Thorn (kirin)

Thorn, also known as the Bounteous Kirin, is one of the five legendary kirin kami from Kamigawa that are known to meet with each other every 1,000 years.
==History==
Thorn is one of the five legendary kirin kami of Kamigawa representing green. He appears as a green-scaled kirin in his natural form but can also shift into many other forms. As a human, he would be seen leaning heavily on a twisted staff of hard cherry with a single leaf of emerald green that had a large thorn growing from the top and would have a wooden begging bowl hanging from a hempen cord at his waist.
As the Kami War began, the five kirin met up as they do every 1,000 years. They met in a small teahouse inside a painting in Minamo. Thorn was one of the first to show up finding Pipe and Silverbeard both playing a strange chess-like game while awaiting the others. As the others argued for or against intervening in the war, Thorn argued that both Kami and mortals were a part of the rhythm of nature and were a part of the same whole. He believed both were just as important as the other.
For the past 1000 years, Thorn acted as many different things and witnessed mortals working with nature itself. For a time he became an ox plowing fields tended by human monks. He observed how they added mulch to the field and rotated their crops so that the land might not be poisoned by too much of one thing. He would observe their festivals of sowing and harvest where they observed the proper rites for the kami of rice and the kami of fresh water. Sometime later he instead became a bamboo grove, carefully tended by the orochi. Every spring, they would pick his greenest shoots so that the taller stalks would not be crowded and sickened. Then they would pickle the shoots for eating through the summer and fall, and in the winter, they would spread their offal upon his roots, nurturing new shoots in the spring and thus maintaining the cycle.
Before coming to the meeting, he became a stream that flowed past rice fields tended by kitsune. They built sluices and gates on him and burned incense to count the passing of hours so that they might know when to redirect his runoff from one family's field to another's so that all might partake of nature's boon evenly, and never in excess. They would sing songs to pass the time as they waited by the sluice gates. He could hear their voices, full of life, yet tinged with sadness--an acknowledgment of mortality, like the grain that grows tall in the summer yet knows of the harvest that will come. He noted that despite this they continued to live and die and give themselves back to the land. Due to all of this, he believes The Great One's war is folly, for he would upset the balance that both mortal and kami work hard to preserve. His final thoughts were: "How can we kami seek to destroy this? How can the worshiped live without those to worship them?"
Scale argued against his points by also noting the destruction their wars bring, how much destruction some bring on nature, and how much nature destroys in turn sometimes. Though, Thorn would not be swayed believing he has seen the good in mortals. In the end, after Scale made his points and stormed off the others left the meeting. In the end, Thorn was the last to leave the teahouse and began to descend the winding path down the mountainside.Alex Smith, The Meeting (archived).
==Story appearances==
Title 	Author 	Publishing date	Set 	Setting (plane)	Featuring
The Meeting	Alexander O. Smith	2005-05-18 	Saviors of Kamigawa	Kamigawa 	Makie, Toru, Pipe, Silverbeard, Thorn, Dew, Scale, Godo (mentioned), Meloku (mentioned), Ishi-Ishi (mentioned), Snow-Fur (mentioned)
==In-game references==
==References==
Category:Kirin