Kitsune

Part of Jurai, a desktop ecosystem by 0xSrcAura.

Ase, the seven-tailed kitsune, and her seven tarot folds: a lockscreen and greeter theme for SDDM, and for Ryoku's session lock, which speaks the same idiom.

The mantra gate

Status: work in progress. The mantra gate is still under construction. The basic login (Ase, the folds binding as you type, the password field, the seal) is finished and works with the gate off, which is how Kitsune ships. Turn the gate on only to explore it.

Kitsune can stand a sequence gate in front of the password field. It ships off. Turn it on in theme.conf:

MantraGate=true
MantraOrder=truth,power,wisdom,judgment,life,love,discipline

With the gate on, the seven folds are dealt shuffled at every showing: every lock, every login screen, and again after every wrong answer. You answer with the slot numbers (the small numeral on each card, 1 to 7 left to right) in your order of the folds: type the digits, or tap the cards. The folds are named truth, power, wisdom, judgment, life, love, discipline. MantraOrder is where you put them in the order that means something to you.

A wrong sequence redeals. After the configured number of wrong sequences (MantraAttempts, default 3) the gate stands down to the password field for the rest of the showing; nothing re-arms it on its own. A hint at the bottom left of the face opens a panel with the gate switch, the attempt limit, whether a key is set, and a plain account of how the gate works. The switch at the bottom right of the face lifts the gate for that showing only; theme.conf is the standing setting.

A right sequence opens the password field. If you also set

MantraPass=<your password>

a right sequence skips the field and logs in directly. Read that again before you set it: MantraPass is your password, in plain text, in a config file. Anyone who can read the file has the password. It exists for a seat whose theme.conf nobody else can read (chmod 600, your own machine). It is empty in the shipped theme, on purpose.

What the gate is, plainly: a personal sequence in front of your password, not a replacement for it. PAM still checks the credential, exactly as before. Anyone watching one full unlock can see the order you answered in, just like watching a password typed. The gate is a ritual, and friction for casual hands. It claims nothing more.

Setting your mantra

You do not need to edit theme.conf by hand. The package ships a companion, kitsune-mantra, which runs in your session:

qs -p ~/.local/share/qylock/themes/kitsune/companion/run

It deals the same fan. Set your order by tapping the cards or typing their numbers; the cards are numbered because both ways are first-class. The window prints its own keyboard map. Try your mantra deals a practice fan, shuffled like the door's, and tells you whether it would open.

Sealing writes theme.conf through a small writer. Your password crosses to it on standard input only, never as an argument, never shown back, and the file lands at mode 600. Leave the stored key out and a right sequence simply opens the password field. No setup is ever required to log in.

The ground

Behind Ase is your own desktop, captured at the moment of locking and blurred past reading: shapes and light, nothing legible. The capture is taken locally by the tools/fuin-lock wrapper, kept in the runtime tmpfs (/run/user/<uid>/fuin-desktop.png), never sent anywhere, overwritten at every lock, gone at logout. Locks with no fresh capture (the greeter, an idle lock) fall back to the wallpaper under the same blur and dimming.

Faint energy moves in that ground: filaments at rest, a slow surge of light now and then, a rare brighter crackle. It is a shader over the blur, driven by a sporadic timer. Decoration.

The password ceremony

With the gate off, or once it opens, the face works like this: type your password and the folds bind one by one. At seven the Cast rises: INVOKE THE SEAL. A wrong password scatters the cards; the right one opens the seal.

Built by 0xSrcAura in 2026 for Jurai shell, carried to RyoStore whole. See PROVENANCE.txt for the record.

Install (RyoStore): the kitsune lockscreen. On Ryoku it seats for both the session lock and, once SDDM's Current names it, the login door. For the desktop capture at the session lock, bind your lock key to tools/fuin-lock (on Ryoku it takes the capture, then calls ryoku-shell lock; elsewhere, any screenshot tool plus your own lock command in the same two lines).

Her sister door

Kitsune is one of a pair. Her sister is Fūin, Jurai's Threshold: the wallpaper blurred behind a drawn veil, a password field breathing prism light. The face never learns who checks the password; PAM does.