The Beauty Of The West

Chapter 1: Escaping Honno-Ji

After hearing the news of Lord Nobunaga's death, you began thinking of different ways to escape. First and foremost, you needed to get the keys to your chains, but you had no idea where to even start looking.

You went about your daily routine. You were in the kitchen cleaning up after a meal when you realized that after eating, more than half the clan went to bed. This was your chance to get a good look at their formation and patterns they may have had as they did their rounds. This was vital information for your escape.

You poked your head out of the kitchen and followed a guard walking down the hallway, holding your chains tightly and trying to keep them from making noise. It worked for a while. The guard led you to the front of the castle, where he would then start his shift on night watch. Peaking around, you could only spot 4 other guards, for a total of 5. To avoid being caught, you would have to sneak around all of them, or find a horse and make a break for it. Now the question was, how often did they change shifts, and did they all change at the same time?

"Hey what are you doing??" You hear another man from down the hall behind you. Panicked, you began to run towards the open fields outside the castle. Everyone on guard had seen you run, and now the entire castle knew of your attempted escape.

You knew you couldn't get far with the chains in which you were bound. You heard the sound of horses behind you and they were coming up behind you fast. So you attempted to hide in the tall grass of the fields, hoping they didn't see which direction you took in the dark. But they did. You silently cried when one of them picked you up and brought you back to the castle and locked you in your room, after slapping you and shoving you in there.

It had been years since you had set foot outside and now, you couldn't get out of your room without someone actually opening the door. There went your plans for sneaking away. You mentally scolded yourself for trying to escape too early.
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A few days had passed and no one even came to your room to make sure you were still alive. This wasn't new to you. Sometimes you would go a few days without food until the clan realized they needed you to be their maid. Sometimes you wondered what they would do without you, and what they did everyday before you got there. In a way, their survival depended on you. That gave you an idea.

A guard finally opened the door to let you out, only to put you to work. There were rooms all over the castle that they wanted you to clean. Some looked like a hurricane had hit them. But you just rolled up your sleeves and went to work.

Room after room you cleaned, making your way patiently to the library. It was huge, but when the guards were leaving you alone, you liked to pick up a book and read to keep your sanity. 14 years was more than enough to get acquainted with the information that was in that library. So, pretending to dust, you made your way to the a corner with all kinds of books on herbs. There, you flipped through and found a few herbs for numbing and paralyzing if ingested. Some even caused paralysis in the respiratory system and led to eventual death. Those plants like the Curare plant and strychnine plant were easy to distinguish. They were leafy and green. Surely no one would have noticed if you decided to roll some into their sushi or flavored their soup with it. Since you were the one preparing the meals in that castle, your idea was to try to sneak in those herbs with the food to make your escape. Sounded easy right? But you needed to get your hands on those herbs first. That was plan A.

You quickly returned the book to where you had found it and made your way to the next room that needed cleaned. You were exhausted by the time you made it to the kitchen to prepare a meal. It was so much work to make food for so many men but you were used to it.

After cooking and cleaning, you made your way down a hall you have never been down. It was the way to Lord Nobunaga's chambers, and you thought that since there was a book on poisonous herbs, that he might have some in his room. You didn't put it past him, to have something like that in his possession.