Tenko

Tenko

Fox-eared and tailed, sometimes several times over, the Tenko are the smallest Faerie race and the most consequential in proportion to their number. They differ from the Cait Sith in that they are not nearly as fox-like as the Cait Sith are cat-like — the resemblance is a suggestion rather than a fact, and a great deal of Tenko humor turns on how much this bothers other people.

They are mischievous, cunning, calm, and closer to the Divine than any other race. They also hit extremely hard when provoked.

Appearance

Russet through white, with one to nine tails — the count is not a rank, whatever the court believes, and Tenko have never corrected the misunderstanding because it is useful. Their wings are storm-grey and crackle audibly in the hour before rain.

What the tail count actually tracks is disputed among Tenko, which is the joke's second layer: the leading theory at the Shrine is that it correlates with how far along a metamorphosis is, and that a nine-tailed Tenko is closer to leaving than to arriving.

Attuned Magic

Lightning. A nascent Tenko draws sparks and reads the charge in the air. A powerful one calls down strikes, rides a storm front, and channels the raw current of the sky through their own body without harm. It is the only attuned magic that is dangerous to bystanders by default, and it makes the Tenko's reputation for gentleness a matter of choice rather than incapacity.

In the Ninefold it is worked as maintenance: charge drawn off the terraces before a storm breaks, channel-gates flashed clear, and the standing practice of walking up into the weather that visitors find inexplicable and the drain-crews regard as a Tuesday.

Life

Shrines outnumber houses. Households are small, scattered up the terraces, and bound into the water-rota — the maintenance obligation that falls on every household in the province by turn, and which is the only real law the Ninefold enforces.

Names. One name, given at the First Gate, and it is not a family name — Tenko do not carry lineage, on doctrinal grounds. A Tenko who takes a second name has left the province, and everyone at home will know why.

Arrival. A new Tenko is walked up the gates. Not all nine — as far as they can go in a day — and then asked what they saw, and the answer is written down and kept, and never referred to again in their hearing. The Shrine has four centuries of these. Nobody outside the priesthood knows what they are for.

Rota. Skipping your turn on the drains is the closest thing the Ninefold has to a serious crime, and it is enforced socially, absolutely, and without regard to rank, priesthood, or piety.

Society

The Ninefold Shrine is a complex of nine gates ascending a mountainside, each marking a step toward whatever sits at the top. The Tenko are the Kingdom's theologians, and their theology is a problem for it: they hold that the world was made whole, abundant, and unranked, and that the doctrine of advancement through service is something the Faeries invented and then mistook for revelation.

Actual power sits at Rota Hall, with the engineers who keep the terraces standing, and the Shrine has never won a disagreement with them.

Tribes

An island, three ways of being a fox, and one watch that pays for the other two.

The Kumiho refuse the Huli Jing nothing, and everyone on the island understands exactly why.

Currents

The Nine Gates. The priesthood, ranked by gate, conducting a four-century argument about what the world was made for at a volume the capital cannot hear.

The Blessing Trade. Priests who supply the nobility with legitimacy in wording that indicts it. It funds the province and compromises it a little more each year.

The Open Gate. Younger priests who want the doctrine said plainly and publicly, and who correspond with Lumenhal's Publication Party. Both sets of elders find this alarming.

The Frog Chapters. Not Tenko. Frog communities holding the flooded terraces with a devotional practice that predates the Tenko arrival, which the Tenko incorporated rather than replaced — the single most subversive fact in Ninefold theology.

Relations

The Eternal City cannot suppress them, because the nobility desperately wants Tenko blessings for legitimacy. Hakumei, Priest of the Ninth Gate, and his predecessors have accordingly become extremely skilled at giving blessings that sound like endorsements and parse, on close reading, as warnings. They correspond carefully with the Wisps, who have reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction.

Playing One