Hizashi Nagareboshi

The Fall

Hizashi didn't so much come down from the sky as get thrown out of it. He spent his earliest years up there guarding it, mostly alone and extremely sure of his own importance. Then, during the Patchwork Era, roughly a thousand years before the present day, a comet came through the upper sky while he was out flying. He saw it coming. Being a kid with nothing better to do, he flew toward it to get a better look.

It hit him square in the back. He fell for a long time and landed hard in a field outside Sky Village, one of the old Seven Villages, known for the priests who climbed its tall shrine every night to read the stars. The impact left a crater, burns down his back that scarred into the marks he still has, and something broken in him that wouldn't let him fly. Whatever else the comet was carrying went into the ground nearby. He didn't notice. He was eight, or looked it, and he was busy screaming.

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Sky Village

A group of local kids found him the next morning, mostly because they'd been told to stay away from the crater. At the bottom was a boy about their age, scorched, bleeding and furious, who told them to get lost in words none of them had heard before. They poked him with sticks until he passed out, then dragged him home to the one adult they trusted not to panic.

Chomei was a young Mareep who ran the orphanage on Sky Village's south road. She cleaned him up, bandaged his back, fed him, and never asked where he'd come from. He was grateful for that. He'd have died before saying so.

As soon as he could walk he started trying to fly again. He jumped off the orphanage roof, then the granary, then the shrine steps, then a cliff path above the rice terraces that ended with a broken arm. It never worked. Chomei patched him up every time and never once told him to quit. Eventually she just started leaving the bandages by the door so he could grab them himself.

Legendaries age slowly, so Hizashi grew up next to the other orphans more or less as one of them. He had brothers and sisters. He fought over blankets, got stuck with the worst chores, and learned to cheat at cards from a boy who very much regretted teaching him. For the first time in his life he had a home.

It didn't last the way he wanted it to. One by one the other kids got adopted out: to merchant families from Crystal Lake, fishermen from Ice Bay, couples from villages he'd never seen. They wrote letters, then fewer letters. Some came back years later with kids of their own, then with grandkids, and had to explain who the boy on the porch was, because he still looked about twelve. Hizashi got very good at waving people off. After a while he stopped being home when the carts came. It was easier to not get attached in the first place.

The only person that never worked on was Chomei.

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Chomei

Chomei never left. She just got older. Hizashi watched it happen over the years: grey coming into her wool, her knees going, the day she stopped climbing onto the roof to yell at him and started doing it from the yard instead. She's the only person he's ever loved, and the only family he's ever really claimed. He never told her. She probably knew anyway. She knew where he hid the sake.

Near the end of her life, Chomei got sick. Hizashi didn't take it well. He spent most of that year away from the orphanage, showing up at shrines that didn't want him and asking priests questions they refused to answer. Most of them were about how Lady Arceus raised mortals into something more, and whether anyone else could do the same thing. He came home with something. What it was, and what he did with it, he's never told anyone.
Chomei didn't die of her illness.

Hizashi has never said what happened that night, and everyone who could have asked has been dead for close to a thousand years. He stopped saying her name. Most people in the Empire today have no idea she ever existed.

He buried her himself. That same night he climbed the star shrine, the tallest building in Sky Village, and jumped off it the way he had a hundred times as a kid. This time the air caught him. He flew for the first time since the comet, and there was nobody left in the yard to see it. He didn't come back down for years.

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The Lost Years

The sky didn't help. Everything up there was exactly how he'd left it, and it turned out he didn't want it anymore. Eventually he came back down, though never to Sky Village.

The centuries after are mostly a blur by his own account, since he was drunk for a lot of them. He drifted between fishing towns, clan holds and shrine hamlets, anywhere with a festival and something to drink. He found out he was great with people as long as he didn't keep them. He'd stay long enough to be everyone's favorite stranger and leave before anyone got old.

Somewhere in there he made his first lantern, a small light meant to lead him back to Sky Village whenever he wanted to go home.

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The Shrine War

Hizashi was alive for the fall of the Kami Shrine and the Shrine War that followed, when the Weather Kami's storms tore the old borders apart. Nobody's sure what he did during the war. Ask him and he'll say he was drunk, or asleep, or busy, depending on the day. A few old sailors in Radiant Harbor swear the rain used to stop wherever he walked. He's never confirmed it, and he's never denied it either.

When the Seven Villages abandoned their old land, Sky Village went with them. Hizashi heard about it late. He lit the lantern for the first time and it took him straight to the orphanage, or what was left of it: a stone foundation buried in tall grass. He stayed there most of the night. When he finally left he took the lantern with him, and figured out it worked both ways. It could lead him to places, and it could bring people to him.

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Radiant Harbor

After the war, a line of refugees heading southeast toward an unmapped cove picked up a stranger one night. He had a lantern and no explanation, walked at the front of the line the whole way there, and never took a single wrong turn.

He meant to leave once they arrived. Instead he threw the cove's first festival on the beach, with three lanterns and a crate of sake he definitely didn't pay for, because those people had buried enough of their own and he figured they could use one good night. They kept inviting him back. He kept saying yes.

He stayed longer than he'd stayed anywhere since Sky Village. He watched the cove grow into a port and the port grow into the Empire's great merchant coast. He watched the founders die, then their kids, then theirs. He threw a party every time the harbor needed one and plenty of times when it didn't. When Radiant Harbor needed a Leader, he said yes before they'd finished asking, and he's held the seat ever since.

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Tenshō 412

Over the past couple of years, Leaders and Guardians across the Sun Empire have been disappearing, with no bodies, no explanation, and nobody appointed to replace them. Lady Arceus has stayed silent the whole time. Hizashi is one of the last legendaries left who remembers how things used to work. His public reaction was to throw a festival.

Around the same time, a Deoxys named Hanabi Murakami turned up in the harbor and became one of its Guardians. Hizashi liked her immediately. She has spent the two years since doing everything she can to never be in the same room as him, which he's decided means she's shy.

When Arceus finally broke her silence and named a new Leader for the first time in decades, a Mewtwo called Risuto.

Likes: Lanterns, festivals, drinking, hot springs, mild weather, heights, sour berries, meat, music, traveling, stargazing

Dislikes: Sweets, being sober, extreme weather, talking about his past, birthdays

Voice Claim: Daisuke Ono (JP), Matthew Mercer (EN)