First, the drums began.  Their pounding beat filled Tadaji's mind as he looked wildly around.

He was in his home of years before, the one he had shared with his beloved, Chisato.  The house was dark and hazy around the edges.

Something reached out of the darkness and took his hand. An unseen ghost.  It led him outside.

He followed, away from the safety of his home and down a forest path paved with black stones splashed with red.

Tadaji's terror grew as the ghost pulled him through the dark forest.  From the shadows, thousands of eyes stared at him - thousands of eyes in the dark sockets of hundreds of disembodied heads.  They floated cheek to cheek around him.  Some were bare skulls, smashed and broken with battle wounds.  Others dripped gore and dragged shreds of skin.  Still others bore gaping, oozing plague sores so large that Tadaji could see bone, jaw, and teeth glinting through holes in the rotting flesh.

He tried to scream, but no sound came.

The heads opened their mouths wide and laughed, filling the forest with a chorus of unholy sound.

The ghost pulled him into a clearing.  The drumming became louder.  It matched the rhythm of Tadaji's heartbeat.  He struggled to breathe.

The drummers stood in a circle facing a large fire.  They were tall samurai, dressed in identical black armor, with no mon to identify what family or clan they were from.  But it was not a fire; it was a fiery drum, the flames licking its edge as the warriors beat on and on.

Standing atop of the drum was Tamura.

He was no more than fifteen, and he wore the deep purple kimono that his mother had made for his gempuku, the traditional coming-of-age ceremony.  His face was hidden in the flickering shadows.

As Tadaji watched, the flames caught the hem of the kimono and burst in a shower of blue sparks.  He tried to race to his son, to save him from the flames, but the ghostly hands held him in an icy grip.

Tamura began to burn.