Mischievous Rain was the strange and powerful sorceress who commanded the forces of the Lady's Empire in Port of Shadows. She was allegedly one of the new Taken, apparently enslaved by the Lady at some point during the 6 years between the Battle at Charm (the end of the first chronicle) and the Black Company's mission in Tally (the opening of the second). Believed by Croaker to have been a transformed Tides Elba, some later historians claimed the identity of Mischievous Rain may have been assumed by the Lady, either in whole or in part.
Mischievous Rain's stated goal was to stop the Resurrectionists' threat of the "Port of Shadows" – a prophesied woman who would conceive the Dominator's reincarnation and therefore posed an existential threat to the Domination. She had supernatural tattoos which moved on her skin, wore a yukata that featured both a "midnight" blackness that was darker than any other cloth and moving star shapes, and was often followed by a magic sound like wind-chimes tinkling. She flew a flying carpet that was "wildly colored and iridescent, like peacock feathers" stretched around a wooden frame "twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and one foot high."[1]
Port of Shadows[]
When Mischievous Rain first arrived on her flying carpet in the eastern city of Aloe, she outranked both the Whisper (the most senior of the new Taken) and the Limper (the last of the Ten Who Were Taken). The mysterious sorceress brought with her the strange twin children Baku and Shin, alongside a three-eyed cat named Ankou. She claimed the children were hers by Croaker – evidently conceived at the Tower at Charm – but Croaker had no memory of this and instead came to believe that they (and the cat Ankou) were demon entities bound to her service. Bizarrely, Mischievous Rain frequently and publicly put herself forward as Croaker's wife, which left him dumbfounded and her subordinate Imperials awestruck. Her stated goal was to defeat the threat of the Port of Shadows prophecy, which prophesied that a woman would conceive the Dominator's reincarnation.
Mischievous Rain oversaw the Lady's directive to capture the numerous "Tides Elba copy girls" around Aloe, including Honnoh. She flew some of them to the Tower, and returned with two of them (Kuroneko and Shironeko) who had been specially trained at the Tower to track down other copy girls like themselves.
Next, in the Ghost Country, Mischievous Rain commanded a vast Imperial army and almost every sorcerer from within the Empire to systematically wipe out the numerous, unnamed, ancient sorcerers and lethal monsters that had been buried throughout that region for untold centuries. She then orchestrated the Imperial capture of the granite castle, where a cell of Resurrectionists was hiding behind an invisible, impregnable barrier of sorcery. After having several tunnels built beneath the sorcery barrier, Mischievous Rain sent Ankou and other forces to neutralize the Resurrectionists within. She personally entered the castle with Croaker, Baku, Shin, Kuroneko, and Shironeko, and they encountered the woman called Laissa and her elderly son, the wizard Precious Pearl. Laissa, formerly one of the four Senjak sisters, recognized Mischievous Rain, indicating the Taken was in fact a member of the Senjak family and could have been the Lady herself. Mischievous Rain also inexplicably knew Croaker's birth name, and introduced him to Laissa as her husband. Moments later, a high-magnitude spell of completely unknown origin – that had been slowly crescendoing for many weeks – climaxed, and virtually everyone forgot the name "Mischievous Rain" and that she had ever existed. The Black Company and most of the people of Aloe (except, for example, Sana Ans) gradually lost not only their memory of Mischievous Rain, but most of their time in this region in general.
References[]
- ↑ Port of Shadows, ch. 12