Song of the Shadows
The Song of the Shadows is a Dharmic path in in the Vampire: The Masquerade campaign supplement Kindred of the East. Followers of this Dharma are commonly called Bone Flowers, and are a stoic and dispassionate lot, known mostly for speaking with the souls of the deceased and concerned with safeguarding all knowledge before it is lost forever. Their chosen Virtue is Yin.
Bone Flowers are sages and historians, and they see it as their sacred duty to preserve as many important works of knowledge as they could, from the teachings of sages like Xue, to books that would otherwise be too dangerous to be allowed to exist. The average Bone Flower will have a small personal library to protect, but the Dharma as a whole oversees several major libraries, including a massive complex underneath the city of Chongquing.
Due to their highly controlled natures, they are the ideal custodians of proscribed works, as they are the least likely to flirt with indiscretion. Incidentally, Bone Flowers make excellent diplomats, spies, and assassins for this exact same reason.
Bone Flowers can be counted to be the most reasonable and outright pragmatic of their wu, but even they appreciate the passion of their opposite numbers, the Thrashing Dragons, whose enthusiasm they try to temper with common sense. Without Yang, after all, a Kuei-jin is nothing but a corpse.
The Dharma has the distinction of having its Arhat still stay in the Middle Kingdom (her only other peer being the Arhat of the Thrashing Dragons), though it is said that once the Sixth Age gives way to the Seventh, she would finally enter Heaven as is her right.
