the Dawnlands. The Human who would become leyasu was evidently an exalted warrior, for he was buried with many charms and wards upon him to ensure a peaceful eternal rest. A sanctified dagger was tied into his mouth, and he was wreathed in paper talismans inscribed with incantations against Darkness.
His corpse decayed unnaturally slowly, held in near stasis by his magical protection. The charms around him withered and disintegrated, but their magic remained potent upon his person. Centuries later, Siroth unleashed the Scourge of Darkness and true Undead walked Teleria. The Scourge was such that even the holy Dawnlander magic of old was not able to prevent a seed of Undeath from taking root in the body of the ancient warrior. The warded corpse shook and writhed, but the weight of the earth compacted around it over the years held it fast. The mind of the warrior was long gone, but over many decades entombed in the ground, a new mind shaped itself — formed from the clash of Light and Darkness, of Undeath and the magic of life and hope. Inchoate and deprived of all sensory stimuli, it raged against its own being, and became obsessed with the ultimate destruction of all creatures of Darkness, including itself.
After many centuries, the corpse was exposed to the light of day by the mattocks and shovels of Shadowkin laborers digging a canal – their last deeds as living beings. The Undead body rose from the loosened dirt and pummeled one worker with its bare hands, then drew the ceremonial blade it had been buried with and cut down the rest. The revenant sensed an evil permeating the land, the taint of Siroth’s Mikage puppets and their tyrannical rule.
Rumors of a sleepless, unshakable hunter of Mikage autocrats and soldiers then spread. When their enforcers brutalized peasant insurrectionists, leyasu appeared. He evened the odds, and smote any bodies that stirred with Undeath on the corpse-strewn battlefield. Cruel Demonspawn aristocrats were laid low in their sumptuous halls, their bodyguards killed or driven away in terror, their Undead servants destroyed. After several months and many sightings, even Lady Mikage acknowledged the threat of this ‘Onryo leyasu’, as it came to be known, and sent forth word to her underlings to destroy this dangerous adversary.
Morikore the Pitiless, a fearless tyrant, gathered his strongest warriors and went to hunt down leyasu, but they were slain to a soul, their guts spilled across the grass and Morikore’s head left at the feet of his corpse. A potent Shadowkin necromancer, Tsukyu, suspected leyasu’s nature, and sought to take command of him. To help subdue the revenant, she brought her finest creation, an Undead amalgam made from the flesh and bones of Shadowkin and horses alike. But the Onryo cut through its thick muscle and sinew as if it were empty air, unbinding the Shadow magic of the creation at the touch of his holy blade. With a few quick strokes, the monster collapsed, reduced to quivering chunks. Alarmed, Tsukyu spoke words of dark power, attempting to force leyasu’s animating Undeath to acknowledge her as its master. But his wards reflected the sorcery of her words and burned her own mouth to ash. With her spells ineffective, leyasu made short work of her.
The fall of the Mikage Autocracy did nothing to abate leyasu’s implacable thirst for purgation. To this day, the revenant clad in weathered armor still roams, an unthinking force of nature. Woe to any who would traffic with Demons or reanimate Undead anywhere within the lands of Yakai, for Onryo leyasu will bring such malefactors death, unswervingly and unstoppably. So comprehensive is his vengeful watch that some believe there is more than one Onryo, for the burial rites that created him would have almost certainly been used on more than one fallen Dawnlander centuries ago. The Three Sovereigns, the modern rulers of Yakai, have vowed to uncover the truth of leyasu’s existence. They have called upon the citizenry to help track the elusive avenger, wherever he may roam in the old Dawnlands which he is now eternally bound to defend.