The Shining Ones
The story comes down from the past, so many generations gone now, that its time is lost to us. But it begins like this:
The Gods were born and drawn from their image they created the first shining ones, the first Japanese. The gods waited and watched as their images grew and came to understand how to create children. They watched them practice and watched them succeed. The first woman was with child, but not one but three children. They watched as her stomach grew and they watched as she gave birth to the first one in the dark of the night, the next was born in the time between, night and day and the last was born full into the light. They watched as the three brothers grew and they watched as they grew into men. The gods were impatient and they created more people, but they watched the first ones with greater care.
Their names are lost now in the mists of time, so we shall call them as they were born, child of the dark(Kurada Riku), child of the twilight (Matsuo Riku) and child of the sun (Ishimaru Riku). Like all brothers they fought, but Kurada took things too far. One day while watching Ishimaru and Ishimaru's wife, he grew covetous of the wife. Kurada made some advances and was rejected. His hatred grew of his lucky Sun Brother and in the dark of the night when Kurada ruled, he killed his brother's pregnant wife. Ishimaru's rage was great and he lashed out at his brothers, not knowing which had betrayed him. He killed both Matsuo and Kurada's wives and children.
The gods saw them fighting and took each of them up to the heavens, where they took a single drop of blood from each and dripped them onto the earth. Where the drops landed, the three islands of Japan formed. Each brother was assigned an island, Kurada the north island, where it was cold and sun never shined much. Matsuo the larger island in the middle was to be a buffer between the two more headstrong brothers, and Ishimaru was given the south and sunniest. They created water between them and let their anger cool over the centuries. The gods watched as they remarried and watched as they had children, but they had neglected one thing--the children grew up and had children and they had children and on and on it went, never growing old and never dying. They decided that all things must die to make way for new growth, so they instilled in the others the ability to grow old and die. And die they did, but the brothers as they grew older, the land started to act strangely. Created from the blood of the brothers who were now dying, the land was dying with them. In the end the gods had to make them immortal again so the land of Japan would never die.
In time, men learned to sail and upon seeing other men in their lands who were strangers to them, they learned to make war. The three brothers learned again of each others existence and they warred upon each other. The anger had never went away, it had just smoldered until they saw each other again. Japan's waters ran red with blood.
The gods could no longer abide these wars and decided to let them fight it out, whoever lived, their island would stand and the rest would fall. Fate sometimes lends a hand to things, the three brothers met in battle. They killed each other at the same time. There would be no Japan if they all died and so the gods decided that they would live, but not in the way that they were before. They took the bodies of their first children and burned them and then divided the ashes into 75 urns, 25 for each body. Thinking that it would be just that if all the lands were to live in peace a portion of each body was buried on each island. So 25 urns were buried on each of the three islands, eight urns of the brothers whose island it wasn't and nine for the one that it was. Each urn was identical to the other, so there was no way to tell whose urn was whose.
Time passed and the gods forgot, but man had grown and some of the urns had been found. Some were worshipped, others were lost in people's piles of things, and others still buried and forgotten. Emperor Yoshikuni took interest in the urns and for the rest of his life and the lives of 4 of his generations, collected the urns.
So it was that Yoshikuni the Fifth found himself in possession of 75 urns. Now that you had them what do you do with them? He brought together the greatest minds of the times and sought the source of their powers. They yielded no secrets to him but one, that they were the spirits of another age. He crafted with others three orbs of power to be able to communicate with the spirits of the urns, but cut into so many pieces the spirits were unable to talk coherently. He opened the urns and trapped each spirit piece into an orb. Soon they were able to talk again and the anger arose again and each tried to influence Yoshikuni into absorbing the spirits of the dead into him. Yoshikuni was a smart man and had listened to them talk over the months of the hatred they had for each other and how if one of them truly died, part of Japan would die with it. Yoshikuni locked them away in the imperial vaults for all eternity, its secrets only passed on to the emperors of Japan.