The origins of the Jester.
Before the name Kagetsu no Jōka meant fear, before the mask, before the silver-threaded jester's garb—he was just a boy.
A quiet, thin child born in the lowest rung of a minor house, too small to be noticed, too strange to be loved. His magic was weak. Flickers, Sparks, Enough to light a candle, never a fire. The other children called him Hollow.
But Hollow didn't cry,
He watched,
He listened,
And he remembered.
He remembered the bruises left by his father's belt when he failed a spell. He remembered how his mother wept while turning her back on him. He remembered how the villagers threw stones when he walked by. And he remembered his sister. The only one who ever smiled at him.
Until the day they burned her.
They called it purification, said she was tainted by demons, said she had his darkness on her.
He watched the flames rise, he listened to her screams.
And he remembered.
That night, he found the old shrine deep in the woods—forgotten by the gods, just like him. Inside, there was nothing but silence, dust, and a cracked mirror that didn't reflect what it should.
He spoke no prayers.
He didn't need to.
He bled into the mirror, And the mirror bled back.
When he left the shrine, the boy was dead.
In his place stood something else.
He wore a mask—porcelain, white, eternally grinning. It wasn't to hide his face. It was to mock the world that had made him wear his sorrow so long. He painted his robes in blood-red and abyssal black, the colors of laughter and loss. And he laughed. Loud, Mad, Unbroken.
Not Hollow anymore.
Kagetsu.
His rise was not a legend.
It was a warning.
He tore through cities and kingdoms, not like a beast, but like a stage performer. The world was his theater. The blood was his ink. And death?
Death was the punchline.
He didn't just kill. He unwound people—exposed the truths they hid, stripped them of illusions before their final breath. It was not power he wanted.
It was honesty.
Raw, brutal, soul-shattering truth.
And as he grew stronger—beyond what any mortal should reach—the gods began to worry.
The pantheon, once proud in their thrones of golden clouds and fire, watched him undo prophecies with a laugh and break chosen heroes with a glance. He didn't defy the rules.
He rewrote them.
The gods feared what they could not control. So, they came down from their heavens, cloaked in righteous fury. They called it judgment.
But he called it the best show of all.
He danced through their champions.
He sang through their holy spells.
He smiled as he bled them.
But even Kagetsu, in all his chaos, could not fight the gods forever.
Not yet.
So, when they could not kill him, they sealed him.
In a cage not made of bars, but of time itself.
A barrier that kept him still, frozen at the edge of memory—like a myth too dangerous to be spoken aloud.
Centuries passed.
Wars rose and fell, Empires crumbled. His name became a whisper, then a rumor, then a forgotten joke.
Until the day something called to him.
Something small.
Something broken.
Something desperate.
A girl with no spark.
No power.
No name worth remembering.
Amane Tsukihana.
Her pain cracked the barrier like a stone through glass.
And through that fracture—
He stepped free.
Now, the world turns.
Old gods shift in their slumber.
And the jester smiles again.
Because this time, he doesn't just want revenge.
He wants everything.