Long ago in a distant land, Aku, the shape-shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But I, the lost son of the land he pillaged, wielding a magic sword, stepped forth to oppose him. Before I struck the final blow, Aku tore open a portal in time and flung me into the future, where his evil was law! For fifty years I sought to return to the past and undo the future that was Aku. I saw great cities and conversed with beasts that spoke in the tongue of man. I made allies. I wondered the earth now beset to its four corners by beings from worlds beyond the stars.

I fell in love.

It was with her help that I returned to the past and vanquished the foul sorcerer. But without Aku to father her, my dear beloved ceased to exist, and I was alone.

For the fifty years I wondered the world under the rule of Aku, I did not age. The spell he had cast upon me at the deciding moment of our first battle made me ageless. When I returned to my home as its Prince, I still did not grow old. My father passed in his old age, and I was crowned Emperor. I fell in love again and sired a daughter, whom I named Ashi.

I still did not age, but my beloved wife and daughter did, and I lost Ashi a second time.

I sired many sons and daughters, and I had many wives for myself, and concubines. This was a matter of fulfilling the expectations of my people; my heart was cold to all love. My nation grew, and my people could count on the constancy of one thing, if nothing else: that their Emperor would never leave them. No man could conquer me, no illness could take me, and the years passed as seconds to me. A great people bowed before me on my chrysanthemum throne and the ages were mine to do with as I pleased.

And I had nothing.

For threes days, the unnamed prince, displaced in time by the wizard Aku's spell, followed the tracks of the mysterious creatures who had fled from him in a mad panic. They were many, so to assess their course was a trivial matter for this lost son of Wa, who had been trained all over the world as a boy. However, as the young man trudged through mud and dust endlessly, he caught no sight of the masses that had evacuated the town in which he had landed. Worse still, he could find no food, and his strides became smaller, more timid, as his body grew weak. The prince clung to that strange, dirty doll in the shape of a squid he had found under his geta, now his only source of comfort in a land he could not recognize.

Indeed, when morning would come, he could see no sun, just an endlessly bleak grey sky. The trees by which he passed were all bare, and all stood perfectly straight and had branches facing upwards like the teeth of a trident or like the horns of a devil. The light of the sky was so diffused that even these massive trees bare cast any shadow, and the prince, upon sight of them during the first day of his journey, gasped and drew his sword, believing them to be an approaching horde of Akus!

On the second day, as his hunger began to affect his strength, he began finding more substantive clues to the traveling of the evacuees than footprints or displaced flora and stones. He at first found shoes dropped here and there, and then he came upon a horrible sight, one that recalled the evil image that met him two nights ago: a trail of small children, trampled, left behind by their terrified families. He collapsed to his knees upon seeing them, and as he regained his composure and approached them, his flesh began to crawl at the sight of them: aquatic, slimy, not unlike the river goblins of which he had heard stories as a child.

The prince stopped in his tracks, fell to his knees again, and wept. His mission had been to free his people from the thrall of Aku, but now he could recognize no features of the land. The people who inhabited this place, as far as he could see, were ugly and monstrous. And, in his attempt to get his bearings, he had inspired such terror that parents would trample their own children to death. These evils swirled about in his head, and the young swordsman fell to his side, murmuring, crying, gripping his hair.

What had Aku done?

On the morning of the third day, such as it could be called morning, the prince brought himself uneasily to his feet, using his holy sword in its sheath as a walking stick. With no way but forward to go, he continued his meaningless pursuit of these tracks. To find where they lead, he may find some semblance of civilization, something he could recognize, somewhere he could get his bearings, regroup, and return home to slay Aku. The warrior began to see more signs of the evacuees as he traveled. Indeed, there were more trampled children, and now came the trampled elderly. Personal effects like clothing and pottery were strewn about in the grey mud. The signs only grew more horrible as he proceeded, and their portents became darker.

Here, there were many people strewn about, some in piles, bloodied and clearly torn apart by some great monster. There, there were heaps of heads and overturned carts alongside the carcasses of what the prince could surmise were beasts of burden, no less bizarre and alien than the people they pulled. The mud beneath the prince's feet grew black with the spilled blood of these people, and it took all that the poor warrior had to keep from being sick. Combined with the sheer horror of the scene was the awful stench, death and low tide at the same time. The prince nearly collapsed in the black mud from the dizziness the overpowering smell was inducing in him.

Then he heard one low, soft moan.

The prince hurried to an overturned cart, and attempting to free itself from the cart by weakly digging at the mud was a small kappa child. Our warrior bounded over to it, and the child looked up at him with life slowly draining from its eyes and let out a soft wail of fear. "Do not be afraid, child!" called the prince as he knelt in the mud and lifted the cart up off the child. "I will not hurt you! Please believe me!" He offered his hand to the child, and the little creature timidly accepted it, allowing our dear hero to pull it free from the cart. He held the child in his arms tenderly, careful not to frighten it.

"Please," he begged of the poor, weakened thing, "tell me what has happened here. Who did this to you?"

The child stared into the prince's eyes, that same terror he saw in the eyes of the creatures when they caught sight of him those nights ago. The child raised its webbed hand and, as it shook with pain and weariness, pointed directly at the prince's face.

The child said, "You did."

EPISODE II