House of the Drake
Origin of the Kakuza of Sakana Cove
Volume I: Blood, Coin, and Firelight
Chapter I: Before the Curtain Fell
There was a time before the smoke curled from the opium dens, before the fish market whispered names that made your spine turn to water — a time when Sakana Cove knew peace, or at least the kind born of enforced silence. It was the Time of the Silk Curtain, when the East clung to its ancient codes and foreign ships were turned away with cannon smoke and spells.
The kobolds of the region were considered vermin by the highborn and the hard-handed — small, clever, easily ignored. They were dock workers, trap-checkers, errand runners. You saw them at the back of food lines, or bent beneath loads twice their weight. They had no guilds. No name. No voice.
They were expected to bow, and so they did.
But when the Silk Curtain fell, and the gates opened to Western ships and slick-tongued merchants with foreign coin and firewater, the city’s soul began to rot sweetly from within. Law gave way to vice. Old pacts were bought out with new gold. And no one noticed the kobolds—still cleaning nets, still scrubbing stones—but now watching.
From the alleys near the brackish gutters of Sakana Cove’s underbelly, a kobold child named Tomazowa watched it all, eyes glowing like twin coals in the dark. Small even by kobold standards, he darted through crowds like smoke through reeds. But Tomazowa did not scurry like the others. He listened.
He remembered every name that cursed him. Every stone thrown by human boys. Every boot that knocked over his foraged bowl. The kobolds were last in line — always — and he had tasted that shame for the last time.
He would become something different. Something more.
Chapter II: Tomazowa’s Fire
They called him ‘Zowa the Latch’, because he clung to doorframes and half-rotted beams, listening to sailors' tales and studying the movements of criminals and port guards. The other kobolds were scared, submissive — trained by generations of mistreatment to stay in their place. But Zowa looked at the crooked men with sharp suits and sharper knives coming off the foreign ships and saw not fear, but blueprints.
He began to whisper to others — the outcasts, the runt-kobolds who worked the oyster carts or swept the fish guts at the market. He found three like-minded souls:
- Ishimo, whose hands could pick a purse without disturbing the shadow.
- Kura, silent and unnoticed, able to vanish into the backdrop of any crowd.
- Binzo, who could make anyone like him long enough to rob them blind.
They were still pushed around, still spat on by fishmongers and guards and sailors. But under Zowa’s leadership, they stopped accepting it. They started retaliating. First with mischief. Then with sabotage. Then with real force.
Tomazowa gave them something the kobolds had never had in Sakana Cove — a voice, and a banner. Not a cry for pity, but a code of strength.
They took over a forgotten tackle shack, abandoned on the edge of the old harbor. Disguised as a fish and bait barge, its hull rotted from years of salt, but the belly of the ship? That was the beginning. Crates became chairs. Lines of salt barrels became secret doors. Binzo stitched a faded drake symbol onto a cloth from a Western shipwreck.
They named it the House of the Drake.
Chapter III: The Kakuza Rise
It started with control over the kobold quarters. Then came the bribes — low-level guards, then inspectors. Kobolds working in the fish markets began paying dues to the House of the Drake — not out of fear, but out of belief. Zowa wasn’t just fighting for himself — he was lifting all of them.
The kobolds who once worked for humans began owning their own stalls. The gamblers paid protection. The drug runners paid passage. And if they didn’t?
The ‘cleaners’ came.
One by one, the larger gangs — mostly human, half-orc, or tiefling — began to realize someone else was running the shadows. And they hated what they found: a gang of kobolds — little vermin, once kicked and ignored — now ruthless, disciplined, and untouchable.
The city folk began whispering the word: Kakuza. A twist of kobold tongue and old Yamataki slang for “clan,” it carried more bite than bark.
By the time Enchanter Tengukensei sensed the rot, the Kakuza had already spread from the back alleys to the docks, the gambling dens, the opium cellars, and the crooked bones of the city itself. Tengukensei did not act. Not yet. He stood on rooftops and watched, wind in his robes, the storm rising beneath him.
They weren’t just kobolds anymore.
They were organized. They were ruthless. They were the law of the street. And the House of the Drake had hatched a syndicate.
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Chapter 7: Shadows Beneath the Lanterns
The early morning mist hung low over Sakana Cove, curling through the stalls like smoke from a dragon’s nostril. The scent of drying seaweed, boiled octopus, and yesterday’s regret drifted through the air. Enchanter Tengukensei, his long sleeves brushing the ground, moved quietly past a line of old crates, his geta clacking on the damp stones like a distant warning.
The vendors saw him and stiffened. Not out of fear—at least not of him—but in memory of who might be watching. Tengukensei did not meddle. He had made that clear. But today, he made the rounds—not as a judge, not as a savior, but as a reminder.
“They come at night,” whispered an eel-seller with a missing thumb. “The little bastards. One takes the coin, another takes the eel. If I say no, they send the one with the silver mallet.”
Tengukensei said nothing, only nodded. The eel-seller relaxed. That was enough.
Across the way, a dried shrimp vendor with cracked glasses leaned closer. “They call it hiss-money,” she said. “A ‘gift’ for protection. But say no once and the fish go missing. Say no twice and your son gets beaten in the alley. Say no three times, and you don’t say much after that.”
At the fish market, crates arrived before sunrise. No one ever asked what was inside the opium sacks marked “anchovies.” Even fewer questioned the red-eyed kobolds who skittered between shadows, tails twitching, ears perked for resistance.
A spice merchant quietly slid Tengukensei a small folded parchment. Inside, in trembling script:
“Three girls taken this week. One only fourteen. Forced into the smoke dens. They say it’s the House’s price for forgiveness.”
He crushed the parchment, tucked it into his sleeve, and walked on.
Behind him, shutters closed like eyelids.
Chapter 8: The House That Fear Built
By dusk, the Cove felt different. The lanterns flickered uneasily in the salt-thick wind. Stallholders packed up faster now. It wasn’t safe to linger. The Kakuza kobolds of the House of the Drake preferred the dark.
Tengukensei stepped into the side alley of the meat works. The blood gutters still ran, red and lazy. A butcher with one eye and broken fingers told his tale without meeting the tengu’s gaze.
“They don’t even ask for coin anymore,” he growled. “Just take what they want. Say they’re owed it. Call it the ‘meat tithe.’ You ever seen a kobold strip a carcass with their teeth? I have. Still dream of it.”
A former apothecary, now turned spice peddler, stood trembling near the moonlit edge of the pier. He’d refused to sell opium for a week after his brother overdosed.
“They put a dead eel in my bed,” he muttered. “Wrapped in silk. Its belly stuffed with coins. One of them whispered: ‘Take the money. Or we take more than your sleep.’ I started again the next morning.”
Tengukensei passed the gambling pit, where a dice boy cried as he scrubbed blood from the floor. No one spoke of the loser. The bet was rigged; the debt was real.
And in the distance, bobbing gently in the harbor, was the Drake’s Den — a floating barge disguised as a humble fish and tackle shack. Paint chipped from sea spray. Lanterns marked “bait for sale.” Nets draped lazily across the railings. To the ignorant, just another fisher’s barge.
Inside? Velvet rooms, smoke-drenched dens, rigged dice tables, silken girls, and tight-lipped kobolds counting coin and whispers. The House of the Drake didn’t just run the Cove — they choreographed its descent.
He didn’t approach it.
He didn’t need to.
Tengukensei turned toward the cliffs overlooking the Cove. Before he left, he looked back once—not at the kobolds, but at the people.
The Cove wasn’t his to save.
But he would not let it fall unseen.
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