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.