Battle of Shining Bay

The Battle of Shining Bay is a play by the Dynastic playwright Cynis Bei, commissioned by House Cynis to celebrate the Parade of Seven Shattered Helms in RY746. It is ostensibly a historic epic, a retelling of an actual battle between the forces of the Shogunate and the Fae in the West during the wake of the Great Contagion.

Plot

Battle of Shining Bay combines a military tale and a romantic triangle. It begins with two young Dragonblooded officers, Rafa and Daiye, childhood friends serving at the Shining Harbour Fortress, headquarters of the Great Water Fleet of the Shogun. Rafa begins a romantic relationship with Eshun, a physician leading the Fleet's medical wing, after he chooses to overlook her need for corrective lenses and approve her medically fit for service in a ranger scale. The two are betrothed, but a sudden onrush of Fae invaders sees the Fleet's rangers deployed to the Western edge of Creation, where their position is overrun and all are presumed lost, declared dead.

Comforting each other over Rafa's apparent death, Eshun and Daiye fall into their own romantic relation and are quickly married. However, Rafa has survived, making the difficult journey back through enemy lines to reach the Shining Harbour Fortress. She visits the local teahouse only to find her lover in the arms of her best friend, and is enraged at what seems to be a betrayal... a brawl ensues between Rafa and Daiye, which burns down the teahouse and threatens to spread throughout the town... but at that moment a massive Fair Folk fleet arrives, strange behemoth beasts surfacing in the harbour as bloated flying whales disgorge fiery bombs upon the Shining Harbour Fortress. Several ships of the fleet are destroyed immediately, and the Fortress itself is set aflame, but Rafa and Daiye put aside their differences to lead the counterattack and drive off the Fae.

The chumyo of the Water Fleet declares that the Fair Folk must be made to pay for their attack, and commands a strike against the Fae prince in charge of their Western forces. Rafa and Daiye are assigned to the mission, which penetrates deep into enemy lines and succeeds in slaying the Fae prince, but takes heavy casualties trying to fight its way back out. Daiye is mortally wounded, unable to move, and when Rafa refuses to leave her, she guts herself and makes her friend swear to return to Eshun's love.

Rafa at last returns to Shining Bay, where she must pass on the sad news to Eshun, who falls tearful into her arms as the power of the Imperial Manse explodes through the sky behind them and wipes out the Fair Folk. The play ends with them being wed and birthing a daughter, who they name Daiye.

Production

The Battle of Shining Bay, like many Cynis Bei plays, makes heavy use of effects. In order to properly simulate the elemental combat between Dragonblood and Fae, Bei employs specialized charms as well as mundane effects: one of the most notable are the Fae flying whales, formed from bladders filled with floating, flammable gas covered over with a silk and balsa puppet figure. Black-robed assistants direct the whales from below, and when they must be destroyed the gas itself causes them to light up and incinerate in spectacular fashion... the play cannot be performed in theatres with low ceilings.

Reception

The Battle of Shining Bay was massively unpopular with the critics of the Dynasty, its love story deemed bland and contrived, the characters given little time to develop and leaping from one scene to the next with minimal transition, the opposite of the classical ideal for Shogunate plays.

While the Battle for Shining Bay was an actual event, Cynis Bei's play is criticized widely by both current military officers and Shogunate historians for gross inaccuracy. The Shogunate had no 'Water Fleet', nor did Shogunate-era militaries include medical wings. Even at that time, the Fair Folk were known to lack the command-and-control that would make a surgical strike viable, so such tactics would never have been attempted against them.

There are other anachronisms too, the most glaring being the character of taimyo Sesus Badarin, who heroically blasts apart a wyld behemoth with Elemental Bolts, several centuries before the birth of his House founder.