Liu Taizong

"Shrewd butterflies made of wood and iron; covering our carts, our Emperor, and our legacy."

History
Lord Taizong is a man born in lands shifting as often as the wind. Banners of Khans, Khagans, Emperors, and Warlords, all fixed themselves as a deity yet within a decade they found a dagger in their back. Distant relative to the old Shu Emperors, Taizong exists as a miniscule form of resistence through being a mere contender to the lands of Old Shu. Centuries ago, his family were mighty yet now? Reduced.

Taizong's education was rigid and uniform. While the child of Emperors long ago, he would receive a noble's education. Understanding with haste Taizong soon began to realize the position his family was in. Desperately clinging onto what was, the Khagan's most personal guards and advisors would reassure his religation to the humble scholarly route.

By sixteen he would inherit the Lordship of Guangdao. While his father youthful, his words were loudly carried by the wind. The Khagan's guards arrived and made a gruesome example of him. Taizong never knew what his father had uttered, nor did he know of his father's death immediately. Gaining knowledge through the drunken guards patrolling his family's estate, he would hear of the planned execution of him and his mother.

Taizong, fearing for his very life would attempt to win over the heart of his mother but she knew it was only delaying the inevitable. While guards broke through their doors, they burned ancient tapestries, and the sigil of the Liu Dynasty, and by extension the Shu Dynasty. While he was brazen with his knowledge, he could not carry a sword in the same weight he carried his words. With three strokes of his ancestral dao, he was smitten by the guard's sword.

The darkness consumed his concious, and like his concious his vision was blackened. From what was perceived as months, were minutes. He witnessed the downfall of the eternal Khaganate of Kherjia, the rising of a power in the far east. . . and the coming of pure evil. Whispers filled his mind, and before he could articulate he awoke.

Taizong could never completely recall such a potent memory effectively, but acknowledge its power he could. Where he had assumed he was to be burned to paraded through the city as if he were a prize, he was found in a cart of bodies. Swiftly he had escaped, and began a harsh path into the woods without the handlers noticing a corpse moving.

To the world, Liu Taizong, and by extension the Liu Dynasty, ended that night.