Goguma

The capital of Hikari

Goguma is the capital city of the Kingdom of Hikari, lying deep within Hikari territory. It is a walled bastion that has stood firm for decades, built on the kingdom's bedrock of honour and tradition. Its sturdy stone walls stretch far across the surrounding plains and stand over the approach like a guardian, making the city the strategic and symbolic heart of the realm.

Banners and heraldry

The battlements of Goguma fly white banners bearing a great red carp leaping from a blue river to swallow the sun. This civic standard is distinct from the black bear with crimson eyes on red that marks the personal sigil of the late Warrior-King Yoshino Hikari, the emblem carried by Satomi Hikari's loyalist host during its march.

The city under the usurper

Under Arata Hikari and the nobles who back him, Goguma is described as hollowed into a shadow of its former glory. Its once-crowded thoroughfares sit desolate. Homelessness and poverty run unchecked, and with no authority willing to restrain the ruling class, the starving population is left to survive in the gutters.

Dissent is answered with deliberate brutality. Public executions have become a daily spectacle, staged as a standing reminder of the price of defiance. The city that expresses a long Hikari ideal of honour is therefore governed, at the time of the civil war, through fear rather than through the tradition its walls represent.

The seat of power

At the heart of the city stands the ancestral Hikari Royal Castle, the seat of the ruling line, which under Arata's occupation looms over the streets as a monument to cruelty rather than prosperity. It is from a concealed war room within this fortress that Arata directs the campaign against his sister.

Strategic position in the civil war

Goguma is the objective of Satomi's advance during the Hikari Civil War. Rather than stand a siege, Arata elects to call his banners and meet the loyalist army in the open field, which moves the decisive fighting of the Battle of a Thousand Shadows onto the plains beyond the capital instead of against its walls.

The opening of the gates

After the Battle of a Thousand Shadows, Queen Satomi Hikari's army marches on the capital and finds the great wooden gates barred on the order of the nobility holding the inner keep. Her forces encircle the walls and prepare for a siege.

The siege never happens. The soldiers on the ramparts, worn down by months of abuse under the nobles during their queen's absence, act on their own: a lone messenger slips out under cover of night and promises that the gates will open at noon the following day. They do.

Satomi's vanguard enters the main thoroughfares and panic spreads through the noble quarter. Nobles are pulled out of concealed cellars, cut off at secondary gates, or arrested on the spot after claiming they had been loyal all along. Every noble who turned on the royal family is in custody before sunset.

The gallows in the central plaza

The capital is the site of the public execution that closes the civil war. Massive wooden gallows of heavy oak beams and coarse hemp rope are erected in the heart of the central plaza within days of the city's fall, and the captured nobles are paraded in chains through the crowded streets to reach them, pelted by the citizens they had abused.

Queen Satomi Hikari addresses the square from the platform before the drop and again after it, using the same plaza that had staged Arata's daily executions to declare that this shall be the final Hikari blood spilled in the land. The captured enemy soldiers are pardoned on condition of rebuilding the realm. The crowd's roar at her closing declaration is described as carrying far beyond the walls of Goguma and out into the open plains — and it reaches the castle tower where Yumi Raijin wakes from a week of unconsciousness.

The week of celebration

Satomi declares the following week a national holiday. The city that had been described as desolate, starving and governed through fear reverses completely: the thoroughfares fill with people dancing, singing and dining within the walls, lights fill the sky, and the once-starving populace feasts while cheering their new queen.

Droves of nobles from the city and from neighbouring kingdoms arrive for the culminating royal ball, and the castle at the city's heart is described as shining brighter than anything else in Goguma on the night it is held. The capital's recovery is therefore recorded in the same terms as its decline — by what its streets look like and who is eating.