Dark Fate (Rich-text format)
And there's the final version, as submitted for the Ficathon. By starting at a point when the story was reaching its climax, I ended up avoiding my previous problems regarding the long exposition time.
I made some reference to the previous drafts when writing this, most notably stealing a few lines from the third draft. Good writing should never go to waste, I suppose.
Nishi disappeared from this draft, but halfway through the beginning I realized that I needed a third supporting name, and thus came up with Tetsu on the fly. I'd call him a new supporting character, only he starts out dead already, so I guess he doesn't really count. A similar fate happened to Seiki, although at least she gets quite a few references here.
The bandit's (technically Goro's) death could have been written a little better. I mean, all that happens is that Kazuo runs him through with a sword within the space of a couple of paragraphs. On the other hand, I didn't want to write an extended fight scene because I was afraid that it would have shifted the atmosphere around too much.
The same doesn't hold true about the oni, though. I figure that it would have been best to let a reader imagine what the demon was and what it looked like, rather than strain the atmosphere by adding a few more descriptions. I also wanted the story to end there, emphasizing the fact that Kazuo had effectively failed, and coinciding the end of the story with what looked to be the end of his life.
Learned quite a few things from this one, and I'll be sure to put them into effect the next time a Ficathon rolls around. Maybe by then I'll be able to analyze exactly what makes L5R fiction, L5R fiction.
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