The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

“A life of dangerous adventures might seem worth it now, when you are young and seemingly invincible, but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.”

For a moment, she couldn’t name the emotion welling up inside her. When she did identify it, an insane part of her wanted to laugh—because it was pity. For this ridiculous man on his knees in the snow, for this blind, self-centered woman who had been married to him for fifteen years and never seen him for what he was. Fifteen years and she had never once looked at Takeru as someone who might need her help. Or if she had, she had shut it down—it’s not my place, not my responsibility, not my family.

So many years, he had avoided touching this porcelain doll he had been given for fear of breaking her. He hadn’t wanted to see this beautiful, strange woman crumble the way his mother had. Somehow, he had broken her anyway, but she hadn’t broken quietly like porcelain. She had broken like black glass and ice—jagged and more dangerous than ever.

For his whole life, Takeru had been certain that he was right to cast his pain off on the mountain, that it was the only way—because how could one possibly hold so much suffering in something as small as a human form?

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

Misaki was rushing toward him now, the final, most important part of his life bearing down on him. And he saw them both for what they were: a woman who needed her husband, and a man who needed his wife.

So much of her anger had spawned from Takeru treating her like a doll, but she hadn’t been much better. She had treated him like a human-shaped mass of ice without considering that there might be entirely human reasons that ice had formed.

“But if I learned one thing from Firebird, it’s that 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.

“Now, I don’t know how unfortunate the circumstances of his birth were, and I don’t know what kind of evil is after you, but it doesn’t matter. Even if his life is hard, if this all turns out just as horribly as you imagine, you won’t regret him. You’ll never regret him.”

“I can’t tell you everything is going to be all right,” Misaki said. “Neither of us is that naïve anymore, but I can tell you to live the time you have with that boy instead of spending it on worry and regret. You might have twenty years with him. You might only have two. If you waste that time, if you miss it, then when it ends, you’re going to feel like the biggest idiot who ever lived.”

“I spent a lot of time regretting,” she admitted. “I had a brilliant son, loving friends, and a whole family growing up all around me. And I was too wrapped up in my own regret to cherish it. I didn’t take ownership of that life until it was all slipping through my fingers and it was too late.”