The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

But like many Matsudas before him, Mamoru experienced surges of madness when the feeling of his jiya consumed him. In those moments, he knew that the power rolling through his body was born from the ancient forces that had raised Kaigen from the sea. It was more than faith. It was fact.

‘there are a million ways to tell the same story. Our job as jaseliwu is to find the one the listener needs to hear. Not necessarily the one that makes them the happiest or the one that gives them the most information, but the one they need to hear to do what they need to do.’

But here, high in the obscuring mists of Takayubi, where nothing seemed to have changed for a thousand years, it was easy to believe the fantasy of a stable world.

There were times it felt as though she could see straight through him, to his beating heart and all the flaws it sent pulsing through his veins.

A warrior shouldn’t lose his temper like that. It was wrong of me.” “Was it?” Kwang said. “What?” “You’re patriotic and loyal. You’re exactly what everyone’s told you to be.”

We can’t claim to be crime-fighters if we disrespect life just as much as the criminals we fight.”

“There are few things uglier than a wounded ego.

“Most strong things are rigid. If you are water, you can shift to fit any mold and freeze yourself strong. You can be strong in any shape. You can be anything.”

“Why don’t you try taking responsibility for the things you can control instead of the things you can’t?”

No matter how cold the nights get here,

the sun is rising somewhere. Somewhere, it’s making someone warm.”

You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”

listening never made any man dumber, but it’s made a lot of people smarter.”

She tilted her head. “You have dimples.” “I got them from you.”

SOBBING

“Why would it bother me?” Mamoru said. “This is good news. I’m the son of two great fighters, instead of one. This is good. It means that I must be strong. I should be proud.”

“Did you ever kill anyone?” “No.”

“Good morning, Nii-sama,” she said and poured the hot tea in his cup instead of his lap.

He smiled— the smile of a weak man seeing a very rare chance to feel powerful.

A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.

Yet the ten-year-old had held the Matsuda boys through the night, while their parents were too frozen to do so.

For so many years, Misaki had thought she would never belong in Takayubi, but somehow, while she hadn’t been paying attention, this place had become home.

How had she been so cavalier with lives that meant something to Robin? How had she shrugged off atrocities and then called it strength? Here on the slopes of her mountain, where every corpse was a personal loss, she did not feel strong at all.

and she wished, she wished, from the depth of her aching chest, that her claws could pull a life back to the Duna as easily as they could tear one out of it.

“You don’t need to apologize to me.” “Mmm.” Setsuko rubbed Misaki’s back. “But someone should.”

“My son’s sword doesn’t have a name.” “Of course it does, Matsuda-dono,” Kotetsu said in his singularly gentle, rumbling voice. “It gave its maker and wielder to earn it. That is Mamoriken,” he nodded to the sword, “the Protector.”

“I’m Matsuda Misaki,” she said with pride and honesty she never attached to those words before. “I’m your wife.” And she attacked him.

She had taken every drop of hardship like a stroke of the hammer, turning it to strength, and she was stronger than Takeru.

“You think I killed your children,” Misaki said, “like your father always said.” “I think you saved my wife,” Takeru said.

Stopppppp :(

“I won’t raise another generation as blind as my own.”

“Look at you,” he said, and the sound of his Lindish tugged at a long-forgotten feeling in her chest. “You went and turned into a lady.”

She was so busy trying to regain her bearings she didn’t realize that the bundle on Robin’s back had started moving until a little brown hand popped out. The hand found purchase on Robin’s shoulder and was soon followed by a head of sleep-tousled hair and a pair of coal black eyes. He had a child too.

a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.

Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.

Oof

For everything that had changed, this hadn’t. It hurt. Gods in the Deep, it hurt, but it didn’t consume her. After so long, she had learned to carry it like a woman.

the simple magic by which she held herself together. Love for what she had and what was gone. Love no matter the pain.